“Fix bayonets!” he roared in the Japanese he had learned years ago. “Charge!”
Betrayed by their own virtues—ardor and obedience—the Japanese leaped erect and charged, coming in a swarm to be obliterated by Marine rifle fire or the hosing of the tank’s machine gun.
Six enemy guns were knocked out by Warner and the tank, until the Japanese were gradually thrust from the swamp and a solid Marine firing line had been built up. Captain Warner lost a leg as a result of wounds received in his attack, but he had put the battle on the way to being won. Artillery observers were soon up front calling for the fire which held the line until morning.
Then five batteries of field guns began firing. Machine guns swept the swamp, mortars lobbed in shells, antitank guns blasted away with cannister shot—and the screams of the enemy were audible to the Marines. When the guns fell silent the men of the First Battalion, Twenty-first Marines, moved through the First Battalion, Third, into the swamp and found it as still and silent as a morgue.
Koromokina contained the bodies of 377 Japanese soldiers who had died to kill 17 United States Marines.
It was November 9 and Technical Sergeant Frank Devine was desperate for a story. He was a Marine combat correspondent, one of that corps of professional newsmen who had given up their jobs to march with the Marines and write about them. They were assigned one to a regiment and given the mission of reporting the battle at the cannon’s mouth. Their stories went by mail to Marine Headquarters in Washington and were passed on to the press from there.
On that morning of November 9 Devine was soaking wet and he did not have a story in sight.
True, there had been the Battle of the Koromokina Swamp, but that hadn’t happened in his sector. True, Major General Roy Geiger had relieved Lieutenant General Vandegrift as commander of the First Marine Amphibious Corps on Bougainville and the Treasuries, but that was a story for the civilian war correspondents (it was a big one, however, for Vandegrift of Guadalcanal was going home to his fourth star and command of the Marine Corps). True again, the first elements of the Army’s 37th Division had begun to arrive, but that was the Army combat reporters’ beat—and who wanted to write about dogfaces anyway?
Sergeant Devine looked sourly at the sodden sheet of paper in the little typewriter cradled on his knees. He noticed that the machine had already begun to rust and wondered how many days before it would become useless. He wondered what it would be like to wear dry socks and sleep on dry ground. He listened to the rain. He stared and tried to think of something that the folks at home might find interesting, and then he wrote:
“Bougainville, Nov. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9—It rained today.”
The fighting on Bougainville had shifted to the Marines’ right or eastern flank.
Since November 5, the men of the 23rd Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel Kawano had been striking hard at the Raiders blocking the Mission Trail. The trailblock held. More, the Marines came out of it to push farther toward a fork about 2,000 yards outside the new perimeter where the Mission Trail joined the Piva Trail, becoming thereafter the Piva Trail. This force, commanded by Colonel Edward Craig, had left the Raiders holding the trailblock behind them and by November 8 had pushed up to a point just below the Mission-Piva confluence. The next morning they would attack past it.
On the morning of November 9 the Twelfth Marines opened up with howitzers. When the barrage lifted, the Marine riflemen attacked—and were struck by Japanese who had waited out the artillery in foxholes.
Again it was grenade for grenade, shot for shot. Tanks were useless. The trail was too narrow and the swamp on either side too deep. The Marines had to attack straight ahead-blindly.
A platoon led by Lieutenant John Sabini was pinned down by an unseen machine gun. Sabini jumped up, shouting, “When they open up on me, fire back!” The Japanese did open up and Sabini was hit. He fell. He jumped up again, still shouting, and was hit again. By then his Marines had spotted the hidden gun and had charged it and destroyed it. The attack slogged forward, 40 or 50 yards an hour.
Downtrail the Japanese came stealthily at the Raiders’ roadblock, searching out its defenses. When they had located two foxhole outposts each manned by a pair of Marines with a BAR and rifle, they opened up with heavy machine-gun fire. They filled the air with grenades. The Marines in one of the holes were killed. There was a lull.
In the other hole Pfc. Henry Gurke said to Pfc. Donald Probst, “Look, you’ve got the BAR and you’re more important.”
