Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  It was everywhere, a cloying caking dust that was thick and clogged in the nostrils, coarse in the throat and clotted in the corners of the eyes. It swirled in dense clouds or sparkled in tiny jewels within those shafts of hot sunlight sometimes made visible by explosions that rent one cloud of dust only to start another.

  Into this dust at about noon came the First Battalion, Seccond. Its men joined the attack in the central sector under Major Wood Kyle. They were also riddled and many of them were deflected toward that right or western flank where Major Ryan still attacked and the tanks rolled toward the sea-wall gap.

  Four of the tanks had foundered in potholes, but two of them reached Ryan as he re-formed for a flanking assault through the pillboxes on the western shore. The Shermans rolled over foxholes, blasted pillboxes open with their cannon, and machine-gunned the escaping survivors. Once Lieutenant Ed Bale’s China Gal met a Japanese light tank in open combat and dueled her. The impact of the Japanese 37’s on China Gal’s hide left the steel lemon-yellow on the inside, but the 75’s of the bigger Sherman left the Japanese tank a smoking wreck.

  On the left a pair of 37-millimeter antitank guns had been dragged ashore. The boats carrying them had been sunk, but the gunners had rolled their heavy wheeled weapons through the water. They got them up on the beach, but there was still no way to get them over the sea wall. Two Japanese light tanks were seen bearing down toward the lip of the sea wall.

  “Lift’em over!” came the cry. “Lift ‘em over!”

  The goo-pound guns seemed to fly over the wall. There they spoke with sharp authority. One enemy tank lurched around and gushed flame. The other fled.

  The Marines on the left had a Sherman tank of their own to force their way across Betio. It was a smoke-blackened, dented hulk called Colorado and commanded by Lieutenant Lou Largey. It was the lone survivor of the four which had come into Jim Crowe’s sector that morning.

  One had been destroyed by an American dive-bomber. Another had been set afire by enemy guns. A third had been hit by the Japanese and had fallen into a hole in which enemy ammunition was piled. It had been there when another American dive-bomber screeched down—even as Chaplain Boer commended the three dead Marines to God and the sea—and it had gone up with the exploding shells. Colorado had also been hit and set aflame, but Largey had taken her back to the beach to put out the fire, and by early afternoon Colorado was again charging pillboxes.

  At half-past one, with all but a single battalion of the reserve committed, Julian Smith was convinced that the critical point had been reached. He asked Holland Smith up at Makin to release the Sixth Marine Regiment to him. If Holland Smith said no, Julian Smith was prepared to gather this last battalion, to collect his bandsmen, specialists, typists and service people, and lead them into the battle himself. Howlin’ Mad Smith said yes. Assured now of a fresh and larger reserve, Julian Smith notified the uncommitted First Battalion, Eighth, to stand by for a landing. The men had been boated since before dawn, as had all the Marine combat teams. All that was required was to select the proper place to land. At a quarter of three Julian Smith signaled Shoup asking him if he thought a night landing was possible.

  Shoup never got the message, and the First Battalion, Eighth, stayed in their boats.

  Someone had come for Pfc. Libby.

  The wounded Marine had felt the tide going out and had pushed himself away from his wrecked amtrack. He hoped to float out to the ships on the tide.

  Just then someone waded toward him. He wore a Marine’s helmet and had a rifle slung across his back. He carried a bayonet in his hand. He came directly toward Pfc. Libby and he called out:

  “What state are you from?”

  “Maine,” Libby gasped. “Where you fr—?”

  Pfc. Libby came to his feet in the water, for the bayonet this man was lifting was hooked at the hilt.

  The Japanese lunged. Libby threw up his left hand. The bayonet pierced his palm. Libby grabbed the blade with his right hand and wrenched it away. The Japanese fumbled for his rifle. Libby swung. He hit the Japanese behind the ear with the hilt. The Jap moaned and sank into the water. Libby hit him on the forehead as he fell. Then he seized his head and held him under.

  Pfc. Libby let go and began paddling weakly toward the reef. Hours later an amtrack found him floating in his life preserver 1,000 yards offshore. His body was wrinkled like a prune and blood still flowed from his torn hands. But he was alive.

