Shadows In the Jungle by Larry Alexander Page A

school’s number-two-ranked football team. Barnes had come to the Scouts from the 32nd Division, where he had been on special assignment to train intelligence and reconnaissance platoons for the 127th Regiment.
    The mission Bradshaw had been handed was actually the second one to come the Scouts’ way. The first, a four-day reconnaissance of the Marakum area fifteen miles east of Bogadjim on New Guinea’s northern coast, had been assigned to McGowen, but then was scrubbed.
    This one would not be. The Scouts were to perform a reconnaissance mission on Los Negros Island, a prelude to MacArthur’s planned retaking of the Bismarck Archipelago and final isolation of the huge Japanese naval base at Rabaul on New Britain, 390 air miles to the southeast.
    Part of MacArthur’s plan for seizing and neutralizing both the Bismarck Archipelago and the northern coast of Dutch New Guinea as far west as the Sepik River called for Krueger’s 6th Army to capture the Admiralty Islands, off the northwest coast of New Guinea.
    Earlier in 1944, MacArthur’s forces had taken key areas along New Guinea’s northern coast from troops of Gen. Hatazo Adachi’s 18th Army, sealing off the Vitiaz Strait between New Guinea and New Britain, and blocking Japanese access to the Bismarck Sea.
    Farther to the east Adm. William F. Halsey’s naval forces, moving up from the Solomons, sailed to within 125 miles of Rabaul. There, Grumman Hellcats and Dauntless dive-bombers from his powerful carrier strike force plastered the Japanese with a series of relentless air attacks.
    Orders for MacArthur’s planned leap at the Admiralties, code-named Brewer, were cut on November 23, 1943, with D-day tentatively set for April 1.
    Initially Dutch, the Admiralty Islands were discovered in 1615 by Capt. William Schouten, but became part of German New Guinea in 1848 when the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia divided up control of New Guinea. In 1918, as Germany was being stripped of her overseas holdings under the Treaty of Versailles following the First World War, the islands passed to Australian control, which was how things stood until the Japanese arrived in early 1942.
    The Admiralties consist of 160 islands, with the two principal ones being Manus to the west and Los Negros to the east. The two are separated by a narrow, shallow strait that is navigable only by native canoes and small boats.
    The northern coastlines of Manus and Los Negros, combined with the curving shores of the lesser islands, form a U shape. In the middle of this U is Seeadler Harbor, which, at twenty miles long, six miles wide, and 120 feet deep—accessible through a channel that cuts between the islands of Ndrilo and Huawei—is one of the finest anchorages in the Pacific.
    Manus, the largest island at forty-nine miles long and sixteen wide, is cut by a rugged mountain range running its length to a height of 2,355 feet. The soil of Manus and Los Negros is a reddish clay, traversed by many fordable streams that are prone to flash flooding. Coastal plains are bounded by mangrove swamps, while the interior of the islands are thick jungle. The entire area sweats under a climate that is hot and humid, and frequent heavy rains turn the clay into a sticky substance the natives call gumbo. In 1944, about thirteen thousand natives, mostly Melanesian with Micronesian blood, inhabited the islands.
    * * *
    The first mission selected for the Alamo Scouts was to be a one-week reconnaissance of the western portion of Manus, with a team of Scouts rowing ashore from a submarine. This plan was soon cut back to a four-day patrol of New Guinea’s Marakum area, with insertion to be by PT boat. In approving this revision on February 21, Krueger’s chief of staff wrote, “This should be a good test for Scouts and should prove of value to them.”
    Plans changed again three days later, just before the mission was to commence. MacArthur moved Operation