Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  After making last-minute adjustments of my gear, I went up on the flying bridge when General Quarters was bused at 0215. There was a half-moon dodging in and out of the clouds forty-five degrees to portside. It was cool up there, with a brisk breeze on the rise. It was possible to make notes when the moon was out. A calm voice came over the loudspeaker: “Target at 112 true, 26,800 yards ahead.” “Blackfish 870 yards.” “Blackfish 1000 yards.” “Blackfish 900 yards.” The Blackfish was the lead transport, and the Blue Fox was next. The feint red signal light of the lead ship slowly flashed on and off as we followed her to Tarawa.

  Lieutenant Vanderpoel, the ship’s gunnery officer, was talking to me and lieutenant Commander Fabian, who was to be beach master on Tarawa. Vanderpoel was indignant. He had seen a lot of this war, at Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Attu, Kiska, And they had never allowed him to fire his guns on the transport. True, they were not heavy guns such as battleships carry, but they might help. If he could just turn them on the shore, as the warships would turn theirs. “Just once I want to shoot,” he said, “but this time they said again ‘Transports will not fire.’ We sit on these damn transports and we don’t get to see anything of the war, and the Marines have to go in and do it all. Damn.”

  By 0330 the Marines had begun loading the outboard boats for the first wave. The sergeants were calling the roll: “Vernon, Simms, Gresholm. …” They needed no light to call the well-remembered roll, and they didn’t have to send a runner to find any absentees. The Marines were all there. One of the sergeants was giving his men last-minute instructions: “Be sure to correct your elevation and windage. Adjust your sights.”

  At 0400 I went below. I stood outside the wardroom as the first and second waves walked through and out to their boats. Most of the men were soaked; their green-and-brown-spotted jungle dungarees had turned a darker green when the sweat from their bodies soaked through. They jested with one another. Only a few even whistled to keep up their courage.

  “How many you going to kill, Bunky?” one of them shouted at a bespectacled Marine. “All I can get,” said Bunky, without smiling, as he wiped his beloved rifle barrel.

  “Oh, boy,” said a kid well under twenty, “I just want to spit in a dead Jap’s face. Just open his mouth and let him have it.”

  Said another, “I should have joined the Boy Scouts. I knew it.”

  They were a grimy, unshaven lot. The order had gone outs they must put on clean clothing just before going ashore, in order to diminish the chances of infection from wounds, but now they looked dirty. Under the weight, light though it was, of their combat packs, lifebelts, guns, ammunition, helmets, canvas leggings, bayonets, they were sweating in great profusion. Nobody had shaved for two or three days.

  Outside I saw Dr. Edwin J. Welte, a crop-haired, young Minnesotan who had finished medical school only about five years ago. “Well,” he said, “nobody is trying to get out of fighting this battle. Out of the whole battalion only eleven are being left in the ship’s sick bay. Five are recurring malaria cases, one busted his knee on maneuvers, one is a post-operative appendectomy, one is a chronic knee that somebody palmed off on the regiment, and the rest are minor shipboard accidents. All the malaria cases will be able to go ashore in two days.”

  Who else was being left behind? “Nobody that I know of except one pfc. who got obstreperous and they had to throw him in the brig. Only one man in the brig the whole trip, and he’s always been a bad character.”

  We walked back to the junior staff officers’ bunkroom, which was full of young Marines indulging in what might have been a college bull session. Outside we could hear the dynamo-hum of the cables letting the boats down into the water. Everybody had on his pack and his helmet, for all these men were going on the assault waves which would start leaving for Betio in ten or fifteen minutes. Young, mustachioed Captain Ben Owens, the Oklahoma boy who was battalion operations officer, looked up as we entered, and said, “Doc, I’m going to get shot in the tail today.”

  Dr. Welte: “Oh, you want a Purple Heart, huh?”

  Owens: “Hell, no, I want a stateside* ticket.”

  Colonel Amey, the battalion boss, came in, stretched mightily, and ho-hummed. I asked him how many Japs we were going to find on Betio. “Not many, apparently,” he said. “They’ve got five-inch guns. They’d have been shooting at us by now.”

