Challenge for the Pacific

  Although shaken by the loss of Wasp, Admiral Turner was also aware that Guadalcanal probably could not be held without the Seventh Marines, as well as a valuable load of aviation gasoline which he was bringing with him. On September 16—which would be September 17 back in Washington—he decided to push on to Guadalcanal.

  He was favored by overcast skies. General MacArthur came to his assistance with a series of bombing raids on Rabaul, and so did Admiral Yamamoto by sailing back to Truk.

  Turner slipped through Torpedo Junction to stand off Lunga Roads at dawn of September 18. Four thousand fresh Marines with all their equipment came flowing ashore, while destroyers Monssen and MacDonough paraded the Bay hurling five-inch shells at enemy-held sections of Guadalcanal.

  That night Kawaguchi’s men prepared to rest in a ravine south of Mount Austen. Soldiers hacked a clearing in the jungle. The wounded were laid on the ground to the rear so that their cries and the horrible smell of their gangrenous wounds would not keep the others awake. Then the able tottered to their feet to search for food.

  The men had become ravenous since the rice gave out. They tore bark from trees or grubbed in the earth for tree roots. They drank from puddles and in a few more days they would gnaw their leather rifle slings. Some of them had already buried their mortars and heavy machine guns, but they had been too weak to bury hundreds of comrades dying along the way. The dead were left beside the trail to become moving white mounds of dissolution, true “corpses rotting in the mountain grass.”

  That night as these barefoot and ragged scarecrows sucked on their agony in insect-whirring blackness, someone switched on a shortwave radio to a patriotic mass meeting held in Hinomiya Stadium in Tokyo. Captain Hiraide of the Naval Staff announced the recapture of the airfield on Guadalcanal and a great gust of cheering drowned out the moans of the Kawaguchi wounded. Hiraide said:

  “The Marines left in the lurch have been faring miserably since they were the victims of Roosevelt’s gesture.” There was more applause, and again Hiraide’s voice: “The stranded ten thousand have been practically wiped out.”5

  It was well that it was dark, so that no one need look the other in the eye.

  In the morning, while the Kawaguchis swung west to cross the upper reaches of the Lunga River, abandoning helmets, packs, light machine guns—all but their rifles—a decrepit old launch wheezed up to the beachmaster’s jetty at Kukum.

  Corporal Eroni held the tiller while Captain Carl brought the balky old engine to a coughing silence. Both men calmly stepped out to introduce themselves to a band of startled Marines. Then they borrowed a jeep and drove to General Geiger’s headquarters. Carl strode into the Pagoda. Geiger looked up in glad surprise. Carl had been given up for dead. Then Geiger grinned slyly.

  “Marion,” he said, “I have bad news. Smitty has fourteen planes, now. You still have only twelve. What about that?”

  Carl stroked his lantern jaw, hesitating. Then he burst out, “Goddamit, General, ground him for five days!”6

  Corporal Eroni had gone from the Pagoda to see his old friend, Sergeant Major Vouza, and his chief, Martin Clemens.

  Vouza had completely recovered from his wounds. In fact, shortly after his throat had been sewn up, he had asked for something to eat. Now, as September turned toward October, Vouza was back at work scouring the trails for Japanese prisoners. He could deliver them on schedule and to order, always trussed and slung, perhaps a bit more painfully tight than heretofore, because Vouza had scars on chest and neck to remind him of Mr. Ishimoto.

  Vouza was highly popular among the Marines. He wore their dungaree uniform when inside the base, the medal they had given him pinned proudly on the jacket.

  Martin Clemens was also a favorite, something like a celebrity whom Intelligence kept trotting out for the entertainment of visiting personages. The day Eroni arrived a colonel was brought to see Clemens. The colonel seemed very interested in the natives. He asked if they had known how to write before the advent of the white man.

  “Not very well,” Clemens replied. “You see, they had no paper.”7

  Even Eroni joined the shout of laughter, and then he left, accompanied by a Marine radio operator, bound for Marau on the eastern tip of Guadalcanal. The Marine’s mission was to set up a coastwatching station for submarines.

