Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War

by Robert Leckie

  “Al,” Geiger grunted, “got your Group ready for war?”

  Cooley gulped. His dive-bomber squadron had just been split four ways to form new squadrons and his fighters were new and untrained. But he smiled weakly and said: “Not ready, sir—but willing.”

  “Well, you’re going next Saturday,” Geiger grunted.2 And they did.

  In the last week of September, Cooley and five Dauntless pilots were flown into Guadalcanal by Scat. Geiger immediately put Colonel Wallace in charge of all fighters and Cooley in charge of the bombers, with orders to stop the Tokyo Express.

  On September 21 Cooley led the Dauntlesses against destroyer Kagero unloading troops at Kamimbo, but failed to sink her.

  Next day they attacked the enemy assembly point at Visale, a few miles north of Kamimbo. Roy Geiger flew one of the bombers. Disgusted to hear pilots complaining that the bomb-pocked airstrip was risky, fifty-seven-year-old Geiger had lumbered from the Pagoda to squeeze into a Dauntless cockpit. Then he thundered aloft to drop a thousand-pounder on the Japanese. That night more bombers struck at a group of destroyer-transports.

  On September 24 Cooley’s planes bombed and strafed destroyers Umikaze and Kawakaze—the killer of Blue—in Kamimbo Bay.

  Nevertheless, the Tokyo Express still ran as scheduled. The troops were getting through, and Vandegrift, alarmed by patrol reports of strong defenses on the Matanikau, decided that he had better attack.

  It was from Chesty Puller that Vandegrift heard of the enemy strength.

  Puller was a lieutenant colonel now, and on September 21 he was just where he wanted to be: at the head of a body of Marines hunting the enemy. His Crusader’s Cross around his neck, his jungle-stained copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars in his pocket, his stump of a cold pipe in his mouth, Puller was leading his men toward the headwaters of the Matanikau.

  And the Japanese were waiting for him. They struck repeatedly at his column, and these unseasoned men of the First Battalion, Seventh Marines, proved themselves not as jungle-wise as they might be. On the night of the first day they were all but exhausted from the ordeal of moving through the sort of terrain which had ruined General Kawaguchi’s brigade. Colonel Puller was also out of breath, from swearing at them.

  In the morning they were hit again. One of the casualties was Captain Jack Stafford. He was torn about the face and neck by the explosion of his own rifle grenade. Puller came to his side just as a corpsman gave him morphine. He saw that Stafford was strangling in his own blood. He unsnapped a big safety pin from his bandoleer. He reached into Stafford’s mouth, seized his tongue, and pinned it neatly to the man’s dungaree collar. Puller’s action saved Stafford’s life, and it convinced his men that perhaps this little leader with the big chest and the big voice was even bigger than his legend.

  They were an improved force, when, on September 23, they struck out again for the upper Matanikau. This time, though they lost seven dead and twenty-five wounded in fights with Oka’s outposts, they gave much worse than they got. But there was still no crossing the Matanikau. Oka had blocked all the fords. On the morning of September 26, Puller called for air and artillery support. But the enemy was dug in and could not be dislodged. So Puller swung north and moved down the east bank of the Matanikau toward the coastal road. Japanese mortars and automatic weapons emplaced on the Matanikau’s west bank struck them as they moved. Weary, they reached the coast at sundown.

  From reports of Puller’s foray it was clear to Vandegrift that the enemy held the Matanikau west bank in strength. He decided on a three-pronged operation to dislodge him.

  The First Raiders, now under Lieutenant Colonel Sam Griffith, were to march inland along the Matanikau’s east bank. They would cross the river at a log crossing called Nippon Bridge, and then wheel right to attack downstream to the sea.

  As the Raiders attacked, the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, would strike across a sandbar at the mouth of the Matanikau.

  Simultaneously Puller’s battalion would sail west to Point Cruz, land to the west of this promontory, turn left and attack to the east along the coastal track.

  The operations were to be under Red Mike Edson, now in command of the Fifth Marines. They began on the morning of September 27, and they began with immediate trouble.

