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
Sunday, November 23, 2008
This Day in the History of Victories in Unnecessary, Poorly Planned Assaults
On this day in 1943, U.S. Marines seized control of Tarawa and Makin atolls from the Japanese. It had been a rough three day battle for the Marines who had killed all but 17 of the islands' Japanese defenders, once numbering 4,600, but it had cost the Marines 3,000 casualties because the Higgens boats were sent at low tide and ran aground on the reef 500 yards from the beach. Very few Marines were able to get out of the boats, not drown and walk neck deep to shore under withering Japanese fire. The second wave only got about half of it contingent ashore and the Marines held at the end of the first day a very narrow strip of sand about 100 yards long. The Japanese held out for two more days, causing horrendous casualties to the last and then waged a Banzai wave attack which was barely held off by the surviving Marines. This group of islands could have easily been bypassed thus making the costly lesson completely unnecessary. Worse, the validity of the lessons learned only lasted a year or so until the Japanese changed tactics and allowed the invading forces to land unopposed but then slaughtered them inland. A monumental waste for which few heads rolled.
Labels: WWII History; Pacific theater; Tarawa
