A Dawn Like Thunder

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Still following Hanson, he swung the plane into a tight turn and tore away from the enemy ship. In the turret, Frank Balsley made certain he strafed the decks of the ship with his fifty-caliber machine gun as it receded into the distance.

  Bert Earnest was looking back at the Japanese ship when he saw a torpedo explode against its port side. It was the first one he had seen actually detonate after striking the target.

  “It’s a hit,” someone yelled on the radio. “She’s coming to a stop.”

  Either Gene Hanson or Aaron Katz had put the torpedo into the ship, which was now dead in the water. To Aaron, it didn’t matter either way. He was just grateful that the plane’s oil pressure was holding steady.

  The six Avengers made it back to Henderson Field about an hour later.

  When they landed, Pete Peterkin checked out all of the planes with Chief Hammond. Five out of the six were in no condition to fly again, even by Swede’s standards. They had been hit with dozens of rounds of machine gun bullets, piercing the wings, fuselages, and internal systems. It had been a miracle no one was wounded. Katz’s plane was in the worst shape. His Avenger had absorbed a twenty-millimeter cannon round in the engine. It was still lodged inside.

  Swede came over to Hanson and Katz to confirm that one of their torpedoes had made the direct hit. It was impossible to know for sure which one it had been, he said, so they would share the credit in his report. He solemnly shook both their hands.

  1500

  Swede spent the rest of the day brooding before he finally exploded. The eruption came in the squadron’s ready tent on Pagoda Hill. Relaxing with the other pilots, Bert Earnest thought Larsen had gone nuts.

  “We’re going back for that cruiser,” he suddenly bellowed at them.

  After the ship had been torpedoed by Katz or Hanson, Swede had radioed the others that he wanted to stay and see it sink. Finally, Lieutenant Commander Kirn, who had been commanding the mission, told him it was time to go, particularly with so many of his planes shot up.

  “Sink, you bastard!” Swede had yelled into the radio.

  Back on the ground at Henderson Field, he couldn’t let it go. As the hours passed, the thought of the ship sitting up there with the Japanese probably working to save it pushed him over the edge.

  He angrily announced in the ready tent that they were going back up there to finish the job. Pete Peterkin was forced to tell him that five of the six Avengers were out of commission. Only one plane was in flying condition.

  Swede ordered it to be armed with a torpedo. Later in the afternoon, he heard that a flight of five P-39 Airacobra fighters and eleven dive-bombers was heading up the Groove in the same direction. Taking the one undamaged Avenger, Swede tagged along.

  When they arrived over the site of the morning attack, the warship was lying dead in the water exactly where Swede had left it. Three destroyers were circling the stricken vessel.

  Swede did not care about the other ships. He only wanted to finish the cruiser. He radioed a request to the leader of the five Airacobra fighters that they make a strafing run with their machine guns to suppress antiaircraft fire while he went in low to launch his torpedo.

  They were about to make a strafing run in support of the dive-bombers on one of the other ships, and moved off. Swede kept pleading on the radio for them to come back, but they never responded. As Swede angrily maneuvered his plane into position for the attack, he accidentally triggered the torpedo release, sending it harmlessly off in the wrong direction. It made him apoplectic.

  “The cruiser,” Swede called out to the dive-bombers. “Get the goddamn cruiser.”

  He watched as the rest of them pummeled one of the destroyers, which quickly sank. When Swede finally swung away to fly back to Guadalcanal, the ship was still floating calmly in the sea.

  In truth, the Japanese never had a chance of saving it, with or without Swede. They had simply been rescuing the crew before it sank. By the time Swede reached Henderson Field again, the ship was at the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound.

  The pilots in Torpedo Eight were convinced Swede had gone slaphappy.

  Divine Fire

  Tuesday, 13 October 1942

  Guadalcanal

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  No man who lived through the next twenty-four hours on Guadalcanal would ever forget them. The Japanese were prepared for the final showdown, and it started with another massive air strike on Henderson Field.

