It had stopped raining. When the firing stopped a great quiet fell on the jungle. And in the quiet, we heard the desperate shouting of a man who was evidently in great trouble. He was shouting something like “Yama, Yama!” as if his life depended on it. Then the voice was smothered up in a fusillade of machine-gun and rifle fire. It was a Jap. But we never found out what he was shouting about.
The tide of our action seemed to be turning. We heard no more artillery, and a runner came back from Capt. Antonelli’s troops with the happy word, “We solved the problem, took the village.” Nick’s men sent back word that more Jap 75’s had been captured, unmanned.
Appropriately, the clouds were clearing and the sun was coming out. Fresh reinforcements for our troops were landing. But now we did not need them.
We marched on into Tasimboko without any further resistance. We found many more cases of Japanese food and sacks of rice, and ammunition for Jap machine guns, rifles and artillery pieces, totaling more than 500,000 rounds, Col. Griffith estimated. We burned the ammunition and destroyed the village of Tasimboko, including a radio station which the Japs had established there.
Looking over the bodies of the Japs who had been killed (about thirty), we found some interesting items: pictures of Javanese women, American ammunition with labels printed in Dutch. And we found that the gunsights with the 75’s were of English manufacture, and that some of the Japs had been armed with tommy guns. It seemed that some of these soldiers who had run so fast had been veterans of the Jap campaigns in the East Indies, and possibly Malaya too. Perhaps this was the first time they had been surprised. Or perhaps they had heard too much about what happened to the Japs who tried to cross the Tenaru.
Most of the loot we had captured was destroyed. But we transported the medical supplies back to headquarters, and our men helped themselves to large stocks of British cigarettes, bearing a Netherlands East Indies tax stamp.
The sun had set and there was only a faint reddish glow on the clouds over the horizon to light the darkening sky, when, in our transport ships, we reached a point offshore from the Tenaru River. We were heading toward home.
But the day’s excitement was not yet over. We got word that twelve Jap aircraft had been spotted. Our fighter planes were rising into the twilight sky.
The transports went into evasive maneuvers, and, fortunately, the sky grew quickly darker, and was black, except for high streaks of silver gray, when the Japs arrived.
They did not come to Guadalcanal. For once, they picked Tulagi as their target, and we saw cup-shaped bursts of bright white light rising from the direction of the island, just over the horizon rim. We heard the distant thudding of the bombs a few seconds later, and wondered if the Japs would spot our wakes in the dark. But they did not.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
Shortly after 12:30 this morning, I heard the others in my tent dashing for the shelter. Maj. Phipps shouted to me to come along, and I heard cannonading coming from the north, but I was too tired to move.
At breakfast this morning, I heard that a small group of Jap destroyers or light cruisers had shelled Tulagi—and hit Capt. Theodore’s little ship and set it afire.
Later in the day, I heard that Capt. Theodore had been wounded through the chest in the course of the engagement. But he had beached his little craft, and saved it from sinking, despite his wounds. I am glad to hear that he is expected to live.
This is the second time that I have left a ship in the evening and it has been attacked and lost before morning. This fact gives rise to the thought that my luck has been good, so far.
There were two air-raid alarms today. But the Japs never appeared. It was a quiet afternoon. We sat in Col. Hunt’s CP after lunch, talking of the reunion we will have ten years hence, and the tales we’ll tell about Guadalcanal, then, and how by that time our imaginations will have magnified our deeds immeasurably, and we will all be heroes.
Col. Hunt told us about some of his narrow escapes in the World War, when he commanded the Sixth Marines. Our casualties were very high, then, he said, and gave the figures. But the fighting at the Tenaru battle, he said, was about as concentrated and intense as in any engagement of the World War.
Tonight we were awakened, just before midnight, by the sound of heavy firing in the jungles. There were machine guns, rifles and, occasionally, the crash of a mortar.
