by RNS | May 30, 2024 | Beating Tsundoku
Gregg Adams, US Marine versus Japanese Soldier (Osprey, 2024)
In just three months, between 15 June and 15 September 1944, US Marines launched three amphibious assaults on the Japanese held Mariana islands in the Pacific Ocean. The combat was brutal and fought mainly between infantrymen, sometimes hand-to-hand. Gregg Adams surveys those soldiers on both sides of the bayonet and has a fascinating story to tell.
Adams begins by describing the organisation and equipment of the US Marine Corps. The Corps underwent a thorough reorganisation before the Marianas campaign, though on the ground that made little difference to Marines who considered themselves elite. That was helped by their having greater firepower at squad level than the Japanese and every Marine knew how to fight. Adams also describes the Japanese organisation in some detail down to the battalions with the unenviable task of defending the islands in the Marianas. Moving on to doctrine and tactics, Adams considers the development and application of US amphibious warfare, which in WWII was a constant work-in-progress. That included naval bombardment, aspects of pre-landing demolition, and command and communications. Japanese defensive doctrine had dictated trying to defeat the enemy at the beach, including counter-attacks, but in Summer 1944 that prudently changed to defence in depth tactics with limited counter-attacks. The result either way was total destruction of the Japanese forces, though the cost to the Marines was always high.
Turning to his case studies, Adams narrates the assaults on Saipan, Guam, and Peleliu. He provides the background to the battles, the forces involved, and an account of the fighting for each one. These were hard fought battles with the Japanese using the numerous caves in the coral to their advantage, and the Marines struggling to grab a foothold on the islands. Once they did, the battles were attritive in nature with Marines winkling out dug-in Japanese defenders. Nowhere was this tactic more difficult than on Peleliu where the Marines suffered staggering casualties as they inched forward, but the Japanese still wore down in an ultimately one-sided fight. Perhaps the futility of the Japanese efforts is best described by one source on Guam where counter-attacking Japanese soldiers resorted to kicking and pounding on Marine tanks, such was their desperation.
Adams concludes that these assaults in the Mariana Islands ‘validated US amphibious doctrine’, though they still had many lessons to learn, particularly concerning how to overcome Japanese defensive positions. For the Japanese, Adams highlights deficiencies in artillery, a lack of infantry, and often suicidal counter-attacks. The change to defence-in-depth tactics proved somewhat more effective at Peleliu and later island defensive actions. Adams closes with a note on the consequences of the US capture of Saipan, which was a turning point in the Pacific War.
Some Osprey books read like chapters in larger works, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In this case, US Marine versus Japanese Soldier builds on Adams’ previous volume in the Combat series and other Osprey books on the Pacific Campaign, and as you collect these books, as so many do, they create a mosaic effect covering different aspects of the conflict. In effect, as a student, you can choose your own reading path towards understanding the whole campaign. However, US Marine versus Japanese Soldier is also a self-contained volume covering all the aspects you need to know about how these men executed and defended against amphibious assaults. Adams doesn’t take his story much further than the beaches, but there are other more targeted Osprey books for that. Adams’ engaging and informative text is well supported by Osprey’s usual quality artwork and photograph selection, which military history readers will undoubtedly enjoy.
by RNS | May 26, 2024 | Beating Tsundoku
Romain Cansière, Tanks on Iwo Jima 1945 (Osprey, 2024)
The enduring image of the Battle of Iwo Jima, in 1945, is that of US Marines stuck on a volcanic ash beach with Japanese fire raining down on them. What followed was a brutal slugfest across that small island where 49,000 men died on both sides. Less well known is the role of tanks in this battle. Both sides deployed tanks on Iwo Jima with varying fortunes. In this survey, Romain Cansière introduces those machines and the men who fought and, too often, died in them.
Cansière begins with a brief survey of Japanese tanks on Iwo Jima, all 35 of them, split into three Companies of light and medium tanks and an HQ Company, which were then allocated to different parts of the island to await the Americans. The invaders’ first wave alone consisted of 70 amphibious LVTs with 75mm guns. They were followed by M3 half-tracks, also with 75mm guns, and three Battalions of Shermans, including flamethrower variants. The Japanese also lacked anti-tank guns, preferring to attack with magnetic grenades for the most part, though they also improvised some guns and mines, some of the latter proved effective against Shermans. What they did have was mastery of the terrain, as the Americans soon found out. The US tankers improvised too, adding bits of wood, concrete, and steel to their armour to reduce the effect of Japanese attacks.
