Born of a young man’s fascination and driving determination to understand what really happened some seven decades earlier on Betio Island, Tanks in Hell is likely the most accurate account of tanks at the battle of Tarawa that will ever be written.

“I knew very little about the Pacific war before starting this project,” admits co-author Roman Cansiere (1), a French citizen. “[O]ur history sticks to what happened in Europe… The Pacific, for the French,” he says, “[is] a forgotten theater of operations.” (2) Nonetheless, since he was a teenager Cansiere has had an interest in the Pacific War, especially the fourteen Marine Corps tanks of Charlie Company on Tarawa. As he learned to read and write better in English, Cansiere purchased US books and began to read more and more about Tarawa. Rather quickly, he noticed numerous inconsistencies in different books about the battle. By March 2012, Cansiere resolved to unravel what really happened to the officers and men of Charlie Company, First Corps Medium Tank Battalion on Betio Island of Tarawa Atoll in 1943. He contacted The National Archives in Washington DC to request information about the battle and created www.tanksontarawa.com to collect more data online. By way of the website, Cansiere “met” Oscar E. “Ed” Gilbert, an experienced writer and World War II researcher, who helped with the site. In the summer of 2013, Cansiere traveled to Washington to conduct more research at the National Archives, the Marine Corps History Division, and the National Museums of the Marine Corps and the Pacific War. He and Gilbert were also finally able to meet face to face. Gilbert suggested they preserve their research for future generations. Together, Cansiere and Gilbert worked to resolve the many differing accounts and discrepancies by pouring over after-action reports, ground and air photographs taken during the battle, recorded interviews from survivors who had since passed away, and conducting interviews with two of the last remaining survivors, one of whom was Charlie Company’s commanding officer at Tarawa.

Contrary to common belief, history is not a fixed thing. It begins to metamorphose almost as soon as events occur. After a few decades the historical record can become distorted almost beyond the recognition of those who lived it. The history of the battle for Tarawa in November 1943 was a victim of this peculiar process. (3)
Oscar E. Gilbert, co-author

In 1940, so far as most flag officers were concerned, amphibious warfare, in the form of troops assaulting a defended beachhead, began and ended in Greek waters – at the battles of Troy and Gallipoli, respectively. However, “Most flag officers” did not include those of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. But by 1943, despite several large-scale naval operations including Guadalcanal and Tulagi (both uncontested landings) in the Solomon Islands, the tactics and techniques of modern amphibious doctrine had yet to be fully tested, especially with tanks.

Tanks in Hell begins by framing the battle of Tarawa within the United States’ larger strategic goals for prosecuting the Pacific War. Chiefly, stopping Japan’s brutal expansionism in the Asian-Pacific theater by holding them north of Australia and the Australian shipping lanes, and east of Alaska and Hawaii; then, mount a two-pronged offensive to drive the Japanese back to their home islands. One prong would be a predominantly land offensive conducted by the U.S. Army under Gen. MacArthur to expel the Japanese from the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, China, and Korea. The second prong, led by Admiral Nimitz though thinking sounds good, would initially endeavor to halt the Japanese advance west of Hawaii, Midway, and the Aleutian Islands and ensure the Japanese did not isolate Australia; then push the Japanese back to their home islands by seizing their advanced naval bases built on tiny atolls throughout the Pacific from which they could service ships and submarines, launch land-based fighter or attack planes, and fly amphibious early warning aircraft from the shallow, normally placid waters of an atoll’s lagoon. At just 2100 nautical miles from Honolulu, 2500 miles from Australia, and 2800 miles from Tokyo, Betio was just such an island. (4)

The Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Ernest J King, put it this way, “The general scheme of things is not only to protect the lines of communication with Australia but … to set up ‘strong points’ from which a general advance can be made through the New Hebrides, Solomons, and the Bismarck Archipelago.” (5)

A year after their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese began to fortify Betio Island by landing the 111th Pioneers/Construction Unit (8-900 men) and 1200 Korean slave laborers policed by 120 Japanese civilians. They built hundreds of mutually supporting, concrete and coconut log bunkers covered with sand, laid mines, strung thousands of meters of barbed wire, and to deny invaders a beachhead, they surrounded the island with a coconut log seawall. To defend Betio, the Japanese brought in the Sasebo 7th Special Naval Landing Force (1500 men), men from the 6th Special Naval Landing Force, the 3rd Special Base Force (300 men) [the] 4th Fleet Construction Unit,” (6) —all under the command of 49-year-old Rear Adm. Keiji Shibasaki, who famously boasted, ‘“A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years.”’ (7) Tarawa had become an unsinkable aircraft carrier and in the end, it would claim some 6000 lives – many of whom would be Charlie Company Marines.

