“A four-striper will bring an admin staff,” I said. “If nothing else, I’ll avoid the paperwork avalanche that’s coming. By the way, I don’t think I got a chance to tell you yesterday: I never finished my full seven years of surgical training before I left school and signed up. Did three years of surgical residency at Duke until Pearl Harbor. Garr thinks I’m an impostor.”
He stopped on the muddy path. “You listen to me, Doc. I’ve seen a lot of surgeons in my eighteen years, okay? You’re a better surgeon than most of them. Those two docs from Cactus kinda said the same thing. You’re gonna do fine here, and that’s an f-a-k fact.”
“In your humble opinion,” I replied, but I was secretly flattered.
“Damn straight,” he said as we resumed our walk to the hut. “And, even better, now you’re the poor bastard gonna be on the hook for all those drug custody signatures and stuff. Instead of yours truly. I like the hell out of that.”
I had to laugh.
FIVE
The bombing attack had been noisy but the damage wasn’t as bad as the attack two weeks ago. The boats were called torpedo boats, not gunboats, but each of our mahogany beauties sported one 20 mm automatic cannon, one twin-barreled, turret-mounted 50-caliber machine gun, and two single 50-caliber pedestal-mounted machine guns in addition to the four torpedo tubes. One of the boat gunners explained the math: A single 50-caliber machine gun can shoot 750 rounds per minute to a range of 2,000 yards or 6,000 feet of altitude. The Bettys typically came in at 3,000 feet to deliver their bombs. With six boats in the cove, they’d run into an anti-aircraft position that was shooting 18,000 rounds per minute at them, not counting the 20 mm guns. This storm of fire had apparently distracted the pilots and bombardiers to the point where most of the bombs had fallen into the harbor or the jungle. Three planes had been seen crashing into the sea off Tulagi. Two boats were destroyed, one of the pontoon piers sunk, and a lot of damage to the base camp from the Bettys’ own 20 mm guns, and, of course, the bomb shelter would have to be rebuilt. The Quonset hut had survived, which meant the radio station had survived.
My immediate problem was to cobble up yet another medical facility. HM1 Greer was returning to Guadalcanal with the two docs and Miller, his apprentice. Lieutenant (JG) Sykes had been charged to close up our newly minted Tulagi facility and then report across the strait to Garr’s operation. Tulagi was now technically “secured,” thus there was no need for a medical aid station there. The arrival of a captain over on Cactus meant that he would immediately begin consolidating all medical services in the Solomons theater of operations under his direct command. That made sense, but it didn’t solve my immediate problem. I needed somewhere to provide immediate casualty care for the crews of our squadron. Chief Higgins came up with a solution.
“There’s a bunch of Seabees over there on Tulagi,” he said. “They’re fixing up the harbor facilities after that LST blew up. Scuttlebutt says they’re building a real pier for the big transports, since Guadalcanal doesn’t have a harbor anywhere. How’s about I go over there and see what they can do for us.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Besides, I think Boss Cushing wants his base operations hut back.”
The next day, two LCMs showed up in our cove. LCM stood for Landing Craft, Medium, popularly called Mike boats. One discharged a full-size bulldozer, the other a few hundred wooden pallets piled with bags of cement mix. That was the beauty of amphibious landing craft: they could drive right up to the beach, run aground, drop a ramp, and drive their cargo off. With all that weight gone ashore, the boat could then simply back off the beach and go get more stuff. The chief in charge was called “Tiny Tim” Hauser. He was, of course, a giant, with reddish blond hair, a graying beard, and hands the size of dinner plates. Higgins and I went down to meet him. He introduced himself and then told me in a booming voice what he had in mind.
“We’re gonna scrape a big damn trench,” he began. “Eight foot deep, twenty wide, a hundred long. Line the damn floor with a cement shell. Then we’re gonna line the damn walls with pallets, stood up on end, two high. Then we’re gonna fill them pallets with damn cement. Meanwhile, my boys’ll cut down a whole damn shitload of trees, and then we’ll put a damn log roof on the trench. Two layers of tree trunks with a layer of damn steel Marston matting in between. There’ll be a line of support columns running the whole damn way down the middle inside. That way we can finish it up by putting all that damn sand and dirt on top in a wide mound. I’ve got two electricians on my team. You give me a diagram of where you want what, and they’ll damn well wire it up. Your boss says he has a generator he can lend you. How’s that sound, Doc?”
