Tarawa

by Robert Sherrod

  That night as I gratefully soaped myself in an outdoor shower on Funafuti, Co-pilot Hugh Wilkinson said, “I hated to tell you this when you boarded the plane at Tarawa, but all of you smelled like dead Japs.” Lieutenant Wilkinson gave me some of his clothing, for I had none except the dirty Marine dungarees I had worn for six days. “Can’t I give you these in exchange?” I said. “Perhaps a native woman would wash them.”

  Said Wilkinson, “Thanks just the same, but I think we’ll bury the dungarees. Let’s go get a bottle of beer.”

  AFTERTHOUGHTS

  JUST EIGHT DAYS after the first Marines hit the beach at Betio, I was again in Honolulu. Already there were rumblings about Tarawa. People on the U. S. mainland had gasped when they heard the dread phrase, “heavy casualties.” They gasped again when it was announced that 1,026 Marines had been killed, 2,600 wounded.* “This must not happen again,” thundered an editorial. “Our intelligence must have been faulty,” guessed a member of Congress.

  This attitude, following the finest victory U. S, troops had won in this war, was amazing. It was the clearest indication that the peacetime United States (i.e., the United States as of December, 1943) simply found it impossible to bridge the great chasm that separates the pleasures of peace from the horrors of war. Like the generation they educated, the people had not thought of war in terms of men being killed—war seemed so far away.

  Tarawa, it seemed to me, marked the beginning of offensive thrusts in the Pacific. Tarawa appeared to be the opening key to offensive operations throughout the whole Pacific—as important in its way as Guadalcanal was important to the defense of the U. S.-Australian supply line. Tarawa required four days; Guadalcanal, six months. Total casualties among Marines alone, not even including malaria cases, were about twenty percent higher on Guadalcanal.

  * This first estimate actually was somewhat higher than revised casualty figures: 685 killed, 77 died of wounds, 169 missing, about 2100 wounded.

  Tarawa was not perfectly planned or perfectly executed. Few military operations are, particularly when the enemy is alert Said Julian Smith: “We made mistakes, but you can’t know it all the first time. We learned a lot which will benefit us in the future. And we made fewer mistakes than the Japs did.” Tarawa was the first frontal assault on a heavily defended atoll. By all the rules concerning amphibious assaults, the Marines should have suffered far heavier casualties than the defenders. Yet, for every Marine who was killed more than four Japs died—four of the best troops the Emperor had. Looking at the defenses of Betio, it was no wonder our colonels could say: “With two battalions of Marines I could have held this island until hell froze over.”

  Tarawa must have given the Japanese General Staff something to think about.

  The lessons of Tarawa were many. It is a shame that some very fine Americans had to pay for those lessons with their lives, but they gave their lives that others on other enemy beaches might live. On Tarawa we learned what our best weapons were, what weapons needed improving, what tactics could best be applied to other operations. We learned a great deal about the most effective methods of applying Naval gunfire and bombs to atolls. Our capacity to learn, after two years of war, had improved beyond measure. The same blind refusal to learn, which had characterized many of our operations early in the war, had almost disappeared. We were learning, and learning how to learn faster.

  The facts were cruel, but inescapable: Probably no amount of shelling and bombing could obviate the necessity of sending in foot soldiers to finish the job. The corollary was this: there is no easy way to win the war; there is no panacea which will prevent men from getting killed. To me it seemed that to deprecate the Tarawa victory was almost to defame the memory of the gallant men who lost their lives achieving it.

  Why, then, did so many Americans throw up their hands at the heavy losses on Tarawa? Why did they not realize that there would be many other bigger and bloodier Tarawas in the three or four years of Japanese war following the first Tarawa? After two years of observing the Japanese I had become convinced that they had only one strategy: to burrow into the ground as far and as securely as possible, waiting for the Americans to dig them out; then to hope that the Americans would grow sick of their own losses before completing the job. Result! a Japanese victory through negotiated peace. It seemed to me that those Americans who were horrified by Tarawa were playing into Japanese hands. It also seemed that there was no way to defeat the Japanese except by extermination.

