Challenge for the Pacific

CHAPTER SIX

IT WAS at Tulagi that the American counteroffensive began.

Minutes after Tulagi radioed its last defiant message, shells from cruiser San Juan smashed the radio shack. Tulagi was never heard from again.

Out in the harbor men of the Yokohama Air Group frantically sought to save eight blazing Kawanishi flying boats caught on the surface like sitting ducks. A ninth, piloted by Lieutenant Commander Yoshio Tashiro, roared over the water and tried to flounder aloft, only to be tumbled back in flames by San Juan’s guns. Commander Tashiro and his roaring tiger belt-buckle—triplet to the one worn by his brother-in-law Lieutenant Junichi Sasai—sank to the bottom of Iron Bottom Bay.

Off Tulagi’s southern coast the men of the First Raider Battalion were debarking from destroyer-transports which had brought them from New Caledonia. Lieutenant Colonel Edson watched them going. Short, wiry, pale, and icy-eyed, his eyebrows mere wisps of that carroty red hair which had earned him the nickname of “Red Mike,” Edson stood with his hands on the butt of the big six-shooter he wore, Western style, smiling his cold smile while making sure that the men were stripped down for battle.

“Don’t worry about the food,” he told a company commander fretting about the absence of rations. “There’s plenty there. Japs eat, too. All you have to do is get it.”¹

Edson was not leading the attack personally. Lieutenant Colonel Sam Griffith would do that. Griffith was another hard professional, but with an intellectual side. He was a Chinese scholar, a Marine who could write as well as fight. Shortly before eight o’clock, with the British Residency and other buildings on the southeastern tip enshrouded in smoke, Griffith and the Raiders sped for the northwestern end of the little, boot-shaped island. At eight o’clock their Higgins boats grated to a halt on coral shoals and assault riflemen leaped into the surf.

They sank into waist-deep water. Many of them floundered beneath heavy loads and went under. Others slipped on slimy coral underfooting and also sank. Yanked to their feet by their buddies, they struggled shoreward. They emerged with blood streaming from hands and knees torn by cruel coral. Fortunately, no enemy fire spat from the jungle and they plunged into its murk. At 8:15 A.M. Griffith signaled:

“Landing successful, no opposition.”

Now the Raiders moved swiftly. They were two thirds up the island. They scaled a steep grim cliff to their front and wheeled right. They drove southeastward along the cliff’s spine and sloping sides. Behind them, the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel Harold Rosecrans crossed the same landing beaches and swung left. Rosecrans’s men were to clear the northwestern third. They struck out quickly and found the territory undefended. They turned again and moved in behind Griffith in support.

Throughout the morning the Raiders moved over rough, jumbled ground, working through rocks and trees, keeping clear of shore trails covered by enemy cliffs. At noon they spilled into the former Chinese settlement on the island’s north coast, and there the Japanese struck back.

Mortar shells began to fall. Marines toppled. Lieutenant (j.g.) Samuel Miles, a physician, rushed to help three badly wounded men and fell dead, the first casualty of the campaign. A company commander was wounded. The Marines moved more warily against these rickety Chinese shacks and the tempo of their advance slowed. Late in the afternoon, Edson, who had come ashore, called a halt.

The Marines held a line running roughly from Carpenter’s Wharf on the north to a small clubhouse south of the Residency. It was not really a continuous line, rather a position held by Raiders in hastily scooped two- or three-man foxholes—sometimes connected with each other, more often not—with the Second Battalion, Fifth, backing them up.

Red Mike Edson calculated that there were about three hundred Japanese defenders in front of his men, and he expected that they would counterattack that night.

Rabaul’s counterattack was already underway.

Upon receipt of the Tulagi message, Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa had ordered the 25th Air Flotilla to send twenty-four Betty bombers bound for New Guinea to Tulagi-Guadalcanal instead. Then he called in the Tainan Group’s fighter leader, Commander Tadashi Nakajima. He showed him the target area. Nakajima was thunderstruck. Six hundred miles to the target and six hundred back! Even if his Zeros could land at Buka on Bougainville on the way back, they would still be flying the longest fighter mission ever. Mikawa did not care.

“Take every Zero that will fly,” he said.

Nakajima protested. “This is the longest fighter mission in history. Not all of my men are capable of making it. Let me take only my twelve best pilots.”²

His eyes blazing, Mikawa shoved the Tulagi farewell over the table. Nakajima read it and stiffened. Very well, then: eighteen Zeros for Guadalcanal. Nakajima left the shack and told an orderly to recall the men waiting in cockpits for the New Guinea mission. They came back—Sakai, Nishizawa, Ota, Lieutenant Sasai—the best of Japan’s aces, and they wondered at the anger on Nakajima’s face. Handing out maps of the Solomons, he told them quickly of the American strike. Lieutenant Sasai’s face blanched. He stared straight ahead and said softly: “My brother-in-law was assigned to Tulagi.”³ Nakajima ignored him and rapped out the distance to the target. The men gave low whistles of disbelief. Nakajima ignored them too and snapped: “We will take off at once for Guadalcanal.”

The pilots broke up into trios. Saburo Sakai turned to his wingmen, Yonekawa and Hatori. “You’ll meet the American Navy fliers for the first time today. They are going to have us at a distinct advantage because of the distance we have to fly. I want you both to use the greatest caution. Above all, never break away from me. No matter what happens, no matter what goes on around us, stick as close to my plane as you can. Remember that—don’t break away.”⁴

Yonekawa and Hatori nodded. Why break away anyway? Saburo Sakai had never lost a wingman.

Turning, the three pilots joined the others sprinting for their Zeros. They climbed into cockpits and watched two dozen Bettys go thundering down the runway ahead of them. At last Commander Nakajima lifted his hand over his head. Within ten minutes all of his fighters were airborne.

In Tokyo, reports of the American invasion did not unduly disturb Imperial General Headquarters. Army General Staff’s chief reaction was one of surprise to find that the Navy had been building an airfield on “this insignificant island in the South Seas, inhabited only by natives.”⁵ An intelligence report from the Japanese Military Attaché in Moscow claimed that there were only 2000 Americans involved and that they intended to destroy the airfield and withdraw.⁶ The enemy operation was nothing but a reconnaissance-in-force. The report was believed, although both Army and Navy agreed that the Americans should be ousted before they could put the airfield into operation.

General Gen Sugiyama, chief of Army General Staff, spent the morning hunting for a unit to do the job.

Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of Naval General Staff, passed a more active day. First, he had received Admiral Mikawa’s radioed request for approval of his proposal to launch a night surface attack against the American fleet. Nagano had been appalled. A night attack in the narrow, uncharted water of The Slot seemed too risky. But his staff, arguing that this was a chance to hit the Americans hard, persuaded him to approve Mikawa’s plan. He signaled:

“Execute.”

Next, Nagano directed Combined Fleet to give first priority to the recapture of Guadalcanal. Admiral Yamamoto immediately set up a supreme Southeast Area Force and notified Vice-Admiral Nishizo Tsukahara on Saipan to take charge of it. Tsukahara, commander of the Eleventh Air Fleet, quickly made provisions to lead the cream of his command to Rabaul for action next day. Tsukahara now superseded Mikawa.

Admiral Yamamoto also began gathering all available ships and planes for a massive sortie. Characteristically, he considered the Solomons invasion as one more chance to destroy the enemy fleet. It was not Guadalcanal that was important to him; it was the fact that the American Navy was gathered there in force and could be annihilated in decisive battle.

Thus the importance of Guadalcanal to Japan’s military leaders: General Sugiyama, echoed by General Hyakutake, thought it a mere nuisance which might interfere with the Port Moresby operation and must therefore be quickly squelched, Admirals Nagano and Yamamoto saw it as an opportunity to regain the naval edge lost at Midway.

Nevertheless, Nagano thought enough of the event to report it to Emperor Hirohito. Putting on dress whites, Nagano went to the Emperor’s summer villa at Nikko. Alarmed, more prescient than his admirals, Hirohito said he would return to Tokyo.

“Your Majesty,” Nagano protested, “it is nothing worthy of Your Majesty’s attention.”⁷ Nagano showed the Emperor the report from Moscow, and Hirohito stayed in Nikko.

Gunichi Mikawa was overjoyed to receive Naval General Staff’s order to attack. He had already ordered Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto to sortie from New Ireland with Eighth Fleet’s big sluggers, heavy cruisers Chokai, Aoba, Kinugasa, Kako, and Furutaka, along with destroyer Yunagi. Mikawa intended to board Chokai to lead his force, plus light cruisers Tenryu and Yubari then in harbor at Rabaul, south to the Solomons.

Mikawa had also attended to reinforcements for the Solomons garrisons. Hyakutake had been of no help, as Mikawa had expected, insisting that he could not spare a man from the Port Moresby operation. So the admiral had had to scrape up 410 men from the Fifth Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force and from the 81st Garrison Unit. He put them under Lieutenant Endo with instructions to board transport Meiyo Maru and sail south for Guadalcanal next day.

Mikawa realized that this was not very many men, but he expected them to do some good; for he, too, believed that there were only about 2000 Americans to the south.

Japanese bombers flying to Guadalcanal from the airfield at Kavieng on New Ireland usually passed over Buka Passage in the northern Solomons—where they could be seen by the coastwatcher, Jack Read.

Bombers flying from Rabaul passed over Buin on Bougainville—and there they could be spotted by the coastwatcher, Paul Mason.

At half-past ten that morning of August 7 the bespectacled and benign Mason sat serenely within his palm-thatched hut on Malabite Hill and heard the thunder of motors overhead. He rushed outside and counted the Bettys preceding the Zeros down to Guadalcanal. He ran back inside and signaled:

“Twenty-four torpedo bombers headed yours.”

Twenty-five minutes later, aboard the Australian cruiser Canberra down at Iron Bottom Bay, sailors heard the bullhorn announce:

“The ship will be attacked at noon by twenty-four torpedo bombers. All hands will pipe to dinner at eleven o’clock.”

The “bonzer boys up north,” as the Australians described their countrymen of the coastwatchers, had given the convoy’s sailors time to line their bellies for battle, and Admiral Fletcher’s fighter pilots time to climb high over Savo Island to await the oncoming enemy.

Commander Nakajima’s fighters were flying at 13,000 feet. Sixty miles south of Rabaul they passed over Green Island. Saburo Sakai looked down in astonishment. He had never seen such incredibly green hills before. He noticed that the island was horseshoe-shaped and he filed the landmark in his brain.

Over Bougainville the sun beat so harshly upon the canopy of Saburo’s airplane that it made him thirsty. He took a bottle of soda from his lunchbox. Forgetting the high-pressure altitude, Saburo slit the cork—and the soda came foaming into his cockpit, covering everything until it was dried by the cockpit draft. But there was a coating of dried sugar left on Saburo’s goggles and his windscreen and controls. He had to rub them clean. As he did, his Zero wandered all over the formation, and he missed the beauty of The Slot as they winged southeastward over that broad, blue sea-corridor.

Over New Georgia the formation began climbing, crossing the Russells at 20,000 feet. Fifty miles ahead of them the pilots could see Guadalcanal. Next they saw Iron Bottom Bay and gasped at the spectacle of so many ships, such a vast armada cleaving white, crisscrossing wakes in the water. Then they saw the Wildcats. There were six of them, stubby, powerful craft painted olive but for the white underside of their wings. They came plunging down out of the sun. But they ignored Saburo and his comrades. They were diving on the torpedo bombers, heedless of the popping black bursts of antiaircraft fire which rose from the American ships and kept the Bettys respectfully high.

Some of the Zeros raced ahead, firing to distract the Americans. But the Wildcats rolled together and disappeared in dives. They forced the Bettys to bomb wildly, to make foolish attempts to hit moving ships from four miles up. Saburo ground his teeth and wondered why the bombers had not been carrying torpedoes. Perhaps it was because they had been loaded for land bombing against New Guinea. Whatever, it was a waste—and now the Wildcats were growling and spitting among the Bettys. Some of the Japanese planes fell blazing into the Bay.

Nakajima’s Zeros formed up and escorted the bombers as far north as the Russells. Then they turned back to Guadalcanal. And the Wildcats jumped them. Time after time the Americans came plunging out of the sun, fired, rolled back and vanished far below. Each time they fired quick bursts from six .50-caliber machine guns mounted in the wings of each plane. After each pass, the Wildcats climbed into the sun to make their single, massed, slashing attack, and to bank and climb again. Such tactics astounded Nakajima’s pilots. They cut his formation to pieces, and they forced him to flee for safety.

Saburo Sakai was also shaken. Japan’s leading ace gaped at the spectacle of a single Wildcat taking on three Zeros in a wild left-spiraling dogfight. The American had come out on the tail of a Zero and was stitching its wings and tail with bullets when Saburo dove and drove him off. It was then that Saburo Sakai became engaged in the dogfight of his life. Spin for spin, roll for roll, spiral for spiral, the American matched the Japanese master. They fought each other and also those tremendous G pressures which pushed each pilot down in his seat, investing flying suits with the weight of lead and heads with the senseless density of iron. At last Saburo got the upper hand. Again and again he cut inside the American, he wounded him, and then, as the man flew on like a bleeding automaton, Saburo drove in for the kill with a stream of cannon shells that sent the Wildcat spinning seaward in flames and its pilot drifting limply toward Guadalcanal’s beaches beneath a blossoming, billowing parachute.

It was Saburo Sakai’s fifty-ninth kill and within a few minutes he had his sixtieth—a Dauntless dive-bomber.

His blood up, Saburo climbed to 13,000 feet to hunt for further game. He sighted eight aircraft over Guadalcanal. He gunned his motor to come up on them in surprise. He would take the Wildcats on the right and leave the others for three Zeros following him. But the American planes were not Wildcats. They were Avengers, heavy, sturdy torpedo-bombers; they had .50-caliber gunners in top and belly turrets; and they were waiting for Saburo Sakai.

Saburo saw the trap too late. He tried to fireball out of it with overboosted engine and flaming guns. The Americans opened fire.

From twenty yards away Saburo Sakai could see the stuttering muzzles of those massed guns, and then a terrible power smashed at his body, searing spikes went driving into his brain, and his Zero nosed over and fell toward the sea.

Before Tulagi had been assaulted it had been necessary to secure the island’s left flank. This had been accomplished at 7:40 in the morning when B Company of the First Battalion, Second Marines, landed at Haleta Village on Florida Island. Private Russell Miller was the first Marine ashore, thus becoming the first American to tread Japanese-held soil in World War II.

Next it was required to protect the right flank of Gavutu-Tanambogo by occupying the tip of Halavo Peninsula on Florida. Other Marines of the same battalion carried out this mission. Both operations were unopposed.

It was different at Gavutu-Tanambogo. These Siamese-twin islets, joined by a narrow causeway, were both tiny; Gavutu barely 500 by 300 yards, Tanambogo even smaller. Both were steep, ringed by coral, pocked by armored caves, and defended by troops sworn to go down fighting. Marines of the First Parachute Battalion were to take these objectives, beginning with Gavutu. They had to sail around the island to get at the only landing place, a seaplane ramp and pier on the northeastern tip.

About noon of August 7, almost coincidental with the arrival of the Japanese airplanes, Major Robert Williams and his Paramarines sped toward the seaplane ramp.

Automatic fire struck them in the boats. They found that naval shelling had torn the ramp into jagged pieces. Swerving wildly, the boats made for the pier. Some men jumped onto it, getting inland. Most of them were pinned down beside the pier. A hail of fire came from three sides: from a Gavutu hill to the left, from trenches behind the pier and from Tanambogo on the right. Major Williams was hit and command passed to Major Charles Miller. Riddled, the Paramarines called desperately for naval gunfire to knock out the enemy positions. But the covering destroyers dared not run close in uncharted, shoal-filled waters.

A landing boat full of mortars roared to the rescue. Mortarmen vaulted over gunwales and bent swiftly to the task of setting up their unlovely stovepipe killers. Soon shells were plop-plopping from tubes to fall with a killing crrrunch-whummp in enemy trenches. Enemy fire fell off and the assault swept forward. Fresh units came in to join it. The Japanese fought doggedly from their trenches. Corporal George Grady charged eight of them, firing his Thompson submachine gun as he ran. Two fell dead and Grady’s tommy gun jammed. He swung the weapon like a club and smashed an enemy soldier to the ground. He drew his sheath knife and stabbed two more. And then the others were upon him to exact his own life.

