Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Then Major Williams was hit and the command passed to Major Charles Miller. Captain Harry Torgerson began lashing sticks of dynamite to the ends of poles, or of strips of planking. Under the protective fire of his men, Torgerson rushed the cavemouths, hurling his explosives like javelins, sometimes stooping to poke them in if the opening was too narrow. Sometimes a bare instant separated his throw and the blast, for these were only five-second fuses. There came a time when an instantaneous explosion sent him rolling down a hill.

  “Goddam, Cap’n,” yelled an irreverent Marine, “you done lost the seat of yer pants!”

  “Screw the pants!” screamed the singed and denuded Torgerson. “Get me more dynamite!”

  Thus was born the first of the gloriously raggedy-assed Marines, and thus was Guvutu conquered.

  If the Japanese bombers flew to Guadalcanal from the big northern air base at Kavieng on New Ireland, their route would take them over Buka Passage in the Northern Solomons—and there they could be spotted by the Australian coastwatcher, Jack Read.

  If they flew from the bigger base at Rabaul, their route took them over Buin—and there they could be seen by the Australian coastwatcher, Paul Mason.

  On the morning of August 7 the red-balled bombers rose from Rabaul and went roaring south. They passed over Buin at about half-past ten, the thundering of their motors rousing Mason as he sat in his palm-thatched hideout on Malabite Hill. Mason rushed outside. He counted 24 torpedo bombers, “Kates” as they were called. He ran back inside and flashed his radio message:

  “Twenty-four bombers headed yours.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, aboard the Australian cruiser Canberra in the waters between Guadalcanal and Tulagi, an impersonal voice came over the bullhorn:

  “The ship will be attacked at noon by twenty-four torpedo bombers. All hands will pipe to dinner at eleven o’clock.”

  Americans within earshot of that announcement could grin at the suggestion that the Japanese bombers were after “the ship,” which was Australian, rather than the convoy, which was otherwise entirely American. But, as the Aussies say, the information was “fair dinkum,” and at exactly twelve noon 24 bombers did appear over Sealark Channel. They were met by a roar of antiaircraft fire which put them to flight with only three of their eggs splashing harmlessly into the sea.

  The “Bonzer boys” up north had made the first of hundreds of priceless advance warnings.

  At a few minutes past six in the evening of August 7, American destroyers ran close to Tanambogo and let go with five-inch guns. A flight of dive-bombers swooped down through gathering smoke to drop their bombs. A Japanese three-inch gun on a Tanambogo hilltop was blown into the air in full view of the Marines coming from Guvutu to attack the island.

  B Company of the Second Marines, the outfit which had landed so easily on Florida, was making the assault. Their Higgins boats made a wide swing around the causeway, turning in sharply to a northern beach. The men could see that there was not a tree left standing on Tanambogo. An oil dump was burning furiously beneath a dense cloud of smoke, and the five-inch shells of the destroyers were still wailing over their heads. To the men of B Company, it looked like another holiday.

  But it was holocaust instead. A sheet of fire fell on them from the crown of Tanambogo. Private Russell Miller, the first American to land on Japanese soil, fell dead at his Lewis gun.

  Then a destroyer shell dropped short and exploded among the Higgins boats.

  Shell fragments flew, killing and wounding, striking a coxswain and tearing him from the wheel of his boat. The boat swung sharply around, heading back for Guvutu. Other coxswains, sensing a withdrawal, turned to follow. Only three boats plunged forward through the mounting Japanese fire. In them were Captain Edgar Crane, the mustachioed commander of Company B, and Lieutenant John Smith. The boats lurched to a halt on the sand adjoining a concrete pier.

  “Follow me!” cried Lieutenant Smith, darting across the sand and plunging into a thicket.

  But his men could not follow. Though Smith had gotten past that crossfire of bullets converging on the three boats, his men could not. They were as though nailed to the beach. They slipped leftward, wriggling through water, until they could link up with Captain Crane at the pier.

  Inside the thicket, Lieutenant Smith was all alone. He could hear firing on the beach behind him. He began working back to it, moving from scrub to scrub. He saw someone lying beneath a palm tree. “Come on, Marine,” he whispered. The figure came erect, lips parted and bright teeth flashing like his bayonet. Smith shot him dead, whirled, and raced back to the beach.