  Then I reasoned that many Americans had never been led to expect anything but an easy war. Through their own wishful thinking, bolstered by comfort-inspiring yarns from the war theatres, they had really believed that this place or that place could be “bombed out of the war.” It seemed to many that machines alone would win the war for us, perhaps with the loss of only a few pilots, and close combat would not be necessary. As a matter of fact, by the end of 1943 our airplanes, after a poor start, had far outdistanced anything the Japanese could put in the air. We really did not worry particularly about Japanese airpower. If we could get close enough, we could gain air supremacy wherever we chose. But did that mean we could win the war by getting only a few pilots killed? It did not. Certainly, air supremacy was necessary. But airpower could not win the war alone. Despite airplanes and the best machines we could produce, the road to Tokyo would be lined with the grave of many a foot soldier. This came as a surprise to many people.

  Cur information services had failed to impress the people with the hard facts of war. Early in the war our communiqués gave the impression that we were bowling over the enemy every time our handful of bombers dropped a few pitiful tons from 30,000 feet. The stories accompanying the communiqués gave the impression that any American could lick any twenty Japs. Later, the communiqués became more matter-of-fact. But the communiqués, which made fairly dry reading, were rewritten by press association reporters who waited for them back at rear headquarters. The stories almost invariably, came out liberally sprinkled with “smash” and “pound” and other “vivid” verbs. These “vivid” verbs impressed the headline writers back in the home office. They impressed the reading public which saw them in tall type. But they sometimes did not impress the miserable, bloody soldiers in the front lines where the action had taken place. Gloomily observed a sergeant: “The war that is being written in the newspapers must be a different war from the one we see.” Sometimes I thought I could see a whole generation losing its faith in the press. One night a censor showed me four different letters saying, in effect: “I wish we could give you the story of this battle without the sugar-coating you see in the newspapers.”

  Whose fault was this? Surely, there must have been some reason for tens of millions of people getting false impressions about the war. Mostly, it was not the correspondents’ fault. The stories which gave false impressions were not usually the front-line stories. But the front-line stories had to be sent back from the front. They were printed somewhat later, usually on an inside page. The stories which the soldiers thought deceived their people back home were the “flashes” of rewritten communiqués, sent by reporters who were nowhere near the battle. These communiqué stories carrying “vivid” verbs were the stories that got the big headlines. And the press association system willy-nilly prevented these reporters from making any evaluation of the news, from saying: “Does this actually mean anything, and if it does, what does it mean in relation to the whole picture?” The speed with which the competing press associations had to send their dispatches did not contribute to the coolness of evaluation. By the time the radio announcers had read an additional lilt into the press association dispatches—it was no wonder that our soldiers spat in disgust.

  Said a bomber pilot, after returning from the Pacific: “When I told my mother what the war was really like, and how long it was going to take, she sat down and cried. She didn’t know we were just beginning to fight the Japs.”

  My third trip back to the United States since the war began was a let-down. I had imagi
ned that everybody, after two years, would realize the seriousness of the war and the necessity of working as hard as possible toward ending it. But I found a nation wallowing in unprecedented prosperity. There was a steel strike going on, and a railroad strike was threatened. Men lobbying for special privilege swarmed around a Congress which appeared afraid to tax the people’s new-found, inflationary wealth. Justice Byrnes cautioned a group of newsmen that we might expect a half million casualties within a few months—and got an editorial spanking for it. A “high military spokesman” generally identified as General Marshall said bitterly that labor strikes played into the hands of enemy propagandists. Labor leaders got furious at that. The truth was that many Americans were not prepared psychologically to accept the cruel facts of war.

  The men on Tarawa would have known what the general and the justice meant. On Tarawa, late in 1943, there was a more realistic approach to the war than there was in the United States.

  TARAWA’S CASUALTIES

  Reported through January 26, 1944

  U. S. MARINE CORPS

  KILLED IN ACTION

  Lieutenant Colonel

  Amey, Herbert R., Jr.

  Claude. David X.

  Major

  Drewes, Henry C.

  Captain

  Fox, James O.

  Litile, Bonnie A.

  Rose, Robert W.

  Royster, Thomas B.

  Tatom, William E.

  Walker, Edward G., Jr.

  Wentzel, George R.

