The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  A strong pocket remained in the area just inland of the juncture of Red 1 and 2. Here the Japanese had set up additional machine guns on the first night of the battle, and commanded a sweeping field of fire over both landing beaches. The pocket would not be fully reduced until the third day of the fight.

  Robert McPherson, circling over the island in his floatplane as he had all day on November 20, provided invaluable information about the progress of the battle. Lieutenant Plant communicated directly with him by radio and relayed updates to Shoup, who was plainly relieved to have those firsthand accounts from a bird’s-eye perspective.50 As on the previous day, McPherson occasionally found occasion to strafe Japanese positions or drop grenades from the cockpit.

  Fortifications behind Red 3 were among the most stubborn on the island. Again and again, pillboxes that had been cleaned out with grenades or flamethrowers became a renewed threat. They were divided into compartments by strong interior walls, so a grenade thrown into a firing port might kill just one or two men, leaving others unharmed. Reinforcements entered through tunnels or covered trenches. Major Crowe wondered aloud, “Do they have a tunnel to Tokyo or something?”51 Marines entered some of these subterranean spaces and fought their enemies with bayonets and knives. Tanks advanced and fired into slots at point-blank range. Bulldozers pushed coral and sand up against the firing ports, covering them and smothering the occupants.

  By early afternoon on the second day, November 21, it was evident that the Americans would prevail. It was not yet clear how long it would take to secure the island, or how many more lives would be lost in the effort. High tide was at 12:18 p.m., and for several midday hours the navigability of the lagoon was much improved. Higgins boats and tank lighters brought a steady flood of supplies, ammunition, tanks, half-tracks, and heavy construction equipment to the pier. Wounded men on stretchers were carried back to the fleet, where they would be transferred to hospital ships. The sight of a jeep hauling a 37mm gun up the pier seemed significant to Bob Sherrod, who noted, “If a sign of certain victory were needed, this is it. The jeeps have arrived.”52

  Japanese snipers remained active everywhere on the island. The sound of bullets whizzing past their ears became so familiar that many marines ignored it. Men made a point of walking upright in studied nonchalance. “Walking along the shore with bullets all around should have been terrifying,” one lieutenant later remarked, “but after a while you figured there was nothing you could do about it, and you just quit worrying.”53 Refusing to acknowledge the Japanese snipers, whose fire was usually inaccurate at longer ranges, offered a way to broadcast one’s disdain for the enemy. “Shoot me down, you son of a bitch,” barked a private, as he ambled down Beach Red 2 and a bullet cut through the air nearby.54 Another marine was shot in the hand and lost part of his thumb; he “just laughed and kept going.”55 A lieutenant was “nicked in the rear” as he stood talking at Shoup’s headquarters. “I’ll be damned,” he remarked. “I stay out front four hours, then I come back to the command post and get shot.”56

  Colonel Shoup, who wore a mask of dust and dirt like every other marine on the island, summed up the situation that afternoon: “Well, I think we’re winning, but the bastards have got a lot of bullets left. I think we’ll clean up tomorrow.”57 He was plainly exhausted, having slept not at all the previous night. He was still bleeding through his bandage. His report to General Julian Smith would enter Marine Corps lore: “Casualties many; percentage of dead not known; combat efficiency: We are winning.”58 At 8:30 p.m., Colonel Merritt Edson, the 2nd Division chief of staff and a veteran of many hard battles on Guadalcanal, stepped on the beach and relieved Shoup of command.

  On the third day of the battle, Japanese resistance buckled and collapsed. The 6th Marines rolled up the southern shore and joined with other units to overrun the airfield. The last axis of organized resistance in central Betio was in a two-story steel-reinforced concrete blockhouse that had withstood all direct hits by shells or bombs. The hard-run bulldozers were called into service to finish the job. They approached with blades raised as armor against fire, and shoved a small mountain of sand and coral up to cover the entrance and firing slots. A few marines climbed to the top of the structure and poured gasoline down the air vents. A single hand grenade was enough to convert the blockhouse into a kiln. The remains of 300 Japanese were later excavated from the interior.

