The survivors struggled onward toward Cape Hoskins and ultimately
Rabaul. On 9 April, Easter Sunday, four half-starved Japanese wandered
onto the San Remo Plantation, where Gayle's battalion had bivouacked
after pursuing the enemy eastward from the Willaumez Peninsula. The
Marine unit was preparing to pass in review for the regimental commander
later that day, when a sentry saw the intruders and opened fire. The
ensuing skirmish killed three of the enemy. One of the dead proved to be
Major Komori; his pack contained a rusty revolver and a diary describing
the sufferings of his command.
Colonel Sato, with the rest of the rear guard for the _Matsuda Force_,
set out from Augitni on 7 March, one day after Komori, who sent back
word on the 19th that patrols from the 5th Marines had fanned out from
the Willaumez Peninsula, where the reinforced regiment had landed almost
two weeks earlier. When Sato reached Linga Linga and came across a
bivouac abandoned by a Marine patrol, his force had dwindled to just 250
men, less than half the number that started out. He received a shock the
following day when American landing craft appeared as his men prepared
to cross the Kapaluk River. He immediately set up a perimeter to beat
back the expected attack, but the boats were carrying elements of the 2d
Battalion, 1st Marines, under Major Charles H. Brush, Jr. A patrol from
Brush's Company F landed on a beach beyond Kandoka, the former site of a
Japanese supply cache, and dispatched one platoon, led by First
Lieutenant William C. Schleip, westward along the coastal track, even as
Sato, aware only of the general location of the landing, groped eastward
toward the village. On 26 March, the two collided, the Japanese
surprising the Marines in the act of crossing a small stream and pinning
them down for some three hours until the approach of reinforcements from
Company F forced the enemy to break off the action, take to the jungle,
and bypass Kandoka.
As the head of Sato's column disappeared in the jungle, one of the
division's light airplanes, scouting landing sites for Brush's
battalion, sighted the tail near Linga Linga. The pilot, Captain Petras,
turned over the controls to Brigadier General Earl C. Long, also a
pilot, sketched the location of the Japanese, and dropped the map to one
of the troop-laden landing craft. Petras then led the way to an
undefended beach, where Brush's Marines waded ashore and set out in
pursuit of Sato. On 30 March, Second Lieutenant Richard B. Watkins, at
the head of an eight-man patrol, spotted a pair of Japanese, their
rifles slung, who turned out to be members of a 73-man patrol, far too
many for Watkins to handle.
Once the enemy column had moved off, Watkins and his men hurried to
Kandoka, where he reported to Major Brush and obtained mortars and
machine guns before again taking to the trail. Brush followed, bringing
a reinforced rifle platoon to increase the Marine firepower. Meanwhile,
the Japanese encountered yet another Marine patrol, this one led by
Sergeant Frank Chliek, which took up a position on high ground that
commanded the trail. When they heard Chliek's group open fire, Watkins
and Brush hurried to its aid; the resulting slaughter killed 55
Japanese, including Colonel Sato, who died sword in hand, but the
Marines did not suffer even one casualty.
On 9 April, the 3d Battalion, 1st Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel
Hankins, replaced Brush's 1st Battalion and continued the search for
enemy stragglers. The bulk of the _Matsuda Force_, and whatever supplies
it could transport, had by this time retreated to Cape Hoskins and
beyond, and Army troops were taking over from the Marines. Almost four
months had elapsed since the landing at Cape Gloucester; clearly the
time had come for the amphibious troops to move on to an operation that
would make better use of their specialized training and equipment. The
final action fought by the Leathernecks took place on 22 April, when an
ambush sprung by the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, killed 20 Japanese and
resulted in the last Marine fatality of the campaign. In seizing western
New Britain as part of the isolation of Rabaul, the division suffered
310 killed in action and 1,083 wounded, roughly one-fourth the estimated
Japanese casualties.
Early in February 1944, after the capture of the Cape Gloucester
airfields but before the landing at Volupai, General Rupertus warned
that his 1st Marine Division might remain on New Britain indefinitely.
