War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  These engagements were little noted by an American press corps focused on the bloody Allied campaign in Italy. But for the Joint Chiefs, the operations demonstrated how dramatically the balance of power had shifted in the South Pacific since the beginning of the year. Even though the war in Europe was still the first priority, with Rabaul effectively neutralized, it was finally time to start a new drive toward Japan—this time in the central Pacific.

  While Halsey and MacArthur were battling their way north, determined to isolate Rabaul as they aimed for the Philippines, Nimitz had been slowly building up his forces in Hawaii. By November 1943, American industry was churning out hundreds of airplanes a day, bigger and faster ships, thousands of landing craft, and hundreds of thousands of fresh soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coast Guardsmen, and Marines.

  Over MacArthur’s vehement objections, Nimitz convinced the Joint Chiefs that a new drive through the central Pacific should become the main axis of attack against Japan. For MacArthur, holding tight to his goal to liberate the Philippines, it was a bitter pill to swallow. But once the Chiefs decided, they made sure that Nimitz got what he needed, particularly the new Essex-class fleet carriers capable of carrying more than a hundred of the latest Navy aircraft: Grumman F6F “Hellcat” fighters, Curtiss SB2C “Helldiver” bombers, and F4U “Corsairs,” which the Japanese had taken to calling “Whistling Death.” Nimitz also got better submarines, now equipped with new torpedoes and commanded by bolder skippers who were decimating the Japanese merchant marine fleet. By November 1943, at fleet anchorages in Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Ellice Islands, he had nineteen carriers—light, medium, and heavy—twelve battleships, fourteen cruisers, and fifty-six destroyers.

  To support and supply them—and to land his Marine and Army assault troops—Nimitz also assembled more than 200 other vessels: twenty-nine fast attack transports, scores of new LST and LSD amphibious assault ships, dozens of fleet oilers, repair ships, ocean-going tugs towing fuel barges, hospital ships, tenders, and hundreds of smaller PT boats, landing craft, and tracked amphibious assault vehicles.

  With all this combat power, Nimitz was ready for Operation Galvanic. The plan called for his 5th Amphibious Force to seize three tiny atolls in the Gilberts 2,600 miles west of Hawaii, near the intersection of the equator and the International Date Line. Some described these little spits of land as “the first stop past the middle of nowhere,” and they all had, like so many other places in the vast Pacific, strange-sounding names: Abemama, Makin, and Tarawa.

  The plan of attack approved by Nimitz was fairly simple: Fast carrier forces would isolate the three atolls from the threat of any Japanese reaction coming from Truk or the Marshalls. They would then conduct pre–D-day aerial attacks to destroy any Japanese aircraft at their seaplane base on Makin and the airfield being built on Betio Island in the Tarawa atoll.

  After the battleships “softened up” fortifications ashore, Admiral Kelly Turner’s 5th Amphibious Force would simultaneously storm Makin and Tarawa. The ground force, designated as the 5th Amphibious Corps, commanded by Marine Major General Holland M. Smith, consisted of the 18,000-man, reinforced 2nd Marine Division for the Tarawa assault and 6,700 soldiers of the Army’s 27th Infantry Division to secure Makin, 100 miles to the north. The U.S. submarine Nautilus would land a Marine rifle company on lightly defended Abemama. It would be the only part of Operation Galvanic that went according to plan.

  Major General Holland M. Smith

  On 13 November, B-24 Liberators of the 7th Air Force began a weeklong series of bombing raids to “soften up” both Makin and Tarawa. Then, the night before the landings, seven battleships and nine cruisers began pounding both Makin and Betio in a pre-assault bombardment unlike anything ever tried before by the U.S. Navy. Everyone, including the Marines watching offshore, assumed that it would be enough to pulverize the defenses ashore. They were wrong.

