Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  The two wounded men sitting beside me questioned each passerby. “Did —— get killed?” “Have you seen —— or ——?” “You old dope, I thought you were dead.” “How’s ——?” Anybody seen him?” A new arrival sat down beside us and said, “I got more lead in my tail than ever now—that bastard raised up and grinned and threw his grenade. I got sprinkled, but Joe got him.”

  The three of them carried on a conversation for the rest of the time I stayed there, about an hour. Between rumblings of five-inch destroyer shells that were exploding within a hundred yards, causing the earth to tremble beneath us, I picked up matches of their talk. They were not afraid, as men might be expected to be who had been shot. They talked quite calmly about what they had seen and speculated on the fate of their comrades. “I know we’ve already got over twenty-five percent casualties in my company,” one said.

  Said the latest arrival, a red-head, “Jones was walking by there right after that other fellow got bumped off and a Jap shot off a piece of his thumb. Jones just laughed and kept going.”

  “That guy has got plenty of guts.”

  “That Greenwalt has got plenty, too.”

  “Where’s Peterson?”

  “I think he’s shot.”

  “T. C. Martin got a leg blown off.”

  “Very few people ain’t got hit.”

  I do not know what happened to those three wounded Marines. The plan was to evacuate them back to the ships after dark. I hoped they made it all right. I knew such imperturbable men would be needed for other battles.

  By four o’clock the naval gunfire and the planes were really raising hell back of us. The destroyer salvos sounded like thunderclaps: the explosion of the hits right back of us, then the whistling of the shell, then the sound of the rumbling of the guns which reached our ears later. The strafing planes-Grumman Hellcats—were coming over now in great numbers, four, six, and eight at a time. First we could see the two wisps of smoke—a gray-blue wisp from the guns on either wing. Then we could hear the popping of the bullets, which sounded like hot grease in a frying pan. They were tearing into the palm trees and the shellholes scattered inland back of us. Then the dive bombers would appear in the sky above us; two or three at a time would dive screamingly toward the earth and let go their bombs. A moment later we would hear the explosions of the bombs—ka-whump, ka-whump, ka-whump. And the earth would shudder and more sand would run into our shoes. Then eight more fighters would appear on a line, roaring in at one or two thousand feet overhead, and the sixteen wisps of smoke would trail behind the eight plan, and the grease-popping sounded like a monumental fish-fry. During all these weird, indescribably great noises a Jap machine gun usually chattered incessantly—poppoppoppop— if to show us that all the noise had affected it not at all.

  Before I left Major Crowe I noticed a young lieutenant who came into the headquarters area. He walked around completely nonchalant, giving orders to the men with him, while the Jap snipers fired at him steadily. He did not even wear a helmet. I knew that no officer could afford to let his men know he was afraid, but I thought this was carrying it a little too far, this walking around, getting shot at bareheaded. I noted the lieutenant’s name—Aubrey Edmonds—because I did not see how he could possibly survive the battle. Later I checked up and found that he had been wounded the second day—shot, not through the head, but in the back.

  My friend Lieutenant Hawkins of the Scout and Sniper platoon appeared. “Get down, Hawk, or you’ll get shot,” somebody yelled at him. The Hawk, who had come back for more ammunition, snarled, “Aw, those bastards can’t shoot. They can’t hit anything.” Then he and the men with him leapt over the seawall again. “Hawk’s platoon has been out there all day,” an officer told me. “They have knocked out a hell of a lot of machine guns.”

  I got up about 4:30 to look for my own battalion. Someone had told me that its headquarters were in a shellhole about two hundred yards to the west, on the other side of the pier. When I left Major Crowe’s battalion I figured it was getting along pretty well. Casualties were high, but the Marines were whittling away at a lot of machine guns and snipers. The firing from in back of us seemed much less terrific now than it had been three or four hours earlier, though we had stopped trying to land more troops until nightfall, because the Japs were knocking out too many of our boats in the water. From Crowe’s headquarters I could count more than fifty disabled tanks, amphtracks, and boats in the water on both sides of the pier. Major Crowe’s battalion had a very tough assignment—the Japs drifted up from the tail of the island to the center all through the battle, we learned later, and the supply seemed inexhaustible—but the assignment was not impossible, it seemed.

