A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Kawaguchi wanted to delay the attack, but without radio communication he had lost contact with the rest of the main force, and his messengers couldn’t reach them in time. Only one of his three battalions began its attack at the appointed time. Over the course of the next two hours, confused elements of the other battalions went forward after fighting their way through the jungle. Kawaguchi’s two diversionary forces never reached their launching point.

  In spite of the disjointed nature of the attacks, Kawaguchi’s men made good progress on the right flank of Edson’s line between the ridge and the Lunga River. There weren’t enough Marines to maintain a solid defense perimeter, and the Japanese slipped through the gaps between the strong points.

  Three platoons were forced to withdraw before they were cut off and wiped out. In one engagement, seven Marines went missing, presumably captured and killed. The rest had to fight their way back to the ridge.

  Standing in the darkness of his command post, Colonel Edson felt the Japanese attacks slowly peter out and die. He knew that the Japanese would regroup for another assault, and probably make it under the cover of darkness the following night. Edson began thinking about ways he could redeploy his men to give the Japanese a surprise.

  He hoped he had enough men to stop them.

  Sunday, 13 September 1942

  Espiritu Santo

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  1100

  Swede gathered his pilots and crews together to give them the word.

  They had been on Espiritu Santo for almost two weeks. Although more men had come down with dysentery, they now had a potable water supply, and were getting hot chow.

  It had been raining heavily for two days, and was still pouring when Swede brought them together to say that he had just received new orders. The Japanese were putting on a big push. The squadron was headed for Guadalcanal.

  With the Enterprise and Saratoga gone, the Japanese now controlled the waters around Guadalcanal and the place was getting shelled almost every night by their warships. Every day, the airfield was bombed by planes from Rabaul, and the enemy was sending in thousands of troops, more all the time. It was shaping up to be the biggest battle of the Pacific War.

  Torpedo Eight was going up to help stem the tide. Theirs had been the first and only torpedo squadron ordered in with the fighters and dive-bombers. The men should be proud of being chosen, he said. They were the best torpedo squadron in the Navy.

  There was no telling how many of the pilots and crews would make it back when it was all over, he said. He didn’t want anyone going with him who wasn’t prepared to see it through to the end.

  Swede said he would lead the first group of six Avengers up later that day once the planes were ready. The pilots and crews he had chosen should pack up all their personal gear and stow it in the airplanes. The five pilots were Gene Hanson, Bert Earnest, Jack Barnum, Tex Grady, and Red Doggett. The list included every pilot in the first division except Aaron Katz and Bob Evarts.

  Espiritu Santo would remain their permanent base, said Swede. More pilots and crews would be rotated back and forth to Guadalcanal as needed. The Marines already had plenty of support people up there, so most of the squadron’s machinist’s mates and ordnance men would remain behind with the personnel staff.

  Swede reminded the men that the squadron had a new motto after the Battle of Midway. Attack with Vengeance, he exhorted them. They had only one job to do, he said, and that was to kill Japs.

  Standing with the enlisted men, Frank Balsley wondered what he would find up there. He was a fifty-caliber turret gunner, and a replacement member of Gene Hanson’s crew. He would be going up in the first group.

  At twenty-one, Frank had never thought of the enemy as “nips” or “Japs.” Growing up in Gardena, California, his oldest friend was Japanese, along with half of his high school class, and he had liked them all. They came from good, hardworking families just like his, trying to get through the Depression like everyone else.

  Frank’s father had been a butcher and then run a small grocery store. The Japanese families were some of his best customers. It had come as a real shock to Frank when he realized that America was going to war against Japan. Now he rushed to get ready.

  As navigation officer, Smiley Morgan made sure that each pilot had a map of the Eastern Solomon Islands to go with his chart board. He estimated that it would take them four or five hours to get there.

  The rest of the pilots came out to the field to wish Swede and the others good luck. It was around noon when the six planes, heavily loaded with torpedoes, ammunition, and other gear, took off down the dirt airstrip and lifted off.

