THIRTEEN

INFERNO

NOVEMBER 20–21, 1943

Since any attack was expected to come from the open ocean to the south and west of Betio, the lagoon side was not as heavily defended. At 0441 on D-day, after realizing that the Americans were going to approach the island from the lagoon, the Japanese defenders launched their first salvo, a red-star cluster shell, and cranked their four eight-inch guns around to the north.

A scheduled American airstrike at dawn failed to materialize, which allowed the Japanese to more effectively shell the convoy floating between two and four miles northwest of the island. At 0700, the minesweepers Requisite and Pursuit took fire as they led destroyers Ringgold and Dashiell into the lagoon.1

As smoke from a burning ammunition dump choked the skies above Betio, the Japanese began to bombard the amphibious LVTs and Higgins boat transports at their departure line more than a mile out into the lagoon, causing Gen. Julian Smith to delay the assault from 0845 to 0900.

As soon as the Second Scout and Sniper Platoon under Lt. William Deane Hawkins and Lt. Alan Leslie reached shore, tasked with capturing a five-hundred-yard-long pier jutting into the lagoon, they reported three alarming facts: The water at the edge of the lagoon was only three feet deep, not enough to accommodate the four-foot draft of a Higgins boat; there appeared to be plenty of resistance left, despite the navy’s bombardment; and LVTs were hanging up on a three-foot coconut-log seawall, unable to move inland. All three problems would contribute to heavy casualties on D-day.

The low tide was no obstacle to the armored LVT-1 “Alligators” and LVT-2 “Water Buffaloes,” whose wheels took over as soon as they hit the reef. But they were also sitting ducks; by the end of the battle, ninety of 125 deployed LVTs had been destroyed by Japanese fire or mines, or knocked out at the seawall.2

But marines on LVTs were the lucky ones. Those on Higgins boats fell victim to the “the tide that failed,” the shallow water that forced navy coxswains to disgorge their cargo of heavily laden marines some six to eight hundred yards offshore, where some drowned. Those who found footing in chest-deep water had no choice but to slosh shoreward into relentless Japanese fire.

Hundreds of marines were killed before even reaching the beach. Exact numbers are not available, but one chaplain counted seventy-six bobbing in the surf in his sector alone when the fighting was over,³ while thirty-nine of the seventy men assigned to shore-party duty on Red Beach 1 never made it to the island.⁴

Although some historians have sought to deflect blame for the tide debacle, navy and marine planners were aware that shallow water on the reef could cause problems on November 20. Maj. Frank Holland, a New Zealander who had served as Britain’s Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert Islands for fifteen years, warned the Americans that the assault would encounter what he called a “dodging tide” that would doom hundreds of marines to death on the reef. Alas, senior officers said it was too late to rearrange timetables short of calling off the assault, and they weren’t willing to do that.⁵

Holland was right, though the scientific term is “apogean neap tide,” an especially low high tide that occurs when the moon is farthest from the earth; one of Tarawa’s two easily predicted neap tides in 1943 happened to occur on D-day.6 Some argue, however, that the shallow neap tide made it easier for the LVTs to reach the shore, since they could move three times as fast once their tracks gripped onto something solid.⁷

Descriptions of the first hours of battle read like infernal visions.

“The island was a mass of smoke, flames of different colors, bright red, gray, black, and stuff was just blowing up like mad. Naval gunfire was coming down on top of us. A lot of marines’ entire combat careers lasted only a few seconds. The landing craft ramps went down, and they were shot dead,” said Dean Ladd, who was shot in the torso before reaching the beach and taken back to the Heywood.⁸

First Lt. William Deane Hawkins and his men were first to reach the pier. Charging up a seaplane ramp, they used grenades, rifles, and flamethrowers to take out a machine-gun position and two structures, which allowed others to reach the pier and make their way to the beach from pylon to pylon. A landing team came ashore on Red Beach 1, the westernmost lagoon assault zone, at 0910, followed by another on Red Beach 3 east of the pier at 0917, and another at Red 1.

S.Sgt. William Bordelon, an assault engineer, one of just four marines to survive a direct hit on their amtrac, landed on Red 1. Once ashore, he took out two pillboxes, then continued to fight even after a charge went off in his hand and he was struck by machine-gun fire. After going back into the water to rescue an injured man, he assaulted another Japanese position before being killed by machine-gun fire. He would later be awarded the Medal of Honor, as would Hawkins, after falling on the second day of battle.

