Guadalcanal Diary

by Tregaskis, Richard;

  “Sure, they hurt some,” he said cheerfully. “Like a bee-sting. But outside of that they’re O.K.”

  I looked at the spot where the one marine who had been seriously injured had been lying asleep at the time of the shelling. It was a squat shelter constructed of wooden boxes which were now partially splintered. There was a small, oval-shaped hole in the sand less than ten feet away. Here the shell had struck, sending a shower of fragments into the marine’s shelter.

  “If he didn’t have the little house, he’d of been a dead duck,” said Pvt. Kagle.

  At about 2:30 in the afternoon, our air-raid siren sounded, and we watched our swift fighter planes zooming into the overcast sky. They were straining to “get upstairs” before the Japs arrived.

  I went to an open spot at a bend in the Lunga River to watch the fighting. I could see no planes for a few minutes, ours or theirs. But I distinctly heard the tat-tat-tat of machine guns, the tortured sound of zooming motors.

  A plane swooped suddenly out of the sky, streaked over the tree-tops to my right. Then another behind it. The second was one of our Grumman Wildcats. His guns rattled and stopped, then rattled and kept rattling. The first plane, I realized, must be a Jap fighter. Was he strafing the airport? I had time to think only that, and then both planes were gone.

  Then we heard the swishing sound of bombs falling, and a sharp, ground-shaking “crack-crack-crack” as they struck. From somewhere up in the gray continent of sky, the Jap bombers had dropped their sticks.

  I went to the airport immediately after the “all clear” and waited for our fighters to come down. Most of them seemed almost hilariously elated as they taxied in one by one and jumped down from their cockpits. For most of them, it was a first victory over the enemy—although a few had made contact with some Zeros on the 21st.

  A smiling, handsome lieutenant told me how he and another fighter pilot had knocked down two enemy bombers apiece. The pilot was Lieut. Ken Frazier (of Burlington, N.J.). “I took the left side of the formation and Carl [Lieut. Marion E. Carl of Hubbard, Ore.] took the right. I let one have all my guns and he exploded. Then I moved my sights up a little and let go at the second guy. A sheet of flame came out of one of his motors.”

  Lieut. Frazier had, quite naturally, been excited by the experience. He could not say surely how many enemy bombers there had been or whether they were one or two motored craft.

  A blond lad with very white teeth laughed as gaily as if he had been given a much-desired present, as he told his story. He was Lieut. J. H. King (of Brookline, Mass.).

  “That bomber was flying along like a fat and happy goose,” said Lieut. King. “I dove at it and it just exploded at the first burst.”

  He told me, laughing as if it were a huge joke, how he had been chased by a flock of Zeros. “I ducked into a cloud,” he said. “Each time I came out I found them sitting there buzzing around and waiting.”

  Col. Fike, the graying executive officer of the marine fliers, was taking notes on their stories, arranging a tally of victory. The memo on his notebook pad showed a total of ten bombers and eleven Zeros shot down in the fight.

  Two of our fighter planes were still unreported when we left the airport. Another pilot had been seen to bail out over Tulagi Bay. The rest had returned. It was not a bad score at all: three of our men missing, in exchange for twenty-one Japs shot down.

  We drove across the airfield on the way back to our camp. The Japs had missed it completely, although the runways were obviously their target. In a neighboring meadow, we saw two fairly regular lines of large craters churned into the black earth, where sticks of bombs had struck.

  A large trailer truck lay on its side, apparently overturned by the bomb blast, and the cab had been riddled, windshield shattered, by bomb fragments. But it was a captured Jap vehicle, and no one, said bystanders, had been in the cab at the time.

  There were the usual rumors, this afternoon, that a large force of Japs were on their way in to attack Guadalcanal, and most of us went to bed again with our shoes on, and our helmets within easy reach. But I decided to be comfortable for once, despite the rumors, and took off pants, shirt, shoes and socks.

