Tarawa.....November 20, 1943

This is in honor of the brave men of the Marines and US Navy that took part in the terrible Battle of Tarawa. We should never forget these heros.

Best Regards

 

Tarawa on the Web
The Assault of the Second Marine Division on Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll, 20-23 November, 1943.

 

Short account of the battle from a Marine veteran. The book; "One Square Mile of Hell: The Battle for Tarawa" by John Wukovits is a great account of the battle.

76 Hours of Hell | The American Legion | Veterans Serving Veterans

 

For those that haven't read it, Alexander's "Utmost Savagery" is the gold standard for books on Tarawa.

 

I don't disagree with your statement on the book "Utmost Savagery" one bit. Alexander's book is probably the best read for the battle analysis as a whole. Also love his work on "Edson's Raiders".

What "One Square Mile of Hell: The Battle for Tarawa" brings to the table a personal side; you get to know several of the Marines and their stories. Some from the living veterans and some from letters of men who gave their life on that small and savage Island. I was really touched and mad when Gene Seng, Jr. and Charles Montague were killed. Life long friends who somehow managed to serve on the same machine gun. Along with MoH winner (posthumously) William J. Bordelon, the three (Bordelon, Seng and Montague) were all graduates of Central Catholic High School, San Antonio, TX.

There are a lot more great stories contained in the book, but I won't spoil it for those who have not read it yet.

Off my soap box now, it is a book worth reading about the battle and it's horrors. I went through quite a range of emotions while reading it. God bless anyone from the 2nd Marine Division who fought on Bloody Tarawa.

 

I agree with what you've written, it does provide that personal side, I've read it and it is a good book. I think if you only read one book on Tarawa it should be Alexander's, if you read a second it should be Robert Sherrod's, "Tarawa: The Story of a Battle". As a third there are quite a few good accounts including, "One Square Mile of Hell". I think if you read the first two you'll be driven to read the rest because it is one of the most incredible battles in history. One scene that will always stick in my mind is the group of Marines stuck on the reef when their Trac was sunk, they've lost their weapons and a P-boat comes by and offers to evacuate them back to the transports. They refuse and ask the boat to return with weapons so they can try and make it to shore and help their fellow Marines. That's the spirit that allowed them to prevail at Tarawa despite the Japanese Commanders boast that "a Million Americans couldnt take the Island in a Hundred Years".
I think a close second has to be the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea, 1950, a simply amazing fight. For it I recommend, "Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950" by Martin Russ, "Chosin:Heroic Ordeal of the Korean War", by Eric Hammel and "Last Stand of Fox Company" by Drury and Clavin. Amazing stuff. Several vignettes that stick in my mind; it's so cold that a squad gathers in a hut and burns it down around them, with them inside, to get warm. The 5th and 7th Marines have consolidated at Hagaru-Ri in preparation for the breakout south, the line Marines don't know what the plans are, the newspapers in the U.S. are writing that they are surrounded and will be wiped out, two riflemen in a foxhole speculating that they'll hold in place till spring, when the 2nd Marine Division will join up and they'll resume the offensive. That's Esprit de Corps!







General Song had devised a plan to attack and destroy the two leading regiments of the 1st Marine Division, the 7th and 5th. The remainder of X Corps could then be annihilated, one by one. General Song sent his plan to Mao for approval. In reply Mao said:
"The American Marine First Division has the highest combat effectiveness in the American armed forces. It seems not enough for our four divisions to surround and annihilate its two regiments. [You] should have one to two more divisions as a reserve force.

 

Across the Reef: Marine Corps Assault on Tarawa:

http://www.marines.mil/news/publications/Documents/Across%20the%20Reef%20-%20The%20Marine%20Assault%20of%20Tarawa%20%20PCN%2019000312000_1.pdf



Joseph Miles Griggs, Jr., H Battery/3/10

Tarawa on the Web

 

Amazing how, all these years after this hash of a battle, the Marine corps can still be quite straitfaced when it comes to describing the lessons of Betio, (pronounced Bey-shee-o).

This article seems to follow the same pattern, quoting 'Time' Magazine as if it was something that has not passed into the dustbin of history....

"Last week, some two or three thousand United States Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of.......the Alamo, Little Big Horn, and Belleau Wood. That name was Tarawa."

In "Goodbye Darkness", Marine William Manchester pulls no punches.....