  First Lieutenant

  Bonnyman, Alexander, Jr.

  Carlton, David A.

  Dunahoe, Clinton N.

  Fricks, Hugh D.

  Gaston, Glenn M.

  Harvey, Robert J.

  Hennessey, Edward C.

  Hofmann. Wilbur E.

  Maurer, Walter L.

  Mills, Justin G.

  Phillips, John B.

  Reichel, Maurice F.

  Rixstine, Herman K.

  Ross, Armatcad E.

  Ruud, Reuben P.

  Shceedy, William I.

  Vincent, Richard W.

  Second Lieutenant

  Anderson, John E.

  Beck, Louis B.

  Becker, Thomas D.

  Blakeslee, Leslie C.

  Bussa, George S.

  Carpenter, Willis A.

  Christenson, Marius W.

  Culp, William C.

  Curry, Louis E.

  Dahlgren, Donald R.

  Jauregui, Augustine V.

  Martin, Fred J.

  Matthews, Ernest A.

  Moore, Harvel L.

  Powell, Buell Frederick

  Rozanski, Edward E.

  Sexton, Joseph J.

  Terrell, John N.

  Tomlinson, Mark

  Warrant Officer—MG

  Booker, Leonard A.

  Shealy, Bernard E.

  First Sergeant

  Harris, George W., Jr.

  Konz, Michael P.

  Slaughter, Orvan S.

  Vanditti, Dominick

  Gunnery Sergeant

  Amadio, Domenick D.

  Cook, Sidney A.

  Fleming, Robert L.

  Gregerson, Henry R.

  Jay, William R.

  Perkins, Faul

  Stroud, Herbert

  Summers, Arthur B.

  Swanson, Harold

  Wharton, Robert H.

  Technical Sergeant

  Carlsen, Harry A.

  Supply Sergeant

  Warren, Page

  Platoon Sergeant

  Barker, Elmer C.

  Dickens, Rowe W.

  Gurley, Joe

  Haktead, Murat

  Nedbalec, Jerry

  Norman, Basil, Jr.

  Pate, Charles S.

  Trotter, George E.

  Wheeler, Leslie J.

  Williams, Leonard E.

  Staff Sergeant

  Bayless, Joseph W.

  Bordelon, William J.

  Kroenung, Wesley L. Jr.

  Snyder, John

  Sergeant

  Abbott, Myron I.

  Atkins, James R.

  Audette, Osea A.

  Bowden, George W.

  Bozarth, David B., Jr.

  Brackeen, J. T.

  Cole, Duane O.

  Darby, Howard O.

  Dimon, Emmett L.

  Dougherty, Michael D.

  Farris, Fred

  Fillcky, Frank S.

  Flanary, Kermit C

  Fomby, Clifton E.

  Gerst, James L.

  Gibbons, William R.

  Haisley, James R.

  Hubert, James J.

  Jellema, John B.

  Johnson, Hugh W.

  Johnson, Roy W.

  Kidwell, Julius H.

  Ledbetter, Emmet G.

  Lee, Lendell

  Lmdquist, Everett S.

  Loyall, Lawrence L.

  Lyon, Clifford A.

  Maine, James J.

  Marble, Bernard A.

  Marsh, Everett N.

  Manriello, Ugo

  Mitchell, Clyde C.

  Moore, Fae V.

  Morgan, Francis

  Morris, Jerome B.

  Odom, Millard

  Phelps, Ulysses 5.

  Phillips, Kenneth N.

  Powell Frank C.

  Powless, Henry

  Randall, Dwight W.

  Reece, Criss

  Reeser, George R.

  Richter, Leroy R

  Roberts, Raymond O.

  Roll, Ralph G.

  Simpson, Edward L.

  Simpson, Robert E.

  Skinner, Morris W.

  Smith, Kenneth L.

  Snair, Carl, Jr.

  Stoddard, Donald D.

  Sutherland, Walter V.

  Thorp, Vernon L.

  Van Heck, Robert F.

  Wells, Vernon S.

  Wiehardt, Vincent H.

  Williamson, Wesley O.

  Corporal

  Abadie, John A.

  Adams, Clay O,

  Anderson, Vera M.

