The Battle of Cibik’s Ridge: Bougainville, November 1943

Manning a .30-caliber heavy barrel machine gun M1919A4, flexible on Bougainville.

by Captain Steve Cibik, USMC as told to James D. Horan and Gerold Frank

Bougainville—to most pre-war Americans who had ever heard of the place at all, a name conjuring exotic and sensuous visions. An island of travel poster beaches and perfumed flowers, of smiling maidens and languorous moonlight breezes. Yet, to the young Americans from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Nevada who fought for this island, the thoughts will always be different. They’ll be of murky heat, of mosquitoes big as a penny, of primeval slime into which a man could disappear and never be seen again… and of the enemy, ever-present and relentless.

American forces landed on Empress Augusta Bay, Bougainville, on 1 November 1943, in order to secure an airfield site within effective striking distance of the big Japanese base on Rabaul, key to the southwestern Pacific area. But to operate an airfield, the surrounding jungle had first to be cleared of swarming enemy defenders. This was to be the Marines’ job and one small part of that job is described by a Marine captain who was probably one of the first soldiers of the war to have a battlefield named after him.

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It was The Fox who found the ridge. A lesser man would never have seen it, for it was a geographical freak, a knob of stone and earth lost in the green fury of the Bougainville jungle. The Fox—Lieutenant William Kay, of Baltimore, a scout’s scout, a wizard in bushcraft—came trudging out of a wall of rain, his sharp nose sniffing, his thin utility almost transparent with water as it clung to his lean body. “You going up the ridge?” he asked, shaking the water from his eyes like a dog. “Okay, Steve; come along.”

It was late afternoon of 20 November 1943. Only a few minutes before, our battalion had taken time out to rest. The odor of the jungle, warm and humid, was in our nostrils when Major Donald C. Schmuck, of California, appeared, coming up the line.

“Steve,” he said without preface, “there’s a knoll up ahead. Lieutenant Kay found it. He’ll lead you to it. Take your men and occupy it for the night.” He spat water and grinned. “We don’t want the Japs to get on top of us tonight, and there are plenty of them out there. Keep your fingers crossed.”

Then he was gone, and The Fox was emerging from the curtain of rain. I turned to my platoon sergeant, Charles B. Kenneday, of Winter Garden, Florida, and said, “Let’s go.”

We were a veteran company, with Guadalcanal behind us, and we thought we knew jungle. But here on Bougainville we were battling jungle such as we had never dreamed of. For nineteen days we struggled in miasmal swamps, fought vines that wrapped themselves about our necks like a whip, birds that dived at us like screaming Stukas, bats whose wings whirred like falling artillery shells, and snakes, lizards and insects without name or number. For nineteen days we attacked this natural enemy with our machetes and knives, hacking our way through almost solid barricades of vegetation run riot.

It rained daily from noon to dusk—fierce, pounding tropical rains. If we had been lucky to hit fairly dry ground, we slept in foxholes six or eight inches deep. During the night, water seeped up through the earth. We invariably awoke drenched. Snakes ten feet long, with brown and sickly yellow markings, came out of the jungle one night to be our bedfellows, curling up with us for warmth. Next morning was loud with shouts of “Snakes! Snakes!” and the sounds of thuds and thumpings as the men frantically beat them to death.

Now, on the twentieth day, we moved single file along the trail in the downpour and gathering darkness.

“What kind of a knoll is it?” I asked Kay.

“I’ve never been up there. I spotted it by luck,” he said over his shoulder. “Stand fifty yards in front of it and you don’t see it. We’ll hit there in a few minutes.”

We moved slowly, fifty-one of us in all, and at the tail end of the column our sixteen machine gunners struggled and swore under the weight of their two machine guns and ammunition cans. I carried a telephone, and behind me two scouts carefully let out a spool of combat wire for communication with our commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hector de Zayas. We pushed on, and after a while the rain stopped.

Shortly before 6:30, The Fox halted. He pointed to the left. “See it?” he asked.

I stood at his side and followed his finger. I made out a slight rise in the terrain.

It was the ridge. Nature had camouflaged it with surpassing skill; if it had not been for a nakedly white tree, it would have escaped us completely.

“That’s it,” he said. “All yours. To-fa!” he said cheerily, and with that Samoan good-bye, he turned back.

