carrying ammunition for the Third Battalion, First.
Up front, one of the companies was raked by bullets coming from a system of four bunkers bristling with machine guns. It was a roadblock. Captain Joseph Terzi and Captain Phillip Wilheit of Company K were instantly killed. Their men deployed. They let go with the newfangled bazooka, but the rockets merely lodged in the soft earth around the bunkers. The flame-throwers wouldn’t work. The riflemen deployed and began firing and someone yelled for ammunition.
“Let’s go!” Oswald shouted, and Paul Hansen let out the amtrack’s clutch and gunned its motor. The gray amphibian came careening up the road with blazing machine guns. Paul Hansen pointed its nose at the nearest bunker, intending to roll over it and cave it in. The Japanese spilled out of the exits and came swarming at the amtrack. Many of them were shot down by Sergeant Oswald and Leslie Hansen, but the rest got to the amtrack before the ground Marines could drive them off. Oswald fell, mortally wounded. Leslie Hansen was dragged from his gun and beaten and stabbed to death. The Japanese turned to take Paul Hansen, but by then he had skillfully rocked the amtrack free and was rolling over the bunker and crushing it while the riflemen closed and polished off the Japanese.
With the blind sides of the remaining bunkers exposed and many of their defenders slain, the Marines quickly overran them with grenades and bayonets.
By then it was late afternoon, and the Marines halted and dug in, just as the first of the monsoon rains broke over their heads.
It came out of the northwest. Men on the beaches struggling to unravel a traffic snarl of 150 abandoned Army six-by-six trucks could see it coming, an opaque gray wall of water marching across the Bismarck Sea. It came with the sound of rolling drums and then it was over the jungle and the water was swishing, streaming, gurgling earthward. It was as nothing these Marines had seen before, this Niagara of a monsoon. It was not a rain storm, a spell of rain—it was a season of it. It was the cloudburst in perpetuity, and it was so constant during the ensuing four months that both Japanese and Americans numbered the dry days of sunshine and cherished their memory.
Already one of the 150-millimeter howitzers of the Fourth Battalion, Eleventh Marines, had sunk together with its prime mover. There were five inches of gun shield, the top of the tractor’s vertical exhaust pipe and the tips of its levers above the surface.
In a little while there would be nothing.
Night.
Louie the Louse.
Flares.
Out of their rain-filled holes tumbled Marines, their nerves again pulsing and twanging as though it were Guadalcanal again and there had never been an Australia. But there was no thundering and flashing out at sea. The Marines went back to their holes, already too miserable to be mystified by the inexplicable enemy.
20
Major General Matsuda had to decide whether he was cut in two or whether he had the enemy surrounded.
He chose the latter. It was not because he was a stupid commander, which he was not; it was because on a map this could appear to be the truth. The Americans were in the swamp. They could not maneuver. They were exposed to the very tactics with which Matsuda had hoped to defend the Cape.
While Colonel Sumiya’s men held out on the airfield to the west, Colonel Katayama’s 141st Regiment would counterattack from the east. Matsuda had already ordered Katayama to call in all his patrols and to march north, leaving only token forces behind to defend his southern garrisons. For Matsuda had accurately concluded that the major assault on New Britain had come in his Cape Gloucester area. The Americans south at Arawe were not to be feared.
But then Matsuda acted on a pair of misconceptions which seemed to be congenital among Japanese Army commanders. He underestimated the enemy’s strength and belittled his fighting ability. He put the Marine force down at 2,500—when it was by then actually five times that—and then sent about a thousand men up against it without waiting for Katayama’s 141st to arrive from the south.
Matsuda ordered the 2nd Battalion, 53rd, to move from Borgen Bay positions east to the center of the Seventh Marines’ position at “Damp Flat.” Shortly after midnight the morning of December 27, just as a thunderstorm broke, the Japanese began attacking.
Even the howls of the
That same morning Pappy Boyington led his Black Sheep up to Rabaul again. Once more the Zeros rose to meet them, and again Boyington’s aim was true. He shot one down. He was within one plane of tying Joe Foss’s record and he flashed eagerly among the red-balled Zeros. Then oil spurted over his glass hatch. Three times Boyington wound back the hood and tried to wipe the film away, but he couldn’t. Exasperated, he turned and flew back to Torokina Airfield. He landed. Someone said it was a shame the oil had prevented his tying Foss’s record of 26 planes.
“What’s the difference?” Boyington growled. “I couldn’t have hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle anyway.”
But he knew it was not so, and he had wanted that twenty-sixth kill very badly.
The morning of December 28 brought high winds to Cape Gloucester, as well as an earthquake and that rare bird of war: an enemy prisoner.
His name was Corporal Kashida Shigeto and he was taken by the Third Battalion, First Marines, during an action fought at Hell’s Point, about a mile east of the airfield. There were a dozen big bunkers there, each occupied by about 20 Japanese soldiers. There were a few 75-millimeter gun emplacements. The Marines threw four Sherman tanks at Hell’s Point. One of them rumbled around a bend and ran into a Japanese 75-millimeter gun.
The Japanese gunner ran to his gun and pulled the lanyard. The gun roared and the shell struck the tank and exploded. It left a small dent. The astonished Japanese soldier fled, for the tank had lurched forward and was rolling toward him. Now the other tanks came up, flushing the Japanese out of the bunkers into the fire of following riflemen. One of these riflemen struck his foot on an object in the ground. Looking down, he gazed into the agonized eyes of Corporal Kashida Shigeto. The Marine hesitated. He did not know whether to shoot or to kick the Japanese, but he had plenty of time to decide, for Corporal Shigeto was buried up to his neck. His trench had caved in on him a few moments after he had received a painful wound in the shoulder.
Then to Corporal Shigeto’s amazement the Americans began to dig him out. An intelligence officer had arrived just in time to convince the puzzled rifleman that he should neither kill nor kick, that he should in fact be kind. The Marines had learned how kindness could open the lips of Japanese prisoners. Taught to expect torture, Corporal Shigeto was delighted to accept the offer of cheese from a K-ration and an American cigarette. He began to answer questions. His country had not signed the Geneva Convention under which all captured soldiers are to give their name and serial number—and nothing more—nor did Japan tell her soldiers how to act when captured, for surrender was the supreme disgrace. Cave-ins and other forms of accidental surrender were not anticipated, and so the suddenly amiable Corporal Shigeto began to answer his captor’s questions with great fervor and detail.
As a result of what he said, General Rupertus did not press his attack to the airfield. He decided to wait until the Fifth Marines arrived in the morning.