We lay awake and listened. And then cannonading started, to the north. We went to the dugout, and I sat on the sandbagged entrance with Maj. Phipps. The guns, we knew, were big ones, because of their heavy tone and the brightness of the flashes against the sky. But Bill Phipps was sure they were firing in the Tulagi area, not off our shore. He had measured the interval between the time of the flash and the time the related boom of the gun reached us. That interval, he said, was ninety seconds. Multiply the 90 by 1,100, the number of feet sound travels in a second, and you get 99,000 feet, or about twenty miles. Tulagi is twenty miles north of us.
Star shells glowed in the sky. The Japs were illuminating the Tulagi shore. One of our observation posts phoned in the report that there were three Jap ships, probably cruisers, and that they were firing salvos.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
This morning we heard that the Japs had shelled Tulagi harbor last night and again hit Capt. Theodore’s ship, which was still beached.
I went to the CP of Maj. Nickerson (the Raider officer) and talked to some of the men who did outstanding work on the excursion to Tasimboko, day before yesterday. Among them, two young corpsmen, Pharmacist’s Mate Alfred W. Cleveland (of South Dartmouth, Mass.) and Pharmacist’s Mate, second class, Karl B. Coleman (of McAndrews, Ky.). They told me how they had used a penknife to amputate the ragged stump of one Raider’s arm after it had been shattered by a 75 explosion; the wounded man had been the one whom I had seen, lying in a foxhole, just after he had been treated and bandaged. These two lads, Nick told me, had saved the wounded man’s life by amputating the remnants of his arm; the medicos themselves had said that the man would have died if the two lads had not done such a good and quick job in the field.
Pvt. Andrew J. Klejnot (of Fort Wayne, Ind.) told me how he had picked off one of the crew of one of the Jap 75’s.
“There were only two men on the gun,” he said. “I picked off one, and the other went and hid behind some boxes in a little ammunition dump. I fired into the dump and set it afire.”
I moved my worldly possessions from Col. Hunt’s CP out to Gen. Vandegrift’s headquarters today. The general has moved into the “boon-docks,” as the marines call the jungles; and the new spot is too much of a trek from Col. Hunt’s headquarters.
A tent has been put up for us correspondents, near the general’s headquarters. The members of our “press club” now are Bob Miller, Till Durdin, Tom Yarbrough, and there is a new arrival, Carlton Kent.
The Japs air-raided us at about noontime; twenty-seven of the usual silver-colored, two-engine type, flying lower than usual today. But the sticks of bombs fell a long distance from our location at the time.
The general’s new CP is located in the thick of the jungle. Sui, pet dog of the commissioner, Martin Clemens, proved it tonight by dragging an iguana, a small dragon-like lizard, into plain view as we sat at dinner over the crude board table tonight. Sui had unearthed the iguana at the jungle edge, which stands up straight and dense as a wall only a few feet from our mess table.
The tent which has been put up for correspondents is one of a number located at the foot of a ridge, facing the jungle. The general’s tent is atop the ridge. Tonight we were told to be on the alert, since the Japs had been reported infiltrating the jungle which we faced. We were told that if an attack came, we should retire up the ridge to the crest, where a stand would be made.
“I wish I had a pistol,” said Yarbrough, as we correspondents lay in our bunks, after dark. And the rest of us were nervous, and not anxious to go to sleep. We kept up a clatter of conversation to help our spirits.
The sit
uation was not without an element of humor. For, as we lay awake, the mackaws sat overhead in the trees and bombed our tent. The plopping of their missiles was loud and frequent. The birds seemed to have singled out our tent for the heaviest bombardment. Maj. Jim Murray, the general’s adjutant, chided us about the fact. “Those birds have got the correspondents’ number, all right,” he said.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11
The Japs who were supposed to be investing the jungle in front of our tent did not put in an appearance last night. There was not even any firing out in the “boon-docks.”
In today’s air raid—by twenty-six Jap two-engined bombers—I had my closest escape from a bomb explosion. When the air-raid alert came in, Miller, Durdin and I went to the top of the ridge and walked down it, looking for a good high spot from which we could watch the bombers.
