;e Rabau) target and in December units of the
IS. 6th Army made a surprise landing at Arawe.
ew Britain, followed by a Marine invasion at Cape
joucester opposite Arawe.
BLOOD RUNS AT BETIO
(DMIRAL CHESTER W. NIMITZ, in his Hawai
ian office as Commander in Chief of the Pacific
leet, also had to clear the central Pacific to acquire
jses for a push into the heart of the Japanese-held
jtpire.
He had the strength to do it. Six new battleships
•ad joined the fleet and others repaired since Pearl
•arbor now were ready to return to the line. The
urcraft carrier fleet which numbered seven in
341 now totaled 50 of all types, including some
onverted hastily from light cruisers, some from
:erchant ship hulls, and some from oilers. There
as an ample supply of carrier planes.
Heavy cruisers and other warships were added
j the fleet almost daily. Mass production methods
ere sending a total of 11 destroyers off assembly
rays in 17 shipyards every month. Under a billion
ollar program for landing craft construction begun
o 1942, more than a third of a million tons of these
ssential little craft came out of former bridge
aiilding or steel-working companies along the
aasts or in the Mississippi valley.
Naval personnel, which numbered 325.U95 on
lecember 7, 1941, had shot up to 2,000,000 by the
niddle of 1943. There were almost 400,000 rigidly
trained Marines, and more than 150,000 Coast
Guardsmen.
Now, Nimitz reasoned, he could hit the Gilberts
wounded occupants into the sea.
The first waves now were crouched on their
beachhead behind a seawall only 20 yards from the
water’s edge.
Marine General Holland M. (“Howling Mad”)
Smith peered through his glasses and pointed to
the central beach. The next morning a battalion
raced onto that bea<’h as the first wave leaped the
seawall. Other reinforcements kept coming in from
the west and the east ends of narrow Betio. beating
back banzai charges at they advanced.
On the morning of the fourth day 4.800 Japanese
were dead and the objective was secured. The Army
had landed on Makin at the same time and had
taken it against considerably lighter opposition.
The bodies of 931 dead Marines lay on Tarawa's
coral or in the surrounding, reddened waters. But
Nimitz’ Navy had taken a giant step forward in the
Pacific.
THE UNDERGROUND WAITS
ADOLF HITLER had preceded all his blitzkrieg
moves with a war of nerves. Once the democ
racies quaked when der Fuehrer raised his voice.
Now the Allies could call the turn, decide when
and how to strike, while the Axis wondered what
was going to happen.
In November, 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill and
China’s Chiang Kai-shek met under the shadow
of the pyramids at Cairo to formulate new moves
against Japan. From their meetings came the “Cairo
Declaration”—a plan to strip the Nipponese of the
fruits of their aggressions since 1894.
Then the President and the Prime Minister
Poland and Czechoslovakia, resistance forces also
were waiting. Their very presence in the mountain
caves and farmers’ barns of Norway held down
200,000 German troops. Silently they dribbled par
affin into shipments of fish. They added salt to
cement intended for Nazi fortifications. They stole
blueprints. They smashed a plant where the Nazis
experimented with “heavy water”—a material
needed in a grandiose Teutonic plan to win the war
with devastating atomic bombs.
In Yugoslavia, the resistance movement Had
blossomed into a minor front. Two rival guerrilla
movements had risen there after the Axis occupa
tion-one headed by General Draja Mihailovic,
another by Marshal Josip Broz, known as Tito. The
two forces fought each other as well as the Nazis
but in 1943 Tito won the struggle for British sup
port, and now—aided by increased supplies and the
withdrawal of Italian occupation forces — he was
providing increasing trouble for Hitler.
Inside what the Nazis regarded as Germany— the
prewar Reich, western Poland, Alsace-Lorraine,
Bohemia and Moravia—there was another poten
tial fifth column of tremendous size. This consisted
of millions of prisoners of war and “slave labor”
brought in from all the countries that had felt the
thump of the goose-step. Herded in cold and ugly
barracks, fed almost starvation diets, they could if
aroused and mobilized become a mighty force. But
over them stood the death-striking Gestapo.
