Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Japanese south of the airfield?

  Vandegrift was uneasy. He had just strengthened the Matanikau left with all he could spare from his reserve. What would he do if Puller got hit hard back there?

  Probably, he thought, he would have to use the soldiers. There was a battalion of the 164th in bivouac behind the Tenaru.

  The men of the U.S. 164th Infantry Regiment were sulking. They were sick and tired of being an orphan outfit, being pushed around. They had been squeezed out of their own division—the 41st—when the old National Guard “square” divisions were made “triangular,” that is, cut from four to three infantry regiments. They had been tossed into another orphan outfit with the bastard name of Americal Division—not even a number!—and been pushed around the Pacific. They had landed in dismal Noumea, which was bad enough, being an oversized hatrack for Navy brass, but which was also worse with those snooty French colonials frosting the doughfoots and the fact that if there was so much as a single native girl to go skylarking with she’d surely be found doing some shave-tail’s laundry.

  Then they were detached again and handed over to the Marines!

  They had been bombed and shelled and shot at and put on the Tenaru and then been made to suffer the indignity of having fresh-faced kids five and six years their junior tell them they should have been on Guadalcanal “when it was really rough.” Kids that couldn’t grow beards, and they’d come around with their notched rifles and try to swap souvenir battle flags for the candy the 164th still possessed or for wrist-watches that had not yet rusted in the jungle. Japanese “battle flags”1 Even the men of the 164th knew that the Marines made them by pounding red match tips onto the center of white handkerchiefs.

  The men of the 164th were sore, nor did they feel any better when they heard the rumor that they had been alerted to stand by for action in a battle expected that night.

  At seven o’clock on that night of October 24, Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige crawled forward to the nose of the ridge position which was then being occupied to nail down the Matanikau left flank. Paige’s men had reached their position in darkness. Now the sergeant was feeling around him with his hands, searching for a good position for the guns. He felt the ridge fall away sharply to either side.

  “Here,” he whispered to the men of his machine-gun platoon. “Put the guns here.”

  They set them up, moving stealthily, careful not to stumble in the mud, careful to slip the gun pintles into tripod sockets without a telltale clink of metal.

  “Chow time,” Paige whispered. “Where’s the chow?”

  They had one can of Spam and also a can of peaches “borrowed” from a rear-echelon galley on their march south to the ridge. The man carrying the peaches mumbled that he had dropped the can and it had rolled down the ridge into the jungle. There were fierce coarse things hissed in the dark and it was well for the loser of the peaches that the night veiled his face. Paige opened the Spam, tore the soft meat in pieces and pressed them into outstretched hands. The men ate.

  They took up watches on their guns. It began to rain. Suddenly, after midnight, from far to their left, they heard the sound of battle.

  At half-past midnight Sunday morning, October 25, the rain was coming down in a torrent, and a torrent of Japanese soldiers was washing against the line held by Chesty Puller’s Marines.

  Their attack came at a point perhaps 2,000 yards south of Henderson Field, and a little less than five miles to the east or left of the newly fortified ridge where Sergeant Paige and his men sat.

  The Japanese came by the thousands, so many of them rushing and shrieking that the soggy ground shook beneath their feet. They hit the barbed wire even as the Marine guns erupted, and some of them came through it, using the bodies of fallen comrades as ladders over and bridges through the wire.

  These were soldiers of the 29th Regiment led by the shouts of their commander, Colonel Masajiro Furumiya, inspired by the dashing sight of the 7th Company—the color company streaking through a rent in the barbed wire and charging toward the line of American pits and holes.

  A few feet behind that line Chesty Puller bellowed at his men, directing counterfire. He found one Marine lying in the tall grass. He stooped, seized him, booted him in the behind, and snarled: “Get the hell up theah, an’ doan lemme se youah shirttail touch youah ass until you do!” The Marine ran forward to fight—to fight and live to boast of how old Chesty gave him a good one right between the cheeks.

