In the aftermath, Sears’ heartbroken father went to Europe, leaving the children in the care of domestic help, relatives and friends. This idyllic upbringing was interrupted when Sears’ mother suddenly took ill and died in 1911. The house where Sears grew up abutted lush Heard Pond, where she spent warm days exploring and collecting turtles and frogs. The eldest of six children, Mary Sears was born on July 18, 1905, in Wayland, Massachusetts, 18 miles west of Boston. It’s no exaggeration to say that Sears-gathering data, making top-secret calculations on the eve of battle, leading her team of scientists and analysts, including the group she called the “enlisted girls”-helped the United States and its allies achieve victory in the Pacific. Her long-neglected story, virtually forgotten today, illustrates how the nascent field of oceanography came of age and refocused its efforts on the war, and how fledgling amphibious forces grew into premier assault teams. Yet at the age of 38, this unknown plankton researcher found herself in the middle of a terrible global war providing critical advice to combat strategists-advice that countless lives depended on. Even then, despite impressive scientific credentials, her appointment as the Navy’s first official oceanographer did not come easily. If there was any hope of mastering the seas in time to stop the Axis powers, it was up to the people on the new Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee on Meteorology’s new oceanography subcommittee-and particularly to an untested, diminutive marine biologist named Mary Sears.Īs one of the few women in the tradition-bound specialty of oceanography, Sears had had to surmount numerous obstacles to establish her academic career. And the lack of this intelligence-comprehensive data on tides, waves, ocean depths, bioluminescence and underwater topography-was going to cost lives, ships and equipment as the Navy expanded the Pacific campaign. The tide would remain at approximately three feet, one of the lowest for the year, and would barely budge for 24 hours.Ī startling realization dawned on the investigating officers. But on November 20, 1943, the day the amphibious assault on Tarawa began, an apogean neap tide prevailed. Many of the landing craft required a minimum of four feet of water to clear the reef, and the operation plan included high tide estimates of five feet. Operations planners, relying on outdated nautical charts and the imperfect memories of foreign officers, had misjudged the tide. But one major blunder that turned the shoreline into a killing field was shockingly basic. The research ship would ultimately travel over a million miles.īetween an aerial bombardment that fell short, an uncoordinated and delayed assault against a heavily defended shore and a shortage of amphibious tractors to get across the reef, there were plenty of missteps to scrutinize. Sears in 1962, christening Atlantis II for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Though the United States prevailed at Tarawa, more than 1,000 Americans were killed in the fighting and more than 2,000 wounded, a toll that prompted senior commanders to investigate a question that, especially at this critical stage of the war in the Pacific, would have extraordinary consequences: What exactly went wrong? A lot was riding on the operation to seize the Gilberts, which was a crucial part of the Allies’ island-hopping Central Pacific prong of attack against the Japanese. ![]() ![]() Smith and the warriors of the 2nd Marine Division hoisted an American flag up a palm tree on Betio, a bird-shaped island at the southwest tip of the Tarawa Atoll. ![]() “These men were being picked off by the machine guns.we could see the machine gun bullets hitting the water like raindrops.” Still, just 76 hours after the offensive to retake the island had begun, Maj. “We couldn’t see the blood, but we knew what was happening,” Charles Pase, then a 17-year-old Marine from West Virginia, recalled of what he saw from a nearby ship. As Marines jumped into the water and tried to make their way to the beach, Japanese fire mowed them down. Marines ran up against a coral reef hundreds of yards from shore. At the Battle of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943-one of the major amphibious landings of the war-as many as 100 boats full of U.S.
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