I cannot see it clearly on my phone but I can traslate when I get on a comp.
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Can anybody ready Japanese characters on this rifle ?
- Thread starter WFO62
- Start date
Post it over at gunboards. Great deal of knowledge there.
On the wood the rough translation appears to be "big long year".
It is Kanji.
JBWJr
was very close ... above the two 0's is the number "7"... "big long year 700.With some quick research here is maybe more than you wanted but with the rifle in your hand I hope it adds value...
The American perimeter was dotted with a number of hills and valleys. The famed Hill 700 was right in the center of the perimeter, towering above the entire area with a clear view of the airfield. Hill 700 was the linchpin of the American defenses, the key to holding the perimeter positions to its right and left and eventually the airfield.
The 3rd Marine and 37th Infantry divisions were spread thinly along this two-mile perimeter, with forces in reserve that could be sent forward wherever the Japanese might break through. Patrols were sent out to find and fix Japanese troop concentrations. A few prisoners were taken, and several quickly confessed that the Japanese command had finally understood the U.S. defensive concept and tactical plan with Hill 700 as its heart.
On March 8, the inevitable massive Japanese attack began, and it did not wane until March 13, when Hill 700, which had been partially overrun by the Japanese, was retaken by 37th Division forces, who annihilated thousands of Japanese in the recapture phase.
At 6 a.m. on the 8th, the first artillery shell from the attacking Japanese hit in the 145th Infantry Regiment’s sector. The enemy began to carry the fight to the Americans.
The American beachhead was on a coastal plain lying at the foot of the towering Crown Prince Range, volcanic mountains held by the Japanese. The enemy also occupied the rest of Bougainville–giving them a white elephant compared to the Americans’ potent mouse. The two American divisions could not spread their perimeter beyond the nearest foothills overlooking the beachhead. The best they could do was to hang on to the lesser heights that dominated the airfield and to deny those hills to enemy artillery.
Hostile fire was coming from Japanese positions on Blue Ridge, Hills 1001, 1111, 500 and 501 and the Saua River valley. Fire from only a few pieces could hit the airfield from those positions, but those meager rounds hinted at the Japanese destructive potential if they could place their cannon on the hills that the 37th Division defended, mainly Hill 700.
At 7 a.m., the 2nd Battalion, 145th Infantry, received a few stray small-arms rounds, just enough to alert all positions and encourage the men to clean their M-1 rifles. Short-range patrols discovered that the enemy was assembling in front of the 2nd Battalion, and it was thought that the major attack would be against Hill 700...
Shells continued to fall–not only on the airstrip but also on the 145th, the 6th Field Artillery Battalion, the 54th Coast Artillery Battalion, and the 77th and 36th Seabees. Casualties were light, but the Americans were tense. The inaccuracy of the Japanese fire made even the least strategic American installation subject to those wild haymakers. Helmeted repairmen kept the airstrip in operation, filling up holes and smoothing out shell craters. Planes landed and took off with casual disdain. A few planes were destroyed, however, and the possibility of declaring the bomber strip off-limits was seriously considered.
At noon the last patrol was reported in by the 145th, and the combined guns of the 135th Field Artillery, the 6th Field Artillery, the 140th Field Artillery, the 136th Field Artillery, and two battalions of the Americal Division artillery were readied for area fire on the Japanese as they moved from assembly areas behind Hills 1111 and 1000 toward the American lines. The Japanese 3rd Battalion, 23rd Infantry, and the 13th Infantry (less one battalion) crowded toward Hill 700 to join the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry, which had filtered in earlier. For two hours, thousands of rounds of American medium and heavy artillery blanketed the target zone. Later, a prisoner admitted that the Japanese 3rd Battalion, 23rd Infantry, was practically annihilated during this bombardment; he said the rest of the troops escaped a similar fate by moving close enough to American lines to get within that umbrella of safety. Anticipating this ruse, U.S. artillery observers had called for fire closer and closer to the 37th’s front lines.