  Except for a few isolated snipers and stragglers, all remaining Japanese forces were now corralled into the long narrow eastern tail of the island. Marines cautiously entered the pillboxes and dugouts and discovered that many Japanese had taken their own lives. The war correspondent Jim Lucas found a bunker filled with Japanese soldiers who had removed their shoes, put their rifles in their mouths, and pulled the triggers with their toes. The forces penned in the eastern end of the island, about 300 men, staged a banzai attack at dusk. The marines held their positions and mowed them down. Mopping up actions continued in the next three days, but seventy-six hours after the initial landing, Betio was declared secured. General Julian Smith went ashore with his staff and took command at noon on November 23.

  Even before the fighting was concluded, the marines had begun the sad and grisly work of burying their dead. There was no time to lose. Bodies decayed rapidly in the tropical sun, and a fetid stench had settled over the island. The living worked instinctively, without being ordered to do it—they waded into the shallows and retrieved their floating comrades, dragged the bodies up the beach and lined them up in rows, collected their dog tags. Bulldozers dug long trenches. Chaplains presided over the burial ceremonies. White crosses were planted in long rows. About 1,000 marines were killed, and twice that number wounded. The abnormally high ratio of dead to wounded was explained by the fact that so many men who died had been struck in the lagoon or on the beaches, where they could not be safely rescued and were often hit by additional fire.

  Nearly the entire Japanese garrison was killed, more than 4,000 troops and laborers. The marines had taken 146 prisoners, mostly Korean laborers. Just seventeen Japanese combatants had allowed themselves to be taken alive, and only one officer—an ensign. The Koreans were quick to let their captors know that they were not Japanese, and many pitched in willingly to assist in burying the American dead. The marines attached less urgency to the task of getting the enemy dead under the ground, but that was necessary on grounds of sanitation alone. Clouds of big green tropical flies were abuzz over the burial sites. “The stench of death hung over Betio,” wrote Lucas. “We had slaughtered more than 4,000 Japanese. Their grotesquely burned, blackened corpses littered every foot of the atoll, many of them dead for three days. They were bloated and swollen. For weeks we were to taste and smell corruption.”59 Burial details heaved the enemy dead into bomb craters, and bulldozers shoved coral over them.

  The hospital ship Solace entered the lagoon on the morning of the battle’s climactic day. As soon as she had dropped her anchor, landing craft and launches came alongside. Normally, casualties were brought aboard on only one side at a time, but now the gangplanks were lowered on both sides of the ship simultaneously. At midday, corpsmen held up sheets in an attempt to shield the wounded from the tropical sun. The Solace’s doctors and nurses were on their feet for the ensuing twenty-four hours.60

  A transport, the President Polk, brought heavy equipment and supplies needed to begin the work of restoring the airfield and converting the shattered island into a modern naval and air base. The unloading of massive machines in the shallow lagoon presented familiar problems. Admiral Hill had hoped to have the transports out of the area in twenty-four hours, but a week after D-Day the navy was still struggling to get needed cargo out of the ships and onto the beach. Only the LCTs were large enough to move the heaviest units, such as steam shovels and cranes, but only three LCTs were in working order. “Speaking in the words of the poets, this is a hell of a place to unload,” Hill told Spruance, “and I am afraid we can’t report as much progress as I had hoped.” Turner
reported the same sorts of frustrations at Makin. “As is almost always the case with the Army, and often with the Marines, it was very difficult to get enough men to unload boats, even slowly,” he told Spruance on November 30. “As soon as the troops debarked from the LSTs and APs, they simply evaporated. Boats would lie at the pier for hours on end without a pound moving, while those garrison troops were out sightseeing.”61

  Bulldozers, landed on Betio while the fighting was still hot, cleared the airstrip of corpses and debris. Bomb and shell craters were filled and paved over with coral cement. Four days after the invasion, the first American fighter planes landed on Betio. Construction teams cleared the roads and began assembling a water purification plant. Amid the mountains of wreckage shoved to the edges of the roads and taxiways were uprooted palm trees, smashed tanks and armored vehicles, lengths of sheet iron ejected from blasted pillboxes, and the contorted remains of hundreds of bicycles.

