Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  But one of them fell in flames into an open hold of the transport George F. Elliott. The big ship was set hopelessly afire. She was scuttled at twilight, the first major American ship to rest beneath that body of water which would be known as Iron Bottom Bay for the scores of vessels which would join her on its floor. Fortunately, Elliott’s troops had gone ashore the preceding day—but she went down with a battalion’s supplies.

  Night began to fall and General Vandegrift went aboard McCawley with a feeling of satisfaction. Though one transport was gone, though one destroyer was apparently only out of action, the Japanese had lost more than three-quarters of their planes, and they had not harmed those piles of precious supplies that were at last beginning to disappear inland. All of Vandegrift’s Marines were safely ashore, the airfield was his, the harbor islands were almost secured, and he could count on a few more days of unloading.

  But he could not.

  Admiral Turner was going to take the supply ships away in the morning.

  The powerful Japanese surface force which he and Admiral Fletcher had feared was coming down The Slot.

  5

  The Slot was the sea corridor running 400 miles from Bougainville to Guadalcanal. It was a watery passage between the Solomon Islands, which faced each other in two near-orderly rows at near-regular intervals of from 50 to 60 miles. Japanese ships based at Rabaul had about 240 miles to go before they reached The Slot’s northwest terminus at Bougainville. They entered it at midday, planning to arrive off the southeast terminus at Guadalcanal under cover of darkness.

  A task force of seven cruisers led by Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa entered The Slot at about midday on August 8. They came down it in column of battle: Mikawa’s flagship Chokai leading, followed by the heavy cruisers Aoba and Furutaka, next two more heavies, and then a pair of light cruisers. They were sighted almost immediately by an American search plane. But by half-past eleven on the night of August 8, the search plane’s warning had not been received by all of the ships patroling Savo Island.

  With their picket destroyers, cruisers Chicago and Canberra guarded the south gate between Savo and Guadalcanal, while the north gate was held by Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria and their pickets. It was getting on to the midnight change of watches aboard these ships. Weary sailors tumbled out of their bunks, gulped hot coffee and groped their way on deck to relieve the eight-to-twelvers. The new watch could see faint flashes of lightning over the western horizon. A rain squall was making up off Savo. It would work for Admiral Mikawa.

  His patrol planes had already been catapulted aloft, prepared to drop illuminating flares. His men were at their battle stations in gun turrets above decks, alongside torpedo tubes below—ready to strike the Allied warships before falling upon the thin-skinned transports at their leisure.

  At about eleven o’clock some of the Allied warships began picking up unknown airplanes on their radar. Others actually heard them droning overhead. Some mistook them for friendly aircraft, for the Japanese pilots had boldly turned on running lights. In that confusion which often precedes disaster, the reports were either misdirected, misinterpreted or ignored.

  A few minutes before one o’clock in the morning of August 9, Mikawa’s lookouts spotted the American destroyer Blue off to their right. Some 50 great guns swiveled around in the night and trained upon the little ship. Luckily for Blue, unhappily for her sister ships off Savo, neither her lookouts nor her radar had spotted the Japanese.

  On went Mikawa’s cruisers, hitting 24 knots… 26…

  At half-past one, Mikawa’s lookouts sighted Savo. Three minutes more and Mikawa passed the battle order:

  “All ships attack!”

  In five minutes, they had gotten the range, had loaded the torpedo tubes. In one more, hissing fish were leaping from the sides of the Japanese cruisers, were cleaving the dark water toward those unsuspecting sentinel ships. Two more minutes, and Chokai had closed to within two miles of them, still undetected…

  Now the warning came. Destroyer Patterson had sighted a big ship. The radio alarm was braying:

  “Warning! Warning! Strange ships entering harbor!”

  It was forty-three minutes past one in the morning of August 9, and it was already too late.

  Eerie greenish flares swayed down from the Japanese patrol planes and the harbor rocked to the roaring of the main batteries on Chokai, Aoba and Furutaka. Marines ashore looked fearfully at one another in baleful light filtering down from the blackness above. A dread silence interrupted the Tulagi conference of Vandegrift and Brigadier General William Rupertus. And then two of the Japanese steel fish finished their run by thrusting with cyclonic force into the side of Canberra, almost at the same moment that a shower of Japanese shells fell on her decks with merciless precision—and the Battle of Savo Island had begun.

