Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  Now, I realized, this is the payoff. Now I knew, positively, that there were Japs, and evidently plenty of them, on the island. They were not dead. The bursts of shellfire all around us evidenced the fact that there was plenty of life in them. “This is not going to be a new kind of beachhead landing,” I said to myself. “This is going to be traditional—what you have always been told is the toughest of all military operations: a landing, if possible, in the face of enemy machine guns that can mow men down by the hundreds.” This was not even going to be the fifth wave. After the first wave there apparently had not been any organized waves, those organized waves which hit the beach so beautifully in the last rehearsal. There had been only an occasional amphtrack which hit the beach, then turned around (if it wasn’t knocked out) and went back for more men. There we were: a single boat, a little wavelet of our own, and we were already getting the hell shot out of us, with a thousand yards to go. I peered over the side of the amphtrack and saw another amphtrack three hundred yards to the left get a direct hit from what looked like a mortar shell.

  “It’s hell in there,” said the amphtrack boss, who was pretty wild-eyed himself. “They’ve already knocked out a lot of amphtracks and there are a lot of wounded men lying on the beach. See that old hulk of a Jap freighter over there? I’ll let you out about there, then go back to get some more men. You can wade in from there.” I looked. The rusty old ship was about two hundred yards beyond the pier. That meant some seven hundred yards of wading through the fire of machine guns whose bullets already were whistling over our heads.

  The fifteen of us—I think it was fifteen—scurried over the side of the amphtrack into the water that was neck-deep. We started wading.

  No sooner had we hit the water than the Jap machine guns really opened up on us. There must have been five or six of these machine guns concentrating their fire on us—there was no nearer target in the water at the time—which meant several hundred bullets per man. I don’t believe there was one of the fifteen who wouldn’t have sold his chances for an additional twenty-five dollars added to his life-insurance policy. It was painfully slow, wading in such deep water. And we had seven hundred yards to walk slowly into that machine-gun fire, looming into larger targets as we rose onto higher ground. I was scared, as I had never been scared before. But my head was clear. I was extremely alert, as though my brain were dictating that I live these last minutes for all they were worth. I recalled that psychologists say fear in battle is a good thing; it stimulates the adrenalin glands and heavily loads the blood supply with oxygen.

  I do not know when it was that I realized I wasn’t frightened any longer. I suppose it was when I looked around and saw the amphtrack scooting back for more Marines. Perhaps it was when I noticed that bullets were hitting six inches to the left or six inches to the right. I could have sworn that I could have reached out and touched a hundred bullets. I remember chuckling inside and saying aloud, “You bastards, you certainly are lousy shots.” That, as I told Colonel Carlson next day, was what I later described as my hysteria period. Colonel Carlson, who has been shot at in a number of wars, said he understood.

  After wading through several centuries and some two hundred yards of shallowing water and deepening machine-gun fire, I looked to the left and saw that we had passed the end of the pier. I didn’t know whether any Jap snipers were still under the pier or not, but I knew we couldn’t do any worse. I waved to the Marines on my immediate right and shouted, “Let’s head for the pier!” Seven of them came. The other seven Marines were tar to the right. They followed a naval ensign straight into the beach—there was no Marine officer in our amphtrack. The ensign said later that he thought three of the seven had been killed in the water.

  The first three of us lay on the rocks panting, waiting for the other five to join us. They were laboring heavily to make it, and bullets from the machine guns on the beach were still splashing around them like raindrops in a water barrel. By this time we three were safely hidden from the beach by the thick, upright, coconut-log stanchions of the pier. I watched these five men and wondered how on heaven or earth they managed to come so close to death, yet live. Once I thought the last man, a short Marine, would not get under the pier. Twenty yards away, he fell and went under. But he was not hit. In a moment he was up again, struggling through the water, almost exhausted beyond further movement, but still carrying his heavy roll of telephone wire. When he had gone under I had asked myself whether I had the breath or the courage to go after him. I was relieved when the necessity of answering the question was obviated by his arrival.

