“Do we know if there are Japs coming?” I asked Boss.
“Sort of,” he said, cupping a cigarette lighter in his hands and lighting up. “The coast-watchers keep a lookout from the islands up and down the Slot. If they see a Jap formation—ships or bombers—they send an alert to Cactus.”
“These coast-watchers—are they all Aussies?”
“Mostly,” he said. “These are men who were here before the war—planters, colonial administrators, missionaries, and some soldiers of fortune. When the Japs came, some of them disbanded whatever they were doing and took to the hills. The Aussie government got them radios and some basic logistical support. They depend on the natives on their islands for protection. If they’d been good to the natives, the system worked. If not, well…”
“So, these guys are our eyes and ears up and down the Solomons chain?”
“Precisely, and they’re invaluable. It’s a dangerous life because the Japs know about them. They hunt them and try to direction-find their radios. If they catch one, they execute him and any natives who’ve been helping him.”
“Why wouldn’t that deter the locals from helping?”
“Funny thing, that. These Micronesians have long memories of conquering invaders: Spanish, Arabs, and even Chinese going back centuries. These islands are their home, and they’re not happy when ‘occupiers’ show up, especially when they turn out to be barbarians—like the Japs. They appear to be docile, submissive. When the strong wind blows, survivor trees bend. But then sometimes whole Jap patrols vanish out in the jungle. Like I said, if a planter goes bush to become a coast-watcher, everything will depend on how he treated the locals who worked for him before the Japs showed up.”
The radio speaker in front of us on the control console sputtered to life with a strange squeal, followed by a series of clicks. “Boss, this is five-four-four. Radar contact, three-four-zero, range eleven miles, closing.”
“Five-four-four, roger contact,” Boss responded. “Track and report.” He then called down to our radar operator and asked if he had the contact. Negative. Boss then gave the order for all boats to light off all their engines.
“Why can’t our radar see them?” I asked.
Cushing shrugged. “Hell if I know,” he said. “We’ll wait until one more boat sees the contacts, then we’ll set up for an attack.”
Our other two engines rumbled to life in a cloud of exhaust smoke, shaking the entire boat. I suddenly realized that this was why a large, four-engine seaplane could sneak up on a PT boat going at full speed: even at idle, those three 2,500-hp Packards made conversation just about impossible.
“If we tangle with destroyers tonight,” Boss said, “I want you to get below with the radar operator; it won’t help you if we take a five-inch, but the mahogany stops a lot of frag.”
“Got it,” I said.
The 544 boat came back up on the radio. “Two large, several small contacts. Estimate speed twelve knots, course south.”
Cushing ordered the boats into a line-abreast formation for a head-on attack on what he estimated was a formation of two tin cans and some smaller craft, called self-propelled amphibious barges, loaded with troops and supplies. He explained that if he did it right, only the forward two five-inch mounts on each destroyer would be able to fire on us while steaming into twelve torpedoes rushing right at them.
“I’ve got them,” our radar operator called out. “Range nine thousand yards, bearing 350, steady course. Loose column formation.”
Cushing acknowledged and ordered the formation up to twelve knots. The hulls wouldn’t plane at that speed, so our wakes wouldn’t be that big.
“Four minutes to intercept,” Cushing told the crew. There followed the sounds of machine guns jacking rounds into their chambers. The torpedo director was turned on to establish communications with the four torpedoes. One crewman took the tube covers off each tube and hand-cranked the tubes out to a ten-degree firing angle to make sure we didn’t run over one if it failed to accelerate.
“Two minutes!” Cushing shouted. “Commit the gyros!” Then he began to accelerate the boat. Our other two boats were required to keep station on Cushing’s boat, so there was no need for radio orders. I was still standing in the cockpit, my discomfort from the helmet and the bulky life jacket long forgotten. I stared out into the gloom ahead of us and saw absolutely nothing, but when I looked to our sides, I could very clearly see the bow waves of the other two boats as we came up to forty knots.