  Now that gap in the wire was being closed as Marine riflemen and machine-gunners opened up in concert. Colonel Furumiya and the men of the color company were cut off between the wire and the Marine foxholes. The two guns under Sergeant John Basilone—Manila John they called him—were firing full trigger, piling up bodies as the bullets streaked out at a rate of 250 rounds a minute. Soon Basilone’s guns were out of ammunition. Manila John ducked out of his pit and ran to his left to get more belts. As he did, Furumiya’s men, drifting to the west, overran the section of guns at Basilone’s right. They stabbed two of the Marines to death and wounded three others, driving on farther to the rear after the American guns jammed when the Japanese tried to turn them on the Marines.

  Basilone returned to his own pit just as a runner came up gasping: “They’ve got the guys on the right.” Basilone raced up the rightward trail. He blundered into a barefoot private named Evans—“Chicken” they called him because of his tender eighteen years—and the Chicken was firing his rifle and screaming at the enemy: “C’mon, you yellow bastards!” Basilone ran on, jumped into the silent pit, and found that the guns were jammed. He ran back to get one of his own guns.

  At his own pit, Basilone seized a machine gun and spreadeagled it across his back. He shouted at half of his men to follow him and ran back up the trail to his right. The men ran after him, overtaking him just as he reached a bend in the trail. Around the bend were half a dozen Japanese infiltrators. The Marines killed them and ran on.

  Now they were in the fallen pit and the men were firing the gun Basilone had brought, while Manila John himself lay in the mud working to unblock the jammed guns. The Japanese were forming again outside the wire, gliding through the rain in bunches. Now Basilone had the guns fixed. They were set up. The men were frantically scraping mud from machine-gun belts they had dragged uptrail. Then they were firing again, and Basilone was rolling from gun to gun, shooting up each successive belt as soon as it was fed into the breech and snicked into place.

  Now it was half-past one in the morning and still the men of the Sendai were rushing, while their commanding general made a jubilant report of victory back to Hyakutate. And the Sendai were falling even as the naval liaison officer back at Kukumbona relayed the message to Admiral Yamamoto and the Combined Fleet in these words: “Banzai! Occupied airfield.”

  During the next half-hour the Japanese began to falter under rising American fire. They still rushed at the wire, but when they reached that point where the bullets crisscrossed with an angry steady whispering, they began to peel off in groups, flitting through the rain-washed illumination of the shell flashes to throw themselves down in the darkness and crawl toward the Marine lines on their bellies. Sometimes Basilone and his men turned their pistols and rifles around to take on the infiltrators.

  In that half-hour, it became clear to General Maruyama that his first two thrusts had failed and he had better regroup and try again. The earlier optimism must be toned down and he sent off a report to Hyakutate that the fighting was still going on. The naval officer transmitted the message to Yamamoto.

  It was now a little after two in the morning and the firing had begun to die down.

  At shortly after two in the morning, Sergeant Mitchell Paige and his men heard firing to their right. Unknown to them, a party of Colonel Oka’s men had slipped through a draw between their right and the left of the Third Battalion, Seventh, and had overwhelmed an observation post.

  Paige crawled forward on the ridge. He heard low mumbling in the jungle below. There
were Japanese down there. Paige decided to force them to attack before they could discover his position. He pulled the pin from a hand grenade. His men, hearing that snick, pulled their own pins. Paige threw. The men handed him their primed grenades and he threw these too. There were explosions, Hashes—screams.

  Paige’s men scuttled back to their guns, bracing.

  But no one came.

  At half-past three in the morning the Sendai came rushing again at Lieutenant Colonel Puller’s line, and at that time also the men of the 164th Infantry went into battle with the Marines.

  Led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall, the regiment’s Third Battalion had marched from bivouac behind the Tenaru to Puller’s battlefront to the southwest. They came sloshing in through the darkness, guided by the yelling and jabbering and hammering of the fight. Lieutenant Colonel Hall quickly found Lieutenant Colonel Puller, who was brief.

  “I’m in command here,” Chesty snapped, “and I’m feeding youah men in piecemeal whether you like it or not.”

  Hall had heard of Puller and this was obviously not the moment to quibble over seniority.

  “Go ahead,” Hall said, and the 3rd Battalion, 164th, went into line.

