The Conquering Tide
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Spruance wanted no part of the dispute, and simply ignored it. “Oh, Carl, don’t worry about it,” he told Moore. “They know what I want to do, and they’re not going to make any trouble.” That was not so. When no compromise emerged after prolonged argument, Moore put the question to Spruance again, and was told, “Fix it up to suit yourself.”75
The fleet commander’s laissez-faire attitude placed Moore, a navy captain, in the unenviable role of refereeing a stand-up fight between an admiral and a general. “They both complained to me about the other,” he recalled:
Holland Smith particularly complained about Kelly Turner. He was a whining, complaining type. He loved to complain. He loved to talk and loved to complain, and he would come and sit on my desk and growl about Turner. ‘All I want to do is kill some Japs. Just give me a rifle. I don’t want to be a commanding general. Just give me a rifle, I’ll go out there and shoot some Japs. . . . I’m not worried about anything else around here.’ See, that kind of a line. I was trying to soothe him down, and Turner would come and complain about that blankety-blank Smith, couldn’t get any cooperation out of him, and so forth.76
At last a compromise emerged. Moore crafted an operational order that left Turner in command of the landing forces until the shore commander went ashore and assumed command of the troops. When Turner was so informed, all troops ashore would fall under command of the Fifth Amphibious Corps and thus report to Holland Smith. The model was accepted, and would remain in force throughout the remainder of the war.
Turner and Smith readily agreed on one point. Neither man wanted to capture the isolated phosphate rock island of Nauru, which had been included among the objectives assigned in the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive. Nauru’s mountainous terrain presented difficulties, and it lay 380 miles south of Tarawa, the atoll that was GALVANIC’s main objective. Nauru was of little value either to the enemy or to the Allies, and its small airfield could be kept “pounded down” by regular air raids.
On September 24, Admiral King flew into Pearl Harbor for his regular bimonthly conference with Nimitz. At CINCPAC headquarters the next morning, Spruance circulated a letter written by Holland Smith that laid out the case to scratch Nauru from GALVANIC. King asked, “What do you propose to take instead of Nauru?” Spruance proposed Makin, an atoll north of Tarawa, on the grounds that it was more strategically located and could be more easily stormed. “Admiral King gave me the fish eye,” Spruance recalled, “but agreed to recommend the change of objectives to the JCS.”77
The Gilbert Islands were sixteen palm-crowned atolls, straddling the equator about 400 miles west of the International Date Line. Each atoll was formed by an oblong ring of long, narrow, sandy islands enclosing a brilliant sapphire lagoon. Peak elevation was about 10 feet above sea level. Though they were near the equator, the islands were swept by a steady ocean breeze, and the air was pleasingly dry and fresh. Robert Louis Stevenson, who had visited the Gilberts in the 1880s, found “a superb ocean climate, days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a heavenly brightness.”78
Makin Atoll was three-sided, with a lagoon measuring eight by sixteen miles. Butaritari, a ribbon of sand thirteen miles long, was the only island in the atoll that could accommodate an airfield. Makin had been employed by the Japanese as a seaplane base, but little else. It was not strongly defended. Aerial photos had detected no large-caliber shore guns and few coastal fortifications, and the garrison was thought to number 500 to 800, of whom a proportion would be laborers rather than trained fighters.
Tarawa, eighty-three miles south of Makin and about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii, looked to be a considerably tougher nut to crack. The largest and southernmost island in the atoll was Betio, slightly more than two miles long and about half a mile wide, with an axis favorably oriented toward the prevailing winds. Betio, the Americans knew, was one of the most heavily fortified islands in the Pacific. A 4,000-foot airstrip lay behind a network of trenches, bunkers, and pillboxes constructed of concrete and overlaid with sand and palm logs. Shore guns ranging in size from 5 to 8 inches faced north, west, and south. On its lagoon shore, Betio was protected by coral reefs to a distance of about 1,200 yards. Based on aerial reconnaissance, the garrison appeared to number between 2,500 and 3,100 men.
