Eyewitness tells of landing –
Johnson: Yanks storm ashore under withering fire to crush Japs on Tarawa in bloody battle
One Marine major uses shotgun to blast snipers
By Richard W. Johnston, United Press staff writer
With U.S. Marine assault forces at Tarawa, Gilbert Islands – (Nov. 23, delayed)
Exactly 60 hours ago, the sea off this tiny island was swarming with Higgins landing boats and I was scrambling down a net with U.S. forces that were about to launch an assault on Tarawa.
It was 8:30 a.m. (local time) – zero hour – and the U.S. Marines were about to land again, and write another glowing chapter in their long and honorable history.
This was “D-Day” and for an hour, our big battleships offshore had been pouring shells onto the atoll. Still earlier – shortly after 6:00 a.m. – carrier-borne dive bombers peeled off above the island.
Orange flames shot into the air and then a pillar of black smoke rose slowly. We had hit a Jap ammunition dump.
I was assigned to a battalion commanded by Maj. Henry Pierson Crowe, 44, who has spent 24 years in the Marine Corps. We went down the nets at 8:30 a.m. and our boats streaked for the beach.
Then we were ashore and I flopped down in the sand. The Jap snipers opened up and bullets began whistling overhead. Then enemy machine-gunners put a curtain of fire across the beach.
Mortal shell crashes
I got to my feet and started forward, but a mortar shell crashed nearby and flattened me face down in the sand. Then another ammunition dump exploded and all of us were bounced off the ground by the explosion. Coral and debris rained down as I got to my knees and started crawling up the beach toward a primitive command post. There I saw one of the strangest sights I ever expect to see.
Maj. Crowe, standing upright and ignoring the Japanese fire, was stomping back and forth issuing commands and carrying a 12-gauge shotgun. Every once and a while, he would swing the shotgun to his shoulder and take a potshot at a Jap sniper.
I paused there a moment and had time to think back on our landing and wonder how any of us had come through it alive. About 1,500 yards out from the shore, the Japs began to fire on our boats. A few minutes later, there was a crashing, scraping sound and our boat was hung on coral, 1,000 yards from the shore.
Maj. William C. Chamberlin of Chicago, Illinois, a former economics professor at Northwestern University, and now our battalion executive officer, decided on the spot to abandon ship. He plunged into water shoulder-deep and we followed him. The Jap machine-gunners let us have it and all we could do was to keep walking through the water toward the shore. It was the longest walk of my life.
Men fall into water
Bullets cut ripples in the water around us. A Marine walking by my side dropped with a bullet through his leg. I could see men falling into the water, wounded or dead. All the boats in our wave of the assault had been hung up on the coral and the water was filled with Marines plunging and slipping toward the shore.
That walk through the water was bad enough, but we still had our troubles at the command post where Maj. Crowe was blasting away at the Japs with his shotgun.
The Japs were endeavoring to pin our men down behind a natural barricade of sand. But time after time, the Marines went over the top in the face of Jap fire without hesitation or reluctance.
The Japs maintained a steady fire from a reinforced concrete blockhouse only 100 feet from our post until Maj. Crowe ordered up a demolition squad with flamethrowers. A great ball of flame engulfed the blockhouse and there was no more resistance from that quarter.
Wave after wave of Marines thrust against the Jap positions widening the beachhead.
Just after noon, a reinforcing wave appeared offshore. As the Higgins boats scuttled for the beach, Jap emplacements on our flank opened up with a five-inch automatic weapon and blew two of the boats out of the water.
Planes work over area
Survivors plunged into the sea and swam toward shore under relentless machine-gun strafing.
Maj. Crowe shifted several companies against the Jap flanking position because it was evident they would have to be knocked out if our incoming boats were to be saved.
At 2:30, after the bitterest fighting, our men fell back to give Hellcat fighters and dive bombers a chance to work over the area.
For more than an hour, our planes crisscrossed it, hitting a point less than 200 yards from my foxhole. The din was head-splitting but not as bad as that made by the destroyers which opened up with a tremendous fire.
After the destroyer finished, the Hellcats and dive bombers gave a return engagement. They came drilling in 60 feet off the water, their fire reverberating like a stick dragged over a washboard.
After the bombardments, our men were able to bring our casualties to the more or less protected area behind the barricade.
Typewriter survives
I broke out my typewriter, which had somehow survived the trek through the breakers and typed up my notes.
Beside me lay a boy with a shot through his shoulder. While my fingers tapped the typewriter keys, a Marine on my left died.
Then the Hellcats came over for a last pass at the Japs and something creased my chest. It was an empty .50-caliber shell kicked out by the planes. I thought at first it was a bullet.
Gradually, our men were pushing the Japs back across the island. Every man from private to major conducted himself without thought of personal safety. Because of this, many will never leave Tarawa. Their grave will be in its shifting sands.
But because they died, the Japs will leave Tarawa.