In November 1943, the combined forces of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Army struck a decisive blow into the Japanese-held Central Pacific. Operation Galvanic unleashed a series of amphibious assaults in the Gilbert Islands (now the nation of Kiribati) with supporting strikes from the sea and air. Galvanic wrested control of the Gilberts from Japan with the seizure of three atolls—Apemama, Makin, and Tarawa. The stage was set for the next advance into the Marshall Islands. But the cost in lives was high: More than 6,000 men died on Tarawa, and another 1,200 died at Makin or in the waters that surrounded it. While the majority of the dead were the Japanese who held the islands, nearly 1,800 of those killed were U.S. servicemen.
War correspondent Robert Sherrod, who witnessed the bloody assault and its aftermath, wrote that, “What I saw on Betio was, I am certain, one of the greatest works of devastation wrought by man.” Combat photographs of the battle and Tarawa’s torn and shattered shores remain some of the most powerful images of the Pacific War—a lone Marine, dashing under fire among palm trees with their tops blown off; an amphibious tractor, its bow wedged up against the log seawall of Red Beach; the corpses of fallen Marines at the water’s edge; a group of Marines swarming up a sand-covered blockhouse to engage the enemy dug in on the other side.
Fifty-six years after the battle, I sailed in the wake of Operation Galvanic through the heart of the Gilberts and into the Marshalls, revisiting the once-bloody atolls of Tarawa and Makin, as well as the advance bases at Nanumea and Funafuti in the former Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu)—where Army Air Corps B-24s once roared off packed-coral runways to bomb Japanese-held islands in preparation for the impending invasion.
This is a part of the globe, close to the Equator in the mid-Pacific, that most of the world does not often see. Isolated by vast stretches of water, limited air service, and infrequent visits by tourists, the island nation of Kiribati in particular is nonetheless crowded. Tarawa atoll, the capital of Kiribati, is a chain of coral islets with a total land area of only nine square miles—on which, in 1990, some 29,028 people lived. Many of them live on Betio, a square mile of coral and sand, and the scene of the Battle of Tarawa. What once was a pitted mass of churned sand, with topped palm trees, cracked and blistered pillboxes and bunkers, and the detritus of war is now a crowded urban setting. A modern concrete pier juts out into the lagoon, leading to a cluster of concrete and tin buildings. A perimeter road rings the island. Along it, a relic of the past occasionally comes into view—a small Japanese antiaircraft gun, the turret of a Type 95 tank, the rusted barrel of an Arisaka rifle protruding from the sand, a rim of broken concrete marking a foundation.
You have to look hard to find traces of the Battle of Tarawa when you walk through downtown Betio. Veterans of the battle who have returned to the island are shocked to discover how much it has changed and that what was once a charnel house is now teeming with life. Where the past intrudes most is at the water’s edge, on the beach.
Our ship approached Betio in the early morning hours, after a three-day sail from Funafuti, where Task Force 53 had gathered before sailing for Tarawa. Funafuti’s airport, still in use, is the original airfield graded into the coral for the B-24 Liberators of the 7th Air Force, whose planes had flown on bombing and photo reconnaissance missions over Tarawa. In the early-morning darkness, our ship lay several miles off Tarawa, waiting for daylight to enter the narrow channel into Tarawa Lagoon. Standing on the deck in the darkness as the dawn slowly lit the sky, I was struck by the gentleness of the scene. In the same hours, on 20 November 1943, the horizon before me was lit violently as the battleships, cruisers, and destroyers of the Southern Attack Force of Task Force 53 opened fire, raining shells on the Japanese defenders. Now only the yellow-red tint of the sun peeked above the sea and the clouds massed at its distant edge, revealing Betio in the distance.
We approached the channel slowly and anchored off Betio in company with a fleet of small fishing and interisland trading vessels. The low shore before us, highlighted by the shallows of the coral reef, was in clear view. In 1943, the spot where the ship now swung at anchor would have come under heavy fire from Japanese guns. From that spot, rows of landing craft would have been pushing for the shore, only to encounter the reef—which on the morning of 20 November lay exposed by the low tide. We headed for shore at 0900, roughly the same time the first Marine amtrac, No. 49 (“My Delores”), hit the beach. The long run to shore over the 800- to 1,200-yard shallows of the reef was a powerful reminder of the incredible slaughter as Japanese guns opened up on the assaulting Marines, who had to wade across the same shallows or crouch in slow-crawling amtracs.
