Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  The Marines hated their LST’s with a flippant fierce hatred. Very few men enjoyed the luxury of sleeping in the bunks provided for them below. Most of them slept on deck, usually on field cots placed underneath LCT’s lashed to the deck on blocks so they could be launched over the side on D-Day. Being nine-knot cows, LST’s had to leave for combat earliest, for they took the longest, and this meant that the chances of their being bombed, torpedoed or shelled were more prolonged, and that their food supply would inevitably give out, along with the fresh water, forcing the troops to live off the rations in their packs and to wash in salt water.

  No, the LST’s were not popular, any more than had been the M-1, or Garand, semiautomatic rifle when it was first issued. The Marines had fought with the bolt-action, five-shot Springfield rifle on Guadalcanal. This was the famous ‘03 which had made the United States Marines the sharpest shooters in the world. They hated to exchange it for the less-accurate M-1, even though the Garand fired an eight-round clip as fast as a man could pull the trigger. Burning powder gases operated the M-1’s loading mechanism, thus providing the greater firepower, to which the Marines reluctantly yielded.

  But at least they had gotten rid of the Reising gun, that slovenly substitute for a Thompson submachine gun which they had taken onto Guadalcanal. The Reising gun was useless, and the Marines swore that the only Japanese hurt by them were those hit by the ones being thrown away. In the Reising’s place came the tommy gun, firing 20- or 30-round clips. For officers and machine-gunners and other Marines assigned to crew-served weapons there was the new M-1 carbine. It was light, firing a clip of 15 30-caliber bullets at semiautomatic. It provided firepower, but it wasn’t tough enough to withstand the corrosion of the jungle. It would break down when fired too long, and then anyone who carried a carbine would search frantically for a rifle-still the best gun to have around when things were getting sticky.

  There was also the bazooka, that long-tubed rocket-launcher which a man rested on his shoulder and fired like a rifle, and there was the flame-thrower. Both were new and untried.

  They would soon be tested, however, as would all those other weapons and ships now flowing to the three Marine divisions training in the Antipodes and to the Raider battalions on Noumea in mid-May of 1943.

  It was May 15 and Bill Coffeen had the foolish notion that someone was cradling him like a baby.

  He opened his eyes. He was being carried. He was in the arms of a husky Melanesian and he was being lifted from his raft.

  “You allasame ‘Merrican?” the man asked, “or you allasame Jap?”

  “I’m American,” Coffeen gasped.

  The Melanesian’s white teeth flashed in his dark face.

  “’Merrican good fella,” he said, and gathered Coffeen in his powerful arms and took him to a village inland from the beach. Coffeen was puzzled at first over how the Melanesian could mistake a tall Westerner for a short Japanese. But then he understood. He had shrunk to a hank of bone and shriveled skin, his flesh was like burnished copper, his head was a mop almost as fuzzy as his rescuer’s, but plastered down with dried salt, as was the heavy beard covering half his face.

  At the village, Coffeen ate. He was saved. Next day his infected foot was lanced, the ulcers covering his body were bathed in an antiseptic—and then Coffeen fell ill with malaria.

  There were now four airfields on Guadalcanal and Fleet Admiral Mineichi Koga was determined to succeed where his predecessor, Yamamoto, had failed. He was going to destroy Guadalcanal air power.

  In mid-May he shifted his aerial strength from Truk to Rabaul and in early June the Zekes and Vals and Bettys swept south again.

  On June 7, 112 of them collided with American and New Zealand planes high above the Russell Islands in one of the Solomons campaign’s biggest dogfights. At 22,000 feet, Lieutenant Sam Logan’s Corsair was turned into a torch by the 20-millimeter cannon of a Zeke.

  Logan bailed out. His parachute opened and he began to float seaward.

  The Zeke returned. Its pilot made pass after pass at the helpless Logan, and then, failing to hit him, drove at him with whirling propeller blades in an attempt to chop him to pieces. He had cut off part of Logan’s right foot and left heel and was coming again to finish the job when a New Zealand pilot drove him off. Logan hit the water and was rescued. But his right foot had to be amputated. Even so, Logan flew again, for this indomitable Marine was the first American to receive permission to continue to fight and fly with what the Marines called “a store leg.”

