was only 230 miles from Rabaul, in comparison to the 640 miles which had separated Rabaul and Guadalcanal a year ago.
Japanese bombers plastered Puruata endlessly and made a sleepless hell of the lives of the Marine pioneers and depot companies who were stationed there. By day the bombers were not so bad, for there was always Marine air to intercept them and drive them off.
But at night…
At night little Puruata lay like a moonstone embedded in the dark ocean. Moonlight bathed her coconuts and washed the water breaking on her seaward reef to silver. Moonlight marked her clearly for the enemy bombers, and men who had worked all day ran to man antiaircraft guns or to form stretcher parties to make the inevitable search for the dead and wounded once the bombers had flown away.
Their ears were filled with the wailing and crashing of the bombs and the
Even so Puruata never lost its sense of humor, that self-mockery which could make men laugh even while the air around them was whizzing with disintegrating steel-as they did the night Puruata had its third straight raid and a little Marine ran for his foxhole shouting:
“Hang onto your false teeth, girls-they may be dropping sandwiches.”
Colonel Kawano had decided to withdraw. He was going to move off the Piva Trail which ran north-south over Bougainville’s towering mountains and retreat east over the East-West Trail. He was going to await the arrival of reinforcements.
To gain time to make his withdrawal, Kawano arranged a delaying action at a position he had fortified beforehand. It was in a coconut grove just below the junction where the Piva Trail going north met the East-West going east. It was about five miles outside General Turnage’s perimeter. Something less than a company was assigned to hold it. It was a sturdy defense line, well underground, for the men of the 23rd Regiment respected the Marine artillery.
But on the morning of November 13, when Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Smoak’s Second Battalion, Twenty- first, attacked through the coconut grove, they came on without their artillery. They were immediately pinned down. E Company led by Captain Sidney Altman was unable to move. Word was sent back to Smoak. He rushed up reinforcing companies and called for the artillery.
Lieutenant Bob Rennie went up the trail to join Major Glenn Fissel, the battalion’s executive officer. He set up his telephone behind a mangrove tree about fifty yards away from the source of all that banging and chattering. He gave his position to the artillery operations officer and said, “Put a round about five hundred yards in front of me.”
It went whistling over, but its crash was muffled by the jungle.
“Bring it down two hundred yards,” Rennie said.
The whistle was louder, the crash of the shell distinct and reverberating, but it seemed to the left of the battle.
“Another hundred down and you’d better bring it right one hundred yards.”
The shell’s passage was a scream now, its crash echoing. Rennie glanced at Major Fissel.
“That deflection seem all right, Major?”
Fissel nodded and Rennie spoke again into the telephone.
“Down one hundred. Deflection correct.”
There was hardly an instant separating the scream and the
“Down fifty. Deflection correct.”
Now the scream of the shell seemed to begin sooner and stay around longer. The crash shook water from the foliage.
“How was that?” Rennie asked.
Fissel ignored him and shouted uptrail, “Pass the word for someone up there to come back and tell us how those shells are going.”
A Marine came back. His face was gaunt and streaked with slime. He shouted, for his ears were still full of the clamor of battle.
“If you come back another twenty-five yards you’ll be right on top of those lousy Japs: ‘
Lieutenant Rennie’s face blanched. His lips tightened. Twenty-five yards! It was too risky. But he gave the order.
“Down twenty-five.”
And now the screams were those of wounded and dying men, hoarse and trailing in their agony and making no words but only the atavistic sounds of stricken animals.
“Cease fire!” Rennie shouted frantically into the telephone.
“Cease fire!”
He knew it, he should never have brought it in that close, and he cursed that Marine for misleading him into bringing death down on his own men. Then another Marine appeared, an officer, and he was angry.
“What in hell’s the matter with the artillery? Why’d you cease firing?”
“Aren’t we hitting our own men?”
“Like hell you are!” the officer bellowed. “Those are the Japs screaming. Make ‘em scream some more— plenty more! My men like to hear it.”
So the tension left the lips of Lieutenant Rennie and he smiled as he picked up the telephone and said:
“Belay that last. Fire for effect!”
The shells continued to crash into the coconut grove and when the barrage was lifted, E Company had pulled out of the enemy trap and was able to re-form for the attack which went forward that day and the next until the coconut grove was cleaned out.
The mouth of the East-West Trail had been cleared and the way was now open to pursuit.
7
When Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki came out to the Gilbert Islands in August, 1943, to direct the defense of this Central Pacific group about 2,400 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, he set up headquarters on the islet of Betio. This was the coral speck which the Japanese had renamed Bititu and which the world now knows as Tarawa from the chain of which it is only a part.
For Tarawa is not an island but an atoll, one of those chains of islets created by a great saw-toothed saucer of coral rising from the ocean floor. The broken teeth sticking above water are the islets. Within them, in the hollow of the saucers—enclosed or half-closed by surrounding reef—are lagoons. They are excellent anchorages. Some of the islets are broad enough to support airports. Tarawa Atoll, a triangle with its sides running about 30 miles north-south and its base about 25 miles east-west, formed one of these anchorages. It was accessible through a western channel about six miles above Betio, which was the westernmost islet and the left-hand angle of the triangle. Betio was also just big enough to support an airfield while being too small for enemy maneuver. It became the heart of the defense of Tarawa Atoll, which was itself the key to the Gilberts, and it was fortified by the Japanese as had been no island in history.
Such defenses were the result of the raid on Makin Atoll 105 miles north by Carlson’s Raiders in August, 1942. The Makin incursion had had a rich yield of headlines in America, but it had warned Japan of the necessity of defending the Gilberts and of the futility of attempting it on Makin. In September of 1942 an industrious rear admiral named Tomanari Saichiro began fortifying Betio. He built an airfield on the western half of the parrot-shaped islet, on the bird’s body, and he made each of Betio’s 291 acres bristle with every gun in the Japanese arsenal-all mounted within pillboxes, blockhouses and huge bombproofs of ferro-concrete two stories high. Betio’s beaches