  The soldiers went in by squads, moving in alongside squads of Marines, sometimes having to be led by hand, it was so dark, the ground was so slippery. They also held, helping to halt and shatter that third and final onslaught of the Japanese.

  By seven o’clock in the morning the Sendai stopped coming, and Admiral Yamamoto’s aide had flashed the word that the airfield was still American. By then also the rain had stopped.

  The sun was out, falling with ghastly illumination on the sodden heaps of lifeless flesh lying sprawled before Puller’s lines, warming the Marines and soldiers, setting the jungle steaming.

  It was Dugout Sunday.

  That thundering sabbath of the twenty-fifth of October, during which only stretcher-bearers, ammunition-carriers or airfield crews dared stay long erect, was set in motion by that prematurely jubilant «Banzai!“ which the naval officer at Kukumbona had flashed to Yamamoto at half-past one in the morning.

  His subsequent messages were vague. Before he could send off the seven o’clock admission that the airfield was still American, the Japanese Combined Fleet had begun its end of the coordinated land-sea-air attack which was to crush the Americans.

  Carriers flew off airplanes to obliterate remaining American air strength on Henderson Field and to sink whatever ships were found in Iron Bottom Bay. A cruiser-destroyer force made for a point behind Florida Island to enter the battle on call. Three big destroyers—Akatsuki, Ikazuchi and Shiratsuyo—sped down The Slot to shell the Guadalcanal shore and to attack shipping. And then, as the liaison officer began tempering his original jubilation, Yamamoto kept the remainder of the Combined Fleet sailing a circle 300 miles north of Guadalcanal. The situation had not only become unclear, the Japanese admiral had received reports indicating that American carrier and surface forces were coming up to Guadalcanal from southern bases.

  Dugout Sunday’s services began at ten in the morning, which was when Akatsuki, Ikazuchi and Shiratsuyo showed up. They steamed into the Bay with all guns going and pounded Marine coastal installations. They sank the tugboat Seminole and made wreckage of other little harbor craft. They looked hungrily about for other victims, and then, to their great surprise, geysers of water rose around them.

  Gunners of the Third Marine Defense Battalion were blasting at the Japanese destroyers with five-inch rifles. They were scoring hits. Soon black clouds were boiling off the destroyers’ sterns. Sending up a screen of smoke, Akatsuki, Ikazuchi and Shiratsuyo streaked for home.

  The airplanes arrived at half-past two.

  The Japanese pilots attacked thinking the airfield had been knocked out. If they had come in the morning their belief would have been correct, in effect, for the rains of the preceding night had made a mire of both runways. But General Geiger put his repair crews to work while placing a call for help with American air bases in the south, and the Seabees and engineers, aided by a hot, drying sun, had the runways operable by midafternoon. Then there began that daylong jolting rhythm of flying, fighting, landing, refueling, rearming —and flying again.

  Captain Joe Foss and Lieutenant Jack Conger were among those Marine fighter pilots who struck ferociously at the first Japanese flight of 16 heavy bombers, plus escorting Zeros. Foss had been on Guadalcanal only 16 days and he was already a legend. He had shot down 11 enemy planes—had flamed four bombers on October 23 alone—and now on Dugout Sunday, riding his cockpit with a dead cigar stub clenched in his teeth, he was climbing aloft to duplicate that feat. In the first scramble Foss and three others took on six Zeros. Foss got two of the three knocked down. But his Wildcat was so riddled by bullets he had to go down for another one, bringing his pilots down with him to refuel. They went back up to close with nine of the dozens of Zeros leading a fresh formation of bombers over the field. Foss shot down two more, and dove for home again, just one plane shy of a kill for every day he had spent on the island.

  Lieutenant Jack Conger fought until he ran out of ammunition. He had escorted a crippled comrade back to Henderson, fighting off Zeros all the way. He shot one down, but now, as he turned and screamed up toward an enemy fighter, the pressure of his thumb on the gun button brought no response from his wing guns. Still he flew upward at the Zero. He brought his whirling propeller blades under its tail. The Zero turned frantically, and broke in two.

