Challenge for the Pacific

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

FOR NEARLY three months, now, both sides had been frustrated in a war of blacks and whites: black for the nights in which the Japanese attacked, landed troops and supplies or shelled the enemy; white for the day in which the Americans attacked, landed troops and supplies or flew off airplanes to intercept bombing raids preparing the way for the enemy’s movement at night.

But now, now it was November—the crucial month, the fourth month of battle—and both sides entered it with redoubling arms and confidence in ultimate victory.

In Tokyo, Imperial General Headquarters prescribed, for the third time, a massive co-ordinated assault by the Army and Navy. Tactically, there would be a difference. Surprise night attacks were to be abandoned in favor of steady driving operations launched from the Japanese platform west of the Matanikau.

The remnant of the Sendai Division was to assemble on that platform while awaiting the arrival of the 38th Division, and, later, the 51st Division then in China, and a mixed brigade, also in the Far East. Once the Sendai had recovered from its mauling at the hands of the Americans, and all of these units were in place, the offensive would be renewed.

Despite three bloody and unmitigated defeats, the Army betrayed no doubts about its ability to recover Guadalcanal, and with it, the Japanese offensive in the Pacific. The Army felt this way because it continued to believe Navy reports of smashing victories at sea, particularly the last exaggeration: two American carriers and three battleships sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

Many admirals were not nearly so sanguine. They were not because they knew the truth of their own frightful losses in both carrier and land-based air, and because they appreciated, better than the generals, the terrible risks involved in putting men and supplies ashore in the face of enemy land-based air.

Some admirals, among them Gunichi Mikawa and Raizo Tanaka, argued against reinforcing while Henderson Field remained operative. They wished to suspend operations until Rabaul could be expanded as a rear base and a forward base near Buin could be established. Then, with Henderson Field truly knocked out, then and only then, they would renew the attack.¹

Tokyo could not agree. Reinforcement was to commence immediately, in the customary way: nightly runs of the Tokyo Express preceded by daylight bombing of Henderson Field and accompanied by night surface bombardment so furious as to make The Night of the Battleships seem, in comparison, a veritable rosy dawn. Already, at his base in Truk, Admiral Yamamoto was at work on a plan drawing heavily from his formidable array of battleships.

Reinforcement was also an American concern, but as much, if not more, with aerial as with ground strength. Land-based air, the Americans knew, with all respect and admiration for General Vandegrift’s skill and the doggedness of his doughty troops, was holding Guadalcanal. Accordingly, aircraft and pilots were being gathered to replenish a Cactus Air Force which, on October 26, the day of Santa Cruz, was down to twenty-nine combat planes.

On October 19, five days before President Roosevelt had ordered the Joint Chiefs to rush all available weapons to Guadalcanal, General Marshall had alerted the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division under the command of Major General J. Lawton Collins for movement from Hawaii to the South Pacific. Moreover, Admiral Halsey had canceled the Ndeni operation which Richmond Kelly Turner had found so attractive, and which Alexander Archer Vandegrift had considered so inimical, and he had ordered the 147th Infantry Regiment, the Eighth Marine Regiment, the Second Marine Raider Battalion, long-range artillery, and a battalion of Seabees forward to Guadalcanal.

However, American reinforcement had encountered two setbacks: one, the sinking of President Coolidge with an Army regiment’s equipment, and, two, Kelly Turner’s penchant for playing general. Balked on Ndeni, Turner, a persuasive man, convinced Admiral Halsey that another airfield should be constructed at Aola Bay, about fifty miles to the east of Lunga Point. Turner approached Halsey aware that Vandegrift’s engineers, and Martin Clemens, who had lived at Aola, considered the area impossible as an airfield site. Turner also made his proposal without Vandegrift’s knowledge or acquiescence, and so, a battalion of the 147th Infantry, half of the Raiders, all of the Seabees, artillery from the Americal Division, as well as Marine coastal and antiaircraft guns, were to go into Aola rather than into Vandegrift’s perimeter.

Vandegrift protested, and though his arguments would ultimately move Halsey to withdraw the Aola expedition, they did not prevent the immediate loss of men and guns upon which the general had been relying. To lose the Seabees was an especially stiff jolt, for all of their skills and heavy equipment were very badly needed at Henderson Field; while long-range artillery could have been turned against Pistol Pete, again shelling the runways, and the Raiders and another battalion of infantry would naturally make the ground defenses that much stronger.

After the defeat of the Sendai, Vandegrift had about 23,000 Marines and 3000 soldiers in his command. But of these, 4000 Marines were with Rupertus on Tulagi, and the others—particularly the men who had landed on August 7—were very close to exhaustion.

They were shadow troops. Three months of uninterrupted ordeal such as no American troops had ever sustained, before or since, such as few soldiers in history have experienced, had made them walking skeletons of parchment flesh and quivering nerve. They were the young ancients, the old-young, staring with a fixed thousand-yard stare out of eyes that were red-rimmed and sunken. Their bodies were taut rags of flesh stretched over sticks of bone. They had come to Guadalcanal muscular and high-spirited young men, but now each had lost at least twenty pounds, some had lost fifty, and their high fervor had ebbed and nearly flowed away. They were hanging on by habit only, fighting out of the rut of an old valor.

They were lonely. It was an utter, aching, yearning loneliness, it was a feeling of what has been called “expendability,” a conviction that their country had set them down, alone, in the heart of an enemy camp and then forgotten them. They could not comprehend the contradiction of their own total commitment to the war and news of labor strikes at home or, worse, of ships lying unloaded in their own Bay because merchant seamen wanted extra pay to unload them.

And they were losing hope. Hope, which had nourished their spirits better than enemy rice had kept their bodies, was all but gone now. It had been eroded like an island in a stormy sea. Tide after tide of adversity had washed over it, each time it had emerged intact—but with shrunken shores. Now hope was a cluster of sea-washed rocks and scraggly palm trees standing in the path of a new tidal wave of calamity gathering in the north.

Without hope, these men turned in upon themselves. They rarely spoke except to close friends. Squad by squad, they kept apart; they became tribal or clannish. Some men who had spent as much as two months in the same foxhole along the same river or on top of the same ridge could not, except by dire threats from NCOs or direct orders from officers, be made to move as much as fifty yards away from their holes. It was as though they feared to displease the local deity. Much as they might explain that bombs and shells fell in showers and instantaneously on this dreadful island, and that a man was a fool to be caught very far from shelter, they acted, actually, from an atavistic dread; three months of modern war in the primitive jungle had stripped away the acquired vesture of civilization and left them naked and trembling again before a tutelary god. In this hole they had survived, and they would not leave it.

Such men would not even leave their holes to go to chow, and other men could not go because the galleys were generally located so far to the rear that they had not the strength to get there and back. Their comrades brought food to them, just as they brought food to hundreds of men who burned with malarial fires but who were not considered sick enough to be admitted to the hospitals in the rear. And malaria was now also a scourge. In the First Marine Division there had been 239 cases of malaria in September, there were 1941 in October, and before November ended there would be 3200 more.

Malaria and dengue fever, yellow jaundice and dysentery, tropical ulcers that ate into the outer covering of the bone and the rot of fungus festering and leaving flesh encrusted and oozing pus by the canteen-cup, these were also enemies; foes as real as the Japanese with all their troops and ships and airplanes; adversaries as authentic as the miasmic jungle and those formless fears of the imagination which trooped into a man’s mind each night, as dusk deepened into darkness, and remained there until dawn.

Dawn sometimes found men out of their minds; most often men who, losing hope, had also lost their sense of humor. For humor was the last rampart. More than hope, even, it stood between a man and insanity; and with all else gone, or going, these Americans held onto their humor.

It was not a dainty mirth. Men moved by it could shout with laughter to hear that a Marine’s collection of enemy ears, pinned on a clothesline of enemy rope, had been lost in a single dissolving cycle of rain-and-sun; they could chuckle while sawing enemy leg bones in sections with a bayonet, prying out the marrow and shaping a grisly ring to grace their true love’s fingers; or they could smile to hear of the two Japanese soldiers who had been found sitting in serene confidence in the center of the beehive that was Henderson Field, waiting there, as they had been ordered, “to rendezvous with the main body.”

Private Phil Chaffee also possessed this grim sense of humor. It sustained him on his numerous overnight patrols into the enemy positions around Grassy Knoll. Twice a week, accompanied by a taciturn red-bearded sergeant, Chaffee came down the ridge held by Lucky and Lew Juergens, bantering with them as he walked toward the jungle between the ridge and Grassy Knoll.

“Hey, Chaffee, got your pliers?”

“You know me, boy, I’d sooner forget m’ rifle.”

“How about it, Chaffee? I’ll give you ten bucks for that Bull Durham sack around your neck.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. How about a pint of my blood, too, huh?”

“How many teeth you got in that sack?”

“That’s my business.”

“A hundred?”

“Guess again, boy. Guess up a storm.”²

Chaffee would vanish into the rain forest, reappearing a few days later with a triumphant grin and a heavier Bull Durham sack, and one day he came back from Grassy Knoll wagging two fingers and bursting with pride.

“Two Japs!” Juergens snorted. “Who’n hell ain’t shot two Japs?”

Chaffee feigned surprise. He twirled the ends of his handlebar mustache, and asked, “With the one bullet?”³

Thus these Marines faced November, the month of decision which Archer Vandegrift began by attacking to the west once more.

General Vandegrift wanted to upset his temporarily beaten enemy before he could consolidate west of the Matanikau again. He also wanted to knock out Pistol Pete and to force General Hyakutake to use landing beaches much farther west, thus complicating his supply problems.

Vandegrift’s objective was the Poha River, a mile and a half west of Hyakutake’s 17th Army headquarters at Kukumbona. To take it, the Marine general collected a force of five thousand Marines—the Second Marines less a battalion under Colonel John Arthur, the Third Battalion, Seventh, reinforced by the Scout-Snipers, and the Fifth Marines—all to be commanded by Red Mike Edson.

The Fifth Marines were to cross the Matanikau at Nippon Bridge while the Third Battalion, Seventh, crossed farther inland and punched farther west.