  * “Stateside,” meaning “back to the United States,” is a Marine term.

  Owens looked at the deck a minute and said, “That’s right We’re only eleven thousand yards offshore now. They’ve got some eight-inch guns, too. But just wait. You’ll hear one whistle over in a minute. When he does those battlewagons will open up on that son-of-a-bitch and rock that island—”

  Owens continued, “Maybe the battlewagons and the bombs will knock out the big guns, but I’m not saying they’ll kill all the Japs. I still think well get shot at when we go in, and I’m still looking for that stateside ticket, Doc.”

  Jay Odell, a slender young junior-grade lieutenant who learned how to be a naval air-liaison officer after leaving his Philadelphia newspaper job, had been standing in a corner without saying anything. Now he spoke up, “Everybody is putting too much faith in the statistics about the number of tons that’s going to be dropped.”

  Now, at 0505, we heard a great thud in the southwest. We knew what that meant. The first battleship had fired the first shot. We all rushed out on deck. The show had begun. The show for which thousands of men had spent months of training, scores of ships had sailed thousands of miles, for which Chaplains Kelly and MacQueen had offered their prayers. The curtain was up in the theatre of death.

  We were watching when the battleship’s second shell left the muzzle of its great gun, headed for Betio. There was a brilliant flash in the darkness of the half-moonlit night. Then a flaming torch arched high into the air and sailed far away, slowly, very slowly, like an easily lobbed tennis ball. The red cinder was nearly halfway to its mark before we heard the thud, a dull roar as if some mythological giant had struck a drum as big as Mount Olympus. There was no sign of an explosion on the unseen island—the second shot had apparently fallen into the water, like the first.

  Within three minutes the sky was filled again with the orange-red flash of the big gun, and Olympus boomed again. The red ball of fire that was the high-explosive shell was again dropping toward the horizon. But this time there was a tremendous burst on the land that was Betio. A wall of flame shot five hundred feet into the air, and there was another terrifying explosion as the shell found its mark. Hundreds of the awestruck Marines on the deck of the Blue Fox cheered in uncontrollable joy. Our guns had found the enemy. Probably the enemy’s big eight-inch guns and their powder magazine on the southwest corner of the island.

  Now that we had the range the battleship sought no longer. The next flash was four times as great, and the sky turned a brighter, redder orange, greater than any flash of lightning the Marines had ever seen. Now four shells, weighing more than a ton each, peppered the island. Now Betio began to glow brightly from the fires the bombardment pattern had started.

  That was only the beginning. Another battleship took up the firing—four mighty shells poured from its big guns onto another part of the island Then another battleship breathed its brilliant breath of death. Now a heavy cruiser let go with its eight-inch guns, and several light cruisers opened with their fast-firing six-inch guns. They were followed by the destroyers, many destroyers with many five-inch guns on each, firing almost as fast as machine guns. The sky at times was brighter than noontime on the equator. The arching, glowing cinders that were high-explosive shells sailed through the air as though buckshot were being fired out of many shotguns from all sides of the island. The Marines aboard the Blue Fox exulted with each blast on the island. Fire and smoke and sand obscured the island of Betio. Now the Jap, the miserable, little brown man who had started this horrible war against a peace-loving people, was beginning to suffer the consequences. He had asked for this, and he shou
ld have known it before he flew into Pearl Harbor that placid Sunday morning. As the warships edged in closer, coming into shore from many thousands of yards until they were only a few thousand yards away from their target, the whole island of Betio seemed to erupt with bright fires that were burning everywhere. They blazed even through the thick wall of smoke that curtained the island.