  Guadalcanal

  General A. A. Vandegrift

  After stewing over the message he had received from Vice Admiral Ghormley about the withdrawal of naval support for his Marines, General Vandegrift pulled aside Colonel Thomas, his operations officer.

  They were going to defend the airfield until it was no longer possible, come hell or high water, Navy or no Navy, Vandegrift told him. If they lost the airfield, he would lead the survivors up into the hills and fight a guerrilla war. Just to be on the safe side, he told Thomas to prepare a contingency plan in case they were overrun.

  Vandegrift left his command post and went to the Pagoda to give the bad news to General Roy Geiger, who had just arrived earlier that week to take command of the Marine air group. Vandegrift told him that if it looked like they were about to be overrun, Geiger should fly out all of his planes.

  At the same time, Colonel Edson was meeting with his senior officers at the ridge. He told them that he expected the Japanese to make an all-out assault that night, and that he was pulling most of them back from their original line to form a new one farther up the ridge. General Vandegrift had agreed to make available a reserve battalion to shore up any gaps that might develop during the battle.

  Thirty-eight Japanese planes from Rabaul made an attack at around noon. Edson was visiting one of his units to tell the Marines what was at stake. If they failed to hold the ridge, he said, they would end up changing places with the Japanese, and would be reduced to eating lizards in the jungle.

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  1750

  The first thing Gene Hanson thought as they came in to land at Henderson Field was that it looked like a shallow bowl of black dust. The planes that had already landed were stirring up huge clouds of it as they taxied to the dispersal areas. Deep bomb crevices marked the edges of the runway like craters of the moon. Beyond the airfield, a grass field was littered with airplane wrecks.

  Bert Earnest only noticed the American plane that had just been shot down over the airfield as they were coming in. The Dauntless dive-bomber plowed into the trees near the runway and exploded in a fireball.

  As soon as they were on the ground, Marines came running up to tell them to get their gear out of the planes right away because they were expecting a shelling attack. Within a few minutes, they were walking toward a tent encampment concealed in a coconut grove north of the runway.

  Frank Balsley felt something odd beneath his feet as he walked across the dark, gritty soil. It took a few moments to realize what it was. The earth seemed to emanate heat, as if there were a volcano down below the surface, waiting to blow.

  The enlisted men were assigned tents, four to each one. A Marine showed them where to find the latrines and told them to familiarize themselves with the locations of the slit trenches around the camp before it got dark. When the shelling started, they needed to get to one right away.

  Aside from four cots and mosquito netting, the tents offered no other comforts of home. Balsley stowed his stuff under his cot. By the time he went back outside, it was getting dark. Within thirty minutes, it was almost pitch black.

  The officers were billeted in two-man tents. Bert Earnest was assigned to one with Jack Barnum. A big rat was waiting for them inside. The rat seemed to look at the tent as his assigned quarters and was in no hurry to vacate. Jack Barnu
m said he hated rats and asked Bert to get rid of it. When Bert advanced on the rat, it retreated under the back edge of the tent.

  The mess tent was supposedly near the beach area, and the pilots were about to go looking for it in the darkness when a Japanese scout plane droned over Henderson Field and began dropping flares.

  The sky was suddenly filled with light and sound as Japanese warships lying offshore began pounding the airfield and its surrounding installations with salvo after salvo of heavy gunfire.

  Frank Balsley lay in his slit trench and wondered how men got through something like this every night. Being shot at by a Zero was one thing. He could shoot back. But all he could do now was lie there in the hot dirt and hope that one of the shells didn’t land too close.

  The Battle of Edson’s Ridge, September 12–14, 1942

  Sunday, 13 September 1942

  Edson’s Ridge

  Guadalcanal

  2100

  In the middle of the shelling, Kawaguchi’s men came charging out of the darkness below Edson’s Ridge screaming, “BANZAI . . . BANZAI!” A few hundred yards to the north, Vandegrift listened to the growing crescendo of the battle and knew that this was no probing action. From the symphony of hand grenades, machine guns, automatic rifles, and mortar fire, he knew it was the all-out assault they had been waiting for since Edson found the supply dump at Tasimboko. Now it would come down to whether he had enough men to drive them back.

