The helmsman swung his wheel to left. Big E straightened, the enemy’s terrible trio sped harmlessly past the ship’s left side.
But now destroyer Smith was on fire. A wobbling, smoking Kate had flown straight into her forward gun mount. Smith’s bow was a mass of flames.
Hardison turned left again, and Smith dropped back to come astern of South Dakota; and then, her guns still firing, she buried her flaming nose in the battleship’s high foaming wake to put her fires out and return to station.
“Torpedo on the starboard bow!”
There was no chance to turn inside the wakes this time, the torpedo was too close. Hardison made no calculated delay before coming hard right again. He gave the order instantly, Big E’s stern skidded left again, and this time the torpedo ran harmlessly down the ship’s right side.
Plunging down its wake, Enterprise passed the drowning enemy aviators who had launched it. They gazed up at Hardison in frustrated malevolence, and then Big E’s wake thundered over them and they were gone.
Now there were five more Kates attacking Enterprise from dead astern. They maneuvered for a shot at her left middle. Hardison kept turning right to give them his narrow stern, while his force’s gunners spat out a storm of 20-mm shells. Three Kates went down in quick succession, the fourth made a bad drop and crashed, but the fifth launched with good aim from nearly dead astern.
Hardison swung his ship to parallel the torpedo track and watched the enemy missile pass along his left side.
Enterprise plunged along at twenty-seven knots, her men still battling fires, others trying to patch her riddled flight decks, and lookouts watching carefully for periscopes again. Overhead, returning planes from both her own and Hornet’s decks pleaded for permission to land. At last, Commander Crommelin insisted that they must land, holes or no holes, or else run out of gas and crash.
They began coming in, and as they did, South Dakota’s radar picked up a large formation of enemy aircraft to the west. Planes that had not landed pulled up their wheels and banked away with roaring motors. Without altitude, they were out of the fight, and it was up to Kinkaid’s gunners.
Once again, they beat the enemy off. Although the Japanese planes had had the advantage of low cloud cover, they were also denied the opportunity of singling out Enterprise for concentrated assault. Twenty of them attacked in shallow dives that are the delight of antiaircraft gunners, and eight of them were shot down while scoring only one near-miss on Enterprise.
A few minutes later, a handful of stragglers pounced on South Dakota and the cruiser San Juan. A 500-pounder hit the battleship’s Number One turret. Inside that thick steel cocoon no one was aware of the hit, but a bomb splinter struck Captain Gatch in the neck. For a single confused minute, South Dakota spun out of control and made straight for Enterprise.
Once again Hardison was swinging his ship, and then San Juan, also knocked out of control by an enemy bomb, went careening left with whistle blowing, guns shooting, and breakdown flag flying—while the American ships broke formation and went scrambling off in every direction to avoid her.
Finally, San Juan was brought under control. Enterprise sailed on, her forward elevator still jammed, but already beginning to take on planes and turning south at full speed—retiring hastily south to escape the big enemy surface force now rushing down to finish her off.
Northampton had Hornet in tow and was dragging her over the ocean at three knots.
But Admiral Kakuji Kakuta, now in command of the Japanese carriers, had been closing the distance between himself and the Americans, and he had more strikes in the air.
In late afternoon a half-dozen Kates caught the plodding carrier. They came at her in a fast weaving glide. They launched six torpedoes. Only one hit, but one was enough.
It rammed into the aviation store room with a sickly green flash and cracked Hornet open. A tide of fuel oil two feet deep went cascading through the third deck to knock Commander Creehan’s men off their feet, nearly drowning them, forcing them to rescue each other by a hand chain leading to a ladder and escape scuttle. Hornet listed sharply. Gradually the tilt built up to 18 degrees.
“Prepare to abandon ship!”
Hornet’s men stood by, her guns firing on while dive-bombers came at her again, and missed, and a V of high-flying Kates made a horizontal attack, and missed, and then Hornet’s men went over the side.
