Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  The battle for Gavutu-Tanambogo thus became the first significant opposed landing experienced by American amphibious forces in the Pacific War. Many historians tend to dismiss this early action as an amateurish, backwater skirmish. Indeed, daylight the next day brought rapid tactical success to the invaders. A reinforcing infantry battalion, supported by a destroyer lying barely five hundred yards offshore, landed on Gavutu at midmorning. Two rifle companies and a pair of light tanks then assaulted Tanambogo. A day’s hard fighting served to root out the cave defenders on both islands. The 1,300 assault Marines suffered 157 casualties in the two-day battles. Against the greater air-sea-land drama of the nearby Guadalcanal campaign, this action appears inconsequential.

  Yet the Gavutu-Tanambogo landings represented a microcosm of the opposed landings to come in the Central Pacific. All the promise and frustration peculiar to forcible seaborne assaults appeared to some degree in this crude little preview—including the excruciatingly difficult task of conducting a ship-to-shore assault against a determined foe.

  American armed forces brought two unique and interactive forms of naval warfare to fruition in the later years of the Pacific War: the employment of fast carrier task forces and the execution of long-range, amphibious assaults against fierce opposition. While there were many amphibious landings throughout the Pacific, only a few qualify as storm landings—the Japanese description of America’s bold, frontal, daylight assaults into the teeth of prepared defenses.

  An amphibious landing per se is an assault launched from the sea by naval and landing forces against a hostile shore. Storm landings in the Pacific War were those amphibious landings distinguished by six additional characteristics. They were all dangerous, long-range, large-scale, self-sustaining assaults executed against defended positions while within the protective umbrella of fast carrier task forces.

  For a variety of geostrategic reasons, these storm landings occurred in the Central Pacific from November 1943 to the spring of 1945. The list is short: Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa (where the Japanese 32d Army simply transplaced their beachfront defenses a mile inland), and, by projection, Kyūshū. For the United States, each assault demonstrated a growing mastery of the concentration of overwhelming naval force against a strategic objective and literally kicking down the front door.

  Ominously, as American amphibious power became manifest over time, so did the lethality and intensity of the Japanese defenses. These two converging developments were on an exponential collision course in the massive amphibious assaults on southern Kyūshū planned for November 1945. My principal focus therefore covers that twenty-four-month period, roughly from D-Day in the Gilberts to the planned D-Day for Operation Olympic in Kyūshū.

  My deliberate focus on this short list of opposed seaborne assaults comes at the expense of hundreds of other landings in the Pacific. I bypass these operations intentionally but with full respect for every web-footed trooper of any service who ever splashed ashore on any godforsaken beach throughout the theater. Each landing had its own story of drama and risk. None were easy. Even Kiska and Morotai cost the landing forces casualties. In part, this universal costliness reflected the tenacity of Japanese defenders, who even when they opted to forgo coverage of a certain beach always seemed to leave behind a die-hard sniper or a series of ingenious booby traps. Many more casualties stemmed from the very nature of amphibious operations—hazardous work with heavy equipment in one of the most unforgiving environments on earth, the surf zone, that jagged seam between land and sea . . . the particular province of the assault amphibians.

  The storm landings of the final two years of the Pacific War illustrate both the extreme potential and the great risk of large-scale amphibious assaults. There was nothing of the subtlety of Chinese military theorist Sun Tsu in these landings. The days of combining a tactical defensive with the strategic offensive ended with Guadalcanal and Bougainville. These later operations in the Central Pacific were assaults from start to finish. The landing force never relinquished the offensive. The battles were violent, relatively short, thoroughly decisive, always bloody.

  The ability to undertake this most complex and perilous of military operations—the opposed amphibious assault—was the great unknown as the Pacific War opened. The United States fortunately had the rudiments of joint doctrine in place, but many senior officers doubted it would ever work against a well-armed opponent. The doctrine ultimately proved valid, prompting British military historian J.F.C. Fuller to acclaim the development of American amphibious power projection as “the most far-reaching tactical innovation of the war.”

