It sure seems like I’ve been on a history kick lately, doesn’t it? And, I suppose I have.
Part of it is because you usually can’t learn from things that haven’t yet happened, and everything that has already happened is history. Just because you didn’t know about it doesn’t mean it wasn’t history. It just was history you didn’t know about.
I bet a lot of you didn’t know about Edward Heimberger, one of the heroes of the Battle of Tarawa.
Who knew that one of Arnold the Pig’s friends had such a background?
There is a WWII documentary (of course I can’t remember which — it was a series, though) that interviewed a Marine who was an eyewitness, from a higher point on the beach, to this exact act of heroism. It stuck in his mind after all the years since the war. Powerful stuff.
This video glosses over the fact that he went back to his ship with wounded, came back, picked up more, and repeated that several times, all under fire; which the interviewee said was the main credit: the boats were not expected to make more than one trip to the beach and back to the safety of their vessel. In other words, he could have quit after only one trip and not one of his shipmates would have been surprised.
I read that the difficulties during the “neap tide” referred to in the narrative, which caused the invasion boats to ground on the coral reefs, were predicted to the Navy by a local fisherman who knew that area well. They dismissed his intelligence (in both senses of the word). They felt our technology could overcome anything. Wrong.
If you can track down a copy of the video “The Battle History of the Marines” there is an interview with him. He doesn’t make it sound very heroic on his part. But he mentions some of the Marines in the water refused rescue and just wanted him to bring them some weapons because they has lost theirs. When he got back they were all dead.