Harry knew nothing about New Britain Island before landing there. Few did. On a map, it appeared as a 370-mile-long, forty-to fifty-mile-wide crescent above New Guinea south of the equator. Its topography was tropical: steaming emerald rain forests and smoking purple volcanoes, its terrain punishing. The official Marine history would call New Britain “one of the evil spots of this world.” In vine-threaded jungles with tree canopies smothering light, soldiers would confront alligators, pythons, wild pigs, leeches, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, not to mention the enemy.
