How 190 Australians Held Off A Japanese Battalion For 38 Hours While Cut Off And Surrounded

The reef caught the first landing craft at about quarter past four in the morning. The bow scraped,  then stopped. The men inside were pitched forward against the ramp. Outside, the dark water of Empress Augusta Bay was  slack between tides, and the coral shelf they did not know existed sat about 25 m short of the beach. The second craft  hit.

The third hit. Only the fourth made it close enough to drop its ramp on sand. Three of the four had stranded on a reef the planners had not put on the map. This is the story of what happened next, of 190 Australians from a Queensland militia battalion  who waded ashore on the wrong part of the beach in the dark, and discovered, as the sky began to pale, that they could not bring their heavy weapons off the boats,  of a reinforced company of country lads from Townsville and Cairns and the Atherton

Tablelands who held a small perimeter for 38 hours against a Japanese force that grew from 100 men to 500, and of a single  beached landing craft half full of seawater with 38 men inside it waiting through one of the longest nights of the war for the boats to  come back. It begins 12 hours earlier.

Hour minus 12. The 7th of June, 1945. The Soraken Peninsula on the northwest coast of Bougainville. In a briefing tent set back  from the beach, Captain Henry Clyde Downs stood over a map. He was already a known man in his battalion. Five months earlier, during the fighting along the Genga River, his A Company had cleared a ridge  that the Australians had ever after called Downs Ridge in his honor.

 He was the kind of officer the militia produced when it produced  its best. Steady, direct, not given to oratory. The men of A Company, 31st/51st Infantry Battalion, called him by his  rank and meant it. The plan was laid out on the map in chinagraph pencil. The Japanese  held the Boni’s Peninsula in strength.

About 2,000 naval troops were dug in along its base in five battalions, supported by mortars and mountain guns, fighting from prepared positions in jungle so thick a man could pass within 10 yd of a bunker  and not see it. For weeks, the 11th Brigade had been pushing north along a line called the Ratsua Front, and for weeks the line had moved barely 100 yd at a time.

 The three Australian battalions in the Brigade, the 26th, the 55th/53rd, and the 31st/51st, were each down to about half strength. Brigadier John Stevenson, the Brigade Commander, needed to break the deadlock. The plan was to outflank it from the sea. A reinforced company of the 31st/51st would land at night near the jetties at Porton Plantation, 3 mi north of the Ratsua line.

 They would dig in on the beach, secure a perimeter, and wait. From the south, the rest of the 31st/51st and the 26th Battalion would push hard against the Japanese front. The Japanese, caught between the hammer and the anvil, would have to break.  The flanking force was to be A Company with a platoon from C Company attached, and Downs in command.

 190 men, six landing craft from the 42nd Assault Landing Craft Company,  supporting arms, a section of engineers from the 16th Field Company, a detachment from the 19th Field Ambulance, men from the 223rd Supply Platoon to handle the ration dump, and the gunners of the 11th and 12th batteries of the 4th Field Regiment  standing by on the Sarakan Peninsula with their 25-pounders ranged onto the landing beach  in advance.

 The second mountain battery would also be on call. There was no allotted air cover for the landing itself. Two core headquarters had reviewed the request and decided  that the targets identified by aerial reconnaissance were not, in the bland phrase that came back, suitable air targets. Air support could be summoned once they were ashore, but the landing itself would be made in darkness without softening fire on a beach that aerial photographs had shown to contain Japanese fortifications.

 Downs ran through it for his officers. The map showed the beach as a clear shelving sand approach.  There was no marked reef. He did not know it then, and the men in the briefing tent did not know it. But the chart was wrong. A coral shelf ran along the front of the beach about 25 m out from the high water mark,  and at low tide it would sit just below the surface invisible from the deck of an approaching landing craft.

 The Australians would learn of its existence by hitting it. Outside the tent, the light was failing. The men cleaned weapons. They were told to drink as much water as they could hold before they boarded because once they were ashore, each man would have only what was on his belt.  They drew grenades.

 They drew bandoliers of .303. Some wrote letters they did not bother  to seal. The senior NCOs walked the lines and checked rifles. A few of the older soldiers who had been at Simba Ridge could be heard quietly telling the newer men to keep their heads down and listen to the section leaders. Across the strait,  the dark line of the Bunas Peninsula sat under the last red strip of evening cloud.

