The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Admiral Nimitz opened the meeting with cursory pleasantries and then turned to Ghormley and asked for a briefing on the state of play. The chief problem with Guadalcanal, said Ghormley, was the difficulty in providing logistical support to the marines. Only two fast transports were left; aviation gasoline reserves were down to 5,000 gallons; and the ships bringing additional supplies and material from the United States had been loaded carelessly, so that the ships’ manifests did not provide an accurate record of what cargoes they carried or where they were stowed. A lack of advanced port facilities in Noumea and everywhere else north of New Zealand made it nearly impossible to reload the attack transports for runs into Guadalcanal. Nimitz sympathized, observing that “cargo handling, living arrangements, and gas storage are terrible everywhere we go.”25 Turner predicted the Japanese could take Guadalcanal at “any time with a good landing force, three or four carriers, and proper ships.” If the Japanese forces on the island had been quiet since the battle on the ridge, it was only “a lull in their efforts.”26

  The three-hour conference exposed all of the cross-service and cross-theater tensions in the South Pacific, and indeed in the entire global conflict. General Sutherland, speaking for MacArthur, said that the fight for Guadalcanal was not nearly as critical as the defense of Port Moresby and Milne Bay on New Guinea, where the Allies had 55,000 vulnerable troops. Ghormley’s naval forces should operate farther west, he said, to counter Japanese moves toward those positions. Excerpts from CINCPAC staff notes summarized the exchange that followed:

  Nimitz: Doubts that Jap will “come around the corner for Moresby.” Easier to stop us at Guadalcanal.

  Sutherland: Gen. MacArthur wants Ghormley to cover the whole area. . . . Fleet shouldn’t be restricted to a line. Should base more ships on Australia, including TF-1 [the battleships] which would be better located strategically than at Pearl.

  Nimitz: TF-1 must remain in Hawaii.

  Kenney: The Japs have lots of bauxite; can increase plane production.

  Nimitz: The Jap is not happy. Shipping losses 1,000,000 tons. . . . Avgas shipped from Japan.

  Kenney: With bauxite Japan has, they can increase production to 2,000 planes per month.

  Nimitz: I don’t believe the Japs can build 2,000 planes per month.

  Kenney: We should take Rabaul.

  Turner: We can’t take Rabaul now. We must continue to eat away at the edges. Can do nothing but attrition until we have local air and naval superiority . . . covering air and naval forces.

  Sutherland: We want to establish a school of amphibious warfare.

  Turner: We have no amphibious training going on. Our school is CACTUS.

  Nimitz: On question of Ghormley covering MacArthur, we must counter Jap air with our carriers, which cannot operate in restricted areas. We now have only one, Hornet; Enterprise will be ready 6 Oct.

  Sutherland: Once on north coast Papua we will put our fighters there, bombers at Moresby.

  Kenney: If Japs take Milne they can get at Moresby easily.

  Nimitz: I still say he isn’t comin’ round the corner.

  Kenney: If they do they’ll stop our supply line, and starve out our 55,000 at Moresby.

  Nimitz: Tell MacArthur we have sent him everything we have.27

  The problems in both theaters were plain to see, but Hap Arnold had come from Washington with an entirely different agenda, and a message that must have galled all of the men around that green baize–covered table. The future five-star general believed that the South Pacific was “oversaturated” with army air units. He reminded the Pacific commanders that the Allies’ global strategy called for defeating Germany first. They could not afford to let American airpower be sucked into the vortex of the Pacific War when the more dangerous enemy was still rampaging across Europe. Between MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s commands, he counted some 1,314 airplanes, and another 302 on the way, for a total of 1,616. That was against his best estimates of Japan’s airpower in the theater: 554 airplanes. The only way the navy’s request for more air could be met was by drawing them away from Europe. Arnold was against it. Air reinforcement of the Pacific should be halted and even reversed—the Allies should be moving planes from the Pacific to Europe. These arguments, he knew full well, did not “make a hit with either the high ranking officers of the navy, or, probably, with General MacArthur.”28

