The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Rear Admiral Mitscher, who flew his flag in the Yorktown, emphasized that the entire carrier task force was just a sophisticated support system for its aviators. “Pilots are the weapon of this force,” he told his staff. “Pilots are the things you have to nurture. Pilots are people you have to train, and you have to train other people to support the pilots.”9 He was a small, wiry man with a gaunt and weathered face. There was barely a hair left on his head, and he used the call sign “Bald Eagle.” Rarely did Mitscher ever leave the Yorktown’s flag bridge. He was usually perched on a stool, dressed in wrinkled khakis and a faded duck-billed cap, with a pair of binoculars on a strap around his neck. He normally had very little to say, but he listened carefully and absorbed everything his pilots told him. When he did speak, it was in a wan, raspy voice, and he was not always successful in making himself understood. Jocko Clark, his first flagship captain, said he had to teach himself to read lips in order to decipher the admiral’s words.

  Arleigh Burke, Mitscher’s longtime chief of staff in Task Force 58, observed that the admiral often had an uncanny sense of what the enemy was about to do, and he was usually right. He was not clairvoyant, said Burke—he simply had the intuition of a veteran aviator who had been flying from carriers as long as any pilot in the navy. His expectations were high, and he did not hesitate to relieve a man who failed to meet them. “He was a little bit of a fellow, a sandblower, who was a magnificent commander,” Burke said. “He knew his pilots; he knew his job; he was skillful himself. . . . He was wise, he was simple, he was direct, and he was ruthless.”10

  THE INEXORABLE ATTRITION of Japanese airpower in the central Pacific had been underway since long before FLINTLOCK. At the end of December 1943, the Americans had four working airfields in the Gilberts, including three that could accommodate heavy bombers. Rear Admiral John H. Hoover’s land-based air command sent USAAF bombers against the eastern Marshalls from rear bases at Canton and Ellice Islands and new bases at Makin and Tarawa. The workhorse of this campaign was the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, often escorted by F6Fs or P-39 Airacobras. The raiders noted a steady decline in the number of enemy fighters that rose to meet them. Navy PB4Ys, a naval version of the B-24, flew reconnaissance missions over the islands and laid mines in the channels. Nimitz’s headquarters diary recorded the near-daily “milk runs” that preceded the FLINTLOCK landings. On January 21, fifteen B-24s dropped 30 tons of bombs on Roi-Namur and Kwajalein islands. The next day, ten B-24s dropped 20 tons of bombs on Roi; on January 29, five B-24s left 13 tons; on January 30, seven B-24s added another 21 tons. Mille, Jaluit, Malelop, Taroa, and Wotje were all bombed heavily on the same day.11

  On the morning of January 28 (D-Day minus three), Admiral Frederick C. Sherman’s Task Group 58.3 landed a knockout blow on the airfield at Kwajalein Island. The dawn F6F sweep encountered no Japanese fighters at all, and the bomber squadrons that followed ensured that the airfield would not return to action before the amphibious fleet arrived. The next day, Sherman’s group struck Eniwetok, the westernmost of Japan’s fortified Marshalls atolls, and gave it the same kind of treatment. Sherman’s carriers remained off Eniwetok for three days while their air groups pulverized the airfields and ground installations. On the third day, not much was left but heaps of rubble and a few palm trees that had been completely stripped of their foliage. The airmen reported that they could not find any targets on the ground or in the lagoon that seemed worth bombing, and “the island looked like a desert waste.”12

  The warships assigned to bombard the landing beaches came over the eastern horizon before dawn on January 31. Off Roi, at 6:51 a.m., Admiral Richard L. Conolly maneuvered his flagship Maryland to a position 2,000 yards off the northern beaches. That amounted to point-blank range for 16-inch guns—or as Holland Smith put it, “So close that his guns almost poked their muzzles into Japanese positions.”13 At precisely 7:15 a.m., the naval guns fell silent all at once, and the drone of carrier planes immediately filled the void. A precise airstrike followed, and as the planes flew away, the guns opened up again. A 127mm artillery emplacement on Roi fired gamely at the cruisers and destroyers offshore, but quickly attracted return fire that knocked it out of action. Truman Hedding recalled, “We learned a lot about softening up these islands before we sent the Marines in. We really worked that place over. They developed a tactic called the ‘Spruance haircut.’ We just knocked everything down; there wasn’t even a palm tree left.”14 The islands in Kwajalein Atoll were struck by about 15,000 tons of bombs and naval shells in the seventy-two hours before H-Hour, amounting to more than a ton of ordnance for each man in the Japanese garrison. A wag on Turner’s command ship adapted Winston Churchill’s verdict on the Battle of Britain: “Never in the history of human conflict has so much been thrown by so many at so few.”15

