The Shore at Tarawa

A Small Island, a Big Door

Tarawa is an atoll in the Gilbert Islands, almost on the equator, more than two thousand miles southwest of Pearl Harbor.

Its main island is called Betio, and it is tiny. Less than three miles long. No more than eight hundred yards wide. Nowhere on it is higher than about ten feet above the sea.

Japan took Tarawa from the British in the first days after Pearl Harbor. On Betio, they built an airfield. And around that airfield, they built one of the strongest defenses any Allied force would attack in the Pacific.

Concrete bunkers. Pillboxes of steel and coconut logs. A seawall along the beach. Big coastal guns. Barbed wire and mines in the water. The garrison numbered about forty-eight hundred men. Some twenty-six hundred were elite naval infantry. The rest included construction troops and Korean laborers who had been forced into service.

Their commander, Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki, boasted to his troops that "a million Americans couldn't take Tarawa in 100 years."

But the road across the Central Pacific ran through the Gilberts. American planners wanted the Marshall Islands next, then the Marianas, then Japan itself. Therefore, Betio's airfield had to be taken first.

Shibasaki had built his fortress. And he had one more defender that didn't need a gun. It was lying just under the water.

The Reef and the Tide

The job went to the Second Marine Division, veterans of Guadalcanal, under Major General Julian C. Smith.

The planners knew the reef was the problem. It stretches hundreds of yards out from Betio's beaches. The standard landing boat of the day, the Higgins boat, needed about four feet of water to float a load of Marines over it.

Would there be four feet on the morning of the landing? Nobody could promise it. A New Zealand officer, Major Frank Holland, had spent years sailing those waters. He flatly predicted, "there won't be three feet of water on the reef!"

The Marines had one answer. The amtrac, short for amphibian tractor. A tracked vehicle that could swim like a boat, then crawl over coral like a tank. Amtracs had been built to haul supplies, not men into battle. But the division's operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Shoup, saw what they could do. The Marines bolted on makeshift armor and gathered every one they could find. One hundred twenty-five would go in.

But that wasn't enough to carry everyone. Later waves would still ride Higgins boats, and they would need the tide. Shoup made sure his men knew it was a fifty-fifty chance they'd have to wade.

Any sailor who's worked small boats knows you don't argue with a tide table. You plan around it, and you pray it's right.

On the day of the landing, it was a neap tide, the weakest kind. The water over the reef barely rose. Marines later called it a dodging tide.

The water never came.

The Long Walk In

Early on November 20th, Navy battleships, cruisers and destroyers pounded Betio. Planes bombed and strafed it. It looked like nothing could survive.

But the defenders had dug deep. When the guns lifted, they came back to their own.

A little after nine in the morning, the first amtracs crawled over the reef and hit the beach. Most made it. But many were stopped cold at the seawall, and Marines spilled out onto a narrow strip of sand under fire from every direction.

Then the Higgins boats arrived. They hit the reef and stopped. Some coxswains, seeing the slaughter ahead, dropped their ramps too early, in deep water. Marines weighed down with radios and ammunition sank, and many drowned.

As a Navy man, that one is hard to hear. A coxswain's whole job is getting his Marines to the beach. That morning, the reef took it out of his hands.

Which brings us back to that walk. The rest climbed out and walked. Five hundred yards. Sometimes a thousand. Chest-deep, then waist-deep, then knee-deep, through water raked by machine guns from three sides. In one battalion, seventy percent of the first wave of two rifle companies fell before reaching the beach.

On the beach, Staff Sergeant William Bordelon, a combat engineer, saw a shell hit his amtrac and kill most of the men inside. He led the survivors ashore. He built explosive charges by hand and knocked out two enemy positions. He was hit, and refused medical help. He ran back into the water to pull out a wounded Marine. Then he charged one more position with one more charge, and he was killed.

About five thousand Marines stormed Betio that first day. By nightfall, some fifteen hundred were dead, wounded or missing. The rest held a scrap of sand smaller than a quarter of a square mile.

Offshore, General Smith and the admiral in command sent a grim report up the chain. "Issue remains in doubt."

That night, the Marines waited for the counterattack that could push them into the sea. It never came. The naval bombardment had torn up the defenders' telephone lines, and the Japanese commander couldn't organize one.

They had survived the night. But the morning would bring the tide again.

Seventy-Six Hours

On the second morning, reinforcements came in. And once again, the water never came. The boats grounded on the reef. Marines waded about five hundred yards, and again they were cut down.

That morning, First Lieutenant William Deane Hawkins led his scout-snipers against one pillbox after another. He was shot in the chest and kept going, until a Japanese shell ended his fight. Shoup said of him, "It's not often that you can credit a first lieutenant with winning a battle, but Hawkins came as near to it as any man could." The airfield would later be named Hawkins Field.

Shoup himself had taken a shell fragment in the leg before he even reached the beach. He kept command anyway, first standing waist-deep by the pier, then beside an enemy bunker, directing the fight by radio. On the afternoon of the second day, he sent back a report Marines still quote. "Casualties: many. Percentage dead: unknown. Combat efficiency: We are winning."

He was right. The momentum had turned.

On the third day, a massive bombproof shelter held up the whole advance. First Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman led a small team of engineers straight up its sandy slope. When enemy troops poured out, Bonnyman stood in front, emptied his flamethrower, and charged with his carbine. He was killed. But his men held, and the strongpoint fell.

That night, the last defenders threw desperate counterattacks. The Marines threw them back.

At five minutes past one in the afternoon on November 23rd, the commanders announced that organized resistance on Betio was over. About seventy-six hours had passed since the first amtrac hit the seawall.

The shooting had stopped. Now someone had to walk the beach.

The Price and the Lessons

One of the men who walked it was Chaplain Wyeth Willard. He went along Red Beach One, where the first waves had waded in, finally clear of enemy pillboxes. He wrote down what he found.

"Along the shore, I counted the bodies of seventy-six Marines staring up at me, half in, half out of the water."

More than a thousand Marines and Navy corpsmen were killed at Tarawa. More than two thousand were wounded. Of roughly forty-eight hundred defenders, only one hundred forty-six were taken alive, and all but seventeen of them were Korean laborers.

Admiral Chester Nimitz said the capture of Tarawa "knocked down the front door to the Japanese defenses in the Central Pacific." Commanders learned fast. More amtracs, better armored. Swimmers to scout reefs before a landing. Better naval gunfire. Ten weeks later, American forces landed in the Marshalls and paid a smaller price.

Still Bringing Them Home

Many of the dead were buried on Betio, some where they fell, and after the war, hundreds couldn't be found. In 2015, a nonprofit called History Flight found a lost burial site. Alexander Bonnyman was in it. Seventy-two years after he charged that bunker, he came home to Knoxville, Tennessee. Teams are still searching today.

Our sponsor, Parcaut Supply Co., released a shirt today called The Shore at Tarawa, honoring these Marines. If you'd like to see it, the link is in the description.

As a Navy veteran, I think about the coxswains and corpsmen too. The Navy and the Marine Corps went in together at Tarawa.

And somewhere under the sand on Betio, Marines who walked in across that reef are still waiting to be brought home.

Tomorrow: after a year and a half on the trail, William Clark hears waves and writes six words in his notebook. Was he really looking at the Pacific? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Subscribe, and tomorrow's story will be waiting for you. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.