Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  At that point, 270 soldiers of the 2nd Company, 1st Battalion, 23rd Japanese Infantry, began fighting to hold the landing beaches west of the Cape. Snipers on Puruata poured rifle fire into the boats rounding the island, and from 18 big pillboxes on the right or east flank came the bullets of automatic weapons and the shells of a 75-millimeter field piece.

  The Japanese gun whanged from within a concealed emplacement of coconut logs and sandbags. Before it fired 50 shells it had sunk four landing boats and damaged 10 others carrying the men of Major Leonard (Spike) Mason’s First Battalion, Third.

  Sergeant Robert Owens, among the first men to land safely, spotted the emplacement from which the gun poured its terrible fire. He crawled toward it. He posted four men to pin down the two rifle bunkers which covered the approach to the gun. Then he jumped to his feet and charged. He was hit repeatedly on his way in, but he kept on. He dove straight through the gun port. He killed the gunner and drove the other crewmen out the rear entrance, where they were cut down by his companions. Then Owens sank to the ground, dying. His charge had won the Medal of Honor and also had destroyed the most formidable obstacle on the Torokina beaches.

  With the gun knocked out, Major Spike Mason could continue his reorganization of the assault on the pillboxes. One by one they fell, while Mason’s Marines and the Second Raider Battalion of Lieutenant Colonel Joseph McCaffery darted low through enemy small-arms fire, running in close to the hulking pillboxes to hurl the grenades that flushed the enemy into the open. At one pillbox Platoon Sergeant Bill Wilson began firing at 15 enemy soldiers dashing from an exposed trench for the security of a pillbox. He was joined by another Marine. They killed them all and advanced on another bunker. As a terrified Japanese burst from its entry Wilson leaped on his shoulders and finished him with a knife thrust.

  It was that kind of fighting—savage, close, primitive. For the first time the Marines were meeting an organized beach defense, and they were taking casualties. McCaffery fell, mortally stricken. Mason was wounded. He refused evacuation, for he feared a counterattack and had no wish to be the living commander of a lost battalion. He turned command over to his executive. “Get the hell in there and fight!” he swore, and the assault swept on until the smoke and yells and roar of battle had faded by noon and most of the 270 Japanese who had fought so hard to hold the Cape were dead.

  On the west or left flank it was not the Japanese but the sea that was the enemy. The Ninth Marines came in unopposed, but their beaches were too steep for the landing boats to ground along the full length of their keel. They were upended. They were swamped or they filled at the stern and slid off the beach to sink in deep water. Sixty-four landing boats and 22 LCM’s were broached before the troops came ashore.

  But by noon, more than half the Third Marine Division had been landed and destroyers were heading south for Guadalcanal to escort the second echelon north. Over at Puruata the Third Raider Battalion was mopping up the Japanese snipers. And the 30 Japanese fighters and bombers which had been gulled down Choiseul way had at last found the true target and were roaring in to strike it.

  The red-balled planes arrived at forty minutes past noon, making for the troops ashore and the transports out in Empress Augusta Bay. Dropping down from the clouds to take on eight of them came five Marine Corsairs led by Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Williamson. Among them was Butcher Bob Hanson, the youthful, India-born lieutenant who was to have one of the most brilliant—and meteoric—careers of all American fliers.

  While his comrades knocked down two of the enemy aircraft, Hanson made three quick high side passes at a trio of low-flying Kates and shot down all of them. But the bullets of a Kate rear-gunner shot down Hanson. He crashed safely, got out, inflated his rubber boat until he sighted the destroyer Sigourney in the Bay. He paddled toward it, hopefully singing “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and Sigourney obligingly came about and picked him up.

  Except for slight damage to destroyer Wadsworth, where two sailors were killed and five wounded, the Japanese attackers caused little damage. They lost 22 planes while shooting down four Americans, and they had not killed a single Marine.

  It had not been thought possible that the swamps and steaming jungle of Guadalcanal could be anywhere exceeded. These men had trained on Guadalcanal and had learned how to live in the rain forest. After Guadalcanal they thought of themselves as jungle-fighters, but they had not been on Guadalcanal during the rainy season.

