The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  General Julian C. Smith intended to land three battalions on Betio’s northern beaches—one each on the beaches designated Red 1, Red 2, and Red 3. He held no illusions about the strength of the enemy’s defensive fortifications. The log seawall revealed by reconnaissance photos stood about 20 feet above the high-tide mark, and varied from about 3 to 6 feet tall. Directly behind it was a complex of rifle pits and covered pillboxes, connected by trenches and positioned to provide interlocking fields of fire on the beach and lagoon. Coral sand and rocks were piled between the seawall and the pillboxes to obscure visibility from the beach. Concrete obstacles and iron spikes were positioned to stop armored vehicles, and tank traps had been dug to a depth of about 6 feet.106

  Admiral Turner chose to hold one regiment (the 6th) of the 2nd Marines in reserve, a decision hotly opposed by Julian Smith. Turner alone would decide whether to commit the reserve force, though he was expected to consult with Holland Smith, who would be present on his flagship. As in the Guadalcanal campaign the previous year, Turner’s decision to hold ground forces in reserve forced the marine commanders to alter their plan of attack. After being curtly overruled, General Julian Smith insisted that the orders be spelled out in writing, “as I did not feel that the plan should be my responsibility.”107

  The most worrisome aspect of the assault on Tarawa atoll remained the coral reef in the lagoon. Thanks to a titanic construction ramp-up spurred by Admiral King, new landing craft and amphibious vehicles were available in much greater numbers. There was a confounding array of different types, all designated by acronyms beginning with “L” (landing): LCVPs, LCVs, LCMs, LCIs, LSTs, LVTs, LCTs, and so on. Not all were equally suited to the task at hand. Training exercises often resulted in significant damage and mechanical failures, and a chronic dearth of spare parts kept damaged craft on the beach.108 Well-trained crews were needed to operate the landing craft, but training programs on the mainland were strained to the breaking point. Prior to GALVANIC, one amphibious officer recalled, “Several LCTs and LCIs had no officers or men who had ever been to sea prior to their trans-Pacific voyage.”109

  The answer to Tarawa’s reefs was the LVT (landing vehicle, tracked), an amphibious tractor often called the “amtrac” or “alligator.” These clever little vehicles could clamber up and over shallow coral heads and drive up a beach. In tests overseen by General Holland Smith, an amtrac charged up a Hawaiian beach, crushed a log barricade under its treads, and “walked clean through seven lines of barbed wire.”110 They could be transported in LSTs and launched directly into the sea about two to three miles offshore.

  The 2nd Marine Division, in September 1943, could muster a hundred amtracs, but many had been hard run in the Guadalcanal operation and were in a sad state of disrepair. General Julian Smith estimated that he could make seventy-five of the craft seaworthy by cannibalizing parts from the remaining twenty-five, which would then be junked. Fifty new LVTs were found in Samoa, and they were fetched by LSTs after the division had already sailed from Wellington. Each amtrac could carry about one platoon, and would be required to make several return trips back to the transport group. Some would inevitably be disabled or destroyed. The trouble would arise with the second and third waves, as the supply of available amtracs diminished. Most of the marines in those later waves would likely be obliged to land in ordinary Higgins boats (LCVPs), which might not manage to cross the reefs. If they could not, the men would have to wade in to the island under heavy enemy fire.

  Each of the three Red beaches would be seized, initially, by one battalion. Estimates of Japanese troop strength ranged as high as 4,000, so the attackers would be at approximate parity with the defenders. Early planning for Tarawa had contemplated the possibility of seizing an island adjacent to Betio and converting it into an artillery platform. The option was discarded as it could lead to a lengthy stalemate in the shallows separating the two islands. If the marines on the three Red beaches were unable to penetrate directly inland, Julian Smith would move forces down to the west end of the island, “secure that and then attack from the flank.”111

  Without overwhelming superiority in numbers (at least initially), the marines would trust in airpower and heavy naval fire support to gain the upper hand. For about two and a half hours before the initial landings, the island would be worked over by carrier planes and raked by battleships, cruisers, and destroyers offshore. The fire support group would draw in as close as 1,000 yards from the beach. In the first phase, they would concentrate their fire on the 8-inch artillery emplacements and knock them out. In the second phase, they would simply blanket the entire 300-acre island with high-explosive shells. General Julian Smith and his fellow marines were not nearly as sanguine as were the admirals concerning the potential of the preinvasion bombardment. Having suffered under repeated naval barrages on Guadalcanal, the marines understood that troops could hunker down in well-covered bunkers or trenches and withstand such punishment.