Gradually the Marines gained the upper hand. By midafternoon they held the highest land on the islet and the American flag was flung to the wind there. But the Marines stood atop a volcano. Beneath their very feet was a series of about two dozen impregnable coral caves, and around these a fierce battle began.

Improvising swiftly, the Marines strapped explosives to the end of long poles. They fitted them with five-second fuses and pushed or hurled them into cave mouths. Big blond Captain Harry Torgerson led the attack. His first charge sealed off an enemy position and blew his pants off. “Boy, that one was a pisser!”⁸ Torgerson yelled, running back for more explosives.

“Goddam, Captain,” an irreverent Marine called, “you done lost the seat of yer pants.”

“Screw the pants,” Torgerson bellowed, “get me more dynamite!”⁹

One by one the caves fell to Torgerson and his pole-chargers and Gavutu was conquered before nightfall.

A strong cold wind blowing through his shattered windshield restored Saburo Sakai to consciousness.

He felt his plane falling, plummeting like a stone. But he could see nothing, only red, only a world of scarlet. Flames? No. He felt no heat. He groped for the stick with his right hand. He pulled it back gently. Pressure pushed him back into his seat. The Zero was coming out of its dive.

But where was he? What was he to do?

He tried reaching for the throttle with his left hand. He could not. He worked his feet on the rudder bar. Only the right one moved, and the Zero skidded violently.

Saburo’s left side was paralyzed.

He began to weep.

Tears flowed from the samurai’s eyes and suddenly the red thinned and vanished and he saw sunlight again. He had wept away the blood that had gummed his vision.¹⁰

Even so he could see only dimly. Once he had lost sight of the water, and the great black shapes sliding by beneath his wings, he realized vaguely that he was lost. His instruments were sometimes clear, sometimes a blur—and he had to trust to touch. Fits of madness or a terrible overpowering desire to sleep seized him. But he flew on, thinking suddenly that the blood must have come from a wound. He raised his right hand to snap off his glove and felt his head. There was a slit in his helmet, there was a hole in his head. He could feel the thick sticky blood inside it, feel his skull, and he feared to feel deeper.

His Zero droned on and he discovered that he was flying at 200 miles an hour. The wind dried his face. Then his right eye flamed in pain. He put his hand before it, withdrew it, and discovered that his vision had not changed. He was blind in his right eye. Wave after wave of pain passed over him. He became conscious of loss of blood. With only one hand, he tried to use his four service bandages. The wind tore them away. He unwound his silk muffler. He pushed it beneath his helmet. Agonizing inch by agonizing inch he shoved it up and into his wound.

Saburo Sakai flew on. His vision and his thinking gradually clearing, he found himself on a 330-course bound for the middle of the Pacific. He corrected it and flew on, the samurai of the sky. He flew on, fighting drowsiness and despair, he flew on racked with pain and aware that he probably did not have enough gas to reach a Japanese-held island. Then he saw beneath him that strikingly green, horseshoe-shaped island.

Green Island!

He was only sixty miles south of Rabaul.

Saburo Sakai’s hand trembled on the throttle. He could make it! And there was a big island dead ahead. There was a mountain. Saburo cursed. He recognized the mountain. He was over New Ireland. He would have to cross this 2400-foot mountain peak to come down at Rabaul on the other side. He would have to climb and consume more gas. But he would have to, and he flew on—his Zero now rocked by the lash of a rain squall.

Saburo came down over St. George Channel between New Ireland and Rabaul and saw the great foaming wakes of two big ships blow beneath his wings. He saw the ships—heavy cruisers—steaming south at full speed.

But then he saw tiny Vunakunau beneath his wings. He saw the narrow runway and decided to try to ditch off the beach. He was only a few feet above the water when he changed his mind. The impact might knock him unconscious and he would drown. He had to climb again, he had to circle the field four times, in all, before he finally lowered down. A sharp jolt, a skid, an abrupt halt—and then a blessed blackness engulfed him.

Japan’s greatest ace had come home on his iron will and his unrivaled flying skill, but he had lost the sight of one eye and would not fly again until the last days of the war. Attrition had begun in the invincible Tainan Air Group, in the 25th Flotilla. Although there was sudden joy in the faces of the men who lifted unconscious Saburo Sakai from his bloody and riddled cockpit, behind their eyes lay an older, deeper grief.

Of fifty-one aircraft that left Rabaul that August 7, thirty had not come back.

The Americans could not possibly take Tanambogo from Gavutu. Every so often bursts of daisy-cutting machine-gun fire came whistling over the causeway from this smaller of the twin islets. No one ventured near the causeway above ground.

Brigadier General William Rupertus, who commanded the operations in the harbor islands, decided to take Tanambogo from the sea. He called upon Company B of the Second Marines, the outfit which had seized Haleta on Florida Island without firing a shot.

Air strikes were called down on Tanambogo. Destroyers pounded its installations. A Japanese three-inch gun was blown into the air in full view of the Marines coming to the assault. Daylight was fading fast as the coxswains pointed their prows shoreward and gunned the motors.

From a hilltop crowning Tanambogo came a terrible, withering fire. Private Russell Miller, the first American to land on Japanese soil, fell dead at his Lewis gun. A destroyer shell fell short and exploded among the boats. A coxswain was wounded and torn from the wheel of his boat. The craft yawed wildly, swinging around and heading back to Gavutu. Others followed it. Only three boats dared the Japanese fire and only one got ashore. Its occupants were pinned down and chopped up by Japanese fire. Under cover of night, friendly boats slipped in to take off dazed American survivors.

Tanambogo was very tough, Rupertus admitted. He would have to have more men. He appealed to Vandegrift who in turn appealed to Admiral Turner. Another battalion of the Second Marines—one which Turner had been holding back for the Ndeni operation—was released to Rupertus. At dawn of August 8, the attack would be renewed.

The two cruisers seen by Saburo Sakai were Aoba and Kinugasa. They were part of the force of five heavy cruisers and one destroyer which Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto had brought south from Kavieng under Admiral Mikawa’s orders. Before Saburo saw them they had also been sighted by an American B-17, which radioed the sighting back to Australia. After that Goto had detached Chokai and the destroyer Yunagi to pick up the Eighth Fleet commander while he continued on in Aoba with the others.

Chokai sailed into Simpson Harbor at two o’clock. Admiral Mikawa and his staff came aboard and Eighth Fleet commander’s red-and-white striped flag was broken from the masthead. A half-hour later, with Yunagi and the two light cruisers, Mikawa’s flagship stood out of the harbor.

It was a fine clear day. A sea as calm as a mirror lay glimmering in the sunlight. On Chokai’s bridge the officers chatted in high spirits. The men were excited. Everyone knew that they were sailing to battle.

Gunichi Mikawa was confident, even though he was aware of the terrible risks that he ran. His returning pilots had already informed him of the vastness of the American fleet. They had seen no aircraft carriers but Mikawa knew that carriers had to be somewhere in the vicinity. Mikawa dreaded the carriers, and he hoped to avoid aerial attack.

Throughout the afternoon and night of August 7, Mikawa intended to steam toward Bougainville. Next day, August 8, would be spent marking time north of Bougainville, well out of range of carrier aircraft. With dusk the ships would enter The Slot. They would come up on the enemy under cover of darkness, destroy him, and then race north again to be out of carrier range by daylight of August 9.

Mikawa’s eight ships were to strike like a wolfpack falling on a flock of sheep. First they would destroy the sheep dogs, the American warships, after which the sheep, the transports, could be devoured at leisure.

Three hours out of Rabaul, Mikawa’s and Goto’s ships made rendezvous. “Alert cruising disposition,” was ordered for the night. As the ships swung into line an American submarine was sighted. It was the veteran S-38 under Lieutenant Commander H. F. Munson. Mikawa ordered his ships to turn east to avoid it. Munson let them go. He had been so close to the enemy column that he could feel his vessel shuddering under their powerful wash. Nor could he, Munson, maneuver. Nevertheless he could see that something big was brewing. He decided to patrol St. George Channel, and meanwhile, he sent off the report: “Two destroyers and three larger ships of unknown type, heading 140 degrees True, at high speed, 8 miles west of Cape St. George.” Although Munson had miscounted the number of ships, he had still given Guadalcanal a valuable warning.

Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner did not heed the warning, just as he had dismissed the earlier report of Goto’s ships made by a Flying Fortress. Turner was not troubled because he considered a surface sea attack on the night of August 7 to be a practical impossibility. He was, however, deeply concerned about attack on August 8—either day or night. Because of this he had expressed doubts about plans to search The Slot and had requested Admiral McCain to make sure that Flying Fortresses would patrol that sea-corridor in the morning.

Otherwise, Turner was confident. The first day of invasion had gone off beautifully. Perhaps 17,000 Marines had been landed. Fletcher’s carriers were still to the south and would not depart until Sunday, August 9. On that clear calm Friday night of August 7 sailors on watch could congratulate themselves on being safe at sea and not ashore like the Marines on Tulagi, whence came the sounds of battle.

Red Mike Edson had expected the Japanese to counterattack at night, and they did.

Marines in their shallow foxholes could hear the enemy assembling. The Japanese crawled noisily out of their caves and dugouts. They shouted their war cry “Banzai!” in a kind of gurgling turkey-gobbler whoop. They howled threats which, they had been assured, would turn American hearts cold with fear.

“Japanese boy drink American boy’s blood!”

“Blood for the Emperor!”

They attacked, coming in ragged bands or sometimes as solitary infiltrators. They fired their rifles as they charged, deliberately trying to draw giveaway fire so that they might grenade the source of muzzle flashes. Where they threw grenades they were grenaded, where they closed with knives they were met with knives. Four times they charged, striking savagely at Marine positions in the center.

Here they came against Private First Class Johnny Ahrens and his Browning Automatic Rifle, and each time Ahrens and his chattering BAR broke them up. Just before dawn the Japanese were finally repulsed.

Captain Lewis (“Silent Lew”) Walt came quickly to the foxhole held by Ahrens. He found the youth dying. He was covered with blood. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly. There were bullet holes in his chest and thick blood rose slowly from three deep bayonet wounds. Next to Ahrens lay a dead Japanese sergeant. A dead officer was sprawled across his legs. Around his foxhole thirteen more Japanese bodies lay crumpled in grotesque, ungainly death. Johnny Ahrens lay dying, still clinging to his BAR, and Walt, a big, powerful man, bent to lift the youth in his arms.

“Captain, they tried to come through me last night,” Ahrens gasped, “but I don’t think they made it.”

“They didn’t, Johnny,” Walt replied gently. “They didn’t.”¹¹

The attack on Tanambogo had re-commenced.

At 8 A.M., August 8, the Third Battalion, Second Marines, landed on Gavutu to help mop up. By noon Gavutu was cleared and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hunt signaled that he was ready to attack Tanambogo. He asked for an air strike. Six Dauntlesses came swooping down—to drop their bombs on Gavutu! Three Marines were blown apart and six others badly wounded. Enraged and helpless, Colonel Hunt hurled a stream of invective at the departing “friendly” planes. Then San Juan stood into the harbor to shell Tanambogo briefly and withdraw. Next another group of carrier bombers arrived. They were going to knock out a Japanese position crowned by a Japanese flag. Once again, several bombs fell short—and more Marines on Gavutu were killed and wounded.

Hunt asked that he be spared further air “support.”

At four o’clock he called on the destroyer Buchanan to attempt short-range fire. Buchanan ran boldly inshore and blasted Tanambogo so thoroughly that a company of Marines were able to land standing up. An hour later they tore down the flag that had so disastrously intrigued the dive-bombers, and next day mopping-up operations cleared both Tanambogo and Tulagi of the remaining Japanese.

About 750 Japanese had died defending Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo, while 144 Americans were killed and 194 wounded. Capture of the harbor islands had not been costly—as “prices” are measured in the heartless business of war—and yet it seemed so when compared to the effortless conquest of Guadalcanal.

CHAPTER SEVEN

VANDEGRIFT’S main body—some 10,000 Marines—hit the middle of Guadalcanal’s northern coastline shortly after nine o’clock the morning of August 7.

Two battalions of Colonel Hunt’s Fifth Marines came in abreast, fanning out on a front of 2000 yards to cover for Colonel Cates’s First Marines landing behind them in a column of three battalions.

They were unopposed.

The Americans were stunned. Many of these youths had sincerely expected to fight for their lives from behind a barricade formed by the bodies of fallen comrades. Instead they had trotted into an exotic grove of coconut palms, and some of them celebrated this pleasant introduction to modern war by shinnying up the palms to throw down coconuts to their buddies. Bayonets honed razor-sharp were drawn to cleave, not enemy skulls, but the outer husks of coconuts, and next to puncture softer inner shells yielding a cool and tasty milk.

“Knock off openin’ them coconuts!” screamed an outraged sergeant who had memorized the “Know Your Enemy” manual by heart. “They might be poisoned!”

“Damfine poison,” Lew Juergens murmured, drinking happily, and Lucky shot back disdainfully, “Who’n hell’s gonna poison a whole damn grove of coconuts?”¹

A few minutes later, the Fifth Marines wheeled west to work toward the village of Kukum, and the First Marines plunged south toward Grassy Knoll, or Mount Austen, a high patch of ground which dominated the airfield from the south. Grassy Knoll was supposed to be only two miles inland across passable terrain. Actually it was four miles away and over the sort of tortuous terrain with which Martin Clemens—still crouching by his radio at Matanga—had become painfully familiar.

Throughout the day men whose bodies had softened during weeks of shipboard life scrambled up the faces of muddy hills and slid down the reverse slopes. Rifles rang against canteens and falling helmets rattled on the stones. Gasping in humid heat, bathed in a stream of enervating sweat and burdened with packs and ammunition loads that were far too heavy, the First Marines moved through dripping rain forests with all the stealth of a traveling circus. They blundered through fields of sharp kunai grass as tall as a man and sometimes became lost in them or shot at each other there. They forded what seemed to be river after river but what was actually one or two streams doubling back on themselves. Half of the time they had no scouts out ahead of them and most of the time they had no flankers probing the jungle to either side, and if the Japanese had chosen to sit in ambush that day there could have been a slaughter.

But the enemy was absent. Only a few—Mr. Ishimoto among them—were east of the Tenaru River. Most of them—about 1700 naval laborers, with their protectors of a Naval Landing Force—had fled to the west of that Lunga River against which the Fifth Regiment was advancing.

The Fifth was also moving slowly, but without the excuse of difficult terrain. They were attacking, as General Vandegrift angrily told Colonel Hunt, as though they expected to encounter the entire Imperial Army. Hunt passed the general’s rage along to his leading battalion commander, and the Fifth finally reached the day’s objective about two miles west of the landing beach.

Both regiments dug in to pass nights made miserable by rain and mosquitoes, and fitful by the wild firing of trigger-happy sentries shooting at land crabs, wild pigs, shadows, and—with occasional tragedy—their own men. At midnight Vandegrift directed Cates to forget Grassy Knoll and to swing west toward the Lunga River in the morning, coming in on the airfield from the south.

On Saturday morning the First Marines quickly overran the airfield. Here was the prize of the campaign, and it would soon be named Henderson Field in honor of Major Loften Henderson, a Marine flying hero who was killed at Midway. Besides Henderson Field there was a complex of wharves, bridges, ice plants, radio stations and power and oxygen plants. The Japanese “termites,” as the Marines were contemptuously calling the enemy laborers and their impressed Korean allies, had thrown all this up in slightly more than a month.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Regiment continued its cautious advance against Kukum. Patrols did not reach the camp until midafternoon. They found a litter of uniforms, those two-toed, rubber-soled shoes called tabis, shirts, helmets, caps, packs, mosquito netting, blankets, rifles, tea cups, chopsticks, and—most indicative of the panicky flight induced by Quincy’s opening shells—rice bowls containing half-eaten breakfasts. Later, the Fifth Marines found great stores of rice, wormy, gummy rice which the Marines then spurned but which they did not, fortunately, destroy: it would one day stand between them and starvation.

