The Conquering Tide
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That was not to say that the naval barrage had done no good at all. At a stateside lecture in January 1944, General Edson (newly promoted) enumerated the results: “They did take out the coast defense guns during that two and a half hours before H-hour,” he said. “They did take out the antiaircraft guns. They took out or neutralized a certain percentage of the anti-boat guns, but they took out practically none of the beach defenses, emplacements which have your machine guns, some of the 37mm, anti-boat guns and rifles. The bombardment also completely disrupted the communications set-up on the island.”75
News of the losses suffered at Tarawa caused a minor public imbroglio at home. General Vandegrift, newly appointed commandant of the Marine Corps, made the controversial decision to allow publication of photographs depicting dead marines strewn along Beach Red 2. No such photographs had previously appeared in the American press. Compared to the carnage occurring elsewhere in the world, 3,000 casualties in three days was not an inordinate loss. But the American people received the news with some shock. Pointed questions were raised in the press and in Congress. What was the strategic importance of Tarawa? Was the toll worth it? Had the marines or the navy botched the job? Holland Smith stoked the controversy by offering some pointed on-the-record observations to reporters. The navy had failed to provide adequate numbers of amtracs, he said, and the preinvasion naval bombardment had been deficient. He compared the assault at Tarawa to Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. MacArthur, always attuned to stateside politics, offered oblique comments to the effect that good commanders do not allow their forces to suffer needlessly high casualties. As usual, these criticisms were echoed and amplified in William Randolph Hearst’s national newspaper chain.
The commotion quickly reverberated from Washington back to Pearl Harbor. On December 14, King penned an angry memo to Nimitz, dressing the CINCPAC down for failing to release timely information in conjunction with his reports. King had been obliged to reply to “editorial comment, radio broadcasts, and remarks in Congress” concerning the navy’s lack of support for the marines. The COMINCH was vexed by Holland Smith’s public claim that he had not received as many landing craft as he had requested. Likening Tarawa to Pickett’s charge was foolish, not least because one was a victory and the other a debacle. In that vein, King complained that Nimitz’s censors were passing stories that reported heavy casualties “without even mentioning the fact that it was victory.”76
Nimitz also heard directly from parents and wives of some of the slain marines. “You killed my son on Tarawa,” a mother wrote from Arkansas. The CINCPAC insisted on reading and answering all such letters. He told Lamar, “This is one of the responsibilities of command. You have to send some people to their deaths.”77
With the prominent exception of Holland Smith, navy and marine leaders closed ranks in support of one another and defended the overall conduct of Operation GALVANIC. General Vandegrift insisted that the American people must be “steeled” to the inevitable costs of war. Tarawa, he said, had been “the first true amphibious assault of all time,” an operation that “validated the principle of the amphibious assault, a tactic proclaimed impossible by many military experts.” As for the casualties: “Of course it was costly—we all knew it would be, for war is costly.”78 The real lesson of Tarawa was that the Japanese were doomed, for they could no longer feel secure on any island, no matter how strongly fortified and defended.
Julian Smith emphatically denied that the losses could be attributed to any clearly avoidable deficiency or tactical error. “It was a grand scrap, well-planned and hard-fought. If I had to do it over again, there’s no single thing that I could do better.”79 Writing to a friend back in the States, Smith judged that “our naval gunfire was magnificent as well as our air support. Our intelligence was far better than we can expect in most attacks. So far as I’m concerned there were no surprises in the whole operation.”80 Writing to another friend on Christmas Day, Smith opined that the casualties suffered on Tarawa were in fact “very light.”81 Admiral Spruance, who had personally argued for taking the Gilberts, always insisted that the conquest of Tarawa was absolutely necessary despite the costs.82 As the picture became clearer, influential voices in the American press endorsed that view. Tarawa was only the first of several such island battles to come, warned a New York Times editorial on December 27, 1943: “We must steel ourselves now to pay that price.”83
Holland Smith, alone among the major commanders of GALVANIC, concluded that Tarawa had been a misadventure and that the Gilberts should have been bypassed altogether. He said it plainly, and was the only one to do so: “Tarawa was a mistake.”84 With this, Smith breached a powerful taboo. No one wanted to hear that young American lives had been thrown away to no good purpose. But the retroactive case against GALVANIC, iconoclastic though it was, did not and does not warrant a back-of-the-hand dismissal. With a further buildup of forces, the Pacific Fleet could have penetrated directly into the Marshalls, bypassing the Gilberts. Such an operation would have become feasible by February 1944, just three months after GALVANIC. Whether Betio’s airfield would remain a threat to sea communications is arguable, but without possession of the Marshalls the Japanese would have encountered great difficulties in keeping the island supplied with aircraft, parts, fuel, and other needed supplies. Ernest King’s determination to get the central Pacific offensive underway before the end of 1943 had certainly carried weight in the decision to go through the Gilberts.
