Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  American forces in the Pacific were learning valuable lessons in this interim period. Among them were these two realities about their Japanese enemies: they were not invincible, but they were tenacious, lethal fighters. Victory seemed achievable, but all hands could sense the great cost in time, treasure, and blood it would require to fight across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean.

  In the meantime, local commanders of all three services thought Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift’s assessment of current amphibious capabilities made good sense: “Landings should not be attempted in the face of organized resistance,” he wrote in his final Guadalcanal report, “if, by any combination of march or maneuver, it is possible to land unopposed and undetected.”

  Vandegrift’s stricture would prove relevant for most of 1943, but changes in strategy and technology, already in the wind, would soon provide a better road map for victory in the Pacific.

  Chapter Two

  Pacific Proving Ground

  Air raid at 1335—terrible! No warning. Right in bull’s eye. Estimate 300 casualties. All HQ hit badly. Gross sights—arms and legs moving all directions.... Nearly crapped out myself.

  Lt. Col. David M. Shoup, USMC

  Personal journal, Rendova,

  2 July 1943

  Every American landing attempt during 1942–43 in the Pacific ran the risk of such stinging Japanese counterstrikes as occurred on D+2 at Rendova. It was a time when neither antagonist could gain a significant advantage over the other, and the parallel development of U.S. amphibious proficiency and Japanese counterlanding virtuosity remained low key. While the United States lacked the preconditions, specialized weapons systems, and confidence to launch a true storm landing until late autumn of 1943, the Japanese considered the threat to their far-flung Pacific conquests as minimal during much of that same period.

  With the notable exception of the Gilberts, Japanese base development in the early years consisted principally of building tactical airfields. These they utilized adroitly as interim staging bases, shifting air units back and forth around the Pacific perimeter, from the Kuriles to the Celebes, like pieces on a giant chessboard. Otherwise, few Pacific islands under Japanese control benefited from advanced defensive preparations against potential enemy assaults from the sea in this interim period. The great defensive citadels of Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and Okinawa did not become fortified until 1944. Most Japanese commanders were so flushed with “victory fever,” imbued with the spirit of the offensive, and disdainful of the fighting qualities of their enemies that they gave little serious thought to a sustained Allied counteroffensive in the foreseeable future.

  This blinkered mind-set bothered Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet, who had long warned that the Japanese would enjoy only a limited grace period in the Pacific (he figured two years at most) before America’s enormous industrial capacity would complete its conversion to a war economy and begin to flood the Pacific with powerful new task forces. But an ULTRA decryption provided Yamamoto’s flight schedule to a site within reach of U.S. land-based air units in the Solomons. On 18 April 1943 U.S. Army Air Forces P-38 Lightnings sent the admiral to a watery grave.

  There would be other Japanese admirals, some with formidable tactical skills, but the Imperial Navy would never replace Yamamoto. The chronic failure of the Combined Fleet in subsequent years of the war to derail even a single American storm landing would reflect in part the absence of this naval warrior. Had he lived, Yamamoto would not likely have succeeded against America’s increasing technological power, but at least he would have failed gloriously, in high seas combat. He surely would not have forfeited the Gilberts, Marshalls, and eastern Carolines without a fight, as his successor would do. Taking Yamamoto off the board improved the odds that America’s great naval warfare experiments to follow in the Central Pacific would eventually succeed.

  U.S. campaign planners from Pearl Harbor to Brisbane cheered at the muted news of Admiral Yamamoto’s aerial ambush, but they still faced other daunting barriers to launching a sustained offensive campaign in the Pacific in 1943.

  Vulnerability of the amphibious task force remained the principal concern. Executing conservative, short-range, shore-to-shore amphibious landings against an isolated segment of New Guinea’s endless coastline (General MacArthur’s preferred approach) was one thing. Cutting loose from the bounds of land-based air support for a distant strike in the Central Pacific would represent quite another—an inconceivable risk to many planners, downright suicidal to others. Limited assets and unproven doctrine reduced strategic options. As a consequence, the prevailing concern about vulnerability would continue to place a premium on surprise, speed, and simplicity in amphibious planning—a limited reach for limited objectives.

