Challenge for the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  November 7 had seemed like a dull day at Henderson Field. It seemed that the aerial doldrums, begun after the Battle of Santa Cruz, were going to continue—until coastwatchers radioed reports of eleven enemy destroyers slipping down the top of the Solomons.

  Major Paul Fontana led his newly arrived squadron of Marine fighters aloft first, and after him came Captain Joe Foss with more Wildcats. About 150 miles to the north Foss saw the specks of the enemy ships crawling over the flat obsidian surface of the sea like a file of ants. Then he saw six float Zeros flying escort. The Zeros struck boldly at the American bombers, trying to ruin their aim as they screamed down on Admiral Tanaka’s skillfully maneuvering ships.

  Some of their bombs scored direct hits on destroyers Takanami and Naganami, inflicting major damage and killing troops, but no ships were sunk and the Tokyo Express sailed on toward Tassafaronga.

  The Zeros were not so fortunate.

  “Don’t look now,” Joe Foss yelled by radio to his pilots, “but I think we have something here.”6

  They went zooming down in attack, practically jostling each other, giving each other the aerial elbow in their eagerness not to be left out in the scramble of seven Wildcats for six Zeros. Foss shot the first one, blowing it into an aerial dust bag. And then they were all gone. Foss looked up. He could see five empty parachutes ballooning gently downward. He wondered where the pilots were. Then he saw a sixth chute with an enemy pilot dangling from the harness.

  The pilot unbuckled himself and plummeted head-first into the sea, and there were six clouds of empty silk swaying gently in the sky.

  Strange enemy indeed, Foss thought, and prepared to go down to strafe the destroyers. Grasping the stick, he made his customary quick survey of the clouds—and saw a pontoon protruding from a bit of fluff above him.

  He went up after it and found a single-motored biplane scout. He came in close, missed, and was raked by the scout’s rear-gunner. Wind came howling through a hole in his windscreen. Foss came back and shot the scout into the sea. He caught a second scout by surprise and sent it down like a torch.

  And then his motor began to fade and spout smoke, and Foss realized that he was far from home and coming down into the sea near Malaita Island.

  Two or three miles offshore, his tail hooked into the water, his plane skipped, bounced, came down hard, nosed over and began to sink like a stone.

  Foss was trapped. Water poured into his cockpit with the force of a sledgehammer, knocking him groggy. The plane was plunging toward the bottom of the sea, but Foss could not get out. He had forgotten to unhook his parachute leg strap, and now water was underneath both his chute harness and his inflated life vest, making him so buoyant he could not reach the leg strap.

  Still descending, he became frantic and caught his foot under the seat. He was going to drown if he did not calm himself. Holding off death with iron self-control, he straightened, pushed down with all his strength, freed the foot and strap—and shot upward through a crushing weight of water.

  But the leg straps of the chute harness were still buckled. They brought Foss to the surface behind-up and face-down. He gulped mouthfuls of sea water. He swallowed more, unbuckling the straps. Then his preserver shot up over his mouth and he took in more.

  Still thrashing about, Foss undid his shoes and felt himself become more buoyant. He tried to swim toward Malaita. But the current was too strong and he was barely staying in place. A big black tail fin cut the water a few feet to the side of him. Another slid past on the other side. Foss remembered the chlorine capsule in his pocket. It was supposed to keep the sharks away. He grasped it and broke it.

  In another hour it was dark, and the sharks were back. They were all around him.

  Within the darkening stadium in Washington, D.C., the floodlights were just coming on. They came on at about the time that Joe Foss and his fellow Marines roared aloft to intercept the Tokyo Express. And as the stadium blossomed with light and the uniforms of the football players became more brilliant and the thick carpet of grass beneath their feet turned a brighter green, the loudspeaker crackled and blared: “The President of the United States announces the successful landing on the African Coast of an American Expeditionary Force. This is our second front!”7

  A single great cry of national pride went reverberating around the arena. The football players went cartwheeling and hand-springing down the middle of the field. America, agonizing over prospects of fresh disaster in the Pacific, was looking eagerly away to a new theater.

