The general turned his jeep to another part of the airport, and that was fortunate, for a delayed-action bomb, a big fellow, blew up near the spot where we had turned, a few seconds after we left.
Miller and I hopped off at one of the shelter pens, the skeletal type of hangars the Japs had built on the airport, and waited for our fliers to come down.
Marion Carl came in, grinning happily, to tell us that he had shot down his fifth and sixth planes—both Zeros. The lads call him “the Zero man,” literally a very unflattering title, but in this connotation quite agreeable to Carl.
The other pilots seem to have great respect for Carl. They don’t mention it to him, but one of them told me today: “What a pilot! He’s a natural. Always relaxed.”
Carl was with the marine fliers on Midway, during the great battle, and shot down one Zero there. I asked him how the Zeros he was meeting over Guadalcanal compared with those at Midway.
“I dunno why,” he said, “but we got shot up a lot more there than we do here. Maybe the pilots were better than these.”
Capt. John L. Smith (of Lexington, Okla.), Carl’s squadron leader, is a more quiet type. He has the steadiest eyes I have ever seen; they are brown and wide-set and you fancy they would be most at home looking out over the great plains of the West.
Smith is a prairie type: tanned face, wide cheekbones, the erect head of a horseman, a thick neck set on square shoulders, a big, sinewy body. You get the impression that life must have a calm, elemental simplicity for him.
Capt. Smith did not say so, but he is the ace among the fliers on Guadalcanal. Already he has shot down nine enemy planes. And that success does not seem to have excited or perturbed him at all.
Back at my tent, I found Don Dickson and Lieut. McLeod (William J. McLeod of St. Petersburg, Fla.) sitting on a bunk, deep in conversation. They seemed to be working over some sort of document. Dickson, who usually has a wonderfully good temper, said rather curtly: “We have a little private matter here.”
I felt a little cut, but later found out what the conspiracy was. P.F.C. Tardiff informed me that I was under arrest, and two marines with fixed bayonets took me in tow. Dickson came by and said with mock gravity, “You’re a prisoner of war.”
Capt. Hodgess, the Australian, was also brought along under military guard. We stood side by side—“Stand at attention, Pvt. Tregaskis,” snapped Lieut. Wilson—while Col. Hunt marched out and gravely read a long “citation” for each of us. This document honored us for our speed in getting to a dugout amidst a bombardment and drafted us for membership in the “Lunga Point Shell-Dodging Marines.”
Don Dickson, who had been an artist and cartoonist in civilian life, had embellished our citations with comic drawings. Making them had been his “private matter” in the tent. The documents were embellished with official-looking seals made from Jap beer-bottle labels.
Col. Hunt solemnly pinned captured Japanese medals on Viv Hodgess’ chest and mine. It was the Eighth Order of Palenowa. “We found a case of those in the Jap tent camp,” said Col. Hunt. (Later he told me: “We had to put on some kind of show for the boys. They were getting a little bit glum.”)
Tonight was quiet. The Jap submarine which visits us nocturnally—we now call it “Oscar”—did not show up. Nor did the cruisers and destroyers which have often bothered us.
But I was not to have any rest this night, despite the quiet of the evening. I was awakened by the unpleasant symptoms of a local epidemic, which the doctors call gastro-enteritis.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 27
I thought I could sleep off my illness, but that was impossible. This was a formidable assault of the ailment. I generated a dizzying fever and nausea.
This morning the air-raid alert sounded. I felt too sick to move from my cot, whatever happened. Don Dickson came in and said the warning had become urgent, and asked if I wanted help in getting to the dugout. I told him I would stay where I was.
I heard the drone of planes in the sky and got my helmet and put it on, then turned face down on the cot. That way, I figured, I would have a maximum of protection.
But the bombers did not make a run today. They jettisoned their bombs somewhere in the backwoods. Evidently they are growing chary of our fighters. (Yesterday, according to the official count, our fighters downed seven Jap bombers and five Zeros.)
