Although achieving consensus on Tarawa was not easy, the process reflected one of the strengths of Nimitz’s team and of the admiral himself. Nimitz’s down-home demeanor and his love of small-town axioms concealed both his intellect and ferocity. He had been able to assemble a tremendous collection of field commanders, in part because of his openness and his ability to keep his own prodigious ego at bay while managing the egos of others. As part of the planning process, he was willing to accept ideas that conflicted with his own, which inspired those around him to express their opinions freely.
Kwajalein perhaps contradicts the image of Nimitz as a master compromiser. Nimitz wanted to invade Kwajalein, and Spruance and Turner did not. Nimitz finally said to them, “Sitting behind desks in the United States are able officers who would give their right arms to be out here fighting the war. If you gentlemen cannot bring yourselves to carry out my orders, I can arrange an exchange of duty with stateside officers who can. Make up your minds. You have five minutes. Do you want to do it or not?”
Roosevelt knew Nimitz’s strengths. In the early days of the war he told Frank Knox, “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won.” The previous week Knox had flown to Pearl Harbor to assess the extent of the disaster, and he’d returned convinced that Admiral Husband Kimmel was not the man to be commander-in-chief in the Pacific. The following day he and Roosevelt decided that Nimitz would be their choice. At the time Nimitz was head of the Bureau of Navigation. Earlier that year, Roosevelt had offered him the second-highest-ranking post in the Navy, that of Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet, but Nimitz asked to be excused, pleading that such an advance by a junior over so many officers his senior would generate ill will. Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of the choice of Nimitz, “No more fortunate appointment to this vital command could have been made.”
Nimitz had an eye for talent and chose his field commanders well. For his senior commander he picked Admiral Raymond Spruance. Many considered Spruance the most intelligent, most thorough senior officer in the Navy. His fame extended back to the victory at Midway, in which he, after replacing Admiral “Bull” Halsey, performed superbly by boldly but carefully directing the carriers Enterprise and Hornet and the attacks on Yamamoto’s fleet. After the battle Nimitz brought Spruance aboard as his chief of staff. At Nimitz’s Pearl Harbor headquarters, the two admirals swam and took long walks together and grew close. Spruance admired his boss’s intelligence, but more than anything else he respected what he called his “utter fearlessness.” Spruance said of Nimitz, “He is one of the few people I know who never knew what it meant to be afraid of anything.” Because he had a skin infection and was suffering from sheer exhaustion and was in no shape to fight a major battle, Halsey suggested that Spruance, an old cruiser commander, who had never before commanded a carrier, replace him. Nimitz took his advice and never regretted his decision. Captain Gilven Slonim, USN, writing in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, said of Midway that it was “the inception of the greatness of Admiral Raymond Spruance.” King’s flag secretary said, “I have never met a commander who did not prefer serving under the methodical Spruance.… My feeling was one of confidence when Spruance was there and one of concern when Halsey was there.” Samuel Eliot Morison called him “one of the greatest fighting and thinking admirals in American naval history.” Yet at Midway Spruance came under criticism for failing to engage Yamamoto after sinking four Imperial carriers. The Japanese fleet was still superior to the American fleet, and Spruance did not relish a night engagement. Spruance also knew that Nimitz preferred the competent to the flashy.
In mid-1943 Nimitz gave Spruance command of the newly created Central Pacific Force (which later became known as the Fifth Fleet in April 1944), the Navy’s striking arm in the Central Pacific, and promoted him to the rank of three-star admiral. Spruance exercised his new authority by asking Nimitz to appoint two officers as his amphibious experts: the colorful Admiral Richmond Kelly “Terrible” Turner and the cantankerous, Alabama-born leatherneck General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. Turner, whom Nimitz would name commander of the Joint Expeditionary Force, had a reputation for irascibility, much like King, but combined his short temper with a ferocious fighting spirit, an iron will, an unequaled attention to detail, and a keen and quick intelligence. After commanding amphibious forces for the landing on Guadalcanal and keeping those forces supplied, a Sisyphean task, Turner became widely regarded as a master tactician. The Japanese said Turner was like an “alligator—once he bites into something he will not let go.”