Sgt. Elwin Hart and his two-man radio team followed Hawkins’s team into shore, where they hunkered down in an abandoned mortar pit just fifty yards from the pier. One of Hart’s team, Pfc. Elmer Mathies Jr., was killed by a gunshot wound to the neck when he peeked above the rim of the pit, and was later buried in Cemetery 27. Hart spent almost the entire battle hunkered down in that hole, where for many hours his Morse code signals were the only communication link between Gen. Julian Smith and Col. David Shoup, earning himself the nickname “the voice of Tarawa.”9

Those first hours of battle flirted with disaster. At 0959, Maj. John F. Schoettel famously radioed Shoup, “Receiving heavy fire all along beach. Unable to land at all. Issue in doubt.” When the colonel ordered him to land on Red 2 at 1015, Schoettel replied, “We have nothing left to land.”¹⁰

A short time later, Schoettel waved down a medium-tank company and ordered it to land, in hopes of softening up the beach. Eight tanks under the command of 1st Lt. Lou Largey, six commanded by 1st Lt. Ed Bale, and three others rolled down the lowered ramps of their transport vehicles and rumbled across the reef toward shore.

On Red Beach 3, only Largey’s Colorado survived. Bale’s platoon, assigned to land at Red Beach 1, ran into all sorts of trouble. Not eager to drive over the bodies of dead marines, he made a split-second decision not to plow through a break in the seawall and instead headed west toward the “bird’s beak,” Betio’s northernmost point. But four of his tanks foundered in shell holes—including the Cobra, which remains visible today in surprisingly good condition—and only China Gal, commanded by Bale, and Cecilia, made it ashore around 1110. China Gal soon lost its 75mm gun when a Japanese light tank managed to land a shot right down the barrel, and Bale then took command of Cecilia.¹¹

Three of Tarawa’s four eventual Medal of Honor recipients, Shoup, Bordelon, and Hawkins, were all ashore in the early hours of the fighting. The fourth, Sandy Bonnyman, had been assigned with the rest of his 2/18 Pioneers to shore-party duty, which meant unloading supplies for use at forward positions.

But the chaotic early hours of fighting had blown my grandfather’s unit’s best-laid plans, and 2/18’s lead team didn’t reach the pier until 1630 on D-day. Even after they had helped extinguish a fire raging atop the damaged pier, they determined that it couldn’t be used to deliver supplies until it was repaired. So they had little to do.

At two o’clock on the morning of D+1 (November 21), Sandy’s friend 1st Lt. Tracy Griswold crept forward under cover of darkness in search of Col. Shoup’s command post. He returned an hour and a half later with instructions to abandon the pier “and return at a time when it would be possible to land supplies without the risk of small arms fire and mortar fire.” Some of Sandy Bonnyman’s shore party began evacuating casualties to the USS Zeilin while others established security lines at the foot of the pier and on Red Beach 2 to the west. On orders from Maj. George H.L. Cooper, Sandy and 1st Lt. Michael Mosteller assembled thirty marines from their F Company and 2/8 I Company, who spent the first night of the battle holding the security perimeter on Red 2 and retrieving injured marines from forward lines.12

At some point early in the battle, my grandfather caught the attention of combat photographer Cpl. Obie Newcomb.

“It was my job to cover the battle as a photographer and . . . I was in the front lines all the time. The reason this Lt. stuck in my mind was whenever there was a job to be done he was the first to volunteer. I can still see him as he went up to the front to bring back a wounded Marine in his deep Southern drawl,” recalled Newcomb, who initially believed the officer’s name was “Barnaman.”¹³

From that point on, Newcomb tried to hover around Sandy. The photographer even let him borrow his entrenching tool to dig the foxhole where he would famously capture him amid his fellow marines as they huddled beneath the shattered, blackened corpses of palm trees, waiting to assault the bunker on D+2.¹⁴

Despite sustaining heavy casualties, by 1800 on D-day the marines had established footholds two hundred yards in from the “bird’s beak” and some four hundred yards inland from the pier, including the northeast-southwest runway of the airfield. That night, dug into their foxholes, the marines anxiously anticipated a counterattack. But it never came.

Nobody knew it yet, but Adm. Keiji Shibasaki, commander of the Japanese forces on Betio, was dead. He’d been killed while standing in front of his looming steel-reinforced concrete command bunker when an American shell smashed to earth precisely where Shibasaki and his top officers were standing at mid-afternoon on D-day.

