Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Those denunciations delivered since Tarawa—that Marines were capable only of the frontal charge and were careless with men’s lives—would receive their reply in the New Britain campaign. On New Britain it was as though Guadalcanal were being reversed, for here were 10,000 Japanese holding a jungle beachhead and airfield against the onslaught of some 19,000 Americans—and here all the superiority of air and sea was as surely American as it had been Japanese at Guadalcanal.

  Again Radio Tokyo announced the result in advance. While the First and Seventh Regiments were aboard their destroyer-transports and LCI’s, leaving the Fifth in reserve on New Guinea, the Japanese radio was informing the world of how that devil’s brood of degenerates and jailbirds called the First Marine Division had been kicked out of Melbourne in disgrace and were now about to be turned loose on Cape Gloucester.

  “But I am pleased to add,” said the announcer, “that our soldiers are fully prepared to repulse this insolent attempt. The jungles will run red with the blood of the butchers of Guadalcanal.”

  19

  It was Christmas Day in the States, but out on the dark waters of Dampier Strait it was the morning of December 26, and Major General Iwao Matsuda’s radios were already sputtering with reports of an invading force circling the Cape and standing off the northern coast a few miles to the east.

  At six o’clock the thundering began. Two cruisers and eight destroyers sailed back and forth, blazing at the shore with orange-yellow bursts while a pair of rocket-firing LCI’s daintily picked their way through an opening in the barrier reef. They took up positions to either end of the landing beaches and soon the swooosh of their missiles was audible beneath the booming of the guns.

  It was still dark, and the Marines assembled on the decks of their destroyers could feel a twinge of pity for the enemy ashore. They knew what it was like to receive naval gunfire. There had actually not been need of a big force of warships, for the bombers of the Fifth Air Force had been pounding Cape Gloucester for weeks. They had dropped 2,000 tons of explosive. During the last few nights Liberators had been circling the airfield, dropping a bomb every six minutes, putting Japanese nerves through the wringer of an American Washing-Machine Charley. Now in the beginnings of a blue day arising roseate behind 6,500-foot Mount Talawe there were more of the big, four-engined Liberators coming back to bomb. Flight after flight of them appeared high in the sky, humming like bees and seeming as small. There was the red winking of Japanese antiaircraft fire, but then the ferocious Mitchells and Havocs—two-engined attack bombers—swooped low with flashing nose cannon and machine guns. There was no more winking.

  Men of the Seventh Regiment went over the side of their destroyers into the landing boats. The boats fanned out and headed for a landing beach about five miles east of the airfield. They charged into the smoke being swept seaward by an onshore wind. They vanished. After them went the LCI’s, groping for the barrier passage and a quick run-in. They disappeared. The bombardment and bombing lifted. The smoke drifted seaward. The LST’s came forward slowly, and then the returning landing boats burst out of the smoke.

  They were empty. Their coxswains were grinning and raising jubilant clenched fists. “Landing unopposed,” they shouted, and the water began boiling beneath the sterns of the LSTs as these unlovely dray-horses of the sea surged forward through the reef passage.

  To the southwest, Masters’ Bastards were also landing unopposed. They were the men of the Second Battalion, First, and they called themselves that because Lieutenant Colonel James Masters was their commander and because Masters’ Bastards had a good rude ring to it.

  They landed at Tauali on the extreme west of the Cape, roughly seven miles southwest of the airfield. A swarm of LCI’s beached themselves, their ramps banged down—and Masters’ Bastards ran ashore. They darted across a man’s-length of sun-bathed black mud beach and plunged into the murk of the jungle.

  They would not see daylight again for two weeks.

  They sat there, facing east, blocking the coastal track running from Japanese bases to the southeast of the airfield. They patrolled constantly and killed a few of the enemy and waited for the Japanese to try to force their way through them.

  The Seventh Regiment’s sector was marked on the map as “Damp Flat.”

  “It’s damp, all right,” growled those Marines who were already wading through a hip-deep swamp, already glum with recollection of Guadalcanal. “It’s damp clear up to yer ass!”

