“Wow,” I said. “How’d that go over?”
“Never really found out,” Greer said. “Garr’s face went from red to purple, but then six trucks showed up with wounded from one of our cruisers, and we were off to the races again.” He peered into the hazy distance over the strait. “That our coach and six?”
He was pointing out into the Sealark Channel, the strait that separated Guadalcanal and Tulagi, where I could now see a white V approaching. We gathered our stuff, asked a couple of the beachmaster’s crew to help with the trunk, and went down the short hill to the pontoon landing. All of us were sweating profusely; the morning sun was out and baking the place already. The PT boat rumbled into the makeshift “harbor,” backed down, and then came alongside the pontoon and put over two mooring lines. It looked as if the entire crew was at general quarters, wearing helmets and stifling in gray kapok life jackets. There appeared to be only one officer, a lieutenant (junior grade) who wore a fore-and-aft cap, khakis, a set of oversize binoculars on a neck strap, and a .45 in a holster. He gave us a brief glance and then resumed a sky search. He definitely looked like a man expecting trouble.
We were escorted to the boat’s stern, where we could clamber aboard from the pontoon. Our seabags and the all-important trunk followed, plus some other boxes of medical supplies that Greer had managed to commandeer from Big Top Number One. The boat didn’t linger. We were hustled down into the interior by one of the crewmen, along with our gear, and then off we went, slowly at first as we cleared the pontoon landing and went past the ship, whose sides were aswarm with small boats off-loading stuff. Then the engines revved up into a mechanical howl, throwing all three of us back into our chairs. The noise coming from the engine room behind us was overwhelming, so there was no possibility of talking. We could feel that sleek eighty-foot mahogany hull begin to plane through the tops of a light chop out in the strait, bumping rhythmically over the small wave tops and occasionally hitting something bigger, causing the engines to scream momentarily as the props came out of the water. As water taxis went, this one was a humdinger. The surgical trunk was sliding around, so Greer grabbed some kapok life jackets and strapped them to the trunk to absorb the bumps.
Tulagi Island was supposedly twelve miles from Lunga Point. The engines began to slow after just ten minutes, so this boat had to be capable of at least fifty miles per hour. Gasoline exhaust fumes began to blow back into the interior as she slowed down and came off the plane, along with a wave of noxious hot air. The engine noise then subsided as they idled two of her three 2,500-hp Packards. I decided to climb the ladder to the weather deck to escape the engine fumes. A squall of 50-caliber machine-gun fire greeted me as my head popped up out of the hatch, along with the sound of the boat’s 20 mm cannon firing back aft. We had apparently arrived at the same time that a six-pack of Jap “Betty” bombers came out of the midday sun and began blowing up everything in and around the harbor.
The boat made a violent maneuver to starboard, and I ended up sliding back down the ladder without touching a single rung. I landed on the deck, where my two hospitalmen were trying to pick themselves up from that sudden turn. For one galvanizing instant, all three of us stared at one another with open mouths, and then came an explosion that lifted the front end of the boat right out of the water and back down again, causing all three of us to smack our foreheads on the deck.
Two seconds later the centerline engine went to full power and the boat accelerated, but not at all like she’d done over on the Guadalcanal side of the strait. A wave of seawater entered our compartment from the direction of the bow, turning us into human flotsam and jetsam whirling around in the rapidly flooding compartment. The engine strained to build rpms but the boat was losing the battle as her forward spaces flooded. There was a sudden powerful jolt just as we started to grab the lower rungs of the ladder, once again throwing the three of us back into the roiling seawater, which was now halfway up the bulkhead. The remaining engine choked and then died, but the guns topside did not. A small avalanche of 50-caliber shell casings rained down through the hatch and, with the engine silenced, we could now hear the roar of aircraft engines flashing overhead, followed by the truly scary sound of large-caliber bullets tearing into the hull behind us. All three of us were submerged into the four feet of water in the compartment. We were then treated to the sting and tugs of rounds coming through the compartment and expending their energy, thanks be to God, in the water.