"That (article) made everyone on Betio stand tall but it deserves second thoughts. The Alamo and Little Big Horn were massacres for the Americans, and the Fifth and Sixth Marines were cut to pieces at Belleau Wood. 'Times' comment may be attributed to a curious principle which seems to guide those who write of titanic battles. The longer the casualty lists- the vaster the investment in blood- the greater the need to justify the slain. The fallen are honoured by hallowing the names of the places where they fell; thus, writers enshrine the memory of the Verduns, the Passchendaeles, the Dunkirks, and the Iwo Jimas, while neglecting decisive struggles in which the loss of life was small......"

"In the Pacific we recieved 'pony' editions-reduced in size, with no ads- of 'Time' and the 'New Yorker. The comparisons of great battles from the past didn't impress most of us; we saw it for what it was: wartime propaganda designed to boost the morale of subscribers, a sophisticated version of the rhapsodies about the Glorious Dead who had given Their All, making the Supreme Sacrifice. Our sympathies were with those who protested the high casualties."

"Looking seaward, I realize that the only way I can grasp what the assault was like for those first three waves of Marines is to get my feet wet. Leaving my camera with the policeman, to photograph me, I trudge out and don't reach landing craft depth until I have gone over a thousand yards. Looking shoreward, seeing the bunkers and pillboxes, I feel anger roaring in my chest, and I think of the men who fell in the surf, sprawled like priests at high mass. Suddenly the most important thing in the world for me is to leave Betio.

At the ferry slip I find Tony Charlwood, the ordnance wizard. He has finished defusing shells and will return to Belfast and the IRA on tomorrow's plane. As we wait for the boat he talks about the battle here and says bluntly, "It was a bloody crime." In his opinion even the coming of the white man was tragic for the islands because the natives adopted the worst of the newcomers' ways. Pointing towards a litter of Australian beer cans and discarded filter tip packs, he says scornfully, "Look at that. The people here have no respect now. And look at THAT." I am already looking at it: a monument to the Marine dead defaced by graffiti. But perhaps the memorial deserves no better, for as we read it together we see that it is clearly self serving. "Tarawa", the plaque reads, "was the testing ground for Marine amphibious techniques and doctrine. It paved the way for the island campaigning that followed and provided answers that saved thousands of American lives along the road to victory in the Pacific." Tony turns away. He mutters, "Thats what the British said about Dieppe."....(end of extract)

Volga Boatman writes....One can only but agree with Manchester, and all the other home front families that complained to Washington about this grossly mis-managed excuse for a victory. At the time, Washington was in a quandary about how to explain the cost of this bird shaped fragment of coral....(Manchester writes....)

"In Washington's new Pentagon building, officers studied the pictures of dead Marines on Tarawa, debating whether to release them to the press. They decided to do it; it was time, they felt, to shock the home front into understanding the red harvest of combat. The published photos touched off an uproar. Nimitz received sacks of mail from greiving relatives - a mother wrote, "You killed my son!" - and editorials demanded a congressional investigation. The men on Tarawa were puzzled. The photographers had been discreet. No dismembered corpses were shown, no faces with chunks missing, no flies crawling on eyeballs; virtually all the pictures were of bodies in Marine uniforms face down on the beach. Except for those who had known the dead, the pictures were quite ordinary to men who had scraped the remains of buddies off bunker walls or who, while digging foxholes, found their entrenching tools caught in the mouths of dead friends who had been buried in the sand by exploding shells."...(end of extract)

VB writes....The justification for the mess of Betio still goes on today. People are taught exactly that which the monument on Betio tells it as. Phrases like "Testing ground", or "Paved the way" proliferate, excusing the manner in which Marine commanders mis-managed this shocking battle, small by European standards, but probably the most concentrated killing-ground of the entire war. Betio is only less than half the size of Manhatten's Central Park. No part of it is more than three hundred yards from the water. A good golfer can drive a ball across it at almost any point. 4,819 Japanese corpses were joined by over 1,500 American bodies on a miserable island ninety miles from the equator. The stench from this most concentrated of battlefields rose out of the tropical heat, permeating men's clothing and hair, lingering for days as a 'taste' in the mouths of the Seabees and other troops who were tasked to clean up the enormous pile of rotting flesh.

Only the Marine corps, and their Washington bosses, seemed to believe their own explainations for this shambolic fiasco.

