War Stories II (46 page)

Mike Ryan assembled the remnants of two battalions and organized a charge that effectively eliminated Japanese resistance on the western end of the island. General Julian Smith came ashore and established his command post in what had been one of Admiral Shibasaki's command bunkers. Unbeknownst to the Marines, the Japanese commander was already dead. When he and his staff had moved to a secondary command post on the south side of the island, a sharp-eyed Marine had spotted them. With a radio finally dried out and working, the Marine had alerted a destroyer just outside the reef. The Navy responded instantly, firing salvo after salvo over the heads of Marines in the open. They scored a direct hit, killing Shibasaki, his chief of staff, his gunnery officers, and his operations officer. It probably changed the course of the battle.

On the night of 22–23 November, the now leaderless Japanese launched three futile and uncoordinated counter-attacks. The Marines, now better supplied, mowed them down. As the battle entered its third day of fighting, additional troops were landed across Green Beach and came ashore without opposition.

With most of the airfield now in Marine hands, General Smith ordered his weary troops to clear the Japanese pocket that still held between Red Beaches Two and Three and to conduct a sweep east down the narrow length of the island. As they were preparing to do so, a message to Tokyo from the remaining Japanese defenders was intercepted by Navy code-breakers: OUR WEAPONS ARE DESTROYED. FROM NOW ON EVERYONE WILL ATTEMPT A FINAL CHARGE. MAY JAPAN EXIST FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS.

Only thirteen Japanese were captured, most of them wounded or unconscious, and about a hundred Korean slave laborers gave themselves up. That afternoon, shortly after 1300 on 23 November 1943, General Smith declared that organized resistance had ended on Tarawa atoll.

But the Battle for the Gilbert Islands wasn't quite over. On Makin atoll, a hundred miles north of Tarawa, the poorly prepared soldiers of the 27th Division had taken two days longer than expected to secure tiny Butaritari Island. Though there were fewer than 400 enemy combatants on the little spit of sand, the 6,000 American soldiers had suffered sixty-four killed and 152 wounded. Another forty-three U.S. sailors had been killed and nineteen wounded in the pre–H-Hour bombardment when a turret exploded on the battleship
Mississippi
. By the afternoon of 23 November all but one of the Japanese defenders were dead and 104 construction workers and Korean laborers were captives. Unfortunately, things were about to get worse for the Americans.

Early on 24 November, while the Navy waited impatiently for the Army to backload onto their waiting transports, a Japanese submarine slipped through the destroyer screen around Makin atoll and sent a torpedo into the side of the carrier escort
Liscome Bay
. She blew up immediately, taking 650 of her 900 men to the bottom.

The following day, American and British flags were raised and flown over Tarawa. However, there was still the grim task of burying the dead. Some 6,000 men—5,000 of them Japanese defenders—lay dead on this tiny island atoll on the equator, their corpses strewn across an area smaller than the Pentagon and its parking lots. More than 1,000 Marines had been killed and about 1,500 wounded.

Later, when Admiral Nimitz toured the island he remarked that it was the first time that he had actually smelled death. He was likewise astounded that most of the Japanese bunkers, pillboxes, and gun emplacements seemed to be only lightly damaged despite the initial furious naval and aerial bombardments.

Nimitz directed that detailed architectural drawings of all the fortifications be made and had exact replicas of the Japanese defenses constructed on the naval gunnery range at Kailavi. He then insisted that every destroyer, cruiser, and battleship heading into the western Pacific pass a test of destroying these fortifications.

Marine Corps combat cameraman Sergeant Norman Hatch had a ringside seat for the battle and documented it through the lens of his motion picture camera.