Japan Built The Strongest Island in the Pacific and Lost It in 3 Days
At about 9 in the morning on the 20th of November in the last weeks of 1943, the first wave of American amphibious tractors crawled up over the coral reef that ringed the island of Betio and kept going toward the beach. They were ugly, slow, thin skinned boxes on tracks, and they were the only vehicles in the entire invasion fleet that could climb a reef.
Behind them came the ordinary landing craft carrying the rest of the assault, and those boats did not climb anything. They ran onto the coral and stopped dead 500 to 800 yd from dry land. The ramps went down anyway. Marines stepped off into water that came up to their chests, and then they started walking. Ahead of them lay half a kilometer of shallow lagoon with nothing in it to hide behind, and dug into the sand at the far end were nearly 500 concrete and coconut log firing positions, cited months earlier to cover exactly that
stretch of water. The machine guns opened up while the men were still waiting. The Japanese officer who had built those positions had told his garrison that the island could not be taken. Rear Admiral Ki Shibasaki had told them a million Americans could not do it in a century, and he was not being theatrical.
He had good reason to believe it. Betto was the most heavily fortified piece of ground the United States had yet attempted to assault from the sea. 76 hours later, it was over. Out of a garrison of some 4,700, all but a handful were dead. 17 Japanese soldiers were taken alive. The strongest island in the Pacific had been built, garrisoned by elite troops, supplied, and lost inside of three days.
And the reason it fell that fast is the same reason it had been so terrifying to attack. Betio was small. That is the first thing to understand and it is genuinely difficult to hold in your head. The island is the largest in the Terawa atole and it is about 2 and 1/2 m long and no more than 800 yd across at its widest point.
The whole thing covers less than half a square mile. It is smaller than many airports. It is smaller than a great many farms. Into that space, the Japanese had put close to 5,000 men, and something like 500 fighting positions. There were pill boxes of reinforced concrete, blockhouses roofed with layers of coconut logs and sand, machine gun nests dug into the beach, trenches connecting them, and tank turrets set into the ground as fixed gun positions.
There were coastal defense guns, including 8-in naval rifles capable of destroying a transport. Every position was cighted so that its fire crossed with the fire of others, and the whole island had been arranged to kill men in the water and on the sand. They had also built a seaw wall. Along much of the northern shore, where the Americans would have to land, a barrier of coconut logs about 4 ft high ran just above the high water mark.
Anyone who survived the wade and reached the beach would find himself pinned against that wall, unable to advance with Japanese positions firing along the length of it. There was a reason for all of that effort, and it was the airfield. Betio had a runway, and a runway in the Gilbert Islands sat squarely across the American route into the central Pacific.
If the United States wanted to drive west toward the Marshalss, the Maranas, and eventually Japan itself, it needed the Gilberts. And the Japanese, understanding this perfectly, had spent a year turning the island around that runway into what one of them called an unsinkable battleship. The operation the Americans mounted against the Gilberts was called Galvanic, and Betier was only part of it.
Other forces went ashore at Makin to the north where a much smaller Japanese garrison was overcome in a few days and at Apamama which was taken by a scouting party. Terawa was the hard center of the operation and it absorbed the second marine division a formation of veterans who had fought on Guadal Canal and had spent the intervening months training in New Zealand.
The force that sailed for the atal was enormous by the standards of anything the Pacific had yet seen. Something like 200 ships and more than 35,000 marines, soldiers, and sailors were committed to seizing a few islands with a combined area smaller than a midsized town. Major General Julian C. Smith commanded the division that would make the assault under an amphibious command structure that had been assembled specifically for the central Pacific drive and had never yet been tested in a real fight.
None of those men had done this before and that includes the admirals. The whole apparatus of a modern amphibious assault against a defended shore, the naval bombardment schedules, the control of successive waves, the coordination of air support with troops on the beach, the movement of supplies across a reef was being attempted at scale for the first time.
Almost every part of it went wrong somewhere on the 20th of November, and almost every part of it was rebuilt afterward on the basis of what happened. But the annihilation of Batio’s garrison did not begin at the reef. It begins a year earlier with a thousand Japanese engineers and 1,200 Korean laborers hauling coral and coconut logs across half a square mile of sand.