“So?” Probst whispered, his eyes fastened on the green tangle to his front.
“They’re using a lot of grenades,” Gurke explained. “One of ’em might land in the hole.”
Probst nodded in anticipation, and Gurke concluded: “So if one should land in here I’ll take it.”
It was not the time to argue. The enemy was rushing in again and Probst’s automatic rifle was chattering and spreading death among them. Then came the somersaulting grenades and the thud as one of them plopped between them. It lay there, a dirty hissing container packed with death and Gurke threw Probst aside and dropped upon it.
Pfc. Probst never knew whether or not he heard the muffled explosion for his finger was squeezing the trigger of the BAR his friend had found “important” enough to die for, and the charging enemy was falling back. They returned, again and again, sweeping in on other fronts, but the roadblock still held. The attack up the Piva Trail went forward until, on the morning of November 10, with a brief sharp artillery shoot and the support of 12 low-flying Avengers, the Second Battalion, Ninth, moved out to find that the enemy was gone.
Colonel Kawano had left 550 of his soldiers along the Mission-Piva Trail in fighting that began November 5 and ended November 11, and there were only 19 Marines killed and 32 wounded.
And there was also a posthumous Medal of Honor for Pfc. Henry Gurke.
Life on Puruata was like living on a bull’s-eye. This tiny islet 700 yards long and 400 wide was now the warehouse of the Bougainville campaign. The mainland beaches were too narrow and there was no dry coastal plain on which to place food and ammunition dumps. LST’s running up to Bougainville had to come to Puruata to unload.
So did the Japanese bombers from Rabaul. It was such an easy trip they could make it regularly. Torokina was only 230 miles from Rabaul, in comparison to the 640 miles which had separated Rabaul and Guadalcanal a year ago.
Japanese bombers plastered Puruata endlessly and made a sleepless hell of the lives of the Marine pioneers and depot companies who were stationed there. By day the bombers were not so bad, for there was always Marine air to intercept them and drive them off.
But at night…
At night little Puruata lay like a moonstone embedded in the dark ocean. Moonlight bathed her coconuts and washed the water breaking on her seaward reef to silver. Moonlight marked her clearly for the enemy bombers, and men who had worked all day ran to man antiaircraft guns or to form stretcher parties to make the inevitable search for the dead and wounded once the bombers had flown away.
Their ears were filled with the wailing and crashing of the bombs and the whamming of the antiaircraft guns, and when the fuel dump was set afire or the ammunition depot blew up they rolled the gas drums out of the inferno or darted among the exploding shells to lug ammunition cases to safety.
Even so Puruata never lost its sense of humor, that self-mockery which could make men laugh even while the air around them was whizzing with disintegrating steel-as they did the night Puruata had its third straight raid and a little Marine ran for his foxhole shouting:
“Hang onto your false teeth, girls-they may be dropping sandwiches.”
Colonel Kawano had decided to withdraw. He was going to move off the Piva Trail which ran north-south over Bougainville’s towering mountains and retreat east over the East-West Trail. He was going to await the arrival of reinforcements.
To gain time to make his withdrawal, Kawano arranged a delaying action at a position he had fortified
beforehand. It was in a coconut grove just below the junction where the Piva Trail going north met the East-West going east. It was about five miles outside General Turnage’s perimeter. Something less than a company was assigned to hold it. It was a sturdy defense line, well underground, for the men of the 23rd Regiment respected the Marine artillery.
But on the morning of November 13, when Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Smoak’s Second Battalion, Twenty-first, attacked through the coconut grove, they came on without their artillery. They were immediately pinned down. E Company led by Captain Sidney Altman was unable to move. Word was sent back to Smoak. He rushed up reinforcing companies and called for the artillery.
Lieutenant Bob Rennie went up the trail to join Major Glenn Fissel, the battalion’s executive officer. He set up his telephone behind a mangrove tree about fifty yards away from the source of all that banging and chattering. He gave his position to the artillery operations officer and said, “Put a round about five hundred yards in front of me.”
