Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Hawkins and the Scout-Snipers went in to seize the pier extending about 500 yards into the lagoon. It split the landing beaches, and from it those numerous Japanese latrines now filled with riflemen and machine-gunners could rake the Marine amtracks passing to either side.

  Hawkins had his men in two landing boats, one commanded by himself, the other by Gunnery Sergeant Jared Hooper. In a third boat were the flame-throwing engineers of Lieutenant Alan Leslie.

  They came in and hit the reef. They were held up there just as enemy mortars began to drop among them and drums of gasoline stacked on the pier began to burn. Sniper and machine-gun fire raked the boats. Airplanes were called down on the enemy guns while Hawkins and his men awaited transfer to amtracks. They got them and rode in to assault the pier. They fought with flame-throwers, with grenades, with bayonets. They fought yard by yard, killing and being killed-while the pier still burned-and swept ashore to attack enemy pillboxes.

  Like Hector in his chariot, Lieutenant Hawkins stood erect in his amtrack while it butted through barbed wire, climbed the sea wall and clanked among the enemy spitting fire and grenades.

  In another amtrack called The Old Lady was a stocky corporal named John Joseph Spillane, a youngster who had a big-league throwing arm and the fielding ability which had brought Yankee and Cardinal scouts around to talk to his father. The Old Lady and Corporal Spillane went into Betio in the first wave, a load of riflemen crouching below her gunwales, a thick coat of hand-fashioned steel armor around her unlovely hull. Then she came under the sea wall and the Japanese began lobbing grenades into her.

  The first came in hissing and smoking and Corporal Spillane dove for it. He trapped it and pegged it in a single, swift, practiced motion. Another. Spillane picked it off in mid-air and hurled it back. There were screams. There were no more machine-gun bullets rattling against The Old Lady’s sides. Two more smoking grenades end-over-ended into the amtrack. Spillane nailed both and flipped them on the sea wall. The assault troops watched him in fascination. And then the sixth one came in and Spillane again fielded and threw.

  But this one exploded.

  Johnny Spillane was hammered to his knees. His helmet was dented. There was shrapnel in his right side, his neck, his right hip, and there was crimson spouting from the pulp that had once been his right hand.

  But the assault troops had vaulted onto the beach and were scrambling for the sea wall. Though Johnny Spillane’s baseball career was over, he had bought these riflemen precious time, and he was satisfied to know it as he called, “Let’s get outta here,” to his driver and the squat gray amphibian backed out into the water to take him out to the transport where the doctor would amputate his right hand at the wrist.

  Pfc. Donald Libby also came in on the first wave. He came in crouching in fear, grimacing in pain. Machine-gun fire had been sweeping his amtrack since it had lumbered up on the reef, and there were bullets in both of Libby’s thighs. Then a mortar shell landed in the amtrack, killing all but two men, hurling Libby into the water.

  He came to the surface with seven shrapnel fragments lodged in his flesh. He was bleeding heavily, but he hoped the salt water would staunch the flow. He dog-paddled toward his wrecked amtrack. It was canted on its side in the water. Libby grabbed the amtrack’s wheel and hung onto it. A life preserver floated by. He seized it and squirmed into it, clenching his teeth against the pain of his movement. He floated behind the amtrack, hardly more than his nose above the surface. At night, if he still had strength, he would try to swim out to the ships.

  Lieutenant Commander Robert MacPherson buzzed back and forth over Betio and the lagoon in his Kingfisher observation plane. He was acting as the eyes of Major General Julian Smith aboard Maryland. Howlin’ Mad Smith was up at Makin with Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance, the over-all commander.

  MacPherson peered below him. The muzzles of Ringgold’s and Dashiell’s guns were spitting flame and smoke and the little amtracks were bobbing shoreward. Some of them stopped and began to burn. Tiny dots of men leaped on the beach to go clambering over the sea wall and vanish beneath the pall of smoke still obscuring Betio.

  The Marines seemed to be attacking in little groups—three or four of them, rarely more than half a dozen—moving behind their NCO’s. Here and there a loner struck at the enemy.

