“Our situation here, Colonel Edson, is excellent. Thank you, sir.”
Edson swore softly. It was a Japanese. They had cut his wire. How to reach Sweeney? Edson seized a brass-lunged corporal and spoke rapidly. The corporal darted forward on the ridge. He cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed:
“Red Mike says it’s okay to pull back!”
Sweeney heard and gathered the remnant of his company. Slowly, taking a raking fire, grenades, they fought back to the ridge.
On top of the ridge Edson and Major Bailey were rallying their men with insults and taunts, trying to drive them forward with those irrational shouts which often halt those rational drifts to the rear. Edson was now within 10 yards of his foremost machine gun. He lay on his belly with his arm curled around his hand telephone, sometimes lifted and slammed to earth by the force of enemy mortar blasts. He saw a knot of men milling around aimlessly. He rose and rushed at them, screaming as he pointed toward the Japanese: “The only thing they have that you don’t is guts!” He led them to new positions, for he was shortening his lines, while Bailey ran among other reluctant Raiders, seizing them individually by the arm. “You,” he snarled, “do you wanna live forever?” It had been said by Dan Daly in Belleau Wood and had been mocked by a generation, but now it was being flung in American teeth once more and it could still sting.
They went forward again, to dig in, to hurl the grenades rushed to them by Bailey, to draw a shallow horseshoe on the center of the ridge and await the full fury of the Kawaguchi Brigade now massing for the final rush.
Red Mike Edson had called for artillery; with him to spot the enemy was a private named Watson. He would be Second Lieutenant Watson in the morning in reward for that hell he called down from the heavens. The shells came whistling in from the Eleventh Marines’ 105-millimeter pack howitzers a half-mile back. They fell in a curtain of steel not 200 yards from that desperate last horseshoe of defense. They shook the Marine defenders, squeezed their breath away, but they made a flashing white slaughter among the Kawaguchis.
When the Japanese commanders fired rocket signals for attack, Watson marked them and directed redoubled shelling on the enemy breaking for the ridge. They were blown apart. The night was made hideous with their screams, and those who passed that dreadful line were either cut down by Marine fire or beaten to the earth by clubbed rifles and bayonets.
It was now half-past eleven and Red Mike Edson had contacted his general and told him he would hold.
Just before midnight Admiral Mikawa’s warships reached Guadalcanal. They heard firing to the south of the airfield. They began cruising about, awaiting General Kawaguchi’s flare signaling recapture of the airfield. Then they heard firing to the east.
The Ishitari Battalion had attacked the Tenaru. They struck through a field of kunai grass against the weapons and barbed wire of the Third Battalion, First Marines. They were caught halfway across by the massed firing of Marine 75-millimeter howitzers. The Ishitaris were broken. They reformed and came again. The guns roared. Marine tanks joined the riflemen. The Ishitaris were driven off.
Admiral Mikawa was bewildered. The firing to the east had subsided. There was only a fitful crackling of gunfire in the southern hills. There was still no flare, and it was getting dangerously close to the dawn that would make him visible to American bombers. Admiral Mikawa gave up and sailed home.
It was daybreak on the ridge. A rosy sun was rising almost directly to the left of the Marine front, lighting the battle that was now over. There was only an occasional shot, the boom of a grenade on a boobytrapped body. Six hundred Japanese lay sprawled on the ridge slopes or were faintly visible in the ravines below. Souvenir-hunters were already moving warily among the bodies. Major Bailey was receiving treatment for another wound. Red Mike Edson’s men were being relieved by the Second Battalion, Fifth. Slow-flying Army Airacobras rose from the airfield to harry the retreating enemy. Mopping-up began in the jungle and far to the Marines’ rear among those Japanese who had infiltrated. Four of these infiltrators rushed into General Vandegrift’s headquarters with a cry of “Banzai!” They were shot down, but only after a Marine sergeant had died of a sword thrust.
There was also a brief flare-up to the west, where a Japanese daylight attack across the Matanikau River was hurled back.
