Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  “Too bad,” Crowe muttered. “But it sometimes happens. Fortunes of war.” He glanced upward at the American planes. “They do it too. One .50-caliber slug just hit one of my men. Went through his shoulder, on down through his lung and liver. He lived four minutes.” He shrugged. “Well, anyway, if a Jap ever sticks his head out of his pillbox the planes may kill him.”

  Over on the right flank, the western toehold, Major Ryan was calling for naval fire to knock out the Japanese positions. Lieutenant Thomas Greene, a naval gunfire spotter, signaled a destroyer and pinpointed Ryan’s targets. The destroyer ran in and let go. Another destroyer followed. The men whom Shoup had already called “fighting fools” fanned out behind China Gal and another tank to begin their attack. The tanks stopped and one of the tank commanders called out:

  “Send us an intelligent Marine to spot the pillboxes for us.”

  “Hell’s fire!” a sergeant snorted. “I ain’t very smart, but I’ll go.”

  He went, walking between the tanks, guiding them from pillbox to pillbox, and the western beaches began to fall.

  To the east, Dave Shoup heard the report of Ryan’s progress with relief. At a few minutes before four o’clock he turned to Major Culhane and said:

  “I think we’re winning. But the bastards still have a lot of bullets left.”

  Then Colonel Shoup put his estimate into the language of official reports, concluding with that terse summary which would become historic:

  “Casualties many; percentage dead unknown; combat efficiency: We are winning.”

  Colonel Shoup’s Marines could have told him an hour earlier that the issue was no longer in doubt.

  The Japanese had begun to kill themselves.

  They had been told that the Americans tortured their captives. More, surrender meant the disgrace of a man’s family. So they had begun blowing themselves up, shooting themselves or disemboweling themselves—choosing suicide as the means of immortalizing their spirits among Japan’s warrior dead at Yasakuni Shrine. Men found with bayonets thrust up into their vitals lay beside loaded rifles. Grenade suicides with missing hand-and-head or hand-and-chest, or those others who lay down in their bunkers to place rifle muzzles in their mouths while pushing the trigger with their big toe, were often found in places where the attack was only beginning. They had not waited to take a few Marines with them.

  Aboard Maryland General Julian Smith had given Colonel Maurice Holmes of the Sixth Marines his orders for a pair of landings. One was to be made on the newly cleared western beaches of Betio. The other would be on Bairiki, a little islet just east of Betio. Japanese had been reported attempting to reach Bairiki from Betio’s tail. Smith also wanted to place artillery on the islet to batter Betio.

  Shortly before five o’clock carrier planes began striking Bairiki, diving at the lone pillbox mounting two machine guns and held by 15 Japanese. Fifty-caliber bullets passed through the gun ports and entered a gasoline can the Japanese had unwisely brought inside with them.

  Flames leaped from the position, and the Second Battalion, Sixth, commanded by big Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Murray, occupied Bairiki without incident.

  A few hours later the other landing took place. The First Battalion, Sixth, led by youthful Major William Jones, rode rubber boats in to Betio’s western tip. They were embarrassed at the tearful welcome given them by Major Ryan’s ragged remnant. They moved through them and dug in.

  Up in the central sector Brigadier General Edson had come ashore. Julian Smith had sent Red Mike in to relieve the near-exhausted Shoup. Edson took command at six o’clock and David Shoup resumed control of what remained of his Second Marine Regiment. He had not slept for forty hours and his leg wound was paining him, but he had hung onto those two desperate holds and kept his scattered units fighting.

  On the left flank Major Jim Crowe called for naval gunfire against Admiral Shibasaki’s bombproof. His men were going to have to go up against it next morning, and he wanted them to go the easy way.

  At dusk a destroyer ran in so close to Betio that it seemed it would scrape the bottom of the lagoon. Flame spouted from the muzzles of its five-inchers…. Four, five, six rounds—and then the answering crash and flame as the shells struck Admiral Shibasaki’s command post. The graceful, slender ship was almost obscured in smoke. Chips of cement flew from the bombproof’s five-foot walls, geysers of sand leaped from its roof overgrown with palm trees. Some eighty rounds flashed around it like monster fireflies.