 

VB: Your post serves no purpose except to inflame. You have cited no sources and have given no references for your opinion.
Please explain : "Testing Ground" and "Paved the way"
Please provide sources for your excerpts and extracts.

 

Jug ol'boy, my source is listed at the very top of the extract...

For the benfit of a fellow rogue, I state again, William Manchester's auto biography, "Goodbye Darkness".

If you think I'm going to call the Battle of Tarawa anything other than the 'shambolic fiasco' that it clearly was, you are mistaken.

Nothing new about inflamatory remarks in the realm of history.

Manchester was an ex-Marine. Not as much combat time than some, but he fought nonetheless, and I value the opinions of a respected journalist and Pacific vet.

Manchester makes it quite clear that there should be very little thats positive to be said about this engagement. I agree wholheartedly. No political correctness for history, tell it like it was.

If my post serves no purpose except to inflame, then it has achieved it's objective. People, generally, SHOULD get angry about the mess of Betio. Contemporaries who lost friends and relatives certainly did. Newspapers and weeklies editorialized and demanded explainations from the Pentagon about the mishandling of this battle. If you don't get angry, then you have learnt nothing from this particular corner of WW2.

Nuff said.

 

I guess they cite references differently in Australia than they do in the rest of the world. You're post is garbage.

Manchester was not at Tarawa and therefore his "First hand account" is inaccurate. His disdain for the battle is more akin to that of an Iowa farm wife viewing the pictures in Life Magazine:

 

What do you want?

Manchester is an american.

 

I think your flag waving is just as bad as anything I've seen here. Take up your complaints with the persons responsible for the Tarawa fiasco.

Don't shoot the messenger.

This forum is not about glorification of warfare, it's avbout history. Sometimes, history ain't all peaches and cream, ol'son. Sometimes, it's dark, and dangerous.

You've obviously read a lot of flag waving nonsence about what actually happened at Betio. Too bad.

Truth hurts, eh?

Just remeber, Jughead, we Aussies fought in the Pacific too.

It's one of the freedoms our servicemen die to protect, so complain away! Just make sure you don't look idiotic when you do, as you do now!

Best regards...

Son of Anzac

 

I've read quite a lot about Betio actually, I had to it was part of being a Marine.
And for the record I am not "Shooting" any messenger, all I am doing is trying to point out that there are other factors that contributed to the high tolls at Betio and they did not include poor leadership or lack of prior planning:

Tarawa (Betio) is a compilation of "firsts" and was a harbinger of things to come. If you compare Tarawa (Betio) to the first 76 hours of any campaign, in Europe, you'll find very similar casualty rates. Compare Tarawa (Betio) to battles in the Pacific after 1943 and Tarawa is not much more than a fly speck.

As I will always say: "Do your research, cite your sources and provide your own opinion (do not regurgitate what others profess as original) "

 

Jug, if the lessons learnt applied to other Pacific battles, the death toll from these contests should have gotten less...not more.

military commanders will always attempt to explain away a failure. and Tarawa was a failure in many aspects.

I cited Manchester simply because he was the one that made no bones about it, told it like it was. I would rather hear history from veterans than from 'eminent' historians who have never heard a shot fired in anger, much less put on a uniform.

I don't call over three thousand casualties a 'victory' by any stretch of the imagination. These days, the three SMiths in command would have been SACKED.

We, in Australia, just lost three dead and seven wounded to a rouge Afghan policeman that we were training. We consider that a defeat.

You should too.

It's not always possible, but our military does not appreciate sending people home in body bags for any reason. In New Guinea, Australian forces noticed that Americans were a little more slapdash when it came to casuaties. American officers in Europe even admitted as much when describing montgomery's so called lack of speed in attempting to close the Falaise Gap. They believed that americans covered more ground because they had NOT been through Passendeale and the Somme, and were far more willing to accept casualties. the Marine Corps doctrine stressed time factors above casualties. At Betio, they threw themselves forward with utter abandon. They justified this by citing the torpedoing of the carrier "Liscome Bay", stateing that every day wasted at Betio made the sinking of that carrier all the more possible. The Liscome Bay cost over 500 deaths, around a third of the fatalities at Betio.

Justifications will always come from career minded officers looking to advance their personal cause at the expense of the people they are entrusted to.

At Betio, the Marines were caufght with their pants down. Heads should have rolled but didn't. That was a bigger crime than the deaths themselves.

I am not unfamiliar with your record. I've even admired your posts. But I'm not going to participate in good ol'boy flag waving. And neither was Manchester.


