We heard a series of explosions, sounding like bursting mortar shells coming from the direction of the Tenaru River front. Col. Thomas and Col. Cates stopped talking for a moment to listen.
“Ours or theirs?” said Col. Thomas.
“I don’t know,” said Col. Cates, taking a puff from his long cigarette holder. “That’s the trouble with this war,” he said with a smile. “You never know.”
“In the last war we used to know where the enemy was,” he said.
Col. Thomas laughed and started for his jeep. But a marine came out to the car and said an air-raid warning had gone up. “There’s a large number of enemy planes on the way,” he said.
Our own Grumman fighters were taking off. We could see them swinging up into the sky, reaching for altitude. A few minutes later the warning changed to urgent.
“All right,” shouted Col. Cates to all and sundry around his CP, “stand by your holes.”
But the Japs did not show up. At 11:12 the “all clear” signal came. (We heard later that the Japs had been Zero fighters, who were driven off.)
We could hear another long series of loud “bomp-bomp” sounds like mortar shells exploding, in the direction of the Tenaru.
Col. Cates explained it. “The damn Japs are throwing rifle grenades into our positions,” he said.
It was 11:15 when Col. Cates got a radio message from Col. Cresswell. “Col. Cresswell says he is beginning to attack,” he said. “His right flank is on the Ilu River [the Ilu is east of the Tenaru and runs roughly parallel to it]. There are no tanks.” Evidently the tanks had been held up by some obstacle in terrain.
Col. Thomas had climbed into his jeep again and was starting back to the general’s headquarters. Did I want to go back? Col. Cates had just taken a telephone call. “Good work,” he was saying. “A white flag, eh?” he turned to me. “The Japs are coming across with a white flag,” he said.
“I’ll stay here awhile and maybe go up to the front,” I told Col. Thomas.
“O.K.,” he said. “Good luck.”
His jeep ground into high speed.
“Hold your fire and tell the men to take them prisoner,” Col. Cates was saying into the phone. He hung up.
“It’s just one man coming over with a white flag,” he said. He called Capt. Wolf, the interpreter attached to his troops. He instructed the captain to go up to the Tenaru front and talk to the prisoner, who was wounded. I started out for the front with Wolf.
We walked several hundred yards through a former cocoanut grove until we came to an advanced command post. The firing sounded quite loud here and the men of the command post were stretched out flat on the ground.
“Better get down,” said one of them. We squatted in the dirt.
One of the officers was talking on the phone. “All right,” he said, “we’ll send a couple of men out to check it.”
“Our line to Col. Pollock is out,” he said. “Probably mortar fire clipped it. Who’ll go?”
Two marines, looking scared but resolute, offered their services. “We’ll show you the way to where Col. Pollock is, if you’ll follow us,” they said.
So we started out, moving fast, keeping low, halting behind trees to look ahead. The marines found the break in the line, and set to work to repair it.
“Col. Pollock is up that way,” they said, pointing toward the Tenaru. “He’s right out on the point.”
Now we moved with even more caution than before, running bent from the waist as we made our way from tree to tree. Snipers were firing occasionally. We heard the crack of their guns, and bullets ricocheting among the trees. Our artillery was still ranging on the Jap positions on the far side of the Tenaru. And the Japs were throwing rifle grenades over to our side. We could see one of the bursts ahead, a spray of dirt rising where the explosive hit. Occasionally we heard the bursts of sharp-sounding Jap machine-gun fire: the light .25 calibers.
We pushed ahead, moving between bursts of firing, until we could see the river, and the long curving spit of gray sand which closed its outlet into the sea, and the shadowy cocoanut grove across the river where the Japs were.
We were crouching behind a tree when Col. Pollock, looking quite calm and walking erect, came over. “The prisoner’s up there,” he said. He pointed to a group of three or four men lying prone around a foxhole about fifty feet away.
We made a dash for the foxhole and flopped beside it. In the foxhole on his back, with one of his arms wrapped in a red-stained swath of bandage, lay the Jap prisoner. He looked dazed and unhappy.
