The Ichiki Detachment, which, in the Japanese manner, took the name of its commander, Colonel Kiyono Ichiki, was a reinforced battalion with a strength of about 2,000 men. General Hyakutate decided to use this unit to deal with the annoyance —for such he still regarded it—at Guadalcanal. Though there were but 2,000 Ichikis to hurl against an enemy force his intelligence had estimated at 10,000 men, were these enemy troops not, after all, Americans?
General Hyakutate lost some of his irritation in contemplating a bold stroke that would at once regain Guadalcanal and its vital airfield, would gratify Imperial Headquarters and would also respectfully suggest a measure of his contempt for the new assignment.
Hyakutate ordered Colonel Kiyono Ichiki to move. The Ichikis sailed from Guam to the great naval base at Truk. On August 16, Colonel Ichiki led some 900 storm troops aboard six fast destroyers and shoved off. Behind them came a cruiser and a destroyer escorting two transports carrying the remainder of Ichiki’s troops and his supporting arms.
Ichiki’s destroyers sped swiftly down The Slot, rapidly leaving the slower transports behind. The colonel was in a hurry, for one of the Army’s battle reports on American capabilities said: “It can be seen that when they are pressed for time, the American dispositions and especially their organization of fire are not coordinated. Therefore we must not fail to move fast and attack quickly, giving them no time in which to prepare their positions.”
But the Marines were already prepared and there was aerial reinforcement on its way.
She had been the merchant ship Macmormail, but now she was the Long Island. With her flight deck topside and a few guns she had been turned into a makeshift aircraft carrier, dignified in that status with the name of an American battle, and sent into the Pacific.
On August 20 she reached the southern Solomons and flew off 19 Wildcat fighters and 12 Dauntless dive-bombers to the embattled Marines on Guadalcanal.
The planes came skimming over the coconuts, and the men below glanced up nervously to hear the hum of motors. But then they saw the Yankee star on the wings and they shouted in jubilation. Two of the planes deliberately circled Henderson Field for all to see, and the men ran along the ridgesides and riverbanks and beaches, throwing helmets in the air, punching each other gleefully, cheering and crying for joy.
The first relief had come.
Colonel Kiyono Ichiki was a military man. His carriage was stiff, his jaw square, and his glance struck straight from narrowed eyes. His habit of courage was matched by a habit of thought as clipped and uniform as his military mustache.
He had landed his 900 men on August 18 at Taivu 20 miles to the east of the Tenaru River and he had decided not to wait for the following troops. Nine hundred men such as his—big, strong fellows among the very best troops in the Empire—were surely sufficient to overrun the American defenses and seize the airfield.
Next day, Colonel Ichiki wrote in his diary: “18 Aug. The landing. 20 Aug. The March by night and the battle. 21 Aug. Enjoyment of the fruits of victory.”
True, it was only 19 Aug.—but Colonel Ichiki foresaw the chance that he might die before he could make this entry. So he inscribed the inevitable, postdated it for posterity, and then he sent out a large party to lay communications wire.
Captain Charles Brush was not a military man. His shoulders slumped, his gait was shambling and his sideways glance was of an accusing character calculated to cause respect among the troops, but which actually only confirmed their suspicion that the skipper had quit teaching high school to take a small revenge on the schoolboys who would follow him into service.
On the morning of August 19, leading a patrol of roughly 80 men, Captain Brush shuffled eastward from the Tenaru. Some time after noon, his advance scouts caught sight of the Ichiki wiremen moving slowly westward. Brush attacked.
Part of his patrol drove straight ahead while a platoon swung to the right to get behind the Japanese. In a fight lasting nearly an hour, 31 of the Japanese were killed and three others escaped into the jungle. Three Marines were killed and three wounded.
It might have been put down as another jungle skirmish, except that the patrol was unusally large for the supposed remnant of laborers left on the island. Moreover it had been led by four officers of surprisingly high rank, the uniforms of the dead soldiers were new—and they had been laying communications wire when attacked.
Brush quickly stripped the dead of maps and documents and sent these back to the perimeter.
