Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Kelly Turner proved equally fearless in commanding his task forces against enemy-held islands. “Close the range or cease firing,” he chided one cruiser at Makin. His battleship commanders needed little encouragement. When Turner queried the Mississippi why her number 2 turret was no longer firing at Butaritari, the skipper reported a turret explosion had killed forty-three officers and men, but his other main batteries had assumed the fire missions of the stricken turret until the carnage could be cleared.

  Similarly, Admiral Hill did not hesitate to risk dispatching two destroyers and two minesweepers into Tarawa’s lagoon on D-Day to blaze the way for the assault craft despite the gauntlet of fire that greeted them. He even chided Spruance’s flagship, the cruiser Indianapolis, for opening fire on Betio at twenty-two thousand yards—“an extreme range.” The valor of the battleship Colorado, closing to thirty-one hundred yards at Tinian, drew a punishing fire from shore batteries but helped make the decoy landing all the more convincing. Adm. “Close-In” Conolly’s personal bravery in this regard at Guam and the Marshalls also illustrates the point. So does the case of the destroyer that approached “within rock-throwing range” to knock out the Japanese mountain gun at Guam’s Adelup Point on W-Day. “This was a beautiful bit of seamanship [that] saved the lives of lots of Marines,” said Maj. Louis Metzger, who had lost several of his LVT-As to this troublesome gun crew.

  Close fire support: the older battleships, now too slow to accompany the fleet carriers, found a welcome home with the amphibious forces. Here the battleship Pennsylvania delivers fire from her 14-inch batteries in support of the III Amphibious Corps assaulting Guam. (U.S. Naval Institute)

  The daring of battleships and cruisers steaming in harm’s way to pound the amphibious objective provided one measure of the Navy’s intent to add ferocity and momentum to the assault, but these large ships at least had armor protection. Gen. Julian Smith had rather forcibly reminded the shore bombardment admiral before Tarawa that his Marines would be “crossing that beach with no more armored protection than a goddamned khaki shirt.” The same could be said of the “small boys” of the amphibious task force—the minesweepers, LCI-G gunboats, and UDT boats. The “Elsie Gee” gunboats would attract increasingly deadly counterbattery fire in the storm landings to come. Few naval craft would ever be so vulnerable to major-caliber enemy fire at such short ranges.

  The increasing employment of minesweepers, UDT teams, and close-in fire support craft reflected the Navy’s increasing confidence in maintaining command of the sea and air around their amphibious objective in the Central Pacific. Spruance and Turner had overruled Julian Smith’s request for “advance force operations” at Tarawa on the basis of their concern with major surface and air counterattacks. The advent of the fast carrier task forces changed that equation drastically. Once the fleet and amphibious force commanders accepted that reality, they stopped placing such a premium on strategic surprise and tactical speed and began to develop a full menu of preliminary amphibious measures.

  These initiatives included a more sensible use of the Fleet Marine Force Reconnaissance Company, commanded throughout the war by Capt. (later Maj.) James L. Jones. The unit had distinguished itself in the Gilberts by teaming with the troop submarine Nautilus to capture vital Apamama Atoll, but their most valuable contributions came later, especially at Tinian, where their stealth swimmers executed a rock-by-rock, mine-by-mine, nighttime reconn of alternate landing beaches. The force reconn Marines’ surreptitious work complemented the more brazen deployment of the underwater demolition teams. After the Marshalls, Turner learned to use his UDT frogmen in daylight, which they needed for the ticklish work of rigging explosives to offshore obstacles and mines. This required a regular armada of ships to provide smothering protective fire while the men did their work close to the beaches. Such noisy and obvious daylight operations could not help but alert the Japanese as to the exact beaches chosen for assault.* But by then (typically D-Day-minus-1) it was too late to execute major troop redeployments during the concurrent naval shelling and aerial strafing.

