Talk:Battle of Saipan

message: The article has a section listing medals awarded to the Americans. Were no medals awarded to any Japanese soldiers or are they just not listed here? Thanks  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.35.135.174 (talk) 02:39, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Medals for Japanese Soliders?

message: The Guy Gabaldon content was added with a POV-pushing link.  I've independently verified some of the information, restored NPOV, and removed the rest.  Jehochman (Talk/Contrib) 19:03, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV Issue

message: This was inserted into the text, and then reverted:
However, there is a testimony of gasoline's being able to be reeled to surroundings of the elderly person and the child of the Japanese gathered by the U.S.Army, to ignite, and all women's who have come out from the cave according to calling the U.S. military being made source nakedness, being loaded into the track, and to have having been carried away, tooIssue in September of 'Seiron (正論)' 2005年 of "NHK watching" of Tokusuke Tanaka (former army captain) testimony by Akira Nakamura (中村粲) .
I understand why it was reverted, its English needs serious cleaning up, I put it here so it is not forgotten.
--Stor stark7 Talk 17:56, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Book by Akira Nakamura

message: The summary, under the section 'Commanders' gives Takeo Takagi as the Japanese commander, the second paragraph of the introduction names Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito as the Japanese commander. Something seems wrong here. --Andrzej Gandecki (talk) 17:02, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  The name of the Japanese commander 

message: The paragraph beginning "The operation was marred by" seriously misrepresents to context of General Ralph Smith's dismissal. It should either be truncated to simply note the dismissal or expanded to cover the controversy or throughly.
The dismissal is well covered in "Coral and Brass" by  Holland Smith as well as "To the Marianas" by Edwin P. Hoyt.
There were in fact several elements of the 27th division failed repeatedly to carry out orders. Ralph Smith was given every oppertunity to correct the problems and failed to do so. His succesor did get the division to complete the missions ordered but only after dismissing several regimental commaanders.
SqeePjox (talk) 04:47, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Smith vs Smith 

message: The Marianas invasion did not have a bigger fleet than the Normandy invasion.Brocky44 (talk) 19:07, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fleet 

message: The last sentence of the intro to Battle of Saipan says that Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito commanded the 43rd division, whereas Battle of Saipan order of battle says that he commanded the 31st army. Now I know that the 43rd division was part of the the 31st army, but if someone knowledgeable on the subject could clear this up, I will remove the contradiction template. Jmfriesen (talk) 00:39, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradiction of "Battle of Saipan order of battle" 

message: Section Civilian surrenders and suicides and section Battle (before the first sub section) both contain this paragraph:
"In the end, about 22,000 Japanese civilians died. Almost the entire garrison of troops on the island — at least 30,000 — died. For the Americans, the victory was the most costly to date in the Pacific War. 2,949 Americans were killed and 10,364 wounded, out of 71,000 who landed." 
--Mortense (talk) 18:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redundancy 

message: The discussion of the mass suicides on Saipan relies much too heavily on David Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, which is a highly controversial source, without giving any indications of the controversy. Bergamini has been scathingly criticized by most mainstream scholars on this period in history:
Herbert P. Bix: "[Bergamini's] book took some courage, but embedded in it was a full-blown conspiracy theory that no sane person could accept." From an interview: http://cgi.cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/foc/
Sheldon: "The book is a polemic which, to our knowledge, contradicts all previous scholarly work, whether in English or in Japanese. It also contradicts the facts upon which this previous scholarship rested. Specialists on Japan have unanimously demolished Bergamini's thesis and his pretensions to careful scholarship." From a peer-reviewed journal article: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2693904
David M. Kennedy (historian): "One reviewer observed that Bergamini was "believable only by violating every canon of acceptable documentation." The historian Barbara Tuchman said that Bergamini's thesis "appears to be almost entirely a product of the author's inference and of his predilection for the sinister explanation."" Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/98apr/horror.htm
Theodore Cook: "You name it, He did it. The bible of the Hirohito conspiracy theorists. It asks many of the right questions. The problem is where he says he finds the answers. Best to avoid using, but read it to see where others get their “inside knowledge.”" Source: www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/sino-japanese/ChinaWarBib.pdf
Joshua A. Fogel "...David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, a work long ago dismissed by serious historians of Japan as based on little substantial evidence..." Source: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/china_review_international/v015/15.1.fogel.html
There are a number of links to academic criticisms of Japan's Imperial Conspiracy in Wikipedia's own article on the book. Unfortunately, they are mostly behind a subscription-only wall.
There's no question a large number of civilians killed themselves at Saipan, in one of the most dreadful incidents of the war in the Pacific. However, Bergamini's figure of 22,000 civilian suicides is implausible. The number of civilians on the island at the time of the invasion is given as 26,000 by Gordon L. Rottman, and American records indicate that 18,000 civilians were interned (http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=129784). That means the civilian suicides could have been as much as 8,000, still horrible but much less than Bergamini's figure.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yaush (talk • contribs) 17:21, 28 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Overreliance on Bergamini 

