Storm Landings in the Central Pacific were operations of vast distances, great speed, and terrible striking power. The Navy would spearhead seven of them, beginning with Tarawa, and the battles would be short, violent, and decisive, battles of “a magnitude and ferocity that may never again be seen in this world,” writes historian Joseph H. Alexander.18
For the Japanese army, these would be fights to the last; there would be nowhere to retreat to and no prospect, as at Guadalcanal, of evacuation. The American armadas covering the invasions would make sure of that.
The prodigious expansion of the Pacific Fleet made these lightning landings possible. By late 1943, the United States Navy had grown to the point where it was not only the largest and most powerful in the world, but larger than the combined navies of all other warring powers. Seven new battleships had joined the fleet, mostly to provide ship-to-shore fire. Even more significant was the astonishing growth of the Navy’s air arm. The Pacific Fleet added seven enormous Essex-class carriers and eleven lighter carriers, augmented by numerous escort carriers. The new Essex-class carriers were fast and heavily armed, and each of them was capable of carrying from eighty to a hundred aircraft—the most formidable of them the new F6F Hellcat, which could outfight the feared Japanese Zero. The ships formed carrier task forces made up of troop transports and amphibious vessels protected by battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and minesweepers. And each task force had a “sea train” of fuel, cargo, repair, and hospital vessels that allowed it to operate out of port for as long as seventy days. Carrier groups were refueled every four days by oilers, which also brought the mail and the latest movies.
Vice Admiral Marc A. “Pete” Mitscher’s Task Force 58, controlling a large part of the fast carriers—each of them carrying 28,000 men, the size of small city—was alone more powerful than the entire Japanese Navy. “Task Force 58 is really something new under the sun,” wrote two reporters who covered the war in the Pacific. “It is so big that one captured Jap pilot said he knew they’d lost the war when he got his first bird’s-eye view of its hundreds of ships, from destroyers to huge carriers and 45,000-ton battlewagons, spread over 40 square miles of ocean. It is so fast that no pre—Pearl Harbor battleship could keep pace with it. And it is relentless, because it never has to go home.”19
TARAWA
Now this remorselessly modern Navy was ready to strike a series of hard blows in the Central Pacific. The first was aimed at Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, 2,400 miles west of Hawaii and at the far end of the defensive perimeter Japan had established to protect its island empire. The landing here was significant both strategically and tactically, strategically because it inaugurated America’s great ocean-borne amphibious offensive and was the first real test of American amphibious doctrine, tactically because it taught valuable and painful lessons in island landing.
Tarawa is an atoll, a ring of tiny coral islands that nearly encloses a picture-pretty lagoon. The target on Tarawa was Betio, its largest island, but only a tiny speck in the vast Pacific, about the size of New York’s Central Park. It is less than two miles long and little more than 700 yards wide at its center, and it is pancake flat, with no point rising more than a few feet above the surf line. While Marines reduced it and seized its nearly completed airfield, the 27th Army Division would storm lightly defended Makin atoll, 100 miles to the north.
Nimitz placed Raymond Spruance, a hero at Midway and the newly appointed commander of the Fifth Fleet, in charge of Operation Galvanic, the invasion of the Gilbert Islands. Thirty-five thousand troops and 6,000 vehicles were carried by fast transports protected by the Fifth Fleet’s nineteen carriers, twelve battleships, and a supporting flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers. The entire armada covered fifty square miles of ocean. And a good part of it was committed to Betio.
Betio was garrisoned by 4,600 men, over half of them Japanese Imperial Marines, volunteers known for their fighting spirit and stoic discipline. These elite troops would be positioned behind the most formidable system of defenses Americans had yet to encounter in the Pacific. The assault force was Major General Julian C. Smith’s 2nd Marine Division, half of them veterans of Guadalcanal who had been recuperating from malaria in New Zealand. They were under the overall command of salty-tongued Major General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, one of the Marines’ chief architects of amphibious warfare, and the commander who would direct almost every major island assault in the Central Pacific.
