Wednesday, November 26, 2008
More About Tarawa
Jules Crittenden does a longer post on Tawara, regarding discovery of a 'lost' Marine graveyard there. He uses the same photo I did at the start of my post, but he has a lot more. Tawara was one of the few places during WWII where a combat photographer took some film of enemy troops moving about in the open (at about minute 8:40). If you've seen Full Metal Jacket (based on The Short-Timers, the best and most savage book on Viet Nam I've read) it will look very familiar to you (the bird is the word). In the first photo I use today, you can see another problem with the Marine assault on the atolls. Those are M-2s .50 Browning machine guns at the front corners of the amtrak (LTV-1). So why am I calling them a problem? There's no metal shield for the gunners. The guys manning them were picked off quickly as they slowly churned onto the beach. The Marines solved the problem later and almost all the LTVs on Iwo Jima had near complete shields for the BMGs, almost turrets.
Labels: WWII History; Pacific theater; Tarawa
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 2:13 PM 
