Challenge for the Pacific

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This time he would use five full battalions.

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

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

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

On that morning the two forces collided.

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

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

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

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

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

The Japanese were trapped.

Shells from the Marine 105-mm howitzers shrieked and crashed among them. They came without warning, and because they did they devastated the enemy and made terrified, milling cattle of them. They sprinted in terror for the sanctuary of a ridge behind them, but as they broke from cover the Marines drove them back into the ravine with mortars and machine-gun fire. Back they tumbled, back into thickets of flashing death. Up toward Puller’s position they flowed, and once again the mortars and the machine guns swept death among them.

And so it went, back to be blasted or torn apart, up to be riddled to pieces—and very few of them survived.

No less than seven hundred men fell in that slaughter-pen of a ravine, and General Maruyama’s first meeting with the Marines ended in sharp defeat. His 4th Infantry Regiment was shattered, for another two hundred men had been killed by the other American forces.

And so the Third Matanikau came to an end on a familiar critical note. With 65 dead and 105 wounded, Vandegrift’s battalions came back along the coastal road to resume positions along that Henderson Field perimeter that was now threatened as never before. As they did they heard airplane motors thundering overhead. Looking up they saw twenty Wildcats. Major Leonard (Duke) Davis was bringing his squadron into Guadalcanal. General Geiger would now have forty-six fighters to hurl into an aerial battle even then blazing up with unprecedented fury.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THUS did the Marines on Guadalcanal bawl out their derision of the Army, singing, to the tune of “Bless ’em All,” an uncomplimentary and inaccurate estimate of why it was that they were still alone after two months of uninterrupted ordeal. For General MacArthur had nothing to do with Guadalcanal, except to mount formations of Flying Fortresses against the Japanese bastion at Rabaul, and Army troops had not been included in the operation in the beginning.

Yet, even as the Marines on Guadalcanal continued to sing so caustically, there were Doggies coming to Tulagi.

They were coming because their commander in the Pacific, Major General Millard Harmon, did not share Admiral Ghormley’s reservations about reinforcing Vandegrift. Moreover, Harmon thought that Kelly Turner’s continued insistence upon carrying out the occupation of Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands—over Vandegrift’s protests—would prove inimical to the entire campaign. On October 6, Harmon sat down and addressed an unsolicited recommendation to his chief, Admiral Ghormley. He said:

“The occupation of Ndeni at this time represents a diversion from the main effort and dispersion of force.…

“If we do not succeed in holding Guadalcanal our effort in the Santa Cruz will be a total waste—and loss. The Solomons has to be our main effort. The loss of Guadalcanal would be a four-way victory for the Jap—provide a vanguard for his strong Rabaul position, deny us a jumping-off place against that position, give him a jumping-off place against the New Hebrides, effectively cover his operations against New Guinea.

“It is my personal conviction that the Jap is capable of retaking Guadalcanal, and that he will do so in the near future unless it is materially strengthened. I further believe that appropriate increase in strength of garrison, rapid improvement of conditions for air operations and increased surface action, if accomplished in time, will make the operation so costly that he will not attempt it.”¹

Harmon’s letter had the effect of tearing off Ghormley’s smoked glasses and letting him see the situation a little less darkly. Perhaps the admiral was stung by the general’s reference to “increased surface action,” or perhaps, as had happened in September when Kelly Turner argued strongly for dispatching the Seventh Marines to Guadalcanal, Admiral Ghormley’s hesitant nature, like a rundown battery, needed periodic recharging from the more volatile spirits around him. Whatever the reason, Admiral Ghormley became all energy and determination.

He postponed the Ndeni operation and alerted the 164th Infantry Regiment of the Americal Division for movement to Guadalcanal. On October 8 at Nouméa—the day on which the monsoon mired Vandegrift’s and Maruyama’s men in the jungle—the 164th’s soldiers began filing aboard McCawley and Zeilin. Next day—the one on which the Marines withdrew triumphantly and the Wildcat reinforcements arrived—Admiral Turner led these transports north. Escorting him were three destroyers and three mine layers.

Ranging ahead of him went a Covering Force of two heavy and two light cruisers and five destroyers under Rear Admiral Norman Scott. Two Striking Forces, one built around carrier Hornet and the other around battleship Washington, also sortied north.

Vice-Admiral Robert Ghormley was giving Guadalcanal everything he had. The island was going to be reinforced at all costs, and the United States Navy was at last sailing toward The Slot with open guns.

It was pitch black at Aola, but Martin Clemens knew the coastline as well as he had known his “digs” in Cambridge. Besides, three scouts and three Americans were stationed along the shore. All seven men held hooded flashlights. Hearing the murmur of motors offshore, they began to signal with them.

The murmur rose, then lessened. Clemens heard the lapping of wavelets against a hull, and then, the scraping of a keel on sand. One of the Marines called “Halt!,” and an American voice answered with the password. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hill of the Second Marines came out of the darkness. With him was his staff. He told Clemens that his two companies of Marines were enroute to Aola in Higgins boats towed by a pair of Yippies. Unfortunately, one of the Yippies had towed one boat under at a loss of fifteen men drowned. But there would still be about 500 rifles available for the attack on Gurabusu and Koilotumaria, the villages to the west of Aola in which the Japanese radios were located.

Clemens assured Hill that the enemy was unaware of their presence. Two nights ago he had come to Aola with three scouts and three Americans. They had spent the intervening days mapping the target area and alerting village headmen to provide scouts and carriers.

Clemens thought there would be no difficulty surprising the Japanese and destroying the radios as General Vandegrift had ordered. He also thought, although he did not say it aloud, that he would find Ishimoto among the enemy.

Far to the west on the darkness of that same night—October 9—a destroyer put Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake ashore on Guadalcanal. With him were his senior staff officer, Colonel Haruo Konuma; Major General Tadashi Sumuyoshi, commander of 17th Army Artillery; and Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, who had been to Rabaul to brief staff officers on the difficulties presented by both the Americans on Guadalcanal and the island’s terrain. Like Maruyama before them, the staff officers could not believe that any terrain or any enemy could deter Japanese soldiers. And yet, the moment Kawaguchi set foot again on the island which had taught him otherwise, he heard himself vindicated: an officer from Maruyama’s staff stepped forward to tell Hyakutake that the American artillery had “massacred” the 4th Infantry that very day.

His face bleak, Hyakutake followed Kawaguchi to his 17th Army command post, which had been established “in the valley of a nameless river about three kilometres west of Kokumbona.”² There, he immediately called for a daybreak meeting with Maruyama.

The conference convened and Hyakutake heard additional recitals of defeat. The Sendai Division had been forced to retreat for the first time in history, the east bank of the Matanikau had been lost as a platform from which to bombard the airfield and to launch an offensive, and both the Ichiki and Kawaguchi remnants were of more use to the enemy than the Emperor. Moreover, food and medicines were scarce, the roads and trails were hardly passable, and there was a shortage of artillery shells.

Hyakutake sat listening, his small face and large round glasses giving him the look of a preoccupied lemur. Then he announced that the attack was to proceed as planned, and turned to issuing orders and making his own report.

He notified the 38th Division in the Shortlands to send down the 228th Infantry Regiment and the 19th Independent Engineer Regiment. He told Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo: “The situation on Guadalcanal is far more aggravated than had been estimated.”³ He called for reinforcements.

And so, Admiral Gunichi Mikawa in Rabaul began collecting ships again, and Pistol Pete was readied for a voyage south.

Pistol Pete was the name which the Marines were to confer on all of Hyakutake’s artillery. Actually, the guns were six-inch howitzers. Eight of them, plus a few guns of smaller bore, with their ammunition and tractors, medical supplies, sixteen tanks, miscellaneous equipment and a battalion of troops, were loaded aboard seaplane carriers Chitose and Nisshin. Another thousand men were placed on six destroyer-transports. Three heavy cruisers and two destroyers were formed as a covering force.

This was to be the largest Sendai movement so far, and Admiral Mikawa demanded ample aerial protection for it.

The Tokyo Express, now run by Rear Admiral Shintaro Hashimoto, had not lost any troops so far this month; but its ships had been battered. Since the night of October 3, when Ramada and the cruiser Sendai crossed contradictory courses, American bombers from Henderson Field had been appearing over The Slot in growing numbers. On October 5 they severely damaged destroyers Minegumo and Murasame, on October 8 they had so blasted northern terminals in the Shortlands that traffic down The Slot was snarled for twenty-four hours, and on the night of October 9 they struck at Tatsuta and other destroyers carrying Hyakutake south.

Admiral Mikawa asked Admiral Tsukahara to do something about it. Tsukahara promised that he would neutralize Henderson Field on October 11, and Mikawa gave the order for the Tokyo Express to move on that date.

It did. The first to leave was the Covering or Bombardment Force composed of big destroyers Hatsuyuki and Fubuki and heavy cruisers Aoba, Kinugasa, and Furutaka, veterans of the Battle of Savo Island. Commanding was another veteran of that great victory: Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto, the first admiral from either side to sail into Iron Bottom Bay.

Rear Admiral Norman Scott had been in the Bay on that momentous night of August 8–9, but he had been in command of the Eastern Defense Force and had been unable to sail to the aid of Admiral Crutchley in the west. Nevertheless, Scott, an aggressive and thorough sailor, thirsted for revenge.

For three weeks prior to departing Nouméa, Scott had been training his men in night fighting. He drove them without stint, and he insisted that his commanders teach themselves the proper use of radar. When Ghormley chose him to lead the force covering the 164th Infantry Regiment which Turner was bringing to Guadalcanal, Scott regarded the mission as an opportunity to avenge Savo.

Twice, on October 9 and 10, Scott led his ships toward Cape Esperance. But General Geiger’s bomber pilots had cleared The Slot. Aerial reconnaissance reported no suitable targets.

On October 11 a Flying Fortress from the New Hebrides reported Goto’s force sailing south. Two more aerial sightings were made, and at six o’clock that night Goto was reported a hundred miles north of Cape Esperance.

Scott eagerly signaled his approach order to his ships. He calculated that the enemy force should appear west of Savo just before midnight.

But Norman Scott would be there first.

There was a sudden rain shower at dawn of October 11. Martin Clemens, lying on a slope outside the Japanese encampment at Gurabusu, felt the water being dammed against his body. He hunched up slightly to release it—and then the Marines around Gurabusu attacked.

The Japanese fought back. They opened fire and Captain Richard Stafford raised his head above his coconut log to see what was happening. He fell back with a bullet between the eyes.

Clemens jumped up and joined the attack. A Japanese officer swung a saber at him. The Japanese missed and a Marine shot him dead. The other enemy soldiers turned to flee and charged straight into the bullets of American machine guns. Suddenly, it was quiet. The skirmish was over. Thirty-two enemy had been killed with only Captain Stafford lost.

Clemens went through the Japanese encampment. He found a gold chalice belonging to the missionaries. It was being used as an ash tray. One of the dead enemy soldiers lay wrapped in the altar cloth he had been using for a blanket. Then Clemens found vestments and the unmarked graves of the priests and nuns whom Ishimoto had murdered. Clemens watched his scouts. They prowled among the bodies, turning them over and shaking their heads in a disappointed negative.

Colonel Hill came back from Koilotumaria. The action there had not been successful. The enemy had run off into a swamp. Only three of them were killed, and two Marines were lost.

But one of the dead Japanese, according to a native scout, was Mr. Ishimoto.

Clemens could never be sure. The wounds inflicted by modern arms tend to make identification difficult. Nevertheless, the former carpenter from Tulagi was never heard from again.

The skies were still overcast when the men aboard Admiral Goto’s ships heard the thundering of aircraft motors above them. They were momentarily fearful, but then, realizing that they were still about two hundred miles north of Guadalcanal, they decided that the unseen planes were their own.

They were. Thirty-five Bettys escorted by thirty Zeros were flying at 25,000 feet. They came over Henderson Field shortly before four o’clock and found, to their dismay, that a shift of clouds had covered the target. More, scores of enemy Wildcats were growling and slashing among them. The bombers fled east, dropping their explosives in the sea.

And some of the bombs fell right in front of the landing boats bringing the Marines from Gurabusu to Aola.

It was as though a Martian cornucopia had been overturned, showering these returning victors with geysering bombs, spurting bullets and cartridge cases that fell on water like pebbles or rang sharply on steel decks.

Suddenly there was a terrible rising scream and a Wildcat came plummeting straight down. The pilot cleared his plane at about a hundred feet above the water and he struck it with such force that his clothing was torn off. He was rescued, but he died ten minutes later. Another Marine pilot crashed into the Bay. He was hauled into Clemens’s boat with an eye hanging out. He was taken to Aola where the efficient Eroni put the eye back in and bandaged it, and the pilot was back in action within a month.

And so Admiral Tsukahara’s stroke to neutralize Henderson Field was a failure. At the cost of these two Wildcats shot down, the Marines had destroyed seven bombers and four Zeros. Henderson had not been harmed. Yet, General Geiger’s fliers had been kept so active that Admiral Goto was able to steal safely down The Slot.

That was why, that midnight at Aola, the Marines and Martin Clemens saw a flashing and heard a rumbling that was neither thunder nor lightning.

There had been glimmerings of true lightning over the dark horizon that night as Admiral Scott’s ships formed into battle column and sailed for Savo.

Three destroyers—Farenholt, Duncan, and Laffey—held the lead, followed by four cruisers, Scott’s flagship San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Helena, with the tail of the column formed by two more destroyers, Buchanan and McCalla. They swung wide around Guadalcanal’s west coast, moving at top speed. Conical Savo loomed grimly ahead and speed was dropped to twenty-five knots, then to twenty. Scott prepared to launch planes. As Mikawa had done two months ago, so would Scott do on this dark breezy Sunday night.

Catapults flashed aboard San Francisco and Boise and two Kingfishers swooshed off into the black. Helena, which had not been notified, dumped hers overboard as inflammable material. Salt Lake City attempted to launch hers, but the plane was set afire by her own flares and was also jettisoned.

The burning aircraft’s flames could be seen fifty miles to the north by men aboard Admiral Goto’s ships. Goto thought it was Hyakutake signaling from his beachhead or else the seaplane carriers carrying Pistol Pete. He ordered replies blinkered. When no answer was forthcoming, some of Goto’s officers aboard flagship Aoba were suspicious. But Goto continued to flash his signal lights, hoping to lure any American ships in the vicinity away from the landing area. Goto did not really expect to find any, The Slot and Iron Bottom Bay having been such incontestable Japanese preserves during the past few months.

His column sailed on—cruisers Aoba, Furutaka, and Kinugasa, with destroyers Fubuki and Hatsuyuki off Aoba’s beam—a giant T speeding south to shell Henderson Field.

Below, Scott got his first scout-plane report: “One large, two small vessels, one six miles from Savo off northern beach, Guadalcanal.” Could this be the big force reported earlier that day? It did not seem so. Nor was it. It was part of the Supply Force. Scott continued to sail to the west of Savo on a northerly course. At half past eleven he ordered a countermarch to the south.

Goto still rushed toward him.

Inadvertently, Norman Scott had “crossed the T.” His ships were sailing broadside to the approaching enemy column: all his guns could be brought to bear to rake Goto stem-to-stern.

Helena got a radar contact!

Fifteen minutes before midnight Captain Gilbert Hoover broadcast a two-word signal: “Interrogatory Roger,” which meant, “Request permission to open fire.” Admiral Scott thought he meant “Roger” as employed to acknowledge receipt of a previous message. He replied, “Roger,” which also meant “Commence firing!” But Scott did not want to commence firing. Hoover was uncertain. With unsuspecting Aoba closing the range to a mere 5000 yards, with Helena’s gunners fingering their mechanisms in agony, Hoover repeated his former inquiry and Scott repeated his former, “Roger.”

Helena opened fire.

Six- and five-inch shells howled toward Aoba. They missed, but the second salvo caught the enemy cruiser full amidships. Now Salt Lake City and Boise were thundering at Goto’s stricken flagship. Not white flashes but orange flames gushed from the muzzles of heavier eight-inch guns. Aoba bucked and shuddered. Her bridge buckled. Admiral Goto was mortally wounded. He lay dying on his twisted bridge, gasping:

“Bakayaro! Bakayaro! Stupid bastard! Stupid bastard!”⁴

Goto thought friendly ships were firing on him. He thought vessels of the Supply Force had blundered, and as his own guns began to speak, he gave the order to cease fire.

Norman Scott also thought his ships were firing on each other—which was true in the case of Duncan and Farenholt—and he also gave the order to cease fire.

Then the dying Goto gave the command to turn right.

The movement enabled the Japanese ships to aim all their guns, but it also gave the Americans the opportunity to mass their fire at each ship as it approached the frothing white water that marked the turning point. They did, for Scott’s gunners were slow to respond to his orders to cease firing. Some of them never did, and Aoba and Furutaka were battered repeatedly and set ablaze.

Nine minutes before midnight Scott ordered: “Resume firing!”

