“I wish I’d known who he was,” Vandegrift said. “I could have saved him a trip to the Raiders.”
“Sir?” Banning asked, obviously concerned.
“If his brother is who I think he is, he was flown out of here the day before yesterday,” Vandegrift said. When he saw the looks on their faces, he hastily added: “In near-perfect health. I’m surprised you don’t know, Dillon. Sergeant Thomas J. McCoy was ordered back to the States by the Director of Public Affairs. They seem to think he can boost enlistments and sell war bonds. The press is calling him ‘Machine Gun McCoy.’”
“I’d heard about that, Sir. It just slipped my mind.”
“I could understand Sergeant McCoy being called ‘Killer,’” Vandegrift said, shaking his head in a mixture of surprise and amusement. “Not only did I recommend him for the Navy Cross, for what he did on Edson’s Ridge with his machine gun, but he’s built like a tank and looks like he can chew nails. But that young man…”
“In his case, Sir, the Killer’s looks can be deceiving,” Banning said.
“What’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know how familiar you are with the Buka Operation, General?”
“The Marines operating the Buka Coastwatcher station were at the end of their rope, and you went in and replaced them?”
“Yes, Sir,” Banning said. “McCoy set up the Buka operation for General Pickering. And went in with it. He went ashore from the sub before the plane got there. That was his second rubber-boat landing. He was on the Raider raid on Makin.”
“He gets around, apparently,” Vandegrift said, and then asked, “What’s he going to do here?”
“He’s returning to the States, Sir, via Espiritu Santo.”
Vandegrift nodded, then, ending the casual conversation, said, “You say General Pickering sent you to see me, Major?”
“Yes, Sir,” Banning said, then turned to Major Dillon. “Jake, will you excuse us, please?”
Dillon nodded, then pushed the canvas aside and left them alone.
General Vandegrift looked at Banning.
Banning took a sheet of flimsy paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to the General.
* * *
TOP SECRET
NOT LOGGED
ONE COPY ONLY
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
FOLLOWING IS DECRYPTION OF MSG 220107
RECEIVED 090942 2105 GREENWICH
FROM SECNAV WASHINGTON DC
TO SUPREME COMMANDER SWPOA
EYES ONLY MAJOR EDWARD BANNING USMC
SECNAV DESIRES THAT MAJOR BANNING
[1] PREPARE AN ANALYSIS OF JAPANESE INTENTIONS AND CAPABILITIES REGARDING GUADALCANAL BASED ON ALL INTELLIGENCE AVAILABLE TO HIM AND HIS STAFF
[2] PERSONALLY OBTAIN FROM COMGEN 1ST MARINE DIVISION HIS EVALUATION OF HIS CAPABILITIES TO COUNTER THREAT, YOU ARE DIRECTED TO MAKE YOUR ANALYSIS [[1] ABOVE] AVAILABLE TO COMGEN 1ST MARDIV.
[3] PROCEED TO PEARL HARBOR, T.H., WHERE BOTH ANALYSES WILL BE TRANSMITTED VIA SPECIAL TRANSMISSION FACILITIES TO SECNAV EYES ONLY BRIG GEN FLEMING PICKERING USMCR WHO WILL BRIEF SECNAV
[4] BE PREPARED, IF SO ORDERED, TO PROCEED FROM PEARL HARBOR, T.H., TO WASHINGTON DC TO PERSONALLY BRIEF SECNAV.
[5] SECNAV AND GEN FLEMING WISH TO STATE THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF SENSITIVITY OF THIS ASSIGNMENT AND TO EXPRESS COMPLETE CONFIDENCE IN GENERAL VANDEGRIFTS AND MAJOR BANNINGS DISCRETION
BY DIRECTION SECNAV
HOUGHTON, CAPT USN
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT TO SECNAV
TOP SECRET
* * *
General Vandegrift read the message, looked at Banning, then read the message again.
“Very interesting,” he said. When Banning didn’t reply, Vandegrift added, “Are you going to tell me what this is all about, Banning?”
Banning looked uncomfortable.
