Strong Men Armed

modernized and sent out to join bombardment forces.

It was about half-past three in the morning. A half-moon flitted in and out of fleecy clouds. It was cool. Marines going down cargo nets into waiting landing boats could feel the perspiration drying on their foreheads.

They came from stifling galleys in which they had dined on steak and eggs, french fried potatoes and hot coffee, a meal as sure to induce perspiration as it provoked dismay from the transport surgeons who would soon be sewing up some of these men.

“Steak and eggs!” a surgeon aboard Zeilin exclaimed. “Jesus, that will make a nice lot of guts to have to sew up-full of steak!”

The men were boated now, moving slowly away from the big ships, coming to make the difficult transfer to the amtracks. They made it without accident. The attack lines were forming a quarter-mile off the lagoon entrance. Little Pursuit and Requisite were darting into the channel to sweep it clear of mines -and at 4:41 A.M. a red star-shell swished into sight high above Betio and a half-hour later the Japanese shore batteries opened up.

The American battleships fired back.

Aboard Maryland the great long lengths of steel fingered the sky. One of them leaped. Flame spouted from it. A streaking blob of red sailed toward Betio. Marines in their tiny churning boats could watch its progress. They saw no explosion on Betio. The shell was short. Again the great gob of orange flame and the speck of streaking red, and again no explosion. But then dawn seemed to burst like a rocket from western Betio. A great sheet of flame sprang 500 feet into the air, and the explosion which succeeded it sent shock waves rolling out over the water.

Old Maryland had hurled one of her 16-inch armor piercers into the ammunition room of the eight-inchers mounted on Betio’s western tip. It was perhaps the greatest single bombardment feat of the war, for that shell of more than half a ton had killed men by the hundreds and had detonated hundreds of tons of enemy shells, and utterly wrecked the eight-inchers’ blockhouse. And then Tennessee and Colorado began to thunder. All the battleships were firing in salvos, drifting in and out of their own gunsmoke as they paraded the Betio shoreline. Heavy cruisers belched flame and smoke from eight- inch muzzles. The lights roared away with six-inchers. Destroyers ran in close to send five-inch bullets arching ashore with almost the rapidity of automatic weapons.

Betio was aglow. She was a mass of fires. Great dust clouds swirled above her. Smoke coiled up and fused with them. Fires towered high and lit them with a fluttering pink glare. It seemed that Admiral Hill had been right, that Betio would not greet another dawn. The islet was being torn apart. She was no longer visible beneath that pall, now frowning, now glowing.

Then at forty-two minutes past five the American warships ceased firing. The American carrier planes were coming in, and it would be well to let the smoke clear so that the Dauntlesses and Avengers and the superb new Hellcat fighters could see their targets.

But the air strike did not arrive, and in the interval those “pulverized” Japanese began firing back.

They shot at the transports with five-inchers and those eight-inchers still operative. They drove the transports off, and plowing after them in flight went the amtracks and landing boats loaded with Marines. For half an hour the fleeing transports duck-walked among exploding shells, and then, because the air strike had still not arrived, the American warships resumed fire.

For ten minutes the air was filled with their bellowing, and then with the islet again glowing, the carrier planes came in. Hardly a bursting enemy antiaircraft shell or bullet rose to chastise these strafing, swooping planes, and it seemed that Betio was surely zemmetsu. Again she was swathed in smoke.

But as Pursuit and Requisite entered the lagoon through the reef passage, shore batteries on the landing beaches lashed out at them. The minesweepers called for Ringgold and Dashiell. The two graceful destroyers swept into the lagoon, firing as they came, with amtracks full of Marines churning after them.

A shell struck Ringgold to starboard, passing through the engine room. But it didn’t explode. Another. Again a dud. Through the smoke and fire ashore Ringgold’s gunnery officer had spotted the flashes of her tormentor. Her five-inchers swung around and gushed flame. There was a great explosion ashore. The enemy gun’s ammunition dump had been hit.

It was getting close to nine o’clock and the amtrack motors were rising to full throttle. The swaying clumsy craft were going into Betio. They were taking harmless air bursts overhead, taking long-range machine-gun fire with bullets rattling off their sides. The wind was blowing Betio’s smoke into their faces, blowing the water flat and thin over the reef-but the amtracks were bumping over it and boring in. Now the Marines were ducking low beneath the gunwales, for a volcano of flame and sound had begun to erupt around them and there were amtracks blowing up, amtracks beginning to burn, amtracks spinning around, slowing and sinking—for if they cannot move they sink—and there were amtracks grinding ashore and rising from the surf with water streaming from their sides, with helmeted figures in mottled green leaping from them and sprinting over the narrow beaches toward the treacherous sanctuary of the sea wall; and falling, falling, falling as they ran.

The Scout-Sniper Platoon went into Betio five minutes before the first wave. It was led by a lieutenant named William Deane Hawkins, but hardly any of the platoon’s 40 men could remember Hawk’s first name. He was just Hawk, lean and swift like a hawk, a man as convinced of victory as he was sure of his own death in battle. Hawkins had joined the Marines with this remark to his closest friend: “I’ll see you some day, Mac-but not on this earth.” He had come up from the ranks, actually risen, unlike that legion who “come up through the ranks” by marking time as an enlisted man while powerful friends push their commission through channels.

Hawkins and the Scout-Snipers went in to seize the pier extending about 500 yards into the lagoon. It split the landing beaches, and from it those numerous Japanese latrines now filled with riflemen and machine-gunners could rake the Marine amtracks passing to either side.

Hawkins had his men in two landing boats, one commanded by himself, the other by Gunnery Sergeant Jared Hooper. In a third boat were the flame-throwing engineers of Lieutenant Alan Leslie.

They came in and hit the reef. They were held up there just as enemy mortars began to drop among them and drums of gasoline stacked on the pier began to burn. Sniper and machine-gun fire raked the boats. Airplanes were called down on the enemy guns while Hawkins and his men awaited transfer to amtracks. They got them and rode in to assault the pier. They fought with flame-throwers, with grenades, with bayonets. They fought yard by yard, killing and being killed-while the pier still burned-and swept ashore to attack enemy pillboxes.

Like Hector in his chariot, Lieutenant Hawkins stood erect in his amtrack while it butted through barbed wire, climbed the sea wall and clanked among the enemy spitting fire and grenades.

In another amtrack called The Old Lady was a stocky corporal named John Joseph Spillane, a youngster who had a big-league throwing arm and the fielding ability which had brought Yankee and Cardinal scouts around to talk to his father. The Old Lady and Corporal Spillane went into Betio in the first wave, a load of riflemen crouching below her gunwales, a thick coat of hand-fashioned steel armor around her unlovely hull. Then she came under the sea wall and the Japanese began lobbing grenades into her.

The first came in hissing and smoking and Corporal Spillane dove for it. He trapped it and pegged it in a single, swift, practiced motion. Another. Spillane picked it off in mid-air and hurled it back. There were screams. There were no more machine-gun bullets rattling against The Old Lady’s sides. Two more smoking grenades end-over-ended into the amtrack. Spillane nailed both and flipped them on the sea wall. The assault troops watched him in fascination. And then the sixth one came in and Spillane again fielded and threw.

But this one exploded.

Johnny Spillane was hammered to his knees. His helmet was dented. There was shrapnel in his right side, his neck, his right hip, and there was crimson spouting from the pulp that had once been his right hand.

But the assault troops had vaulted onto the beach and were scrambling for the sea wall. Though Johnny Spillane’s baseball career was over, he had bought these riflemen precious time, and he was satisfied to know it as he called, “Let’s get outta here,” to his driver and the squat gray amphibian backed out into the water to take him