fight as flight.
A week passed. Once a patrol going south from the airfield was ambushed on Mount Talawe. In the sharp quick fight that followed Sergeant Phil Mottola shot a Japanese. The man screamed in English: “I’m shot!”
“Shot hell!” Mottola yelled. “You’re dead!”
With that Mottola finished him off, and the patrol moved on. To run into another ambush. And then another. The closer the Marines got to low ground behind Mount Talawe the stiffer became the opposition. Some attempts to close with the enemy at the points of ambush would find the position abandoned, or sometimes the Japanese would be in pillboxes on cliffs commanding the trails winding down from the hills. From these they fought with mortars and machine guns. Colonel Sato’s men were fighting a skillful delaying action.
At Natamo Point east of Hill 660 on the north coast, a patrol was stopped by intense automatic-weapons fire. A captured map showed Natamo Point to be fortified with many machine-gun positions. For two days planes of the Fifth Air Force worked it over, but when the Marines sought to cross the Natamo River they found their way still barred by automatic cannon and artillery. It was not until they had made shore-to-shore landings around the river, called down their own artillery and brought up rockets that they were able to force Lieutenant Hanahara’s roadblock.
For such it was. It was the last gate to the northern approaches to Nakarop. Five hundred yards east of Natamo Point the Marines found a wide, unmapped corduroy road. They sent patrols down it. On January 29 the Marines entered their Egaroppu which they at last knew to be Nakarop.
It was empty, and now began an elaborate game of hide-and-seek as Marine amphibious patrols pursued the fleeing Matsuda. They chased him throughout February, leapfrogging patrols along the coast to all the rallying places.
Matsuda had not tarried at Kokopo. He had gone on to Karai-ai about 20 miles farther east. The Marines landed at Karai-ai and found only the dead and dying. Matsuda had taken a boat. He might be found at Upmadung.
Upmadung?
There had not been so much fun with a word since the Marines had maneuvered in Melbourne Bay aboard a ship called HMS
But Matsuda had not stayed there, either. While Colonels Sumiya and Katayama had marched off by land, he had taken another boat which eventually landed him at Cape Hoskins.
Behind him, crawling over the trails, eating native dogs and plundering native gardens, starving and suffering, came the wretched, rotting remnant of his brigade. They had been abandoned by their comrades. They were wounded and their flesh stank. Their bodies were covered with fungus infections. There were many of them actually crawling on hands and knees, for their feet were too rotten to support them. They had little idea where they were going. When they had no more strength to move, they lay on the trail. The moment the point of a Marine patrol came into sight they blew themselves up with grenades. There were others too weak to do this and the Marines began to take prisoners.
The Marines had begun to pity the foe, for they had never seen such miserable defeat, and even they became nauseous as they moved along the trails between Borgen Bay and Iboki Plantation, holding their noses against the stink of death.
30
Rabaul, the mighty fortress to which Matsuda’s miserable soldiers were crawling, was completely exposed to aerial attack in the last days of February.
The ruinous American strike on Truk had led Fleet Admiral Koga to order all naval planes and pilots out of Rabaul to Truk as reinforcements, and the great base on eastern New Britain was left with a few Army aircraft and an occasional patched-up naval fighter after the January savaging of the fighter-sweeps launched by Marine pilots to the south.
Among these fliers was Butcher Bob Hanson, the lieutenant who had shot down three enemy planes over Torokina on D-Day and had so jauntily survived his own crash. Hanson began his second tour of duty on January 13 with five planes to his credit. Within the following seventeen days he shot down 20 more. Whenever Hanson went up, he shot down at least one Japanese aircraft. On January 30 the last day of that period, Hanson flew up to Rabaul to help strike at newly arrived fighter strength there. Of 21 Japanese planes shot down, Hanson got four. His record now stood at 25 planes. He had another ten days to go on his tour of duty and it seemed likely that he would surpass even Pappy Boyington’s mark of 28 planes. But Hanson was not the pilot to play it safe; it was his habit to volunteer for every mission that came his squadron’s way—whether a fighter-sweep which could mean more red balls painted on his Corsair’s fuselage, or a strafing mission which meant the risk of the black bursts of enemy antiaircraft fire. On February 2 Hanson volunteered for a strafing mission over Cape St. George and he was killed when he was unable to pull out of a run made at typically low altitude. The citation accompanying his Medal of Honor spoke his epitaph: “He was a master of individual combat.”
And now, in late February, Rabaul was almost helpless beneath mounting hammer blows. The fighter- sweeps had accounted for the destruction of 863 Japanese planes since the construction of Torokina Airfield and the “milk-run” bombing flights were now beginning. These sorties—Army, Navy, New Zealand and Australian as well as Marine—were launched off the big new fields on Bougainville and Green Island. February also marked the date when the Japanese on Rabaul started to go underground, beginning the first of 350 miles of tunnels and caves for storage and living purposes.
Kavieng, that air-sea base on New Ireland which General MacArthur did not have to invade after all, was also flattened, and Marine bombers of Commander Air Solomons began to sing a new song to the tune of “Oh, Susanna”:
