D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  There was no water on the reef and we ran up on it fast and hit it hard, sending everyone flying. Then the coxswain tried to drop the metal ramp of the plywood boat and it wouldn’t go down. It was panic time, for all hell was breaking loose around us, and we were a sitting duck. Crowe told everyone to go over the side, and that’s not easy to do on an LCVP, especially under the fire with all your battle gear, weighing about sixty to seventy pounds. The gunwales are almost shoulder high and we had to climb over them and drop into water that was about chest level. My assistant, Bill Kelliher, and I had to be very careful. We couldn’t get our cameras and film wet. So Kelliher went over the side first, and I loaded him with his cameras and gear, which he carried on his shoulders. Then I went over the side and one of the boat handlers loaded me with my camera equipment.

  It was about 400 yards to the beach and we followed the men who had gotten out of the boat ahead of us. But they were all low in the water; all that was sticking out was their helmets. They looked like a herd of turtles. Nobody was standing up and walking, except Kelliher and me. This was my first time in combat and I could see the bullets hitting in the water all around me, and there was a sniper firing at us from under the pier. And I kept saying to Kelliher, “We got to stay upright, don’t get down, don’t get under the water.”

  If you ever walked through water you know what an effort it is, and we were weighted down and were wearing heavy boots…. When we got to the beach I fell into a shell hole and started shooting film. But before I did I got a sense of what a mess we were in when I looked up and saw a Marine lying right in front of me with his left buttock shot off. All the flesh was exposed and bleeding. My face was about two feet away from his wound, and I thought, Jesus! That could be me!

  While I was lying in that hole I got a graphic shot of Jim Crowe standing up and leaning on an LVT, while everyone around him was sucking sand. He was an inspiration to some mighty scared boys who were hugging that seawall. He was walking around cradling a shotgun in his arm and clenching a cigar in his teeth and barking, “Look, the sons of bitches can’t hit me. Why do you think they can hit you? Get moving. Go over that wall and kill some goddamned Japs.” This got people up and moving to establish a perimeter in front of us, some kind of toehold on that beach. But these guys soon got pushed back. There were too many of them and not enough of us. And we couldn’t see the bastards. They were dug in like rodents. But Crowe had the right idea. Unless we went over that wall we were going to die.

  Here we were in this big mess, and all I could think about was getting it on film. It’s like your camera is your gun. You have no sense of danger; you block it out. When you’re looking through the viewfinder you’re divorced from what’s going on around you. What you’re doing is looking at a movie out there—that’s right, the battle seems like a movie—and your entire intention is to get that movie. Subconsciously, you know guys are shooting at you, but you dismember yourself by looking through that viewfinder. Capturing the story of the battle becomes the most important thing in your life.

  And I had a big responsibility, after all. This was the first time the Marines had made an assault on a fortified beachhead, and I was the only Marine cameraman to get onto the beach that day. The rest couldn’t get in until the next day. I had a job to do. If I didn’t capture this on film, no one would.33

  A Marine killed on D-Day wrote in the last letter to his wife: “Marines have a way of making you afraid—not of dying, but of not doing your job.”34

  As the battle deteriorated, General Julian Smith, on the bridge of the flagship Maryland, radioed General Holland Smith, on the battleship Pennsylvania, near Makin. He wanted reinforcements, the 6th Marine Regiment, which was being held in reserve, and he ended with the ominous words, “ISSUE IN DOUBT.”

  This message had been sent after getting word of the situation on Betio from the commander of the assault forces, Colonel David M. Shoup, a bull-necked, profane man who wrote poetry in his private moments and later became Commandant of the Marine Corps. “He was awfully nervous about whether we were going to lose the battle or not,” Sherrod recalled, “but his troops would never have known it. He’s one of the reasons the battle was not lost. Directing the fight from an improvised command post right behind a Japanese blockhouse, with the enemy still in it, he was a rock. I can see why he got the Medal of Honor at Tarawa after being wounded and refusing to be evacuated.”35