  So also would Lieutenant Gil Percy live to fight again, even though on that same afternoon of June 7 he had fallen into the sea from a height of 2,000 feet. Percy’s elevator control and wing tanks were shot out when he was flying at that altitude. He leaped from his cockpit and pulled the parachute cord. The chute didn’t open. It merely trailed after him to mark his plunge. Percy was certain he was dead in that obliterating instant when life seemed to be blotted out, but then he tasted salt water. He opened his eyes. There were bubbles all around him and then his head had burst into the light of day and the only things he had to worry about now were sharks and how to swim to a nearby island with a broken back, two sprained ankles and cannon wounds in one arm and both legs.

  He began back-stroking toward an island a mile distant. Three hours later he reached an offshore reef. He dragged himself up on it and lost consciousness. At dawn the tide floated him into shore and he crawled up on the sand to be found by three Melanesians. One of them stood guard over Percy while the others went for help. Soon a motor launch with two doctors aboard came to the island. Percy went back to Guadalcanal, and then to a hospital in Auckland. One year later he was back in action.

  Admiral Koga lost 23 pilots that day of June 7, and he lost 107 more when he sent 120 planes south on June 16. After the sixteenth, Guadalcanal was never again attacked by daylight.

  The Japanese had had enough of Captain Donald Kennedy.

  Among the most daring of all the coastwatchers, Captain Kennedy had kept most of the Melanesians on New Georgia hostile to the Japanese, using them to hide downed American flyers while he signaled for small boats or the big flying ships called Dumbos to come get them. Kennedy had also harried the Japanese on New Georgia incessantly-bursting from his mysterious jungle lair to strike swift blows, then melting back into the green tangle again—and he had repeatedly waylaid barges loaded with Japanese soldiers and massacred them.

  Kennedy had only attacked when it became likely that Japanese patrols or barge movements might stumble on his Segi Point hideout and thus reveal the entire coastwatching apparatus, of which the Japanese still had no suspicion. Though he had only killed to keep his secret, he had done so with customary vigor and efficiency. Now Colonel Genjiro Hirata was going to use the entire First Battalion of his 229th Regiment to get rid of him.

  Kennedy ambushed the first force sent against him and captured the inevitable diary describing Colonel Hirata’s plans for Captain Kennedy. Kennedy called for help.

  At dusk of June 20 two companies of the Fourth Raiders boarded the destroyer-transports Dent and Waters and sped from Guadalcanal to New Georgia. By dark the two ships were gingerly picking their way through the shoal-filled channel to Segi Point. Kennedy lighted bonfires ashore to guide them in and cheerfully radioed, “Okay here.” It was not quite okay in the channel, for both ships had scraped bottom. But they worked free, and in the morning the Marines came ashore to seize the beachhead which opened the campaign in the Central Solomons. The long breathing spell between the end of fighting on Guadalcanal and the resumption of the American offensive was ending.

  It was June 25 and a Dumbo had come for Staff Sergeant Bill Coffeen. The big PBY landed offshore from the native village and Coffeen went out by canoe to climb aboard.

  The Melanesians had saved his life. They had nursed him through malaria. Their food had restored half of the roughly 40 pounds Coffeen had lost during the thirty-two days he had paddled about The Slot on his raft. They had even given the
young American a pet parrot to take back to Guadalcanal with him. Coffeen waved his farewell and they waved back gaily, smiling warmly.

  Then Bill Coffeen flew back to Guadalcanal, only to start “beating his gums” not ten minutes after his return.

  It was not that Bill Coffeen was not grateful for his life, not that he minded the hunger or ulcers or sunburn or malaria so much, it was only that while he had been 72 days missing in action his buddies of Squadron 213 had finished their tour of duty, had “pitched one helluva liberty” in Sidney, and were now back on the ‘Canal ready to start their second tour with good old Bill Coffeen back aboard.

  “We told the Aussie gals all about you, Bill,” his buddies said solemnly. “Usually while we were walking down to the pub.”