At midnight of October 31 engineers began throwing three foot bridges across the Matanikau. Then Marine artillery and cruisers San Francisco and Helena, with destroyer Sterett, began pounding the enemy. At dawn, the warships came in close to shell Point Cruz, and the attack went forward.

General Hyakutake fought desperately to hold his position. He plugged his riddled front with service troops, walking wounded, sick, typists, clerks, and cooks, mustering every able-bodied man who could fight. But the Marines drove them back toward Point Cruz. The night of November 1, Edson halted just short of the Point. Behind him, engineers threw a ten-ton vehicular bridge over the Matanikau. In the morning, Edson called upon Silent Lew Walt to wheel his battalion north and drive to the sea on the other side of Point Cruz.

Walt’s men drove quickly into place. The Japanese at Point Cruz were now hemmed in on three sides with their backs to the sea. Edson ordered his men to attack in one of the Pacific war’s rare bayonet charges. The Marines swept forward with a yell to kill every one of the 350 enemy soldiers caught in the trap.

And then General Vandegrift’s third attempt to clear his western flank was again interrupted by events in the east.

On November 2, Vandegrift was informed by Admiral Halsey’s intelligence section that the Japanese would land near Koli Point to the east that night.

Vandegrift decided to intercept them. He would mark time in the west while clearing the east. Once that was done, he could throw all his strength into the Matanikau thrust.

So Red Mike Edson returned to the perimeter, leaving a blocking force west of Point Cruz under Colonel Arthur, and Herman Henry Hanneken’s tired but trusty battalion was pulled out of the line and sent on a forced march toward Koli Point.

Hanneken’s Marines reached Koli before dusk, fording the Nalimbiu River which debouches into the Bay there, and pushing on to the east bank of the Metapona River a few miles farther east.

Hanneken organized a coastal perimeter and tried to reach Vandegrift by radio. But he could not. The river crossings had soaked his radios. There was nothing to do but sit down to await the arrival of the Tokyo Express.

Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo had been relieved of his command. He was going home, and Commander Tameichi Hara came to see him before he left Truk. Hara was surprised to see that the hero of Pearl Harbor looked so haggard.

“You don’t look good, Admiral,” he blurted.

Nagumo tried to make light of his appearance. “Just a touch of flu,” he said. “Once back home, I’ll be in good shape.”

Hara nodded. “Sasebo’s climate will cure you,” he said. “And you deserve a rest. Compared to your duty, sir, I’ve been on a pleasure cruise.”

“Well, you’ll have a tougher time from now on,” Nagumo said grimly, informing his visitor that all but two of Combined Fleet’s carriers were going home for repairs. Hara was astounded, and then dumfounded to hear Nagumo admit that although Santa Cruz had been a Japanese tactical victory, it was “a shattering strategic loss for Japan.” To offset American replacement capacity, Nagumo explained, Japan had to win every battle overwhelmingly.

“This last one,” he said, “was not an overwhelming victory.”⁴

Saddened, Commander Hara returned to Amatsukaze. He knew that he would soon be sailing his destroyer from Truk as part of the Guadalcanal bombardment fleet. And now, as Nagumo told him, Japan’s precious warships were to be risked without aerial cover.

The next day, November 3, Commander Hara stood on his bridge to watch cruisers Isuzu, Suzuya, and Maya and eight destroyers sortie from Truk. Standing on Isuzu’s flag bridge was Hara’s old chief, Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka. He was taking his squadron to the Shortlands. Tanaka the Tenacious was returning to the helm of the Tokyo Express, and even as he sailed, the Express’s first run in the new reinforcement operation was making for Koli Point.

One cruiser, three destroyers and one transport were bringing more men and supplies to Colonel Toshinaro Shoji at Tetere. Shoji had arrived at this village east of Koli Point—the place where Mr. Ishimoto murdered the missionaries—after an agonizing march from the October battleground. He brought with him 2500 starving and exhausted men, the remnant of the Sendai Division’s right wing. He expected his badly needed supplies to arrive early in the morning of November 3.

Or roughly at the same time Admiral Kelly Turner’s airfield-building expedition would arrive farther east at Aola.

Martin Clemens was at Aola.

With him were a handful of Marines and his cook, Michael, who had just been discharged from the hospital, his dark face pocked with pink shrapnel scars as mementoes of The Night of the Battleships. Clemens had brought his party to his old headquarters to provide landing beacons for Kelly Turner’s Aola expedition. Three pyramids of logs twelve feet high were built on the beach at intervals six hundred feet apart. At three o’clock in the morning of November 3, in a pouring rain, they were set ablaze.

Clemens and his men stood watching the fire. Firelight made grotesque silhouettes of their lumpy, poncho-swathed figures. The cold rain made their teeth chatter. Then, from the east, Clemens saw the swell of high-speed ships washing over the beach. The wash continued west toward Koli Point. Clemens gazed at the beacons in apprehension.

“I hope they don’t draw crabs,” he muttered.

The Japanese ships had sailed north of Florida Island. They rounded its eastern tip and entered the Bay. Landing beacons were noticed at Aola, but they were considered an enemy trap—a very clumsy one—and the ships pressed west to anchor and unload at Gavaga Creek, midway between Koli and Tetere.

Colonel Hanneken was chagrined. He could see the enemy putting men and supplies ashore, but they were too far away for immediate action. He decided to attack at dawn.

He did, and his Marines collided with Japanese soldiers marching west to Koli. Both sides recoiled, but the Japanese snapped back faster. They struck the Americans with light howitzers and mortars, while working a force around to their rear.

Hanneken withdrew. He pulled back across the Metapona to the west bank of the Nalimbiu, where he had communications wire connecting him with the perimeter. He notified Vandegrift of his predicament and was told to expect aerial assistance.

It came, and it hit Hanneken’s men.

Hanneken called for an end to aerial “assistance,” and it was canceled. And then Vandegrift ordered Hanneken to hold while General Rupertus came over from Tulagi to take command.

Martin Clemens watched his second set of signal pyramids lose its brilliance with the arrival of first light of November 4. Then he saw a quartet of old American four-stack destroyers entering the Bay. Farther out were transports guarded by destroyers. Soon landing boats swung out from the four-stackers and the Raiders of Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson went down into them. They came roaring ashore, and the Raiders leaped out to go racing up the beach with fixed bayonets.

They had been told to land as though opposed, and they fanned out quickly into the jungle.

Martin Clemens watched them in amusement, for he was, by then, one of the Old Breed of American Marine. He had been there “when the stuff hit the fan,” and he had the right to say, as the first Marine in history is reputed to have said to the second Marine, “Lissen, boot, you shoulda been here when it was really rough.” And so he was prepared when a Raider racing toward him and Michael came to an astonished halt at the sight of the Englishman in his slouch hat and the native with the face full of scars.

“What kinda disease is that?” the Raider asked, pointing at Michael.

“Bomb disease!”⁵ Clemens snorted, turning to watch, with tolerant disdain, the arrival of the rest of Admiral Turner’s well-dressed and well-fed Johnny-come-latelies.

Not all of the American transports stopped at Aola. Some moved farther west to Lunga Point, bringing General Vandegrift a pair of welcome acquisitions: the Eighth Marine Regiment and two batteries of 155-mm “long Tom” rifles.

The long Toms meant that the days of Pistol Pete’s unchallenged reign were numbered, for the 155 rifles could outshoot the Japanese 150-mm howitzers. The Eighth Marines meant that the attack in the west could be renewed, as soon as Rupertus could clear up the situation in the east.

Listening to reports from Hanneken and Clemens’s scouts, General Rupertus wisely concluded that there were quite a few Japanese to the east. He decided to hold at the Nalimbiu until Chesty Puller’s battalion could come downcoast by boat to take the enemy in his seaflank while Colonel Bryant Moore took the 164th Infantry south to turn north and take the Japanese on his landward flank.

Late that day—November 4—the operation began.

To the west that same day—November 4—soldiers of the 228th Infantry Regiment of the Japanese 38th Division were marching to General Hyakutake’s rescue.

Seventeen destroyers had landed them at Kamimbo and Tassafaronga early that morning. As they came ashore, Major General Takeo Ito, the 38th’s infantry commander, turned them east to Kukumbona.

Meanwhile, General Hyakutake radioed Colonel Shoji at Tetere and ordered him to join him in the west.

Shoji was dismayed at having to forgo the chance to avenge the Sendai. Nevertheless, he left a rear guard of five hundred men at Gavaga Creek and began swinging around Henderson Field along the trail cut by the Kawaguchi Brigade.

Rupertus tried to cut him off with Colonel Moore’s two battalions of the 164th Infantry. But these units, having blundered into each other at night and fought a bloodless battle between them, were unable to halt more than a handful of Shoji’s men. The main body, perhaps three thousand men, had escaped.

Gung ho!

In Chinese it means “Work together,” and Evans Carlson had learned it during his prewar service with the Chinese Eighth Route Army. After taking command of the Second Raiders—and weeding out the fainthearted with the question “Could you cut a Jap’s throat without flinching?”—Carlson gave them Gung ho! as both slogan and battle cry. One day the phrase would come to mean a Marine esprit bordering on chauvinism, and that would be partially as a result of the fury with which Carlson’s Raiders scourged the men of Colonel Shoji’s column in a month-long private war of their own.

Guided through the jungle by native scouts under the command of Sergeant Major Vouza, depending upon native carriers to lug the ammunition and rations of rice, raisins, and bacon that were periodically parachuted to them along the way, they killed five hundred of Shoji’s men at a loss of only seventeen of their own. And they did this with a single, simple tactic which Carlson had also learned in China.

His main body marched, unseen, in a column parallel with the Japanese. His patrols followed directly behind the enemy. Each time the patrols encountered large numbers of Japanese, they opened fire. As Colonel Shoji began to rush reinforcements to his rear, Carlson’s men struck from the flank with all their firepower.

Then they vanished.