For some time I lay abed, feeling dizzier and sicker by the moment. I could hear the booming of cannon-firing batteries. Don Dickson told me it was our own batteries I heard. They were shelling the Matanikau-Kokumbona area. The Jap forces which had been landed piecemeal at nighttime had filtered back into those villages. We were going to blast them out. The artillery was softening the positions. Then a large body of troops was going to move in, later in the day.
Dr. Hopkins (Henry Hopkins, of Hyannis, Mass.) came in to give me some medicine; my nausea quickly disposed of it. After that, I was carried off feet first. I remember hearing the familiar squeak of the stretcher as I was put into the ambulance, the jouncy ride, losing my sense of direction, and reading, several times, the red letters “USN, MC” painted on the stretcher above mine, being placed on a cot that was too short for me, as most of them are, and then suffering through four or five hours of tortured sleep and being conscious that my fever was rising and nausea increasing. I had a bad case.
(Gastro-enteritis is marked by a combination of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and high fever. The organism, if there is one, has not been isolated. The doctors on Guadalcanal knew little of the cause of the matter, were too busy with more serious matters to bother about pathological research into this local plague.)
It was dark when I became conscious of movement and talking at the entrance to the tent. I heard the shuffling of feet, and somebody said: “His clothes are wet. Better get ’em off.” They had brought in a casualty. I was too sick to be interested. But the voices kept on.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Sunstroke.”
Then I heard grunts and groans. They were moving the man from the stretcher to bed.
“He’s a big ’un,” said a voice.
A doctor spoke in a pleasant, soft voice. “Were you out in the sun?” he asked.
The man spoke as if it were difficult to summon wind enough for words. “Chees,” he said. It was a sort of gasp. Then he said, “Chees,” again, and finally: “I’ve got a platoon. On the ridge.”
“You’re in the hospital now,” said the doctor. “I’m Dr. Lynch.” (Dr. George Lynch of Boston, Mass.)
The man said “Chees” again. And then, sick as I was, I recognized the voice. It was Lieut. Donoghue, of Jersey City, one of my shipmates on the transport which had brought me to Guadalcanal.
Finally the corpsmen brought Lieut. Donoghue to, and he told, between gasps of “Chees,” a foggy story of having been out on a ridge with his machine-gun platoon. They were advancing on Matanikau with the other troops, he said, when the commanding officer ordered him to take his platoon up onto a steep rocky ridge. “My men pooped out,” he said, “after we got up. I went down to look for Capt. Hawkins. I asked where he was. Next thing I remember, Dr. Claude giving me a drink.… Chees.”
Another of the men in the tent, a young lieutenant who was recuperating from gastro-enteritis, wanted to chat in the evening. He and the corpsman in charge talked about the fight for Matanikau. The corpsman said there had not been many casualties in today’s attempt to get into the town. He said there were some killed and wounded, but the wounded weren’t being brought here; they were being taken to another hospital.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28
Lieut. Donoghue repeated his story this morning. He said he felt better, but he talked as if thinking and speaking were a great effort.
The young lieutenant who is recuperating talked with the corpsman about how good the “chow” was at this camp. The lieutenant said he wished he could stay awhile. Possibly by accident, he smoked a cigarette just before his temperature was to be taken. This upset the corpsman,
who accused the lieutenant of gold-bricking, which, after some confusion, the lieutenant cheerfully admitted.
Lieut. Donoghue, at the opposite extreme, begged the doctor to let him go, as his mind cleared at about midday. “I hate to lie down in one place, Doc,” he said.
I still suffered from nausea and vomiting and fever, and was not inclined to be interested in any of these goings-on, or even curious when later in the afternoon a lot of our planes took off, and there was a great, excited passing of “scuttlebutt” about a huge Japanese task force which was supposedly on its way to attack Guadalcanal. (I got the news next day that a force of one small Jap destroyer and three larger ones had been spotted by a patrol of our dive-bombers near Santa Isabel Island. The dive-bombers had attacked the small destroyer and set it afire. And a striking force—the other planes which we had heard taking off—had found the small destroyer listing and burning, and had attacked two of the others. Both of these had been hit; one exploded and sank, and the second burned and was apparently heavily damaged.)