In less than two days Admiral King had obtained his coveted airfield and General Vandegrift had occupied nearly all the ground he required to defend it. It would have seemed incredibly easy, if the fighting had not then been continuing across the Bay, and if Vandegrift’s supplies were not mounting in target-size piles on the beach.

This, the unloading problem, had turned out to be Vandegrift’s biggest headache. Because he had put five of his six infantry battalions into action and kept one in reserve, he had had only a few hundred men to spare for stevedore duty. They could not possibly cope with all the supplies dumped on shore by hundreds of landing boats and lighters plying back and forth from the transports like swarms of buzzing water bugs. Confusion had multiplied the difficulties. Untrained coxswains brought rations to beaches marked for fuel or medical supplies were mixed in with ammunition. Sailors could not help, because, as they rightfully maintained, it was their job to bring material ashore and the Marines’ to get it off the beach. Many Marines not committed to action might have helped, but they merely watched their comrades of the shore parties melting under the strain. “Hell, Mac, we’re combat troops,” they sniffed. “You unload the goddamn stuff.”² Combat troops, they said, swimming in the Bay or cracking coconuts. Eventually the disorder became so great that perhaps a hundred boats had to wait offshore, bobbing gently in the swells, while coxswains searched vainly for an open stretch of beach to land on. Even though Vandegrift had received the message, “Unloading entirely out of hand,” he dared not, on this eighth of August, risk weakening his line troops. He could only hope that the supply dumps might not seem so conspicuous from the air next time the Japanese bombers came calling.

Early on August 8 the coastwatcher Jack Read began moving to a new position atop a steep ridge on northern Bougainville. At twenty minutes of nine, as he and his carriers plodded upward through the jungle, they heard the thunder of low-flying aircraft. Directly overhead passed flights of Betty bombers escorted by Zeros layered above them and to their flanks. Read started to count, while two carriers set up his aerial. A few minutes later he had signaled Townsville, Australia:

“Forty-five bombers going southeast.”

From Townsville the message was flashed to Melbourne and thence to Pearl Harbor, and at 9:10 that morning the alarm was received by the fleet in Iron Bottom Bay. Unloading ceased. Beaches were emptied of working parties. All ships got underway while Saratoga stacked flights of Wildcats over Savo at altitudes of ten, fifteen, and twenty-five thousand feet.

This time the Japanese avoided Savo. Fifty miles away from the island they swung to the north, turning southeast again to come in over Florida Island unharried by the American fighters. This time the Bettys carried torpedoes. This time they skimmed the treetops and went thundering among the transports.

They counted on a slaughter. They flew low, only twenty to forty feet above the water, hoping to come in under the guns’ depression limit, as they had done against British warships. But the American ships were equipped with better fire-control systems and their guns were built to depress.

It was the Japanese who were slaughtered. They flew into a literal storm of steel and were torn apart. Up at Bougainville stony-eyed Jack Read smiled softly to hear an excited voice on the radio shouting: “Boy, they’re shooting them down like flies, one, two, three… I can see eight of them coming down in the sea right now!” Everywhere the Bettys were blowing up, flaming, disintegrating. American ships were showered with pieces of wings and fuselage. On one transport sailors swept the limbs and torsos of Japanese airmen over the side. But one Betty did succeed in sending a torpedo flashing into the side of destroyer Jarvis, sending her staggering south to be caught by more Japanese bombers the next day and sent to the bottom with all hands. Another Betty crashed and exploded on the deck of George F. Elliott and set her hopelessly afire. The creaking old ship which had brought Johnny Rivers and Al Schmid and Phil Chaffee and Lucky and the rest of the Second Battalion, First Marines, from San Francisco to Guadalcanal would eventually perish.

So did all but one of the forty-five Bettys that flew to Iron Bottom Bay that day. The surviving bomber pilot landed at Rabaul and announced that he had sunk a battleship.

Pilots of all nations commonly exaggerate the results of their missions. The height and speed of aerial war only magnify the human tendency to make all destroyers battleships or to confuse a smokescreen for a funeral pyre. Some pilots exaggerate out of overenthusiasm, others out of unashamed mendacity. Japanese pilots, as Admiral Mikawa might have known, are more susceptible to the affliction, because, like Japanese admirals, they cannot lose face.

Nevertheless, Mikawa sailed down The Slot warmed by reports from Rabaul pilots to the effect that yesterday they had sunk two cruisers, a destroyer, and six transports, while heavily damaging three cruisers and two transports. Then, at noon, a search plane from Aoba returned to report that the great American fleet still lay in the harbor unscathed.

Mikawa was shocked, and the news aggravated his earlier dismay at having been discovered by the enemy.

At 10:20 that morning a Lockheed Hudson bomber was sighted circling above a group of Mikawa’s ships. Eighth Fleet commander had cannily divided his forces to deceive the enemy, and the Hudson sighted the larger group. The enemy plane hovered overhead for a quarter-hour before flying off toward Australia. At eleven o’clock another Hudson appeared over the smaller section, to be driven off by massed guns. Admiral Mikawa had no doubt that these planes had alerted the Americans. He was sure that the enemy carriers had been warned.

Mikawa’s dismay increased at the sight of Zeros returning from Guadalcanal in straggling twos and threes. Their lack of formation meant that they must have been through heavy fighting. Mikawa discussed the situation with his staff during lunch. They had lost the hoped-for surprise and they had heard nothing of the whereabouts of the enemy carriers. What to do? As though by answer, Mikawa broke radio silence to ask Rabaul about the carriers. He got no reply.

At one o’clock Mikawa concluded that if the enemy carriers had not been sighted, that meant that they were far to the south—too far away from Guadalcanal to catch him after he began his getaway. He decided to continue the attack. He ordered speed increased to 24 knots and set course through Bougainville Strait.

At four o’clock Mikawa’s ships turned left and entered The Slot.

Meiyo Maru was leaving Rabaul.

Almost all of the naval troops which Admiral Mikawa was sending to Guadalcanal were aboard this 5600-ton transport. Five smaller ships would escort Meiyo and carry her supplies. Meanwhile, many of the men belowdecks were making out their wills, as Japanese soldiers do before entering battle. They cut off locks of hair or pieces of fingernail and slipped them into the envelopes containing the wills and sealed them shut. Other men wound belts of a thousand stitches around their waist. They had received these bulletproof talismans from sisters or sweethearts who had stood patiently on Japanese street corners to beg a stitch from passing women. Not many of the soldiers believed in the magic powers of the belts, yet they put them on rather than be guilty of discourtesy to a loved one. A Japanese may be cruel, but he is never rude.

In early afternoon Meiyo Maru stood slowly out of Simpson Harbor bound for Guadalcanal.

Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher was leaving the Solomons.

The commander of the Expeditionary Force was not waiting until Sunday morning, as he had promised, but had turned his ships southward before dusk of Saturday night. He was taking with him three aircraft carriers, one battleship, six heavy cruisers and sixteen destroyers—by far the greater portion of the invasion fleet’s fighting power.

Throughout that day of August 8, Admiral Fletcher had been fretting. He had bombarded his commanders with inquiries about enemy torpedo-bombers. He was remembering the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, when Japanese torpedoes had finished Lexington and Yorktown. With forebodings he learned of the torpedo-bomber attack in Iron Bottom Bay that afternoon. But Admiral Fletcher did not consult Admiral Turner who had been in that battle, nor did he take comfort from reports of how completely the enemy had been devastated. Admiral Fletcher consulted chiefly with his fears. In late afternoon he radioed Vice-Admiral Ghormley:

“Fighter-plane strength reduced from ninety-nine to seventy-eight. In view of the large number of enemy torpedo planes and bombers in this area, I recommend the immediate withdrawal of my carriers. Request tankers be sent forward immediately as fuel running low.”

Fletcher did not wait for Ghormley to approve or reject his recommendation for withdrawal. His carriers were already heading south as the message cleared, and it would be twelve hours before Fletcher finally received Ghormley’s approval to retire. He had yet to be sighted by the enemy, his fighter strength was double the enemy’s, and his bunkers held enough fuel to keep him in the area for at least two more days; but the commander of the Expeditionary Force was pulling out.

Admiral Fletcher had thought too much about a long black shape tipped with 1200 pounds of explosives—the dreaded Long Lance Torpedo of Japan.

Because, after World War I, Japan had been denied naval equality with the great powers, she felt that she must, of necessity, turn to other measures which would offset superior opposition. One of these was foul-weather or night torpedo attacks aimed at whittling the enemy down to size for decisive daylight battles.

Throughout the 1930s the Japanese Navy trained in the stormy North Pacific, seeking, in nocturnal maneuvers, the utmost in realism. Ships collided and sank and men were lost without qualm. Night binoculars were developed, for the Japanese knew nothing of electronic detection devices such as radar, and the fleet was combed for men with exceptional night vision. These sailors were trained in special techniques until they were able to distinguish objects four miles away on dark nights. Excellent starshells were also produced, as well as parachute flares. Night-fighting cruisers, some of which carried as many as eight torpedo tubes on their decks, were equipped with float planes whose crews were well-drilled in night scouting or in dropping flares to illuminate a surprised enemy.

It was with such crews and such weapons that Admiral Mikawa came steaming down The Slot, bound to destroy the American invasion fleet.

In the afternoon of that August 8, Commander Ohmae aboard Chokai finished drafting the battle plan. With a feeling of extreme confidence he sent it to be wigwagged to the Fleet.

“We will penetrate south of Savo Island and torpedo the enemy main force at Guadalcanal. Thence we will move toward the forward area at Tulagi and strike with torpedoes and gunfire, after which we will withdraw to the north of Savo Island.”

As dusk approached every ship was ordered to jettison all topside flammables to clear the decks for battle. Depth charges and loose gear were stowed below. Gradually, as the sun began to sink, a feeling of exhilaration ran through the Fleet. Admiral Mikawa signaled:

“Let us attack with certain victory in the traditional night attack of the Imperial Japanese Navy. May each one calmly do his utmost.”³

Gunichi Mikawa was himself calm. It was by then full dark and he had come down The Slot without an American airplane to detain him.

Defense of Iron Bottom Bay against surface attack depended upon extensive aerial reconnaissance.

Searching of The Slot began, on that August 8, with none of the additional reconnaissance which Admiral Turner had requested the night before.

Then the Flying Fortresses on routine search missed Mikawa’s fleet by sixty miles.

Finally, of the two Royal Australian Air Force pilots who had sighted Mikawa from their Hudsons, only one bothered to make his report.

That report was filed after the pilot flew another four hours, returned to base in New Guinea and had tea. It then passed through seven separate relays before it was received by Admiral Turner eight hours and nineteen minutes after the sighting was made. The message said: “Three cruisers, three destroyers, two seaplane tenders or gunboats, course 120, speed fifteen knots.” Reading it, Turner took counsel from what he thought the enemy would do, rather than what the enemy could do. He decided that the Japanese were going to set up a seaplane base at Gizo Bay in the central Solomons. Turner was not at that moment entirely calm, for he had just intercepted Fletcher’s message to Ghormley.

Turner was trembling with rage. He, too, would have to leave quickly. Even though the ships were far from unloaded, he could not risk them to air attack without air cover of his own. But he would still like to discuss the situation with his commanders, so he sent for Vandegrift and Rear Admiral Sir Victor A. C. Crutchley.

Rear Admiral Crutchley was the last Briton to hold the rank of Flag Officer Commanding the Australian Naval Squadron. He was both a veteran of World War I, in which he had won the Victoria Cross, and of the present war, in which he had commanded battleship Warspite in the second battle of Narvik. Very tall, very charming, Crutchley was a great favorite with the Aussie sailors, who called him “Old Goat’s Whiskers” for the magnificent red beard and mustache which he wore to hide an old wound-scar.

Turner had given Crutchley the Western Defense Force. Eastern Defense had gone to Rear Admiral Scott in San Juan accompanied by the Australian cruiser Hobart and the American destroyers Monssen and Buchanan. Turner did not expect trouble at the eastern entrance to the Bay because an attack there would have to follow a roundabout route.

But at the western entrance to either side of Savo an enemy coming down The Slot would have a clean shot at the American fleet. So Crutchley had gone there, and the British admiral had begun by dividing his forces.

He put his radar destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot to either side of Savo on the outside and his six heavy cruisers to either side of Savo on the inside. Aboard Australia, his flagship, Crutchley sailed a north-south patrol followed by Canberra and Chicago in that order. Destroyers Patterson and Bagley were in front to screen. The cruisers were in column about 600 yards apart and they reversed course every hour.

The northern group was commanded by Captain Frederick Riefkohl aboard Vincennes followed by Quincy and Astoria. Destroyers Helm and Wilson formed the screen. Riefkohl sailed a box patrol, ten miles to a side, cruising at ten knots to turn right at 90 degrees every half hour.

Crutchley thought dividing his forces was excusable because he believed that six heavy cruisers would be an unwieldy force at night. Admiral Mikawa with seven cruisers did not share this belief. Crutchley also thought that he would have ample forewarning of enemy approach; it was not his fault that Allied reconnaissance had failed utterly. Then, Crutchley thought that Admiral Turner’s message to come aboard McCawley meant that he should withdraw Australia from the battle line. This he did, leaving Captain Howard Bode in Chicago in charge. But Captain Bode remained at the stern of his column because he expected Admiral Crutchley to resume position in Australia. In fact, Admiral Crutchley had not drawn up a detailed battle plan. Meanwhile, Captain Riefkohl aboard Vincennes was not aware that Australia and Crutchley had left station. Anyway, Captain Riefkohl was tired and going to bed. So were all the other cruiser commanders.

Finally, the conference called by Turner served no purpose other than to reduce and confuse the Western Defense Force. Turner merely notified Vandegrift and Crutchley, at about eleven o’clock, that he was leaving in the morning. He showed them Fletcher’s message. Vandegrift understood. It was a fait accompli foreshadowed by the conference in the Fijis. He could also agree with Turner’s description of Fletcher’s flight.

“He’s left us bare ass!”⁴

Mikawa’s staff was gathered in flag plot, when, at nine o’clock, the great news came in from Rabaul: Sunk, two enemy heavy cruisers, one large cruiser, two destroyers and nine transports; left burning, one heavy cruiser and two transports. Gunichi Mikawa forgot yesterday’s exaggerations to believe today’s.

A few hours later he launched three float planes. They were to drop course flares to guide the fleet in and they were to scout the enemy and illuminate his position upon order. They would also have very little hope of ever getting back to their ships. But Japanese fliers—there were three men in each plane—expected to die for the Emperor. The catapults flashed and the planes disappeared in the night.

Gunichi Mikawa went to Chokai’s bridge with Commander Ohmae. They were supremely confident. They peered into the night to see every bridge streaming with the banners that marked them out in the dark. Keen-eyed lookouts could make out and identify every ship by its silhouette or the red or white rings painted around its funnels. All ships were sailing in line of battle: Chokai, Aoba with Admiral Goto aboard, Kinugasa, Furutaka, Kako, the lights Tenryu and Yubari, destroyer Yunagi bringing up the rear. No other navy had so prepared itself for night battle, Mikawa thought, remembering one of the Japanese Navy’s favorite sayings:

“The Americans build things well, but their blue eyes are no match for our dark eyes in night actions.”

One of the things Americans had built well was the sound tracking device installed aboard the submarine S-38, then submerged and tracking Meiyo Maru fourteen miles west of Cape St. George. At about midnight Commander Munson closed to one thousand yards. He fired two torpedoes. Both hit, and Meiyo Maru sank with fourteen officers and 328 men. Her five sister ships were recalled to Rabaul. The first attempt to reinforce Guadalcanal had failed and in the morning sharks were splashing among bloated bodies bound with belts of a thousand stitches.

Another thing well built by the Americans was the radar installed aboard destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot. But this far-ranging electronic eye must also be understood to be effective. Neither Admiral Crutchley nor the destroyer commanders were aware that their search-legs needed to be coordinated. When these picket ships outside Savo stood at the extreme end of their search-legs they left between them a hole in the radar screen twenty-five miles wide. As August 8 neared its end Blue and Ralph Talbot sailed toward each other and then away from each other.