Building a fortress so strong that its designers stopped believing it could ever be broken. To understand what happened on that island, you have to understand what the Americans were actually attempting. because it had never been done before. Every amphibious operation the United States had carried out up to that point had gone ashore somewhere the enemy was not or was weak.
At Guadal Canal, the Marines had landed almost unopposed, and the fighting had come afterward. In North Africa, the landings had been against French troops of uncertain enthusiasm. Nobody had ever assaulted a small, heavily fortified island directly across a defended beach. There was a serious body of professional opinion holding that it could not be done at all.
The British experience at Gallipoli in the First World War loomed over the whole question, and Gallipoli had ended in a bloody failure that took 9 months to admit. Military theorists argued that modern automatic weapons and prepared positions gave the defender such an advantage at the waterline that a frontal amphibious assault against a fortified coast was simply suicide.
That argument mattered enormously because the entire American strategy for winning the Pacific War depended on the answer being wrong. The plan was to advance across the central Pacific by seizing island bases one after another, building airfields on each and using them to cover the next jump.
Every one of those islands would be small, fortified, and surrounded by water. If a fortified atole could not be taken by direct assault, there was no road to Japan across the central Pacific at all, and the war would have to be fought some other way entirely. So Terawa was a test and everyone involved at the top understood it as one. The Marine Corps had spent the 1930s developing amphibious doctrine almost alone, working out how to get organized fighting units from ships onto a hostile shore.
And Betio was where that doctrine would either be proven or discredited. The men who went in were carrying an argument as well as their weapons. The plan had two great strengths and one enormous well understood weakness. The first strength was firepower. The Americans assembled a bombardment force of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers and put something like 3,000 tons of shells onto an island of half a square mile along with carrier air strikes.
On paper, the arithmetic was absurd. There were officers in the fleet who said openly that they would not be delivering marines to a battle. They would be delivering them to an occupation because nothing could live through that weight of metal. The second strength was a new machine and it is the reason anybody reached the beach at all. The amphibious tractor, which the Marines called the Amtrak, was a tracked landing vehicle that could swim in water and then drive up over an obstacle and keep moving on land.
It had been developed from a civilian machine built for rescue work in the Florida swamps, and it had been used at Guadal Canal mainly as a cargo hauler. Somebody realized that its tracks meant it could climb a coral reef, which no boat could do, and that made it the only vehicle capable of guaranteeing a landing regardless of the tide.
Getting them was a fight in itself. The marine planners wanted Amtraks badly, and the Navy was reluctant, partly because they were fragile and unarmored, and partly because there were very few of them available. In the end, the assault went in with about 125, enough to carry the first three waves and no more.
Everybody behind those waves would be in conventional landing craft, and conventional landing craft needed water over the reef. There was one more decision worth understanding, and it turned out to be the right one for a reason nobody expected. The planners chose to land on the northern shore inside the atoles lagoon rather than on the open ocean beaches to the south.
The southern side had better water, but was the side the Japanese had fortified most heavily with the largest guns bearing on the approaches. Going in through the lagoon meant crossing a wider reef flat and accepting a longer, more awkward approach in exchange for hitting the island where the defenses were somewhat thinner.
It also meant something valuable that emerged only during the fight. Two American destroyers, the Ringold and the Dashel, were able to work their way into the lagoon itself and take up firing positions a few hundred yards off the beach. From in there, they could shoot directly at Japanese positions along the shore over open sights, and they stayed and did it through the assault.
Warships firing at pointblank range from inside a coral lagoon is not a maneuver that appears in any textbook. And on the first day, it was one of the few things that went well. The heavy Japanese coastal guns, the 8-in pieces the American estimate had missed, were British-made naval rifles that the Japanese had acquired years earlier.
Their crews used them against the transports and the approaching waves, and they were dangerous enough that the fleet had to keep its distance in places. Several were knocked out by naval gunfire during the bombardment, which was fortunate, because a single wellserved 8-in gun firing into a stream of landing craft in shallow water could have made the morning far worse than it was.
Which brings us to the weakness. And it is the part of this story that Americans found hardest to accept afterward because it was their own mistake. Nobody knew what the tide would do. Beio’s reef lay several hundred yards offshore and the depth of water over it varied with the tide. The landing craft needed about 4 feet to float across.
