(The following story by Scott Wong appeared on The Argus website on November 11.)
FREMONT, Calif. — Dan Archer’s combat career lasted 76 hours, but the short battle in which he fought on a tiny mid-Pacific atoll is regarded by historians as one of the bloodiest small battles of World War II.
This Veterans Day falls just days before the 60th anniversary of the battle at Tarawa — fought on a 3-mile-long, 1,000-yard-wide island that today is part of the Republic of Kiribati — a battle that left more than 1,100 Americans and 4,800 Japanese dead and thousands more injured.
Archer, an 85-year-old Fremont resident, was one of the injured. The longtime Ohlone College trustee and former Newark school principal didn’t consider himself a hero — just “damn lucky.”
Archer was serving with the 2nd Marine Division on the morning of Nov. 20, 1943, when it invaded Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.
Low tide and a coral shelf made it nearly impossible for the landing crafts to reach shore. Instead, Archer and his comrades — carrying 75-pound packs and a standard-issue rifle — waded in waist-high water from about 500 yards from shore.
“We were just sitting ducks several hundred yards out into the ocean,” Archer said. “Hundreds of Marines were being dumped off shore, and because the landing craft couldn’t go any further, and the tide was out … we were helpless. The Japanese were dug in and firing at those of us who were trying to wade to shore.”
Although his comrades were being picked off by machine-gun fire, Archer was more concerned about getting cut up by the razor-sharp coral than being hit by a bullet or mortar shell, he said.
“I was just fortunate that I survived out there,” he said. “It took us more than three days, and for the length of time involved in that invasion, it’s often classified as the bloodiest battle of the Second World War.”
Archer is a native of Somerset, Ohio, a region known for producing Philip Sheridan and other famous Civil War generals. Archer’s two grandfathers fought for the Union, one earning a Congressional Medal of Honor that he has kept through the years.
Archer volunteered for the Marine Corps in early 1943, while enrolled in Xavier University in Cincinnati. Pearl Harbor had been attacked a year earlier and Archer heard reports that some of his high school classmates had been killed in the fighting.
“I could have continued in school at the time, but I was overcome with patriotism,” Archer said.
Within the year, he was shipped off to boot camp in Paris Island, S.C., advanced training in New River, N.C., and to a San Diego naval base — a door to the Pacific, where America was staging its assault on Japan.
Months later, Archer landed back on the West Coast at the Oakland Naval Hospital, where he was treated for injures suffered while crossing the Tarawa reefs.
Today, as Veterans Day passes, the country is fighting a different war, one with different enemies and troops. But the holiday has lost some of its meaning, Archer said.
“There isn’t the attention paid to a day like Veterans Day that I feel it should have,” he said. “When I was a kid back home, people were more responsive to honoring the veterans. Every town had a parade, and a local band and orchestra and flags.”
For Archer, the world wars have become two of life’s great ironies. He notes that Americans drive BMWs, Mercedes, Hondas and Toyotas — products of the country’s wartime enemies.
“I’m not bitter or critical,” he said. “I just think of it as an irony that not too many decades after we fought two fierce wars against the Japanese and the Germans, we’re all here driving their automobiles up and down the highway. Time can erase a lot of memories and bitterness.”