[Illustration: Department of Defense (USMC) photo 72599
_The stumps of trees shattered by artillery and the seemingly bottomless
mud can sometimes stymie even an LVT._]
The Japanese clearly were preparing to counterattack. Conoley's
battalion had a dwindling supply of ammunition, but amphibian tractors
could not begin making supply runs until it became light enough for the
drivers to avoid tree roots and fallen trunks as they navigated the damp
flat. To aid the battalion in the dangerous period before the skies grew
pale, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. Puller, the executive officer of the
7th Marines, organized the men of the regimental Headquarters and
Service Company into carrying parties to load themselves down with
ammunition and wade through the dangerous swamp. One misstep, and a
Marine burdened with bandoliers of rifle ammunition or containers of
mortar shells could stumble and drown. When Colonel Frisbie, the
regimental commander, decided to reinforce Conoley's Marines with
Battery D, 1st Special Weapons Battalion, Puller had the men leave their
37mm guns behind and carry ammunition instead. A guide from Conoley's
headquarters met the column that Puller had pressed into service and
began leading them forward, when a blinding downpour, driven by a
monsoon gale, obscured landmarks and forced the heavily laden Marines to
wade blindly onward, each man clinging to the belt of the one ahead of
him. Not until 0805, some twelve hours after the column started off, did
the men reach their goal, put down their loads, and take up their
rifles.
Conoley's Marines had in the meantime been fighting for their lives
since the storm first struck. A curtain of rain prevented mortar crews
from seeing their aiming stakes, indeed, the battalion commander
described the men as firing "by guess and by God." Mud got on the
small-arms ammunition, at times jamming rifles and machine guns.
Although forced to abandon water-filled foxholes, the defenders hung on.
With the coming of dawn, Takabe's soldiers gravitated toward the right
flank of Conoley's unit, perhaps in a conscious effort to outflank the
position, or possibly forced in that direction by the fury of the
battalion's defensive fire. An envelopment was in the making when
Battery D arrived and moved into the threatened area, forcing the
Japanese to break off the action and regroup.
[Sidenote: The Jungle Battlefield
On New Britain, the 1st Marine Division fought weather and terrain,
along with a determined Japanese enemy. Rains brought by seasonal
monsoons seemed to fall with the velocity of a fire hose, soaking
everyone, sending streams from their banks, and turning trails into
quagmire. The terrain of the volcanic island varied from coastal plain
to mountains that rose as high as 7,000 feet above sea level. A variety
of forest covered the island, punctuated by patches of grassland, a few
large coconut plantations, and garden plots near the scattered villages.
Much of the fighting, especially during the early days, raged in swamp
forest, sometimes erroneously described as damp flat. The swamp forest
consisted of scattered trees growing as high as a hundred feet from a
plain that remained flooded throughout the rainy season, if not for the
entire year. Tangled roots buttressed the towering trees, but could not
anchor them against gale-force winds, while vines and undergrowth
reduced visibility on the flooded surface to a few yards.
No less formidable was the second kind of vegetation, the mangrove
forest, where massive trees grew from brackish water deposited at high
tide. Mangrove trees varied in height from 20 to 60 feet, with a visible
tangle of thick roots deploying as high as ten feet up the trunk and
holding the tree solidly in place. Beneath the mangrove canopy, the maze
of roots, wandering streams, and standing water impeded movement.
Visibility did not exceed 15 yards.
Both swamp forest and mangrove forest grew at sea level. A third form of
vegetation, the true tropical rain forest, flourished at higher
altitude. Different varieties of trees formed an impenetrable double
canopy overhead, but the surface itself remained generally open, except
for low-growing ferns or shrubs, an occasional thicket of bamboo or
rattan, and tangles of vines. Although a Marine walking beneath the
canopy could see a standing man as far as 50 yards away, a prone
rifleman might remain invisible at a distance of just ten yards.
Only one of the three remaining kinds of vegetation seriously impeded
military action. Second-growth forest, which often took over abandoned
garden tracts, forced patrolling Marines to hack paths through the small
trees, brush, and vines. Grasslands posed a lesser problem; though the
vegetation grew tall enough to conceal the Japanese defenders, it
provided comparatively easy going for the Marines, unless the grass
turned out to be wild sugar cane, with thick stalks that grew to a
height of 15 feet. Cultivated tracts, whether coconut plantations or
gardens, posed few obstacles to vision or movement.]
[Sidenote: Rain and Biting Insects
Driven by monsoon winds, the rain that screened the attack on Conoley's
2d Battalion, 7th Marines, drenched the entire island and everyone on
it. At the front, the deluge flooded foxholes, and conditions were only
marginally better at the rear, where some men slept in jungle hammocks
slung between two trees. A Marine entered his hammock through an opening
in a mosquito net, lay down on a length of rubberized cloth, and zipped
the net shut. Above him, also enclosed in the netting, stretched a
rubberized cover designed to shelter him from rain. Unfortunately, a
gale as fierce as the one that began blowing on the night of D-Day set
the cover to flapping like a loose sail and drove the rain inside the
hammock. In the darkness, a gust of wind might uproot a tree, weakened
by flooding or the effect of the preparatory bombardment, and send it
crashing down. A falling tree toppled onto a hammock occupied by one of
the Marines, who would have drowned if someone had not slashed through
the covering with a knife and set him free.
The rain, said Lieutenant Colonel Lewis J. Fields, a battalion commander
in the 11th Marines, resembled "a waterfall pouring down on you, and it
goes on and on." The first deluge lasted five days, and recurring storms
persisted for another two weeks. Wet uniforms never really dried, and
the men suffered continually from fungus infections, the so-called
jungle rot, which readily developed into open sores. Mosquito-borne
malaria threatened the health of the Marines, who also had to contend
with other insects--"little black ants, little red ants, big red ants,"
on an island where "even the caterpillars bite." The Japanese may have
suffered even more because of shortages of medicine and difficulty in
distributing what was available, but this was scant consolation to
Marines beset by discomfort and disease. By the end of January 1944,
disease or non-battle injuries forced the evacuation of more than a
thousand Marines; more than one in ten had already returned to duty on
New Britain.
The island's swamps and jungles would have been ordeal enough without
the wind, rain, and disease. At times, the embattled Marines could see
no more than a few feet ahead of them. Movement verged on the
impossible, especially where the rains had flooded the land or turned
the volcanic soil into slippery mud. No wonder that the Assistant
Division Commander, Brigadier General Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr., compared
the New Britain campaign to "Grant's fight through the Wilderness in the
Civil War."
[Illustration: _The monsoon rains flood a field kitchen at Cape
Gloucester, justifying complaints about watery soup._