A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  The pilots waited for Swede’s orders to go in, but he decided not to attack. After radioing the USS Mackinac that the estuary was clear of enemy ships, he led the flight back to the carrier.

  OVER GUADALCANAL

  1400

  Still searching for targets over Guadalcanal, Smiley Morgan finally met the enemy. At that moment, he had been lagging well behind Harwood instead of staying in the tight, well-ordered formation.

  “Zeroes at eleven o’clock,” someone called out on the radio.

  Staring through his windshield, Smiley was shocked to see dozens of Japanese planes materialize out of the glare. Seeing that they all appeared to be heading in his general direction, Smiley quickly tucked the nose of his Avenger right behind Bruce Harwood.

  The Japanese planes went straight for the American transports lying offshore. The American fighters were waiting for them. When the enemy dive-bombers dove to begin their attacks, the Grumman Wildcats went down after them. The Japanese Zeroes that were escorting the bombers went down after the Wildcats.

  The first major air battle of the campaign was under way.

  Harwood received orders to return to the Saratoga. As Smiley banked to the west, he saw one of the Japanese dive-bombers spiral down in flames toward the sea. Below him, an American transport ship was burning, the dull red flames rising into the sky inside a great cloud of black smoke.

  USS SARATOGA

  1800

  The officers’ wardroom was packed with happy and excited pilots, most of them still in sweat-stained flying clothes, all talking and gesturing with their hands to show how they had made an attack or shot down an enemy plane. Based on their own arithmetic, the score included at least twenty Japanese fighters and bombers.

  The Saratoga’s wardroom mess staff had pulled out all the stops to celebrate the fliers’ victories in the air. The cooks had come up with the delicacy they had been hoarding for just such an occasion. It was the centerpiece of the small feast, fried Spam sandwiches served on silver trays along with canned fruit juice.

  It seemed to Smiley as if the fighter pilots thought they had shot down half the Japanese air force. He felt embarrassed at having only seen the enemy in the air, while these men had actually engaged and defeated them.

  In truth, fifteen Grumman Wildcats had failed to return to the three American carriers, a stunning loss. Nine of the Wildcats had been shot down by Japanese Zeroes, while six others had crashed. The Japanese had lost twelve planes, two of them Zeroes.

  One of Saratoga’s fighter pilots told Smiley he thought he had shot down one Zero, and possibly two. Although Smiley was happy for him, it made him feel even more left out.

  He did receive one congratulatory boost from his best friend in the squadron, James Hill Cook. Cook laughingly recounted how he had seen Smiley tuck his plane in right behind Harwood after they had spotted the Zeroes. He told Smiley it was a magnificent example of precision flying.

  Later, Swede gathered the squadron pilots together to say that although it had been easy pickings so far, the enemy would be back in the morning. Raising his clenched fist, he told them that this would be their first opportunity for vengeance. They were Torpedo Eight, he said, and it was time to begin settling the score for Midway.

  That night in his stateroom, Gene Hanson lay in his berth and tried to erase the Malaita mission from his mind. In hindsight, he wished that he had spoken up to Swede about it, or, like John Taurman, refused to drop his bombs. But it was too late now. There was no way to undo it.

  GUADALCANAL

  2300

  On Guadalcanal and Tulagi, ten thousand newly landed Marines sat in their foxholes and stared into the unfathomable darkness, waiting for a Japanese counterattack. The cries of exotic birds and other creatures filled the moist night air.

  Along with the unnerving sounds from the rain forest, land crabs the size of a man’s fist moved everywhere just under the surface of the sand. The noise of the digging crabs reminded one young Marine of someone chewing pecans, shells and all.

  Their imaginations ran wild.

  Hearing a strange noise in the jungle, a Marine would fire at it, thinking that Japanese sappers were about to assault his position. When one man fired, it triggered off a chain reaction of echoing rounds from skittish Marines farther along the line.

