A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Jack ran back to the squadron office to get his portable typewriter. It was the principal weapon he had to fight the war, and it was definitely going with him. When he got back to the breeches buoy, Jack refused to go until the sailors operating it agreed to send over his typewriter and file cabinet.

  They resisted until he threatened to bring Swede Larsen down on their heads. Whether that made a difference or they just got tired of arguing, the sailors finally secured his file cabinet and typewriter onto the canvas rig and sent it over to the Grayson.

  The morning torpedo attack had caused twelve casualties out of the two thousand men serving aboard the Saratoga. One of the injured was Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, whose forehead had been split open when the torpedo struck. When the Saratoga began its long journey back to Pearl Harbor, Fletcher went with her.

  Only two carriers, the Wasp and the Hornet, remained in the South Pacific.

  Sunday, 6 September 1942

  Espiritu Santo

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  The island of Espiritu Santo was located six hundred miles southeast of Guadalcanal. In early July, the Americans had begun constructing a sprawling naval base there to provide logistical support for the Guadalcanal invasion.

  Across the island from the base, a naval construction team had bulldozed a section of jungle near the sea and built a primitive airfield. It now became home to Torpedo Eight and several other air squadrons.

  Espiritu Santo was no South Seas paradise. Any visions of beautiful native girls fanning a weary Navy officer with palm fronds on a sun-kissed beach were quickly shattered. The surrounding rain forest was as dense as anything Pete Peterkin had ever seen. The ten-foot-high undergrowth was so thick that a man couldn’t pass through it without bringing along a machete to clear a path. The jungle went right to the edge of the shoreline.

  The airfield itself was no more than a landing strip. The Navy construction team hadn’t had time to build dispersal areas, and there were no shops to repair aircraft or buildings to house the support personnel. The squadron’s Avengers had to be parked alongside the runway. The crews refueled them with hand pumps from fifty-five-gallon drums. There was no electricity or running water.

  “Where are we supposed to live?” was the most commonly repeated question when they first arrived.

  Near the landing strip, the new arrivals were shown several mounds of supplies covered by waterproof tarps. The material included canvas tents, hand tools, jerry cans full of drinking water, and cartons of K rations.

  Bruce Harwood quietly announced that they would have to build their own camp. The pilots and enlisted men would all pitch in together. The news was not greeted with enormous enthusiasm by Bert Earnest. Clearing jungle with a shovel to put up a tent in 100-degree heat was not what he had signed up for as an officer and a gentleman.

  They began with the most important facilities first, the latrines. The enlisted men built their latrines at the edge of the ocean. The officers preferred the grassy hill near the airstrip.

  The only clothing they had to wear was what they had brought from the Saratoga. There was no rain gear, mosquito netting, kerosene lamps, or cooking equipment. It was the wet season. Without warning, the skies would release a deluge of lukewarm rain as they worked to build the camp. It would start and stop as quickly as turning a faucet and reduce their newly cleared paths into muddy quagmires.

  As soon as the latrines were set up, voracious flies descended on the encampment. Without a screened mess tent, the flies attacked their food as soon as it was ladled onto a plate or removed from a can. The men would eat with one hand while waving away insects with the other.

  Within days, some of the men began having serious bowel problems. Pete Peterkin was one of the first. An initial bout of dysentery led to a loss of ten pounds, and it didn’t stop there.

  About fifty native men were living near the airstrip. They came from inland villages and worked under the direction of the Navy construction team. Except for the little leather cups they wore around their genitals, they were naked.

  The squadrons had been warned that Espiritu Santo still had cannibals and headhunters within its native population. No one felt compelled to find out if any of the laborers still practiced their traditional skills.

  Harwood had no idea how long they would have to stay there. The most active rumor was that they were going to be sent north to support the Marine air group at Guadalcanal.

  Swede arrived with the rest of the squadron a few days later. He called everyone together to read them a statement written by Captain Ramsey of the Saratoga shortly before Swede had taken off for Espiritu Santo.