Once again shock waves went rolling over black water and Marines crouching in Guadalcanal’s sodden holes heard again those familiar iron tongues of midnight.

Captain Charles (“Soc”) McMorris of San Francisco heard the order just as his lookouts sighted a strange warship on a parallel course three quarters of a mile to the west. Frisco’s searchlights leaped alight to illuminate a destroyer with a white band around her second stack. American gunners, now trained, knew her as Fubuki.

They opened up from all sides. They poured a horrible punishing fire into the enemy ship, and she blew up and sank at seven minutes before midnight.

Now all the American ships were pursuing fleeing Aoba and Furutaka. They pummeled them by turns. But now Kinugasa was fighting back.

With destroyer Hatsuyuki, the big Japanese cruiser had misread Goto’s orders and had turned left rather than right. The mistake saved them. It took them out of the fight, and it gave Kinugasa the chance to open up on Boise at eight thousand yards.

Eight-inch shells straddled the American and a spread of torpedoes came running toward her. Captain Mike Moran ordered hard right rudder and Boise swung around to comb the wakes.

Then Boise spotted Aoba and put her searchlights on her. Aoba fired back, and Kinugasa made a bull’s-eye of the American’s light. For three minutes Boise took a fearful pounding, until heroic Salt Lake City interposed her own bulk between her and the enemy, while silencing Aoba and driving Kinugasa off.

And now it was the twelfth of October. Furutaka was dragging herself toward her watery grave twenty-two miles northwest of Savo, Fubuki was gone, Aoba was so badly damaged she would have to limp all the way home to Japan for repairs, while slightly damaged Kinugasa and unscathed Hatsuyuki were streaking north for sanctuary.

Behind them destroyer Duncan, fired on by both sides, was also in her death throes: she would take the plunge at two o’clock in the morning.

And Boise was ablaze. Her gallant crew was struggling to quench the flames that streamed off her tail as she joined up with the victorious American column and sailed south for Nouméa. Aided by sea water which flowed through her pierced sides to flood the magazines, Boise made it.

The Battle of Cape Esperance was over. It was an American victory, and though it was not as decisive as Savo, it was at least some measure of vengeance for that defeat. Moreover, it made it clear to the enemy that The Slot was no longer a Japanese channel, and it heartened the Marines on Guadalcanal to know that the Navy was coming out fighting again.

But the Battle of Cape Esperance did not prevent Pistol Pete from coming ashore. The enemy supply ships went boldly about unloading Hyakutake’s big guns, his tanks, his shells and his medical supplies. They paid dearly for their insouciance: that same October 12 Dauntless dive-bombers from Henderson Field caught destroyers Murakumo and Natsugumo in The Slot and sent them to the bottom loaded with survivors from Goto’s stricken ships.

In all, Japan had lost one heavy cruiser and three destroyers against one American destroyer sunk. And Henderson Field had been spared bombardment.

But not for long.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE JAPANESE did not consider the Battle of Cape Esperance to be an unmitigated defeat. Rather, they regarded the outcome as salutary: Admiral Scott had sailed his ships south and the way was now clear for heavier bombardment of Henderson Field.

Much, much heavier—for Combined Fleet was now ready.

On October 9 the big converted carriers Hiyo and Junyo with smaller Zuiho sailed into Truk lagoon, and Vice-Admiral Kakuji Kakuta—a Japanese giant standing six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds—left his flagship, Hiyo, to report to Admiral Yamamoto aboard Yamato.

With Kakuta’s arrival, Yamamoto now had five carriers, five battleships, fourteen cruisers and forty-four destroyers—backed up by about 220 land-based airplanes to deploy against the enemy. On October 10 most of these ships sortied from Truk as part of the Guadalcanal Supporting Forces commanded by Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo. Yamamoto, remaining behind, watched them go.

As always, it was a stirring sight. Out of the reef passages they sailed, battleships leading—standing to sea in a stately column of ships. Then they were in open water and the escort ships broke column, heeling over with strings of signal flags tautening in the wind, while the queens of the fleet—the carriers—steamed majestically into position surrounded by protecting rings of cruisers and battleships.

They sailed south to take up supporting positions north of the Solomons, and to carry out Yamamoto’s instructions: “… apprehend and annihilate any powerful forces in the Solomons area, as well as any reinforcements.”

A few days after they departed Truk, their own reinforcements began going aboard six fast transports in the Shortlands. These were the last of the Sendai and some of the soldiers of the 38th Division: about ten thousand men in all. They were to arrive at Guadalcanal the night of October 14–15, joining General Hyakutake’s 17th Army in time for the big push now scheduled for October 20. Before they sailed, Henderson Field would be knocked out to guarantee them safe passage.

That was why, a few days after the grand sortie from Truk, battleships Kongo and Haruna under Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita peeled off from Kondo’s forces and made for Guadalcanal. Each carried five hundred horrible fourteen-inch bombardment shells, plus ammunition of smaller sizes. Both were escorted by seven destroyers and flag cruiser Isuzu carrying Tanaka the Tenacious back to The Slot. These ships were also loaded to bombard, as were four heavy cruisers scheduled to deliver later attacks.

But The Night of the Battleships would be first: on October 13.

Kelly Turner’s luck had held.

While Norman Scott had been sailing south in triumph, Turner had pushed on to the north with 3000 soldiers of the 164th Infantry Regiment. The huge Japanese armada which Yamamoto had ordered to destroy American reinforcements had left Truk too late to intercept him. Fourteen Japanese submarines screening Torpedo Junction had somehow let his two transports filter through.

As dusk of October 12 approached, Kelly Turner sighed with relief. He had made it. At dawn next morning he would be off Lunga with the first American soldiers to join the first American offensive.

Lieutenant Alan Montgomery’s four torpedo boats were truly not running at all when they arrived at Guadalcanal that afternoon of October 12. They had been towed from the New Hebrides by destroyers Southard and Hovey, entering the great battle of the Pacific and Iron Bottom Bay in a pedestrian style that delighted the hearts of the uninhibited deep-water sailors who greeted them.

“Rub-a-dub-dub, five gobs in a tub!”

“Tootsie-toys, yet! The Japs got the Tokyo Express and we got the Toonerville Trolley.”

Under tow the torpedo boats were indeed unlovely and unformidable sights, but once they had been freed and fallen astern and had drowned the taunts of their detractors in the great throaty roar of their powerful motors, they went thundering across the Bay with lifted prows, planing gracefully along and throwing out huge bow waves that showered torpedo tubes and machine-gun mounts with spume and trailed a thick wide wake of frothing white behind them.

With their arrival the battle for Guadalcanal became complete.

Marines and sailors, soldiers and fliers, Seabees, native scouts and Japanese laborers, every type of warrior or martial worker imaginable had fought above, around, and upon this island; they had struck and hacked and shot at each other on foot or from every type of ship or aircraft or vehicle, wielding every kind of gun or knife, fighting with spears and axes, with fists and with stones—and now the bold little cockleshells were here to round out the roster and complete the arsenal of modern arms. As they came into the fight, taxiing up to Government Wharf in Tulagi Harbor, the Skytrains of SCAT were overhead flying south with the last of that valiant band of Marine fliers who were the first to fight for Cactus Air Force.

Major Richard Mangrum was himself the only pilot of his bombing squadron able to walk away from the field. Seven other fliers were dead, four had been wounded, and the remainder flown out with malaria or other illnesses. Four of Mangrum’s reargunners had also been killed, and another wounded.

Major John Smith was going home as America’s leading ace: nineteen enemy warplanes shot down in less than two months. But six of Smith’s fighter pilots had been killed and six others wounded. Captain Carl was still alive, victor in sixteen aerial battles, and he, too, went home that afternoon of October 12—after the Skytrains had unloaded their cargoes of precious gasoline.

Fuel supplies were again critically short at Henderson Field. Although a Skytrain could fly in enough 55-gallon drums to keep twelve Wildcats aloft for one hour, what they brought in on October 12 would certainly be gone by October 13. Once again General Roy Geiger appealed to Nouméa, and an emergency barge-towing convoy was made up.

Cargo ships Alchiba and Bellatrix, PT-tender Jamestown, fleet tug Vireo and destroyers Meredith and Nicholas each towed a barge loaded with two thousand drums of gasoline and five hundred quarter-ton bombs.

They set out from Espiritu Santo late in the afternoon of October 12, a few hours after Japanese engineers began surveying a road to the south of Henderson Field.

Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama had graciously consented to Captain Oda’s request that the trail to the assembly areas be called “The Maruyama Road.” That had been on October 10. The next day Captain Oda and his engineers sat down with Colonel Matsumoto, the Sendai Division’s intelligence officer, to study aerial photographs of the route. They saw the roof of a solid jungle. It seemed straight going. Oda was sure he could blaze the trail to the upper Lunga without difficulty. Meanwhile, Colonel Matsumoto would continue to torture captured Americans to extract information from them. None of them had talked so far, much to the surprise of Matsumoto and the concealed admiration of Colonel Masajiro Furumiya of the 29th Infantry,¹ and they had had to be beheaded in the honorable way. But more prisoners would be taken, and perhaps more forthright measures would produce better results.

Leaving Matsumoto, Captain Oda and his engineers cheerfully set out to cut The Maruyama Road.

“Hey, Lucky—the doggies are here!”

“Yeah, I know, Lew,” Lucky grunted. “They came in on the New York bus.”

“It’s the straight dope. They’re out in the Bay. You want to take a look?”

“We can’t. We’ve got to stand by to move out. We’re moving to new positions today or tomorrow.”²

It was true, both that the 164th Infantry Regiment had arrived safely off Lunga Point, and that this latest reinforcement had induced General Vandegrift to shift his troops again. He expected the gathering enemy to strike hard from west of the Matanikau and he was moving his strength in that direction. The Tenaru line to the east would be held by the newly arrived 164th under Colonel Bryant Moore. To the south of Henderson Field, farther inland and a little to the east of Bloody Ridge, Vandegrift stationed Chesty Puller’s battalion.

Almost exactly at the point where The Maruyama Road was to terminate.

“Condition Red!”

The cry was almost meaningless to these American soldiers hearing it for the first time on that afternoon of October 13, and it was raised too late.

Up north Japanese patrols had at last flushed the coastwatchers from their hideouts. Paul Mason and Jack Read were on the run, unable to warn Guadalcanal, and Henderson Field’s new radar had also been remiss. And so, twenty-four Bettys with escorting Zeros came thundering over the big runway and Fighter One while forty-two Wildcats and thirteen P-400s and Airacobras hung roaring on their noses in a desperate attempt to gain altitude. Eventually, one bomber and one fighter would fall to their guns, but not before huge gashes were torn in both runways, parked aircraft were blasted apart, five thousand gallons of gasoline were set afire, and the men of the 164th Regiment had felt the first scorching licks of a baptism of fire that none of Vandegrift’s Marines had ever experienced.

Some of the bombs fell on Colonel Moore’s men only a few minutes after they set foot on Guadalcanal. Corporal Kenneth Foubert was killed—the first American soldier to die on the island—and two other men were wounded. Casualties mounted during another savage raid—again without warning.

All of the planes of the second raid got safely away, except for the Zero which fell to the flaming wing guns of a square-jawed, cigar-smoking Marine captain named Joseph Jacob Foss. Then Foss took a bullet in his oil pump and came rocketing down from 22,000 feet to a dead-stick landing while a trio of Zeros took turns trying to shoot off his tail. It was Captain Foss’s first victory, and it was a hair-raising flying feat which was to be typical of Henderson’s newest and greatest fighter pilot.

Individual victories, however, were of small solace to Archer Vandegrift on that black-bordered day of October 13. Henderson Field was now out of action for the first time. Geiger had almost no gasoline. The fury of the enemy onslaught suggested that a period of comparative lull had ended and that the Japanese were now opening their third and heaviest bid for victory. Far away in Australia General Douglas MacArthur was planning an all-out defense of the island continent in the event that the Solomons were lost, a huge Japanese bombardment force had been reported on its way south, forcing Admiral Turner to flee for the New Hebrides again, and as dusk introduced The Night of the Battleships, Archer Vandegrift heard a new voice speaking over Henderson Field.

Sergeant Butch Morgan was preparing the general’s dinner when Pistol Pete spoke.

His first shell screamed over Vandegrift’s pavilion and struck the big runway with a crash. Sergeant Morgan seized his World War I helmet and raced for the dugout. Another shell screeched overhead. Morgan slammed on his helmet and dove for cover.

Crrrrash!

General Vandegrift looked up in thoughtful surprise.

“That wasn’t a bomb,” he said. “That’s artillery.”³

Sergeant Butch Morgan came out of the dugout, his face a crimson match for his red walrus mustache. He looked around him furtively to see if any boots had witnessed the discomfiture of the Old Salt who had fought in France and knew all about artillery barrages.

“Aw, hell,” Morgan muttered, taking off his helmet and going back to his makeshift stove. “I mean, only artillery…”

If it was “only” artillery, it was still authoritative enough to reach the airfield and to introduce a new element of danger into the harried lives of the Seabees there. Formerly, after attack from bombers or warships, repairmen might rush to the torn-up runway to fill the craters without fear of lightning striking twice in the same place. But now, Pistol Pete could fire one shell, wait until the Seabees were at work, and then drop another in the very same place.

Moreover, Vandegrift’s heretofore matchless artillery was now outranged. Even his biggest guns, five-inch rifles, were of lesser bore than these six-inch howitzers of Hyakutake’s; and his field pieces, 105- and 75-mm howitzers, that is, roughly four- and three-inch cannon, were far outweighed by them. Nevertheless, the Marine artillerymen were unafraid to duel the Japanese in counter-battery firing; if only they could locate them. The Marines had no sound-and-flash ranging equipment on Guadalcanal, and General Geiger could not consume precious gasoline keeping observation planes aloft.

Pistol Pete would speak for many, many days, unsilenced even by the five-inch rifles of visiting destroyers; speak as he was speaking now in the fading light of October 13, churning up the runways and forcing Marine ground crews to dare his flying fragments while moving parked aircraft to the comparative safety of Fighter One, ranging in on Kukum to chew up naval stores, hurling desultory shells into the Marine perimeter and moving from there, accidentally, into the heart of the 164th Infantry’s bivouac area, raining shells upon these soldiers with such ferocity that one of them—a sergeant—crawled about begging his men to shoot him.

Then it was dark.

Pistol Pete thundered on, red flares shot up from the jungle, enemy bombers roared overhead—flashing in and out of Marine antiaircraft fire and thick pencils of searchlight crisscrossing the sky—and everywhere there was a thumping and lashing of tortured earth and a whistling of invisible steel, while dazed and sleepless men stumbled in and out of their pits and foxholes, bracing for the enemy to appear once the uproar ceased.

At half past eleven Louie the Louse planted a green flare directly over Henderson Field and The Night of the Battleships began.

Screened fore and aft, and flanked to each side by Isuzu and Admiral Tanaka’s seven destroyers, battleships Haruna and Kongo raced down The Slot at twenty-five knots.

Just before midnight, west of Savo, speed was dropped to eighteen knots. Gunnery officers could see the first of many flares burning brightly over Henderson Field. They began calculating the mathematical problems. At half past one, at a range of about ten miles, sixteen great fourteen-inch guns swiveled toward Henderson, gouts of flame gushed from their muzzles, and huge red blobs went arching through the blackness with the effect of strings of lighted boxcars rushing over a darkened hill.

Henderson Field became a sea of flame.

Fires and explosions were visible from the darkened bridges of the Japanese ships. Sailors cried out in glee and excitement. To Admiral Tanaka the battleships’ pyrotechnic display seemed to make the famous Ryogoku fireworks show a pale candle by comparison.⁴

Ashore the Americans were passing through an agony not to be repeated in World War II. It was a terror of the soul. It was as though the roar of colliding planets was exploding in their ears. Self-control was shattered, strong faces went flabby with fear, men sobbed aloud or whimpered, others put their pistols to their heads. It was not possible to pray.

It was possible only to crouch in gunpits to watch, through the rectangles of the gun embrasures, a horizon quivering with gun flashes, and to hear the soft, hollow thumping of the enemy’s salvos—

Pah-boom, pah-boom. Pah-boom, pah-boom, pah…

—to feel the dry constriction of the throat and to hear the great projectiles wailing hoarsely overhead,

Hwooo, hwoo-ee,

and then to be thrown violently to earth and feel the stomach being kneaded as though by giant fingers of steel, while the eardrums rang and the head ached and the teeth were rattled by the perfection of sound, a monster clanging as though the vault of heaven were a huge casque of steel and giants were beating on it with sledgehammers, beating one-two, one-two-three, as the salvos came crashing in from two-gun turrets, three-gun turrets, and the flogged earth leaped and bucked and writhed.