  The Japanese torpedoes had already given Canberra her mortal wounds, and though she fought back with two fish of her own and a few rounds from her four-inchers, she was done.

  Chicago’s bow was blown off. She was out of the fight, unable to hinder the enemy cruisers swinging left and making for the northern force, running up on Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria, switching on their powerful searchlights, taking the stunned Americans under point-blank range and sending them to the bottom. Not all of them sank immediately, but they had taken their death blows.

  The Battle of Savo Island, which sailors and Marines more accurately called the Battle of the Five Sitting Ducks, wore on until dawn—when Mikawa took his cruisers out of Iron Bottom Bay and streaked for home. He left the American transports unmolested, but he had sunk four cruisers, damaged a fifth and also damaged a destroyer. His only losses were a direct hit on Chokai’s chartroom, plus some slight damage to Aoba.

  After Mikawa left, Admiral Turner also departed with the transports and their escorts.

  In the sundown of August 9, men of the First Marines returning to the beaches from their toilsome, useless march inland, saw no ships in Iron Bottom Bay. Only a few blackened, smoking hulls were visible to their left, toward Savo as they faced the water. Otherwise there was nothing.

  The Marines were all alone.

  6

  The fact of complete isolation had been accepted by Major General Vandegrift as early as the dawn of August 9. In that misty light, in a driving rain, he had assembled his staff officers, his regimental and battalion commanders.

  The booming of the big guns could still be heard to the west of the Division Command Post near Alligator Creek. Concussions shook the palm fronds, showering those officers who stood beneath them to avoid the rain. Someone had made coffee over a smoking, sputtering fire. The hot black liquid was passed around in empty C-ration cans.

  Offshore, lifting mists revealed the gray truncated shape of a prowless cruiser making slowly eastward between a pair of shepherding destroyers.

  “Chicago,” someone said in awe.

  There was a shocked silence, and then Colonel Gerald Thomas, the Division’s operations officer, broke the bad news swiftly.

  The Navy was going, and no one could say when or if it would return. The Marines could presume loss of the air as well as the sea. They were not only isolated but separated, with nearly half of the combat battalions over on the harbor islands. That very loss of air and sea suggested that there would be no hope of getting these troops over to Guadalcanal. Tulagi had eight days’ supplies and Guadalcanal a few days more than that. Reinforcements, resupply, were only a hope. What were they going to do?

  They were going to finish the airfield, get the supplies off the beach and dig in. They were going to hold a beachhead, which, when marked off on a map, made an oval shape extending about 3,500 yards inland at its deepest and 7,500 yards from west to east at its widest. Most of the small towns of America are bigger than this beachhead was. But it was all the Marines needed, for it contained the southwest-northern slant of Henderson Field at a point about 2,000 yards inland and equidistant from the eastern and western flanks. These flanks were represente
d by the Tenaru River on the east or right flank as the Marines faced the sea, and by the Kukum hills on the west or left flank. To the south, behind the airfield, the line was almost made of paper. Here was a series of local outposts, at their strongest as they drew curving back from the Tenaru and ran fairly straight west for about 3,000 yards to the Lunga River. Here, they curved again, following the crooked river line northwest or seaward for 2,500 yards until they ended at the artillery command post and Vandegrift’s new headquarters. The gaps to the rear of the airfield were numerous, but between the Lunga and the western hills there was one big gap about 2,000 yards wide. This was to be guarded by constant daily patrols, and to be very loosely “filled” at night by small outposts. The strongest point was the northern or seaward front, where the Marines dug in along the beach to defend against counterlanding.

  This was the “perimeter” which was to be held by 10,000 foot soldiers with hand guns, mortars, some tanks and three battalions of light artillery against an enemy who possessed interior lines from Rabaul 640 miles north, as well as all the men, guns, ships and airplanes he needed to press the initiative which was now his. That was the situation which Colonel Thomas outlined to those commanders who stood grim-faced in the rain. And when he stopped speaking and the conference ended, the Battle for Guadalcanal passed from an offensive into a defensive operation.

  United States Marines, trained to hit, were now being forced to hold.

