* These versatile little guns provided yeoman service for the Marines in the Pacific War. Originally developed for mule-borne expeditionary forces, the pack howitzers could be disassembled into several man-portable components. A nightlong effort to manhandle these components ashore from the reef at Tarawa by the 1st Battalion, 10th Marines, made a major difference in the second day of that battle. Many Old Breed Marines, who recalled the stress of trying to unload “French 75” artillery pieces over the gunwales of motor whaleboats in the Potomac River at Quantico in the 1920s, swore by the versatility of the dismountable pack howitzers. So would “New Breed” Marines when they winched the small howitzers up impossible cliffs for point-blank fire against Japanese caves at Peleliu and Okinawa.
* At the same time, amphibious cargo ships, AKs, were modified to carry landing craft and were redesignated attack cargo ships, AKAs. Both APs and AKs also received enhanced antiaircraft armaments in the modification process.
Chapter Three
Turning Point at Tarawa
But the enemy was also daring. Under our fires they came in large numbers, one after another, wading the shallows, stepping over their friends’ bodies. I in my tank kept shooting until the gun barrel became red hot. I felt that we were certain to die because the U.S. fighters came in large numbers.
Petty Officer Tadao Onuki, IJN
Personal memoir, Tarawa,
20 November 1943
The first storm landing of the Pacific War erupted with concentrated violence at dawn on 20 November 1943 against the Japanese bastion on Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll, in the Gilberts. Imperial General Headquarters, though shocked by this enemy initiative, had every confidence that Betio’s fortified garrison could withstand any American landing attempts. Rear Adm. Keiji Shibasaki, highly regarded in Tokyo, commanded the 3d Special Base Defense Force on Betio, an untested but well-trained force of forty-six hundred naval infantry and engineers.
Shibasaki realized he was in the presence of a powerful American naval task force. Each of his strongholds in the Gilberts—Tarawa, Makin, Apamama, Ocean, and Nauru—had been plastered the preceding week by carrier aircraft and heavy cruisers, augmented by long-range bombers from the Ellice Islands. What did it mean? The Japanese high command believed the American landing at Bougainville in the Solomons earlier that month represented the principal enemy winter offensive in the Pacific. Surely this activity in the Gilberts was but a diversion.
The faint gray light of morning nautical twilight on 20 November shattered Shibasaki’s reasoned assumptions. The horizon swarmed with scores of enemy warships—battleships, cruisers, the unmistakable silhouettes of troop transports. Already he could see hundreds of tiny dots circling the anchored transports—a landing force. This was no feint! His radio crackled with excited reports from the Makin outpost at Butaritari Island, surrounded by another huge task force. Shibasaki sent an urgent report to the Fourth Fleet commander in the Marshalls and quickly ordered his big coast-defense batteries to open fire.
Shibasaki had drilled his gunners for this precise moment each day of the four months since he had assumed command. The crown jewels of his defensive fire system were four turret-mounted, 8-inch naval cannons, relics of a direct purchase from Great Britain during the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, yet amply suited for interdicting the entrance to Tarawa Atoll or disrupting enemy tactical formations offshore. But the proliferation of live targets seemed to rattle Shibasaki’s novice gun crews; they hurried their shots and did little damage. Moreover, their blazing muzzle flashes attracted the immediate attention of a pair of old Pearl Harbor victims with a score to settle. The battleships Tennessee and Maryland, joined by Colorado, leveled their main batteries and methodically demolished three of the Japanese gun positions and their principal magazine in a matter of minutes.* Shibasaki’s smaller-caliber coastal guns performed with similar ineptitude. The lagoon entrance, the back door to Betio, now lay uncovered.
Shibasaki could only curse his misfortune. He lacked perhaps two weeks in completing the encirclement of Betio with mines and obstacles. He had placed top priority on the southern and western defenses, figuring the Americans would surely land there, and his laborers had not yet finished work on the northern, lagoon-side beaches. Even now he had three thousand mines sitting uselessly in storage, waiting to be sown throughout the lagoon approaches. Sure enough, Shibasaki’s spotters soon reported an enemy task unit of two minesweepers and two destroyers approaching the unobstructed channel.