  He returned to a desperate situation. Captain Crane and his men could not fight past the pier. Their machine-gunners had set up to help, but had been silhouetted by the light of the burning oil dump. Jap gunners riddled them. They were forced to withdraw by boat. As night fell, more boats came in to take off B Company’s mounting number of wounded. A dozen men hung on at the pier, covering the withdrawal, until darkness came and they slipped across the causeway to Tanambogo.

  With that dawn of August 8, the Third Battalion, Second, began the fierce fight which took Tanambogo. First the battalion landed on Guvutu to assist in mopping up that island. Then its companies began the land-sea assault which sent one force advancing across the causeway from Guvutu on foot and the other making a landing from Higgins boats.

  The waterborne attack was launched with the support of two tanks commanded by Lieutenant Robert Sweeney. They landed and rolled inland with bullets clanging off their steel sides. Some 50 Japanese came swarming at them, charging with turkey-gobbler shrieks, running low with outthrust pitchforks, with pipes or crowbars which they hoped to ram into the tanks’ treads. The tank guns blazed. A few of the Japanese fell. The others came on. Lieutenant Sweeney opened his tank turret to direct fire. He was shot in the forehead. A Japanese thrust a crowbar in the treads of the other tank. It stalled. The Japanese began hurling Molotov cocktails against the tank’s side. It began to burn. Tankers came popping out the open turret, jumping through the flames, fighting their way, one by one, through a crowd of knife-swinging, pitchfork-jabbing Japanese.

  Marine riflemen were rushing up to take the Japanese under fire. Private Kenneth Koons began picking off enemy soldiers from the throng milling around the other tank, which had become wedged between two coconut trees. He saw one of them slam a pitchfork down its open turret. ,He saw the Japanese scream and grab his hand where the tank commander had shot him. Koons took aim and finished him off.

  Another Japanese jumped on top of the embattled tank. Inside it, Pfc. Eugene Moore aimed his .45 at a round tan face framed like a bull’s-eye within the ring of the uncovered turret. He squeezed the trigger. The face flew out of sight. The tank worked free, lurched, and halted. A crowbar had been jammed in the wheelers. Moore seized a tommy gun and poked his head out of the turret and fired.

  A hurtling object struck him, fell inside the tank. There was a flash and a roar. It had been a hand grenade. It killed the tank commander. Now Molotov cocktails were bursting on the sides of the tank, setting it on fire. Now Moore’s own neck was ablaze. He ducked below.

  “Let’s get out of here,” yelled the driver, and leaped from the turret.

  He was shot through the head.

  Private Koons was able to kill the driver’s killer, but now, as he pressed a fresh clip into his rifle he gaped in astonishment. The last man—Pfc. Moore—was coming out the tank feet first. And the Japanese went wild. They seized him and punched him. They stuck him with pitchforks. They knifed him. They kicked him in the face and in the stomach. They tore the hair from his head. They ripped his pockets apart and took his money. And then, in a final maniacal outburst, unaware of how steadily their numbers had been dwindling under the methodical fire of Private Koons and other riflemen, one of the Japanese grabbed Moore by the feet and another by the arms —and they swung him to and fro against the tank, trying to beat the life out of him until Marine bullets found them and it was they
, not Moore, who were dead.

  The Japanese died to a man—42 of them—with Koons shooting most of them himself. And Pfc. Moore was hurriedly carried to a battalion aid station, where his numerous wounds and bruises were bandaged and he awoke to hear the news that Tanambogo was also falling.

  In late afternoon, while the tankers made their stand just inland of Tanambogo’s beaches, the force from Guvutu began advancing across the causeway. A spray of bullets whittled them. They ran forward, some of them falling, at last closing with the Japanese defenders, who jumped from their holes swinging bayonets and brandishing knives. The Marines cut them down and moved on to Tanambogo. By seven o’clock that night the land force had secured the Tanambogo end of the causeway.

