Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  On the night of November 24 the Tokyo Express sailed again from Rabaul with 920 soldiers. They were aboard the destroyer-transports Yugiri, Amagiri, and Uzuki, escorted by the big destroyers Onami and Makinami. The force, commanded by Captain Kiyoto Kagawa, sailed straight for Buka—where Thirty-One-Knot Burke and his Little Beavers were lying in ambush.

  American Naval Intelligence had guessed that the Japanese meant to reinforce. On November 24, Admiral Halsey sent this message to Captain Burke:

  Thirty-One-Knot Burke, get this. Put your squadron athwart the Buka-Rabaul evacuation line about 35 miles west of Buka. If no enemy contacts by early morning, come south to refuel same place. If enemy contacted, you know what to do.

  —HALSEY

  Burke led Charles F. Ausburne, Claxton, Dyson, Converse and Spence north under low-scudding clouds. They came to a 100-mile stretch of squall-dappled sea between Buka and New Ireland to the west. They waited there, unaware that Captain Kagawa had already completed reinforcement of Buka.

  While Onami and Makinami had stood offshore as a screen, Yugiri, Amagiri and Uzuki ran in to discharge the troops and also to take aboard 700 aviation troops who had been idle since the Buka fields were knocked out. Then the destroyer-transports rejoined the screen and the entire force made west.

  At a few minutes before two in the morning of November 25, the destroyers of Captain Burke sighted these Japanese ships and sent 15 torpedoes streaking toward Captain Kagawa’s screen. Then they turned sharp right to avoid counterfire.

  Four minutes later Captain Kagawa’s lookouts on Onami sighted the American fish. Kagawa had thirty seconds to avoid them. It was not enough. He sailed into them. Onami blew apart, and a ball of red fire rolled 300 feet skyward from the place where she had been. Makinami began breaking in two and was finally pounded beneath the waves by Spence and Converse.

  Aboard Ausburne, with Claxton and Dyson tearing after him, Burke began to pursue the three destroyer-transports frantically hurrying home. They had a good lead, but they couldn’t match Burke’s 33-knot pace. In a quarter-hour Burke’s destroyers had closed the gap from 13,000 yards to 8,000. Burke was exuberant. He radioed Halsey’s headquarters at Guadalcanal. “I’m ridin’ herd!” he yelled. Being from the Colorado cowboy country, he could not restrain a “Come a Ki-Yi-Yippee, Yippee-Ay!”

  Then Burke had a hunch. He zigged his division right for a minute and then zagged back to the previous course. There were three explosions. Yugiri had unloaded her torpedoes and they had struck the wakes of Burke’s destroyers and exploded.

  Burke’s destroyers opened up with guns pointing forward. They were coming on hotly, their prows hissing sharply through the black water, and they had no time to maneuver for broadside firing. The blast of Ausburne’s Number Two mount blew the hatch off Number One mount ahead of it, but the guns continued to fire. Burke began fish-tailing to bring his stern batteries to bear. The fire of all three American destroyers was converging on Yugiri. She was circling, burning. At a few minutes after three, while Amagiri and Uzuki were making their getaway, Yugiri went under.

  The battle of Cape St. George had ended. The Tokyo Express had run its last, and the Little Beavers of Thirty-One-Knot Burke sailed south without a scratch.

  Inside the expanded Torokina beachhead the Seabees had brought off another of those feats of engineering wizardry which the Marines had come to take for granted. The Seabees had built an airfield in the soup of the Torokina swamp. They began it November 9 and at dawn of December 10 the first of VMF-216’s Corsairs put down on the completed airstrip. Seventeen came in, followed by a half-dozen Dauntlesses and a Skytrain transport. Within a week Army Aerocobras joined the Corsairs in close-up support against the Japanese on Bougainville. Soon there would be Lightning night-fighters operating from Torokina, which meant the days of Washing-Machine Charley were also numbered. The Navy’s Corsairs, the Marines’ Venturas and the Army’s Lightnings had shown how an intricate system of radar vectoring could put them on Charley’s tail.

  But more important, Torokina Airfield had brought Rabaul within fighter range. This was the importance of the Seabee’s engineering feat, though it was lost on the ordinary Marine in his very real gratitude for the new roads.

