Last week some two to three thousand U.S. Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of Concord Bridge, the Bonhomme Richard, the Alamo, Little Big Horn and Belleau Wood. The name was Tarawa.
—TIME, Dec. 6, 1943
Last week, 25 years after the bloody landing, retired Marine Corps General David M. Shoup returned to Tarawa to participate in ceremonies commemorating the 76 hours when the corps suffered 3,319 casualties, among them 1,027 dead. Some 4,700 Japanese also died in the invasion, the first in a series of amphibious operations that sent...
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