  Transports carried nearly 64,000 troops of the 4th Marine Division and the Army’s 7th Infantry Division. The first troop landings were to occur on several small islands adjoining Roi-Namur, designated IVAN, JACOB, ALLEN, ANDREW, ALBERT, and ABRAHAM. Aerial photos had shown that they were either deserted or very lightly garrisoned, but if they contained any enemy artillery pieces, they might pose a threat to the landing boats. Once they had been secured, the marines would set up artillery batteries to direct fire onto the fortified beaches of Roi-Namur.

  H-Hour for the landings on IVAN and JACOB had been set for 9:00 a.m., but choppy seas and a stiff breeze made for a difficult transfer into the amtracs. Once in the boats, marines were tossed cruelly on the swells and soaked to the skin by heavy salt spray. The inexperienced navy crews struggled to keep the boats in formation. With their radios drenched and unusable, orders had to be passed verbally from boat to boat. Delays inevitably followed. At 9:30, the first boats churned in toward the beaches. Carrier planes dived low to bomb and strafe the Japanese firing positions. The boats destined for IVAN, battling heavy waves and winds, had to slow their speed to navigate through uncharted reefs. Several of the first-wave amtracs turned away from their assigned landing beaches on the ocean-facing side, and instead went around the island and put ashore on the lagoon beaches. This improvised landing succeeded, as the handful of Japanese defenders could not move into new positions quickly enough to counter it. From their beachhead, small groups of marines quickly overran the island and declared it secure at 11:00.

  In the early afternoon, troops went ashore on the little islands ALLEN, ALBERT, and ABRAHAM, all to the east of Roi-Namur. As they raced into the beaches, the Higgins boats and LVTs fired bow-mounted machine guns and rockets and destroyed many of the Japanese guns. Having circled offshore for hours, many wet and seasick marines were relieved to stagger ashore, even if greeted with a hail of enemy fire. In most cases, on these secondary islands, effective fire support, air support, and the not-inconsiderable firepower mounted on the landing craft forced the small Japanese garrisons to keep their heads down, facilitating a bloodless landing. ALBERT was secured at 3:42, ALLEN by 4:28, and ANDREW (where there were no defenders at all) by 3:45. ABRAHAM, where only six Japanese soldiers were found, was secured by nightfall. American casualties had been minimal. That night, howitzers were hauled ashore and positioned to lay down fire on the fortified beaches of Roi and Namur.

  The snafus encountered on D-Day were manageable, and none had been entirely unanticipated. “The Commanding General and Staff of the Northern Landing Force were well aware that things might not go as planned on D-Day,” General Schmidt’s chief of staff later observed.16 But the morning had witnessed a general breakdown in the command and control of landing craft. Admiral Conolly attributed the problem to the inexperience of the boat crews and a dearth of pre-landing rehearsals, exacerbated by rough weather and the loss of radios to water damage. For all of that, the admiral proudly concluded, “the plans were made to work and that is the final test of a command and its organization.”17

  The bulk of the 4th Marine Division was to storm the lagoon-side beaches of Roi and Namur at dawn on February 1. All would land in amtr
acs. In order to avoid the confusion and disorder of Tarawa, the first two waves would climb into the amtracs while the vehicles were still embarked on the LST tank carriers. According to the operations plan, the amtracs would roll down the ramps and launch some miles offshore. Then they would enter the lagoon by the channel east of Namur and rendezvous off the landing beaches. But the little landing craft had labored mightily in the heavy seas offshore on D-Day, so Admiral Conolly decided to take the LSTs into the lagoon before dawn and launch the boats much closer to the beaches.

