Images of long-ago Tarawa continue to haunt our consciousness: the bodies of U.S. Marines floating in the lagoon; tracked landing vehicles (LVTs) impaled on the seawall; dead Japanese defenders scattered around their pillboxes; death and destruction everywhere. Memories of such desolation caused the late General David M. Shoup, the only Medal of Honor recipient to survive the battle, to ask, “Why did two nations spend so much for so little?” But Shoup himself became a beneficiary of the costly lessons learned at Tarawa. So are even the newest members of the sea services today.
In the 50 years since the controversial assault, some historians have dismissed the battle as an ill-advised blunder; others have told the story in nationalistic terms, a triumph of American heroism over Japanese fanaticism. Neither approach is valid. Given the perceived realities of the Pacific War in autumn 1943, the campaign for the Gilbert Islands was a prudent gamble that yielded enormous benefits at painful but acceptable costs. And both antagonists had their share of heroes in the bloody fight for Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll.
This engagement’s place in naval history rates more significance than just another hard-fought battle on an obscure, equatorial island in eastern Micronesia. From the perspective of a half-century, the seizure of Tarawa represents an enduring landmark—how it validated amphibious doctrine, conduct of joint operations within a naval campaign, and development of innovative tactics and techniques. The 50th anniversary of the battle provides a good opportunity to review what happened there, what it cost, and what it all meant.
First, we must dispel some myths. Tarawa was neither the first opposed amphibious landing by U.S. naval forces in the Pacific nor the first encounter between U.S. Marines and the Rikusentai, the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces. Those distinctions belong to Tulagi and Gavutu in the Solomons, battles that took place the previous year.
Yet Tarawa is unique for three reasons of its own. The first concerns geography. The shift of operational focus to the Central Pacific heralded a different kind of naval warfare. No longer would U.S. forces have the advantage of multiple landing sites along relatively undefended beaches of large islands, as in the Southwest Pacific. The Gilberts in particular featured small coral atolls separated by huge expanses of open ocean, characteristics favorable to a defender willing to fortify those islets suitable for air- fields. The absence of advanced staging bases and nearby airfields for land-based air support led the U.S. Navy to accelerate experimentation with new operational concepts: fast carrier strike forces and large, self-sustaining, amphibious task forces, accompanied by follow-on garrison and construction units. Both concepts demanded huge increases in numbers and types of ships, as well as seaborne logistical support units. Further, the scarcity of suitable wharfs or accessible channels through fringing reefs in the Gilberts greatly lengthened the unloading process, making the amphibious task force and its escorts more vulnerable to enemy interdiction. Strategic surprise and speed of execution became urgent imperatives.
Tarawa’s second unique feature was the intensification of violence. The Allied landing in Salerno earlier in the fall had produced more casualties, but Tarawa’s losses were compressed in time and space. Nearly 6,000 Japanese and Americans died in three days within an area smaller than New York City’s Central Park. The landing force also suffered an abnormally high ratio of killed to wounded — one Marine died for every three shot. Graphic news accounts of Tarawa, deliberately released by the Roosevelt administration, horrified and fascinated a generation of Americans on the home front.
The third feature unique to Tarawa was less obvious initially, but it has proved to be the battle’s defining characteristic: it was the first, full-scale, trial by fire of the new U.S. amphibious doctrine. Proponents and critics in all services were still challenging or defending its feasibility. Fleet Training Publication 167, Doctrine for Landing Operations, U.S. Navy, was barely five years old when the 2d Marine Division crossed the line of departure at Betio. Indeed, Change #3 to the publication, redefining responsibilities for planning naval gunfire support, was fresh off the press when the Fifth Fleet got underway for Operation Galvanic, the campaign to seize Tarawa, Makin, and Apamama.
