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Tanks in Hell

A Marine Corps Tank Company on Tarawa

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

A NEW DOCTRINE FOR A NEW WAR

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

— General Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the hours after midnight on 20 November, 1943 the officers and men of the Second Marine Division aboard ships and boats lying in the darkness off Betio had studied and trained for a new type of warfare. Amphibious operations dated back to ancient Greece, when ships first transported and disembarked armies for land battles with the enemy. But this was something new, an amphibious assault, a full-scale frontal attack from the open ocean against powerful fixed defenses.

In the eyes of many military theorists, the British debacle at Gallipoli in the Great War had conclusively discredited the amphibious campaign. That operation, a pet project of First Sea Lord Winston Churchill, was intended to secure the Dardanelles Straits and knock Turkey — a German ally — out of the war. The first attempt failed disastrously when Allied battleships ran afoul of mines and shore batteries. Seeking to open the straits by a land campaign, on 25 April 1915, a British and Commonwealth force began to land at two remote locations on the Dardanelles Peninsula overlooked by high hills, at Cape Hellas on the southern tip, and at "Anzac Cove," south of Suvla Bay on the west coast.

British commanders, faced with minimal opposition but absent any direct orders to advance, simply sat on the beach. Quick reinforcement by the Turks penned the huge Allied force into the two shallow beachheads. A force that eventually numbered nearly 490,000 British and Commonwealth and 49,000 French and French Colonial troops piled up in the small beachheads. A horrific struggle against Turkish defenses, climate, disease, and day-to-day extremes of weather continued until the last position was finally evacuated on 8 January 1916.

For many military and naval theorists the lesson was clear — shore batteries and machine guns had rendered amphibious operations a thing of the past.

For the US Navy this new "common wisdom" presented a conundrum. Ever since the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, the Navy's planners had foreseen a potential naval war with expansionist Japan. During the aftermath of the Great War, in 1918, Japan was granted a protectorate over the former German colonies in the Pacific and East Asia. By the 1920s the Japanese Empire sprawled into the Central and Southwestern Pacific, and American planning for a naval war took on new urgency. Increasing Japanese militarism, and particularly expansionism in China throughout the 1920s and 1930s, left little doubt that despite any diplomatic efforts, Japan and the Western powers would eventually clash.

Following the long-established naval doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the Navy planned for a drive across the Central Pacific, culminating in a climactic naval battle with the Imperial Navy. Landing forces would be needed to seize islands in the Marshalls, Marianas, and other island chains to serve as supply and fueling bases. These could only be secured by amphibious operations.

For its part, the US Army had no interest in risky amphibious operations; their future war plans centered on Europe and to a lesser degree the large land masses of the Asian periphery. The assumption was that in Europe the Army could land at friendly ports as it had in the Great War. In other regions, Sir Basil H. Lidell-Hart's "strategy of the indirect approach" — in vogue as a way to avoid bloody stalemates like that on the Western Front — decreed landing at some unopposed site, quickly seizing a port, and marching overland to battle.

The Navy leaders, grappling with how to prosecute a naval war in the vast reaches and small islands of the Central Pacific, found itself without the means to capture the forward bases required by such a war.

The Marine Corps, smarting under the accusation that it had become a "second Army" and struggling to find a role in the gutted post-war defense establishment, would be the ideal service to serve as the Navy's Advanced Base Force to both capture and defend forward naval bases. The Marine Corps eagerly seized upon the role. By the late 1930s the Marines had developed a detailed doctrine for amphibious assault, and trained for years. But they had never actually conducted such an assault against an enemy.

The fall of France in 1940 and the stunning advance of the Japanese in early 1942 had, of course, thrown all the Army's careful war plans out the window. In all theaters of war, amphibious assaults would be necessary prerequisites to any attack upon the Axis Powers. The first Allied offensives came in the southwestern Pacific, but did not test the new Marine Corps doctrine of amphibious assault.

At Guadalcanal the Japanese fled into the jungle rather than oppose the landings, and on the smaller islands nearby, small landing operations had been met by disorganized defenders. It was fortunate. The first assault landings conducted by the Marines were chaotic, with units landing in the wrong positions, wandering about, and critical supplies just piling up on the beach.

On New Georgia, the Marine Corps units were under the operational control of the Army in a test of Lidell-Hart's much-advocated "strategy of the indirect approach"; the soldiers and Marines landed at an undefended spot and attacked overland. The offensive bogged down in horrific jungle warfare, and the cherished strategy was soundly discredited. Learning from the experience, on Bougainville the Marines had again landed in a relatively remote — and lightly-defended — location, but constructed airfields and let the Japanese endure a grueling struggle with the jungle, as they marched overland to counterattack the American lodgment.

