Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  Colonel Carlson’s ideas about indoctrinating soldiers had apparently teen passed up by his superiors—the United States military services have never been known for their non-conservatism. The Raider Battalions had all but lost their identity after they were merged into a regiment in 1943- Colonel Carlson was on the Tarawa expedition as an observer for another division, which he served, not as a field commander where he could put his ideas into effect, but as a staff officer. But he, like other observers, was to play an important role on Tarawa.

  During the long, sweltering trip to Tarawa the Marines found little excitement. They spent an hour a day cleaning their rifles —the Marine still calls his rifle his best friend—and sharpening their knives and bayonets. Another hour was devoted to studying aerial photographs and twelve-foot contour maps of Betio. Every man concentrated on learning just where he would land and just what he was supposed to do when he got there. A few manned anti-aircraft guns. Besides that there was nothing to do except eat and sleep. They always seemed to be asleep, in their bunks, on the decks, under the landing boats, on any given surface. Some were always playing cards—pitch, gin rummy, solitaire, bridge. Many read dogeared magazines that were anywhere from six weeks to six years old, or pocket-sized Penguin murder mysteries brought up from New Zealand. Every second day there was a new movie of the kind that was usually sent to the armed forces: the kind that was optimistically labeled Grade B by its makers when it was filmed two to five years ago. After witnessing something called Marry the Boss’s Daughter, a perspiring Marine walked out remarking, “I ought to have my head examined for sitting through that one.”

  The one consuming passion of the Marines seemed to be letter-writing, as my roommates, the junior officers who had to censor the letters, testified frequently and sometimes profanely. Lieutenant Adolph (“Swede”) Narvik, the battalion staff officer charged with mail censorship, spent some eight hours a day reading letters, increased to twelve hours as the ship neared Betio. Finally he had to call on other officers to help, as the mail collector brought in big bags almost hourly and emptied them in the big desk drawers. “I wouldn’t mind so much,” Norvik cried out, “if that damned corporal didn’t write five identical letters to five different girls every day.” A high percentage of the letters were addressed to New Zealand, which I reflected might have been food for American isolationists’ thought. The Marines could not mention our destination in their letters, or even the fact that we were going into battle—a severe restriction, I thought, since the news of our invasion would have reached all parts of the world weeks before the letters were received. Many times later I pondered on the effect created in many homes where letters were received after the writer had been pronounced “Killed in action.” Such was to be the rate of more than a hundred and fifty of the letter writers on the Blue Fox.

  About halfway between Base X and Tarawa, I attended one of the battalion staff meetings in the wardroom. Presiding officer was the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert R. Amey, Jr., a Pennsylvanian who had moved to San Diego, as had so many Marine officers whose career had become the war. A tall, black-haired, black-mustached officer in his midthirties, as handsome as a movie star, Colonel Amey was popular with his staff, his company commanders, and his men. Naturally shy, speechmaking came unnaturally to him, but he had to do it, so he got up and began outlining the plan of battle.

  “I’d call these various islands of the Tarawa Atoll by their real names,” he said, “but I can’t pronounce them. So I’ll call them by their code names, which you all know better, anyway. … Colonel Shoup’s combat team will consist of the three assault battalions, plus detachments of artillery and engineers. Ours is the center battalion, as you know.

  “The entire operation depends on our combat team, and we are the center of it. The whole thing hinges on our three battalions. We’ve got to get that island and the airfield on it. We’ll bring in the Seabees and they’ll straighten out the air strip and we’ll have planes operating off it pretty damn quick. The Navy has always promised us close support and here’s where we get it. The land-based bombers start hitting the place D minus four [four days before D Day]. The PBY’s will hit Jaluit and Mili to knock out the Jap airfields there. On D minus three a carrier force will hit Tarawa from sun-up to sun-down. D minus two a cruiser force will shell it from sun-up to sun-down. D minus one the carriers hit it again from sun-up to sun-down.

