Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  If the engine conks out now

  We’ll come down from forty thou—

  And wind up in a rowboat at Rabaul.

  The Sherman tanks lumbering up to Suicide Creek were led by a tunnel-blasting bulldozer driven by Corporal John Capito. Capito began cutting down the 12-foot-high near bank, pushing the earth into the stream to form a causeway. A sniper peppered him and Capito was shot in the teeth. Then the Japanese began raking the bank with small-arms fire. Staff Sergeant Keary Lane crawled forward and jumped into the driver’s seat. He too was shot. Pfc. Randall Johnson crawled up to the bulldozer. He swung it around between him and the enemy. He began running alongside it, working the controls with a shovel and an axe handle as he cut the bank down. There was now a passage, but it was already getting dark and the crossing would have to be made in the morning.

  In that fading light Pappy Boyington paddled his rubber boat toward Rabaul and hoped there was no truth to the line, “ ‘Cause they’ll never send a Dumbo way out here.” If there was no rescuing Catalina, there might at least be an American submarine.

  A submarine surfaced and it had a big red ball painted on it and in the dimness of dusk Boyington could see the conningtower hatch pop open and disgorge a dozen short men with odd flat hats. Boyington was brought aboard. His wounds were not treated, but he was offered tea and cookies and given cigarettes. A pharmacist’s mate who spoke English said to him: “You don’t have to worry about anything as long as you are on this boat.”

  An hour later the sub docked at Rabaul and Boyington was led ashore tied and blindfolded.

  It was dark on the Japanese side of Suicide Creek.

  Corporal Caldwell and Pfc. Raschke found it hard to see as they crawled down the creek in search of Lieutenant Atkins. They had been given permission to return for their wounded platoon leader, and had brought two riflemen with them for fire cover. They came to the bank where they had last seen “Tommy Harvard” and crawled up it into the underbrush.

  They could hear only the rushing of the river and the muttering of the Japanese. Should they go back or should they risk calling out? Caldwell and the riflemen lay in the bushes with covering rifles while Raschke slithered out on the edge of the bank and began calling softly:

  “Tommy Harvard… Tommy Harvard…”

  A voice came weakly: “I’m down here.”

  Raschke stiffened. It could be a Japanese trick. He called out again.

  “What’s your real name?”

  The voice gasped, “Elisha Atkins.”

  The Marines slid cautiously down the bank. They found Atkins shaking from hours of immersion in the water, weak from the loss of blood. They lifted him up gently and carried him back to their lines.

  “God!” Lieutenant Atkins whispered hoarsely. “Am I glad to see you.”

  22

  Aogiri Ridge?

  Could there be such a place? There wasn’t anything with that name on the map. Even the Melanesians now returning from their mountain hideouts had never heard of it. Nor could you trust them. They were so happy to see the Americans—for the Japanese had latterly treated them wretchedly—that they would smile and bob their heads and say “Yes” to any point fingered out on the map.

  Obviously there was such a place, for the message taken from that dead Japanese warrant officer’s pocket mentioned it twice, emphasizing its importance, and the documents found in the pack of the deceased Lieutenant Abe indicated that there was at least a full regiment back there somewhere. Also, when the tanks rolled over Suicide Creek on the morning of January 4, they found that the enemy had retreated.

  So there should be quite a hatful of Japanese to the southeast, probably around Hill 660.

  Was Hill 660 Aogiri Ridge? No. Corporal Shigeto said Hill 660 was called Manju Yama, meaning Sweet Cookie Hill. Maybe it was Hill 150 just to the south of Target Hill. A rough sketch on the message made it look that way, and so the attacking Marine battalions were sent against Hill 150. They took it and found that it was probably not Aogiri Ridge at all.

  The attack southeastward continued, with Brigadier General Shepherd still anxious to locate this Aogiri Ridge.

