Challenge for the Pacific

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AN HOUR after dark on the night of September 3 a message arrived at Cactus “Operations.” A transport was arriving and the airfield would have to be illuminated.

Seven jeeps bounced to the south end of the strip and switched on their lights. There was a thundering overhead and some of the drivers instinctively ducked. The transport’s wheels cleared them by a few feet and the big plane bumped to a halt. The door swung open and a cold white grizzly bear in khaki stepped down.

Brigadier General Roy Geiger had flown up from the New Hebrides, where he was supposed to be commanding the First Marine Air Wing, to take charge of Cactus Air Force. With him were his chief of staff, Colonel Louis Woods, and his Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Munn.

They were three of the most experienced air officers in the Marine Corps, led by a general who won his wings in 1916 and had flown every type of aircraft from the open-cockpit crates of World War I to the newest-model Grumman fighters then parked in Henderson’s coconuts. Roy Geiger was also a Parris Island classmate of Archer Vandegrift, and he had helped him fight Cacos in Haiti by ordering his pilots to load a small bomb aboard a Jenny and drop it on an enemy stronghold simultaneously with a ground attack launched by Vandegrift. The day after Geiger arrived, pitching his tent not far from the Pagoda, he called on his old friend. He brought him a package from Admiral Nimitz marked “fan mail.” Vandegrift opened it. It was a case of Scotch. But Geiger was aware that Vandegrift, a Virginian, subscribed to the Virginian’s belief that a man who drank Scotch rather than bourbon was either a tourist or a show-off, and so, he said, “Archer, I have a case of bourbon, and I’ll trade you level—even though mine are quarts.”¹

Vandegrift was delighted and the two generals placed the Scotch—as rare as bathing beauties on Guadalcanal—into a jeep and drove off to Geiger’s tent. Geiger looked for his bourbon, and found that it was gone. Some pink-cheeked fly-boy with more red balls on his fuselage than hairs on his chin had made off with his general’s refreshments, and the general’s face beneath his thatch of snow-white hair was also round and red and his bleak blue eyes were icy with rage. Archer Vandegrift, Virginian though he was, decided that he was not now in Virginia: he would keep the Scotch. He gave his old friend two bottles, and departed; and Geiger took command of Cactus Air Force in a humor so foul that even Colonel Woods, accustomed to his chief’s harsh cold furies, was impressed.² In such mood, Geiger drove his fliers from a splendid August into a superb September.

Henderson’s old-timers and the new arrivals of Colonel Wallace had already learned to fight together, having knocked down seven of forty enemy attackers on September 2, two of them falling to Major Galer’s guns; and the following day Leo Smith’s dive-bombers joined Mangrum’s to fall upon Colonel Oka and his thousand Kawaguchis barging down The Slot. On Geiger’s first day of command, Wildcats were sent to help the Dauntlesses make Oka’s passage even more harrowing than Admiral Tanaka had predicted, and on the ensuing two days scout-bombers went ranging 200 miles to the northwest to strike at Gizo Bay, the heretofore too-distant daylight hideout of the Tokyo Express. Gradually, Geiger’s inordinately bad temper subsided into his normal curtness. He became fond of his young fliers, jaunty in their dark-blue baseball caps and shoulder holsters. In turn, they ceased to think of him as ruthless but as single-mindedly aggressive and they called him the Old Man. A magnificent band of fighters had found the right leader, and it was well, for the Tokyo Express was recruiting cruisers and destroyers by the dozen and Rabaul and Buka were reinforced with aircraft to the extent that Geiger would be outnumbered 180 planes to seventy by mid-September. Nevertheless, the men of Cactus Air Force continued to whittle the enemy, growing in offensive spirit and gathering almost nightly at the Hotel de Gink, Henderson’s hostelry for visiting pilots, to toast each other in medicinal alcohol—or perhaps “borrowed” one-star bourbon—while bellowing out a popular parody of “On the Road to Mandalay”:

Meanwhile, as the Solomons aerial war grew fiercer, the Seabees began working on Henderson Field.

The Sixth Naval Construction Battalion arrived at Guadalcanal on September 1. Like all other Seabees—a nickname based on the initials CB—these men were experienced craftsmen. They were tractor drivers, carpenters, masons, dynamiters, electricians, shipfitters, machinists, and so on, who had volunteered to put their skills at their country’s disposal. Most of them were well past the draft age; some of them were veterans of World War I. Their average age of thirty-five was nearly double the age of many of Vandegrift’s Marines who watched the Seabees coming ashore and thought that they were being reinforced by their fathers.

“What the hell, pop! They running outta men at home?”

“Hey, pop—you get your wars mixed up or somethin’?”

“Hang onto yer false teeth, grandad—the Jap’s’re dropping sandwiches.”

The Seabees grinned weakly, until one of the Marines inevitably went too far, chortling: “Seabees, huh? Stands for Confused Bastards, you ask me. What’n hell you old geezers gonna do here?”

“I’ll tell you what, you mother’s mistakes,” a Seabee roared back. “We’re gonna protect the Marines!”³

It was not exactly true, but it had the effect of provoking sweet shouts of anguish from the indignant Marines. Thereafter—and throughout the Pacific war—both Seabees and Marines were drawn together in a rough but affectionate camaraderie based upon mutual respect.

Having been rushed to Guadalcanal, the Sixth Battalion’s men had very little equipment: two bulldozers, six dump trucks and a big, waddling carryall capable of scooping up twelve cubic yards of earth. But they also had Japanese trucks and tractors, graders and rollers, Japanese cement, and Japanese poles, lumber and soil pipe. With this, and with gradually increasing supplies of their own, they took over the job of completing and enlarging Henderson Field, while also repairing the strip after enemy air raids.

Repair was vital, and it had to be done quickly. The moment the Japanese approach was signaled, all of Henderson’s Wildcats roared aloft to intercept, while the Dauntlesses and P-400s—“Klunkers” as they were now called—took off either to fly out of range or to bomb and strafe the Japanese at either end of the island. But every plane which survived the raid would be coming back, returning to a field pocked with craters. One afternoon in early September, the Seabees watched in agony while seven fighters came in one after another, and cracked up.

So the Seabees discovered that the enemy’s 500-pound bomb usually tore up 1600 square feet of Marston steel matting, and packages of that much matting were placed alongside the strip. Trucks loaded with exactly the amount of sand and gravel required to fill such a crater were parked out of sight at strategic points. Compressors and pneumatic hammers to pack the fill were placed in readiness. Assembly lines for passing and laying matting were organized. At the moment of the enemy’s approach, all of the Seabees—cooks included—raced to their stations. The moment the bombers departed, sometimes while Zeros shrieked down to strafe, they made for the airstrip. Twisted matting was torn from the craters even as the loaded trucks roared up from the coconut groves. Fill was poured into the holes while men with hammers and compressors leaped in to pack it. New matting was passed, laid, and linked to undamaged strips. Inside forty minutes, the hole would be completely filled and covered.

Repairing shell-holes, of course, took longer. The Seabees had to wait before going to work; for as everyone on Guadalcanal knew, if the bombers left as quickly as they came, it seemed that the Tokyo Express would never leave.

It was next to impossible for Cactus Air Force to derail the Tokyo Express at night. The Japanese ships were only visible during periods of bright moonlight, and these, of course, were the nights when they usually stayed home. Moreover, weather conditions worsened during September and the moon was on the wane, and the wily Tanaka had instructed his skippers never to reveal position by firing on American aircraft at night. They only fired when they were ready to depart, sailing westward through the Bay, blasting Henderson and the Marine positions as they went, and hitting top speed as they cleared Savo and turned northwestward for home.

Nevertheless, Henderson’s pilots always took to the skies whenever the Tokyo Express was reported landing troops or supplies. They tried to illuminate the Bay with flares and sometimes they went down as low as five hundred feet looking for long dark shapes. But they seldom did more than keep the Japanese on the alert.

Warships equipped with radar might sink the enemy ships, but the American Navy had not been back in force since Savo. Nor were American sailors the equal of Japanese seamen in night-fighting. They were still cautious, fearful of firing on friendly ships; and they were not trained to recognize the enemy by silhouette as the Japanese were. Blue, the destroyer that had been blind to Admiral Mikawa’s approach at Savo, gave tragic demonstration of these failings the night after the Battle of the Tenaru. With another destroyer, Henley, she tried to intercept a Japanese landing. Four minutes after her sonar and radar had made a contact on a strange ship, and just as she was bringing her guns and torpedo tubes to bear, she was racked by a Long Lance from the enemy destroyer Kawakaze, which had just put troops ashore. Blue lost several feet of her stern and had to be scuttled.

After this, although perhaps not on account of this, there were fewer and fewer American warships entering Iron Bottom Bay at night.

Little and Gregory were two of a rare kind at Guadalcanal: ships that stayed. Sisters of sunken Colhoun, they were old fourstack destroyers converted into fast transports. They had brought Red Mike Edson and the Raiders and Parachutists from Tulagi to Guadalcanal, and on September 4 they took aboard a party of Raiders under Colonel Griffith to patrol Savo Island.

Aboard Little a lookout cried “Periscope!” and the ship prepared to close with depth charges before the “periscope” was sheepishly recognized as the mast of a sunken American ship. Ashore on Savo, the Raiders found no Japanese but only charred and oily debris and the mounds of shallow graves, still more grim testimonials to the efficiency of Admiral Mikawa’s ships. A native named Allen-luva told the patrol that the Japanese had not been on Savo since July.

“Take bananas, chicken, pumpkin, everything,” Allen-luva said angrily.

“Him talk pidgin?” someone asked.

“Like drunk man,” Allen-luva snorted. “Him talk ‘aeroprane’ and ‘Guadarcanar.’”⁴

The Marines laughed and went back aboard Gregory and Little. They returned to Guadalcanal at dusk. Because it was an extremely dark night, Little and Gregory did not go back to Tulagi Harbor as was customary. Commander Hugh Hadley in Little decided to patrol off Lunga Point.