  It was a forest swamp and General Matsuda had not thought any sane commander would land there. He had fortified it lightly, while concentrating his forces to either side of it. When Colonel Julian Frisbie’s men landed here they encountered only a few empty coconut bunkers, a pair of untended and unemplaced 75’s and a huddling handful of terrified shipping engineers. The Marines overran the beach and swept into the jungle.

  On the left, the First Battalion, Seventh, made for a height called Target Hill. They found that the Japanese had abandoned Target Hill during the bombardment, and they occupied the enemy’s positions.

  On the right the Seventh’s Third Battalion sloshed to its designated perimeter.

  In the center the Second Battalion crossed the coastal road and drove inland through sporadic sniper fire, only to bog down in the worst of the swamp.

  Men moving over what seemed like solid ground were sucked down into waist-high muck, and had to be pulled out. The Marines were floundering, tripped by vines and sometimes thrown down by them. They had to be careful of the numerous shells lying unexploded in the soft mud. They had to clamber over rotten forest giants which had begun to fall during the shelling and were still falling. One man was killed by one. He was the Division’s first fatality on Cape Gloucester. Nineteen more men would be killed by New Britain’s falling trees, and some 30 others would be badly injured. The Marines were already calling them “widow-makers.”

  At last the men in the center debouched on dry ground. They moved on, but they had not gone 100 yards before they were in swamp again. They had penetrated to a depth of 1,200 yards.

  By a quarter after ten Major General William Rupertus, the Division’s new commander, was ashore with his staff and setting up a headquarters. By noon the Third Battalion, First Marines, were landing on another beach about three miles farther west. They wheeled right, marching up the coastal road to attack Cape Gloucester Airfield, another two miles west. By midafternoon Rupertus was calling for the Fifth Marines to come up from New Guinea.

  In Rabaul it was believed that the American task force sighted between New Guinea and New Britain on Christmas Night was headed for Arawe on New Britain’s southern coast. An Army cavalry regiment had landed against light opposition at Arawe eleven days earlier, and the Japanese believed that the task force was bringing more troops there. Then came Matsuda’s call for help on the northern coast.

  The officer commanding 63 Zeros and 25 dive-bombing Vals sent aloft from Rabaul quickly changed the target to Cape Gloucester, but his order was not transmitted. The planes flew up to Arawe, found nothing and flew back home again.

  At half-past two in the afternoon, however, they were on the target, coming in low and fast on the beached supplies and the second echelons of LST’s just arriving from New Guinea. They struck, and the Americans began to make mistakes.

  While the Japanese sank the new destroyer Brownson. and hit others, gunners on the LST’s shot down two American bombers and seriously damaged two others—so confusing the Mitchell pilots that they began to bomb and strafe Marines on Cape Gloucester. They killed one man and wounded 14 others before they flew off, and then the Japanese planes headed east for Rabaul and the heavy booming of bombs gave way to the sharp crackling of the fight being made by the Third Battalion, First, on its march to the airfield.

  Sergeant Robert Oswald figured he had two good men in the brothers Hansen. They were twins, Paul and Leslie, both privates, sons of a widow who had already lost an older boy in the war. As Oswald’s amtrack moved along the road to
the airfield Leslie Hansen was on the machine guns with him, and Paul was driving. They were carrying ammunition for the Third Battalion, First.

  Up front, one of the companies was raked by bullets coming from a system of four bunkers bristling with machine guns. It was a roadblock. Captain Joseph Terzi and Captain Phillip Wilheit of Company K were instantly killed. Their men deployed. They let go with the newfangled bazooka, but the rockets merely lodged in the soft earth around the bunkers. The flame-throwers wouldn’t work. The riflemen deployed and began firing and someone yelled for ammunition.