  We were still four hundred yards from the beach. But now we could crawl in most of the way under the protection of the pier, where we made difficult, if not altogether invisible, targets. After a few minutes of breath-catching we started crawling. A hundred yards from the beach, the pier rested on big coral rocks on the ground, so we had to take to the water again. It was only a little more than knee-deep now.

  I looked on both sides of the pier. Our battalion had been supposed to land on the right side, but there was no sign of life anywhere on the right. But on the left there seemed to be three or four hundred people milling around the beach and they were wearing, not Jap uniforms, but the spotted brown-and-green jungle dungarees of the United States Marines. The eight of us decided to go to the left.

  We ducked low, creeping along the edge of the pier. We were not even shot at. We came upon a stalled bulldozer. This, I reflected, was the American way to fight a war—to try to get a bulldozer ashore, even before many men had preceded it. Later I learned that a bulldozer is a fine weapon; it can shovel up sand over a low slit in a pillbox, causing the enemy inside to smother. Two Marines tinkered with the bulldozer, but it had sunk too deep in the water that covered an unseen shellhole. A third Marine lay behind the bulldozer seat. He already had a bullet through his thigh. Then the Jap machine gun chattered, rattling its fire against the frontal blade of the bulldozer. We ducked low behind the machine.

  “How goes it?” I asked the Marines.

  “Pretty tough,” one of them said, matter-of-factly. “It’s hell if you climb over that seawall. Those bastards have got a lot of machine guns and snipers back there.”

  After a few minutes the Jap gave up trying to shoot at the four of us behind the bulldozer. I dashed bade to the pier, which was only fifteen feet to the left. During the dash I stepped into a shellhole seven feet deep. Then I swam the rest of the way to the pier.

  With each movement of the surf a thousand fish washed against the pier—fish six inches to three feet long. Regardless of their effectiveness against Jap emplacements, shellfire and bombing misses could kill a lot of fish by concussion.

  I passed a stalled medium tank, which had floundered when it sank into one of the shellholes. A hundred yards farther to the left there was a stalled light tank. To my surprise I saw a nearly naked figure appear from under the water, swim the last few feet to this tank, then jump in through the top of it. At first I thought it was a Marine who had gone to repair the tank But why would he take all his clothes off, and why swim under water? Perhaps it was a Jap, but why? I reported the incident when I got ashore, but the officer, with his hands already full, paid little attention to the report. We were to hear later from this stalled tank and from many another disabled tank and amphtrack and boat.

  Upon reaching the end of the pier I ducked into a foxhole in the sand which was already crowded with three Marines. I took my first close look at bird-shaped Betio. At this point on the bird’s belly, behind the pier that stuck out like a leg, there was a gap. This gap was heaped three or four feet high with sand, but the rest of the island’s north rim seemed to be a four-foot seawall built of coconut logs which had been driven into the ground. From the water’s edge to the seawall there was twenty feet of sand and brown and green coral. These twenty feet were our beachhead. The Japs controlled the rest of the island, excepting this pocket—twenty feet deep and perhaps a hundred yards wide—which had been establ
ished by the Second Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment, the farthest left of our three assault battalions, plus two other pockets which had been established as fragilely by the other two battalions. The beginning at Betio did not look bright. But several hundred Marines had gone over that seawall to try to kill the Japs who were killing our men as they waded ashore. They went over—though they knew very well that their chances of becoming a casualty within an hour were something like fifty percent.

  I stooped low and ran the hundred feet from the end of the pier to a stalled amphtrack which was jammed against the seawall. Beside the amphtrack a dead Marine lay on the sand. He was the first of many dead Americans I saw on Betio. There was a wide streak of blood on the amphtrack, indicating that the dying man had bled a lot.

  A big, red-mustached Marine walked over. “Who is he?” he asked.

  “An assistant amphtrack driver, sir,” another Marine said. “Name was Cowart. He was twenty years old. He married a girl in Wellington.”

  “Well, cover him up. Will the amphtrack run?”

  “No, sir. We’ve tried to start it, but I guess the starter was knocked out when this man was killed.”

  I walked over and introduced myself to the red-mustached Marine. His name was Henry Pierson (“Jim”) Crowe and he had been an old-time enlisted man. Now he was a major, commanding the assault battalion that had landed at this point.