The U.S. offensive in the Gilberts was a product of operational constraints and imperfect planning assumptions. Just about everything involved in Operation Galvanic represented a compromise—“the art of the possible.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff assigned Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief Pacific, limited resources and a starkly brief time frame to prove the validity of the Central Pacific drive as a strategic alternative to General Douglas Mac Arthur’s Southwest Pacific route to Tokyo. The many airfields and fleet anchorages of the Marshall Islands were attractive early objectives in such a drive. Nimitz, however, knew the Marshalls were simply too strongly defended and located too far beyond sustained bomber range for his newly cobbled, widely scattered, and largely untested Central Pacific Force to undertake in 1943. Nimitz convinced the Chiefs that advance seizure of the closer, smaller Gilberts would be an essential preliminary move, valuable as a springboard for the Marshalls, a combat shakedown for his new task organization, and a potential early success to help justify opening the new front. The Chiefs agreed, but under such terms that Fifth Fleet planners, throughout Galvanic, could hear the clock ticking away for the Marshalls. Speed would thus be of the essence, for both political and operational reasons. So would caution in the face of potential Japanese countermoves. Memories of the Savo Island disaster the previous year still cast a shadow over campaign planning in the Pacific.
The U.S. forces did a good job collecting intelligence about Japanese action in and near the Gilberts, but assessment of this data was skewed by underestimating the fighting skills of the Rikusentai and overestimating the capability of Japanese air and surface units to counterattack at such long ranges. Regarding the former, the 2d Marine Division intelligence report relegated the Rikusentai to a single sentence: “Naval units of this type are usually more highly trained and have a greater tenacity and fighting spirit than the average Japanese Army unit.” This proved to be a significant understatement. The U.S. Marines who landed on Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo in August 1942 had their hands full seizing the islands from a 350-man detachment of the 3d Kure Special Naval Landing Force. The Japanese naval defenders displayed exceptional qualities of discipline, marksmanship, small- unit leadership, proficiency with heavy weapons, and creative camouflage. There would be several thousand Rikusentai defending the Gilberts, mainly on Betio Island.
The U.S. preoccupation with the Japanese battle fleet was an understandable but expensive concern. As recalled by Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill, commanding the amphibious task force for Tarawa, “at least 40 rounds of antipersonnel projectiles per gun had to be left in reserve in case of a fleet action. This reduced our capacity for shore bombardment projectiles by about 37%.”
Similarly, the perceived imperative for lightning speed in executing the amphibious assault placed an unrealistic premium on rapid unloading and withdrawal of transports. Admiral Hill wrote Vice Admiral Raymond A. Spruance in advance to reassure the fleet commander that “I fully hope we may get the transports completely out of the area in approximately 24 hours.” It was an unrealistic goal. Indiscriminate general unloading of Hill’s transports commenced early on D-Day and produced chaos. Hundreds of boats bearing combat cargo of all descriptions soon filled the lagoon. There was no established beachhead, only the tiny, fireswept head of the pier at the reefs edge. Shoup, at the time a colonel commanding forces ashore the first 36 hours, found it nearly impossible to obtain urgent resupplies of ammunition, water, plasma, stretchers, radios, or flamethrowers. Soon, boats to evacuate all the wounded, or shift forces between Betio and Bairiki Islands, had run out. In fact, this debacle led to one of the first doctrinal modifications to result from Galvanic. After Tarawa, transport groups would commence general unloading only at the call of the landing force commander, based on his assessment of the tactical situation ashore.
The U.S. commanders made three planning assumptions about Tarawa that proved particularly grievous to the assault. They assumed (although many disagreed) that there would be sufficient water over Betio’s reef at a rising neap tide on D-Day to permit passage of Higgins boats (LCVPs), preserving the momentum of the assault. Many assumed that preliminary bombardment by naval guns and carrier aircraft would “obliterate” the small island. And they also assumed that their tactical communications were adequate for the mission.
Admiral Hill’s counterpart was Major General Julian C. Smith, who commanded the 2d Marine Division. The two heard many different estimates about tidal ranges expected on D-Day. Frank Holland, a major in the reserve forces of New Zealand, had spent 15 years before the Japanese invasion teaching school and running an interisland schooner in Tarawa Atoll. He flatly predicted a prolonged neap tide during the landing. Hill dismissed him curtly. Smith, a long-time rail hunter in the marshes adjoining the Chesapeake Bay, had learned to listen to local people about tidal conditions. He quietly advised his Marines to heed Holland’s warning. Events on D-Day quickly proved the New Zealander’s dire predictions were right on target.
