by John Hersey
Word was passed up through the encampment: “Mass at six-thirty for those who want it. Six-thirty mass.” Attendance was pretty good that morning. While that religious rite was being carried out, there was also a pagan touch. Four buzzards flew over the camp. “To the right hand,” said a young Marine, like a Roman sage. “Our fortunes will be good.”
One of the last orders we had heard Colonel Sims give the evening before was to the officer of the mess: “Breakfast in the morning must be a good, solid, hot meal. And if we get back from starving ourselves for two or three days out there and find that you fellows who stay behind have been gourmandizing, someone’ll be shot at dawn.”
Breakfast was solid, all right—our last square meal for three days. On the table there were huge pans full of sliced pineapples, beans, creamed chipped beef, a rice-and-raisin stew, crackers, canned butter, jam, and coffee.
As the units began lining up to move out, the first artillery barrage broke out—our guns coughing deeply, and then a minute later the answering coughs, far out. At eight-thirty the column started to move. We had a good long hike ahead of us. Colonel Sims’s encampment was about eight miles from the Matanikau, but terrain would force the column to move at least fifteen miles before contact.
Gradually the column fell into silence. The walking, which had been casual and purposely out of step, began to get stiffer and more formal, and finally much of the column was in step. On the engineers’ crudely bulldozed roadway, there began to be a regular crunch-crunch-crunch that reminded me of all the newsreels I had seen of feet parading on asphalt, to a background of cheering and band music. As a matter of fact, we had a band with us, but the bandsmen were equipped with first-aid stuff, stretchers, and rifles.
For a time the column wound through thick jungle, then emerged on a grassy plain edged by a kind of Great Wall of steep, bare ridges. Just before we reached the first of the ridges, Colonel Sims turned in his position at the head of the column and said, “Ten-minute break. Get off the road, spread right out.”
Lieutenant Colonel Julian Frisbie, Colonel Sims’s hulking executive officer, sat cross-legged in the grass and thundered at me, “Would you like to hear about our plan of operation?
“It’s a very simple scheme,” he explained. “We know that the Japs have moved up into positions on the other side of the mouth of the Matanikau. Perhaps some of them have already crossed to this side. Our aim is to cut off and kill or capture as many as we can. Those which we don’t pocket we must drive back.
“Edson—that’s Colonel Merritt Edson, who trained the first Marine raiders—will push a holding attack to the river right at the mouth, and try to make the Japs think we intend to force a crossing there. Whaling actually will force a crossing quite a little higher up, and then will wheel downstream beside the river. Hanneken will lead part of our force through behind Whaling, will go deeper than Whaling, and then cut right. Then Puller will go through deeper yet and cut right, too. If necessary another force will go around by sea in Higgins boats and land behind the Japs to close the trap.
“This is very much like the plan Lee used at the Chickahominy, when he had Magruder make a demonstration south of the river, and sent D. H. Hill, A. P. Hill, and Longstreet across at successive bridges, with Jackson closing the trap at the rear. We aren’t sending the units in with quite the same pattern, but it’s the same general idea. The advantage of our scheme is that Whaling goes in, and if he finds the going impossible, we haven’t yet committed Hanneken and Puller, and we can revise our tactics. I think it’ll work.”
“All up! Let’s go!”
The column started sluggishly up again. As it wound up over the ridges, past a battery of 75’s through a gap in the double-apron barbed-wire barrier, and out into the beginnings of no man’s land, it looked less like a drill-ground army than like a band of western pioneers, wary of Indians. Each man was armed to his own taste and heart’s content. Most carried rugged old 1903 bolt-action Springfields. A few had Browning automatic rifles. Almost all carried knives, slung from their belts, fastened to their packs, or strapped to their legs. Several had field shovels. Many carried pistols. Pockets bulged with grenades. Some were not satisfied with one bayonet, but carried two. There were even a couple of Jap swords. But probably the greatest refinement was a weapon I spotted in the tunic pocket of Corporal Joseph Gagney, of Augusta, Maine—a twelve-inch screwdriver.