“Like damn Christmas, Chief,” I said, somewhat in awe. “Can you really do all that?”
“Can do, Doc. That’s our motto. We’ll even disguise the damn mound by covering it in the tops of all them damn trees we cut down. They’ll all die but then it’ll look like damn jungle that took sick. Damn Japs’ll never see it.”
“Hate to sound like a whiner, Chief,” I said, “but we’ll need water down there. And overhead lights. I’ll get you that diagram, but since we’ll be underground, we’ll also need some kind of forced ventilation. Our job will be to stabilize casualties so they can be sent over to Cactus, so mostly it’ll be cots, a small surgical area, and a safe place, away from rain, insects, Japs, and other undesirables.”
He thought about that for a moment. Then he nodded. “Can do, Doc,” he said. “We’ll figure all that damn shit out. Don’t worry about a damn thing.”
And, by God, they did. Four days later the entire damn thing was in place. The chief himself was the dozer operator and he had the trench opened up and excavated in one morning of howling diesel engine and lots of smoke. The dozer was enormous and equipped with a 50-cal machine gun at the operator’s station, which was surrounded by vertical plates of steel for protection. His tree-cutters began hauling in tree trunks while the trench was being dug out and then they built a crude yard-and-stay crane rig to place the trunks. Others hammered reinforcement bars through the pallet walls, then tacked up plywood over the open boards of the pallets. The cement was next. Bags of the mix were opened into the dozer’s huge bucket and then water added. Hauser then mixed it by rotating the bucket up and down and then poured it directly into the vertical pallets. They gave it a day to harden while they placed the tree trunks, which had been cut to twenty-four feet, long enough to rest on the top of the dirt-cement walls. Hauser told me the dirt would subside so that the tree trunks would ultimately rest on the pallet walls.
The Marston matting was the same stuff they used over on Cactus to “pave” the airfield after bombing or shelling damage. Long strips of steel, punctured with a pattern of holes to reduce weight, came off the ships in large rolls. A bulldozer would unroll the steel matting after another dozer had pushed in the crater dirt. They could have a runway back in action within one hour, and the matting gave us a comforting layer of steel in our tree-trunk “roof.” Ventilation was achieved using twenty-inch red-devil blower fans from one of the cargo ships. There was no way to provide ducting, so they installed two red devils to draw air down from topside through a section of steel pipe, and then one blower to suck it out of the space and send it back topside. The first thing I noticed when I went down into the space was that it was much cooler than topside. That alone would provide great relief for suffering wounded men.
Boss Cushing and Deacon Haller came to see the finished space. Cushing immediately asked how much of it I would need to provide a casualty aid station for squadron casualties, seeing as that new four-striper over on Cactus was supposedly centralizing all hospital functions over there. I’d thought the whole thing would be a medical setup. Silly me. As soon as Boss experienced the cooler and far less humid space, he explained to me that this would be a perfect place for crews that had been out all night to get some real sleep, instead of having to curl up under a salt-encrusted tarp on their boats, fighting off noise, insects, and daily downpours
while trying to get some rest. I had to admit, for a casualty triage and first-response medical station, I probably only needed thirty feet of the 100-foot-long bunker. Boss brought the skippers down into the bunker and explained what he had in mind. God, yes, was the unanimous reply. Deacon started making arrangements.
It was a good thing he did, because three days later a smirking and now full Commander Garr and the new four-striper, Captain Horace Benson, Medical Corps, USN, showed up at the PT boat base. Word had gotten back to Cactus that the Seabees had constructed a large bunker to be used as a medical aid station. At 2,000 square feet, it was larger than anything over on Cactus and far more secure than the tent city I’d started out in. The captain, a short, somewhat rotund orthopedic surgeon by trade, was one of those guys who looked like he went through life with a permanent expression of disapproval of everything and everybody he encountered. I could see in a heartbeat that our Cadillac bunker would seem like a direct challenge to the new regime standing up over on Cactus, as I’m sure Garr had been quick to point out. We were saved from a tongue-lashing by Boss, who’d hurried to the bunker when he got word a four-striper was intruding on his patch. He explained in vivid detail to the suspicious captain that most of the bunker would serve as a refuge for his desperately sleep-deprived boat crews, with only one end being reserved for casualty aid prior to transport to Cactus.