  Colorado was on the left and China Gal was on the right, between them were perhaps 3,500 United States Marines, and the sun was setting behind the tuft of the Betio parrot’s head.

  Some 5,000 assault troops had come ashore, and of these about 1,500 were already dead or wounded. And now, between that pair of tanks, there were two separate and precarious holds on Betio. The left or eastern foothold, in which Colonel Shoup’s command post was located, began at about midway of the north coast and ran west for about 600 yards. It was 250 yards deep at its farthest penetration, roughly halfway across the airfield. Holding this, from left to right facing south or inland, were Major Crowe’s Second Battalion, Eighth; the riddled Third Battalion, Eighth; and the First and Second Battalions, Second. The right or western hold was a tiny enclave 200 yards deep and perhaps 100 yards wide which Major Ryan’s reorganized Third Battalion, Second had hacked out on the extreme western tip—the bird’s beak.

  Between Ryan’s toehold and Shoup’s foothold was a gap fully 600 yards wide stuffed with Japanese men and guns.

  Out in the lagoon, still in boats, were the recently alerted First Battalion, Eighth, and those waves of the Third Battalion, Eighth, which had been unable to get ashore.

  Standing west of Tarawa in ships was that Sixth Marine Regiment just returned to Major General Julian Smith. There was no artillery ashore, but Lieutenant Colonel Rixey was preparing to bring in some batteries under cover of darkness.

  These were the lines of the Second Marine Division as the dust began to settle and night fell on Betio.

  But there were no lines as such; there were groups of Marines who had dug in here or fortified an abandoned pillbox there. There were gaps everywhere. Flanks were dangling. The inland advance of some units could be measured in hundreds of yards, others in scores of feet. Some troops were still trapped beneath the sea wall. In some places the Japanese would need to go only 30 feet to drive the Americans into the sea.

  It was a situation made for counterattack, and even the most rear-ranked private among all those embattled Marines knew that just as the Japanese always defended at the water’s edge, he always counterattacked at night.

  Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki had planned to counterattack. He had always believed that his defenses would stop the Americans at the water’s edge, and that a strong nocturnal counterblow would finish them off.

  But the terrible bombardment which had failed to slaughter Shibasaki’s men had knocked out his communications. His men were scattered over the island in strong points and there was now no way of assembling them for the counterattack.

  He could attempt to communicate with them by runner, but it was likely the runners would be picked off. Worse, Admiral Shibasaki had not even provided himself with message blanks. There were, of course, dozens of bicycles at his disposal, but bike-riding messengers would only provide these uncouth Marines with jokes as well as targets.

  Admiral Shibasaki stayed within his huge bombproof command post. Though his men lobbed mortars into the Marines on the beaches or swam out to the wrecked American boats or the capsized Saida Maru to harass them with sniper fire, they did not counterattack. They had killed many Americans that day. Next day they would kill more. Admiral Shibasaki was not cast down by the loss of his communications. Obviously it was the Americans, not the Japanese, who were in a tight spot.

  All through the night, cries of “Corpsman!” “Corpsman!” were raised above and below the sea wall. Men wounded during the day, men who fought on while wounded, were dying from loss of blood. And there was a shortag
e of blood plasma, of bandages.

  “Doc” Rogalski had patched up the dozen or so men left of the 40 whom Lieutenant Toivo Ivary had led against the central sector. Ivary’s right leg had been shattered by a grenade and he had been shot in the arm. Sergeant Jim Bayer had been shot in the head. Rogalski had fixed up the lieutenant’s leg with splints and sulfa and bandaged the sergeant’s head. And then, during the morning-long fight to knock out a pillbox looming over the sea wall, he used up the rest of his supplies.

  In the afternoon as more wounded were brought back to the beach, Rogalski was forced to take medical kits from the bodies of fallen fellow corpsmen. He waded into the lagoon to strip dead Marines of the little first-aid pouches attached to their cartridge belts and even tore their skivvy shirts off them and ripped them up for bandages.

  At last Rogalski could find no more bodies in the black waters of the lagoon. The tide had floated them out.

