by Oliver North
But while I was loading, a Jap gunner has me in his sights from my left, and he’s got me cold. Before I could swing my gun around he fired all thirty rounds from his light machine gun at me and missed. I could feel the warmth of the bullets going past. I immediately fired one burst, and he was gone.
I got ready to go down the hill and a guy jumps up, an officer. He had his revolver out, and I ran toward him, bouncing and running down the hill, firing. He and sixteen or seventeen guys came out of the kuni grass, and with one big burst, I just mowed them down. The officer, firing at me, hit my helmet twice. He threw his revolver down and reached for his samurai sword, and as he started to pull it out, I was on top of him. I gave him a burst, and later, I thought, “That’s exactly what poor Charlie Locke got.”
The hand-to-hand combat lasted probably four or five hours. I looked around, and nobody was moving. And it was as quiet as a cemetery. All our machine guns were still hot—absolutely red hot and steaming. But they were still able to fire. They’d fired beautifully, with no stoppages.
No writer has ever written about it because nobody knows anything about it except my platoon, but we were the first and closest to the enemy, and we killed over 1,000 Japanese that night.
A few nights later I watched five Jap ships come in. They were going to land their troops right near my platoon on the beach, fourteen miles inside enemy territory.
They started down the beach but something had told me to put my machine guns on the beach, in an echelon, instead of lining up four guns. When they hit the surf, we were supposed to kill them all as they came ashore.
I told my platoon, “We’re here, and we’re going to hold this ground. I know our machine guns are going to work well. We’ve got the best weapons in the world.”
Meanwhile, “Chesty” Puller’s outfit had 800 Marines on his line. Nimitz had sent us 1,400 men of the Army’s 164th Infantry Division. They did a fabulous job.
When it was all over the colonel came through and said, “Sergeant Paige, you’re now Lieutenant Paige.”
Mitch Paige never mentioned it, but one of the decorations he received for the action that night was the Purple Heart. The other was the Congressional Medal of Honor.
NORTHEAST OF SANTA CRUZ ISLAND
NEAR 165° LATITUDE, SOUTH PACIFIC
26 OCTOBER 1942
2130 HOURS LOCAL
A few hours after Mitch Paige and his desperately outnumbered Marines had prevailed in fighting for their lives to hold Bloody Ridge, Admiral Kinkaid and the sailors and airmen of the Enterprise and Hornet battle groups found themselves engaged in a battle of their own—with about the same odds. Admiral Nobutake Kondo had departed Truk with an armada of four aircraft carriers, five battleships, fourteen cruisers, and forty-four destroyers, intending to support General Kawaguchi’s ground offensive.
Admiral Thomas Kinkaid commanded the USS Enterprise task force and later commanded MacArthur’s 7th Fleet.
But he arrived too late. At about 0300 on the morning of 26 October, a PBY out of Espiritu Santo detected Kondo’s carriers shortly after he had turned north after receiving word that Kawaguchi’s ground attack had failed.
Halsey, hearing the patrol plane’s report and looking at his plotting board in Noumea, sent a three-word “flash” precedence message to Kinkaid: “ATTACK. REPEAT—ATTACK.”
At dawn on 26 October, aircraft from the Enterprise found Kondo’s fleet northeast of the Santa Cruz Islands and promptly holed the flight deck of the light carrier Zuiho. But the Japanese counter-attacked immediately, pounding Hornet with bombs and torpedoes, leaving the carrier dead in the water, afire and listing.
By midday the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands was over. U.S. bomb and torpedo attacks had crippled the heavy cruiser Chikuma and seriously damaged the carrier Shokaku. The American pilots and anti-aircraft gunners—particularly those on the battleship South Dakota—had killed 102 of Kondo’s airmen. But a Japanese sub managed to slam a torpedo into the side of the destroyer Porter, and the final air raid of the engagement had put three bombs into the flight deck of the Enterprise.
The Porter had to be scuttled and Hornet went down after dark—joining the remains of seventy-four U.S. Navy pilots who had been downed in the fight. As the Enterprise and her escorts limped back to the south as Kondo retired toward Truk, for the first time since the war began, the U.S. Navy had no operational carriers in the Pacific Ocean.