  Before dusk the rain began to fall. Marines sloshing inland discovered that the difference between Guadalcanal and Bougainville was that Bougainville was all jungle. There were no lovely white beaches, only a streak of sand separating sea from forest. There were no pleasant groves of coconuts, for dark and wild Bougainville had never attracted planters.

  In the rains falling that dusk of November 1, wiremen found that it was taking them an hour to move a hundred yards. It was hard to move supplies, except by hand or amtrack. Anything wheeled was useless. Because of this it was not until nightfall that Major General Turnage had established his beachhead perimeter.

  This was an area about 5,000 yards in width on an east-west axis, and 1,000 yards at its deepest. Protecting it against the Japanese 23rd Regiment then assembling inland was a roadblock which a battalion of Raiders had set up along the Mission Trail. The trail ran into the jungle from roughly the center of the perimeter, slanting right or east. The Raider roadblock was placed across it at a point about 2,000 yards outside the perimeter. This was to stop, or at least check, the night’s inevitable Japanese counterattack.

  But it never came.

  Marines sitting up to their waists in water heard nothing but the blundering of an occasional wild pig, or, more infrequently, the thrashing of one of those Japanese soldiers who had infiltrated with no notion of what he would do once he had pierced the line. One of these fell into a water-filled hole occupied by a Marine rifleman.

  “I’m too young to die,” he cried in impeccable English.

  “So am I,” the Marine yelled, and killed him with his knife.

  Otherwise, the lines were quiet. There was only the steady drumming of the rain. Back in Division headquarters it seemed strange that the enemy did not strike.

  Then at a half-hour or so after two in the morning there was a flashing and a thundering to seaward and a sudden buzzing of CP telephones and the word was passed:

  “Condition Black. You may expect shelling from enemy ships followed by counterinvasion.”

  In Rabaul on November 1 a counterinvasion had been ordered for the Cape Torokina area and then canceled.

  Rear Admiral Sentaro Omori had been told to take 1,000 soldiers aboard five destroyer-transports to the American beachhead on Bougainville. Omori assembled his fleet—six big destroyers, the heavy cruisers Myoko and Haguro, the lights Sendai and Agano—and took them down to St. George Channel between New Britain and New Ireland. They waited there for the destroyer-transports, which did not show up until half-past ten that night. Already chafing at the delay, disturbed at having been sighted by an American submarine, Omori was further upset to hear that the transports could not make more than 26 knots. Then an American plane dropped a bomb close aboard Sendai at eleven o’clock, and Omori asked Rabaul for permission to send back the transports so that he might speed down to Empress Augusta Bay unencumbered and attack the American transports. Permission was granted. Bending on 32 knots, Omori took his warships south.

  Waiting below to meet him, knowing he was coming, was Rear Admiral A. Stanton (Tip) Merrill, commanding Task Force 39.

  Admiral Merrill had already set minesweepers to work sealing off Torokina with a field of mines. He too had sent his transports away and had taken station about 19 miles off the Cape at the mouth of Empress Augusta Bay—determined “to prevent the entry therein of a single enemy ship.”

  Merrill had more ships but not as much firepower as the enemy. He had eight destroyers, including the four “Little Beavers” of Captain Arleigh ( Thirty-One-Knot ) Bur
ke, and the light cruisers Montpelier, Cleveland, Columbia, and Denver. At about half-past two in the morning of November 2 the pips of the approaching Japanese warships were clearly visible on American radar screens.

  “Believe this is what we want,” Montpelier’s combat information center reported, and ten minutes later the battle was joined.

  It quickly broke up into three fights, one between the cruisers and two separate destroyer battles. Almost immediately the savage concerted shellfire of Merrill’s cruisers struck Sendai. It was radar-controlled firing at its best. Sendai began to burn brightly, exploding as she burned. Destroyers Samidare and Shiratsuyu swung violently around to escape the fire that was sinking Sendai and collided with one another with a screech of rending steel. They limped home to Rabaul.

  Zigzagging violently, making smoke, the American cruiser commanders shifted fire to the Japanese columns centered around Myoko and Haguro. Again their aim was unerring. The third salvos walked right into them. Destroyer Hatsukaze tried to dodge. She swerved between the two big cruisers and shuddered as Myoko plowed into her, shearing off two of her tubes, mangling her starboard bow, leaving her to be torn apart and sunk by the American destroyers.

