With the Marines at Tarawa 1944 Office of War Information; World War II

more at http://quickfound.net/

'Marines clean machine guns and attend religious services aboard transports at sea, climb into landing craft which head for shore, wade through the surf protected by naval, and aerial bombardment, consolidate beach positions, move inland, and care for wounded. Reel 2, a landing craft is hit. Mortars are fired and Japanese infantry flushed from dugouts. Marines and tanks move up. Gen. Smith inspects positions. Wounded Marines are loaded on a ship and the dead buried at sea. Japanese POW's are searched and given first aid. Construction on an airstrip is begun; a plane lands and the pilot congratulates Marines.'

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Marines_at_Tarawa

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

With the Marines at Tarawa is a 1944 short documentary film directed by Louis Hayward. It uses authentic footage taken at the Battle of Tarawa to tell the story of the American servicemen from the time they get the news that they are to participate in the invasion to the final taking of the island and raising of the Stars and Stripes.

The film is in full color and uses no actors, making it a valuable historical document. The documentary showed more gruesome scenes of battle than other war films to date. Marine Staff Sergeant Norman T. Hatch, armed with a .45 caliber pistol and a Bell & Howell hand-cranked Eyemo camera, captured 35mm film footage as near as 15-yards away from the enemy during combat. According to the documentary The War, President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself gave approval for showing the film, against the wishes of many advisors.

Since the pictures were far too graphic to meet the standards of Hollywood producers and distributors, only the President could grant permission for its release to the general public. President Roosevelt consulted the only man who was present at the Battle of Tarawa that he personally knew and trusted, Time-Life photographer Robert Sherrod. Quoting Sherrod, "I tell the President the truth. Our soldiers on the front want people back home to know that they don't knock the hell out of them every day of every battle. They want people to understand that war is a horrible, nasty business, and to say otherwise is to do a disservice to those who died." Based on Sherrod's prompting, FDR agreed to release the film, uncensored.

The film won the 1944 Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject. The Oscar was presented to the US Marine Corps, and today a replica Oscar is displayed at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Due to the shortages of metals needed during the war effort, the Academy presented the Marine Corps with a plaster statue in the shape of a tablet. It is also housed at the same museum, but is not on display...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tarawa

The Battle of Tarawa was a battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II that was fought on 20–23 November 1943. It took place at the Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands, and was part of Operation Galvanic, the U.S. invasion of the Gilberts. Nearly 6,400 Japanese, Koreans, and Americans died in the fighting, mostly on and around the small island of Betio, in the extreme southwest of Tarawa Atoll.

The Battle of Tarawa was the first American offensive in the critical central Pacific region. It was also the first time in the Pacific War that the United States had faced serious Japanese opposition to an amphibious landing. Previous landings met little or no initial resistance, but on Tarawa the 4,500 Japanese defenders were well-supplied and well-prepared, and they fought almost to the last man, exacting a heavy toll on the United States Marine Corps. The losses on Tarawa were incurred within 76 hours...