  Conger’s plane was also staggered. It was going over, falling. Conger couldn’t bring it out. That huge obliquely-sliding mirror which was the surface of Iron Bottom Bay seemed to flip up toward him. Conger strained at his escape hatch. He couldn’t get out, he thought he would never get out, and that monster mirror was about to slap him. With a great wrench, Conger was free. He was barely 150 feet above the water when his parachute billowed, jerking him. He could see his plane plummet down among the coconuts, then he was into the mirror, jolted and jarred as though it possessed the very density and opaqueness of glass.

  Conger surfaced, treading water. He slashed at the smothering shroud of his parachute. He glanced up to see another Zero falling in flames. He gaped in astonishment as its pilot floated down to water not 20 feet away from him.

  Now there was a rescue boat speeding toward Conger. It came alongside, its exhaust putt-putting hollowly in the swells. Conger was hauled aboard. The boat slewed around and made for the Japanese pilot. Conger called to him, made surrender motions. The flier dived under. He came up beside the boat, kicked with both feet against its hull, and tried to swim away. The boat pursued. Conger grabbed a boathook and caught the flier by his jacket. The man struggled. Conger leaned forward. They contemplated each other, warbirds of East and West, the one rescuing, the other refusing—and the Japanese pulled out a Mauser pistol, pressed it against Conger’s face and pulled the trigger.

  Click!

  Conger sprawled backward. I’m dead! he thought. But he was not, nor was the Japanese pilot, who, failing to return death for life, had placed the pistol to his own head and produced another click. Conger seized a water can and slammed it down on the flier’s head. Limp and unconscious, the Japanese was hauled into the boat.

  In all, 26 Japanese planes fell to Marine fighters and antiaircraft gunners. Marine bombers went up too, and from the hilarious shouts of their returning pilots, even the imprisoned little flier might have guessed that they had caught the Japanese ships behind Florida and left a cruiser sinking.

  And yet, the flier’s confusion could never match the consternation of that naval liaison officer then composing a fourth report for Admiral Yamamoto. The Army’s night attack had failed. There had been “difficulty in handling the force in the complicated terrain,” he reported, but General Hyakutate was going to try again that night. The Army was ready.

  The Army had better be ready, the Navy thundered. There was a naval battle making up northeast of the Solomons and the Army must have po
ssession of the airfield before it began.

  Down the chain of command went Hyakutate’s frustration. Colonel Oka had better attack tonight. Maruyama’s Sendai had better keep faith with its motto: “Remember that Death is lighter than a feather, but that Duty is heavier than a mountain.”

  But heavier than duty was that mountain of despair weighing upon the men of the Sendai this night of October 25. They munched their meager ration, stunned, dispirited and wet—for the jungle continues to drip long after the sun comes out. Their officers were not sure of their position; Matsumoto’s map had caused them to blunder into the Marines the preceding night. The men were still mindful of that hideous firepower which had nearly made zemmetsu of the 29th Regiment. What had happened to the 29th? Was it true that they had lost their colors? Where was Colonel Furumiya?

  He was trapped behind the enemy lines.

  The 7th Company which had carried the 29th’s colors through the Marine wire had been annihilated. Only Colonel Furumiya and a staff officer had survived. Throughout the night they had blundered through the dark, hoping to rejoin their regiment. They had become lost. With day, they had gone into hiding, for the colors were wound around the waist of Colonel Furumiya. Loss of the regiment’s colors to the enemy meant that the 29th would be struck from the lists in disgrace. Rather than risk exposing them to capture, Colonel Furumiya decided to lie low and await Maruyama’s inevitable night attack.

  The inevitability of an attack that night of October 25 was also evident to Sergeant Paige’s platoon of machine-gunners, men with names like Leiphart, Stat, Pettyjohn, Gaston, Lock, McNabb, Swanek, Reilly, Totman, Kelly, Jonjeck, Grant, Payne, Hinson.

  They had found their can of peaches in the jungle and had opened it with a bayonet—Guadalcanal’s all-purpose instrument—and eaten. Then they dug in, certain of an attack from the fact of the myriad winking lights they had seen in the jungle. They knew these were not fireflies but the colored flashlights which the enemy used for signaling.