By daybreak the main battle, that which the Marines were already calling Bloody Ridge, was over. There were 40 dead Marines and 104 wounded, against a Japanese toll which would rise far above the 600 dead at Bloody Ridge, the 250 who fell at the Tenaru, the 100-odd destroyed at the Matanikau. For General Kawaguchi had already begun a cruel march south through the jungle, a terrible red-trailed retreat of which one of his officers wrote:
“I cannot help from crying when I see the sight of these men marching without food for four or five days and carrying the wounded through the curving and sloping mountain trails. The wounds couldn’t be given adequate medical treatment. There wasn’t a one without maggots. Many died.”
And yet, Bloody Ridge marked only the end of the beginning—a fact made plain to the Marines by a Japanese prisoner who stood among his slaughtered countrymen and said:
“Make no matter about us dead. More will come. We never stop coming. Soon you all be Japanese.”
10
September 15—the day after the Battle of Bloody Ridge—gave proof that the high superiors of that Japanese prisoner were truly determined to keep coming.
On that day an American fleet was hit hard in “Torpedo Junction,” a 640-mile stretch of the Coral Sea between Guadalcanal and Espiritu Santo which abounded in Japanese submarines.
The Japanese subs attacked the carriers Wasp and Hornet, the fast new battleship North Carolina, seven cruisers and 13 destroyers—in effect the American Pacific fleet. Fortunately, a prudent decision by Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner deprived the Japs of juicier prey: the six transports carrying the Seventh Marine Regiment from Espiritu to Guadalcanal. The day before, a big Kawanishi flying boat was spotted tracking the task force. Turner sent the transports back to Espiritu that night.
Next day, the fifteenth, a blue, cloudless, tropic day, the red-balled Japanese subs struck at the Americans sailing in two sections about a half-dozen miles apart.
Mighty North Carolina shuddered as a Japanese fish smashed her side. She turned and went streaking south. Little O’Brien staggered after her, only to fall apart and sink before she could reach port. Hornet and the others got away, but Wasp took three torpedoes. She burned brightly beneath the red glow of twilight on September 15, and then she went under.
Beneath the same red sky in Tokyo, high-ranking officers of the Imperial Army and Navy reported the results to cheering thousands in Hinomiya Stadium. They also reported the news of the “recapture” of the Guadalcanal airfield, and then, to bursts of thunderous applause, came this announcement:
“…and the stranded 10,000 Marines, victims of Roosevelt’s gesture, have been practically wiped out.”
It was a great day in Tokyo, and at Rabaul, Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate, gratified to hear that his humble part in the victory had not been overlooked, turned to tidying up his triumph.
Hyakutate was going to use all the 20,000 soldiers then available to him to dispose of the remaining Marines. He would be sure this time, for reports filtering back to Rabaul from the Kawaguchis suggested that these Marines did not conform to the Imperial Staff Manual descriptions of Americans. They were beasts, the refuse of jails and insane asylums. They drank blood. They cut off the arms of their prisoners and staked their bodies to the earth. Then they drove over them in steamrollers.
No, Hyakutate would not gamble again. He would send all the Sendai Division. Advance units would go down The Slot in fast destroyer-transports. They would be followed by the Sendai’s commander, Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, then the main body aboard slower transports, next the combined aerial and sea power of the Imperial Navy—and finally by Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate, who would sai
l down in October in time to accept the American surrender.
In the third week of September the Tokyo Express began running troops to Guadalcanal again.
There were now 23,000 Marines on Guadalcanal, for the Seventh Regiment had come in.
Becoming bold in the wake of the Torpedo Junction disaster, Kelly Turner had turned the six transports around while still at sea and started them for Guadalcanal again. Under cover of hazy skies, assisted by the plastering of Rabaul by Army bombers, the transports sailed through Torpedo Junction on the sixteenth and seventeenth and arrived off Lunga Roads at Guadalcanal before dawn of September 18. At a few minutes before six the men of the Seventh began coming ashore.
Now, bolstered by 4,262 fresh men, and more of his combat troops coming over from Tulagi, Major General Alexander Vandegrift changed his style of defense.
