Tanks on the Beaches: A Marine Tanker in the Pacific War (review)

This book is a very readable biography of Robert W. Neiman, Robert M. Neiman's father, assisted by Kenneth W. Estes, a Marine tanker of a later generation. After touching briefly on his early formative years, the book focuses on Neiman's career as a Marine tank officer from 1940 to 1946. Robert Neiman was a serious Marine officer but not an overly serious man. He enjoyed a party, and, in the book you can read of many of them during the war and afterwards.

Neiman went to New Zealand in July 1942 with the 1st Marine Division and enjoyed the delights of a country with many young women, with most of the young New Zealand men off to the war. After a stop at Guadalcanal, Neiman returned to California to help train Marine tankers. He led his tank company through tough battles on Roi-Namur, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima, then led another tank company on Okinawa. Probably no other tanker served in combat on both Iwo and Saipan. He was an innovative leader and helped develop tank tactics for these island invasions.

Neiman was imaginative in many areas and modified tanks so as to make them safer for their crews. He saw heavy combat and won the Navy's highest award, the Navy Cross, for his leadership in an attack on Saipan, where he had to switch tanks twice under fire after the tanks became inoperative from land mines. Neiman speaks frankly of the failure of some officers to lead properly and prevent unnecessary casualties. At the end of World War II he commanded and was executive officer of a tank battalion in China.

Neiman and his close friend and combat executive officer, Robert L. Reed, had decided earlier to stay together after the war ended, either as Marine officers or in civilian life. Neiman, at the end of the fighting, decided that he wanted to find and marry a "beautiful" girl, but thought the Marine Corps was not the right place to do that. So when Major Robert W. Neiman, and Robert Reed left the Marine Corps, they went into business together and eventually owned a chain of lumber and building supply outlets. Neiman says that his leadership experiences in the Marine Corps helped make him successful as a businessman.

This book fulfills its promise of depicting a young Marine successful in combat and in life, with clear goals and ideals, and helps me understand how we won the war.