Shooting War Page #4

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You don't think about it.

You're so excited. You're not scared.

But you're scared after

when you come back. You're shaking.

We dropped two million tons of bombs

but never matched results promised

by air-power advocates.

This war would be won on the ground,

as Norman Hatch learned when

he made the Tarawa landing in 1943.

I was riding with Jim Crowe,

a battalion commander.

He wasn't happy having me there.

As he told me, he didn't want

any Hollywood marines.

I had to testify that I was

a regular marine, a shot expert,

that I could do something with a rifle.

He said, "All right,

but don't get in my way."

I was sitting alongside him

shooting what was going on.

He observed that his amtracs,

the first three waves,

were not maintaining their course.

There was a.50 calibre buried

in the sand, shooting at them

and they kept edging over to the right.

Crowe could see his front disappearing

because of this.

He told the coxswain to put the boat in.

We ran up on the reef,

the ramp wouldn't go down,

so we had to go up over the side,

which was difficult with so much gear.

We were exhausted

because you can't walk through water

without having a lot of resistance.

And loaded down with gear,

it just drained you.

It took us a couple of minutes

on the beach to get oriented.

Hatch was pinned down

with the invaders.

There was nothing to do but shoot:

Combat footage

with a previously unknown ferocity.

The Japanese emplacements

were fantastic.

They'd built a concrete bunker

and covered it with sand and logs,

and covered that with sand.

They were pretty impregnable.

The Pacific war

favoured the cameramen.

Spaces were confined,

the action within them tightly focused.

The brutal reality of war revealed itself

here as it rarely did elsewhere.

Hatch caught the marines and their

enemy in combat in the same shot.

That was luck. Somebody said,

"Here they come."

I turned and there it was,

and I just kept on shooting.

Had the Japanese mounted

a coordinated counter-attack,

they might have driven the marines

back into the sea.

But the fighting remained

as Hatch's film showed it:

Ferocious, yet disorganised.

Most of the Japanese

fought to the death.

The marines took only 17 prisoners.

The seas continued

to run against reinforcements.

Among them was

another cameraman, John Ercole.

We didn't even know

what was going on.

We were going nowhere. The propeller

and the tide didn't come together.

I was shooting whatever I could,

people in my boat and things like that.

19 hours later,

we finally made a landing.

What Ercole found to shoot

was mostly the dead and wounded.

Their evacuation was poorly handled.

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