  Holland Smith had monitored the progress of the fight on Betio from his flagship off Makin Atoll, eighty-three miles north of Tarawa. The general was losing patience with the 165th Infantry Regiment’s methodical, go-slow approach to reducing Makin’s modest enemy garrison (which numbered just 600 men, only half of whom were fighting troops). The job, in Smith’s view, should have been accomplished on D-Day. But after landing on the east shore of Makin’s main island of Butaritari, the army troops held fast in defensive positions against discontinuous mortar and machine-gun fire. A second landing on the north (lagoon) side of Butaritari followed later that morning. Casualties were light, but as darkness fell on the night of November 20, only about half the island was in American hands.

  The army’s tactical concept of a gradual advance may have limited its casualties from hour to hour, but it extended the duration of the battle for Butaritari. Receiving reports of the carnage on Betio, Smith badly wanted to take his flagship south, but plans had specified that he and Turner (on the Pennsylvania) would remain off Makin until Butaritari was captured. General Ralph Smith did not declare the island secure until 1:40 a.m. on November 23.62 Throughout and after GALVANIC, the marine-army antagonism inherent in the “Smith over Smith” command setup was kept under a lid. But the same two generals would reprise their dispute on Saipan eight months later, with more public repercussions.

  Holland Smith flew down to Tarawa in a PBY patrol plane on the morning of November 24. Looking down at Betio as the seaplane circled above the lagoon, he was shocked and saddened: “The sight of our dead floating in the waters of the lagoon and lying along the blood-soaked beaches is one I will never forget. Over the pitted, blasted island hung a miasma of coral dust and death, nauseating and horrifying.”63 He went ashore that afternoon. The island was swarming with marines wearing three-day beards and layers of grime and coral dust. They were hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. Many sat alone, seemingly dazed, wearing the expression called the “thousand yard stare.” Smith and a number of other senior officers presided over a simple flag-raising ceremony near the airstrip. As the islands had been a British protectorate, a Union Jack was hoisted alongside the Stars and Stripes.

  With rare exceptions, the flag officers of the U.S. Navy had no direct experience of combat prior to the war. The assault on Tarawa had been a case study in amphibious operations—and it was necessary, from a professional view, for all senior officers who had participated in planning the invasion to see the results firsthand. In the two weeks after the battle, a stream of high-ranking visitors toured the devastated island. Admiral Hill went ashore on November 25 and wrote Spruance the next day, urging him to do the same. Examining the formidable Japanese defenses, he said, was “a liberal education for all of us.”64 Admiral Nimitz and a party of CINCPAC staff officers flew into Tarawa on a DC-3 about a week after the initial assault. Nimitz had never seen anything like it, and he told his flag lieutenant, Arthur Lamar, that it was “the first time I’ve smelled death.”65 General Julian Smith hosted an incongruously lavish dinner in his mess tent, complete with a white tablecloth and hearts of palm salad. Lamar noted that dead marines were still washing up on the beach.

  As Holland Smith inspected the remains of the Japanese defenses, he concluded that the aerial bombing and naval gunfire had been ineffective. In some places, pillboxes were entirely intact, appearing as if they had not been touched at all. Many of the subterranean works were covered with alternating layers of concrete, palm logs, steel beams, and coral sand. One bunker was later found to be covered with “six feet of reinforced concrete, on top of which were two layers of crisscrossed iron rails, covered by three more feet of sand, two rows of coconut logs topped by a final six feet of sand.”66 In his postwar memoir, Smith recorded the cutting view that “the Navy was inclined to exaggerate the destructive effect of gunfire and this failing really amounted to a job imperfectly done.”67 He told the admirals that Tarawa should have been subjected to three full days of uninterrupted naval bombardment. As for the carnage inflicted as the marines waded to shore, the navy should have moved heaven and earth to get more LVT tractors to the Pacific in time for GALVANIC.

  Admiral Turner answered these criticisms at the time and again after the war. No one who had seen Tarawa could fail to be moved by the scale of the carnage; all resolved to learn from the operation and apply those lessons in future amphibious invasions. But it would not be tactically wise to station a fleet off an atoll such as Tarawa for a week or more prior to an operation. The risk of submarine incursion was too great. As if to prove his point, the navy lost a jeep carrier in an especially horrific submarine attack on November 24.

