The Women Who Ran Toward the Guns: How a Split-Second Decision on Saipan Saved 37 Lives and Shattered the Lies of War

Camp Baker, Saipan – September 1945

The war was technically over. The Emperor had spoken the impossible words, the surrender documents had been signed on the deck of the USS Missouri, and the world was beginning the slow, painful process of exhaling. But on the island of Saipan, the war had a way of lingering like the smell of wet ash and cordite that never quite left the air.

For Corporal James Mitchell, a Marine sentry patrolling the northern perimeter of Camp Baker, peace was just a word on a piece of paper. The reality was the jungle line, a dense wall of green about two hundred yards out, where “holdouts”—Japanese soldiers who refused to believe the news—still hid in caves, starving and dangerous.

The morning of September 14th began with the usual sounds of camp life: the hum of diesel generators, the distant clatter of mess trays, the squawk of tropical birds. Then, the shouting started.

It wasn’t the rhythmic chanting of a banzai charge. It was high-pitched, frantic, and terrified.

Mitchell raised his rifle, his thumb flicking the safety off. His eyes scanned the tree line, trained to look for the glint of a bayonet or the drab olive of a uniform. What he saw instead made his brain stutter.

Figures were breaking through the undergrowth, stumbling over roots, tearing through vines. They weren’t soldiers. They were wearing rags that might have once been kimonos or nurse’s uniforms. They were barefoot. And they were screaming.

“Don’t shoot!” Mitchell yelled, the words tearing out of his throat before he could even process the thought. “They’re women!”

The other sentries on the line froze. Fingers hovered over triggers. In the heat of the Pacific theater, hesitation could get you killed, but the sight before them was so jarring it overrode their training.

Thirty-seven women were running toward the American fence. And behind them, the jungle erupted in gunfire.

Crack. Crack-crack.

It wasn’t American fire. It was coming from the caves. The Japanese officers, hidden in the dark recesses of the cliffs, were shooting their own women in the back to stop them from surrendering.

The women screamed as bullets kicked up dirt around their feet. They didn’t stop. They ran with the desperate, flailing energy of the damned, throwing themselves against the chain-link fence, gripping the metal mesh until their fingers bled.

“Open the gate!” Mitchell roared, abandoning protocol. “Open the damn gate now!”

A private hesitated, looking for an officer, but Mitchell’s fury propelled him into action. The gate swung open. The women poured through, collapsing into the dust of the American compound, gasping for air, clutching each other, waiting for the execution they had been promised.

The Propaganda of Fear

To understand why these women were shaking so violently, one must understand the voice that had lived in their heads for years. It was a voice that whispered from radios and screamed from posters: The Americans are monsters. They are devils. If they capture you, they will torture you. They will humiliate you. Death is the only honor.

Ko was twenty years old. She had been a nurse in a field hospital before the invasion of Saipan in 1944. For over a year, she had lived in a damp cave with remnants of a Japanese unit, surviving on lizards, bugs, and tree bark.

When the news of the surrender finally trickled into the caves, the officers had gathered the group. They declared it an American trick. They debated mass suicide. They talked about throwing the women off the cliffs to “save” them from the Americans.

That morning, when Ko and the others decided to run, they weren’t running toward hope. They were running toward what they believed was a quicker, less painful death than starvation or a bullet from their own commanders.

Now, lying in the dirt of Camp Baker, Ko looked up. A giant American Marine loomed over her. He held a rifle. She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the end.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. She flinched violently.

“You okay?” the voice was deep, rough, but… gentle.

She opened her eyes. Corporal Mitchell wasn’t aiming his rifle at her. He was kneeling. He was offering her a canteen of water.

The cognitive dissonance was deafening. The “devil” was giving her a drink?

The Triage of Mercy

Chaos descended on Camp Baker, but it was a controlled chaos. Lieutenant Robert Chen, the camp’s senior Nisei (Japanese-American) interpreter, rushed to the scene. He found the women huddled under a supply tent, surrounded by Marines who looked more confused than aggressive.

“You are safe now,” Chen said in Japanese, his hands raised to show he was unarmed. “We will not harm you.”

The women stared at him. A Japanese face in an American uniform? It was another impossibility in a day full of them.

“Tell them they need medical attention,” Captain William Hayes, the camp doctor, barked as he arrived. “Look at them, Chen. They’re starving.”

