Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  The Marines on New Britain were mystified, for the enemy had vanished. No Japanese had been found in force since Hill 660 fell on January 15. The Marines began to hunt the enemy, their search complicated by the fact that he knew the terrain, while they did not, and that he could fight when and where he chose. For every one of the enemy’s moves, the Americans would need to counter with a dozen groping moves of their own. They were actually mapping the terrain as they patrolled it, and a day rarely passed without a report of another unmapped trail found through an unknown jungle, over an anonymous mountain, around a nameless swamp. Worse, the Marines had still not located Egaroppu, that place as pregnant with mystery as it was stuffed with vowels. So the war in western New Britain became a huge blind chase, made more nerve-racking by the fact that the pursued was as capable of fight as flight.

  A week passed. Once a patrol going south from the airfield was ambushed on Mount Talawe. In the sharp quick fight that followed Sergeant Phil Mottola shot a Japanese. The man screamed in English: “I’m shot!”

  “Shot hell!” Mottola yelled. “You’re dead!”

  With that Mottola finished him off, and the patrol moved on. To run into another ambush. And then another. The closer the Marines got to low ground behind Mount Talawe the stiffer became the opposition. Some attempts to close with the enemy at the points of ambush would find the position abandoned, or sometimes the Japanese would be in pillboxes on cliffs commanding the trails winding down from the hills. From these they fought with mortars and machine guns. Colonel Sato’s men were fighting a skillful delaying action.

  At Natamo Point east of Hill 660 on the north coast, a patrol was stopped by intense automatic-weapons fire. A captured map showed Natamo Point to be fortified with many machine-gun positions. For two days planes of the Fifth Air Force worked it over, but when the Marines sought to cross the Natamo River they found their way still barred by automatic cannon and artillery. It was not until they had made shore-to-shore landings around the river, called down their own artillery and brought up rockets that they were able to force Lieutenant Hanahara’s roadblock.

  For such it was. It was the last gate to the northern approaches to Nakarop. Five hundred yards east of Natamo Point the Marines found a wide, unmapped corduroy road. They sent patrols down it. On January 29 the Marines entered their Egaroppu which they at last knew to be Nakarop.

  It was empty, and now began an elaborate game of hide-and-seek as Marine amphibious patrols pursued the fleeing Matsuda. They chased him throughout February, leapfrogging patrols along the coast to all the rallying places.

  Matsuda had not tarried at Kokopo. He had gone on to Karai-ai about 20 miles farther east. The Marines landed at Karai-ai and found only the dead and dying. Matsuda had taken a boat. He might be found at Upmadung.

  Upmadung?

  There had not been so much fun with a word since the Marines had maneuvered in Melbourne Bay aboard a ship called HMS Manoora.

  But Matsuda had not stayed there, either. While Colonels Sumiya and Katayama had marched off by land, he had taken another boat which eventually landed him at Cape Hoskins.

  Behind him, crawling over the trails, eating native dogs and plundering native gardens, starving and suffering, came the wretched, rotting remnant of his brigade. They had been abandoned by their comrades. They were wounded and their flesh stank. Their bodies were covered with fungus infections. There were many of them actually crawling on hands and knees, for their feet were too rotten to support them. They had little idea where they were going. When they had no more strength to move, they lay on the trail. The moment the point of a Marine patrol came into sight they blew themselves up with grenades. There were others too weak to do this and the Marines began to take prisoners.

  The Marines had begun to pity the foe, for they had never seen such miserable defeat, and even they became nauseous as they moved along the trails between Borgen Bay and Iboki Plantation, holding their noses against the stink of death.

  30

  Rabaul, the mighty fortress to which Matsuda’s miserable soldiers were crawling, was completely exposed to aerial attack in the last days of February.

  The ruinous American strike on Truk had led Fleet Admiral Koga to order all naval planes and pilots out of Rabaul to Truk as reinforcements, and the great base on eastern New Britain was left with a few Army aircraft and an occasional patched-up naval fighter after the January savaging of the fighter-sweeps launched by Marine pilots to the south.

