Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  Meanwhile, the Marines had landed Colonel Shoup’s combat team reserve battalion, the first battalion of the Second Regiment. During the night considerable quantities of ammunition, some artillery, some tanks (light and medium), and other supplies had also been brought in.

  General Julian Smith had sent a message from his battleship headquarters: “Attack at dawn; division reserve will start landing at 0600.” The division reserve was the first and third battalions of the Eighth Marines.

  Our casualties had been heavy on the first day, but well over half the dead, and practically all of the wounded, had been shot, not in the water, but after they had reached land and climbed the seawall. Those wounded more than lightly in the water had little chance of reaching shore. The amphibious operation up to that point, therefore, could have been called better than successful. The hell lay in the unexpectedly strong fortifications we had found after we landed.

  It was not possible—and never will be possible—to know just how many casualties the three assault battalions had suffered D Day. Most officers agreed afterward that thirty-five to forty percent was as good a guess as any. Effectively, they were groggy if they had not been knocked out, because their organization was ripped to pieces. Their percentage casualties among officers had been heavier than among the men, and key men such as platoon sergeants, virtually irreplaceable, had been killed or wounded. Therefore, we had to have more men quickly, and General Smith had said they were on the way.

  Because the second day was even more critical than the first, and because it was the day the tide finally turned in our favor, I have written a play-by-play chronology (as I saw it) from my notes:

  0530: The coral flats in front of us present a sad sight at low tide. A half dozen Marines lie exposed, now that the water has receded. They are hunched over, rifles in hand, just as they fell. They are already one-quarter covered by sand that the high tide left. Further out on the flats and to the left I can see at least fifty other bodies. I had thought yesterday, however, that low tide would reveal many more than that. The smell of death, that sweetly sick odor of decaying human flesh, is already oppressive.

  Now that it is light, the wounded go walking by, on the beach. Some are supported by corpsmen; others, like this one coming now, walk alone, limping badly, their faces contorted with pain. Some have bloodless faces, some bloody faces, others only pieces of faces. Two corpsmen pass, carrying a Marine on a stretcher who is lying race down. He has a great hole in his side, another smaller hole in his shoulder. This scene, set against the background of the dead on the coral flats, is horrible. It is war. I wish it could be seen by the silken-voiced, radio-announcing pollyannas back home who, by their very inflections, nightly lull the people into a false sense of all-is-well.

  0600: One of the fresh battalions is coming in. Its Higgins boats are being Mt before they pass the old hulk of a freighter seven hundred yards from shore. One boat blows up, then another. The survivors start swimming for shore, but machinegun bullets dot the water all around them. Back of us the Marines have started an offensive to clean out the Jap machine guns which are now firing at our men in the water. They evidently do not have much success, because there is no diminution of the fire that rips into the two dozen or more Higgins boats. The ratatatatatat of the machine guns increases, and the high pi-i-ing of the Jap sniper bullet sings overhead incessantly. The Japs still have some mortars, too, and at least one 40- or 77-mm. gun. Our destroyers begin booming their five-inch shells on the Jap positions near the end of the airfield back of us.

  Some of the fresh troops get within two hundred yards of shore, while others from later waves are unloading further out. One man falls, writhing in the water. He is the first man I have seen actually hit, though many thousands of bullets cut into the water. Now some reach the shore, maybe only a dozen at first. They are calm, even disdainful of death. Having come this far, slowly, through the water, they show no disposition to hurry. They collect in pairs and walk up the beach, with snipers still shooting at them.

  Now one of our mortars discovers one of the machine guns that has been shooting at the Marines. It is not back of us, but is a couple of hundred yards west, out in one of the wooden privies the dysentery-fearing Japs built out over the water. The mortar gets the range, smashes the privy, and there is no more firing from there.

  But the machine guns continue to tear into the oncoming Marines. Within five minutes I see six men killed. But the others keep coming. One rifleman walks slowly ashore, his left arm a bloody mess from the shoulder down. The casualties become heavier. Within a few minutes more I can count at least a hundred Marines lying on the flats.

