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Stranglin\uDBFF\uDC00g Rabaul (1943)
Strangling Rabaul (1943)
Easily a hundred thousand Japanese occupied Rabaul in 1943.
MacArthur wanted to conquer Rabaul directly; Halsey had huge doubts. The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided for them: Neutralize and eventually bypass Rabaul in 1943 by a series of low-budget half-steps – working sequentially “up the ladder” of the Solomons and Bismarcks. Doing so would entail a very hazardous year’s work for a still underequipped, understrength Marine amphibious force: a full-scale air war and three major assault landings.
Rabaul lay 560 air miles northwest of Guadalcanal. Since the island-studded seas posed a hazard to Halsey’s two carriers, the air war against Rabaul would be waged predominantly by land-based aviation, which meant a significant role for the Marines. Thirty-three squadrons of Marine tactical aircraft would fight in the skies over Rabaul and its protective network. Their principal mission: defeat of the formidable Imperial Naval Air Force.
Marine Brigadier General Francis “Pat” Mulcahy, one of the few Leatherneck aviators to shoot down a German fighter in World War I, commanded the 2d Marine Aircraft Wing. Mulcahy’s immediate concern became the new Japanese airfield built at Munda Point on New Georgia. Munda would have to be seized by a landing force.
Concurrently, the savage air war raged unabated. Marine pilots engaged in desperate air-to-air battles each day, making the most of the limited attributes of their F4F Wildcats with “hit and run” tactics against the superbly maneuverable Zeros. Then, on February 12, 1943, the first squadron of USMC F4U Corsair fighters arrived in the theater. The tables were about to be turned in the air war.
In the right hands, the Corsair became such an efficient flying and killing machine that a new generation of Marine fighter pilots emerged as legendary aces in the skies surrounding Rabaul. Lieutenant Kenneth Walsh became the first Corsair ace on May 13, 1943, shooting down his fourth, fifth, and sixth Zeros in a hectic morning. Walsh had earned his pilot’s wings in 1937 as a Marine private and proved absolutely fearless in aerial combat. On August 30 he stormed single-handedly into a formation of fifty Zeros attacking USAAF B-24 bombers over Bougainville. In the wild melee that ensued, Walsh shot down four enemy fighters before being forced to crash at sea. Walsh survived, received the Medal of Honor, and returned to the air campaign, eventually claiming twentyone authenticated kills.
Lieutenant Robert Hanson became the greatest Corsair ace of the war, achieving twenty-five kills from his F4U in the South Pacific. He shot down twenty Japanese planes in an incredibly brief six days. Hanson’s luck ran out at the end. On the day before his twenty-fourth birthday, and just days before he was due to be rotated back to the States, Hanson lost a duel with antiaircraft batteries at Cape St. George on New Ireland. His Medal of Honor was a posthumous award.
Flamboyant and indomitable Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was the most widely known Corsair pilot to receive the Medal of Honor. “Pappy” accumulated his Corps-best twenty-eight kills in several different aircraft (he shot down his first six Japanese planes while a volunteer
P-40 pilot for the “prewar” Flying Tigers in China), but he attained his greatest renown as skipper of VMF-214, an F4U squadron nicknamed “The Black Sheep.”
While colorful Corsair pilots like Walsh, Hanson, and Boyington captured the public’s admiration, Marine divebomber and torpedo bomber pilots played equally critical roles in the sustained air battle for Rabaul.
Marine night fighters made their debut in the South Pacific in 1943, early pioneers of a tactic which would grow in value as technology improved.
The few night kills came at the hands of extremely brave pilots at outrageously short ranges.
Close air support in the jungles of the South Pacific was an imprecise art.
To do the job right – and avoid killing friendly ground troops – required reliable communications between an experienced aviation ground party, hunkered at the side of the infantry commander. It was a hell of an investment, taking seasoned pilots out of their beloved cockpits and deploying them with “the grunts,” but the value of having a seasoned dive-bomber pilot on the ground, assessing the target and talking his former cohorts into the attack, could not be beat. The 3d Marine Division at Bougainville experimented with ground-based air liaison teams with considerable success, an encouraging start.