  The terrain still favored the Japanese. As the Marine battalions swung like a gate southeastward to Borgen Bay, they plunged into another swamp. The Seventeenth Marines again built corduroy roads and knocked down riverbanks to get the tanks into bitterly-resisting Japanese pockets. At noon on January 7, as the right flank swung through an area 1,000 yards diagonally southwest of Target Hill, Lieutenant Colonel David McDougal of the Third Battalion, Fifth, was wounded. Five hours later his executive officer, Major Joseph Skoczylas, was also hit. Lieutenant Colonel Chesty Puller, still commanding the Third Battalion, Seventh, took over both outfits. Next morning Puller turned the other battalion over to a tall, brawny, square-faced lieutenant colonel with the fanciful name of Silent Lew Walt.

  As Walt’s men pressed the attack that morning of January 8 they felt the ground rising gently beneath a tangle of vines and creepers. It seemed drier. Though the map insisted they were on level ground, they were in fact beginning to climb steep slopes. They were being swept by interlocking small-arms fire. They did not know it then, but they had found Aogiri Ridge. Nor did they know that there were 37 bunkers ahead, most of them connected by underground tunnels. If one bunker fell and the Marines moved on, it would suddenly erupt again behind them. Walt’s men took heavy casualties, and General Shepherd had to rush two reinforcing companies up to Aogiri Ridge. The Marines did not take Aogiri Ridge or even dent it that day. They fell back to their morning positions and dug in.

  At dawn of January 9 Walt’s men struck out in straight frontal attack again. They couldn’t flank the position because its guns could rake either side. They couldn’t bypass it, for it would cut Marine communications. They had to strike straight ahead, staggering with fatigue, moving through jungle so thick they could not see 10 yards ahead of them, and all the while being struck by an invisible foe. They faltered, and Walt called for a 37-millimeter cannon.

  The goo-pound gun was trundled forward.

  “All right,” Walt shouted, as he and his runner put their stooping shoulders to one of the wheels. “Who’ll give me a hand?”

  There was no response, but then Walt tore at the gun with such savage fury that his men leaped in beside him. They pushed the cannon up the steep slope, stopping to fire cannister shot, blasting apart the jungle and clearing a path through the bunkers. Men were killed or wounded but others rushed in to take their place. Up, up it went, bumping and volleying and at last it was atop the ridge, and the hail of its cannister was sweeping among the enemy like shotgun pellets.

  The Marines had a hold on Aogiri Ridge.

  The Japanese in Rabaul led Major Boyington by rope halter to a hut half a mile from the dock. There they questioned him for twenty-four hours. When he balked, they twisted the ropes around his wrists until he was about to lose consciousness; then they loosened the rope and continued. They did not treat his wounds for ten days. They preferred to punch him in the jaw and beat his legs with rifle butts. They beat him regularly during the six weeks in which they held him prisoner there, for they did not like the American major who had taunted them so derisively, nor did they like the terrible things his comrades were doing to their once-mighty base. Already there was a new light-bomber strip being completed on Bougainville, and Rabaul had only six more weeks to live.

  Colonel Katayama had decided to use his last reserve battalion to knock the Americans off Aogiri. It was the 3rd Battalion, 141st, commanded by Major Asachichi Tatsumi. During the darkness succeeding the Marines’ conquest of the ridge-top, these men of Major Tatsumi had been gathering on Aogiri’s reverse slope. Around midnight of that January 9 they began to chant:

  “Marines prepare to die, Marines prepare to die.”

  At a quarter past one in the morning of January 10 they rushed up the slope screaming and howling, but were swiftly cut down by the Marines who had seized upon the chanting to get
ready in the right place. The shattered waves flowed back down the slope and came up again. Once more they were hurled back.

  In his foxhole Silent Lew Walt was calling 105-millimeter fire in closer and closer to his lines. He cut through the objections of the artillery officers in the fire-direction centers and called for shells as close as 50 yards to his own men, for the Japanese were obviously under orders to retake Aogiri or die.

  A third wave came up and was stopped.

  The fourth rushed up led by Major Tatsumi himself. In belted raincoat, with pistol in one hand and samurai sword in the other, the battalion commander led two other officers in a dash through the Marine lines. They ran toward Walt’s command post where the American commander lay in his water-filled foxhole waiting for them, his .45 automatic pistol in his hand. Two of them fell but Tatsumi came on.

