William Deane Hawkins led the charge to clear the pier on D-day, and later took out “three pillboxes before he was caught in a burst of Japanese shellfire and mortally wounded.”26 Engineer William Bordelon had fallen on D-day.
When the sun set on the second day of the battle, in other words, the actions for which three of Tarawa’s Medal of Honor recipients would be recognized were in the books. The fourth, my grandfather, remained in action, but discrepancies in various accounts—the Medal of Honor citation, photographer Newcomb’s recollections, the Marine Corps’ official account of the battle, Salazar’s report, letters sent to my great-grandparents, and later published accounts—have made it all but impossible to piece together a reliable chronology of his movements prior to his fatal assault on the bunker on November 22.
These actions, at least, are well established: After landing, Sandy and his second-in-command organized a security detail on Red 3, led a team of combat engineers into action, joined up with Crowe, and failed in his first attempt to take the blockhouse.
According to 2nd Lt. J.L. Dent Jr. of Headquarters Battalion, at some point during the early morning of November 21, Sandy “organized a platoon of about fifty men from what there were on the beach, and went forward and posted them in a defensive line for the night. The next morning this group started knocking out pillboxes. . . . He used riflemen to fire into the opening and keep the Japs down, then he would run out, get on top, and throw dynamite or TNT inside and clear it out that way.”27
At some point, Crowe learned that Sandy was an engineer with extensive demolitions experience and began consulting him about taking the hulking blockhouse. Marvin Sheppard, a private in intelligence with 2/8 Headquarters Company, recalled listening in as my grandfather tried to convince the major that the only way to take the bunker was with demolitions.
“I remember Maj. Crowe thought they shouldn’t use explosives, because if it was an ammo dump, we’d all get killed,” said Sheppard, who contacted me after seeing a news report on CNN. “The first time I ever saw your grandfather he was saying, ‘I doubt very much if they would build a weapons building that close to the water.’ He said he didn’t think there was any danger.”28
Crowe evidently found that argument convincing enough to send Sandy forward to advise Maj. William Chamberlin on a plan to take the bunker.
By the end of the first day of battle, Betio was a horrific charnel ground. Blistering tropical sun had not only drained the marines of energy, leaving their skin burned, lips cracked and bleeding, but also transformed hundreds American and Japanese corpses into a ghastly mockery of their former humanity.
There was neither time nor equipment to bury the dead during the fighting, and within hours, many bodies had bloated to bursting, leaving splotches of putrid, blackening entrails. The reek of death clung to the marines’ hair, skin, and clothing. As Robert Sherrod famously observed, “Betio would be more habitable if the Marines could leave for a few days and send a million buzzards in.”29
“Even toward the end of the first day, the stench was already bad. There was no breeze blowing at all, we were straddling the equator, and it was about a hundred degrees. Bodies just lay around there, bloating within two or three hours, tearing the uniforms open and releasing the stench,” recalled Max Clampitt, a machine gunner with the 6th Regiment who later served seven terms as mayor of Hobbs, New Mexico. “It lasted the whole five days I was there and left a little fog, a kind of haze over the whole island. It sticks with me to this day.”30
By 1800 on D+1, the marines held the entire western end of Betio as well as most of the airfield, and were gradually drawing the noose around the remaining Japanese forces. Supplies and vehicles were rumbling off the pier and reinforcements made their way to the lines. Before surrendering command to Edson, Shoup offered this famous assessment of where things stood: “Casualties: many. Percentage dead: Unknown. Combat efficiency: We are winning.”31
The issue was no longer in doubt, but the fight was not yet over, and Sandy Bonnyman was still in it.
FOURTEEN
KALEIDOSCOPE
NOVEMBER 22, 1943
Plans were laid for the third day of battle before the sun rose on November 22. Navy ships were to blast Japanese forces that were holed up on the eastern end of Betio with a barrage of fourteen- and sixteen-inch shells. At 0700, carrier-based aircraft were to make runs over the same area for twenty minutes, repeated at 0830, 0930, and 1030.