It went whistling over, but its crash was muffled by the jungle.
“Bring it down two hundred yards,” Rennie said.
The whistle was louder, the crash of the shell distinct and reverberating, but it seemed to the left of the battle.
“Another hundred down and you’d better bring it right one hundred yards.”
The shell’s passage was a scream now, its crash echoing. Rennie glanced at Major Fissel.
“That deflection seem all right, Major?”
Fissel nodded and Rennie spoke again into the telephone.
“Down one hundred. Deflection correct.”
There was hardly an instant separating the scream and the wham. Rennie glanced again at Fissel. The shells were landing only a hundred yards from the Marine front. It could be dangerous to lower the range, but Fissel nodded, and Rennie’s voice was tinged with apprehension as he said:
“Down fifty. Deflection correct.”
Now the scream of the shell seemed to begin sooner and stay around longer. The crash shook water from the foliage.
“How was that?” Rennie asked.
Fissel ignored him and shouted uptrail, “Pass the word for someone up there to come back and tell us how those shells are going.”
A Marine came back. His face was gaunt and streaked with slime. He shouted, for his ears were still full of the clamor of battle.
“If you come back another twenty-five yards you’ll be right on top of those lousy Japs: ‘
Lieutenant Rennie’s face blanched. His lips tightened. Twenty-five yards! It was too risky. But he gave the order.
“Down twenty-five.”
And now the screams were those of wounded and dying men, hoarse and trailing in their agony and making no words but only the atavistic sounds of stricken animals.
“Cease fire!” Rennie shouted frantically into the telephone.
“Cease fire!”
He knew it, he should never have brought it in that close, and he cursed that Marine for misleading him into bringing death down on his own men. Then another Marine appeared, an officer, and he was angry.
“What in hell’s the matter with the artillery? Why’d you cease firing?”
“Aren’t we hitting our own men?”
“Like hell you are!” the officer bellowed. “Those are the Japs screaming. Make ‘em scream some more—plenty more! My men like to hear it.”
So the tension left the lips of Lieutenant Rennie and he smiled as he picked up the telephone and said:
“Belay that last. Fire for effect!”
The shells continued to crash into the coconut grove and when the barrage was lifted, E Company had pulled out of the enemy trap and was able to re-form for the attack which went forward that day and the next until the coconut grove was cleaned out.
The mouth of the East-West Trail had been cleared and the way was now open to pursuit.
7
When Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki came out to the Gilbert Islands in August, 1943, to direct the defense of this Central Pacific group about 2,400 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, he set up headquarters on the islet of Betio. This was the coral speck which the Japanese had renamed Bititu and which the world now knows as Tarawa from the chain of which it is only a part.
For Tarawa is not an island but an atoll, one of those chains of islets created by a great saw-toothed saucer of coral rising from the ocean floor. The broken teeth sticking above water are the islets. Within them, in the hollow of the saucers—enclosed or half-closed by surrounding reef—are lagoons. They are excellent anchorages. Some of the islets are broad enough to support airports. Tarawa Atoll, a triangle with its sides running about 30 miles north-south and its base about 25 miles east-west, formed one of these anchorages. It was accessible through a western channel about six miles above Betio, which was the westernmost islet and the left-hand angle of the triangle. Betio was also just big enough to support an airfield while being too small for enemy maneuver. It became the heart of the defense of Tarawa Atoll, which was itself the key to the Gilberts, and it was fortified by the Japanese as had been no island in history.
