"Outcome in Doubt": Invasion of Tarawa fails, 1943

It almost did. OTL, the 2nd Marines lost 30% of their numbers before they ever got ashore. By evening of the first day, they were clinging to a narrow strip along the beach. The Americans were in a parlous situation, and they knew it. A few hours after the landing, one of the Marine colonels radioed back, "outcome in doubt".

It was. A determined attack might have pushed the invaders back into the sea. The Japanese had rough parity in numbers and plenty of weapons and ammo. They even had -- for almost the only time in the Pacific War -- armor superiority; all but three of the American tanks had been destroyed before reaching the beach, while the Japanese had a number of small but perfectly functional tankettes.

What they didn't have was a commanding officer. In one of the Pacific War's strangest strokes of fortune, Admiral Shibasaki and most of his staff had been killed by a single destroyer shell on the afternoon of the first day. Shibasaki was shifting his command from one bunker to another; keen-eyed American spotters saw a group of Japanese on the move, and the destroyer got a clean hit. Not only did they kill Shibasaki, but it seems that they killed or wounded almost all of his staff, so that the rest of the defenders didn't even know their commander was gone.

So [handwave] have that spotter blink at the wrong moment, so that Shibasaki gets away.

Organizing the defense wouldn't be easy; the Japanese communication lines were cut by shellfire, so they had to use runners. But Shibasaki seems to have been a competent commander, his soldiers were veterans, and Japanese doctrine at this point was to wipe the invaders out on the beach. So he gets his men organized, orders a counterattack... and by midmorning, the best of the Second Marine Division is dead, and Tarawa firmly back in Japanese hands.

Now what?

The knock-on effects will be fairly huge. OTL, Tarawa was the first major assault against an enemy-held atoll. It was a shakedown run for weapons, landing gear, and tactics. If it fails, the US advance in the Central Pacific will be held up, possibly for months. There would also be major effects on the morale and strategy of both combatants.

I have some thoughts, but I'd like to hear what others think first. Anyone?


Doug M.
 
OK, based on the disparity on the numbers presented by Wikipedia, I'd say that the USA suffers far higher causalities but takes the island. The Japanese are trying to stop 10x Americans from landing on the beachheads, with heavy bombardment backing them up.

The USA would be shocked at the ferocity of the fighting, but I think that this would be learned sooner or later that the Japanese were going to fight tooth and nail. I suppose that doctrines would call for heavier bombardment of beachheads and there would be a stronger desire to avoid liberating unneeded islands.

The worst way this could spiral would be the USA avoids liberating the Philippines and focuses solely on Japan. Even if the USA decides on this obvious route of attack, I think Japan has no real answers to stop the USA from storming the Pacific. This would tick off MacArthur to no end, but if invasions are this bloody, the Navy and Air Force had really better beat the daylights of a beachhead.
 

CalBear

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ZERO probability. The outcome was "in doubt" until the next wave arrived and that was what the Marine officer was referring to (in point of fact it was never in doubt, it was simply that the level of losses was unprecedented resulting in the broadcast).


By sunset of the first day the Marines had around a quarter of Betio in their control AND had some armor landed and in operation.

Map linky for situation at 1800 on Day One: http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-M-Tarawa/maps/USMC-M-Tarawa-2.jpg
 
I think that it might have been possible for the Japanese to have held, if it had gone perfectly for them. I've always thought of Tarawa as a bit of a training exercise.

Had it gone wrong, it would have certainly made the campaign more inclined to expend lives in a more cautious manner. Many or the Islands that were attacked were not absolutely neccesary to win the war.

They were however very neccesary for public relations. The United States desperately needed the victory's in the Pacific, however costly, to demonstrate to the peeps back home, that thier sacrifices were not in vain.

I have no illusions about the Japanese winning the war, but a loss here might've screwed the timetable for 6 months or more, just saying.

JMO
 
The Japanese had a decent chance defeating the first wave but they could not prevail against the invasion. Unless there was a IJN task force on the way to interdict the US fleet, or a freak storm blew up the defenders were doomed. Tarawa was chosen as a test case that could not fail. It was far from Japanese reinforcement, it was a tiny island with no mountains to really dig in. They were isolated and with limited supplies.

Tarawa was also strategically irrelevant. Gaining Tarawa doesn't do much to further the island hopping campaign. So why would the IJN risk the fleet to save Tarawa?
 