  Staff Sergeant Bill Bordelon was such a loner. He was one of four Marines to survive the gunning of their amtrack from about 500 yards out. He reached the beach, running low. Behind him were the remainder of his men, dead and dying or drowning. Bordelon had to get the pillboxes that filled the air around these men with whining invisible death.

  He prepared his demolition charges.

  He sprang erect and went in on the pillboxes, running at them from their flanks because the Japanese used very small gun ports which reduced their field of fire. Twice Bordelon threw and sprinted for cover and each time a pillbox collapsed with a roar. Bordelon primed more charges and ran against a third.

  Machine-gun bullets hit him, but he stayed on his feet. He saw the white blocks of explosive sail into the gun port and ducked. The third position was knocked out. Then he seized a rifle to cover a group of Marines crawling over the sea wall.

  Bordelon pushed aside a medical corpsman who wanted to treat his wounds. He had heard the cry of “Help!” from the surf. There was a wounded man there. Bordelon dragged him ashore. He ran back into the water to find another wounded man and bring him in. Then, because he was either oblivious of his own wounds, or convinced that he was dying and that there was so little time, Staff Sergeant Bill Bordelon ran again at an enemy position.

  And the Japanese gunners saw him coming and shot him dead.

  The first battalion to reach Betio was the Second Regiment’s Third under Major Schoettel. At ten after nine two companies led by Major Mike Ryan reached the sea wall on the right or western beach. They crawled up under its lee, taking fierce machine-gun fire. Major Schoettel was still offshore with following troops. He couldn’t get in, and in two hours those companies under the sea wall were cut in half.

  At seventeen minutes after nine Major Jim Crowe’s battalion hit the beaches on the left or eastern flank. Two of Crowe’s amtracks found a break in the sea wall and rolled through, speeding all the way across the airfield’s main strip before they were halted. But it was an isolated success. Sea-wall gun ports began to spit death among the Marines on the beach. Snipers picked off head after head raised above the wall. One of Crowe’s men strolled down the beach, heedless of the major’s angry bellowing to stay low. He grinned impishly at a wildly-gesturing buddy, and then a rifle spoke and the Marine spun and crumpled to the ground, and when he rolled over, face to the smoke-drifted sky, his eyes were bulging from the impact of the bullet which had passed behind them.

  “Somebody go get that Jap son of a bitch,” Major Crowe yelled. “He’s right back of us here waiting for somebody to pass by.”

  A Marine leaped up on the sea wall. After him came a flame-throwing team, one Marine with the twin cylinders of liquid fire strapped to his back and holding the nozzle out to spray, the other covering him with rifle fire. The Marine beyond the sea wall hurled blocks of dynamite into a pillbox 15 feet inland. There was a roar and clouds of smoke and dust billowed out. A mushroom-helmeted figure darted out the exit. The man with the nozzle squirted. A long hissing spurt of fire struck the Japanese soldier and he flamed like a struck match, shivered and was charred and still.

  At the central beach, marked by the burning pier, Colonel Shoup was trying to come ashore to take command of the battle. With Shoup were Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson of Makin and Guadalcanal, who had come to Tarawa as an observer; the redheaded Major Tom Culhane, Shoup’s operations officer; Lieutenant Colonel Presley Rixey, commander of an artillery battalion; and Commander Donald Nelson, the regimental surgeon. They came to the reef in a landing boat. Shoup hailed an amtrack carrying wounded out to the transports. The wounded were transferred into the landing boat and Shoup’s party boar
ded the amtrack.

  It was about ten o’clock, and as the amtrack waddled shoreward, Colonel Shoup listened to radio reports of the carnage on the beaches. On his right, Major Schoettel was still caught out on the lagoon, unable to reach those two companies being chopped up under the sea wall. From Schoettel, Shoup heard this:

  “Receiving heavy fire all along beach. Unable to land all. Issue in doubt.”

  Shortly after ten o’clock Schoettel radioed again:

  “Boats held up on reef of right flank Red 1 (the western beach). Troops receiving heavy fire in water.”