  The first streaks of dawn crept through the sky. The warships continued to fire. All of a sudden they stopped. But here came the planes—not just a few planes: a dozen, a score, a hundred. The first torpedo bombers raced across the smoking conflagration and loosed their big bombs on an island that must have been dead a half hour ago! They were followed by the dive bombers, the old workhorse SBD’s and the new Helldivers, the fast SB2C’s that had been more than two years a-borning. The dive bombers lined up, many of thousands of feet over Betio, then they pointed their noses down and dived singly, or in pairs or in threes. Near the end of their dives they hatched the bombs from beneath their bellies; they pulled out gracefully and sailed back to their carriers to get more bombs. Now came the fighter planes, the fast, new Grumman Hellcats, the best planes ever to squat on a carrier. They made their runs just above the awful, gushing pall of smoke, their machine guns spitting hundreds of fifty-caliber bullets a minute.

  Surely, we all thought, no mortal men could live through such destroying power.

  Surely, I thought, if there were actually any Japs left on the island (which I doubted strongly), they would all be dead by now.

  It was a half hour after dawn that I got a first rude shock. A shell splashed into the water not thirty feet from an LST which waited near the Blue Fox. Our destroyers, which by this time were firing again as the planes finished their bombing and strafing runs, were firing very wide, I surmised. A shell hit not more than fifty yards from our stern, sending a vertical stream of water high into the air, like a picture of a geyser erupting.

  I turned to Major Howard Rice and said, “My God, what wide shooting! Those boys need some practice.”

  Major Rice looked at me quizzically. Said he, “You don’t think that’s our own guns doing that shooting, do you?”

  Then, for the first time, I realized that there were some Japs on Betio. Like a man who has swallowed a piece of steak without chewing it, I said, “Oh.”

  By this time our first three waves of boats were already in the water, and the fourth and fifth were getting ready to load. But the sudden appearance of the enemy upset our plans. These valuable transports, with their thousands of troops, could not stand idly by and take a chance on being sunk. By now we were within four or five miles of the target. We had no definite knowledge that all the Japs’ big guns on Betio were not still working. Captain John McGovern, commodore of the assault transport division, gave the order. The transports heeled around quickly and set out to sea, whence we had come only two hours ago.

  The transports streaked out of the danger zone, with the Japs firing vainly at them as they went. The first three waves, including hundreds of boats from many transports, had no choice but to turn around and streak after the mother ships. As they turned and ran our warships opened up again. By firing his gun the Jap had given away its location. Now the fury of the warships, big and small, mounted into a crescendo of unprecedented fire and thunder. They pounded the Jap with everything in the gunnery officer’s book. If there had been an unearthly flash of lightning before daylight, now, at close range, there was a nether world of pandemonium. Hundreds of shells crashed with hundreds of ear-rocking thuds as they poured toward the Jap biggun position. Soon there was no more firing. The last Jap big gun had been silenced. Now the transports could finish loading their assault waves into the boats, and Betio would soon feel the tread of the U. S. Marines’ boondockers.*

  The fifth wave climbed down, the rope nets at 0635, into the landing boats which bobbed drunkenly on the rough sea and smacked into the transport. Within five minutes after we pushed off, a half barrel of water was splashing over the high bow of the Higgins boat every minute. Every one of the thirty-odd men was soaked before we had chugged a half mile. While a Marine held his poncho over our heads I tried to put my fine watch into a small, heavy waterproof envelope. It seemed a pity to lose such a watch, especially since Sergeant Neil Shober, a craftsman with a jeep or with a strip of metal, had made a handsome wrist band for the watch out of a piece of Jap Zero wing he had brought from Guadalcanal. Into another envelope I dropped my newly filled cigarette lighter and some valuable pictures; into another a pack of cigarettes.

  * Marine shoes with thick soles and soft, rough leather tops.

  The sun had hardly leaped above the horizon and we shivered as the cool seawater drenched us, it seemed, beyond the saturation point. I remembered the nip of brandy the doctor had given me. I pulled the little bottle out of my pocket and shared it with the Marine standing next to me. If there was ever an occasion for taking a drink at seven o’clock in the morning this was it.