The joint amphibious campaign to seize New Georgia and wipe out the nettlesome Japanese airfield at Munda Point bogged down because of inexperience, inadequate resources, and deadly enemy resistance. No Marine divisions were available for Operation Toenails. Thirty thousand Army troops would provide the bulk of the landing forces, beefed up by the Marines’ 9th Defense Battalion. Marine Raiders and parachutists would execute special operations missions behind Japanese lines.
Two companies of Marine Raiders jump-started the New Georgia operation on June 21, 1943, landing at Segi Point, rescuing an endangered Coast Watcher, then crossing the island in four brutal days to surprise and destroy the Japanese coast defense guns at Viru Harbor.
Admiral Kelly Turner landed the Army’s 43d Division and the 9th Defense Battalion on Rendova Island on June 30, scattering the handful of Japanese defenders.
Then came Japanese air raids from Rabaul. The first evening a Japanese pilot hit Turner’s flagship, the McCawley, with a well-aimed torpedo.
On D+2 (the second full day after the D-Day landing) a flight of eighteen Mitsubishi “Betty” bombers and Zero escorts surprised the amphibious force and devastated the congested beachhead, bombing and strafing at will. Marine 90mm gunners wheeled into action, eventually driving the raiders away, but the beach resembled a charnel house.
The star-crossed campaign struggled on. Army troops landed on northwestern New Georgia on July 2-3. Across the island, at Rice Anchorage on the Kula Gulf coast, Marine Colonel Harry Liversedge led a composite regiment of Raiders and Army infantry ashore.
Fighting through the jungle in a driving rainstorm, Liversedge’s force crossed the Giza Giza River on improvised rafts of logs and ponchos, then drove the Japanese from the villages of Maranuso and Enogai on the east side of the Dragon’s Peninsula. Liversedge led the rest of his men against the port of Bairoko.
Opposing Liversedge in the thickly jungled Dragon’s Peninsula was Rear Admiral Minoru Ota, commanding one of the largest concentrations of rikusentai to fight the Americans in the war. For two weeks the Kure 6th Special Naval Landing Force slugged it out toe-to-toe with the Raiders and soldiers. Both sides suffered heavy casualties in vicious, point-blank jungle fighting.
The rikusentai defending Bairoko had time to construct sturdy pillboxes of coconut logs and coral. The Raiders, light infantry in the truest sense, lacked artillery or bunker-busting weapons. The Japanese stonewalled the Raiders’ advance less than 300 yards from Bairoko.
Munda Field eventually fell to three Army divisions and the 9th Defense Battalion after five weeks of steady fighting. Admiral Halsey helped restore morale by his commonsense decision to bypass heavily defended Kolombangara and strike Vella Lavella. There an Army regimental combat team and the Marine 4th Defense Battalion landed on August 15. The Marines withstood a dizzying succession of 121 Japanese air raids, knocking forty-two enemy planes out of the sky.
The Allies were grinding inexorably north and west. New Georgia was under new management. The 9th Defense Battalion’s big guns now defended Munda Point airfield, allowing Pappy Boyington’s Black Sheep Corsairs to roar aloft in fighter sweeps against Rabaul, now 440 miles away.
Mountainous, wildly jungled Bougainville, northernmost island of the Solomons, was the next objective. The presence of five Japanese airfields on the island underscored the enemy’s strategic appreciation for Bougainville. Ashore, Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake, the wholesale loser of Guadalcanal, commanded 35,000 troops.
At best Halsey hoped to use his Marines to catch Hyakutake by surprise, seize a foothold along the southern coast, then defend the enclave desperately while the Seabees carved a pair of landing fields out of the jungle.
Halsey assigned the Bougainville mission to the I Marine Amphibious Corps, commanded by General Vandegrift, the victor of Guadalcanal. Vandegrift would use Major General Allen Turnage’s highly trained 3d Marine Division to spearhead the assault landing, followed by the Army’s 37th Division and fully supported by fifty-two squadrons of Allied land-based aircraft (including fourteen USMC squadrons).
