by Ian W. Toll
The struggle for Guadalcanal now settled into a repetitive daily pattern. Each day, shortly after noon, Japanese bombers appeared overhead and pounded the island, concentrating their bombs on marine installations, defenses, and the airstrip. A single battery of four 90mm antiaircraft guns, set up on the edge of the airfield, usually discouraged the pilots from descending lower than 20,000 feet. Still, the bombing arrested construction work and forced the units positioned around the airfield to spend hours each day in hastily dug slit trenches and foxholes. Occasionally Zero fighters made low-altitude strafing runs. The twin-engine bombers flew lazy circles above the island even after having released their payloads. Vandegrift’s officers correctly deduced that they were snapping aerial photographs of the airfield and the various installations and weaponry in the marine perimeter.
Air attacks did not claim heavy casualties, but the absence of any friendly planes overhead ate away at morale. If the Japanese could send their Zeros all the way from Rabaul, why couldn’t the American fighters come up from Espiritu Santo, which was slightly closer? The answer, as an aviator could explain, was that the heavier Wildcats did not have the range to make such a flight. Guadalcanal needed its own air force—it was urgently necessary to complete “Henderson Field,” the name now given to Guadalcanal’s not-quite-finished airstrip in honor of Major Lofton R. Henderson, who had perished while leading a squadron of marine bombers against the enemy fleet at Midway.
At 11:00 a.m. on August 18, eight G4M “Betty” bombers appeared suddenly over Henderson at well under 5,000 feet. Radar had failed to pick them up. Men standing along the side of the field scattered and ducked into foxholes and trenches. A tightly concentrated pattern of 500-pound bombs fell around the antiaircraft batteries and down the length of the strip, leaving seventeen craters that would have to be filled in by the engineers. In flying so low, the G4Ms exposed themselves to antiaircraft fire, and several were observed to trail smoke as they turned northwest for home.
The near-daily midday raids were followed by harrowing nighttime bombardments—at first by submarines and then (on August 16) by destroyers that snuck into Ironbottom Sound after dark. Often these ships disgorged Japanese troop reinforcements and supplies onto Guadalcanal’s northwestern beaches. Lacking heavy shore guns or air cover, the marines could do nothing to interfere with Japanese ships even in broad daylight. On the afternoon of the sixteenth, several dozen marines on a hill near Kukum watched as a Japanese destroyer disembarked about 200 troops on the beach to the west.
Almost every night, a floatplane circled over the marine perimeter, dropping occasional bombs here or there. Collectively known to the Americans as “Washing Machine Charley” or “Louie the Louse,” these nocturnal visitors usually did little damage. But they kept the marines awake, and that may have been their purpose. The marines spoke of “shoes on” and “shoes off” nights.20 Most of the division was sleeping on the ground, curled up on ponchos against the wet earth. Some attempted to rig crude hammocks, but every sleeper had to be positioned near his foxhole so that he could execute the half-awake rolling maneuver called the “Guadalcanal twitch.” The marines, almost none of whom had experienced combat before setting foot on this miserable island, were on edge. Any noise in the jungle beyond their lines might signal the beginning of an enemy attack. Men on the perimeter threw away a lot of ammunition in that first week. On the fourth night, marine units dug in on opposite sides of the airfield held an “intramural” (friendly) firefight, exchanging a large volume of fire before their officers put a stop to it. Mercifully, none was injured.
The stultifying heat and humidity, oppressive swarms of insects, gnawing hunger, and sleepless nights wore the men down. The first two weeks felt like two months. Sickness soon began to take its inevitable toll. Most of the 1st Division marines would suffer dysentery and malaria at some point during the campaign, often at the same time. When overtaken by a malarial fever, a marine was taken off the lines to the hospital tent near Lunga Point, where he and a hundred or so fellow sufferers lay bathed in sweat from head to toe, oscillating between blazing fevers and teeth-rattling chills. When the fever broke, usually after twenty-four to forty-eight hours, the man put his boots back on and went back to his foxhole. Chronic dysentery was so common as to be universal, but it did not normally require hospitalization. Rogal recalled, “It was so bad and so prevalent that a solid bowel movement was a cause for rejoicing.”21
The marine perimeter was semicircular in shape, bounded by Ironbottom Sound on the north and the jungle foothills to the south. It was about five miles wide (east to west) and about two miles deep (north to south). It covered most of what had been, before the war, the three largest and most prosperous Lever Brothers coconut plantations on Guadalcanal (named Kukum, Lunga, and Tenaru). For that reason, it was the most developed part of Guadalcanal—which is not to say it was well developed, but it did have a network of reasonably passable dirt roads running between the beach, Lunga Point, and Henderson Field. Much of the land was covered with coconut palms planted in neat and orderly rows, offering some cover against daytime bombing and strafing attacks.
