Robert M. Neiman, perhaps the most experienced combat 
commander of the U.S. Marine Corps’ tank arm, was one of the 
rare USMC officers to serve in both Iwo Jima and Okinawa battles. 
In Tanks on the Beaches, Neiman and his coauthor, Kenneth W. 
Estes, relay vivid accounts of fighting in the Pacific War, as well 
as Marine Corps service during the entire World War II period, 
devoid of idolatry and mythmaking.

    After the capture of Guadalcanal, Neiman endured Japanese 
bombardments there to gather information for his assignment as 
operations officer of a new tank school being formed in California. 
He eventually led his own tank company through four island 
battles culminating in the cauldron of Iwo Jima. Later, he finished 
the war as executive officer and commanding officer of the 1st 
Tank Battalion on occupation and security duty in North China in 
1945–46.

    Neiman and Estes take the reader from prewar training at 
Quantico and in North Carolina through the off-duty delights of a 
New Zealand bereft of men, the horrors of Saipan and Iwo, the 
peculiar situation in China after the war, and then back to the states 
for Neiman’s successful postwar career as a lumber retailer.
 
    Through it all, Estes translates Neiman’s eye for the interesting 
and the human into a multifaceted tale of a young marine going to 
war. This is an adventure story with many novel turns that will 
attract the interest of military experts, military history aficionados, 
Marine Corps members in general, and veterans of armored 
fighting vehicle units. Neiman is not a USMC icon, just one of the 
unheralded thousands of officers who did the real fighting. This is 
their story as much as it is his.

_________________________________________________________

ROBERT M. NEIMAN is retired and now lives in Indian Wells, 
California. KENNETH W. ESTES is a historian, defense 
consultant, and former commissioned officer in the U.S. Marine 
Corps. He lives in Seattle, Washington.


Number Eighty-five: Texas A&M University Military History 
Series


What people are saying about this book


"Neiman and Estes have written a memoir that is a personable, 
fascinating, and illuminating account of the men and machines of 
the 1st and 4th Tank Battalions, USMC. It is essential reading for 
anybody interested in tank warfare and marine campaigns in the 
Pacific in WWII.—Military Trader, August 2005

“No other book relates the Marine tankers’ World War II 
experience so authentically or so personally. It is a captivating true
account and, if you like your prose straight up, this is your
book.”—Military History of the West