This singular treaty-like arrangement provided the working basis for the smoothest, most trouble-free embarkation I ever participated in. There were a minimum of confusion and rancor and a maximum of cooperation and efficiency. One ship was combat loaded, buttoned up, and in the stream within a record forty-eight hours. The other vessels were not far behind. The young officer behind it all, Major Krulak, went on to a brilliant and productive career culminating as a lieutenant general commanding Fleet Marine Force Pacific during the Vietnam War—the most effective officer I have ever known.
During this period, to regularize my position and authority, I was designated commander, First Base Depot, an organization providing rear area support for an engaged Marine division. Such an assignment was regarded by all good Marines as a fate worse than death. I had become a quartermaster, a bean counter, at least for the time being. I made a point of never going to my office. I refused even to find out where it was located. But this assignment did bring me back in touch with my old friends Colonel Salmon and Harry Detwiler. Both contacts proved exceedingly helpful throughout our time in New Zealand.
Amphibious shipping was in extremely short supply, and it was necessary to impose draconian restrictions. General Vandegrift’s order was brief: “Take only that which is necessary to fight and to live.” This meant bullets, beans, and blankets. No tents, no cots for officers, no luxuries of any sort. The only exception made was in the case of accoutrements for the Division Field Hospital. Even these proved to be unnecessary as we captured a suitable building near Kukum and used stretchers instead of cots to facilitate evacuation from the hospital to nearby stretcher-size foxholes during the frequent periods of bombardment from sea or air. As the operation progressed, most casualties were quickly evacuated by air to Noumea.
As part of my new job, I inherited all the problems involved in rationing the landing force that Colonel Pate had vainly tried to solve with Navy Supply in Washington. The weather was still fine, but even so Aotea Quay was littered with corn flakes as the flimsy cardboard shipping cartons came apart, scattering their contents. This was a continuing reminder that our rationing problems were still with us. For example, the supply of meat available to us was totally useless because we lacked refrigeration. I explained our meat problem to Colonel Salmon. His immediate reply was, “We will give you every tin of meat in New Zealand.” And they did, along with coffee, dehydrated milk, and powdered eggs. The canned meat included a considerable quantity of lambs’ tongues, considered a delicacy down there. The response of my Marine Corps friends was predictable: “Twining has gone and bought up every lamb tongue in New Zealand and now we’ll have to eat the goddamned things.” Later on, however, they proved a welcome alternative to the smelly mountain of dried fish we inherited from the emperor, or the eternal Spam of the U.S. ration.
I had left New Zealand on a new assignment before the second echelon, 1st Marines (reinforced), arrived on the Ericsson. They had suffered a stormy trip and were forced to endure a 1,500-calorie daily diet of bad food. Though not in good physical condition, they had to immediately unload Ericsson, combat load its cargo on three separate attack transports and one AKA, and reembark. The weather turned unusually foul (it was now winter here, south of the equator), and the working details labored in three shifts around the clock in the chilly, wind-driven rain. It was utterly impossible to meet the deadline for making an attack on 1 August. A delay of one week was granted by the Joint Chiefs.
In the meantime, I left Wellington in company with Major McKean of Commodore Reifsnider’s staff. We were to make an aerial beach reconnaissance of the objective area, Guadalcanal and Tulagi. General Vandegrift was particularly concerned about the nature of the beaches selected for the landings, especially those on Guadalcanal, about which we had no information, no pictures, and only an ancient German chart to guide us. He became singularly uneasy when he noted that the beaches on Koro Island in the Fiji Islands, chosen by the Navy Department in Washington and designated for our rehearsal landings, appeared to be totally unsuitable for the purpose. He wanted the beaches and their approaches that we intended to use on Guadalcanal and Tulagi to be sighted by someone qualified to pass judgment on their suitability. Both McKean and I had had good recent experience along these lines during the Fleet Landing Exercises of the late 1930s. As B-2 (intelligence) of the old 1st Brigade, I had personally reconnoitered the beaches used in the St. Croix, Vieques, and Puerto Rico landings, some at night using rubber boats and some by air, and felt I had attained a fair degree of competence in assessing a beach’s suitability for troop landings.
