“Lucky strike,” came back a low voice. It was the correct password.
Back at Henderson Field, Pete Peterkin knew something had gone wrong when darkness fell and the plane didn’t return. He went to the operations tent and was told that three airmen had crashed in the sea and were on their way to the hospital.
When Pete got there, Gene and his crew had just arrived. In the lantern light, Francis and McNamara looked all right to Peterkin, but Hanson seemed to be in shock. He couldn’t stop talking about the fact that Mahoney had been in the plane and was still down there now.
Peterkin took them back to camp in a jeep he had borrowed. It was raining so hard that the airfield had flooded, and the jeep kept sinking up to its wheel base in the lower sections of the path.
The airfield was still being shelled, and Pete had to cross it to get to Mahoney’s camp. He was circling the field when the jeep broke down in a flooded gulley. They abandoned it and went forward on foot.
Arriving at the camp, Peterkin told Captain Lew Aronson, Mahoney’s executive officer, that Mahoney was dead. The news spread quickly, and cast an immediate pall on the whole company. Mahoney’s men had admired him as Torpedo Eight had once revered John Waldron. Gene was worried that some of the Marines would harbor hard feelings toward him, but no one said anything.
They could still hear the sound of Japanese artillery fire. Captain Aronson told them that all the battle action was taking place along the Matanikau, but to be on their guard because snipers had infiltrated the southern perimeter.
Later that night, the rain finally stopped, and a pale moon came out. Fred Mears and Aaron Katz were trying to sleep through the bark of distant artillery and machine gun fire when someone slipped inside their tent.
“Sir, I think there’s a sniper outside,” a Marine whispered.
Fred grabbed his forty-five, pulled back the slide, and cocked it. Putting on his steel helmet, he slowly crept toward the tent opening, and crouched down to see what was happening outside.
He couldn’t see anything beyond the cluster of tents, but could easily imagine a sniper in the trees above him. Suddenly, a loud shot went off within a few feet of his ear. It was the young Marine who had given him the whispered warning, apparently firing at a Japanese sniper.
Turning around, Fred saw Aaron Katz moving behind him in the shadows of the tent, pointing his own cocked pistol in Fred’s direction. It wasn’t enough to have snipers inside the perimeter. Now his tent mate was aiming at him. He suddenly got mad.
“Goddamn it, Katz, put that pistol away or I’ll blow your head off!” he snarled.
Outside, cooler heads prevailed along the perimeter line. Orders were given to refrain from firing unless the shooter was certain that the target he was shooting at was an enemy soldier.
Saturday, 24 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
In the morning, Swede demanded that Chief Hammond make him another Avenger. Hammond said he couldn’t promise anything, but would get his mechanics to work on the remaining hulks in the boneyard.
Gathering the rest of the men together, Swede announced that Torpedo Eight would now do its fighting on the ground. The word was that there would be an even bigger push along the Matanikau River that night. Although Torpedo Eight was in a rearguard position, he warned them that anything could happen, and they needed to be ready.
After breakfast, he led them down to the front lines of the Marine perimeter. Dividing them into groups, he assigned the men foxholes that had been prepared under the direction of one of Major Mahoney’s platoon officers earlier in the week.
Their section of the line had been dubbed “Bloody Knoll” after the September battles. Torpedo Eight’s foxholes were dug into the side of a ridge that looked down into a ravine covered with solid undergrowth. Beyond the ravine was an almost endless vista of thick jungle.
Swede decided that some of the men hadn’t dug their holes deep enough, and ordered them to go deeper. He then had the squadron’s thirty-caliber machine guns placed between sandbags in the forward foxholes. Finally, he inspected the firing positions, making sure every man had a Springfield rifle with plenty of ammunition and a small supply of hand grenades.
More than one of the pilots wasn’t thrilled with the idea of fighting the Japanese from foxholes. Their job was to fly airplanes. They had already begun to question why Swede was keeping them there when there had been only one plane to fly, and that one for only two days since the big shelling attack.
