The World at War (37 page)

ROBERT SHERROD

I was conditioned by what I had gone through in the invasion of the island of
Kiska where we landed thirty-five thousand troops – thirty thousand Americans and five thousand Canadians – to do battle with the Japanese who as a matter of fact had been evacuated in a very clever move a few days before we made the landing. Nonetheless, once the wheels started rolling the full thirty-five thousand were landed and the only casualties were some American units that started shooting at each other, I think they killed about thirty and wounded about ninety.
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MARINE JOE HRUSKA

2nd Marine Division, Tarawa

I was at Pearl Harbor during the 7th December attack and I was in Guadalcanal, so I was exposed to warfare prior to this engagement. To me Tarawa was just another part of this war. We were briefed, of course, before the landing and it really didn't mean nothing to us, nothing really exceptional, nothing at all. It was just going to be another phase, another battle, another day in the life of a marine.

COLONEL DAVID SHOUP

CO, 2nd Marine Regiment, Tarawa

We didn't have too good an idea how many they were. We knew they'd been shipping Japanese in there and they'd been digging holes all over the place, but sometimes you can't tell. You might dig four holes for one soldier to fool the other fellow. We had this wonderful aerial photo of the island, which gave every position; it's absolutely unbelievable, I still have a copy of that map in which every foxhole showed up, every tank trap, every gun emplacement. From that we drew wonderful maps so that every squad leader had a map of his section, which showed what he was going to be confronted with, how many positions, how many guns and how many tank traps and all that but not how many people. Aboard ship one evening we were even going around the
island and counting the toilets.
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ROBERT SHERROD

Tarawa was the first step in the drive across the Pacific aimed at taking air bases from which Japan could be bombed. The bombing by B-29s, we knew even at that stage, was not going to be successful from China and it never was successful. So the drive was to break the inner barrier of Japanese defences and to do this we had to skip from one island to another, from one chain of islands to another. slapping most of them but taking certain key islands for air bases. The strategy was rather simple – the carriers went ahead and bombed the islands and the amphibious forces followed up. We were hoping all the time that the Japanese fleet wouldn't come out in enough strength to stop the drive, as it might have several times.

CORPORAL EDDY OWEN

2nd Marine Division, Tarawa

With the information we had before we went ashore we didn't figure there'd be too much opposition because we'd been told that they were going to drop all these bombs, they were going to drop seventy-two daisy-cutters, and in fact I believe the terminology they used was the equivalent of two destroyer-loads of high explosive would be dropped on the one square mile island. Well, we thought we'd just walk in, get a star on a bar, you know. So really the first time that I knew they were firing at us I was still on board and we were watching the bombardment, explosions, and we saw stuff hitting the water and we all thought it was some kind of large fish. Then all of a sudden someone screamed and we all dived into the paint locker, and I went ashore with two skinned knees because I happened to be on the bottom. By then of course we realised that there was opposition on the beach, as we had been told before we went in. We had been briefed, I believe, that there were eighty-four pillboxes around the perimeter of the airstrip and of course each one had a machine gun in it.

COLONEL SHOUP

We had no air bombardment. It was planned but the bombers that were supposed to come and hit the place and put down the daisy-cutters and just eliminate these buildings and all the trees to make it easier for us, they never got there. We got some later but it was not very much. You never have enough air support but the thing was by the next morning I'd gotten some requests out to the Fleet Commander for naval gunfire and bombardment in some particularly tough areas. There's nothing more effective than a five-inch or an eight-inch shell that lands in a foxhole – that's pretty damned effective, that's the end of that outfit. But if it lands twenty-five yards away, you wish it to hell.

ROBERT SHERROD

I've seen a lot of men who refused to go when they were ordered to. 1 spoke to Colonel Shoup about this and during the battle an officer came up to him and said, 'Colonel, I've got a thousand men out there and I can't get them to follow me across the airfield' – which was a very hot place to go, anyway. And Shoup said, 'You simply have to go and take as many with you as will come, and if it's only ten men that's better than nothing.'