  Faint cries of “Corpsman!” were still being raised along the beach as Rogalski sat, helpless, under the sea wall. Suddenly four amtracks came out of the darkness and crawled up under the sea wall. Rogalski rose expectantly, but then slumped. Marines jumping out of two of them had begun to unload artillery shells or were wrestling howitzer parts over the side. It was then that Rogalski saw the stretcher-bearers and corpsmen jumping out of the other two and he ran to join them, helping them put Ivary and Bayer and the other wounded into the amtracks for the trip to the reef and waiting landing boats.

  The amtracks roared away even as wading artillerymen emerged from the water carrying the parts of their dismantled guns on their backs.

  Beyond the reef, Lieutenant Ivary lay in the landing boat that was taking him to a transport. He turned to Sergeant Bayer.

  “I’ve been wondering for a long time, Sarge—how come they call your home town Dime Box?”

  “Dime Box is a pretty little town in Texas, sir,” Bayer replied.

  “An’ you know, lying back there under the sea wall I wondered if I’d ever see it again. But it’s on the San Antonio Pike, between Giddings and Caldwell. A long time ago it was only a plantation. One of the plantation’s mammies would leave a dime in the mailbox every day for the mailman to get her a box of snuff. That’s how they come to call my town Dime Box.”

  Lieutenant Ivary nodded. He could hear voices high above him. He felt the boat being lifted up in the air. He was very weak but he was feeling better already.

  “Thanks, Sarge,” the lieutenant murmured. “I always wondered.”

  And as the booms swung the landing boat onto the deck of the transport, ten short-snouted pieces of artillery were made ready hub to hub under the sea wall.

  They would be firing at dawn.

  9

  The men of the First Battalion, Eighth, had spent the night in boats. They had not come ashore during darkness as Major General Julian Smith had intended, because his message to Colonel Shoup had not been received. On the morning of November 21 Colonel Shoup had called for them to help expand the beachhead in the central sector.

  There were by then only 18 amtracks left and the First Battalion, Eighth, came up to the reef in landing boats. At a quarter after six the ramps of the landing boats banged down, and the Marines began wading in.

  From blockhouses on the beach and from the wrecked hulk of Saida Maru came a terrible steady drumming of machine-gun fire, and the morning of the second day was worse than the first.

  Out on the reef Marines were rescuing wounded comrades and dragging them back to the landing boats. Pfc. James Collins carried one stricken man back. He turned and seized another, a corpsman who had been shot in the shoulder. He lifted him. There was an explosion, and half the wounded man’s head was blown off. Collins dropped the lifeless body and waded to the beach in tears. Only three of the 24 men who had been in his boat reached the shore. Only 90 of 199 men in the first wave ever got in.

  But the wade-in continued, while Marines of the First and Second Battalions, Second, attacked furiously against the blockhouses that were delivering that awful fire. The pack howitzers lined up hub to hub on the beach were leaping and baying in an attempt to silence the enemy machine guns. The artillerymen were using shells with delayed fuses intended to explode once they had penetrated the concrete, but they were firing to a narrow front and thy could not get them all.

  Carrier planes swooped down to strafe and bomb the blockhouses, but the enemy fired on. Dive-bombers pounded the Saida Maru, but it still crackled with fire. Marine mortars ashore pounded Saida Maru, but the bullets only slackened, they did not stop. It would eventually take a force of dynamite-throwing engineers covered by riflemen to clean out the ship infestation.

  Sometimes the Marines sought to veer away from the enemy’s field of fire. One platoon slipped off to the right toward the sector held by Major Ryan. They waded into a cove, and they were shot down to a man.

  It continued for five full hours, and when Major Lawrence Hays at last got his battalion ashore and reorganized, he found he had lost 108 men killed and 235 wounded. But 600 Marines had survived the wade-in. They were now available for the desperate battle raging everywhere along the western half of Betio. As Colonel Shoup radioed Julian Smith at half-past eleven in the morning:

  “The situation ashore doesn’t look good.”

