The Shocking Reason U.S. Marines Wanted Japan to Attack Again

Tarawa cost 1,009 Marines and 687 sailors killed in 76 hours — and most of that price was paid by men who could not kill the enemy because the enemy would not leave his bunkers. This is the story of the reversal at Betio, and of why U.S. Marines came to want the Japanese to charge. On the night of 23 November 1943, three hundred Japanese naval infantry crossed into the Marine lines at four hundred yards and left two hundred dead inside the perimeter in under an hour. The Marines wanted more of it. It would never come again. This video covers Operation Galvanic and the Battle of Tarawa, 20–23 November 1943: the Second Marine Division at Betio, the neap tide that left three feet of water over the reef, Rear Admiral Keiji Shibazaki's five hundred pillboxes and forty guns, the destroyers Schroeder and Sigsbee, Colonel David Shoup's Second Marines, and the night the Imperial Japanese Navy garrison came out to die. It also follows the lesson into Saipan and Iwo Jima, where the Japanese stopped attacking — and the cost of that decision fell on the Marines. Sources and why this is different: built from after-action reports, the Marine Corps monograph "Across the Reef", Navy Historical and Heritage Command accounts of the Tarawa landings, loss tables, and the Tenth Marines' fire support records. Subscribe for the definitive history of the United States in the Second World War — new documentaries every few days. #WW2 #WorldWarII #PacificWar #Tarawa #USMarineCorps #WWIIHistory #Betio #USNavy #GilbertIslands #OperationGalvanic #MilitaryHistory #USAInWW2