Franklin Roosevelt was preparing America for bad news. Even as Vandegrift’s men marched toward their ships to attack Kawaguchi’s men at Tasimboko, the President in the White House was minimizing the campaign with the deprecating phrase “local operation.” Then, the announcement of Japanese victory on Guadalcanal would not come like the crack of doom.6
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
KIYOTAKE KAWAGUCHI was as confident of victory as Colonel Ichiki had been. He had 6200 men ashore whom he would hurl at Henderson Field in a three-pronged attack.
1. The major blow would be led by himself. He would take a battalion of the 124th Infantry and the two remaining Ichiki battalions to the south of the airfield, wheel and attack north.
2. Another battalion of the 124th would strike west across the Tenaru.
3. From the vicinity of the Matanikau River two reinforced battalions under Colonel Oka would cross the Lunga River and hit the airfield from the northwest.
Meanwhile, the main blow was to be supported by naval gunfire and air strikes.
It was a tidy plan, worthy of any textbook or any army that marches on maps. General Kawaguchi had devised it in the Shortlands in between arguments with Admiral Tanaka. It did not occur to him then, as it did not now occur to him, that he might scout the battlefield and the enemy before drawing up a battle plan.
Like Colonel Ichiki, he was making free and fiery interpretation of General Hyakutake’s measured instructions to “view the enemy strength, position and terrain” to see if it was “possible or not to achieve quick success” with his present strength. An impatient man, Kawaguchi had no intention of wasting time studying the enemy. To him there was no question of quick success. The Americans were few in number and inferior in quality. Japanese “spiritual power” would triumph. Moreover, by stealing stealthily south, by “tunneling through the jungle” as he called it, he would come up on the American rear and surprise them. The map had shown him a hogbacked ridge which ran down into the airfield. It seemed to be undefended.
In such confidence, General Kawaguchi went sloshing southwest. The Ishitari Battalion moved off directly westward. Colonel Oka’s force, gathering at the Matanikau, marked time for the appointed hour on the night of September 12.
Left behind at Tasimboko were three hundred men guarding General Kawaguchi’s food, part of his artillery, and a trunk containing his dress whites.
After dark on September 7 the Raiders under Colonel Edson boarded two destroyer-transports and a pair of converted California tuna launches now dignified with the initials YP, meaning patrol boat and translated “Yippy.” The Marines sailed east to Tasimboko, their approach announced by showers of bright red sparks pouring from the Yippies’ funnels.
In a misty dawn, the Raiders clambered into their Higgins boats. The Japanese, aware of their presence, prepared to receive them with a pair of 47-mm antitank guns capable of blowing the American boats out of the water.
But then the shredding mists revealed the large transports Fuller and Bellatrix escorted by a cruiser and four destroyers. They were enroute to Lunga Point, but Kawaguchi’s rear guard thought they were coming to Tasimboko. The Japanese broke and ran, abandoning the antitank guns, their own weapons and their breakfasts.
Landing unopposed, the Raiders quickly removed the antitank guns’ breech blocks and hurled them into the sea. Then they struck inland half a mile and wheeled west through a coconut plantation.
In the meantime, General Kawaguchi’s panicky soldiers had informed the brigade commander that a major enemy landing was being made in his rear, and he, in turn, had notified Rabaul.
General Hyakutake was at last distressed. He ordered the 41st Infantry Regiment to mark time at Kokoda in New Guinea for possible transfer to Guadalcanal, and then he radioed Tokyo that Kawaguchi was “sandwiched.” Tokyo quickly notified two battalions in the East Indies to stand by, even as Admiral Mikawa planned a night bombardment with a cruiser and eight destroyers and the Tokyo Express shipped two battalions of the Aoba Detachment aboard.
It was a first-class flap which continued to flutter until word came from Kawaguchi suggesting that his earlier report had been exaggerated.
Nevertheless, General Kawaguchi could not turn to strike the Raiders. He was bogged down. Among other things he had underestimated the jungle. His engineers had not been able to hack out the clear straight “tunnel” that had been promised, and three thousand men of the Kawaguchi Brigade were strung out in a snaking column three miles long. They clawed up slime-slick slopes or stumbled through swamps sometimes armpit-deep, or were tripped at every turn by tangles of root and creeper and fern, ravaged, as they went, by clouds of stinging wings and all those jungle creatures that fall, fasten, and suck.
