by Hugh Ambrose
Soon after climbing out of their planes, the new pilots would have realized that they had entered a chaotic situation. Everyone there had been greatly affected by the previous night's cataclysm. Six pilots and four enlisted men had been killed. The marine general in charge of all flight operations, Roy Geiger, was busy moving the operations center. The rude wooden building left by the Japanese, called the pagoda because of its distinctive roofline, had been blown to bits. The new operations center was a tent not far away. The ground crews and veteran pilots had to shake off the effects as fast as possible because there was a lot of work to do: assess the damage, bury the dead, clean up the wreckage, and fight the oncoming enemy.
Two waves of Japanese bombers and fighters had struck the field by the time Mike arrived.113 The first raid had dropped its bombs unchallenged; the Wildcats had not been able to get into the air in time. The U.S. fighters had been ready for the second wave, which had arrived overhead at 1:03 p.m. They had shot down fifteen bombers and three Zeros. The waves of enemy planes had been attempting to knock out the airfield in preparation for the arrival of their ships. The updated scouting report at four p.m. revealed one imperial battleship, three cruisers, and four destroyers bearing down on Guadalcanal on course 130 degrees at a speed of twenty-five knots; while this powerful force was still 180 miles out, another force of destroyers and troop transports was even closer. In the early evening, two groups of Dauntlesses rose from Henderson Field, their target the troop transports and destroyer escorts. While these thirteen dive- bomber pilots confronted the enemy, the new arrivals started getting orientated.
The Dauntless dive-bombers shared the use of the main airstrip with the torpedo planes and any PBYs or B-17s that came through. The Wildcats did not fly off of Henderson. They used the smaller airstrip, designated Fighter One but appropriately called the Cow Pasture. Today, however, the dive- bombers used the Cow Pasture because an enemy field piece was shelling Henderson. As the men of Bombing Six were introduced, Mike realized "we had a mishmash of everybody." To the Marine Corps squadrons had been added pilots from each of the three U.S. carriers to have been damaged or sunk recently: Enterprise, Saratoga, and Wasp. Some of the men Mike had met on Espiritu Santos. Only one squadron had arrived recently as a complete unit. The others, like Mike's Bombing Six, had arrived in dribs and drabs. All told, there were about twenty- three Dauntlesses ready to fly, but there was very little gasoline.
Spread out under the coconut trees on the northern side of the field was Mosquito Gulch, as the pilots referred to their quarters. Being shown a tent with six cots for living quarters came as no surprise. The foxholes and trenches that had been dug near every tent got the new guys' attention. After a visit to the mess tent for the evening meal, it came time to hit the rack because the next day would demand just as much from them. The two Dauntless strikes had returned before dark, having scored a combined total of five possible hits on the enemy transports.114 The screening warships had fired up a lot of flak. Everyone expected another attack soon. The unrelenting heat made a blanket unnecessary. Sleep came slowly to the guys lying in their clothes or in their skivvies. Keeping some clothes on, they had been warned, made it easier to run for the nearest bunker when the shelling started.
Lieutenant Micheel's initiation into the Cactus Air Force continued later that night, when a floatplane came over. The pilots ran for their bunkers in the light of the flares hanging above. The salvos from the enemy warships concentrated on the two airstrips, which put the new guys in the bull's-eye. Sitting in a bunker swatting mosquitoes, Mike endured the raid. After the all clear sounded, he walked back to discover what he called "the problem of living in the tent." Flying metal and exploding trees had torn great holes in it. His tent mates agreed they needed more protection. The next morning, they went to steal some sheets of steel grating, called Marston matting, used to cover some of the main runway. They had something else they needed that sheet metal to cover.
