Col. Whaling had come up to our position to see how our advance was going. He brought word that Capt. Hardy’s troops had landed beyond Kokumbona and pushed through the town with little opposition. They were moving in now from the west of Matanikau. Capt. Spurlock’s troops had also been successful; they had cut a trail through the difficult jungle on the land side of Matanikau and were moving into the outskirts of the village.
Heavy rifle fire, however, still pinned down the movement of our group of marines, under Capt. Hawkins. And there were still machine guns ahead of us, firing intermittently.
It was raining again. We squatted in the mud amidst covering bushes and Col. Whaling, who had come up to our position by landing boat, told us how his boats had been chased by the same Jap warship which we had earlier seen lying off the coast. The ship had fired a few shells at the boats, but fortunately hurt no one.
The word came back from our advance elements, via runner, that our troops were pushing ahead to the village. The firing had by this time slackened considerably. There were only a few stray rifle shots to be heard.
But there were still some Japs to be cleaned up. Suddenly we heard a terrific burst of automatic rifle fire, mixed with the reports of rifles and sub-machine guns, to our left. Then silence. And a few minutes later, a marine walked down to the trail with a small, uniformed Jap in tow.
As the Jap came toward us, there were angry shouts from the marines. “Kill the bastard!” they yelled. “Kick him in the b– – – –!”
This Jap did not have an inscrutable face. Now it was marked by signs of terror obvious even to the Occidental eye. The marine guard explained the reason. “There were four of them,” he said. “His three pals were cut in pieces.”
Sgt. Hurlbut, Miller and I had agreed by this time to return to headquarters. So it was decided that we should accompany the prisoner to the rear, with Sgt. Hurlbut acting as guard.
It was 11:30 when we started, keeping to the edge of the trail. The jungle around us was silent, and we four, three Americans and the Jap pigmy, were alone. We wondered if we would run into a net of snipers lying in wait for stragglers.
There was one sniper waiting for us. As we came to a bend in the trail, he fired from behind us. We heard the crack of the rifle and the whiz of the bullet, but it did not sound very close. However, we broke into a run, while Hurlbut goaded the Jap along with his .45. The Jap was very obliging. He ran faster than we did; probably he was thinking how happy one of his own people would be to kill him, now that he had disgraced himself by being captured.
We got around the bend in the trail before the sniper could fire again. And we met no more of his disagreeable ilk.
But the excitement of the day was not yet over. As we neared Kukum, we saw a group of landing boats moving in toward shore. They were far enough from the beach so that it was hard to tell whether they were American craft. And just then we heard the sound of an approaching plane, and a B-17 came in over the water and swooped low over the landing boats. The combination was too much for some of the jittery shore outposts. To them, the B-17 appeared to be strafing—and that positively identified the boats as Japanese.
“A Jap landing party!” they shouted. And the handful of marines standing about ran madly for cover.
For a second we were swept by the feeling of excitement that filled the air. But I stopped to fix my field glasses on the supposed enemy landing boats. They were our own.
Miller, Hurlbut and I were not yet sure. The Japs might have captured our boats or manufactured some like them. This might actually be a landing party, and the B-17 might have been strafing.
“If it is a landing party, what shall I do with the prisoner?” said Hurlbut, motioning toward the Jap with his gun.
The Jap now looked utterly disconsolate. It was plain that he understood our alarm and expected to be dispatched immediately.
But we had been watching the landing boats with our glasses, and now we could make out that there were several figures of men visible in each boat. If the boats had been carrying Japs, they would have appeared to be empty, save perhaps for the coxswain, for the Japs would have been crouching below gunwale level. Thus we reasoned, at any rate. And we were right.
The B-17 had passed on toward Tulagi, and now we saw her turning. Through glasses, one could make out the masts of a ship, projecting above the horizon, directly below the bomber. We knew the aircraft had dropped bombs, for we saw a mushroom of dark-brown smoke rising from a point just aft of the rear mast, and a steady torrent of smoke followed.
