Word: betio
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...splash ashore. From the air, Tarawa looked like a peaceful string of jade beads carelessly tossed on a dressing table. Each of the islands surrounding the lagoon is a bit of equatorial sand and coral nourishing coconut palms, breadfruit and pandanus trees. But on the bird-shaped island of Betio at the end of the string, the scars of war may not be erased for 100 years. Surprising evidence still remains of the ghastly battle fought on the half square mile of all but forgotten real estate...
Smell of Death. To be sure, Betio has become the Broadway of Tarawa. A dance hall teems with devotees of the newly discovered twist. Outdoor movies attract audiences of hundreds each evening (10? to sit on the ground, 20? upstairs). But blockhouses and rusting gun barrels still pock the landscape, and laborers regularly unearth skeletons that have been buried beneath the sand for a quarter-century. It all came back, Sherrod reported-"the sweetly sickening smell of death given off by thousands of bodies rapidly rotting in the tropical sun, the sight of an island stripped of every...
From the mid-Pacific battleground, Sherrod cabled: "A small rock memorial near the Betio Club, blockhouses, big guns-everything but a few shot-up am-tracks visible at low tide belongs to the Japanese. It seems fitting to affix a bronze plaque at the base of a white pylon in memory of the United States Marines who won a unique battle there. They provided the lessons for the rest of the journey...
...Honor, the nation's highest award for heroism, to six of them. Two of the heroes, both marines, were dead. Their mothers came to the White House in their place. From El Paso came Mrs. C. Jane Hawkins, whose son, Lieut. William D. Hawkins, after being wounded on Betio Island, had fought on for hours-to die from Jap gunfire. From Worcester, Mass, came Mrs. George F. Power, whose son, Lieut. John V. Power, died outside a Jap pillbox on Namur Island, holding his left hand to a stomach wound, firing a carbine with his right...
...Betio is changed greatly. The tangled morass of coconut logs and bomb-pitted sand has been leveled. Orderly rows of tents have risen to shelter the marines, the sailors, the airmen and the Seabees who man this outpost...