Strong Men Armed

side of the lagoon passage below or southwest of Roi.

At eight o’clock in the morning of January 31, even as Mr. Madison of Majuro was regaling the Recon Boys with palm toddy, Rear Admiral Richard Conolly ordered the bombardment of these tiny specks of coral to commence. After the naval guns came the carrier planes, after them came the rocket boats swooshing their missiles aloft like flights of arrows, and next the wallowing amphibian tanks—the “armored pigs”—striking the seaward side and blasting away with cannon. A few minutes before ten, the Marines of the Division Scout Company and the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth, were churning ashore.

Most of the few-score Japanese had killed themselves. There were others to be killed during a swift mop-up on both islets, but squalls and a wild surf turned out to be more of an obstacle to the landings than the enemy. Before eleven o’clock Lieutenant Colonel Clarence O’Donnell was able to radio that the islets were secure. An hour later artillery began to come ashore. At the same time minesweepers approached both channels. Moving slowly, almost as though they were butting the mines aside, the stubby little vessels entered the passages while carrier planes swooped over Roi-Namur’s lagoon beaches to lay down a covering smokescreen. Slowly, like the rising thunder of a storm, the fury of fire issuing from three battleships, five cruisers and 19 destroyers grew around Roi- Namur. Fires were leaping from Namur’s lagoon beaches under the pounding of Tennessee and Colorado. To the west Maryland was hurling steel and fire at Roi and its airstrip. But Admiral Conolly wanted Maryland to make sure of Roi’s blockhouses.

“Move really close in,” he radioed Maryland.

The Marines were delighted. This was what they had wanted at Tarawa. Mighty old Maryland was less than a mile offshore. Her spotter could see the targets. Admiral Conolly had earned his nickname. Henceforth he would be known to Marines as “Close-in Conolly.”

The men of the Underwater Demolition Teams were returning to the destroyer Schley, reporting their work successful. More Marines were moving across the lagoon to take a trio of islets just below Namur. They were the Second and Third Battalions, Twenty-fifth, led by Lieutenant Colonels Lewis Hudson and Justice (Jumpin’ Joe) Chambers. They seized the islets. Artillery was brought ashore here too.

All was in readiness for the next day.

In the morning four battalions of land-based artillery began firing, the bombardment ships hurled the last of 2,655 tons of steel into two islets not a mile-square apiece and the carrier planes bombed and strafed once more. As one Marine cried out exultantly: “This time we’ve got what it takes! This time we’ve got everything!”

Everything, as he would soon discover, would have to include the rifle slung over his shoulder.

27

It was a bright pink dawn, but neither Roi nor Namur could be seen in it. Only the narrow white lines of their beaches were visible, with here and there a jagged coconut stump sticking out above the smoke, flames, dust and flying rubble.

The skies became overcast. There were squalls. The lagoon water was choppy and Marines became nauseous in their amtracks. They cursed the hold-up caused by the novelty of bringing the LST’s into the lagoon. They had been scheduled to attack at ten o’clock, but now they would not make the 4,000-yard run to shore until twelve o’clock.

They should have been thankful for the delay. By the time they hit the beaches, not a single Japanese officer of consequence was alive to direct the defense of either island. Even as the amtracks formed in line and swept shoreward, a 1000-pound bomb fell on the Namur bomb shelter holding the seven senior officers who had survived the bombardment which killed Admiral Yamada and most of his staff three days ago. It was now every man for himself.

The Twenty-third Marines landed on Roi at exactly noon and raced rapidly inland against almost no opposition. Seventeen minutes later Colonel Louis Jones was jubilantly signaling Major General Schmidt: “This is a pip! Give us the word and we’ll take the island.” But Schmidt ordered Jones to halt and reorganize while warships shelled the northern half of Roi.

At four o’clock, with tanks leading the way, the Twenty-third swept forward again. A hundred separate skirmishes erupted. Dazed and leaderless, the Japanese fought singly or in small groups. They hid in drainage ditches and fired into the rear of the advancing Marines. They made desperate stands in ruined pillboxes. At one of these Pfc. Richard Anderson pulled the pin of his grenade to throw and the missile slipped from his hands. There was no time to retrieve it. It had been his fault and he compensated for the error by smothering the grenade with his body and was killed. The men whose lives he had saved moved forward.

They raced across Roi’s airfield until at six o’clock they had come to the northern beaches on the sea. There they found an enemy trench filled with dead soldiers. The Japanese had placed their rifle muzzles under their chins and kicked the triggers with their big toes. They lay there in precise rows, as though they had been obedient to the last, killing themselves on order.

Roi had fallen to the Twenty-third Marines, but it had also fallen to the bombs and shells of the invasion fleet, to the howitzers set up on the lower islets. The horrible efficiency of that preinvasion bombardment was nowhere more evident than in the desolation of Roi’s three-strip airfield.

Hundreds of Japanese lay sprawled around it, their bodies horribly mutilated. They were caught in attitudes of flight as though they had been cut down while running for safety. They lay in huge shellholes and in ruined blockhouses. Sheets of corrugated iron were strewn everywhere. Gaunt, denuded concrete pilings stuck out of the ground in rows and the buildings they had held together were heaped about them in rubble. Japanese aircraft littered the airstrips like broken giant birds. There was nothing left, only a handful of doves cooing in a dovecote atop an unharmed radio station, a few little red chickens dashing noisily about, a pig nosing the ruins, and a big white foolish goose which had escaped the invaders’ shellfire only to land in their cooking pot.

Roi was the quickest conquest of the Pacific, but across the causeway of Namur there was a real battle going on.

“Okay, you liberty-hounds,” Sergeant Pappy Meeks had bellowed, “let’s go ashore!”

Meeks’s platoon had gone charging up Namur’s lagoon beach, along with all the other assault platoons of the Twenty-fourth Marines, and had lost contact with headquarters almost immediately. Major General Schmidt’s staff had to depend for information on a Douglas dive-bomber which roamed the skies about the battlefield with a major named Charles Duchein in its rear-gunner’s seat.

Shortly before noon, immediately after the bombardment lifted, Major Duchein reported Japanese soldiers crossing the causeway from Roi to Namur. At half-past twelve he reported that the Twenty-fourth Marines had landed successfully on Namur, but were running into opposition from pillboxes and blockhouses that were still standing.

Shortly before one o’clock Major Duchein peered down at Namur’s eastern shore to see a Marine assault team moving against what seemed to be a giant blockhouse.

But the building was used as a warehouse, and it was stuffed with torpedo warheads.

Lieutenant Saul Stein led his men up cautiously to the big blockhouse on Namur. One of his Marines slipped forward and placed a shaped charge against the side of the building. He ran back and ducked.

The blast tore a hole in the side of the building.

Out the hole, out exits suddenly flung wide, came streams of Japanese soldiers.

Lieutenant Stein’s Marines were too surprised to open fire. They were not bewildered. They had heard the Japanese were crazy.

“Throw in some satchel charges,” Stein ordered.

They were thrown in.