  “?‘Your record of achievements is a matter to the greatest pride to us and it is our fervent determination to rejoin you as expeditiously as humanly possible,’?” read Swede aloud as they all stood in the sweltering heat. “?‘In the meantime carry on as you have in the past. No one could ask more.’?”

  If the words had been meant to raise morale, they fell short of the mark. The different squadrons in the camp were already bickering. One evening, Lee Marona was helping to deliver a meal to the officers’ mess tent when he overheard a senior pilot in a dive-bomber squadron accuse the enlisted men in Torpedo Eight of stealing food. Swede told the man to prove it or go outside with him. The other officer backed down.

  On the afternoon of September 3, Fred Mears and Harry Ferrier flew onto the airstrip. The Enterprise had gone back to Pearl Harbor after all, but Fred Mears and his friend Dick Jaccard hadn’t gone with her.

  Like the air squadrons aboard the Saratoga, the Enterprise squadrons had been ordered to fly ashore and await further orders. After they landed at their first stop in the New Hebrides, Mears and Jaccard buried their disappointment by getting drunk on native wine and stealing an Army jeep to go joyriding on the dirt roads surrounding the airstrip. Fred was then ordered to join Torpedo Eight at Espiritu Santo.

  Bert Earnest was down at the airstrip when Fred and Harry arrived. Bert and Harry had a chance to catch up as they walked over to the tent encampment. Mears was no happier to see Swede than Swede was to see him.

  It wasn’t quite up to the standards of the Moana Hotel, but Fred quickly embraced the reality of his new surroundings. The next morning, he worked with two other pilots to build the camp’s first shower, using two fifty-five-gallon drums suspended over coconut tree logs.

  Life on the island settled into a monotonous routine. Occasionally, the officers were invited to eat supper at a Marine officers’ mess near the airfield. The enlisted men had to make do with K rations, along with local fruits and vegetables, including “island cabbage,” which was boiled in a pot and smelled like a man’s sweat.

  Jack Stark hated the island cabbage. What he longed for most was milk from the ripe coconuts that rested so tantalizingly at the tops of the palm trees near their tents. They rarely dropped to the ground.

  He finally decided to approach one of the native laborers. Using sign language, he got his message across. Holding a nickel in his fingers, he pointed to the top of a palm tree. In less than a minute, the native had climbed the tree, and tossed down a batch of ripe coconuts. After Jack had gathered the harvest, he gave the man his nickel.

  He was sharing the milk with his friends when Swede Larsen came by and roundly chewed him out. Apparently, an officer in the Navy construction team had visited Swede to complain that one of his men was single-handedly screwing up the local economy. He had been paying the natives six cents a day and the workers were now demanding a raise.

  The Canal

  Friday, 11 September 1942

  Guadalcanal

  35th Brigade, Japanese Infantry

  General Kiyotaki Kawaguchi

  Sitting at his headquarters tent in a steaming jungle clearing a few miles to the east of the Marine defense perimeter, General Kawaguchi decided he was ready to capture Henderson Field. As soon as he controlled the airfield, swarms of Japanese planes would land there and consolidate his gains. />
  Unlike the late Colonel Ichiki, who had believed he could take the airfield with one “spear thrust” through the American perimeter, Kawaguchi had created a complex attack plan. It left no matter to chance, and even included the site of the formal ceremony in which General Vandegrift would personally surrender to him near the airfield.

  With twenty-seven hundred square miles of beaches and dense jungle to cloak their movements, the Japanese had succeeded in land-ing Kawaguchi’s troops at their designated locations. The American Marines began to mockingly refer to the nightly deliveries as the “Tokyo Express.”

  On the night of September 4, a Japanese light cruiser and eleven destroyers put ashore nearly a thousand troops before swinging around to sink two American destroyer transports, killing both ships’ captains and thirty-three sailors. The stunned survivors floated ashore the next day.

