Strong Men Armed

15

Battle had begun again on Bougainville.

On November 20, the day the Second Marine Division began landing on Betio, a patrol of the Third Marine Division made the discovery that was to touch off the Battle of Piva Forks.

On the afternoon of that day the Second Battalion, Third Marines, pursued the retreating Colonel Kawano and his 23rd Infantry Regiment through the jungle. The Marines moved east on the East-West Trail, a path about three miles north or inland of Major General Allen Turnage’s perimeter at Cape Torokina. A patrol reported reaching a high nameless knoll to the left or north of the trail and about 2,000 yards east of its western terminus. The knoll was the highest ground yet found on Bougainville. It overlooked Empress Augusta Bay and could block the Marines moving east on the trail. It also commanded a big swamp lying south or beneath the trail and occupied by the blocking force under the personal command of Colonel Kawano. Luckily, the knoll was unoccupied.

Lieutenant Colonel Hector de Zayas ordered Major Donald Schmuck to occupy the knoll with F Company. Major Schmuck called a young lieutenant named Steve Cibik.

“There’s a knoll of some kind ahead, Steve. It isn’t on the maps. No elevation listed. Get your men together and move up on it.”

With 35 riflemen and 16 machine-gunners Lieutenant Cibik moved to the knoll. His voice was urgent, for it was getting dark. He told his men to string wire behind them and dig in. He tried to telephone back to the command post, but someone had neglected to connect the wire at the other end.

Cibik and his men passed an anxious but uneventful night, and in the morning, while the mists began to shred over the jungle roof below them, Cibik began sending out patrols.

His men came back excited. They had found empty Japanese positions up ahead. Cibik and his Marines moved out quickly to occupy them. The foxholes were littered with cigarette butts, chopsticks and coconut meat. Cibik guessed that the Japanese had pulled back during the night to avoid Marine artillery fire and that they would return.

The Japanese did return, carelessly. Marine rifles crackled. Mushroom-helmeted figures fell. The others fled. Now Cibik made preparations to hold off the counterattack he expected to follow. He put a machine gun to either flank and a third in the center. A private named Charles Skinner suggested putting a fourth gun out ahead or east of the ridge to surprise the enemy. Cibik agreed and Skinner set up his ambush. Then a section of light mortars came up the ridge. A line was built up to right and left.

But the enemy did not come that night. They came next morning. They blundered into the surprise fire of Private Skinner, the lash of the mortars and the submachine-gun firing of a Marine who had climbed a tree. The attack was broken up, just as Major Schmuck arrived to take command on the knoll that was already being called Cibik’s Ridge.

That night 30 more Marines arrived to help stop a second and heavier attack made the following day, November 23. Cibik’s Ridge was taken for good.

Next morning light and heavy field artillery battered the Japanese positions in the swamp. Seven battalions —three of them from the Army’s 37th Division—hurled 5,760 shells into the enemy lines. Forty-four machine guns and 21 mortars joined the bombardment.

As the assault battalions moved to the jump-off points, their ears were filled with an incessant roar and rattle. Then there came the sharper, more fearful sounds of the enemy firing counterbombardment. The flashing of their guns was spotted from Cibik’s Ridge and within minutes the counterbattery firing of the Marines and soldiers had put them out of action.

The attack went forward. The Marines sloshed through mud up to their calves and broke into a silent swamp. They slogged on. The enemy sent up reserves to counterattack. The Marines met them in toe-to-toe, tree- for-tree fighting that ended in extermination of the counterattackers. So it went throughout this bleak, grim Thanksgiving Day and through the following day, when a fierce charge through a shower of grenades brought death to Colonel Kawano and the remnants of his trail-blocking force.

Reports of enemy losses in the Battle of Piva Forks were conflicting. Some put the dead as high as 1,196, which, together with the Japanese destroyed in the Torokina fighting, would put the 23rd Regiment’s dead at 2,014. Other estimates suggested that this figure was highly exaggerated. It probably was, for the 23rd’s main body was still intact farther east on the East-West Trail.

More important, Piva Forks enabled General Turnage to expand the Torokina perimeter to roughly 8,000 yards breadth, with Cibik’s Ridge and the Piva River now inside its eastern boundary.

This was the new disposition completed by November 26, the day after the Tokyo Express made its last run.

16

The Japanese Army commanders in Rabaul—General Imamura and Lieutenant General Hyakutate—were still not convinced that the enemy’s chief objective was Cape Torokina. They believed that the American intention was merely to build a fighter strip there, before moving about 75 miles higher to seize better air bases at Buka Passage off Bougainville’s northern nose. Though the Buka airfields had already been made useless to Japan by American bombing, they could still be of use to the enemy in his drive against Rabaul. The Japanese Navy did not agree, but the Army had its way.

On the night of November 24 the Tokyo Express sailed again from Rabaul with 920 soldiers. They were aboard the destroyer-transports Yugiri, Amagiri, and Uzuki, escorted by the big destroyers Onami and Makinami. The force, commanded by Captain Kiyoto Kagawa, sailed straight for Buka—where Thirty-One-Knot Burke and his Little Beavers were lying in ambush.

American Naval Intelligence had guessed that the Japanese meant to reinforce. On November 24, Admiral Halsey sent this message to Captain Burke:

Thirty-One-Knot Burke, get this. Put your squadron athwart the Buka-Rabaul evacuation line about 35 miles west of Buka. If no enemy contacts by early morning, come south to refuel same place. If enemy contacted, you know what to do.

—HALSEY

Burke led Charles F. Ausburne, Claxton, Dyson, Converse and Spence north under low-scudding clouds. They came to a 100-mile stretch of squall- dappled sea between Buka and New Ireland to the west. They waited there, unaware that Captain Kagawa had already completed reinforcement of Buka.

While Onami and Makinami had stood offshore as a screen, Yugiri, Amagiri and Uzuki ran in to discharge the troops and also to take aboard 700 aviation troops who had been idle since the Buka fields were knocked out. Then the destroyer-transports rejoined the screen and the entire force made west.

At a few minutes before two in the morning of November 25, the destroyers of Captain Burke sighted these Japanese ships and sent 15 torpedoes streaking toward Captain Kagawa’s screen. Then they turned sharp right to avoid counterfire.

Four minutes later Captain Kagawa’s lookouts on Onami sighted the American fish. Kagawa had thirty seconds to avoid them. It was not enough. He sailed into them. Onami blew apart, and a ball of red fire rolled 300 feet skyward from the place where she had been. Makinami began breaking in two and was finally pounded beneath the waves by Spence and Converse.

Aboard Ausburne, with Claxton and Dyson tearing after