By the end of the third day, Wakde could be considered won. A few enemy stragglers remained hidden away, but were soon found and eliminated. The fight for Wakde cost the Americans 40 men killed and 107 wounded. Japanese losses were 759 killed and 4 captured, representing virtually the entire garrison. A few bodies remained buried inside caves that had been destroyed by demolition charges; the remains of several of these soldiers were uncovered in September 2005.13
The 836th Engineer Aviation Battalion began working on the airfield as soon as it was captured. The field was declared operational on the morning of May 20, and the first Allied planes arrived later that day. Soon, two fighter groups and two heavy bomber groups called Wakde Airdrome home. On May 27 B-24 Liberators stationed at Wakde were the first American warplanes to fly photorecon missions over the Philippine island of Mindanao. MacArthur and his army were on their way back.
—
With Wakde secured, American attention turned back to the mainland and focused on the eighteen-mile stretch from Toem to Sarmi and the ten thousand Japanese troops spread along the coast. The two remaining battalions of the 163rd RCT had formed and held a defensive perimeter around the Arara and Toem area, with only occasional contact with small enemy units during limited patrols. The western boundary of the perimeter was near the Tor River, just sixteen miles from Sarmi. When General Krueger learned from Allied code breakers that possibly two regiments of Japanese troops were planning to attack the Americans around Arara, he decided to move first. The attack was assumed to be coming from the direction of Sarmi to the west, where most enemy troop concentrations were located.
What Krueger did not know, and American intelligence had failed to detect, was that two battalions of the Japanese 223rd Infantry Regiment, along with their artillery support, were then in the process of crossing the Tor River about four miles inland. General Tagami, 36th Division commander, had ordered these troops, called the “Yoshino Force” after its commanding officer, Colonel Naoyasu Yoshino, to work their way around the American landing zone and prepare to attack the Americans from the rear.14
A second group of Japanese was also to the rear of the Americans. Called the “Matsuyama Force,” after its commander, Colonel Soemon Matsuyama, it had been sent by General Tagami toward Hollandia to attack the Americans there. By May 17, when the landings at Arara took place, this force, made up of two battalions from the 224th Infantry and a battalion of mountain artillery, was halfway between Sarmi and Hollandia. It had taken nearly two weeks to reach this halfway mark. The same day, Tagami sent Matsuyama orders to halt and turn back toward a small coastal village named Masi-masi, about four and a half miles east of Toem. From there he was to prepare to attack the Americans.15
With troops to the east and the south of the enemy landing zone, Tagami positioned a third force west of the Tor River. This force was composed of at least one battalion of combat troops and a mix of construction and service units for approximately 2,500 men. He planned to trap the Americans within these three pincers. Both sides waited for the result of the fighting on Wakde before proceeding. Tagami could actually watch the extermination of his eight hundred men on the island from the vantage point of a hilltop near the Maffin airfield.16
On May 21, Brigadier General Edwin D. Patrick and his 158th Regimental Combat Team landed at Arara as replacements for the 163rd RCT. The 163rd was being withdrawn, along with its commander, Brigadier General Doe, to prepare for MacArthur’s next planned assault, on Biak Island. Patrick had earlier served as Alamo Force chief of staff, but had locked horns with Krueger. When General MacArthur learned of the friction between the two, he suggested that Krueger assign Patrick command of the 158th RCT. This 3,100-man Arizona National Guard unit was one of the most unusual in the U.S. Army. Made up of members of the Maricopa and Pima Indian tribes, Mexican Americans, as well as whites, it was originally the 1st Arizona Volunteer Infantry, which had been an outgrowth of both the Arizona Rangers and a Confederate force called the Arizona Scout Companies. The regiment had received jungle warfare training in Panama, where it encountered the six- to ten-foot-long venomous pit viper snake commonly called the bushmaster, hence the nickname “Bushmasters” adopted by the regiment.