  After the ships of the Tokyo Express streaked up The Slot, they were replaced by Japanese submarines which entered the Bay from the other end. They lay there to fire their torpedoes at transports anchored off Lunga Roads. Sometimes they surfaced to attack smaller vessels with their deck guns. At other times they duelled Marine 75-mm howitzers on Tulagi. The Marines had smaller cannon but they usually could drive the submarines down by shelling their gun crews.

  All of these actions were clearly visible to men on the beach defenses, or to other Marines who had come down to the shore to take a swim—in the way that Pfc. Richard McAllister went swimming near Lunga in late September while a small cargo vessel was being unloaded. McAllister saw an enemy periscope break the water. He saw a torpedo go flashing toward the cargo ship. Then he saw it come curving just off the ship’s stern and come running straight at him.

  McAllister turned and swam. His arms flailed the water like a racing windmill. He swam wondering if there was enough metal in his dog tags to draw the torpedo toward him. He looked back wildly and saw the torpedo coming closer. He looked ahead and saw a beach working party scattering and taking for the coconuts.

  He looked again backward and saw the torpedo’s steel snout only a few feet behind him. He swerved and dug his face into the water and flailed. His feet felt the sand beneath him just as the torpedo skimmed past him and drove up on the beach not three feet to his side.

  But McAllister did not pause to measure the miss. Nor did he tarry for his clothes. His legs were now free and pumping and he entered the coconut grove going very, very fast. Later, this precious Long Lance would be disarmed and shipped home to instruct American manufacturers in the things that they did not know about torpedoes.

  The military correspondent told General Vandegrift that the American people did not know what was going on at Guadalcanal. He said that they had been led to believe that the Marines were firmly entrenched and occupied almost the entire island. Today, September 19, the correspondent said, he had discovered that this was far from true. It was obvious that American troops were besieged within a small perimeter at the end of a riddled supply line.

  Moreover, he said, in Washington the high command seemed about ready to give up on Guadalcanal, and in Nouméa a spirit of defeatism had seized Admiral Ghormley’s headquarters. There were at that moment upwards of sixty ships lying unloaded in Nouméa because of the confusion at Ghormley’s headquarters and because the ships’ officers and crews, already drawing exorbitant “combat-zone” pay, wanted to be paid overtime rates to unload them. The correspondent had seen all this and he wanted to know what the general thought about it.

  Vandegrift said that he did not like it at all. He would like the American public to know what had been done, that Japan had been stopped for the first time. He discussed the situation pro and con and concluded firmly that the enemy had actually been hurt more. He said he would like the public to know how his men had stood up to ordeal, and especially with what magnificent high spirit they continued to hang on. The correspondent was surprised. He examined the general shrewdly.

  “Are you going to hold this beachhead?” he asked. “Are you going to stay here?”

  “Hell, yes!” Archer Vandegrift snorted. “Why not?”8

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  GENERAL VANDEGRIFT’S confidence rested upon the fact that he now had more than 19,000 men and could go over to a cordon defense.

  Hitherto his line had been continuous only on the northern beaches and the Tenaru barrier to the east. On the west and south he had held strong points tied together by patrols with the gaps covered by artillery. Now he could draw a ring around Henderson Field. He could advance
south to a deeper ridge line and do the same to the west, and there would be no gaps anywhere. It meant spreading a lot of men thin, defending at every point weakly rather than at vital points in depth, and it also meant that wherever the enemy chose to attack he could concentrate his most against Vandegrift’s least. But Vandegrift did have superb artillery, he would have more with the arrival of five-inch naval rifles and eventually 155-mm “Long Toms,” and he thought he could build a line strong enough to withstand any attack until he could counter with his now-ample reserves.