I asked him how he happened to bring that along.
“Oh,” he said, “just found it on my person.”
“When do you expect to use it?”
“Never can tell, might lose my bayonet with some Japs in the neighborhood.”
After we came out on the last and highest ridge, Colonel Sims and I walked by a short cut down to a coastwise road, where we commandeered a jeep and rode forward as far as we could. This coast sector was where Colonel Edson, past master of the bush, was staging his holding attack. We asked our way to his command post.
Colonel Edson was not a fierce Marine. In fact, he appeared almost shy. Yet he was probably then among the five finest combat commanders in all the U.S. Armed Forces. “I hope the Japs will have some respect for American fighting men after this campaign,” he says so quietly you have to lean forward to catch it all. “I certainly have learned respect for the Japs. What they have done is to take Indian warfare and apply it to the twentieth century. They use all the Indian tricks to demoralize their enemy. They’re good, all right, but”—Colonel Edson’s voice trails off into an embarrassed whisper—”I think we’re better.”
Edson’s forward command post stood in the last of the palm trees, and consisted of a foxhole and a field telephone slung on a coconut tree. As we came up, he was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, talking to one of his units on the phone.
When he was through phoning, Sims asked him what his situation was. “Only slight contact so far,” he said. “We’ve met about a company of Japs on this side of the river, and they seem to be pretty well placed.”
“I hope the muzzlers aren’t pulling back,” Sims said.
“Don’t think so. They seem to have some mortars on the other side of the river, and I think they’re pretty solid over there.”
Here at Edson’s C.P. I heard for the first time close at hand the tight-woven noise of war. The constant fabric of the noise was rifle fire. Like a knife tearing into the fabric, every once in a while there would be a short burst of machine-gun fire. Forward we could hear bombs falling into the jungle, and the chatter of strafing P-39’s. A mortar battery directly in front of us was doubly noisy, for its commander was an old-fashioned hollering Marine. But weirdest of all was the sound of our artillery shells passing overhead. At this angle, probably just about under the zenith of their trajectory, they gave off a soft, fluttery sound, like that of a man blowing through a keyhole.
I inquired about the doubly noisy mortar battery. It belonged, I was told, to a character such as you would find only in the Marine Corps. This was Master Gunner Sergeant Lou Diamond, who was said to be approximately two hundred years old. I saw him presently, a giant with a full gray beard, an admirable paunch, and the bearing of a man daring you to insult him. Lou was so old that there was some question whether to take him along on such a hazardous job as the Solomons campaign. He was getting too unwieldy to clamber up and down cargo nets. On one of the last days before embarking, Lou found out that they were debating about his antiquity, so he went out and directed loading operations with such vehemence that for a time he lost his voice entirely; the next morning he was told he could go along.
Now there he was, proving that even if he out-Methuselahed Methuselah, he would still be the best damn mortar man in the Marines. As he went by he was, as usual, out of patience. He wanted to keep on firing, and had been told to hold back. “Wait and wait and wait and wait,” he roared. “Some people around here’ll fall on their arse from waiting....”
For the next two hours and more we were to witness some waiting which was nearly disastrous
to the general plan. This delay was caused by the watering of our force. The men had hiked more than ten miles under a broiling sun, and most had emptied their canteens. No one was certain when there would be another chance to water up—and water is the most precious commodity in human endurance. Therefore it was extremely important for the men to fill up.
The disaster was the way they did it. The water source was a big trailer tank, which had been towed out from the camp by a truck. The tank had only one faucet, and each man had to file by, turn the faucet on, hold his canteen under it, and turn it off again. This took time, far too much time.
We turned off the beach road and cut up through a jungle defile parallel to the Matanikau. Now we were really moving into position, and word was passed that we must be on the lookout for snipers. The trail led us constantly upward. Occasionally we would break out onto a grassy knoll, then plunge back into the jungle. The jungle seemed alien, an almost poisonous place. It closed in tightly on either side of the trail, a tangle of nameless vines and trees.