  After the marines had taken the beaches, naval fire support would become a considerably thornier subject. The island was very small, so friendly and enemy forces would necessarily be engaged at eyeball-to-eyeball range. But the marines must have the ability to call in naval shelling and air attacks, even on targets very near their own positions. Phase III of the fire support plan was triggered when the assault forces had an initial foothold on the beach. At that point, targeting and firing decisions would shift into the hands of shore parties. Marines ashore, the GALVANIC plan took pains to emphasize, “are not merely spotting agencies, but also control firing.”112 They would select the targets, call fire down on those targets, and order firing to end. The same was true of air support. The marines were to set up reflective panels or smoke pots marking their forward positions. The pilots were warned that these markers “must be scrupulously observed, and direct support attacks executed without endangering our ground forces.”113

  Carl Moore worked fifteen-hour days to complete the operational plans for GALVANIC in time to meet the sailing date. The basic plan could fit into three pages, but no fewer than seventeen “planning annexes” were appended. There was a communication plan, an intelligence plan, a meteorological plan, an air search plan, a logistics plan, and contingency plans for major action. Plans directed the movement and rendezvous of various fleet elements.114 Minor changes in any one annex often compelled a run of corresponding changes to others. On October 13, three weeks before the sailing date, Moore warned Spruance that the planning process was in chaos, and that many important decisions remained to be rendered. He gently implied that the boss ought to spend more time in the office and involve himself more closely in the vital work. But Spruance remained as serene and aloof as always, often disappearing for hours into the hills above headquarters. “Raymond is so funny,” Moore wrote his wife:

  When he feels the urge for exercise, nothing can stop him. He won’t stop for anything but goes tearing off, usually with me grabbing at his coattails trying to get him to sign something or give me some decision that will let me proceed until he gets back. Invariably he begs me to come along, knowing darn well that I won’t, and if I did the work would stop. When he gets back, it’s hard to make him pay attention long enough to read and sign before he flops into bed. What a life I have.115

  On October 29, Moore and the Fifth Fleet staff worked late into the night to complete the final product. The GALVANIC operations plan ran to 324 pages and weighed three pounds. A platoon of marines was rounded up to perform the careful work of mimeographing, collating, and binding 300 copies. At 5:00 a.m. they were finished. Couriers began distributing copies to commands and ships throughout the Navy Yard. Copies were boarded on planes to be flown to New Zealand, Noumea, Efate, Funafuti, and Samoa. Moore, dog-tired and mentally shattered, wrote his wife on the morning of the thirtieth: “The heartbreaking struggle is over.”116 But the real heartbreak, as he was to reflect many years later, awaited in Tarawa lagoon.

  * The U.S. Navy had 119 aircraft carriers in commission at war�
��s end. Had the conflict lasted until 1947 or 1948, a reasonable prognosis in the early days, Clark’s figure might have been surpassed.

  † Later genealogical research revealed that Clark’s Cherokee ancestry was considerably more diluted. He had a single Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother, making him one-thirty-second Cherokee.

  Chapter Eleven

  FOR THE SAKE OF SECRECY, AS WAS CUSTOMARY, THE RANK AND FILE were left in ignorance of their destination until the ships were well underway. As the 2nd Division transport fleet left Wellington Harbour on the morning of November 7, most marines assumed they were headed to Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of North Island, for more landing exercises. It was even supposed that they might march back down the gangways to the Wellington wharves later the same day, in time for a dance previously scheduled for that evening.

