Inferno - Max Hastings [276]
The expansion of the U.S. Navy made possible a growing Pacific buildup in the course of 1943. Four huge Essex-class fleet carriers and five light carriers provided the core of fast task forces which included battleships and cruisers for shore bombardment and destroyers for radar picket and antisubmarine escort duties. A vast fleet train of oilers and supply vessels enabled the fighting ships to sustain 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, often covering hundreds of square miles of ocean. The U.S. 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 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps advanced from one foothold to the next, knowing that the Japanese had fortified them all in anticipation of their coming.
Adm. 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. U.S. 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 U.S. Marine Corps’ war. On Betio, the main islet, less than two miles long and 700 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