  Earlier that morning, just as the dreadful wade-in began, Shoup had ordered Lieutenant Hawkins to take his scout-sniper platoon against a Japanese position holding five machine guns. It barred the way to the central sector attack with which Shoup hoped to cut Betio in two.

  The Hawk gathered his men. He had often said, “I think my thirty-four-man platoon can lick any two-hundred-man company in the world.” Now he was going on a company-size mission to prove it. His men moved methodically from gun to gun, laying down covering fire while Hawkins crawled up to the pillbox gun ports to fire point-blank inside or toss in grenades. The guns fell, but not before Hawkins had been shot in the chest. He had already lost blood from shrapnel wounds the day before, but he still resisted the corpsman’s suggestions that he accept evacuation.

  “I came here to kill Japs, not to be evacuated,” Hawkins said. He and his men knocked out three more enemy positions and then Hawkins was caught in a burst of mortar fire and when they carried him to the rear he was already dying.

  But he and his men had opened the way for the cross-island attack, an assault which Colonel Shoup held as important as Major Ryan’s drive to clear Betio’s western beaches for the safe arrival of the reinforcing Sixth Marines.

  Still in charge of the battle so long as Julian Smith remained aboard Maryland, Colonel Shoup crouched in his command post and listened to telephoned reports, his hand shaking slightly. His CP was still in front of the occupied Japanese pillbox and it seemed to be crowned by a perpetual cloud of dust rising from the attack south across the airfield. Out of the dust just before noon limped the dirtiest Marine Shoup had seen so far. A quarter-inch of grime coated his beardless face while a lock of limp blond hair hung from beneath his helmet. The youth’s name was Adrian Strange and he entered the colonel’s CP bawling, “Somebody gimme a pack of cigarettes. There’s a machine-gun crew out there in a shellhole and there ain’t one of ‘em’s got a butt.”

  Someone threw him a pack of Camels. Imperturbable, impressed by neither the brass crouching below him nor the bullets buzzing above, Pfc. Strange took one of the cigarettes and lighted it.

  “I just got another sniper,” he said, grinning. “That’s six today, an’ me a cripple.” He blew smoke. “Busted my ankle steppin’ in a shellhole yesterday.” The bullets began buzzing as though coming in swarms, and Pfc. Strange sneered, “Shoot me down, you son of a bitch!”—before turning to limp back to the airfield.

  Not all the Marines on Betio that day were like Pfc. Strange. A few minutes after he had limped off a tearful young major ran into Shoup’s CP crying:

  “Colonel, my men can’t advance. They’re being held up by a machine gun.”

  Dave Shoup spat i
n disgust.

  “God a’mighty! One machine gun!”

  The major turned in confusion and went back to his men, and he had hardly disappeared before there was a sharp crrrack! in the CP and Corporal Leonce Olivier yelped in pain. A Jap in the pillbox had poked a rifle out an air vent and shot him in the leg. Someone dropped a grenade down the vent, but no one took comfort from the muffled explosion. The pillbox had walls three feet thick and was probably compartmented inside.

  The confused young major came back.

  “Colonel, there are a thousand goddam Marines out there on the beach and not one will follow me across the airstrip.”

  Shoup spat again.

  “You’ve got to say, ‘Who’ll follow me?’ And if only ten follow you, that’s the best you can do—but it’s better than nothing.”

  The major departed—for good this time—and the attack across the airfield to Betio’s southern coast gained momentum. It reached its objective before dusk, after the Marines occupied abandoned enemy positions and beat off two fierce counterattacks.

  Betio was sliced in two and the Marines had possession of most of the airfield, the base which would one day be known as Hawkins Field.

  On the left flank, the Marines under Jim Crowe were making slow progress. They were trying to beat down the network of pillboxes and blockhouses surrounding Admiral Shibasaki’s bombproof in their sector. It was slow because the men had to go in against an enemy concealed from view. The diving, strafing planes could not knock out these positions. Even Lieutenant Largey’s 32-ton Colorado was not heavy enough to crush most of them. Largey saw one of his own men fall from his own fire and went back to report in grief to Crowe.

  “I just killed a Marine,” he said. “Fragments from my 75 splintered against a tree and richocheted off. God damn, I hated for that to happen.”