  The Liscome Bay (CVE-56) was operating as part of Task Group 50.2, about twenty miles southeast of Makin. Her air group had conducted air searches, artillery-spotting missions, and strafing and bombardment runs over the atoll. Before dawn on the twenty-fourth, the ship was at flight and general quarters, on a course of 270 degrees, at a speed of 15 knots. Frequent sonar contacts had been reported that night, and extra lookouts had been posted. At 5:09 a.m., an officer on the starboard gallery walkway spotted an inbound torpedo wake. He alerted the bridge by telephone, but there was no time to evade. It struck amidships at 5:10, at the most vulnerable part of the hull. The blast immediately detonated the carrier’s principal magazine, and all of her aircraft bombs went up at once.

  The blast ascended to 1,000 feet. A witness stationed in Fly Control described it as “a huge ball of bright orange-colored flame, with some white spots in it like white-hot metal.”68 Debris fell on ships nearly two miles away. Michael Bak, a sailor on the destroyer Franks, remembers watching in horror as the cosmic orb rose into the predawn sky. “We watched the whole thing,” he said. “We were just dumbfounded that the ship was blowing up.”69

  The after half of the Liscome Bay was simply no longer there. There were no survivors from any part of the ship aft of frame 118. Fires raged in the hangar, and power cut out to the remaining sections of the bow. The ship sank in twenty-three minutes. “It was dark out there, but I remember it was just like putting a candle out,” said Bak. “The ball of fire was knocked out as the ship sank.”70 Destroyers moved in to pick up survivors, and aircraft patrolled overhead. By midmorning there was nothing left to be seen but “wreckage and empty life rafts.”71

  The Liscome Bay took 687 of her crew with her into the deep. Among the slain was Rear Admiral Henry M. Mullinnix, commander of the Escort Carrier Group. The carrier’s loss accounted for about a third of all American lives lost in Operation GALVANIC. If Ralph Smith’s troops had moved faster to overrun Makin, perhaps the fleet could have withdrawn a day or two earlier, sparing the Liscome Bay her fate. Taking the number of casualties from all services into account, the Marine Corps doctrine of aggressive offense was to be preferred to the army’s stolid pace. Nimitz later concluded, “Nowhere has the Navy’s insistence upon speed in amphibious assault been more sharply vindicated.”72

  THE LESSONS OF TARAWA were carefully studied and applied in plans for future amphibious landings. With benefit
of hindsight, the marines concluded that the assault forces had carried too much equipment to the beaches. When landing on a very small island such as Betio, it was better to go in light and rely on a steady resupply by sea. Many officers recommended leaving the packs on the transports and carrying only a belt. The landing forces should take fewer rations, less water, but more grenades, and leave behind bedding rolls, sandbags, gas masks, barbed wire, and mess kits. Radios should be waterproofed and perhaps brought in on flotation trays. Ammunition should likewise be wrapped to keep it dry. In any future operation in which landing craft would have to cross a coral reef, it was essential to supply an adequate number of LVTs. There was room for improvement of ship-to-shore coordination of air and naval fire support.

  Most later agreed that navy leaders had exaggerated the destructive potential of naval bombardment. Rear Admiral Howard F. Kingman, commander of the fire support group, had reportedly pledged in a briefing, “It is not our intention to wreck the island. We do not intend to destroy it. Gentlemen, we will obliterate it.”73 Remarks in the same vein were attributed to Admiral Hill. It is conceivable that these sentiments were more inspirational than predictive, intended to lift the spirits of the young marines who would launch an unprecedented assault on a heavily defended beach. (Many marines later attested that the tremendous barrage was a boost to morale, if nothing else.) The U.S. Navy had studied the effects of bombardment on strong fortifications, and the limitations were well understood. The battleships’ 16-inch high-explosive shells would strike Betio with a terminal velocity of 1,500 feet per second. They would demolish structures above ground, but according to Admiral Hill it was always understood that they would have “doubtful penetrating power.”74 Indeed, during the first morning’s bombardment, many of the naval projectiles hit the island at too shallow an angle—some were observed to ricochet and bound off into the sea.