War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  The Marines were bunched up, and when Major Crowe saw this, he said, “I don’t like it. I’m losing my beachhead.” That meant it would be difficult for other boats or Amtracs to get in.

  So he said, “Put this damn boat in right now!” Well, the coxswain gunned it, and we went in and hit the reef 600 yards off shore, and stopped cold. Then the ramp wouldn’t go down in the front. That meant everybody in the boat, some thirty or forty guys, had to get up over the sides of the boat. The sides of the boat were about shoulder height for a six-foot-tall man.

  With sixty or seventy pounds of gear it was difficult to get up over that, much less drop into the water up to your chest, and keep your equilibrium.

  Well, it was done. I had an assistant with me, Bill “Kelly” Kelleher. He carried two canisters of film and I carried two. We couldn’t fall into the water, because it would have ruined the equipment.

  The men who had gone out ahead of us were now dog-paddling in the water, and all you could see were their helmets.

  There were snipers under the pier, and that had me really worried, because I had to stay upright. I was probably too good a target. But neither Kelleher nor I got hit.

  It’s difficult to walk in water; there’s too much resistance. The only thing that enabled us to do it was the fact that we had so much weight on our bodies that we were able to stay upright and keep walking.

  When we got in we were exhausted. We fell into a shell hole for a few minutes and right above me, to my left, was a guy who got his right buttock shot off and was unconscious. Shock had set in. The corpsman had taken care of him, and I realized then that this was a very dangerous situation.

  There wasn’t much chaos on the beach at that time. Everybody was digging in, trying to make sure that they had themselves protected.

  Kelly and I shared a shell hole. We dug it out, and the division chaplain came along and asked me if I’d dig a hole for him because he was busy ministering to people.

  The Japanese went for the amphibious tractors that were stuck out on the reef. They just swam out there in the night and got in. In the morning, they shot at us from our backside.

  Early on I figured out that I could not carry a weapon over my shoulder and a camera at the same time. Lieutenant Colonel Tom Colly, the intelligence officer, agreed with us and he got the quartermaster to issue pistols to the photo section.

  Before the landing Major Crowe said, “I don’t want any damn Hollywood cameramen with me.”

  I said, “I’m not Hollywood. I’ve been in the Marine Corps for five years now and I’ve been fully trained, and I’m a sharpshooter.” I told him, “I’ve had plenty of training, and I can bend down and pick up a rifle any time I need it.”

  He finally said, “All right, just don’t get in my way.” And from that time on, I was practically glued to him.

  Major Bill Chamberlain, the battalion commander, came into Major Crowe’s command post on the morning of the third day and said, “I’m ready to take that command post now.” Chamberlain came to me and said, “Sergeant, would you like to photograph our attack on the command post?”

  I said, “Yes, sir!” We had to crawl to get to this command post because the shells that our Navy was firing from the ships just sort of bounced off and we didn’t want to get killed by our own navy.

  We looked at it and figured that we’d more or less have to go over the top of it as well as around the sides. So we did.

  The photography of those efforts and the other things that went on helped later in the training of new Marines. They had a good opportunity to see what it was really like. That was one of the major benefits of the film.

  Wherever I looked, there was something to shoot. By the end of the battle, which lasted seventy-six hours, I’d only shot a little over 2,000 feet of film.

  Attacking places that are well equipped for protection, like a pillbox, is very difficult. It’s a two- or three-man operation. Sometimes you have to sneak up on the pillbox, crawl up to the entrance, and toss a grenade inside, or a flame-thrower will come up and put an inferno inside.

  When you’re taking pictures and looking through the viewfinder, you divorce yourself from everything else. The picture you’re taking is the only thing of importance.

  So when it was time to bring all of that film back to Washington, Frank Capra, then a major in the Army, was stationed at the Army Pictorial Center in Long Island. The Joint Chiefs of Staff asked him to come down to look at the film of Tarawa and make a film out of it.

