Happy Birthday to Us!
...a little tidbit I like to post on our birthday.
At the Quebec conference in August of 1943, the Allied high command announced it's intention to launch an offensive in the Central Pacific, in the drive towards Japan. A prime objective of this drive, to be undertaken as a Navy-Marines operation, was to take the Marshall Islands. The Marshall Islands would serve as an air base from which further operations could be launched against the Marianas, and from there against the Japanese home islands. But 500 miles to the southeast of the Marshalls, an archipelago of atolls called the Gilberts stood between U.S. forward ground air bases and the Marshalls. The Gilberts had only one workable airstrip for refueling American aircraft and that was on the island of Betio in the western Gilbert Island atoll of Tarawa. The Japanese commander in charge of the defense of Tarawa, Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki, said "A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years."
Six Thousand Marines took it away from them in three days!
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