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Show Yanks Had to Blast Japs Out of Holes On Marshalls Doughboys of the Seventh infantry division who captured Kwajalein and other islands of the Kwajalein atoll during the invasion of the Marshall Mar-shall islands literally had to dig the Japanese out of the ground. Col. Syril E. Faine, infantry, of New Straitsville, Ohio, who is now in the United States, acted as deputy chief of staff of the division during the six-day six-day campaign. He said" the Japanese Japa-nese defenders of the mid-Pacific coral base had taken refuge in hundreds hun-dreds of shell craters by the time the first waves of infantry hit the shore on January 31 (February 1, Pacific time). "It was just like killing rats," he declared. "The whole island was rubble, after the preliminary bombing bomb-ing and shelling. The Japs had crawled underground wherever they could, and the infantrymen had to stop at every hole and fire down into it, or throw grenades into it." Playing Possum. The Japanese were up to their usual nasty tricks, went on Colonel Faine. Even after they were hopelessly hope-lessly defeated, they refused to give up. At one point in the action, an American aid station was established estab-lished close to a pile of three apparently ap-parently dead Japs. Only two of them, it turned out, were really dead. The third, at the bottom of the heap, pulled himself up after playing possum for a long time and fired one ineffectual shot at an American officer. Other Japs blew themselves up with grenades. The landing on the Marshalls, Colonel Faine said, was preceded by one of the most intensive bombardments bom-bardments of the war. Both army and navy planes participated, and later, warships pounded the Jap defenses. de-fenses. "One airstrip on the Wotje atoll was so chopped up," Colonel Faine said, "that not only couldn't the Japs get a plane off it, but you couldn't even have run a wheelbarrow wheelbar-row along it." Amphibious Warfare. The aerial hammering kept up as the invasion armada, containing more ships than there were in our whole navy at the start of the war, swept over the horizon. As the landings started, Seventh division infantrymen in-fantrymen who had received special amphibious training drove their own "alligators" and "ducks" toward shore, and later ferried supplies back and forth from the mother ships. The doughboys had relatively easy going when they first hit the beaches advancing 1,300 yards on the first day. On the second day, they began to run into lines of pillboxes, against which they advanced with combat engineers right behind them. With flamethrowers, grenades, and other weapons, the infantrymen calmly cleaned out each pillbox as they got to it. The engineers used 400 tons of dynamite on two islands alone, levelling everything on them. |