Across the Reef at Tarawa

The profound shock of the bloody amphibious assault at Tarawa provided a sobering preview of what was to come in the Pacific war, as well as the lessons that would be learned and heeded by the Marine Corps and Navy leading to ultimate victory. Some measure of the horror is depicted in Tarawa,

20 Nov 1943, by Col. Charles H. Waterhouse, USMCR (Ret.), 1975, acrylic on canvas.

Across the Reef at Tarawa

For its duration, the short, savage Battle of Tarawa was the bloodiest amphibious assault of the war. When it shuddered to a halt, seventy-six hours after the initial landing, nearly 6,000 men lay dead in an area smaller than the space occupied by the Pentagon and its parking lots. Eleven hundred were United States Marines.

Few amphibious battles in the Pacific would levy such terrific demands on Marine leadership. Every man would be tested in this fiery crucible, but none more so than those at the front of the shock troops.

Commandant Thomas Holcomb had selected Major General Julian Smith to command the 2d Marine Division. Some considered Smith too soft-spoken and inexperienced to lead a 20,000-man division into brutal combat. But Holcomb, who had seen war at its worst in France, knew Smith to be fearless under fire and a superb trainer of men.

Smith, in turn, picked Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, hero of Tulagi and Guadalcanal, for his chief of staff and – acting on a shrewdly perceptive hunch – kept the unknown, unproved Lieutenant Colonel David Shoup as his amphibious planner. Later, just before the battle, Smith would follow another hunch and give Shoup command of the assault regiment (promoting him to colonel in the process), wisely making his talented subordinate both the architect and executioner of the forcible seizure of Tarawa.

Sobered by Betio’s [one of Tarawa atoll’s five main islands] elaborate fortifications, Julian Smith, Edson, and Shoup requested a preliminary seizure of an offshore island as an artillery fire support base, three days of combined naval, air, and artillery pounding, a diversionary landing, and full use of the 2d Marine Division’s three regimental combat teams. Nimitz and Spruance had to reject all of this. Speed of execution would prevail.

The strength of the Japanese garrison on Betio came as no surprise to Julian Smith, Red Mike Edson, or David Shoup. The landing force knew a month in advance the location and field of fire of 95 percent of Betio’s 500 pillboxes and gun emplacements.

The concept of converting the thin-skinned, unarmored, logistical amphibian tractors (LVTs) into reefcrossing, assault landing craft to carry storm troops ashore over a fringing reef originated with Lieutenant Colonel Brute Krulak in an earlier “crash test” elsewhere in the South Pacific, but the 2d Marine Division troops at Tarawa were the pioneers who gambled with the idea when all the stakes were on the line.

Shoup favored using LVTs to assault Betio from the git-go. Major Henry Drewes, commanding the 2d Amphibian Tractor Battalion, organized an enterprising crew of tinkerers and scroungers to convert the best seventy-five of his beat-up Guadalcanal vehicles for tactical use. They applied lightweight, bolt-on armor to the cabs, festooned the topsides with machine guns, and made field-fixes to the exhaust and bilge pump systems to better survive the extended ship-to-shore movement.

But seventy-five old LVTs were too few to do the job. That’s when Julian Smith energized Howlin’ Mad Smith to “howl” at “Terrible” Turner to ensure delivery of at least fifty of the new LVT-2 Water Buffaloes. “No LVTs, no landings,” Smith barked.

Major Drewes dispatched a provisional company of “amtrackers” (LVT crewmen) to Samoa. There, very late in the preliminary stage, they received delivery of the new vehicles, quickly mastered them, and just as quickly took off in three LSTs (tank landing ships) to join the Tarawa task force off Betio on the early morning of D-Day, in the very nick of time.

The Navy promised to “obliterate” Betio in its allotted three hours of preliminary bombardment. The red dawn on D-Day brought swift, deadly reality. The command ship’s principal radio net became the first casualty. Each time the battleship Maryland fired her main guns, the concussion knocked more landing force radio nets out of commission. Julian Smith would suffer from marginal to nonexistent communications with Shoup, his tactical commander ashore, for the next thirty critical hours.

The vaunted prelanding bombardment never came close to “obliterating” Betio. Nor were the carrier pilots effective in their two strafing and bombing missions. One arrived late, the other early; neither did any real damage. The eagerly expected mission of USAAF medium bombers with 2,000-pound “daisy-cutter” bombs failed to materialize. It turned out they never got the request submitted by the Marines weeks in advance. This error would cost scores of lives.