According to after-battle accounts by the few Japanese captured, compassion may have killed the much-admired Shibasaki. As the fighting raged, the admiral had allowed wounded rikusentai—Japanese marines—to be sheltered in the command bunker.15 When things started getting too crowded, rather than have them removed, he decided to relocate his command to a smaller bunker on the south side of the island, away from the main thrust of the assault. As his officers assembled in front of the bunker, an unknown American scout apparently saw them and radioed in the fire request that cut the head off the Japanese command just hours into the battle.¹⁶

The sudden loss of leadership and severe damage to exposed communications wires had left the Japanese utterly rudderless. Had Shibasaki survived, historians surmise he would have mounted a massive counter-attack during that first night that could have proved disastrous to the marines. But thanks to that single, direct hit, the Americans were spared.

Gen. Smith gave orders to step up the fight in the early morning hours of D+1. But as the sun climbed toward its zenith, Shoup radioed, “Situation ashore uncertain.”

“From dawn until about 1300, D plus 1 on Betio was like a supplement or extension of D Day,” wrote Time-Life correspondent Richard Johnston, who was hunkered down with the marines. “The fighting was savage beyond belief, the issue was still in doubt.”17

From his command post in the shelter of a bunker on Red Beach 2, Shoup requested at 0513 that the 1st Battalion, 18th Marines (1/18), commanded by Maj. Lawrence C. Hayes Jr. land on Red Beach 2. The unit encountered heavy machine-gun fire as it waded across the reef, but eventually made it ashore largely intact, where it began to push west to join up with 3/2, which had held the “bird’s beak” through the night.¹⁸ Shoup ordered 1/2 and 2/2 to push south from their line in the middle of the airfield and 3/2 to leave its toehold and capture west-facing Green Beach.

Carrier-based navy planes bombed and strafed the airstrip south of the American lines on D+1, allowing elements of 1/2 and 2/2 to clear out several machine-gun positions and drive across the remaining runways to Black Beach on Betio’s two-and-a-quarter-mile-long southern shore. LVTs were soon ferrying food, water, ammunition, and medical supplies to the marines holding the beach, returning to the lagoon side loaded with wounded.¹⁹

Shortly after 1100, 2nd Lt. Thomas N. Greene called in destroyer strikes on Japanese positions south of 3/2’s line. Once the dust had settled, Maj. Michael P. Ryan and 3/2 followed the medium tanks China Girl and Cecilia to Green Beach, meeting minimal resistance. By noon on the second day of battle, the western end of Betio was in American hands. That afternoon, Smith committed the Sixth Marines to the fight for the first time, sending some ashore at Green Beach to push east across the airfield, and others to the neighboring island of Bairiki, to which Japanese troops had begun to flee.

Contrary to some later reports, my grandfather was never idle during the Battle of Tarawa.

Sometime during the day on November 21, Maj. George R.L. Cooper committed the sixty men under Bonnyman and Mosteller “to assault action.” But the after-action shore-party report written by Lt. Col. Chester A. Salazar, Sandy’s CO, does not give further details.20 However, when compared to Salazar’s report, my grandfather’s Medal of Honor citation seems to be in error when it states that he led a group armed with explosives and flamethrowers to destroy “several hostile installations before the close of D-day”²¹ (author’s emphasis); it may be that the citation got the action correct, but misreported the chronology.

Salazar’s report lays to rest frequent speculation that Sandy “abandoned” his shore-party duties without orders, as should nullify once and for all Joseph Alexander’s assertion that as a shore-party officer, he was “essentially out of a job for the first fifty hours or so.”²² Certainly photographer Obie Newcomb was impressed: “It seemed to me he was the busiest man in the whole battle of Tarawa.”²³

Even as other units had continually pushed forward, Maj. Jim Crowe’s 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines had stalled badly on Red 3. Pinned on a narrow beachhead by three machine gun positions firing from a steel pillbox, log wall, and enormous, mysterious sand-covered structure about a hundred yards southwest of the short Burns-Philp pier, the unit continued to take casualties throughout the second day of fighting. When the second platoon of F Company, led by 2nd Lt. George Bussa, attempted to assault the blockhouse from the east, “the enemy laid down such a withering fire that the group was almost wiped out.”²⁴ (Bussa, like Sandy, was recorded as having been buried in Cemetery 27.)

After Bussa’s assault failed, my grandfather led an attack on the southern entrance of the sand-covered monolith, “killing many of the defenders before they were forced to withdraw and replenish their supply of ammunition and grenades.”25 (Some accounts have placed these assaults on D-day. However, after-action reports confirm that my grandfather’s 2/18 did not land until 0430 on D-day, and the Marine Corps’ Historical Division places both attempts on D+1.)

