at Tarawa (1913–1919) and became Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony in 1926. 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 U.S. Marines landed on Tarawa and fought Japanese soldiers occupying entrenched positions on the atoll. The Marines captured the island after 76 hours of intense fighting that killed 6,000 people in total. The fierce fighting was the subject of a documentary film produced by the Combat Photographers of the Second Marine Division entitled With the Marines at Tarawa. It was released in March 1944 at the insistence of President Roosevelt. It became the first time many Americans viewed American servicemen dead on film.. The US built bases on Island. The Kiribati Government began a road restoration project funded in part by the World Bank in 2014 to re-surface the main road from Betio in the west to Bonriki in the east, upgrading the main road that transits Tarawa from a dirt road. As of 2018, all that remained to be completed of this project was the sealing of the Japanese Causeway, connecting Bairiki and Betio, done in 2019. Literature and journal A Pattern of Islands by Sir Arthur Grimble, John Murray & Co, London, 1952; republished 2011 by Eland, London, Return to the Islands by Sir Arthur Grimble, John Murray & Co, London, 1957 The 2004 book The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost is a lighthearted account of the author's two years living on Tarawa. The Precedence of Tarawa Atoll, by H.E. Maude and Edwin Doran Jr, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Jun. 1966), pp. 269–289. Kiribati. Cronache illustrate da una terra (s)perduta is an illustrated book of Alice Piciocchi (illustrator: Andrea Angeli). March 2016. 24 Ore Cultura, Milan, also in French translation Chronique illustrée d’un archipel perdu, éditions du Rouergue, 2018. "Tarawa" by war correspondent Robert Sherrod was published in 1944 and chronicles the WWII battle In popular culture Tarawa is the site of the 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Frank Filan, depicting a destroyed bunker. Leon Cooper, a US Navy Landing Craft Operator who took part in the WWII battle, returned to the island in 2008 to investigate reports the beach he landed on was littered with garbage. His journey was chronicled in the