Twelve times Carlson’s Raiders savaged the enemy in this fashion, and by the time Colonel Shoji’s haggard and reeling column reached Kukumbona, Guadalcanal was known in their language not only as Ga Shima, or Hunger Island, but also as Shih Shima.

Death Island.

On November 5—the day the lean and passionate Carlson led his men in pursuit of Colonel Shoji—Admiral Tanaka arrived in the Shortlands. Two runs of the Tokyo Express had already made those landings at Gavaga Creek and in the west, and Tanaka immediately prepared another one.

On November 7, eleven destroyers were to take 1300 men of the 38th Division to Tassafaronga. Tanaka hoped to lead the sortie personally, but Admiral Mikawa insisted that he remain in the Shortlands. Tanaka was needed to plan additional runs of the Tokyo Express scheduled for November 8, 9, and 10. In all, two cruisers and sixty-five destroyers were to be involved in these shipments. Finally the biggest convoy of all, eleven big fast transports carrying half the 38th Division, was to leave on November 13, after Admiral Kondo’s battleships and cruisers had made powder and hash of Henderson Field.

So the eleven destroyers set sail without him, taking the northern route above the Solomon chain.

They would arrive at Tassafaronga at midnight of November 7.

November 7 dawned bright and hot. Martin Clemens decided it was a good day to return to the perimeter from Aola. The Army battalion there had set up a defensive line and the Seabees were already at work building roads. Clemens decided there was nothing more that he could do, and he was anxious to resume his interrupted duties as chief recruiter and straw boss for a force of native stevedores. He had planned to bring back a prisoner or two with him, but “Wimpy” Wendling, an exuberant Marine marksman, had shot holes in that hope.

Wendling and four scouts had gone to Koilotumaria to round up a few of the Japanese missed in the last foray. They had found four, but instead of capturing them they had killed them. Wendling reported that he had attempted to persuade a wounded, English-speaking officer to surrender. The officer refused. Wendling advanced offering a chocolate bar. The Japanese whipped out his saber and swung.

Fortunately, Wimpy explained, his finger was still on the trigger.

So Clemens led his party into their landing boat and sailed west for Lunga.

A mile offshore the lookout called, “White water to starboard.”

Clemens was surprised. He knew there were no reefs in the vicinity. He raised his glasses to look for the “white water” and saw a bubbling wake leading straight into the side of the supply ship Majaba. A huge column of water spouted into the sky followed by a roar. Majaba listed, holed by the Japanese submarine I-20. Sinking fast, she staggered ashore and beached herself, later to be salvaged and patched up.

Destroyers dashed about, their sterns digging deep into the water, depth-charges arching off their fantails and geysers of water marking the underwater explosions. Dive-bombers came hurtling down, too, and Wendling jumped up on the prow to wave a huge American flag—just in case some inexperienced Dauntless pilot should mistake a Higgins boat for an enemy barge.

They reached Lunga and found that they had beached right next to a Japanese torpedo. It lay on the beach, long, silvery, and wicked, still hot and steaming from its futile run at Majaba. A bomb-disposal officer was at work dismantling it. Clemens walked back to his tent wondering if it were possible to find a safe spot or pass a dull day on Guadalcanal.

November 7 had seemed like a dull day at Henderson Field. It seemed that the aerial doldrums, begun after the Battle of Santa Cruz, were going to continue—until coastwatchers radioed reports of eleven enemy destroyers slipping down the top of the Solomons.

Major Paul Fontana led his newly arrived squadron of Marine fighters aloft first, and after him came Captain Joe Foss with more Wildcats. About 150 miles to the north Foss saw the specks of the enemy ships crawling over the flat obsidian surface of the sea like a file of ants. Then he saw six float Zeros flying escort. The Zeros struck boldly at the American bombers, trying to ruin their aim as they screamed down on Admiral Tanaka’s skillfully maneuvering ships.

Some of their bombs scored direct hits on destroyers Takanami and Naganami, inflicting major damage and killing troops, but no ships were sunk and the Tokyo Express sailed on toward Tassafaronga.

The Zeros were not so fortunate.

“Don’t look now,” Joe Foss yelled by radio to his pilots, “but I think we have something here.”⁶

They went zooming down in attack, practically jostling each other, giving each other the aerial elbow in their eagerness not to be left out in the scramble of seven Wildcats for six Zeros. Foss shot the first one, blowing it into an aerial dust bag. And then they were all gone. Foss looked up. He could see five empty parachutes ballooning gently downward. He wondered where the pilots were. Then he saw a sixth chute with an enemy pilot dangling from the harness.

The pilot unbuckled himself and plummeted head-first into the sea, and there were six clouds of empty silk swaying gently in the sky.

Strange enemy indeed, Foss thought, and prepared to go down to strafe the destroyers. Grasping the stick, he made his customary quick survey of the clouds—and saw a pontoon protruding from a bit of fluff above him.

He went up after it and found a single-motored biplane scout. He came in close, missed, and was raked by the scout’s rear-gunner. Wind came howling through a hole in his windscreen. Foss came back and shot the scout into the sea. He caught a second scout by surprise and sent it down like a torch.

And then his motor began to fade and spout smoke, and Foss realized that he was far from home and coming down into the sea near Malaita Island.

Two or three miles offshore, his tail hooked into the water, his plane skipped, bounced, came down hard, nosed over and began to sink like a stone.

Foss was trapped. Water poured into his cockpit with the force of a sledgehammer, knocking him groggy. The plane was plunging toward the bottom of the sea, but Foss could not get out. He had forgotten to unhook his parachute leg strap, and now water was underneath both his chute harness and his inflated life vest, making him so buoyant he could not reach the leg strap.

Still descending, he became frantic and caught his foot under the seat. He was going to drown if he did not calm himself. Holding off death with iron self-control, he straightened, pushed down with all his strength, freed the foot and strap—and shot upward through a crushing weight of water.

But the leg straps of the chute harness were still buckled. They brought Foss to the surface behind-up and face-down. He gulped mouthfuls of sea water. He swallowed more, unbuckling the straps. Then his preserver shot up over his mouth and he took in more.

Still thrashing about, Foss undid his shoes and felt himself become more buoyant. He tried to swim toward Malaita. But the current was too strong and he was barely staying in place. A big black tail fin cut the water a few feet to the side of him. Another slid past on the other side. Foss remembered the chlorine capsule in his pocket. It was supposed to keep the sharks away. He grasped it and broke it.

In another hour it was dark, and the sharks were back. They were all around him.

Within the darkening stadium in Washington, D.C., the floodlights were just coming on. They came on at about the time that Joe Foss and his fellow Marines roared aloft to intercept the Tokyo Express. And as the stadium blossomed with light and the uniforms of the football players became more brilliant and the thick carpet of grass beneath their feet turned a brighter green, the loudspeaker crackled and blared: “The President of the United States announces the successful landing on the African Coast of an American Expeditionary Force. This is our second front!”⁷

A single great cry of national pride went reverberating around the arena. The football players went cartwheeling and hand-springing down the middle of the field. America, agonizing over prospects of fresh disaster in the Pacific, was looking eagerly away to a new theater.

Then the whistle blew and the sobering players lined up for the kickoff.

Little splashes of phosphorescence indicated to Joe Foss the places where the sharks were. He barely moved, fearing that if he extended an arm to swim, he would withdraw a spouting stub. Other splashes became audible farther away. They sounded like paddles. Peering through the murk, Foss saw a canoe and a native gondola coming toward him.

Were they Japanese?

Foss stayed motionless among the sharks and his fears. The boats passed to either side. Foss saw a lantern. For nearly a half hour, the lantern swayed eerily about him as the canoe and the gondola continued their search.

A voice said, “Let’s look over ’ere,” and Joe Foss’s heart leaped.

“Yeah!” he bellowed. “Right over here!”

The lantern winked out and on the gondola above him Foss thought he saw natives raising war clubs and he knew he heard them jabbering wildly.

“Friend!” Foss yelled. “Birdman! Aviator! American!”⁸

Suddenly there was the man with the lantern above him, and friendly arms were outstretched toward him. Foss grasped them. They were those of Tommy Robinson, an Australian sawmill operator, and he pulled Foss into the canoe. Another man, in clerical clothing, said, “I’m Father De Steinberg,” just as a flying fish leaped from the sea and smashed the lantern.

Foss gaped at the fish. It was twenty inches in length with a long, sharp needle of a bill.

“I should have kept this thing down,” Robinson said apologetically. “But I guess I got the wind up a bit. Many a bloke has lost his eyes at night because of holding lights.”⁹

Foss shuddered and instinctively put his hand over his eyes, shivering again while Robinson cheerfully advised him that he had been wise to remain offshore with his friends, the sharks. If he had come ashore at the point he had been hoping to reach, he would have had to ford a stagnant stream full of crocodiles.

The boats made for Buma Mission. Foss was welcomed ashore by Bishop Aubin, and another bishop who was Russian, as well as a Norwegian planter, four priests from as many different countries, and two brothers—one from Emmetsburg, Iowa—and eight sisters, one from Boston.

They fed him and gave him dry clothes and a bed. It was not really a bed, rather the lumpy pad of an ascetic monk with a rocklike sack for a pillow, but Joe Foss slept well on it.

Except for a bad few minutes at midnight when he awoke sick and retching from the sea water he had swallowed.

“It smells of exhibitionism,” Bull Halsey said. “To hell with it!”¹⁰

The admiral was on Guadalcanal. He had come there Sunday, November 8, and he was, with customary bluntness, rejecting his staff’s suggestion that he stand up in his jeep and wave or do something to make his presence known to the island’s ragged defenders.

Halsey would not, for he had seen their faces, and he would not insult them by crowing, in effect: “Give a cheer, Halsey’s here.” So he drove without fanfare to Vandegrift’s headquarters. Vandegrift took him on tour of the battlegrounds, and treated him to a dinner which so impressed the admiral that he asked to see the cook.

Butch Morgan appeared. His red mustache was carefully brushed. He wore clean khaki trousers and his skivvy shirt was immaculate. He stood ramrod straight while Commander, South Pacific, praised his cooking, until, reddening and fidgeting apace with the admiral’s encomiums, he finally burst out: “Oh, bullshit, Admiral—you don’t have to say that!”¹¹

Joe Foss also enjoyed his dinner that Sunday.