  I stooped low, trying to get down far enough so that the Japs wouldn’t be able to see me over the seawall, and walked briskly back along the beach toward the pier. I felt a little ashamed to stoop down, when most of the Marines by now were disdaining the Japs to the extent of walking upright. But I had been shot at and missed so many times during the day that I felt that I didn’t want to tempt my luck. By next day I was walking upright, too. I believe that man can get used to anything after a while, even bullets.

  The dash across the forty-foot-wide area at the end of the pier, an area which was openly exposed, was dangerous, and almost everyone who tried it was shot at. But I was curious to know what had happened to my own battalion. So I ran across the forty feet, heard three or four bullets sing by, then dropped behind a big coral rock. There was a deep indentation in the coastline at this point. I could walk around the rim, as some reckless Marines were doing, or I could wade through the waist-deep water of the indentation. I chose to wade. When I had reached the beach again I asked a Marine where Second Battalion headquarters was. He pointed to a shellhole under the seawall about a hundred feet ahead. I ran behind the seawall and dropped into the hole.

  There I was greeted by three officers I knew: Lieutenant Colonel Irvine Jordan, an observer from another Marine division; “Swede” Norvik, and Lieutenant Odell, the naval aviation liaison man; and Bill Hippie, the A.P. reporter. On Betio everyone was glad to see anyone he knew, because the chances of not seeing him were so heavy. During the six hours since I had landed, for instance, I had become convinced that I was the only correspondent still alive, and I was very glad to see Bill Hippie.

  Colonel Jordan was giving a message to a Marine who wrote it down in Ms yellow book, tore out a sheet, and handed it to a runner who ran up the beach with it. Then he turned to me, “This is really hell. Colonel Amey was killed; his body is lying out there in the water. I was ordered to take over the battalion.”

  “Where is Major Rice and his staff? Did they make it?” I asked. Ordinarily Major Rice would have taken over the battalion on Colonel Amey’s death.

  “Haven’t heard a word from than. I’m afraid none of them made it. This is all the staff we’ve got Odell here has got a bullet through his shoulder, but he’s helping.”

  Said Bill Hippie, “Colonel Amey was right beside me when he was shot, We were within fifty feet of the shore.”

  Narvik said, “Doc Welte got it, too. He was in our boat.”

  There were half a dozen Marines in the shellhole headquarters—runners, corpsmen, and communicators. But dozens of others would gather around us, behind the seawall.

  “You men, get on up front,” Colonel Jordan would say. “They need you out there.” A few of the Marines would pick up their guns and head over the seawall, singly, and in twos and threes, but many of them were reluctant to move. Colonel Jordan turned to me, “They don’t know me, you see. They haven’t got the confidence men should have in their officers.”

  The firing over the seawall was even heavier than it had been at Major Crowds headquarters-not so much heavy gunfire and bombing near here, because our own men were scattered through the coconut trees at this point—but every coconut tree seemed to have a Jap sniper in it.

  I don’t think E Company has got ten men left,” said Norvik, his blue eyes
opened wide. This was an exaggeration, of course, as battlefield reports often become exaggerated, but it indicates the extent of the casualties the Second Battalion believed it was taking.*

  There were two wounded men in a small, covered Jap coconut-log emplacement on top of the seawall. One of them was in considerable pain and he had a high fever. The other was not hurt badly. He kept a lookout from the rear opening of the emplacement, in case the Japs tried to overwhelm us. On the rim of the shellhole, on the side nearest the water, there were three or four dead Marines. There had not been time to cover them. The dead and the living were so inextricably mixed that it was sometimes difficult to tell one from another.

  “How do you feel, Odell?” said Colonel Jordan. ‘Don’t you want to go back to a ship tonight?” Lieutenant Odell grinned and said, “I’m all right. I’ll stick it out here. You need all the help you can get.”

