Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  We got to talking about the history of the Gilbert Islands, which were soon to be injected violently into American history. According to Captain Tschaun’s copy of the pre-war New Zealand publication, Sailing Directions on Navigation Between the Islands and Atolls of the Gilbert Group, the first of the sixteen islands to be discovered was Nikunau, one of the southernmost of the islands. A British Commander Byron came across it in the Dolphin in 1765. But Captains Gilbert and Marshall were the principal pioneers; each named a group of islands after the other. In 1788 Gilbert in the Charlotte and Marshall in the Scarborough discovered Abemama, Kuria, Aranuka, Tarawa, Abaiang, Butaritari, and Makin. A Captain Bishop of the brig Nautilus discovered Nonouti and Tabiteuea in 1799. Captain Patterson in the Elizabeth sighted Arorae and Miana in 1809, and Captain Duperry of the corvette Coquille discovered Marakei in 1824.

  “You probably don’t know it,” said James Forbes, “but you Americans had a hand in developing the Gilberts. In 1841 two ships belonging to the United States Exploring Expedition, the Peacock and the Flying Fish, commanded by Commander Wilkes and Captain Hudson, were out here in the Gilberts, They mapped and charted reefs and anchorages around many of the islands.

  “And,” he added, “those are the charts that are still used.

  “There have been other Americans in the Gilberts from time to time. The census of 1931 showed one American Negro among the 26,000 natives of the Gilberts. I never found out what happened to him. Then, back in the nineteenth century, there were a couple of sailors who deserted their ships—the Gilberts were always a great place for beachcombers. One of them was an Irishman and the other was an American. When a British ship came by, as one did once in a while, both of them claimed to be Yanks. If an American ship sailed through, they were both British subjects, therefore immune to any regulations. They lived like kings and ruled their island—it was Marakei—with iron hands.”

  The old Bltsterbutt splashed through the deadening heat of the South Pacific with great monotony. A battleship cruise can be very dull when there is no prospect of action. Sometimes the convoy would head east; another day we would find ourselves mysteriously going west or north. We must have crossed the international dateline three times; finally we lost count of whether it was Thursday or Friday, and nobody cared very much. One day I asked Forbes how the British happened to take over the Gilbert Islands.

  “That’s an interesting story, as I heard it from the old timers,” he said. “There was an old tyrant of a king on Abemama—that’s the loveliest of the islands, I think. His name was Timbinoka, and he cut men to pieces if they sneezed in his presence. Timbinoka* began reaching out, so Captain Davis of H. M. S. Royalist sailed in and proclaimed a British protectorate over the group in 1892.

  * The spelling, like all spelling of native Gilbertese names, is a compromise. It might be Timtinaka, because p, t, and b are usually slurred into nothingness. Abemama is often spelled Apemama—the b or p is little more than a pause between the two vowels.

  “Robert Louis Stevenson had a run-in with Timbinoka. Stevenson came to the Gilberts in search of a climate to rest his tubercular lungs. He landed a horse, too, which scared hell out of the natives on Abemama—they had never seen one. Timbinoka was too much for Stevenson, so he packed up and sailed away for Samoa.

  “Later, when Stevenson wrote The South Seas he referred to George Murdoch as ‘a niggardly recluse,’ favorite of the native king. Well, George was a sort of handyman for Timbinoka at that time—he had come out from Scotland when he was nine or ten. But he later became District Officer, and he never forgave Stevenson.”

  “You Yanks think the South Seas are not romantic,” said James Forbes. “Well, that’s because you’re naturally the home-sickest people on earth and because you haven’t seen much of the South Seas except the jungles and mud and rain and malaria. War is always fought in the worst possible places; the Central Pacific will be a little better, so far as the weather is concerned.

  “In peacetime the South Seas are a wonderful place, though. I remember a friend of mine, mate on a trading schooner that was in Suva. Well, Suva is the capital of the South Seas. It used to have everything, including all the vices, even an All-Nations Street.

  “This mate liked to dance, he did. He went to a dance one night at the Grand Pacific Hotel—that’s the place everybody heads for in Suva. Ever been there?”