And then it was over. The three of us crouched on the submerged deck with only our heads exposed. The boat was motionless but the water in our compartment continued to rise. We could hear feet banging around on the deck above and then a face appeared in the hatch.
“Out!” the face yelled. “Right now!”
No problem, I thought. Greer was the closest to the ladder so he went up first. Miller, whose eyes were out on stalks, appeared to be frozen in terror. He didn’t move, so I pushed his head underwater. He came back up, spluttering and babbling, and then I pushed him toward the ladder. He froze up again. I shouted at him to go up and, miraculously, he did, but then he hesitated again, with his head halfway out of the hatch. I put both hands on his backside and elevated him through the hatch with strength I didn’t know I had, generated by the fact that the boat was obviously sinking. I didn’t need to climb the ladder: the rising water pushed me up and out of the hatch in a wave of gasoline-tainted foam. Greer was nowhere to be seen. Miller was down on the sloping deck, lying on his back like an overturned turtle, sobbing. I looked around.
Fires, everywhere. We were close to the shore. Ahead of us was a scene of total disaster. I caught a quick glimpse of two dungaree-clad bodies bobbing nearby, their heads and lower extremities submerged. Then the boat began to slide backwards. As it gathered speed, Miller and I rolled off the deck, just in time for the smashed bow to swerve sideways and push me down. I panicked and started kicking to get out from under the boat but it was gone in just a few seconds and I popped up to the surface. The boat was out of sight, but the disaster on the shore was in full swing: buildings burning, palm trees blasted into kindling, another LST aflame from stem to stern alongside the large pontoon pier about a quarter mile away, and a small clutch of natives wandering aimlessly in the dirt streets, the women wailing and the dark-skinned men stupefied.
Directly in front of me was the beach, if you could call that narrow band of black sand a beach. There were five sailors stretched out on the sand in various states of disrepair. The air was filled with the wail of sirens, crackling fires, and the sounds of aircraft buzzing around nearby. Ours, I prayed, and they were. Four Wildcats from Henderson Field were overhead, looking for revenge, but the Jap bombers were long gone on their 500-plus-mile flight back to Rabaul.
Greer. Where was Greer? A shout from behind me answered my question. Greer was fifty feet off the shoreline, trying to tow the surgical trunk as he did a sidestroke. It was barely afloat but those kapoks had done their job. I swam out to meet him and help him with the trunk. The harbor on Tulagi was on the backside of the island with respect to Guadalcanal across the strait, so the waters here were flat calm.
“Miller make it?” he asked as we huffed and puffed our way onto the black beach.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He clutched up and I had to push him out of that compartment. If he could swim, he should be okay.”
Two jeeps slammed to a stop at the shore. One of them produced a Navy captain in wet, sun-bleached khakis who was wearing a pith helmet. He was a big guy, round-faced, redheaded, and with an impressive beard. As Greer and I struggled to pull the trunk up onto the steeply sloping sand, he asked if one of us was the doctor. I raised my hand.
“Thank God,” he said. “I’m Dutch VanPiet, CO Tulagi. We need you now. You hurt?”
“No, sir,” I replied. “I’m wet, scared, shocked, and pissed off, but no, I’m not hurt.”
He grinned. “Join the crowd,” he said, but then his face sobered. “We had a medical tent, red crosses and
all, but the pig-fucking Goddamned Japs machine-gunned it. I—”
He was interrupted by a thunderous blast as that burning LST over in the harbor blew up. The ship virtually disappeared in a 300-foot-wide churning column of fire, smoke, and things. To my astonishment, the captain and the people who’d come with him all sprinted past me and into the water. VanPiet grabbed my shoulder as he went by and pulled me in with him, as one of the white hats grabbed Greer and pushed him underwater.
“Down, down!” VanPiet shouted before submerging. “Deep as you can go!”