  “That’s just the beginning. On D Day about dawn the Jap airfields at Nauru, Jaluit, and Mili will be heavily bombed, so there won’t be any Jap planes to bother us on Tarawa. On Tarawa itself the air and naval bombardment will be alternated steadily for four hours [here Colonel Amey recited the exact schedule] and they will put a total of about three thousand tons of high explosives on that little square mile in that time. There’s never been anything like it. As we hit the beach the planes will be strafing very close in front of you to keep the Nips down until you can get in there and knock off what’s left of them. I think we ought to have every Jap off the island—the live ones—by the night of D Day.”

  Colonel Amey was sweating profusely. I doubt that he had ever made such a long speech before. He continued. “We are very fortunate. This is the first time a landing has been made by American troops against a well-defended beach, the first time over a coral reef, the first time against any force to speak of. And the first time the Japs have had the hell kicked out of them in a hurry.

  “Maybe we’ll walk ashore. I don’t know. It depends on the effect of gunfire and air bombardment.”

  Lieutenant Norvik got up as Colonel Amey finished. He gave a detailed outline of what we knew about the number of Japs on Tarawa, where they were located, where nearby Jap bases were located and what was based there. The intelligence turned out to be surprisingly accurate—except that we did not know the extraordinary strength of the Jap fortifications. Of the Gilbertese, Norvik said, “They are fine people, very friendly, some speak English. Their heads should never be touched—very important, it has something to do with religion. They are very jealous of their women. There is a native drink made from coconut that makes men insane and want to kill. Natives used to be given six months for possessing it.

  “When talking to you the natives may sit down. That’s their way of being respectful. The island is very low. Six feet down you hit water, so don’t drink it until it has been tested. Dysentery is a big factor—that’s why the Japs build their heads [toilets] over the water, which they approach by those little platforms you see in the photographs.” Lieutenant Norvik instructed the audience about the password and countersign, and sat down.

  Before the meeting broke up, Colonel Amey stood up and shouted, “Just a minute—I forgot a couple of things. Tell your men to drink very little water at first. Every man will take two canteens, but we can’t be sure how long it will be before we can get some water ashore. And there will be no pilfering. The M.P.’s will warn you first, then shoot. And don’t forget. Hit ’em quick and hit ’em hard. They’ll be punchdrunk from the shellfire, so hit ’em before they can pull themselves together.”

  I was curious to know what various officers thought the effect of the naval gunfire and aerial bombardment would be. Obviously, the ease or difficulty of our task depended on the number of Japs killed or stunned by the preliminary bombing and shelling. When I asked General Julian Smith at Base X, he wouldn’t even attempt a guess at first. He finally said he wouldn’t count on more than one-third of them being killed before the Marines hit the beach. As indicated above, Colonel Edson was bearish on the effect of the high explosives: “Where the Navy gunnery officers make their mistake is in assuming that land targets are like ships—when you hit a ship it sinks and all is lost, but on land you’ve got to get direct hits on many installations, and that’s impossible, even with three thousand tons of shells and bombs.” One day on the Blue Fox I went up to see Colonel Shoup and tried to pin him down for an estimate.

  “Well,” said Dave Shoup, whose “major general’s qu
arters” were the single hottest spot on the transport, “if there are three thousand Nips on the island, I’d say not more than seven hundred will be dead when we get ashore. But the degree of their ability to function will be something else. The bombing and shelling will tear up their communications, for one thing, and they can’t fight effectively without communications.

  “What worries me more than anything is that our boats may not be able to get over that coral shelf that sticks out about five hundred yards,” said Shoup. “We may have to wade in. The first waves, of course, will get in all right on the ‘alligators’ [amphibious tractors], but if the Higgins boats draw too much water to get in fairly close, we’ll either have to wade in with machine guns maybe shooting at us, or the amphtracks will have to run a shuttle service between the beach and the end of the shelf. We have got to calculate high tide pretty closely for the Higgins boats to make it.”

