Challenge for the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  PART THREE

  AT BAY

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  AN HOUR after dark on the night of September 3 a message arrived at Cactus “Operations.” A transport was arriving and the airfield would have to be illuminated.

  Seven jeeps bounced to the south end of the strip and switched on their lights. There was a thundering overhead and some of the drivers instinctively ducked. The transport’s wheels cleared them by a few feet and the big plane bumped to a halt. The door swung open and a cold white grizzly bear in khaki stepped down.

  Brigadier General Roy Geiger had flown up from the New Hebrides, where he was supposed to be commanding the First Marine Air Wing, to take charge of Cactus Air Force. With him were his chief of staff, Colonel Louis Woods, and his Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Munn.

  They were three of the most experienced air officers in the Marine Corps, led by a general who won his wings in 1916 and had flown every type of aircraft from the open-cockpit crates of World War I to the newest-model Grumman fighters then parked in Henderson’s coconuts. Roy Geiger was also a Parris Island classmate of Archer Vandegrift, and he had helped him fight Cacos in Haiti by ordering his pilots to load a small bomb aboard a Jenny and drop it on an enemy stronghold simultaneously with a ground attack launched by Vandegrift. The day after Geiger arrived, pitching his tent not far from the Pagoda, he called on his old friend. He brought him a package from Admiral Nimitz marked “fan mail.” Vandegrift opened it. It was a case of Scotch. But Geiger was aware that Vandegrift, a Virginian, subscribed to the Virginian’s belief that a man who drank Scotch rather than bourbon was either a tourist or a show-off, and so, he said, “Archer, I have a case of bourbon, and I’ll trade you level—even though mine are quarts.”1

  Vandegrift was delighted and the two generals placed the Scotch—as rare as bathing beauties on Guadalcanal—into a jeep and drove off to Geiger’s tent. Geiger looked for his bourbon, and found that it was gone. Some pink-cheeked fly-boy with more red balls on his fuselage than hairs on his chin had made off with his general’s refreshments, and the general’s face beneath his thatch of snow-white hair was also round and red and his bleak blue eyes were icy with rage. Archer Vandegrift, Virginian though he was, decided that he was not now in Virginia: he would keep the Scotch. He gave his old friend two bottles, and departed; and Geiger took command of Cactus Air Force in a humor so foul that even Colonel Woods, accustomed to his chief’s harsh cold furies, was impressed.2 In such mood, Geiger drove his fliers from a splendid August into a superb September.

  Henderson’s old-timers and the new arrivals of Colonel Wallace had already learned to fight together, having knocked down seven of forty enemy attackers on September 2, two of them falling to Major Galer’s guns; and the following day Leo Smith’s dive-bombers joined Mangrum’s to fall upon Colonel Oka and his thousand Kawaguchis barging down The Slot. On Geiger’s first day of command, Wildcats were sent to help the Dauntlesses make Oka’s passage even more harrowing than Admiral Tanaka had predicted, and on the ensuing two days scout-bombers went ranging 200 miles to the northwest to strike at Gizo Bay, the heretofore too-distant daylight hideout of the Tokyo Express. Gradually, Geiger’s inordinately bad temper subsided into his normal curtness. He became fond of his young fliers, jaunty in their dark-blue baseball caps and shoulder holsters. In turn, they ceased to think of him as ruthless but as single-mindedly aggressive and they called him the Old Man. A magnificent band of fighters had found the right leader, and it was well, for the Tokyo Express was recruiting cruisers and destroyers by the dozen and Rabaul and Buka were reinforced with aircraft to the extent that Geiger would be outnumbered 180 planes to seventy by mid-September. Nevertheless, the men of Cactus Air Force continued to whittle the enemy, growing in offensive spirit and gathering almost nightly at the Hotel de Gink, Henderson’s hostelry for visiting pilots, to toast each other in medicinal alcohol—or perhaps “borrowed” one-star bourbon—while bellowing out a popular parody of “On the Road to Mandalay”:

  In Cactus “Operations”

  Where the needle passes free

  There’s a hot assignment cookin’

  For Marine Group Twenty-three.

