At the Battle of Tarawa, from 20 to 23 November 1943, US Marines captured the heavily fortified islet of Betio in the Gilbert Islands after 76 hours of ferocious fighting. A misjudged tide left many landing craft grounded on the reef, forcing Marines to wade ashore under fire and suffer heavy losses. The near-total destruction of the Japanese garrison, and the shock of the American cost, taught crucial lessons for later Pacific landings.5
Tarawa was barely two miles of sand, but the Japanese had made it the most heavily defended atoll that Allied forces would ever invade in the Pacific. The Marines who waded ashore across its reef in November 1943 learned the price of an opposed landing the hard way.6
Part of The greatest battles of the Pacific War · Before: The Guadalcanal Campaign · Next: The Battle of Peleliu
Who won the Battle of Tarawa and why?
The United States won. In 76 hours the 2nd Marine Division took Betio and killed almost all of its roughly 4,800 defenders. The Marines won because enough of them reached the seawall on the first day to hold on, and the Japanese, their commander dead and their telephone lines cut, never mounted the counterattack that might have thrown them back.7
The island-hopping campaign
By late 1943 the Allies were driving across the central Pacific toward Japan, taking island bases one by one. The Gilbert Islands were the next step, and the key was Betio, a tiny islet of Tarawa Atoll with an airfield, held by a strong Japanese garrison.8
The operation, code-named Galvanic, was the first major American offensive in the central Pacific, launched under Admiral Chester Nimitz. The Japanese had seized Makin, in the northern Gilberts, within days of Pearl Harbor. Now the 2nd Marine Division, many of its men veterans of Guadalcanal, would take Tarawa, while troops of the Army's 27th Infantry Division landed on Makin, more than 100 miles to the north.9
Betio was less than three miles long and no more than 800 yards wide, about 291 acres in all, with no ground higher than about 10 feet above the sea. The plan drawn up by the division's operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Shoup, was to carry the first three waves over the reef in amphibian tractors, tracked vehicles that could crawl across coral; the boats of the later waves, which drew three and a half feet or more when loaded, would need about four feet of water over the reef to float.10
Getting enough tractors was a battle of its own. The Marines pressed for every one they could find, and the corps commander, Major General Holland M. Smith, put it to the Navy bluntly, in Alexander's account: no amphibian tractors, no operation. Fifty new LVT-2s were shipped straight from the West Coast to join the division's older machines, but even so there were enough only for the first three waves.11
The commanders' decisions
The date was a gamble. No reliable tide tables existed for the Gilberts, and 20 November fell in a period of neap tides, when high water is at its lowest; an irregular “dodging” tide could leave too little water on the reef for hours. Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commanding the amphibious force, decided not to wait. Every day of delay brought high water an hour later, raised the risk of a west wind that would make landing impossible, and moved toward spring tides that would cover the beach up to the Japanese barricades. Morison judged that Turner took a two-to-one chance and lost.12
On the first afternoon the division commander, Major General Julian C. Smith, short of news from the beach, radioed Holland Smith for the corps reserve, the 6th Marines, ending his message with the words “Issue in doubt.” It was released. The next day, when Major Michael Ryan's men cleared the western end of the island, Julian Smith landed the 6th Marines there, on Green Beach, instead of feeding them across the reef into the center, and they gave the attack the fresh strength it needed.13
The fortress of Betio
The defenders had packed the islet with bunkers, pillboxes and gun positions, and their commander boasted, by one prisoner's account, that a million men could not take it in a hundred years. A heavy naval and air bombardment preceded the landing, but it was neither long enough nor heavy enough to destroy the deep, well-built defenses.14
How many Japanese defended Tarawa?
