by Jim McEnery
Our makeshift showers, toilets, and galley were located out on the weather decks, which were sure to be awash with garbage, sewage, and seawater in rough weather. Food had to be served and eaten on open decks, regardless of weather conditions.
Of course, we had no idea where we were going or how long it would take to get there. We had no specific information on our ultimate destination, but most of us from Guadalcanal could guess that it was “another damn island with another damn airfield.”
We were right on both counts.
On October 11, the Fifth Marines landed at Milne Bay on the eastern tip of New Guinea. Meanwhile, for reasons only the Army knew, the Seventh Marines went on past Milne to Oro Bay, eighty miles away on the northwestern coast of New Guinea, and the First Marines and division headquarters ended up on Goodenough Island, about fifty miles off the eastern tip of New Guinea.
Milne reminded me of Guadalcanal in more ways than one. Our home there was a tent camp that Marine engineers had gouged out of the jungle along with a narrow street composed mostly of shin-deep mud.
The rain poured down in sheets for hours at a time. Then it rained some more. The legs of our cots sank into the mud until we were practically lying on the ground.
It was a grim, gloomy, depressing place, and we were destined to be there for two and a half months while Army and Marine Corps brass butted heads over the plans for our next invasion.
It was almost Christmas when we finally learned where we were headed. It was a place called Cape Gloucester on the island of New Britain, some 600 miles away.
“The Cape,” as we came to call it, would make our interlude at Camp Balcombe seem like a vacation in paradise. By comparison, even Milne Bay would look like the garden spot of the Pacific.
RED MUD, RED BLOOD, GREEN HELL
THE FIRST MARINE Division was given the day off on Christmas Day 1943. But the very next morning—December 26—troops of the Seventh and Fifth Marines hit the beaches at Cape Gloucester. Once again, just as we’d expected, taking a Jap airfield was the division’s prime objective.
This one was at the southwestern tip of New Britain, a large island east of New Guinea. The big Nip air and naval base at Rabaul was at the extreme eastern tip of New Britain, but it was 300 miles away from our objective and in a separate combat zone where Admiral Bull Halsey was in charge. Our zone was under the jurisdiction of Dugout Doug MacArthur and General Walter Krueger, commander of the U.S. Sixth Army.
The American and Australian navies and air forces pounded the daylights out of our target area for ten days before the Marines went in. This was more than twenty times the advance preparation we’d gotten at Guadalcanal, but I was still thankful that K/3/5 wasn’t in the first wave on this landing. Actually, the whole Third Battalion, Fifth, was still at Oro Bay when the invasion started. This may have been because of the logistical mess the Army had created when it broke up our division and scattered the various regiments out in different camps up to eighty miles apart.
This time around, it was men of the Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, that got the “honor” of going ashore first. They landed at 7:46 AM on December 26, and two minutes later they were followed by the First Battalion, Seventh. The First and Second Battalions, Fifth were next in line.
I’m sure all these guys were nervous as hell because they couldn’t even see the beach ahead of them for all the smoke raised by the bombardment.
As it turned out, though, Jap opposition to the landing was exactly the same as we’d seen at the ’Canal—meaning it was zero. There was no opposition at all, and the coxswains on the landing craft came back to the LSTs (landing ship, tank) offshore yelling, “Landing unopposed! Landing unopposed!”
The reason for this was that, instead of hitting the beach closest to the airfield, the Marines surprised the Japs by landing a few miles to the southeast, in an area called Beach Yellow near the shores of Borgen Bay. Not a single enemy shot was fired at them that morning.
But just as they did at Guadalcanal, foul-ups by our mapmakers set up some dangerous booby traps for those first guys ashore. The maps were based on aerial photographs made on a cloudy day—which most days were at Cape Gloucester—and the areas covered by clouds were simply left blank on the maps. So there was no way to tell what was there.
Beach Yellow itself was swallowed up in a wild tangle of jungle growth that came almost to the edge of the surf. Then came the big shock. Just a few feet farther inland, an area described on the maps as “damp flats” was actually an impassable swamp.
