Challenge for the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  Foss banked hard. He went after a Zero which went into a dive, pulling out and looping. Foss cut close inside, and the Zero went over on its back. Foss was upside-down, too, when he triggered a leading shot at the red-balled fighter and caught him in a terrible, converging burst.

  His second kill had blown up.

  Foss ducked again to avoid debris, and suddenly a Zero came from nowhere, slow-rolling as though in a victory celebration, and Foss’s plane again shook from the recoil of its wing guns. There was a disintegrating flash, and the pilot popped from his cockpit and nearly hit Foss’s plane.

  Now there were two Zeros coming at Foss, one head-on, the other from an angle. Foss rushed at the first one. The planes drove toward each other with smoking guns. The Japanese swerved right, and Foss aimed a burst behind his motor. Streaming flames, the Zero came on—exploding off Foss’s right wing and rocking the Wildcat with the force of the blast.

  Now Foss’s plane was smoking. The enemy had scored hits. Foss went over in a dive for home. A Zero came after him, overran, and Foss fired his last rounds at him in a useless burst. Another Zero raked him on a side pass. Foss radioed for help, and two Marine fliers came roaring over to shoot down both Zeros.

  Foss reached the field safely, bringing in his fourth damaged plane since he had begun fighting from Henderson on October 10. One more shot-up Wildcat, he thought, and I’ll be a Japanese ace.2 But he was already twice an American ace, with eleven aircraft downed in fourteen days.

  Other newly made aces were rolling exultantly over the field, among them Lieutenant Jack Conger, a wiry gamecock who had chased a Zero all the way up to Savo before sending him down in flames. Of the twenty Zeros that came down to Guadalcanal that October 23, every one was destroyed. So was one bomber, while four others staggered home trailing smoke and flames.

  Once again the Cactus Air Force had fought to save the ground troops, for Maruyama’s anticipated bombardment never came off.

  Nor would his attack.

  General Maruyama was beside himself. Shortly after the raid from Rabaul was repulsed, he was notified that General Kawaguchi had not yet reached his assembly area. He could not possibly attack at sunset. Maruyama had no alternative but to postpone his assault another day. He did, and then, in an icy rage, he telephoned Kawaguchi and relieved him of his command. Colonel Toshinaro Shoji took his place.

  Next, Maruyama attempted to reach General Sumoyoshi to tell him to postpone the Matanikau thrust until sunset of October 24. He could not reach him. As happened so frequently to both sides in that moist, dissolving jungle, communications had broken down.

  But Maruyama did reach Hyakutake, who quickly informed Yamamoto, who angrily sent his fleet tankers south and ordered Kondo’s force to withdraw for refueling.

  Yamamoto was incensed. One carrier had already been lost because of delays, and here he was forced to withdraw his entire fleet from the target area. More, he was made uneasy by reports of growing American naval strength along the supply line to Guadalcanal. A patrol plane from the Gilbert Islands had sighted Enterprise steaming north, and a few days before that Hornet had been detected. Then, suddenly, like ghosts, the American carriers had vanished. What did it mean? Neither Yamamoto nor Chuichi Nagumo, both of whom carried the memory of Midway burned in their brains, could supply the answer. One thing Yamamoto knew, though: he would brook no more delays, and he informed Hyakutake of his displeasure.

  Hyakutake contacted Maruyama again. There was no doubt: the attack would go forward at sunset of October 24. By early morning of October 25 Hyakutake should receive the message signaling capture of the airfield. It was one word: “Banzai!” Upon receipt of it, the Koli Detachment would be ordered to land to the east.

  Meanwhile, Maruyama inquired, had he remembered to specify that when the American commander came to the mouth of the Matanikau to surrender, he must come unarmed and accompanied only by an interpreter?

  The American commander was not on Guadalcanal.

  The Catalina which Foss and his comrades had escorted south that morning of October 23 also carried Alexander Archer Vandegrift. Admiral Halsey had had the grace and the common sense to summon the ground commander to an important conference at Nouméa. Kelly Turner was there, too, along with Lieutenant General Holcomb, Major General Harmon, Major General Alexander Patch, commander of the U.S. Army’s Americal Infantry Division from which the 164th was drawn, and which was now scheduled to relieve the First Marine Division—when and if it was possible.