Marine intelligence officers were disturbed by the maps. They were accurate, with all of the weak points along the Tenaru carefully marked.
Lieutenant Colonel Al Pollock pulled some of the machine-gunners of his Second Battalion, First, off the beach line and sent them south along the Tenaru to extend his right flank. On the left where a sandspit kept the green sluggish Tenaru from reaching the sea, Pollock had placed his heaviest concentration—machine guns, riflemen and a 37-millimeter antitank gun, all dug in behind a single strand of barbed wire running across the sandbar.
The sandpit was as good as a bridge across the river. Pollock placed outposts beyond it, west of it, in the coconut grove across the river.
Night fell swiftly, as it does in the jungle. A few stray shafts of light seemed to linger, as though trapped between jungle floor and jungle roof, and then it was black and silent except for the stirring of those creeping, crawling things that move by night. Men crouched along the Tenaru peered at the narrow dark river gleaming wickedly in the faint starlight and felt all those atavistic fears flowing formlessly around their hearts. The crocodiles were out, their noiseless downstream swimming marked by the gradually widening V of their wakes.
Down at the sandbar there was movement opposite the outposts. A marine fired at the sound.
“No, no! Me Vouza. Me Sergeant-Major Vouza.”
A short powerful figure stagged out of the darkness. Blood streamed from his naked chest, from his throat. He was a fuzzy-haired Melanesian, he was Sergeant-Major Vouza of the Solomons Island Police and the Japanese had caught and tortured him. He was taken to Pollock’s command post, and there, with blood still dripping from his wounds, he began to speak.
“I was caughted by the Japs and one of the Jap naval officer questioned me but I was refuse to answer. And I was bayoneted by a long sword twice on my chest, through my throat, and cutted by side of my tongue. And I was got up from the enemies and walked through the American front line.”
“How many Japs?” Pollock asked sharply.
“Maybe 250, maybe 500.”
Pollock had heard enough. He called Division to come for Vouza. He glanced at his watch to mark the time at eighteen minutes past one in the morning, and at that moment a green flare rose from the coconut grove, a Marine sentry fired a shot —and the charge of the Ichikis began.
They came flowing across the sandspit, sprinting, hurling grenades, howling. They came blundering into that single strand of barbed wire, and there they milled about in a jabbering frenzy. They hacked wildly at the wire with bayonets, they tried to hurdle it, and they slung long thin lengths of explosive-packed pipe under it in hopes of blowing gaps in it.
Then the Marines opened fire, the flare-light faded and the re-enveloping night seemed to reel with a thousand scarlet flashes. Machine guns chattered and shook. Rifles cracked. Grenades whizzed and boomed. Fat red tracers sped out in curving arcs and vanished. Orange puffs spat from the mouth of the antitank gun. Howitzers bayed in the rear distance and their whistling shells crashed and flashed among the coconuts where mortar missiles had already described their humming loops and were falling with that dull crrrunch that tears and kills.
Private Johnny Rivers unclamped his heavy machine gun to spray a hosing fire. Across the river a Japanese machine-gun section jumped into an abandoned amtrack to set up a crossfire on Rivers’ pit. Their bullets crept up the riverbank, ate their way down the water-jacket of Rivers’ gun and found his heart. Rivers froze on the trigger. Dead, he fired 200 more rounds. Pr
ivate Al Schmidt jumped on the gun, fed it another belt, resumed the fire. A grenade sailed into the pit. It exploded. It knocked out the gun. It blinded Al Schmidt. He lay in the darkness while the battle swirled around him.
Downstream the barrel of the antitank gun glowed red in the dark. It was firing point-blank at the charging foe, spewing a hail of cannister shot that sometimes struck them down in squad groups. Another grenade somersaulted through the night. It fell hissing into the antitank dugout and filled it with roaring light and death. Riflemen jumped into the dugout and the 37 glowed red again.
The Ichiki charge rose in fury. Squad after squad, platoon after platoon, burst from the covering darkness of the coconut grove to dash against the line. They broke it. They came in on holes and gunpits, running low with bayoneted rifles outthrust for the kill. At a gap in the leftward wire, three Japanese rushed for big Corporal Dean Wilson in his foxhole.
