Two months after losing more than 1,000 Marines at Tarawa, the U.S. military hit Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The assault on Jan. 31, 1944, would prove the Americans had learned from their mistakes.
The 4th Marine Division and the Army's 7th Infantry Division landed on several islands within the atoll. Four days later, they had killed more than 8,000 Japanese defenders at a cost of 372 American dead. Four Marines had earned the Medal of Honor. The victory helped expedite the drive toward Japan.
Kwajalein stands as one of the most successful amphibious operations in American military history. Every complication encountered at Tarawa a few months prior was addressed by the military, which ensured Kwajalein was a massive success.
What Went Wrong at Tarawa
The 2nd Marine Division landed on Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll on Nov. 20, 1943. The assault plan called for a three-hour naval bombardment followed by waves of Marines in Higgins boats crossing the reef.
The bombardment was devastating, but American planners underestimated the tide. Maj. Frank Holland had warned that tidal conditions would leave only three feet of water over the reef. Higgins boats needed at least four to move forward. His concerns were ignored.
Holland was right. Only the tracked LVT amphibious vehicles could cross the reef. The Marines had just 125 of them for the assault; most were destroyed on the first day. Thousands of Marines climbed out of their Higgins boats at the reef's edge and waded 500 to 800 yards through chest-deep water to the beach while under fire.
The high-explosive naval shells that hit the island had detonated on contact with sand and logs from coconut trees. The Japanese bunkers underneath the cover were untouched.
The 2nd Marine Division secured Betio in 76 hours. It cost them over 1,000 dead and 2,000 wounded. Photographs of American bodies floating in the lagoon shocked the nation when they reached newspapers weeks later.
Applying the Lessons
Adm. Chester Nimitz ordered massive changes for Kwajalein. The bombardment would last three days instead of three hours. Ships would close to point-blank range and fire armor-piercing rounds instead of high-explosive shells.
Assault troops would seize small islands first and position artillery on them before hitting the main objectives. And critically, all landings would come from the lagoon side, where Japanese defenses were weakest.
Rear Adm. Richard Conolly earned the nickname "Close-In" for his insistence that fire support ships move within range of Japanese shore batteries. The battleship USS Mississippi engaged targets from 1,500 yards, so close her crew could see individual palm trees disintegrate under her 14-inch guns.
Nimitz also made a controversial decision. He bypassed the heavily fortified outer atolls where intelligence said the Japanese had concentrated their main defenses. American codebreakers had intercepted communications revealing that most combat troops were stationed on outer islands like Wotje, Mili, Maloelap and Jaluit. Nimitz would skip them entirely and strike directly at Kwajalein, the administrative center of Japanese operations in the Marshalls.
His subordinates objected. Rear Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner called the plan dangerous and reckless. Vice Adm. Raymond Spruance agreed. Kwajalein sat deep inside Japanese-held waters with enemy airfields surrounding it.
Nimitz overruled them. He would not waste any more American lives taking outlying islands. He would take Kwajalein and only the most vital objectives before striking into the Marianas.
The Japanese Garrison
Kwajalein Atoll sits roughly 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii, a crescent of 97 islands encircling a lagoon larger than the island of Oahu. Rear Adm. Monzo Akiyama commanded roughly 8,000 troops across the atoll from his headquarters on Kwajalein Island. He had held the position since August 1941.
Fewer than half of his men were trained infantry. The rest were Korean laborers, aviation personnel and support staff who had never expected to fight on the ground.
Akiyama had concentrated his strongest fortifications facing the ocean, with dual-mounted 127mm coastal guns, 37mm cannons, anti-aircraft batteries, eight blockhouses and 52 pillboxes filled with machine guns. Anti-tank ditches and fighting trenches guarded the beaches. He positioned everything to stop an assault from the sea, never imagining American amphibious vehicles could cross the coral reefs to land inside the lagoon.
Akiyama also had 110 aircraft scattered across the atoll's airfields. On Jan. 29, 1944, American carrier planes from Task Force 58 caught 92 of them on the ground at Roi airfield and destroyed them in a single strike. By the time the landings began, not a single Japanese aircraft remained operational in the region.
Akiyama himself never saw the invasion. On Jan. 25, four days before the air strike, a naval shell hit his command bunker and killed him. The garrison would fight without its commander or its air cover.