The boats began to load at dusk. Hour zero. The night of the 8th of June, the six landing craft left Soraken in line astern with the throb of their diesels muffled and their navigation lights doused. The sea was calm. The pilots ran in close to the dark shore watching for the white line of surf that should mark the beach.

 The leading craft cut its engines back. The bow rose slightly as the water shallowed, and then, at about 4:15 in the morning, it stopped. The reef. The pilot reversed his engines. The hull ground against coral and did not move. Behind him,  the second craft was already committed and could not stop in time. It hit, too. Then the third.

Three of the four lead craft had run aground 25 m short of the beach. One of the support craft, further out, was still afloat and waiting its turn. Only one of the four leading boats made it onto sand. For a few seconds, the bay was completely silent. Then the order to debark came down the boats in low voices.

  The ramps dropped. The men jumped into chest-deep water with rifles held high and waded for the beach. There was no fire from the dark line of trees ahead. The shock troops moved through the surf in a long ragged line. Section commanders positions in undertones. Boots found the wet sand at the high water mark.

 The first Australians went down into the prone position and pointed their Bren’s at the tree line. The beach, against every reasonable expectation, was unopposed. But the heavy gear was still on the boats, the vehicles, the trailers, the larger mortars, much of the ammunition reserve, the engineering stores, all of it was stowed in the holds of the three stranded craft, 25 m offshore on the wrong side of a reef.

Some of the men formed working parties and began to carry what they could through the chest-deep water by hand. The ammunition came off in boxes balanced on shoulders.  The wounded gear, the heavier weapons, the radios that had taken the spray, the ration crates that had floated free, came off in pieces.

  By the time the eastern sky began to gray, the company was on the beach, but its punch was not. The Brens were ashore. The mortars, most of them, were not. The reserve ammunition was perhaps a third of what had been loaded. Downs walked the perimeter at first light and laid it out. The position was small, a shallow arc of jungle perhaps 150 yd across and 70 yd deep, sitting  between the beach and the inland scrub. The Brens went onto the flanks.

The riflemen dug in along the inland edge. The wounded aid post and the company command post were sighted in a hollow at the center. There was no high ground. There were no natural barriers. There was only the sand at their backs and the jungle in front of them. And Downs knew before the sun cleared the horizon that they were going to be there for a while.

Hour six. Dawn on the 9th of June, the first Japanese probes came in just after first light. The Japanese commander on the Bonis Peninsula, a naval officer named Kato, had been told of the landing within an hour of its happening. He moved fast. By the time Downs had finished walking his perimeter,  Kato had already concentrated a force of about 100 men in the bush opposite the beach.

 He had positioned them quickly and well, and he was bringing more. Trucks were already on the move from the Buka Passage area, 15 mi to the north, carrying naval infantry from his reserve battalions. Barges  were running south down the coast. By midday, the force around the Australian perimeter would be 300 strong. By the next day,  it would be approaching 500.

 The first contact was a probe by a small Japanese patrol. Three or four men came carefully through the trees on the south flank. They fired a few rounds, drew an immediate response from one of the Brens,  and pulled back into cover. A few minutes later, another probe came in from the north. B The Australians held their fire until the Japanese were close enough to see  clearly, then opened up.

 A Japanese soldier fell. The rest pulled back. From his command post in the central hollow, Downs sent the radio man the first situation report of the day. The radio worked, just. The wet had got into it  during the wade in from the stranded craft. For an hour the firing was sporadic, then it changed character.

The Japanese  began to feel along the perimeter for a soft spot, throwing in section strength attacks from different points one after another, watching where the return fire was thinnest. Downs walked the line and shifted men.  He moved a Bren from the southern arc to the eastern arc to cover where one of his sections had been engaged for 10  minutes and was getting low on belts.

 He told the company sergeant major to start an ammunition count. The first count came back lower than anyone had hoped. They were going to have to make every round matter. Out on the water, the support craft that had not grounded was trying to come in. Two more landing craft had been dispatched from Saraken with reinforcements and supplies.

  The Japanese had read the situation, too. Kato had pushed machine gun teams forward along the flanks of the beach and the tide was at its lowest of the morning. The first resupply craft made its run, took heavy fire from both shoulders of the beach and could not put its bow down on the sand. It pulled out. A second craft arrived an hour later.