ORDERED TO HAVE 50 PERCENT OF ALL PERSONNEL ON GUARD AT ANY ONE TIME, no one in the 2/1 got much sleep the night of October 14. Another night of shelling meant the start of a ground assault. IJN convoys supposedly had been sighted eighty-five miles away. In the morning, word came that seven enemy transports were unloading at Kokumbona. Lieutenant Benson ordered his mortars to break down the guns immediately and prepare to move out. Soldiers began arriving to take the 2/1's positions. The mortarmen "wished the doggies luck as we boarded trucks," and wound their way toward the airfield.115 The IJA artillery seemed to chase their convoy as it wound its way north, to cross the Lunga River, then southwest, to some hills facing the jungle. Twenty-six bombers came over and welcomed them to the neighborhood with a carpet bombing. The marines' AA guns plucked two of them from the sky. Looking out to the coast, Sid's squad could see the Japanese transports unloading. U.S. planes bombed and strafed them, "killing thousands," but it looked to the squad like the B- 17s hit the IJN the hardest, leaving four smoking. Two of the enemy's transports got away, leaving a ghastly scene: "water full and beach lined with dead." The #4 gun squad started digging in.
NOT SCHEDULED TO FLY ON HIS FIRST FULL DAY ON CACTUS, LIEUTENANT Micheel walked over to the operations tent and soaked up the situation. Like the ready room on the Big E, the tents around the ops tent offered plenty of hot coffee and the latest intelligence. The uniform of the day was khaki pants, khaki shortsleeved shirt, and army boots; those not about to fly might wear only shorts and boots. In order to provide some protection from the fierce sun, the pilots were issued blue baseball caps; the mechanics wore red ones.116 Like most of his comrades, Mike wore his pistol in its shoulder holster, even when he was not flying.
October 15 started badly for the Cactus Air Force. The holes in Henderson Field prevented its use. Ground crews were still assessing the damage to the planes and looking for supplies of aviation gasoline. Crews drained the gas tanks of wrecked airplanes. The first Wildcats took off at dawn. A single Dauntless dive-bomber followed, the first of four to make individual attacks against the five enemy troop transports and eight destroyers that were landing troops a few miles down the shoreline. At six forty a.m., a scout reported another group of heavier battlewagons a few miles out, and five destroyers twenty miles out.
The morning's all-out search for aviation gasoline uncovered five separate spots where the drums had been buried by working parties. One cache of one hundred barrels had been buried down on the beach near Kukum.117 Lost drums of gasoline only pointed up the chaotic nature of life on the Canal. Out on the field, engineers used a combination of U.S. and Japanese heavy equipment to repair the strip. On the flight line, the ground crews had long since learned how to keep the planes flying despite chronic shortages of essential items. Spare parts often came from the wreckage of other aircraft, most of which had been collected into a boneyard just off the strip. Without carts and hoists for the bombs, the men manhandled five-hundred-and thousand-pound bombs onto and off of planes. They fueled the planes using hand pumps connected to fifty- five-gallon drums of fuel.118 The plane captains eventually declared eleven more Dauntlesses fit to fly. The Klaxon announced the noon enemy raid at eleven a.m., which proved to include fewer bombers than usual. After the Wildcats fought the enemy planes, a number of sorties of Dauntlesses took off in the afternoon for the enemy ships. One PBY pilot took off with two torpedoes jerry-rigged to the wings; he managed to launch one of them into the side of an enemy ship. An enemy fighter chased the lumbering PBY all the way back to Henderson Field, where the six machine guns of a Wildcat turned it into a ball of fire a few hundred feet above Micheel's head.119
Lieutenant Commander Ray Davis led the last strike of the day. He and two others flew over the three transports burning fiercely on the shoreline to chase after the ones fleeing up the slot. Ray found his quarry about sixty-five miles away, dove through the AA fired by the destroyers. One of his wingmen scored a hit. The Cactus Air Force had savaged the enemy and sent them packing, for the moment. A lot of the emperor's ships were
still steaming around the slot.
A few of the navy's transport planes, the R4D (known to the army as the C-47 and to the world as the DC-3) landed with drums of gasoline and departed with wounded marines and fifteen exhausted pilots. Six Dauntlesses arrived. The supply ships due that day, however, had been turned back. As the day ended, a few of the pilots flying the torpedo planes announced that they were going to grab rifles and go up into the hills to help the Seventh Marines.120 Mike declined. He had been scheduled to fly the next day and it looked like there would be enough gas.