General Vandegrift had to consider many unpleasant possibilities. The greatest danger, he concluded, was a counter-landing in force on the same beach that the marines had taken on August 7. He drew up his beach-facing defenses behind Lunga Point, running from the Tenaru River to a hill about 1,000 yards southwest of Kukum. The marines dug foxholes and trenches, swinging picks and turning dirt out with shovels in the sweltering heat. At first they had no sandbags or barbed wire, as these items had not been unloaded from the cargo ships before their withdrawal on August 9.22 Automatic machine guns were emplaced along these lines and positioned to sweep the beach. Units detailed men to start moving the piled-up supplies off the beach and back into secure supply dumps. Vandegrift also had to consider the possibility of a concerted attack anywhere along his perimeter; the enemy might attack from the east and west simultaneously. That danger prompted Vandegrift to pull in the eastern flank from the Ilu River to the Tenaru. This shortened his perimeter and made it more defensible, a decision that would very soon be vindicated.
Company commanders gathered each morning at Vandergrift’s command post. All were fatigued: worn down by the heat, the stress, and the difficulty in getting a decent night’s sleep. In his memoir, the general left a portrait of his officers sitting on the wet ground, sipping cold coffee from tin cups and listening to the sound of “rain hissing on a pathetic fire.”23 They were haggard, filthy, and unshaven. All wore brave faces, but Vandegrift sensed that morale was fragile. They wondered if they had been abandoned by the navy. When a radio broadcast mentioned decorations awarded to navy crews, a low growl of anger circulated through their ranks.
Vandegrift moved to fortify the division’s spirits by issuing a series of upbeat announcements. Japanese resistance on Tulagi had been snuffed out. Patrols had not encountered any strong enemy force outside the lines. Work on the airfield was progressing rapidly, and marine fighter squadrons would soon arrive. The general made a point of touring the lines at midday, timing his visits to precede the daily Japanese airstrikes. He often posed for photographs with the troops, “a morale device that worked because they thought if I went to the trouble of having the picture taken then I obviously planned to enjoy it in future years.”24
Not least among the marines’ difficulties was a nearly complete lack of intelligence about enemy troops on the island. Except for a few minor skirmishes in patrols outside the perimeter, the enemy had not yet shown his hand. Vandegrift did not know how many Japanese troops were “out there,” or where they were bivouacked, or how well armed or provisioned they were, or what they intended in the way of counterattack. The stillness of the jungle exerted subtle psychological pressure on men who had been trained for a quick, hard-fought amphibious assault. The few prisoners taken by patrols outside the lines seemed to be laborers rather than soldiers (“termites” as the marines called them), and they could
offer little information about the Japanese army’s presence on the island.
On August 12, a Japanese naval warrant officer was taken prisoner near the Matanikau River. Interrogated by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge, the 1st Division intelligence officer, he revealed that there were several hundred Japanese stragglers encamped on the west bank of the river who might be willing to surrender. Another report referred to a “white flag” displayed near an enemy position. Goettge proposed to take a combat patrol down the coast in a Higgins boat, land near Point Cruz, and go up the river in search of these prospective prisoners. Vandegrift gave his reluctant assent. The party landed after nightfall on the twelfth and was ambushed immediately. Goettge was the first man killed in an action that quickly developed into a massacre. Only three survivors managed to escape and make their way back into the marine perimeter. A reinforced company was sent back out to look for the lost patrol, but no one and no bodies could be found. Lurid stories later appeared in the press, suggesting that the Goettge patrol had been enticed by a sham surrender. But there is no evidence to suggest any such trickery on this occasion, and it is likely that the “white flag” spotted the previous day was a “Rising Sun” in which the red disk was concealed from view.