  Though Vandegrift’s commanders tried to keep the bad news to themselves, it was inevitable that the men would soon learn of their perilous isolation. But they only grasped its import gradually. That aching, empty, yearning sense of loneliness that characterized the stand on Guadalcanal would not seize them fully for yet another week. In the meantime, they frolicked.

  They found and plundered a warehouse full of delicious Japanese beer and saki, a yellowish Japanese rice wine. The day of that discovery Guadalcanal’s single coastal road was thronged with dusty, grinning Marines trudging along with cases of beer on their shoulders or pulling captured Jap rickshas piled high with balloon-like half-gallon bottles of saki. They buried the loot, out of sight of prying officers, drinking it secretly and sometimes getting in a tipsy state that would account for more than one outburst of “trigger-happy” firing on the lines.

  In the morning, the trigger-happy might find that the “enemy” against whom they had battled so valiantly in the dark was one of those blundering mammoth land crabs in which Guadalcanal abounded or perhaps some scarecrow of a plantation cow.

  There was also, in this gay interlude between the real thing of the landing and the impending real thing of the Japanese counterattack, the nightly comedy provided by men who had difficulty pronouncing the passwords.

  All of the passwords—“Lallapaloozer,” “Lollipop,” “Lallygag” —were loaded with L’s because the Japanese normally cannot make that sound, turning it into a liquid R instead. But polysyllabic passwords could also tie the tongues of Marines such as the one who had arisen in the night to relieve himself and was having trouble with “Lilliputian.”

  “Halt!” came the sentry’s cry.

  “Fer Gawd’s sake, don’t shoot. It’s me, Briggs.”

  “Gimme the password.”

  “Lily-poo… luly…”

  “C’mon, c’mon! The password, or I’ll let yuh have it.”

  “Luly-pah… lily-poosh…” Silence, and then, in outrage: “Aw, shit—shoot!”

  Of course the sadistic sentry did not shoot, for he and all the men around him were already collapsed with laughter, a bawdy mirth that continued throughout that naive week until Lieutenant Colonel Goettge led out a patrol to accept a Japanese surrender and was ambushed and massacred.

  It was Goettge who had organized the helter-skelter gathering of information prior to the landings. He was a man of great vigor and daring. He was also a man of compassion, and this, when offered to an enemy as compassionate as a crocodile, was a fatal virtue.

  On August 12, a Japanese naval rating had been captured behind the western lines. He was questioned. He was a sour little crab-apple of a man, making his answers sullenly and with great reluctance. But he admitted that many of his fellows west of the Matanikau River—a stream lying a few miles to the west of the Kukum Hills line—were sick and starving, and that they might be persuaded to surrender. To this was added a patrol report of a “white flag” flying at a Japanese encampment west of the Matanikau.

  Hearing this, Goettge was moved. He took personal charge of a patrol that was to have scouted the Matanikau that day. He included in this patrol the Fifth Marines’ surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm L. Pratt, and Lieutenant Ralph Cory, an interpreter. Goettge cleaned out the Division Intelligence Section and borrowed veteran NCO’s from its regimental counterpart in the Fifth. After dark, under a moonless, starless night, leading the ill-natured Japanese by a rope, Goettge and 25 men left by Higgins boat for the “surrender area.”

  They landed opposite Matanikau Village. They moved quickly inland about 20 yards, halting before a cluster of grass huts set in a fringing wood. They built up a perimeter. Goettge and a few men went forward to reconnoiter and were struck to the ground by converging streams of rifle and machine-gun fire. Goettge was killed instantly, shot in the head. The Japanese fire rose in fury. Commander Pratt was mortally wounded. A sergeant with the prophetic name of Custer was shot in the arm, then killed.

  The Marines were pinned down, unable to move, firing back blindly while the enemy fire raked them mercilessly. The Japanese were so close that the Marines could feel the hot air of their muzzle blasts. But the enemy did not approach. He was content to toy with this rainbarrel full of fish.

