1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Vandegrift was pleased as punch to receive Clemens because of his firsthand knowledge of the big island, his native scouts, and especially his radio, which was far better than anything the marines had. When Vandegrift asked how he kept his radio working in this wet, humid climate, Clemens responded, “I just wait until morning, open it, dry it out and by afternoon it works.”3 Vandegrift was also impressed by Clemens’s ability to communicate in the pidgin English the Solomon Islanders spoke when they talked with white men. Savor the following colloquy between Clemens and one of his native scouts.

  “One thousand Jap-an come ‘shore ‘long Lunga ‘long Monday. Altogether come ‘shore ‘long big fella launch-ich catch’m one hundred man, got’m big fella machinegun.”

  “Which way you savvy altogether one thousand ‘e stop ‘long Lunga, Donvu? Which way you take’m long time for come tell’m me?”

  “Me fella sit down ‘long scrub, catch’m ten fella stone ‘long hand, and me count’m altogether come ‘shore, got’m tin hat, khaki boot, allsame pigpig got’m two toes and long fella bayonet. Me get’m sore leg, pain, ‘long belly b’long me.”4

  Whatever that exactly meant, Vandegrift marveled not only at Clemens’s language skills but that he had been able to teach natives how to identify a tank when they had never before seen one and to tell the difference between a destroyer and a cruiser. He immediately offered the Englishman a position on his intelligence staff (which had just been wretchedly depleted).

  Meantime, the Japanese were not idle. The Japanese Seventeenth Army was headquartered at Rabaul and preparing to deploy to the north side of New Guinea, where it hoped to cross that island’s huge mountain spine and take Port Moresby from the land side. (It will be remembered that a direct invasion of Port Moresby by sea had been foiled as a result of the Battle of the Coral Sea.) But now with the Guadalcanal landings the Japanese recognized the closer threat, though they underestimated its dimensions. When Admiral Mikawa brought his cruisers down for the Battle of Savo Island on August 8 he had also brought a destroyer with several hundred Japanese troops as a sort of stopgap measure. By now many of them had been killed in piecemeal actions by the marines, including some sixty-five in the sharp battle at the Matanikau, where Colonel Goettge’s patrol had been wiped out and where Vandegrift had sent further patrols to clean out the Japanese positions.

  And so the commander of the Japanese Seventeenth Army now decided to send to Guadalcanal a crack combat infantry outfit that had been languishing on Guam ever since the Battle of Midway forced the Japanese to cancel their invasion of that island. About a thousand of these soldiers under the command of Colonel Kiyono Ichiki were the first to land, in the darkness of August 18, about twenty miles east of the airfield. Another five hundred Japanese “marines” from the Special Naval Landing force had come ashore to the west of the airfield, near the Matanikau River. Even though a much stronger Japanese force was already under way to join them Ichiki, against orders, decided not to wait but to attack the Americans immediately and, so he thought, recapture the airfield.

  Vandegrift and his marines knew something was up. In the early morning after the Ichiki force had landed, marines on the beaches heard and spotted the waves from several of the Japanese destroyer transports washing ashore and a marine patrol ambushed and killed a number of Japanese troops wearing fresh uniforms with all the accoutrements of the hardcore Japanese soldier. Convinced he was going to be attacked from both sides by a newly landed force, Vandegrift wisely increased his patrol and sent out a remarkable man to assess the situation.

  Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza was one of Clemens’s native scouts who had recently retired from the small so-called Solomon Islands Constabulary and been fighting with Clemens as one of the coast-watcher patrolmen. While a battalion of marines moved through the coconut groves toward what they thought was the Tenaru River about two miles from the airfield (it was actually the Ilu, according to some accounts, so bad were the marines’ maps)* Vouza, bushy-haired and bandy-legged and somewhat larger than most Solomon Islanders, went deep into the jungle and swung around again, coming up on the coconut groves near the beach. There he saw a large number of Japanese soldiers, well armed and well organized, moving toward the marine positions along the river, and in the process he was seen and captured by the Japanese. When he was taken before one of Ichiki’s commanders he refused to answer questions and so was tied to a tree and brutally beaten with rifle butts, then bayoneted several times in the chest; his throat was slashed by a Japanese officer’s sword and he was left for dead when Ichiki moved out.

