by Jim McEnery
The fact that all three of the survivors, Platoon Sergeant Frank L. Few, Sergeant Charles C. “Monk” Arndt, and Corporal Joseph A. Spaulding, described the slaughter in detail in interviews, magazine articles, and official reports didn’t seem to make any difference.
Sometimes I think the brass were just too embarrassed by the whole thing to admit the truth because Goettge and his men were naive and gullible enough to walk right into a trap. I guess United States Marines were supposed to be too smart and tough to make mistakes like that.
Maybe the brass just wished everybody would forget it, but I knew I wouldn’t. And I don’t think any of the other guys who were there that morning ever forgot it, either. We still had an awful lot to learn about the Japs—but we were learning.
As we marched away that morning, I could hear a voice inside my head repeating the same words over and over: I won’t forget! I won’t forget! I won’t forget!
That afternoon, mostly just to take my mind off the things I’d seen that day, I took a few sheets of Jap paper I’d found out of my pack and wrote my mom a letter.
Even if the censors had let me get away with it, I wouldn’t have mentioned anything about what happened to Colonel Goettge and his party or anything else about the situation on Guadalcanal because it would’ve worried Mom and my sister, Lil, too much. Instead, I tried to make it sound as cheerful as I could.
At the time, I really had my doubts that they’d ever get to read what I was writing, anyway. Our mail service wasn’t too reliable, to say the least.
But after all these years, I still remember how I started the letter.
“Well, here we are on this beautiful tropical island,” I wrote, “and everything’s just fine . . .”
BUSHIDO TAKES A BEATING
VERY FEW MARINES had ever heard the Japanese word “Bushido” at the time we landed on Guadalcanal. But no word in any language was more important to Japanese soldiers, from the highest-ranking officer on down to the lowliest private. It was a whole lot more than just a word. It was a way of life—and death.
Bushido was an ancient warrior’s code that the Japs believed gave them greater physical power and spiritual strength than the “soft, spoiled” Americans they were fighting. It was based on the idea that the Japanese were a superior race. They called themselves the “sons of heaven” and thought they were divinely favored by the Sun God, whose symbol was splashed across their “flaming asshole” battle flags.
In the Imperial Japanese Army, Bushido was the foundation for a military caste system based on sheer brutality, one that was practiced like a religion. Privates in that army were beaten and abused unmercifully by soldiers who outranked them. Then, after they were promoted to a higher rank, those former privates handed out the same cruel punishment they’d gotten to other new privates.
In combat, Bushido emphasized using bayonets and swords instead of bullets whenever possible, especially when the Jap attacks came in the dark of night. The theory was that slashing blades were even scarier to their enemies than gunfire. Up until Guadalcanal, the Japs were always on the attack, and they’d had great success with their fanatic banzai charges, where hundreds of screaming troops threw themselves at enemy positions with swords and fixed bayonets.
In the early going, these charges worked like a charm against Allied troops all over the Pacific. They scared the hell out of defenders and paralyzed them to the point they couldn’t fight back. When they saw the Japs coming at them that way, they usually either broke and ran or just gave up. This is how 80,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops ended up as prisoners of war after the fall of the “impregnable fortress” of Singapore.
But on Guadalcanal, the Japs started finding out those banzai charges were like a double-edged sword. They could cut either way. If the troops they were attacking held their ground and kept firing, a charge like that could end up being mass suicide for the attackers.
That’s one thing the Marines taught the Bushido bastards in August and September of 1942.
WHOEVER CAME UP with that old saying about how it’s “always darkest before the dawn” could’ve been talking about what happened on Guadalcanal during the four weeks between August 20 and September 14.
That’s when two of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history were fought on the island and our situation in general was looking bleak as hell.
It just so happened that I wrote another letter to the folks at home on August 20. Mom saved it, and I still have it, as a matter of fact. In it, I was still trying hard not to let on how grim our situation was.
“How are you all?” I wrote. “I’m fine myself, and I hope you are all the same. I’m on Guadalcanal Island now and in the best of health and feel fine as far as morale is concerned.”
At the time, we actually felt like we had our backs to the wall, and it was hard to see any way out. Jap planes were bombing us around the clock, and their destroyers were pulling in close to shore to shell the airfield and our positions around it. Our Navy was still somewhere else far away, so the Nips were landing reinforcements just about every night with no opposition, and until we got some naval or air support, there was nothing we could do about it.
But when the second of those two major battles ended in mid-September, over 1,700 banzai-charging Nips were dead, and our fighter planes and bombers were flying missions out of the former Jap airfield. The Marines renamed it Henderson Field in honor of Major Lofton Henderson, a Marine pilot killed at the Battle of Midway.
Things got a little brighter after that, and we could finally feel the tide beginning to turn our way. But they couldn’t have looked much lousier than they did at the time I was writing that letter.
Now don’t get me wrong. We still had a long way to go. But when the Marines won those two big fights—the history books call them the Battle of the Tenaru River and the Battle of Edson’s Ridge—we began to see a few glimmers of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel we were in.