NAVAL BATTLE OF GUADALCANAL
NEAR GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS
13 NOVEMBER 1942
2330 HOURS LOCAL
The stunning Japanese losses ashore on Guadalcanal—roughly ten killed for every American casualty—did nothing to diminish Tokyo’s insistence that the island be recaptured. By 12 November the Tokyo Express had brought Kawaguchi’s ground forces up to nearly 30,000 troops—more than the Americans had ashore. The Japanese continued their persistent probes and contact patrols, creating casualties on both sides every day and night. But they never again mounted another major ground offensive against the airfields.
At sea, however, it was a different story. For the remainder of October and up through the first days of November, the Tokyo Express continued an established pattern of nighttime deliveries of troops and supplies—then blasting away with naval guns at the U.S. Marines and Army troops ashore—before scooting back up the slot to safety. But on 5 November, Station Hypo code-breakers deciphered a lengthy message ordering another major attack. Cruisers, carriers, battleships, and eleven transports escorted by an equal number of destroyers were directed to deliver 13,500 fresh Japanese troops to Kawaguchi.
After seeing this intelligence, Nimitz called for help. Bombers and fighters were flown out from Hawaii. A regiment of Marines from the 2nd Marine Division and 6,000 more soldiers from the Americal Division recently arrived from the U.S. were rushed to shore up Vandegrift’s defenses. Repairs to the Enterprise were hastily completed and she was dispatched with the battleships Washington and South Dakota in company to seek out and destroy the enemy counter-invasion force.
On the afternoon of 12 November, a hastily assembled U.S. cruiserdestroyer force, designated as Task Force 65 and commanded by Rear Admiral Dan Callaghan, took up station at the southern end of the slot to intercept the Japanese Combined Fleet. Task Force 65 consisted of two heavy cruisers: the USS San Francisco (Callaghan’s flagship, damaged when a Japanese pilot crashed his flaming plane into her) and USS Portland; three light cruisers: Atlanta (Admiral Scott’s flagship), Helena, and Juneau; and eight destroyers: Barton, Monssen, O’Bannon, Cushing, Laffey, Sterett, Aaron Ward, and Fletcher—thirteen ships in all. They were no match for the two battleships, heavy cruiser, and fourteen destroyers under the command of Admiral Hiroaki Abe.
It was clear but moonless at 0200 on 13 November when the two forces met at close range in the waters between Guadalcanal and Savo Island. In a furious thirty-minute melee, which the Marines watched from ashore, both Admirals Callaghan and Scott were killed, four American destroyers were sunk, and the cruiser Atlanta was set afire from bow to stern and had to be scuttled. The cruiser Portland and another U.S. destroyer were left dead in the water and the cruiser Juneau, struck by a torpedo, was forced to retire to the south.
But the Japanese didn’t fare that well, either. Two of Abe’s destroyers, Akatsuki and Yudachi, were sunk outright and three more of his destroyers were seriously damaged. And his flagship, the battleship Hiei, was so badly damaged that she became a crippled, defenseless target for bombers from Henderson Field, who sent her to the bottom.
By dawn of 13 November, the remnants of Abe’s force were fleeing north, pursued by aircraft from Henderson Field and B-17s from Espiritu Santo. The violent encounter might have escaped notice in the U.S. press but for the fate of the Juneau. As the damaged heavy cruiser limped south thorough Ironbottom Sound, she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and went to the bottom with more than 700 aboard—including the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa. They had all enlisted in
December 1941 to avenge the death of their friend Bill Ball, who was killed at Pearl Harbor.
The five Sullivan brothers killed in the sinking of the Juneau.
Seaman Frank Holmgren was a nineteen-year-old captain’s orderly aboard the Juneau and was with his high school buddy Charlie Hayes when the Japanese torpedo hit the ship’s number-one engine room.
SEAMAN SECOND CLASS
FRANK HOLMGREN, USN
Near Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands
13 November 1942
0330 Hours Local
In November, we were assigned to a group that was going to take more Marines and supplies to Guadalcanal. Around one o’clock in the morning I could hear this boom, boom, boom. I thought they were planes dropping bombs. I had no idea that the Jap fleet was coming in. And here we are, right in the middle of them.
