The Battle of Tarawa officially began at 08:55 hrs on 14 November 1943 , the first American soldiers to land at Tarawa were a demolitions team whose job it was to neutralize a pier jutting out into Tarawa's massive lagoon from Betio's northwest side to prevent the defenders from obtaining a crossfire advantage over the landing beaches on either side. Military planners had predicted a cake-walk for the Marines.
But the Japanese were too well dug in, the bombardments had proved ineffective, and Naval Intelligence had mis-judged the degree to which the tides would recede during what was a tropical "dry season", and the majority of the armored landing craft found themselves beached on the reefs and coral shoals surrounding Betio and could go no further; most Marines had to hop off and walk as much as a quarter mile in knee to hip to neck to waist to knee deep water under heavy Japanese machine gun fire, bogged down by carrying their 60 - 80 lb combat kits and weapons. Many Marines died when they stumbled into overhead-depth pockets in the reefs they had to cross and drowned, weighed down by their heavy packs, and many more were blown into bits by the stunningly accurate Japanese mortar fire: the defenders had scouted out the most
Progress in the battle on the first day was more or less limited to advances made on the unit-by-unit level, relying upon the dogged determination of the individual soldiers: a waist high hail of gunfire raked up and down the length of Betio from the dug in pillboxes and each one of them had to be "cleaned out" by assaulting them with explosives and flamethrowers. Losses amongst US demotions squads were appallingly high. The Japanese also had created traditional interlocking fields of fire to cover the advance from multiple angles, as well as arranging their positions in such a way that any one bunker under attack would often be covered by two or three others. To walk standing upright on Betio during days 1 and 2 was to embrace death. Movement on the island was reduced to crawling through the white coral sand and piles of debris from the bombardment; gains were often measured in inches as men on both sides were being killed left and right. Most Marines who came ashore on Betio set foot on the island after becoming necessarily skilled at advancing through the waist deep tide in a crouching position while holding their rifles above their heads to make as small a target as possible, only to confront a coconut log sea wall constructed by the Japanese that they had to hurl themselves over face first i
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