Aboard Talbot lookouts could see past Savo Island to their rear toward Tulagi, where George F. Elliott still burned. Her fire silhouetted some of the ships of the northern force. Over Savo there was a storm making up. Lightning flashes glimmered. The warm moist air was becoming more oppressive. Just before midnight Talbot’s lookouts heard motors overhead.

An airplane with flashing lights flew over them.

Astonished, Talbot’s watch gave immediate warning over the Talk Between Ships. But this and similar alarms were discounted by commanders who considered Mikawa’s scouts to be “friendly.” Would the Japanese dare show lights?

Blue and Talbot sailed on, together and apart, together and apart.

Before midnight the Japanese ships picked up the first marker lamp thirty miles off Cape Esperance. They were on course! Speed was increased to twenty-six knots. Shortly afterward a light was sighted in the direction of Tulagi. Admiral Goto reported that the sky was red over the island.

The ships steamed on…

On Chokai’s bridge Gunichi Mikawa stood erect and tense. His fingers whitened as he gripped the splinter-screen and peered ahead. At 12:40 A.M., August 9, hulking Savo Island loomed out of the darkness. Three minutes later a lookout sighted a ship steaming ahead from right to left. He had seen it on a black night at a distance of five miles.

It was Blue.

“Left rudder,” Mikawa ordered. “Slow to twenty-two knots.”⁵

Every gun, every eye in the fleet was trained on Blue. The slightest indication that she had seen, and Blue would be blown to bits. Thirty seconds… a minute… and Blue turned about! She reversed course and sailed back to Guadalcanal.

“Ship sighted, twenty degrees to port.”

Heads and guns again swiveled. It was Ralph Talbot, and she was sailing away.

“Right rudder,” Mikawa ordered. “Course one hundred and fifty.”

They went through the gap and the wolves were now in the pasture.

At 1:25 A.M. Mikawa gave the order: “Prepare to fire torpedoes.”

Destroyer Yunagi lost speed and dropped behind to keep an eye on Blue.

“Cruiser, seven degrees port,” a lookout cried, sighting a ship nine miles distant, illuminated in the glow of the burning Elliott. But it was too far north. Mikawa bored on, hunting for the southern force.

“Three cruisers, nine degrees starboard, moving to the right.”

There they were, the ones he wanted, in reality Chicago and Canberra with destroyer Patterson, and Mikawa gave the order: “Commence firing.” Giant steel fish leaped from loaded torpedo tubes and went hissing through the black water. “All ships attack,” Mikawa ordered, and great spiky guns fingered the sky.

At last Patterson had seen the enemy and was broadcasting the tocsin: WARNING! WARNING! STRANGE SHIPS ENTERING HARBOR!

It was too late. The Long Lances were flashing on their way and parachute flares came swaying down from Mikawa’s scout planes. Marines lying on their ponchos in Guadalcanal’s whispering blind rain forests were made suddenly fearful to see all made grotesque and ghostly about them by this wavering pale green light.

Out on the Bay black water glittered evilly under the flares. Chokai in the lead, the Japanese cruisers came on with bellowing guns.

A few seconds later a pair of Mikawa’s deadly steel fish finished their run and rammed with titanic thrust into the hull of Canberra. Twenty-four shells whistled in and broke her body. Her captain and her gunnery officer were killed. Fires started and spread. Canberra was done for and would have to be scuttled.

Another torpedo blew off the bow of Chicago. Captain Bode tumbled topside out of a sound sleep. He had a column of cruisers to shoot at, and he sailed out of the battle in the wrong direction. He also neglected to inform the northern force that he was under attack.

It took the Japanese only a few fiery minutes to blast and rout the southern force, and now Mikawa divided his column and turned left to take on the northern force.

Archer Vandegrift limped painfully below on the mine layer Southard. He had twisted an old football knee leaving McCawley for Admiral Crutchley’s barge. Crutchley had offered to take him to Southard. As they parted, the admiral said: “Vandegrift, I don’t know if I can blame Turner for what he’s doing.”⁶ The general made no reply. Reproach, at this moment, was beyond him; even if he did think that the behinds of his Marines were somewhat barer than Turner’s, who was leaving in the morning.

Vandegrift was going to Tulagi to see if Rupertus had been able to get any supplies ashore. Guadalcanal had received something less than half of its sixty-day ration, but Tulagi, busy fighting, surely had less.

In Southard’s wardroom Vandegrift gratefully sipped hot coffee, until a sailor’s voice came booming through the bridge tube: “Commodore, you better come up here. All hell’s broke loose!”⁷

Racing topside unmindful of his bad knee, Vandegrift came on deck to see flares burning far off Southard’s stern and hear the boom of naval guns. He was elated. He thought that the Americans were winning. It might not be too long before Turner would be back.

Suddenly the beams of powerful searchlights slashed the western night.

Astoria was last in column. In 1939 Astoria under Captain Richmond Kelly Turner had carried the ashes of Ambassador Hirosi Saito to Japan from America. Now, in the morning of August 9, Chokai’s big guns were saying thanks. Salvo after salvo of eight-inch shells tore into Astoria. The big ship shuddered and bucked. Like Canberra, like all the other Allied ships and unlike the Japanese, Astoria was heavy with flammable wood, with upholstered wooden wardroom furniture, and her decks and bulkheads were thick with paint and linoleum. Within a few minutes Astoria was a blazing shambles and would sink at noon that day.

It was Aoba who had turned on her searchlights. She caught luckless Quincy with her guns still pointing fore and aft. Quincy swung her guns and fired. Her shells crashed into Chokai’s chartroom. But now Quincy was caught between Mikawa’s two columns. Piece by piece and man by man, Quincy came apart. Her captain died just after he had ordered her helmsman to try to beach the burning cruiser on Savo. She began to turn over. “Abandon ship!” Men scrambled over her side, and some were still clinging to her, like ants on a sinking can, at 2:35 A.M., when Quincy rolled over and dove—the first American warship to sink to the floor of Iron Bottom Bay.

In the lead, Vincennes was the last to be caught. Searchlights picked her out, too, but she fought back. As Kako’s near-misses sent geysers of water pluming above her, Vincennes hurled shells at Kinugasa and hit her. But then Japanese shells exploded the airplanes on the American’s fantail and Vincennes was doomed. One after another the Japanese cruisers swept by the staggering, burning American ship to rock her with more torpedoes and gunfire. Vincennes sank a few minutes after the death of Quincy.

In thirty-two minutes the Japanese had destroyed four Allied heavy cruisers and damaged another. As they sped toward the regrouping rendezvous northwest of Savo, their wakes washed over a thousand oil-covered American seamen clinging desperately to empty shell cases, life rafts, orange crates—to any piece of flotsam or jetsam that might keep them afloat. Marine Corporal George Chamberlin, wounded five times by shrapnel, was saved when a sailor named Carryl Clement swam to his side, removing Chamberlin’s shoelaces and tying the wounded man’s wrists to ammunition drums. Other wounded were not so fortunate, for Savo’s shores abounded in sharks. Blood attracted them. Throughout the night men vanished with horrible swiftness. At dawn rescue operations would begin and sailors and Marines would stand on the decks of rescue craft to shoot sharks while others hauled 700 survivors aboard, blanching, sometimes, to see men with streamers of tattered flesh flopping on the decks like octopus or others so badly burned that corpsmen could find no place to insert hypodermic needles. But Gunichi Mikawa’s guns had taken the lives of 1270 men and wounded 709 others.

Meanwhile, northwest of Savo, Mikawa prepared to make short and bloody work of the thin-skinned American transports. It was clear to him that he had destroyed the sheep-dogs and the sheep were now his to devour. But then, he faltered.

It was not that he feared any of the remaining warships; he would have been overjoyed to put more enemy combat vessels on the bottom. Mikawa was just not aware of either Admiral Scott’s Eastern Force or Admiral Crutchley in Australia. Mikawa honestly believed that he had sunk five cruisers and four destroyers, almost all of the American warships that his planes had not reported “destroyed.” No, it was the American dive-bombers that Gunichi Mikawa feared. He, too, had been at Midway. All the way down The Slot his chief fear had been for the American carriers. It had seemed incredible to him that he could enter the Bay unchecked. Now, he would not stretch his luck. He would not tarry to be destroyed by American air with the advent of daylight. Like Admiral Fletcher, Admiral Mikawa fled his fears.

At 2:40 A.M. he ordered his ships to make full-speed north for Rabaul.

That afternoon Admiral Turner’s amphibious fleet upped anchor and made full-speed south for New Caledonia.

An hour later a battalion of the First Marines moved from Henderson Field to the beach to take up new positions. The men gaped in amazement at empty Iron Bottom Bay. Even the most obtuse private could grasp the meaning of that vacant expanse of shimmering blue water.

They were all alone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

KELLY TURNER stood on McCawley’s lower bridge yelling through a megaphone to Archer Vandegrift standing below him in a tossing small boat.

Turner did not know the details but Crutchley’s covering force had been badly mauled. Turner was leaving as soon as his boats had finished fishing survivors from the water. Turner did not say when he would be back. Turner waved and Vandegrift waved, and then the general’s boat beached on Guadalcanal and Vandegrift limped ashore.

He called a meeting of his staff and all regimental and battalion commanders.

They came straggling through the rain to the Division Command Post near Alligator Creek. They were colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors. New beards were sprouting raggedly on their chins. Their eyes were bloodshot and their baggy dungarees were stained with mud. They stood watching the rescue operations on the Bay or speculating on what all the shooting had been about last night. Coffee had been brewed over a smoking, sputtering fire and the hot black liquid was passed around in C-ration cans. Some of the officers cursed when the hot metal burned their lips. Others swore when concussions from the west shook the palm fronds and showered them with rainwater. The explosions were from Canberra being scuttled by torpedo and Astoria dying by compartments.

Offshore, the mists lifted to reveal the foreshortened shape of a prowless cruiser making slowly eastward between two destroyers.

“Chicago,” someone said in a shocked voice.

Archer Vandegrift came out of his tent.

He spoke quickly and bluntly. The Navy was leaving and no one knew when it would be back. Only God could say when and if they would get air cover. They were now open to every form of attack: troops by land, bombs from the air, shells from the sea. And they were to inform every officer and man in their command of this unlovely truth: they were all alone.

But, said Archer Vandegrift softly, his strong jaw lifting, they would also tell their men that Guadalcanal would not be another Bataan. Marines had been surviving such situations as this since 1775. Here also they would survive—and that was all the general had to say.

Now Colonel Gerald Thomas, the division’s operations officer, took over. Thomas said they would now:

• Organize the defense of Guadalcanal.

• Get the supplies inland.

• Finish the airfield.

• Patrol.

They were going to hold a perimeter roughly 7500 yards wide from west to east and penetrating inland about 3500 yards. It would be bounded on its eastern or right flank by the Tenaru River and on the west or left by the Kukum Hills. Its northern or seaward front would be the most heavily fortified, because it was here that Vandegrift expected the Japanese to counterattack. Its landward rear would be the most lightly defended, for here the terrain was jungle and jumbled hills and could be held by outposts tied together by roving patrols. The First Marines were to hold the Tenaru and the beach line west to the Lunga River. The Fifth Marines would hold the beach from the Lunga west to Kukum and around back to the Lunga. Colonel Pedro del Valle, commander of the Eleventh Marines, would set up his 75-mm and 105-mm howitzers in central positions from which to strike any point on the line. The 90-mm antiaircraft guns of the Third Defense Battalion were to emplace northwest of Henderson Field, and the 75-mm half-tracks were to dig in north of the airfield to be ready for movement to prepared positions on the beach. In the meantime, Vandegrift would hold his tank company and one battalion from the First Marines in reserve.

This was the line which the Marines were to hold in isolation against an enemy who now possessed the initiative and all the ships, airplanes, guns, and men required to press it. Trained to hit, United States Marines were now being forced to hold.

Except for the damage to Chokai’s chartroom, Admiral Mikawa’s ships had escaped the battle of Savo Island unscathed. Not a plane had pursued them as they sped up The Slot. They were jubilant. At midday of August 9, Mikawa signaled Goto to make for Kavieng with Aoba, Furutaka, Kinugasa, and Kako, while he led the remaining ships to Rabaul.

Early next morning Goto’s ships proceeded confidently toward Kavieng Harbor. As they went, they passed through the eye of a periscope clutched in the hands of Lieutenant Commander J. R. (“Dinty”) Moore aboard submarine S-44. Dinty Moore was excited. The cruisers seemed huge to him. He decided to attack the last in column, Kako. He waited until he was close enough to see the Japanese officers on Kako’s bridge, a distance of about seven hundred yards, and then he fired a spread of four torpedoes and dove.

Thirty-five seconds later the first of Moore’s torpedoes struck Kako with a thunderous explosion. One by one the others hit.

Kako’s boilers blew up. Far below the stricken cruiser, American sailors looked at each other with fearful eyes, listening to the hideous water noises of a disintegrating ship. Kako’s death rattle was worse than the enemy depth charges. It was as though giant chains were being dragged across the submarine’s hull.¹ But the submarine survived, as Kako did not, although this solitary American underwater victory of the Guadalcanal campaign was omitted from the paeans of praise which the Japanese press had begun to pour out on the victors of Savo Island.

Eventually and in private, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto would reprimand Gunichi Mikawa for his failure to sink the American transports. In public and immediately, however, Mikawa and his men were hailed as heroes. Victory parades were held in every city, and in Tokyo exulting crowds thronged the streets.

Headlines proclaimed “great war results… unrivalled in world history,” Australia had “absolutely become an orphan of the southwest Pacific.” Twenty-four warships and eleven transports “filled to capacity with Marines” had been sunk.²

The House of Peers directed that a certificate of gratitude be presented to the Minister of the Navy, and English-language broadcasts coyly announced that there was still “plenty room at bottom of Pacific for more American Fleet—ha! ha!”

In America there was silence. There were also disturbing estimates such as the one sent to General Marshall by Major General Millard F. Harmon, commander of Army forces under Admiral Ghormley. On August 11, Harmon wrote: “The thing that impresses me more than anything else in connection with the Solomons action is that we are not prepared ‘to follow-up’… Can the Marines hold it? There is considerable room for doubt.”³

Admiral King may also have had doubts. He betrayed the possibility of their existence by his exasperated refusal to comment on Japan’s exaggerated reports of Savo. After his public information officer asked him what he should tell Washington’s importunate reporters, King snapped: “Tell them nothing! When it’s over, tell them who won.”⁴

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

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 Matanikau 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.

On the morning of August 19, Brush led his patrol of eighty men eastward from the Tenaru. Shortly after noon, his advance scouts caught sight of the Ichiki wiremen moving slowly westward. Brush attacked.

He pinned the enemy down while Lieutenant Joseph Jachym led a squad off to the right and took up a position in the Japanese left rear. The Marines then struck the enemy front and rear with converging automatic fire. In a fight of about an hour’s length Brush’s men killed thirty-one Japanese while three others escaped into the jungle. Three Marines were killed and three wounded.

Sensing something unusual in the enemy patrol, Brush posted security and personally searched the bodies. He found, for the first time, helmets marked with the Japanese Army star rather than with the Navy’s chrysanthemum. He found an unusual number of officers among the dead. Four carried swords and field glasses, wore polished boots and were clad in neatly pressed uniforms decorated by rows of campaign ribbons. Brush rifled their map cases. He was astonished. Although the maps’ markings were in Japanese they were startlingly clear and they pinpointed the Tenaru line’s weak points with appalling accuracy.

Brush withdrew and made his report to Colonel Cates’s headquarters. General Vandegrift was notified. Some of his staff advised him to push rapidly eastward to surprise this new enemy. Vandegrift demurred. His mission was to hold the airfield. But he did order immediate strengthening of the Tenaru flank, and Colonel del Valle’s artillerymen quickly “zeroed-in” on every point along the line.

