In early 1940 Major Gerald C. Thomas, post historian at the Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia, taught officer students the practical lessons of the Gallipoli campaign, the great Allied disaster in the Dardanelles in 1915, then and now the epitome of perilous execution of an amphibious assault against a fortified shoreline. Captain David Monroe Shoup, a former farm boy from Battle Ground, Indiana, served as assistant instructor to Thomas for the course.
Three-and-a-half years later, at Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll, freshly-promoted Colonel Shoup had the dubious distinction of leading the first large-scale U.S. amphibious assault against a heavily fortified enemy bastion. The classic battle literally hung in the balance for the first day-and-a-half. Indeed, as some of Shoup’s former students surveyed the devastated beachhead that first night, more than one made dark reference to “another damned Gallipoli.” Yet none of the doleful “issue in doubt” reports ever came from Shoup. His indomitable fighting spirit during the initial 36 hours of this first trial by fire of the new amphibious doctrine was often all that stood between victory and disaster.
David Shoup’s performance in the Tarawa campaign is doubly significant because he, through the fortunes of war, served as both architect and executor of the forcible seizure of Betio. For his role in conceiving the ground-breaking assault plan, he received the Legion of Merit with Combat “V.” For his subsequent role ashore in junking those elaborate plans and adapting to tactical realities, Shoup received the British Distinguished Service Order and the only non-posthumous Medal of Honor for Tarawa. His achievements in both dimensions have come to exemplify the distinguishing characteristics of amphibious assault: detailed planning and violent execution.
David Shoup eventually served in the Marine Corps for 38 years, rising from second lieutenant to general. His career seemed dominated by two abrupt “spikes”—where events catapulted him from obscurity into national prominence. The first occurred at Tarawa in 1943; the second in 1959 when he became the surprise selection of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be the 22nd Commandant of the Marine Corps. As Shoup recorded earlier in a private journal, “if you are qualified, fate has a way of getting you to the right place at the right time—’tho sometimes it appears to be a long, long wait.”
Shoup had already endured a long wait by the time of the battle at Tarawa. A 1926 graduate of DePauw University, he earned an Army commission through the school’s ROTC program. A month later, greatly influenced by a recruiting lecture by General John A. Lejeune, 13th Commandant of the Corps, Shoup switched services. His ensuing 17 years of service represented steady if unremarkable duty. Command of a battalion, the universal goal of every infantry officer, lasted only four months. More commonly, his penchant for details and industrious work ethic made him an ideal staff officer, and he served sequentially as operations officer on the regimental, brigade, and division levels. This included deployment with the 1st Marine Brigade to Iceland and the 2d Marine Division to the South Pacific. While the division general staff did not deploy to Guadalcanal, Shoup went separately (though briefly) as an observer.
Shoup saw his only significant combat five months before Tarawa during an abbreviated stint as an observer with the Army’s 43rd Division during the Rendova landing. This little-known assignment, while personally unpleasant for him, proved to be a useful experience. At Rendova, Shoup saw first-hand how quickly amphibious plans can become bollixed up on the beach judging from his rough journal, he knew fear (“Jap plane strafed beach—down in my little hole very fast”), horror (“legs and bodies missing in all directions”), and pain (“first noted wound right leg”). But back in camp, he was 38, unknown and unheralded, the Operations and Training Officer (D-3 in those days), when Major General Julian C. Smith took command of the division on 1 May 1943 in New Zealand.
The new division commander had the promise of the Commandant that he could have any field-grade officers he needed to prime the division for its next combat mission. Smith already had taken advantage of this offer, bringing in Colonel Merritt A. Edson, the highly regarded veteran of Tulagi and Guadalcanal, as his chief of staff. Smith then took a hard look at the officer who would be his second most valuable assistant, this Lieutenant Colonel Shoup, his D-3.
