Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Logistics dominates amphibious operations from concept to consolidation. No aspect of military art requires such a fine balance between the “broad-arrow operators” and the “stubby-pencil logisticians.” The most exquisite landing plan will quickly come to grief unless the ships are combat loaded with such excruciating forethought as to support each aspect of the scheme of maneuver ashore. Successful embarkation required detailed knowledge of both combat cargo and the characteristics of all types of amphibious and merchant ships—a rare blend of arcane skills.

  Unloading the stuff took less mental acumen but much more manpower. General Geiger had to deploy nearly one-fifth of his III Amphibious Corps as shore party and shipboard working parties at Guam. Here again, leadership—or the lack of it—dominated. While the Navy produced legendary logistics specialists like Commodore Carl E. “Squeaky” Anderson, the Marines too often regarded their own shore party as a transient brigade for combat replacements. A few brilliant logisticians emerged in the Fleet Marine Force—Col. Francis B. Loomis Jr. of IIIAC, Col. Earl S. Piper of the 5th Marine Division, Lt. Col. James D. Hittle of the 3d Marine Division—but shore party support of the landing force evolved only fitfully throughout the war. Some of the problems were organizational. The Marine divisions lacked sufficient vehicles and personnel to support advancing troops fully during an extended campaign over considerable distances, as at Okinawa (or, by projection, Kyūshū).

  Col. Robert Debs Heinl, veteran artillery officer and colorful historian of the Corps, described the “entire roll of Central Pacific battles, from Tarawa to Iwo Jima [as] amphibious warfare a l’outrance [to the utmost].” The key ingredient for this formula lay in the realm of tactical mobility, the means of rapid projection of the landing force ashore with sufficient acceleration to overrun the defenders. Amphibian tractors (LVTs), DUKWs, and Higgins boats (LCVPs) eventually constituted the trinity of the ship-to-shore assault, and the combination proved effective. But each type of craft held disadvantages for the landing force: in the aggregate they were slow, rough-riding, and vulnerably exposed. Not even the LVTs were well-suited for tactical assault beyond the high-water mark, as Saipan and Iwo Jima showed.

  Certain officers in the postwar period considered the vulnerability of the ship-to-shore movement to be the last unresolved problem of amphibious assault. In 1951 Col. Lewis W. Walt, a highly decorated veteran of the Solomons and Peleliu, wrote: “The time is past when assault infantry can be placed as helpless victims aboard slow-moving landing craft, several miles from shore, and expect a sufficient number of them will reach a defended beach to initiate an attack.”

  Such concerns led eventually to the development of alternate, faster means of getting men and combat equipment ashore: transport helicopters, air-cushioned landing craft, tilt-rotor aircraft, and the “moonstone” of engineering development, an armored, assault amphibian fully capable of transitioning into an infantry fighting vehicle ashore. Reducing the chronic vulnerability of the surface assault remained for decades the one lingering shortfall from the Pacific War.

  Storm landings in the Central Pacific were therefore both effective and dangerous. The United States resorted to frontal, daylight attacks because we lacked the command, control, and navigational capabilities to execute massive night landings—and because of our inability to observe and adjust preliminary naval bombardment in darkness.

  The unbroken string of victories in the Central Pacific exacted a heavy toll. For the Marines and their organic Navy personnel alone, storming the fortified islands of Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa cost a total of 74,805 combat casualties. Losses among participating Army and offshore Navy units in these same operations would spike the total close to 100,000 men.

  Reflect on this for a moment. Consider both the sacrifices and the achievements of these men and their surviving counterparts in fighting their way across five thousand miles of hostile ocean under conditions that are almost beyond modern comprehension. We today might well feel constrained to ask the same question Lt. Col. Donn J. Robertson asked himself after watching the lead elements of his 3d Battalion, 27th Marines, storm ashore during the worst of Japanese shelling at Iwo Jima: “What impels a young guy landing on a beach from the very first craft in the face of fire?”

  Combat artist Kerr Eby captured the grim cost of storm landings in his etching titled “Ebb Tide” and rendered on Tarawa. (U.S. Navy Combat Art Collection)

  Veteran combat correspondent Robert Sherrod put it this way: “It is true, by and large, that the United States won the Pacific war through its massive industrial power, which the Japanese could never expect to match—and it is easy to say so. But no man who saw Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa would agree that all the American steel was in the guns and bombs. There was a lot, also, in the hearts of the men who stormed the beaches.”