The evening of that momentous August 19, unknown to Vandegrift and his Marines, President Franklin Roosevelt radioed Joseph Stalin: “We have gained, I believe, a toehold in the Southwest Pacific from which the Japanese will find it very difficult to dislodge us. We have had substantial naval losses there, but the advantage gained was worth the sacrifice and we are going to maintain hard pressure on the enemy.”¹⁰

If Admiral Robert Ghormley back in Nouméa had seen the Chief Executive’s cable he probably would have been astounded at its optimism—for Admiral Ghormley had already gotten off pessimistic dispatches to Nimitz and King—and if Admiral Yamamoto to the north in Truk had seen it, he would have dismissed it as typical of American soft-soap salesmen.

That American toe, as Yamamoto confidently expected, was about to be squashed flat by Operation Ka.

CHAPTER NINE

KA, the first syllable of the Japanese word for Guadalcanal, was the code name for the joint Army-Navy plan to recapture that island. Colonel Ichiki’s force—the 900 already on Guadalcanal and the remaining 1500 still steaming down The Slot—represented the Army’s contribution. It was to be supported by much the greater part of Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet.

Since August 7, the admiral had been gathering ships from all over Greater East Asia. Within about a dozen days—or at least by the time Captain Brush’s Marines had met and destroyed the Ichiki patrol—there were three aircraft carriers gathered around Truk,[6] supported by three battleships, five cruisers, eight destroyers, one seaplane carrier, and numerous auxiliary ships. To this could be added Admiral Tsukahara’s Rabaul force composed of one hundred planes of the Eleventh Air Fleet and four cruisers and five destroyers of Admiral Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet.

Combined Fleet’s carrier aircraft were to clear Solomons waters of all American surface ships.

Eleventh Air Fleet’s planes were to hammer Marine positions on Guadalcanal by day.

Mikawa’s ships—the Tokyo Express—were to batter the Marines by night.

All of this was in support of 2400 troops: it was a whale backing up a weasel. But it was typically Japanese, and it reflected, once again, the Army’s unshakable conviction that there could not be more than a few thousand Americans on Guadalcanal, and the Navy’s fixed determination to lure out and destroy the American fleet.

Moreover, General Hyakutake had given Colonel Ichiki orders which permitted him to attack immediately, without waiting for anyone to move, if he saw fit. And Ichiki, on August 19, had already decided to attack. The weasel would strike without waiting for the whale.

To the south of Guadalcanal a flying whale was fighting a flying elephant.

A huge four-engined Kawanishi flying boat homeward bound for the Shortlands after scouting American waters had blundered into a Flying Fortress returning to Espiritu Santo after scouting Japanese waters.

Captain Walter Lucas brought his more-maneuverable Fort up under the Kawanishi’s belly. The American’s guns began stuttering. The Japanese began to weave from side to side to bring the American within range of his 20-mm tail cannon. Captain Lucas whipped his big plane broadside to the lumbering Kawanishi’s tail. Sergeant Vernon Nelson in the Fort’s waist triggered a killing stream of bullets into the enemy tail gun.

Lucas cut in sharper. The big Kawanishi weaved away. Now on this side, now on that side, these great groaning mastodons of the sky fought each other. They turned and twisted for twenty-five minutes, until, at last, the Kawanishi broke off to flee and the Fort bored in to kill.

Nelson and Sergeant Chester Malizeski shot out three of the Kawanishi’s engines, and the whale went down for a water landing near an island. Lucas pursued. He brought his winged elephant in low over the taxiing whale, and Sergeant Edward Spetch, another gunner who had so far failed to fire a shot, caught the enemy full in his sights, pressed the trigger and watched him blow up and burn.

It was August 20, a date to remember for men accustomed to the dull routine of aerial reconnaissance.

American reconnaissance—plus reports from Australian coastwatchers—had warned Admiral Ghormley of the impending Ka Operation. Ghormley ordered Vice-Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher to protect the Solomon sea lanes with the three-carrier force he had withdrawn from Guadalcanal. A fourth carrier, Hornet, with her supporting cruisers and destroyers, left Hawaii to join them. Meanwhile, new battleships Washington and South Dakota, together with the antiaircraft cruiser Juneau and escorting destroyers, were ordered from the East Coast through the Panama Canal.

Admiral King was preparing for a showdown battle at Guadalcanal. He was deliberately pushing in the blue chips. Like all of the other high commanders, King was aware that in mid-August of 1942 the entire war had come to crisis. Everywhere—in Russia, in North Africa, in the North Atlantic, in the Pacific—the enemy was on the verge of triumphant breakthrough. Stalin was clamoring for more supplies, so was Britain’s General Montgomery in Egypt, the Bolero build-up was still going forward, and Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to massive Allied landings in North Africa. What claim could Guadalcanal advance among such lofty preferences and priorities? Alone among the high commanders, Admiral Ernest King considered Guadalcanal paramount and urgent.

On Guadalcanal the Marines holding the Tenaru line had also sensed that a critical time had come. From the first light of August 20, the Second Battalion, First, under Lieutenant Colonel Al Pollock had been busy fortifying the west bank of the river.

Actually, the Tenaru[7] was not a river but a backwater. It flowed sluggishly north to the sea, but was barred from entering it by a broad sandspit. The sandspit was like a bridge across the river and was thus the focal weak point. Here Pollock concentrated most of his machine guns and rifles and a 37-mm antitank gun dug in behind a single strand of barbed wire strung across the sandspit. Pollock also had 81-mm mortars, of course, and the guns of the Eleventh Marines behind them.

Next, Pollock decided to extend his right flank. He ordered a group of riflemen to take up positions south along the river, and he pulled machine guns off the beach to support them.

Among the riflemen was Phil Chaffee and among the gunners were Lucky and Lew Juergens and their comrades Bud Conley and Bill Smith. Grumbling, they broke down their guns. Juergens spread-eagled that heavy iron instrument of torture known as the tripod across his back and Lucky hefted the gun on his shoulder. The others grasped the water cans and ammunition boxes and moved out.

They passed the sandspit and saw that outposts had been stationed at its eastern end. Men were carefully sandbagging the antitank gun. There were piles of cylinders heaped behind the gun’s wheels.

“Canister,” Lucky explained. “The canisters are made of wax and filled with steel balls. When they’re fired the wax melts and the shots spray all over the place. It’s like a shotgun, only with ball-bearings instead of bee-bees.”

“Goddlemighty damn, Lucky,” Smith snorted. “A feller could git kilt in this war.”¹

They laughed and trudged along the river bank. A hundred yards to the south they came to a machine-gun dugout. Johnny Rivers and Al Schmid had their gun outside the dugout and were oiling it. There was a shamrock painted on the gun’s water jacket for Schmid and the word Chief for Johnny. Schmid got up and limped toward them.

“Hey, Smitty,” Juergens called, “what’n hell’s wrong with you?”

“The rot,” Schmid said sourly. “The doc says I got blood poisoning from it. He says I gotta go in the hospital tomorrow if I don’t want to lose my leg.”²

They shook their heads in commiseration and toiled on. Almost everyone on the island had “Guadalcanal rot,” a fungus infection resulting from humidity and the habit of sleeping in shoes and socks, fully clad, which the visits of the Tokyo Express had induced. Most of them had dysentery, too, and a few were already down with malaria.

Passing a bend about 150 yards upstream from Schmid and Rivers, the men came to the gunsite chosen by Gunny Blalock. They put down the guns. Although they had two of them, there was time to dig only one emplacement. Sweat poured from their bodies as they dug. It made sodden ropes of their belts. Mosquitoes and ants bit like fire and flies landed on their festering fungus sores to feed on pus and increase infection. From the coconut groves to their left they could hear axes ringing. But there was no time to cut logs to roof their own dugout. They would do that tomorrow. Behind them shadows were lengthening and the sun was sinking beyond the groves of coconuts across the river, when, suddenly, directly overhead they heard the sound of airplane motors.

They scattered.

Then someone shouted: “They’re ours!”

It was true. The airplanes had red-white-and-blue stars painted on their wings and fuselages. Slew McCain had delivered. In the last hours of sunlight little Long Island—a carrier converted from the motor ship Macmormail—had stood southeast of San Cristoval and flown off twelve Marine Dauntlesses under Major Richard Mangrum and nineteen Marine Wildcats commanded by Captain John Smith.

Two of the planes deliberately circled Henderson Field and Vandegrift’s perimeter for all of their comrades of the foot Marines to see, and the men ran whooping and cheering along the ridges and river banks and beaches, punching each other joyfully and hurling bloodthirsty threats into the no-man’s-land occupied by the invisible foe.

Across the Tenaru, Mr. Ishimoto heard the motors and paused momentarily in his interrogation of Sergeant Major Vouza.

Vouza had gone on his patrol carrying a miniature American flag given to him as a souvenir. On the twentieth he became uneasy about it. He hid it beneath his lap-lap and made for the village of Volonavua, where he intended to hide it, and he blundered into a company of Japanese.

They seized him and brought him before Colonel Ichiki. Ishimoto was there. He watched while the Japanese tore off Vouza’s lap-lap and he smiled evilly when the little rolled flag tumbled to the ground. Speaking in pidgin, Ishimoto began his interrogation.

But Vouza refused to answer. He remained silent and defiant. The Japanese hustled Vouza to a tree. They bound him with straw ropes. They battered him with the butts of their rifles. They jabbed him with bayonets. Groaning, blood pouring from his wounds, Vouza sagged against the ropes. At last came the coup de grâce. A soldier stabbed Vouza in the throat.

At dusk, the Japanese departed. They moved into position for the attack. Although Colonel Ichiki had discovered that there were more Americans on Guadalcanal than he had been led to believe, he was still confident that he could push through them and capture the airfield.

Vouza was not dead. He awoke in darkness. His chest was sticky with blood. He could feel the cut beside his tongue where the enemy steel had entered. Yet, he was alive. He must warn the Americans. He began biting the ropes that bound him. He felt himself weakening from pain and loss of blood. He chewed on. Finally, the ropes parted. Vouza slumped to the ground and began crawling west.

It was dark along the Tenaru. Only the faint light of stars glinted on the river’s black surface.

In the center of the line Al Schmid lay on his blanket with mosquitoes droning in his ears and his leg throbbing with pain. He wondered if he would have to leave his buddies. One of them had promised to “cook it” out of him, saying: “When we get up I’ll get some salt water and heat it up in the pot, and you put your foot in there when it’s boiling hot. That’ll draw the goddam lump down.”³ Now, Schmid felt waves of heat pass through his body. Then he felt cold and began to shiver. Did he have malaria, too?

Farther to the right Lucky and Juergens sat on sentry duty outside the unfinished gunpit—a gaping black square in the dark night—peering at the river between them and the coconut grove. From far to their left came the gentle murmur of the sea. Suddenly a strange rippling V appeared to their right moving downstream. Two greenish orbs were at its center. It was a crocodile, and a Marine on their right whooped and fired at it. It dove and disappeared.

“Goddam, Lew,” Lucky whispered, glancing uneasily at the coconuts, “I could stand a cigarette.”

“They’d spot it, Lucky. Anyway, those Jap butts taste like they’re half tobacco and half horseshit.”

“You ask me, Lew, they’re a hundred per cent horseshit.”⁴

Suddenly there were lights swinging and bumping across the river. The two Marines were astounded.

“Who goes there?” Juergens bellowed.

The lights bumped on.

“Who goes there? Answer, or I’ll let you have it!”⁵

The lights went out.

Now all of the men on the right flank were excited and awake. They crowded about the gunpit, speculating, searching the darkness with straining eyes.

Sometimes Vouza was able to walk and make better time. He lurched along the trail, yet sure of every step; for Vouza had been born on Guadalcanal and knew the trails as they can only be known by a man who has spent his boyhood on them. At other times, though, Vouza was so weak he had to crawl. When this happened he wanted to weep. He was sure that he was dying and he wanted to live only long enough to warn the Americans of the impending attack.

Just before midnight, perhaps a half mile from the Tenaru, Vouza blundered into Marine outposts.

“Me Vouza,” he called. “Me Sergeant Major Vouza.”

Warily, they let him approach. He began to blurt out his tale, and they carried him to Colonel Pollock’s command post.

By the time Vouza reached Pollock, the battalion’s outposts had detected enemy to their front. They exchanged rifle fire. Pollock gave them permission to withdraw and turned to deal with the bleeding, gasping native who had come to warn him.

“How many Japs?” Pollock asked sharply.

“Maybe two hundred-fifty, maybe five hundred,” Vouza gasped.⁶

Round numbers were enough for Pollock, and he wheeled to call Regiment to send down Martin Clemens, for whom the dying man kept calling, and at that moment a flare rose from the river bank and the Ichiki charge began.

Colonel Ichiki had gathered his nine hundred men in the woods east of the sandspit. He was going to hurl about five hundred of them across the sandspit. After they had broken through, he would pour more of his men through the gap. At some time around half past one in the morning of August 21,⁷ the Ichiki shock troops began gathering in the shallows. Their mortars fell on Marine lines. Nambu light machine guns spoke with a snapping sound. Heavier automatics chugged. And then, silhouetted against the sea by the eerie swaying light of a flare, the Ichikis charged.

They came sprinting and howling and firing their rifles, and the Marines were ready for them. Like a train of powder, the American lines flashed alight. Machine guns spat long lines of curving tracers. Grenades exploded in orange balls. Rifles cracked and their muzzles winked white like fireflies. Mortar shells plopped smoothly from their tubes, rising silent and unseen until they had climbed the night sky and fallen among the enemy with flashing yellow crashes that shook the earth. Everywhere were tongues and streaks and sparks, orange and white, red and yellow, and the night was herself a slashed and crisscrossed thing. Everywhere also was the counterpointing of the guns, the wail of battle, the mad orchestration of death—and running through it all like a dreadful fugue came the regular wham! of the antitank gun spewing out its mouthfuls of death.

In the center Al Schmid had rolled out of his sleep and come crawling into the gunpit. Johnny Rivers was already at the trigger, his helmet on. Corporal Lee Diamond burst inside. He began pushing sandbags away from the gun so that they could fire it into the water if the enemy tried to swim. Rivers saw a dark, bobbing mass on the opposite shore. It looked like cows coming down to the river to drink. “Fire!” Diamond yelled, and Rivers’ gun began to stutter and shake. With screams and movement, the crowd broke up.

To the right Lucky and Juergens had seized their unemplaced gun and were triggering short bursts at the sound of movement in the coconuts. They moved the gun up and down the riverbank to give the impression of massed weapons, to confuse the enemy whose tracers came gliding out of the black toward them.

Down at the sandspit the barrel of the antitank gun glowed red in the dark. It cut swathes in the ranks of the enemy still pouring to the attack; squad after squad, platoon after platoon, running low with outthrust bayonets, gurgling “Banzai! Banzai!” But the short squat shapes were falling. Singly, in pairs, sometimes in whole squad groups, the antitank’s canister sickled them to the sand. Banzais changed to shrill screams of pain or the hoarser trailing cries of death. Now a grenade sailed into the antitank position. It exploded in a flashing roar. The gun fell silent. But a squad of riflemen leaped into the pit and the gun glowed red again.

Now the Ichiki charge was mounting in its fury. It flowed up against the barbed wire and seemed to be dammed up there. Baffled, jabbering, the Japanese milled around—and Marine fire struck them down and stacked their bodies high. But some of the Japanese got through. They closed with Marines in their pits. Three of them made for the hole held by Corporal Dean Wilson. Wilson brought his BAR around. It jammed. “Marine you die!” a Japanese soldier screamed, hurtling toward Wilson with lunging bayonet. Wilson seized his machete and swung it. The Japanese sank to the ground with his intestines squirting through his fingers. Wilson swung his thick-bladed knife twice more, and disemboweled two more enemy.

A Japanese jumped into Corporal Johnny Shea’s hole. He drove his bayonet twice into Shea’s leg. He lifted it to slash upward through the groin, and Shea kicked and jammed the Japanese against the foxhole, struggling to free his jammed tommy gun. The bolt sprang home and Shea shot the man to death.

