Those denunciations delivered since Tarawa—that Marines were capable only of the frontal charge and were careless with men’s lives—would receive their reply in the New Britain campaign. On New Britain it was as though Guadalcanal were being reversed, for here were 10,000 Japanese holding a jungle beachhead and airfield against the onslaught of some 19,000 Americans—and here all the superiority of air and sea was as surely American as it had been Japanese at Guadalcanal.
Again Radio Tokyo announced the result in advance. While the First and Seventh Regiments were aboard their destroyer-transports and LCI’s, leaving the Fifth in reserve on New Guinea, the Japanese radio was informing the world of how that devil’s brood of degenerates and jailbirds called the First Marine Division had been kicked out of Melbourne in disgrace and were now about to be turned loose on Cape Gloucester.
“But I am pleased to add,” said the announcer, “that our soldiers are fully prepared to repulse this insolent attempt. The jungles will run red with the blood of the butchers of Guadalcanal.”
19
It was Christmas Day in the States, but out on the dark waters of Dampier Strait it was the morning of December 26, and Major General Iwao Matsuda’s radios were already sputtering with reports of an invading force circling the Cape and standing off the northern coast a few miles to the east.
At six o’clock the thundering began. Two cruisers and eight destroyers sailed back and forth, blazing at the shore with orange-yellow bursts while a pair of rocket-firing LCI’s daintily picked their way through an opening in the barrier reef. They took up positions to either end of the landing beaches and soon the
It was still dark, and the Marines assembled on the decks of their destroyers could feel a twinge of pity for the enemy ashore. They knew what it was like to receive naval gunfire. There had actually not been need of a big force of warships, for the bombers of the Fifth Air Force had been pounding Cape Gloucester for weeks. They had dropped 2,000 tons of explosive. During the last few nights Liberators had been circling the airfield, dropping a bomb every six minutes, putting Japanese nerves through the wringer of an American Washing-Machine Charley. Now in the beginnings of a blue day arising roseate behind 6,500-foot Mount Talawe there were more of the big, four-engined Liberators coming back to bomb. Flight after flight of them appeared high in the sky, humming like bees and seeming as small. There was the red winking of Japanese antiaircraft fire, but then the ferocious Mitchells and Havocs—two-engined attack bombers—swooped low with flashing nose cannon and machine guns. There was no more winking.
Men of the Seventh Regiment went over the side of their destroyers into the landing boats. The boats fanned out and headed for a landing beach about five miles east of the airfield. They charged into the smoke being swept seaward by an onshore wind. They vanished. After them went the LCI’s, groping for the barrier passage and a quick run-in. They disappeared. The bombardment and bombing lifted. The smoke drifted seaward. The LST’s came forward slowly, and then the returning landing boats burst out of the smoke.
They were empty. Their coxswains were grinning and raising jubilant clenched fists. “Landing unopposed,” they shouted, and the water began boiling beneath the sterns of the LSTs as these unlovely dray-horses of the sea surged forward through the reef passage.
To the southwest, Masters’ Bastards were also landing unopposed. They were the men of the Second Battalion, First, and they called themselves that because Lieutenant Colonel James Masters was their commander and because Masters’ Bastards had a good rude ring to it.
They landed at Tauali on the extreme west of the Cape, roughly seven miles southwest of the airfield. A swarm of LCI’s beached themselves, their ramps banged down—and Masters’ Bastards ran ashore. They darted across a man’s-length of sun-bathed black mud beach and plunged into the murk of the jungle.
They would not see daylight again for two weeks.
They sat there, facing east, blocking the coastal track running from Japanese bases to the southeast of the airfield. They patrolled constantly and killed a few of the enemy and waited for the Japanese to try to force their way through them.
The Seventh Regiment’s sector was marked on the map as “Damp Flat.”
“It’s damp, all right,” growled those Marines who were already wading through a hip-deep swamp, already glum with recollection of Guadalcanal. “It’s damp clear up to yer ass!”
It was a forest swamp and General Matsuda had not thought any sane commander would land there. He had fortified it lightly, while concentrating his forces to either side of it. When Colonel Julian Frisbie’s men landed here they encountered only a few empty coconut bunkers, a pair of untended and unemplaced 75’s and a huddling handful of terrified shipping engineers. The Marines overran the beach and swept into the jungle.
On the left, the First Battalion, Seventh, made for a height called Target Hill. They found that the Japanese had abandoned Target Hill during the bombardment, and they occupied the enemy’s positions.
On the right the Seventh’s Third Battalion sloshed to its designated perimeter.
In the center the Second Battalion crossed the coastal road and drove inland through sporadic sniper fire, only to bog down in the worst of the swamp.
Men moving over what seemed like solid ground were sucked down into waist-high muck, and had to be pulled out. The Marines were floundering, tripped by vines and sometimes thrown down by them. They had to be careful of the numerous shells lying unexploded in the soft mud. They had to clamber over rotten forest giants which had begun to fall during the shelling and were still falling. One man was killed by one. He was the Division’s first fatality on Cape Gloucester. Nineteen more men would be killed by New Britain’s falling trees, and some 30 others would be badly injured. The Marines were already calling them “widow-makers.”
At last the men in the center debouched on dry ground. They moved on, but they had not gone 100 yards before they were in swamp again. They had penetrated to a depth of 1,200 yards.
By a quarter after ten Major General William Rupertus, the Division’s new commander, was ashore with his staff and setting up a headquarters. By noon the Third Battalion, First Marines, were landing on another beach about three miles farther west. They wheeled right, marching up the coastal road to attack Cape Gloucester Airfield, another two miles west. By midafternoon Rupertus was calling for the Fifth Marines to come up from New Guinea.
In Rabaul it was believed that the American task force sighted between New Guinea and New Britain on Christmas Night was headed for Arawe on New Britain’s southern coast. An Army cavalry regiment had landed against light opposition at Arawe eleven days earlier, and the Japanese believed that the task force was bringing more troops there. Then came Matsuda’s call for help on the northern coast.
The officer commanding 63 Zeros and 25 dive-bombing Vals sent aloft from Rabaul quickly changed the target to Cape Gloucester, but his order was not transmitted. The planes flew up to Arawe, found nothing and flew back home again.
At half-past two in the afternoon, however, they were on the target, coming in low and fast on the beached supplies and the second echelons of LST’s just arriving from New Guinea. They struck, and the Americans began to make mistakes.
While the Japanese sank the new destroyer
Sergeant Robert Oswald figured he had two good men in the brothers Hansen. They were twins, Paul and Leslie, both privates, sons of a widow who had already lost an older boy in the war. As Oswald’s amtrack moved along the road to the airfield Leslie Hansen was on the machine guns with him, and Paul was driving. They were