When the question was put to him many years later, Julian Smith was philosophical: “Well, I think it was just one of those things. War is war.” Whether Tarawa could have been safely bypassed or not, it was a victory. The navy and marines had learned valuable lessons that would be put to profitable use in future operations. If the Americans had not made those mistakes at Tarawa, they would have made them in the Marshalls, suffering proportionally higher casualties in the latter as a result. And the bloody conquest of Tarawa had proved an important point to both sides in the conflict. Japan’s grand strategy rested on the supposition that the American people would not stand for the losses required in a long war. But Tarawa served notice to the enemy that no price was too high, “and every one of those islands that they were fortifying became a base for us to bomb Japan and to carry the war farther on.”85
IN ACCORDANCE WITH SPRUANCE’S PLAN, Baldy Pownall had stationed his aircraft carriers (Task Force 50) in defensive zones northwest of the Gilberts. Remarkably, the sprawling armada of flattops and screening vessels managed to steal into these enemy-dominated waters undetected by either submarine or air patrols.86 Beginning at dawn on November 19, airstrikes rained destruction down on Japanese airfields and installations throughout the region. Fighter and bombing squadrons returned from Tarawa and Makin with inflated estimates of the damage inflicted on Japanese defenses, and were later chagrined to learn of the bloodbath on Betio. Their impressions, they realized, had been far too optimistic.
Pownall’s flagship, the Yorktown, was skippered by his erstwhile detractor Jocko Clark. She was at the center of Task Group 50.1, which included her sister the Lexington and the light carrier Cowpens. On the morning of the landings at Tarawa and Makin, the three air groups concentrated their attention on the two largest airfields in the eastern Marshalls, on the atolls of Jaluit and Mille. TBF Avengers were employed as glide-bombers, armed with 1,000-pound bombs. One scored a direct hit on an ammunition dump at Mille, sending an awe-inspiring mushroom cloud up through the cloud ceiling. “We demolished the place,” said Ralph Hanks of VF-16, the Lexington’s fighter squadron. “There was little or no aircraft opposition.”87 Yorktown’s hardworking Hellcat squadron (VF-5) flew combat air patrols and antisubmarine patrols over the carriers. Many pilots completed three or four flights before nightfall on D-Day.
Admiral Koga’s Operation Z had envisioned hard-hitting naval and air counterattacks on just such an offensive as GALVANIC, but the situation in the South Pacific did not permit committing any major part of the
Combined Fleet to defend the Gilberts. Koga was still mainly concerned with the two-headed threat to Rabaul. American intelligence indications of a fleet moving out of Truk turned out to be a red herring. But the big airfields in Kwajalein Atoll were plentifully supplied with medium bombers, and the submarine threat remained a source of serious concern. On the afternoon of D-Day, radio eavesdroppers on the Yorktown intercepted a Japanese transmission ordering more submarines into the area, and (as a Yorktown air officer noted in his diary) “for land-based bombers on Kwajalein to find us and attack as soon as possible.”88 Mitsubishi G4M (Allied code name “Betty”) units promptly began leapfrogging east and south, down the archipelago of Japan’s island airbases. Pownall and his commanders expected night attacks by G4Ms armed with aerial torpedoes, and knew also that the enemy bombers would approach at wave-top altitude in order to avoid early radar detection. As anticipated, blips began appearing on radar screens shortly after sunset.
