Here was another ragged edge for the Tarawa assault. The Navy commissioned USS Ashland (LSD 1) the first week of August 1943. At the same time, halfway across the world, Vice Adm. Raymond A. Spruance, newly appointed commander of the Central Pacific Force, sat around a map of Tarawa Atoll in a New Zealand hotel room with Maj. Gen. Julian Smith and the senior officers of the 2d Marine Division brainstorming the problem of how to get Sherman tanks ashore. The Ashland would play a significant role in Galvanic, delivering the fifty new LVT-2s to Capt. Ray “Hootie” Horner’s enterprising amtrackers in Samoa in late October, hastening over to New Caledonia to embark the fourteen Sherman tanks, then catching up with the Southern Attack Force in the New Hebrides only two weeks before D-Day. The Ashland succeeded in delivering the goods in the lagoon at Tarawa, but so close had been the schedule that the first time the 2d Marine Division ever laid eyes on the new Sherman tanks was that very chaotic morning.
Some staff admirals in Pearl Harbor derided Raymond Spruance for trying to build his new Central Pacific Force into an overwhelming armada. “Spruance,” said one, “wants to use a sledgehammer to drive a tack.” The new force commander shrugged off the criticism. Although inexperienced in amphibious warfare, he could sense its inherent risks. Years later, after commanding the great amphibious victories in the Gilberts, Marshalls, Marianas, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, Spruance would declare that the principal lesson he learned at Tarawa was the need to use “violent, overwhelming force, swiftly applied.” Even in 1943 he knew how big a task lay ahead.
The Marines likewise knew in advance that Tarawa would be a tough nut to crack. Lt. Col. Jack Colley’s enterprising intelligence section provided Julian Smith and his commanders a wealth of tactical information about the Japanese garrison, their weapons, numbers, and dispositions. Smith was particularly uneasy about the artificial restrictions imposed on his division.
The Gilberts would be merely the first step, a modest-size operation to shake down new forces, test new doctrine, and seize advance air bases—all in preparation for the pending assault on the larger, more strategically valuable Marshalls, five hundred miles west of the Gilberts. So be it. But Smith perceived the Marshalls “clock” to be driving every Gilberts decision. Galvanic, in effect, had to be executed in time to preserve the Marshalls schedule, whose D-Day was a mere six weeks away. That inflexible mandate, coupled with the Navy’s natural concern with a major engagement with the Combined Fleet, put a premium on speed of execution for Galvanic.
“Get the hell in and get the hell out,” said Nimitz to Spruance. Nimitz and Spruance therefore scotched Julian Smith’s proposals for advance seizure of neighboring Bairiki Island for an artillery fire support base, an amphibious feint against Betio’s north shore, and several days of naval bombardment. The Southern Attack Force would instead have three hours at first light on D-Day to pummel Betio with everything in the book. What the hell, many officers reasoned, the island was a small spit of sand and coral. Three hours’ concentrated fire by the force of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers—augmented by attack aircraft—would constitute the biggest preliminary naval bombardment of the war to date. The admiral commanding the fire support ships even promised Smith he would “obliterate” the island.
The initial counterbattery fire delivered by the battleships against Admiral Shibasaki’s 8-inch guns at the onset of the battle seemed to underscore this boast. From that point, however, the preliminary bombardment went downhill sharply. All hands—commanders, gunners, directors, spotters—simply had too much to learn about this specialized mission. The bombardment proved spectacular to watch, but it was all sound and fury, with scant little damage to Betio’s five hundred pillboxes and gun positions. These deficiencies became exacerbated when Adm. Harry Hill ordered cease fire twenty minutes before the first assault waves reached the beaches.
The biggest surprise encountered by the 2d Marine Division in their assault on Betio was not low water over the coral reef—most had been advised to expect this—but the unsettling realization that the Japanese garrison had somehow survived the “war’s largest bombardment” with their tactical integrity, crew-served weapons, and fighting spirit intact. That’s when the “issue in doubt” reports began to emerge from the bloody fighting.
The next thirty hours were excruciating for the commanders offshore and further distant—Harry Hill and Julian Smith on the battleship Maryland, Ray Spruance nearby on the heavy cruiser Indianapolis, Kelly Turner and Holland Smith on the battleship Pennsylvania near Makin (observing the 27th Army Division’s assault, but glued to radio reports from Tarawa), Chester Nimitz at his headquarters at Makalapa Heights, Oahu. “Issue in doubt” at Tarawa meant the whole Central Pacific campaign was now at risk. This first storm landing had to succeed.
The twin American offensives in the Solomons and the Gilberts whipsawed and confounded the Imperial General Headquarters and caused Admiral Koga to fritter away his Combined Fleet in misdirected countermeasures. But there was a world of difference between Operation Galvanic and Operation Dipper, the Bougainville campaign.
Unlike Galvanic, which envisioned an unremitting offensive surge from start to finish, Dipper resembled the Guadalcanal initiative months earlier, in which the Allies combined a strategic offensive with a tactical defensive. The mission of the 3d Marine Division was not to conquer Bougainville, but rather to seize an unoccupied sector of jungle near Cape Torokina on the island’s southern coast, then hang on for dear life while the SeaBees built from scratch two airfields to be used against Rabaul. Like Galvanic, campaign planning for Dipper emphasized surprise and speed of execution.
A diversionary landing by Brute Krulak’s 2d Parachute Battalion on Choiseul Island distracted Japanese attention long enough for the amphibious task force to venture into Empress Augusta Bay. Here there was no brash admiral to proclaim his intention of “obliterating” Bougainville. Four destroyers opened up on the target beachhead without great effect. The 3d Marines and the 2d Raiders, leading the assault, were soon on their own.
By all definitions, this was not a storm landing. Bougainville would soon become a deadly and prolonged campaign fought under brutish jungle conditions. But the decision to attack an unimproved stretch of the long coastline paid dividends on D-Day morning because fewer than three hundred Japanese rikusentai constituted the immediate defensive force. A single Japanese 75-mm gun, unscathed by the naval gunfire, had a field day delivering enfilade fire against the Higgins boats approaching the beach. Knocking it out took exceptional personal courage by Marine sergeant Robert A. Owens, whose family later received the posthumous Medal of Honor on his behalf. Five squadrons of Marine and Navy torpedo bombers and dive-bombers swept in low to hammer the beach shortly before touchdown.* Meanwhile, a vicious surf disrupted the landing more than enemy fire, swamping scores of boats and scattering the assault waves. In all, the 3d Marine Division sustained about two hundred casualties getting ashore. The troops dug in quickly. The small assembly of amphibious ships offloaded limited supplies in great haste, as agreed, then retreated, in dire jeopardy.
Within hours, more than a hundred Japanese bombers and fighters began screeching over the beachhead. Rear Adm. Aaron S. Merrill prevailed against a major surface counterattack in the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay. Admiral Koga then deployed two entire air groups—120 planes and crews—from his carriers remaining at Truk. He also detached a force of heavy cruisers to Rabaul. Adm. William F. Halsey’s thin resources were stretched to the breaking point.
Bull Halsey reacted to these threats by launching a high-risk preemptive strike. On 5 November he deployed his only two carriers, the old Saratoga and the smaller Princeton, in a daylight foray into the Northern Solomons. The carrier pilots caught the Japanese task force by surprise in Rabaul’s Simpson Harbor, damaging eight cruisers and shooting down scores of Koga’s transplaced naval aviators.
Halsey’s initiative earned tremendous strategic dividends for Americans throughout the Pacific. These preemptive raids saved the
Bougainville beachhead, for one thing, and by annihilating the equivalent of two entire carrier air groups, the strikes rendered Admiral Koga essentially toothless throughout the ensuing U.S. campaigns in the Gilberts and Marshalls. Koga would not dare deploy the Combined Fleet without carrier air cover. His decision to reinforce Rabaul thereby proved disastrous. Moreover, his surviving aviators returned with wildly exaggerated claims of having sunk a dozen U.S. carriers and battleships. Blindly accepting their claims, Koga concluded that he had at least derailed any possible American incursion into the Central Pacific by a matter of months. He had no clue that an enormous new enemy force was already steaming toward the Gilberts.
The Central Pacific Force thus achieved strategic surprise, assembling its disparate components in the Gilberts from half a dozen distant ports before finally being detected by Japanese maritime patrol aircraft two days before D-Day. Both Koga at Truk and Shibasaki at Tarawa refused at first to believe the reports. Surely this was a diversionary raid. . . .
The Marines struggling to seize Betio Island would need every possible advantage to gain the edge. The twin gambles of attacking through the lagoon and using jury-rigged LVTs as assault craft had succeeded handsomely—but then the wheels came off. The vaunted obliteration of Betio by preliminary bombardment had proven so ineffective that a battery of four Japanese dual-purpose (antiaircraft-antiboat) 75-mm guns in open revetments along the reentrant of Red Beach One remained untouched. These guns, firing horizontally at point-blank range, exacted a fearsome toll among the LVTs trying to shuttle reinforcements from those units in boats stalled by the exposed reef. The battery maintained this deadly fire for a full hour after touchdown until an improvised storming party of Marines snuffed them out one by one with grenades and bayonets.
The Japanese fought like banshees. The naval infantrymen in their pillboxes or fighting holes displayed none of the “buck fever” of the coast-defense gunners in the opening rounds of the battle. Shibasaki had identified every yard of the island with a firing grid. Howitzer crews plotted their targets using pre-positioned aiming stakes; machine gunners maintained assigned fields of fire along the barbed wire and tetrahedrons; riflemen kept their cover and concealment. The attacking Marines fought with their own ferocity, but any man who lifted his head above the seawall attracted bullets from a dozen sources, most of them dangerously close at hand. Hoarse cries arose along the ragged beachhead: “Corpsman!” “Demolitions!” “Flamethrowers!” These vital resources would remain scarce throughout the day.
Here was the classic vulnerability of an opposed amphibious assault. The initial assault force, ashore but hard hit, held on virtually by its fingernails. Behind them, stalled by the reef and receiving heavy fire, hovered the critically needed reinforcements for momentum, acceleration, and support. The tide was inexplicably weird. Even a neap tide should have risen enough by now to permit boat passage over the reef—but low water prevailed for nearly thirty hours.* The Marines’ alternate plan to use empty LVTs to shuttle fresh troops in from the reef came a cropper as Japanese gunners found the weak spots on the thinly armored vehicles. Machine guns drilled them full of holes; howitzers and knee mortars dropped high explosives squarely on their open hatches; high-velocity, dual-purpose guns blew them apart and set them ablaze.†
Julian Smith’s attempts during the next twenty-four hours to land three sequential infantry battalions by wading from the jumbled reef provided a shooting gallery for Japanese gunners, cost hundreds of casualties, and scattered the survivors—disorganized and often weaponless—along a mile and a half of ghastly beach.
As the battle hung in the balance that first afternoon, the outcome would be shaped by the powerful personalities of the opposing commanders on the ground, Adm. Keiji Shibasaki and Col. David Shoup. Both were hard-nosed, competent military professionals. Both had emerged from relative obscurity to sudden prominence in this fierce battle.
Julian Smith had gambled twice on Shoup before the battle began. Shoup had little to commend his continued services as division operations officer when Smith assumed command. He had only slight experience in command or combat and had never planned a division-level amphibious assault. But Smith recognized a fighting heart within Shoup’s barrel chest and stuck with him. Then, after Shoup had prepared the intricate landing plan, Smith promoted him to colonel and gave him command of the 2d Marines, the regimental combat team destined to lead the assault on Tarawa. By these two decisions, Julian Smith did more to win the forthcoming battle than he would do throughout D-Day.
Shoup proved worthy of Smith’s confidence. Seared and embarrassed by his experience at Rendova, Shoup set his face to the horrors and chaos he knew to expect. His personal landing on Betio on D-Day was a five-hour odyssey. He straggled ashore at noon, wounded and waterlogged, but immediately took charge. Ignoring the crippling effects of the laggard tide and his awful communications, Shoup rallied his surviving battalion commanders, maintained relentless offensive pressure, and exhibited rocklike faith that his Marines would prevail.
Shibasaki’s principal contributions came before the Marines landed. He had trained and motivated his troops superbly. Though surprised by the Americans’ assault waves penetrating the lagoon and reef, he had reacted coolly in shifting forces from primary to alternate positions. He also demonstrated a humanitarian side to his character. We now know from recent translations of Japanese accounts of the battle that Shibasaki died that first afternoon—not the third day as recorded in our histories. He gave up his concrete blockhouse to be used as a hospital for his hundreds of casualties, assembled his staff in the open, and began to move to a secondary command post several hundred yards away. In one of the ironic flukes of battle, a Marine with perhaps the only working field radio on the island spotted the cluster of officers in the open and quickly called in naval gunfire. The two destroyers in the lagoon, Ringgold and Dashiell, cut loose with salvos of 5″/38 rounds fused as air bursts. Steel shards rained over the exposed Japanese, killing Shibasaki and his entire staff. By these few salvos, the Navy fire support task group made up for all its shortcomings of the day.
Mary Craddock Hoffman
That’s why the Japanese were unable to launch their expected counterattack the first night. They did so two nights later, a ferocious and well-coordinated affair, which by then was doomed. The greatest opportunity for the Japanese to throw the invaders back into the sea existed that first night, with scarcely more than three thousand Marines ashore, clinging to irregular pockets of narrow beachhead. Here the issue was indeed “in doubt.” Shibasaki, had he lived, would have thrown everything into the attack.
With the dawn of the second day, however, the crisis for the Americans passed. While getting ashore over Red Beach never got any easier, the enterprising Maj. Mike Ryan patched together a force of “orphans” from five different battalions to seize the western end of the island. There, late in the day, the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, landed by rubber boat, streaming ashore uncontested with full unit integrity and supporting arms. Then the final victory became a matter of time—no longer conjecture.
Meanwhile, the Army’s 27th Division prevailed on Makin Atoll, and the Fleet Marine Force Amphibious Reconnaissance Company stole ashore from the transport submarine Nautilus to capture lightly held Apamama. Suddenly, Galvanic ended. Admiral Spruance had seized the Gilberts in exactly two weeks. The time schedule for the Marshalls invasion remained intact. The redoubtable SeaBees had “laid the table” for the next invasion. Already, medium bombers were taking off from captured or newly built airstrips in the Gilberts to begin pounding and photographing the Marshalls—now within range of bombers and fighter escorts alike.
The senior commanders in Galvanic then conducted a brutally honest critique of all they had learned in the campaign. There was no time to spare, no sensitivity for bruised reputations. This agreement generated a remarkable outpouring of frank assessments by men of all services. Problems abounded, but the basic doctrines seemed sound. Despite Tarawa’s fri
ghtful costs (a thousand dead Marines; twenty-four hundred wounded), the commanders concluded that the inaugural trials of the new offensive naval warfare doctrines had succeeded. The fast carriers had effectively shielded the amphibious task force from surface sorties from either the Combined Fleet at Truk or the Fourth Fleet at Kwajalein. Carrier-borne air patrols had intercepted most of the Japanese air attacks against the beachheads. Gunships had proven they could in fact “fight a fort,” and from close range at that. And the fledgling doctrine of amphibious assault against a fortified objective had finally been validated, albeit at high cost. Most senior commanders recognized that if the new doctrine could work at Tarawa under the worst imaginable hydrographic and tactical conditions, it could likely work anywhere in the world—given better coordination of naval gunfire and aerial bombardment, improved communications, more LVTs, and stealthy, lion-hearted swimmers to scout the reefs and enemy offshore obstacles in advance. Each of these critical deficiencies were significantly improved for the Marshalls campaign, an impressive, joint effort in precious little time.
Moreover, the thorny issue of command relations in amphibious operations seemed to be resolved. At Tarawa, the attack force commander, Admiral Hill, retained overall command of the operation until his counterpart landing force commander, Gen. Julian Smith, had established full control ashore at 1458 on D+3. Here was a significant improvement, not only over the Gallipoli debacle but also over Guadalcanal the year before Galvanic.
Tarawa was thus a vital proving ground for the storm landings to come. Yet it had also been riskier and costlier than expected because so many elements of the complex assault had been undertaken for the first time. Each of the major commanders made mistakes. As Kelly Turner admitted, the experience proved invaluable but “it was a goddamned painful lesson.” Turner erred twice. He failed to ensure that Admiral Hill knew the submarine Nautilus would be operating near Betio in the path of the Southern Attack Force’s final approach. (Hill’s “friendly fire” damaged the sub and nearly wiped out the Apamama invasion force.) Turner also failed to notify Hill that he had earlier agreed to a half-hour delay in the first air attacks on Betio on D-Day morning. (Hill, unaware, stopped firing, waiting on the planes, giving Shibasaki his first grace period to recover.)
Storm Landings Page 7