At Auckland we reported to Admiral Ghormley’s headquarters and were told that we would be flown to the objective area from Noumea. We arrived in Noumea by PBY the next day and were billeted in Argonne (AG-31), an ex-submarine tender that had relieved Curtiss (AV-4), a seaplane tender, and flew the flag of Rear Adm. John S. McCain, commander, Air Force, South Pacific Area (ComAirSoPac). The admiral’s air force was composed primarily of two hard working squadrons of PBYs and some Marine fighters.
McCain sent for me the next morning. He knew there was a war going on and intended to do something about winning it. Just talking with that man gave me a good feeling. He told me he couldn’t send us into the Solomons from Noumea, his planes being too short-legged. The Army Air Corps officer there could but wouldn’t. “No use asking him,” said Admiral McCain. I had known the AAC officer in Hawaii when we were both second lieutenants and privately agreed with the admiral’s assessment. He said that he had a good friend, General Scanlon, commanding the Army Air Corps in Port Moresby, New Guinea, who he knew would get us in there. McCain sent a personal dispatch to Scanlon asking for his help. As I started to leave he snapped, “What do you know about aerial reconnaissance anyway?” I was formulating a modest reply when he cut me off with, “Well, you got to go anyway. Even if they burn you up. Good luck.”
We flew to Brisbane, Australia, on a Qantas Air commercial plane. There, the U.S. naval representative, Commander Slawson, arranged for our flight to Port Moresby via Townsville, Australia, on Army Air Corps planes. At Port Moresby everything had been arranged for our reconnaissance the following day. We enjoyed a good dinner at the Australian Officers’ Mess and afterward were summoned to General Scanlon’s living quarters, where he spoke very freely with us. He felt his force was getting inadequate support from Australia. His pilots, some of whom had been stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines and had been fighting since the start of the war, were exhausted, and their equipment was in bad condition. Tomorrow he would send out his largest strike of the war, twenty-four B-17s. He doubted if over half would reach the target. Less than half did. Scanlon was of Old Army origin; he had known my brother Nate in the old days and, like him, had a West Pointer’s keen interest in close air support for soldiers engaged in battle on the ground. This apostasy eventually led to his professional undoing in the air force.
It was 17 July. McKean and I turned out before daylight and were taken to Twenty Mile Field to enplane for the trip to Guadalcanal. At the field our flight faced a long delay while the heavily loaded B-17s made their takeoffs for Rabaul. We had left Moresby before breakfast and were thoughtfully invited by the Australians to a place they termed their pie shack . It consisted of four rough wood posts covered with a roof of thatched palm. Inside was a ruddy-faced, bare-waisted Australian soldier making something he called coffee in a huge aluminum kettle over an open fire. He dumped several pounds of ground coffee into his copper, as all kettles are called down there even if they are made of cast iron. Next, he opened can after can of evaporated milk and poured the contents over the dry coffee already in the pot, tossed in a few pounds of sugar, and finally added water to the brim, stirring it with a two-by-four stud, saying, “Let ’er rip.” What a brew!
There were reputed to be small cans of fruit available to sustain us during our long flight, but these had long since disappeared into the pockets of the Air Corps crews who preceded us. This too had been t
he fate of the hardtack, but a few bits and pieces of crumbs were still left in the bottom of the metal container. McKean and I filled our pockets, providing against the necessities of the day.
We met our pilot and copilot, a major and captain. Both were obviously capable, experienced, squared-away types. I felt we were in good hands. They explained that our flight would be made in a B-17P, a plane adapted to long-range photographic flights by the conversion of the bomb bay space into fuel tanks. Our flight would be a long one—stretching the maximum range of the aircraft.
We taxied to the runway but were again delayed by the return of planes with rough engines or other mechanical difficulties developed during the early part of their Rabaul strike. Once in the air our troubles seemed over. The plane performed perfectly, the weather was fine, and the visibility was unlimited.