As if in answer to the marines’ urgent need for better local intelligence, the coastwatcher and former colonial district officer Martin Clemens appeared on August 14. Clemens had been invited down from his high mountain aerie by Charles Widdy, the former Lever Brothers plantation manager who had landed with the marines, by a handwritten note delivered by a native runner: “American marines have landed successfully in force. Come in via Volanavua and along the beach to Ilu during daylight—repeat—daylight. Ask outpost to direct you to me at 1st Reg. C.P. at Lunga. Congratulations and regards.”25 Beginning at dawn, Clemens had packed up his radio gear and came down the hill, a cavalcade of native carriers in train. He took a circuitous route, taking care to avoid the enemy lurking in the jungle, and hailed the marines from a position just east of Volanavua. The marines raised their rifles but held fire, and then welcomed Clemens warmly with cigarettes and chocolate bars. It had been months since the Scotsman had spoken English, except over the radio. He was speechless with emotion.
Late that afternoon, after having cleaned himself up, Clemens was taken to division headquarters and introduced to Vandegrift. He perched on a ration box in the general’s command post and told the entire story of his activity since the Japanese had landed on Tulagi more than three months earlier. The general described his visitor as a “remarkable chap of medium height, well-built and apparently suffering no ill effects from his self-imposed jungle exile.”26 He wore shorts and black dress oxfords that had been polished to a high sheen. It was obvious that he knew a great deal of the island and its people, and he already had intact a native constabulary that would serve well as a patrolling force. Vandegrift placed him in charge of “all matters of native administration and of intelligence outside the perimeter.” The Scotsman would contribute invaluable intelligence through his native scouts—brave and steadfast fighters who could, when necessary, shed their uniforms and blend into the native population. Guadalcanal had been a campaign of extermination from the beginning, and the islanders understood that sort of fighting well. Traveling quickly and silently over secret paths through the jungle, they were to prove fearsome guerrilla fighters.
THE JAPANESE NAVY APPARENTLY BELIEVED it had crippled the invasion fleet in Ironbottom Sound. According to Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet war diary, Allied losses in naval and air action between August 7 and August 9 amounted to twelve cruisers (eight heavy, four light) and “several destroyers.”27 The Fifth Air Attack Force jacked these estimates up to “twenty some cruisers, destroyers, transports, and other types” of ships.28 When the buoyant reports reached Tokyo, however, the Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) apparently deemed them too conservative: a press communiqué declared that at least twenty-eight Allied warships and thirty transports or freighters had been sent to the bottom. An unnamed source boasted that “American and British naval strength has been reduced to that of a third-rate power.”29
Gross inflation of claimed air and naval combat results was a pervasive syndrome in the Pacific War. Throughout the conflict, for example, American aviators and submariners consistently overestimated the number and tonnage of enemy ships sunk. (Those discrepancies would cause embarrassment after the war, when the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey published revised estimates based on Japanese records.) But Japanese military leaders were often led astray by even the most improbable claims. If Japanese naval and air forces had slaughtered the invasion fleet, then the enemy troops on Guadalcanal must be underequipped and under-provisioned. They could be mopped up without much trouble. Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of the Naval General Staff (NGS), hastened to the summer palace in Nikko to soothe the emperor’s concerns. The capture of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, he said, was “nothing worthy of Your Majesty’s attention.”30
The local army headquarters in Rabaul was largely unconcerned about the American move into the Solomons. Far more important, or so it seemed, was the campaign in eastern New Guinea, where the Twenty-Fifth Air Flotilla was preoccupied with a buildup of Allied air strength in Rabi, and the Japanese army was determined to take the dusty colonial outpost of Port Moresby by marching troops over the soaring hump of the Owen Stanley mountains.31 A Japanese prewar assessment had emphasized the importance of Moresby as a “stepping stone.” Its airfields and naval base would guarantee Japan “control of the air and sea in the Southwest Pacific.”32 The interior offensive against Moresby would eventually be defeated by the valor of Australian troops, assisted by an awful climate and grueling terrain. But for the time being, it remained the chief priority of Japanese ground forces in the region.