  Then the whistle blew and the sobering players lined up for the kickoff.

  Little splashes of phosphorescence indicated to Joe Foss the places where the sharks were. He barely moved, fearing that if he extended an arm to swim, he would withdraw a spouting stub. Other splashes became audible farther away. They sounded like paddles. Peering through the murk, Foss saw a canoe and a native gondola coming toward him.

  Were they Japanese?

  Foss stayed motionless among the sharks and his fears. The boats passed to either side. Foss saw a lantern. For nearly a half hour, the lantern swayed eerily about him as the canoe and the gondola continued their search.

  A voice said, “Let’s look over ’ere,” and Joe Foss’s heart leaped.

  “Yeah!” he bellowed. “Right over here!”

  The lantern winked out and on the gondola above him Foss thought he saw natives raising war clubs and he knew he heard them jabbering wildly.

  “Friend!” Foss yelled. “Birdman! Aviator! American!”8

  Suddenly there was the man with the lantern above him, and friendly arms were outstretched toward him. Foss grasped them. They were those of Tommy Robinson, an Australian sawmill operator, and he pulled Foss into the canoe. Another man, in clerical clothing, said, “I’m Father De Steinberg,” just as a flying fish leaped from the sea and smashed the lantern.

  Foss gaped at the fish. It was twenty inches in length with a long, sharp needle of a bill.

  “I should have kept this thing down,” Robinson said apologetically. “But I guess I got the wind up a bit. Many a bloke has lost his eyes at night because of holding lights.”9

  Foss shuddered and instinctively put his hand over his eyes, shivering again while Robinson cheerfully advised him that he had been wise to remain offshore with his friends, the sharks. If he had come ashore at the point he had been hoping to reach, he would have had to ford a stagnant stream full of crocodiles.

  The boats made for Buma Mission. Foss was welcomed ashore by Bishop Aubin, and another bishop who was Russian, as well as a Norwegian planter, four priests from as many different countries, and two brothers—one from Emmetsburg, Iowa—and eight sisters, one from Boston.

  They fed him and gave him dry clothes and a bed. It was not really a bed, rather the lumpy pad of an ascetic monk with a rocklike sack for a pillow, but Joe Foss slept well on it.

  Except for a bad few minutes at midnight when he awoke sick and retching from the sea water he had swallowed.

  “It smells of exhibitionism,” Bull Halsey said. “To hell with it!”10

  The admiral was on Guadalcanal. He had come there Sunday, November 8, and he was, with customary bluntness, rejecting his staff’s suggestion that he stand up in his jeep and wave or do something to make his presence known to the island’s ragged defenders.

  Halsey would not, for he had seen their faces, and he would not insult them by crowing, in effect: “Give a cheer, Halsey’s here.” So he drove without fanfare to Vandegrift’s headquarters. Vandegrift took him on tour of the battlegrounds, and treated him to a dinner which so impressed the admiral that he asked to see the cook.

  Butch Morgan appeared. His red mustache was carefully brushed. He wore clean khaki trousers and his skivvy shirt was immaculate. He stood ramrod straight while Commander, South Pacific, praised his cooking, until, reddening and fidgeting apace with the admiral’s encomiums, he finally burst out: “Oh, bullshit, Admiral—you don’t have to say that!”11

  Joe Foss also
enjoyed his dinner that Sunday.

  He had been to the thatched chapel and he had also been put on display for the benefit of curious natives. The fathers had asked him to stand between two huts while the Malaitans passed by to examine him. Short, with powerful muscles rippling beneath purply black skin, they not only made a striking contrast to the tall fair American, they seemed very much amazed that there was a difference at all.

  One of the priests explained that many years before the war an American schooner had stopped at Malaita with a crew of southern Negroes. They had told the Malaitans that they were Americans, and so, the islanders had expected Foss to be black.

  Foss was not surprised. One of the sisters he had spoken to had never seen an automobile, and the first airplanes she saw were those that flew and fought overhead. Hardly any of the missionaries knew anything of the war going on across The Slot, to say nothing of what had happened in the world during the past few decades, and that was why, as Foss sat down to dinner, they pressed him to stay with them for two weeks.

