Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons

  The natives gave them anything but a warm welcome. Most of the villagers vanished into the hills, refusing to work at the camp or supply any food. They had paid taxes for years, explained a committee of elders, and here was the government running away. MacFarland said he was willing to pay for what he needed, but they told him his money was no good. Japanese money was what they wanted now.

  The situation looked desperate. Gold Ridge was gone. Food stocks were low. The natives were hostile. MacFarland was now stuck in a gloomy valley where he couldn’t even see the sun, let alone the Japanese. On the 15th he radioed the grim details to Eric Feldt at Townsville. Back came an encouraging but cryptic answer:

  GOOD WORK BAD LUCK. POSITION NOT AS BAD AS IT APPEARS. STAY IN BUSH BUT DO NOT REPEAT NOT TRANSMIT FROM ANY POSITION WITHIN TEN MILES OF YOUR CAMP. STICK IT OUT FOR FOUR MORE WEEKS AND I WILL RESCUE YOU BUT DO NOT MOVE TO BEACH UNTIL INSTRUCTED

  For good measure, a separate message was relayed from the Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff at Melbourne, promising, “It won’t be long now”; and the control station at Auki assured Martin Clemens, “Things are happening for the best.”

  “There is a big stunt brewing,” MacFarland wrote Clemens on the 19th—his first cheerful letter in days—and on the 21st he elaborated: “It is only a matter of a few weeks, and we will be in the money again …. My advice is, sit pat—either come here or keep in close touch with us and wait for the big event.”

  For Martin Clemens the outlook wasn’t nearly so rosy. His carriers had vanished; his teleradio wasn’t working; and worst of all, he learned from the natives that Ishimoto had visited Aola for the first time with a lugger full of troops. They had torn apart the office, dug up Andrew Langebaea’s garden, and carried off his potatoes. Andrew himself underwent a stiff grilling, but he was wearing only a pair of shorts and managed to pass himself off as a bush boy.

  Suddenly Vungana no longer seemed like Edinburgh Castle. With Ishimoto now concentrating on the eastern end of Guadalcanal, Clemens felt terribly exposed in this lofty perch. He decided to pull back once again, hoping for someplace less conspicuous.

  At 9:00 A.M. on July 19 he started off, heading ever higher and deeper into the interior. On the 20th the path faded out, and the party continued up a river, usually waist-deep against a swirling current. His last pair of shoes gave out, and for a while he hobbled along on bruised and bleeding feet. One of the scouts finally made him a pair of sandals out of a mail bag, and Clemens ruefully recalled the regulation against damaging government property.

  Late that afternoon they climbed a nearly perpendicular rock-face to reach a village of just four huts called Vuchicoro. At last he felt safe again and ordered the party to make camp. It was pouring rain and the radio still didn’t work; so he whiled away the time rereading his Shakespeare. As a substitute for supper he made up the menu for the first dinner he’d have if he ever got out of this alive: Toheroa soup from New Zealand, Lobster Newburg, and duck with green peas. Then he munched a soggy piece of hardtack and curled up to sleep.

  Snowy Rhoades was in trouble too. One day as he sat in his leaf hut up the Hylavo River—the place that seemed so safe—he was visited by a native who had been working on the Lunga airstrip. The native brought word from the Japanese commander saying they knew where Snowy was; they were coming to get him, and when they did, they wouldn’t execute him; they were going to cut off his hands and feet.

  “That’s when I decided to sleep with a pistol under the pillow,” Rhoades later recalled. He did more than that. A friendly native told him about a secret cave two miles deeper into the jungle, and he lost no time moving there. Arriving, he found it was not so much a cave as a long ledge of overhanging rock, but it was perfect for his purposes. Adding a leaf “verandah,” he had room for himself, twenty carriers, and all his stores. As was his invariable custom, he hid the teleradio in a separate place—this time in a leaf hut a mile away. Making sure that its location was known only to the four natives who built it, he once more felt relatively safe.

  At Bombedea, Don MacFarland was again beset by doubt. Food was low, and the carriers were deserting. There were reports of a 500-man Japanese force coming down the south coast—this could cut off all escape. When Eric Feldt said to stick it out for four weeks, that didn’t seem long, but the last ten days had been hell, and now it seemed a lifetime.

