The Conquering Tide (63 page)

D-Day plus one dawned at low tide, and the retreating sea revealed a macabre scene. Dead marines were strewn along the beach or floating on the water. The blackened, gnarled shapes of more than fifty wrecked amtracs and Higgins boats were half awash in the shallows or grounded on the coral flats. A sweet stench of decaying flesh wafted over the island; it would worsen steadily as the sun rose. Marines foraged through the packs and pockets of their dead friends for ammunition, canteens, cigarettes, and rations.

The three assault battalions, pinned down on their three narrow beachheads, shared a sense of relief and even surprise at having survived the night. The dreaded enemy bayonet charge had never materialized. But their circumstances remained perilous. They were scattered in small, largely isolated
units. Unless they took more territory, they were likely to be driven back into the sea. It was impossible to obtain an accurate tally of their casualties, but it seemed likely that more than a third of the troops who landed on D-Day had been killed or wounded. Losses were proportionally higher among officers and noncommissioned officers. “We're in a mighty tight spot,” said Colonel Shoup. “We've got to have more men.”
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The marines needed more of everything, in fact—more men, more ammunition, more armored vehicles, more artillery. To fight in the heat they would need more freshwater and salt tablets. The doctors and corpsmen had worked all night to treat the wounded and evacuate them to the fleet, but first aid supplies of every category were running low. Marshall Ralph Doak, a chief pharmacist's mate, worked to evacuate wounded marines to an LST that had been converted into a temporary hospital ship. Near the beach, he recalled, the surf was tinted visibly red.
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General Julian Smith, from his headquarters on the
Maryland
, had notified Shoup that he intended to land the diversion reserve, the first and third battalions of the 8th Marines, at 6:00 a.m. The reserves had loaded into Higgins boats well before dawn, and many had been circling in the lagoon for half the night. As the first waves churned in toward Beach Red 2, Japanese machine guns and light artillery opened up, and it was soon evident that the landing would be no less bloody than those of the previous day. The Japanese had apparently set up additional weapons in their strong pocket at the junction of Red 1 and 2. The LCVPs hung up on the reef, and marines waded into enemy fire in waist-deep water. Men took refuge behind the concrete obstacles placed offshore by the Japanese, or behind disabled landing craft. From there, however, it was a long dash across open beach. “The carnage was terrible!” Rogal wrote. “The water to my front was soon dotted with the floating bodies of the dead and wounded. Most of [that battalion] had been eliminated—more than 300 casualties.”
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Japanese soldiers had apparently swum out to a small wrecked freighter on the reef. From that position, their rifles and machine guns could reach marines disembarking from grounded landing craft 400 yards offshore. Carrier dive-bombers attempted to destroy the vessel, but missed repeatedly.
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“From the beachhead it was a sickening sight,” Bob Sherrod recorded. “Even before they climbed out of their Higgins boats, the reserves were under machine-gun fire. Many were cut down as they waded in, others
drowned. Men screamed and moaned. Of twenty-four in one boat only three reached shore.”
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The awful scene on the beach helped to spur the marines already on the island to attack with renewed energy. The morning's plan was simple. Shoup intended to cut the island in two by driving directly south, across the airfield, to the ocean shore. Major Henry P. Crowe's forces at Red 3 were to overrun the network of formidable defenses that stood between him and the airfield. Major Michael P. Ryan, who held a small salient at the northwestern point of the island, was to attack south, along Beach Green, and attempt to secure it as a bridgehead for further troop landings.

Marines brought their 75mm pack howitzers up the beach and began pummeling enemy firing positions farther inland; naval fire support was called down on the enemy's strong points; Hellcats flew low overhead and strafed; dive-bombers hit assigned targets based on radioed coordinates. Cumulatively, this onslaught began to break down the enemy's defenses, but the Japanese were resilient. The enemy's pillboxes could be cleaned out only by direct infantry assault.

