Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  “There was one thing that won this battle, Holland,” says Julian Smith, “and that was the supreme courage of the Marines. The prisoners tell us that what broke their morale was not the bombing, not the naval gunfire, but the sight of Marines who kept coming ashore in spite of their machine-gun fire. The Jap machine-gun fire killed many Marines in the water and on the beach. But other Marines came behind those who died. They landed on the beaches, they climbed the seawall, and they went into those enemy defenses. The Japs never thought we would get to those defenses. They never thought they would lose this island. They told their men a million of us couldn’t take it.” Julian Smith tells Holland Smith about Lieutenant Hawkins, that he is going to name the airfield for Hawkins. “His will be my first recommendation for the Medal of Honor,” says Julian Smith.

  On the beach there is a twin-mount 5.5-inch seacoast gun, which obviously had been demounted from a ship for shore duty. Three dead Japs are inside the cup surrounding the gun, and there are two more in a cut-back which has been hit directly. In the area of this twin-mount naval gunfire has obviously been very effective. On a sand hill thirty yards behind the guns the Japs had mounted a fire director and range finder.

  A hundred yards or so west of the first guns there is another twin-mount 5.5-inch set of guns. This is a grisly sight. There are two Japs under the gun barrels who have committed suicide with hand grenades. Four more are in a ditch leading from a nearby dugout. Only one of these is a suicide, but another’s heart bulges out of his chest, which apparently has been rent open by a shell, and a third is only a stick of char.

  The generals marvel at the strength of the machine-gun emplacements on this south shore—almost a solid wall of apparently impregnable defenses all the way up to the southwest tip of the island. They concede that one-six must have done a thoroughgoing job.

  At the southwest tip of the island they see two of the four eight-inch guns which the Japs had on Betio. Both guns are pointed toward the direction from which our transports approached, but it is obvious that they were put out of action by some of the first salvos fired by our battleships. Hardly a round of eight-inch shells has been fired. It is easy to see what did the trick: a direct hit on the concrete powder chamber next to the guns. A gaping hole through the powder chamber indicates that a sixteen-inch shell perforated there. Inside the chamber there are about twenty-five charred Japs. Others are hanging on the jagged edge of the hole and for fifty yards beyond the hole Japs are spewed out over the sandy terrain. That must have been the terrific explosion we saw on the third battleship shot.

  Next to the exploded powder chamber is the biggest hole on the pockmarked island of Betio—some sixty feet in diameter and much deeper than the sub-surface water level of the island. Scattered about the rim of the great hole are about two hundred rounds of eight-inch ammunition, evidence that the ammunition dump as well as the powder house blew up.

  These two guns were served by a small mechanical trolley whose tracks circle the inside of the gun emplacements. The guns are labeled V. S. and M. (Vickers), indicating that they were captured from the British, or purchased from the British when Japan was an ally. Both eight-inch guns have been hit directly many times. The smaller guns, notably 77-mm. and machine guns, might escape hits from the terrific bombing and shelling which preceded our attack, but the larger ones were comparatively easy targets.

  The generals and their inspecting party turn north and head back from the Betio bird’s tufted head toward its beak. They see what had been a Japanese radar screen, mounted on a concrete pedestal. In front of a sign—"Danger: Mines"—battle-weary Marines are swimming nude, attempting to wash the crust, the scum, and the odors of Betio from their tanned bodies. There are no dead bodies on the western end of the island to impede the swimming. The generals note the lone grave of Captain Thomas Royster of the Second Amphibious Tractor Battalion. As they pass two of the deadly 77-mm. guns which are still in working condition, Julian Smith remarks, “These are the guns that kill our people; we can knock out the big guns.”

  Three pigs lie in a pen. One of them is dead from shrapnel hits. The other two act dazed, merely grunt.

  The Generals Smith examine a 13-mm. machine gun at the northwest tip of Betio. Hundreds of empty shells show that it was fired many times before the nearby Jap had the top of his head blown off. “That gun killed a lot of Marines,” says Julian Smith.