  Believing that the American carriers had been driven from the Solomons, the Japanese high command was supremely confident that their upcoming offensive would be successful.

  Kawaguchi believed that no more than two thousand Marines protected the perimeter around the airfield. With six thousand fully equipped soldiers, General Kawaguchi was content with what he thought was a three-to-one advantage, and ready to execute his plan.

  Although more than ten thousand Marines actually defended the airfield, they were spread out along a twelve-mile front. The area to the south of the airfield was the most lightly defended, and that was where Kawaguchi planned to make his principal attack.

  Kawaguchi’s battle plan called for a three-pronged assault. The main force, which had come ashore fifteen miles east of the American positions at Taivu Point, would penetrate several miles inland, and then pivot to attack the airfield from the south. Kawaguchi would personally lead them to victory.

  A diversionary force would simultaneously attack from the southeast, aiming its thrust toward Alligator Creek, where Colonel Ichiki’s men had been wiped out on the night of August 20. Their spirits would thus be avenged.

  His third force, which had been landed to the west of the American perimeter, would cross the Matanikau River and attack the Americans’ southwest perimeter at the same scheduled time. The assaults would be supported by naval gunfire from Japanese warships offshore. Prior to the attack, an aggressive bombing campaign would be unleashed by land-based bombers flying from Rabaul to soften up the American positions.

  By September 5, native scouts reported to Vandegrift that Japanese troops had occupied the village of Tasimboko near Taivu Point. Vandegrift decided he would not wait for them to attack. On the night of September 7, he sent the 1st Marine Raider Battalion, commanded by Colonel Merritt Edson, in a small flotilla of ships to make an amphibious raid behind the enemy positions.

  At dawn the next morning, Edson’s Marine Raiders came ashore in a driving rain. Near the landing beach, they came upon two unmanned thirty-seven-millimeter field pieces. The guns were brand-new. Unopened crates of ammunition were stacked next to each one.

  Following the trails toward Tasimboko, Edson’s men confronted the rear guard of General Kawaguchi’s main force, which had already left the village on its march into the interior.

  The Japanese had left behind several hundred troops to defend Tasimboko, along with Kawaguchi’s field artillery, his entire supply of cached food and ammunition, and a well-equipped radio station that allowed him to maintain contact with the other two forces on the island.

  Edson’s men were incredulous after they had swept away the rear-guard soldiers and found the huge stockpile of supplies. It included five hundred thousand rounds of ammunition for Kawaguchi’s machine guns, rifles, and field pieces, large stores of medical supplies, new uniforms, boots, knapsacks, and a small mountain of crated food, canned goods, rice, and other supplies. Based on what they had brought ashore, Edson estimated the size of the Japanese force to be at least four thousand men.

  There was no time for his Raiders to haul everything away. With the exception of the medical supplies and a few cases of British-made cigarettes, he ordered the rest of the supply dump destroyed along with the radio station.

  Some of the Marines felt compelled to disobey the colonel’s orders. They weren’t called “Raiders” for nothing. Accomplished foragers, they returned to the beach lugging more than twenty cases of Japanese beer and Kawaguchi’s entire supply of sake.

  For Kawaguchi, the loss of his supplies was a potential nightmare. If he didn’t capture the airfield within a few days, his troops would have nothing to eat except what they could forage in the jungle. With the radio station destroyed, he was no longer able to communicate with the commanders of the other two forces except by messenger.

  After Edson returned with his report, Vandegrift knew that a major attack was coming, but he still didn’t know where. Native scouts sent back messages that Japanese units were on the move in several areas around the twelve-mile-long perimeter.

  Edson and Colonel Gerry Thomas, the division’s operations officer, told Vandegrift they thought they knew where the attack was going to come from. Unfolding a crude map, they pointed to a spot less than a mile south of the airfield.

  It was a low ridge that ran for more than a half mile beneath the slope of Mount Austen. Most of it was parallel to the Lunga River, and dominated the surrounding terrain. The long hilly spine had four smaller ridges that projected out like legs and were matted with tall kunai grass.