  Suddenly two short-round shells struck the treetops overhead and exploded and killed Tatsumi. He fell a few paces from Lieutenant Colonel Walt. Now the Marine machine guns atop Aogiri Ridge were low on ammunition. Walt hurriedly sent men to the rear for ammunition, for he expected a fifth charge. He could hear the enemy chanting again, massing again—and then the ammunition belts arrived. Walt looked at his watch. One minute… two… three… four…

  They came up again and this time they were broken forever.

  Aogiri Ridge had been captured and held, and now it was being renamed. Brigadier General Shepherd climbed the ridge later that morning to look about 2,000 yards southeast to Hill 660, the highest ground in Borgen Bay, lying about seven miles southeast of the airfield. Shepherd spoke to Walt’s glassy-eyed Marines and congratulated their leader. He suggested making an American out of Aogiri.

  “We’ll call it Walt’s Ridge,” he said.

  23

  Having found a place that was not on the map—Aogiri Ridge —the Marines on western New Britain now turned to looking for a place marked on the map but impossible to find.

  The difficulty was a matter of phonetics.

  When the Australians began to map New Britain they often used place names already in use among the Melanesians, translating them phonetically. A tiny village such as Nakarop remained Nakarop. When the Japanese replaced the Australians they made Japanese translations of these English phonetics. Thus Nakarop—the site of Matsuda’s lair—became Egaroppu.

  The Marines had only lately learned from prisoners that Major General Matsuda was in western New Britain. They heard that he had his headquarters somewhere inland. From enemy maps and documents they correctly guessed that Matsuda was at Egaroppu.

  But no one familiar with New Britain—not an Australian planter, not a missionary, not a Melanesian—had ever heard of Egaroppu. Many attempts were made to compare Australian and Japanese maps, but the Japanese maps were so sketchy it was impossible to pinpoint any one interior village. Aerial reconnaissance was useless, for there was nothing to be seen beneath the ubiquitous jungle roof. More, there seemed to be no inland trails from the north coast. The Marines had no way of knowing that Matsuda had linked his headquarters to Borgen Bay in the north by means of a seven-mile trail tunneled through the jungle. Nor did any of their maps show other concealed trails running out Nakarop-Egaroppu’s back door to points far east of Borgen Bay.

  Even on the morning of January 10, when the importance of Aogiri Ridge as an outerwork of Hill 660 was being grasped, the Marines did not know that they had uncovered the northern trail to that mystifying Egaroppu. Mopping up Aogiri Ridge that morning they crossed a wide firm trail which was found to connect all of Borgen Bay’s supply dumps, bivouacs and landing facilities with some point inland. That point inland was the headquarters of Colonel Katayama at a place called Maigairapua. Beneath Maigairapua was Nakarop. But the Marines did not go south along this hidden trail because they were busy cleaning out a nasty pocket between Aogiri and Hill 150.

  It was nasty in a very literal sense and it was not crushed, again in a literal sense, until the engineers had built another corduroy road over which four light tanks and a pair of half-tracks were brought up. When the pocket fell, it was found to contain the enemy’s biggest supply dump on New Britain.

  All that remained was to take Hill 660, on which General Shepherd expected to find the bulk of some 2,500 to 3,000 Japanese estimated to be still in the Borgen Bay area, for many of the 53rd Regiment had slipped out of Cape Gloucester over jungle trails and had joined Katayama’s 141st.

