west of these Marines on the left or western flank. The Japanese planned to get upriver and then turn right or east to work down against the American perimeter.
The main body struck at the Marine left held by the Third Battalion, Ninth. They were stopped. They withdrew into the swamp, and at twenty minutes after eight the Marines attacked.
They too were stopped, for the Japanese had occupied those foxholes and entrenchments abandoned only a few days before when Turnage shortened his lines. They had had more than an hour to improve them, and the Japanese had no equals at digging in.
Now it was stalemate, and during it, a Laruma River patrol led by Lieutenant Orville Freeman opened battle with those Japanese who had marched upriver. Outnumbered, Freeman withdrew. He retreated to the perimeter, setting up frequent rear-guards to ambush the pursuing Japs. It would take him thirty hours to get back to his lines, during which one Marine would be killed and Freeman himself would be wounded. But they would make it.
In the meantime, on that morning of November 7, Major General Turnage called for his reserve.
The men of the First Battalion, Third Marines, had gone into reserve to rest after doing most of the fighting during the Cape Torokina landings. They had been pleased. But now, like the Raiders of Guadalcanal, they were learning that it is often safer to be on the lines than to be behind them where the general can put you to use.
At a quarter past one these men passed through the bogged-down Third Battalion, Ninth. They attacked into a tangle of fern and creeper and giant trees with a mire for underfooting and five yards for visibility. Men shot at movement and when concealed Japanese machine guns spat at them they hurled grenades at the sound.
Sergeant Herbert Thomas threw a grenade in this way, but it was caught by ropelike lianas overhead and dropped back among Thomas and his men. The sergeant threw himself on it and was killed. The men he had saved moved on.
Then a Marine tank came churning through the muck. It swayed as it burst through the undergrowth like a great blind amphibian, the sharp branches of the undergrowth clawing harmlessly at its metal hide, its cannon jerking and spouting flame. Captain Gordon Warner ran alongside the tank. He carried a helmet full of hand grenades, hurling them at Japanese machine-gun nests to spot them for the tank-gunner.
“Fix bayonets!” he roared in the Japanese he had learned years ago. “Charge!”
Betrayed by their own virtues—ardor and obedience—the Japanese leaped erect and charged, coming in a swarm to be obliterated by Marine rifle fire or the hosing of the tank’s machine gun.
Six enemy guns were knocked out by Warner and the tank, until the Japanese were gradually thrust from the swamp and a solid Marine firing line had been built up. Captain Warner lost a leg as a result of wounds received in his attack, but he had put the battle on the way to being won. Artillery observers were soon up front calling for the fire which held the line until morning.
Then five batteries of field guns began firing. Machine guns swept the swamp, mortars lobbed in shells, antitank guns blasted away with cannister shot—and the screams of the enemy were audible to the Marines. When the guns fell silent the men of the First Battalion, Twenty-first Marines, moved through the First Battalion, Third, into the swamp and found it as still and silent as a morgue.
Koromokina contained the bodies of 377 Japanese soldiers who had died to kill 17 United States Marines.
It was November 9 and Technical Sergeant Frank Devine was desperate for a story. He was a Marine combat correspondent, one of that corps of professional newsmen who had given up their jobs to march with the Marines and write about them. They were assigned one to a regiment and given the mission of reporting the battle at the cannon’s mouth. Their stories went by mail to Marine Headquarters in Washington and were passed on to the press from there.
On that morning of November 9 Devine was soaking wet and he did not have a story in sight.
True, there had been the Battle of the Koromokina Swamp, but that hadn’t happened in his sector. True, Major General Roy Geiger had relieved Lieutenant General Vandegrift as commander of the First Marine Amphibious Corps on Bougainville and the Treasuries, but that was a story for the civilian war correspondents (it was a big one, however, for Vandegrift of Guadalcanal was going home to his fourth star and command of the Marine Corps). True again, the first elements of the Army’s 37th Division had begun to arrive, but that was the Army combat reporters’ beat—and who wanted to write about dogfaces anyway?
Sergeant Devine looked sourly at the sodden sheet of paper in the little typewriter cradled on his knees. He noticed that the machine had already begun to rust and wondered how many days before it would become useless. He wondered what it would be like to wear dry socks and sleep on dry ground. He listened to the rain. He stared and tried to think of something that the folks at home might find interesting, and then he wrote:
“Bougainville, Nov. 1,
The fighting on Bougainville had shifted to the Marines’ right or eastern flank.
Since November 5, the men of the 23rd Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel Kawano had been striking hard at the Raiders blocking the Mission Trail. The trailblock held. More, the Marines came out of it to push farther toward a fork about 2,000 yards outside the new perimeter where the Mission Trail joined the Piva Trail, becoming thereafter the Piva Trail. This force, commanded by Colonel Edward Craig, had left the Raiders holding the trailblock behind them and by November 8 had pushed up to a point just below the Mission-Piva confluence. The next morning they would attack past it.
On the morning of November 9 the Twelfth Marines opened up with howitzers. When the barrage lifted, the Marine riflemen attacked—and were struck by Japanese who had waited out the artillery in foxholes.
Again it was grenade for grenade, shot for shot. Tanks were useless. The trail was too narrow and the swamp on either side too deep. The Marines had to attack straight ahead-blindly.
A platoon led by Lieutenant John Sabini was pinned down by an unseen machine gun. Sabini jumped up, shouting, “When they open up on me, fire back!” The Japanese did open up and Sabini was hit. He fell. He jumped up again, still shouting, and was hit again. By then his Marines had spotted the hidden gun and had charged it and destroyed it. The attack slogged forward, 40 or 50 yards an hour.
Downtrail the Japanese came stealthily at the Raiders’ roadblock, searching out its defenses. When they had located two foxhole outposts each manned by a pair of Marines with a BAR and rifle, they opened up with heavy machine-gun fire. They filled the air with grenades. The Marines in one of the holes were killed. There was a lull.
In the other hole Pfc. Henry Gurke said to Pfc. Donald Probst, “Look, you’ve got the BAR and you’re more important.”
“So?” Probst whispered, his eyes fastened on the green tangle to his front.
“They’re using a lot of grenades,” Gurke explained. “One of ’em might land in the hole.”
Probst nodded in anticipation, and Gurke concluded: “So if one should land in here I’ll take it.”
It was not the time to argue. The enemy was rushing in again and Probst’s automatic rifle was chattering and spreading death among them. Then came the somersaulting grenades and the
Pfc. Probst never knew whether or not he heard the muffled explosion for his finger was squeezing the trigger of the BAR his friend had found “important” enough to die for, and the charging enemy was falling back. They returned, again and again, sweeping in on other fronts, but the roadblock still held. The attack up the Piva Trail went forward until, on the morning of November 10, with a brief sharp artillery shoot and the support of 12 low-flying Avengers, the Second Battalion, Ninth, moved out to find that the enemy was gone.
Colonel Kawano had left 550 of his soldiers along the Mission-Piva Trail in fighting that began November 5 and ended November 11, and there were only 19 Marines killed and 32 wounded.
And there was also a posthumous Medal of Honor for Pfc. Henry Gurke.
Life on Puruata was like living on a bull’s-eye. This tiny islet 700 yards long and 400 wide was now the warehouse of the Bougainville campaign. The mainland beaches were too narrow and there was no dry coastal plain on which to place food and ammunition dumps. LST’s running up to Bougainville had to come to Puruata to unload.
So did the Japanese bombers from Rabaul. It was such an easy trip they could make it regularly. Torokina