 It also could not get in. Kato’s men had preempted the approaches. The Australians on the beach watched the boats withdraw and understood, without needing to be told, that nothing was coming in from the sea today. To the south,  the relief force was moving. The rest of the 31st/51st and the whole of the 26th battalion were pushing hard at the Japanese front.

 The plan had always been that  they would break through and link up with the beachhead within 24 hours. They were not breaking through. The  Japanese ahead of them, knowing they could not retreat any further along the peninsula, were fighting with the calm desperation of men with no other option.

 From prepared positions in country that favored  the defender, the relief force gained yards and lost men. By  midday on the 9th of June, it had moved perhaps 300 yards in 8 hours and the company on the beach was still effectively alone. Hour 12, midday on the 9th of June. The first major assault came in just after the sun reached the top of the sky.

 It came from three sides at once. Mortar bombs began to fall on the perimeter, dropped from Japanese tubes set up in the bush at ranges Downs could not return because his own mortars were still mostly on the stranded craft. The bombs walked across the perimeter  in twos and threes.

 Sand and coral fragments lifted from the beach. One bomb landed in the perimeter and wounded three men of the center platoon. The aid post in the hollow began to receive its first serious casualties of the day. The medical orderlies worked with the patient unhurried economy of men who knew they were going to be doing this for a while.

Behind the mortar fire came the infantry. About 100 Japanese came out of the trees on the south side of the perimeter in a rush. A sergeant out in front waving his men on with his arm. The Australian  Brens caught them at 50 yards. The first wave went to ground. A second wave came over them. The Brens fired in short controlled bursts the way the section commanders had drilled them.

 Conserving belts, picking targets, the Japanese  closed to within 30 yards. A grenade went into a slit trench and killed two riflemen. A third was wounded. The line held. On the north side another assault came in at almost the same moment. The Australians there were thinner on the ground because Downs had thinned the line to feed the South.

 The Japanese got closer there into the trees just behind the Australian forward positions, and for 10 minutes there was a confused close-range fight in which men fired at shapes and shouted to each other through gunsmoke. A corporal of A Company stood up in his weapon pit, fired a full magazine of his Owen gun into a group of advancing Japanese, dropped back to reload, and was hit in the shoulder. He kept firing.

 The line held. Downs called in the artillery. 12,000 yd across the water on Surakan, the 25-pounders of the 11th and 12th batteries had been waiting since dawn for the call. The forward observer with Downs on the beach gave the targets in clipped sentences. The first ranging round came in,  fell long, was adjusted.

 The next round was closer. Downs adjusted it closer still. Soon the gunners were dropping shells inside 50 yd of the Australian forward positions, ringing the perimeter with a curtain of high explosive that walked the Japanese back from the wire. As the day went on, the shells came closer. By mid-afternoon, some of them were falling within 25 yd of the Australian slit trenches, throwing dirt and metal over the men in their own holes.

 It was the only way to keep the Japanese off the line. The artillery officer, watching his fall of shot from a position on the beach with  the wounded going past him into the aid post, kept asking the same question over the radio  and getting the same answer, “Bring them in closer.” By 2:00 in the afternoon, the Australian ammunition count had become a serious problem.

 The Brens were down to a few belts apiece. The riflemen were husbanding magazines. The mortar crews had perhaps a dozen bombs left between them.  The wounded in the central hollow now numbered more than 30, and the medical detachment was working out of two stretchers and a tarpaulin. Water was running short.  The men had drained their canteens.

There was no shade, and the heat was unrelenting. And the wounded needed more water than the standing men. Downs walked the perimeter again. He told his section commanders, quietly and without theatrics, that they were going to be there until at least nightfall, and they should fire only at what they were sure of. Hour 18.

Evening of the 9th of June, the sun went down on the perimeter and took the worst of the heat with it. The Japanese probes  did not stop. They continued through the dusk and into the dark, never quite an assault, always a presence at the edge of the trees, always a footfall close enough to make the men in the forward pits jerk their heads up and aim into the black. Downs took stock.

 The company had lost four men killed and seven wounded in the day’s fighting, which by the standards of the war so far was not catastrophic. But the supply situation had become  genuinely critical. He could not be resupplied from the sea. Kato had seen to that. He could  not be relieved by the southern force.

 They were still stuck 500 yd short of the perimeter, unable to break through. He had perhaps another full day’s ammunition if his men fought sparingly. He had less than that for water. His casualties were stable but accumulating. He was, in the truest surrounded. At about 7:00 in the evening,  the brigade headquarters made a decision.

