Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Hill’s decision to cease all firing during the most vulnerable final approach of the ship-to-shore assault provided a second, more critical respite for the Japanese defenders. His insistence on pell-mell unloading of landing force supplies and equipment—while understandable in light of the expectation of Japanese counterattacks—became a grievous burden to the embattled troops ashore. At one point on the third day, everything came to a halt. All boats were filled and awaiting the impossibly long sequence of unloading at the pierhead. Julian Smith could not transfer Lt. Col. Ray Murray’s fresh troops from Bairiki into the lines on Betio—the amphibious force had lost its tactical mobility.

  Julian Smith’s main error stemmed from having to marry two of his first three assault waves with their assigned amphibian tractors on the high seas in total darkness. His intricately choreographed landing plan proved dangerously complicated. Troops disembarked into boats in the dark, which then set off searching for the new LVT-2s (from LSTs that might or might not arrive in time), executed a time-consuming and dangerous gunwale-to-gunwale transfer at sea, then endured a ten-mile run to a fortified beach against a punishing headwind. The friction of war provides a high coefficient in opposed landing operations. Smith and Hill had to delay H-Hour twice, and even then the first waves landed twenty to twenty-five minutes late.

  The price in men and machines to assault Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll—the first storm landing. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  The performance of Holland M. Smith as commanding general of V Amphibious Corps (VAC) in Galvanic needs a critical review. On one hand, the senior Smith deserves credit for bucking Turner and getting the LSTs laden with fifty additional LVTs for the 2d Marine Division in time for Tarawa (at one point fulminating: “No LVTs, no operation!”). But “Howlin’ Mad” Smith missed many other opportunities to enhance the 2d Marine Division’s preparations for the forcible seizure of Tarawa. Specifically, the corps commander seemed ineffective in these areas:

  • Distributing “Lessons Learned.” Holland Smith was commanding general, Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet before assuming command of the new V Amphibious Corps for Galvanic. In either capacity he should have been the principal collector and disseminator of amphibious lessons learned in the Pacific. But the 2d Marine Division never received Brute Krulak’s “LVT Crash Test” report, even though the commandant sent Smith a copy five months before Tarawa. Nor is there evidence that Smith made any efforts to standardize the successful use by amphibious forces in the South Pacific of LCIs converted to fire 40-mm guns and heavy mortars in support of the assault waves. Moreover, Marines in the Solomons had reported improved tank-infantry communications by jury-rigging EE-8 field phones to the back of their tanks. This report would have been a great benefit to the Sherman tanks assigned to the 2d Marine Division. At Tarawa, tankers and riflemen could find no common frequency for their radios; no one knew to experiment with “bustle-mounted field phones”; and an undue number of tank commanders became casualties when they had to dismount to talk face-to-face with their supporting infantry.

  • Unequal Distribution of Critical Items. The 27th Division, slated to assault lightly defended Makin, received half the new LVT-2s, half the borrowed Sherman tanks, plenty of new bazookas, barrage rockets, and flamethrowers—even sufficient lumber to build sleds and toboggan pallets for their supplies. The 2d Marine Division had to scrounge flamethrowers from Army units in the South Pacific and received no bazookas, rockets, or lumber. And their long-sought fording kits for the Sherman tanks never arrived.

  • The Missing “Daisy-Cutters.” The 2d Marine Division requested in October that the Seventh Air Force drop two-thousand-pound daisy-cutter bombs (so-named because they would detonate above-ground and annihilate troops and weapons lacking strong overhead cover) on Betio on D-Day before the landing. Delivered with any degree of accuracy at the time requested, these munitions would have made mincemeat out of the garrison’s exposed dual-purpose gun crews, the beachfront installations with the greatest potential for devastating the landing force. The Seventh Air Force never got the request. Nor is there evidence that Holland Smith made any supervisory effort to ensure that this critical, interdepartmental appeal would in fact be honored. Likely, some starch-khakied staff officer pigeonholed the request, fearing such heavy munitions might damage the airstrip. This bureaucratic ineptitude should have received the full blistering heat of Smith’s unholy wrath. The issue was saving Marine lives, not preserving a level runway. “For God’s sake,” Smith should have thundered, “that’s why we have two battalions of veteran SeaBees attached to the assault force! Get Julian Smith his damned daisy-cutters!”