  “We are all living on hope,” he wrote Clemens on July 28. “If nothing happens before the weekend, I intend to flit. I would suggest you do likewise. Patrols are approaching the Ridge, and I don’t intend to wait here until I can’t get out .… I may be wrong, but I am going to get out before it is too late.”

  But of course he stayed. Every once in a while a man discovers he can go beyond the limits he sets for himself—can endure more than he ever dreamed he could—and so it was with Don MacFarland. His deadline, Friday, July 31, came and went—and still no sign of the Allies—but he did not “flit,” as he liked to put it. Instead he found himself writing Martin Clemens, “We will hang on for a few more days as you suggest .… I suppose we must have faith.”

  So it was back to the teleradio and the latest information he could get for Townsville. Kelemende slipped up to Gold Ridge again for another look at the Japanese airstrip. They were working on it 24 hours a day now. The construction crews used great flarelike lights at night. The runway, a scout reported, was red clay and gravel over grass. It looked almost finished.

  Clemens and Rhoades had their scouts out too. In three months these primitive natives had learned a lot about the ways and toys of civilization. They now reported trucks and tractors and destroyers with breezy familiarity. Yet there were mix-ups. On July 29 Bingiti reported planes “with wheels” on Halavo Beach at Tulagi. If true, this meant there was a second Japanese airstrip. Clemens’s teleradio was working again, and he immediately relayed the report to Townsville.

  To MacFarland this was simply incredible—Halavo Beach was only 20 yards long—and he was right. It turned out that some Zero float planes were resting on bogie wheels, and Bingiti’s informant mistook the bogies for landing gear.

  On August 1 Daniel Pule sent Clemens a particularly detailed report with a map of Lunga plain showing tents, workshops, bomb sheds, and a wireless station. Trenches and dugouts were neatly marked in red pencil. There was no way to forward the map, but Clemens radioed the information to Townsville. Back came an urgent query for the exact location of the wireless station. Clemens managed to oblige in ten minutes.

  Still, how much longer could they last? MacFarland was now living mainly on potatoes and a melonlike fruit called pau pau, Clemens on taro root and an occasional pumpkin. Native support was falling apart, and this could be fatal. With it, the Coastwatchers might somehow luck through; without it, they were lost. So far they had managed, but the native chiefs were practical men who couldn’t afford to stick with a loser, if the Japanese were really going to take over the island.

  The Tassimboko villagers were now openly pro-Japanese, and some of the settlements around Visale were leaning that way. At his cave near the Hylavo, Snowy Rhoades learned that the local chiefs had held a meeting and decided he was too much a liability to have around. They were sure he would ultimately be caught and the neighboring villages wiped out for harboring him. The solution was to liquidate him themselves first and take his head to the Japanese.

  At this point a chief named Pelisse objected. Rhoades had a rifle with a thousand rounds and was a good shot besides. Even if they attacked at night, many of them would be killed. As for himself, he had promised to help Rhoades, and he would keep his promise. On this note the chiefs deferred their decision … but for how long? And how many Pelisses were there on Guadalcanal?

  On August 3 Don MacFarland decided to join Martin Clemens for what might turn out to be a last stand. He had no carriers and wrote Clemens, begging him to send any he could round up. “I know it is tough, but if you can’t do it, then I’m afraid I have no chance.”

  But even in
these dark hours the Coastwatchers somehow managed to keep up a steady flow of information for the insatiable brass at Townsville and the control station at Auki on Malaita. Headquarters was no longer offering soothing advice to lie low. On August 4 Auki fired off a particularly urgent request: “Any reliable additional information as to number, type, location troops; positions, types and calibre of guns to be sent now.”

  During the next 31 hours Clemens sent eight different messages giving his scouts’ latest information on Japanese troop billets, mess facilities, bomb and fuel storage, trenches, and the planting of a naval gun for coastal defense.