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 25

  My taking off my clothes last night, with a view to sleeping more comfortably, turned out to be a great mistake. Just after midnight this morning, my sleep was shattered by explosions coming very close. The instant reflex action took me out of bed and onto the ground, flat. I knew that the others were leaving our tent, dashing for the dugout. I fumbled for my helmet and couldn’t find it.

  I could hear heavy gunfire, in a sequence that I knew instantly was ominous: the metallic, loud brroom-brroom of the guns going off, then the whistle of the approaching shells, then the crash of the explosions, so near that one felt a blast of air from the concussion.

  I ran for the dugout, not stopping even for slippers, but hit the deck and stopped dead still just inside the tent flap when I heard more shells on the way. The crash of the explosions dented in my eardrums, and I could hear the confused sounds of debris falling.

  Col. Hunt and I arrived at the dugout at the same moment. We bumped into each other at the entrance and then backed away and I said, “You go first, Colonel.” He said politely with a slight bow, “No, after you.” And we stood there for a few moments, arguing the matter, while the shells continued to fall. The colonel too had decided to sleep comfortably last night and now wore only his “scivvie” drawers and shirt. We must have made a comical couple, for I took a riding for the rest of the day about the Alphonse-and-Gaston act performed in underwear and under fire.

  But the humor of that moment was soon gone. When the barrage halted, we could hear a blubbering, sobbing cry that was more animal than human. A marine came running to the dugout entrance to say that several men had been badly wounded and needed a corpsman. And the crying man kept on, his gurgling rising and falling in regular waves like the sound of some strange machine.

  I edged around a smashed tent toward the sound and found myself amidst a scene of frightfulness. One gray-green body lay on its back. There was a small, irregular red hole in the middle of the chest.

  Nearby lay the wounded man who had been crying in the night. A big, muscular fellow, he lay on his right side, while a doctor bandaged the shredded remains of one leg, and a corpsman worked on the twisted, gaping mouth of a wound which bared the other leg to the bone.

  His face and shoulders lay in the center of a sheet of gore. Face wounds rained blood on the ground. A deep excavation through layers of tissue had been made in one shoulder. The other shoulder, too, was ripped by shrapnel. I could see now how he made the terrible noise. He was crying, sobbing, into a pool of blood. The blood distorted the sound of his wailing, as water would have done, into a bubbling sound. The sound still came in cycles, rising to peaks of loudness. One of the wounded man’s hands moved in mechanical circles on the ground, keeping time with his cries.

  There were others wounded. Two dim lights, set in a square dark shape, marked an ambulance, standing by. Corpsmen were loading it. The squeak of the stretchers sliding into place, a sound much like that of a fingernail scratched across a blackboard, I shall never forget.

  Next to the smashed tent stood the splintered trunk of a palm tree. The top of the tree had fallen onto another tent, squashing one side of it. The tent walls which still stood had been torn by flying shell fragments.

  Back at Col. Hunt’s headquarters shack, I found Capt. Hodgess, the Australian guide, telling how the treetop had fallen onto his bunk. He found humor in the matter. “First time I ever had a tree in bed with me,” he said. He was uninjured.

  When the wounded had been carted off, we went tentatively back to bed. And we were glad to hear our planes taking off, obviously in an attempt to attack the Jap ships which had been bombarding us.

  In the calm morning light, we found that our damage and casualties in the shelling had been amazingly slight when one considered the possibilities. Only the one she
ll, which had come so close to my tent, had caused any injuries. That missile had exploded when it struck the top of the palm tree. The downward blast of the explosion had killed the one marine who had died instantly. The marine whom we had heard crying in the night had also been hit by that shell. He had died of his injuries before morning. Two others had been seriously wounded but would not die. About ten had suffered slight wounds from the flying fragments. The damage had been confined to the two tents, a few holes in surrounding structures, and the broken palm tree. We made up for the tree to some degree by serving the hearts-of-palm, a choice part of the branch, for lunch today.

  In general, it seemed amazing that the enemy could throw so many rounds of ammunition into our camp and do so little damage.

