Battle Cry - Leon Uris [196]
We stood topside as the guns of the Fifth Fleet leveled the distant palms and split the dawn with salvo after salvo. Ear-shattering bursts and lines of shells following a red course into Betio. The rest of the troops were locked below but I had my crew in the spare room by the radio room. Hour after hour the battlewagons cracked and thundered and reeled awesomely under the impact of the explosives they were hurling into the tiny coral speck.
“Gawd,” Andy whispered, “nothing could live after this.”
“The whole island is on fire.”
“Gawd.”
“Here come the cruisers in closer.” A smashing broadside was hurled from the Portland and another from the Mobile. Little destroyers cockily moved into point-blank range with their five-inchers blazing. Flares of light belched from the guns of the warships with every salvo until the dawn became daylight.
I checked my watch as we dropped anchor in the transport area. The Second Marines awaited word from the Maryland whose code name was ROCKY.
H-Hour crept close and every ship of the fleet poured it on except the screening destroyers, which circled the transports on the alert for enemy submarines. Admiral Parks had claimed he would sink Betio. I wouldn’t have argued with him.
“Somehow,” Danny said, “I can’t help but feel sorry for those Japs. Suppose it was us?”
The punishing spectacle rose to new heights until Betio faded from view behind a shroud of rising smoke.
Then it became very quiet.
Excited troops of the Second Marines clambered topside to their landing stations.
“I hope the Navy left some Japs for us.”
“Man, what a hammering they gave old Helen.”
“Now hear this, now hear this: Team One, over the side.”
“Let’s go, boys, over the side.”
“Man, I bet the pogey bait Sixth is burning up.”
“That’s us, always a bride, never a bridesmaid.”
“Come on, you guys, step it up.”
Fifteen minutes before the Second Marines were scheduled to hit Blue Beach, a platoon of picked men, the Scouts and Snipers, was sent in to clear the long pier on Betio. It ran between Blue Beach Two and Blue Beach Three and jutted out from the island for five hundred yards, running over the reef to deep water. The pier had been used to unload supplies and also as a seaplane ramp.
Scouts and Snipers, under command of rugged Lieutenant Roy, closely resembled the Raiders in operation.
The battle plan unfolded in the minutes before H-Hour. The big warships withdrew and left only the relative quiet of the destroyers pounding the immediate landing area. Minesweepers were operating in the lagoon. The Second Marines were in their landing craft and circled the control boat like Indians circling a covered-wagon train. Then they began the perilous transfer to the alligators. The first setback beamed into the operations room of the flagship Maryland. The smoke screen had to be called off. The wind was in the wrong direction.
Tod Philips fumed. He wanted smoke cover for the assault wave. He asked for a time check as heavy bombers were due from Samoa to pattern-bomb Betio with daisycutters, missiles which exploded, scattering shrapnel over the ground. The second setback came in. The planes were overloaded and had been forced to turn back after losses while taking off.
As the Second Marines continued their transfer to the alligators the sky became an umbrella of dive bombers and strafing planes which roared in at treetop level, raking and pinpointing Helen from one end to the other. Suddenly, with only half their passes made, the planes returned to their carriers. It had proved impossible to bomb Helen effectively. The flame and smoke were too thick to see targets on the island.
Without a single shot having been fired by the enemy, the operations room of the Maryland became uneasy. As the fighter planes moved back, the control board radioed: WE HAVE LOST SEVEN ALLIGATORS AND ALL PERSONNEL IN TRANSFERRING TROOPS FROM LANDING CRAFT.
The shock of the drowning of over a hundred men fell hard on the steamy, smoke-filled operations room aboard the flagship. Foul Ball Philips bit his cigar in half. The confused aides