On the morning of 23 October 1945, in the basement of a ruined hospital on Saipan, forty-seven Japanese women waited to die.

They had armed themselves with whatever they could find: broken chair legs, lengths of pipe, spoons honed into crude blades against concrete. They had rehearsed it in whispers. When the Americans came – and they knew they would come – they would attack, all at once. Better to be cut down fighting than endure what Tokyo’s broadcasts and garrison rumours had promised: torture, rape, slow death at enemy hands.

When the door finally gave way under the boots of a Marine clearing team, light knifed into the darkness. Flashbeams swept across hollow faces and trembling hands. At the front of the group stood the eldest, Nurse Kō, thirty-four years old, her spine straight despite weeks of hunger. She stepped forward, hands raised, and spoke in rapid, formal Japanese. It was the language of surrender and of acceptance; she was telling them, with as much dignity as she could muster, to do what they wished.

The Marines did not raise their rifles. Slung across their shoulders were medical bags and folded blankets.

Through an interpreter someone found at the surface, a young corporal addressed the women. His words made no sense to ears conditioned by four years of war. “Ma’am,” he said carefully, “we’re here to help.”

The battle for Saipan had ended three months earlier, in July 1944, in a slaughter that left nearly 30,000 Japanese soldiers dead and more than 3,000 Americans alongside them. Civilians had died in equally shocking numbers. Many had thrown themselves off the cliffs at Marpi and elsewhere rather than fall into enemy hands. For weeks beforehand, Japanese troops and propagandists had filled loudspeakers with warnings: Americans were monsters. They would rape, torture, kill. Better to die by your own hand than suffer unspeakable humiliation.

The forty-seven women in that basement – nurses, clerks, radio operators, cooks – had believed all of it. They were not combat troops, but they wore uniforms and had served the Emperor. When the final line broke and the garrisons fell back into caves and ruins, they had fled with the wounded into the shattered hospital and burrowed into the lower levels. For weeks they lived on rainwater and scraps of food scavenged from abandoned storerooms, listening to the distant rumble of artillery and the closer eruptions of demolition charges as Japanese soldiers killed themselves rather than surrender.

When the guns fell quiet and the island was declared secure, the fighting moved on, to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Saipan’s ruins, though, still held stragglers. Marine patrols worked methodically through blasted bunkers and mangled buildings, looking for hidden weapons – and people. That is how they found the basement, the barricaded door, the women waiting for the end.

The women knew nothing of the Geneva Convention. Japan had signed the 1929 agreement governing the humane treatment of prisoners of war but never ratified it; in practice, its provisions meant nothing inside the Japanese military system. American and British prisoners in Japanese hands had suffered starvation, forced labour and abuse, and had died at a rate unmatched anywhere else in the conflict.

The United States, by contrast, had ratified the Convention and, despite the fury provoked by Japanese atrocities, had instructed its forces to observe its rules. Prisoners of war, the document said, were to receive adequate food, shelter and medical care. They were to be protected from violence, intimidation, insults and public curiosity. It was a dry, legalistic text, but commanders in the field had internalised its essence. How you treated the defeated, they believed, said as much about your civilisation as your conduct in battle.

In the moments after the basement door was kicked in, none of that mattered to the women. All they saw were silhouettes and rifle barrels. It took repeated assurances from the interpreter before Kō risked lowering her hands. One by one, the others followed. It was the first small crack in a wall of fear built over years.

They were led up into the sunlight, blinking and swaying. The air outside smelled of smoke and rot. Saipan’s landscape was a moonscape of collapsed concrete and shredded palms, burnt-out tanks and wrecked trucks. Two of the women, too weak to climb, had to be carried. They were loaded onto trucks and driven past the devastation, past hills that still bore the scars of July’s desperate charges and cliffs where civilians had died in their thousands.

Inside the canvas-covered trucks there was very little sense of where they were going. Some thought of firing squads, others of forced labour on some distant island. For them, surrender meant entering a void.

