“I wouldn’t be too sure that they didn’t accomplish anything important,” said Curly Levitt. “A few of them may still be loose in the jungle. I have a hunch that we’ll hear from them yet.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you, Curly,” Barry Blake put in. “I’m not so much worried about the few Jap parachutists that may have escaped to the bush. To be sure, they could do plenty of damage. But if immediate damage had been their purpose, we’d have had two or three times as many to fight. I have a hunch that this bombing and skirmishing on the field was just a trick to cover up some other maneuver.”
“You mean a Jap landing on the beach, sir?” asked Fred Marmon. “That thought hopped into my head, too—but it’s no good. Our boys have that coastline guarded so well that wild pigs couldn’t get through without raising an alarm. Their scouts would have brought us warning.”
“Let’s try to get a little shuteye, then,” Curly Levitt yawned. “We won’t help matters by worrying or arguing all night. ’Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”
At dawn the field was roused by a third bombardment. This time it was a shelling from medium-heavy field guns. It plowed the already bombed runways until the field looked like a map of the moon’s craters. Two swift fighter planes tried to take off before the last smooth strip of ground was blown up. One of them ground-looped.
The second, by clever dodging of bomb holes, managed to take the air. Fifteen minutes later it returned, riddled with bullet holes. The pilot nosed over trying to land on the field’s least plowed end. When they pulled him out of his wrecked fighter he said that he had flown over the enemy positions at less than five hundred feet and had a pretty good look at them.
The Japs were entrenched on a grassy ridge, about 1500 feet above the field and within easy range. There were two or three hundred of them, with at least twenty pieces of artillery camouflaged in clumps of trees. Evidently they had been landed by parachute from a swarm of huge transport planes, under cover of the night attack on the air field.
“You were right about the purpose of that raid, Lieutenant Blake,” Fred Marmon admitted, as the Rosy O’Grady’s crew moved their tent farther into the jungle. “The Japs will make our field useless as long as they hold that ridge. The problem is how to clean them out.”
“Better heads than ours are working on that right now,” Barry told him. “We could bomb the Jap positions with planes based at Port Moresby, for instance. Or we could bring up troops and take the ridge by assault. But neither job would be as easy as it sounds. We’ll just have to wait for the brass-hats to decide.”
The American plan did not develop for forty-eight hours. During that time a transport vessel arrived with more antiaircraft and two companies of soldiers. They were welcome additions to the field’s strength, but they did not solve the problem of the Japs’ shellfire.