About 4,800 men held Betio. American intelligence counted 4,836, including construction workers, of whom about 2,600 were first-rate naval troops of the 3rd Special Base Force and the Sasebo 7th Special Naval Landing Force. Among their weapons were four eight-inch naval guns, the so-called Singapore guns, dozens of smaller coastal, antiaircraft and field guns, and seven light tanks.15
Their commander, Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki (also written Shibazaki), had taken over in 1943 and planned to destroy the Marines at the water's edge. He died in his blockhouse early in the battle, on 21 November according to Morison. The bombardment had already cut his wire communications, and he never organized a counterattack on the first night, when the Marine foothold was most vulnerable.16
The reef and the tide
The assault went wrong at the water's edge. The tide was lower than expected, grounding many landing craft on the fringing reef far from shore. Marines had to wade hundreds of yards through the lagoon under withering fire, and casualties were terrible before they even reached the beach.17
The danger had been foreseen. Major Frank Holland, who had lived and sailed in the atoll for 15 years, warned that there would not be three feet of water on the reef at high tide. Others who knew the islands promised more, but the troops were told there was an even chance they would have to wade ashore.18
The morning of 20 November
The battle began before dawn, when Japanese coastal guns opened fire on the ships offshore and the battleships answered; Maryland's 16-inch guns silenced the eight-inch battery on the southwestern point. Then the plan began to slip. The carrier strike due at 5:45 did not arrive until 6:10, after a change of timing that never reached Admiral Hill, whose flagship had lost her radio with her first main-battery salvo, and the defenders were given 20 to 25 minutes of grace.19
The tractors were late as well. Wind and a heavy chop slowed them, H-hour was put back from 8:30 to 8:45 and then to 9:00, and the first of them reached the beach only at about 9:10. Fearing for the boats in the smoke, Hill stopped the naval gunfire at about 8:55, and the defenders used the pause to move men from the south shore to the lagoon beaches. That shift, together with the tide, was the main reason for the terrible losses of the first hours.20
Seventy-six hours
Those who got ashore clung to a narrow strip behind a log seawall and fought inland bunker by bunker over three days, often with flamethrowers and explosives at point-blank range. The Japanese fought nearly to the last man, and in 76 hours the islet was taken.21
How did the Battle of Tarawa unfold day by day?
The Marines landed on 20 November 1943 and by nightfall held only a shallow strip of beach. On 21 November they pushed across the airstrip to the south coast and seized the western end of the island, Green Beach, so fresh battalions could land. On 22 November they drove east, and on 23 November they crushed the last resistance.22
Of some 5,000 Marines who got ashore on the first day, about 1,500 were dead or wounded by nightfall, and the survivors held less than a quarter of a square mile. Lieutenant William Deane Hawkins's scout-snipers fought ahead of the riflemen, and Shoup commanded everyone ashore until the division's chief of staff, Colonel Merritt Edson, came in on the second evening. On the night of 22 to 23 November the Japanese spent much of their remaining strength in counterattacks against the 6th Marines, and by about 1 p.m. on 23 November the fighting was over.23
How many Marines died at Tarawa?
About 1,000 Americans were killed in 76 hours. Joseph Alexander's Marine Corps history counts 997 Marines and 30 Navy medical men dead, 88 Marines missing and presumed dead, and 2,292 wounded, 3,407 casualties in all. Samuel Eliot Morison's naval history gives 980 Marines and 29 sailors killed and 2,101 wounded who recovered.24
Almost the entire garrison died: by Alexander's figures 4,690 of the 4,836 men on the island, while the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency puts the dead at more than 3,000 Japanese and about 1,000 Korean laborers. Only 146 were taken prisoner, and by Morison's count just one officer and 16 enlisted men among them were Japanese; the other 129 were Korean laborers.25
The sea added to the toll. On 24 November the Japanese submarine I-175 torpedoed the escort carrier Liscome Bay off Makin; her bombs exploded and she sank within minutes, taking 53 officers, among them Rear Admiral Henry Mullinix, and 591 enlisted men, 644 in all.26
Why Tarawa mattered
Tarawa was an American victory, but its cost, so many lost on so small a place, stunned the American public when the newspaper reports and casualty lists came home. The hard lessons, better reconnaissance of reefs and tides, more and better amphibian tractors, longer, heavier and more accurate bombardment, were applied to the far larger landings that followed across the Pacific. See also Iwo Jima and Okinawa.27 › Ira Hayes
The first results came quickly. The landings in the Marshalls, the next step of the central Pacific drive, used the doctrine as modified by Tarawa and took similar objectives with fewer casualties and in less time. Morison, who had little patience with talk of “tragic Tarawa,” called it a magnificent victory, well planned and bravely executed.28
How is Tarawa remembered today?
Betio is now part of the Republic of Kiribati. It still holds American dead: the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lists about 374 Americans as unaccounted for from the battle.29
In 1946 an Army graves registration company, the 604th, gathered the American remains it could find into one cemetery, and those that could not be identified were later buried as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Almost half of the known dead were never found. From 2016 the Tarawa unknowns in Honolulu were disinterred for DNA testing, and men lost on Betio are still being identified and brought home, among them Sergeant Robert Van Heck of Chicago, buried in Illinois in January 2025.30
