Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  Lieutenant Paine, who had been nicked in the rear as he stood talking to us—“I’ll be damned. I stay out front four hours, then I come back to the command post and get shot”—has more news about Hawkins. “He is a madman,” says Paine. “He cleaned out six machine-gun nests, with two to six Japs in each nest. I’ll never forget the picture of him standing on that amphtrack, riding around with a million bullets a minute whistling by his ears, just shooting Japs. I never saw such a man in my life.”

  The young major whose men were held up by a single machine gun was back again. “Colonel, there are a thousand goddamn Marines out there on that beach, and not one will follow me across to the air strip,” he cries, desperately. Colonel Jordan, who by this time was back at his old job as observer, our battalion having been merged with Major Wood Kyle’s reinforcing first battalion, speaks up, “I had the same trouble. Most of them are brave men, but some are yellow.” I recall something a very wise general once told me, “In any battle you’ll find the fighting men up front. Then you’ll find others who will linger behind, or find some excuse to come back. It has always been that way, and it always will. The hell of it is that in any battle you lose a high percentage of your best men.”

  Says Colonel Shoup, “You’ve got to say, “Who’ll follow me? And if only ten follow you, that’s the best you can do, but it’s better than nothing.”

  1300: Now they are bringing up the dead for burial near the command post. There are seven laid out about ten yards from where I sit They are covered with green and brown ponchos, only their feet sticking out I think: what big feet most American soldiers and Marines have! None of those looks smaller than a size eleven. The stench of the dead, as the burial detail brings them past and lines them up on the ground, is very heavy now.

  Somebody brings in the story of a Jap sniper whose palm tree roost was sprayed repeatedly. But he kept on firing, somehow. Finally, in disgust, a sergeant took a machine gun and fired it until he had cut the tree in two, near the top. The fall is supposed to have killed the Jap.

  1430: Things look better now. The amphtracks—those that are left—are bringing stuff ashore and carrying the wounded regularly, and they get shot at only occasionally when they head back into the water. Major Ryan and his crowd are doing very well at the western end of the island, and the Sixth Marines are about to land there and start down the south shore. We’ve got another company of light tanks ashore, and they are going up as close as possible to the Jap pillboxes and firing high explosives into the slits. The improved situation is reflected in everyone’s face around headquarters.

  1600: Bill Hippie and I head east along the beach to Major Crowe’s headquarters. By this time we are so confident that the battle is running in our favor that we do not even crouch down, as we walk four feet apart, one ahead of another. After we cross the base of the pier the inevitable sniper’s bullet sings by. “Jesus,” says Hippie, “do you know that damned bullet went between us?” We crouch down under the protection of the seawall during the rest of the journey.

  That tough, old-time Marine, Jim Crowe, is having a tough time yet, but he is still as cool as icebox lettuce. “We kill ’em and more come filtering up from the tail of the island,” he says. I ask him about his casualties. “Already had about three hundred in my battalion,” he says.

  A young tank officer, Lieutenant L. E. Larbey, reports to the major as we are talking to him. “I just killed a Marine, Major Crowe,” he says bitterly. “Fragments from my 75 splintered against a tree and ricocheted off. God damn, I hated for that to happen.”

  “Too bad,” mutters Crowe, “but it sometimes happens. For tunes of war.”

  The heavy tanks are being used against the pillboxes. They have tried crushing them, but even a thirty-two-ton tank is not very effective against these fortifications. “We got a prisoner last night,” said Crowe, “and we have four more, temporarily, sealed up in a pillbox. I suppose they’ll kill themselves before we get ’em out.”

  The strafing planes are coming overhead in waves now and the grease-popping sound of their guns is long and steady. “Don’t know how much good they do,” says Crowe, “but we know their bullets will kill men if they hit anything. One fifty-caliber slug hit one of my men—went through his shoulder, on down through his lung and liver. He lived about four minutes. Well, anyway, if a Jap ever sticks his head out of a pillbox the planes may kill him.”

