Cape Gloucester, 1943

The 1st Marine Division landed at Cape Gloucester, on the western tip of New Britain, on December 26, 1943 — its first operation since Guadalcanal. The objective was the Japanese airfield, taken by December 30. The enemy after that was the island itself.

The landing came at the height of the monsoon. Rain fell for days without stopping. Swamps the maps called forest swallowed men to the waist. Trees rotted through at the root and came down without warning, killing Marines in their foxholes. Weapons rusted overnight and clothing never dried. The Marines called the place the Green Inferno.

The fighting for the ridges inland went on into January. When the division finally came out in the spring, its next island was Peleliu.

The whole picture is streaked with rain — vertical, relentless, dissolving the trees into gray. A column of Marines in ponchos wades toward the viewer through water the color of mud, rifles held low and dry, heads down. A jeep sits axle-deep beside them, going nowhere. The huge buttressed trunks overhead frame the scene like a cathedral, and the light that gets through is thin and green. No one is fighting. The painting is about weight: of water, of gear, of walking.