Still, the enemy was in an excellent position. Once the Japanese closed in on the Americans, it was difficult for the U.S. artillery to reach an enemy hiding literally under the front lines. Mortars pounded away in the dark with unobserved results. The 136th Field Artillery alone expended 1,239 rounds that day. Those manning the observation posts yelled back that the enemy was scrambling up the hill after the artillery had subsided. Several booby traps and warning devices were exploded near the positions of Companies E and G, 145th Infantry, and the men in the perimeter holes replied with small arms and mortars. The enemy retaliated with rifles and knee mortars. Fog and rain made the darkness impenetrable.
During that night attack, a device cooked up by Staff Sgt. Otis Hawkins proved invaluable. As soon as the first Japanese started jimmying the barbed wire on the perimeter, Hawkins ordered mortar flares fired and wires pulled, setting off gallon buckets of oil ignited by phosphorus grenades. With help from this artificial lighting, Hawkins directed 600 rounds of 60mm mortar fire, and the riflemen picked off many Japanese who had counted on darkness and confusion to help them achieve their goal.
At the boundary between Companies E and G, an alert sentry killed two Japanese who had squirmed through the wire, and the 2nd Battalion, 145th, reported possible penetration at Hill 700. Under cover of heavy rain and darkness, using Bangalore torpedoes and dynamite to blast holes in the wire, and pushing one full battalion directly at the forward U.S. emplacements, the Japanese had shoved their foot in the door.
Holding fast, the hopelessly overwhelmed soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 145th Infantry, lived or died where they stood. The Japanese assaulted an isolated mortar observation post from Company E, situated on a knoll on the outer perimeter and affectionately dubbed ‘Company E Nose.’ The enemy managed to cut three of the four double aprons of protecting wire before a sergeant, investigating the noise, crawled out of his pillbox and discovered them. Just as the Japanese placed a Bangalore torpedo under the fourth double apron, the sergeant opened up with his Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and caught eight Japanese in the wire. Holding off additional Japanese with his BAR, he called in a 60mm mortar concentration, adjusted it in and around the wire, ducked back to his pillbox and then had a steady concentration dropped around–and often behind–his pillbox during the night. The sergeant and his men survived.
Not so fortunate were Sergeant William I. Carroll, Jr., Pfc John W. Cobb, Pfc Armando W. Rodriguez and Pfc Howard E. Ashley from Company G. Fighting desperately from their large emplacement, they were engulfed by Japanese who attacked them from all sides. Disregarding a possible escape route because they recognized the strategic importance of their assignment, they decided to stick it out, hoping for reinforcements.
The four soldiers fired rifles and threw hand grenades, and Rodriguez knifed an enemy soldier who got in close. His knife was later found in another dead Japanese soldier 100 yards away. One fanatical Japanese shoved a Bangalore torpedo next to the pillbox, and the explosion dazed the occupants. The Japanese then rushed the emplacement. Semiconscious, the four men fired at and wrestled with the enemy. The next day, when the bodies of the gallant Americans were recovered, 12 dead Japanese were found inside the pillbox. Probably many more of the hundreds of lifeless Japanese found around that position were killed by those four soldiers.
At dawn, elements of the Japanese 23rd Infantry, 6th Division, had occupied a portion of the north slope and two strategic positions on the crest of Hill 700, penetrating the American lines 50 yards deep and 70 yards wide. At 7 a.m., a forward observer sensed a new attack in the offing and told his battalion, ‘Pour it on as close to me as you can get.’ The artillery response melted the new Japanese attack. The enemy salient was further boxed in when the 145th lines were extended around the south slope of Hill 700.
At noon, elements of the 1st and 2nd battalions, 145th, counterattacked to regain the lost pillboxes. Some progress was made to the east of the penetration and on the south slope of Hill 700, but the Japanese dagger still cut into the American perimeter. Japanese artillery and mortar shells dropped on the suffering troops, and Japanese snipers pecked away. Enemy field artillery positions were spotted on Blue Ridge, and the 135th Field Artillery plastered them. Chemical mortars whammed their shells into the rear of enemy avenues of approach.