  0730: The Marines continue unloading from the Higgins boats, but fewer of them are making the shore now. Many lie down behind the pyramidal concrete barriers the Japs had erected to stop tanks. Others make it as far as the disabled tanks and amphtracks, then lie behind them to size up the chances of making the last hundred yards to shore. There are at least two hundred bodies which do not move at all on the dry flats, or in the shallow water partially covering them. This is worse, far worse than it was yesterday.

  Now four of our carrier-based fighters appear over the water. The first makes a glide and strafes the rusty freighter hulk, then the second, third, and fourth. Thousands of their fifty-caliber bullets tear into the old ship, each plane leaving a dotted, blue gray line behind each wing. “The god-damn Japs must have swum out there last night and mounted a machine gun in that freighter,” says an officer beside me. “I thought I saw some bullets coming this way.”

  Three more Hellcats appear. These carry small bombs under their bellies. The first dives for the freighter and misses by at least fifty yards. The second does likewise. But the third gets a direct hit and the old freighter gushes a flame fifty feet into the air. But the flame apparently is from the bomb explosion alone, because it dies out immediately. “May kill some of our own men out there with that bombing and strafing,” observes the officer, “but we’ve got to do it. That Jap machine gun is killing our men in the water.” A dozen more bomber-fighters appear in the sky. One after another they glide gracefully to within a few hundred feet of the freighter, drop their bombs, and sail away. But only one of the twelve gets a hit on the freighter. I am surprised at their inaccuracy—one bomb is two hundred yards beyond the target. These fighter-bombers are less accurate than the more experienced dive bombers.

  0800: Back at Colonel Jordan’s command post nobody is happy. Things are still going badly. Colonel Jordan is talking to Major Crowe: “Are there many snipers behind your front lines? Uh, huh, we have a hell of a lot, too.”

  “Where is my little runner? Where is Paxedes?” asks Colonel Jordan.

  “He is dead, Colonel. He was killed right over there,” a Marine answers. Corporal Osbaldo R. Paredes of Los Angeles was a brave Marine. All during the first day he had carried messages through intense fire, never hesitating to accept the most dangerous mission. “Oh, hell!” says the misty-eyed colonel. “What a fine boy! I’ll certainly see that his family gets the Navy Cross.” He stops suddenly. The Navy Cross seems quite inadequate now, only a few minutes after Paredes has been killed.

  By now all the coconut trees from which snipers had been shot yesterday are filled again with more snipers. The sniper fire seems more frequent than ever and nobody can stick his head out of the battalion shellhole without getting shot at. The hell of it is that they are in trees only a few yards away, and they are hard to spot They are not dangerous at any respectable range, but from their nearby positions they can kill a lot of Marines. A Marine comes by headquarters grinning. “I just got one,” he says. “He dropped his rifle on the third shot, and it fell at my feet. But I swear I haven’t seen him yet. I guess they tie themselves to trees just like they did at Guadalcanal.”

  0830: By now most of the Marines have arrived who will ever get ashore from those waves that were hit so badly early this morning. Those lying behind the tank blocks and the disabled boats get up once in a wh
ile and dash for shore. But I’m afraid we lost two hundred of them this morning, maybe more.

  A captain comes by and reports that one of his men has single-handedly knocked out eight machine-gun nests—five yesterday and three this morning. Another unattached officer, whose normal duty is a desk job, not combat, drops in and reports that he finally killed a sniper. He had been out looking all morning— “How can you kill the bastards if you can’t see them?”—and he finally had fired a burst into a coconut palm. Out dropped a Jap, wearing a coconut-husk cap. We feel that we are eliminating a lot of Jap machine gunners and snipers now. As the last men come ashore, there is only one machine gun firing at them, and it hits nobody.

  0940: Now the high explosives are really being poured on the Jap positions toward the tail end of the island. Our 75-mm. pack howitzers are firing several rounds a minute. The strafing planes are coming over by the dozens, and the dive bombers by the half-dozens. Now we have many 81-mm. mortars joining the deathly orchestra. Betio trembles like a leaf, but I ask myself, “Are we knocking out many of those pillboxes?”