The assault on Tarawa was assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, which had fought in the later stages of the Guadalcanal campaign and then had withdrawn to New Zealand for rest, recuperation, and additional training. The division was under the command of Major General Julian C. Smith, who first caught wind of the coming operation in mid-August, when he learned that Admiral Spruance was flying into Wellington and wanted to see him. Spruance, with Captain Moore in tow, walked into Smith’s office and dropped a pile of documents on the desk. Did the general think his division could take Tarawa? Smith had not heard of Tarawa: “Never knew there was such an island.”79 He would review the documents, he said. When did Spruance need an answer? “I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” said Spruance. Smith said his division would do the job.
Admiral King had envisioned GALVANIC as a navy and marine show, but George Marshall was keen to get the army into action in the central Pacific, and offered the 27th Infantry Division, then located in Hawaii. Nimitz assigned the assault on Makin to one of the division’s regimental combat teams, the 165th Infantry. Major General Ralph C. Smith was to command these troops, completing a triumvirate of three (unrelated) Smiths in charge of the GALVANIC invasion forces. The command arrangement placing the marine Holland Smith above the soldier Ralph Smith was a source of predictable unpleasantness. The army’s top man in the Pacific, General Robert C. Richardson, questioned the need for the army troops to be folded into the Fifth Amphibious Corps, and proposed that Ralph Smith report directly to Admiral Turner. Nimitz declined the suggestion. Operation GALVANIC required cooperation between the services on an unprecedented scale, and the CINCPAC was intolerant of infighting. But the interservice sensitivities inherent in this mixed command hierarchy would erupt into a public imbroglio the following year, in the Marianas.
The army assault regiment required intensive amphibious training, and Holland Smith oversaw landing exercises at several remote bays in the lesser Hawaiian Islands. Poor weather conditions forced the cancellation of several exercises, and beach conditions did not perfectly match those of the actual objective. Holland Smith was concerned about the regiment’s readiness and even its morale. But he took some consolation in the mounting evidence, based on air and submarine reconnaissance, that Makin would be a walkover, at least when compared to Tarawa.
As in the Solomons, the Americans were short of accurate charts or hydrographic tables covering the Gilberts. They relied, in part, on information dating back to the nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries. Summing up the state of the charts, Turner told Nimitz, “The land contours are inaccurate, soundings are few and unreliable, the orientation of land areas is frequently in error and even the location of the island is often questionable.”80 Putting reconnaissance teams ashore in advance of the operation was considered, but then ruled out, as it might alert the Japanese to the coming invasion. The submarine Nautilus, fitted with special equipment for periscope photography, brought valuable data back to Pearl Harbor in August. Aerial photographic reconnaissance, conducted in September and October by carrier planes and B-24s, provided more information on the state of Betio’s coastal fortifications. The photos plainly revealed the locations of the big guns, which were mounted in strong concrete emplacements. The photos also revealed that the entire island was ringed with obstacles: coconut log seawalls, barbed wire aprons, antitank ditches, and concrete tetrahedrons in the surf.
Analysts estimated the size of the enemy garrison by counting the latrines and reckoning how many troops each latrine would serve. (They were constructed on pilings over the beach, so that the surf would carry away excrement, and therefore were readily identifiable in aerial photographs.) Low-altitude oblique shots of the beach defenses would have proved valuable
in determining the precise locations of covered pillboxes and bunkers, but the rushed preinvasion schedule did not permit for such flights.81
Several dozen British residents of the Gilberts had fled to New Zealand and Australia at the outset of the war. Sixteen of these dislocated British colonialists, whom the Americans collectively nicknamed the “foreign legion,” were questioned closely about conditions in Tarawa lagoon. A vital concern was the depth of water over the reefs that lay between the entrance to the lagoon and the north side of Betio. Some were confident that the reefs would be at least 5 feet deep at high water. If that was so, the American landing craft could pass over them with no danger of grounding. But the intended date of the invasion coincided with a neap tide, when the tidal range would be reduced to a minimum. Major F. L. G. Holland of New Zealand, who seemed to know Tarawa better than anyone else, warned that the depth over the reefs could be less than 3 feet. Moreover, the neap tide would cause irregular “dodging currents” that might carry the landing craft off their courses. After interrogating Major Holland at length, Julian Smith concluded that the man knew what he was talking about, and warned Admiral Turner and Holland Smith that the marines might have to disembark and wade ashore from the fringing reef, perhaps half a mile from Betio’s north beach.
