It's not that unlike being a Marine at Wake or Correigidor in some sense. Hang on for life, Guadalcanal is right here right now in this state, the turkey shoot and Saipan are on the horizon. Coming to your neighborhood everywhere.
Now you're pushing my history buttons.
I have done a bit of wargaming, mainly collecting games and analyzing them since at first I could find nobody to play with and then I had no spare time (family and refresher training in computer science) -- I have since donated the vast majority of my games to a local gaming club just so somebody could use them.
One such was a collection of four smaller games,
Westwall by SPI. They were mainly small battles involved in the Battle of the Bulge where superior German forces just completely overran our positions or else we were returning the favor later. Victory conditions involved how long you could hold out before the onslaught before having to retreat.
Correigidor was one such hopeless battle as was Wake Island. There was just no way to win against such opposition. However, as the History Guy tells it, the Wake Island defenders acquitted themselves incredibly well against such overwhelming opposition (
No webpage found at provided URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbxrqQFetvI). Truly, as per the by-line, History that Deserves to be Remembered. That link is very well worth clicking on.
Guadalcanal was another matter. One of the major differences between the US Army and the US Marine Corps is that the marines deploy far faster and easier because they don't have to take their massive infrastructure with them, but rather the US Navy supplies that. At Guadalcanal, that naval infrastructure was quite literally sunk by the Japanese. In those wargames, one of the salient features was maintaining your line of communication (LOC) because that was also your supply line. Lose your LOC and your combat factors are diminished because you are out of supply. Our troops on Guadalcanal were out of supply. Our navy had to regain control of the waters off of Guadalcanal in order to restore those supply lines. While the Marines had to hang on until that happened.
The Marianas Campaign, Operation Forager, started with Saipan and then worked its way down the island chain with Tinian being next -- Tinian was the real objective because its massive airfields brought our B-29 Superfortress bombers within striking range of the Japanese homeland islands. The battle to take Saipan was bloody and fierce. Of historical note is Marine PFC Guy Gabaldon, a Mexican-American orphan from Los Angeles who was raised by a Japanese-American family (played by Jeffery Hunter, AKA Starfleet CAPT Christopher Pike, in
Hell to Eternity (1960). He used his knowledge of the Japanese language to talk over 1,000 Japanese civilians and soldiers into surrendering instead of being killed senselessly.
My father was a SeaBee (Naval Construction Battallion, CB, hence "Sea Bees") assigned to Saipan
after it was pacified. Despite not having been through actual combat, the aftermath that he witnessed changed him forever -- my mother said that he was never the same man after he returned.
The Marianas Turkey Shoot was an entirely different matter altogether. As Operation Forager descended on Saipan, the Japanese Operation Go (¿5?
As in ichi, ni, san, shi, go?) went into action. Operation Go was meant to deliver a decisive blow to the US Navy. It failed.
When ADM Spruance learned that a Japanese task force was approaching, he took much of the naval assets of Operation Forager, leaving what was needed to support the landings, to face the Japanese fleet. That became the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The air battle came to be known as the Marianas Turkey Shoot in which the Japanese suffered massive losses in aircraft and aircrews against our minimal losses such that after that Japanese air power was minimal and their aircraft carriers were mainly just tokens. ADM Spruance was criticized for not having pressed the advantage, but he didn't know that this attack wasn't just a feint, which was a typical Japanese strategy (eg, to divert our attention away from Midway, they invaded the Aleutian Islands at the same time).
Also, this battle is the source of one of the most inspiring naval commands for me, right up there with "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!": "Turn on the lights!" The last air battle was late in the day, so our aircraft were returning in the dark and could not find their carriers. Light discipline is very strict in the Navy in wartime, since the slightest hint of light from a ship could mark it for death from a submarine's torpedo. Spruance's order to turn on the lights so that the aircraft could return and land was incredibly courageous.