Operation Cleanslate: Richard Tregaskis in the Russell Islands

 As the last of the exhausted and starving Japanese troops evacuated Guadalcanal in early February 1943, Richard Tregaskis, a correspondent with the International News Service who had reported on the action with the U.S. Marines during their first seven weeks on the island, prepared for another trip onboard a naval task force—this one aimed at the Russell Islands, codenamed Operation Cleanslate. American military officials planned to strike another target, New Georgia, in the future, and the capture of the two large islands in the Russells, Banika and Pavuvu, would provide the necessary space for supporting airfields and naval bases on islands best known to many for the coconuts harvested by its approximately 350 inhabitants for plantations owned by the Lever Brothers.

The islands in the Russells had been described by those who had visited as a land of “rain, mud, and magnificent coconuts.” Still, at least Banika Island seemed an appropriate location for American forces to construct the facilities needed to support future operations, as reports indicated that it had such positives as “well-drained shore areas, deep water, protected harbors, and lack of malaria.”

As he had before for the Guadalcanal operation, Tregaskis sailed with the master of amphibious warfare, Admiral Richmond K. Turner. Although Turner, the commander of Task Force 61, expected limited opposition on the ground, he warned the correspondent that the Japanese would do all they could to strike the American forces with numerous air raids once they had landed at the Russells and started setting up bases there. “Those b------- are going to react and do a lot of bombing here,” Turner prophesized. “There’s no doubt about that.” The admiral also worried about a response by the Japanese navy against the limited forces at his disposal—destroyers, fast transports, minesweepers, and motor torpedo boats. Jack Rice, an Associated Press photographer who accompanied Tregaskis on the expedition, had the same fears as the admiral. Rice had experience being under enemy bombing, and said he planned, once on solid ground, to dig a foxhole and “pull the top in after me.”

Major General John H. Hester, the commander of the U.S. Army’s Forty-Third Infantry Division, tasked with taking the Russells, was confident that his men would be successful whatever opposition they faced. Although his soldiers had yet to experience combat, they had trained hard and appeared eager to get into action. Hester said about twenty-five men had broken out of the hospital when they heard the outfit was getting ready for the Russell offensive. “It cured ’em,” the general informed Tregaskis. “There were a couple, though, who had appendicitis. It didn’t do anything for THEM.”

Ambling about the deck of his ship before the February 21 landing, Tregaskis had the opportunity to compare the soldiers of the Forty-Third with the marines he had come to know on Guadalcanal. In general, he noted, the soldiers were much more varied in appearance and age than the marines (one from Pittsburgh was reputed to be forty-four years old), which he expected, as about half of the army troops were draftees (the marines had all been volunteers). 

An officer said that the men in the division represented every state in the Union, but that most came from Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont, along with Mississippi and Georgia and Swedes from Minnesota. A former automobile mechanic from Mississippi told Tregaskis he thought that the outfit was glad to finally end its training and finally see some action, with most of the soldiers feeling as he did—the job had to be done and the sooner it was the sooner they all could return home to their families. “These people were not as wild or youthful or exuberant as the Marines,” Tregaskis said. There was grousing from some involved in the operation, conceived by Turner and grudgingly approved by Halsey, who had told Turner, “go ahead, as some kind of action is better than none.”

One of the engineers, responsible for constructing the facilities on the Russells, complained to Tregaskis that those in charge “just put an X on the map and want us to build a base there. They never stop to think about terrain or anything like that.” The correspondent attributed the nitpicking he heard to the usual “beefing that you find anywhere in normal military or naval circles.” The army men passed the time shipboard in similar ways to what the marines had done on their way to Guadalcanal, Tregaskis remembered—playing cards, reading books and magazines, writing letters to loved ones, sharing photographs of their sweethearts, cleaning their weapons, and painstakingly reviewing their orders. Plans called for three simultaneous landings—on the north end of Pavuvu Island’s Pepesala Bay (a task to be handled by the 800 men of the Third Marine Raider Battalion), on the east coast of Banika Island’s Renard Sound, and on the southwest coast of Banika Island’s Wernham Cove.  

Whatever tension there may have been about the impending action lessened when a reconnaissance team of six American and Australian officers that had explored the area before the February 21 invasion found no Japanese troops on any of the islands except for a dead fighter pilot lying beside his crashed Zero. On Bycee (also called Baisen) Island at the northern edge of the Russells the officers did find evidence of a recent large concentration of Japanese, estimating that anywhere from 500 to 1,000 had established a camp and started work on a base. “But now all the enemy were gone,” Tregaskis reported. “The Japs had left large stores of supplies, including rifles, ammunition and medical items, behind them. They had evidently gone in a hurry, for even such items as packs and helmets were abandoned.” Still, the Japanese did not let the operation go completely unchallenged.

