William FINNEGAN…
We left Melbourne app. mid-October and sailed to Goodenough where we trained and reacclimated to the tropics for the rest of Oct thru most of Dec. Shifted to Finschafen app 10 days before Christmas 43 and staged there for the landing at Cape Gloucester… I recall one evening there hearing a bunch of the guys going by in the back of a six-by (truck) singing Christmas carols… Until then I hadn't realized it was Christmas time… Some enterprising Marines were also playing Santa Claus with some sick bay alchohol which they had liberated from stockpiles on the beach and were dispensing it liberally into our waiting canteen cups… We mixed it with some canned grape juice which enabled us to swallow it… It would almost lift you off your feet if you stopped to smell it… I woke up after sunrise in a mud rut on the road through camp… There was a jeep on the road honking the horn at me as they could not get out of the mud ruts which had hardened to go around me… I staggered to our squad tent just in time to fall out for assembly where the 1st Sgt began screaming and threatening us to find out who stole the sick bay alky… The sun was getting up there, the heat came down and I threw up… Naturally he said "Finnegan, I knew it was you…" I wound up cutting Kunai grass with my bayonet for most of a day I would always forget… If you've never tried this, don't… A couple days later we were on New Britain… Bill

WIBUR BULEY, 1st marine division
Hi Justin, good to hear from you.
I am still alive and very well. 
We arrived by boat from Goodenough
We trained, kept in shape and exchanged articles of interest between us and the Diggers. Diggers ate lots of meals with us.
We were supposed to be standing by in Reserve for theAustralians during the Battle of Saddleburgs in case they needed assistance. They didn't.
I have no idea where we were camped. I have a book on the New Britain Campaign. I'll see what it says.
It was typical jungle. Didn't hear of many cases of Malaria while there. We were all on Atabrine.
No Air raids that I remember
No Patroling or mopping up
We left on Christmas Day 1944 for Cape Gloucester, New Britain. My Battalion landed by ourselves up the coast to stop any Jap soldiers leaving the Cape or stop any reinforcements coming down from Rabaul. We had one skirmish. Killed about 1-200 Japs leaving the Cape.
My most outstanding memory of the Cape is the heavy constant rain.
Foxholes full of water.  would like to go back t see where we were, in the dry season. I do remember going on patrol up the side of a live volcano.Ground was warm, glow on the low lying clouds. after one fight on new britain they were ordered to shoot all the wounded japs and that sometimes he still sees the face of a jap he shot............"they were not scared at all..it takes a lot of belief in something to be that strong". 
 
wilbur bewley

USMC On MAINLAND NEW GUINEA

Nothing was ever too bad for the First Marine Division. When word came of the move, the transport quartermaster had blithely planned the loading of the Division's men and equipment on APAs, the Navy's especially designed troop-carrying assault transports. He was rudely disillusioned when the chit for the ships came down from Brisbane. The Division was to move on Liberty ships, a passage that would mean worse than steerage quarters for the men.

"Heads," showers and galleys were built on the weather decks, a guarantee that refuse of all sorts would wash the decks in bad weather. Food must be ladled out and eaten on the open decks whether the weather was fair or foul. And the only troop-quartering space was an area in the upper hold. Most of the men had to sleep topside, fashioning out of ponchos and shelter halves and stray pieces of line rude and flimsy canvas housing.

The idea of dispersion was carried out even in staging: the 5th Marines to go to Milne Bay, that deep cleavage of water in the eastern angle of New Guinea; the 7th Marines to Oro Bay, on past Milne on the northwestern coast of New Guinea; the 1st Marines, Engineer regimental headquarters and Division headquarters to Goodenough Island, in the D'Entrecasteaux group, some fifty miles off the eastern tip of New Guinea, about equidistant (eighty miles) both from Oro and Milne.

The Engineers of course went up first to build camps, sailing from Melbourne between August 19 and August 24. A month later, on September 19, the infantry units began to follow. By October 23, the last of the men of the First Marine Division who were to take part in the Cape Gloucester campaign had left Melbourne.

If the men had succeeded in forgetting in Melbourne what the tropics was like, the mucky, dark New Guinea jungle in which they staged was a reminder. Whether they were veterans of Guadalcanal or recruits fresh from the States, the rainforest produced a noticeable air of glumness in the new encampments.

Some of the few pleasant memories of the staging areas arise from a peculiarly Marine form of recreation. Each of the areas was also used by Army troops, and the men inevitably contrasted their own food and equipment - sparse by order when not by fortune - with the seeming bounty of the better-fed, better-clothed, better-housed Doggies. This became a challenge, for it is in the unwritten tradition of the Corps that foraging upon the Doggies is legitimate.

There was loot to be had at Milne Bay, an Army supply base in the fall of 1943, but to land-bound Marines, the problem was to get out in the busy harbor, aboard the incoming ships, where really big deals would be made.

The 5th hadn't been at Milne two weeks before one of his men came to Colonel John T. Selden, regimental CO, with a scheme. The Army beachmaster was short of hands who could operate the small motor launches used to run messages between ship and shore. The Marine Amtrak drivers were qualified. Why not lend them to the Army? , "Give a little, get a little!" was Selden's assent.

Thereafter each night at dusk, four launches pulled up at the Marine Amtrak area on the beach and unloaded the day's loot. By the time the 5th was ready to leave Milne Bay, two of the four launches; were assigned to the regiment for its full-time use, principally, remembers one of the 5th's officers, "for official sightseeing and fishing trips."

More sober attention was given in the staging areas to another kind of boat activity. In the year since the Division landed at Guadalcanal, a new fleet of, blunt-nosed, small ships and boats had appeared in the Pacific. The new LSTs, LCIs and LCTs were ideally suited for the short haul from New Guinea to Cape Gloucester.

The Division had no experience with these new craft and the Division was perfectionist. "The idea always seemed to be," one man recalls, "to do it again and again and again until it became automatic. That was the training technique of the Division. They tried to teach us through constant repetition, to do all the little things without thinking about them also, out of this monotonous going over and over things, you came to think nothing could go wrong. You and your buddies did it so often together that you got to have a lot of confidence in the business of doing the thing with the group, whether it was a squad, a platoon, or a company."

As might have been expected from the Division's past experience with paucity of equipment, there were not enough of the new landing craft to train in the way Division staff wanted the men trained. Practice loading and unloading was conducted from mock-ups, from "slots" marked out on the New Guinea beaches with tape to conform to the exact size of an 1ST deck. It was not until three days before final embarkation from the staging areas that all the craft that were to take part in the main assault landing were assembled for a full rehearsal, and even though it was realized that the short time lag would not allow for repair, cleaning and re-waterproofing of equipment, the troops nevertheless were sent ashore at Cape Sudest. "The timing and experience gained in this rehearsal outweighed the harm it did to equipment," says one report.