We moved on. Suddenly I was brought up sharply against a wall of hard earth. I hacked at it with my knife, and the blade struck rock. It was an almost perpendicular wall with an outcropping of stone, impossible to climb. We had reached the base of the ridge. Moving like blind men, we investigated. Finally, we found a good layer of earth covering the rock. I gripped a tangle of roots as thick as my wrist, and began to climb. After half an hour’s heartbreaking work, we reached a small saddle where the ridge leveled off for a distance of fifteen feet, just as our communication wire gave out. We threw ourselves down to rest.

Better dig in here for the night, I thought. No knowing how much farther we have. And then, are we climbing into a trap? Are the Japs up there, hearing us, waiting?

I nudged Kenneday. “Tell them to dig in,” I said. “We’ll pull out before dawn.” I heard Kenneday’s whispered order go down the line. The men set to work in the darkness, scooping up the soggy earth with their knives and helmets. I cranked the telephone and whispered “CP. CP.”

I had to inform Colonel de Zayas that we were pitching in here for the night. Our artillery had been hammering this ridge with everything it had. If they opened up before we left, we would be wiped out. “CP. CP,” I repeated.

No answer.

After ten minutes of fruitless calling, I turned the phone over to the man next to me and began to dig my own foxhole. The whispered “CP. CP,” went on. I had the men take over the phone in turn. It grew deadly quiet. In this lull, even nature seemed to be listening, as we were, for that voice, to be reassured that we were in communication somehow with our front line. At five a.m. I told Kenneday to take an eight-man patrol and see how far it was to the summit. He and his men vanished. There was nothing to do but wait. A splatter of mud announced Kenneday’s return. it was at least two hundred more feet to the summit, he told us, and there, on a small knoll hardly big enough to turn around in, he’d found more than a dozen Japanese foxholes. He’d seen no Japanese, but they couldn’t be far away. I woke my men. One by one they climbed out of their foxholes, rubbing their red-rimmed eyes, moving stiffened bodies. We started up once more.

As we climbed, the jungle awoke too. We heard the raucous caw of the bird that screeched for all the world like wood being sawed, the weird woman-like scream of the “banana cat”—half cat, half anteater, as near as we could make out—and the endless buzzing and whirring of insects.

We climbed for nearly two hours, dragging ourselves up by the vines, and lashing ropes around our guns to pull them up, like Alpine climbers. Finally we reached the summit and lay there, our hearts pounding. There were fifteen foxholes. Some were well constructed, large enough to hold four men, covered with a lean-to of bamboo, thatched with banana leaves. We found chopsticks, cigarette butts, scraps of paper, food cans, the remains of fire. Apparently the Japanese used the crest as an observation post by day, and at night retired to their bivouac area at the base of the far side of the hill, to get away from our artillery fire.

I walked to the edge of the ridge and almost gasped. What a view of Bougainville! We were on the tip of a thumb of earth five hundred feet high, an oasis in a sea of mist-covered jungle, the only high ground for miles around. In the distance towered the Emperor Mountain Range, and in its center, marked by wisps of dark, curling smoke, brooded the volcano of Mt. Bagana, and far out across the jungle roof top were the sparkling waters of Empress Augusta Bay.

We moved about the ridge slowly, examining our position.

“Look here!” called Kenneday suddenly. He was standing at the head of a narrow trail which led down into the concealed depths of the gorge below. Twenty yards away, we stumbled on a second trail. One led north, the other east. Both had been used recently. Kenneday and I talked things over.

What was our job now, and what had we to do it with? Our forces were small—there were fifty-one of us—we had only eleven belts of machine gun ammunition, which would be used up in a few minutes of concerted fighting. We’d have to depend principally upon the BARs [Browning automatic rifles] and rifles. Each of us had three band grenades, and in emergency we would have to make the best use of these. We had no food. But no matter what the cost, we had to bold this ridge. Five hundred yards behind us were our front lines. In the valley below, on the other side of the Piva River, were several thousand Japanese troops. We all knew that a big battle must be fought when the two forces met at the river’s fork. When we attacked, this ridge would be invaluable. From here, we could spot Japanese positions and direct our heavy artillery fire; from here, we could drive down into the valley, engaging the Japanese while our main forces fought their way across the river. On the other hand, were the Japanese in control of this ridge, the tables would be turned. This ridge could be the key to success or failure in this phase of the battle of Bougainville.