The masts came up higher on the horizon, and we could see the stack of the ship and the superstructure. It was a Jap heavy cruiser, and her fantail was afire. The B-17 had scored a direct hit.
We could hear the sound of heavy anti-aircraft firing coming from the Jap, see bursts in the sky. But the bomber had done his job; now he climbed up into the sky and headed for home.
The Jap was crippled, but not stopped. He made full steam for the passage that leads to the sea, between Florida and Savo Islands. Clouds of brown smoke were still rising from the fantail.
Back at Col. Hunt’s CP, later in the afternoon, I heard the official news that Matanikau and Kokumbona had been taken. Gunner Edward S. Rust (of Detroit, Mich.), an officer attached to Col. Hunt’s staff, came in to tell an exciting tale of the Matanikau attacks. Rust had accompanied Capt. Spurlock’s troops—the group which closed in on Matanikau from the jungle or land side—and had seen plenty of action. Capt. Spurlock’s forces had run into Jap entrenchments, good defenses in depth which had been hard to take. They had killed sixty to seventy of the defenders, and a handful had escaped.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 20
Awakened this morning by the sound of cannonading, coming from the direction of Tulagi. Getting to be a routine occurrence. I quickly went to Kukum, where a group of marines stood on the beach looking toward the north.
“A damn Jap cruiser was in, shelling Tulagi,” said one of the watchers. He pointed to a Flying Fortress which cruised slowly over the horizon. “That B-17 scared him away,” he said.
News this morning that the number of Japs killed on our expedition to Matanikau yesterday is about 100. Of these, Capt. Spurlock’s troops are officially credited with sixty-five to seventy-five; the remainder were finished by Capt. Hardy’s company, coming in from the west, and Capt. Hawkins’ company, which Miller, Hurlbut and I had joined for the expedition. Our own casualties, killed and wounded, totalled fewer than twenty-five.
I dropped in at Capt. Spurlock’s CP this morning to hear his story of the Matanikau raid. He said the hardest part of his advance had been the push through some 600 yards of intrenched positions on the village outskirts. The Japs, he said, had built a system of trenches reinforced with logs. They had a number of machine guns, including a heavy weapon of about .60 caliber. When the enemy trenches had been cleaned out, one by one, the Japs made a last effort to win, said the captain; they made a bayonet charge.
“That was when a few of them got away,” said Capt. Spurlock. “But most of them were killed. Our men took pretty careful aim and knocked them off. Some of our people even stood up and fired off-hand at the Japs in the middle of the charge.”
Gunner Rust, said the captain, had been one of the heroes of the advance. He had thrown hand grenades from the phenomenal range of a few yards, an almost superhuman feat, to blast a Jap machine-gun nest. And when a platoon leader had been killed, Rust, although he was acting officially only as an observer, had taken over the disordered platoon and held it in a skirmish line.
Probably the outstanding hero of the attack, however, had been P.F.C. Nicholas Sileo, a tough scrapper from Brooklyn. Sileo was a Browning automatic rifleman who had been doing excellent work in cleaning out Jap snipers during the approach to Matanikau. When the stiffest resistance was encountered on the outskirts of the town, he set to work on a Jap machine-gun nest, but exposed himself while working into position, and was shot three times; one bullet hit him in the chest, a sec
ond in the groin, and a third shattered his hand, ripping two fingers clean away. That might have knocked out a lesser man, but not Sileo. He kept on firing his gun, using his good hand to pull the trigger.
Capt. Spurlock said he had lost one of his best friends, and one of the finest marine officers, in the Matanikau fracas. The friend and officer was Lieut. George H. Mead, heir to the Mead Paper Company fortune, and famed as a former polo player at Yale. Lieut. Mead had taken over the “point” platoon when the N.C.O. in charge was killed, and had led the platoon brilliantly, disregarding Jap sniper fire until, finally, a bullet hit him in the face, killing him instantly.
At Gen. Vandegrift’s CP today, I heard the news that a patrol led by Capt. Charles H. Brush (of New York City) caught a Jap patrol, about twenty-five strong, near Koli Point (east of the airport) last night, and killed eighteen of them in a short, savage fight.
