Sixty-three years ago this month, the 2nd Marine Division landed in the Gilbert Islands on a tiny islet smaller than New York City's Central Park. In doing so, it precipitated one of the most vicious battles in the history of a Corps that has become famous for tough fights. Betio was the name of the island, but the battle has become known by the name of the atoll in which Betio formed the centerpiece of the Japanese defense: Tarawa.

As much as any battle of World War II, Tarawa illustrates the profound difference between how the American news media regarded war in 1943 and how it does so today.

The landing at Tarawa, for example, was plagued from the start by what today would almost certainly be characterized as an intelligence failure. Tarawa was surrounded by a fringing reef that extended as far out as a thousand yards in places. On D-day, the tide was so low that landing craft could not cross the reef. Many Marines were forced to debark at the edge of the reef and wade in to the beach under murderous fire.

The Marines who had planned the operation were disappointed, but not surprised. The question of tides had surfaced early in the planning process. The planners knew that tides would be lower than normal on D-day, but no one knew whether or not the water over the reef would be so low that landing craft could not reach the beach.

Unfortunately, the American naval charts and tidal information were based largely on data collected by the Wilkes Expedition of the mid-1800s. Even local mariners with recent experience were unable to predict the tides with certainty.

To hedge their bets, the Marines looked for an alternate way to land. The solution was the amphibious tractor or amtrac. This ingenious vehicle could swim ashore like a boat but could crawl over the reef on its tracks if necessary.

Before they could implement their innovative plan, the Marines had to surmount two obstacles. The first was to round up an adequate number of amtracs. The best they were able to do was to assemble enough to land the first three waves. The rest of the Marines would literally have to wade into the fight.

Because the amtracs were designed as logistics vehicles, they were unarmored. To afford them minimum protection, the Marines searched junkyards throughout New Zealand, where they were stationed, for boiler plate and other pieces of scrap that could be welded to the amtracs as a form of home-made armor.

The planners were also relying on an intense pre-landing bombardment by air and naval gunfire to eliminate, or seriously damage, the coast-defense guns and heavy machine-guns on Betio that could destroy the amtracs during the landing. In spite of predictions that the bombardment would "obliterate" the defenders, the reality was very different.

The hundreds of reinforced concrete and coconut-log bunkers and gun positions that caused some historians to call Tarawa "the most heavily defended atoll that would ever be invaded by Allied forces in the Pacific" proved to be largely impervious to bombs and gunfire. As a result, the Marines were forced to dig the Japanese out of their positions one bunker at a time. The defenders were Rikusentai, special naval-landing-force troops who preferred death to surrender. When the battle was over, eight of the 2,571 defenders were alive. The rest had been killed in the fighting or had committed suicide to avoid capture.

Because Tarawa was the first assault against a heavily defended atoll, the Marines were breaking new ground. They found themselves lacking adequate numbers of flamethrowers, tanks and demolition teams needed to deal with extensive fortifications. The battle degenerated into the most savage kind of no-quarter close combat that was reflected in American casualties. In the 76 hours it took to secure Betio, the Marines and their Navy corpsmen suffered 3,407 casualties, more than a thousand of them killed.

The toll at Tarawa shocked the American public. Gen. Douglas MacArthur criticized the landing as "an unnecessary massacre," and some members of Congress demanded an investigation.

Robert Sherrod, a war correspondent who landed with the Marines on Betio, became convinced that the Japanese adopted their fatalistic approach in the "hope that the Americans would grow sick of their own losses before completing the job."

Shortly after the battle, a New York Times editorial dealt with the numerous American mistakes at Tarawa by noting that "a cunning enemy like the Japanese will always present us with problems that can never be quite solved in advance." The editorial went on to say that the approach adopted by the enemy "makes the war against Japan a war of extermination in which there is virtually no quarter."

Incredible! A paper that now worries about depriving captured terrorists of their sleep was writing in 1943 about a war in which enemy garrisons "will have to be killed off to the last man."

One can only wonder how today's New York Times would have dealt with Tarawa and what the impact might have been on American public opinion.

Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (USMC, ret.), a monthly contributor, is a military historian and a professor of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy or the Department of Defense.