  Vouza was still alive, though, and soon as the coast was clear he began gnawing at his ropes, freed himself, and somehow struggled into the marines’ lines. He asked for Clemens who, when he heard the news, radioed headquarters, rushed out to the position in a jeep, and translated Vouza’s report that a large body of Japanese were moving toward them. Then Vouza said to Clemens and the others surrounding him, “I didn’t tell them anything,” and collapsed. Clemens put him in the jeep and rushed him back to the hospital, where he was sewn up. Meantime, the lucky marine battalion commander, acting on Vouza’s intelligence report, managed to get a large force across the river and onto Ichiki’s left flank and rear.5

  About one-thirty A.M., August 21, a single green flare burst brightly over the coconut groves, signaling the beginning of the Japanese attack. It was a fiasco from the start, because of Vouza’s information and the smart and quick use of it by the marine commander. The 870 Japanese troops were trapped between the main marine lines on the river and the new ambush force set up on their left flank and rear. Ichiki’s not too imaginative plan had been to march straight alongside the beach using the long coconut grove as cover, then rush the American lines and overpower them by sheer force of will. The sea was on their right, blocking any movement in that direction. The only thing for the Japanese to do now was fling themselves forward in a banzai charge, which they did. It was the perfect trap and they were mowed down by the hundreds, their bodies piled up three and four deep in front of the marine machine-gun pits, especially on the sand spit along the beach that generally blocked the flow of the river into the ocean. American artillery and mortars crashed down on them in the coconut groves. When some tried to escape by running into the ocean and swimming away, the marines aimed at their bobbing heads and pulled the trigger. Some hundred or more were killed in this way and washed up on the beaches with the next high tide, a frightful sight.

  At daylight there were still Japanese sporadically firing at marines from the coconut grove. At this point Vandegrift had had enough. He sent forward his little platoon of five light tanks for mopping up. These machines moved back and forth in the groves, uprooting trees and blasting or running over the remaining Japanese. Newsman Richard Tregaskis was on the scene at that point: “We watched these awful machines as they plunged across the spit and into the edge of the grove. It was fascinating to see them bustling amongst the trees, pivoting, turning, spitting sheets of yellow flame. It was like a comedy of toys, something unbelievable, to see them knocking over palm trees which fell slowly, flushing the running figures of men from underneath their treads. We had not realized there were so many Japs in the grove.”6

  Vandegrift himself remembered that, by afternoon’s end, the tanks’ treads “looked like meat grinders.” He was also appalled at the tenacity and treachery of the Japanese, writing in a report to his superior that “I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting. These people refuse to surrender.” He went on to say how some Japanese wounded would call out in English for help, then “wait until the men come up to examine them and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade. You can readily see the answer to that. . . the answer [is] war without quarter.”7

  Robert Leckie* was an eighteen-year-old private and machine gunner, just a few months out of basic training. He was manning his gun on the banks of the river just before the attack. “The Tenaru River lay green and evil, like a serpent, acr
oss the palmy plain. Normally the Tenaru stood stagnant, its surface crested with scum and fungus; if there were river gods, the Tenaru was inhabited by a baleful spirit.” As he and his companions watched, “suddenly in the river there appeared a V. It seemed to be moving steadily downstream. ... To our right came a fusillade of shots. It was from G Company riflemen, shooting at the V. The V disappeared.”8

  When the fighting broke out it quickly became a melee in the dark, red tracer bullets arcing everywhere and the terrific explosions of mortars, artillery, and flares eerily lighting up the hot tropical landscape. One of Leckie’s nearby platoon mates was killed by a bullet to the heart while firing his machine gun, and the assistant gunner Al Schmidt later received the Navy Cross for continuing to fire the gun even after he had been almost completely blinded by fire.*

