MEN AND MUD (1, July 1943)

Men and Mud
By: William Bradford Huie
From: The United States Navy in World War II
Compiled and edited by: S. E. Smith

U.S. Army soldiers come ashore on 
Rendova Island on 30 June 1943.

It was a wet dawn in the Solomons, July 1, 1943.  D-Day, H-Hour at Rendova.  Through murky half-light, tropical rain fell in sheets.  Heavy, flat-bellied tank lighters battered down the waves––krrump, krrump––as they pushed from the transports toward East Beach.  In the boats tight-lipped Seabees, Marines and soldiers (Amphibian Task Force 31, composed of the 24th Naval Construction Batallion, the Ninth Defense Marines and the 172nd Infantry Combat Team) crouched by the wet flanks of bulldozers and watched the palm-fringed beach edge closer.  After eleven months of conquest and consolidation at Guadalcanal, our forces were at last reaching up the “slot” of the Solomons for the big Jap air base at Munda on New Georgia Island.  From Rendova, Munda would be within reach of our heavy howitzers.

The New Georgia group of islands

    The high whine of Jap .25-calibers cut across the water as the bandy-legged rats in the palms began sniping at our coxswains.  The men cursed, crouched lower, gripped gunbutts harder.  As though the rain weren’t enough, salt water drenched the men as the boats churned through heavy surf.  The boats skidded in soft sand; ramps dropped; there was a brief, fierce skirmish; and the Japs who were left alive faded back into the coconut groves.  Automatic-weapons troops pushed in two hundred yards to form a defense arc, while the Seabees began furiously unloading trucks, tractors, heavy guns, ammunition and supplies.

Ships laden with equipment and troops approach Rendova

    The Jap ground forces had been dispersed easily.  Now the real battle was joined; the battle against nature and time and the inevitable Jap bombers.  Men and supplies are vulnerable while they are in landing craft; they are even more vulnerable during the period they are on the open beach.  So in every beach operation the Seabees must drive hard to get ashore; drive even harder to unload; then exert the last drop of energy to get the supplies off the beach, dispersed and hidden.

    Leading the Seabees was 48-year-old Commander H. Roy. Whitaker (Civil Engineer Corps, USNR, Philadelphia, Pa.), a pint-sized construction veteran with the energy of a jackhammer.  He described the action.  

Marines landing at Rendova Harbor on D-Day

    “Where we landed the soil was unbelievably marshy,”  he said.  “The mud was deep and getting deeper.  A swampy coconut grove lay just back of the beach, and we had to cut a road through there.  Guns had to be transported from our beach over to West Beach so that shells could be hurled across the narrow strip of water onto the Jap positions at Munda.  And still that rain poured.

    “All day long we sweated and swore and worked to bring the heavy stuff ashore and hide it from the Jap bombers.  Our mesh, designed to ‘snowshoe’ vehicles over soft mud, failed miserably.  Even our biggest tractors bogged down in the muck.  The men ceased to look like men; they looked like slimy frogs working in some prehistoric ooze.  As they sank to their knees they discarded their clothes.  They slung water out of their eyes, caused their mud-slickened hands, and somehow kept the stuff rolling ashore.

LCIs being unloaded at Rendova

    “A detachment under Irv Lee (Lieutenant Irwin W. Lee, CEC, USNR, Monmouth, Il.) fought to clear the road West Beach.  The ground was so soft that only our biggest cats could get through.  The Japs were still sniping, but in spite of this the men began felling the coconut palms, cutting them into twelve-foot lengths and corrugating the road.  Our traction-treaded vehicles could go over these logs, but the spinning wheels of a truck would send the logs flying, and the truck would bury itself.  To pull the trucks out we lashed a bulldozer to a tree, then dragged the trucks clear with the ‘dozer’s winch.