  The man Tokyo entrusted to defend the Gilbert Islands, forty-nine-year-old Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki, commanded a mixed force of 2,900 elite naval infantrymen (similar to our Marines), about 1,500 armed construction troops (like the U.S. Navy’s Seabees), and 1,500 conscripted Korean laborers. He dispatched 284 of the naval infantry and about 500 of the construction troops and laborers to Makin. The rest, about 4,000 in all, were packed into bunkers and revetments on the narrow two-mile spit of land called Betio Island at the south end of Tarawa atoll—where the British had started an airstrip before Japan seized the Gilberts on 7 December 1941.

  Admiral Keiji Shibasaki

  By the time Admiral Hill and his Marines arrived offshore, Shibasaki and his troops had been working on the Betio defenses and airstrip for months. He had once asserted that his troops could “hold Tarawa against a million Americans for a hundred years.” They built massive concrete blockhouses, bunkers covered with six feet of coconut logs and sand, dug sheltered trench lines and tank traps, and constructed more than 400 mutually supporting bombproof gun emplacements and machine gun positions. His shore-based artillery, manned by instructors from the Imperial Artillery School, boasted eight-inch, five-inch, and smaller caliber naval guns and mortars—all with pre-registered targets on the coral reef surrounding Betio.

  And Shibasaki knew what the Americans did not: The coral reef was itself a formidable natural barrier that would prevent almost any landing craft from crossing at any time other than a very high tide. To make matters worse for the Americans, the naval planners in Pearl Harbor decided to conduct Operation Galvanic during a “neap tide”—the time of month when the alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth create lower than usual tides. For the Marines going ashore on Betio, it would prove to be a very costly error.

  U.S. 5TH AMPHIBIOUS FORCE

  BETIO ISLAND, TARAWA ATOLL

  20 NOVEMBER 1943

  1800 HOURS LOCAL

  Major General Julian C. Smith, the 2nd Marine Division’s commander, had insisted on a massive pre-invasion bombardment before his troops hit Betio’s narrow beach. He got what he asked for. His Marines, many of them veterans of the Guadalcanal campaign, had been treated to a pre-dawn breakfast of steak and eggs and were circling outside the reef in their landing craft and LVTs when the sixteen-inch guns of the battleships and the cruisers’ eight-inch guns had opened up at 0500. The ear-shattering barrage went on for more than an hour as more than 2,500 tons of high-explosive shells rained down on the little island. Then, at 0610, the naval gunfire lifted so the carrier aircraft could deliver another 900 tons of bombs and strafe the landing beaches. After the dive-bombers and fighters finished their work, the naval gunfire resumed again until 0845, when Admiral Hill ordered a cease-fire for fear of hitting the LVTs and Higgins boats as the men of the assault wave headed for their landing beaches.

  Major General Julian C. Smith

  To the Marines headed toward the beach and the pilots flying overhead, it looked as if the entire island was on fire. The wooden barracks, equipment sheds, and Shibasaki’s headquarters building were blasted into splinters and burning. Huge billows of black smoke and suspended particles of sand were blasted into the air by the shells and bombs, and the cloud drifted a mile into the sky.

  Unfortunately, the first three assault waves—using 125 LVTs—took much longer than expected to make it across the coral reef. As soon as the destroyers stopped firing, the Japanese defenders rushed back to their guns, raking the tracked amphibians as they crawled up onto and across the reef where the water was only two or three feet deep. Few of them made it to the beach unscathed. Worse still, all the LCMs and LCVPs carrying the fourth, fifth, and sixth waves for Red Beaches One and Two ground to a halt 600 to 1,000 yards offshore, forcing the Marines to disembark and wade through chest-high water under heavy machine gun and mortar fire. In many places, the water was even deeper. At Red Beach Three, those who made it to the beach were exposed to withering fire from Japanese gunners hidden in the pilings of the long pier jutting out into the lagoon.

  For the Marines who had watched the pre-landing bombardment a
nd finally made it to the beach, the results of that volume of enemy fire was unbelievable. It seemed like the only thing those thousands of tons of munitions had done was to push a little sand around and cut down a few palm trees.