The planners expected roughly 5 ft at the hour of the assault, which would have been sufficient. What they had to work from were fragmentaryary charts, some old sailing directions, and the recollections of a handful of former residents of the Gilberts, one of whom warned them bluntly that they could not count on it.
The date chosen fell during a neep tide, the period in the lunar cycle when the difference between high and low water is smallest. Instead of 5 ft over the reef, there were three, and in places less. It was not enough. Every conventional landing craft in the assault, and there were hundreds of them, was going to stop at the coral and put its men into the water hundreds of yards from shore.
The Americans got one other important thing wrong. Intelligence had assessed the Japanese coastal armament and concluded there was nothing heavier than 6in guns on the island. In fact, there were 8 in naval rifles, and their presence had been reported and confirmed months earlier without making it into the assault estimate.
The men going in believed the defenses were weaker than they were. There was a general confidence in the fleet that turned out to be the most dangerous thing aboard. Officers had looked at the tonnage of shells allocated to a target of half a square mile and had concluded quite reasonably on the arithmetic that the problem was already solved.
Men were told the landing would be a formality. That belief was passed down to the assault battalions and it meant that a great many young marines climbed into their landing craft that morning expecting to walk ashore onto a ruin. What they were going up against was by the standards of the Pacific War first rate.
The core of the garrison consisted of about 2,600 men of the Special Naval Landing Force, which was the Japanese Navy’s own infantry, roughly equivalent to Marines, and regarded as elite. They were well equipped, well-trained, and thoroughly dug in. Around them were another thousand Japanese construction troops and some,200 Korean laborers who had done most of the digging.
Their commander, Rear Admiral Ki Shibasaki, had arrived a few months before the invasion, and his approach to defending the island was entirely orthodox for the Japanese army and navy of 1943. The doctrine said to destroy the enemy at the wat’s edge. Everything went into the beach defenses. Guns were cighted to hit landing craft.
Machine guns to sweep the shallows and the sand. Obstacles laid to funnel boats into the fire. The whole island was a wall facing outward. There was no defense in depth to speak of because depth was not what the doctrine asked for. There was no plan for a long fight from prepared positions in land.
No tunnel network, no scheme for giving up the beach and bleeding the enemy over weeks. Shibasaki did not intend to trade space for time. He intended to kill the Americans in the water, and if any of them got ashore, his men would counterattack and drive them back into it. It is worth pausing to note that this was not stupidity, and it was not even obviously wrong in 1943.
No one had ever taken a fortified atal by frontal assault and the reason no one had tried was that the professional consensus said it could not be done. Shibasaki was defending his island in the way that every military academy in the world would have recognized as correct against an operation that most experts considered impossible.
He was applying sound doctrine to a problem that had not yet been solved. What he could not know was that the Americans were about to solve it in one very expensive morning using a tracked vehicle originally designed to rescue people from swamps. Nor could he know that the enormous bombardment he was about to endure would fail to destroy his fortifications and would instead destroy the one thing his plan could not function without, which was his ability to give orders.
The garrison spent its last weeks working. Photographs taken before the invasion show an island stripped and rearranged with a runway down the middle, revetments and bunkers everywhere, obstacles laid in the shallows, and the coconut log seaw wall running along the northern shore. The Koreans and the construction troops had produced out of coral sand and palm trunks and imported concrete one of the densest concentrations of fortification per square yard anywhere in the Pacific.
The boast about the million men and the hundred years was his. And the interesting thing about it is how reasonable it looked at the time. He had elite troops, 500 mutually supporting positions, heavy guns, a seaw wall, a reef, and a doctrine that had never yet been tested against a full frontal amphibious assault because nobody had ever dared try one.
The bombardment began before dawn on the 20th of November, and it was, by every account, the most terrifying spectacle any of the watching Marines had ever seen. Battleships fired at ranges so short that they were practically point blank for a 16-in gun. The island disappeared under smoke and dust and flame. Trees went up. Fuel dumps burned.
From the transports, it looked as though the coral itself was being ground into powder. It achieved far less than it appeared to. Three hours of naval gunfire and air attack destroyed some positions and killed a number of defenders. The great majority of the pillboxes survived. Sand and coral absorb shellfire in a way that concrete alone does not.
