Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Eniwetok was to become a staging area for the United States armed forces. Its numerous islets could hold airfields and receive men and its broad round anchorage could harbor ships. More, lying nearly 3,000 miles west-southwest of Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok was only 670 miles northeast of Truk and about 1,000 miles southeast of Saipan.

  Truk and Saipan would have to be pinned down while Eniwetok was being seized. Truk, being closest, would be hit first—and it would be hit with the swelling power of the Fifth Fleet under Vice Admiral Spruance. Nine carriers under Rear Admiral Marc Mitscher, six big new battleships under Ching Lee, 10 cruisers heavy and light, three full squadrons of destroyers and a special task force of 10 submarines—all of this would strike at the mighty atoll which the Marines called “the Gibraltar of the Pacific.”

  That would be on February 17.

  That same day the orphan regiment of the Marine Corps would be fighting for the airfield on Engebi Islet on Eniwetok Atoll.

  The Twenty-second Marines were the waifs of the Pacific. They were an independent regiment formed in early 1942. They had been out of the States eighteen months, but had spent almost all this time on garrison duty in the Samoan Islands, maneuvering in the jungle, making countless landings —training, training, training—and coming down with malaria and that horrible swelling of the legs and genitals called filariasis or elephantiasis, but which the Marines knew as mumu. Disease, not bullets, had riddled the Twenty-second and filled it with replacements.

  In late 1943 the staging for Kwajalein began and it seemed that Colonel John Walker’s regiment would at last see battle. But the Twenty-second wound up with the 106th Army Infantry in that tactical reserve commanded by Brigadier General Thomas Watson. They stood off Kwajalein in their ships while the “boots” of the Fourth Marine Division went ashore at Roi-Namur.

  Now it was these very Fourth Division boots who were salty. They hadn’t a month overseas yet, but they were already coming around offering to show their scars. It was not pleasant for a grizzled gunnery sergeant of the Twenty-second to be patronized by fuzzy-chinned teen-agers who were still wearing their first pair of GI socks. To them the hash-marked gunnies could not scream, “Yuh chicken-boot—I’ve worn out more seabags than you have socks!” The boots had only to blink and inquire earnestly:

  “You guys seen any action yet?”

  But all this would change at Eniwetok.

  Up at Engebi Islet at Eniwetok Atoll, Colonel Toshio Yano of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Amphibious Brigade, was completing his battle orders. Colonel Yano calmly expected the invasion of Engebi, for it was the largest of Eniwetok’s northern islets and it possessed the atoll’s airfield. Also on Engebi were about 1,200 of the 2,586 troops with which Major General Yoshima Nishida was supposed to defend Eniwetok. On the tenth of February, with General Watson’s plans for the invasion of Eniwetok already complete, Colonel Yano informed his troops that they could expect to be bombed and shelled and invaded, concluding with this directive:

  “Plans must be followed to lure the enemy to the water’s edge and then annihilate him with withering firepower and continuous attacks.”

  It was the inflexible Imperial Staff doctrine of “annihilation at the water’s edge” again, but unfortunately for Colonel Yano and his men, the Staff Manual said nothing about what was to be done with battleships “lured” to the water’s edge.

  There were battleships almost at the water’s edge that windy, overcast morning of February 17.

  Great, ghostly, gray shapes—old Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Colorado—they prowled not a mile off Engebi’s beaches with the muzzles of their 14-inch guns streaming flame and smoke.

  The entire invading force had entered the lagoon. Rear Admiral Harry Hill had decided to force his way through the southern reef, through Wide Passage, 25 miles directly south of Engebi at the bottom of the lagoon, seven miles northeast of Wide Passage. Minesweepers had cleared a path, sweeping up 28 moored mines in Wide Passage, and then the ships formed column. The little minesweepers led them in, then the destroyers, next the battlewagons and cruisers, finally the transports. They came in with all guns firing, blasting and raking blackjack-shaped Eniwetok Islet on the right at Wide Passage, battering Parry and Japtan Islets to either side of Deep Entrance.