Tokyo had already written off the Marshall Islands. After the losses in the Solomons and New Guinea, Imperial Headquarters knew it could not reinforce every outpost. The outer islands were expendable.
The defenders were ordered to die where they stood, buying time for a decisive battle closer to the home islands. The men on Kwajalein knew they were not expected to survive.
The Bombardment
The landings began Jan. 31, 1944. Army soldiers from the 7th Infantry Division's 17th Infantry Regiment landed on Cecil, Carter, Carlos and Carlson Islands in pre-dawn rubber boat landings against scattered resistance. These islets would serve as artillery platforms for the main assault. Marines from the 25th Regiment seized five islands near Roi-Namur and did the same.
By nightfall, the Army's 145th Field Artillery Battalion had howitzers registered on Kwajalein Island. Marine artillery was zeroed in on Roi-Namur. Both main objectives on opposite sides of the atoll would be hit from land and sea simultaneously.
The naval bombardment was unprecedented. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers poured 7,000 rounds into Kwajalein Island on D-Day and the day after. Artillery on the captured islets added 29,000 more.
Lt. Phil Wood of the 24th Marines watched from the deck of the USS DuPage.
"The incessant pounding had been going on for 24 hours now," he wrote. "We didn't see how there could be anything left."
When dawn broke on Feb. 1, one soldier recorded that the island "looked as if it had been picked up 20,000 feet and then dropped." Estimates suggested 50 to 75 percent of the defenders were killed before a single American stepped onto the main islands.
Roi-Namur
Roi and Namur were twin islands connected by a narrow causeway and a sandbar at the northern end of the atoll. Roi held the airfield. Namur held barracks, ammunition dumps and administrative buildings. Together, they were defended by 3,563 Japanese troops and Korean laborers. The 23rd Marines would take Roi. The 24th Marines would take Namur.
Most of the Marines in the 4th Division had never heard a shot fired in combat. The division had been activated barely a year earlier at Camp Pendleton, filled with volunteers and draftees who had trained on the beaches of California for this moment.
The landing was chaos. Salt water had shorted out the radios in the amtracs, cutting communication between units. The tracked vehicles proved too long for the elevators on the LSTs, forcing crews to rig wooden ramps to wrestle them onto tank decks. Boats collided in the pre-dawn darkness. Units landed in the wrong places. Companies were separated. Platoons scattered.
But the confusion mattered less than it might have because the bombardment had been so effective. The 4th Marine Division hit both islands from the lagoon side on the afternoon of Feb. 1.
Roi fell within hours. The airfield offered little cover and the bombardment had devastated the garrison. Defenders emerged dazed from shattered bunkers only to be cut down. By 6:00 p.m., the 23rd Marines declared the island secure.
It was on Roi that afternoon that Pfc. Richard B. Anderson earned the Medal of Honor. The 22-year-old from Tacoma, Washington, was hunting snipers across the airfield with three other Marines when he dropped into a shell crater for cover. Anderson carried a box of grenades. He pulled one, armed it, went to throw it and fumbled the grenade. It dropped to the bottom of the 15-foot crater.
There was no time to retrieve it. Anderson threw himself on top of it. The blast tore through him. Corpsmen evacuated him to the USS Callaway, where he died that afternoon. Three Marines walked off Roi because of what he did.
The Fight for Namur
Namur was different. The island was packed with shattered buildings and rubble that provided cover. Japanese soldiers waited in cellars and fired from piles of debris. Every wrecked structure became a strongpoint.
The Marines cleared blockhouses and pillboxes one at a time, working with flamethrowers, satchel charges and rifles. The fighting was close. Room by room. Position by position.
The worst moment came at 1:05 p.m. A demolition team led by Lt. Saul Stein approached a massive concrete blockhouse on the right flank. A second team led by 1st Lt. Joseph LoPrete approached from the left. Stein's men blew a hole through the wall with a shaped charge. A platoon of Japanese soldiers came running out as the Marines engaged them. Stein ordered his men to destroy the position with satchel charges. His men lobbed explosives into the bunker.
Neither Stein nor anyone else knew the blockhouse was the atoll's main torpedo magazine, stacked with torpedo warheads, aerial bombs and high explosives stockpiled to supply the entire island chain.