After grabbing a deep breath, I did what he said, clawing for the bottom and wondering why. Then large, heavy objects began landing in the water, some of them smacking the surface with a sound like a lash, others slicing down into the clear water like glittering butcher knives and burying themselves in the bottom muck. This seemed to go on for an hour but it was probably more like thirty seconds. I finally popped to the surface, gasping along with the others. The shore was littered with various debris: gray pieces of the ship’s hull, unexploded artillery shells, the carcasses of vehicles still in their shipment wraps, and lots of body parts. Captain VanPiet dog-paddled over to me.
“Welcome to beautiful downtown Tulagi,” he said. “It’s usually not this noisy on a Sunday.”
I just stared at him. He grinned back at me, but it was the savage, hollow-eyed grin of a man who was on the edge of losing it. I knew just how he felt.
TWO
Captain Willem VanPiet was a Dutchman, all right, through and through. My uncle, also a doctor, had served in World War 1. He’d told me that the British Navy had an expression about the Dutch: there’s the Rotterdam Dutch, the Amsterdam Dutch, and the Goddamned Dutch. VanPiet was one of the latter. Loud, intense, profane, red-faced, with a generally bigger-than-life persona. He’d come ashore on Tulagi with the Marines after the Japanese seaplane base and a clutch of flying boats had been worked over by a carrier air group. Guadalcanal had been taken pretty easily at first because the Japs had been completely surprised and most of their people there were civilian construction workers. Tulagi and the surrounding islands, Gavutu, Malaita, and Mokambo, had been a different story. The Japs had put their version of the Marine Corps ashore there to protect the Kawanishi base. They had put up a terrific fight and it had taken days for the Marines to be able to declare that Tulagi was finally secure.
Captain VanPiet’s official title was Commander Naval Activities Tulagi, and that pretty much described it. Anything and everything that went on here was under his command. Unlike Guadalcanal, which was important because it had an airfield, Tulagi Island was important because it had a harbor. When one of our cruisers got mauled by the deadly efficient Japanese battle fleet in a night action out there around Savo Island, Tulagi provided a place for her to limp in and lick her wounds. The Navy hadn’t planned to have a field hospital here, but it soon became evident that one was sorely needed, mostly to deal with shipboard casualties. The Marines accounted for some of the wounded, but a cruiser with her bow blown off might land eighty people ashore for treatment. Captain VanPiet’s job was to keep these ships afloat long enough to make them sufficiently seaworthy to get the hell out of Dodge and back to a more secure area.
VanPiet was fully up to the job from what I could see. With fires still burning everywhere from that bombing raid, he got on his jeep radio, issuing rapid-fire orders and yelling at everyone within earshot to hurry up. If his subordinates seemed to be moving too slow, he reminded them that the Japs would be back, and that if the Japs weren’t coming back, he, VanPiet, was already here. I couldn’t be sure which option his people thought was worse, but his efforts seemed to galvanize everyone around him. Greer, Miller, and I just stood there, dripping wet, waiting to see what happened next. Then Greer remembered there were more medical supplies aboard the PT boat, which had now reappeared on its side in the shallows just off the beach. He and Miller swam out to the wreck and started groping around to see what they could salvage. I didn’t know where the boat’s crew had gone.
Another jeep appeared an hour later and picked the three of us up along with the precious surgical equipment trunk and some of the medical bags from the wrecked PT boat. Some sailors from the Tulagi command had swum out to the boat and retrieved the bodies of three crewmen and the skipper. They laid them out on the sand, covering their faces with bloody life jackets. Captain VanPiet was now trying to organize a working party to salvage whatever else they could from the wreck of the LST. He waved us toward the jeep while he and his people prepared to comb the bones of the LST for usable equipment.
We were driven past the road leading down to what had been the actual harbor. The 400-foot-long floating pontoon string that had served as the pier was now fifty yards from the water, upside down on the side of a small hill. The stern, propeller, and rudder assembly of the LST lay athwart the road we were taking to the medical encampment, forcing our jeep to go off the road to get around the mess. All the palm trees in the area had been reduced to bare stumps. The ground was littered with every kind of debris imaginable. There were no people visible around the harbor, although I thought I could see body fragments here and there. There was a ghastly feeding frenzy going on in the near harbor as the sharks converged. A complex of small wooden warehouses along the waterfront had been flattened. The only thing standing was a flagpole, whose American flag hung in tatters, as if in mourning. By then I think we were all in shock. I had never seen such destruction.
