Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  That night the Japanese themselves improved the situation for Smith, coming out of their emplacements in a boomeranging banzai charge.

  They struck at Major Jones’s First Battalion, Sixth, where it held down the right or southern half of a 400-yard cross-island line. This line was drawn just east of the airfield, where the bird’s body ends and the narrowing tail begins. The left or northern half was held by Major Crowe’s men.

  The attack was made skillfully at first. Some 50 Japanese slipped past an outpost line and at half-past seven had opened a small gap between two companies. They were obviously there to feel out the Marine positions. They tried to draw fire.

  But the Marines did not shoot. They struck at the Japanese with bayonets and clubbed rifles and grenades, and while the beach guns and the howitzers on Bairiki converged in a hemming line of fire between the lines, they killed them to a man.

  In the interval between this thrust and the second attack, Major Wood Kyle moved a company of Marines into reserve behind Jones while Major McLeod leapfrogged one of his companies forward to fill the gap this movement left. At eleven o’clock the Japanese came again, this time with two 50-man parties. They fired openly, shouting and throwing grenades aimlessly. A score of them came charging at a BAR position held by Pfc. Lowell Koci and Pfc. Horace Warfield. They were clearly silhouetted in the glare of gasoline fires lighted behind them by Marine mortars.

  The Marines fired. They ducked down to reload and a Japanese soldier jumped into their hole thrusting with his bayonet. It drove into Warfield’s thigh. The Japanese strained to withdraw it, and Koci, a husky 200-pounder, seized his BAR by its muzzle and swung it around like a whip. The butt struck the man behind the head and brained him. His legs thumped the sand as he fell.

  Again the artillery cut off retreat for these infiltrating Japanese, and the Marines went about the work of destroying them.

  At four o’clock in the morning of November 23, with the moon making a grotesquerie of the coral flats—humping the convex roofs of the pillboxes, squashing the squares of the blockhouses, catching the jagged stumps of coconut trees and drawing them out like giant corkscrews—some 300 more Japanese launched the counterattack which broke their own backs.

  They flowed up against the Marine lines yelling and jabbering, and for a time there seemed to be too many of them. Lieutenant Norman Thomas telephoned Major Jones and yelled: “We’re killing them as fast as they come at us, but we can’t hold much longer. We need reinforcements!” There wasn’t time for reinforcement; there was only time for what Jones was sternly commanding:

  “You’ve got to hold!”

  While the destroyers Schroeder and Sigsbee hurled salvo after salvo into the Japanese assembly areas, while the shells of the Marine artillery fell within 75 yards of the front lines, Thomas and his men fought with rifle, bayonet and grenade. By five o’clock the banzai charge was shattered. There were 200 dead Japanese within the Marine lines. There were 125 more torn and broken corpses out where the artillery had fallen.

  There were now only 500 Japanese left alive on Betio.

  12

  The men of the Second Marine Division were rushing to victory on the morning of November 23. They were going downhill. The taste of triumph was in the air, and all those who pressed for it moved with a mastery that must have been annihilating to the souls of the enemy.

  At seven o’clock, the first of the carrier aircraft plunged to the attack. They bombed and strafed for half an hour. For another quarter-hour, pack howitzers hurled their shells into the tail of Betio. Warships on both the ocean and lagoon sides thundered for the next fifteen minutes, and then it was eight o’clock and time for the riflemen to attack.

  “Let’s go!” cried Lieutenant Colonel McLeod, and the Third Battalion, Sixth, swept forward with crackling rifles.

  They were the freshest troops on Betio. They had not yet fought. They passed through the lines held by Major Jones’s Marines—now exhausted from a day and night of constant fighting—and spread out on a two-company front to punch down the length of the narrowing tail. In front of them clanked Colorado and China Gal-those indestructible Shermans which were still capable of battle—while seven light tanks rolled to either flank.

  The attack gathered momentum. It raced forward 150 yards within a matter of minutes. The Japanese defenders fired only fitfully at the onrushing Americans—and then turned their weapons on themselves.