    “When night came we had unloaded six ships, but the scene on the beach was dismal.  More troops, Marines and Seabees had come in, but the mud was about to lick us.  Foxholes filled with water as rapidly as they could be dug.  There was almost no place near the beach to set up a shelter tent, so the men rolled their exhausted, mud-covered bodies in tents and slept in the mud.  As the Japs would infiltrate during the night, the Army boys holding our line in the grove would kill them with trench knives.

    “Next day, at 1330, without warning, the Jap planes came in with bomb bays open.  All of us began firing with what guns had been set up, but most of the Seabees had to lie in the open on the beach and take it.  We tried to dig trenches with our hands and noses while the Japs poured it on us.

Fires burning on "Suicide Point" after the Japanese air raid on 2 July
 that caught American forces by surprise
and left over 150 Americans dead or injured.

    “The first bombs out two main fuel dumps, and we had to lie there in the mud and watch our supplies burn while the Japs strafed us.  One bomb landed almost under our largest bulldozer, and that big machine just reared up like a stallion and disintegrated.  Then every man among us thought that his time had come.  A five-ton cache of our dynamite went off, exploding the eardrums of the men nearest it.  That soggy earth just quivered like jelly under us.

    “When the Japs had exhausted their ammunition they flew off, leaving us to put out the fires and treat our wounded.  I’ll never forget the scene on that beach.  In our outfit two of our best officers (Lieutenant Lee and Lieutenant George W. Stephenson, CEC, USNR, Klamath Falls, Ore.)  and twenty-one men were dead.  Many more were wounded, others were missing, and a number were out of their heads.  Our galley equipment, most of our supplies, and all the men’s seabags and personal belongings were destroyed.

    “ ‘Okay, men,’ I yelled, ‘we got nothing left but what we got on, so let’s get back to work.’

The landing area crowded with supplies
immediately following the invasion

    “All that night Doctor Duryea (Lieutenant-Commander Garrett Duryea, Medical Corps, USNR, Glen Cove, N.Y.) worked with our wounded.  The biggest job was to get them clean.  That’s one thing about being a Seabee.  Aboard ship you bathe, wash down with anti-septic, and put on clean clothing before an action.  In the Air Force you can take a bath before you take off.  But when a Seabee gets hit, he’s usually on a beach in the mud.  Mud seems to be our element.  When we die we die in the mud.

The aftermath of an August air raid on Rendova

    “Next day, while we worked in relays, chaplains from the Army and Marines helped us bury our dead.  Three more had died during the night.  Not one of those boys would have ever thought of himself as a hero, but I felt proud to have been their commanding officer.  They were construction men, most of them from the oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas, and, with never a complaint, they had died in the mud trying their damnedest to get a job done.

    “By the morning of the fourth day we had opened the road to West Beach, but what a road it was!  We had literally snaked those big 155’s through two miles of mud, and the Marines began setting them up.  We were also developing a storage area some distance from the beach and were trying desperately to reduce our hazards on the beach.  It takes men with real guts to unload on an open beach without air cover.  Our men had been under constant strain for ninety hours; at least fifty of them were running high temperatures from constant exposure to mud and water; they could only jump between gasoline drums and powder barrels when the Japs came over; and the beach, as always, was a potential torch with ammunition, Diesel oil and gasoline everywhere.  The mud was too deep for trucks.  To move the inflammable stuff back into the storage areas, the men had to emplace themselves in the mud in a bucket-brigade fashion.  For hours they’d work that way, passing the heavy packages back in to the camouflage area and sinking deeper into the mud each time they handled a package.  And still the rain poured.

The US Marine crew of the 9th
Defense Battalion's 155 mm "Long Tom"
artillery fires from Rendova or a nearby
island in support of the US Army's
offensive on New Georgia, July 1943

    “Late that afternoon we got our first big thrill.  From over on West Beach the Marines opened up on Munda with the 155’s.  Our men stopped work and cheered almost insanely.  The others stationed with bulldozers and winches along the road to West Beach joined in the cheer.  No group of men had ever endured more in order for guns to begin firing.  It hurts American construction men down deep to have to lie in mud and be strafed  by Japs; and now those 155’s were giving it back to the Japs with interest.  The firing was a tonic to us.  The men went back to unloading furiously.

