Remembering The Battle of Tarawa. On November 20, 1943 the famed 2nd Marine Division attacked with support from the US Navy. It was 76 hours of pure hell. I hope all involved rest in peace. Tarawa on the Web Awarded The Medal Of Honor
One of my favorite depictions of the battle was by then Marine Sgt. Tom Lovell. He captures it very well. You used to see copies of this painting in just about every bar outside Camp LeJeune and Camp Pendleton.
Here's a photo I scanned in at the National Archives last month: View attachment 17730 It's Tarawa, but the exact date wasn't listed, only "Filed 28 March, 1944."
Good find. This is a famous picture, the LVT-1 in the picture #49, is the "My Deloris", the first Amtrac to hit the beach that morning. She was recovered, shipped back to the US, and went on a War Bond tour. She spent years at the LVT museum on Camp Pendleton (just an open parking lot with a bunch of different model LVT's). I went there a bunch as a kid and climbed around on them, and then years later as a Marine went ovet and checked them out. I never realized then what an important historic artifact I was seeing. Then, years later I had read she was scrapped because of deterioration from the elements. The amtrackers built their own museum and restored a number of the vehicles, I later read that the LVT-1 "Alligator" at the museum was in fact, the "My Deloris", she had survived again. The amtrac in the foreground is the early version of the LVT-2 "Water Buffalo". This is a different view of "My Deloris" same location different angle. She was even a motion picture star, appearing during the Tarawa landing scene, in John Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima. All the rest of the LVT's in the scene are LVT-3 models that the Marine Corps didn't use until around the time of Okinawa and were the primary type used post war and in Korea.
Thanks for the reminder. I read a book about Tarawa (Iforget the name and am too lazy to look for it). It still gives me chills.
There are so many really famous evocative drawings of our victories and losses. They (pictures/art) are a part of our collective. ..Why can't I reproduce some? Our fathers fought in/for them. ... I want some of that stuff on my wall.
A random one; thanks for the history lesson! This photo was scanned out of Record Group 80-G at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. 80-G is purely photos, roughly a hundred to a box. Some boxes will be nothing but "heads" (official shots of officers), but most are full of image after image of interesting photos collected by the Navy. There may be nearly a full box of one event (I have roughly 100 images I scanned in of CVL-23 Princeton's loss) and yet just this one solitary Tarawa image in another box (I'm sure there's a couple boxes full of Tarawa photos - since these were turned over by different commands there tends to be repeats and there's no great order to what is where). It can be a lot of fun, but also "frustrating" when you go looking for one photo and stumble across an entire box you want to scan.
One of the finest men I ever knew, COL Tyson Wilson, USMCR, as a young officer served in the 8th Marines at Tarawa; not to mention Guadalcanal, Saipan and Okinawa, too. He was a professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute for some 33 years. I was one of those fortunate to have him as a faculty advisor during my cadetship. Universally beloved at the Institute, Ty-Ty Wilson was an honorary member of my class, 1974, and always wore his class ring. COL Tyson Wilson, USMCR, passed away last year, just a few days after Christmas.
A film "Marines in Tarawa" was released during that time. We are lucky for so much data left to us by those reporters. Us has done a very good job in Tarawa. And Japs has as well.
I hope they're not all resting in peace quite yet, but when they get to that point I hope they do. ;-) Neat pictures, neat story. Has to be pretty shortly after the battle as clearly things are still a little . . . shall we say messy? But not too soon as that's an awful lot of iron remarkably close to the shore. Thank you all.