Gilbert and Cansiere shine a light into the darkest recesses of the practically forgotten early days of tanks in the Marine Corps – before there was any kind of doctrine for employing tanks from the sea or against the Japanese on confined atolls with very little room to maneuver. They cover virtually every aspect of the Marine tanker from infancy – when nobody knew anything and most didn’t care to know anything about tanks – through their first use in an expeditionary, amphibious warfare role in support of the infantry in combat, to the lessons learned at Tarawa and the early development of Marine Corps tank doctrine. A better study of the topic will likely never be done; in-depth topics include:
• Landing ships like the preciously scarce LSTs (Landing Ship Tank) and the LSDs (Landing Ship Dock).
• LCMs (Landing Craft Mechanized), Higgins boats, Amtracks, and Alligators.
• M4 “Sherman” tanks and the big differences between the different models acquired by the Marines. Including exact colors, markings, and serial numbers. Plus the M32B2.
• Forming First Corps Medium Tank Battalion.
• Organization and Training aboard Camp Pendleton.
• Communications between higher, adjacent, and subordinate units.
• The tankers' clothing and equipment (officers & enlisted) – from head to toe – colors, sizes, fabrics (fabric weave patterns), canteens, canteen covers, dogtags, shoes, helmets, socks, and even underwear.
• The surprising array of rifles, carbines, light & submachine guns, pistols, grenades, knives, and bayonets.
• Japanese weapons on Betio.

Whenever possible, I review both the e-book and the audiobook. The e-book contains many pictures of everything listed above plus many of the Charlie Co. men. The book also contains several maps (of just okay quality – some are a little blurry and/or hard to comprehend) that are compared and contrasted with actual invasion photos taken from overhead Navy aircraft and the many differing eyewitness accounts of both Marines and Japanese. The e-book contains many web links. But unfortunately, every link that I tried did not work (but I did not try them all). Despite that issue, there’s still an abundance of maps and information available online – just beware of the sources.

If you’re unfamiliar with the battle of Betio/Tarawa, I recommend first reading the official “Marine Corps Monograph” of the operation by Capt. James R. Stockman, USMC available on the web – for the maps if for no other reason.

For both the Marine Corps and the United States public, the Battle for Tarawa was a watershed event. For the Marine Corps, it drove home the fact that amphibious operations in modern warfare were more deadly and unforgiving than ever before, and if the Marine Corps was going to remain in business (and not be absorbed by the Army), and assault from the sea was going to be their thing, they still have a lot more learning to do. In the US, there was a collective “gasp” at the headlines – “heavy casualties” – and shock at the numbers of dead and wounded Marines (1026 dead, 2600 wounded - these numbers were later revised lower to 931 killed or missing, 2100 wounded). (8) (Marine Corps doctrine recommends a ratio of no less than 3:1 when attacking a defended position. In reality, ‘“[t]he Marine Corps would barely muster [a ratio of] 1.66:1 against Shebasaki’s garrison.”’ (9) If there were 5000 Japanese on Tarawa, with 15,000 Marines in the assault, I would assume at least 50% casualties or 7500 dead and wounded Marines. It could’ve been a lot worse!) Perhaps the US public was naïve as a whole? Robert Sherard, the author of Tarawa, who went ashore with the Marines, had this to say: “This attitude, following the finest victory U. S, troops had won in this war, was amazing. It was the clearest indication that the peacetime United States (i.e., the United States as of December 1943) simply found it impossible to bridge the great chasm that separates the pleasures of peace from the horrors of war. Like the generation they educated, the people had not thought of war in terms of men being killed—war seemed so far away.”’ (10)

