The Battle of Tarawa
In the Battle of
Tarawa in 1943, the USMC conquered a series of Pacific islets.
3,000 Marines fell; out of 4,700 Japanese only 17 survived. It’s
impossible to imagine a survival rate of 1/3 of one percent. Said one
of those survivors, when asked if Japanese morale ever broke, Yes,
when the dieing Marines kept coming and coming.
We complain about less than 2,000 dead in Iraq in two years or so—half again as many died in a single battle for a single string of islets nowhere in the Pacific.