  The fight lasted all night and into the next day but the American shells and machine-gun and rifle fire took a deadly toll. As Japanese fire from the grove dwindled, marines could be seen walking among the wrecked trees. “Dead bodies were strewn about the grove,” Leckie wrote. “The tropics had got at them already and they were beginning to spill open. I was horrified at the swarms of flies, black, circling funnels that seemed to emerge from every orifice: from the mouth, the eyes, the ears. The beating of their myriad tiny wings made a dreadful low hum.”9

  Leckie went on, “One of the marines went methodically among the dead armed with a pair of pliers. He had observed that the Japanese have a penchant for gold fillings in their teeth, often for solid gold teeth. He was looting their very mouths. He would kick their jaws agape, peer into the mouth with all the solicitude of a Park Avenue dentist—careful, always careful not to contaminate himself by touch—and yank out all that glittered. He kept the gold teeth in an empty Bull Durham tobacco sack, which he wore around his neck in the manner of an amulet. ‘Souvenirs’, we called him.”10

  When Leckie got back to the other side of the river and approached his machine-gun pit he saw a crowd of marines gaping at the opposite bank, where a number of dead Japanese had fallen into the water. What they were gaping at was frightful—a crocodile was eating a Japanese body. “I watched in debased fascination,” Leckie said, until the crocodile “began to tug at the intestines.” Later that night, he recalled, “the V reappeared in the river. Three smaller V’s trailed afterward. They kept us awake, crunching.”11

  Forty-three marines were killed in the action, and twice that number wounded. But practically all of Colonel Ichiki’s force was dead, nearly eight hundred of them. Ichiki himself ordered the regimental colors burned, then drew his sword and committed hara-kiri; thus ended the first attempt by the Japanese to retake Guadalcanal.*

  The victory had brightened even further the afternoon before the Battle of the Tenaru with the arrival of the first American warplanes on Guadalcanal. Admiral McCain, good to his word, had located a small escort carrier and had it steam to within fly-off distance of Guadalcanal and launch twelve dive-bombers and nineteen Wildcat fighters. When the first plane landed and taxied up the newly finished runway, Vandegrift remembered, “I was close to tears and I was not alone, when this handsome and dashing aviator jumped to the ground.

  “Thank God you have come, I told him.”

  Not only that, but McCain “took a terrible chance” sending in a small convoy of destroyer escorts carrying aviation gasoline, tools, spare parts, bombs, ammunition, plus a good-sized (900-man) Seabee battalion to help the engineers further improve the airfield.12

  The Seabees were a brand-new animal for the U.S. Navy. After Pearl Harbor it quickly became apparent that global war would require huge construction projects all over the Pacific, and elsewhere, projects that would demand very proficient craftsmen such as welders, iron- and steelworkers, road and airfield building experts, mechanics, shipfitters, pier and dock builders, carpenters, pipe fitters, electricians, and so forth. Most Americans possessing these skills were older—most, in fact, because of their age, were not even subject to the draft—but there was simply no time to train the younger draftees for these highly skilled jobs. Within a few months after the Pearl Harbor attack, more than a hundred thousand accomplished craftsmen had volunteered for new Naval Construction Battalions, the Seabees, and by war’s end they would number a quarter of a million. These were the men who built Boulder Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, and, for that matter, the Pentagon. Their motto was “Can Do!”

  Vandegrift was damned glad to have them, too; the Seabees had gone right to work finishing up his airstrip with the left-behind Japanese equipment and cement. It was then christened Henderson Field, after the marine major Lofton Henderson, who, it might be recalled, had been killed leading his squadron of untrained dive-bomber pilots in the “glide-bombing” attack against the Japanese fleet that first fateful morning of the Battle of Midway. Their arrival was none too soon. By day and by night the Japanese bombed and shelled the airstrip, trying to put it out of commission, and the Seabees’ job was to keep it functioning. This entailed almost superhuman effort. The leader of these Seabees, forty-five-year-old navy commander Joseph Blundon, a former civil engineer and World War I veteran, explained, “When the Jap bombers approached, our fighters took off; [then] their bombers blasted the airstrip; and then if we couldn’t fill up the holes fast enough before our planes ran out of fuel, they would have to try to land anyway. I saw seven of our fighters crack up on one bitter afternoon.”

