Challenge for the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  “Here,” he called softly. “Put the guns here.”

  They moved with silent swiftness. Gunners with their 53-pound tripods, assistants with their 33-pound guns, ammunition carriers with 19-pound boxed belts in each hand, all burdened with their own weapons and equipment, they slipped forward without as much as the chink of gun pintle entering tripod socket.

  “Chow time,” Paige whispered. “Where’s the chow?”8

  The can of Spam was present but the can of peaches was absent without leave. Its bearer mumbled incoherently about its having slipped from his grasp to roll down the ridge. Paige hissed sharp guttural uncomplimentaries in the delinquent’s direction, and then he opened the Spam with his bayonet, tearing the thick soft meat into hunks and pressing it into outstretched hands.

  They ate.

  They sat hunched by their guns. It began to rain again. At midnight, the men on watch heard the sound of firing far to their left.

  ———

  It was only about seven o’clock before General Maruyama’s commanders were able to bring any semblance of order out of the confusion caused by the rain. Over on the right wing, where Kawaguchi’s failure to cope with the terrain had cost him his command, Colonel Shoji, his successor, was also behind schedule. Shoji had also not reached his jump-off point.

  Impatient, Maruyama ordered the left wing to attack.

  Colonel Masajiro Furumiya took the 29th Infantry forward, and a few minutes later they were flowing around Colonel Puller’s outpost.

  Sergeant Ralph Briggs and his men on outpost hugged the ground, while Briggs rang up Colonel Puller’s command post.

  “Colonel,” he said softly, “there’s about three thousand Japs between you and me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. They’ve been all around us, singing and smoking cigarettes, heading your way.”

  “All right, Briggs, but make damned sure. Take your men to the left—understand me? Go down and pass through the lines near the sea. I’ll call ’em to let you in. Don’t fail, and don’t go in any other direction. I’ll hold my fire as long as I can.”

  “Yes, sir,” Briggs said, and hung up.9

  Then the sergeant and his men began crawling slowly on their bellies to the left. All but four of them, whom the Japanese caught and killed.

  At eleven o’clock it began to rain heavily again, and the Japanese came hurtling against Puller’s Marines.

  Once again they were screaming:

  “Blood for the Emperor!”

  “Marine, you die!”

  Once again the foulmouthed raggedy-tailed defenders of democracy were bellowing:

  “To hell with your goddamed Emperor! Blood for Franklin and Eleanor!”10

  The Japanese were charging by the thousands, so many of them that the sodden ground shook beneath their feet. They hit the barbed wire even as Marine guns erupted in a bedlam of firing.

  Japanese fell on the wire, others hurled themselves upon it while their comrades used their bodies as bridges.

  Colonel Furumiya was at the head of his troops, shouting and waving his saber. He led the color company—the 7th—through a break in the American wire and went racing with them toward the enemy’s guns.

  Inspired by the breakthrough, willing to follow their colors into hell, the Japanese soldiers flowed toward the gap.

  But the Marines closed it. Colonel Furumiya and the color company were cut off from the rest of the regiment.

  Now the attack was veering toward dead center. The Japanese hordes were rushing at Manila John Basilone’s machine guns. They came tumbling down an incline, and Basilone’s gunners raked them at full-trigger. They were pouring out five hundred rounds a minute, the gun barrels were red and sizzling inside their water jackets—and the precious water was evaporating swiftly.

  “Piss in ’em, piss in ’em!” Basilone yelled, and some of the men jumped up to refill the jackets with a different liquid.

  The guns stuttered on, tumbling the onrushing Japanese down the incline, piling them up so high that by the time the first enemy flood had begun to ebb and flow back into the jungle, they had blocked Basilone’s field of fire. In the lull Manila John ordered his men out to push the bodies away and clear the fire lanes.

  Then he ducked out of the pit to run for more ammunition. He ran barefooted, the mud squishing between his toes. He ran into Puller’s CP and ran back again burdened with spare barrels and half a dozen fourteen-pound belts slung over his shoulders.

  As he did, Furumiya’s men drifted west. They overran the guns to Basilone’s right. They stabbed two Marines to death and wounded three others. They tried to swing the big Brownings on the Americans, but they only jammed them. They left the pit and drove farther to the rear.

