Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [139]
Relief came with the dark, and some tanks and artillery got to the beach. By next morning the Marines had enough of a foothold that they could call in carrier support aircraft to make strikes on the Japanese positions. The divisional reserve came ashore that day, though it lost 350 officers and men just reaching dry land. Inch by inch the Marines fought their way forward, the Japanese fighting back for every step. By nightfall on the second day, the Americans had secured the western end of the island. That night the Japanese launched a suicide charge that left their dead piled up in front of the Marine positions, and the next day, the 23rd, the last pockets and pillboxes were cleared out. Tarawa was secured.
The cost, to both sides, had been horrible. Of the 4,700-odd garrison, a hundred Korean laborers were taken prisoner. Only seventeen combat soldiers were taken alive; all the rest fought to the death. In killing them the Marines suffered 985 dead and 2,193 wounded, roughly ten casualties per acre. The ratio mounts even higher if one accepts the estimate that half the Japanese casualties were suffered by the air and naval bombardment.
Tarawa taught the Americans many lessons about the techniques of amphibious landings. They needed better pre-invasion reconnaissance, better and different types of fire-support, better ship-to-shore communications. But it could all be done. After the Dardanelles in 1915-16 military men came to the conclusion that opposed landings were doomed to failure. By 1943 that decision was reversed, and American planners believed that an amphibious assault could get ashore, no matter what the obstacles. The price might seem prohibitively heavy, but improved tactics, weapons, and the new masses of material would remedy that. New ships, new planes, and thousands of trained men were pouring out of the United States. The western Pacific lay ahead: the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Marianas, the Philippines, and at the end—the home islands, Japan itself. At whatever price, the theme begun at Guadalcanal would reach its climax in Tokyo Bay.
21. The European Resistance Movements
THE GERMAN CONQUEST of Europe was intended to be permanent. The First Reich was the old Holy Roman Empire, and it had been laid to rest by Napoleon after the Battle of Austerlitz; the Second Reich was the Hohenzollern Empire; proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1871, it collapsed with the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918; the Third Reich was to last for a thousand years. At least so Hitler said, and so he meant. He was building for the ages.
Not everyone agreed with his concept of the Master Race and the inherent superiority of the Aryan peoples. In western Europe, though at first the Germans behaved themselves, the shock of conquest and defeat soon wore off, and as soon as it did, men and women began thinking of ways to thwart the conquerors. General von Senger und Etterlin wrote in his memoirs of being billeted in a chateau in Normandy after the French surrender, and visiting with the owners and exchanging pleasantries. In 1939 and 1940 there was still some sense of European community among the well-to-do and well educated of the Continent, and French and German had conquered each other so often that there were recognized modes of behavior for such situations. There were also strong currents of authoritarianism in right-wing French circles, and a substantial number of Frenchmen initially preferred the Germans as masters to their own French Socialists, or even worse, the Communists.
The sense of community wore off when Frenchmen realized that these Germans were not quite what they were thought to be. As Neville Chamberlain had earlier discovered, the Nazis were not gentlemen. Temporary occupation, requisitioning, a certain degree of traffic in art work and monuments, all these were still within the code. Labor conscription, holding prisoners of war as hostages, blatant robbery of personal as opposed to state property,