  More than any other member of the Joint Chiefs, Arnold backed rigid adherence to the “Germany-first” principle. By prior agreement with the British, the Army Air Forces were to concentrate a tremendous force of bombers and fighters at airfields in southern England, where they would operate with the Royal Air Force in the bombing campaign against Germany. The planned buildup had been substantially delayed by deployments to support WATCHTOWER and TORCH. In July 1942, nine heavy air groups were on their way to the Pacific and another eleven to Africa. In a strongly worded private memorandum to Harry Hopkins on September 3, 1942, Arnold expressed “growing apprehension” over the dispersal of American airpower to peripheral theaters and reminded Hopkins that the war was to be fought according to the “Germany-first” strategy. He could rely on neither Marshall nor King to back the strategy reliably: “At this writing, the major effort of the Navy is from the Southwestern Pacific to the Northwest against Japan. . . . The Army, for one reason or another, has changed its primary objective from time to time as circumstances, policies, and politics dictated.” The cost of these “piecemeal dispersals and petty diversions all over the world,” he wrote, was to cripple the air campaign against the industrial heartland of Germany:29

  [The navy’s] main objective is in the South Pacific. Little by little, bit by bit, the Navy is increasing its strength down there, calling for large air and ground support. Every increase in strength that the Navy gets for its operations in the Pacific necessitates taking something away from some other theater. These reinforcements may save our Navy or prevent the recapture of South Pacific islands occupied by us, but there is a strong possibility that the Navy could withdraw entirely from that theater and we would not lose the war. Furthermore, if we capture all the islands up to and including New Britain, we still would not necessarily win the war. On the other hand, if we beat the Germans we know that we will win the war.†30

  Nor was this attitude of Pacific localism limited to the navy. When Arnold met with MacArthur in Brisbane the following day, the imperious commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific area demanded 500 more planes of any kind. When Arnold referred to commitments in Europe, MacArthur offered his professional opinion that “a sufficient number of air bases could never be established in England to provide air cover for a second front.”31 Arnold was incredulous. “Germany-first” was the sanctioned basis of the Allies’ entire global strategy, and here was a major Allied theater commander who did not accept it even in theory. All subordinate commands, Arnold concluded, ought to be “indoctrinated with the idea that there is a United States plan—An Allied plan—for winning the war, and all must conform to it.”32

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF SEPTEMBER 29, Nimitz boarded his Coronado for the three-hour flight to Espiritu Santo, the advanced air and supply base that provided direct support to the garrison on Guadalcanal. There he was greeted by Admiral Aubrey “Jake” Fitch, who had succeeded McCain as the commander of SOPAC air forces.

  Nimitz could not have been surprised by the retrograde conditions at Santo. He had been well informed of circumstances on the airfield since it had been hewn out of the jungle two months earlier. Still, to see it with his own eyes must have made an impression. There were no circulating runways, no traffic control, not even a control tower. The aircrews lived in primitive huts and tents, getting very little recreation or rest. They were plainly exhausted, and many were sick. At Segond Channel, he watched as the fuel drums were dropped from the transports and “swum” into shore, then lifted onto the backs of trucks and dispersed to uncovered fuel dumps. Every day, 20,000 gallons of aviation fuel was landed on the island by these grueling means
.

  Nimitz awarded decorations to several marine and navy pilots, and a Distinguished Service Medal to Fitch. Then he and his retinue boarded an army B-17, provided by Fitch, for the 620-mile hop to Guadalcanal.

  The B-17 had plenty of range to make the flight, and in case of a sudden ambush the Fortress was a rugged and well-defended airplane. But the young pilot flew into a weather front and soon admitted that he was not sure of his position. That was a gentle way of saying he was lost in the lowering white murk. All hands scanned the seascape below. Lieutenant Arthur Lamar fished a National Geographic map of the South Pacific out of his bag and tried to match it up to the contours of passing islands. They found Guadalcanal and flew up the north coast. Finally they glimpsed the small, muddy airfield littered with junked airplanes and surrounded by bomb craters and tent camps. A torrential rain was beating down as the aircraft sloshed and skidded to the edge of the runway. Nimitz stepped down into the downpour and was greeted by Vandegrift.