  Foss thought he might stay a week—he could fish and inspect the wrecked Japanese planes in the hills—until he heard the familiar roar of a Catalina’s motors and he rushed down the steps of the dining hall built on stilts to find that his friend, Major Jack Cram, had come for him.

  Joe Foss went back to the war. He left his silk parachute for the sisters to sew into clothing, he promised to bring his hosts some tobacco, and he went out to the Catalina in a native canoe—returning to that Henderson Field from which, during the weeks to come, he would rise to score his twenty-sixth aerial victory and tie the record set by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I.

  Behind him the Malaitans had begun to chant vespers.

  Across the Bay, Washing Machine Charley and the Tokyo Express bellowed a martial vespers to introduce Admiral Halsey to Guadalcanal at night.

  The admiral sat out the performance in General Vandegrift’s dugout, rising, during a lull, to strike a sandbag with a knuckly fist.

  “Stout structure you have here, Archie,” Halsey grunted, and then the All-Clear sounded, and both men left.

  Behind them, staff officers stared in wonderment at the stout sandbag which had just burst and was pouring sand on the floor with a weary sigh.

  The departure of Charley and the Express did not mean that Marines on the ridge directly behind Vandegrift’s dugout could also go back to sleep, as had the admiral and the general. No, it meant, rather, that now they could emerge in dripping discontent from the watery pits in which they had taken shelter, to pass a few unharassed hours squatting on their haunches while hoping the customary but rarely fulfilled hope that the rain would stop and they might dry off.

  Private Juergens began to swear. He swore at the enemy with an ardent fluency, making masterly use of that ugly four-letter word without which most Marines, like handcuffed orators, are speechless. Suddenly they were all on their feet howling foul epithets at the enemy, real or imagined, in the dark jungle below them. They called Emperor Hirohito a “bucktoothed bastard” and they suggested that Premier Tojo impale himself upon the Japanese caudal appendage, and then, up from the jungle a reedy high voice screeched back in outrage:

  “F——— Babe Ruth!”12

  Chesty Puller was being evacuated from Gavaga Creek.

  The day before, he had led his battalion of Marines in the western push against Gavaga while Moore’s soldiers attacked from the south and Hanneken hit from the west. The enemy had replied with an artillery barrage.

  Fragments from an exploding shell tore into Puller’s lower body and his legs. He was knocked flat. Bleeding freely, he called to a nearby Marine.

  “Call headquarters, old man.”

  “I can’t, sir. The line’s been cut.”13

  Puller staggered erect to help repair the break, and a sniper shot him twice in the arm. Puller sank to the ground again. His men placed him on a poncho, dug a foxhole and lowered him gently into it. He spent the night there. In the morning a corpsman came to tie an evacuation tag to Puller’s uniform. Puller snatched it away, snarling:

  “Go label a bottle with that tag! I can go under my own power.”14

  Puller arose unsteadily and limped a thousand yards down the trail to the beach. He sank to the ground again. To his agonized dismay, he could not, in front of his men, go farther. His proud spirit could no longer goad his weakening flesh, and he had to crawl into the landing boat.

  Sailing down the coast in a fog of pain, he could hear the firing signaling the beginning of the end for the enemy at Gavaga.

  On November 9—while Chesty Puller was taken by jeep to the primitive hospital inside the perimeter—Admiral Halsey held a press conference. A newsman asked how long he thought the Japanese would continue to fight.

  “How long can they take it?” Halsey snapped.15

  Another reporter asked the admiral how he proposed to conquer.

  “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs,”16 he shot back.

  Later, Halsey decorated some of Vandegrift’s officers and men. He met the general’s staff, and also Martin Clemens. Turning to drive to the runway, Halsey said: “Well, Clemens, you carry on. We’ve got to beat these goddamed little yellow bastards.”17

  At the airfield, Halsey said farewell with twinkling eyes. “Vandegrift,” he said, “don’t you do a thing to that cook.”18

  Then he was gone, and a few hours later Archer Vandegrift had resumed the attack in the west.