Here and there, the pale green of the bottom gives way to the darker blue of shell holes. The sea has cleaned this portion of the battlefield, but still cannot conceal all of the devastation of November 1943. One cannot help but think of that morning, of these now-placid waters churned into a bloody red mass of geysers, of men mowed down by the shells and bullets, or of the men weighed down by 100 pounds of gear who dropped from landing craft into waters 15 to 20 feet deep and sank.
Once on Betio, I moved slowly down the length of Red Beach 2 and Red Beach 3, where the Marines gained a tenuous foothold by nightfall on 20 November. A low palm log seawall fringed the beach in 1943; it has since been replaced by a concrete block wall of approximately the same height. Standing atop it, you have an unobstructed view—and a clear field of fire—across the reef. As if to remind you of that hellish morning, a half-sunk M4A2 Sherman tank, stuck in a shell hole, lies close to the shore. On the beach, exposed by the falling tide, are the rusted remains of two amtracs—a reminder of how few reached the seawall under the deadly crossfire.
Crossing the island, I reached Green Beach. There the Marines fought through barbed wire traps and enemy fire to gain control of the western end of Betio on the morning of 21 November. The remains of dozens of amtracs lie on the reef, exposed by the falling tide. Groups of children scrambled out over the exposed reef as I watched, jumping in and out of the wrecks. They laughed in delight as they caught a fish trapped in the rusty pools of water by the retreating sea. At the southwest corner of the beach is Temakin Point, where two 8-inch Vickers coastal defense guns remain emplaced. One gun still points out along the beach, but the other—blasted and battered—lies half buried in the wet sand. The concrete emplacement itself— cracked, holed, and tumbled—surrounds the guns. Another sign of the passing years and how commonplace these relics now are to a generation that has not experienced the war are the scattered beer cans and graffiti that cover the area.
From Temakin Point, I hitched a ride in a bus along the ocean side of Betio. There the Japanese heavily fortified the shoreline. Bunkers, many of them collapsed and open, their vaulted roofs cracked and thrown down, lie half buried in the tangled brush. Stopping by the island cemetery, I walked down to the beach to find a Japanese twin 127-mm battery, the barrels resting beneath the mount and rusting slowly into the coral pebbles and sand.
A monument in the cemetery honors the memory of 22 British Coastwatchers, captured in the Gilberts by the Japanese and imprisoned on Betio. Before the battle, they were beheaded by their captors. In the aftermath of the battle, on an island covered with corpses, their bodies never were identified. But their names and a concrete cross commemorate their sacrifice, along with their epitaph cast into the concrete: “Standing unarmed to their posts, they matched brutality with gallantry, and met death with fortitude.” Standing before this simple white cross, you cannot help but be struck by the fact that this entire island—for all of its crowding, motor bikes, and mini- vans—is a graveyard. That fact was driven home when I again reached the road and was stopped by a local man driving a battered hatchback. On the seat was a collection of twisted, rusted Model 38 Arisaka rifles. “Twenty dollars American” was the price. Other relics, also offered for sale, included cartridges, unfired ammunition (both Japanese and American), and shrapnel. Questioning any person on the island quickly reveals that you cannot dig anywhere on Betio without finding them—and bones.
We drove along the shore to the far, eastern end of Betio. There, Takarongo Point is studded with broken concrete emplacements and two 8-inch Vickers guns. Pointed out to sea, they are frozen with rust. The barrel of one gun is chipped and broken, as if a fortunate hit from the ships bombarding Betio struck it. The Arisaka vendor followed the bus to Takarongo, insistent on peddling his wares, but departed as the bus headed back, this time through central Betio to reach the imposing concrete command bunker of Admiral Keiji Shibasaki. There, on 22 November, some of the last desperate fighting took place. Atop the sand-covered bunker, Marine First Lieutenant Alexander “Sandy” Bonnyman, Jr. led his men in the fight for the stronghold. Bonnyman was killed, hut the bunker was taken as TNT charges and burning gasoline drove out the defenders. For his bravery and initiative, leading a “forlorn hope” in what historian Joseph H. Alexander terms “the equivalent of an 18th century storming party,” Bonnyman was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
The bunker, with its protective sand removed, is now a cracked, dark shell surrounded by chain link fencing. Used by the locals as a unofficial latrine, it is sealed off, unmarked, and surrounded by nearby houses. This portion of the island has experienced the greatest change since 1943. Indeed, Betio is a for cry from the “corpse-strewn landscape of scorched and shell-pocked sand, shredded coconut palms and smashed pillboxes” that greeted the eye on 23 November. Even the airfield—built by the Japanese and the objective of the battle—is now gone, its runways covered by buildings. The only open space of any size is an area of the runway now used as a soccer field. And yet the older residents of Betio and the surrounding islands of Tarawa remember the battle, and their grown children, living in the midst of the former battlefield, can readily point out the remaining sites and relics.