Ever since 1942, when the 1st Tank Battalion was stood up at Camp Pendleton, California, the Marine Corps has endured a love/hate relationship with the tank. With the Marine Corps being an infantry-centric force, the grunts love the heavy armor’s firepower and protection, especially in urban environments. And tanks are naturally at home in places like Iraq, with wide open expanses of desert. Of course, Marines operate “in any clime or place,” whether or not it’s good for the employment of tanks is irrelevant – be that the steaming jungles of Vietnam, the frozen mountains of Korea, or the hot and sandy deserts of Iraq. And tanks are not just big and heavy, they’re behemoths; and with the newest M1 smashing the scales with over 80 tons of heft, getting it from ship to shore in combat in a reasonable amount of time is always an issue that requires tradeoffs when loading and/or prepositioning ships and the ship to shore movement. But that has not been an issue in the last three and a half decades of war as the Marine Corps has essentially been used as a second Army with virtually no specific need for the Navy. And that brings us to the latest National Defense Strategy (NDS).

The NDS is released only when there is a significant shift in the nation’s strategic direction and priorities that the Armed Forces must prepare for. In 2022 the US released the latest NDS signifying a strategic shift away from counterinsurgency and fighting rogue nations in the Middle East to focusing on peer vs. peer/near-peer conflicts with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia. (11) With that new guidance, the Marine Corps has been making arguably the biggest changes since its founding in 1775, a modernization strategy – dubbed Force Design 2030. “[T]he core will realign itself as part of the naval expeditionary force” (12) focusing on a “Navy centric war fighting role.” The Corps will concentrate on enhancing capabilities in contested maritime spaces, with emphasis on the littoral zone, setting up decentralized and distributed Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations across the Pacific island or on floating barge bases creating critical maritime chokepoints to help the Navy knockout enemy ships. (13)

To do this, the Marine Corps must get “slimmer.” (14) In 2020, then Commandant, Gen. David Berger, felt the Corps was “overinvested” in several key areas. Drastic changes are being made; anything that does not strictly support the NDS moving forward is being modified or cut to include reducing infantry battalions from 24 to 21, modifying squads from 12 to 15 Marines, (15) cutting amphibious vehicle companies from 6 to 4, reducing towed artillery, tossing out all law enforcement, even the Marine Corps’ new fifth-generation fighters, the F-35B and F-35 C Lightning IIs, are being reduced from 16 to 10 aircraft per squadron, and much more. (16)

But most pertinent to this review is that the Marine Corps has already rid itself of all three of its Tank Battalions. So as it was, during the summer of 2020 at a ceremony aboard the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, as the Marine Corps’s first and final tank battalion, First [Corps Medium] Tank Battalion’s colors were rolled and stowed a final time (potentially). (17) Thus ends the storied career of the Marine Corps’s First Tank Battalion, right? Well, maybe, but if you’re absolutely positive the Marine Corps is out of the tank business for good, consider this: how many times has the Marine Corps prepared for one war, only to be called to fight in a totally unexpected and different clime or place? I don’t know the exact answer, but allow me to leave you with one example:

During the Cold War, the US focused on countering Russia across the cold and wet steppe of Eastern Europe; and with the responsibility of securing NATO’s northern flank, the Marine Corps trained to fight in the far northern Arctic climate of Europe. But what happened, where were they sent to fight? To a place that was essentially the exact opposite of an Arctic steppe – Vietnam.

NOTES:

1. Why Roman Cansiere is not listed as an author is highly curious. He writes the first of the two prefaces to Tanks in Hell where he clearly states, “The idea to write a book came in the winter of 2012–2013 when Ed suggested we permanently preserve the history of Charlie Company… Ed and I compared what we had. It took us many hours to check and re-check what information we had, and decide what more we needed. We wanted to use as much original material as possible from the archives. Together we also interviewed two veterans in person: Joe Woolum and Ed Bale. Those were the most memorable moments of my life. I was becoming aware that this book was taking on more importance not only to me, but to the veterans as well… Writing went quickly since Ed is an experienced author and because we had already spent countless hours doing research. This story was in one sense becoming ours."

In the second preface to Tanks in Hell, Oscar E. "Ed" Gilbert writes, "We have approached the story of a single company on Tarawa…For all these reasons we have recorded the instances where different lines of evidence disagree. This is our analysis of a battle, and we do not pretend it is the absolute truth.”