By 10 p.m. a few more pillboxes were recovered, but the Japanese repulsed attempts to recover the remaining positions on the commanding ground of Hill 700. The reverse slope was pitted with Japanese foxholes, and reinforcements kept pushing forward over the dead bodies of their comrades, clashing head-on with the attacking Americans.
Darkness discouraged much aggressiveness, but during the night the Japanese chattered and whistled as they replenished American sandbags and enlarged American foxholes, strengthening their own precarious positions. The 135th Field Artillery alone had expended 2,305 rounds during the day. That afternoon, two light tanks from the 754th Tank Battalion had tried to wipe out pockets of resistance with little success. During the day, the Americans had lost one officer and 28 enlisted men killed and four officers and 135 men wounded. Japanese losses were 511 killed.
The night of March 9 was ominously quiet, and the next morning the Americans pounded the Japanese, who seemed to gain strength with each hour of digging time and infiltration. A provisional battalion from the 251st Anti-Aircraft Artillery occupied a sector of the 145th’s line and with terrifying accuracy laid its 90mm anti-aircraft guns on point-blank targets in the hills. At 11:15 a.m. on the 10th, 36 American bombers showered targets marked by artillery smoke shells. The 135th, 140th and 136th field artillery and the 145th Infantry’s cannon company kept pounding away. At noon, Japanese troops were reported moving south along the Laruma River; the American artillery made short work of this fresh target.
At 5 p.m. the 1st and 2nd battalions, 145th Infantry attacked again, assuming that the Japanese resistance had been sufficiently softened. Using Bangalore torpedoes, bazookas and pole charges, the infantrymen strove for the enemy pillboxes on the crest of Hill 700. The main line of resistance was tenuously re-established with the exception of a 30- or 40-yard gap in the lines. Four pillboxes remained in Japanese possession. Ammunition supply was a knotty problem, and the men ran out of hand grenades in the middle of the attack. Japanese artillery and mortar shells dropped sporadically.
At 6 p.m., the 37th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop was brought south and east of Hill 700; it then advanced into ticklish positions in the Company G area. During the night, increased Japanese gibbering and scurrying in front of Cannon Hill was detected, and Lt. Col. Russell A. Ramsey’s 3rd Battalion on Cannon Hill reported that the Japanese had resorted to firecrackers and other ruses to draw fire. American casualties for that day were seven enlisted men killed, and seven officers and 123 enlisted men wounded. Three hundred and sixty-three Japanese were erased. The 129th and 148th infantry sectors had been relatively quiet, although patrols invariably ran into enemy squads and platoons.
During the afternoon of March 10, Brig. Gen. Charles F. Craig, the assistant division commander, visited the regimental and battalion commanders of the 145th Infantry on the south slope of Hill 700 to observe the situation for the division commander. It was late at night before he could return in a halftrack over the bullet-swept road down which he had come.
During that night, Staff Sgt. William A. Orick of the regimental intelligence section, with two men who had joined him, had a brush with the enemy on top of Hill 700; his companions were bayoneted and evacuated to the battalion aid station. Returning alone to the site of the struggle, Orick slipped a noose of telephone wire over the foot of a Japanese officer killed in the struggle and then pulled him from the crest of the hill. On his body were found plans for the attack on the beachhead, with maps and directions. That information was rushed to the Division G-2 section.
During the early morning hours of March 11, the enemy maneuvered forward and occupied an empty pillbox on the forward slope of Hill 700. With their reverse-slope positions in front of Hill 700 as a stepping stone, the Japanese launched a new assault at dawn. The 23rd Infantry of the Japanese 6th Division attacked along the front from Hill 700 to Cannon Ridge. They came on in waves, one whole battalion attacking on a platoon front. Brandishing their prized sabers, screeching ‘Chusuto!’ (‘Damn them!’), the enemy officers climbed up the slope and rushed forward in an admirable display of blind courage. The men screamed in reply, ‘Yaruzo!’ (‘Let’s do it!’) and then ‘Harimosu!’ (‘We will do it!’). As they closed with the Americans, their leaders cried, ‘San nen kire!’ or ‘Cut a thousand men!’