We move on to how tanks were used in combat. The amphibious tanks bogged down on the ash beaches, as did the M3s. Of those, the ones that did get off the beach were held back because they were too open and vulnerable. The Shermans would do the heavy lifting as the US Marines pushed inland, but as the tanks rolled forward, they encountered the mines and greater opposition. Despite losses, the US tanks worked with the infantry to methodically clear Japanese bunkers, though sometimes they had to retire because they drew fire down on the accompanying Marines. Elsewhere, Cansière notes, well-placed Japanese anti-tank guns and mines took their toll on the tanks and crews. The Japanese also used some tanks in counterattacks, but Shermans and Marine bazookas had the edge on them.
Cansière concludes with US casualty figures, and he observes that the US tanks on Iwo Jima fought differently than on other islands and that the new M4A3 Sherman had a significant advantage over the M4A2. As for the Japanese, they did the best they could but were annihilated, and they learned few lessons from the battle. The main US lesson was to increase battlefield support for their tanks and add more flamethrowers and dozer tanks. Cansière closes with a note on where you can visit the few remaining tanks from Iwo Jima. Although a slim volume, Tanks on Iwo Jima is an interesting read. Cansière covers all the bases in a survey style that doesn’t go too deep into his subject, though he includes a useful bibliography at the end for further reading. The photographs and artwork are first class as you might expect from Osprey. Modellers, wargamers, and military history buffs will all take something positive from Cansière’s book.
by RNS | May 21, 2024 | Beating Tsundoku
Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, Going Downtown (Osprey, 2022)
For many of us, the Vietnam War conjures up images of ‘grunts’ wading through paddy fields or hacking through the jungle. When the air war is mentioned, we picture B-52 strikes at a distance or Phantoms dropping napalm onto the aforementioned jungle. But, as Thomas McKelvey Cleaver illustrates in Going Downtown, the air war over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1961 to 1975 was a complex and ever-changing combat environment that in many ways echoed the struggles on the ground yet in others differed little from by then traditional methods.
Cleaver sets the background of the Vietnam War with its deep roots and a foreboding about the inevitability of US involvement. A sense of ‘mission creep’ is also there from the beginning in his account, as with so many others, when initial clandestine involvement developed quickly into an all out war that the US had not planned for as a Cold War scenario. They didn’t need to, or so they thought, because the North Vietnamese would fold against superior US technology and numbers. It would not take long for the US planners to discover their ‘deficiencies’ and ‘failures’. Cleaver narrates the various operations the US launched, such as Rolling Thunder, Barrel Roll, and Steel Tiger. Most early actions took place over South Vietnam, but it was missions in North Vietnam where the SAMs, AAA, and MiGs would take the greatest toll on American planes and pilots.
President Johnson escalated the air war, but as Cleaver notes, most USAF pilots were not initially trained for air-to-air combat. North Vietnam had its issues too, and Cleaver covers those, though his focus is on the US Air Force. He also describes and assesses the various warplanes and missiles that flew through Vietnam’s lethal skies. Much of Cleaver’s narrative is set in 1967, which makes sense because of the increasing level of combat, and by the end of that year, he notes, the US was running out of targets in North Vietnam. The tail-off in bombing North Vietnam came in November 1968, with some clandestine bombing in Cambodia and Laos continuing until 1972 when fighting ramped up again to counter the threat of invasion from North Vietnam. Then Nixon unleashed the Christmas bombing campaign over North Vietnam in 1972, which brought the North Vietnamese to the peace table. US drawdown was already underway by then and continued until very few USAF units remained. The last US action Cleaver describes took place in May 1975.
That summary is not the whole book, however. What lifts Cleaver’s work from other nuts-and-bolts histories are his frequent accounts of combat told mostly by the pilots that fought in them. What becomes clear is that while the technology of aerial warfare had advanced in leaps and bounds from previous wars, what combats often came down to were individual duels between courageous men that combat pilots of all eras could attest to. Cleaver has a real knack for telling pilots’ often hair-raising stories (the rescue of two downed pilots in 1969 should be a movie!) At the higher level of operations, Cleaver is often scathing of the US command and bureaucracy. There is an argument that US forces fought with one arm tied behind their backs, and Cleaver does little to dispel that. His Vietnam heroes were the ones doing the fighting, perhaps as it should be. Overall, this is an outstanding account of the USAF in southeast Asia, and one that every student of the war should read.