Smith saw little on the surface that commended Shoup specifically. He had little command time, negligible exposure to combat, and limited experience in planning major amphibious assaults or division-level combat operations. Since Smith himself was similarly deficient in these critical areas, he would have been wholly within his rights to demand some accomplished veteran of the Solomons campaign to serve as his operations and training officer. But Smith looked beyond Shoup’s service record, observed his work habits, his aggressive spirit. No officer in felicitous New Zealand worked harder or longer than Shoup, as he drove himself and his section in preparation for combat. Smith stuck with Shoup.
With two quiet decisions—first, to retain Shoup as D-3; later, to give him command of the principal assault elements—Julian Smith did as much to win the battle of Tarawa in advance as he did during the actual fighting.
Both leaders placed a premium on rigorous field training. And their efforts received a tremendous boost from Edson, who contributed not only his extensive combat experience but also his recent success in the innovative training workup for the 1st Raider Battalion the previous year. The three officers worked together to produce an intensive combat training program for the previously fragmented 2d Marine Division. Interestingly, for all the major frustrations in training for Tarawa—the critical shortage of amphibious ships, sparse availability of close air support, and total lack of any opportunity for advance field work with the new Sherman medium tanks or LVT-2 Water Buffaloes—the division went into battle as well-prepared for the ensuing chaos as any similar outfit in the war. Even with half the ranks filled with green troops, the fire discipline of the shot-up landing force that first, wild night ashore was superb—the hallmark of a well-trained outfit.
Training at first had no specific objective. The 2d Marine Division, still part of the 1st Marine Amphibious Corps in Admiral William F. Halsey’s South Pacific Command, anticipated more jungle fighting in the eventual assault on Rabaul. This milieu changed abruptly in early August 1943, when Vice Admiral Raymond A. Spruance flew to Wellington, New Zealand, for a classified conference with Julian Smith and a handful of his senior staff and commanders.
The Wellington conference represented a major turning point. There, Spruance announced the formation of the Central Pacific Force under his command, the pending reassignment of the division to the 5 th Amphibious Force under Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner and the V Amphibious Corps under Marine Major General Holland M. Smith, and the principal first objective: Tarawa.
The conference was also significant because there, at the initiation of the great amphibious campaigns that swept across the Central Pacific to the very gates of Japan, the U.S. forces were starting at virtually ground zero in amphibious expertise. With the exception of Edson, no one in the Wellington hotel room had ever conducted an opposed amphibious landing. And while Kelly Turner and “Howlin’ Mad” Smith had plenty of amphibious exposure, both ended up spending the Gilberts campaign near Makin, leaving Tarawa to Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill, the newly assigned commander of the Southern Attack Force, and Julian Smith.
This new assignment sobered the officers assembled to meet with Spruance. Most had experience “war-gaming” a Central Pacific campaign and knew of the problem caused by barrier coral reefs. Tarawa was no exception. Shoup pointed this out to Spruance, asking about the availability of experimental, shallow-draft, plastic boats. Spruance knew the extent of his resources in the Pacific—for this operation he had only the conventional, wooden-hulled Higgins boats with their four-foot laden draft. Shoup, according to his cryptic journal, then suggested “amtracs,” the thin-skinned, fully tracked logistic-support LVTs, or amphibian tractors. No record hints at Spruance’s response. He was not one to meddle in a subordinate commander’s details; he likely looked at Julian Smith, shrugged, and said, “Whatever it takes.”
The innovation of converting logistic LVTs into assault landing craft to tackle Tarawa’s fringing reef was one of Shoup’s most brilliant ideas, as well as the 2d Marine Division’s greatest gamble. World War II naval historians are familiar with the division’s hasty modification of 75 LVT-1 Alligators with improvised armor plating and additional machine guns; how they convinced the Navy to send the unescorted USS Harris (APA-2) to Fiji for surf and reef testing of the modified vehicles; and how Julian Smith made Holland Smith demand of Kelly Turner the last-minute delivery of 50 new LVT-2s to Tarawa the morning of D-Day. The LVT thus became Shoup’s solution to overcoming Tarawa’s reef, uncertain tides, and bristling defensive works: the amtracs would forcibly land the assault waves on the beach, then turn around, if necessary, and conduct transfer-line operations with any following boats stranded by the reef.
