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A 20-year-old crewman on the boat had been shot through the head, and had murmured: "I think I'm hit, will you look?" Now he lay on the beach. A Jap ran out of a coconut-log blockhouse into which Marines were tossing dynamite. As he emerged a Marine flamethrower engulfed him. The Jap flared like a piece of celluloid. He died before the bullets in his cartridge belt finished exploding 60 seconds later.
The Marine beachhead at this point comprised only the 20 feet between the water line and the retaining wall of coconut logs which ringed Betio. Beyond this strip, Jap snipers and machine-gunners were firing. In a little revetment was the headquarters of Major Henry P. ("Jim") Crowe, a tough, red-mustached veteran who had risen from the Marine ranks to command of one of the assault battalions. Near by passed a parade of wiremen, riflemen, mortarmen and stretcher bearers.
A handsome young Marine walked briskly toward Major Crowe's headquarters, grinning in greeting to a pal. There was a shot. The Marine spun around, fell to the beach dead. He had been shot through the temple. A Jap sniper had waited since early morning for just such a shot at a range of less than ten yards.
A bit later a voice called: "Major, send somebody to help me! The son-of-a-bitch got me." Two men crawled over the retaining wall, dragged back a Marine shot through the knee. Then a mortar man 75 yards down the beach rose to a kneeling position, tumbled with a sniper's bullet through his back. The wounded man's companion popped up to help, got a bullet through the heart.
The Low Point. That was the way it went the first day. The assault battalions had been cut to ribbons. Anyone who ventured beyond the beachhead and the retaining wall — and by mid-afternoon several hundred Marines had so ventured — was likely to become a casualty. From treetop concealment and from pill box slits Jap snipers and machine-gunners raked the Americans.
But the Marines did not weaken. One remarked that a friend had lost a piece of his thumb: "He just looked down at it and laughed and kept on going. That damn fool has plenty of guts." The story of another "casualty" got around: "He got shot pretty bad in the shoulder but he won't even come in to let 'em dress it until he finds the mucker that shot him. He's still out there pokin' his rifle in all the holes and shootin' like hell and gettin' shot at a million times a minute." At great risk from shore batteries, destroyers ran close to the beach, opened up on targets as small as one Jap sniper or one pillbox mound. It was precision firing, the shells often landing less than 50 yards from the Marines. If the high explosives did not wreck many of the fortifications, they did strip away most of the islands' palm fronds.
The first night passed perilously. The Marines held three beachheads, the longest less than 100 yards from end to end, the deepest 70 yards inland. The Japs commanded the rest of the island. For every Marine who slept in a foxhole, two kept watch through the darkness.