  But now Omori’s heavies were opening up with eight-inch star-shells and patrol planes were dropping white and colored flares. The American cruisers, unscratched for half an hour, began to receive hits. Eight-inch salvos straddled them. Denver received three eight-inch hits forward and began to take in water, but she stayed afloat while the battle became a thing of terrible beauty.

  Clouds drifting overhead had become suffused with the light of flare and gunflash. They illuminated the battle as though it were being fought upon a theatrically lighted black pond, and all that flashed and glittered and shone seemed to be magnified by the encircling darkness. There was that quality of slow majesty attendant upon night surface action when great ships move at great speed over great bodies of water. Salvos striking the sea threw up great geysers; they seemed not to leap but to gather themselves upward, to rise in slow-pluming fountains, to catch the red light of burning ships, the green-gold of flame-streaming guns, the jagged orange glinting off swirling black water, to catch it, to make it dazzling with its own phosphorescence—and then to burst apart in a million vanishing sparkles.

  It would have been an unreal world, a ghostly one, fantastical, but for the pungent smell of smoke, the constant thundering of the guns and the real crashing of the shells and crying of the stricken.

  As the battle continued, Admiral Omori came to believe that he had destroyed three American cruisers. He thought that near-misses straddling them and raising geysers in the air had been torpedo hits. When the American cruisers vanished beneath their own smoke, he believed they had sunk—and he sailed home.

  Like Mikawa at Savo, Omori had not gotten in on the American transports. Unlike him he had not sunk an American ship.

  It was dawn of November 2 but the Marines inland on Bougainville saw only the murky light of the swamp as they hurried to expand their beachhead. The Twenty-first Marines held in division reserve by Major General Turnage were to be brought in from Guadalcanal, followed by the Army’s 37th Infantry Division, representing the corps reserve. In the meantime the Marine combat battalions pushed deeper into the rain forest and expanded the perimeter wide enough to contain the airfield which the Seabees were building. The new line’s left rested on the Koromokina Swamp in the west and its right at a point about 2,000 yards east of Cape Torokina. Its over-all width was about 5,500 yards, it was about 2,000 yards at its deepest and something more than 1,000 yards at the norm. Outside it was the rain forest to the north and behind it the waters of Empress Augusta Bay. The Laruma River lay 10,000 yards to the west of it on the left and the crooked Piva River about the same distance east on the right.

  Major General Turnage still had the Raiders holding the Mission Trail roadblock-but now only about 400 yards outside the perimeter. Puruata was becoming a supply dump, and little Torokina Island midway between Puruata and the Cape had also been occupied. Turnage also reshuffled his units to place the fresh ones in position to receive the counterthrust he still believed to be impending—either from sea or jungle. In this movement, the left flank had been shortened and the Koromokina Swamp positions held by two battalions had been abandoned. And this would help the enemy in the counterinvasion that was to come.

  Lieutenant General Hyakutate had not given up on the idea of counterinvasion by sea. After Admiral Omori sent back the transports the night of November 1, Hyakutate collected 3,000 men from the 17th Division’s 53rd and 54th Regiments. They were to go south escorted by another powerful cruiser force which was to sweep the waters clear of Americans and bombard the Marine beachhead while the soldiers went ashore.

  The cruisers came down from Truk—Takao, Maya, Atago, Suzuya, Mogami, Chikuma, Chokai—the old pros, the big and veteran sluggers of Admiral Kondo’s 2nd Fleet. With them came light cruiser Noshiro, four destroyers and a sizable fleet train. They came into Rabaul on November 5 to refuel. They considered themselves safe. There were 150 planes on Rabaul’s fields. American bases were too far off. There were no American carriers at sea.

  But Princeton and Saratoga had already raced up to Bougainville under cover of darkness. At nine in the morning of November 5 they began to fly off their planes—97 fighters and bombers-and three hours later a torrent of American aircraft thundered up St. George Channel, roared straight through the flak of the flatfooted enemy ships without breaking formation, and then broke off into small groups to begin their work.