Lieut. Donoghue talked about the advance on Matanikau. He said that en route he had passed the mutilated body of a young woman lying by the side of the trail. He said that the girl had been raped and her torso hacked.
Tonight the other patients in the tent, who were with one exception in better shape than I (the exception was a sick officer who was being checked for possible malaria), spent an interminable time yarning about the Solomons campaign to date. Some of the stories were fairly interesting; like the one about the Jap who, in the first night on Tulagi, was challenged by a marine sentry. The Jap said in English that he was the corporal of the guard. “O.K., bud,” said the marine, and opened up with his pistol. There was no such thing as a corporal of the guard in that organization.
Another story, which I had heard before, was about the Japs in one of the dugout caves on Tulagi. An interpreter went out to ask them, in Japanese, to surrender; one of the Japs had stuck his head out of the entrance and answered in colloquial English.
That led to other yarns about the Japs’ ability to speak English, and the alleged fact that many of the dead wore American high-school rings. Then, there were stories about the American mementoes that had been found on Jap bodies. American cigarette cases, etc. Then the yarning turned to our first days on Guadalcanal, the large amount of shooting at shadows during the first few nights ashore and how, allegedly, the general had issued an order that no shots should be fired, that only the bayonet should be used, and that this measure had cut down the unnecessary firing—that was the story.
And so the yarning went on, and finally somebody told the classic story about the two marine jeep drivers on Guadalcanal, supposedly a true story, very true, anyhow, in its essential American psychology. It was about two jeeps passing in the night, one with proper dim-out headlights, the other with glaring bright lights. So the driver of the dim-light car leans out as they pass and shouts to the other driver: “Hey! Put your f– – – – –g lights out!” To which the other replies: “I can’t. I’ve got a f– – – – –g colonel with me!”
SATURDAY, AUGUST 29
This morning at about four o’clock I heard somebody shout “Air raid!” and slid out of bed and through the folds of my mosquito net and onto the floor just as the bombs came swishing down. The crack of their explosions, however, was not loud, and I surmised they were small ones. We found after the excitement was over that some Jap floatplanes had made a sneak attack. The bombs had fallen far from the airfield and caused only a few casualties.
From 9:30 on, we spent the morning dragging ourselves to a dugout and back; there were three air-raid alarms. The shelter was crammed with sick people. The feverish, emaciated wrecks, most of them suffering from gastro-enteritis, were a pitiful sight.
The Japs did not show up until noontime. Then there were twenty-four bombers with an escort of twenty-two Zeros. I climbed out of the murky air of the dugout—I was feeling well enough to haul myself around without help by this time—and watched our anti-aircraft bursting in the sky. Then came a shower of bombs, and I could see the dark-brown smoke of their explosions rising above the treetops.
Our fighters caught the Japs. I heard the familiar sound of diving or zooming motors and rattling machine guns in the clouds. And then one plane came tearing down out of the sky in the most awful power dive I have heard. The sound accelerated and rose in a crescendo that filled the sky. I never saw the plane, but it seemed a certainty that it was coming down directly on top of us. But I heard the plane crash some distance away, and a cloud of black smoke edged up over the trees to the south.
It was a Jap bomber. Visitors who came later in the day to our tent said that the plane had come down vertically and must have been going well over 600 miles an hour when it hit the ground, and that it disintegrated like a bomb on impact. Apparently the pilot had been killed, and in his dying efforts, had jammed the controls forward. The total tally of our pilots for the day was three Jap bombers downed and four Zeros. We had lost no planes in the fighting.
A marine who came in to bring some clothes to one of the inmates of our tent told us that Matanikau had been successfully occupied by our troops, but that the resistance indicated that the Japs had been landing troops and supplies. And the impression had been confirmed by the discovery of large stores of fresh ammunition and food cans.
It is rather easy for the Japs to build up strong forces, piece by piece, on other parts of this island—if the transporting ships can reach our shores unharmed, which they have been able to do.