“Time and again, members of our column would fall into waist-deep sinkholes and have to be pulled out,” one Marine said of the swamp. “Any slip could mean a broken leg, a sprained knee, or a twisted ankle.”
Despite all this, the Marines advanced west along the coast toward the airfield with surprising ease on the morning of D-plus-1, meeting only scattered opposition. By that night, they were at a position they hadn’t expected to reach until D-plus-3, but from that point on, the going got tougher.
About 2 PM on D-plus-2, with Sherman tanks leading the way, men of the Third Battalion, First Marines broke through a Jap defensive line of pillboxes, machine gun bunkers, and 75-millimeter field pieces. None of the Nips’ weapons even fazed the heavily armored Shermans.
“We turned a corner and ran right into a Jap 75,” said a Marine tanker. “I saw one Jap walk calmly over and pull the lanyard. The shell . . . hardly scratched the tank. They were so astonished they just stood there while we mowed ’em down and smashed the piece.”
At almost the same time that afternoon, the Second Battalion, Seventh was repelling a determined Jap charge in a swampy area near the beach. When it was over, our troops counted 466 enemy bodies in the mud. Marine losses in the fight were 25 killed and 75 wounded.
A series of firefights continued over the next couple of days, but at 1 PM on December 30 (D-plus-4), General Rupertus, our division commander, notified General Krueger that the airfield was secure.
“First Marine Division presents to you as an early New Year gift the complete airdrome of Cape Gloucester,” Rupertus’s message read. “Situation in hand due to fighting spirit of troops, the usual Marine luck, and the help of God.”
At that point, a lot of people probably thought the battle for the Cape was as good as over. They were sadly mistaken.
BY THE TIME K/3/5 landed on New Year’s Day, Marine engineers had used hundreds of logs to build a road of sorts across the swamp so supplies could be moved inland, and we didn’t have it nearly as tough as our first troops had. But it was obvious from our first few minutes ashore that Cape Gloucester was one of the most miserable places on the face of the earth. In the mornings, a heavy blue-green mist rose from the jungle like steam. It shrouded the sun so it looked like twilight until about the middle of the day.
On that first morning, a driving rain began, and once it started, it never seemed to end. By the time we’d been ashore ten minutes, all of us were soaked to the bone, and I don’t think we ever dried out completely in the nearly four months we were there.
I’d thought Guadalcanal was bad, but the weather at Cape Gloucester was the worst—and wettest—I ever saw anywhere. Absolutely and without a doubt. The ground—when you could find it for the water—was nothing but squishy red mud. It stuck to everything like glue—to our skin, our rifles, our packs, our uniforms, our boondocker shoes. Within a few minutes after we landed, we were covered in it so thick you could hardly tell a Marine from a Jap.
A pair of socks would turn to mush in your boots in less than a week from the constant moisture, but not many of us noticed because we’d go for days without ever seeing our feet. We had cases of trench foot and jungle rot by the hundreds.
It didn’t take us long to get into some heavy action. I heard rifle fire the minute we landed, but it was hard to tell where it was coming from. The Seventh Marines were somewhere up ahead of us, and we were supposed to pass through their right flank and take the lead position in the day’s
advance.
Late that afternoon, we started to dig in for the night when a dozen or so Japs suddenly charged out of the jungle, waving their bayonets and yelling. Our riflemen killed most of them, but a few melted back into the undergrowth.
The next morning, after a nervous night, we were heading downhill through a fairly open area—one of the few we’d seen—when another group of about ten Japs popped out of some brush to challenge us. PFC Slim Somerville hit them with short bursts from his BAR, and Corporal Leland Paine and I joined in with our M-1s until all the Japs went down.
We thought at first it was just another brief skirmish like the one the night before. We were wrong.
Just as we approached another strip of dripping-wet, livid-green jungle along the bank of a creek, our platoon leader, Lieutenant Dykstra, was hit by a volley of automatic weapons fire that damn near chewed his right arm off. At least four or five rounds tore through it between his shoulder and his wrist.