  My footage was used in the film produced for public exhibition by Warner Brothers and distributed by Universal. It was called With the Marines at Tarawa, and it received the Academy Award for the Most Outstanding Short Documentary for 1944.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  17 DECEMBER 1943

  1100 HOURS LOCAL

  Norm Hatch’s award-winning documentary might never have been made except for an inadvertent release of some of the footage he and his assistant, Bill “Kelly” Kelleher, had shot during those four furious days. Their 16mm negatives, rushed back to the States by zealous public affairs officers, were supposed to be subject to clearance by military censors in Washington. But when the film reached San Francisco, instead of sending it directly on for clearance, black-and-white prints several minutes long were made selectively from Hatch’s black-and-white reels and from Kelleher’s color footage. Fox Movietone News then distributed hundreds of these black-and-white celluloid prints to local movie theaters. The agency was never told that government censors hadn’t cleared the footage.

  U.S. Marine casualties at Tarawa.

  Roosevelt was furious. The American people were stunned. On the eve of the holiday season, local movie screens were showing American war dead—not one or two, but hundreds. The Movietone narrator succinctly summed up the graphic images: “The battle of Tarawa is officially described as the most ferocious fight the Marines have ever been in. Each hour was terrifying with violence and gunfire and the hurling of grenades.”

  Nimitz and Vandegrift—now the senior Marine in the Pacific—importuned Admiral King, the chief of naval operations, that they had nothing to cover up and that the American people deserved to know the bitter truth about how difficult it was going to be to beat the Japanese. Roosevelt agreed, and the footage shot by Norm Hatch and Bill Kelleher was edited to produce the Academy Award–winning documentary With the Marines at Tarawa. And though enlistment in the Marines dropped by 35 percent for a few months, war bond sales increased dramatically.

  The lessons learned in seventy-six hours at Tarawa were almost all technical and resulted in changes that would make future amphibious assaults less costly, including the biggest one in Europe: Normandy. As a result of the losses at Tarawa, the Marines received hundreds of improved LVTs equipped with heavy guns and armor. The Navy developed LCMRs—landing craft equipped with rocket launchers to provide heavy suppression fire just before the assault waves hit the beach. Better long-range waterproof radios were developed and fielded. Naval gunnery improved with new training, ammunition, and fuses. Marine and Navy carrier pilots were provided with better training and more lethal bombs—like napalm—for dealing with well-prepared defenses.

  And for the Marines who would have to do it again and again and again all the way across the Pacific, the survivors of the 2nd Division’s assault on Tarawa were sent as cadre to other Marine units to teach others the “lessons learned.” And wherever they went, those who fought at Tarawa were greeted with awe. As one survivor said, “Every participant became a hero in spite of himself.”

  CHAPTER 12

  ASSAULT ON THE MARIANAS

  (JUNE–AUGUST 1944)

  HQ CENTRAL PACIFIC

  PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

  11 JUNE 1944

  After the horrific bloodletting on Tarawa, Major General Holland M. Smith urged Nimitz to reconsider Operation Flintlock—the invasion of the Marshall Islands—scheduled for 1 February. The plan Nimitz had approved calle
d for simultaneous landings on Maloelap, Wotje, and Kwajalein atolls. Smith, joined by Admirals Spruance and Turner, insisted that the central Pacific forces were inadequate to seize all three Japanese bases at the same time and that a protracted period of “softening up” the three targets—with sequential assaults—would yield the same results with fewer American casualties.

  Navy code-breakers and occasional long-range reconnaissance flights by PBYs flying from the Ellices, Tarawa, and Pearl Harbor confirmed what Smith, Turner, and Spruance feared. The Japanese had held the Marshalls since 1935 and were now hastily improving the defenses on all three atolls and their other outlying bases in the Marshalls: Jaluit, Mili, and Majuro. By January, there were already 5,500 Japanese troops on Kwajalein atoll and more were on the way from the Marianas and the Home Islands. Tokyo apparently believed that the Americans intended to seize the Marshalls next—and the Japanese planned to make any U.S. invasion as expensive as possible.

  Nimitz was already under pressure from Washington to advance his timetable for seizing the Marianas. The Joint Chiefs wanted to use the islands as a base for a new generation of long-range bombers now coming off production lines in the U.S. The big Boeing B-29 “Superfortresses,” with a 20,000-pound destructive potential that had no other rival in the air, could make the trip to Tokyo from the Marianas in under six hours.