At one o’clock next morning the Americans observed gunfire flashes in the east near Taivu.

Destroyers Yudachi, Hatsuyuki, and Murakumo were to provide diversionary bombardment while transports put the last of General Kawaguchi’s men ashore at Taivu. At about one o’clock in the morning, they began. And then the startled gunners looked to the west where two small American destroyer-transports were beautifully outlined in the light of five beautiful American flares.

Little and Gregory both thought the gunflashes were from a Japanese submarine. They sped eastward, and then, a Catalina on patrol a half mile ahead also saw the flashes and also thought that they came from a submarine, and helpfully dropped a string of flares to mark the target.

In that light the three enemy destroyers, each nearly as big as a light cruiser, began battering Americans mounting only one four-incher, some 20-mm guns and a few light and heavy machine guns. Little and Gregory fought bravely, but within a few salvos of feelers the Japanese had the range. Commander Hadley was killed on Little’s bridge. Gregory was shredded by salvos of five-inch shells and set blazing from stem to stern. Both ships were blazing wrecks, but the Japanese made certain of their destruction. They sailed between them, hurling shells to both sides. Many Americans in the water were killed by those shells. Some of them dove deep to get beneath burning oil, to avoid flaming embers cascading down from their ships. They tried to swim out of seas of fire, and sometimes, if they were lucky, water which had risen into the sky in long geysering plumes came raining down to put out the fires around them. Others, such as Lieutenant Commander Harry Bauer, skipper of Gregory, were not so fortunate. Badly wounded, Bauer struggled to escape both burning oil and the suction of his sinking ship. Two men—Clarence Justice and Chester Ellis—swam to his side to pull him free. Bauer heard a sailor cry out that he was drowning. He directed his rescuers to the man’s aid, and he was never seen again.

Once more tragedy had overtaken American ships and men on the dark brooding surface of Iron Bottom Bay, and far to the west Lieutenant Richard Amerine heard the thundering and saw the flashing and he wondered what was happening now on this satanic paradise.

The Japanese had not seen Amerine parachute into the jungle around Cape Esperance. No one had come for him. But Amerine was growing weak. He had been subsisting for five days on snails and insects. He knew which ones were edible because he was an entomologist. In fact, he had seen such an astounding variety of insects that he had been brokenhearted not to have a butterfly net with him.

That day, though, he would have traded it for a rifle.

He had nearly blundered into a party of Japanese. Luckily, he had found one enemy soldier sleeping beside a track and he had seized a boulder and smashed the man’s head like a china doll’s. Then he took the dead soldier’s pistol with which he killed two more of them, shooting one and battering the other with the pistol butt.

Now, in the early darkness of September 5, he lay in the whispering, dripping jungle and wondered if there were more Japanese between him and the Marine lines.

With daylight, he arose and began walking east again.

There was “pogey-bait” on Guadalcanal.

It would seem absurd that during a time of critical shortages in fuel and goods and ammunition anyone should bother to bring in candy, and yet, on September 5, a Skytrain flown by Lieutenant Colonel Wyman Marshall came in under fire loaded with pogey-bait and cigarettes. Then Colonel Marshall flew out with a load of wounded.

Next day more Skytrains arrived, carrying drums of fuel, ammunition, machine guns, and mortar shells—departing, again, with wounded. Thus was begun the famous shuttle operation called Scat after South Pacific Combat Air Transportation Command.

Meanwhile, the Marines were issued pogey-bait at the rate of one bar of candy to a squad. Rather than divide it and provide too little for all, the men drew lots. The blushing winners took their prizes and went slinking into the bush to devour it beyond the reproachful eyes of the losers.

Combined Fleet had returned to Truk.

After ten days of useless cruising north of Guadalcanal, fifty-odd ships led by great Yamato sailed into the lagoon to refuel.

Admiral Yamamoto called a conference aboard his battleship. He was taciturn as he spoke to his commanders. For the first time he cautioned against underestimating American fighting strength, and he issued two simple orders:

1. Keep the location and movements of Japanese carriers unknown to the enemy.

2. Make initial air assaults against the enemy as strong as possible.

These instructions were to cover Combined Fleet’s support of Major General Kawaguchi’s attempt to capture Henderson Field. The all-out aerial assault was to be launched September 12 in concert with Kawaguchi’s attack.

Commander Tameichi Hara came back from the conference to his destroyer Amatsukaze. Lieutenant Kazue Shimizu, his gunnery officer, met him with a doleful face.

“What’s the matter with you?” Hara snapped.

“We failed to catch a single fish today,” Shimizu said. “This super fleet of ours has exterminated every fish in the atoll in just three days.”⁵

On September 9 the super fleet shoved off again, bound for the Solomons.

Lieutenant Amerine had come back from the dead. On September 6, gaunt and staggering, he wandered into Marine lines at Kukum. He was brought to Vandegrift’s headquarters to inform Intelligence of what he had seen. But Amerine had little to tell. The Japanese he had killed had been stragglers and he had not come upon any large bodies of enemy troops.

Colonel Thomas still believed that the large enemy formations were to the east. Clemens’s scouts continued to report a Japanese build-up at the village of Tasimboko, about a mile west of Taivu. In fact, Thomas and Colonel Twining had already begun to plan a raid on Tasimboko, and Colonel Edson came to headquarters to propose just such an operation. The night of September 6, Thomas informed Edson that he could go ahead with it.

“We must not overrate the importance of our successes in the Solomons,” the President was saying warningly in his annual Labor Day speech to the nation, “though we may be proud of the skill with which these local operations have been conducted.”

Franklin Roosevelt was preparing America for bad news. Even as Vandegrift’s men marched toward their ships to attack Kawaguchi’s men at Tasimboko, the President in the White House was minimizing the campaign with the deprecating phrase “local operation.” Then, the announcement of Japanese victory on Guadalcanal would not come like the crack of doom.⁶

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

KIYOTAKE KAWAGUCHI was as confident of victory as Colonel Ichiki had been. He had 6200 men ashore whom he would hurl at Henderson Field in a three-pronged attack.

1. The major blow would be led by himself. He would take a battalion of the 124th Infantry and the two remaining Ichiki battalions to the south of the airfield, wheel and attack north.

2. Another battalion of the 124th would strike west across the Tenaru.

3. From the vicinity of the Matanikau River two reinforced battalions under Colonel Oka would cross the Lunga River and hit the airfield from the northwest.

Meanwhile, the main blow was to be supported by naval gunfire and air strikes.

It was a tidy plan, worthy of any textbook or any army that marches on maps. General Kawaguchi had devised it in the Shortlands in between arguments with Admiral Tanaka. It did not occur to him then, as it did not now occur to him, that he might scout the battlefield and the enemy before drawing up a battle plan.

Like Colonel Ichiki, he was making free and fiery interpretation of General Hyakutake’s measured instructions to “view the enemy strength, position and terrain” to see if it was “possible or not to achieve quick success” with his present strength. An impatient man, Kawaguchi had no intention of wasting time studying the enemy. To him there was no question of quick success. The Americans were few in number and inferior in quality. Japanese “spiritual power” would triumph. Moreover, by stealing stealthily south, by “tunneling through the jungle” as he called it, he would come up on the American rear and surprise them. The map had shown him a hogbacked ridge which ran down into the airfield. It seemed to be undefended.

In such confidence, General Kawaguchi went sloshing southwest. The Ishitari Battalion moved off directly westward. Colonel Oka’s force, gathering at the Matanikau, marked time for the appointed hour on the night of September 12.

Left behind at Tasimboko were three hundred men guarding General Kawaguchi’s food, part of his artillery, and a trunk containing his dress whites.

After dark on September 7 the Raiders under Colonel Edson boarded two destroyer-transports and a pair of converted California tuna launches now dignified with the initials YP, meaning patrol boat and translated “Yippy.” The Marines sailed east to Tasimboko, their approach announced by showers of bright red sparks pouring from the Yippies’ funnels.

In a misty dawn, the Raiders clambered into their Higgins boats. The Japanese, aware of their presence, prepared to receive them with a pair of 47-mm antitank guns capable of blowing the American boats out of the water.

But then the shredding mists revealed the large transports Fuller and Bellatrix escorted by a cruiser and four destroyers. They were enroute to Lunga Point, but Kawaguchi’s rear guard thought they were coming to Tasimboko. The Japanese broke and ran, abandoning the antitank guns, their own weapons and their breakfasts.

Landing unopposed, the Raiders quickly removed the antitank guns’ breech blocks and hurled them into the sea. Then they struck inland half a mile and wheeled west through a coconut plantation.

In the meantime, General Kawaguchi’s panicky soldiers had informed the brigade commander that a major enemy landing was being made in his rear, and he, in turn, had notified Rabaul.

General Hyakutake was at last distressed. He ordered the 41st Infantry Regiment to mark time at Kokoda in New Guinea for possible transfer to Guadalcanal, and then he radioed Tokyo that Kawaguchi was “sandwiched.” Tokyo quickly notified two battalions in the East Indies to stand by, even as Admiral Mikawa planned a night bombardment with a cruiser and eight destroyers and the Tokyo Express shipped two battalions of the Aoba Detachment aboard.

It was a first-class flap which continued to flutter until word came from Kawaguchi suggesting that his earlier report had been exaggerated.

Nevertheless, General Kawaguchi could not turn to strike the Raiders. He was bogged down. Among other things he had underestimated the jungle. His engineers had not been able to hack out the clear straight “tunnel” that had been promised, and three thousand men of the Kawaguchi Brigade were strung out in a snaking column three miles long. They clawed up slime-slick slopes or stumbled through swamps sometimes armpit-deep, or were tripped at every turn by tangles of root and creeper and fern, ravaged, as they went, by clouds of stinging wings and all those jungle creatures that fall, fasten, and suck.

No, Kawaguchi could not turn; he could only send his rear guard the peremptory order:

“Confront the enemy.”

Plucking up their courage, they did. Two mountain guns and a pair of howitzers and numerous Nambu machine guns began firing from the coconut groves and Edson’s men were pinned down.

