The Pied Piper Of Saipan

"My actions prove that God takes care of idiots."
--Guy Gabaldon

A cunning, brave, and very crazy Marine has passed away after a long, good life:

Guy Gabaldon, who as an 18-year-old Marine private single-handedly persuaded more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers to surrender in the World War II battle for Saipan, has died. He was 80.

Gabaldon died of a heart attack Thursday at his home in Old Town, his son, Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Hunter Gabaldon, said Monday.

Using an elementary knowledge of Japanese, bribes of cigarettes and candy, and trickery with tales of encampments surrounded by American troops, Gabaldon was able to persuade soldiers to abandon their posts and surrender. The scheme was so brazen — and so amazingly successful — it won the young Marine the Navy Cross, and fame when his story was told on television's "This Is Your Life" and the 1960 movie "Hell to Eternity."

"My plan, as impossible as it seemed, was to get near a Japanese emplacement, bunker, or cave, and tell them that I had a bunch of Marines with me and we were ready to kill them if they did not surrender," he wrote in his 1990 memoir "Saipan: Suicide Island."

"I promised that they would be treated with dignity, and that we would make sure that they were taken back to Japan after the war," he wrote.

The 5-foot-4-inch Gabaldon used piecemeal Japanese he picked up from a childhood friend to earn the trust of the enemy, who believed his story of hundreds of looming troops. In a single day in July 1944, Gabaldon was said to have gotten about 800 Japanese soldiers to follow him back to the American camp.

His exploits earned him the nickname the Pied Piper of Saipan.

His knowledge of Japanese was a bit more than elementary: he was raised by a Japanese family in Los Angeles and was in Military Intelligence precisely because of his language ability.
You'll find an excellent interview with him here, where he discusses both his prisoner-collecting and his helplessness in stopping civilians from throwing their children off the cliffs.