D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  MARINE DEAD ON THE BEACHES OF TARAWA (USMC).

  In an awful indication of the ferocity of the fighting, burial details were able to identify only half of the 997 dead Marines. The fighting was so brutal and continuous that the men had almost no time to eat or sleep. “There was just no way to rest; there was virtually no way to eat. Mostly it was close, hand-to-hand fighting and survival for three and a half days. It seemed like the longest period of my life.” Major Carl Hoffman recalled.52

  At Guadalcanal, the Japanese evacuated their forces when the cause became hopeless. On Betio, they left crack troops to fight and die. Only seventeen Japanese soldiers were captured. It wasn’t an American victory; it was a small holocaust. Even the killing ground was massacred. There was nothing left standing on Betio but the blackened stumps of palm trees and the defiant walls of empty, blown-out blockhouses. The air was still, and the stink of death was in it.

  When the correspondents came back to Betio at the end of the fighting their senses were assaulted. “As T walked up the pier, from the comparatively clean smelling sea, the overwhelming smell of the dead hit me full in the face,” Sherrod recalls, “and I vomited a little. By dark I was used to it again.” No picture, he said, could capture the devastation of Betio. “You can’t smell pictures.”53

  On the final day, Eddie Albert was back in the lagoon picking up marble white corpses that had been in the water for two days. “In the heat, they float very quickly in the warm water. And so I picked them up and took them back for a proper burial.”54 When the tide came in, it carried the mangled and swollen bodies of men who had died off the reef. Corpsmen waded in and fished them out of the water and placed them on the sand. Some of the men had been in the water so long their hair had washed off. “I always expected them to lift their heads for air hut they never did,” said one Marine.55

  The bodies were placed in a long line on the sand. Nearby, a man in a bulldozer prepared a large trench. The uncovered bodies were placed in it, and a chaplain performed the last rites. “The bulldozer pushes some more dirt in the Marines’ faces and that is all there is to it. Then the bulldozer starts digging a second trench.”56

  It was high tide. Watching the water splash against the seawall to a depth of three feet, carrying the dead who were on the beach to the seawall itself, where they floated grotesquely, it struck Sherrod that the death tide of Tarawa might have saved more Marines than it killed. If the tide had come in earlier the invaders would not have had a beachhead on D-Day. They would have had to go over the seawall and into killing fire, or else back into the lagoon.

  When the battle was over, Sherrod walked the island’s perimeter, recording what he saw in his notebook. “Betio would be more habitable,” he wrote, “if the Marines could leave for a few days and send a million buzzards in.”57 Meeting up with a group of generals who had come on the island to assess the damage, he spotted something that ennobled all this human savagery. It was a dead Marine, leaning forward against the seawall, with one upraised arm on it, supporting his body. Just beyond his hand, on the top of the wall, was a blue and white flag, a beach marker to designate the spot where his assault wave was to land. Looking at it, General Holland Smith said: “How can men like that ever be defeated?”58

  Sherrod would say later: “If we ever fought a battle in which courage was the dominant factor, it was at Tarawa.”59

  When the Marines left the island, William Jones and his men had to stay behind to bury the Japanese who had killed so many of their friends. They buried them as their fellow Marines had been originally buried, in big trenches, the bodies stacked like the coconut logs of the Betio fortifications. “Then we unburied our dead,” Jones recalls, “and put them on a ship to take them back to Honolulu. After the war, the Japanese came back and removed their dead for proper burial.”60

  Robert Sherrod left Tarawa convinced of something people back home did not want to hear: that there was no way to defeat the enemy except by extermination. In late 1943, when American production began to reach its fabulous potential, a lot of Americans expected the war to end soon, brought to a sudden conclusion by fire from the sky. We would bomb Germany and Japan back to the stone age; close combat would be unnecessary. Tarawa put the lie to this. The road from Tarawa to Tokyo would be one of the bloodiest campaigns in all of history, and every fight would be to the death. There would be no more enemy evacuations as at Kiska and Guadalcanal, a chilling thing to contemplate. “When I told my mother what the war was really like, and how long it was going to take, she sat down and cried,” said a bomber pilot who returned home from the Pacific in 1943. “She didn’t know we were just beginning to fight the Japs.”61 But how was this to be made known to the American public?