  The destroyer stopped firing. Major Crowe shrugged.

  “They never hit it squarely,” he said, his outer gruffness masking an inner disquiet. “Just almost.”

  Within the bombproof Rear Admiral Keichi Shibasaki contemplated the shattered bits of the Yogaki Plan. He had gotten almost no help, nothing but a submarine or two which had harassed the enemy the night before the invasion. Last night a single plane had flown up from the Marshalls. Tonight he could expect no more. Obviously the Americans had neutralized the Marshalls.

  And Tarawa, he knew, was falling.

  Having felt the lash of the American destroyer’s five-inchers, Shibasaki could guess that it would be his bombproof’s turn tomorrow. He composed his last message for Tokyo.

  “Our weapons have been destroyed,” it said, “and from now on everyone is attempting a final charge…. May Japan exist for ten thousand years!”

  10

  Apamama was truly called the Atoll of the Moon.

  She was the loveliest of all the Gilberts, a brilliant pale green lagoon caught in a circlet of sun-bathed islets which were themselves clasped by the gleaming white of the beaches—and surrounding it all was the soft blue of the sea. To Apamama in 1889 came Robert Louis Stevenson as the guest of the philosopher-king Tem Binoka; to Apamama three years later came the British Government; and to Apamama in another half-century came two companies of Japanese under a midget of a monocle-screwing colonel.

  The colonel departed in 1943 with the airfield done and with some 1,000 handsome, good-natured, lazy Apamamese introduced to the horrors of work. There were only an excitable captain and two dozen Imperials left when, in the early morning blackness of November 21, the 68 Marines of Captain Jim Jones came to Apamama to scout out the atoll’s defenses for the November 26 invasion.

  They came down from Tarawa the night of November 20, making the 85-mile run southeast aboard the big submarine Nautilus. Shortly after midnight Nautilus heaved out of the sea and the Marines came up on deck to inflate and launch rubber boats from her stern.

  They were struck by rain squalls. Only three of the boats’ outboard motors started. One conked out and there were but two left to tow the remaining boats, all bobbing and wallowing now in a wild cross-sea of wind and wave while the current pulled them toward the barrier reef. Two boats were carried off into the darkness. Aboard the others, Marines paddled frantically to avoid being cast up on the boiling reef.

  An hour later the wind abated. The two missing boats rejoined the column. Now the only enemy was the current, and three hours later Captain Jones’s men were paddling within the comparatively calm waters of the lee shore.

  Jones began sending out patrols to scout the islets of Apamama. One of these scouting parties included Lieutenant George Hard, a short, bald Australian who had lived in the Gilberts before the war and knew the people of Apamama. Minutes after the patrol set out, Lieutenant Hard saw and recognized two Apamamese wading to the Marines’ islet from another one to the right. Hard and the Marines hid in the bushes, for the Australian had no notion of how the Gilbertese had reacted to Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. When the two men were almost on them, Hard jumped up and called a greeting in Gilbertese.

  “Why, my word!” one of them replied in unruffled English. “It’s Mr. Hard! But were you wise to come and visit us now, Mr. Hard? The Sapanese are still here.”

  Hard grinned. So did the Marines when they learned that the Gilbertese pronounce a J as an S. It was a pleasure to imagine the irritation
of those numerous Sapanese who spoke English.

  Mr. Hard’s old friend explained that there were only 25 of these Sapanese now, but that they were well entrenched around a radio station on another islet. They had both heavy and light machine guns, mortars and much ammunition, and their pillboxes on both ocean and lagoon beaches would not be easy to rush.

  After Captain Jones heard the news he decided to attack. That night he and his “Recon Boys” spotted the winking of blinker lights at sea. An enemy submarine had come to evacuate the atoll’s garrison. But the Japanese couldn’t get away. Jones’s men had destroyed the motor-powered whaleboat that was to have been their getaway craft, and in the morning the Recon Boys would be out to destroy the Japs as well.