  As Griffith and his Raiders approached Nippon Bridge they were struck by a storm of fire. The gallant Major Bailey was killed. Colonel Griffith attempted to swing around the blocking force and come down on its rear. But this slow and painful maneuver was eventually spotted by the Japanese and they opened fire. Griffith was wounded and his Raiders were stalled.

  But garbled messages led Vandegrift and Edson to believe that the Raiders were safely across the river. Edson ordered the Marines at the river-mouth to attack across the sandbar. They did, and were beaten back.

  At this moment, Puller’s battalion, under Major Otho Rogers in the absence of Puller, who was with Edson, sailed west to Point Cruz. They came quickly ashore and prepared to swing to their left. But the Japanese had seen them coming and had wisely pulled back and allowed them to penetrate about 400 yards inland. Then they struck at the Americans from three sides. They poured mortars and bullets into them and within a few minutes Major Rogers was killed—blown apart by a mortar landing almost under his feet—as were half a dozen others. Captain Charles Kelly took command. The toll of dead and wounded rose, especially in the company commanded by Captain Regan Fuller. The only way out for these Marines was the way they had come, now completely covered by enemy fire. And then the Japanese moved to surround them.

  Colonel Edson had called for aerial support of the Marines trapped down at Point Cruz, but his message was never received. One of the heaviest air raids of the month came roaring down from Rabaul to knock out all of Henderson Field’s communications.

  While the raid was at its height, Chesty Puller hurried down to Kukum to hail the old four-stack destroyer, Ballard, which had escorted his men up to Point Cruz. He came aboard and Ballard began sailing west to the rescue.

  Marines on Point Cruz were fighting desperately. Mortarmen fired at almost point-blank range. They held the mortars in place by lying on their backs to support the tubes with their feet. Captain Kelly tried to contact Captain Fuller’s outfit. But Sergeant Robert Raysbrook, the communications man, reported that he had forgotten to bring his radio.

  HELP

  Lieutenant Dale Leslie saw it underneath him, tiny but distinct, in white letters that might be T-shirts. Leslie was flying his Dauntless along the coast in search of targets. He came down closer, saw the trapped Marines, and radioed Edson. Then he began patrolling the area, waiting to help. Beneath him on the Bay he saw an American destroyer approaching.

  Sergeant Raysbrook was redeeming himself. He saw Ballard’s approach, saw the black smoke boiling from her four stacks, and saw her guns begin to raise into position. He seized the T-shirts and jumped erect to wigwag the ship while reading her responses.

  Chesty Puller was on Ballard’s deck. He could see Raysbrook through his field glasses.

  “Return to beach immediately,” he had Ballard signal.

  “Engaged,” Raysbrook wagged. “Cannot return.”

  “Fight your way. Only hope.”

  There was no reply, and Puller had another message sent:

  “Give me your boundaries right and left. Will use ship’s fire.”3

  Raysbrook obliged, and Ballard’s five-inchers began hurling shells into the jungle between the Marines and the sea. They cut huge swathes in it. To the east, a battalion of Marine artillery began battering the tip of Point Cruz to prevent the Japanese from occupying it and cutting off the retreat.

  And Puller’s men were coming down. They came plunging down the slopes with wild yells, firing as they came. They were halfway to the beach before the enemy tried to halt them. Platoon Sergeant Anthony Malanowski told Captain Fuller, “I’ll handle the rear. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.” Malanowski took a BAR from a wounded man and laid it across a log. He
knelt down. He was never seen again, although the men he was covering heard the bursts from his automatic rifle.

  The Marines crowded down to the beach, and the enemy came after them slipping from tree to tree and nearly indistinguishable in their green uniforms. A Japanese officer sprang from the bush. He swung his saber with both hands and beheaded a Marine. The officer jumped back into cover just as a grenade thrown by Fuller flushed a tottering and dying enemy soldier from a thicket.

