If there was any hope of mastering the seas in time to stop the Axis powers, it was up to the people on the new Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee on Meteorology’s new oceanography subcommittee-and particularly to an untested, diminutive marine biologist named Mary Sears.Īs one of the few women in the tradition-bound specialty of oceanography, Sears had had to surmount numerous obstacles to establish her academic career. And the lack of this intelligence-comprehensive data on tides, waves, ocean depths, bioluminescence and underwater topography-was going to cost lives, ships and equipment as the Navy expanded the Pacific campaign. The tide would remain at approximately three feet, one of the lowest for the year, and would barely budge for 24 hours.Ī startling realization dawned on the investigating officers. But on November 20, 1943, the day the amphibious assault on Tarawa began, an apogean neap tide prevailed. Many of the landing craft required a minimum of four feet of water to clear the reef, and the operation plan included high tide estimates of five feet. Operations planners, relying on outdated nautical charts and the imperfect memories of foreign officers, had misjudged the tide. But one major blunder that turned the shoreline into a killing field was shockingly basic. The research ship would ultimately travel over a million miles.īetween an aerial bombardment that fell short, an uncoordinated and delayed assault against a heavily defended shore and a shortage of amphibious tractors to get across the reef, there were plenty of missteps to scrutinize. Sears in 1962, christening Atlantis II for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Though the United States prevailed at Tarawa, more than 1,000 Americans were killed in the fighting and more than 2,000 wounded, a toll that prompted senior commanders to investigate a question that, especially at this critical stage of the war in the Pacific, would have extraordinary consequences: What exactly went wrong? A lot was riding on the operation to seize the Gilberts, which was a crucial part of the Allies’ island-hopping Central Pacific prong of attack against the Japanese. Smith and the warriors of the 2nd Marine Division hoisted an American flag up a palm tree on Betio, a bird-shaped island at the southwest tip of the Tarawa Atoll. “These men were being picked off by the machine guns.we could see the machine gun bullets hitting the water like raindrops.” Still, just 76 hours after the offensive to retake the island had begun, Maj. “We couldn’t see the blood, but we knew what was happening,” Charles Pase, then a 17-year-old Marine from West Virginia, recalled of what he saw from a nearby ship. As Marines jumped into the water and tried to make their way to the beach, Japanese fire mowed them down. Marines ran up against a coral reef hundreds of yards from shore. ![]() At the Battle of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943-one of the major amphibious landings of the war-as many as 100 boats full of U.S.
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