And a low structure roofed with layers of logs and sand is a very hard thing to hit with flat trajectory naval guns. The Americans had used mostly high-capacity shells rather than armorpiercing, and they had fired for hours rather than days. But the bombardment did one thing that nobody appreciated at the time, and it may well have decided the battle.
It wrecked the Japanese communications network on the island. Telephone lines were cut, radio equipment was destroyed, and command posts lost contact with their subordinate positions. Shibasaki was left with a garrison of well-trained men in excellent positions who could no longer be coordinated as a whole.
Every pillbox would fight its own battle. That is not what a defensive plan built around counterattack requires. The first Amtraks reached the beach at around 9 in the morning, and for a few minutes the plan worked. Then the situation began to come apart in every direction at once. Japanese fire from positions that should have been destroyed tore into the tractors and dozens of them were knocked out on the reef and in the shallows.
Behind them the landing craft grounded on the coral exactly as feared and the wade began. It is worth being plain about what that meant because it is the image that defines this battle. Men carrying weapons and equipment stepped into chest deep water hundreds of yards from shore and walked toward a beach lined with machine guns.
They could not run. They could not take cover. They could not shoot back with any effect. Some drowned in shell holes. Some were hit and went under with their packs. Officers and radio men were shot down carrying the equipment that would have let anyone coordinate what was happening.
The first wave lost heavily, and the waves behind it walked into the same water. There was one piece of cover in all that lagoon, and men used it because it was the only thing available. A long wooden pier ran out from the beach across the reef flat, built before the war to service cargo ships, and it gave a thin line of shelter to anyone willing to work along its pilings.
Marines crouched behind it, moved along it, and were shot off it. Taking the pier and clearing the Japanese positions at its head became one of the small, desperate objectives of the first hours. Among the men who fought, there was a left tenant named William Dean Hawkins, who led a scout and sniper platoon and spent the first day and a half systematically destroying Japanese positions at close range.
He cleared pillboxes with grenades and demolition charges, was wounded, kept going, and was killed on the second morning still doing it. The airfield that the whole battle had been fought over was named after him afterward. He was one of the four men awarded the Medal of Honor for Terawa and one of the three who did not live to know it.
The losses among the Amtraks tell their own story about the margin the Americans were operating on. Of roughly 125 vehicles that went in, more than 90 were destroyed or disabled over the course of the fighting. They were unarmored, they were slow, and they had to cross open water in full view of prepared guns. The men who drove them made repeated trips through that fire, bringing men in and carrying wounded out, and the reason there was a beach head to reinforce on the second day, is that those crews kept going back. By the middle of the afternoon,
the assault existed as a series of disconnected footholds. Marines were pinned along the beach behind that coconut log seaw wall in places a few yards deep, unable to get over the wall because everything beyond it was covered by fire. Tanks were being landed and drowning in shell holes in the lagoon. Nobody ashore had a clear picture of anything.
Command ashore fell to Colonel David Shupe, who had come in wounded and had gone forward anyway, and who spent that first day and night running the battle from a captured Japanese bunker on the beach. There were still live Japanese soldiers inside part of that bunker while he worked. He had almost no communications, no clear idea how many men he had, and no way to move them.
And by every measure, the assault was on the edge of failure. Late that first day, he sent back a message that summed up the situation exactly. Casualties, many percentage dead, not known. Combat efficiency, he said, was that they were winning. That night was the moment the battle could have been lost.
Something like 5,000 Marines were ashore in a shallow strip along the northern beaches, disorganized, short of water and ammunition with the reef behind them and the fortress in front. A coordinated Japanese counterattack against that lodgement delivered in the dark by 2,600 elite naval infantry who knew the ground intimately might well have thrown them into the sea.
The Americans knew it and spent the night waiting for it. It never came. The attack that Japanese doctrine demanded and that the situation invited was never organized because the men who would have had to organize it could not talk to one another. The bombardment that had failed to destroy the pillboxes had destroyed the wires and the radios.
And so the garrison passed the most dangerous night of the battle, sitting in its excellent positions, fighting as individual strong points, waiting for orders that nobody could send. That is where the first half of this story ends, with the Marines holding a few yards of sand and the fortress unable to coordinate its own defense.