  I asked a number of enlisted Marines how tough they thought it was going to be. “Tougher than anybody has said,” was the consensus. One sergeant went into some detail about his opinion of the Tarawa operation. “We know the Navy is going to hit that damn island with everything there is. But something in the back of my mind tells me there’s going to be a lot of shooting Japs left when we start going ashore. What makes me think that? Well, I’ve seen a lot of bombing and shelling on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, and it never was so awfully effective as these airplane nuts would have you think. Airplanes can sink ships, and they can scare hell out of you on land—I sure don’t like to be bombed—but they never actually kill many people. And we’ve heard about the shelling and bombing of New Georgia—that didn’t turn out to be very effective, and our ground troops had a hell of a time, being green like they were. And there was Kiska, which had been bombed and shelled I don’t know how many times. But when the Army got ashore they found out it hadn’t done much good, even if the Japs had left. The Japs left there because they knew the ground troops were coming, not because of the bombing.

  “Now,” the sergeant continued, “I know all these things. But at the same time I realize that all the bombing and shelling that has been done in the past, including that in Europe, is child’s play compared to what the Nips on Tarawa are going to get. It’s hard to imagine three thousand tons of high explosives falling on an island as small as that without killing everything on it, no matter how well the little brown bastards dig in. And, brother, I can testify that they are the damnedest diggers in the world. It’s like pulling a tick out of a rug to get one out of his hole. You see what it all adds up to—I don’t know what to think, and we won’t ever find out until we try it.”

  I wished I had that sergeant’s name. He was the best prophet on the ship. I felt that he was right, at the time. I had left New Guinea after the seventy-second Jap raid on Port Moresby; up to that time not an American on the soil of New Guinea had been killed by Japanese bombing except a few airmen who had been caught in their planes on the ground. And during those raids the Japs had air superiority at almost all times. In those days I liked to console myself by thinking that our bombing was more accurate—it was a year later before I would concede that even the over-publicized Norden bombsight could not kill a Jap when he was in a hole. I had also seen the ineffectiveness of the American bombing on Kiska—the island had barely been touched in the scores of raids between the Japanese occupation in 1942, and the time we landed in August, 1943. Still, three thousand tons on one square mile. …

  What actually threw me off, and made me unprepared for what we were going to find on Tarawa, was not the preparatory bombing-and-shelling illusion. It was the conversation that took place among the officers during the last two dap aboard the Bitte Fox. One afternoon I wrote in my notebook: “Oh, oh, where have I heard this before? Says Colonel Shoup, ‘I don’t give a damn if there is not one Jap on the island. Our objective is the airfield, and if we get that without losing a Marine, I’ll be happy. Killing every Jap on Tarawa is not worth losing one Marine’s life.’”

  Dave Shoup continued, “If the Japs meant to trick us into this operation and tie up a big force at the same time, they succeeded. Just look out here”—pointing to the scores of ships extending to the horizon on every side—“battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and I don’t know how many transports and LST’s. But we’ll put that airfield in operation right away and start bombing the Marshalls.”

  The cause of this new. trend of thought was a report from the B-24’s which had bombed Betio the day before: no signs of life on the island, and very weak anti-aircraft fire. Perhaps the Japs were pulling out, just as they had pulled out of Kiska. That phrase, “Very weak anti-aircraft fire,” had such a familiar ring! The night in August before our convoy sailed from Adak for Kiska I had talked with the B-25 pilots who had bombed Kiska twice that day. Said one of the senior pilots, Major Richard Salter, “I don’t believe there are any Japs on Kiska. I haven’t seen a sign of movement in two weeks of bombing the island The new pilots come back and report ‘Very weak anti-aircraft fire,’ but new pilots are always seeing things. There isn’t any anti-aircraft fire at all.”

  Thus, I edged myself into thinking that the Japs had left Tarawa, too. I knew it was a dangerous frame of mind for someone going in with the assault waves, and I noted the feeling in my book. “If there are a lot of Japs on Tarawa I’ll be utterly unprepared psychologically.” The feeling among the officers increased as we neared Tarawa. “The chances are fifty-fifty this is another Kiska,” one artillery officer offered to bet, without finding any takers. A transport surgeon who had also gone through the Kiska dry-run was caustic: “There won’t be a damned Jap on Tarawa, and I’ll bet we haven’t got an alternate target. Why in the hell don’t we just take this force and keep going to Tokyo and get the goddam war over with?” he said, knowing nothing about the difficulty of supply and organization and the millions of gallons of oil such a force needed for only one day’s steaming.

  Try as I might, I never got over the feeling that the Japs had pulled out of Tarawa—not until the first bullet whizzed by my ear.