  Halsey sat smoking while the others settled around a table. Then he asked Vandegrift to outline the situation. Vandegrift did. His soft, courteous voice was charged with urgency. The question was one of reinforcement of every kind. He needed more airplanes and the rest of the Americal Division and a regiment from the Second Marine Division, then enroute to the Pacific. His men were worn out. There were now seven hundred new cases of malaria a week.

  Holcomb and Harmon spoke. They agreed, vigorously. Kelly Turner spoke. He was stung by the implied rebuke to his efforts. He rehearsed all of his attempts to supply the island, he said there were getting to be fewer transports and fewer warships to protect them. There were no sheltering bases at Guadalcanal. They still needed the seaplane base at Ndeni to provide aerial cover of the supply line. Solomons’ waters were too narrow for maneuver. Torpedo Junction swarmed with submarines.

  Halsey heard him out, his knuckly fingers drumming the desk, his eyes thoughtful under the shaggy gray brows. Then he turned to Vandegrift.

  “Are we going to evacuate or hold?”

  “I can hold,” Archer Vandegrift said softly. “But I’ve got to have more active support than I’ve been getting.”

  “All right,” Halsey said. “Go on back. I’ll promise you everything I’ve got.”3

  Archer Vandegrift did go back, to find Guadalcanal ablaze with battle again.

  In the United States Marine Corps there is a legend concerning the battle between Serapis and Bonhomme Richard. After the British commander summoned John Paul Jones to surrender, and after that doughty sailor had flung back his immortal, “I have just begun to fight,” it is said that one of the Marines* who had been fighting very briskly in the rigging looked down upon John Paul in disgust, and snorted: “There’s always some poor slob who doesn’t get the word.”

  On the night of October 23 the unfortunate Major General Tadashi Sumoyoshi was one of those who did not get the word. Maruyama had not reached him to postpone his attack on the Matanikau, Hyakutake had not done so either, and Sumoyoshi was himself lying in his dugout in a malarial coma.

  His attack went forward at six o’clock that night.

  Once again Colonel Nakaguma’s Fourth Infantry was torn apart. Ten battalions of Marine artillery had registered their guns on the Matanikau mouth and the coastal track behind it, and they blew the massing Japanese apart with a howling hurricane of steel.

  Then Sumoyoshi’s tanks burst from the cover of the jungle and went racing with spinning inner wheels toward the sandspit. One came, two came, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—and then the Marine gunners in dug-in half-tracks on the west bank decided that there were enough targets.

  Wham! Brrranng! Ba—loom!

  Seventy-five millimeter rifles smoked and recoiled, howitzers to the rear bucked and bellowed, 37-mm antitank guns spat out flat trajectories, everyone opened up—riflemen, machine-gunners, BAR-men, mortarmen—and in a single disintegrating outburst lasting at the most three minutes, they halted or blew apart all but one tank and sent bullets or shells into the backs of the crewmen who leaped from them to flee.

  The surviving tank was the first one, carrying Captain Maeda, the tank commander. It came whizzing over the sandbar. It rolled over strands of barbed wire and crushed a pillbox and wheeled to its right to come clanking down on a foxhole occupied by Private Joe Champagne.

  Champagne ducked. The tank rolled over his hole and paused, as though Captain Maeda was taking his bearings. Champagne pulled a grenade from hi
s belt, stuck it in the tank tread, and pulled the pin while the tank resumed speed and clattered away.

  Barrrooom!

  Maeda’s tank sloughed around out of control. A Marine halftrack drove down to the sandbar. Its seventy-five flashed and Maeda’s tank shivered. It fired again. Flames gushed from the tank. Its ammunition locker had been hit, and it was blown twenty yards into the sea where it was finally finished off.

  And now those massed battalions of American artillery were walking their fire back along the coastal road, raking the assembly area, knocking out three more tanks, and putting the dreadful seal of annihilation upon the Fourth Infantry Regiment of the Sendai Division.

