Battle of Tarawa

Background

By the autumn of 1943 the Japanese had been driven from the Aleutians and the Solomons campaign was nearly over. The American Joint Chiefs had long held that Japan was best beaten by a series of amphibious assaults across the Central Pacific, and the Gilbert Islands, south-east of the Japanese bases in the Marshalls and Carolines, were the first step. The operation, codenamed Galvanic, aimed to take Tarawa, Makin and Apamama and to open the way to the Marshalls.

The Japanese had seized Tarawa and Makin from the British in the first days of the war. After Carlson's raid on Makin in August 1942 exposed their weakness, they reinforced the Gilberts and turned Betio, the main island of Tarawa Atoll, into a fortress around a new bomber airstrip. Rear Admiral Tomonari Saichiro, an engineer, built the defences; in 1943 Rear Admiral Shibasaki, reputed more fighter than engineer, replaced him. Shibasaki is widely reported to have told his men that a million men (or a million Americans) could not take Tarawa in a hundred years.

Betio was under three miles long, no more than 800 yards across and nowhere more than 10 feet above sea level, ringed by a coral reef. Nimitz, fearing a Japanese fleet sortie under the 'Yogaki' defensive plan, demanded speed: Spruance told his commanders to take the islands 'with lightning speed'. Strategic surprise limited the preliminary bombardment to about three hours on the morning of D-Day, ruled out first seizing neighbouring Bairiki as an artillery base, and Holland Smith held back the 6th Marines as corps reserve. Julian Smith was left with a frontal assault at roughly two to one.

The armies

The 2nd Marine Division, veterans of Guadalcanal rebuilt in New Zealand, carried about 18,000 Marines and sailors to Tarawa; some 55 per cent were combat veterans. Major General Julian Smith commanded, with the forceful Merritt Edson as chief of staff. Colonel David Shoup, the operations officer who planned the landing, took command of the 2nd Marines for the assault. Combat Team 2 (the 2nd Marines with 2/8 attached) would land first, the rest of the 8th Marines in division reserve. Shoup's key idea was to use LVT amphibian tractors, unarmoured supply vehicles, to cross the reef: about 75 serviceable LVT-1s plus 50 new LVT-2s, enough for the first three waves only. Everyone after them would come in Higgins boats (LCVPs) and LCMs, which needed about four feet of water over the reef. Fourteen M4A2 Shermans made their combat debut with the Marines.

The defenders numbered about 4,800, of whom some 2,600 were naval infantry of the 3rd Special Base Force and the Sasebo 7th Special Naval Landing Force, the rest pioneers and construction troops, many of them Korean labourers. They manned coast-defence guns up to four British-made 8-inch Vickers guns, antiboat and field guns, 14 Type 95 light tanks, and dual-purpose 13mm machine guns sited to sweep the beaches, all integrated into nearly 500 pillboxes and bunkers behind log-and-coral seawalls, wire, mines and concrete obstacles.

The battle

D-Day, 20 November. The transports arrived off the atoll after midnight and began debarking at 0320, but were in the wrong anchorage and had to shift, scrambling the transfer of troops into LVTs. The Japanese opened fire with their coast guns before dawn and the battleships replied; the carrier air strike came late, and the bombardment lifted before the troops arrived. H-Hour slipped from 0830 to 0900 as the LVTs struggled against a westerly current: 42 LVT-1s in Wave One, then 24 and 21 LVT-2s, with LCVPs behind them.

The tractors crossed the reef, but the shallow neap tide stopped the boats. Touchdown was 0910 on Red Beach One at the western 'bird's beak' re-entrant, 0917 on Red Three east of the long Burns-Philp pier, and 0922 on Red Two between them. Few LVTs could climb the five-foot seawall; those that stopped were hit by mortars and howitzers. The later waves grounded on the reef and waded 500 to 1,000 yards under fire. On Red One, Major Schoettel's 3/2 was shot to pieces and he signalled at 0959 that the issue was in doubt; Major Mike Ryan gathered stragglers on the western shore. Shoup, wounded, ran the battle from beside the pier. Most of the Shermans were lost in shell holes or to fire; by nightfall two of 14 were running. About 5,000 Marines were ashore, a third of them casualties, holding less than a quarter of a square mile. Smith and Hill reported 'issue remains in doubt'. The expected counterattack never came: the bombardment had cut Shibasaki's wire communications.