It went on for an hour and a half, while Henderson Field’s airplanes were blown to bits or set afire or crushed by collapsing revetments, while Tanaka’s destroyers thickened the battleships’ fire with their own five-inch shells, while Marine shore-batteries on Guadalcanal and Tulagi bravely but vainly attempted to drive off an enemy far out of range, and while Lieutenant Montgomery’s bold little PT boats came racing out of Tulagi Harbor to challenge the intruders. Even the Japanese were astonished at these impetuous waterbugs charging at a pair of whales, although they recovered from their surprise in time to swing ponderously about and comb the American torpedo wakes. Then the destroyers turned on their searchlights and drove them off.

Kongo and Haruna bellowed on. Until, at three in the morning, a sudden quiet came over Guadalcanal.

At dawn the Americans came sleepwalking from their holes to gaze in awe upon huge baseplates and shell fragments and to congratulate the Japanese gunner who had zeroed-in on a ration dump, making mince of cases of Spam to feed it, bit by detestable bit, to Guadalcanal’s populous colony of rats. Otherwise, there was nothing to laugh about.

Forty-one men—many of them pilots—had been killed, and a score more were wounded. Many men were buried alive and had to be dug out, among them Michael, Martin Clemens’s cook, who was pulled out of a collapsed dugout with his face streaming blood.

Henderson Field was a ruin. Smoke still curled skyward from burning fuel dumps, jagged sections of steel runway matting lay hundreds of yards away from cratered airstrips, part of the hospital was wrecked, tents flapped in the wind like canvas sieves, and there were great swathes cut in the coconut groves where the trees stood in serried rows of serrated stumps.

Neither of the runways was usable. General Geiger had had thirty-nine Dauntlesses operational when he went to bed the night before, but when he tumbled groggily to his feet on this morning of horror, he had only five. Sixteen of his Wildcats were twisted ruins, and every one of the twenty-four remaining required repairs. Most of the Avenger torpedo-bombers recently arrived were useless, and the Army aviators, whose P-400s and Airacobras were still usable, received this chilling briefing from a Marine colonel:

“We don’t know whether we’ll be able to hold the field or not. There’s a Japanese task force of destroyers, cruisers, and troop transports headed our way. We have enough gasoline left for one mission against them. Load your planes with bombs and go out with the dive-bombers and hit them. After the gas is gone, we’ll have to let the ground troops take over. Then your officers and men will attach yourselves to some infantry outfit.

“Good luck and good-by.”⁵

Up went the Army craft beside four Dauntlesses. They found the enemy convoy and they attacked. But they failed to sink them and the Japanese ships pressed on.

Back at Henderson Field, Seabees and Marine engineers drove themselves to repair the airfields. Squadron commanders conferred anxiously with their repair officers.

“What’s left, Lieutenant?”

“You’d need a magnifying glass to find it, Colonel.”

“Well, start using one then. How about Number 117?”

“Her? Oh, she’s great—wasn’t even scratched. Except that she needs an engine change. Other than that, all she needs is both elevators, both stabilizers, the right auxiliary gas tank, right and center section flaps, right aileron, windshield, rudder, both wheels and the brake assembly. But she’s still in one piece, sir, and I guess we can get her up in six days.”

“Six days!”

“Dammit, Colonel, back in the States it’d take six months to do it!”

“All right, all right—but let’s keep those junk-pickers of yours busy.”⁶

Henderson’s mechanics patched up ten more bombers that day. They did it even as bombs fell upon them from twenty-five unchallenged Betty bombers which came winging in at noon; an hour later, when fifteen more bombers and ten Zeros arrived overhead, they had twenty-four fighters aloft and waiting. Nine bombers and three Zeros were shot down, at a cost of two Marine pilots and one Army flier.

And then it became clear that Cactus Air Force was out of gas.

Admiral Ghormley’s headquarters was aware of the critical situation at Henderson Field. General Vandegrift’s urgent message requesting twenty bombers “immediately” had been received by Vice-Admiral Aubrey Fitch—who had replaced Admiral McCain as commander of South Pacific Air—but the best Fitch could do was send six more Dauntlesses to Guadalcanal.

In Espiritu Santo, Admiral Turner readied another emergency shipment of gasoline. Destroyer McFarland, now converted to a seaplane tender, was loaded with 40,000 gallons of gasoline, in tanks below and in drums topside, together with a dozen torpedoes, airplane flares and supplies of 37-mm shells.

McFarland would get to Guadalcanal about the same time as the slower barge-towing convoy which had set out from Espiritu two days before.

Admiral Yamamoto was elated by Admiral Kurita’s reports of the destruction of Henderson Field. His carriers could now venture close to Guadalcanal without fear of land-based air, and he notified Admiral Kondo to move toward the island at top speed.

Kondo’s mission was to destroy the American naval forces which Yamamoto mistakenly believed to be in the vicinity, and to support General Hyakutake’s attack on the American airfield.

In the meantime, Admiral Mikawa would pick up where Kurita had left off.

Again Louie the Louse, again the flares, again the long sleek shapes gliding down The Slot—and once more Guadalcanal’s earth quivered while cursing Americans blundered blindly through the darkness toward their holes.

This time it was Gunichi Mikawa with flagship Chokai and big Kinugasa, the lucky battler of Cape Esperance. They began shelling even as six transports from the Shortlands began unloading troops and supplies off Tassafaronga, only fifteen miles west of the Marine perimeter.

Chokai and Kinugasa hurled 750 eight-inch shells into the American beachhead. Racing north unmolested, Mikawa jubilantly radioed Yamamoto that the enemy airfield was zemmetsu: wiped out.

With dawn of October 15, Marines on the southern ridges could look west past Kukum and see, with chilled hearts, the Japanese ships calmly unloading, while destroyers screened them to seaward and enemy planes patrolled the skies above them.

Behind these dispirited but not yet despairing Marines there was a ruined airfield, only three Dauntlesses that could fly, and not a drop of gasoline.

“No gasoline?” Roy Geiger thundered. “Then, by God, find some!”⁷

Then Geiger radioed Espiritu Santo to fly in nothing but fuel that day, while his startled supply officers hurried from the Pagoda to start hunting gasoline. First, they drained the tanks of two wrecked Flying Fortresses, getting four hundred gallons out of one of them, and next someone remembered four hundred drums of Japanese aviation gasoline that had been cached outside the airfield’s outer rim during the early days.

It was enough to contradict Admiral Mikawa’s estimate of Henderson Field’s fighting capacity.

“Always pray,” Lieutenant Anthony Turtora had written to his parents, “not that I shall come back, but that I shall have the courage to do my duty.”⁸

Shortly after daybreak on October 15, Lieutenant Turtora climbed into one of Henderson’s three flyable Dauntlesses. His motor roared and the stubby powerful ship went zigzagging down the bomb-pocked runway, struggling aloft while ground crews watched with caught breath. Then Turtora flew down to Tassafaronga to do his duty. He did not return, but after him came scores of pilots who also had the courage to do their duty.

They should not have been airborne, by every law of logic Admiral Mikawa should have been right; and yet, all day long the ragtag Cactus Air Force struck at the enemy transports. Flying on gasoline supplies which were always on the verge of giving out, until another Army or Marine transport roared in from Espiritu, the Wildcats and P-400s and Airacobras tangled with Japanese Zeros or swept in low to strafe enemy troops. Seated in the cockpits of Dauntlesses and Avengers which Henderson’s magnificent mechanics had patched together in fulfillment of their vow to salvage everything but the bullet holes, the bombers showered the enemy ships with 1000- and 500-pound eggs, or dove down through streamers of antiaircraft fire to strafe and to blast supply dumps.

Late in the day Flying Fortresses came up from Espiritu to join the Tassafaronga assault, their majestic formation provoking cries of delight from Marines atop the ridges who had been cheering on the airmen throughout the day. And then a great shout broke from their lips. They had seen a clumsy Catalina lumbering west with two torpedoes tucked under its belly.

It was the Blue Goose, General Geiger’s personal plane, and Mad Jack Cram was at the controls.

Major Cram had flown into Guadalcanal to deliver torpedoes. He had begged the use of one of them, and an ensign who had already been down to Tassafaronga told him he could have both. Then Cram gathered his crew and climbed back into Blue Goose.

He nursed the awkward Cat into the sky. He made for a rendezvous with eight fighters and a dozen Dauntlesses a few miles east of Henderson. Beneath him, Major Duke Davis and his Wildcats were cakewalking down the runway between the bursts laid down by Pistol Pete.

Blue Goose was roaring along with the Dauntlesses and Wildcats toward the transports and thirty Zeros flying cover above them. Then the dive-bombers were going over, flashing down through the flak, and big bulky Blue Goose was going over with them.

She was built to make 160 miles an hour, this Catalina, but she was diving at 270. Her great ungainly wings shook and shrieked in an agony of stress. She would surely fall apart.

Cram pulled the stick back. He leveled off at one thousand feet. Then he went over again. Blue Goose came thundering over two transports at seventy-five feet. She shuddered and bucked in their flak blasts. Cram sighted off his bow at a third transport. He yanked the toggle release. His first torpedo hit the water and began running straight and true. He yanked again, and the second fell. It porpoised, righted—and followed the first into the transport’s side.

Blue Goose had broken the transport’s back. She was done. Her skipper drove her up on the beach. Soon two more transports were beached, and the other three had turned and raced back toward the Shortlands.

Now Blue Goose was fighting for her life. Five Zeros went after her. Cram stood his big plane on one wing and raced for Henderson Field. The Zeros took turns raking his tail. Cram began roller-coastering, rising and diving, rising and diving. He came over the main strip with his ship wailing through a hundred holes. But he was going too fast to land. He made for Fighter One. He began letting down, while Marine antiaircraft gunners shot two Zeros off his tail.

Then a third came after him, just as Lieutenant Roger Haberman brought his smoking Wildcat down with lowered wheels.

Haberman shot the Zero off Cram’s tail and Blue Goose went plowing up the strip in a pancake landing. Cram and his crewmen emerged unscathed, only to hear Geiger bellow:

“Goddamit, Cram! I ought to court-martial you for deliberate destruction of government property!” Then Geiger strode into the Pagoda to write out a recommendation for a Navy Cross.

And so the “safest” run of the Tokyo Express was all but wrecked. The three beached ships would eventually be turned into charred and rusting skeletons; many of General Hyakutake’s reinforcements were lost and the remainder would have to complete the southern movement by barge, ravaged by American torpedo boats at night, scourged by their aircraft by day. In all, about 4500 men would reach Hyakutake in time for the big push. But he would not get all his supplies. Many of them were already burning and American destroyers would set other depots afire. As the day came to an end, three Japanese transports had been lost, in effect, and five Zeros and three Bettys shot down; against the loss of seven of Geiger’s aircraft.

It had been a memorable fifteenth of October, and tomorrow McFarland and the barge-towing convoy would arrive.

Early in the morning of October 15 the Japanese fleet reached a station two hundred miles north of Guadalcanal. Admiral Kondo took personal command of heavy cruisers Myoko and Maya and led them toward The Slot. Meanwhile, Nagumo’s carriers flew off scout planes to search for the American fleet. They found no carriers, but at ten o’clock in the morning they reported sighting a force of one cruiser, two destroyers, and two transports at a point a hundred miles south of Guadalcanal.

Nagumo decided to attack, even though the target was three hundred miles distant. Twenty-seven Vals and Kates roared aloft from Zuikaku, speeding toward what was in actuality the barge-towing convoy from Espiritu.

But they would find only two targets.

Nagumo’s scout plane had already made transports Alchiba and Bellatrix, destroyer Nicholas and PT-tender Jamestown conclude that it would be wise to withdraw. Fleet-tug Vireo and destroyer Meredith plowed on. Shortly before eleven they beat off a two-plane attack. Then they received word that enemy ships were close by, and they, also, decided to reverse course.

But Vireo moved too slowly, and so, Meredith ordered her abandoned and prepared to sink her with torpedoes—just as Nagumo’s warbirds came tumbling out of the sky.

They fell on Meredith.

Bombed, torpedoed, and machine-gunned, the destroyer sank almost instantly. Her men took to the life rafts. One raftful succeeded in boarding drifting Vireo. But the others could not and these rafts became floating horrors. Wounded and dreadfully burned sailors lay in the boiling sun across the gratings while salt water washed across their open cuts and burned bodies. Other men clung to the lifelines, waiting for someone aboard to die so that they could take his place.

The sharks found them. They dragged the men on the lifelines under. One great scaly beast flipped onto a raft and tore a chunk of flesh from a dying man’s thigh before his horrified comrades could seize the flopping creature by the tail and heave it back into the sea again.

After three days and three nights of agony unrivaled, eighty-eight survivors of Vireo and Meredith were eventually rescued by destroyers. But 236 were not.

Thus did the Navy suffer to keep the Marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal alive and fighting.

They were out in the Bay again.

Heavies Myoko and Maya were there, with Admiral Kondo in command, and ordeal was renewed and red again.

Parading within less than five miles of the island, Kondo’s cruisers fired a crushing 1500 rounds of eight-inch shell into the American perimeter.

In the morning, General Geiger counted fifteen ruined Wildcats. His Cactus Air Force numbered only twenty-seven planes, and it was again out of gasoline.

Henderson Field’s only hope now rested in Lieutenant Colonel Harold (“Indian Joe”) Bauer’s fighter squadron at Espiritu Santo, alerted for movement north, and in McFarland, still bending it on for Iron Bottom Bay.

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

Tears streaming down their cheeks, the men of the Sendai Division stood outside the encampment at Kukumbona, their faces toward the Emperor and their ears filled with the familiar words of the Imperial Rescript.

They were marching against the Americans.

On this morning of October 16, while Roy Geiger contemplated the ruins of his air force, seven thousand of them prepared to march through the jungle to an assembly area south of Henderson Field.

As always, General Maruyama was supremely confident. Captain Oda and his engineers had sent back encouraging reports on the progress of the Maruyama Road. The Sendai should easily be in place by “X Day,” now tentatively set for October 22. So the general ordered his men to take only five days’ rations.

Then, stroking his thin line of supercilious mustache, he suggested to General Hyakutake that the appropriate place to receive the surrender of the American commander was at the mouth of the Matanikau River.

After which, at noon of October 16, he set out along the Maruyama Road.

A few hours later his rear guard heard the welcome sound of Japanese aerial bombs falling on American ships in Iron Bottom Bay.

McFarland got to Guadalcanal ahead of Joe Bauer’s fliers.

A floating gasoline dump and ammunition depot, the brave little ship entered the Bay on the morning of October 16. Her crew and her skipper, Lieutenant Commander John Alderman, were understandably eager to unload, and they quickly began lowering drums over the side into waiting lighters while dropping a fuel line to a barge which had come alongside.

Commander Alderman and his crew were not quite so eager to take aboard their return cargo: 160 hospital patients, half of whom were those exhausted and battle-fatigued men who were still, in those days, ungraciously described as “war neurotics.”

At five o’clock Alderman sighted a periscope and decided to get under way. He did, with the gasoline barge still alongside taking on fuel.

Some time later Colonel Bauer’s squadron of nineteen Wildcats, plus seven Dauntlesses, came winging overhead. They came in with fuel tanks almost empty, and they began lowering quickly down for a landing. Bauer would come in last.

And then nine Japanese dive-bombers fell without warning on McFarland.

Alderman rang up full speed and ordered the barge cast off. She was, in time to be holed and sunk.

Then an enemy bomb burst among the depth charges on McFarland’s fantail. Huge explosions racked the ship. The neurotics panicked. They stampeded through the passageways and tried to tear weapons and life jackets away from sailors struggling desperately to save their ship.

Above, Joe Bauer saw McFarland plodding along at barely five knots. She was a helpless target for about five Vals which had still to make their dive. With his gas tanks nearly empty, Bauer went wolfing swiftly among the enemy.

He shot down four of them before he came down with bone-dry tanks.

McFarland was saved, as well as her precious cargo of ammunition.

Rugged Joe Bauer, Indian Joe Bauer, one of the most inspirational of flying leaders, and also the pilot whom all Marines regarded as “the greatest,” had brought off the most astonishing single feat of aerial arms in the annals of Guadalcanal. In the words of his adoring wingman:

“The Chief stitched four of the bastards end to end.”⁹

CHAPTER TWENTY

“IT NOW appears that we are unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area,” the admiral reported. “Thus our supply of the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.”

It was not Ghormley the pessimist who wrote those words on October 15, 1942, but rather Nimitz the optimist.

And his grim estimate of the situation came at a time when it was next to impossible for Admiral King in Washington to divert any additional ships or supplies or men to the South Pacific. Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, was gathering. President Roosevelt had insisted that American troops be committed against Germany at some time in 1942. His Joint Chiefs of Staff had argued for a cross-Channel invasion of France but their British counterparts had objected; backed by Prime Minister Churchill they held out for the North African venture, and Roosevelt had agreed with them.

A vast concourse of ships, a logistics problem as yet unrivaled, was involved in transporting some 90,000 men to North Africa from bases as far away as England and the United States.