Less well known is the fact that much of the frantic work done by the 2d Marine Division trying to solve the reef/tide problem on its own behalf was redundant. Months earlier, at the request of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the 1st Marine Amphibious Corps had assigned Lieutenant Colonel Victor H. Krulak the task of testing LVT-ls under surf and reef conditions in Noumea, New Caledonia. Krulak’s favorable report enabled the Joint Planning Staff of the Joint Chiefs to proclaim that coral reefs in the Central Pacific could be assailed successfully with the common LVT. Headquarters Marine Corps sent the report back to the Pacific “for information,” but it never reached the 2d Marine Division, which had to reinvent the wheel under extremely tense conditions. Nor did headquarters seem to take much interest in ram- rodding the delivery of newer LVTs to the Pacific to meet operational deadlines.
Missed communications and long-range indifference characterized much of the planning for Tarawa. The 2d Marine Division, blessed with an early start by virtue of Spruance’s advance visit, did much of its planning in a vacuum. It had little choice. The brand-new V Amphibious Corps did not come on line for another six weeks and then displayed all the usual growing pains. Worse, Hill, the amphibious task force commander, did not make it to New Zealand until eight days before final embarkation. “Concurrent and parallel planning” became wishful thinking.
Shoup nevertheless pressed on with his campaign planning. The division had a resourceful intelligence section that made full use of the detailed aerial photographs of Betio provided by B-24 bomber crews of the 7th Air Force flying out of Funafuti. Shoup stated later that he never saw such high-quality photography—images so clear that his staff could count the privy holes and estimate the size of the enemy garrison within 5% of the totals provided by ULTRA radio intercepts. From such input, Shoup and Edson prepared an exhaustive, masterful “estimate of the situation.” With few exceptions, the men of the 2d Marine Division knew full well what lay waiting for them at Betio—reef, guns, tanks, troops. Unfortunately, tactical plans to offset some of these obstacles—an extended preliminary bombardment, advance seizure of neighboring Bairiki Island as a fire-support base, and a demonstration feint against the south coast—proved unacceptable to Spruance and Turner because of limited assets and the critical factor of time.
Two elements shaped and limited Shoup’s tactical planning for the Tarawa assault. One was this perceived urgent need for speed of execution. Guadalcanal had demonstrated the vulnerability of amphibious ships clustered around an advanced beachhead. Three weeks before Tarawa, the Japanese had responded to the Bougainville landings with a furious air and surface counterstrike at Empress Augusta Bay. Spruance and Turner fully expected the Japanese Combined Fleet to sortie from Truk against the U.S. invasion of the Gilberts. The Marines’ request for anything more than an immediate, direct frontal assault on Betio could not be supported in the face of this urgency.
The other limiting factor was the sheer mass of unknowns existing prior to Tarawa. Would the Japanese stay and fight, or would they evacuate in the manner of Guadalcanal and Kiska earlier in the year? What was the fighting heart of the newly-formed special naval landing forces assigned to defend Betio? Precisely how much water would be over the reef during the rising low tide at H-Hour? How effective would the “greatest naval bombardment of the war” be against Betio’s concrete, coral, and coconut log fortifications? Would the 2,000-pound “daisy-cutter” bombs requested from the 7th Air Force be delivered? Would the tank landing ships (LSTs) bearing the new LVT-2s arrive in time? Could the troops execute an open-water link-up between Higgins boats and the new LVTs in the predawn darkness of D-Day? Would the Sherman medium tanks arrive in time, and would they be able to negotiate the reef?
