Strong Men Armed

him, Burke began to pursue the three destroyer-transports frantically hurrying home. They had a good lead, but they couldn’t match Burke’s 33-knot pace. In a quarter-hour Burke’s destroyers had closed the gap from 13,000 yards to 8,000. Burke was exuberant. He radioed Halsey’s headquarters at Guadalcanal. “I’m ridin’ herd!” he yelled. Being from the Colorado cowboy country, he could not restrain a “Come a Ki-Yi-Yippee, Yippee-Ay!”

Then Burke had a hunch. He zigged his division right for a minute and then zagged back to the previous course. There were three explosions. Yugiri had unloaded her torpedoes and they had struck the wakes of Burke’s destroyers and exploded.

Burke’s destroyers opened up with guns pointing forward. They were coming on hotly, their prows hissing sharply through the black water, and they had no time to maneuver for broadside firing. The blast of Ausburne’s Number Two mount blew the hatch off Number One mount ahead of it, but the guns continued to fire. Burke began fish-tailing to bring his stern batteries to bear. The fire of all three American destroyers was converging on Yugiri. She was circling, burning. At a few minutes after three, while Amagiri and Uzuki were making their getaway, Yugiri went under.

The battle of Cape St. George had ended. The Tokyo Express had run its last, and the Little Beavers of Thirty-One-Knot Burke sailed south without a scratch.

Inside the expanded Torokina beachhead the Seabees had brought off another of those feats of engineering wizardry which the Marines had come to take for granted. The Seabees had built an airfield in the soup of the Torokina swamp. They began it November 9 and at dawn of December 10 the first of VMF-216’s Corsairs put down on the completed airstrip. Seventeen came in, followed by a half-dozen Dauntlesses and a Skytrain transport. Within a week Army Aerocobras joined the Corsairs in close-up support against the Japanese on Bougainville. Soon there would be Lightning night-fighters operating from Torokina, which meant the days of Washing-Machine Charley were also numbered. The Navy’s Corsairs, the Marines’ Venturas and the Army’s Lightnings had shown how an intricate system of radar vectoring could put them on Charley’s tail.

But more important, Torokina Airfield had brought Rabaul within fighter range. This was the importance of the Seabee’s engineering feat, though it was lost on the ordinary Marine in his very real gratitude for the new roads.

It was now possible for a man to walk on Bougainville without having cold wet mud working down within his socks, without hearing the customary slop-suck, slop-suck sound of one foot following the other out of foot-high slime. The network of roads hacked out of the jungle by these doughty movers and shakers of earth also meant that the Torokina beachhead was becoming stuffed with food and supplies which would reduce the discomfort of living on an enormous, vile-green lily pad. So the Marines were grateful and on Bougainville they did the Seabees the unrivaled compliment of a kind word for another branch of the United States armed forces. On one of the Seabees’ new roads the Second Raider Battalion erected this sign: 

So when we reach the Isle of Japan
With our caps at a jaunty tilt,
We’ll enter the City of Tokyo
On the roads the Seabees built.

It was warm and well-meaning and it made everyone smile. Only later in the war would the Marine smile vanish, but by then it was too late to correct the impression—slyly fostered by the Seabees—that Marines never went ashore anywhere until the Seabees gave them the word that the roads were ready.

17

At the beginning of December Major General Turnage decided to take up a blocking position to the right of the northeast curve of his Bougainville beachhead. He wanted to occupy a series of ridges which began about a half-mile east along the East-West Trail and ran another mile and a half to the west bank of the Torokina River.

There were four of these heights, one called Hill 600 to the south of the trail or beneath it, and three north or above it. These were Hill 1000, next a nameless hill about 250 feet high, then Hill 600A. Turnage struck at the northern hills first.

Hill 1000 was seized by the Third Parachute Battalion in the early part of the month. On December 12 the Twenty-first Marines hit the nameless hill—and quickly called it Hellzapoppin’ Ridge for the reception they received.

Hellzapoppin’ had sheer slopes on its sides, east and west, and could only be approached from the forward and reverse slopes, south and north. Its crest was a mere 40 yards in width, though it ran 350 yards fore and aft. It was covered with a dense green tangle, in which the Japanese had constructed the usual complex of interlocking holes and bunkers, and giant trees on its summit served as a screen to detonate the mortars which the Marines tried to drop on the heavily fortified reverse slope.

The Twenty-first Marines came at Hellzapoppin’ for five days, during which Colonel Evans Ames used every one of his regiment’s nine rifle companies in the assault. During this time the Marines also began to develop the tactic of close-up aerial support which would be one of their outstanding contributions to modern warfare, calling on Avenger torpedo-bombers to deliver low-level strafing and bombing attacks within unusually close range of their own lines. But even five days could do no more than bring a purchase on Hellzapoppin’s forward slopes, and on December 17 the Marines called for an all-out aerial strike on the still-undented reverse slope.

On that same December 17 a column of unlovely LST’s was plodding along the coast of northeast New Guinea, bringing the First Marine Division back to the war.

The final echelons of the First Marine Regiment were coming up from Goodenough Island to Finschhafen and Oro Bay. Here they would join the Seventh Marines, and these two regiments would sail across Dampier Strait to assault Cape Gloucester on the western tip of New Britain.

They would do this for General MacArthur, for the price of frolicking in the fleshpots of Melbourne had been service under his command in the Southwest Pacific area. General MacArthur had placed the First Marine Division in his ALAMO Force and sent it on an operation which would nail down his right flank while he struck farther north in New Guinea, and would also isolate the great Japanese base at Rabaul on eastern New Britain. For Bougainville to the east and the new Japanese airfield on Cape Gloucester to the western end of New Britain would straddle Rabaul.

This was the First Division’s mission as it sailed again to battle—as stiff-necked as ever and perhaps a shade more arrogant in the knowledge that it was still going it alone. The men of this division had been on their own since leaving the States nineteen months ago, and they had come to regard themselves as the proprietors of the Pacific. They had even designed their own uniform while in Melbourne, and it was said of them in Washington: “Any resemblance between the First Division and the remainder of the Marine Corps is purely accidental.”

So the hard-nosed First set its sights on western New Britain, while on that same December 17 indelicate Pappy Boyington was treating mighty Rabaul on the eastern tip to its first experience of the fighter-sweep.

It was a simple tactic, one which Boyington had discovered over Kahili two months ago. He had flown over the enemy base and taunted the enemy to come up and fight. When they did the Black Sheep shot them down.

But Boyington had only had four or five planes that time. Now, in early December, with Torokina Airfield bringing Rabaul within 230 miles’ range, Boyington proposed to Major General Ralph Mitchell that the fighter-sweep be used on a bigger scale against the 200 or so fighter planes which the Japanese had still operative there. Mitchell agreed.

On December 17 Boyington led 31 Corsairs, 22 Hellcats and 23 of those gaudily painted New Zealand