  But such abstract considerations pale beside the sheer human drama of those precarious, go-for-broke storm landings that cut the heart out of Japanese dreams of preserving an empire in the Pacific Ocean—three-dimensional battles of a magnitude and ferocity that may never again be seen in this world.

  The first opposed landings at Gavutu-Tanambogo therefore deserve special mention. In the Florida Islands in 1942 the amphibians forced their way ashore against the equivalent of an enemy battalion. Thirty-two months later, and thirty-five hundred miles to the northwest, Adm. Kelly Turner would order his landing force ashore at Okinawa against a reinforced field army—and prevail. The differences in scale between Baker Company’s hasty assault on Tanambogo and the U.S. Tenth Army’s complex invasion of Okinawa were enormous, yet the central components hardly varied. The Americans learned from the Gavutu-Tanambogo experience the valuable dichotomy that while amphibious assaults require painstaking planning, the plan serves nothing more than to bring forces in contact with the enemy close to the objective. Thereafter, success or failure devolves quickly under heavy fire and great stress to the improvisational skills of a handful of junior officers and NCOs.

  The early amphibious assaults in the Solomons also taught the Americans there would be no easy road to Tokyo. Yet the mere fact that the United States could launch a division-level amphibious offensive in its avowed secondary theater eight months to the day after Pearl Harbor was remarkable in its own right. In the process, and at a cost, the amphibians learned valuable lessons. Maj. Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, USMC, commanding the 1st Marine Division in the Guadalcanal campaign, appraised the Gavutu-Tanambogo experience in these terms: “The combat assumed the nature of a storming operation from the outset, a soldier’s battle, unremitting and relentless, to be decided only by the extermination of one or the other of the adversaries engaged.” These words also proved an apt prediction of the storm landings to follow.

  The experiences of Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 2d Marines, at Tanambogo had therefore contributed to the scant body of practical knowledge of waging amphibious war against defended Japanese islands. Night landings would unduly exacerbate the inherent problems of amphibious operations. So would hasty landings executed without decent intelligence or sufficient coordination of supporting arms. Chaos could be expected to rule any opposed beachhead.

  Fifteen months later Baker Company would be the first outfit to fight its way across embattled Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll.

  * I use the World War II version of the military phonetic alphabet throughout (i.e., Able, Baker, etc., vice the current Alfa, Bravo, etc.).

  Chapter One

  Cracking a Tough Nut

  To effect such a landing under the sea and shore conditions obtaining and in the face of enemy resistance requires careful training and preparation.... It is not enough that the troops be skilled infantry men and jungle men or artillery men of high morale; they must be skilled water men and jungle men who know it can be done—Marines with Marine training.

  Maj. Earl H. Ellis, USMC

  “Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia,”

  1921

  Whatever one’s opinion of “Pete” Ellis as a self-styled espionage agent, the man was indisputably a prophet of naval warfare in the Pacific in the early interwar years. Ellis was among the first to examine the strategic and operational consequences of a
future war with Japan. Ellis saw that America’s Pacific naval bases—Pearl Harbor, Guam, Midway, Wake, the Philippines—were few and vulnerable. By contrast, Japan benefited immensely when the League of Nations mandated to them the former German island colonies in the Marianas, Palaus, Carolines, and Marshalls. Ellis clearly envisioned the “island hopping” strategy necessary for American forces to wrest control of these advance naval bases from the Japanese. More significantly, the maverick Marine officer knew each island base would have to be seized forcibly, which to him dictated a clear requirement for specially trained and equipped amphibious forces able to fight their way ashore.

  Ellis was little more than a voice crying in the wilderness in those early years. The U.S. military in the 1920s was singularly ill-prepared to conduct an amphibious campaign of the nature and scope envisioned by Ellis. At best, the nation could claim the existence of a series of lightly armed, poorly trained landing parties—mixed, provisional forces of soldiers or Marines and bluejackets in motor whaleboats—good perhaps for expeditionary service in troubled harbors, but hardly a force capable of storming a fortified beachhead. Nor was there much inclination to develop such a capability. Too expensive, too complicated, increasingly too risky.