  The arrival of the Eighth Marines under Colonel Hall Jeschke had prompted Vandegrift to renew his push toward Kukumbona. He sent this force to join Arthur holding the blocking position with his own Second Marines and a battalion of the 164th.

  But the attack, begun in the afternoon, bogged down in a furious rainfall.

  Next day the sun was blazing, and the Eighth Marines, like all new arrivals on Guadalcanal, wilted in its heat.

  On the following day the sun shone even more fiercely. Although it did not deter the veteran units at Gavaga Creek—who finally reduced the enemy pocket, killing 350 Japanese at a loss of forty Americans dead and 120 wounded—the heat again slowed Colonel Arthur’s advance. So did General Hyakutake’s well-entrenched, stubborn, and enlarged forces.

  By mid-afternoon only four hundred yards had been gained. By that time also, General Vandegrift had been informed by Admiral Halsey that a great fleet had sailed from Truk. Presumably, it was going to join other large forces gathering at Rabaul and in the Shortlands.

  Later that day, two furious air raids signaled the end of the aerial doldrums and underlined Halsey’s warning.

  Once again Archer Vandegrift was forced to shift from an offensive to a defensive stance. He recalled his troops from both fronts. He strengthened his lines. He tried to conceal his apprehension, but with little success. Anyone who had been on Guadalcanal long enough could read the signs. They knew—at Henderson Field, along the beaches and the riverbanks, atop the ridges and down in the gloom of the jungle—they knew as they had always known that the breaking point had to be reached some time.

  And this was it.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  FOR THE first time since the Japanese garrison on Tulagi had sent its last, heartbreaking message, “Praying for everlasting victory,” Japan’s Army and Navy had drawn up a plan that was concentrated rather than dispersed, detailed rather than complicated.

  Admiral Yamamoto had placed Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo in command of an armada of two aircraft carriers, four battleships, eleven cruisers, forty-nine destroyers, eleven transports, and 14,000 men.

  The troops were to augment General Hyakutake’s 17th Army, which, in mid-November, at last outnumbered Vandegrift’s forces by 30,000 to 23,000. Some 3000 of the reinforcements comprised a Combined Naval Landing Force, while the remaining 11,000 formed the main body of the 38th Division.

  They were to land on the morning of November 13, after Henderson Field had been bombarded night and day. The first barrage wa
s to be delivered on the night of November 12–13 by Vice-Admiral Hiroaki Abe with battleships Hiei and Kirishima, cruiser Nagara and fourteen destroyers. Gunichi Mikawa, with six cruisers and six destroyers, would bombard during the daylight of November 13 while a convoy of eleven high-speed Army transports, escorted by twelve Tokyo Express destroyers under Tanaka the Tenacious, put the troops ashore at Tassafaronga.

  Throughout this operation, Admiral Kondo with carriers Hiyo and Junyo, battleships Haruna and Kongo and other ships would sail in distant support about 150 miles north of Savo. Hiyo’s and Junyo’s airplanes would, of course, bomb Henderson Field in concert with the eagles from Rabaul.

  Thus the major assault-and-landing plan, simplified at last, with the knockout blow to be delivered “all at once, in big ships,” as Gunichi Mikawa had argued in that late August of long ago. And among its details, finally, was the destruction of the Allied coast-watching network on Bougainville.

  Japan now knew to what disastrous degree her movements of ships and aircraft had been made known to the Americans. Because she did, aircraft from Rabaul or New Ireland rarely flew above The Slot, now, and ships sailed south on three different routes.

  Nevertheless, coastwatchers continued to operate close to fields such as Buin and it was very difficult to conceal the gathering of a great armada from those numerous native scouts who, as the Japanese also now realized, were not harmless “civilians” in lap-laps but rather very dangerous enemy spies. Since trapping the scouts themselves was obviously impossible, or at least impractical, the Japanese decided to strike at the organizing brains behind them.

  Jack Read in the north of Bougainville and Paul Mason in the south at Buin were to be caught and killed.