Despite this assistance from the air, the march to Gilnit taxed the
ingenuity of the Marines involved and hardened them for future action.
This toughening-up seemed especially desirable to Puller, who had led
many a patrol during the American intervention in Nicaragua, 1927-1933.
The division's supply clerks, aware of the officer's disdain for
creature comforts, were startled by requisitions from the patrol for
hundreds of bottles of insect repellent. Puller had his reasons,
however. According to one veteran of the Gilnit operation, "We were
always soaked and everything we owned was likewise, and that lotion made
the best damned stuff to start a fire with that you ever saw."
As Puller's Marines pushed toward Gilnit on the Itni River, they killed
perhaps 75 Japanese and captured one straggler, along with some weapons
and odds and ends of equipment. An abandoned pack contained an American
flag, probably captured by a soldier of the _141st Infantry_ during
Japan's conquest of the Philippines. After reaching Gilnit, the patrol
fanned out but encountered no opposition. Puller's Marines made contact
with an Army patrol from the Cape Merkus beachhead and then headed
toward the north coast, beginning on 16 February.
To the west, Company B, 1st Marines, boarded landing craft on 12
February and crossed the Dampier Strait to occupy Rooke Island, some
fifteen miles from the coast of New Britain. The division's intelligence
specialists concluded correctly that the garrison had departed. Indeed,
the transfer began on 6 December 1943, roughly three weeks before the
landings at Cape Gloucester, when Colonel Jiro Sato and half of his
500-man _51st Reconnaissance Regiment_, sailed off to Cape Bushing. Sato
then led his command up the Itni River and joined the main body of the
_Matsuda Force_ east of Mount Talawe. Instead of committing Sato's
troops to the defense of Hill 660, Matsuda directed him to delay the
elements of the 5th Marines and 1st Marines that were converging over
the inland trail net. Sato succeeded in checking the Hunt patrol on 28
January and buying time for Matsuda's retreat, not to the south, but, as
the documents captured at the general's abandoned headquarters
confirmed, along the northern coast, with the _51st Reconnaissance
Regiment_ initially serving as the rear guard.
[Illustration: _On 12 February 1944, infantrymen of Company B, from
LtCol Walker A. Reaves's 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, advance inland on
Rooke Island, west of New Britain, but find that the Japanese have
withdrawn._