Word: tarawa
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Last week some two to three thousand U.S. Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of Concord Bridge, the Bonhomme Richard, the Alamo, Little Big Horn and Belleau Wood. The name was Tarawa...
Last week, 25 years after the bloody landing, retired Marine Corps General David M. Shoup returned to Tarawa to participate in ceremonies commemorating the 76 hours when the corps suffered 3,319 casualties, among them 1,027 dead. Some 4,700 Japanese also died in the invasion, the first in a series of amphibious operations that sent U.S. forces island-hopping across the Central Pacific toward Japan. Robert Sherrod, the TIME and LIFE correspondent who filed the story of Tarawa in 1943 after leaping into neck-deep water and wading ashore with the fifth wave of Marines...
This time, the Americans traveled by plane rather than in the rattling, thumping holds of transports crowded with Marines, many of whom were about to die under murderous machine-gun fire even before they could 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...
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...
Named within hours as Hochmuth's successor was Major General Rathvon McClure Tompkins, 55, a Colorado-born veteran of Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Saipan, where he won the Navy Cross and picked up a load of Japanese shrapnel that still causes him to limp at the end of a ten-mile hike. Known as "Tommy Two-Star" behind his back, Tompkins served in the Dominican Republic during the 1965 crisis before becoming commander of the Marines' Parris Island boot camp in June, 1966. When Marine Corps Chief of Staff Lieut. General Henry Buse called from Washington to ask Tompkins...