3 Locations
WWII Historical Sites
Saipan carries the weight of the Pacific War's most costly battles. These sites — memorials, bunkers, and landing beaches — hold that history with the gravity it deserves.
Featured American Memorial Park
A 133-acre living memorial in Garapan honoring the Marianas Campaign of 1944, with a visitor center, the Court of Honor, and the ABMC Saipan Memorial alongside recreational grounds and Micro Beach.
Featured Banzai Cliff
A clifftop memorial park at Marpi Point where civilians and soldiers died in the final days of the Battle of Saipan — dozens of monuments raised by Japanese families, prefectures and veterans' groups, on a headland that drops straight into deep blue water. A sacred pilgrimage site, and a separate place from nearby Suicide Cliff.
Featured Suicide Cliff
A clifftop peace memorial park on Mt. Marpi — Laderan Banadero in Chamorro — where a joint U.S.-Japan-Micronesia memorial has stood since 1972. One of the final and most solemn sites of the Battle of Saipan, and a separate place from nearby Banzai Cliff, though you can see one from the other.
Landing Beaches
Last Japanese Command Post
The Grotto
Two cliffs, not one
Visitors regularly conflate Banzai Cliff and Suicide Cliff, and it's an easy mistake — they sit close together at Marpi Point, commemorate the same closing days of the Battle of Saipan, and you can see one from the other. But they're separate sites with separate memorials: Banzai Cliff is a headland scattered with dozens of monuments raised by Japanese families, prefectures, and veterans' groups; Suicide Cliff is a joint U.S.–Japan–Micronesia peace memorial on Mt. Marpi that's stood since 1972. Both are free, unstaffed, and open sunrise to sunset — and both deserve the time to actually read the monuments rather than a five-minute photo stop.
American Memorial Park is the more accessible entry point if you want context before the clifftop sites: a 133-acre memorial in Garapan with a staffed visitor center, the Court of Honor, and the ABMC Saipan Memorial, right next to Micro Beach. It's the one WWII site here you can pair with a swim.
How to visit respectfully
These are memorial and burial sites, not overlooks — the language matters. In line with how this guide writes about them, we say "civilian and military deaths at the close of the Battle of Saipan," not the phrase you'll sometimes see used elsewhere. Keep voices down, stay off the monuments, and treat both clifftops the way you'd treat any cemetery: as a place people still come to grieve, not a backdrop.