90 mm antiaircraft guns on Rendova

    “We had received some additional equipment, but that night we still had only enough tents and cots for our expanding sick quarters.  The men had tried to pitch a few shelter tents, but the tents would sink in the mud.  There was still nothing else to do but wrap yourself in whatever you could find and sleep in the mud.  When you are sufficiently exhausted you can do that, but after you pass forty you have one helluva time getting up in the morning.

155 mm "Long Tom" artillery
being towed on Rendova

    “On the fifth day we continued to unload troops, supplies and equipment.  Our storage areas became more congested, due to our distribution difficulties and also due to delays in transshipments over to our positions on New Georgia Island, from which we were also attacking Munda.  The Seabees sent many small working parties to help the Army and Marines, yet our beach condition grew worse under the continuing heavy rains.  At 1400 the Japs bombed us heavily, but this time the damage was much lighter because of the furious anti-aircraft fire.  The Army and Marines had many guns set up by this time, and the Seabees helped man the guns on twenty LSI’s and two LST’s at the beach.  We were able to prevent the Japs from strafing us, and seven Jap planes crashed in our immediate area.

Marine AAA and "Long Tom" artillery positions
on Northern Rendova, July 4, 1943

    “Seabee casualties were only one man missing and one wounded in this raid, but our number of psychopathic cases had begun to mount.  We had to evacuate ten men who had become hysterical.  As men grow physically exhausted, they became more and more susceptible to nervous collapse under bombing.

    “By the sixth day the 155’s were pouring shells onto Munda almost incessantly, and we still had the supply road open, but our position seemed more impossible than ever.  None of us could remember anything except mud and bombs.  The rains seemed to get heavier.  But somehow the men kept working.  Word came that 5000 troops had been landed on New Georgia near Munda.  Munda was doomed if we could just hold out and keep those 155’s firing.  The Japs knew this as well as we did, so at 1315 they came at us again.  But this time it was a different story.  Our own air forces were ready to take up the fight now, and our planes came in and tangled with the Japs right over our heads.

    “We lay in those muddy foxholes for an hour and watched the air battle.  Since we couldn’t fire the AA guns without endangering our own planes, there was nothing else for us to do but lie in our grandstand seats and count the falling Japs.  Each time a Zero would burst into flames our exhausted, mud-covered men would leap up and cheer wildly.

    “Knowledge that we now had air cover improved our morale on the seventh day.  Also we had managed to borrow three stoves from the Army and Marinesand were providing the first hot food for the men.  Three air battles were fought over us during the day, but our planes didn’t allow the Japs to get close enough either to bomb or strafe us.  That night the Japs came over three times, forcing us to hit the water in the foxholes, but most of us had given up hope of ever being dry again.

    “On the eight day we continued to unload supplies, repair landing boats and haul the ammunition through the mud to the 155’s.  The Marines kept up the shelling of Munda almost continuously.  One enemy air attack in the afternoon lasted for fifty minutes, but our planes were opposing the Japs constantly, and we suffered little damage.  During the day we evacuated seven additional cases of war hysteria.  That night we had to hit the foxholes twice.

    “On the ninth day the Japs attempted four large-scale raids, but our damage was slight.  Our air cover was now functioning perfectly except at night.  We evacuated three more cases of war hysteria, and that night we had to hit the water three times as the Japs bombed us rather heavily.  But our bombardment continued, and our roads were still open in spite of the continuing rain.

    “On the tenth day we had five light enemy raids, and evacuated additional cases of war hysteria, but morale continued high.”

