Word: reefs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...After that there is the Jesus factor - the unpredictable." Each new objective has its peculiar problem. The Marshall Islands differ from Guadalcanal, which is an 80-mile long island with a great jungle-covered spine and coconut groves, jungles and grassy flatlands along its shores. No coral reefs guard its coast. The Marshalls, like the Gilberts, are ancient atolls - coral reefs ringing irregularly around blank and limpid lagoons. On the reef, like beads in a necklace, are occasional land masses of coral sand, large enough to support airfields and artillery installations. Hot and waterless, the Marshalls lie under the equatorial...
...vulnerable to an attack from Pearl Harbor, is the low-lying, V-shaped coral mound once so courageously defended by Major James P. Devereux and his Marines. Directly west of the Gilberts the isolated, three-by-four-mile mound of Nauru rises 225 feet above the sea. A coral reef encircles it closely. Because of its rich phosphate deposits (in addition to its strategic position), it is jealously held...
These armed LVTs (Landing Vehicles, Tracked) proved themselves in the reef-guarded Gilberts. Other landing craft were halted by the coral rings around the islands. The Alligators (originally developed by Donald Roebling for hurricane rescue work in Florida swamps) kept going, climbed over the barriers, crawled up on the beaches, ranged inland. Their tanklike, clanking steel treads worked...
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...
...officer shouted : "You'll have to go in right away as soon as I can get a boat for you. The shell around the island is too shallow to take the Higgins boats." The news was chilling. It meant something dimly foreseen but hardly expected: the shallow coral reef around Betio would bar landing save by special small, steel-plated boats, of which there were all too few, or by wading...