Such defenses were the result of the raid on Makin Atoll 105 miles north by Carlson’s Raiders in August, 1942. The Makin incursion had had a rich yield of headlines in America, but it had warned Japan of the necessity of defending the Gilberts and of the futility of attempting it on Makin. In September of 1942 an industrious rear admiral named Tomanari Saichiro began fortifying Betio. He built an airfield on the western half of the parrot-shaped islet, on the bird’s body, and he made each of Betio’s 291 acres bristle with every gun in the Japanese arsenal-all mounted within pillboxes, blockhouses and huge bombproofs of ferro-concrete two stories high. Betio’s beaches were girdled by a sea wall made of coconut logs clamped and stapled together. It was from three to five feet in height and stood about 20 feet inland from the water. An American helmet reared above this sea wall would be as clear and helpless as a fly walking down a windowpane. And if the Americans crouched beneath it, Betio’s mortars would dye the sands with their blood. The mortars had the beaches registered—and they were behind a formidable array of machine guns and light artillery interlocked to sweep the lip of the sea wall, and after that the airfield.
There were 62 heavy machine guns and 44 light machine guns—many of them twin mounts-nine 37-millimeter antitank guns and the 37’s of 14 light tanks dug into the coral sand and camouflaged with palm fronds-to say nothing of the rifles, pistols, grenades and bayonets of the defending troops, to say nothing of the heavier artillery.
Of this there were six 70-millimeter battalion guns, eight more 75-millimeter dual-purpose guns, ten 75-millimeter mountain guns, four five-inch dual purpose guns, six 80-millimeter guns, four coast defense guns 5.5 inches in diameter and four eight-inch coastal guns brought to Betio from Singapore. Most of these guns were mounted to fire antiboat along preselected fields of fire. They were sighted from concrete-and-coral pillboxes. The five- and eight-inch guns could duel the invading ships. The eight-inchers were placed at each end of the island, two to an end, and served from enormous concrete ammunition rooms.
To either end of the airfield, east and west, there were tank traps. The field itself was protected by rifle pits and pillboxes, dug in deeply and covered with coconut logs and coral sand and sometimes also with concrete. These firing holes were also interlocked, often served by networks of trenches.
Only the water defenses needed improvement when, eleven months later, Admiral Shibasaki arrived on Betio to relieve Saichiro. The new commander completed these on the south or ocean side by erecting a wicked offshore maze of horned concrete tetrahedrons. They were wired together, mines were sprinkled among them, and they were so placed as to channel all incoming boats into the point-blank fire of the 70-, 75- and 8o-millimeter guns. This was done by mid-September, 1943. Admiral Shibasaki next set his men to placing the same sort of obstacles between the northern or lagoon beaches and the lagoon reef about 500 to 1,000 yards offsho
re. When this was done, the admiral would have fulfilled his assignment in the Imperial General Headquarters plan called Yogaki, or Waylaying Attack. Yogaki’s purpose was to teach the Americans the prohibitive costs of invading fortified islands. Under it, Shibasaki was to make Betio impregnable while:
Long-range aircraft flew down from Rabaul and Kavieng to bomb the invaders, and then land on Gilberts-Marshalls fields;
Short-range aircraft flew down from Truk by stages to these same airfields to provide aerial defense;
Admiral Kondo’s powerful Second Fleet arrived to attack American shipping;
And a heavy force of submarines converged from all directions.
This was the plan, but on September 19 the Americans began hacking away at it.
On that night and the succeeding day the new American carriers Lexington and the smaller Princeton and Belleau Wood made their fighting debut at Betio’s expense. Their airplanes shot up the boats needed to carry the tetrahedrons out into the lagoon and they also destroyed much of the cement.
Still, Shibasaki was not dismayed. His gun emplacements had not been harmed. He had had time to make Betio’s ocean side impregnable and Tarawa was now on the neap, that seasonal tide when waters are lowest. Shibasaki doubted very much if the Americans would be able to cross the lagoon reef.
So did the Americans; so did a couple of generals named Smith.
The first was Holland M. Smith and he was a major general in command of the Fifth Amphibious Corps. He was six-one, graying, a man with a dandified white mustache and professorial eyeglasses juxtaposed against a big aggressive nose and a tongue that could be blistering and irreverent whenever Marines were being slighted. The Marines called him Howlin’ Mad. In legend it was because of what he had said to the men he led on a record-breaking hike through the Philippine jungle in 1906; in fact it was because it fitted his first name and middle initial as much as his temperament.
Strong Men Armed Page 19