  1630: Crowe is talking on the phone, apparently to Colonel Shoup: “I suggest we hold a line across from the Burns-Philp pier tonight.” That means his men have advanced about two hundred yards to the east, toward the tail of the island, and he believes they can hold a line all the way across the island, which is about six hundred yards wide at that point. Meantime, my old battalion, plus the reinforcements, are cleaning out the center of the island, Major Ryan’s battalion is holding the western end, and a battalion of the Sixth Marines is landing to start down the southern shore (the Betio bird’s back). We can see the light now. We are winning, but we’ve still got to dig out every last Jap from every last pillbox, and that will cost us a lot of Marines. I reflect: isn’t that true of our whole war against the Japs? They haven’t got a chance and they know it, unless we get fainthearted and agree to some kind of peace with them. But, in an effort to make us grow sick of our losses, they will hang on under their fortifications, like so many bedbugs. They don’t care how many men they lose—human life being a minor consideration to them. The Japs’ only chance is our getting soft, as they predicated their whole war on our being too luxury-loving to fight.

  Of this much I am certain: the Marines are not too soft to fight. More than three thousand of them are by this time assaulting pillboxes full of the loathsome bugs, digging them out.

  1700: Hippie and I are surprised to see two more correspondents—we had long since decided that none others were alive. But Dick Johnston, a young, pencil-thin U.P., man, and Frank (“Fearless”) Filan, A.P. photographer, had also managed to land with the assault waves. “Filan, here,” says Johnston, “is a hero. The Marine next to him was shot as they waded in. Filan started helping him back to the boat. But then a sniper opened up on the boat from the side. The Marine beat Filan to the shore. And Filan ruined all his cameras and equipment helping the Marine.” The two correspondents report that at least one more correspondent arrived this morning. Don Senick, the newsreel man. “His boat was turned back yesterday,” says Johnston, “but they got ashore this morning. Senick ought to get the Purple Heart. He was sitting under a coconut tree. A bullet hit above his head and dropped on his leg. It bruised him.”

  Lieutenant Larbey sits down beside us. “Were you ever inside a tank when it got hit?” he asks. “The spot inside the tank where the shell hits turns a bright yellow, like a sunrise. My tank got two hits a while ago” Larbey walks back to his iron horse. Says Johnston, “That guy is a genius at keeping his tanks running. He repairs the guns, refuels them somehow, and reloads them with ammunition.”

  A tall, grinning Marine is here at headquarters getting ammunition. He has a bandage on his arm, and a casualty tag around his neck like those the corpsmen put on every man they treat—in case he collapses later from his wound.

  “Get shot in the arm?” asks Jim Crowe.

  “Yes, sir,” says Morgan.

  “What’d you do, stick your arm out of a foxhole, eh?”

  “No, sir, I was walking alongside a tank.” And Morgan goes on about his business, gathering ammunition. Crowe looks up at the sky, which is full of planes. “Look at them god-damn strafing planes. They haven’t killed fifty Japs in two days,” he growls.

  A grimy Marine seated alongside us muses: “I wonder what our transport did with those sixteen hundred half pints of ice cream that was to be sent ashore yesterday after the battle was over.”

  An officer comes in and reports to Major Crowe that a sniper is raising hell with the people working on supplies at the end of the pier. By this time we are stacking great piles of supplies on the end of the pier
. The officer thinks the fire is coming, not from the beach, but from a light tank that is half sunk in the water. It is the same tank that I saw the naked figure dive into as I came ashore. These devilish Japs!

  A destroyer standing so close to shore that it must be scraping bottom has been ordered to fire at a big concrete blockhouse a couple of hundred yards away from us. First, it fires single rounds—five or six of them. Then, when the range is found, it opens up with four guns at a time and to us it seems that all bedlam has broken loose. After about eighty rounds it stops. “They never hit it squarely,” says Major Crowe, “but almost.”

  1803: Now, at three minutes past six, the first two American jeeps roll down the pier, towing 37-mm. guns. “If a sign of certain victory were needed,” I note, “this is it. The jeeps have arrived.”