  Preliminary naval gunfire ran the gamut of effectiveness during the seven storm landings: inadequate at Tarawa and Peleliu, marginal at Saipan and Iwo Jima, superb at Guam, Tinian, and Okinawa. Tarawa’s failures stemmed from inexperience. Iwo Jima’s shortcomings had more to do with logistic limitations and a preoccupation by the fleet commander with suppressing enemy air counterattacks by striking the Japanese homeland. Sometimes the difference lay in the nature of the amphibious force commander. “Close-In” Conolly, brilliant at Guam, did not participate in the Peleliu campaign. Sometimes the difference reflected differing service priorities. With the exception of Guam and Okinawa, the landing force always wanted more preliminary naval gunfire support than the Navy was prepared to give. Holland Smith and Harry Schmidt fought for ten days of preliminary naval shelling of Iwo Jima. They got three.

  If preliminary naval bombardment varied widely in duration and effectiveness in these major landings, the record of subsequent naval gunfire support to troops ashore proved consistently outstanding. As at Tarawa, once shore fire control parties made it safely ashore with working radios—one of the battle’s turning points—naval gunfire improved dramatically. Even in the leanest of amphibious operations in the Central Pacific, a division could count on the full-time support of a designated battleship; a regiment got a cruiser; each infantry battalion on the line rated a destroyer. Nor did this support end at sunset. Other designated ships would take station prepared to fire star shells over the approaches to the main line of resistance; other ships awaited the inevitable call for high-explosive shells once the parachute flares illuminated a Japanese raiding party. In addition to star shells, destroyers often bathed the contested ground at night with their searchlights—as at Iwo Jima when they surprised Japanese troops swarming from caves on Suribachi for a counterattack.

  While beachhead logistics problems represented the biggest operational hurdle to increasing the velocity of amphibious assault in late 1944, close air support remained the biggest disappointment. The efficiency of air support of amphibious assaults seemed to function in the reverse of naval gunfire: good in the preliminary pounding, ragged after troops stormed ashore. Much of this had to do with the failure of the landing force to incorporate a workable, survivable system of command, control, and communications for tactical air support. Another factor was the absence of opportunities to train with air control systems under realistic conditions. A third detriment concerned the uneven proficiency of the Navy squadrons assigned to support the landing force from their escort carriers. Most squadrons lacked the experience of precision bombing and strafing in the proximity of friendly troops. Typically, their missions within the amphibious task force extended to combat air patrols, antisubmarine patrols, search and rescue—even delivering pesticides like DDT over troop concentrations in battle. Frequently pilots flying close support missions for troops ashore were restricted to maximum bomb loads (often only five hundred pounds) and minimum elevation (say, fifteen hundred feet).

  Ground troops became much concerned with minimum elevation restrictions on support pilots after Tinian, where napalm bombs were first introduced. In that battle, Army pilots dropped 150 jettisonable wing tanks filled with gasoline and napalm jelly. U.S. forces originally intended the napalm strikes as a defoliant, but veteran infantrymen quickly saw the tactical benefits of the new weapon. The bombs were inaccurate and not altogether reliable, but when they worked they were awesome. But no Marine on the ground felt comfortable with a tank-full of napalm tumbling down in his vicinity from fifteen hundred feet. Fifty feet was more like it!

  In truth, the Marines still hankered for an operational reunion with their own aviation units. The desire was understandable. Marine pilots were trained first as infantry officers—many served subsequent exchange tours with ground units—and developed a natural inclination to provide more responsive close air support to their counterparts on the ground. Marine Corps aviati
on units filled several vital operational needs in the Pacific War, and their numbers grew exponentially—from a scant prewar configuration of 2 air groups and 11 squadrons in mid-1940 to a peak of 5 air wings, 32 groups, and 145 squadrons in the fall of 1944. But the leap-frog strategy of the Central Pacific campaign removed the assault troops beyond supporting range of all their land-based fighters and dive-bombers. Holland Smith’s long struggle to get the Navy to dedicate escort carriers to Marine fighter and attack squadrons for amphibious support did not bear fruit until Okinawa in 1945.

  Actually the Marines fighting ashore on Tinian and Iwo Jima received exceptional close air support from Army P-47 squadrons, an uncommon role for the long-range fighters, but one performed with great elan. The Navy squadrons, however, would continue to deliver the bulk of the calls for air support ashore. As air command and control systems evolved during Iwo Jima and Okinawa, so would the proficiency, responsiveness, and safety of those on-call missions.

