“By any rational standard, the most devastating cost of war is the lives of the men it kills and maims. In these terms, the price of Guam came high. In 21 days of battle Marine units of the Southern Troops and Landing Force lost 1,190 men killed and 377 died of wounds and suffered 5,308 wounded in action; the 77th Infantry Division casualties were 177 men killed and 662 wounded. In the same period, 10,971 Japanese bodies were counted. Sealed in caves and bunkers by shellfire and demolitions lay hundreds more of the enemy dead. Perhaps as many as 10,000 Japanese were still alive in the jungles of Guam on 10 August [1944]. Except for the doomed group defending the enemy headquarters at Mt. Mataguac, there was little cohesion among the men that survived. In the months to come, when American troops in training for combat sharpened their skills in a perpetual mopping-up action, all Japanese efforts at counterattacks and guerrilla warfare floundered in a bitter struggle for survival. Starvation was a constant spectre to the men hidden in the vast stretches of jungle, and many of those that were later captured or killed were too weak to fight or hide any longer. For these survivors of the Thirty-first Army, Guam became a nightmare.” – Henry I. Shaw, Jr., Bernard C. Nalty, and Edwin T. Turnbladh, Central Pacific Drive, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. III, “The Return to Guam”