  Sherrod and a number of others who covered the war believed the American people were being lied to. There were combat correspondents who filed unvarnished reports, but government censors and cooperating news agencies rewrote them, playing up the positive and shielding the public from the bloody harvest of the war. After Tarawa, Sherrod returned to an America that was “not prepared psychologically,” he wrote, “to accept the cruel facts of war.”62

  Sherrod’s stories in Time and Life gave the double-barreled bad news of Tarawa’s butcher’s bill and the certainty of higher costs to come. But it was the visual evidence that really struck home. Since World War I, the government had prohibited the media from showing pictures of dead American soldiers, even of bodies covered with blankets. This changed two months before Tarawa, when the head of the newly created Office of War Information, Elmer Davis, the “Mount Everest” of radio news commentators, asked President Roosevelt to lift the ban on the publication of photographs of dead American soldiers. The public, Davis insisted, “had a right to be truthfully informed” about the war, subject to restraints dictated by military security. Roosevelt relented, and Life magazine led the way, publishing a photograph by George Strock of three dead American soldiers Lying on a desolate beach at Buna. This provoked tremendous controversy, and readers and other news writers assailed Life for giving people more of the war than they could take, or for engaging in “morbid sensationalism.”63

  THIS PHOTO OF A SHATTERED JAPANESE PILLBOX REVEALS THE FEROCITY OF THE FIGHTING ON TARAWA (USMC).

  This was the situation when Norman Hatch returned from Tarawa with 3,700 feet of film. The Marines had imposed no censorship restrictions on photographers and correspondents at Betio; they had been free to document the battle as they witnessed it. Still, Hatch expected to run into trouble with the military censors. He was shocked when the Navy released all of his film to the newsreels. Theaters across the country began showing the first unrestricted combat shots that the American public had ever seen, and Hatch’s name was put on the marquees. Hatch’s footage was also used in a color-tinted documentary film the Marine Corps produced for general distribution. But the film, With the Marines at Tarawa, could not be released without Roosevelt’s approval.

  The President was in a quandary. Photographs of the carnage at Tarawa had al ready appeared in the press, along with a statement from Holland Smith that Tarawa was taken only because of the willingness of the assault forces to die.64 This caused a storm of outrage, as did the release of the casualty lists. Why, people wondered, had American boys paid such a frightful price to take an obscure stand of coral that should have been blasted into oblivion. Was this some horrible intelligence blunder by the Navy? Some congressmen called for a special investigation, and Nimitz’s office was flooded by mail from mothers who accused him of killing their sons.

  Roosevelt had heard that the Tarawa film was graphic and wondered if the public was ready for it. On the other hand, the war bond drive was flagging, and a film like this, showing what America was up against in the Pacific, might give it a boost. Robert Sherrod helped the President make up his mind, as he recounted years later.

  I WAS TOLD ABOUT THIS TARAWA film and allowed to see the rough cuts before it was edited. And they were pretty raw, pretty bloody. People
didn’t know the war was that bad.

  I went to one of Roosevelt’s press conferences and stayed afterward and had a chat with him, as I had done before many times during the war. He had been in Teheran meeting with Stalin and Churchill at the time of the Tarawa battle and they hadn’t told him a great deal about it apparently, because he said to me. “Why didn’t they use the battleship shells to blow up the island?” And [I told him] they had used the battleship shells. They used everything they had. Then the President said, “What about that movie they shot? I hear it’s pretty raw. pretty rugged.”

  “Yes sir,” I said. “That’s the way it is out there.” And I recommended that he release it.

