The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Vandegrift and his marines had a friend in Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain, Commander of Aircraft South Pacific (COMAIRSOPAC), who was determined to saturate Henderson Field with air reinforcements. A week after the 1st Division landed on Guadalcanal, he became the first high-ranking visitor to the island, dropping in for an overnight stay with a bottle of bourbon under his arm. That night, an enemy destroyer lobbed 5-inch shells into the perimeter from Ironbottom Sound, driving the general and the admiral (both dressed in skivvies) into Vandegrift’s bomb shelter. “By God, Vandegrift, this is your war and you sure are welcome to it,” McCain said. “But when I go back tomorrow I am going to try to get you what you need for your air force here.”36

  Before he left the next morning, McCain told Colonel Twining that the 1st Division’s fight was not really about Guadalcanal. It was not, as Twining paraphrased, “a grudge fight between some raggedy-assed Marines and the Japanese. . . . In the admiral’s view, Guadalcanal was a rampart, not an outpost. Its successful defense could lead to the destruction of Japanese naval power in the Pacific.”37 McCain wrote in the same vein to Nimitz and King shortly after returning to Espiritu Santo. If adequately reinforced, Guadalcanal could become “a sinkhole for enemy air power.”38 So long as the Japanese arrogantly insisted on sending airstrikes across 600 miles of sea, the long flights alone would whittle down their numbers. Guadalcanal could finish the process begun at Coral Sea and Midway—the gradual extinction of Japan’s remaining cadre of irreplaceable veteran aviators.

  In the following weeks, McCain lobbied persistently for air reinforcements. He asked for additional army planes, particularly P-38s (which performed much better than the P-39/P-400 at higher altitudes). He summoned air reinforcements from throughout his COMAIRSOPAC domain and asked Nimitz and MacArthur for more. Aviation gasoline, bombs, ammunition, spare parts, tools, and ground personnel were urgently needed. VMF-223 ran out of oxygen canisters three days after the squadron’s arrival on the island. The transport William Ward Burrows would carry a large load of supplies and the marine air group’s ground personnel to Guadalcanal. In the interim, the marine Wildcats were serviced by sailors attached to the CUB-1 base construction facility. Turner sent another battalion of Seabees to the island to upgrade and lengthen Henderson Field so that it could handle B-17s. Land immediately northeast of Henderson was cleared and graded for a shorter auxiliary grass airstrip to be called “Fighter One.” When aviation gasoline stocks dipped dangerously low, fuel drums were loaded onto B-17s and flown into the island. The Hornet had come south with a squadron of unassembled fighters stored overhead in her hangar deck. They were assembled and flown into Henderson. From August through November, the Cactus Air Force would field a total of eight fighter, twelve dive-bomber, and two torpedo squadrons from three branches of the armed services.

  Enterprise and Saratoga squadrons, orphaned by the maiming of their ships, were sent into Guadalcanal and told to operate from Henderson until further notice. Lieutenant Commander Harold H. “Swede” Larsen led his squadron of TBF Avengers, Torpedo Squadron Eight (VT-8), into Henderson in mid-September. McCain urged that the bombers be sent on late-afternoon and evening missions up the Slot to destroy Japanese ships before they could land troops and supplies on the island. “Your whole existence up there,” he wrote Vandegrift and General Roy Geiger (commander of air forces on Guadalcanal) on September 14, “depends on hitting those Jap ships consistently before they get there, while they are there, or during departure.”39 Four days later he added, “The planes must find those ships that come in and hit you at night, and must strike them before dark. Should I die now, those words will be found engraved on my heart.”40