If this book is not a collaborative effort by two authors, one inexperienced and one experienced, you could have fooled me! Why Roman Cansiere is not included as a primary author on the cover is inexplicable.
2. Oscar Gilbert, Tanks in Hell: A Marine Corps Tank Company on Tarawa (Newburyport, MA: Casemate Publishers, 2015), Aquile 2.32%.
3. Gilbert, Aquile 3.17%.
4. “Bing Chat with GPT-4,” accessed February 23, 2024, https://www.bing.com:9943/chat.
5. Flint Whitlock, “Tarawa: ‘Marine Corps’ Toughest Battle,” Warfare History Network, accessed February 21, 2024, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/tarawa-marine-corps-toughest-battle/.
6. Whitlock; Gilbert, Tanks in Hell, Aquile 25.07%.
7. Whitlock, “Tarawa.”
8. Robert Lee Sherrod, Tarawa: The Incredible Story of One of World War II’s Bloodiest Battles (New York: Skyhorse Pub., 2013), Aquile 47.74%.
9. Joseph H. Alexander, Utmost Savagery: The Three Days Of Tarawa (New York: Naval Institute Press, 2014), 28.3% Aquile.
10. Sherrod, Tarawa, Aquile 47.74%.
11. Todd South, “Marines ‘Not Optimized’ for the next Great Power Fight, Commandant Says. This Is How the Corps Will Need to Change,” Marine Corps Times, October 4, 2019, https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/10/04/marines-not-o....
12. South.
13. Todd South, “Goodbye, Tanks: How the Marine Corps Will Change, and What It Will Lose, by Ditching Its Armor,” Marine Corps Times, March 24, 2021, https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/03/22/goodbye-tanks....
14. Shawn Snow, “The Corps Is Axing All of Its Tank Battalions and Cutting Grunt Units,” Marine Corps Times, March 23, 2020, https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2020/03/23/the-corps-is-....
15. Snow.
16. Snow.
17. South, “Goodbye, Tanks.”
  ( )

Born of a young man’s fascination and driving determination to understand what really happened some seven decades earlier on Betio Island, Tanks in Hell is likely the most accurate account of tanks at the battle of Tarawa that will ever be written.

“I knew very little about the Pacific war before starting this project,” admits co-author Roman Cansiere (1), a French citizen. “[O]ur history sticks to what happened in Europe… The Pacific, for the French,” he says, “[is] a forgotten theater of operations.” (2) Nonetheless, since he was a teenager Cansiere has had an interest in the Pacific War, especially the fourteen Marine Corps tanks of Charlie Company on Tarawa. As he learned to read and write better in English, Cansiere purchased US books and began to read more and more about Tarawa. Rather quickly, he noticed numerous inconsistencies in different books about the battle. By March 2012, Cansiere resolved to unravel what really happened to the officers and men of Charlie Company, First Corps Medium Tank Battalion on Betio Island of Tarawa Atoll in 1943. He contacted The National Archives in Washington DC to request information about the battle and created www.tanksontarawa.com to collect more data online. By way of the website, Cansiere “met” Oscar E. “Ed” Gilbert, an experienced writer and World War II researcher, who helped with the site. In the summer of 2013, Cansiere traveled to Washington to conduct more research at the National Archives, the Marine Corps History Division, and the National Museums of the Marine Corps and the Pacific War. He and Gilbert were also finally able to meet face to face. Gilbert suggested they preserve their research for future generations. Together, Cansiere and Gilbert worked to resolve the many differing accounts and discrepancies by pouring over after-action reports, ground and air photographs taken during the battle, recorded interviews from survivors who had since passed away, and conducting interviews with two of the last remaining survivors, one of whom was Charlie Company’s commanding officer at Tarawa.