D+1, 21 November. Major Hays's 1/8, held in its boats all night, was ordered in on Red Two at 0615 and again met a reef too shallow to cross. Wading 500 yards into crossfire from the Red One/Two strongpoint and the wrecked schooner Niminoa, it lost more than 300 men. On the west, Ryan's composite force, with a working radio and destroyer fire, took the whole of Green Beach from 1120. Smith landed 2/6 on Bairiki at 1655 to cut off the escape route, and that evening Major Jones's 1/6 paddled rubber boats 1,000 yards to Green Beach. Shoup's report closed: 'Casualties: many. Percentage dead: unknown. Combat efficiency: We are winning.'

D+2, 22 November. 1/6 attacked east along the south shore while the 8th Marines, with Sherman support, ground into the strongpoints east of the pier. Lieutenant Bonnyman's engineers seized the top of the great bombproof shelter, driving hundreds of defenders out into Marine fire. Edson, sent ashore the previous evening, now commanded on the island. That night the Japanese counterattacked 1/6 again and again; the last, at 0400 by some 300 men, was broken in hand-to-hand fighting with help from artillery and destroyers in the lagoon.

D+3, 23 November. McLeod's 3/6 passed through Jones's line and reached the eastern tip by 1300, while Shoup reduced the last re-entrant pocket on Red One/Two. Smith and Hill signalled the end of organised resistance at 1305, about 76 hours after the first tractor hit the seawall.

Aftermath

The garrison was almost wiped out: 4,690 dead and 146 prisoners, all but 17 of them Korean labourers. Marine casualties for Tarawa came to about 3,300, nearly 1,000 dead, in 76 hours; Alexander puts the division's losses for the whole Galvanic operation at 3,407. Many bodies were swept out to sea, and the remains of missing Marines are still being recovered and repatriated from Betio. Smaller units cleared the rest of the atoll by 28 November.

The losses shocked the American public. Newspaper headlines, a ten-day delay in releasing casualty lists and the senior officers' own remarks fed the alarm; MacArthur called such frontal attacks 'a tragic and unnecessary massacre', and Holland Smith later declared Tarawa a mistake, a view Nimitz, Spruance, Turner, Hill, Julian Smith and Shoup rejected. Nimitz said it knocked down the front door to the Central Pacific, and the Marshalls were invaded ten weeks later. Norman Hatch's film With the Marines at Tarawa won an Academy Award.

The lessons shaped every later Central Pacific landing: many more and better-armoured LVTs, longer and aimed naval bombardment, waterproof radios and command ships, tank-infantry co-operation, flamethrowers, and underwater demolition teams to survey reefs before an assault. The tide itself remains a debating point, from Frank Knox's 'sudden shift in the wind' to later talk of 'dodging tides'.

Wargaming it

Betio is a gift to the wargamer: a small, flat, bounded table with no room to manoeuvre and no doubt about the objective. The whole battle fits a company-to-battalion game at 1:1 or section level, and individual episodes (Red One and the bird's beak, Hays's wade on D+1, the bombproof shelter, the night counterattacks on 1/6) make tight skirmish scenarios.

The heart of any game is the approach. The tide is the key random variable: give the American player a known number of LVTs and make reef depth a roll, so that boat-borne waves may have to wade 500 to 1,000 yards. LVT losses, the seawall as a barrier to vehicles, and the short bombardment gap that let the Japanese man their guns are all worth modelling. Command friction matters as much as firepower: failed radios, units landing on the wrong beach, the reserve held in boats all night.

For the Japanese, the decisions are when to leave the bunkers. Shibasaki's lost communications prevented a counterattack on the first night, when Julian Smith thought it might have driven the Marines into the sea; a game that lets the defender keep control of his reserves, or keeps Shibasaki alive, tests that 'what if'. The other is American: what if the 6th Marines had been released at once, or Bairiki seized and the bombardment lengthened, as Shoup proposed?

Maps and pictures