It took 8 hours to get every name and number in this story right because Terawa is usually told either as a straightforward American triumph or as a pointless massacre and it was neither of those things. If this is the history you want more of hit like one like nothing more. Thank you.
The second day changed the shape of everything and it changed for two reasons. The first was that the tide finally came in, which allowed landing craft to cross the reef and put reinforcements, ammunition, water, and artillery onto the beach in quantity. The second was that the Marines had worked out overnight, and largely by themselves, how to kill a pillbox.
That method became the pattern for the rest of the Pacific War, and it was invented on that beach under fire by sergeants and left tenants who had no manual for it. A team would pin the firing slit with rifle and machine gun fire so that nobody inside could aim. Under that cover, another man would work around to the flank or the rear, where the structure had no embraasure.
Then came flame or explosive. A flamethrower burst through the aperture or a satchel charge shoved against the wall or into a ventilation opening and the position stopped firing. Then the team moved to the next one and did it again 500 times. It was slow and it was appallingly dangerous for the men doing the flanking and it worked.
Tanks helped where they could get through, firing at blockouses from a few yards away. Half tracks with heavier guns were brought ashore. Naval gunfire was called in on individual strong points by observers who could now actually see what they were shooting at. But the essential work was small groups of infantry with flame and demolition charges.
Moving from one concrete box to the next. The reinforcements that came ashore on the second day made the decisive difference. And getting them in required one more improvisation. A regiment held in reserve was landed on the western end of the island on a beach designated green where the water was deep enough to work with and it came in behind the Japanese positions facing the lagoon.
Artillery was landed as well, and in one of the cleverest strokes of the battle, a battalion of guns was put ashore on a neighboring island in the atole from where it could fire the length of Betio’s eastern tail without any risk of being counterattacked. Tanks made a difference, too, where they could be got into action.
Medium tanks had been landed on the first day, and most had been lost in shell holes in the lagoon or knocked out by gunfire. But a handful survived and worked with the infantry, driving up to blockhouses and firing into them from a few yards away. The crews gave their vehicles names, and the surviving tanks became known quantities to the men fighting alongside them.
The thing the Marines wanted most on that island was water. Betto had no fresh water at all, and it sat almost on the equator, and by the second day, men who had been fighting continuously in that heat were badly dehydrated. Water had to be brought across the reef in cans in the same amtraks that were carrying ammunition and taking out wounded, and there was never enough of it.
Some of the water that did arrive had been stored in drums that left it tasting of oil and made men who drank it sick. The Japanese fought exactly as their doctrine and their training required, which is to say they fought from where they stood and did not withdraw. Positions held out until they were destroyed.
Men in bunkers that had been sealed off kept firing at anything that passed. Snipers stayed in place among the wreckage of the palm grove and the ruined buildings by the airfield. Marines took ground and then discovered that positions they had walked past were still occupied and shooting them in the back.
Hit subscribe right now because coming up is the death of the man who said the island could not be taken. And the night his garrison came out of its holes to attack. Do not go anywhere. By the end of the second day, the Marines had pushed inland across the airfield in the center of the island and had cut Bato in two, and they had linked their beach heads into something resembling a continuous line.
That mattered enormously. A garrison that cannot maneuver and cannot be reinforced on an island less than a mile wide was now being compressed toward the narrow eastern tail of the island. And every hour of compression made the American job easier and the Japanese position more hopeless. Somewhere in the first two days, Ki Shibasaki was killed.
Exactly how and exactly when are genuinely uncertain, and both of the accounts in circulation deserve to be treated with care. One version holds that he died on the first day, killed by American naval gunfire as he moved between command posts. which would help explain why the Japanese defense was never coordinated after the landing.
The other holds that he died on the 22nd when Marines assaulted the main command block house, poured fuel into its ventilators, and set it al light, killing everyone inside. The two stories cannot both be true, and the honest position is that the sources disagree. What is not in doubt is the effect. Whether it happened on the first afternoon or on the third day, the central direction of the Japanese defense collapsed early and never recovered.
