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There was little resistance the first day or two, for the majority of Japanese had been withdrawn from the beach when the Navy shelling beganThe early advances were only briefly delayed by a minor ambush, or a temporary defense position set up along a ravine or across a trailThe troops pawed forward gingerly a few hundred yards at a time, sending out many patrols to examine the ground ahead before each company moved upThere was no front line for several days at leastLittle groups of men filtered through the jungle, fought minor skirmishes with still smaller groups, and then moved on againCumulatively there was a motion forward, but each individual unit moved in no particular direction at any given timeThey were like a nest of ants wrestling and tugging at a handful of bread crumbs in a field of grass On the third day the men captured a Japanese airfieldIt was a minor affair, a quarter-mile strip of cleared jungle with a small hangar recessed in the brush and a few buildings already destroyed by the Japanese, but the Pacific communiques included it, and radio announcers mentioned the victory toward the end of their news broadcastsThe airfield had been taken by two platoons who circled the jungle about it, routed the sole machine-gun squad still defending the clearing, and radioed back to Battalion HeadquartersThe nightly defense gucci backpack positions of the General's troops had some coherence for the first timeThe General established a front line a few hundred yards beyond the airstrip, and listened that evening to the Japanese artillery bombarding the fieldBy midmorning the next day his troops had moved forward another half mile up the peninsula, and the front had broken again into sluggish separate globules of mercury It seemed impossible to maintain any sort of orderTwo companies might start in the morning with perfect liaison between their flanks, and by nightfall would be bivouacking a mile apartThe jungle offered far more resistance than the Japanese, and the troops tried to avoid it wherever they could, threading their way along creekbanks, forging trails through the comparatively uncluttered wilderness of natural coconut groves, and moving with pleasure through the occasional clearings of kunai grassThe Japanese in response would shell the clearings at unpredictable hours, so that the troops avoided them finally, and blundered through the uncertain avenues which thinner patches of jungle might provide In the first week of the campaign the jungle was easily the General's worst opponentThe division task force had been warned that the forests of Anopopei were formidable, but being told this did not make it easierThrough the densest portions, a man would lose an hour in cartier tank must moving a few hundred feetIn the heart of the forests great trees grew almost a hundred yards high, their lowest limbs sprouting out two hundred feet from the groundBeneath them, filling the space, grew other trees whose shrubbery hid the giant ones from viewAnd in the little room left, a choked assortment of vines and ferns, wild banana trees, stunted palms, flowers, brush and shrubs squeezed against each other, raised their burdened leaves to the doubtful light that filtered through, sucking for air and food like snakes at the bottom of a pitIn the deep jungle it was always as dark as the sky before a summer thunderstorm, and no air ever stirredEverything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouseHeat licked at everything, and the foliage, responding, grew to prodigious sizesIn the depths, in the heat and the moisture, it was never silentThe birds cawed, the small animals and occasional snakes rustled and squealed, and beneath it all was a hush, almost palpable, in which could be heard the rapt absorbed sounds of vegetation growing No Army could live or move in itThe men skirted the jungle forests, and moved through second-growth brush, past smaller woods of coconut treesEven here they could never see for more than replicas bolsas fifty or a hundred feet ahead, and the early stages of the operation were conducted by groping movements of tiny groups of menThe peninsula was only a few miles wide at this point, and the General had two thousand men stretched across it, but there was little connection between themBetween one company of a hundred and eighty men and another, there was room for any number of Japanese troops to slip throughEven when the terrain was comparatively clear, the companies would not often try to set up a partial lineAfter a week of fumbling through the jungle, the military concept of a connected line could seem no more than a conceptThere were Japanese left everywhere behind the front troops, and all through the jungle, in every part of the area that the General had captured on the peninsula there were subsidiary ambushes and skirmishes, until the mouthpiece of the ocarina seemed covered with bursThere was an intense and continuous confusion The General had expected this, had even made his allowances for itTwo-thirds of his force of six thousand men were kept in the rear working on supplies, and threshing the jungle in security patrolsHe had known from intelligence reports before the campaign began that the Japanese had at least five thousand men against him, and of these, his men had not come in contact with more than a few hundredThe Japanese tiffany jewellery commander, General Toyaku, was obviously holding them for a protracted defenseAs if in assurance, the scattered air reconnaissance that was granted Cummings occasionally from Army Headquarters, brought back photos which showed a powerful defense line set up by Toyaku on a front which ran from the main mountain range of Anopopei to the seaWhen Cummings came to the base of the peninsula he would have to pivot his troops through a ninety-degree arc to the left and face the defense line Toyaku had built For this reason, Cummings did not mind the leisureliness of his advanceOnce his troops had reached the Toyaku Line it would be essential to keep them well supplied, and for that he would need a road which could keep pace with his menOn the second day after the invasion, the General had reasoned quite correctly that the main battles with the Japanese would occur miles awayHe had immediately diverted a thousand men to building a roadThey started on an improved trail which the Japanese had used for motor transport from the airfield to the beach, and the division engineers widened it, sodding the top surface with gravel from the beachBut beyond the airfield the trails were rudimentary, and after the first week still another thousand men were assigned to the road It took them three days to build each mile, and the front troops drew constantly kelly handbag ahe