  In the meantime, Shepherd gave his Marines a rest. The day after the pocket was crushed and the Second Battalion, First, had marched up to Cape Gloucester from Tauali, the Marines in Borgen Bay spent at their ease in the rain-swept coastal swamps. They read and reread letters from home, then committed them to memory for they had begun to fall apart; they thought of writing letters themselves, but the paper was sodden, their pencils had swelled and burst, the fountain pens had become clogged and their points had separated; they pried apart their pocketknife blades which had rusted together and scraped the mold off their clothing and off their rifles and slung the rifles upside down under their ponchos, while debating whether or not to keep a ruined wrist-watch or heave it into the swamp; they removed their precious cigarettes from beneath their helmets and lit them with matches kept dry inside a contraceptive and smoked them with cupped hands; they badgered their officers for dry socks or a cartridge belt to replace those now decomposing; they ate hot chow of which the rain quickly made a cold wet slop and they were very grateful for the coffee kept hot in covered GI cans—sometimes so hot that it heated the lips of the canteen cups and burned the lips of the drinkers. Then the self-control of men who could joke about jungle rot and dysentery would at last break, because the sudden pain caused them to drop the coffee: “An’ now I am pissed-off!”

  In the morning they cleaned the protective oil off their clips of cartridges, made certain that grenade pins were not rusted tight, and then—after the artillery and mortars had stopped firing and the Fifth Air Force’s bombers had flown home—they attacked the steep stern slimy face of Hill 660.

  Captain Joe Buckley had been a Marine when practically all the men subordinate to him—and some of those superior to him—were as yet unborn. He had joined the Marines in 1915, and here he was, twenty-eight years afterward, a man close to fifty and a veteran of wars large and small, leading a ragtag bobtail of a force through the jungle of New Britain.

  Captain Buckley was going to skirt Hill 660 on its seaward or eastern side and get in behind it. To do this he had a pair of half-tracks, two light tanks, a 37-millimeter gun platoon, about 80 riflemen and 40 pioneers who had thoughtfully brought along their bulldozers. There was also a belligerent Army sergeant who had gone AWOL from his service outfit in New Guinea. He had stowed away on an LST and had been gladly welcomed aboard by those Marines with whom he wished to fight.

  Early in the morning, with the bulldozer plowing a passage through the barrier of mud, Buckley’s motley set out. They were fired at from the Japanese atop Hill 660 but the tanks and half-tracks roared back and the little column sloughed on. By half-past ten in the morning it had skirted the base of Hill 660 and set up a roadblock behind or south of it.

  Any Japanese attempting to retreat from Hill 660 would have to move through Buckley’s Marines or wade a swamp.

  Only occasional snipers hampered Lieutenant Colonel Henry Buse’s Marines in their approach march to the foot of Hill 660. The Marines shot them out of the trees, leaving them dangling on their ropes.

  Hill 660’s slopes were as steep as 45 degrees. They were slimy with rain-soaked, malodorous vegetation and they were swept by enemy fire. The Marines began to climb on all fours, but they were pinned as flat as they could make themselves. Bullets sang above them and they could go no farther. Nor could they withdraw.

  Lieutenant Colonel Buse got a platoon of light tanks forward. They laid a covering fire in front of the Marines’ noses, and the companies finally came back down the hill as it grew dark.

  The next morning, January 14, Buse sent
companies around to the right or west of Hill 660, to its inland side. He was probing for a soft spot. His men could never go up that front slope without terrible casualties. Almost to the rear of Hill 660, separated from Captain Buckley by a swamp, the Marines found their soft spot. It was lightly guarded because it was so steep. The Japanese did not think anyone could come up it.

  Buse ordered his men up and they went up. They went up in a sudden burst of energy and valor as mystifying as it was marvelous. They clawed up that vertical face of gummy clay and came in on the startled enemy and put him to death among his guns. Those who fled down the hill ran the roaring gantlet of Captain Buckley’s men. Those who counterattacked a day later were torn apart in a march and countermarch of mortar shells. And those who survived this slaughter perished in sea or swamp to either side of Buckley’s guns, one whole group of them cut down in a daisy chain as they crossed a creek holding hands.

  Hill 660 had fallen. Its price had not been high in blood but in hardship, in the ordeal written on the faces of the men who took it and were at last being relieved after twenty-three days in the swamp. They were all dripping hair and smeared red-brown with soil. Mud-stained ponchos or Japanese raincoats hooded their heads against the rain and they walked woodenly, staring straight ahead while mechanically spooning mouthfuls of cold beans from the little ration cans in their hands.