Tarawa Was A Grim Lesson

For Tojo

By Harold Cooper

THE battle of the Gilberts in November was, for the Japanese, one of the most significant of the war, for it demolished a theory on which their whole Pacific strategy had been based.

Until Tarawa fell, the master minds of To jo’s High Command had be lieved that it was possible to fortify small islands so strongly as to make them virtually impregnable, and had conjured up gratifying pictures of the American foe squandering his superior strength in a series of costly and vain assaults against positions on the outermost fringe of the Japanese de fences.

THERE is ample evidence that the Jap Admiral in command at Tarawa expected to hold out against all-comers. And he had some ex cuse for being cocksure.

The tiny islet of Betio, which was the key to the enemy’s defence system in this area and on which the most savage fighting of the brief but bloody campaign took place, was quite literally a floating fortress. Not a single device prescribed by the text books of modern warfare had been overlooked.

On the seaward side its shores were protected by row after row of barbed wire and behind the wire was a thickly sown minefield. The island was trisected by two colossal anti tank ditches and between them, built on a site wfcich was obviously regarded as being one of the safest spots in the Central Pacific, stood the Jap battle headquarters, a massive concrete structure looking as though it might have been borrowed from the Maginot Line. .

Betio is roughly triangular in shape and at its three corners were formid able batteries of six and eight inch guns—two of them made by Vickers, though whether they were acquired by pre-war purchase or salvaged from

. .. some fallen Asiatic bastion such as Singapore is not known. defend this miniature Gibraltar I fth h that . js D erhans a false

Betfo TsTs flat as

a billiard table) the Japs had a garnf more than 4 000 nicked men between a thousand and Korean labourers available as somewhat dubious reserves This meant a ne ten to the acre that wherever the Marines landed were b?Sd to find the Japs -Z underfoot before very long. wS ammun ition and food including many thousands of tins of British pmpwpnpv rations cantured in emergency rations Ldyiuieu

Malaya. They were ready for a long siege and were confident of their ability to survive it.

This supposedly shell-proof, bomb proof, invasion-proof citadel, on the fortification of which such particular care and such generous expenditure of resources of all kinds had been lavished, was brought under complete American control after a battle last ing only five days. Whatever else Betio might claim to be, events have certainly shown that it was not Marine-proof.

THE important feature of the Betio victory is that the circumstances in which it was achieved justify the assumption that it can be and will be repeated over and over again. There was no fluke about it, no lucky break which could be said to have swayed the teetering fortunes of battle and decided the issue in favour of the Marines.

The Marines won on their merits;

and, indeed, what mischances oc curred were to the benefit of the defenders.

Thus, at the end of the first day’s fighting, two out of the three Marine bridgeheads had been lost and the third was held so thinly that the Japs may well have calculated that one last spirited counter-attack would suffice to fling the remnants of the invasion force back into the sea.

That night there prevailed on the corpse-strewn beaches of Betio a crisis. precisely similar in nature though not comparable in scale to that which General Mark Clark’s sth Army had to live through at Salerno.

By all the rules of warfare that last flimsy toe-hold was doomed to swift effacement.

But the Marines have rules of their own and those rules required that there should be no further retreat That final perimeter, buckling at half a dozen points and exposed to every conceivable variety of crossfire from a murderous concatenation of Japa nese guns, had to be held. And held it was, until tight-lipped reinforce ments came ashore in the half light of dawn to plug the gaps in a line that sagged and swayed but never broke.

THE crisis had passed, but the battle had yet to be won. According to Japanese anticipations, that battle was to have been a long-drawn-out affair, with the defenders exacting such a sickening toll of the attackers that the assault would at length be broken off from sheer exhaustion.

But, in the event the frenzied fanaticism of soldiers who believed that death in action would earn for them rare privileges in some warriors’

Valhalla proved no match for the cold-blooded courage of boys who hated to die, but who were serenely determined that nothing should dis tract them from the fulfillment of their sombre duty.

In four days of furious carnage on Betio the Japs learned the fateful lesson that fanaticism is not enough and that a nation which is collec tively prepared to disembowel itself should its Emperor give the signal is not thereby necessarily qualified for the role of conqueror of the world.

In a bloody, slogging contest with grenades, knives, bayonets and tommy guns as the chief weapons, the Marines gave nearly 4,000 Japs their passports to Valhalla and would have issued more had not the supply of applicants run out.

Five days after the ramp of the first American landing barge touched Betio’s shining coral beach the im pregnable fortress had been subdued; and, inside his concrete battle head quarters, the Japanese Admiral lay dead, with the bodies of 300 of his countrymen sprawled round him.

THE booty seized was fascinating in its variety, and included im pressive stacks of paper money which the paymaster had accumulated in anticipation of cpmmitments which were destined never to be incurred.

The story is told of one Marine who, the day after the battle had ended, was asked by an officer: “How are things going?”

“Fine,” he replied. “I won 10,000 yen at poker last night.”

The Japanese war-lords can have no illusions left, confronted as they now are by these two disturbing facts: the fortresses with which they have ringed their eastern Empire are vul nerable, and the soldiers who garrison those fortresses are very/very mortal.