Original subtitles

At about 9 in the morning on the 20th of

November in the last weeks of 1943,

the first wave of American amphibious

tractors crawled up over the coral reef

that ringed the island of Betio and kept

going toward the beach. They were ugly,

slow, thin skinned boxes on tracks, and

they were the only vehicles in the

entire invasion fleet that could climb a

reef.

Behind them came the ordinary landing

craft carrying the rest of the assault,

and those boats did not climb anything.

They ran onto the coral and stopped dead

500 to 800 yd from dry land. The ramps

went down anyway. Marines stepped off

into water that came up to their chests,

and then they started walking.

Ahead of them lay half a kilometer of

shallow lagoon with nothing in it to

hide behind, and dug into the sand at

the far end were nearly 500 concrete and

coconut log firing positions, cited

months earlier to cover exactly that

stretch of water. The machine guns

opened up while the men were still

waiting. The Japanese officer who had

built those positions had told his

garrison that the island could not be

taken. Rear Admiral Ki Shibasaki had

told them a million Americans could not

do it in a century, and he was not being

theatrical. He had good reason to

believe it. Betto was the most heavily

fortified piece of ground the United

States had yet attempted to assault from

the sea. 76 hours later, it was over.

Out of a garrison of some 4,700,

all but a handful were dead. 17 Japanese

soldiers were taken alive.

The strongest island in the Pacific had

been built, garrisoned by elite troops,

supplied, and lost inside of three days.

And the reason it fell that fast is the

same reason it had been so terrifying to

attack. Betio was small. That is the

first thing to understand and it is

genuinely difficult to hold in your

head. The island is the largest in the

Terawa atole and it is about 2 and 1/2 m

long and no more than 800 yd across at

its widest point. The whole thing covers

less than half a square mile.

It is smaller than many airports. It is

smaller than a great many farms. Into

that space, the Japanese had put close

to 5,000 men, and something like 500

fighting positions.

There were pill boxes of reinforced

concrete, blockhouses roofed with layers

of coconut logs and sand, machine gun

nests dug into the beach, trenches

connecting them, and tank turrets set

into the ground as fixed gun positions.

There were coastal defense guns,

including 8-in naval rifles capable of

destroying a transport. Every position

was cighted so that its fire crossed

with the fire of others, and the whole

island had been arranged to kill men in

the water and on the sand. They had also

built a seaw wall. Along much of the

northern shore, where the Americans

would have to land, a barrier of coconut

logs about 4 ft high ran just above the

high water mark. Anyone who survived the

wade and reached the beach would find

himself pinned against that wall, unable

to advance with Japanese positions

firing along the length of it. There was

a reason for all of that effort, and it

was the airfield.

Betio had a runway, and a runway in the

Gilbert Islands sat squarely across the

American route into the central Pacific.

If the United States wanted to drive

west toward the Marshalss, the Maranas,

and eventually Japan itself, it needed

the Gilberts.

And the Japanese, understanding this

perfectly, had spent a year turning the

island around that runway into what one

of them called an unsinkable battleship.

The operation the Americans mounted

against the Gilberts was called

Galvanic, and Betier was only part of

it.

Other forces went ashore at Makin to the

north where a much smaller Japanese

garrison was overcome in a few days and

at Apamama which was taken by a scouting

party.

Terawa was the hard center of the

operation and it absorbed the second

marine division a formation of veterans

who had fought on Guadal Canal and had

spent the intervening months training in

New Zealand. The force that sailed for

the atal was enormous by the standards

of anything the Pacific had yet seen.

Something like 200 ships and more than

35,000 marines, soldiers, and sailors

were committed to seizing a few islands

with a combined area smaller than a

midsized town. Major General Julian C.

Smith commanded the division that would

make the assault under an amphibious

command structure that had been

assembled specifically for the central

Pacific drive and had never yet been

tested in a real fight. None of those

men had done this before and that

includes the admirals.

The whole apparatus of a modern

amphibious assault against a defended

shore, the naval bombardment schedules,

the control of successive waves, the

coordination of air support with troops

on the beach, the movement of supplies

across a reef was being attempted at

scale for the first time. Almost every

part of it went wrong somewhere on the

20th of November, and almost every part

of it was rebuilt afterward on the basis

of what happened. But the annihilation

of Batio's garrison did not begin at the

reef. It begins a year earlier with a

thousand Japanese engineers and 1,200

Korean laborers hauling coral and

coconut logs across half a square mile

of sand. Building a fortress so strong

that its designers stopped believing it

could ever be broken. To understand what

happened on that island, you have to

understand what the Americans were

actually attempting.

because it had never been done before.