So could the Jap destroyers. A star shell popped up above us, followed by the boom of the gun that had fired it. By now we were roaring along at full power. Boss raised his hand and dropped it. Four fish fired in succession and drove ahead of us at forty knots toward the by-now alerted enemy. Red flashes appeared directly ahead of us, although how far away I couldn’t tell. Boss, still at the controls, began making a wide weave just as ear-cracking explosions began to raise surprisingly large fountains of yellow-tinged water around us. I started to duck down and then realized the futility of doing that: this was a wooden-hulled boat. This was a good idea, I kept telling myself, suddenly longing for my bunker.
And then we were among them. I caught a brief glimpse of what looked like an enormous bow coming straight at us, its bow wave rising almost to its main deck. He was obviously trying to ram us, but Boss turned across the onrushing bow and then every one of our guns opened up, sending streams of tracer fire into the upper works of the destroyer. I could actually see rounds ricocheting inside the destroyer’s pilothouse. Our gunners shot up his stacks, topside AA gun positions, the boats, antennas, life rafts. Our guns were using APIT rounds on the 50s; armor-piercing incendiary tracers. Every fifth round was painted with phosphorous, and I saw several small fires getting under way along his decks. We were so close alongside that the destroyer’s guns could no longer bear on us but that didn’t stop them from shooting, their five-inch guns belching fire and smoke right in our faces.
We flashed by the destroyer in seconds, our 20 mm cannon gunner trying desperately to hit the rack of depth charges back on the destroyer’s stern. The destroyer’s aftgun mount then took up the fight, sending red-hot rounds right over our heads as Boss bobbed and weaved at nearly fifty miles an hour in the destroyer’s wake. I couldn’t see either of the other two boats until there was a large explosion off to one side of the Jap formation. Then we ran into the troop barges. Once again, our gunners were shooting at everything in sight, and then I realized the everythings were shooting back. We made two very hard turns, which forced me to sit down or fall overboard. Something grazed the top of my helmet, knocking it to the back of my head despite the chin strap.
At that moment I saw one of our other boats thundering past us, her entire stern area a mass of orange high-octane gasoline flames. All the barges were firing at her, and her front-end gunners were shooting back until the boat just exploded. Boss made a few more violent turns to shake off the streams of Jap tracer fire coming our way. In the distance something was burning on the water and it looked too big to be a PT boat or a barge. Maybe one of our torpedoes had struck home. I looked aft and saw some smaller fires on the water astern of us, and then it was all over.
We blasted along at top speed for five more minutes before slowing down to a mere twenty knots. Amazingly, the other surviving PT boat appeared out of the dark and closed in on us from one side. Together we headed for the western side of Savo Island, hoping against hope there wasn’t a second Jap destroyer formation behind the island. As soon as we were in the shadow of Savo Island itself and could no longer see the fires behind us, we slowed down to twelve knots, mindful that the Jap destroyers may have called in a Kawanishi or two. I tried to catch my breath; everything had happened so fast that I still couldn’t take it all in. I could hear the clink of spent machine gun cartridges rolling around on the deck and inside the gun tubs. Then one of the 50s went off, firing a single round that had cooked off in the red-hot chamber, which made everyone jump. The gunner quickly rem
oved the belt and jacked out the next round. All the barrels were so hot that I could see the dull red glow of the steel. They were literally smoking in the dense, humid air.
The 544 boat came up on the radio and reported seeing the 621 boat go down.
“We need to go back?” Cushing asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” the other skipper said. “When she blew up, I could see the three engines come out of the water, still attached to their props. There can’t be anything left.”
“Unless,” I offered, unasked, “someone got blown clear off the deck.”
