Why US Marines Hated Fighting Alongside the Army – The Rivalry That Nearly Cost Saipan 

June 16th 1944. General Holland Smith stood inside his command tent on Saipan, holding a report that made his hands shake with rage. The 27th Infantry Division had been ordered to attack at dawn. They hadn’t moved, not pinned down, not cut off, not destroyed, just stopped. While marines on both flanks were fighting and bleeding and dying, an entire army division was sitting in place, and the gap they left in the line was about to swallow everything Holland Smith had built.

He picked up the phone and called Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner. He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t suggest a course of action. He said one thing, I want Ralph Smith relieved of command. Today. What happened next would ignite the most explosive inter-service controversy of the Pacific War. A scandal that reached Congress, consumed careers, and exposed a rivalry so deep and so bitter that American commanders were fighting each other while Japanese soldiers were still fighting them.

But to understand why Holland Smith made that call, you have to understand what marines and soldiers thought of each other long before they ever landed on Saipan. And you have to understand that the hatred had been building for years. The rivalry between the Marine Corps and the United States Army was not born in the Pacific.

It was born in the pages of military doctrine and fought over in the halls of Washington, where the army spent decades trying to absorb, defund or outright eliminate the marines entirely. Army generals argued that a separate amphibious force was redundant, the army could conduct its own beach assaults. The marines were an expensive duplication of capability, the army already had.

The marines disagreed and they had been proving the army wrong since 1918. By the time World War II began, the institutional contempt ran in both directions. Army officers saw marines as glory hunters, a boutique force built for headlines and parades, not sustained combat. Marines saw army soldiers as parade ground bureaucrats who had forgotten how to fight, trained for positional warfare in Europe while the marines had spent twenty years perfecting the one skill that would matter most in the Pacific.

How to land on a beach held by men who wanted you dead. That expertise made the marines indispensable. It also made them insufferable. Marine officers were proud to the point of arrogance. They believed their training was harder, their standards higher, their men tougher. They had earned that belief in blood at Guadalcanal and Tarawa.

But belief, no matter how honestly earned, has a way of curdling into contempt. And by 1944, marine contempt for army soldiers was not a private opinion, it was institutional attitude. Holland Smith embodied it completely. His nickname was Howlin’ Mad, and he had earned it. He was loud, profane, aggressive, and utterly convinced that the marine way of doing things was the only way that worked.

He had commanded joint marine and army forces through the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaigns, and, every time he dealt with army divisions, he came away furious. They moved too slow. They consolidated when they should attack. They waited for artillery when marines would already be inside the enemy’s wire.

The army, for its part, thought Holland Smith was a maniac. He threw men at fortified positions without adequate preparation. He accepted casualty rates that army commanders found unconscionable. Marine bravado, army officers privately argued, was just another word for recklessness that got men killed. Both sides were partly right, which made everything that happened on Saipan inevitable.

Saipan was the prize. Fifteen miles long, eight miles wide, mountainous, honeycombed with caves, and defended by 32,000 Japanese troops who had been ordered to die in place. The island sat close enough to the Japanese home islands that B-29 bombers flying from Saipan could reach Tokyo. Capturing it would not just win a battle, it would put a gun to Japan’s head.

Everyone understood the stakes. That made the dysfunction that followed even harder to explain. The assault began on June 15th, 1944. Two marine divisions hit the beaches on the western coast. The second marine division on the left, the fourth marine division on the right. The 27th Infantry Division, an Army National Guard unit from New York, was held in reserve.

They would be committed when the marines needed support. The marines needed support almost immediately. The beach was a killing ground. Japanese artillery had pre-registered every foot of sand. Within hours the two marine divisions had taken 2,000 casualties. They were ashore but barely, and the Japanese counter-attacks that first night nearly pushed them back into the sea.

The 27th Division was committed the following day. They were assigned the centre sector, tasked with advancing north through the middle of the island, while marine divisions drove along the coasts. It was a straightforward plan, three divisions in line, advancing together, keeping their flanks connected. The marines advanced.

The 27th Division did not. In their sector lay a broad valley and two terrain features that would later be named Death Valley and Purple Heart Ridge. The Japanese had turned both into fortresses. Interlocking fields of fire, mortars zeroed on every approach, snipers in positions that seemed to multiply no matter how many were cleared.

The 27th Division hit those defences and slowed to a crawl. What happened next is the part that historians still argue about, because the two sides tell completely different stories. Holland Smith’s version. The 27th Division was timid, poorly led, and unwilling to pay the price that the terrain demanded. Ralph Smith, the Army General commanding the division, was too cautious.

He was managing his casualties instead of fighting the enemy. While marines died on the flanks, Army soldiers were taking breaks. Ralph Smith’s version. His division faced the strongest Japanese positions on the island through the worst terrain, with inadequate artillery support, against an enemy who had specifically prepared those defences to stop exactly the kind of attack he was being ordered to make.

He was not slow. He was fighting conditions that the marine commanders on the flanks simply did not face. The after-action analysis supports Ralph Smith more than Holland Smith ever admitted. The terrain in the Army sector was objectively more difficult. The Japanese concentration of defensive works in Death Valley was extraordinary.

Units that arrived to replace the 27th Division later found themselves making the same painful grinding as progress for exactly the same reasons. But Holland Smith did not want analysis. He wanted movement, and on June 24th, nine days into the battle, he called Ralph Smith’s relief. The Army was furious, not just angry.