  “Let’s go!” Oswald shouted, and Paul Hansen let out the amtrack’s clutch and gunned its motor. The gray amphibian came careening up the road with blazing machine guns. Paul Hansen pointed its nose at the nearest bunker, intending to roll over it and cave it in. The Japanese spilled out of the exits and came swarming at the amtrack. Many of them were shot down by Sergeant Oswald and Leslie Hansen, but the rest got to the amtrack before the ground Marines could drive them off. Oswald fell, mortally wounded. Leslie Hansen was dragged from his gun and beaten and stabbed to death. The Japanese turned to take Paul Hansen, but by then he had skillfully rocked the amtrack free and was rolling over the bunker and crushing it while the riflemen closed and polished off the Japanese.

  With the blind sides of the remaining bunkers exposed and many of their defenders slain, the Marines quickly overran them with grenades and bayonets.

  By then it was late afternoon, and the Marines halted and dug in, just as the first of the monsoon rains broke over their heads.

  It came out of the northwest. Men on the beaches struggling to unravel a traffic snarl of 150 abandoned Army six-by-six trucks could see it coming, an opaque gray wall of water marching across the Bismarck Sea. It came with the sound of rolling drums and then it was over the jungle and the water was swishing, streaming, gurgling earthward. It was as nothing these Marines had seen before, this Niagara of a monsoon. It was not a rain storm, a spell of rain—it was a season of it. It was the cloudburst in perpetuity, and it was so constant during the ensuing four months that both Japanese and Americans numbered the dry days of sunshine and cherished their memory.

  Already one of the 150-millimeter howitzers of the Fourth Battalion, Eleventh Marines, had sunk together with its prime mover. There were five inches of gun shield, the top of the tractor’s vertical exhaust pipe and the tips of its levers above the surface.

  In a little while there would be nothing.

  Night.

  Louie the Louse.

  Flares.

  Out of their rain-filled holes tumbled Marines, their nerves again pulsing and twanging as though it were Guadalcanal again and there had never been an Australia. But there was no thundering and flashing out at sea. The Marines went back to their holes, already too miserable to be mystified by the inexplicable enemy.

  20

  Major General Matsuda had to decide whether he was cut in two or whether he had the enemy surrounded.

  He chose the latter. It was not because he was a stupid commander, which he was not; it was because on a map this could appear to be the truth. The Americans were in the swamp. They could not maneuver. They were exposed to the very tactics with which Matsuda had hoped to defend the Cape.

  While Colonel Sumiya’s men held out on the airfield to the west, Colonel Katayama’s 141st Regiment would counterattack from the east. Matsuda had already ordered Katayama to call in all his patrols and to march north, leaving only token forces behind to defend his southern garrisons. For Matsuda had accurately concluded that the major assault on New Britain had come in his Cape Gloucester area. The Americans south at Arawe were not to be feared.

  But then Matsuda acted on a pair of misconceptions which seemed to be congenital among Japanese Army commanders. He underestimated the enemy’s strength and belittled his fighting ability. He put the Marine force down at 2,500—when it was by then actually five times that—and then sent about a thousand men up against it without waiting for Katayama’s 141st to arrive from the south.

  Matsuda ordered the 2nd Battalion, 53rd, to move from Borgen Bay positions east to the center of the Seventh Marines’ position at “Damp Flat.” Shortly after midnight the morning of December 27, just as a thunderstorm broke, the Japanese began attacking.

  Even the howls of the banzai-makers were drowned out in the clashing of the clouds, the drumming of the rain, the drawn-out toppling crash of the widow-makers being hurled to earth by the wind, and the treetop explosions of artillery shells. The defending Marines could not fight from foxholes full of water. They lay on top of the ground. It became a blind battle, decided, in the end, by Marine mortars “laid in by guess and by God,” and the dawn arrival of a special weapons battery. The Japanese withdrew in the morning, leaving more than 200 dead on the field. There were 25 dead Marines and 75 wounded.

