Challenge for the Pacific

  It was dusk when Smith reached the Ilu. He forded the river and ran through a wood into a field of kunai grass. Across the field he saw two men in a vehicle. He thought they were Japanese. Then he heard them yelling in English and ran up to them.

  It was Colonel Cates and his jeep driver. Cates had heard that Smith had been shot down. He had studied his map to calculate the route he would take if he were in Smith’s place, and he had driven to the field and waited there.

  Smith poured out his thanks in an Oklahoma drawl, rueful, meanwhile, at the loss of his lucky baseball cap and his failure to destroy his plane. But even this was vouchsafed him by the solicitous Cates. A patrol from his First Marines found and burned Smith’s plane and brought back his baseball cap.

  Next day, quickly recovering from the enemy’s stratagem, the Wildcats resumed their old team tactics, as well as their slaughter of enemy aircraft; while Dauntlesses and Avengers, joined by Flying Fortresses from New Hebrides, went ranging up The Slot to strike at the Tokyo Express again.

  Even the pessimistic Admiral Ghormley sent Hornet and a screen against the enemy massing in the Shortlands, although the carrier strike was thwarted by the bad weather upon which Hyakutake and Mikawa had been counting.

  Alone in August, the Marines had held; at bay in September they had fought the enemy off; but now the month of crisis was at hand: October was beginning with those monsoon rains and moonless nights which lay like a concealing cloak over troops of the Sendai Division then sailing steadily south.

  PART FOUR

  CRISIS

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  IN ALL the Imperial Japanese Army there was no unit more illustrious than the 2nd or Sendai Division. It had been founded in 1870 when the Emperor Meiji, making a modern Japan, organized a modern army. Into its ranks came sturdy peasant youths recruited from the Sendai region north of Tokyo, and although they were not samurai, they demonstrated, during the savage Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, that they could fight the warrior-caste on even terms or better.

  The Sendai considered themselves the Emperor’s own, and their motto was a couplet taken from Meiji’s rescript to soldiers and sailors:

  Remember that Death is lighter than a feather,

  But that Duty is heavier than a mountain.

  The Sendai fought in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 the division distinguished itself by capturing Crescent Hill at Port Arthur in a bloody night attack. The Sendai were also distinguished for their ferocity during the Rape of Nanking in the Chinese War, they had fought the Russians at Nomonhan, and had had an easy time of their invasion of Java.

  For two years between action in Manchuria and Java, the Sendai was at home replenishing its depleted ranks with young recruits. Many of its soldiers sailing south to Guadalcanal in this October of 1942 could remember, with swelling hearts and misting eyes, the day on which they went off to war. In each town the entire community assembled to honor the departing conscripts. The mayor read to them portions of the Imperial Rescript:

  “I am your Commander-in-Chief, you are my strong arms. Whether I shall adequately fulfill my duty to the Ancestors depends upon your fidelity … If you unite with me, our courage and power shall illuminate the whole earth.”

  Regimental commanders such as Colonel Masajiro Furumiya of the peerless 29th Infantry succeeded the mayors, bowing to the audience to say, in a typical speech delivered in ringing tones: “As the dying leopard leaves its coat to man, so a warrior’s reputation serves his sons after his death. You will see that these sons of yours will be nurtured by the Army. They will be given the courage that will impel them to leap like lions on the foe. In the moment of national crisis our lives are no more significant than feathers, and immense treasures are as valueless as the dust in your streets. Each subject, as each least handful of earth, is in the service and possession of the Emperor.

  “Tomorrow,” he told the recruits, “you will report to your regiment, but today, before you leave, you will observe the ancient ritual of your fathers. You will say farewell at the cemetery before the tombs of your ancestors, and receive from them all the inherited loyalty for the Emperor that your family’s generations have cherished.”1

  Later the Sendai’s recruits were lined up on the parade ground to receive their rifles from the hands of an officer, who told them: “Conscripts, your rifle enables you to serve the Emperor just as the sword of the samurai made him strong and terrible in the Imperial service. You will keep its bore as bright and shining as the samurai kept his blade. On the outside it may, like yourselves, become stained with mud and blood, but within, like your own warrior’s soul, it will remain untarnished, bright, and shining.”2

  And so, like knights receiving their spurs, the Sendai accepted their rifles, making a profound obeisance before them, and in the morning they were introduced to the harsh brutal life of the Japanese soldier, one so pitilessly purposeful that it would provoke the westerner to mutiny, but one which these youths, trained almost from the cradle in disciplined adversity, regarded as the penultimate step toward a glorious destiny: fighting and dying for the Emperor.