They left their dying ship in splendid order, going hand over hand down lines hung over Hornet’s sloping sides, or jumping into the water to swim to waiting life rafts. But to a sailor, to leave a ship is to leave home. Many of them had fond memories of the big ship, dying just six days after her first birthday. They left part of their personalities aboard her, part of themselves stuffed into seabags that would now go down with their ship. One man might mourn the loss of his favorite books or his Bible, while another would regret having to leave his wife’s picture or a bundle of dog-eared letters-from-home; others thought ruefully of the candy bar they had been saving for the midnight watch or cursed the loss of a collection of pornographic pictures or a souvenir of Honolulu or a good-luck charm or even a pair of loaded dice. A Marine sergeant going over the side protested that he had no time to save two Alka-Seltzer bottles filled with quarters. Officers and men who had money or valuables in the ship’s safe were also abandoning ship at cost. Commander Gus Widhelm had $600 in poker winnings in the safe, together with the titles to two automobiles, and he was losing a record-player and his fifty-two Bing Crosby records and a collection of Strauss waltzes. Commander Dodson had managed to destroy the ship’s secret papers but he could not save his collection of Greek and Roman coins. They, along with Commander Smith’s lithographs and wood cuts and collection of French literature, would ultimately sink to the bottom of the sea.
Pat Creehan all but refused to leave, working stubbornly at his engines, until, with the water above his shoulders, he cast a last fond look at his turbines, and climbed out the escape hatch.
Out in the water, destroyers which had already taken off Hornet’s wounded moved rapidly among the life rafts to take able survivors aboard. Three of the men so rescued—Richard McDonald, Frank Cox, and Russell Burke—vowed loudly that never again would they light three cigarettes on one match.
Captain Mason was the last to leave Hornet. Silent and impassive, he climbed down a cargo net into a waiting boat, and then destroyers Mustin and Anderson ran in to sink his ship with torpedoes.
Isoroku Yamamoto was elated to hear that Enterprise and Hornet—the two ships which had violated inviolable Tokyo—had been caught and crippled by his fliers. His orders to his fleet were brief: “Chase and mop up the fleeing enemy.”
All ships gave immediate pursuit. Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo sent battleships Kongo and Haruna and a dozen cruisers and destroyers plunging southeast at a furious thirty knots. Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe with battleships Hiei and Kirishima, and another flock of cruisers and destroyers, also poured it on. After both surface forces came Kakuta with Junyo and Zuikaku, hoping to get off a finishing strike at dawn.
But Admiral Kinkaid had wisely taken his ships out of range. The best that the Japanese could do was to find Hornet and to scare off the American destroyers which had failed to sink her.
Mustin and Anderson had fired eight torpedoes each at Hornet. Nine of them hit, yet Hornet remained afloat; proof, if more were ever needed, that America’s shipbuilders were superior to her torpedo-makers.
Only four Japanese fish were needed to do what sixteen American torpedoes could not do. They were launched by destroyers Akigumo and Makigumo and they put U.S.S. Hornet, seventh American ship of that name, beneath the wave.
Only crippled Enterprise now stood between the enemy and Guadalcanal.
In Tokyo a great victory was proclaimed.
But once again, the Japanese failed to understand that if they had won a tactical victory—as they certainly had in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands—they had suffered strategic loss. Although Hornet was gone and Enterprise was
damaged, the Americans had once again bought time with blood. Enterprise could be repaired while more ships and aircraft were rushed to the South Pacific.
But for Japan, Santa Cruz meant that Hiyo, Zuiho, and Shokaku were out of the fight for Guadalcanal, and a hundred aircraft, with their precious pilots and crews, had been lost. After Santa Cruz, Japan’s carrier-based aircraft would no longer be a factor at Guadalcanal. Perhaps Emperor Hirohito, again more prescient than his admirals, was aware of the strategic loss; for the Imperial Rescript issued to celebrate the victory was the very model of a cautious vaunt.
“The Combined Fleet is at present striking heavy blows at the enemy Fleet in the South Pacific Ocean,” Hirohito said. “We are deeply gratified. I charge each of you to exert yourselves to the utmost in all things toward the critical turning point in the war.”
Even as the Rescript was announced to the people of Japan, on Guadalcanal itself the men of the Emperor’s own division were passing through an ordeal duplicating the travail of the Kawaguchi Brigade before them. Retreating east and west, the Sendai also clawed at trees for bark, or drank from muddy puddles, or gnawed their rifle slings.