Edson immediately called for aerial support and sent a company led by Clemens’s scouts along a jungle trail to turn the enemy’s right flank. Then Captain Dale Brannon’s shark-nosed Klunkers arrived to strafe and bomb the Japanese. At noon, the encircling company had deployed in the Japanese rear. Caught in a crossfire, the enemy fled again. Twenty-seven dead bodies were found draped over six heavy machine guns. Most of Kawaguchi’s food supply was also discovered, and fifty men were detailed to jab their bayonets into cans of sliced beef and crabmeat while others dragged thousands of bags of rice into the surf. All Japanese weapons were destroyed and the field pieces towed into the Bay. Enemy maps, charts, and notebooks were gathered up and a powerful radio set was wrecked.

Then, with great hoarse shouts of joy, the Marines blundered into a thatched warehouse loaded with beer and sake. When they returned to their waiting ships late that afternoon they were loaded down with bottles and with cans of beef and crab, which, as they sheepishly explained to the gently inquiring Colonel Edson, they had somehow forgotten to destroy.

It is delicious to drink the enemy’s wine and to eat his sweetmeats, and it is glorious to make him grind his teeth, as the Raiders did, sailing west to Kukum with Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s fancy white duds nailed to the masthead.

Mr. Ishimoto had been in the vicinity of Tasimboko and he reacted swiftly to the American raid.

He rounded up the missionaries and demanded again that they advise the Americans to surrender. Father Oude-Engberink replied that he could not. As he had said to Martin Clemens, he was neutral. But it would be difficult for Ishimoto to consider white skin and large noses neutral, and he shouted:

“It is useless to resist the Japanese. They are too strong for you. You cannot win and you must leave Guadalcanal.”¹

Again, the priests refused. Political affairs were not their concern. Ishimoto ordered them tied and thrown into a native hut where they were tortured and bayoneted to death. Old Sister Edmée, her body swollen and deformed by elephantiasis, was sent blundering off into the bush. But Sisters Sylvia and Odilia, both young, were also murdered.

After they were raped.²

The night of his return Red Mike Edson had gone to Colonel Thomas at Vandegrift’s headquarters. “This is no motley of Japs,” he said in his throaty whisper.³ Next morning, smiling his cold white smile, Edson was back. Thomas looked up from patrol reports and Intelligence interpretations of the captured Tasimboko documents. “They’re coming,” Thomas said.

Edson nodded. But from where? He pointed to a ridge on an aerial photograph and whispered: “This looks like a good approach.”⁴

Thomas was startled. Edson had fingered the very ridge to which General Vandegrift, tired of jumping in and out of airfield dugouts, was planning to move his command post. Edson was unperturbed. The ridge was a perfect approach to the airfield. It was a broken hogback running parallel to the Lunga River south of the airfield. South, east, and west—that is, front and both sides—it was surrounded by jungle; but to the north or rear it ran gently down into Henderson Field. What better approach, Edson argued, and Thomas, agreeing, took him to see the general.

Vandegrift was pleased to see the two men unfold their map and confidently pinpoint the avenue of enemy approach.

“Where is that?” he asked.

Respectful but reproachful, Edson said: “The ridge you insist on putting your new CP behind.”⁵

Vandegrift smiled softly. He had already rejected some rather profane objections from his staff regarding his new command post, and he was not now going to change his mind. Engineers were already at work building a pavilion 35 × 18 feet which would house the living and working quarters of Vandegrift and his chief of staff, Colonel Capers James. It was to have Japanese wicker furniture and a Japanese icebox run by kerosene and it would be surrounded by woods filled with the colorful parrots and macaws which Vandegrift found so delightful. No, he would not change his mind, even if he could immediately grasp the danger of leaving that ridge undefended. So the general courteously ignored the colonel’s respectful rebuke and ordered him to take his composite battalion of 700 Raiders and parachutists and block that open ridge.

Then the general returned to such urgent matters as his repeated request for reinforcements. He wanted at least one regiment, preferably, if he could get it, his old Seventh Marines.

The Seventh Marines had been in Samoa since the middle of May. Trained as an assault elite, they were withering as garrison troops. There was enchanted moonlight filtering through the branches of banyan trees and the soft plinking of native guitars. There was also a ration of two cans of beer daily and hot food from the galleys. And there was the tsetse fly that brings “mumu,” as the Samoans call elephantiasis.

None of these things are typical of a Corps dedicated to the principle that hunger and hardship are the school of the good soldier. “Nothing is too good for you,” the Marine Corps tells its men, adding: “But we’ll let you have it anyway.”

But on Samoa the Seventh was “living it up” in comparison to its brother regiments on Guadalcanal and the spectacle of Colonel James Webb—“Gentleman Jim” in his natty whipcord breeches and his gleaming low-quarter shoes—leading hikes in a station wagon was also not calculated to inflame its men with ardor.

It was up to the battalion commanders to try to keep their men battle-fit. One of these leaders was Lieutenant Colonel Herman Henry Hanneken, the veteran of the Banana Wars who had killed the Caco chieftain, “King” Charlemagne, in personal combat. Another was Major Chesty Puller.

At forty-four, Puller was already a Marine legend. He had won two Navy Crosses in Haiti and Nicaragua. He was that very rare bird of war: a man who actually loves combat and who is beloved by his men. Puller’s Marines delighted in repeating those numerous Pullerisms, true or false, such as his remark when he saw his first flamethrower: “Where do you fit the bayonet on it?” They boasted of his bullhorn voice and they claimed that his huge chest bulging from an otherwise spindly frame hardly five feet six inches high was capable of repelling enemy bullets. Puller’s military credo contained two articles: conditioning and attack.

On Samoa he repeatedly ordered his men out on long hikes beneath a brazen sun, instructing his officers: “Gentlemen, remember to have every man carry a one-inch square of beef suet in his pack. If they’ll grease their feet daily, and avoid so much washing, they’ll have no blisters. An old trick from the Haitian soldiers, and it never fails. You can’t march men without feet, gentlemen.”⁶

But Puller, like the other professional officers, soon began to mourn the Samoan confinement: “Here I am, stuck out here to rot on this damned island while other people fight the war. They’ve marooned us.”⁷ Hearing of the Battle of the Tenaru, he cried: “They mowed ’em down! One of these days we’ll be giving ’em hell like that. Better than that.”⁸

A few weeks later the Seventh Marines were ordered to Espiritu Santo. It was rumored that they were not going to Guadalcanal, but to New Guinea to fight for General MacArthur.

Admiral Ghormley pondered a most disturbing message. Admiral Nimitz was ordering Ghormley to turn over to General MacArthur one reinforced regiment of “experienced amphibious troops,” together with the ships required to mount them. Ghormley was puzzled. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had originated this order, surely must know that the only “experienced” amphibious troops in the Pacific were fighting for their lives on Guadalcanal. Could he mean the Seventh Marine Regiment, even then sailing toward Ghormley’s area? Ghormley asked the advice of Richmond Kelly Turner. He got a very straight answer:

“The only experienced amphibious troops in the South Pacific are those in Guadalcanal and it is impracticable to withdraw them.” Turner then laid it on the line:

“I respectfully invite attention to the present insecure position of Guadalcanal.… Adequate air and naval strength have not been made available. Vandegrift has consistently urged to be reinforced at once by at least one regiment… I concur.”

What might have been a very soft filching of Guadalcanal’s dwindling strength was thus prevented.

And Vandegrift’s strength was dwindling. Malaria was now ravaging his ranks as the enemy had not been able to do. Every day new shortages appeared—in bombs, bullets, starter cartridges, oxygen, tires, and lubricating oil—thus complicating old and constant shortages in food and fuel.

General Geiger’s strength was being whittled by shortages rather than by Zeros. Eight airplanes cracked up on take-off on September 8. Two of them were restored to readiness but the others were hauled off to the “boneyard” where sharp-eyed mechanics cannibalized them for spare parts.

On September 10 there were only eleven Wildcats available, and the enemy aerial onslaught was mounting. Combined Fleet’s sortie from Truk and the steady reinforcement of northern airfields were ominous signs. Admiral Nimitz did not fail to observe them. On that same September 10 he ordered all carrier aircraft “that could be spared” to be flown to Guadalcanal, thus contradicting the Navy’s doctrine that carrier aircraft should fly from carriers, as well as countermanding Ghormley’s promise to Fletcher that his fighters would not be committed to Guadalcanal. Pledges made in all sincerity in response to reasonable requests, the niceties of command prerogatives, military dogma, all had to go by the boards, now, for the enemy was obviously mounting a major bid to recover Guadalcanal.

Crisis had come.

General Vandegrift knew it as he moved into his new command post behind the ridge that would be called Bloody, and Red Mike Edson knew it going down to Kukum to tell his men that they were moving to a “rest area.”

“Too much bombing and shelling here close to the beach,” Edson said. “We’re moving to a quiet spot.”⁹ He smiled, enjoying the joke. The men moved out. Twice they were forced to take cover from air raids, but by two o’clock in the afternoon they were fortifying Bloody Ridge.

Edson put the parachutists under Harry Torgerson—the singed dynamiter of Gavutu—on his left or eastern flank. The Raiders took over the center and right with the right flank company strung out thinly toward the Lunga. Edson’s own command post was in a gully about a hundred yards south of Vandegrift’s new headquarters. Here he put his reserve, a depleted company of Raiders.

None of the men really believed that they had come to a “rest area,” and some of them were already cursing Edson as a glory-hound who hung around headquarters sniffing out bloody assignments for his men. None of them, however, actually suspected that they, and they alone, stood between an approaching enemy and that Henderson Field which was now the prize of the Pacific war. So some of these men did not dig so deeply as they might have, for to dig into coral with truncated entrenching tools which are little better than trowels can be so painful and exhausting that only the fear of death can impel some men to attempt it.

That fear came upon these Marines next morning. Stringing barbed wire and hacking out fields of fire in the undergrowth, they heard the cry “Condition Red!” Twenty-six Bettys with twenty escorting Zeros were on their way. The men kept on working. The target would be, as always, the airfield behind them.

