76 Hours: The Invasion of Tarawa - Kindle edition by Eric Hammel, John E. Lane. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets.
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- 76 Hours : The Invasion of Tarawa
- The Battle of Tarawa: 76 Hours of Hell – 5,700 Dead for Twelve Square Miles
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- Battle of Tarawa - HISTORY
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In late , the United States launched attacks in the central Pacific. These were meant to speed up victory in the war by drawing Japanese forces away from larger offensives.
The Tarawa Atoll, part of the Gilbert Islands, was one of the targets of this advance. Both sides prepared extensively for the fighting on Tarawa though the Americans did so from a position of ignorance. Tarawa is an atoll made up of fifteen small islands in the shape of a triangle, their total land area only twelve square miles. In the center is a lagoon, and reefs shelter many parts of the atoll.
The British, who had governed the atoll before the war, were remarkably ill-informed about it. All their maps were over a century old, and they had no records of the tides and currents in the surrounding sea. Aerial reconnaissance provided some information about the islands and the Japanese defenses, but the attack would still be launched through a fog of ignorance.
76 Hours : The Invasion of Tarawa
The focus of both the Japanese defenders and the Americans attackers was Betio, which had been the British headquarters. Just two miles long and a few hundred yards wide, this flat island guarded the only entrance to the lagoon, and had a pier for small boats, though this could only be used at high tide. Having built their main airfield in the region there, the Japanese forces were concentrated on this spot.
These defences included artillery pieces. Thanks to the small, flat, featureless nature of the island, almost all of them could hit almost every one of its beaches.
The Battle of Tarawa: 76 Hours of Hell – 5,700 Dead for Twelve Square Miles
At the tops of those beaches were walls of palm logs and wire up to five feet high, behind them rifle pits and machine-guns. Behind those were fortified machine-gun emplacements of coral, logs and reinforced concrete, hidden with sand. Beyond those were pillboxes holding anti-tank guns and field guns. To make the landings, the Americans gathered Amtracs — amphibious tractors. These had previously only been used to bring supplies in but were deemed better than landing craft given the uncertain terrain. Armour plates and machine-guns were bolted onto them in preparation for the landings.
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The 2 nd Marines, who would head the landings on the 20th of November, believed that the mission was going to be a piece of cake. They could not have been more wrong. On the night of the 19th of November, things started going wrong. Strong currents created chaos as troops transferred to their landing craft.
- Planning and Preparation.
- The Battle of Tarawa: 76 Hours of Hell - 5, Dead for Twelve Square Miles!
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Overnight air raids had not taken out the shore batteries as they were expected to. Rear-Admiral Hill had calculated that the Amtracs would reach the shore in forty minutes, but this proved optimistic. As the bombardment of the shore stopped to avoid hitting the troops, they were still out at sea and exposed.
At ten past nine in the morning, the first troops reached the island. The Invasion of Tarawa. Lane On the morning of Saturday, November 20, , the U.
Battle of Tarawa - HISTORY
The objective was tiny Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll. The result was an immortal story of tragedy and near defeat turned around into an epic of victory and indomitable human spirit. Although the admirals commanding the Tarawa invasion fleet had assured the Marines that Betio would be pounded to coral dust by a massive naval and air bombardment-the largest of its kind ever seen to that time-the first waves of Marines found the Japanese defenses intact and manned by determined foes.
Within minutes of the start of the head-on assault, the American battle plan was a shambles and scores of Marines had been killed or wounded. The assault virtually stopped at the water's edge, its momentum halted before many Marines ever dismounted from the amphibian tractors that had carried them to the deadly, fire-swept beach. Follow-up waves of Marines suffered grievous casualties when they were forced to wade more than yards through fire-swept, knee-deep water because tidal conditions had been miscalculated by the invasion's planners.
Follow the bloody battle for Betio in graphic detail as heroic American fighting men advance every life-threatening step across the tiny island in the face of what many historians agree was the best and most concentrated defenses manned by the bravest and most competent Japanese defenders American troops encountered in the entire Pacific War. Product details Format Paperback pages Dimensions People who viewed this also viewed.
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