message: The narrative states that it was comprised of about 3,000 Japanese, yet later it goes on to state that over 4,300 bodies were counted...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.105.96.39 (talk) 10:10, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Banzai charge 

message: I have checked the quotation cited in Bergamimi...pp1012-14 of "Japan's Imperial Conspiracy" -- there is no such claim in these pages cited.  The reference is wrong. This needs to be removed. 
talk  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Canadaman1 (talk • contribs) 07:24, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: As of Jan 2020, the references are back in!  I'm not a SME on this and prefer editors who are to attend to this issue. HammerFilmFan (talk) 22:46, 25 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hirohito's Involvement in Civilian Mass Suicides 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The OOB had gotten kind of unwieldy and there was a separate OOB page anyway, so I moved the detailed info to that page and dropped in a compact Opposing Forces into the main article. Hungrydog55 (talk) 01:43, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Simplified Opposing Forces 

message: The infobox says 7k and 22k with no explanation for the discrepancy. MyIP19216811 (talk) 16:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I suspect 22,000 was the number of civilian deaths on all three islands, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, mistakenly attributed only to Saipan. "Report on the Capture of the Marianas" linked in the article lists 14,785 civilian internees on Saipan by 10 August, while the National Park Service (link here) estimates a pre-invasion population of 26,000, of whom 18,000 were finally interned by the end of the war. So 7,000-8,000 is probably the correct figure. The Pittsburgher (talk) 23:02, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Civilian casualties in the infobox 

message: I fixed some missing citations. I added details and attributed existing quote to Rear Admiral Miwa. Also added another oft-mentioned quote by Fleet Admiral Nagano. Both Saipan-related quotes have been frequently misattributed and are often presented as if they were contemporaneous with events, but both were given a few months after the war when they were interrogated. Each quote has a citation that includes a reliable secondary source that cites the primary source. But the primary source (which is publicly accessible) is given as well. 
For Nagano's quote, I used an up-to-date source that correctly cited the source, but I also used was Hoffman's vintage 1950 book. Though much more information and perspective has been gained in the past 70+ years, it still has a wealth of detail and citation, and I suspect it is still a source book for many of the subsequent studies. If there are problems, please remove it, though I'd suggest returning the book to "Further Reading".
Also, I had removed the "citations needed" banner for the "Battle" Section after addressing the specifically marked "citation needed" templates, but realized that there was still a lot of uncited material to be addressed.  If someone wants to take it on, the whole "Battle" section could use a bit of work. 
Also, the citation formatting could use some updating. Right now, it is quite messy. To make a start, I templated all the book references. If nobody objects I'd like to fix the citation style and make it consistent. My preference is to use the short footnote format, which allows readers to see the source at a glance, and can allow convenience links. Wtfiv (talk) 23:17, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: References and Citations

message: As I find myself reworking the article, I've just added the above subheading  In addition to the contenxt changes below, I continue to check citations as I come to them and rework them into sfn format, and add new sources as appropriate. Wtfiv (talk) 22:29, 20 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Ongoing edits