The Japanese Navy had concentrated its defenses on the outer edges of the Marshall Islands, betting that any American assault would come from the sea. Instead, the newly formed 4th Marine Division drove straight through the heart of the archipelago, striking Kwajalein Atoll, the largest coral atoll in the world, at its northern tip. Two small islands joined by a causeway formed the main objective. Roi was almost entirely airfield, while Namur was covered in palm trees, concrete buildings, and thick brush.
Aerial photographs revealed that the heaviest fortifications on both islands pointed out toward the ocean. The lagoon side, where the Americans intended to come ashore, was left comparatively open. Before the main landing, the division seized four small islands beside the objective and dug in its artillery there. At Tarawa two months earlier, Marine planners had requested the same support and been refused on the grounds that it would sacrifice surprise and endanger the ships.
For the Marshalls, the commanders approved it, and the guns were in place by January 31, 1944—the day before the invasion. The division had existed for only about five and a half months when it sailed from San Diego on January 13, 1944. Many of its men knew the objective only by two code words: “burlesque” for Roi and “camouflage” for Namur. Several landing ships had come straight from building yards on the Ohio River.
At a rehearsal off San Clemente Island, some of those ships refused to accept vehicles they had not launched themselves, and a few tractors ran out of fuel and were lost at sea. The bombardment began at 06:51. Two small islands, code-named Ivan and Jacob, guarded a deep-water pass into the lagoon and had to be taken from the seaward side. A 14-knot breeze kicked up swells that drenched the amphibious tractors, drowned their radios, and cut their speed nearly in half.
A battery of twin 5-inch guns on Roi opened fire on the supporting ships and had to be silenced twice by a cruiser. Jacob was overrun within a quarter of an hour of the first tractors reaching it at 09:52. On Ivan, the assault company could not cross the reef on the ocean side, so scouts went around and landed on the lagoon beach instead, with the rest following them in. By midday the howitzers were coming ashore, the light guns on Jacob and the 105mm weapons on Ivan.
The afternoon went worse. Minesweepers found the pass beside Jacob too shallow for the destroyer Phelps, the control ship for every landing that day. The small craft assigned to stand in for her never heard about the change, and control fell to a submarine chaser carrying the assistant division commander, General James Underhill, who had no copy of the control plan. Admiral Richard Conolly later called it the only landing in his experience where he had real difficulty controlling the craft—a strange sentence to find in the paperwork of a victory.
Albert and Allan, on the eastern rim of the atoll, fell a little after 15:00. Then the tractors went off to refuel because nobody had given them orders about a third island. Lieutenant Colonel Justice Chambers found four tractors, loaded 120 Marines into them, and put them across a shallow strait onto Abraham at 18:00, behind a smoke screen from his own mortars. Abraham lay about 400 yards from Namur, and all night his men dragged every machine gun, mortar, and anti-tank gun they could reach onto its northern edge.
Conolly spent the same afternoon moving his battleships in. At one point the Maryland was within 1,000 yards of Roi, firing on its guns and blockhouses. Battleships are not built to work that near a beach, and the fleet gave him a nickname about it that stuck. That night, swimmers from the newly created underwater demolition teams, on their first operation of the war, went over the lagoon beaches of Roi and Namur.
They found no mines and no man-made obstacles. The side of the islands the garrison had given the least attention was open. The fleet in the lagoon was far less orderly. Some landing ships showed none of the agreed lights, and a few captains refused to give gasoline to crews they did not recognize.
Seven tractors were never found at all. At first light, the 24th Marines reported it was short 48 tractors for the attack on Namur. On one landing ship, the newer models were too long to go down the elevator from the upper deck, so men with a cutting torch trimmed the rear splash fenders off each one until it fit. 10:00 became 11:00.
The regiment’s commander, Colonel Franklin Hart, shuffled vehicles between companies and borrowed two rifle companies from his reserve battalion. That battalion belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Aquilla Dyess, who ran a lumber business in Augusta, Georgia. In 1928, as a college student, Dyess had swum out through the surf off Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina and brought in two women who were drowning, for which he was given the Carnegie Medal. The regiment bound for Roi was ready.
At 11:07, its commander, Colonel Louis Jones, asked the Phelps why the attack was being held up. Five minutes later, the red flag came down from her yardarm and both regiments went, though Hart believed he had been promised time to report his waves in position. Conolly later described the decision as a calculated risk of the kind responsible commanders must make. On Roi, the armored amphibians crawled ashore at 11:33 ahead of the troop carriers and turned their 37mm guns on the western point.
The riflemen of the 23rd Marines came in behind them and met almost nothing. The Japanese who had survived the bombardment were few, and most of them were dazed. An observer overhead radioed that the troops were not taking cover, which sounded like a complaint until Jones came ashore and explained it. “This is a pip,” his message to General Harry Schmidt began.
“No opposition near the beach. ” One blockhouse held up the second battalion for a while. It was reinforced concrete about three feet thick and had taken a hit from a battleship shell and an aerial bomb without coming down. It had three gunports, one facing north, one east, and one west.