The regiment’s new commander was a bit unusual himself. Born in Indiana, Edwin Patrick had joined the Indiana National Guard after college and served in World War I. Said to have mercurial mood swings that often made him reckless, he was bold and personally courageous in combat. His habit of wearing a green jumpsuit earned him the moniker “Green Hornet” by his men. He also attached a large, conspicuous star to the front of his helmet that many later suspected had resulted in his death during the Philippines Campaign in March 1945. By then he was commander of the 6th Division and one of only three American division commanders killed in combat during the war.17
General Krueger worried that the Japanese would attempt to retake Wakde, and that the small toehold he had on the mainland would offer little protection from a concentrated assault. He reversed an earlier decision concerning the size of the territory the Americans would hold in the Arara-Toem area and undertook to go on the offensive before the enemy did. Having been informed by Army intelligence that only about two thousand enemy soldiers were at Sarmi—a gross underestimate, as it turned out—he ordered Patrick to attack across the Tor River and head for Sarmi.
After relieving a battalion from the 163rd along the bank on the river, the 3rd Battalion of the 158th proceeded west toward its objective, a village located at the beginning of Maffin Bay that the Allies called Maffin No. 1. When the 3rd Battalion ran into increasing enemy resistance, the 1st Battalion was ordered across the river in support late that afternoon. By the end of the day, the advance elements of the 3rd Battalion had been forced by enemy fire to dig in four hundred yards short of the objective.
The following morning, the attack resumed, with the 1st Battalion advancing along the coast road and the 3rd Battalion on the left. Some progress was made, but Japanese resistance continued to increase. In addition, American artillery failed to silence Japanese artillery because the Japanese hid their weapons inside caves during the day, pulling them out after dark to bombard American positions. Assisted by several tanks, the Americans made slow progress over the next few days, finally reaching the Snaky River at the base of their next objective, Lone Tree Hill, on May 26.
One hundred seventy-five feet high, Lone Tree Hill was twelve hundred yards long and eleven hundred yards wide. Misnamed because someone drew a single tree atop the hill on an Allied map, it was actually covered in dense jungle growth and honeycombed with coral outcroppings, crevices, and caves that offered protection to the defending Japanese. The north side of the hill drops off precipitously to the shore of Maffin Bay. The fighting went badly for the Americans around Lone Tree Hill and they were forced to fall back first to the nearby Snaky River, then farther back to the Trifoam River near Maffin No. 1. The result was the relief of the 158th’s field commander.
General Krueger became increasingly concerned about the safety of his beachhead when he learned of several poorly coordinated attacks from an unexpected quarter: the American eastern flank. These assaults were the work of the Matsuyama Force that had originally left Sarmi to attack Hollandia on May 2. One thing the Americans had in their favor was that the troops of the Matsuyama Force were now in extremely poor condition due to a lack of supplies and the exhaustion of the men who had been trampling through the jungle for weeks.
Adding to Krueger’s worries was the return to the battlefield of the Yoshino Force, which had crossed and then recrossed the Tor River to attack from the south. Beginning at ten thirty p.m. on May 20, elements of this force struck isolated antiaircraft and machine-gun positions along the American perimeter west of Arara. Two gun positions fell to the enemy, who then turned the American machine guns against the other isolated positions. As the Japanese attempted to set ablaze the American supply dump, fighting during the night reached
such ferocity that men struggled hand to hand, with rifle butts, bayonets, pistols, and knives, until the attackers were finally driven off at four thirty the next morning. The fighting around these gun positions and the supply dump resulted in twelve Americans dead and ten wounded. After daylight, the troopers counted fifty-two Japanese bodies. The fact that no wounded Japanese soldiers were found indicated that wounded men had apparently been taken away as the enemy retreated.18
Believing his own forces might be outnumbered, and that perhaps it had been a mistake to send the 158th RCT in with very little combat experience, Krueger decided a larger force was required, and ordered the entire 6th Infantry Division into the beachhead. In addition, Krueger needed to pull the 158th out of the current action because Patrick and his men were slated for an upcoming operation elsewhere. The unsuccessful fighting for Lone Tree Hill cost the 158th RCT 70 killed and 257 wounded. The one bright spot of the operation was that the Americans claimed to have killed nine hundred of the enemy, a figure that was never fully confirmed.19
Other than a few units that had fought during the New Britain invasion, the 6th Infantry Division was without real combat experience. Once again, Americans with little or no fighting background were thrown against hardened Japanese soldiers who had fought for several years in the bloodbath that was the war in China. The commanding officer of the 6th Infantry Division was Major General Franklin C. Sibert. The Kentucky native and West Point graduate was from a strong military family. His father had been a major general in the Army Engineers and commanded the 1st Infantry Division during the First World War, and his brother was a brigadier general on the staff of Omar Bradley in the European theater. Sibert had commanded a machine-gun battalion during World War I. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he was serving on the staff of General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell in the China-Burma theater. He accompanied Stilwell on his famous twenty-nine-day trek out of central Burma to India, a retreat that kept Stilwell barely ahead of the advancing Japanese.