Overconfidence in preliminary bombardment was a more forgivable sin at that stage of the war. Betio Island would receive the most intensive naval bombardment in history on the morning of D-Day—nearly 3,000 tons of high explosives. Nothing, many planners believed, could survive such a pounding. One veteran of the Solomons campaign who warned against over-reliance on “neutralization” fire was Navy Captain Herbert B. Knowles, who had observed a similar, if smaller, bombing and shelling of Gavutu Island. “From daylight to noon this little island was subjected to repeated bombing attacks and bombardment by cruisers and destroyers,” he recalled, “The results had been most disappointing.” Few planners listened to Knowles’s concerns.
The amphibious task force flagship for Admiral Hill and General Smith at Tarawa was the old battleship USS Maryland (BB-46), a restored survivor of Pearl Harbor. Electronics technicians swarmed over her flying bridge in port to install the hundreds of tactical communications nets needed for the operation. Time ran out. The flagship sailed with half the work force still on board, still making tests and modifications. Their work was in vain. The first salvos of the ship’s 16-inch guns on D-Day knocked out most circuits for hours. Hill could not contact the carrier pilots. Smith could not speak to his principal subordinates leading the assault ashore. (Ironically, the first dedicated amphibious force flagship, the USS Appalachian (AGC-1) entered Pacific waters while Operation Galvanic was still underway; she would take part in the Marshalls invasion). Meanwhile, troop radios fared no better—still not waterproof, despite repeated operational reports to the Bureau of Ships dating from Operation Torch in North Africa the previous year. Very few tactical command nets were functional throughout the first day and a half.
The Japanese also made some costly assumptions before the battle of Tarawa. On Betio, they assumed their exposed, 8-inch gun positions—each with delicate fire control systems and semiprotected magazines—could survive even nominal aerial and naval bombardment. They understandably assumed that the fringing reef would prohibit any landing attempts during low tide. They assumed the Americans would land across the same beaches the Japanese had used, the south shore, accessible from the open ocean, and by then heavily mined. The Japanese garrisons also believed in the success of the theater commander’s Yogaki (“Waylaying”) Plan—island defenders pinning down the attackers at the water’s edge until surface, air, and submarine attacks could strike from the Marshalls and Carolines. The garrisons did their part, but the Japanese Combined Fleet did not sortie from Truk after early November; the few long-range aircraft that survived Spruance’s combat air patrols and destroyer screens were able to damage only one ship, the USS Independence (CVL-1); and the submarines, deadly enough in sinking USS Liscome Bay (CVE-56) near Makin, were too few to disrupt the American victory.
The battle of Tarawa was a productive proving ground for new concepts, tactics, and techniques. Easily the most significant innovation by either side was the American decision to convert logistical LVTs into improvised assault vehicles (see side bar). Senior commanders of all three services—plus the few surviving Japanese—agreed after the battle that the LVTs had been the decisive materiel factor.
Tarawa also saw the first (and last) combat use of rubber rafts in the ship-to-shore movement by a Marine Corps battalion landing team. Launched by USS Feland (APA-11) on the afternoon of D+1, the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines paddled ashore at Green Beach, the first landing team to reach Betio intact—a turning point in the battle. But Landing Team 1/6 was blessed with immense good fortune. The 84 rafts crammed with a thousand Marines were within small arms range in broad daylight for three hours without sustaining a single casualty. Moreover, the rafts were just buoyant enough to escape the many anti-boat mines fastened to subsurface coral heads off Green Beach. Indeed, one accompanying LVT, laden with critical supplies, struck such a mine; the explosion blew the vehicle 10 feet in the air and killed all but one of the occupants.
That incident illustrates Japanese innovations in preparing defensive positions, a signal characteristic of Tarawa. The island of Betio—small, flat, devoid of jungle, having such a high water table that emplacements could rarely be dug deeply—was an unlikely site to become “the Corregidor of the Central Pacific.” Yet Rear Admiral Tomanari Saichiro, the first flag officer assigned to the Gilberts, was so skillful and enterprising an engineer that he rapidly transformed Betio into a defensive masterpiece. Saichiro’s imaginative use of terrain, hydrography, and weaponry produced offshore obstacles, channelization into grazing, interlocking fires, mutually supporting pillboxes, and redundant coverage by fire of every avenue of approach. Most positions had overhead protection in the form of logs, steel plates, and deep sand. Saichiro enforced fire discipline among M-95 heavy machine gun crews emplaced along the sea wall by blocking out the front of the embrasures. Gunners were forced to look only in the direction of their assigned sectors, typically enfilade fire along offshore obstacles. Saichiro’s demolitions experts also planted an abundance of antiboat mines around most of the interior of the reef. The mines that destroyed the LVT on Green Beach and a second LVT which ventured into those waters the following day had shattering explosive force. Unfortunately for the garrison, the Imperial Japanese Navy transferred Saichiro before the job was completed, and the U.S. Marines were able to find the island’s one soft spot, the northwest shore, where mines had not yet been emplaced.
