Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

Bordelon pushed aside a medical corpsman who wanted to treat his wounds. He had heard the cry of “Help!” from the surf. There was a wounded man there. Bordelon dragged him ashore. He ran back into the water to find another wounded man and bring him in. Then, because he was either oblivious of his own wounds, or convinced that he was dying and that there was so little time, Staff Sergeant Bill Bordelon ran again at an enemy position.

And the Japanese gunners saw him coming and shot him dead.

The first battalion to reach Betio was the Second Regiment’s Third under Major Schoettel. At ten after nine two companies led by Major Mike Ryan reached the sea wall on the right or western beach. They crawled up under its lee, taking fierce machine-gun fire. Major Schoettel was still offshore with following troops. He couldn’t get in, and in two hours those companies under the sea wall were cut in half.

At seventeen minutes after nine Major Jim Crowe’s battalion hit the beaches on the left or eastern flank. Two of Crowe’s amtracks found a break in the sea wall and rolled through, speeding all the way across the airfield’s main strip before they were halted. But it was an isolated success. Sea-wall gun ports began to spit death among the Marines on the beach. Snipers picked off head after head raised above the wall. One of Crowe’s men strolled down the beach, heedless of the major’s angry bellowing to stay low. He grinned impishly at a wildly-gesturing buddy, and then a rifle spoke and the Marine spun and crumpled to the ground, and when he rolled over, face to the smoke-drifted sky, his eyes were bulging from the impact of the bullet which had passed behind them.

“Somebody go get that Jap son of a bitch,” Major Crowe yelled. “He’s right back of us here waiting for somebody to pass by.”

A Marine leaped up on the sea wall. After him came a flame-throwing team, one Marine with the twin cylinders of liquid fire strapped to his back and holding the nozzle out to spray, the other covering him with rifle fire. The Marine beyond the sea wall hurled blocks of dynamite into a pillbox 15 feet inland. There was a roar and clouds of smoke and dust billowed out. A mushroom-helmeted figure darted out the exit. The man with the nozzle squirted. A long hissing spurt of fire struck the Japanese soldier and he flamed like a struck match, shivered and was charred and still.

At the central beach, marked by the burning pier, Colonel Shoup was trying to come ashore to take command of the battle. With Shoup were Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson of Makin and Guadalcanal, who had come to Tarawa as an observer; the redheaded Major Tom Culhane, Shoup’s operations officer; Lieutenant Colonel Presley Rixey, commander of an artillery battalion; and Commander Donald Nelson, the regimental surgeon. They came to the reef in a landing boat. Shoup hailed an amtrack carrying wounded out to the transports. The wounded were transferred into the landing boat and Shoup’s party boarded the amtrack.

It was about ten o’clock, and as the amtrack waddled shoreward, Colonel Shoup listened to radio reports of the carnage on the beaches. On his right, Major Schoettel was still caught out on the lagoon, unable to reach those two companies being chopped up under the sea wall. From Schoettel, Shoup heard this:

“Receiving heavy fire all along beach. Unable to land all. Issue in doubt.”

Shortly after ten o’clock Schoettel radioed again:

“Boats held up on reef of right flank Red 1 (the western beach). Troops receiving heavy fire in water.”

Shoup immediately replied:

“Land Beach Red 2 (the central sector) and work west.”

Schoettel answered:

“We have nothing left to land.”

The first message had come out to the ships from the beach. No one could identify the sender. It said:

“Have landed. Unusually heavy opposition. Casualties 70 per cent. Can’t hold.”

To the Marines of the fourth, fifth and sixth waves waiting beyond the reef in landing boats and LCM’s, this meant one thing: they must hurry ashore.

They rode in to the reef and found the water no higher than three feet, and often only inches deep. They looked for the amtracks which were to take them into the battle.

There weren’t any.

Eight amtracks had been destroyed as the first wave attacked. Many more of them carrying the next two waves had been knocked out, and others were hit when they tried to back off the beach to return to the reef. Fifteen of them sank the moment they reached deeper water. Major Henry Drewes, commander of the amtrack battalion, had been killed. Nearly all the amtrack gunners were dead. They had dueled the shore guns, but they had been visible and unprotected. The enemy had been neither.

The men waiting outside the reef would have to wade in.

They clambered out of their boats, milled about on the reef while bullets keened among them, and then they jumped off it and began to walk through waist-high water.

The Japanese gunners hung on grimly to their triggers, for now they understood why Rear Admiral Shibasaki had been so confident of repelling the invaders. The Americans were walking along a broad avenue of death. There were so many of them falling they would surely stop coming.

But they waded on, from a quarter-mile out, from a half-mile out—unable even to fire their weapons, for they had to hold them overhead to keep them dry—sometimes stepping into coral potholes and going under, there to lose helmets and weapons.

“Spread out!” the officers cried. “Spread out!”

Pfc. Richard Lund came in with a radio and screamed as a bullet struck him in the right chest and came out his right arm. It spun him around and knocked him under. He arose and walked on. With the radio.

Marines died in the deep water, and died in the shallow surf where gentle waves rolled their bodies along the beaches. They fell like fanned-out decks of cards once they had gained the leftward beach and blundered into the point-blank fire of weapons poked through sea-wall gun ports. They were caught on barbed wire offshore and killed, and here Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Amey, commander of the Second Battalion, Second, met instant death.

Still they came on, even the wounded clinging to the burning pier, working their way in hand over hand. Above them Lieutenant Commander MacPherson gazed in horror from his observation plane, watching the tiny figures wading through the water with rifles held high, watching them vanish, feeling the tears of grief gathering behind his eyes.

But they got inshore, even the wounded, even the dying youth with his chest torn open who fell on the beach and cried for a cigarette.

“Here, I’ll light one for you,” a Marine said.

“No,” the stricken youth gasped. “No time… gimme yours…”

The cigarette was thrust into his mouth and held there. The youth drew, the smoke curled out his chest—and he died.

There were rifles stuck in the sand of the beaches and there were bottles of blood plasma hanging from them. The bottles were tied to rifle butts with gauze and their little rubber tubes ran down into needles jabbed in the veins of wounded Americans. Corpsmen talked gently to the stricken men, waving the flies away.

The corpsmen and the doctors worked throughout the clamor of battle. They laid the men out on stretchers, giving them plasma and morphine. Marine riflemen guarded them as they worked, for sometimes the Japanese attempted to sneak down to the beaches and throw grenades in among the casualties.

They came out from under the pier or from the latrines or slipped into the water from the hulk of the Saida Maru, a freighter which had been knocked over on its side by an American destroyer in the preinvasion bombardments. The Japanese swam to shore through their own fire. One of them appeared in the central sector. He came out of the water brandishing a grenade.