Capt. Wolf immediately began talking to him in Japanese. But the prisoner’s answers were slow and apparently not very satisfactory. A marine told me the prisoner had got up from a foxhole and walked across the intervening no-man’s-land all alone. “Like a ghost,” he said. “Or somebody walking in his sleep.” Evidently it had been an awful spectacle.
The Jap said he did not think the others would surrender. When asked how the invaders had arrived on Guadalcanal, he was very vague. He either knew nothing or would say nothing about the ships on which they had arrived on Guadal. (One reason for his confusion became apparent later, when it was learned from other prisoners that the troops, new arrivals, were not told where they were or where they were going. Some of them did not even know they were on Guadalcanal.)
It was only about a hundred yards from the foxhole, where the prisoner lay, to the front line of the Tenaru River.
Snipers began to range on us from across the river. We heard the ping-ping-ping of their .25’s, and bullets began to whir fairly close. I lay for a few moments while the firing continued, thinking what a wonderful target we were, gathered so close together in a small circle, and then two of the other onlookers and I got the same idea at the same moment; we headed for cover.
A pink-cheeked captain shared my cocoanut tree. He told me while we watched the shadowy woods across the river that it was his unit which had been doing the fighting in this particular sector. He said that his name was James F. Sherman, and that he came from Somerville, Mass. “Lots of Boston boys in the outfit,” he said. Then we heard the crackling of a light .25 caliber machine gun, and it was no effort at all to duck and stop talking.
When the firing let up a little, the captain waved a hand at a point of land which marked the seaward extremity of the Tenaru’s west bank. “That’s Hell Point,” he said. “That’s where the Japs tried their crossing. Some of our men moved up onto the point to get a better field of fire, and the Japs put up flares that were as bright as daylight. We lost some people in there. But,” he added, “we stopped the Japs.”
One did not have to look hard to see that he was understating the case. I worked my way, crawling between volleys of firing, flopping close to the earth when a mortar shell or grenade burst, to Hell Point, and looked out on hundreds of Jap bodies strewn in piles.
It was easy to see what they had tried to do. A sandbar, about fifteen feet wide and ten feet above the water level at its crest, shut off the mouth of the Tenaru from the sea.
The Japs had tried to storm our positions on the west bank of the river by dashing across the sandbar. Many of them had come close to reaching their objective. But they had run into unexpected rows of barbed wire at Hell Point, on our side of the Tenaru.
“That wire maybe saved the day,” said a marine lying next to me.
I looked across the river into the shadowy cocoanut groves, where only 150 yards from us the advance elements of the enemy were located. We could hear the crack of rifle and machine-gun fire from there, and the occasional crash of our own artillery shells falling among the Jap positions. But no Japs were visible—and that, I had learned, was a perfectly normal condition in this jungle warfare.
I heard the report of a sniper’s rifle coming from the right very close, on our side of the riverbank. The sound seemed to come from above. I saw a marine run, crouching, from one tree to the foot of another, and stand peering up into the tree, with his rifle ready.
Then, sil
ently as a ghost, he beckoned to another marine, who then zigzagged his way to the foot of the same tree. The second marine had a tommy gun. The first marine pointed up into the foliage, and the second followed the gesture. Then the marine with the tommy gun made his way to a nearby stump, and crouched behind it, watching the tree top. I resolved to watch him ferret out the sniper and bring him to earth, but my attention was distracted by the sound of a .25 caliber machine gun coming from the sandbar that closed the mouth of the Tenaru.
“There’s a bunch of Japs on the lee side of the bar,” said the marine next to me. “They open up every hour on the hour from behind it. We can’t spot ’em.”
I could see how it might be possible for Japs to hug the lee side of the bar without being seen by our people. The bar was curved in a gentle arc toward the sea, and the bar had steep shoulders like an old-fashioned road. The result of this combination of circumstances was that at certain places there was excellent cover.
The machine gun snapped out at us again in a long burst. “If we could spot that guy we could lay mortar fire right on him,” said my informant.