  I said I had been in the G. P. H., as everybody calls it, in August, 1942. It was full of American soldiers and sailors drinking whisky, served by dour, barefoot Indian waiters, and at the bar stood lusty New Zealand soldiers, drinking beer; and there were three newly arrived, homesick American Army nurses sitting on the cool porch talking to a press association correspondent, refusing to drink anything.

  “Well, that shows what war will do to a place,” said Captain Forbes. “The G. P. H. used to be a real showplace. All the American tourists who came in on the Matson liners went to the dances at the G. P. H. There was a boatload there the evening my friend went to dance. He met this attractive American woman—not elderly, but mature, I’d say between thirty-five and forty. They had a few drinks. Between dances they took a spin out to Suva Point. Then they danced some more. He told her he was mate on a trading schooner. She was simply thrilled; wouldn’t he show her the schooner? So he took her out to the schooner.

  “The lady sailed away next day, but she started to write letters to my friend. She wanted to chuck it all and come out to live with him. He used to answer her letters and play along with her, just for fun. Then one day he got a letter that scared the lights out of him, from a lawyer in the States, saying this correspondence must cease. The lady’s husband had found out about it and was quite angry. The correspondence ceased, forthwith. A long time afterward my friend saw the lady’s picture in a big society magazine he happened to pick up. He didn’t know she was so important. But, I tell you, this South Sea does something to people.”

  That was a fine voyage on the old Blisterbutt But, when action is in the offing, even the best of voyages, with the best of companions, begins to pall. The worst part about any war is the waiting, and even the most patient of Marines—who are likely to see more action than anybody else—begin to fret after days, weeks, and months of preparing, watching, and waiting for a few hours or a few days of combat. Americans hate to wait. The Japs said the chief characteristics of American soldiers were optimism and impatience, and, whereas a Jap sniper stoically would wait all day for one particular shot at one particular officer before he gave away his position and got himself killed, the American would say, “The hell with this waiting,” then break out his tommy gun to kill all the Japs he could before trying to make a break.

  Thus, we were glad to reach the end of our journey. In the last few days we correspondents had written whatever stories occurred to us during the voyage, we had read a book a day, we had talked to all the officers and many of the crew. We had drunk three or four Coca-Colas at a sitting, just for the excitement of rolling dice with the chaplain to see who would pay for them—the padre invariably lost. In the last few days we found ourselves, at about five in the afternoon, speculating on what three-year-old Grade B movie would be shown—for the second time during the voyage—in the wardroom after dinner.

  Late one afternoon in November we reached the spot where We would rendezvous with the Second Marine Division, which was coming up from New Zealand. The rendezvous point was Base X in the South Pacific. I had spent most of the past two years in the Pacific and I knew what a big ocean it was, but it occurred to me that a battle on the equator had taken me from New York to San Francisco to Honolulu to a jungle base in the South Pacific. Already I had traveled thousands of miles for the Battle of Tarawa, not counting five thousand more on the Wake Island side trip, and the battleground was still some hundreds of miles away.

  THE MARINES

  LIKE OTHER BASES built early in the war, X had settled down. Hastily cleared out of the jungle when the Japs seemed to be on the verge of cutting southwar
d from Guadalcanal to New Caledonia, thus periling the thin supply line to Australia, X was now on the way to becoming a rear area. Life was crude—nothing like the “country dubs” at Honolulu, Noumea, Kodiak, and such places that had apparently been forever by-passed by the war—but it was not unpleasant.

  Now that the base had been built to sizable proportions, the airfields built, the anti-aircraft guns unlimbered, there was not so much of the backbreaking labor that must go into a new base. The soldiers and sailors had enough beer most of the time; once in a while they saw a good movie at one of the open air theatres; they lived in quarters that were comfortable enough, many of them in Pacific huts or Quonset huts modified for hot weather.

  Certainly, they wanted to go home, or anywhere. Who wants to sit out the war in a clearing in the jungle, a million miles from nowhere? Many of them counted the days. When the war correspondents finally got ashore and went into Ensign Parsons’ office, they asked politely how long he had been on Base X.

