It was not until the Second sailed from Wellington in late October that the governor general of New Zealand was told the Marines were leaving his country for good. They were going to Efate in the New Hebrides.
It was at Efate that the Second Division made its practice landings, using those 50 new amtracks picked up in Samoa. It was in Efate that a bull-chested, bull-necked, profane colonel named David Shoup was placed in charge of that Second Regiment which was going to lead the way in to Betio. The Second’s commanding officer, Colonel William Marshall, became ill in Efate, and Major General Julian Smith named his operations officer, Shoup, to take his place. And it was at Efate, during a meeting attended by Britishers who had lived in the Gilberts, that someone spoke of the difficulty of crossing Betio’s lagoon reef on the neap tide.
“Neap tide!” exclaimed Major Frank Holland. “My God, when I told you there would be five feet of water on the reef, I never dreamed anyone would try to land at neap tide. There won’t be three feet of water on the reef!”
The Americans were shocked, and a meeting of captains and pilots who had sailed the Gilberts was called. In spite of what Holland had said, it was concluded that there would probably be enough water to float both landing boats and LCM’s over the reef.
Which was not true.
But by then all the plans had been made. It was argued that to wait until after November 22, when the spring tides would appear, would also be to risk a coincident west wind which whips up a steep short sea off Betio. Also, the flood of the spring tide would cover Betio’s beaches right up to the barricades and there might not be any place to land. Again, each day’s delay would mean the arrival of the flood an hour later, and because invasions normally must come at the flood, that meant one hour less daylight in which to seize the beachhead.
Admiral Turner still was willing to gamble on the presence of a high-dodging tide on November 20, and the great invasion fleet of three battleships, five cruisers, nine destroyers and 17 troop and cargo ships had already begun to assemble. Naval bombardment officers were already predicting what they were going to do to Betio.
“We are going to bombard at 6,000 yards,” said one battleship captain. “We’ve got so much armor we’re not afraid of anything the Japs can throw back at us.”
“We’re going in at 4,000 yards,” said a cruiser skipper. “We figure our armor can take anything they’ve got.”
And Major General Julian Smith arose to say, “Gentlemen, remember one thing. When the Marines land and meet the enemy at bayonet point, the only armor a Marine will have is his khaki shirt!”
Then the fleet upped anchor and sailed for Betio.
At Betio more misfortune had befallen the
On November 1 the American Marines had landed at Bougainville and troops intended for Shibasaki had been sucked off to the Solomons.
On November 5 the American carriers had made their disastrous strike at Rabaul and had knocked out the cruiser screen of Vice Admiral Kondo’s Second Fleet.
On November 11 the American carrier planes came again, destroying many planes on the ground at Rabaul, shooting down something like go of them in ensuing dogfights. Many of these were the short-rangers from Truk which had been staged into Rabaul in preparation for strikes at the Marines on Bougainville. Now Shibasaki would not get his aerial cover. More, he had also been informed that the submarine force was badly depleted and he could expect the help of only a few undersea boats in the Gilberts.
By November 13, when the American fleet left Efate, aerial strikes at the Gilberts and especially Betio had risen in fury. American planes were constantly overhead from that date until November 10. On the eighteenth alone, carrier planes dropped 115 tons of bombs. Next day it was 69 tons and three American cruisers and two destroyers hurled 250 tons of projectiles into Betio the same day.
Clearly the Americans believed that they could knock out Betio. Shibasaki did not. He was confident as he moved among the 300 headquarters troops who shared his vast two-story bombproof at roughly the island’s center. He knew, and the Americans as yet did not, that only the direct hits of the biggest bombs could destroy most of his positions. His own bombproof he thought impregnable. As Keiji Shibasaki frequently assured his troops:
“A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years.”
The men actually coming to take it, in less numbers and time, were in the best of fighting shape, for they were already bitching.
They were openly “beating their gums” over the stench and heat below decks; about the confusion of crossing the International Date Line so often that one week had two Sundays and no Thursday; over being tricked by the “Hawkes Bay Hoax” and not having had the chance to say goodbye in style; about being offered the insult of assaulting an upside-down bird of an island rock while the Third Division was taking Bougainville-which even the Stateside folks had heard of-and the First had sneaked up to New Guinea to try to steal headlines from Dugout Doug; over the tedium of playing endless games of gin rummy, of smoking, of drinking lukewarm coffee that the swabbie messman handed you like he wanted to charge you for it; of washing socks and underwear by tying them to ropes and heaving them over the fantail to be cleansed by the wake from the propeller; of reading paperbacked mysteries, paperbacked westerns, Bibles, histories; and finally of having to be led below daily, platoon by platoon, to dissolve in puddles of their own sweat while the officers rolled down the bulkhead maps and went over their role on Betio-again and again and again.
It was the maps which gave the men the impression of Betio as an upside-down bird. They were of course oriented north, and because the parrot’s back was the south coast and the underbelly the north, the bird seemed upside down. The Marines were going to hit this north coast, the underbelly, with three battalions landing in three sectors almost exactly coextensive with the airfield, the bird’s head and body. In roughly the center of this was a long pier stretching out into the lagoon, and this gave the impression of the bird’s legs.
Attacking on the left or east would be the Second Battalion, Eighth Marines-detached to Colonel Shoup’s Second Marines for the assault—led by the red-mustachioed Major Henry (Jim) Crowe, a “mustang” up from the ranks and a commander as energetic as he was enormous. In the center would be the Second Battalion, Second, under Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Amey. On the right or west was the Third Battalion, Second, under Major John Schoettel. Major General Julian Smith would have his three remaining battalions in reserve, for his Sixth Marine Regiment was still detached to Fifth Corps.
The first three waves were to be led into the lagoon by destroyers
Julian Smith and his commanders still doubted that there would be enough water on the reef for the landing boats to cross it. Their only consolation was that they had had the forethought to provide themselves with enough amtracks to take in the first three waves. They took no comfort from the message sent them by the Tarawa force’s sea commander, Rear Admiral Harry Hill. It said:
“It is not our intention to wreck the island. We do not intend to destroy it. Gentlemen, we will obliterate it.”
8
The invasion fleet stood off Tarawa Atoll on the morning of November 20. Seventeen dark shapes slid into position about a mile off the western entrance to the lagoon, a few miles above the islet of Betio. They were the transports.
Below the lagoon entrance were the fire-support ships, battleships
