The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  His communications were terrible. Combat radio “manpacks,” soaked in seawater during the long wade, were disabled or unreliable. He had to shout to be heard over the roar of rifle and artillery fire. Message runners carried dispatches up and down the beach, but many were cut down while dashing across exposed positions. When Shoup got through by radio to the third battalion commander, still in a transport in the lagoon, he urged that additional reinforcements be landed east of the pier, where the volume of enemy fire was more moderate. From there, they could work their way west along the beach or attack directly inland.

  When Lieutenant Plant stumbled up the beach, Shoup ordered him to stay at the command post and act as air coordinator. Plant, with the help of a skilled radioman, got through to the Maryland and asked for “everything you can bring.” The air officer on the Maryland was concerned about the risk of friendly fire. “Those targets are only a few hundred yards from the beach,” he said. “Where are your front lines?” Plant reported, “Front line is on the beach.” There was a pause as the meaning sank in, and the voice replied, “Wilco.”27

  By training and instinct, the marines were predisposed toward aggressive infantry tactics. Enemy positions should be taken quickly, by frontal or flanking attacks. Forward momentum was imperative, and it must be sustained even at the cost of heavy early casualties because a stalled advance might deteriorate into a dangerous stalemate. But on Betio, in those early hours of the battle, the marines could not gain an initial foothold above the seawall. The coral “no-man’s-land” between the wall and the Japanese firing positions was strewn with dead marines. Corpsmen exposed themselves to deadly fire to pull the wounded to safety. Armored vehicles were urgently needed to spearhead the drive inland. A few LVTs roared up the beach, ramps up, and tried to climb the seawall. They succeeded only in exposing themselves to point-blank antitank fire. By midmorning, dozens of wrecked and burning amtracs lay on the beach or in the shallows. By the end of the day, half the amtracs that had been hurled against Betio were out of action.

  When tank lighters put seven medium Sherman tanks ashore on Beach Red 3 at about noon, they led the first effective direct assault on heavily fortified enemy positions. Many of the machines were disabled by enemy fire, or fell into tank traps or drove over mines. But even an immobilized Sherman provided cover for the flamethrower teams and riflemen who followed close behind, and the disabled tanks themselves could be employed as makeshift pillboxes. In the early afternoon, above Red 3, the marines finally began the slow, murderous process of pushing into the island’s interior. They flanked and wiped out the pillboxes, though it was often necessary to revisit the same positions more than once as enemy soldiers entered them through covered trenches. A lieutenant reported, after the battle, “The combination of tanks, flamethrowers, and riflemen proved effective in destroying the enemy with minimum losses.”28

  Sherrod, following close on the heels of the advancing infantry and jotting down notes whenever he could take cover, recorded what he saw: “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.”29

  Lieutenant Lillibridge and his platoon joined a group of marines huddled against the seawall on Beach Red 2. “The scene was utterly weird, out of some very bad John Wayne movie,” he wrote. “I ducked up to the captain with my men bunched up behind me and I blurted out, ‘Do you know where A company is?’ He pointed out over the wall and said ‘I think they’re out there somewhere.’ Without thinking I jumped up and said ‘Let’s go,’ and without even looking back I went over the seawall and just ran straight ahead. Everybody followed me. It was absolutely insane, not asking if this was impossible, but I wasn’t thinking clearly.”30

  On the Maryland, cruising about a mile offshore, General Smith and Admiral Hill were frustrated by unreliable radio links with Shoup and other unit commanders. The reports from the beachhead were fragmentary and perplexing. The marines were asking for more of everything—reinforcements, ammunition, air support, half-tracks and tanks, drinking water, medical corpsmen and supplies. The commanders and their staffs struggled to form an accurate picture of the situation ashore. Their most reliable source of information was provided by one of the Maryland’s Kingfisher spotter planes, which circled above the island for much of the day. Lieutenant Commander Robert McPherson, the pilot, made detailed observations of the Japanese positions, and even strafed or dropped grenades when opportunity offered. General Julian Smith sent a staff officer along on one of the floatplane’s several flights on the afternoon of D-Day.31