  There were three chaplains on board the Blue Fox: the Protestant, M. J. MacQueen, the Catholic, F. W. Kelly, who were attached to the Marines, and the ship’s chaplain, Peter IL McPhee, Jr. As the ship neared the target their duties increased progressively. If there was any sign of nervousness or fear or intimation of approaching fate, die Marines showed it in their increasing attention to religion. This is, of course, as it should be. In battle death is as normal as life, and any man is a fool who goes into battle without adjusting himself to admit, “I may be killed,” and steeling himself to say, “I am not afraid to die.” The man who is prepared to die, should that be his lot, approaches battle calmer and with a clearer head. He is a better soldier.

  Religious services were usually held on deck. Several times daily the ship’s loudspeaker would drone: “Protestant services will be held at 1700 on Number Seven hatch,” or “Catholic mass is now being held on Number Four hatch.” Father Kelly was a young, black-haired, blue-eyed priest from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, who was frequently asked in friendly fashion by Marines from the Protestant South whether he was married. About twenty-seven percent of the men of the battalion were Catholics, but Father Kelly was as popular with the Protestants, just as Chaplain MacQueen was as popular with the Catholics as with the Protestants. Denominational distinctions did not mean much to men about to offer up their lives.

  “This is probably the most informal type of service in the world,” said Father Kelly. “I hold mass on deck, and I hold confession in a comer of the wardroom. The boys come and tell me what they have done, say they are sorry, and that’s that.” Later, on Betio, I was to see Chaplain Kelly supervising the burial of many of these men who had made their last confession to him not many hours before. Amid the buoyancy of life or the stillness of death, Chaplain Kelly, like the Marines who were his charges, was a professional.

  Of all the Marines on the Blue Fox, there were none more professional
than the thirty-four men of the regimental Scout and Sniper Platoon. This platoon had been formed of picked men after the Second Regiment had found the need for some such group of experts on Guadlcanal; qualifications for the S. & S. platoon included not only the dead-eye of an expert rifleman and the patience of an Indian—the heart of absolute fearlessness was just as important All the Marines, it seemed, hated the Japs. Said Colonel Shoup, “The New Zealanders used to ask me how we instilled such bitter hatred in our men. I said we didn’t instill it. ‘Just wait until you see a lot of your buddies shot to pieces by the Japs,’ I said. And you get mad at ’em for making life so miserable and uncomfortable. We wouldn’t be out in these stinking jungles if the Japs hadn’t attacked us.” But there were no Marines who hated the Japs more than the Scout and Sniper men. Through bitter experience they had learned that men who hate most, kill best. “I just want to kill them all— that’s all,” said a Polish-American private first-class.

  Except that they were all picked troops and they knew they were élite of the élite Marines, the Scout-Sniper men had not very much in common. The thirty-four men came from eighteen different states—five from Wisconsin, five from California. Their racial background was a ladleful from the American melting pot: Gunnery Sergeant Hooper, the second in command, was from Milford, New Jersey; there were Davis from Tennessee, Gillis from Ipswich, Massachusetts, Deka and Krzys from Cleve land, Leseman and Kloskowski from Wisconsin, Selavka from Connecticut and Allred from Sophia, North Carolina, Putz from Forest Hills, New York, and Collins from Chatham, New York. Besides Hooper, there were three other sergeants, nine corporals; the rest were privates first-class.

  The rest, that is, except the platoon’s leader: First Lieutenant William D. Hawkins of El Paso. I saw “Hawk,” as everybody called him, several times on the Blue Fox. The last time I saw him was the day before D Day. We stood topside after dinner, watching the miracle of the equatorial sunset: gold and flaming red, slate-gray and solid blue streaks and green streaks. To the west, between our ship and the sunset the outlines grew dimmer, as the sun set lower, of some forty American ships of war. Hawkins was saying, “You know we’re going in first. We are going to wipe every last one of, the bastards off that pier and out from under that pier before they have a chance to pick off the first wave. But one man had to stay behind to take care of our equipment. I asked for volunteers. Not a man in the crowd would volunteer to stay behind. My men are not afraid of danger.”