Osprey Trade Editions : Tarawa 1943

In 1943 the island of Beito in the Tarawa Atoll was defended by the elite troops of the Special Naval Landing Force, whose commander, Admiral Shibasaki, had boasted that, 'the Americans could not take Tarawa with a million men in a hundred years.'. In a pioneering amphibious invasion, the Marines of the 2nd Division would overcome serious errors of planning to fight a 76-hour battle of unprecedented savagery. The cost would be more than 3000 Marine casualties at the hands of a Japanese garrison of some 3700 men. The lessons learned at Tarawa would dispel forever any illusions that Americans had about the fighting quality of the Japanese, and would provide the US Marine Corps with vital experience for the forthcoming assault of the Marshall Islands. Text by Derrick Wright with illustrations by Howard Gerrard.