  Basilone returned to his pit just as a runner dashed up gasping:

  “They’ve got the guys on the right.”

  Basilone raced to his right. He ran past a barefoot private named Evans and called “Chicken” for his tender eighteen years. “C’mon, you yellow bastards!” Chicken screamed, firing and bolting his rifle, firing and reloading. Basilone ran on to the empty pit, jumped in, found the guns jammed, and sprinted back to his own pit.

  Seizing a mounted machine gun, Basilone spread-eagled it across his back, shouted at half of his men to follow him—and was gone. A squad of men took off in pursuit. They caught Basilone at a bend in the trail, and blundered into a half-dozen Japanese soldiers. They killed them and ran on.

  Then they were inside the silent pit, firing the gun which Basilone had brought, while Manila John lay on his back in the mud working frantically to free the jammed guns.

  Beyond the wire in the covering jungle, the Sendai were massing for another charge.

  Submarine Amberjack had nearly reached Guadalcanal.

  Inside her sausage-shaped belly were nine thousand gallons of aviation gasoline destined for Henderson Field tanks that were again nearly bone-dry. She also carried two hundred 100-pound bombs. She had departed Espiritu Santo more than two days ago, and now, sliding along at her top submerged speed, she expected to make Lunga Point by daybreak.

  But then her orders were changed. From Guadalcanal came instructions to put in at Tulagi with her cargo. Henderson Field was under major attack, the issue was in doubt, and it would be foolish to make the enemy a gift of the gasoline.

  Chesty Puller called Colonel del Valle to request all the artillery support possible.

  “I’ll give you all you call for, Puller,” del Valle grunted. “But God knows what’ll happen when the ammo we have is gone.”

  “If we don’t need it now, we’ll never need it. If they get through here tonight there won’t be a tomorrow.”

  “She’s yours as long as she lasts.”11

  Both men hung up and the Marine artillery began glowing red again.

  “Colonel,” Captain Regan Fuller said over the telephone to Puller, “I’m just about running out of ammo. I’ve used almost three and a half units of fire.”

  “You got bayonets, haven’t you?” Colonel Puller asked.

  “Sure. Yes, sir.”

  “All right, then. Hang on.”12

  It was half past one in the morning and the Sendai were coming again, there was a white breath around the muzzles of the Marine 105s, and Manila John Basilone had his guns fixed.

  Basilone rolled from gun to gun, firing, exhausting first one belt and then another, while his men worked wildly to scrape the mud from cartridges that had been dragged along soggy trails. And the Sendai rolled forward in even greater strength, with both wings charging, now, punching holes in the Marine lines, forcing General Geiger in the rear to counter with his reserve, and leading General Maruyama to radio the one signal that all Japan was waiting for:

  “Banzai!”

  General Hyakutake heard it with elation back in Kukumbona and he relayed it north to Admiral Gunichi Mikawa in Rabaul. Mikawa immediately ordered three large destroyers carrying the Koli Detachment to land these troops on eas
tern Guadalcanal as scheduled.

  And Combined Fleet’s carriers turned south again.

  Some time after two o’clock in the morning of Sunday, October 25, Sergeant Mitchell Paige and his men heard firing to their right.

  A band of Colonel Oka’s soldiers had slipped through the draw between Paige and Hill 67 and had overwhelmed an outpost.

  Paige slipped forward on his ridge. He heard mumbling below him. He pulled the pin of a hand grenade and heaved the bomb into the jungle. His men pulled their pins and handed Paige their grenades, and he threw these bombs, too.

  There were flashes and screams.

  But no one came.

  At half past three General Maruyama hurled his third charge at the Americans—and this time his men heard for the first time the eight-round semiautomatic firing of Garand rifles in the hands of American soldiers.

  The 164th Infantry was in action.

  General Geiger had fed its Third Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall into the battle. Hall’s soldiers marched from their bivouac behind the Tenaru to the front, sloshing through the streaming darkness guided by a Navy chaplain, Father Keough, the only man at headquarters who knew the way. Puller went to meet them.

