Word: pillboxed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Britain. General MacArthur's men (Marine veterans of Guadalcanal) had won their objective on New Britain's western tip: the Japs' two Cape Gloucester air strips, 250 miles from Rabaul. With an accurate pre-invasion bombardment, with Sherman tanks, heavy artillery and pillbox-killing flamethrowers, they had overwhelmed the Jap defenses in four days and a few hours. Now they pressed into the jungle hinterland, where a Jap remnant had dragged artillery to shell the airfield. Enemy resistance was fanatic. At this spot alone, almost 1,000 Japs were slain, many in suicidal counterattacks. Reported Navy Secretary...
...went over the log fort, Tassone expertly dropped his blade. The pillbox collapsed. Methodically, as if he were smoothing a rough spot in a road, Tassone bladed earth over it. After the battle, the hasty grave was shoveled open: twelve bodies and a large new gun were exhumed...
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...
College men have gotten all the breaks in this Army of the United States. Sure, we all know about the former graduate student in architecture who first blows up the pillbox on the local beach and only then gets down to work plying his trade in the form of sundry beach-landing structures. He can claim the Army has read the qualification card too literally. So can the disgruntled G.I. who is in the mechanized cavalry because his mother was a bareback equestrienne for Barnum and Bailey. Nobody's denying they make mistakes in classification. It's a big Army...
...there pokin' his rifle in all the holes and shootin' like hell and gettin' shot at a million times a minute." At great risk from shore batteries, destroyers ran close to the beach, opened up on targets as small as one Jap sniper or one pillbox mound. It was precision firing, the shells often landing less than 50 yards from the Marines. If the high explosives did not wreck many of the fortifications, they did strip away most of the islands' palm fronds...