  On the left or lagoon side a system of supporting bombproofs slowed one company down. McLeod sent the other company racing down the ocean flank in a bypassing movement. Once they were past the bombproofs, the Marines of this company spread out again. Behind them the bypassed company moved in on the bombproofs, while Lieutenant Lou Largey brought Colorado into position. The liquid fire of the flame-throwers began to describe its fiery are—disappearing through the mouths of the gun ports. Suddenly a door flew open in the biggest of the bombproofs. Perhaps a hundred Japanese rushed out, tumbling over one another in their flight down a narrow exit channel.

  Colorado’s gun swiveled around and fired.

  Fifty, perhaps more, of the enemy were struck to the ground by that shattering shot and soon resistance had ended among the bombproofs.

  To the west, in The Pocket, the Marines of Major Hays’s battalion and the Ryan-Schoettel battalion were cleaning up. Half-tracks drove among the pillboxes and blockhouses blasting with their 75’s, while kneeling riflemen picked off the fleeing enemy. Others hurled shaped charges and grenades. Flame-throwing teams darted up to the entrances and fire gushed from nozzles.

  McLeod’s Marines were approaching Betio’s eastern shore. China Gal rumbled among the blockhouses, taking on those that still fired cannon, while the light tanks went after the machine guns and rifles. The Third Battalion, Sixth, was making a slaughter of eastern Betio. The tail was lashing its last. The Marines here killed 475 Japanese with their own losses kept to nine dead and 25 wounded. The enemy was too stunned to fight back.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon a dusty, sweating Marine waded into the sea between Betio and Bairiki and stooped to bathe his face in warm water.

  Betio had fallen.

  13

  “The Saps are all dead,” the tall young Apamamese said cheerfully on the morning of November 24, and asked for a cigarette. It was given to him, and he began to tell Captain Jim Jones of what had happened to the Japanese since November 22, when Jones attacked their radio station behind the shelling of the submarine Nautilus, only to be driven off with one Marine killed and another wounded.

  The following day, said the Apamamese, he had gone to the vicinity of the radio station. He had seen that the captain of the atoll garrison was making a speech to about fifteen soldiers who had survived the shelling and the fight. He hid himself and watched.

  The captain waved his samurai saber and howled.

  “We shall kill the American devils!”

  He yanked his pistol from its holster and brandished it in the air. It went off accidentally. It struck the captain and mortally wounded him. Then his men began killing themselves. They dug graves and lay down in them and then placed the muzzles of their weapons in their mouths and pulled the triggers.

  Captain Jones led his men to the radio station and found that this was so. The Marines finished the burial job the enemy had begun and then the people of Apamama came out of hiding.

  There were smiling young men, strong and athletic; eager youngsters more than willing to shinny up trees and throw down coconuts to the Marines; young girls with round bare breasts and straight black hair hanging to their waists and skirts of sail cloth bound tightly around brown hips; and there were old people coming out of the hiding places they had fled to when the shooting began. They came back to their thatched huts to light cooking fires. Shyly, some of the girls began to sing “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.”

  The Marines looked away. It was not that they were shy. It was just that they were embarrassed. They felt awkward in their clumsy habili
ments of war. They felt heavy with themselves and their world, as though they had blundered into some Eden which had not known the serpent.

  It was, of course, a romantic notion. But this was the Atoll of the Moon, that Apamama which these Marines would prefer to remember as “The Land of Moonshine.”

  14

  On this same November 24 the Marines were preparing to leave Betio. The transports were already standing into the lagoon with deliberate slow majesty.

  The Third Battalion, Sixth, would soon be sailing south to “invade” Apamama and gain that comic celebrity which Marines do not value. The Second Battalion, Sixth, had begun the long hot march up the atoll chain from Bairiki—driving all the Tarawa survivors before them, until, at the northernmost islet of Buariki, they would destroy 175 Japanese against 32 of their own killed and 59 wounded.