Contrary to common belief, history is not a fixed thing. It begins to metamorphose almost as soon as events occur. After a few decades the historical record can become distorted almost beyond the recognition of those who lived it. The history of the battle for Tarawa in November 1943 was a victim of this peculiar process. (3)
Oscar E. Gilbert, co-author

In 1940, so far as most flag officers were concerned, amphibious warfare, in the form of troops assaulting a defended beachhead, began and ended in Greek waters – at the battles of Troy and Gallipoli, respectively. However, “Most flag officers” did not include those of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. But by 1943, despite several large-scale naval operations including Guadalcanal and Tulagi (both uncontested landings) in the Solomon Islands, the tactics and techniques of modern amphibious doctrine had yet to be fully tested, especially with tanks.

Tanks in Hell begins by framing the battle of Tarawa within the United States’ larger strategic goals for prosecuting the Pacific War. Chiefly, stopping Japan’s brutal expansionism in the Asian-Pacific theater by holding them north of Australia and the Australian shipping lanes, and east of Alaska and Hawaii; then, mount a two-pronged offensive to drive the Japanese back to their home islands. One prong would be a predominantly land offensive conducted by the U.S. Army under Gen. MacArthur to expel the Japanese from the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, China, and Korea. The second prong, led by Admiral Nimitz though thinking sounds good, would initially endeavor to halt the Japanese advance west of Hawaii, Midway, and the Aleutian Islands and ensure the Japanese did not isolate Australia; then push the Japanese back to their home islands by seizing their advanced naval bases built on tiny atolls throughout the Pacific from which they could service ships and submarines, launch land-based fighter or attack planes, and fly amphibious early warning aircraft from the shallow, normally placid waters of an atoll’s lagoon. At just 2100 nautical miles from Honolulu, 2500 miles from Australia, and 2800 miles from Tokyo, Betio was just such an island. (4)

The Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Ernest J King, put it this way, “The general scheme of things is not only to protect the lines of communication with Australia but … to set up ‘strong points’ from which a general advance can be made through the New Hebrides, Solomons, and the Bismarck Archipelago.” (5)

A year after their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese began to fortify Betio Island by landing the 111th Pioneers/Construction Unit (8-900 men) and 1200 Korean slave laborers policed by 120 Japanese civilians. They built hundreds of mutually supporting, concrete and coconut log bunkers covered with sand, laid mines, strung thousands of meters of barbed wire, and to deny invaders a beachhead, they surrounded the island with a coconut log seawall. To defend Betio, the Japanese brought in the Sasebo 7th Special Naval Landing Force (1500 men), men from the 6th Special Naval Landing Force, the 3rd Special Base Force (300 men) [the] 4th Fleet Construction Unit,” (6) —all under the command of 49-year-old Rear Adm. Keiji Shibasaki, who famously boasted, ‘“A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years.”’ (7) Tarawa had become an unsinkable aircraft carrier and in the end, it would claim some 6000 lives – many of whom would be Charlie Company Marines.

Gilbert and Cansiere shine a light into the darkest recesses of the practically forgotten early days of tanks in the Marine Corps – before there was any kind of doctrine for employing tanks from the sea or against the Japanese on confined atolls with very little room to maneuver. They cover virtually every aspect of the Marine tanker from infancy – when nobody knew anything and most didn’t care to know anything about tanks – through their first use in an expeditionary, amphibious warfare role in support of the infantry in combat, to the lessons learned at Tarawa and the early development of Marine Corps tank doctrine. A better study of the topic will likely never be done; in-depth topics include:

• Landing ships like the preciously scarce LSTs (Landing Ship Tank) and the LSDs (Landing Ship Dock).
• LCMs (Landing Craft Mechanized), Higgins boats, Amtracks, and Alligators.
• M4 “Sherman” tanks and the big differences between the different models acquired by the Marines. Including exact colors, markings, and serial numbers. Plus the M32B2.
• Forming First Corps Medium Tank Battalion.
• Organization and Training aboard Camp Pendleton.
• Communications between higher, adjacent, and subordinate units.
• The tankers' clothing and equipment (officers & enlisted) – from head to toe – colors, sizes, fabrics (fabric weave patterns), canteens, canteen covers, dogtags, shoes, helmets, socks, and even underwear.
• The surprising array of rifles, carbines, light & submachine guns, pistols, grenades, knives, and bayonets.
• Japanese weapons on Betio.

