World War II Day by Day

SWPA HQ, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia • April 26, 1943

By January 1943, as the six-month campaign for Guadal­canal in the South­west Pacific Solo­mon Islands was winding down (the Japa­nese aban­doned the island on Febru­ary 7), it became clear that the Allies lacked suffi­cient resources to swiftly dis­lodge the Japa­nese from heavily fortified Rabaul, 650 miles to the west. Rabaul, sitting on the north­eastern end of New Britain Island, was Japan’s main for­ward oper­ating base for naval and air units in the South­eastern Pacific, having fallen to an inva­sion force of 20,000 men the previous January. Rabaul’s huge bay—actually the cal­dera of a vol­cano—accom­mo­dated dozens of large war­ships and aux­il­iary vessels. Ashore, Japanese con­struc­tion workers even­tually exca­vated 350 miles of tun­nels and caves into the vol­canic soil around the town and installed under­ground bar­racks, clinics, maintenance facilities, and ammunition dumps.

In recognition of these developments the Allies announced on this date, April 26, 1943, a slower, more deli­ber­ate plan for Rabaul’s capture, code­named Opera­tion Cart­wheel. It super­seded a plan by Gen. Douglas Mac­Arthur, Supreme Com­mander of the South­west Pacific Area, who had pro­posed imme­diately after the Japa­nese naval defeat at Midway (June 1942) a quick cam­paign against Rabaul that would result in the capture of that bastion in less than three weeks (!) and push Japan’s strongest advance base in the South Pacific over 800 miles north­wards to Truk (Chuuk) in the Central Pacific. How­ever, by the summer of 1943 the idea of “island hopping” (i.e., leap­frogging) past the Rabaul strong­hold was floated, gaining strength at the end of the year when Ameri­can soldiers and Marines landed on the oppo­site side of New Britain from Rabaul, at Cape Glou­cester, and found them­selves tied down not only by the Japanese enemy but by para­sitic and viral dis­eases (mala­ria and dengue, typhoid, and yellow fevers), swamps, fungal infec­tions (jungle rot), and jungles infested with leeches, fire ants, and giant mosquitoes.

Eventually the Allies abandoned Rabaul as an objec­tive. They cut off and by­passed Japanese strong­holds to attack more lightly defended islands. The crite­rion became not how many Japa­nese troops and arma­ments they could defeat or destroy, but how to obtain islands to use as aerial launching pads en route to Japan with the least risk of casual­ties. That said, seizing Japa­nese-held islands in a series of amphi­bious assaults was rendered costly by the fana­tical determi­nation of the Japa­nese defenders. In the Marines’ campaign to capture Tarawa (Novem­ber 20–23, 1943), out of a modest-size garri­son of 3,000 enemy troops, 1,000 con­struc­tion workers, and 1,200 Korean forced laborers, just 17 Japa­nese (one officer and 16 enlisted men) and 129 Koreans survived the battle.

Battle of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, November 20–23, 1943

Above: Pacific Theater Command Areas, August 1942. Clock­wise from top: North Pacific and Cen­tral Paci­fic (under Adm. Chester Nimitz, whose head­quarters was in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii), South Pacific (under Vice Adm. Robert Ghormley, succeeded by Adm. William Halsey, Jr. in mid-October 1942, whose com­mand head­quarters was in New Cale­donia), and South­west Paci­fic (under Gen. Douglas Mac­Arthur, whose headquarters was in Bris­bane, Aus­tralia). The North, Central, and South Pacific theater com­mands were sub­ordi­nate com­mands of Pacific Ocean Areas under Adm. Nimitz through­out the war. Tarawa Atoll’s Betio Island—an island half the size of New York’s Cen­tral Park—and the Gilbert Islands straddle the dashed lines dividing the Central Pacific and South Pacific areas. The entire Cart­wheel opera­tion was coor­di­nated with a series of leaps up the Central Pacific’s Gil­bert and Marshall islands, Tarawa and Makin (Oper­a­tion Gal­vanic), Eniwetok (Operation Catchpole), Kwajalein (Operation Flintlock), and points north.

Left: Marines seek cover among their dead and wounded behind the sea wall on Red Beach 3, Tarawa, Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific, November 1943. One out of five Marines who assaulted the beaches died. The Battle of Tarawa, coor­di­nated with the bloody eastern phase of Oper­a­tion Cart­wheel, was the first American offen­sive in this criti­cal Pacific region, and it was also the first time in the war that the U.S. faced serious Japanese opposition to an amphibious landing.

Right: A Marine from 2nd Marine Division uses a flame­thrower to clear a path through what was once a thick jungle on Tarawa, 1943. Japa­nese soldiers burned in their fox­holes, bunkers, and caves after being hit by flamethrowers in the savage fighting.

Left: Two Japanese Imperial Marines who com­mitted sui­cide by shooting them­selves rather than sur­ren­der to U.S. Marines, Tarawa, 1943. At Tarawa Amer­i­cans faced one of the best, most con­cen­tra­ted Japa­nese defenses encoun­tered in the Paci­fic War. The island’s 4,500 Japa­nese defenders were well supplied and well pre­pared, and they fought almost to the last man, exacting a heavy toll on U.S. Marines (1,009 killed and 2,101 wounded) and sailors (687 killed). Nearly all of the casualties occurred in the first 76 hours.

Right: Marines guard Japanese POWs dressed in rags on a Tarawa beach, November 1943. Many of the POWs were stripped to their loin­cloths to make sure that they had no hidden weapons.

With the Marines at Tarawa, U.S. Government Film (1944)