  We had word from our shore observation posts this morning that the force which had shelled us consisted of three destroyers. Evidently the destroyers had been carrying troops which were landed at a point to the west of the airport, well beyond our lines. Then the small armada had swung along the shore to pay us their respects with high explosives.

  At the airport operations headquarters, Lieut. Turner Caldwell (of San Diego, Cal.), the leader of a squadron of naval dive-bombers, told me that the marauding Jap ships had been spotted by our planes and a possible hit scored on one of the destroyers.

  “Anybody that flew over the spot today could see an oil slick about twenty-five miles long,” he said. “It might be we sank the destroyer.”

  While we were talking, there was an almost continual roar of planes taking off from the airport. They were going out to attack the large Jap task force of warships and transports which had been hovering in this area. More bombing flights went up all through the day. The results were encouraging: the Jap forces had been turned back and dispersed and one of their cruisers and two transports badly damaged.

  At the aviation bivouac, I found a group of marine dive-bomber pilots sprawling under a tent canopy. They seemed exhausted, and most had wiry incipient beards and dirty faces; they had been flying since midnight this morning. Some of them told me they had slept in their planes.

  They told their stories cheerfully. Maj. Richard C. Mangrum (of Seattle, Wash.), leader of the group, told me smilingly about the unusual way in which he had hit one of the Jap transports.

  “I dived on the cruiser in our original attack,” he said. “But my bomb got stuck and wouldn’t come off. I didn’t know about it at the time.

  “When we were flying back home after the attack was completed, the other guys told me my bomb was still on. So I left the formation and went back. I saw a transport then that we hadn’t even seen before. I guess it had been under a cloud.”

  Maj. Mangrum’s radioman and rear gunner, Corp. Dennis Byrd, described the hit the major had scored. “The bomb seemed to hit near the fantail,” he said. “A big column of smoke and water went up.” Byrd said he was sure the steering apparatus of the ship must have been damaged.

  The pilots said it is always hard to see your own hit, if you are a dive-bomber, because by the time the bomb strikes, you are too busy pulling out of your dive, and dodging anti-aircraft, to take time to look behind you. A radioman-rear gunner, who faces the rear, or a squadron mate, however, often has an excellent view.

  Lieut. Lawrence Baldinus (of Yuma, Mich.) had not been able to see the hit he scored directly amidships on the largest Jap transport, which incidentally carried the large red flag of a Jap general or admiral, and might have been a flagship. But Lieut. Don E. McCafferty (of Hempstead, L.I.) said he had enjoyed a “fascinating view” of Baldinus’ bombing.

  “The bomb hit right by the bridge,” he said, “and everything went up as if it was made of wood—like a model in the movies. I veered over to watch it, I was so fascinated, just everything spraying up and coming down.”

  Maj. Mangrum said he had seen Baldinus’ transport, which was a big ship of about 14,000 tons, burning fiercely, and seen indications that the crew were abandoning ship. “There were small boats all over the water,” he said.

  I found Lieut. Fink (Chris Fink of Gray Bull, Wyo.), the naval dive-bomber who had hit the enemy cruiser, a new vessel of the Jintsu class. He was a slow-speaking Westerner, and said, as the other pilots had said, that he had not had a chance to watch his bomb hit. But his radioman, Milo L. Kimberlin (of Spokane, Wash.), told the story: “The bomb hit right on the bridge and a sheet of flame and smoke went right up to the clouds. I could see the stack and bridge lift out of the ship and go kerplunk into the ocean. She was still burning when we left. You could see the smoke and flames for about forty miles.”

  I was skirting the airfield en route to Col. Hunt’s CP this afternoon, when the air-raid alert sounded, and a few moments later, we heard the impressive sound of many powerful engines, and saw the usual thin silver line of Japanese bombers spanning the sky.