  MacFarland was having less luck. At 3:30 P.M. on the 5th he gloomily reported, CANNOT OBTAIN ANYTHING RELIABLE, NATIVE REPORTS VERY CONFLICTING …

  Then, five hours later, pure gold. The competent Fijian Kelemende was now back on Gold Ridge and had his own contacts out. Two of them had been drafted by the Japanese to work on the airstrip. They had escaped during an Allied bombing raid, and Kelemende rushed them down to MacFarland on the Sutakiki. From the information they supplied he radioed the most complete picture yet of the situation on Lunga plain:

  ONE APPROX 6-INCH GUN ON HILL BEHIND LUNGA STRIP AA GUNS ON SAND BEACH LIGHT CALIBER APPROX. 2 INCH OF THESE SCOUT SAW THREE LUNGA SIX KUKUM BUT ARE OTHERS STOP NO ARMED FIGHTING VEHICLES OBSERVED STOP RUNDWAY IN POSITION PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED BUT IS GRAVEL AND CLAY FROM NEARBY HILLS NOT CEMENT STOP UPON 31ST JULY WHEN NEAR COMPLETION RUNWAY HIT ALSO ROAD ROLLER BUT ONE STILL REMAINS STOP HANGAR IN COURSE CONSTRUCTION NEAR RUNWAY STOP AS NEAR AS CAN BE GAUGED FROM TENT AND HUT ACCOMMODATION OF WHICH HALF LABOR CORPS….

  It was just the kind of information needed by the Allied invasion armada, now ploughing north through the Coral Sea toward Guadalcanal. This great force was the immediate result of the danger posed by the Japanese airstrip, but its genesis could be traced much further back.

  The Solomons had caught the eye of Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief United States Fleet, as long ago as February. He saw both the threat they posed in Japanese hands and the opportunity they offered as an Allied strong point in a step-by-step reconquest of the Pacific. Trouble was, the Allies had agreed that the defeat of Germany came first, and both President Roosevelt and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall were cool to any operations that diverted men and resources from Europe. If necessary, Marshall’s planning chief, Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was even willing to let Australia go down the drain.

  Nonsense, King argued, the Americans couldn’t just stand by while the Japanese gobbled up island after island. It was all very well to beat Hitler first, but certain minimum steps had to be taken to stabilize the situation in the Pacific. Ernie King was a man of ruthless determination. “They always call on the sons-of-bitches when they’re in trouble,” was the way he is supposed to have explained his own appointment as COMINCH. But he was enormously respected. All spring he kept hammering away for a limited offensive in the South Pacific, and in the optimistic atmosphere that followed the great American victory at Midway his persistence finally won out.

  By July King’s War Plans Officer, Rear Admiral Kelly Turner, had developed a plan calling for, among other goals, the capture of Tulagi and the simultaneous occupation of an airfield (or airfield site) on the north coast of Guadalcanal. King and Nimitz quickly approved, and Turner was put in charge of the Amphibious Force. Christened WATCHTOWER, the Tulagi landings were set for August 1—only a month off.

  July 4, and the whole scheme picked up tremendous momentum. That day Nimitz’s industrious code-breakers deduced that the Japanese were planning major landings on Guadalcanal. Coast-watcher messages and aerial reconnaissance soon made it clear that the enemy was already doing just what the Americans planned to do—build an airstrip on Lunga plain. This airstrip, eyed so avidly by both sides, suddenly became the focal point for the whole operation. It was what made Guadalcanal—code name, CACTUS—so important.

  Yet no one seemed to know anything about the place. When Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, Commander of the South Pacific, informed Brigadier General A. Archer Vandegrift that his First Marine Division would be landing on Tulagi and Guadalcanal in five weeks, the General was utterly astonished. He didn’t even know where they were.

  On July 22 the Marines sailed from Wellington, New Zealand, and few military enterprises have ever begun under greater handicaps. Some components of the division had yet to join up. There wasn’t time to load all their equipment. Space was so tight they had only ten days’ supply of ammunition. No one yet knew much about Guadalcanal. There were no good maps, and an aerial photographic mosaic of the island had been lost. Admiral Ghormley pleaded for more time, and King grudgingly moved the landing date back to August 7—but not a day beyond that.

  From the 28th to the 31st the operation was rehearsed on the tiny Fijian island of Koro. Everything seemed to go wrong, and Vandegrift consoled himself with the old theatrical maxim that a bad dress rehearsal means a good opening night.

  On the evening of July 31 the whole force weighed anchor and headed northwest for the Solomons under Admiral Fletcher, the officer in tactical command. At last the breaks began coming their way. The weather turned hazy, and no Japanese patrol plane caught even a glimpse of the huge armada—over 80 ships spread out over the sea in a giant circle. Nor did any enemy submarines run across this choice target. The sea remained calm, the voyage completely uneventful.