Boss gave me a long look and then nodded. He instructed the other boat to maintain formation and said that we were going back to take a look. We turned around and headed southwest, maintaining slow speed. Boss asked the radar operator if he had anything; he did not. We really didn’t know where to begin searching, but every kapok life jacket had a tiny flashlight pinned to its lapel and a police whistle sewn into a pocket. If there was a guy out there in the water with his light on, we might, just might, spot him. We couldn’t turn on lights for obvious reasons.
We went back to the area where we’d lain in wait for the Japs to come to us. Then we moved slowly north, along the line of where we’d initiated the torpedo attack. It was all an approximation. No one had been navigating or keeping track. Boss spread the two boats out to 500 yards distance to increase coverage. Suddenly we smelled fuel oil. One moment the usual humid warm air of the tropics, the next the eye-stinging reek of bunker oil.
“Maybe we did get one of those bastards,” Cushing muttered.
We slowed even more and then one of our crew said: “Look—over there.”
We all squinted in the dim light available. Then we saw a head. And then another. Then several. They were bobbing in the sea, except their faces looked shiny black.
The oil. They were in the oil slick.
They were Japs.
“What the hell do we do now?” one the crewmen whispered, as if he didn’t want the Japs to hear him. We realized we were surrounded by at least a hundred men in the water, just bobbing around in an oil slick. None of them raised a hand or shouted. It was eerie.
“I know what to do with them,” the forward gunner said, reaching for his 50-cal ammo belts. Boss raised his hand.
“No,” he said. “Their own ships left them here. We’ll let nature take its course. Besides, Japs don’t surrender. Let ’em die in peace. It’s what they want. Our guy was west of here, headed north. That’s where we’re going.”
With that he told our companion to head northwest, same speed, same distance. We searched for three more hours, using the expanding-square technique to cover the most ground. Run north for half a mile, then turn east, run for three-quarters of a mile, then turn south, run for a full mile, and so on. We found nothing, not even a gasoline slick. Two hours before sunrise we gave it up and headed for home, still crawling along by MTB standards. The boat was silent except for the engines and the squeak of our radar antenna. No one had anything to say. I finally approached Cushing.
“You knew it was hopeless, didn’t you?” I asked quietly.
He shrugged. “I thought it was, but I can’t say I knew that it was. You can’t know unless you go look. You were right to suggest it.”
I had no answer for that.
“And besides, I did it for the rest of the squadron. Guys gotta know that we’ll try to find them, if at all possible. Sometimes it isn’t. I learned that from the Marines. They don’t leave anybody behind, not even their dead, if at all possible. All Marines know that, so they fight harder.”
We kicked it up as nautical twilight began to bloom on the eastern horizon and headed for the barn. The Kawanishis knew better than to hang around once dawn broke and Cactus fighter planes came out hunting, but the Bettys weren’t bashful about making strafing runs on PT boats during the daylight.
The next day at noon we held a memorial service for the lost crew. A chaplain came over from Tulagi to conduct the service. It wasn’t the first time and probably wouldn’t be the last. The padre said the appropriate words and Cushing made a nice speech about the individuals on the boat. I was impressed—he knew all their names and even some detail about each one of them.
Our nighttime search hadn’t been the only one. A Catalina launched out of Henderson Field with fighter protection at sunrise and searched the entire Savo Island area for an hour. They found the big oil slick we’d encountered, but spotted no floating Japs or debris. Either they’d been picked up on the reinforcement convoy’s return trip, or they’d succumbed to all that oil and the ever-present sharks.
Somehow word got back to Cactus that I’d gone out on a patrol. A sharp rebuke ensued. Cushing was blasted for allowing it, and I was equally censured for requesting it. Boss shrugged it off. “Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke,” he quipped. “And besides, I think it’s important that you have some firsthand knowledge of what goes on out there.”
After the Jap battleship bombardment, the theater commander, Vice Admiral Ghormley, was relieved by Vice Admiral William Halsey, USN. “Bull” Halsey was cut from a different cloth from Ghormley. He immediately detached two of the American battlewagons escorting the carriers and sent them into the waters around Guadalcanal. The Japs had handily cleaned the clocks of most of our Navy’s heavy cruisers in a series of night actions, so when they came back for another heavy bombardment run on Henderson Field with cruisers and the battleship, IJN Kirishima, they got a nasty surprise.