  American campaign planners also worried about assailability. Japanese defenders on the small atolls of the Central Pacific would be hard to surprise. The vast region also abounded with coral reefs, natural obstacles to even the sturdiest landing boats during most tidal ranges. This was not an unanticipated problem. The intermittent reef surrounding Gavutu-Tanambogo had served to channelize the American assault landing into one open sector, which proved to be well covered by Japanese Nambu machine guns. In the earlier landing on Tulagi, not a single boat in the first wave could negotiate the reef. Troops wading the final one hundred yards ashore in chest-deep water could thank their lucky stars the initial landing was unopposed.

  In 1938 Maj. Gerald C. Thomas, soon to become one of the Marine Corps’ most influential senior officers, testified before Congress about the protection Guam’s fringing reefs would likely provide that island’s defenders. Given adequate base defense development funds, Thomas argued, the reefs would help a decent-size defensive force resist up to sixty thousand Japanese invaders. When Congress refused to authorize any base development whatsoever in the Central Pacific, Thomas realized the Marines would face severe problems in the inevitable requirement to recapture Guam by force. Sooner or later the amphibians would have to solve the reef problem.

  Certain Pacific Theater commanders and planners shared Thomas’s early concern. In fact, a Japanese submarine bombardment of U.S. Navy facilities on tiny Johnston Island on 7 December 1941 was thwarted by the unexpected appearance in those waters of the heavy cruiser Indianapolis and a squadron of destroyer minesweepers. Their mission that final day of peace was to test the capability of the Navy’s new landing craft, the “Higgins boats,” to traverse a coral reef. Higgins boats proved a boon to Allied assault forces in all oceans of the war, but the versatile craft required between three and four feet of water under the keel to clear a coral reef when carrying a full load of troops or equipment.* Marginal water depth over the reef would risk running the craft hard aground and damaging the rudder and prop guard. This operational limitation demanded accurate tidal information in advance. Unfortunately, such precise data were not readily available in many distant reaches of the Pacific.

  For their part, the Japanese had accurate tide information at hand to support their reef-crossing, night landings on Guam in 1941, but that merely reflected the proximity of Japanese bases in the Marianas surrounding the American naval base. Lacking this precise information in 1942, Navy captain Minoru Ota, commanding the 2d Combined Special Naval Landing Force earmarked for the invasion of Midway, planned to transit that island’s reefs by rubber boats—once the mighty Combined Fleet crushed the American fleet in the “decisive naval battle” offshore.

  The Allies’ lack of confidence in their ability to mount a major offensive seaborne campaign in 1942 led to two experiments with large-size amphibious raids. These took place within a week of each other in August of that year at opposite ends of the earth—at Makin in the Gilbert Islands and at Dieppe on the French coast. Neither proved satisfactory. The Dieppe raid turned into a tactical disaster. German defenders recovered from their initial surprise to cut down half the Canadian and British troops along the beaches. Dieppe, however, had redeeming strategic benefits. Adolph Hitler thereaf
ter believed the inevitable cross-channel assault would have to be tied to a port facility, such as Calais or Cherbourg, thereby distracting his attention from the undeveloped Normandy beaches, which would be pierced by the Allied landings sixteen months later.

  The Makin raid had considerable potential. Two large transport submarines penetrated the Gilberts undetected, surfaced off Butaritari Island by dark of night to launch Marine lieutenant colonel Evans E Carlson’s 2d Raider Battalion, an elite unit that would shortly earn acclaim for its jungle-fighting exploits on Guadalcanal. Carlson’s objective was simply to distract Japanese attention from the landings in the Solomons and spoil their buildup of countervailing forces in the South Pacific. The Raiders surprised and defeated the Japanese garrison, but Carlson’s tactical victory was clouded by his hasty withdrawal from the island, in which he inadvertently left nine Marines behind (soon captured and beheaded). Worse, unlike Dieppe, the raid accrued no strategic benefit. Quite the opposite, Carlson stirred up a hornet’s nest in what had been a quiet, lightly held backwater of the Japanese perimeter.

  Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) moved with alacrity to improve the defensive posture of these outer islands. Japanese naval expeditionary forces promptly seized and occupied the Gilberts in force, along with neighboring Nauru and Ocean Islands. The Makin raid sparked the beginning of the Japanese development of tiny Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll, as their easternmost fortified outpost.

  Neither Makin nor Dieppe provided encouragement to commanders or strategists regarding the military utility of amphibious operations. The whole business seemed too risky and too complicated to warrant serious consideration in operations against well-organized opposition. Yet there seemed no other operational means of advancing across the Pacific to the Japanese home islands.

  By the end of 1942 the United States had launched two large-scale amphibious operations, Operation Torch in North Africa and Operation Watchtower in the Solomons. Torch was a huge undertaking, a triple landing of some 107,000 Allied troops in Morocco and Algeria against brief but sharp opposition by Vichy French forces. The landings reflected more of the inherent chaos of amphibious operations. Many boats landed miles from their assigned beaches, scrambling unit integrity, while rough surf and inexperienced seamanship resulted in the loss of some two hundred landing craft. Although the D-Day beaches portrayed a disaster of classic proportions, the landing force projected sufficient troops and combat support ashore to stay, and the operation continued. An American Army had taken the offensive against the Axis in the European Theater and landed more or less intact in the rear of German general Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. There would be hell to pay ahead for the green American troops at Kasserine Pass, but Rommel’s desert supremacy would soon wane. Torch worked.

  So did Watchtower at Guadalcanal and the Floridas. Smaller, more ragged, and more exposed to major enemy counterattacks than Torch, the Guadalcanal operation literally hung in the balance throughout the three months following the landing. Seizing and holding Guadalcanal, even under such lean and hazardous conditions, produced enormous strategic benefits for the Allies in the Pacific. Perhaps the difficult art of forcible amphibious assault deserved a closer look.

  Most strategic planners overlooked the opposed landings at Gavutu-Tanambogo in their review of the state of amphibious virtuosity. This was an unfortunate oversight, because the small-scale but viciously fought landings on those two islands provided a microcosm of the great amphibious campaigns to follow in the Central Pacific. Every flaw in the Gavutu-Tanambogo operation held a corrective lesson to be learned, had anyone taken the time for a serious examination.

  Mary Craddock Hoffman

  A good look at Gavutu-Tanambogo would have highlighted the special requirements for amphibious intelligence: the assault force needs precise information on tides and reefs, obstacles and surf zones, beach gradient and trafficability—all in addition to reports of the enemy’s strength and defensive weaponry. Lacking almost all of this essential information, Captain Crane’s rifle company rushed into a buzz-saw in their hasty night landing attempt on Tanambogo.

  There would be significant intelligence shortcomings in several of the storm landings to come (Peleliu, Okinawa), but never again would a landing force splash ashore so dangerously blind as did the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal and the Floridas. Amphibious intelligence would prove superb at Tarawa (with the notable exception of reliable tidal information). Several factors made such a marked improvement possible in the ensuing fifteen months: the professional growth of the intelligence staffs of the assault divisions (as personified by Lt. Col. Thomas J. “Jack” Colley and his crackerjack D-2 section of the 2d Marine Division); the integration of intelligence efforts with Admiral Nimitz’s Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA); and the onset of reliable aerial photography by the Seventh Air Force and (later) carrier aviation. The missing link remained the absence of on-the-scene reconnaissance of the beach approaches for the storm landings ahead. Tarawa would illuminate the crying need for scout-swimmers. Underwater demolition teams (UDTs) would be available for the Marshalls onward. The amphibians could have used them as early as the Solomons.