  In his command post under a copse of bomb-scarred coconut palms, General Vandegrift met with his staff to assess the day’s results. It was raining hard as the staff told him what little they knew.

  So far, things had gone well, at least on Guadalcanal. They had secured most of their assigned objectives although the terrain bore little resemblance to what they had been led to expect in the preinvasion briefings. Mount Austen had been described as a hill by one of the former plantation managers who had briefed them in New Zealand. To Vandegrift’s staff, it looked more like Mount Everest.

  The first captured prisoners from a Japanese construction unit assigned to build the airfield told the Americans that their army had fled into the jungle when the bombing and shelling began.

  It had been a different story on Tulagi. There, the fighting had been horrific. The island was honeycombed with caves, and the Japanese had set up machine gun nests in them with intersecting firing positions. There were tunnels between the caves, and they were impervious to bombs. The only way to reduce the enemy strong points was for Marines to go into the caves with grenades and improvised demolition charges. A lot of Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson’s Marine raiders had died trying.

  The major concern for Vandegrift was getting his equipment and supplies ashore, particularly the field guns, tanks, food, and ammunition. At their preinvasion conference aboard the Saratoga on July 27, Admiral Fletcher had said he would give him three days before pulling out the carriers. Once the carriers were gone, there was no guarantee that Admiral Turner, who commanded the transports, would remain behind without fighter protection.

  So far, Vandegrift estimated that they had received less than 20 percent of what was needed to hold the airfield and the islands. The supplies had come ashore much faster than the shore party of three hundred Marines could move them inland off the beaches. The Higgins boats had been forced to idle offshore waiting to bring in their cargoes.

  There was no front ramp on the Higgins boats, and everything had to be manhandled out of them, carried up the beach, and distributed to the supply dumps set up farther inland.

  In the brutally humid heat, things had quickly bogged down. The Marines had never felt anything like it. It quickly sucked the energy out of a man. But the only way Vandegrift could add men to the work details was to take them from combat regiments, and he still had no idea of the threat he might be facing from the Japanese.

  As scattered gunfire continued to erupt along the perimeter, Vandegrift ordered that more Marines be assigned in the morning to the unloading task. It was critical that the antiaircraft guns and field artillery in the transports be brought ashore so that the Marines would be able to defend themselves after the Navy pulled out.

  SATURDAY, 8 AUGUST 1942

  USS SARATOGA

  TORPEDO SQUADRON EIGHT

  0600

  Dawn was breaking under a leaden sky when Torpedo Eight took off from the Saratoga to attack Japanese-held positions on the small island of Tanambogo, located two miles east of Tulagi.

  A garrison of several hundred Japanese defenders continued to hold out from the island’s highest promontory, designated Hill 121. From its deep coral caves, the Japanese were pouring a withering stream of machine gun fire down on the Marines attempting to take the island.

  When Swede’s flight of twelve Avengers arrived at the designated target, they were ordered to drop their payloads onto the caves from which there was still resistance. Afterward, they returned safely to the Saratoga.

  On Guadalcanal, the invasion continued to go smoothly. By noon on the eighth, Vandegrift’s Marines had captured the airfield along with newly constructed machine shops, repair sheds,
and underground storage tanks filled with fifty thousand gallons of gas and oil.

  To the north of the airfield, Marines found a rich haul of food and supplies amassed by the Japanese in preparation for their im-minent occupation, including a fully functioning ice-making plant. Within an hour, someone had erected a handwritten sign reading tojo ice company . . . under new management.

  There were tons of bagged rice and stacks of tinned goods including Alaskan crabmeat cocktail, sliced beef, and exotic fruits and vegetables. When a Marine uncovered a large supply of beer and sake, it was immediately put under armed guard.

  With most of their tactical objectives secured, the next challenge for Vandegrift was to hold the islands against the expected Japanese counterattack. It came swiftly from both air and sea.

  The first fifty enemy attack planes arrived at almost precisely noon. The Japanese pilots had received orders to try to sink the carriers that were providing air support for the invasion force, but these were deployed too far offshore. Unable to locate them, the Japanese torpedo bombers headed for the dozens of stationary transport ships.