  The movie was shown. Not the rawest part, but enough to indicate that this is going to be a hard war to finish fighting in the next two years. [After] it was released, I saw the chief of public relations at Marine Corps headquarters, and he said, “What were the consequences of releasing that film? Enlistments fell off 35 percent.”65

  But war bond sales increased dramatically, the film won an Oscar in 1944 for best documentary, and the wide-angle photograph that Frank Filan shot on the first day from the beach, Tarawa Island, won a Pulitzer Prize. Like Mathew Brady’s Civil War exhibition, “The Dead of Antietam,” the film and photographs of Tarawa showed Americans on the home front a war they had not yet seen. In doing this, they helped strengthen public resolve for even grimmer struggles ahead. “We must steel ourselves now,” the New York Times warned, “to pay [the] price.”66

  Tarawa, the first great test of Marine amphibious assault doctrine, rewrote the book on Storm Landings, pointing up the need for greater and more accurate naval gunfire and air bombardment, for frogmen and underwater demolition teams to clear obstacles and scout beaches and tides, for more and better-armed amphibious assault vehicles.67 But the principal weapon on Tarawa needed no improving: a Marine wading ashore with his rifle at the ready.

  Tarawa was the culmination of almost two decades of Navy and Marine Corps amphibious planning. “At Tarawa,” wrote General A. A. Vandegrift, “we validated the principle of the amphibious assault, a tactic proclaimed impossible by many military experts…. Hereafter no matter what the strength of [the enemy’s] bastion he could never feel secure. This was the real lesson of Tarawa.”68

  The Combined Chiefs of Staff, formed immediately after Pearl Harbor, was the supreme Anglo-American military authority. It was made up of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and its equivalent, the British Chiefs of Staff. The committee advised the President and Prime Minister on military strategy and carried out military decisions taken by them. The committee sat in Washington and was chaired by Leahy.

  The first LVTs were modified versions of vehicles used by Roehling for hunting trips in the Florida swamplands. They were excruciatingly slow, with a maximum speed of nine miles per hour on land and four in the water. Lightly armored, they were essentially seagoing light trucks. By 1944, improved versions were capable of speeds of seventeen to twenty mph on land and five to six in the surf, which made them still slower than the DUKWs. But unlike the DUKW, the tracked LVT could crawl over almost anything, including, most importantly, the fringing reef of a coral island.

  By 1944, the greatly improved LVT (A) was virtually an amphibious light tank. It had a snubnosed, turret-mounted 75mm howitzer, along with four machine guns. And its armor could withstand machine gun fire and exploding shell fragments, although not direct artillery hits.

  *The Joint Chiefs of Staff, formally constituted in February 1942, was the President’s foremost advisory body on the planning and conduct of the war. From mid-1942 to the end of the war, its members were General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of American naval operations, Lieutenant General Henry II. “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, and Admiral William D. Leahy. Although Leahy, an old confidant of Roosevelt’s, was the committee’s chairman and the President’s chief of staff, the committee was dominated by Marshall, who became Roosevelt’s chief military advisor.

  *The LVTs was also called amphtracs or amtracs, although most Marines called them Alligators, the name their inventor, Donald Roehling, had given them.

  Saipan

  ITALY

  While American Marines were storming the beaches of Betio in late November 1943, Ernie Pyle’s foot-slogging infantry was fighting the mud, the snow, and the Germans in the forbidding mountains of central Italy, in a campaign that was as abysmally planned and ferociously fought as Tarawa. It was a campaign that had begun in controversy the previous summer.

  With North Africa cleared and control of the waters of the Mediterranean assured in the late spring of 1942, the Allies prepared the first blow against Europe. The objective was not northern France, as the Americans had hoped, but what Churchill called Europe’s “soft underbelly.”