  And each of those soldiers, sailors, airmen, Coast Guardsmen, and Marines who did so—on our behalf—left us a national heritage, a legacy of saltwater, and coral sand, and young blood.

  Semper Fidelis

  Appendix

  Ten Unforgettable Amphibians

  The legendary amphibians of the Pacific War included great commanders with colorful nicknames—“Terrible” Turner, “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, “Handsome Harry” Hill, “Close-In” Conolly—as well as their less-flamboyant counterparts like Roy Geiger, Harry Schmidt, Simon Buckner, and Julian Smith. Yet tens of thousands of “lesser lights” executed these seven storm landings—or defended against them—and rarely received their due credit.

  Here is a sampling of ten of these men: six U.S. Marines, three U.S. Navy, one Imperial Japanese Navy. The sample includes a fighter pilot, a beachmaster, a SeaBee, a battalion surgeon, a rikusentai, a rifleman. Their personal contributions helped make the storm landings so memorable in our history.

  Carl E. “Squeaky” Anderson, Navy Beachmaster. In amphibious operations, the critical “blue-green” seam between the Navy and the landing force exists along the high-water mark of the beach. Navy beachmasters control the boats; shore party units hump the cargo clear of the beach. Here chaos often reigns. Indeed, a vital lesson learned from Tarawa concerned the need for a “fully qualified beachmaster arriving early to take charge of the entire unloading situation.” “Squeaky” Anderson filled that vacuum. (The nickname came from his use of bullhorns on the beach to exert his will.) His commanding presence at Iwo Jima impressed a Royal Navy liaison officer: “On the beach was an extraordinary character, almost as wide as he was tall, delivering his commands in amazingly blasphemous language with a strong Scandinavian accent. He managed to get things done.” Anderson, a native of Jansberg, Sweden, came to the United States in 1909, served in the Navy in World War I, then worked as a master mariner in Alaskan waters. Returning to active duty in 1940, he served in the Aleutians, then joined Adm. Harry Hill’s staff in the Central Pacific. His ability to unload critical cargo over unlikely beaches at Apamama, Eniwetok, Saipan, and Tinian proved invaluable. Iwo Jima presented the greatest challenge. Anderson, then fifty-seven, developed hinged Marston matting, armored bulldozers, and sand sledges in advance to move cargo over the soft-sand beaches. Yet, once ashore, even Anderson had to admit “this is the toughest beach I have ever seen.” When asked by reporters how he had managed to keep supplies flowing in, casualties flowing out, he replied, “I get so much hell from the Admiral I yust pass it on. Then we get things done.” Anderson ended the war as force beachmaster on Hill’s staff.

  Thomas Jack Colley, Marine Combat Intelligence Officer. Storm landings would demand exceptional tactical intelligence. As staff intelligence officer for the 2d Marine Division at Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, Jack Colley pioneered new ground and set tough professional standards. Colley was thirty-four at Tarawa, a Naval Academy graduate with field experience in China, Iceland, and Guadalcanal. Planning the Tarawa assault became his greatest challenge. He and his free-spirited staff integrated information from ULTRA intercepts, aerial and submarine periscope
photographs, interviews with former Gilbertese, and their own judgment to produce an astonishingly accurate intelligence estimate. Indeed, the D-2 situation map of Betio became a collector’s item before the year was out, a model of painstaking analysis and careful artwork. Neither Colley nor anyone else in 1943 had knowledge of the “apogean neap tide”—his field notebook for D-Day at Betio contains the carefully penciled expectation of high tide at 1009 at five feet even, an otherwise accurate forecast. Colley went ashore on D+3 with Julian Smith, both officers having to bail out when Japanese fire from “the Pocket” disabled their LVT. Colley respected the rikusentai. “These people here were Jap marines,” he wrote his parents, “and were highly selected, trained, and dead-eye Dicks with their weapons.” He also bristled at media efforts to blame Tarawa’s casualties on poor intelligence. “Actually,” he wrote, “and you can paste this in your hat, nobody in authority was very much surprised at that Battle—I know I wasn’t.” At Saipan, Colley’s interrogation of his captured Japanese counterpart provided a chilling, early forecast of the extent of civilian resistance to be expected should the Allies invade Japan proper.