Moreover, Admiral King’s hands were also very full contending with German U-boats, which sank eighty-eight ships and 585,510 tons of cargo in the Atlantic during October, and with supplying British forces in Egypt via the long route around the Cape of Good Hope. General Marshall was solidly for Torch, now that Roosevelt had given it the green light, and General Arnold, although not equally enthusiastic, still cherished his never-to-be-realized dream of bringing Germany to her knees by strategic bombing, which meant concentrating aircraft in Europe.

Admiral King and General MacArthur might argue that disaster must not be courted in the Solomons and New Guinea just to get into action against the Germans, thus boosting morale on the home front as well as perhaps providing for the eventual invasion of Europe, but the Commander-in-Chief of American armed forces, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was not to be moved. Torch still burned with the green light.

And so Nimitz knew that the Guadalcanal situation was critical simply because the Japanese Navy was concentrating all its forces there and he had not equal forces to oppose them.

Then, on October 16, the day the Sendai marched south on Guadalcanal, Nimitz received a shattering message from Admiral Ghormley.

“This appears to be all-out enemy effort against Guadalcanal. My forces totally inadequate to meet situation. Urgently request all aviation reinforcements possible.”

The following day Ghormley came through with an estimate of what he needed to save the day: all the submarines in MacArthur’s area, all the cruisers and destroyers in Alaska, all the PT boats in the Pacific except those at Midway, a review of the entire destroyer assignment schedule in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and from the Army Air Force ninety heavy bombers, eighty medium bombers, sixty dive-bombers, and two groups of fighters, including those Lightnings which General Arnold was reluctant to release.

Nimitz, a calm and orderly man, was staggered. Obviously such recommendations did not spring from a hopeful mind. Such forces, even if they could be made available, could not be furnished instantly. And the time was one for instantaneous action with the forces that were available. Chester Nimitz sighed and came reluctantly to a decision.

Back in Washington on that same day—October 16 in Washington, the seventeenth in the South Pacific—Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was meeting the press. Came the question: Can Guadalcanal be held?

“I certainly hope so,” the Secretary said. “I expect so. I don’t want to make any predictions, but every man out there, ashore or afloat, will give a good account of himself.”

That night on Guadalcanal the Marines heard of the Secretary’s shy little pep talk with hoots of derision.

“Didja hear about Knox? It was on the ’Frisco radio. He says he don’t know, but we’re sure gonna give a good account of ourselves.”

“Yeah, I heard—ain’t he a tiger?”¹

The following day a four-engined Coronado flying boat circled above Admiral Ghormley’s flagship, Argonne, in the harbor at Nouméa.

The pilot eased back on the throttle and brought the plane down gently on the water’s surface. An admiral with a craggy face and tufted gray eyebrows clambered out just as a motor whaleboat drew alongside. The admiral jumped into the tossing whaleboat.

A young junior grade lieutenant stepped up to him, saluted, and handed him a sealed envelope marked “Secret.”

The admiral tore it open and read. He read it again, blinking, and then he handed it to his Marine adviser and friend, Colonel Julian Brown. It said:

“Jesus Christ and General Jackson!” Bull Halsey swore. “This is the hottest potato they ever handed me.”²

On Guadalcanal, men who had never once lost hope of victory, who were entering their eleventh week of battle still confident of it, heard the news with shouts of jubilation.

A real tiger was taking over.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE ARRIVAL of the 164th Infantry Regiment’s three thousand soldiers had given Archer Vandegrift 23,000 men on Guadalcanal, with another four thousand under General Rupertus on Tulagi. Guadalcanal, however, was the prize; and Vandegrift again reorganized his defenses there.

Sector One comprised seven thousand yards of beachfront held by a composite force of Marines from the Third Defense Battalion, Special Weapons, Amtracks, Engineers, and Pioneers. On its right or eastern flank it joined the 164th holding Sector Two, a 6500-yard line south along the Tenaru which curved back west short of Bloody Ridge. Here it tied in with Sector Three held by the Seventh Marines, less one battalion, for another 2500 yards west to the Lunga, Sector Four, defended by the First Marines, less one battalion, stretched an additional 3500 yards west until it merged with Sector Five, which, held by the Fifth Marines, curved back north to the sea.

Essentially, this was the same perimeter which the Marines had been holding since August 7, except for one new feature: a battle position on the east bank of the Matanikau.

Here two independent battalions of Marines, backed up by artillery and 75-mm half-tracks, held a line from the river mouth left to Hill 67 about a thousand yards inland. Although this position was about three thousand yards to the west of the perimeter, it could be supplied along the coastal road. It could also depend upon Marine artillery registered to fire anywhere along the entire defense.

In reserve, Vandegrift held one infantry battalion and most of the tank battalion. Regimental commanders all held a third of their strength in reserve, as did lesser commanders down through companies.

It was a neat and efficient cordon depending upon the mobility offered by interior lines, and it had, of course, that single exception on the Matanikau. But it was here, from the Japanese assembly area at Kukumbona, that Archer Vandegrift expected the main thrust.

And he was wrong.

Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake still depended upon the Sendai Division then marching south to deliver the main blow in his three-pronged assault involving 22,000 men.

General Maruyama was to attack at a point a bit east of the area in which General Kawaguchi had met defeat. His seven thousand men were to seize the airfield, the very nerve center of the American defense.

To assist him, Hyakutake had arranged for a reinforced battalion of the 38th Division to land to the east of Koli Point. This “Koli Detachment” would be boated and ready to land on order.

On the west, Hyakutake planned a heavier distraction. Here he would use a tank-infantry-artillery unit under Major General Tadashi Sumoyoshi, commander of 17th Army artillery. Sumoyoshi’s guns had already been at work battering the enemy airfield and perimeter. Now they would support the remnants of Colonel Nakaguma’s Fourth Infantry Regiment as they charged across the Matanikau River mouth behind sixteen tanks. Farther inland, Colonel Oka’s composite force would cross the river to flank the Americans on Hill 67. Then, while Nakaguma was striking the enemy at the river mouth, Oka would turn north to come in behind the American battle position and isolate it.

In the meantime, Rabaul would mount sustained aerial attacks, covered by Zeros based on Buka and the new field at Buin on southern Bougainville. Combined Fleet’s battleships and heavy cruisers would crush the Americans with sustained bombardment. Once the airfield was captured, Yamamoto’s eagles would fly in to operate from it. His gunfire ships would cut off the American retreat.

All depended on the capture of the airfield, all depended on the peerless Sendai striking from their secret position to the south.

They would not, they could not fail. Guadalcanal airfield should again be Japanese by the morning of October 22.

October 22?

Isoroku Yamamoto was annoyed. What was wrong with the Army? First, the deadline had been moved back from October 17 to October 20. And now there was another postponement of two days. The huge Guadalcanal Supporting Forces had been at sea since October 11, at sea doing nothing; doing nothing and consuming fuel. Was the Army not aware that a fleet feeds on oil? All the Army had to do in Operation Ka was supply a few divisions of men; they had not contributed so much as a single airplane—and here they were dragging their feet again.

While they did, the Americans would surely reinforce. Isoroku Yamamoto did not subscribe to any of those wildly optimistic evaluations of the American change of command, especially not the one predicting “withdrawal of all American naval forces from the South Pacific.”¹ Yamamoto could only admire the daring skill which had brought off the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. He did not think that a rude, aggressive man like Halsey—with his insulting boast that he would ride the Emperor’s white horse down Pennsylvania Avenue—could have the slightest intention of withdrawing. Halsey would attack, he would reinforce; and the Army was playing into his hands.

And there, Yamamoto was exactly right.

The Big E was coming back to battle. The mighty proud flattop that had been in almost every action since the Pacific War began was whole again, the damage she had suffered August 24 during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons had been repaired. On October 16 she cast off her last lines and stood out to sea from Pearl Harbor.

On her flag bridge was Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, bareheaded and shirt-sleeved as always among his helmeted and jacketed sailors, pacing the deck with binoculars around his neck. Kinkaid was to take tactical command of South Pacific Force after his own carrier and screen had made rendezvous with Hornet and her screen. Then, for the first time since Wasp went down on September 15, the Americans would have two carriers to oppose the Japanese.

Enroute to the rendezvous area, Kinkaid received a message from his new chief, Halsey, urging him to proceed at all possible speed. Kinkaid obeyed. But he could never join Hornet before daybreak of October 24.

And that, according to Hyakutake’s timetable, was just two days too late.

Masao Maruyama was almost in tears. Kawaguchi had been right. The terrain was incredible. And that unspeakable Captain Oda, could he not have realized that if his lightly equipped trailblazers could very easily crawl up and down these terrible cliffs, heavily laden combat troops could not?

Every one of Maruyama’s men carried sixty pounds of personal equipment, besides machine guns or grenade launchers. Each man carried an artillery shell. They had no mules to pull the guns, 37-mm antitank pieces, 70- and 75-mm howitzers. All the division’s horses had been left in Rabaul. The only way to get the artillery up and down the cliffs was by hand and by ropes. It was impossible to do this in daylight because of the American aircraft. It had to be done at night; as a result, the artillery was dropping far behind.

Thirty-five miles, that was all that they had to go, and yet, after five days marching, the advance guard had gone only twenty-nine. Six miles of foul, impenetrable jungle still lay between them and the assembly area. And these were the Sendai! These were the men of Colonel Furumiya’s matchless 29th Infantry who had marched 122 miles in seventy-two hours.

But the men had been splendid. They had gone on half-rations without a murmur, and they plodded on inspired by the sight of officers who also were hungry, who also carried guns or artillery shells. Nor had the Sendai forgotten its heritage. Each morning the march was renewed with the memorable words:

“I am your Commander-in-Chief, you are my strong arms…”

Each time the men seemed to be on the verge of collapse their officers rallied them by turning them to face toward the Emperor, to sing:

They sang with tears streaking their mud-caked cheeks, uncaring if American patrols were in the vicinity. But for all their endurance, for all their sacrifice, General Maruyama knew by October 21 that he could not possibly make the deadline. He radioed General Hyakutake back in Kukumbona that he would have to postpone the attack until October 23.

It was October 22 and it was obvious that Admiral Kakuta’s flag carrier Hiyo was not going to be of use. Hiyo had developed engine trouble. Her power-plant, originally designed for a merchant ship, could not provide the speed required by a carrier. Kakuta sent Hiyo back to Truk at her top speed of six knots and took his flag, together with the Emperor’s picture, aboard his last flattop, Junyo.

On October 23, General Maruyama had reached the end of his march. He set up his headquarters on a rise called Centipede-Shaped Ridge and made his final dispositions.

The point he chose to attack was slightly to the east of the ridge at which General Kawaguchi had met defeat. Unknown to Maruyama, it was defended by the Marine battalions commanded by Chesty Puller and Herman Henry Hanneken.

Facing north toward the sea, the Japanese right consisted of the 29th Infantry, with antitank guns, mortars, mountain artillery, and engineers. It was commanded by General Kawaguchi. The left wing, composed of similar arms and similar strength, was led by Major General Yumio Nasu. In reserve was the 16th Infantry, which Maruyama intended to use once Kawaguchi and Nasu had broken through.

The attack would begin just after sunset, following the scheduled aerial bombardment of the Americans.

October 23 seemed like a dull day to the fighter pilots on Henderson Field. The big enemy push was expected hourly, and yet the skies were free of red-balled aircraft. In the morning, Captain Joe Foss and a few other Wildcat pilots escorted a Catalina south toward Nouméa. Lieutenant General Thomas Holcomb, Commandant of the Marine Corps, was aboard. Holcomb had come to visit Vandegrift, and now, he and some other generals were flying down to confer with Admiral Halsey.

Foss and his comrades dipped their wings in farewell, and flew back to Henderson.

At noon they were hanging on their noses clawing for altitude.

Sixteen Japanese bombers were coming in, escorted by a few Zeros. The Wildcats closed. In the rear of the formation, Joe Foss took a last look around. High above, like a flight of silvery flying fish, he spotted about eighteen Zeros. They were coming down in a screaming dive. They flashed beneath him.

Foss dove to overtake them. A Wildcat crossed his course firing into a Zero trying desperately to escape. Another Zero was on the Wildcat’s tail. Foss swung in behind him. Only a few feet away, he pressed the button.

Ba—loom!

The enemy plane was gone. It had blown up with the vehemence characteristic of the Zero. Foss saw the pilot pop from his cockpit like a pea pressed from a pod. The motor went spinning into space, and Foss tore through an aerial dustbin of bits and pieces of aircraft. Below him, the plane’s wing section was sailing downward like a leaf.

Foss banked hard. He went after a Zero which went into a dive, pulling out and looping. Foss cut close inside, and the Zero went over on its back. Foss was upside-down, too, when he triggered a leading shot at the red-balled fighter and caught him in a terrible, converging burst.

His second kill had blown up.

Foss ducked again to avoid debris, and suddenly a Zero came from nowhere, slow-rolling as though in a victory celebration, and Foss’s plane again shook from the recoil of its wing guns. There was a disintegrating flash, and the pilot popped from his cockpit and nearly hit Foss’s plane.

Now there were two Zeros coming at Foss, one head-on, the other from an angle. Foss rushed at the first one. The planes drove toward each other with smoking guns. The Japanese swerved right, and Foss aimed a burst behind his motor. Streaming flames, the Zero came on—exploding off Foss’s right wing and rocking the Wildcat with the force of the blast.

Now Foss’s plane was smoking. The enemy had scored hits. Foss went over in a dive for home. A Zero came after him, overran, and Foss fired his last rounds at him in a useless burst. Another Zero raked him on a side pass. Foss radioed for help, and two Marine fliers came roaring over to shoot down both Zeros.

Foss reached the field safely, bringing in his fourth damaged plane since he had begun fighting from Henderson on October 10. One more shot-up Wildcat, he thought, and I’ll be a Japanese ace.² But he was already twice an American ace, with eleven aircraft downed in fourteen days.

Other newly made aces were rolling exultantly over the field, among them Lieutenant Jack Conger, a wiry gamecock who had chased a Zero all the way up to Savo before sending him down in flames. Of the twenty Zeros that came down to Guadalcanal that October 23, every one was destroyed. So was one bomber, while four others staggered home trailing smoke and flames.

Once again the Cactus Air Force had fought to save the ground troops, for Maruyama’s anticipated bombardment never came off.

Nor would his attack.

General Maruyama was beside himself. Shortly after the raid from Rabaul was repulsed, he was notified that General Kawaguchi had not yet reached his assembly area. He could not possibly attack at sunset. Maruyama had no alternative but to postpone his assault another day. He did, and then, in an icy rage, he telephoned Kawaguchi and relieved him of his command. Colonel Toshinaro Shoji took his place.

Next, Maruyama attempted to reach General Sumoyoshi to tell him to postpone the Matanikau thrust until sunset of October 24. He could not reach him. As happened so frequently to both sides in that moist, dissolving jungle, communications had broken down.

But Maruyama did reach Hyakutake, who quickly informed Yamamoto, who angrily sent his fleet tankers south and ordered Kondo’s force to withdraw for refueling.

Yamamoto was incensed. One carrier had already been lost because of delays, and here he was forced to withdraw his entire fleet from the target area. More, he was made uneasy by reports of growing American naval strength along the supply line to Guadalcanal. A patrol plane from the Gilbert Islands had sighted Enterprise steaming north, and a few days before that Hornet had been detected. Then, suddenly, like ghosts, the American carriers had vanished. What did it mean? Neither Yamamoto nor Chuichi Nagumo, both of whom carried the memory of Midway burned in their brains, could supply the answer. One thing Yamamoto knew, though: he would brook no more delays, and he informed Hyakutake of his displeasure.

Hyakutake contacted Maruyama again. There was no doubt: the attack would go forward at sunset of October 24. By early morning of October 25 Hyakutake should receive the message signaling capture of the airfield. It was one word: “Banzai!” Upon receipt of it, the Koli Detachment would be ordered to land to the east.

Meanwhile, Maruyama inquired, had he remembered to specify that when the American commander came to the mouth of the Matanikau to surrender, he must come unarmed and accompanied only by an interpreter?

The American commander was not on Guadalcanal.

The Catalina which Foss and his comrades had escorted south that morning of October 23 also carried Alexander Archer Vandegrift. Admiral Halsey had had the grace and the common sense to summon the ground commander to an important conference at Nouméa. Kelly Turner was there, too, along with Lieutenant General Holcomb, Major General Harmon, Major General Alexander Patch, commander of the U.S. Army’s Americal Infantry Division from which the 164th was drawn, and which was now scheduled to relieve the First Marine Division—when and if it was possible.

Halsey sat smoking while the others settled around a table. Then he asked Vandegrift to outline the situation. Vandegrift did. His soft, courteous voice was charged with urgency. The question was one of reinforcement of every kind. He needed more airplanes and the rest of the Americal Division and a regiment from the Second Marine Division, then enroute to the Pacific. His men were worn out. There were now seven hundred new cases of malaria a week.