  But now, on the morning of November 24, most of the Second Division was departing the stench and heat and ruin of Betio. They had killed 4,690 of the enemy and 991 of their own comrades had died or were dying. They had suffered 2,311 men wounded—and many of these would not be fit to fight again. But they had taken Tarawa the untakable, they had done the thing Japan thought impossible. Yet, there was no thought of glory in their minds—of the posthumous Medals of Honor that would come to Hawkins, Bordelon, Bonnyman, of the one that Colonel Shoup would wear—as they came to the beach and stopped and blinked in astonishment.

  There was no beach.

  The spring tides had come, and the sea flowed up against the sea wall. For a moment there was wonder in the old eyes staring out of young faces. Then they shrugged and clambered aboard the boats. It was all one: high water on the reef also would have meant high water at the sea wall and nowhere to hide.

  The boats took them out to the waiting ships while, overhead, roaring airplanes were already beginning to arrive on Hawkins Field. One of them carried Major General Howlin’ Mad Smith. He was coming from Makin, which had been taken by about 6,500 soldiers of the Army’s 27th Division. They had landed unopposed and killed 445 Japanese combat troops while capturing 104 laborers. They had lost 66 dead and 152 wounded. Howlin’ Mad Smith was greeted at the airfield by Julian Smith. Both generals went to division headquarters for the flag-raising.

  “Maybe we should have two flags,” said Julian Smith. “After all, Tarawa was British once.”

  “Anybody got a British flag?” Howlin’ Mad Smith asked.

  Major Holland, the Britisher who had predicted the height of the reef water with such accuracy, rummaged in his bag. He pulled out a pair of underwear drawers and a little Union Jack. He grinned and handed it over. The banners of the two democracies went up the poles and the Rising Sun came down.

  The generals Smith began to tour the island. Even Julian Smith, who had been on Betio since November 22, was stunned by what he saw. Both generals understood at last why pillboxes and blockhouses which had withstood bombs and shells had eventually fallen. Within each of them lay a half-dozen or more dead Japanese, their bodies sprawled around those of three or four Marines. Julian Smith’s men had jumped inside to fight it out at muzzle range.

  Many of the pillboxes were made of five sides, each ten feet long, with a pair of entrances shielded against shrapnel by buffer tiers. Each side was made of two layers of coconut logs eight inches in diameter, hooked together with clamps and railroad spikes, with sand poured between each layer. The roof was built of two similar layers of coconut logs. Over this was a double steel turret, two sheathings of quarter-inch steel rounded off to deflect shells. Over this was three feet of sand.

  “By God!” Howlin’ Mad exclaimed. “The Germans never built anything like this in France. No wonder these bastards were sitting back here laughing at us. They never dreamed the Marines could take this island, and they were laughing at what would happen to us when we tried it.” Howlin’ Mad shook his head in disbelief. “How did they do it, Julian?” he began, and then, below and above the sea wall, he found his answer.

  Below it as many as 300 American bodies floated on that abundant tide. Above it, leaning against it in death, was the body of a young Marine. His right arm was still flung across the top of the sea wall. A few inches from his fingers stood a little blue-and-white flag. It was a beach marker. It told succeeding waves where they should land. The Marine had planted it there with his life, and now it spoke such eloquent reply to that question of a moment ago that both generals turned away from it in tears.

  “Julian,” Howlin’ Mad Smith went on in soft amendment—“how can such men be defeated?”

  15

  Battle had begun again on Bougainville.

  On November 20, the day the Second Marine Division began landing on Betio, a patrol of the Third Marine Division made the discovery that was to touch off the Battle of Piva Forks.

  On the afternoon of that day the Second Battalion, Third Marines, pursued the retreating Colonel Kawano and his 23rd Infantry Regiment through the jungle. The Marines moved east on the East-West Trail, a path about three miles north or inland of Major General Allen Turnage’s perimeter at Cape Torokina. A patrol reported reaching a high nameless knoll to the left or north of the trail and about 2,000 yards east of its western terminus. The knoll was the highest ground yet found on Bougainville. It overlooked Empress Augusta Bay and could block the Marines moving east on the trail. It also commanded a big swamp lying south or beneath the trail and occupied by the blocking force under the personal command of Colonel Kawano. Luckily, the knoll was unoccupied.