From the start of the war, the Japanese had proved to be more adept in fighting at night, whether on the sea or in the air. Few American aviators had even attempted to land aboard a carrier after nightfall. Defending ships against night air attacks was a relatively new problem, and the Americans were groping toward tactical innovations to meet the threat. Each of Pownall’s task groups stationed a single destroyer about fifteen to twenty miles west of the center of the formation to act as a radar picket. Aboard each task group’s flag carrier, the Combat Information Center (CIC) tracked bogeys and vectored fighters to intercept them. But it was immensely difficult to see the darkened enemy planes, and the Hellcats did not often get an opportunity to engage them. Later, as radar-directed antiaircraft fire grew more sophisticated, ships learned to shoot down night attackers sight unseen. In November 1943, that technology remained in its infancy. “At that time we didn’t have night fighters,” said Truman Hedding. “The Japanese Betties would come in just at evening dusk, just as it was getting dark, and we couldn’t do anything about it. They would fly around and drop torpedoes at us, and they were getting us too, now and then.”89
The G4Ms approached low over the sea, typically flying “down the moon path,” as Hedding recalled, so that the target ships were silhouetted in moonlight.90 Under such conditions, the rectangular profile of an aircraft carrier was instantly recognized. If the ships were traveling at speeds above 10 knots, they left long fluorescent wakes that were as good as illuminated arrows pointing to their locations. On the night of November 20, Pownall ordered Task Group 50.1 to slow to 8 knots in hopes of rendering it invisible from the air. That ruse involved a dangerous trade-off—if the enemy pilots spotted the slow-moving fleet, the carriers would make easy targets.
Task Group 50.3, about forty miles south, bore the worst of the night’s attack. About fourteen torpedo-armed G4Ms got through the screening ships and dropped their fish at close range. One struck the starboard quarter of the light carrier Independence. She suffered heavy casualties and major damage and had to withdraw for repairs. The crew managed to make her seaworthy enough to limp back to Funafuti. From there she was sent back to San Francisco for extensive repairs. She did not get back into the war until the following July.
At dawn on the twenty-first, the Yorktown and Lexington air groups returned to Mille, where they bombed the airstrips and other installations as they had the previous day. Japanese air units were staging through the island, and each time the Americans returned, it seemed that the Japanese had more planes on the ground and circling overhead. In the afternoon, Captain Hedding (Pownall’s chief of staff) ordered the Yorktown’s fighter squadron to fly a reconnaissance mission over Mille to determine how many bombers remained. Commander Charlie Crommelin, VF-5’s skipper, volunteered to lead a group of eight Hellcats on the flight.
Hedding’s orders were to observe and report, not to attack—but Crommelin elected to fly low over the Japanese airfield on the pretense of taking a closer look. He strafed a G4M as it taxied toward the runway, and set it afire. He banked and came around for another strafing run. Before he reached the edge of the field, Crommelin’s cockpit was hit directly by a 20mm antiaircraft shell. The blast destroyed most of his instruments and shattered his Plexiglas canopy. Crommelin suffered severe shrapnel wounds in his face, neck, chest, and right arm. He lost all vision in his left eye and could barely see through his right. The windshield was intact, but a spider-web pattern of cracks obscured visibility. Crommelin, barely able to see through the blood, managed to open his canopy so that he could look out of the right side of the cockpit. He leveled off at 300 feet. A wingman flew alongside and escorted the skipper 120 miles back to the Yorktown. The chances of a successful recovery seemed dubious, but Crommelin made a perfect approach, snagged an arresting cable, and then taxied forward to the parking area and shut his engine down. While trying to hoist himself out of the cockpit, he collapsed. Jocko Clark’s action report noted, “He was lifted from the cockpit in a semiconscious condition, suffering from severe shock and loss of blood.”91 Crommelin was carried down to sickbay on a stretcher. His left eye was saved. After a lengthy recuperation in the United States, he was reassigned and flew again.
Aerial torpedo attacks continued almost every night, depriving the crews of rest. On the Yorktown, Clark told the officers on duty to awaken him each time a strange plane appeared on radar. Depending on its location, course, and speed, Clark would decide whether to arise and return to the bridge in pajamas to take the conn.