  Build was the word. With bulldozers, barbed wire, axes, shovels, sandbags, and machetes made of cut-down cavalry sabers, Vandegrift’s men built a bristling defensive ring in an energetic style which would one day prompt a Japanese officer to snort that the U.S. Marines were actually not genuine jungle-fighters because “they always cut the jungle down.” He was not wrong. In the jungle ravines between the ridges sweating Marines hacked out fields of fire of up to a hundred yards. In the fields they burned the kunai grass to clear even longer lanes between their guns and the enemy’s cover. In the coconut groves axes rang and great trees came crashing down to cries of “Charge it to Lever Brothers!” and then the trunks were chopped into sections and the logs dragged across holes that were now deeper and more thickly cushioned with sandbags. Clumps of grass were planted atop the logs and in a few days tropic moisture had fastened them there so that the gunpits gave the appearance of low hummocks. Barbed wire was now plentiful and the Marines strung apron after apron of it until the outer rim of Vandegrift’s ring was formed of concentric collars of cruel black lace. Outside this rim mortarmen and artillerists marked all the likely assembly points and trails. All approaches were mined or booby-trapped. Hand-grenade pins were partially withdrawn and fastened to wires intended to trip unwary feet. Inside the rim riflemen dug Japanese spider-holes, deep vertical pits in which, if they were not filled with rain, a man could stand and shoot. Machine gunners, meanwhile, interlocked their guns or registered them for night firing. They placed cans of gasoline in trees and pressed cartridges into sandbags under their gunbutts to mark the exact spot to fire at night and set the cans afire.

  On and on they worked, cursing, cursing, cursing as they did, for these filthy, ragged, gaunt, undaunted men could no more work without the name of God on their lips than a preacher can preach without it. They cursed everything and everyone about them, calling down the Divine wrath upon friend and foe alike, upon the barbed wire that ripped their flesh and the flies that fed on the blood, or on the female anopholes mosquito who carried malaria and bit with her tail straight up; they cursed the rain that drenched them or the sun that scorched them, the sweat that made their tools slippery or the dysentery growling in their bowels; they spoke unspeakables about Washing Machine Charley and the Tokyo Express, and when they were at the chow line in the galley they were not delicate in describing the mess plopping wetly on their outstretched messgear or in delineating the lineage of the cooks who could not make it palatable—and yet they had not exhausted themselves, having saved the most anguished and insulting oaths for that moment, when, approaching the end of the line cursing the tasteless black liquid sloshing around in canteen cups now so hot that they burned their fingers, they were told to halt and open their mouths while corpsmen threw into them those bitter yellow atabrine pills which were supposed to suppress malaria, but which would also, as these infuriated men would believe until the war was over, make them impotent. “You shanker-mechanic!” they howled. “You think I want a broken arrow?” And so they virtually swore Vandegrift’s new line into existence, only shutting their mouths when it was their turn to go on patrol.

  The patrols went out daily. They were Vandegrift’s eyes and ears. They usually went out in squads—ten or a dozen men—occasionally in company strength up to two hundred. They were lightly armed. The men carried only one canteen of water and enough bullets to beat back an ambush. They smeared their faces with mud and adorned their bodies with branches. They moved silently along the trails, spaced out at intervals of a dozen feet to left and right of the track. Progress was agonizingly slow, often at a rate of no more than a mile in a day. They moved and halted, moved and halted, investigating every turn, searching every defile that might lead to ambush.

  There were frequent ambushes during late September. On one of them a company scouting the Lunga south of the perimeter was struck by machine guns and pinned to the ground. Unseen Japanese sat behind their weapons calling, “Come here, please. Come here, please.” The Marines began a fighting withdrawal, pulling back gradually, but leaving behind men who had fallen in the jungle. One of them was Private Jack Morrison. He had been shot in the chest and toppled into the underbrush with his feet sprawled across the trail. Another Marine lay moaning behind a log, and a Japanese soldier hurdled the log to jab downward twice with his bayonet. There were no more moans. Morrison clenched his teeth against his own outcries.

  Pfc. Harry Dunn also lay in the underbrush. But he was not hurt. He was playing dead. Throughout that waning afternoon the enemy tramped through the ambush area, stripping the dead, laughing and calling to each other. But they did not notice Morrison’s outflung feet. Morrison passed from consciousness to unconsciousness. His mind was like a boat drifting from mist to sun, from mist to sun. He felt the blood oozing from his wounds, felt himself growing weaker. The last time he awoke it was dark. A hand was over his mouth. He stiffened in horror, but then a voice spoke gently in his ear: “It’s all right. It’s me—Harry Dunn.”

