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Tarawa
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tags: [geography]
► definition
Definition:1. an atoll and the capital of the Republic of Kiribati, in the central Pacific Ocean. It comprises North Tarawa, which has much in common with other, more remote islands of the Gilberts group; and South Tarawa, which is home to 56,284 people as of 2010 – half of the country's total population. The atoll is best known by outsiders as the site of the Battle of Tarawa during World War II.[...]During World War II, Tarawa was occupied by the Japanese, and beginning on 20 November 1943 it was the scene of the bloody Battle of Tarawa. On that day United States Marines landed on Tarawa and suffered heavy losses from Japanese soldiers occupying entrenched positions on the atoll. The Marines secured the island after 76 hours of intense fighting with around 6,000 dead in total from both sides.text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike2. USS Tarawa (LHA-1) is a United States Navy amphibious assault ship, the lead ship of her class, and the second ship to be named for the Battle of Tarawa during World War II. Tarawa was decommissioned on 31 March 2009, at San Diego Naval Base.text from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike
photo: by Government of Kiribati, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licensemap: by OpenStreetMap®, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
photo: By Taylor Goode. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6952613
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looked out upon the wide expanse of ocean, heaving under a dark and lowering sky, and wondered moodily why I was ever such an idiot as to take charge of a trading station on such a God-forsaken place as Tarawa Island in the Gilbert Group.
Louis Becke. The Strange Adventure of James Shervinton (1902)
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[...] Tarawa's lone road unravels from idyllic to raw to a Malthusian hell. There are, simply, too many people on South Tarawa, particularly on the islet of Betio, which has the world's highest population density, greater even than Hong Kong.
J. Maarten Troost. The Sex Lives of Cannibals, p.64 (2004)
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Oceania is a world of villages, each with its own rules and routines. And with strikingly few exceptions, the larger urban areas like Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea are either cesspools of criminality or dissolute slums like South Tarawa in Kiribati, where the inhabitants drift ever further from the village culture that has sustained them for generations.
J. Maarten Troost. Getting Stoned with Savages (2006)
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Off the New Jersey coast, the helicopter assault ship Tarawa and two frigates were racing to join up, bringing ten AV-8B Harrier attack fighters and fourteen ASW helicopters to supplement his air strength.
Tom Clancy. The Hunt for Red October, p.169 (1984)
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