  Each morning, marine and navy SBDs flew “the milk run,” a long scouting patrol up the Slot. Every plane at Henderson typically scrambled aloft at midday, if only to avoid being caught on the ground during an airstrike. In the late afternoon, a flight of six to eight SBDs again left Guadalcanal to scout up the Slot for incoming Japanese shipping. These late-day flights were productive, as they forced enemy ships to hang back in the northwest until dark, and thus limited the amount of time they could spend in Ironbottom Sound. The Cactus Air Force also began flying night missions by the light of the moon. Dive-bombing at night was still a fairly low-percentage game, however, and operational losses were high. Swede Larsen’s torpedo planes flew scouting and attack missions, but they were rarely able to press home a coordinated attack with dive-bombers, and the hit rate was frustratingly low throughout September. In a debriefing recorded at the Navy Department in January 1943, Larsen recommended “fighting a war that is a very aggressive war. . . . If you can possibly attack and continue attacking—which means a continuous series of replacement supplies and aircraft and provisions, you certainly ought to do it. It was a black eye that we had to let a lot of those Jap ships get away from there, but there really wasn’t anything to do about it.”41

  AFTER THE ANNIHILATION OF ICHIKI’S FORCE at the mouth of the Tenaru, General Vandegrift asked his brain trust—Colonel Twining and Colonel Gerald C. Thomas—to consider where the Japanese might attempt their next attack. The colonels had previously expressed concern about an amphibious landing on the beaches around Lunga Point. But the Japanese did not possess the amphibious equipment to make a hostile landing under fire, and any fleet large enough to mount such an attack would inevitably be discovered from the air. With good roads around Lunga Point, moreover, reinforcements could be moved into that area quickly.

  A more worrisome problem was the exposed ridge directly south of Henderson Field. In that direction, the jungle provided cover for an enemy approach by stealth. With a concerted attack, the Japanese might break through to the airfield, which lay only a few hundred yards north of the perimeter.

  The ridge—remembered later as “Edson’s Ridge” or, alternately, “Bloody Ridge”—ran from northwest to southeast for a distance of some 1,000 yards. It rose to a series of bumps or spurs just a few hundred yards from the jungle tree line. Vandegrift deployed Colonel Merritt Edson’s battalion of raiders and parachutists to dig into defensive positions on one of the forward spurs. A battery of howitzers was brought up from Lunga Point to provide fire support. Two battalions were kept in reserve.

  Admiral Tanaka’s “Rat Express” continued to run supplies and troop reinforcements into the island almost every night. Costly experience had taught Tanaka that he must not attempt daylight operations in air-striking range of Guadalcanal. To make matters worse, the Japanese navy’s command setup in the region was in evident disarray, and Tanaka was receiving contradictory orders from the Combined Fleet and the two rival subordinate naval commands at Rabaul: the Eleventh Air Fleet and the Eighth Fleet. On August 29, a new invasion force under Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi arrived at Shortland Island in the transport Sado Maru. Two nights later, General Kawaguchi and most of his force, about 3,000 men, were landed successfully from eight destroyers on a beachhead east of the marines, near Taivu Point. The rest of his force attempted to reach the island in landing barges from Gizo Harbor, a tactic Tanaka had warned against, to no avail. More than a dozen of these heavily loaded barges were caught in the open sea and sunk by sixteen SBDs of Scouting Squadron Five (VS-5 of the Enterprise). But Tanaka’s persistent destroyer operations gradually added to General Kawaguchi’s force. By September 12, it numbered more than 6,000 troops. They bivouacked around the villages of Kokumbona and Tasimboko, about twelve miles east of the American beachhead.

  September 11 and 12 were as intense as any two-day period the marines had yet experienced. A large strike of G4Ms crossed overhead at noon and walked a pattern of bombs across the populated area just south of the field. Not enough fighters were aloft to break up the attack. That afternoon, twenty-four Wildcats of VF-5, made homeless by the torpedoing of the Saratoga, set down on Henderson Field. Their arrival was welcome, but it also put pressure on the gasoline reserve, which was running dangerously low. That night, the marines enjoyed especially heavy shelling by c
ruisers and destroyers in the sound. September 12 was one long unremitting series of Japanese air raids, and many marines spent the entire day in bomb shelters. At nine that night, the ships returned to give the Americans a three-hour working over with the big naval guns. Harold Buell recalled “a monstrous shelling on a scale unlike any before. . . . The shells were cutting trees off right over our heads, and the shrapnel was falling around us like hailstones. All of us in the trench survived, but the marines of VMSB-232 nearby were not so fortunate. A shell hit on top of their shelter, killing Lieutenants Rose and Baldinus and wounding two others. The whole thing was a nightmare.”42