  Blundon continued, “We pitched our camp right on the edge of the field to save time [thereby putting themselves in some of the worst harm’s way on Guadalcanal]. We found that a 500-pound bomb would tear up 1,600 square feet of Marston mat, so we placed packages of this quantity of mat along the strip, like extra rails along a railroad. We figured how much sand and gravel was required to fill the average bomb or shell crater, and we loaded these measured amounts on trucks and placed the trucks under cover at strategic points. Then when the Jap bombers approached, every Seabee, including our cooks, manned his repair station. The moment the bombers had passed over, these men boiled out of the holes and raced for the craters. We found that 100 Seabees could repair the damage of a 500-pound bomb in forty minutes, including the replacing of the Marston mat.*

  “In other words, forty minutes after that bomb had exploded, you couldn’t tell that the airstrip had ever been hit.”

  Blundon recalled that there weren’t enough shovels to go around so some of his men had to use their helmets to scoop up dirt and lug it to the craters. During the first six weeks there were 140 Japanese air raids in which the strip was hit at least once. “Our worst moments were when the Jap bomb or shell failed to explode when it hit. It still tore up our mat, and it had to come out. When you see men choke down their fear and dive in after an unexploded bomb so that our planes can land safely, a lump comes in your throat and you know why America wins wars.”13

  Back at Pearl Harbor Admiral Nimitz and his staff were racking their brains about how to ease the strain on the marines at Guadalcanal. Even before the Battle of Savo Island, they understood there were simply not enough capital ships in the South Pacific to hold at bay the strong Japanese fleet at Rabaul, let alone the fact that there were hardly enough transports and destroyers to keep the marines on Guadalcanal fed and supplied. It was agonizing, but then someone came up with an idea.

  In the early days of the war the U.S. Marines had formed three special Raider Battalions, each about a thousand men strong—elite troops whose mission was to go in quickly and destroy an enemy outpost. One of these battalions, Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson’s First Marine Raiders, had already been used in the fierce battle at Tulagi, but another was still sitting at Pearl Harbor: Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson’s Second Marine Raider Battalion, and a plan began to emerge to use them to take some of the pressure off Guadalcanal. What was contemplated was a raid on another Japanese-held island, which might lead the Japanese to conclude that America was going to land in a number of places almost simultaneously. This, it was hoped, would keep the Japanese
off balance, guessing where the Americans would turn up next, and possibily stop them from reinforcing Guadalcanal until the marines had established a formidable defense there. The island selected for this ruse was called Makin, an atoll in the Gilbert Islands chain, a thousand miles northeast of Guadalcanal and two thousand miles from Hawaii. There were about a hundred Japanese soldiers manning it, and the theory was to have Carlson’s people land there, shoot up the place, put the radio station and anything else out of business, capture any documents they could, and then scram as fast as possible.

  Accordingly, on August 9, 1942, the day after Vandegrift landed his men on Guadalcanal, and the night of the awful Savo Island disaster, Carlson and 222 of his raiders set off in two U.S. Navy submarines for the eight-day trip to Makin. It was a grueling passage. There wasn’t room enough on the submarines for everyone and so the marines, when they were not eating, had to lie in the submariners’ bunks just to keep out of the way.

  When the submarines surfaced off Makin on August 16, rubber boats propelled by outboard motors were launched and the raiders landed on the atoll just before dawn of the seventeenth. The boats were pulled up into beach brush and hidden and everyone prepared to move stealthily inland toward the Japanese installations. Then some marine accidentally fired off his weapon and Colonel Carlson decided just to rush across the two-mile-wide atoll and make a fight of it. The Japanese met them with their usual ferocity. One of the submarines began to fire salvos from its deck gun into the Japanese positions, killing sixty, and the Japanese commander reported to his superior by radio, “All men are dying serenely in battle.” The Japanese had lashed themselves in trees from which they sniped at marines. The fight lasted until late in the afternoon and the Japanese radio station on Makin was destroyed, but when the marines attempted to get back to their submarines the strong surf thwarted them. Rubber boats overturned, outboard motors conked out, and more than half the men were left marooned on the atoll.