The medical area was on another low hill at the north end of the island. It, too, was a mix of small wooden buildings with palm-covered roofs but no sides, a string of the ubiquitous artillery shipping containers, and one large medical tent, although not as large as the ones over on Guadalcanal. Three bomb craters were visible crossing the road, creating a line that pointed at the hospital tent. For the first time I could see people, but only when we arrived could we see that most of the buildings and the main tent were riddled with large-caliber bullet holes, despite the large red crosses painted on their sides. Hospitalmen and Marines were extracting wounded men from the slit-trench bomb shelters beside the compound. Some were ambulatory, but many were being brought out of the trench on green canvas stretchers. Our driver, a frightened-looking Navy sailor, turned to me in the front right seat.
“The captain said to bring you here, sir,” he announced in a high voice. “Said you’d know what to do next.”
Anything’s possible, I thought. We got ourselves, the trunk, and the other medical stuff out of the jeep, which promptly sped off back toward the harbor area. I looked around. I could see a small island across the northern harbor approach channel. There appeared to be several PT boats there, huddled in a cove surrounded by dense tropical jungle and palm trees. I sent Greer to find the senior medical officer and told Miller to guard our precious equipment. Miller seemed to be still a bit shell-shocked so I didn’t want to tax him with anything important. I remember thinking we’d all be pretty busy soon enough. Then I saw one of the PT boats from across the harbor getting under way and pointing his bow in our direction as we headed toward the tent complex.
The situation at the medical compound was disheartening, to say the least. The senior medical officer on Tulagi had been one Lieutenant Commander Roger Stone, MD. He’d remained behind in the main tent to stay with the patients who couldn’t be moved and had caught a 20 mm round. His number two was Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Randy Smythe, MD, a very young-looking GP whose gray face revealed the strain of both the attack and the bloody press of even more casualties. He’d gone into the main tent right after the strafing run and had watched the SMO die with a fist-size hole in his chest. Smythe was sitting against a tree when we found him, covered in blood and looking like he was about to go catatonic. I told him who we were but he just sat there for a moment with one of those thousand-yard-stares I’d heard about. Then he declared he couldn’t do this anymore and could I please take over as SMO. Just at that moment the island’s air raid siren started up,
causing a panic among the survivors of the first Betty raid.
Smythe pitched down on the ground and covered his head with his arms, while the stretcher-bearers tried to decide what to do. The big tent would be the target if the Jap planes came this way, but there was hardly time to get the wounded back down into the trenches. Greer ran to where the stretcher-bearers stood dithering and began issuing orders. The sound of approaching aircraft engines encouraged the disorganized mob into action. I tried to get Smythe up off the ground but he went rigid and wouldn’t move. I gave up and ran to where Greer was directing the stream of casualties back down into the bomb shelters. To my horror I saw a Jap bomber coming over the nearby island just above the treetops. The nose of the plane was blinking with muzzle flashes and then a stream of shell splashes began to unzip their way across the harbor, headed in our direction.
The Mitsubishi G4M twin-engine bomber, nicknamed “Betty” for the Navy recognition charts, carried 20 mm cannons in addition to their other armament. Everybody hit the deck as quickly as they could. I rolled under the trunk of a palm tree that had been cut down by the last attack. When I heard the sound of 20 mm rounds whacking their way up the hill I just closed my eyes and prayed. Then I felt the tree trunk jerk as a round went right through it and blasted sand into my face. There was a roar of engines as the plane flashed overhead and I caught a brief glance at the red meatballs painted on its fuselage and then registered the fact that his right engine was on fire as he swooped out into the strait. A moment later a Marine fighter howled overhead and chased the burning Betty down to a fiery death in the sea. I started to get up but then I heard more engines and the booming of bombs going off. It sounded like they were hitting that PT boat base across the harbor.
The Hooligans Page 2