No, Kawaguchi could not turn; he could only send his rear guard the peremptory order:
“Confront the enemy.”
Plucking up their courage, they did. Two mountain guns and a pair of howitzers and numerous Nambu machine guns began firing from the coconut groves and Edson’s men were pinned down.
Edson immediately called for aerial support and sent a company led by Clemens’s scouts along a jungle trail to turn the enemy’s right flank. Then Captain Dale Brannon’s shark-nosed Klunkers arrived to strafe and bomb the Japanese. At noon, the encircling company had deployed in the Japanese rear. Caught in a crossfire, the enemy fled again. Twenty-seven dead bodies were found draped over six heavy machine guns. Most of Kawaguchi’s food supply was also discovered, and fifty men were detailed to jab their bayonets into cans of sliced beef and crabmeat while others dragged thousands of bags of rice into the surf. All Japanese weapons were destroyed and the field pieces towed into the Bay. Enemy maps, charts, and notebooks were gathered up and a powerful radio set was wrecked.
Then, with great hoarse shouts of joy, the Marines blundered into a thatched warehouse loaded with beer and sake. When they returned to their waiting ships late that afternoon they were loaded down with bottles and with cans of beef and crab, which, as they sheepishly explained to the gently inquiring Colonel Edson, they had somehow forgotten to destroy.
It is delicious to drink the enemy’s wine and to eat his sweetmeats, and it is glorious to make him grind his teeth, as the Raiders did, sailing west to Kukum with Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s fancy white duds nailed to the masthead.
Mr. Ishimoto had been in the vicinity of Tasimboko and he reacted swiftly to the American raid.
He rounded up the missionaries and demanded again that they advise the Americans to surrender. Father Oude-Engberink replied that he could not. As he had said to Martin Clemens, he was neutral. But it would be difficult for Ishimoto to consider white skin and large noses neutral, and he shouted:
“It is useless to resist the Japanese. They are too strong for you. You cannot win and you must leave Guadalcanal.”1
Again, the priests refused. Political affairs were not their concern. Ishimoto ordered them tied and thrown into a native hut where they were tortured and bayoneted to death. Old Sister Edmée, her body swollen and deformed by elephantiasis, was sent blundering off into the bush. But Sisters Sylvia and Odilia, both young, were also murdered.
After they were raped.2
The night of his return Red Mike Edson had gone to Colonel Thomas at Vandegrift’s headquarters. “This is no motley of Japs,” he said in his throaty whisper.3 Next morning, smiling his cold white smile, Edson was back. Thomas looked up from patrol reports and Intelligence interpretations of the captured Tasimboko documents. “They’re coming,” Thomas said.
Edson nodded. But from where? He pointed to a ridge on an aerial photograph and whispered: “This looks like a good approach.”4
Thomas was startled. Edson had fingered the very ridge to which General Vandegrift, tired of jumping in and out of airfield dugouts, was planning to move his command post. Edson was unperturbed. The ridge was a perfect approach to the airfield. It was a broken hogback running parallel to the Lunga River south of the airfield. South, east, and
west—that is, front and both sides—it was surrounded by jungle; but to the north or rear it ran gently down into Henderson Field. What better approach, Edson argued, and Thomas, agreeing, took him to see the general.
Vandegrift was pleased to see the two men unfold their map and confidently pinpoint the avenue of enemy approach.
“Where is that?” he asked.
Respectful but reproachful, Edson said: “The ridge you insist on putting your new CP behind.”5
Vandegrift smiled softly. He had already rejected some rather profane objections from his staff regarding his new command post, and he was not now going to change his mind. Engineers were already at work building a pavilion 35 × 18 feet which would house the living and working quarters of Vandegrift and his chief of staff, Colonel Capers James. It was to have Japanese wicker furniture and a Japanese icebox run by kerosene and it would be surrounded by woods filled with the colorful parrots and macaws which Vandegrift found so delightful. No, he would not change his mind, even if he could immediately grasp the danger of leaving that ridge undefended. So the general courteously ignored the colonel’s respectful rebuke and ordered him to take his composite battalion of 700 Raiders and parachutists and block that open ridge.