  3

  Take me somewhere east of Ewa

  Where the best ain’t like the worst,

  Where there ain’t no Doug MacArthur

  And a man can drown his thirst—

  Where the Army gets the medals

  And the Navy gets the queens,

  But the boys who get the rookin’

  Are United States Marines.

  It was the song of the Solomons and it had a chorus descriptive of the changed character of the aerial war against Japan. It went:

  Hit the road to Gizo Bay

  Where the Jap fleet spends the day.

  You can hear the duds a’clunkin’

  From Rabaul to Lunga Bay.

  Pack your load up to Rekata,

  Where the float-plane Zeros play,

  And the bombs come down like thunder

  On the natives cross the way.

  For it was now the American bombers which went sweeping up The Slot. Marine airmen who roared that sardonic ditty while gathered at the Hotel De Gink for a convivial canteen cup of medical alcohol cut with grapefruit juice were bellowing their displeasure with the daily bombing missions aimed at knocking out the Bougainville airfields while the New Georgia offensive slugged ahead. That the De Gink-Guadalcanal’s famous shack for itinerant pilots—now resounded to the singing of a bombardier’s ballad was indicative of the change. Even the De Gink was new, for the old one had been destroyed in one of those shellings during the days when the fighter pilot was the photographer’s darling.

  By the end of June the hot pilot was in demand again. The Army’s 43rd Division landed at Rendova while Marines and soldiers landed at Vangunu east of Munda, and the enemy’s attempts to get at the transports brought 170 Allied fighters swarming aloft to intercept 130 Japanese invaders. Dogfights swirled all over the Central Solomons in a wild, far-ranging struggle during which 100 enemy aircraft were shot down, as opposed to 14 American, and a new brood of Marine Corsair aces was born. Among them were Lieutenant Ken Walsh and Lieutenant Alvin Jensen, and a wisecracking, cigar-smoking fly-boy with the fanciful name of Murderous Manny Segal.

  Like Walsh and Jensen, Lieutenant Segal had been a former enlisted naval pilot. Now he was a Marine officer, flying wing off the famous Zeke Swett as the Fighting Falcon Squadron helped to cover the Rendova landing. At noon Murderous Manny Segal heard someone yip, “There’s a big fight going on downstairs!”

  “This I gotta see,” Segal murmured, and went nosing over as Swett led the division down. Segal was momentarily startled. Swett was leading the Corsairs around and beneath the dogfight. Then he saw the bombers with their “big angry meatballs” on the fuselage and he understood. Murderous Manny Segal worked up on one of the Bettys in a high side run. He fired. He could see his tracers flowing into the bomber’s starboard engine. It burst into flames. Hypnotized by his first taste of combat, Segal nearly flew into the wreckage. He was awakened by the blasting of antiaircraft shells from an American destroyer. His Corsair was all but thrown back on its tail and his cigar flew from his mouth. Groggy, he pulled back on the stick and climbed to safety.

  Up high again, Segal saw a Zero riding the tail of a smoking Wildcat. He chased the Zero all the way up to the next island, Kolombangara, where a single sharp burst blew it up. He had two planes to his credit on his first flight, and within another two weeks he was an ace.

  On July 11, with Segal again flying wing for Swett, eight of the Fighting Falcons took off for a patrol over Rendova. Six turned back because of engine trouble. Swett and Segal were alone. They heard from the fighter director that there was “a big bogey” coming down The Slot: 30 Bettys with a cover of 20 Zeros flying at 18,000 feet. Swett and Segal nosed over from 26,000 feet and went slashing among them. They broke up the formation. Swett missed on his first pass, but Manny Segal shot down the Zero that went for Swett’s tail. Three more eased in behind Segal, and Swett obliged by shooting one of them down. Then the two Marine fliers became separated. They were no longer able to protect one another, but Segal shot down two more planes, and Swett sent a bomber plunging into the ocean with such impact that water swept skyward in a plume so high it doused his Corsair.

  And then Segal and Swett were shot down.

  Swett’s Corsair smacked the water in a dead-stick glide. It remained surfaced for some time, giving Swett protection from the pair of Zeros which strafed him. He was finally rescued by Captain Donald Kennedy’s smoothly-functioning organization at Segi Point.