One facet of an American failure would be what if the Japanese fleet
which had sortied to relieve the Gilbert's could be induced into a major fleet battle. Task Force 50 had 11 aircraft carriers vs 3 Japanese carriers and if the US fleet had crushed the Japanese fleet in 1943, there would be no question about Tarawa's fate. The US navy might have been emboldened to storm the Marshall 's and the Marianas months ahead of schedule being there would be no real threat from the IJN.
 
"One facet of an American failure would be what if the Japanese fleet
which had sortied to relieve the Gilbert's could be induced into a major fleet battle."

This was the original plan. Admiral Koga saw Tarawa as a lure to bring the American fleet to the Decisive Battle. Up until just before the invasion, the Japanese were ready to jump as soon as the US made an appearahce.

However, while the Japanese were confident of winning a slugging match, they weren't willing to go into battle without at least rough parity in the air. And Koga lost that in the month preceding Tarawa. That's because in October, the US staged a devastating series of raids against the Marshalls and Rabaul in October and early November. In the Marshalls, they trashed the Japanese airstrips; in Rabaul, they damaged six cruisers and shot down over 100 planes.

Also, Koga had sent a small force against the Bougainville invasion on November 1 -- and gotten a bloody nose at the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay, losing a cruiser and a destroyer. So, by the time the US invasion force showed up off Tarawa, Koga was already down seven cruisers and a hell of a lot of planes.

In retrospect, the best play for Koga would have been to react to Bougainville at once and with full power, sending his entire fleet instead of a task force. This might have succeeded; the Bougainville invasion force was much smaller than the one at Tarawa, and if Koga had hit it with everything he might have pulled off a major upset.

Why didn't he? Because (1) he correctly thought that the main thrust would be against Tarawa, and he wanted to react against that; and (2) Japanese intelligence sucked. There had been several false alarms in the summer and autumn of 1943, and the fleet had sortied twice -- expensive wastes of limited fuel.

It's an interesting example of how the Allies used superior resources to overcome what should have been a Japanese advantage of interior lines.


Doug M.
 
"Tarawa was also strategically irrelevant. Gaining Tarawa doesn't do much to further the island hopping campaign. So why would the IJN risk the fleet to save Tarawa?"

The IJN didn't care much about Tarawa per se. It was bait. In the summer of 1943, Koga told Shibasaki that his job was to hold an American invasion off for "three to seven days" while the Combined Fleet sortied to crush the USN in Decisive Battle.

Alas for Koga, he lost seven cruisers and a third of his carrier planes in the first half of November, and also saw his forward bases in the Marshalls rendered inoperable for weeks. Without land-based aircraft to cover the Combined Fleet, and with a very marked inferiority in carrier planes, he realized that he couldn't come out to play. So Shibasaki was left to defend Tarawa without hope of relief.

(I say "alas", but in retrospect it might have been better for the Allies if Koga /had/ sortied; even if he'd been at full strength, the odds would have favored the USN. We might have seen a Battle of the Philippine Sea, only eight months earlier. Ah, well.)

As for Tarawa having no strategic value: for the Japanese, it was a useful outpost threatening Allied lines of communication, but mostly it was bait for the Decisive Battle. For the Allies, though, it was a much-needed base for the drive on the Marshalls. It could be neutralized by bombing and bypassed, sure, but the Allies really needed an airfield and a forward base before moving into the Marshalls. While massive carrier raids could suppress Japanese air power in the Marshalls temporarily, for an invasion the Allies really needed a land base within range.

This is not to say there weren't alternatives. Makin and Apamama islands could also support air bases, and were much more lightly defended. But they were dangerously close to Tarawa, and it's really questionable whether the Allies could have left a major Japanese base behind their lines at this stage of the war. They'd do it later, most notably with Rabaul, but they had more resources by then and geography made Rabaul easier to ignore.


Doug M.
 
"ZERO probability. The outcome was "in doubt" until the next wave arrived and that was what the Marine officer was referring to (in point of fact it was never in doubt, it was simply that the level of losses was unprecedented resulting in the broadcast)."

Well, the Marine officer in question was Gen. Julian Smith, the commander of the invasion force. So I think we should take him seriously.

Next wave: there were two big problems at Tarawa. One was that most of the troops had to wade through several hundred yards of water to reach the beach. The other was that the invasion force had a limited number of LVTs -- just 88 of them -- and they got shot up pretty badly. By nightfall of D-Day there were less than 20 still working. This meant that reinforcement slowed down to a crawl and resupply just wasn't happening. The Marines had no way to get more men and more stuff onto the island.