MARINE PEDERSON

2nd Murine Division, Tarawa

We were told they were Imperial Marines and we were told there were quite a few over five thousand. We were told they were going to receive blockbusters before we got there, which we didn't see.
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ROBERT SHERROD

I was surprised when we found the boats would not go over the reef and we, except for those who could go in the limited number of amphibious tractors, would have to wade in to the beach, which was something like seven hundred yards and a very long wade indeed with machine-gun fire and mortar fire falling all around you. I felt very thankful to be alive considering the difficulty of getting ashore and the number of men I had seen killed. I was with half a boatload that crawled in under the pier, which somehow or other didn't have a lot of Japanese under it shooting at us, as they had before. So we managed to crawl towards the beach under the pier until the last hundred yards or so where the pier was solid under the water, and I felt a hundred times going in that I would never make it.

COLONEL SHOUP

I'd read a great deal about it, listened to the British people who were down there telling us about the tides and all that and we had estimates of the depth of the water over the reef. Our problem was that the LCVPs [Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel – aka Higgins boat] always drew a certain amount of water and of course the question was would there be that amount of water. We arranged to get a certain number of amphibious tractors which would take the men in to the beach, unload and then, hypothetically, come back out to the reef no matter if there was one foot of water or none and pick up another load and bring them in. Well, that's wonderful except the Japanese were in this battle too, and they didn't permit such a high percentage of these amphibious tractors to come back – they shot them up at the beach.

MARINE PEDERSON

I saw a lot of bodies floating on the water, a lot of marines and they still had their packs on. They had the worst of it, really, out in the water, because they came in on the
Higgins boats and they were dropped in pretty deep water. Some of them were fortunate enough to get to the pier, others weren't and they died right there in the water. The first, second and third waves were very fortunate because they were all in armoured amphibious tractors and the AmTracs all got to the beach. There were quite a few of them knocked off but at least the rest got to the beach and they got their men off. But then the fourth, fifth and sixth waves were in Higgins boats and they came up short because the reef was there and as they couldn't go no further they dropped their front and the marines got out, and the water was above their heads.

MARINE HRUSKA

We went in on regular old Higgins boats. At that time there wasn't too many half-tracks or AmTracs or whatever you call them and we had nothing but plain old Higgins boats, the old-fashioned plywood boats. We got up in the morning, had breakfast early and there was no commotion, no disturbance, no nothing, except that this was going to be no more than an exercise. And then of course when we went in to the island we discovered it wasn't going to be a drill. We discovered it when the ramp of the Higgins boat was dropped and we looked for a shore that wasn't there. We were quite some way out from the beach, far enough to the point where you couldn't see the beach for the turmoil of warfare, the smoke, the fire, the bombs, and we actually couldn't see the shoreline at all.

ROBERT SHERROD

People were always being shot just next to you, it seemed. After I'd got ashore and was leaning against the small sea wall – it was only four feet high and made of coconut logs banked with sand – and soon after I got ashore a marine came by and he cheerfully waved at a friend of his and all of a sudden he spun around with a bullet straight through the head. I suppose he was five feet from where I was at the time, but this was the danger unless you bent low and almost crawled along the beach. During the first night the Japanese did swim out to this old hulk of a freighter which had been sunk some time before and also to the disabled tanks and tractors hung up on the reef and opened up on our people, so the people coming in the second morning took the heaviest casualties because they were getting it not only from the front but from the sides. Very courageous thing the Japanese did – they were all killed, of course, but they caused a great deal of damage before they were.

MARINE PEDERSON

Out of this particular pillbox, or from behind the pillbox, came an Imperial Marine with a Molotov cocktail and I killed him. I continued on to the pillbox – until you throw your charge you usually go behind the pillbox – and there was also an Imperial Marine there, and I was not prepared for him and he was not prepared for me. He ran, thank God. Of course if he had been prepared for me, I would have been dead.

