LtGen Julian C. Smith Collection
The atmosphere in both Washington and Pearl Harbor was particularly tense during this period. General MacArthur, still bitter that the 2d Marine Division had been taken from his Southwest Pacific Command, wrote the Secretary of War complaining that “these frontal attacks by the Navy, as at Tarawa, are a tragic and unnecessary massacre of American lives.” A woman wrote Admiral Nimitz accusing him of “murdering my son.” Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox called a press conference in which he blamed “a sudden shift in the wind” for exposing the reef and preventing reinforcements from landing. Congress proposed a special investigation. The Marines were fortunate to have General Alexander A. Vandegrift in Washington as the newly appointed 18th Commandant. Vandegrift, the widely respected and highly decorated veteran of Guadalcanal, quietly reassured Congress, pointing out that “Tarawa was an assault from beginning to end.” The casualty reports proved to be less dramatic than expected. A thoughtful editorial in the 27 December 1943 issue of The New York Times complimented the Marines for overcoming Tarawa’s sophisticated defenses and fanatical garrison, warning that future assaults in the Marshalls might result in heavier losses. “We must steel ourselves now to pay that price.”
The controversy was stirred again after the war when General Holland Smith claimed publicly that “Tarawa was a mistake!” Significantly, Nimitz, Spruance, Turner, Hill, Julian Smith, and Shoup disagreed with that assessment.
Admiral Nimitz did not waver. “The capture of Tarawa,” he stated, “knocked down the front door to the Japanese defenses in the Central Pacific.” Nimitz launched the Marshalls campaign only 10 weeks after the seizure of Tarawa. Photo-reconnaissance and attack aircraft from the captured airfields at Betio and Apamama provided invaluable support. Of greater significance to success in the Marshalls were the lessons learned and the confidence gleaned from the Tarawa experience.
Henry I. Shaw, Jr., for many years the Chief Historian of the Marine Corps, observed that Tarawa was the primer, the textbook on amphibious assault that guided and influenced all subsequent landings in the Central Pacific. Shaw believed that the prompt and selfless analyses which immediately followed Tarawa were of great value: “From analytical reports of the commanders and from their critical evaluations of what went wrong, of what needed improvement, and of what techniques and equipment proved out in combat, came a tremendous outpouring of lessons learned.”
All participants agreed that the conversion of logistical LVTs to assault craft made the difference between victory and defeat at Betio. There was further consensus that the LVT-1s and LVT-2s employed in the operation were marginal against heavy defensive fires. The Alligators needed more armor, heavier armament, more powerful engines, auxiliary bilge pumps, self-sealing gas tanks—and wooden plugs the size of 13mm bullets to keep from being sunk by the Japanese M93 heavy machine guns. Most of all, there needed to be many more LVTs, at least 300 per division. Shoup wanted to keep the use of LVTs as reef-crossing assault vehicles a secret, but there had been too many reporters on the scene. Hanson W. Baldwin broke the story in The New York Times as early as 3 December.
Naval gunfire support got mixed reviews. While the Marines were enthusiastic about the response from destroyers in the lagoon, they were critical of the extent and accuracy of the preliminary bombardment, especially when it was terminated so prematurely on D-Day. In Major Ryan’s evaluation, the significant shortcoming in Operation Galvanic “lay in overestimating the damage that could be inflicted on a heavily defended position by an intense but limited naval bombardment, and by not sending in the assault forces soon enough after the shelling.” Major Schoettel, recalling the pounding his battalion had received from emplacements within the seawall, recommended direct fire against the face of the beach by 40mm guns from close-in destroyers. The hasty, saturation fires, deemed sufficient by planners in view of the requirement for strategic surprise, proved essentially useless. Amphibious assaults against fortified atolls would most of all need sustained, deliberate, aimed fire.
While no one questioned the bravery of the aviators who supported the Betio assault, many questioned whether they were armed and trained adequately for such a difficult target. The need for closer integration of all supporting arms was evident.
Communications throughout the Betio assault were awful. Only the ingenuity of a few radio operators and the bravery of individual runners kept the assault reasonably coherent. The Marines needed waterproof radios. The Navy needed a dedicated amphibious command ship, not a major combatant whose big guns would knock out the radio nets with each salvo. Such command ships, the AGCs, began to appear during the Marshalls campaign.