  Another 650 men had been killed, and in the dawn of October 24 Marines along the Matanikau heights could look down upon a silent sandbar clogged with broken, burned-out tanks and the bodies of the enemy. Nothing moved but the crocodiles swimming hungrily downstream.

  * They were French Marines.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  ENTERPRISE had arrived in time to fight.

  Guadalcanal’s tortuous terrain, General Maruyama’s overconfidence, his own and General Hyakutake’s failure to appreciate that plans possessing precision and power on paper often wobble and weaken in time and space—all these factors had conspired to grant the Americans the time they needed to double their carrier strength in the Pacific.

  All these factors, and Vandegrift’s dauntless Marines; for even as Enterprise and her screen reached the rendezvous area 850 miles southeast of Guadalcanal at daybreak of that October 24, Admiral Kinkaid knew that the enemy’s latest attempt to seize Henderson Field had been repulsed. He knew also that the Marines were bracing for a far more furious attempt that night.

  If they could hold again, could fight for just one more day’s grace, then perhaps Kinkaid’s ships would have the time to strike the enemy fleet.

  And so, Enterprise and her escorts met the tanker Sabine, slipping two at a time to either side of the big fleet cow to fill their tanks with thick black oil. Later in the day, lookouts sighted the silhouettes of Hornet and her screen standing over the rim of the horizon with slow majesty. When they joined, Halsey had at sea two carriers, two battleships, nine cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers to oppose Admiral Yamamoto’s four flattops, five battleships, fourteen cruisers, and forty-four destroyers.

  By three o’clock in the afternoon the American battleship group, Washington, three cruisers and seven destroyers commanded by Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee, had turned northwest to come up under Guadalcanal’s southern coast and patrol it, and the two carriers went racing northeast to intercept or trap the enemy.

  Kinkaid’s orders were to take his ships north of the Santa Cruz Islands, which are almost due east of Guadalcanal, and then to turn them southwest to cut off the enemy fleet. With any luck, they might even get behind the suspecting Japanese to batter them beneath the waves as they had done at Midway.

  Chuichi Nagumo sat in his cabin aboard flag carrier Shokaku. The marks of Midway seemed to have been etched deeper into his face. His skin was sallow and wrinkled and his hair was gray. Beside him on a table were the immaculate white gloves he always wore on deck. In his hands was a sheet of tabulated reports of enemy ship sightings.

  “The enemy carriers have been missing for a week,” Nagumo muttered. “What does this mean?”1

  He called for his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Jinichi Kusaka.

  “Any reports on enemy carriers?” he asked.

  Kusaka shook his head, and Nagumo began musing aloud: “At Midway, the enemy struck us at a time of his choosing. Now, too, there is no doubt that the enemy pinpoints our position as if on a chessboard, but we are running blind …”2

  There was a tense silence, broken by a staff officer suggesting that Nagumo wire Yamamoto for instructions. Nagumo remained silent, but Kusaka closed his eyes and dictated a message: “May I suggest halting our southward advance until we receive definite word that the Army has captured Guadalcanal airfields? There seems to be a possibility of our being trapped if we continue going like this.”3

  After a long delay Nagumo received Yamamoto’s reply: “Your Striking Force will proceed quickly to the enemy direction. The operation orders stand, without change.”4

  Nagumo snorted while Kusaka bit his lip. “All right,” Chuichi Nagumo said with a shrug, “start fueling the carriers.”5

  One of the results of the Japanese debacle on the Matanikau the night of October 23 was that it confirmed the Marines’ belief that the major assault was to come from the west.

  Roy Geiger, now a major general and in command during Vandegrift’s absence, moved to reinforce there. He pulled Colonel Hanneken’s battalion out of the line south of the airfield and sent it marching toward the Matanikau.

  Now Chesty Puller’s battalion had an entire front of 2500 yards to defend.

  Masao Maruyama spent the morning conferring with his officers at his headquarters at Centipede-Shaped Ridge. At noon, he issued the following order:

  The Division has succeeded in reaching the rear flank of the enemy in absolute secrecy.

