A great work of art this is not. A great account of one of the US’s bloodiest battles in WWII, it is.
Robert Sherrod was a journalist, a war correspondent primarily working for Time and Life through much of his career. Tarawa (sometimes labeled “Tarawa: The Story of a Battle” is a very narrow view of one man’s observances of one of the amphibious landings at Tarawa, one of many of the Kiribati islands in the South Pacific that had to be retaken from the Japanese.
Exclusive to perhaps a time forgotten, Sherrod makes almost no comments, observances, or recaps of things he did not see first hand. This is a true “newspaperman’s” accounting in the most traditional sense. Sherrod takes you from his time in the transport ships to wading ashore to the first initial encounters with the Japanese defenders through his wanderings around the island after the battle was resolved. All of this from purely his own eyes.
One doesn’t get a sense of the larger battle, the wider strategy, the importance of the operation, the behind the scenes machinations, its longer term implications…Sherrod takes you there with him, reports what he saw and cuts you loose the moment the battle is over.
None of this is to say the work isn’t valuable…it is. It gives you a first hand view of what the American Marines faced taking the island. You get the unvarnished violence of such acts—from both sides. Here are the bodies cut in half, the missing limbs, the torched bodies. Here are the random things that make war sometimes a surrealist event—the tiny cat who survives and is cared for by a man who likely just finished killing scores of his fellows…the incongruous survival of a pane of glass when all else surrounding is blasted away. Its that “truth” that Sherrod saw that I think he sought to convey to the public.
If there is one tangent that Sherrod allows himself to indulge in from time to time it is his disdain for the stateside public. Referencing coal mining and other labor strikes in a time of war, the public’s belief that all battles could be one simply by bombing from 30,000 feet, that all Americans had to do was to show up to win the battle, and so on, Sherrod allows this feeling to shine through—That America is soft in its stateside population, that it has no real concept of war or what it takes to fight a war, that the media is not honest with the public about the difficulties of war and I think he hopes to change that or at least not be part of it.
Sherrod was good acquaintances with Roosevelt in these years and would press the President to allow the airing of a film about Tarawa which showed the battle in gruesome reality. The film was originally going to be hidden from view as it was felt the American public would lose their will to support the war if it was shown just how brutal and difficult the war actually was and the film was too violent to meet the then current Hollywood standards with only the President allowed to approve its release. Sherrod would be quoted as saying “I tell the President the truth. Our soldiers on the front want people back home to know that they don't knock the hell out of them every day of every battle. They want people to understand that war is a horrible, nasty business, and to say otherwise is to do a disservice to those who died.”
A quick read and more than a little dry, don’t expect Tarawa to “entertain” you, it simply seeks to inform you. And by those standards it succeeds in covering this bloody battle where some 4700 Japanese were killed in less than three days on a piece of land only two miles long and 800 yards wide with the Americans suffering 1000 deaths of their own. To give you an idea of just how amazing it is that the Marines suffered only 1000 deaths (another 2000 injured) understand that in the time the Japanese held the island they had constructed at least 500 machinegun equipped, concrete enforced, pillboxes to solidify their defense along with 40 separate artillery emplacements. This was the largest Pacific invasion to date at this point in the War and drove home just how difficult the Japanese would be to roll back. With the 4700 Japanese dead there were only 17 that surrendered…most deciding to fight to the death or commit suicide rather than surrender.
Sherrod reveals all the ugliness of war while still honestly representing the heroism of the Marines he accompanied. One could do far worse is learning what our forces faced in the Pacific than starting here.