  All day long they heard drill sergeants bellowing, “Wan-hashi, wan-hashi”—wan for the teacup which all Japanese hold in their left hands, hashi for the chopsticks grasped with the right. “Wan-hashi, wan-hashi. Teacup-chopsticks, teacup-chopsticks.”

  It was a tantalizing chant for men accustomed to a crude and tasteless diet of soybean curd for breakfast; rice, pickled fish and sliced radishes for lunch; and raw fish, rice or beets and a cup of sake for dinner. But the Sendai’s menu was not devised to please but rather to inure men to privation. In the field it was worse: rice balls and soybean curd. On this, the men of the Sendai had been trained to endure as had no other troops in the world. Before they left Japan, the men of Colonel Furumiya’s 29th Regiment had marched 122 miles in seventy-two hours, carrying their weapons, 150 rounds of ammunition and a forty-pound pack, sleeping only four hours, and then, with the roofs of their barracks in sight, they had double-timed the last few miles.

  This was the division and these were the men with whom Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake would at last crush the Americans. Although Hyakutake was no longer contemptuous of his enemy, he was still confident of defeating him; and he still underestimated his forces at about ten thousand after making allowances for the eight or nine thousand “killed” by Colonel Ichiki and General Kawaguchi. Nevertheless, he was not going to allow his forces to drift into battle piecemeal as formerly. He was going to concentrate them, and he had already ordered the 38th Division to move from Borneo to the Shortlands for shipment to Guadalcanal. Finally, he would no longer trust impetuous subordinates: General Hyakutake was going down to Guadalcanal to take personal command. He expected to arrive the night of October 9 with his 17th Army Headquarters.

  In the meantime, he got the Sendai on their way. Admiral Mikawa’s ships had already landed one unit—the 4th Infantry Regiment—on western Guadalcanal in mid-September. The remainder under the Sendai’s commander, Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, would make three separate runs led by a cruiser also named Sendai.

  The first, with Maruyama aboard, was to leave October 3.

  Admiral Nimitz arrived in Nouméa on the third of October. He conferred with Vice-Admiral Ghormley and was disturbed by what he learned. Nimitz was not so much impressed by the confused supply situation—which could not be blamed on a man who had been given an entire area tied in a shoestring—but by Ghormley’s deep pessimism about Guadalcanal. When the possibility of reinforcing the island was discussed, Ghormley protested. He said it would be unsafe to strip rear-area islands of their garrisons. The Japanese “might break through and attack our lines of communication.”

  Nimitz did not challenge Ghormley’s convictions. After all, he was the man in charge. But Nimitz returned to Pearl Harbor wondering if perhaps there should not be someone else in command, someone more aggressive, someone who share
d his own optimism about Guadalcanal.

  It was very difficult for Chester Nimitz not to think of Bull Halsey.

  That same October afternoon Martin Clemens was thinking that the time had come to rescue Snowy Rhoades and Bishop Aubin’s missionary party at Tangarare.

  For the past few weeks Rhoades had been reporting a steadily deteriorating situation at the mission station on the southwest coast. Both he and Schroeder, the frail old Savo storekeeper turned coastwatcher, were down with malaria. Dysentery had all but done for Bishop Aubin, and the entire party was without food. The Japanese, unimpressed by the bishop’s policy of neutrality, had taken it all.

  Clemens asked Vandegrift if it would be possible to divert a Catalina flying boat to the rescue. The general, preparing a third offensive west of the Matanikau, was annoyed at being distracted by what he called “a bunch o’ nuns.”3 But then Rhoades signaled, “Bishop requests also evacuation of native nuns as if left behind they will be raped,”4 and Vandegrift consented to Clemens’s request.