  It was growing dark. It was easy to see that the attack on Betio had not succeeded as we had hoped it would. Our beachhead at Second Battalion headquarters was, like Major Crowe’s, only twenty feet wide. Fifty yards to the westward up the beach, and some fifteen yards inland, Colonel Shoup had set up regimental headquarters behind r. big Japanese pillbox—the beachhead at that point amounted to perhaps sixty-five or seventy feet.

  “All right, men,” shouted Norvik, “dig your foxholes. Well probably get bombed tonight. I want two men to stay on guard far every one who goes to sleep.” To others he said, “I want men in foxholes on top of the seawall and as far inland as you can go. If the Japs rush us tonight we’ve got to be ready for them.” A Jap sniper took a shot at Norvik, the shrill pi-i-ing whistling by his ears. He ducked down and continued ordering the defenses of the battalion—or what was left of it.

  * Actually, E Company’s casualties were very high. Five of its six officers were killed: Capt. E. G. Walker, Lebanon, Tenn., lieutenants Maurice F. Reichel, Blytheville, Ark., Louis B. Beck, Cincinnati, William C Culp, West Palm Beach, Fla., Donald IL Dahlgren, Rector, Mich.

  As darkness began to settle over Tarawa, we could see more Americans heading for shore through the dimming light. “Couple of companies of reinforcements,” said an officer. These men were being unloaded at the end of the pier. They could not yet walk along the pier, but they could crawl beneath it and alongside it The Japs kept trying to pepper them with machine guns and rifles, but their aim generally was not good. Some men would land at the end of the five-hundred-yard pier, and try to walk down it, but the Japs would increase their fire until the Americans usually had to jump into the water or get hit. Even the artillery which was being brought in, 37-mm. anti-tank guns and 75-mm. pack howitzers, were pushed and pulled through the water—they could have been rolled down the pier in one-tenth the time, if it had been possible.

  Bill Hippie and I borrowed a shovel—correspondents rarely carry shovels—walked up the beach about twenty yards, and began looking for a spot to dig a foxhole. We stopped at a coconut-log pillbox and cautiously mounted the seawall to look in it. Inside were four Japs lying beside their machine gun. They were dead.

  We jumped off the seawall, back onto the sand. This seemed as good a place as any to dig a foxhole, even if it were only ten feet from four dead Japs who were already beginning to smell. We dug the foxhole wide enough for the two of us, and deep enough so that we would be below the surface of the ground when the Jap bombers came over. We agreed that one would try to sleep while the other stood watch. I knew I was not going to sleep, though I hadn’t slept the night before aboard ship—how long ago that seemed, aboard ship! And Bill knew he wasn’t going to sleep. For one thing, the Japs would fire their mortars and rifles all night, if only to keep the Marines awake.

  I was quite certain that this was my last night on earth. We had twenty feet along perhaps one-sixteenth of one-half of one side of the island, plus a few men in shellholes on either side of the airstrip. The Japs had nearly all the rest. Although we had landed a lot of troops—perhaps three thousand—by this time, most were crowded into such a small space that we did not have room for foxholes to hold them all. And if the Japs counterattacked, what could we do except shoot at them from behind our seawall until they finally overwhelmed us?

  For the first time since morning, I was really scared—this was worse than wading into the machine-gun fire, because the unknown was going to happen under cover of darkness. I tried to joke about it. “Well, Bill,” I said, “it hasn’t been such a bad life.” “Yeah,” he said, “but I’m so damned young to die.”