From the beginning, the Japanese badly underestimated the number of marines in the lower Solomons. They were apparently misled by an intelligence report filed by a Japanese attaché in Moscow, who had picked up rumors in conversation with unidentified Russians. The Guadalcanal landing was a raid rather than a sustained invasion, the attaché reported, and American troop strength on the island was only about 2,000.33 (Vandegrift had five times that number on Guadalcanal and another 6,000 on the islands across Ironbottom Sound.) Aerial photo reconnaissance in mid-August failed to correct the misimpression. Perhaps the Americans would attempt to dynamite the airfield and supporting equipment and then withdraw. If so, it was no matter; Guadalcanal could be reoccupied and the airfield completed in good time.
Nevertheless, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet and the highest-ranking seagoing admiral of the Japanese navy, committed the bulk of his available naval forces to a counteroffensive known as “KA-Go.” His paramount objective—unaltered since the debacle at Midway two months earlier—was to flush out and destroy the American aircraft carriers, which he knew to be operating in the waters south and east of Guadalcanal.34 KA-Go involved four main elements. A landing force of army and special naval landing troops would be embarked in four troopships. They would sail for Guadalcanal in a convoy under the command of Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, who flew his flag on the light cruiser Jintsu. These forces were first dispatched from the Inland Sea in Japan to Truk Atoll, from which they departed on August 16. A carrier task force built around the Zuikaku and Shokaku (with the baby flattop Ryujo), and commanded by the veteran Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, would descend on the Solomons from the north. The two big carriers would hang back until the American carriers revealed themselves; then they would strike. Nagumo’s carriers would be heavily reinforced with surface ships, including the powerful battleships Hiei and Kirishima and heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma. Two other forces, comprised chiefly of surface ships, would backstop the carriers and invasion convoy—Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe’s Vanguard Force, with two battleships, three heavy cruisers, and one light cruiser, and Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo’s Advance Force, including six cruisers, the seaplane tender Chitose, and sund
ry destroyers. If Nagumo could find, engage, and destroy Fletcher’s carriers, the entire Japanese fleet would advance into Ironbottom Sound and wipe out whatever American naval resistance remained, and then land ground forces on the island to recapture the airstrip.
VANDEGRIFT’S 1ST ENGINEER BATTALION RACED TO COMPLETE Henderson Field using captured Japanese construction equipment and materials, including six road rollers, two tractors, and fifty handcarts. A gap of about 180 feet in the middle of the strip remained to be filled and graded. “Worked on the field just as Japs had, with their equipment,” read an early draft of the 1st Division report. “No bulldozer, power shovel, or dump truck. Seemed endless work.”35
On August 12, the airfield was continuous to a length of 2,600 feet, and a navy PBY amphibious patrol plane landed to the cheers of hundreds of marines. Among the passengers was Lieutenant William Sampson, who had been sent personally by Admiral McCain, the SOPAC air chief, to assess the field’s condition. Sampson thought it ready to handle fighters, but too short and soft for bombers. A number of tall trees obstructed the approach on the eastern end of the field, and would have to be cut down. The muddy surface was not yet overlaid with steel Marston matting, nor did it include taxiways or revetments (earthen walls to shield parked planes against explosions). Henderson was badly exposed to the south—its western end was only about 300 yards from the perimeter, and thus vulnerable to light artillery fire, sniper fire, and an attack in force. But McCain had made it his personal business to get as many planes into Guadalcanal as quickly as possible, even if it meant stripping the airbases at Espiritu Santo and Efate. “The best and proper solution of course is to get fighters and SBDs onto your field,” he told Vandegrift in a handwritten letter delivered by Sampson.36 He promised marine fighter and dive-bombing units by August 18 or 19. Three days later, the first Seabee unit arrived with a “carryall,” a machine that could scoop about twelve cubic yards of earth out of the ground at one stroke. The work accelerated rapidly, and Henderson was declared ready to receive any type of airplane on August 18.