For twenty years the Marine Corps had planned and trained for a direct assault on a heavily defended beach. The Corps had developed and acquired the specialized landing craft required to mount such an operation, and had refined the specialized tactics of coordinating naval fire support, air support, and logistics. But the marines had not yet proved to themselves, or to the enemy, that a small fortress-island could be taken by frontal amphibious assault. Tarawa posed formidable problems. There would be no immediate means of achieving depth of deployment; the landing forces would initially be pinned down on a long, narrow beach. The flat little island would offer scant room for maneuvering onto the enemy’s flanks. The battlefield was so contracted, it seemed doubtful that direct naval gunfire or air support could be provided without posing danger to the marines ashore. All understood in advance that the assault on Tarawa was unprecedented and might prove appallingly costly.
SINCE THE 1920S, NAVAL AVIATORS had been authorized to wear brown leather shoes with khaki uniforms, while surface naval officers were obliged to wear black. This negligible uniform distinction acquired symbolic importance when the flyers began calling themselves “brownshoes,” and their more tradition-bound colleagues “blackshoes.” The flyers made a point of bending the uniform code by scuffing their shoes and refusing to polish them, by growing their hair just a little longer than regulations allowed, and by wearing weather-beaten caps, including the distinctive “duck-billed” cap made famous by Marc Mitscher. The brownshoes liked to test the limits of naval discipline and decorum. “When you’re in a battleship, you’re in the Annapolis Navy,” wrote Joseph Bryan III, who served as an intelligence officer on the Yorktown:
But when you’re in a carrier, you’re in the fighting Navy. Your ship is being run by and for a bunch of barn-storming youngsters who don’t tie their shoes at all, if they don’t feel like it, and who would just as soon address Admiral King as “Ernie,” unless it meant he’d ground them and keep them out of the next scrap.82
Vice Admiral Towers, who had headed the Aeronautics Bureau in Washington before taking up his billet as COMAIRPAC in October 1942, was the navy’s senior aviator in active service and the acknowledged leader of the brownshoe navy. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1906, the same year as Raymond Spruance and one year after Nimitz. His remarkable career had advanced in close step with the evolution of naval aviation. He had learned to fly in 1911, in a primitive biplane with a wooden frame, fabric-covered wings, wire struts, and a top airspeed of 60 knots. Towers was a protégé of the pilot and aircraft designer Glenn Curtiss. He achieved various distance and endurance records; he set up the first flight-training program in Pensacola; he completed the first air crossing (in stages) of the Atlantic; he commanded the navy’s first aircraft carrier, the Langley (CV-1). He had survived several plane crashes. Many of his contemporaries had not been so fortunate. For more than twenty years, he had battled King and Nimitz over such questions as funding for the carrier navy and promotions for career aviators. He had earned a somewhat begrudging respect from both colleagues, and reached reasonable compromises concerning the training, selection, and promotion of officers involved in naval aviation and aircraft carriers. But he was never personally close to any of the officers he regarded as “battleship-oriented,” and he argued that the attack on Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse by Japanese air attack off Malaya in December 1941 had transformed naval warfare into something fundamentally new.
The brownshoes were simultaneously elites and insurgents. They disdained old naval dogmas and were resolved to subvert them. They wanted more of everything—more commands, promotions, decorations, publicity, and resources, and a more dominant voice in strategic planning. It was not enough, they argued, to rely on the leadership of traditional line officers who were “air-minded.” The new fast carrier task forces were the vanguard of the fleet that would carry the war into the western Pacific. Therefore, the fleet ought to be led by men who had come up through the brownshoe ranks. Not even Ernest King or Bill Halsey, who had passed through flight training as captains on the wrong side of forty, were bona fide members of the flying fraternity—they were latecomers who had earned their wings in order to qualify for carrier command. Most of the “real” brownshoes were younger men, including a group of ambitious and talented “Young Turks” who had earned their wings in the 1920s, led air squadrons, skippered carriers, participated in the development of new aircraft, and were approaching the threshold for flag rank.