  It was now possible for a man to walk on Bougainville without having cold wet mud working down within his socks, without hearing the customary slop-suck, slop-suck sound of one foot following the other out of foot-high slime. The network of roads hacked out of the jungle by these doughty movers and shakers of earth also meant that the Torokina beachhead was becoming stuffed with food and supplies which would reduce the discomfort of living on an enormous, vile-green lily pad. So the Marines were grateful and on Bougainville they did the Seabees the unrivaled compliment of a kind word for another branch of the United States armed forces. On one of the Seabees’ new roads the Second Raider Battalion erected this sign:

  So when we reach the Isle of Japan

  With our caps at a jaunty tilt,

  We’ll enter the City of Tokyo

  On the roads the Seabees built.

  It was warm and well-meaning and it made everyone smile. Only later in the war would the Marine smile vanish, but by then it was too late to correct the impression—slyly fostered by the Seabees—that Marines never went ashore anywhere until the Seabees gave them the word that the roads were ready.

  17

  At the beginning of December Major General Turnage decided to take up a blocking position to the right of the northeast curve of his Bougainville beachhead. He wanted to occupy a series of ridges which began about a half-mile east along the East-West Trail and ran another mile and a half to the west bank of the Torokina River.

  There were four of these heights, one called Hill 600 to the south of the trail or beneath it, and three north or above it. These were Hill 1000, next a nameless hill about 250 feet high, then Hill 600A. Turnage struck at the northern hills first.

  Hill 1000 was seized by the Third Parachute Battalion in the early part of the month. On December 12 the Twenty-first Marines hit the nameless hill—and quickly called it Hellzapoppin’ Ridge for the reception they received.

  Hellzapoppin’ had sheer slopes on its sides, east and west, and could only be approached from the forward and reverse slopes, south and north. Its crest was a mere 40 yards in width, though it ran 350 yards fore and aft. It was covered with a dense green tangle, in which the Japanese had constructed the usual complex of interlocking holes and bunkers, and giant trees on its summit served as a screen to detonate the mortars which the Marines tried to drop on the heavily fortified reverse slope.

  The Twenty-first Marines came at Hellzapoppin’ for five days, during which Colonel Evans Ames used every one of his regiment’s nine rifle companies in the assault. During this time the Marines also began to develop the tactic of close-up aerial support which would be one of their outstanding contributions to modern warfare, calling on Avenger torpedo-bombers to deliver low-level strafing and bombing attacks within unusually close range of their own lines. But even five days could do no more than bring a purchase on Hellzapoppin’s forward slopes, and on December 17 the Marines called for an all-out aerial strike on the still-undented reverse slope.

  On that same December 17 a column of unlovely LST’s was plodding along the coast of northeast New Guinea, bringing the First Marine Division back to the war.

  The final echelons of the First Marine Regiment were coming up from Goodenough Island to Finschhafen and Oro Bay. Here they would join the Seventh Marines, and these two regiments would sail across Dampier Strait to assault Cape Gloucester on the western tip of New Britain.

  They would do this for General MacArthur, for the price of frolicking in the fleshpots of Melbourne had been service under his command in the Southwest Pacific area. General MacArthur had placed the First Marine Division in his ALAMO Force and sent it on an operation which would nail down his right flank while he struck farther north in New Guinea, and would also isolate the great Japanese base
at Rabaul on eastern New Britain. For Bougainville to the east and the new Japanese airfield on Cape Gloucester to the western end of New Britain would straddle Rabaul.

  This was the First Division’s mission as it sailed again to battle—as stiff-necked as ever and perhaps a shade more arrogant in the knowledge that it was still going it alone. The men of this division had been on their own since leaving the States nineteen months ago, and they had come to regard themselves as the proprietors of the Pacific. They had even designed their own uniform while in Melbourne, and it was said of them in Washington: “Any resemblance between the First Division and the remainder of the Marine Corps is purely accidental.”

  So the hard-nosed First set its sights on western New Britain, while on that same December 17 indelicate Pappy Boyington was treating mighty Rabaul on the eastern tip to its first experience of the fighter-sweep.

  It was a simple tactic, one which Boyington had discovered over Kahili two months ago. He had flown over the enemy base and taunted the enemy to come up and fight. When they did the Black Sheep shot them down.