  1900: Back at regimental headquarters, Colonel Shoup wipes his red forehead with his grimy sleeve and says, “Well, I think we are winning, but the bastards have got a lot of bullets left.” I ask him how much longer it would last. “I believe we’ll clean up the entire western end of the island tomorrow, maybe more. It will take a day or two more to root them all out of the tail end of the island.”

  A surgeon grunts and rises from where he has been working feverishly over a dozen wounded Marines who lie on the beach. His blood-plasma containers hang from a line strung between a pole and a bayoneted rifle stuck upright into the ground. Four deathly pale Marines are receiving the plasma through tubes in their arms. “These four will be all right,” the doctor thinks, “but there are a lot more up the beach that we probably can’t save.” He continues, “This battle has been hell on the medical profession. I’ve got only three doctors out of the whole regiment. The rest are casualties, or they have been lost or isolated. By now nearly all the corpsmen have been shot, it seems to me.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Presley M. Rixey, a blue-eyed, mustachioed Virginian who commands the artillery attached to Colonel Shoup’s regimental combat team, is the first man I have heard pick the turning point of the battle, “I thought up until one o’clock today it was touch and go. Then I knew we would win. It’s not over yet, but we’ve got ’em.” Supplies are beginning to flow over the pier in quantity now. The last of Colonel Rixey’s 37’s and 75’s are being landed, “at long last,” he says.

  “You know what,” says Colonel Rixey, “I’ll bet these are the heaviest casualties in Marine Corps history. I believe we’ve already lost more than ten percent of the division and we haven’t landed all of it.” Until now I haven’t considered Tarawa in the light of history. It has only seemed like a brawl—which it is— that we might easily have lost, but for the superb courage of the Marines. But, I conclude. Colonel Rixey may have something there. Maybe this is history.*

  1930: Hippie and I begin digging our foxhole for the night—this time a hundred yards further up the beach, next to Amphtrack No. 10. “This one came in on the first wave,” says a nearby Marine, “there were twenty men in it, and all but three of them were killed.”

  As we dig deeper, the smell from our foxhole becomes oppressive. “Not all the Japs used those privies over the water,” I commented. Hippie has finished digging with the shovel, and now he begins smoothing the foxhole with his hands—all foxholes should be finished by hand. The smell is so oppressive we throw a few shovelfuls of sand back into the hole to cover at least some of the odor.

  Then we lie down to sleep. It has been more than sixty hours since we closed our eyes and the danger of a night attack has been all but eliminated, so we sleep soundly.

  2400: We are rudely awakened after three hours’ sleep. The tide has come up and flooded our foxhole. This is unusual, because the tide has not been this high since we reached (he island. We sit on a bank of sand, wide-awake and knowing that there will be no more sleep tonight. Besides, Washing Machine Charley will be due soon and nobody can sleep while being bombed.

  0500: Washing Machine Charley was over at four o’clock. He dropped eight bombs in his two runs over the island. Said Keith Wheeler, later, “He was absolutely impartial; he dropped half his bombs on us and half on the Japs.” Water or no water, we lay face down in our foxhole as he came over. As the bombs hit, there was a blinding flash a couple of hundred yards up the beach, to the west. A few minutes later a Marine came running up the beach, shouting, “There are a lot of men hurt bad up here. Where are the corpsmen and the stretchers?” He was directed to a pile of stretchers nearby. Soon the stretcher bearers returned, silhouetted by the bright half-moon as they walked along the beach. Washing Machine Charley had killed one man, had wounded seven or eight.

  *At Soissons July 19, 1918, the Marines suffered 1,303 casualties. They probably took more the first day on Tarawa, and the ratio of dead to wounded was 1 to 2 instead of 1 to 10.

  0530: At first light, Bill Hippie looks at what had been our foxhole. Then he learns that the odor was caused, not by Jap excrement, but by the body of a dead man who had been buried beside the foxhole. Bill had been clawing the face of a dead man as he put the finishing touches on the foxhole.