I got to my station and in five minutes or so we were hit in the number-one fire room. And the firemen were trying to keep the bulkhead from collapsing and trying to get men out of there. Then all the lights went out. I’m not a very good swimmer. I was scared to death.
I got up to the second deck and I didn’t know until we got topside that we were really in among the ships of the Jap fleet. And I could see they were still firing.
The San Francisco got hit at the stern, right through the fantail. They must have been right in the middle of it, too. We saw what was left of the thirteen ships that went in, and I remember seeing the Helena. The Portland was hurt. And the San Francisco. I didn’t even see the destroyers because they were out. After we got hit I was thinking that we’d have to go back to Pearl Harbor for repairs. While Charlie and I were sitting there, we noticed three life rafts tied down to the deck. So since we’d been hit and in bad shape and didn’t want to “go down with the ship,” we untied them.
It was just about then, when everything seemed quiet, that we were hit by another torpedo. The ship blew up in my face. And the next thing I know I’m in the air. When I come back down on the ship my hand hit a life jacket so I wrapped it around me, got up on my feet, and held on to a gun mount.
I looked back at the fantail and there was nothing there! And then all of a sudden I heard the roar of the ocean and I said, “I’m gonna die!”
I went down with the ship. How far down I went, I don’t know. But I thought I was dead at the time. And the next thing I know, I’m coming up out of that water. And I could see light. The life jacket was bringing me back up, and when I popped to the surface there was fuel oil, all over.
I looked around and saw some guys on a raft, so I made my way over to them. They were the three rafts that Charlie and I untied on the deck of the ship just before we were hit. They were the only rafts that got off the ship.
I remember someone saying, “The ships are leaving us!”
They kept on going; they didn’t come back and pick us up.
I think it was the second day that an Army plane came down low and dropped a rubber raft but no supplies. All the guys were really hurt badly and passing out. I remember somebody taking the dog tags off of someone before they rolled him off into the ocean. The sharks came then and after they got one, they went after more. People were dying, left and right.
As the days went by, we didn’t have anything to eat and we had sharks all around us. Every so often it would rain, so we’d get some water to drink. But some of the guys were going out of their heads from drinking salt water. Others went out of their heads and jumped off the raft even though the sharks were waiting for them.
On the fourth day somebody else jumped off, and as he did I saw a shark take him. That left just five of us.
That afternoon things were getting bad. Then we heard this seaplane coming in. The pilot landed in the water and they finally pulled us in. The first thing I said to the pilot was, “Did you find those cork nets out there?” I knew my buddy Charlie Hayes was on one, but he said no. That’s how I learned Charlie never made it. That’s when I passed out.
They took us back to Guadalcanal. How many survivors? After that torpedo hit it was seventy-five, or maybe a hundred. Now there were just five of us.
I just had confidence that I was gonna make it.
NAVAL BATTLE OF GUADALCANAL
NEAR GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS
14 NOVEMBER 1942
2330 HOURS LOCAL
While Frank Holmgren was floating in the waters of Ironbottom Sound awaiting rescue, thousands of his countrymen were fighting to save Guadalcanal.
In the early morning hours of 14 November, Admiral Mikawa’s bombardment force cruisers arrived offshore and proceeded to pound the airfield and the Marine positions around it. At dawn, “Cactus Air Force” planes and bombers from Enterprise found Mikawa’s cruisers, sinking one and damaging three others. Then U.S. planes pounced on Tanaka’s troop transports, sending seven to the bottom, carrying more than 7,000 Japanese soldiers with them.
While U.S. aircraft were pounding Tanaka’s transports and escorts, Halsey ordered the battleships South Dakota and Washington to detach from Enterprise and proceed at flank speed to intercept a new threat: Admiral Nobutake Kondo was heading back into the fight with the battleship Kirishima, four cruisers, and nine destroyers.