  Among these fliers was Butcher Bob Hanson, the lieutenant who had shot down three enemy planes over Torokina on D-Day and had so jauntily survived his own crash. Hanson began his second tour of duty on January 13 with five planes to his credit. Within the following seventeen days he shot down 20 more. Whenever Hanson went up, he shot down at least one Japanese aircraft. On January 30 the last day of that period, Hanson flew up to Rabaul to help strike at newly arrived fighter strength there. Of 21 Japanese planes shot down, Hanson got four. His record now stood at 25 planes. He had another ten days to go on his tour of duty and it seemed likely that he would surpass even Pappy Boyington’s mark of 28 planes. But Hanson was not the pilot to play it safe; it was his habit to volunteer for every mission that came his squadron’s way—whether a fighter-sweep which could mean more red balls painted on his Corsair’s fuselage, or a strafing mission which meant the risk of the black bursts of enemy antiaircraft fire. On February 2 Hanson volunteered for a strafing mission over Cape St. George and he was killed when he was unable to pull out of a run made at typically low altitude. The citation accompanying his Medal of Honor spoke his epitaph: “He was a master of individual combat.”

  And now, in late February, Rabaul was almost helpless beneath mounting hammer blows. The fighter-sweeps had accounted for the destruction of 863 Japanese planes since the construction of Torokina Airfield and the “milk-run” bombing flights were now beginning. These sorties—Army, Navy, New Zealand and Australian as well as Marine—were launched off the big new fields on Bougainville and Green Island. February also marked the date when the Japanese on Rabaul started to go underground, beginning the first of 350 miles of tunnels and caves for storage and living purposes.

  Kavieng, that air-sea base on New Ireland which General MacArthur did not have to invade after all, was also flattened, and Marine bombers of Commander Air Solomons began to sing a new song to the tune of “Oh, Susanna”:

  Oh, I went up to Kavieng,

  The maps upon my knees,

  The soup was thick, the night was black,

  No wingtips could I see

  The lights went on, they shot at me,

  I swore and heaved a sigh,

  We stayed up there for two damn hours—

  ComAirSols, don’t you cry!

  Oh, ComAirSols never cries for me,

  Though I go to Kavieng each night

  And bomb the enemy.

  We tune in on the radar set,

  Gaze in the crystal ball,

  Geishas smile in the scope—

  We know we’re at Rabaul.

  This life’s a mighty pleasant thing,

  If I depart too soon,

  Please write my epitaph to read:

  “No hits, twelve runs, no moon.”

  It was these Marine airmen, flying half of all the Allied sorties against Rabaul, shooting down three-fifths of all Rabaul planes destroyed in combat, who were largely responsible for keeping the power of this monster base in check, and the way to new invasions open.

  On the twenty-ninth of February, 1,000 troopers of the dismounted 1st Cavalry Division landed in the Admiralty Islands, 250 miles north northwest of Cape Gloucester. It was a reconnaissance-in-force accompanied by General Douglas MacArthur. At the end of that day the troopers had captured the airfield of Los Negros and MacArthur had decided to stay.

  Six days later the First Marine Division was staging another invasion of its own, one as well planned as it was unnecessary.

  The plan was to invade the Willaumez P
eninsula 120 miles east of Cape Gloucester. Why, has never been made clear. It has been argued that Willaumez contained an airfield, but it was in fact only big enough to receive Piper Cubs; or that its seizure would cut off the retreat of Matsuda’s survivors, but everyone knew that those poor wretches, if they lived, were already a burden to the enemy; or that, finally, the Marine troops had become dispirited in the miasma of the swamp and needed an offensive operation to revive them—a misconception which seems to afflict many commanders once they pass from company grade to field rank and above. Put plainly: men don’t like to fight. They do it for a number of reasons, some of them noble, but not even the men who write Marine propaganda would suggest that the men’s morale is raised by finding strongpoints for them to storm. The truth is that in February the First Marine Division possessed all that was useful in western New Britain: the airfield and the Borgen Bay heights guarding it. The Division was also in contact with the Army at Arawe in the south and the enemy had been cut to pieces.