  The 70 Japanese fighters already airborne to oppose them could not knock down more than 10 of them, and the damage to Kondo’s cruisers was enormous. Not one ship was sunk, but few were left in fighting trim. Takao was torn apart at the waterline, Mogami was sent staggering back to Japan for repairs, Atago took three near-misses and a bomb fell down one of Maya’s stacks and exploded in her engine room. Meanwhile the lights Agano and Noshiro were also hit and destroyer Fujinami was holed by a dud torpedo and Wakatsuki ripped open by near-misses.

  Then, as the Navy planes flew back to their mother ships, 24 Army Liberators and 67 Lightnings came winging over from New Guinea and the Woodlarks to pound the city itself and tear up the docks.

  Yet, with the cruiser force out of action, and the naval phase of the counterattack now almost impossible, a portion of Hyakutate’s soldiers was still going to be sent down The Slot on the first run of the Tokyo Express in nearly a year.

  Why?

  Because the Rabaul planes sent out to hunt Princeton and Saratoga and their escorting warships thought they had found their quarry between Cape Torokina and the Treasuries. What they had actually found was one damaged LCT under the care of an LCI-gunboat and a PT-boat. The Japanese planes struck. The three little American ships not only beat them off but also shot a few of them down. Next day the world heard this from Radio Tokyo:

  “One large carrier blown up and sunk, one medium carrier set ablaze and later sunk, and two heavy cruisers and one cruiser and destroyer sunk.”

  It was the biggest lie of the Pacific War, the ultimate result of the Japanese custom of making reports wearing rose-colored glasses. Because of it the Tokyo Express sped down to Bougainville the night of November 6. Four destroyers took 475 soldiers down to Koromokina Swamp, the place which would give its name to the brief, bitter battle in which they died.

  The men of the Third Battalion, Ninth Marines, rose from their watery sleeping places at dawn of November 7 and saw 21 Japanese barges plodding toward beaches just west of Koromokina Swamp. The boats beached and Japanese soldiers jumped ashore and ran into the jungle. Some of them struck up the Laruma River still farther west of these Marines on the left or western flank. The Japanese planned to get upriver and then turn right or east to work down against the American perimeter.

  The main body struck at the Marine left held by the Third Battalion, Ninth. They were stopped. They withdrew into the swamp, and at twenty minutes
after eight the Marines attacked.

  They too were stopped, for the Japanese had occupied those foxholes and entrenchments abandoned only a few days before when Turnage shortened his lines. They had had more than an hour to improve them, and the Japanese had no equals at digging in.

  Now it was stalemate, and during it, a Laruma River patrol led by Lieutenant Orville Freeman opened battle with those Japanese who had marched upriver. Outnumbered, Freeman withdrew. He retreated to the perimeter, setting up frequent rear-guards to ambush the pursuing Japs. It would take him thirty hours to get back to his lines, during which one Marine would be killed and Freeman himself would be wounded. But they would make it.

  In the meantime, on that morning of November 7, Major General Turnage called for his reserve.

  The men of the First Battalion, Third Marines, had gone into reserve to rest after doing most of the fighting during the Cape Torokina landings. They had been pleased. But now, like the Raiders of Guadalcanal, they were learning that it is often safer to be on the lines than to be behind them where the general can put you to use.

  At a quarter past one these men passed through the bogged-down Third Battalion, Ninth. They attacked into a tangle of fern and creeper and giant trees with a mire for underfooting and five yards for visibility. Men shot at movement and when concealed Japanese machine guns spat at them they hurled grenades at the sound.

  Sergeant Herbert Thomas threw a grenade in this way, but it was caught by ropelike lianas overhead and dropped back among Thomas and his men. The sergeant threw himself on it and was killed. The men he had saved moved on.

  Then a Marine tank came churning through the muck. It swayed as it burst through the undergrowth like a great blind amphibian, the sharp branches of the undergrowth clawing harmlessly at its metal hide, its cannon jerking and spouting flame. Captain Gordon Warner ran alongside the tank. He carried a helmet full of hand grenades, hurling them at Japanese machine-gun nests to spot them for the tank-gunner.