The 20th Infantry Regiment of the 6th Division, along with a medical battalion and two field artillery battalions, arrived at Arara on June 11. They began relieving elements of the overwhelmed and exhausted 158th RCT. The latter had spent the previous three days solidifying its defensive position and eliminating several advance Japanese outposts. The remainder of the division, including General Sibert, who assumed command of Tornado Task Force from the departing Patrick, soon joined them. Krueger wanted Sibert to begin immediate operations against Lone Tree Hill, as well as the two hills near it also occupied by enemy forces. General Krueger was determined to move against Sarmi, which he continued to believe, incorrectly, was lightly defended. He hoped to use the Maffin Bay area for staging operations against Biak and other islands to the west.
Once Sibert had his entire division and its equipment unloaded from landing craft, and his 1st Infantry regiment assigned the areas to the south and west from where the Yoshino and Matsuyama Forces had launched attacks, he moved against Lone Tree Hill. He was unaware that the remnants of both forces, badly mauled in their earlier attacks and suffering from food and ammunition shortages, as well as weakened by disease, had begun moving west, away from the Americans, in search of a place of safety. Colonel Matsuyama would eventually circle around and join the defense of Lone Tree Hill.20
Meanwhile, the Japanese were not idle. They were repairing and reinforcing their defenses on Lone Tree Hill and, from an observation post hidden deep behind branches of a tall tree atop the hill, keeping an eye on the activities of the Americans. Living quarters inside caves were expanded, and additional bunkers were built using mostly coconut logs and hunks of coral. Seven field artillery pieces were placed in advantageous positions on and around the hill. More than eight hundred combat troops from the 224th Infantry and the 36th Artillery waited for the Americans to try to capture the hill. Many remained well hidden inside the caves, under bunkers, and inside dugouts that kept them out of sight of the approaching enemy.21
In addition to the soldiers actually on the hill, there were another thousand Japanese troops on the two adjoining hills and in the surrounding area, focused on the approaches to the hill. These were mostly infantry, but also included men from artillery, antiaircraft, and construction units.
General Sibert launched his attack against Lone Tree Hill on June 20, using his division’s 20th Infantry Regiment. In the vanguard were the 1st and 3rd Battalions. Halted by automatic-weapons fire, the men in several companies spent that night pinned down and isolated from the rest of the battalions. On the twenty-first, all three battalions spent the day patrolling and reconnoitering Japanese positions.
On June 22, the entire regiment struck from two directions. The 1st Battalion attacked from the beach, aided by several tanks. The tankers could not leave the coast road due to marshy soil, limiting their help. The 2nd and 3rd Battalions attacked from the jungle-covered south, but ran into problems with the muddy terrain. Help soon arrived in the form of eighteen P-47 Thunderbolt fighter–ground attack aircraft from the newly opened airfield on Wakde Island. Yet even this was less than satisfactory, as the Japanese had buried themselves deep into the hill in many places.
