Fighting Ghosts in Tarawa: Cpl Roy Roush Part I

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Corporal Roy Roush. Roush served in the Marine Corps during World War II, and fought throughout the Pacific Theater.

In this interview, Roush describes the Battle of Tarawa.

Cpl Roy Roush:

Historians have said that Tarawa was the heaviest fortified piece of property during World War II. More heavily fortified than any piece of real estate, even in Europe. By rights, no marine should have ever set foot on Tarawa. The Japanese admiral there, in charge of the island, had bragged that it would take a million men a hundred years to take Tarawa. But the men of the 2nd Marine Division did it in only 76 hours, and that was something absolutely incredible. We lost over a thousand Marines, something like 1,026, that died during the battle. More died later on. There were 5,000 Japanese killed. And if you put it together, Tarawa was a bloodiest affair for the 76 hours of combat probably during the war. Let me describe how the guns and the machine guns were placed against the sea wall. They were very cleverly camouflaged, there was not too much distance between them, maybe 75 to a hundred feet in most cases. The Marines that were coming in facing one machine gun nest, were not only facing the fire from that gun, but they were also facing crossfire from the guns on the left and on the right, so that every Japanese machine gun position had cover crossfire from the ones on each side. It was most difficult. I don't know how anybody ever got ashore and survived, but somehow they did.

Tarawa was bombarded for several days before we landed, by some of our battleships, and cruisers, and destroyers. It was also attacked by our aircraft, to the extent that they thought that nobody could survive on the island. And a day or so before we landed, they gave up dropping any more bombs because they thought it would be useless. And we were told that we would just sort of go in and just wipe up, mop up the defenders. They didn't think there would be many people alive. Wrong. Those fortifications were so strong that many of them could take a direct hit from a gun from one of our battleships or a bomb, and still survive. They were incredibly strong.

As a matter of fact, the Japanese Admiral's command post was a large concrete building that had double walls to it. The walls were something like two and a half feet thick. The outer wall, well both walls. In between the two walls was an airspace, and in my book I show photographs where shells from our 16-inch battleships struck it, gave it a direct hit, and failed to penetrate the inner wall. The fortification had to be taken by the Marines on foot, hand-to-hand combat. And I just wondered what the Japanese Admiral thought when he saw Marines coming into his command post.

A lot of the guys never made it ashore. A lot of the guys drowned in the water trying to wade in. The problem was, in addition to their heavy fortifications at the sea wall, was that we came across the reef that in some places was almost a mile out from the island. And the Higgins boats, that a lot of the guys were in, normally could not make it. A few did finally maneuver around and get ashore, but most of the guys that did get ashore were in the amphibian tractors. Thank God for the amphibian tractors because, had it not been for them, we could never have taken Tarawa.

But a lot of the guys were in the Higgins boats were dumped out on the water and had to wade in. And many times it was over their head when the ramp was open or the guys jumped off, and they just disappeared, went right on down. Most of them did not have a chance to get their equipment off and come to the surface, and they're still down there.

The second day they called in the reinforcements that was the 6th Regiment, and instead of landing in front of their main fortifications on the Red Beaches, we landed on the west side on Green Beach, that was not as heavily defended. We still had to wade ashore, but we did not face the opposition that the 2nd and 8th Regiments had, and we managed to get ashore. Fortunately, I did not have to land on the first day or I may not be here. They suffered extremely high casualties.

Those that got ashore in the first few hours were stuck onto the very narrow beach in front of these machine gun nests. They finally managed to knock out these machine gun nests by basically going over the top of them and then attacking them from the rear. That was their soft spot. It was just virtually impossible to knock them out from in front. So this gave them some protection in that area. But all during the first day, and up until about noon of the second day, all of our forces were concentrated in the very narrow strip of beach in front of the sea wall.

Finally, about noon on the second day, it was decided that if they stayed there they'd all die. And most of them thought they were going to die anyway, so they thought they might as well take a few Japanese with them. And I believe it was Colonel Crowe that finally stood up and said, "Come on, follow me. Let's go get the son of a guns." And they charged up over the sea wall and finally succeeded in taking the island.