Around the perimeter of the AllieS lines, forces
from the occupied countries—the “armies in exile”
—also were waiting to fight their way home.
General de Gaulle’s French troops had already
The High Tide Of The Axis In Europe And The Pacific
AREAS HELD AT ANY TIME
BY AXIS NATIONS
in force. They were a group of coral atolls lying
south and east of the mandated Japanese bases in
the Carolines and Marshalls. Only when they were
cracked would it be safe to proceed deeper into
the Pacific.
In August, September and October Nimitz sent his
carriers to raid Marcus, Tarawa, Abamama and Wake
islands. Admiral Raymond A. Spruance was ap
pointed commander of the central Pacific force, and
in November he moved a great fleet of battleships,
cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers and destroyer
escorts off Tarawa and Makin.
The barrage was deafening. Shells screamed into
every acre of the atolls; dive bombers screeched
down against expected points of resistance. It was
the most tremendous barrage in the history of
naval warfare.
But when Marines climbed into landing craft and
streaked toward the shore of Betio, Tarawa, on
November 20, the Japanese were waiting.
They had built pillboxes deep into the coral and
had mounted mighty coastal guns captured from
the British at Singapore. From their holes they
splashed shells around the transports and sprayed
the oncoming landing craft.
The first three Marine waves got across the la
goon reef against the rising datter of machine guns.
The fourth wave’s landing craft stalled on the reef.
Boats overturned and threw their bleedings
stepped into a plane and flew to Teheran, Iran, for
a four-day conference with Premier Joseph Stalin.
It was Roosevelt’s first meeting with the Russian
leader and it ended on a friendly, intimate note.
The “Teheran Declaration” reached a new peak in
the psychological war against Hitler:
“We have reached complete agreement as to the
scope and timing of operations which will be under
taken from the east, west and south. ... No power
on earth can prevent our destroying the German
armies by land, their U-boats by sea and their war
plants from the air. Our attacks will be relentless
and unceasing.”
General Eisenhower and many others predicted
victory in 1944. Europe was told to hold itself ready
to strike the Nazis when full-scale invasion of the
continent came.
In France, 200,000 well-trained and trusted guer
rilla fighters, welded into the French National
Council of Resistance, were waiting for the word.
These “soldats sans uniforme” once were shop clerks,
waiters, mechanics. Now they were the deadliest
fifth-column on the continent. They maintained con
tact with Britain and were secretly supplied with
guns and ammunition by night-flying planes. While
they waited they spied and sabotaged—blowing
vital bridges, dynamiting railroad cars, terrorizing
Nazi sympathizers, protecting downed Allied fliers.
I& Norway and Denmark, Belgium and Holland,
come into the fight in North Africa, a sizeable Polish
force was battling up the Italian mountains, and
there were' French Polish, Belgian, Czechoslova
kian and Dutch representations in the R.A.F
But still in London, waiting for the word to go,
were strong Polish tank, artillery, parachute and
infantry units. A large part of the Norwegian mer
chant marine, once fourth largest in the world;
2,800,000 tons of Dutch and 350,000 tons of Belgian
shipping, also were available to the Allies.
HITLER ADVANCES BACKWARDS
AS the world awaited the opening of a “Second
Front," the Allies continued pressure in Russia,
Italy and the Pacific.
The Nazis could not stop the Soviet tide. The
offensive that broke the siege of Stalingrad had
moved into a summer offensive and that, in turn,
kept rolling—with necessary stops to bring up sup
plies and reinforcements—into another winter drive.
Berlin spoke of “strategic fighting withdrawals" and
“successful disengagements from the foe” and “fluid
maneuvers” and “shortening lines.” But words could
not change the map, which now showed the Rus
sians approaching Odessa in the south and the pre
war borders of Poland in the north.
It was a people’s army that was chasing the in
vader—a colorful, massive wave of determined
peasants rallying to Stalin’s cry of “death to the