BlueMax noted "the disparity on the numbers presented by Wikipedia... the Japanese are trying to stop 10x Americans from landing on the beachheads". Well, Wikipedia is great, but it only goes so far. The Americans could only get men and supplies onto the island so fast, and by the evening of D-Day their pipeline had shrunk to a straw. The Marines didn't get clear numerical superiority until the evening of Day 2.

What turned it around? Well, Tarawa is shaped like a long skinny triangle pointing east. The Americans had seized two separate beachheads along the northern coast, on in the middle and one at the northwestern corner. On the morning of D+1, the Marines at the far western beach struck south along the base of the triangle. By afternoon they had taken the entire west coast. That allowed large numbers of reinforcements to be shipped in using rubber boats; the Japanese could no longer direct fire against them. After that the outcome was no longer in doubt.


"By sunset of the first day the Marines had around a quarter of Betio in their control AND had some armor landed and in operation."

The map you link to is rather misleading, because the American salient was not a neat bulge. The Japanese and Americans were intermingled, with a couple of major Japanese strong points surrounded but not yet overrun. As the Marine commander on the island (Col. Shoup) said, "at nightfall on D-Day, my lines looked like a stock market graph."

Furthermore, the Japanese were conducting an active defense. They had some very strong positions just to the east of Red Beach Three -- they wouldn't be overrun until D+2 -- and were massing troops behind them and moving guns from the eastern end of the island.

Most of the Japanese troops were rikusentai, Special Landing Forces, basically the Japanese answer to the USMC. These were well trained, well armed veterans with plenty of ammunition. A concerted attack on the night of the first day would have put the Americans in a very difficult position.

As to tanks, the Americans had a total of four Shermans ashore and working on the evening of D-Day. The Japanese started with fourteen light tanks of which ten seem to have been still functional. Two of the four were on the isolated westernmost beachhead. So the Japanese could potentially have hit the central salient with up to ten light tanks versus two Shermans, plus about 2,500 well armed veteran infantry against roughly 2,000 exhausted Marines running low on ammo with their backs to the sea.

The Japanese command had been decapitated (and the highest ranking surviving officer was stuck in "the Pocket", between the two beachheads), so it didn't happen. But if it had... well, nothing is certain in war, but I don't think this would have "ZERO probability" of success.


Doug M.
 
Well, nothing stops this from being a massacre, but all that really seems possible here is the first wave is trashed. The Japanese have no way to replace losses in this situation, nor do they have a way to procure supplies. None of this is going to change.

I mean, on the second day, even if the first wave is entirely repulsed, you are still going to have continuous bombardment! The Japanese aren't faring well even if the first wave is repulsed. The Second Wave is probably going to break Japan--all it needs to do is secure a toehold so that the USA can use rubber craft, and then its all over.

Tarawa was already a massacre; I doubt that the deaths of another thousand American troops matter that much in the big picture--not that this is not a disaster, but Tarawa historically caused dissent in the eyes of the American public anyway!

Very little is happening as a result, except that USA is taking a good hard look at how they conduct an amphibious assault.
 

CalBear

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Well, nothing stops this from being a massacre, but all that really seems possible here is the first wave is trashed. The Japanese have no way to replace losses in this situation, nor do they have a way to procure supplies. None of this is going to change.

I mean, on the second day, even if the first wave is entirely repulsed, you are still going to have continuous bombardment! The Japanese aren't faring well even if the first wave is repulsed. The Second Wave is probably going to break Japan--all it needs to do is secure a toehold so that the USA can use rubber craft, and then its all over.

Tarawa was already a massacre; I doubt that the deaths of another thousand American troops matter that much in the big picture--not that this is not a disaster, but Tarawa historically caused dissent in the eyes of the American public anyway!

Very little is happening as a result, except that USA is taking a good hard look at how they conduct an amphibious assault.

Which is exactly what happened IOTL. The three hours of gunfire was shown to be totally inadequete, later invasions would have DAYS of pre landing bombardment.

The excess losses at Tarawa probably saved five or six times their number in future landings.
 

CalBear

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"ZERO probability. The outcome was "in doubt" until the next wave arrived and that was what the Marine officer was referring to (in point of fact it was never in doubt, it was simply that the level of losses was unprecedented resulting in the broadcast)."

Well, the Marine officer in question was Gen. Julian Smith, the commander of the invasion force. So I think we should take him seriously.