Now there were no planes at all, and Swede had not asked to be relieved. Instead, he had them digging foxholes. They were pilots, not badgers. They had not been trained for this kind of combat. The Navy pilots could no more go hand-to-hand against a Japanese soldier than a Marine could climb into the cockpit of an Avenger and launch a torpedo into the side of an enemy warship. With no planes to fly, the obvious answer was for them to go where there were some.
Some of the enlisted men in the squadron were no happier about the idea than the officers. They were mechanics, machinist’s mates, radiomen, and metalsmiths. A number of them had never fired a rifle, much less tossed a hand grenade.
Now they were part of Swede’s private army, one grumbled. None of the complaints mattered. Swede was in command of the squadron, and he said they were going to fight.
As darkness fell, the men had their second meal of the day before heading out to their foxholes. Pete Peterkin was sharing one with Chief Hammond. It had begun to rain again, and Hammond was resourceful enough to have fashioned a roof shelter out of a ground tarp supported by wooden stakes. Others just hunkered down in their ponchos and let the rain drub on their helmets.
As uncomfortable as he was in a water-filled foxhole, Fred Mears concluded that it was probably a lot worse for the enemy soldiers slogging through the jungle. He didn’t have long to find out.
Lieutenant Colonel Puller, commanding the southern perimeter, was standing in his command shelter when a Marine sergeant in an advance outpost beyond the perimeter whispered through his field phone that he was surrounded by thousands of Japanese soldiers, and that they were heading Puller’s way.
Minutes later, the main assault by five thousand soldiers of the emperor’s Sendai Division was launched against a line held by the seven hundred men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, and anchored at Bloody Knoll by the thirty-one naval personnel commanded by Lieutenant Swede Larsen.
Infiltrating the Marine positions, teams of Japanese sappers began cutting the barbed wire in Puller’s front. Puller grabbed his field phone and ordered, “Commence firing.”
The rain-filled black sky suddenly turned bright with the explosion of flares, mortars, machine guns, and grenades. Under the brief glow of the flares, the Marines could see hundreds of Japanese coming out of the jungle on the run, most of them attacking near the center of Puller’s line.
The line might have been thin, but it was embedded with nests of machine guns, sixty-millimeter mortars, antitank guns, and Browning automatic rifles. Puller’s machine gunners kept firing belt after belt of ammunition as the waves of Japanese troops charged toward them. The fury of one attack would end with a stack of bodies in front of their positions. Before they could drag them away to clear their field of fire, the next wave would be coming on.
The Marines fired mortar rounds as fast as they could load them to break the momentum of the Sendai charges. Yet, the disciplined Japanese kept coming, hurling hand grenades and shouting epithets as they fought their way toward the defensive line and pushed it back up the ridge.
At the far end of the line near Bloody Knoll, Gene Hanson heard the dull explosions of mortars and hand grenades, followed by the rattle of automatic weapons as the Japanese launched their assault. He and the others watched the dark sky light up to the east of them like a Fourth of July fireworks display.
He wondered how they would do if the Japanese attack came their way. Wiley Bartlett was wondering the same thing. Half-Cherokee and
from Lenox, Alabama, he had earned a reputation as one of the most gifted machine gunners in the squadron. The Marines had strung a single strand of barbed wire in front of his position, and he didn’t think it would stop a billy goat, much less a Japanese soldier.
As the fighting continued unabated, Lieutenant Colonel Puller received a call on his field phone from Colonel Arthur Sims, his regimental commander, demanding to know what was going on. Sims was immediately skeptical that Puller’s battalion was being hit by anything more than a diversionary attack, and still convinced that the main assault would be coming from the west along the Matanikau.
“If you want to find out what’s going on, come and see,” Puller growled into the field phone.
By then, dozens of Japanese had penetrated the defense line, one of them planting a Japanese flag inside the perimeter. Puller called an artillery position in the rear on his field phone and asked for fire support.