  Twelve miles offshore, General Smith and Rear Admiral Hill waited for a situation report aboard the flagship USS Maryland. But most of the radios that the assault waves had taken with them had been soaked during the reef crossing and were now useless. It was only after Colonel David M. Shoup, the assault commander, managed to get up to the seawall and find a dry radio did they realize the magnitude of the carnage on the beach. Smith immediately committed the division’s reserves to the fight, sending in another 1,100 Marines. By 1800, nearly 5,200 exhausted troops were ashore—most of them in two widely separated pockets—and almost a third of them casualties. One of those who had made it was Lieutenant Don Lillibridge from Mitchell, South Dakota.

  SECOND LIEUTENANT

  DON LILLIBRIDGE, USMC

  Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll

  20 November 1943

  2300 Hours Local

  I was a lieutenant in A Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines. I was the youngest officer in the battalion, just turned twenty-two, but I had thirty-nine men in my rifle platoon who were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old, so they were a lot younger. I’d never been away from home in my life and I was very inexperienced.

  We loaded up, and after we were on board, we were told where we were going. Nobody had ever heard of Tarawa or knew where it was. I saw the stuff on the map and it was just little dots in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A captain assigned all of us replacement officers to different units.

  Tarawa was my first battle. In the dark you could see the naval shells streaking red through the sky onto the island. And following all the explosions after the aerial and naval bombardment of the island, we assumed that there would probably be nothing left. It just didn’t seem possible that there could be anybody left alive on the place.

  When we hit the reef and started to go up over it, we were hit by machine gun fire. I remember a bullet came through the Amtrac because it wasn’t armored. It passed between my dungarees and my backpack. I could feel the heat as it went through. And I thought, Maybe I’ve been hit! But it was a fraction off—if it hadn’t been, it would’ve shattered my spine—so I was lucky.

  Marines at Tarawa

  We hit the beach and all leaped out. I jumped out first, by the seawall, and on the very narrow beach were bodies everywhere—in the water, floating on the water, and on the little beach. My guys were jammed up against the seawall for protection against enemy fire.

  I leaped up over the seawall and I just took off inland. And they all came after me. But the Marines who followed us, about two or three minutes later, all got shot, just wiped out. I ran inland until I came to this large, twenty-by-twenty-foot depression in the sand, about two or three feet deep. And there were guys in there, and facing me with his back to the wall was Lieutenant Seeley.

  He looked at me and said, “Lilly . . . I faced death eleven times today.” One of the curious things about Tarawa was, you almost never saw the enemy. They were in the bunkers, and they were firing at you and you were firing at them. The only way to get them out—as it turned out—was when a handful of Sherman tanks got ashore.

  There was this big structure built with coconut palms and concrete. It must’ve been thick because it was very solid. It hadn’t been destroyed by the naval bombardment and I saw it had a huge aperture about a foot high and about four feet long. This tank came up and I pointed to it. He rolled right up to it, stuck the muzzle right up into the opening, and fired a couple rounds. That’s the kind of thing, plus the flame-throwers that the combat engineers, the flame-thrower demolition outfit, used on the bunkers. The flame-throwers didn’t just burn people; they also sucked all the oxygen out of these structures, and the people inside suffocated.

  Marines using a flame-thrower on Betio.

  Since many of the Japanese were killed in their bunkers, most of the bodies all over the island by the end of the battle were Marines. So many were killed just trying to get on the beach. And that held true for the second day as well.

  That experience was a devastating shock. It was the single most traumatic event I’ve ever experienced in my life. I lost twenty-six of the thirty-nine men in my platoon. By the third night, I was the only officer left in the company, which was about the size of my original platoon

  Tarawa was so small that you could stand on one side and see over to the other side, from the lagoon to the ocean. It was 800 yards wide at the widest point, and then tapered down to about four feet at the east end. It was about two and a half miles long. That’s what made the battle so unusual—its tiny size and all this concentrated fury.

  I didn’t get across the island until the morning of the third day. Bodies were everywhere: a hand here, an arm there, a leg, a shattered torso. A head, even.

  Well, even though I had another battle ahead of me, Tarawa was the first one, and it’s the impact of losing so many guys that I think really lasted throughout my whole life. None of this occurs at the time of the battle, you understand. This effect and the impact of it all comes after the battle is over.