Meanwhile, Col. Merritt A. “Red Mike” Edson ordered the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines to push along the southern coast at daylight to meet up with marines holding the south side of the airstrip. Meanwhile, 1/8 was to drive westward at 0700 to eliminate a pocket of resistance on the border between Red beaches 1 and 2. Despite being supported by three tanks, Bangalore torpedoes, thermite grenades, TNT satchels, and flamethrowers, 1/8 was unable to take out three enemy pillboxes. But Japanese forces were in no position to take offensive action. By 1100 the marines controlled most of Betio’s southern coast and had almost entirely surrounded the Japanese forces that remained on the western two-thirds of the island.
But over on Red Beach 3, Maj. Crowe’s forces had gained no ground, thanks to the interlocking fields of fire from the three enemy positions—a steel pillbox, the L-shaped coconut-log wall, and the massive, sand-covered emplacement some sixty yards southeast of the pier. Roy Elrod, a first lieutenant with weapons company, 8th Marines, recalled that they got a boost when the Ringgold fired its five-inch guns from one thousand yards out in the lagoon and struck the bunker, which blasted some of the sand from the top.
“It was dangerous to us, because we were only forty to fifty yards away. But what it did do was uncover those air vents on top,” he said.1
At some point, Maj. William Chamberlin gathered his men and told them he’d decided to lead a charge up the sandy slopes to take the blockhouse. But when he shouted, “Follow me!” only T.Sgt. Norm Hatch, armed only with a movie camera, followed.
“Major, where is your weapon?” Hatch shouted when they reached the top of the hill and saw Japanese advancing toward them through the smoke.
“I gave it to a kid and my pistol doesn’t work; it got wet,” Chamberlin replied.
“[Chamberlin] said, ‘We’d better get the hell out of here right now,’ and we ran back down the side of the damned thing,” Hatch said at age eighty-nine. “It all happened in nanoseconds, though we didn’t use that term then. We got back down and the whole goddamn unit was just staring at us wondering what in the hell we were doing. The major held another meeting, which wasn’t so pleasant this time.”2
Sandy Bonnyman had been pondering how to take the big bunker ever since offering his services to Crowe, and seeing the exposed ventilation shafts gave him an idea: If they could take out the gunner on top with flamethrowers and explosives, they could then make a deadly delivery of flaming fuel and TNT down those vents.
“He went back to Major Crowe and said, ‘I know how much pressure builds up, and if we can drop explosives down those air vents, it’ll chase those people out,’” said Elrod, who contacted me in 2015.
The resulting concussions and inferno would kill many of the Japanese inside and drive any survivors into the open, where Elrod’s gunners would be able to take them out from positions facing the east- and south-facing entrances. Chamberlin gave the go-ahead to my grandfather and ordered him to lead the assault.
“Your grandfather drew up the plan,” said Elrod, who was sent to cover the south portal with two 37mm machine guns. “The rest of us just went along.”3
At 0930, Crowe ordered K Company to take out the coconut-log emplacement with a barrage of 60mm mortar shells. At around 1300, Lt. Lou Largey swiveled the turret of the Colorado and unloaded his 75mm guns on the steel pillbox.4 Two down, one to go.
But there was no way to take the hulking blockhouse, which had withstood relentless bombing, from afar. It would require desperate, dangerous close combat by the team of twenty-one engineers and riflemen assem
bled by Sandy Bonnyman. They dubbed themselves “Forlorn Hope,” a British phrase describing a necessary action in which many would die.
“As bright as (Sandy) was,” Roy Elrod said, “I’m sure he knew there was little chance he would come off there. He had to know when he went out on top he could be seen by just about every Japanese on the island.”5
Sometime in mid-afternoon, the men of Forlorn Hope began their dash toward the bunker, covered by 37mm guns and mortars.
“What happened next, though witnessed by hundreds,” Joseph Alexander wrote, “remains kaleidoscopic.”6
It’s fair to say that in the chaos of battle, everyone’s recollections are probably a little kaleidoscopic. Yet over the years, despite a few counter-historical embellishments, the essential narrative concerning my grandfather’s final hours remained remarkably consistent—until the publication of Joseph Alexander’s Utmost Savagery in 1995.
In his exhaustively detailed history of the battle, Alexander made the curious choice to accord the fifty-year-old recollections of a single eyewitness, Cpl. Harry Niehoff, A Company, 1/18, the status of revealed truth, thereby upending virtually every previous accounting of Sandy Bonnyman’s actions on November 22, 1943. Though Niehoff had given a somewhat similar account to Eric Hammel and John E. Lane in 19697, Utmost Savagery effectively diminished my grandfather’s contribution that day.