Every amphibious operation the United

States had carried out up to that point

had gone ashore somewhere the enemy was

not or was weak. At Guadal Canal, the

Marines had landed almost unopposed, and

the fighting had come afterward.

In North Africa, the landings had been

against French troops of uncertain

enthusiasm. Nobody had ever assaulted a

small, heavily fortified island directly

across a defended beach. There was a

serious body of professional opinion

holding that it could not be done at

all. The British experience at Gallipoli

in the First World War loomed over the

whole question, and Gallipoli had ended

in a bloody failure that took 9 months

to admit. Military theorists argued that

modern automatic weapons and prepared

positions gave the defender such an

advantage at the waterline that a

frontal amphibious assault against a

fortified coast was simply suicide. That

argument mattered enormously because the

entire American strategy for winning the

Pacific War depended on the answer being

wrong.

The plan was to advance across the

central Pacific by seizing island bases

one after another, building airfields on

each and using them to cover the next

jump. Every one of those islands would

be small, fortified, and surrounded by

water. If a fortified atole could not be

taken by direct assault, there was no

road to Japan across the central Pacific

at all, and the war would have to be

fought some other way entirely. So

Terawa was a test and everyone involved

at the top understood it as one. The

Marine Corps had spent the 1930s

developing amphibious doctrine almost

alone, working out how to get organized

fighting units from ships onto a hostile

shore. And Betio was where that doctrine

would either be proven or discredited.

The men who went in were carrying an

argument as well as their weapons.

The plan had two great strengths and one

enormous well understood weakness.

The first strength was firepower.

The Americans assembled a bombardment

force of battleships, cruisers, and

destroyers and put something like 3,000

tons of shells onto an island of half a

square mile along with carrier air

strikes. On paper, the arithmetic was

absurd.

There were officers in the fleet who

said openly that they would not be

delivering marines to a battle. They

would be delivering them to an

occupation because nothing could live

through that weight of metal. The second

strength was a new machine and it is the

reason anybody reached the beach at all.

The amphibious tractor, which the

Marines called the Amtrak, was a tracked

landing vehicle that could swim in water

and then drive up over an obstacle and

keep moving on land.

It had been developed from a civilian

machine built for rescue work in the

Florida swamps, and it had been used at

Guadal Canal mainly as a cargo hauler.

Somebody realized that its tracks meant

it could climb a coral reef, which no

boat could do, and that made it the only

vehicle capable of guaranteeing a

landing regardless of the tide. Getting

them was a fight in itself.

The marine planners wanted Amtraks

badly, and the Navy was reluctant,

partly because they were fragile and

unarmored, and partly because there were

very few of them available.

In the end, the assault went in with

about 125, enough to carry the first

three waves and no more. Everybody

behind those waves would be in

conventional landing craft, and

conventional landing craft needed water

over the reef. There was one more

decision worth understanding, and it

turned out to be the right one for a

reason nobody expected. The planners

chose to land on the northern shore

inside the atoles lagoon rather than on

the open ocean beaches to the south. The

southern side had better water, but was

the side the Japanese had fortified most

heavily with the largest guns bearing on

the approaches. Going in through the

lagoon meant crossing a wider reef flat

and accepting a longer, more awkward

approach in exchange for hitting the

island where the defenses were somewhat

thinner. It also meant something

valuable that emerged only during the

fight. Two American destroyers, the

Ringold and the Dashel, were able to

work their way into the lagoon itself

and take up firing positions a few

hundred yards off the beach. From in

there, they could shoot directly at

Japanese positions along the shore over

open sights, and they stayed and did it

through the assault. Warships firing at

pointblank range from inside a coral

lagoon is not a maneuver that appears in

any textbook. And on the first day, it

was one of the few things that went

well. The heavy Japanese coastal guns,

the 8-in pieces the American estimate

had missed, were British-made naval

rifles that the Japanese had acquired

years earlier. Their crews used them

against the transports and the

approaching waves, and they were

dangerous enough that the fleet had to

keep its distance in places. Several

were knocked out by naval gunfire during

the bombardment, which was fortunate,

because a single wellserved 8-in gun

firing into a stream of landing craft in

shallow water could have made the

morning far worse than it was.

Which brings us to the weakness. And it

is the part of this story that Americans

found hardest to accept afterward

because it was their own mistake. Nobody

knew what the tide would do.

Beio's reef lay several hundred yards

offshore and the depth of water over it

varied with the tide.