In 1940 and 1941, Holland Smith taught new Marine units the art of amphibious warfare, but Spruance’s first encounter with the general was while Smith was training the Army’s 7th Division in San Diego for the invasion of the Aleutians. Like Turner, Smith drove himself and his troops hard. When it came time to choose a leader to direct the ground forces for the Central Pacific campaign, the mild-mannered Spruance knew that the combative general was his man. If Spruance initially feared the pairing of Turner and Smith, it would eventually prove to be one of his better decisions. One Marine officer said of them, “The two men struck sparks like flint against steel,” adding that the partnership, “though stormy, spelled hell in bold red letters for the Japanese.” One naval officer called Turner “the meanest man I ever saw, and the most competent naval officer I ever served with.” Smith added, “Kelly Turner is aggressive, a mass of energy and a relentless task master. The punctilious exterior hides a terrific determination. He can be plain ornery.” Smith, however, was critical of the Navy for what he called its “mental arteriosclerosis.” An Army historian described Howlin’ Mad Smith as “a bully, something of a sadist.”
Tarawa was the first battle of the Central Pacific and the test of nearly two decades of joint Navy and Marine Corps planning. The force assigned to make the frontal assault was Major General Julian Smith’s 2nd Marines, half of them hard-bitten veterans of Guadalcanal, the other half young men only recently out of boot camp. Their target was the thirty-eight-island atoll’s main port, Betio, a 291-acre scrap of coral, lying only feet above the surf line. But Betio, 1,000 miles northeast of Guadalcanal and 2,400 miles west of Hawaii, was the most fiercely defended beach in the world. The Japanese had constructed a four-foot barrier wall of coconut logs and coral around the island. They had mined the beach and laid down long strings of double-apron barbed wire. Tank traps protected their command bunkers and firing positions, and nearly five hundred pillboxes were reinforced with steel plates, concrete, and sand. A garrison of 4,800 men, many of them first-rate naval troops, watched over the island behind quick-firing, eight-inch, turret-mounted naval rifles called “Singapore Guns,” heavy-caliber field artillery guns and howitzers, including powerful 200-mm coastal defense guns, heavy and light machine guns, 50-mm knee mortars, and tanks. Rear Admiral Meichi Shibasaki told his troops that “a million Americans couldn’t take Tarawa in one hundred years.” In early November, Admiral Koga learned of MacArthur’s invasion of Bougainville and decided that that was the major American thrust. Then came the carrier strike on Nauru atoll, west of the Gilbert Islands. By the time he realized that the Gilberts were the main target, it was too late. He sent troops from Truk, but by the time they arrived in the Marshalls, the Gilberts were lost.
Major General Julian Smith knew he wouldn’t have one million men, but he was hoping to add the 6th Marines to his attack force. When Holland Smith and the general in charge of the land invasion, informed him that they would be held in reserve, Julian Smith realized that he would be trying to take an island fortress with only a two-to-one superiority in troops. Marine shock attack doctrine clearly called for a three-to-one minimum.
The Navy unleashed a spectacular (3,000 tons of high explosives) but short-lived bombardment on the morning of D-Day. One admiral boasted, “We do not intend to neutralize [the island], we do not intend to destroy it. Gentlemen, we will obliterate it.” But Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief for Allied air, l
and, and sea forces in the Pacific Ocean, hoping to get the Marines on shore before the Japanese had time to regroup, limited the barrage to just three hours, twenty minutes shorter than it was supposed to be, which meant that the enemy had time to man their defenses while the Marines were still far from the point of attack. (Note: A plan to drop 2,000-pound bombs as the coup de grâce never materialized, and air support was canceled when it became clear that it could not be done safely—the Marines crossing the seawall were so close to the defenders that they would be hit by their own side’s aerial bombardment. Reporter Robert Sherrod wrote that despite the truncated barrage, everyone figured that most of the Japanese “would be dead by the time we got to the island.”
It was not to be. The first wave of 1,500 Marines went in on amtracs that crawled over the reef, plunged into the breaking waves, and chugged onto the beach. The rest, relying on faulty naval intelligence and obsolete tide charts (from 1841), came in on deeper-draft Higgins boats that slammed into the coral and stopped. Soon blood stained the surf red. Longtime residents had warned that the reef would be impassable. A pilot in a Navy patrol plane, looking down on the carnage, later admitted that he wanted to cry.