[Japanese commander Admiral] Shibasaki may have been poorly served by his coast defense guns, but his dual-purpose (antiair, antiboat) gun mounts had a field day shooting horizontally at point-blank ranges against the U.S. landing craft. These deadly guns, ranging from 75mm to 127mm, sat in open emplacements, fully vulnerable to air-burst munitions that had not been used. Now the Marines would have to overrun each position by direct assault with rifles.

Incredibly, despite the interminable ship-to-shore movement and the hot reception provided by Shibasaki’s gunners, the first three assault waves of Marines in their LVTs made it ashore in wholesale numbers. Japanese gunners, perhaps flustered by the LVTs, knocked out only eight of the eighty-seven assault vehicles. David Shoup’s great gamble had paid off in spades. In ten minutes he had 1,500 Marines hugging the seawall along Betio’s north shore.

Then the wheels came off the assault. The Marines hoped by mid-morning to have enough water over the reef for their Higgins boats to cross with ease. But something was terribly wrong. The fourth and fifth waves, mounted in Higgins boats, crashed to a halt all along the partially exposed reef. The troops were still 500 to 600 yards from the beach, and the water was already dotted with crisscrossing machine gun bullets, the air rent by terrifying near-misses from the antiaircraft guns.

Marines take cover behind the coconut palm sea wall on Red Beach 3, Tarawa.

National Archives

Shoup’s “Plan B” called for the empty LVTs to return to the reef, transfer troops from the boats, and recycle to the beach. This worked only momentarily. Then the big, untouched, dual-purpose guns began to spout their deadly fire against the thin-skinned LVTs, blowing them up, setting them ablaze.

The Marines in the follow-on waves could only curse, scramble out of their grounded boats, climb across the razorsharp coral, and begin the agonizingly slow wade ashore. Here was the first day of Belleau Wood reincarnated. The blue-green waters of the lagoon turned a milky crimson.

Japanese fire was particularly vicious on the right flank, where Red Beach One included a dangerous concave reentrant, soon called “The Pocket.” Here a battery of four Japanese 75mm dual-purpose guns butchered the approaching landing craft.

So ghastly was the slaughter that Major John Schoettel honestly believed he had witnessed the loss of his entire 3d Battalion, 2d Marines. When Shoup radioed him to slide left, land near the pier, then work his way back west, Schoettel replied bitterly, “We have nothing left to land.”

Unknown to Schoettel, one of his company commanders, Major Michael “Mike” Ryan, had survived the bloodbath with at least half of his force intact by staying low and shifting westward, beyond the killing zone.

Dozens of soaked stragglers, the human debris of four different landing teams, many weaponless, gravitated to Ryan.

These would become “Ryan’s Orphans”; collectively they would win this dreadful battle.

Colonel Shoup’s personal ship-to-shore odyssey took four hours, during which he lost two thirds of his regimental staff and suffered minor wounds and a badly wrenched knee. In spite of the absolute hell that was Betio – and in spite of the total collapse of his intricate assault plan – Shoup kept his head and his blazing will to win.

With a handful of aides he established a command post on the lee side of a still-occupied Japanese bunker near the base of the pier. He would not budge from this spot – nor even sit down – for the duration. The Rock of Tarawa was ashore and in command.

Four hours after his assault waves stormed ashore on Betio Island, Julian Smith realized his division was in the fight of its life. The “heaviest preliminary bombardment of the war to date” had failed to diminish the firepower and fighting spirit of the Japanese rikusentai who infested the little spit of an island like a hive of deadly bees.

And Smith sensed that something was freakishly wrong with the tide. Each of Smith’s reinforcing infantry units was hung up along the exposed reef in their boats – forced to wade ashore against that murderous machine gun fire. He had just committed his last reserves.

Smith sent a terse message to his superior officer, Major General Howlin’ Mad Smith, commanding V Amphibious Corps, ninety-five miles away at Makin: “Request release of Combat Team 6. Issue in doubt.”

Julian Smith did not exaggerate. The Battle of Tarawa would truly hang in the balance for its first thirty hours.

There were no LVTs left by the time Shoup ordered Major Robert Ruud’s 3d Battalion, 8th Marines, to land on the left flank. Hundreds were shot down while wading in, despite [Major Hendry] Crowe’s frantic efforts to provide covering fire. The majority would get ashore, somehow, but the process took a day and a night and cost Ruud his unit integrity and most heavy weapons. That goddamned tide.

Shoup was never more vulnerable than that first night at Betio.

Five thousand of his Marines had crossed the Line of Departure. At least 1,500 lay dead or wounded. Many of the others were badly disorganized. Very few crew-served weapons had survived the disorderly wade from the reef.

Each Marine unit expected a major counterattack during the darkness. A gut-wrenching anxiety hovered over the riflemen in their shallow holes.

