Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  0700: Here, a hundred yards inland from the beach, is the type of fortification that has withstood this awful pounding for two days, and it is no wonder! Double thicknesses of eight-inch-thick coconut logs, hooked together with steel spikes, buttressed by upright logs driven far into the ground, covered by three feet of shrapnel-absorbing sand. The pillbox cannot be built altogether underground because water lies only four to six feet under the surface on Betio, so it is half underground and half above ground. Dick Johnston, the U.P. correspondent, marvels at the almost impregnable construction when a Marine engineer comes along and says, “You’ve got to give them credit They’ve got a good engineer somewhere in this Jap Navy.” At the sunken entrance to the pillbox two Marines are warming a can of C ration on a folding field stove over a Sterno flame. We put a can of the C ration—vegetable and beef hash—over the flame and eat a heavy breakfast of our own. For the first time it occurs to me that I haven’t eaten in two days.

  Nearby there is a chicken yard containing about twenty chickens, including two dead ones, and a coop inhabited by two small black and white ducks. Although the area is still under sniper fire a boyish Marine chases an escaped chicken, then dives heartily after the bird, but misses. The two Marines eating with us guffaw. Says one, “I almost opened up on a pig last night.”

  Johnston is tempted to take a flashlight, go into one of the pillboxes to hunt souvenirs. But the smell at the entrance is so oppressive he is easily dissuaded. Some Marines tell us that there are twelve dead Japs inside. An apocryphal story going the rounds concerns the Marine who had thrown several charges of TNT into a pillbox, but could still hear one Jap moving around. The Marine is supposed to have yelled, “Come on out and surrender, you Jap bastard!” And the Jap allegedly answered, “Go to hell, you souvenir-hunting Yankee son-of-a-bitch!”

  0730: Back at Colonel Shoup’s headquarters, his red-headed operations officer, Major Tom Culhane, croaks happily, “We got ’em by the eyeballs now!” Major Culhane has shouted orders over the telephone, above the din of battle, for nearly forty-eight hours, until he sounds like Mr. Wendell Willkie shortly after he opened his 1940 presidential campaign. Somebody asked the major whether he thought his voice would last until the battle ended. He answered, “I didn’t think so last night, but we are going so fast now I believe I’ll finish in a whisper.”

  There is good news, too, about Major Rice and the rest of the battalion staff I last saw as we started ashore. Major Rice’s amphtrack landed far up the beach and his men have been fighting with Major Ryan’s heroic piece of a battalion. Rice himself has maintained communications for Ryan.

  The single saddest tragedy on Betio is reported—not that one American’s death is sadder than any other, but because we thought for a while this death might have been averted—lieutenant Hawkins, the nonpareil Texan, died during the night, One of the high-ranking officers comments in a low voice, “It’s not often that you can credit a first lieutenant with winning a battle, but Hawkins came as near to it as any man could. He was truly an inspiration.”

  Several officers sit under a palm tree. They have watched the battle from its dark beginning to its present bright hopes of an early end Says Colonel Carlson, the old Marine Raider, “Did you see three-eight (third battalion Eighth Marines) and one eight wading in? They were mowed down like flies. I believe one-eight had a hundred casualties in less than a minute.”

  Said Colonel Edson, the hero of Guadalcanal, “This is the first beachhead they have really defended. They had no choice but to defend here—they had no interior position to retreat to; it was all exterior. Anyway,” he smiles, “it won’t last as long as Guadalcanal.”

  Captain “French” Moore, the Navy doctor who is division surgeon, shakes his head. “I was on Guadalcanal. And it was duck soup.”

  One of the officers off a transport comments, “I was at the Sicily landing. It was a pink-tea party, with ninety percent girls and ten percent boys.”

  Carlson: “This was not only worse than Guadalcanal. It was the damnedest fight I’ve seen in thirty years of this business.”

  It occurs to me that perhaps this Tarawa battle is going to be history, after all.

  0800: Dr. Moore reports that six hundred wounded had been evacuated to the ships by last night, including four wounded who were floated out of a disabled tank lighter through a hole in its side. Up to now thirty-six have been buried at sea from the ships.

