Word: saipan
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...year after Pearl Harbor Day, Pride got his first seagoing command: the carrier Belleau Wood, which joined with the Wasp, Enterprise, Saratoga and Essex as the first big carrier strike force. Some of the names entered on the Belleau Wood's log: Tarawa, Wake Island, Makin, Kwajalein, Truk, Saipan, Tinian...
...Powers [TIME, July 20], let me give Powers a little scoop concerning the overpublicized Marine Corps. The Marine Corps receives public attention because marines have a peculiar habit of being the best in anything they undertake. If I remember the 27th Army Division correctly, they were the outfit on Saipan that could not keep up with the Marines and whose commanding general, Ralph Smith, was relieved of his command because he couldn't get his men to move forward. As for comparisons between the Army and Marine Corps, the Marine Corps will top the Army in anything except size...
...review of Samuel Eliot Morison's New Guinea and Marianas: it might well be subtitled, "How the Navy and Marines won the war without help from the Army and Air Corps." In particular, I bridle at the mention of the 2nd and 4th Divisions storming ashore [on Saipan], etc. No mention is made of the fact that the 27th Infantry Division was called in to bail the Marines out of the mess they got themselves into . . . because they didn't have the wherewithal to secure the beachhead. The 27th was a floating reserve and was not even supposed...
...Cautious? Reduced to 35 planes and minus two carriers, Ozawa hightailed it out of the Philippine Sea. Yet, since he had saved the bulk of his 55-ship fleet, Spruance and Mitscher felt small joy. Had Spruance been overly cautious? No, says Morison, he had the Saipan beachhead to think of. "Military men never get any credit for guarding against dangers that might occur yet do not; but they are quickly 'hanged' if they fail adequately to guard against dangers that do occur-witness Pearl Harbor." Moreover, Morison argues, the battle was fully as decisive as Ozawa thought...
...fleet denuded of its air groups was like a crab without claws. Saipan, Tinian and Guam were doomed. Sake-crazed and glory-minded, the Japanese made desperate banzai charges and blew themselves up with their own land mines. They paid with ten lives for every American marine and G.I. life they took. "On 12 August 1944," concludes Historian Morison proudly, "the Philippine Sea and the air over it, and the islands of Saipan, Tinian and Guam, were under American control. May they never again be relinquished...