After twenty minutes the trucks pulled into a camp ringed with barbed wire and guarded by towers. There were wooden barracks, a flagpole, a medical tent. The trappings looked like a prison. In practice, it was the closest thing to safety any of them had seen in years.

An American officer stood waiting, accompanied by a Japanese-American interpreter in a U.S. uniform. His eyes flickered over the women and then dropped to his clipboard. The interpreter translated his instructions: they would be processed, examined by doctors, given clothing and assigned to quarters. There were no shouted commands, no insults, no blows. The words were curt and bureaucratic, but they carried nothing of the cruelty the women had been taught to expect.

One after another, they were taken inside a hut where female Army nurses waited with equipment laid out on tables. The women stripped under thin blankets and submitted to examinations that were brisk, professional and impersonal. A nurse dabbed antiseptic on an arm wound that had been left to fester; another listened to a chest with a stethoscope; a doctor frowned at the swollen joints of Kō’s knee and ordered further treatment. Nobody struck them. Nobody touched them in ways that betrayed their vulnerability.

Afterwards, each woman was handed a cup of water and told through the interpreter to drink slowly. The water tasted clean and shockingly abundant.

From there they were shepherded to a bathing area – a row of big galvanized tubs filled with hot water. They stared at the tubs in disbelief. They had not properly bathed for months; in the caves and ruins, washing had been a luxury reserved for the most grievous wounds. A nurse gestured and spoke a single English word that needed no translation: “Bath.”

They undressed again, more self-conscious this time in daylight, sank into the water and flinched as heat bit into inflamed skin. Then they relaxed. The water soothed muscles knotted with caveside nights and constant fear. As the dirt and sweat loosened and floated away, more than one woman started to cry quietly, not from shame but from the unfamiliar kindness of the act.

Clean clothes followed: plain cotton shirts and trousers, undergarments, socks. No insignia, no rank. Just fabric without holes. They dressed slowly, half expecting someone to snatch the garments back.

The mess tent was the next shock. It smelled of rice and fish stock. A section had been set aside for the new prisoners; the rest was filled with khaki uniforms. The Americans glanced over as the women came in, then turned back to their trays. No one jeered. No one ogled. The women sat down on bench seats, hands in their laps, and waited.

Mess orderlies arrived with trays and began distributing food: bowls of white rice, grilled fish, miso soup. Someone – perhaps a Nisei cook, perhaps a local hire – had told the kitchen how to prepare Japanese dishes. There were even pickled vegetables and green tea.

The women stared at the food as if it might vanish. Kō picked up her chopsticks with hands that shook. She had watched comrades die of starvation on Saipan. Here, in a camp run by the enemy, she was being given more in one meal than she had eaten in a week. The first mouthful of rice was almost painful in its normality.

A younger woman, twenty-two-year-old Yuki, brought the fish to her lips, then froze. Her mind could not reconcile what she had been told – that Americans were brutal animals who would torment and defile prisoners – with the simple reality of warm food and soldiers who ignored her.

Halfway through the meal, her composure collapsed. Her chopsticks slipped from her fingers and clattered to the table. She covered her face and began to sob. A nurse hastened over, alarmed, and crouched beside her with a hand on her shoulder. The interpreter asked what was wrong.

“She is confused,” Kō answered in Japanese. “We were told you would hurt us. Instead, you feed us.”

The interpreter relayed this. The nurse’s face changed. Pity, perhaps, or something close to shame, crossed it. She squeezed Yuki’s shoulder and returned to her duties.

That night, after another round of processing and a head count, the women were shown into a long barrack. Cots lined the walls, each with a thin mattress, pillow and folded wool blanket. The door was of wood, not bars. Outside, a sentry paced.

Inside, nobody slept immediately. They lay fully clothed on top of their blankets, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of an American camp. A jeep’s engine. Laughter from a distant tent. An occasional shout. Every noise might presage the betrayal they still half-expected: the arrival of men with bad intentions, the culminating cruelty.

