The river block became a shallow horseshoe. Fortifications at the mouth “refused” the right flank, that is, exposed it in a backward curve to the beach behind it. Then the line ran slightly more than 2,000 yards along the river past Nippon Bridge to refuse the left flank, which was drawn back across a ridge and down into the jungle and allowed to dangle there.
Vandegrift knew it was possible to cross the river at other points farther inland than Nippon Bridge. But he was making shift with what he had. He could spare two battalions. The Third Battalion, Seventh, went in line on the left and the Third Battalion, First, on the right. They could be reinforced and supplied along the coastal road connecting them with the original perimeter still held intact a few miles back east. Artillery was placed in support.
All this was done in the few days following the victory gained across the Matanikau October 7-9, done while that big invasion force of which the coastwatchers had sent warning was sailing down The Slot.
The Japanese ships were bringing Pistol Pete to Guadalcanal.
This was the collective nickname which the Marines were to bestow on those 150-millimeter howitzers with which General Maruyama hoped to chew up the runway at Henderson Field, as well as to batter the American lines.
On October 10 four of these big guns went aboard a seaplane tender at Rabaul.
Next day they sailed south in that task force which included destroyer-transports bringing more of the Sendai Division to Guadalcanal, cargo ships, a protecting screen of destroyers and a division of cruisers to shell Henderson Field while guns, men and supplies were being put ashore.
Waiting for them off Cape Esperance was Rear Admiral Norman Scott with four cruisers and five destroyers of his own.
Again the island of Guadalcanal was quivering like a live thing. Once more the night glowed with the glare of burning ships while concussions rolled unimpeded over blackly gleaming water. Marines ashore were throwing aside ponchos and blankets and rushing for their holes in frantic, jostling groups. And Alexander Vandegrift was entering his headquarters tent to sit in battle vigil beneath the light of a single blue electric bulb.
The Battle of Cape Esperance had begun.
Pistol Pete and the bombardment force coming down had collided with Rear Admiral Norman Scott’s cruisers and destroyers coming up. And Scott “crossed the T.” He swung wide of western Guadalcanal to cover the Savo Island water gate and at midnight his ships were standing broadside to the Japanese, all their guns swiveled and trained starboard upon the perpendicular of an enemy column “now visible to the naked eye.
Heavy Salt Lake City hurled ten swift salvos into cruiser Furutaka, broke her in two, sank her. Heavy San Francisco, the lights Boise and Helena, and the five destroyers, shot off shell after shell into the others. Big Aoba, Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto’s flagship, took 40 hits. She staggered out of the battle, Goto dying on his bridge, half of the crew dead. The big destroyer Fubuki went down. Destroyer-transports hit bottom. In the morning, planes from Henderson boiled out to finish big destroyers Natsugumo and Murakamo. By then the American destroyer Duncan was also gone—shot at by both sides—and Boise had two gun turrets burned out. But before morning Alexander Vandegrift’s vigil had ended in jubilation. Colonel Thomas had rushed into his tent to tell him that Norman Scott had squared accounts for the Battle of the Five Sitting Ducks. Iron Bottom Bay was no longer a Japanese lagoon. The Navy would be coming back, and there would be reinforcements.
But a dozen miles west to Kukumbona, General Maruyama gave orders for the emplacement of four big guns with their tractors. If many ships and men had not survived the crossing of the T—Pistol Pete had.
We asked all the Doggies to come to Tulagi
But General MacArthur said “No.”
When asked for his reason—
“It isn’t the season.
”Besides you have no U.S.O.!”
There was a refrain, beginning with the uncomplimentary and unjust sobriquet “Dugout Doug.” The Marines knew that General Douglas MacArthur was a brave man, but this did not deter them from singing their derision of the Army Dogfaces who had still not arrived on Guadalcanal. The Marines had given up hope—not of victory, but of help-and had turned to mocking the Doggies.
So they were astonished, almost resentful, to find on the morning of October 13 that the Doggies had actually come to Tulagi. The Army’s 164th Infantry Regiment had arrived from Noumea, just in time for a fiery baptism which not even the Marines had experienced.