  They sailed up the lagoon to Engebi and pummeled her, while Major General Nishida got off this signal from his headquarters on Parry Islet: “Enemy fleet entering the lagoon in large numbers. Request reinforcements.” Even if it had been possible to send them, they could never have arrived in time. Already Captain Jim Jones’s Recon Boys were going ashore on Camellia and Rujiyoru, two coral specks lying to the east or right of Engebi. Before two o’clock in the afternoon, Jones had reported their capture. By nightfall Company D (Scout) of the Fourth Tank Battalion had captured little Bogon to the left of Engebi, and artillery was ashore and emplaced on these bracketing islands, ready to join the warships at dawn.

  That same evening of February 17, “the Gibraltar of the Pacific” had been found to be not an impregnable rock but rather an empty shell.

  For years American planners had spoken in awe of Japan’s secret base in the Carolines. Truk had been the invincible this and the invulnerable that. No one wanted any part of Truk—not the Army, not the Army Air Force, not the United States Marines. It was the most perfect oceanic fortress that nature could devise. It was a drowned mountain range within a coral reef. The peaks of those mountains formed the numerous wooded islands within vast Truk Lagoon. On four of these islands the Japanese had built airfields and on other islands were naval and administrative centers. All of these islands, and the ships sheltering in Truk Lagoon, were beyond the range of hostile warships forced to stand outside the enclosing coral reef. The Truk Islands were therefore safe against naval surface attack, and assault troops would never get across that reef—if Truk’s airplanes ever allowed them to reach it. Truk was only open to attack from the air, but before Kwajalein, airplanes had to fly a long, long way to reach Truk. Before Torokina and Tarawa it was beyond range. By early February, however, the terrible attrition of the Bismarcks and the Solomons had siphoned off much of Truk’s air strength. At the same time two Marine pilots-Major James Christensen and Captain James Yawn—had taken Liberator scout planes aloft from Torokina Airfield and flown 850 miles to Truk under cover of freak tropical storms. Upon their return they produced the war’s first aerial photographs of Truk, photos which electrified Nimitz’ headquarters because they showed the Japanese Combined Fleet anchored in Truk Lagoon.

  That had been February 4, the very date on which the Army’s 7th Division secured Kwajalein Islet, ending the entire Kwajalein Atoll Campaign. Immediately Rear Admiral Mitscher’s three fast carrier groups sped down to Majuro to refuel. On February 12 they were streaking north of Eniwetok to rendezvous with tankers, to join up later with the battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines which, with themselves, formed Spruance’s Fifth Fleet.

  But by then the bird had flown. The eight-rayed flag of the commander in chief, Japanese Combined Fleet, had departed Truk Lagoon forever. Fleet Admiral Koga had not liked the appearance of that American reconnaissance plane and had ordered his big ships back to Tawi-Tawi. He himself sailed to Japan in 63,000-ton Musashi.

  Yet, as 72 Hellcats rose off the decks of five carriers before dawn of February 17, and as Admiral Spruance led the big warships on a round-the-atoll prowl, there were still two Japanese cruisers, eight destroyers and upwards of 50 merchant ships in and around Truk Lagoon, to say nothing of 365 airplanes and those four airfields which Mitscher’s warbirds were coming to destroy.

  At sunrise the Hellcats were over Truk and battling 45 Japanese fighters. They shot down 30 of them, formed again and came roaring down to shoot up the aircraft parked on three fields. One exuberant Hellcat pilot spotted a transport plane which had slipped into a safe landing at Param Field. Its occupants were dashing for a concrete slit trench at one end of the field. The Hellcat pilot swooped and blew up the transport. He
came back again to try for about 15 fighters parked near the slit trench. He hit a few and tried to spray slugs within the trench but he wasn’t able to—which was lucky, for Major Pappy Boyington and six other American fliers were in that trench. The Japanese had been taking them from Rabaul to Japan via Truk, and had arrived in time for the Americans to take a dubious delight in the capabilities of the new Hellcat fighters.

  Though Boyington and his companions had been blindfolded, their guards were not at that moment insisting on regulations. The Americans saw the Hellcats chew up about 40 more Japanese planes. They even watched while the Avengers came in with hundred-pound fragmentation bombs, but they ducked for safety with the arrival of Dauntlesses bearing thousand-pounders.