The Japanese commander ordered every surviving coast-defense gun to engage the new threat from the north. Quickly the green water around the approaching ships erupted in huge geysers. But Shibasaki’s luck remained snake-bitten. His most proficient 5.5-inch gun crew nailed the lead destroyer dead center with two quick shots—but both shells were duds. Soon an American smoke screen began to obscure the ships in the lagoon, although not before lookouts reported a long column of landing craft entering the channel five miles northward of Betio.
Japanese island defenders used these versatile Type 98 (1929) 127-mm dual-purpose gun mounts against American aircraft and landing craft during the Pacific War. (Larry E. Klatt)
Admiral Shibasaki did not panic. A veteran himself of amphibious landings along the coast of China, he knew better than most the difficulties the Americans still faced. The heart of the Japanese defenses on Betio lay in their well-sited antiboat and heavy machine guns, enhanced by the natural protection of the coral reef. Shibasaki once taught advanced navigation to other naval officers; he well knew the neap tide that morning favored his defenders. Then, shortly before 0900, the great bombardment by ships and planes suddenly ceased. The enemy assault craft were still two miles away from the beach. Grateful for this opportune blunder, Shibasaki began shifting forces and field guns from the southern defenses to alternate firing positions along the threatened north shore.
As the three ragged waves of enemy assault craft surged into plain view, the Japanese commander realized with surprise that these were not wooden boats but some kind of sea-going light tanks, amphibian vehicles loaded with assault troops. To the consternation of every Japanese defender, these “little boats on wheels” hit the exposed coral reef and slithered across without stopping. And now the heavy machine guns in the bow of each oncoming vehicle—nearly a hundred in all—opened a torrent of .50-caliber bullets against the seawall, pillboxes, and pier pilings, forcing the rikusentai gunners back from their firing embrasures.
Admiral Nimitz, visiting Tarawa after the battle, ordered the SeaBees to provide blueprints of the Japanese fortifications for his engineers. Carpenter’s Mate 3/c Larry E. Klatt produced this rendering of a sector command post in December 1943. (Larry E. Klatt)
Admiral Shibasaki would fight and die as a warrior this day, confident to the end that his high-spirited troops and interlocking defenses would inflict grievous damages on these upstart invaders. But it was likely at this point that an officer of Shibasaki’s qualifications would have realized that the Pacific War had reached a turning point. Abruptly, he and his fighters were very much alone and on their own against an overpowering and relentless enemy armada. “May the Empire exist another ten thousand years,” his survivors would radio forlornly two days later, before they, too, became overwhelmed and silenced. The Americans had suddenly, and savagely, breached Japan’s outer perimeter in the Central Pacific.
Operation Galvanic was the code name assigned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the campaign to seize the Gilberts by the newly created Central Pacific Force.* Galvanic represented the kickoff of the massive Central Pacific drive, a dramatic second front in the war against Japan. The Gilberts campaign was at the same time a high-stakes gamble with enormous consequences, an acid test of several unproven and controversial new doctrines concerning fast carrier operations, mobile logistics, and offensive amphibious warfare. The key word in this context is “offensive.” Unlike the desperate holding actions and limited incursions in the Southern and Southwestern Pacific to date, each ste
pping stone across the Central Pacific would be characterized by a fierce offensive from start to finish. Galvanic would mark the emergence of storm landings as the embodiment of this offensive spirit.
There were reasonable American military officers in the Pacific in 1943 who expressed serious doubts whether any U.S. campaign could succeed beyond the protective umbrella of land-based tactical aircraft, whether any naval task force could operate at extended ranges beyond fixed repair and replenishment facilities, or whether any fortified island could ever be assaulted by amphibious forces. These men honestly believed that the vast ocean expanses and heavily barricaded enemy atolls of the Central Pacific would prove to be the burial ground of any American force foolish enough to “leap off the deep end.” It would be wiser and safer, they argued, to concentrate limited resources in General MacArthur’s deliberate approach along the Solomons–New Guinea–Philippines axis.
