After dark, General Smith sent his chief of staff, “Red Mike” Edson, ashore to take command of all forces on Betio and Bairiki. Shoup had done a magnificent job, but it was time for the senior colonel to take charge. There were now eight reinforced infantry battalions and two artillery battalions deployed on the two islands. With LT 3/6 scheduled to land early on D+2, virtually all the combat and combat support elements of the 2d Marine Division would be deployed.
Edson reached Shoup’s CP by 2030 and found the barrel-chested warrior still on his feet, grimy and haggard, but full of fight. Edson assumed command, allowing Shoup to concentrate on his own reinforced combat team, and began making plans for the morning.
Years later, General Julian Smith looked back on the pivotal day of 21 November 1943 at Betio and admitted, “we were losing until we won!” Many things had gone wrong, and the Japanese had inflicted severe casualties on the attackers, but, from this point on, the issue was no longer in doubt at Tarawa.
[Sidebar ([page 33]):]
Colonel David M. Shoup, USMC
An excerpt from the field notebook David Shoup carried during the battle of Tarawa reveals a few aspects of the personality of its enigmatic author: “If you are qualified, fate has a way of getting you to the right place at the right time—tho’ sometimes it appears to be a long, long wait.” For Shoup, the former farm boy from Battle Ground, Indiana, the combination of time and place worked to his benefit on two momentous occasions, at Tarawa in 1943, and as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s deep selection to become 22d Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1959.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 310552
Col David M. Shoup, here as he appeared after the battle, was the fourth and only living Marine awarded a Medal of Honor from the Tarawa fighting.
Colonel Shoup was 38 at the time of Tarawa, and he had been a Marine officer since 1926. Unlike such colorful contemporaries as Merritt Edson and Evans Carlson, Shoup had limited prior experience as a commander and only brief exposure to combat. Then came Tarawa, where Shoup, the junior colonel in the 2d Marine Division, commanded eight battalion landing teams in some of the most savage fighting of the war.