First he had to suffer through an intense barrage. Fifteen hundred of the eight-inch naval shells kept every airman and every marine cringing inside their bunkers and foxholes for more than an hour. In the morning, there were ten flyable Dauntlesses. In the ops tent, the skipper's priority of the day soon became clear: to destroy the enemy troops and materiel. Planes from the carrier USS Hornet, which had sailed into the area during the night, would assist. For Mike's briefing, a few marine officers came into the operations tent and joined in the briefing on enemy locations. After orientating the new guys, pointing out locations like Bloody Ridge, the Matanikau River, and the beaches of Kokumbona, one of them put his finger on a spot, looked directly at the pilots and said, "You go out there and get this place. . . ."
Mike walked to his Dauntless, parked under a coconut tree. The holes cut by shrapnel had been filed down until they were smooth. The plane captain and his team left the small holes at that. They screwed down any tears that threatened to open wider at speed. They covered the large gashes with pieces of tin cut from the fuselages of wrecked planes. In the cockpit, Mike looked down the length of his wing and noticed four or five large patches. "None of them were structural," he was assured; "they're just airfoil."
The airstrip lacked the smoothness of his carrier's flight deck. Its great length, however, offered Mike all the room in the world to gain flying speed. He hardly got his wheels up before he was over the target area. He looked down at the jungle below, back at the map on his plotting board, and then back down. Translating the poor map to the green terrain below was a difficult piece of orienteering. When the flight leader felt like he had the target, he radioed back to base. He received a curt reply, "Clear the bomb." The planes pushed over into a short dive to get their aim and then pulled the release.
Mike dropped a depth charge, not a general-purpose bomb, in part because the Cactus Air Force happened to have a lot of them. Mike had heard depth charges "were good to drop on guys in the woods . . . the shrapnel would go out all over." The enemy fired at him, but nothing could hit him at his speed except an AA gun. He completed the mission in less than an hour, then repeated it. The Mitsubishi bombers made their run at the marines and Henderson Field about three p.m., releasing their ordnance as the Wildcats dropped down upon them.
More exhausted pilots rotated off Cactus that night. Their departure meant more work for Bombing Six. A test of endurance began. Most days included at least one hour spent in a bunker, riding out the enemy air raids. Only a few days into the campaign, his buddy Bill Pittman jumped into a hole, only to land on a shard of jagged metal. It cut him badly and he left for sick bay. The Japanese artillery across the river played havoc with them on the airfield. Named Pistol Pete, the 150mm howitzer had developed a nasty habit of shooting at planes in the final moments of their landing pattern.
Though he saw marines all around--marching in formation, guarding the aircraft--the mess hall was the only place he came into close contact with them. Getting in the chow line, he first came to the medics handing out Atabrine. Once inside, mess men ladled "chili or . . . meat loaf or something like that" onto a tin plate and he found a seat where he could. From the conversations around him, Mike would have understood that the reconstituted potatoes sticking to his plate were regarded as a major step up from K rations. Though he did not ever learn much about the specifics of the ground campaign, from what he and his fellow pilots could see, "we didn't have any problem thinking that the marines, as long as they were supplied, they would be able to hang on."
Bombing Six's tactical missions against ground troops--dropping depth charges and strafing troop concentrations--grew out of the self-evident need to help the marines. With air superiority over the island for most of each day, the navy pilots could help the infantry campaign. They had not been trained, however, to provide "close air support." Direct radio communication between pilots and commanders on the ground had not been developed. Some of the problem was technological. Navy radios were problematic; marine radios were worse. The sets in Mike's plane operated on different frequencies than the radios of the marines. While the rear seat gunner could try to dial in lower frequencies, this did not become the easy answer.
Without pilots and marines trained in common procedures, and constrained by the emerging technology of radio, the leadership groped their way toward a solution during the heat of battle. Expediency won out. Marines marked targets using white phosphorus rounds.
