76 hours of hell ended on Nov. 23, 1943. There is a documentary of that hell.
“With the Marines at Tarawa” is
appropriately titled. The Second Marine
Division invaded the island of Betio in the Tarawa atoll. The invasion took place from November 21-23,
1943. The amphibious invasion was the
first of the island-hopping campaign and the first landing that was
contested. The 2nd Marine
Division had fought on Guadalcanal, but that invasion was not opposed. Betio was very well-defended and the Marines
had trouble just getting to the beach, much less inland. Some of the Marines had to wade to the beach
under heavy fire. One of those men was
Sgt. Norman Hatch who was armed with a .45 pistol and a 35 mm. movie
camera. Hatch and other photographers
were embedded with the Marines. Two of
them were killed. Louis Hayward, an
actor who enlisted before the war, was the director. The footage was brutal and when the film was
shown to President Roosevelt, his aides recommended that the film be
censored. They were worried the public
was not ready to see what war is really like.
FDR consulted with war correspondent Robert Sherrod (who later wrote a
book about Tarawa). Sherrod told the
President that the Marines wanted the public to know what the war was really
like. FDR agreed and gave the green
light for the film to be shown in movie theaters. It had the effect of causing
many factory workers to work harder. The
movie won the Best Documentary Short Story Oscar.
The movie has a typical war
documentary template. But this was the
first war documentary that many Americans saw, so it was new to them. The doc begins with the Marine Corps Hymn,
naturally. The music pops up throughout
the movie. Troops board the transport
ships. They view a relief map of the
island. As the camera pans over the
Marines, the narrator tells the audience “Many of these men were killed the
following morning.” The Navy warships
and planes bomb the island. “It didn’t
seem possible that anyone could live through that bombardment.” That would have been a conclusion reached by
most of the Marines. They will be
wrong. The combat is intense as the
photographers are amazingly close to the action. There is a lot of gunfire in this movie. The audience sees Marines wading to
shore. Flamethrowers are used. The Marines use grenades on the entrenched
Japanese. Before Americans see dead
Marines, they see a lot of dead Japanese.
“They are savage fighters. Their
lives mean nothing to them.” Later, we
see American corpses. “These are Marine
dead. This is the price we have to
play.” (I just recently saw an exhibit
of art by Tom Lea. Lea was an artist who
painted scenes he saw when he was on board the carrier Hornet and with the
Marines on Peleliu island. One of his most famous paintings is of a Marine who
has been shreaded by machine gun fire.
He entitled the painting “The Price.”)
Marines are buried at sea. The
Seabees come in and repair the airfield.
The American flag goes up.
It’s no surprise the film won an Oscar. It was groundbreaking. The color footage would have wowed audiences. That would have been one emotion. Others would have been horror and patriotism. Although Hayward wanted to show the hell of war, he also wanted to Marines effectively defeating the “savage” enemy. Although that enemy is referred to as Japs and Nips, this is not really a propaganda film. It is a chronicle of a battle. The film covers many of the highlights that the battle is famous for. But it is a little hazy as to strategy and tactics. The battle comes off as simpler than it actually was. It omits all the errors the Navy and Marines made. The narrator says about the bombardment: “Everything went like clockwork.” The fact that a force of B-24 bombers failed to show up is not mentioned. The wading across the coral reef is glossed over. Seems like Hatch (who provided much of the footage) would have wanted that emphasized. The most patriotic impact the film could have had would have been to describe how those American boys risked their lives for each other. (Not for the people in the audience.)
Tarawa deserved a good documentary and it got one. The 76 hours of hell are not hellish enough in celluloid, but considering it came close to not being released, it was as hellish as you could get in 1944. The narration is sparse and it’s not jingoistic. The film let’s the remarkable footage do the talking most of the time.
On a personal note, I used to show a documentary to my American History classes entitled “Seven Views of War.” It focused on the experiences of seven American servicemen and women in WWII, Korea, or Vietnam. One of the seven was Hatch. I can remember him saying that his footage was the first time Americans saw dead Americans. Do your part, factory worker!
P.S. I just was doing some research on the battle for my website (History Anecdotes for Teachers) and I ran across a myth that the documentary perpetuated. The narrator mentions that the shore guns that the Navy took out was Vickers guns captured by the Japanese at Singapore. Many years later, historians discovered the guns were sold to Japan in 1905 for the Russo-Japanese War. The mistake was understandable.
Here is the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JolhiCbU_u8
GRADE = B
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