[Illustration: Department of Defense (USMC) photo 69985
_Marines struggle to winch a tractor, and the 105mm howitzer it is
towing, out of the mud of New Britain. The trails linking Volupai and
Talasea proved as impassable for heavy vehicles as those on Cape
Gloucester._]
On the morning of 9 March, Company G of Gayle's battalion advanced up
Mount Schleuther while Companies B and C from Barba's command cleared
the villages around the base. Company G expected to encounter intense
opposition during its part of the coordinated attack, but Terunuma had
decamped from the mountain top, leaving behind one dead, two stragglers,
and an artillery piece. The enemy, however, had festooned the abandoned
75mm gun with vines that served as trip wires for a booby trap. When the
Marines hacked at the vines to examine the weapon more closely, they
released the firing pin and detonated a round in the chamber. Since the
Japanese gun crew had plugged the bore before fleeing, the resulting
explosion ruptured the breech block and wounded one of Gayle's men.
Besides yielding the dominant terrain, Terunuma chose not to defend any
of the villages clustered at the base of the mountain. The 5th Marines
thus opened a route across the Willaumez Peninsula to support further
operations against Matsuda's line of retreat. Since 6 March, Colonel
Smith's force had killed an estimated 150 Japanese at the cost of 17
Marines killed and 114 wounded, most of the casualties suffered on the
first day. The final phase of the fighting that began on Red Beach
consisted of securing Garua Island, abandoned by the Japanese, for
American use, a task finished on 9 March.
The results of the action at the base of the Willaumez Peninsula proved
mixed. The grass airstrip at Talasea lacked the length to accommodate
fighters, but the division's liaison planes made extensive use of it,
landing on either side of the carcass of a Japanese aircraft until the
wreckage could be hauled away. The trail net, essentially a web of muddy
paths, required long hours of hard work by Company F, 17th Marines, and
Army engineers, who used a 10-ton wrecker to recover three Sherman tanks
that had become mired during the fighting. By 10 March, the trails could
support a further advance. Two days later, elements of Deakin's 3d
Battalion, 5th Marines, having moved inland from the beachhead, provided
a guard of honor as Colonel Smith and his executive officer, Lieutenant
Colonel Henry W. Buse, raised over Bitokara the same flag that had flown
over Airfield No. 2 at Cape Gloucester.
_Final Combat and Relief_
The flotilla of Army LCMs and Navy LCTs that supported the Volupai
landings inflicted further damage on Japanese coastal traffic, already
hard hit by air strikes. On 9 March, a convoy of landing craft carrying
supplies around the tip of the peninsula for delivery to the advancing
Marines at Talasea spotted four enemy barges, beached and sloppily
camouflaged. An LCT took the barges under fire from its 20mm cannon and
machine guns, destroying one of the Japanese craft. Later that day, two
LCMs used the 37mm gun of the Marine light tank that each was carrying,
to fire upon another barge beached on the peninsula.
The enemy tried to make the best possible use of the dwindling number of
barges, but the bulk of Matsuda's troops moved overland, screened by
Terunuma's men during the transit of the base of the Willaumez
Peninsula. About a hundred Japanese dug in at Garilli, but by the time
Company K of Deakin's 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, attacked on 11 March,
the enemy had fallen back to a new trail block about three miles
distant. For four days, the Marines fought a succession of sharp
actions, as the Japanese retreated a few hundred yards at a time,
dragging with them a 75mm gun that anchored each of the blocking
positions. On 16 March, Deakin himself joined Company K, arriving in an
LCM that also carried a section of 81mm mortars. The Japanese turned
their cannon seaward to deal with this threat but failed to hit the
landing craft. Shortly after the Marine mortars landed and went into
action, Terunuma's men again withdrew, but this time they simply faded
away, since the bulk of _Matsuda Force_ had escaped to the east.
Having secured the Red Beach-Garua Bay-Talasea area, the 5th Marines
dispatched patrols southward to the base of the Willaumez Peninsula,
capturing only the occasional straggler and confirming the departure of
the main body of Matsuda's command. The 1st Marine Division established
a comfortable headquarters, training sites, a hospital that utilized
captured stocks of Japanese medicine, and a rest area that featured
swimming off the Garua beaches and bathing in hot springs ashore. The
Navy built a base on the Willaumez Peninsula for torpedo boats that
harried the surviving Japanese barges. Unfortunately, on 27 March, the
second day the base was operating, Allied aircraft mistook two of the
boats for Japanese craft and attacked, killing five sailors and wounding
18.
One of the courses taught at the new Garua training center sought to
produce amphibious scouts for the division's future operations. The
school's headquarters decided that a reconnaissance of Cape Hoskins
would serve as a suitable graduation exercise, since aerial observers
had seen no sign of enemy activity there. On 13 April, Second Lieutenant
Richard R. Breen, accompanied by Lieutenant Marsland of the Royal
Australian Air Force, embarked with 16 trainees, two native guides, and
a rifle platoon from the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, in a pair of LCMs.
While two instructors stood by in one of the landing craft, the platoon
established a trail block, and the future scouts advanced toward the
Cape Hoskins airfield, no longer used by the Japanese. En route to the
objective, however, the patrol encountered fire from small arms and
mortars, but the Marines had apparently learned their lessons well, for
they succeeded in breaking off the action and escaped without suffering
casualties.
Meanwhile, the Japanese retreat continued. Komori's troops, blazing the
trail for Sato's command from Augitni to the northern coast, encountered
a disheartening number of hungry stragglers as they marched toward a
supply depot at Kandoka, roughly 10 miles west of the Willaumez
Peninsula. Crossing the Kuhu River, Komori's soldiers came under
ineffectual fire from an American landing craft. The rain-swollen Via
River, broader than the Kuhu, proved a more serious obstacle, requiring
a detour lasting two days to reach a point where the stream narrowed.
Komori's provisions ran out on 17 March, forcing the soldiers to subsist
on taro, birds and fish, and vegetables from village garden plots,
supplemented by some welcome coconuts gathered from a plantation at
Linga Linga. After losing additional time and a dozen lives crossing yet
another river, the Kapaluk, Komori's troops straggled into Kandoka on
the 24th, only to discover that the food and other supplies had been
carried off toward Rabaul. Despite this crushing disappointment, Komori
pressed on, his men continuing to live off the land as best they could.
Five more men drowned in the fast-moving waters of the Kulu River, and a
native hired as a guide defected. Already weakened physically, Komori
came down with an attack of malaria, but he forced himself to continue.
[Illustration: _Before the building of a rest area at Garua Bay, with
its hot springs and bathing beaches, these Marines relax in one of the
crystal clear streams running into the sea from New Britain's
mountainous interior._