The explosion was devastating. A column of smoke shaped like an atomic mushroom cloud rose over Namur. Chunks of concrete, unexploded torpedo warheads and palm trees rocketed into the air.
"Trunks of palm trees and chunks of concrete as large as packing crates were flying through the air like matchsticks," recorded 1st Lt. Samuel H. Zutty.
Lt. Wood, approaching the beach in a landing craft, felt "a tremendous blast of air seemed to stop the boat, followed by a wave of sound that left everything throbbing." Debris splashed among the landing craft offshore.
One Marine was blown completely off the island and into the lagoon. An observation pilot keyed his radio and said, "The whole damn island has blown up!"
Twenty Marines died instantly, including Stein and LoPrete. Nearly 100 more were wounded. It was the deadliest single moment of the entire operation. The blast gave the surviving Japanese defenders time to recover and regroup.
The fighting continued into the afternoon. It was during this bitter room-to-room combat that 1st Lt. John V. Power led his platoon from Company K, 4th Battalion, 24th Marines against a Japanese pillbox that was raking his men with machine gun fire.
A burst caught Power in the stomach as he charged. Gut-shot and dying, he kept moving. He reached the pillbox, shoved his rifle through the firing aperture and killed the crew inside. Only then did he collapse. The 25-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, died within minutes. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously.
As darkness fell, the surviving Japanese launched numerous counterattacks. Marines dug in and waited. Flares lit the island up in bright white light, and anything that moved drew fire.
Just before daybreak on Feb. 2, Japanese soldiers launched a massive banzai charge against the 3rd Battalion, carrying rifles, bayonets and swords.
A gap between Companies I and K was exploited. The fight turned into a chaotic frenzy of bayonets, knives and clubbed rifles. Only the timely arrival of Company L and a few medium tanks stabilized the line.
During the melee, Pvt. Richard K. Sorenson was defending a shell hole with five other Marines when a Japanese grenade landed at their feet. He threw himself on it. The blast tore through his thighs, hips and legs. A corpsman tied off a severed artery and packed the wounds. Sorenson was evacuated to a transport ship bound for Hawaii.
Among those fighting off the counterattack was 44-year-old Cpl. Earl Brown of Item Company and his 19-year-old son, Pfc. Jack Brown. When Jack enlisted, Earl, a veteran of the Great War, decided he couldn't let his boy go alone.
The two had pulled every string to serve in the same unit. Jack had even gone AWOL and stowed away on his father's ship when illness nearly kept him from the operation. Jack was killed during the fighting that morning.
The Fighting Comes to an End
By morning, Japanese resistance was collapsing into pockets. Lt. Col. Aquilla J. Dyess, commander of 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, had been everywhere during the fighting, exposing himself repeatedly to direct his men.
The 35-year-old South Carolinian had already earned the Carnegie Medal for civilian heroism before the war, diving into a flood-swollen river to save a drowning woman. During the fight on Namur, he guided his Marines through the hell of combat and was ensuring they defeated the last pockets of resistance.
Only the day prior, he broke through Japanese lines and saved a group of Marines who had been surrounded by enemy forces. Now he sprinted between groups of his Marines and urged them to advance against the enemy, ignoring the intense fire targeting him.
Dyess climbed onto the parapet of a Japanese anti-tank trench to point out targets to his Marines. A machine gun burst cut him down. He became one of only two men in American history to earn both the Carnegie Medal and the Medal of Honor.
His Marines continued finishing off the remaining pockets of Japanese resistance on the island. By noon on Feb. 2, Roi-Namur was secure.
Of the 3,563 Japanese and Korean defenders, only 91 survived as prisoners, 51 Japanese soldiers and 40 Korean laborers. The Marines lost 195 killed in action.
The Fight for Kwajalein Island
On the other end of the atoll, 45 miles to the south, the 7th Infantry Division faced Kwajalein Island. The island stretched 2.5 miles long but only 880 yards wide at its broadest point, narrowing to just 300 yards at its northern tip. It was defended by 5,112 Japanese troops and Korean laborers.
The soldiers of the division were veterans. They had fought the brutal Aleutian Islands campaign at Attu and Kiska, learning hard lessons about combat against the Japanese and friendly fire. Now they would apply what they knew to the coral islands of the Pacific.