  In the other critical dimension of amphibious assault, the surf zone, the landing forces benefited not only from the advent of newer, more reliable LVTs and upgunned LVT-As, but also from an ugly-looking hybrid vehicle developed by the Army and soon used in all theaters of the war, the DUKW amphibian truck. The DUKW was in effect a 2.5-ton, six-wheel truck configured to a boat-shaped flotation hull. Waterborne, the vehicle used a propeller driven by a power take-off from the transmission and steered by a standard rudder. Wheels and propeller operated together as the vehicle emerged from the surf zone. At thirty-one feet long and eight feet wide, each DUKW could carry twenty-five men, but the best way to use a DUKW was to stuff it with five thousand pounds of critical supplies (freeboard permitting) for the ship-to-shore movement, then load a dozen wounded men in litters and evacuate them back through the surf to a hospital ship. Then repeat the process—around the clock.

  DUKWs and LVTs complemented each other rather than competed for missions. With their slightly more generous armor plate and more machine guns, LVTs retained their tactical role as assault vehicles. DUKWs, with much greater cargo capacity, filled and surpassed the logistic role formerly held by LVTs, and typically landed in waves just after the assault LVTs. Both vehicles were displacement hulls in the water, meaning neither could generate much speed or creature comfort in rough seas. LVTs had slightly better seakeeping and surfing capabilities than DUKWs and proved superior in some inland swamps. But DUKWs had much greater reliability and maintainability, operated with exceptional agility over most marginal terrain ashore, and provided a capability no LVT could ever do—transport a 105-mm howitzer (a shoe-horn fit). For Army and Marine divisions alike, the ability to land 105-mm battalions early in an assault represented a most welcome tactical enhancement. Moreover, DUKWs proved worth their weight in gold in delivering a steady stream of artillery ammo directly from ship to firing batteries ashore.

  Storm landings and armored amphibian vehicles—the LVT-As—were made for each other in the Pacific War. Barrier reefs and shallow water kept the LCI-G gunboats (even with their admirable five-foot drafts) and Navy wave guide boats at arm’s length; the Marines were on their own for the final thousand yards. As Adm. Harry Hill instructed his boat control officers at Saipan: “The reef marks the limit of Navy responsibility for leading in the assault. . . . Your job is to get them to the correct part of the reef.” Thereafter the first wave would consist of LVT-As, firing on the move from turret-mounted 37-mm guns (LVT-Als) or 75-mm howitzers (LVT-A4s). Subsequent employment of the LVT-As ashore went through several variations. Planners learned to reject the temptation to use the armored amphibians as light tanks. The top-of-the-line LVT-A4 weighed nineteen tons and featured half-inch frontal and turret armor—enough to deflect small-arms fire, but the vehicle proved vulnerable to every larger Japanese weapon. If hydrographic conditions permitted, the LVT-As were better employed by diverting them to the flanks just before reaching the beach—where, still enjoying the relative protection of their low freeboards in the water, they could maintain direct or indirect fire to assault troops until the field artillery could land. The vehicles proved at their best in such operations close to the shore. At Guam, Maj. Louis Metzger’s 1st Armored Amphibian Tractor Battalion led the initial ship-to-shore assaults, helped anchor Navy landing craft to the reef for the offload of Sherman tanks, led subsequent assaults on Cabras Island and Orote Peninsula, and conducted long-range water patrols along the northern coastline.

  The most significant developments in weapons organic to the Marine division during this period related to the tactical use of flame. Tarawa had demonstrated the urgent need for both portable and vehicle-mounted flamethrowers. There the 2d Marine Division had faced the task of overcoming nearly five hundred Japanese pillboxes with only twenty-four back-pack flamethrowers. Short-range systems mounted on M-3 Stuart light tanks appeared in time for the Marshalls. Another system appeared as a replacement for the Sherman bow machine gun. Both proved unsatisfactory in the Central Pacific. Assault troops needed a turret-mounted flame launcher with greater range, enhanced safety, and more endurance. An ad hoc team of Army Chemical Corps officers, Marine Corps tankers, and an enterprising SeaBee officer then developed a prototype turret-launcher and mounted three of them on LVTs for Peleliu. These proved invaluable except for the traditional limitation of all amphibian vehicles—too thin-skinned for adequate protection in close combat ashore. Adapting an official version of the prototype Sherman turret took longer than it should have, but at least eight were ready in time for Iwo Jima, where they were without a doubt the weapons of choice. Factory-built versions of the Sherman flame tank appeared in quantities in Army tank battalions in time for Okinawa.