  Yet the art of projecting a landing force ashore against hostile opposition was no twentieth-century newcomer to military science. As early as 55 B.C., British cavalry and spearmen attacked Julius Caesar’s VII and X Roman legions as they waded ashore, ten thousand strong, from their transports near present-day Kent. Likewise, French cannoneers and cavalry provided a hot greeting to Gen. Sir Ralph Abercromby’s British invaders as they struggled through the surf at Aboukir Bay, Egypt, in 1801. Momentarily at least “the issue was in doubt” for both landing forces, but Caesar and Abercromby eventually prevailed, securing beachheads and penetrating the interior. Military and naval commanders historically viewed disembarking in the face of enemy opposition as a dangerous but achievable mission.

  This viewpoint changed sharply as the Industrial Age arrived. In the eyes of nearly every military and political leader of the great powers in the 1920s and 1930s, the successes of Caesar and Abercromby had been eclipsed by the disastrous Allied amphibious campaign against the Turkish Dardanelles in 1915, known simply as “Gallipoli.” Here was a campaign in which the Allies violated virtually every known principle of war, yet the persistent image was that of the British landing force being slaughtered in wholesale numbers as they tried to disembark from the experimental “amphibious assault ship,” the River Clyde. No matter that the River Clyde was a converted collier, an unarmored coal-hauler crudely modified to disembark hundreds of troops through open bay doors onto a gangway more or less connected to pontoon causeways alongside—or that in execution the ship made a direct, unsupported approach to the target beach in full daylight, grounded broadside to the Turkish positions, and began spilling her gallant but doomed troops directly into well-aimed rifle and machine-gun fire. The wonder is that the Turks didn’t kill the entire force and blow the ship out of the water.

  Gallipoli had enormous strategic and political implications within the context of World War I and its aftermath. Military analysts concluded that large-scale, opposed amphibious landings had been rendered ineffective by the fruits of the Industrial Age. If Turkish riflemen and machine gunners could poleax a veteran Allied expeditionary force launched by the Royal Navy in the Dardanelles, what would befall other amphibious forces attempting such landings against opponents equipped with more modern weapons, such as heavy artillery, submarines, and attack aircraft?

  The British military analyst Liddell Hart concluded in 1939 that advances in airpower alone had rendered amphibious operations prohibitively costly. “A landing on a foreign coast in face of hostile troops has always been one of the most difficult operations of war,” he wrote. “It has now become much more difficult, indeed almost impossible, because of the vulnerable target which a convoy of transports offers to the defender’s air force as it approaches the shore. Even more vulnerable to air attack is the process of disembarkation in open boats.”

  Rear Adm. Kelly Turner had Hart’s exact words in hand three years later as he steamed into the Southern Solomons as commander, South Pacific Amphibious Force. In the Solomons, however, Turner’s “disembarkation in open boats” went fairly well. But the vulnerability of his irreplaceable amphibious ships received glaring emphasis during the next forty-eight hours. First, Japanese long-range bombers sank the transport George F. Elliot (PA 13); next Vice Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher withdrew his carriers; then Japanese Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa’s striking force of heavy cruisers surprised and thoroughly defeated the Allied cruisers during the night battle of Savo Island, leaving Turner’s amphibians at extreme risk. Indeed, only Mikawa’s sudden timidity at the height of his tactical victory prevented the Japanese force from annihilating the virtually defenseless transports and cargo ships clustered off the nearby beaches. Turner had little choice but to beat an ignominious retreat, his landing force supplies barely half unloaded, leaving the 1st Marine Division to fend for itself on Guadalcanal and the Florida Islands.

  These events occurred in the South Pacific during the second week of August 1942, a period in which the utility of amphibious operations to the U.S. war effort probably reached its lowest ebb. True, America’s evolving amphibious capability had enabled this limited offensive in the Pacific, surprising the Japanese and boosting home front morale. But the difficulty experienced in executing the opposed landings at Gavutu-Tanambogo remained troublesome, and the extremely close call of Turner’s amphibious task force immediately following the Savo Island battle remained downright harrowing. Maybe Liddell Hart had called it right. Modern technology might have relegated amphibious operations to the diminished role of raids and diversions.