  Shoup immediately replied:

  “Land Beach Red 2 (the central sector) and work west.”

  Schoettel answered:

  “We have nothing left to land.”

  The first message had come out to the ships from the beach. No one could identify the sender. It said:

  “Have landed. Unusually heavy opposition. Casualties 70 per cent. Can’t hold.”

  To the Marines of the fourth, fifth and sixth waves waiting beyond the reef in landing boats and LCM’s, this meant one thing: they must hurry ashore.

  They rode in to the reef and found the water no higher than three feet, and often only inches deep. They looked for the amtracks which were to take them into the battle.

  There weren’t any.

  Eight amtracks had been destroyed as the first wave attacked. Many more of them carrying the next two waves had been knocked out, and others were hit when they tried to back off the beach to return to the reef. Fifteen of them sank the moment they reached deeper water. Major Henry Drewes, commander of the amtrack battalion, had been killed. Nearly all the amtrack gunners were dead. They had dueled the shore guns, but they had been visible and unprotected. The enemy had been neither.

  The men waiting outside the reef would have to wade in.

  They clambered out of their boats, milled about on the reef while bullets keened among them, and then they jumped off it and began to walk through waist-high water.

  The Japanese gunners hung on grimly to their triggers, for now they understood why Rear Admiral Shibasaki had been so confident of repelling the invaders. The Americans were walking along a broad avenue of death. There were so many of them falling they would surely stop coming.

  But they waded on, from a quarter-mile out, from a half-mile out—unable even to fire their weapons, for they had to hold them overhead to keep them dry—sometimes stepping into coral potholes and going under, there to lose helmets and weapons.

  “Spread out!” the officers cried. “Spread out!”

  Pfc. Richard Lund came in with a radio and screamed as a bullet struck him in the right chest and came out his right arm. It spun him around and knocked him under. He arose and walked on. With the radio.

  Marines died in the deep water, and died in the shallow surf where gentle waves rolled their bodies along the beaches. They fell like fanned-out decks of cards once they had gained the leftward beach and blundered into the point-blank fire of weapons poked through sea-wall gun ports. They were caught on barbed wire offshore and killed, and here Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Amey, commander of the Second Battalion, Second, met instant death.

  Still they came on, even the wounded clinging to the burning pier, working their way in hand over hand. Above them Lieutenant Commander MacPherson gazed in horror from his observation plane, watching the tiny figures wading through the water with rifles held high, watching them vanish, feeling the tears of grief gathering behind his eyes.

  But they got inshore, even the wounded, even the dying youth with his chest torn open who fell on the beach and cried for a cigarette.

  “Here, I’ll light one for you,” a Marine said.

  “No,” the stricken youth gasped. “No time… gimme yours…”

  The cigarette was thrust into his mouth and held there. The youth drew, the smoke curled out his chest—and he died.

  There were rifles stuck in the sand of the beaches and there were bottles of blood plasma hanging from them. The bottles were tied to rifle butts with gauze and their little rubber tubes ran down into needles jabbed in the veins of wounded Americans. Corpsmen talked gently to the stricken men, waving the flies away.

  The corpsmen and the doctors worked throughout the clamor of battle. They laid the men out on stretchers, giving them plasma and morphine. Marine riflemen guarded them as they worked, for sometimes the Japanese attempted to sneak down to the beaches and throw grenades in among the casualties.

  They came out from under the pier or from the latrines or slipped into the water from the hulk of the Saida Maru, a freighter which had been knocked over on its side by an American destroyer in the preinvasion bombardments. The Japanese swam to shore through their own fire. One of them appeared in the central sector. He came out of the water brandishing a grenade.

  A Marine sentry charged him and bayoneted him in the belly and then shot his bayonet free.

  As the doctors worked on, corpsmen loaded the wounded aboard the amtracks which took them to the reef and the waiting landing boats. Men needing immediate care were draped over rubber boats and hauled to the reef by hand.

