The U.S. military’s drive westward through the Central Pacific began in earnest on November 20, 1943, with the invasion of the atolls of Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, code-named Operation Galvanic. The campaign provided a steep but necessary learning curve. Nimitz and his planners had expected to overwhelm the Japanese defenders with firepower as well as manpower and complete the assault in a day—the main island, Tarawa, was but two miles long and six hundred yards wide, with a high point of ten feet in elevation.
Instead, a close-in naval barrage fired on a relatively flat trajectory created a scene of apparent wild destruction but failed to penetrate the deeply dug-in fortifications. Coordination between air support, naval bombardment, and the assault waves hitting the beaches left much to be desired. A full thirty minutes elapsed between the end of the shore bombardment and the first assault wave, giving the defenders ample time to emerge from their bunkers and defend the beaches. And while LVTs (landing vehicles, tracked) floated over the surrounding coral reefs without difficulty, other landing craft grounded on them during an unforeseen low tide. They were forced to disgorge their troops into deep water and deadly fire.
Makin fell to the army’s Twenty-seventh Infantry Division on November 23 with only light casualties, but dug-in defenders on Tarawa cost the veteran Second Marine Division over three thousand casualties, more than a third of them killed. These delays on the ground also cost the navy. Once the invasion target was confirmed, Japanese planes and submarines keyed on the Gilberts.
Despite the criticism leveled at Admiral Fletcher in moving his carriers off the beachhead at Guadalcanal the previous year, Nimitz instructed Spruance to do just that in the Gilberts after a torpedo plane disabled the light carrier Independence. But the deadliest loss came off Makin when a Japanese submarine fired a torpedo into the escort carrier Liscome Bay. These half-pint “jeep” carriers were intended to bear the burden of close-in air support and fighter protection for amphibious landings, but they were frequently as vulnerable as floating gasoline cans. The torpedo exploded the Liscome Bay’s magazine, quickly sinking the ship and killing nearly 650 officers and crew out of a complement of about 900. Among those missing and presumed dead was enlisted man Doris “Dorie” Miller, to whom Nimitz had awarded the first Navy Cross to an African-American, for his heroism during the Pearl Harbor attack. Clearly, it was deadly to linger around beachheads.
In typical fashion, Nimitz wanted to rush to Tarawa and see the difficulties firsthand in order to better educate his forces for the next go-round. Spruance advised him to wait a day or two, as mopping-up operations were still under way, but Nimitz would have nothing to do with that. On November 25, he flew with selected staff in a PB2Y Coronado from Pearl Harbor to the Ellice Islands and then hopped a Marine Corps DC-3 for the flight to Tarawa. Even then, the plane had to circle while bulldozers worked on the recently captured airstrip.
“I have never seen such a desolate spot as Tarawa,” Nimitz wrote Catherine. “Not a coconut tree of thousands was left whole.”1 His men, however, saw him, and just as on his visit to Guadalcanal, word spread quickly through the Second Division: “The old man? Oh yeah, he came by my post last night.” The effect on morale was incalculable.
But Tarawa’s heavy casualties brought a howl of protest in the United States. Some of it was pointedly personal. “You killed my son on Tarawa,” one bereaved mother wrote to Nimitz. To the admiral’s credit, he insisted that every piece of mail be answered.2
Other criticism came from closer at hand. Amphibious forces commander Marine Corps Major General Holland M. Smith was indeed “howlin’ mad” at the casualties, and he vented his frustration on Nimitz when they regrouped back in Pearl Harbor. Smith claimed that Tarawa wasn’t worth the price paid and that it should have been left to “wither on the vine” rather than be taken by direct assault.3
On an island-by-island basis, Smith’s argument might have been made almost anywhere, but in the broader picture of the Central Pacific, the tactical lessons of Tarawa had to be learned someplace. Grieved though he was by the casualties, Nimitz, with King’s continuing support, was glad that these lessons were learned early in the Gilberts. But to Smith’s point, perhaps the most important lesson of Tarawa was that it reinforced in the minds of all the top commanders the island-hopping strategy that Thomas C. Kinkaid had already pioneered in the Aleutians and Halsey was embracing in the Solomons.
The most immediate effect of the bloody land and sea battles on and around Tarawa was to make Nimitz’s chief lieutenants suddenly leery and extremely cautious about their next thrust into the Marshall Islands. That was the scene of Halsey’s early 1942 raid with Enterprise. Now, instead of just commanding the cruisers in Halsey’s task force, Raymond Spruance was in command of the entire Fifth Fleet.
Cerebral Spruance may have initially underestimated Nimitz. Their early encounters had been largely social, and Nimitz’s low-key, aw-shucks manner tended to camouflage his razor-sharp thinking. Any skepticism certainly changed to admiration, however, after Spruance relied on Nimitz’s general directives at the Battle of Midway and then spent a year with Nimitz as his chief of staff, housemate, and general confidant. “The better I got to know him,” Spruance recalled, “the more I admired his intelligence, his open-mindedness and his approachability for any who had new or different ideas, and, above all, his utter fearlessness and his courage in pushing the war.”4