76 Hours: The Invasion of Tarawa

by Eric Hammel, John E. Lane

On the morning of Saturday, November 20, 1943, the U.S. 2d Marine Division undertook the first modern amphibious assault against a well-defended beachhead. The objective was tiny Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll. The result was an immortal story of tragedy and near defeat turned around into an epic of victory and indomitable human spirit. Although the admirals commanding the Tarawa invasion fleet had assured the Marines that Betio would be pounded to coral dust by a massive naval and air bombardment—the largest of its kind ever seen to that time—the first waves of Marines found the Japanese defenses intact and manned by determined foes. Within minutes of the start of the head-on assault, the American battle plan was a shambles and scores of Marines had been killed or wounded. The assault virtually stopped at the water’s edge, its momentum halted before many Marines ever dismounted from the amphibian tractors that had carried them to the deadly, fire-swept beach. Follow-up waves of Marines suffered grievous casualties when they were forced to wade more than 500 yards through fire-swept, knee-deep water because tidal conditions had been miscalculated by the invasion's planners. Follow the bloody battle for Betio in graphic detail as heroic American fighting men advance every life-threatening step across the tiny island in the face of what many historians agree was the best and most concentrated defenses manned by the bravest and most competent Japanese defenders American troops encountered in the entire Pacific War.76 Hours, available only via the Amazon.com Kindle Bookshelf, is the original text-only version of the pictorial history entitled Bloody Tarawa.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, World War II, Military Fiction, Military History

307 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Eric Hammel was born in 1946, in Salem, Massachusetts, and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Central High School of Philadelphia in January 1964 and earned a degree in Journalism from Temple University in 1972. His road to writing military history began at age twelve, when he was stuck in bed for a week with a childhood illness. Eric's father bought him the first paperback book he ever owned, Walter Lord's Day of Infamy. As he devoured the book, Eric realized that he wanted to write books exactly like it, what we now call popular narrative history. Lord had pieced together the book from official records illuminated with the recollections of people who were there. Eric began to write his first military history book when he was fifteen. The book eventually turned out to be Guadalcanal: Starvation Island. Eric completed the first draft before he graduated from high school. During his first year of college, Eric wrote the first draft of Munda Trail, and got started on 76 Hours when he was a college junior. Then Eric got married and went to work, which left him no time to pursue his writing except as a journalism student.

Eric quit school at the end of his junior year and went to work in advertising in 1970. Eric completed his journalism degree in 1972, moved to California in 1975, and finally got back to writing while he operated his own one-man ad agency and started on a family. 76 Hours was published in 1980, and Chosin followed in 1982. At the end of 1983 Eric was offered enough of an advance to write The Root: The Marines in Beirut to take up writing books full time. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eric eventually published under his own imprint, Pacifica Press, which morphed into Pacifica Military History and IPS Books. At some point in the late 1990s, Eric realized he had not written in five years, so he pretty much closed down the publishing operation and pieced together a string of pictorial combat histories for Zenith Press. Eric nominally retired in 2008 and took up writing as a full-time hobby writing two novels, 'Til The Last Bugle Call and Love and Grace. Fast forward to 2018 and Eric was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and on August 25th 2020, Eric passed from this life to the next at the age of 74.

Reviews

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Title is 76 Hours: The Invasion of Tarawa.

"Tarawa Atoll is a wedge-shaped string of islands lined up along the edge of a large natural lagoon. ... The target, Betio, is the westernmost island of the southern arm. ... Second Marine Division drew Betio, in Tarawa Atoll. The code name for the operation was GALVANIC." (page 28)

"Colonel David Shoup was the most frustrated man in Tarawa Lagoon. During the three hours after sunrise that November 20th (1943), Shoup's three initial landing teams had been strewn all over three beaches and the reef; all were fighting major, unremitting actions, and there was little the combat team commander could do to help." (page 95)

"The fighting on Betio's northern beaches was in the hands of the two or three thousand individual Marines still capable of handling their weapons. It was from the start, to be decided by the efforts of individuals, squads, and platoons pitted against isolated snipers and gun emplacements. It was, as from the very start, a matter of finding the enemy and digging him out. Win, lose, or draw, it was the sort of battle that defied plans or control." (page 107)

[Rod Pyle]

Acceptable read of the battle for Tarawa.