Next wave: there were two big problems at Tarawa. One was that most of the troops had to wade through several hundred yards of water to reach the beach. The other was that the invasion force had a limited number of LVTs -- just 88 of them -- and they got shot up pretty badly. By nightfall of D-Day there were less than 20 still working. This meant that reinforcement slowed down to a crawl and resupply just wasn't happening. The Marines had no way to get more men and more stuff onto the island.

BlueMax noted "the disparity on the numbers presented by Wikipedia... the Japanese are trying to stop 10x Americans from landing on the beachheads". Well, Wikipedia is great, but it only goes so far. The Americans could only get men and supplies onto the island so fast, and by the evening of D-Day their pipeline had shrunk to a straw. The Marines didn't get clear numerical superiority until the evening of Day 2.

What turned it around? Well, Tarawa is shaped like a long skinny triangle pointing east. The Americans had seized two separate beachheads along the northern coast, on in the middle and one at the northwestern corner. On the morning of D+1, the Marines at the far western beach struck south along the base of the triangle. By afternoon they had taken the entire west coast. That allowed large numbers of reinforcements to be shipped in using rubber boats; the Japanese could no longer direct fire against them. After that the outcome was no longer in doubt.


"By sunset of the first day the Marines had around a quarter of Betio in their control AND had some armor landed and in operation."

The map you link to is rather misleading, because the American salient was not a neat bulge. The Japanese and Americans were intermingled, with a couple of major Japanese strong points surrounded but not yet overrun. As the Marine commander on the island (Col. Shoup) said, "at nightfall on D-Day, my lines looked like a stock market graph."

Furthermore, the Japanese were conducting an active defense. They had some very strong positions just to the east of Red Beach Three -- they wouldn't be overrun until D+2 -- and were massing troops behind them and moving guns from the eastern end of the island.

Most of the Japanese troops were rikusentai, Special Landing Forces, basically the Japanese answer to the USMC. These were well trained, well armed veterans with plenty of ammunition. A concerted attack on the night of the first day would have put the Americans in a very difficult position.

As to tanks, the Americans had a total of four Shermans ashore and working on the evening of D-Day. The Japanese started with fourteen light tanks of which ten seem to have been still functional. Two of the four were on the isolated westernmost beachhead. So the Japanese could potentially have hit the central salient with up to ten light tanks versus two Shermans, plus about 2,500 well armed veteran infantry against roughly 2,000 exhausted Marines running low on ammo with their backs to the sea.

The Japanese command had been decapitated (and the highest ranking surviving officer was stuck in "the Pocket", between the two beachheads), so it didn't happen. But if it had... well, nothing is certain in war, but I don't think this would have "ZERO probability" of success.


Doug M.


There were troops on Green Beach (the base of the Betio "triangle" starting on D-DAy. They were relatively successful from the beginning of the battle, actually having moved back at dark from their deepest advance into a stronger defensive position. This was where the Shermans had landed and the armor's presence had allowed for a decent consolidation of the perimeter.

The Japanese actually made it slightly more difficult for the invaders, thanks to that "lucky" hit on the defenders command group, by NOT attacking over the open ground that first night. The navy had sufficient firepower off shore to make any major attack into the sort of slaughter that the Japanese mass charges always featured.

At Tarawa you have the amphibious counterpart to the Guadacanal land battles; in both instances the USMC learned a pricey lesson about what did & did not work from its prewar doctrine. Unlike the 'Canal, where there was actually a chance for the defenders (or, more properly, the defenders' reinforcements) to defeat the Americans, there was none at Tarawa. The USN owned the surrounding waters, had the IJN come out they would have, as you pointed out, simply have suffered the Battle of the Philippine Sea disaster some months earlier.

With absolute control of the air and the sea the U.S. forces were going to win out. The losses suffered were horrible, mainly becuase a better pre-invasion bombardment and reinforcement of Green Beach earlier on D-Day could have avoided much of the bloodshed. In any case, with the massive advantages afforded by the USN's air and sea dominance in the region there was no chance that the Japanese would repulse the invasion. This absolute led the Corps to a series of decisions that, in hindsight, were sub-optimal, but were never close to being decisive errors.

BTW: The biggest irony of the entire GALVANIC Operation is that the Japanese didn't start to turn Betio into the killing ground of November '43 until the U.S. proved the need to do so by flattening Makin in an August 1942 attack by Marine raiders. The next month was when the IJN began its defensive works. Had some other location been selected for the diverionary attack in support of the Guadacanal landings, Tarawa might have been much easier, resulting in greater losses later in the Pacific Campaign.
 
There were troops on Green Beach (the base of the Betio "triangle" starting on D-DAy.