These battle cries sounded like so much whistling in the dark to the GIs. Mowed down by heavy fire from the dug-in infantry, the Japanese kept tumbling over the bodies of their comrades, unwaveringly advancing toward the spitting guns. The battles on Hill 700 and Cannon Hill were at such short range that infantry weapons alone had to repulse the assault waves. The attack on Cannon Hill came to an end and by 8 a.m. the dazed remnants of a Japanese battalion had withdrawn, leaving hundreds of dead comrades stacked up in front of the 145th’s line.
In the midst of the Japanese assault, Lieutenant Clinton S. McLaughlin, Company G’s commander, dashed from pillbox to pillbox in the heat of the battle, encouraging and directing his men; he stopped only occasionally to return the fire of a few persistent Japanese whose bullets tore his clothes to shreds, punctured his canteen, and painfully wounded him twice. When the Japanese had gotten to within a few feet of the platoon’s most forward position, McLaughlin jumped into the lead emplacement, which had already been outflanked by the enemy. Then he and Staff Sgt. John H. Kunkel, firing point-blank at the invaders, killed enough of them to dissipate the threat. The pile of bodies in front of their position numbered more than 185. Both McLaughlin and Kunkel were later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
On Hill 700, the enemy soldiers had succeeded in holding on to a part of their salient, and fresh Japanese troops kept thrusting forward, trying to occupy new positions and reinforce old ones. By this time, the 145th infantrymen were near physical exhaustion from the continuous three-day fight. Lieutenant Colonel Herb Radcliffe’s 2nd Battalion, 148th Infantry, having been alerted the night before, arrived in a rear area and prepared to assist the embattled 145th Infantry in its efforts to recapture the lost positions.
Retaking the enemy-held positions on Hill 700 was a daunting undertaking. The Americans had to assault the enemy-held pillboxes by crawling up a slope so steep that a foothold was difficult to secure and maintain. Add withering machine-gun fire, rifle fire and grenades, and the obstacles looked almost insurmountable. The Japanese guns swept all approaches. Their positions were only 25 yards from and overlooking the main supply road. Their guns on the crest of the hill covered the ridge itself with intense, accurate and deadly grazing fire. Approximately 100 yards to the rear of those ground-emplaced weapons, other machine guns in trees on the spur of the hill also swept the entire front. With the exception of a few scattered trees and a series of shallow trenches, little cover was available for troops moving up the slope.
Tanks and armored cars manned by the 37th Cavalry Reconnaissance drivers were the only safe means of moving casualties and supplies up and down the main supply road. Evacuation had been hazardous and backbreaking from the start. On the first day of the fight, litter-bearers hand-carried the wounded over a back mountain trail to the reserve area of the 1st Battalion, 145th. The route was long and painful, and the only alternative was the supply road.
On the 9th, ambulances had tried to run the gantlet and succeeded. Encouraged, a convoy of litter jeeps and ambulances from Collecting Companies A and B, 112th Medical Battalion, drove to the Company G motor pool, an area safe for motor vehicles. The route from there was dangerous, and Colonel Cecil B. Whitcomb, commander of the 145th Infantry, explained to the drivers that he would not order them to run this Japanese blockade.
Eight men went on their own anyway, and though they were under fire most of the trip, brought their casualties back safely. Drivers Bob Pittman and ‘Doc’ Davis were slightly nicked by mortar fragments. Private Joe Bernard of Company A had his ambulance ripped in the hood, the cab and finally the windshield by two Japanese snipers. The ambulance orderly was hit, and halftracks were called in. Seventeen halftracks thereafter made constant round-trips from the lines to the aid stations.
Against the obstacles of terrain, supply and determined Japanese resistance, the 2nd Battalion, 148th Infantry, prepared to go into action. Lieutenant Colonel Radcliffe and his five company commanders made a reconnaissance of the sector, and Radcliffe then presented his recommendations for an attack to Brig. Gen. Charles Craig, who was representing the division commander at the 2nd Battalion, 145th, command post.
The plans called for an immediate envelopment of the remaining enemy positions on Hill 700 by Company E. The plans were approved, and at 1:20 p.m. on the 11th the first Company E scout moved cautiously over the line of departure.
