ON TARAWA OUTPOST

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 303, 22 December 1943, Page 3

ON TARAWA OUTPOST

WELL-FED JAPANESE BATTLE ON A BEEB DUMP The Japanese defending Tarawa, captured afte rthree days of the hardest fighting in the Pacific, "were among the healthiest and best fed Nipponese troops yet encountered by the Marine Corps, relates Master Technical-Sergeant Jim G. Lucas, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a Marine Codps combat correspondent, who took part in the landing attack. Literal 1 j', the Japanese on Tarawa had everything, and until that fateful Sunday morning when our battleships opened fire off shore, duty here must have been a real vacation. The Nips had excellent living quarters, the best of food, plenty of Japanese beer, new clothing, new rifles, and a wide variety of reading material. One of the first battles of the campaign was fought o,ver the top of a large Japanese beer dump. The prisoners taken in the battle were husky, weil-trained, and apparently the cream of the Japanese Imperial Naval Landing Forces, virtually every prisoner stripped himself naked before surrendering— to convince the Marines he carried no concealed weapons—and their bodies showed their well being Beyond doubt, Tarawa was the most strongly defended enemy outpost yet seized by the Marines. Its coasts were lined with heavy guns pill-boxes, prepared mortar emplacements, tanks, tank traps, land mines and bomb-proof shelters. Even the impact of our bombing and shelling was not enough to knock them out, and it was necessary for the Marines to go in after them.

The Nips showed the same dogged fanaticism they displayed in the Solomons and New Georgia. Even yet, some of them are holding out in dugouts at the far end of the island, although their fate is sealed. In capturing Tarawa, it is estimated we seized more than a million dollars' worth of supplies and materials, itself a crippling blow. Virtually every Marine on Tarawa looked death in the face. We came in under direct fire, we silenced big batteries in hand-to-hand fighting, and we went through a hell of enemy fire. As we told our general, who came by after we had settled down, the going had been pretty rough for a while. Later the general's aide told us that the coxswain piloting their boat to shore had been wounded, and they'd had a narrow squeeze. In taking Tara\ r a our officers agree that the Marines tackled, and whipped, the toughest job ever cut out foi , them. It did not take as long as Guadalcanal , , which took six months. This took only three days. But on Guadalcanal- there were some areas, five or six miles behind the fighting lines, where men could rest after their stint. But here, all of the island, 800 yards wide and two miles and a half long, was a front. Every man was a fighting man, and every man here shared the dangers through some of the hardest fighting in history. m There will be heroes out of Tarawa. It has happened so swiftly that it is virtually impossible now to learn who they are. Sunday morning, four days ago, we were just a bunch of Marines. Since then, a century of living has gone past.