  The first wave of forty-two attack planes arrived from Rabaul at around midday as a newly arrived convoy of American transports was in the process of unloading men and materiel. At that moment, they could not have been more vulnerable to a bombing attack.

  The Japanese fighters and bombers ignored them.

  In preparing for the upcoming offensive, their orders were to make the airfield inoperable, and they did their best to accomplish the task, destroying a B-17 and damaging twelve other aircraft, including four of Swede’s Avengers, which were undergoing repairs. More important, one of the Japanese bombers made a direct hit on an aviation gas tank that held five thousand gallons of high-octane fuel. The resulting explosion could be heard over most of the island.

  The next wave of Japanese planes, thirty-two Zeroes and bombers, arrived two hours later, and added to the day’s damage total before returning to Rabaul. The Japanese lost only two Zeroes in the combined strikes.

  Something even more threatening to Vandegrift’s Marines was taking place at sea. A Dauntless dive-bomber flying a search pattern two hundred miles north of Cape Esperance came upon a large naval task force heading toward Guadalcanal. It was screened by eight destroyers. Behind the destroyers came six high-speed transports. The transports were carrying 4,500 Japanese troops, as well as more field guns, howitzers, tanks, antiaircraft guns, and ammunition.

  The balance of forces on Guadalcanal was reaching another critical stage.

  Pete Peterkin had been working all afternoon with Chief Hammond’s mechanics to repair the four Avengers from the first bombing attack. Pete had taken a break to eat the afternoon meal in the mess tent when he suddenly heard an explosion on the airfield.

  There were no planes overhead, and it was different than the loud crump of a bomb. He had plenty of experience with falling bombs. They made the earth tremble. This explosion didn’t. A few moments later, there was another sharp blast, followed by yet a third. This one was definitely closer.

  “Incoming artillery,” someone shouted and they all headed for a nearby slit trench.

  What Vandegrift feared most had come to pass. The Japanese had brought ashore 150-millimeter howitzers to shell Henderson Field, and the Marines had no long-range guns to hit back at them.

  Vandegrift thought the artillery barrage might portend a full-scale ground attack. As night fell, he ordered a general alert. Around the twelve-mile defensive perimeter, sweating Marines waited in the darkness.

  No attack came, but later that night a formation of Japanese aircraft came over, dropping bombs near the airfield and again sending the pilots and flight crews rushing to their foxholes. When the all-clear siren sounded, they wearily trudged back to their tents.

  At 0130, a red flare ignited in the sky over the western edge of Henderson Field. A few seconds later, a white flare went off over the Pagoda, followed by a green flare over the eastern end of the runway.

  The multicolored flares had been dropped by Japanese planes to provide the initial aiming points for the battleships steaming slowly down Sealark Channel less than a mile offshore. Admiral Yamamoto had sent two of the most powerful ships in the Japanese navy, the Kongo and the Haruna, both named after Japanese mountains, to eradicate the so-called Cactus Air Force once and for all.

  The worn-out pilots and crews in the coconut grove slept straight through the flares. Suddenly, star shells began bursting over the airfield, bathing the encampment in an eerie light. That woke them up fast.

  The star shells were followed by the first salvo of sixteen big guns from the b
attleships. Each of the gun barrels was fourteen inches in diameter. Each shell weighed more than thirteen hundred pounds.

  Once the bombardment was under way, Japanese artillery spotters on Mount Austen helped to direct their fire. With almost clinical precision, the two battleships began walking barrages back and forth across the runway and dispersal areas containing the American aircraft and their support facilities. They moved on to the personnel encampments concealed in the coconut groves.

  As Pete Peterkin heard the first salvo whistling toward them, he raced from his tent to an underground shelter. At least twenty men joined him there, including many of Torpedo Eight’s support personnel. The dugout was about sixteen feet square, with a sandbagged roof of tree trunks reinforced with iron pipes. Peterkin had felt safe there under the past shellings. Crouching next to the others, he sensed that this one was different.