On the evening of February 17 a convoy of transports and escorting warships heading to the staging point for the invasion came under attack by a group of twelve to fourteen enemy torpedo planes. A naval officer who experienced the attack, Commander Charles O. Camp of Omaha, Nebraska, told Tregaskis that he could see one of the Japanese came right at his ship and it seemed like a long time before the ship’s gunners hit and destroyed the enemy. “I found myself squeezing, saying to myself, ‘I hope they hit him pretty soon.’ Finally, he burst into flame and there was a splatter of fire when he hit the water.”

The other torpedo planes made their attack runs at intervals of about four or five minutes, Camp added. “Our destroyer screen would pick them up and shoot at them and then the transports would join in,” the officer recalled. “It was like the Fourth of July. At one time there were five patches of flame on the water when the planes hit. As they struck the water in flames the planes looked like a mess of burning pieces. The ships kept turning to avoid the torpedoes and the attack was over in about 15 minutes. We had been unhit.”

In the days leading up to the February 21 landings, Hester and Turner were busy reviewing plans with their officers. Tregaskis recalled there were numerous last-minute changes and “an infinity of details” to be cared for. Turner’s headquarters thronged with high-ranking army and naval officers—admirals, generals, colonels, and commanders. “That’s the most gold braid I ever did see in one place,” a solider observed to Tregaskis. On the rainy night before the landing, soldiers had to jockey for space to sleep on deck. “The destroyers which formed a large part of our fleet had barely enough space below for their own crews,” Tregaskis recalled. “And in the large troop-carrying lighters which spread around the destroyers and auxiliary transports like ducklings around their parents, there was no hope of cover. The boats were open to the weather.”

On the destroyer to which he was assigned, the correspondent noted that the troops had no shelter except for the scanty cover of torpedo tubes and gun mounts, and these spaces were crowded “by a fortunate few.” Although reconnaissance had shown that there would probably not be any ground resistance in the Russells, some onboard, he noted, were sure that before the morning was over “we would be bombed: that the Japs might tackle our ships as they were unloading their cargoes of men, and our landing boats as they were striking for the shore; or at least, that we would be intensively bombed after we had landed.” Tregaskis overheard one of the soldiers holding forth to that effect in conversation with a circle of his friends and sailors. He asked them an unanswerable, it seemed, question about bombs being unleashed on them: “When you see the son of b------ comin’ right at you, what the f--- you gonna do, where the f--- you gonna go?”

No enemy projectiles fell on Tregaskis and the members of the Forty-Third Division the morning of the invasion. Because no Japanese had been unearthed, there was no need for a preliminary bombardment, and the ships’ guns were silent. The soldiers had calm weather, which made for an orderly landing—except for, that is, the landing barge, on which Tregaskis traveled, which had some trouble at Wernham Cove at the southern end of Banika. “We had thought our boat would be one of the first ashore,” he remembered. “But we soon changed our minds: suddenly our craft thudded against a coral reef, and bumped its way solidly aground. The soldiers looked silently over the side, watching the schools of small, bright blue fish daring amongst the vari-colored coral formations.”

Tregaskis noted that when one of the men asked their officer, Lieutenant Jackson S. King of Colusa, California, what they should do if the Japanese suddenly showed up, he had a straightforward solution: “We’d just dive in and try to swim for shore.” The craft’s skipper, Bosun Charles T. Howard, directed a mass movement to the stern and port side and, finally, the weight shifted, the engine churned furiously, and the boat began to “shudder its way off the reef.” It finally reached the beach, its ramp clanked down “like a medieval drawbridge, and our troops poured out,” reported Tregaskis.

All along the edge of a coconut grove Tregaskis could see the “tangled impediments and bustling crowd of the typical landing. There were piles of blue, soggy barracks bags, rifles stacked and in piles, wooden boxes of small arms ammunition and the black cardboard cloverleaf cases of artillery shells in great dumps.” At the water’s edge he could see additional landing boats running ashore and disgorging their troops, as well as soldiers rolling loaded trucks down the ramps of huge landing barges. “Platoons and companies were forming up and setting out up the hill to reconnoiter neighboring woods,” he said. All of this would have made a perfect target for Japanese bombing, but the enemy “literally ‘missed the boat,’” Tregaskis recalled. “Either they were intimidated or unaware of our operation.”