“If they get through here tonight there won’t be a tomorrow,” said Puller as the attack waves kept coming out of the jungle to the left and center of his line. The artillery commander promised him everything he could deliver.
As the firing got increasingly louder, it became obvious to Gene Hanson that the enemy attack was moving in their direction. A few minutes later, the men in the forward foxholes began pouring fire down into the ravine below them.
The attacks kept coming all night long. At one point, Puller was grateful to receive reinforcement from a green Army unit, the 3rd Battalion, 164th Infantry, that had just arrived at Guadalcanal. Puller fed them piecemeal into his most depleted positions. They made a difference.
Shortly before dawn, the attacks finally came to an end.
The Japanese had driven a lodgment into Puller’s line that was more than a hundred yards deep and two hundred yards wide, but at terrible cost. In the first sickly light of day, Puller’s Marines looked out on the narrow expanse leading down to the edge of the jungle and saw the Japanese dead lying as if in windrows, a thousand of them, maybe more. More than two dozen Marines had paid the ultimate price to stop them.
Japanese snipers had worked their way through the holes in the line, and were now settled into hiding places in the trees and undergrowth, waiting for the opportunity to kill as many Marines as possible.
Sunday, 25 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
As coffee was being carried in jerry cans to the foxholes, a few of the enlisted men in Torpedo Eight took their Springfields down into the ravine below their position. They found the bodies of several Japanese soldiers. There were blood trails leading back toward the jungle.
Pete Peterkin didn’t know who was responsible for killing the Japanese attackers, but he was proud of the way the men had kept their heads. After a breakfast of K rations in their foxholes, Captain Aronson informed the squadron that there would probably be another attack along the perimeter that night.
Swede told Peterkin and Hammond to take his mechanics down to Henderson Field to begin work on his new plane, and to be back before dark. Fred Mears went with them.
At 0800, a twin-engine Japanese plane came into Henderson Field as if it was planning to land, and was shot down by Marine machine gunners. Inside the aircraft, the Marines found several dead Japanese officers in dress uniforms.
Apparently, a Japanese radio operator on Guadalcanal had erroneously relayed a message to Rabaul that the Sendai Division had captured the airfield. The officers in the plane had been part of the advance guard that had been sent down to officially congratulate Maruyama on his success.
But Maruyama’s men had not captured Henderson Field, and that fact became quickly apparent to the first wave of Japanese planes, which had expected to find Japanese flags welcoming their arrival. Instead, they faced withering antiaircraft fire.
They immediately radioed back to Rabaul that the field was still in American hands. The additional troop deployments planned by the high command were temporarily canceled, although the Japanese navy’s carrier planes were ordered to continue strafing and bombing the American positions in preparation for the next attack by the Sendai Division.
When Fred reached the airfield it was quickly apparent to him that Japanese carriers had to be close by, because he had never seen so many Zeroes before. When one wave would finish strafing and move off, another was coming in to hit the American positions.
He was standing in an antiaircraft position near the field when a group of Japanese dive-bombers arrived. A young Marine holding two forty-five-caliber Colt pistols was standing alongside him when one of the dive-bombers nosed over to make its run. In apparent support of the antiaircraft guns, the boy raised his pistols and opened fire, blazing away with both barrels as the plane came hurtling down at them.
As the pilot pulled out of his dive and tore away, the young Ma-rine swung the forty-fives across Fred’s chest, and continued firing past his right ear. Fred decided it was safer back in his foxhole on Bloody Knoll.
Kept idle by the daylong strafing and bombing attacks, Peterkin and Hammond had been unable to continue work on the plane, and went back, too. While they had been down at the field, Roy Williams, a Torpedo Eight ordnanceman from Texas, had shot and killed a Japanese sniper in a coconut palm near their position. As darkness fell, Swede sent the men back into their foxholes.
Farther down the line, Lieutenant Colonel Puller’s Marine battalion, now reinforced by the 2nd Battalion, 164th Infantry, waited in the darkness for the Sendai Division to make its next move.