  A Raider company on one of the knolls of the ridgeline absorbed the brunt of the initial attack. They held. A second column of Japanese troops broke through a gap in the line and swung around to cut off a platoon. The Americans had to fight their way back along the ridge for more than two hundred yards to hook up with an-other unit. Edson began calling in artillery strikes, directing the fire closer and closer to his own lines to break the thrust of the Japanese assault.

  The strength of the attacks ebbed and flowed. During one lull at around 2300, Vandegrift’s staff felt confident they had won. Then Kawaguchi’s men came on again, fighting through the rain of artillery shells, taking over Marine foxholes, severing communications, and sowing confusion up and down the line.

  From their newly gained ground, the Japanese began pouring a barrage of mortar shells onto the ridge. One of the shells severed the telephone line between Edson and the artillery batteries that were delivering targeted fire.

  Another column of Japanese attackers came out of a smoke screen at the left end of Edson’s line, many of them shouting epithets in English. One screamed, “Fuck Babe Ruth!” The Marines answered in kind.

  The Japanese broke through the principal defensive line on Edson’s left, and drove a significant wedge through the right. After hours of constant pressure, the ever-thinning line of defenders on Edson’s left flank began retreating up the hill to make a last stand near one of the highest knolls along the ridge.

  Two platoons that were cut off in the center of the line withdrew as well. Under continuous fire, the Marines dug in at the top of the knoll. Their last line resembled the outer rim of a horseshoe.

  General Kawaguchi was within sight of victory. If he could drive the last group of Marines off the ridge, it was literally downhill the rest of the way to the airfield. Once he had it, Japanese troop planes were standing by to land at the field and solidify control.

  In their encampment within the coconut grove, the newly arrived pilots and crews of Torpedo Eight could feel the ground reverberate beneath their feet with each salvo of the Marines’ heavy artillery. The din was incredible.

  At one point, another gun battle flared up east of the coconut grove. It was one of Kawaguchi’s diversionary forces. The flight crews nervously wondered what to do if the Japanese broke through. Most of the pilots were carrying forty-fives but those wouldn’t be much use against grenades and machine guns.

  Shortly after midnight, they heard planes coming, and more flares went off over the airfield. The flight crews ran to reach the slit trenches as Japanese warships in Sealark Channel began another shelling attack.

  The battle went on all night. At its most critical juncture, with Edson’s men holding the last line on the knoll a half mile from Henderson Field, Vandegrift waited for the Japanese commander to deliver a coup de grâce. Victory or defeat hung in the balance. By then, his big howitzers had expended more than two thousand rounds of artillery shells on the Japanese positions and were running out of ammunition.

  But the final attack never came.

  One of Kawaguchi’s three battalions had been poised to attack on the left side of Edson’s line when the assault began. However, the battalion commander, Colonel Watanabe, became separated from his men in the jungle, and never arrived to lead them. Confused about their orders, his junior commanders remained unsure of where to go. Only a fraction of them got into the fight.

  After seven hours of combat, with much of the fighting hand-to-hand, the slowly diminishing noise of battle signaled to Vandegrift that it was finally over. The Japanese had attacked twelve times, and the Marines had held.

  At the pilots’ encampment north of Henderson Field, one of the newly arrived fliers encountered a Marine officer at the mess tent near the beach and asked, “Hey . . . is it like this every night around here?”

  Monday, 14 September 1942

  Edson’s Ridge

  Guadalcanal

  0700

  The Japanese lay everywhere in the kunai grass, hundreds of them in every pose of violent death, all the way from the knolls along the ridgeline down to the banks of the Lunga River. In a number of places, dead Japanese soldiers lay entwined with Marines.