  Most of the big bombs were dropped on the ships in the lagoon. They hit everything afloat, and outside the atoll there were more ships sinking beneath the bombs of the carrier planes or being slashed into shredded steel by the guns of mammoth New Jersey and Iowa, the heavy cruisers Minneapolis and New Orleans, and four destroyers. The Japanese sailors fought with customary valor, here a destroyer taking on a battleship, here a subchaser trying to outgun a destroyer, but the results outside the atoll were the same as within. In all, Japan lost two light cruisers, four destroyers, three auxiliary cruisers, two submarine tenders, two subchasers, an armed trawler and an airplane ferry—and 24 merchant ships, of which five were tankers. With smaller craft, a total of 200,000 tons of shipping was lost. Most of Truk’s 365 aircraft were either destroyed or damaged, and 75 per cent of the base’s supplies ruined.

  Against this the Japanese retaliated with a single torpedo-bomber strike. One Kate got a torpedo into Intrepid, killing 11 men, wounding 17, and forcing the carrier to retire. With this went 12 American fighters downed, seven torpedo-bombers and six dive-bombers—a total of 29 pilots and crewmen killed. There was not an American ship lost.

  It was total, stinging defeat, a source of great bitterness to those Japanese fighter pilots who fought so vainly to prevent it. As had the men of the Bastard Air Force at Guadalcanal, the enemy fliers fought throughout the day flying, returning, rearming, and flying again. In midafternoon one of them skidded his Zero into a landing at Param Field. He jumped from his plane and ran for the bomb shelters to sit out the strafing attacks until his plane was ready again.

  He passed the slit trench in which the seven Americans were crouched and stopped, astonished. He recovered his composure and said quietly, “I am a Japanese pilot.” The Americans said nothing, though they wondered if the Japanese was joking. “I am a Japanese pilot,” the man said again. He tapped his leather pistol holster ominously. “You bomb here —you die.”

  The Americans were still not sure, but having survived weeks of torture in Rabaul, expecting more of it and perhaps death in Japan, they were almost beyond caring.

  “With all the goddamn trouble we got already,” Boyington growled, “ain’t you the cheerful son of a bitch.”

  There was a bare pause, and then there was the roar of powerful motors, the chilling sound of Hellcat 50-caliber bullets smacking the coral, the tinkling of falling empty cartridges. The Japanese pilot sprinted for the bomb caves, and the Americans were left with another grim joke to sustain them in the bleak eighteen months lying between the present and the day of their liberation in Japan, a liberation which brought Boyington the Medal of Honor and found him still the outstanding Marine ace of all time.

  Next morning Admiral Mitscher’s planes flew again over Truk’s fields, but not a single plane rose to oppose them. The Fifth Fleet sailed east in jubilation.

  On that same morning Radio Tokyo spoke to the Japanese nation and the world with unaccustomed candor:

  “A powerful American task force suddenly advanced to our Caroline Islands Wednesday morning and repeatedly attacked our important strategic base, Truk, with a great number of ship-based planes. The enemy is constantly repeating powerfully persistent raids with several hundred fighters and bombers, attacking us intermittently. The war situation has increased with unprecedented seriousness—nay, furiousness. The tempo of enemy operations indicates that the attacking force is already pressing upon our mainland.”

  There had never been such an admission before. It suggested that Premier Tojo’s iron grip upon the Emperor and nation was weakening. Within another day there was to be more bad news to hasten the downfall of Tojo’s “Manchuria gang.”

  Engebi was falling.

  The Twenty-second Marines attacked bomb-pitted, shell-pocked Engebi two battalions abreast. They ran into Japanese crazed by thirst and maddened by the fury of the bombardment. The battle split off into small separate actions. Sometimes the Japanese fought with knives, leaping into the shellholes where the Marines had set up their guns, closing with a fury born of desperation. Sometimes they fought out of spider holes, lifting the lids after the Marines had passed, firing into their rear. The inevitable debris of the bombardment clogged the routes of advance, and there were often live Japanese firing machine guns from the ruins. But by four o’clock the Marines had overrun the airfield and General Watson had withdrawn the Third Battalion, Twenty-second, for use against Eniwetok Islet the next day. The other battalions dug in—and spent a restless night.