  Robert E. Galer, Marine Aviator. Bob Galer’s war against the Japanese ran the gamut from Pearl Harbor to Okinawa. Although he would never forget the outrage of the preemptive Japanese air raid, Galer attained early vengeance. As a twenty-nine-year-old major, he commanded Marine Fighting Squadron 224 during the early, desperate months at Guadalcanal. Flying from Henderson Field, Galer became one of the Corps’ first aces, eventually downing thirteen Japanese planes and receiving the Medal of Honor for “superb airmanship, outstanding skill, and personal bravery.” Bored with Stateside duty—and advised by Washington officials that it was “too dangerous” to reassign him to another combat squadron—Galer worked his way back to the Pacific in the endeavor to improve the ragged state of close air support to landing operations. As an observer at Peleliu and Angaur, Galer saw firsthand both the promise and the problems of integrating air support to the landing forces with naval gunfire and artillery. Sensing the urgent need for better communications, he helped train three air control teams to use the new M-584 field radar and UHF radios. These teams evolved into the Landing Force Air Support Control Units that contributed so significantly to the storm landings of 1945. Galer then hit the road to supervise these teams in combat ashore at Iwo Jima, Luzon, and Okinawa. In the latter campaign, Galer’s teams controlled as many as 375 aircraft on station simultaneously and directed night fighters to thirty-five confirmed kills. One of the few men to experience the tremendous growth of U.S. amphibious power from start to finish, his remark on the beach at Iwo Jima on D-Day is revealing: “Back at Guadalcanal it was ‘can we hold?’ Here it’s ‘when can we get it finished?’”

  James Logan Jones, Amphibious Reconnaissance Marine. No unit better reflected the growth of amphibious virtuosity than the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, Amphibious Reconnaissance Company, commanded throughout the war by James L. Jones. The Marines came close to losing Jones and his men in 1943 when friendly fire nearly sank the transport submarine Nautilus in the Gilberts. The sub and its troop contingent survived, going on to small-unit glory in the wholesale capture of Apamama Atoll. Thereafter, Jones and his men provided outstanding service in a series of pre-D-Day exploits in the Marshalls, Marianas, and Okinawa. Jones had chosen the Marine profession relatively late in life, at twenty-eight; for years he had sold farm tractors in west Africa. His international experience qualified him as an intelligence officer under Gen. Holland Smith’s Amphibious Force, Atlantic Fleet. Smith had been intrigued with amphibious reconnaissance (“we’re fighting blind without this”) since sub-launched Marines first paddled ashore in fleet exercises in the 1930s. Jones formed his unique company, then followed Smith west to the Pacific. Over time, Jones’s men became adept at launching rubber boats at night from subs or high-speed transports, paddling ashore, and securing vital intelligence. Prior to Tinian the unit executed a dangerous reconn of potential landing beaches under the very feet of Japanese sentries. At Okinawa Jones’s well-conditioned scouts reconnoitered the 77th Division’s beaches in the Kerama Retto, helped seize Keise Shima as a fire support base, and stormed Tsugen Jima. In each of these stealthy endeavors Jones enhanced the odds for amphibious success and built a solid operational foundation for the Force Reconn units of the succeeding fifty years.

  Michael F. Keleher, Navy Surgeon, 4th Marine Division. “Irish Mike” Keleher was a newcomer to amphibious assault when he joined the 3d Battalion, 25th Marines, in 1943. Disembarking from a troop transport by cargo net into a boat alongside “required the timing of a flying-trapeze artist,” he admitted, but he soon put this practice to good use during Roi-Namur, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. Keleher marveled that any human could survive the naval bombardment at Namur, “but we soon learned that the Japanese soldier is very tough.” So was “Irish Mike.” During a Japanese night attack on Saipan, Keleher worked desperately to save a Marine whose leg had been nearly severed in the fighting. Holding his flashlight in his teeth, the surgeon used scissors and a tourniquet on the battlefield to complete the amputation and staunch the bleeding. The Marine lived. The next day an artillery round knocked Keleher senseless, but he returned to duty in a few hours. By the Tinian landing, Keleher felt that “we were now well-trained, experienced, and blooded veterans.” Then came Iwo. Keleher landed on D-Day amid absolute hell on earth and began treating casualties in a shell crater. On the third evening the battalion commander, Lt. Col. “Jumping Joe” Chambers, fell with a bullet in his chest. Keleher got to him quickly, applied a pressure bandage, dragged him out of the fire, administered plasma. He had to draw his pistol to convince a reluctant DUKW driver to take the critically wounded Chambers out to the hospital ship. Chambers would live to receive the Medal of Honor, but before being evacuated to the States he wrote “Irish Mike” a personal note: “I cannot leave without thanking you for my life. There’s no question that you saved mine, in the same manner you have saved so many others.”