These unknowns haunted Shoup. As embarkation date neared, he grew even more frustrated. The new bunker- busting “bazooka” rocket launchers and amphibious barrage rockets had been in the Pacific for months; neither arrived in New Zealand in time to deploy with the landing force. Two dozen portable flame throwers arrived at the last moment. Some operators learned how to use the new weapons by firing billows of flame off the fantails of their ships en route to the Gilberts. Amphibious workup training had proved illusory. The ships simply were not available; those that did arrive early in New Zealand frequently developed mechanical problems. As a consequence, Shoup conducted regimental-scale amphibious training only once. The only division-level training occurred during the two rehearsal landings at Efate, in the New Hebrides, and that took place in the absence of close air support, Sherman tanks, or the LVT-2s. Shoup worried that the complex choreography of his ship-to-shore plan would never be tested fully until the real McCoy.
Shoup’s perspective changed after Efate. There Julian Smith had to replace the ailing commander of the reinforced 2d Marines, the combat team destined to lead the Tarawa assault. Smith quickly awarded Shoup a spot promotion and gave him the key command. Shoup, abruptly the newest colonel in the Corps, took charge “with a lump in my throat.” His regiment included a number of veterans of the Gavutu landing the previous year. Julian Smith had also attached Major Henry R. “Jim” Crowe’s 2d Battalion, 8th Marines to Shoup for the assault. Crowe had proved himself as a fighter; his men were well-trained and tightly disciplined. Altogether, Shoup would lead a well-armed, formidable force across the reef on D-Day.
The problem was, the Marines ran head-long into an equally well-armed force of Japanese, inspired by the lion- hearted Admiral Keiji Shibasaki and seemingly impervious to the ragged U.S. preliminary bombardment. And the tide failed abysmally. Only decades later did physicists determine that the Marines unwittingly made the landing during an apogean neap tide, one of only two such phenomena in all of 1943. The tidal range varied little; no landing boats crossed the reef in the first 30 hours of the assault.
Shoup’s bold gamble with LVTs worked in spades, the crude vehicles trundling over the reef with ease (to the astonishment of the Japanese) to deliver 1,500 Marines of the first three waves essentially intact. But the second part of Shoup’s gamble quickly fell apart. Some LVTs survived to make round-trip shuttle runs from the boats grounded along the reef; most were subsequently shot to pieces or ran out of gas from their four-hour run at full-throttle that long morning. So, too, did the momentum of the attack run out of gas. Wading troops became easy targets for Shibasaki’s gunners. The battle was up for grabs.
In keeping with his character, Shoup decided to go ashore early, intending to land soon after the assault waves. But without LVTs, no one got ashore at Betio on schedule. Shoup and his small command group, embarked in a pair of Higgins boats, suffered the same frustrations. The process took five hours.
Shoup’s journal reflects one of the grim chaos of that first morning. Wading through the shallow waters of the lagoon toward the relative protection of the pier, he encountered a bedraggled file of Marines, weaponless, heading back toward the reef. As he tried to rally them, they responded with, “We can’t go in, we’re going back to the ship.” “Pick up weapons from the dead and follow me in,” Shoup ordered. Closer to shore, a Japanese marksman shot Shoup’s bodyguard: “peaceful look, hole appeared front and rear into his neck; seemed to say, ‘this is all I have to give, Colonel, I hope I’ve helped.’”
The final 50 yards of Shoup’s odyssey proved the most difficult. Confronting a cluster of Marines seeking shelter behind a grounded Japanese tank lighter next to the pier, Shoup pointed to the eagles on his collar and demanded, “Are there any of you cowardly sons of bitches got the guts to follow a Colonel of Marines?” Moments later: “I turn, see about ten following—my heart beats big thumps. The Marines are coming in and will be okay.” Then: “Shell bursts. Man behind screams, flops forward on face, hands smack water at my side. Piece of something gets in my leg. Concussion puts me down in the water. . . . Carlson [Lieu- tenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson] comes out when he hears I’m down. ... I crawl closer, gather all I have and to my feet and to the beach and down.” Welcome to Betio. Shoup then established his command post along the seaward side of still-occupied Japanese bunker. From that contested spot he fought the Battle of Tarawa.