  Still, the operation known as the Talasea Landing was ordered, and it was turned over to Colonel Oliver P. ( “O.P.” ) Smith, a man who had a reputation as a planner and who now commanded the Fifth Marines.

  Smith decided not to go around the northern tip of the peninsula to get at the airfield on the east coast at Talasea. Most of the 1st Battalion, 54th Infantry, was concentrated there under Captain Kyamatsu Terunuma. Smith preferred coming in the back door, on the west coast at a place called Volupai. This meant a shore-to-shore voyage covering 60 miles from Iboki Plantation to Volupai.

  On the afternoon of March 5 the vanguard of some 5,000 Marines climbed into amtracks and the amtracks rolled aboard a group of LCT’s. At ten o’clock that night, with torpedo boats leading the way, they sailed east to Volupai. In the morning they attacked under the covering fire of the First Marine Division “Navy” and “Air Force.”

  The Navy consisted of tanks carried aboard LCM’s. Their turret machine-gunners had a clear field of fire and their artillery could blast straight ahead after the ramps were lowered. The Air Force consisted of a Piper Cub observation plane from which Captain Theodore Petras dropped hand grenades, once it became known that Australian Beauforts were weathered in and could not show up to deliver an air strike.

  The Marines went in and were hit by mortars. They began to take casualties, but they continued on. Then they ran into flanking fire from Little Mount Worri and halted. They had only five miles to go to Talasea, but it took them three days.

  The men who had planned the invasion of Bougainville had chosen Cape Torokina because they estimated that it would take Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate three months to mount a counterattack there. They were wrong. It had taken four months.

  On March 8 from 100 to 200 artillery shells fell on the perimeter which the Army’s Fourteenth Corps held around Torokina’s airfields. It was the opening gun in the heaviest artillery bombardment which Japan mounted in all the South Pacific. For months the scattered units of Hyakutate’s 17th Army had been toiling over the Bougainville mountain trails to the Torokina assembly point. Field pieces had been laboriously hauled up by hand. Shells had been brought up by hand, too, and it took two men four days to bring up a single hundred-pounder.

  On March 8 they were ready. Still using the tactics of Guadalcanal, still smarting from Guadalcanal, Hyakutate told his men:

  “The time has come to manifest our knighthood with the pure brilliance of the sword. It is our duty to erase the mortification of our brothers at Guadalcanal. Attack! Assault! Destroy everything! Cut, slash, and mow them down. May the color of the red emblem of our arms be deepened with the blood of the American rascals. Our cry of victory at Torokina Bay will be shouted resoundingly to our native land.

  “We are invincible! Always attack. Security is the greatest enemy. Always be alert. Execute silently.”

  Then, estimating that Major General Oscar Griswold’s Fourteenth Corps had only one division, when in fact it had both the 37th and the Americal, Haruyoshi Hyakutate sent 15,000 Japanese up against three times that many Americans.

  On March 10 the Fifth Marines broke into Talasea. They had come on through heavy mortar fire and numerous ambushes. They had passed through a unique banzai the night the Japanese worked themselves up into a frenzy, and charged off to their own rear. But on March 10 Talasea was theirs, at a cost of 17 Marines killed and 114 wounded, against 150 Japanese dead. The end result of their effort was expressed with succinct eloquence by a mud-stained Marine whom a war correspondent fresh from the States had asked: “What outfit did you relieve here?” The Marine spat disdainfully and said:

  “The Fifty-fourth Japanese!”

  Boredom had set in on Cape Gloucester, wet-blanket boredom. There had been no nocturnal air attacks since mid-February. Except for the Fifth’s excursion to Talasea, there had been no action. The storms had begun to subside, though 20 men had been killed so far by the widow-makers and 50 more had been injured, and there had been an Army captain who crawled down a riverbank to drink and had his arm chewed off by an alligator. There had also been three men killed by lightning, and one night a storm turned a brook into a torrent and swept away a battalion’s bivouac area. Marines on patrol about 10 miles downcoast awoke next morning to find the battalion’s ration of powdered eggs, powdered milk, ten-in-one rations replete with bacon, and even vanilla extract—which would make excellent “jungle juice”—washed up at their feet. They canceled patrolling for the day and gorged themselves.