  On the afternoon of October 3, however, the Ramada sailed over from Malaita and Clemens dropped his plans for the Catalina. Ramada was the old Guadalcanal District vessel, a wooden schooner forty feet long and powered by a diesel engine at a speed of six knots. Her hull was black and her awnings gray and she was marked by two white crosses.

  Ramada had come to Guadalcanal with three Japanese airmen who had been captured after their bomber crashed, and Clemens asked her skipper, Peter Sasambule, if he would make the rescue trip to Tangarare. Sasambule demurred. Even though he was among the best of the native captains, a sailor who could creep like a cat among the uncharted Solomons waters, he did not like the prospect of sailing his flimsy craft past enemy-occupied territory by day and by night through the southern terminus of the Tokyo Express. But Clemens persuaded him. Early that afternoon, escorted by a fighter-plane, Ramada swung wide off the Guadalcanal coast and went chugging northwest.

  Two hours later a coastwatcher radioed that six Japanese destroyers led by Sendai were 140 miles distant from Cape Esperance. They would arrive there about four o’clock the next morning.

  Marine and Navy dive-bombers immediately prepared to strike. They took off before dusk. In the half-light of a dying day they found the Japanese convoy and came screaming down to plant a direct hit on Sendai and another on a destroyer.

  Nevertheless, the ships carrying General Maruyama and his troops pressed on. At four o’clock in the morning they set Maruyama and another Sendai regiment safely ashore on Guadalcanal.

  Ramada, which had turned Cape Esperance around midnight, also made a safe passage to Tangarare. On October 4 she sailed back under the friendly square wings of a Wildcat fighter. She arrived off Lunga after supply ships Fomalhaut and Betelgeuse and their destroyer escorts had entered Iron Bottom Bay from the other direction on a daring run of the Torpedo-Junction gantlet. Landing boats and lighters were swarming on the Bay and destroyers were prowling up and down the coast when Ramada made her entry, steaming sedately along loaded to the gunwales with Rhoades, and Schroeder; Bishop Aubin, frail and weak in his white soutane, a pectoral cross on his breast and his umbrella grasped in his hands; six priests, six European nuns and double that many native sisters, all of them dressed in white habits. The sailors gaped as Ramada dropped anchor and the Wildcat overhead dipped its wings in salute and flew away.

  Martin Clemens came aboard and quickly put the six priests on one of the supply ships. They scrambled up the bosun’s ladder. The European sisters, however, offered a different problem. A mail boat was lowered, the nuns stepped into it, and then the little craft was drawn neatly aboard to the cheers of all within view. Bishop Aubin came ashore to spend the night with General Vandegrift, who received him graciously. In the morning, he returned to Ramada. Together with the native nuns, and a party from the Church of England mission on Tulagi, he sailed for Buma Mission on Malaita.

  In a war without quarter, neutrality had not been possible.

  On the day that the missionaries left Tangarare, a group of far-from-neutral natives set out from the abandoned mission station. Led by Constable Saku, one of Clemens’s best scouts, they were out to kill Japanese.

  Two days later—October 5—they came upon ten Japanese soldiers gathering wild nuts by a river. The soldiers had piled their rifles on a rock. Saku and his comrades crept up to the rock, took the rifles and hid. Saku warned his men not to shoot and thus draw help to the enemy. The Japanese returned, and the natives leaped from the bush swinging axes and spears. Terrified, the Japanese bent to seize stones—and they were slaughtered to a man.

  Saku’s merciless band repeated the same tactics against nine more Japanese soldiers, and they fought a pitched rifle battle with another dozen. Eventually they killed thirty-two of the last of the Kawaguchi stragglers still making their pitiful way west, and they buried a hundred of their rifles. Along the route of the Kawaguchi retreat they found heaps of whitening bones and in the jungle they discovered wrecked and rusting red-balled aircraft with charred skeletons in flight suits still erect in their seats.

  The jungle wept at the enemy’s misery, but Saku’s band continued to hunt him without pity.