  In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy around the airfield in one blow.

  Both left and right will begin the charge at five o’clock and penetrate the enemy lines.

  I will stay at present location until three o’clock and will then head for the airfield behind the left unit.6

  It was Kiyono Ichiki and Kiyotake Kawaguchi all over again, except that neither of these supremely self-confident men had ever dashed off such a masterpiece of vague bravado as “In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy … in one blow.” His private plans locked in his breast, Masao Maruyama followed his left wing toward the jump-off point.

  And the monsoon came down in a torrent.

  Rain fell with the rattle of rifle-fire. In a single sodden minute the jungle was a streaming, swishing, gurgling swamp and the Sendai Division was segmented. Companies were lost, platoons were lost, squads were lost. Communications went out. And as the rain came steadily down, it became apparent that there would be no five o’clock attack.

  Colonel Oka was still not in position.

  The commander who had attacked very timidly and very tardily at the Matanikau a month ago under General Kawaguchi, was again dragging his feet under General Hyakutake. He did not cross the Matanikau upriver to come down behind the American battle position. He explained his failure with the message: “The Regiment endeavored to accomplish this objective of diverting the enemy, but they seemed to be planning a firm defense of this region.”

  It was not true. The Marine position in the west ended on Hill 67, where its left flank was refused, that is bent back and left dangling in the jungle. General Hyakutake knew this and could not accept Oka’s alibi. He came up to the front personally and ordered Oka to get moving.

  He did, and he moved too far.

  Marines on top of Hill 67 spotted Japanese soldiers moving across a lower ridge to their left. They reported it to headquarters.

  Geiger quickly diverted Hanneken’s men then marching west toward the Matanikau, sending them south instead to organize undefended high ground about a thousand yards east of the refused left flank.

  Before they swung left, these Marines passed through the headquarters area. With cots and tents and clean clothing, it seemed to them a lotus-eater’s land, a place where troops dined on Spam and powdered eggs and canned fruit and other dishes that were veritable delicacies compared to frontline fare. So they helped themselves to what they saw, having no faith in a chain-of-supply which begins with the cow at headquarters and ends with the tail at the front.

  In the platoon of machine guns led by hard-jawed Sergeant Mitchell Paige a small can of Spam and a large can of peaches were thus “procured.”

  Paige’s men trudged on, confident of “living it up” tonight, because for some of them, as they suspected, there would be no tomorrow.

&
nbsp; Chesty Puller was spreading himself thin, trying to cover the entire 2500-yard sector which fell to him after the withdrawal of Hanneken’s battalion. Every man in Puller’s battalion except the mortarmen was put into line.

  They seized strands of wire marking a jeep-road to their rear and strung it by winding it around trees, adorning it with cans filled with stones and grenades with half-pulled pins.

  Throughout the morning and afternoon Puller roved his lines, chomping on his cold stump of pipe, removing it to bellow orders (“We don’t need no communications system,” his men boasted, “we got Chesty!”), or speaking through teeth clamped firmly around the stem. Puller’s manner was urgent because a young Marine who had fallen behind a patrol that morning had seen Japanese officers studying his position through field glasses. Puller urged his men to dig deeper, but when he came to one position he pulled his pipe from his mouth, pointed at the hole with it, and grunted, “Son, if you dig that hole any deeper Ah’ll have to charge you with desertion.”7

  The Marine grinned, and Puller strode on, pleased to see that Manila John Basilone had fortified his pair of machine guns almost in the exact center of the line.

  Colonel Puller returned to his “command post”—a field telephone hardly ten yards behind his lines—to repeat his request for permission to withdraw his outpost platoon. He was convinced that the enemy was coming, and he feared that the forty men on outpost would be needlessly sacrificed. But his arguments—generally couched in ungentle roars—were unavailing. The men stayed outside the line.

  Finally, Puller had all of the field phones opened so that every company and platoon could hear every message.

  And then the rains came down.

  At seven o’clock that night the rains slackened. Sergeant Mitchell Paige crawled forward on the nose of the ridge which his section was to defend. It was dark. Paige felt about with his hands, hunting for a good position.