  That same morning Pappy Boyington led his Black Sheep up to Rabaul again. Once more the Zeros rose to meet them, and again Boyington’s aim was true. He shot one down. He was within one plane of tying Joe Foss’s record and he flashed eagerly among the red-balled Zeros. Then oil spurted over his glass hatch. Three times Boyington wound back the hood and tried to wipe the film away, but he couldn’t. Exasperated, he turned and flew back to Torokina Airfield. He landed. Someone said it was a shame the oil had prevented his tying Foss’s record of 26 planes.

  “What’s the difference?” Boyington growled. “I couldn’t have hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle anyway.”

  But he knew it was not so, and he had wanted that twenty-sixth kill very badly.

  The morning of December 28 brought high winds to Cape Gloucester, as well as an earthquake and that rare bird of war: an enemy prisoner.

  His name was Corporal Kashida Shigeto and he was taken by the Third Battalion, First Marines, during an action fought at Hell’s Point, about a mile east of the airfield. There were a dozen big bunkers there, each occupied by about 20 Japanese soldiers. There were a few 75-millimeter gun emplacements. The Marines threw four Sherman tanks at Hell’s Point. One of them rumbled around a bend and ran into a Japanese 75-millimeter gun.

  The Japanese gunner ran to his gun and pulled the lanyard. The gun roared and the shell struck the tank and exploded. It left a small dent. The astonished Japanese soldier fled, for the tank had lurched forward and was rolling toward him. Now the other tanks came up, flushing the Japanese out of the bunkers into the fire of following riflemen. One of these riflemen struck his foot on an object in the ground. Looking down, he gazed into the agonized eyes of Corporal Kashida Shigeto. The Marine hesitated. He did not know whether to shoot or to kick the Japanese, but he had plenty of time to decide, for Corporal Shigeto was buried up to his neck. His trench had caved in on him a few moments after he had received a painful wound in the shoulder.

  Then to Corporal Shigeto’s amazement the Americans began to dig him out. An intelligence officer had arrived just in time to convince the puzzled rifleman that he should neither kill nor kick, that he should in fact be kind. The Marines had learned how kindness could open the lips of Japanese prisoners. Taught to expect torture, Corporal Shigeto was delighted to accept the offer of cheese from a K-ration and an American cigarette. He began to answer questions. His country had not signed the Geneva Convention under which all captured soldiers are to give their name and serial number—and nothing more—nor did Japan tell her soldiers how to act when captured, for surrender was the supreme disgrace. Cave-ins and other forms of accidental surrender were not anticipated, and so the suddenly amiable Corporal Shigeto began to answer his captor’s questions with great fervor and detail.

  As a result of what he said, General Rupertus did not press his attack to the airfield. He decided to wait until the Fifth Marines arrived in the morning.

  Colonel John Selden led the First and Second Battalions of the Fifth Marines into Cape Gloucester shortly after dawn of December 29, landing at the beach where the First Marines had come in. The Fifth’s men were brought uproa
d to the airfield by truck. They dismounted and were deployed wide to the left or south of the road. They were to advance on the airfield through the jungled ridges, while the First rolled up the road.

  The assault began and quickly picked up momentum. The rain stopped. The sun was shining. The roadbound Marines burst from a wood onto the edge of a field of kunai grass. Beyond it was the airfield.

  Artillery shells screeched overhead and crashed in front of them. The tanks rolled forward, their 75’s blasting and machine guns blazing. Riflemen clustered behind them and began moving at a trot. There was the happy barking of a dog. A German shepherd whose Japanese master had fallen at Hell’s Point was running out in front. He had taken the point. He was leading them in, and suddenly the troops were grinning with relief, for there was no one on the airfield to oppose them. Corporal Shigeto’s reports of thousands of men seemed proven false.

  But the Japanese prisoner had actually not exaggerated. Colonel Sumiya and his men had abandoned the airfield. They had also withdrawn from a series of ridges directly south of it, and it was past these empty bunkers that the men of the Fifth Marines moved as they came in on the airfield from their jungle march.

  During the darkness of that night the Japanese came back to these bunkers, reoccupied them—and turned the guns toward the airfield below.