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    Tarawa 1943: The turning of the tide
    Tarawa 1943: The turning of the tide
    Tarawa 1943: The turning of the tide
    Ebook185 pages1 hour

    Tarawa 1943: The turning of the tide

    By Derrick Wright and Howard Gerrard

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An detailed examination of this bloody Pacific battle, featuring maps, artwork and archive photography.

    The island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll was defended by the elite troops of the Special Naval Landing Force, whose commander, Admiral Shibasaki, boasted that "the Americans could not take Tarawa with a million men in a hundred years". In a pioneering amphibious invasion, the Marines of the 2nd Division set out to prove him wrong, overcoming serious planning errors to fight a 76-hour battle of unprecedented savagery. The cost would be more than 3000 Marine casualties at the hands of a garrison of some 3700.

    This richly illustrated volume examines the battle in depth and the lessons learned, which would dispel forever any illusions that Americans had about the fighting quality of the Japanese.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateAug 20, 2012
    ISBN9781782002390
    Tarawa 1943: The turning of the tide
    Author

    Derrick Wright

    Derrick Wright's interest in WWII was sparked by his childhood in the Teeside area of the UK which was subjected to many bombing raids. After national Service with the Army, he became an engineer specialising in Ultrasonics. Retired, he lives with his wife on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors.

    Read more from Derrick Wright

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      Tarawa 1943 - Derrick Wright

      Archives)

      ORIGINS OF THE CAMPAIGN

      The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s flotilla of ‘black ships’ in Tokyo Bay in 1853 heralded Japan’s emergence as a modern power after centuries of self-imposed feudalism. Once they had become convinced that protective isolation had to be abandoned if they were to evolve, the Japanese adopted a European style constitution during the reign of Emperor Meiji, and by 1890 a form of parliament, the Diet, had been established although the real power remained in the hands of shadowy military cliques and advisers interposed between the Emperor and his cabinet.

      Expansion became a priority as the population burgeoned, and natural resources diminished. The Bonin Islands, the Kuriles, and Okinawa were annexed, and in 1894 the Korean government was overthrown and a puppet regime appointed. By 1904 disagreements with Russia over spheres of influence in Manchuria and Korea led to an undeclared war. Japan scored spectacular military successes at Port Arthur, and at the great naval battle of Tsushima where the Russian fleet was destroyed for minor Japanese losses.

      Betio Island from the west. Taken after the battle, this photograph shows the size of the island with its dominant airfield, and Green Beach in the foreground. It is difficult to comprehend that over 5,600 people died here in the space of 76 hours. (US Air Force)

      The Sherman tank played a pivotal role in the capture of Betio Island and provided invaluable assistance to the infantry in mopping up pockets of resistance. (National Archives)

      The outbreak of World War I afforded further opportunities for expansion without serious involvement. Siding with the Allies enabled Japan to absorb German holdings in China, and the islands of the central Pacific. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 ceded Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas, as well as the Carolines and Marshall Islands, affording an outer ring of defensive locations that would prove invaluable after 1941.

      The Washington Naval Conference of 1921–2 sought to prevent a naval dominance in the Pacific by any single power by limiting the tonnage of the American, British, and Japanese fleets. But by the late 1920s Japan had become disillusioned with the treaty, seeing the extra tonnage allowed to America and Britain, for their Atlantic commitments, as a humiliation.

      China had long been viewed as a vast source of raw materials, and in 1931 the blowing up of a section of the Japanese-owned Manchurian railway was seized upon as an excuse for intervention, on the pretext of protecting Japanese lives and property. Relations with the West steadily deteriorated with the withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, and the renunciation of the Washington Naval Treaty in 1935. All-out war with China broke out in 1937, and Japan embarked on a huge naval expansion program laying down the keels of what were to be the world’s two largest battleships, the Yamato and the Musashi, each of 72,000 tons.