Apparently mollified, Benson and Garr left. I heard Garr saying to the captain as they walked off: “That’s the guy I was telling you about, sir. Third-year resident posing as a qualified surgeon, if you can believe that.”
Benson just shook his head and they both went out of sight up the ramp leading to the surface. Boss, unaware of my purple past, asked what the hell that was all about. I told him I’d fill him in at evening prayers, as the after-hours decompression sessions were called. Evening prayers was also where the screamers lived. Then Wally Higgins and I went to work finishing up the now much-diminished casualty station. I never did get to tell my tale of woe to Cushing because he went out that night, substituting for a skipper who’d come down with some kind of jungle fever. The boats went north up what everybody was calling the Slot, that 500-mile-long stretch of water that runs like a channel from Guadalcanal all the way to Rabaul, down which what was becoming known as the Tokyo Express made its way nightly to raise hell with the US Navy and the Marines around Guadalcanal. The boats were on the hunt for a reinforcement convoy bringing Jap infantry down to Cactus. In a way it was a good thing that the boats went where they did, because that night the Japs sent two battleships to Guadalcanal with orders to destroy the airfield and all its works.
These two behemoths arrived off Lunga Point in the middle of the night and began lobbing fourteen-inch shells onto Henderson Field. Each shell weighed about one ton and the target wasn’t exactly capable of getting out of the way. The noise of their salvoes was thunderous. Everybody left at the MTB base got up to watch the horizontal bolts of lightning illuminating the western horizon, followed by ear-punishing thumps from the big guns and then a long crescendo of explosions ashore. It seemed to go on forever but probably even longer than that over on Cactus, itself. We never actually saw the battleships, only the enormous balls of fire coming out of each barrel every time they fired. It looked like there were two slowly moving volcanoes out there in the strait. Two to three miles of the western horizon were in flames when they finally stopped firing. Higgins wondered aloud if I thought the hospital had been destroyed. I was afraid to venture a guess, but I couldn’t imagine anything around Henderson Field had survived that. “Where the hell are our battleships?” he complained.
“Back at Pearl,” I said, without thinking.
“Oh,” he said, with a sick look. “Right.”
The hospital over on Cactus did survive, sort of. One of those fourteen-inch shells had landed in the Big Top itself, which had been evacuated by that time. It failed to explode, which was fortunate. The bad news was that it was still there, with just the base of the one-ton projectile showing from a large sand crater that had pushed over one side of the tent. A bomb-disposal crew had been sent by Catalina from Nouméa. They recommended dismantling the medical tents and putting them somewhere else, and then they’d blow the shell up. Finding a new location wasn’t the problem. Henderson Field, its runways, fuel storage areas, aircraft parking revetments, and 80 percent of its planes had been destroyed. The one outfit that had been spared was the Seabees, and those bulldozer warriors got to work even before the smoke cleared. By daylight they had the main runway operational, and by noon twenty-five Navy and Marine Corps replacement fighters began landing.
It was a good thing they did, because right afterwards a division of Betty bombers showed up over the Sound to attack the clutch of transports that was anchored off Tulagi, waiting for their turn to off-load. This time the transports were under the protection of an entire destroyer division, five ships, who were most definitely not anchored. Once again, we got a ringside seat while those tin cans flamed one bomber after another with an entire skyful of AA fire. Two Bettys decided enough was enough, dumped their bombs into the sea, and tried to leave the scene. But not soon enough. Four Marine fighters jumped them on their way north and showed us why our fighter pilots called the Betty a flying gas station. I had to wonder what the Jap high command up there at Rabaul would think about the fact that, even after a battleship bombardment, Henderson Field was clearly back in action the very next day and that none of their bombers had returned.