  As the shells burst in the palm trees

  You hear “Operations” say

  “Fill the belly tanks with juice, boys,

  Take the Scouts to Gizo Bay

  Take the Scouts to Gizo Bay.”

  Oh, pack a load to Gizo Bay

  Where the Jap fleet spends the day.

  You can hear their Bettys chunkin’

  From Rabaul to Lunga Quay.

  Hit the road to Gizo Bay

  Where the float plane Zeros play

  And the bombs roar down like thunder

  On the natives, ’cross the way.

  Meanwhile, as the Solomons aerial war grew fiercer, the Seabees began working on Henderson Field.

  The Sixth Naval Construction Battalion arrived at Guadalcanal on September 1. Like all other Seabees—a nickname based on the initials CB—these men were experienced craftsmen. They were tractor drivers, carpenters, masons, dynamiters, electricians, shipfitters, machinists, and so on, who had volunteered to put their skills at their country’s disposal. Most of them were well past the draft age; some of them were veterans of World War I. Their average age of thirty-five was nearly double the age of many of Vandegrift’s Marines who watched the Seabees coming ashore and thought that they were being reinforced by their fathers.

  “What the hell, pop! They running outta men at home?”

  “Hey, pop—you get your wars mixed up or somethin’?”

  “Hang onto yer false teeth, grandad—the Jap’s’re dropping sandwiches.”

  The Seabees grinned weakly, until one of the Marines inevitably went too far, chortling: “Seabees, huh? Stands for Confused Bastards, you ask me. What’n hell you old geezers gonna do here?”

  “I’ll tell you what, you mother’s mistakes,” a Seabee roared back. “We’re gonna protect the Marines!”3

  It was not exactly true, but it had the effect of provoking sweet shouts of anguish from the indignant Marines. Thereafter—and throughout the Pacific war—both Seabees and Marines were drawn together in a rough but affectionate camaraderie based upon mutual respect.

  Having been rushed to Guadalcanal, the Sixth Battalion’s men had very little equipment: two bulldozers, six dump trucks and a big, waddling carryall capable of scooping up twelve cubic yards of earth. But they also had Japanese trucks and tractors, graders and rollers, Japanese cement, and Japanese poles, lumber and soil pipe. With this, and with gradually increasing supplies of their own, they took over the job of completing and enlarging Henderson Field, while also repairing the strip after enemy air raids.

  Repair was vital, and it had to be done quickly. The moment the Japanese approach was signaled, all of Henderson’s Wildcats roared aloft to intercept, while the Dauntlesses and P-400s—“Klunkers” as they were now called—took off either to fly out of range or to bomb and strafe the Japanese at either end of the island. But every plane which survived the raid would be coming back, returning to a field pocked with craters. One afternoon in early September, the Seabees watched in agony while seven fighters came in one after another, and cracked up.

  So the Seabees discovered that the enemy’s 500-pound bomb usually tore up 1600 square feet of Marston steel matting, and packages of that much matting were placed alongside the strip. Trucks loaded with exactly the amount of sand and gravel required to fill such a crater were parked out of sight at strategic points. Compressors and pneumatic hammers to pack the fill were placed in readiness. Assembly lines for passing and laying matting were organized. At the moment of the enemy’s approach, all of the Seabees—cooks included—raced to their stations. The moment the bombers departed, sometimes while Zeros shrieked down to strafe, they made for the airstrip. Twisted matting was torn from the craters even as the loaded trucks roared up from the coconut groves. Fill was
poured into the holes while men with hammers and compressors leaped in to pack it. New matting was passed, laid, and linked to undamaged strips. Inside forty minutes, the hole would be completely filled and covered.

  Repairing shell-holes, of course, took longer. The Seabees had to wait before going to work; for as everyone on Guadalcanal knew, if the bombers left as quickly as they came, it seemed that the Tokyo Express would never leave.

  It was next to impossible for Cactus Air Force to derail the Tokyo Express at night. The Japanese ships were only visible during periods of bright moonlight, and these, of course, were the nights when they usually stayed home. Moreover, weather conditions worsened during September and the moon was on the wane, and the wily Tanaka had instructed his skippers never to reveal position by firing on American aircraft at night. They only fired when they were ready to depart, sailing westward through the Bay, blasting Henderson and the Marine positions as they went, and hitting top speed as they cleared Savo and turned northwestward for home.