The 32nd and 184th Infantry Regiments stormed ashore on the morning of Feb. 1 after the pulverizing bombardment. The first wave hit the beach at 9:30 a.m. Within 12 minutes, 1,200 soldiers were ashore without a single casualty.
"The effect of the heavy preliminary bombardment had been overpowering," recorded the Army's official history. "There were no Japanese still alive on the sands where the 32nd landed."
Resistance stiffened as the soldiers pushed inland. Japanese survivors fought from log bunkers, pillboxes, anti-tank ditches and rubble piles. Unlike the Marines' rapid assault on Roi-Namur, Maj. Gen. Charles Corlett ordered a methodical advance. His men had learned the cost of haste in the Aleutians. They would take Kwajalein yard by yard.
Roughly 40 reinforced concrete pillboxes dotted the island's length. Each one had to be reduced individually. The process involved locating the position, pinning it down with rifle fire, then bringing up a flamethrower team or tank to burn or blast the defenders out.
The fighting took on an urban character as infantry cleared wrecked barracks and administrative buildings room by room. Engineers worked alongside riflemen with flamethrowers, satchel charges and white phosphorus grenades to root out the defenders who refused to surrender.
The soldiers witnessed several counterattacks at night. Japanese survivors slipped through gaps in the lines. Some reached the rims of American foxholes before being spotted. But there was no massed banzai charge like the one on Namur. The defenders were too shattered to organize anything larger than infiltration.
The End of Kwajalein
By Feb. 4, the remaining Japanese had been compressed into a pocket near Nob Pier at the island's eastern end. The final day's fighting was the bloodiest, street combat through shattered blockhouses. The last organized resistance was finished off that evening.
By Feb 5, the atoll was secure. The American Marines and soldiers who had secured it stood victorious on their respective islands, surrounded by a devastated landscape and thousands of enemy corpses.
Of the 5,112 Japanese and Korean defenders on Kwajalein Island, only 174 survived as prisoners, 49 Japanese soldiers and 125 Korean laborers.
The 7th Infantry Division lost 177 killed in action. The urban-like combat they faced on the island foreshadowed the horrific conditions the U.S. Army would face in Manila later that year.
Along with the Marine actions on Roi-Namur, the fight to secure Kwajalein Atoll killed around 8,000 Japanese soldiers at the cost of 372 Americans. A massive success compared to the horrendous casualties endured on Tarawa.
The Results
Compared to Tarawa, the longer bombardment, armor-piercing shells, lagoon-side landings, artillery pre-positioned on captured islets, and tank-infantry teams trained to reduce bunkers systematically proved extremely successful. The Japanese paid a heavy price on Kwajalein.
Col. S.L.A. Marshall, the Army historian who interviewed veterans immediately after the battle, called Kwajalein a "well-planned, well-handled, well-fought fight, from the first bombardment to the death of the last resisting Japanese soldier."
Sorenson survived his wounds and became one of only four Marines in World War II to survive throwing himself on a grenade. He received the Medal of Honor in a hospital bed in Seattle five months later. Meanwhile, Earl Brown survived the battle and later visited his son’s grave on Namur.
Nimitz's gamble had paid off. The quick victory allowed him to accelerate the Pacific timetable by 60 days. The assault on Eniwetok, originally scheduled for late April, jumped off on Feb. 17, barely two weeks after Kwajalein fell. American forces had penetrated Japan's outer defensive ring for the first time, seizing territory the enemy had held since before Pearl Harbor.
The road to Tokyo was open, and only a few months later, U.S. forces would seize Saipan, bringing them within striking distance of Japan.
Japanese commanders studied the loss of Kwajalein. Beach defenses could not survive American firepower. Any position the Americans could see, they could destroy. Future garrisons at Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa would fortify inland, in caves and tunnels where naval guns could not reach.
They would let the Americans land unopposed, then bleed them in fighting that negated American advantages in firepower and mobility. The relatively quick victories in the Marshalls would not be repeated.
Today, Kwajalein Atoll hosts the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. The lagoon where landing craft carried soldiers and Marines to battle now serves as an impact zone for missiles launched from California. On Roi-Namur, tracking radars occupy the island where the U.S. military employed one of its most successful amphibious operations of the Pacific War.