Having the unit tied down for an extended period alarmed the recently
appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Vandegrift. "Six
months there," he remarked, referring to an extended commitment in New
Britain, "and it will no longer be a well-trained amphibious division."
Vandegrift urged Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of Naval Operations,
to help pry the division from MacArthur's grasp so it could again
undertake amphibious operations. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in
Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, wanted the division for the impending
invasion of the Palau Islands, the capture of which would protect the
flank of MacArthur's advance to the Philippines. In order to obtain the
Marines, Nimitz made the Army's 40th Infantry Division available to
MacArthur, in effect swapping a division capable of taking over the New
Britain campaign for one that could spearhead the amphibious offensive
against Japan. MacArthur, however, briefly retained control of one
component of the Marine division--Company A, 1st Tank Battalion. That
unit's medium tanks landed on 22 April at Hollandia on the northern
coast of New Guinea, but a swamp just beyond the beachhead prevented the
Shermans from supporting the advance inland.
The commanding general of the Army's 40th Infantry Division, Major
General Rapp Brush, arrived at New Britain on 10 April to arrange for
the relief. His advance echelon arrived on the 23d and the remainder of
the division five days later. The 1st Marine Division departed in two
echelons on 6 April and 4 May. Left behind was the 12th Defense
Battalion, which continued to provide antiaircraft defense for the Cape
Gloucester airfields until relieved by an Army unit late in May.
In a campaign lasting four months, the 1st Marine Division had plunged
into the unforgiving jungle and overwhelmed a determined and resolute
enemy, capturing the Cape Gloucester airfields and driving the Japanese
from western New Britain. A number of factors helped the Marines defeat
nature and the Japanese. Allied control of the air and the sea provided
mobility and disrupted the coastal barge traffic upon which the enemy
had to depend for the movement of large quantities of supplies,
especially badly needed medicines, during the retreat to Rabaul.
Warships and landing craft armed with rockets--supplemented by such
improvisations as tanks or rocket-equipped amphibian trucks firing from
landing craft--supported the landings, but the size of the island and
the lack of fixed coastal defenses limited the effectiveness of the
various forms of naval gunfire. Using superior engineering skills, the
Marines defied swamp and undergrowth to bring forward tanks that crushed
enemy emplacements and added to the already formidable American
firepower. Although photo analysis, an art that improved rapidly,
misinterpreted the nature of the damp flat, Marine intelligence made
excellent use of captured Japanese documents throughout the campaign. In
the last analysis, the courage and endurance of the average Marine made
victory possible, as he braved discomfort, disease, and violent death
during his time in the green inferno.
[Sidenote: New Weapons in the Division's Arsenal
During the period of rehabilitation following the Guadalcanal campaign,
the 1st Marine Division received two new weapons--the M4 medium tank,
nicknamed the Sherman in honor of William Tecumseh Sherman whose Union
troops marched from Atlanta to the sea, and the M-1 rifle. The new
rifle, designed by John C. Garand, a civilian employee of the
Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, was a semi-automatic, gas-operated
weapon, weighing 9.5 pounds and using an eight-round clip. Although less
accurate at longer range than the former standard rifle, the M-1903,
which snipers continued to use, the M-1 could lay down a deadly volume
of fire at the comparatively short ranges typical of jungle warfare.
In addition, the division received the M4A1, an early version of the
Sherman tank, which MacArthur valued so highly that he borrowed a
company of them from the 1st Marine Division for the Hollandia
operation. The model used by the Marines weighed 34 tons, mounted a 75mm
gun, and had frontal armor some three inches thick. Although a more
formidable weapon than the 16-ton light tank, with a 37mm gun, the
medium tank had certain shortcomings. A high silhouette made it a
comparatively easy target for Japanese gunners, who fortunately did not
have a truly deadly antitank weapon, and narrow treads provided poor
traction in the mud of New Britain.
[Illustration: _Marine infantrymen, some of them using the M1 rifle for
the first time in combat, and a Sherman tank form a deadly team in the
comparatively open country near the Cape Gloucester airfields._