But the target was Bloody Ridge.

That tan, humpbacked mound rearing out of the dark green jungle sea like the spine of a whale leaped and shuddered as though harpooned.

Those who had dug pits hurled themselves into them, those who had not stood erect or tried to run and were killed or maimed.

And then the raid was over. It was quiet on the Ridge, beneath the growl and whine of aerial combat in which Marine fliers destroyed seven enemy planes and in which Major Robert Galer, shot down in the Bay, survived to swim ashore. But the men on Bloody Ridge did not know this. They knew only that the enemy was after their Ridge and they brushed dirt from their dungarees and began to dig with desperate fury.

“Some goddam rest area,” a corporal snarled. “Some goddam rest area!”¹⁰

Out in the jungle, General Kawaguchi’s toiling column of three thousand men took comfort in the sound of Japanese bombs falling on American Marines. But it was small comfort. Their march to the battle area had become an excruciating torment. It was a blind blundering stagger through a malevolent green labyrinth. Kawaguchi had no guides. The policies of Mr. Ishimoto had seen to that. Nor did the general have accurate maps or aerial mosaics.

Nevertheless, he pressed on. General Hyakutake had insisted that September 12 was to be the night of the attack and Kawaguchi could not miss that rigid deadline. He closed his eyes to the sight of limping soldiers and took an iron grip on his confidence. He would still prevail. Two of the Ichiki battalions would make the breakthrough and then the powerful unit led by Lieutenant Colonel Kusukichi Watanabe would dash to the airfield. Kawaguchi’s forces to east and west would close in simultaneously.

And then the surrender ceremony that day…

Remembering his lost white uniform General Kawaguchi’s face darkened and his hand fell to his saber hilt.

Vice-Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner also heard those Japanese bombs. He flew in just before “Condition Red!” was sounded and the Japanese bombers who raked the Raiders’ ridge also introduced Kelly Turner to the grim realities of life on Guadalcanal.

He sat out the raid in Vandegrift’s dugout just a hundred yards north of the quaking Ridge. He was discomfited but after the bombers left, Vandegrift noticed that he still looked tense. He was. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and silently handed it to Vandegrift. Color drained from the general’s face. He winced. He was reading Admiral Ghormley’s estimate of the situation on Guadalcanal. Commander, South Pacific, summarized the enemy build-up: naval forces were gathering at Rabaul and Truk, aerial reinforcements were arriving daily, dozens of transports were in Simpson Harbor waiting to put troops aboard; an overwhelming push against Guadalcanal was likely. Then Ghormley scrutinized his own situation. He listed shortages in cruisers, carriers, destroyer-transports, and cargo vessels.

Admiral Ghormley concluded that he could no longer support the Marines on Guadalcanal.

Without a word Vandegrift handed the message to Colonel Thomas. The colonel read and looked up dumfounded.

“Put that message in your pocket,” Vandegrift told him. “I’ll talk to you about it later, but I don’t want anyone to know about it.”¹¹

Thomas nodded, watching Admiral Turner pulling a bottle out of his bag. He poured three drinks, and said: “Vandegrift, I’m not inclined to take so pessimistic a view of the situation as Ghormley does. He doesn’t believe I can get the Seventh Marine Regiment in here, but I think I have a scheme that will fool the Japs.”¹²

Turner’s plan was simply to bring the Seventh over a course well to the east of the normal approach, while carriers Wasp and Hornet and their screen sailed out of sight of the transports as though on normal patrol.

Vandegrift was encouraged at the thought of receiving 4000 fresh troops, but in Turner’s next breath he was dismayed. The admiral was playing general again. Because he was still Amphibious Force Commander, and because Guadalcanal had not yet taught the Americans that Landing Force Commanders such as Vandegrift must be at least the equal of the Amphibious Force Commanders when on the ground, Kelly Turner was still Archer Vandegrift’s superior. In that capacity he wanted to use the Seventh Marines to carve out little American enclaves on Guadalcanal. He was hopeful of establishing another airfield at Aola Bay, the point far to the east where Martin Clemens had had his district office. Vandegrift protested. Henderson Field was the prize. It was protected by a perimeter. All troops should be used to hold that perimeter until it was time to go on the offensive to drive Japan from the island.

The two men could not agree, and their discussion of how to use the Seventh Marines ended in stalemate.

That afternoon reinforcements of a different order arrived: twenty-four Wildcats from crippled Saratoga flew into Henderson Field led by Commander Le Roy Simpler.

That night the Tokyo Express was on schedule. For almost two hours Japanese naval shells combed Bloody Ridge. Once again the coral shivered and shook and Edson’s men dug their noses into damp coral and prayed. Once again Kelly Turner took shelter in Vandegrift’s dugout. He heard the shells whispering hoarsely overhead, heard them crash and felt their shock waves rattle the dugout. He had time to reflect on his earlier criticism of Vandegrift as being “unduly concerned” for the safety of his perimeter.¹³

In the morning Vandegrift showed him the carnage, especially the field hospital struck by a big shell. Before Turner departed he told Vandegrift: “When I bring the Seventh in I will land them where you want.”¹⁴

Aboard Saratoga in Pearl Harbor that afternoon, Admiral Chester Nimitz was about to present decorations. All hands were lined up on the flight deck. Nimitz stepped to the microphone and said, “Boys, I’ve got a surprise for you. Bill Halsey’s back!”

A storm of applause greeted Admiral Halsey as he stepped on deck, and the light blue eyes beneath the bristling gray eyebrows filled with tears. Halsey was ready for his new assignment, command of a carrier task force built around Enterprise; but his ships were not ready, yet. In the meantime, he would tour the South Pacific on an itinerary that would take him, he hoped, to Guadalcanal.

General Vandegrift had seen Admiral Turner safely off. Now he was walking back to his command post with Colonel Thomas. Vandegrift was preoccupied, thinking of Ghormley’s gloomy estimate. Then his jaw lifted and he said:

“You know, Jerry, when we landed in Tientsin in 1927, old Colonel E. B. Miller ordered me to draw up three plans. Two concerned the accomplishment of our mission, the third a withdrawal from Tientsin in case we got pushed out.” Vandegrift’s words came soft and slow. “Jerry, we’re going to defend this airfield until we no longer can. If that happens, we’ll take what’s left to the hills and fight guerrilla warfare. I want you to go see Bill Twining, swear him to secrecy and have him draw up a plan.”¹⁵

Thomas went to see Twining. “We can’t let this be another Bataan, Bill. We’ll go to the headquarters of the Lunga. We’ll take our food and bullets.”¹⁶ Twining agreed. He went to his tent and wrote out, by hand, an operation order which had neither date nor serial number. He put it in his safe.

Over at the Pagoda, Archer Vandegrift spoke to Roy Geiger. He told him that the Marines were staying on Guadalcanal, Navy or no Navy. “But if the time comes when we no longer can hold the perimeter I expect you to fly out your planes.”

Geiger said, “If we can’t use the planes back in the hills, we’ll fly them out. But whatever happens, I’m staying with you.”¹⁷

Vandegrift nodded appreciatively, and then, the siren wailed and the cry arose: “Condition Red!”

Forty-two enemy airplanes were winging down from the north. To meet them Cactus Air Force sent eleven Marine and twenty-one Navy fighters thundering skyward. Sixteen enemy planes were knocked down at a loss of one American ensign killed in a dead-stick landing. But some of the bombers got through. Once more Marines on the Ridge dove without hesitation into their holes, again sticks of 500-pound bombs and strings of daisy-cutter fragmentation bombs walked the Ridge—killing, maiming, stunning.

Now the men of Red Mike Edson drove themselves to complete their fortifications. Spools of wire stripped from less-threatened positions were brought up and hastily strung. Extra grenades and belted machine-gun ammunition were put into the pits. To the rear, batteries of 105-mm howitzers had been moved to new positions to give Edson close support. Artillery fire plans had been drawn and maps gridded. An artillery observer was stationed in Edson’s command post on the southern snout. Communication wire ran backward to a fire direction center and Vandegrift’s headquarters.

The general’s slender reserve, the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, moved into supporting positions. Its officers scouted approach routes which they might have to follow in darkness.

Every gun, every Marine on Guadalcanal was now committed. It was now up to the Raiders on the Ridge. The enemy was coming that night, Vandegrift was certain. Clemens’s scouts had come in with reports of three thousand men moving toward assembly points on the Lunga’s east bank.

Darkness came quickly as it does in the tropics. In swiftly dying sunlight homing birds lost the brilliance of their plumage. Above the Ridge the skies were clouding over. Soon that long knobby peninsula was blending into the black of the jungle flowing around it. It was silent. The last spade had clinked on coral, the last command had been shouted. Marines in their holes closed and reopened their eyes to accustom them to darkness. They listened for the regular sounds of men among the irregular sounds of nature. Sometimes their mouths twitched to hear an iguana bark or the crrrack of the bird whose cry was like the clapping of wooden blocks.

It began to rain.

General Kawaguchi’s iron confidence was rusting in the rain forest. The jungle had scattered his detachments. He was not ready to attack, and yet he must. Rabaul was counting on it. He would like another day to prepare, but he could not ask for it, even if he had dared, because the Americans had destroyed his radio at Tasimboko. Helpless, he put his available forces along the Lunga opposite the Marine right flank and awaited the naval bombardment that was to precede his attack.

Louie the Louse droned overhead.

Around nine o’clock he dropped a flare.

A half hour later a cruiser and three destroyers shelled the Ridge. Some of their projectiles crashed around the Marine positions, some fell short, but most of them exploded harmlessly in jungle west of the Lunga.

Edson’s men tightened their grip on their weapons.

The shelling ceased twenty minutes after it began, a rocket rose from the jungle, machine-gun and rifle fire broke out like a sputtering string of firecrackers, and the Kawaguchis came pouring out of the black.

“Banzai!” they screamed. “Bonnn—zaaa—eee!”

