An All but Forgotten Name

Last week some two to three thousand U.S. Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of Concord Bridge, the Bonhomme Richard, the Alamo, Little Big Horn and Belleau Wood. The name was Tarawa.

--TIME, Dec. 6, 1943

Last week, 25 years after the bloody landing, retired Marine Corps General David M. Shoup returned to Tarawa to participate in ceremonies commemorating the 76 hours when the corps suffered 3,319 casualties, among them 1,027 dead. Some 4,700 Japanese also died in the invasion, the first in a series of amphibious operations that sent U.S. forces island-hopping across the Central Pacific toward Japan. Robert Sherrod, the TIME and LIFE correspondent who filed the story of Tarawa in 1943 after leaping into neck-deep water and wading ashore with the fifth wave of Marines to hit the beach, has long been saddened by the realization that the island's name no longer evokes an instant, horrified response. "A whole generation," he said, "has matured without knowledge of a battle the like of which had never happened before, and in all probability will never happen again." A former editor of the Saturday Evening Post and now a freelance journalist, Sherrod returned to Tarawa with Shoup, who, as a colonel, had commanded the invasion.

This time, the Americans traveled by plane rather than in the rattling, thumping holds of transports crowded with Marines, many of whom were about to die under murderous machine-gun fire even before they could splash ashore. From the air, Tarawa looked like a peaceful string of jade beads carelessly tossed on a dressing table. Each of the islands surrounding the lagoon is a bit of equatorial sand and coral nourishing coconut palms, breadfruit and pandanus trees. But on the bird-shaped island of Betio at the end of the string, the scars of war may not be erased for 100 years. Surprising evidence still remains of the ghastly battle fought on the half square mile of all but forgotten real estate.

Smell of Death. To be sure, Betio has become the Broadway of Tarawa. A dance hall teems with devotees of the newly discovered twist. Outdoor movies attract audiences of hundreds each evening (10-c- to sit on the ground, 20-c- upstairs). But blockhouses and rusting gun barrels still pock the landscape, and laborers regularly unearth skeletons that have been buried beneath the sand for a quarter-century. It all came back, Sherrod reported--"the sweetly sickening smell of death given off by thousands of bodies rapidly rotting in the tropical sun, the sight of an island stripped of every one of its many thousands of coconut trees."

From the mid-Pacific battleground, Sherrod cabled: "A small rock memorial near the Betio Club, blockhouses, big guns--everything but a few shot-up am-tracks visible at low tide belongs to the Japanese. It seems fitting to affix a bronze plaque at the base of a white pylon in memory of the United States Marines who won a unique battle there. They provided the lessons for the rest of the journey to the end of the war."

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