Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War

  The Marines on Guadalcanal were the least impressed by reports of their impending doom. Hearing Tokyo Rose describe them as “summer insects which have dropped into the fire by themselves,” they hooted in derision or made uncharitable estimates of the virtue of Japan’s lady propagandist. The truth was that Vandegrift’s Marines were actually on a kind of ignorantly blissful frolic.

  They had already made light of Savo by renaming it “The Battle of the Five Sitting Ducks,” and they gave proof of how little they understood the consequences of that naval disaster by talking confidently of returning to New Zealand in three weeks, or whenever it was that the Army, the lowly “dogfaces,” would arrive to relieve them, the heroes of the Pacific. Then these invincible young warriors—most of whom had yet to see the silhouette of the enemy’s mushroom helmet—would bask in the tender and accommodating admiration of the young ladies of Wellington while consuming acres of steak-and-eggs and quaffing cool oceans of down under beer. In the meantime, they gamboled.

  They discovered and plundered a warehouse stuffed with quarts of Japanese beer and balloon-like half-gallon flasks of Japanese sake. They buried the loot in the cool sands of the sea, digging it up at night to drink and revel just like the good old moonshining days at New River; and sometimes, because they had underestimated the power of enemy wine, there were ferocious night “battles” fought between tipsy sentries.

  Almost every night there was the burlesque provided by men who could not pronounce the passwords. All of the passwords—Lollipop, Lallapaloozer, Lolligag—were loaded with L’s because of the Japanese difficulty with that sound.5 But polysyllabic passwords also sat awkwardly on the tongues of Marines such as the rifleman who awoke to relieve himself on the night the password was “Lilliputian.”

  “Halt!” the sentry cried.

  “Fer Gawd’s sake, Lucky, don’t shoot. It’s me, Briggs.”

  “Gimme the password.”

  “Lily-poo … luly …”

  “C’mon, c’mon! The password, or I’ll let you have it.”

  “Luly-pah … lily-poosh …” Silence, and then, in outrage: “Aw, shit—shoot!”6

  The Guadalcanal frolic was not uninterrupted. General Vandegrift’s supplies had to be moved inland and this meant working parties toiling in the alternating extremes of drenching rains or blistering sun. Men were also needed to bury ammunition on the edges of Henderson Field, and the field itself required the unrelenting labor of Marine engineers working with Japanese equipment. On August 12, Henderson was pronounced operational, or at least able to receive a Catalina flying boat piloted by an aide of Admiral McCain’s. Actually, Henderson Field was only 2600 feet long, it was muddy and bumpy, it had no covering of steel matting or taxiways, and it was not drained. But the admiral’s aide optimistically rated it suitable for fighter operation.

  Meanwhile, to conserve food, the island had gone on a twice-daily ration composed chiefly of captured enemy rice, a wormy paste which nauseated some of the daintier spirits among the conquerors until they came to realize that they would have to swallow it—“fresh meat” and all—or starve. Occasionally the mess was spiced by a few lumps of Argentine bully beef or a dubious delicacy described as New Zealand lamb’s tongue, and sometimes a marksman among the Marines would bring down a plantation cow. Phil Chaffee shot one. He had not yet caught a gold-toothed enemy head in his sights, but he shot a cow through the eye at 200 yards.

  Gradually, the mood of innocent gaiety gave way to one of grim wariness, starting on August 9 when the Emperor’s “glorious young eagles” came winging down from Rabaul to make Guadalcanal shiver and shake with 500-pound bombs and those grass-cutting fragmentation bombs which kill and maim; gradually the fact of isolation was grasped by even the most facetious, for the Tokyo Express had begun to run and each night Japanese destroyers or cruisers slid into the Bay to shell Americans cringing in sodden holes, and each day submarines surfaced to sink everything in sight; gradually, these lighthearted young men began to realize that they were all alone with only a few pounds of rice and the bullets in their belts to keep them alive—and then came the massacre of the Goettge patrol and they knew that they were at war.

  Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge was Vandegrift’s intelligence officer. It was Goettge who had gone to Australia to scrape together all available information on Guadalcanal, and it was Goettge who, on August 12, decided that the Japanese to the west might be willing to surrender.