We had to hold it. We established the two machine guns, each with a crew of six men; one covering the east trail, under Sergeant Richard Murphy, who had grown a reddish beard that gave him an appearance of raffish gaiety; the other, covering the north trail, under Slim Tierney, a taciturn Westerner. I had only one order to give the boys: “Don’t fire until you must. We’re saving all the ammunition we can.”

We started to construct a perimeter defense, using the foxholes the Japanese had already dug. Suddenly, as I scooped up a double handful of earth, I heard pounding feet. I wheeled around. Murphy was racing up the trail, BAR in his right hand, signaling frantically. He had heard the Japanese working their way upward, apparently ignorant that the hill had changed hands.

We flung ourselves in our holes and waited. From behind the shelter of a huge banyan tree, I made out the first Japanese. I waited until they were within range.

“Let ’em have it!” I shouted.

Our BARs came to life; our riflemen, forced to sit up to aim because the hill was so steep, fired like a picked team of marksmen. The Japanese screamed and vanished into the jungle. But they left behind them four still bodies. That was four for our side.

Kenneday grunted. “Might as well sit around till they come back again,” he said.

I knew they would too. The Japanese must have known every blade of grass, every quivering leaf here. They’d made good use of the terrain. If they succeeded in destroying the two guns, we’d be lost.

Ducking low, I ran back to Murphy’s machine gun nest, leaping the last few feet and landing in their midst. Murphy, a rugged, stocky, ex-baseball player from the Ohio sandlots, was sitting behind his gun, peering into the jungle below.

“Have the boys move this gun about twenty feet to the left, Murph,” I said. “If the Nips come back, let’s be where they ain’t.”

He nodded assent, and I made it back to my foxhole. The men redoubled their digging. As the morning wore on, the heat grew. It must now have been nearly one hundred degrees. The men worked, drenched to the skin by perspiration. They were drinking water at an alarming rate, and I passed the word to go easy. Each man had only what remained in his canteen.

At noon, our artillery began. The first shell burst less than one hundred yards from us on the Japanese side of the ridge. The earth shook and the shrapnel whistled through the air. We lay in the foxholes and prayed that our artillery would not shorten range. If they did—one well-placed shell could wipe us all out.

The shelling lasted fully half an hour, and when it stopped we climbed cautiously out of our foxholes.

Kenneday prowled about and returned to announce, “Nobody hurt. So far, so good.”

Suddenly a figure appeared low on the crest of the ridge. I jumped for my rifle, only to discover that it was Lieutenant Kay, unperturbed as ever.

He crouched there, a coil of wire strung over his left shoulder, and drawled, “You sure moved since the last time I saw you!”

I didn’t have any time to agree with him. I grabbed the coil, and the three of us climbed down the ridge to the saddle where we’d spent the night before. What we saw made us pause.

Kenneday pointed. “Look at that!” he said.

It was as though a cyclone had whirled through what had once been our foxholes. The earth was churned and plowed by direct shell bursts. Had we remained there, we would have been blasted to bits.

We had been bracketed by our own fire!

I hunted for the phone and found it covered with earth. We spliced the wire quickly and paid it out as we climbed back to the knoll. I plugged in the phone, cranked it, pressed the butterfly, and said, “CP! CP!”

A voice answered sharply, “Hello?”

I took a deep breath. “This is Cibik,” I said. “Give me—”

A cool voice broke in, “Hello, Steve!” It was Colonel de Zayas himself. “Damn glad to hear you.”

Kay grinned at me, and I grinned back.

“We’re sitting on the top of the world, sir,” I replied. “This ridge is a wonderful observation post. It’s the only high land in the entire area.”

“Very good, Steve,” he said. “Now—” He had no sooner said “now” than our artillery opened up again. Shells tore over our heads, screaming like banshees. Fragments of steel nipped and tore at vegetation. A shower of splintered bark, broken twigs, ripped vines, tatters of banana leaves descended on us. It was impossible to talk while the thunder of shells rolled over the valley. I took advantage of a brief pause.

“Hear that, sir?” I said. “We’re right in the middle of that barrage.”

Colonel de Zayas was still on the phone. “What’s your height?”

I had never made guesses for artillery before, but I tried it. “About four hundred feet, sir.”

“We’ll take care of it. Anything else?”

Again the thunder of Japanese fire. “Yes, sir. We need more ammunition. We’ve only eleven belts. If they attack in force, we’re sunk. And we need food, sir.”

“We’ll send the ammunition and food up as soon as we get some down here, Steve,” he said.

