Continuing a walk around Betio, I concentrated on the coast first as it was low tide. The battle lasted only for a couple of days, but some of the mess is still here. I had heard that you can even still find human remains in the sand, which has never been completely cleared of all war remains. Walking on the beach, I stumbled upon the rusting remains of what looked like a similar gun, and I could see other items stuck in the sand. One of them bore a love declaration to a certain Lilian both had graffiti on them, making them look less menacing. Once I reached the entrance to Betio, though, it was very obvious: there are two large mounted guns pointing towards the Pacific, in a quite good condition still.
With plenty of rusting vehicle parts, it was not easy to say if they were war related, or more recent remains of a truck.I walked from Bairiki, the islet to the east of Betio, over the causeway that links both islands, and started scanning the beach to see if there was anything visible already here. Most of the remains of the war have been removed, but many still remain, and walking around Betio you are bound to see those war relics. After bombing Pearl Harbour in 1941, the Japanese built strongholds in several places of the South Pacific which thus eventually became a battleground of the biggest war of our history and which took the war to places that were of strategic importance, but otherwise had nothing to do with the war. The Battle of Tarawa took 3 days from 20 November 1943, and in those few days, more than 1100 US marines and 4500 Japanese soldiers were dead. Some of these places have actually seen heavy fighting in the Second World War, and Tarawa is one of those places. Think South Pacific and you are almost bound to think of atolls with incredible turquoise waters, of remote villages, of peaceful people living their everyday lives far away from the rest of the world - literally.
Battle of Tarawa relics > Kiribati > Oceania
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