ROBERT SHERROD

We found that the man who had been shooting at people along the beach, such as the marine who was killed right in front of me, the sniper was in one of these devilish bunkers they had built. There was only a small slit at the top of a coconut log and we didn't assume that a Japanese would be crazy enough to be right in there. Finally Major Crow said, 'Hey, that shooting is coming from in there, fifteen feet away,' so a marine threw a hand grenade in and another one came up with his flame-thrower. The Japanese ran out at that time but they caught him with the flame-thrower and incinerated him. You can't have a lot of sympathy for him after you've seen him kill a man within five feet of you. It was the idea of a killer being killed, and the method of the killing did not make a great deal of difference to one's thinking at the time.

CORPORAL OWEN

By the third day the smell of death was terrible. Every day as the tide came in there was one navy corpsman that had been killed and when the tide went out they'd leave him hanging over the superstructure of the pier but we were afraid to get him because there were Japanese under there, we knew that. Finally, as some of them were captured – we were trying to capture the Japanese and take them back aboard ship for interrogation – finally, one night, we had to go and get this corpse so that we could bury it.

ROBERT SHERROD

The island was one square mile we thought; actually after the war we found it was only half a square mile. So if you can imagine nearly six thousand dead men on an island as small as three hundred acres, and considering that it's one degree from the equator and the amount of heat, you can imagine the smell that got within a day or two of all this rotting flesh, it was a terribly oppressive thing. I don't know anywhere in World War Two where there was such a concentration of death. I believe there was in the trench warfare of the First World War but certainly never again did I see such a concentration of death as there was on this tiny little island. The other thing that was so impressive, that is besides the very heavy casualties, was the speed with which it all happened – it only lasted seventy-six hours.

COLONEL SHOUP

We learned many, many things, which were later adopted in the procedures, and also gave warning to all other forces about what was likely to happen, and what had to happen if you were going to be successful. Many things had to be done better and naval gunfire had to be made a little more accurate and heavier, and maybe fired parallel to the beach instead of over the top of the landing force, so that you get a better chance for your shells to be effective. Also some of the smaller things which may not have added up as a tremendous thing but were very helpful. For example the Japanese came out on the beach when our tractors came in and threw grenades in. Well, the men that are down in the tractor have no chance to kill the Japanese – maybe the fellow that's running the tractor, if he hadn't already been knocked off or he becomes so fearful that he's out of action in effect. So the Japs will slip out and throw grenades in our tractors. Well, as you know our people get decorated for picking up a grenade and throwing it back but this is not so easy when you're six feet deep in a tractor. Well, as a result of that one of the things we did was we put chicken wire on top of the tractors and when someone threw a grenade instead of going into the tractor and exploding among the troops we could throw it off.

CHAPTER 15
VICTORY IN NORTH AFRICA

While many would agree with Lord Mountbatten's judgement that Bill Slim (see Chapter 28) was the finest general the Allies produced during the Second World War, Bernard Montgomery was entrusted with by far the greater part of British resources and consequently received much the most publicity during and after the war. Everybody in Britain followed the fortunes of 'Monty' and the Eighth Army, and church bells were rung when they won the grinding second battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942. Winston Churchill broadcast a cautiously worded welcome: 'This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end – but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning'.
The World at War
interviewers were interested mainly in Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, conditions in the desert and the allegedly chivalrous nature of the fighting, so I have had to dredge items such as the Allied landings in French North Africa on 8 November from interviews dealing primarily with other matters. Elsewhere, the massive Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad on 19–20 November was doubtless a more significant turning point, but thanks to Hitler's belated decision to pour men and resources into North Africa, more than 150,000 Axis soldiers became prisoners of war in Tunisia on 13 May 1943 – 60,000 more than the miserable German defenders of Stalingrad who surrendered to near-certain death on or around 30 January, the tenth anniversary of Hitler's rise to power. The North African campaign was free of the atrocities that were a feature of every other theatre, chiefly because it was not fought among the civilian population so there was only a very limited amount of what we now evasively call 'collateral damage'. But it is also the
case that the Italians who made up the bulk of Rommel's army were generally decent folk, and their deadlier allies behaved far better here than elsewhere, probably because there were no SS units in Rommel's army. But as several veterans testify in the following pages, it was not the 'clean' environment many believe it to have been: the essence of war is always brutality.