The system of strong points with artillery covering the gaps was abandoned in favor of a ring around Henderson Field and the new fighter strip. It meant spreading a lot of men thin. It meant defending every point, but weakly, as opposed to defending some vital points, but strongly. And thus it would also mean that wherever the enemy attacked he would be hitting with the most against Vandegrift’s least. It was an old-fashioned defense, as surely outdated by artillery as the long bow had made an anachronism of mounted knights. But the Japanese artillery had been as ineffectual as the Marines’ had been superb.
So Vandegrift drew his ring around Henderson Field. With barbed wire, axes, shovels, sandbags, machetes and bulldozers now in abundance, his men began building a tight bristling defensive ring which would lead one Japanese officer to snort that U. S. Marines were actually not true jungle-fighters because “they always cut the jungle down.” The cordon followed approximately the same oval-shaped dispositions as the old beachhead line 3,500 yards deep and 7,500 yards wide, but all the gaps were plugged—especially the big ones to the south of the airfield.
Coconut groves rang to the strokes of the axe. Big trees came crashing down, were chopped into sections and dragged over wide sandbagged holes. More sandbags went atop the logs and over this were planted clumps of grass. In that lush-growing moist heat, the grass quickly took root and the rough-hewn pillboxes took on the appearance of low hummocks. Fields of fire—thatis, cleared lanes between the guns and the enemy—were burned out in the grass or hacked out in the jungle. Apron after apron of barbed wire was strung until many of the Marine fronts were as wicked laceworks of glittering black wire and tan, charred grass. Riflemen learned to dig Japanese spider-holes, those vertical foxholes in which a man could stand to fight. Mortarmen sandbagged their heaps of shells. Booby-traps were fashioned of hand grenades with partially loosened pins attached to trip wires. Machine-gunners set up interlocking crossfires or registered their guns for night firing. Artillerymen plotted the fronts, registered the trails, marked the likely assembly areas. As the men worked, barely nourished by two daily meals of wormy rice, daily patrols went winding into the jungle.
Patrols were the eyes and ears of that line of defense, the feelers that went out daily—east,south and west—probing for the presence of the enemy. They went out in groups of a dozen men, occasionally in company strength. They were lightly armed. The men carried only a canteen of water. They fastened their gear tight to prevent tell-tale clinks, they daubed their faces with mud, adorned their blouses and helmets with branches—and moved out slowly, hugging the trails to right and left with intervals of a dozen feet between them, listening for the sudden cry of birds that might betray a lurking enemy, moving at a crawling, crablike rhythm, at a pace so maddeningly slow that tension became multiplied, all the sounds so magnified that the rustling of a lizard might echo in helmet-muffled ears like the movement of a human body.
Patrols moved warily because ambushes were frequent during September. On one of them a company scouting the Lunga south of the perimeter was struck by a sudden storm of fire. Men could hear Japanese calling from the jungle, “Come here, please. Come here, please.”
Private Jack Morrison saw Marines slump to earth around him. He felt white-hot pain sear his arm and his chest. He shouted in agony and toppled into a bush, his body obscured by undergrowth, his feet sticking out over the trail. To his right along the riverbank a Marine had fallen behind a log. He was moaning aloud. Behind him, hidden in a foxhole, was another Marine. He was Pfc. Harry Dunn. He was not wounded. He was playing dead. For in the complete surprise and success of that assault, the ambushed company had pulled back down the trail.
It was late afternoon and Morrison lay in the bush listening to the Japanese running about, jabbering to each other as they hunted down the wounded and bayoneted them. Great retching waves of pain swept over his body, but he ground his teeth and kept silent. He had heard the Marine behind the log moan. He had seen the Jap jump over the log with upraised bayonet, had seen it slammed down—once, twice—and had heard no more moaning.
Sometimes a merciful blackness engulfed Morrison. He would pass out, returning to the agony of consciousness, pass out again. He could feel the blood oozing from his wounds, sense the strength leaving him. His thirst was a torment. Still he dared not move—not even after night had fallen, for the enemy was still active.
Toward midnight he felt a presence alongside him. A hand came over his mouth. He stiffened in terror, then relaxed to hear the voice whisper in his ear, “It’s all right. It’s me—Harry Dunn.” Slowly, gently, Dunn pulled Morrison away from the trail and into a thicket. He took off the wounded youth’s shirt and tried to bind his wounds. But there was so much blood the shirt became soaked and was useless. Dunn threw it away.