  My knees shook. My whole body trembled like jelly. I peered into the darkness over the seawall, seeing nothing, hearing nothing except an occasional shot from a Jap sniper’s rifle. But, I reasoned, it hasn’t been a bad life at that. Suppose I don’t live until morning? I have already lived fully and quite satisfactorily. Why should I be afraid to die? My family will be well provided for, with my own insurance and the insurance my company carries on its war correspondents. It will be tough on my children, growing up without a father, but at least they will have a very capable mother and the satisfaction of knowing that their father died in line of duty. And why should any war correspondent assume that he can claim exemption from the death that had already come to Colonel Amey and Doc Welte? If I were not here as a war correspondent I would be here as a Marine, anyway. These people made me sick who were always saying, “Oh, what dangers you war correspondents must go through!” I say: war is dangerous, period. And what right has any American to feel that he should not be in it as fully as any other American? This is, I reflected, the United States’ war, not the sailors’ war or the Marines’ war or the soldiers’ war. What the hell?

  These thoughts were snapped off like a light when a thousand orange-red flashes lit up the sea a couple of miles out. The sky filled with the outpouring of dozens of ships’ guns, red balls of fire followed by deafening roars from over the water. “Look, Bill,” I cried, “it’s a naval battle! All the guns are firing on the surface of the water!” Of course, it was not a naval battle at all. Some low-flying Jap planes had started for the ships in the harbor, and the ships’ anti-aircraft guns had opened up on them. They were frightened away and the firing stopped as suddenly as it had started.

  Not long afterward a dozen Jap machine guns started chattering at the men on and off the pier, their pink tracer bullets curving out of the palm trees until they were doused in the water. But—of all things, some of this fire was coming from our own disabled boats in the water, and some of it was not the pink of the Jap tracers, but the orange-red stream of our own guns! Our guns, being turned against our own men. It took some time for this to sink in. Then I realized: the Japs had swum out in the darkness to our disabled boats and amphtracks. There they had manned the machine guns we had left in those boats, and now they were shooting at us. Clever, courageous little bastards! They knew it was suicide, but they knew they might kill some Americans before they themselves were killed.

  During the night word was passed down the line: the Japs have broken through to the end of the pier. Now we were cut off, even from Major Crowe’s battalion. I had not yet heard any word from the other assault battalion which had landed up on the western tip of Betio.

  About an hour before dawn we heard the unmistakable purring of a Jap flying-boat’s engines. “Old Washing Machine Charley,” commented one of the Marines in a nearby foxhole. “I haven’t seen him since we were at Guadalcanal. He doesn’t do much harm but he keeps you awake.” The bomber circled back and forth across the island, evidently trying to find out what was going on down there. Jap machine guns began chattering back of us and pink streams poured toward the beach; the Nips apparently were trying to direct Washing Machine Cabarley to us with their effeminate-looking tracers. Charley dropped a couple of bombs, then he flew around a few minutes longer and dropped the rest. They all fell harmlessly into the water. Then he flew away.

  During the night I did not see a single Marine fire his rifle. Such firing might have given away our positions. Whatev
er else, I decided, these Marines were not trigger-happy. They were not forever firing at some figment of their imagination.

  THE SECOND DAY

  THIS IS THINGS STOOD at dawn of the second day: the three assault battalions held their precarious footholds—Major Crowe’s was about midway of the island’s north beach, just east of the pier; lieutenant Colonel Jordan’s held a portion of the beach a couple of hundred yards west of Crowe, on the other side of the pier; and the third assault battalion, I learned, had landed on the strongly fortified western tip of the island, on the beak of the Betio bird. This last-named battalion, although separated from its staff and part of its troops, actually had been more successful than the first two. Under the leadership of one of its company commanders, Major Mike Ryan, who took over when the battalion c.o. landed in another pocket, it had fought its way inland until it held a seventy-yard beachhead before dark of the first day. The naval gunfire had been particularly effective on this western end of the island, knocking out all the big guns which had been the chief defense, and Major Ryan’s men had, in the words of Colonel Shoup, proved themselves “a bunch of fighting fools.” The battalion, of course, was isolated from the rest of the Marines on the island.

  During the first night the Japs, apparently because their communications had been disrupted and many of their men undoubtedly had been stunned, had not counterattacked. Probably as many as three hundred Japs, we learned later, had committed suicide under the fierce pounding of our naval guns and bombs.