No Bended Knee

by Merrill B. Twining

  Upstream a bridge would be required by the 1st Marines, already coming ashore. We hadn’t expected to need a bridge, so the wooden components of Stinky Davis’s bridge were buried in the hold of Bellatrix (AK-20) under tons of rations. At Koro we learned a bridge would be an indispensable requirement and Davis was told “to get with it.” Not one to question an order, he was able to acquire enough timber in some highly irregular manner from the ship’s supply of damage control lumber and dunnage to construct a bridge in two sections, each carried athwartships on an LVT.

  These horrible contraptions went ashore with the first wave and moved out ahead of the front lines in the designer’s desire to get the job done. Correspondent Dick Tregaskis discovered Davis out there later in the afternoon waiting for customers and complaining loudly about being shot at by both sides.8

  As a bridge it was a structural monstrosity. The left bank of the stream was six feet higher than the right, resulting in a rakish and totally unbridgelike appearance. The deck was made of an assortment of dunnage, supplemented by palm logs cut on the spot. I always enjoyed confronting Davis with a photograph of it. Over the years his professional pride in finished workmanship caused him to maintain, unconvincingly, that this was not the bridge he built. But it was. And it served us handsomely for moving artillery and vehicles in support of the 1st Marines when they needed it.

  I reported the slow progress of 1st Battalion, 5th Marines to the chief of staff, who made no comment but immediately left the CP. I assumed he had gone to confront the battalion commander. Returning to the landing beach, I awaited the arrival of Col. Clifton B. Cates, commanding 1st Marines. I had been instructed to give him a copy of a recently received aerial photograph of Lunga Point and to tell him to disregard that part of the attack order regarding seizing Mt. Austen and limit his advance to seizure of the airfield. This information had been sent to Cates early that morning, but we were not sure he had received it.

  While returning to the command post, I encountered the senior colonel ashore, who informed me that if General Vandegrift did not come ashore, he could not be expected to assume command. The colonel considered the situation similar to that contemplated in U.S. Navy Regulations wherein a relieving officer of the deck was justified in declining to take over the watch if, and as long as, he considered the vessel to be in a hazardous situation. I had an idea that the general was already on his way to the beach so did not enter into any discussion of the matter. I made no mention of this to the general or Jerry when they reached the beach a few minutes later.

  We proceeded to the night’s command post, which Capt. Jim Murray had established at a covered spot along a branch of the Ilu, not far from Stinky Davis’s bridge. The general was dissatisfied with the slow advance. Jerry sent Maj. Bill Buse of our D-3 staff on a reconnaissance of the route ahead, using two LVTs for the purpose. They returned two hours later, having probed as far as the Tenaru River without encountering any real resistance.

  Just prior to nightfall the general called a conference of the senior leaders and stressed the need to press on across the Tenaru in the morning. Cates, who really didn’t quite know where in the dense rain forest two of his battalions were, covered up by saying that his men were tired and hungry and needed a good night’s rest and a hot breakfast before moving out around 1000 next morning. Vandegrift made no comment, but he was a careful listener. He knew as we all did that Cates’s men went over the side with three C-ration meals and a brown bag of sandwiches in their haversacks and that nobody was going to get any hot chow for a long time. Cates was a splendid regimental commander with a nonpareil record in France. He was needlessly clutching at straws. His battalions had been ashore only a few hours and had performed flawlessly under great difficulties in fighting the adverse jungle terrain. Cates had nothing whatsoever for which to apologize.

  We moved out at first light next morning. The battalions of 1st Marines made rapid progress through the thick jungle and rain forest, emerging on the open country around the airstrip. The 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, continued its overly cautious progress toward the Japanese headquarters camp at Kukum.