  Surprisingly, there existed even in those dark days a reservoir of optimism about the soundness of America’s fledgling amphibious doctrine among certain Navy and Marine Corps officers, including Admiral Turner and General Vandegrift, commanding the embattled 1st Marine Division. This optimism in the face of dire setbacks stemmed from years of truly innovative research and analysis performed by a succession of officers from the sea services at the Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia, during the 1930s. As a matter of ironic fact, the advent of the Amphibious Age had its roots in the flawed Gallipoli campaign. Navy and Marine officers spent several years brainstorming the mistakes and failures of Gallipoli in the effort to determine whether amphibious warfare in fact had any future in the twentieth century.

  The process of microexamining the Gallipoli campaign followed the path modern industrialists might describe as “reverse engineering.” The analysts painstakingly broke the entire campaign into its most minute components. The Quantico team documented appalling failures in everything from operational security to fundamental leadership, but they also found intriguing possibilities that, properly pursued, might have led to tactical success. The conclusive question remained, Was the Allied amphibious invasion of Gallipoli foredoomed, or did it stand a chance given certain doctrinal changes?

  There were no easy answers. Any large-scale amphibious assault against an opposed beach is inherently complex, difficult, and hence vulnerable. The complexity can be daunting, despite Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s disclaimer in a 1950 interview that “an amphibious landing is not a particularly difficult thing. . . . You put your men in boats and as long as you get well-trained crews to take the boats in, it is the simplest deployment in the world—the men can go nowhere else except to the beach.” Eisenhower was the greatest joint force commander in U.S. history, but these words (spoken seven months before the Inchon landing) reflect too many years as a staff officer and too few as a troop leader. Omaha Beach on D-Day morning at Normandy would have been no place for the Supreme Allied Commander, but had “Ike” been there, or just offshore, he would never have made such a breezy statement.

  Eisenhower could have learned from his Normandy invasion that momentum is the ess
ence of any successful amphibious assault against a defended shoreline. But everything involved in delivering combat power ashore from the sea degrades momentum. Even under the best conditions the amphibious commander faces a formidable challenge in “stuffing” his landing force into small craft and delivering them to the correct beach with sufficient momentum to attack a fortified enemy. Add hostile fire, barrier reefs, high surf, rip tides, barbed wire, and comm failures, and the “simplest deployment in the world” quickly degenerates into chaos—absolute, unmitigated chaos.

  An early and vivid example of the perils inherent in amphibious operations became manifest to U.S. officers during Fleet Operation Number 4, a simulated landing on Culebra Island in February 1924. The single troop transport was so poorly loaded that it took nine days to get medical supplies ashore. Naval boat officers missed their assigned beaches and landed off target and out of sequence. In short, reported Marine brigadier general Eli K. Cole, “chaos reigned.” Concluded Rear Adm. Montgomery N. Taylor, commanding the naval attack force: the Navy needed first a doctrine for amphibious assault, then a training program. His advice went largely unheeded for the next ten years.

  The Gallipoli analysts at Quantico in the early 1930s tried to examine this latest field evidence in light of their research. Tracing the fault lines of the 1915 campaign was easy enough; determining whether there could be any practical solution required certain leaps of faith. Consider some of the key issues. Would chaos reign along every assault beach—and would that necessarily disqualify the landing? Could naval gunfire adequately support the landing force until field artillery displaced ashore? Could attack aircraft operate within the same “envelope” as naval gunfire without undue risk to the aviators? How much advance naval and aerial bombardment was enough, and who should coordinate it, and by what means? Was there nothing better than motor whaleboats available to deliver combat-equipped assault troops through the surf zone to the beach? How in the world could the landing force ever hope to get tanks and field guns and their prime movers ashore from amphibious ships while under fire? And what of the thorny issue of command relations between the troop commander and the naval commander?