He had been to the thatched chapel and he had also been put on display for the benefit of curious natives. The fathers had asked him to stand between two huts while the Malaitans passed by to examine him. Short, with powerful muscles rippling beneath purply black skin, they not only made a striking contrast to the tall fair American, they seemed very much amazed that there was a difference at all.

One of the priests explained that many years before the war an American schooner had stopped at Malaita with a crew of southern Negroes. They had told the Malaitans that they were Americans, and so, the islanders had expected Foss to be black.

Foss was not surprised. One of the sisters he had spoken to had never seen an automobile, and the first airplanes she saw were those that flew and fought overhead. Hardly any of the missionaries knew anything of the war going on across The Slot, to say nothing of what had happened in the world during the past few decades, and that was why, as Foss sat down to dinner, they pressed him to stay with them for two weeks.

Foss thought he might stay a week—he could fish and inspect the wrecked Japanese planes in the hills—until he heard the familiar roar of a Catalina’s motors and he rushed down the steps of the dining hall built on stilts to find that his friend, Major Jack Cram, had come for him.

Joe Foss went back to the war. He left his silk parachute for the sisters to sew into clothing, he promised to bring his hosts some tobacco, and he went out to the Catalina in a native canoe—returning to that Henderson Field from which, during the weeks to come, he would rise to score his twenty-sixth aerial victory and tie the record set by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I.

Behind him the Malaitans had begun to chant vespers.

Across the Bay, Washing Machine Charley and the Tokyo Express bellowed a martial vespers to introduce Admiral Halsey to Guadalcanal at night.

The admiral sat out the performance in General Vandegrift’s dugout, rising, during a lull, to strike a sandbag with a knuckly fist.

“Stout structure you have here, Archie,” Halsey grunted, and then the All-Clear sounded, and both men left.

Behind them, staff officers stared in wonderment at the stout sandbag which had just burst and was pouring sand on the floor with a weary sigh.

The departure of Charley and the Express did not mean that Marines on the ridge directly behind Vandegrift’s dugout could also go back to sleep, as had the admiral and the general. No, it meant, rather, that now they could emerge in dripping discontent from the watery pits in which they had taken shelter, to pass a few unharassed hours squatting on their haunches while hoping the customary but rarely fulfilled hope that the rain would stop and they might dry off.

Private Juergens began to swear. He swore at the enemy with an ardent fluency, making masterly use of that ugly four-letter word without which most Marines, like handcuffed orators, are speechless. Suddenly they were all on their feet howling foul epithets at the enemy, real or imagined, in the dark jungle below them. They called Emperor Hirohito a “bucktoothed bastard” and they suggested that Premier Tojo impale himself upon the Japanese caudal appendage, and then, up from the jungle a reedy high voice screeched back in outrage:

“F——— Babe Ruth!”¹²

Chesty Puller was being evacuated from Gavaga Creek.

The day before, he had led his battalion of Marines in the western push against Gavaga while Moore’s soldiers attacked from the south and Hanneken hit from the west. The enemy had replied with an artillery barrage.

Fragments from an exploding shell tore into Puller’s lower body and his legs. He was knocked flat. Bleeding freely, he called to a nearby Marine.

“Call headquarters, old man.”

“I can’t, sir. The line’s been cut.”¹³

Puller staggered erect to help repair the break, and a sniper shot him twice in the arm. Puller sank to the ground again. His men placed him on a poncho, dug a foxhole and lowered him gently into it. He spent the night there. In the morning a corpsman came to tie an evacuation tag to Puller’s uniform. Puller snatched it away, snarling:

“Go label a bottle with that tag! I can go under my own power.”¹⁴

Puller arose unsteadily and limped a thousand yards down the trail to the beach. He sank to the ground again. To his agonized dismay, he could not, in front of his men, go farther. His proud spirit could no longer goad his weakening flesh, and he had to crawl into the landing boat.

Sailing down the coast in a fog of pain, he could hear the firing signaling the beginning of the end for the enemy at Gavaga.

On November 9—while Chesty Puller was taken by jeep to the primitive hospital inside the perimeter—Admiral Halsey held a press conference. A newsman asked how long he thought the Japanese would continue to fight.

“How long can they take it?” Halsey snapped.¹⁵

Another reporter asked the admiral how he proposed to conquer.

“Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs,”¹⁶ he shot back.

Later, Halsey decorated some of Vandegrift’s officers and men. He met the general’s staff, and also Martin Clemens. Turning to drive to the runway, Halsey said: “Well, Clemens, you carry on. We’ve got to beat these goddamed little yellow bastards.”¹⁷

At the airfield, Halsey said farewell with twinkling eyes. “Vandegrift,” he said, “don’t you do a thing to that cook.”¹⁸

Then he was gone, and a few hours later Archer Vandegrift had resumed the attack in the west.

The arrival of the Eighth Marines under Colonel Hall Jeschke had prompted Vandegrift to renew his push toward Kukumbona. He sent this force to join Arthur holding the blocking position with his own Second Marines and a battalion of the 164th.

But the attack, begun in the afternoon, bogged down in a furious rainfall.

Next day the sun was blazing, and the Eighth Marines, like all new arrivals on Guadalcanal, wilted in its heat.

On the following day the sun shone even more fiercely. Although it did not deter the veteran units at Gavaga Creek—who finally reduced the enemy pocket, killing 350 Japanese at a loss of forty Americans dead and 120 wounded—the heat again slowed Colonel Arthur’s advance. So did General Hyakutake’s well-entrenched, stubborn, and enlarged forces.

By mid-afternoon only four hundred yards had been gained. By that time also, General Vandegrift had been informed by Admiral Halsey that a great fleet had sailed from Truk. Presumably, it was going to join other large forces gathering at Rabaul and in the Shortlands.

Later that day, two furious air raids signaled the end of the aerial doldrums and underlined Halsey’s warning.

Once again Archer Vandegrift was forced to shift from an offensive to a defensive stance. He recalled his troops from both fronts. He strengthened his lines. He tried to conceal his apprehension, but with little success. Anyone who had been on Guadalcanal long enough could read the signs. They knew—at Henderson Field, along the beaches and the riverbanks, atop the ridges and down in the gloom of the jungle—they knew as they had always known that the breaking point had to be reached some time.

And this was it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

FOR THE first time since the Japanese garrison on Tulagi had sent its last, heartbreaking message, “Praying for everlasting victory,” Japan’s Army and Navy had drawn up a plan that was concentrated rather than dispersed, detailed rather than complicated.

Admiral Yamamoto had placed Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo in command of an armada of two aircraft carriers, four battleships, eleven cruisers, forty-nine destroyers, eleven transports, and 14,000 men.

The troops were to augment General Hyakutake’s 17th Army, which, in mid-November, at last outnumbered Vandegrift’s forces by 30,000 to 23,000. Some 3000 of the reinforcements comprised a Combined Naval Landing Force, while the remaining 11,000 formed the main body of the 38th Division.

They were to land on the morning of November 13, after Henderson Field had been bombarded night and day. The first barrage was to be delivered on the night of November 12–13 by Vice-Admiral Hiroaki Abe with battleships Hiei and Kirishima, cruiser Nagara and fourteen destroyers. Gunichi Mikawa, with six cruisers and six destroyers, would bombard during the daylight of November 13 while a convoy of eleven high-speed Army transports, escorted by twelve Tokyo Express destroyers under Tanaka the Tenacious, put the troops ashore at Tassafaronga.

Throughout this operation, Admiral Kondo with carriers Hiyo and Junyo, battleships Haruna and Kongo and other ships would sail in distant support about 150 miles north of Savo. Hiyo’s and Junyo’s airplanes would, of course, bomb Henderson Field in concert with the eagles from Rabaul.

Thus the major assault-and-landing plan, simplified at last, with the knockout blow to be delivered “all at once, in big ships,” as Gunichi Mikawa had argued in that late August of long ago. And among its details, finally, was the destruction of the Allied coast-watching network on Bougainville.

Japan now knew to what disastrous degree her movements of ships and aircraft had been made known to the Americans. Because she did, aircraft from Rabaul or New Ireland rarely flew above The Slot, now, and ships sailed south on three different routes.

Nevertheless, coastwatchers continued to operate close to fields such as Buin and it was very difficult to conceal the gathering of a great armada from those numerous native scouts who, as the Japanese also now realized, were not harmless “civilians” in lap-laps but rather very dangerous enemy spies. Since trapping the scouts themselves was obviously impossible, or at least impractical, the Japanese decided to strike at the organizing brains behind them.

Jack Read in the north of Bougainville and Paul Mason in the south at Buin were to be caught and killed.

Hunting dogs were shipped into Buin and kept there in a wire cage while a patrol of a hundred soldiers was brought up from the island’s southern tip at Kahili.

Mason’s scouts quickly discovered the dogs, and Mason signaled their location to the Americans. A Catalina flew over Buin and dropped a bomb.

“Killed the lot,” Mason signaled cheerfully, before departing Buin for the towering green-black mountains that ran down Bougainville’s north-south spine. After him came the Japanese patrol. Between the two moved the ever-faithful scouts, reporting every enemy movement or sending the patrol panting up the wrong slopes. Exhausted, convinced that no effete westerner could survive in such horrible terrain, the Japanese withdrew.

Paul Mason returned to his hideout in Buin. He resumed broadcasting with a report of the enemy’s failure. Then he sent this ominous message:

“At least 61 ships this area: 2 Nati-class cruisers, 1 Aoba, 1 Mogami, 1 Kiso, 1 Tatuta, 2 sloops, 33 destroyers, 17 cargo, 2 tankers, 1 passenger liner of 8,000 tons.”¹

It was this message, joined to the reports of tirelessly searching Flying Forts and Catalinas, which sent the last American carrier force in the Pacific tearing north again.

Big E was coming back to battle a cripple, but coming back because Bull Halsey was throwing even half-ships and cockleshells into America’s desperate struggle to save Guadalcanal.

