WAR IS A DIRTY BUSINESS, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT comes to clothing. Combatants can go for days without removing their uniforms, while dried blood, caked mud, and all the other stains of campaigning accumulate. This was the situation in which U.S. Marines found themselves after the battles of Saipan and the neighboring island of Tinian (from which the nuclear strikes on Japan would be launched), as well as elsewhere in the Pacific, in 1944. But these Marines were inventive. They put their heads together with members of the Navy’s construction battalions—the Seabees—and built the contrivances that came to be called Saipan windmills, or windmill washers.

On June 15 the 2d and 4th Marine Divisions landed on Saipan. The next night they were joined by the Army’s 27th Infantry Division. The assault would eventually involve more than 127,000 troops, supported by more than 500 ships. As expected, resistance was intense. About 32,000 Japanese fighters were waiting on the island, and all but 2,000 of them died in the battle. Not until July 9 did U.S. forces declare Saipan secured. By that time they were very tired, and very dirty.

Traditionally, Marines scrubbed their clothes by hand over rocks, dipped them in rivers or buckets, or filled their allpurpose helmets with soap and water. Those same helmets served as cooking pots, as shaving bowls, and even on occasion as protection in battle. But they were hardly suited for washing clothes.

No one knows who made the first windmill washer, but one thing is certain: Once it appeared, copies sprang up across the island. Harry Gooch recalled that “the Seabees were masters at making such items that were needed—at a price, of course.” But, he added, “when most of us had extra Japanese equipment to trade, all it took was a little haggling.” The Seabees were not involved in all the construction, though; many models were strictly Marine-built.

From an engineering standpoint, the washers were simple enough. The usual machine was made from half of a 55-gallon steel fuel drum, but other tubs, both wooden and metal, were used. Each one had a hole drilled near the bottom for a tapered wooden drain plug. Scrap wood could be cut and shaped to make the windmill’s sail frame—to which wood or sheet-metal sails were nailed—and a frame to support the agitator. The crankshaft, usually salvaged from a junked piece of machinery, would be attached to the frame with washers and cotter pins, and the frame bolted to the tub. A one-quart can usually served as the plunging device for the agitator, which was confined between a pair of guardrails nailed to the frame. Some upscale models used jeep gears, an arrangement like those that spin modern-day washing machines.

In a moderate 10 to 15 mph wind, each wash took about an hour. The washers, filled with soap, water, and clothes, were left out in the breeze; the hot sun would heat the water, although some soldiers made a low fire in a shallow pit under the steel tub to keep it hot during use. The process worked well, though colors tended to fade. Of course, Gooch pointed out, “It helped to have enough time to do the laundry.” That was an ingredient not always available.

Carl Noss, a Marine staff sergeant, praised the resourcefulness of the mechanics he worked with on Saipan. In a motor section near their camp, there was an old narrow-gauge railroad track that had once been used to haul sugar cane from the fields. The tracks lay in a weed-choked trench about 6 feet deep and 20 feet wide. Nearby were a dozen drums of aviation gasoline captured from the Japanese. “Since we had received the word that the general was going to make an inspection of our regimental area,” Noss recalls, “and all the weeds in the railroad track area had to be removed for several hundred yards, it just seemed like it made good sense to empty some of the drums into the railroad trench and toss a lighted torch on it to take care of all the weeds. Then there would be some empty drums for our washing machines.”

That’s what they did. As expected, the gasoline caught fire in seconds and burned to the ground everything standing in the trench. Unfortunately, there were also many rounds of live ammunition left over from the fighting. The flames set off explosions and sent bullets tumbling through the air. Overall, though, the operation was a success; the weeds were gone, and once the fumes cleared from the drums, Marines and Seabees could use welding torches to take the tops off or cut them in half to make two washtubs.

It was important to keep an eye on your clothes as they washed, a lesson Gene Tabor learned the hard way. “For the first four or five months on Tinian, we scrounged parts, mostly from the Seabees, to make a 55-gallon-drum washing machine. It worked real fine, except for one problem. I put my clothes on the line late one evening. We had to wait our turns. Later we had an alert. I forgot about them until the following morning. When I went to get them, they were gone.” At first he thought someone had taken them, but when he looked closely at the water, he found tiny pieces of cloth throughout. The washer had cleaned his clothes, all right—and dissolved them in the process. “Shortly after that, battalion headquarters set up a washing tent and employed Korean and Japanese women to wash all our clothes.”

The sight of the washers awed Roland Jennings, who was on Saipan from August 1944 to September 1945. His unit, the 10th Marines, camped on a skinny oblong of real estate bordered on the south by East Field (or Kagman Point), a landing strip for fighter planes, and on the north by a 90-mm anti-aircraft battery, with the eastern slope of Mount Tapotchau, the highest point on Saipan, as a rugged backdrop.

“Windmills dotted the landscape all along the route,” Jennings recalls. “They came in various shapes and sizes. Most were only a few feet tall. The economy model used the familiar and abundant 5-gallon square tin container for the tub, in lieu of a modified 55-gallon drum. Some designs were ingenious, others simple. But it was a sight to see all of them in motion, powered by the ever-present trade wind.”

Ross E. Stauffer remembered the washers clearly: “I certainly have a fond memory of these washing machines, which were located among the iaeeed coral near the edge of a cliff in Saipan.” Cliffs were sought-after spots because of the winds, but Bill Jefferies didn’t much enjoy the privileged location. His unit’s machines were near an airfield that today is Saipan International Airport, and as he tended his clothes, he could see planes “come back at dusk, some on fire and crash-landing in the ocean and on the field.”

Compared with radar, the proximity fuze, and the atomic bomb, the windmill washer must be considered one of the less impressive technological achievements of World War II. But to the Marines of Saipan and Tinian, sweating on their barren rocks in the middle of the Pacific, it made a world of difference.