  As they came in low across Sealark Channel, the planes came under a hail of disciplined antiaircraft fire from the American escort ships, but they still succeeded in sinking one transport and damaging a destroyer.

  At 1800 that evening, Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher came to a decision that was to have profound consequences for the invasion. He decided to recommend the immediate withdrawal of his three carriers.

  At the planning conference on July 27, Fletcher had told General Vandegrift that he would keep the carriers in close proximity to the landing beaches for three days. Unfolding events, however, not the least of them the loss of twenty-one Grumman Wildcat fighters in the previous twenty-four hours, had now caused him to change his mind.

  Earlier that afternoon, he had spoken by short-range radio with Admiral Leigh Noyes, who was in tactical command of the three carriers. “In view of possibility of torpedo plane attack and reduction of our fighter strength I intend to recommend immediate withdrawal of carriers. Do you agree?”

  “Affirmative,” responded Noyes.

  Admiral Fletcher based his decision on several factors. Almost the entire Marine amphibious force was now ashore, and they had achieved most of their initial objectives on Guadalcanal and Tulagi. There were no important ground targets left for his dive-bombers and torpedo planes to hit.

  Unaware of Admiral Turner’s unloading problems with the transports, Fletcher viewed the three carriers as more important than the invasion force itself. He also embraced the philosophy that carriers should be used to strike quickly and withdraw before the enemy could mount a strong counterattack. This situation seemed a perfect example of that philosophy. In his mind, the withdrawal was a temporary repositioning of his carrier fleet to confound the enemy.

  Fletcher proceeded to inform Admiral Turner, whose transport ships were still being unloaded, of his decision to pull out. As darkness fell, Fletcher ordered the three carriers to head southeast in a long column away from the invasion area.

  The withdrawal left Turner in a difficult position. More than half of the 1st Marine Division’s supplies, including most of its heavy equipment, still remained aboard the transports. That material might be critical to their survival.

  With Fletcher pulling the carriers out, however, there would be no fighter protection for his transports. The only defense against Japanese attack planes would be the antiaircraft guns on the escort force of cruisers and destroyers that remained under Turner’s personal command.

  The Japanese gave him little time to make a decision on whether to stay or go.

  At 1900, shortly after Fletcher began his withdrawal, Turner received the news that an American search plane had sighted a Japanese naval force of seven ships, including at least four cruisers, heading south from Rabaul.

  Based on the reported speed of the enemy force, Turner believed there was little possibility of their ships reaching the waters around Guadalcanal that same night. While the unloading of the transports continued, he deployed his escort force of eight cruisers and six destroyers to the north of his transports to block the Japanese from getting through.

  Two American destroyers were sent on ahead to guard the approaches around Savo Island through which any Japanese force would have to penetrate to reach the landing beaches. Both destroyers were equipped with radar, and would warn the rest of the escort force as soon as the enemy appeared.

  Late in the evening, Turner decided that without the carriers, his transports were simply too vulnerable to air attack. The following day, he would begin withdrawing them from the landing zones.

  Turner radioed General Vandegrift on Guadalcanal, and requested that he join him on his flagship, the USS McCawley. Shortly before midnight, Vandegrift arrived to confer about the situation. Turner informed him that Admiral Fletcher had departed from the invasion area with the three carriers. Without air cover, Turner said he felt compelled to withdraw.

  This news was a stunning blow to Vandegrift. He had hoped to have at least two more days to bring ashore the rest of his supplies and equipment. He persuaded Turner to give him an opportunity to find out the military situation on Tulagi before the admiral made his final decision.

  Vandegrift was en route to Tulagi aboard the minelayer USS Southard, when the blackness of the northern horizon was lit up by a series of brilliant explosions. It sounded like distant thunder.

  One of the ship’s officers thought it might be heat lightning. Standing on deck, Vandegrift knew it came from heavy naval guns, and that a major naval battle was taking place to the north.