  Landing boats from Ballard were roaring inshore, led by a Coast Guard coxswain named Donald Munro. Munro held his tiller with one hand and raked the enemy with machine-gun fire with the other. He was killed. Some of the boats faltered. The Dauntless flown by Dale Leslie came roaring in behind them, shepherding them toward the beach. Leslie’s gunner sprayed bullets into the onrushing Japanese. But the enemy came closer. Some of the coxswains were unwilling to wait for the last stragglers. Captain Fuller persuaded them with his pistol, and before the sun was low in the western sky all of the trapped battalion had been drawn off, including twenty-three wounded and most of the bodies of twenty-four dead.

  It might have been a slaughter if the battalion had broken. But the Marines kept their nerve and their ranks and the rescue took some of the sting out of the Matanikau defeat.

  Defeat it was, and General Vandegrift was quick to admit it. His operation had been based on faulty intelligence which underestimated both the terrain and the enemy—hitherto an exclusively Japanese characteristic—and he had drifted into it. Having lost sixty dead and one hundred wounded, Vandegrift withdrew his forces to await a more favorable opportunity.

  On September 28, one day after the Matanikau defeat, General Vandegrift received the following letter from Admiral Turner:

  Now would seem to be the time to push as hard as possible on the following items: (a) continue clearing out all the nests of enemy troops on the north side of Guadalcanal, initial operations continuing to the westward. I believe you are in a position to take some chances and go after them hard. I am glad to see Rupertus is cleaning up Florida Island; and believe he should establish detachments on Sandfly Passage, the north coast, Matumba Bay at the eastern end of Florida, as soon as justified. Here we are working up a scheme to start out within a few days with the two destroyer-transports available and two companies of the Second Raiders, to attack the Jap outposts entrenched at Cape Astrolabe, Malaita; at Marau Bay on Guadalcanal, and at Cape Hunter. We want to coordinate these operations with you, and get your approval of our plan; therefore the Commanding Officer of the Second Raider Battalion, after conference with me, will shortly fly up and see you and go over our plans with you. One question to decide is whether or not to leave small detachments of the Second Raiders at these places; at a later time, we would relieve them with other line troops.4

  Vandegrift was infuriated. Here he was crossing swords with Kelly Turner again over the same old issue: the admiral’s fondness for the general’s troops. It had begun in New Zealand and had continued into Guadalcanal when, after the Savo disaster, Turner had sailed away with 1400 men of the Second Marines. He had then attempted to form them into a “2nd Provisional Raider Battalion,” and had written to Admiral Ghormley recommending the overhaul of all Marine regiments so that each one would carry a raider battalion for special missions. Turner wrote that he did not believe Marine regiments would be needed in the Pacific, adding: “The employment of a division seems less likely.” All of these moves and recommendations had been made without consulting Vandegrift, and it had required the intervention of Admiral Nimitz to scuttle Turner’s plans for the Marines. Now, with the arrival in the New Hebrides of the “authentic” Second Raiders—the outfit that had raided Makin under Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson—Turner was once again putting down the sextant and reaching for the baton. To Vandegrift, who admired and respected Turner when he was at sea, the proposal was nonsense.5 He answered it bluntly:

  From reconnaissance it is estimated the Japanese are now holding this river [Matanikau] line in force of about fifteen hundred men as outpost line of resistance. Information received from a captured prisoner, a copy of his testimony which is enclosed with this letter, would tend to show that we may expect an attack in force from additional troops to be landed some time around the first of October when the moon is favorable to such landing and operations. If the testimony of this prisoner is true, and an additional division is landed to the west of us and puts down a major push in depth through our west or southwest lines, they are now so thinly held and our reserves so few that it could well be dangerous to our position.

  I regret that Major Bailey of the Raiders was killed and that Lieutenant Colonel Griffith, the present Commander of the Raiders, was wounded in the shoulder. I have talked the question over with Edson, its previous Commander, and I believe that with the losses sustained in both officers and men of this battalion, and the strenuous work that they have done, that they should be returned to Noumea or some other place for rebuilding. If this is done, I urgently recommend that the Second Raider Battalion be sent in to replace them as we will need all the strength we can get for this next push which I feel sure will be a major one.6

  Vandegrift dictated his reply confident that he had at least one ally in Nouméa. That was Major General Millard F. Harmon, who had spent a night on Guadalcanal a few days before, and who had agreed with Vandegrift’s estimate of the situation. Moreover, Harmon had told Vandegrift that he would never place an Army division on Guadalcanal under Turner’s command.7 So Vandegrift stuck to his guns, and two days after he did he had gained another ally.