At 2315 on 14 November, the two American battlewagons, accompanied by four destroyers—all under the command of Rear Admiral Willis Lee aboard Washington—were on station south of Savo Island when Kondo’s force emerged from the radar “shadow” of Savo Island. The Japanese struck the first blow, sinking two of Lee’s destroyers with Long Lance torpedoes and so severely damaging the South Dakota with naval gunfire that she retired to the west escorted by the two surviving U.S. destroyers. Lee, aboard Washington , now faced Kondo’s entire force alone. The battleship’s crew, responding to their commander’s courageous order to open fire and close with the enemy, rose to the occasion and hit the Kirishima more than fifty times with five- and sixteen-inch radar-directed shells—all in under seven minutes.
The barrage wrecked the Japanese flagship and Kondo decided he’d had enough. He ordered the Kirishima and a disabled destroyer scuttled and quickly fled north, providing a sufficient distraction for the tenacious Tanaka to beach his four remaining, badly damaged transports on the Guadalcanal coast. There he succeeded in disembarking 2,000 surviving Imperial Army soldiers—but not their supplies—before the ships were pounded to pieces by the “Cactus Air Force.”
By the end of the three days’ battle, only 2,000 of the nearly 11,000 Japanese troops on the transport ships made it ashore, but with none of their necessities—ammunition, rations, and other supplies and equipment.
The two opposing forces withdrew and counted the costs. The Japanese had sunk eight American ships and damaged seven more. Almost 2,000 American sailors lost their lives—including 720 from the Juneau alone. Of the 725 men thrown into the sea when their ship went down, just five sailors survived.
The Americans sank five Japanese ships and damaged three others. But the loss in Japanese lives was horrific. More than 11,000 soldiers and sailors had died in the waters around Guadalcanal.
There would be one more major battle—the Battle of Tassafaronga—on 29–30 November. By then the Japanese had given up trying to retake Guadalcanal and concentrated on getting their troops off the island. They repeated their strategy of sending transports down the slot in Ironbottom Sound, but this time the eight Japanese ships were met by nine superior ships of the U.S. Navy. After the battle, each U.S. ship had sunk one Japanese ship, and the Americans suffered damage to three others.
The Japanese were on the run both physically and psychologically. Still, they eventually managed to evacuate 13,000 troops from Guadalcanal. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were left on the island to fend for themselves. Rather than surrender, they fought to the death, committed suicide, or died of starvation or disease before it all finally ended in early February 1943.
After the six-month series of battles for Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Kelly Turner was promoted to vice admiral, and Vice
Admiral “Bull” Halsey was promoted to full admiral. When he put on his fourth star, Halsey credited it to the Marines and the courageous actions of Admirals Dan Callaghan and Norman Scott—both awarded posthumous Medals of Honor.
The final Japanese toll for Guadalcanal was catastrophic: 25,000 lives lost; more than two dozen ships sunk—including irreplaceable carriers and battleships—and the loss of at least 600 planes. The Japanese defeat at Guadalcanal also spelled the end of their efforts to take Port Moresby and the rest of New Guinea.
The Americans lost 1,600 lives in the land, sea, and air battles for Guadalcanal. U.S. ship and aircraft losses equaled Japan’s twenty-four ships and 600 aircraft. For those who fought on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, it was indeed a tropical hell. The grisly hand-to-hand combat would become the blueprint for action in later Pacific island battles. But Admiral Halsey best summed up the overall result of the fight: “Before Guadalcanal, the enemy advanced at his pleasure. After Guadalcanal, he retreated at ours.”
CHAPTER 10
THE BLACK SHEEP SQUADRON
(AUGUST 1943–JANUARY 1944)
MARINE FIGHTER SQUADRON VMF-214
ESPIRITU SANTO, NEW HEBRIDES
22 JULY 1943
1130 HOURS LOCAL
The failure of the Japanese efforts to retake Guadalcanal was paralleled by their collapse on New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula. By mid-January, MacArthur had more than 30,000 Australian and American troops committed to overrunning 12,000 Japanese in the “Buna Pocket.” At the end of the month, just before Guadalcanal was finally secured, the last surviving Japanese defender was killed or captured—at a cost of more than 3,000 Allied lives—nearly double the U.S. losses to take Guadalcanal.