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

Combat in the Pacific campaigns of World War II poses a challenge for a series like Panzer Grenadier, with pretensions to simulate all theaters of the conflict (and some from a little before and a little after). The island campaigns often feature very dense concentrations of troops, and in many of them there is very little maneuver.

The series’ first developer, Brian Knipple, actually designed a game on the Battle of Peleliu for the series; at one point he wanted to include it in our old Guadalcanal game. Nearly 60,000 men fought for Peleliu over a span of two months in late 1944. The island’s only 12.8 square kilometers in size, which made the game not very fun to play. The map was completely covered with units, shooting at each other at point-blank range. That same dynamic is going to be present for most Pacific island battles.

But not for Saipan. Saipan is just large enough to make use of our standard geomorphic-style game boards, which you put together to form the battlefield for a particular scenario. Panzer Grenadier: Saipan 1944 has game boards showing the varied terrain of Saipan (and the other Marianas islands): sugar cane fields, jungle-covered mountains, sugar cane fields, beaches, rocky hills, and sugar cane fields. They’re beautiful, and easily adaptable to other, geographically similar lands.

While the Americans poured three divisions onto the island, which the Japanese defended with one and a half, there still was plenty of maneuver between the two elite infantry forces. That’s the basis of the game’s 41 scenarios. Let’s have a look at the scenarios of Chapter Five.

Chapter Five
The Marines Push North
On the left of the American line, the 2nd Marine Division held the area between the western coast of Saipan and the island’s mountainous spine, with 4th Marine Division on its right. The Marines here would face not only the rough terrain of the island’s interior, but urban fighting in the island’s capital of Garapan - not a very large town, but a place where the Japanese command still had some semblance of control and could supply reinforcements.

Open in new tab to embiggen this map.

Second Marine Division would have the assistance of naval gunfire support on its coastal advance, and now had all of its divisional artillery ashore and ready for fire missions. The Marines had suffered 6,165 casualties to this point, with 2,514 of those from 2nd Marine Division (the Army, less heavily engaged so far, had taken 320 casualties). Two men assigned to V Amphibious Corps had been wounded.

The Japanese for their part would defend Garapn with naval troops and the inland area with relatively fresh troops of the 135th Infantry Regiment that had been defending beaches on the northern end of the island. The 43rd Infantry Division holding the west side of Saipan had about 9,000 troops left and 13 artillery pieces.

Scenario Twenty-Three
Patrol Action on Hill 790
19 June 1944
One unexpected aspect of the breakdown in Japanese communications was a lack of meaningful signals for the Americans to intercept and decode. Signal intel could not tell them the locations of Japanese units, because the Japanese 31st Army didn’t know, either. To find the enemy ands fix his location, 2nd Marine Division reverted to an aggressive series of patrols.

Conclusion
The Marines found Hill 790 only lightly held, and rushed to occupy the position. Those Japanese still holding the area, including a few light tanks dug in as immobile pillboxes, fought fanatically to hold their ground. But Maj. Gen. Igetea Keiji, 31st Army’s acting commander, had already decided to pull back to the rugged slopes of the twin peaks of Mount Tapochau and Mount Tipo Pale.

Notes
The Japanese are dug in around their immobile tank; it can still shoot but can’t move. The Marines must destroy it, because that’s what Marines do.

Scenario Twenty-Four
Foothills of Mount Tipo Pale
22 June 1944
The Marine offensive would involve both divisions advancing side-by-side, with plentiful support from the 18 artillery battalions now ashore and in place. Second Marine Division faced Mount Tipo Pale in the exact center of its sector, a fearsome defensive position of woods, brush, and rocky slopes, with numbers caves that the Japanese had turned into small fortresses. The 2/2 Marines moved up a ravine well-covered by fire from those cave emplacements.

Conclusion
The Japanese held firm, losing a few positions but keeping the Marines from advancing out of the ravine and on to the peak of Mount Tipo Pale. The Japanese clung to their caves for two more days, forcing the Americans to bend their line around them, and greatly slowing the overall progress of 2nd Marine Division. They managed to withdraw in good order, and continue the fight further to the north.

Notes
There aren’t many Japanese dug in on this hilltop, but they are very determined to stay there. The Marines have a flamethrower platoon but otherwise are just Marines. But they are never just Marines.

Scenario Twenty-Five
Foothills of Mount Tapochau
23 June 1944
The rough, folded ground around the fringes of Mount Tapochau (sometimes rendered “Tapotchau” in American reports) provided endless positions for Japanese fortified lines, with excellent fields of fire. The Marines faced just such a fortified outpost on the eastern edge of the mountain, near the boundary between the two Marine divisions. The Japanese had few troops but many machine guns, and the Marines had to winkle them out if the advance were to continue.

Conclusion
The Japanese once again held on despite repeated Marine attacks, relying on the firepower of their machine guns to drive off the attackers. At dusk the Marines withdrew, leaving the ridgeline in Japanese hands, only to return the next day with assault engineers wielding flamethrowers and explosive charges, supported by rocket launchers. The Japanese would not yield or retreat under this pressure either, all of them dying at their posts.

Notes
There aren’t all that many Japanese standing in front of the Marines this time, but over half of them are machine gunners. The Marines are going to have to be careful here, and the Japanese player should pay careful attention to all the special powers this game system grants to machine gun units.

Scenario Twenty-Six
Warehouse Find
24 June 1944
On the afternoon of 19 June, a group of Japanese tankers from the 9th Tank Regiment who had lost their vehicles in the tank battle on the invasions first night entered Garapan. There, they found a warehouse with ten tanks that had been slated for shipment to Truk; apparently, they had mechanical defects. After several days’ work, they got seven of them to run again, and set out to attack the Marines pressing in on the town.

Conclusion
The tanks went forward without coordinating their attack with any other Japanese units; the crews had been out of contact with their regiment for days. They soon ran into Sherman tanks and half-track mounted 75mm guns, which shot of six of them; the seventh somehow escaped. But while the Americans touted their victory over the odd attack, neither had they moved any closer to Garapan.

Notes
A tiny force of Marines is attacked by an even smaller force of Japanese tanks. This isn’t going to end well.

Scenario Twenty-Seven
Summit of Mount Tapochau
25 June 1944
The task of taking the summit of Mount Tapochau, the highest point on Saipan at 1,554 feet, fell to Lt. Col. Rathvon M. Tompkins’s 1/29th Marines, the “orphan battalion” attached to 2nd Marine Division. The 2/8th Marines would attack on his flank, but while the 2/8th made good progress, the 1/29th remained stuck until Tompkins took the initiative.

Conclusion
Tompkins shifted his battalion through the 2/8th Marines, and personally led a small detachment from the divisional recon company up a seemingly un-climbable cliff. He then brought two of his companies up the newly-found path, and despite repeated Japanese counter-attacks they pushed up the slope to capture the summit, aided by heavy mortar and artillery fire.

Notes
Japanese morale is starting to slip, while the Marines are starting to apply a serious numerical edge in their attacks against them. Even so, the Orphan Battalion (we met tham a couple of chapters back) has a pretty high bar to meet for victory.

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

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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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