Report On Tarawa: Marines’ Show

Aboard one of the many troop transports plowing the long sea furrows to Tarawa, and later in the hell of Betio, was TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod. His story:

Ship life was dull. The men of the and Marine Division fairly wilted in their crowded, hot quarters. They spent an hour each day cleaning rifles, sharpening bayonets, then another hour studying aerial photographs and contour maps of Betio, the little bird-shaped island that was the main fortification of Tarawa atoll. There was nothing else to do except see movies, read dog-eared magazines, play cards and sleep, which Marines can do at any time in any position on almost any given surface.

The Marines seemed anything but excited. More than half of them were veterans of Guadalcanal. They had the calm confidence of a Corps which assumes that it is the best fighting force in the world. They knew that the most concentrated bombing and shelling in history would precede their landing: almost 1,000 tons of aerial bombs, plus 1.500 tons of shellfire, on Betio’s crowded, scant square mile (see cut). But they could not be sure that even this tremendous pre-landing bombardment would wreck the defenses built by the Japs. On the night before battle, sweat-drenched men packed the wardroom, spilled into the passageways to pray with their chaplains.

D Day. Long before dawn of D Day the first wave of Marines was in its boats, the second wave was climbing down the nets in half-moonlight. At 5 a.m. the sky lit up like the crack of doom: battleship guns were pounding Betio. Soon light and heavy cruisers joined the concert of inferno. Ashore, flames spurted hundreds of feet high. Surely, the Marines thought, mortal men could not stand such pounding.

The Marines’ confidence rose. They wondered if the Japs, who undoubtedly knew that the Americans were coming, might now have evacuated Tarawa as they had Kiska. Then, suddenly, a great splash kicked up the sea a few hundred feet from one transport, only 50 feet from another. The Japs were firing their coastal guns. Betio would not be another Kiska, after all.

H Hour. The first wave had been ordered to hit the shore at 8:30. Correspondent Sherrod had been assigned to the fifth wave, commanded by Major Howard Rice, which would reach the beach 31 minutes later, presumably after the first four waves had established comfortable positions. But now it was obvious that H Hour would be delayed because the Jap fire had forced the transports to shift to a safer area.

The fifth wave milled around in what had turned into broad daylight. Now the naval gunfire mounted to an unbelievable crescendo of thunder, smoke and fire. Then came the planes, dropping big bombs, little bombs, incendiary bombs. Wave after wave after wave of torpedo-bombers and dive-bombers from carriers crossed and crisscrossed Betio. Offshore, the rough sea tossed the Higgins craft and drenched the Marines and their weapons.

Black Hours. A mile ahead something was happening. The early waves were not hitting the beach as they should. A control boat sped up and its officer shouted : “You’ll have to go in right away as soon as I can get a boat for you. The shell around the island is too shallow to take the Higgins boats.” The news was chilling. It meant something dimly foreseen but hardly expected: the shallow coral reef around Betio would bar landing save by special small, steel-plated boats, of which there were all too few, or by wading.

A small boat came alongside Correspondent Sherrod’s party. An officer said: “Half of you men get in here. They need help bad on the beach.” Jap shells began peppering the water. Major Rice and 17 men scampered into the small craft, which headed for the beach through a barrage of mortar and automatic-weapon fire. The Higgins boat milled around for another ten minutes, getting its share of near-misses. One Marine picked a half-dozen pieces of shrapnel from his lap, stared at them. Another said: “Oh God, I’m scared.

I’ve never been so scared in my life.” Two more small boats, disabled, passed.

The officer of a third offered to take the remainder of the Higgins boatload as far as he could. As the men shifted, they saw another craft half a mile ahead puffing smoke, saw figures jumping over its side into the water. By now the Marines real ized that this was going to be a landing, if any, in the face of enemy machine guns.

Said the wild-eyed small-boat boss : “It’s hell in there. They’ve already knocked out a lot of boats and there are a lot of wounded men, lying on the beach from the first wave. They need men bad. I can’t take you all the way in because we’ve got to get back out here safely and get some more men in there quick. But I’ll let you out where you can wade in.” The men crouched low. The little vessel was loaded with silent prayers.

Then the boat boss said: “;From here on you can walk in” The men in the boat, about 15 in all, slipped into neck-deep water.

Bloody Hours. Five or six machine guns were concentrating all their fire on the group. Any one of the 1 5 would have sold his chances for an additional $25 on his life insurance policy. There were at least 700 yards to walk slowly, and as the waders rose on to higher ground, they loomed as larger and larger targets. Those who were not hit would always remember how the bullets hissed into the water inches to the right, inches to the left.

After centuries of wading through shallowing water and deepening machine-gun fire, the men split into two groups. One group headed straight for the beach. The other struck toward a coconut log pier, then crawled along it past wrecked boats, a stalled bull dozer, countless fish killed by concussion. Those who got ashore did not know just how many of the 15 had been lost — probably three or four.

Near the landing point, a boat in on the first wave had stalled.

A 20-year-old crewman on the boat had been shot through the head, and had murmured: “I think I’m hit, will you look?” Now he lay on the beach. A Jap ran out of a coconut-log blockhouse into which Marines were tossing dynamite. As he emerged a Marine flamethrower engulfed him. The Jap flared like a piece of celluloid. He died before the bullets in his cartridge belt finished exploding 60 seconds later.

The Marine beachhead at this point comprised only the 20 feet between the water line and the retaining wall of coconut logs which ringed Betio. Beyond this strip, Jap snipers and machine-gunners were firing. In a little revetment was the headquarters of Major Henry P. (“Jim”) Crowe, a tough, red-mustached veteran who had risen from the Marine ranks to command of one of the assault battalions. Near by passed a parade of wiremen, riflemen, mortarmen and stretcher bearers.