  But Boyington had only had four or five planes that time. Now, in early December, with Torokina Airfield bringing Rabaul within 230 miles’ range, Boyington proposed to Major General Ralph Mitchell that the fighter-sweep be used on a bigger scale against the 200 or so fighter planes which the Japanese had still operative there. Mitchell agreed.

  On December 17 Boyington led 31 Corsairs, 22 Hellcats and 23 of those gaudily painted New Zealand Warhawks from Bougainville to Rabaul.

  The slow, low-flying Warhawks went in first and their eager New Zealand pilots ran into a formation of forty Zekes. They shot down five of them before Boyington’s main body arrived. The Japanese scurried for home and stayed there.

  Again Boyington hurled his taunts, and again came that polite inquiry:

  “Major Boyington, what is your position?”

  “Right over your effing airport!” Boyington yelled. “Why don’t you yellow bastards come up and fight?”

  “Why don’t you come down, sucker?” the Japanese taunted.

  Boyington grinned and led his fighters in a circling, high-low weave designed to confuse the enemy antiaircraft. Still the Japanese refused combat. Boyington and Moe Casey nosed over in a dive. They came in spraying the parked aircraft, always keeping a safe distance from those Japanese machine guns which were so accurate at short range. They climbed back up to 20,000 feet, where the other fighters were stacked.

  “All right, you bastards, I was down,” Boyington yelled. “How about you coming up?”

  Silence.

  Exasperated, his gasoline low, Boyington turned and flew back to Torokina.

  There were, he told Major General Mitchell, too many Allied planes out that day. The Japanese liked the odds a bit more in their favor. Seventy-six planes of three different types were also too difficult to handle. If the general would let him take up 36 planes—or at least no more than 48—he’d show him some real results.

  Mitchell agreed, but it could not be done until the air strikes had flown to Hellzapoppin’ Ridge.

  Three air strikes flew off Torokina on December 18. The foot Marines marked their front lines with colored smoke grenades. They marked the enemy targets by firing white phosphorous mortar shells. And the pilots dropped their bombs. Hellzapoppin’ Ridge was wreathed in smoke. Gradually the gaunt outlines of the ridge became visible, for the bombardment was divesting it of its vegetation and unmasking its defenses.

  The First and Third Battalions of the Twenty-first Marines attacked. They moved against the ridge from two sides, but the enemy had come out of his remaining holes once the bombardment was lifted and still held out.

  Another air strike.

  Six Avengers came roaring over the treetops. They dropped 48 100-pounders on targets within 75 yards of the Marine front. They circled and flew back to strafe at treetop level, and this time the attack was irresistible.

  Hellzapoppin’ was the last fierce battle of the Third Marine Division on Bougainville. Hill 600A was taken on December 23 and Hill 600 fell on December 27. The following day Major General Turnage turned over his Bougainville lines to Major General John Hodge, commander of the Marines’ old friends from Guadalcanal—the Americal Division.

  By the end of the year almost all of the Third Marine Division was back at Guadalcanal. They had seized an airfield in the heart of a blackwater jungle, had bought it at the cost of 423 killed and 1,418 wounded. They had counted well over 2,000 enemy bodies and there were probably at least that many more who died from their meeting with the Third Marine Division on Bougainville. Moreover, Torokina Airfield was already mounting the flights of planes that were roaring requiem for Rabaul.

  Five days after the fall of Hellzapoppin’ Ridge, Major Boyington proved the wisdom of the smaller sweep. He took 48 fighters up to Rabaul and caught 40 enemy fighters in the air. Thirty of them were shot down—12 by the Black Sheep alone, of which Boyington himself got four. For the first time in a year Joe Foss’s 26-plane record was in jeopardy.

  18

  Within the swamp forests of western New Britain was a swamp fox named Iwao Matsuda. He was a major general in the Imperial Japanese Army, a shipping specialist who had come to the vicinity of Cape Gloucester to direct the movement of barges from Rabaul to New Guinea.

  The barge movement had become important to Japan after the disaster of the Battle of the Bismarck Sea in March, 1943, when Allied aircraft sank eight transports and four destroyers bringing troops to New Guinea from Rabaul. Thereafter no big ships were risked within range of enemy air power. As had happened in the Solomons, New Guinea began to be supplied by barge.

