A Dawn Like Thunder
Page 36
Things were no less dramatic up at Major Mahoney’s camp to the south of the field. At supper, Mahoney predicted that the all-out Japanese offensive would begin in a few days. There was no telling from which direction the Japanese might launch their assault, although it would definitely be delivered at night. General Vandegrift believed it would come from the west beyond the Matanikau River, where he thought the Japanese were mostly concentrated, but there was a chance Mahoney’s unit might see action along their own southerly positions. Mahoney’s only concern was that the defense line on the southern perimeter was stretched thin.
Torpedo Eight would do its share, Swede told him.
Early the next morning, he ordered the squadron’s enlisted men to begin preparing foxholes along the Marine defensive line. When they finished digging the holes, he told them to bring up the thirty-caliber machine guns from the wrecked Avengers. Those would definitely give them a good edge.
Gene Hanson expressed the concern that all their machine gun ammunition had tracer rounds in its belts for use in aerial combat. Firing from their foxholes would immediately give away their positions. Swede told him not to worry about it.
Wednesday, 21 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Japanese Sendai Division
General Masao Maruyama
The Japanese were now poised to unleash their most ambitious attempt yet to retake Guadalcanal. Fully committed to the undertaking for the first time, the Japanese Imperial Army had chosen the Sendai Division to make the principal assault against the American Marines.
Also called the “Courageous Division,” it had been trained under the stern, unyielding commander, General Masao Maruyama. One of the most storied units in the army, the Sendai Division had been formed in 1871. It had fought well in the Russo-Japanese War, and more recently in Manchuria and the Dutch East Indies. Maruyama’s men had been trained to deal with privation, and particularly excelled at night fighting.
The division had been delivered at night by the destroyers and transports of the Tokyo Express. As they regrouped ashore, General Maruyama became concerned that they would be infected by what he viewed as the sense of defeatism displayed by the troops already there. “Do not expect to return to the homeland,” he told them, “unless you are victorious.”
On October 11, two of his division’s staff officers were reconnoitering the American defense perimeter from the foothills of Mount Austen and spotted what they believed were undefended positions to the south of the airfield. The positions were almost directly in line with the ridges occupied by Major Mahoney’s special weapons unit and other elements of the 7th Marines.
The observations of the Japanese staff officers led to a plan that called for a surprise night attack from the south. Nine battalions of the Sendai Division would roll over the lightly defended sectors near the Lunga River and then drive for the airfield. All they needed to do was capture it, after which reinforcements would immediately be flown in to consolidate their bridgehead.
Surprise was the key to the strategy, and so far, they had managed to achieve it. Their engineers had constructed a road through the jungle that would allow the Sendai Division to reach its staging area by October 22. In anticipation of the road’s historic importance in the pantheon of great Japanese victories, it was named Maruyama Road after the division’s commander.
General Harukichi Hyakutake, the newly arrived overall Japanese commander on Guadalcanal, issued an announcement. “The time of the decisive battle between Japan and the United States has come.” His staff began to make preparations for accepting the American surrender.
By the twenty-first, the Japanese had amassed more than seventeen thousand troops on Guadalcanal for their final drive to retake the airfield. Although outnumbered by the more than twenty-two thousand Marines, they rivaled the Americans in effective strength. The freshly arrived Sendai Division was ready to go forward with unmatched zeal.
Vandegrift’s Marines were not filled with unmatched zeal. Most of them had been on the island for two and a half months. They had fought two major battles and dozens of firefights and skirmishes in the sweltering heat and the putrid jungle. They had been subjected to constant shelling and aerial bombardment, poor food, bad water, jungle rot, dysentery, rat bites, snake bites, leeches, and trench foot. Many had refused to take Atabrine to prevent malaria because of rumors that the pills might make them sterile. Now many of them had contracted malaria.