  These explosions were of a totally different magnitude than what the men had become used to in the previous weeks. Like falling bombs, these shells not only made the ground tremble, but stirred the air in the dugout with black dust. In the past, the airfield had received the brunt of the shelling. These shells were hitting all over their encampment, too.

  He could hear loud crack-cracks as the tops of palm trees above the dugout were severed from their trunks. They fell to the ground with resounding thuds. The men around Peterkin remained silent for the first fifteen minutes. However, unlike past attacks, the earsplitting noise and constant ground tremors never stopped. After half an hour with no letup in the bombardment, several men began weeping uncontrollably. One became hysterical and had to be subdued.

  Bert Earnest had been lying in his tent when the first salvo of shells came in over the coconut grove. Glancing around in the sudden daylight, he saw Jack Barnum lying asleep in the other cot.

  As Bert watched, two rats leaped from the ground onto Jack’s cot and began frantically climbing his mosquito netting. Barnum, who hated rats, woke to them clawing wildly above his face and chest. Bert and Jack were both scrambling through the tent opening a few seconds later.

  Earlier that morning, Bert had observed one of the other officers digging a foxhole between their tents. As the man worked and sweated under the sun to shovel out the dry, dusty soil, Bert had laughed at him.

  Now he headed straight for the hole. He found it unoccupied, probably because it was still only half-finished. Nevertheless, the shallow hole looked incredibly inviting as the tops of the coconut palms in the encampment began snapping off above him, hurtling down like battering rams.

  When he landed stomach-first in the trench, he felt something squirm underneath him. It was another rat. He stood up long enough to hurl it away, and then dropped down again. Hugging the earth, he made himself as small as he could as the shells came thundering in like an approaching freight train. He could hear shrapnel splinters tearing through the cloth of the tent he had just vacated with Barnum.

  It was no different for the general commanding all of the forces on Guadalcanal. Vandegrift was now huddled belowground in his own foxhole across the airfield. The fourteen-inch shells played no favorites with rank or age. They dealt death wherever they landed.

  There was nothing Vandegrift could do but take it. He had no artillery that could reach the battleships and there were no American warships nearby to confront them at sea. Gerry Thomas was trying to make light of the situation, saying to Vandegrift at one point in the middle of a furious barrage, “I don’t know how you feel, but I think I prefer a good bombing.”

  “I think I do . . . ,” began Vandegrift, when the shrieking blast of a near direct hit drowned out all other sound. The concussion of the bursting shell knocked him off his feet, and he came to rest on the plank floor of the dugout, temporarily in shock.

  Major Gordon Bell, the commander of one of the Dauntless squadrons, was in a dugout close by when it took a direct hit. He was killed along with the rest of his senior officers.

  Fred Mears made it to his own foxhole before the first salvo hit. Wearing his blue-striped pajamas, he had also remembered to put on his steel helmet. There were already a number of men in the foxhole ahead of him, all pressed together as far away from the dugout’s opening as possible.

  Each salvo came over with its own shrieking scream. Looking up, he watched the sky above him turn garish orange as the shells exploded. The ensuing cracks of thunder sent shrapnel flying in every direction. Above the raw smell of newly dug earth, the distinctive odor of cordite filled his nose.

  After one of the shells detonated close to their foxhole, he could feel the man crouched next to him begin to shake. It was contagious. At the far end of the dugout, another man was trying to burrow under the men next to him.

  One of the squadron’s chief petty officers was sharing Fred’s hole. With each mind-boggling roar of sound, he kept calmly repeating the same three lines over and over.

  “Hell’s fire,” he would say first. “Holy balls” would follow the next burst. “A red-ass mule” was his finisher.

  Bob Ries was squatting near Fred. When they caught each other’s eyes, one of them started giggling. The other joined in, unable to help himself. At one point, Ries was brazen enough to say, “Don’t worry, they haven’t got our range yet.” A few moments later, a coconut palm fell on the entrance to the dugout with a crash.

  Forty-five minutes after it began, the shelling came to a sudden stop.

