Saipan 1944:
Scenario Preview, Part Six
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2025

At first glance, Panzer Grenadier looks like a hardware-oriented game. It’s got pictures of tanks and artillery and other weaponry on its playing pieces, and each type is spelled out and carefully rated for its capabilities.

But as Panzer Grenadier: Saipan 1944 makes clear, there’s much more than that under the hood. It’s the soft factors that make this game run. Initiative shows each side’s staff capability, how its higher organization can plan and execute operations. The side with better initiative gets to do more things. Morale reflects a unit’s willingness to enter combat; the side with better morale can better stand up to the rigors of battle, especially when it comes to close assault. More leaders make a side more effective, and the spread of them matters, too, to allow a “chain activation” that brings a large part of your forces into action at once.

In Saipan 1944, the American player has two distinct forces, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army. They usually fight separately. The Marines gained a healthy disdain for the Army’s fighting abilities during this campaign; these scenarios let you answer the question yourself, whether that’s a fair assessment. So let’s have a look at them.

Chapter Six
The Empire Division
The New York National Guard’s 27th Infantry Division (the “Empire Division,” also called the “New York Division”), had mobilized in October 1940 with the rest of the National Guard, though it had participated in large-scale maneuvers during the two previous years. After filling out its ranks with draftees from the New York City region, it moved south for training in Alabama and Louisiana. Still under its peacetime four-regiment organization, it moved to California in the spring of 1942, and on to Hawaii in April. Maj. Gen. Ralph C. Smith, well-regarded for his staff work and his World War One battlefield courage, took command in November 1942.

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There the division remained for the next year and a half, until six of its nine battalions deployed in November in the Gilbert Islands, taking Makin and Eniwetok against stout (if highly out-numbered) Japanese opposition and Majuro against none. And there the trouble began. Marine Lt. Gen. Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith berated Ralph Smith for the Army formation’s supposed lack of progress on Makin, citing the soldiers he’d seen walking about rather than fighting. It turned out that Holland Smith had encountered a working party a mile behind the front line, but this embarrassment seems to have set his temper against Ralph Smith and the 27th Infantry Division.

The division continued on with V Amphibious Corps to the invasion of the Marianas in June 1944. The Army regiments came ashore last, and at first had duty pushing back the Japanese holdouts in the south-eastern corner of Saipan. Holland Smith wanted to leave just one battalion to contain them there, but Ralph Smith told him that a full regiment would be needed. The Marine general agreed, but his staff sneered openly at the request. Army-Marine relations were already poor when the Empire Division entered the center of the line, between the two Marine divisions, and facing the roughest and most defensible terrain Saipan had to offer.

Scenario Twenty-Eight
Hell’s Pocket
23 June 1944
On the morning of 23 June, the Army’s 27th Infantry Division would first relieve the Marines holding the line below Mount Tapochau, and then advance up what the soldiers quickly termed “Death Valley.” The narrow front only allowed the division two deploy six companies in the assault, against well-prepared Japanese defenders occupying tangled and dense terrain.

Conclusion
The Army troops made little progress into the valley, running into a position they called Hell’s Pocket, where interlocking fields of fire swept a patch of open ground. Col. Russell G. Ayers of the 106th Infantry did not wish to incur the casualties of a frontal assault into automatic weapons fire, and Ralph Smith agreed. But the slow advance of the Army troops infuriated Holland Smith, but unlike Ralph Smith, the corps commander did not visit Hell’s Pocket to see the problem for himself. On the following day, Holland Smith fired Ralph Smith, starting a cascade of bitter inter-service friction.

Notes
This is a bigger scenario than the previous few, with larger forces on both sides, including strong support weapons for the Japanese defenders. The Army is on the attack, and this scenario should give the players at least a little sympathy for Ralph Smith – the Japanese have a strong position, great morale and a liberal issue of heavy weapons.

Scenario Twenty-Nine
The Emperor’s Sword
23-24 June 1944
The high ground assigned to the Marines on either flank of the Army division did not lend itself to a Japanese counter-attack. The Japanese 136th Infantry Regiment had fought well since the American landings, but losses had piled up in the solid week of heavy combat. Not enough to stop Col. Yukimatsu Ogawa’s carefully planned counter-attack, spearheaded by six surviving tanks of the 9th Regiment.

Conclusion
The Americans failed to spot the tanks until they were right on top of their positions, and the first one burst through unscathed with the following five tanks were sThe ubjected to a furious barrage of artillery and bazooka fire that quickly destroyed them all. But the lead tank blithely cruised up and down the American front line, shooting up foxholes, command posts and a captured Japanese ammunition dump. The resulting explosions panicked much of the 3rd Battalion, which fell back in disarray. The tank clattered on into the lines held by the 23rd Marines, who promptly dispatched it with a bazooka round.