  Preparations are being made for burying our own nearby dead, many of whom have been in the water for two days. It is a gruesome sight, even to men who have become hardened to anything, including the past two days’ omnipresent sight and smell of death. Thirty-one Marines are now laid out in a line beyond the command post. Some are bloated, some have already turned a sickly green. Some have no faces, one’s guts are hanging out of his body. The eyeballs of another have turned to a jellied mass, after so long a time in the water.

  The corpsmen and burial parties continue to bring in the dead from the coral fiats, now that those flats are subject to but little sniper fire. One dead American wears a soggy, blue, kapok life preserver—he probably cussed because all the rubber, inflating-type, life preservers had been passed out before his turn came. Here come four more waterlogged, lifeless bodies. All of them wear knives which they never got to use.

  The bulldozer scoops a long trench, three feet deep. Its Seabee driver pays scant attention to the sniper who fires at him occasionally. The bodies, not even covered by a blanket or poncho, are brought over and placed in the trench, side by side, while Chaplains MacQueen and Kelly supervise their identification and last rites. This is no dignified burial—a man’s last ceremony should be dignified, but this isn’t. The bulldozer pushes some more dirt in the Marines’ faces and that is all there is to it. Then the bulldozer starts digging a second trench.

  Lines of corpsmen are bringing in the bodies as fast as they can find stretchers and wade into the shallow water. One Marine is brought in who has suffered the greatest indignity of all. His head has been blown off completely. His left arm is gone, and only a few shreds of skin hang from his shoulders, I thought I had become inured to anything, but I am nauseated by this sight. I turn to the big red-bearded Marine gunner who is standing beside me and say, “What a hell of a way to die!” The gunner looks me in the eye and says, “You can’t pick a better way.”

  1000: For the first time a good view of the battle is available. There is a five-foot-high lumber pile beyond the incompleted barracks building. It is possible to stand behind this lumber and watch the battle that is being waged across the airfield and to the eastward—by now bombs and artillery and naval gunfire and mortars have sheared the fronds off most of the coconut palms, and Betio is nearly bare except for the stumps of the trees.

  To the awful symphony of the big guns is added the crackling rifle fire of hundreds of Marines and several pillboxes full of well-hidden Japs. Marines dart across the expanse of the airfield while machine guns and snipers’ rifles kick up dust around them. They dodge from shellhole to shellhole as they advance toward the enemy. One Marine is wounded but drags himself the remaining ten feet to a shellhole, where eager hands pull him out of further danger. On the other side of the runway a medium tank, looking like a great, clumsy bug, lumbers up to a pillbox and begins blasting away, from less than fifty feet, round after round of 75-mm. shells. A Jap, naked except for his white cloth G-string, runs out of the pillbox and throws himself under the tread of the tank. There is a small explosion as the Jap’s hand grenade goes oft but his suicide nets him nothing except his idea of a warrior’s heaven. The grenade does not even blow the tank’s tread off. The tank lumbers over the Jap, still firing. Further down the field, Marines carrying mortar containers and boxes of ammunition walk across the open area. There are three of them. They do not even bother to try to run, though bullets spitting into the dust of the runway down this way plainly demonstrate that they are being fired at.

  One of the destroyer shells finds a hitherto undi
scovered oil dump in the middle of the island and the flames reach up very high. The destroyer gloatingly increases its firing until an area more than a hundred feet square is a roaring mass of flame and smoke. The island thumps and quivers, and flame and dust and curtains of smoke blend into the medley of unearthly noise.

  1030: A dozen of us are standing around, or leaning against the big pillbox that protects Colonel Shoup’s headquarters from frontal fire. All of a sudden a sniper who has apparently worked his way around to the side opens up. The bullets whiz through the command post, past the new ammunition dump we have started. Marines who are working on the dump start running. All of us at headquarters hit the dirt. All except rocklike Dave Shoup. He stands, fully exposed, arms akimbo, and bellows, “Stop! God damn it! What are you running for? Take cover, then move on up and kill the bastard.” The Marines sheepishly work themselves back westward. One who was hit on the side of the face by a bullet is bandaged and led off.