Even the most outspoken proponents of the Central Pacific campaign admitted serious concerns about the risks. Success in this endeavor would provide a shorter road to Tokyo, but it remained an unthinkable strategic option until such time as the United States could deliver the numbers of improved ships and aircraft that would enable the Pacific Fleet to achieve superiority at sea and in the air along the avenue of advance.
Prevailing against the still-powerful Japanese Combined Fleet and the many fortified island outposts in the Central Pacific would require foremost plenty of the new Essex-class fleet carriers, with their greater payload (three squadrons), speed, range, and antiaircraft protection. Beyond the fleet carriers the priority list included escort carriers and major-caliber gunfire support ships to enhance amphibious landings; more submarines and destroyers and minesweepers; new, fast replenishment ships and tankers; larger, faster amphibious ships and self-deploying landing ships; improved fighters and dive-bombers; enhanced radar; more reliable torpedoes; variable-time (VT) fuses; medium tanks; more effective flamethrowers. The whole issue of extended range, high mobility, self-sustaining task forces needed validation. Could we really develop the ability to refuel, rearm, and replenish our surface combatants without having to cycle each ship a thousand miles back to rear naval bases? Would we ever have enough ships—transports, cargo ships, merchants—to deliver a combined amphibious assault plus a follow-on base defense force with its heavy antiaircraft guns and air search radars?
The new doctrine of amphibious assault remained unproven in a real trial by fire. Invariably, the principal U.S. objectives in the Central Pacific would be those islands capable of supporting an airfield, and in Micronesia there were only a limited number of islands of sufficient overall length whose long axes conveniently faced the prevailing wind. Most of these already sported Japanese airfields and base defense forces. All were further protected by coral reefs. Prospects for success seemed unlikely.
Operation Galvanic took place twenty-three months after Pearl Harbor, seventeen months after the battle of Midway, and fifteen months following the landings at Guadalcanal and the Floridas. Amphibious planners had devoted much of this time wrestling with the problem of how to get assault forces across a barrier reef while under enemy fire. Some Marines perceived that the means of tactical reef-crossing mobility already existed within their own organizational equipment. Strangely, it was like pulling teeth to bridge the gap between concept and practice.
The humble tracked landing vehicle (LVT—also called “amtrac” and, initially, “amphtrac”) provided the solution to the barrier reef. The first model LVT-1s (Alligators), which joined the Fleet Marine Forces in 1941, proved to be true amphibians, capable of being lowered by a ship’s boom, swimming shoreward, negotiating a plunging surf, then operating inland through marginal terrain. In the Solomons, however, the Alligators remained simply logistical vehicles, in effect seagoing trucks. Their thin armor, slow speed, fragility, and scary tendency to lose power and watertight integrity in the ocean kept them from tactical mobility applications with embarked troops.
Maj. Gen. Holland M. Smith, rightfully credited as the nation’s foremost amphibious pioneer in the early 1940s, became the first senior Marine to propose a tactical role for these primitive LVTs. As commanding general of the Atlantic Fleet Amphibious Force in March 1942, Smith recommended that an amphibian tractor battalion be assigned each division for beach assault. “Swamp areas and coral reefs encountered near the beachline are passable by no other means,” he stated. “The use of the amphibian tractor permits a wider selection of landing places and more freedom of maneuver for the attacker.”
The Navy listened to Smith’s suggestions. Among the new features contained in Change Two to Fleet Training Publication 167, Landing Operations Doctrine (August 1942) appeared this modification to the ship-to-shore chapter: “Landing vehicles, track, will be useful and should be available for crossing coral reefs.”
In April 1943 Marine colonel David R. Nimmer, a Guadalcanal veteran assigned to the Joint War Plans Committee, evaluated the amphibious feasibility of the proposed Central Pacific campaign. Nimmer asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps whether the current LVT-1 could in fact negotiate a coral reef while being pounded by a plunging surf. The commandant promptly ordered Maj. Gen. Clayton B. Vogel, commanding the I Marine Amphibious Corps (IMAC) in the South Pacific, to conduct a field test. Vogel knew of an officer in his command who had been instrumental in forming and training the first amphibian tractor unit in the Corps, Lt. Col. Victor H. “Brute” Krulak, then commanding the 2d Parachute Battalion.