  We know the Japs are still killing and wounding a lot of men. The stretchers are passing along the beach again, carrying their jungle-cloth-covered burdens. One Marine on a stretcher is bandaged around the head, both arms, and both legs. One of the walking wounded, his left arm in a white sling, walks slowly along the beach in utter contempt of the sniper who fires at him.

  1100: Finally at Colonel Shoup’s headquarters. And what a headquarters! Fifteen yards inland from the beach, it is a hole dug in the sand back of a huge pillbox that probably was some kind of Japanese headquarters. The pillbox is forty feet long, eight feet wide, and ten feet high. It is constructed of heavy coconut logs, six and eight inches in diameter. The walls of the pillbox are two tiers of coconut logs, about three feet apart. The logs are joined together by eight-inch steel spikes, shaped like a block letter C. In between the two tiers of logs are three feet of sand, and covering the whole pillbox several more feet of sand are heaped. No wonder our bombs and shells hadn’t destroyed these pillboxes! Two-thousand-pound bombs hitting directly on them might have partially destroyed them, but bombing is not that accurate—not even dive bombing—on as many pillboxes as the Japs have on Betio. And when bombs hit beside such structures they only throw up more sand on top of them.

  Colonel Shoup is nervous. The telephone shakes in his hand. “We are in a mighty tight spot,” he is saying. Then he lays down the phone and turns to me, “Division has just asked me whether we’ve got enough troops to do the job. I told them no. They are sending the Sixth Marines, who will start landing right away.” Says a nearby officer: “That damned Sixth is cocky enough already. Now they’ll come in and claim they won the battle.” *

  From his battalion commanders Colonel Shoup receives regular telephone reports. One of them is now asking for air bombardment on a Jap strongpoint on the other side of the airfield, which we can see a few hundred feet from regimental headquarters. “All right,” says the colonel, putting down the telephone. “Air liaison officer!” he calls, “tell them to drop some bombs on the southwest edge of 239 and the southeast edge of 231. There’s some Japs in there giving us hell.” The numbers refer to the keyed blocks on the map of the island. It seems less than ten minutes before four dive bombers appear overhead, then scream toward the earth with their bombs, which explode gruffly: ka-whump, ka-whump, ka-whump, ka-whump. Even nearer than the bombs, destroyer shells in salvos of four are bursting within ten minutes after a naval liaison officer has sent directions by radio.

  * The Sixth is one of the two Marine regiments which fought so bravely and brilliantly in France in World War I. But other regiments are jealous of the Sixth’s honors. Examples: (1) in Shanghai it used to be said that the “pogeybait” Sixth ordered $40,000 worth of post-exchange supplies-one dollar’s worth of soap, the rest in candy (“pogey-bait”); (2) in New Zealand other Marines spread the rumor that the fourragére which the Sixth’s men wore on their shoulders indicated that the wearer had a venereal disease.

  Next to regimental quarters rises a big, uncompleted barracks building, which withstood our bombing and shelling very well. There are only a few small holes in the roof and wooden sides of the building. Five-foot tiers of coconut logs surround the building, to protect it against shrapnel. I run the thirty feet from Colonel Shoup’s command post eastward to the tier and leap over it. Some Marines are in the unfloored building, lying on the ground, returning a Jap sniper’s fire which comes from we know not where. Says a Marine: “That god-damn smokeless powder they’ve got beats anything we ever had.” Then I cross the interior of the building, go through a hole in the wall and sit down beside some Marines who are in the alleyway between the wooden building and the tier of coconut logs.

  “This gets monotonous,” says a Marine as a bullet whistles through the alley. We are comparatively safe, sitting here, because we are leaning against the inside of the log tier, and the vertical logs that act as braces are big enough for us to squeeze behind. The problem is to flatten one’s legs against the ground so that they are not exposed to the sniper’s fire.

  1130: These Marines are from H Company, the heavy-weapons company of the battalion I came with. “We’ve already had fifteen men killed, more in twenty-four hours than we had on Guadalcanal in six months,” said the Marine sitting next to me, “and I don’t know how many wounded.”

  “We started in in one amphib, and it got so hot the driver drove off before he had unloaded all of us. Then the amphib sank—it had been hit—and another one picked us up and brought us ashore.”