Holcomb and Harmon spoke. They agreed, vigorously. Kelly Turner spoke. He was stung by the implied rebuke to his efforts. He rehearsed all of his attempts to supply the island, he said there were getting to be fewer transports and fewer warships to protect them. There were no sheltering bases at Guadalcanal. They still needed the seaplane base at Ndeni to provide aerial cover of the supply line. Solomons’ waters were too narrow for maneuver. Torpedo Junction swarmed with submarines.

Halsey heard him out, his knuckly fingers drumming the desk, his eyes thoughtful under the shaggy gray brows. Then he turned to Vandegrift.

“Are we going to evacuate or hold?”

“I can hold,” Archer Vandegrift said softly. “But I’ve got to have more active support than I’ve been getting.”

“All right,” Halsey said. “Go on back. I’ll promise you everything I’ve got.”³

Archer Vandegrift did go back, to find Guadalcanal ablaze with battle again.

In the United States Marine Corps there is a legend concerning the battle between Serapis and Bonhomme Richard. After the British commander summoned John Paul Jones to surrender, and after that doughty sailor had flung back his immortal, “I have just begun to fight,” it is said that one of the Marines[8] who had been fighting very briskly in the rigging looked down upon John Paul in disgust, and snorted: “There’s always some poor slob who doesn’t get the word.”

On the night of October 23 the unfortunate Major General Tadashi Sumoyoshi was one of those who did not get the word. Maruyama had not reached him to postpone his attack on the Matanikau, Hyakutake had not done so either, and Sumoyoshi was himself lying in his dugout in a malarial coma.

His attack went forward at six o’clock that night.

Once again Colonel Nakaguma’s Fourth Infantry was torn apart. Ten battalions of Marine artillery had registered their guns on the Matanikau mouth and the coastal track behind it, and they blew the massing Japanese apart with a howling hurricane of steel.

Then Sumoyoshi’s tanks burst from the cover of the jungle and went racing with spinning inner wheels toward the sandspit. One came, two came, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—and then the Marine gunners in dug-in half-tracks on the west bank decided that there were enough targets.

Wham! Brrranng! Ba—loom!

Seventy-five millimeter rifles smoked and recoiled, howitzers to the rear bucked and bellowed, 37-mm antitank guns spat out flat trajectories, everyone opened up—riflemen, machine-gunners, BAR-men, mortarmen—and in a single disintegrating outburst lasting at the most three minutes, they halted or blew apart all but one tank and sent bullets or shells into the backs of the crewmen who leaped from them to flee.

The surviving tank was the first one, carrying Captain Maeda, the tank commander. It came whizzing over the sandbar. It rolled over strands of barbed wire and crushed a pillbox and wheeled to its right to come clanking down on a foxhole occupied by Private Joe Champagne.

Champagne ducked. The tank rolled over his hole and paused, as though Captain Maeda was taking his bearings. Champagne pulled a grenade from his belt, stuck it in the tank tread, and pulled the pin while the tank resumed speed and clattered away.

Barrrooom!

Maeda’s tank sloughed around out of control. A Marine halftrack drove down to the sandbar. Its seventy-five flashed and Maeda’s tank shivered. It fired again. Flames gushed from the tank. Its ammunition locker had been hit, and it was blown twenty yards into the sea where it was finally finished off.

And now those massed battalions of American artillery were walking their fire back along the coastal road, raking the assembly area, knocking out three more tanks, and putting the dreadful seal of annihilation upon the Fourth Infantry Regiment of the Sendai Division.

Another 650 men had been killed, and in the dawn of October 24 Marines along the Matanikau heights could look down upon a silent sandbar clogged with broken, burned-out tanks and the bodies of the enemy. Nothing moved but the crocodiles swimming hungrily downstream.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ENTERPRISE had arrived in time to fight.

Guadalcanal’s tortuous terrain, General Maruyama’s overconfidence, his own and General Hyakutake’s failure to appreciate that plans possessing precision and power on paper often wobble and weaken in time and space—all these factors had conspired to grant the Americans the time they needed to double their carrier strength in the Pacific.

All these factors, and Vandegrift’s dauntless Marines; for even as Enterprise and her screen reached the rendezvous area 850 miles southeast of Guadalcanal at daybreak of that October 24, Admiral Kinkaid knew that the enemy’s latest attempt to seize Henderson Field had been repulsed. He knew also that the Marines were bracing for a far more furious attempt that night.

If they could hold again, could fight for just one more day’s grace, then perhaps Kinkaid’s ships would have the time to strike the enemy fleet.

And so, Enterprise and her escorts met the tanker Sabine, slipping two at a time to either side of the big fleet cow to fill their tanks with thick black oil. Later in the day, lookouts sighted the silhouettes of Hornet and her screen standing over the rim of the horizon with slow majesty. When they joined, Halsey had at sea two carriers, two battleships, nine cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers to oppose Admiral Yamamoto’s four flattops, five battleships, fourteen cruisers, and forty-four destroyers.

By three o’clock in the afternoon the American battleship group, Washington, three cruisers and seven destroyers commanded by Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee, had turned northwest to come up under Guadalcanal’s southern coast and patrol it, and the two carriers went racing northeast to intercept or trap the enemy.

Kinkaid’s orders were to take his ships north of the Santa Cruz Islands, which are almost due east of Guadalcanal, and then to turn them southwest to cut off the enemy fleet. With any luck, they might even get behind the suspecting Japanese to batter them beneath the waves as they had done at Midway.

Chuichi Nagumo sat in his cabin aboard flag carrier Shokaku. The marks of Midway seemed to have been etched deeper into his face. His skin was sallow and wrinkled and his hair was gray. Beside him on a table were the immaculate white gloves he always wore on deck. In his hands was a sheet of tabulated reports of enemy ship sightings.

“The enemy carriers have been missing for a week,” Nagumo muttered. “What does this mean?”¹

He called for his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Jinichi Kusaka.

“Any reports on enemy carriers?” he asked.

Kusaka shook his head, and Nagumo began musing aloud: “At Midway, the enemy struck us at a time of his choosing. Now, too, there is no doubt that the enemy pinpoints our position as if on a chessboard, but we are running blind…”²

There was a tense silence, broken by a staff officer suggesting that Nagumo wire Yamamoto for instructions. Nagumo remained silent, but Kusaka closed his eyes and dictated a message: “May I suggest halting our southward advance until we receive definite word that the Army has captured Guadalcanal airfields? There seems to be a possibility of our being trapped if we continue going like this.”³

After a long delay Nagumo received Yamamoto’s reply: “Your Striking Force will proceed quickly to the enemy direction. The operation orders stand, without change.”⁴

Nagumo snorted while Kusaka bit his lip. “All right,” Chuichi Nagumo said with a shrug, “start fueling the carriers.”⁵

One of the results of the Japanese debacle on the Matanikau the night of October 23 was that it confirmed the Marines’ belief that the major assault was to come from the west.

Roy Geiger, now a major general and in command during Vandegrift’s absence, moved to reinforce there. He pulled Colonel Hanneken’s battalion out of the line south of the airfield and sent it marching toward the Matanikau.

Now Chesty Puller’s battalion had an entire front of 2500 yards to defend.

Masao Maruyama spent the morning conferring with his officers at his headquarters at Centipede-Shaped Ridge. At noon, he issued the following order:

The Division has succeeded in reaching the rear flank of the enemy in absolute secrecy.

In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy around the airfield in one blow.

Both left and right will begin the charge at five o’clock and penetrate the enemy lines.

I will stay at present location until three o’clock and will then head for the airfield behind the left unit.⁶

It was Kiyono Ichiki and Kiyotake Kawaguchi all over again, except that neither of these supremely self-confident men had ever dashed off such a masterpiece of vague bravado as “In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy… in one blow.” His private plans locked in his breast, Masao Maruyama followed his left wing toward the jump-off point.

And the monsoon came down in a torrent.

Rain fell with the rattle of rifle-fire. In a single sodden minute the jungle was a streaming, swishing, gurgling swamp and the Sendai Division was segmented. Companies were lost, platoons were lost, squads were lost. Communications went out. And as the rain came steadily down, it became apparent that there would be no five o’clock attack.

Colonel Oka was still not in position.

The commander who had attacked very timidly and very tardily at the Matanikau a month ago under General Kawaguchi, was again dragging his feet under General Hyakutake. He did not cross the Matanikau upriver to come down behind the American battle position. He explained his failure with the message: “The Regiment endeavored to accomplish this objective of diverting the enemy, but they seemed to be planning a firm defense of this region.”

It was not true. The Marine position in the west ended on Hill 67, where its left flank was refused, that is bent back and left dangling in the jungle. General Hyakutake knew this and could not accept Oka’s alibi. He came up to the front personally and ordered Oka to get moving.

He did, and he moved too far.

Marines on top of Hill 67 spotted Japanese soldiers moving across a lower ridge to their left. They reported it to headquarters.

Geiger quickly diverted Hanneken’s men then marching west toward the Matanikau, sending them south instead to organize undefended high ground about a thousand yards east of the refused left flank.

Before they swung left, these Marines passed through the headquarters area. With cots and tents and clean clothing, it seemed to them a lotus-eater’s land, a place where troops dined on Spam and powdered eggs and canned fruit and other dishes that were veritable delicacies compared to frontline fare. So they helped themselves to what they saw, having no faith in a chain-of-supply which begins with the cow at headquarters and ends with the tail at the front.

In the platoon of machine guns led by hard-jawed Sergeant Mitchell Paige a small can of Spam and a large can of peaches were thus “procured.”

Paige’s men trudged on, confident of “living it up” tonight, because for some of them, as they suspected, there would be no tomorrow.

Chesty Puller was spreading himself thin, trying to cover the entire 2500-yard sector which fell to him after the withdrawal of Hanneken’s battalion. Every man in Puller’s battalion except the mortarmen was put into line.

They seized strands of wire marking a jeep-road to their rear and strung it by winding it around trees, adorning it with cans filled with stones and grenades with half-pulled pins.

Throughout the morning and afternoon Puller roved his lines, chomping on his cold stump of pipe, removing it to bellow orders (“We don’t need no communications system,” his men boasted, “we got Chesty!”), or speaking through teeth clamped firmly around the stem. Puller’s manner was urgent because a young Marine who had fallen behind a patrol that morning had seen Japanese officers studying his position through field glasses. Puller urged his men to dig deeper, but when he came to one position he pulled his pipe from his mouth, pointed at the hole with it, and grunted, “Son, if you dig that hole any deeper Ah’ll have to charge you with desertion.”⁷

The Marine grinned, and Puller strode on, pleased to see that Manila John Basilone had fortified his pair of machine guns almost in the exact center of the line.

Colonel Puller returned to his “command post”—a field telephone hardly ten yards behind his lines—to repeat his request for permission to withdraw his outpost platoon. He was convinced that the enemy was coming, and he feared that the forty men on outpost would be needlessly sacrificed. But his arguments—generally couched in ungentle roars—were unavailing. The men stayed outside the line.

Finally, Puller had all of the field phones opened so that every company and platoon could hear every message.

And then the rains came down.

At seven o’clock that night the rains slackened. Sergeant Mitchell Paige crawled forward on the nose of the ridge which his section was to defend. It was dark. Paige felt about with his hands, hunting for a good position.

“Here,” he called softly. “Put the guns here.”

They moved with silent swiftness. Gunners with their 53-pound tripods, assistants with their 33-pound guns, ammunition carriers with 19-pound boxed belts in each hand, all burdened with their own weapons and equipment, they slipped forward without as much as the chink of gun pintle entering tripod socket.

“Chow time,” Paige whispered. “Where’s the chow?”⁸

The can of Spam was present but the can of peaches was absent without leave. Its bearer mumbled incoherently about its having slipped from his grasp to roll down the ridge. Paige hissed sharp guttural uncomplimentaries in the delinquent’s direction, and then he opened the Spam with his bayonet, tearing the thick soft meat into hunks and pressing it into outstretched hands.

They ate.

They sat hunched by their guns. It began to rain again. At midnight, the men on watch heard the sound of firing far to their left.

It was only about seven o’clock before General Maruyama’s commanders were able to bring any semblance of order out of the confusion caused by the rain. Over on the right wing, where Kawaguchi’s failure to cope with the terrain had cost him his command, Colonel Shoji, his successor, was also behind schedule. Shoji had also not reached his jump-off point.

Impatient, Maruyama ordered the left wing to attack.

Colonel Masajiro Furumiya took the 29th Infantry forward, and a few minutes later they were flowing around Colonel Puller’s outpost.

Sergeant Ralph Briggs and his men on outpost hugged the ground, while Briggs rang up Colonel Puller’s command post.

“Colonel,” he said softly, “there’s about three thousand Japs between you and me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. They’ve been all around us, singing and smoking cigarettes, heading your way.”

“All right, Briggs, but make damned sure. Take your men to the left—understand me? Go down and pass through the lines near the sea. I’ll call ’em to let you in. Don’t fail, and don’t go in any other direction. I’ll hold my fire as long as I can.”

“Yes, sir,” Briggs said, and hung up.⁹

Then the sergeant and his men began crawling slowly on their bellies to the left. All but four of them, whom the Japanese caught and killed.

At eleven o’clock it began to rain heavily again, and the Japanese came hurtling against Puller’s Marines.

Once again they were screaming:

“Blood for the Emperor!”

“Marine, you die!”

Once again the foulmouthed raggedy-tailed defenders of democracy were bellowing:

“To hell with your goddamed Emperor! Blood for Franklin and Eleanor!”¹⁰

The Japanese were charging by the thousands, so many of them that the sodden ground shook beneath their feet. They hit the barbed wire even as Marine guns erupted in a bedlam of firing.

Japanese fell on the wire, others hurled themselves upon it while their comrades used their bodies as bridges.

Colonel Furumiya was at the head of his troops, shouting and waving his saber. He led the color company—the 7th—through a break in the American wire and went racing with them toward the enemy’s guns.

Inspired by the breakthrough, willing to follow their colors into hell, the Japanese soldiers flowed toward the gap.

But the Marines closed it. Colonel Furumiya and the color company were cut off from the rest of the regiment.

Now the attack was veering toward dead center. The Japanese hordes were rushing at Manila John Basilone’s machine guns. They came tumbling down an incline, and Basilone’s gunners raked them at full-trigger. They were pouring out five hundred rounds a minute, the gun barrels were red and sizzling inside their water jackets—and the precious water was evaporating swiftly.

“Piss in ’em, piss in ’em!” Basilone yelled, and some of the men jumped up to refill the jackets with a different liquid.

The guns stuttered on, tumbling the onrushing Japanese down the incline, piling them up so high that by the time the first enemy flood had begun to ebb and flow back into the jungle, they had blocked Basilone’s field of fire. In the lull Manila John ordered his men out to push the bodies away and clear the fire lanes.

Then he ducked out of the pit to run for more ammunition. He ran barefooted, the mud squishing between his toes. He ran into Puller’s CP and ran back again burdened with spare barrels and half a dozen fourteen-pound belts slung over his shoulders.

As he did, Furumiya’s men drifted west. They overran the guns to Basilone’s right. They stabbed two Marines to death and wounded three others. They tried to swing the big Brownings on the Americans, but they only jammed them. They left the pit and drove farther to the rear.

Basilone returned to his pit just as a runner dashed up gasping:

“They’ve got the guys on the right.”

Basilone raced to his right. He ran past a barefoot private named Evans and called “Chicken” for his tender eighteen years. “C’mon, you yellow bastards!” Chicken screamed, firing and bolting his rifle, firing and reloading. Basilone ran on to the empty pit, jumped in, found the guns jammed, and sprinted back to his own pit.

Seizing a mounted machine gun, Basilone spread-eagled it across his back, shouted at half of his men to follow him—and was gone. A squad of men took off in pursuit. They caught Basilone at a bend in the trail, and blundered into a half-dozen Japanese soldiers. They killed them and ran on.

Then they were inside the silent pit, firing the gun which Basilone had brought, while Manila John lay on his back in the mud working frantically to free the jammed guns.

Beyond the wire in the covering jungle, the Sendai were massing for another charge.

Submarine Amberjack had nearly reached Guadalcanal.

Inside her sausage-shaped belly were nine thousand gallons of aviation gasoline destined for Henderson Field tanks that were again nearly bone-dry. She also carried two hundred 100-pound bombs. She had departed Espiritu Santo more than two days ago, and now, sliding along at her top submerged speed, she expected to make Lunga Point by daybreak.

But then her orders were changed. From Guadalcanal came instructions to put in at Tulagi with her cargo. Henderson Field was under major attack, the issue was in doubt, and it would be foolish to make the enemy a gift of the gasoline.

Chesty Puller called Colonel del Valle to request all the artillery support possible.

“I’ll give you all you call for, Puller,” del Valle grunted. “But God knows what’ll happen when the ammo we have is gone.”

“If we don’t need it now, we’ll never need it. If they get through here tonight there won’t be a tomorrow.”

“She’s yours as long as she lasts.”¹¹

Both men hung up and the Marine artillery began glowing red again.