Yes, but the rubber boats couldn't be used until the Americans controlled all of Green Beach -- and that wasn't until the afternoon of Day 2.

If you look at a map of Day 1, it looks like the central beachhead is the main assault while the western one is much smaller. But actually it was the western one that ended up making the difference, sweeping down the west coast (Green Beach) on Day 2 and then along the southern coast on the morning of Day 3.


The Japanese actually made it slightly more difficult for the invaders, thanks to that "lucky" hit on the defenders command group, by NOT attacking over the open ground that first night. The navy had sufficient firepower off shore to make any major attack into the sort of slaughter that the Japanese mass charges always featured..

The close fire support from the destroyers in the lagoon was incredibly helpful, and probably made the difference in the battle. That said, it would be of limited use against a night attack. This is exactly what happened on the night of Day 3, when the Japanese made their last big attacks: naval gunfire killed very few of the attackers. Two of the three attacks started with large-scale infiltration, and the attackers were just too close to American lines (or actually behind them) for the big guns to be effective.


With absolute control of the air and the sea the U.S. forces were going to win out.

Eh. Naval bombardment alone doesn't win battles. The Japanese had absolute control of the air and sea in their first attack on Wake; it didn't help. (Yes, they came back later. But the first assault? Not so great.)

As for command of the air, tactical air support on Tarawa was pretty bad -- the pilots meant well, but did not coordinate well with the ground. Not one Japanese strong point was destroyed or even seriously damaged by air attack.

More to the point, until Green Beach was secured the Americans simply couldn't get men and supplies onto Tarawa. Again, the crucial threat here was the loss of LVTs. The Americans started with 88 on D-Day morning; by sunset they had less than 20. Meanwhile the Japanese had shifted every gun they could move up to the north coast. This is why the ratio of Marines killed between reef and beach rose steadily through the day. It's also why the central beachhead didn't expand much in the 24 hours after D-Day afternoon -- the Marines were short of ammo and had no weapons heavier than a few light machine guns and flamethrowers.

There's no question that the Americans had brought overwhelming power to bear on Tarawa. The knotty problem they faced was bringing that power into play, actually getting men and weapons onto the island and off the beach.

The losses suffered were horrible, mainly becuase a better pre-invasion bombardment and reinforcement of Green Beach earlier on D-Day could have avoided much of the bloodshed.

The problem was that LVTs couldn't easily reach Green Beach; it would require them to swing around the NW corner of the island, under fire the whole way. Also, the western and southern coasts were more heavily defended than the north. (Which is why Julian Smith correctly chose to attack the way he did.)

The Marines did get a toehold on Green Beach on D-Day, but only on the northernmost 100 yards or so. The rest of Green Beach had to be taken from inland. Once it was, of course, the Americans could land as much as they wanted without worrying about enemy fire, and the battle was decided.

BTW: The biggest irony of the entire GALVANIC Operation is that the Japanese didn't start to turn Betio into the killing ground of November '43 until the U.S. proved the need to do so by flattening Makin in an August 1942 attack by Marine raiders. The next month was when the IJN began its defensive works.

Well, 15 months passed between the Makin raid and GALVANIC. One suspects the Japanese would have reinforced Tarawa anyhow.

Here's another bit of irony: in September '43, the Japanese sent almost 1000 soldiers on a troop transport to reinforce Betio. The Americans intercepted the Japanese transmissions, broke the code, and sent a sub to sink the transport. Which it did. About 300 soldiers on the transport survived, using lifeboats and wreckage to reach a nearby atoll... where they stayed for the next two years, living on fish and rainwater, most surviving the war. If they'd made it to Tarawa they would have died to a man.


Doug M.
 

CalBear

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...
Here's another bit of irony: in September '43, the Japanese sent almost 1000 soldiers on a troop transport to reinforce Betio. The Americans intercepted the Japanese transmissions, broke the code, and sent a sub to sink the transport. Which it did. About 300 soldiers on the transport survived, using lifeboats and wreckage to reach a nearby atoll... where they stayed for the next two years, living on fish and rainwater, most surviving the war. If they'd made it to Tarawa they would have died to a man.


Doug M.

Hadn't hear about that one. Interesting tidbit.
 
Googling, I see I've mis-remembered some details. The ship was the Bangkok Maru, and it was sunk by the submarine Pollock, which was sent there by an ULTRA intercept. The survivors were picked up by Japanese ships and taken to nearby Jaluit atoll, which was later bypassed and left isolated for the rest of the war.


Doug M.
 
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