  “Have you seen any other war correspondents, Major?” I asked. The major said he had not Poor Frank Filan and Dick Johnston, I thought. They were the A.P. photographer and U.P. reporter who were supposed to land with Crowe’s battalion.

  The major had other business. Many of his Marines had already gone over the seawall to kill Japs. Now telephone wires were being strung between their forward shellhole posts and his command post behind the stalled amphtrack. I saw a chaplain nearby. I asked him if many men from his battalion had been killed. “I just got here,” he said. “I haven’t seen but two dead except this man by the amphtrack.”

  I sat down and leaned against the amphtrack, next to the seawall. Now and then bullets would rattle against the amphtrack, but the seawall made a fairly safe place to sit. With several Marines who were there, wiremen, corpsmen, and battalion staff headquarters men, I felt quite luxurious. If I stayed there, in the dip under the wall, I would be quite safe from any of the Japanese bullets which sang overhead in their high soprano. The Jap mortars, like their guns, were being concentrated on our boats as they approached the shore.

  Six hundred yards out, near the end of the pier, I watched a Jap shell hit directly on an LCV that was bringing many Marines ashore. The explosion was terrific and parts of the boat flew in all directions. Then there were many Marines swimming in the water.

  Two pairs of corpsmen brought two more dead men and placed them beside the dead boy who had been married to the girl from Wellington. Even now the men had been ashore less than an hour. Yet already the smell of death under the equator’s sun could be detected faintly.

  Our destroyers were only a thousand yards or so offshore by now and they had begun firing on the tail end of the island, where there were no Americans. The battleships opened up from the other side of the island. Their shells made a great roaring sound when they smacked the land behind where we were sitting. Then we could hear the whish of the shells through the air, then the report from the muzzles of the guns. It seemed odd. It was as though the shells were giving an answer before the question were asked.

  I took out my soaked notebooks and opened them up to dry on the hub of the amphtrack. Then I fished the waterproof envelopes out of my wet dungarees. My fine watch was ruined—there was an accumulation of green scum under the crystal. The cigarette lighter in another envelope was also soaked and ruined and already rusted, but the pack of cigarettes was still dry, and they seemed more valuable at the time than either of the other items.

  A young Marine walked in front of us, about fifteen feet from where we were sitting, and about five feet from the water’s edge. A rifle cracked loudly from behind us. The Marine flinched, grabbed at his head, then ducked to the sand. I thought he had been hit, but, miraculously, he had escaped. He picked up his helmet. There were two inch-wide holes in the top of it, one on each side. The Jap bullet which tore through his helmet had missed his head, but not by more than an eighth of an inch. The Marine’s only wound was a scratch on his face, where the helmet had scraped as it was torn savagely off his head.

  “All right, god damn it,” shouted Major Crowe, “you walk along out there standing up and you’re sure as hell going to get shot. Those bastards have got snipers every ten feet back there.”

  Not fifteen minutes later, in the same spot, I saw the most gruesome sight I had seen in this war. Another young Marine walked briskly along the beach. He grinned at a pal who was sitting next to me. Again there was a shot. The Marine spun all the way around and fell to the ground, dead. From where he lay, a few feet away, he looked up at us. Because he had been shot squarely through the temple his eyes bulged out wide, as in horrific surprise at what had happened to him, though it was impossible that he could ever have known what hit him.

  “Somebody go get the son-of-a-bitch,” yelled Major Crowe, “He’s right back of us here, just waiting for somebody to pass by.” That Jap sniper, we knew from the crack of his rifle, was very close.

  A Marine jumped over the seawall and began throwing blocks of fused TNT into a coconut-log pillbox about fifteen feet back of the seawall against which we sat. Two more Marines scaled the seawall, one of them carrying a twin-cylindered tank strapped to his shoulders, the other holding the nozzle of the flamethrower. As another charge of TNT boomed inside the pillbox, causing smoke and dust to billow out, a khaki-clad figure ran out the side entrance. The flame thrower, waiting for him, caught him in its withering stream of intense fire. As soon as it touched him, the Jap flared up like a piece of celluloid. He was dead instantly but the bullets in his cartridge belt exploded for a full sixty seconds after he had been charred almost to nothingness. It was the first Jap I saw killed on Betio—the first of four thousand. Zing, zing, zing, the cartridge-belt bullets sang. We all ducked low. Nobody wanted to be killed by a dead Jap.