We found three or four men at work building a shelter at a spot several hundred yards away, where the ridge was bare of any foliage except grass, and one had a wonderful view of the sky. The incipient shelter, now only a pit, was just what we wanted in the way of a box seat for the show. It was deep and wide. We could sit on the edge until the bombers were just overhead, then still have plenty of time to dive for cover.
We did just that. The planes came as usual in a wide line that was a very shallow V, stretching across the sky. As usual, the antiaircraft guns put up bursts in the vicinity, and as usual the bombers plowed on steadily, holding their formation and course.
Then the bombs came. When we heard them rattling down, we piled into the pit, layer upon layer of humanity, and waited. The bombs made a slightly different sound this time, perhaps because they were closer than before. Their sound was louder and more of a whistle. And the explosions were deafening. You could hear fragments skittering through the air over the top of the pit, and in that second all of us must have known that if we had been lying on the bare ridge we would have been hit and hurt.
Till Durdin said, “Hot.” I saw that he was touching the sole of his shoe. He pulled a piece of metal out of the leather and held it gingerly between two fingers. It was a bomb fragment, still warm from the explosion.
Miller and I were anxious to see how close the craters had been this time. We spotted a small crater about forty yards from our pit. It was this missile, probably, that had thrown the fragments over our heads.
Beyond the small crater were other, larger holes. One of them must have been thirty feet across. That one lay about three hundred yards from our pit, fortunately beyond effective range. It was one of an irregularly spaced line of craters that led into the jungle beyond the grass.
Now, from the jungle, we heard excited shouting, and cries for a corpsman. We knew that meant that there had been some people hurt down there. We saw several being brought out on stretchers.
Our fighter planes were already avenging the casualties. We heard the sounds of a dogfight in the sky, and later came word that they had knocked down six of the bombers and one Zero.
Later this afternoon, our dive-bombers came in from a trip to Gizo. This time they had found a small ship, a patrol-boat type of craft, lying off the base, and had sunk it. They had also bombed the buildings of the base again.
At air-operations headquarters I found a box which had been sent me by plane, from my shipmates on a former task-force excursion. It included cans of beans, brown bread, salmon, peaches. Miller, Pvt. Frank Schultz, who drives our jeep, Jim Hurlbut (the Marine Corps correspondent) and I went down to the Lunga, taking the box along, and had a swim in the swift, clear water. Then we opened the cans and had a feast. .
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
This morning, as an urgent air alert was flashed, we of the Press Club decided to go down to Lunga Point to watch the show for today. So we piled into a jeep and our driver turned out one of the fastest cross-country records such a vehicle has ever achieved. He was not inclined to be caught on the road when the bombers arrived.
At the Point, Miller put on the headphones of the radio set and began calling out the interplane conversations of our fighters, who were by that time rising to search for the foe.
At 11:42 Maj. Smith called: “Control from Smith. They’re coming in from the south—a big squadron of ’em.” And then we saw them, the usual impressive span of two-motored silver bombers, Mitsubishi 96’s, moving like a slender white line of cloud across the blue sky.
This time the planes were set against an almost cloudless sky, and had a long course of blue to traverse before they reached dropping point over the airport. That chance gave the anti-aircraft an unusually good opportunity to range on them.
At first, the puffs of ack-ack fire were too high and ahead of the Japs. We saw the silver-bodied planes pass under the spotty cloud formed as the bursts spread out and merged. And then the AA began to come on the range. The flashes of the bursts came just in front of the silver-bodied planes; then one bomber in the left side of the formation was hit. We saw the orange flash of the explosion just under his wing, under the starboard motor nacelle, and then the motor began to trail a pennant of white smoke and the plane pulled off and downward, and left the formation.
Just as the plane pulled clear of the formation, another antiaircraft shell burst directly under the belly of one of the planes at the center of the formation. A tongue of flame spread across the middle of the plane, then receded and was swallowed in a torrent of black smoke, and, in an instant, the plane was nosing straight down toward the ground. Now I saw one wing sheer off as if it were paper, and flutter after the more swiftly falling fuselage. Then the plane simply disintegrated, chunks fluttering away and falling, while the center part of the plane plunged at ever-accelerating speed toward the ground.