  HQ 2ND MARINE DIVISION

  USS MARYLAND

  5 MILES WEST OF BETIO ISLAND, TARAWA ATOLL

  20 NOVEMBER 1943

  1830 HOURS LOCAL

  With four battalions of his 2nd Division ashore, General Julian Smith and his staff sought ways to break the bloody deadlock. Once darkness fell, the shooting stopped almost entirely. An expected Japanese counter-attack never materialized because the communications wires connecting Admiral Shibasaki with his subordinate commanders had all been cut by the furious bombardment and the gunfights earlier in the day.

  Exhausted Marines from intermingled units held onto their positions in three-to-five-man foxholes dug in the soft sand or in shell holes and bomb craters created by the pre-landing bombardment. On the beach, Navy medical corpsmen continued to load wounded into LVTs, shuttling them back out to the ships. On their return trips to the beach the Amtracs brought in 75 mm howitzers, mortars, ammunition, fresh working radios, and water for the terribly dehydrated Marines.

  As the night wore on, LCVPs and LCMs that had made it across the reef at high tide were policing up bodies and equipment floating in the lagoon. Among the salvage officers engaged in this grisly task was movie star Eddie Albert. Now a lieutenant (jg), he had volunteered for the Navy after Pearl Harbor and was serving as a small boat officer on the USS Sheridan, a transport anchored offshore.

  At thirty-three, Albert was likely one of the oldest lieutenants in the Navy. He could have been in Hollywood making training movies. Instead, he went to Officers’ Candidate School, got his commission, and was assigned as a salvage officer off Betio.

  During the operation he made twenty-six trips bringing back the wounded from Betio. On one of his forays into the seawall, he picked up a wounded Japanese officer. He told how it happened: “There were piles of dead and wounded and I was in the mess . . . and a Japanese was among the wounded . . . standing up. And I thought, ‘Well, he’s the only Japanese that knows what is going on. Maybe I could get him up to our ship.’ He’s the only Japanese that the interrogators had to talk to—the rest of them were dead.”

  Eddie Albert said that the multiple trips to the beach were just part of “doing his job.” But he was awarded the Bronze Star for valor. One of those who believe he deserved it is Dean Ladd, a rifle platoon commander who spent much of the night of 20 November circling offshore in the lagoon, waiting to get ashore and help his pinned-down comrades. Ladd was only twenty-two but already a combat veteran of Guadalcanal by the time he reached Tarawa.

  LIEUTENANT DEAN LADD, USMC

  Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll

  21 November 1943

  0845 Hours Local

  We knew we were moving out; we didn’t know where until about the first of October 1942. We wer
e put into the line battalions and started training as a unit against snipers and the things that we’d learned from what was going on in Guadalcanal. In the process, I went to Officers’ School, which they did with a lot of us who had combat experience to see if we had the necessary leadership ability in high-stress situations. Many of the NCOs became officers. I was one of those. As corporal I got a field commission and a week or two later we got the mission to go to Guadalcanal.

  I joined a green unit that hadn’t been in combat. We were there on Guadalcanal three months. We made our last drive to shove the Japanese off the island as they started to withdraw. They fought a real rear guard action. We were just continually being whittled down. A lot of it was from sickness, malaria. I had four men killed and three wounded on Guadalcanal. When we finally drove the Japanese off the island, we had no idea what our next mission was going to be.

  I was twenty-two, almost twenty-three. I was leading guys who were seventeen, eighteen. Some had joined the Marine Corps when they were sixteen, having lied about their age.

  The Japanese decided that Tarawa was going to be defended. They brought in a lot of concrete, cut down coconut trees, and put in some of the thickest-walled bunkers you can imagine. They put in eight-inch naval turret guns. They had rifle pits and a seawall all the way around made of coconut logs that were about four feet high. And then, spaced between the riflemen in the pits, were hundreds of machine guns. Well, we were led to believe that our naval gunfire would pretty well obliterate that place. But it didn’t.