Whenever possible, I review both the e-book and the audiobook. The e-book contains many pictures of everything listed above plus many of the Charlie Co. men. The book also contains several maps (of just okay quality – some are a little blurry and/or hard to comprehend) that are compared and contrasted with actual invasion photos taken from overhead Navy aircraft and the many differing eyewitness accounts of both Marines and Japanese. The e-book contains many web links. But unfortunately, every link that I tried did not work (but I did not try them all). Despite that issue, there’s still an abundance of maps and information available online – just beware of the sources.

If you’re unfamiliar with the battle of Betio/Tarawa, I recommend first reading the official “Marine Corps Monograph” of the operation by Capt. James R. Stockman, USMC available on the web – for the maps if for no other reason.

For both the Marine Corps and the United States public, the Battle for Tarawa was a watershed event. For the Marine Corps, it drove home the fact that amphibious operations in modern warfare were more deadly and unforgiving than ever before, and if the Marine Corps was going to remain in business (and not be absorbed by the Army), and assault from the sea was going to be their thing, they still have a lot more learning to do. In the US, there was a collective “gasp” at the headlines – “heavy casualties” – and shock at the numbers of dead and wounded Marines (1026 dead, 2600 wounded - these numbers were later revised lower to 931 killed or missing, 2100 wounded). (8) (Marine Corps doctrine recommends a ratio of no less than 3:1 when attacking a defended position. In reality, ‘“[t]he Marine Corps would barely muster [a ratio of] 1.66:1 against Shebasaki’s garrison.”’ (9) If there were 5000 Japanese on Tarawa, with 15,000 Marines in the assault, I would assume at least 50% casualties or 7500 dead and wounded Marines. It could’ve been a lot worse!) Perhaps the US public was naïve as a whole? Robert Sherard, the author of Tarawa, who went ashore with the Marines, had this to say: “This attitude, following the finest victory U. S, troops had won in this war, was amazing. It was the clearest indication that the peacetime United States (i.e., the United States as of December 1943) simply found it impossible to bridge the great chasm that separates the pleasures of peace from the horrors of war. Like the generation they educated, the people had not thought of war in terms of men being killed—war seemed so far away.”’ (10)

Ever since 1942, when the 1st Tank Battalion was stood up at Camp Pendleton, California, the Marine Corps has endured a love/hate relationship with the tank. With the Marine Corps being an infantry-centric force, the grunts love the heavy armor’s firepower and protection, especially in urban environments. And tanks are naturally at home in places like Iraq, with wide open expanses of desert. Of course, Marines operate “in any clime or place,” whether or not it’s good for the employment of tanks is irrelevant – be that the steaming jungles of Vietnam, the frozen mountains of Korea, or the hot and sandy deserts of Iraq. And tanks are not just big and heavy, they’re behemoths; and with the newest M1 smashing the scales with over 80 tons of heft, getting it from ship to shore in combat in a reasonable amount of time is always an issue that requires tradeoffs when loading and/or prepositioning ships and the ship to shore movement. But that has not been an issue in the last three and a half decades of war as the Marine Corps has essentially been used as a second Army with virtually no specific need for the Navy. And that brings us to the latest National Defense Strategy (NDS).

The NDS is released only when there is a significant shift in the nation’s strategic direction and priorities that the Armed Forces must prepare for. In 2022 the US released the latest NDS signifying a strategic shift away from counterinsurgency and fighting rogue nations in the Middle East to focusing on peer vs. peer/near-peer conflicts with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia. (11) With that new guidance, the Marine Corps has been making arguably the biggest changes since its founding in 1775, a modernization strategy – dubbed Force Design 2030. “[T]he core will realign itself as part of the naval expeditionary force” (12) focusing on a “Navy centric war fighting role.” The Corps will concentrate on enhancing capabilities in contested maritime spaces, with emphasis on the littoral zone, setting up decentralized and distributed Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations across the Pacific island or on floating barge bases creating critical maritime chokepoints to help the Navy knockout enemy ships. (13)

To do this, the Marine Corps must get “slimmer.” (14) In 2020, then Commandant, Gen. David Berger, felt the Corps was “overinvested” in several key areas. Drastic changes are being made; anything that does not strictly support the NDS moving forward is being modified or cut to include reducing infantry battalions from 24 to 21, modifying squads from 12 to 15 Marines, (15) cutting amphibious vehicle companies from 6 to 4, reducing towed artillery, tossing out all law enforcement, even the Marine Corps’ new fifth-generation fighters, the F-35B and F-35 C Lightning IIs, are being reduced from 16 to 10 aircraft per squadron, and much more. (16)