  Five prisoners, naked except for their split-toed shoes, are marched into headquarters by Captain John T. O’Neill of Somerville, Massachusetts, and two enlisted men armed with tommy guns. The prisoners sit around a coconut palm on their haunches, looking up and frowning curiously as if they wonder what on earth will happen to them. They are short, but well muscled and apparently well-fed. Only one has been wounded; his left hand is bandaged. An intelligence officer questions them briefly in Japanese, then Colonel Shoup orders them sent out to the ship which is receiving prisoners. “Korean laborers,” says the intelligence officer. “They are mighty glad to get captured.” A few minutes later another prisoner is led in, but this one, also a husky Korean, has been allowed to retain his short, civilian-fray pants. He wears a bandage on his neck, another on his arm. He tells the intelligence officer he had arrived on Betio only a few days ago—he had been cutting coconut logs on another island further up the atoll; these logs were shipped down to Betio, whose concealing foliage had been only slightly disturbed until the American battleships started working on it—D Day.

  1130: Back of the incompleted barracks building is a big tinsmith shop. The sheets of tin and galvanized iron tell us that the Japs had plans to continue building up Betio. Many of the sheets are just so much twisted and perforated metal, but some are still serviceable. Of them the Marines build shelter from the noonday equatorial sun. Beside the mass of tin there is a big pile of twisted steel pipe. Marines who are bringing in more guns have trouble wheeling the 37’s over it. Some of the Marines have already collected the long .303 Jap rifles. The newer rifles have a straight-shanked bayonet instead of the bayonet with the half loop at the hilt (for catching the enemy’s bayonet and twisting his gun out of his hand). Japs on Attu and Guadalcanal had bayonets with loops at the hilt.

  Along this area atop the seawall there are half-sunken machine-gun emplacements every five yards. These little coconut log fortresses are shaped like a Y with the top half-closed, covered with sand which is covered by palm fronds. To look at row upon row of these pillboxes facing the sea, it seems impossible that the Marines ever got ashore D Day. But, in one of them, somewhat larger than most along here, I think I find the answer. Inside the pillbox there are four dead Japs and two dead Marines. Enough of those men in the first wave got ashore, jumped in with the Japs and killed them. Thus they knocked out enough machine guns so that others in later waves might live and win. Looking down on these two Marines, I can say, “These men gave their lives for me. I can understand it, because this machine gun covered the part of the water I had to wade through. They also gave their lives for one hundred and thirty million other Americans who realize it, I fear, only dimly.” My feeling is one of deep humility and of respect for such brave men—God rest their souls. How much every man in battle owes to every other man! How easy to see on the battlefield that we are all in this thing together!

  1200: The pillbox which contained the four Japs Lieutenant Doyle killed has been cleaned out. It is now a communication center, and a switchboard is functioning inside it. Lieutenant Charlie Lowry of Valdosta, Georgia, who has an 81-mm. mortar platoon, has stopped inside the log-barricaded entrance. “I’ve lost about a fourth of my men,” he says. “Tha’s just the number of casualties we’ve had,” says George T. Olson of Jackson, Mississippi, staff sergeant of the regimental communicators. “Ten out of forty.”

  There is still some sniping, and a bullet whizzes overhead now and then. After one furious burst, Sergeant Olson says, “It doesn’t do much good to duck unless you’re in direct line of fire. You might duck the wrong way and get a stray bullet any how.”

  “You sure can tell the difference between new men and those who have been through it before,” Olson continues. “One kid was shaking all over this morning because he had to cross the air strip. I didn’t send him. But two of my men have been walking through the line of fire all day. They don’t seem to mind it.” Across the strip we could see from this rear entrance to the pillbox four ammunition carriers calmly walking along, as if they were strolling through Central Park, completely unmindful of a dozen popping machine guns, the crash of artillery and naval gunfire, and the pall of smoke and fire.

  “This morning some of the natives were brought over from one of the other islands,” says the sergeant. “They said the Japs had told their men a million Americans couldn’t take Tarawa, I guess we are doing all right.”

  1230: In a shellhole with two Marines. Sniper fire is still rather severe—sometimes we surround a sniper, pass him, and assume somebody has killed him, when all of a sudden he lets go a flock of bullets. Then we cannot find him under his log or in his hole. One is shooting at something beyond us, and his soprano bullets sing over our heads. Says one grinning Marine, “I have only one regret—that John L. Lewis is not beside me.” Sap the other, “He wouldn’t be alive if he was beside me. I don’t mean the Japs would kill him. I would.”