  Fred warily crawled out of his hole to see a landscape that was dramatically altered. Most of their tents were gone, and the ground was covered with a thick layer of palm fronds from the shattered trees that had once towered over them. The reek of cordite was almost overpowering.

  Beyond the coconut grove, fires were raging all over the airfield. An exploding ammunition depot set off a spectacular light-and-sound show all on its own. Airplanes were blazing like torches at their dispersal points, and the flames from burning aviation gas reached hundreds of feet into the air.

  Fred heard an engine start. Across the encampment, he saw some men climbing into the back of a truck. Calling out to Ries, he started running toward it. Judge Wendt, who had been wounded in the back by flying shrapnel, managed to climb aboard along with Bert Earnest, Aaron Katz, and Gene Hanson.

  Dozens of men were converging on the truck from all directions, including Pete Peterkin and the men from his dugout. The driver told them he was going to try to make it to the beach, where there were several well-protected air-raid bunkers.

  Thirty or forty men were already crammed into the back of the truck’s freight bed. At least that many were still trying to crawl aboard, climbing on top of the layers of men already there.

  Another pinwheel star shell suddenly lit up the sky over their heads. The two Japanese battleships had only stopped firing long enough to turn around before coming back up Sealark Channel to deliver the second round.

  Men were screaming to make more room in the truck as they frantically tried to claw a place aboard. By then, others were clinging to the roof of the cab and the front hood.

  Machinist’s Mate Bill Magee had seen that it was useless to try to get in the back. He draped himself over the left front fender, with his face pressed against the engine cowling, and his hands clutching the front bumper. Maybe this is dumb, he thought as he hung there. What if the driver hits a tree?

  Frank Balsley was hanging on to the side of the truck’s freight bed when the driver put the transmission in gear and began driving down the rough, debris-strewn road toward the beach. Men who couldn’t find places on the truck ran after it, begging him to stop. Their voices could barely be heard over the deafening noise of the shells.

  For Fred Mears, it was the wildest ride of his life, at least sober. The driver couldn’t use his lights for fear of attracting shell fire, but he was soon doing forty miles an hour. The truck careened along the rough track, pitching and rolling with its wriggling cargo like a boat in a heaving sea.

  As they neared the beach, the men at the top of the pile look
ed out across Sealark Channel to see the Japanese battleships as their blazing gun batteries unleashed another barrage.

  When the truck came to a stop, the men began running toward the shelters on the beach. Gene Hanson saw what looked like a welcoming underground pit, and leaped into it along with several other men. It took them only moments to realize it was a latrine. They weren’t complaining.

  At around 0300, the shelling finally came to a stop.

  The battleships had launched 973 rounds of fourteen-inch cannon shells into the American positions. Rarely in the history of warfare had so much naval gunfire been concentrated into so small an area over so short a time. Looking down from Mount Austen on the flaming conflagration, Japanese artillery spotters joyfully radioed that they were looking at “a sea of fire.”

  The Japanese weren’t finished. For the rest of that night, enemy bombers came over in small clusters to bomb targets lit by the fires that burned out of control on the airfield.

  At 0530, the big Japanese howitzers opened up again on Henderson Field from their positions west of the Matanikau River. With everything they had already gone through, most of the pilots and crews slept straight through it in their bunkers and foxholes.

  At dawn, a weary Fred Mears emerged from one of the shelters on the beach wearing his filthy blue pajamas and steel helmet. Aaron Katz had a raincoat on with nothing underneath.

  The truck that had brought them down to the beach pulled up an hour later and unloaded two jerry cans filled with hot, sweetened coffee. It tasted better than any java Fred had ever enjoyed in the finest homes of New Haven, San Francisco, or Seattle.

  Wednesday, 14 October 1942

  Guadalcanal

  Torpedo Squadron Eight

  The dog-tired pilots and crews of Torpedo Eight returned to their encampment in the coconut grove to find that little had survived the shelling undamaged. The once soaring palm trees above their tents had been cut off at a height of about thirty feet. The palm boughs that had provided them with shade from the sweltering sun now littered the compound.