  Nevertheless, Henderson’s pilots always took to the skies whenever the Tokyo Express was reported landing troops or supplies. They tried to illuminate the Bay with flares and sometimes they went down as low as five hundred feet looking for long dark shapes. But they seldom did more than keep the Japanese on the alert.

  Warships equipped with radar might sink the enemy ships, but the American Navy had not been back in force since Savo. Nor were American sailors the equal of Japanese seamen in night-fighting. They were still cautious, fearful of firing on friendly ships; and they were not trained to recognize the enemy by silhouette as the Japanese were. Blue, the destroyer that had been blind to Admiral Mikawa’s approach at Savo, gave tragic demonstration of these failings the night after the Battle of the Tenaru. With another destroyer, Henley, she tried to intercept a Japanese landing. Four minutes after her sonar and radar had made a contact on a strange ship, and just as she was bringing her guns and torpedo tubes to bear, she was racked by a Long Lance from the enemy destroyer Kawakaze, which had just put troops ashore. Blue lost several feet of her stern and had to be scuttled.

  After this, although perhaps not on account of this, there were fewer and fewer American warships entering Iron Bottom Bay at night.

  Little and Gregory were two of a rare kind at Guadalcanal: ships that stayed. Sisters of sunken Colhoun, they were old fourstack destroyers converted into fast transports. They had brought Red Mike Edson and the Raiders and Parachutists from Tulagi to Guadalcanal, and on September 4 they took aboard a party of Raiders under Colonel Griffith to patrol Savo Island.

  Aboard Little a lookout cried “Periscope!” and the ship prepared to close with depth charges before the “periscope” was sheepishly recognized as the mast of a sunken American ship. Ashore on Savo, the Raiders found no Japanese but only charred and oily debris and the mounds of shallow graves, still more grim testimonials to the efficiency of Admiral Mikawa’s ships. A native named Allen-luva told the patrol that the Japanese had not been on Savo since July.

  “Take bananas, chicken, pumpkin, everything,” Allen-luva said angrily.

  “Him talk pidgin?” someone asked.

  “Like drunk man,” Allen-luva snorted. “Him talk ‘aeroprane’ and ‘Guadarcanar.’ ”4

  The Marines laughed and went back aboard Gregory and Little. They returned to Guadalcanal at dusk. Because it was an extremely dark night, Little and Gregory did not go back to Tulagi Harbor as was customary. Commander Hugh Hadley in Little decided to patrol off Lunga Point.

  At one o’clock next morning the Americans observed gunfire flashes in the east near Taivu.

  Destroyers Yudachi, Hatsuyuki, and Murakumo were to provide diversionary bombardment while transports put the last of General Kawaguchi’s men ashore at Taivu. At about one o’clock in the morning, they began. And then the startled gunners looked to the west where two small American destroyer-transports were beautifully outlined in the light of five beautiful American flares.

  Little and Gregory both thought the gunflashes were from a Japanese submarine. They sped eastward, and then, a Catalina on patrol a half mile ahead also saw the flashes and also thought that they came from a submarine, and helpfully dropped a string of flares to mark the target.

  In that light the three enemy destroyers, each nearly as big as a light cruiser, began battering Americans mounting only one four-incher, some 20-mm guns and a few light and heavy machine guns. Little and Gregory fought bravely, but within a few salvos of feelers the Japanese had the range. Commander Hadley was killed on Little’s bridge. Gregory was shredded by salvos of five-inch shells and set blazing from stem to stern. Both ships were blazing wrecks, but the Japanese made certain of their destruction. They sailed between them, hurling shells to both sides. Many Americans in the water were killed by those shells. Some of them dove deep to get beneath burning oil, to avoid flaming embers cascading down from their ships. They tried to swim out of seas of fire, and sometimes, if they were lucky, water which had risen into the sky in long geysering plumes came raining down to put out the fires around them. Others, such as Lieutenant Commander Harry Bauer, skipper of Gregory, were not so fortunate. Badly wounded, Bauer struggled to escape both burning oil and the suction of his sinking ship. Two men—Clarence Justice and Chester Ellis—swam to his side to pull him free. Bauer heard a sailor cry out that he was drowning. He directed his rescuers to the man’s aid, and he was never seen again.

