Goodbye, Darkness

  The palms on the beach were bent seaward, curtseying toward Tulagi, but inland they stood tall and straight. Because the soap company needed the ground beneath them kept clear for harvesting the coconuts, the Marines had a clear run to the crushed-coral airstrip, which was swiftly taken and named Henderson Field after a Corps pilot who had died in the Battle of Midway. Repair sheds, hangars, and revetments were already finished. Obviously the enemy had expected to use the field within a week at the latest. The scoop was that the Japanese liked to fight in the dark, so Vandegrift expected a counterattack that first night. He was very vulnerable on Red Beach. Equipment had piled up alarmingly. When a Bougainville coastwatcher had radioed, “Twenty-four torpedo bombers headed yours,” sailors manhandling the crates had had to dive for shelter. Luckily the bombardiers from Rabaul were wildly inaccurate, merely inflicting minor damage on one U.S. destroyer. But the only disturbance on the Canal after darkness was from land crabs, screeching tropical birds, and a stampeding herd of wild pigs. Men whispered hopefully to one another that now, with the beachhead secure, GIs would relieve them, letting them return to the bars of Wellington. They studied the unfamiliar stars in the sky and dreamt their wistful dreams.

  Red Beach, Guadalcanal, 1978

  Across Ironbottom Sound the situation was very different. There the Marines were encountering their first real combat. Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo were honeycombed with caves and the leather necks were taking casualties. Hand grenades were almost useless; the enemy tossed them back. Merritt Edson's Raiders (First Raider Battalion) had forty-seven killed; the Marine Parachutists, eighty-four dead. It is a myth — inspired by the Iwo Jima flag raising — that every World War II Marine carried an American flag in his pack, but somebody on tiny Tanambogo had one of them, and for several hours the island resembled a nineteenth-century battlefield, with the Stars and Stripes snapping angrily over one end of Tanambogo and the Rising Sun over the other. After a noisy charge a Marine sergeant pulled down the Nip banner, and dynamiters sealed the caves one by one. That should have given the enemy's commanders pause — nothing like that had happened to them before — but their rear echelon was as overconfident as ours was fearful. Rabaul reassured Tokyo; the chief of the naval general staff donned his dress uniform and appeared at Hirohito's summer villa at Nikko to inform the emperor that there was no cause for worry. One banzai attack, he predicted, would drive the Marines into the sea. That Friday night four waves of crack Nip troops hit the Raider lines on Tulagi with mortars, grenades, and machine guns. A handful of attackers made it through the lines to the old British Residency but were killed back there when they were discovered hiding under the veranda. At dawn Pfc John Ahrens, an Able Company BAR man, was found covered with blood. He had been shot twice in the chest and bayoneted three times. Around him were the corpses of a Nip officer, a Nip sergeant, and thirteen Nip infantrymen. His huge company commander, Lewis W. Walt, picked up the dying youth and held him in his arms. Ahrens said, “Captain, they tried to come over me last night, but I don't think they made it.” Walt said softly, “They didn't, Johnny. They didn't.”

  Five hours later Vandegrift boarded the Wacky Mac and was dealt another blow. An enemy fleet had been sighted leaving Rabaul. Fletcher was withdrawing three carriers from the Sound. Turner, who as a consequence would now lack air cover, had to weigh anchor and sail away with the transports bearing the Marines who had not yet debarked and most of the landing force's supplies — its sandbags, howitzers, coastal defense guns, most of its ammunition, and all but eighteen spools of its barbed wire. Vandegrift, deprived of his lifeline, would be left with a few days' rations, no more. He accused Fletcher of “running away,” but to no avail. Of course, he was told, the transports would soon return. That was certainly the navy's plan, but that night brought catastrophe. The armada steaming south from Rabaul was bigger and closer than had been thought, and it was commanded by one of Hirohito's most gifted admirals, Gunichi Mikawa. Leading seven cruisers and escorting vessels down the Slot, Mikawa, concealed by the cone of Savo Island, appeared undetected at 1:43 A.M. and pounced on the Allied force which had been left to hold the Sound. He had already launched his torpedoes when a U.S. destroyer sounded the alarm. The forty-minute battle which followed was one of the most crushing defeats in American history. Of five Allied cruisers, four were sunk and the fifth crippled; of the American and Australian sailors in the water, 1,023 were killed, drowned, or eaten by sharks. The return of Fletcher's task force was postponed indefinitely, perhaps forever. The troops ashore were left bare-assed. Now the “Tokyo Express,” as they called it, would come roaring down the Slot to land Jap troops on the island around the clock and shell the Marines on shore from ships beyond the range of the Americans' pitifully small mortars and guns.