We hold a tiny strip of this island, a toehold, a piece about seven miles wide and four miles deep, centering around the airport. The Japs can move about the remainder of the island, which is ninety miles long and thirty miles deep, almost at will.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 30
We were roused at 1:30 this morning by an alert, and went over to the air-raid shelter in the moonlight. But no aircraft appeared, and at 1:45 we went back to bed. I helped a feverish gastro-enteritis sufferer from the steaming dugout and found his arm hot to the touch. I was glad that I had shaken the disease.
After breakfast I got my discharge from the hospital and went down to Kukum. Two ships were lying offshore, one a freighter, the other the auxiliary transport Calhoun.
We had an air-raid alert soon after, and the two ships up-anchored and hustled off to sea, where they would have more room to maneuver evasively if attacked.
Lieut. Comdr. Dexter told us we would have a good view of the raid from the beach. “We have the best spot on the island,” he said. “We see the approach, the anti-aircraft fire, watch the bombs drop, see the dogfights, and send boats out to pick up the aviators who get shot down.”
But today there was a low ceiling of heavy, dark cumulus clouds, and a beneficent rain-squall covered the Calhoun and the freighter. They were blotted out of sight even from shore.
No bombers appeared, but we heard the sounds of a furious dogfight coming from the high banks of clouds. It lasted for about ten minutes.
At the airport, we talked to the fighter pilots as they came in from the raid. Capt. Smith told us he had had his biggest day of fighting, had shot down four Zeros, three of them, he said, in a minute and a half.
“I dove on one, shot him down, and saw another on my wingman’s tail,” he said, calmly. “I slewed over and picked off that one. Then I saw one coming at me from below and ahead. I nosed over and dove right at him and let all my guns go. I had a tough time avoiding crashing him head on. I could see the prop shatter, and I came so close I could see his damned head—his helmet and goggles. He was trying to climb out of the ship then, and I guess he used his chute.”
After that, said the captain, he had ammunition left for only one gun. He lit out for the airport, trying to sneak in low over the water. “I was flat-hatting along the beach at about fifty feet,” he said, “when I saw two Zeros ahead and to the right. I made a run on one of them with my one gun and saw him fall off and dive into the water. The o
ther one took off as fast as he could go. I did too, because I’d used up all my ammo.”
Capt. Carl also had a good day’s dogfighting; he told us happily that he had shot down three more Zeros, making his total score nine, to date.
At Gen. Vandegrift’s headquarters, we got the official word that eighteen of the Zeros encountered that day had been shot down. Gen. Vandegrift was happy about it. Today, he said, interception had been perfect; the bombers were driven off and most of the Zeros destroyed.
But the afternoon was not yet over; suddenly we got word of a surprise air raid and raced for cover. Then we felt the ground shake, from deep down, as if there were an earthquake. There was a succession of tremors, and we heard deep, dull booming sounds coming from the direction of Kukum. I raced for the open and saw a towering black cloud mushrooming over the trees in the direction of Kukum.
The cloud of smoke mounted higher into the sky, and then we heard the news: the Calboun had been hit by Jap bombers. They had come in three waves, a total of sixteen bombers, and the little auxiliary transport had been hit squarely by three bombs. She had sunk almost immediately.
Miller and I set out for Kukum immediately in a jeep, but it was impossible to get there. The roads were jammed with trucks bringing in survivors and wounded. We gave up the project of getting to Kukum, and I contented myself with talking to Dr. Bill Duell (of Hackensack, N.J.), who had seen the bombing.
The deep explosions which we had felt shaking the earth, he said, had been caused by depth charges. A submarine had been hovering in the vicinity at the time the bombers attacked the Calhoun. One of our destroyers had dropped a series of depth charges at the same time the Calhoun was being bombed.
“I saw a lot of little puffs traveling along the surface where the depth charges were going off,” he said. “You could feel the ground shake; it was terrific, out there on the beach. And then the black bow of the sub just reared out of the water like a whale and sank back.”
Losing the Calhoun seemed like a terrible tragedy at the moment. But later in the evening, we heard that the loss of life aboard the ship had been slight. We had recovered about 100 of the crew, lost only about thirty-eight.
Guadalcanal Diary Page 16