There was a click and silence.

Kay pushed his cap to one side. “Well, I guess you’re all taken care of now. I have to get back. I’ll pass the word to hustle up that ammunition. To-fa,” he said, and vanished over the side of the ridge.

Suddenly, one of Murphy’s BAR men dashed up. “Japs coming up again, Steve,” he said, and I saw the bush trembling about one hundred yards away.

“We’ll do it with rifle fire and grenades,” I ordered. I waited half a minute more, then yelled, “Now!” pulling the pin of my own grenade and lobbing it over.

At the same time, Kenneday’s men opened with rifle fire. The brush was peppered. There were screams and the sound of men rushing down the trail. Then a pause, and from everywhere below, the Japanese answered us with furious rifle fire. They were there in force. All that long morning we heard the shrill chatter of Japanese voices and even the clanging of their shovels and the sound of wood being sawed. They were apparently preparing some sort of defensive position.

Through the early afternoon we heard the battle orchestration from the valley—the spatter of rifle fire, the tat-a-tat of Japanese Nambu light machine guns, merging with the hoarse staccato of our machine guns and the cough of our mortars.

It was now about three o’clock. A blue haze covered the valley, at once luminous and pale, and suddenly I realized it was raining down there. But here on our little knob, our waiting army was still dry. In the hope that the rain clouds would blow over us, the boys made cups of banana leaves and placed them on the rims of the foxholes. But only the valley lay drenched and steaming, and no rain fell for us.

An hour and a half before dusk, our reinforcements arrived—ten men under Lieutenant Herbert G. Young, with three mortars and enough C-rations to go around once for every man.

Lieutenant Young, a tall, matter-of-fact virtuoso of the mortar, dropped his field telephone and announced, “Well, general, here we are. Where are your Japs?”

“I’ll show you the Japs, but let’s have some of these rations.”

We distributed them around and the men had their first food in fifty hours. After we had licked the cans clean, I turned to Lieutenant Young and waved toward the north trail.

“Listen,” I said.

Faintly, we heard the echoes of chopping and sawing.

“Okay,” he said, and he and his men swiftly set up their mortars and unloaded the miniature torpedo-like shells.

At five p.m., Lieutenant Young’s men went into action with an earsplitting cacophony of sound. The pom! pom! pom! of the mortars punctuated the hot afternoon, and it continued while the swift twilight rushed across the sky and darkness fell. Then the rain came and the temperature dropped. Somehow, despite the cold and the wet and the acute discomfort, some of us slept.

Those of us who could not sleep lay wondering. Would we be alive tomorrow? Would we get food and ammunition? If the Japanese attacked in force, could we hold them? Thank God we had got that telephone in.

My thoughts were interrupted by a new sound—the sound made by two bamboo branches struck together. Then a rustling. I glanced at my watch; a globule of rain lingered on the crystal, making the figure “3” grotesquely large. It was nearly four a.m. I crept through the cream-smooth mud to Kenneday. He was awake too. “Japs.” He formed the word with his lips. I nodded. They were down the trail, waiting for us to give ourselves away.

The night passed, and as dawn lit up our bivouac on the morning of the twenty-second, the rain stopped.

At 8:05 a.m. Sergeant Murphy suddenly raced up the trail, yelling, “Japs! Japs!” We stiffened into position, and a moment later the voice of Pfc. Steve Rider came.

“I’m hit!” he cried. A burst of Japanese fire punctuated his words.

Corporal Jeffra, standing next to me, swore under his breath. “I’ll go down after him,” he said.

I looked at him. “Go ahead,” I said.

He vanished down the north trail, and it was a long three minutes before he reappeared, helping Rider through the underbrush. Rider was limping.

“They’re out there, Steve,” he said. “A whole shebang of them.”

Blood showed faintly on his right thigh. I ripped the leg of his utility and uncovered a small black puncture. A corpsman came up on the double, examined the wound, sprinkled sulfa powder on it and covered it with a battle dressing. I sent a man to accompany him back to our own lines.

Sergeant Peter Henzi, a tall youngster with a thick black beard, who hailed from Union City, New Jersey, was in earnest conversation with Lieutenant Young a few yards away. After Rider left, he hurried over to me.

“Suppose I go down there and spot the mortar fire,” he suggested.

Tierney, still eager for a Japanese, chimed in. “I’ll go with you,” he said. There was a gleam in his eye and the lines of his jaw were hard.