Our squadron had been somewhat sidelined right after these momentous events. As the squadron doc, I attended the morning debriefings and then the afternoon pre-briefings, mostly to learn about what these guys did and to get to know the boat skippers. The boats went out only at night; in daylight they were vulnerable to enemy and friendly air attacks. I learned that the squadron, my squadron now, was running the eighty-foot-long Elco brand of motor torpedo boats, or MTBs. Their main anti-ship armament was four 2,600-pound MK VIII torpedoes, launched from twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes bolted to the deck. Each torpedo packed a 466-pound TNT warhead and had a range of eight miles, running at forty knots. The boats’ propulsion was provided by three Packard 2,500-horsepower marine engines.
I approached Deacon one morning and asked if I could go out on a patrol. He said he’d talk to Boss, but since I was the only doc they had, Boss would probably say no.
Cushing surprised him. He said, hell, yes, I’ll take him out. He needs to understand what our people are going through out there. That afternoon I attended the pre-brief, which wasn’t very elaborate. In theory they would go out at night in search of enemy ships, which they would then attack with torpedoes. About half of them carried something called radar, which allowed them to see enemy ships electronically in the dark. Their principal tactics involved patrolling at slow speed while conducting a radar search for Jap ships. When they detected one, they’d accelerate to forty-five miles an hour, roar in, release their torpedoes, and then run like hell. The reality was somewhat different. First of all, they were equipped with old WWI vintage aerial torpedoes, which half the time just went over the side and drowned. Secondly, when a PT boat went up to full speed, it made a very large wake, which, in the phosphorescent seas around the Solomons, was a dead giveaway to all those first-class Japanese optics. As soon as they started in for the attack the escorting destroyers would open fire with five-inch guns. Boss pointed out that it made for a pretty simple fire-control problem for the Jap gunners: the boats had to come straight at the enemy ships; the five-inch guns only had to lay their barrels down on the bearing and shoot continuously to wipe out their wooden-hulled tormentors.
Added to this was the problem of night-flying Kawanishi seaplanes. They would come down the Slot and arrive in the area of Guadalcanal at about the same time as the Jap transports and their escorting destroyers. They didn’t have this radar gadget that we had, but they didn’t really need it. From above, the Jap pilots could see those phosphorescent wakes even when the boats
were loitering at slow speeds. They’d circle behind the boats, fly up the wake, and release a stick of bombs. Our boat skippers could be forgiven for sometimes thinking that all their efforts were somewhat superfluous, until one night they caught a Jap submarine unloading troops and supplies onto one of Guadalcanal’s northern coves. This time the torpedoes did work, followed by several high-speed passes with the machine guns that tore the sub and the troops waiting to off-load her to pieces.
We left at sundown that night and headed out toward the waters around Savo Island, where four Allied heavy cruisers and about a thousand Americans and Australians were asleep in the deep. I was riding Cushing’s boat, which had been designated the command boat. We went out at a moderate fifteen knots to suppress the wakes. A crewman took me around to each of the deck weapons—the twin 50s, the single 50, and the 20 mm cannon back aft. I took a quick look into the radar display that was down in the crew room; all I saw was a fuzzy green ring in the center of a small, circular screen which the operator told me was “sea return”—the beam bouncing off the light chop in the strait and reflecting the signal back to the boat’s radar receiver. The more active the seaway, the larger that ring would grow, sometimes large enough to conceal a lurking enemy. A single dim ray of light swept around the display. The radar antenna was on a stub mast up above. It squeaked quietly every time it passed the 330-degree mark for some strange reason.
Cushing took his formation of three boats to a spot midway between Savo Island and Cape Esperance on the northern end of Guadalcanal. We shut down two of the three engines and then ran at idle on the third. Supposedly the fleet forces around Guadalcanal had been told that we’d be out there, when and where. The night was steamy hot, with low flying scud clouds, occasional passing squall lines, and not quite enough wind to keep the engine exhaust at bay. Boss made sure I had a steel helmet and a life jacket on, which made the heat even more hostile. The water temperature was eighty-five degrees, barely cool enough to maintain the engine coolant systems. The other two boats were out there in the gloom nearby, also idling. I stayed up in the cockpit area with Boss; the rest of the crew appeared to be dozing on their gun and torpedo stations. The radar operator kept watch down below, where it was even hotter. He, too, wore a kapok life jacket and a helmet. Battle dress, as it was called, was mandatory at all times when at sea on patrol. Trouble came quickly around Guadalcanal.
The Hooligans Page 5
