This ruse would also be preceded by a hard jab to the left of Kahili and a feint to the right. On October 26 a brigade of New Zealanders were to occupy the Treasury Islands just below and left of Bougainville. This would strengthen Japanese suspicion of an impending assault on Kahili, while providing a forward staging base for Torokina.
The following night Lieutenant Colonel Victor Krulak’s Second Marine Parachute Battalion was to land at Choiseul, below and to the right of Bougainville. They would come ashore loudly rattling sabers and making very much smoke from very little fire. For though there were only 725 of them, Vandegrift had told Krulak on October 25:
“I want an immediate and credible appearance of a large force.”
By that time Hyakutate was ready with new troops and an old plan.
The remnants of those 17th Army units cut up at Guadalcanal had been sloughed off on Major General Noboru Sasaki in the Central Solomons. While Hyakutate had been up in Rabaul raking in the fresh 6th and 17th Divisions to replace them, the luckless but able Sasaki had been down in New Georgia conducting a brilliant delaying campaign with such men as those Nagoya unfortunates who had arrived in his command swimming. By the time of Sasaki’s defeat in early October, Hyakutate’s 17th Army was again up to 50,000 men.
Some 40,000 of them were in the Bougainville area, and most of them belonged to the 6th Division—the infamous 6th which had raped Nanking—commanded by Lieutenant General Masatane Kanda. Again, as much because of the inflexible Hyakutate’s notions of how to defend against amphibious attack as because of Bougainville’s extensive coastline, these troops were strung out. There were some 5,000 in the north, another 5,000 on the east coast and about 25,000 around Kahili to the south and those island airfields off the southern shore.
There were only 300 at Cape Torokina, but Hyakutate was confident of his ability to repulse the enemy no matter where he landed. He still believed that counterattacks or counterlandings with reinforcements from Rabaul would destroy the enemy, despite the fact of what had happened to such attempts at Guadalcanal. He still relied on the sea and air power of the Japanese Navy to make such troop movements possible, despite the fact of what had been happening to that Navy since Ching Lee took the battleships through. He still regarded the jungle as an excellent cover for the maneuvering of troops, despite the fact of how cruelly the jungle had scourged the Kawaguchis and the Sendai.
By October 26, the day the New Zealanders occupied the Treasuries, Hyakutate was more certain than ever that the invasion would be at Kahili. But next day he was startled to receive reports of “large forces” landing at Choiseul. The Treasuries had held down Bougainville’s eastern flank. Choiseul still guarded the west. Should he join the battle at Choiseul?
Victor Krulak was called “Brute,” as all the coxswains of Annapolis crews are called. In the Marine Corps the nickname stuck for other reasons. The short, blond Krulak could take it.
He could also move with great speed. Hardly six days after Lieutenant General Vandegrift had told him, “Take immediate action. Get ashore where there are no Japs,” Krulak had brought his Second Parachutists ashore on Choiseul at a place called Voza.
They boarded the destroyer-transports
Next day they hid themselves. They set up a dummy beach far away from the point at which they had actually landed. After they dispersed in the jungle some 80 Melanesian bearers carefully brushed out all their footprints in the sand. They spent the day marking time until Admiral Halsey’s announcement that “strong American forces” had landed on Choiseul.
At dawn the next day Krulak’s men went out to raise deliberate hell on Choiseul’s southwest coast. One patrol moved noisily into the mountains. Another led by Krulak moved right or southeast toward the Japanese base at Sangigai. The Marines spotted about 15 Japanese soldiers unloading a
Three light machine guns were set up on a rock cliff overlooking the beach and the Japanese 150 yards away. They fired. They killed three Japanese instantly and shot down four more of those who ran down the beach. They let the rest of them go, destroyed the barge, and while word of the appearance of the Americans was signaled to Hyakutate in Rabaul, Krulak’s patrol began sketching the enemy’s position at Sangigai in preparation for an attack next day.
On that day, Krulak split his forces. One half moved downcoast to assault Sangigai from the west. The other half, under Krulak, marched up the Vagara River, crossed and came down on Sangigai from the northeast.
It was a toilsome march, for the Japanese rarely cut roads into the interior of the jungle and they slashed out trails to their own scale. The Marines moved through swamps, fording the snakelike Vagara at twelve different points. And when most men moved through water up to their chest, the Brute was immersed up to his neck. There was no time to rest; the coastal force had been instructed to attack two hours after Krulak’s men marched off.
Shortly after two that afternoon the coastal force pounded Sangigai with rockets and mortars. The men of Company E charged into the town and found it deserted. The Japanese had taken Admiral Halsey at his word and had already retreated into the hills, where they were already colliding with Krulak.
About a half-hour after the beach barrage began, the Marines in the mountains heard jabbering in the jungle not 20 yards ahead. They dropped to the ground and began hastily building up a front, just as the Japanese popped into view 10 yards off.
The fight lasted an hour. First the Japanese closed with yells and rifle shots, and the Marines repulsed them. One machine-gunner, unable to wait for his buddy to bring up the gun’s tripod, fired with the butt braced against his right leg and the barrel clasped in his left hand. By the time the tripod arrived and he withdrew his hand, much of its flesh was left on the barrel. Another gunner fired while a rifleman dueled a sniper in the foliage of a huge banyan tree. The sniper fell alongside the machine-gunner. He was wounded in the hip. The gunner pulled out his knife, killing the sniper with his right hand while continuing to fire with his left.
The enemy pulled back to a system of burrows and bunkers dug underneath those enormous banyans while snipers left behind in the treetops raked the Marines, wounding Krulak in the face. Marine demolition men crawled forward toward the bunkers. One of them reached into his kit for a six-block charge. It wouldn’t come free. He tore at it and the entire kit of twenty-four blocks came loose. The Marine shrugged, stuck in a fuse, lighted it and hurled it beneath the banyan. There was a rocking explosion. The great tree jumped in the air, toppled and crashed against another forest giant.
The fight ended with the customary
The Japanese crawled out of their holes and came rushing at Krulak’s Marines. They got among them, but were killed in hand-to-hand fighting. Immediately Krulak ordered a platoon forward in a counterattack.
The Marines rushed at the shrieking Japanese with wild yells of their own, and as they broke them and sent them fleeing into the jungle, an outraged BARman raised his head above the edge of his foxhole and bellowed:
“For God’s sake, shut up! Us bastards are mad enough already!”
In a few more moments all was quiet but for the muffled explosions coastward, where E Company was methodically blowing up the Japanese headquarters, turning ammunition dumps into miniature volcanoes and cheering with delight to see the explosive gala provided by the detonated medical supply dump, where the sky was filled with flaming fragments of wood and metal crisscrossed by long white ribbons of the bandages unrolling in flight.
Krulak’s men made more smoke for General Vandegrift before they were withdrawn by LCI at midnight of November 3. By that time they had accomplished their mission. General Hyakutate had already begun to move Bougainville troops south to Choiseul by barge. On November 1 he sent 60 bombers and escorting fighters against the “force of 20,000 men” which Radio Tokyo said was then ashore on Choiseul.
The Japanese aircraft were bombing the bait even as the Third Marine Division commanded by Major General Allen Turnage hit the narrow beaches of Cape Torokina.
6