Brute Krulak conducted a hair-raising series of tests of four Alligators under reef and surf conditions in New Caledonia from 26 April to 3 May. In Krulak’s words, “the operation subjected the machines to severe punishment,” which created control problems, “shipped considerable water,” and made for an uncomfortable ride (“personnel were thrown roughly about”). Surprisingly, the vehicles made the grade. Krulak’s conclusion simply stated was, “It is mechanically feasible to employ amphibian tractors as supply and personnel carriers in an amphibious operation executed across coral reefs and involving surf up to ten feet in height.”
The IMAC test report sped back to Washington. Colonel Nimmer and the Joint War Plans Committee had it by mid-May. On 10 June the Joint Chiefs released Joint Planning Staff Report No. 205, “Operations against the Marshall Islands.” The JCS had come to view the Central Pacific campaign more favorably. Among the many politicostrategic factors leading to this turnaround was one practical operational breakthrough: “Recent tests conducted in the South Pacific indicate that the amphibian tractor can negotiate a fringing reef in all conditions up to a ten-foot surf without too great damage from the pounding or much probability of stranding.” The Joint Planning Staff further recommended that amphibious task force commanders use the new tank landing ships (LSTs) to transport assault troops and LVTs to the objective. LSTs could carry seventeen LVTs, launch them ten times faster by bow ramp than transports could by swinging boom, and could approach closer to the shore than the deeper draft transports, thus enabling a faster run to the beach.
The story deserved a happier ending. To this point the Guadalcanal Old Boy Network had worked swiftly to answer a tough question—Nimmer at the JCS to (very likely) Col. Gerald C. Thomas at Marine headquarters to Brute Krulak in New Caledonia and back. But thereafter the details of Krulak’s report and the practical suggestions of JPS No. 205 began to fade from sight. Adm. Kelly Turner, for one, would not abide the introduction of LSTs into his attack forces for Galvanic because he believed their slow speed of advance (nine knots on a good day) would jeopardize his formations and forfeit surprise. Worse, while amphibious troop commanders like Vogel and Holland Smith had copies of Krulak’s test as early as May and June, respectively, neither thought to share that information with the 2d Marine Division, earmarked to assault the reef-plagued Gilberts for Operation Galvanic in November.*
Other knotty problems remained to be resolved before the Central Pacific Force would truly be ready to unleash the first storm lan
dings. The Marines in the Pacific were anxious to receive the M-4 Sherman medium tank, whose 75-mm gun, heavier armor, and enhanced mobility would provide a quantum improvement over the existing M-3 Stuart light tanks. While the Shermans had fared rather poorly in initial encounters against the larger German Tigers and 88-mm antitank weapons in Europe, the Marines figured the new mediums would be ideal in the Pacific against the less lethal Japanese tanks and smaller antitank guns (typically 47-mm).
There were two obstacles to deploying Sherman tanks in an amphibious assault in 1943: the incompatibility of the thirty-four-ton vehicle with existing amphibious shipping, and the delayed arrival in the Pacific of fording kits, the simple exhaust-pipe extensions and engine seals needed to protect the Shermans against flooding during tactical debarkation. In view of the high priority accorded Operation Galvanic, the matter of rushing fording kits to the Pacific should have been readily achievable. The kits nevertheless failed to arrive in time. Five of the fourteen Sherman tanks assigned to the Betio assault drowned in shallow shell craters inside the reef during the ship-to-shore movement on D-Day morning—a critical, nearly fatal, loss.
The larger problem of producing a compatible amphibious ship for the Shermans fared better, albeit in just the nick of time. By mid-1943 the Navy Department had copied a British design and begun producing a revolutionary new amphibious ship of strange proportions whose conventional bow seemed dominated by hunched shoulders and a chopped-off stern. This was the dock landing ship, the LSD, a unique class of amphibious ships still in service in the U.S. fleet. The LSD’s enduring utility came from its ability to ballast down at sea, lower a stern gate and flood its well deck to sufficient depth to permit medium landing craft (LCMs), preloaded with, say, Sherman tanks, to float out the stern and proceed directly to the beach—or at least as far as the coral reef.
Storm Landings Page 6