Notes
Tank attack! Not a very big tank attack, but when you have high-morale Japanese infantry charging in the tanks’ wake, stuff can happen. The U.S. Army doesn’t have their usual massive artillery backing, and it’s at nighttime, so the Japanese have a fair chance of doing some damage here.

Scenario Thirty
Death Valley
26 June 1944
The new temporary division commander, Sandy Jarman, also saw the futility of a frontal assault up Death Valley, but knew that he hadn’t been appointed just to confirm Ralph Smith’s opinion. He decided to put the weight of the assault on one wing, pressed up close to the ridgeline bordering the valley. This would at least give a little shelter from the storm of automatic weapons fire. Or so he hoped.

Conclusion
The advance came to a halt under heavy Japanese fire, and the Americans brought up their heavy machine gun platoons to lay down intense covering fire. That allowed the infantry to resume their advance, only to be cut down by still more enemy machine guns. Ogawa’s regiment had taken heavy losses, but he’d been sent the remnants of the 118th Infantry Regiment, whose transport had been torpedoed on its way to Saipan. Ogawa used these men to refill his own ranks, and assure that his heavy weapons remained in action.

Notes
Against a canny Japanese player, this is going to be a very tough fight for the U.S. Army, which has good numbers but not the firepower or morale of the Marines. The Japanese can force the Americans to come the length of the board and then engage in a series of close assaults, and if they place their delaying forces carefully, the Americans aren’t going to win easily.

Scenario Thirty-One
Hell’s Pocket, Revisited
28 June 1944
Lt. Gen. Yoshitsugu Saito, commanding the Japanese 43rd Infantry Division, had decided to retreat to a new defensive line just to the north. But the ever-innovative Col. Ogawa saw that while the Americans had overrun Hell’s Pocket after his own men pulled out, they had not occupied it, moving on themselves. Ogawa sent some of his troops back behind the new American line, where they could again dominate Death Valley. The Americans could have to try again to capture the rocky, cave-riddled position.

Conclusion
Ogawa continued to use his limited assets to maximum effect, his mortars in particular doing more than a full allotment of artillery might have accomplished. The Americans brought up self-propelled guns to work over the Japanese positions, and when the smoke cleared and they advanced, other Japanese positions opened fire. An unexpected attack by two Japanese tanks killed the commander of the 106th Infantry’s 3rd Battalion and two of his company commanders, also bringing the American advance to a halt again.

Notes
The U.S. Army is advancing and the Japanese must stop them across a broad front, not merely by hanging onto hilltop positions. They have a small contingent of weak tanks to help out, but it’s a pretty tough assignment for the Emperor’s men.

Scenario Thirty-Two
Purple Heart Ridge
30 June 1944
The Army division had finally made progress in the last days of June, despite the determination of the Japanese to delay them and Ogawa’s skillful deployments. The Fighting Sixty-Ninth’s 2nd Battalion would conclude the operation, new division commander Maj. Gen. George Griner directed, by taking the last Japanese outposts on Purple Heart Ridge.

Conclusion
The Americans noted lighter resistance than expected; having accomplished their task, Ogawa’s men had been ordered to make their way north to the new line of resistance. The Americans had taken heavy casualties in clearing Death Valley; it’s impossible to sort out Japanese losses for this period but they were also heavy and, unlike those of the Americans, could not be replaced.

Notes
The Fighting Sixty-Ninth is up against a strong Japanese hilltop position, but the Japanese are starting to lose their will to fight and the Americans are gaining theirs, giving the original Fighting Irish a serious morale edge for the assault combat that’s sure to come.

Scenario Thirty-Three
Attack Ruthlessly
2 July 1944
Howlin’ Mad Smith had a new complaint: none of his three divisions, Marine or Army, had made full use of the bountiful artillery support now available on the island. As the Japanese pulled back to what 43rd Division commander Yoshitsugu Saito termed the “final line” of resistance, Smith ordered that massed artillery fires precede the next attacks. “Infantry will closely follow artillery concentrations and attack ruthlessly when the artillery lifts,” Smith directed his three division commanders. “Absence of tanks is no excuse for failure of infantry to press home the attack.”

Conclusion
To the right of the 106th Infantry, heavy enemy fire halted the 105th Infantry’s 3rd Battalion; Griner apparently had not heeded Smith’s maxim to plaster everything in front of him with artillery fire. The 106th Infantry pressed forward, outstripping their neighbor’s advance until they ran into five Japanese tanks dug in as static emplacements. The New York Guardsmen overcame these obstacles before dusk, setting themselves up for another advance only to find that the Japanese had pulled back during the night.

Notes
The Japanese have run out of fuel for their tanks, and dug them in as immobile defensive strongpoints. Site them well as the Japanese player, because they’re pretty much the best defense you’ll have against the American light tanks spearheading their advance.

And that’s Chapter Six. Next time, it’s Chapter Seven.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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