During the four months our troops fought in Bougainville and I commanded the Rear Echelon in Guadalcanal, I did make a few in- and- out boat trips to the front and happened to be there when the famed Battle for Hill 700 was fought, for which my old Company F won a Presidential Citation.
The Japanese had finally concluded we were not going to pursue them, so in March, they had to come after us. They massed about 20,000 troops along a seven mile long perimeter, manned by both the 37th and the Americal Divisions. Concentrated attacks on thinly held lines always result in some initial success. One thousand Japanese suicide soldiers attacking on a 100 yard front will break through, suffering immense causalties, but counterattacks by our reserve troops who had pinpointed the breakthrough can . . . and did . . . drive the Japanese back.
We were able to anticipate the heavy attack on Hill 700, one of the higher and best fortified sectors, by a fluke. One of our patrols, the day before the attack, probing to determine the location of Japanese troop concentrations in front of our lines, had a fire fight with a Japanese patrol. They wiped out the Japanese with the exception of a lone soldier who had been knocked unconscious by a concussion grenade. He was brought back to Regimental Headquarters, came to, recognized he had been captured and was thus in his own mind forever disgraced.
The Empress Augusta Bay Perimeter
For the future, he was no longer Japanese, and when our Nisei interrogators asked him questions, he had been so badly prepared to be taken prisoner that he seemed anxious and relieved to supply the answers. One question had to do with the assembly area of the troops who would soon be assaulting our position, and he was shown a map of the entire perimeter. He circled an area behind Hill 700, and told the Niseis that was where approximately 5000 Japanese were ready for an attack at dawn the next day. I sat in on this stunning interrogation, and was involved in discussing with the Regimental staff whether the information might have been correct . . . or was it just a ruse. All those in on the questioning agreed that this Japanese had actually written off his country and his fellow soldiers and was well prepared mentally to help us. On the basis of the prisoner’s information, our artillery and airforce shelled and bombed the one mile square area behind Hill 700. Later we discovered the chopped up bodies of almost 4000 enemy, many having been hit so often by so many bombs and shells that the area had the appearance of a massive hamburger facility. The smells emanating from that one mile square area of mincemeat, rotting under the tropical sun, were unbearable. When we sent in troops with bulldozers to bury the chopped- up dead, we finally made use of our gas masks . . . the first and last time they were worn.
Before that sickening experience, the Japanese still alive, about 1000, attacked our lines, broke through for a few hours, were then counterattacked and driven back. The few hundred survivors ran to the other side of the island and never fought again. They spent the remaining months and years there, raising enough food to survive and building deep enough bomb shelters to withstand the periodic reminders that the U. S. forces knew they were still there.
One heroic incident which took place in our Co. F. and Co. G. counterattack that drove the enemy off Hill 700 was contained in a letter I wrote Irene:
‘‘ Two of our companies did a magnificent job in one of the counterattacks. One of the two was my old Co., Co. F. Its CO, one of my best friends, a brilliant kid named Goodkin . . . 24 years old . . . performed a feat of heroism which has been unrivalled thus far. He led the attack personally in the teeth of the Japanese fire. Jumping into an unoccupied pillbox, he noticed some shells burning, ready to go off. He got ready to go out when suddenly one of his men collapsed into the hole, wounded badly. Goodkin knew he couldn’t carry the man out of the hole without both being killed, so he grabbed the smoking shells and tossed them toward the Japanese with his bare hands, burning himself badly. He still wouldn’t quit and led the final assault which annihilated the enemy. Only then were his raw, bleeding hands noticed, and he was immediately hospitalized. Check Finn was here at that time and Check and I went to visit Sid. I didn’t know the whole story then but guessed he had done well despite his modest declaration. A few weeks later I learned that he had been recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, the country’s highest award, by the commanding general of the Division himself. He is now with his company. His promotion to captaincy came through two days after mine so I outranked him . . . as far as rank goes . . . but I don’t come up to his knees in terms of courage and leadership. If he gets the Medal and goes home to receive it, I’ll tell him to call on you. ’’
The ‘‘ Check Finn’’ mentioned above was a Navy Lieutenant, the best and oldest friend I have in the world, since the time our Mothers wheeled our baby buggies together along Lexington Avenue, Dayton, Ohio. The odds that this friend might possibly be on board a supply ship, in Bougainville, the same day and night I was there, are about 2,000,000 to one; but we did manage to learn of the other’s presence, made contact, met and among other things (including hugs and kisses) visited the front lines and the field hospital together. Fifty years later we gathered with other childhood friends in Dayton, Ohio, and Check confirmed the general veracity of my war stories when our other friends began looking incredulously at their coward- pacifist pal spinning such bloody tales.
