Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

Nothing had more power to make atabrine unpopular than this last rumor, and as the number of atabrine delinquents grew, medical people resorted to an advertising campaign which suggested that, so far from being a sterilizer, atabrine actually possessed powers which were at once a compound of monkey glands, Spanish fly and wax from the ear of the queen bee. There were roadside signs of voluptuous nudes accompanied by the legend: “Come Back to This—Take Atabrine.” There was, in the school of art which has made the mammary gland the American oriflamme, a picture of a bare-breasted blonde amazon who offered: “Two Reasons Why You Should Take Atabrine.” The Marines had become fed up, and they passed off the boredom by producing their own reductios of the powers of atabrine. Soon the lines and the bivouacs blossomed with signs such as these:

And then the entire silly business of sugar-coating the bitter atabrine pill came to an end after the appearance of this taunt:

The last nail was being hammered into the coffins of Kavieng and Rabaul. The St. Matthias Islands, the northern-most of the Bismarcks, were coming under attack.

Since the ist Cavalry’s reconnaissance-in-force on Los Negros had been turned into eventual capture of the Admiralty Islands, it had only remained to seize a base north of Kavieng. Once this was done, with American bases to the south on Cape Gloucester and to the west on the Admiralties, the Bismarcks and the Solomons would be completely cut off from the Empire. The St. Matthias island chosen for this maneuver was Emirau. The attacking force was the Fourth Marine Regiment, an outfit now composed of all those Raider units which had been deactivated, once it became apparent that the Raider hit-and-run specialty was no longer of use in the Pacific.

These men were also the heirs of the old Fourth Marine Regiment which had served in China, had barely gotten out of Shanghai before Pearl Harbor—and had arrived in the Philippines in time to fight on Bataan and Corregidor, where they burned their colors and surendered.

The new Fourth Marines went into Emirau on March 20, and because they once were Raiders and had that Raider penchant for songs and slogans, they went in whistling, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

It was a beautiful morning on Emirau for there was not a Japanese in sight. There was only a little wooden sign which said, in Japanese: “This island occupied by Imperial Landing Party, January, 1942.”

It was not much in the way of material for a new Raider ballad, but it would have to do—at least until April when the Fourth Marines went back to Guadalcanal to hook up with that other loner regiment—the Twenty-second-and form the First Provisional Marine Brigade.

In the meantime Kavieng and Rabaul had been cut off. They were not aware of it, for they believed in the coming of that mythical “Greater East Asia Annihilation Fleet” which Premier Tojo had invented to keep up the morale of his bypassed bases. But if the Annihilation Fleet could keep up morale, it could not keep the great bases of the Bismarcks in the war.

It was all over at Torokina by March 25. By then the three-pronged assault which Hyakutate had ordered had been shattered by the soldiers of the 37th and Americal Divisions, with considerable help from their artillery. Some 5,000 Japanese soldiers had been killed, and only 263 Americans had died. The long, bloody, toilsome climb up the Solomons ladder which had begun more than nineteen months before at Guadalcanal was at an end. The Slot was now an American canal, Haruyoshi Hyakutate had issued his last battle order and the surviving men of that 17th Army which he had lost twice over were reduced to grubbing for existence in the native gardens of Bougainville.

A similar end soon overtook their counterparts in New Guinea, where units of Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi’s 18th Army were being chopped up and isolated. On April 22 the soldiers of General MacArthur leapfrogged far up the New Guinea coast to land unopposed at Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea, and to move inland to a stiff fight.

By then some 130 miles of New Britain’s coast were in Marine hands, Matsuda’s 65th Brigade had been all but annihilated, and the last battle had been fought at Linga Linga on March 20. A patrol of the Second Battalion, First, led by that same Charles Brush who had ambushed the vanguard of the Ichiki Detachment on Guadalcanal, ambushed Colonel Jiro Sato’s rear-guard. Of the 500 men whom Sato had gathered at Upmadung, not 100 had survived the march, and these were all killed by the Marines. Sato himself died like a soldier, with his sword in his hand at the head of his troops, concluding the delaying action which had enabled Matsuda and half his men to escape. Five thousand Japanese had been killed on New Britain and an unprecedented 500 had surrendered. All this was accomplished at a loss of 310 Marines killed and 1,083 wounded, proof of how low Marines could keep their casualties when maneuver was possible.

By now also the men of the First Marine Division wanted to get away from the Army. In mid-April they awaited the arrival of their relief, the Army’s 40th Infantry Division. And yet, when the Army did arrive, there were actually some Marines who were reluctant to leave. That was because the Fifth had found a home at Talasea.

They had found a beautiful grove of tall graceful coconut trees, they had found Bitokara Mission on the high bluffs overlooking blue and breezy Garua Harbor—a place of broad green lawns, of gardens riotous with the vivid blooms of the tropics, of neat white-painted buildings, all dominated by capacious St. Boniface Mission Church. There was also smiling San Remo Plantation and there were even sulphur springs. Some nights the Melanesians would stage “sing-sings” for the American Marines who had been so generous with their cigarettes and had guaranteed many, many years of labor trouble for Australian planters who bought work with “sticks tobac.”

“Finding this place,” said one Marine, “is like finding Heaven in Hell.”

But they were out of Talasea before May, sailing back to the norm of Hell-in-Heaven, the mud and rotting coconuts and rats and bats and dejection of a place called Pavuvu in the beautiful Russell Islands. From Pavuvu some of them went home, for the rotation system developed by the U.S. armed services was at last bringing relief to those men who had been overseas two years or more. But there were more Marines coming out from the States than going in, for there were now five full divisions and a brigade in the field.

On the same twenty-eighth of April on which the last Marine quit New Britain, the Navy struck the blow which would send this striking force charging off in a new direction.

On that day Truk was destroyed.

American carriers stood about 150 miles to the west of the once-fearful base in the Carolines and flew off flights of Hellcats. They swept over Truk to clear the skies for the bombers. They tangled with 62 Japanese fighters and shot most of them down. In two days they destroyed 59 in aerial combat and knocked out 34 on the ground. Truk was left with 12 planes.

Though there were no ships of any size in the lagoon, everything afloat there was sunk. Everything above ground on the airfields was knocked down. So thorough was this obliterating blow, so devastated were the Japanese, that the Americans could rescue their downed airmen in Truk Lagoon. A float-plane pilot from North Carolina went after three men on a raft there. He capsized in choppy seas, but another of North Carolina’s floats came in, took the raft under tow, and taxied out to the waiting submarine, Tang, which had patrolled the reef on lifeguard duty. Of 46 Americans shot down, more than half were rescued.