  Smith’s failure to follow through on this fundamental request from his most endangered division represented an inexcusable lapse. Survivors of the assault waves have recounted a half century later how they kept looking skyward all the way to the beach, still expecting to see the B-24 Liberators arrive overhead with their payloads of daisy-cutters.

  Holland Smith, to be fair, had his hands full with many matters, and so did Marine Corps Headquarters, frantically trying to help four separate divisions get ready for major assaults within three months (Bougainville, Tarawa, Cape Gloucester, the Marshalls). But Smith clearly knew in advance which of these would be the most critical. He also had a superb chief of staff in Brig. Gen. Graves B. Erskine. Even amid all the competing, gargantuan tasks, it still should have been easy for Smith and Erskine to ensure that the forces bound for Tarawa would be as well-armed and fully supported as humanly possible. The 2d Marine Division had the right to expect nothing less from their senior headquarters. Afterward, Julian Smith and (particularly) David Shoup believed they had been forced to rely on their own devices in far-distant New Zealand on too many operational and logistical matters beyond their jurisdiction. Shoup would go to his grave still bitter about the failure of the division’s request for daisy-cutters on D-Day to reach the Seventh Air Force. After Galvanic the V Amphibious Corps (and the IIIAC, as well) would greatly improve in stewardship to component commands. At Tarawa the gap was unseemly and critical.

  In retrospect, perhaps it was helpful that the Tarawa landing proved less than perfect. True, the new doctrine of amphibious assault against fortified opposition had been validated in a consummate trial by fire. But commanders and strategic planners needed to accept and appreciate the two enduring realities that would characterize the storm landings to come: each would feature a high degree of vulnerability; each would slip at least temporarily into unmitigated chaos.

  For all their strategic benefits, storm landings would always exact a high price. Sensible tasking, solid intelligence, competent staff work, first-class training, and disciplined leadership could reduce the costs significantly, but—as a Cold War amphibian would later say—“it is not the nature of amphibious warfare to be bloodless.” The Navy would face greater threats during landing operations in the Marianas, Philippines, and Okinawa. Newer-model Marine Corps LVTs would be sturdier, faster, more seaworthy—yet still protected by nothing heavier than a quarter-inch of armor. Accepting this fact, the VAC standard operating procedure for LVTs in 1944 simply directed each crew to “carry a supply of wooden plugs to plug bullet holes caused by enemy fire.”

  Regarding the chaos factor, Lt. Col. Evans F. Carlson, an observer at Tarawa from the newly formed 4th Marine Division, contributed this comment after the battle: “Leaders must be trained to adapt themselves quickly to unexpected and unfamiliar situations when units have become disorganized. . . . This might be called training in SNAFU leadership.” A fellow observer from the 4th Division was Lt. Col. Walter I. Jordan, who assumed command of the shot-up remnants of the 2d Battalion, 2d Marines, with the death of the battalion commander on D-Day. Jordan recommended: “Landing teams should practice landings wherein all units are mixed up while in small boats. Then permit only a certain percentage of each company to land. Furthermore, have those units land on the wrong beaches without their officers and NCOs and little or no communications equipm
ent.”

  The Japanese also endeavored to learn lessons from the shocking loss of their Betio fortress in such short order. Island commanders in the Marshalls received urgent messages from Imperial General Headquarters to beware of the Americans’ amphibious tanks and their propensity to attack through the lagoon against an island’s weakest defenses. The Japanese tried frantically to send fortification materials and automatic cannons to their garrisons in the Marshalls, but conditions were changing in the Pacific. The Imperial Navy had enjoyed fifteen months of relatively unimpeded access with which to build up the defenses of Betio. Now American submarines had drastically tightened their ring. And time was running out.

  Admiral Spruance’s Central Pacific Force, bolstered immeasurably by success in the Gilberts, hit the Marshalls with twice the size force. Using his fast carriers as an effective shield, Spruance bypassed the eastern Marshalls to strike at Kwajalein and Roi-Namur, then Eniwetok. Sharp fighting ensued locally, and a thousand Americans died in a dozen landings, but nowhere did conditions approach the level of desperation and savagery as at Tarawa. Galvanic had paved the way. In less than three months the new American offensive had chewed a thousand-mile bite out of the Japanese perimeter.