  When we reach the northern shore—the bird’s throat—we notice an amazing phenomenon: the full tide is now washing against the seawall to a depth of three feet, and the Marines who were lying on the beach this morning are now floating against the seawall. In other words, the tide during those first two critical day was exceptionally low, perhaps due to a wind from the south, or the Marines would have had no beachhead at all! This was truly an Act of Providence.

  The Marines floating in the water are now pitiful figures. Many of them have had the hair washed off their heads by this time. Julian Smith orders an additional burial party formed to speed up the interment of the Americans. The eyes of the two veteran major generals are misty when they view the bodies of gallant Marines who were killed just before they reached the seawall. Says Holland Smith, “You must have three or four hundred here, Julian.” But the most stirring sight is the Marine who is leaning in death against the seawall, one arm still supported upright by the weight of his body. On top of the seawall, just beyond his upraised hand, lies a blue and white flag, a beach marker to tell succeeding waves where to land. Says Holland Smith, “How can men like that ever be defeated? This Marine’s duty was to plant that flag on top of the seawall. He did his duty, though it cost him his life. Semper fidelis meant more to him than just a catch phrase.” We pass on down the seawall rather quickly, because it is impossible to look at such a sight, and realize its implications, without tears.

  Three dead Japs lie in a pillbox behind the seawall. Near one of them there is a green-covered bound volume of the National Geographic for September-December, 1931, with markings in Japanese on the ends. The first article in the volume is about New Hampshire. Says New Hampshire-born Barney McQuaid, sticking the volume under his arm, “I am not ordinarily a souvenir-hunter, but, gentlemen, this is my souvenir.”

  The generals are awestruck when they inspect the pillboxes the assault troops had to knock out. “By God,” says Holland Smith, “those Marines just kept coming. Many of them were killed, but more came on. It looks beyond the realm of a human being that this place could have been taken. These Japanese were masters of defensive construction. I never saw anything like these defenses in the last war. The Germans never built anything like this in France. No wonder these bastards were sitting back here laughing at us! They never dreamed the Marines could take this island, and they were laughing at what would happen to us when we tried it.”

  Back at headquarters there is the first complete report on what happened on the other twenty-four islands of the Tarawa Atoll. The Second Battalion of the Sixth Infantry had landed on the next island, Bairiki, where a few Japs offered light resistance. But most of them fled to Abaokora, northernmost island of the atoll, with the Marines pursuing hotly. From there the Japs could go no further. The Marines killed the 150 to 200 Japs who fought to the last. Three officers and twenty-six men of the battalion were killed, and about six officers and sixty men were wounded. On Abemama, the other Gilbert atoll where there were Japs, about thirty Marine scouts had landed and hemmed in the Japs. One Marine was killed; the twenty-five Japs committed suicide.

  By now the LST’s have nosed up to the edge of the shelf that surrounds Betio. At low tide they discharge trucks by the dozen which carry supplies ashore over the coral flats, through the hole that has been cut into the seawall. Within a very few days Betio will be a strong American base—stronger offensively than the Japs had made it defensively.

  Not until next day did we learn that three Marines had been killed on the western end of the island by Jap snipers, shortly after the generals had passed that point.


  On the sixth day I walked over the eastern half of Betio—the half which got almost as much attention prior to the landing as the western half, plus an additional four days’ pounding by every gun in the U. S. Navy, every gun up to 75 mm. in the U. S. Marine Corps, and many hundreds of Navy bombers and fighters. If the western half was a shambles, the tail end was the acme of destruction and desolation. Shellholes and bomb craters, uprooted coconut trees, exploded ammunition dumps, some pulverized pillboxes, big guns broken and bent, and many hundreds of rotting Japanese bodies. This is the route I took in viewing the carnage on the tau end of Betio:

  At the pillbox near Major Crowe’s headquarters where I had seen the first Jap fried by a flamethrower, I note the details of the fortification, now that it has been stripped down by repeated charges of TNT. The three feet of sand that covered its rounded top has been blasted away. The top actually was a cone-shaped piece of armor, two layers of quarter-inch steel. Beneath that steel turret there were two layers of eight-inch coconut logs—the turret armor was used apparently to give the top a rounded shape which would deflect bombs. This pillbox was five-sided, each side about ten feet, with a buffer tier at the entrance for protection against shrapnel. Each side consisted of a double tier of coconut logs, hooked together by steel spikes with sand between the tiers. Over the whole, including the sides, there was a deep layer of sand, which gave the pillbox the appearance of a tropical igloo. There were two entrances to the pillbox—one to seaward and one to the east.