  Andregg, Henry, Jr.

  Barrows, Merle R.

  Berg, Thomas J.

  Birdsong, Jessie L.

  Bowen, Clvis William

  Bowie, Clvis Woodward

  Brneckner, Norman L.

  Bryan, James W.

  Burill, Russell M.

  Cabral, Frank R.

  Cain, Thomas D., Jr.

  Campbell, Arthur A.

  Coatley, Elmer W.

  Cole, Oscar H., Jr.

  Condelario, Vincent R.

  Cooper, Thomas H.

  Critchley, Walter G.

  DePreta, James J.

  Ecker, Clinton J., Jr.

  Ellis, Harold O.

  Fitzpatrick, John J.

  Gagne. Arthur F., Jr.

  Garde, Sebastian B.

  Gautreaux, Lawrence M.

  Getz, Allen K.

  Gleason, Robert B.

  Goins, Marvin F.

  Goldtrap, Claire E.

  Gonsalves, Joseph R.

  Gorenc, Joseph A.

  Guerriero, Anthony G.

  Haywood, William C.

  Hirt. Gerald A.

  Hogan, Jimmie D.

  Holland, Paul J.

  Hopping. Ernest F.

  Jarmulowski, Stanley V.

  Karlson, Donald A.

  Lanning, Hazen B.

  Lancz, John R.

  Lee, Wilson R.

  Luther, Hubert C

  Marshall, Edward

  Marshall, Richard H.

  Martin, Elmer L.

  Martinez, John J.

  Massey, Stanley E.

  Mayer, Stephen J.

  McCall, Quentin “W.

  McGrath, John J.

  McNichol, John V.

  Meadow, Wayne G

  Miller. Harold E.

  Miller, Walter A.

  O’Donnll, Morgan. H.

  Paluch, George A.

  P
aredes, Osbaldo R.

  Patterson, David W.

  Pellenito. Andrew

  Percer. Walter T .

  Phillips, John E.

  Pinckard, George W.

  Platt, Thomas F.

  Rasmussen. Albert L.

  Ribeiro, Arthur E.

  Rigdon, Marvin R.

  Robertson, Mark R:

  Sands, William F.

  Scisley, John Francis

  Sherrod, James H.

  Shockey, Warren R.

  Simonetti, Joseph M.

  Smith, Glen R.

  Snapp, Raymond C.

  Snipes, Neal E.

  Snyder, Robert A.

  Spence, John S.

  Trantham, Jack

  Tuhey, Raymond J.

  Valdez, Charles T.

  Vaughan, Welver C.

  Walcaewskip Edmund R.

  Wallace, Fred C.

  Wallace. Frederick L.

  Walsh, Robert A.

  Webb, Hester S.

  Williamson, William L.

  Private First Class

  Ackerman, Henry R.

  Adkins, Ray E.

  Agnew, Robert H.

  Alger, Theodore J.

  Allen, Randolph

  Anderson, Harold J.

  Anderson, Truitt A.

  Aid, Olan

  Armstrong, Jarrel M.

  Ary, Clarence K.

  Athon, Frank L., Jr.

  Atkins, George J.

  Ault, James W.

  Ault, Joseph E.

  Bacon, Thomas C.

  Bange, Oliver L.

  Barden, John J.

  Bauman, Benjamin G.

  Baumbach, Elden R.

  Bayens, John R.

  Begin. William W.

  Bemis, Robert E.

  Benavides, Philip U.

  Bennett, Nelson C.

  Berg, Bert M.

  Bishop, Edward E.

  Bittick, Rova E., Jr.

  Bladanon, Clarence E.

  Bohne, Kenneth D.

  Boschetti, Joseph F.

  Braddock, Abraham S.

  Brandenburg, William E.

  Braun, Richard

  Breithaupt, Marion W.

  Brindley, Warren B.

  Brock, Roland E.

  Brown, Darwin H.

  Brown, Duane McL.

  Brozyna, Anthony

  Bnan, Norman A.

  Burch, Harold R.

  Burrows, Merrill G.

  Byrd, Harry E.

  Byrnes, Bernard J.

  Campbell, Douglas K.

  Campbell, Floyd E.