“Marine you die!” they shrieked. “Marine you da—eee!”

They drove the Raiders back. They sliced off a platoon on the far right flank, cut communications wire and went slipping farther down the Lunga to attempt an encirclement.

On the left the Japanese struck the parachutists half a dozen times, punched holes in their front and broke them up. And then they milled wildly about, unable to capitalize on the impetus of their blows, and before dawn Edson was able to pull back his left flank and re-form it.

But General Kawaguchi had no such control. His troops battled beyond his reach. Their attacks became purposeless and fragmented. On the right where they had gained the greatest success, they lost their way once they had departed the straight going of the riverbank. They thrashed and fell in the underbrush. Their jabbing bayonets met empty air or dug up earth. Meanwhile, Marine mortars flashed among them and Marine artillery whistled down into pre-plotted areas and found Japanese flesh there as anticipated.

Gradually, the American platoon that had been cut off fought its way back to the right slope of the Ridge.

At dawn the Japanese melted back into the jungle.

The Marines rose up and counterattacked to regain lost ground.

Bloody Ridge had held.

That morning, Red Mike Edson called a conference of staff officers and company commanders. They sat around him in a semicircle, drinking coffee and smoking. Red Mike sat on a log, his legs crossed, spooning cold hash from an open can. He chewed slowly as he talked.

“They were testing,” he said. “Just testing. They’ll be back. But maybe not as many of them.” He smiled. “Or maybe more.” He paused, his jaws chewing. “I want all positions improved, all wire lines paralleled, a hot meal for the men. Today: dig, wire up tight, get some sleep. We’ll all need it.” His officers rose. “The Nip will be back,” Red Mike said. “I want to surprise him.”¹⁸

Major Kenneth Bailey was among the officers who set to work preparing Edson’s surprise: a pullback from the previous night’s positions. Bailey had been wounded at Tulagi and sent to a hospital in New Caledonia. Leaving without permission and before his wound was fully healed, he had hitchhiked an airplane ride back to Guadalcanal in time for the battle.

Edson’s pullback served to tighten and contract his lines. It improved the field of fire for automatic weapons, and it confronted the Japanese with a hundred yards of open ground over which they must move to close with the Marines.

Many of those Marines had the look of sleepwalkers by afternoon of this September 13. They stumbled along the Ridge, lifting their feet high like men in chains. Seventy-two near-sleepless hours—hours of shock and sweat and pain beneath the enemy’s bombs and shells, in the face of his bullets—had numbed them. They had expected to be relieved by Vandegrift’s reserve, but intermittent aerial attacks had kept that battalion under cover.

Three separate air raids struck at Henderson Field that day. But there were now ample fighters on hand to meet them. Wildcats had come in from carriers Hornet and Wasp and Guadalcanal received its first torpedo-bombers with the arrival of six Avengers. Although Admiral Ghormley was as pessimistic about Guadalcanal as he had been at the start, he was nevertheless giving the beleaguered Marines all the air he had: in toto, sixty planes.

But Rabaul got more.

On September 12 the 26th Air Flotilla which was to have relieved the riddled 25th came into the Guadalcanal battle as reinforcement instead, and 140 aircraft were added to those already based at Rabaul and Bougainville.

Next day many of them were on the runways, propellers turning, while pilots sat in ready huts awaiting word to fly south. Loaded troop transports stood by with idling engines. All was in readiness for the surrender ceremonies.

But there was no word from General Kawaguchi.

Neither General Hyakutake nor Admiral Tsukahara had been able to communicate with Kawaguchi since the enemy landing at Tasimboko. He had, of course, sent them his message of September 11 in which he notified them of his intention to take possession of the airfield the night of September 12–13. Since then, nothing…

Tsukahara sent four scout planes south. They came back with bullet holes suggesting that the Americans were still in possession of Henderson. Rabaul’s top commanders postponed the fly-down for the surrender ceremony one day. The customary attacks were renewed on Henderson, but it was considered unsafe to attack the Ridge. Instead, it was decided to strike the enemy force which had landed at Tasimboko to “sandwich” Kawaguchi.

Twenty-six Bettys and a dozen escorting Zeros thundered south. They came in low over Florida Island and pounced on Kawaguchi’s rear echelon. In one moment these Japanese were dancing for joy to see the sun flashing off the red balls on their comrades’ wings, in the next they were being blown flat or apart or were dragging themselves to the beaches to stop the slaughter by spreading their own red-balled flags out on the sand. The Zeros only strafed them where they lay, and one day Martin Clemens’s scouts would bring these bullet-pierced and blood-caked flags into the perimeter as souvenirs.

Out at sea Combined Fleet’s scout planes had also reported the Americans in possession of the airfield, thereby contradicting Rabaul’s message claiming that it had been captured.

Admiral Yamamoto was as annoyed as the commanders in Rabaul. Where was Kawaguchi?

He was grinding his teeth in the jungle and preparing a fresh attack.

At one time during last night’s abortive assault General Kawaguchi found himself alone but for his adjutant, his orderly and a few soldiers. The assault had been that haphazard.

Moreover neither Colonel Oka in the west nor the Ishitari Battalion in the east had attacked as scheduled.

But tonight, Kawaguchi thought grimly, they would. He had seen to that, contacting both commanders. Moreover, he had been able to get some kind of order into his own force, still well over 2500 men. Once again he would strike with two reinforced battalions until a hole had been ripped open for Colonel Watanabe’s elite. It was unfortunate that his artillery had been lost at Tasimboko and that the Americans had captured the Ishitari guns supposed to batter the Ridge; nevertheless, Japanese spiritual power should still suffice to overwhelm these contemptible Americans.

Of whom, unknown to General Kawaguchi, there were only 400.

“Gas attack!”

A cloud of vapor drifted over the Marine right, and the too-precise voice came again:

“Gas attack!”

But there was no gas, only smoke, an attempt to mask that 100-yard approach, and a trick to shake American nerves.

But the Marines held to their holes, watching the jungle while flares made a ghoulish day of the night. And then the jungle spewed out short, squat shapes.

Two thousand men, launching two major attacks, they came sprinting toward the Marines in waves. They came on to a rising, shrieking chant:

“U.S. Marines be dead tomorrow.”

“U.S. Marines be dead tomorrow.”

“You’ll eat shit first, you bastards!” a BAR-man screamed, and the Ridge erupted with the mad wail of battle.¹⁹

Japanese fell, but still they came on. Platoon after platoon, company after company, flowed from the jungle and went bowlegging it through the flickering green light. They bent back the Marine lines like a horseshoe. But they could not break them. Marines fought back individually. Pfc. Jimmy Corzine saw four Japanese setting up a machine gun on a knob. He rushed them. He bayoneted the gunner, and swung the gun around to spray the enemy with his own death. Then Corzine was killed.

On the right the Japanese were once again chopping up the Americans into small groups. Captain John Sweeney’s company was cut up into small pockets of resistance. His own right flank was gone and he was down to sixty men, and on the left a mortar barrage and another Japanese charge was splintering Torgerson’s parachutists.

Torgerson rallied his faltering men. He went among them and taunted them. He held roll call on the Ridge and challenged each man to go forward by name. They went. They fought back with machine guns. But the Japanese singled out the automatic weapons and lobbed grenades down on them. Sergeant Keith Perkins crept over the Ridge searching for ammunition for his two machine guns. One by one, his gunners were struck down. Perkins jumped on his last gun and was also killed.

Now there was another iron tongue baying over Guadalcanal.

Even as the Raiders were resisting that first fierce charge, Louie the Louse flew over Henderson Field. He cut his motors, coasted, dropped his flare, and seven destroyers in Iron Bottom Bay began shelling the field. They fired for an hour, their voices thrumming like a bass viol beneath the clatter and screaming of the Ridge, the jabbering of the Japanese and the coarse cursing of the Marines.

Then the Japanese ships fell silent. They had heard firing south of the airfield. They waited for the flare from General Kawaguchi signaling its capture. Then they heard firing from the east.

The Ishitari Battalion was attacking the Third Battalion, First Marines. They had crossed the Tenaru River upstream and emerged into a broad field of kunai grass. They formed and charged. Halfway across they ran into barbed wire and the massed fire of Marine guns. American 75-mm howitzers rained shells among them. They broke and fled. They re-formed east of the field for a stronger attack, and came again.

Once more they hit the wire and were torn apart. But some of them got through. Captain Robert Putnam rang up Lieutenant Colonel William McKelvy, to report:

“Some Japs just got inside my barbed wire.” There was a pause, and then Putnam concluded: “There were twenty-seven of them.”²⁰

Squat dark shapes were running low toward the Ridge when Red Mike Edson’s telephone jangled. A voice said cautiously:

“What name do you identify with Silent?”

“Lew,” Edson whispered.

“That is correct,” Captain Lew Walt said, and began his report. Another voice broke in:

“Our situation here, Colonel Edson, is excellent. Thank you, sir.”²¹

Edson swore softly. It was the enemy. They had cut the wire and Captain Sweeney on the right was still cut off. How to reach him? Red Mike seized an iron-lunged corporal and sent him forward. The man cupped his hands to his lips and bellowed:

“Red Mike says it’s okay to pull back!”²²

Out in the wild spitting blackness of the right flank Sweeney’s isolated remnant fought back to the contracted Marine line.

For Red Mike Edson was shortening his position. The battle had come to crux and he was taunting his men to win it. He lay within ten yards of his foremost machine gun. He lay with his arm curled about his telephone and shielding his face against fragments whizzing from the blasts that lifted him up and slammed him to the ground. He saw men drifting toward the rear and he ran at them. He seized them and spun them around and pointed his finger at the enemy and snarled: “The only thing they have that you don’t is guts!”²³

Major Bailey also darted at retreating Marines. He had been running back and forth from the Ridge to the rear for grenades and ammunition. He crawled over the bullet-swept Ridge to bring them to Marine foxholes. He caught at the arms of dazed men and slapped them, screaming: “You! Do you want to live forever?”²⁴

It was the cry of old Dan Daly echoing across the decades from Belleau Wood, and it made another generation of young Americans ashamed of what they were about to do. They turned and went back.