“Sir, I think it’s right there. I don’t like to speculate….”
“Speculate,” Vandegrift ordered, softly but sharply.
“Sir, is the General aware of General Pickering’s mission when he was here before?”
“You mean, here on Guadalcanal? Or in the Pacific?”
“In the Pacific, Sir.”
“It was bandied about that Pickering was Frank Knox’s personal spy.”
“Sir, it is my understanding that General Pickering was dispatched to the Pacific to obtain for Secretary Knox information that Secretary Knox felt he was not getting through standard Navy channels.”
“You’re a regular, Banning,” Vandegrift said. “I shouldn’t have to tell you about going out of channels.” He paused. “About my personal repugnance to going out of channels.”
“Sir, may I speak frankly?”
“I expect you to, Major.”
“Sir, with respect, you don’t have any choice. I am here at the direction of the Secretary of the Navy. I respectfully suggest, Sir, that if the Secretary of the Navy elects to move outside the established chain of command, he has that prerogative.”
“Would you say, then, Major, that the contents of this message are not known to the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific?”
“I would be very surprised if it was, Sir.”
“And the reference…” Vandegrift said, then paused and looked at the message again, “…the reference to their confidence in my discretion, and yours, means that we are not expected to tell them about it?”
“I would put that interpretation on that, Sir,” Banning said.
“When this comes out, Banning, as it inevitably will, my superiors will conclude that I went over their heads. I would draw the same conclusion.”
“Sir, I can only respectfully repeat that we have received an order from the Secretary of the Navy.”
“In which I see the hand of Fleming Pickering,” Vandegrift said. “I think this was Pickering’s idea, not Mr. Knox’s.”
Banning didn’t reply for a moment. There was no doubt in his mind that the whole thing was Fleming Pickering’s idea. For one thing, the Secretary of the Navy almost certainly had no idea who one obscure major named Edward Banning was.
“Sir, I respectfully suggest—”
“I know,” Vandegrift interrupted him. “It doesn’t matter whose idea it was, Knox has signed on to it. Right? And we have our orders, right?”
“Yes, Sir,” Banning said, uncomfortably.
“The reference…” Vandegrift began, and again stopped to look at the message in his hand, “…to ‘all intelligence available to you and your staff.’ I presume that includes MAGIC intercepts?”
“Sir,” Banning said, now very uncomfortable, “I’m not at liberty…”
“Pickering was here, as you know. I know about MAGIC.”
“Sir—”
Vandegrift held up his hand, shutting him off, and then went on, “…and thus I should have known better than to put that question to you. Consider it withdrawn.”
Banning was visibly relieved.
“General,” he said, “I have access to certain intelligence information, the source of which I am not at liberty to disclose. More important, not compromising this source of intelligence is of such importance—”
Vandegrift held up his hand again, silencing him. Banning stopped and waited as Vandegrift visibly chose the words he would now use.
“Let’s go off at a tangent,” he said. “The last time I was in Washington, I had a private talk with General Forrest. Perhaps he was out of school and shouldn’t have told me this, but we’re very old friends, and I flatter myself to think he trusts my discretion….”
Jesus Christ, did Forrest tell him about MAGIC? I find that hard to believe!
Major General Horace W. T. Forrest was Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 (Intelligence), of The Marine Corps.
“Anyway, General Forrest told me a story about the British being in possession of a coding machine…”
The Enigma machine. I can’t believe Forrest told him about that, either.
“…which permitted them to decode certain Germa
n codes…”
I’ll be damned, he did!
“…and that one of the German messages intercepted and decoded was the order from Berlin to the Luftwaffe to destroy Coventry,” Vandegrift went on. “Which posed to Prime Minister Churchill the difficult question, ‘Do I order the Royal Air Force to prepare to defend Coventry? Which will probably save Coventry, and a large number of human lives, civilian lives. But which will also certainly let the Germans know we have access to their encoded material. Or do I let them destroy Coventry and preserve the secret that we are reading their top-secret operational orders?’”
“I’m familiar with the story, Sir.”