  THE THIRD DAY

  THIS WAS THE DAY the Japs fell apart. There were many factors in this rout. Another company of light tanks and a few thirty-two-tan tanks had a field day with the Japs, who cowered in their pillboxes and waited for death. Armored half-tracks, mounting 75-mm. guns, paraded up and down Betio all day, pouring high explosives Into pillboxes, carrying Marine riflemen who killed Japs whenever they dared stick their heads up. The men with the flamethrowers killed many hundreds in their fortifications, or outside their fortifications. Our line across the island had held during the night, preventing any fresh Japs from filtering toward the scenes of the toughest fighting. On the third day the question was not, “How long will it take to kill them all?” but, “How few men can we expect to lose before killing the rest of the Japs?”

  But probably the biggest factor on the third day was Major William Jones’ first battalion of the Sixth Marines, who jumped off at dawn from their landing point on the southwestern tip of the island and marched straight up the beach that is the Betio bird’s back. The Sixth took heavy casualties—the fortifications on this south beach were even stronger than those on the lagoon side of the island—but they swung ahead quickly and violently, like men who were anxious to get it over with. Lieutenant Colonel McLeod’s third battalion of the Sixth landed on the western beach in the early morning and marched through Major Ryan’s depleted forces, cleaning out huge fortifications as they went along, walking beside medium tanks which boxed into the fading Japs.

  Commented Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson in mid-morning, “These Marines are in the groove today.” Lieutenant Colonel Jordan, who had been distressed earlier because some of the Marines hung back on the beaches, was proud of these same men today. “Tell you something interesting. Once we got those men off the beaches and up front, they were good. They waded into the Japs and proved they could fight just as well as anybody.”

  During the day I saw the first five of many Japs I saw who committed suicide rather than fight to the end. In one hole, under a pile of rubble, supported by a tin roof, four of them had removed the split-toed, rubber-soled jungle shoes from their right feet, had placed the barrels of their .303 rifles against their foreheads, then had pulled the triggers with their big toes. The other had chosen the same method some five hundred Japs chose on Attu: holding a hand grenade against his chest, thus blowing out the chest and blowing off the right hand. From the time he was a baby the Jap had been told that he was superior to the white man, and all he had to do to win was to fight aggressively. When he found that this was not true, and the white man could fight aggressively, too, he became frustrated. He had never been taught to improvise and his reflexes were hopelessly slow; if his plan of battle failed, as the Jap plan on Tarawa failed when the first Marines made the shore, he was likely, under pressure, to commit suicide. He didn’t know what else to do.

  This is the way I recorded what I saw on Betio the third day:
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br />   0600: The destroyers open up on the tail end of the island from very close range. Their targets are immense concrete blockhouses, which they are determined to penetrate if it takes dozens of five-inch rounds in the same precise spot on the wall. It is reported that three hundred Japs are in one of these blockhouses. The 75 howitzers, firing rapidly, are concentrating on the same area and the noise is greater than it has been before. The captain of A Battery is reported dead—shot through the head by a sniper.

  Two dead Japs in a crater just behind our last night’s fox holes have been discovered wearing Marine helmets, jungle dungarees and boondockers.

  A corpsman comes by and sits down to chat. He found a dead Marine under the edge of the pier, in a position where he might not have been discovered for days. From the dead Marine’s pack the corpsman had taken two cans of corned beef, two wet packs of Lucky Strikes, a soaked wallet containing a letter and some airmail stamps and an identification card: “William F. Pasco... born March, 1923.” The corpsman knows he shouldn’t have removed a dead man’s identification—because of the confusion that might result if the corpsman himself is killed or wounded later, but like so many well-meaning soldiers and Marines—“I thought I’d send the stuff home to his folks.”

  0630: Now the destroyers have let up momentarily and the dive bombers and strafing fighters are vying with each other to see who can tear up the tail end of the island. This goes on unceasingly for a half hour, with probably more than two hundred planes taking part. The isolated Japs on that end of the island must know that our determination to take Betio has not weakened. By now our own troops are dispersed so widely over the Island that the bombers concentrate only on the tail-end third. When the planes have finished, the destroyers and artillery open up more furiously than ever. Sometimes the whole island shakes until it seems ready to disappear into the ocean—as the battleship gunnery officers threatened it would. But we doubt that it will.