  Lieutenant Colonel Hector de Zayas ordered Major Donald Schmuck to occupy the knoll with F Company. Major Schmuck called a young lieutenant named Steve Cibik.

  “There’s a knoll of some kind ahead, Steve. It isn’t on the maps. No elevation listed. Get your men together and move up on it.”

  With 35 riflemen and 16 machine-gunners Lieutenant Cibik moved to the knoll. His voice was urgent, for it was getting dark. He told his men to string wire behind them and dig in. He tried to telephone back to the command post, but someone had neglected to connect the wire at the other end.

  Cibik and his men passed an anxious but uneventful night, and in the morning, while the mists began to shred over the jungle roof below them, Cibik began sending out patrols.

  His men came back excited. They had found empty Japanese positions up ahead. Cibik and his Marines moved out quickly to occupy them. The foxholes were littered with cigarette butts, chopsticks and coconut meat. Cibik guessed that the Japanese had pulled back during the night to avoid Marine artillery fire and that they would return.

  The Japanese did return, carelessly. Marine rifles crackled. Mushroom-helmeted figures fell. The others fled. Now Cibik made preparations to hold off the counterattack he expected to follow. He put a machine gun to either flank and a third in the center. A private named Charles Skinner suggested putting a fourth gun out ahead or east of the ridge to surprise the enemy. Cibik agreed and Skinner set up his ambush. Then a section of light mortars came up the ridge. A line was built up to right and left.

  But the enemy did not come that night. They came next morning. They blundered into the surprise fire of Private Skinner, the lash of the mortars and the submachine-gun firing of a Marine who had climbed a tree. The attack was broken up, just as Major Schmuck arrived to take command on the knoll that was already being called Cibik’s Ridge.

  That night 30 more Marines arrived to help stop a second and heavier attack made the following day, November 23. Cibik’s Ridge was taken for good.

  Next morning light and heavy field artillery battered the Japanese positions in the swamp. Seven battalions—three of them from the Army’s 37th Division—hurled 5,760 shells into the enemy lines. Forty-four machine guns and 21 mortars joined the bombardment.

  As the assault battalions moved to the jump-off points, their ears were filled with an incessant roar and rattle. Then there came the sharper, more fearful sounds of the enemy firing counterbombardment. The flashing of their guns was spotted from Cibik’s Ridge and withi
n minutes the counterbattery firing of the Marines and soldiers had put them out of action.

  The attack went forward. The Marines sloshed through mud up to their calves and broke into a silent swamp. They slogged on. The enemy sent up reserves to counterattack. The Marines met them in toe-to-toe, tree-for-tree fighting that ended in extermination of the counterattackers. So it went throughout this bleak, grim Thanksgiving Day and through the following day, when a fierce charge through a shower of grenades brought death to Colonel Kawano and the remnants of his trail-blocking force.

  Reports of enemy losses in the Battle of Piva Forks were conflicting. Some put the dead as high as 1,196, which, together with the Japanese destroyed in the Torokina fighting, would put the 23rd Regiment’s dead at 2,014. Other estimates suggested that this figure was highly exaggerated. It probably was, for the 23rd’s main body was still intact farther east on the East-West Trail.

  More important, Piva Forks enabled General Turnage to expand the Torokina perimeter to roughly 8,000 yards breadth, with Cibik’s Ridge and the Piva River now inside its eastern boundary.

  This was the new disposition completed by November 26, the day after the Tokyo Express made its last run.

  16

  The Japanese Army commanders in Rabaul—General Imamura and Lieutenant General Hyakutate—were still not convinced that the enemy’s chief objective was Cape Torokina. They believed that the American intention was merely to build a fighter strip there, before moving about 75 miles higher to seize better air bases at Buka Passage off Bougainville’s northern nose. Though the Buka airfields had already been made useless to Japan by American bombing, they could still be of use to the enemy in his drive against Rabaul. The Japanese Navy did not agree, but the Army had its way.