“Yes, I thought you might be,” Vandegrift said. “Coventry, you will recall, was leveled by the Luftwaffe, with a terrible loss of life. I presume the English are still reading German operational orders, and that the Germans do not suspect that they are.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I believe Churchill made the correct decision. Do I make my point, Major?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I will not inquire into the source of your intelligence, nor will I act upon anything you tell me.”
“Yes, Sir,” Banning said.
“Go on, please, Major,” Vandegrift said.
“Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake has assumed command of Japanese operations on Guadalcanal,” Banning said.
Hyakutake commanded the Japanese Seventeenth Army.
Vandegrift looked surprised.
“I was about to say, I know that. But you mean he’s here, don’t you? Physically present on Guadalcanal?”
“Yes, Sir. He arrived 9 October.”
“He’s a good man,” Vandegrift said, almost to himself. It was not an opinion of Hyakutake’s character. Rather, it was one professional officer’s judgment of the professional skill of another.
“Sir, would it be a waste of your time if I recapped the situation as I understand it?”
“No,” Vandegrift said. “Go ahead.”
“It is our belief, Sir, that until very recently, neither the Imperial Japanese General Staff itself, nor the Army General Staff, nor the Japanese Navy, has taken seriously our position on Guadalcanal. This is almost certainly because of a nearly incredible lack of communication between their Army and their Navy. For example, Sir, we have learned that until we landed, the Japanese Army was not aware that their Navy was building an airfield here.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Vandegrift said. “But on the other hand, sometimes our Army doesn’t talk to our Navy, either.”
“As bad as that gets, Sir, it’s nothing like the Japanese,” Banning said. “Neither, Sir, was the Japanese Army made aware of the extent of Japanese Navy losses at Midway, not until about two weeks ago. Because they presumed that their Naval losses there were negligible, the Japanese Army concluded that we would not be able to launch any sort of counteroffensive until the latter half of 1943.”
“And then we landed here,” Vandegrift said.
“Yes, Sir. And even when we did, they were unwilling or unable to believe that it was anything more than a large-scale raid. The Makin Island raid times ten, or times twenty, so to speak. This misconception was reinforced when Admiral Fletcher elected to withdraw the invasion fleet earlier than was anticipated.”
“Admiral Fletcher,” Vandegrift said evenly, “apparently believed that he could not justify the loss of his ships in a Japanese counterattack.”
“The Japanese interpretation, Sir, was that following the Battle of Savo Island, and our loss of the cruisers Vincennes and Quincy—”
“And the Australian Canberra…”
“—and the Canberra, that the Marines were abandoned here.”
“There were people here who thought the same thing,” Vandegrift said.
“Yes, Sir,” Banning said. “General Pickering among them.”
“Go on, Banning.”
“And then Japanese intelligence, as reported to and accepted by the Imperial General Staff, was faulty,” Banning said. “Remarkably so. Their estimate of Marines ashore was two thousand men, for instance. And they claimed our morale was low, and that deserters were attempting to escape to Tulagi.”
“Really?” Vandegrift asked. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“Based, apparently, on this flawed intelligence, the IJGS made the decision that recapture of Guadalcanal would not be difficult. And because the airfield would be of value to them when they completed it, they decided that the recapture should be undertaken without delay. Initially, in other words, they didn’t consider the possibility that we had the capability to make the airfield operational.”
“I find it hard to accept they could be so inept,” Vandegrift said.
“Yes, Sir, so did we. But that, beyond question, seems to be the case. In any event, at that point, General Hyakutaka was given responsibility for the recapture of Guadalcanal. He decided that six thousand troops would be necessary to do so, and that he could assemble such a force from his assets without hurting Japanese operations on New Guinea and elsewhere.
“He then dispatched an advance force, approximately a thousand men under Colonel Ichiki Kiyono, which landed here on 18 August at Taivu. Again, presumably because of the intelligence which reported your forces as two thousand men, with low morale, and attempting to escape to Tulagi, Kiyono launched his attack along the Ilu River….”
“And Kiyono’s force was annihilated,” Vandegrift said.
