Profit & Loss

More eloquent than words was the camera's record of the carnage in the Gilberts. Capture of the atolls had cost the U.S.:

>1,092 men killed, 2,680 wounded. Most casualties (95%) were marines who fell on Tarawa's Betio island. The Gilberts' 5,700 Jap garrison was virtually wiped out.

>One warship sunk--the torpedoed escort carrier Liscome Bay.* Many went down with her off Makin, including her skipper, Captain Irving D. Wiltsie, and a task force commander aboard her, Rear Admiral Henry M. Mullinnix.

>Four planes, against 46 of the enemy shot down while attacking American ships.

Lesson In Tactics. The lessons of Tarawa were hard. From admirals down to leatherneck privates there had been great expectations for the massive pre-landing barrage. Warships poured in 2,900 tons of shells, planes dropped 700 tons of bombs. For every square yard of scant square-mile Betio there were 20 lb. of explosive.* Marines, watching the awesome show from their transports, chortled: "There won't be a Jap alive when we get ashore."

The commanders might have been less confident. At Munda in the Solomons U.S. troops had learned about the toughness of concentrated Jap defenses.

At Betio, they learned again.

Skillful Jap engineers had used stone-hard coconut logs, steel rails, concrete and sand to make incredibly stout fortifications. They had staggered 500 pillboxes in such fashion that marines who captured one found themselves under fire from two others. Covered with three or four feet of sand, the redoubts defied aerial reconnaissance, survived everything but direct hits with heavy shells or bombs. Often a 2,000-lb. bomb, striking within a few feet of a pillbox and digging a 15-ft. hole, merely threw more sand on top of the Jap fortifications. Surveying Betio's defenses after the battle, Marine Major General Holland ("Howlin' Mad") Smith, chunky, bespectacled commander of amphibious operations, said: "It looks beyond the realm of human possibility that this place could have been taken."

Thus the commanders learned the shortcomings of their softening-up technique. For the next atoll there might be bigger bombs and more of them. There might be a fire barrage laid down by planes dropping Molotov-cocktail mixture (gasoline and pitch) and incendiaries that would burn off the whole top of a small island or incinerate its occupants. Naval gunfire might be heavier, but there were limitations on the amount of shells warships could expend on shore fortifications and still be ready to take on an enemy fleet.

Lesson in Landing. Tarawa had shown up other deficiencies: costly had been the failure of Higgins boats and other landing craft to get over Betio's reef (TIME, Dec. 6). The Navy blamed this on a sudden strong wind that lowered the water. For the next atoll, they might be prepared with improved boats or amphibious machines adapted from the "Alligator" tractor that can crawl over a sharp coral shelf.

Lesson in Learning. From Betio, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod cabled:

"We believe the Marshalls, Carolines, Marianas, Philippines and Jap islands will be easier because of Tarawa. Our period of blind refusal to learn, so exasperating early in the war, has all but passed. We have learned to learn faster.

"Next time, even the Japs must realize, we will hit them harder. But no amount of bombing and shelling can obviate the necessity of sending in foot soldiers to finish the job. The corollary is this: There is no easy way to fight a war. and there is no panacea to prevent men from getting killed."

*The Liscome Bay was the first baby flat-top to go down. The U.S. has lost four other carriers, has some 40 of all types now presumably in operation.

*Other record barrages: on Berlin the R.A.F. hurled 2,300 tons of bombs. At El Alamein the British used 600 guns, firing 1,500 shells a minute, on a four-mile front. At Orel the Russians lined up 3,200 gun barrels (some guns were multi-barreled) along every mile of a 20-to 25-mile front. At World War I's Passchendaele, the Allies massed 3,091 guns, or one to every six yards of an elevenmile front, fired them for ten days, threw 4 3/4 tons of shells for every yard of front.

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