  From the reef the wounded went to the transports, and sometimes they were shelled en route and there would be dead among them by the time they came alongside the ships. On one of these ships a landing boat with a gaping five-inch shellhole in its side was hoisted on deck. The wounded were taken out. But there were three dead Marines. Their bodies were placed in winding sheets and taken to the rail. Chaplain Harry Boer was called. He was a young minister. He had never said burial service before. Marines and sailors removed their helmets and Chaplain Boer spoke:

  “We are in the presence of the last enemy, death. We did not know these men personally, but God does—and therefore we commit them unto Him who is the righteous judge of the earth.” There was the screech of a plane diving to bomb a Japanese ammunition dump, and the chaplain paused, waiting for the explosion ashore. A sheet of flame rose into the air. The Dauntless had hit the dump. It had also knocked out a Marine tank, but no one aboard ship knew this. They bowed their heads again as the chaplain continued: “It is for us, the living, in the presence of these dead, to devote ourselves more seriously to the task before us. I am the Resurrection and the Life, and he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

  The white-sheeted figures went over the side. There was a splash. An impersonal voice blared over the bullhorn on the bridge:

  “The issue ashore is still in doubt.”

  It was, and Colonel David Shoup, who was trying so hard to get there, was being struck by savage fire.

  Heavy machine-gun fire raked Shoup’s amtrack as it neared the beach. The vehicle slewed around and retreated to the end of the pier. It circled to the east or left side and joined a wave of LCM’s lightering dual-purpose medium tanks to Jim Crowe’s embattled battalion.

  Then a pair of Japanese 75-millimeters spoke. Whang! Whang! One LCM went under with all aboard and another withdrew, sinking.

  Colonel Shoup’s amtrack again returned to the pier. An exploding mortar shell wounded Shoup in the leg, all but knocking him unconscious. But he was still determined to get ashore, for now he was out of contact with Major Schoettel’s battalion on the right.

  Schoettel’s battalion was attacking, though its leader was still unable to get ashore. Major Mike Ryan had reorganized the two shattered sea-wall companies and struck inland. They were slowly rolling up the enemy, and there were six Sherman tanks coming in to help them.

  The tanks left their LCM lighters on the reef and came on through water up to their turrets. Men walking with flags guided them around the treacherous potholes. The Shermans came slowly, leaving wide-spreading V’s in their wake, rocking and lurching as their 75’s roared. When they reached the beach they found it so littered with dead and wounded they could not pass. They would not crunch over the bodies of their buddies, dead or living, and they backed into the water again to make for the gap which the engi
neers had blown in Shibasaki’s sea wall.

  Pfc. Donald Libby wondered if anyone would come for him. The battle had grown fiercer since he had been hurled into the water and had seized hold of his ruined amtrack. Now he could hear the clanging, tooth-rattling whang of a Japanese gun and hear the screams of stricken men. Libby was still alone in water now made chalky with dust. He swayed like a beached log, growing colder….

  Libby had heard the dreadful slaughter of the Third Battalion, Eighth Marines, as they came to reinforce Major Jim Crowe’s battalion on the left.

  They came speeding up to the reef five boats abreast. The landing ramps came banging down.

  Whang!

  The boat farthest right vanished. It had been there and then it was not there.

  Whang! A second boat disappeared. One of the coxswains became terrified of approaching the reef. “This is as far as I go!” he cried. His ramp banged down and a full boatload of heavily laden Marines charged off it into 15 feet of water. Many drowned, but still more were able to shuck their loads and swim to the reef, hauling themselves over it oblivious of how it slashed their flesh.

  Hardly a third of that first wave reached the beach. Then the second wave of Crowe’s reinforcements started ashore. Colonel Shoup shouted at them from the pier, waving his arms and ordering them to come his way, to take shelter behind the pier and wade to the central beach. They did, but by the time the second wave got ashore it was badly disorganized.

  At last Colonel Shoup got in. He set up his command post in a hole dug in the sand behind a pillbox full of Japs. He was 15 yards inland, but he could see almost nothing of the battle for the dust that hung over Betio.