The Japanese had another advantage. In addition to their massive infusion of troops, their navy had provided them with scores of field guns, 150-millimeter howitzers, heavy machine guns, heavy tanks, light tanks, and nearly two hundred tons of food, ammunition, and other supplies.
Most important, at the point of attack in their major ground assault, they would outnumber the Marines by a margin of about four to one.
Thursday, 22 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
1350
Swede and his metal Frankenstein were ready for the squadron’s first mission since October 12. In the previous week, the number of flyable Wildcat fighters had dropped to seventeen, and the Cactus Air Force was increasingly desperate for replacements.
Swede’s Avenger had been loaded with twelve one-hundred-pound bombs, and the air staff had given Swede the coordinates of several suspected Japanese concentrations near Henderson Field.
Shortly after 1400, he accelerated down the runway and took off into a clear sky. From the air, the field was like an oasis in a sea of enemy-held jungle. One minute’s flying time in any direction took them over Japanese positions.
Swede’s turret gunner, Judge Wendt, looked for possible targets as they flew over the thick jungle canopy at an altitude of eight hundred feet. Wendt knew they had found a good place to bomb when antiaircraft fire began putting holes in the Avenger’s newly replaced wing.
Swede swung around for a glide-bombing attack and then delivered a full salvo of twelve bombs on the spot where Judge Wendt had told him he had seen the enemy gun position. The resulting explosion set off several fires.
When they returned to the fighter strip, Chief Hammond expressed his worry about the shrapnel damage to the new wing structure. The wires and cables were all chewed up inside, he said. “Just make it fly,” Swede told him.
By the time the Avenger had been loaded with another complement of bombs, Japanese artillery pieces had again begun raining shells down on the airfield, and flight operations were suspended.
Swede’s next mission would have to wait until morning.
Japanese Sendai Division
General Masao Maruyama
Maruyama had hoped to be in a position to launch his attack at precisely 1800 on the twenty-second, but his troops had become bogged down on the Maruyama Road over the previous four days. Calling it a “road” was a bitter exaggeration for the men who had to contend with its eighteen-mile length to the staging area. The road was nothing more than a narrow trail cut through jungle, swamps, and deep ravines, and barely wide enough for a man carrying a pack.
General Maruyama had decided he needed artillery support for his assault, and his staff ordered the men to dismantle the guns and hand carry them to the staging area. General Kawaguchi, who now commanded the right wing of Maruyama’s force, found that he was encountering exactly the same difficulties that had led up to his own defeat on Edson’s Ridge a month earlier. He did not want to be part of another defeat, and began expressing his concerns about the assault plan.
By the time Maruyama’s men reached the staging areas for the assault, it was already evening, and too late for them to make a coordinated attack. Recognizing that he needed more time to properly organize the two wings of his force, General Maruyama postponed his assault until the following night.
Friday, 23 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
At dawn, the Japanese resumed their artillery bombardment of Henderson Field. Later that morning, a flight of
American transports was expected to arrive carrying critically needed spare parts from Espiritu Santo. Swede was asked to try to suppress the artillery fire by bombing a few of the closest Japanese positions.
Pete Peterkin watched him take off from the fighter strip. The Japanese were so close to the field by then that he could visually follow the plane through its entire flight. After lifting off, Swede headed west toward the Matanikau River. Making a slow circle, he came back and dropped a full salvo of bombs. Peterkin watched a flock of white birds suddenly soar up from the jungle canopy to escape the exploding havoc. The Avenger was back on the fighter strip in less than fifteen minutes. The American transport planes arrived safely shortly afterward.
At 1130, nearly fifty Japanese fighters and bombers arrived to attack the airfield, and thirty-two fighters went up to do battle with them. Seven enemy planes were shot down.
When the sky was clear again, Swede took off to go after other Japanese artillery positions near the Matanikau River. For this mission, he had been given specific map coordinates by the operations staff. He attempted to put the bombs directly on the assigned targets.