For the Marines at Tarawa, the tactical learning curve was costly but ultimately productive. After 24 hours of literally hanging on by their fingernails, the troops improvised practical methods to break the Japanese defenses. From such field experiments came the soon-familiar “blowtorch and corkscrew” techniques of assaulting fortified positions by teams of infantry and combat engineers using flame throwers, satchel charges, and bangalore torpedoes. And once they overcame their communications problems, the Marines learned to maximize their superior firepower by close integration of naval gunfire, carrier aircraft, field artillery, and tanks to pound enemy strongholds thwarting the advance of the infantry. The final assault of the 3d Battalion, 6th Marines on residual Japanese positions throughout Betio’s eastern tail on D+3 featured carefully orchestrated supporting arms that bore no resemblance to the first day’s utter chaos.
An ancient maxim revalidated at Tarawa was the benefit of strenuous conditioning prior to combat. The opposing forces on Betio were in unusually good shape. The Japanese were much more acclimated to the oppressive heat, but the Marines’ intensive, preliminary field training in New Zealand gave them an edge as the battle entered its third day of unrelenting close combat. Superior physical conditioning was a significant factor in what soon became a race between a large body of Rikusentai and Lieutenant Colonel Raymond L. Murray’s 2d Battalion, 6th Marines throughout the outer islands of Tarawa Atoll. Murray’s men were more heavily laden than their quarry, but these Marines had recently completed a 60-mile forced training march that was already a Marine Corps legend. The Marines caught up with the Japanese force on Buariki; the ensuing fight ended Japanese resistance in the Gilberts.
Operation Galvanic also provided an early and successful example of joint service covert operations. The transport submarine Nautilus (SS-168) surfaced 3,000 yards off Apamama Atoll during the night of 21 November and launched a clandestine team of force reconnaissance Marines and Army engineers in rubber rafts. They located the small Japanese garrison and took it under fire. The submarine helped with fire support with her 6-inch deck guns. Within three days, the Japanese were dead, and several thousand Marines and SeaBees poured ashore to begin building an airfield. Three weeks later, the first heavy bombers of the VII Air Force arrived, in preparation for the Marshalls campaign.
Tarawa produced many dividends. In the strategic sense, the capture of Betio removed the threat of Japanese bombers to the Allied sealanes leading to the South Pacific. Captured or newly constructed airfields on Betio, Makin, and Apamama were instrumental in launching photo-reconnaissance and strike missions against the Marshalls. Admiral Nimitz survived the initial adverse public reaction to the Tarawa bloodbath and kept the Central Pacific drive on track. The road to Tokyo still would follow several routes, but the main thrust thereafter would be through the Central Pacific. The Pacific War was therefore shortened by victory in the Gilberts. Emperor Hiro- hito appeared before the Japanese Diet the month following the battle to announce, “The war situation is most serious.” Within a matter of weeks, Imperial General Headquarters took the unprecedented measure of removing divisions from the Kwantung Army, facing the Soviets in Manchuria, for redeployment to the Central Pacific.
The U.S troops held the strategic initiative. Soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen assigned to the Fifth Fleet applied operational and tactical lessons learned at Tarawa with great care in the Marshalls. There was a direct consequence: the United States seized Kwajalein, Roi-Namur, and Eniwetok faster and at a markedly reduced overall cost than ever imagined. Specifically, CinCPac planners would claim that experience gained at Tarawa helped the Fifth Fleet take the Marshalls twice as fast and with half the casualties.
These were tangible, immediate benefits of the bloody fight for the Gilberts. In historical perspective, Tarawa’s foremost significance stems from the validation of the new U.S. doctrine of amphibious assault under the most awful conditions imaginable. It worked. And if the doctrine worked at Tarawa, it most likely would work anywhere.