  Covered by the big guns of the battleship Tennessee and other fire support ships, the tank carriers entered the lagoon at dawn. Carrier airstrikes and marine artillery on the adjoining islands added to the toll of misery inflicted on the defenders. The volume of fire from Japanese positions on both Roi and Namur had slackened considerably since the previous day. The bombardment of Roi, delayed by the passage of LSTs between the support units and the island, began at 7:10 a.m. The scheduled landing, designated “W-Hour,” was set for 10:00.

  Getting the amtracs off the LSTs was not nearly as straightforward as had been anticipated. Those on the upper decks had to be lowered by elevators to the tank decks, but in a nasty twist, it turned out that the second-generation amtracs (“LVT-2s”) were too long to fit in the elevators. They had to be moved onto an inclined ramp, and even then they fit by just inches. Each machine had to be maneuvered just so, and delays unavoidably ensued. A malfunctioning elevator on one LST stranded nine amtracs on the weather deck. At 8:53 p.m., bowing to the inevitable, Conolly pushed W-Hour back to 11:00 a.m.

  At 11:12, a signal dropped from the destroyer Phelps, sending the first waves of landing boats toward Roi. It was a thirty-minute run into the Red beaches. The naval barrage rose to a crescendo, and the air coordinator held the Avengers and Hellcats to above 2,000 feet so they could continue to bomb the islands while the naval guns were pouring shells into it. The simultaneous air and naval bombardment during the approach of the first wave was judged a great success, and similar tactics were to be employed in later amphibious operations.

  The planes and naval guns desisted with exact timing as the first boats scraped ashore. The treads of the LVTs bit into the sand and drove up the beaches, firing their machine guns and rockets at enemy positions. The first waves hit Namur about fifteen minutes later. Four battalions were put ashore on the two connected islands before noon.

  Roi was a relative cakewalk. Wendy Point, the island’s western extremity, was swiftly overrun by armored amtracs. The marines found that many of the pillboxes and defensive entrenchments had been blasted to rubble by the heavy bombing and bombardment. Japanese defenders seemed stupefied by the mighty shelling and did not fight with their usual ferocity. The landscape had been so drastically chewed up by naval shelling and bombing that many landmarks identified on the maps were no longer there. Infantry units could not be sure exactly where they were, relative to their assigned targets, so they instinctively kept advancing toward the northern beaches. A few high-spirited companies had to be summoned back to the island’s midsection so that the advance could proceed in order.

  When the first tanks came ashore at midday, all remaining resistance was crumbling. Roi’s level terrain was well suited to these machines, which punched directly into the heart of the island and fired on pillboxes at point-blank range. By three in the afternoon, friendly fire posed more danger to the marines than did enemy fire. From the air, observers noted that marines were walking upright, without bothering to take cover from enemy fire. By late afternoon, the only remaining organized resistance on Roi was in a complex of bunkers at the northeastern end of the island. A large and well-coordinated attack on this section pushed the remaining defenders back to the beach, where they perished under artillery fire or took their own lives. At 6:02 p.m., Colonel Louis R. Jones reported that the northern side of the island was secured.

  The marines had a much rougher time on Namur, which was joined to Roi by a sand spit on the lagoon side. There the terrain was less accommodating to the tanks and armored vehicles. Most of the heavy armor was stopped at the top of Beach Green, and could only provide fire support from behind the attacking infantrymen. Tanks became mired in soft sand, or drove into shell craters and tank traps, or could not climb over the heaps of rubble that were the remains of bombed-out defensive emplacements. As on Roi, the naval barrage had thoroughly altered the landscape, so the advancing marines could not identify the landmarks they found on their maps. Thick underbrush and heavy palls of smoke obscured visibility. At the center of the island, Japanese snipers concealed themselves in a brush field and shot several marines as they came within range. There seemed little danger of a counterattack in force, but the nests of Japanese riflemen would have to be cleaned out by direct infantry assault.

