Word: coconuts
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Through Arawe's coconut groves the Japs had cut a runway now unused and overgrown by tropical bush. Arawe's harbor served as a barge-staging point for supplies to Jap centers on New Britain's south coast. In American hands Arawe would sever one enemy line of communication, would provide a jumping-off place for the next Allied amphibious advance. Most important, it would turn an idle airstrip into a forward base against Rabaul...
...hour after the landing, Fireman First Class Aurelio Tassone of Milford, Mass. was roaring along on his 20-ton 'dozer when he spotted an enemy strongpoint. Skirting the coconut-logged bunker, he came at it from the rear. Bullets banged off the big blade which he had raised as a shield. The tractor rolled on like its armored offspring, the tank...
Skillful Jap engineers had used stone-hard coconut logs, steel rails, concrete and sand to make incredibly stout fortifications. They had staggered 500 pillboxes in such fashion that marines who captured one found themselves under fire from two others. Covered with three or four feet of sand, the redoubts defied aerial reconnaissance, survived everything but direct hits with heavy shells or bombs. Often a 2,000-lb. bomb, striking within a few feet of a pillbox and digging a 15-ft. hole, merely threw more sand on top of the Jap fortifications. Surveying Betio's defenses after the battle...
...command post on the wrecked beachhead, the Marines' Major General Julian Smith proposed a dual ceremony. Up a coconut palm, stripped of fronds by shellfire, rose the Stars & Stripes. Simultaneously, up an adjacent tree, soared the Union Jack...
...became evident that the Jap list of killed and wounded would be longer than the American. That was no consolation to the leathernecks who had seen their mates fall. But there was satisfaction in mopping up the snipers. One gang of 50 Marines fired rifles and carbines into one coconut tree at a trapped Jap. He returned the fire after he had been hit at least 50 times...