  Where had they landed? “Right over there by that pillbox with the four Japs in it,” he replies, pointing to the spot near which Bill Hippie and I had dug our foxhole. “You know who killed those Japs? Lieutenant Doyle of G Company did it—that’s P. J. Doyle from Neola, Iowa—he just tossed a grenade in, then he jumped in with the Japs and shot them all with his carbine before they could shoot him.”

  By now it is fairly raining sniper bullets through our alley, as if the sniper is desperate because he isn’t hitting anybody. The sniper is evidently a couple of hundred yards away, because there is a clear space that is far back from the open end of the alley. Japs can hide behind a coconut log without being seen all day, but nobody ever heard of one hiding behind a grain of sand.

  A bullet ricochets off the side of the barracks building and hits the leg of the private who is second down the line. “I’m glad that one was spent,” he says, picking up the .303-caliber copper bullet, which is bent near the end of the nose. I reach out for the bullet and he hands it to me. I drop it quickly because it is almost as hot as a live coal. The Marines all laugh.

  These Marines calmly accept being shot at. They’ve grown used to it by now, and I suddenly realize that it is to me no longer the novelty it was. It seems quite comfortable here, just bulling. But I am careful to stay behind the upright coconut log which is my protection against the sniper.

  Into the alleyway walks a Marine who doesn’t bother to seek the protection of the coconut logs. He is the dirtiest man I have seen on the island—men get dirty very quickly in battle, but this one has a good quarter inch of gray-black dust on his beardless face and his dungarees are caked. A lock of blond hair sticks out from under his helmet.

  “Somebody gimme some cigarettes,” he says. “That machinegun crew is out there in a shell-hole across the airfield and there’s not a cigarette in the crowd.” One of the Marines throws him a pack of Camels.

  The new arrival grins. “I just got me another sniper. That’s six today, and me a cripple.” I ask if he has been shot. “Hell, no,” he says, “I busted my ankle stepping into a shellhole yesterday.” His name? “Pfc. Adrian Strange.” His home? “Knox City, Texas.” Age? “Twenty.”

  Pfc. Adrian Strange stands for a few minutes, fully exposed to the sniper who has been pecking at us. Then the sniper opens up again, the bullets rattling against the coconut logs.

  Pfc. Strange
sings out, “Shoot me down, you son-of-a-bitch.” Then he leisurely turns around and walks back across the airfield, carrying his carbine and the pack of cigarettes.

  “That boy Strange,” says the Marine next to me, “he just don’t give a damn.”

  1200: Colonel Shoup has good news. Major Ryan’s shorthanded battalion has crossed the western end of the island (the bird’s head), and the entire eight-hundred-yard beach up there is now ours. There are plenty of Japs just inside the beach, and the fortifications on the third of the island between Shoup’s command post and Ryan’s beach are very strong. And the entire south shore of the island, where there are even stronger pillboxes than there were on the north, remains to be cleaned out. That is the job of the Sixth Regiment, which will land this afternoon.

  A young major comes up to the colonel in tears. “Colonel, my men can’t advance. They are being held up by a machine gun.” Shoup spits, “Goddlemighty, one machine gun.”

  1215: Here the Marines have been sitting in back of this pillbox (Shoup’s headquarters) for twenty-four hours. And a Jap just reached out from an air vent near the top and shot Corporal Oliver in the leg. In other words, there have been Japs within three feet—the thickness of the wall—of the Marines’ island commander all that time. Three Japs had been killed in the pillbox yesterday, and we thought that was all there were.

  There is very bad news about Lieutenant Hawkins. He may die from his three wounds. He didn’t pay much attention to the shrapnel wound he got yesterday, but he has been shot twice this morning. He wouldn’t be evacuated when he got a bullet through one shoulder. “I came here to kill Japs; I didn’t come here to be evacuated,” he said. But a while ago he got a bullet through the other shoulder, and lower down. He lost a lot of blood from both wounds.

  Said the corporal who told me this, “I think the Scout and Sniper platoon has got more guts than anybody else on the island. We were out front and Morgan (Sergeant Francis P. Morgan of Salem, Oregon) was shot in the throat. He was bleeding like hell, and saying in a low voice, ‘Help me, help me.’ I had to turn my head.”