Saipan & Tinian 1944: Piercing the Japanese Empire (Campaign) Paperback – April 27, 2004

This book helps me remember my wife's and my visit to both of these islands and makes even more clear what we saw in person. Great book.

Very detailed view of those battles.

eryinformative

Fantastic book!!

Informative but not particularly readable.

No new insites

Gordon L. Rottman's Osprey Campaign #137, Saipan and Tinian 1944, is effective in laying out and summarizing the events of the campaign, but it is dry as dirt. Rottman provides a wealth of information indicating that he has much to offer military readers, but he lacks the style - in what he chooses to discuss and how he describes it - that renders this volume rather sterile. Assaulting two tropical islands defended by thousands of fanatical defenders should evoke emotions of fear, courage and resignation, but Rottman can only offer terse descriptions of sequential unit movements and actions. Indeed, if one were to remove all the unit designations and the words "moved," "landed," "attacked" and "defended" from this volume there wouldn't be much left to this narrative. Rottman's knowledge of the US Marine Corps is impressive, but he doesn't seem to be aware that history is made by human beings, not by faceless unit designations. Nowhere is Rottman's omission of the human element in this campaign more evident in the fact that he fails to mention any of the five Medal of Honor recipients on Saipan (Agerholm, Baker, Epperson, McCard and Timmerman) and the two on Tinian (Ozbourn, Wilson); all seven were KIA and they deserve mention.
Rottman begins with a 5-page introduction that lays out the origins of the campaign and the nature of the two islands (although he omits mentioning the civilian population of the island). The lack of a strategic map depicting the location of the islands in the Pacific or their relation to the other invasion on Guam, is a serious omission. The author then discusses the US invasion plan, included the unprecedented large-scale use of over 600 amphibious tractors (amtracs), which Rottman notes "set the standard for future operations." One odd point here is that Rottman notes that the invasion plan for Saipan included an option to land a reinforced battalion on the opposite side of the island the night before the main invasion, in order to drive inland a seize a key piece of high ground. Although Rottman notes that "this extremely risky mission" - which is a euphemism for suicidal - was cancelled, he never identifies who ordered it in the first place. The Japanese army and navy forces defending Saipan and Tinian were handicapped with a number of serious deficiencies that undermined their efforts, including lack of a unified command; shortages of ammunition, construction materials, artillery and small arms; and heavy losses from US submarine attacks while enroute to the islands (according to Rottman, about 3,000 troops were lost to submarine attacks). Rottman notes that about 40% of the 31,000 Japanese army troops on Saipan were unarmed, and that many fighting positions were incomplete. On the other hand, the Japanese forces had a high level of fanaticism and were able to cunningly use their meager reserves to inflict serious losses on the US invaders.
Rottman provides only five 2-D maps in this volume: Japanese defenses on Saipan and on Tinian; the battle in central Saipan on 27 June 1944; and the capture of Tinian. The three 3-D Bird's Eye View Maps are: D-Day, Green Beach on Saipan; the Japanese Banzai attack on Saipan; and J-Day on Tinian. The three color battle scenes depict: clearing Afetna Point on Saipan; Japanese tank attack on Saipan; and LVTs emplacing "cliff ramps" on Tinian. While Rottman's bibliography is conventional, his order of battle is superb, with all the myriad minor detachments noted. Rottman also provides information on the battlefield today.
Although Saipan is one of many Second World war invasions that has been all but forgotten due to the hyping (milking) of D-Day, Rottman notes that US forces suffered over 2,000 casualties on the first day of the landings - comparable to Omaha Beach, which occurred nine days earlier. Despite landing with two divisions abreast, the US Marines required two days of fighting to seal the inter-division boundary - a defect which the Japanese cunningly exploited with repeated small-scale counterattacks. After twelve days of fighting, the two Marine divisions and one army division had secured most of the island and began the final costly reduction of Japanese pockets. It was during this period that the senior US ground commander, Marine LGN "Howling Mad" Smith relieved the army commander of the 27th Infantry Division. While Rottman mentions that this controversial decision was unwarranted, he does so in a footnote and seems to have little sympathy for the 27th ID on Saipan. However, a close examination of the tactical combat indicates that the army units and commanders on Saipan performed admirably and the relief was probably due more to differences on tactical philosophies rather than failure to accomplish the mission. The landings on Tinian are interesting because the Americans chose to ignore the best beaches and achieve surprise by landing on tiny, sub-optimal stretches of beach. Indeed, the two landing beaches on Tinian were only 114 meters wide and the US units were forced to land in company columns, but they achieved tactical surprise. Rottman's description of the LVT-launched "cliff ramps" is a good example of American engineering ingenuity to solve a tactical problem.
In the end, the battles on Saipan and Tinian were foregone conclusions due to US air and naval superiority, but the cost for both sides was still very high: over 18,000 US casualties (3,700 dead) against about 37,000 Japanese military and 26,000 civilian deaths. Indeed, more than half the population of the islands died in the fighting. With the islands secured, the US began the end game for the Pacific War, of putting heavy bombers in range of the Japanese industrial heartland. Rottman gets his facts straight, but forgets to include the kind of personal accounts that bring military history to life.

The 1944 U.S. invasion of Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas Islands was a key moment in the Pacific War. Saipan and Tinian were strongly held by Japanese military forces who considered them part of the Japanese Empire; the struggle with the U.S. Marine and Army invasion force was to the death. For the U.S., Saipan and Tinian became vital airbases for the bombing of the Japanese homeland. The invasion itself was a large scale assault that involved three divisions of troops, a precursor to the large scale U.S. combined assault on Okinawa in 1945.

"Saipan & Tinian 1944: Piercing the Japanese Empire" is an Osprey Campaign Series entry by Gordon Rottman with illustrator Howard Gerrard. The format includes an introduction, a discussion of the opposing forces and their commanders and plans, and a narrative of the battles themselves. The text is accompanied by maps, diagram, photographs and illustrations that depict the course, and the ferocity, of the fighting. The narrative is extremely detailed, reading almost like an operations order for the U.S. assault and the Japanese defense. That may be the most noticeable shortcoming of the book, which is curiously sterile in its retelling of the battle. Even the controversial relief of the Commander of the Army's 27th Division by Marine General "Howlin' Mad" Smith, an incident which threatened to poison interservice relations, gets only brief mention. Similar brief mention is made of the naval aviation fight, the famous "Marianas turkey shoot", that protected the U.S. invasion force.

"Saipan & Tinian 1944" is recommended as an introduction to a complex campaign that probably needs coverage beyond the limited scale of this Osprey edition.