Between 15 June and 9 July 1944 American forces assaulted Saipan, a Japanese-held island in the Mariana Islands, as the first stage of Operation Forager. The landing was launched at the same time as the Allied invasion of Normandy. Two Marine divisions and an Army division defeated the Japanese 43rd Infantry Division, and the battle triggered the Battle of the Philippine Sea, which largely destroyed Japanese carrier airpower. Organized Japanese resistance ended with a mass suicide charge of at least 3,000 soldiers, and about 1,000 civilians also killed themselves. The battle cost more than 46,000 US and Japanese military casualties and at least 8,000 civilian deaths. Its capture gave American B-29 bombers bases within range of Japan's major cities, which made strategic bombing possible. The defeat was so serious that Hideki Tōjō resigned as prime minister, and Japan's government told citizens for the first time that the war was going badly.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.