Unboxing Blood Reef: Tarawa

Betio is a sliver of coral and sand at the southwest corner of Tarawa Atoll. It’s about two miles long and never more than 800 yards wide. In November 1943, it also held a Japanese airfield and some of the toughest beach defenses anywhere in the Pacific.

The 2nd Marine Division took it in 76 hours. It cost them more than a thousand dead, and most of the defenders fought to the last man. MMP’s Blood Reef: Tarawa puts that whole fight on your table, reef and all. Let’s have a look.

Getting It

Blood Reef: Tarawa is Historical Module 5 for Advanced Squad Leader (ASL). Multi-Man Publishing (MMP) released it in 1999, after acquiring and overhauling an earlier Heat of Battle design. It’s been out of print for a long time, and it’s highly sought after.

Expect to pay somewhere around $400 to $500 on the used market. That’s a lot of money for a box that’s going to drown your Marines.

Contents:

• 2 map sheets, 23″ x 31″
• 650 1/2″ counters
• 176 5/8″ counters
• 7 scenarios
• 3 campaign games
• Chapter T rules
• Chapter divider

One Million Men, One Hundred Years

Betio was the objective because of its airfield, which the Americans needed for the drive across the Central Pacific. Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki commanded the garrison of about 4,700 men. He skipped a defense in depth. Instead, he packed the shoreline with concrete pillboxes, coconut-log seawalls and antiboat guns, all built to stop a landing at the water’s edge.

He famously boasted that it would take “one million men one hundred years” to take the island. Spoiler alert… it didn’t.

Order of Battle

The Neap Tide

The plan leaned on naval bombardment, but a bad tide wrecked the first day. Planners hadn’t counted on a neap tide, which left the water over the fringing reef too shallow for the landing craft. Only 125 tracked LVTs could crawl over the reef. The deep-draft Higgins boats ran aground 500 to 800 yards from the beach.

So the later waves climbed out and waded in, chest deep, loaded down with gear, through machine-gun and artillery crossfire. Losses in those first waves were staggering. It was a slaughter. The brand-new Shermans didn’t do much better. Most plunged into submerged shell holes or fell to antitank fire, and only a handful were still running by nightfall.

Leadership Under Fire

With the plan in ruins and command scattered, it came down to the initiative and nerve of individual Marines. Colonel David M. Shoup was wounded but kept organizing the pinned-down troops on the beach. He famously reported to the fleet: “Casualties many; Percentage of dead not known; Combat efficiency; we are winning.”

On the western shore, Major Michael P. Ryan gathered stragglers from several battalions, nicknamed “Ryan’s Orphans,” and cleared Green Beach. That finally let reinforcements land in one piece. Behind Red Beach 3, 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Jr. led a fatal assault with explosives and flamethrowers that cracked a huge Japanese bombproof.

Shibasaki was killed on the first day, and the Japanese never managed a coordinated counterattack. On the night of 22 November, the survivors finally charged. The Marines broke them with artillery and close-quarters fighting. After 76 hours, Betio was declared secure. Only 17 Japanese soldiers and 129 Korean laborers survived. Everyone else fought to the death.

Seventy-Six Hours on Betio

Here’s the fight, day by day, on the map below. Its letters match the chronology beside it, and the numbers match the table of the module’s scenarios right under the map. The module’s own map covers nearly the whole island, so every one of them happens somewhere on it.

The campaign games cover more ground. A Special Valor works the Red 1 and Red 2 end of the island, and Utmost Savagery uses the whole map.

The Shock to the Home Front

Tarawa changed how Americans saw the war. It shattered the idea of a clean, fairly bloodless fight. War correspondent Robert Sherrod and combat photographer Staff Sergeant Norman Hatch captured the horror of the beach assault and the scale of the losses.

Some worried the footage would break civilian morale. President Franklin D. Roosevelt released Hatch’s film uncensored anyway, and With the Marines at Tarawa won the 1944 Academy Award for documentary short. Instead of panic, the honesty pulled the country together. War bond sales jumped, and the public got ready for the grind still to come at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

The Beast in the Box

Blood Reef: Tarawa has a reputation in the community, and it’s part legend, part warning. From a design and gameplay point of view, BRT is a beast. The map isn’t especially large for a historical module, but the unit density and the special rules make it intimidating. It rates high on complexity, even by ASL standards.

If you’re used to the flow of ETO scenarios, this module makes you unlearn a lot of instincts. You have to accept the brutal attrition of an opposed landing across a wide, shallow reef. Once you’re on the island, play gets more familiar, with a lot of bunker busting.

Scale and Unit Density

Two map sheets cover Betio, and you get seven standalone scenarios, like The Hawk and China Girl. But the real draw is the campaign games, especially CG III, Utmost Savagery. Clear off the dining room table.