It was the proudest and the most terrible day in the history of the Marine Corps. Men fought with extraordinary courage, returning to the line of fire even after having been wounded several times. “They'd fight with broken arms, gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds,” recalled Vern Garrett, a
Yorktown
pharmacist's mate. “I'd patch them up and tell them to go back to the ship and they'd say, ‘I'm all right,' and they would just keep on fighting.”
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Lieutenant William D. Hawkins, a Texan, was one of those rare men who seemed entirely indifferent to danger. He dashed across exposed firing fields with wild-eyed, manic courage; he personally attacked one enemy pillbox or machine-gun nest after another, throwing grenades into firing ports; he refused to be evacuated even after suffering serious shrapnel wounds. Hawkins commandeered an amtrac, loaded the remains of his platoon into it, and charged into concentrated machine-gun fire. A witness told Sherrod, “I'll never forget the picture of him standing on that amtrac, riding around with a million bullets a minute whistling by his ears, just shooting Japs. I've never seen such a man in my life.”
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Shortly after noon a bullet caught him in the shoulder and severed an artery. He died in minutes. Later, Betio's captured airfield would be named Hawkins Field, and the lieutenant's mother would accept a posthumous Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt.

Not all men were equally courageous. Some quailed and stuck fast in their foxholes and had to be prodded into action. Finding a corporal hiding under a pile of rubble, Shoup smacked the man's legs until he came out. He asked the corporal to tell him his mother's first name. “Well,” said Shoup, “do you think she'd be proud of you, curled up in a hole like that, no damn use to anybody?” The corporal admitted that she would not be proud, but said that the rest of his squad was dead and he had no orders. Shoup pointed to several marines crouched below the seawall and said, “Pick out a man, then another and another. Just say, ‘Follow me.' When you've got a squad, report to me.”
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The corporal did it, and took his new squad into battle. Shoup never learned what became of him.

Fear was instinctive and omnipresent. Even Shoup, who earned a Medal of Honor for his performance at Tarawa, struggled to keep his nerves under control. He was not the Hollywood archetype of a battlefield commander, said Frank Plant, who was by his side throughout the battle—“not the typical hero type or even the typical Marine officer; he was rotund and physically rather clumsy. I remember thinking at times when he had to get somewhere by crawling that that was pretty tough on an old fellow; actually he was only in his late 30s.” The colonel occasionally revealed signs of “fear which approached despair.”
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Sherrod observed that Shoup's hands shook as he held a field telephone. His voice grew hoarse from shouting over the din of battle. “God!” he exclaimed to a group of officers at the command post. “How can a man think with all this noise going on?”
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When a young major complained that his men would not follow him to the airstrip, Shoup reduced the problem to a simple formula: “You've got to say, ‘Who'll follow me?' And if only ten follow you, that's the best you can do, but it's better than nothing.”
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American carrier planes operated above the island from dawn to dusk, and Plant continued to call down airstrikes on enemy targets. Battalion commanders radioed their requests to Shoup, using keyed block numbers on a map, and Shoup relayed them to Plant. “Air liaison officer!” the colonel might say; “Tell them to drop some bombs on the southwest edge of 229 and the southeast edge of 231. There's some Japs in there giving us hell.”
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Plant would radio the request, and about ten minutes later the dive-bombers would hurtle down from overhead and drop 1,000-pounders on or near the targets.

All agreed that there was room for improvement in ground-air coordination. At times it seemed that there were too many planes over Betio. When
a long file of Hellcats strafed enemy positions, their propellers kicked up sand and dust and obscured visibility. Plant asked that the attacks “be spaced more apart to allow the air to clear in between attacking planes.”
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There were no midair collisions, but several near misses. “We thought we were pretty doggone good with our bombs and bullets,” said Alex Vraciu, veteran of the Guadalcanal campaign, “but it didn't turn out that way.”
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Bombs that struck near fortified positions did little or no damage: only a direct hit had any real chance of killing the men inside. In most cases, said another pilot, “you couldn't really see what you were shooting at or bombing.”
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Naval gunfire or “call-fire” proved especially valuable against Japanese firing positions and pillboxes above Beach Green, on the western side of the island. A gunfire spotter made radio contact with the fleet and called 5-inch fire down on the enemy's strong points. The shelling came as close as fifty yards to the forward American lines. Immediately after the ships ceased fire, tanks and infantrymen attacked. In many cases, the naval shellfire provided the margin of victory; in others, it was credited with reducing marine casualties. By noon, Major Ryan's forces had taken control of the entire western end of the island, to a depth of 200 yards above Green. Reinforcements could now be landed without opposition. General Smith, receiving the news by semaphore signal, ordered the first battalion of the 6th Marines ashore. They would land before dark, take cover in foxholes for the night, then move through Ryan's forces and roll up the southern shore at daybreak. Additional reserves were put ashore on Bairiki, the adjoining island to the east, in order to prevent Japanese troops from fleeing up the atoll.