In my book, I talk about what demoralized the Japanese. And according to one prisoner that we took, he said it was not our shelling, not the bombing, but it was a site of the Marines that kept coming and kept coming. He said, "We could not stop them. They overran our defenses and took the island." And some of the Japanese then started committing suicide at the end.

They'd been defeated, they saw that they were being defeated. And a lot of the Japanese chose suicide rather than the humility of defeat.

The Japanese military had a history of winning all of their battles for over 2,000 years. It was not until Guadalcanal that they suffered their first defeat on land, and that was by the hands of the US Marines. It was something that they, hard for them to accept. Defeat or surrender, it was not in their vocabulary. But after Guadalcanal, they began to get the idea.

When the Marines went over the sea wall it was a very disorganized operation. The guys were all mixed up, a lot of them were not with their own company, but that didn't seem to matter. Wherever they were, they seemed to form a team. And one company commander, for example, or a master sergeant, could take over what ever group of Marines that were nearby. I describe it in my book as something like cowboys and Indians. It was little groups of Marines here and little groups of Marines there, that started progressing inland. And while one group was progressing, another group would offer them cover. Some of the BAR men were out in front, also, some of the guys with flamethrowers, waiting for the Japanese to make a break from, maybe from one bunker into another bunker, to catch them in the open. Some of the motion pictures that were shot were some of the best of the war. Showing the enemy up close, I mean real close, within 20 or 30 feet, running from one bunker to another bunker, they were caught in the opening.

And don't forget, Tarawa was a very, very, very small area. It may be the size of maybe two or three city blocks. It was very, very compressed fighting.

Most of the Japanese had been taken care of along the sea wall. The survivors or the remainder were still in some of the bunkers. And after, as I say, after we had taken the sea wall area, then it was just a matter of attacking the bunkers throughout the rest of the island. Except at night. The Japanese would come out at night and would do Banzai charges against our groups. And on the last night they almost broke through our lines, and it was very, very fierce fighting, hand-to-hand fighting. And the company Commander called for reinforcements, and was told that there were no reinforcements, he'd have to hold his own. And he did. But there was fighting with sabers and bayonets.

It would be anything from a group of eight or 10 or 15, maybe up to a hundred or more, or maybe 200. I think that largest Banzai attack on Tarawa consisted of probably 250, 300 Japanese.

And it lasted for quite a while. And they did come into close contact with our men, actually get into their positions, and it was every man fighting for himself.

To get their courage up for some of these banzai attacks, they would sake themselves up. The spirit of their banzai charges were, I don't think, ever matched in any other location in Europe. These guys came at us with absolutely no fear of death. As a matter of fact, I think they preferred death. Because a Japanese soldier that dies on the battlefield is ensured a place in their holy shrine. I forgot the name of it right now. But it is a shrine of their military heroes. And that's one of the highest honors that a Japanese soldier can have, is to die in battle. Or even better yet, to take an enemy with them. And they were all trying for it. No fear of death whatsoever.

Now, one of the Marines that was in the 2nd Regiment that landed the first day, who was in on the assault across the island, told me that when we fought our way across, then we turned around, we regrouped and fought our way back across. And he said after three or four sweeps back and forth across the island, they finally got it under control. But it was like the Marines fighting above ground, and the Japanese fighting underground. It was a very strange a battle.

You just sort of figured out where they were. You would spot a bunker and you would have to assume that there were Japanese in it, and you would attack it. You would attack it with flamethrowers or you could throw grenades in. We found the smoke grenades were quite effective, and either they'd have to come out or suffocate. During my four campaigns, it was rare that you really saw an enemy a soldier out in the open. Usually we didn't see them until after they were dead.

It was almost like fighting ghosts. You would have to assume that if there was an area that you couldn't see through, you had to assume that there were Japanese there. And we would spray it with bullets, with machine gun fire, or Browning automatic rifle fire, or throw grenades into it. More often than not, no, there was not Japanese in there, but quite often we would go in to investigate and then we'd find dead Japanese. Fighting the Japanese was bizarre. It was not conventional warfare like it was in Europe. I think in Europe they could pretty much figure out what the Germans would do. They were smart and they were effective, but the Japanese were very unconventional. You never knew what they were going to do, and that's what made them very dangerous. More often than not, they would not do what you would think they should do,, or the practical thing or the conventional thing. They would always do something unconventional.