  Five thousand Marines assaulted the beach on D-Day. By midnight, 1,500 of them were dead or badly wounded, making this the bloodiest day up to then in Marine Corps history. This was the crisis moment of the battle, when it could easily have been lost. That night, the Marines were packed so tight on the narrow beach that no one could move without stepping on somebody else, and hanging in the tropical air was the stench of their own dead, piled up behind them on the water’s edge. Lots of guys thought they were trapped and doomed. It was “like being in the middle of a pool table without any pockets,” said one Marine.36 The men expected a banzai attack, but Jim Crowe told them, “I don’t want a single shot fired on the beach tonight unless the Japs hit us with everything they got.” He said if any Japanese came crawling in over the seawall, “get ’em with your knives.” That was because there were so many troops on the beach that if they started firing at enemy infiltrators they would kill their own comrades.

  “I remember drifting off to sleep,” Hatch recalls, “and in the middle of the night I heard somebody yelling, ‘There’s a Jap in here and he’s killing people, he’s killing the wounded …’ I reached for my knife … [but] all of a sudden the guy yells, ‘I’ve got him.’

  “You know, we probably would have pulled out that night if we could have because I’m convinced that if the Japanese had been able to mount a force, they would have pushed us right off the beach. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done about it because we didn’t have enough people ashore. They really missed a big chance.”37

  For fifty years after the battle, historians surmised that the Japanese did not attack because Admiral Shibasaki’s wire communications had been knocked out by the naval bombardment, making it impossible for him to orchestrate a coordinated counterstrike. But recently translated Japanese war records reveal that Shibasaki was killed by the initial naval bombardment, cut down out in the open with most of his staff while they were moving from one bunker to another. This is why his Imperial Marines were in no position to mount a countercharge.

  The following morning Norman Hatch and Robert Sherrod sat at separate spots against the seawall looking out into the lagoon, one taking notes, the other scanning the action with a camera, recording a slaughter even worse than the one they had just survived.

  After spending the night in their boats—seasick, wet, and scared—a group of Marine reinforcements started coming in on Higgins boats, only to smash into the reef and ground. “The Japanese were zeroed in on that reef edge,” says Hatch. “It was almost uncanny to watch a ramp go down and a bunch of guys make a surge to come out and a shell explode right in their faces…. Boats were blown completely out of the water and bodies were all over the place. If Hollywood tried to duplicate that it would not be believed.”

  Hundreds of Marines died in the water; it was worse than the first day.38

  Seasick Marines caught on the reef began to be rescued by a Navy salvage boat officer named Edward Heimberger, whom some of them recognized as the movie star Eddie Albert. He was sent out to salvage broken boats, but all he did was salvage Marines. “As I looked around I saw a lot of men in the water, wounded, so I tried to pick them up,” Albert recalled years later. His boat was carrying drums of high-octane gasoline and was taking fire from at least five machine gun nests. “The bullets were incendiary and armor-piercing and they came right through the boat and skittered around on the floor. Fortunately somebody was watching over us and the bullets didn’t hit any of those tanks.”

  A group of Marines who were not wounded, but had lost their rifles, refused Albert’s offer t
o evacuate them. “They said ‘take the wounded in.’” Then they asked Albert if he was coming back. “And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And they said, ‘Bring some rifles.’ So I dropped off the wounded [on the hospital ship] and came back. By that time they had all been killed.”39

  “We were losing, until we won,” General Julian Smith would say years later.40 The Marines started winning on the afternoon of the second day. But even on that dismal morning some things began to go right. It all started when Major Michael Ryan took a ragtag unit of “orphans” from other battalions and, with the help of two tanks and naval gunfire, fought his way down the west coast of the island and captured a large beach, called Green Beach. Now General Julian Smith could land reinforcements securely, along with heavy weapons. While Smith was assembling a landing force of the 6th Marines, the men on the main invasion beaches started to move out over the seawall and take enemy bunkers. As Hatch recalled, the inspiration was Major William Chamberlin:

  HE WAS AN OLD MAID, IN training and aboard ship, a college professor who was always telling the guys to put on their T-shirts so they wouldn’t get sunburned. But on the beach that second day he was a goddamned wild man, a guy that anybody would follow in combat.

  A PARTIALLY CAMOUFLAGED JAPANESE BLOCKHOUSE ON HEAVILY FORTIFIED TARAWA (USMC).

