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The Diorama
The students of Gilbert Junior High School, Gilbert, Ariz., chose to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the battle for Tarawa with a special diorama. Measuring 45 square feet in size, the diorama recreates the first hours of the invasion on Red Beach 3. The action is concentrated between the base of the long pier on the extreme right and the Japanese command blockhouse on the far left. Hundreds of Marines, some wading ashore, others crouching behind the seawall and still others moving inland, are depicted in miniature.
The diorama was constructed over a period of seven montlis by students 14 to 15 years of age in World History classes taught by Glen Frakes. The project, entirely handmade, is incomplete as of this writing. Upon completion, the Tarawa Diorama will be shipped to the Marine Corps Historical Center in Washington, D. C. It is estimated that 4,500 hours of labor will be required for the complete project, A delegation of students from Gilbert hopes to present the Tarawa Diorama and an earlier one of Corregidor to President Reagan on Veterans' Day.
On the Marines' maps, the objective island was identified as "Helen." Its real name was Tarawa, a coral atoll in the Gilberts, comprised of some 20 tiny islets surrounding a placid lagoon in the central Pacific, only 200 miles north of the equator.
It was the mission of the men of the Second Marine Division to wrest control of the largest of Tarawa's islets, a two-mile-long, 600-yard-wide, strip of coral called Betio, from the hands of some 4,836 fanatical and determined Japanese defenders, thereby securing Betio's newly completed airfield for future U.S. operations against Japan.
Betio's commander, Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki, is reported to have boasted before the battle that "A million men could not take Betio in a hundred years." Betio fell to the Marines in 76 hours, perhaps the bloodiest three days in the Marine Corps' then 167-year history. And for the men of the Second Marine Division who, on November 20, 1943, landed in the hell that was Tarawa, those 76 hours were to prove to be the longest, most exhausting and most terrifying of their lives.
The Battle
How had it come to be, this battle in...