  The Gavutu-Tanambogo operation should also have indicated the need for greater emphasis on amphibious training. Much of this is unsophisticated familiarization. How to waterproof weapons and equipment. How to use tag lines to lower crew-served weapons into a boat alongside. How to move a unit of troops through the narrow confines of a transport to the designated debarkation station on deck. How to descend via a rope net into the landing craft (never easy—“hands on the vertical, feet on the horizontal, watch that last step!”). When to lock and load. When to fix bayonets. How to roll over the gunwales of the landing craft (until the ramped Higgins boats appeared), hit the water, dash across the beach to the first objective. The simplicity of these tasks is deceiving. Lack of familiarity in any aspect has an accordion effect, which produces the well-documented beachfront chaos. We could have learned this fully from the landings in the Floridas.

  Naval gunfire support against Japanese emplacements on Gavutu and Tanambogo proved unsatisfactory, yet we failed to learn this lesson until after Tarawa. Naval officers were slow to accept the fact that rapid, saturation bombardment would not succeed against fortifications or caves, that long-range firing lacked the precision necessary to take out critical targets. The antiaircraft cruiser San Juan unleashed 280 rounds from her 6-inch guns in five minutes against Gavutu, but it mainly served to deafen the defenders hunkered in their caves and to announce the approach of the landing force. The destroyer Monssen’s 200 rounds of 5-inch fire from 4,000 yards off Tanambogo on D-Day were not nearly as effective as her 92 rounds from 500 yards the following day.

  In truth, the quality and quantity of naval gunfire support would continue to be a bone of contention between the landing force and the Navy throughout the war. In the storm landings to come, the landing force would deem naval gunfire support satisfactory only at Guam, Tinian, and Okinawa. The lessons of the Floridas seemed quickly forgotten. Navy commodore Herbert B. Knowles, who would command the transports at Tarawa and many subsequent assault landings, recalled his concern with the deficiencies of preliminary gunfire support against Gavutu when he commanded the transport Heywood: “From daylight to noon this little island was subjected to repeated bombing attacks and bombardment by cruisers and destroyers. The results had been most disappointing. Perhaps the reason little was learned from that particular landing was because of the smallness of the island and the few people involved, none of them being of any great rank.”

  Similarly, close air support at Gavutu and Tanambogo had proven of marginal value. Troops on the ground could not communicate with the aviators overhead. Twice, Navy planes bombed clusters of Marines fighting for Gavutu, the “fratricide” killing and wounding a dozen men and adding further to the frustration of a very long afternoon. Clearly, this critical area needed analysis and improvement. Unfortunately, we squandered the opp
ortunity. D-Day at Tarawa would reflect identical shortcomings. And there was a larger issue of close air support evident in the Floridas. Although we had no alternatives at the time, it was unwise to risk strategic assets like fleet carriers to provide direct air support to the landing force. The U.S. Navy would need two kinds of carriers to prosecute the Pacific War: large, fast carriers to take the war to the enemy on the high seas and small escort carriers to deliver sustained close air support to amphibious operations. Both types were on the way—but not in 1942.

  The early, opposed landings in the Floridas also revealed dangerous, momentum-robbing deficiencies in the ship-to-shore movement. The amphibious force supporting the 1st Marine Division contained a mix of six different kinds of landing craft, many of them still without bow ramps. Advent of the thirty-six-foot, ramped Higgins boats, the LCVPs (officially, Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel), would simplify and improve this situation, but there remained the problem of crossing coral reefs, and the requirement for larger boats—“lighters”—needed to land artillery and tanks while under enemy fire. The new fifty-foot LCM-3s (medium landing craft, also made by Andrew Higgins) would solve this problem nicely, once the fleet could provide sufficient transports with the boom capacity to handle the heavier craft and their tanks or guns.