I said it was all right with me. They picked up Lieutenant Young’s field phone and crawled toward the Japanese lines. I took up a careful position in my foxhole.

About fifteen minutes later, Pete’s voice came over the wire, clear and calm. “I’m hooked up and in position now, Steve,” he said. “Let’s have one on the range.” I turned to Lieutenant Young, who was directly behind me, and repeated, “Fire one round; same range—”

There was a violent, ripping explosion.

Pete’s voice came over again, “Bring it over twenty-five yards.”

Again the roar.

“Right twenty-five yards.”

Young and his men worked fast. The shell was dropped in and the men stepped aside.

Henzi’s voice, “Getting closer. Make it twenty-five again.”

This time I heard the crash of the explosion come tinnily over the wire. A moment later, Pete’s voice, “Right in there, Steve! You hit so close, Tierney got it in the hand.”

“Pull out, Pete,” I told him. “We want to lay down a concentration there.”

“Okay,” he said.

Ten minutes passed, and then we saw Tierney and Henzi coming toward us from the east trail. Tierney had been hit in the left wrist.

Now Lieutenant Young and his men were pouring a steady stream of shells into the Japanese position. Tierney refused to leave, and because he was a good man, I kept him with me. Henzi explained that he’d got within fifty feet of the Japanese and our shells then almost grazed their heads as they came over.

Above the burst of our fire, the Japanese machine guns sounded. The screaming commands of the Japanese officers came faintly to our ears. It was a hot, steady exchange. Presently, the firing died down to a few ragged rifle shots.

Kenneday climbed out of his foxhole. There wasn’t much ammunition left, he said. I rang up Colonel de Zayas and asked again for ammunition. As I spoke, the Japanese snipers began pinging. The men stared watchfully from their foxholes. They showed the effects of twenty-two days on Bougainville. They were dirty, bearded and hollow-eyed. Those who were too weary to sit or lie down stood about; sorry figures, their arms hanging limply, their shoulders drooping. They expressed fatigue in every limb.

Shortly after noon, the sniping died down. And with the heat, the air brought us the sickening odor of Japanese bodies—those who had been killed in the first attack during our first few hours on the ridge. By mid-afternoon, it was almost nauseating.

Finally, Kenneday said, “I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going down and see what I can do about those dead Japs.”

He was back shortly, his clothes reeking. He shook his head ruefully.

“I feel like a morgue keeper,” he said. “Give me some hunks of wire.”

He went back with six men, and when he returned the second time, he was white under his stubble of black beard.

“They’re spread all over the place,” he said. “They must have walked right into our fire.”

He and his patrol had carefully examined the Japanese graveyard. They found machine guns ripped apart by shrapnel. The Japanese were coming up the ridge to make a stand. Some of them apparently were trying to put their guns in place not only on the ridge but in trees. Had they succeeded, their troops could have advanced under a sheltering umbrella of their fire, and our situation would have been perilous.

Kenneday and his men used the wire to drag some of the bodies into a large foxhole and used that as a common grave. They’d found a small black book with a tan paper cover, post cards with nature scenes, and photographs of Japanese pin-up girls.

Kenneday produced what appeared to be a mechanical pencil. “Look at this,” he said. “I was going to open it, but I figured it might be a booby trap.”

We decided that the wisest thing was to send everything down to the Intelligence officers behind our lines. It was a good idea. We learned later that the pencil contained sufficient explosives to blow up a squad of men.

Before dawn we had reinforcements, drifting in by twos and threes. I spread them along the crest of the ridge, closing the gaps in our defensive line. They hadn’t come a minute too soon. The Japanese attacked with knee mortars and artillery fire. It was a full-scale offensive, with Japanese infantry advancing steadily toward us in the face of everything we could hurl at them. Our guns never paused for breath. Shell after shell whistled over, moaning and crashing across the ridge, while we crouched below, pinned under a murderous crossfire. The brassy cordite was bitter in our mouths. Discretion was the better part of valor, I decided, and grabbed the phone. “CP! CP!”

A voice answered.

I shouted, “Tell the colonel to raise the elevation fifty feet, will you? Listen to it!”

A shell roared overhead. I held up the phone, so that the shell’s wine wailed into the mouthpiece.

There was a quick “Okay, fella,” from the other end. “We’ll take care of it.”

All that night, I was constantly on the phone, directing the fire. The shelling ceased at dawn. At nine o’clock, the phone rang.