  The barges moved at night, hiding out by day in the numerous coves and creeks of New Britain’s irregular northern coast. They crept around Cape Gloucester at the western tip of the north coast and slipped over to Rooke Island (Umboi) still farther west. From there they made the nocturnal dash across the Dampier Strait to New Guinea.

  Major General Iwao Matsuda made Cape Gloucester the midway point of this Rabaul-New Guinea barge movement, but as the thunder of the aerial assault upon Rabaul traveled westward to his own sector, Matsuda saw clearly it would soon be necessary for him to defend the Cape. To do this Matsuda had the 65th Brigade, a mixture of no less than 41 separate detachments and groups ranging in size from four men to 3,365. The war in the Solomons and New Guinea had thrown up many military waifs and orphans on the shores of New Britain and Iwao Matsuda had been made their guardian. He had only two battle-seasoned line regiments—the 53rd Infantry of Colonel Koki Sumiya and the 141st commanded by Colonel Kenshiro Katayama—plus artillery and machine cannon companies and a battalion-size combat outfit called the 51st Reconnaissance Regiment commanded by Colonel Jiro Sato. On December 1, Matsuda listed his strength as 15,018 men, although he actually had something closer to 10,000 to defend western New Britain.

  About 3,000 of these under Colonel Katayama were strung out at outposts as much as 40 or 50 miles southeast of the airfield. Another 4,000 were in the Cape Gloucester Airfield vicinity under Colonel Sumiya. The airfield, incidentally, was an area only about two miles wide and a mile deep set in fields of kunai grass at the extreme northern tip of the Cape. Cape Gloucester itself formed the northern extremity of western New Britain. It was a nipple of land about 12 miles wide from west to east and rising roughly eight miles higher than the rest of the north coast stretching away east from it. In the indenture thus formed was Borgen Bay. The remainder of Matsuda’s men were in this Borgen Bay area or else were with him in his headquarters at Nakarop.

  Here Matsuda had a personal residence built 10 feet off the sodden ground. He had a bedroom with a four-poster bed and adjoining bath. He had a fancy kitchen, well stocked with canned delicacies from America, Australia and England. He had cases of saki and beer. He had a living room with floors of inlaid wood and pink wicker furniture and he had a record-player. He had a prayer room with an altar window. He had an air raid shelter 30 f
eet long to which he might descend from his kitchen. General Matsuda had, moreover, the concealment which towering mountain ranges and man-swallowing swamps could give him. Though Nakarop was only a dozen miles south of the airfield, and hardly half that distance inland from Borgen Bay, this was western New Britain. This was a blind, blundering, inconstant place where a man might pass within ten feet of a village or a man and not see either, where rivers changed their courses in a single night because a dozen inches of rain had fallen within half a day, where the soaring mangrove tree which marked this morning’s path was gone by noon and the man crushed and hidden beneath its prostrate bulk would be reported missing for a month, or where this afternoon’s barricade is carried away by tonight’s flood or collapses in tomorrow’s earthquake.

  New Britain was not, like Guadalcanal, alluring—for she was as unlovely without as she was hideous within. If her interior was a hag of a place, with sunless sinks of swamps and steaming near-equatorial heat, then her exterior was a witch, hump-backed, with great green-black spines of mountains, blackhatted with thundercloud and shrouded with sheets of rain, smoking from the round bowls of volcanoes, and girdled all around by black mud beaches so narrow that a tall man might lie across them with head in jungle and toe in sea.

  On this dark island men did not so much think as feel. They felt themselves to be sentient clots stuck in a primeval ooze where everything was soft and squishy to the touch—including the puckering pulp of their own flesh—and it was only when their minds suggested that they, too, were dissolving in this monotonous mush of water and corrupting matter that they would realize they had a mind. Here men struggled to exist, and after that to fight, and here also the Marines would have their first opportunity to maneuver against the enemy. For New Britain was 370 miles long west to east and an average of 40 to 50 miles wide. True, the Marines would be maneuvering only for the airfield and Borgen Bay, but this was still a land mass larger than either Guadalcanal or Bougainville.