But most pertinent to this review is that the Marine Corps has already rid itself of all three of its Tank Battalions. So as it was, during the summer of 2020 at a ceremony aboard the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, as the Marine Corps’s first and final tank battalion, First [Corps Medium] Tank Battalion’s colors were rolled and stowed a final time (potentially). (17) Thus ends the storied career of the Marine Corps’s First Tank Battalion, right? Well, maybe, but if you’re absolutely positive the Marine Corps is out of the tank business for good, consider this: how many times has the Marine Corps prepared for one war, only to be called to fight in a totally unexpected and different clime or place? I don’t know the exact answer, but allow me to leave you with one example:

During the Cold War, the US focused on countering Russia across the cold and wet steppe of Eastern Europe; and with the responsibility of securing NATO’s northern flank, the Marine Corps trained to fight in the far northern Arctic climate of Europe. But what happened, where were they sent to fight? To a place that was essentially the exact opposite of an Arctic steppe – Vietnam.

NOTES:

1. Why Roman Cansiere is not listed as an author is highly curious. He writes the first of the two prefaces to Tanks in Hell where he clearly states, “The idea to write a book came in the winter of 2012–2013 when Ed suggested we permanently preserve the history of Charlie Company… Ed and I compared what we had. It took us many hours to check and re-check what information we had, and decide what more we needed. We wanted to use as much original material as possible from the archives. Together we also interviewed two veterans in person: Joe Woolum and Ed Bale. Those were the most memorable moments of my life. I was becoming aware that this book was taking on more importance not only to me, but to the veterans as well… Writing went quickly since Ed is an experienced author and because we had already spent countless hours doing research. This story was in one sense becoming ours."

In the second preface to Tanks in Hell, Oscar E. "Ed" Gilbert writes, "We have approached the story of a single company on Tarawa…For all these reasons we have recorded the instances where different lines of evidence disagree. This is our analysis of a battle, and we do not pretend it is the absolute truth.”

If this book is not a collaborative effort by two authors, one inexperienced and one experienced, you could have fooled me! Why Roman Cansiere is not included as a primary author on the cover is inexplicable.
2. Oscar Gilbert, Tanks in Hell: A Marine Corps Tank Company on Tarawa (Newburyport, MA: Casemate Publishers, 2015), Aquile 2.32%.
3. Gilbert, Aquile 3.17%.
4. “Bing Chat with GPT-4,” accessed February 23, 2024, https://www.bing.com:9943/chat.
5. Flint Whitlock, “Tarawa: ‘Marine Corps’ Toughest Battle,” Warfare History Network, accessed February 21, 2024, https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/tarawa-marine-corps-toughest-battle/.
6. Whitlock; Gilbert, Tanks in Hell, Aquile 25.07%.
7. Whitlock, “Tarawa.”
8. Robert Lee Sherrod, Tarawa: The Incredible Story of One of World War II’s Bloodiest Battles (New York: Skyhorse Pub., 2013), Aquile 47.74%.
9. Joseph H. Alexander, Utmost Savagery: The Three Days Of Tarawa (New York: Naval Institute Press, 2014), 28.3% Aquile.
10. Sherrod, Tarawa, Aquile 47.74%.
11. Todd South, “Marines ‘Not Optimized’ for the next Great Power Fight, Commandant Says. This Is How the Corps Will Need to Change,” Marine Corps Times, October 4, 2019, https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/10/04/marines-not-o....
12. South.
13. Todd South, “Goodbye, Tanks: How the Marine Corps Will Change, and What It Will Lose, by Ditching Its Armor,” Marine Corps Times, March 24, 2021, https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/03/22/goodbye-tanks....
14. Shawn Snow, “The Corps Is Axing All of Its Tank Battalions and Cutting Grunt Units,” Marine Corps Times, March 23, 2020, https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2020/03/23/the-corps-is-....
15. Snow.
16. Snow.
17. South, “Goodbye, Tanks.”
  ( )