  “Here they are, Colonel,” Keough called, and Puller shook his hand, grunting: “Father, we can use ’em.” Then he turned to Hall: “Colonel, I’m glad to see you. I don’t know who’s senior to who right now, and I don’t give a damn. I’ll be in command until daylight, at least, because I know what’s going on here, and you don’t.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Hall said, and Puller continued:

  “I’m going to drop ’em off along this road, and send in a few to each platoon position. I want you to make it clear to your people that my men, even if they’re only sergeants, will command in those holes when your officers and men arrive.”

  “I understand you,” Hall said. “Let’s go.”13

  They went. The soldiers went into the fight, sometimes having to be guided in by hand, in that slippery darkness, and they too, held, when the Sendai came flowing toward its third futile attempt to annihilate the Americans.

  By seven o’clock in the morning, the Sendai had stopped coming.

  Nearly a thousand of them had stopped living. They lay in sodden heaps outside and partly within the American wire. One column of Japanese dead lay opposite Captain Fuller’s antitank guns. They were in perfect formation, each man laying halfway atop the man in front of him—felled in a single scything sweep like a row of wooden soldiers.

  Within the jungle, General Maruyama beheld his survivors: bands of dazed and hollow-eyed men stumbling woodenly back to their assembly areas. Nowhere could Maruyama find Colonel Furumiya. Obviously, the airfield was still American.

  Masao Maruyama got off a message to General Hyakutake indicating that he was “having difficulty” capturing the field.

  And then Dugout Sunday began.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  OCTOBER 25 was to be known as Dugout Sunday because most Americans on Guadalcanal sat out that reverberating sabbath below ground.

  It was set in motion by Masao Maruyama’s premature paean of victory. By the time he had retracted it and admitted that Henderson Field was still in enemy hands, Admiral Mikawa had sent the Koli Detachment destroyers speeding down The Slot, while cruiser Yura and five destroyers went sweeping to the north to come around Florida Island and bombard Koli Point.

  Flights of Bettys were bombed-up and fueled at Rabaul, and escorting Zeros at Buka and Buin stood at the ready with idly spinning propellers.

  Admiral Yamamoto had also been electrified by Maruyama’s “Banzai!” He had ordered carrier Junyo under Admiral Kakuta to fly off planes to land on the airfield, notified Nagumo’s carriers to move south, and alerted Kondo’s battleships to steam south to destroy Admiral Lee’s battleship force and chew up the American supply line.

  Then came the message suggesting that the airfield was not quite captured—to be followed in the afternoon by an outright admission of defeat—and the angrily perplexed Yamamoto ordered Kakuta to fly off bombing strikes instead, canceled the battleship attack, and left Nagumo more bewildered than ever.

  And so, the Koli Detachment ships opened Dugout Sunday services, to the dismay of a very attentive audience in submarine Amberjack.

  Amberjack entered Iron Bottom Bay at about daybreak. Her periscope lookouts could see the old four-stack destroyers Trever and Zane steaming out of Tulagi Harbor, to which they, too, had brought gasoline. Fleet-tug Seminole was moving slowly toward Lunga Point, carrying, of course, a load of gasoline for Henderson Field.

  Amberjack’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander J. A. Bole, decided that Iron Bottom Bay was getting congested. He reversed course.

  Thirty minutes later his periscope displayed three big Japanese destroyers racing into the Bay, hull-down, shelling Marine positions as they came. They were Akatsuki, Ikazuchi, and Shiratsuyo, and they carried the men of the Koli Detachment.

  Amberjack could not risk her cargo by entering battle. She could do only one thing: she went down.

  As she did, the Japanese destroyers spotted little Trever and Zane. They broke out battle signals, rang up flank speed, and swung around to a collision course with all guns firing. Trever and Zane fled, firing back with their little three-inchers. A Japanese shell exploded on Trever’s after gun, demolishing it and its crew. Trever swerved hard left and then right again, and ran into the shoals of a channel between Savo and Florida. Zane followed. Both these ancients were now rattling along at twenty-nine knots. Trever’s No. 2 boiler casing burned through. The Japanese closed.

  And then three Wildcats came screaming down from the skies. They had somehow managed to take off from sodden, soupy Fighter One—their wheels throwing out arcs of spray as they thundered along, spinning as they rose—and then they were airborne and saw the enemy below about to finish off Trever and Zane. They had no bombs, only bullets, but they turned the Japanese destroyers around and sent them fleeing west.