They fought on while Colonel Edson lay on his belly bringing his own artillery in closer and closer to the charging enemy. A corporal named Watson who would be Lieutenant Watson in the morning spotted the enemy for him. He marked the Japanese rocket signals and directed redoubled fire to break up the enemy’s massing points.

“Closer,” Edson whispered. “Closer.”²⁵

The Ridge shook and flashed. A terrible steel rain fell among Marines and Japanese alike. Terrified enemy soldiers dove into Marine foxholes to escape death above ground. Marines knifed them and pitched them out again. The night was hideous with the screams of the stricken, for artillery does not kill cleanly: it tears men’s organs with jagged chunks of steel, it blows off their limbs and burns their faces black.

But now the Kawaguchis were falling back again. Now the short squat shapes were springing to their feet and sprinting back into an opaque wall of darkness, jabbering once they had gained cover—for it was the chief failing of these jungle-fighters that they could not keep silent in the jungle. At two o’clock they came again behind another mortar barrage which cut wires to Vandegrift’s headquarters and the artillery.

“Marine you die!” the Japanese shrieked again, but with a notable lack of their former fervor, and the Marines, already exultant with the scent of victory, replied with strings of obscene oaths and streams of bullets, and they cut the enemy down.

At half past two in the morning of September 14 Red Mike Edson called headquarters and said:

“We can hold.”²⁶

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BATTLES do not end suddenly, they die down.

Throughout that long dawn of September 14 the Battle of Bloody Ridge sputtered on like an expiring fuse. Before daylight General Kawaguchi launched two more attacks which came after units of Vandegrift’s reserve had groped their way into Edson’s support. But they were faltering thrusts which hardly began before Marine artillery broke them up.

At six o’clock the Army P-400s roared over the Ridge at twenty feet, spewing cannon into Kawaguchi’s assembly points with devastating effect.

Two thousand yards to the east on the Ishitari Battalion front, five Marine tanks clanked rashly past their own wire in an attempt to repeat the Tenaru slaughter. Three of them sank in the mud and were knocked out by antitank fire. Nevertheless, the Ishitaris retreated rapidly east.

On the Ridge the random pinging of sniper’s bullets still kept Marine heads low. Souvenir-hunters such as Phil Chaffee would pause yet a bit before venturing among more than five hundred Japanese bodies strewn about these muddy slopes. Marines were still dying. At eight o’clock a jeep loaded with wounded was riddled by machine-gun fire that killed Major Robert Brown, Edson’s operations officer, and almost all the other occupants. One of the wounded drove the shattered vehicle out of range on its starter: it hopped out of sight like a monster toad.

Some of the Japanese had infiltrated. Three of them slipped into General Vandegrift’s command post.

“Banzai! Banzai!”

Vandegrift looked up from messages he was reading outside his pavilion. He saw two onrushing enemy soldiers and an officer swinging a saber. The officer hurled the saber like a spear at a nearby sergeant, transfixing him. Inside a tent Sergeant Major Shepherd Banta heard the enemy scream: he turned from castigating a clerk to rush outside with drawn pistol and shoot the enemy officer dead. A Marine corporal tried to shoot one of the soldiers, but his pistol jammed. He dove at the intruder; just as he hit him shots rang out all over the command post and both Japanese soldiers fell dead.

Vandegrift continued reading his messages. They indicated to him that Edson had won the most critical battle of the campaign. But they also made it plain that he could not go over to the offensive to destroy his shattered enemy. Colonel Thomas had already fed the Second Battalion, Fifth, into the battle and left Vandegrift without any reserve. Even though Edson had won a great victory at a loss of only fifty-nine Marines dead or missing and 204 wounded, his composite force was reeling. The parachutists were in tatters, down to 165 officers and men of an original 377, and he would have to get them off the island. The Raiders were down to 526 effectives out of an original 750. Vandegrift dared not weaken any point in his line by pulling out troops: there had been the attack to the east and there were reports of enemy forces massed at the Matanikau. No, Archer Vandegrift could only be thankful for Red Mike Edson and his men and let the enemy withdraw.

General Kawaguchi was withdrawing. He was departing in tears.

Throughout the morning he had heard the roll call of disaster: 708 of his men dead, 505 of them wounded. American firepower had been ferocious. Even now the American aircraft with shark-teeth painted on their sharp snouts were pumping cannon into his survivors. And shame had dishonored his defeat: Colonel Watanabe had failed to join the action. The powerful battalion which was to dash to the airfield had spent the night marking time. When Kawaguchi heard of this he wept openly. His guardsman’s mustache quivered, and he sent for Colonel Watanabe.

“Coward,” he cried as the colonel approached, “commit harakiri!”¹

Colonel Watanabe hobbled closer and Kawaguchi relented. The man could barely stand, and Watanabe explained that the jungle march had ruined his feet and he had been unable to lead his troops. He did not say why he had not turned his command over to his executive officer, and Kawaguchi was too distressed to press him on it.

The general had to choose between returning to Taivu in the east or marching west to join Colonel Oka at the Matanikau. Still unclear on the nature of the American force that had landed in his rear at Tasimboko, wishing to gather his forces, he decided to go west. In mid-morning he gave the order to break through the jungle toward the headwaters of the Matanikau. Some 400 badly wounded men were placed on improvised litters, four and sometimes six soldiers to a litter, and Kawaguchi’s ragged, beaten, bleeding column began snaking south.

In mid-afternoon they heard firing to the west. Colonel Oka was at last launching his attack from the Matanikau. The firing died down almost as soon as it began, indicating that Oka was not only tardy but also timid.

Overhead, above the matted jungle roof that gave them cover, Kawaguchi’s men could hear the familiar growling of dogfighting airplanes.

Rabaul had still not heard from General Kawaguchi, although it was plain that Henderson Field was still in American hands. Therefore the customary bombing formations were sent south, and they were met by the customary flights of Marine Wildcats.

There was now a rivalry among these fliers, and Captain John Smith and Captain Marion Carl were tied for the lead with twelve kills apiece. That day neither of them shot down another enemy plane, but Carl’s fighter was so badly riddled that he was forced to bail out over Koli Point to the east.

His parachute blossomed above him and he drifted down into the Bay. He freed himself from his harness and swam ashore. Waiting for him on the beach was a powerful, smiling Fijian named Eroni. He was one of Martin Clemens’s most valued men, a “medical practitioner” who was highly respected by the natives. Eroni promised to take the tall American back to Henderson Field.

Kelly Turner was keeping his promise to Archer Vandegrift.

On that morning of September 14 he sailed in McCawley at the head of a force bringing the Seventh Marines from Espiritu Santo to Guadalcanal. Admiral Ghormley, who had not favored Turner’s plan, had nevertheless given his beetle-browed amphibious commander all that he could, once he saw that Turner could not be dissuaded. A strong carrier group built around Wasp and Hornet and commanded by Rear Admiral Leigh Noyes was to protect Turner’s convoy of six transports.

Throughout the day these transports went zigzagging toward Torpedo Junction. Reports of enemy activity multiplied: carriers and battleships to the north, Tokyo Express warships to the northwest.

At noon a big Kawanishi lumbered overhead and Turner knew he had been spotted. He decided that he must withdraw: he could not dare to risk these four thousand Marines who might be the saving of Guadalcanal. But he would continue on until nightfall to delude the enemy into thinking he had held course. After dark, he would retire to await a more favorable opportunity.

Wasp and Hornet with mighty North Carolina and their screens held toward Torpedo Junction.

September 15 dawned cloudless and blue. Six miles of white-plumed waves separated Wasp and Hornet. The morning passed with no reports of the enemy, either above or below the sea. Some time after noon combat air patrol shot down a two-engined flying boat beyond the range of the carriers. At 2:20 o’clock Wasp turned into the wind to launch and receive planes.

Commander Takaichi Kinashi, skipper of submarine I-19, watched this maneuver through his periscope. His joy was unbounded. Wasp was in an awkward position and none of her six circling destroyers seemed to have sighted his submarine yet.

Captain Forrest Sherman aboard Wasp sounded the routine whistle for a turn, and bent on 16 knots to return to his base course, and Commander Kinashi sent a spread of four torpedoes hissing toward the swinging ship.

“Torpedoes!” starboard lookouts yelled.

Captain Sherman ordered rudder full right. But the Long Lances were running fast and true. Two of them struck forward to starboard and a third broached and dove to strike the hull fifty feet forward of the bridge.

Wasp was whipsawed. She leaped and twisted like a stricken monster. Planes were lifted and slammed to the deck. Men were hurled against steel bulkheads, generators were torn from their foundations, and the great ship took a dangerous list. Fires broke out, and Wasp was a floating torch whose smoke and flames were ominously visible to Hornet a half dozen miles away.

Now Hornet had to meet her own ordeal, for submarine I-15 had joined the attack. Her skipper loosed his own spread of steel fish. They sped unseen toward Hornet, until destroyer Mustin on Hornet’s port bow sighted a wake ahead and to port. Mustin swung hard left to avoid it, hoisted the torpedo warning and gave the alarm by voice radio.

Hornet got out of the way.

But one of I-15’s torpedoes passed under Mustin’s keel and ran 500 yards into the side of North Carolina. A great roar, a pillar of water and oil shooting into the sky, five men killed—and a gash 32 feet long and 18 feet high was torn twenty feet below North Carolina’s water line. But battleships are built to take it. Forward magazines were flooded as a fire-prevention measure and within five minutes the great vessel had lost her list and was steaming majestically along at twenty-five knots.

Destroyers are not so husky, and another of I-15’s torpedoes tore into O’Brien to deliver what was to be her death wound: she would break up and sink while attempting to return to West Coast ports.

And now Wasp was a holocaust. Flames raged out of control. At three o’clock a shattering explosion shook her, killing men on the port side of the bridge and hurling Admiral Noyes to the deck, his clothes burning. Captain Sherman evacuated the bridge. He conferred with his officers on the flight deck and concluded that the ship was lost.