Supporting the ground campaign ranked a distant third in priority to finding the Tokyo Express and stopping it. Having been in this battle since D-day, Bombing Six understood the nature of the fight and the routes by which the enemy struck them. With all of the challenges of getting as many Dauntlesses as possible into the air each day, the organization of the search missions looked "kind of happenstance" to Mike. He could see why. The CO of the Cactus Air Force, General Geiger, made his decisions based on the available aircraft. He and his staff had to maintain a striking force of Dauntlesses loaded with bombs designed to sink ships at the ready, while dispatching others on scouting or infantry support missions. Four days after Bombing Six landed, the CO pointed to Mike and another guy and said, "Okay, you've got the center marker. You've got the outside slot." He gave them a takeoff time for a scouting mission.
Flying a search mission over the Solomons demanded less skill than an ASW search off Enterprise because the chain islands made it so easy to navigate. Up the slot he flew, aware that somewhere in those islands, hiding in nameless bays just out of range, the Tokyo Express was waiting for darkness. As directed, he paid particular attention to the island of New Georgia on this first trip. He returned home empty-handed, feeling like a failure and afraid that everyone would have to pay for his failure by spending the night in the foxhole while a cruiser or two plastered the perimeter. Men would get hurt, even die. In the afternoon he flew another mission against the ground troops, then did it all again the next day, when he arrived back at Henderson to find that most of the planes over the field belonged to the Japanese. For some reason, the Zeros allowed his Dauntless to land undisturbed. Mike attributed it to just dumb luck. The word in the ops tent was that Admiral Halsey had relieved Admiral Ghormley as the commander of the South Pacific. Having come within a hair of losing his life, the news of "some admiral relieving another admiral" made no impression on Micheel.
The next day he had better luck. He flew in a strike of twelve planes led by the skipper of another squadron. They found three enemy destroyers 175 miles out. Aiding the ships' powerful defensive weapons were a dozen floatplanes. Avoiding the enemy planes and AA guns made dive-bombing difficult and they scored one near miss. The next day, the scouts found no warships. Micheel made quick strikes against the enemy up the beach at Kokumbona.
The following day, October 21, the long- range scouting planes flying off of Espiritu Santos reported enemy ships in the slot. The strike team, including Mike, got the order to scramble. After the briefing in the ops tent, he walked out to his assigned plane to take a good, hard look at it and, once airborne, he stared at the gauges and evaluated their readings. The plane captain would not put him in a plane with a serious mechanical problem, but the Cactus crews defined the term "serious problem" differently than did the men on the hangar deck of the Big E. Along with the patches, a plane's airspeed indicator might need an adjustment, or a radio that had checked out on the ground might fail in the air. Sometimes Mike flew one plane without a gyro b
ecause "well, as long as the weather's great you don't need a gyro."
Mike flew with his friend Dick Mills. As they cleared the coastline, each pilot and his gunner fired a short burst from their guns as a test. Dick's machine guns, though, had not been properly synchronized with the propeller in front of them, and he shot his prop off. The Dauntless began to lose flying speed quickly. Mike stayed with Dick's plane as it went down in the water near Russell Island. Dick made what looked like a good landing. Mike opened the throttle to catch up with his strike. Over the target area, they saw waves breaking over a reef. Assuming that the air corps bombers at high altitude had mistaken these waves for wakes, the navy pilots called it a fake and flew home.
After reporting the loss of Dick to Ray upon his return, there was not much to do. Micheel did not get around much. He knew enough to stay away from the front lines, and on Guadalcanal the front line lay in any direction he might choose to walk. Much as he would have liked to cool off down at the Lunga River, he refrained. While the "adventurous guys in our squadron" went swimming, he had heard reports of snipers down there, and he wasn't "too anxious to meet up with one of those." A fear of snipers explained only part of his behavior. After ten days on Cactus, he felt the weight of the struggle and realized innately to conserve his energy.