  Thomas J. Colley, intelligence officer, 2d Marine Division. (Douglas J. Colley)

  Robert E. Galer, fighter ace, air control pioneer. (U.S. Marine Corps)

  James L. Jones, amphibious reconnaissance pioneer. (James L. Jones Jr.)

  Michael F. “Irish Mike” Keleher, battalion surgeon, 3d Battalion, 25th Marines. (Barbara Keleher)

  Larry E. Klatt, Navy SeaBee. The Naval Construction Battalions and the Marines enjoyed a symbiotic relationship throughout the Pacific War. At one point each Marine division included a SeaBee battalion. For twenty-three-year-old Carpenter’s Mate 1/c Larry Klatt, a former architectural draftsman from Denver, this meant the submergence of his 18th SeaBee Battalion into the 2d Marine Division for Tarawa. Klatt and his unit had tasted combat in the Solomons, but Tarawa would provide their defining moment. In that savage melee, the Marines learned that the most valuable vehicle on the beach was a SeaBee bulldozer, equally useful in burying low-lying Japanese bunkers, digging howitzer parapets, or clearing the runway. Klatt, ashore on D+3, received a personal welcome when a sniper’s bullet zipped within an inch of his head. By Saipan, Klatt and crew considered themselves amphibious veterans, but the long hours spent in a bobbing LVT proved unsettling: “Some of those who trained the hardest lay greenest in the bottom of the boat.” Ashore, Klatt survived sniper fire as a stretcher bearer, experienced profound fear when a Japanese 8-inch gunner methodically bracketed the beachhead with high explosive shells, felt compassion for a native Chamorro woman whose newborn baby died in the battle. Klatt’s SeaBees then devised breaching ramps to help Marine LVTs assault Tinian’s steep escarpments. But Klatt’s greatest contribution to the storm landings of 1944–45 lay in his meticulous scale drawings of the Japanese fortifications on Betio at the demand of Chester Nimitz, appalled at the failure of naval shelling. Nimitz’s engineers used Klatt’s blueprints to build exact replicas on Kahoolawe in Hawaii. No gunship could thereafter go west to war without first assaulting “Klatt’
s pillboxes.”

  Lewis J. Michelony Jr., Marine First Sergeant, 2d Marine Division. Prewar Marine first sergeants tended to be grizzled veterans in their forties. “Micky” Michelony reflected the “New Corps,” a young man so physically fit, forceful, and responsible that Maj. William K. Jones, commanding the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, selected him as a top sergeant at the tender age of twenty-two. Michelony suffered no fools—he had been middleweight boxing champion of the Atlantic Fleet—and he took seriously his duties of training and discipline. He saw enough combat in Guadalcanal to fine-tune his reflexes. On D+3 at Tarawa, die-hard Japanese gunners ambushed Michelony’s patrol. Desperate, Michelony dove headfirst into a nearby bunker, tumbling into what he thought was a pool of water. It was instead a foul residue of the bunker’s Japanese defenders, some long dead, others still alive. Michelony spat, swore, scrambled to safety, reeking. He never regained his sense of smell. By Saipan, he figured he had used up his luck. The D-Day landing was “a mess—dead Marines all up and down the beach.” That night his patrol encountered the major Japanese tank attack, caught between two fires as they raced back to their lines. Two weeks later Michelony tried to rescue a patrol that had been ambushed in a draw dominated by three Japanese cave positions. “I did the crazy thing. I hollered ‘this is Micky, your Top Sergeant; if anyone’s alive down there, sound off, otherwise I’m going to flame the whole draw.’” One Marine answered weakly. Michelony crawled down and rescued the survivor, then returned and destroyed each cave position. He had grown up in the Pennsylvania coal mines during the depression. “In a small town, everyone was family. So were my Marines. I loved them like brothers.”