It was these Marine airmen, flying half of all the Allied sorties against Rabaul, shooting down three-fifths of all Rabaul planes destroyed in combat, who were largely responsible for keeping the power of this monster base in check, and the way to new invasions open.
On the twenty-ninth of February, 1,000 troopers of the dismounted 1st Cavalry Division landed in the Admiralty Islands, 250 miles north northwest of Cape Gloucester. It was a reconnaissance-in-force accompanied by General Douglas MacArthur. At the end of that day the troopers had captured the airfield of Los Negros and MacArthur had decided to stay.
Six days later the First Marine Division was staging another invasion of its own, one as well planned as it was unnecessary.
The plan was to invade the Willaumez Peninsula 120 miles east of Cape Gloucester. Why, has never been made clear. It has been argued that Willaumez contained an airfield, but it was in fact only big enough to receive Piper Cubs; or that its seizure would cut off the retreat of Matsuda’s survivors, but everyone knew that those poor wretches, if they lived, were already a burden to the enemy; or that, finally, the Marine troops had become dispirited in the miasma of the swamp and needed an offensive operation to revive them—a misconception which seems to afflict many commanders once they pass from company grade to field rank and above. Put plainly: men don’t like to fight. They do it for a number of reasons, some of them noble, but not even the men who write Marine propaganda would suggest that the men’s morale is raised by finding strongpoints for them to storm. The truth is that in February the First Marine Division possessed all that was useful in western New Britain: the airfield and the Borgen Bay heights guarding it. The Division was also in contact with the Army at Arawe in the south and the enemy had been cut to pieces.
Still, the operation known as the Talasea Landing was ordered, and it was turned over to Colonel Oliver P. ( “O.P.” ) Smith, a man who had a reputation as a planner and who now commanded the Fifth Marines.
Smith decided not to go around the northern tip of the peninsula to get at the airfield on the east coast at Talasea. Most of the 1st Battalion, 54th Infantry, was concentrated there under Captain Kyamatsu Terunuma. Smith preferred coming in the back door, on the west coast at a place called Volupai. This meant a shore-to-shore voyage covering 60 miles from Iboki Plantation to Volupai.
On the afternoon of March 5 the vanguard of some 5,000 Marines climbed into amtracks and the amtracks rolled aboard a group of LCT’s. At ten o’clock that night, with torpedo boats leading the way, they sailed east to Volupai. In the morning they attacked under the covering fire of the First Marine Division “Navy” and “Air Force.”
The Navy consisted of tanks carried aboard LCM’s. Their turret machine-gunners had a clear field of fire and their artillery could blast straight ahead after the ramps were lowered. The Air Force consisted of a Piper Cub observation plane from which Captain Theodore Petras dropped hand grenades, once it became known that Australian Beauforts were weathered in and could not show up to deliver an air strike.
The Marines went in and were hit by mortars. They began to take casualties, but they continued on. Then they ran into flanking fire from Little Mount Worri and halted. They had only five miles to go to Talasea, but it took them three days.
The men who had planned the invasion of Bougainville had chosen Cape Torokina because they estimated that it would take Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate three months to mount a counterattack there. They were wrong. It had taken four months.
On March 8 from 100 to 200 artillery shells fell on the perimeter which the Army’s Fourteenth Corps held around Torokina’s airfields. It was the opening gun in the heaviest artillery bombardment which Japan mounted in all the South Pacific. For months the scattered units of Hyakutate’s 17th Army had been toiling over the Bougainville mountain trails to the Torokina assembly point. Field pieces had been laboriously hauled up by hand. Shells had been brought up by hand, too, and it took two men four days to bring up a single hundred-pounder.
On March 8 they were ready. Still using the tactics of Guadalcanal, still smarting from Guadalcanal, Hyakutate told his men:
“The time has come to manifest our knighthood with the pure brilliance of the sword. It is our duty to erase the mortification of our brothers at Guadalcanal. Attack! Assault! Destroy everything! Cut, slash, and mow them down. May the color of the red emblem of our arms be deepened with the blood of the American rascals. Our cry of victory at Torokina Bay will be shouted resoundingly to our native land.
“We are invincible! Always attack. Security is the greatest enemy. Always be alert. Execute silently.”
Then, estimating that Major General Oscar Griswold’s Fourteenth Corps had only one division, when in fact it had both the 37th and the Americal, Haruyoshi Hyakutate sent 15,000 Japanese up against three times that many Americans.
On March 10 the Fifth Marines broke into Talasea. They had come on through heavy mortar fire and numerous ambushes. They had passed through a unique
“The Fifty-fourth Japanese!”
Boredom had set in on Cape Gloucester, wet-blanket boredom. There had been no nocturnal air attacks since mid-February. Except for the Fifth’s excursion to Talasea, there had been no action. The storms had begun to subside, though 20 men had been killed so far by the widow-makers and 50 more had been injured, and there had been an Army captain who crawled down a riverbank to drink and had his arm chewed off by an alligator. There had also been three men killed by lightning, and one night a storm turned a brook into a torrent and swept away a battalion’s bivouac area. Marines on patrol about 10 miles downcoast awoke next morning to find the battalion’s ration of powdered eggs, powdered milk, ten-in-one rations replete with bacon, and even vanilla extract—which would make excellent “jungle juice”—washed up at their feet. They canceled patrolling for the day and gorged themselves.
Otherwise it had been boring since mid-February, and the Marines amused themselves by carving designs on their mess gear, listening to Tokyo Rose, swapping specimens of the highly pornographic propaganda which the Japanese dropped on New Britain, or by launching a counteradvertising campaign against that bitter yellow pill called atabrine which they were forced to swallow three times daily.
Atabrine was a malaria preventative. It had been developed after Japan had cornered most of the world’s sources of quinine. It had been introduced in the Pacific at the end of 1942, and in early 1944 on New Britain it had kept the incidence of malaria down to a rock-bottom minimum. But the men did not like atabrine. It was the perfection of bitterness. Many men could not swallow atabrine. It also turned a man’s skin yellow, a permanent yellow, many men innocently assumed. There were rumors that it made a man sterile.
Nothing had more power to make atabrine unpopular than this last rumor, and as the number of atabrine delinquents grew, medical people resorted to an advertising campaign which suggested that, so far from being a sterilizer, atabrine actually possessed powers which were at once a compound of monkey glands, Spanish fly and wax from the ear of the queen bee. There were roadside signs of voluptuous nudes accompanied by the legend: “Come Back to This—Take Atabrine.” There was, in the school of art which has made the mammary gland the American oriflamme, a picture of a bare-breasted blonde amazon who offered: “Two Reasons Why You Should Take Atabrine.” The Marines had become fed up, and they passed off the boredom by producing their own