  Smith had committed his reserve troops, the first and third battalions of the 8th Marines, but by midafternoon, the beachheads remained precarious. He radioed Holland Smith: “Successful landings on Beaches Red 2 and 3. Toehold on Red 1. Am committing one LT [Landing Team] from division reserve. Still encountering strong resistance.” The marines had suffered heavy casualties, he added. “The situation is in doubt.”32

  The assault on Makin (eighty-three miles north of Tarawa) was well in hand, but Holland Smith was irked by the slow advance of the army troops on that island. He now realized that the fight on Betio (in the Tarawa atoll) was shaping up to be a bloodbath. After conferring briefly with Admiral Turner, he agreed to release the Corps reserve regiment, the 6th Marines, to be landed on Betio.

  The marines now had a tenuous hold on the western part of Betio and on a small salient directly inland of Shoup’s command headquarters. The close coordination of naval gunfire and air support was critical to maintaining these positions. Two destroyers drew in close to the island and dropped 5-inch shells on targets as directed by radio.

  Hours of unremitting bombardment made a mess of Shibasaki’s telephone communications. The wiring had been buried in shallow trenches or even left out on the sand, and much of it was shredded and useless. Frustrated at his inability to make contact with various units via field telephone, the admiral decided to move his command post to the south side of the island. He would yield up the large concrete blockhouse that had been his headquarters to be employed as a field hospital for the wounded. But as Shibasaki and a group of staff officers left the blockhouse on foot, one of the destroyers managed a lucky shot. A 5-inch shell detonated directly among them, killing the admiral and several other senior officers. That sudden beheading of the Japanese command threw the defenders into confusion and may have accounted for their failure to coordinate an early banzai charge. It was a momentous development that probably saved many American lives. Without sufficient depth of deployment, a massed counterattack against any one point of the marine lines would have been difficult to beat back.

  As darkness fell, the firing quieted down and the marines prepared for the night. Rogal recalls that first night on Betio as being strangely subdued, “almost uneventful.”33 Neither side wanted to divulge their positions by firing their weapons. A Japanese plane circled overhead, unseen. Guadalcanal veterans promptly designated it “Washing Machine Charlie,” and joked that the same persistent nocturnal visitor they had come to know so well at Henderson Field had trailed them north. The specter of a bayonet charge kept them on edge. For every one man who slept, two were ordered to remain awake and alert. The marines had landed more than 5,000 men on the island, but they were corralled into three narrow beaches and two salients, neither of which penetrated more than seventy yards inshore. Their ammunition dumps were exposed and vulnerable to a single well-aimed grenade. Frank Plant could not sleep at all: “Our vulnerability and the value of darkness to the Japanese method of fighting, especially a massive banzai attack using in effect suicide tactics, became so real and so terrorizing.”34

  D-Day plus one dawned at low tide, and the retreating sea revealed a macabre scene. Dead marines were strewn along the beach or floating on the water. The blackened, gnarled shapes of more than fifty wrecked amtracs and Higgins boats wer
e half awash in the shallows or grounded on the coral flats. A sweet stench of decaying flesh wafted over the island; it would worsen steadily as the sun rose. Marines foraged through the packs and pockets of their dead friends for ammunition, canteens, cigarettes, and rations.

  The three assault battalions, pinned down on their three narrow beachheads, shared a sense of relief and even surprise at having survived the night. The dreaded enemy bayonet charge had never materialized. But their circumstances remained perilous. They were scattered in small, largely isolated units. Unless they took more territory, they were likely to be driven back into the sea. It was impossible to obtain an accurate tally of their casualties, but it seemed likely that more than a third of the troops who landed on D-Day had been killed or wounded. Losses were proportionally higher among officers and noncommissioned officers. “We’re in a mighty tight spot,” said Colonel Shoup. “We’ve got to have more men.”35 The marines needed more of everything, in fact—more men, more ammunition, more armored vehicles, more artillery. To fight in the heat they would need more freshwater and salt tablets. The doctors and corpsmen had worked all night to treat the wounded and evacuate them to the fleet, but first aid supplies of every category were running low. Marshall Ralph Doak, a chief pharmacist’s mate, worked to evacuate wounded marines to an LST that had been converted into a temporary hospital ship. Near the beach, he recalled, the surf was tinted visibly red.36

  General Julian Smith, from his headquarters on the Maryland, had notified Shoup that he intended to land the diversion reserve, the first and third battalions of the 8th Marines, at 6:00 a.m. The reserves had loaded into Higgins boats well before dawn, and many had been circling in the lagoon for half the night. As the first waves churned in toward Beach Red 2, Japanese machine guns and light artillery opened up, and it was soon evident that the landing would be no less bloody than those of the previous day. The Japanese had apparently set up additional weapons in their strong pocket at the junction of Red 1 and 2. The LCVPs hung up on the reef, and marines waded into enemy fire in waist-deep water. Men took refuge behind the concrete obstacles placed offshore by the Japanese, or behind disabled landing craft. From there, however, it was a long dash across open beach. “The carnage was terrible!” Rogal wrote. “The water to my front was soon dotted with the floating bodies of the dead and wounded. Most of [that battalion] had been eliminated—more than 300 casualties.”37

  Japanese soldiers had apparently swum out to a small wrecked freighter on the reef. From that position, their rifles and machine guns could reach marines disembarking from grounded landing craft 400 yards offshore. Carrier dive-bombers attempted to destroy the vessel, but missed repeatedly.38 “From the beachhead it was a sickening sight,” Bob Sherrod recorded. “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 twenty-four in one boat only three reached shore.”39

  The awful scene on the beach helped to spur the marines already on the island to attack with renewed energy. The morning’s plan was simple. Shoup intended to cut the island in two by driving directly south, across the airfield, to the ocean shore. Major Henry P. Crowe’s forces at Red 3 were to overrun the network of formidable defenses that stood between him and the airfield. Major Michael P. Ryan, who held a small salient at the northwestern point of the island, was to attack south, along Beach Green, and attempt to secure it as a bridgehead for further troop landings.

  Marines brought their 75mm pack howitzers up the beach and began pummeling enemy firing positions farther inland; naval fire support was called down on the enemy’s strong points; Hellcats flew low overhead and strafed; dive-bombers hit assigned targets based on radioed coordinates. Cumulatively, this onslaught began to break down the enemy’s defenses, but the Japanese were resilient. The enemy’s pillboxes could be cleaned out only by direct infantry assault.

  It was the proudest and the most terrible day in the history of the Marine Corps. Men fought with extraordinary courage, returning to the line of fire even after having been wounded several times. “They’d fight with broken arms, gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds,” recalled Vern Garrett, a Yorktown pharmacist’s mate. “I’d patch them up and tell them to go back to the ship and they’d say, ‘I’m all right,’ and they would just keep on fighting.”40 Lieutenant William D. Hawkins, a Texan, was one of those rare men who seemed entirely indifferent to danger. He dashed across exposed firing fields with wild-eyed, manic courage; he personally attacked one enemy pillbox or machine-gun nest after another, throwing grenades into firing ports; he refused to be evacuated even after suffering serious shrapnel wounds. Hawkins commandeered an amtrac, loaded the remains of his platoon into it, and charged into concentrated machine-gun fire. A witness told Sherrod, “I’ll never forget the picture of him standing on that amtrac, riding around with a million bullets a minute whistling by his ears, just shooting Japs. I’ve never seen such a man in my life.”41 Shortly after noon a bullet caught him in the shoulder and severed an artery. He died in minutes. Later, Betio’s captured airfield would be named Hawkins Field, and the lieutenant’s mother would accept a posthumous Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt.

  Not all men were equally courageous. Some quailed and stuck fast in their foxholes and had to be prodded into action. Finding a corporal hiding under a pile of rubble, Shoup smacked the man’s legs until he came out. He asked the corporal to tell him his mother’s first name. “Well,” said Shoup, “do you think she’d be proud of you, curled up in a hole like that, no damn use to anybody?” The corporal admitted that she would not be proud, but said that the rest of his squad was dead and he had no orders. Shoup pointed to several marines crouched below the seawall and said, “Pick out a man, then another and another. Just say, ‘Follow me.’ When you’ve got a squad, report to me.”42 The corporal did it, and took his new squad into battle. Shoup never learned what became of him.