The bolt on Johnny Rivers’ machine gun raced madly back and forth. Johnny had unclamped the gun and was firing freely. But the enemy was fighting back. They had spotted the American position. They poured bullets into it. Sand and log chips flew about the pit. Rivers hunched forward, searching for the enemy gun. There was a little grin on his face, the same expression Schmid had seen there when Johnny got hit in the ring.

A burst of bullets tore into Johnny Rivers’ face. Blood spurted from the holes and he fell backward dead.

Al Schmid jumped into his place. He fought on, dueling the Japanese gun located in an abandoned Marine amtrack a hundred yards upriver. Corporal Diamond was shot in the arm, but he stayed alongside Schmid. Eventually, they silenced the enemy. And then a grenade sailed sputtering into the pit to fill it with roaring light. Al Schmid was thrown flat on his back. He could not see. He put his hand to his face and felt blood and pulp. He was blind. He felt for his pistol and waited for the enemy rush. If he could not see, he could still smell. At the first whiff, he would…

But the Ichiki charge had been annihilated. Only a few dazed bands of the five hundred men who began it had survived; they dragged themselves east across the torn and lifeless bodies of their comrades, crawling over sand that was thick and clotted with blood.

At about five o’clock in the morning, Colonel Ichiki struck again.

This time he tried to get around the sandspit. His mortars and some light cannon pounded Marine positions while a reinforced company waded out beyond the breakers. Then they moved west, wheeled to face the beach, and came charging through the surf with bared bayonets. And the second carnage was more bloody than the first.

Running erect and with no attempt to get below the American fire, the Japanese soldiers were cut down by Marine machine guns firing from the west. Artillery strikes came whistling and crashing down upon them. Balked by the wire, struck from the side by bullets and from the sky by shells, the Japanese perished almost to a man—falling one upon another until they lay three deep in death for the tide to bury them in the morning.

With daylight, a crackling rifle fire began along the line. The Marines lay on their bellies to pick off the remaining Ichikis flitting among the coconuts. Colonel Pollock came down to the river to stride among his marksmen, shouting: “Line ’em up and squeeze ’em off!” Seeing a man being treated for a wound in the groin, Pollock grinned and called: “I hope the family jewels are safe.”⁸

All along the line automatic rifles and machine guns were pouring bullets into the grove where Colonel Ichiki and his wretched remnant lay. Sometimes enemy soldiers jumped into the water to swim away, as though they preferred death by drowning to being stung by the swarms of invisible bees buzzing among the coconuts. Their heads bobbed on the surface like corks, and the Marines shot them through the head.

Far to the right four terrified Japanese came sprinting along the Tenaru’s east bank, and Lucky jumped on the unemplaced machine gun to cut down three of them with a swift, swinging burst. Then the machine gun broke down, plowing up earth with bullets. Lucky seized a rifle to shoot the fourth.

“Cease fire!” came a command from farther right. “First Battalion coming through.”

Gradually the line fell silent while Marines of Vandegrift’s reserve battalion crossed the river and fanned out through the coconuts. Vandegrift had released them to Colonel Cates after Cates and Thomas agreed that the time had come to swing his right at Ichiki and drive the enemy into the sea. Slowly, like an inexorable broad blade, the right flank swung to the north.

General Vandegrift came to Cates’s command post. He listened to reports of the fighting. He swore softly after he heard of how wounded Japanese would lie still until American medical corpsmen came up to examine them, and then blow themselves and their benefactors to bits with hand grenades. The only answer to that, Vandegrift told himself, was war without quarter⁹; and he gave Cates a platoon of light tanks to finish off the treacherous foe.

The tanks completed the slaughter. They clanked across the sandspit after the American battalion had driven Ichiki’s remnant into a pocket where Marine artillery and the newly arrived Marine aircraft could shell and strafe them. Like the scything chariots of the Persians, the tanks ground remorsely over dead and wounded alike. They chased Japanese while belching canister and spraying machine-gun bullets. They ran up to enemy positions to take them under muzzle-blasting fire or butted coconut trees to shake down Japanese for riflemen to shoot. Those Japanese whom they could not shoot or flail with canister they ran over, until, with all the literal and gory reality of that battle for Guadalcanal which was now irrevocably without quarter, their rear ends resembled meat grinders.

The first organized Japanese counterthrust at Guadalcanal had ended in disaster. Some 800 of Colonel Ichiki’s men lay dead, and there were very few of the survivors who were not wounded; some of whom would also die. Marine casualties were less than a hundred, of whom forty-three were dead. Most important of all, the legend of the Japanese superfighter had been shot into a sieve and would no longer hold water. Emperor Hirohito’s “devil-subduing bayonets” had been broken by a foe superior in Japan’s own vaunted “spiritual power” as well as in firepower. The soft, effete Americans had shown how savage they could be.

That afternoon, even as Sergeant Major Vouza began his amazing recovery, even as Al Schmid—who would regain part of his sight years later—was taken out to a destroyer, the last of the Japanese were finished off. Souvenir-hunters began swarming among the dead. Phil Chaffee was one of them. He had begun prospecting. Moving warily, he kicked dead mouths open; he flashed his light inside them, his eyes darting about until they came upon what he sought—and then he put in his pliers and yanked. Thus, one of the victors taking one of the grislier trophies.

Far to the east Colonel Kiyono Ichiki tasted his own “fruits of victory.” He burned his colors and shot himself through the head.

CHAPTER TEN

WHEN COLONEL ICHIKI and his men sped south in six fast destroyers on August 16 they set in motion Admiral Yamamoto’s Operation Ka.

Although Ichiki had failed in his rash decision to destroy the Americans “at one stroke,” Ka was continuing as planned. Two slow transports carrying the remaining 1500 Ichikis continued south from Truk, followed by the faster and bigger transport Kinryu Maru loaded with a thousand men of the Yokosuka Fifth Naval Landing Force. All were bound for Guadalcanal under command of Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka.

Tanaka, the veteran destroyer leader who had commanded the Landing Force at Midway, had been placed in command of the Guadalcanal Reinforcement Force and assigned to Eighth Fleet at Rabaul. And “Tanaka the Tenacious,” as he would one day be called by his admiring enemies to the south, had not liked his new assignment any more than he had favored the ill-fated expedition against Midway. He considered that landing troops in the face of an armed enemy was the most difficult of military undertakings and He was dumbfounded that Imperial General Headquarters was attempting such operations without prior rehearsals or even preliminary study.¹But his opinion had not been asked, nor would it ever be—a fact which also irked him—and so Tanaka the Tenacious took over as ordered, convinced that Guadalcanal reinforcement would be a failure and certain that Eighth Fleet did not know what it was doing.²

At first, he was surprised and gratified to hear that Captain Yasuo Sato’s six destroyers had successfully put the Ichiki spearhead ashore at Taivu. Next, he was aggrieved and dismayed to hear of Colonel Ichiki’s destruction. Then, he was shaken to learn that American aircraft had landed at Henderson Field, thus making his attempt to put troops ashore more difficult than ever.

Nevertheless, Tanaka the Tenacious plowed on. At least he would have the support of Combined Fleet, which had sortied from Truk shortly after his own departure.

Isoroku Yamamoto had assembled his customary massive armada. He was going to direct it by radio from aboard Yamato, cruising in the vicinity of Truk.

There was the Advance Fleet force of battleships led by Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo and the Striking Force of three carriers commanded by Chuichi Nagumo. Yamamoto was going to bait the American carriers with light carrier Ryujo. While their aircraft were away attacking her, planes from Shokaku and Zuikaku would make surprise strikes on them. After they were destroyed, Kondo’s fleet would batter Guadalcanal. And Kondo had the battering power. Yamamoto, an old battleship man much as he might emphasize air power, had seen to that. Big Mutsu and the bombardment sluggers Hiei and Kirishima, backed up by six heavy cruisers, would wreck Henderson Field and mangle the Marines so that the troops aboard Mikawa’s transports would only have to mop up.

Moreover, there was added insurance: about a dozen submarines had been sown in waters southeast of Guadalcanal. They lay athwart the American supply line. One day, American sailors would give those waters the descriptive name of Torpedo Junction.

By August 20, Yamamoto knew that Admiral Fletcher’s carriers were at sea. Two days later he had placed Combined Fleet in position to attack about two hundred miles north of the southern Solomons. Fletcher’s three carriers—Saratoga, Wasp, and Enterprise—were about three hundred miles to their southeast. The Americans were operating as independent groups for fear of Torpedo Junction’s numerous torpedoes.

By the same date Fletcher also knew that the enemy was at sea. One of Slew McCain’s long-ranging Catalinas had detected Tanaka’s transports. Tanaka had himself realized that he had been observed. From flagship Jintsu, a light cruiser, he reported to Rabaul. Admiral Mikawa at once ordered him to turn about and make north. Tanaka obeyed. And then he received a message from Admiral Tsukahara commanding Southeast Area Force, and therefore superior to Mikawa, instructing him to proceed as ordered.

Furious, Tanaka was now positive that Rabaul did not know what it was doing. But he did not turn about as Tsukahara had ordered, for it would be impossible to reach Guadalcanal the morning of August 24 as scheduled. And that was indeed fortunate for Tanaka.

By August 22 General Vandegrift was also aware of Tanaka’s approach. He felt chilled at the prospect of large-scale enemy reinforcement. As yet, he had no way of knowing that the First Marines had all but destroyed the enemy to the east. Vandegrift debated risking his new Cactus Air Force, so-called after the code name for Guadalcanal. He decided that he must, and sent Mangrum’s bombers and Smith’s fighters roaring aloft. He watched them go from the top of the Japanese pagoda-like structure which had become Cactus Air Force’s headquarters.

The Marine planes ran into a solid front of weather. Driving rain misted their windshields. Visibility fell close to zero, and they had to turn back. Vandegrift watched them come in. He was pacing the Pagoda’s muddy floor when Mangrum entered to make his negative report. Vandegrift thanked his pilots courteously, but Mangrum thought that the general was deeply distressed.³

Next day, in clearing weather, the Marine fliers again went on the hunt; but Tanaka had turned north as ordered and they missed him.

Vandegrift’s distress deepened.

Martin Clemens was very much distressed. He was worried about Mr. Ishimoto. His capture and torture of Vouza made it clear that as long as Ishimoto was alive, Clemens’s scouts were in mortal danger. They could not feign neutrality and mingle with the enemy with Ishimoto about.

After the battle of the Tenaru, Clemens had had his men comb the battlefield for Ishimoto’s body. They did not find it.

Then Gumu, a scout who had become separated from the Brush patrol, came into the perimeter reporting he had been caught by Ishimoto. Gumu had been sitting beside a track with ten stones to count the Ichikis as they passed. He made a movement and was discovered by Ishimoto and four soldiers. They had Father Oude-Engberink, Father Duhamel and Sister Sylvia and old Sister Edmée of France and Sister Odilia of Italy with them. The missionaries were under guard, having been brought from their mission at Ruavutu.

Gumu said Ishimoto had tried to make the fathers go back to the Americans and tell them that the Japanese were too powerful and that they should surrender. They refused, and they and the sisters were taken east.

Ishimoto also tried to make Gumu carry his pack. When Gumu said he was sick and could not lift it, Ishimoto hit him across the mouth. Gumu continued to feign illness and was at last released. Coming west, he met another native who told him he was the lone survivor of five natives who had carried a wounded Marine back to American lines. Ishimoto and his soldiers had bayoneted the other four to death.

According to Gumu there were quite a few parties of Japanese wandering about in the east. But no new force had landed. For this news, at least, Clemens was thankful; and he passed it along to Marine intelligence.

Haruyoshi Hyakutake was puzzled, as well as distressed.

General Hyakutake had heard from signal men whom Colonel Ichiki had left behind at Taivu and their report was astounding. Annihilation? It had never happened before. Moreover, in a military given to writing reports wearing rose-colored glasses, there was absolutely not a single euphemism available to describe it. Hyakutake at last notified Imperial General Headquarters: “The attack of the Ichiki Detachment was not entirely successful.” Then he ordered Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi and his brigade of five thousand Borneo veterans to stand by for movement to Guadalcanal.

Admiral Raizo Tanaka had resumed course for Guadalcanal. Shortly after noon of August 24 his lookouts sighted heavy cruiser Tone speeding southward on the eastern horizon, followed by Ryujo flanked by destroyers Amatsukaze and Tokitsukaze. Tanaka was encouraged. These ships were his indirect escort to Guadalcanal. Even though Ryujo was to decoy the Americans, she could still fly off aircraft to bomb Guadalcanal.

Commander Tameichi Hara stood on the bridge of Amatsukaze steaming at twenty-six knots off Ryujo’s starboard beam. He looked at the 10,000-ton decoy and wondered how her green pilots—replacements for the veterans lost at Midway and latterly over Guadalcanal—would stand up to Ryujo’s first battle test.

Grimly recalling how his and Admiral Tanaka’s fears had been realized at Midway, Hara kept glancing apprehensively upward. He looked at Ryujo steaming serenely along and wondered if her skipper was not taking her decoy role too fatalistically. She had no aircraft ready to fight. True, Ryujo had flown off fifteen fighters and six bombers to attack Guadalcanal. Nevertheless, Hara knew that she still had nine more fighters belowdecks and he wondered why some of them were not at least armed and ready.

Even after American scouts sighted them, Ryujo acted like a mesmerized ship, sending two fighters up only after Amatsukaze and the others had begun blasting with antiaircraft guns. Hara lost his temper. He dashed off a message for an Eta Jima classmate aboard Ryujo.

“Fully realizing my impertinence, am forced to advise you of my impression. Your flight operations are far short of expectations. What is the matter?”⁴

It was a rude message—incredible for a Japanese—and the Ryujo force was dumfounded by it.

Yet, Hara’s classmate sent the reply: “Deeply appreciate your admonition. We shall do better and count on your co-operation.”⁵

Seven more Zeroes quickly appeared on Ryujo’s decks. Their propellers were just beginning to spin when Amatsukaze’s lookouts shouted: “Many enemy planes approaching.”

They were from Saratoga. Thirty Dauntlesses and eight Avengers under Commander Harry Felt. The dive-bombers flew at fourteen thousand feet above broken and fleecy cloud cover, but the torpedo planes circled at a lower level waiting to strike when all enemy guns were turned toward the Dauntlesses.

Now the dive-bombers came sliding down a staircase of clouds.

They came out of a bright sun that blinded enemy gunners and polished the white caps ruffling a dark blue sea; thirty pilots diving one after another through tracers reaching up like yellow straws, thirty pairs of hands and feet working sticks and rudder-bars to steady aircraft bucking beneath the onslaught of heavier flak; and thirty rear-gunners sitting tensely to watch the narrow tan deck of Ryujo growing larger and larger. Five thousand feet, and the pilots bent to their bombsight tubes to center that deck in the crosshairs. Two thousand feet and they seized release handles. Thirty thousand-pounders falling on wildly weaving Ryujo, thirty great eggs describing their yawning parabola in full view of morbidly fascinated Japanese seamen; and then the pilots were drawing back hard on sticks, pulling out fast and flat and away while tracers seemed to wrap them in confetti and their own gunners cursed with fierce joy and raked the enemy decks with bullets.

Then the Avengers came skimming in off Ryujo’s bows, launching an anvil attack from either side so that no matter which way the enemy carrier turned to evade she would still be exposed to warheads.

Ryujo never had a chance.

Scarlet flames shot up from her. Explosions staggered and punctured her. Smoke billowed upward in huge balls that thinned as they rose into the air like pillars. As many as ten bombs had pierced her decks and at least one torpedo flashed into her side. She was an iron red sieve and Commander Hara watched in agony as she rolled over to expose her red-leaded belly. There was a hole in that, too. Then Hara’s ship and the others were rushing to her side to take off survivors. Three of her Zeros appeared, returning from the Guadalcanal strike. They circled wistfully overhead before ditching alongside the destroyers. The pilots were rescued. Ryujo would sink shortly after dusk with a hundred Japanese still aboard her.

To the west, Rear Admiral Mikawa saw the smoke columns rising from the dying carrier, and he turned to look fearfully in the direction of Henderson Field.