Brigadier Stephenson had been watching the situation through his radio for 2 days, and he could see what Downs could see. The relief column was not going to break through in time. The beachhead could not be sustained. The men were going to have to come off. The order went out to the 42nd Landing Craft Company, “Make ready to evacuate.

” Out on the water near Sarakan, the men of the 42nd began preparing their craft for what every one of them knew was going to be the worst job they had ever been given. They were engineer-trained boat handlers, not infantry. Their landing craft were thin-skinned plywood things with a small armored wheelhouse and a Bren mounted in a tub on the bow.

 They were designed to put infantry onto a beach in a contested landing and then withdraw. They were not designed to take infantry off a beach under fire with their decks crowded with wounded in the dark on a falling tide. There were not enough of them, either. The 42nd had to gather every craft it could. On the Perilita, the firing slackened as the dark came on.

The Japanese did not assault in the night, but they kept up a constant ragged pressure of small arms fire, walking rounds along the edge of the perimeter, listening for movement.  The wounded in the central hollow were beyond comfortable. Some of the more serious cases had been there since midday.

The medical orderlies had run out of morphine. They were giving water in capfuls. The men in the slit trenches did not sleep. They listened to the bush and counted their remaining rounds in their heads. Hour 24, the night of the 9th of June into the early hours of the 10th. The order to extract was confirmed.

 The plan came back to Downs over the radio. The 42nd would come in at first light on the morning of the 10th. Three assault landing craft. They would put their bows down on the sand. The Australians would withdraw to the beach in good order, embark the wounded first, then the standing men, and pull out under covering fire from the artillery on Sarakan and air support from RAAF Boomerangs and Royal New Zealand Air Force Corsairs that had finally been laid on for the extraction.

 The whole thing was supposed to take 20 minutes.  Downs acknowledged the plan, signed off, and turned to his second-in-command. He never made it to the boats. Sometime in the dark hours of that night, the Japanese tried one more time to break the perimeter. The exact sequence of what happened next was not recorded by men who had any leisure to write it down.

 What is recorded is that Downs was leading from the front, moving along the line as he had done since the landing, when he was hit. The accounts of where and how he fell are uncertain. What is [clears throat] certain is that he was  lost at some point during the final phase of the operation, either killed in the perimeter that night or lost overboard the next day, and that his body was never recovered.

 He was listed afterwards  as missing, presumed killed. His command passed to the senior surviving officer. Hour 32, the morning of the 10th of June, the Japanese, sensing the Australians were about to break for the boats, came in hard at first light. Kato had been reinforced overnight. The force around the perimeter was now between 400 and 500 strong, almost three times the number of defenders.

 They came in from three sides simultaneously,  naval infantry behind a heavy preparation of mortar and machine gun fire, pushing for the kill before the Australians could get off the beach. The Brens fired their remaining belts,  the riflemen fired what they had, the forward observer called the artillery in closer than he had called it in yet.

Shells began landing within 25 yd of the Australian forward pits, almost on top of the line, and the gunners on Sirakan were sweating over their tubes  because they knew that a single ranging error of 50 yd either way would put the round into the Australian wounded. Then, the air came in.

 16 RAAF Boomerangs and Royal New Zealand Air Force Corsairs swept down over the trees from the south. They had been called in for this moment, and they put their bombs and rockets and 20-mm cannon fire into the bush around the perimeter, working the trees in fast, low passes, breaking  up the assault as it formed.

 The Japanese, who had been about to roll over the line, went to ground. The Australians, hugging the bottoms of their slit trenches as the rockets came over, came up again as the planes pulled away and held what was left of the perimeter  here. In the bay behind them, the three landing craft of the 42nd came  in.

 They came in fast, in line abreast, their bow gunners firing into the tree line, the spray rising white from the bows  as they cut through the inshore water. The first craft hit the sand at a quarter to five in the afternoon. The ramp dropped.  The Australian wounded were already at the water’s edge, brought down from the perimeter by their mates in a controlled  and disciplined withdrawal that by every account that survived took less than five minutes.

 They went aboard first, the worst cases first, the walking wounded behind them. Then the remaining standing men came down off the perimeter in sections,  the rear sections firing as they came. The line came apart by the numbers, exactly as it had been drilled. The whole embarkation took five minutes.