  Kawaguchi’s attack on the ridge began at 7:30 p.m. on the thirteenth. A red flare was fired from the tree line, and a wave of Japanese soldiers charged Edson’s line. The fighting quickly degenerated into a series of vicious hand-to-hand encounters. One wave of attackers followed another, and the weight of these repeated attacks threw the marines back to within a quarter mile of the airfield. A counterattack on Kawaguchi’s east flank by the reorganized Parachute Battalion forced the Japanese to pull back into the tree line. Constant artillery fire by a battery of 105mm howitzers apparently claimed heavy casualties among the Japanese. “That night was hell: savagery on both sides,” recalled David Galvan, a radioman-gunner in one of the SBD squadrons. “That night everything was firing; nothing was held back. Shells went flying over our head: We were very close to the battle and could hear the artillery, the gunfire, the screaming.”43

  At the height of the battle, small groups of Japanese soldiers broke through Edson’s lines, and a few reached the edge of the airfield before they were cut down. Several SBDs were positioned so that their rear-facing, .30-caliber machine guns could be trained toward the ridge. A marine assigned to guard one of the SBDs killed an enemy soldier as he climbed onto the wing. “I knew that any Jap that got this far would try to destroy the plane by putting a hand grenade into the cockpit. So I just sat there waiting, and sure enough here came this gook right up onto the wing. I put my automatic piece against his chest and gave him a short burst—bastard never knew what hit him.”44 Vandegrift’s command post, about 300 yards south of the ridge, came under direct attack at dawn, but the attackers—two soldiers and an officer wielding a samurai sword—were killed within direct sight of the general.

  Morning found the Japanese in retreat and Edson’s battalion in possession of the ridge. General Geiger sent up several P-400s to strafe the remaining enemy units. Patrols went into the jungle and killed a few stragglers, but Kawaguchi was in headlong retreat. More than 800 Japanese dead were counted on the ridge and adjacent positions. The total number of Japanese casualties was about 1,200, most of whom were killed in action or later died of wounds. The marines lost 143, killed and wounded combined.

  The Japanese infantryman was fast losing whatever mystique he had earned in the early phase of the war. For more than twenty years, the Japanese army had emphasized “fighting spirit” over tactics or technology, and adopted the banzai charge as its main offensive doctrine. Against disciplined troops dug into fortified lines and supported by artillery, those tactics were ruinous. Twice in three weeks, a fanatical bayonet charge had been repelled, with casualty loss ratios of about ten to one. Among the marines, spirits rose. They listened to Radio Tokyo’s broadcasts with mordant good humor. At the village of Kukum, a big billboard was erected at a crossroads known as “Times Square.” On it was reported all of the news of the day, including the numbers of enemy aircraft claimed in air combat overhead and the latest baseball scores from home.

  Morale was further boosted on September 18, when an unexpectedly large transport fleet anchored off Lunga Point and began disembarking supplies and 4,000 marine reinforcements (the 7th Marines). These fresh troops were warmly welcomed, as were the lavish quantities of food, medical supplies, ammunition, and construction equipment unloaded onto Beach Red. Martin Clemens later recalled, “We were terribly excited, and licked our chops at the prospect of a square meal.”45

  THE ENTERPRISE, MAIMED AT THE BATTLE of the Eastern Solomons, had been obliged to part ways with the Saratoga and withdraw to Pearl Harbor for extensive repairs. Fletcher’s Task Force 61 was soon reinforced by the arrival in the Solomons of two more carrier groups—Task Forces 17 and 18, built around the Hornet and the Wasp, respectively.