  Otherwise it had been boring since mid-February, and the Marines amused themselves by carving designs on their mess gear, listening to Tokyo Rose, swapping specimens of the highly pornographic propaganda which the Japanese dropped on New Britain, or by launching a counteradvertising campaign against that bitter yellow pill called atabrine which they were forced to swallow three times daily.

  Atabrine was a malaria preventative. It had been developed after Japan had cornered most of the world’s sources of quinine. It had been introduced in the Pacific at the end of 1942, and in early 1944 on New Britain it had kept the incidence of malaria down to a rock-bottom minimum. But the men did not like atabrine. It was the perfection of bitterness. Many men could not swallow atabrine. It also turned a man’s skin yellow, a permanent yellow, many men innocently assumed. There were rumors that it made a man sterile.

  Nothing had more power to make atabrine unpopular than this last rumor, and as the number of atabrine delinquents grew, medical people resorted to an advertising campaign which suggested that, so far from being a sterilizer, atabrine actually possessed powers which were at once a compound of monkey glands, Spanish fly and wax from the ear of the queen bee. There were roadside signs of voluptuous nudes accompanied by the legend: “Come Back to This—Take Atabrine.” There was, in the school of art which has made the mammary gland the American oriflamme, a picture of a bare-breasted blonde amazon who offered: “Two Reasons Why You Should Take Atabrine.” The Marines had become fed up, and they passed off the boredom by producing their own reductios of the powers of atabrine. Soon the lines and the bivouacs blossomed with signs such as these:

  REACH FOR AN ATABRINE INSTEAD OF A JEEP.

  HEMORRHOIDS? GIVE ATABRINE A 30-DAY TRIAL.

  WRITE FOR FREE BOOKLET.

  STOP EXCESS FALLING HAIR! USE ATABRINE!

  And then the entire silly business of sugar-coating the bitter atabrine pill came to an end after the appearance of this taunt:

  WHY WEAR A TRUSS? TAKE ATABRINE.

  The last nail was being hammered into the coffins of Kavieng and Rabaul. The St. Matthias Islands, the northern-most of the Bismarcks, were coming under attack.

  Since the ist Cavalry’s reconnaissance-in-force on Los Negros had been turned into eventual capture of the Admiralty Islands, it had only remained to seize a base north of Kavieng. Once this was done, with American bases to the south on Cape Gloucester and to the west on the Admiralties, the Bismarcks and the Solomons would be completely cut off from the Empire.
The St. Matthias island chosen for this maneuver was Emirau. The attacking force was the Fourth Marine Regiment, an outfit now composed of all those Raider units which had been deactivated, once it became apparent that the Raider hit-and-run specialty was no longer of use in the Pacific.

  These men were also the heirs of the old Fourth Marine Regiment which had served in China, had barely gotten out of Shanghai before Pearl Harbor—and had arrived in the Philippines in time to fight on Bataan and Corregidor, where they burned their colors and surendered.

  The new Fourth Marines went into Emirau on March 20, and because they once were Raiders and had that Raider penchant for songs and slogans, they went in whistling, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

  It was a beautiful morning on Emirau for there was not a Japanese in sight. There was only a little wooden sign which said, in Japanese: “This island occupied by Imperial Landing Party, January, 1942.”

  It was not much in the way of material for a new Raider ballad, but it would have to do—at least until April when the Fourth Marines went back to Guadalcanal to hook up with that other loner regiment—the Twenty-second-and form the First Provisional Marine Brigade.

  In the meantime Kavieng and Rabaul had been cut off. They were not aware of it, for they believed in the coming of that mythical “Greater East Asia Annihilation Fleet” which Premier Tojo had invented to keep up the morale of his bypassed bases. But if the Annihilation Fleet could keep up morale, it could not keep the great bases of the Bismarcks in the war.