  Aboard the Southard, sailors began cheering with each rumbling explosion, confident that the American and Australian escort force was dealing the Japanese a serious defeat. The explosions went on for more than forty minutes before the northern horizon went dark again.

  For a sea battle, it had been the worst disaster in American naval history.

  The two American radar-equipped destroyers had not detected the Japanese force as it approached Savo Island under the cover of the black, moonless night. After evading the American picket destroyers, six Japanese cruisers and one destroyer had closed on the rest of the unsuspecting Allied escort force.

  First using their Long Lance torpedoes, which ran true for more than ten miles at a speed of fifty knots, and then using barrages of deadly accurate gunfire, the Japanese force sank the heavy cruisers Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes, and Canberra. Another cruiser, the USS Chicago, was heavily damaged.

  In forty minutes, thirteen hundred American and Australian sailors had been killed, with hundreds more grievously wounded. Oil-soaked and delirious survivors floated for miles across what was soon to become known as “Ironbottom Sound.”

  Incredibly, the Japanese had not lost a single ship.

  The only saving grace for the Americans was that after annihilating the Allied escort force, the Japanese naval commander made the wrong assumption that Fletcher’s three American carriers were still protecting the transport ships at Guadalcanal. Not wanting to be caught in daylight by American dive-bombers and torpedo planes, he withdrew at high speed toward Rabaul, sparing the transports almost certain destruction.

  SUNDAY, 9 AUGUST 1942

  GUADALCANAL

  1ST MARINE DIVISION

  1800

  Admiral Turner’s transport ships sailed away from Guadalcanal late that afternoon, taking with them artillery pieces, antiaircraft guns, trucks, barbed wire, food, and ammunition.

  The Marines stood alone.

  General Vandegrift was enraged at what he viewed as a desertion by the Navy, first by the carriers, and now by the vital supply ships. The Marines on Guadalcanal and Tulagi were well aware of what had happened to the American forces in the Philippines just five months earlier. On Bataan, the Americans had been forced to surrender to the Japanese army when their food and ammunition ran out, after which thousands of Allied soldiers had died while being herded
sixty miles at bayonet point into captivity. Now the Marines had to wonder if they would share the same fate. After inventorying what they had ashore, including captured Japanese supplies, Vandegrift’s staff estimated that if each man was limited to two meals per day, there was a three-week supply of food.

  Along the landing beaches, shell-shocked survivors from the sunken cruisers were still floating in on life rafts when Vandegrift brought dozens of his senior regimental officers together to brief them on what they could expect in the weeks ahead.

  They sprawled out on the sand under a lashing rain squall, staring up at him with slack faces and bloodshot eyes. Vandegrift knew that if they were to survive, he needed to convince these men that they could hold the islands against whatever the Japanese threw at them until they were relieved.

  It was too soon to know the final score from the naval action at Savo Island, but the results didn’t look good. As he spoke to his officers, the cruiser Chicago, its bow sheared off, slowly crawled past the beach on its way out of the invasion area.

  This was no time to sugarcoat the truth. He decided to hold nothing back, telling them he had no idea when they might be resupplied, while assuring them that this was not going to be another Bataan or Wake Island, where the Americans would be forced into a humiliating surrender. Even if they had to fight on alone, the Marines were going to hold.

  The first thing they needed to do was establish a coordinated line of defense to meet the all-out counteroffensive that would soon be coming at them by air and sea from the Japanese fortress at Rabaul. Their next priority was to finish the airfield so it would be ready for the Marine air group that was on its way to provide them with air support against the Japanese attack planes. The final priority was to disperse all of the supplies and ammunition from the landing beach to protected supply dumps that could withstand air attack by Japanese bombers.

  They were in a tough spot, he said as his officers sat through the downpour, but Marines had fought and survived in a lot of tough spots before. They had everything they needed to defeat the Japanese as long as every man pulled together and did his job.