Going in on the first attack, the Avenger attracted heavy ground fire, but made it through unscathed. Swede dropped two bombs and then accelerated away as Judge Wendt strafed the position. On their second pass, the antiaircraft fire was more accurate. Judge Wendt felt the plane shudder as it took hits from one of the antiaircraft batteries. When Swede dropped his second salvo, there was a massive secondary explosion. At the same time, Wendt felt a searing pain down his arm from a shrapnel wound.
Judge radioed on the intercom that he had been hit and Swede flew straight for the runway. After Wendt had been taken to the hospital tent, Chief Hammond warned Swede that with the additional shrapnel damage to the wing, the plane should be grounded. Swede ordered it fueled and rearmed for the next mission.
Japanese Sendai Division
General Masao Maruyama
The ongoing Japanese artillery bombardment from west of the Matanikau River had finally convinced Vandegrift’s staff that it was from the west that the Japanese would launch their major ground assault. As the bombardment continued, however, the Sendai Division was actually far to the south of Henderson Field.
Surprise would have been complete, but Maruyama’s plan had hit a snag. When his advance units had arrived at the staging area the previous night, they had been told the American lines were only four miles away.
In the light of day, it became obvious this wasn’t the case. General Kawaguchi’s men were mired in trackless jungle. A scout informed him they were actually eight miles from the American perimeter.
Early in the afternoon, Kawaguchi informed Maruyama that only one of his three battalions would be in position to attack that evening. Maruyama ordered him not to deviate from his original plan. When Kawaguchi protested that he couldn’t adhere to the plan, Maruyama removed him from command.
The Americans still had no idea that the Sendai Division was there. The almost impenetrable jungle canopy prevented observation by spotter planes. As the afternoon dragged on, the Japanese continued slogging north toward the American lines.
Torpedo Squadron Eight
1500
Gene Hanson volunteered to fly the next mission against the Japanese positions west of the Matanikau. To acquaint himself with the idiosyncrasies of Hammond’s patchwork plane, he flew it out over the jungle for a few minutes without drawing any fire.
Back on the ground, Hanson said he was comfortable with the plane’s handling ability. Judge Wendt was back from the hospital with a bandaged arm, and wanted to go out again. Wendt was the best gunner in the squadron, and Gene said he was grateful to have him.
American ground spotters had located a Japanese artillery battery, and provided the map coordinates. In the air, Gene went up to a thousand feet and closed on the target. He released the bombs squarely over the battery and returned without receiving any damage.
Japanese Sendai Division
General Masao Maruyama
1700
The Japanese ruse to persuade the Americans that their main assault would come along the Matanikau was still working perfectly. Vandegrift’s staff had begun moving men and guns from other parts of the line to face the assault when it came. When they were finished, nine artillery batteries faced west, and the Marine defensive line there had been strongly reinforced.
Those same decisions left the southern perimeter weakened. Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Puller would be defending a line almost one and a half miles long with just his 1st battalion of the 7th Marines. The line ran roughly east to west, and traversed open fields separated by deep ravines and dense jungle. It was anchored near the Lunga River by Edson’s Ridge, where Kawaguchi’s force had been defeated a month earlier.
The sun was setting in the jungle to the south of Edson’s Ridge when Colonel Shoji, the officer who had replaced Kawaguchi, was forced to send a message to General Maruyama that his right wing was still not prepared to make the attack that night.
An enraged Maruyama briefly considered his options before finally recognizing he had none. At 1715, he once more postponed the main assault until the following night. He also issued orders to postpone the two diversionary attacks along the Matanikau River that were timed to begin at the same hour as the Sendai’s assault. Unfortunately, those orders did not reach the units involved.
The attacks went forward after another artillery bombardment on the Marine positions east of the Matanikau. Vandegrift’s new operations officer, Colonel Merrill Twining, concluded, “It looks like this is the night.”
From out of the jungle west of the Matanikau, two waves of Japanese tanks rumbled forward followed by Japanese infantry. The Marines waited for them in their positions east of the river.