Wilson swung his BAR toward them. It jammed. The Japanese rushed onward, screaming “Marine you die!” One of them drove downward for the thrust. Wilson seized his machete and slashed. The man sank to the ground, his entrails slipping through his clutching fingers. The others slowed. Wilson leaped from his hole and attacked, hacking them to death with his thick-bladed knife.
There was a Japanese inside Corporal Johnny Shea’s hole. His bayonet was into Shea’s leg, out again, in again—out and slashing upward. Shea kicked with his right foot, slamming the Japanese against the foxhole side while he yanked desperately at the bolt of his jammed tommy gun. The bolt snicked free and Shea shot his assailant to death.
There were hurrying squat shapes swarming around the foxhole where Lieutenant McLanahan lay with wounds in both arms, in his legs, in his buttocks—loading rifles and clearing the jammed weapons of those men who could still fire.
There were tall shapes mingling with the short ones, figures that closed, merged, became as one grotesquely whirling hybrid of struggling limbs, for now the battle had become that rarity of modern war, the close-in fight of clubbed rifles and thrusting blades, of fists and knees and gouging thumbs. Now there were more tall shapes than short ones, for Pollock had thrown in a reserve platoon, and the guttural cries of “Banzai!” were growing fainter beneath the wild keening of the battle, the crackling of rifles, the hammering of machine guns, the gargling of the automatics, and the jumping wham of the 37.
The Ichikis were stumbling now over heaps of slain comrades strewn along the sandbar. They were themselves slumping into loose ungainly death, for the Marine fire had been multiplied from upriver where the guns had been swung seaward and trained on the sandspit. The last of the Ichikis were trapped. Marine mortars had drawn a curtain of fire behind them. Bullets ahead, shell-bursts behind—forward or backward was to die.
Some chose the river, where American bullets still sought and found them and where crocodiles found them in the morning. Some chose to run the gantlet of guns along the shore, peeling off to their right at the barbed wire, dashing through the surf only to be dropped where the incoming tide would roll their bodies and cover them with sand. Others chose the sea. They plunged into the water. They tried to swim back to the east, but it was now dawn and their bobbing heads were visible targets for those Marine riflemen who had left their pits and had thrown themselves flat to fire from the prone position.
“Line ‘em up and squeeze ‘em off!” roared Pollock, striding among his men. “Line ‘em up and squeeze ‘em off!”
The remainder of Colonel Ichiki’s elite was being wiped out within the coconuts.
“Cease fire!” came the order, up and down the line. “Hold your fire, First Battalion coming through!”
Over the river, green-clad men were flitting through the coconuts. The First Battalion, First, had crossed the Tenaru upriver and had fanned out into a flanking skirmish line. Now they were working seaward.
Downstream, Marine tanks rolled slowly over the sandspit. They reached the coconut grove and turned right.
By nightfall more than 700 Japanese bodies had been counted. There were 34 dead Marines and 75 wounded. The surviving Japanese had sought the treacherous sanctuary of the jungle, there to endure hunger, black nights and the slow dissolution of the rain forest. They wandered leaderless, for Colonel Kiyono Ichiki had already tasted “the fruits of victory.”
He burned his colors and shot himself through the head.
7
In all the Imperial Army there was no commander who could surpass Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate in the peculiar Japanese custom of celebrating defeat with a loud cry of victory. General Hyakutate knew all those euphemisms whereby a setback became “a valiant advance” or the report of a rout reached the ears of the Emperor as “a glorious withdrawal of unshaken discipline.”
But the affair of the Ichikis was unique. There was no euphemism at hand to describe annihilation. Undaunted, General Hyakutate sent Tokyo this message: “The attack of the Ichiki Detachment was not entirely successful.” Then he drew up a plan for another attempt at recapturing Guadalcanal.
