 When we attacked Tarawa, the main atoll Bishio was surrounded by a coral reef, or actually segmented reefs. Coral grows anywhere there isn't fresh water. So on any island that's got a river where large quantities of fresh water are coming into the lagoon, the coral dies and there's a natural opening into the lagoon. Well, Tarawa doesn't have a river. What happened was the British who had held the island before the Japanese captured it actually notified they warned us that the tide would be such that it might be low enough that some of our boats might get hung up on the reef, they might snag. They looked at the tides, they thought they could get the Higgins boats over, but when it came time to actually invade there was an odd, neat tide and the reef was exposed, there wasn't enough water to get the Higgins boats over. The Marines had to get out in some cases 800 yards through the water. The Japanese machine gun and mortar fire just decimated them. I knew which battalions were going to be first landers and I wanted the guys to be with them. So a couple of weeks before we were to offload or load on the ships rather, I sent my guys out to these battalions so that they could know the people in the battalion, know the commanding officer and so that the people in the battalion would know that they were with them, weren't strangers. And so I picked for myself the battalion commander I thought would be in the trouble of most and that would be where the best pictures would be made. And his name was Jim Crow, he was a major. We landed on Tarawa about, well, they're supposed to be 8 o'clock in the morning. They postponed it and we finally won a shore at 8.30. I was in the first wave and the first and second waves were amphibious tractors. We got a shore, but in getting to the shore we rode on coral for about 600 yards. But all of a sudden he saw the amphibious tractors that had carried in most of the first three waves sort of piling up against the pier. I jokingly later used to say that it looked like an automobile junkyard. They were piling up on each other because the pier stopped them. But what was happening was that there was a Japanese machine gunner buried in a tank top on one side over there and he was shooting machine gun bullets at these tractors and they were heavily armored or anything. And we got a shore and we tried to climb the wall and of course the gunners were out. By that time the gunners were out, the Air Force had done its preparation and they'd quit. And they shelled the damn thing and they said, somebody told me that the shelling for Terao was supposed to be about equivalent of four pounds of TNT per square foot of land. He said, that much exploded and they're going to sink the damn mile. But when the track landed two of the guys went off the right side, they're dead, they're still there. Two of them went over the wall, they're dead, they're sitting there. And the rest of them just sat there for a while. But that was causing Jim Crow to sit out there and say, I'm losing my beach head. I don't have any beach head in there and I've got all these boats coming in. We were in Red Beach 1, next was Red Beach 2. The Japs denied the left half of Red Beach 1 to us and all of Red Beach 2. All the way down to the pier. Cox and Gunder, in a way we went. And as he hit the reef, which we knew he would do, he pulled the gag to lower the ramp and it wouldn't go down. So they meant we all had to go up over the side of the LCV pieces above shoulder height on me. The boats hung up anywhere from 400 to 600 yards offshore. The guys had to get out and wade ashore and set all of the portion of the beach that they didn't have. The Japanese machine guns were in force and they just riddled those people. They were also using anti-aircraft guns and shooting at those people waiting in. After Jim Crow put a set on the beach, the first boats to come in, and I was sitting there with my back to the seawall loading a camera and having to watch this. As soon as it hit the reef and dropped the ramp, a shell would come in and hit it from the other side of the island. Blasted all the pieces, you'd see the boat blowing apart, people blowing apart. And this happened half a dozen times. Sitting there not being able to do anything to stop it was one of the worst feelings I had during the entire war. It's a helpless feeling, those guys needed help, there's nothing we could do about it except watch. I think that Jim Crow at that point had the only radio that was active and he radioed the ships and the command ship laying offshore. Don't send in any more troops at all until we figure this thing out and we're able to negate it. As the day wore on, all of the battalion commanders on the beach, three beaches as it was called, were very concerned because they knew how many Japanese were there and they figured that there'd probably be a Banzai charge in the evening as dark set in that would really get those of us that were on the beach and hadn't gone in very far, you know. And so there was talk about from the ship outside of bringing in the replacement boats after dark. So they put out the word practically like for the love of God, don't send anybody in the dark because we won't know who's on the beach. As it was, a half a dozen Japanese crawled into our beach in the night and were stabbing the wounded laying on the beach. And the next morning we had enough people come in behind us to help out. We were able to go down all the way to the other end of the island where we'd been the day before and there's another tank trap that tied into the one we had and that night we were able to secure that tank trap. We had enough people to go back and clean out the damn pillboxes over behind us. See, everybody, both in the European war and the Japanese war, everybody was dug in. The Germans had wonderful dug-in emplacements, you know. And so you didn't see them until you crawled up if you did to throw a grenade in or something like that. But it wasn't like the old-day wars when people were out on the open plains running against you, you know. They didn't do that very often because everybody'd be killed. Tarawa was actually the most intense fighting in a short period that I ever saw. He talked about being scared, I was scared on Tarawa. When I first went into combat in the Wutu in Tanabogo, this was a big lark for a 16-year-old. He was having a ball, but there were no more balls from then on. From there after, anytime I got into an amphibian tractor and an assault, I was scared chilly. And each additional assault, I was more and more scared. The law of averages was going to catch up with me sooner or later, and I was always afraid and I was my turn. In that 76 hours, there were a little over 1,000 Marines killed and about 1,250 some-odd Marines wounded and pretty nearly 4,500 Japanese killed. We had never actually failed at Tarawa. We won the battle and were never really in danger of losing the assault because we outnumbered the Japanese, we outgunned them. It was almost inevitable that we would win and secure the island, but it was a horrific carnage. It was not until the third and fourth days that we finally destroyed the Japanese resistance. We realized we had to get tighter. We had to keep them in maneuvering and had to get them in the compact formations, which is what we aim for at Normandy at D-Day.