[PeterPrinciple]

"the high state of training and discipline of the individual Marine, his morale, and his confidence and determination to continue the attack even though those about him became casualties."

My Uncle was wounded on Iwo Jima and in my research, it looked as if they trained for almost a year or more to attack that particular island.......was one of the lessons of tarawa to spend more time on training or was a year the standard procedure?

[dd5339]

Oorah Ping!

Semper Fi

[SAMWolf]

I'm not sure, but I know that Tarawa did have an effect on training procedures, not sure about the length of time.

[WhiskeyPapa]

was one of the lessons of tarawa to spend more time on training or was a year the standard procedure?

Based on what happened at Tarawa the Navy built the same sort of bunkers the Japs used and figured out the best way to wreck them. Seems like the problem at Tarawa was that they used a lot of armor piercing rounds fired at flat trajectories. The sand absorbed the kinetic energy of the rounds and the Japs were largely unaffected. Only direct hits of course were destroying the bunkers.

The Navy did learn how to wreck the bunkers and by Iwo Jima you see the Japs yielding the beaches to the Marines without contesting them with direct fire. They planned to fight inland.

A big thing the Japs did on all the islands was to use indirect (mortars and artillery) fire instead of direct fire to kill Marines. Marine arty that landed immediately went to work on counter-battery fire to suppress the Jap arty.

The U.S.S. Tennessee developed a technique where the anti-aircraft guns (the 40 MMs) led the assault waves of Marines up to the beach, shifting fire deeper and deeper inland as the LVT's (landing vehicle, tracked) approached the beach. There was no way the Japs could withstand that.

Semper Fidelis

Walt

[tarawa]

This was one of the first major opposed landings in WWII. The training and lead-up time for later landings would have been shortened, due to now we knew more about what to give priority to in training, and more about what really did not need to be considered. When training for a landing at Tarawa, we would probably have trained for a lot of unnecessary eventualities, due to we really had no idea what to expect.