  On that day a Japanese seaman was captured. He was a sour little man, answering questions in a surly voice until a few ounces of medicinal brandy improved his manners and brought the admission that hundreds of his comrades were starving in the jungle and were anxious to surrender. This intelligence was coupled with a report the previous day that a Japanese “white flag” had been seen at a Japanese position west of the west-lying Matanikau River.

  That night Goettge asked General Vandegrift if he might investigate. Vandegrift looked up from his meal of cold beans and shook his head. Goettge pressed him, and the general reluctantly agreed.

  Twenty-five men, the cream of the Division Intelligence Section, as well as some of the best scouts in the Fifth Marines, were chosen to accompany Goettge. Shortly before midnight, under a moonless sky, leading the Japanese seaman by a rope around his neck, the Goettge patrol departed by Higgins boat for the “surrender area.”

  They landed opposite Matanikau Village. They moved inland to set up a perimeter opposite a group of huts. Goettge and a few others went forward to reconnoiter and were cut down by converging streams of machine-gun fire. One by one, the others received their mortal wounds. Only three men survived. They escaped by swimming. They tottered into Marine lines with blood streaming from flesh slashed and torn by coral. One of them reported that as he fled just before daybreak he turned for a last look and saw sabers flashing in the sun.

  Sabers flashing in the sun.

  That was the phrase and the image that carried Vandegrift’s men from a merry to a murderous mood. So the enemy had chopped up wounded Marines who had come on a mission of mercy to save the wretched enemy. So be it. Now let the enemy come so that these Marines—products of a soft and effete civilization—could also kill, could also chop up wounded; and with their own sabers.

  Patrols that had been cautious to the point of timidity now turned aggressive. Marines who would one day dread recurrent combat now hoped openly for battle. No longer would the cry “Condition Red!” send men flying to their dugouts and air-raid shelters to sit out, with fear and prayer, the daily wail and crash of enemy bombs; no, they remained aboveground to watch with gleeful hate while Henderson’s antiaircraft gunners brought down Betty after Betty and gradually forced the enemy to escalate their bombing runs from a devastating ten thousand feet to an ineffective twenty-five thousand. Sometimes, now, Marines dueled enemy warships with their puny 75-mm howitzers or ran half-tracks down to the beach to engage the enemy’s arrogant submarines, and once old Gunny Lew Diamond attempted to pursue a red-balled submarine with an 81-mm mortar mounted on a Higgins boat. Fortunately for Lew, he was restrained; but his gesture nevertheless reflected the rising ardor among his younger comrades.

  These enraged young men had no way of knowing that the enemy “surrender” flag luring Goettge to disaster had actually been a Japanese flag hanging limp, thus concealing the rising sun at its center. It would never be known whether or not the captured Japanese seaman had been a deliberate plant. Nor would anyone think of criticizing Goettge for allowing curiosity or compassion to cripple his common sense. No, all that these Marines could consider was those inhuman sabers flashing and dripping and they swore that they would have their revenge.

  From now on there would be no quarter.

  Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake was annoyed.

  On August 13, the day on which the Goettge patrol was slaughtered, Imperial General Headquarters directed him to squelch the pests in the southern Solomons. He would, of course, continue his operation against Port Moresby
. But, under a new Central Agreement signed by General Sugiyama and Admiral Nagano, his 17th Army would have to attend to Guadalcanal first.

  The new orders irritated Hyakutake because he was in a hurry to get on with his beautiful new plan for conquering Moresby and because he considered the “insignificant” Guadalcanal incursion a distraction. Moreover, the general was having difficulty rounding up troops. As was common among the Japanese, the 50,000 men comprising his 17th Army had been presented to him unassembled. The famous 2nd Division—called the Sendai after the city near Tokyo in which it was recruited—was in Java and the Philippines; the 38th or Nagoya Division was in the Dutch Indies; some 17th Army antitank units were as far away as Manchuria, and other units were engaged in New Guinea; the 35th or Kawaguchi Brigade was in the Palaus; and the crack Ichiki Detachment which was to have captured Midway was still on Guam.