Shoup’s desperate objective for the next 24 hours became the struggle to build sufficient combat power ashore, to avoid defeat in detail, and to penetrate the hard shell of the Japanese perimeter defenses. In many respects, this was indeed a smaller Gallipoli in the making, and Shoup, recognizing this, worked furiously to get reinforcements across the reef with full unit integrity. Poor communications and lethal Japanese fire frustrated every attempt to achieve this objective until twilight the second day. In the meantime, three successive battalion landing teams, largely bereft of operational LVTs, were shot to pieces and scattered in trying to reinforce the precarious toeholds along the northern shore. Most Sherman tanks made it ashore, only to be frittered away by local commanders in unsupported attacks inland. Only two Shermans remained fully operational by dusk. Getting a single battalion of 75-mm pack howitzers ashore took a heroic, all-night effort.
Shoup was never more vulnerable than he was during that first night. A concerted Japanese counterattack from east to west needed to have recaptured a mere 400 yards to render the U.S. positions untenable. Yet when Brigadier General Leo Hermle, assistant division commander, approached the beach that evening with orders from an extremely concerned Julian Smith to take command of the forces ashore, Shoup barked at him, telling him it was unsafe to land, and ordering Hermle to get the hell out from under that pier and go get in communication with General Smith.” Shoup was not about to relinquish command. Similarly, he bristled when Colonel Elmer E. Hall, commanding the 8th Marines, came ashore the second day. Hall was 20 years senior to Shoup and in fact had been division chief of staff before the arrival of Edson, but Shoup burned with a brighter flame. Hall merely lent Shoup some of his radio operators and moved on to look after his own troops. Shoup was welcome to the beleaguered command.
Shoup’s tough optimism finally paid off with the sudden good news at noon of the second day that Major Mike Ryan’s improvised force had seized the entire western end of Betio. Getting a reserve battalion landing team ashore over that abruptly uncovered beach took an agonizing six more hours—the friction of war—but even then, Shoup’s luck held. The reinforcements, Major William K. Jones’s 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, came ashore in rubber boats from the reef, a 1,000-yard, 90-minute paddle with the entire force fully backlit by the setting sun. Not a single Japanese fired at them.
By dark of the second day, Shoup held command of nearly the entire division. Eight infantry battalions, two artillery battalions, the tankers, amtrackers, and most engineers were then ashore on Betio and Bairiki—close to 10,000 men. Julian Smith knew it was time to send in his chief of staff. Edson found Shoup still on his feet, wounded and haggard, but full of fight. Shoup deferred to Edson, the veteran warrior, and reverted to being a regimental commander. The battle still had to run its bloody course. But at this point, it was Edson’s fight, and soon Julian Smith’s. The fighting on Betio finally ground to a halt 40 hours later. Tarawa, already an amphibious warfare landmark, soon passed into the realm of legend.
Three slain Marines and David Shoup received nominations for the Medal of Honor after the battle. Some jealousies surfaced among Shoup’s contemporaries at this level of recognition, but Julian Smith knew full well whose broad shoulders had borne the responsibility during the critical first 36 hours of the assault. The nomination process took 14 months. On 22 January 1945 Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal made David M. Shoup the 25th Marine to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II.
Combat leadership takes different forms. Shoup’s style was not the conspicuous, over-the-top, out-in-front, pistol-waving type commonly envisioned. That was not his role at Tarawa. Three of his majors—Navy Cross recipients Mike Ryan, Jim Crowe, and Bill Chamberlin—were more exposed, more tactically involved, and equally valiant. But Shoup’s style was perfectly suited to his critical role as commander of the reinforced regimental combat team. He was consistently steady, confident, tough, resourceful, adaptable, supportive, and visible—a rock of solid Indiana granite amid Betio’s shifting, bloody sands. He was a superb assault-team commander. And 16 years later, he became a superb Commandant.
Shoup also proved to be a less-than-hawkish affiliate member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early 1960s. Tarawa had left its mark. As he mused in his journal after the battle: “War seems to be a kind of conspiracy of society to deprive hopeful living children, as well as those yet unborn, of their fathers.”