  It was the Twenty-second’s first night in combat, and no one had thought to collect all those Japanese and American weapons strewn about the battlefield. The Japanese crept out of their holes, rearmed themselves, and infiltrated. One of them tossed a grenade in a foxhold held by Corporal Anthony Damato and three others. Damato flung himself on the bomb and was killed. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. Sporadic fighting fluttered on, but by dawn resistance on Engebi had been crushed. Colonel Yano and all but a few of his men were dead, and these others would be mopped up during the day. At dawn, Colonel Walker raised the American flag over Engebi while a private blew “To the Colors” on a captured Japanese bugle.

  At dawn of February 19 the two battalions of the 106th Infantry went ashore on Eniwetok Islet. They made slow going at first. General Watson sent in the Third Battalion, Twenty-second. The Marines struck across the islet’s waist, the pace of the other battalions quickened, the Japanese spent themselves with individual squad counterattacks during the night, and Eniwetok Islet was secured by late afternoon of February 20.

  It remained to take Parry Islet.

  Parry was about two miles north of Eniwetok Islet. It formed the southern side of Deep Passage. Across Deep Passage a half-mile farther north was Japtan Islet. To take Parry, the Recon Boys first seized Japtan Islet as a base for artillery. That was on February 21, and on the same day Pennsylvania and Tennessee stood within a half-mile of Parry’s lagoon beaches and pounded the little islet. Next day, with cruisers, destroyers and rocket boats joining the battleships and the Japtan artillery, all three battalions of the Twenty-second Marines attacked Parry.

  At half-past seven that night, after Japanese tanks were destroyed in a pitched battle with the Marine mediums, and after naval gunfire destroyed the last pocket and probably also destroyed Major General Nishida, the battle ended with this message from Colonel Walker to General Watson:

  “I present you with Parry. Request this unit be relieved for re-embarkation in the morning.”

  The request was granted. On February 23 the Twenty-second Marines went back aboard ship. They were veterans now. They had lost 184 killed, 540 wounded, and had disposed of roughly 2,000 Japanese. They were going back to Kwajalein, where, with Captain Jones’s Fifth Corps Recon Company, with the Scout Company of the Fourth Marine Division, they made dozens of landings to secure the islets of that enormous atoll. Then there was a brief idyll. With other Marines they sang hymns with the Marshallese and walked sentry duty naked but for a tan GI towel swathed about their hips like a Micronesian’s lap-lap. And they tried very hard to twist their tongues around those unpronounceable islet names—Ennumennent, Edgigen, Enubuj, Gugegwe, Bigej, Ennylabegan. When they met and mastered Ennugenliggelap the campaign in the Marshall Islands was
obviously over.

  29

  The swamp fox of New Britain—Major General Iwao Matsuda —had been prepared to flee long before he was ordered to withdraw.

  While the Borgen Bay complex had been falling in mid-January, Matsuda had ordered a Lieutenant Hanahara up to Natamo Point on the eastern edge of Borgen Bay and charged him with a do-or-die defense there. He had also brought Colonel Jiro Sato up from the south and ordered him to defend the approaches southwest of Nakarop-Egaroppu.

  Hanahara, then, held a roadblock between the Americans at Borgen Bay and the mouth of the trail to Matsuda’s headquarters. Sato held the high ground between the Americans at the airfield and Matsuda. True, the trails from the south coast were now undefended, but it would take the Americans some time to work all the way around the Cape and come up on Nakarop from the south.

  Hanahara and Sato were in place before that January 21 on which Matsuda received a message from Lieutenant General Yasushi Sakai, commander of the 17th Infantry Division at Cape Hoskins—a north coast point midway between Cape Gloucester and Rabaul. Sakai instructed Matsuda to pull the 65th Brigade back to a rallying place called Kokopo, about six or seven miles east of Natamo Point and something like a dozen miles northeast along the back-door trail from Nakarop.

  Matsuda left Nakarop by the back door. He sent out his sick and wounded first. Then himself, guarded by Colonels Sumiya and Katayama and the only available combat troops. His artillery followed. If Sato survived, he could come too—but not Hanahara. He was to fight to the death.

  Iwao Matsuda was in high spirits as he crossed the headwaters of the Natamo River and encountered Superior Private Toshio Herotsune. He sought to raise Private Herotsune’s flagging morale by assuring him that there were strong reinforcements marching even then to the brigade’s relief. Then Matsuda vanished into the jungle, bound, not for Kokopo, not for any intermediate rallying place, but for Cape Hoskins some 170 miles east.