  Early in the morning he came over to me and said, “We’re going to take that command post,” pointing to a monstrous bunker about forty feet high and on a slope. “Are you interested in coming along and getting some good pictures?” Staff sergeants don’t argue with majors, so I told him that sounded like a good idea.

  He got his junior officers around him in a foxhole and said, “All right. We’re going to jump off at 0900 and we’re going to go right over the top of that thing and blow them the hell out.” Then he told everybody to synchronize their watches, just like they do in the movies. “When I give the signal, we’re off and running.”

  We were in a foxhole together and at 0900 sharp the major gets up and looks at me and says, “Are you ready?” Then he charges out yelling, “Follow me.” We ran right up to the top of that blockhouse. When we got there I looked around and it was only the major and me. And there were about a dozen Japanese looking up and wondering what the hell we’re doing on top of their command post. I said, “Major, where’s your weapon?” And he said, “I gave my carbine to somebody else and I lost my pistol.” All I had in my hands were my cameras, so I said, “We’d better get the hell out of here.” So we turned and ran down back off the other side and jumped into a foxhole.

  Then there was a little ass-chewing and he got everybody together again and they took that blockhouse by dropping charges down the air vents, shooting in fire from flamethrowers, and firing their weapons through the gun slits. After they did that, we waited, and several squads of troops came rushing out to engage us, figuring we were surrounding them. We annihilated them, and I was able to capture this on film. This is where my forty-five seconds of fame started which lasted me sixty years. In the Pacific war one hardly ever saw the Japanese, and this was the only time we caught a shot of the enemy in some strength fighting us at point-blank range.

  After this, the battle became an island-wide search-and-destroy mission.41

  It was called “blind ’em, blast ’em, and burn ’em.” That’s how Tarawa would be taken, just the way Chamberlin took that big blockhouse. Withering rifle fire drove the Japanese defenders away from their firing slits so that demolition men could heave TNT satchel charges into the bunkers. Then Marines carrying napalm tanks on their backs poured fire and flame through the openings, burning up the oxygen inside and suffocating the defenders. The work was done in teams, but one Marine, Scout Sniper William Deane Hawkins, went on a one-man rampage, attacking pillbox after pillbox—crawling up to them in the sand, firing into the gun ports, and tossing grenades inside—until he was ripped apart by mortar fire. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, and the airfield at Betio was named Hawkins Field.

  U.S. MARINES STORM A JAPANESE “BOMB PROOF” ON TARAWA (USMC).

  Some bulldozers and additional light tanks were landed on the afternoon of the second day, when the tide finally rose, and they were used to break the bunkers. The tanks went in close and blasted away. Bulldozers, manned by Seabees, were brought up to seal the entrances to blockhouses. Gasoline was poured into the vents and ignited with explosives. The charred corpses were not removed. The bulldozers finished the job, entombing the victims under tons of coral and sand.

  “The improved situation is reflected in everyone’s face around headquarters,” Sherrod wrote in his notebook late that afternoon. “The Japs’ only chance is our getting soft, as they predicated their whole war on our being too luxury-loving to fight. Of this much I am certain: the Marines are not too soft to fight. More than three thousand of them are by this time assaulting pillboxes full of the loathsome bugs, digging them out.”42 It is about this time that Shoup sent the fleet his now famous situation report: “Casualties: Many. Percentage Dead: Unknown. Combat Efficiency: We Are Winning.”43

  On the evening of the second day, the 6th Marines began landing on Green Beach, with Mike Ryan’s “orphans” providing cover. They came in across the heavily mined lagoon on rubber rafts, led by Ryan’s good friend Major William Jones, the “Admiral of the Condom Fleet,” his men called him. Beginning at dawn the next day, Jones’s men moved slowly, but with violent effect, across the south coast of Betio, in the wilting heat, reducing one enemy stronghold after another. They took heavy hits from infantry in log and sand forts and from snipers who had tied themselves to the trunks of coconut trees, but they fought “like men who were anxious to get it over with,” in Sherrod’s vivid description.44 Another battalion landed on Green Beach, and these fresh troops marched through Jones’s depleted forces, “walking beside medium tanks which bored into the fading Japs.”