By midafternoon on the twenty-second, most of the 3rd Battalion troops had fought their way to the very summit of Lone Tree Hill, helped by an intense artillery barrage. What they did not realize was that the Japanese had offered only minor resistance to their advance. While the Americans struggled uphill, most of the enemy, hidden inside their caves and bunkers, allowed them to pass. Once the 3rd Battalion reached the top, the Japanese emerged and opened fire, cutting off any hope of escaping what was essentially a well-laid trap.
With the 3rd Battalion pinned down and calling for help, the 2nd Battalion rushed to the rescue until it was caught exposed in a gully and was itself trapped by concentrated enemy fire. Meanwhile at the top, the 3rd Battalion was relentlessly attacked by mortars, automatic weapons, and even small mountain artillery pieces the enemy had successfully hidden. After dark, Colonel Matsuyama and two companies of his 224th Infantry attacked in a banzai charge that resulted in six excruciating hours of hand-to-hand combat. Finally driven back by the desperate Americans, Matsuyama’s men returned to their bunkers and caves. The fighting resulted in the deaths of thirty members of the 3rd Battalion and the wounding of nearly one hundred others. The number of Japanese dead and wounded could not be determined because the enemy dragged their casualties back to their hiding places. Among their wounded was Colonel Matsuyama, whose injury did not keep him from remaining in command of his troops.22
Both American battalions were isolated from each other and from the troops at the bottom of the hill. Their lines of communications cut, they were unable to inform their regiment that they were in desperate need of food, water, and ammunition. While the Americans waited for the next inevitable attack, Matsuyama received reinforcements in the form of three fresh companies that had made their way up the hill undetected.
Unable to dig into the coral, most of the men of the 3rd Battalion had to satisfy their need for protection from enemy fire by lying prone next to logs and trees felled by the earlier shelling and bombing. A nighttime torrential rainstorm made life for these men even more miserable, although it did have the positive effect of reducing Japanese attacks and providing them with some drinking water.23
The assault came just before dawn the next morning, June 23. It was not against the 3rd Battalion at the top, however, but the 2nd Battalion in and around the gully. The advancing troops did not engage with the usual Japanese battle cry, but approached the battalion silently. Somehow, they had acquired various pieces of U.S. Army uniforms and American weapons. If this was part of a plan to get in close to the 2nd Battalion, it mostly worked. The Americans at first held their fire, thinking the approaching men might be a patrol from another battalion. Since it was still before dawn, the Japanese could not be seen clearly until they were a mere fifteen yards away, when they
were recognized as the enemy. In the hand-to-hand fighting that ensued, both sides suffered heavy casualties. After an hour, the Japanese once again withdrew to their bunkers and caves.
At eight a.m. the men of the 2nd Battalion were ordered to make every possible effort to reach the surrounded 3rd at the top of Lone Tree Hill. They were just four hundred yards from the 3rd, but realized there was no way they could go directly to the top. The enemy was too numerous and too well placed. It would be a suicide mission for most if not the entire battalion. Instead, they made their way back down and moved north around the hill, and then over the next few hours fought their way up to the crest. At two p.m. the lead units of the 2nd Battalion reached the men of the 3rd, but this only increased the number of Americans trapped atop Lone Tree Hill.
Efforts to get food, ammunition, and medical supplies to the trapped men were thwarted. Then, on June 24, an incredible act of heroism succeeded in opening a supply line to the trapped battalions. Company L of the 1st Infantry Regiment of the 6th Infantry Division attempted to force its way through the Japanese blockade. Loaded down with food and other badly needed supplies, the men finally fought their way to the top. Unfortunately, they had been unable to bring much ammunition, and now they, too, were trapped. It was then that Private First Class Carl H. Parsiola, a twenty-four-year-old construction machinery operator from Michigan, decided to take action. Dashing through machine-gun fire to get back down the hill, Parsiola organized a group of volunteers who attacked the Japanese positions with rocket launchers, hand grenades, and flamethrowers. The overwhelming and relentless assaults killed dozens of enemy soldiers, and more important, opened a route by which supplies, especially ammunition, could reach the beleaguered soldiers at the top. For his courageous action, Parsiola was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.24
War at the End of the World Page 35