“Colonel,” Captain Regan Fuller said over the telephone to Puller, “I’m just about running out of ammo. I’ve used almost three and a half units of fire.”

“You got bayonets, haven’t you?” Colonel Puller asked.

“Sure. Yes, sir.”

“All right, then. Hang on.”¹²

It was half past one in the morning and the Sendai were coming again, there was a white breath around the muzzles of the Marine 105s, and Manila John Basilone had his guns fixed.

Basilone rolled from gun to gun, firing, exhausting first one belt and then another, while his men worked wildly to scrape the mud from cartridges that had been dragged along soggy trails. And the Sendai rolled forward in even greater strength, with both wings charging, now, punching holes in the Marine lines, forcing General Geiger in the rear to counter with his reserve, and leading General Maruyama to radio the one signal that all Japan was waiting for:

“Banzai!”

General Hyakutake heard it with elation back in Kukumbona and he relayed it north to Admiral Gunichi Mikawa in Rabaul. Mikawa immediately ordered three large destroyers carrying the Koli Detachment to land these troops on eastern Guadalcanal as scheduled.

And Combined Fleet’s carriers turned south again.

Some time after two o’clock in the morning of Sunday, October 25, Sergeant Mitchell Paige and his men heard firing to their right.

A band of Colonel Oka’s soldiers had slipped through the draw between Paige and Hill 67 and had overwhelmed an outpost.

Paige slipped forward on his ridge. He heard mumbling below him. He pulled the pin of a hand grenade and heaved the bomb into the jungle. His men pulled their pins and handed Paige their grenades, and he threw these bombs, too.

There were flashes and screams.

But no one came.

At half past three General Maruyama hurled his third charge at the Americans—and this time his men heard for the first time the eight-round semiautomatic firing of Garand rifles in the hands of American soldiers.

The 164th Infantry was in action.

General Geiger had fed its Third Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall into the battle. Hall’s soldiers marched from their bivouac behind the Tenaru to the front, sloshing through the streaming darkness guided by a Navy chaplain, Father Keough, the only man at headquarters who knew the way. Puller went to meet them.

“Here they are, Colonel,” Keough called, and Puller shook his hand, grunting: “Father, we can use ’em.” Then he turned to Hall: “Colonel, I’m glad to see you. I don’t know who’s senior to who right now, and I don’t give a damn. I’ll be in command until daylight, at least, because I know what’s going on here, and you don’t.”

“That’s fine with me,” Hall said, and Puller continued:

“I’m going to drop ’em off along this road, and send in a few to each platoon position. I want you to make it clear to your people that my men, even if they’re only sergeants, will command in those holes when your officers and men arrive.”

“I understand you,” Hall said. “Let’s go.”¹³

They went. The soldiers went into the fight, sometimes having to be guided in by hand, in that slippery darkness, and they too, held, when the Sendai came flowing toward its third futile attempt to annihilate the Americans.

By seven o’clock in the morning, the Sendai had stopped coming.

Nearly a thousand of them had stopped living. They lay in sodden heaps outside and partly within the American wire. One column of Japanese dead lay opposite Captain Fuller’s antitank guns. They were in perfect formation, each man laying halfway atop the man in front of him—felled in a single scything sweep like a row of wooden soldiers.

Within the jungle, General Maruyama beheld his survivors: bands of dazed and hollow-eyed men stumbling woodenly back to their assembly areas. Nowhere could Maruyama find Colonel Furumiya. Obviously, the airfield was still American.

Masao Maruyama got off a message to General Hyakutake indicating that he was “having difficulty” capturing the field.

And then Dugout Sunday began.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

OCTOBER 25 was to be known as Dugout Sunday because most Americans on Guadalcanal sat out that reverberating sabbath below ground.

It was set in motion by Masao Maruyama’s premature paean of victory. By the time he had retracted it and admitted that Henderson Field was still in enemy hands, Admiral Mikawa had sent the Koli Detachment destroyers speeding down The Slot, while cruiser Yura and five destroyers went sweeping to the north to come around Florida Island and bombard Koli Point.

Flights of Bettys were bombed-up and fueled at Rabaul, and escorting Zeros at Buka and Buin stood at the ready with idly spinning propellers.

Admiral Yamamoto had also been electrified by Maruyama’s “Banzai!” He had ordered carrier Junyo under Admiral Kakuta to fly off planes to land on the airfield, notified Nagumo’s carriers to move south, and alerted Kondo’s battleships to steam south to destroy Admiral Lee’s battleship force and chew up the American supply line.

Then came the message suggesting that the airfield was not quite captured—to be followed in the afternoon by an outright admission of defeat—and the angrily perplexed Yamamoto ordered Kakuta to fly off bombing strikes instead, canceled the battleship attack, and left Nagumo more bewildered than ever.

And so, the Koli Detachment ships opened Dugout Sunday services, to the dismay of a very attentive audience in submarine Amberjack.

Amberjack entered Iron Bottom Bay at about daybreak. Her periscope lookouts could see the old four-stack destroyers Trever and Zane steaming out of Tulagi Harbor, to which they, too, had brought gasoline. Fleet-tug Seminole was moving slowly toward Lunga Point, carrying, of course, a load of gasoline for Henderson Field.

Amberjack’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander J. A. Bole, decided that Iron Bottom Bay was getting congested. He reversed course.

Thirty minutes later his periscope displayed three big Japanese destroyers racing into the Bay, hull-down, shelling Marine positions as they came. They were Akatsuki, Ikazuchi, and Shiratsuyo, and they carried the men of the Koli Detachment.

Amberjack could not risk her cargo by entering battle. She could do only one thing: she went down.

As she did, the Japanese destroyers spotted little Trever and Zane. They broke out battle signals, rang up flank speed, and swung around to a collision course with all guns firing. Trever and Zane fled, firing back with their little three-inchers. A Japanese shell exploded on Trever’s after gun, demolishing it and its crew. Trever swerved hard left and then right again, and ran into the shoals of a channel between Savo and Florida. Zane followed. Both these ancients were now rattling along at twenty-nine knots. Trever’s No. 2 boiler casing burned through. The Japanese closed.

And then three Wildcats came screaming down from the skies. They had somehow managed to take off from sodden, soupy Fighter One—their wheels throwing out arcs of spray as they thundered along, spinning as they rose—and then they were airborne and saw the enemy below about to finish off Trever and Zane. They had no bombs, only bullets, but they turned the Japanese destroyers around and sent them fleeing west.

Right into Seminole and Yippie 284 making with agonizing slowness for the sanctuary of Tulagi Harbor.

Akatsuki, Ikazuchi, and Shiratsuyo nearly rammed the little Americans, they were so close—and at point-blank range they needed only two minutes to put the Yippie under and turn Seminole into a floating holocaust.

Then the Japanese were in trouble. Marines with five-inch naval rifles opened up from Guadalcanal. They scored hits. Smoke poured skyward from the destroyers. Putting out smoke of their own to screen themselves, the Koli Detachment destroyers fled up The Slot.

Meanwhile, Yura and her five destroyers still swept around Florida. They intended to come around the island’s eastern tip, and swing south toward Koli Point. But an unarmed search plane spotted them as they approached Florida. At the Pagoda on Henderson Field, Yura and her steel brood were marked for action—once the field had dried.

Dugout Sunday was turning hot and clear.

Far to the north, Chuichi Nagumo’s ships were still taking on oil.

Nagumo was dozing in his cabin, when an orderly dashed in with a message from a patrol plane:

“I have shot down an enemy plane, apparently a scout.”¹

Nagumo leaped erect, shouting:

“Cut refueling! Turn the carriers around and head north!”²

Both the Nagumo trio of carriers and Admiral Kakuta in Junyo turned about and headed north at twenty knots.

Chuichi Nagumo had failed to turn his carriers away at Midway; but he was not going to make the same mistake at Guadalcanal.

The sun which warmed sailors of both fleets quickly dried the moldy uniforms of Chesty Puller’s soldiers and Marines at work refortifying their positions for the anticipated renewal of battle that night. By mid-morning, the sun was blistering hot. Its scorching rays shone with dissolving intensity upon the corpses lying outside the lines beneath buzzing, conical swarms of black flies. Already, these bodies were beginning to turn lemon yellow, to swell and burst like overripe melons; already the sticky-sweet smell of corrupting flesh rose sickening and overpowering in the nostrils of these sweating Americans.

At Henderson Field, ready pilots kept glancing nervously between the quickly drying airfield and the blue skies overhead, where carrier Zeros circled unmolested, radioing the good news to Rabaul that the deadly Wildcats were up to their hubcaps in mud and would not be airborne that day.

But the Japanese, also contending with bad weather, were not able to respond quickly. By the time sixteen Bettys and escorting Zeros came roaring in, Henderson Field had dried sufficiently to allow the Wildcats to scramble aloft. Captain Joe Foss and Lieutenant Jack Conger were among those who struck at the enemy formation. Foss shot down two of three Zeros destroyed in a flight of six. But then, his fifth plane riddled beneath him, he was forced to go down for another one. Going up again, he tore into the Zeros escorting a fresh contingent of enemy bombers. He shot down two more—and he dove for home with fifteen kills to his credit during the sixteen days he had been on Guadalcanal.

Jack Conger also shot down a Zero in the second attack. Banking, he went thundering after another. He pressed the gun button. No response. He was out of ammunition. Undaunted, Conger still flew at the Zero. He hung on his nose and brought his propeller under the enemy’s tail. The Zero swerved, and broke in two.

Now Conger’s plane was going over in a vertical dive. He fought wildly to bring it out. It still fell. Conger strained at his escape hatch. He could see Iron Bottom Bay rising up toward him, growing larger. It was as though a great steel-gray griddle had been catapulted upward, flying up, up, and up, expanding until it was a monstrous obliterating roundness. Conger struggled with the hatch. He thought he would never get out, that the huge griddle would shatter him, and then, at 150 feet, he was out in the air, his parachute was blooming overhead, and he was into the griddle, his body jarred as though he had been slammed on the soles of his feet with an iron bar.

Just before he went under, Conger saw his Wildcat crash in the coconuts. Then he was going down deep, only to have his swift descent arrested by his rigging. He surfaced, treading water, slashing with a knife at the smothering shroud of the parachute. Twenty feet away another pilot floated gently down into the water.

He was Japanese.

A rescue boat sped toward Conger. It reached him and reduced speed. Conger was hauled aboard. Then the boat came about and headed for the Japanese pilot. Conger called to him to surrender. The Japanese pilot held his breath and sank out of sight. He came up beside the boat, kicked at it, and tried to shove himself away. Conger grabbed a boathook and snared the man by his jacket. The man struggled, snarling with hate. Conger leaned forward to boat him. The Japanese dug his hand under his armpit and whipped out a huge Mauser pistol. His malevolent eyes only inches from Conger’s startled ones, he pressed the pistol to his benefactor’s temple and pulled the trigger.

Click!

Conger tumbled backward, thinking: I’m dead! He was not, nor was his enemy who, failing to return death for life, attempted to take his own by placing the pistol to his own head, producing only a second exasperating click. Conger seized a water can and slammed it down on the man’s head. Unconscious, he was dragged into the boat and taken to Guadalcanal.

Where the two enemies became good friends.

Mitchell Paige’s men had found their peaches. Dugout Sunday’s sun had picked it out in the jungle beside the ridge. The moment the men had seen it glinting there, like a lost jewel, they whooped and went scrambling down to retrieve it. Men with American names—Leiphart, Stat, Pettyjohn, Gaston, Lock, McNabb, Swanek, Reilly, Totman, Kelly, Jonjeck, Grant, Payne, Hinson—they squatted on their haunches in the drying mud and ate with great relish the only food they would get that day.

Then they dove for their foxholes, for Admiral Kakuta’s Junyo had turned south again and her dive-bombers and Zeros were overhead.

To the east, almost exactly between Chesty Puller’s position on the left and Paige’s ridge on the right, Lucky and Juergens squatted on a ridgetop talking. They, too, heard the sound of motors—and almost too late.

A Zero came skimming down their ridge like a skier. They sprawled flat, bullets spurting dust around them. The Zero thundered over them and banked. Juergens dove into his dugout and dragged out his machine gun. He began setting it up, cursing. Lucky ran toward him. But the enemy fighter-plane was coming in to strafe again, and Juergens went sprawling again while Lucky whirled and ran for the edge of the ridge. The Zero pursued, roaring, spitting bullets, shedding tinkling cartridge cases. Lucky jumped and fell six feet, rolling down the hillside while the Zero went roaring out over the jungle roof. Then he scrambled back up the ridge and ran to squat beside Juergens.

Again, the Zero turned and made for the ridge.

“C’mon, you son of a bitch,” Juergens swore. “You won’t find it so easy this time.”³

In came the enemy plane, again spitting bullets, and the Marine gun was hammering its reply—and then a pair of Airacobras rose like genies from Henderson Field to the rear, catching the unsuspecting Zero full in their cannon sights and blasting him into a shower of debris.

One more of a total of twenty-six Japanese planes had fallen to Henderson’s fliers—while out beyond Florida Island Henderson’s bombers had caught Yura and were pounding her beneath the waves.

Before sunset the Japanese cruiser was a wreck. Naval and Marine dive-bombers had flown four attacks against her, Flying Fortresses had come up from Espiritu to multiply her wounds—and she was finally abandoned and sunk by her own destroyer, Yudachi. Destroyer Akizuke was also racked, and had to be beached on Santa Isabel Island. Her four sisters fled.

Dugout Sunday had seen the complete rout of the attempt to put the Koli Detachment ashore on eastern Guadalcanal.

It was not Sunday but Saturday in the United States. On the East Coast it was a sunny autumn afternoon. Football crowds flocked to the stadiums along sidewalks bordered by yellowing maples. In Washington the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in session. One of the first matters to be discussed was a message from the Commander-in-Chief. It said:

“My anxiety about the Southwest Pacific is to make sure that every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal, and that having held it in this crisis that munitions and planes and crews are on the way to take advantage of our success.”⁴

President Roosevelt had taken a direct hand. But he had taken it on the very day on which a vast concourse of ships and men had departed East Coast ports bound for North Africa.

Even though Roosevelt requested the Joint Chiefs to canvass the entire armaments situation over the weekend, even though Admiral King might be pleased that the White House was now so concerned over Guadalcanal, all of the Joint Chiefs realized that there was at that moment very little to be spared for the South Pacific.

And by nightfall there would be one valuable ship less.

President Coolidge was sliding into Segond Channel at Espiritu Santo. The big Army transport carried the 172nd Infantry Regiment of the 43rd Division. Her civilian skipper kept her straight on course toward a minefield. Patrol craft signaled desperately, shore blinkers winked wildly—but Coolidge sailed on.

Then she blundered into two mines and began to sink. She went down slowly; all but two men were rescued. But the 172nd’s guns and gear were gone, together with the ship that was to have taken them to Guadalcanal.

Admiral Nagumo’s turnaround and run north had widened the gap between his fleet and Admiral Kinkaid’s carriers. By midday of Dugout Sunday Hornet and Enterprise were west of the Santa Cruz Islands and about 360 miles southeast of Nagumo.

Kinkaid was uncertain of the enemy’s position. A Catalina had detected Nagumo’s ships at noon, moving southeast again, but had lost them in a squall. Rather than await the enemy’s pleasure, Kinkaid decided to launch both searching and striking flights from Enterprise.

They found nothing. When planes of the strike returned after dark, the first one crashed on the flight deck and six others were lost in the water.

It was a bad beginning.

Masao Maruyama did not think that a poor start necessarily presaged a bad finish.

At Centipede-Shaped Ridge that afternoon he called for a “final death-defying night attack.” He was committing the 16th Infantry, led by Colonel Hitoshi Hiroyasu, to replace the slaughtered 29th. Both his wings were in place. Colonel Shoji on the right was at last in position. On the left, Major General Nasu was prepared to lead the charge, just as Colonel Furumiya had done the night before.

General Maruyama was sorrowful over the loss of Furumiya. It had been because of him that he had ordered his second and third attacks. Commander of the proud Sendai, Maruyama could not turn his back on an officer who had carried a Rising Sun banner into enemy lines.⁵ Even today he had sent out search parties for the colonel. They had not found him, and Maruyama reluctantly concluded that Furumiya was dead.

He was not.

Colonel Furumiya, Captain Suzuki, and seven others had survived the Americans’ systematic slaughter of the Seventh Company. Throughout Dugout Sunday they lay in the undergrowth within enemy lines, their bodies draped with leaves and vines. American patrols passed them but did not see them.

Like Colonel Ichiki before him, Colonel Furumiya thought of burning his colors and committing ceremonial suicide before the smoke. But the smoke might attract attention and bring the Americans to capture the colors before they were completely destroyed. To lose the regimental flag was unthinkable. Although the 29th Infantry may have been zemmetsu so far as its officers and men were concerned, it lived while its flag remained unviolated. To lose that flag was to lose the 29th’s honor. Annihilation in battle was a thousand times more preferable to such disgrace. This was why, according to many historians, the great General Maresuke Nogi committed suicide after the Emperor Meiji had died: he was expressing his apology for having lost his battalion colors during the Satsuma Rebellion. No, the flag, the very esprit de corps of the Japanese Army, could not be risked.