The battalion’s report called it more evidence of the enemy’s mistaken assumption that the Americans would attack from the sea: none of the three ports faced south, toward the lagoon the Marines had just crossed. A halftrack put five rounds into the steel door. A demolition squad pushed Bangalore torpedoes down through a shell hole in the roof, and half a squad went in after the grenades. Nobody had told the engineers to cease fire, and they set a shaped charge on one of the ports while the infantry was still inside.
Nobody was hurt. The company commander reported that everyone left the building in a great hurry and without any dignity at all. The medium tanks on Roi did not wait for orders. They roamed the island for about an hour, firing into every ditch and heap of rubble, until Schmidt asked whether anyone could bring them back so the regiment could attack in some kind of order.
Roi was declared secured at 18:05 that evening. Namur was another matter. It was covered in brush and concrete, and its lagoon side was far from empty. A line of anti-tank ditches and trenches ran behind the beaches, and the armored amphibians meant to climb ashore ahead of the 24th Marines could not get across them.
They stopped at the water’s edge and fired from there. Second Lieutenant John Chapin was leading a rifle platoon in the first wave. His tractor worked its way toward a beach he could not see for smoke and dust, and when he turned to speak to his platoon sergeant at the machine gun beside him, the sergeant was dead. Up to then, Chapin wrote later, “the landing had felt like one more practice run, and then the reality of it smashed into my consciousness.
” His platoon came ashore 300 yards to the right of where it was meant to be. Before long, a bullet caught him on the cheekbone just below the right eye, and he found afterward that another had gone clean through his helmet above the ear. He shook sulfa powder into the cut, bandaged it himself, and kept going. Near the first phase line stood a large concrete building, and none of the Marines working toward it knew what was stacked inside.
At 13:15 in the afternoon, an assault team from the second battalion set shaped charges against its wall. The Japanese near it ran. When the wall was breached, the demolition men threw satchel charges through the hole. Lieutenant Colonel Homer Litzenberg, the regiment’s executive officer, was in a boat about 300 yards offshore, and he watched as the whole of Namur disappeared from sight in a brown cloud of sand and dust.
Two more blasts followed. Chunks of concrete came down on the regimental command group, and an artillery spotter in a plane overhead felt it lurch upward. The explosions killed 20 men of the second battalion and injured 100 more—about half of everything the battalion lost on Namur. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Brice, was among the injured and refused to leave.
The first theory blamed a 16-inch shell and an explosives warehouse, but the investigation found that the satchel charges had set off a store of torpedo warheads. The two smaller blasts are harder to explain. The official history allows that the first explosion may have set off two nearby magazines, or that the Japanese may have fired them on purpose, and it never chooses. Its source was Captain Joseph Lrit, who commanded one of the two assault teams at that bunker, and even the man standing there could not settle it.
It was the division’s first night under fire, and the battalion spent it dug in short of the northern shore. Star shells went over all night with a noise the men found unnerving at first. Machine gunners along the beach fired into the treetops at snipers who were not there, until General Schmidt came out of his command post in person to calm them down. Across the causeway on Roi, a reserve battalion fired somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 rounds at a single sniper who did not exist and hurt three of its own men doing it.
Before dawn, the Japanese on Namur came at a gap between two companies, and somewhere in that fighting a 19-year-old private first class died. His father, a 44-year-old corporal, had joined up so the two could serve together. When the son was transferred to another outfit, he stowed away on his father’s ship, and the authorities took him off and put him under arrest. His mother telephoned the commandant’s office in Washington and told the whole story.
The charges went away, and father and son sailed for the Marshalls on the same ship. The official pamphlet that tells their story leaves them unnamed, but researchers of the 24th Marines have since identified them as Corporal Earl Brown and his son Jack. At dusk on the first day, Dyess had gone out through the enemy line with a few men to bring back four injured Marines who had been cut off. In the morning, with Brice out of action, Hart gave Dyess command of Brice’s battalion as well as his own, and its attack went in at 10:06.
The last Japanese position on Namur was an anti-tank ditch, part of the defenses dug along the ocean shore. Dyess was standing on its parapet, directing a squad around the flank, when a burst of machine gun fire killed him. His citation says he had spent the morning posting himself between the opposing lines to point out objectives. He was 35 years old.
He remains the only man to hold both the Medal of Honor and the Carnegie Medal, and the airstrip on Roi became Dyess Field. The two assault battalions met at the northern tip at 12:15, and Namur was declared secured at 14:18 that afternoon. Hart never believed it had to cost what it did. He stayed convinced that if his tractors had arrived as planned, or if someone had simply held the attack until noon, Namur would have fallen faster and with fewer casualties.
Chapin was hit again on Saipan that June. After the war, he went to the Historical Division at headquarters and wrote the first official history of the 4th Division, and half a century later, he wrote the core pamphlet on the Marshalls that tells much of this story. He died in 2008. Ten days after Namur fell, early on the morning of February 12, 1944, a dozen or so Japanese seaplanes came over Roi.
They dropped strips of metal foil to confuse the American radar, caught the defenders by surprise, and hit an ammunition dump. By the time the fires burned out, about 85 percent of the supplies stockpiled on the island and roughly a third of the heavy construction equipment were gone. Thirty Americans died and something like 400 more were injured. The raid had come from the Mariana Islands.
The 4th Marine Division’s next landing that June was on Saipan in the Marianas.