McKean and I were assigned places in the nacelle at the nose of the plane, where the clear plastic gave limitless forward vision. I was assigned the bow machine gunner’s position, which covered the sector dead ahead and also allowed optimum observation of our objective.
As an old machine gunner, I was entranced by my weapon. A new development and product of vibration science research and engineering, it could fire over 1,000 rounds per minute, as opposed to the 150-round output of the ancient 1917 Browning our ground forces still used, a crosseyed old bitch that kicked, jerked, and jolted like a jackhammer gone mad.
McKean and the plane’s navigator were situated behind my left shoulder on the port side of the nacelle. Our “map” was a reprint of a prewar illustration from the National Geographic covering the islands of the Southwest Pacific north of Australia. There was not much detail—Guadalcanal was about half an inch long—but nothing better was to be had.
Celestial navigation was apparently new to the Army Air Corps, and our youthful navigator was certainly not overly conversant with its techniques. He took an occasional sun line, then resumed reading a comic book, in which he was completely absorbed. I recalled vividly the trip to New Zealand in Bill Rassieur’s PBM. There the navigator was a young ensign just out of Annapolis. Sam Pickering rode herd on him all the way and kept him at the onerous sun line task as long as we were in the air.
About 1400 we spotted Guadalcanal and Tulagi on our port bow and altered course to the north to make a first run over Tulagi. I had expected to make the first run over Guadalcanal but soon understood the reason for the pilot’s decision. Recent reports of enemy planes based in the area had not been confirmed, but if any were present they would undoubtedly be Rufes—Zeros on floats—operating out of Tulagi Harbour. Their presence or absence would be the controlling factor governing the length of our visit. We flew at low altitude— between 2,000 and 3,000 feet—taking pictures as we passed over the Tulagi beaches. My visual inspection confirmed what the old German chart of Tulagi Island had indicated: coral reefs offshore almost everywhere, making landings impracticable for any except light forces. As McKean and I studied the inhospitable beaches, the intercom came alive with excited shouts of “float planes taking off from Tulagi Harbour!” No one was certain of their number.
We headed south across Lunga Channel to Guadalcanal. The pilot calmly passed the word: “Clear all guns.” I turned loose a few short bursts in the general direction of Red Beach on Guadalcanal—probably the first shots fired by a member of the 1st Marine Division at an enemy target in World War II. The machine gun fired beautifully with no more vibration than a water pistol. I couldn’t believe it.
Over Koli Point on Guadalcanal, our pilot turned right and headed west over the shoreline to give the cameraman a chance to run a photographic strip of the sandy beaches bordering Lunga Point, our proposed landing area. I was overjoyed to see that the beaches were totally unlike those we had just seen on the Tulagi side of the channel. Amazingly, there was no evidence of coral on either the beaches or the approaches thereto. The deep blue color of the water indicated good depth extending up to the shoreline itself. These were undoubtedly steep-to beaches, perfect for landing both men and supplies—ideal in every way for our purposes. On the left there was unmistakable evidence of an airfield. There was a large gap in the center but the project had plainly reached an advanced stage of construction.
Over Lunga Point the plane was turning for another run to photograph a strip further inland from the beach when the intercom came to life with shouts of “Here they are!” and “Here they come!” All hell broke loose. Our plane shook from the fire of its several guns, punctuated all too frequently by the heavy jolt of an enemy 20mm projectile exploding inside the fuselage. Our pilot maneuvered violently to evade their firing runs and give our own guns a favorable firing opportunity. There was a triumphant howl—“You got that son of a bitch!”—as one Zero came apart in a burst of fire. Then a cry of “There goes a smoker!” as another of our little friends dropped out of the fight.
By this time our pilot, still closely pursued, had reached cloud cover and sought to stay within it by twists and turns of a sort never found in any flight manual. As the plane continued its violent gyrations in the clouds, I could not escape the fantasy that it had become a huge antediluvian monster twisting and turning, fighting for its life, in some misty primordial swamp against the savage onslaughts of a pack of predators.
