Admiral Nimitz by Brayton Harris

Author:Brayton Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MIDCOURSE CORRECTION

By November 1943 Nimitz was ready to take on the next major target: Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands, about 1,000 miles to the northeast of Guadalcanal. As they had planned to do with Guadalcanal, the Japanese were turning Tarawa into an airbase from which they could seriously impact U.S. efforts in the central Pacific. Nimitz’s attack force—a true armada—included 12 battleships, 6 fleet carriers, 5 light carriers, 8 escort carriers, 100 other ships, and 18,300 men in the landing force. They were to take out a garrison of some 2,500 combat troops plus the same number of construction workers. It should have been a walk in the park. It was a crawl through bloody hell.

The pre-invasion bombardment was intense and the landings were a failure. Because of an exceptionally low tide, most of the landing craft could not make it over the reef and on to the beach. The troops had to wade ashore under heavy enemy fire, against a determined defense. The bombardment seemed to have had no effect whatsoever.

Eventually, almost all of the Japanese defenders were killed, along with perhaps 1,600 of the invading force. About 2,000 Americans were wounded.

Two days after the island fell, Nimitz headed for a visit to see what went wrong. Spruance, in charge of the operation, tried to dissuade him: There were holdouts hiding in caves; the runway was not ready for any heavy aircraft; most of the dead had not yet been buried. Nimitz went anyway, but his plane had to circle for an hour while the Seabees finished lengthening the airstrip. He landed to the stench of rotting corpses; it was, he told Lamar, “The first time I’ve ever smelled death.”1

Nimitz saw that the enemy had been dug in so well that ship and aerial bombardment had been largely ineffectual; the troops were hunkered down in solid concrete bunkers covered with tons of shock-absorbing sand and logs. One of the few Japanese survivors said his commander had boasted a million men could not take the island in a hundred years.2

Nimitz had a mockup of the Tarawa defenses constructed on Kahoolawe, a small uninhabited Hawaiian island, and tested the effectiveness of various types of ammunition. Fire control teams, to be landed with the first wave of troops, were trained to spot targets and direct more accurate fire.

One lesson learned at Tarawa: The landing force commander needed solid hydrographic reconnaissance before a mission was even planned. How deep was the water, what was the slope of the bottom, where were the obstructions—natural or manmade—and what could be done to remove them? This directly led to the development of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), organized by the bomb-disposal expert who Nimitz had encouraged to transfer in from the British Naval Reserve. Commander Draper Kauffman shifted from training Navy bomb disposal teams to disposing of landing-zone obstacles. The work of the UDTs sounded more hazardous than it was, because the men operated underwater and usually under cover of the pre-invasion bombardment, which kept curious defenders from poking around in the surf.

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