Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

To make this eBook easier to read, particularly on handheld devices, some images have been made relatively larger than in the original pamphlet, and centered, rather than offset to one side or the other; and some were placed a little earlier or later than in the original. Sidebars in the original have been repositioned between chapters and identified as “[Sidebar (page nn):”, where the page reference is to the original location in the source book. In the Plain Text version, the matching closing right bracket follows the last line of the Sidebar’s text and is on a separate line to make it more noticeable. In the HTML versions, that bracket follows the colon, and each Sidebar is displayed within a box.

Frontispiece: The original photograph was printed across two pages, and the middle, which appears here as a vertical gap, was lost in the binding. An excellent copy of the full photograph may be found on the web at:

www.mcu.usmc.mil/historydivision/World%20War%20II/SAIPAN%2083261.jpg

Page 17: “would be multi cave openings” was printed that way.

Page 21: ‘battalions of the 105th Infantry “were standing still when there was no reason why they should not move forward.” That did it. Jarman relieved the colonel commanding the 106th and replaced him’ was printed that way, with references to two different regiments.