THERE’S NO CANAL on Guadalcanal in spite of what a lot of people seem to think. But there’s a shallow little river there that I’ll never forget. It was more like a creek than any of the rivers I ever saw in America. I mean, in most places you could wade all the way across it without ever getting wet much above your shins.
It’s called the Matanikau, and I couldn’t even pronounce its name for a long time. I thought it was “Makanakow” or something like that. But this puny excuse for a river turned out to be what the brass called the “most strategically important natural geographic feature” on the whole damn island.
It was more important than other streams we fought along, like the Tenaru or the Lunga or Alligator Creek, for one simple reason. Everything west of it was owned by the Japs, while Henderson Field and the territory on the east side of the Matanikau were held by the Marines. And like I said before, the Japs wanted that airfield really bad.
Beginning in late August, the First Marine Division had set up its main defensive perimeter in a big semicircle that followed the Tenaru River inland from the sea, then curved to the west south of the airfield until it reached the sea again about two miles from the Matanikau. After making several moves to the west, K/3/5 and the rest of the Fifth Marines were dug in along a low ridge that faced the Matanikau from the east. From there, the lines swung north through a coconut grove to the waters of Iron Bottom Sound.
Things started getting hot and heavy on August 18. That’s when three companies from the First and Third Battalions, Fifth Marines, were sent across the Matanikau for the first time to strike at enemy forces on the west side of the river, where the Japs were strongly in control.
When word filtered down that General Vandegrift was planning this attack, a lot of us in K/3/5 hoped our company would be one of the ones picked to go, but it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, the outfits assigned to this mission were Company B of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, and our sister companies, I and L, of the Third Battalion.
Company L, commanded by Captain Lyman Spu
rlock, kicked off the action by advancing to a river crossing about 1,000 yards inland, killing ten Japs along the way. Late on the afternoon of the 18th, they set up their defenses on the west side of the river.
But the next morning, August 19, the going got tougher. Company L had a hard time hacking its way through the jungle, and the men came under heavy fire from a ridge several hundred yards to the west. One of the platoon leaders was killed, and when Lieutenant George Mead, the company executive officer, took over the platoon, he was killed, too.
Still, the company made slow but steady progress until about two o’clock that afternoon, when they encircled Matanikau Village, near the mouth of the river, and heard Jap voices jabbering and yelling “Banzai!” This alerted Captain Spurlock that an enemy attack was forming up, and he quickly alerted his troops to get ready.
A few minutes later, when the Japs charged with fixed bayonets, his Marines met them with volleys of hot lead.
After a firefight that lasted close to two hours, the Japs bugged out, and when Spurlock’s men went into the village, they found sixty-five enemy bodies there. Their own losses were four dead and eleven wounded.
All three Marine companies pulled back across the river after that, so the attack didn’t really gain any permanent ground for us. But the best thing that came out of it for the men of L Company was bloody, positive proof that banzais don’t win battles.
Bullets do.
And L Company’s experience was just a small sample of what happened next.
Action along the Matanikau continued later in the day on August 19, when a company-size patrol from the First Marines also crossed the river looking for a Jap force reported on the west side. They surprised an enemy patrol in another small village, and another firefight broke out. When it ended about an hour later, thirty-one of the thirty-four Japs in the patrol were dead, and only a handful of Marines were wounded.
This was good, but when the Marines took a close look at the bodies, they could tell by the Japs’ uniforms that a lot of the dead ones were officers. Division headquarters decided this was a strong indication that enemy reinforcements were being landed on Guadalcanal. Actually, there hadn’t been much doubt about it before, but this evidence pretty well convinced the brass that the Japs were steadily increasing their strength.
This wasn’t good news, but before word about it spread to the grunts in the foxholes, we all had another reason to celebrate. The next day, August 20, we watched our first two Marine air squadrons circle over Henderson Field and come in for a landing. VMF-223 arrived with nineteen F4F Grumman Wildcat fighters, and VMSB-232 showed up with twelve SBD-3 Douglas Dauntless scout bombers.
Boy, were they a sight for sore eyes! In K/3/5’s sector of our defensive perimeter about a mile southwest of the airfield, everybody started cheering and waving their arms and throwing their helmets up in the air. Some of the guys actually got all teary-eyed at the sight of those planes. As for me, I didn’t shed any tears, but the planes gave me a better feeling in my gut than I’d had since we landed.
The first thing I did when I saw them was get down on my knees and say, “Thank you, Lord.”
The planes and pilots based at Henderson Field immediately became known as the Cactus Air Force because “Cactus” was the military code name for Guadalcanal. But it was a really appropriate nickname for other reasons, too, because they sure turned out to be a thorn in the Japs’ side.
It meant an awful lot to us just to know they were there and that we had air support again. Now maybe those “washing machine Charlies” wouldn’t act so damn comfortable on their raids anymore.
NATURALLY, THE PRESENCE of the Cactus Air Force drew a lot of attention from the Japs, too, because it meant a lot of trouble for them. To tell the truth, I think the idea of having to deal with our planes drove the Nips a little nuts, judging from the bone-head moves they made over the next thirty-six hours.