Dunn crept out of the thicket in search of water, for both men’s canteens were empty. He crawled to the dead Marine behind the log. But the body had been completely looted. Helmet, weapon, belt, canteen, all were gone. Dunn looked to his right. He could see the Lunga gleaming darkly, could hear the wavelets lapping her shores. But he dared not break for it. He would have to cross a clearing in full view of the Japanese, still moving around the riverbank, still calling out loudly to one another.
Dunn crawled back to Morrison in the thicket. They lay there, through the night, through the entire next day, among swarming mosquitoes and crawling ants while the terrible sweet stench of decaying flesh rose from the lumps that had been their comrades, while their tongues swelled in their mouths, and while Morrison burned in the fire of his pain and Dunn kept his hand clamped over his mouth to stifle his. groans.
At last it was night again and the Japanese had moved upriver. Dunn dragged Morrison down to the river. He pulled him behind a log caught in the shore underbrush and lowered him gently into the water. Then he lay down and rolled over, opening his mouth, allowing the river water to caress his burning palate. Morrison drank, too, for the first time in two days.
Now Dunn had Morrison on his back. He was crawling down the riverbank toward the sea and the Marine lines, keeping well inshore for fear of the crocodiles prowling the Lunga, yet shying clear of the enemy-infested jungle. He stopped frequently to rest, and crawled on again. Sometimes Morrison mumbled wildly in his delirium, sometimes he sank into unconsciousness. Occasionally Dunn would also lose his senses. But he would awaken and crawl on.
At daybreak they reached the Marine lines. Still bleeding, Morrison was rushed to the airfield and quickly evacuated to a base hospital. Dunn was taken to a field hospital, carried there—for he had passed out from exhaustion.
It was no longer the Bastard Air Force but Cactus Air Force, so called after the code word for Guadalcanal. It was under the command of a grizzled white bear of a brigadier general named Roy Geiger. He was a flying general, a pioneer of Marine aviation who had flown as a captain in World War One. General Geiger was also a student of land warfare. On Guadalcanal, he consistently visited the front lines to study Vandegrift’s dispositions. Geiger would one day become the only Marine to command an American army, but in those late September days on Guadalcanal he was still bringing Marine air power to its
maturity.
Geiger came into Guadalcanal September 3 on the first transport plane to reach Henderson Field. Shortly afterward he was promoted to major general. He took up headquarters in a wooden shack called “The Pagoda” and located only 200 yards from the main runway. He quickly became known as The Old Man to that youthful flying fraternity which made up his command. For Cactus Air Force was actually a band of brothers who looked so much alike on the ground—the faces of each obscured in the shadow of identical long-billed blue baseball caps, the left breast of each bulky with the same automatic pistol stuffed into the same shoulder holster . strapped over identical faded khaki shirts—that it was not surprising to see them fighting like wing-joined twins in the skies.
Geiger’s men had learned never to dogfight a Zero. The Japanese fighter planes were too fast, too maneuverable. They would be in on the Wildcat’s tail and firing away. But the Wildcats had the armor and the firepower, and if one of them was no match for one Zero, two of them fighting together could take on five enemy. They watched each other’s tails, firing quick six-gun bursts at the attacking Zeros—and because the Japanese planes had thin skins and no self-sealing gas tanks, they flamed easily. The Marines had learned other things, among them the necessity of wiping their guns free of oil lest they freeze at altitudes above 25,000 feet, and the danger of coming in behind a bomber’s tail guns. They contented themselves with making overhead passes at the bombers, flashing past protecting Zeros with quick bursts, then diving for safety and a pull-out.
And while the Wildcats were mastering the Zero which had once been the scourge of the Pacific—slaughtering the Marine Buffaloes at Midway—Cactus Air Force’s Dauntless dive-bombers and Avenger torpedo-bombers ranged up The Slot to fulfill Vandegrift’s requests for strikes on the Tokyo Express.
Strong Men Armed Page 7