  At noon a large flight of enemy twin-engine torpedo planes came in from the east and launched an attack against Transport Group Xray and its screening ships. As an air-surface battle it was unique—the surface forces fired downward on the attacking aircraft, not upward as we instinctively think of antiaircraft fire. The enemy torpedo planes skimmed the water in their efforts to sink our ships. Our ships’ antiaircraft, Marine shore-based antiaircraft, and carrier planes were all successful. Enemy losses were at least fourteen planes, and the attack was successfully beaten off, but not without loss. Jarvis (DD-393) had taken a torpedo just after a flaming plane crashed onto the transport George F. Elliott (AP-13), after that ship had been bombed. Elliott was abandoned and drifted, burning, throughout the night. Her survivors were rescued by the Hunter Liggett (APA-14). Jarvis crawled away to the southeast under her own power. She was sunk the following afternoon by Japanese torpedo bombers. There were no survivors.9

  This attack proved demoralizing to Transport Group Xray. Commodore Reifsnider ordered general unloading to begin before the landing force was in a position to receive the torrent of cargo that immediately descended on the beach. Chaos at Red Beach ensued, and the situation became irretrievable.

  Lt. Col. Freddy Wieseman, USMC, who came to know as much about all phases of landing force logistics as anyone, put it this way: “The initiation of general unloading by the Naval (Task Force) Commander is a matter that should be prevented by custom, doctrine, high command, Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive, and force of arms if necessary.”10

  The situation triggering Reifsnider’s untoward action was not of his making. Fletcher, Turner, and Vandegrift must all share the blame. Fletcher for his intransigence, the other two for failing to work out a compromise solution as the situation grew serious. Such solutions were available. One would have been to shift the entire beach operation to Lunga Point, where at midafternoon of 8 August ample troop labor could have been made available. Vandegrift was aware of this and for some strange reason ignored the option. Mines? Not a single Japanese mine was ever found in Lunga Roads. They existed only in the mind of the task force commander along with such other bogeys as PT boats and seaplane tenders.

  Reifsnider in his action report noted “a total lack of conception [sic] of the number of labor troops required to unload boats and move material off the beach.”11 Vandegrift was more aware of the problem than Reifsnider. Knowing that it was an unsolved problem at the highest levels, Vandegrift had, on or about 27 June, asked for a replacement battalion to serve the purpose. (The Marine Corps has no labor battalions as such.) These personnel were never sent. His remaining source, the division reserve, was taken from him by Turner’s insistence on withholding it for the Ndeni project. Vandegrift’s only remaining solution was to divert combat troops to the task, but he could do this only if and when they had accomplished their mission ashore. This might have required the transports to remain in the area somewhat longer. At this time they had been in the area only thirty hours before they wanted to go home.

  In the governing Force Order the problem had been foreseen clearly but never settled. It had been waffled in true Pentagon style by finding language that each side could interpret in its own way, sometimes a worthwhile subterfuge to secure an agreement of importance that in all other respects is non-controversial. The magic words were “the shore party commander may call upon unit commanders for additional labor,” but they enjoined no specific unit to provide it. Semantics has no place on the battlefield. By midafternoon it became necessary for Vandegrift to ask Turner to cease all unloading operations until Red Beach could be cleared. The breakdown was complete.

  Despite this, it had been a highly successful joint operation. Combat loading at Wellington, embarkation, and the ship-to-shore operation on 7 August were successful beyond any precedent. I had participated in four of the seven Fleet Exercises (1924
through 1941) and had never seen things done as well. Success was largely due to the fact that by mutual agreement between Vandegrift and Reifsnider, the established procedures prevailing in the Amphibious Forces Atlantic and published in their Force Orders were made governing.

  I spent a good deal of the afternoon accompanying Lt. Col. W. E. Maxwell and the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, in a snail-like advance toward Lunga Point. There was no resistance except for an occasional sniper or a small, bewildered group of construction workers, mostly Okinawans. The battalion commander was still convinced we were walking into a trap. The junior officers and men were disgusted. In midafternoon I broke off and headed for the airfield. On the way I encountered Colonel Hunt with his Headquarters Company of clerks, dog robbers, and MPs and also his Regimental Weapons Company, a first-class combat outfit. Hunt called out, “What’s Max doin’, still snoopin’ and poopin’?” (Marine lingo for scouting and patrolling). I had to agree and moved on toward the strip.

