Foreword
In the capture of the southern Marianas, including the recapture of Guam, during the summer of 1944, Army ground and air forces played an important, though subordinate, role to that of the Navy and its Marine Corps. Marine personnel constituted the bulk of the combat troops employed. The objective of this campaign was “to secure control of sea communications through the Central Pacific by isolating and neutralizing the Carolines and by the establishment of sea and air bases for operations against Japanese sea routes and long-range air attacks against the Japanese home land.” Its success would provide steppingstones from which the Americans could threaten further attack westward toward the Philippines, Formosa, and Japan itself, and would gain bases from which the Army Air Forces’ new very long range bombers, the B-29’s, could strike at Japan’s heartland. Recognizing and accepting the challenge, the Japanese Navy suffered heavy and irreplaceable losses in the accompanying Battle of the Philippine Sea; and the islands after capture became the base for all the massive air attacks on Japan, beginning in November 1944.
In the operations described in the present volume, landings against strong opposition demonstrated the soundness of the amphibious doctrine and techniques evolved out of hard experience in preceding Pacific operations. Bitter inland fighting followed the landings, with Army and Marine Corps divisions engaged side by side. The author’s account and corresponding Marine Corps histories of these operations provide ample opportunity to study the differences in the fighting techniques of the two services. Dr. Crowl also deals frankly with one of the best-known controversies of World War II, that of Smith versus Smith, but concludes that it was the exception to generally excellent inter-service cooperation.
With team effort among the military services the order of the day, this record of the Army’s experience in working with the Navy and the Marine Corps should be particularly valuable both now and in the future.
Warren H. Hoover
Colonel, U.S.A.
Acting Chief of Military History
Washington, D.C.
16 March 1959
The Author
Philip A. Crowl, who has an M.A. from the State University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University, taught History at the Johns Hopkins University and at Princeton. Commissioned in the Navy in World War II, he became a lieutenant (senior grade) and commanding officer of an LCI gunboat that was in action at Leyte Gulf, Lingayen Gulf, and Okinawa. From 1949 through 1956, Dr. Crowl was a historian with the Office, Chief of Military History. He was awarded the James V. Forrestal Fellowship for 1953-54 to study command relationships in amphibious warfare in World War II. Since 1957 he has been in Department of State Intelligence. Dr. Crowl is author of Maryland During and After the Revolution (1943) and coauthor of The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War (1951) and Seizure of the Gilberts and Marshalls (1955).