  Bastogne was considered an epic in the ETO. The 101st Airborne was surrounded there for eight days. But the Marines on Guadalcanal were to be isolated for over four months. There have been few such stands in history. Over the millennia of war certain crack troops must be set apart, elite units which demonstrated gallantry in the face of overwhelming odds. There were the Greeks and Persians at Thermopylae, Xenophon's Ten Thousand, the Bowmen of Agincourt, the Spanish Tercios, the French Foreign Legion at Camerone, the Old Contemptibles of 1914, the Brigade of Guards at Dunkirk. And there was the olio of leatherneck units who fought on the Canal under the name of the First Marine Division. All but abandoned by the vessels which brought them there, reduced to eating roots and weeds, kept on the line though stricken by malaria unless their temperature reached 103 degrees, dependent for food and ammo on destroyers and fliers who broke through the enemy blockade, always at great risk, they fought the best soldiers Tokyo could send against them, killed over twenty thousand of them, and won. In an author's note accompanying The Thin Red Line, his novel about the Canal, James Jones wrote that “what Guadalcanal stood for in 1942-43 was a very special thing,” that he wanted to share with his readers the “special qualities which the name Guadalcanal evoked for my generation.” James Michener compared the fighting on the island to Valley Forge and Shiloh. Morison wrote: “Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion, recalling desperate fights in the air, furious night naval battles, frantic work at supply and construction, savage fighting in the sodden jungle, nights broken by screaming bombs and deafening explosions of naval shells.” Winston Churchill, after studying the battle, simply wrote: “Long may the tale be told in the great Republic.”

  At the time, however, one wondered whether there would be anyone left to tell it. It should be added that, had it been told then, the teller's enthusiasm for Churchill's European war would have been tepid. One reason the struggles in the Pacific constantly teetered on the brink of disaster is that they were shoestring operations. At one point the United States was spending more money feeding and housing uprooted Italian civilians than on the Americans fighting the Japanese. The navy let the Marines on the Canal down because Washington was letting the navy down, devoting nearly all its resources to Eisenhower's coming invasion of North Africa. We knew that our theater was a casualty of discrimination, not because Tokyo Rose told us — though she did, again and again — but because our own government, appealing to its national constituency, which was almost entirely comprised of former Europeans and their descendants, boasted of it. The news about the Italian refugees, for example, was released by the State Department. It pleased Little Italys across the country. The Marines, MacArthur's GIs, and the bluejackets in the Pacific were less elated.

  Slipping past the leering guns of the Nip cordon, American destroyers managed to meet the Canal's crying need for ammunition and, later, artillery. Food was another matter. The average leatherneck lost twenty-five pounds during the siege. Night blindness became a serious problem for the men on the line; they simply weren't getting enough vitamin A. To his Raiders, men of machismo who resembled the British commandos, Colonel “Red Mike” Edson gave a quintessential piece of Marine Corps advice. “There's plenty of chow,” he said, grin
ning wickedly. “The Japs have it. Take it away from them.” Red Mike's mordant wit became part of the Canal legend. So did the incident of Admiral Halsey's bully beef. When Halsey took over he changed the momentum of the battle with a few words. Visiting the Canal — something Ghormley had never done — he held up two fingers and told Vandegrift, “Give me two days. I'll have AKA's here in two days.” A war correspondent accompanying him asked if he thought the Marines could hold on. Halsey jerked his thumb toward the Japanese lines. “How long do you think they can take it?” he asked. During his day on the Canal the island was bombed by Bettys and shelled by Jap cruisers firing eight-inch guns at a range of ten thousand yards. Vandegrift was anxious to get the admiral off the Canal after dark. He was worried, not only about Halsey's safety, but also about his digestion. Vandegrift knew how appalling the chow would be. The admiral wouldn't go. He dined, as Vandegrift and his officers dined, on thin, gummy bully beef. In an obvious attempt to boost morale, he said enthusiastically: “You know, this is the best bully beef I've ever tasted. I wish the men in my galley could do as well. Let me talk to your mess sergeant.” The man appeared, trembling in the presence of so mighty an officer. Halsey raved on and on about the bully beef. Then he stopped. Vandegrift nudged the mess sergeant. “Say something to the admiral,” he whispered. Still quaking, the man stuttered: “Bul-Bullshit, Admiral. Bul-Bullshit.”