  That incident demonstrated something of the characteristics of the Jap sniper. The Jap who killed the grinning Marine had been waiting all morning in the pillbox, not thirty feet from the beach, for just such a shot. Jap snipers are poor marksmen, compared to Marine Corps experts. But at thirty feet not even a poor marksman can miss twice.

  I stayed around Major Crowe’s battalion headquarters most of that first afternoon, watching the drama of life and death that was being enacted around me. Men were being killed and wounded every minute. The casualties passed along the beach on stretchers, borne by the Navy medical corpsmen who took high losses themselves—out of one group of twenty-nine corps men, I heard later, twenty-six were killed or wounded before the battle had ended. But these corpsmen casually, almost slowly, bore their poncho-covered cargo in streams along the beach. The faces of the dead were covered; those of the wounded were not. Once in a while it was possible to load an amphtrack with these wounded and send them back out to the ships which had hospital facilities. Almost any man will go through greater danger to save a friend’s life than he will endure in killing the enemy who is the cause of that danger.

  The number of dead lined up beside the stalled headquarters amphtrack grew steadily. But the procession of the wounded seemed many times greater. There went a stretcher with a Marine whose leg had been nearly torn off; another had been bit in the buttocks by a 13-mm. bullet or 20-mm. shell—a man’s fist could have been thrust into the jagged hole; another was pale as death from the loss of much blood—his face seemed to be all bones and yellowish-white skin and he was in great pain.

  From a bomb crater about forty feet over the seawall a strong voice called out during a lull in the big-gun firing, “Major, send somebody to help me! The son-of-a-bitch got me!” Without waiting for orders two corp
smen crawled over the seawall in the face of machine-gun fire which opened up as they appeared. They returned quickly, half dragging, half carrying a husky Marine who had been shot through the bone above his knee. The wounded man, groaning, was sat beside me. “I think he is in that coconut palm,” he said, waving his hand in the direction from which he had come. Then he lay down on the sand and inadvertently groaned some more.

  A corpsman bandaged the wounded man’s leg and jabbed a morphine syrette into his arm. By this time I had been on the island nearly three hours and my notebooks were dried, if wrinkled. I felt that I should do some reporting. I asked the Marine what his name was. It was a very difficult name, and I know I didn’t get it right, even after he had spelled it for me twice, but in my notebook it appears as Pfc. N. Laverntine, Jr.

  Another Marine who looked no more than nineteen strolled over the seawall. He sat beside the wounded man, smiled, and said, “Bastard got me in the leg, too. I thought I’d stepped on a god-damn mine. It felt like an electric shock.” Then he pulled up his trouser leg, showing a neat bullet hole through the fleshy part of his leg. He—his name was Wilson which I could spell —was very deprecating about his wound, which wasn’t even bleeding.

  Seventy-five yards down the beach, near the end of the pier where I had first landed, the Marines had set up an 81-mm. mortar which they were firing every minute or so. One of them got up to a kneeling position to adjust his instrument. We saw him tumble over the edge of the hole the mortar was set in. Then his companion jumped up to help him. He fell bade into the hole. There evidently was another Jap sniper very close to them. I learned later that the first man had been shot through the back; the second who tried to help him had got a bullet through the heart. The men with the TNT and the flamethrower went after a pillbox only a few feet from where the two Marines had been hit. This time the charge of TNT must have been very powerful, because the explosion was as loud as a 75-mm. gun and smoke and dirt flew fifty feet into the air. The sand around the coconut logs was evidently jarred loose, because the flamethrower was sprayed onto the logs, and, although nothing will burn tough, fibrous coconut logs, the flame must have got inside the pillbox. We could hear dozens of bullets popping inside. Later, four dead, charred Japs were found inside the pillbox.