  A large concrete blockhouse stood near the geographic center of the island. Heavily reinforced with steel, it had withstood the bombing and shelling of the past seventy-two hours, and now gave cover to several dozen Japanese soldiers. At 1:05 p.m., a platoon of marines surrounded and prepared to destroy it. They tossed charges and grenades into several apertures. The structure went up in an earth-shattering explosion, and debris rained down on the heads of men all over the island. An officer on the lagoon beach reported that “trunks of palm trees and chunks of concrete as large as packing crates were flying through the air like match sticks. . . . The hole left where the blockhouse stood was as large as a fair-sized swimming pool.”18 The titanic blast claimed the lives of about twenty marines and wounded about a hundred more. Upon later examination, officers concluded that the grenades and demolition charges had touched off a magazine stocked with torpedo warheads. Reinforcements were summoned from the beach to plug the gap in the marine lines.

  In the mid-afternoon, marines cleared lanes for the tanks so that they could be brought up to the edge of the field of underbrush, from which Japanese snipers continued to fire. The tanks poured 37mm canister shot into the field until no one fired back. As night fell on February 1, about two-thirds of the island was firmly in American hands. A pocket of resistance remained in the northeast corner, but the final attack would have to wait until daylight on February 2.

  The morning’s attack was led by medium Sherman tanks advancing through lanes cleared by the marines. Infantrymen followed with grenades and flamethrowers. The last sustained resistance was offered by a small group of Japanese soldiers firing from an antitank ditch behind the ocean beach. Tanks flanked the trench and poured canister fire into it.

  Sporadic firing continued through midday, but the island was declared secured at 2:18 p.m. An American flag was raised above a scorched wasteland. Peace reigned over Roi-Namur as night fell on February 2.

  The army’s 7th Infantry Division was assigned the job of taking banana-shaped Kwajalein Island, at the southeastern corner of the atoll. As at Roi-Namur, assault troops first landed on smaller adjacent islands and set up batteries of 105mm and 155mm howitzers. Minesweepers swept the best deepwater entrance to the lagoon. The fire support ships of the Southern Attack Force closed to within 2,000 yards and leveled a seawall above the assault beaches. Two regiments (the 32nd and 184th) landed on the lagoon side of Kwajalein at 9:30 a.m. on February 1. At first, the attackers encountered only feeble and intermittent resistance and quickly secured the eastern half of the island. The heavy punishment inflicted on the garrison from air and sea had apparently done its work. But the army troops moved slowly and methodically, advancing cautiously against the enemy’s fixed positions in line with their doctrine and training. On D-Day plus one, opposing lines were drawn across the western third of the island. The remains of the Japanese garrison was given time to dig into new positions. Major General Charles H. Corlett’s forces called in heavy airstrikes and naval fire support, which steadily reduced the enemy’s bunkers and pillboxes to piles of rubble.

  As on Makin three months earlier, General Holland Smith was not satisfied with the army’s stolid pace: “I could see no reason
why this division, with ample forces ashore, well covered by land-based artillery and receiving tremendous naval and air support, could not take the island quicker.”19

  The fight for Kwajalein dragged out for four days. Prodded repeatedly to finish the job, and reminded of the ever-growing risk of enemy air and submarine incursion against the fleet waiting offshore, General Corlett ordered a decisive westward push on the fourth day of the battle. Tanks led the way, firing point-blank into one pillbox after another; troops followed with hand grenades and flamethrowers. “Every now and then, gas, oil, and ammunition dumps would be blown up,” recalled Ken Dodson, a naval officer on one of the transports offshore. “The explosions and the gunfire shook the ship. The roar was never-ending. Then came the smoke and the stench, getting worse every day, until we were heartily glad to leave the place.”20 As in every other such fight, Japanese stragglers infiltrated the American lines through tunnels and overlooked bunkers, and the assault troops quickly learned to watch their backs. Nisei interpreters (second-generation Japanese Americans) broadcast surrender appeals through loudspeakers, but there were only a few dozen takers, and most of the men who gave themselves up were Korean laborers.

  Kwajalein Island was declared secure at 7:20 p.m. on February 4. Ken Dodson went ashore the next morning. Writing to his wife, he described a desolate landscape of “shell craters and hillocks of upturned coral.” Dodson was sickened by the sight of the enemy dead, and was surprised to find that he pitied them: