Betio, part of the Tarawa Atoll, is a small, bird-shaped island along the equator in the central Pacific. Early in the morning on November 20, 1943, elements of the Second Marine Division boarded tracked landing vehicles and headed for Betio’s beaches to battle Japanese forces under the command of Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki. The Japanese commander had boasted to his approximately 4,800 troops that “a million men couldn’t take Tarawa in 100 years.”
It took the marines just seventy-six hours to capture the two-mile long island. They paid, however, a terrible price. For a time, it seemed as if the marines would be thrown back into the sea. War correspondent Robert Sherrod of Time magazine, who wrote a best-selling book about the fighting, said that it was the “only battle which I ever thought we were going to lose.”
Born on December 30, 1904, Shoup, at the age of twelve, moved with his family from their home near Battle Ground to a farm outside of Covington. “I always felt I had more than my share of chores to do on the farm,” said Shoup, who helped to feed his struggling family by using his skills as a hunter. In an interview with the Indianapolis Star, Shoup’s mother, Mary, remembered that even as a child her son had shown a will to “get to the top in whatever he did.”
While in Covington Shoup met his future wife, Zola De Haven, at a Halloween party. “I saw a cute little girl sitting across the room and decided right there she was the girl I was going to marry,” said Shoup. “It took me 15 years to convince her.” (The two were finally married in September 1931.) Shoup later noted that a person could achieve much in life if he had “an angel for a mother and an angel for a wife.” During his days attending the local high school, he earned a reputation as an excellent student as well as athlete, playing on the basketball team and winning election as senior class president in 1921.
After graduating with honors from high school, Shoup received a partial scholarship to attend DePauw University, where he majored in mathematics and used his athletic talents on the college’s wrestling and football squads. Although his scholarship covered his tuition, Shoup had to work at a variety of jobs in order to help pay for his living expenses. He worked as a waiter and dishwasher and spent time in a cement factory and as principal of a school in Tab, Indiana. The scramble to make ends meet also led Shoup to enroll in the advanced Reserve Officer Training Corp program offered to upperclassmen at the university.
During his senior year of college, Shoup became a member of the ROTC’s Scabbard and Blade Honor Society. At the group’s annual meeting in New Orleans, representatives from the DePauw chapter heard a speech from JohnA. Lejeune, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. At the end of his talk, Lejeune encouraged the young men in attendance to inform honor graduates of their colleges to write him a personal letter if they were interested in obtaining a commission in the marines. Shoup heard about Lejeune’s offer and immediately sent off a letter taking advantage of the opportunity.
After graduating from DePauw in June 1926, Shoup found himself once again in dire financial circumstances. To help make ends meet, he served on active duty for two weeks with the Army Reserve Corps at Camp Knox in Kentucky. After his initial tour expired, he continued to apply for additional weeks of active duty “because I got good pay, more money than I ever saw in my life.” While at the army camp, he received a telegram from the marines to report for a physical examination in Chicago. Shoup passed the exam and eventually received a commission as a second lieutenant.
On August 25, 1926, Shoup reported for duty with sixteen other newly commissioned officers to the marine barracks in Philadelphia to receive their first assignments. Major Alley D. Rorex told Shoup he be playing with the marine football team. “Whereupon I made the first mistake I made in the Marine Corps,” Shoup recalled. “I said, ‘Sir, I didn’t come in the Marine Corps to play football.’ Major Rorex had Shoup stand at attention for what seemed like twenty minutes before responding, “From now on, the Marine Corps will tell you what to do, you’re not going to tell us what to do.”
Over the next several years, Shoup served in a variety of duties with the Marine Corps, including as part of an expeditionary force sent by the U.S. government to protect American lives during a revolution in China in 1926–27, working with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the United States during the Great Depression, and serving onboard the battleship USS Maryland.
When Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in the Hawaiian Islands, on December 7, 1941, Shoup, then a major, was stationed with other members of the First Marine Brigade in Iceland. President Franklin Roosevelt had sent American forces to Iceland in the fall to relieve British troops, who were needed for the fighting in North Africa, and to protect the vital North Atlantic shipping routes. With America’s entry into World War II, Shoup left Iceland for the Pacific to fight the Japanese, serving as operations and training officer for the Second Marine Division stationed in Wellington, New Zealand, in late 1942.
Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Shoup saw action as an observer with the First Marine Division at Guadalcanal and with the army’s Forty-third Infantry Division at Rendova, New Georgia, where he earned his first Purple Heart after being wounded in the leg. Back with the Second Marine Division at its McKays Crossing Camp outside of Wellington, the thirty-eight-year-old Shoup earned a reputation as “the most formidable poker player” in the division, according to fellow marine J. Frederick Haley. Shoup became a familiar figure to the men of the division, who appreciated his ability to listen to their suggestions and his colorful, often profane, language. His leadership ability would be tested to the utmost on Betio.
Such horrific scenes caused some marines to refuse to leave the safety of whatever cover they could find. A frustrated major bitterly complained to Shoup that his men refused to follow him for an attack on the island’s airfield. “You’ve got to say, ‘Who will follow me?’ And if only ten follow you,” Shoup said, “that’s the best you can do, but it’s better than nothing.” Trying to get word of the dicey situation on Betio to his commanders onboard the USS Maryland, Shoup sent Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson with a message on what supplies were needed. “You tell the general and the admiral that we’re going to stick and fight it out,” Shoup told Carlson.
Later, Shoup sent a message to General Julian Smith that read: “Casualties: many. Percentage dead: not known. Combat efficiency: we are winning.” The ultimate American victory came after approximately seventy-six hours of desperate fighting. It was a battle, one war correspondent observed, won “by sheer courage—when the Marines had nothing else to fall back on, they had courage.”
Two years after he retired from the service in December 1963, Shoup spoke out against the growing American involvement in Vietnam. He told students at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California, that Southeast Asia, as related to the safety and freedom of the United States, was not “worth the life or limb of a single American.” He later cowrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly magazine criticizing the growth of militarism in America.
Shoup died on January 13, 1983, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His opposition to the Vietnam War may have puzzled, and angered, some of his friends in the military, but it reflected his experience of the true cost of war he had seen on the beaches of Betio. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle, he had returned to the island to help dedicate a memorial. Shoup ended his speech with a prayer that read: “Please God, may our ships of state sail on and on in a world forever at peace.”
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