  Dunn pulled Morrison back from the trail into a thicket. He tried to bind his wounds with Morrison’s shirt. But the garment became soaked with blood and Dunn threw it away. Then Dunn crept among the bodies of his comrades looking for water. The Japanese had taken all the canteens. Next he crawled to the river bank. He could see the Lunga gleaming darkly. He could hear murmuring wavelets. But he dared not cross a clearing in full view of the Japanese.

  All that night and the next day Dunn and Morrison lay in their thicket, among the flies and ants and slithering things, their tongues beginning to swell with thirst, their noses filled with the sweet stench of flesh already decadent, and with Dunn’s hand firmly clamped over Morrison’s mouth.

  Night fell again and Dunn decided that the Japanese had withdrawn upriver. He dragged Morrison to the Lunga. He pulled him gently down into the water. They drank for the first time in two days. Then Dunn sank into the river and pulled Morrison onto his back. He began crawling down the riverbank. He watched the river fearfully for widening V-shaped wakes, for he knew that the Lunga was infested with crocodiles. Sometimes Morrison cried out, and Dunn had no way to silence him. Sometimes Dunn passed out from exhaustion, but he always regained consciousness and crawled on.

  At daybreak Dunn reached the perimeter. Morrison was carefully lifted from his back and carried, still bleeding, to a jeep that rushed him to the airfield. There a plane flew him out to a base hospital and eventual recovery. Dunn, who had at last passed out from exhaustion, was taken to the Guadalcanal hospital.

  The Japanese who had ambushed Harry Dunn’s company were from Colonel Oka’s command. They were on patrol from the Matanikau River line which it was Oka’s responsibility to hold, and it was to this haven that Major General Kawaguchi was bringing his beaten troops.

  But it was not a haven. There could be no rest beneath the constant strafing and bombing of American aircraft and there could be no rehabilitation without rice. Oka’s men were also hungry. They had brought only enough rations to tide them over until General Kawaguchi captured the airfield. After that they would live off American food. But the Americans had not surrendered and Oka had requested emergency rations from Rabaul. Unfortunately, the provisions that were put ashore at Kamimbo Bay to the west had to be brought east over fifty miles of jungle trail and through the clutching hands and hungry mouths of the two thousand men of the 8th Base Force who had fled the airfield the day that the Americans landed. Another seven hundred men from a Naval Landing F
orce also stood between Oka’s thousand souls and their food. Thus, when the first of the Kawaguchis stumbled into camp on September 22, they found themselves among friends nearly as miserable as themselves.

  Colonel Oka blanched at the sight of them. He had never seen such human wrecks. They did nothing but beg rice from his own hungry troops or wander among them with lit fire cords in their mouths pleading for a few crumbs of tobacco. Fighting Americans had not been like fighting the Chinese,1 he was informed. Some of these survivors who had been with Colonel Ichiki at the Tenaru had horrible tales to tell of the Marines. They said they were foulmouthed beasts, the refuse of jails and asylums. They cut off Japanese soldiers’ arms and legs and ran over their bodies with steamrollers.

  Neither Colonel Oka nor General Kawaguchi considered such stories fit for the ears of the defenders of the Matanikau, still less for the men of the 4th Infantry Regiment which had arrived at Cape Esperance in mid-September. Led by Colonel Nomasu Nakaguma these fresh and well-equipped troops, part of the crack Sendai Division, had marched east to reinforce the Matanikau. It would be unwise to allow them to mingle with the Kawaguchi scarecrows and catch that most deadly of military diseases: defeatism. So the survivors of Bloody Ridge were sent farther west again, to the food stores and doctors and quinine at Kamimbo Bay and Cape Esperance, and, for the more fortunate among them, for shipment to Rabaul and hospital treatment via destroyers.

  For the Tokyo Express was running at full throttle again.

  In late August, just before he had left for the South Pacific, Brigadier General Roy Geiger had encountered Lieutenant Colonel Albert Cooley in San Diego.

  “Al,” Geiger grunted, “got your Group ready for war?”

  Cooley gulped. His dive-bomber squadron had just been split four ways to form new squadrons and his fighters were new and untrained. But he smiled weakly and said: “Not ready, sir—but willing.”