BY mid-afternoon our column had emerged on the crest of a broad and fairly high ridge, which looked down over the whole area of battle. It was there that I came to understand the expression, “the fog of war.” We thought we knew where we were, then found we didn’t, then found it wasn’t too easy to locate ourselves. The Matanikau was hidden from our view by intervening ridges, so we were not sure of its course.
Fortunately we were high enough to see the coastline; we could figure out where we were by triangulation. One of the men took a bearing with a little field compass on Point Cruz, off to our left. Then he took a bearing on Lunga Point, back where the camp lay. He drew the two lines of bearing on the map, tangent to the tips of the points—and where the lines crossed was our position.
Lieutenant Colonel Puller’s men were following us up the trail. When Sims found where we were, he told Puller that we would have to push on, even though darkness might shut down before we reached the prearranged bivouac. Now Colonel Puller was one of the hardest Marine officers to restrain, once he got started. He was as proud of his men as they were of him. And so when Colonel Sims told him to move on, he threw out his chest, blew out his cheeks, and said, “That’s fine. Couldn’t be better. My men are prepared to spend the night right on the trail. And that’s the best place to be if you want to move anywhere.”
Colonel Frisbie overheard this and couldn’t resist giving The Puller a rib. “Gwan,” he said, “we know your men are tough. The trouble with the trails along these ridges is that there’s not enough horse dung for your men to use as pillows.”
As we moved forward, the high flat snap of Jap snipers’ rifles became more and more frequent. Once in a while, from nowhere, a lone bullet would sing over our heads like a supercharged bee, and hundreds of men would involuntarily duck, even though the bullet was long past. The worst seemed to come from a valley ahead and to the left of us. Down there Whaling was trying to force his way through to the river, and his men were meeting not only sniper fire but occasional machine-gun and mortar fire. When I looked at the faces of a handful of Colonel Sims’s young men, who by now were already friends of mine—C. B., Bill, Ralph, Irving, Ted—I saw that they were no longer boastful joking lads. The music in that valley made them almost elderly.
Our bivouac for the night was on a ridge right above that valley, and we had hardly had time to set up some radio equipment and to get the field telephone working when the walking wounded began to dribble up the awful incline out of the valley: young fellows with bandages wrapped scarf-like around their necks, or with arms in slings, or with shirts off and huge red-and-white patches on their chests. They struggled silently up that forty-five-degree slope, absolutely silent about what they had seen and how they felt, most with a cigarette dangling lifelessly, perhaps unlit, out of one comer of the mouth, their eyes varnished over with pain.
Near the equator, the sun rises at about six and sets at about six all year round. By a quarter past six that night, it was nearly dark. An overcast was settling down; it looked like rain.
Breakfast had been huge, but we had done quite a bit of work in twelve hours. We were famished. There were no niceties out here; no please-pass-the-salt and no sir-may-I-please-be-excused. We just flopped down wherever we happened to be and opened our rations and gulped them down. The main course was Ration C—fifteen ounces of meat-and-vegetable hash, straight from the can, cold but delicious that evening. For dessert we had a bar of Ration D.
Gradually our bivouac settled down for the night. The men snuggled down into whatever comfortable spots they could find. They couldn’t find many, because Guadalcanal’s ridges came up, once upon a time, out of the sea, and their composition is nine-tenths crumbled coral—not the stuff of beauty rest.
C.B. had had the sense, as I had not, to look for a comfortable bed before it got pitch dark. The spot he picked was at the military crest—not on top of the ridge, but a little down the side—so we would not be silhouetted at dawn, and so sniper fire from the opposite side of the ridge could not reach us. Somehow he had found a place about twelve feet long and six feet wide where the coral was quite finely crumbled. When he heard me stumbling around and cursing coral, he called me over. I took off my pack and my canteen, folded my poncho double, and settled down. There was nothing to serve as pillow except either my pack, which was full of ration cans, or my steel helmet. I finally found that the most comfortable arrangement was to put my helmet on, and let it contend with the coral.