But Vandegrift knew his landing would incur violent and immediate Japanese counterattacks from every point on the compass. Achieving even the modest mission of landing, building airfields, and holding on for dear life would require of Vandegrift uncommon luck, guile, and fortitude. Vandegrift opted to lead with guile.
Here was the ideal mission for Lieutenant Colonel “Brute” Krulak’s 2d Parachute Battalion. Vandegrift ordered Krulak to execute a diversionary landing on nearby Choiseul Island and make the Japanese think he had a division on the rampage. The combative Krulak executed this to perfection.
The parachutists stormed ashore on Choiseul at midnight on October 28. Before the astonished Japanese could react, Krulak’s well-trained warriors raided enemy installations along a twenty-five-mile sector. The 650 Marines raised holy hell throughout Choiseul for nine days. General Hyakutake took the bait, dispatching reinforcements from Bougainville even after the main landing there.
Deemed unsuitable for carrier use, and with a reputation inspiring nicknames like “the ensign eliminator,” the Chance Vought F4U Corsair was passed off to the Marine Corps. For the Marines, the Corsair was a godsend and welcomed with open arms when it first arrived at Henderson Field with VMF-124. Corsairs at Henderson Field, 1st Lt. Howard Hugh Laidman, USMCR, 1943, watercolor on paper.
Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps
Against such numbers, the final firefights became desperate. Krulak, wounded himself, sought aid in evacuating his casualties. Two Navy PT boats, led by Lieutenant John
Fitzgerald Kennedy, USNR, lent a hand. One of Krulak’s corporals died on Kennedy’s bunk. The raiding force withdrew intact, mission accomplished.
Krulak’s diversion seemed to rattle Hyakutake. When the real American landing occurred at Bougainville, he withheld his counterattack orders a fatal week, worrying that these U.S. Marines were just another diversion.
Less than 300 Japanese troops opposed the November 1 landing at Cape Torokina – Halsey had indeed “hit ‘em where they ain’t” – but the defenders and the hydrography combined to make the landing difficult.
As the landing force struggled to clear the near-shore jungle of Japanese defenders, the skies overhead erupted with screaming waves of Marine dive-bombers, taking advantage of the rare opportunity for both Leatherneck air and infantry to operate together. This one-two punch combination helped the assault units advance the beachhead line well into the swampy terrain behind the high-water mark, clearing the way for supporting waves.
While General Hyakutake withheld his reserves to determine whether the Torokina landing was another American feint, the Japanese command at Rabaul mounted a furious and immediate series of counterattacks. Four waves of bombers and fighters attacked the vulnerable beachhead and the exposed amphibious task force on November 1 alone, but Halsey had plenty of Allied fighter squadrons aloft to give battle. Twenty-six of the raiders went down in flames, the others scattered.
With the night a Japanese surface force swept south from Rabaul seeking to achieve another Savo Island victory against the American invasion fleet. This time the U.S. Navy stood ready. The ensuing Battle of Empress Augusta Bay resulted in a stinging defeat for the Imperial Navy.
Nearly 500 Japanese troops fought their way through the surf in the rear of the force beachhead line, took up firing positions along the Koromokina River, and raised hell with Turnage’s support echelons. Killing them one by one took the Marines several anxious days. Japanese air raids materialized each day and night. Hyakutake finally released his main combatant units, the 2d Infantry Division and a very good force of rikusentai, the Kure 7th, and these troops engaged the Leathernecks and GIs in a series of sharp brawls under hellacious conditions of terrain and foul weather. In six grueling days the 3d Marines fought as many skirmishes, collectively called the Battle of Piva Forks, losing a hundred men but killing a thousand Japanese.
The battle for the American beachhead at Cape Torokina continued unabated into December. The 21st Marines took the lead, fighting savagely to control the high ground known as “Hellzapoppin Ridge.” Marine dive-bomber squadrons lent a hand. Given this support, the 21st Marines took and held the high ground.
On the twenty-eighth, General Turnage turned over his positions ashore to the Americal Division; overall command of the campaign ashore passed from General Geiger’s IMAC to the Army’s XIV Corps. The Marines left steaming Bougainville with pleasure.
