A heavily used planning map for the June 1944 invasion of Saipan, annotated by Lester “Les” Carlyle of the 24th Marines, who served as the radioman for regimental commander Colonel Franklin A. Hart during the landing.

Saipan and the 24th Marines
American forces invaded Saipan on June 15, 1944, opening the campaign to seize the Mariana Islands from Japan. The principal assault force consisted of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions, with the Army’s 27th Infantry Division initially held in reserve. Capture of Saipan and the other principal Marianas would provide bases for the new B-29 bomber within range of the Japanese home islands.

The 4th Marine Division comprised three infantry regiments, the 23rd, 24th and 25th Marines. The 23rd and 25th made the division’s initial assault on the southwestern coast, while Hart’s 24th was held in reserve and participated in a diversionary feint off Tanapag Harbor to the north. As the assault regiments fought their way inland against heavy opposition, the 24th was brought ashore later that day and joined the fighting.

Over the next three weeks the 24th fought its way north with the rest of the division, from the hard fighting around Aslito Airfield through the final advance to Marpi Point at the northern end of the island. The campaign was extraordinarily costly: thousands of Americans were killed or wounded, most of the Japanese garrison died, and large numbers of civilians were also killed. Saipan was secured on July 9 after nearly a month of exceptionally violent fighting.

Carlyle’s annotated map of Saipan
This was prepared by the 4th Marine Division’s G-2, or intelligence, section and “reproduced by 20th Marines (Engrs).” The 20th Marines was the division’s engineer regiment, comprising an engineer battalion and a pioneer battalion responsible for such tasks as demolitions, obstacle clearing, road and bridge work, and shore-party operations.

The map depicts the southern part of Saipan, extending from the invasion beaches on the southwest coast inland past Charan Kanoa and Lake Susupe to Aslito Airfield, and eastward to Magicienne Bay and south to Nafutan Point. The printed information is relatively spare, showing the coastline, roads and tracks, elevations, airfield, settlements and beaches, all overlaid by a numbered grid, presumably to facilitate rapid reference to locations. Topographic information is limited to scattered spot elevations: even the tactically significant north-south ridge between the 4th Division’s landing beaches and the airfield is not explicitly delineated.

Carlyle’s annotations supplemented the printed map with geographic and tactical information, identifying such landmarks as Charan Kanoa, Lake Susupe, Aslito Air Field, Cape Obiam and Magicienne Bay (Lau Lau Bay), and marking roads, ridges and other features. More importantly, he marked “RCT [i.e., Regimental Combat Team] 23” and “RCT 25” along the invasion beaches, added boundaries demarcating unit sectors, marked the O-1 (first objective) line just west of the “Eastern Ridge,” and indicated distances in yards. There is no corresponding indication of where Carlyle’s own 24th Marines would land or of their subsequent movements ashore. Since the regiment was still in reserve under the invasion plan, this strongly suggests that the annotations were made before D-Day, presumably from one or more pre-invasion briefings.

The reverse side is headed in large type “RESTRICTED” and “NOT TO BE TAKEN ASHORE ON D-DAY.” Beneath is a “4th Marine Division Landing Information Sheet,” with questions to be answered by each Marine under the supervision of his officers and NCOs. They cover his chain of command; debarkation station; landing craft and wave; scheduled time and point of landing; direction of movement; initial objective; neighboring units; reporting responsibilities; and what to do if separated from his unit. For unknown reasons, Carlyle never completed the form.

Lester Carlyle
Carlyle was born in East Orange, New Jersey on June 16, 1925. He enlisted in the Marines in early 1943, underwent boot camp at Parris Island, and then attended Radio Operators School at Camp Lejeune, where he learned Morse code. He was assigned to Headquarters & Service Company, 24th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, and first saw combat at Roi-Namur in the Kwajalein Atoll in February 1944.

The invasion of Saipan took place one day before Carlyle’s nineteenth birthday. He later recalled: “I was assigned as the Regimental Commander’s radioman during the landing and to the regimental scout team when ashore.” The regimental commander was Colonel Franklin A. Hart, who led the 24th Marines at Roi-Namur, Saipan and Tinian and later rose to four-star rank.

Carlyle went on with the 4th Marine Division to Tinian and Iwo Jima, thus participating in all four of the division’s wartime amphibious assaults. After the war he pursued a career in aerospace, working for McDonnell Douglas for 35 years. He died on April 17, 2017 at the age of 91 and was buried at Riverside National Cemetery in Riverside, California.

Provenance
Acquired, together with a similarly annotated map of Kwajalein, from a private party in Santa Ana, California. According to the seller, the two maps formed part of an archive of Carlyle material—including maps, firearms and ephemera—that he had acquired from another collector. That collector in turn claimed to have purchased the material directly from Carlyle in the early 2000s. The present sheet bears Carlyle’s name in pencil, apparently in the same hand as the extensive annotations.

Sources
Not in OCLC, though a Google image search yields a few examples illustrated online.  Background on the 24^th Marines and Lester Carlyle from:

• History of the 4th Marine Division, 1943–2000 (U.S. Marine Corps, 2010); (accessed online on the U.S. Marine Corps website);
• “Les Carlyle: From Qwajalein to Iwo Jima with the Fourth Marine Division,” accessed on the website of the USS Hawkbill museum;
• “Lester Carlyle, 91, USMC, WWII, Riverside – 12 MAY,” accessed on the website of the Southern California Patriot Guard Riders.