The landing craft needed about 4 feet to

float across.

The planners expected roughly 5 ft at

the hour of the assault, which would

have been sufficient. What they had to

work from were fragmentaryary charts,

some old sailing directions, and the

recollections of a handful of former

residents of the Gilberts, one of whom

warned them bluntly that they could not

count on it. The date chosen fell during

a neep tide, the period in the lunar

cycle when the difference between high

and low water is smallest.

Instead of 5 ft over the reef, there

were three, and in places less. It was

not enough. Every conventional landing

craft in the assault, and there were

hundreds of them, was going to stop at

the coral and put its men into the water

hundreds of yards from shore. The

Americans got one other important thing

wrong. Intelligence had assessed the

Japanese coastal armament and concluded

there was nothing heavier than 6in guns

on the island.

In fact, there were 8 in naval rifles,

and their presence had been reported and

confirmed months earlier without making

it into the assault estimate. The men

going in believed the defenses were

weaker than they were. There was a

general confidence in the fleet that

turned out to be the most dangerous

thing aboard.

Officers had looked at the tonnage of

shells allocated to a target of half a

square mile and had concluded quite

reasonably on the arithmetic that the

problem was already solved.

Men were told the landing would be a

formality. That belief was passed down

to the assault battalions and it meant

that a great many young marines climbed

into their landing craft that morning

expecting to walk ashore onto a ruin.

What they were going up against was by

the standards of the Pacific War first

rate.

The core of the garrison consisted of

about 2,600

men of the Special Naval Landing Force,

which was the Japanese Navy's own

infantry, roughly equivalent to Marines,

and regarded as elite.

They were well equipped, well-trained,

and thoroughly dug in.

Around them were another thousand

Japanese construction troops and

some,200 Korean laborers who had done

most of the digging. Their commander,

Rear Admiral Ki Shibasaki, had arrived a

few months before the invasion, and his

approach to defending the island was

entirely orthodox for the Japanese army

and navy of 1943.

The doctrine said to destroy the enemy

at the wat's edge.

Everything went into the beach defenses.

Guns were cighted to hit landing craft.

Machine guns to sweep the shallows and

the sand. Obstacles laid to funnel boats

into the fire.

The whole island was a wall facing

outward. There was no defense in depth

to speak of because depth was not what

the doctrine asked for. There was no

plan for a long fight from prepared

positions in land. No tunnel network, no

scheme for giving up the beach and

bleeding the enemy over weeks. Shibasaki

did not intend to trade space for time.

He intended to kill the Americans in the

water, and if any of them got ashore,

his men would counterattack and drive

them back into it. It is worth pausing

to note that this was not stupidity, and

it was not even obviously wrong in 1943.

No one had ever taken a fortified atal

by frontal assault and the reason no one

had tried was that the professional

consensus said it could not be done.

Shibasaki was defending his island in

the way that every military academy in

the world would have recognized as

correct against an operation that most

experts considered impossible. He was

applying sound doctrine to a problem

that had not yet been solved.

What he could not know was that the

Americans were about to solve it in one

very expensive morning using a tracked

vehicle originally designed to rescue

people from swamps.

Nor could he know that the enormous

bombardment he was about to endure would

fail to destroy his fortifications and

would instead destroy the one thing his

plan could not function without, which

was his ability to give orders. The

garrison spent its last weeks working.

Photographs taken before the invasion

show an island stripped and rearranged

with a runway down the middle,

revetments and bunkers everywhere,

obstacles laid in the shallows, and the

coconut log seaw wall running along the

northern shore.

The Koreans and the construction troops

had produced out of coral sand and palm

trunks and imported concrete one of the

densest concentrations of fortification

per square yard anywhere in the Pacific.

The boast about the million men and the

hundred years was his. And the

interesting thing about it is how

reasonable it looked at the time. He had

elite troops, 500 mutually supporting

positions, heavy guns, a seaw wall, a

reef, and a doctrine that had never yet

been tested against a full frontal

amphibious assault because nobody had

ever dared try one. The bombardment

began before dawn on the 20th of

November, and it was, by every account,

the most terrifying spectacle any of the

watching Marines had ever seen.

Battleships fired at ranges so short

that they were practically point blank

for a 16-in gun. The island disappeared

under smoke and dust and flame. Trees

went up. Fuel dumps burned. From the

transports, it looked as though the

coral itself was being ground into

powder. It achieved far less than it

appeared to. Three hours of naval

gunfire and air attack destroyed some

positions and killed a number of

defenders.