Instead, shortly after midnight, the door opened again. Three figures stood there: two soldiers and a nurse, arms full of blankets and a metal pot. Wordlessly, they distributed extra covers and poured hot tea into cups, setting them on the floor by each cot. “Gets cold at night,” the interpreter explained. “This will help.”

When they left, closing the door gently, the women stared at each other. It was too much. The propaganda had not prepared them for an enemy that brought blankets.

Routine settled over the following weeks. They were no longer combatants; they were prisoners of war, assigned light duties in and around the camp. Some worked in the laundry, their hands in soapy water that was warm and plentiful. Others cleaned barracks or helped with kitchen tasks under guard. They were given pay in camp script which could be exchanged for small items in the canteen. The sums were tiny, but the fact of being paid at all felt like a restoration of dignity they hadn’t known they had lost.

In the canteen, shelves held strange luxuries: chocolate bars, canned fruit, notebooks and pencils, toothbrushes. Kō stared at the chocolate. It reminded her of pre-war Tokyo department stores, of things her daughter had never tasted. She bought a bar and kept it for a week before breaking it into microscopic pieces and sharing it.

The Americans themselves became more human as the days stretched into months. Some were brusque. Others tried out halting Japanese from phrase books. One soldier, a lanky corporal from Minnesota, was particularly persistent. He pointed at objects and supplied English: “soap”, “comb”, “blanket”. When Yuki repeated the words tentatively, he beamed as if she had passed an exam.

There were still boundaries. Guards were always present. Fraternisation was prohibited, and the women carried the knowledge that the nation feeding them had also burned their cities. That truth came home in the most searing way when Captain Morrison arranged a film showing.

The projector clattered to life in the recreation hut. Grainy black-and-white images filled the sheet tacked to the wall: Tokyo’s Ginza district reduced to charred skeletons; Hiroshima’s flattened expanse; women picking through rubble; children bandaged and burned. The women sat rigid on the benches, staring as the places they remembered from childhood appeared as scars.

Americans watched too. Some smoked in silence; some frowned. One sailor left halfway through, his jaw clenched. There was no gloating in the room, no cheering. When the film ended, the lights came on slowly. Through the interpreter, Morrison addressed them.

“The war is over,” she said. “Your country has surrendered. Japan is under occupation. There will be hunger and hard times. But there will also be rebuilding. Aid is being sent. You are safe here. You are prisoners, but you are not our enemies anymore.”

Safe. It was a fragile word, easily broken. There were still moments of fear, spikes of remembered hate, nightmares that woke the women gasping. Yet the accumulation of ordinary kindness – hot water, blankets, respectful touch, the absence of abuse – began to erode the certainties that had driven so many to cliffs three months before.

When orders came, at last, for repatriation, the women’s feelings were complicated. Going home meant leaving a place where their stomachs were full and their bodies tended; it meant returning to a country they barely recognised from the film reels, to families who might be dead, to cities of ash. But it also meant stepping out from under the gaze of the enemy, ending the cognitive dissonance of being cared for by those they had been told to hate.

They boarded ships back across the Pacific with bundles of clothing and a few possessions bought at the canteen. Some carried English phrase books. Many carried something less tangible: a memory of unexpected mercy.

In the years that followed, those memories would rub up against new propaganda and old grievances. They would be softened by time or sharpened by hunger. But the story of the blankets, the tea, the soap, and the nurse who apologised when the antiseptic stung would not vanish.

They had gone into that basement on Saipan ready to die at American hands rather than endure dishonour. They came out of the war with a different understanding: that cruelty and kindness did not belong to one side or the other, and that sometimes, even in the wake of unspeakable violence, it was possible for victors to choose humanity over vengeance.

In a conflict defined by firestorms and prison camps, that choice is easy to overlook. Yet for forty-seven women on a ruined island, it was the hinge on which their lives turned.