Tarawa: at world’s edge
July 26, 2010
Tarawa from above
(Photo by Tokyo Reporter, March 17, 2010) Read more
Evening arrives at the Nippon Causeway on Tarawa, Kiribati
March 12, 2010
Evening arrives at the Nippon Causeway on Tarawa, Kiribati, the site a major World War II battle in 1943
(Photo by Tokyo Reporter, March 11, 2010) Read more
Return to Tarawa
September 14, 2009
TARAWA, KIRIBATI (TR) – Sixty-six years ago, the Pacific island atoll of Tarawa was a World War II battlefield of billowing black smoke and death’s stench. Allied and Japanese forces blazed through its coconut trees and white sands, today a part of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, and turned it into a charred chunk of earth upon which roughly 6,000 lives were lost — making it one of the most gruesome battles in U.S. military history.
Former U.S. Naval Ensign Leon Cooper remembers that seventy-six-hour period as if it were yesterday. “I still have nightmares from to time,” says the 89-year-old. “A random smell reminds me of the stink of that time. A sudden loud noise makes me jump.”
But with the landscape of Tarawa, the capital of the nation’s collection of coral atolls that are spread over 1,351,000 square miles of ocean, now largely a rubbish pit, Cooper set his demons aside and returned, in February 2008. Read more