The great majority of the pillboxes

survived.

Sand and coral absorb shellfire in a way

that concrete alone does not. And a low

structure roofed with layers of logs and

sand is a very hard thing to hit with

flat trajectory naval guns. The

Americans had used mostly high-capacity

shells rather than armorpiercing, and

they had fired for hours rather than

days.

But the bombardment did one thing that

nobody appreciated at the time, and it

may well have decided the battle. It

wrecked the Japanese communications

network on the island. Telephone lines

were cut, radio equipment was destroyed,

and command posts lost contact with

their subordinate positions. Shibasaki

was left with a garrison of well-trained

men in excellent positions who could no

longer be coordinated as a whole. Every

pillbox would fight its own battle.

That is not what a defensive plan built

around counterattack requires. The first

Amtraks reached the beach at around 9 in

the morning, and for a few minutes the

plan worked.

Then the situation began to come apart

in every direction at once.

Japanese fire from positions that should

have been destroyed tore into the

tractors and dozens of them were knocked

out on the reef and in the shallows.

Behind them the landing craft grounded

on the coral exactly as feared and the

wade began. It is worth being plain

about what that meant because it is the

image that defines this battle.

Men carrying weapons and equipment

stepped into chest deep water hundreds

of yards from shore and walked toward a

beach lined with machine guns.

They could not run. They could not take

cover. They could not shoot back with

any effect.

Some drowned in shell holes.

Some were hit and went under with their

packs. Officers and radio men were shot

down carrying the equipment that would

have let anyone coordinate what was

happening. The first wave lost heavily,

and the waves behind it walked into the

same water. There was one piece of cover

in all that lagoon, and men used it

because it was the only thing available.

A long wooden pier ran out from the

beach across the reef flat, built before

the war to service cargo ships, and it

gave a thin line of shelter to anyone

willing to work along its pilings.

Marines crouched behind it, moved along

it, and were shot off it. Taking the

pier and clearing the Japanese positions

at its head became one of the small,

desperate objectives of the first hours.

Among the men who fought, there was a

left tenant named William Dean Hawkins,

who led a scout and sniper platoon and

spent the first day and a half

systematically destroying Japanese

positions at close range.

He cleared pillboxes with grenades and

demolition charges, was wounded, kept

going, and was killed on the second

morning still doing it.

The airfield that the whole battle had

been fought over was named after him

afterward. He was one of the four men

awarded the Medal of Honor for Terawa

and one of the three who did not live to

know it. The losses among the Amtraks

tell their own story about the margin

the Americans were operating on. Of

roughly 125 vehicles that went in, more

than 90 were destroyed or disabled over

the course of the fighting.

They were unarmored, they were slow, and

they had to cross open water in full

view of prepared guns. The men who drove

them made repeated trips through that

fire, bringing men in and carrying

wounded out, and the reason there was a

beach head to reinforce on the second

day, is that those crews kept going

back. By the middle of the afternoon,

the assault existed as a series of

disconnected footholds.

Marines were pinned along the beach

behind that coconut log seaw wall in

places a few yards deep, unable to get

over the wall because everything beyond

it was covered by fire. Tanks were being

landed and drowning in shell holes in

the lagoon.

Nobody ashore had a clear picture of

anything. Command ashore fell to Colonel

David Shupe, who had come in wounded and

had gone forward anyway, and who spent

that first day and night running the

battle from a captured Japanese bunker

on the beach. There were still live

Japanese soldiers inside part of that

bunker while he worked. He had almost no

communications, no clear idea how many

men he had, and no way to move them. And

by every measure, the assault was on the

edge of failure. Late that first day, he

sent back a message that summed up the

situation exactly. Casualties, many

percentage dead, not known. Combat

efficiency, he said, was that they were

winning. That night was the moment the

battle could have been lost. Something

like 5,000 Marines were ashore in a

shallow strip along the northern

beaches, disorganized, short of water

and ammunition with the reef behind them

and the fortress in front. A coordinated

Japanese counterattack against that

lodgement delivered in the dark by 2,600

elite naval infantry who knew the ground

intimately might well have thrown them

into the sea. The Americans knew it and

spent the night waiting for it. It never

came. The attack that Japanese doctrine

demanded and that the situation invited

was never organized because the men who

would have had to organize it could not

talk to one another. The bombardment

that had failed to destroy the pillboxes

had destroyed the wires and the radios.

And so the garrison passed the most

dangerous night of the battle, sitting

in its excellent positions, fighting as

individual strong points, waiting for

orders that nobody could send.