Ryujo’s fighters and bombers had joined with about a half-dozen Betty bombers from Rabaul to raid Henderson earlier that afternoon. All of Captain Smith’s available Wildcats had been waiting for them. They shot down sixteen enemy planes. Captain Marion Carl flamed two bombers and a Zero, and Lieutenants Zennith Pond and Kenneth Frazier and Marine Gunner Henry Hamilton shot down a pair apiece. Four Wildcats were lost, but only three pilots.

It was far from being the most famous aerial battle in Solomons history, but it marked the beginning of the end for Japanese air power.

When Admiral Nagumo heard of the attack on Ryujo he thought that the time to avenge Midway was at hand. He still believed that Fletcher had three big carriers in the vicinity, unaware that Wasp had been sent south to refuel. The flattops which a float plane had reported sighting after two o’clock were Enterprise and Saratoga.

Certain that Fletcher had flown off all his planes against sacrificial Ryujo, Nagumo ordered Zuikaku and Shokaku to send every eagle they could fly screaming against the Americans.

They missed Saratoga entirely, but they caught Enterprise at about half-past four—and they also caught a tiger by the tail.

Fletcher had not forgotten Lexington or Yorktown, and he had not flown off all of his planes. He had fifty-three Wildcats stacked in the skies, waiting. They tangled with the Japanese planes—dive-bombing Vals and single-engine torpedo-launching Kates heavily protected by layers of Zeros—and a wild scrimmage raged overhead. Even returning American dive-bombers and torpedo-planes roared into the battle.

But most of this action raged at the edge of a perimeter far outside the range of Enterprise’s guns; far, far beyond the sight of lookouts squinting into the bright tropic afternoon. The Big E, yet to be scratched in the Pacific War, still sailed along at twenty-seven knots with all her planes up and all her Marines and sailors at battle stations. A few minutes after five o’clock a 20-mm gun-pointer caught the flash of sun-on-a-wing. It was a Val turning over, the first of thirty.

Enterprise’s guns opened up. Behind her, mighty North Carolina belched out an umbrella of steel and smoke over the imperiled flattop. But the Vals kept coming down. Every seven seconds one of them peeled off and dove. They attacked with all the skill that Felt’s dive-bombers had shown over Ryujo. Even though square-winged Wildcats slashed and growled at them coming down, risking friendly aircraft fire, the Japanese pilots never faltered.

Soon Big E’s gunners could see the landing-gear “pants” of the leading Val, could make out the horrible dark blob of an egg nestling between them, and could see, with indrawn breath, that blob detach, yawn, and fall.

There was a monstrous shuddering slap against Enterprise’s side. The first bomb had near-missed.

Big E twisted and turned. Her own gunners and North Carolina’s spat networks of steel across the sky, but at 5:14 the big carrier took her first bomb-hit of the war. A thousand-pounder crashed through the after elevator. It penetrated to the third deck before its delayed-action fuse exploded it with a whip-sawing roar that flung every man aboard up-down-and-sideways. Thirty-five sailors were killed. Huge holes were torn in the deck and sideplates were ruptured. Thirty seconds later, the second bomb hit—only fifteen feet from the first.

Again a violent whipping motion, again death—thirty-nine sailors—but this time smoke and fire. Stores of five-inch powder bags had been hit.

Listing and pouring out smoke, the Big E still raced along at twenty-seven knots—and then she took a third bomb.

Fortunately, it was only a 500-pounder, and its fuse was defective. Damage was comparatively slight. Enterprise was still moving ahead, and all that Captain Arthur Davis and his men need do now was to save their burning ship.

From Lieutenant Commander Herschel Smith in Central Station came the orders. Surrounded by deck plans and diagrams of every system—fresh and salt water, oil and gasoline, ventilation, steam, electricity—and flanked by a battery of telephone-talkers, Smith relayed his instructions to teams of fire-fighters, repairmen, and rescuers.

Men with hoses played streams of water on burning bedding or clothing, men with foam generators smothered burning oil, men with CO₂ extinguishers put out electrical fires; and men in asbestos suits and breathing-masks shambled into burning compartments to rescue wounded or burned sailors, bringing them to other men in gauze masks and white coats who sewed flesh or straightened bones or sprayed charred skin with unguents. Other men with axes trimmed shattered timbers around deck holes, hammering square sheets of boiler plate over them. Debris parties cleared the decks of bomb fragments or replaced torn planking. Weakened and dangerous areas were marked off. Gradually, Big E was prepared to receive planes topside. Belowdecks, officers and bluejackets strove to get her on an even keel again. Three portside ballast tanks were flooded while those to starboard were pumped out. Flooded storerooms had to be pumped dry. Carpenters began repairing two big holes in Enterprise’s side, above and below the water line. Working up to their armpits in water, using emergency lighting, they built a cofferdam of two-by-six planking placed vertically a foot from the side of the ship. They covered the holes from the inside with heavy wire meshing. Between the meshing and the cofferdam they packed mattresses and pillows. Then they wedged the cofferdam tight against the packing and began pumping.

An hour after the last bomb struck, Enterprise turned into the wind at 24 knots to receive aircraft.

Less than an hour later, the helmsman reported, “Lost steering control, sir,” and a few minutes later the rudder had jammed and Enterprise was turning, turning helplessly to starboard.

Captain Davis slowed to ten knots. He broke out the “Breakdown” flag. He ordered the rudder fixed. And Enterprise circled like a defenseless whale while North Carolina and cruiser Portland stood close by and the group’s destroyers raced around and round them, sniffing for submarines. Below, Chief Machinist Mate William Smith buckled on a rescue-breather-vest and put on his breathing-mask. He filled his pockets with the tools that he thought he would need and stepped into the rubble-strewn oven that was the elevator machinery room. At the other end, behind a dogged-down hatch, was the steering engine room…

Above, Enterprise’s big air-search antenna swung—and stopped. “Large bogey. Two seven zero, fifty miles.” It was Nagumo’s second strike. Thirty Vals from Zui and Sho. And Enterprise still turned…

Below, the heat had sent Smith sagging to the deck. He was dragged back. He recovered and returned, accompanied by Machinist Cecil Robinson. They stumbled through the debris to the hatch. They got their hands on the dogs, and passed out…

Above decks the seas and the skies were darkening. Anxious gunners tilted their chins into the gathering gloom. The big bedspring antenna swept the skies…

Smith and Robinson had been rescued. They had revived and had stumbled to the hatch again. They swung it open. Smith darted inside. He saw that the mechanism had not completed its shift to port. He completed it. The rudder moved again.

Above, the helmsman reported: “Steering control regained, sir.”

Enterprise straightened and sailed south.

Nagumo’s eagles had missed her. They had flown past fifty miles away, going southeast. Enterprise recovered the last of her planes. One flight of eleven Dauntlesses led by Lieutenant Turner Caldwell was too far away to return. They flew on to Guadalcanal, landing after dark by light of crude flares. They were warmly welcomed, and they would prolong their “visit” for almost a month.

And now all of Fletcher’s ships were retiring. Admiral Kondo’s battleships and cruisers came tearing after them. In a night action, they could blow the lightly armed flattops to bits, they could overwhelm North Carolina and her cruisers.

But Fletcher’s caution this time had thwarted the enemy. Kondo could not catch up. The Battle of the Eastern Solomons had ended indecisively. Nevertheless, Ryujo was forever lost and Enterprise, though knocked out of action for two months, would come back to fight for Guadalcanal again, and again.

Admiral Tanaka’s convoy of troops had withdrawn to the northeast again while Admiral Nagumo’s pilots struck at Enterprise. Then, hearing reports that two enemy carriers had been left burning and probably sinking, Admiral Mikawa in Rabaul ordered Tanaka to turn south again.

With a sinking heart, Tanaka obeyed.

Night of the twenty-fourth came and his ships plowed on.

Below him, off Guadalcanal, five destroyers of his command bombarded the Americans. Then they sped north to join Tanaka. They were aged Mutsuki and Yayoi, and the newer Kagero, Kawakaze, and Isokaze. They joined up early in the morning of August 25 at a point 150 miles north of Henderson Field. Tanaka was delighted to have them. He drew up his signal order for their movements and formations, and just as it was being wigwagged the enemy Dauntlesses broke through the clouds.

The dive-bombers were Mangrum’s Marines and Caldwell’s “visitors” from Enterprise. They had caught the Japanese unawares, not even able to ready their guns to return fire.

Lieutenant Larry Baldinus planted his bomb forward of Tanaka’s flagship Jintsu. Near-misses staggered the big cruiser and showered her with tons of geysering water. Another bomb struck the forecastle. Men fell and steel fragments flew. Tanaka was knocked out. He recovered consciousness in clouds of choking smoke. As the smoke cleared, he saw a Dauntless flown by Ensign Christian Fink swoop down and set Kinryu Maru afire with a well-placed thousand-pounder. Admiral Tanaka ordered Jintsu to limp back to Truk for repairs, and began transferring to Kagero. He instructed Mutsuki and Yayoi to take off Kinryu Maru’s troops. Then he took Kagero and the other destroyers speeding north out of airplane range.

But the Dauntlesses had radioed Tanaka’s location and their message brought eight Flying Fortresses over Kinryu and her ministering destroyers. In a shower of deadly eggs Kinryu was finished off and Mutsuki, lying motionless in the water, was sunk almost instantaneously.

Commander Kiyono Hatano of Mutsuki was one of the survivors fished from the water by men of Yayoi. To him had fallen the ignominious honor of skippering the first Japanese ship to be sunk by horizontal bombers, and he took it with resignation, saying: “Even the B-17s can make a hit once in a while.”⁶

Then Yayoi put about and sailed north.

More ships and more soldiers had been lost to the Emperor. Of the troops who were finally put ashore in the Shortlands, many were wounded or burned and none had their weapons.

Ka had failed and American toes still clung to Solomons soil.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

TRUK was quiet.

Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi and most of his brigade had sailed south in the big transports Sado-maru and Asakayama-maru, and the Nagumo and Kondo fleets had refueled and set out for waters northeast of Bougainville, where they would cruise on call while the carrier aircraft joined the onslaught on Henderson Field.

Weary sailors of the few warships still anchored inside Truk Lagoon took advantage of the respite. They swam or merely loafed aboard ship, watching the blue ocean boil white over the fringing reef. Others fished. The lagoon abounded in fish of all varieties and the men had their fill of sashimi, thin strips of raw fish which Japanese consider a delicacy.

Aboard destroyer Amatsukaze one day the men caught a falcon which had fluttered down and perched on the mast. They put it in a crude cage. Then someone caught a rat. The rat was placed inside the cage with the falcon and Amatsukaze’s crew gathered around to watch. Hearing their voices, Commander Tameichi Hara came out on deck to investigate.

The falcon sat calmly on its perch. Its eyes were closed. The rat raced around in terror. Suddenly, the falcon blinked and swooped on the rat. It put out one of the rat’s eyes, and the sailors cheered. Now the rat scurried around the cage with the falcon whirring after it. One turn, and the falcon put out the rat’s other eye. The men roared their approval, and Commander Hara returned to his cabin with tightened lips.

Hara was not dismayed by the cruelty of his men. It just seemed to him that the falcon was an American dive-bomber and the rat was a Japanese destroyer.¹ And “Rat,” as Commander Hara knew, was the code word for the new plan of reinforcing Guadalcanal.

Admiral Tsukahara commanding Southeast Area Force had decided that Japanese strength was to be built up steadily on Guadalcanal by stealthy night landings from destroyers. He directed Admiral Tanaka, still steaming up The Slot, to carry out the first Rat Operation the night of August 27.

Tanaka quickly instructed his Shortland headquarters to place about 400 men and supplies for three times that many aboard three destroyers. They were to leave the Shortlands, which was still out of range of Henderson Field, at five in the morning and arrive at Taivu on Guadalcanal at nine that night. Two hours after they had departed, Tanaka, then safely home, received an Eighth Fleet order postponing the landing until the next night. Tanaka quickly replied that the ships had already left, but Eighth Fleet countered: “Recall destroyers at once.”

Tanaka obeyed. But his patience was wearing thin. For the third time since he had assumed command of Guadalcanal Reinforcement Force he had received conflicting orders from Tsukahara and Mikawa. Again Tanaka rued the haphazard character of the Guadalcanal operation. If such confusion continues, he thought, how can we possibly win a battle?² Probably, Tanaka would have been horrified if he had known the extent of that confusion.

At Rabaul, Tsukahara and Mikawa operated from separate and apparently rival headquarters. Each interpreted intelligence reports as he saw fit and each drew up his own plans.³ The result was confusion for Tanaka the Tenacious, who had to struggle to keep his bow into those contrary winds.

So the three destroyers were recalled, refueled and set to marking time in the harbor pending departure at the same time next morning.

That night, cruisers Aoba and Furutaka slid into Shortland Harbor with Tanaka’s old friend Aritomo Goto. Both admirals expressed their fears over Rabaul’s slipshod management. Then Tanaka learned that four other destroyers being assigned to him were headed for Guadalcanal from Borneo loaded with an advance echelon of the Kawaguchi Brigade. They also were to land at Taivu on the night of August 28.

So Tanaka ordered Captain Yonosuki Murakami to take his three refueled destroyers, plus one more, and join up with the Kawaguchi group then at sea. But the Kawaguchi destroyers radioed that a fuel shortage prevented their stopping in the Shortlands; they would go on to Guadalcanal.

They did go on, sailing on a Rabaul schedule that put them within daylight range of Henderson Field. Colonel Mangrum’s Dauntlesses went boiling aloft and caught them squarely in The Slot. Asagiri with Captain Yuzo Arita aboard took one 500-pounder in her innards and blew up. Shirakumo was left dead in the water and Yugiri was staggered and sent limping home.

Tanaka was consumed with rage upon hearing the report. Once again ships and men had been lost because Rabaul would not or could not understand that landings in the face of enemy air power were suicidal. A midnight conference was called to discuss the disaster, and then, Captain Murakami radioed that he was turning back to the Shortlands. Tanaka was speechless. Much as he wanted to, he could not order Murakami to take his troop-laden destroyers to Guadalcanal as ordered, because now they could not make it before dawn and would be easy prey to American planes.

Admiral Tanaka contented himself with tongue-lashing Captain Murakami in the morning. Then Tanaka, in turn, took a blistering reprimand from Tsukahara and Mikawa. He passed it along with interest to Murakami and sent him hotly south.

After breakfast that morning Sado-maru and Asakayama-maru sailed into Shortland Harbor with Major General Kawaguchi and his main body. Kawaguchi, a fine figure of a man with his guardsman’s mustache and his neatly-pressed khakis, came aboard Tanaka’s new flagship, the heavy cruiser Kinugasa. Kawaguchi said he was anxious to get the bulk of his brigade to Guadalcanal as quickly as possible. Tanaka said he would have his wish. When properly planned, Rat runs were swift and safe. American air might be a daylight danger but at night Guadalcanal and The Slot were Japanese. Moreover, air cover could now be supplied. The new airfield at Buka on northern Bougainville was operational and had received 29 Zeros on August 28.

General Kawaguchi demurred. With consummate courtesy he explained that he detested destroyer transportation. He preferred barges. He had landed successfully in Borneo after a 500-mile voyage by barge. Destroyers had little space, and it was because of this limitation that Colonel Ichiki had been forced to land with reduced rations and insufficient equipment. Big barges could carry all of Kawaguchi’s men and equipment. That equipment, as Kawaguchi did not inform Tanaka, included the general’s dress white uniform. He intended to wear it during flag-raising ceremonies at Henderson Field. And that, said General Kawaguchi, was that: barges it would be, just as General Hyakutake had agreed.

No, said Admiral Tanaka, it would be destroyers; just as Admiral Mikawa had ordered. Barges were far too slow and much too risky. With the conference now at stalemate, Tanaka informed Kawaguchi that he was radioing Mikawa for instructions and suggested that Kawaguchi do the same with Hyakutake.

From Rabaul, Tanaka learned nothing except that an American force of two transports, one cruiser and two destroyers, had been reported at Lunga Point. Admiral Mikawa had personally directed Captain Murakami to attack this force after he had unloaded his troops.

Next morning Captain Murakami returned to Shortland to announce that he had unloaded troops safely at Taivu. However, he had not attacked the American ships.

