Overview

In May 1943, a self-described really young, green, ignorant lieutenant assumed command of a new U.S. Marine Corps company. His even younger enlisted Marines were learning to use an untested weapon, the M4A2 Sherman medium tank. His sole combat veteran was the company bugler, who had salvaged his dress cap and battered horn from a sinking aircraft carrier. Just six months later, the company would be thrown into one of the ghastliest battles of World War II. On November 20, 1943, the 2nd Marine Division launched the first amphibious assault of the Pacific War, directly into the teeth of powerful Japanese defenses on Tarawa. In that blood-soaked invasion, a single company of Sherman tanks, of which only two survived, played a pivotal role in turning the tide from looming disaster to legendary victory. In this unique study, Oscar E. Gilbert and Romain V. Cansiere use official documents, memoirs, and interviews with veterans to follow Charlie Company from its formation, and trace the movement, action--and loss--of individual tanks in this horrific four-day struggle. The authors follow the company from training through the brutal seventy-six-hour struggle for Tarawa. Survivor accounts and air-photo analyses document the movements--and destruction--of the company's individual tanks. It is a story of escapes from drowning tanks, and even more harrowing extrications from tanks knocked out behind Japanese lines. It is a story of men doing whatever needed to be done, from burying the dead to hand-carrying heavy cannon ammunition forward under fire. It is the story of how the two surviving tanks and their crews expanded a perilously thin beachhead and cleared the way for critical reinforcements to come ashore. But most of all, it is a story of how a few unsung Marines helped turn near disaster into epic victory.

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9798200414215

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Joe Barrett, an actor and Audie Award and Earphones Award-winning narrator, has appeared both on and off Broadway as well as in hundreds of radio and television commercials. Romain Cansiere is a native of southern France, interested in the U.S. Marine Corps since his teenage years. His current historical research is on the Marine Corps in World War I. Romain is coauthor, with Oscar E. Gilbert, of Tanks in Hell: A Marine Corps Tank Company on Tarawa, winner of the 2016 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award for distinguished nonfiction. Oscar E. Gilbert was a U.S. Marine Corps artilleryman and instructor, and retired after a thirty-eight-year career in government service, university teaching, and international petroleum exploration. He is the author of numerous books on military history. He lives in Texas.

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