This time he would use the surviving rear-echelons of the Ichiki Battalion—around 1,100 men—together with the 6,000-man brigade commanded by Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi (the Japanese have no rank of brigadier general). This force would land on Guadalcanal supported by planes and ships of the Combined Fleet. The fact that it was still outnumbered by the 10,000 enemy troops to the south did not deter Hyakutate. He still refused to accept the Americans as worthy foemen. He believed the battle report that stated: “The American soldiers are extremely weak when they lack support of fire power. They easily raise their hands during battle and when wounded they give cries of pain.” So General Hyakutate ordered 5,000 Kawaguchis to join the remaining Ichikis on one of those nightly runs down The Slot which the Marines were already calling the Tokyo Express. He sent them south with the battle cry:
“Remember the Ichiki suicide!”
And they had to turn back.
On August 25, the day after the Japanese Combined Fleet met Admiral Fletcher’s carriers in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the Japanese convoy was sighted north of Guadalcanal by bombers from Henderson Field. A Dauntless piloted by Lieutenant Larry Baldinus dove down to plant an egg forward on the big escort cruiser, Jintsu. She went staggering home, asmoke and afire, while a Navy dive-bomber and other Marines fell on the transport Kinryu Maru. They stopped her dead in the water, and when destroyer Mutsuki went to help her, they stopped Mutsuki to—leaving both ships to await the obliterating bombs of a flight of Flying Fortresses which followed up their attack. The remaining Japanese ships turned north and sailed to the Shortland Islands, where the soldiers debarked to board barges for a less ostentatious trip south.
Henderson Field, meanwhile, had withstood the aerial assaults which had been planned to make way for these troops. On August 24, the Marine fighter pilots shot down 11 Zero fighters and 10 bombers at a loss of three of their own planes. That date marked the beginning of the long epic defense of Guadalcanal’s skies, which was to match the stand being made on the ground. From August 24 onward, Marine fliers began shooting down Zeros and twin-engined Betty bombers at a rate of from six to eight kills for every one of their own men lost. They fought, of course, with the almost invariable assistance of Navy and Army airmen—but the Guadalcanal aerial war was in the main a Marine affair, fought by the self-styled Nameless Wonders of the Bastard Air Force. These men were galled almost nightly to hear the San Francisco radio speak of “Navy fighters” or “Army bombers” while only the enemy might know who rode the cockpits of “American aircraft” or “Allied planes.” And it was a Bastard Air Force, for if aerial combat is a gentleman’s war, if it is clean, quick and sporting to fight in the clouds with hot meals and soothing drinks and laundered bedsheets awaiting the survivors, this was not so on Guadalcanal. Here the fly-boys were like the foot-sloggers.
They lived next to Henderson Field, in the very center of the Japanese bull’s-eye. They rose an hour before dawn. If they cared
to eat that common gruel of wormy rice and canned spam that passed for meals on Guadalcanal, they ate it standing up, spooning the detestable slop out of borrowed mess gear. They gulped hot black coffee from canteen cups while bumping jeeps drove them through the darkness to the airstrip, where they warmed up planes that had to be towed from revetments by tractor. Then it was dawn and they were roaring aloft, climbing high, high in the skies, sucking on oxygen. They went to battle in a sort of floating world where the only sounds were the roaring of their own motors and the hammering of their guns; where all the sights were the blind white mists of engulfing clouds, the sudden pain of reappearing sunlight bursting in the eyeballs, the swift dread glimpse of the red balls streaking by.
If the Japanese patrol planes which came over at night and were called Washing-Machine Charley for the uneven beat of their motors failed to kill many of these pilots, they succeeded in keeping them awake. They circled the night sky for hours. When their gas was low and the patience of their victims nearly exhausted, they dropped their eggs and sauntered home.
To be replaced by another Charley, or far, far worse, to be supplanted by Louie the Louse. This was the name for all those scouting aircraft whose swaying flares heralded the arrival of the Tokyo Express off Guadalcanal. Louie’s droning motors and his flares were all the warning given. Then the sea-lying darkness flashed and the great naval shells wailed overhead and these pilots who were the very targets of the Japanese ships were flung gasping out of their cots while the roaring air squeezed their bodies like rubber dolls in the hand of a giant.
Strong Men Armed Page 5