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TOP OF THE LADDER: Marine Operations in the Northern Solomons
by Captain John C. Chapin, USMCR (Ret)
The Coconut Grove Battle
On D plus 10, 11 November, a new operation order was
issued. "Continue the attack with the 3d Marine Division on the right
(east) and the 37th Infantry Division on the left (west)." An
Army-Marine artillery group was assembled under IMAC control to provide
massed fire, and Marine air would be on call for close support.
The first objective in the renewed push was to seize
control of the critical junction of the Numa-Numa Trail and the East
West trail. On 13 November a company of the 21st Marines led off the
advance at 0800. At 1100 it was ambushed by a "sizeable" enemy force
concealed in a coconut palm grove near the trail junction. The Japanese
had won the race to the crossroads, and the situation for the lead
Marine company soon became critical. The 2d Battalion commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Eustace R. Smoak, sent up his executive officer,
Major Glenn Fissell, with 12th Marines' artillery observers. They
reported the situation as all bad. Then Major Fissell was killed.
Disdaining flank security, Smoak moved closer to the fight and fed in
reinforcing companies. (By now a lateral road across the front of the
perimeter had been built.)
(click on image for an enlargement in a new window)
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The next day tanks were brought up and artillery
registered around the battalion. Smoak also called in 18 torpedo
bombers. The reorganized riflemen lunged forward again in a renewed
attack. The tanks proved an ineffective disaster, causing chaos at one
point by firing on fellow Marines on their flank and running over
several of their own men. Nevertheless, the Japanese positions were
overrun by the end of the day, with the enemy survivors driven off into
a swamp. The Marines now commanded the junction of the two vital trails.
As a result, the entire beachhead was able to spring forward 1,000 to
1,500 yards, reaching Inland Defense Line D, 5,000 yards from the
beach.
One important result of this advance was that the two
main airstrips could now be built. The airfields would be the work of
the Seabees. The 25th, 53d, and 71st Naval Construction Battalions
("Seabees") had landed on D-Day with the assault waves of the 3d Marine
Division — to get ready at once to build roads, airfields, and camp
areas. (They had a fighter strip operating at Torokina by December).
Always close to Marines, the Seabees earned their merit in the eyes of
the Leathernecks. Often Marines had to clear the way with fire so a
Seabee could do his work. Many would recall the bold Seabee bull dozer
driver covering a sputtering machine gun nest with his blade. Marines on
the Piva Trail later saw another determined bulldozer operator filling
in holes in the tarmac of his burgeoning bomber strip as fast as
Japanese artillery could tear it up. Any Marine who returned from the
dismal swamps toward the beach would retain the wonderment of the
"Marine Drive." It was a two-lane asphalt highway, complete with wide
shoulders and drainage ditches. It lay across jungle so dense that the
tired men had had to hack their way through it only a week or so
before.
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"Marine Drive" constructed by the 53d Naval Construction
Battalion enabled casualties to be sent to medical facilities in the
rear and supplies to be brought forward easily. Photo courtesy of Cyril
J. O'Brien
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Meanwhile, back on the beach, the U.S. Navy had been
busy pouring in supplies and men. By D plus 12 it had landed more than
23,000 cargo tons and nearly 34,000 men. Marine fighters over head
provided continuous cover from Japanese air attacks. The Marine 3d
Defense Battalion was set up with long range radar and its antiaircraft
guns to give further protection. (This battalion also had long-range
155mm guns that pounded Japanese attacks against the perimeter.)
By now, the 37th Infantry Division on the left was on
firm ground, facing scattered opposition, and able to make substantial
advances. It was very different for the 3d Marine Division on the right.
Lagoons and swamps were everywhere. The riflemen were in isolated,
individual positions, little islands of men perched in what they
sarcastically called "dry swamps." This meant the water and/or slimy mud
was only shoe-top deep, rather than up to their knees or waists, as it
was all around them. This nightmare kind of terrain, combined with
heavy, daily, drenching rains, precluded digging foxholes. So their
machine guns had to be lashed to tree trunks, while the men huddled
miserably in the water and mud. They carried little in their packs,
except that a variety of pills was essential to stay in fighting shape
in their oppressive, bug-infested environment: salt tablets, sulfa
powder, aspirin, iodine, vitamins, atabrine tablets (for supressing
malaria), and insect repellent.
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Navajo Code Talkers
Marines who heard the urgent combat messages said
Navajo sounded sometimes like gurgling water. Whatever the sound, the
ancient tongue of an ancient warrior clan confused the Japanese. The
Navajo code talkers were busily engaged on Bougainville, and had already
proved their worth on Guadalcanal. The Japanese could never fathom a
language committed to sounds.
Originally there were many skeptics who disdained the
use of the Navajo language as infeasible. Technical Sergeant Philip
Johnston, who originally recommended the use of Navajo talkers as a
means of safe voice transmissions in combat, convinced a hardheaded
colonel by a two-minute Navajo dispatch. Encoding and decoding, the
colonel then admitted, would have engaged his team well over an
hour.
When the chips were down, time was short, and the
message was urgent, Navajos saved the day. Only Indians could talk
directly into the radio "mike" with out concern for security. They would
read the message in English, absorb it mentally, then deliver the words
in their native tongue — direct, uncoded, and quickly. You couldn't
fault the Japanese, even other Navajos who weren't codetalkers, couldn't
understand the codetalkers' transmissions because they were in a code
within the Navajo language.