  Late afternoon, August 6, and Fletcher’s carriers—Saratoga, Enterprise and Wasp—peeled off with their escorts to take their covering position south of Guadalcanal. The rest of the ships ploughed on. Dusk, and on the thirteen transports nearly 17,000 Marines settled down for a last night at sea. On the mess deck of the transport American Legion the juke box blared away, while a young Marine, his body glistening with sweat in the stifling heat, did some exaggerated jitterbugging. On the flagship McCawley Kelly Turner moodily thought of a passage written in 1939 by the British military analyst Liddell Hart: “A landing on a foreign coast in the face of hostile troops has always been one of the most difficult operations of war. It has now become almost impossible.”

  One Guadalcanal Captain, Tei Monzen of the Imperial Japanese Navy, had good reason to be pleased. The 2571 construction troops under his command had done wonders in the month they had been building the airstrip on Lunga plain. The field was nearly finished. Repair shops, bomb sheds, a fine medical clinic, and a pagodalike administration building were ready; only a small middle section of the runway remained to be graded. Around the field a criss-cross of serviceable roads connected the positions of the 400-man force assigned to defend the base.

  It was time for a small celebration. On the evening of August 6, Monzen ordered an extra ration of sake for all hands, and it was announced that thanks to their industry and patriotism, planes would start landing in a few days.

  In the mountains to the east Martin Clemens spent a fruitless day. His scout Bingiti had just returned from Lunga, but the man was exasperatingly vague. Yes, he thought the strip could now be used. No, he wouldn’t say any planes had actually landed there—but he wouldn’t say they hadn’t.

  It was all very frustrating. Clemens had left his perch on Vuchicoro, hoping he could operate more effectively at Matanga, a village closer to the coast. Today it didn’t seem to make much difference where he was. He felt disgusted and depressed. He was hungry and his feet hurt. Starting his diary entry for August 6, he asked rhetorically, “Is nothing going to happen after all?”

  This same evening Pat and Jack Campbell, the teenage sons of the old gold miner F. M. Campbell, stood on Gold Ridge, looking down at the field. They had come up from Bombedea to see if anything new was going on, but to their surprise all was dark. For the first time in days the Japanese weren’t working by flare-light. Contemplating a wasted trip, the boys joined the Fijian caretaker Kelemende in the manager’s house and went to bed.

  Jack woke up before daybreak on Friday, August 7, and just couldn’t get back t
o sleep. For a while he tossed and turned, but it was useless. Finally he slipped quietly out of the house so as not to disturb Pat or Kelemende, sat down on the grass near the crest of Gold Ridge, and stared into the empty night.

  Soon the first hint of dawn streaked the eastern sky, and gradually he could make out the dark bulk of the Lunga plain stretching below him toward the coast. It was going to be a cloudy day, so it was still fairly dark when suddenly, a little after 6 o’clock, a series of flashes erupted from the sea. Next, the distant boom of guns, and then more flashes and explosions as shells ripped into the shore.

  Pat and Kelemende came bounding out of the house, and the three of them watched in excitement. Still more flashes, and as the day grew brighter, they could see that the channel between Tulagi and Lunga was literally covered with ships. Cruisers and destroyers lay close in, pounding the shore, and behind them waited an array of freighters and transports. Beyond these, other warships were pounding Tulagi across the channel.

  Now there were planes too … sweeping in from the south … dive-bombing the beaches … raking the shore with machine guns. A gasoline dump exploded, sending an orange balloon of flame into the sky.

  Down in the valley of the Sutakiki Don MacFarland could see none of this, but he heard the gunfire, saw the waves of carrier planes, and knew what it all meant. The days of worry and waiting were over—Feldt had been true to his word—deliverance was at hand. Snowy Rhoades at his “cave” and Martin Clemens at Matanga could also hear the guns and see the planes, and they too felt a surge of immeasurable relief. Twisting the dials of his teleradio, Clemens caught snatches of carrier jargon and bursts of American slang. “Calloo, callay, oh, what a day ! ! !” he scribbled in his diary at noon. “On combat radio I hear Tulagi is taken, and at 1205 Marines land on Gavutu. Wizzard ! ! !”