  At one in the morning Sergeant Monk Arndt was ordered to swim back for reinforcements. He stripped. He crawled back to the water, naked but for shoes and helmet, under which he had tucked his pistol, hooking its butt on the chin strap. He swam breaststroke along the beach. The Japanese fired, raising little spurts of water all around him. Arndt felt foolishly exposed, as though his nakedness had left him without armor. He swam out to sea, crawling over the cruel subsurface coral that tore and tattered his flesh like pinking shears. He turned shoreward again. He found a beached native boat. One end was riddled with bullet holes. He pushed the boat out and got in the other end, paddling with a plank lying on its bottom. He paddled past the Marine lines, shouting “Million! Million!” for though he had forgotten the password, he knew that million had a million L’s. As dawn came and the mists swam up from the sea, Arndt had reached the Marine boat base. He waded ashore, the red of his blood streaming from multiple slashes below the hips, the knucklebones of his fingers laid bare.

  But Arndt had arrived too late. It was already all over for the patrol to the west. Two other Marines escaped, swimming east to safety. One of them who left just before daybreak turned for a parting look as the sun came up. He saw sabers flashing in the sun.

  Sabers flashing in the sun.

  It ran like a rallying cry all along the Kukum ridges, sweeping east through the coastal gunpits and foxholes, turning right to race up the barbed-wire line of the Tenaru, bursting in the ears of the airfield outposts, among the artillerymen, the amtrack drivers, the tankers, and the engineers grimly bulldozing the airstrip which only the day before had received its first American plane. It had the power to chill hearts, but on Guadalcanal those hearts were swelling with rage. The Marines could not have known that the “surrender flag” was actually a Japanese battle flag accidentally hanging limp and thus obscuring its red center, or that the Goettge mission was conceived in an error compounded by compassion. They only knew that Marines had risked their flesh to help the enemy and had been slaughtered in reward.

  All light bantering ceased. Timid patrols turned aggressive and savage. Marines hoped openly for battle, and because they had also not yet known it, talked loudly of wanting the enemy to come because they wanted to kill him and chop him up with his own sabers. There would also come a time when
these same men would dread recurrent battle, but now, after the Goettge patrol, they wanted it.

  They would get it. It came, at first, down The Slot. Destroyers, sometimes cruisers, sneaked into the bay during darkness to pound the airfield or the men crouching in pits, turning at dawn to streak back to Rabaul. Submarines surfaced between Guadalcanal and Tulagi, firing deck guns to sink every small American ship in sight, chasing Higgins boats back to the anchorage. Sometimes the Marines dueled the enemy warships with their puny 75-millimeter pack howitzers or with the .75 rifles mounted on half-tracks run down to the water. Once the celebrated Gunnery Sergeant Lew Diamond offered to take an 81-millimeter mortar aboard a Higgins boat and go after a submarine which was shelling Guadalcanal with five-inch guns. The offer was declined. But Gunny Lew’s proposal was reflective of the new aggressive spirit which had seized Vandegrift’s Marines after the Goettge patrol, and which kept them on their guns even as the bombs came wailing and crashing down on Henderson Field during increasing aerial bombardment of Guadalcanal.

  Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate, then assembling his 17th Army at his headquarters in Rabaul, was of one mind with Imperial Headquarters in its conviction that the Americans would tire quickly of war. To this end Admiral Nagumo had sailed to Pearl Harbor. Strike the Americans hard, set them back so far that by the time they had changed from the manufacture of playthings to the making of munitions the resource-rich booty of the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia would have been consolidated under the Reign of Radiant Peace. Then, when the Americans attempted to come back, Japan would make it so costly that they would quit the war in a negotiated peace.

  Until recently, General Hyakutate’s mission in the over-all scheme of conquest laid down by the militant Premier Hideki Tojo had been to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea, which was just to the north of Australia. But then Port Moresby was given to the 18th Army while Hyakutate’s 17th was told to recapture Guadalcanal. The change annoyed General Hyakutate. Port Moresby seemed by far the more important operation. Nor was the general—a small, thin, testy man—pleased with the army which Imperial Headquarters had given him to do the job at Guadalcanal. As so often happened with the Japanese military, the 17th Army’s 50,000 men had been given to Hyakutate unassembled. The famous 2nd Division——called the Sendai after the city near Tokyo from which most of its men were recruited—was in Java and the Philippines; the 38th Division was in China, along with 17th Army antitank units as far away as Manchuria; the Kawaguchi Brigade, actually close to a division, was in the Palaus; and the Ichiki Detachment was on Guam.