  Right into Seminole and Yippie 284 making with agonizing slowness for the sanctuary of Tulagi Harbor.

  Akatsuki, Ikazuchi, and Shiratsuyo nearly rammed the little Americans, they were so close—and at point-blank range they needed only two minutes to put the Yippie under and turn Seminole into a floating holocaust.

  Then the Japanese were in trouble. Marines with five-inch naval rifles opened up from Guadalcanal. They scored hits. Smoke poured skyward from the destroyers. Putting out smoke of their own to screen themselves, the Koli Detachment destroyers fled up The Slot.

  Meanwhile, Yura and her five destroyers still swept around Florida. They intended to come around the island’s eastern tip, and swing south toward Koli Point. But an unarmed search plane spotted them as they approached Florida. At the Pagoda on Henderson Field, Yura and her steel brood were marked for action—once the field had dried.

  Dugout Sunday was turning hot and clear.

  Far to the north, Chuichi Nagumo’s ships were still taking on oil.

  Nagumo was dozing in his cabin, when an orderly dashed in with a message from a patrol plane:

  “I have shot down an enemy plane, apparently a scout.”1

  Nagumo leaped erect, shouting:

  “Cut refueling! Turn the carriers around and head north!”2

  Both the Nagumo trio of carriers and Admiral Kakuta in Junyo turned about and headed north at twenty knots.

  Chuichi Nagumo had failed to turn his carriers away at Midway; but he was not going to make the same mistake at Guadalcanal.

  The sun which warmed sailors of both fleets quickly dried the moldy uniforms of Chesty Puller’s soldiers and Marines at work refortifying their positions for the anticipated renewal of battle that night. By mid-morning, the sun was blistering hot. Its scorching rays shone with dissolving intensity upon the corpses lying outside the lines beneath buzzing, conical swarms of black flies. Already, these bodies were beginning to turn lemon yellow, to swell
and burst like overripe melons; already the sticky-sweet smell of corrupting flesh rose sickening and overpowering in the nostrils of these sweating Americans.

  At Henderson Field, ready pilots kept glancing nervously between the quickly drying airfield and the blue skies overhead, where carrier Zeros circled unmolested, radioing the good news to Rabaul that the deadly Wildcats were up to their hubcaps in mud and would not be airborne that day.

  But the Japanese, also contending with bad weather, were not able to respond quickly. By the time sixteen Bettys and escorting Zeros came roaring in, Henderson Field had dried sufficiently to allow the Wildcats to scramble aloft. Captain Joe Foss and Lieutenant Jack Conger were among those who struck at the enemy formation. Foss shot down two of three Zeros destroyed in a flight of six. But then, his fifth plane riddled beneath him, he was forced to go down for another one. Going up again, he tore into the Zeros escorting a fresh contingent of enemy bombers. He shot down two more—and he dove for home with fifteen kills to his credit during the sixteen days he had been on Guadalcanal.

  Jack Conger also shot down a Zero in the second attack. Banking, he went thundering after another. He pressed the gun button. No response. He was out of ammunition. Undaunted, Conger still flew at the Zero. He hung on his nose and brought his propeller under the enemy’s tail. The Zero swerved, and broke in two.

  Now Conger’s plane was going over in a vertical dive. He fought wildly to bring it out. It still fell. Conger strained at his escape hatch. He could see Iron Bottom Bay rising up toward him, growing larger. It was as though a great steel-gray griddle had been catapulted upward, flying up, up, and up, expanding until it was a monstrous obliterating roundness. Conger struggled with the hatch. He thought he would never get out, that the huge griddle would shatter him, and then, at 150 feet, he was out in the air, his parachute was blooming overhead, and he was into the griddle, his body jarred as though he had been slammed on the soles of his feet with an iron bar.

  Just before he went under, Conger saw his Wildcat crash in the coconuts. Then he was going down deep, only to have his swift descent arrested by his rigging. He surfaced, treading water, slashing with a knife at the smothering shroud of the parachute. Twenty feet away another pilot floated gently down into the water.