  Edson's joke about taking Japanese supplies proved to be wisdom in disguise. Fleeing into the bush, the enemy had left large stocks of soy sauce, rice, tinned sliced beef, canned Japanese seaweed, crab meat, canned vegetables, and beer, and Marines enthusiastically digested it all. Cooks preparing it warmed chow on field stoves burning Japanese kerosene. The meals were eaten from Jap bowls with Jap chopsticks. After the entrees the leathernecks sucked Jap hard candy and drank sake from delicate Jap cups. The enemy's cornucopia, in those early days, seemed inexhaustible. Red Mike himself found diversion in an English translation of a “Short History of Japan”; his mess was enlivened by Nip phonograph records played on a captured Victrola. Men were issued Japanese occupation money to buy Japanese souvenirs. At Henderson Field, two large Japanese air stations, an air-compression plant for torpedoes, machine shops, and two electric-light plants proved to be invaluable. Nip girders and Nip piles were used to build bridges and piers. Everyone smoked Japanese cigarettes. The chances of mailing letters were slight, but men wrote then anyhow — on Japanese rice paper. Some calculated the number of days left in their enlistments with Japanese abaci. Heads were built of Nip lumber and shielded from flies by Jap screening. Since Fletcher had fled with all the toilet paper, and since Tokyo Rose seemed to be the only reliable source of information, Marines completed their toilet rites at the head by wiping themselves with copies of the New York Times which had somehow made it through the blockade. One issue was so used with particular relish. It reported that the Marines were tightening their grip on the Solomons as navy keeps supplies flowing in. On the strength of this dispatch, the troops were thrilled to learn, the Dow-Jones stock average had gained 4.93 points. But the most priceless news story, too precious for disposal in the head, appeared on page 25 of Time's August 24 issue. Reporting on the Battle of Savo Island, it revealed: “Japanese cruisers and destroyers tried to smash the invasion fleet. Then came what U.S. tars had long prayed for: the first real gun-to-gun test of U.S. and Japanese surface sea power. Result: a licking for the Japs.”

  One Marine gunny taught a small class in Nipponese flower arrangement, using a superbly illustrated book recently published in Tokyo, and another NCO, who had liberated an ice plant which had been left in excellent condition by the departing enemy, erected two signs outside it. One read:

  TOJO ICE FACTORY

  UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

  — J. Genung, Sgt., USMC, Mgr.

  The other sign was headed today's score. On it, after each air battle overhead, he used a Japanese brush to write U.S. aircraft losses and the number of enemy planes stitched, flamed, and splashed. If you were cowering in a foxhole near Henderson, you could often hear the hot 50-caliber cases falling from the sky. After a lull, when Condition Red was lifted, someone would say: “Ain't getting any more cases; let's go up to the ice plant.” The Seabees, whom every Marine adored, had arrived, extended and finished Henderson Field two weeks after the landing, and immediately started work on a two-hundred-yard grassy fighter strip parallel to it. On August 20, the first twelve SBD (Scott Bomber Douglas) Dauntless dive-bombers flew in from the east and landed on Henderson, followed by nineteen stubby-winged Wildcats. It was, Vandegrift later recalled, “one of the most beautiful sights of my life. I was close to tears and I was not alone.” Enemy pilots led by Vs of arrowing Aichi 99s covered by Zeroes raced down from Rabaul to challenge them. The field, shelled every night, was in deplorable condition. If rain was falling it was a mire; if the day was dry the runway was obscured by clouds of dust. Maintenance crews were constantly cannibalizing downed U.S. planes; otherwise they had no spare propellers, wheels, windscreens, or tires. Also lacking were machines to belt ammunition, bomb hoists, dollies, and tankers. The pilots were dead on their feet and weakened by their grim diet of beans, rice, and hash. Nevertheless, as the weeks passed the statistics showed that our fliers were outscoring the Japs and their Zeroes, Bettys, and Zekes. The Marine airmen called themselves the “Cactus Air Force,” after the code name for the Canal operation, and their aces — Pappy Boyington and Joe Foss especially — were heroes to the infantry.

  Dogfights were daylight spectacles. The nights belonged to the Japanese fliers, chiefly two of them: “Louie the Louse,” a float plane which nightly dropped two to four drifting pale green flares over the beachhead, and “Maytag Charlie” or “Washing Machine Charlie,” so named for his whining toy engine, which sounded like an airborne Yippie. You could set your watch by Charlie. Each night he dropped his 250-pound bombs, too few to threaten the Marines' defenses, but enough to keep them awake, which was the idea. Colonel Robert Pepper's 90-millimeter antiaircraft guns sought Charlie in vain. Four American night fighters up there would have done the job in a few minutes, but somehow requests for them were always pigeonholed in Noumea. So when he came, you jumped from your soggy blankets and dove into your foxhole, which held as much as six inches of water. In the hot zinging iron that fell, men said they found American nuts, bolts, and screws — scrap iron the United States had sold to Japan before Pearl Harbor. One corporal claimed he recognized Eleanor Roosevelt's false teeth. Nobody laughed. Louie and Charlie weren't funny. Nights were feared on the Canal. You watched the beautiful tropical sunsets with dread.

