Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 28, 1993 TAG: 9312010370
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SID MOODY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was scarcely bigger than a golf course, this coral islet called Betio.
But it was the first of a series of bloody steppingstones across the Central Pacific for the United States toward Japan, steps in World War II that were to make names like Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa hallowed names.
The Marine landing on Tarawa, the better-remembered name of the atoll of which Betio was a part, on Nov. 20, 1943, was a harbinger of most of what was to come. Short, furious fighting on islands too small for subtlety ending in triumph for the Americans and annihilation or mass suicide for the Japanese garrisons.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Southwest Pacific Command, deplored the straight-ahead, pointblank tactics of the Marines as heedlessly wasteful of lives. (His American and Australian army troops, however, lost more men clearing eastern New Guinea than the Marines and Army had in vicious fighting on Guadalcanal in 1942.) MacArthur argued - in vain - that America's naval and air strength be poured into his offensive up the New Guinea coast, on to the Philippines and thence to Japan.
The interservice infighting for limited men and materiel - with the war in Europe having priority - sometimes left bystanders wondering who the real enemy was, the Axis or U.S. generals and admirals down the hall. Fortunately, the Pacific was big enough to accommodate large egos and jealousies and traditions.
Whatever its merits, MacArthur's strategy flew in the face of the Navy brass and their commander, Adm. Ernest J. King, who were damned if their new fast carriers and battleships would serve under an Army general. Moreover, they argued, by opening a second front in the Pacific the Japanese would be whipsawed by alternating American attacks and kept off balance and out of position. This turned out to be the case.
When Marines landed on Bouganville in the Solomon Islands on Nov.1, 1943, the Japanese fleet hurried there fearing an attack on their major base at Rabaul. Thus there was only a land garrison to defend Tarawa, 1,291 miles to the east, three weeks later.
The existence of parallel offensives also solved the problem of handling MacArthur's hero status with the American public and the Army's and Navy's unwillingness to have one service command the other.
``The establishment of the two theaters and two routes of advance in the Pacific neatly solved the bureaucratic and public relations problems,'' wrote war historian Ronald H. Spector in ``Eagle Against the Sun.''
Essentially what the U.S. strategy was in Adm. Chester Nimitz's theater was to secure successive islands and fixed aircraft carriers within bombing range of the next island to be invaded, thus leapfrogging in about 500-mile jumps. MacArthur used similar tactics in New Guinea. These moves were accompanied by ever-increasing numbers of carriers, battleships and land-based bombers which were taking command of the sea and air from the Japanese, just as the architect of Pearl Harbor, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, had forecast.
Tarawa (TAR-awa) was an atoll of 25 islets in the Gilbert Islands near the Equator, 2,081 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor. Its 4,500 defenders, members of the first-rank Japanese navy, were based on the 21/2-by-21/2-mile islet of Betio (BAY-she-oh) and led by Adm. Keiji Shibasaki. He boasted his force could ``withstand assault by a million men for 100 years.''
The Japanese had armed Betio with 25 eight-inch coastal guns captured from the British at Singapore. They had buried 14 tanks in the sand and built 100 blockhouses, some with concrete walls 8 feet thick. Then there were the tides.
Tarawa is one of those rare spots on the planet with ``dodging'' tides with unpredictable movements on a roughly 24-hour cycle - one high and one low a day. Since the attack was coming across a half-mile reef, timing the tide was critical. Maj. F.L.G. Holland, a New Zealander who had lived on Tarawa 15 years, warned the Americans there was only 3 feet over the reef at low tide. ``You won't be able to cross.'' The Higgins landing craft drew 4 feet.
The planners of the invasion, Operation Galvanic, predicted there would be 5 feet on D-Day. But the night before, 14-year-old Rota Onorio paddled his canoe out to the huge fleet of three battleships, five escort carriers, 26 cruisers and destroyers and 126 transports carrying 18,000 Marines of the 2nd Division. He told the Americans the reef would be impassable tomorrow. Nevertheless, the Marines were coming.
Landing on hostile shores under fire was as second nature to the U.S. Marine Corps as leathernecks. Two hundred Marines stormed Fort Montague in Nassau Harbor in the Bahamas during the American Revolution. During the 1920s and '30s, Marines (there were only about 350 officers and 10,000 enlisted men in the whole service) were continually landing in trouble spots in the Caribbean to safeguard American interests.
``If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the Japanese bases of the Pacific were captured on the beaches of the Caribbean where the problems involved were worked out in Marine maneuvers,'' wrote Gen. Holland M. ``Howlin' Mad'' Smith, who led the Tarawa Marines.
Marine Corps doctrine became a landing manual in 1934 that was holy writ during the Pacific War. But Tarawa taught some murderous lessons of its own.
Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner, who had the nickname ``Terrible Turner,'' was in charge of getting the landing force organized and ashore. Then Smith, ``the only Marine general who could shout louder than any admiral,'' was to take over. They had only century-old charts and interviews with former residents to steer by. And the tide was indeed out.
On Makin (MUG-rin), 99 miles to the north, 6,700 men of the Army's 27th Division landed, opposed by about 800 mostly labor troops. To the south the U.S. warships blasted Tarawa for two hours. ``It seemed like no living soul could be on that island,'' said Navy Capt. Charles Moore, chief of staff to Adm. Raymond Spruance, overall invasion commander. ``There aren't 50 Japs alive.''
The Marines in their new amphibious armored amtracs found out otherwise as they crunched over the unexpectedly shallow reef at 4 mph. Eleven of the machines made the shallows only to be destroyed by mortar fire. The rainbow tropical waters turned red from the blood of Marines and dead fish.
Col. David M. Shoup, a future commandant of the Corps, made it ashore and set up a headquarters of a sort against the wall of a Japanese fort. After 90 minutes, as the Marines clung to a 20-foot strip of beach in the lee of a coconut log seawall, Shoup radioed for ``all possible support.''
``It was like being in the middle of a pool table without pockets,''\ recalled one of men in the first waves.
Three hours later, with casualties at 20 percent and only 1,500 Marines ashore, Shoup radioed: ``We need help. Situation bad.''
Destroyers risked grounding to steam as close as they dared to shell the defenders.
Near Shoup, Time magazine correspondent Robert Sherrod saw an enemy soldier hit by a flamethrower.
``The Jap flared up like a piece of celluloid. He was dead instantly, but the bullets in his cartridge belt exploded for a full 60 seconds after he had been charred to nothingness.''
By dusk, 5,000 Marines were holding 1,000 yards of beach despite 1,500 dead and wounded. Some artillery had been landed, as well as blood plasma.
That night Japanese snipers sneaked out to the wrecked amtracs to fire at the Marines from the rear with their own machine guns.
During the first night the Marines held their fire lest they give away their positions. The next morning more Marines waded in through the hellfire. ``Within five minutes I saw six men killed,'' Sherrod noted. ``I can count at least a hundred Marines lying on the flats.''
Bloated bodies, violently mutilated by gunfire, lay at water's edge, providing some of the grimmest photographs of World War II. But the Marines kept coming in as the tide rose. Tanks were ashore. Marines cut the island in two, dodging among the pillboxes and stumps of shattered palm trees. Shoup to fleet: ``We're winning.''
A bulldozer driver, fending off bullets with his blade, scooped sand against the entrance of Shibasaki's concrete bunker. Marines poured gasoline down the air vents, then lighted it, incinerating 300 Japanese.
After three days, the surviving Japanese at the end of the island staged a Banzai charge. Crying ``Japanese drink Marines' blood!'' they stormed Lt. Norman K. Thomas's Company B.
``We're killing them as fast as they come at us, but we can't hold much longer. We need reinforcements,'' he radioed Maj. Bill Jones of the 6th Marine Regiment.
``We haven't got them to send to you. You've got to hold,'' Jones replied.
They did. Three hundred Japanese lay dead before them.
Offshore, Japanese submarine I-75 torpedoed the U.S. escort carrier Lipscombe Bay, which exploded spectacularly before sinking with the loss of 600 sailors.
On Makin, where operations were also hampered by the low tide, the Army took the island after three days. ``The troops were jittery and stayed jittery,'' said Turner, attributing this to poor officering, further evidence of mutual mistrust, even disdain, between the services.
By the afternoon of the third day, 75 hours and 45 minutes after it began, the battle of Tarawa was over. Only one Japanese officer and 16 enlisted men survived; 1,027 Marines had been killed. Many of their bodies washed to sea or were buried under the sands of battle. For years, parts of skeletons of the fallen would surface. Some probably lay buried under the runways speedily built by the Seabees in preparation for the next steppingstone, Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands.
Smith toured Betio after the battle. ``I passed boys who looked older than their fathers. It was the most completely defended island I ever saw.''
Tarawa had been instructive. Next time, instead of firing in flat trajectory at the walls of pillboxes, the Navy would lob shells to hit their more vulnerable roofs from above. Better radios to withstand the shock of battle and salt water would be developed. More landing craft were needed and the pace of the landing assault quickened.
When Kwajalein was pasted from air and sea on Feb. 1, 1944, preparatory to invasion, one onlooker said, ``The entire island looked as if it had been picked up to 20,000 feet and then dropped.''
And so it was to be, again and again, westward relentlessly across the misnamed Pacific Ocean, island speck by island speck, body by body as Tarawa faded in the wake of the advancing Americans.
by CNB