  As the skies cleared that afternoon, the general took the admiral on a tour of the defense perimeter. Nimitz met several of the regimental commanders, who spoke in low tones about the action they had seen and their preparations for the future. He observed the still-unburied hundreds of Japanese dead strewn across the hill south of Edson’s Ridge. In the Pagoda, General Geiger briefed him on the air campaign, and Nimitz took in the exhausted and hunted appearance of the airmen who had been on the island for a month or more. At the field hospital, he spoke to men wounded in battle and men laid low by malaria or other tropical ailments. “The grim appearance of the command noticeably impressed him,” Vandegrift wrote of his visitor; “I was not exactly sorry since I wanted Nimitz to see what we were up against.”33

  The next morning, Nimitz was to award decorations, and Vandegrift’s staff was up late that night writing citations. Lieutenant Herbert L. Merillat found the entire process shockingly arbitrary. The number of decorations to be handed out, he noted, was not determined by any impartial standard of heroism, but by “the number and types of medals the admiral totes along.” Officers lobbied on behalf of their units and horse-traded so that each received its share. Marginal cases were dressed up, and many deserving men were undoubtedly neglected. Merillat confided to his diary that he was relieved he did not have the responsibility to decide the awards, because “there are so many real heroes here.”34

  The ceremony took place at 6:30 a.m. in a bamboo grove in front of Vandegrift’s shack. Lieutenant Lamar read the citations as the admiral went down a line of marines and pinned medals to chests. The solemnity of the occasion was broken by some singing and shouting of marines up the hill, who were ignorant that a ceremony was taking place, and had to be told to quiet down. A sergeant keeled over in a dead faint as Nimitz approached to pin a medal on his chest. When he came to, he apologized and explained that he had “never seen a four-star admiral before and he was scared to death.”35 Vandegrift was genuinely surprised and moved when he received the Navy Cross.

  The flight back to Espiritu Santo was delayed by the condition of Henderson Field, which remained a quagmire after the previous day’s downpour. One thousand feet of the runway still lacked steel matting. The first of the two planes to attempt takeoff (it carried Nimitz) could not get airborne. It skidded down the last unmatted section of the strip, did a ground loop, and came to a stop at the edge of a ravine. Nimitz descended from the plane and went to lunch with Vandegrift. They would wait for the sun to dry the strip. At midday they tried again, and this time the Fortress wobbled into the sky and droned away to the east.

  THE MARINES ENDURED. They suffered the enervating heat and humidity, the endless torture of insects, the hours of pelting rains that swamped their foxholes and tent camps. They sweated and shivered through the malarial fevers. When they had an hour or so of relief, they took a bar of soap and went down to the Lunga River. With their mates manning machine guns and watching for enemy soldiers or estuarine crocodiles, they scrubbed their bodies and their dungarees, washing themselves as thoroughly as they could in the brown water. But no amount of scrubbing did away with the “jungle rot,” the blisters and open sores that accumulated on their wrists, in their armpits, under their testicles. Scratching made it worse, and they warned themselves and each other not to scratch, but sooner or later the temptation overcame the will to resist. The “prickly heat,” as it was called, was just another inescapable annoyance of life on the stinking, godforsaken island. The marines carried away their dead and buried them respectfully, marking their graves with wooden crosses or a stick with a helmet slung on top. They stripped the Japanese dead of whatever valuables or interesting souvenirs were found on their persons, and even smashed out their gold teeth and pocketed them as spoils of war. The stench of their rotting flesh wafted on the breeze. The unburied bodies were overrun with ants. In time, nothing would be left but polished bone.