Behind them, Colonel Masajiro Furumiya had decided that suicide was the only resort. He and Captain Suzuki had not been able to escape on the night of October 26–27. American fire had forced them back to their hideout. They were alone, for the others had been killed. Weak with hunger, Furumiya and Suzuki had barely enough strength to tear the 29th Infantry’s colors into bits of bright red and white silk and to grind them into the mud. Then Colonel Furumiya wrote a letter which Suzuki was to deliver to General Maruyama, if he survived.
“I do not know what excuse to give.…
“I am sorry I have lost many troops uselessly and for this result which has come unexpectedly. We must not overlook firepower. When there is firepower the troops become active and full of spirit. But when firepower ceases they become inactive.
“Spirit exists eternally.
“I am going to return my borrowed life today with short interest.”3
Colonel Furumiya paused. He wrote his last line: “The mission of a Japanese warrior is to serve his Emperor!”4
Masajiro Furumiya tottered to his feet. He straightened. He bowed profoundly in the direction of the Emperor, and the captain put the pistol to the colonel’s head and pulled the trigger.
PART FIVE
CRUX
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
FOR NEARLY three months, now, both sides had been frustrated in a war of blacks and whites: black for the nights in which the Japanese attacked, landed troops and supplies or shelled the enemy; white for the day in which the Americans attacked, landed troops and supplies or flew off airplanes to intercept bombing raids preparing the way for the enemy’s movement at night.
But now, now it was November—the crucial month, the fourth month of battle—and both sides entered it with redoubling arms and confidence in ultimate victory.
In Tokyo, Imperial General Headquarters prescribed, for the third time, a massive co-ordinated assault by the Army and Navy. Tactically, there would be a difference. Surprise night attacks were to be abandoned in favor of steady driving operations launched from the Japanese platform west of the Matanikau.
The remnant of the Sendai Division was to assemble on that platform while awaiting the arrival of the 38th Division, and, later, the 51st Division then in China, and a mixed brigade, also in the Far East. Once the Sendai had recovered from its mauling at the hands of the Americans, and all of these units were in place, the offensive would be renewed.
Despite three bloody and unmitigated defeats, the Army betrayed no doubts about its ability to recover Guadalcanal, and with it, the Japanese offensive in the Pacific. The Army felt this way because it continued to believe Navy reports of smashing victories at sea, particularly the last exaggeration: two American carriers and three battleships sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.
Many admirals were not nearly so sanguine. They were not because they knew the truth of their own frightful losses in both carrier and land-based air, and because they appreciated, better than the generals, the terrible risks involved in putting men and supplies ashore in the face of enemy land-based air.
Some admirals, among them Gunichi Mikawa and Raizo Tanaka, argued against reinforcing while Henderson Field remained operative. They wished to suspend operations until Rabaul could be expanded as a rear base and a forward base near Buin could be established. Then, with Henderson Field truly knocked out, then and only then, they would renew the attack.1
Tokyo could not agree. Reinforcement was to commence immediately, in the customary way: nightly runs of the Tokyo Express preceded by daylight bombing of Henderson Field and accompanied by night surface bombardment so furious as to make The Night of the Battleships seem, in comparison, a veritable rosy dawn. Already, at his base in Truk, Admiral Yamamoto was at work on a plan drawing heavily from his formidable array of battleships.
Reinforcement was also an American concern, but as much, if not more, with aerial as with ground strength. Land-based air, the Americans knew, with all respect and admiration for General Vandegrift’s skill and the doggedness of his doughty troops, was holding Guadalcanal. Accordingly, aircraft and pilots were being gathered to replenish a Cactus Air Force which, on October 26, the day of Santa Cruz, was down to twenty-nine combat planes.
On October 19, five days before President Roosevelt had ordered the Joint Chiefs to rush all available weapons to Guadalcanal, General Marshall had alerted the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division under the command of Major General J. Lawton Collins for movement from Hawaii to the South Pacific. Moreover, Admiral Halsey had canceled the Ndeni operation which Richmond Kelly Turner had found so attractive, and which Alexander Archer Vandegrift had considered so inimical, and he had ordered the 147th Infantry Regiment, the Eighth Marine Regiment, the Second Marine Raider Battalion, long-range artillery, and a battalion of Seabees forward to Guadalcanal.