  Only minutes later there was a startling outburst of small-arms and mortar fire. I turned around and raced back. Hunt had given up on Max and taken his weapons company, reinforced with the clerks and dog robbers of headquarters, and stormed across the main Lunga bridge. He was proceeding at the head of the column into Kukum when I joined him. There was a moment or two of sporadic firing. I got into the act and emptied a clip at a few Japs fleeing into the palms. It was all over.

  We halted momentarily. The sound of heavy firing came to us from Tulagi. We felt left out. No one broke ranks until a scrawny little recruit, with the quartermaster creases still showing in his second suit of herringbone fatigues, ran across the road to a small blackboard nailed on a tree in the center of the Japanese camp. He paused thoughtfully, chalk in hand, then wrote, “Tokyo your full of shit. Pvt. M. Shapiro.”

  At the same hour that Private Shapiro inscribed his immortal statement, General Hyakutake, commander of the Japanese 17th Army, was at his headquarters in Rabaul receiving his initial briefing on our landing in the Eastern Solomons. Turning to his naval liaison officer, the general asked, “What is a Marine?”12 To his unmitigated sorrow, he would soon find out.

  The camp at Kukum was in great disorder. The occupants had been surprised at breakfast, and the intensity of our bombardment drove them to instant flight. There were large piles of rice in split bamboo matting bags, a small mountain of wooden tubs full of odorous dried fish, and other goodies of mysterious appearance. The paymaster’s safe was wide open. On a table was a wooden locker box full of occupation currency, which I turned over to Frank Goettge. I made a quick estimate of the camp’s apparent troop capacity—about 2,000 men—and got this word to General Vandegrift, hoping he would revise downward the estimate of enemy strength to a number justifying assignment of additional men to remedy the logistic breakdown at Red Beach.

  Colonel Hunt’s aggressive action in personally occupying Kukum had produced the desired result in a hurry. But it was no solution to the command problem in his 1st Battalion.

  CHAPTER 6

  Nightmare Battle

  On the night of 8 August the division command post was established on the beach in the vicinity of Block Four, a copra-processing shed belonging to Lever Brothers. This site gave us a sweeping view of what was soon to be known as Ironbottom Sound, a broad expanse of water extending across to Savo Island, then north to Tulagi, where deadly fighting was still going on. The flash and smoke of battle was continuous, punctuated at intervals with bursts of heavy gunfire as the light cruiser San Juan (CL-54) and its accompanying destroyers responded to calls for naval gunfire to support elements of the 2d Marines landed to reinforce the 1st Parachute Battalion, which had suffered heavy losses in its attack on the adjacent islets, Gavutu and Tanambogo. It was still a dingdong, hammer-and-tongs fight over there, but we were winning.

  Frank Goettge, the 1st Division intelligence chief (D-2), and I crossed the beach and took a short swim in the warm water to get rid of two days’ accumulated grime. Off to the west we could see the cruisers of the covering force guarding the western approaches to the transport area. One entrance lay north of, the other south of, Savo Island, situated between Guadalcanal and the Florida islands. These entrances were not narrow channels but broad reaches of deep water. Three heavy cruisers with accompanying destroyers were assigned to guard each approach: Vincennes (CA-44), Quincy (CA-39), and Astoria (CA-34) to the north; HMAS Australia , HMAS Canberra, and Chicago (CA-29) to the south.

  In the gathering dusk I saw that each group was moving back and forth across its assigned approach, patrolling in column, the northern group employing a rectangular box pattern. As we left the cleansing and refreshing water, Frank stopped for one last look and said, “I guess they’re not going to close up for the night.” I had almost forgotten that ships in column used to do that. My memory harked back to long night watches spent as a midshipman JOOD on a bridge wing of the old dreadnought Delaware , taking continuous stadimeter readings on our next ship ahead. I dismissed his remark with the thought that they probably had some modern electronic recognition device that made closing up unnecessary.