“Abandon ship!”

Wounded were gently lowered over the side onto life rafts and floating mattresses and then Wasp’s men jumped and dove for their lives. Destroyers picked them up. Of 2247 men aboard, 193 were lost and 366 wounded. All but one of Wasp’s airborne planes landed safely on Hornet, and Rear Admiral Norman Scott in cruiser San Francisco, now in command of the group, ordered destroyer Lansdowne to sink the ship that had fought German U-boats in the Atlantic and saved Malta.

Lansdowne fired five torpedoes. All hit, three exploded, and at nine o’clock that night Wasp went to her death in the Pacific.

Hornet was now the only American carrier operational in the Pacific. O’Brien’s special antiaircraft firepower was lost to her, North Carolina was also out of the fight for Guadalcanal, and Washington was the only new battleship still available.

And four thousand Marines had lost half the protection required to get them safely through the waters of Torpedo Junction.

News of Wasp’s sinking sweetened the bitter taste in Admiral Yamamoto’s mouth. Commander, Combined Fleet, had been chagrined to receive reports of the American carrier force at the very moment when his ships were low on fuel. He had had to spend three days refueling at sea at a point two hundred miles north of Guadalcanal, and had missed the chance to strike.

Then, on September 15, he had heard reports of the Kawaguchi disaster, and had been filled with bitter anger.² Rather than waste more valuable fuel sailing aimlessly around, he had ordered his ships back to Truk. Enroute, he received Commander Kinashi’s joyful report of having destroyed Wasp.

At Truk a conference was held between Yamamoto’s staff and General Hyakutake’s staff. It was decided that more troops would be needed in addition to the Sendai Division already assembling at Rabaul. Tokyo was notified and two days later Imperial General Headquarters assigned the veteran 38th or Nagoya Division to Hyakutake.

Japan’s high command also instructed Hyakutake to suspend the Port Moresby operation indefinitely. On September 14 his troops had looked down on the lights of the Allied port, but now they were to retire to Buna to await the successful conclusion of Operation Ka.

In the meantime three new carriers then training in home waters would join Yamamoto at Truk. They would not arrive, however, until the second week in October, much to the consternation of some officers who believed that to delay a full-scale counteroffensive for almost a month was to grant the enemy a respite which might prove suicidal for Japan. They wanted to strike immediately, break in on the Americans while they still had their backs to the wall.

But Isoroku Yamamoto was adamant. He wanted those three carriers. Besides, it would take nearly a month to get the Sendai Division into Guadalcanal.

The loss of Wasp was to deepen Admiral Ernest King’s conviction that the desperate situation at Guadalcanal could not be retrieved without more airplanes for Henderson Field. King made this conclusion clear at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 16.

General Arnold replied that the need was landing fields, not planes. If Guadalcanal had more than eighty or a hundred planes the craft would sit idle on the fields and their pilots would get stale. In England planes and pilots could be used against Germany every day.

“There should be a reconsideration of allocation every time there is a new critical situation,” King said. “The Navy is in a bad way at this particular moment.”³

It was an astounding admission from King the confident, and the Navy’s commander-in-chief followed it up by asking for Lightning fighters for Guadalcanal. Arnold reluctantly agreed to divert fifteen of them from the North African invasion scheduled for November. That was all he could spare, and he could not say when he could spare them. King insisted that the South Pacific had to be saturated with such planes, and Arnold exploded:

“What is the saturation point? Certainly, not several hundred planes sitting on airdromes so far in the rear that they cannot be used. They will not do us any good, and may do us some harm.”⁴

King left the meeting in exasperation. Next day, his pen impelled by reports of the Wasp disaster, he prepared a memorandum for General Marshall. Of sixty-two Wildcats delivered to Guadalcanal since August 20 only thirty were operational. The Navy, he wrote, could not “meet this rate of attrition and still operate carriers.” It was therefore “imperative that the future continuous flow of Army fighters be planned, starting at once, irrespective of, and in higher priority than, the commitments to any theater.”

King had ceased to make requests. Now he was demanding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the Tokyo Express was running at full throttle again.

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

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

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

“Well, you’re going next Saturday,” Geiger grunted.² And they did.

In the last week of September, Cooley and five Dauntless pilots were flown into Guadalcanal by Scat. Geiger immediately put Colonel Wallace in charge of all fighters and Cooley in charge of the bombers, with orders to stop the Tokyo Express.

On September 21 Cooley led the Dauntlesses against destroyer Kagero unloading troops at Kamimbo, but failed to sink her.

Next day they attacked the enemy assembly point at Visale, a few miles north of Kamimbo. Roy Geiger flew one of the bombers. Disgusted to hear pilots complaining that the bomb-pocked airstrip was risky, fifty-seven-year-old Geiger had lumbered from the Pagoda to squeeze into a Dauntless cockpit. Then he thundered aloft to drop a thousand-pounder on the Japanese. That night more bombers struck at a group of destroyer-transports.

On September 24 Cooley’s planes bombed and strafed destroyers Umikaze and Kawakaze—the killer of Blue—in Kamimbo Bay.

Nevertheless, the Tokyo Express still ran as scheduled. The troops were getting through, and Vandegrift, alarmed by patrol reports of strong defenses on the Matanikau, decided that he had better attack.

It was from Chesty Puller that Vandegrift heard of the enemy strength.

Puller was a lieutenant colonel now, and on September 21 he was just where he wanted to be: at the head of a body of Marines hunting the enemy. His Crusader’s Cross around his neck, his jungle-stained copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars in his pocket, his stump of a cold pipe in his mouth, Puller was leading his men toward the headwaters of the Matanikau.

And the Japanese were waiting for him. They struck repeatedly at his column, and these unseasoned men of the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, proved themselves not as jungle-wise as they might be. On the night of the first day they were all but exhausted from the ordeal of moving through the sort of terrain which had ruined General Kawaguchi’s brigade. Colonel Puller was also out of breath, from swearing at them.

In the morning they were hit again. One of the casualties was Captain Jack Stafford. He was torn about the face and neck by the explosion of his own rifle grenade. Puller came to his side just as a corpsman gave him morphine. He saw that Stafford was strangling in his own blood. He unsnapped a big safety pin from his bandoleer. He reached into Stafford’s mouth, seized his tongue, and pinned it neatly to the man’s dungaree collar. Puller’s action saved Stafford’s life, and it convinced his men that perhaps this little leader with the big chest and the big voice was even bigger than his legend.

They were an improved force, when, on September 23, they struck out again for the upper Matanikau. This time, though they lost seven dead and twenty-five wounded in fights with Oka’s outposts, they gave much worse than they got. But there was still no crossing the Matanikau. Oka had blocked all the fords. On the morning of September 26, Puller called for air and artillery support. But the enemy was dug in and could not be dislodged. So Puller swung north and moved down the east bank of the Matanikau toward the coastal road. Japanese mortars and automatic weapons emplaced on the Matanikau’s west bank struck them as they moved. Weary, they reached the coast at sundown.

From reports of Puller’s foray it was clear to Vandegrift that the enemy held the Matanikau west bank in strength. He decided on a three-pronged operation to dislodge him.

The First Raiders, now under Lieutenant Colonel Sam Griffith, were to march inland along the Matanikau’s east bank. They would cross the river at a log crossing called Nippon Bridge, and then wheel right to attack downstream to the sea.

As the Raiders attacked, the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, would strike across a sandbar at the mouth of the Matanikau.

Simultaneously Puller’s battalion would sail west to Point Cruz, land to the west of this promontory, turn left and attack to the east along the coastal track.

The operations were to be under Red Mike Edson, now in command of the Fifth Marines. They began on the morning of September 27, and they began with immediate trouble.

As Griffith and his Raiders approached Nippon Bridge they were struck by a storm of fire. The gallant Major Bailey was killed. Colonel Griffith attempted to swing around the blocking force and come down on its rear. But this slow and painful maneuver was eventually spotted by the Japanese and they opened fire. Griffith was wounded and his Raiders were stalled.

But garbled messages led Vandegrift and Edson to believe that the Raiders were safely across the river. Edson ordered the Marines at the river-mouth to attack across the sandbar. They did, and were beaten back.

At this moment, Puller’s battalion, under Major Otho Rogers in the absence of Puller, who was with Edson, sailed west to Point Cruz. They came quickly ashore and prepared to swing to their left. But the Japanese had seen them coming and had wisely pulled back and allowed them to penetrate about 400 yards inland. Then they struck at the Americans from three sides. They poured mortars and bullets into them and within a few minutes Major Rogers was killed—blown apart by a mortar landing almost under his feet—as were half a dozen others. Captain Charles Kelly took command. The toll of dead and wounded rose, especially in the company commanded by Captain Regan Fuller. The only way out for these Marines was the way they had come, now completely covered by enemy fire. And then the Japanese moved to surround them.

Colonel Edson had called for aerial support of the Marines trapped down at Point Cruz, but his message was never received. One of the heaviest air raids of the month came roaring down from Rabaul to knock out all of Henderson Field’s communications.

While the raid was at its height, Chesty Puller hurried down to Kukum to hail the old four-stack destroyer, Ballard, which had escorted his men up to Point Cruz. He came aboard and Ballard began sailing west to the rescue.

Marines on Point Cruz were fighting desperately. Mortarmen fired at almost point-blank range. They held the mortars in place by lying on their backs to support the tubes with their feet. Captain Kelly tried to contact Captain Fuller’s outfit. But Sergeant Robert Raysbrook, the communications man, reported that he had forgotten to bring his radio.

Lieutenant Dale Leslie saw it underneath him, tiny but distinct, in white letters that might be T-shirts. Leslie was flying his Dauntless along the coast in search of targets. He came down closer, saw the trapped Marines, and radioed Edson. Then he began patrolling the area, waiting to help. Beneath him on the Bay he saw an American destroyer approaching.