The emerging generation of aviators was uncomfortably mindful that their rivals in the Army Air Forces had climbed the promotion ladder more rapidly. The army flyers had also enjoyed the benefits of a more open-handed policy in awarding medals and other honors. Naval leaders correctly suspected that Hap Arnold’s USAAF aspired to consolidate the functions of military aviation under its own aegis. With a political brawl over service unification looming in the postwar future, the danger to the navy’s institutional interests was evident. Towers told a colleague in Washington that there had been a “failure of the high commands to give senior aviation officers, of long experience and proven professional ability, a real voice in strategic plans.”83
As plans for GALVANIC took shape, Towers advised Nimitz to send the new carrier task forces on far-ranging missions to attack Japanese airfields and (if opportunity offered) the Japanese fleet. He warned against limiting their freedom of movement by keeping them corralled in defensive sectors. Spruance and Turner wanted the carriers to provide air cover to the fleet while troops were landed at Tarawa and Makin; Towers preferred to send them 600 miles northwest, into the Marshalls, where they could rain bombs down on the enemy’s airfields and cut off his air response at the source. Towers, echoing his chief of staff, Forrest Sherman, thought the Gilberts a waste of time and balked at the scale of GALVANIC. The outspoken COMAIRPAC complained that “Spruance wants a sledgehammer to drive a tack.”84
Towers went around Nimitz to make his case to King and others in Washington. On August 18, he wrote James Forrestal, undersecretary of the navy: “I must confess that those of us out here who are in a position to have a reasonably good idea of not only what is going on but also what is planned, have a feeling approaching utter hopelessness, and when I say this I’m referring to major plans and major policies.”85 Towers privately criticized the elevation of the blackshoe Spruance to command of the Fifth Fleet, and when certain remarks reached Spruance’s ears, a rift opened between them. Spruance later told Admiral Charles M. “Savvy” Cooke Jr. that “if you were not an admirer of Towers, your path was not made smooth if he could help it. . . . Towers was a very ambitious man.”86 That was perhaps the most damning indictment Spruance e
ver aimed at a fellow officer.
From their high perch, Nimitz and Spruance believed they saw the big picture more clearly than did the brownshoe insurrectionists. The carriers could strike the enemy hard and across great distances, but they could not win the transpacific campaign outright. Whatever their capabilities or aspirations, the aviators and their machines must fit coherently into the grand scheme of amphibious invasions supported by finely choreographed logistics. The force that would take the Gilberts included 191 ships, 35,000 troops, and 117,000 tons of cargo. Coordination and protection of such an enormous force was an overriding concern, and no single component of the fleet should be let off the leash without considering the consequences to the whole. Nimitz, patient and forbearing as he was, eventually grew weary of the protests and grievances, and instructed Towers to lower his tone. In a heated meeting that fall, Towers recalled, Nimitz’s “reaction was to the effect that I did not know what I was talking about.”87
Prominent among the “Young Turks” was Captain Joseph J. Clark, known to friends and shipmates as “Jock” or “Jocko.” At the war’s outset, he had been executive officer of the old Yorktown (CV-5). Promoted captain in February 1942, he had returned to Washington to await reassignment. There he made a name for himself by proposing a plan, seemingly absurd on its face, to build 150 new aircraft carriers. By his own account, there was nothing scientific in the figure: he thought it obvious, after Pearl Harbor, that the navy would need a vast fleet of carriers to crush Japan, and he had simply plucked a big, round number “out of the air.” Kelly Turner, still head of the navy’s war plans unit, brushed the idea off, saying, “You can’t get that many.” But Admiral Towers thought Clark was “absolutely right” and arranged to send the young captain on a multi-city speaking tour to promote the idea.*88