Then the general returned to such urgent matters as his repeated request for reinforcements. He wanted at least one regiment, preferably, if he could get it, his old Seventh Marines.
The Seventh Marines had been in Samoa since the middle of May. Trained as an assault elite, they were withering as garrison troops. There was enchanted moonlight filtering through the branches of banyan trees and the soft plinking of native guitars. There was also a ration of two cans of beer daily and hot food from the galleys. And there was the tsetse fly that brings “mumu,” as the Samoans call elephantiasis.
None of these things are typical of a Corps dedicated to the principle that hunger and hardship are the school of the good soldier. “Nothing is too good for you,” the Marine Corps tells its men, adding: “But we’ll let you have it anyway.”
But on Samoa the Seventh was “living it up” in comparison to its brother regiments on Guadalcanal and the spectacle of Colonel James Webb—“Gentleman Jim” in his natty whipcord breeches and his gleaming low-quarter shoes—leading hikes in a station wagon was also not calculated to inflame its men with ardor.
It was up to the battalion commanders to try to keep their men battle-fit. One of these leaders was Lieutenant Colonel Herman Henry Hanneken, the veteran of the Banana Wars who had killed the Caco chieftain, “King” Charlemagne, in personal combat. Another was Major Chesty Puller.
At forty-four, Puller was already a Marine legend. He had won two Navy Crosses in Haiti and Nicaragua. He was that very rare bird of war: a man who actually loves combat and who is beloved by his men. Puller’s Marines delighted in repeating those numerous Pullerisms, true or false, such as his remark when he saw his first flamethrower: “Where do you fit the bayonet on it?” They boasted of his bullhorn voice and they claimed that his huge chest bulging from an otherwise spindly frame hardly five feet six inches high was capable of repelling enemy bullets. Puller’s military credo contained two articles: conditioning and attack.
On Samoa he repeatedly ordered his men out on long hikes beneath a brazen sun, instructing his officers: “Gentlemen, remember to have every man carry a one-inch square of beef suet in his pack. If they’ll grease their feet daily, and avoid so much washing, they’ll have no blisters. An old trick from the Haitian soldiers, and it never fails. You can’t march men without feet, gentlemen.”6
But Puller, like the other professional officers, soon began to mourn the Samoan confinement: “Here I am, stuck out here to rot on this damned island while other people fight the war. They’ve marooned us.”7 Hearing of the Battle of the Tenaru, he cried: “They mowed ’em down! One of these days we’ll be giving ’em hell like that. Better than that.”8
A few weeks later the Seventh Marines were ordered to Espiritu Santo. It was rumored that they were not going to Guadalcanal, but to New Guinea to fight for General MacArthur.
Admiral Ghormley pondered a most disturbing message. Admiral Nimitz was ordering Ghormley to turn over to General MacArthur one reinforced regiment of “experienced amphibious troops,” together with the ships required to mount them. Ghormley was puzzled. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had originated this order, surely must know that the only “experienced” amphibious troops in the Pacific were fighting for their lives on Guadalcanal. Could he mean the Seventh Marine Regiment, even then sailing toward Ghormley’s area? Ghormley asked the advice of Richmond Kelly Turner. He got a very straight answer:
“The only experienced amphibious troops in the South Pacific are those in Guadalcanal and it is impracticable to withdraw them.” Turner then laid it on the line:
“I respectfully invite attention to the present insecure position of Guadalcanal.… Adequate air and naval strength have not been made available. Vandegrift has consistently urged to be reinforced at once by at least one regiment … I concur.”
What might have been a very soft filching of Guadalcanal’s dwindling strength was thus prevented.
And Vandegrift’s strength was dwindling. Malaria was now ravaging his ranks as the enemy had not been able to do. Every day new shortages appeared—in bombs, bullets, starter cartridges, oxygen, tires, and lubricating oil—thus complicating old and constant shortages in food and fuel.