A handsome young Marine walked briskly toward Major Crowe’s headquarters, grinning in greeting to a pal. There was a shot. The Marine spun around, fell to the beach dead. He had been shot through the temple. A Jap sniper had waited since early morning for just such a shot at a range of less than ten yards.

A bit later a voice called: “Major, send somebody to help me! The son-of-a-bitch got me.” Two men crawled over the retaining wall, dragged back a Marine shot through the knee. Then a mortar man 75 yards down the beach rose to a kneeling position, tumbled with a sniper’s bullet through his back. The wounded man’s companion popped up to help, got a bullet through the heart.

The Low Point. That was the way it went the first day. The assault battalions had been cut to ribbons. Anyone who ventured beyond the beachhead and the retaining wall — and by mid-afternoon several hundred Marines had so ventured — was likely to become a casualty. From treetop concealment and from pill box slits Jap snipers and machine-gunners raked the Americans.

But the Marines did not weaken. One remarked that a friend had lost a piece of his thumb: “He just looked down at it and laughed and kept on going. That damn fool has plenty of guts.” The story of another “casualty” got around: “He got shot pretty bad in the shoulder but he won’t even come in to let ’em dress it until he finds the mucker that shot him. He’s still out there pokin’ his rifle in all the holes and shootin’ like hell and gettin’ shot at a million times a minute.” At great risk from shore batteries, destroyers ran close to the beach, opened up on targets as small as one Jap sniper or one pillbox mound. It was precision firing, the shells often landing less than 50 yards from the Marines. If the high explosives did not wreck many of the fortifications, they did strip away most of the islands’ palm fronds.

The first night passed perilously. The Marines held three beachheads, the longest less than 100 yards from end to end, the deepest 70 yards inland. The Japs commanded the rest of the island. For every Marine who slept in a foxhole, two kept watch through the darkness.

The Turning Point. Next morning before dawn a lone Jap plane came over, shied away as U.S. ships put up a terrific ack-ack barrage. Soon after the first light the 2nd Division’s reserves made for shore. From the beachhead it was a sickening sight.

Even before they climbed out of their Higgins boats, the reserves were under machine-gun fire. Many were cut down as they waded in, others drowned. Men screamed and moaned. Of 24 in one boat only three reached shore.

Low tide that morning bared the bodies of many Marines, some hunched grotesquely, others with arms outstretched, all arrested while charging forward. At regimental headquarters, located 30 yards inland against a Jap log-and-steel-laced blockhouse, staff officers worked grimly. Colonel David Shoup, huge, bull-necked commander of the men ashore, reported: “We’re in a mighty tight spot. . . . We’ve got to have more men.” It was touch-&38;-go whether the Marines would all be killed, or, less likely, be pushed back into the sea.

The turning point came about 1 p.m. on the second day. Millions of bullets, hundreds of tons of explosive poured into the stubborn Japs. Strafing planes and dive-bombers raked the island. Light and medium tanks got ashore, rolled up to fire high explosive charges point-blank into the snipers’ slots of enemy forts. Artillery got ashore, laid down a pattern over every yard of the Jap positions. Ceaseless naval gunfire became more accurate.

But the decisive factor was the fighting spirit of the U.S.

Marines. Not every Corpsman was a natural hero: some quivered and hugged the beach, but most—those who feared and those who disdained death—went forward into the Jap fire.

Lieut. William D. Hawkins, a Texan, led his platoon into the coconut palms. Though twice wounded, he refused to retire. He personally cleaned out six machine-gun nests, sometimes by standing on top of a half-track and firing at four or five Japs who fired back from blockhouses. One of Hawkins’ men sobbed: “My buddy was shot in the throat. He was bleeding like hell and saying in a low voice, ‘Help me, help me!’ I had to turn my head.

We kept on advancing.” At least two wounded company commanders, and probably half a dozen others, stayed at the front directing operations. The percentage of men who fought on despite injuries was very high.

The Victory Point. That afternoon Colonel Shoup wiped his red forehead with a grimy sleeve, said: “Well, I think we’re winning, but the bastards have got a lot of bullets left. I think we’ll clean up tomorrow.” The Colonel was right. On the third day the Japs began to fall apart. The Marines advanced inland at a mounting pace, overran Betio’s valuable airfield, bottled the Japs in the island’s tail. U.S.

casualties fell off rapidly. Before noon it became evident that the Jap list of killed and wounded would be longer than the American. That was no consolation to the leathernecks who had seen their mates fall. But there was satisfaction in mopping up the snipers. One gang of 50 Marines fired rifles and carbines into one coconut tree at a trapped Jap. He returned the fire after he had been hit at least 50 times.

The Japs were crack Imperial Marines. Some, when they realized that further opposition was useless, removed their split-toed, rubber-soled jungle shoes, placed rifles against their foreheads, pulled triggers with their big toes. But most fought to the death.

The enemy’s stout pillboxes drew admiration from the Americans. Said a Marine officer: “You’ve got to hand it to them.

They’ve got a mighty good engineer working for them.” The fortifications had stood up under naval guns, land artillery, 1,000-lb. aerial bombs, point-blank tank fire. When U.S. half-tracks, mounting 75-mm. guns, got ashore, the Marines enjoyed following them. These machines stuck their gun barrels into pillbox openings, fired away. One Jap hit by a 75-mm. shell flew high into the air, then spiraled down, disintegrating as he fell.

“Semper Fidelis.” The third afternoon and next day the waterlogged bodies on the coral flats were gathered up, the crude island graveyards were filled. The U.S. Marines, living and dead, had proved they could take it as superbly as any fighting men had ever taken it.