  It seemed to Hyakutake that Colonel Ichiki’s force would be enough to take care of the two thousand Americans to the south. After all, Ichiki had two thousand highly trained men, the elite of the famous 28th Infantry Regiment which had fought Russians at Nomonhan during the unproclaimed—and unpublicized—Russo-Japanese border war of 1939, and which had thereafter battled Chinese in Manchuria. Two thousand battle-hardened Japanese against two thousand soft Americans? It was like sending a man on a boy’s errand.

  With contempt and with confidence Lieutenant General Hyakutake ordered Colonel Kiyono Ichiki to proceed to Guadalcanal.

  Martin Clemens was coming down at last.

  On August 12 a scout had brought him a message directing him to enter Marine lines. Next day, bestowing a fond farewell pat on the teleradio that had been his companion for five months, presenting the village headman’s aged father with a pair of gorgeous yellow corduroy shorts, Clemens departed for the Tenaru River accompanied by ten scouts.

  They encountered Sergeant Major Vouza enroute. Vouza proudly told Clemens of his private war against the Japanese on eastern Guadalcanal. At Koli Point he had invited three Japanese into a hut for refreshments. After the door closed Vouza and his comrades subdued their guests, slung them on poles like dressed pigs, and carried them down to American headquarters. Grinning with happy cruelty, Vouza explained that he had decided to bind his captives because, “They walk slow too much.”

  Clemens and his scouts passed the night in a deserted village. On the morning of the fourteenth they struck out through kunai grass five feet high. Clemens still carried his only pair of shoes, padding along on sore and swollen feet sheathed in heavy woollen miner’s socks. Coming around a bend in the coast, Clemens saw the green, scum-crested Tenaru. Across it he could see Marines in light green dungarees hauling supplies along the beach.

  Clemens halted his ragged band. He adjusted the pistol on his hip and glanced at his rifle-bearer to make sure he was carrying the weapon smartly. They dressed ranks. Clemens put on his shoes. He straightened and gave the order to move out.

  There was a lump in his throat and he could barely whisper his name to the guards, but Martin Clemens came marching in.

  Bull Halsey was well again.

  Dermatitis had kept him invalided for two months in hospitals at Pearl Harbor and in Virginia, but he had finally been certified as fit for duty and he was returning to the Pacific. Before he did, he took a short leave. Hoisting a convivial drink with friends at his family’s home, he was astonished to see one of his grandsons come tearing into the room shouting:

  “Look, Granddaddy! You’re famous! Here you are in the funny papers!”7

  Corpses drifting swollen in the sea depths,

  Corpses rotting in the mountain grass—

  We shall die, we shall die for the Emperor.

  We shall never look back.

  It was the ancient Japanese battle oath and the modern national anthem, and the men of the Ichiki Detachment chanted it while boarding ship at Truk. They had come there from Guam, for Colonel Ichiki had moved with customary speed. Now, August 16, he took nine hundred men aboard six fast destroyers and sailed south. Colonel Ichiki was going to land at Taivu Point, about twenty-two air miles east of the Tenaru River, at midnight of August 18. Simultaneously, about 250 men of a Naval Landing Force would land west of the Americans as a distraction. The remainder of Colonel Ichiki’s force—about 1500 troops—would follow in slower ships.

  Colonel Ichiki’s orders from General Hyakutake were: “… quickly recapture and maintain the airfields at Guadalcanal. If this is not possible, this detachment will occupy a part of Guadalcanal and await the arrival of troops in its rear.” Ichiki, of course, contemplated no such waiting period. He was eager to close with the enemy and his military mustache fairly bristled with the ardor of his yearning. Though he was a trained infantry officer with a high reputation among his colleagues, Ichiki was also fond of what the Japanese call “bamboo-spear” tactics. He believed that Japanese “spiritual power” was ultimately invincible. He made sure that his men read the battle instruction, which said: “When you encounter the enemy after landing, regard yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with his father’s murderer. The discomforts of the long sea voyage and the rigors of the sweltering march have been but months of watching and waiting for the moment when you slay this enemy. Here before you is the man whose death will lighten your heart of its burden of brooding anger. If you fail to destroy him utterly you can never rest at peace. And the first blow is the vital blow.”8

  Colonel Kiyono Ichiki was going to deliver that first blow.

