U.S. Navy Combat Art Collection

      Artist Kerr Eby, who landed at Tarawa as a participant, entitled this sketch “Bullets and Barbed Wire.”

Across the Reef:

       The Marine Assault of Tarawa

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      by Colonel Joseph H. Alexander, USMC (Ret)

      In August 1943, to meet in secret with Major General Julian C. Smith and his principal staff officers of the 2d Marine Division, Vice Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commanding the Central Pacific Force, flew to New Zealand from Pearl Harbor. Spruance told the Marines to prepare for an amphibious assault against Japanese positions in the Gilbert Islands in November.

      The Marines knew about the Gilberts. The 2d Raider Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson had attacked Makin Atoll a year earlier. Subsequent intelligence reports warned that the Japanese had fortified Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll, where elite forces guarded a new bomber strip. Spruance said Betio would be the prime target for the 2d Marine Division.

      General Smith’s operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel David M. Shoup, studied the primitive chart of Betio and saw that the tiny island was surrounded by a barrier reef. Shoup asked Spruance if any of the Navy’s experimental, shallow-draft, plastic boats could be provided. “Not available,” replied the admiral, “expect only the usual wooden landing craft.” Shoup frowned. General Smith could sense that Shoup’s gifted mind was already formulating a plan.

      The results of that plan were momentous. The Tarawa operation became a tactical watershed: the first, large-scale test of American amphibious doctrine against a strongly fortified beachhead. The Marine assault on Betio was particularly bloody. Ten days after the assault, Time magazine published the first of many post-battle analyses:

      Last week some 2,000 or 3,000 United States Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of Concord Bridge, the Bon Homme Richard, the Alamo, Little Big Horn and Belleau Wood. The name was “Tarawa.”

Setting the Stage

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      The Gilbert Islands consist of 16 scattered atolls lying along the equator in the Central Pacific. Tarawa Atoll is 2,085 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor and 540 miles southeast of Kwajalein in the Marshalls. Betio is the principal island in the atoll.

      The Japanese seized Tarawa and Makin from the British within the first three days after Pearl Harbor. Carlson’s brief raid in August 1942 caused the Japanese to realize their vulnerability in the Gilberts. Shortly after the raid, the 6th Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force arrived in the islands. With them came Rear Admiral Tomanari Saichiro, a superb engineer, who directed the construction of sophisticated defensive positions on Betio. Saichiro’s primary goal was to make Betio so formidable that an American assault would be stalled at the water’s edge, allowing time for the other elements of the Yogaki (“Waylaying Attack”) Plan to destroy the landing force.

      The Yogaki Plan was the Japanese strategy to defend eastern Micronesia