The battlefield is full of distractions. Now I was distracted by heavy firing from our own rifles, coming from my left. I saw a line of marines, lying close together behind sandbags, firing out to sea.
Out in the glassy blue water I saw globs of water jump up where the bullets struck. “They’ve got a Jap out there,” said my friend. “He’s trying to swim around and get in behind us. We’ve killed a lot of ’em that way.”
A veritable sheet of bullets was smacking into the water. The marines apparently were all anxious to shoot a Jap.
I worked my way back to Capt. Sherman, who was standing behind a tree with Col. Pollock. Pollock still looked calm and efficient as he trained his field glasses on the patterned rows of cocoanut trees across the river.
There were bright-yellow explosions in the grove now, a series of them. A haze of white smoke drifted among the trees. And apparently from the back of the grove came heavy fusillades of rifle and machine-gun fire.
Col. Pollock looked at his watch. “Probably Cresswell’s coming in,” he said.
Machine guns began to clatter on our right. “They must be trying to cross the river down there,” said Capt. Sherman. He told me how, in the darkness of the early morning today, some of the Japs had tried to cross the Tenaru lagoon by swimming.
Some of them, he said, had reached our side and hidden themselves in an abandoned tank which lay on the sloping riverbank. They had set up a machine-gun nest in the tank and it had taken some hours’ effort to get them out. I could see the gray bulky shape of the tank up-angled on the slope.
“That machine gun in the tank made it tough for the marines to man that field piece,” said Capt. Sherman. He pointed to an artillery piece on the riverbank. “They could take that thing in cross fire,” he said. “Every time somebody moved into position to fire the gun, he got shot.”
I remembered then that during the first heavy outburst of firing during the early morning I had heard the loud bang-bang-bang of the field piece, slower and heavier than the fire of a machine gun, and then not heard it again for an hour or two.
At about 1:15 Col. Pollock said, “Our people are coming in at the rear now. I can see ’em. Keep your fire down.” He walked erect along our front firing line, saying, “Keep your fire down. Those are our people coming in the rear.” Rifle and machine-gun fire still cracked on the other side of the river; grenades and mortar shells were still bursting among us, but Col. Pollock was as cool as if he were leading a parade-ground maneuver.
The volleys of machine-gun and rifle fire, from the depths of the grove across the river, grew louder. Col. Cresswell’s people were rolling the Japs toward us.
Suddenly I saw the dark figures of men running on the strip of beach that bordered the palm grove. The figures were far off, possibly a half mile down the light ribbon of sand, but I could see from their squatness that they were Japs. There was no time for any other impression. In a few seconds the black, violently moving blobs were squashed down on the sand and we heard a fusillade of rifle fire. The Japs did not get up again. It was the first visible evidence that Cresswell’s men were completing their maneuver of encirclement.
We knew that from this time on things were going to grow hotter along the Tenaru. It was possible that, as the Japs were pushed in from the rear, they might charge our positions on the west bank of the Tenaru, might again try to take the spit of sand across the Tenaru mouth.
Two ambulances had come up and stopped well back of our front line. The bearers were now picking up casualties on stretchers, loading them on the ambulances. Col. Pollock said to me: “The ambulances are going back. You can ride if you want to.” I decided to stay and see the excitement.
The colonel passed the word along the line that there should be no firing unless a specific target was visible. The men had one of those a few moments later when a single Jap jumped out of the underbrush, just across the Tenaru in the edge of the cocoanut grove, and made a dash for the beach. A storm of firing burst from our line, and red streaks of tracers zipped around the Jap. He dropped to the ground, and for a moment the firing ceased, and then again he was up and running wildly for his life, and the firing was louder than ever. This time he fell violently, on the beach, and did not get up again.
Now the .25 caliber Jap machine gun which had been shooting at us for hours from the lee side of the Tenaru was opening up again. As usual, it had the effect of making us keep cover and to a certain extent pinning us down. But this time we spotted the Jap. A sharp-eyed marine saw a hand move above the level of the top of the sandbar, and made a mental note of the exact spot.