One time on Saipan, as we were advancing, a Japanese officer jumped out from hiding and stood with a saber over his head. And instead of attacking one of us nearby, he runs towards a half-track that was following us, trying to charge a half-track, to defeat a half-track with a saber over his head. Now I don't know how he thought he might be able to damage or capture a half-track, and he didn't. When he got, he was coming directly in front of it towards the 75 millimeter gun that was on the half-track. And when he got 15, 20 feet away, they pulled the trigger on the howitzer and just literally blew him to smithereens. As I say in my book, "Why didn't he attack one of us from hiding with his saber rather than the half-track?" Didn't make sense, but what a way to go. Went out in a blaze of glory.

Well, on Tarawa for example, most of the guys had to wade in, consequently lost their communication equipment. At that time, we didn't have these little small handheld walkie-talkies. The radios that we had were large backpacks and very few of those got ashore. So there was very little communication among the men once they got ashore. It was just like word of mouth, pass the word down, pass the word this way.

But talking about the wounded on Tarawa, it breaks my heart every time I think about what happened to these guys. There were so many casualties in such a short period of time that the few doctors, the corpsmen, were just overwhelmed. And guys were laying there dying and bleeding to death. There were times when guys that were still alive were tagged dead because the doctors and the corpsmen spent their time trying to save those that they thought they could save. Now, if they had not been overwhelmed, they could have saved, say more people, the guys that were more severely wounded. But the guys that were the worst, they had a tag on that says "dead," and they were ignored. The dead and the wounded piled up on that narrow beach on Tarawa so heavily, that actually it restricted our activities of combat.

There's one story about, matter of fact it was a Jewish kid, and he'd been hit pretty badly, and the doctor came to him to tend to him and started to give him morphine. And he said, "Please, doc, no morphine, no morphine." The doctor says, "Why?" He says, "If you give me morphine I won't be able to fight anymore." That was a fighting spirit that these men had. But the doctor knew that he was incapable of fighting and went ahead and gave him morphine anyway, but that was a spirit of these guys. These guys that took Tarawa, in my opinion, were the greatest fighters in the world. And when they're gone, the world will never see the likes of them again.

To every Marine, every corpsman was a hero. We looked to them like a godfather. We depended on them for our survival, and we knew that if we ever got hit or wounded and we called for corpsmen, if there was one within calling distance, he would be there. I never saw a corpsman fail to get up and go to a wounded Marine, even under the heaviest of fire. And consequently, there was a lot of casualties among the corpsmen, and God bless every one of them. We just loved them.

We were short on everything, from communications equipment, to medical supplies, corpsmen, doctors, ammunition, food, water, everything. But somehow or another, it just didn't seem to matter. In intense combat, seems like you don't particularly get hungry, you don't get thirsty, you don't notice the fatigue. You just keep on going until after it's all over with, and then you literally collapse.

By the way, the Japanese had some of the largest anti-aircraft guns that were used in the war. They were something like 105-millimeter or something like that, larger than any aircraft gun that we had, and I think larger than anything the Germans had, and they turned those on us.

As a matter of fact, they had three eight-inch coastal defense guns that they fired on our convoy with and during the invasion as we were circling, oh, three or four miles off the island, they fired some shots at our convoy, and one of them nearly missed the ship that I was on and did strike the fan tail of the ship right directly behind me. So, they had a lot of firepower.

Satchel charges played a very important part of knocking out a lot of the large bunkers. Some of these bunkers were large. And normally, as powerful as the satchel charges were, it would take more than one satchel charge. We learned pretty quickly that you just don't throw in one satchel charge and go charging into these bunkers. You're still going to meet some resistance, and these guys could take a lot of a punishment, a lot of punishment. Don't think Japanese soldiers weren't tough. They were tough. They were wiry. They could take unbelievable amount of punishment and still come out fighting. They were something else. And being fairly small in stature, most of them, they could hide in unbelievable places. You could walk within five or six feet of them sometimes if they were camouflaged, and you'd never know they were there.