  By that time also the Marines driving inland from the tank beachhead had captured two-thirds of the islet. Cave after cave fell to the style of attack first improvised by Captain Torgerson on Guvutu. Gunnery Sergeant Orle Bergner earned the nickname of “The One-Man Stick of Dynamite” as he led the way.

  Next day mopping-up operations secured the last of the harbor islands. About 750 Japanese had been killed defending them, a score of prisoners had been taken and about 60 more Japanese had escaped by swimming to Florida Island. The islands had been captured at a cost of 144 Americans killed and 194 wounded, an unusually high proportion of dead to wounded which gives testimony to the savagery of the battle. There was also testimony to the spirit which had won it, and this was given by a communications sergeant named Robert Bradley.

  Bradley had been perched in a balcony of the Lever Brothers plantation store on Tanambogo. He was a forward observer for a mortar section. Enemy fire pierced his throat, smashing his voice box. Blood gushed from his wound, and as a naval doctor rushed to stop the flow, Bradley began making frantic writing motions. The doctor gave him a pencil. Bradley wrote:

  “Will I live?”

  The doctor nodded, and Bradley wrote once more:

  “Will I speak again?”

  The doctor hesitated, then nodded a second time. Bradley grinned. Almost with a flourish, he wrote:

  “What the hell’s the use in worrying!”

  That was the sardonic spirit that took Tulagi, and it would be this—during the four-month ordeal ahead—that would hang on to Guadalcanal.

  4

  Guadalcanal.

  She was beautiful seen from the sea, this slender long island. Her towering central mountains ran down her spine in a graceful east-west keel. The sun seemed to kiss her timberline, and lay shimmering on open patches of tan grass dappling the green of her forests. Gentle waves washed her beaches white, raising a glitter of sun and water and scoured sand beneath fringing groves of coconut trees leaning langorously seaward with nodding, star-shaped heads.

  She was beautiful, but beneath her loveliness, within the necklace of sand and palm, under the coiffure of her sun-kissed treetops with its tiara of jeweled birds, she was a mass of slops and stinks and pestilence; of scum-crested lagoons and vile swamps inhabited by giant crocodiles; a place of spiders as big as your fist and wasps as long as your finger, of lizards as long as your leg or as brief as your thumb; of ants that bite like fire, of tree-leeches that fall, fasten and suck; of scorpions without the guts to kill themselves, of centipedes whose foul scurrying across human skin leaves a track of inflamed flesh, of snakes that slither and land crabs that scuttle —and of rats and bats and carrion birds and of a myriad of stinging insects. By day, black swarms of flies feed on open cuts and make them ulcerous. By night, mosquitoes come in clouds—bringing malaria, dengue or any one of a dozen filthy exotic fevers. Night or day, the rains come; and when it is the monsoon it comes in torrents, conferring a moist mushrooming life on all that tangled green of vine, fern, creeper and bush, dripping on eternally in the rain forest, nourishing kingly hardwoods so abundantly that they soar more than a hundred feet into the air, rotting them so thoroughly at their base that a rare wind—or perhaps only a man leaning against them—will bring them crashing down.

  And Guadalcanal stank. She was sour with the odor of her own decay, her breath so hot and humid, so sullen and so still, that all those Marines who came to her shores on the morning of August 7 cursed and swore to feel the vitality oozing from them in a steady stream of enervating sweat.

  Vandegrift’s main body, some 10,000 men of the First and Fifth Marines, had hit Red Beach almost at the center of Guadalcanal’s northern coastline. The Fifth landed first, with two battalions abreast. Unopposed, they jabbed inland, then wheeled to their right, or west, to work along the shore toward Japanese installations near the Lunga River. A Japanese laboring force of about 1,700 men had fled when the first of the American shells and bombs crashed among them as they sat at breakfast. Marines bursting into their encampment found bowls of still-warm rice on tables. More important, the Japanese had abandoned an airfield nearly complete with hangars, blast pens and a dirt runway 3,600 feet long. This was named Henderson Field after Major Lofton Henderson, who gave his life crash-diving a Japanese warship at the Battle of Midway. There was not only Henderson Field but also a complex of wharves, bridges, ice plants, radio stations and power and oxygen plants which the Japanese had succeeded in throwing up since work began July 4. There were tons and tons of rice —wormy, despicable rice which the Marines spurned but fortunately did not destroy, for it would one day stand between them and starvation. These were not all discovered the first day, although the airfield was captured by the First Marines on August 7.