  There were twenty-one of them, this time. I counted them; then, as they were almost overhead, I dashed for shelter behind a huge limestone rock. I heard the bombs coming down, and the swishing sound of their descent was louder than I had ever heard it before. I forgot technique—forgot the approved method of taking bomb cover, which is to support yourself a little on elbows to avoid concussion—and instead burrowed as deeply as possible into the ground. The crash of the stick of bombs was loud, and I felt the earth jerk with the impact. Clods of dirt came showering down. When the last “carrummp” had sounded, I waited a few seconds, then got up a bit shaken and looked across the grassy field at a row of fresh, clean-cut, black bomb craters. The ground everywhere around was strewn with small, cube-shaped clods of earth. I measured off the distance between me and the nearest crater. It was not much more than 200 yards.

  Tonight I heard cheerful reports of an action between our naval forces and the Japs’, somewhere near Guadalcanal: our torpedo bombers from a carrier had attacked the Jap carrier Ryuzyo and probably sunk it; at the same time, eighty-one Jap planes had attacked one of our carriers and seventy-one had been shot down. Our bombers had scored hits on other Jap warships of unspecified number and type.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26

  Bob Miller and I were standing at the edge of the airfield today when the now-routine Jap air raid occurred. We now have the timing of these matters pretty well organized. We know about how long we can afford to watch the bombers coming before taking cover. Today we heard the bombs screeching down as loud and close as they were yesterday. Then we piled into a small foxhole. This time I remembered to support myself slightly on my elbows, to avoid concussion, in case one came too close. Some of our people have been so badly shaken by close ones that they have suffered shock and prolonged bleeding from the nose.

  The worst time in a bombing is the short moment when you can hear the bombs coming. Then you feel helpless, and you think very intensely of the fact that it is purely a matter of chance whether or not you will be hit. The chances vary with your location: the Japs are bombing such and such an area, so many acres; the circles of fragments from their bombs will cover a certain proportion of the total acreage. You wonder if your portion of the acreage will be overlapped by the acreage of the bombs.

  If you are caught on the airport by a bombing, you can figure your chances for escaping injury are much fewer than elsewhere, for the airport always seems to be the Japs’ target. But even in other parts of the island, where odds may be greater, say, nine out of ten that you won’t be hit, you wonder if you will be the unlucky tenth case.

  You will also think about those who have been cruelly wounded or killed by previous bombings, and in your imagination you suffer the shock of similar wounds. You also wonder why, instead of getting into a shelter which has a sandbagged roof, you stayed around to gawk and left yourself only time to get to an open foxhole or nothing at all for protection except the flatness of the earth. When you have nothing but the earth and your lack of altitude to protect you, you feel singularly naked and at the mercy of the bombs.

  These thoughts pass very swiftly through your head during the
short time that seems so long, the time when you hear the bombs swishing and rattling through the air on their way down to you. And while your mind is racing through these thoughts, your ears, without any conscious effort on your part, are straining to gauge the closeness of the bombs from the swishing and the rattling of them.

  After the sticks have hit, you wait a few more minutes, suffering from a disinclination to get up immediately; you watch the ground, close in front of your eyes, very patiently, and wait to see if there will be another stick or more sticks. Usually, here on Guadalcanal, there are no more sticks after the bombers have made one run. They do not come back then because they are too busy trying to fend off our fighters.

  When you finally get up to look around, you have butterflies in your chest and your breath is noticeably short and your hands feel a bit shaky. Those feelings do not seem to be avoidable by any conscious effort.

  This morning Miller and I jumped up rather quickly after the sticks had cracked down, and before the dust columns of the explosions had settled saw reddish flames leaping into spreading brown smoke at the far edge of the field. Some of the bombs had hit one of our oil dispersal dumps. But there did not seem to be any other damage.

  Gen. Vandegrift passed us in his jeep. He was anxious to see what damage, if any, the bombs had done to the airfield. Miller and I hitched a ride with him, and we dashed over toward the fires; but as we came close we could see that only a few barrels had been hit.

  “I can see those Jap pilots turning in a report about how they turned the airport into a holocaust,” said Miller. “How they could see the flames for forty miles, etc.” We laughed, because undoubtedly that was just what the Japs did—those who got back.

  Somewhere up in the sky the crescendo, protesting wails of zooming and diving motors could be heard, and the chatter of machine guns. We knew many of the Japs would never get back to make any report at all.