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By Root 1160 0

raging in all these areas, the southwest and the central Pacific remained the crucial points of conflict. The Japanese high command was still not entirely unhappy with events. They had expected to shift to a defensive strategy once their perimeter was achieved, and all of their setbacks so far—the Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, even Papua in New Guinea—had occurred beyond the perimeter as they originally envisaged it. Most of the losses could be explained away, though the consequences were awkward; they were bothered by the diminution in the number of their trained carrier pilots and they initiated an intensive training program. They could still hope that a few hard defeats on the main line of the perimeter would make the Americans give up. But as 1943 rolled on, the skies began to darken for them.

The Americans did not give up, and the process of nibbling away at the empire went on with increasing energy. MacArthur and Halsey kept pounding at the approaches to Rabaul. It was the end of 1943 before the Japanese were cleared off the Huon Peninsula of New Guinea, and the Americans leaped to the west end of New Britain, the island on which Rabaul sits. At the same time they worked their way up the Solomons, and the litany of pain, defeat, and victory begun at Guadalcanal went on: Rendova, New Georgia, Kolombangara, Vella Lavella, Bougainville. Flyspecks on the globe became engraved forever on hearts in the United States, in Australia, and in Japan. The constant drainage of men and materials hurt the Japanese more than it did the Americans and the Australians; the Allied forces could afford it better.

In the central Pacific it was an ocean war; the carrier task forces ranged over the great spaces. In March of 1943 the Allied chiefs approved a second approach to the Philippines, due west from Hawaii, and turned the navy loose. Admiral Nimitz wanted to go for the Marshalls, but lacked sufficient troops for that. He decided instead on a landing in the Gilberts, farther east, and picked the island of Tarawa as his target.

Tarawa is an atoll, the top of a submerged mountain forming a circle of islets. The largest of these islets, Betio, was only a few feet above the water, containing a scant 300 acres of sand and coral and palm trees. The Japanese had put 4,700 troops ashore here and they had done their best to make the island a fortress. Betio was ringed by two coral reefs; the inner, unknown to the Americans, rising high enough that landing boats would not be able to get over it. The few breaks in the reef the Japanese mined and wired. On the island itself they brought in eight-inch guns from Singapore, built redoubts, dugouts, pillboxes, and bunkers. They mined and wired again, and set up interlocking zones of fire. Then they sat down to wait it out.

The Americans showed up on November 13. First there were heavy air strikes, followed by a lengthy pre-invasion bombardment from the navy. Neither of these did as much damage as the Americans hoped. Flat-trajectory naval guns had but a limited effectiveness against deeply dug positions, which required plunging fire to reduce them. Then, on the 21st, while the army overran the nearby island of Makin, the Marines went ashore.

Almost everything went wrong. The landing boats grounded on the inner reef, where the Japanese had their guns ranged. Under heavy fire the troops clambered out of the boats and into waist-and chest-deep water and began to wade the several hundred yards to the beach. The Japanese machine guns opened up on them in the water. The amphibious tractors that clambered over the reef immediately became targets for mortars and artillery. Many were hit, some broke down, some made it to the beach, then could not get up over the palm log barricades. With Marines on the beach the navy stopped its shore bombardment for fear of hitting its own people. The Marines were pinned down to a few square yards of sand in front of the barricades; there was no way back across the bloodstained waters of the lagoon, and no way forward. All that long day they clung to their strip of