Filling a campaign game takes a lot of counters. The Marines command three Battalion Landing Teams (BLTs) full of rifle companies, heavy weapons and support units. The counter mix in the box doesn’t seem big enough to fill the CG. Other players say it works out anyway, because so many Marines die early that their counters get recycled into later waves. Grim, but efficient.

Chapter T

The BRT rules run long, and they bounce you all over the rulebook. You’ll go from Chapter T, the module rules, to Chapter B for terrain, to Chapter G for the Pacific, and back again. Still, the mechanics it adds are great tools for modeling the chaos of the landing.

Most of the “ocean” the Marines cross is actually Shallow Reef. They have to get over it to reach Red 1, Red 2, Red 3 and Green Beach, either wading at about three hexes a turn or riding LVTs at about four.

Because of the historical low tide, LCVPs can’t cross the reef. That leaves the Marines churning through open water for turns on end. They’re sitting ducks for Prep Fire and Defensive Fire from dug-in Japanese antitank guns, AA guns and artillery, and those guns keep acquiring their targets.

The first wave has to ride in LVTs. Those have Armor Factors of 1 or 2, so they become burning wrecks with all their passengers in a hurry. The trick is to get out fast, but your Marines don’t want to. They have to pass a Task Check to disembark, and about half of those attempts fail. Meanwhile, the Japanese player is Intensive Firing everything he owns. The first two turns of the CG turn the reef into an LVT graveyard.

To give the Marines a chance before they disembark, units inside the LVTs are “cloaked.” The Japanese player can’t cherry-pick targets, like sniping a 10-3 leader before he reaches the seawall, until the LVT is destroyed or the units bail out.

The Shermans have to drive slowly across the reef, so the Marines use Pathfinders. They’re single-man counters whose only job is to guide a tank through the water. If a tank has no Pathfinder, or its Pathfinder gets shot, its chance of bogging on the reef goes way up.

While they’re in the amphibians, on the reef or on the beach, the Marines are Fanatic and don’t break. They have nowhere to rout, so a failed MC means Casualty Reduction instead. A 6-6-8 that fails doesn’t flip to its broken side. It drops straight to a half-squad.

That models the do-or-die beachhead and drives the casualties way up while the Marines wade in. Once a unit pushes past the beach into a hinterland hex, normal rout rules come back. Until the Marines grab a few buildings, though, most broken units will be routing or Low Crawling back to the seawall.

The Japanese defense is all about fortifications. There’s a Command Bunker with rooftop, ground-level and underground cellar Locations. Seawalls take a Breach attempt to cross. Mined tetrahedrons choke off the landing zones, and wire funnels the attackers into fire lanes. Spotters in towers can call down the big 8-inch coastal guns. None of it’s friendly.

The Marines answer with naval OBA. Shipboard observers at level 1 can fire directly at bunkers with a unique two-hit system, or the Marines can wait for Shore Fire Control Parties to land and call in the big barrages. Inaccurate fire can rubble the long pier, though, and that cuts a vital supply route. Yes, that happened to me. See the image above.

Personal Morale Check

You’ve probably heard players talk about the PMC, the Personal Morale Check. Sometimes the dice or the tone of a game wear a player down, and he stops having fun or starts taking crazy risks. If any game tests a player’s PMC, it’s playing the Marines in BRT.

To win, the Marines have to control every fortified building Location, pillbox, bombproof and command bunker. And they have to do it before the Japanese score more than 804 CVP, roughly 402 MMC. In most scenarios, losing a handful of squads or tanks hurts. Imagine losing hundreds of them. The image to the left is the Marine casualties after the first three turns of Utmost Savagery. 😐

For the first several campaign dates, with waves landing on turns 1, 3 and 5, the Marine player has to accept a massacre. It’s what happened historically, and it’s what happens in BRT. Losing 15 squads in a single Defensive Fire Phase is common early on, as LVTs burn on the reef and wading Marines get cut to ribbons. I’m not ashamed to admit my own PMC has been tested more than once!

Blood Reef: Tarawa isn’t a game of surgical maneuver. It’s an exercise in attrition, wave management, morale and patience. Until the Marines get off the beach and into the hinterland, it feels like one giant turkey shoot. Eventually the tide turns. Pun intended. The question is whether the Marines have enough left after the reef to take the whole island.

Where to Buy

Long out of print. Expect to pay $400 to $500 on the used wargaming market.

Debriefing

Blood Reef: Tarawa puts one of the bloodiest landings of the war on a single, crowded map. The reef rules, the cloaked LVTs, the Pathfinders and the no-break Marines make the first turns feel as awful as they were. Once the Marines reach the seawall, it turns into a long, grinding bunker fight.

It’s not a module for everyone, and it’s not cheap to find. If you get the chance to play it, start with one of the smaller scenarios before you try a campaign game. And when you do take on Utmost Savagery, adjust your Personal Morale accordingly.

Academy Out!

GET TO THE CHOPPA…!!!

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