Tarawa: The Incredible Story of One of World War II's Bloodiest Battles

by Robert Sherrod

Overview

In the summer of 1943, at the height of World War II, battles were exploding all throughout the Pacific theater. In mid-November of that year, the United States waged a bloody campaign on Betio Island in the Tarawa Atoll, the most heavily fortified Japanese territory in the entire Pacific. They were fighting to wrest control of the island to stage the next big push toward Japan—and one journalist was there to chronicle the horror.

Dive into war correspondent Robert Sherrod’s battlefield account as he goes ashore with the assault troops of the U.S. Marines 2nd Marine Division in Tarawa. Follow the story of the U.S. Army 27th Infantry Division as nearly 35,000 troops take on less than 5,000 Japanese defenders in one of the most savage engagements of the war. By the end of the battle, only seventeen Japanese soldiers were still alive.

This story, a must for any history buff, tells the ins and outs of life alongside the U.S. Marines in this lesser-known battle of World War II. The battle itself carried on for three days, but Sherrod, a dedicated journalist, remained in Tarawa until the very end, and through his writing, shares every detail.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626361836
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	02/22/2013
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	204,146
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

ROBERT SHERROD was a seasoned American journalist and longtime war correspondent for both Time and Life magazine. He reported from overseas during the Vietnam War, and also World War II, when he was travelling with the U.S. Marines. He went on to write two more books about World War II. Sherrod died in 1994 at the age of eighty-five.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE MARINES

LIKE OTHER BASES built early in the war, X had settled down. Hastily cleared out of the jungle when the Japs seemed to be on the verge of cutting southward from Guadalcanal to New Caledonia, thus periling the thin supply line to Australia, X was now on the way to becoming a rear area. Life was crude — nothing like the "country dubs" at Honolulu, Noumea, Kodiak, and such places that had apparently been forever by-passed by the war — but it was not unpleasant.

Now that the base had been built to sizable proportions, the airfields built, the anti-aircraft guns unlimbered, there was not so much of the backbreaking labor that must go into a new base. The soldiers and sailors had enough beer most of the time; once in a while they saw a good movie at one of the open air theatres; they lived in quarters that were comfortable enough, many of them in Pacific huts or Quonset huts modified for hot weather.

Certainly, they wanted to go home, or anywhere. Who wants to sit out the war in a clearing in the jungle, a million miles from nowhere? Many of them counted the days. When the war correspondents finally got ashore and went into Ensign Parsons' office, they asked politely how long he had been on Base X.

"I've been here only seven months," said Mr. Parsons, "but some of the men have been here about eighteen months."

"Eighteen months, hell," said a dungaree-clad quartermaster. "It will be nineteen months day after tomorrow."

We had to wait several days for the arrival of the Marines in the transports. The Officers Club was as pleasant a place as might be found on the edge of a jungle in the South Pacific, and the bar was open two hours each afternoon, serving the best rum Collinses south of the equator. The ice-making machine at the bar was a source of wonderment to the newly arrived officers. It spewed forth in unending succession thin slivers which, when placed in a glass, gave forth such an appearance as to cause one officer to ask, "What am I drinking, bourbon and noodles?" But it was cold.

During the wait at Base X we met the men who would run the Tarawa show: Rear Admiral Harry Hill, the lean, handsome commander of the Southern (Tarawa) Amphibious Force; Major General Julian C. Smith, sensitive, kindly Marylander who commanded the Second Marine Division; and Colonel Merritt A. Edson, chief of staff of the division.

Of these Edson was best-known. With his famed First Raider Battalion, he was generally credited with saving Guadalcanal during the fierce fighting of September 13 and 14, 1942 — an action which won him the Congressional Medal of Honor and the British Distinguished Service Order. No man in the Marine Corps was more highly regarded by the professionals than Edson. A husky, intense blond, he was slightly hunch-shouldered, and his soft voice did not belie his steel-blue killer's eyes. He hated the Japs, as only men who have met them in combat hate them. Whenever, during his hour-long lecture to the correspondents the day before we left Base X, he used the phrases, "killing Japs," or "knocking off Nips," his eyes seemed to light up, and he smiled faintly.

