What Happened in the Battle

Battle of Tarawa

By R. W. Robson

UNTIL November 30, there was a certain mystery about the oper ations in the Gilberts. It seemed that the flat, narrow islets, with deep water right up to the ocean side, presented a fairly simple problem for the attacking forces. It was assumed that while our air supremacy took care of enemy aircraft, our warships would lie fairly close in, and literally plaster the low terrain with high ex plosive, while the assaulting forces dashed ashore, under cover of the ships’ guns and our own aircraft.

But it soon became clear that, while something like that may have happened on Butaritari and Abe-, mama, there was an entirely different story on Tarawa. The operation there was difficult and protracted, and the atoll was not occupied before the US Marine had suffered severely.

Now we know what happened.

There was a sudden shift of the wind: the ocean currents and tides did not follow their usual course; and the assaulting parties of Marines, instead of landing on the edge of the islet of Betio, were stranded on coral reefs many hundred yards from the shore, and had to struggle forward through shallow water.

Further, the Japanese, evidently ex pecting this kind of operation, had covered the flat surface of Betio with cement pill-boxes, buried deep under masses of coconut logs and further masses of packed coral soil. The islet was heavily bombarded; but nothing but a direct hit from a big shell could disturb those pill-boxes.

The Marines had to struggle ashore through the coral reefs and heads, and there is no more difficult, pain ful and more poisonous walking in the world. As they advanced through the shallows, and then assaulted the pill-boxes, they were literally mown down. Yet they eventually rooted all

those Japs out of their innumerable pill-boxes, and occupied the islet of Betio. They hunted the Japs on to the next islet, Bairiki (site of the famous trainifig school for Micro nesian boys) and eventually wiped them out. It was a bloody affair, but it will stand as one of the finest achievements of this famous Corps.

IKNOW those treacherous tides of Tarawa. Only two years ago— almost to the day of the American assault —I was out on a schooner in the lagoon and, when I tried to re turn to Betio, I found that the tide had run out in a phenomenal way, so that there were only a few inches of water over half a mile of inter vening reefs, where big launches usually floated comfortably. The very

next day, the tide rose so high, at a time when it should have been low, that it flowed over the edges of the low atoll.

It was sheer bad luck that it should have happened at the moment of the American attack.

The manner in which the Japanese defended this Tarawa atoll gives a significant colour to the prospect of assaulting similar atolls in the near by Marshalls, which have been held by the Japs for 20 years, and towards which American faces now are turned.

It would appear that the Japs can so place concrete pill-boxes in the coral formation that they are almost wholly protected against the bombs of our planes or the shells of our ships.