Where the Americans long believed that their D-Day bombardment had left Shibasaki too disorganized to attack, the impassioned admiral was in fact dead before dark.

Unaware of Shibasaki’s death, Shoup and Julian Smith were extremely glad to greet sunrise of the second day. Yet the issue remained in doubt.

The Marines could still not get an organized unit ashore.

The 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, tired and seasick from spending the night in their Higgins boats, tried to land on line in the center (another communications failure: Shoup wanted them to come ashore in column along the pier as [Artillery Commander Lt. Col. Presley] Rixey had done). They hit the reef hard, discovering in shock that the tide had not varied a foot in the last twenty-four hours, and proceeded to catch hell from every Japanese gunner on the island.

The sight of this slaughter caused Lieutenant Deane Hawkins to run amok along the pillboxes still dominating Red Beach Two.

This hellish morning, armed only with a handful of grenades and supernatural courage, Deane Hawkins attacked bunker after bunker. Hit several times, Hawkins raged against one emplacement after another, stuffing grenades through firing slits, down vent tubes, into rear entrances.

No man could survive the snapping cross fire that chased him across the open spaces. One Nambu machine-gunner put a 7.7mm round through Hawkins’ armpit, into his chest. He died in 10 minutes, surrounded by his brokenhearted scout-snipers.

But Hawkins’ personal vendetta diverted a lot of fire from the troops struggling ashore and inspired [Major Wood] Kyle’s shorthanded battalion to leap up and race across the island, runway and all, cutting Betio in two.

Shoup credited Hawkins with winning the battle.

A posthumous Medal of Honor went to his family. Julian Smith insisted the Navy name the captured airstrip “Hawkins Field,” the only infantryman to earn such a distinction.

Unknown to Shoup and Smith at the time, the greatest breakthrough of the battle was taking place along the western coast. There, in one brilliant hour, Mike Ryan led his “Orphans” in a carefully executed drive from north to south.

Making the most of his precious two Sherman tanks, and blessed with a shore fire control team whose radio still worked, Ryan swept south behind a protective wall of supporting fire, exterminating an entire company of rikusentai and a daunting tangle of pillboxes.

Suddenly – finally – Smith had a covered beach over which to land the 6th Marines, the combat team he had beseeched Holland Smith and Kelly Turner to release the day before.

The 1,000-yard transit [of Major William “Willie K” Jones’ 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, in rubber boats] took an hour, during which they were helpless targets, vividly backlit by the setting sun. But so thoroughly had “Ryan’s Orphans” cleared the coastline that not a single Japanese could uncork even a rifle shot in their direction.

Shoup, buoyed by finally having a fully organized and equipped battalion in the fight, released a situation report which quickly became a classic: “Casualties many; percentage dead unknown; combat efficiency: We are winning!”

The Marines now had the momentum. The third day of the battle bore little resemblance to the chaos of the first day and a half.

Willie K. Jones led his powerful battalion east down the length of the airfield, covering 800 yards before noon and relieving Woody Kyle’s encircled troops on the south coast. Shoup led a violent attack by his 2d Marines eastward against The Pocket. Jim Crowe and the 8th Marines continued to beat against the large sand-covered bunker to their left front.

By dark on D+2, the 8th Marines and Willie K. Jones’ 1/6 occupied parallel positions along opposite sides of the runway, two-thirds down the island. Julian Smith had come ashore to take command of his division, though sick at heart on viewing his appalling losses.

That night the surviving rikusentai organized a series of sharp attacks against Jones’ forward positions, culminating in an all-out charge by 600 to 700 riflemen.

Jones lost 40 killed and 100 wounded, but his disciplined companies held the line.

The fighting on Betio ended quickly the next morning. The 6th Marines swept to the eastern tail; the 2d Marines finally overran The Pocket.

Seizing heavily fortified Betio cost the 2d Marine Division 3,407 casualties. One man died for every three hit, reflecting the savagery of the fighting.

Tarawa provided a treasure trove of operational lessons. Under the lead of Holland Smith and Kelly Turner, the amphibians identified critical improvements needed in radio communications, naval gunfire, close air support, hydrographic intelligence, and assault weapons.

Encouragingly, many of these changes came about fast enough to be on hand for the Marshalls campaign six weeks later.

More than anything, the sacrifices of Tarawa had proven conclusively the validity of the doctrine of offensive amphibious assault first proclaimed by the handful of Marine and Navy pioneers at Quantico ten years earlier.

Island fighting became, if anything, worse as the war went on for the Marine Corps, with the Japanese resisting more and more fanatically as the Marines drew nearer to the Home Islands.

Mop Up in the Marshalls, by Col. Donald F. Dickson, USMCR, 1944, watercolor on paper.