“Down! Down!” a couple of guys hollered as a corpsman ran to the lieutenant and tried to get a tourniquet on his mangled arm. He was in bad shape, and I said a quick “Our Father” for him after I hit the dirt and rolled behind a large tree. It was the first of at least a dozen times I said the Lord’s Prayer that day.
Then, before I could blink my eyes, all hell broke loose. Gunfire erupted all around me, but I couldn’t see a damn thing to shoot at. Just to my right, no more than an arm’s length away, Corporal Horace E. “Tex” Goodwin of K/3/5’s machine gun section had just set his .30-caliber weapon on its tripod when a bullet struck him squarely in the chest.
His eyes were wide open, and he looked straight at me for a second. It seemed like he was trying to say something, but then he fell without making a sound, and I could tell he was dead before he hit the ground. The sniper who got him must’ve been in one of the trees right above us, and I felt the need to move to safer ground in a hurry.
As I scrambled away, a corpsman jumped up and ran toward Goodwin’s body, but I tackled him before he got there and pulled him down.
“It’s no use, Doc,” I said. “He’s gone. You can’t help him. You’ll only get yourself killed if you try.”
The corpsman nodded and backed off. He’d have plenty of other wounded to deal with soon enough. Out of nowhere, we were caught up in one of the hottest firefights any of us had ever seen.
A few seconds later, my buddy Lou Gargano, who was hunkered down right next to me, took a sniper’s bullet through his canteen. Before we left Oro Bay, Lou had been promoted to platoon sergeant and taken over as our platoon guide, replacing Sergeant John Kelly, who’d been severely wounded in one of our last scraps on Guadalcanal.
Now, with Lieutenant Dykstra wounded, we couldn’t afford to lose Lou, too.
Luckily, he wasn’t hurt, just stunned a little and with a good-sized bruise on his backside. But the force of the bullet had knocked him down, and he’d dropped his carbine as he fell. Now it was lying out in the open a few feet from where I was crouching.
Lou turned to me and frowned. “Hey, Mac,” he said, “can you grab my carbine for me? I can’t reach it.”
I barely heard him above the rising roar of rifle fire, but I hugged the muddy ground and slithered forward on my belly.
I was reaching for the carbine when I heard a Marine yell from behind me. “Don’t go there, Mac! They’ve got the range on you!”
I grabbed the carbine anyway, made a fast retreat without getting hit, and handed the weapon back to Lou.
“You okay?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, still sounding a little dazed. “But I don’t know what the hell I’m doing sitting here. Jesus, with the lieutenant down, I’m the platoon leader now. Let’s go!”
Lou got to his feet and waved us forward toward the trees lining the bank of a stream about twenty yards ahead of us. “Stay low and take cover in the creek,” he yelled.
The stream was designated on our maps as Suicide Creek. After what happened there over the rest of that day and into the next, I decided maybe the guy who drew up the maps knew something we didn’t.
I jumped up and ran for the creek bank as hard as I could go, staying in a crouch. To get out of the line of fire, I went over the bank without slowing down and hardly looking where I was going. In my hurry, I tripped on some rocks in the bottom of the creek and fell, spraining my left ankle and twisting my knee really bad.
A jolt of pain stabbed through my leg, and I could almost hear the tendons popping in there. It hurt like crazy, and I could barely walk. Even worse, my M-1 got messed up when it fell in the water.
Just to my left, Corporal Leonard Ahner, a lanky farm boy from rural Indiana, crawled up to take a look over the creek bank, and a rifle slug ripped through the shoulder of his dungaree jacket. Somehow, though, it didn’t leave a wound.
“Well, that was a close shave,” Ahner said quietly after he jerked his head back down behind the bank. I always admired those Hoosier boys. They hardly ever seemed to get rattled. As for me, I was rattled as hell—and hurting, too.
To my right, Corporal Paine was hugging his rifle and breathing hard as he eased up to take a look over the bank. “Now right about here,” he panted, “is where I’d like to see John Wayne ride up and hit ’em with both barrels.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth when a Jap bullet grazed Paine’s cheek. He reached up to touch the wound, then looked down and frowned at the blood on his fingers.