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I think you need to re-evaluate your interpetation of casualty:

Here is another reference:
[SUP]http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-M-Tarawa/USMC-M-Tarawa-B.html

I would also encourage you to not make personal attacks.
[/SUP]

 

Volga most of what you posted is garbage, you might want to research the topic before you post such strong opinions.

Manchester was a good writer but a rather poor historian and as Jughead pointed out he wasn't at Tarawa, even though while reading the book he made it appear that way.

1.) The decision to assault Tarawa was not made by the Marine Corps it was determined by CINCPAC, at the direction of Admiral King with the concurrence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Nimitz's planners at Pearl Harbor. Betio became a target because the Central Pacific campaigns objective was the seizure of the Marshall's. The US had virtually no intell on the Marshall's and their proximity to the Japanese bastion at Truk made good intell a priority. Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands had an airfield. Seizure of this airfield would allow for aerial reconnaisance and land based air support for the Marshalls Operation.

2.) The Marine Corps was not, as you contend guilty of poor planning. They were given an objective and planned accordingly, using a number of innovative new techniques and minimizing to the greatest extent possible the difficulties of overcoming the Japanese defenses.
2a.) The seaward sides of Betio were even more heavily defended than the lagoon side. The Marine Corps planners opted to assault across the reef because it was the one part of the island that they had a reasonable chance of success.
2b.) The assault on Tarawa was the first use of LVT's (Landing Vehicles Tracked) in the assault role. Prior to Tarawa they had been used stricktly as a logistical vehicle. When trying to come up with a practical way to assault across the reef, 2nd Division planners came up with the idea of using their tracked amphibians as assault vehicles, because they were well aware that there was a good chance there would be insufficient water covering the reef to allow for passage of their Higgins boats.
The 2nd Marine Division rated 100 LVT's. Due to their usage during the Guadalcanal Campaign, most of their vehicles were worn out and there were no replacements. The division set about trying to refurbish their LVT's and managed to come up with 75 serviceable. These they modified with ad hoc armor made out of boiler plate locally made in New Zealand. Still lacking enough vehicles to land all the assault waves, division planners learned that there were 100 new LVT-2's on the docks in San Diego awaiting transport to the south pacific. General Smith, Julian C., commanding general 2nd Marine Division tried desperately to get the additional vehicles. Going to the amphibious commander of the operation General Smith, Holland M. who in turn went to Admiral Turner, the overall commander.
"At the height of the shouting match , Smith stated his own bottom line: "No LVT's, No operation." Turner acquiesed. But someone else, probably Spruance, divided the LVT-2's, fifty for the 2d Marine Division at Tarawa, fifty for the 27th Infantry Division attacking Makin. This in turn rankled Shoup (2dMarDiv Operations Officer) who already knew the Japanese at Makin numbered less than five percent of those defending Tarawa..." Utmost Savagery pg. 60.
2c.) The use of these vehicles was particularly successful. One of the reasons that the battle got the reputation it did was because the Marine Corps, initially, tried to prevent publication, in the open press, of how well the LVT's worked.
"The 2nd Marine Division also contributed to the illusion that Tarawa was an ill-conceived blunder by trying to supress reports of the successful use of LVT's in leading the assault ashore. The idea made sense, Japanese defenders in the Marshalls and the Marianas might still believe their coral reefs protected them from conventional landing boats. But Shibasaki's flash message on D-day reported "more than 100 amphibious tanks" led the American assault, and Imperial General Headquarters quickly shared this intelligence with other island commanders."
"The Marines would have been much better off allowing full media disclosure. Positive publicity about the LVT gamble would have provided a valuable offset to the initial dire reports. Restricted from mentioning LVT's, the correspondants naturally concentrated on the ordeal of the men wading ashore, a vivid experience many of them shared.. Unleavened byany reports of LVT's penetrating the reef, the landing sounded more and more like botched planning and poor intelligence. Not until two weeks after the battle did military journalist Hanson Baldwin (not at Tarawa) break the story about the role of the LVT's....
Utmost Savagery pg.228

more to follow....

 

[video=youtube;NJyaIc-E9Ms]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJyaIc-E9Ms&ob=av1e[/video]


This film, when released to the public greatly effected Marine Corps Enlistment in an adverse way.

http://arts.monash.edu.au/publications/eras/edition-10/grant-review3.pdf

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