"We cannot count on heavy naval and air bombardment to kill all the Japs on Tarawa, or even a large proportion of them," said Colonel Edson, to the more-than-mild surprise of some of us who had been listening to the claims of some battleship gunnery officers — one claimed there would not even be a land mass for the Marines to land on after the big guns had finished with Tarawa.

"Neither can we count on taking Tarawa, small as it is, in a few hours. You must remember the inevitable slowness of ground action," added Edson. The colonel talked for an hour. He went into the details of the Tarawa operation, pointing out which battalions would land where. He gave us the timing schedules of the naval guns and planes which would shower Tarawa in less than four hours with the most concentrated mass of high explosives in all history — the ships would fire 2,000 tons of shells, ranging from 16-inch battleship shells weighing more than a ton apiece to 5-inch destroyer bullets weighing a little over fifty pounds; the planes would drop 1,500 tons of bombs (actually, this figure was cut down somewhat — we were told after the battle that, not counting the four days' previous bombardment, 900 tons of bombs actually fell on Tarawa in the pre-landing action). The correspondents finally had been notified officially about Tarawa.

"Some of the battalion commanders think we can take it in three hours," smiled Edson, "but I think it may take a little longer. These Nips are surprising people." I asked General Smith about his division. He was very proud of it. "I think they will do well. They are a fine bunch of fighting men. And guess how many are absent without leave? Just sixteen out of seventeen thousand, and only four of them were last-day cases which failed to show up when we left New Zealand. You'll have to look a long way to find a better record than that; you can usually figure on one percent missing the boat when it is about to sail into combat.

"There's one thing about an operation of this kind that most people don't realize," Julian Smith continued, "and that is the vast amount of preparation involved. There are a million things that must be attended to before the division commander can say, 'Ready.' We started planning this Tarawa operation last August — we were told on August first that the Central Pacific had been chosen as the next theatre, and we were well into the plans two weeks later.

"Look at the special training the men had to get — beachhead landings, night fighting, various kinds of new equipment. Then the equipment had to come from many thousands of miles. Some of the ships we are going to use weren't even built when we started preparing. Some of the LST's [landing ships for tanks] we will use won't meet us until we get outside Tarawa. I'm afraid the people back home do not know what careful planning and precise timing are required to fight even one battle in a war."

Before we left Admiral Hull's battleship Merritt Edson spoke up, "One more thing I forgot to tell you. The troops on Tarawa are a special navy landing force — what the newspapers call Jap Marines or Imperial Japanese Marines. That means they are the best Tojo's got."

The correspondents drew their assignment. Four of us were assigned to the transport which would carry the Second Battalion of the Second Regiment of the Second Division: myself; red-headed William Hippie of the Associated Press, a former Honolulu newspaperman; Bundy the artist; and Don Senick, Fox newsreelman who had long since acquired the nickname, "Fearless Fosdick."

Our battalion was scheduled to hit the center of the landing area, with another assault battalion on either side of us. "I see that we get shot at from both sides," observed Hippie, cheerfully. As a matter of fact, all three battalions were to be shot at from both sides, though ours was to take the heaviest casualties of all the battalions that finally landed on Tarawa — about sixty percent.

But that was still days away. Before sailing out of the South Pacific there was one more full-scale dress rehearsal. A small boat took us out to the Navy transport, which I shall call the Blue Fox. The Blue Fox was stacked to the gunwales with Marines. They filled the holds, they poured over onto the decks. They were restless, after more than two weeks already aboard, but never during the voyage to Tarawa did I hear one complaint.