The Japs, said the general, were Navy troops, well armed and equipped. Apparently they had been landed from a Jap warship to make a reconnaissance.
One of the Nip lieutenants had been wounded in the exchange of firing, and when Capt. Brush approached him, he put his pistol to his head and killed himself. (Here was one Jap who had lived up to the hara-kiri tradition of death before dishonor—in contrast to our Jap prisoners, who apparently enjoyed American hospitality without thought of suicide.)
This afternoon the marines on this island enjoyed a long-awaited treat; it was the pleasure of seeing our air support arrive. We watched the flights of fighter planes and dive-bombers swing over the airport, then come in for a landing. The powerful roar of their motors was reassuring. It seemed almost unbelievable that we did not have to dive for shelter at the sound.
“That’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen,” said one marine.
And I heard an officer say: “Morale’s gone up twenty points this afternoon.”
V
TENARU FRONT
FRIDAY, AUGUST 21
At about 2:30 this morning, we were awakened by the sound of heavy machine-gun fire coming from the east. There were several long bursts, and then rifle fire joining to form a waterfall of sound. But then the firing slacked, and we decided the disturbance had been only a brush between one of our listening posts and a Jap patrol.
At 4:30, however, we were waked again, and this time we knew it was no mere patrol action which we had heard. The sound of the firing was loud now, and it sounded as if hundreds of rifles and machine guns were firing at once. And now the firing of smaller arms was augmented by loud, heavy reports that could be only artillery or mortars. We hurriedly got dressed and went to Col. Hunt’s field office, where a group was already gathered. Considering the fact that the firing we had heard probably marked the long-awaited Jap invasion attempt, everyone seemed in high good humor. Possibly the coming of our air support yesterday was responsible.
We sat in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the firing. We heard one extremely long burst of machine-gun fire.
“That fella’s finger must have stuck to the trigger,” said one of the voices in the dark.
“Another belt, another barrel,” said another.
“Dear Mom,” said Col. Hunt, “please send me another barrel.”
“With accessories; G.I.,” said another voice.
We listened while the firing swelled in volume. “Sounds like a pretty fair-sized engagement,” said Col. Hunt.
We could see red flares, then white, then red flares rising against the sky in the direction of the beach. “Mebbe some Jap landing party,” suggested Lieut. Wilson.
At about five o’clock, we heard the heavy, loud crashing of artillery fire. We could hear the guns going off, then the explosions as the shells hit. But the explosions sounded farther away than the gun reports. We decided it was our own artillery, ranging on the Japs.
In Col. Hunt’s CP, the good-natured banter continued, but there was frequent and slightly anxious reference to the fact that dawn was approaching. “Wait until our planes get up and hit those babies,” said Lieut. Snell. “Won’t they be surprised?” He glanced at his watch. “About forty minutes to go before sun-up,” he said.
The talk shifted to yarns about marine yesterdays in Nicaragua and China, and about this or that famous marine character, but the approach of the dawn was carefully clocked every ten minutes or so.
At about six o’clock the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, when we heard the sound of airplane engines.
“Ah,” said Lieut. Wilson, “airplanes!” And he rubbed his hands, as before a feast. Our planes were warming up.
We had been trying to get through a call to Gen. Vandegrift’s headquarters, to find out what was happening. Now Lieut. Wilson tried again, and got an answer.
“The firing was all prearranged barrage,” he reported. “The enemy front line is the Tenaru.”
It was a slight shock to hear the news, for if the enemy front lay on the Tenaru River, then probably a formidable invasion force was only three or four miles from the airport, to the east, trying to break through our defenses.
The sound of airplanes grew louder. The engines were being revved up now, preparatory to takeoff.
Col. Hunt was talking earnestly on the phone. “Apparently they tackled somebody this time,” he said. He hung up. “Tell the reserve outfit to get ready to move,” he told Lieut. Wilson. “They may need help on the Tenaru.”
Immediately after breakfast I went down to Gen. Vandegrift’s headquarters to seek out Col. Jerry Thomas, operations chief and the sparkplug of our troops in the Solomons. I wanted to check the matter of the Jap invasion with him. I still found it hard to believe that a large-scale assault had begun.