Doubtful that one man’s memory could be trusted to overturn what had seemed to be settled history, I vowed to find the truth, no matter where the evidence led. I spent years tracking down every account of my grandfather’s actions I could find, in books, newspaper articles, and letters, even a comic strip. But in the end, it was my conversations with some of the men who were actually there that really made the difference.
There is little dispute over the beginning of the assault: Niehoff began hurling TNT “satchel” charges over the top of the bunker while Pfc. John Borich directed a column of fire from his flamethrower onto the sandy summit, which took out the machine gunner. Sandy then led the way up the slippery northwest corner of the mound, accompanied by Borich and Niehoff, a scene captured on film by Hatch and later incorporated in the 1944 documentary, With the Marines on Tarawa.
Pfc. Earl “Pappy” Coleman and Sgt. Elmo Feretti soon followed, and once on top, Sandy ordered them, along with Niehoff, to begin tossing explosive charges down three ventilator openings while Borich jammed the nozzle of his flamethrower down a fourth on the north side, spraying the interior of the bunker with flaming diesel.8 It didn’t take long for scores of desperate, screaming Japanese to begin streaming from the blockhouse’s east- and south-facing exits, where Elrod and other marines began to mow them down. But those who survived turned to charge up the bunker’s east and south slopes to meet the attackers.
The initial assault didn’t last long, but Sandy was in constant motion.
“There were three guys going up that bunker. I remember hearing him hollering loud enough to hear over all the ammo and other noises in his Southern accent, ‘Fight, you guys! Get over there, you get over here, make sure you kill them as they come out!’” remembered Karol Szwet, a machine gunner with 3/8, at age ninety-two.9
Most famously, Cpl. Obie Newcomb stood at the back of the bunker snapping photos that remain the only known images of a Medal of Honor recipient engaged in the action for which he was cited.
“It was a perfect hell hole and the boys needed a little urging when things started to break,” the photographer remembered. “I can still see him waving the boys up over that blockhouse and his Southern voice urging them on. What a wonderful man. A braver man never existed.”10
Newcomb’s famous photos later become a continuing source of confusion, however, when he sent them to the Bonnyman family in 1944. He marked the photos with arrows pointing to a figure he believed to be Sandy amid a swarm of marines. But Newcomb was many yards from the action and numerous sources have discounted those arrows, including Elrod, who witnessed the action atop the bunker from his machine-gun position facing the south entrance.
“I have wanted for seventy-one years to tell this story, and I’m probably the only person alive who knows exactly what happened,” Elrod told me. “All those pictures you see now, with all the marines on top and coming up, with the arrows, that was after your grandfather was killed. No one went up at the time of the initial fighting except those three or four men with him. I saw it all happen.”11
Elrod, his machine-gun pointed at the south entrance, had a front-row seat as Sandy, a cigar clenched between his teeth, stood alone at the southeastern edge of the sandy mound and continually fired his thirty-caliber carbine at the swarm of enemy fighters coming toward him. Elrod also recalled that Japanese mortar shells were falling all around him.
“I watched the whole thing and I can tell you, he was the only one there, and the one who really turned the tide,” said Elrod, who later received the Navy Cross for his actions on Saipan and would retire many years later as a lieutenant colonel. “I was more impressed with him than anyone else I ever served with. If there was ever who anyone deserved the Congressional medal, he was it.”12
Pfc. Marvin Sheppard recalled that he and “another kid” from HQ intelligence, whose name he could not recall at age eighty-six, had been drawn to the sound of fighting at the bunker, like many other marines in the area, and watched the assault unfold from the rear. He remembered that they sprinted back to the seawall after hearing Sandy shout for more explosives, but by the time the two young marines returned, my grandfather’s voice had gone silent.13
In the days, months, and years following his death, the story of my grandfather’s last stand would be told and retold countless times, in public and in private, often in contradiction to official records, and occasionally with thrilling, but false, details.
Unsurprisingly, the more remote the source, in both time and space, the more likely the story is to resemble a Hollywood war drama, and Sandy a kind of action figure.