For the thirteenth was also the day on which Australian coastwatchers in Bougainville were fleeing Japanese patrols and keeping radio silence. There were no advance warnings of the three Japanese aerial formations that struck so savagely at the island. At noon, 24 twin-engined bombers and escorting Zeros flew over Henderson Field before the Marine Wildcats could climb to intercepting stations. They let loose a rain of bombs and incendiary bullets that set stores of aviation gasoline blazing. Two hours later 15 more bombers pounced, multiplying destruction. Captain Joe Foss shot down one of the escorting Zeroes—his first—took a bullet in the oil pump of his engine and came rocketing down from 22,000 feet to a dead-stick landing while a trio of Zeros rode his tail. But the rest of the attackers escaped. And then the third Japanese formation struck, bombing the coconut groves where the 164th was bivouacked.
The Doggies had been blooded.
It was dusk and Sergeant Butch Morgan was preparing the evening meal for General Vandegrift. He was frying meat on a Japanese safe that had been upended and made into a griddle.
Pistol Pete spoke.
His first shell screamed over Division Headquarters and struck the airfield with a crash. Sergeant Morgan grabbed his helmet and raced for his air-raid hole. Another shell screeched overhead. Sergeant Morgan held his helmet down tight and ducked.
Crrrrrash!
Alexander Vandegrift looked up in surprise. He glanced thoughtfully overhead.
“That wasn’t a bomb,” he called. “That’s artillery.”
Sergeant Butch Morgan was embarrassed. He glanced about him, shamefaced, hoping that no boot had seen his flight—for Sergeant Morgan was an Old Salt who had fought in France and knew something of artillery.
“Aw, hell,” he muttered, taking off his helmet. “I mean, only artillery…”
If it was “only artillery” it was the first with enough authority to reach the airfield. And now Pistol Pete was pumping them out, ripping up the big strip with a thoroughness that would make night flight impossible, shifting to hammer the perimeter, swinging to Kukum to blow up naval stores—and finally falling among the men of the 164th with such rending red terror that a sergeant crawled about begging his men to shoot him.
And then the same terror came upon all the island.
Red flares shot up from the jungle, Pistol Pete roared and roared, enemy aircraft circled overhead—drifting in and out of the crisscrossing searchlight beams that sought them, eluding the flak and dropping bombs—and men stumbled into foxholes, climbed out of them, ran back to them, bracing in expectation of they knew not what.
At half-past one in the morning Louie the Louse planted a green flare over the airfield and the Night of the Battleships began.
Mighty Haruna and Kongo had steamed down from Rabaul. Cruisers and destroyers came with them, some to join the airfield bombardment, others to protect seven transports loaded with General Maruyama’s remaining troops.
They slid into the bay, screened by cruiser Isuzu and eight destroyers. They awaited the flares of the ground troops, the patrol plane’s green light. Then: “Commence firing!”
Star shells rose, horrible and bright, scarlet with the fat red beauty of Hell, exploding like giant ferris wheels to shower the night with streamers of light. And then, the 14-inchers of the battleships, the eight-inchers of Isuzu, the five-inchers of the destroyers…
Pah-boom, pah-boom. Pah-boom, pah-boom, pah
Men in their holes could hear the soft hollow thumping of the salvos to seaward, s
ee the flashes shimmering outside the gun ports, and then the great airy boxcars rumbling overhead, wailing and straining—hwoo-hwooee—seeming to lose breath directly overhead, to pause, whisper, and go on. Then the triple tearing crash of the detonating shells and the bucking and rearing of the very ground beneath them.
American troops had never before been exposed to such cannonading and would never be so again. Even the great naval shellings that would one day fall upon the Japanese would not be comparable, for the Japanese would be in coral caves or huge pillboxes of ferro-concrete, while these Americans crouched in dirt holes, within shelters of mud and logs.
Henderson Field’s bombers were blown to bits, set afire, crushed beneath collapsed revetments. Shelters shivered, sighed and came apart. Foxholes buried their occupants. Men were killed—41 of them, among them many pilots—and many, many more men were wounded. But the over-all effect upon men’s souls was devastating.
