“Take me back to Tarawa!” said a disgruntled marine when he first set eyes on the place to which the division had been sent. “With a little more planning,” said another after having checked out the place more thoroughly, “they could have picked a worse spot.”
It was December 1943 and the 2nd division of the United States Marines had just taken Tarawa, a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, from the Japanese. The cost had been horrendous. Over the course of just three days, nearly a thousand marines were killed, more than two thousand wounded or listed as missing, all on one small island, Betio, a narrow stretch of sand barely two and half miles long. Roughly five thousand Japanese were estimated to have died, often horribly, in its defence. New York Times correspondent Robert Trumbull was shaken by what he saw when it was over:
This battle was the bloodiest mess ever seen. Today, twenty-four hours after the last organized Japanese resistance ended, the dead of both sides lie all over the island, and riddled corpses form a ghastly fringe along the narrow white beaches where men of the Second Marine Division died for every foot of sand. It is impossible to look in any direction from any point on this island … without seeing bodies of marines and Japanese. Out from the beaches in the shallow water … dead marines hang over the barbed wire barricades in groups of three and four where they were shot down by squads. Beneath the one long pier where the marines crawled ashore under cover of the wooden planking corpses of the men who didn't make it still cling to barnacled cross-pieces. There are already a dozen small marine graveyards on Betio with identification tags tied to the crude wooden crosses where the Second Marine Division interred its first heroes. These graveyards are only begun.
Some of the marines who landed on Betio were veterans who had fought on Guadalcanal. Others were green and their inexperience was a challenge for the officers who led them. But it was heroism that won the day: the heroism of artillerymen who carried their heavy howitzers in pieces through shoulder-high waves to reach the beach under fire; the heroism of the driver who carved a berm in the sand with his bulldozer, ignoring the bullets that buzzed around him; the heroism of Lieutenant William D. Hawkins who, enraged at the losses his unit had suffered, launched what amounted to a single-handed attack on a series of enemy bunkers. These few stood apart but those who followed them were courageous too. They had to be. A senior officer, “Red Mike” Edson, said the division paid a stiffer “price in human life per square yard” than in any other engagement in Marine Corps history.
The marines on Betio saw friends killed and maimed. They saw the enemy in its hundreds literally roasted by flame-throwers or blown to pieces by artillery. The engagement was sudden, its action compacted, enacted without respite. A proportion of the casualties were said to have suffered from battle fatigue but for all the experience was traumatic.
They left, begrimed and exhausted, on troopships. Even the outbound journey was grim. “The smell of blood, death, and disinfectant filled the stuffy transports,” wrote one historian. “Each day, Marines who had succumbed to the wounds they had received at Tarawa slid over the side to their final resting place at the bottom of the sea.” The men on board must have hoped they were returning to the civilized comforts of the camp in New Zealand where they had been based before. Instead, the ships took them to Hilo, Hawaii, and thence into the interior of the Big Island. It was here that the two marines, on first seeing their new home, uttered their anguished complaints.
And not without reason. They were to be based on land borrowed from the mighty Parker Ranch, sixty-five miles from any proper city, situated between a pair of volcanoes, with vast herds of cattle and flocks of sheep for company. The camp wasn’t even built. Streets were laid out and tents stacked in place, but nothing had been set up when they arrived. The bruised and bloodied 2nd Marine division was in the construction business.
It was here that they were expected to recover, regroup and prepare for another assault, one likely to be just as gruelling as the one they had just gone through. What’s surprising is how well it worked, how effectively the trauma of battle was ameliorated. A clue to its success can be read in the pages of the newspaper the men published. They called their new home Camp Tarawa, and the paper they produced, with comic irony, Tarawa Boom De-Ay.
The first issue contained, as might be expected, a message of congratulation from the commanding officer and an editorial indicating that discipline, which had suffered in what the writer termed euphemistically, “the recent period of informality,” was to be restored: “Now is the time to get back the zip and snap for which the Marine Corps is noted. Let’s watch those salutes….” There was a long article about the Parker Ranch, “one of the most colossal cattle-manufacturing plants in the world,” where thirty-five thousand head of cattle roamed over half a million acres of grassland, and a shorter piece in which Staff Sergeant William K. Beech described how he and a colleague were welcomed over Christmas into the home of a local businessman, who, at the end of the day, showed him to a room that featured a bed with an “honest-to-goodness innerspring mattress.” Only with difficulty, reported Beech, was he dissuaded from choosing instead the more familiar discomfort of the floor.
The sports page carried a summary of the football games played recently in the United States (USC trounced Washington State 20-0 in the Rose Bowl), while a sidebar listed the results of games played on the camp’s sports field. These included more or less serious competitions in which companies would have been pitted against one another, such as wrestling and boxing matches and the one-hundred-yard dash, and frivolous ones, such as the sack- and three-legged races. A diagram illustrated the “blooper pitch” thrown by Detroit Tiger pitcher Rip Sewell that reportedly sailed twenty-five feet in the air before returning to earth in the vicinity of home plate, utterly confounding the hitter. There were expertly drawn cartoons, as well, reflecting the mildly misogynistic brand of military humor, and a final page of photographs taken by Marine photographers on Tarawa, to remind them of what they had gone through.
What these yellowed pages suggest is the role played by shared experience in recovering from trauma. The general’s words assured the men that the battle had been worthwhile. They were on the side of the righteous. (Church services were listed as well.) The photographs reminded them of what they had achieved and what they had lost. They could talk to one another about this, or not. Perhaps talk wasn’t necessary. Some things didn’t need to be said. Their present exertions, in building the camp and in playing games, used up energy that might otherwise have found less constructive expression. The resumption of parade-ground discipline would have been annoying but reassuring. Their isolation enforced camaraderie. Senior officers knew these factors served to instil and reinforce esprit de corps. I suspect they also understood, at least instinctively, that the routines and fellowship of the camp were balm to the unsettled psyches of men who had so recently walked with death.
I wonder what it’s like for the men now fighting the Russians in Ukraine, some of whom have been fighting for years. What respite is there for them? What time to heal? Camp Tarawa was no holiday resort but it worked in a way that seems almost luxurious. Not that the 2nd Marines had it easy. After Tarawa came Saipan.
Their war wouldn’t end for another two years.
Sources: Keyes Beech, dispatch December 16, 1943, NARA RG 0127, Entry #A1 1004, Box #3 Beech Tarawa; Robert Trumbull, New York Times, November 28, 1943: Maj. David N. Bruckner, A Brief History of the 10th Marines (Washington DC: History and Museums Division, USMC, 1981) p. 68.
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Cartoon: Patrick Dorian