“Well, hell, Mac,” he said, “I don’t think old John’s gonna show up, do you?”
“No, man,” I said. “Looks like we gotta fight this one on our own. Open your mouth and let me check that wound.”
I looked to see if the bullet had gone all the way through Paine’s cheek, but despite the blood running down the side of his face, there was none in his mouth that I could see.
“You’re okay,” I said. “Just keep your head down.”
Over near where Ahner had almost been hit, I heard Gargano yelling instructions to me.
“We’ve got to get in position to return fire on these bastards,” Lou hollered. “Start sending the men up the creek bank one at a time, and have them follow me.”
The firing was so heavy by now you could hardly pick out individual shots, but I did what Lou said. Buddy or no buddy, he was the platoon leader now, and he was giving the orders.
Of the fifteen or so guys I sent over the creek bank, close to half of them came back wounded. I sent the worst cases back toward the rear and told them to leave their rifles. My leg was giving me such pain I could hardly move, but I started disabling the wounded guys’ M-1s so if the Japs overran our position, they wouldn’t be able to use them against us.
The Jap rifles were puny and inferior compared to ours, but they sure as hell caused us plenty of agony that day. We had at least ten guys wounded in the Third Platoon—about a third of our total strength—and it was a miracle there weren’t more.
After about an hour, the Japs pulled back, and we got a little breather. I managed to haul myself out of the creek and limp back toward the company CP. On the way, I passed a wounded Marine lying unconscious and unattended on a stretcher, and a minute later, I spotted Sergeant Jim Day of K/3/5 and told him about the wounded guy.
“Don’t worry, Mac, I’ll take care of him,” Day said. He was one of the most trustworthy guys in the company, and I knew he’d do what he said. “What’s the matter with your leg?” he asked me. “Did you get hit, too?”
“Nah, hell, I fell in the creek and screwed up my knee and my rifle both,” I said.
“Here, take my rifle,” Day said. “I’ll pick up another one at the CP.”
So we traded M-1s. I’d disabled at least seven or eight weapons left by wounded men in the past hour or so without even realizing I could’ve replaced my own ruined rifle with one of them. That’s how addled I was.
WHEN I HEADED BACK to where I’d been earlier, I could still hear quite a bit of firing in the distance, although things seemed quie
t in the immediate area. But as I started downhill toward the creek, I saw Lou at the bottom, motioning me to stop.
He was giving me a thumbs-down sign and waving me away, and I knew he meant the route I was taking wasn’t safe. So I stayed where I was and took cover.
It was a damn good thing I did, but nobody apparently warned the guys in the machine gun platoon from M Company. As they approached the creek, they came straight down the hill instead of following an angle that would have given them some protection, and the Japs cut them to pieces. I don’t know how many casualties they took, but they were badly hurt. Their section leader, Lieutenant Elisha Atkins, was severely wounded and weak from loss of blood, but he ordered his men to leave him in the water where he’d fallen and get across the creek to safety.
Later, two enlisted men decided to go back for him, but they couldn’t find him. They crouched neck-deep in the water and listened, but they couldn’t hear a thing. They were afraid to call out to him for two reasons. First, the Nips might hear them and start shooting, and second, the lieutenant might think they were Nips themselves and refuse to answer. Some enemy soldiers knew a little English and were good at imitating American voices, as I’d learned firsthand at the Matanikau River on Guadalcanal.
Fortunately, the two Marines remembered a nickname that some of the machine gunners called the lieutenant—mostly behind his back—because of the Ivy League university he’d attended.
“Tommy Harvard,” they started whispering. “Tommy Harvard.”
After a long silence, they heard a faint voice coming from an inlet in the creek bank: “I’m down here.”
“What’s your real name?” they asked cautiously.
“Elisha Atkins,” he said, and they hauled him out. He was in bad shape, but he made it okay.
ALL DAY ON January 2, the Third Battalions of the Fifth and Seventh Marines fought back and forth across Suicide Creek. Some of our guys crossed the stream as many as four times, but neither battalion was able to gain a solid foothold on the opposite bank.