Hippie and I were assigned to a small bunkroom which already contained five junior officers, first and second lieutenants and a Marine Gunner (warrant officer). It was not only hot; it was steaming. How we slept in that torrid bunkroom I do not know, but we actually managed to sleep about fourteen hours out of each twenty-four. In the daytime there were two portholes that could be opened, but at night these had to be closed, and there was a blackout screen with an airscoop attached for only one of these portholes. That let in a little air, but even the ocean night air in the South Pacific seemed like so much steam. We lay in bed and sweated without pause all night long. Then, in the daytime, we swallowed many salt tablets to restore the salt we had lost through perspiration during the night.

I matched with Hippie to see which of us would hit the beach in the battalion commander's landing boat, which of us in the battalion executive officer's boat. He drew the c.o.'s boat, which was to go in shortly after the first wave. My boat would reach shore with the fifth wave, some minutes after the first wave.

On the morning of the rehearsal, which would be held on an island before we proceeded to Tarawa, we were awakened at 0230. Breakfast in the broiling officer's wardroom was pancakey eggs and coffee. Some time before dawn the boats of the first wave were hoisted over the side, filled with the Marines who were to have the toughest job in the military book: landing on an enemy beach in the face of hostile fire.

The boat which I was to ride into the beach for this rehearsal — and, later, into Tarawa — drew alongside shortly after five o'clock. We climbed over the side of the transport and scampered down the rope cargo net, being careful to grasp the Tactical ropes of the net — lest the man just above step on your fingers. There were about thirty-two of us in the Higgins boat, mostly staff personnel of the battalion. Senior officer in the boat was Major Howard Rice of Detroit, a short, pleasant Regular Marine who worried about his falling hair. One of the favorites of the battalion who was in our boat was young Dr. M. M. Green of Reno, a Navy doctor whose escapades in New Zealand had fastened on him the nickname: "Greeno the Mareeno."

Some were medical corpsmen ("pelicans"), but most of the enlisted men in the boat were communications personnel: operators of portable radios, wiremen, and runners — many an old Marine still puts absolute faith in these fearless message carriers who operate between the front lines when radios go haywire and the enemy cuts the telephone lines. For this rehearsal they were a rollicking crew until most of them fell asleep during the two hours of circling and circling, waiting for the waves of boats to form. One poor fellow was seasick over the side of the boat. His pals showed him no mercy.

"How would you like a nice piece of fat pork?" one of them chirped, and the seasick Marine lost the rest of his breakfast. "Take a drink of warm salt water," advised another.

The Marines also liked to talk about their life in New Zealand. One Marine came in for a lot of ribbing because from the final maneuver on a desolate New Zealand beach he had returned to the transport and asked the corpsmen for a venereal prophylactic, much to the envy of his fellows who asked him what on earth he had been doing. Seems that his outpost far up "front" had been crossed by some friendly Maori girls.

The Marines apparently had been heroes to the New Zealanders, especially to the New Zealand girls. Several hundred Second Division men — some said two hundred, some said a thousand — had married New Zealand girls. And there had been plenty of women to go around, a rare state of affairs in this womanless war. "Hey, Jones," shouted one Marine who stood near the stern of the boat, "tell 'em about that old dame about thirty-six or thirty-seven you had out in Wellington that sneezed and her teeth fell in her beer."

Major Rice ordered everybody to duck low in the boat for the last couple of hundred yards. The boat driver put on full steam and after a few minutes we heard the boat crunch on the sand; the ramp in the bow was lowered and we dashed the remaining twenty-five yards through knee-deep water. We had made our last practice landing. The troops deployed into the jungle, some as deep as eight hundred yards — the maximum width of Tarawa. Overhead some planes, but not nearly as many as we would actually have on Tarawa, made practice dives and strafing runs. Behind us came other waves of men who rushed ashore when the white wakes of their boats had melted into the land.

Ashore I met the man who commanded the combat team, the three assault battalions. His headquarters had been set up just as they would be set up on Tarawa, in the same relative spot, using the same telephones and radio and staff who would perform the same functions under enemy fire. Colonel David Shoup — he had been promoted from lieutenant colonel that day — had assumed command only yesterday, relieving an ailing regimental commander almost on the eve of battle.