Sergeant Raysbrook was redeeming himself. He saw Ballard’s approach, saw the black smoke boiling from her four stacks, and saw her guns begin to raise into position. He seized the T-shirts and jumped erect to wigwag the ship while reading her responses.

Chesty Puller was on Ballard’s deck. He could see Raysbrook through his field glasses.

“Return to beach immediately,” he had Ballard signal.

“Engaged,” Raysbrook wagged. “Cannot return.”

“Fight your way. Only hope.”

There was no reply, and Puller had another message sent:

“Give me your boundaries right and left. Will use ship’s fire.”³

Raysbrook obliged, and Ballard’s five-inchers began hurling shells into the jungle between the Marines and the sea. They cut huge swathes in it. To the east, a battalion of Marine artillery began battering the tip of Point Cruz to prevent the Japanese from occupying it and cutting off the retreat.

And Puller’s men were coming down. They came plunging down the slopes with wild yells, firing as they came. They were halfway to the beach before the enemy tried to halt them. Platoon Sergeant Anthony Malanowski told Captain Fuller, “I’ll handle the rear. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.” Malanowski took a BAR from a wounded man and laid it across a log. He knelt down. He was never seen again, although the men he was covering heard the bursts from his automatic rifle.

The Marines crowded down to the beach, and the enemy came after them slipping from tree to tree and nearly indistinguishable in their green uniforms. A Japanese officer sprang from the bush. He swung his saber with both hands and beheaded a Marine. The officer jumped back into cover just as a grenade thrown by Fuller flushed a tottering and dying enemy soldier from a thicket.

Landing boats from Ballard were roaring inshore, led by a Coast Guard coxswain named Donald Munro. Munro held his tiller with one hand and raked the enemy with machine-gun fire with the other. He was killed. Some of the boats faltered. The Dauntless flown by Dale Leslie came roaring in behind them, shepherding them toward the beach. Leslie’s gunner sprayed bullets into the onrushing Japanese. But the enemy came closer. Some of the coxswains were unwilling to wait for the last stragglers. Captain Fuller persuaded them with his pistol, and before the sun was low in the western sky all of the trapped battalion had been drawn off, including twenty-three wounded and most of the bodies of twenty-four dead.

It might have been a slaughter if the battalion had broken. But the Marines kept their nerve and their ranks and the rescue took some of the sting out of the Matanikau defeat.

Defeat it was, and General Vandegrift was quick to admit it. His operation had been based on faulty intelligence which underestimated both the terrain and the enemy—hitherto an exclusively Japanese characteristic—and he had drifted into it. Having lost sixty dead and one hundred wounded, Vandegrift withdrew his forces to await a more favorable opportunity.

On September 28, one day after the Matanikau defeat, General Vandegrift received the following letter from Admiral Turner:

Now would seem to be the time to push as hard as possible on the following items: (a) continue clearing out all the nests of enemy troops on the north side of Guadalcanal, initial operations continuing to the westward. I believe you are in a position to take some chances and go after them hard. I am glad to see Rupertus is cleaning up Florida Island; and believe he should establish detachments on Sandfly Passage, the north coast, Matumba Bay at the eastern end of Florida, as soon as justified. Here we are working up a scheme to start out within a few days with the two destroyer-transports available and two companies of the Second Raiders, to attack the Jap outposts entrenched at Cape Astrolabe, Malaita; at Marau Bay on Guadalcanal, and at Cape Hunter. We want to coordinate these operations with you, and get your approval of our plan; therefore the Commanding Officer of the Second Raider Battalion, after conference with me, will shortly fly up and see you and go over our plans with you. One question to decide is whether or not to leave small detachments of the Second Raiders at these places; at a later time, we would relieve them with other line troops.⁴

Vandegrift was infuriated. Here he was crossing swords with Kelly Turner again over the same old issue: the admiral’s fondness for the general’s troops. It had begun in New Zealand and had continued into Guadalcanal when, after the Savo disaster, Turner had sailed away with 1400 men of the Second Marines. He had then attempted to form them into a “2nd Provisional Raider Battalion,” and had written to Admiral Ghormley recommending the overhaul of all Marine regiments so that each one would carry a raider battalion for special missions. Turner wrote that he did not believe Marine regiments would be needed in the Pacific, adding: “The employment of a division seems less likely.” All of these moves and recommendations had been made without consulting Vandegrift, and it had required the intervention of Admiral Nimitz to scuttle Turner’s plans for the Marines. Now, with the arrival in the New Hebrides of the “authentic” Second Raiders—the outfit that had raided Makin under Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson—Turner was once again putting down the sextant and reaching for the baton. To Vandegrift, who admired and respected Turner when he was at sea, the proposal was nonsense.⁵ He answered it bluntly:

From reconnaissance it is estimated the Japanese are now holding this river [Matanikau] line in force of about fifteen hundred men as outpost line of resistance. Information received from a captured prisoner, a copy of his testimony which is enclosed with this letter, would tend to show that we may expect an attack in force from additional troops to be landed some time around the first of October when the moon is favorable to such landing and operations. If the testimony of this prisoner is true, and an additional division is landed to the west of us and puts down a major push in depth through our west or southwest lines, they are now so thinly held and our reserves so few that it could well be dangerous to our position.

I regret that Major Bailey of the Raiders was killed and that Lieutenant Colonel Griffith, the present Commander of the Raiders, was wounded in the shoulder. I have talked the question over with Edson, its previous Commander, and I believe that with the losses sustained in both officers and men of this battalion, and the strenuous work that they have done, that they should be returned to Noumea or some other place for rebuilding. If this is done, I urgently recommend that the Second Raider Battalion be sent in to replace them as we will need all the strength we can get for this next push which I feel sure will be a major one.⁶

Vandegrift dictated his reply confident that he had at least one ally in Nouméa. That was Major General Millard F. Harmon, who had spent a night on Guadalcanal a few days before, and who had agreed with Vandegrift’s estimate of the situation. Moreover, Harmon had told Vandegrift that he would never place an Army division on Guadalcanal under Turner’s command.⁷ So Vandegrift stuck to his guns, and two days after he did he had gained another ally.

It was the last day of September and a furious thick rain was heralding the onslaught of the monsoon. Above Guadalcanal a Flying Fortress had lost its way, and then, coming very low, the pilot had seen the island and Henderson Field. He landed with twin V’s of dirty water curving away from his big rubber wheels and then he taxied slowly through the mud toward a group of officers standing beneath a cluster of palm trees.

A ramp was run up to the Fort and a slender, white-haired man in khaki with four stars pinned to his collar stepped out.

General Vandegrift stepped forward and saluted smartly.

Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Area, had come to Guadalcanal.

Vandegrift was not sorry that Nimitz had made an arrival typical of Guadalcanal. He wanted him to see what he and his men were up against, and he took him to see his perimeter. That night Vandegrift had no trouble impressing Nimitz with the necessity of concentrating forces to defend the airfield. Later, as the two men relaxed over a drink, Nimitz said:

“You know, Vandegrift, when this war is over we are going to write a new set of Navy Regulations. So just keep it in the back of your mind because I will want to know some of the things you think ought to be changed.”

“I know one right now,” Vandegrift replied grimly. “Leave out all reference that he who runs his ship aground will face a fate worse than death. Out here too many commanders have been far too leery about risking their ships.”⁸

Nimitz smiled and said nothing.

In the morning it began to rain hard again. Vandegrift and Geiger hurried their guest to the airfield, both of them buoyed by Nimitz’s promise of “support to the maximum of our resources.”⁹ At the field Nimitz decided that he would like to fly in the Flying Fort’s nose. He crawled forward over the protests of his staff, and the big plane’s motors coughed. It began thundering down the runway. Roy Geiger blanched. The Fort had not enough take-off speed. Suddenly the pilot shut off power and slammed the brakes, and the plane began to slide.

It slid almost the length of the strip and came to a halt with its distinguished nose hanging over the edge of the field not far short of the trees.

Admiral Nimitz went meekly to the back of the plane and the Fort finally took off safely.

It was not too soon. For the rain had stopped and clearing weather suggested that the noon raid in the enemy’s mounting aerial onslaught would be down on schedule.

It was on September 25 that Rabaul received the reinforcements required to crush the enemy to the south: one hundred Zeros and eighty bombers were brought to Vunakanau and Lakunai fields. Two days later the attack began.

Thirty-one bombers struck at Henderson in the raid that knocked out communications between Vandegrift and his Matanikau forces, but the Navy and Marine fighters who intercepted them shot down six Bettys and five Zeros at no loss to themselves.

Next day close to sixty of the Emperor’s eagles came winging down and the Americans shot down twenty-three bombers and one Zero. Jubilant, Vandegrift radioed Nouméa: “Our losses: no pilots, no planes, no damage. How’s that for a record?”

When September came to an end, three of Henderson’s Marines were the top aces of America: Major John Smith had nineteen kills, Captain Carl had sixteen and Major Galer had eleven. Since aerial battle began, the Americans had shot down well over two hundred enemy aircraft against thirty-two of their own lost. And the Americans had lost fewer pilots. Japanese fliers, fighting over enemy territory, scorning parachutes as beneath the dignity of the samurai who cannot surrender, usually went down with their aircraft.

Nevertheless such staggering losses were suicidal for the Japanese, and they began October determined to wipe out American fighter strength. A few bombers were used as bait for swarms of Zeros. On October 2 the trick worked: four Americans were shot down, against only five enemy planes, and among them were Major Smith and Major Galer.

Galer had shot down a Betty when a Zero came up on his tail and riddled his Wildcat. Galer knew he would be forced to land, but he wanted to retaliate first. He dove into a cloud as though he was trying to get away. Instead of coming out below, he came out on top—and caught the Japanese waiting beneath him. He pressed his gun button, and both aircraft went down in flames.

It was the second time Galer had been shot down, but he landed safely in a field and walked home.

Major John Smith crashed in the jungle. He jumped from his Wildcat and began running west. His breath came as quickly as his perspiration but he kept running through the silent, eerie jungle, hastening to get out of it before dark.

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

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

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

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

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

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