The lead squad of Company E’s right platoon crawled awkwardly up the precipitous slope. Led by Lieutenant Broadus McGinnis, 11 men of the squad went over the crest together. Eight men were killed instantly, mowed down by machine-gun fire from their front and flanks. Lieutenant McGinnis and three other men dived safely into a connecting trench on the enemy’s side of the hill and captured a pillbox by killing the three Japanese occupants.
From his vantage spot in the pillbox, McGinnis shouted instructions back to the rest of his platoon throughout the afternoon. At 4 p.m., as he peered out of the pillbox to determine enemy intentions, he was killed by a burst of machine-gun fire. Further advances were deemed suicidal, and at 7 p.m. Company E was ordered to cease the attack, reorganize, hold the ground it was able to occupy and supplement its defenses with one platoon of heavy machine guns from Company H.
Wire teams from Company G strung concertina wire in the gap between platoons, which was covered by fire from positions on the reverse slope of the hill. The rest of the battalion, meanwhile, had settled down for the night in the forward assembly area. The operations for the day, though unsuccessful in restoring the main line of resistance, did prevent further penetration by the Japanese.
At 8 a.m. the next morning, Companies E and F attacked again in a coordinated double envelopment, with Company G in reserve and Company H in general support. The two attacking companies edged slowly around the hill to the right and left, remaining in defilade as much as possible in order to avoid the Japanese machine guns that dominated the ridge in both directions. Then they dispersed along the steep slope. Using every means at their disposal, from smoke and fragmentation grenades to flamethrowers, rocket launchers and dynamite, the Americans began to make their way to the top of Hill 700 against undiminished Japanese resistance.
On the Company F side of the hill, a flamethrower team–Pfc Robert L.E. Cope and Pfc Herbert Born of 2nd Battalion Headquarters Company–crawled up to destroy an enemy pillbox from which machine-gun fire held up the advance of the company. The two soldiers had joined the regiment after the New Georgia campaign and were now seeing their first action. They worked forward, dragging the bulky equipment over terrain dangerously exposed to Japanese automatic-weapons fire until they were 10 yards from the pillbox. At that point, they suddenly rose up in full view of the Japanese and doused the emplacement with liquid fire, destroying it and killing its occupants. The pair then came back through the same hazardous area, recharged their flamethrower and returned to destroy another pillbox. They repeated the action a third and fourth time. Altogether, they crossed the exposed sector five times and knocked out four enemy positions.
The rocket launcher, or bazooka, had not yet been fired in action by the 148th. Staff Sergeants Jim L. Spencer and Lattie L. Graves told Lieutenant Oliver Draine that they would volunteer to take a crack at it. Preceding the company until they reached a shallow trench 20 yards from the nearest Japanese pillbox, they selected their target, and with much anticipation they launched their first rocket. Although this round completely missed the target, the men were so pleased with their partial success that they immediately reloaded the weapon, aimed more carefully and launched a second rocket. This time they scored a direct hit and demolished the pillbox. Now greatly encouraged, they concentrated their rocket fire on other Japanese positions, with Spencer holding the bazooka and Graves reloading it, yelling, ‘Make way for the artillery!’
Spencer and Graves dodged from one covered position to another, blasting away, either killing the occupants of the pillboxes or frightening them into flight. During the intervals between loading and firing the launcher, Graves blasted away with his M-1 rifle, and on one occasion killed three fleeing Japanese. Spencer and Graves fired the bazooka periodically for three hours.
Private First Class Jennings W. Crouch and Pfc William R. Andrick, armed with BARs, advanced with their platoon in the initial movement across the fire-swept ridge. Then, under withering Japanese fire, they ran toward enemy-occupied pillboxes on the rest of the hill. From their final position 15 yards from the pillboxes, they began their assault, firing their rifles from the hip as they advanced. Crouch had an eye shot out, among other wounds, and one .25-caliber bullet went through Andrick’s left wrist. Upon reaching the pillbox, they poured a steady stream of fire into the entrance until all the occupants were killed.
Man who make love to exhaust pipe have hot rod
"Man who have hole in pocket feel cocky all day" -Confucius