  With enemy resistance collapsing, Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, who had become a Marine Corps legend at Guadalcanal, came in to relieve an exhausted David Shoup as beach commander. With him came more tanks and other heavy armor. The tanks “had a field day with the Japs,” Sherrod wrote later, and “armored half-tracks, mounting 75-mm. guns, paraded up and down Betio all day … pouring high explosives into pillboxes.” Observing the progress his Marines were making, Edson smiled and said, “It won’t last as long as Guadalcanal.”45

  In every part of the island, Marines found Japanese who chose suicide over surrender. The accepted way was to lie down, remove the split-toed jungle shoe from the right foot, put the barrel of an Arisaka rifle in the mouth, or up against the forehead, and squeeze the trigger with the big toe.

  With most of the island under American control, the reporters went out to a transport ship and began writing their stories on typewriters borrowed from the Navy. Less than an hour after they left, the Japanese staged the first of a series of all-night assaults on William Jones’s thin front lines, culminating in an early morning banzai charge, with the troops screaming “Marine you die!” and officers swinging samurai swords. “We’re killing them as fast as they come at us, but we can’t hold out much longer. We need reinforcements,” the company commander pleaded with Jones on the field phone. “We haven’t got them,” Jones replied. “You’ve got to hold.” Supported by naval guns that fired within 500 yards of the American lines, the Marines locked up in hand-to-hand combat with knives and bayonets. “Everyone got into the fight,” said Jones. “It was a madhouse.”46 The next morning, a stunned Marine with bloodshot eyes crawled out of his foxhole, looked at the 300 or so massacred Japanese lying around him, and said, “They told us we had to hold … and, by God, we held.”47

  A MARINE IN FULL BATTLE GEAR TRIES TO SURVIVE THE BLISTERING HEAT ON TARAWA (USMC).

  Marine veteran William Manchester would write later: “At the time it was impolitic to pay the slightest tribute to the enemy, and [Japanese] determination, their refusal to say die, was commonly attributed to ‘fanaticism.’ In retrospect it is indistingui
shable from heroism. To call it anything less cheapens the victory, for American valor was necessary to defeat it.”48

  These desperate attacks hastened the end of what could have been a prolonged battle had the Japanese decided to hold out in their bombproof bunkers. “I had a chance to walk the lines in front of my front lines,” Major Jones recalls. “And tears came to my eyes because of all the dead Marines mingled with dead Japanese.” Marine photographers came up and took moving pictures of the bodies. Then Jones called for the big gallon cans of “torpedo juice” (straight alcohol used by the Navy as torpedo fuel) that a sailor had given him back in New Zealand. “And we opened it up and had a cocktail party in one of the tank traps.”49

  The next day, November 23, 1943, the fighting ended. Betio was declared secured at 1312 hours on the fourth day. It had been seventy-five hours and forty-two minutes since the Marines had hit the beach. Makin was taken, with light casualties, on the same day, giving the Americans control of the Gilbert Islands. (At Makin, the Navy took most of the losses when the escort carrier Liscome Bay was torpedoed by an enemy submarine, sending 644 crewmen to their deaths.) What they had did not seem like much. “I’m on Tarawa in the midst of the worst destruction I’ve ever seen,” a Marine officer wrote his wife.50 But as Admiral Nimitz said, they had kicked open the door to the Japanese heartland. Already, Hellcats were landing on Betio’s airstrip; and from there, reconnaissance planes would soon be flying over the Marshall Islands, gathering intelligence for the next Storm Landing.

  THE DEAD OF TARAWA

  At Tarawa, the Marines and Navy suffered 3,407 casualties. That was nearly 1 percent of the entire Marine Corps of 390,000 officers and men. Losses were similar at Guadalcanal, but “this was … worse than Guadalcanal,” said the old Marine Raider Evans Carlson as the fighting wound down. “It was the damnedest fight I’ve seen in thirty years of this business.”51 Tarawa was a horror because the killing was so compressed in time and space. Marines were in Guadalcanal, a much larger island, for six months. They were at Tarawa four days, and the total acreage of Betio is only one-half square mile. In this compacted space there were almost 6,000 dead soldiers, enemy and American.