  “I’ve been here only seven months,” said Mr. Parsons, “but some of the men have been here about eighteen months.”

  “Eighteen months, hell,” said a dungaree-clad quartermaster. “It will be nineteen months day after tomorrow.”

  We had to wait several days for the arrival of the Marines in the transports. The Officers Club was as pleasant a place as might be found on the edge of a jungle in the South Pacific, and the bar was open two hours each afternoon, serving the best rum Collinses south of the equator. The ice-making machine at the bar was a source of wonderment to the newly arrived officers. It spewed forth in unending succession thin slivers which, when placed in a glass, gave forth such an appearance as to cause one officer to ask, “What am I drinking, bourbon and noodles?” But it was cold.

  During the wait at Base X we met the men who would run the Tarawa show: Rear Admiral Harry Hill, the lean, handsome commander of the Southern (Tarawa) Amphibious Force; Major General Julian C. Smith, sensitive, kindly Marylander who commanded the Second Marine Division; and Colonel Merritt A. Edson, chief of staff of the division.

  Of these Edson was best-known. With his famed First Raider Battalion, he was generally credited with saving Guadalcanal during the fierce fighting of September 13 and 14, 1942—an action which won him the Congressional Medal of Honor and the British Distinguished Service Order. No man in the Marine Corps was more highly regarded by the professionals than Edson. A husky, intense blond, he was slightly hunch-shouldered, and his soft voice did not belie his steel-blue killer’s eyes. He hated the Japs, as only men who have met them in combat hate them. Whenever, during his hour-long lecture to the correspondents the day before we left Base X, he used the phrases, “killing Japs,” or “knocking off Nips,” his eyes seemed to light up, and he smiled faintly.

  “We cannot count on heavy naval and air bombardment to kill all the Japs on Tarawa, or even a large proportion of them,” said Colonel Edson, to the more-than-mild surprise of some of us who had been listening to the claims of some battleship gunnery officers—one claimed there would not even be a land mass for the Marines to land on after the big guns had finished with Tarawa.

  “Neither can we count on taking Tarawa, small as it is, in a few hours. You must remember the inevitable slowness of ground action,” added Edson. The colonel talked for an hour. He went into the details of the Tarawa operation, pointing out which battalions would land where. He gave us the timing schedules of the naval guns and planes which would shower Tarawa in less than four hours with the most concentrated mass of high explosives in all history—the ships would fire 2,000 tons of shells, ranging from 16-inch battleship shells weighing more than a ton apiece to 5-inch destroyer bullets weighing a little over fifty pounds; the planes would drop 1,500 tons of bombs (actually, this figure was cut down somewhat—we were told after the battle that, not counting the four days’ previous bombardment, 900 tons of bombs actually fell on Tarawa in the pre-landing action). The correspondents finally had been notified officially about Tarawa.

  “Some of the battalion commanders think we can take it in three hours,” smiled Edson, “but I think it may take a little longer. These Nips are surprising people.”

  I asked General Smith about his division. He was very proud of it. “I think they will do well. They are a fine bunch of fighting men. And guess how many are absent without leave? Just sixteen out of seventeen thousand, and only four of them were last-day cases which failed to show up when we left New Zealand. You’ll have to look a long way to find a better record than that; you can usually figure on one percent missing the boat when it is about to sail into combat.

  “There’s one thing about an operation of this kind that most people don’t realize,” Julian Smith continued, “and that is the vast amount of preparation involved. There are a million things that must be attended to before the division commander can say, ‘Ready.’ We started planning this Tarawa operation last August—we were told on August first that the Central Pacific had been chosen as the next theatre, and we were well into the plans two weeks later.

  “Look at the special training the men had to get—beachhead landings, night fighting, various kinds of new equipment. Then the equipment had to come from many thousands of miles. Some of the ships we are going to use weren’t even built when we started preparing. Some of the LST’s [landing ships for tanks] we will use won’t meet us until we get outside Tarawa. I’m afraid the people back home do not know what careful planning and precise timing are required to fight even one battle in a war.”