  Pity was also not a quality describing Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama. Haughty was a better word; haughty, irritable, and unbending—and the commander of the Sendai Division had found the situation on Guadalcanal one calculated to make these characteristics quickly known to Colonel Oka and General Kawaguchi.

  First, Maruyama was displeased that these two officers had allowed the Americans to get away from the Point Cruz trap so easily. But he was above all infuriated to find that they had allowed the wretched veterans of this miserable campaign to mingle with men of his fresh 4th Infantry Regiment and to spread their tales of horror among them. On October 5—the day that Saku began slaughtering Japanese—Colonel Nomasu Nakaguma had brought Maruyama a letter written by one of the 4th’s soldiers. It said:

  The news I hear worries me. It seems as if we have suffered considerable damage and casualties. They might be exaggerated, but it is pitiful. Far away from our home country a fearful battle is raging. What these soldiers say is something of the supernatural and cannot be believed as human stories.5

  Lieutenant General Maruyama promptly issued a general order to all troops:

  From now on, the occupying of Guadalcanal Island is under the observation of the whole world. Do not expect to return, not even one man, if the occupation is not successful. Everyone must remember the honor of the Emperor, fear no enemy, yield to no material matters, show the strong points as of steel or of rocks, and advance valiantly and ferociously. Hit the enemy opponents so hard they will not be able to get up again.6

  Then General Maruyama began planning an advance to the east bank of the Matanikau River. He, too, had recognized the advantages to be had from that position. He could put artillery there and shell Henderson Field and he could use the east bank as a jumping-off point for the grand attack scheduled for October 17.

  Maruyama ordered Colonel Nakaguma to take the 4th Infantry across the Matanikau early in the morning of October 7.

  Then he sat down at his field desk, mopped his streaming face with a towel, and resumed the study of his maps. The mouth of the Matanikau, it seemed to him, would be the most suitable place for the American commander to surrender his sword.

  General Vandegrift also studied the mouth of the Matanikau on his maps that October 5. It occurred to him that the river and the terrain offered the same possibilities which Robert E. Lee had exploited at the Chickahominy. He would make a demonstration at the river mouth while other forces crossed the Matanikau upriver to swing right and close the trap at the rear.

  This time he would use five full battalions.

  Two battalions from the Fifth Marines would mass at the river mouth under Edson.

  Two battalions of the Seventh—Puller’s and Herman Henry Hanneken’s—and a battalion from the Second Marines reinforced by Colonel William Whaling
’s scout-snipers would make the march inland. Whaling would be in command. He would be the first to cross Nippon Bridge, wheel north and march toward the sea. Hanneken would cross the river next, and move farther west before turning to the sea himself. Then Puller would cross and make the deepest western penetration, swinging round to march toward Point Cruz. Once Puller held that point, the Fifth would charge west across the river mouth.

  The attack was to commence October 7, the same day that Maruyama had chosen for Nakaguma’s attack.

  On that morning the two forces collided.

  Edson’s men met Nakaguma’s men at the river mouth and Whaling encountered Japanese while still east of the river and marching toward Nippon Bridge. Edson called for help and Vandegrift sent him the remnant of the First Raiders. Under Silent Lew Walt, now, these exhausted Marines entered their last battle. They helped the Fifth push the enemy into a pocket, and when the desperate Japanese attempted to break out that night in a banzai charge they killed sixty of them.

  October 8 it rained. It came down in monsoon sheets and both forces lay mired in the muck and murk of a Solomons downpour. Then Vandegrift learned, as had happened so often before when he attempted to break up enemy concentrations, that an enemy task force was bearing down on Guadalcanal. He would have to trim his ambitions.

  Next day the three battalions crossed the Matanikau upriver as planned, but with instructions to swing east once they had reached the sea. Then they would pass through the Fifth Marines at the river mouth and enter the perimeter.

  They did, but before they did Chesty Puller flushed an entire battalion of the enemy.

  Marching north toward Point Cruz his scouts caught sight of large numbers of enemy soldiers at the bottom of a ravine. It looked like a bivouac area. Puller called for artillery fire and set his battalion on high ground to watch.