The buildings in the “regimental area” of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina are modest, post-war brick buildings that, to the visitor’s eye, look more or less alike.  Yet, each of the Marine Regiments of the Second Marine Division has its own storied history and battle honors.  As Captain J. W. Thomason wrote in his Great War masterpiece Fix Bayonets, these histories represent

“…traditions of things endured and things accomplished, such as Regiments hand down forever.”

There are symbols of these honors for one to see, if you know where to look.  On a thousand trips past those symbols, one never failed to make me pause and reflect.  On the headquarters building for the Second Marine Regiment hangs their unit crest.  The crest contains only three words.  They are in English and not Latin, and they are not a catch phrase nor a bold proclamation of a warrior philosophy.  They are simple and stark.  Across the top of the unit crest is the word “TARAWA”.  And at the bottom, the grim admonition, “KEEP MOVING”.

It was 66 years ago on this date that the Second Marine Division began the assault on Betio Island, in the Tarawa Atoll.  The island, roughly two thirds of the size of my college’s small campus, was the most heavily fortified beach in the world.  Of the Second MarDiv, the 2nd Marine Regiment landed two battalions abreast on beaches Red 1 and Red 2.  The assault began what was described as “seventy-six stark and bitter hours” of the most brutal combat of the Pacific War.   More than 1,000 Marines and Sailors were killed, nearly 2,300 wounded, along with nearly 5,000 Japanese dead, in the maelstrom of heat, sand, fire, and smoke that was Betio.

Assault on Betio's Northern beaches

Marine Dead on Beach Red 1

I will not detail the fighting for Betio here, as there are many other sources for that information.   Nor will I debate whether the terrible price paid for Betio was too high.   What cannot be debated is the extraordinary heroism of the Marines and Sailors who fought to secure the 1.1 square miles of baking sand and wrest it from the grasp of an entrenched, fortified, and determined enemy.   The fighting was described as “utmost savagery”, and casualties among Marine officers and NCOs were extremely high.   As one Marine stated, initiative and courage were absolute necessities.  Corporals commanded platoons, and Staff Sergeants, companies.

Marines assault over coconut log wall on Beach Red 2

The book by the late Robert Sherrod, “Tarawa, The Story of a Battle”,  is a magnificent read.  Another is Eric Hammel’s “76 Hours”.    Also “Utmost Savagery”, by Joe Alexander, who additionally produced the WWII commemorative “Across the Reef”, an excellent compilation of primary source material.    For video, The History Channel produced a 50th anniversary documentary on the battle, titled “Death Tide at Tarawa”, in November 1993.  I also highly recommend finding and watching this superb production.  It is  narrated by Edward Hermann, and interviews many of the battle’s veterans, including Robert Sherrod, MajGen Mike Ryan, and others, who provide chilling and inspiring commentary of the fighting and of the terrible carnage of those three days.

Master Sgt. James M. Fawcett, left and Capt. Kyle Corcoran salute Fawcett's father's ashes on Red Beach 1. MSgt Fawcett's father landed on Red 1 on 20 Nov 1943.

Tarawa remains a proud and grim chapter in the battle histories of the units of the Second Marine Division.  Each outfit, the 2nd, 6th, 8th, and 10th Marines, 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Tracks, and  miscellaneous support units, fought superbly against frightful odds and a fearsome enemy.   It is on the Unit Crest of the 2nd Marines, whose battalions paid the highest price for Betio, that the most poignant of those histories is remembered.    Three simple words:  “TARAWA;  KEEP MOVING”.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Marine Corps, Navy, history | read comments (0)

Click to enlarge

Today as we make our way through the oft touted and oft doubted Deepwater Acquisitions Project in an effort to further our capabilities you’ll take comfort in knowing that procurement time hasn’t really changed all that much. Don’t hold me to this but at the 10,000 foot level our timetable of the current projects could rival that of the acquisition of our first HH-65’s. It was 1979 when the CG selected the Eurocopter Daulphin to replace the Sikorsky HH-52A and nearly six years later, in 1985, it was introduced to service but only after being accepted in 1984… I’m sure we used the year (+/-) to do a little training.

Today we operate, I believe entirely, the “C” model of the Dolphin, and are in the midst of the Deepwater enhancement to give the aircraft its “M” designation. This “M” entitles us to call it an MH-65C- a Multi-Mission Cutter Helicopter. This particular aircraft is also the helo used by our Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON) replacing the Agusat MH-68A Stingray in February 2008- a very corporate looking helicopter in its own right. I encourage you to Google for further information or check out the Wikipedia page on said subject.

One more thing… don’t forget to enjoy your Thursday.

Ryan Erickson is a semi-regular contributor to USNI and can normally be found at ryanerickson.com; this post was written as an original piece for USNI.

Posted by Ryan Erickson in Aviation, Coast Guard, history | read comments (0)

Every year, millions of Oslo vehicles roll over these nondescript metal plates. Put down by workers to cover road construction, they lay undignified and unnoticed. But, there is history in these plates. They belong to Tirpitz.