From Betio, our ship raised anchor and traveled about 100 nautical miles to Butaritari, also known as Makin. Also part of Kiribati, this island was the scene of another Galvanic battle and the earlier, famous raid by Carlson’s Raiders in 1942. Nothing remains of the concrete church where the Marines holed up before withdrawing, but elsewhere on this idyllic, isolated island, treks into the jungle and along the shores revealed notable relics of the battle of November 1943.
No major development or population boom has changed Butaritari. King’s Wharf, and the tumbled remains of On Chong’s wharf, still jut out to ring the lagoon-side invasion beach. A platform for a Japanese gun, its weapon long gone, stands sentinel at the base of King’s Wharf. Beyond it, as I walked along the road leading into the village, the thatched houses and fences suddenly gave way to the bullet-riddled, collapsing hulk of a Kawanishi H8K flying boat, also known by the U.S. designation of “Emily.” Strafed and sunk before the battle, it was pulled ashore by the Japanese and used as a fortified position until blasted. Bullet and shell holes have made a sieve of the now- thin aluminum.
I was greeted by local people who were eager to guide all-too-infrequent tourists into the jungle to visit the World War II sites. Japanese pillboxes, gun emplacements, and anti-tank ditches still lie in the undergrowth. As we hiked through the trees, in the sweltering heat, I was reminded constantly by the guide that the landscape we marched through was unchanged since 1943. In the midst of the foliage, it was easy to let your mind wander back in time, and to see how in this theater of war just how easily the enemy could be concealed, and how suddenly you could encounter them.
In the midst of a group of trees and brush, the guide stopped and pointed to the disturbed ground. “This is where the Japanese are buried,” he announced. A low concrete cistern, rusted machinery, and a group of rooting pigs tethered to the palms dotted the area. A consultation of maps showed that we were in the midst of the Japanese construction force’s camp, and searching the brush we were rewarded with broken gears, transmissions, and chassis of disassembled vehicles. A low depression marked a filled-in pit, which is where the locals say the dead Japanese defenders of Makin are buried.
A walk along the lagoon’s shores revealed two battered shipwrecks rising above the water. Inter-island trading vessels, they had been stranded at Makin by the arrival of war. Pounded and sunk in the shallows before the battle, they too were fortified by the Japanese. A wade through the thigh- deep shallows of the reef revealed twisted, torn metal where shells from the bombarding ships offshore had crashed down on these exposed, desperate positions. Other shell holes in the jungle, some of them converted into the sunken bobai pits where the locals grow and harvest food, offer other tangible reminders of the bombardment of Butaritari. The people of the island also recall those times, and how some of them, held on the island by the Japanese in the face of the impending battle, fell victim to the shelling.
Touring these two, distinctly different islands—one altered and changed significantly since the war, the other seemingly frozen in time—I gained a firsthand look at these distant battlefields whose names remain as imposing chapters in the history of the Pacific War. Time has smoothed the sands, and the sea, salt air, and jungle are slowly reclaiming the relics of those hellish days of intense battle. It was a reminder of the passing not only of time, but of how differently this distant theater’s battlefields have fared than those in Europe. There are no manicured lawns or military cemeteries here. But in this healed landscape of war, a friendly, warm, and welcoming people, the I-Kiri-bati, live at peace with the ghosts of the past. An animal pen made of discarded aircraft propeller blades, a shell-hole converted to a garden, a child’s smile on a once bitterly contested beach, now washed only by warm tides and lit by the soft light of a tropical sunset, speak to us of the resilience of the human heart even as we are reminded of days of thunder and incredible sacrifice.