Even on the morning of January 10, when the importance of Aogiri Ridge as an outerwork of Hill 660 was being grasped, the Marines did not know that they had uncovered the northern trail to that mystifying Egaroppu. Mopping up Aogiri Ridge that morning they crossed a wide firm trail which was found to connect all of Borgen Bay’s supply dumps, bivouacs and landing facilities with some point inland. That point inland was the headquarters of Colonel Katayama at a place called Maigairapua. Beneath Maigairapua was Nakarop. But the Marines did not go south along this hidden trail because they were busy cleaning out a nasty pocket between Aogiri and Hill 150.
It was nasty in a very literal sense and it was not crushed, again in a literal sense, until the engineers had built another corduroy road over which four light tanks and a pair of half-tracks were brought up. When the pocket fell, it was found to contain the enemy’s biggest supply dump on New Britain.
All that remained was to take Hill 660, on which General Shepherd expected to find the bulk of some 2,500 to 3,000 Japanese estimated to be still in the Borgen Bay area, for many of the 53rd Regiment had slipped out of Cape Gloucester over jungle trails and had joined Katayama’s 141st.
In the meantime, Shepherd gave his Marines a rest. The day after the pocket was crushed and the Second Battalion, First, had marched up to Cape Gloucester from Tauali, the Marines in Borgen Bay spent at their ease in the rain-swept coastal swamps. They read and reread letters from home, then committed them to memory for they had begun to fall apart; they thought of writing letters themselves, but the paper was sodden, their pencils had swelled and burst, the fountain pens had become clogged and their points had separated; they pried apart their pocketknife blades which had rusted together and scraped the mold off their clothing and off their rifles and slung the rifles upside down under their ponchos, while debating whether or not to keep a ruined wrist-watch or heave it into the swamp; they removed their precious cigarettes from beneath their helmets and lit them with matches kept dry inside a contraceptive and smoked them with cupped hands; they badgered their officers for dry socks or a cartridge belt to replace those now decomposing; they ate hot chow of which the rain quickly made a cold wet slop and they were very grateful for the coffee kept hot in covered GI cans—sometimes so hot that it heated the lips of the canteen cups and burned the lips of the drinkers. Then the self-control of men who could joke about jungle rot and dysentery would at last break, because the sudden pain caused them to drop the coffee: “An’ now I
In the morning they cleaned the protective oil off their clips of cartridges, made certain that grenade pins were not rusted tight, and then—after the artillery and mortars had stopped firing and the Fifth Air Force’s bombers had flown home—they attacked the steep stern slimy face of Hill 660.
Captain Joe Buckley had been a Marine when practically all the men subordinate to him—and some of those superior to him—were as yet unborn. He had joined the Marines in 1915, and here he was, twenty-eight years afterward, a man close to fifty and a veteran of wars large and small, leading a ragtag bobtail of a force through the jungle of New Britain.
Captain Buckley was going to skirt Hill 660 on its seaward or eastern side and get in behind it. To do this he had a pair of half-tracks, two light tanks, a 37-millimeter gun platoon, about 80 riflemen and 40 pioneers who had thoughtfully brought along their bulldozers. There was also a belligerent Army sergeant who had gone AWOL from his service outfit in New Guinea. He had stowed away on an LST and had been gladly welcomed aboard by those Marines with whom he wished to fight.
Early in the morning, with the bulldozer plowing a passage through the barrier of mud, Buckley’s motley set out. They were fired at from the Japanese atop Hill 660 but the tanks and half-tracks roared back and the little column sloughed on. By half-past ten in the morning it had skirted the base of Hill 660 and set up a roadblock behind or south of it.
Any Japanese attempting to retreat from Hill 660 would have to move through Buckley’s Marines or wade a swamp.
Only occasional snipers hampered Lieutenant Colonel Henry Buse’s Marines in their approach march to the foot of Hill 660. The Marines shot them out of the trees, leaving them dangling on their ropes.