Institutionally, genuinely, permanently furious. An Army general had been fired by a Marine general. It had never happened before in American military history. Army commanders across the Pacific protested. General Robert Richardson, the senior Army commander in the Pacific, conducted his own investigation and concluded that Ralph Smith’s relief was completely unjustified, and that Holland Smith had acted out of prejudice against Army troops.

Richardson confronted Holland Smith directly. He showed up at Marine headquarters, uninvited, and told Holland Smith that he had no right to relieve an Army general, and that his conduct had been an outrage against the Army of the United States. Holland Smith stared at him and said that he had done his duty and would do it again.

The confrontation leaked. The press got hold of it. Time magazine ran a story that made Holland Smith look like a hero and the 27th Division look like cowards. The story was written without access to Army records, without interviewing Army survivors, and without mentioning that the 27th Division had suffered nearly 3 ,000 casualties in the fighting.

Holland Smith criticised as inadequate. The Army veterans of Saipan never forgave that story. Some of them never forgave the Marines. The battle itself continued. Saipan was declared secured on July 9th. The cost was staggering, nearly 17,000 American casualties. Marine and Army units had fought side by side through some of the most brutal close -quarters combat in the Pacific, crawling through sugarcane fields and into cave systems, where the Japanese fought to the last man.

And at the end of it, the Marines and the Army hated each other more than when they started. The institutional fallout was real and lasting. Army commanders in subsequent Pacific operations actively resisted being placed under Marine command. Planning for future assaults had to account for inter-service friction that shouldn’t have existed at all.

At the highest levels, Admiral Chester Nimitz quietly concluded that Holland Smith should never again command Army ground forces. The solution was to keep the services separate where possible, a workaround for a problem that nobody was willing to fix directly. What actually happened in Death Valley matters because it revealed something important about how military reputations get made and how institutional pride can corrupt honest assessment.

The Marines were not wrong that the 27th Division struggled. They did, but the Marines were wrong about why. It was not cowardice and it was not poor leadership. It was the intersection of brutal terrain, concentrated defences, and a tactical situation that demanded exactly the kind of grinding, methodical advance that Marine culture had trained itself to despise.

The Marines preferred shock and speed, the Army preferred fire and movement. Against a prepared enemy in broken terrain, the Army approach was not weakness. In many cases it was wisdom. Holland Smith was too proud to see it. He had spent his career building the case that Marine aggressiveness was superior to Army caution, and Saipan had to fit that narrative even when the evidence pointed elsewhere.

Ralph Smith understood something Holland Smith never accepted. Dead soldiers do not capture objectives. A division that takes 60% casualties in three days and ceases to exist as a fighting force has not served its country. It has simply ceased to exist. The Marines called this acceptance of losses a sign of fighting spirit.

The Army called it arithmetic. Both were right. The question was always which philosophy fit the specific battle. And on Saipan, in the terrain assigned to the 27th Division, the answer was not as obvious as Holland Smith insisted. The Marines and the Army would go on to fight together through the rest of the Pacific War.

At Iwo Jima, purely a Marine operation. At Okinawa, Marines and soldiers side by side again. And again, the inter-service tension simmered beneath the surface. By the end of the war, the two institutions had developed a working relationship that was professional, effective, and built on mutual respect for what each side could do.

But the respect never quite buried the contempt. It just learned to keep quiet. Ralph Smith was never given another combat command. He spent the rest of the war in staff assignments. His career effectively ended by a decision that his own service concluded was unjust. He retired in 1948, and when reporters asked him about Saipan, he declined to revisit it publicly.

His private correspondence tells a different story. In a letter written years after the war, he described the relief as the moment he understood that in coalition warfare, the greatest danger is sometimes not the enemy you’re fighting, but the ally who controls the narrative afterward. Holland Smith retired in 1946, celebrated as one of the architects of amphibious warfare, the man who taught the Navy and Marines how to take a beach.

His role in the Ralph Smith affair was noted in official histories as a then moved past. The Marine Corps did not dwell on it. Moving past inconvenient truths is also a form of institutional pride. The men of the 27th Infantry Division came home to New York, and for years struggled against these the reputation Holland Smith and Time Magazine had built for them.

Veterans who had crawled through Death Valley under Japanese mortar fire found themselves explaining at VFW posts and family dinners why their division had supposedly not fought hard enough. Most of them eventually stopped explaining. The rivalry between the Marines and the Army did not cause America to lose Saipan.

The island was taken, the airfields were built, the B-29s flew, Japan’s strategic position collapsed. By any measure, the operation succeeded. But it nearly didn’t. And the reason it nearly didn’t had nothing to do with Japanese defenders, it had to do with two American institutions that respected themselves so completely they had forgotten how to respect each other.

The gap in the line at Saipan was not just a gap between two divisions. It was a gap between two ways of understanding what fighting meant, what sacrifice cost, and who got to decide when enough was enough. Holland Smith made that call on June 24th because he believed the Marines’ way was the only way. History suggests he was wrong, but history also suggests he never knew it.

The most dangerous rivalry on Saipan wasn’t the one between Americans and Japanese. It was the one between Americans and Americans. And unlike the Japanese, that rivalry survived the battle completely intact.