That is where the first half of this

story ends, with the Marines holding a

few yards of sand and the fortress

unable to coordinate its own defense. It

took 8 hours to get every name and

number in this story right because

Terawa is usually told either as a

straightforward American triumph or as a

pointless massacre and it was neither of

those things.

If this is the history you want more of

hit like one like nothing more.

Thank you. The second day changed the

shape of everything and it changed for

two reasons.

The first was that the tide finally came

in, which allowed landing craft to cross

the reef and put reinforcements,

ammunition, water, and artillery onto

the beach in quantity.

The second was that the Marines had

worked out overnight, and largely by

themselves, how to kill a pillbox. That

method became the pattern for the rest

of the Pacific War, and it was invented

on that beach under fire by sergeants

and left tenants who had no manual for

it. A team would pin the firing slit

with rifle and machine gun fire so that

nobody inside could aim. Under that

cover, another man would work around to

the flank or the rear, where the

structure had no embraasure. Then came

flame or explosive. A flamethrower burst

through the aperture or a satchel charge

shoved against the wall or into a

ventilation opening and the position

stopped firing. Then the team moved to

the next one and did it again 500 times.

It was slow and it was appallingly

dangerous for the men doing the flanking

and it worked. Tanks helped where they

could get through, firing at blockouses

from a few yards away. Half tracks with

heavier guns were brought ashore.

Naval gunfire was called in on

individual strong points by observers

who could now actually see what they

were shooting at. But the essential work

was small groups of infantry with flame

and demolition charges. Moving from one

concrete box to the next. The

reinforcements that came ashore on the

second day made the decisive difference.

And getting them in required one more

improvisation.

A regiment held in reserve was landed on

the western end of the island on a beach

designated green where the water was

deep enough to work with and it came in

behind the Japanese positions facing the

lagoon. Artillery was landed as well,

and in one of the cleverest strokes of

the battle, a battalion of guns was put

ashore on a neighboring island in the

atole from where it could fire the

length of Betio's eastern tail without

any risk of being counterattacked. Tanks

made a difference, too, where they could

be got into action. Medium tanks had

been landed on the first day, and most

had been lost in shell holes in the

lagoon or knocked out by gunfire.

But a handful survived and worked with

the infantry, driving up to blockhouses

and firing into them from a few yards

away. The crews gave their vehicles

names, and the surviving tanks became

known quantities to the men fighting

alongside them. The thing the Marines

wanted most on that island was water.

Betto had no fresh water at all, and it

sat almost on the equator, and by the

second day, men who had been fighting

continuously in that heat were badly

dehydrated.

Water had to be brought across the reef

in cans in the same amtraks that were

carrying ammunition and taking out

wounded, and there was never enough of

it.

Some of the water that did arrive had

been stored in drums that left it

tasting of oil and made men who drank it

sick. The Japanese fought exactly as

their doctrine and their training

required, which is to say they fought

from where they stood and did not

withdraw.

Positions held out until they were

destroyed.

Men in bunkers that had been sealed off

kept firing at anything that passed.

Snipers stayed in place among the

wreckage of the palm grove and the

ruined buildings by the airfield.

Marines took ground and then discovered

that positions they had walked past were

still occupied and shooting them in the

back. Hit subscribe right now because

coming up is the death of the man who

said the island could not be taken. And

the night his garrison came out of its

holes to attack.

Do not go anywhere. By the end of the

second day, the Marines had pushed

inland across the airfield in the center

of the island and had cut Bato in two,

and they had linked their beach heads

into something resembling a continuous

line.

That mattered enormously. A garrison

that cannot maneuver and cannot be

reinforced on an island less than a mile

wide was now being compressed toward the

narrow eastern tail of the island. And

every hour of compression made the

American job easier and the Japanese

position more hopeless. Somewhere in the

first two days, Ki Shibasaki was killed.

Exactly how and exactly when are

genuinely uncertain, and both of the

accounts in circulation deserve to be

treated with care.

One version holds that he died on the

first day, killed by American naval

gunfire as he moved between command

posts. which would help explain why the

Japanese defense was never coordinated

after the landing. The other holds that

he died on the 22nd when Marines

assaulted the main command block house,

poured fuel into its ventilators, and

set it al light, killing everyone

inside. The two stories cannot both be

true, and the honest position is that

the sources disagree.

What is not in doubt is the effect.