Since the day Enterprise had staggered from Santa Cruz into the hill-girdled harbor of Nouméa, a battalion of Seabees, all of repair-ship Vulcan’s crew, and the carrier’s own craftsmen had been working around the clock to put her back in shape. Enterprise had lain there beside the dozing little French colonial town with its dainty white replica of Notre Dame de Paris crowning the harbor, while her decks rattled to the incessant pounding of air-hammers, while even the nights winked and twinkled with the spark and sputter of welder’s torches, and while other ships sped north with the last of Admiral Halsey’s available troops.

Six thousand of them, Marines and soldiers of the 182nd Infantry Regiment, had been rushed to Guadalcanal to even the 30,000-to-23,000 numerical superiority now possessed by the enemy.

The first group, the Marines, had arrived on November 11 in a convoy commanded by Rear Admiral Norman Scott. Even as they hurried ashore, the enemy struck with the two air raids which ended the aerial doldrums and underlined Halsey’s warning to Vandegrift. The only damage was in near-misses suffered by transport Zeilin, while eleven enemy aircraft were shot down against seven Wildcats lost.

The second group led by Admiral Turner and carrying the 182nd Infantry Regiment was due to arrive the following day, November 12.

So also, Admiral Halsey learned, would the aircraft and battleships of Admiral Kondo’s huge fleet.

Only Enterprise, still needing ten days of repairs, battleships South Dakota—also crippled—and Washington, two cruisers and eight destroyers could offset this powerful enemy concentration.

Halsey ordered them back.

On November 11, Seabees and Vulcan-crew and all, Enterprise stood out of Nouméa. She made the open sea with her decks still shaking and echoing to air-hammers, with welder’s arcs still sparking, with a big bulge in her right side forward, without watertight integrity and one oil tank still leaking, and with her forward elevator still jammed as it had been since the bomb at Santa Cruz broke in half.

Fortunately, the elevator was stuck at the flight-deck level. Or at least it was thought to be. No one, not even Bull Halsey, would have dared to press the “Down” button to find out. If the elevator went down and did not come up again, there would be a big square hole in the flight deck and Enterprise would be useless.

Thus, depending on her after elevators to bring planes to and from the hangars below, Enterprise sailed back to battle only half a carrier. With her, though, were screening ships powerful enough to take on Admiral Kondo’s sluggers.

If they could get there in time.

If…

This time there would be no complicated Japanese Army timetable of attack to work in their favor. This time all depended on a favorable wind.

If it blew from the north Enterprise could launch her planes without having to turn around. But if it blew from the south, the big ship would have to turn into the wind to launch. Leaving Nouméa behind and entering radio silence, Admiral Kinkaid stood bareheaded on Big E’s bridge and saw that the luck of Santa Cruz had forsaken him.

It was a south wind.

Far to the north, the weather favored the Japanese.

At three o’clock in the morning of November 12, Admiral Abe had detached his battleships and three destroyers from Admiral Kondo’s main body. He had sailed south for the Shortlands, making rendezvous with Nagara and eleven more destroyers, among them Amatsukaze under Commander Hara.

They sped down The Slot to bombard Henderson Field, and they ran into a fortuitous rain squall.

Thick clouds clotted overhead. Rain fell in sheets. The sky darkened as though night had fallen, and Abe jubilantly ordered his ships to keep on course at a steady eighteen knots.

Some of Abe’s staff officers aboard flagship Hiei objected. Although the squall certainly would protect the ships against surprise attack, it also made it dangerous to keep plowing ahead in complex formation.

Admiral Abe had formed his fleet into a tight double crescent. Half the destroyers formed a leading arc about five miles ahead of Nagara and the other destroyers, which formed a second arc. Following in column were Hiei and Kirishima better than a mile apart. Some of Abe’s officers thought the fleet should slow down, or else risk collision in the darkness, but Abe replied:

“We must maintain this speed to reach the target area in good time.”²

Charging south almost blindly, his men sweating despite the drenching rain, Admiral Abe pressed ahead.

And the covering squall stayed with him at the same speed.

“Twenty-four torpedo bombers headed yours.”

The message was from Paul Mason at Buin, and it was acted upon immediately by the second group of American ships in Iron Bottom Bay.

Kelly Turner had brought them in early that morning of November 12. They had begun unloading hurriedly, and the 182nd Infantry was already ashore by the time Mason’s warning was received. A few minutes later the Wildcats were taking off and Turner had broken off unloading. He set his transports in two parallel columns of three ships each and sailed them toward Savo. Around them cruisers and destroyers bristled with antiaircraft barrels.

Shortly after two o’clock the Bettys were sighted circling over eastern Florida Island. They had formed two groups, north and south, to make the customary “anvil” attack from both sides. Turner deliberately baited the northern group by turning right to give them his ships’ broadsides.

The Bettys came boring in.

A ferocious storm of steel swept among them. One by one they began to crash into the sea, but many of them still dropped their torpedoes.

Turner swung his ships left. Only his narrow sterns beckoned to the Bettys, and their torpedoes ran harmlessly by either side of the transports.

To the south, Wildcats from Henderson ripped through the second group. Eight minutes after the enemy attack began, it was over and only one of the twenty-four Bettys, and five of eight escorting Zeros, had survived.

Destroyer Buchanan, damaged during that storm of American antiaircraft fire, was put out of action and sent home, while the heavy cruiser San Francisco had been slightly damaged by an enemy suicider who had deliberately crashed into the after control station.

Satisfied, Kelly Turner turned his ships around and resumed unloading.

Hiroaki Abe was jubilant. He actually chortled his delight with “This blessed squall.”³ His spirits rose higher upon receiving a report from the scout plane he had launched before entering the storm. It said: “More than a dozen warships seen off Lunga.”⁴

Abe smiled, and said: “If Heaven continues to side with us like this, we may not even have to do business with them.”⁵

Heaven, it seemed, had no intention of deserting him; for the storm still raged around his ships.

Rainfall on Guadalcanal muffled Carlson’s Raiders in their approach to an unsuspecting company of Japanese. Guided by Sergeant Major Vouza, the Raiders had moved stealthily up narrow native trails to the tiny village of Asimana on the upper Metapona River. They saw, to their satisfaction, that many of the enemy were bathing in the river. Colonel Carlson waited patiently until his men were in position. Then, he spoke one word:

“Fire!”

There were only a few minutes of massacre. Not one of 120 Japanese soldiers survived. The Raiders left their unburied bodies there to rot in the jungle, quickly resuming their pursuit of the harried Colonel Shoji.

The prospect of foul weather as a cloak to conceal the movement of the Tokyo Express did little to cheer Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, sortying from the Shortlands that afternoon. Aboard flagship Hayashio, Tanaka led twelve destroyers, eleven transports and 14,000 men toward Tassafaronga. But he had no faith in the fickle Solomons weather, and he also still thought that it was foolhardy to attempt to reinforce Guadalcanal in the face of Henderson’s air power. Tanaka did not think that Abe would be able to demolish the field any more than Kurita had done so a month ago, and he wondered how many of his ships were going to survive.⁶

As Tanaka’s ships neared Bougainville the weather began clearing.

Jack Read was on the run.

Having been warned by his scouts that the Japanese at Buka Passage were coming after him, he had notified Australia and been advised to flee, maintaining radio silence.

Read moved confidently into the high mountains on northern Bougainville. On the second day of his flight, November 12, a hot hazy morning sun turned into an afternoon downpour. Read and his scouts and the carriers bearing the teleradio slipped and swore while climbing higher to elude the pursuing Japanese.

They reached a mountain peak just as the rain stopped. Sunlight poured through a hole in rapidly dissolving clouds. The mists parted and the horizon became clear. Sailing down it in orderly formation were eleven large Japanese transports protected by twelve destroyers.

They were heading southeast.

Jack Read ordered his radio set up immediately and began broadcasting.

Although the storm was staying with Hiroaki Abe he had no reason to be so confident.

An American Catalina had sighted and reported him early that morning, even as he made rendezvous with Commander Hara’s column, and now, Jack Read had warned Kelly Turner of the Tokyo Express’s approach.

Turner realized immediately that this was the enemy’s big push.

Abe’s big ships were either out to sink Turner’s transports or bombard Henderson Field. Kelly Turner was confident that he could lead the transports, already ninety per cent unloaded, south to safety.

But what of Henderson Field?

It must not be bombarded. It must not because the planes of Cactus Air Force would then be unable to rise to intercept the enemy reinforcements—the heart of the entire Japanese operation—the planes from Enterprise would not be able to land on Guadalcanal to join them, and because one more day, at least, must be gained to allow Admiral Kinkaid’s powerful battleships time enough to enter the battle.

But to save the airfield, to gain the day, to stop the powerful enemy on this ominous and onrushing night of Thursday the twelfth and Friday the thirteenth, Kelly Turner had only two heavy and three light cruisers and eight destroyers. Nevertheless, he ordered them to halt the enemy—to stop the bombardment at all costs.

Turner gave command of this force to Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan.

Admiral Callaghan had been Vice-Admiral Ghormley’s chief of staff. It was Callaghan who had sat in silence at the acrimonious conference in the Fijis during which Frank Jack Fletcher had curtly advised Turner and Vandegrift that they would receive minimum carrier support for the invasion of Guadalcanal. After Halsey had relieved Ghormley, bringing his own chief of staff with him, Callaghan had gone back to sea.

He belonged there. Handsome with his shock of thick white hair and his jet-black eyebrows, his large dreamy eyes and straight, strong features, he might have been an ancient Celtic wanderer sailing a tossing coracle toward some undiscovered shore. Even his men idolized him, as does not happen often in any navy, and they called him “Uncle Dan.”

But he had neither the experience nor the training for the mission given to him by Turner.

Callaghan was chosen because he was senior to Norman Scott, the victor of Cape Esperance, who was also in the Bay aboard his flag cruiser Atlanta. Scott’s very victory also seems to have had inordinate influence on Callaghan, for he formed his ships in the same sort of column which had crossed the T on Aritomo Goto a month before.