All these battles had been fought in a theatre of war where the Marines and Navy had never intended to fight, and had been fought to secure the vital sea lanes to Australia. By late 1943, Japanese southward expansion had been blunted, and the Navy returned to its pre-war plan for a Central Pacific naval offensive.

Inherent in the plans for any amphibious assault was the risk of an enemy naval counterattack, to catch the vulnerable transport ships as they stood off the invasion beachheads. For their part, the Marines accepted that assault landings under threat of a naval counterattack would need to be hastily mounted, prone to confusion, and probably excessively violent. They had attempted to train accordingly.

Mahan had published his seminal work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 16601805 in 1890, in the days when airplanes were the stuff of science fiction. Even the Navy's fundamental plan for war in the Pacific — War Plan ORANGE, the case for a naval war against Japan — was a 1920s concept based upon the needs of a battleship navy. Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea, and Midway suddenly changed everything.

By late 1943, islands were even more important than in Mahan's plan, but now had a new significance as sites for air and submarine bases. The Gilbert Islands, tiny coral specks never before considered particularly important to anyone, now had immense strategic value. They could provide air bases from which land-based bombers could "soften up" the more valuable islands of the Marshall Island chain to the northwest. Aircraft based in the Marshalls would in turn help neutralize the main Japanese naval base at Truk, the linchpin of Japanese power in the southwestern Pacific. Elimination or isolation of Truk would pave the way for two Pacific offensives — a naval drive through the Central Pacific, and Douglas MacArthur's second drive through Melanesia to the Philippines. The two campaigns, planned to converge on Formosa, would utilize America's numerical and material superiority to neutralize any advantage the Japanese might have gained from interior lines of communication.

The capture of Betio would be the vital first step in the new "second front." It would also be the first real-world test of the doctrine of amphibious assault to capture advanced island bases.

The Japanese had not intended to fight for the Gilbert Islands. Occupied almost as an afterthought, bases in the Gilberts were merely part of a screen, positions from which patrol planes could search the emptiness of the Central Pacific and give warning of American threats to more significant positions in the Marshall Islands. The Japanese were so confident, that following their initial seizure, they actually reduced the size of the garrison at their main base on Butaritari Island (Makin Atoll) to about 70 men.

Then on 17-18 August 1942, the Second Marine Raider Battalion fell upon the floatplane base and long-range communications facility on Butaritari, destroying the facilities and annihilating the small garrison. Though intended only as a diversion to support the Guadalcanal campaign, like many things in war, the raid had unintended consequences. Alarmed, the Japanese launched a crash program to expand the defenses of their outlying bases from the Aleutians to the Bismarcks, and particularly in the Gilberts.

For the Americans, speed was now of the utmost importance. After the victories at Midway and the Coral Sea, the US Navy seized the initiative. It was important to apply immediate and unrelenting pressure upon the Japanese. Delays simply gave the enemy time to dig deeper and more formidable defenses. Lost time now would later be paid for in American blood.

In the revised Japanese defensive scheme, their primary base in the Gilberts would not be Butaritari, but the tiny island of Bititu (Americanized as Betio) on Tarawa Atoll. The natives were exiled to smaller islands. Elite rikusentai (naval infantry) and sailors of the Imperial Japanese Navy would garrison the new base, and Japanese and Korean laborers were assigned to build an airfield and to construct strong defenses on the small (291 acres/about 1.2 square kilometer) and much more defensible island.

The purpose of the defenses was not necessarily to repel an attack. As anticipated by the Americans, the Japanese strategy was that of a yogaki, or waylaying attack, code-named Z Operation. The defenses were only required to slow an attack and pin the vulnerable amphibious shipping in place long enough for a naval counterstroke. Aircraft would be staged through nearby islands, and submarines and surface vessels would converge from bases like Truk.

Today it is difficult for many Americans to understand the concerns of Navy admirals over such a threat, but for all the Allied navies, and throughout the war, the global shortage of amphibious shipping was an overarching concern. (The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General of the Army George C. Marshall, famously remarked that he thought of little else). In 1943, many of the US Navy's amphibious troop transports were ancient converted ocean liners, and only a handful of specialized seagoing landing craft, like the Landing Ship, Tank (LST), had as yet entered service. The really critical class was the Landing Ship Dock (LSD) used to transport and land heavy equipment such as medium tanks.

The LSD was the brainchild of Sir Roland Baker of England, the designer of the LST. His original designs were the Landing Ship Stern Chute, a modified ferryboat that slid loaded landing craft off a ramp from the vehicle deck, and the Landing Ship Gantry, a modified oil tanker that lowered loaded landing craft over the side with a huge crane. Neither proved very satisfactory. The LSD was a large specially designed ship that could carry pre-loaded tank landing craft internally. The ship could flood the internal cargo bay (called the well deck), and open the entire stern like a huge ramp, allowing the loaded landing craft to emerge ready for action. The design eliminated the dangerous practice of lifting heavy vehicles into landing boats with cranes, and greatly speeded landing operations. Most important, it could carry the new thirty-ton M4 medium tanks, too heavy to lift with existing ships' cranes. All LSDs for the US and British navies would be built in American shipyards.