  At the knoll where the Raiders had made their final stand, a large cluster of dead Marines lay together in a roughly parallel line along the crest. Below them lay the bodies of the Japanese who had almost made it to the top.

  In the morning, General Vandegrift was standing near his command post when three Japanese came charging out of the dense undergrowth. A Japanese officer rushed toward him waving a samurai sword. He was shot down after skewering one Marine.

  The first count of enemy dead exceeded six hundred. It was impossible to know how many more had been killed in the shelling of the jungle beyond the Lunga, or how many wounded survivors the Japanese had taken with them.

  The Marines had lost forty-nine killed, with more than two hundred wounded. The figure represented more than a third of the Raider battalion’s strength before the battle.

  In the brutal heat and humidity of Guadalcanal, it was necessary to get the bodies underground as quickly as possible. The American dead were gathered from all over the battlefield, brought to the cemetery, and buried under hand-lettered signs or simple wooden crosses. There was little time for ceremony.

  There was none for the Japanese. For most of the morning, bulldozers moved up and down the slope of the ridge. They scooped up the bodies, deposited them in freshly excavated trenches, and covered them with soil.

  Later that day, Torpedo Eight absorbed its first casualty on Guadalcanal. Swede had taken his Avengers up on two short flights to familiarize the pilots with the terrain of Guadalcanal and the surrounding islands. The flight didn’t encounter any enemy planes or ships. After landing back at Henderson Field, there was an air raid, and Tex Grady fell out the back of a truck, injuring his elbow and knee. He was evacuated the same day.

  Swede sent word to Espiritu Santo that he needed a replacement pilot for their sixth Avenger. That night, the pilots of Torpedo Eight sat in the darkness and listened to Gene Hanson’s portable radio, freshly charged with a supply of flashlight batteries he had remembered to bring with him from the Saratoga.

  The clearest station on the dial came from a Japanese radio network, and it featured the voice of the Japanese-American woman known as Tokyo Rose. Her soft mellifluous voice brought them the latest American swing bands. Between the musical selections, she talked seductively to the Americans serving across the Pacific. As Gene and the others listened, she made special mention
of the men “cut off on Guadalcanal,” and expressed her regret that they would soon be destroyed by the forces of the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy.

  On their first two nights, the pilots and crews hadn’t gotten much sleep. Their third night proved no different. They were lying in their tents under mosquito netting when enemy destroyers in Sealark Channel began lobbing shells into their positions again.

  Tuesday, 15 September 1942

  Truk Atoll

  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

  All through the night of September 13–14, the Japanese commanders on Rabaul waited for the radio message from Kawaguchi confirming he had captured the airfield. Reinforcements were standing by to occupy the field as soon as it came through.

  But the signal never came.

  On the morning of the fourteenth, they sent a reconnaissance flight over Guadalcanal to try to ascertain the results of the battle, but the planes were shot down, indicating that the airfield was still in American hands. On the morning of the fifteenth, the message finally came through from General Kawaguchi. He reported that he had failed to capture the airfield, and was temporarily retreating to regroup his forces.

  Within hours of receiving Kawaguchi’s report, Admiral Yamamoto issued new orders decreeing that the combined fleet’s principal objectives were to transport sufficient troops and artillery to take back Guadalcanal, and to destroy the American airpower there.

  He also approved plans to construct a new airfield at Buin on the southern tip of Japanese-held Bougainville. That would cut in half the distance his fighters and bombers had to fly between Rabaul and Guadalcanal. He ordered his 11th Air Fleet to commence large-scale air attacks on Henderson Field.

  The chastened Japanese army quickly followed suit. On the same day, they ordered the 2nd and 38th army divisions, totaling more than 17,000 troops, to embark for Guadalcanal with 170 artillery pieces.

  A month earlier, one fully equipped Japanese infantry division combined with heavy air and naval support would probably have been enough to retake the airfield. But now the Americans were being reinforced, too.