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By Root 1230 0

up to seventy days of continuous operations, far beyond the Royal Navy’s capabilities. There were also escort carriers to provide close support for the amphibious armadas, hundreds of PT-boats for inshore work, together with repair and hospital vessels. Though these ships were overwhelmingly manned by landsmen without previous seagoing experience, officers and crews displayed skills of navigation, gunnery and seamanship which entirely outclassed those of their enemies. The steep decline in the Japanese Combined Fleet’s operational performance, from high professionalism in December 1941 to faltering ineptitude a year or two later, was one of the strangest and most notable phenomena of the war.

Those Japanese pilots who got close enough to see an American task force below them were awed by its size, covering hundreds of square miles of ocean. The US Navy in the last two years of the war projected long-range power such as the world had never seen, and grew larger than all the other combatant navies put together. Substantial elements of this fleet were deployed in support of each of the island assault operations that dominated the latter phase of the eastern war. Nimitz’s central Pacific offensive opened in November 1943, with landings on the tiny atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. There was no scope for strategic deception, because the only credible objectives for American assault were a handful of island air bases. The US Navy and Marine Corps advanced from one foothold to the next, knowing that the Japanese had fortified them all in anticipation of their coming.

Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Gilberts armada included nineteen carriers, twelve battleships and their support vessels, together with an invasion force of 35,000 Marines and 6,000 vehicles. The Americans at sea that day, contemplating the display of their nation’s power around them, felt invincible. US carrier aircraft wrecked every local Japanese airfield with bombs and gunfire; before the landings, Spruance’s heavy guns bombarded the island for three hours, delivering 3,000 tons of shells. Yet the experience that followed proved one of the most bitter of the US Marine Corps’ war. On Betio, the main islet, less than two miles long and seven hundred yards wide, the Japanese had created bunkers of concrete, steel and felled palm trees which were almost impervious to bombs and shells. Marine Karl Albrecht was shocked by his first sight of the beach as his craft approached: ‘It was lined with amphtracs, all of which appeared to be burning and smoking … The attack appeared to have dissolved in confusion. I was terror-stricken and amazed at the same time. We were Americans and invincible. We had a huge armada of warships and a division of Marines. How could this be happening? I discovered the rows of Marines along the beach weren’t lying there waiting for orders to move. They were dead.’

A wide offshore reef checked the assault boats, so that thousands of Marines were obliged to wade the last few hundred yards to the shoreline with agonising sluggishness, under Japanese fire. A navy pilot gazing down on the scene said later: ‘The water never seemed clear of tiny men, their rifles over their heads, slowly wading beachwards. I wanted to cry.’ Four days of fighting followed, among blasted palm trees and skilfully camouflaged defences. When the shooting stopped, the Marines had suffered 3,407 casualties and almost all the 4,500 Japanese defenders were dead – just seventeen prisoners were taken. Every participant in the battle was shocked by its intensity. It was a painful experience for the American people, as well as for the Marines, to discover how hard they must fight to overcome a sacrificial defence. National hubris, the doctrine of American exceptionalism, was affronted by the revelation that a primitive enemy could resist overwhelming firepower, that the path to victory made close-quarter combat and its sacrifices mandatory. Though significant tactical lessons were learned from Tarawa, the same infantry experience would be repeated in later island battles. From