  Up north at Tarawa Navy Lieutenant Herman Brukardt and his corpsmen worked through the darkness in a “pillbox hospital.” The position had been cleaned out by the Marines and Brukardt had set up an operating room inside. Brukardt was a wisp of a man, black-bearded and seemingly tireless. He had been working throughout the day sewing up the badly wounded. Now, at night, in the light of flashlights held by his corpsmen, Robert Costello and James Whitehead, he worked on.

  There was a rifle shot. Brukardt looked up. A wounded Marine pointed grimly into a corner of the pillbox. A Japanese lay there, crumpled in death. He had sneaked into the pillbox while everyone had been absorbed in the operation. Brukardt bent his head again. There was another shot. This time Brukardt didn’t bother to look up.

  Machine-gun bullets smacked against the pillbox’s walls. There were rifle shots. The “walking wounded” outside were beating off a party of infiltrators.

  “Next!” Brukardt said softly. One of the corpsmen leaned out the door and cried, “Next!” and a wounded man hobbled quickly across the moonlit clearing while the Japanese rifles made their sharp flat cracking.

  “We’re out of anaesthetics,” one of the corpsmen whispered. Brukardt shrugged. There were things he had to cut and things he had to sew, and they had to be done, with or without the pain.

  He worked on. There were sometimes moans, occasionally an uncontrollable sob, but mostly there was silence while the flashlight beams played on his hands and the bullets smacked against the outer walls.

  Of 100 men brought to the pillbox hospital only four died.

  11

  The third day of battle on Betio was businesslike and it was brutal. It had not the horror and transcending courage of the first day, when Marines fought to rescue their stricken comrades, to knock out the guns that struck them. Nor had it the desperation of the second, when men fought to avoid defeat. It had only the cold, wary precision of the clean-up. Men fought to exterminate an enemy gone to ground. They killed not to save or preserve but to destroy. Such unexalted work requires professionals.

  The Marines were coldly efficient the morning of November 22 as one battalion attacked east along Betio’s spine or southern shore and another struck west into The Pocket.

  The Pocket was that 600-yard gap which still separated the original Shoup beachhead from the one which Major Ryan had expanded on the west. At seven o’clock in the morning the First Battalion, Eighth, moved out of the Shoup beachhead to reduce it. The men attacked behind three light tanks, but a suicide-soldier got under one of the tanks with a magnetic mine and blew himself and the vehicle apart. The 37-millimeter guns of the light tanks were unable to do more than chip the pillboxes. By noon the attack had done no more than contain the Japanese strong points, and the half-tracks which had come up to relieve the tanks were driven back by machine-gun fire.

  Meanwhile, the First Battalion, Sixth, which had landed on the western beaches the night before, moved rapidly east. Major Bill Jones (whose brother Jim had led the Recon Boys ashore at Apamama) drove his men forward. They were as eager as men can be when attacking a maze of forts concealing a stubborn, skillful enemy. They also had three Shermans and the bulldozers of the engineers to accelerate their attack.

  The tanks moved against a front about a hundred yards wide. Fifty yards behind them came the riflemen, spread out and watchful for the appearance of suicide-troopers with their magnetic mines. If a blockhouse or pillbox resisted the Sherman’s shells, the tanks waddled on, leaving the position to the riflemen and flame-throwers. If individual assault would not storm the position, it could at least neutralize it while a bulldozer slipped in—its driver crouching behind raised sheltering blade—to seal it off with walls of sand.

  At eleven o’clock in the morning the Marines of Jones’s battalion had reached the battalions of the Second Regiment, which had fought to the southern shore midway on the bird’s back the day before. Jones’s men had killed 250 Japanese while taking very light casualties themselves. They moved out along the spine again. By nightfall they had reached the end of the airfield on the southern shore and were dug in looking east toward Betio’s tail.

  Just to their left and rear, Jim Crowe’s men were moving toward them across the ruins of Admiral Shibasaki’s bombproof.

  The approaches to the bombproof as it faced north toward Crowe’s Marines were guarded on the right by a steel pillbox and on the left by a big emplacement made of reinforced coconut logs. At half-past nine in the morning Crowe’s mortars began falling on the coconut-log structure.

  It blew up with a thundering detonation of flame and somersaulting logs. The puny 81-millimeter mortars had scored a direct hit on what had been an ammunition warehouse as well as bunker.