  Murderous Manny Segal also survived. His face smashed and bloodied from the impact of his watery crash, Segal paddled about The Slot for twenty-three hours until an American destroyer spotted him and threw him a line. He was hauled aboard. The sailors rushed forward to help him, and Segal waved them weakly away.

  “Don’t worry, boys,” he gasped—“things are bad all over.”

  On July 28, soldiers of the Fourteenth Corps, spearheaded by Marine flame-throwers mounted on tanks, struck at the Munda Airfield’s labyrinthine defense. They pushed through a gaunt no man’s land where not a tree had been left intact. By August 5 they had taken the airfield. Ten days later the strip was in use and Lieutenant Ken Walsh was fireballing a Corsair down the strip. He roared up to Vella Lavella, shot down a fighter and then launched a lone attack on a formation of nine Vals. He shot down two of them and came in to Munda with two cannon holes in his right wing, his hydraulic line cut, his horizontal stabilizer punctured and his right tire blown. But he made a perfect landing and was actually cheered by the ground crews.

  Fifteen days later Walsh was again demonstrating his superb flying skill. He flew to Kahili, developed engine trouble and returned to get another Corsair. He took off again and tore north to take on 50 Japanese fighters by himself. He shot down four. Walsh was awarded the Medal of Honor for both these actions, and before he left combat he had shot down 21 planes.

  During that same period of fighting in the Central Solomons, Lieutenant Jensen destroyed 24 parked enemy planes in one of the Pacific’s freak feats of combat.

  During a storm which burst suddenly over Kahili on August 28, Jensen found himself separated from his comrades. He flew down through the storm. To his great surprise he emerged from it upside down and directly over the enemy airfield. Jensen twisted his Corsair right side up while roaring to one end of the airport. He banked around and came skimming over the runway with all guns hammering, turning eight parked Zekes, four Vals and 12 Bettys into flaming heaps before the stunned Japanese had a chance to raise a hand against him.

  Such was the heat of the aerial warfare, matching the bitter savagery of the Central Solomons ground fighting, during that August when the armed forces of both nations seemed to be marking time.

  But August also marked the end of that seeming lull, for in Quebec the Quadrant Conference between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had already marked out the specific routes for the march on Japan. General MacArthur would still strike through the Bismarcks to the Philippines, and the Marines would fight twice more in the South Pacific. But Quadrant was also shifting emphasis to the Central Pacific, to the chain of island fortresses that ran like steel-sheathed stepping stones to the very heart of Japan.

  In that same month of August a Japa
nese rear admiral named Keiji Shibasaki came out from Japan to the Central Pacific to direct the defense of the Gilbert and Marshall groups which were the foremost of these islands, the outer glacis of Fortress Nippon. Shibasaki was particularly anxious to fortify an island shaped like an upside-down parrot. The Gilbert Islanders called it Betio, the Japanese renamed it Bititu and the world would know it as Tarawa.

  4

  Major Gregory Boyington was called “Pappy” because he was already a venerable thirty-one years of age when he burst upon the South Pacific with all the ungentle force of his brash, boisterous, belligerent character. His men called themselves “Black Sheep” because they were a collection of replacements, rejects and loners turned over to Boyington as much to squelch his demands for a squadron as in hopes that he would put one together.

  He did put together a squadron, a unique one, and he did it in hardly a month of training on Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. For the captain had found the men, and the men their captain. It was as though mavericks had actually gathered to elect a leader, and then, having asked themselves who among them could shoot fastest, drink most, care less, fly highest and make more enemies in high places, had chosen Boyington.

  Boyington was a veteran long before World War Two broke. He had left the Marines to join Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers in China and Burma. He had shot down six Japanese planes there. After Pearl Harbor he returned home and requested reinstatement in the Marines. But Boyington was considered to be in disgrace for “having left the Corps in a time of national emergency.” After three months of rebuff he at last sent off a desperation telegram to the under secretary of the Navy and was returned to duty.

  He left off parking cars in a Seattle garage and came out to Guadalcanal. With prompt perverseness he broke his ankle playing a sort of nocturnal leapfrog. It seemed that much that had been said about Boyington’s off-duty habits might be true, and it was after this episode that Boyington was given his last chance to deliver.