Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

In Rabaul it was believed that the American task force sighted between New Guinea and New Britain on Christmas Night was headed for Arawe on New Britain’s southern coast. An Army cavalry regiment had landed against light opposition at Arawe eleven days earlier, and the Japanese believed that the task force was bringing more troops there. Then came Matsuda’s call for help on the northern coast.

The officer commanding 63 Zeros and 25 dive-bombing Vals sent aloft from Rabaul quickly changed the target to Cape Gloucester, but his order was not transmitted. The planes flew up to Arawe, found nothing and flew back home again.

At half-past two in the afternoon, however, they were on the target, coming in low and fast on the beached supplies and the second echelons of LST’s just arriving from New Guinea. They struck, and the Americans began to make mistakes.

While the Japanese sank the new destroyer Brownson. and hit others, gunners on the LST’s shot down two American bombers and seriously damaged two others—so confusing the Mitchell pilots that they began to bomb and strafe Marines on Cape Gloucester. They killed one man and wounded 14 others before they flew off, and then the Japanese planes headed east for Rabaul and the heavy booming of bombs gave way to the sharp crackling of the fight being made by the Third Battalion, First, on its march to the airfield.

Sergeant Robert Oswald figured he had two good men in the brothers Hansen. They were twins, Paul and Leslie, both privates, sons of a widow who had already lost an older boy in the war. As Oswald’s amtrack moved along the road to the airfield Leslie Hansen was on the machine guns with him, and Paul was driving. They were carrying ammunition for the Third Battalion, First.

Up front, one of the companies was raked by bullets coming from a system of four bunkers bristling with machine guns. It was a roadblock. Captain Joseph Terzi and Captain Phillip Wilheit of Company K were instantly killed. Their men deployed. They let go with the newfangled bazooka, but the rockets merely lodged in the soft earth around the bunkers. The flame-throwers wouldn’t work. The riflemen deployed and began firing and someone yelled for ammunition.

“Let’s go!” Oswald shouted, and Paul Hansen let out the amtrack’s clutch and gunned its motor. The gray amphibian came careening up the road with blazing machine guns. Paul Hansen pointed its nose at the nearest bunker, intending to roll over it and cave it in. The Japanese spilled out of the exits and came swarming at the amtrack. Many of them were shot down by Sergeant Oswald and Leslie Hansen, but the rest got to the amtrack before the ground Marines could drive them off. Oswald fell, mortally wounded. Leslie Hansen was dragged from his gun and beaten and stabbed to death. The Japanese turned to take Paul Hansen, but by then he had skillfully rocked the amtrack free and was rolling over the bunker and crushing it while the riflemen closed and polished off the Japanese.

With the blind sides of the remaining bunkers exposed and many of their defenders slain, the Marines quickly overran them with grenades and bayonets.

By then it was late afternoon, and the Marines halted and dug in, just as the first of the monsoon rains broke over their heads.

It came out of the northwest. Men on the beaches struggling to unravel a traffic snarl of 150 abandoned Army six-by-six trucks could see it coming, an opaque gray wall of water marching across the Bismarck Sea. It came with the sound of rolling drums and then it was over the jungle and the water was swishing, streaming, gurgling earthward. It was as nothing these Marines had seen before, this Niagara of a monsoon. It was not a rain storm, a spell of rain—it was a season of it. It was the cloudburst in perpetuity, and it was so constant during the ensuing four months that both Japanese and Americans numbered the dry days of sunshine and cherished their memory.

Already one of the 150-millimeter howitzers of the Fourth Battalion, Eleventh Marines, had sunk together with its prime mover. There were five inches of gun shield, the top of the tractor’s vertical exhaust pipe and the tips of its levers above the surface.

In a little while there would be nothing.

Night.

Louie the Louse.

Flares.

Out of their rain-filled holes tumbled Marines, their nerves again pulsing and twanging as though it were Guadalcanal again and there had never been an Australia. But there was no thundering and flashing out at sea. The Marines went back to their holes, already too miserable to be mystified by the inexplicable enemy.

Major General Matsuda had to decide whether he was cut in two or whether he had the enemy surrounded.

He chose the latter. It was not because he was a stupid commander, which he was not; it was because on a map this could appear to be the truth. The Americans were in the swamp. They could not maneuver. They were exposed to the very tactics with which Matsuda had hoped to defend the Cape.

While Colonel Sumiya’s men held out on the airfield to the west, Colonel Katayama’s 141st Regiment would counterattack from the east. Matsuda had already ordered Katayama to call in all his patrols and to march north, leaving only token forces behind to defend his southern garrisons. For Matsuda had accurately concluded that the major assault on New Britain had come in his Cape Gloucester area. The Americans south at Arawe were not to be feared.

But then Matsuda acted on a pair of misconceptions which seemed to be congenital among Japanese Army commanders. He underestimated the enemy’s strength and belittled his fighting ability. He put the Marine force down at 2,500—when it was by then actually five times that—and then sent about a thousand men up against it without waiting for Katayama’s 141st to arrive from the south.

Matsuda ordered the 2nd Battalion, 53rd, to move from Borgen Bay positions east to the center of the Seventh Marines’ position at “Damp Flat.” Shortly after midnight the morning of December 27, just as a thunderstorm broke, the Japanese began attacking.

Even the howls of the banzai-makers were drowned out in the clashing of the clouds, the drumming of the rain, the drawn-out toppling crash of the widow-makers being hurled to earth by the wind, and the treetop explosions of artillery shells. The defending Marines could not fight from foxholes full of water. They lay on top of the ground. It became a blind battle, decided, in the end, by Marine mortars “laid in by guess and by God,” and the dawn arrival of a special weapons battery. The Japanese withdrew in the morning, leaving more than 200 dead on the field. There were 25 dead Marines and 75 wounded.

That same morning Pappy Boyington led his Black Sheep up to Rabaul again. Once more the Zeros rose to meet them, and again Boyington’s aim was true. He shot one down. He was within one plane of tying Joe Foss’s record and he flashed eagerly among the red-balled Zeros. Then oil spurted over his glass hatch. Three times Boyington wound back the hood and tried to wipe the film away, but he couldn’t. Exasperated, he turned and flew back to Torokina Airfield. He landed. Someone said it was a shame the oil had prevented his tying Foss’s record of 26 planes.

“What’s the difference?” Boyington growled. “I couldn’t have hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle anyway.”

But he knew it was not so, and he had wanted that twenty-sixth kill very badly.

The morning of December 28 brought high winds to Cape Gloucester, as well as an earthquake and that rare bird of war: an enemy prisoner.

His name was Corporal Kashida Shigeto and he was taken by the Third Battalion, First Marines, during an action fought at Hell’s Point, about a mile east of the airfield. There were a dozen big bunkers there, each occupied by about 20 Japanese soldiers. There were a few 75-millimeter gun emplacements. The Marines threw four Sherman tanks at Hell’s Point. One of them rumbled around a bend and ran into a Japanese 75-millimeter gun.