  Since August 9 they had been asking one another, “Where’s the fucking navy?” It was a rhetorical question, of course. They were marines; they could rely on no one but themselves. The 1st Marine Division had become the “1st Maroon Division.” “U.S.M.C.” stood for “Uncle Sam’s Miserable Children.” They had been played for suckers. By training and doctrine, they were elite shock troops—amphibious specialists brought in to storm an enemy beach and secure a beachhead. They had done their job. They were not supposed to be left to defend that beachhead for months on end. The plan, as the officers and men had always understood it, called for the army to come in behind them and take over the position. The marines would be pulled back to a rear area for a period of rest, recuperation, and additional training, and later deployed to another amphibious attack on another island closer to Tokyo. Two months after the invasion of Guadalcanal, a new question was on the lips of every marine: “Where’s the fucking army?” It was another rhetorical question, of course. It was their lot to be left behind, as they had been at Wake Island. They were “George,” and the sister services had agreed to “Let George do it.” Singing voices rose in bitter unison from the foxholes. Their profane anthem had been adapted from the old British expeditionary soldiers’ song “Bless ’em All”:

  They sent for the Navy to come to Tulagi,

  The gallant Navy agreed;

  With one thousand sections

  In different directions,

  My God! What a fucked-up stampede!

  (Chorus)

  Fuck ’em all! Fuck ’em all!

  The long and the short and the tall;

  Fuck all the swabbies and dogfaces too,

  Fuck all the generals and above all fuck you!

  So we’re saying goodbye to them all,

  As back to our foxholes we crawl;

  There’ll be no promotion on MacArthur’s ocean,

  So cheer up marines, fuck ’em all!36

  Turner’s handful of suitable attack transports continued irregular runs between Noumea, Port Vila (Efate), Espiritu Santo, and Guadalcanal, but the supply shortfalls were endemic. Food was often in dangerously low reserve, and although the marines were never reduced to a starving condition, they were required to subsist on reduced rations, which sapped their energy and strength. Everyone lost weight, as much as twenty to thirty pounds. Ammunition was landed on Lunga Point and then distributed to caches as directed by the quartermaster. The reserves were usually low enough that the marines had to be warned not to waste a shot unless they were sure of hitting an enemy soldier. Even when the transports arrived in Ironbottom Sound, always a welcome sight, unloading them into the rudimentary port facilities at Lunga Point required meticulous attention and backbreaking labor. Constant harassment by Japanese air attacks required the ships to raise anchor and maneuver at high speed in the sound, losing precious hours. The single most critical shortage, in early October, was aviation gasoline. So critical was the avgas situation that fifty-five-gallon fuel drums were flown into Henderson on DC-3 transports.

  The Tokyo Express, variously known to the marines as the “Cactus Expre
ss” or the “Tojo Express,” landed small numbers of Japanese troop reinforcements and supplies on the beaches west of the American perimeter night after night. Tanaka’s fast destroyers continued to do double duty as transports. Their speed allowed them to hang back until nightfall, far up the Slot, beyond the flying range of the Henderson-based bombers, and then race in under cover of darkness. If they unloaded quickly enough, the destroyers managed to lob a few shells into the marine perimeter and then race westward to be out of range again by daybreak.

  But Tanaka’s destroyers could not land an entire division, at least not on the timetable demanded by the ambitious Japanese plans. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, commander of the Seventeenth Army, needed proper troop transports to do the job. The Japanese had learned through bitter experience that they could not bring transports into Ironbottom Sound as long as planes based at Henderson Field could attack them as they approached. It followed that the Japanese must find some means of putting Henderson out of business long enough to land a division of troops. They had been trying to do exactly that for two months, and thus far failed. This time they would not fail—or to put it more precisely, they could not fail, because the emperor himself had insisted that they succeed.

  VANDEGRIFT REPEATEDLY APPEALED for more troop reinforcements. But Admiral Turner, who stood above him in the chain of command, held very different ideas about the deployment of ground forces. Again and again the two commanders found themselves at cross-purposes. Turner was inclined to disperse ground forces across many islands or beachheads, whereas Vandegrift and his staff preferred the virtues of concentration. The admiral obstinately insisted on holding back the 2nd Marines (assigned to replace the 7th Marines, which had been deployed in Samoa) for a subsequent landing on Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands, 300 miles east of Guadalcanal. Vandegrift’s officers thought Ndeni irrelevant and urged Turner to hold troops in reserve to reinforce Lunga if the fight grew hotter than expected. Only after the admiral had personally witnessed the ferocious combined ground assault and naval bombardment of Henderson on September 11 (taking a bottle of scotch with him to his foxhole, as one marine staff officer noted) did he agree to deliver the regiment to Lunga.