The Japanese had one more surprise in store. Instead of immediately launching the attack by the Sendai, they commenced another artillery bombardment along the Matanikau River, where Van-degrift had initially expected their major assault to take place.
A few minutes after that bombardment began, a separate barrage of artillery fire exploded along the southern perimeter. With Japanese heavy machine guns providing additional covering fire, the Sendai Division charged out of the jungle to launch its second assault.
Again, they came in waves, some with as few as twenty-five men, others with more than two hundred. With dogged determination, they hurled themselves at the reinforced positions in a desperate attempt to break through to the airfield.
As the Sendai Division attacked from the south, Japanese troops also charged the western perimeter at the Matanikau, taking an important section of high ground before being dislodged in a counterattack.
But as on the previous night, Japanese bravery and discipline were no match for presighted mortar positions, well-spotted heavy artillery, intersecting machine gun fire, and thirty-seven-millimeter field guns.
Once again, small groups of Japanese soldiers succeeded in penetrating the perimeter, attempting to outflank the defensive positions, but they were too few to break through to the airfield. Near dawn, the Japanese began to withdraw.
Monday, 26 October 1942
Guadalcanal
Torpedo Squadron Eight
There was no doubt about the margin of the previous night’s victory. It could be found on the blades of the bulldozers that scooped up more than two thousand rapidly decomposing bodies along the perimeter before burying them in mass graves.
Swede pulled Torpedo Eight out of the line later that morning. Some of them hadn’t left their foxholes for two days except to relieve themselves. They hadn’t fought off the main attack of the Sendai Division, but they had held the section of the line assigned to them. Pete Peterkin told them it was the first time an American carrier squadron had ever fought on a front line against an attacking enemy.
By then, the sailors even looked like Marines. Their original clothing was long gone, either shredded in the October 13 shelling or rotted from mildew and dampness after six weeks on the island. Most of them wore Marine-issue dungarees.
And like the Marines, their clammy faces were yellowed with Atabrine, they had ringworm and dysentery, and their nostrils were full of the stench of rotting Japanese corpses. The
y were jaundiced, bone-weary, and fed up with Guadalcanal after weeks of combat action in the air, followed by the daily bombings and shellings on the ground.
Fred Mears yearned for the simple release of a good night’s sleep, devoid of the sound of machine guns and artillery fire, a sleep undisturbed by the knowledge that thousands of men out in the jungle were planning to kill him.
With no planes left to fly, Bert Earnest, Fred Mears, Gene Hanson, and Aaron Katz were in full agreement. It was time to go. They wouldn’t have another serviceable aircraft to fly until Chief Hammond and his mechanics built one. If they even could. One plane for five pilots. It made no sense.
Truk Atoll
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
Yamamoto was undeterred. He had attended the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard University. Yamamoto loved baseball and American movies, particularly westerns. He knew all about cowboys and Indians.
When he committed his forces to retaking the airfield at Guadalcanal, it was because he was convinced the American Navy would try to dash to the rescue, much like the cavalry riding to save the settlers. Instead of the cavalry, he believed they would send their carriers.
Whoever controlled the air and sea-lanes would eventually win the battle. Yamamoto now planned his own ambush. Lying in wait for the Americans would be four Japanese aircraft carriers, two battleships, ten cruisers, and more than twenty destroyers.
For Admiral Nimitz, the key to defeating the Japanese in the Eastern Solomons was to hold Guadalcanal, but to do so, he needed to be able to resupply it from the air and sea. The American carriers and their aircraft were the critical tools needed to maintain his supply line to the beleaguered island.
He had only two available. Steaming near Santa Cruz Island to the northeast of Guadalcanal were the Hornet and the Enterprise. The Enterprise had just returned after undergoing five weeks of repairs from the hits she had received on August 24, the day Torpedo Eight had helped sink the Ryujo.
A Dawn Like Thunder Page 37