“Yes, Sir. Which caused the Japanese to do some second thinking. The Army and the Navy, at that point, Sir, were not admitting to one another the extent of their own losses. Nor—presuming either had learned them—the strength of the First Marine Division or the capabilities of Henderson Field.
“Their next step was greater reinforcement of their troops here. By the end of August, they had landed approximately six thousand men under Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi. At the same time, finally, they realized that they could not logistically support both their operations here and in New Guinea. IJGS radioed General Horii, who had almost reached Port Moresby, and ordered him to halt his advance and dig in. Troops and matériel intended for Papua were ordered redirected here. It was at about this point, Sir, that they gave evidence of a much changed attitude toward Guadalcanal. It was phrased in several ways, but in essence, they concluded that ‘Guadalcanal has now become the pivotal point of operational guidance.’”
Vandegrift grunted.
“General Kawaguchi’s orders were to reconnoiter your positions, to determine whether with his existing forces he could break through them, capture Henderson Field, and ultimately push you into the sea. Or whether the attack should be delayed until he had additional troops and matériel. He elected to attack, possibly still relying on erroneous data about your strength, or possibly because he had come to believe what General Hyakutaka had been saying for some time, and thus the risk was justified.”
“Excuse me?” Vandegrift asked.
“In September, Sir, we broke an intercept from General Hyakutake to the 17th Army, in which he said, ‘The operation to surround and recapture Guadalcanal will truly decide the fate of the control of the entire Pacific.’ At that time, Sir, that line of thinking was almost heretical.”
“Well, he’s right,” Vandegrift said. “And now he’s here, and in command.”
“Yes, Sir. In any event, Kawaguchi attacked what we now call ‘Bloody Ridge.’”
“And, by the skin of our teeth, of Merritt Edson’s teeth, of the Raider and Parachutists’ teeth, we held,” Vandegrift said. “Your Lieutenant McCoy’s brother stood up with an air-cooled .30 caliber Browning in his hands and killed thirty-odd Japanese. And he was by no means the only Marine who did more than anyone could reasonably, or unreasonably, expect of them.”
“Yes, Sir. We’ve heard. They may have to rewrite the hymn.”
“What?”
“From the Halls of Montezuma to the hills of Bloody Ridge.”
“Now that’s heresy, Major
,” Vandegrift said. “But maybe we’ll need another verse.” He smiled at Banning, then went on: “I’m glad we’ve talked, you and I. It’s cleared my mind about several things.” He paused. “You people have really been doing your homework, haven’t you?”
Banning didn’t reply.
“I don’t suppose you know—or if you know, that you can tell me—what Hyakutake’s plans are now?”
“I believe that is why I was sent here, Sir, to tell you what we think, and to get your evaluation of that for General Pickering.”
Vandegrift looked at him, waiting.
“It is our belief, Sir, that as soon as General Hyakutake has ashore what he considers to be an adequate force, he intends to launch an attack on your lines with the objective of taking Henderson Field. We believe that the attack will be three-pronged, from the west and south. The 2nd Division, under Major General Maruyama, will attack from the south, in concert with troops under Major General Sumiyoshi Tadashi attacking from the west. The combined fleet will stand offshore in support, and to turn away any of our reinforcements.”
“How soon is this going to happen?”
“I have no idea, Sir. But I think it is significant that General Hyakutake is physically present.”
“And we are supposed to hold? Does anyone really think we can, with what we have?”
“General Harmon does not, Sir. He has been pressing very hard to get you reinforced in every way.”
Major General Millard Harmon, USA, was a member of Admiral Fletcher’s staff, his ground force expert.
Vandegrift was silent a moment.
“I will give you specifics for your report to General Pickering, Major, because I think he expects them. But what they add up to is that unless we get significant reinforcements, ground and air, we are going to reach the point where even extraordinary courage will be overwhelmed by fatigue and malnutrition.”
“The Army’s 164th Infantry has sailed, Sir, to reinforce you. They should be here shortly.”
“That I’d heard,” Vandegrift said. “But one regiment is not going to be enough.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Get yourself a cup of coffee. I want to organize my thinking for General Pickering on paper.”
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