Americans had yet to learn that the column was not the best formation to employ against the night-fighting, torpedo-firing Japanese. But it was chosen because of Cape Esperance, because it made maneuvering in narrow waters less risky, and because, presumably, it made communication between ships easier. So Callaghan set his ships in column: destroyers Cushing, Laffey, Sterett, and O’Bannon in the lead, heavy cruisers Atlanta, San Francisco, and Portland, followed by lights Helena and Juneau in the center; and in the rear, destroyers Aaron Ward, Barton, Monssen, and Fletcher. Unfortunately, Callaghan did not make good use of his best radar ships. They were not in the lead; moreover, Atlanta with inferior radar was ahead of San Francisco with excellent radar. Finally, no plan of battle was issued.

Nevertheless, for all of these oversights and omissions, the Americans led by Callaghan and Scott did possess that single quality which, so often in this desperate struggle, had extricated the unwary or unwise from a defeat of their own devising.

And that was valor.

The Tokyo Express was turning around.

Shortly before midnight Admiral Tanaka received word from Combined Fleet that the landing at Tassafaronga had been delayed until the morning of November 14. Admiral Mikawa was going to follow up Admiral Abe’s bombardment by shelling Henderson Field on the night of November 13, rather than on the morning of that day.

From flagship Hayashio came the signal to reverse course and retire to the Shortlands.

There was tension on Guadalcanal. It was almost a living quality, like the gases composing the atmosphere. It was a quivering electric dread attuned to the jagged flashes of lightning flitting over the island in the wake of the clearing rain. It was brittle, like the emergent bright stars overhead.

General Vandegrift felt it. He was aware of Abe’s approach, and of the outgunned fleet which Admiral Callaghan had to oppose him. The general’s staff also knew that this was the night. They went to bed not only fully clad, as was customary on Guadalcanal, but wearing pistol belts and clutching hand grenades. Some of them expected to use these in the morning. So did all of Vandegrift’s men, crouching beside their guns or perched on the edge of their holes. They spoke in low voices, often pausing to glance fearfully at the sky or to look furtively over their shoulders. It was as though they expected the enemy from every quarter. Upon the sinking of the new moon beneath the dark mountains their voices became hushed and whispering.

Out on the Bay a nine-knot easterly breeze blew gently into the faces of Callaghan’s lookouts. At ten o’clock, Callaghan saw Turner’s transports safely out of the eastern entrance, and reversed course toward Savo. His ships were still in column. He would make no attempt to flank the approaching Abe to launch torpedoes.

It was to be a straight-ahead plunge aimed at the enemy battleships.

It was now Friday the thirteenth and Admiral Abe’s divine squall had fallen behind.

Hiei and Kirishima and their fifteen sister furies had sailed away from the storm after the admiral had reformed his scattered formation. At half-past one, one of Amatsukaze’s lookouts cried, “Small island, 60 degrees to left.”

Commander Hara looked to his left and saw the black round silhouette of Savo Island.

“Prepare for gun and torpedo attack to starboard!” Hara shouted. “Gun range, three thousand meters. Torpedo firing angle, fifteen degrees.”⁷

Aboard Hiei, Admiral Abe was studying reports. General Hyakutake’s headquarters had radioed that the rain had cleared on Guadalcanal. Scout planes had taken off from Bougainville. There were still no reports of enemy ships. Confident and elated, Abe ordered Hiei and Kirishima to prepare for bombardment. Type-3 shells, thin-skinned 2000-pound projectiles each containing hundreds of incendiary bombs, were stacked on the decks around the 14-inch gun turrets.

A quarter hour later, from Hiei’s own masthead lookout came the frantic shout: “Four black objects ahead… look like warships. Five degrees to starboard. Eight thousand meters… unsure yet.”

From Hiei’s bridge came the cry, “Is eight thousand correct? Confirm.”

“It may be nine thousand, sir.”⁸

Hiroaki Abe was stunned. He had thought to bombard Guadalcanal unchallenged. He had piled the decks of his precious battleships with huge shells that needed but a single enemy hit to detonate them and turn Hiei and Kirishima into floating holocausts.

“Replace all those incendiaries with armor piercing,” he yelled. “Set turrets for firing forward.”⁹ Abe staggered to his chair and waited in agony. It would take at least ten minutes to change over.

And the range between forces was closing rapidly.

The Americans had sighted the Japanese and they had sighted them first.

Cushing at the head of the column had nearly collided with onrushing Yudachi and Harusame. Lieutenant Commander Edward Parker flashed the word and turned hard left to avoid collision. Behind him, his quick turn had piled up the American column.

“What are you doing?” Admiral Callaghan asked Atlanta, directly ahead of him.

“Avoiding our own destroyers,” came the reply.¹⁰

It was then that Hiei’s lookout sighted the Americans, then that the gunners and seamen aboard Hiei and Kirishima rushed from their battle stations to haul the vulnerable Type-3 shells below, stampeding the magazines, pushing and kicking each other to get at the armor-piercing shells lodged deep inside—and it was then that confusion in Admiral Callaghan’s column became compounded.

Excited voices began crackling over the Talk Between Ships. Reports of target bearings multiplied, but no one could tell if they were true bearings or merely relative to the reporting ships. No one knew which target to take under fire or when. From little Cushing still out in the lead came the voice of the destroyer leader, Commander Thomas Stokes, pleading, “Shall I let them have a couple of fish?”¹¹

“Affirmative,” came the reply, but it was too late. Yudachi and Harusame had raced off into the darkness.

Four minutes had passed before Callaghan gave the order: “Stand by to open fire!” Another precious four minutes were to slip by before he bellowed, “Commence firing! Give ’em hell, boys!”

And then, with surprise squandered and opportunity lost, the Americans called upon their last resource—their valor—and went plunging full tilt toward the mastodonic foe.

One of the most furious sea fights in all history had begun.

Ashore on Guadalcanal, veterans of the campaign—Japanese as well as American—looked at each other in openmouthed, overawed incredulity. Never before had the iron tongues of midnight bayed with such a maniacal clanging. Out there giants clad in foot-thick steel were contending with one another, and never before had the thunder of their blows rolled so mightily over glistening black Bay water.

Scarlet star shells shot into the sky with the horrible beauty of hell. Searchlight beams licked out like great pale crisscrossing tongues. Ships in silhouette, big and small, plunged wildly toward each other, heeled away, dashed in and out of the smoke, blew up, blazed, vanished—or reappeared with spouts of white and orange gushing from their guns. The surface of Iron Bottom Bay was like polished black marble shot with the bubbles of torpedo wakes, swirled with the foaming trails of careening ships, splashed with the red or the yellow of burning vessels.

And above the roar and reverberation of the battle came the voice of Admiral Callaghan, crying, “We want the big ones, boys, we want the big ones!”

A trio of American destroyers was charging the big ones. They had broken through Abe’s screen and taken on great Hiei. Cushing in the van loosed a spread of torpedoes from a half-mile range, missing, but forcing Hiei to turn away. But then Cushing was illuminated in searchlight beams and enemy shells began to take her apart.

Laffey swept in so close that she narrowly avoided collision. Hiei’s pagoda-like masts swayed over the little American as she dashed past, pouring a torrent of automatic shellfire into Hiei’s decks. Fires broke out aboard the big Japanese. But then Hiei bellowed and little Laffey began to burn.

O’Bannon bored in last. She came in so close that Hiei could not depress her 14-inch guns to shoot at her. Great shells howled harmlessly over O’Bannon’s masts while her gunners raked the Japanese with guns aimed in the light of her flames. Then O’Bannon was gone, sheering sharply left to avoid burning Laffey, tossing life jackets to sailors struggling in the water as she passed.

Now San Francisco was battering Hiei. But the enemy battleship thundered back. Fourteen-inchers tore into San Francisco’s bridge to kill Admiral Callaghan and almost every American there.

Norman Scott was also dead. Atlanta had been the first to be caught in enemy searchlights. With her port bridge clearly illuminated, bracketing warships gave her her death blows and killed the hero of Cape Esperance.

Thereafter the fight became a melee. It was a free-for-all, ship-for-ship and shot for shot, with Japanese firing upon Japanese and American upon American. Every ship but Fletcher was hit. Barton blew up, Monssen sank, Cushing and Laffey were lost, and so were the cruisers Atlanta and Juneau—the latter finished off by a Japanese submarine as she tried to stagger home from battle.

But the Japanese were fleeing.

Mighty Kirishima, late to enter the battle, was already streaking north at the head of a general retirement.

Every one of Abe’s ships had been staggered. Yudachi was sinking and so was Akatsuki. Amatsukaze had been battered. A cascade of shells had fallen flashing around Commander Hara on his bridge, cutting down his men, blowing his executive officer over the side but leaving his legs behind, and so crippling the ship that Amatsukaze had to be steered manually.

Slowly, in the dawn lighting that glassy metallic sea, dragging herself past survivors lying burned, wounded, and dazed on their life rafts, or struggling to keep afloat in oily, debris-laden, shark-infested waters, little Amatsukaze made her way home.

Off his port bow Hara saw Hiei. The great ship was dying. She was almost dead in the water, crawling, with jammed rudder, in a wide aimless circle. Marine bombers from Henderson Field were already slashing at her. They shot down the eight Zeros flying cover above the battleship while Major Joe Sailer knocked out Hiei’s remaining antiaircraft turret with a well-planted bomb, after which they bombed and torpedoed her without interruption.

But she refused to go down.

“We’ve got to sink her!” Henderson’s pilots cried, landing to rearm and refuel and to return to the attack. “If we don’t the admirals will stop building carriers and start building battleships again.”¹²

Again and again they struck at Hiei, but on and on she crawled, glowing like a great red gridiron, circling and circling while destroyers ministered to her like cubs caring for a wounded lioness, until, at nightfall, after survivors and Admiral Abe had been taken off, the Japanese scuttled her and she sank with a hiss and an oil slick two miles long.