Whether it happened on the first

afternoon or on the third day, the

central direction of the Japanese

defense collapsed early and never

recovered. And an island fortress

designed around counterattack and mutual

support was reduced to a collection of

individual positions, each fighting

until it was destroyed. That command

bunker was itself one of the hardest

single objectives of the battle. It was

a large blockhouse of concrete and sand,

and it took a coordinated assault with

tanks, artillery fired at pointblank

range, demolition charges, and finally

fuel poured down its air vents. Men

climbed onto the roof of an occupied

fortification to do it. The man who led

the assault on that block house was a

first lieutenant named Alexander

Bonnyman, who had been a mining engineer

in civilian life and had come into the

Marine Corps as an enlisted man in his

30s, having no particular need to be

there at all. He organized a party of

engineers and riflemen, worked them up

onto the roof of the occupied structure

with demolition charges and

flamethrowers, and held the top of it

against a counterattack from inside. He

was killed at the crest and the position

fell. His medal of honor was postumous.

There is a coder to Bonny man's story

that belongs in this episode. Like

hundreds of other Americans killed on

Betio. He was buried in a field grave

whose location was subsequently lost and

for 70 years his family was told that

his remains were unreoverable. In 2015,

a private organization working with

archaeologists located a burial trench

on the island containing dozens of

Marines, and Bonnyan was among those

identified.

He was flown home and buried in

Tennessee 72 years after he died. Three

of the four medals of honor awarded for

Tarawa went to men who did not survive

the battle. And the fighting around

positions like that one is why

the fourth went to Colonel Shupe who

lived commanded the battle from that

captured bunker with a wound in his leg

and went on to become commandant of the

Marine Corps. By the third day the

surviving Japanese had been forced into

the eastern tale of Betio, a strip of

sand a few hundred yards wide with the

sea on both sides and nowhere to go.

There was no possibility of evacuation,

no possibility of relief, and no

possibility of victory.

What happened next was the logical end

point of the doctrine those men had been

trained in. On the night of the 22nd,

the last organized Japanese force on the

island came out of its positions and

attacked.

There were several separate charges

through the darkness. men with rifles,

bayonets, and swords running at the

American lines. They came against

Marines who were exhausted and filthy

and had been fighting for two and a half

days, and who had artillery, mortars,

machine guns, and naval gunfire support

ready and registered. They were

destroyed.

That is the plain word for it.

The charges broke on the American line,

and the men who made them were killed in

the open, in numbers, in the dark.

Whatever one thinks of the courage

involved, and it was considerable, the

military effect was to take several

hundred trained infantrymen who had been

fighting effectively from cover and

deliver them into open ground against

prepared automatic weapons. That was the

end of organized resistance.

On the morning of the 23rd of November

1943,

the Marines cleared the last positions

on the eastern tip of the island with

tanks and flamethrowers and bulldozers,

and by the early afternoon, Betio was

declared secure.

76 hours had passed since the first

Amtrak crossed the reef. The accounting

is among the starkkest of the entire

war. of a garrison of roughly 4,700

men, 4,690

were killed.

17 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner

along with about 129 Korean laborers.

The garrison had not been defeated in

the ordinary military sense of being

beaten and forced to surrender. It had

been eliminated essentially in its

entirety in 3 days on an island of less

than half a square mile. The American

cost was terrible and completely

unexpected by the public that read about

it. 997 Marines and 30 Navy personnel

were killed and something over 2,200

more were wounded for a total of roughly

3,400

casualties in 76 hours.

In three days on an island most

Americans could not have found on a map,

the Marine Corps suffered losses

comparable to six months of fighting on

Guadal Canal. And then something

happened that no Japanese planner had

anticipated and no American planner had

prepared for.

The photographs came home. Combat

photographers and cameramen had gone in

with the assault waves, and what they

brought back was unlike anything the

American public had been shown before.

There were pictures of dead Marines

floating in the shallows and lying on

the sand among wrecked Amtraks.

There was film of the Wade and of bodies

at the waterline. Some of those images

were published in Life magazine and

elsewhere with the approval of a

government that had decided the public

needed to understand what the war

actually cost. The reaction was violent.

Americans had been reading about

victories for a year and had not been

shown what victories looked like. There

were angry letters to newspapers and to

Congress.

One mother wrote to a paper demanding to

know who had killed her son, and she

meant the American commanders rather

than the Japanese. There were public

demands to know who was responsible for

sending men to wade across half a

kilometer of lagoon under machine

gunfire, and whether the island had been

worth it, and whether the Marine Corps

had been reckless.

Members of Congress called for

investigations.

