[naval music playing]
These are the men of the second marine division.
We are now embarking on a full-scale amphibious operation after many months of intensive training.
[naval music still playing]
The transports are combat loaded.
The ships of the Navy and Coast Guard form our convoy.
Squadrons of carrier planes cover us in the sky.
Several days from our destination, a destroyer brings us sealed orders.
[dramatic music playing]
It won't be long now before we know where we're bound.
The relief map of our objective is broken out.
Fortified out on the Betio in the Tarawa Atoll.
A very important Jap air base on the outer fringe of their Pacific defenses.
Our platoon leader started explaining the terrain to us.
By the time they were finished, we knew that island and its reefs as well as we knew our own back yards.
We built more machine gun ammunition.
[dreary, dramatic music playing]
Check and test-fire all weapons.
[very loud gun shot booms, listeners should brace or lower their volumes]
Exercise helped to relieve the tension.
Navy and Coast Guard coxswains receive last minute instructions on formations, rendezvous areas, and departure times.
Services are held on the last evening before D-Day.
[organ music playing]
We liked listening to Father Kelly. He'd been with us at Guadalcanal.
He had a way of saying what we wanted to hear.
Many of these men were killed the following morning.
[organ music continues, turns into dramatic music at 2:47]
We are ready.
D-Day. It's the day we attack. Long before daylight, we're over the side into our amphibian tractors and landing boats.
[dramatic music continues]
At daylight our naval vessels open fire, for four solid hours they bombed Tarawa with high explosives.
[bomb blasts]
Everything went like clockwork. When the ships stopped firing, the Navy planes would take over...bombing.
[machine gun sounds]
Strafing. We were a team working together.
[Machine guns blasting]
Then again according to plan, the planes withdraw, the ships' batteries open up again.
[Machine guns sounds]
H-hour, the hour we attack is getting close.
For three days before we moved in, over four million pounds of explosives have been dropped on the island.
It didn't seem possible that anyone could live through that bombardment.
[bomb blasts]
[airplane engines]
From this Jap hulk, machine guns constantly strafed our assault waves.
[airplane soaring sounds]
We bomb them out twice, but each time a new crew took over.
One of our planes scores a direct hit.
[airplane gliding and soaring, loud]
As we approach the island, we have the feeling that the show is just about over.
There doesn't seem to be any organized resistance. However, we're taking no chances.
Suddenly we're met by heavy machine gun and mortar fire. Takes a heavy toll of our boats and men. It doesn't stop us.
[heavy machine guns and bombs]
We fight our way onto the beach.
[machine guns and bombs blasting]
Our men wade ashore from wrecked amphibians.
[gun shots continue]
A long pier extending across the fringing reef gives protection to a lot of our boys on the way in.
We have a pretty good toehold on the beach but Jap fire pins us down for hours.
[gun shots, bombs and airplanes' engines sounding]
Casualties are pretty high, but as we found out later, blood plasma saves a lot of lives.
[gun shots]
When reinforcements arrive, we start moving up.
[gun shots]
It isn't easy knocking those Japs out of their positions. They're hidden in trees, behind revetments, buried pillboxes, bomb proofs, bunkers.
[guns, machine guns, bombs]
[repeated gun fire]
We use hand grenades.
We use all the fire power we have to blast them out.
Our rifle fire is deadly, so are the flame throwers, and the mortars.
[gun shots]
The enemy breaks from cover.
[bomb blasts]
[machine gun fire]
It's tough getting them out of places like this, we can never be sure where their snipers are placed.
We take it slow...easy.
[bomb blast from a hand grenade thrown]
This bunker is giving us plenty of trouble, we have orders to clean it out.
[gun shots]
[bomb blasts]
This is what we found on the other side.
[gun shots]
They're savage fighters; their lives mean nothing to them.
One of our boys is hit.
[machine gun fire]
At night, the Japs would swim out to our wrecked amphibians and set up machine guns.
They got a few of us, before we got them.
[bomb blasts]
Commanding officer of the assault troops confers with his staff.
One of our medium tanks remains in operation.
[machine gun fire]
Although, at the end of the second day, D+1, we breathe a little easier; mortar squads continue to hammer enemy points of resistance.
[hammer hitting metal]
[gun fire]
[bomb blasts]
By this time we know the Japs are licked. They must know it, too.
There's still strong resistance and if suicide snipers tie themselves up in the trees and
take pot shots at us, we hit them but they don't fall, just die and hang there.
[gun shots] [machine gun fire] [gun shots] [ricochet sounds] [machine gun fire] [tank rumbling]
A light tank moves up the airstrip.
One of our boys is wounded during the attack on the airfield.
Another Marine goes out after him in a Jeep under heavy machine gun fire.
[Tank engine noise]
[machine gun fire]
Back at the beach, there's constant activity. Amphibians tow in fresh supplies, food, ammunition, guns.
[gun shots]
As the battle moves across the island, the chaplain's assistants tend the dead. Removing
the lower identification ticket and leaving the duplicate on each Marine so there'll be no mistake later on.
[low music playing]
Generals Holland Smith and Julian Smith commanding the force and division.
Admiral Harry Hill commanding the task force. Sometimes we actually have to dig the Japs out of their holes.
The island is infested with buried pillboxes, many of them still crawling with Japs.
These bunkers were so constructed that heavy shelling and demolition charges failed to crumble them.
Many of them were over 20 feet deep.
Our first prisoners.
The wounded are given first aid in the field, and then carried by stretcher to the boats.
With them always are the Navy hospital corpsman and Navy doctors and surgeons.
At the transport, the steel litters are lifted from the barges and lowered into the hold.
They are taken to the ships hospital, not a second is lost.
[dramatic music]
These are marine dead.
This is the price we have to pay for a war we didn't want and before it's over, there'll be more dead on other battlefields.
[water splashing]
Burial aboard ship for Marines killed in action.
[water splashing]
[gunfire salute]
Just to make sure they're not concealing weapons, the prisoners are lined up and their clothes cut away.
We gave them new ones later from their own dumps.
[sounds of clothes being ripped]
The rest of the island's defending force is dead, none escaped.
Tokyo once boasted that it would cost a hundred thousand of our men to take Tarawa. We lost less
than a thousand; the Japs, over four thousand.
A wounded Japs soldier, we took very little of these.
Most of our prisoners were Korean laborers.
One of our officers captured these Japs from a disabled landing boat.
Prisoners carry their own wounded to the pier for evacuation.
Captured Jap water, this is the first chance the boys have had to wash since they got on the island.
Gun fire from our warships knocked these big guns out early in the bombardment.
These were English Vickers guns captured by the Japs in Singapore.
One of their many light tanks.
This was the Jap command post, built of reinforced concrete, several feet thick.
That building was built to withstand plenty, and did.
We finally took it with TNT and flamethrowers.
The fighting was still going on at one end of the island when the Seabees landed with their heavy equipment.
They set to work clearing the airstrip even while we were fighting for it.
[tank engine sounds]
The first plane landed just 24 hours after the Seabees had started the work.
The second one lands one minute later.
Welcome the pilot to our new home.
It was our first chance to thank those guys for the swell job they did for us before and during the attack.
On D plus four our relief came in.
Maybe you think we weren't glad to see them.
[patriotic music, "Marines' Hymn", plays]
I guess all of us knew from the first, no matter how tough the going was, that we'd take the island.
Just the same, the day the colors were run up on this palm tree and flew for the first time over Tarawa, we got a lump in our throats.
We were mighty proud.
[trumpet plays]
[snare drum rolls]
[band plays]
These are the Marines who took Tarawa.