  The salvos from Nip warships also banished sleep; so, later, did the shells from “Pistol Pete,” a 15-centimeter enemy howitzer on the Grassy Knoll. Our counterbattery fire could never find him. Every time you tried to rest there would be a shot from Pete, the flashing guns of Nip destroyers, Louie's flares, Charlie's drone, or the wail of a siren — another item liberated from the Japanese — at Henderson. When coastwatchers on New Georgia warned that enemy aircraft were overhead there, the word was passed that Condition Yellow was in effect. When they approached the Sound, it was Condition Red. These aerial pests were, and were meant to be, blows at morale. The men on the line couldn't even see the bastards. Even the guys on the beach rarely caught a glimpse of the enemy. If they did, it was usually because the Japs wanted to heighten Marine anxiety with an insolent procession of warships just beyond the reach of Pepper's old five-inch naval guns. Once a Jap move backfired, though. Two Higgins boats, on a mail run from Tulagi to the Canal, seemed doomed when a black Jap submarine, unseen by the men on the boats but clearly visible to those ashore, suddenly surfaced in the Sound behind them. Nip sailors sprang from the conning tower and manned the sub's forward gun. At that moment, to the horror of the men on the beach, blue smoke rose from a malfunction on one of our boats and the other slowed to pick up her crew. The Nips bracketed them in two shots. The men in the boats seemed as good as dead. Then, out of nowhere,
a newly arrived battery of Marine 75-millimeter artillery opened fire. The sub lurched toward one side, damaged. The Japs piled into their conning tower, the black hull vanished, and the Higgins boat bearing the shaken Marines glided into its berth at Carpenter's Wharf.

  At that time, when the Japanese infantrymen were attacking the Marine perimeter from all sides, our defensive arc was about four miles wide. Its eastern anchor was the juncture of the Ilu and Tenaru rivers and the sea. From there it ran down to a ridge a thousand yards south of Henderson and reached its other anchor at the mouth of the Lunga River to the west. This parabola may be roughly compared to a human face, with the Ilu at the left eye, the ridge at the nose, and the Lunga at the right eye. Generally this semicircular line clung to the high ground. Ideally it should have been an iron cordon, sandbagged and shielded by a double-apron barbed-wire fence with heavy reconnaissance patrols probing westward beyond the village of Kukum to the banks of the broad, ominous Matanikau River, about five miles from the Lunga. Later that was in fact done, but with so few Marines ashore in those first weeks, only heights could be strongly defended. There, on the jungly slopes, the men on the line would wire themselves in at night. Between them and the enemy were entrenched Marines in listening posts. The listening posts would report sounds of Jap movement. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, volunteered to spend the night in a listening post.

  But there was really no safe spot within the perimeter. Cooks, bandsmen, and runners were rushed into gaps when enemy breakthroughs seemed imminent. One night a Japanese officer brandishing a samurai sword came within a few yards of the pagodalike structure which served as Vandegrift's command post. The general, pacing the muddy wooden floor, turned, startled. “Banzai!” screamed the Jap, disemboweling a gunny. Nearby, Sergeant Major Shepherd Banta was giving one of his men unshirted hell. Banta drew his pistol, killed the Jap with one shot, and, turning back, continued his tongue-lashing. Anyone, anywhere on the beachhead, might, at any given moment, win a Purple Heart. Feverish or not, if men could walk then they were ineligible for sick bay. Every man was needed. Redheaded Sam Griffith, then Edson's executive officer and later my commanding officer, remembers: “In the South Pacific the navy was no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel. That had been done.” In any event, that was the explanation of the navy brass. Actually Fletcher had idle Wildcats in the New Hebrides. He just didn't believe in reinforcing failure. The enemy seemed to know that the embattled Marines had been all but disowned. Admiral Mikawa was assembling Jap aviation ground crews to be landed on Henderson as soon as the island had been surrendered by the Marines. Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, leading a brigade ashore west of the Matanikau, had drawn up the instrument of capitulation for Vandegrift's signature. He had brought a dress uniform to be worn at the ceremony. Even the date had been set: September 13, 1942. The Marines didn't know the size of the forces being moved from New Guinea to the Canal, but some canisters dropped from Zeroes for enemy infantry fell within our lines. All bore the same message: “Help is coming, coming, coming.”