A grieving public that had been fed

communicates discovered photographs. One

of the men who shaped that reaction had

made the landing himself.

Robert Sherid, a correspondent for time,

waded ashore with the infantry on the

first morning, stayed on the island

through the battle, and then wrote about

it without softening anything. His

account described the wade, the bodies

in the shallows, the smell, and the

exhaustion, and it told American readers

plainly that this was going to be the

pattern of the war ahead, and that they

had better understand it. It was

published while the argument about the

photographs was still raging, and it did

a great deal to shift the argument from

outrage toward comprehension. President

Roosevelt personally approved the

release of the most graphic material,

which was not an obvious decision.

The government had spent 2 years keeping

American dead out of the newspapers on

the theory that the public would lose

its nerve.

The judgment made after Tarawa was the

opposite. That a country facing two more

years of exactly this needed to be told

the truth about the cost and that hiding

it would produce a worse shock later. It

was a gamble on the maturity of the

American public and on the evidence it

paid off. War bond sales did not

collapse. Enlistments did not stop.

A documentary assembled from the combat

footage released the following year won

an Academy Award and it did something

that mattered more than the award. It

showed the country the shape of the war,

it still had two years left to fight.

Whatever one thinks about the decision

to publish those pictures, and there is

a real argument about it, the effect was

to end a certain kind of innocence about

the Pacific. Here is how it unfolded in

order. The 20th of November 1943,

Amtraks crossed the reef while

conventional landing craft ground on the

coral and Marines weighed hundreds of

yards under fire to a beach pinned by a

seaw wall. That first night, the Marines

hold a narrow strip of sand, and the

Japanese counterattack that might have

destroyed them is never organized

because the bombardment had wrecked the

island's communications.

The 21st, the tide rises, reinforcements

and artillery come ashore, and the

systematic destruction of the pillboxes

begins with flame and demolition

charges. The 22nd, the Marines cut the

island in two across the airfield and

assault the main command blockhouse and

the surviving Japanese are compressed

into the eastern tail.

After dark on the third night, the

surviving defenders make a series of

charges against the American line and

are destroyed in the open.

The 23rd, the final positions are

cleared and Betio is declared secure 76

hours after the landing. The factors

behind that annihilation are worth

naming plainly. The first factor was the

amphibious tractor. Without a vehicle

that could climb the reef, the first

waves would have been stopped in the

water like everybody else, and there is

a serious case that the assault would

have failed outright on the first

morning.

125 ungainainely machines adapted from a

swamp rescue vehicle are the reason

there was a beach head at all. The

second factor was the destruction of

Japanese communications.

The naval bombardment failed at the job

it was designed for and succeeded

brilliantly at a job nobody had assigned

it. A defensive plan built on mutual

support and counterattack requires a

commander who can issue orders and after

the first hours the Japanese did not

have one. The third factor was the

American infantry method that was

invented on that beach. pin the

aperture, flank the position, burn or

blow it, move on. It was developed under

fire in a single day, and it became the

standard American technique for reducing

fortifications from that point until the

end of the war. The fourth factor was

the Japanese doctrine itself, and this

is the one that decided the scale of the

disaster.

Everything was at the water line. When

the water line was breached, there was

nothing behind it. Strip away the maps

and the casualty counts, and the fall of

Betio comes down to a single reversal

worth stating plainly.

The Japanese built the most heavily

defended island in the Pacific, and they

lost it in 3 days precisely, because

they had defended it so well in the

wrong place.

Every gun, every man, and every position

had been committed to killing the enemy

at the water's edge.

That produced an appalling first day for

the Americans, and no second line

whatever for the Japanese. A fortress

with no depth is not a fortress. It is a

thick wall, and once a wall is breached,

the thing it was protecting has nothing

left.

There is a second reversal folded inside

the first and it belongs to the

laborers. Of the men on that island,

roughly 1,200 were Koreans brought there

under compulsion to build the

fortifications and about a thousand more

were Japanese construction workers

rather than combat troops. They dug the

imp placements, hauled the coral, and

stacked the coconut logs. And then the

battle closed over them. When the

prisoners were counted, the great

majority were the Korean workers.

The garrison that fought to the last man

was in its final accounting

substantially made up of men who had

built the island rather than chosen to

defend it. Terawa taught both sides, and

that is the real reason it matters more

than its size suggests. The Americans

learned an enormous amount, and they

learned it fast.

Tide and hydrography became a serious

intelligence discipline rather than an

afterthought. And the Navy created

underwater demolition teams to swim in

ahead of landings, survey reefs, and

blow obstacles, which is the direct

ancestor of the modern SEAL teams.

