Their Backs against the Sea

The battle of Saipan lasted twenty-five hellish days in the summer of 1944, and the stakes couldn’t have been higher. If Japan lost possession of the island, all hope for victory would be lost. For the Americans, the island was the only obstacle between them and the Japanese mainland. The outcome of the war in the Pacific was in the balance.

Their Backs against the Sea fuses fresh interviews, oral histories, and unpublished accounts into a fast-paced narrative of the Battle of Saipan. Combining grunt’s-view grit with big-picture panorama (and one of the ugliest inter-service controversies of the war), this is the definitive dramatic story of one of the war’s toughest and most overlooked battles- and an inspiring chronicle of some of the greatest acts of valor in American military history.