However, most of my participation and observation about Bougainville was from afar . . . Guadalcanal . . . and may be best summed up by the following paragraph, written by the historian Stanley Frankel, not the combat infantryman:
The invasion of Bougainville in early November of 1943, was an outstanding success, and comparatively easy due to some very astute advance planning which put our forces ashore where the Japanese least expected them, and thus caught them off balance. The Marines did a fine job and pushed rapidly into the island to the Southeast, while the 37th Division moved to the Northeast. At that time the Marines caught the rough stuff, while we had comparatively little opposition in our sector. The Marines were pulled out, commencing Christmas Day 1943, and were replaced by the Americal Division. There was a comparative lull until March, when the big Battle of Bougainville took place. This was the attempt to the Japanese 17th Area Army, of which the infamous Sixth Division of Rape of Nanking fame was a part, to drive us from our beachhead at Empress Augusta Bay. The Sixth Division was by all odds the finest fighting unit encountered by the 37th Division in all of its campaigns. Here the great strength of the enemy was hurled against the 37th’s more than seven miles of thinly- held front. Never before had more frightful or bloody fighting taken place in the Pacific. For more than a month the Japanese smashed themselves, time after time, against our front, ultimately losing more than 10,000 killed and a unestimated number of wounded. They ran up against a division of veterans that time . . . a division that proved as aggressive and powerful in the defense as it had in the New Georgia offensive campaign. We were beginning to feel the weight of more and better equipment by now. We had more air support, more and better tank support, more artillery, and, above all, men that knew the business of jungle fighting from A to Z. We refined our policy of letting machines fight for us to the maximum. For instance, we shot up more than 450,000 rounds of artillery. The dividends that helped pay is exemplified in the fact that we killed Japanese at a ratio of 33 to every American soldier lost.
The men had reason to be proud of themselves. They had fought two heavy campaigns within a period of eight months and they had won the praise of the highest Pacific commanders. Well under four hundred 37th Division men had been killed in both operations, and nearly 12 thousand Japanese soldiers had been destroyed. The Japanese hold on the Solomons was finally and completely broken. This, tied in with the success in New Guinea, spelled the end of Nipponese ambition in the South and Southwest Pacific. It was a job superbly done.
I moved my rear echelon command to Bougainville in March, and most of the next few months were literally fun and games . . . championship softball tournaments, inter- regimental boxing matches, volleyball, ping- pong, chess. I managed to come up with some tennis rackets, balls, and net, and we paid the natives to stamp out a playable court. Colonel White and I were the two most enthusiastic tennis players, perhaps the best in the regiment, and our sets were fiercely contested. White instructed me not to play a ‘‘ customer’s’’ game with him, that is, letting him win because he outranked me. I didn’t let him win, but he did well against my best chops and spins and cuts. Those afternoons when his hard shots were missing and my slow stuff drove him crazy, he would occasionally lose his mild temper and disdainfully ask me when I was going to stop ‘‘ chicken- shitting’’ around and hit the ball ‘‘ like a man. ’’
A number of Red Cross live shows came our way . . . Frances Langford, Randolph Scott, Jerry Colonna, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Martha Tilton, Larry Adler, Carole Landis, and even Leo Durocher entertained the regiment and dined at our Regimental Officers’ Mess. These celebrities socialized well, seemed more awed by our stories of battle than we were by their celebrity, and the soldiers loved the attention and the reminder that back- home had visited them at the front.
But, from May to December, along with the fun and games came the most rigorous special training our troops had ever had. Close order drill, inspection of barracks, firing on the range were all resumed, to sharpen discipline and combat skills. In addition, we were brought up to date on the latest tank- infantry and amphibious assault tactics. We were readying for wide open plains and the congested cities of the Philippines, and it seemed that our jungle fighting days and nights were over. This was a happy realization, because now the fighting would enable us to maximize our firepower, our artillery, mortars and air strength instead of the primitive one- man- and- a- gun against one- man- and- a- gun.
We practiced loading and unloading a Landing Ship- tank (LST) which was to take some of us to Luzon and the Lingayen Gulf beaches of the Philippines. We practiced climbing up and down the nets on larger boats, and the highlight, or lowlight, of my loading practice came one afternoon when several of us took a motorboat to the troop ship.
Bill Leathers, the S2 (Intelligence Officer) had lent me a pistol for the occasion since he had an extra and I didn’t want to be encumbered with a heavy rifle. We pulled up next to the ship in rather rough water. As the motorboat went up in the waves, White and the S2 jumped and hit the ladder entrance to the ship. I followed, only to be caught in the downswing of the motorboat and flung into the water, trying like hell to swim away from both boats so as not to be crushed in between their sides as they bumped each other.
The S2 Bill Leathers, a lanky, hardbitten Texan . . . leaned over the landing net and put out his hands. Rescue was near. But as I lifted my hands to his he screamed menacingly ‘‘ You sonofabitch, you’ve ruined my pistol, hand it over. ’’ And before he’d help me out of what, to me, threatened to be a watery grave, I had to give him the wet pistol, which he dried fondly with his right hand while he reluctantly used his left to pull me from an infantryman’s most incongruous fate . . . drowning at sea!