Col. Thomas confirmed the story. The enemy had apparently landed in force and made their way down the coast from east to west until they reached the Tenaru River. There they had run into one of our outposts. A fierce exchange of firing had followed, and the Japs had charged across a narrow spit of sand which closed the mouth of the Tenaru. Fortunately, the Japs had run into barbed-wire entanglements and been slowed down by the wire and our own fierce resistance until more troops could be brought into the gap.
Now our artillery was ranging on the Japs. There was the usual doubt as to the enemy’s precise armament, which is natural in any such engagement. Col. Thomas told me all this in short sentences. The phone rang fairly often to interrupt him. He snapped quick orders to the different commanding officers in the sectors under stress.
“I’m going down to Col. Cates’ CP now,” he said. “Do you want to come?”
Col. (Clifton) Cates was the commanding officer of the group of troops which held our front line along the Tenaru. I said that certainly I would like to go.
We jumped into a jeep and hurried along the road to a tent camp. Col. Cates was a quick-moving, quick-speaking, very trim man of middle years. I knew that he had won honors in the First World War. He and Col. Thomas went into a quick huddle on the battle then going on. Col. Cates unfolded a map and pointed to it with a pencil. The scene was very calm, considering that a battle for Guadalcanal was going on only a short distance away.
We could hear the rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire, and an occasional heavy explosion: mortar or artillery fire.
Col. Thomas said: “We aren’t going to let those people [the Japs] lay up there all day.”
“We’ve got to get them out today,” said Col. Cates.
A grizzled man with a lined face and light-blue eyes came up. He was wearing breeches and high, laced boots, and his shirt was wet with sweat. Evidently he had been out in the bush. He was Col. L. B. Cresswell of College City, La.
Col. Thomas nodded. “You know this terrain, L.B.,” he said without further ado, pointing to the map. “How’s the chances of getting tanks in there?”
“Yes,” said Cresswell. “There’s dry land in through these woods.”
“Good,” said Col. Thomas. He turned to Col. Cates. “We’ll give L.B. a platoon of tanks,” he said.
&n
bsp; We heard the booming of our artillery firing, heard the explosions of the shells landing at the front. An artillery liaison officer stood nearby, talking into a phone. He had a direct connection with a spotting post, another with the batteries.
“How is it?” he asked.
He listened, then phoned the batteries. “It’s right on,” he said. “Give G Battery up 200.” The shells were apparently falling amidst the enemy positions.
Cols. Cresswell, Cates and Thomas bent over the map. The plan was developing as they talked. It was to send Col. Cresswell with a strong force of troops around the flank of the Japanese positions.
Col. Thomas marked out the rough Jap position on the map. The enemy forces were evidently concentrated in a fairly small area running along a strip of Guadalcanal’s northern shore. Their front was the Tenaru River, which runs roughly north and south in Guadalcanal. The shoreline runs east and west.
Col. Cresswell would take his troops—and tanks if he could get them through—and move around the southern flank of the enemy position. Then he would drive northward, pushing the enemy toward the sea.
Meanwhile, the American marines who held the line of the Tenaru River (they were under the command of Lieut. Col. Alvin Pollock) would prevent any further enemy advance. The enemy would be boxed in from two sides.
“I want you to get in there and pin these people down,” said Col. Thomas to Col. Cresswell. “It’s between you and Al [Col. Pollock].
“Once in there don’t hold back. Drive in there like Brush [Capt. Brush, whose men wiped out the Jap patrol the night before last] did.”
Col. Cresswell began moving immediately. He shouted to an aide who stood nearby, “Tell B Company to move right down there and wait for the rest.” And he was gone.
“How many casualties?” Col. Thomas asked Col. Cates.
“Hard to tell yet,” said Col. Cates. “There were two ambulances came back loaded and a third being loaded. They have to load between bursts.”
The artillery liaison officer was talking on the phone. “Five volleys per battery.”
Guadalcanal Diary Page 12