During these frequent night attacks on Task Force 50, the Combat Information Centers on the various carriers were scenes of intense activity and nervous tension. Green blips moved across the radar screens, sometimes turning and approaching the center of the screen. A plane making a torpedo run would approach at high speed and then bank sharply away. At that moment the operators could assume that a torpedo was in the water. “Those minutes seemed like years, when you are sitting there waiting to see whether you’re going to get hit,” recalled Fitzhugh Lee, an officer on the Lexington. “CIC was not a happy place to be.” Most of the young radar operators did their jobs with icy skill. Now and again a man would break down under the strain. “We had a few who lost control of themselves and started weeping, crying, praying, and things like that.”92 Whenever it happened, Lee relieved the man at once, lest his hysteria spread and cause a general contagion.
Despite having suffered two consecutive days of heavy air losses, the Japanese doggedly hurled their remaining land-based bombers against Task Force 50. November 23 was another long day of furious air combat. The Lexington’s fighters (VF-16), flying combat air patrol, intercepted an inbound airstrike and shot down seventeen of the nineteen intruders. The next day, the same squadron claimed another dozen enemy planes. Lieutenant (jg) Ralph Hanks, an Iowa pig farmer before the war, became an “ace in a day” by shooting down five Zeros in a single skirmish. In a fifteen-minute air engagement, his throttle never left the firewall and his Hellcat surpassed 400 knots in a diving attack. Hanks had to stand on his rudder pedals and use his entire upper-body strength to keep his stick under control. Intense g-forces caused him to black out several times. This first massed encounter of Zeros and Hellcats did not bode well for the future of the now-obsolete Japanese fighter plane.
The instinctive rivalry between the Yorktown and Lexington air groups was stoked by the former’s perception that the Lexington’s fighters were always lucky to be aloft when the enemy appeared. VF-5, gloated the pilots of VF-16, had been “skunked.” Captain Clark, competitive as he was, sent a genial signal to the Lexington’s skipper, Felix Stump: “Well, you’ve beat us out so far. I hope we have better luck next time.”93
Late-afternoon sorties often required night recoveries, and in these situations returning airmen tended to look for any friendly flight deck. Cases of mistaken identity were endemic among the Essex-class carrier air groups because the ships were built on identical lines and were difficult to tell apart even in daylight. Yorktown planes landed on the Lexington on the evenings of Novem
ber 22 and 23, and in each case the pilots were not aware of the mismatch until they climbed out of their cockpits.
Heavy thunderheads moved into the area late that afternoon, and Pownall ordered all planes aloft to recover and secure. Five FM-1 Wildcat fighters from the Liscome Bay (which would be destroyed the following morning) lost their way in the squall and could not pick up their ship’s YE homing beacon. They flew west and radioed the Yorktown to ask permission to land aboard and return to their carrier the next day. Clark, after consulting with Pownall, assented.
The planes entered the landing circle as the last light drained out of the western sky. The first three FM-1s landed without mishap. The pilot of the fourth forgot to lower his tailhook and was given a wave-off by the landing signal officer. The pilot ignored or did not see the wave-off, came down hard, bounced, gunned his throttle in an apparent bid to get airborne and come around for another try, then came down again and somersaulted over the crash barrier. Several parked planes were destroyed, and four plane pushers were killed immediately. The crashed plane burst into fire, and the flames quickly spread to engulf most of the flight deck amidships. Within twenty seconds the crew had foam hoses on the fire, but the parked planes had been gassed up and armed for morning launch, and their tanks and ammunition went up in a chain of explosions. Magnesium flares ignited and lit up the ship and the sea all around her with an intense yellow light. The wing gun magazines of the parked F6Fs began firing their .50-caliber rounds, forcing the fire brigade to duck and take cover.94
Clark kept the ship headed into the wind to prevent the fire from spreading to as-yet-undamaged planes parked farther forward. “The intense heat was almost unbearable on the island superstructure,” he later wrote. “If the island caught fire, navigation and ship control would be nearly impossible.”95 Clark shouted over the noise to direct the firefighting efforts. “I remember Captain Clark leaning over the navigation bridge, directing the firefighters doing a remarkable job to save the ship,” Truman Hedding later recalled.96 Men in asbestos suits dragged hoses directly into the heart of the conflagration and spread a 3-inch layer of Foamite throughout the stricken area. Tractors towed burning planes to the edge of the flight deck, where they were shoved overboard. The fire burned for half an hour before it was entirely extinguished at 7:05 p.m. Remarkably, the Yorktown had suffered no serious damage and resumed normal flight operations the next morning.97 Several firefighters received commendations for their courage and initiative.