  The machine-gun emplacements on the north side of the island’s tail are much the same as those on the west end. Beside them and back of them there are trenches, some containing twenty-five Jap dead. Inland thirty yards there is a fifteen-foot-high cement-and-coconut-log, sand-covered ammunition dump. There are gashes in the coconut logs where the sand has been blasted away, but no penetration by hundreds of rounds of high explosives.

  A mess kitchen, with two-by-four walls and a tin roof, has been blasted to bits. It measures about twenty-five by one-hundred feet and there are many ten-gallon pots laid on the fire holes in the cement stoves. A hen sets calmly inside the debris. At the east end of the kitchen there are thousands upon thousands of cans of food and broken bottles. Nearby there are a dozen half-Japs whose life had been flicked away by a flame-thrower. One of them is only a charred spinal cord and a lump of burnt flesh where his head had been. A little further on, there are fifty more dead Japs—they seem to be thicker on this end of the island. Scattered around a big blockhouse and what apparently had been a power plant there are at least 150 more who had been hit by a variety of weapons: some are charred, others have their heads blown off, others are only chests or trunks. Only one of them appears to be a suicide. In the midst of them there is a lone Marine, lying under two sprawling Japs. What had been this man’s fate—this man whose pack containing two cans of C ration had been ripped by shrapnel? Had he been killed by a Jap bullet, or hit by some of our own high explosives? Or had he single-handed tried to attack 150 Japs? No reporter is ever likely to answer that question.

  The march up the tail of the island is strewn with carnage. Now, on the sixth day, the smell of the dead is unbelievable. The ruptured and twisted bodies which expose their rotting inner organs are inexpressibly repelling. Betio would be more habitable if the Marines could leave for a few days and send a million buzzards in. The fire from a burning pile of rubble has reached six nearby Jap bodies, which sizzle and pop as the flame consumes flesh and gases. Fifteen more are scattered around a food dump, and two others are blown to a hundred pieces—a hand here, a head there, a hobnailed foot farther away.

  There is a warehouse near the end of the Burns Philp pier, whose contents have been scattered over many hundreds of square feet. A small trolley leads from the end of the pier to the warehouse. Unlike the Jap Army on Attu, the Navy troops on Tarawa were well supplied with mechanized tools and vehicles. Next to the pier there is another armored turret that served atop a pillbox. This one is smashed in on two sides, and perforated a hundred times by strafing bullets. Two Japs are in a shellhole that was a coconut-log pillbox—here the additional four days of shelling proves that some of these pillboxes can be smashed by heavy gunfire. Under the Burns Philp pier lie a dozen Japs who machine-gunned the Americans as they waded ashore (a destroyer finally smashed the pier). Under a privy platform which is also smashed lie fourteen more Japs. At the end of this pier lies a pig, his hams shot off. Three wrecked barges are on the beach. Two of them have double-fuselaged bows, look something like P-38’s.

  Inland there is one of the biggest concrete blockhouses on the island—about sixty by forty, and twenty-five feet high. Four direct hits, probably from battleships, smashed through its walls, and a Marine souvenir-hunter says there are 300 charred Jap bodies inside. Steps lead to the roof of the blockhouse, where there are two 13-mm. machine guns. In one gun nest there are four dead Japs, in the other, two. Four others are scattered around the rooftop and two more are in a pen covered by sandbags. All apparently were killed by strafing planes, although some naval gun shrapnel nicked the extension of the walls which protect the roof-bound machine gunners. These nicks show that the entire thick concrete structure was laced with half-inch reinforcing steel. A Marine sits down on the roof, opens a can of C ration, and eats heartily.