  Before we left Admiral Hull’s battleship Merritt Edson spoke up, “One more thing I forgot to tell you. The troops on Tarawa are a special navy landing force—what the newspapers call Jap Marines or Imperial Japanese Marines. That means they are the best Tojo’s got.”

  The correspondents drew their assignment. Four of us were assigned to the transport which would carry the Second Battalion of the Second Regiment of the Second Division: myself; red-headed William Hippie of the Associated Press, a former Honolulu newspaperman; Bundy the artist; and Don Senick, Fox newsreelman who had long since acquired the nickname, “Fearless Fosdick.”

  Our battalion was scheduled to hit the center of the landing area, with another assault battalion on either side of us. “I see that we get shot at from both sides,” observed Hippie, cheerfully. As a matter of fact, all three battalions were to be shot at from both sides, though ours was to take the heaviest casualties of all the battalions that finally landed on Tarawa—about sixty percent.

  But that was still days away. Before sailing out of the South Pacific there was one more full-scale dress rehearsal. A small boat took us out to the Navy transport, which I shall call the Blue Fox. The Blue Fox was stacked to the gunwales with Marines. They filled the holds, they poured over onto the decks. They were restless, after more than two weeks already aboard, but never during the voyage to Tarawa did I hear one complaint.

  Hippie and I were assigned to a small bunkroom which already contained five junior officers, first and second lieutenants and a Marine Gunner (warrant officer). It was not only hot; it was steaming. How we slept in that torrid bunkroom I do not know, but we actually managed to sleep about fourteen hours out of each twenty-four. In the daytime there were two portholes that could be opened, but at night these had to be closed, and there was a blackout screen with an airscoop attached for only one of these portholes. That let in a little air, but even the ocean night air in the South Pacific seemed like so much steam. We lay in bed and sweated without pause all night long. Then, in the daytime, we swallowed many salt tablets to restore the salt we had lost through perspiration during the night.

  I matched with Hippie to see which of us would hit the beach in the battalion commander’s landing boat, which of us in the battalion executive officer’s boat. He drew the c.o.’s boat, which was to go in shortly after the first wave. My boat would reach shore with the fifth wave, some minutes after the first wave.

  On the morning of the rehearsal, which would be
held on an island before we proceeded to Tarawa, we were awakened at 0230. Breakfast in the broiling officer’s wardroom was pancakey eggs and coffee. Some time before dawn the boats of the first wave were hoisted over the side, filled with the Marines who were to have the toughest job in the military book: landing on an enemy beach in the face of hostile fire.

  The boat which I was to ride into the beach for this rehearsal—and, later, into Tarawa—drew alongside shortly after five o’clock. We climbed over the side of the transport and scampered down the rope cargo net, being careful to grasp the Tactical ropes of the net—lest the man just above step on your fingers. There were about thirty-two of us in the Higgins boat, mostly staff personnel of the battalion. Senior officer in the boat was Major Howard Rice of Detroit, a short, pleasant Regular Marine who worried about his falling hair. One of the favorites of the battalion who was in our boat was young Dr. M. M. Green of Reno, a Navy doctor whose escapades in New Zealand had fastened on him the nickname: “Greeno the Mareeno.”

  Some were medical corpsmen (“pelicans”), but most of the enlisted men in the boat were communications personnel: operators of portable radios, wiremen, and runners—many an old Marine still puts absolute faith in these fearless message carriers who operate between the front lines when radios go haywire and the enemy cuts the telephone lines. For this rehearsal they were a rollicking crew until most of them fell asleep during the two hours of circling and circling, waiting for the waves of boats to form. One poor fellow was seasick over the side of the boat. His pals showed him no mercy.

  “How would you like a nice piece of fat pork?” one of them chirped, and the seasick Marine lost the rest of his breakfast. “Take a drink of warm salt water,” advised another.

  The Marines also liked to talk about their life in New Zealand. One Marine came in for a lot of ribbing because from the final maneuver on a desolate New Zealand beach he had returned to the transport and asked the corpsmen for a venereal prophylactic, much to the envy of his fellows who asked him what on earth he had been doing. Seems that his outpost far up “front” had been crossed by some friendly Maori girls.