  * The USS Colorado (BB 45) had been in overhaul at Bremerton, Washington, on 7 December 1941; she would become extremely popular with the Marines for her willingness to engage shore targets at point-blank range.

  * Soon to be designated the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

  * Hence, there ensued the stirring but redundant saga of Col. David Shoup and Maj. Henry Drewes, who conducted desperate modifications and tests of the 2d Division LVTs just prior to Tarawa to determine if the vehicles could, in fact, cross a coral reef.

  * Effective as this close air support was by their brothers in arms, Bougainville would represent the last time USMC tactical air provided direct support to a Marine landing force until the attack on Ngesebus Island at Peleliu ten months later. The striking distances in the Central Pacific exceeded the “legs” of Marine land-based fighters, and it would take nearly a year before USMC squadrons assigned to CVs and CVEs would coincide with a major amphibious assault. These occurred effectively at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

  * It would be forty-four years before physicist Donald W. Olson would discover that D-Day at Tarawa occurred during one of only two days in 1943 when the moon’s apogee coincided with a neap tide, resulting in a tidal range of only a few inches rather than several feet.

  † The 2d Amphibian Tractor Battalion would lose its intrepid commander, Maj. Henry C. Drewes, half its men, and 72 percent of its LVTs in this battle.

  Chapter Four

  The Marianas

  Storming the “Absolute National Defense Sphere”

  The enemy met the assault operations with pointless bravery, inhuman tenacity, cave fighting, and the will to lose hard.

  Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, USN

  Commander in Chief, Pacific,

  July 1944

  Saipan looked enormous to the Marines in the assault LVTs crossing the line of departure just before H-Hour. These men of the 2d and 4th Marine Divisions were veterans of the Gilberts and Marshalls—landings executed against small coral atolls. Now, a thousand miles further west than the last U.S. outpost, the Marines were approaching an island so large that all of Tarawa, Roi-Namur, and Eniwetok would have fit into a single stretch of scalloped headland looming dead ahead. The Marines knew their enemy. They could sense Japanese officers watching their approach through binoculars from concealed gun emplacements along the entire west coast—hands cradling lanyards or firing keys. Now came the coral reef.

  PFC. J. T. “Slick” Rutherford, a Tarawa veteran, manned a .30-caliber machine gun on the port side of his LVT-2 Water Buffalo on the right flank of the first wave. Tarawa’s lagoon-side reef had at least been free of surf, but here at Saipan the long Pacific rollers broke viciously on the shallow coral ledge. Rutherford watched in horror as a plunging wave caught the stern of the adjacent LVT and flipped it “ass-over-teakettle,” trapping the Marines underneath. Rutherford’s crew could not stop to help. The Japanese storm of fire and steel had erupted all around them. Now came the gauntlet—the final heart-pounding surge to the beach.

  A hail of small-arms fire greeted Rutherford’s LVT as it lumbered ashore onto Saipan’s dirty sand. Japanese marksmen shot the driver in the head. A rifle bullet glanced sharply off the side of Rutherford’s helmet. As he lurched to the right, a mortar round exploded just off the port side, which flattened him and killed the troop commander. The LVT crew’s mission had been to proceed inland several hundred yards. Now all they could do was limp back to sea. Half the crew and troops were dead or wounded. The bloodied survivors stared at each other. “Welcome to Saipan!”

  In the heights above the beaches, a Japanese defender wrote in his journal, “On this day the enemy has landed, and the time has come at last.”

  American victory in the Marianas would not come easily. Operation Forager, the forcible seizure of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian, would require two months of unremitting close combat and cost twenty-seven thousand casualties, an unprecedented expense, but the United States had stormed into Japan’s Absolute National Defense Sphere in great force, and the Pacific War would never be the same.

  History, justifiably, tends to overlook the Marianas campaign. Operation Overlord, the dramatic Allied invasion of Normandy, constituted the “main event” of June 1944, and it eclipsed all concurrent operations. Additionally, Forager’s three storm landings, plus the epic carrier battle in the Philippine Sea, overlap and compete with one another for historical recognition. Some of Saipan’s vignettes—the suicides of Japanese and native civilians off the cliffs at Marpi Point, the Smith vs. Smith controversy—distract from the flesh and bones of the complex air-sea-land campaign. Forager deserves better recognition. The campaign manifested the revolution in naval warfare then underway in the Central Pacific. It also manifested the true nature of storm landings—the audacious concentration of overwhelming force at the point of attack.

  None of the major commanders on either side in the Pacific in mid-1944 seemed to appreciate the unexpected acceleration of combat power represented by the U.S. Fifth Fleet and its integral amphibious components. This was as true of Adm. Soemu Toyoda, now commanding the Combined Fleet, and Lt. Gen. Hideyoshi Obata, commanding the Central Pacific’s 31st Army, as it was of General MacArthur. Even Admiral Nimitz, the theater commander responsible for unleashing the Fifth Fleet, suffered second thoughts about its chances for success against the distant and formidable Marianas.

  Mary Craddock Hoffman

  Consider this latter fact in context. Nimitz’s misgivings occurred during a Pacific strategy conference at Pearl Harbor during 27–28 January 1944. This occurred after Tarawa, before the Marshalls. Nimitz was still receiving hate mail from anguished parents of Marines slain at Betio, still being excoriated in the press. He had gambled in the Gilberts; he was about to gamble again in the Marshalls, striking deep at Kwajalein instead of nibbling at the defended islands along the outer ring. Barely ten weeks earlier he had sweated blood while Halsey risked his only two carriers in the preemptive strike against Rabaul.

  Meanwhile, General MacArthur stridently called for a return to his single-axis campaign through the Southwest Pacific; indeed, his chief of staff and other senior officers came to the Pearl Harbor meeting to argue for consensus on that strategy. Meanwhile, MacArthur had just forwarded an appeal to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, in which he argued: “Give me central direction of the war in the Pacific, and I will be in the Philippines in ten months.... Don’t let the Navy’s pride of position and ignorance continue this great tragedy to our country.”

  Chester Nimitz was the man in the middle. He knew Adm. Ernest King, his direct commander in Washington, advocated seizing the Marianas after the Marshalls. But he also listened to MacArthur’s representatives. When his own staff argued that the Marianas were too far, too big, and of marginal strategic value, Ni
mitz concurred that MacArthur’s single-axis strategy should prevail after the Marshalls campaign. The Marianas would have to wait, perhaps indefinitely.

  Two things happened to change CINCPAC’s mind. First came a blistering message from King, who expressed “indignant dismay” at Nimitz’s waffling on the Marianas. The second, more important catalyst came with the news of the overwhelming success of the Marshalls campaign. Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher, newly appointed commander of the fast carriers of Task Force 58, provided an early glimpse of how abruptly the Pacific War had changed. Throughout the first twenty-seven months of the war Nimitz had safeguarded his few carriers as if they were the nation’s crown jewels. Suddenly the floodgates had opened. Carrier task forces and the Central Pacific were made for each other. Mitscher’s Task Force 58 bore no semblance to the bare-bones U.S. deployments during Coral Sea and Midway. Mitscher stormed into the Marianas as the vanguard of the Fifth Fleet with an awesome force of fifteen carriers, seven fast battleships, twenty-one cruisers, and sixty-nine destroyers.

  The Central Pacific drive accelerated the pace of operations as well as the lethality of American combat power. With the capture of Eniwetok in late February 1944, the Fifth Fleet had conquered the Gilberts and Marshalls in less than one hundred days, an achievement undreamed of in 1942. Admiral King, more strategically oriented than Nimitz, saw immediately that the war could be shortened by continuing the momentum westward, cutting off the flow of war materials from the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese home islands, providing a base for the heralded new B-29 long-range bombers, and provoking a decisive battle with the Combined Fleet. Nimitz, whose earlier audacity had sent Spruance striding across the Marshalls in seven-league boots, turned conservative again, fixated with seizing Truk in the Central Carolines. The CINCPAC staff dutifully prepared campaign plans. Although not at all the Gibraltar of the Pacific described in the western press, Truk would have been both a man-eater and a time-eater. Nimitz planned to send three Marine divisions (the 1st, 3d, and 4th), with two Army divisions in reserve (the 7th and 77th) against Truk.