War Stories II (44 page)

To the Marines headed toward the beach and the pilots flying overhead, it looked as if the entire island was on fire. The wooden barracks, equipment sheds, and Shibasaki's headquarters building were blasted into splinters and burning. Huge billows of black smoke and suspended particles of sand were blasted into the air by the shells and bombs, and the cloud drifted a mile into the sky.

Unfortunately, the first three assault waves—using 125 LVTs—took much longer than expected to make it across the coral reef. As soon as the destroyers stopped firing, the Japanese defenders rushed back to their guns, raking the tracked amphibians as they crawled up onto and across the reef
where the water was only two or three feet deep. Few of them made it to the beach unscathed. Worse still, all the LCMs and LCVPs carrying the fourth, fifth, and sixth waves for Red Beaches One and Two ground to a halt 600 to 1,000 yards offshore, forcing the Marines to disembark and wade through chest-high water under heavy machine gun and mortar fire. In many places, the water was even deeper. At Red Beach Three, those who made it to the beach were exposed to withering fire from Japanese gunners hidden in the pilings of the long pier jutting out into the lagoon.

For the Marines who had watched the pre-landing bombardment and finally made it to the beach, the results of that volume of enemy fire was unbelievable. It seemed like the only thing those thousands of tons of munitions had done was to push a little sand around and cut down a few palm trees.

Twelve miles offshore, General Smith and Rear Admiral Hill waited for a situation report aboard the flagship USS
Maryland
. But most of the radios that the assault waves had taken with them had been soaked during the reef crossing and were now useless. It was only after Colonel David M. Shoup, the assault commander, managed to get up to the seawall and find a dry radio did they realize the magnitude of the carnage on the beach. Smith immediately committed the division's reserves to the fight, sending in another 1,100 Marines. By 1800, nearly 5,200 exhausted troops were ashore—most of them in two widely separated pockets—and almost a third of them casualties. One of those who had made it was Lieutenant Don Lillibridge from Mitchell, South Dakota.

With four battalions of his 2nd Division ashore, General Julian Smith and his staff sought ways to break the bloody deadlock. Once darkness fell, the shooting stopped almost entirely. An expected Japanese counter-attack never materialized because the communications wires connecting Admiral Shibasaki with his subordinate commanders had all been cut by the furious bombardment and the gunfights earlier in the day.

Exhausted Marines from intermingled units held onto their positions in three-to-five-man foxholes dug in the soft sand or in shell holes and bomb craters created by the pre-landing bombardment. On the beach, Navy medical corpsmen continued to load wounded into LVTs, shuttling them back out to the ships. On their return trips to the beach the Amtracs brought in 75 mm howitzers, mortars, ammunition, fresh working radios, and water for the terribly dehydrated Marines.

As the night wore on, LCVPs and LCMs that had made it across the reef at high tide were policing up bodies and equipment floating in the lagoon. Among the salvage officers engaged in this grisly task was movie star Eddie Albert. Now a lieutenant (jg), he had volunteered for the Navy after Pearl Harbor and was serving as a small boat officer on the USS
Sheridan
, a transport anchored offshore.

At thirty-three, Albert was likely one of the oldest lieutenants in the Navy. He could have been in Hollywood making training movies. Instead, he went to Officers' Candidate School, got his commission, and was assigned as a salvage officer off Betio.

During the operation he made twenty-six trips bringing back the wounded from Betio. On one of his forays into the seawall, he picked up a wounded Japanese officer. He told how it happened: “There were piles of dead and wounded and I was in the mess . . . and a Japanese was among the wounded . . . standing up. And I thought, ‘Well, he's the only Japanese that knows what is going on. Maybe I could get him up to our ship.' He's the only Japanese that the interrogators had to talk to—the rest of them were dead.”

Eddie Albert said that the multiple trips to the beach were just part of “doing his job.” But he was awarded the Bronze Star for valor. One of those who believe he deserved it is Dean Ladd, a rifle platoon commander who spent much of the night of 20 November circling offshore in the lagoon, waiting to get ashore and help his pinned-down comrades. Ladd was only twenty-two but already a combat veteran of Guadalcanal by the time he reached Tarawa.