They were skeletal. Their skin was stretched tight over bone, covered in sores and jungle rot. Their hair was matted with lice. Feet were cut and swollen from months of barefoot trekking.

The medical tent became a hive of activity. Navy Corpsmen, young men from Iowa and Brooklyn and Texas who had been trained to patch up bullet wounds, found themselves treating severe malnutrition and neglect.

Danny Walsh, a nineteen-year-old corpsman, knelt before a girl named Yuki. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen. Her feet were a mess of infected cuts. As Walsh cleaned the wounds with warm water and antiseptic, Yuki watched him with wide, terrified eyes. She flinched every time he moved his hand, expecting a blow.

“Easy,” Walsh whispered, though he knew she didn’t understand. “I’m just fixing you up. Easy now.”

When he finished, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a Hershey’s bar. He broke off a piece and held it out.

Yuki stared at the chocolate. Sugar was a myth in the caves. She reached out with a trembling hand, snatched it, and put it in her mouth. Her eyes rolled back as the sweetness hit her tongue. A tear leaked out and tracked through the dirt on her cheek.

Walsh smiled. It was a small, sad smile. “There you go,” he said.

The First Meal

The logistics of housing 37 women in a male POW camp were a nightmare, but Colonel Douglas Wright, the camp commander, made it clear: “Fix it.”

They cleared three large squad tents near the administration building. They brought in cots, blankets, and mosquito nets. They built a makeshift partition for privacy.

But the real test came at the mess hall. Sergeant Vincent Rossi, a gruff Italian-American who ran his kitchen like a battleship, stared at the order. Feed them. Start slow. Rice and fish.

“I ain’t got fresh fish,” Rossi grumbled, already opening cans of salmon. “But I can make the rice.”

When the women were led into the mess tent, wearing oversized Army t-shirts that hung on them like dresses, the room fell silent. The smell of cooking food—real, hot food—hit them like a physical wave.

They sat at the long metal tables. Trays were placed in front of them. Steaming white rice. Canned salmon. Bread and butter. Peaches in syrup.

Ko looked at the tray. Then she looked at Lieutenant Chen.

“Is this… a trick?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “Is it poisoned?”

Chen looked at Dr. Hayes, then back at Ko. “It is not a trick. It is dinner. Eat.”

Ko took the first bite. The rice was warm and soft. It didn’t taste like dirt or bark. It tasted like life. She started to cry, silent sobs shaking her thin shoulders. Around her, other women began to weep as they ate. Some ate ravenously, shoveling food in with their hands; others ate with agonizing slowness, savoring every grain.

Sergeant Rossi watched from the kitchen line, his arms crossed. A young private next to him made a crack about “Jap prisoners.”

“Shut your mouth,” Rossi snapped, his voice low and dangerous. “They’re hungry. You’d cry too if you hadn’t eaten in a year.”

The Unraveling of Lies

In the weeks that followed, a strange ecosystem developed at Camp Baker. The women, recovering their strength, became a part of the camp’s rhythm. The initial fear began to erode, replaced by a cautious curiosity.

The greatest casualty was the propaganda.

Every day, the women saw evidence that contradicted everything they had been taught. They saw American soldiers reading letters from home and crying. They saw men sharing cigarettes and jokes. They saw a society that, for all its flaws, seemed to value individual life in a way the Imperial Army had not.

Fumiko, a former schoolteacher, struggled deeply with this. She had taught her students that Americans were devils. She had sent boys off to war with speeches about glorious death.

“I lied to them,” she confessed to Ko one night in the tent. “I didn’t know I was lying, but I was. These men… they are just men.”

The women wanted to work. Idleness felt wrong to them. Colonel Wright agreed, allowing them to volunteer for light duties—laundry, gardening, kitchen prep.

Ko found herself in the kitchen with Sergeant Rossi. At first, the language barrier was a wall. Rossi would point and grunt; Ko would bow and scramble. But soon, a pidgin language of English, Japanese, and hand gestures emerged.

One afternoon, Rossi tried to teach Ko how to make pancakes. He demonstrated the flip, sending the batter flying into the air. Ko tried. The pancake landed squarely on Rossi’s boot.

The kitchen went silent. Ko froze, terrified she had offended the sergeant.

