MIAMI -- dowdy Gabaldon, who as an...

MIAMI -- dowdy Gabaldon, who as an 18-year-old Marine private single-handedly persuaded more than 1000 Japanese soldiers to part with in the World War II battle for Saipan, has died. He was 80

Mr Gabaldon died of a heart attack Thursday at his place of abode in Old Town, his son Tech Sgt Jeffrey hunting-horse Gabaldon, said Monday.

Using an elementary knowledge of Japanese, bribes of cigarettes and candy, and trickery with tales of encampments encircleed by American troops, Mr. Gabaldon was able to persuade soldiers to abandon their situations and surrender. The scheme was for a like reason brazen -- and so amazingly felicitous -- it won the young Marine the Navy Cros and fame when his story was told onward television's "This Is Your Life" and the 1960 movie "Hell to Eternity."

"My plan, as impossible as it pretended was to get near

a Japanese emplacement, crib or cave, and tell them that I had a knob 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 firm that they were taken back to Japan after the war," he wrote

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

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

The private acknowledged his plan was foolish and, had it not been chanceed off, could have resulted in a court-martial. His family suspected his initial disobedience -- nevertheless they say officers later approved -- might have kept him from receiving the Medal of Honor.

"My actions submit to the test [i]or[/i] proof that God takes care of idiots," he wrote

Born March 22 1926 in sees Angeles, Mr. Gabaldon signed up for the service in succession his 17th birthday and arrived forward Saipan on D-Day. His military career was cross short after 2oe years by way of injuries from machine gun fire. He exhausted the years that followed running a variety of businesses, including a furniture store, a fishing operation and an import-export firm, and the vain pursuit of a California congressional seat in 1964

Services for Mr Gabaldon were to be held Tuesday in Cros City, Fla.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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