In that cataclysm, when every shell seemed to explode with the pent-up flame and fury of a full thunderstorm, some men might glance at their buddies and see in horror how their features had dissolved in a nerveless idiot mask. Men whimpered aloud. Others burst into sobs and rushed from the pits rather than betray their weakness, if such it was, before comrades. There were Marines who put their weapons to their heads. Men prayed with lips moving silently across the backs of others against whom they lay huddled, prayed in confusion —mentally murmuring Grace or a childhood refrain as though it were the Lord’s Prayer—prayed for the strength to stay where they were, to suppress that nameless thing fluttering within them.
The bombardment lasted an hour and twenty minutes, and then Haruna and Konga and their nine sister furies masked their guns and sailed north.
The bombers remained until dawn.
And at dawn Pistol Pete resumed action.
But the Marines and soldiers came above ground anyway. There had been no attack, and who would fear a six-incher after having felt the lash of 14-inch naval rifles?
They were dull-eyed and dazed, but they were already pluming themselves on having “really had it rough,” already forgetting the fierce vows of the night in the profane oaths with which they asked God to take a look at the size of those 14-inch base plates and enormous shell fragments that were displayed to them by day.
The airfield was a shambles. The main strip was unusable. Of 38 bombers, only four survived the shelling. But these four went roaring skyward from Fighter Strip One to strike at the Japanese transports which had put Maruyama’s troops ashore during the night. They sank one, and flew back to an airfield where Marine engineers and Seabees were already hauling fill to the big strip. Bulldozers were butting earth into yawning shell-craters and anxious squadron commanders were conferring with repair officers on the chances of getting airborne.
“What’s left, Lieutenant?”
“You’d need a magnifying glass to find it, Colonel.”
“Well, start using one then. How about Number 117?”
“Her? Oh, she’s great—wasn’t even scratched. Except that she needs an engine change. Other than that, all she needs is both elevators, both stabilizers, the right auxiliary gas tank, right and center section flaps, right aileron, windshield, rudder, both wheels and the brake assembly. But she’s still in one piece, sir, and I guess we can get her up in six days.”
“Six days!”
“Dammit, Colonel, back in the States it’d take six months to do it!”
“All right, all right—but let’s keep those junk-pickers of yours busy.”
They patched together ten more bombers that day. They filled gas tanks by hand, hauled bomb trailers by hand, and lifted the big eggs into the racks with straining, sweating bodies. They did this while Japanese bombers swept over Henderson Field again and again, for Cactus Air Force must be ready to go by the next day, when the remaining Japanese cargo ships would surely return to unload General Maruyama’s supplies.
And then it was discovered that they were running out of gasoline.
Not even the arrival of six more Dauntlesses that afternoon of October 14 raised the drooping spirits of men who heard that news.
General Geiger began issuing orders. He sent a flight of Army B-17’s back to Espiritu Santo, for the Flying Fortresses drank too much gasoline. He ordered the tanks of wrecked planes drained. He sent out a search party to find a cache of 400 drums of gasoline which had been buried outside the airfield in the early days. He instructed Marine air transports to fly in nothing but gasoline. He got fast destroyers headed toward Guadalcanal with more drums lashed to their decks. He called off individual fighter sallies to husband his strength, for he wanted to use all that he had at dawn the next day.
But during the night the big cruisers Chokai and Kinugasa sped down The Slot to enter the Bay and hurl 752 eight-inch shells into Henderson and its defenders. At dawn, Marines standing atop the southern ridges looked westward to a place called Tassafaronga to contemplate the chilling spectacle of six squat Japanese ships calmly going about the business of unloading supplies.
Behind them on the battered airfield there were but three Dauntless dive-bombers able to fly.
“Always pray, not that I shall come back, but that I will have the courage to do my duty,” wrote Lieutenant Anthony Turtora to his parents on a day before his squadron came to Guadalcanal.
In the daylight of October 15, Lieutenant Turtora climbed into the cockpit of his patched-up Dauntless and flew down to Tassafaronga to do his duty. He did not come back. But he and many others of the same spirit did what they set out to do.