Holland Smith was already angry. Earlier he had been on Makin with General Ralph Smith and the slow-moving 27th Division, which was struggling on Butaritari Island, despite its being underdefended. After arriving on Betio, the primary disciple of the Marine doctrine of amphibious warfare became livid. Makin had been a fiasco, but Betio was a killing field. Naval bombardments (and minimal aerial bombardments) had failed to take out enemy blockhouses and pillboxes. Battleships and cruisers had pounded Betio, but they were not firing armor-piercing shells and most of their hits did little damage. That was left to his men—those Marines who were lucky enough to make it ashore alive. Ultimately Smith would liken Tarawa to Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, and criticize the Joint Chiefs for authorizing the invasion instead of leaving Tarawa to “wither on the vine.” Four thousand Marines assaulted the beach on D-Day. By midnight 1,500 of them were dead or badly wounded.
When Tarawa photos appeared in the press, and theaters across the country showed combat footage vetted by the Navy, angry editorials demanded a congressional investigation into the “fiasco.” Shortly after being sworn in as the eighteenth Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Alexander Vandegrift said that Tarawa had “validated the principle of the amphibious assault.” Grief-stricken mothers, however, reacted angrily, writing letters accusing Admiral Nimitz of sacrificing their sons for an inconsequential island many thousands of miles from Tokyo.
General MacArthur, choosing to forget that he had ordered his troops to attack Japanese bunkers head-on, Civil War style, at Buna on New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula, wrote the secretary of war, condemning the Navy for its “pride” and “ignorance.” Still hoping that the Joint Chiefs would choose his New Guinea–Mindanao axis as the primary road to Tokyo, he called the Marine frontal attack at Tarawa “a tragic and unnecessary massacre of American lives” and an omen of the slaughter to come in the Central Pacific. MacArthur ended with a promise to Stimson: “If you give me central direction of the war in the Pacific, I will be in the Philippines in ten months.”
Knowing that people back home were “not prepared psychologically to accept the cruel facts of war,” Robert Sherrod penned an unflinching story titled “The Nature of the Enemy,” which appeared in the July 1944 issue of Time magazine—though he wrote it shortly after Tarawa. Americans, he insisted, had to fortify themselves. Tarawa was a shocking portent, just the beginning of the savage Central Pacific campaign. Despite Americans’ belief that the war would be short-lived, Sherrod wrote that every battle would be a fight to the death.
For the Japanese, Tarawa was a sacrificial conflict. Nearly four thousand men, imbued with a wartime myth that glorified senshi—literally “death in battle”—and forbade surrender, gave up their lives for a coral atoll that Japanese war planners had already decided to forfeit. Sherrod speculated that perhaps it was time to stop treating the Japanese as if they were capable of reason, and time to consider the option of their extermination. On Attu, in the Aleutian Islands, the first campaign he reported, hundreds of Japanese forces blew themselves up with hand grenades or impaled themselves on their bayonets. On Tarawa only seventeen Imperial Marines dared to risk dishonor by turning themselves over to the enemy. Others died fighting or in senseless charges. Marines also found countless Japanese lying in their foxholes with the backs of their heads blown off. To gain entry into the Yasukuni shrine, which venerated those slain in war, and to avoid capture, a Japanese soldier would remove his shoes, put the barrel of his rifle in his mouth, and pull the trigger with his toe. At the close of the battle for Tarawa, it seemed to Sherrod that Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma’s prewar threat to correspondent Clark Lee amounted to more than casual defiance.
If, after Tarawa, Admiral Chester Nimitz wavered in his commitment to the Central Pacific and an amphibious doctrine that relied on initial striking power, speed, and high-risk “storm landings,” he did not show it. On November 26 he flew from Pearl Harbor to Funafuti in the Ellice Islands and then on to the Gilberts. “Tarawa,” he said, “knocked down the front door” to the Japanese defenses in the Central Pacific. He also asserted Tarawa’s strategic importance: the captured airfield on the island of Betio would allow B-24 Liberators to conduct photoreconnaissance of the Marshall Islands.