In late 1943, only three of these priceless vessels existed in the world. Despite the Allied "Germany first" policy, the irascible American chief of naval operations, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, had allocated all three to the Central Pacific campaign. The LSD-1, USS Ashland, would transport Marine Corps medium tanks to Betio. The LSD-2, USS Belle Grove, would transport Army M3 medium tanks for landings on Butaritari. The LSD-3, USS Carter Hall, was still en route from California. The shortage of LSDs would be a limiting factor in amphibious operations as late as the invasion of Peleliu in September 1944.

In 1943, the admirals were painfully aware that the loss of even a few key transport ships would prolong the war, and play to the Japanese overall strategy — a war of attrition in which America would lose hope and accept the new boundaries of an expanded Japanese Empire.

If the Japanese could fall upon the vulnerable shipping standing off a beachhead and destroy even a few precious transports, it would be a major coup. Many armchair admirals have criticized the Navy's seeming timidity, but the American Navy had already proven itself far from timid in the brutal slugfests in the dark waters around the Solomon Islands. The Navy was "... far from reluctant to risk its carrier planes against Japan's island fortresses," and by extension the aircraft carriers that launched the planes. Beginning on 17-18 September the fast carriers pounded Betio and other targets in the Gilberts, and moved on to blast other objectives, leaving the islands to be the target of heavy land-based Army bombers and nocturnal raids by Navy long-range bombers.

Thus the stage was set for a clash of theories. The combatants would stumble blindly into unknown ground, like two fighters in a pitch-black cave. The Americans would face the first real-world test of their new doctrine of amphibious assault. The Japanese would test their new doctrine of defense at the water's edge and the yogaki. The Japanese had constructed powerful defenses that would — they hoped — slaughter any attacker before he set foot on dry land. At worst the defense would bog down an attacker until naval forces arrived to inflict terrible carnage on American ships sitting immobile offshore.

Such blind clashes of untested theories inevitably prove chaotic and violent beyond the wildest imaginings of either side.

SALAD DAYS — FORMATION AND TRAINING

It's not the will to win that matters — everyone has that. It's the will to prepare to win that matters.

— Paul "Bear" Bryant

In the early period of World War II there was still considerable ambiguity as to the role of the Marine Corps in the nation's military and naval establishment. America had been entirely unprepared for its entry into the Great War, on 6 April 1917. Isolationist sentiment had long been strong in America, and a powerful Navy controlling the Atlantic Ocean moat was perceived as the guarantor of that neutrality. By 1917 the Navy — and its ancillary service, the Marine Corps — had already greatly expanded and was prepared for war, but the War Department scrambled desperately to mobilize an army to send to France. The commandant of the Marine Corps, General George Barnett, correctly perceived that the Corps would have to send troops to fight in France in order to justify the force expansion already begun. In April 1917, Britain and France, their populations demoralized and manpower resources nearing exhaustion, sent a delegation to urge an immediate American commitment on the Western Front.

The War Department balked at sending the fledgling American Expeditionary Force, which would be composed almost entirely of new and untrained volunteers and conscripts, into battle piecemeal and before it could be brought up to strength and adequately trained. Eventually the War Department agreed to send a token division under General John J. Pershing, but given its training commitments, could not form a full division. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels immediately volunteered a Marine Corps regiment for immediate service, with another soon to follow. Secretary of War Newton Collins and Army Chief of Staff Tasker Bliss informed Pershing that he would accept a Marine Brigade of two regiments for immediate service in France. To his credit, Pershing pledged to treat the Marine Brigade equitably in all matters.

The Marine Brigade served with distinction as part of the Army's Second ("Indianhead") Division, but that distinction would come at a long-term cost. As a result of a censor's violation of policy, the Marine Brigade won considerable fame in the month-long fighting for Belleau Wood in June 1918. Many Army leaders felt that the Corps had functioned as a "second army," and garnered what they believed to be an undue portion of glory at the expense of the Army units fighting alongside them.

The ever-reserved Pershing held himself aloof from the controversy, and famously said that "The deadliest weapon in the world is a Marine and his rifle." But the controversy aroused the enmity of many future US Army leaders who also felt that Pershing had been pressured to accept Marines into the American Expeditionary Force. Many of these future generals, including George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Omar Bradley, revered Pershing as a father figure, and in 1942 would brook no inclusion of the Marines in Europe.

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Excerpted from Tanks in Hell by Oscar E. Gilbert, Romain Cansiere. Copyright © 2015 Oscar E. Gilbert & Romain Cansiere. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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