  That rumor was toppled in midmorning when an announcement cleared by General Julian Smith told them that they were en route to a major operation. The destination was not yet disclosed. Speculation favored Wake Island or perhaps even the Japanese bastion at Truk. Several days later, after training maneuvers with Admiral Harry Hill’s Southern Attack Group off the New Hebrides, the marines and the ships’ crews were told that they were headed to Tarawa, a name that very few had ever heard. They learned more about the objective while underway. Aerial photographs and contour maps were laid out on wardroom tables. On the transport Sheridan, a plaster model of Betio Island was placed on deck, and the men were briefed on the planned landing. Lieutenant Frank W. J. Plant recalled listening to a Radio Tokyo broadcast in the Sheridan’s boardroom. “Salute to the men of the 2nd Marine Division,” said Tokyo Rose; “Say goodbye to land: you’ll never see it again. We know where you are going—to the Gilberts!”1

  The transports were hot and overcrowded. Men slept whenever and wherever they could. They read dog-eared magazines, played cards, smoked cigarettes, cleaned their rifles, and sharpened their bayonets. Even for young marines in peak physical condition, the voyage was exhausting. Lieutenant G. D. Lillibridge shared a cabin with eight or nine other officers. Each had a cot, but the cots took up every square foot of floor space, so men had to walk over them to enter and exit. Each time someone went out to use the head, everyone in the cabin was inevitably roused. In any case, it was usually too hot to sleep in the ship’s interior. Lillibridge bedded down on deck, where the air was much cooler, but he was stirred awake by men creeping around him and by the frequent rain showers that swept over the ship. Sleep deprivation and cumulative exhaustion settled in as the fleet approached the equator.

  The greater part of the Fifth Fleet sortied from Pearl Harbor on the morning of November 10. A parade of ships filed down the channel all morning—destroyers and cruisers first, at five-minute intervals; then carriers and battleships, at fifteen-minute intervals; finally the transports and auxiliaries. It was a stirring sight. Gray ships dotted the horizon in every direction, too many to count. Ray Gard of the Yorktown recalled the “marvelous sight” and wondered, “Are there any other ships anywhere?”2 Admiral Spruance, who had hoisted his flag on the cruiser Indianapolis, took his daily exercise by pacing the deck for hours each day. With no immediate decisions to make, the admiral slept in his cabin, read paperbacks, and listened to music. Carl Moore began to gather his thoughts about the next step on the road to Tokyo: the conquest of the Marshall Island group, which lay northwest of the Gilberts. From recent experience he knew that it would fall to him to write the plan of operations—his friend and boss would take a bare minimum of interest in the details.

  Operational control of the fleet was in the hands of Kelly Turner, whose flagship was the battleship Pennsylvania. His erstwhile nemesis, Holland Smith, was quartered on the same ship, and the two men spent most of their waking hours together. They had evidently decided to put their previous acrimony behind them, and surprised everyone by becoming fast friends. An early draft plan for GALVANIC had specified that Smith would remain at Pearl Harbor, shorebound at his Fifth Amphibious Corps headquarters. Smith, fuming, prepared to appeal the decision to Washington—but Turner intervened to have the decision reversed, and invited Smith and his staff to share his flagship. “They were just the best buddies you’ve ever seen in your life,” Moore recalled, “and they clicked perfectly in everything they did. They just got along perfectly fine. They messed together. They just loved each other. And as long as the operation was underway there couldn’t have been a closer-knit group.”3

  The approach to the Gilberts was largely uneventful. Radar screens occasionally picked up enemy planes, but none appeared in visual range. American carrier planes patrolled overhead and occasionally made simulated dive- and torpedo-bombing runs on the friendly warships and transports below. Strict radio silence enjoined any use of short-range TBS (talk-between-ships) except in case of emergency, so ships communicated by blinker light. On the seventeenth, recalled a journalist on one of the transports, “we wrapped ourselves around the International Date Line, so that no one was ever quite certain what day it was; often it was Monday and Tuesday within the same twenty-four hour period.”4 The fleet grew steadily as new units appeared at predetermined coordinates, and the overwhelming display of naval power was a thrill to all who witnessed it. Roger Bond, a quartermaster on the Saratoga, counted thirteen aircraft carriers in a single day. Less than a year earlier, the Saratoga and Enterprise had been the sole remaining American carriers left in the Pacific. To lay eyes on thirteen friendly flattops between sunrise and sunset, said Bond, made it “an awesome, awesome day.”5