Good doctrine is like a living organism, adaptable to changes in national strategy, international threats, and military technology. Amphibious warfare doctrine has adapted often during the half-century since Tarawa, but the essential ingredients remain. In fact, many of the doctrinal principles applied by Admiral Harry Hill and General Julian Smith at Tarawa are equally germane today. For example:
• Harmonious blue-green relations
• Concurrent, parallel, detailed planning; followed by violent execution
• Unity of command throughout the transition from sea to shore
• Operational security and the ability to assemble superior maritime forces from scattered staging areas
• Full use of joint service assets to reconnoiter and isolate the objective
• Close coordination of minesweeping, naval gunfire, and the ship-to-shore assault
• Developing a sense of initiative and improvision among troops and boat crews to handle the inevitable confusion of the assault
• Straightforward assessments immediately after the operation: the original “Hot Wash-Up.”
Colonel Shoup was fully aware that victory at Tarawa had been narrowly and dearly won, a product of teamwork at all levels. As he recorded in his field notebook upon leaving the desolated island, “With God and the U.S. Navy in direct support of the 2d Marine Division, there was never any doubt that we would get Betio. For several hours, however, there was considerable haggling over the exact price we were to pay.”
‘Those Little Boats on Wheels’
According to one of the few surviving Japanese on Betio, the turning point of the battle came early, the moment when “those little boats on wheels” crossed the reef at low tide and delivered the assault waves to the beach. Veteran campaigner Lieutenant Colonel Evans F.
Carlson, participating in the Tarawa landing as a hands-on observer, agreed fully: “The choice of LVTs for assault units was particularly fortuitous.”
The Marines were on to something. Not that there was anything wrong with the Navy’s new Higgins boats. To the Marines, the sturdy LCVPs (Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel) were a welcome arrival in the fleet after so many frustrating years trying to land by ship’s whaleboats and unsea- worthy experimental craft. But a loaded LCVP had a four-foot draft, a tactical liability along the barrier reefs characteristic of the Central Pacific. The Marines critically needed a special conveyance for their assault waves, something with armor protection and the mobility to traverse the reef and other offshore obstacles. The tracked landing vehicle, or LVT, became the craft to lead the assault at Tarawa, and amphibious assaults throughout the next half-century.
The Marines used LVT-ls as logistic support vehicles at Guadalcanal. Visionary officers like Victor H. Krulak and David M. Shoup saw the potential in these primitive vehicles to fill the crucial gap in the ship-to-shore assault. Just before Tarawa, Shoup directed the 2d Amphibian Tractor Battalion to install jury-rigged armor plating to their LVT-ls and conduct field tests to determine how the added weight would affect buoyancy and water speed. Surf testing in New Zealand and reef-crossing experiments in the Fiji Islands were encouraging. But 75 LVT-ls were not enough for the job. The Marines fought successfully for an emergency delivery of 50 new LVT-2s, which arrived off Betio just in time to join the assault.
The LVTs endured a six-hour, 10- mile run to the beach under heavy fire, crossing the reef without incident, and delivered 1,500 Marines ashore in the first 15 minutes. Initial losses were acceptable, but then the Japanese gunners found the range. The improvised armor was inadequate protection against the multitude of heavy machine guns and antiboat guns along the island’s perimeter. In three days, the 2d Amphibian Tractor Battalion lost its commander, more than half its members, and 90 of its 125 LVTS.
Such losses were grievous, but the Marines fully appreciated how well the LVTs had performed in the assault. Specific suggestions for improved characteristics found sympathetic ears among top levels of the Navy Department and within U.S. industry. Soon, newer LVTs appeared in the Pacific with factory-installed armor, major- caliber weapon stations, stem ramps, and improved communications and navigation equipment. The tactical use of LVTs at Tarawa had been so successful in execution, so promising for amphibious operations to come, that Colonel Shoup asked war correspondents to avoid mentioning the craft. His “news blackout” did not last long. Journalist Hanson W. Baldwin described the LVT in the 3 December 1943 issue of The New York Times as the ideal means of attacking coral atolls: “an amphibian vehicle that will swim through deep water, crawl over coral projections, and waddle directly on the beach, bringing the men dry-shod to shore.” His was an apt description. Assault LVTs were in the amphibious force structure to stay.
Joseph H. Alexander