  Sicily was the first target. One of the principal objectives of the Italian campaign would be to bring down the weakened regime of dictator Benito Mussolini, taking one of the three main Axis partners out of the war. The airfields at Foggia, in southwest Italy, would also enable Allied air forces to reach southern Germany and the vast oil fields of Romania, Hitler’s chief source of crude oil. And an Allied offensive in Italy would force Hitler to divert combat divisions from the Russian front, relieving the pressure on Stalin’s Red Army, which was bearing the overwhelming burden of the land war against Germany. The Italian campaign, which began with the invasion of Sicily from bases in North Africa in July 1945, achieved every one of these objectives, but at a terrible cost in lives. Italy also siphoned off men and resources that could have been used in the Pacific to hasten the surrender of Japan.

  After taking Sicily, the Allied high command was convinced that the Germans would not commit to an all-out fight in Italy because of long supply lines and British American mastery of the air in the Mediterranean basin. But when Mussolini was ousted in a palace coup and the new government signed an armistice with the Allies. an infuriated Hitler disarmed the Italian army, shipped off 600,000 Italian troops to slave labor camps in Germany, rescued Mussolini from his Italian captors in a daring airborne raid on a mountaintop hotel, and poured in massive reinforcements. The Germans held on for over 500 days, fighting a brilliant defensive campaign, not surrendering until May 2, 1945, the day the Berlin garrison capitulated, effectively ending the war in Europe.

  The Italian campaign was, in reporter Robert Capa’s words, a nightmare of “mud, misery, and death.”1 It was the longest campaign fought by the Western Allies and a horrid throwback to the useless bloodletting of World War I. The Allies would suffer 312,000 casualties, 188,000 of them Americans. The Germans would lose 435,000 men. But the largest loser was Italy itself. Museums, archives, cathedrals, archaeological treasures, and ancient monasteries were blasted and burned, and hundreds of towns were pulverzied beyond recognition, their half-starved survivors turned into war-shocked refugees.

  The Allied forces invaded Italy on September 3, 1943. British General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army crossed the Strait of Messina from northern Sicily and advanced up the toe of the Italian boot, hoping to draw German troops away from the main invasion force, which was to land six days later at Salerno, just south of Naples. Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, a multinational force made up of troops from nearly every Allied nation, with Americans predominating, would make that landing. Montgomery was to push up from the south and link up with him.

  The plan unraveled when Field Marshal Albert Kesselring guessed exactly where the Allies would land and was waiting for them in the hills overlooking the beachhead. And Montgomery was not there to help. He had been held up by German engineers, who were blowing up mountain roads and bridges along his tortuous line of advance.

  On September 12 Kesselring made a slashing counteroffensive. When his panzer divisions smashed through the American lines, Clark considered calling in the Navy and evacuating the entire invasion f
orce. But the Germans ran into overwhelming American artillery fire, causing them to pull back temporarily. Clark then got support from Allied airpower and Navy ship-to-shore fire—and from the 82nd Airborne Division, which made a perilous night drop on the beach. By September 15, the counterattack had lost its force and the Germans began an orderly withdrawal to the north, dark’s Fifth Army joined with Montgomery’s Eighth, coming up from the south, and pursued them.

  It had been a close call. Of all the American amphibious landings of the war, this one and Tarawa came nearest to failing. The Allies entered Naples on October 7, bin the campaign turned into a bloody stalemate when the Germans retired to strong defenses in the mountains of central Italy. “Between Naples and Rome Mr. Winston Churchill’s ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ was pregnant with hard mountains and well-placed German machine guns,” wrote Robert Capa. “The valleys between the mountains were soon filled with hospitals and cemeteries.”2 By this time, Generals Montgomery, Patton, and Eisenhower had gone to England to prepare for the cross Channel invasion, taking with them troops and military equipment that were desperately needed in Italy’s murderous mountain combat. Relegated to a secondary role in the big strategic picture, Clark’s men slogged ahead, wet, tired, and miserable, fighting on ridges of solid rock where Army mules were more valuable than jeeps and tanks.