And an island fortress designed around counterattack and mutual support was reduced to a collection of individual positions, each fighting until it was destroyed. That command bunker was itself one of the hardest single objectives of the battle. It was a large blockhouse of concrete and sand, and it took a coordinated assault with tanks, artillery fired at pointblank range, demolition charges, and finally fuel poured down its air vents.
Men climbed onto the roof of an occupied fortification to do it. The man who led the assault on that block house was a first lieutenant named Alexander Bonnyman, who had been a mining engineer in civilian life and had come into the Marine Corps as an enlisted man in his 30s, having no particular need to be there at all.
He organized a party of engineers and riflemen, worked them up onto the roof of the occupied structure with demolition charges and flamethrowers, and held the top of it against a counterattack from inside. He was killed at the crest and the position fell. His medal of honor was postumous. There is a coder to Bonny man’s story that belongs in this episode.
Like hundreds of other Americans killed on Betio. He was buried in a field grave whose location was subsequently lost and for 70 years his family was told that his remains were unreoverable. In 2015, a private organization working with archaeologists located a burial trench on the island containing dozens of Marines, and Bonnyan was among those identified.
He was flown home and buried in Tennessee 72 years after he died. Three of the four medals of honor awarded for Tarawa went to men who did not survive the battle. And the fighting around positions like that one is why the fourth went to Colonel Shupe who lived commanded the battle from that captured bunker with a wound in his leg and went on to become commandant of the Marine Corps.
By the third day the surviving Japanese had been forced into the eastern tale of Betio, a strip of sand a few hundred yards wide with the sea on both sides and nowhere to go. There was no possibility of evacuation, no possibility of relief, and no possibility of victory. What happened next was the logical end point of the doctrine those men had been trained in.
On the night of the 22nd, the last organized Japanese force on the island came out of its positions and attacked. There were several separate charges through the darkness. men with rifles, bayonets, and swords running at the American lines. They came against Marines who were exhausted and filthy and had been fighting for two and a half days, and who had artillery, mortars, machine guns, and naval gunfire support ready and registered.
They were destroyed. That is the plain word for it. The charges broke on the American line, and the men who made them were killed in the open, in numbers, in the dark. Whatever one thinks of the courage involved, and it was considerable, the military effect was to take several hundred trained infantrymen who had been fighting effectively from cover and deliver them into open ground against prepared automatic weapons.
That was the end of organized resistance. On the morning of the 23rd of November 1943, the Marines cleared the last positions on the eastern tip of the island with tanks and flamethrowers and bulldozers, and by the early afternoon, Betio was declared secure. 76 hours had passed since the first Amtrak crossed the reef.
The accounting is among the starkkest of the entire war. of a garrison of roughly 4,700 men, 4,690 were killed. 17 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner along with about 129 Korean laborers. The garrison had not been defeated in the ordinary military sense of being beaten and forced to surrender. It had been eliminated essentially in its entirety in 3 days on an island of less than half a square mile.
The American cost was terrible and completely unexpected by the public that read about it. 997 Marines and 30 Navy personnel were killed and something over 2,200 more were wounded for a total of roughly 3,400 casualties in 76 hours. In three days on an island most Americans could not have found on a map, the Marine Corps suffered losses comparable to six months of fighting on Guadal Canal.
And then something happened that no Japanese planner had anticipated and no American planner had prepared for. The photographs came home. Combat photographers and cameramen had gone in with the assault waves, and what they brought back was unlike anything the American public had been shown before. There were pictures of dead Marines floating in the shallows and lying on the sand among wrecked Amtraks.
There was film of the Wade and of bodies at the waterline. Some of those images were published in Life magazine and elsewhere with the approval of a government that had decided the public needed to understand what the war actually cost. The reaction was violent. Americans had been reading about victories for a year and had not been shown what victories looked like.
There were angry letters to newspapers and to Congress. One mother wrote to a paper demanding to know who had killed her son, and she meant the American commanders rather than the Japanese. There were public demands to know who was responsible for sending men to wade across half a kilometer of lagoon under machine gunfire, and whether the island had been worth it, and whether the Marine Corps had been reckless.
Members of Congress called for investigations. A grieving public that had been fed communicates discovered photographs. One of the men who shaped that reaction had made the landing himself. Robert Sherid, a correspondent for time, waded ashore with the infantry on the first morning, stayed on the island through the battle, and then wrote about it without softening anything.