But on that morning of Friday the thirteenth, the heart of Commander Hara was heavy with grief as he saw the Americans hurtling down from the skies. They came, he knew, from that Henderson Field which had not been bombarded.

Nevertheless, Gunichi Mikawa was already coming down The Slot determined to succeed where Hiroaki Abe had failed.

Admiral Halsey was aware of Mikawa’s approach, and he planned to intercept him with the battleships from Admiral Kinkaid’s Enterprise force. To send these capital ships into the narrow and treacherous waters of Iron Bottom Bay was not, as Halsey knew, consonant with accepted naval doctrine. But the safety of Henderson Field seemed to him well worth the risk of his heavies, and so, on November 13, confident that the winds favored Kinkaid, he broke radio silence to tell him to put South Dakota and Washington and four destroyers under Rear Admiral Willis Lee with instructions to lay an ambush east of Savo Island. Kinkaid replied:

Halsey was stunned. Mikawa would have a clear path to Henderson Field.

In the early afternoon of Friday the thirteenth the Tokyo Express moved toward Guadalcanal again.

Tanaka’s eleven transports were in a four-column formation sailing at eleven knots with a dozen destroyers deployed to the front and either side.

Tanaka was still in flagship Hayashio, which means “Fast running tide.” The tide, it seemed to Tanaka, who had heard of the disaster which had overtaken Abe, was running fast against Japan.¹³

At eight o’clock that morning Enterprise was still 280 miles south of Henderson Field. But she launched planes, some of which reached Guadalcanal in time to join the attack on Hiei, and continued to steam north.

All day long Big E remained buttoned up with her men at battle stations while her scout planes fanned out in search of the Japanese carriers and her combat air patrol flew overhead. But no enemy ships or aircraft were sighted. At dusk her men were secured from General Quarters and went below. Mighty South Dakota and Washington and their destroyers slid away from the screen and vanished into the darkness ahead. They could not stop Mikawa tonight, but they would at least be in the battle zone by tomorrow.

Enterprise ran steadily north at twenty-five knots.

It was happening again. It was not supposed to happen, Callaghan and Scott were supposed to have ended it, but there it was: Louie the Louse, flares, the lethal thunder-and-lightning of the sea cannonade, and flames engulfing Henderson Field.

Admiral Mikawa had brought six cruisers and six destroyers down to Savo. With flagship Chokai, Kinugasa, Isuzu, and two destroyers, Mikawa guarded the western gate at Savo while heavy cruisers Suzuya and Maya, escorted by light cruiser Tenryu and four destroyers, entered the Bay to bombard.

They hurled about a thousand rounds of eight-inch shell into the airfield, until six little torpedo boats under Lieutenant Hugh Robinson crept from Tulagi Harbor to launch torpedoes at them and scare them off.

Mikawa sailed jubilantly north on that morning of November 14, delighted to see his success celebrated in the intercepted plain-language radio message which Vandegrift had sent to Halsey: being heavily shelled.

In Washington the news that the Japanese had once again penetrated American defenses to batter Henderson Field produced a pessimism and a tension unrivaled throughout the campaign. Upon receipt of reports that heavy Japanese reinforcements were sailing down The Slot unopposed, even President Roosevelt began to think that Guadalcanal might have to be evacuated.¹⁴

Mikawa’s guns had wrecked eighteen American planes and had churned up the airstrips. But they had not knocked out the field entirely, nor had Admiral Kondo sent any aircraft from Hiyo or Junyo down to protect Mikawa from likely pursuit. At dawn of the fourteenth, while fires still raged and ammunition dumps exploded, pilots raced to their armed planes and took off.

They found Mikawa’s ships. They put two torpedoes into big Kinugasa, leaving her to be sunk by pilots from Enterprise, who also bombed Chokai, Maya, and Isuzu. Admiral Mikawa, who had intended to provide indirect cover for Admiral Tanaka’s ships, was forced to retire to the Shortlands.

Tanaka sailed south all alone.

Since dawn, when a few Flying Fortresses had been driven off by covering Zeros, Tanaka the Tenacious had stood on Hayashio’s bridge anxiously scanning the skies. He had seen flights of enemy planes but they did not attack him. He conjectured that they had gone after Mikawa. He was positive that they had not been frightened off by the handful of Zeros circling overhead; all, it seemed, that Admiral Kondo to the north could spare from the crowded decks of Hiyo and Junyo.

At noon Tanaka’s ships were only 150 miles from Guadalcanal, and it was then that the American planes came hurtling out of the sun and the slaughter known as the Buzzard Patrol began.

They flew in from everywhere: from Espiritu Santo, from the Fijis, from Henderson Field, from the decks of Enterprise still closing Guadalcanal at high speed. They flew in to bomb or launch torpedoes or to strafe, banking to fly back to base again or to land at Henderson where cooks, clerks, typists, mechanics, Seabees, even riflemen, had formed a human chain to hand along the bombs and bullets that would shatter the Tokyo Express forever.

Wildcats and Airacobras and the newly arrived twin-tailed Lightnings went flashing and slashing among Kondo’s pitifully few Zeros and the other eagles racing to the rescue from Rabaul. They shot them down while the Dauntlesses dove or the Forts unleashed their high-level patterns or the Avengers came in low with their fish, and then they, too, went after the transports, screaming in at masthead level to rake the decks of ships already slippery with blood.

They struck five times, from noon until sunset, these pilots of the Buzzard Patrol, and they put six transports on the bottom while sending a stricken seventh staggering back to the Shortlands. Admiral Tanaka’s destroyers were powerless to protect their transports. They could only scurry among these burning, listing, sinking charges to take aboard survivors or to fish a weaponless, terrified soldiery from the reddening waters of The Slot.

They were red, and so were bunks and bulkheads glowing with heat and visible beneath decks torn open as though by a monster can opener. American pilots sickened in their cockpits to see the slaughter that they were spreading, but they did not remove their hands from gun-buttons or bomb releases. Every enemy soldier spared meant a Japanese alive to kill Americans on Guadalcanal. And the bullets continued to spurt among the bobbing heads, and bomb followed bomb into smoking, settling ships.

Tanaka the Tenacious plowed on.

He had only four of his original eleven transports, his destroyers were widely scattered by hours of evasive zigzagging, but he was nevertheless determined to make Tassafaronga. After nightfall relieved him of his ordeal, he withdrew to the north. He would wait there until morning, resuming course after Admiral Kondo had bombarded Henderson Field.

Nobutake Kondo was already rushing south with mighty Kirishima escorted by cruisers Atago, Takao, Sendai, and Nagara and nine destroyers. Kondo was infuriated by two days of disaster. He would brook no further delay, no additional losses of ships and men, and he would personally see to the obliteration of the enemy airfield. Kondo was not only spoiling for a fight, he expected one.

In this, Ching Chong China Lee would not disappoint him.

Rear Admiral Willis Lee received the first part of his alliterative nickname at the Naval Academy, and the next two parts during extensive service in China, a land in which his last name, although spelled Li, was far from rare, and where he had befriended a Marine major named Vandegrift.

On the night of November 14, Ching Lee came to Vandegrift’s aid, leading the battleships and destroyers he had detached from Kinkaid’s force the night before. Screened by destroyers Walke, Benham, Preston, and Gwin, Admiral Lee took Washington and South Dakota around Guadalcanal’s western tip. He went sweeping west of Savo, but found nothing, only the glare of Tanaka’s burning transports.

Lee’s six-ship column turned north, and then east to put Savo on the right and enter Iron Bottom Bay.

The bay was calm. Its waters gleamed faintly in the light of a first-quarter moon setting behind the mountains of Cape Esperance. Lee’s deep-water sailors could sniff a sweet land breeze redolent of honeysuckle. They could see very little, only the heights of land looming to either side. Needles on the magnetic compasses fluttered violently as they passed, in grim reminder of their purpose, over the hulks of the sunken vessels that gave the bay its name.

Ching Lee tried to raise Guadalcanal by radio. Back came the reply: “We do not recognize you.”¹⁵

The admiral thought of his friend from China, and countered:

“Cactus, this is Lee. Tell your big boss Ching Lee is here and wants the latest information.”¹⁶

No answer. But then, out of nowhere, but over the Talk Between Ships: “There go two big ones, but I don’t know whose they are.”¹⁷

Lee stiffened. The chatter was from a trio of torpedo boats to his left. He spoke quickly to Guadalcanal again: “Refer your big boss about Ching Lee; Chinese, catchee? Call off your boys!”¹⁸ And then, more sharply to the torpedo boats themselves: “This is Ching Chong China Lee. All PTs retire.”¹⁹

Over the Talk Between Ships a skeptical voice murmured, “It’s a phony. Let’s slip the bum a pickle.”²⁰

“I said this is Ching Chong China Lee,” the admiral roared. “Get the hell out of the way! I’m coming through!”²¹

Startled, the tiny craft scuttled aside and the battleships went through.

Lee led them west again toward Savo, straight toward Sendai and a destroyer coming east as Kondo’s vanguard. Shortly after eleven o’clock, Washington and South Dakota’s 16-inch guns boomed, and the battle was joined.

As always it began badly for the Americans. Japanese crews quickly launched shoals of shark-shaped steel fish. Preston, Benham, and Walke took the full brunt of them, of enemy gunfire as well, and were given their death blows. South Dakota was caught in enemy searchlights and an entire Japanese bombardment force opened up on her. She shuddered under their blows. She fought back, shooting out the searchlights—but Japanese shells tore into her superstructure, sweeping away her search radars and all but one gunnery radar.

But then mighty Washington found Kirishima.

Again and again her 16-inch guns flashed and roared, again and again her five-inchers fired starshell to illuminate the enemy giant or to rip her decks. Kirishima was staggered repeatedly. Nine of those terrible 2700-pound armor-piercers tore into her vitals. Topside she was a mass of flames, she was drifting helplessly, she was done. Kirishima would join her sister-queen, Hiei, on the bottom of the sea. And like Hiei’s ladies-in-waiting, all of Kirishima’s escort, excepting sinking Ayanami, were turning to flee. South Dakota and Washington had trained their terrible guns against Atago and Takao, who were caught in friendly searchlights, and these battered cruisers led the flight to the north.