USS Washington and USS South Dakota, both equipped with sixteen-inch guns and radar-directed fire control, laid into the Jap formation with devastating results. Washington was the star. South Dakota suffered an electrical failure early in the action that disabled her big guns. She then became the main target of the Japanese battleship and suffered a pounding. But, concentrating on South Dakota, the Japs failed to even detect Washington. She soon smothered the Jap battleship in sixteen-inch armor-piercing shells weighing in at 3,200 pounds each. Kirishima went down in the early hours of the next day.
From our vantage point over near the Tulagi harbor, the gunfight out in Ironbottom Sound had looked like two thunderstorms duking it out in the darkness. We got more of the story when Boss came in with three boats. This time they’d gone beyond Cape Esperance and set up shop on the northwestern side of Guadalcanal, hoping to be able to mount an ambush on any reinforcements coming in. They had detected the two American battlewagons as they came up from the southwest. They’d been informed by the coast-watcher network that a Jap battleship had been sighted in the Slot, headed south. The American battleships had come up the west coast of Guadalcanal using radar, hoping to surprise the oncoming Jap formation. Our guys naturally assumed that the large contacts that popped up on their radars had to be Jap ships, because large American warships had been in short supply lately. Ever game, they headed in, lunging out of a cove at forty knots.
The battleships and their four escorting destroyers all sounded the alarm. Then the admiral on Washington, Rear Admiral Willis A. “Ching” Lee realized what they were looking at. He came up on the local fleet radio net in plain English, identified himself by name and Academy nickname, and ordered the boats to stand clear. After a moment of stunned silence, Boss ordered his three boats to turn away and head back for the cove. Then he answered the admiral: “Standing clear,” he said. “We’ve got you covered.” What the admiral thought of that was never revealed but I thought it was pretty gutsy of Cushing. It was fortunate that the radios worked that night because between them, our two battleships sported forty five-inch guns along with their eighteen sixteen-inchers. Cushing and company would have become mahogany kindling in about ninety seconds.
The remaining Jap warships withdrew after this shocking loss, along with the convoy of cargo ships and troop transports they’d been escorting. This meant that the Marines on Cactus got a bit of a breather, but not for long. The Jap base at Rabaul received reinforcement Betty squadrons, and each sunrise in our neck of
the woods was announced by air raid sirens. There were more fighters over on Cactus now, so the Bettys got a hot reception, but on two occasions cargo ships in Tulagi harbor were the targets. One ship was set afire and had to be abandoned, another, after being torpedoed, ran herself aground in order to save the supplies. Cushing told us that the Japs knew they were losing to America’s growing logistics superiority. Food, ammo, tanks and trucks, artillery pieces, medical supplies, and those all-important reinforcements were streaming in from safe bases like Nouméa and seaports in Australia. There were rumors that the Jap soldiers were starting to call Guadalcanal “Starvation Island.” The few, very few, prisoners being taken by the Marines were being described as skeletal.
The underground bunker provided by those amazing Seabees turned out to be a Godsend. The Japs were frantically stepping up their efforts to get basic supplies, especially food, to their troops trying to retake Henderson Field from the Americans. Boss had changed the squadron’s tactics once the Jap push began in earnest. Instead of going north and trying to intercept the Jap reinforcement shipping before it got to Guadalcanal, he stationed his night patrols within ten miles of the known Jap landing positions. This saved fuel, which was still pretty tight, and increased the chances of making an intercept. They never knew which route the Japs were going to use to Guadalcanal, but they did know where their various routes all terminated. The Japs responded by beefing up their destroyer escorts that shepherded the barges down the Slot.
The Hooligans Page 6