His account described the wade, the bodies in the shallows, the smell, and the exhaustion, and it told American readers plainly that this was going to be the pattern of the war ahead, and that they had better understand it. It was published while the argument about the photographs was still raging, and it did a great deal to shift the argument from outrage toward comprehension.
President Roosevelt personally approved the release of the most graphic material, which was not an obvious decision. The government had spent 2 years keeping American dead out of the newspapers on the theory that the public would lose its nerve. The judgment made after Tarawa was the opposite.
That a country facing two more years of exactly this needed to be told the truth about the cost and that hiding it would produce a worse shock later. It was a gamble on the maturity of the American public and on the evidence it paid off. War bond sales did not collapse. Enlistments did not stop. A documentary assembled from the combat footage released the following year won an Academy Award and it did something that mattered more than the award.
It showed the country the shape of the war, it still had two years left to fight. Whatever one thinks about the decision to publish those pictures, and there is a real argument about it, the effect was to end a certain kind of innocence about the Pacific. Here is how it unfolded in order.
The 20th of November 1943, Amtraks crossed the reef while conventional landing craft ground on the coral and Marines weighed hundreds of yards under fire to a beach pinned by a seaw wall. That first night, the Marines hold a narrow strip of sand, and the Japanese counterattack that might have destroyed them is never organized because the bombardment had wrecked the island’s communications.
The 21st, the tide rises, reinforcements and artillery come ashore, and the systematic destruction of the pillboxes begins with flame and demolition charges. The 22nd, the Marines cut the island in two across the airfield and assault the main command blockhouse and the surviving Japanese are compressed into the eastern tail.
After dark on the third night, the surviving defenders make a series of charges against the American line and are destroyed in the open. The 23rd, the final positions are cleared and Betio is declared secure 76 hours after the landing. The factors behind that annihilation are worth naming plainly.
The first factor was the amphibious tractor. Without a vehicle that could climb the reef, the first waves would have been stopped in the water like everybody else, and there is a serious case that the assault would have failed outright on the first morning. 125 ungainainely machines adapted from a swamp rescue vehicle are the reason there was a beach head at all.
The second factor was the destruction of Japanese communications. The naval bombardment failed at the job it was designed for and succeeded brilliantly at a job nobody had assigned it. A defensive plan built on mutual support and counterattack requires a commander who can issue orders and after the first hours the Japanese did not have one.
The third factor was the American infantry method that was invented on that beach. pin the aperture, flank the position, burn or blow it, move on. It was developed under fire in a single day, and it became the standard American technique for reducing fortifications from that point until the end of the war. The fourth factor was the Japanese doctrine itself, and this is the one that decided the scale of the disaster.
Everything was at the water line. When the water line was breached, there was nothing behind it. Strip away the maps and the casualty counts, and the fall of Betio comes down to a single reversal worth stating plainly. The Japanese built the most heavily defended island in the Pacific, and they lost it in 3 days precisely, because they had defended it so well in the wrong place.
Every gun, every man, and every position had been committed to killing the enemy at the water’s edge. That produced an appalling first day for the Americans, and no second line whatever for the Japanese. A fortress with no depth is not a fortress. It is a thick wall, and once a wall is breached, the thing it was protecting has nothing left.
There is a second reversal folded inside the first and it belongs to the laborers. Of the men on that island, roughly 1,200 were Koreans brought there under compulsion to build the fortifications and about a thousand more were Japanese construction workers rather than combat troops. They dug the imp placements, hauled the coral, and stacked the coconut logs.
And then the battle closed over them. When the prisoners were counted, the great majority were the Korean workers. The garrison that fought to the last man was in its final accounting substantially made up of men who had built the island rather than chosen to defend it. Terawa taught both sides, and that is the real reason it matters more than its size suggests.
The Americans learned an enormous amount, and they learned it fast. Tide and hydrography became a serious intelligence discipline rather than an afterthought. And the Navy created underwater demolition teams to swim in ahead of landings, survey reefs, and blow obstacles, which is the direct ancestor of the modern SEAL teams.