However, American reinforcement had encountered two setbacks: one, the sinking of President Coolidge with an Army regiment’s equipment, and, two, Kelly Turner’s penchant for playing general. Balked on Ndeni, Turner, a persuasive man, convinced Admiral Halsey that another airfield should be constructed at Aola Bay, about fifty miles to the east of Lunga Point. Turner approached Halsey aware that Vandegrift’s engineers, and Martin Clemens, who had lived at Aola, considered the area impossible as an airfield site. Turner also made his proposal without Vandegrift’s knowledge or acquiescence, and so, a battalion of the 147th Infantry, half of the Raiders, all of the Seabees, artillery from the Americal Division, as well as Marine coastal and antiaircraft guns, were to go into Aola rather than into Vandegrift’s perimeter.
Vandegrift protested, and though his arguments would ultimately move Halsey to withdraw the Aola expedition, they did not prevent the immediate loss of men and guns upon which the general had been relying. To lose the Seabees was an especially stiff jolt, for all of their skills and heavy equipment were very badly needed at Henderson Field; while long-range artillery could have been turned against Pistol Pete, again shelling the runways, and the Raiders and another battalion of infantry would naturally make the ground defenses that much stronger.
After the defeat of the Sendai, Vandegrift had about 23,000 Marines and 3000 soldiers in his command. But of these, 4000 Marines were with Rupertus on Tulagi, and the others—particularly the men who had landed on August 7—were very close to exhaustion.
They were shadow troops. Three months of uninterrupted ordeal such as no American troops had ever sustained, before or since, such as few soldiers in history have experienced, had made them walking skeletons of parchment flesh and quivering nerve. They were the young ancients, the old-young, staring with a fixed thousand-yard stare out of eyes that were red-rimmed and sunken. Their bodies were taut rags of flesh stretched over sticks of bone. They had come to Guadalcanal muscular and high-spirited young men, but now e
ach had lost at least twenty pounds, some had lost fifty, and their high fervor had ebbed and nearly flowed away. They were hanging on by habit only, fighting out of the rut of an old valor.
They were lonely. It was an utter, aching, yearning loneliness, it was a feeling of what has been called “expendability,” a conviction that their country had set them down, alone, in the heart of an enemy camp and then forgotten them. They could not comprehend the contradiction of their own total commitment to the war and news of labor strikes at home or, worse, of ships lying unloaded in their own Bay because merchant seamen wanted extra pay to unload them.
And they were losing hope. Hope, which had nourished their spirits better than enemy rice had kept their bodies, was all but gone now. It had been eroded like an island in a stormy sea. Tide after tide of adversity had washed over it, each time it had emerged intact—but with shrunken shores. Now hope was a cluster of sea-washed rocks and scraggly palm trees standing in the path of a new tidal wave of calamity gathering in the north.
Without hope, these men turned in upon themselves. They rarely spoke except to close friends. Squad by squad, they kept apart; they became tribal or clannish. Some men who had spent as much as two months in the same foxhole along the same river or on top of the same ridge could not, except by dire threats from NCOs or direct orders from officers, be made to move as much as fifty yards away from their holes. It was as though they feared to displease the local deity. Much as they might explain that bombs and shells fell in showers and instantaneously on this dreadful island, and that a man was a fool to be caught very far from shelter, they acted, actually, from an atavistic dread; three months of modern war in the primitive jungle had stripped away the acquired vesture of civilization and left them naked and trembling again before a tutelary god. In this hole they had survived, and they would not leave it.
Such men would not even leave their holes to go to chow, and other men could not go because the galleys were generally located so far to the rear that they had not the strength to get there and back. Their comrades brought food to them, just as they brought food to hundreds of men who burned with malarial fires but who were not considered sick enough to be admitted to the hospitals in the rear. And malaria was now also a scourge. In the First Marine Division there had been 239 cases of malaria in September, there were 1941 in October, and before November ended there would be 3200 more.