Malaria kept my grandfather’s friend and former commanding officer, Col. Gilder Jackson Jr., from fighting at Tarawa, and the non-eyewitness account he related to Jo Bonnyman veered wildly into cinematic melodrama: “He went forward to place the (Bangalore) torpedo where it would do the most damage and a sniper got him. . . . (He) turned around and smiled at his men and fell to the ground.”14
In a breathless 1959 story about Tarawa, the magazine Saga: Adventure Stories for Men reported that my grandfather “shot two (Japanese), but then the rest were on him. He threw his carbine into their faces, dived at another and killed him with his bare hands.”15 A 1964 American Armed Forces Features “America’s Fighting Heroes” comic strip depicted Sandy as a Rambo-like superhero defying gravity, teeth gritted, his automatic weapon spouting fire at swarms of fang-baring Japanese behind the banner of the Rising Sun.
And then there’s the flamethrower myth. In 1968 former head of the Marine Corps History Division Henry I. Shaw Jr. wrote, “It was Bonnyman who met the enemy head on, spraying the attackers with fire from a flamethrower and killing three before he, himself, was shot down.”16 In his vivid 1979 memoir of the Pacific war, Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester wrote, “Bonnyman remained standing for thirty seconds, firing a carbine and then a flamethrower before he fell, mortally wounded.”17 Minus the flamethrower, both accounts are probably quite accurate.
The myth must be laid at the feet of Maj. William Chamberlin, who erroneously placed the flamethrower in Sandy’s hands while speaking to a Marine Corps historian in 1946 (a detail he did not mention in his Medal of Honor recommendation).18 There was a flamethrower atop the bunker, but it was always in the hands of John Borich.
Historians and fellow marines long gave Sandy Bonnyman credit for assembling and directing the men of Forlorn Hope, leading the charge, and, as Maj. Henry P. “Jungle Jim” Crowe wrote in his Medal of Honor recommendation, leading “his men in placing flamethrowers [sic] and demolition charges” and “standing at the forward edge of the structure [wher
e] he killed three of the enemy before he received mortal wounds.”19
For decades, there was little doubt that my grandfather also schemed out the basic plan of attack. Yet Alexander reports Niehoff’s assertion that he and Borich came up with the idea to use the ventilation shafts to deliver explosives and flame, and that Sandy simply “listened to the men.”20 Niehoff also recalled that Sandy Bonnyman had been largely passive during the assault.
But Niehoff’s most radical assertion was that he and my grandfather were jointly holding off the counterassault, from a prone position, when he “heard the bullet hit him. He never moved and I knew he was dead.” My grandfather’s face was so badly damaged, Niehoff reported, that it was unrecognizable.21 In their 1988 book, 76 Hours: The Invasion of Tarawa, Eric Hammel and John E. Lane recounted Niehoff’s assertion that he was the lone marine holding back the Japanese counterattack when my grandfather joined him on his belly, and shortly thereafter “heard the killing shot thud into Sandy Bonnyman’s body,”22 a detail Niehoff first related to the authors in 1969.23
Niehoff’s own account in 1994 letters to my aunt, Alix Prejean, further detailed that Sandy “turned on his side and rested on his elbow, yelling for some TNT charges to be brought. . . . He had raised his head above the edge of the pillbox and exposed it to fire. . . . I know he never knew.”24 In one letter, Niehoff profusely apologized to my aunt for “using your dad’s body as a shield” after he fell,25 a detail he also reported to Alexander and others. Hammel and Lee reported that Niehoff “leaped across the dead lieutenant’s body and wedged himself between it and a dead Japanese machine gunner” just as he saw a grenade tumbling in from the corner of his eye. Lucky for Niehoff, it was a dud.26
After repeatedly poring over Harry Niehoff’s recollections—that he and Borich, not Sandy, had planned the assault and he, not Sandy, had single-handedly held off the Japanese counterassault—I arrived at an uneasy conclusion: If what he’d said was true, then a great injustice had been committed and Niehoff, not my grandfather, should have been awarded the Medal of Honor. Or could it be that Harry Niehoff simply misremembered what happened that day? Whatever the truth, I knew I had to find out.
Bones of My Grandfather Page 16