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Colonel Frazer West, who at Bougainville commanded a
company in the 9th Marines, was interviewed by Monks 45 years later. He
still remembered painfully what constantly living in the slimy, swamp
water did to the Marines: "With almost no change of clothing, sand
rubbing against the skin, stifling heat, and constant immersion in
water, jungle rot was a pervasive problem. Men got it on their scalps,
under their arms, in their genital areas, just all over. It was a
miserable, affliction, and in combat there was very little that could be
done to alleviate it. The only thing you could do was with the jungle
ulcers. I'd get the corpsman to light a match on a razor blade, split
the ulcer open, and squeeze sulfanilamide powder in it. I must have had
at one time 30 jungle ulcers on me. This was fairly typical." Corpsmen
painted many Marines with skin infections with tincture of merthiolate
or a potassium permanganate solution so that they looked like the Picts
of long ago who went into battle with their bodies daubed with blue
wood.
The Marines who had survived the first two weeks of
the campaign were by now battlewise. They intuitively carried out their
platoon tactics in jungle fighting whether in offense or defense. They
understood their enemy's tactics. And all signs indicated that they were
winning.
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'Corpsman!'
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Painting by Kerr
Fby in the Marine Corps Art Collection
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Less than one percent of battle casualties on
Bougainville died of wounds after being brought to a field hospital, and
during 50 operations conducted as the battle of the Koromokina raged and
bullets whipped through surgeons' tents, not a patient was lost.
Those facts reflect the skill and dedication of the
corpsmen, surgeons, and litter bearers who performed in an environment
of enormous difficultly. Throughout the fight for the perimeter, the
field hospitals were shelled and shaken by bomb blasts, even while
surgical operations were being conducted.
Every day there was rain and mud and surgeons
practiced their craft with mud to their shoe laces. Corpsmen were shot
as they treated the wounded right at the battle scene; others were shot
as the Japanese ignored the International Red Cross emblem for
ambulances and aid stations.
Bougainville was the first time in combat for the
corpsmen assigned to the 3d Marine Division. Two surgeons were with each
battalion and, as in all other battles, a corpsman was with each
platoon. Aid stations were as close as 30-50 yards behind the lines. The
men from the division band were the litter bearers, always on the biting
edge of combat.
Many young Marines were not aware until combat just
how close they would be to these corpsmen who wore the Marine uniform,
and who would undergo every hardship and trial of the man on the line.
The corpsman's job required no commands; he was simply always there to
patch up the wounded Marine enough to have him survive and get to a
field hospital.
Naval officers seldom had command over the corpsman.
He was responsible directly to the platoon, company, and battalion to
which he was assigned.
Ashore on D-Day with the invading troops,
Pharmacist's Mate Second Class Andrew Bernard later remembered setting
up his 3d Marines regimental aid station, just inland in the muck off
the beach beside the "C" Medical Field Hospital. Later, as action
intensified, Bernard saw 15 to 20 wounded Marines waiting at the
hospital for care, and commented, "this was when I noticed Dr. Duncan
Shepherd . . . . The flaps of the hospital tent went open, and there was
Dr. Shepherd operating away, so calm, so brave, so courageous — as
though he was back in the Mayo Clinic, where he had trained."
On 7 December, the Japanese attacked around the
Koromokina. The official history of the 3d Marine Division described the
scene:
The division hospital, situated near the beach, was
subjected to daily air raids, and twice to artillery shelling . . . .
Company E of the 3d Medical Battalion, which was the division hospital
under Commander R. R. Callaway, USN, proved that delicate work could be
carried on even in combat. During the battle the field hospital was
attacked, bullets ripped through the protecting tent, seriously wounding
a pharmacist's mate.
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Painting by
Franklin Boggs in Men Without Guns (Philadelphia: The Blakiston
Company, 1945
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Hellzapoppin Ridge was the most intense and miserable
of the battles for the corpsmen of Bougainville, according to
Pharmacist's Mate First Class Carroll Garnett. He and three other
corpsmen were assigned to the forward aid station located at the top of
that bloody ridge. The two battalion surgeons were considered
indispensable and discouraged from taking undue risks. Regardless,
Assistant Battalion Surgeon Lieutenant Edmond A. Utkewicz, USNR,
insisted on joining the corpsmen at the forward station and remained
there throughout the entire battle. The doctor and his four assistants
were often in the open, exposed to fire, and showered with the dust
thrown up by mortar explosions.
The corpsmen's routine was: stop the bleeding, apply
sulfa powder and battle dressing, shoot syrette of morphine, and
administer plasma. The regular aid station was located at the bottom of
the ridge where the battalion surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Horace L.
Wolf, USNR, checked the wounded again, before sending them off in an
ambulance, if available, to a better equipped station or a field
hospital.
Corpsmen (and Marines) were in deadly peril atop the
ridge. Corpsman John A. Wetteland described volunteers bringing in a
wounded paramarine who was still breathing when he and the medical team
were hit anew by a shell. One corpsman was killed, another badly
wounded, and Wetteland was badly mauled by mortar fragments, though he
tried, he said, "to bandage myself."
Dr. Wolf later painted a grim picture of the taut
circumstances under which the medics worked:
Several of my brave corpsmen were killed in this
action. The regimental band musicians were the litter bearers. I still
remember the terrible odor of our dead in the tropical heat. The smell
pinched one's nostrils and clung to clothing . . . . During combat in
the swamps, about all one could do to try to purify water to drink was
to put two drops of iodine solution in a canteen. Night was the worst,
when we could not evacuate our sick and wounded. But, if one could get a
ride to the air strip on the jeep ambulance to put the sick and wounded
on evacuation planes, one could see a female (Navy or Army nurses) for
the first time in many months.
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The
155mm guns of the Marine 3d Defense Battalion provided firepower in
support of Marine riflemen holding the Torokina perimeter. National Archives Photo
111-5C-190032
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Just
getting to your assigned position meant slow, tiring slogging though
endless mud. Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 68247
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