  Trusting Edson’s and Thomas’s instincts, Vandegrift deployed the Raiders on the forward spur of the ridge that extended down to the Lunga River. He also provided Edson with two companies of the 1st Parachute Battalion, and moved a battery of 105-millimeter guns into a position south of the airfield to provide artillery support.

  While the Marines were digging in along the ridge, General Kawaguchi was leading his main force through the jungle, taking every precaution to prevent its discovery from American spotter planes.

  Initially, they made good progress. Without native guides, however, several of the units became lost. Others got bogged down in the interior’s muddy swamps, and were forced to go around them.

  Kawaguchi’s greatest advantage remained the fact that the Americans still didn’t know the size and location of his force, or when he would attack. On September 11, Kawaguchi received a message from Colonel Oka, whose diversionary force was now west of the Marine defense line near the Matanikau River. Oka vowed he would make his assault at the same time Kawaguchi launched his own attack with the main force.

  The attacks were scheduled for 2200 on the night of September 12.

  At midday on the eleventh, forty-two Japanese aircraft from Rabaul strafed and bombed the airfield. In the course of the raid, bombs were also dropped on the positions where Edson’s men were digging in, killing eleven Marines. It confirmed Edson’s belief that his ridge was the place where the Japanese would attack.

  Vandegrift was at his command post after the air raid when he was handed a message from Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, who commanded all naval forces in the South Pacific under Nimitz. It was not good news.

  “The situation as I view it is very critical,” Ghormley wrote. “Our transportation problem increases steadily as the Japs perfect their blockade methods.”

  Because of the recent loss of two carriers, as well as his inadequate reserves of aircraft, transports, and warships, Ghormley concluded that he could no longer fully support the Guadalcanal operation. The meaning of his words was open to interpretation, but Vande-grift became incensed at what he viewed as another example of the Navy’s failure to actively back up his Marines.

  That night, flares were dropped by Japanese spotting aircraft. The flares presaged a two-hour bombardment of the airfield by Japanese warships cruising unhindered offshore. When the shelling ended, the Marines waited all night in their foxholes for the expected ground attack. The lines remained quiet.

  Saturday, 12 September 1942

  Henderson Field, Guadalcanal

  1148

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bsp; As the noon hour approached, forty Japanese planes attacked the airfield, destroying three Dauntlesses on the ground before dropping bombs on Colonel Edson’s positions along the ridge. The attack killed four Marines and wounded twenty-five more. The Cactus Air Force was successful in shooting down six of the attackers at a cost of two Wildcats.

  With night falling, Colonel Edson’s eight hundred men dug in again along the ridgeline. Earlier that day, Edson had strengthened his most exposed positions by running a single strand of barbed wire in front of them. Once more, the Raiders settled into their foxholes and waited.

  At 2130, four Japanese warships arrived unhindered in Sealark Channel and began shelling both Henderson Field and Edson’s Ridge. The cannonade lasted twenty minutes and killed three pilots at the airfield.

  When the bombardment ended, there was a minute of silence in the hot, humid night. At his command post a few hundred yards from Edson’s Ridge, Vandegrift suddenly heard the stutter of machine gun fire coming from the ridgeline to the south. It was followed by the boom of mortar shells and the chatter of small arms fire.

  Vandegrift waited to see if the firefight grew in intensity, which would signal the beginning of a major assault, or whether the attack was a feint or a possible probing of the line.

  In the dense jungle south of the ridge, General Kawaguchi’s complicated battle plan had begun to unravel. Neither one of his diversionary forces had reached its planned objective or knew where it actually was in relation to the American lines.

  Kawaguchi shared the same predicament. At the scheduled launch hour of 2200, only one of his three battalions had reached its assigned position. His men had struggled all day to cross deep ravines and almost impenetrable undergrowth to reach their ob-jectives while staggering under the weight of rifles, mortars, ammunition, swords, grenades, and several days’ supply of food.