    While the 24th Battalion was suffering its long ordeal at Rendova, helping to make possible the shelling of Munda, across forty miles of water, at Segi Point, New Georgia, the 47th Seabee Battalion was just as furiously playing its role in the Munda drama.  The 47th, led by Commander J. S. Lyles (CEC, USNR, Wagoner, Okla.), had been assigned the task of ripping an airstrip out of the jungle so that our bombers coming up from Guadalcanal to bomb Munda could have fighter protection over the target.  Success of the whole operation depended on the speed with which this airstrip could be built.  The first wave of the 47th began landing at Segi at 1010 on June 30, just twenty hours before the 24th began landing at Rendova.

Captain Wilfred Painter, CEC, USN

    The landing at Segi had been planned as sneak operation.  It was hoped that the battalion could get ashore unobserved by the Japs and could get a head start on the airstrip before the Japs attacked.  To facilitate this strategy, a Seabee scouting party led by Commander Wilfred L. Painter (CEC, USNR, Seattle, Wash.) had slipped ashore from native fishing boats on the night of June 22.  The following day Commander Painter selected an abandoned coconut plantation now overgrown with jungle as the site for the airstrip, and the party began laying out the field.

    Lieutenant Garland S. Tinsley (CEC, USNR, North Charleston, S.C.) was acting as lookout for the scouting party, and on the second day he saw Japs approaching the shore from two directions.  One bargeload of Japs landed a mile west of the proposed airfield and two bargeloads landed a mile and a half east of the field.

    Tinsley reported Condition Black, and the party got set for a fight.  However, by lying doggo for forty-eight hours, the group eluded the Japs, who took to their barges and disappeared.  On D-Day the scouts had the field laid out, ready for work to begin, and they were standing on the beach to direct the landing.

    Thanks to this advance survey, when the 47th’s big HD-12 bulldozers and power shovels rolled off the boats, they at once began pushing down the coconut palms, clearing the strip.  From that moment the 47th battled time and the jungle around the clock.  Equipment “unraveled” off the boats as needed.  Supplies were unloaded and dispersed.  Floodlights were ready before darkness on the first night.  A bivouac area was cleared.  AA guns were manned; exterior guard posted.  And, above all, work proceeded on the airstrip with all possible speed.

    Construction of the strip involved the clearing of an initial area of 250 by 3500 feet; grading and draining the area; covering a minimum area of 100 by 2500 feet with twelve to eighteen inches of coral; and then laying the steel pierced plank, or Marston mat, on a minimum surface of 75 by 2500 feet.  This 75 by 2500 feet is regarded as the minimum safe surface from which our fighter craft can operate.  Our airstrips are thus built in sections, with the aim of producing a minimum “fighter strip” in the shortest possible time; and then lengthening and widening the strip gradually up to the 300 by 5000 feet necessary for heavily loaded four-motored bombers.

Marston mat laid by CB 45 

    At 0822 on July 11 the pilot of a Navy Corsair fighter brought his plane down on the strip in an emergency landing which saved both himself and his ship.  He pronounced the field ready for use, and the exact time was recorded: 10 days, 22 hours, 12 minutes after the first landing boat had ground ashore!  While the Seabees have restored captured Jap fields in much less time, this then stood as a world’s record for converting jungle into a landing area.

    Amazingly, the Japs did not discover the activity at Segi until the seventh day.  This was due both to their preoccupation with our forces at Rendova and to a clever arrangement for handling the lights at Segi.  Whenever Jap planes would take off from the Munda field at night, our forces at Rendova would flash toe warning to Segi.  The 47th would then douse its lights and continue limited construction activities in the dark until Rendova reported that the Japs had returned to Munda.

    Here’s what the speed record at Segi meant to the Munda operation: It was fighter planes from Segi which helped relieve the Jap aerial pressure on the men-in-the-mud at Rendova.  The Segi fighters stood at Ready Alert, and when our bombers came up from Guadalcanal to bomb Munda, the Segi fighters roared into the air to escort the bombers over the target.  Conversely, it was the Seabees, Marines and soldiers on Rendova who, with their shelling, so monopolized the attention of the Japs that the 47th had their field virtually completed before the Japs got on to the fact that it was there.