  Another munition that saw wide use in the Pacific War was white phosphorous (then and now: “Willy Peter”), packaged in every size from hand grenades to heavy artillery rounds. Maj. Kiyoshi Yoshida, the 43d Division staff officer captured by the Americans on Saipan, admitted during interrogation that Japanese troops “feared the phosphorous shells much more than high explosives.”

  The Marine Corps in May 1944 revised its division-level organization and equipment for the third time in the war. The “F Series Division” reflected the latest lessons of the Pacific War. Increased lethality and embarkability factors dominated. At 17,465 men, the division now became the smallest of any of its wartime configurations—more than 2,000 fewer men and 80 fewer trucks than the Guadalcanal-era division, for example. Sherman medium tanks replaced the last of the light tanks. The number of 75-mm pack howitzer battalions decreased, reflecting the trend toward larger caliber artillery pieces now that the ship-to-shore problems had been solved. The number of portable flamethrowers increased tenfold. The widely unpopular Reising submachine guns had been fully replaced by a combination of 12-gauge shotguns and Thompson submachine guns.

  Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs) increased from 558 to 853 in the new division, a reflection of the fundamental restructuring of the rifle squad, subdivided for the first time into three four-man fire teams, each built around a BAR man. The Marines thus continued their thirty-year love affair with the BAR. (“Oh, the BAR,” exclaimed Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd after the war, “now there was a weapon—the finest we had!”) Marines in the Pacific did not cotton to the M1918A2 version of the BAR, with its fancy bipods and hinged butt-plate. Troops quickly “lost” the 2.4-pound bipods in the boondocks, preferring the “lean” World War I versions. The popularity of this reliable automatic rifle can be measured by photographs of combat action in Okinawa, the final battle of the war, in which every other Marine, it seems, had acquired a BAR of his own.

  The 1944 F Series Division achieved some of its economies in personnel by reassigning the organic Naval Construction Battalion to force troops. This made sense—the SeaBees were in constant demand for both combat and postcombat missions—but it broke up an excellent team. The Marines valued the SeaBees’ infectious “can do” spirit. The most prized weapon system at Tarawa on the second and third days of the battle, for example, was
often a SeaBee bulldozer. SeaBees had served as shore party cargo handlers as well as construction troops and adjunct riflemen. Others volunteered to serve with the initial UDT teams, helped devise the turret-mounted flamethrower, and designed mobile ramps to help reduce the congestion at Tinian’s White Beach. The SeaBees would still be very much in the thick of the action, but from henceforth the Marine divisions would not have their very own “battalion of sergeants,” the abundance of skilled petty officers in the construction trades.

  Even without the SeaBees, each Marine division still included more than a thousand Navy personnel under the new T/O. These were the surgeons, dentists, chaplains, and hospital corpsmen who served as an integral part of every Marine tactical unit. A special bond already existed between the infantrymen and their assigned corpsmen, resourceful “country doctors” who shared every hazard with their Leathernecks. Indeed, all seven men of the Navy Hospital Corps who received the Medal of Honor in World War II were corpsmen with the Fleet Marine Forces, Pacific. And always, Navy medical personnel ashore paid a high price for their calling. A total of 414 surgeons and corpsmen were killed or wounded at Saipan, eight times the number for Tarawa. The figure would double again for Iwo Jima.

  The accelerated pace and violent execution of the storm landings in the Central Pacific were exacting a high toll among the landing forces, and by the fall of 1944 the strain was beginning to show. As combat correspondent Robert Sherrod noted at war’s end: “Only eleven divisions of troops (six Marine, five Army) were involved in the [Central Pacific] battles from Tarawa to Okinawa, though often those divisions carried as heavy a responsibility as ever was placed on the men with infantry weapons.” Sherrod took particular note of the 4th Marine Division, which fought four complete battles (the Marshalls, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima) in barely one year, suffered nearly 75 percent casualties—“yet it was in action only 61 days throughout the war.”