By ten in the morning, after a flurry of single-plane sallies, the patchwork, ragtag Cactus Air Force was rising to the attack. It was incredible. They had no right to be airborne. Departing Chokai and Kinugasa had assured the transports that American airpower was now as defunct in fact as in the communiques of Imperial Headquarters. But here they were coming with the sun glinting off their wings—Wildcats, Dauntlesses, Avengers, Army P-39’s and P-400’S, and later Flying Forts from Espiritu. Henderson mechanics had not slept for three days but they had made good their vow to salvage all but bullet holes. Thousand-pound and goo-pound bombs fell among the Japanese ships and beached supplies, bullets flayed and scattered enemy shore parties—while Marines on the ridges wildly cheered the Tassafaronga parade. And then, a great shout of delight broke from their throats to see a clumsy Catalina flying boat lumber into the air with two big torpedoes under her wings.
It was the Blue Goose, General Geiger’s personal plane.
Mad Jack Cram was at the controls. Major Cram had never heard of a PBY making a daylight torpedo attack before, nor had he ever fired torpedoes. But he had flown into Guadalcanal at dusk of the preceding day and been told that there were no Avengers to use the big fish nestled beneath his wings. In that case, he replied testily, he would launch them himself. He had received five minutes’ instruction from a fighter pilot whose brother flew a torpedo bomber, and then, gathering his crew, had climbed into the big Cat.
Now Cram was nursing his ship up. He made for a rendezvous with eight fighters and a dozen Dauntlesses a few miles east of Henderson, far from 30 Zeros flying cover for the ships. Major Duke Davis’ Wildcats were roaring down the runway behind him, taking off even as Pistol Pete ripped at the field again.
The Dauntlesses were at 9,000 feet. They were going over. The lead plane rolled over on its back, flashing down. The Zeros above them began peeling off, riding them down. Flak rose from Tassafaronga. The Blue Goose was going over. She was almost vertical, going for a Japanese transport a mile away. Cram rode the controls with his eyes devouring the speedometer needle. A Catalina was built for 160 miles an hour. Blue Goose was coming down at 270. Her great ungainly wings wailed and flapped in an agony of stress. She would surely come apart.
Cram hauled back on the stick. Blue Goose began to level off at 1,000 feet. Cram went over again. Blue Goose came screaming in at 75 feet, flashing past two transports, shuddering at the antiaircraft burs
t that knocked off her navigation hatch. Now Cram was sighting off his bow at a third transport. He jerked the toggle release. The first torpedo splashed in the water and began its run. Cram yanked again. The second fell, porpoised, righted—and followed the first into the transport’s side.
Five Zeros quit the dogfight to go after Blue Goose. Cram stood the plane on its wing and banked for Henderson Field. Behind him the transport was sinking. But the Zeros were around him, taking turns at making passes at his tail. Cram roller-coasted his ship, diving and rising, diving and rising, while the Zeros raked him homeward. Blue Goose was over the Henderson main strip, but Cram was going too fast to get down. He made for Fighter One, Blue Goose now wheezing through a hundred holes. Still the Zeros struck at his tail.
Cram began putting Blue Goose down. A Zero climbed his tail, just as Lieutenant Roger Haberman was also bringing his smoking Wildcat into the landing circle with lowered wheels.
Wheels still down, Haberman completed his turn, came in behind the Zero and shot it down.
Blue Goose ploughed up the strip in a glorious pancake landing. Mad Jack Cram and his crew emerged unharmed, though it would take much skill and patience to pull Blue Goose together again.
She had accounted for one of the three lost Japanese transports, and helped to drive the others away from Guadalcanal. The Tassafaronga tally-ho had struck a grievous blow at Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama. He had 20,000 men ashore, but he had lost most of the shells for his big guns, much of his food, and nearly all his medical supplies. The last was the worst of all, for beriberi and malaria had already begun to sweep among Maruyama’s earlier arrivals and one of those inveterate Japanese diarists was already setting down his lament:
The lack of sympathy by the headquarters is too extreme. Do they know we are left on the island? Where is the mighty power of the Imperial Navy?
Strong Men Armed Page 9