It was the next part that went wrong. Hour 33, late afternoon of the 10th of June, the landing craft tried to pull off the beach. The tide had fallen. The same coral shelf that had wrecked the landing two days earlier was now sitting just below the waterline, 25 m offshore, and the three loaded craft, riding low in the water with about 60 men in each, could not retract over it.

 Their engines reversed, the hulls scraped. They stopped. All three were grounded. The  Japanese understood immediately what had happened. They opened up. Mortars and machine guns walked their fire across the stranded craft, picking the targets  they had been unable to hit on the beach. The bow gunners of the craft fired back.

 The artillery on Sarakan brought its shells in even closer. The planes came around again. Within 10 minutes, the situation on the three craft  was that of men crammed shoulder to shoulder behind low plywood sides with wounded lying on the deck plates taking  fire from three directions, unable to move.

 The crews of the 42nd did what they could.  To lighten the load on one of the craft, the order was passed for any man who could walk to get out. About a third of the standing men on that craft went over the side into chesty  water, stayed low against the hull on the seaward side, and began to walk the boat by hand, pushing and lifting at the gunwales. Inch by inch it floated.

 Then,  it moved. The hull cleared the coral with a long grinding sound. The men who had been pushing climbed back aboard. The engines caught. The craft pulled out into deeper water  and made for the larger vessels waiting offshore. One craft saved. The second was worked free by similar means about an hour later.

 Some of its load was transferred by hand to other craft that had arrived from Sarakan, four landing craft that had come on their own initiative. The engineer crews having heard what was happening and gone, as one of them later said, to the sound of the  battle.

 The second craft got clear by sunset. The third did not. Hour 36, the night  of the 10th of June going into the early hours of the 11th, the last stranded craft sat on the reef 25 m off the beach with about 38 men still aboard, many of them wounded. The hull holed below the waterline and half full of seawater. It had been receiving fire all afternoon.

 The bow gunner had been killed. An engine hand had been killed. The exhaust pipes had been holed and the engine room was filling with carbon monoxide whenever they tried to run the motors, so that a succession of crewmen had been going down into the bilges in turn, manning the engine for a few minutes each until the fumes overcame them, then being dragged out and replaced.

 The water in the bilges was rising. The men inside were standing in it. The wounded were lying in it. As the light failed, the Japanese moved closer. Some of them waded out through the shallow water along the reef, throwing grenades. The grenades exploded against the plywood sides of the craft, some of them detonating against the hull, and some of them going over the gunwales into the body of the boat.

 The casualties inside grew. Men were hit by fragments and could not move. The standing men returned fire over the sides with rifles. The Bren in the bow tub fired into the dark in short bursts when there was a flash to fire at. There was no covering fire from the beach now,  because there were no Australians on the beach.

 There was no air support because the planes had gone home for the night. There was only the artillery on Sarakan dropping its shells onto fixed lines around the stranded craft to keep  the Japanese off. It was during this period, somewhere in the long dark of that night on the reef, that the worst of the casualties inside the craft happened.

 The accounts differ, but the consensus of the men who came off  the craft afterwards was that the Japanese got men close enough at least once to attack the craft directly. The fight that followed was at very close range, fought in the dark in a half-flooded boat  between men crammed into a space the size of a small room.

 Two of the Australians who went into that boat in the afternoon did not come out of it. Several others were wounded. The boat held in the sense that the survivors held it, but it was a hold  paid for hour by hour. The men inside took turns sitting and standing because there was not enough room for all of them to do either.

 They drank seawater in capfuls. The seriously wounded slipped in and out of consciousness. The night was very long. Some of the men who could swim took the only other option. They went over the side  and into the bay, and they swam for it across about 3 mi of open water in the dark on no rations and very little water  with the south running current of the strait carrying them.

 A number of them made it to Torokina  Island, a small Australian-held offshore base. The water between the reef and the island was known to contain sharks. Several swimmers were rescued by Australian craft that had pushed out from Suraken to  comb the bay for them. A few of the strongest got across to the island under their own power.

 A few who had gone over the side were never seen again. The official records list a number of the men of the company as missing, presumed killed,  and some of them are presumed to have died in the water that night. Hour 38, the pre-dawn of the 11th of June. The last landing craft made its run. It was a single landing craft of the 42nd with a party of headquarters men and engineer volunteers aboard, and it came in under cover of darkness on its second attempt.