  Fear was instinctive and omnipresent. Even Shoup, who earned a Medal of Honor for his performance at Tarawa, struggled to keep his nerves under control. He was not the Hollywood archetype of a battlefield commander, said Frank Plant, who was by his side throughout the battle—“not the typical hero type or even the typical Marine officer; he was rotund and physically rather clumsy. I remember thinking at times when he had to get somewhere by crawling that that was pretty tough on an old fellow; actually he was only in his late 30s.” The colonel occasionally revealed signs of “fear which approached despair.”43 Sherrod observed that Shoup’s hands shook as he held a field telephone. His voice grew hoarse from shouting over the din of battle. “God!” he exclaimed to a group of officers at the command post. “How can a man think with all this noise going on?”44 When a young major complained that his men would not follow him to the airstrip, Shoup reduced the problem to a simple formula: “You’ve got to say, ‘Who’ll follow me?’ And if only ten follow you, that’s the best you can do, but it’s better than nothing.”45

  American carrier planes operated above the island from dawn to dusk, and Plant continued to call down airstrikes on enemy targets. Battalion commanders radioed their requests to Shoup, using keyed block numbers on a map, and Shoup relayed them to Plant. “Air liaison officer!” the colonel might say; “Tell them to drop some bombs on the southwest edge of 229 and the southeast edge of 231. There’s some Japs in there giving us hell.”46 Plant would radio the request, and about ten minutes later the dive-bombers would hurtle down from overhead and drop 1,000-pounders on or near the targets.

  All agreed that there was room for improvement in ground-air coordination. At times it seemed that there were too many planes over Betio. When a long file of Hellcats strafed enemy positions, their propellers kicked up sand and dust and obscured visibility. Plant asked that the attacks “be spaced more apart to allow the air to clear in between attacking planes.”47 There were no midair collisions, but several near misses. “We thought we were pretty doggone good with our bombs
and bullets,” said Alex Vraciu, veteran of the Guadalcanal campaign, “but it didn’t turn out that way.”48 Bombs that struck near fortified positions did little or no damage: only a direct hit had any real chance of killing the men inside. In most cases, said another pilot, “you couldn’t really see what you were shooting at or bombing.”49

  Naval gunfire or “call-fire” proved especially valuable against Japanese firing positions and pillboxes above Beach Green, on the western side of the island. A gunfire spotter made radio contact with the fleet and called 5-inch fire down on the enemy’s strong points. The shelling came as close as fifty yards to the forward American lines. Immediately after the ships ceased fire, tanks and infantrymen attacked. In many cases, the naval shellfire provided the margin of victory; in others, it was credited with reducing marine casualties. By noon, Major Ryan’s forces had taken control of the entire western end of the island, to a depth of 200 yards above Green. Reinforcements could now be landed without opposition. General Smith, receiving the news by semaphore signal, ordered the first battalion of the 6th Marines ashore. They would land before dark, take cover in foxholes for the night, then move through Ryan’s forces and roll up the southern shore at daybreak. Additional reserves were put ashore on Bairiki, the adjoining island to the east, in order to prevent Japanese troops from fleeing up the atoll.

  From Red 2, Lieutenant Wayne Sanford led F Company across heavily contested ground to the southern side of the airstrip. Machine gunners and riflemen covered one another in turn. The men tumbled into an antitank ditch some yards back from the southern beach. The advance completed Shoup’s goal of cutting the island in half, but there were many enemy soldiers remaining in the now-enlarged interior of the American lines, and much more hard fighting was needed to finish them off. Snipers fired constantly—from pillboxes, from trenches, and from the tops of the few palm trees that still had fronds to conceal a man. Ammunition resupply was a constant worry, and ammunition carriers dashed back through heavy fire to carry the belts from the north to the south side of the island.