He was an interesting character, this Colonel Shoup. A squat, red-faced man with a bull neck, a hard-boiled, profane shouter of orders, he would carry the biggest burden on Tarawa. On his judgment and his ability would depend the lives of several thousand men and, ultimately perhaps, whether or not we won the battle.

David M. Shoup had been born on a farm near Battleground, Indiana, thirty-nine years ago. He had won a scholarship at De Pauw University, where he was an A student. I learned all this later. As a matter of fact, Colonel Shoup's grammar, which had not the slightest thing to do with his winning or losing the battle, was more like that of a Marine sergeant who had never passed the eighth grade. He had joined the Marines as a second lieutenant soon after he finished college in 1926. He had served in the usual Navy yards and aboard the battleship Maryland, and in Shanghai, Pekin, and Tientsin. Early in the war he had commanded a battalion in Iceland, and lately he had been Operations Officer of the Second Division. He was the tough Marine officer in the best tradition, and he had the greatest faith in the Marines' ability to succeed in anything they undertook.

Finally the transport was on its way to Tarawa, surrounded by many other transports and by scores of warships: battleships, aircraft carriers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, countless destroyers, mine sweepers, and the various auxiliary craft necessary for landing operations. Whether this naval might induced a general feeling of security, or whether the fifty-five percent of the Marines who were already veterans bred confidence in the others, I do not know. Maybe the heat simply made them lethargic. But there was no more excitement aboard the Blue Fox than if so many men were on their way to the factory on a Tuesday morning.

Several men told me that they had a lot of confidence in the Navy. These men were part of a regiment that had been on Tulagi and Guadalcanal from the start, and their confidence had been shaken when the Navy pulled out after it had lost four cruisers, leaving the Marines without much food and without much visible hope of staying alive. The military necessity of pulling the Navy out of Guadalcanal did not even occur to the average Marine, whose philosophy is based on the simple premise that "when the other fellow is in trouble you don't go off and leave him." "But now," said Pfc. Herman Lewis, who quit his Johnstown newspaper job to enlist in the Marines, "we look at all this Navy, and it gives us confidence. When we looked out at the stretch of water between Tulagi and Guadalcanal and didn't see anything, we didn't feel so good." This renewed confidence in the Navy was shared by enlisted men and officers alike. One of the higher ranking officers on board told me, "The Navy is really going to take some chances this time, even if they lose some ships."

I spent a lot of time studying the Marines. They looked like any group of ordinary, healthy young Americans. The range of their background was as broad as America: farmers, truck drivers, college students, runaway kids, rich men's sons, orphans, lawyers, ex-soldiers. One day Lieutenant William B. Sommerville, the battalion supply officer, himself a Baltimore lawyer, was showing me around the ship. On deck we passed a Marine corporal with a bandaged thumb. Sommerville stopped and asked what happened.

"I let my air hose get away from me," grinned the corporal. We walked on. "That guy," said Sommerville, "was a county judge in Texas when he enlisted."

All these Marines were volunteers. Only now, several months after voluntary enlistments had been stopped — to the unconcealed disgust of old-line Marine sergeants who had from time immemorial been able to fall back on the final, scathing word, "Nobody asked you to be a Marine, bub" — were the first Marine draftees being sent overseas as replacements.

The Marines ate the same emergency rations that soldiers ate in battle. They used the same weapons. They came from the same places. They went to the same schools. What, then, had gained the Marines a reputation as fighting men far excelling any attributed to the average young U. S. citizen in a soldier's uniform?

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

FOREWORD,
PRELUDE TO BATTLE,
THE MARINES,
THE FIRST DAY,
THE SECOND DAY,
THE THIRD DAY,
VIEW OF THE CARNAGE,
AFTERTHOUGHTS,
TARAWA'S CASUALTIES,