  Realizing that he would have to take the Marshalls before moving on to the Marianas, Nimitz countered his critics with a concept of operations that was even bolder than his original plan. The increasingly powerful 5th Fleet would simply bomb and isolate the Japanese garrisons on Wotje, Maloelap, Jaluit, and Mili and go straight for lightly defended Majuro and heavily protected Kwajalein atoll. Once these two bases were secured, the 5th Amphibious Force would seize Eniwetok.

  This daring strategy notwithstanding, Operation Flintlock succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, save perhaps those of Nimitz himself. Starting in early January, Admiral John Hoover’s land-based bombers, flying from the Ellice Islands and Tarawa, began systematic raids on all the Japanese bases in the Marshalls. Well before the end of the month, no Japanese aircraft remained east of the Marianas.

  Meanwhile, Admiral Ray Spruance’s 5th Fleet—more than 350 ships, 700 carrier-based aircraft, and 53,000 assault ships—was deployed to conduct the invasion. A small Marine combat team would secure the lightly defended Majuro. The Army’s 7th Infantry Division was tasked with taking Kwajalein, and the new, untested 4th Marine Division was assigned to seize Roi and Namur at the northern end of the Kwajalein atoll.

  The Marines remembered the lessons learned at Tarawa: The islands of Roi, Namur, and Kwajalein were hit with more than 15,000 tons of bombs. Then, for three days before the assault forces went ashore on 1 February, battleships and heavy cruisers battered the landing beaches and anything above ground on the target islands.

  Hastily deployed Navy underwater demolition teams (UDTs) reconnoitered every beach. New armored amphibians equipped with 37 mm howitzers and machine guns took the assault waves across the coral reef and then ashore. LCMRs equipped with rockets and 40 mm cannons raked the landing beaches under covering fire from close-in destroyers. The USS Appalachian and USS Rocky Mount, recently arrived amphibious command ships standing close offshore, coordinated the landings and the delivery of supporting fire over new, more capable, waterproof radios used by the assault commanders.

  Though inadequate training and rehearsal marred the Marine landings on Roi and Namur, the Army assault on Kwajalein was flawlessly executed. And because nearly half the Japanese defenders were already dead from the massive pre–H-Hour bombardment and shelling, all of the objectives were secured by 4 February. More than 5,000 Japanese were dead at a cost of 177 American lives and fewer than 900 wounded. Before the assault troops were completely backloaded, Seabee bulldozers and graders had the runways, taxiways, and aprons on Roi and Kwajalein fully operational.

  The victory was so swift and lopsided that Nimitz urged Spruance to press his attack on Eniwetok without returning to Pearl Harbor for refit, rest, and replenishment. Spruance agreed and raised Nimitz one by dispatching Marc Mitscher and his Task Force 58 fast carrier groups to destroy the Japanese naval and air bases on Truk, the forward headquarters of the Imperial Combined Fleet. Spruance himself joined in the attack with his flagship, the brand new battleship Iowa, and her sister, New Jersey, accompanied only by two heavy cruisers, four destroyers, and ten submarines.

  In thirty hours of coordinated nonstop air, surface, and underwater attacks starting at dawn on 17 February, the Americans sank fifteen Imperial Navy combatants and sent nineteen Japanese military cargo ships, five tankers, and more than fifty smaller vessels to the bottom. Mitscher’s pilots, flying new radar-guided TBM-1C Avengers, Helldivers, Hellcats, and Corsairs, destroyed over 230 Japanese aircraft at a cost of twenty-five U.S. planes. The carrier Intrepid, hit by a Japanese torpedo launched from a Nakajima B6N “Jill,” was the only American ship damaged, and she managed to limp back to Majuro for repairs.

  While Truk—the Gibraltar of the Pacific—was being pummeled, Turner’s 5th Amphibious Force assaulted Eniwetok atoll. The 22nd Marine Regiment quickly cleared its two objectives—Engebi and Parry islands—and then crossed the lagoon to assist the lesser-trained regiment of the 27th Infantry Division, which had become bogged down on Eniwetok Island. The entire atoll was declared secure on the afternoon of 20 February. Nimitz was now ready to take on a much tougher target 1,000 miles to the west, in the Emperor’s back yard: the Marianas.