  Outside there are two burned Jap tanks, carrying license plates number 102 and 113 and the Navy anchor insignia. A black automobile in a nearby wooden garage has hardly been touched. None of the glass windows has been broken and there are only a few strafing bullets through the top of the car. An indifferent Marine gets in the car, steps on the starter. The engine runs like a sewing machine. Near the garage there is what was once a motor pool—the concrete blockhouse was undoubtedly a headquarters. A dozen motorcycles with sidecars are burned to steel skeletons, but one little motorcycle truck is in fairly good condition.

  Another warehouse a hundred yards beyond is torn to pieces, but only one of the five coconut-log pillboxes surrounding it is not intact. Another warehouse was also the site of another motor pool. None of its trucks or motorcycles will run again!

  Back on the north beach opposite the inland warehouses, there are three fifty-foot-long pillboxes and eight or ten smaller ones. One of the larger fortifications has its top blown completely off. The rest are untouched, but the mounted gun inside—37 mm. or 40 mm.—is twisted and broken, its wheels demolished. Further down the beach there are contiguous shellholes, and shellholes within shellholes, as far as the eye can see. A strong, small pillbox is smashed in, pinning a Jap machine gunner to the bottom of the dugout. The next pillbox also had an armored turret for a top, but it, too, is only a smashed steel cone.

  Within a few hundred yards of the end of the island the Japs had used great bulbous roots of coconut trees for fortifications, back of layers of barbed wire and rows of mines on the beach. Back of the beach, where eight Japs lie in a blasted pillbox, there is a long tank trap fenced in on either side by barbed wire. A little Jap pack howitzer, about 75 mm., but having wheels only thirty inches in diameter, is the first of its kind I have seen on Betio. A 36-inch searchlight on the beach has been shattered. The coconut logs supporting it have been smashed to the ground and the machinery which operated the searchlight is good only for scrap iron.

  Thirty yards inland from the searchlight there is another concrete blockhouse which was an ammunition dump serving the two nearby shattered twin-mount 5.5-inch guns. A direct hit on the ammunition dump had set off the shells inside, which blew the roof heaven knows where. There are hundreds of rounds of ammunition inside. The concrete walls are fairly well intact, however. These walls measure, by a twelve-inch shoe, just eight feet thick, which is a lot of concrete. There is evidence of only one Jap nearby: a leg and arms which probably matched. On the airfield to the west the first F6F lands on Betio.

  Beside an unexploded five-hundred-pound bomb there is a hole caused by a bomb that was not a dud. Six Japs are in the hole, which is filled to a depth o
f two feet by seeping water. Inland there is another mess kitchen with a capacity for ten ten-gallon pots. Near it there had been a barracks building of which now only the floor remains. Scattered around the remains of the building are blankets, shoes, buttons, underwear, “writing pads” —so labeled in English, pans and cups carrying the Navy insignia, sake bottles. Much of the clothing is civilian—evidently there were quite a few Japanese civilians on Betio, or the Navy takes its civilian clothes with it. My souvenir of Betio is a fine, red-figured Japanese silk necktie.

  Near the tail end of the island I cross the 150 yards to the southern shore. In the middle of the tail end of the island there there hundreds of tons of unrusted steel rail and at least a thousand wheels to fit those rails. Unmistakably, the Japs had big plans for Betio.

  On the south shore, near the tail end, are the remains of two more eight-inch Vickers guns. One of the gun barrels is broken off about four feet from where it sticks out of the turret. The other gun is badly burned and strafing bullets had nicked the inside of the barrel so badly that it probably could not have been fired again. There are three searchlights within 300 yards, and numerous 13-mm. and 77-mm. anti-aircraft guns protect the big guns. Not far away there are twenty dead Japs in a shellhole. Perhaps they had worked at the mixer which had bean pouring dozens of pyramidal concrete blocks for the defense of Betio against the expected American invasion.

  By running most of the mile and a half back to the pier, past Seabees and trucks and graders and rollers working on the airfield, past several hundred more dead Japs and one well-hidden live Jap who pestered the Seabees, past hundreds of shellholes and bomb craters of varying depths, I made the plane for Funafuti. I was not sorry to leave the appalling wreckage of Betio and its 5,000 dead. I was thankful that I had lived through the toughest job ever assigned to the toughest outfit the U. S. has produced: the magnificent U. S. Marines.