Wandering over to a nearby plantation house, Tregaskis came across a coastwatcher, Lieutenant Allan Campbell of Sydney, Australia, who sat calmly on the porch and looked out over the peaceful green lawn rimmed with frangipani trees and hibiscus bushes bearing crimson flowers. Campbell had been in the Russells for the last three months, reporting to U.S. headquarters by radio about Japanese ship and troop movements in the islands. “A dangerous job,” said Tregaskis, who asked Campbell if he had any close calls with the enemy. “Yes, they’ve been about,” Campbell said. He had seen them on the other side of the island, wandering about, but they had fled from the Russells the day after American forces had mopped up on Guadalcanal. The Australian officer noted that the Japanese had counted on building an air base in the Russells and having another crack at dislodging U.S. forces from Guadalcanal. Another coastwatcher joined the duo on the porch and asked Tregaskis if he would like a cup of tea. “It was an unexpectedly polite welcome to this island where we had expected a hot reception from Jap aircraft,” the correspondent said.

Later that afternoon, Tregaskis trudged for miles over a rough trail, stumbling constantly over coral extrusions, to reach the camp where he would be sleeping. He, Rice, and a handful of army officers struggled a bit to set up a tent to shelter them for the evening, but eventually succeeded. “Marvel of marvels,” said Tregaskis, “we had folding cots too and did not have to sleep on the ground. Which was well because in the night the rain began to pour down and kept on pouring.” Before they went to sleep, those staying in the tent made sure to pick out a nearby gully where they could seek shelter if, “as we expected,” Tregaskis said, “the Jap bombers came over during the night. But they did not come.”

With the landings a success, Tregaskis spent the next few days, accompanied by Rice, traveling the waters around the Russells, including checking in with the Third Marine Raider Battalion, which had been responsible for seizing Pavuvu Island. En route Tregaskis used his swimming prowess to investigate a downed Japanese Zero lying on a coral bank in shallow water about ten feet down. As everywhere else in the islands, the water was crystal clear, and he could see the plane’s markings and the bullet holes in its wings as he peered down from his boat above. “I dived in and swam about the cockpit and around the tail of the of the plane. The cockpit was intact, untouched by bullets,” he reported. Evidently the Zero had been struck in its engine or lubrication system and had made a forced landing—an observation Tregaskis later verified with occupants of a nearby village. According to their account, the Japanese aviator had survived, been captured by Australian coastwatchers, and sent on to the Americans on Guadalcanal.

Upon reaching Pavuvu, Tregaskis met with the men and officers of the Marine Raiders. Although the Raiders had discovered no traces of the enemy on Pavuvu, on the nearby Bycee Island they had uncovered the remnants of a Japanese camp. “There were shelter caves dug under plantation house, there, and machine gun positions, more than 100 drums of fuel oil, and some foodstuffs,” Tregaskis learned, along with medical supplies, machine-gun ammunition, and hand grenades. One of the unusual items they unearthed was a bottled, honey-tasting liquid. “It seemed like concentrated food to me,” Lieutenant Murray Ehrlich of San Diego, California, said to the correspondent. “It’s quite palatable when take with something else and washed down with a hot drink. It tastes like mineral oil with a very sweet flavor.”

While his traveling companions left to check on the items left on Bycee, Tregaskis stayed behind with the Raiders on Pavuvu to “work furiously” on a typewriter. “I was anxious to get some copy aboard ships which were leaving in the afternoon,” he noted. Tregaskis’s party had a pleasant return trip to Banika, but had a rocky night, as the camp was “full of disturbing shadows and misgivings. It seemed weird that the Japs had not yet attacked.” Sentries were on edge and were quick to call out “Halt!” if they heard or saw any movement in the jungle, Tregaskis recalled. “We had an alert in the middle of the night, but no planes showed up,” he said. Rain did appear, however, falling hard enough to flood the earthen floor of Tregaskis’s tent.

On the afternoon of February 25, it seemed as if the attack everyone had feared had finally happened. Two signalmen came running into Hester’s headquarters clad only in trousers. They told everyone that their group had been fighting with a Japanese patrol in the jungle, and they had abandoned their position when they feared they might be surrounded. Officers scrambled to organize a platoon to send out, with the expectation, Tregaskis noted, that a pitched battle would be joined. The correspondent joined the soldiers as they marched off, with the remaining troops yelling “Give ’em hell boys!” as a farewell as they shoved off on a landing boat for the rescue mission. “We were ready, and had made the same grim mental adjustment for a fight which would have been necessary if we had actually run into one; but the Japs turned out to be phantoms,” Tregaskis said. “We found, on landing, only a badly scared signal company and some croaking bullfrogs in the thick jungle; nary a Jap, as yet.”