There were no soldiers. They were all Japanese Imperial Marines, Japan's finest. They were the equivalent to the American Marines. They were actually Special Naval Landing Forces, and they had their own battle flags.And to be selected as an Imperial Marine, they needed to be of a larger stature. They claimed six-foot, but some of them were not six-feet, but I would say they had to be probably five-foot-eight or higher. And I saw some Japanese that were over six-feet on Tarawa.

About noon on the third day, the island was announced secured. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is absolutely secured, but it meant that we had control of the island. But it still took many days to find the rest of the Japanese. They were hiding in some of the bunkers. Some of them were hiding under the pier. As a matter of fact, I think it was something like five years later, they discovered one or two Japanese that were still hiding out underneath the pier on Tarawa. After the war was over, they finally discovered them. These guys managed to survive.

On the third day, as I say, on Tarawa, after it was now secured, there was still over 100 Japanese soldiers remaining on the rest of the Atoll. Tarawa Atoll is a string of islands about 31 mile miles long. No place on the string of these islands are higher than about four or five feet above sea level. These Japanese soldiers that had escaped during the battle to the other islands had to be found and taken care of. And that was up to our battalion, the second battalion of the Sixth Regiment, Second Marine Division, we were chosen to then secure the rest of the island chain. And we started at the next island over from Tarawa.

By the way, let me explain Tarawa. It was Tarawa Atoll. There was no one island called Tarawa. Where the combat took place was a little island. At the end it was called Betio, B-E-T-I-O I guess it's spelled. So, it's sort of a misnomer to say Tarawa as such, because Tarawa was actually the vicinity, but it was Betio. We called it Helen. That was their code name for it. But anyway, our battalion was chosen to secure the rest of the chain of the islands, and it took us about two and a half days to march the remaining area to the last island at the very tip where we cornered over 100 Japanese who had set up an ambush for us. And it was a very short, close-quartered firefight with a high rate of casualties to killed. Because it was so close, we walked right into this ambush. Like I say, they could camouflage themselves. You had no idea exactly where they were. There were Japanese snipers waiting for us in the trees, behind coconut logs, in foxholes. They were using rifles, and they were using their light machine guns and their knee mortars. And when we got close enough, they opened fire. And in this case, it was one of the few firefights where there were more people killed on our side than wounded. Normally you have a ratio of about three or four guys wounded for everyone killed, but it was reversed in this situation. I lost many friends there that day.

On Tarawa, thank God, there was a pier that the Japanese had that extended out across the reef for, oh, almost a half a mile, a very substantial pier. It was a pier that they had used to unload their heavy eight-inch artillery shell, artillery guns with and so forth, and their tanks and other stuff.

A lot of Marines managed to get ashore by using the pier for cover. And then the Japanese discovered that, particularly during the night, they would go out and hide underneath the pier to attack more Marines that were coming in on the second and the third day.

On the second day, as I say, they would infiltrate underneath the pier, maybe on top of the pier during the night. And then the Marines that were coming in on the second day and the landing craft, they were under a crossfire from not only the bunkers at the seawall, but crossfire from the Japanese on the pier.

After the island's secured on the third day, everybody except our battalion, which was the second battalion of the Sixth Regiment, the Second Marine Division, left the island and went on to a training camp in Hawaii, leaving just our battalion there to garrison the island for another two or three months until we could bring in CBs, bring in the Air Force, Air Corps, who were building a strip, bring in some more Navy personnel until they could build it up into a base.

Otherwise, the Japanese could have come back and submarines or fast attack destroyers and occupy the place again. But apparently if they did attempt, the Navy kept them away. So, nobody succeeded. To my knowledge, no Japanese succeeded in getting back to Tarawa after it was secured.

But there was still Japanese loose running around the island that survived the battle on Betio. And that somehow or another head out from our forces as we swept through the island to the end. And they were a problem to our units there at night looking for food and weapons and so forth. And some of our sentries were attacked, so there were still Japanese roaming the island chain for some months afterwards, and they were a hazard.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Corporal Roy Roush. Next time on Warriors In Their Own Words, we’ll hear Roush describe the Battle of Saipan, the Battle of Tinian, and the Suicide Cliffs.

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