Tirpitz sunk on November 12, 1944, an event brilliantly described last week by UltimaRatioReg. After the war, the Lonely Queen of the North was cut up and sold as scrap. A few of her armor plates were sold to the Norwegian Road Authority, who to this day use them in Oslo as temporary road surface. It is an anonymous but noble end to an august vessel.

Posted by Christopher Albon in Navy, history | read comments (4)

CDR Aboul-Enein’s finally done it. I’m going to rave about it sight unseen, based solely on his reputation.

Back in the mid-nineties, the Navy tried to build a Foreign Area Officer program. It didn’t work due to structural problems, but I was selected for the subspecialty along with a few other officers. I built a professional relationship with a few, including one guy with an unusual name who seemed to know a lot about the Middle East. As soon as I got back into port after 9/11, he was the first guy I emailed; I was worried about the potential for him to get caught up in harassment or trouble.

Turns out the opposite happened. He wound up being the guy who in the E-ring. He taught his fellow Americans about the insidious nature of islamist ideology and how normal folks in the Middle East think about warfare, a quiet, professional voice between the appeasers and the overly Jacksonian militants. This is very hard to do when so many people who oppose American values speak different things to different audiences, and lie to calm rational concerns about threat to people very willing to accept a reasonable-sounding voice. (Other officers I know have failed at this. Perhaps you remember a particularly ugly catfight between two in ‘07 in the Pentagon from people who may resemble this.)

You know CDR Aboul-Enein if you took JPME II and studied the region, or were in the E-ring after 9/11, or in a variety of jobs we shall not mention here. He has written regularly in a number of publications, and has a particular skill in reviewing a book and giving you the essence of what’s going on–and he does that with books in Arabic that normally we would have no idea about. I’ve learned a lot about the region from his scholarship–and this has served me well when I got yanked from my previous warfare community into a new FAO community, language training, and work in the Middle East, where I’m deployed.

So he’s a friend of mine. I trust his instincts and read what he has to write.

And the guy snuck up on me and finally wrote a book. It’s a summary of years of work he’s done, looking at who these people we’re fighting are. How do these people think? What’s the pump that draws from the pool of normal people and spits out these jerks? What’s the scholarship trail?

Here’s the book, published by USNI. Admiral Stavridis has written the foreword. Can’t get much higher recommendation than that.

Posted by Chap in Books, Foreign Policy, Navy, Soft Power, history | read comments (2)

German Battleship Tirpitz at sea, 1943

Sixty-five years ago, RAF Lancasters of Number 617 Squadron, the famous Ruhr “Dambusters”, and Number 9 Squadron, took off on a 2,300 mile mission to sink the German Battleship Tirpitz.  For some weeks, Tirpitz sat by herself in the bitterly cold waters of Tromso Fjord along the Norwegian coast, seldom moving.  In the latter months of her life, she would earn the nickname of Die einsame Konigin des Nordes. The Lonely Queen of the North.

When built, Tirpitz was one of the most powerful units afloat.  Slightly larger than her legendary sister ship Bismarck, KMS Tirpitz displaced more than 43,000 tons.  She was 824 feet long, armed with eight 38-cm (15”) guns, and had exceeded 31 knots on trials.  The British had tried desperately to destroy her before she was even completed, and between the RAF and Royal Navy, many air, surface, and subsurface attacks had been only moderately successful, and had often paid a heavy cost for their efforts.

Tirpitz in Kofjord, 1943

The operational history of Tirpitz is stunningly brief.   In fact, there had been but three sorties for the magnificent ship.  She had only fired her main battery once in anger, at targets ashore during a raid on Spitzbergen in September, 1943.  Yet, she presented a threat to the Russian convoys and to British command of the seas from the time of her launching until her sinking.  Tirpitz, with a varied array of Kriegsmarine capital units (battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, “pocket battleships” Scheer and Lutzow, and the superb heavy cruisers Hipper and Prinz Eugen), had been assigned the mission of commerce raiding, a role originally tasked to her more famous sister, Bismarck.   She never filled that role, nor did she ever engage an enemy surface combatant during her short life.  Hitler, unwilling to risk his heavy warships after the loss of Bismarck,  severely restricted the conditions under which German capital units could put to see to seek battle.

The role in which Tirpitz, and most of the capital ships of the Kriegsmarine, would have the most success was that of a “fleet in being”.   Despite a relatively few heavy units being assembled at any one time, and despite a lack of significant aerial umbrella (aside from some Luftwaffe coastal units) to protect them at sea, the German warships were perceived as a major threat to the convoys from the United States to Britain, and later to the Soviet Union via Murmansk and Archangel.

It has been estimated that the “fleet in being”, of which Tirpitz was the centerpiece and eventually the only significant unit, tied down ten times its own combat power in Royal Navy battleships, carriers, cruisers, and destroyers.   Many of these powerful warships were desperately needed in other theaters of war, most notably in November/December of 1941 in the Pacific.