  I had also forgotten that the last time a divided U.S. fleet entered battle it was decisively defeated by a single ship, the CSS Virginia, the former USS Merrimac turned into an ironclad by the Confederates.

  It was a soft tropical evening. As we looked across at Tulagi, it seemed utterly incongruous that over there men were fighting and killing each other in the midst of such beauty.

  At about 2000 Jerry Thomas told me to take over the command post, stating that General Vandegrift had been summoned aboard the McCawley and that he was to accompany the general. There was to be a conference with Admiral Turner and Admiral Crutchley, the British flag officer who commanded the screening force. The general seemed pleased to go; it would probably give him a chance to get to Tulagi for a visit with Brigadier General Rupertus, commanding the diverse small units of Marines, Raiders, and Parachutists, which were especially suited to the close combat encountered on that fortress-like island.

  On board McCawley, Turner gave his visitors the bad news: Vice Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher had pulled out of the fight, taking with him all the carriers and half the surface forces. This early withdrawal would leave Turner’s ships at Guadalcanal without air cover of any sort and would of necessity force him to also pull out in order to save his highly vulnerable transports. Turner had hoped to stay somewhat longer, but his own apprehensions were heightened by receipt of a much delayed dispatch from commander, Southwest Pacific, warning of the approach of a threatening enemy task force. He then treated his listeners to a Naval War College–type lecture, complete with chart and dividers, as to what the Japanese were up to. The enemy task force, consisting of five cruisers and two seaplane tenders, was headed for Rekata Bay to the north, where it would set up and launch another air attack against the U.S. forces here in Lunga Roads tomorrow. Consequently, Turner would have to clear the area by noon tomorrow. From afar he had read the mind of Admiral Mikawa and divined his intentions.

  There is a little paragraph in nearly every textbook on military intelligence. In substance it says, “Take note of all enemy capabilities to damage or destroy your own forces. Pursue a course of action that will best enable you to deal with those enemy capabilities most dangerous to you. Do not attempt to discern his intentions.”

  The Naval War College version, however, is gravely suspect. In part it says: “The enemy’s capabilities as well as his intentions must be considered.”13

  I repeat: you cannot know your opponent’s intentions, but you can determine with reasonable certainty his capabilities.

  The amphibian forces under Turner’s command had, in the past two days, turned back repeated strong enemy air attacks and had inflicted great losses while suffering relatively little damage in return. The presence of two “seaplane tenders”— they proved to be destroyers—suggested at worst a last-ditch attack by a handful of PBY-type patrol planes with a limited torpedo capabil
ity. This was something Turner’s force could have brushed off with ease. The presence of five cruisers, however, indicated a strong enemy capability for a night surface attack, a real threat to our dispersed covering forces. Yet Turner opted to evade the minor capability by a withdrawal tomorrow and entirely ignored the major threat, the danger of a surface attack tonight, failing even to pass the word to his captains. But many of them had a good idea of what impended anyway.

  Information spreads rapidly in the naval service, whether it be the official word or unofficial scuttlebutt (rumors and gossip exchanged around the ship’s drinking fountain and social center). Sometimes scuttlebutt precedes the official word. Often, it’s “the straight dope.”

  The people who man the communications system of the navy are highly intelligent, greatly skilled, and deeply involved in their arcane profession. They understand the ins and outs of their system better than anyone else. They recognize the “fists” of operators on ships they have never seen. They can spot an interesting dispatch in a dozen different ways out of a maze of routine traffic. After all, they want to know what is going on; their lives are on the line too. By midafternoon the word was out. The carriers knew it, and crew chiefs readied their planes. The transport people had it and passed the word to the Marines at Red Beach. It was bandied about around every scuttlebutt in the fleet: “The Japs are coming, and there’s going to be a helluva fight.” Unofficial, but too true.

  That night the captain of one of the cruisers patrolling off Savo Island wrote in his Night Order Book, “The enemy can reach this position at any time during the mid-watch.” Then he turned in.14