General Geiger’s strength was being whittled by shortages rather than by Zeros. Eight airplanes cracked up on take-off on September 8. Two of them were restored to readiness but the others were hauled off to the “boneyard” where sharp-eyed mechanics cannibalized them for spare parts.
On September 10 there were only eleven Wildcats available, and the enemy aerial onslaught was mounting. Combined Fleet’s sortie from Truk and the steady reinforcement of northern airfields were ominous signs. Admiral Nimitz did not fail to observe them. On that same September 10 he ordered all carrier aircraft “that could be spared” to be flown to Guadalcanal, thus contradicting the Navy’s doctrine that carrier aircraft should fly from carriers, as well as countermanding Ghormley’s promise to Fletcher that his fighters would not be committed to Guadalcanal. Pledges made in all sincerity in response to reasonable requests, the niceties of command prerogatives, military dogma, all had to go by the boards, now, for the enemy was obviously mounting a major bid to recover Guadalcanal.
Crisis had come.
General Vandegrift knew it as he moved into his new command post behind the ridge that would be called Bloody, and Red Mike Edson knew it going down to Kukum to tell his men that they were moving to a “rest area.”
“Too much bombing and shelling here close to the beach,” Edson said. “We’re moving to a quiet spot.”9 He smiled, enjoying the joke. The men moved out. Twice they were forced to take cover from air raids, but by two o’clock in the afternoon they were fortifying Bloody Ridge.
Edson put the parachutists under Harry Torgerson—the singed dynamiter of Gavutu—on his left or eastern flank. The Raiders took over the center and right with the right flank company strung out thinly toward the Lunga. Edson’s own command post was in a gully about a hundred yards south of Vandegrift’s new headquarters. Here he put his reserve, a depleted company of Raiders.
None of the men really believed that they had come to a “rest area,” and some of them were already cursing Edson as a glory-hound who hung around headquarters sniffing out bloody assignments for his men. None of them, however, actually suspected that they, and they alone, stood between an approaching enemy and that Henderson Field which was now the prize of the Pacific war. So some of these men did not dig so deeply as they might have, for to dig into coral with truncated entrenching tools which are little better than trowels can be so painful and exhausting that only the fear of death can impel some men to attempt it.
That fear came upon these Marines next morning. Stringing barbed wire and hacking out fields of fire in the undergro
wth, they heard the cry “Condition Red!” Twenty-six Bettys with twenty escorting Zeros were on their way. The men kept on working. The target would be, as always, the airfield behind them.
But the target was Bloody Ridge.
That tan, humpbacked mound rearing out of the dark green jungle sea like the spine of a whale leaped and shuddered as though harpooned.
Those who had dug pits hurled themselves into them, those who had not stood erect or tried to run and were killed or maimed.
And then the raid was over. It was quiet on the Ridge, beneath the growl and whine of aerial combat in which Marine fliers destroyed seven enemy planes and in which Major Robert Galer, shot down in the Bay, survived to swim ashore. But the men on Bloody Ridge did not know this. They knew only that the enemy was after their Ridge and they brushed dirt from their dungarees and began to dig with desperate fury.
“Some goddam rest area,” a corporal snarled. “Some goddam rest area!”10
Out in the jungle, General Kawaguchi’s toiling column of three thousand men took comfort in the sound of Japanese bombs falling on American Marines. But it was small comfort. Their march to the battle area had become an excruciating torment. It was a blind blundering stagger through a malevolent green labyrinth. Kawaguchi had no guides. The policies of Mr. Ishimoto had seen to that. Nor did the general have accurate maps or aerial mosaics.
Nevertheless, he pressed on. General Hyakutake had insisted that September 12 was to be the night of the attack and Kawaguchi could not miss that rigid deadline. He closed his eyes to the sight of limping soldiers and took an iron grip on his confidence. He would still prevail. Two of the Ichiki battalions would make the breakthrough and then the powerful unit led by Lieutenant Colonel Kusukichi Watanabe would dash to the airfield. Kawaguchi’s forces to east and west would close in simultaneously.
And then the surrender ceremony that day …