With a few hundred enemy reinforcements slipping in almost every night and no U.S. fighting ships in the area to stop them, the Nip commanders had figured on kicking us off the island in short order. When our planes showed up, though, that whole picture changed, and as long as Henderson Field stayed operational and in our hands, it was going to stay changed.
That’s not to say the Japs weren’t still plenty cocky. They were cocky enough to do some really dumb things. They’d been having their way in the Pacific for so long they didn’t think anybody could stop them. They were hell-bent and determined to grab that airfield back, and that’s where they made one of their biggest mistakes.
The first thing they did was try to bomb Henderson Field and its new crop of planes out of existence. All our troop movements in the vicinity of the airfield had to be suspended for a while because of constant dogfights, antiaircraft barrages, and Jap bombing runs.
Our fliers got some valuable help in fighting off the Jap air attacks from a network of coast watchers at points all through the string of islands between Guadalcanal and the Jap bases at Rabaul and Truk. The watchers were mostly civilian natives hired by the Australian navy. When they spotted enemy planes headed in our direction, they radioed warnings that gave our slower, less agile F4Fs time to get off the ground and high above the altitude of the Jap raiders before their Zeros and Betty bombers reached the airfield.
The results were amazing—five Jap planes shot down for every one we lost, even though ours were usually outnumbered by four or five to one.
According to a commendation given to Marine fliers by General Vandegrift, their toll on enemy aircraft and shipping between August 21 and August 30 included twenty-one double- and single-engine bombers and thirty-nine Zero fighters shot down and three destroyers sunk. Five other enemy ships—a cruiser, two destroyers, and two transports—were listed as “probably destroyed.”
But the Japs made their biggest screwups on the ground. One of the first—and worst—of these was made by Colonel Kiyoano Ichiki, commander of the so-called Ichiki Detachment, an elite unit of the 17th Japanese Army.
Using the standard Bushido tactic of screaming night attacks with swords and bayonets, the Ichiki Detachment had already overrun Allied defenders in a series of amphibious assaults in the Pacific. Because of the reputation they’d built, no one in Japan’s high command had any doubt they could do the same thing with ease at Guadalcanal.
When Ichiki and his 2,100 shock troops were rushed from Guam to the Japanese base at Truk in mid-August, six destroyers stood ready to take them the rest of the way to Guadalcanal. Their orders were simple and straight to the point: Recapture the island’s airfield and destroy any upstart Americans who tried to stand in their way.
Ichiki split his force into two echelons and sent the first one as an advance unit. But he didn’t actually think he’d even need the second, and larger, group to complete his mission.
“Colonel Ichiki . . . was so confident when he arrived at Guadalcanal on the night of August 17 with his advance echelon,” wrote First Marine Division historian George McMillan, “he did not feel it necessary to wait for the second echelon of the detachment, some 1,200 more men, which was [traveling] in slower-moving transports. He was going right ahead. He was going to take Henderson Field with 900 men.”
Yeah, like hell he was.
What Ichiki actually did on the morning of August 21 was destroy half his detachment—and himself. He did it with blind, impatient overconfidence—but he got a helluva lot of help from the First and Second Battalions, First Marines.
ACCORDING TO SOME EXPERTS, the bloodbath identified in history books as the Battle of the Tenaru River didn’t actually take place at the Tenaru River at all. Author Richard Frank, who wrote the longest book I ever saw on Guadalcanal, claimed it took place on Alligator Creek, which wasn’t really a creek at all. It was a muddy, sluggish tidal lagoon that only flowed after heavy rains.
And by the way, there weren’t any alligators in Alligator Creek, either, but there were a good many crocodiles.
If you think all this soun
ds confusing, you’re right. But it was the kind of confusion we had to put up with every day on Guadalcanal. On the maps we were given, almost none of the stream names were accurate. Some rivers were just creeks and some creeks were just mud holes. In reality, the points where the Tenaru and Alligator Creek empty into the sea are more than a mile apart, and their wandering courses never take them much less than 1,000 yards from one another.
What’s more important, though, is what happened in the area between the Tenaru and the Alligator on the night of August 20–21, 1942.
During the day on August 20, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock’s Second Battalion, First Marines set up on the west bank of Alligator Creek. Their lines ran north from about 1,000 yards inland to a large sandspit where Alligator met the sea.
The Marines had put together a strong defensive position with well-dug-in machine guns covering the sandspit and a point of land beyond it on the east bank. They had a 37-millimeter gun loaded with canister shot that could rip closely packed infantry troops to shreds, and it was positioned to rake the same area. They also strung a barbed wire barrier across the sandspit near the west bank.
After dark that evening, the Marines farthest to the east got reports of Japanese patrols and gunfire on the east side of the stream, and they started falling back toward the sandspit. The reports worried Colonel Pollock, and he went east on his own to investigate. But a runner caught him before he got to the scene of the trouble and told him about a badly wounded native who’d stumbled into Marine lines claiming he’d seen “maybe 500 Japs” off to the east.
“By this time, I knew something was up,” Pollock said. He called division headquarters to get help for the wounded native, and while he was on the phone, firing broke out along the Alligator. A few minutes later, at about 1:30 AM on August 21, a green flare lit the sky above the east bank of the stream, and about 200 Japs came charging across the sandspit.