  The American carrier task forces were awesome indeed. Seventeen carriers of various types participated in GALVANIC. Frank Plant recalled being “stunned” by the sight of so many ships, especially the giant battleships and carriers: “I was amazed that the fleet was there to protect one little Marine division. That gave me a very proud feeling.”6

  Intelligence had indicated that the Japanese might launch an air attack against the Fifth Fleet from bases in the Marshalls. On November 15, Nimitz’s headquarters diary noted “extensive movement of aircraft in the Marshall-Gilbert Islands.”7 An air officer on the Yorktown estimated that the Japanese had 250 land-based aircraft within reach of the Gilberts, and he predicted that the ship would suffer at least one bomb or torpedo hit during the operation.8 The American carriers were spread far and wide in the week before D-Day. Halsey had requested support in the upper Solomons, where the Japanese navy was threatening to interfere with his amphibious landings at Empress Augusta Bay on Bougainville. Nimitz had detached two of four carrier task groups to detour south and raid Rabaul, with the stipulation that they hurry back north and fall in with the GALVANIC forces by November 12.

  Task Force 50, comprising six large and five light carriers divided into four task groups, was commanded by Rear Admiral Charles A. Pownall. The bald-headed Pownall, affectionately called “Baldy,” flew his flag in the Yorktown. He had come under criticism for a perceived tentativeness in carrier raids against Marcus and Wake Islands earlier in the fall. One of his most strident critics was his own flag captain, Jocko Clark. “I had felt that our admiral was not up to snuff,” Clark later said, framing his criticism more tactfully than he did at the time. “He was a very fine gentleman and a good leader in peacetime, but I think the war was too much for him.”9 Pownall was unsettled by Clark’s aggressive “seaman’s eye” handling of the ship in tight task-force formations. During the raid against Marcus Island, little more than 1,000 miles from Tokyo, Clark had recommended flying several follow-on strikes against the Japanese airfield to be sure it was entirely smashed. Pownall had demurred, preferring to get out of the hot zone in a hurry. He had refused Clark’s emotional appeal to risk extensive search-and-rescue efforts to recover the aircrew of a downed TBF Avenger. (The men were subsequently captured by the Japanese.) On all of these counts, Clark thought Pownall too timid, and many of his fellow captains apparently shared that opinion.10

  The carriers were new, many of their screening ships
were new, and most of their airplanes were new. An entirely new set of doctrines was taking shape. The manuals were being rewritten. Captain Truman J. Hedding, Pownall’s very able chief of staff, had headed a committee of air officers responsible for developing new tactical instructions for the carrier task forces. Hedding liked a circular formation with one or two carriers in the center, surrounded by two inner rings of alternating battleships and cruisers and an outer ring of destroyers. The battleships and cruisers were primarily responsible for antiaircraft defense, and the destroyers for antisubmarine defense.11 When it was time to launch or recover aircraft, all vessels turned into the wind simultaneously. The concept of a circular formation was not new, but the execution became considerably more difficult at the higher speeds possible with the new carriers and battleships, and as the task forces grew larger. Spruance later wrote that the “problems . . . were many, but they were solved as we went along.”12 (He could have said the same of the entire war.)

  The aviators were not reconciled to Spruance’s decision to keep the carriers penned in defensive positions off the Gilberts. The controversy had remained very much alive right up to eve of the GALVANIC operation, with Admiral Towers arguing that the carrier raids against Wake and Marcus in August and September had provided fresh evidence in favor of mobility and aggressive tactics. In an October 9 meeting in CINCPAC headquarters, Towers distributed color photos of the results of those carrier strikes. If the carriers were permitted to go west, he argued, they could unload even greater devastation on Japanese bases in the Marshalls, cutting off the Japanese air threat at its source. Spruance met these arguments by citing the orders of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which required the capture of atolls in the Gilbert Islands. He had not been ordered to knock out enemy airbases in the Marshalls or to seek out and destroy elements of the Japanese fleet. Those objectives, as important as they were, were secondary. The role of carrier airpower in the coming operation was to protect the fleet, the transports, and the invasion beaches. That would change in an instant, however, if the Japanese fleet rushed east to offer battle: “If a major portion of the Jap fleet was to attempt to interfere with GALVANIC,” Spruance wrote his subordinate commanders, “it is obvious that the defeat of the enemy fleet would at once become paramount.”13