Chamorro Women at Camp Susupe: Saipan's Civilians in the Battle and the Camps

A photograph taken on Saipan in 1944 shows three Chamorro women on their way to the first public Mass at Camp Susupe, a civilian internment camp run by the Americans on the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands. On the left, holding a crucifix, is Carmen Mendiola Lizama's daughter; in the middle is Carmen herself. The third woman, carrying a baby, has not been identified. What catches the eye is Carmen's face, which seems to show anguish.

The Park Service article by Nicole Martin that tells their story asks what lay behind that look — the war, confinement in a camp, a destroyed home, news of missing relatives, or simply exhaustion with a war that was not her people's doing. No one can know. What is known is that the experiences, voices and choices of Chamorro and Carolinian people have been left out of most military histories of the Pacific War, and that for centuries their islands were fought over by rival nations that repeatedly discounted them.

Before the battle

The Mariana Islands take in Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The Chamorro lived there for 4,000 years before 300 years of Spanish conquest. In the early 1800s, under Spain, Carolinians whose home islands had been wrecked by typhoons moved to Saipan and settled. After a short period of German rule, Saipan was governed by Japan from 1914 to 1944. In those years nearly 20,000 Japanese, Okinawan and Korean civilians moved to the island — a large number beside its 4,000 Indigenous people, mostly Chamorro, with Carolinians and other Micronesians.

The Battle of Saipan

On June 15, 1944, U.S. Marines landed, starting the 25-day Battle of Saipan. It is seen as a turning point for the U.S. military in the Pacific, but it cost the island's Indigenous communities dearly. When the bombing began, Indigenous, Japanese and other civilians fled for shelter; the three women very likely spent time in the limestone caves scattered across the island.

U.S. Marines find a family, perhaps both Indigenous and Japanese, hiding in a limestone cave in 1944. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration.

For more than three weeks, civilians lived in the caves with little food or fresh water, aware that their homes were probably gone. One survivor recalled that fear — of the unknown and of the noise — was what she felt most. Hundreds of Indigenous civilians died. Another woman remembered losing her baby brother in the battle, and her brother, sister and father all being hit by bullets; her sister died of her wounds.

Camp Susupe

After the battle, the U.S. Civil Affairs Unit moved all civilians into Camp Susupe. It was not ready to feed, shelter and care for almost 18,000 people, who arrived sick, hungry, thirsty, wounded and traumatised. Conditions were appalling. Shelters were built of scraps on dirt floors, with families crowded together; food was military rations, and malnutrition was widespread. A barbed-wire fence kept everyone in.

Bringing back the Catholic Mass was one way people made camp life easier to bear. In the photograph, Carmen and her daughter carry treasured religious objects, which they probably took with them when they fled their homes. Perhaps, the article suggests, Carmen's expression is not distress at all, but the feeling of taking part again in something deeply meaningful.

The unidentified woman holds a baby. Half of the civilian refugees were children. A navy lieutenant later recalled that there were many orphans and that no one had thought to bring baby bottles, so they fed them milk with rubber gloves, medicine droppers and whatever else would work.

Five months after the battle began, the Civil Affairs Unit started moving Indigenous civilians to Camp Chalan Kanoa. Life there was better. Some families lived in pre-war Japanese concrete houses that had survived the fighting and been repaired; others in wooden houses built by army engineers. Some internees were allowed out, under armed guard, to farm and fish, adding to their rations. But they still could not move freely around their own island.

Liberation Day

The war ended on September 2, 1945, but the Indigenous civilians stayed interned. The government gave various reasons: safety, negotiations with Japan, and the future of a strategic island. In January 1946 it began sending Japanese, Okinawan and Korean civilians home, while continuing to hold the Indigenous people. Only when the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands made the United States a governing power over the Northern Marianas were people like Carmen and her daughter free to leave the camps — on July 4, 1946, which Saipan celebrates as Liberation Day.

The holiday is celebrated with great fanfare. It marks the release from the camps and the return to land and villages; those who stayed in their Chalan Kanoa houses could at last make homes there without barbed wire. Despite losing so much, the community survived and rebuilt. Stories like those of the three women are told each Liberation Day, and the day is a time to reflect on how the island and its people were made instruments of war. In American Memorial Park, a memorial honours the 933 Indigenous civilians killed in the Battle of Saipan and during internment.

Sources

Based on "Chamorro Women at Camp Susupe," by Nicole Martin, part of the Home and Homelands Exhibition series, published by the National Park Service, American Memorial Park; the project was supported in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

• The photograph of the three women that the article describes is not on this page. Information about it came from a descendant of the two named women, confirmed with American Memorial Park in 2023.
• The article spells the daughter's first name two ways ("Vicenta" and "Vincenta"); neither is used here.
• The article draws on Keith Camacho, Doug Herman, Don Farrell, Jennifer McKinnon and Stephanie Soder's story map of Camp Susupe (Northern Marianas Humanities Council, 2019), survivor interviews in that story map, Norman Meller's Saipan's Camp Susupe (1999), a 2006 Liberation Day publication, and Time (1944).
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.