  Once more tragedy had overtaken American ships and men on the dark brooding surface of Iron Bottom Bay, and far to the west Lieutenant Richard Amerine heard the thundering and saw the flashing and he wondered what was happening now on this satanic paradise.

  The Japanese had not seen Amerine parachute into the jungle around Cape Esperance. No one had come for him. But Amerine was growing weak. He had been subsisting for five days on snails and insects. He knew which ones were edible because he was an entomologist. In fact, he had seen such an astounding variety of insects that he had been brokenhearted not to have a butterfly net with him.

  That day, though, he would have traded it for a rifle.

  He had nearly blundered into a party of Japanese. Luckily, he had found one enemy soldier sleeping beside a track and he had seized a boulder and smashed the man’s head like a china doll’s. Then he took the dead soldier’s pistol with which he killed two more of them, shooting one and battering the other with the pistol butt.

  Now, in the early darkness of September 5, he lay in the whispering, dripping jungle and wondered if there were more Japanese between him and the Marine lines.

  With daylight, he arose and began walking east again.

  There was “pogey-bait” on Guadalcanal.

  It would seem absurd that during a time of critical shortages in fuel and goods and ammunition anyone should bother to bring in candy, and yet, on September 5, a Skytrain flown by Lieutenant Colonel Wyman Marshall came in under fire loaded with pogey-bait and cigarettes. Then Colonel Marshall flew out with a load of wounded.

  Next day more Skytrains arrived, carrying drums of fuel, ammunition, machine guns, and mortar shells—departing, again, with wounded. Thus was begun the famous shuttle operation called Scat after South Pacific Combat Air Transportation Command.

  Meanwhile, the Marines were issued pogey-bait at the rate of one bar of candy to a squad. Rather than divide it and provide too little for all, the men drew lots. The blushing winners took their prizes and went slinking into the bush to devour it beyond the reproachful eyes of the losers.

  Combined Fleet had returned to Truk.

  After ten days of useless cruising north of Guadalcanal, fifty-odd ships led by great Yamato sailed into the lagoon to refuel.

  Admiral Yamamoto called a conference aboard his battleship. He was taciturn as he spoke to his commanders. For the first time he cautioned against underestimating American fighting strength, and he issued two simple orders:

  1. Keep the location and movements of Japanese carriers unknown to the enemy.
/>   2. Make initial air assaults against the enemy as strong as possible.

  These instructions were to cover Combined Fleet’s support of Major General Kawaguchi’s attempt to capture Henderson Field. The all-out aerial assault was to be launched September 12 in concert with Kawaguchi’s attack.

  Commander Tameichi Hara came back from the conference to his destroyer Amatsukaze. Lieutenant Kazue Shimizu, his gunnery officer, met him with a doleful face.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Hara snapped.

  “We failed to catch a single fish today,” Shimizu said. “This super fleet of ours has exterminated every fish in the atoll in just three days.”5

  On September 9 the super fleet shoved off again, bound for the Solomons.

  Lieutenant Amerine had come back from the dead. On September 6, gaunt and staggering, he wandered into Marine lines at Kukum. He was brought to Vandegrift’s headquarters to inform Intelligence of what he had seen. But Amerine had little to tell. The Japanese he had killed had been stragglers and he had not come upon any large bodies of enemy troops.

  Colonel Thomas still believed that the large enemy formations were to the east. Clemens’s scouts continued to report a Japanese build-up at the village of Tasimboko, about a mile west of Taivu. In fact, Thomas and Colonel Twining had already begun to plan a raid on Tasimboko, and Colonel Edson came to headquarters to propose just such an operation. The night of September 6, Thomas informed Edson that he could go ahead with it.

  “We must not overrate the importance of our successes in the Solomons,” the President was saying warningly in his annual Labor Day speech to the nation, “though we may be proud of the skill with which these local operations have been conducted.”