One of our mortars went into action. We heard the “thwung” sound of the piece discharging, waited the usual long seconds while the projectile arched into the air, then felt the ground shake as the explosive struck the sandbar and blew up.
We could hear a marine shouting, apparently giving the mortar crew directions on the matter of correcting their range. Then again, the “thwung” and the shattering explosion.
“That’s better,” called a marine. “Up fifteen.”
The mortar went off again, and just after it was discharged, the figure of a Jap popped up from behind the spit of sand. He was less than 150 feet from me. I saw him take about three fast steps, and then the mortar shell landed almost directly on top of his helmet. The explosion of the shell was a canopy of dirty gray smoke and debris shedding over the Jap from above, and then swallowing him altogether.
The puff of the explosion expanded over the ground, and as it spread and thinned, we saw three more Japs, evidently members of the same machine-gun crew, leap up and start to run for the far end of the Tenaru sandspit.
They had gone only a few feet when they were in clear view of our troops, and bullets, including tracers from our machine guns, were winging all around them. Two of them fell as the fusillades of firing rang out and one kept running, then dived for cover.
But when he jumped up again, our men were waiting for him. Apparently he sensed this, for he ran desperately, turning in a fast hundred yards in his dash for the far end of the spit. Before he reached it, however, the bullets caught him and knocked him down. I was not sorry to see the end of the last of this machine-gun crew. War takes on a very personal flavor when other men are shooting at you, and you feel little sympathy at seeing them killed.
A rumbling of powerful motors came from behind us. We turned to find a group of four tanks moving down the trail through the cocoanut palms heading for the Tenaru and the spit of sand across its mouth.
The plan, evidently, was to send the tanks across the spit and into the Jap positions at the edge of the grove.
On our (west) bank of the Tenaru the tanks halted for a few moments, then plunged on across the sandspit, their treads rattling industriously. We watched these awful machines as they plunged across the spit and into the edge of the grove. It was fascinating to see them bus
tling amongst the trees, pivoting, turning, spitting sheets of yellow flame. It was like a comedy of toys, something unbelievable, to see them knocking over palm trees which fell slowly, flushing the running figures of men from underneath their treads, following and firing at the fugitives. It was unbelievable to see men falling and being killed so close, to see the explosions of Jap grenades and mortars, black fountains and showers of dirt near the tanks, and see the flashes of explosions under their very treads.
We had not realized there were so many Japs in the grove.
Group after group was flushed out and shot down by the tanks’ canister shells.
Several times we could see our tanks firing into clumps of underbrush where evidently Japanese machine-gun nests were located, for we could hear the rattling of the guns, in answer to the heavier banging of the tanks’ cannon.
I saw a bright orange flash amidst a cloud of black smoke bursting directly under the treads of one of the tanks, saw the tank stop suddenly. It was crippled. The other tanks moved in protectively toward it. I learned later that they were taking off the crew, who escaped uninjured.
The three remaining tanks continued to roar and rattle amidst the palm grove for a time that seemed hours long. Everywhere they turned in their swiveling course, their cannon spewing sheets of orange flame. It seemed improbable that any life could exist under their assault.
I remember seeing one Jap in particular who was flushed out from under the treads of one of our tanks. I saw him jump up, and run hard toward the beach, with the tank following. I thought the tank would run him down or hit him with machine-gun fire, but it turned off quickly and headed back into the heart of the grove.
The Jap, however, continued to run. He was heading for the beach. All along our front line, rifle fire banged and machine guns clattered; the tracers arched around the running Jap.
Then the Jap sank into the underbrush, took cover, and Col. Pollock shouted: “Don’t shoot. You might hit our own tanks.”
The Jap jumped up and ran another forty or fifty feet toward the shore, then sank down into cover again. Despite the warning, several rifle shots were fired at him. As usual, each marine was eager to kill his Jap.
Guadalcanal Diary Page 13