Marines died in the deep water, and died in the shallow surf where gentle waves rolled their bodies along the beaches. They fell like fanned-out decks of cards once they had gained the leftward beach and blundered into the point-blank fire of weapons poked through sea-wall gun ports. They were caught on barbed wire offshore and killed, and here Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Amey, commander of the Second Battalion, Second, met instant death.
Still they came on, even the wounded clinging to the burning pier, working their way in hand over hand. Above them Lieutenant Commander MacPherson gazed in horror from his observation plane, watching the tiny figures wading through the water with rifles held high, watching them vanish, feeling the tears of grief gathering behind his eyes.
But they got inshore, even the wounded, even the dying youth with his chest torn open who fell on the beach and cried for a cigarette.
“Here, I’ll light one for you,” a Marine said.
“No,” the stricken youth gasped. “No time… gimme yours…”
The cigarette was thrust into his mouth and held there. The youth drew, the smoke curled out his chest— and he died.
There were rifles stuck in the sand of the beaches and there were bottles of blood plasma hanging from them. The bottles were tied to rifle butts with gauze and their little rubber tubes ran down into needles jabbed in the veins of wounded Americans. Corpsmen talked gently to the stricken men, waving the flies away.
The corpsmen and the doctors worked throughout the clamor of battle. They laid the men out on stretchers, giving them plasma and morphine. Marine riflemen guarded them as they worked, for sometimes the Japanese attempted to sneak down to the beaches and throw grenades in among the casualties.
They came out from under the pier or from the latrines or slipped into the water from the hulk of the
A Marine sentry charged him and bayoneted him in the belly and then shot his bayonet free.
As the doctors worked on, corpsmen loaded the wounded aboard the amtracks which took them to the reef and the waiting landing boats. Men needing immediate care were draped over rubber boats and hauled to the reef by hand.
From the reef the wounded went to the transports, and sometimes they were shelled en route and there would be dead among them by the time they came alongside the ships. On one of these ships a landing boat with a gaping five-inch shellhole in its side was hoisted on deck. The wounded were taken out. But there were three dead Marines. Their bodies were placed in winding sheets and taken to the rail. Chaplain Harry Boer was called. He was a young minister. He had never said burial service before. Marines and sailors removed their helmets and Chaplain Boer spoke:
“We are in the presence of the last enemy, death. We did not know these men personally, but God does— and therefore we commit them unto Him who is the righteous judge of the earth.” There was the screech of a plane diving to bomb a Japanese ammunition dump, and the chaplain paused, waiting for the explosion ashore. A sheet of flame rose into the air. The Dauntless had hit the dump. It had also knocked out a Marine tank, but no one aboard ship knew this. They bowed their heads again as the chaplain continued: “It is for us, the living, in the presence of these dead, to devote ourselves more seriously to the task before us. I am the Resurrection and the Life, and he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
The white-sheeted figures went over the side. There was a splash. An impersonal voice blared over the bullhorn on the bridge:
“The issue ashore is still in doubt.”
It was, and Colonel David Shoup, who was trying so hard to get there, was being struck by savage fire.
Heavy machine-gun fire raked Shoup’s amtrack as it neared the beach. The vehicle slewed around and retreated to the end of the pier. It circled to the east or left side and joined a wave of LCM’s lightering dual-purpose medium tanks to Jim Crowe’s embattled battalion.
Then a pair of Japanese 75-millimeters spoke.
Colonel Shoup’s amtrack again returned to the pier. An exploding mortar shell wounded Shoup in the leg, all but knocking him unconscious. But he was still determined to get ashore, for now he was out of contact with Major Schoettel’s battalion on the right.
Schoettel’s battalion was attacking, though its leader was still unable to get ashore. Major Mike Ryan had reorganized the two shattered sea-wall companies and struck inland. They were slowly rolling up the enemy, and there were six Sherman tanks coming in to help them.
The tanks left their LCM lighters on the reef and came on through water up to their turrets. Men walking with flags guided them around the treacherous potholes. The Shermans came slowly, leaving wide-spreading V’s in their wake, rocking and lurching as their 75’s roared. When they reached the beach they found it so littered with dead and wounded they could not pass. They would not crunch over the bodies of their buddies, dead or living, and they backed into the water again to make for the gap which the engineers had blown in Shibasaki’s sea wall.
Pfc. Donald Libby wondered if anyone would come for him. The battle had grown fiercer since he had been hurled into the water and had seized hold of his ruined amtrack. Now he could hear the clanging, tooth-rattling
Libby had heard the dreadful slaughter of the Third Battalion, Eighth Marines, as they came to reinforce Major Jim Crowe’s battalion on the left.
They came speeding up to the reef five boats abreast. The landing ramps came banging down.
The boat farthest right vanished. It had been there and then it was not there.
Hardly a third of that first wave reached the beach. Then the second wave of Crowe’s reinforcements started ashore. Colonel Shoup shouted at them from the pier, waving his arms and ordering them to come his way, to take shelter behind the pier and wade to the central beach. They did, but by the time the second wave got ashore it was badly disorganized.
At last Colonel Shoup got in. He set up his command post in a hole dug in the sand behind a pillbox full of Japs. He was 15 yards inland, but he could see almost nothing of the battle for the dust that hung over Betio.
It was everywhere, a cloying caking dust that was thick and clogged in the nostrils, coarse in the throat and clotted in the corners of the eyes. It swirled in dense clouds or sparkled in tiny jewels within those shafts of hot sunlight sometimes made visible by explosions that rent one cloud of dust only to start another.
Into this dust at about noon came the First Battalion, Seccond. Its men joined the attack in the central sector under Major Wood Kyle. They were also riddled and many of them were deflected toward that right or western flank where Major Ryan still attacked and the tanks rolled toward the sea-wall gap.
Four of the tanks had foundered in potholes, but two of them reached Ryan as he re-formed for a flanking assault through the pillboxes on the western shore. The Shermans rolled over foxholes, blasted pillboxes open with their cannon, and machine-gunned the escaping survivors. Once Lieutenant Ed Bale’s
On the left a pair of 37-millimeter antitank guns had been dragged ashore. The boats carrying them had been sunk, but the gunners had rolled their heavy wheeled weapons through the water. They got them up on the beach, but there was still no way to get them over the sea wall. Two Japanese light tanks were seen bearing down