  It was the last day of September and a furious thick rain was heralding the onslaught of the monsoon. Above Guadalcanal a Flying Fortress had lost its way, and then, coming very low, the pilot had seen the island and Henderson Field. He landed with twin V’s of dirty water curving away from his big rubber wheels and then he taxied slowly through the mud toward a group of officers standing beneath a cluster of palm trees.

  A ramp was run up to the Fort and a slender, white-haired man in khaki with four stars pinned to his collar stepped out.

  General Vandegrift stepped forward and saluted smartly.

  Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Area, had come to Guadalcanal.

  Vandegrift was not sorry that Nimitz had made an arrival typical of Guadalcanal. He wanted him to see what he and his men were up against, and he took him to see his perimeter. That night Vandegrift had no trouble impressing Nimitz with the necessity of concentrating forces to defend the airfield. Later, as the two men relaxed over a drink, Nimitz said:

  “You know, Vandegrift, when this war is over we are going to write a new set of Navy Regulations. So just keep it in the back of your mind because I will want to know some of the things you think ought to be changed.”

  “I know one right now,” Vandegrift replied grimly. “Leave out all reference that he who runs his ship aground will face a fate worse than death. Out here too many commanders have been far too leery about risking their ships.”8

  Nimitz smiled and said nothing.

  In the morning it began to rain hard again. Vandegrift and Geiger hurried their guest to the airfield, both of them buoyed by Nimitz’s promise of “support to the maximum of our resources.”9 At the field Nimitz decided that he would like to fly in the Flying Fort’s nose. He crawled forward over the protests of his staff, and the big plane’s motors coughed. It began thundering down the runway. Roy Geiger blanched. The Fort had not enough take-off speed. Suddenly the pilot shut off power and slammed the brakes, and the plane began to slide.

  It slid almost the length of the strip and came to a halt with its distinguished nose hanging over the edge of the field not far short of the trees.

  Admiral Nimitz went meekly to the back of the plane and the Fort finally took off safely.

  It was not too soon. For the rain had stopped and clearing weather suggested that the noon raid in the enemy’s mounting aerial onslaught would be down on sched
ule.

  It was on September 25 that Rabaul received the reinforcements required to crush the enemy to the south: one hundred Zeros and eighty bombers were brought to Vunakanau and Lakunai fields. Two days later the attack began.

  Thirty-one bombers struck at Henderson in the raid that knocked out communications between Vandegrift and his Matanikau forces, but the Navy and Marine fighters who intercepted them shot down six Bettys and five Zeros at no loss to themselves.

  Next day close to sixty of the Emperor’s eagles came winging down and the Americans shot down twenty-three bombers and one Zero. Jubilant, Vandegrift radioed Nouméa: “Our losses: no pilots, no planes, no damage. How’s that for a record?”

  When September came to an end, three of Henderson’s Marines were the top aces of America: Major John Smith had nineteen kills, Captain Carl had sixteen and Major Galer had eleven. Since aerial battle began, the Americans had shot down well over two hundred enemy aircraft against thirty-two of their own lost. And the Americans had lost fewer pilots. Japanese fliers, fighting over enemy territory, scorning parachutes as beneath the dignity of the samurai who cannot surrender, usually went down with their aircraft.

  Nevertheless such staggering losses were suicidal for the Japanese, and they began October determined to wipe out American fighter strength. A few bombers were used as bait for swarms of Zeros. On October 2 the trick worked: four Americans were shot down, against only five enemy planes, and among them were Major Smith and Major Galer.

  Galer had shot down a Betty when a Zero came up on his tail and riddled his Wildcat. Galer knew he would be forced to land, but he wanted to retaliate first. He dove into a cloud as though he was trying to get away. Instead of coming out below, he came out on top—and caught the Japanese waiting beneath him. He pressed his gun button, and both aircraft went down in flames.

  It was the second time Galer had been shot down, but he landed safely in a field and walked home.