HMS Repulse hit by Japanese bombs

HMS Prince of Wales heeling to port and sinking

How might Britain’s (and America’s) fortunes have been different in December of 1941 had a substantial task force (including additional aircraft carriers) been sent to Hong Kong/Singapore, instead of a single aircraft carrier, one modern battleship, and an elderly battle cruiser?   The largest and most powerful navy in the world was spread too thin to do so.   Instead, when Illustrious was damaged running aground, Prince of Wales and Repulse were helpless against far superior Japanese strength, and were sunk by aircraft from the 11^th Air Fleet.  (Had Illustrious been present, it is unlikely that she would have deterred the attacks, and most probably would have been lost along with Repulse and Prince of Wales.)

The threat the Royal Navy believed Tirpitz and her consorts posed can be illustrated by the fate of Convoy PQ-17.  Putting out of the assembly point in Iceland, PQ-17 was bound for Murmansk with about fifty ships and escorts in early July, 1942. Upon a mere report that Tirpitz (along with cruiser Hipper) had put to sea from Trondheim (Operation Rosselsprung), the order was given for PQ-17 to scatter.  In reality, Grand Admiral Raeder ordered Tirpitz to return to Trondheim over concerns that Home Fleet ships and aircraft would attack and sink her.   The merchant vessels of PQ-17, scattered beyond the protection of the escorting warships, were hunted relentlessly by Luftwaffe  aircraft and Donitz’s Wolf Packs, with U-boats and aerial attacks accounting for twenty-four merchantmen, nearly half of the convoy’s strength.

Tirpitz leads cruisers Admiral Hipper and Admiral Scheer to sea in Operation Rosselsprung

Even as late as November of 1944, Tirpitz, by then truly a lonely queen, continued to draw British attention as a lingering threat to Britain and her lifelines from America.  What the British did not know is that a raid on 11 September, 1944 had badly damaged Tirpitz forward, and the decision had been made not to repair her to seaworthiness.  So the raid of 12 November was launched from bases in Britain.

Tirpitz camouflaged at anchor

British Lancasters from 9 and 617 Squadrons arrived to no Luftwaffe fighter opposition, and despite heavy antiaircraft fire struck Tirpitz with at least two of the 6-ton “tallboy” bombs carried.  The massive battleship suffered a magazine explosion, and rolled to port on her beam ends.  She capsized in shallow water, taking more than one thousand of her crew into the icy waters of Tromso Fjord.   The “Lonely Queen” was gone, and the “fleet in being” was no more.  The effort since 1941 to contain and then destroy Tirpitz had been enormous, and had global implications for British and Allied naval strategy throughout the first five years of war.   Her existence as a “fleet in being” had far wider impact strategically than the heroic but ultimately fatal battles fought by her sister Bismarck in 1941 and her sometimes-consort Scharnhorst in 1943.

Tirpitz, capsized and sunk in Tromso

The concept of the “fleet in being” was not a new one, even in 1939.  In fact, the concept went back three centuries, when in 1690 the British had turned the trick on the French.   In the First World War, the High Seas Fleet had pinned down a much greater number of British warships at Scapa Flow than its own strength ever approached.  During World War II, not only were German capital units in northern waters such a “fleet in being”, but the Italian Navy in the Mediterranean served strikingly similar purposes, and necessitated the daring British raid on Taranto in 1940.  Indeed, the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was in many ways a “fleet in being” to the Japanese, posing a far more serious threat than what existed the previous year when the Pacific Fleet was based in California.  The Pearl Harbor attack was, like Britain’s against Taranto, to eliminate a “fleet in being” which could challenge and disrupt control of seas vital to the Japanese.

The topic of Tirpitz and the “fleet in being” concept is not merely of academic and historical interest.  In the first decade of the 21^st Century, there has been much discussion by The People’s Republic of China regarding their desires for a blue-water fleet to protect global interests and establish regional hegemony in the waters of the Western Pacific.  We have seen a growing amphibious and power projection capability, and the maturing of a maritime denial strategy with an eye toward the United States Navy.  There is again discussion, this time more serious, of the development of naval aviation by the PLAN.

Could a burgeoning Chinese Navy become a “fleet in being”?  What implications does that hold for the United States?  In each historical example, a “fleet in being” that threatened vital interests was countered by one of two approaches.  The first was the dedication of naval combat power in excess of that which such a “fleet in being” could bring to bear, ensuring a reasonable chance of victory.   The second was an attack (pre-emptive in some notable cases) on that fleet from the air while the critical elements of that fleet were in harbor.

Ships of the PLAN execute underway replenishment at sea

PLAN Attack SS runs on the surface

Is the PLAN wagering we haven’t the national will for the first approach, and that they can effectively defend against the second?  We would be well-served to look at how the various “fleets in being” affected strategic and operational decisions on the part of maritime powers and wrap such considerations into future Maritime Strategies, and shipbuilding plans.  To do otherwise will be to stumble blindly into a future that our adversaries have prepared carefully for.  Such a course would be foolhardy and costly.

Posted by UltimaRatioReg in Aviation, Foreign Policy, Maritime Security, Navy, history | read comments (10)