Word: betio
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...writing on record." "About as near as you can get, in an armchair, to being in the midst of battle," said The Nation. And Foster Hailey wrote in the New York Times that Tarawa is "a superlative job of reporting, obviously written at white heat while the sounds of Betio still rang in Sherrod's ears and the smell of it still hung in his nostrils...
...Betio Island, white and wasted at the end of a palmy green bay, was more than ever a base of war. But elsewhere in the Tarawa Atoll the sturdy brown Gilbertese had picked up again an old, familiar thread of life...
...upon a young lieutenant firing madly at nothing visible. "Son," said General Smith, "if you don't quit that wild shooting I'm going to take your gun away from you." From Makin soon after the battle had ended, he flew to Tarawa. He walked through little Betio Island's 5,000 enemy and U.S. dead with the 2nd Marine Division's Major General Julian Smith.* A few minutes after they passed a pillbox rubble, Jap snipers killed three marines on the spot they had left...
Largest of these islands is also called Kwajalein. It is two and a half miles long, a third of a mile wide-about as big as Tarawa's Betio. Some 50 miles north along the beads lies Roi, 7/10 sq. mi.-just large enough for an airfield...
North Battle. The Marines captured Roi in a little over 24 hours. As on Betio, the Japs who still lived crawled back at night into pillboxes filled with their own dead. The pillboxes had to be cleaned out again with flamethrowers, blocks of TNT and rocket guns. Namur, separated from Roi by a 200-yd. causeway, was the Japs' last retreat from the Marines...