 The first attempt in the late evening had grounded on the reef alongside the stranded boat itself, and the rescue craft and the wreck had spent some hours together on the coral before the rescue craft worked itself off and pulled out to wait for the tide. It came back in at about 3:00 in the morning. The tide was at its peak.

 The water over the reef was deep enough. The craft ran in close to the stranded hulk, came alongside, and the men of the 42nd began the transfer. The wounded came across first. The dead went into the bottom of the rescue craft. The standing men came last. The whole thing was done quickly and without much noise.

 The men working by feel as much as by sight because the Japanese were still on the beach and a torch would have drawn fire. The 38 survivors of the stranded boat came across. The empty hulk was left on the reef. The rescue craft pulled out into the dark and made for Sarakin. It arrived at 4:30 in the morning of the 11th of June. The men were taken off.

 The wounded went to the 19th field ambulance. The dead were laid out.  The standing men, what was left of them, sat on the sand at Sarakin in the first light and  did not speak. The cost: 23 Australians killed or missing, presumed killed, 106 wounded. Of those killed, 14 were infantry of the 31st/51st Battalion  and seven were listed as missing.

 The remainder were drawn from the supporting arms, principally the men of the  42nd Landing Craft Company and the engineers who had taken the rescue craft back in for the last run. Among the missing was  Captain Henry Clyde Downs, whose body was never recovered, who had led A Company since Simba Ridge and for whom a ridge had been named in another country a few months before he was lost in the surf of one more beach.

The wider operation failed. The Australian flanking attack at Porton, which was supposed to break the Japanese line on the Bonus Peninsula,  had instead delivered a reinforced company into a trap from which it had to be extracted under fire. The Japanese, lifted by the news that they had broken up an Australian landing, began to move from the defensive to the harassing offensive along the Ratsua front.

 Within weeks, the Australian High Command made the decision to call off offensive operations in the northern sector and to pull the line back to a holding position at Buoi Plantation. The advance into the Bonus Peninsula did not resume before the war ended in August, but the company itself had not broken.

 The men of A Company and the attached platoon of C Company, with their attached engineers and medics and supply men had landed on a beach they should not have landed on, dug in on a perimeter they should not have been able to hold, fought off 400 to 500 Japanese for 38 hours with 1/3 of their ammunition and almost none of their heavy weapons and come off the beach in good order with most of their wounded.

  They had been undone by a reef the planners had not marked, by a flanking column that had not arrived in time and by a tide that had fallen at the wrong moment. They had not been undone by their own conduct. It is sometimes useful to be reminded that bravery and failure are not opposites. The men of A company  did not win the battle of Porton Plantation.

The battle was not winnable from the moment the first landing craft hit the reef. But what they did do  in the 38 hours that followed was prevent that operational failure from becoming an annihilation. They held their perimeter. They kept their wounded alive long enough to be taken off. They embarked under fire in 5  minutes.

 They held the inside of a sinking landing craft against close  quarters attack through the longest night of their lives. They got out. In a war of larger battles fought over larger ground for larger stakes, the action at Porton has tended to be remembered as a footnote, a failed flanking landing in a campaign that has itself become a footnote.

 The Queensland militiamen who fought it are mostly gone now and those who came back from the beach did not as a group talk about it much in the years that followed. The 31st/51st  Infantry Battalion was relieved on the 28th of June by the 8th Infantry Battalion and withdrew to Torokina  where it sat out the rest of the war.

The 42nd Landing Craft Company went  back to its routine of moving men and stores between Bougainville and the islands. The Bonus Peninsula remained in Japanese hands  until the surrender. But on a small beach on the northwestern coast of Bougainville, for 38 hours in June of 1945, 190 Australians from the Atherton Tablelands  and the cane country around Cairns and the streets of Townsville held a position that by every measure of doctrine and arithmetic they should not have been able to hold. They lost

 their captain. They lost 23 of their mates. They came off the beach  with their wounded. That is the story of Porton Plantation. It is not a  victory. It is not, in any clean sense, a triumph. It is something stranger and older  and probably more honest than either of those things.

 It is what happens when good men,  properly trained and properly led, are given an impossible job and decide to do it anyway. The beach belongs to the jungle now and the reef is still there and the bay is quiet. But for 38 hours in the winter of ’45, it was the loudest stretch of coast in the South Pacific and the men who were on it  did not, in the end, let each other down.