Exposed to constant fire and making no progress, Crowe decided to move his command post back to the seawall in the shelter of the abandoned hulk of LVT 23. A twelve-man patrol sent to protect the short commercial pier killed fifteen Japanese at the expense of just two casualties during the night, but by the end of D+1, 2/8 had made the least progress of any unit on the island. An exasperated Crowe was forced to wait out the night, knowing they’d get nowhere until they knocked out those three Japanese positions.

At 2030 on November 21, Col. Merritt A. “Red Mike” Edson made his way to the island to relieve Shoup, who had orchestrated the first two days of battle. Having pulled the marines together and taken much of the island despite the disastrous landing on D-day, Shoup was put in command of seven landing teams.

William Deane Hawkins led the charge to clear the pier on D-day, and later took out “three pillboxes before he was caught in a burst of Japanese shellfire and mortally wounded.”²⁶ Engineer William Bordelon had fallen on D-day.

When the sun set on the second day of the battle, in other words, the actions for which three of Tarawa’s Medal of Honor recipients would be recognized were in the books. The fourth, my grandfather, remained in action, but discrepancies in various accounts—the Medal of Honor citation, photographer Newcomb’s recollections, the Marine Corps’ official account of the battle, Salazar’s report, letters sent to my great-grandparents, and later published accounts—have made it all but impossible to piece together a reliable chronology of his movements prior to his fatal assault on the bunker on November 22.

These actions, at least, are well established: After landing, Sandy and his second-in-command organized a security detail on Red 3, led a team of combat engineers into action, joined up with Crowe, and failed in his first attempt to take the blockhouse.

According to 2nd Lt. J.L. Dent Jr. of Headquarters Battalion, at some point during the early morning of November 21, Sandy “organized a platoon of about fifty men from what there were on the beach, and went forward and posted them in a defensive line for the night. The next morning this group started knocking out pillboxes. . . . He used riflemen to fire into the opening and keep the Japs down, then he would run out, get on top, and throw dynamite or TNT inside and clear it out that way.”27

At some point, Crowe learned that Sandy was an engineer with extensive demolitions experience and began consulting him about taking the hulking blockhouse. Marvin Sheppard, a private in intelligence with 2/8 Headquarters Company, recalled listening in as my grandfather tried to convince the major that the only way to take the bunker was with demolitions.

“I remember Maj. Crowe thought they shouldn’t use explosives, because if it was an ammo dump, we’d all get killed,” said Sheppard, who contacted me after seeing a news report on CNN. “The first time I ever saw your grandfather he was saying, ‘I doubt very much if they would build a weapons building that close to the water.’ He said he didn’t think there was any danger.”²⁸

Crowe evidently found that argument convincing enough to send Sandy forward to advise Maj. William Chamberlin on a plan to take the bunker.

By the end of the first day of battle, Betio was a horrific charnel ground. Blistering tropical sun had not only drained the marines of energy, leaving their skin burned, lips cracked and bleeding, but also transformed hundreds American and Japanese corpses into a ghastly mockery of their former humanity.

There was neither time nor equipment to bury the dead during the fighting, and within hours, many bodies had bloated to bursting, leaving splotches of putrid, blackening entrails. The reek of death clung to the marines’ hair, skin, and clothing. As Robert Sherrod famously observed, “Betio would be more habitable if the Marines could leave for a few days and send a million buzzards in.”29

“Even toward the end of the first day, the stench was already bad. There was no breeze blowing at all, we were straddling the equator, and it was about a hundred degrees. Bodies just lay around there, bloating within two or three hours, tearing the uniforms open and releasing the stench,” recalled Max Clampitt, a machine gunner with the 6th Regiment who later served seven terms as mayor of Hobbs, New Mexico. “It lasted the whole five days I was there and left a little fog, a kind of haze over the whole island. It sticks with me to this day.”³⁰

By 1800 on D+1, the marines held the entire western end of Betio as well as most of the airfield, and were gradually drawing the noose around the remaining Japanese forces. Supplies and vehicles were rumbling off the pier and reinforcements made their way to the lines. Before surrendering command to Edson, Shoup offered this famous assessment of where things stood: “Casualties: many. Percentage dead: Unknown. Combat efficiency: We are winning.”³¹

The issue was no longer in doubt, but the fight was not yet over, and Sandy Bonnyman was still in it.