It was Colonel de Zayas. “Can you move in fifteen minutes?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “At ten a.m., your mortars and A Company’s mortars will lay a five-minute concentration on the Japs’ strong point at the base of the ridge. At ten-five, your platoon will attack down the east trail and move along the base of the ridge and join A Company.” He paused, and then he added, “Steve, if it gets too hot, pull out. Don’t lose too many boys. Pull back to the ridge. We need you and your men tomorrow when we hit the Piva River.”

I hung up and looked about for Lieutenant Young. He was examining one of his mortars. “How much stuff you got?” I asked.

“About nineteen rounds,” he said. “What’s the scoop?”

“We’ve got to start moving,” I said. “They want us to attack the Japs at the base. We’ve only got thirteen minutes left.”

I outlined the plan of attack swiftly. The men gathered around, listening quietly. I singled out Mitchum, told him to build up a firing line and spot targets while we moved down. “Pass the word along, so the men know exactly what we’re doing.”

Then we went over the side and down, crawling through thick vegetation, smelling the Japanese dead before we saw them. The signs of our artillery shelling were everywhere. Finally, we reached a point of vantage. At the stroke of ten o’clock, we heard the first mortar roar down below us. Again and again, our shells hit the Japanese position. I counted them—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Lieutenant Young had no more shells. It was now 10:18. Company A’s mortars had not yet opened fire. For a moment, I hesitated. If we went down, we might be caught in A’s fire. Thirty seconds passed. No fire. We had to advance. We moved on cautiously, made about forty yards, and then the Japanese struck, just as I gained the protection of a large banyan tree. I huddled at its base as Japanese rifle and machine gun fire from what we later learned were scores of machine gun nests buried in tangled banyan roots, raked the trees over our heads.

To my left, a huge fellow so quiet that he was hardly ever noticed, gasped and moaned, and seemed to fold up. Mitchum, to my right, started to crawl toward him. I gauged the distance to the wounded man. I was about ten feet away, but that area was almost completely denuded by shellfire. He was on one side of a square clearing, and the three of us, Mitchum, Mathews and myself, began to converge on him from the three other sides. Japanese lead spattered all about us. He slowly began dragging himself back up the ridge, his right thigh a mass of bloody flesh. A Japanese machine gun burst had nearly ripped off his leg. He made no sound, but under the grime and perspiration, his face was white as chalk. As he pulled himself along, he left a red trail on the matted jungle floor. Painfully, he began to crawl across the edge of the clearing less than four feet from me, when another machine gun burst sounded above the sharp snapping of rifle fire. He was caught directly in the chest. He slumped over and lay still. Mitchum stared at me, and I shook my head helplessly. Mathews stopped and said nothing.

A Nambu light machine gun suddenly chattered alarmingly near. The Japanese had succeeded in getting one of their guns up into a tree, and were spraying us. The bullets grazed our heads. We’d have to pull out. I crawled to Mitchum, who was working his gun furiously.

“Mitch—” I began, and he uttered a sharp cry.

“I’m hit!” Blood poured from a wound in his wrist.

“Get back to the ridge,” I said. Mathews now sat like an avenging Buddha with his BAR, waiting for a Japanese burst from one of the trees.

We had to get back up the ridge. The wounded had to be brought up. I had to cross that clearing. I said to myself, Steve, perhaps your number’s up now, and with that I rose and leaped across it. Bullets kicked up the earth before and behind me in that endless second, but I fell unhurt at Mathews’ side.

“Get back,” I said. “Get away from this clearing.”

Another burst of gunfire. Mathews grunted. He rolled over on his back for an instant, the breast of his utility torn and bloody, and on his face was a look of surprise. His body remained in that curious position for a moment.

“Are you hit, boy?” I shouted. “Are you hit?”

His body began rolling over and over down the steep slope. And as it rolled, Japanese fire riddled it as though it were a cloth dummy rolling down a hill and this was rifle practice.

Rage rose in me. I wanted to charge screaming down the hill, firing my rifle until it could fire no more. I wanted to kill Japanese, to plunge my knife into their bodies, to strangle them with my bare hands. My face was covered with grime, perspiration burned in my eyes, my nostrils smarted with the acrid fumes of gunpowder. A hand touched mine. It was Pfc. Charles M. Skinner, of Franklin, Ohio, a BAR man, and while the rest of us worked our way upward, Skinner sat with his BAR, keeping the barrel of his gun hot as he covered our retreat. He deliberately drew the Japanese fire upon himself.