“Well, what do you think of the Marines?” C.B. asked.
I told him I was sold.
“They’re a pretty fine bunch,” he said. “Lots of this particular gang are pretty green, but they’re willing and bright. There’s no griping among the privates in the Marine Corps for two reasons. The first is that they’re all volunteers. If one of them starts talking back, the officer says, ‘Nobody drafted you, Mac,’ and every time, the squawker stops squawking. The other thing is that these men are a really high type. In peacetime the Corps only accepted about twenty per cent of the applicants. In fact, the only difference between our officers and our privates is luck. One fellow got a break that the other didn’t happen to get, and so he has the advantage of position.”
And suddenly, like a child falling off in the middle of a bedtime story, C.B. was breathing hard and regularly. From then on, the night was in my hands, and I didn’t like it.
MY bedroom was the hollow, empty sky, and every once in a while a 105-mm. shell would scream in one window and out the other. There was nothing soft and fluffy about the noise here. We lay within two hundred yards of where the shells were landing, and we heard the peculiar drilling sound you get only on the receiving end of artillery fire. All through the night snipers took pot shots at the ridges.
It was five in the morning before I dropped off. At five-thirty it started raining, and I waked up again. So did all the Marines. The poncho helped, but rain infiltrates better than the Japs. Soon a spot here, a patch there, got wet. With the damp came chills, and before long there were a lot of miserable Marines. The only consolation was that across the way there were undoubtedly a lot of miserable Japs.
War is nine-tenths waiting—waiting in line for chow, waiting for promotion, waiting for mail, for an air raid, for dawn, for reinforcements, for orders, for the men in the front to move, for relief. All that morning, while time seemed so important to a layman, we waited. The plan was for Whaling to force his crossing, after which Sims’s men, under Hanneken and Puller, would follow through.
The artillery and plane barrage that morning was a grim show from our grandstand ridge. The climax of the show was when two TBF’s, the Navy’s most graceful planes, came over and dropped two strings of hundred-pound bombs. From our ridge we could see the bombs leave their bays, describe their parabola, and fall, terribly, where they were intended to fall. All along our ridge and the next, the Marines stood up and cheered.
When the barrage subsided, huge white birds circled in te
rror over the jungle across the way, and we had visions of the Japs circling in terror underneath. Bill, evidently thinking of them, said quietly, “War is nice, but peace is nicer.”
We settled down to wait for Whaling to have success. A few of us crept out on a knoll which towered above the river itself; we could look down on the area where Whaling’s men were doing their bitter work, and we could hear the chatter of their guns, but we could see no movement, so dense was the growth. In midmorning we did see seven Japs running away up a burnt-off ridge across from us. A machine gun about twenty feet from us snapped at their heels, and they dived for cover. “How did you like the sound of that gun?” crowed one of the gunners. “That’s the best damn gun in the regiment—in the Corps, for that matter.”
At 11:40 A.M. the first of Whaling’s men appeared on the ridges across the river. A signalman semaphored back the identification of the unit, so we would not fire on them. At 11:45 Whaling sent a message back that the crossing had been secured. Colonel Hanneken’s men began to move. It was time for me to join a unit and go down.
CAPTAIN Charles Alfred Rigaud, standing there in the drizzle about to lead his heavy machine-gun company forward, looked like anything except a killer who took no prisoners. He had a boy’s face. There were large, dark circles of weariness and worry under his eyes. His mustache was not quite convincing.
We stood on a high grassy ridge above a three-hundred-foot cliff. In the valley below was a little stream, which ran into the Matanikau River. Captain Rigaud’s mission was to clear the valley of snipers, push to the river, and force a crossing.
The crossing was supposed to be made easy by the fact that Whaling’s force was working around behind the Japs on the other side of the river, so the enemy would be trapped. But Whaling had run into trouble and been delayed. Therefore Captain Rigaud’s mission was doomed before it started—but he had no way of knowing that.