  Archer Vandegrift was both heartened and uneasy. He was encouraged because Admiral McCain had begun to send supplies in. On August 15 destroyer-transports Little, McKean, and Gregory arrived with a small Marine Air operations detachment headed by Major Charles Hayes, four hundred drums of aviation gasoline, almost three hundred bombs, belted aircraft ammunition, tools, and spare parts. All this was an earnest of Slew McCain’s earlier promise:

  The best and proper solution, of course, is to get fighters and dive-bombers onto your field. Long Island arrives Vila the early morning of the 17th. Trained pilots will be put aboard and she will proceed to fly-away positions off south tip of San Cristobal. Planes will be flown off to reach field between 4 and 5 in the afternoon probably the 18th, and if not the 18th, the 19th, of which you will be duly advised. As I understand, she has one squadron of fighters and one squadron of dive-bombers …

  General Vandegrift was therefore sure, on the afternoon of August 15, that he would soon have the vital air cover that he now needed more than ever, for Naval intelligence had sent word of something big brewing up north, and on that very day Japanese transports had dropped containers, meant for their countrymen west of Kukum, within Marine lines. Inside one of the cylinders was the ominous message: “Help is on the way! Banzai!”

  The following day, as Vandegrift quickly learned, the destroyer Oite landed supplies on western Guadalcanal, plus 200 men of the Fifth Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force.

  Worse, there were now reports of an enemy build-up to the east. A patrol east of the Tenaru had encountered an American missionary, a priest named Father Arthur Duhamel, who spoke of an increase in Japanese numbers. This fact had been confirmed by the young coastwatcher, Clemens, who came to Vandegrift’s headquarters to put himself at the general’s service. Vandegrift regarded Clemens and his native scouts as a godsend, able replacements for all of the trained Marine scouts lost on the Goettge patrol.

  They were put to use after another disturbing report. Just before midnight of August 18 men along the beaches reported the wash of ships moving east at high speed; at about three o’clock they reported the wash going west again. At dawn there were rumors of an enemy landing to the east. Colonel Thomas ordered Sergeant Major Vouza to conduct a patrol around the entire perimeter from east to west. Meanwhile, a Marine patrol under Captain Charles Brush was sent probing eastward along the coast. Finally, on that same day of August 19, three companies of the Fifth Marines attacked west against the Japanese concentrated on the Ma
tanikau River.

  The western attack was a minor success.

  At Matanikau Village the Japanese counterattacked in the first daylight banzai bayonet charge of the war. The Marines slaughtered them with automatic weapons. Sixty-five Japanese were killed against four Marines dead and eleven wounded.

  At Kukumbona Village farther west another company attempted an amphibious assault. Enroute, their boats were shelled by a submarine and two Tokyo Express destroyers lurking in the Bay. Hugging the coast, the Marines got through to storm Kukumbona and drive the enemy into the jungle.

  It had been the six destroyers carrying Colonel Ichiki and his 900 men which caused the wash observed by Marine coastal sentries. The Japanese had come ashore at Taivu, twenty-two miles to the east of the Tenaru River. Colonel Ichiki decided to attack immediately, without waiting for the arrival of the rest of his troops, as General Hyakutake had suggested he might do. Ichiki shared Hyakutake’s contempt for Americans. He was going to attack at night, because, as the battle studies said: “Westerners—being very superior people, very effeminate, and very cowardly—have an intense dislike of fighting in the rain or the mist, or at night. Night, in particular (though it is excellent for dancing), they cannot conceive to be a proper time for war. In this, if we seize on it, lies our great opportunity.”9

  Colonel Ichiki seized on it. He wrote in his diary: “18 Aug. The landing. 20 Aug. The march by night and the battle. 21 Aug. Enjoyment of the fruits of victory.”

  It was then only August 19, but Colonel Ichiki was a tidy man. He foresaw that he might die before he had a chance to make the last two entries, so he merely postdated them for posterity—and then he sent out a company to lay communication wire.

  Captain Charles Brush did not convey the impression of tidiness. Shambling along in his baggy dungarees, Captain Brush was as debonair as a bear in overalls. But crusty “Charlie,” as his men called him with a notable lack of filial affection, was a capable company commander—one of those reservists who could compel a regular officer’s admiration.