Washington gave pursuit alone, for South Dakota and Gwin had withdrawn, but she found nothing—not even the Japanese transports whom Admiral Lee was also hungrily hunting—and so Ching Chong China Lee swung south of Guadalcanal to sail back to Nouméa in triumph.

Behind him, Admiral Raizo Tanaka began shepherding his four remaining transports for a last-ditch run into Guadalcanal. He asked Admiral Mikawa for permission to beach the troopships, but Mikawa replied: “Negative.” He appealed to the retiring Admiral Kondo aboard Atago, and received the answer: “Run aground and unload troops!”²²

Full steam ahead, with only Hayashio to guard them, the four transports raced toward Tassafaronga. Before the sun was up they had reached it and driven themselves hard aground almost line abreast. Tanaka the Tenacious turned to collect his scattered destroyers—many of them low in the water with rescued troops—and lead them sadly north.

And then came the dawn of November 15.

Men of the First Marine Division who had passed another of so many apprehensive and thundering nights looked west once more, and saw, at Tassafaronga, the familiar sight of enemy ships aground. But these ships were burning. American aircraft were already bombing them from the air, an American destroyer, Meade, was shelling them from the sea, and American long-range artillery was battering them from the beaches.

Air, land, and sea, it was symbolic of this savage struggle to wrest this poisonous green hag of an island from the hands of the Japanese; and now it was ending that way, for the crucial, three-day naval battle of Guadalcanal was over. The Americans had won. They had lost two cruisers and five destroyers, but they had sunk two Japanese battleships, one cruiser and three destroyers, as well as eleven precious troop transports with almost all of a 3000-man Naval Landing Force and half of the 38th Division.

Up on the ridges of Guadalcanal the Marines looked down at the beached and burning transports, and they smiled. It was full of savage satisfaction, that smile, nourished by a merciless and gloating glee. One hundred long days ago these aching, old-young men had begun this battle, and at any moment, upon any instantaneous hour, the black and bloody defeat symbolized by those burning transports could have been theirs.

But they had held, these Marines, the Army had come in, the Navy had fought back, and now, on the morning of November 15, Guadalcanal was truly saved.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ON THE morning of November 15, Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift also knew that the Japanese were beaten, and he sent the following dispatch to Admiral Halsey:

“We believe the enemy has suffered a crushing defeat. We thank Lee for his sturdy effort of last night. We thank Kinkaid for his intervention of yesterday. Our own air has been grand in its relentless pounding of the foe. Those efforts we appreciate, but our greatest homage goes to Scott, Callaghan and their men who with magnificent courage against seemingly hopeless odds drove back the first hostile stroke and made success possible. To them the men of Cactus lift their battered helmets in deepest admiration.”¹

Halsey agreed with Vandegrift’s jubilant estimate. Only minutes before he had showed his staff reports of destruction of the enemy transports, and told them: “We’ve got the bastards licked!”²

But the enemy thought otherwise.

Immediately after proclaiming a smashing Japanese victory in the naval battle of Guadalcanal, Imperial General Headquarters set about the actual destruction of those Americans whom they had just annihilated on paper. This time, the fifth, there was to be intelligent respect for enemy air power.

Before any reinforcements were sent to Guadalcanal, an airfield was to be constructed in the Shortlands, the one recently completed in New Georgia was to be expanded, and a third base sought farther down the Solomons ladder.

This plan, however, was quickly wrecked by the Americans.

Cactus Air Force, at a top strength of 150 planes and still expanding by early December, bombed the Japanese base at Munda on New Georgia into twisted futility, showering a similar interdiction upon Japanese attempts to construct supporting bases. Far to the north, American submarines, gnawing for months on Japanese supply lines, had begun to bite through. Finally, Australian and American soldiers had pressed Japanese forces on New Guinea back toward Buna-Gona, where they were to suffer ultimate defeat and General MacArthur was to gain the springboard from which he would drive up the New Guinea coast.

At bay on New Guinea, barely hanging on on Guadalcanal, the Japanese were not able to send the 51st Division and an independent brigade to the aid of Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake, as they had planned.

They could only struggle to supply him, and this too became a costly ordeal.

The first method of supply was by drums. They were filled with rice or other supplies, linked to each other by rope, lashed to the decks of destroyers for quick transit down The Slot, and then cast into the water off Tassafaronga where they would either be washed ashore or caught and pulled aground by waiting swimmers.

The first attempt at drum-supply produced the Battle of Tassafaronga. On the night of November 30 the Tokyo Express, with Raizo Tanaka still at the helm, collided with a superior American force of cruisers and destroyers under Rear Admiral Carleton Wright. The cargo of drummed-rice had to be abandoned, but Tanaka the Tenacious gave the Americans another bloody lesson in night torpedo-fighting. His ships sank Northampton, put a hole big enough to admit a bus in the side of Honolulu, and knocked Pensacola, New Orleans, and Minneapolis out of action for nearly a year. For this, Tanaka only suffered the loss of destroyer Takanami.

On December 7 a second drum-supply attempt was broken up by American aircraft and those torpedo boats, which, now arriving at Guadalcanal in numbers, were beginning to take over at night where Cactus Air Force left off by day. And while the American sea and air arms were blocking the Tokyo Express, the ground troops had gone over to the offensive.

On December 9, command on Guadalcanal passed from the Marine General Vandegrift to the Army General Patch. Patch wisely decided to wait until he had sufficient forces before attacking. Eventually he would have an entire corps—the XIV—consisting of the Americal Division, the 25th Infantry Division, the Second Marine Division, and, later on, but not committed to combat, the 43rd Infantry Division. With these troops, Patch went out after Hyakutake and his diseased and hungry 17th Army.

The Japanese resisted stubbornly, nevertheless a slow, grinding, overwhelming American assault—supported by air and artillery—eventually dislodged them from their positions west of the Matanikau. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, staff officers exchanged blows during bitter debates over whether Guadalcanal was to be reinforced or evacuated.³ The evacuation party, led by Premier Tojo, gradually gained the upper hand. Finally, at a conference of Imperial General Headquarters convened in the Imperial Palace, Japan admitted defeat. It was decided to evacuate.

The date of that historic decision was December 31, 1942, and by that time, most of the men who had landed at Guadalcanal on August 7 had left the island.

They had begun going out to their ships in late December, these men of the First Marine Division, and their departure would continue through early January. Some of them had been on the lines more than four months without relief, and they came down to the beach at Lunga ragged, bearded, and bony. Some of them had hardly the strength to walk to the boats, and yet, before they left, all of them had visited their cemetery.

It was called “Flanders Field,” and it was a neat cleared square cut into the Lunga coconut groves. Each grave was covered with a palm frond and marked with a rough cross onto which mess gear and identification tags were nailed. Departing Marines knelt or stood there in prayerful farewell, wondering, dazedly, how it was that there were so few graves.

In all, 774 Marines of this division had died, 1962 had been wounded, and another 5400 had been stricken with malaria. Ultimately, the Second Marine Division casualties would reach 268 dead and 932 wounded, so that all Marine ground losses would total 1042 dead and 2894 wounded. Army casualties would total 550 dead and 1289 wounded, making a grand total in American ground casualties of 1592 dead and 4183 wounded. American naval casualties, never to be compiled, would certainly equal, perhaps even surpass this, while the much smaller losses among the airmen would also never be known.

Yet, the Japanese would lose 28,800 soldiers on Guadalcanal itself, many thousands more would die at sea, 2362 pilots and airmen would be lost, and unknown thousands of sailors would also perish—in all, a probable 50,000 men lost in the unsuccessful struggle to recover “this insignificant island in the South Seas.”

But victory, as these Marines knew, is not always measured by casualties, nor do casualties describe how victory is gained. Sacrifice and valor and doggedness and skill, these gain victory, and these, though unmeasurable, at least may be described. In their cemetery, these Marines found an epitaph describing this greatest of Pacific victories and most glorious of American stands. It was a poem. Its words had been painfully picked out on a mess gear with the point of a bayonet. It said:

So they went out to their ships, with “hell” etched on their faces and evident in their sticks of bones and ragged dungarees. They went out so weak that they could not climb the cargo nets and the sailors, weeping openly, had to haul them aboard or fish them from the Bay into which they had dropped. They lay on the grimy decks of these blessed ships, gasping, but happy. And then they heard the anchor chains clanking slowly up the hawse pipes and they struggled to their feet for a last look at Guadalcanal.

They could not see, below the eastern horizon, that Aola Bay where Martin Clemens had begun an ordeal that was to end, in early December, with evacuation and a furlough in Australia. But they could see Red Beach, where they had landed, and Koli Point, where so many enemy had landed. There, still to their left, was the Tenaru, that evil green lagoon and sandspit in which the Japanese myth of the superman had been buried, and for the loss of which Colonel Ichiki had killed himself. To the right lay Henderson Field and all around it those sister airfields busy with two-way aerial traffic. Beyond it was Bloody Ridge which Red Mike Edson and the Raiders had held against the Kawaguchi Brigade, but the fields of kunai fertilized by the blood of the Sendai Division were not visible. Grassy Knoll was, though, rearing its tan hillside above the jungle roof, still, as it had been since August 7, an unattainable first-day’s objective. On the right, west of Lunga Lagoon and those rapidly rising piles of food and supplies, lay the broad mouth of the Matanikau, and west of that, the hook of Point Cruz, and then, stretching far away to the western horizon, Kukumbona and Tassafaronga, and the last of the Japanese landing places from which, on an early February night, the Tokyo Express would depart on its last run, taking with it the last men of the first Japanese army in history to submit to the disgrace of evacuation.

All of these landmarks these men could see in that last long searching look made half of hatred and half of a warrior’s poignant love for the battlefield that made him. And they could see also, while motors throbbed beneath their feet, while the transports made the customary sunset departure for the covering darkness of the open sea, they could see a round red sun beginning to set behind Cape Esperance.

It was sinking, like the Rising Sun of Japan, into the dark Pacific.