  Later that day I was to tremble all over from fear alone, but not yet. We shook and shivered because we were cold. My only memory of the first hour and a half of the ride toward the beach head is sheer discomfort, alternating with exaltation. Our warships and planes were now pounding the little island of Betio as no other island had been pounded in the history of warfare. By standing on the gunwale of the boat I could crane my neck around the ramp-bow and see the smoke and dust and flames of Betio. When the attack paused a moment I could see the palm trees outlined against the sea and sky on the other side.

  Once I tried to count the number of salvos—not shells, salvos —the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers were pouring on the island. A Marine who had a waterproof watch offered to count off the seconds up to one minute. Long before the minute had ended I had counted over one hundred, but then a dozen more ships opened up and I abandoned the project. I did count the number of planes in sight at one time. It was ninety-two. These ships and these planes were dealing out an unmerciful beating on the Japs, and it was good, good to watch. As we came within two miles of the island we could get a better view of what was happening. There were fires up and down the length of the island. Most of them would be the barracks, the power plant, the kitchens, and other above-ground installations we had studied time and again in the photographs. Once in a while a solid mass of flame would reach for the sky and the roar of an explosion could be heard easily from our position in the water. That would be an oil tank or an ammunition dump. The feeling was good.

  It was nearly nine o’clock when the fifth wave arrived at the boat rendezvous and began circling to wait for our turn to go in. I looked around the ramp to see what was on the beach. For the first time I felt that something was wrong. The first waves were not hitting the beach as they should. There were very few boats on the beach, and these were all amphibious tractors which the first wave used. There were no Higgins boats on the beach, as there should have been by now.

  Almost before we could guess at what bad news was being foretold the command boat came alongside. The naval officer shouted, “You’ll have to go in right away, as soon as I can get an amphtrack for you. The shelf around the island is too shallow to take the Higgins boats.” This was indeed chilling news. It meant something that had been dimly foreseen but hardly expected: the only way the Marines were going to land was in the amphtracks (“alligators”) which could crawl over the shallow reef that surrounds Betio. It meant that the landings would be slow, because there were not enough amphtracks for everybody, and we would have to use the emergency shuttle system that had been worked out as a last resort. And suppose the amphtracks were knocked out before they could get enough men ashore to hold what the first wave had taken? And suppose the Marines already ashore were killed fester than they could be replaced under this slow shuttle system?

  I felt very dull—a brain fed on the almost positive belief that the Japs had fled Betio would naturally be slower than a six-year-old writing a letter. I could not quite comprehend what was happening.

&
nbsp; An amphtrack bobbed alongside our Higgins boat. Said the Marine amphtrack boss, “Quick! Half you men get in here. They need help bad on the beach. A lot of Marines have already been killed and wounded.” While the amphtrack was alongside, Jap shells from an .automatic weapon began peppering the water around us. “Probably a 40-mm.,” said one of the calmer Marine officers.

  But the Marines did not hesitate. Hadn’t they been told that other Marines “needed help bad"? Major Rice and seventeen others scampered into the amphtrack and headed for the beach. I did not see them again until three days later, when the battle was over.

  The half-empty Higgins boat milled around for another ten minutes, getting its share of near misses and air bursts. One Marine picked a half dozen pieces of shrapnel off his lap and swallowed hard. Two amphtracks came by. One of our Marines stood up and waved at them, told them that we were ready and waiting to go to the beach. But both had already been disabled by direct hits. Both had wounded and dead men in them, the drivers said. We milled around another couple of minutes, looking for a chance at what appeared to be a one-way ride, but always remembering that “they need help bad” on the beach.

  The next amphtrack crew said they would take us in part of the way, to where we could wade the rest of the way, but amphtracks were getting so scarce he couldn’t take us all the way. We jumped into the little tractor boat and quickly settled on the deck. “Oh, God, I’m scared,” said the little Marine, a telephone operator, who sat next to me forward in the boat. I gritted my teeth and tried to force a smile that would not come and tried to stop quivering all over (now I was shaking from fear). I said, in an effort to be reassuring, “I’m scared, too.” I never made a more truthful statement in all my life. I was not petrified yet, but my joints seemed to be stiffening.