U.S. Marine Corps correspondents described the island garrison their comrades were sent against:
THE JAPANESE OVER A PERIOD OF fifteen months did a very sound job in perfecting their defenses for … Betio. They transformed its flat insignificance into one solid islet fortress which they felt, with considerable justification, would prove impregnable.
For its beaches and the reef were lined with obstacles—concrete pyramid-shaped obstructions designed to stop landing boats, tactical wire in long fences, coconut-log barricades, mines, and large piles of coral rocks.
And for its beach defense there were numerous weapons—grenades, mortars, rifles, light and heavy machine guns … antiboat guns, [and] … coast-defense guns….
The emplacements for these weapons were often seven feet thick, of solid concrete, reinforced by steel, coral sand, and coconut logs.
The pillboxes for the automatic weapons, and even the riflemen’s pits, were scientifically constructed to withstand heavy bombardment. Around a concrete floor in a three-to five-foot excavation was built a twelve-inch reinforced concrete wall. Over this were alternate layers of coral sand, coconut logs, and sandbags. The roof was made in the same way with coral sand covering the entire outside, then tapering off gradually to prevent the casting of shadows which would show in aerial photographs.
In places the blockhouses were of concrete with a roof thickness of five feet, on top of which were palm-tree trunks with a diameter of eighteen inches, and a final layer of angle irons made of railroad steel.
Guarded by these defenses was a landing field: the long, dusty airstrip that gave the Japanese a position of strategic importance in the Central Pacific because it was their nearest point to our travel routes from San Francisco to Hawaii to Australia, because it was our first major obstruction on the road to Tokyo.
In addition to these Japanese-made defenses there were the barriers and hazards of nature. There was the reef. There were the tides.
The Japanese who manned this islet fortress of Betio were not of the ordinary run. They were all volunteers. They possessed a finer physique and training than any other group in the Emperor’s forces…. Their rear admiral in command at the atoll [Keiji Shibasaki] is known to have stated that the invading Americans faced certain annihilation, for “a million men could not take Tarawa.”
The Admiral’s confidence was based on realism….
We were not underequipped for Tarawa. Offshore stood the mightiest fleet ever assembled up to that time in the Pacific. In the two years since Guadalcanal, an amazing variety of special landing craft had been developed to meet the needs of transporting men and materiel for massive seaborne invasions.
Yet Tarawa … was a gamble. For the first time in martial history a seaborne assault upon a heavily defended coral atoll was to be launched. As General Julian Smith told his troops on the eve of D-Day:
“We are the first American troops to attack a defended atoll. What we do here will set a standard for all future operations in the Central Pacific area.”20
As Major General Holland Smith said later, after inspecting Shibasaki’s fortifications: “The Germans never built anything like this in France. No wonder those bastards were sitting back here laughing at us! They never dreamed the Marines could take this island, and they were laughing at what would happen to us when we tried.”21
On the morning of November 20, three hours before the Marines climbed down the cargo nets and boarded their landing craft, the Navy unleashed a spectacular bombardment, the largest yet of the wa
r. “We will not neutralize; we will not destroy; we will obliterate the defenses of Betio,” declared Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill.22 “We thought that most of the Japanese would be dead by the time we got on the island,” reporter Robert Sherrod recalled. “There was even a debate on the troop transport I was on as to whether or not the Japanese had evacuated the island, as they did at Kiska. B-17 pilots who bombed the island the day before reported seeing no signs of life—no return fire, nothing. What we hadn’t figured out, of course, was that this was the most heavily defended beach in the world, yard by yard, and that there were an awful lot of Japanese waiting for us.”23
Unknown to the Marines, the naval bombardment failed to destroy the enemy’s craftily disguised blockhouses and pillboxes, almost 500 of them. The fleet assaulted the island from its lagoon side, where the defenders least expected it, but the Navy stopped the bombardment twenty minutes before the troops landed because of visibility problems. This gave the Japanese time to switch their mobile defenses from the south, or sea beach, to the north side of narrow Betio, turning the dreamy lagoon into a murderous fire zone for their machine guns and mortars.
