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The Town That Got Away With Murder and Other Largely Forgotten Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan November 23, 2019 33 min

30. The Saipan Stare

A weary Marine in the closing days of the 1944 Battle of Saipan. Life Magazine

In the closing days of the Battle of Saipan, in July, 1944, photographer W. Eugene Smith snapped a photo of a US Marine that captured the weariness and wariness of combat as few photos have before or since. It appeared in LIFE Magazine, with the caption:

“Surrounded by the enemy, with bullets whizzing from all directions, this Soldier jerked his head around as one bullet cracked uncomfortably close. He was about 100 feet from the front lines, on the day after the famous breakthrough on Saipan, and had been practically hand-driving Japs out of their pillboxes. More than 2,000 Japs were killed in the drive to the sea.” Decades later, controversy erupted about the identity of the photo’s subject, when a Santa Fe bar owner claimed that it was of his father, Angelo Klonis, an OSS operative, and that it had been taken in Europe, not Saipan.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.