    “When the Japs did discover us,” Commander Lyles reported, “we got a severe pounding.  They hit a dynamite dump, one of our fuel dumps, and peppered our bulldozers and trucks with shrapnel.  But they arrived too late with too little.

    “In at least one way the Japs helped us set our record.  On our fifth day we got the news that twenty-three Seabees had been killed over at Rendova.  Our men redoubled their efforts.  Many of them insisted on working eighteen-hours stretches in order to rush the air cover.”

    During the eleven days in which the 47th was setting its record, fourteen inches of rain fell at Segi Point!

    Three weeks after the opening of the airstrip at Segi, the last Jap had been killed at Munda.  On August 9, 1943, advanced platoons of the 73rd Seabee Batallion began work on the blasted Jap air base.  The Japs had been unable to operate the field for eight weeks, but Commander Kendrick P. Doane (CEC, USNR, Forest Hills, N. Y.), leader of the 73rd, was ordered to have the field in operation by August 18.

    On August 11 additional units of the 73rd arrived, and Commander Doane ordered round-the-clock operations.  The weather gods smiled at last, and a full moon came out to make artificial lighting unnecessary.  In just two more days the men had repaired the north and south runways, and American planes began landing at Munda on the afternoon of August 13.  During that night the Battalion completed additional hardstands off the runways, and on the 14th the field received forty-eight additional planes.

U.S. Army soldiers attack Japanese fortifications
with flamethrowers on or around 1 August 1943
during the battle for the airfield.

    On August 15th the 24th Battalion, which had fought the mud battle at Rendova, arrived at Munda; and the two battalions set to work to make Munda a major base.  The Japs had dug an elaborate tunnel system in the coral, and many of them had died in the tunnels from our flame-throwers.  The Seabees cleaned out the Japs and converted the tunnels into de luxe living quarters.

The airfield at Munda Point

    In November, 1943, Admiral Bill Halsey declared that Munda was the finest air base in the South Pacific.  A citation for Commander Doane read, in part:

    “Prior to his commencing work at Munda there were no roads, and the airfield and taxiways were unusable due to the bombardment and shelling of the area by our forces prior to its capture.  In spite of shortage of personnel and equipment, and faced with a task of great magnitude, Commander Doane was able, nevertheless, by virtue of his planning, leadership, industry, and working ‘round the clock’ to make serviceable the Munda airfield on August 14, 1943, a good four days ahead of the original schedule.  Though subjected to shelling and bombing, both in the camp area and on the airfield, Commander Doane and his men have expanded the size and facilities of the airfield at a phenomenal rate.”

    On receipt of his citation Commander Doane commented: “It’s easy to perform construction miracles with men like the Seabees.  They are the world’s finest construction men.  Courage is innate with them.  They volunteered to do a job, and all they want is a chance to finish that job as soon as possible.  When we took men like this and put them into our organization, we loaded the dice against the Japs.”

Capture of Munda Point, 22 July – 4 August 1943

    To support their claim to being the toughest, don’t-give-a-damnedest outfit in the service, the Seabees have accumulated many stories, both factual and apocryphal.

    On a certain Pacific island, it is said, natives were mopping up the remaining Japs.  One day a group of natives wiped out a party of Japs, but the natives hesitated to kill a strange animal which the Japs had brought to the island.  The animal was a goat, and after observing the goat curiously, the natives returned to their chief for instructions as to whether or not they should kill the strange beast.

    “What manner of beast is it?” the chief asked.

    “Oh, he’s very strange, majesty,” the natives replied.  “He has fierce eyes, long horns, a shaggy beard, will eat anything, and stinks like hell.”

    “Spare him,” the chief ruled at once.  “Don’t kill him.  He’s what the Americans call a Seabee.”

    While this story may be apocryphal, it is a fact that several Seabee battalions have bully goats as mascots.