      Territorial gains in China were rapid and extensive, and when the war in Europe began in 1939, Japanese troops moved into the French colonies in Indo-China (Vietnam). Allied to Germany and Italy by the Tripartite Pact of 1940, Japan also secured her northern borders with a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in 1941. Viewing the situation with mounting unease, the United States froze Japanese assets in America, while Britain and the Dutch East Indies imposed a total ban on oil exports which denied her 90 per cent of her requirements. The seeds of war had been sown, and the appointment of the belligerent Gen Hideki Tojo as Prime Minister in October 1941 accelerated the rush toward hostilities.

      For decades the United States Navy had carried out its Pacific exercises in accordance with ‘Plan Orange,’ a thinly disguised code-name for war in Japan. It was recognized that Japan was the only country in the Pacific capable of mounting an attack on the United States and its bases, and the only one with any reason for doing so. How the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941 came as a surprise is in itself astonishing.

      The brainchild of Adm Yamamoto, a veteran of the great battle of Tsushima and a champion of naval air power, the attack inflicted staggering damage to America’s Pacific fleet and sent shock-waves throughout the country. The ‘date that will live in infamy’ heralded America’s commitment to war against Japan, Germany, and Italy and marked the great turning point of World War II.

      After Pearl Harbor, the first year of the Pacific War was a catalogue of disasters for the Allies. Land and air attacks against the Philippines resulted in the surrender of the islands in April 1942, and the undignified evacuation of Gen MacArthur; the British warships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse fell victim to Japanese aircraft and were sunk off northern Malaya in December; Guam and Wake Island fell in the same month. In February the British bastion of Singapore was surrendered by the hapless Gen Arthur Percival.

      In January the Japanese invaded Burma and New Guinea, and by March the Dutch East Indies, with their massive oil reserves, had been occupied. It was not until May of 1942 that the tide of expansion was checked. A Japanese invasion fleet heading for Port Moresby in New Guinea was intercepted by Adm Fletcher’s Task Force 17, and in the ensuing Battle of the Coral Sea, both sides lost an aircraft carrier; the Japanese Shoho and the American USS Lexington. Although not a decisive victory for the Americans the battle achieved the indefinite postponement of the landings at Port Moresby.

      A Japanese 7.7 mm light machine gun, of similar design to the British Bren gun. They were found by the hundred on Betio Island. (National Archives)

      Under the pretext of mounting an invasion of the tiny atoll of Midway, Yamamoto hoped to lure the remains of the US Navy into a full-scale battle, in which the overwhelming superiority of the Imperial Navy would triumph. However he was unaware that American cryptanalists had succeeded in decoding nearly 90 per cent of Japanese message traffic dealing with the Midway operation. This allowed a smaller US fleet, under Adms Fletcher and Spruance, to secure a tactical advantage which resulted in the sinking of four Japanese aircraft carriers for the loss of one American. Now recognized as the turning point of the Pacific War, the Battle of Midway marked the juncture at which the Japanese tide of expansion was contained. From the summer of 1942, the enemy were first held, and then defeated, in savage fighting in New Guinea by American and Australian troops, while the marines of the 1st Division fought a harrowing battle at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

      The Casablanca Conference in 1943 confirmed the Allies’ determination to make the defeat of Germany their prime objective, but it was also decided to step up the offensive in the Pacific. At a Pacific Military Conference in Washington in March, Gen MacArthur urged a south to north advance, via New Guinea and the Philippines, while Adms King and Nimitz favored an ‘island-hopping’ strategy through the central Pacific. Both options were given tacit approval by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Nimitz, with the assistance of Adm Spruance, began preparations for an amphibious assault on the enemy’s outer defensive perimeter sometime in November 1943.

      Utilizing the islands and atolls ceded to them after World War I, Japan had constructed an outer ring of defenses, ranging from the Marinas, the Palaus and the Carolines, to the Marshall Islands in the east. Truk, in the central Carolines, became the principal naval base—the Gibraltar of the

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