  I had noticed this savage attitude toward labor grow steadily for a long time. It was particularly obvious during the bitter battle of Attu, which was fought during a coal strike. The man who is Tasking his life rarely stops to consider that there may be justice on the side of the striker, if such a thing is possible in wartime, or that other interests greedily force the laborer’s cost of living toward an inflationary point He simply figures that (1) a soldier gets fifty dollars a month for leading the most dangerous, most miserable life this side of hell, and (2) the laborer living in the faraway dream-world of the United States should be willing to forego a few extra cents an hour if it will help get material to the soldier to help him win the war. Only a man who has been on a battlefield can realize how wide is the maw of war. The amount of material required to fight a battle is probably beyond the civilian conception, the soldier figures. When the soldier sees how small a dent he and his comrades have made against the Japanese, and how much more material is necessary to win the Pacific war, he goes red-eyed at the mention of a strike. Oddly, the soldiers bitterest against labor are often labor-union members themselves.

  To the soldier this is all a part of the gap between civilian conception of war and the realities of war—something the soldier himself does not bridge until he has been in a bloody, stinking, unromantic battle. He is likely to grow angry at the Army and Navy publicity men who are forever telling the folks back home how well Joe is treated. He gets mad at the “god damn U.S.O. soldiers” who are stationed safely in the United States. He often scorns the newspapers and radio, particularly those “rear-area people” who rewrite and pump up the drily factual communiqué until it reads pretty and sparkles optimistically and sells more copies of the evening newspaper. The soldier wants the people back home to know that “we don’t knock hell out of ’em” every day of every battle. He wants the people to understand that war is tough and war is horrible. He thinks labor’s tendency to strike is a part of this misconception on the part of his own people at home—surely, no sane man would dream of striking against his own soldiers if he understood what war was like. I often speculate on whether
or not labor did not set itself back ten hard-won years in the last ten giddy months of 1943, because I know labor will have one day to account to some ten million angry men—minus those killed in action fighting labor’s war.

  1300: I haven’t seen a man killed today.

  1330: Back of the seawall, fifty yards farther westward than I have ventured previously, nine dead Marines have been gathered from the interior of the island and placed in a row. Some are covered with ponchos, some with a convenient palm frond. Nearby there is a cheap, cardboard Japanese suitcase, its contents scattered. All the Jap civilian’s underclothing and shirts are silk. The shirt may have been captured. It is marked: “British produce—M. K. Mills. Size 36.” Nearby there are thirteen dead Jap soldiers, dressed in the green wool Navy Landing Force uniform and wrap-around leggings such as U. S. soldiers wore uncomfortably in World War I. Burial parties are beginning to bury the Japs a little farther inland, because the smell of the dead is becoming overpowering after three days. If any sign were needed that victory is ours, this is it: we have started burying the Japs.

  A light tank stops at a fuel dump and four grimy, black-faced Marines hop out. The tank gunner is an Iowa farm boy named Lowell Richman. I ask him how many Japs he has killed today and he gives the modest Marine’s answer, “I don’t know.” His pal says, “He’s killed plenty. We are really knocking them off now.” Says Richman, “We get ’em mostly by running up to the hole of the pillbox and dropping in some high explosive. If they run out we empty the canister into them.”

  A hundred yards farther up the beach I run into a conversation which has material in it for a sermon. Two Marines from the Third Battalion, Second Regiment, evidently old friends, are standing behind the seawall—there is considerable sniper fire hereabouts. One Marine is from Brooklyn, he tells me. He is fed up with the war. “I want to get back home now,” he says. “I want to quit the Marines next year when I am nineteen—my four years will be up. I joined up because I didn’t know any better and I stayed in because of patriotism—I got malaria at Guadalcanal and I could have gone home. But now I want to go stateside.” His companion, another Iowa farm boy—he had married a New Zealand girl—attempted to quiet his friend, “Hell, if you don’t stay out here and get shot at, somebody else will have to come out here and get shot at. Somebody’s got to win the war. I could have gone back—I had malaria, too. But now I don’t want to go back till it’s over. You’re not fighting just for yourself; you’re fighting for the whole United States.”