Torpedo Squadron Eight
1835
The mounting roar of massed artillery, tank, and mortar fire reached the pilots at Henderson Field. Gene Hanson was waiting by the Avenger when Swede received the orders to bomb and strafe the enemy forces surging across the Matanikau near Point Cruz.
Gene volunteered to go up. Judge Wendt’s arm wound had sent him back to the infirmary, and Rube Francis said he would replace him. Jim McNamara manned the tail gun.
Hanson was going through his final flight check in the cockpit when he glanced up and saw Swede standing on the wing. Swede hadn’t said anything to him, or made any move to come over. It struck Gene as odd, but he was too busy to ask.
In fact, Swede had just said good-bye to Major Michael Mahoney after strapping him into the second seat. Mahoney thought he could provide important intelligence to General Vandegrift’s staff if he had a chance to observe the enemy force dispositions from the air with his own trained eye. Swede had given him permission to go. He didn’t inform Gene. As far as Hanson knew, he and his two crew members were the only ones aboard.
Taxiing onto the runway, Hanson shoved the throttle open and headed down the flight path. As he was pulling back on the control stick to lift off, an artillery round exploded on the runway to the left of the plane, shaking it hard before Gene got it in the air.
The Avenger had been armed with twelve one-hundred-pound bombs, and as Hanson approached the target area near Point Purvis, he remembered General Geiger’s warning that it was idiocy to make individual bomb runs against well-defended targets. Gene planned to salvo all of them where they would do the most good, and live to fight another day.
Arriving over Point Purvis, however, he saw good targets just about everywhere. To the right, Japanese tanks were on the move, firing their guns into the Marine defense line. Beyond the tanks, he saw infantry coming on. To the left, he could see exposed Japanese artillery batteries near the river. He decided to drop his twelve bombs one by one.
The plane started taking fire as soon as Gene headed down. He was at eight hundred feet when he released the first bomb on a cluster of Japanese troops heading toward the American line. Regaining altitude, he saw a heavy fie
ld gun open up and headed straight for it, dropping his second bomb. He kept turning in tight circles to drop his bombs where they would help break the momentum of the Japanese attack.
Rube Francis called him on the intercom to say they had taken a bunch of hits in the fuselage, but there was no serious damage yet, and he and McNamara were getting in good strafing runs.
Gene had swung around to make his seventh pass when a burst of flame erupted in the nose of the plane. The engine immediately began to lose power. A few seconds later, it burst into flames. He could feel the growing intensity of the heat in the cockpit as fire licked toward him.
The Avenger was rapidly losing forward thrust. Gene needed to get clear of the battleground before they went in. Looking down, he saw he was near the neck of Point Cruz and turned to swing out over Sealark Channel.
He was turning to come back in for an emergency landing when the engine suddenly died, and the plane began to drop like a deadweight toward the sea. He tried to keep the nose up as they went in.
A shell blast had dislodged the left wheel from its compartment, and when they hit the sea, the Avenger flipped over onto its back. Submerged underwater, Hanson struggled to unstrap himself and fight his way to the surface.
He came out of the water to see Rube Francis and Jim McNamara floating nearby. He didn’t understand why they both began diving under the fuselage as the Avenger sank beneath the surface.
After the plane disappeared, Francis told him that Major Mahoney had been in the second seat. He had probably been knocked unconscious in the crash landing. Unlike the flight crew, he had no training in how to survive a rough ditching.
The three of them treaded water for several minutes, but Mahoney never came up. Hanson was distraught at the thought of the major dying in his plane without his even knowing he was there. He wondered what he might have done differently if he had known. Why hadn’t Swede told him?
It started to rain, a light drizzle that soon became a torrential downpour as they slowly swam toward shore. By the time they neared the beach, it was pitch dark. Gene had no idea which forces held the section of shoreline they were approaching. Hearing American voices on the beach, Gene took the chance of yelling out, “What’s the password?”