  Though the Joint Chiefs in Washington were more than pleased with the pace Nimitz was setting across the central Pacific, Douglas MacArthur was not. Declaring the Gilbert and Marshall Islands operations “diversions,” he urged that more forces be allocated to his southwest Pacific drive and all but demanded that his advance on the Philippines be given priority as the main attack against Japan.

  The Joint Chiefs, deeply engaged in the final preparations for Operation Overlord—the invasion of France—responded by curtly reaffirming the “dual advance” strategy advocated by Nimitz and ordering MacArthur to be ready for an assault on the Philippine island of Mindanao by November. Nimitz was directed to seize Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the summer, secure the Palau Islands in September, and be prepared to support MacArthur’s return to the Philippines when needed. The decision satisfied both strong-willed leaders—particularly since their respective commands were promised the men and matériel necessary to accomplish their difficult tasks.

  One of the reasons that Washington could make such a commitment was the overwhelming response of American industry. By the spring of 1944, despite having more than ten million men already in uniform, American shipyards, airplane plants, and arsenals were churning out sufficient ships, planes, tanks, and weapons to fight a two-front war. There was no way for the Japanese to keep pace.

  The statistics were staggering. In 1942, America produced 214 warships; Japan built 37. In 1943, America launched 414 ships to Japan’s 57. The same disparity was evident in every other category of war matériel. And worse, from the Japanese perspective, American submarines were choking off their flow of oil and strategic materials from Southeast Asia and the East Indies, even coal and steel from Manchuria. By the time Nimitz was ready to send his 5th Fleet against the Marianas, U.S. submarines were sinking Japanese merchant ships faster than they could be replaced.

  Admiral Soemu Toyoda succeeded Admiral Mineichi Koga after Koga was killed in action.

  MacArthur, anxious to take advantage of the Japanese shortages and impatient to wrap up operations on New Guinea, started a series of rapid advances west on the island’s northern coast. On 22 April, with support from Marc Mitscher’s fast carriers, his 84,000 troops at Hollandia and Aitape bypassed Japanese garrisons at Wewak and Madang. Tens of thousands of Japanese troops were killed or left to starve to death in the fetid jungles of New Guinea. In each case, MacArthur’s engineers built or improved existing airstrips for his growing fleet of 5th Air Fo
rce fighters and bombers.

  While MacArthur marshaled strength for his next leap up the New Guinea coast—and while Nimitz was finalizing plans for the Marianas campaign—the strategic picture changed. In early May, their Imperial Japanese opponent—Admiral Mineichi Koga—was killed in a plane crash en route to inspect the construction of naval facilities in the Palau Islands designed to replace the bases on Rabaul and Truk. His replacement, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, was far more aggressive and assured the General Staff in Tokyo that he would “hold the line” and prevent the loss of the Philippines or the Marianas. He set out to surprise the Americans with a plan that he called A-Go.

  MacArthur was the first to see and feel the effects of Toyoda’s leadership. On 17 May he invested Sarmi against relatively light opposition. But on 27 May, his 7th Fleet Amphibious Force landed on the island fortress of Biak. Toyoda, anticipating the move, had reinforced the island garrison and its strength now stood at 11,000. With MacArthur’s landing force heavily engaged ashore, Toyoda called for a surface raid by Japan’s two largest battleships, Yamato and Musashi. Escorted by cruisers and destroyers, the battleships were to knock out MacArthur’s transports and then decimate the American invaders from the rear with their heavy-caliber guns while the Japanese garrison counter-attacked.

  But on 11 June, as Toyoda’s battle group prepared to sortie from the Moluccan Islands, Nimitz began his attack on Saipan. Learning of it, Toyoda called off the Yamato/Musashi counter-offensive and sent the battleships north to defend the approaches to the Philippines. MacArthur’s invasion of Biak was saved by the move he hadn’t wanted Nimitz to make.