From Red 2, Lieutenant Wayne Sanford led F Company across heavily contested ground to the southern side of the airstrip. Machine gunners and riflemen covered one another in turn. The men tumbled into an antitank ditch some yards back from the southern beach. The advance completed Shoup's goal of cutting the island in half, but there were many enemy soldiers remaining in the now-enlarged interior of the American lines, and much more hard fighting was needed to finish them off. Snipers fired constantly—from pillboxes, from trenches, and from the tops of the few palm trees that still had fronds to conceal a man. Ammunition resupply was a constant worry, and ammunition carriers dashed back through heavy fire to carry the belts from the north to the south side of the island.

A strong pocket remained in the area just inland of the juncture of Red 1 and 2. Here the Japanese had set up additional machine guns on the first
night of the battle, and commanded a sweeping field of fire over both landing beaches. The pocket would not be fully reduced until the third day of the fight.

Robert McPherson, circling over the island in his floatplane as he had all day on November 20, provided invaluable information about the progress of the battle. Lieutenant Plant communicated directly with him by radio and relayed updates to Shoup, who was plainly relieved to have those firsthand accounts from a bird's-eye perspective.
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As on the previous day, McPherson occasionally found occasion to strafe Japanese positions or drop grenades from the cockpit.

Fortifications behind Red 3 were among the most stubborn on the island. Again and again, pillboxes that had been cleaned out with grenades or flamethrowers became a renewed threat. They were divided into compartments by strong interior walls, so a grenade thrown into a firing port might kill just one or two men, leaving others unharmed. Reinforcements entered through tunnels or covered trenches. Major Crowe wondered aloud, “Do they have a tunnel to Tokyo or something?”
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Marines entered some of these subterranean spaces and fought their enemies with bayonets and knives. Tanks advanced and fired into slots at point-blank range. Bulldozers pushed coral and sand up against the firing ports, covering them and smothering the occupants.

By early afternoon on the second day, November 21, it was evident that the Americans would prevail. It was not yet clear how long it would take to secure the island, or how many more lives would be lost in the effort. High tide was at 12:18 p.m., and for several midday hours the navigability of the lagoon was much improved. Higgins boats and tank lighters brought a steady flood of supplies, ammunition, tanks, half-tracks, and heavy construction equipment to the pier. Wounded men on stretchers were carried back to the fleet, where they would be transferred to hospital ships. The sight of a jeep hauling a 37mm gun up the pier seemed significant to Bob Sherrod, who noted, “If a sign of certain victory were needed, this is it. The jeeps have arrived.”
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Japanese snipers remained active everywhere on the island. The sound of bullets whizzing past their ears became so familiar that many marines ignored it. Men made a point of walking upright in studied nonchalance. “Walking along the shore with bullets all around should have been terrifying,” one lieutenant later remarked, “but after a while you figured there
was nothing you could do about it, and you just quit worrying.”
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Refusing to acknowledge the Japanese snipers, whose fire was usually inaccurate at longer ranges, offered a way to broadcast one's disdain for the enemy. “Shoot me down, you son of a bitch,” barked a private, as he ambled down Beach Red 2 and a bullet cut through the air nearby.
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Another marine was shot in the hand and lost part of his thumb; he “just laughed and kept going.”
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A lieutenant was “nicked in the rear” as he stood talking at Shoup's headquarters. “I'll be damned,” he remarked. “I stay out front four hours, then I come back to the command post and get shot.”
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