  Ghormley deployed this powerful task force between San Cristobal and the Santa Cruz Islands, in a rectangular zone measuring approximately 160 miles (east-west) by 60 miles (north-south). In this “centrally-located” position, Fletcher could move quickly to counter any Japanese advance into the Solomons while also providing air cover to Turner’s transport fleet as it ran supplies and reinforcements into Ironbottom Sound. But Ghormley’s orders had the perilous effect of tying Fletcher down in a specific area. The carriers, ringed by their accompanying cruisers and destroyers, continually traversed the same waters—heading southeast at night, then reversing course and steaming northwest in the early morning hours. Enemy air and submarine reconnaissance was bound to discover these patterns and react accordingly. Captain Davis of the Enterprise reported to Nimitz on the quandary after his arrival in Pearl Harbor:

  During the past month the strategic situation has required long continued presence of carrier task forces in limited areas within at least approximate range of the enemy. Such risks, of course, must be accepted. They should, however, be minimized in every possible way. The percentage should always be played. The widest possible variation should be made in general location from day to day while still meeting strategic requirements. Higher speeds, even at some increase in fuel expenditures, should be used. There should be no hovering during a given day in the same general vicinity. . . . Occasional departure, whenever the strategic picture permits, entirely away from the area should be undertaken so as to leave the enemy guessing where we have gone and when and where we will appear next.46

  Unhappily, these astute remarks were also prophetic. Knowing full well that the Americans must run convoys between Noumea, Espiritu Santo, and Guadalcanal, Admiral Yamamoto had deployed a scouting line of submarines 150 miles southeast of San Cristobal. The Allied sailors whose duty it was to navigate that submarine-infested corridor gave it a nickname: “Torpedo Junction.” On the last day of August, at 7:48 in the morning, the Saratoga took a single torpedo in her starboard side, just aft of the island. The explosion tore away her blister plating and destroyed the electrical controls for her propulsion system, bringing her to a dead stop. The blast injured a dozen men (including Fletcher) but killed none. Her destroyers scattered depth charges all around the task force, but the attacker (Japanese submarine I-26) dove deep and escaped. Saratoga’s crew got the damage under control, and the carrier was able to limp away under her own power, but she would have to follow the Enterprise to Pearl Harbor for dry-dock repairs and would not get back into the war until November.47

  The following two weeks brought almost daily submarine contacts, either by sound gear or by aerial sightings. On September 6, the pilot of a Hornet TBF Avenger, flying antisubmarine patrol over Task Force 61, caught sight of a torpedo track pointed at the Hornet and dropped a depth charge on it. The torpedo broached, veered off course, and detonated harmlessly. Another torpedo exploded prematurely a few seconds later. A third narrowly missed the Hornet, continued on its course, and also narrowly missed the battleship North Carolina. Later that afternoon, one of the Hornet’s long-range scouts saw an enemy submarine on the surface and dropped depth charges on it, with uncertain results. The next day, as Nimitz reported to King, “Four different contacts, which may or may not have been false, kept the Task Force dodging most of the day.”48

  In mid-September, Ghormley deployed his two remaining carrier groups to provide distant cover for the transport convoy carrying the 7th Marines to Guadalcanal. The reinforcements were landed successfully, but Task Force 61 again tested its luck in the treacherous waters of Torpedo Junction, and this time its luck ran short. On the afternoon of September 1
4, the Wasp—in company with the Hornet, the battleship North Carolina, and more than a dozen screening ships—was proceeding at 16 knots on the familiar northwesterly course. At 2:15 p.m., she turned into the wind to launch planes, then at 2:42 turned back toward her base course of 280 degrees. Before she had completed the turn, her lookouts sang out and pointed to three incoming torpedo tracks close off the starboard bow. The fish were on target and nearly home; the Wasp had no chance of evading any of the three.

  The first struck home just forward of the island. The powerful blast lifted the entire ship and hurled her forward, flinging two F4F fighters into the sea and throwing hundreds of her crew from their feet. Ensign John Jenks Mitchell, a twenty-two-year-old Naval Academy graduate, was thrown 30 feet into the air and landed 60 feet away. He recalled the impact of the first torpedo as “a loud, unruly noise—something like a railroad train going up a flight of stairs—and the next thing I knew it was ten days later and I wanted a cigarette.” (From his hospital bed in Noumea, two weeks after his injury, Mitchell joked to a reporter: “I am thinking of putting in my chit to qualify for landings on the flight deck.”)49 The second and third torpedoes struck in quick succession, each causing the entire length of the ship to leap again. On the hangar deck, planes were lifted and dropped with such force that their landing gear was crushed, and two fighters that were triced up overhead broke loose and fell on the planes below.