But the most forbidding defense the enemy possessed was the jutting coral reef that extends 300 to 900 yards into the placid blue-green lagoon formed by the atoll. On the morning of the invasion the tide was unusually low, and the defenders did not believe the invaders could get over it with their heavily loaded Higgins boats. But the Americans had a new weapon that could climb over reefs and operate as an assault vehicle on land. The Americans did not, however, have enough of them. only 125.
The first wave of Marines went in on amphibious tractors—LVTs—whose caterpillar tracks could move them through water and over land. They had been used at Guadalcanal, but only to carry supplies, not troops, for they were slow, difficult to steer, and lighly armored. Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, head of the Amphibious Task Force, the force responsible for getting the troops to the target, was against using them, but hot-tempered “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, commander of all American ground troops in the Gilberts campaign, had insisted, “No LVT’s, no operation.”24
The Alligators crawled over the wide reef and churned onto the beach, machine guns blazing. The sight of these strange metal monsters that could move across both water and land struck fear into some defenders, but the Japanese quickly recovered and hit the invaders with a crushing crossfire, forcing them to take protection behind a low seawall of coconut logs that ran along the beach. Still, the LVTs delivered 1,500 men to the beaches in the first fifteen minutes, with only minor casualties. America’s first Storm Landing was off to a good start. The problem would be maintaining momentum.
Almost everyone else coming ashore on D-Day rode in Higgins boats, which were larger and had a deeper draft than the amphtracs. They needed four feet of water to get over the reef, but the tide that day was not accommodating. It was an exceptionally unusual “dodging tide” that stayed low for the next thirty hours, confounding the predictions of Marine intelligence experts that there would be at least five feet of water covering the reef. The diesel-powered Higgins boats slammed into the reef and grounded, forcing the Marines to wade in to shore in chest-deep water, under searing fire. “I couldn’t even see the beach because of the tremendous smoke,” said Major Michael Ryan.25 His battalion, like others landing after the first wave, was cut to shreds.
It was now 0920. “Back home,” wrote Hanson Baldwin, “the football crowds [were] gathering; chickens and turkeys, dressed and ready for Thanksgiving, crowd[ed] the markets; on Broadway ‘Life With Father’ [was] in its fifth year, and ‘Oklahoma!’ [took] the mind off war.”26
But in the bullet swept lagoon at Betio, young Americans were dying.
Marines in the slow-moving Alligators returned to the reef to try to ferry in stranded comrades and were blown out of the water, men leaping from them with their clothes aflame. “In the distance I could see the beach,” recalled Marine Karl Albrecht. “It was lined with amphtracs, all of which appeared to be burning and smoking…. The attack appeared to have dissolved in confusion. I was terror stricken and amazed at the same time. We were Americans and invincible. We had a huge armada of warships and a division of Marines. How could this be happening? … I discovered the rows of Marines along the beach weren’t lying there waiting for orders to move. They were dead. There were dead all over. They appeared to outnumber the living.”27
The pilot of a Navy patrol plane described the scene: “The water never seemed clear of tiny men, their rifles over their heads, slowly wading beachward. I wanted to cry.”28 Only at the northwestern tip of Betio did the Marines have any success. There Major Ryan led ashore survivors of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines after spotting a lone Marine landing through a gap in the Japanese defenses. Ryan took charge of these scattered Marine units and created the only organized fighting force on Betio for a day and a half. He had just 200 men and two tanks.
Later that morning Robert Sherrod started in with the fifth wave. He was part of a small band of civilian and Marine Corps correspondents and cameramen, ranging in age from seventeen to fifty-four, who would cover the battle. World War I veteran Kerr Eby, one of America’s greatest combat artists, was the oldest man to land on Betio; Harry Jackson, an aspiring sculptor, was the youngest. Sherrod would write a superb book on Tarawa; Kerr Eby would capture the battle’s ferocity with his brooding charcoals of anonymous Marines, their helmets hiding their faces; and Staff Sergeant Norman Hatch and a team of Marine Corps photographers, headed by Hollywood star Captain Louis Hayward, would produce a film documentary of the fighting that would win an Academy Award. On this morning, all the correspondents and cameramen put themselves in as much danger as any Marine in the assault force. Two of them would die and three would be wounded or injured.