Rossi looked at his boot. He looked at Ko. And then he roared with laughter.

“Nice shot!” he bellowed.

Ko started laughing too. It was a rusty sound, unused for years, but it bubbled up uncontrollably. There, in a canvas tent on a battered island, an American sergeant and a Japanese nurse laughed over a ruined pancake, and the war receded just a little further.

The Christmas Truce

By December, the women were unrecognizable from the skeletal ghosts who had emerged from the jungle. Their hair shone, their cheeks were rounder, and they walked with heads held high.

Christmas was approaching. The camp was buzzing with preparation. For the Americans, it was a time of intense homesickness mixed with celebration. For the women, it was a curiosity.

Rossi had an idea. He went to Chen. “Ask ’em if they wanna cook something. For Christmas. A mix. American food and Japanese food.”

When Chen relayed the offer, the women were stunned. The conquerors were inviting the conquered to share their culture?

On Christmas Day, 1945, the mess tent was transformed. Paper chains hung from the ceiling. A small, sad-looking palm tree was decorated with tin foil stars.

The tables were groaned under the weight of the feast. Roast turkey and stuffing sat next to onigiri (rice balls) and miso soup.

Colonel Wright stood up to speak. “Four months ago,” he said, Chen translating his words, “we were enemies. Today, we are just people sharing a meal. The war is over. Let us choose peace.”

Ko ate turkey for the first time. It was dry, and the gravy was strange, but she ate it with reverence. Across the table, Corporal Mitchell—the man who had saved her life—was trying a rice ball, making a face that suggested he wasn’t sure about the seaweed wrapper.

They caught each other’s eyes and smiled.

After dinner, the entertainment began. A soldier played the harmonica. Then, unexpectedly, Fumiko stood up. She began to sing a traditional Japanese folk song. Her voice was clear and haunting, filling the humid tent.

The Marines didn’t understand the words, but they understood the melody. It was a song about home, about loss, about the beauty of the seasons. When she finished, there was a beat of silence, followed by thunderous applause.

That night, Ko wrote in her secret journal: I came here expecting to die. Instead, I learned how to live. The Americans did not conquer us with guns. They conquered us with bread and soap and laughter.

The Return

In February 1946, the order came: Repatriation. The women were going home.

It should have been a happy moment. But fear returned. Japan was a ruin. They were returning to a country that viewed surrender as a disgrace. Would they be outcasts? Would they be branded traitors?

“I am afraid,” Yuki told Corpsman Walsh as he checked her vitals one last time. “I am not the same person.”

Walsh looked at her. He took off his Navy-issue jacket—the one with the insignia on the shoulder—and handed it to her.

“You take this,” he told her through Chen. “It gets cold on the ocean. You’re a survivor, Yuki. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

The departure was somber. The women packed their meager belongings, now bolstered by care packages from the soldiers: soap, canned food, extra clothes.

As the trucks loaded up to take them to the harbor, Ko looked back at the camp. She saw the mess tent where she had laughed with Rossi. She saw the gate Mitchell had opened.

She realized she was leaving the only place where she had felt safe in years.

The Secret Keepers

Ko returned to a Tokyo that had been flattened by firebombs. Her family was gone, except for her mother, who looked at Ko as if she were a ghost.

“They didn’t kill you?” her mother asked, touching Ko’s healthy arm.

“No, Mama,” Ko said softly. “They saved me.”

It was a dangerous truth. In post-war Japan, the narrative was complicated. Shame and pride warred in the national psyche. So, the women of Camp Baker kept their stories mostly to themselves. They became teachers, wives, mothers. They blended back into the population.

But they didn’t forget.

Decades later, Ko would show her granddaughter a faded blue Navy jacket, kept in a cedar box in her closet. It smelled faintly of old wool and memory.

“This,” she would say, running her thumb over the stitching, “is what a hero gave me. He didn’t speak my language. He was supposed to be my enemy. But he gave me his coat because I was cold.”

The story of the 37 women of Saipan is not found in most history books. It is a footnote in the massive saga of the Pacific War. But it remains one of the most profound examples of the human spirit’s refusal to be defined by hatred.

When faced with the choice between the rigid “honor” of death and the uncertain risk of trust, those women chose to run toward the guns. And the men behind those guns chose to be human.

In the end, that was the greatest victory of all.