Things quieted down. Our pilot moved away from cloud cover, hoping for the best. We had completely lost our orientation but knew too well that our altitude was less than that of the surrounding peaks. Fuel consumption during the fight was unavoidably high, and the remainder was insufficient to take us home unless we were favored by a tail wind. We had taken several hits. Miraculously, all of the plane’s mechanical functions were operating perfectly. We had lost our radio reception capability, although we could transmit.
McKean kept a wary eye on the map and our young navigator. Since we did not know our point of departure from the target area, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to assess our location accurately until we made a landfall on some island recognizable from the air. On the way out, D’Entrecasteaux Island, with its unmistakable outline, had been our point of departure for Guadalcanal. Now we scanned the horizon for it as our landfall on the course home to Moresby.
Time went by. The sun was setting. Still no landfall. Finally we passed over an island that appeared in the gathering darkness to be Trobriand, well north of our intended course. This was communicated to the pilot over another phone as ours had suffered battle damage and would not transmit. The pilot misunderstood or ignored our message, for when we reached the New Guinea coast he turned north toward Salamaua—in enemy territory—instead of south to Port Moresby. We had difficulty in persuading him to correct his course.
The pilot had me operate the levers opening the bomb bay so we could make a quick getaway via parachute when the gas ran out. Fortunately, we soon received unexpected aid from Port Moresby. Aware of our plight, they lit up the whole area with every available searchlight and fired a continuous, heavy antiaircraft barrage into the empty sky, creating a welcome beacon on the horizon. Within minutes that seemed like hours, we made a safe landing with dry tanks.
We’d been in the air for thirteen hours and six minutes, and we had burned a lot of gas and fired a lot of ammunition. What had we accomplished? We had taken a few valuable pictures to substantiate what we saw from the air: that the beaches on Tulagi were extremely difficult for a large amphibious landing, while those on Guadalcanal were ideal. We could set to rest General Vandegrift’s misgivings that some lotus eater in War Plans was running us into another coral pit like the rehearsal area at Koro Island. Also, we had learned that there was a nearly completed airfield on Guadalcanal and had no evidence that the beaches were defended. Our shot-up plane was proof enough of a Japanese air force presence and that they would shoot at us. Events proved us right on every count.
It was quite late when McKean and I got back to our billet in Port Moresby, and the mess was closed, so we went to bed hungry. Early the next morning—before breakfast—we left
for Cairns, Australia. There we were delayed for hours at a small outlying airfield by the nonarrival of the daily plane to Townsville, the advance headquarters of ComSoWesPac’s overall command. General MacArthur was still exercising a form of inspirational leadership from Melbourne, well over 1,000 miles to the south. Some mean persons had the temerity to say that at least he didn’t go farther south to Tasmania.
We landed at Townsville about 2100 and spotted a mess hall with lights still burning. Inside there was plenty of hot beef stew left over from a late supper prepared for a bomber squadron. I ate five plates of the heavenly stuff.
The next morning we checked in at headquarters to pick up prints of all photographs taken on our reconnaissance. These were released to us only after passing through the hands of the intelligence people at Ferdinand, the code name of the headquarters of the justly famed and highly effective Australian Coast Watchers, a tiny organization that made a huge contribution out of all proportion to its numbers.
We were debriefed at length by Comdr. Eric Feldt, the highly respected head of the organization. The name Ferdinand was derived, I suppose, from the renowned bull with the delicate ego who loved to sniff flowers but never learned how to fight. These men—and, I believe, one woman—did something more than fight. They stayed behind when the Japanese came in and supplied vital information of inestimable value to the Allied cause, accepting the constant risk of death in its ugliest form as just part of the cost of doing business.
Feldt gave us ComSoWesPac’s current estimate of enemy strength. We had long considered the high command’s figures suspect due to their faulty method of computation. He then gave me, without comment, a slip of paper on which he had penciled the Ferdinand numbers—numbers about half as large.
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