In truth, Betio’s strategic value was limited. Nimitz had squeezed in the attack between two Southwest Pacific Area efforts—the Marine invasion of Guadalcanal and MacArthur’s February 1944 assault on the Admiralties—because he and his superior, Admiral Ernest King, understood the necessity of seizing the offensive, of keeping the Japanese guessing where the next battle would occur.
Over time, the shock and despair that much of the American public felt over the carnage at Tarawa faded away. But in December 1943, Tarawa was a public-relations disaster. The reality, however, was that future battles in the Central Pacific would more closely resemble Tarawa than Guadalcanal, a large island where Imperial forces were spread too thin to challenge the landing. After Tarawa, the objectives would likely be small, fiercely defended positions. Moreover, the land assaults on Guadalcanal had been supported by nearby service bases in the New Hebrides and New Caledonia Islands, whereas afterward the support would come from floating carrier forces and an armada of battleships providing ship-to-shore bombardment. It was an entirely new, largely untested mode of warfare. Smith hoped that the Marines’ way of doing things would bring about quicker victories and reduce casualties, but the theory’s only dress rehearsal had been Tarawa, which was a disaster despite Admiral Raymond Spruance’s armada. It covered fifty square miles of ocean and included transports, nineteen carriers, twelve battleships, a flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers, 35,000 troops, and 6,000 vehicles. Nimitz had been made aware of the massive logistic “tail” the Central Pacific campaign would require while he was at the Naval War College in the 1920s. “The operations imposed upon BLUE [the United States],” he wrote in his senior thesis at the college, “will require a series of bases westward from Oahu, and will require the BLUE fleet to advance westward with an enormous train, in order to be prepared to seize and establish bases en route.”
Operation maps showed that the Japanese had coastal defense guns, antiaircraft guns, machine-gun pits, pillboxes, circular German-style blockhouses, and antitank trenches. In addition to the Type 89 127-mm dual-purpose guns, the Japanese had four 37-mm guns, nineteen 13-mm dual-purpose guns, ten 20-mm antitank guns, numerous light machine guns, and infantry weapons.
Every Marine—though most of them had never been in battle—harbored a burning hatred of the Japanese. They had all heard the story of the Marine prisoners who were beheaded and mutilated by their Japanese captors on Wake Island. All, too, were familiar with the fate of the “Goettge patrol” on Guadalcanal. (Richard Frank writes that the fate of the patrol remained in the collectiv
e memory of the Corps.) In August 1942, twenty Marines responded to what appeared to be a Japanese attempt to surrender. It was a ruse and the enemy soldiers ambushed, then shot and bayoneted the Marines. The motto after that became “kill or be killed,” and few Marines—or American combat men, in general—bothered to take prisoners. The Japanese fought like wild animals, so they were treated like wild animals. Many of the men who saw multiple battles in the Pacific would come to abhor the Japanese so much that the hate was like fear; they could taste it.
Bull Halsey said, “The only good Jap is a Jap who’s been dead for six months.” Leatherneck, the Marine monthly, ran a photo of Japanese corpses on Guadalcanal with a headline reading GOOD JAPS and a caption emphasizing that “GOOD JAPS are dead Japs.” In War Without Mercy, John Dower suggests that American servicemen regarded the Japanese in the same way the Germans regarded the Russians—as “untermenschen.”
Battle scenes on Roi-Namur are primarily drawn from the memoirs of Robert Graf, Colonel Albert Arsenault’s memoirs, and interviews with (and writings of) Carl Matthews.
CHAPTER 19: PARADISE
Details of Camp Maui are from Carl Matthews and dozens of other Marines who trained there.
The Army’s Jungle Training Center was near Camp Maui.
Graf and More learned that the 2nd Battalion was being restructured and all heavy weapons companies, including Company H, of which they had been members for almost one and a half years, were being dismantled. The .30-caliber machine-gun platoons were attached to the companies they supported, while the .50-caliber machine-gun platoon and 81-mm mortar platoon were reassigned to Battalion. Each full-strength company would now have 247 men with three sections of light and three sections of heavy machine guns.
CHAPTER 20: CAMP TARAWA
Details of Camp Tarawa are drawn from a variety of my interviews, including those with Frank Borta and Glenn Brem.
The Color of War Page 47