The pilot of Sherrod’s landing boat dropped him off near the reef, in neck-deep water. “No sooner had we hit the water than the Jap machine guns really opened up on us…. It was painfully slow, wading in such deep water. And we had seven hundred yards to walk slowly into that machine-gun fire, looming into larger targets as we rose onto higher ground. I was scared, as I had never been scared before.”29
“The water was red,” recalls Harry Jackson. “It takes a lot of blood to make water red.” Jackson waded through the lagoon with his buddy Whitey Cronin, a still photographer. “A mortar hit and I looked around and said, ‘Whitey, Whitey where are you?’ There was a gyrene [Marine] behind me and he said, ‘Is this Whitey?’ And I looked and there is Whitey for sure. The whole front of his skull had been blown off, and I looked right into the cave, this incredibly red-black cave of his being. There is no way to describe what one feels in that instant. I was standing shoulder to shoulder with a Marine, and he said to me, ‘You’ve been hit.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘You are, too.’”30 When enemy fire took down the Marine next to him, Associated Press photographer Frank Filan dropped his cameras in the water to help him. Later, he would borrow a camera to take a famous shot of battered Betio.
One coxswain went out of his mind. “This is as far as I go!” he screamed after running into a hail of bullets. He then dropped the ramp of his Higgins boat and twenty Marines, loaded down with gear, jumped out and drowned in fifteen feet of water.31
Robert Sherrod’s aiming point was a long pier that stretched from the beach to the reef. Its coconut log stanchions offered him some cover. From there he crawled 400 yards to the beach and jumped into a foxhole in the sand. “I took my first close look at … Betio…. From the water’s edge to the seawall there was twenty feet of sand and brown green coral. These twenty feet were our beachhead. The Japs controlled the rest of the island.”32
He was in a sector of the beach commanded by a big, red-mustached major named Henry “Jim” Crowe. After catching his breath, Sherrod walked over to Crowe and asked if he had seen any other war correspondents or photographers. Crowe said he hadn’t but unknown to him, sitting in a foxhole not thirty yards away was Norman Hatch, the only mo
tion picture cameraman on the beach. Hatch had gone in to Betio with Crowe and become separated from him on the reef. His film footage, along with Sherrod’s reporting, would make Crowe an American hero.
MAJOR “JIM” CROWE DIRECTS ACTION FROM HIS IMPROVISED COMMAND POST ON THE CROWDED BEACH OF TARAWA, GILBERT ISLANDS (USMC).
Years later, Staff Sergeant Norman Hatch gave his story of the first day on Tarawa:
BACK IN NEW ZEALAND, WHEN I was put in charge of a group of motion picture photographers for the Tarawa engagement, I selected the one man that I wanted to go into the beach with. His name was Jim Crowe and he had been a hero on Guadalcanal. I wanted to go in with him because he was aggressive. Wherever he went there was bound to be plenty of action to film.
I went to see him and said, “Major, I’m a motion picture cameraman and I’m assigned to go with you in the upcoming engagement.” And he barked, “I don’t want any goddamn Hollywood Marines with me.” I said, “I’m not a Hollywood Marine, I’m a regular, I shot expert with the rifle.” I also told him that the film that I would shoot would be as useful to the Marine Corps as the physical combat would be. He looked at me for a minute and said, “You can go, but stay the hell out of my way.” When it came time to go in on the Higgins boat I sat on the engine hatch with him and he took one look at me and muttered, “Jesus, you’re here.”
He was battalion commander and was not due in until the fifth or sixth wave; his executive officer had gone in with the first wave. As we approached the reef all the boats were hung up, and Crowe looked in toward the beach and saw that his men were packed together against the seawall, with enemy fire and shattered assault craft pinning them into a tiny square of sand and coral. And all of a sudden Crowe yells, “I’ve got no beachhead.” So he shouts to the coxswain, “Put this goddamn boat in right now. I’ve got to get in there and straighten out that beach.” He was afraid he was losing his beachhead and wouldn’t have room for the next companies that were scheduled to come in.
D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC Page 13