So Colonel Furumiya thought of escape instead. He sent Lieutenant Ono and two soldiers to look for a way out. They did not return, and Warrant Officer Kobayashi went to look for them. He, too, vanished.

Peering from his thorny hideout, Furumiya watched the Americans digging in. He made notes on their defenses, observing that their machine-gun positions were about fifty yards apart and that no one seemed to be manning them. From this he concluded that the guns were fired by remote control.

Colonel Furumiya also observed that the enemy seemed to be cheerful. Some of them even sang as they worked.

It was thus that Marine mortarmen sang of their stovepipes, those harmless-looking tubes that shoot straight up and down and kill men, and it was thus that Chesty Puller’s mortarmen were singing while they stacked up piles of shamrock-shaped triple shell casings.

Mortar shells were the only supplies which Puller had been able to get to his lines on Dugout Sunday. All of the aerial fighting, naval shelling, and the constant pounding of Pistol Pete had made movement difficult. Nevertheless, Puller was better prepared than on the previous night, having been able to shorten his front while the 3rd Battalion, 164th Infantry, took over the leftward sector he had held. On the soldiers’ left were their comrades of the 2nd Battalion, 164th.

Puller was confident, and he and his headquarters troops could hoot and jeer in derision at the English voice over Radio Tokyo which was announcing their defeat and impending demise. The fact that it was now the football season in America was not lost on the commentator, who simulated a sportscaster’s staccato, and said:

“The score stands—U.S. Navy, 0; Japan, 21—with the Japanese deep in American territory, ten yards to go. Coach Roosevelt passes up and down chain-smoking cigarettes. A pass is knocked down. America calls time out and Ghormley is pulled from the game. The Rising Sun cheers loudly for Coach Tojo. Roosevelt sends in Halsey to call signals. Another pass is called, but the ball is fumbled on the one-yard line, and the heavy favorites, the U.S., are in a bad way as the gun signals the end of the first half.”⁶

And then it was dark: Colonel Furumiya lay in the bushes waiting for the attack that would rescue them, the American soldiers and Marines braced behind their guns, and the Sendai came flowing out of the jungle in the heaviest of all Guadalcanal’s charges.

“U.S. Marine you going die tonight,” they chanted, “U.S. Marine you going die tonight.”

They were greeted by the customary volleys of obscenity, particularly from American soldiers, against whom the charge was breaking with equal fury, and who were enraged that the enemy should, just like the Stateside newspapers, give all the credit to the Marines.

So the Sendai charged, and American mortars fell among them, artillery shells flashed in the assembly areas, bullets riddled them—and they were cut in two before they reached the wire. It was not a charge, this frenzied rush to destruction, it was a mere death-swarming. They flowed into American steel like moths into flame. Without artillery preparation of their own and without adequate maps or knowledge of the enemy’s position, with arrogant confidence in the superiority of “spiritual power” over firepower and a vaingloriously suicidal determination to look upon death before defeat, Maruyama and his officers sent the Emperor’s best division into a holocaust.

General Nasu was killed, Colonel Hiroyasu was killed, four battalion commanders fell, half of the Sendai’s officers perished, and another thousand men were destroyed.

And still the Sendai Division charged.

Colonel Oka was at last attacking.

His men struck hard at the ridge held by Sergeant Paige’s section.

The Japanese came screeching up the hillside full into Paige’s guns spitting orange flame a foot beyond their flash-hiders. Short shapes fell, but more came swarming in. It was hand-to-hand. Paige saw little Leiphart down on one knee fighting off three attackers. Paige shot two of them. The third killed Leiphart with a bayonet, but Paige killed the killer. Pettyjohn’s gun was knocked out. Gaston fought a Japanese officer, parrying saber swings with his rifle, until the rifle was hacked to pieces. Then Gaston kicked at the blade. Unaware that part of his leg was cut away, he kicked high—and caught the officer under the chin and broke his neck.

All over the ridge the short shapes and the tall shapes flowed, merged, struggled, parted, sank to the ground or rolled down the slopes. Everywhere were the American voices crying, “Killl! Killl!” the gurgling whoops of the Japanese shouting, “Bonnn—za—ee!” or screaming “Marine you die!”

Then the short shapes flowed back down the ridge, and Mitchell Paige ran to fix Pettyjohn’s disabled gun. He pried out a ruptured cartridge and slipped in a fresh belt of ammunition, just as a burst from a Japanese machine gun seared his hand.

Yelling again, the short shapes came bowling up the hill once more. They could not force the left, where Grant, Payne, and Hinson still held out, though all were wounded. In Paige’s center they hit Lock, Swanek, and McNabb. They moved through the gap. Paige dashed to his right to find a gun to stop them. He found Kelly and Totman beside their gun, protected by a squad of riflemen. He ordered the riflemen to fix bayonets, and led them on a charge that drove the Japanese back. Then he set up the gun in the center and fired it until dawn.

As daylight came creeping over the jungle roof to his left, he saw one of his platoon’s machine guns standing unattended on the forward nose of the ridge. Three men in mushroom helmets were crawling toward it. Paige rose and ran forward.…

It had been a warm night at sea.

Aboard flag carrier Shokaku all seemed calm, until the silence was shattered by the ringing of alarms and voices crying “Air raid! Air raid!”

One of Admiral Nagumo’s staff officers dashed for the bridge. He saw two Catalinas come gliding down toward Zuikaku about three miles astern. Four plumes of water rose into the air to starboard of Zuikaku. The officer held his breath. Then the plumes flowed back into the sea and Zuikaku sailed on unruffled.

The officer tumbled down the ladder and raced into Admiral Nagumo’s cabin to report. Admiral Kusaka was there. Both admirals looked at each other, to say with one voice: “Let’s turn around.”⁷

On the bridge of his destroyer Amatsukaze—the ship whose men made such cruel sport with rats and falcons—Commander Tameichi Hara saw Shokaku blink the signal: “All ships turn 180 degrees to starboard!”

Nagumo’s carriers were swinging north again, fearing a concentrated air raid which never came. But this second turnaround would work to their advantage. With dawn of October 26 they would not be where Admiral Kinkaid expected them to be.

With that dawn of October 26, while Sergeant Mitchell Paige raced the enemy for a machine gun, an enemy force in company strength captured a vital ridge between Paige and Puller. They set up machine guns on it and began raking the Marine flank.

Major Odell (Tex) Conoley could see vapor rising from the enemy guns as the jungle water on the barrels was condensed by hot steel. Conoley saw that the enemy’s penetration could be expanded to a breakthrough. He rounded up a party of bandsmen who were serving as litter-bearers, a trio of wiremen, two runners, and three or four cooks, and charged.

There were seventeen of them in all, but they went up hurling grenades and they drove the Japanese off the ridge. Then Conoley called for mortars to lay a curtain of steel between him and the enemy while he consolidated his position, and awaited reinforcements.

They arrived to be greeted by a strutting cook who boasted of having brained an enemy officer.

“What’dja do?” a rifleman jeered. “Hit him with one of yer own pancakes?”

…Mitchell Paige reached the gun first.

He dove for it, squeezed the trigger, and killed the crawling Japanese.

A storm of bullets fell on Paige, kicking up spurts of dust. Paige fired back. Stat, Reilly, and Jonjeck ran to him with belts of ammunition. Stat fell with a bullet in his belly. Reilly went down kicking, almost knocking Paige off his gun, and Jonjeck came in with a belt and a bullet in his shoulder. Jonjeck bent to feed the belt into the gun, and Paige saw a piece of flesh go flying off his neck.

“Get the hell back!” Paige yelled.

Jonjeck shook his head. Paige hit him in the jaw, and Jonjeck left.

Paige moved the gun back and forth to avoid enemy grenades. He saw about thirty men rise in the tall grass below him. One of them put binoculars to his eyes and waved his hand for a charge.

Paige fired a long burst.

The enemy vanished.

Paige called to his riflemen. He slung two belts of ammunition across his shoulders, unclamped his gun, cradled the searing-hot water jacket in his arm, and went down the ridge yelling, “Let’s go!”

“Ya-hoo!” the Marines yelled. “Yaaaa-ho!”

And they went racing down the hill after the dispersing enemy. The officer with the glasses popped up out of the grass and Paige disemboweled him with a burst, and then he and his Marines had burst into the jungle.

It was silent and empty.

The enemy was gone. The battle of Henderson Field was over. General Maruyama had already ordered a full retreat. Colonel Shoji was taking the remnant of the Sendai right wing to the east, Maruyama was leading the reeling left wing to the west. Marine bulldozers were already clanking toward the front to gouge out mass graves in which to inter the reeking carcasses of 2500 dead, Colonel Furumiya and his companions lay despairing in the bush, and Mitchell Paige and his men were trudging slowly back to the ridge.

They sat down wearily. Paige felt the sweat drying coldly on his body. He watched vapor rising from his machine-gun jacket. He felt a burning sensation in his left arm. He looked down. From fingertips to forearm a long white blister was forming, swelling as thick as a rope to mark the place where flesh had held hot steel.

Out in the Bay behind him, submarine Amberjack had at last surfaced, had finally delivered her cargo of fuel, and was now sailing eagerly away to Australia.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

BATTLES on land, sometimes entire campaigns, often have depended upon the outcome of a naval battle; but seldom has a great fight been fought at sea because of what happened ashore.

Yet, the battle of Henderson Field was directly responsible for the savage carrier conflict called The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

Successive postponements of the 17th Army’s major assault on Guadalcanal had not only cost the Japanese the services of carrier Hiyo but had given the Americans time to double their carrier forces; and carrier power varies as the square: two carriers are four times as powerful as one. General Maruyama’s premature message of victory had also left Admiral Yamamoto teetering on a tightrope of indecision and had very nearly sent his carriers tearing into the trap which Admiral Halsey had planned for them.

But Admiral Nagumo’s two turnarounds had kept him well north of Hornet and Enterprise as they slanted northwestward from their run around the Santa Cruz Islands. Throughout the night of October 25–26, while the Sendai Division made rendezvous with ruin, the two American flattops raced along an aggressive northwestward course toward the enemy. Hornet had a deckload of aircraft ready for a moonlight strike, all of the ships were alerted for immediate action—but the Japanese carriers were never found.

Nagumo had been frightened into his second and most fortuitous turnaround by the fruitless attack on Zuikaku. After he had reversed course, the Vanguard Group of battleships and cruisers had also turned north.

Shortly before three o’clock in the morning of October 26, thirteen scouts went zooming aloft from the Japanese carrier decks. A few minutes later the entire fleet—Vanguard gunfire ships, Nagumo’s three carriers, and Admiral Kakuta in Junyo about 130 miles to the north—turned south again.

About five o’clock on the bridge of Amatsukaze Commander Hara heard his radio-room voice tube come to life with the message: “Shokaku scout plane reports a large enemy force at KH17. Force consists of one Saratoga-class carrier and fifteen other ships heading northwestward.”¹ Commander Hara gasped. KH17 was an area 210 miles away on a bearing slightly to the left. The Americans were not directly ahead, or even to the right between the Japanese and the Solomons, as Nagumo’s officers expected. They were to the left. Without those two turnarounds and runs north, the Japanese would have been far to the south and the Americans would have been in behind them.

On Shokaku’s flag bridge, the white-gloved Nagumo grinned broadly. He ordered immediate strikes. Planes began roaring down the decks. To the rear, Admiral Kakuta grimaced angrily to discover the enemy was 330 miles away. He rang up top speed and big Junyo’s boilers built her speed to twenty-six knots in a record ten minutes. Junyo even sprang ahead of her destroyers, much to their astonishment, while Kakuta ordered a strike readied. Although he was far away from the enemy, his pilots could return to the closer Zuikaku or Shokaku. And by the time he was prepared to launch a second strike, he would be much closer.

Ahead of him, forty dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers escorted by twenty-seven Zeros were airborne and burning up the miles between Nagumo’s three carriers and the Americans to the south.

It was only three words, but it was in the style characteristic of Bull Halsey, and it had the effect of opening the sleep-gummed eyes of sailors gulping pre-dawn breakfast on the American ships, of electrifying pilots being briefed on carrier decks, and of making everyone in Kinkaid’s force aware that today there would be a battle.

Kinkaid had already ordered a search of what were to be the battle waters, a thousand square miles of South Pacific to the north of the Santa Cruz. It was a wise decision considering his lack of information on the enemy; but unfortunate in the fact that a few minutes after sixteen Dauntlesses took off, he received a Catalina report, delayed two hours, placing the enemy about two hundred miles to the northwest.

By then the Dauntlesses, each armed with a 500-pound bomb, “just in case,” had paired up and fanned out over the battle water by twos.

Some of the pairs found the Vanguard Group commanded by Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe, and a few of them made unsuccessful attacks on cruiser Tone.

But it was not until a few minutes before seven that Nagumo’s carriers were located. They promptly put up smoke and altered course. The Dauntlesses began fighting off the Zeros buzzing in on their tails. But their report also drew Lieutenant Stockton Strong and Ensign Charles Irvine to the area. They saw the smaller carrier Zuiho below them. They nosed over, a pair of small bombs between them, and went screaming down.

Commander Hara gaped. The American scout planes had come down from the overcast undetected and were already pulling up over Zuiho. Hara could see the silver streaks of their bombs flashing toward the unsuspecting ship. Then Hara groaned. A pair of explosions shook Zuiho and black clouds rolled skyward.

Just two bombs, and both had hit in almost the same place, tearing open a fifty-foot hole in Zuiho’s flight decks, knocking out gun batteries and starting fires. Zuiho signaled that she could launch planes but could not receive them. Nagumo ordered her to fly off all of her fighters and withdraw.

Of five flattops which had sailed from Truk, only three were left.

To Hornet’s fighting sailors, many of whom carried this capital-H quotation from Deuteronomy inside their wallets, no comment on the battle could be more appropriate. And at half-past seven that morning Hornet was first to strike at “they that are left and hide themselves.” Lieutenant Commander William (“Gus”) Widhelm led fifteen Dauntlesses, six Avengers and eight Wildcats aloft, to be followed by forty-four additional aircraft from both carriers.

Behind these seventy-three aircraft winging northwestward, the American ships prepared to receive Nagumo’s sixty-seven warbirds roaring southeast.

Aboard the carriers flammables were heaved over the side, deck hoses were shut off and men stood by with buckets of foamite to fight flames. Liquefied carbon dioxide was fed into gasoline lines to freeze and crystallize as protection against fire. Damage-control units fanned out through the ships while men who worked the huge sprinkler systems stood by in control rooms ready to flood any section of the ship upon order.

Sailors and Marines everywhere put on their helmets and flash clothes, their life jackets as well, if they did not interfere with movement, and the brigs were thrown open and prisoners temporarily freed to take up their battle stations: in the sick bays, in the engine rooms, in the galleys, or on the guns.

Inside soundless turrets made of thick steel, gunners and ammunition passers checked the chains which brought up shells and powder bags from magazines below, while less protected gun crews on weather deck mounts stood by their sights or wiped the oil from gun barrels. Aboard Enterprise, men trained to fire the new 40-mm antiaircraft guns spoke confidently to each other of what these sleek new beauties would do to “bastards,” as American seamen, with characteristic delicacy of phrasing, called enemy aircraft.

Big new battleship South Dakota also mounted the new gun, an American version of the famous Swedish Bofors, and she had them because of an accident.

Rushed to the South Pacific through the Panama Canal, South Dakota had torn her belly open on a coral pinnacle near Tongatabu, and had had to limp into Pearl Harbor for repairs. While there, she was fitted with dozens of the new forties. And her skipper, Captain Thomas Gatch, had made sure his men could shoot them, for Gatch may not have had much passion for clean fingernails or white-glove inspections, but he did like a bull’s-eye. All the way from Pearl Harbor, Gatch had kept his men busy at target practice. Squeegees and buckets lay neglected in South Dakota’s lockers and the big ship became a slattern. At Santa Cruz she was probably the dirtiest ship in the United States Navy, but also one of the deadliest.

And so the ships made ready, and on Hornet, thoughtful cooks baked thousands of mince pies and doughnuts. They hoped, if there was a lull in the battle, to take them throughout the ship, along with buckets of hot coffee, to feed Hornet’s hungry fighters.

Colonel Masajiro Furumiya was in a torment of hunger and thirst. The preceding night, he and the five other survivors of the Seventh Company had attempted to break out of the American lines and rejoin their comrades. They had gotten to within a hundred yards of the American wire and had been pinned to the ground by the terrible hail of fire which riddled General Maruyama’s second nocturnal assault.

