Strong Men Armed

without ponchos, and the chaplains moved among them somberly, their lips moving with final prayers or the words of last rites. Bodies that had been identified were quickly placed in the trenches. When a trench was full, the bulldozers roared and butted against the piles of sand. It was soggy wet sand, for it was impossible to dig more than four feet on Betio without striking water. The dead were covered over, the trench was rollered smooth—and a new one was dug. Many bodies were impossible to identify. One was brought in, headless, one-armed, a few shreds of flesh dangling from the neck like a slaughtered chicken. Robert Sherrod the war correspondent turned away.

“What a hell of a way to die!” he exclaimed, but a big, redheaded Marine gunner stared him in the eye and replied: “You can’t pick a better way.”

It was true. Any Marine would prefer being blown apart to the languishing agony of shrapnel or bayonets in the belly, to being left alone to perish in torment.

Many such solitary sufferers were being discovered this third day of battle. Corpsmen wading through the lagoon in search of bodies also found live men lying within wrecked and blackened amtracks. In one of these they found a dozen dead Marines and one who was still breathing.

The man had shrapnel in his head, arms and legs. He had not had food or water since he went down the cargo nets early in the morning of November 20. He had lain in the sun for two days and been broiled like a lobster. His rifle lay with its muzzle pointing up toward his throat and the corpsmen could guess that he had tried to kill himself but had not had the strength to reach the trigger. They spoke to him gently, assuring him that his ordeal was over. He opened his cracked lips and mumbled:

“Water—pour water on me.”

Major General Julian Smith was on Betio.

He had left Maryland and boarded an amtrack along with Brigadier General Thomas Bourke, his artillery commander. They had gone ashore at the western beach. They had inspected defenses and then gone back aboard the amtrack to move around to Red Mike Edson’s command post by water. As they passed The Pocket, where Major Hays’s men were battering enemy strong points, machine-gun fire struck the amtrack. The driver was wounded, and the amtrack knocked out. Smith and Bourke had to transfer to another, but they made it in. At four o’clock Smith sent off this discouraging message to Brigadier General Leo Hermle, his assistant division commander:

Situation not favorable for rapid clean-up of Betio. Heavy casualties among officers make leadership problem difficult. Many emplacements intact on eastern end of the island. In addition many Japanese strong points to westward of our front lines within our position that have not been reduced. Progress slow and extremely costly. Complete occupation will take at least five days more. Naval and air bombardment a great help but does not take out emplacements.

That night the Japanese themselves improved the situation for Smith, coming out of their emplacements in a boomeranging banzai charge.

They struck at Major Jones’s First Battalion, Sixth, where it held down the right or southern half of a 400- yard cross-island line. This line was drawn just east of the airfield, where the bird’s body ends and the narrowing tail begins. The left or northern half was held by Major Crowe’s men.

The attack was made skillfully at first. Some 50 Japanese slipped past an outpost line and at half-past seven had opened a small gap between two companies. They were obviously there to feel out the Marine positions. They tried to draw fire.

But the Marines did not shoot. They struck at the Japanese with bayonets and clubbed rifles and grenades, and while the beach guns and the howitzers on Bairiki converged in a hemming line of fire between the lines, they killed them to a man.

In the interval between this thrust and the second attack, Major Wood Kyle moved a company of Marines into reserve behind Jones while Major McLeod leapfrogged one of his companies forward to fill the gap this movement left. At eleven o’clock the Japanese came again, this time with two 50-man parties. They fired openly, shouting and throwing grenades aimlessly. A score of them came charging at a BAR position held by Pfc. Lowell Koci and Pfc. Horace Warfield. They were clearly silhouetted in the glare of gasoline fires lighted behind them by Marine mortars.

The Marines fired. They ducked down to reload and a Japanese soldier jumped into their hole thrusting with his bayonet. It drove into Warfield’s thigh. The Japanese strained to withdraw it, and Koci, a husky 200-pounder, seized his BAR by its muzzle and swung it around like a whip. The butt struck the man behind the head and brained him. His legs thumped the sand as he fell.

Again the artillery cut off retreat for these infiltrating Japanese, and the Marines went about the work of destroying them.

At four o’clock in the morning of November 23, with the moon making a grotesquerie of the coral flats— humping the convex roofs of the pillboxes, squashing the squares of the blockhouses, catching the jagged stumps of coconut trees and drawing them out like giant corkscrews—some 300 more Japanese launched the counterattack which broke their own backs.

They flowed up against the Marine lines yelling and jabbering, and for a time there seemed to be too many of them. Lieutenant Norman Thomas telephoned Major Jones and yelled: “We’re killing them as fast as they come at us, but we can’t hold much longer. We need reinforcements!” There wasn’t time for reinforcement; there was only time for what Jones was sternly commanding:

“You’ve got to hold!”

While the destroyers Schroeder and Sigsbee hurled salvo after salvo into the Japanese assembly areas, while the shells of the Marine artillery fell within 75 yards of the front lines, Thomas and his men fought with rifle, bayonet and grenade. By five o’clock the banzai charge was shattered. There were 200 dead Japanese within the Marine lines. There were 125 more torn and broken corpses out where the artillery had fallen.

There were now only 500 Japanese left alive on Betio.

12

The men of the Second Marine Division were rushing to victory on the morning of November 23. They were going downhill. The taste of triumph was in the air, and all those who pressed for it moved with a mastery that must have been annihilating to the souls of the enemy.

At seven o’clock, the first of the carrier aircraft plunged to the attack. They bombed and strafed for half an hour. For another quarter-hour, pack howitzers hurled their shells into the tail of Betio. Warships on both the ocean and lagoon sides thundered for the next fifteen minutes, and then it was eight o’clock and time for the riflemen to attack.

“Let’s go!” cried Lieutenant Colonel McLeod, and the Third Battalion, Sixth, swept forward with crackling rifles.

They were the freshest troops on Betio. They had not yet fought. They passed through the lines held by Major Jones’s Marines—now exhausted from a day and night of constant fighting—and spread out on a two- company front to punch down the length of the narrowing tail. In front of them clanked Colorado and China Gal-those indestructible Shermans which were still capable of battle—while seven light tanks rolled to either flank.

The attack gathered momentum. It raced forward 150 yards within a matter of minutes. The Japanese defenders fired only fitfully at the onrushing Americans—and then turned their weapons on themselves.

On the left or lagoon side a system of supporting bombproofs slowed one company down. McLeod sent the other company racing down the ocean flank in a bypassing movement. Once they were past the bombproofs, the Marines of this company spread out again. Behind them the bypassed company moved in on the bombproofs, while Lieutenant Lou Largey brought Colorado into position. The liquid fire of the flame-throwers began to describe its fiery are—disappearing through the mouths of the gun ports. Suddenly a door flew open in the biggest of the