Amtraks were ordered in far greater

numbers and given armor and guns. Naval

bombardment doctrine was rewritten to be

longer, to use armor-piercing shells

against fortifications, and to fire

deliberately at identified positions

rather than saturating an area.

Communications, control ships, and the

coordination of naval gunfire with

troops ashore were all overhauled. The

scale of the improvement is measurable,

and it is the clearest possible argument

that the lessons were real. Two months

after Betio, the same central Pacific

machine went into the Marshall Islands

and assaulted Quadrilain, an atal with a

comparable garrison in comparable

positions.

The bombardment lasted far longer, used

the right ammunition, and was directed

at identified targets.

There were amraks in quantity with

armor. The landings were surveyed

properly beforehand. Quadriline was

taken with a fraction of the casualties.

The Marines and soldiers who went ashore

there benefited directly from what had

been learned on a reef in the Gilberts,

and so did every American who landed

anywhere in the Pacific for the rest of

the war. That is the hard,

unscentimental case for what Betio

bought, and it is the case the men who

fought there generally made themselves

when they were asked whether it had been

worth it. the same central Pacific

machine kept getting better as it went

west. The lessons of Betio were paid for

in three days and applied for the

following two years. And every

subsequent American landing in the

Pacific was easier because of what

happened on that reef. And the Japanese

learned something too, which is the part

almost nobody tells.

They looked at Terawa and drew the

obvious conclusion, which was that

defending the beach against American

naval and air power was suicide.

The garrison had been annihilated in 76

hours.

So, Japanese planners began working on

something new. The coming doctrine gave

up the shoreline entirely and put the

defense inland and underground in caves

and tunnels.

It forbarred the banzai charge and it

aimed not at winning but at making each

island cost the Americans as much time

and blood as possible.

That doctrine appeared in its first full

form 10 months later on a coral island

called Pelu and it produced the

bloodiest amphibious assault in the

history of the Marine Corps. It appeared

again on Ewima and on Okinawa. Every one

of those battles is descended from what

the Japanese army concluded while

reading the reports from Betto. So both

sides took the correct lesson from the

same three days and both sides were made

more lethal by it. The Americans learned

how to get ashore. The Japanese learned

to stop contesting the shore and to make

the interior of every island a killing

ground instead.

The result was that the landings after

Terawa were generally easier and the

battles after Terawa were generally

worse. At Betio, the fighting was over

in 76 hours. At Pleio, it took 10 weeks.

On Okinawa, it took nearly 3 months and

killed more than 100,000 civilians.

There is a way of reading that which is

worth stating carefully because it cuts

against the natural shape of a story

like this one.

The doctrine Shibasaki followed

destroyed his garrison in three days and

is therefore usually written up as a

mistake. But the doctrine that replaced

it destroyed the garrisons that followed

just as completely and simply took

longer about it and charged more for the

privilege.

Neither approach saved a single Japanese

island. The choice available to those

garrisons by 1943 was not between

winning and losing. It was between dying

quickly and dying slowly. And Tarawa was

the last time a Japanese commander chose

quickly. So the strongest island in the

Pacific fell in three days. And in

falling it changed the way both sides

fought every island that came after it.

Shibasaki had been wrong, and he had

been wrong in a way that killed his

entire command. And the men who studied

his defeat made sure that the next

American landing would face something

far worse than a wall at the waterline.

The island itself is still there, low

and hot and crowded, part of the

Republic of Kiribati now, with a town

built over the battlefield.

Concrete pill boxes stand along the

beaches with the sea washing around

them, and the remains of the great

command block house are still visible.

The Japanese 8-in guns are still in

place, rusting, and the American dead

are still being found. Many of the men

killed on Betio were buried in hasty

field graves in the days after the

battle, and the records of those burials

were incomplete or lost. And when

recovery teams came looking after the

war, they could not locate hundreds of

them. Work has continued for decades.

Archaeological teams have excavated

trench lines and construction sites and

have recovered the remains of Marines

who lay under that sand for 70 years and

more. Some of them have finally been

identified and sent home to families

that had stopped expecting it.

That work is still going on, which is

the strangest thing about this battle to

hold in your mind.

Somewhere on that crowded little island,

under a house or a road or a football

pitch, there are still Americans in the

ground from a fight that lasted 3 days

in 1943.

And every so often, another one of them

is found and named and brought home. The

garrison that was annihilated there is

accounted for down to the last man. The

men who annihilated it are not. And

people are still looking.

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