They had crept back to a clump of underbrush, and now, as they lay there on the morning of October 26, tortured by hunger cramps, their lips cracked and their mouths swelling—tantalized by the smell of cooking issuing from the nearby encampment of Marine mortars—Furumiya again toyed with the idea of suicide. But then, he decided to make one more attempt to escape and save the colors.

At nightfall, calling upon all the strength remaining to them, they would break up into two-man groups and try to crawl to freedom.

There would be no lulls for hungry sailors.

Shortly after nine o’clock that morning, while Enterprise slipped into the sanctuary of a rain squall, the Japanese fliers found Hornet.

There were twenty-seven of them—fifteen Val dive-bombers, twelve torpedo-carrying Kates—and they pressed their attack with great courage, straight into a storm of five-inch and lesser fire from Hornet and her screen. Such attacks seldom fail, and mighty Hornet began to rock and shudder from enemy hits.

The first struck the starboard side of the flight deck aft, and then two near-misses hammered her hull. Next, the Japanese squadron commander came thundering down on a suicide dive. He carried three missiles—one 500-pound bomb and two 100-pounders—and one of the smaller bombs exploded as he smashed into Hornet’s stack. His own momentum and the thrust of the explosion drove him on down through the flight deck, where the second 100-pounder exploded and tore into a ready room below. The big bomb was a dud, but it remained wedged below decks to menace the men of the Hornet as they turned to face the far greater ordeal of the torpedo-bombers.

Though some of the Kates blew up and others plummeted into the sea, the others bored in low astern. Two torpedoes struck to starboard in swift staggering succession, tearing away the ship’s armor and ramming into the engine rooms.

Belching smoke, ablaze from gasoline fires set by the suicider, Hornet lurched to starboard, slowed to a stop, and began taking in water.

Two more 500-pounders struck aft and a third landed slightly forward.

And then a blazing Kate made a suicide run from dead ahead, crashing into the forward gun gallery and blowing up near the forward elevator shaft.

In five minutes Hornet had been left a helpless, drifting, blazing hulk. Her fire mains were broken and her power lines were cut, communications were out, and six fires were burning fiercely, threatening at any moment to engulf the ship, or worse, detonate the deadly 500-pound egg lodged in her vitals.

She seemed surely lost, and there was one despairing moment when Captain Charles Mason issued the order, “Prepare to abandon ship!” But minutes later the bullhorns blared: “Belay that… Belay that… Fires under control!”

Hornet was being avenged.

Her Dauntlesses had found Shokaku, accompanied by still-smoking Zuiho. Just as the Japanese had struck at their own ship, the Americans went plummeting down through layers of flak with enemy fighters clawing at their tails, and they put three to six 1000-pound bombs into Shokaku’s vitals.

Pouring out columns of smoke, her flight deck shredded and her hangars in ruins, all of her guns useless, Shokaku turned away.

Commander Hara aboard Amatsukaze watched her departure in agony, but then he hastened to obey the retiring Admiral Nagumo’s orders to join the screen protecting Zuikaku.

Fortunately for Japan, the American Avengers never found Shokaku, and were unable to finish her off with torpedoes. They struck, instead, along with riddled flights from Enterprise, at Admiral Abe’s Vanguard Group, damaging cruiser Chikuma and forcing her to withdraw. But they had missed the prize: the carriers.

Even so, big Shokaku was out of the war for nine months.

Hornet looked like a good risk.

Damage-control teams led by Commander Henry Moran, and greatly assisted by destroyers Morris and Russell lying alongside to hose the burning ship with sea water, had brought all fires under control by ten o’clock in the morning. Commander Pat Creehan’s black gang had provided steam by hooking up three undamaged boilers to unruptured pipes ingeniously connected to the after engine room. Hornet was fit to be towed, and cruiser Northampton came cautiously forward to secure a line to her.

But then a lone Val swooped down to drop a bomb that missed, but which also canceled towing operations and sent the apprehensive screening ships racing wildly around the crippled giant.

They need not have bothered, for the enemy aircraft were at that moment concentrating on Enterprise.

“I think,” Commander John Crommelin said thoughtfully, studying one of the diving Vals with professional detachment, “I think that son of a bitch is going to get us.”²

He was right.

Plunging at an angle, the 500-pounder slammed through the forward overhang of Enterprise’s flight deck, came clear for fifteen feet, ripped through the fo’c’sle deck, and tore out of the ship’s port side to explode under the port bow, ripping jagged holes in the ship’s side and blowing a Dauntless into the sea.

Thus, at 11:17 A.M., the onslaught on the only undamaged American carrier in the entire Pacific was begun.

Only an hour before, Enterprise had already lost destroyer Porter out of her screen. Japanese submarine I-21 had launched a spread of Long Lances at Big E, but Porter had taken them in her fire rooms and had had to be sunk by gunfire from destroyer Shaw.

And so Captain Osborne Hardison, Enterprise’s new skipper, had also to think of subsurface attack when the enemy dive-bombers came hurtling down from the blue. Fortunately, he did not also have to deal with simultaneous aerial torpedo attack. The Japanese had planned it that way, but of the forty-four planes that were to make co-ordinated torpedo and bombing assaults, the twenty-four dive-bombers arrived a half-hour earlier and went immediately into action.

Steel and flame spouted up to meet them. Aboard mighty South Dakota a hundred muzzles flamed and fell, flamed and fell, like lethal pistons, and a cloud of dark-brown powder smoke drifted off her stern. South Dakota would claim thirty-two enemy aircraft shot down that day, she would be officially credited with twenty-six, but she, and all the other gunfire ships, all of Enterprise’s guns taking full aim at the relentless Vals coming straight down on their twisting, maneuvering ship, could not deny the enemy.

Moments after the first bomb struck, another crashed abaft the forward elevator, breaking in two on the hangar deck where one half exploded and the other half drove down to the third deck before exploding and killing forty men. Fires broke out; light, power, and communications lines were cut; and then a third bomb hit aft of the island superstructure to starboard.

Enterprise was whiplashed. She shook along every inch of her 800-foot length. Nearly every man on his feet was slammed to the deck, her entire foremast turned a half inch in its socket—knocking the antennas on it out of alignment—and a fuel tank was torn open to trail a wake of oil behind as Hardison swung his stricken ship hard to port.

Then the bombers departed and the torpedo-bombers arrived.

There were eleven dark-green Kates in the first wave, but after Lieutenant Stanley (“Swede”) Vejtasa got through with them there were only five. In one of the great flying feats of the war, Swede Vejtasa, who had already shot down two Vals over Hornet, sent six torpedo-planes into the sea before he ran out of ammunition. Three or four more Kates were shot down by other Navy pilots, but still, fifteen broke through the fighter screen. They came flat over the water toward Enterprise, boring in off both bows.

Captain Hardison stood on the Big E’s bridge, his helmet in his left hand, watching the enemy aircraft, staying on course, with South Dakota following a thousand yards distant like a wingman, watching while American firepower whittled the enemy. Five miles out a Kate burst into flames and dove into the ocean with a brief plume of spray. Three miles out another skidded into the water. Two more came apart. But then, five Kates on the right bow made their drops.

Hardison looked quickly to the left. Four more Kates were coming in but had not yet launched. He looked again to his right.

Like a dreadful V, three torpedoes sped straight and true toward him, the middle one slightly out in front. They would strike and sunder Enterprise amidships.

Hardison studied the wakes intently. Everything—Guadalcanal even—depended on his judgment. For one long calculating second Hardison stared at those three long lines of bubbles…

“Right full rudder.”

“Right full rudder, sir!”

Slowly, ponderously, Enterprise’s stern swung left, while her rudder—a huge steel blade three stories high—swept tons of water to the right. Slowly, with fraught majesty, her great bow swung toward the torpedo tracks. Captain Hardison walked to the left wing of his bridge to watch.

Admiral Kinkaid came to stand silently beside him.

As though increasing speed, the wakes bubbled toward Enterprise, and then they were out of sight beneath the left overhang.

“Rudder amidships!”

The helmsman swung his wheel to left. Big E straightened, the enemy’s terrible trio sped harmlessly past the ship’s left side.

But now destroyer Smith was on fire. A wobbling, smoking Kate had flown straight into her forward gun mount. Smith’s bow was a mass of flames.

Hardison turned left again, and Smith dropped back to come astern of South Dakota; and then, her guns still firing, she buried her flaming nose in the battleship’s high foaming wake to put her fires out and return to station.

“Torpedo on the starboard bow!”

There was no chance to turn inside the wakes this time, the torpedo was too close. Hardison made no calculated delay before coming hard right again. He gave the order instantly, Big E’s stern skidded left again, and this time the torpedo ran harmlessly down the ship’s right side.

Plunging down its wake, Enterprise passed the drowning enemy aviators who had launched it. They gazed up at Hardison in frustrated malevolence, and then Big E’s wake thundered over them and they were gone.

Now there were five more Kates attacking Enterprise from dead astern. They maneuvered for a shot at her left middle. Hardison kept turning right to give them his narrow stern, while his force’s gunners spat out a storm of 20-mm shells. Three Kates went down in quick succession, the fourth made a bad drop and crashed, but the fifth launched with good aim from nearly dead astern.

Hardison swung his ship to parallel the torpedo track and watched the enemy missile pass along his left side.

Enterprise plunged along at twenty-seven knots, her men still battling fires, others trying to patch her riddled flight decks, and lookouts watching carefully for periscopes again. Overhead, returning planes from both her own and Hornet’s decks pleaded for permission to land. At last, Commander Crommelin insisted that they must land, holes or no holes, or else run out of gas and crash.

They began coming in, and as they did, South Dakota’s radar picked up a large formation of enemy aircraft to the west. Planes that had not landed pulled up their wheels and banked away with roaring motors. Without altitude, they were out of the fight, and it was up to Kinkaid’s gunners.

Once again, they beat the enemy off. Although the Japanese planes had had the advantage of low cloud cover, they were also denied the opportunity of singling out Enterprise for concentrated assault. Twenty of them attacked in shallow dives that are the delight of antiaircraft gunners, and eight of them were shot down while scoring only one near-miss on Enterprise.

A few minutes later, a handful of stragglers pounced on South Dakota and the cruiser San Juan. A 500-pounder hit the battleship’s Number One turret. Inside that thick steel cocoon no one was aware of the hit, but a bomb splinter struck Captain Gatch in the neck. For a single confused minute, South Dakota spun out of control and made straight for Enterprise.

Once again Hardison was swinging his ship, and then San Juan, also knocked out of control by an enemy bomb, went careening left with whistle blowing, guns shooting, and breakdown flag flying—while the American ships broke formation and went scrambling off in every direction to avoid her.

Finally, San Juan was brought under control. Enterprise sailed on, her forward elevator still jammed, but already beginning to take on planes and turning south at full speed—retiring hastily south to escape the big enemy surface force now rushing down to finish her off.

Northampton had Hornet in tow and was dragging her over the ocean at three knots.

But Admiral Kakuji Kakuta, now in command of the Japanese carriers, had been closing the distance between himself and the Americans, and he had more strikes in the air.

In late afternoon a half-dozen Kates caught the plodding carrier. They came at her in a fast weaving glide. They launched six torpedoes. Only one hit, but one was enough.

It rammed into the aviation store room with a sickly green flash and cracked Hornet open. A tide of fuel oil two feet deep went cascading through the third deck to knock Commander Creehan’s men off their feet, nearly drowning them, forcing them to rescue each other by a hand chain leading to a ladder and escape scuttle. Hornet listed sharply. Gradually the tilt built up to 18 degrees.

“Prepare to abandon ship!”

Hornet’s men stood by, her guns firing on while dive-bombers came at her again, and missed, and a V of high-flying Kates made a horizontal attack, and missed, and then Hornet’s men went over the side.

They left their dying ship in splendid order, going hand over hand down lines hung over Hornet’s sloping sides, or jumping into the water to swim to waiting life rafts. But to a sailor, to leave a ship is to leave home. Many of them had fond memories of the big ship, dying just six days after her first birthday. They left part of their personalities aboard her, part of themselves stuffed into seabags that would now go down with their ship. One man might mourn the loss of his favorite books or his Bible, while another would regret having to leave his wife’s picture or a bundle of dog-eared letters-from-home; others thought ruefully of the candy bar they had been saving for the midnight watch or cursed the loss of a collection of pornographic pictures or a souvenir of Honolulu or a good-luck charm or even a pair of loaded dice. A Marine sergeant going over the side protested that he had no time to save two Alka-Seltzer bottles filled with quarters. Officers and men who had money or valuables in the ship’s safe were also abandoning ship at cost. Commander Gus Widhelm had $600 in poker winnings in the safe, together with the titles to two automobiles, and he was losing a record-player and his fifty-two Bing Crosby records and a collection of Strauss waltzes. Commander Dodson had managed to destroy the ship’s secret papers but he could not save his collection of Greek and Roman coins. They, along with Commander Smith’s lithographs and wood cuts and collection of French literature, would ultimately sink to the bottom of the sea.

Pat Creehan all but refused to leave, working stubbornly at his engines, until, with the water above his shoulders, he cast a last fond look at his turbines, and climbed out the escape hatch.

Out in the water, destroyers which had already taken off Hornet’s wounded moved rapidly among the life rafts to take able survivors aboard. Three of the men so rescued—Richard McDonald, Frank Cox, and Russell Burke—vowed loudly that never again would they light three cigarettes on one match.

Captain Mason was the last to leave Hornet. Silent and impassive, he climbed down a cargo net into a waiting boat, and then destroyers Mustin and Anderson ran in to sink his ship with torpedoes.

Isoroku Yamamoto was elated to hear that Enterprise and Hornet—the two ships which had violated inviolable Tokyo—had been caught and crippled by his fliers. His orders to his fleet were brief: “Chase and mop up the fleeing enemy.”

All ships gave immediate pursuit. Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo sent battleships Kongo and Haruna and a dozen cruisers and destroyers plunging southeast at a furious thirty knots. Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe with battleships Hiei and Kirishima, and another flock of cruisers and destroyers, also poured it on. After both surface forces came Kakuta with Junyo and Zuikaku, hoping to get off a finishing strike at dawn.

But Admiral Kinkaid had wisely taken his ships out of range. The best that the Japanese could do was to find Hornet and to scare off the American destroyers which had failed to sink her.

Mustin and Anderson had fired eight torpedoes each at Hornet. Nine of them hit, yet Hornet remained afloat; proof, if more were ever needed, that America’s shipbuilders were superior to her torpedo-makers.

Only four Japanese fish were needed to do what sixteen American torpedoes could not do. They were launched by destroyers Akigumo and Makigumo and they put U.S.S. Hornet, seventh American ship of that name, beneath the wave.

Only crippled Enterprise now stood between the enemy and Guadalcanal.

In Tokyo a great victory was proclaimed.

But once again, the Japanese failed to understand that if they had won a tactical victory—as they certainly had in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands—they had suffered strategic loss. Although Hornet was gone and Enterprise was damaged, the Americans had once again bought time with blood. Enterprise could be repaired while more ships and aircraft were rushed to the South Pacific.

But for Japan, Santa Cruz meant that Hiyo, Zuiho, and Shokaku were out of the fight for Guadalcanal, and a hundred aircraft, with their precious pilots and crews, had been lost. After Santa Cruz, Japan’s carrier-based aircraft would no longer be a factor at Guadalcanal. Perhaps Emperor Hirohito, again more prescient than his admirals, was aware of the strategic loss; for the Imperial Rescript issued to celebrate the victory was the very model of a cautious vaunt.

“The Combined Fleet is at present striking heavy blows at the enemy Fleet in the South Pacific Ocean,” Hirohito said. “We are deeply gratified. I charge each of you to exert yourselves to the utmost in all things toward the critical turning point in the war.”

Even as the Rescript was announced to the people of Japan, on Guadalcanal itself the men of the Emperor’s own division were passing through an ordeal duplicating the travail of the Kawaguchi Brigade before them. Retreating east and west, the Sendai also clawed at trees for bark, or drank from muddy puddles, or gnawed their rifle slings.

Behind them, Colonel Masajiro Furumiya had decided that suicide was the only resort. He and Captain Suzuki had not been able to escape on the night of October 26–27. American fire had forced them back to their hideout. They were alone, for the others had been killed. Weak with hunger, Furumiya and Suzuki had barely enough strength to tear the 29th Infantry’s colors into bits of bright red and white silk and to grind them into the mud. Then Colonel Furumiya wrote a letter which Suzuki was to deliver to General Maruyama, if he survived.

“I do not know what excuse to give.…

“I am sorry I have lost many troops uselessly and for this result which has come unexpectedly. We must not overlook firepower. When there is firepower the troops become active and full of spirit. But when firepower ceases they become inactive.

“Spirit exists eternally.

“I am going to return my borrowed life today with short interest.”³

Colonel Furumiya paused. He wrote his last line: “The mission of a Japanese warrior is to serve his Emperor!”⁴

Masajiro Furumiya tottered to his feet. He straightened. He bowed profoundly in the direction of the Emperor, and the captain put the pistol to the colonel’s head and pulled the trigger.