To the first man I saw above, I said, “Send word back to get three BAR men down here, so we can get our wounded.”

The BAR men came. They sat up, guns to their shoulders, and fired. The first gun jammed. So did the second. The two men swore.

The third was Arkansas Rowe, a tall, gangling Westerner with a wad of tobacco in his cheek.

“Give it a try!” I said. “Spray ’em!”

Rowe squinted into the jungle, twisted his face to one side, let go a stream of yellow tobacco juice, and aimed. His BAR chattered and stopped.

He turned around, cool as ice. “I didn’t think this damn thing was going to work either,” be drawled, and returned to his firing. Under his protection, our men began to crawl back up the slope. But Mitchum was still down there.

I sent word up for a machine gun crew, and Sergeant Murphy showed up, dragging his weapon after him.

“Keep up a steady fire,” I said. “We’re going to try to reach Mitchum.” Then we set off, but, after a few yards, came upon Pfc. Jacob Solomon, helping a bloody figure stagger along. It was Skinner, and he was badly hurt, his eyes glassy.

Solomon, scarcely able to walk himself, managed to gasp, “I found this guy firing even after the Japs got him. They hit him in the leg and one of the bullets went up the back of his helmet, made a circle right around his scalp, and then fell out.”

I helped carry Skinner up to the crest, and there we laid him down. He needed plasma. Solomon left without a word to bring back Mitchum, going down the slope in the face of Japanese fire. I knelt beside Skinner. He was breathing hard. His face was pale. His hair was plastered against his forehead.

A corpsman hurried over, ripped off Skinner’s pants leg and sprinkled sulfa into the gaping wound. He dressed it swiftly. Then he raised Skinner’s head and gently removed his helmet. Sure enough, there was a bloody, telltale crease about the boy’s head, cut cleanly by the bullet.

I took Skinner’s hand; it was cold and clammy. He was trying to whisper. I leaned over to catch his words. “I’m sorry, Steve,” he was saying. “I tell you, I couldn’t help it. Damn, I’m sorry I couldn’t do better.”

All I could say was, “You did a great job down there, fella! A real job!”

Now Solomon was back with Mitchum, who lay gasping, weak from loss of blood. But he managed to say, “I’m okay, Steve.”

The runner came, out of breath, with the plasma. As it flowed into Skinner’s veins, life seemed to creep back into his body. He smiled weakly when one of the men leaned down to wipe the perspiration from his face, and when a corpsman came up with a bottle of brandy, which he put to Skinner’s lips, Skinner swallowed a few drops and even managed a feeble joke.

“That’s swell,” he whispered, licking his lips. “Let’s have more of that medicine.”

Two corpsmen placed him carefully in a stretcher and set off with him toward our lines. I found my foxhole and slid back into it. Kenneday wandered over. He offered me a cigarette from a dirty pack. It had been rain-soaked and now the cigarettes were dry and brittle. I inhaled deeply.

“Guess we’ll be relieved this afternoon,” he said.

“I hope so,” I said.

We smoked in silence. The firing had died down, save for the occasional snap of a sniper’s rifle. We seemed all right. With our reinforcements, the Japanese would have a tough fight to dislodge us.

In mid-afternoon, the phone rang. It was Colonel de Zayas.

“All right, Steve,” he said. “Move your men back down here. We want you in tomorrow’s attack.”

I gathered my men together and we moved off the ridge the way we had come. The men who followed me in single file were shaky scarecrows, fouled with mud, stained with sweat and gunpowder, their eyes sunken from lack of sleep, their skin showing through their tattered utilities. We climbed down almost as circumspectly as we had climbed up, and finally reached the original trail. Someone was coming up it. It was The Fox. He held a short bowie knife in his hand.

“Hi, ya,” he said. “Congratulations. You boys did a swell job.” I felt a strong hand clasp mine. “Here,” said The Fox. “This is for you.” He gave me the knife.

I looked at it, then at him. “What’s this for?”

He pointed to the handle. He’d carved on it, “From The Fox to Steve.”

“Hell,” he said, “maybe you can use it.”

Members of a patrol crossing a river on Bougainville. The bamboo poles on the right in the river form a fish trap.

Firing a mortar located on one side of a bitterly contested hill at Japanese positions on the other side of the hill. The mortar is a 60mm M2 on Mount M2.