“There were moonlight conditions,” Murakami explained falteringly. “American planes were up.”⁴

Tanaka relieved Murakami on the spot.

That morning Amagiri and Kagero entered the harbor with the remnant of the Kawaguchi advance echelon which had been bombed August 28. They had Shirakumo in tow. Admiral Tanaka quickly put more Kawaguchis aboard undamaged Kagero and Amagiri and filled up Yudachi with another batch. General Kawaguchi protested. Tanaka was compelled to unload Yudachi and send her south to Guadalcanal with naval troops. That night he asked Rabaul for instructions and was criticized for not having sent Amagiri and Kagero down The Slot.

Admiral Tanaka and General Kawaguchi met again on that day, August 30. Kawaguchi still refused destroyer transportation. His staff agreed, especially Colonel Akinosuka Oka. Exasperated, Tanaka readied eight destroyers for departure next morning. Either Kawaguchi would go south on these, or he would stay north. Kawaguchi refused. That night, a message arrived from Eighth Fleet: “Under our agreement with Seventeenth Army, the bulk of the Kawaguchi Detachment will be transported to Guadalcanal by destroyers, the remainder by large landing barges.”⁵

It was a typical Japanese denouement, a face-saving agreement that if the time is not six o’clock or seven o’clock, let it be agreed that it is half-past six. In the morning of August 31, General Kawaguchi sped south on one of Tanaka’s eight destroyers. They landed safely at Taivu at midnight.

A few days later a thousand men under Colonel Oka proceeded south by barge. Hiding out by day and creeping down The Slot by night, they approached their destination undetected until the last night. Then, delayed by heavy seas, they were caught offshore by Henderson Field’s dawn reconnaissance. American aircraft came roaring down on them, spraying bullets into the ranks of soldiers crowded helplessly aboard tossing boats. Four hundred men were lost. The remainder, under the drenched but undismayed Colonel Oka, eventually made the western coast of Guadalcanal.

The direful predictions of Tanaka the Tenacious had been turned into tragic reality. But he was no longer around to foretell fresh disaster. On August 31 he received the reward so often reserved for an accurate prophet of doom: he was relieved of his command.

On that same day Imperial General Headquarters issued an official directive making Port Moresby secondary to the Guadalcanal campaign. General Hyakutake was notified that he must go on the defensive in New Guinea until the Solomons were reconquered. He must utilize all available units of his 17th Army to oust the Americans. Admiral Tsukahara would cooperate with all the airplanes of his Southeast Area Force and all the ships of Admiral Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet. The Nagumo and Kondo fleets would continue to cruise northeast of Bougainville and Combined Fleet itself, with Yamamoto aboard Yamato, would stand by in a supporting position a bit farther north. More submarines were to be fed into Torpedo Junction.

All of the uncommitted power of Imperial Japan was now pointed like a pistol at Henderson Field.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IN MARCH of 1942 the Army Air Force’s 67th Fighter Squadron arrived at Nouméa, New Caledonia, by ship. They had their planes with them in crates. They took them ashore and uncrated them. To their astonishment they found an unfamiliar plane.

It was the P-400, an export version of the early models of the P-39, and originally built for Britain. None of the mechanics had ever worked on a P-400 before, and there were no instructions for assembly included in the crates. Nevertheless, the mechanics got the ships together and the 67th’s pilots learned to fly them.

On August 22 five P-400s led by Captain Dale Brannon and guided by a Flying Fortress flew across 640 miles of open water from Espiritu Santo to Henderson Field. Five days later nine more of them arrived. Cactus Air Force, already composed of the Marines of Smith’s and Mangrum’s squadrons and Turner’s Naval visitors from Enterprise, became a joint command.

Unfortunately, the Army fliers had come to the right place with the wrong plane. The P-400 lacked proper supercharger equipment and its oxygen system was of the high-pressure type. Since there were no bottles of high-pressure oxygen available on Guadalcanal, Cactus’s new pilots could fly only at low levels, usually ten to twelve thousand feet, well beneath high-flying Japanese bombers and Zeros. Moreover, even if they could have flown high enough, the plane was even less of a match for the Zero than the P-39 Airacobra which pilots such as Saburo Sakai and the others of Lieutenant Sasai’s squadron had slaughtered over New Guinea.

Nevertheless, Washington would continue to insist that the Airacobra was just the airplane for the Pacific. General Harmon on Nouméa might write letter after letter to General Arnold in Washington pleading for the new, fast, and long-ranged P-38 or Lightning fighter, but General Arnold would not be moved.

In the meantime, the Airacobra’s lame sister—the P-400—was quickly shot from Solomons skies. Within six days only three of the original fourteen were operational. General Vandegrift withdrew them from aerial combat and assigned their pilots to bombing and strafing Japanese outside the Marine perimeter. Here, with its nose cannon and its light and heavy machine guns, with its ability to carry a 500-pound bomb, the P-400 proved itself a scourge of enemy ground forces. So would the Airacobra, and both planes were to become devastating after depth charges were slung under their bellies and dropped into enemy-held ravines. The concussions were dreadful; they literally blew the Japanese out of their shoes. Nevertheless, neither P-400 nor Airacobra was of much use against the aerial onslaught roaring daily south from Buka and Rabaul, and defense of that Henderson Field for which the Japanese were also now pushing in the blue chips became the sole concern of Captain Smith’s dwindling band of Marine pilots.

In one week these Marines blasted the legend of the invincible Zero into flaming wreckage. Within a week they were shooting down both bombers and fighters at a rate of six to eight for every one of their own lost. Saburo Sakai’s comrades, fighter pilots who had vaunted themselves as all-conquering in the skies, were sent crashing into jungle or plummeting into the sea. Lieutenant Junichi Sasai was the first to die, shot down in a fighter sweep on August 26: the second of the roaring-tiger belt-buckles had come to rest on the floor of Iron Bottom Sound. It was the turn of Ota next, and after him Sakai’s wingmen, Yonekawa and Hatori. Of eighty fighter pilots who had followed Commander Nakajima to Rabaul, only Nakajima himself, plus the peerless Nishizawa—who would live to surpass Sakai, but also to die in the Philippines—and six others would survive the deadly firepower of these stubby American fighters. Not all of these Japanese aces fell to the flaming wing guns of Captain Smith’s men alone, for more Marine fighter squadrons were to enter the battle; nevertheless, they did perish as a result of battle tactics devised by Henderson’s early defenders.

Very early these men realized that the Zero was still able to outclimb, outspeed, and outmaneuver the Wildcat. Just because of this superiority the Japanese pilot was still fond of individual combat; he had no appreciation of team tactics. The Americans, flying a sturdier plane mounting more firepower—a Zero could not take two seconds fire from a Grumman, but the Grummans could take as much as fifteen minutes from a Zero—began flying in pairs. Alone they could not stand up to the Zero, but flying wing-to-wing two Wildcats could take on four or five enemy fighters. It was thus that they fought: warned by the coastwatchers, and later by radar, they climbed high into the sun awaiting the enemy bombers—still their prime target—to come flashing down in a direct overhead or high-side pass calculated to avoid the Bettys’ tail stingers, and then, after a quick flaming burst at an intercepting Zero, they dove for home.

Home was a cot and a tent pitched in the mud under shrapnel-scarred coconuts surrounding Henderson Field. It was a mash of dehydrated potatoes and rice and hunks of sodden Vienna sausage spooned from mess gear borrowed from the foot Marines. Home was the center of the Japanese bombers’ bull’s-eye, the heart of the target for the nightly shells of the Tokyo Express. It was a black and airless dugout in which men who had fought at high altitudes all day crouched to hear the whispering whistle of the bombs dropped by Washing Machine Charley, those nocturnal prowlers so named for the sound of their offbeat motors, or, worse, to listen to the droning approach of Louie the Louse—a cruiser scout-plane—and to see the greenish light of flares filtering through the dugout’s burlap door and to realize that the long dark shapes out on the Bay now had their targets spotted and in a moment there would be a giant roaring and thundering all around them and that for some inexplicable reason it would be difficult to keep the mouth open to reduce concussion and to pray to God at the same time. That was home, and in the dirty gray morning they were up, aching from fatigue induced by vitaminless diets or from sucking on oxygen all day; up to down the blessed cups of scalding black coffee and to walk to the runways where sometimes tractors had to tow their Wildcats from concealing coconut groves; up to squeeze into cockpits and to see the first light glinting weakly off spinning propellers, to inhale lungfuls of blue smoke swirling from coughing motors and to feel it souring the stomach where clots of undigested sausage lay like bits of rubber; and then they were feeding power to the motors, racing down the runway to go climbing, up, up, and up, showing the sea the sky-gray of their bottoms and the sky the sea-blue of their tops, climbing from extreme heat into those high cold altitudes where guns can freeze, climbing from solid earth into a floating world where the neck must swivel like a feeding bird’s, where the only sounds are the thunder of motors or hammering of the guns, where there is cloud mist on the windscreen in one instant and the sparkle of a drying sun in the next, and where, from time to time, a pilot’s eyes dart toward his wingman’s tail to see if there are mud-brown wings and a round red ball and smoking cannon there.

That was the pilots’ life at Henderson Field, a sun-blistered desert of black dust that fouled motors, or a rain-drenched slop of sticky black mud from which aircraft took off with all the easy grace of a fly rising from molasses.¹ Dust or mud, Dauntless dive-bombers equipped with hard rubber wheels for carrier landings churned up this strip like plowshares when they landed. Here was an airfield at its most primitive: when the Dauntlesses took off, their 500-pound bombs had to be lugged and loaded by hand, for there were no hoists; and just to refuel aircraft was an operation of several hours undertaken with 55-gallon drums and a handpump and a chamois strainer, or else by wheeling planes beneath drums slung in the rafters of the rickety hangars built by the Japanese.

And yet, six days after that August 24 on which they began Henderson’s defense by shooting down sixteen of Rabaul’s and Ryujo’s airplanes, most of these men were aces with five kills to their credit. Captain Smith was by then one plane shy of being twice an ace, for on that August 30 he destroyed four Zeros.

Sixteen Bettys heavily protected by Zeros had come winging over Iron Bottom Bay in a vee-of-vees, promptly sinking Colhoun, one of the two transports which the moonstruck Captain Murakami had ignored the night before. Turning to flee, they were attacked by Smith’s Marines. Smith shot down his first Zero easily, coming up on the enemy’s rear with such terrible speed that the pilot never knew what killed him. Smith picked the second Zero off his wingman’s tail, banking sharply to catch him full in his gunsight. The third nearly shot down Smith. Hanging on its nose, the Zero struck straight up under Smith’s belly. His bullets were stitching the Wildcat’s fuselage. Smith nosed over and came at the Zero nose-to-nose. An enemy bullet hit Smith’s windshield but missed Smith. Chunks of steel were flying from the Zero as both planes roared toward each other. They tore past each other fifteen feet apart, and Smith looked over his shoulder to see the Zero start spinning earthward out of control. Heading home with low tanks and only a few remaining bullets, Smith was skimming over the coconuts when he caught a Zero hedge-hopping along the coast. Smith came up behind him, pushed the gun-button, and sent the enemy crashing into the Bay.

Then he landed to receive the congratulations of Cactus Air Force’s new commander, Colonel William Wallace. Wallace led in nineteen more Wildcats under Major Robert Galer and twelve Dauntlesses under Major Leo Smith. They had had a typical arrival, coming in at the height of the battle, and, in the case of the Wildcats, joining it.

Lieutenant Richard Amerine was among the new arrivals. But he did not reach Henderson. His oxygen apparatus went out and he was forced to parachute from his Wildcat over the Guadalcanal jungle. He landed safely at Cape Esperance, and started walking east through enemy lines.

General Vandegrift now had a total of eighty-six pilots and sixty-four planes—three of them Army, ten Navy, the rest Marine—in his Cactus Air Force. This was approximately double the size of the force that had, since August 21, destroyed twenty-one enemy bombers and thirty-nine Zeros while blocking Admiral Tanaka’s reinforcement attempt.

Nevertheless, as Vandegrift knew, the Japanese were now reinforcing more heavily than the Americans. Cactus got thirty-one new planes on August 30, but two days later Rabaul got fifty-eight. The Japanese were also building up ground forces to east and west of Vandegrift’s perimeter. They were fresh troops, whereas the Americans were already emaciated by their twice-daily ration of rice and the exhausting routine of working or patrolling by day and fighting by night; they were racked with dysentery, eaten by the rot, and now, as August ended, the rate of malarial victims was rising with a disquieting steadiness.

Obviously the enemy build-up would continue and grow greater. There seemed to be no way of stopping the Tokyo Express. American warships either could not or would not contest them. Obviously it was up to the planes to hit the Tokyo Express ships before it got dark. But the Dauntlesses and Wildcats were short-range planes. What was needed was long-rangers such as the new Lightning.

Such, basically, was Vandegrift’s thinking, and it was approved and seconded by Slew McCain after the wiry little admiral paid his first visit to Guadalcanal on August 31. Vandegrift broke out his only bottle of bourbon in his honor. There was just enough for about one drink apiece for the two men and their staffs, and then the Japanese siren announced the advent of Japanese bombers. That night a Tokyo Express cruiser bombarded the airfield. In the morning, more bombers arrived. Sitting in Vandegrift’s dugout while the bombs came whistling down, McCain blinked his intense small eyes and said: “By God, Vandegrift, this is your war and you sure are welcome to it. But when I go back tomorrow I am going to try to get you what you need for your air force here.”²

McCain did. He sent a dispatch to Ghormley, MacArthur, Nimitz, and King, declaring:

“Two full squadrons of Lightnings or Wildcats in addition to present strength should be put into Guadalcanal at once with replacements in training to the south… The situation admits of no delay whatever… With substantially the reinforcements requested Guadalcanal can be a sinkhole for enemy air power and can be consolidated, expanded, and exploited to enemy’s mortal hurt. The reverse is true if we lose Guadalcanal. If the reinforcement requested is not made available Guadalcanal cannot be supplied and hence cannot be held.”

Visiting with Ghormley in Nouméa, Undersecretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal became concerned by McCain’s reports. He grasped the importance of holding Guadalcanal, and he would, upon his return to Washington, inform the Joint Chiefs of its aircraft needs. But that was yet to be. At the moment, Ghormley asked MacArthur if he could send Guadalcanal some Lightning fighters. MacArthur replied, with truth and reason, that he needed his handful of Lightnings for defense of New Guinea and Australia. Could Ghormley possibly lend him one or two of his four carriers? No, said Ghormley, he needed them to keep the sealanes to Guadalcanal open.

Besides, there were now only three.

Stately old “Sara Maru,” as her crew called Saratoga, was steaming on defensive patrol about 260 miles southeast of Guadalcanal. There had been a submarine scare, but now, at about seven in the morning, the sea sparkled serenely in the sun and a bugle called all hands to breakfast.

Chow lines formed while Sara Maru’s screen moved dutifully around the big ship. Outside the screen, off Sara’s bow, all this was observed with rising excitement by a Japanese officer watching through submarine I-26’s periscope. At about a quarter of eight, six Long Lance torpedoes went hissing from the submarine’s tubes.

A minute later destroyer MacDonough sighted the periscope about thirty feet off her bow. She hoisted the torpedo warning, and moved in. She dropped two depth charges which had no depth setting, and were therefore useless, and then, simultaneously, her hull scraped against the diving submarine’s side and a torpedo porpoised astern.

On Saratoga Captain DeWitt Ramsey swung his rudder hard right and rang up full speed. Slowly, ponderously, old Sara Maru turned toward the torpedo wakes. But not enough… Two minutes later a torpedo smashed her starboard side abreast of the island superstructure.

It did not seem too bad. No one was killed and only twelve men, including Admiral Fletcher, had been slightly wounded. But after Saratoga finally made it with a tow back to Tongatabu, it was discovered that it would require three months to repair her.

Saratoga was out of the fight for Guadalcanal.

Next day, Vandegrift learned of her loss with a sinking heart, for he had also heard of General Kawaguchi’s landing to the east the night before. Crisis was recurring, and he ordered the Raiders and Paratroopers to move from Tulagi to Guadalcanal.