  Then jaunty, battered Colorado rolled to the steel pillbox’s right. It fired twice, three times, and Shibasaki’s bombproof lay open to attack.

  Crowe’s men moved out, matching shot for shot with the bombproof’s defenders but gradually coming in closer. Assault engineers crawled forward led by a tall cheerful lieutenant named Alexander Bonnyman. They gained the sides of the bombproof and forced their way to the top.

  The Japanese counterattacked. They came in a fury, for the bombproof was the heart of their defenses. As they charged up the slopes of sand piled atop the building, they ran into Lieutenant Bonnyman. Though they should have overwhelmed him, they didn’t. He raked them with carbine fire. They hesitated and Bonnyman charged. “Follow me!” he shouted, and the engineers closed in after him. Bonnyman went down and his Marines went over him and beat the enemy back down the hill. Bonnyman died of his many wounds, but the top of the bombproof had been captured, and as the Japanese began to pour out of its eastern and southern exits they were cut down by riflemen and the scything cannister shot of the 37-millimeter cannon. There were still about 200 left inside, among them Admiral Shibasaki.

  Bulldozers heaped sand against the exits and sealed off the gun ports. Marines poured gasoline down the air vents and dropped in hand grenades.

  There were muffled explosions and then screams. Jim Crowe’s men moved toward Betio’s tail to nail down the left flank of the Marines of Major Jones.

  Behind them, on the western beaches, the Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, had landed on Betio under Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth McLeod. Also to their rear, at a rough cemetery in about the center of the Shoup beachhead, parties of their fellow Marines were burying the dead.

  Bulldozers scooped out long, long trenches three feet deep. Bodies were laid out in rows, without blankets, without ponchos, and the chaplains moved among them somberly, their lips moving with final prayers or the words of last rites. Bodies that had been identified were quickly placed in the trenches. When a trench was full, the bulldozers roared and butted against the piles of sand. It was soggy wet sand, for it was impossible to dig more than four feet on Betio without striking water. The dead were covered over, the trench was rollered smooth—and a new one was dug. Many bodies were impossible to identify. One was brought in, headless, one-armed, a few shreds of flesh dangling from the neck like a slaughtered chicken. Robert Sherrod the war correspondent turned away.

  “What a hell of a way to die!” he exclaimed, but a big, redheaded Marine gunner stared him in the eye and replied: “You can’t pick a bette
r way.”

  It was true. Any Marine would prefer being blown apart to the languishing agony of shrapnel or bayonets in the belly, to being left alone to perish in torment.

  Many such solitary sufferers were being discovered this third day of battle. Corpsmen wading through the lagoon in search of bodies also found live men lying within wrecked and blackened amtracks. In one of these they found a dozen dead Marines and one who was still breathing.

  The man had shrapnel in his head, arms and legs. He had not had food or water since he went down the cargo nets early in the morning of November 20. He had lain in the sun for two days and been broiled like a lobster. His rifle lay with its muzzle pointing up toward his throat and the corpsmen could guess that he had tried to kill himself but had not had the strength to reach the trigger. They spoke to him gently, assuring him that his ordeal was over. He opened his cracked lips and mumbled:

  “Water—pour water on me.”

  Major General Julian Smith was on Betio.

  He had left Maryland and boarded an amtrack along with Brigadier General Thomas Bourke, his artillery commander. They had gone ashore at the western beach. They had inspected defenses and then gone back aboard the amtrack to move around to Red Mike Edson’s command post by water. As they passed The Pocket, where Major Hays’s men were battering enemy strong points, machine-gun fire struck the amtrack. The driver was wounded, and the amtrack knocked out. Smith and Bourke had to transfer to another, but they made it in. At four o’clock Smith sent off this discouraging message to Brigadier General Leo Hermle, his assistant division commander:

  Situation not favorable for rapid clean-up of Betio. Heavy casualties among officers make leadership problem difficult. Many emplacements intact on eastern end of the island. In addition many Japanese strong points to westward of our front lines within our position that have not been reduced. Progress slow and extremely costly. Complete occupation will take at least five days more. Naval and air bombardment a great help but does not take out emplacements.