Amtraks were ordered in far greater numbers and given armor and guns. Naval bombardment doctrine was rewritten to be longer, to use armor-piercing shells against fortifications, and to fire deliberately at identified positions rather than saturating an area. Communications, control ships, and the coordination of naval gunfire with troops ashore were all overhauled.
The scale of the improvement is measurable, and it is the clearest possible argument that the lessons were real. Two months after Betio, the same central Pacific machine went into the Marshall Islands and assaulted Quadrilain, an atal with a comparable garrison in comparable positions. The bombardment lasted far longer, used the right ammunition, and was directed at identified targets.
There were amraks in quantity with armor. The landings were surveyed properly beforehand. Quadriline was taken with a fraction of the casualties. The Marines and soldiers who went ashore there benefited directly from what had been learned on a reef in the Gilberts, and so did every American who landed anywhere in the Pacific for the rest of the war.
That is the hard, unscentimental case for what Betio bought, and it is the case the men who fought there generally made themselves when they were asked whether it had been worth it. the same central Pacific machine kept getting better as it went west. The lessons of Betio were paid for in three days and applied for the following two years.
And every subsequent American landing in the Pacific was easier because of what happened on that reef. And the Japanese learned something too, which is the part almost nobody tells. They looked at Terawa and drew the obvious conclusion, which was that defending the beach against American naval and air power was suicide.
The garrison had been annihilated in 76 hours. So, Japanese planners began working on something new. The coming doctrine gave up the shoreline entirely and put the defense inland and underground in caves and tunnels. It forbarred the banzai charge and it aimed not at winning but at making each island cost the Americans as much time and blood as possible.
That doctrine appeared in its first full form 10 months later on a coral island called Pelu and it produced the bloodiest amphibious assault in the history of the Marine Corps. It appeared again on Ewima and on Okinawa. Every one of those battles is descended from what the Japanese army concluded while reading the reports from Betto.
So both sides took the correct lesson from the same three days and both sides were made more lethal by it. The Americans learned how to get ashore. The Japanese learned to stop contesting the shore and to make the interior of every island a killing ground instead. The result was that the landings after Terawa were generally easier and the battles after Terawa were generally worse.
At Betio, the fighting was over in 76 hours. At Pleio, it took 10 weeks. On Okinawa, it took nearly 3 months and killed more than 100,000 civilians. There is a way of reading that which is worth stating carefully because it cuts against the natural shape of a story like this one. The doctrine Shibasaki followed destroyed his garrison in three days and is therefore usually written up as a mistake.
But the doctrine that replaced it destroyed the garrisons that followed just as completely and simply took longer about it and charged more for the privilege. Neither approach saved a single Japanese island. The choice available to those garrisons by 1943 was not between winning and losing. It was between dying quickly and dying slowly.
And Tarawa was the last time a Japanese commander chose quickly. So the strongest island in the Pacific fell in three days. And in falling it changed the way both sides fought every island that came after it. Shibasaki had been wrong, and he had been wrong in a way that killed his entire command. And the men who studied his defeat made sure that the next American landing would face something far worse than a wall at the waterline.
The island itself is still there, low and hot and crowded, part of the Republic of Kiribati now, with a town built over the battlefield. Concrete pill boxes stand along the beaches with the sea washing around them, and the remains of the great command block house are still visible. The Japanese 8-in guns are still in place, rusting, and the American dead are still being found.
Many of the men killed on Betio were buried in hasty field graves in the days after the battle, and the records of those burials were incomplete or lost. And when recovery teams came looking after the war, they could not locate hundreds of them. Work has continued for decades. Archaeological teams have excavated trench lines and construction sites and have recovered the remains of Marines who lay under that sand for 70 years and more.
Some of them have finally been identified and sent home to families that had stopped expecting it. That work is still going on, which is the strangest thing about this battle to hold in your mind. Somewhere on that crowded little island, under a house or a road or a football pitch, there are still Americans in the ground from a fight that lasted 3 days in 1943.
And every so often, another one of them is found and named and brought home. The garrison that was annihilated there is accounted for down to the last man. The men who annihilated it are not. And people are still looking. Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications because every week we tell you how America actually won its war, the lessons it paid for in blood, and the enemy who learned from them too without the myths and without the easy exaggeration.
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