Hill 660’s slopes were as steep as 45 degrees. They were slimy with rain-soaked, malodorous vegetation and they were swept by enemy fire. The Marines began to climb on all fours, but they were pinned as flat as they could make themselves. Bullets sang above them and they could go no farther. Nor could they withdraw.
Lieutenant Colonel Buse got a platoon of light tanks forward. They laid a covering fire in front of the Marines’ noses, and the companies finally came back down the hill as it grew dark.
The next morning, January 14, Buse sent companies around to the right or west of Hill 660, to its inland side. He was probing for a soft spot. His men could never go up that front slope without terrible casualties. Almost to the rear of Hill 660, separated from Captain Buckley by a swamp, the Marines found their soft spot. It was lightly guarded because it was so steep. The Japanese did not think anyone could come up it.
Buse ordered his men up and they went up. They went up in a sudden burst of energy and valor as mystifying as it was marvelous. They clawed up that vertical face of gummy clay and came in on the startled enemy and put him to death among his guns. Those who fled down the hill ran the roaring gantlet of Captain Buckley’s men. Those who counterattacked a day later were torn apart in a march and countermarch of mortar shells. And those who survived this slaughter perished in sea or swamp to either side of Buckley’s guns, one whole group of them cut down in a daisy chain as they crossed a creek holding hands.
Hill 660 had fallen. Its price had not been high in blood but in hardship, in the ordeal written on the faces of the men who took it and were at last being relieved after twenty-three days in the swamp. They were all dripping hair and smeared red-brown with soil. Mud-stained ponchos or Japanese raincoats hooded their heads against the rain and they walked woodenly, staring straight ahead while mechanically spooning mouthfuls of cold beans from the little ration cans in their hands.
The last of Colonel Katayama’s forces in Borgen Bay had been shattered and the colonel had himself gone back to Nakarop-Egaroppu, where General Matsuda was already preparing his getaway. The fighting at Borgen Bay had been as decisive a victory for the First Marine Division as the battle for Cape Gloucester Airfield.
24
Conquest of the Gilbert Islands in November of 1943 had caused the first break in the outerworks of Fortress Nippon. Now, in February of 1944, seizure of the Marshall Islands would start the breakthrough.
The Marshalls sat athwart the Central Pacific about 400 miles north and 650 miles west of Tarawa in the Gilberts. They guarded all the routes to Tokyo. Directly west or behind them lay the Carolines with the monster air-sea base at Truk and the ocean fort of Peleliu. South and west of them lay General MacArthur’s Bismarcks-New Guinea route to the Philippines. North and west of them lay the Marianas with Guam and Saipan, the Volcanos with Iwo Jima, and the Bonins.
Japan by now had no real hope of holding the Marshalls. Even though Premier Tojo still expected to wear down the American will to fight, he planned to do it by delaying in the Marshalls while strengthening the inner ring of defenses—especially at Peleliu, the Marianas and the Bonins.
The Marshalls were admirably suited to delaying action because there were so many of them. There were 36 true atolls —with perhaps 2,000 islets and islands—in this enormous chain running 650 miles on a northwest- southeast diagonal. They had been in Japan’s possession since they were seized from Germany in World War One, when Japan was on the side of the Allies and also acquiring such easy German booty as the Marianas, but Japan had not bothered to fortify them in any strength until just before the attack on the Gilberts at Makin and Tarawa.
Now there were six atolls on which she had based airfields. These were Eniwetok, Kwajalein, Wotje, Maloelap, Jaluit and Mili. Of these Eniwetok was the farthest west, closest to Japan. Kwajalein was in the center. Wotje and Maloelap were east and north; Jaluit and Mili were east and south. Vice Admiral Musashi Kobayashi, who was in command of the Marshalls, first began fortifying Wotje and Maloelap, but then came Tarawa, and emphasis was shifted to Jaluit and Mili—closest by far to the new American bases south in the Gilberts. Admiral Kobayashi paid little attention to Kwajalein or Eniwetok. They were fortified, of course, but nothing like the eastern atolls, and nothing at all like Tarawa. Kobayashi expected the Americans to attack on the eastern atolls, more likely on Jaluit