By this time the remainder of the Jap bomber formation had passed on out to sea. But one of the planes, possibly crippled by anti-aircraft fire, had become separated from the rest. One of our fighters was quick to pounce on him.
There was quite a group of us on the Point this day, watching the “show.” Now they were cheering like a crowd at a football game. “Whoooo-ee,” shouted someone, “look at that fighter. He’s got him.”
The tiny speck of the fighter, looking like a bumblebee in comparison to the bigger, clumsier bomber, was diving now. And we heard the rattlesnake sound of his guns. The bomber slewed, came up in a whipstall, and fell off in a steep dive toward the ocean.
The other bombers had disappeared somewhere in the blue, but we could hear our fighters going after them.
In the beautiful amphitheater of the sky, the kill of the isolated bomber by the fighter was continuing. We saw the bomber diving straight toward the sea, vertically, but the fighter, like a malevolent mosquito, hovered about the larger object, watching for signs of life.
The bomber dived a few thousand feet, and then, suddenly, pulled out of the dive and climbed straight up into the sky, up and up, like an animal gasping for air in its death struggle.
Quickly, the fighter closed and its machine guns rattled again, for seconds on end in a long burst. And then the bomber paused, fell off on one wing and with spinning wings fluttered vertically toward Tulagi Bay.
A few seconds later the spinning plane hit the water, and from the spot where it struck came a great backfire of ruddy flame and black smoke. And the watchers on the shore cheered madly, as if our side had made a touchdown.
Back at the airport, we found that the final score for the day was ten bombers and three Zeros; another goodly addition to a total that is mounting much too fast to please the Japs.
Capt. Smith came in to report that he had downed his fourteenth and fifteenth planes today; he did not say so, but it was told at the airport that he has been promoted to the rank of major, an award richly deserved.
We found that Lieut. Ken Frazier (Kenneth D. Frazier of Burlington, N.J.) was the pilot who had destroyed the crippled bomber so spectacularly while we watched from Lunga Point. He had shot down another plane as well.
“The first one went down in flames,” he said.
“The straggler was simple. I dived on him, saw the tracers falling a little short, pulled up a little, and then watched the chunks fly off the plane.”
On one edge of the airfield, we found pieces of the Jap bomber which had disintegrated while we watched. There was quite a large section of the fuselage. The metal seemed much more fragile than the skin of the American bombers I have seen.
The cocoanut grove at one edge of the airfield had been struck by a stick of large bombs. The craters were huge. But the bombs had hit nothing of value. A 100-pound bomb had smashed directly into a shack, killing one man, destroying some radio equipment. That was the only visible damage of the bombing.
When somebody came into our tent, at about nine o’clock, and shouted, “Get up, fellas, we’re moving up the ridge,” we did not waste any time, but grabbed helmets and shoes and left. Only a few minutes later, from the ridge-top, we saw a pinpoint of bright green light appear in the sky to the north. The light spread into the glow of a flare, and then we heard the mosquito-like “double-hummer” tone of a Jap floatplane. It was “Louie the Louse”—a generic name for any one of the Jap floatplanes which come to annoy us at night.
“Louie” flew leisurely, as he always does, over the island, dropping more flares, and then we saw the distinctive flashes of naval gunfire coming from the direction of Kukum.
Just as we heard the boom of the gun, the shell whizzed over our heads and crashed a few hundred yards around. There was a second’s pause, and then more flashes followed, so continuously that the sky seemed to be flickering constantly, and shells whined overhead almost in column. They kept coming for minutes on end, fortunately hitting into the jungle several hundred yards beyond us, skimming over the trees under which we were lying. We simply lay there clutching the side of the ridge and hoping the Japs would continue to fire too high.
The barrage kept up for about twenty minutes, then halted. And we waited in silence—the general and the rest of us lying on the ground, waiting to see if the firing would begin again.
Guadalcanal Diary Page 20