Marine casualties in the bruising campaign totaled 423 killed and 1,418 wounded. The operation completed the conquest of the Solomons, neutralized the five Japanese airfields on the island, and placed Rabaul within range of every tactical Allied aircraft in the South Pacific.
It became time for the 1st Marine Division, the Old Breed, to reenter the fray. The Marines’ objective: the Japanese airfield at Cape Gloucester. Their principal opponent: Major General Iwao Matsuda, commanding the 65th Brigade, Imperial Japanese Army.
The amphibious landing on Cape Gloucester on December 26, 1943, was nearly flawless.
The surprise thrust caught the Japanese command in Rabaul off guard.
The Old Breed readjusted to close combat quickly. Two battalions cleared the airstrips of the disorganized defenders on the fourth day.
The Japanese pulled back sullenly toward Aogiri Ridge, an elevation not even shown on Marine maps. The fighting became savage and point-blank as the jungle grew thicker on higher ground. Chesty Puller fought magnificently in this advance, at one point taking command of two infantry battalions, and garnering his fourth Navy Cross. But the breakthrough at Aogiri Ridge would result from the inspired leadership of a new legendary warrior.
The Battle of Walt’s Ridge
General [Lemuel] Shepherd sent Lieutenant Colonel “Lew” Walt to the front on January 8 to take command of the 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, which had lost two commanding officers in the previous day’s fighting. The battalion had stumbled upon Aogiri Ridge, the heavily defended terrain feature that dominated the sector, and had received the brunt of the fire. The troops had neither tanks nor artillery available, only a single 37mm gun. This weapon had been promising earlier, but now half the crew lay dead. Walt asked for volunteers to push the weapon up the steep ridge. No one moved. Walt’s blue eyes flashed angrily, then he dashed for the gun, putting his shoulder to the muddy wheel, legs churning. The surviving crew members joined. They humped the weapon upward a dozen yards, fired a canister round, reloaded, pushed upward again. Machine gun fire rattled against the gun shields, striking down more crewmen. Walt kept pushing. His riflemen sprang to life; some opened a hot fire and others scuttled uphill to put their own shoulders next to Walt’s. In this way, pushing upward, firing canister, advancing again, Walt got them to the top of the ridge. Walt hustled to get every available man up on the crest, dug-in and tied in. He rushed an artillery forward observer team up the ridge, just in time. The Japanese launched five major attacks throughout the night, each masked by the pouring rain. The fighting for the crest was as desperate and savage as any Marines ever experienced in the war. As they had done so well at Edson’s Ridge the previous year, the 105mm gunners of the 11th Marines plastered the reverse slope of Aogiri Ridge all night long. With the dawn the high ground became “Walt’s Ridge.”
One last obstacle remained, the Japanese fortified positions on Hill 660. This became the objective of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Buse’s battalion of the 7th Marines. Buse’s first assault failed, but his enterprising riflemen slid to the flank, assaulted the hill’s steepest face, pulling themselves up hand-over-hand among the roots, and drove the surprised defenders down the slope – squarely into the killing zone of Captain Joseph Buckley’s concealed tanks and half-tracks.
This defeat broke the back of General Matsuda’s brigade. Colonel Oliver Smith’s 5th Marines leapfrogged down the coast, conducting a fifty-seven-mile shore-toshore landing on the Willaumez Peninsula. The 5th Marines seized yet another key airfield at the cost of 130 casualties.
In April 1944, General MacArthur finally released the 1st Marine Division from “The Green Inferno.” By then, New Britain had cost the Old Breed 1,400 casualties.
The Allied strategy of encircling, pounding, and then bypassing Rabaul (and Kavieng, its outlying base on New Ireland) saved many lives and made the most of the modest amphibious assault resources available in the South Pacific. The aviators had delivered the most telling blows – and sustained some of the most grievous losses. One hundred Marine airmen died over Rabaul itself, and hundreds more over the long watery stretches of the Solomons and Bismarcks. The exchange rate was still favorable: Marine pilots shot down 1,520 Japanese planes in the long campaign.