  This regiment (Marine regiments are always called “Marines” in the way that Army regiments are known by their arm, as in “4th Cavalry” or “19th Infantry”) followed the Fifth ashore. One battalion turned right to overrun the undefended airfield. The other two plunged into the steaming morass beyond or south of it.

  All day long the men of these battalions toiled up slime-slick hills and slipped and slid down the reverse slopes, with the machine-gunners breaking the rule of silence by yelps of pain whenever heavy tripods banged cruelly against their necks. They thrashed through fields of sharp-edged kunai grass as tall as a man, sometimes shooting at each other. They forded swift cold jungle streams, often stooping to slosh the blessed water against their faces, even lying full-length in the shallows to let it fall into open mouths—ignoring the officers crying, “Don’t drink! It may be poisoned!” Back came the unfailing reply: “Fer gawd’s sake, lootenant—even the Japs can’t poison a whole damn river!”

  If there had been an organized enemy in the Guadalcanal jungle that day, there might have been an American catastrophe. For these Marines were far from professionals as they blundered onward toward their objective: a high clear height called Grassy Knoll, or Mount Austen, which commanded Henderson Field from the south.

  But if the jungle dissolved Marine discipline, it did not dampen Marine humor. That night, after the men had dug foxholes in the dank earth, they began to ask each other what it was all about. What did General Vandegrift want with Grassy Knoll?

  “Maybe,” said a private, “it’s because it’s the only place with a view.”

  “So?”

  “Where else they gonna put the officers’ club?”

  Then they fell silent, half of them to stand guard in that blind, black whispering jungle, the other half to attempt sleep beneath ponchos that failed to keep out the rain because of the big hole for the head, or behind little veils of mosquito netting that could not keep mosquitoes off because they were plastered to their faces.

  They awoke in the morning—puff-eyed, bitten and soaked —and began sloshing south again.

  At ten minutes of nine on the morning of August 8, the Australian Jack Read stood on a hill overlooking Buka Passage and counted 45 Japanese bombers flying overhead. They had come from Kavieng. Before the sound of their motors had faded behind him, Read was in his shack and at his radio.

  “Forty-five bombers going southeast.”

  A half-hour later Pearl Harbor again broadcast a warning to the Solomons fleet, and General
Vandegrift decided that the noon arrival of the enemy bombers would be just the time to give his beach working parties a rest.

  There were just a few hundred of these working-party men, and they were all headquarters troops and specialists. There were no stevedoring battalions to do the job, and Vandegrift dared not risk detaching any combat troops for it. Though the beach was a jumbled confusion of crates and boxes, though he had received the message “Unloading entirely out of hand,” though nervous cargo captains were badgering him for more men, Vandegrift would not weaken his line troops. So these makeshift stevedores worked on, sweat streaming from naked torsos, and at noon, with some of them already passed out from exhaustion, they took a break.

  Just as half the Japanese bombing force came in low over Florida and went wolfing among the transports.

  Then they came in a straight line, torpedo-laden Kates counting on surprise. But they were struck by a storm of sound and flame that obliterated 12 of them. Only one was successful, launching a torpedo which flashed into the hull of the destroyer Jarvis, sending her limping from the battle—to be sunk later by Japanese aircraft.

  Next the dive-bombing Vals came plummeting down. They too counted on surprise, unaware that fighters from Wasp had taken high stations a half-hour before and were now riding them down, risking their own antiaircraft fire polka-dotting the skies with deadly black puffs; unaware, until .50-caliber bullets chopped off their tails, sheared off their wings, set gasoline tanks ablaze, and started them on the long straight fall to oblivion.

  Far up north the coastwatcher Read crouched by his radio while an excited voice broadcast the results of his alert: “Boy, they’re shooting them down like flies… one… two… three… I can see eight of them in the water right now.”