1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls
Page 31
Then there was the acute shortage of such necessary items as earth-moving equipment, fuel-storage tanks, runway material, and skilled personnel; the small and undeveloped harbors of the South Pacific simply didn’t have the capacity to load and unload all the things necessary for a big invasion operation. To make matters worse, before the marines departed the States their cargo was “commercially loaded” onto the ships, in order to make use of every available bit of space, instead of “combat loaded,” in which every item is placed aboard with a mind toward its immediate need when landing on a hostile beach.* Worse yet was the fact that now that the enormous cargo for the 17,000 marines had to be unloaded and reloaded, the idiot Stevedores Union in New Zealand—with the Japanese knocking at their very doorstep—refused to let their longshoremen work in the rain, when the weather there was terrible at that time of year. So the longshoremen were chased from the docks and the marines themselves began the tedious process of loading and reloading their own ships in the ceaseless downpour; cheap cartons fell to pieces, labels on cans soaked off, leaving a hundred-yard-long soggy mess of drenched cornflakes, powdered milk, flour, and other rations, as well as clothing, shoes and socks, blankets—so many of the things the marines would need to fight the battle.
Another problem was the lack of detailed knowledge of the islands themselves. Because they were so remote, no one had ever made proper maps and charts of them, marking the precise locations and dimensions of beaches, bays, coves, inlets, tides, depths, mountains, jungles, rivers, and other topographical and oceanographic information. An army aerial photography mission launched from Australia was turned back by marauding Japanese Zeros and a package of vital information on the islands’ topography compiled in Australia somehow got lost in the mail.9
A further disaster occurred when the navy task force and marines attempted a dress rehearsal for their landing on Guadalcanal at the end of July. The site selected was a remote island in the Fiji group and according to Vandegrift the exercise was a complete fiasco. The various units involved had never worked together before; indeed, it was the first attempted U.S. amphibious landing since 1898. Landing craft broke down, or were impaled on coral heads, and most marines never reached the beaches; gunnery was wildly inaccurate; and there were worse things, too.
Four days before the fleet was to sail, and just as the rehearsal landings were taking place, a conference was held aboard the Saratoga, Admiral Fletcher’s flagship.* Fletcher, like Ghormley, was against the Guadalcanal operation—even more so; he simply did not think it would succeed. Perhaps the fact that he had so recently seen two aircraft carriers sunk under his command had something to do with it.† But by all accounts, Fletcher appeared unduly pessimistic and dismissive. When told by Admiral Turner that it would take a minimum of four or five days of air cover from Fletcher’s carrier task force to unload all the men and their mountains of supplies, armaments, and equipment, Fletcher balked : “Vice Admiral Fletcher then stated that he would leave the vicinity of the Solomons after two days because of the danger of air attacks against the carriers.” Both Turner, who was overseeing the amphibious landings, and Vandegrift, concerned for his marines, were shocked, if not horrified. It could not possibly be done in two days; the 17,000 marines would be left on the beaches of a hostile island in Japanese territory without many of the things necessary to do their task, let alone to defend themselves. But Fletcher was unmoved, according to the official report. “In any case, he would depart at that time.”10
If Ghormley, the overall commander, had been there he could surely have overruled Fletcher, but he foolishly chose to sit on his hands at his headquarters at New Caledonia, hundreds of miles away, sending instead his chief of staff, who said nothing and only took notes.11 Be that as it may, there was no going back now. The invasion had already been set back one week and Ghormley’s headquarters decreed there could be no further postponements.‡ So on July 31,1942, the Allied armada of eighty-two ships began to steam northwestward, toward Guadalcanal.
* * *
It was said by many that you could smell Guadalcanal before you could see it. When the transports and their escorting warships arrived in the dead of night in what would become known as Ironbottom Sound for the number of ships soon to be sunk there, the aroma of fresh ocean breezes soon turned into a fetid, sinister stink of rotting jungle vegetation and scummy, stagnant “rivers” filled with ferocious crocodiles. Guadalcanal was no tropic island paradise like Tahiti or the beaches of Waikiki. It was a mountainous slug-shaped tropical hell ninety miles long and about twenty-five miles wide, roughly the same length as Long Island, only fatter. Actually, it more closely resembled the contour and size of Jamaica, except there was no Montego Bay. Its dark green jungles harbored poisonous snakes and spiders, enormous rats and land crabs, scorpions and leeches, and, worst of all, clouds of the malaria-carrying anopheles mosquito. On the up side, it was also home to beautiful white cockatoos, mynah birds, and macaws and, besides the ubiquitous coconut, wild citrus and other tropical fruits such as papayas and bananas. Most Americans had never heard of Guadalcanal, or knew how to find it on a map, and those who did most likely recollected it from the widely traveled writer Jack London’s 1911 short story collection South Sea Tales, and here’s what he had to say: “The worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.”12
All of the day and night before the landings, men sat on the decks of the transports cleaning, oiling, and rechecking their weapons and sharpening their knives and bayonets. Chaplains held services. There were last-minute briefings: “Annex E to General Order No. 3: Paragraph D: Burial: Graves will be suitably marked. All bodies will bear identification tags.” Battalion commanders briefed their company commanders (“Goodbye and God bless you and to hell with the Japs!”); company commanders briefed their platoon leaders; platoon leaders briefed their sergeants. Some men played cards or rolled dice and one marine was seen slinging a handful of silver half dollars, one by one, to see how far he could skip them over the ocean waves. “Money don’t mean a thing out here anyhow. Even if you stay alive, you can’t buy anything.” They sang songs, some in harmony: “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Blues in the Night,” “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad).” Below, to the boogie-woogie of a beat-up juke box, some marines jitterbugged with each other. The PA system announced that breakfast would be at four-thirty A.M. By ten P.M. the ship was quiet and dark.13 It was August 6, 1942.
Miraculously the big invasion force had so far gone undetected by Japanese planes, subs, and ships. The convoy had come up along the western side of Guadalcanal, then turned east rounding Cape Esperance with the dark cone of the still active volcano of Savo Island on their port beam, and on into Ironbottom Sound. In the morning darkness they slipped past the exotically named little native villages on Guadalcanal’s north shore: Tassafaronga, Kokumbona, Matanikou, Kukum, Lunga, Tenaru, Tenavatu—most destined to become blood-soaked battlegrounds in the months to come. Other transports went farther north before turning east, leaving Savo Island on their starboard, and headed for landings at Tulagi, some twenty miles north of “the Canal.”
The night heat from the island blew at the men like a bad breath as they lined the decks, waiting to descend rope ladders to the landing craft. So far there was no indication whatsoever that they had been discovered by the Japanese, but in fact they had. Before the first light of dawn Tulagi radio tapped out “Large Number of Ships, Unknown Number or Types, Entering the Sound. What Can They Be?”
The officer receiving this message at Rabaul, six hundred miles to the north, was Admiral Sadayoshi Yamada, commander of the Imperial Navy air group.
At first he thought it was just a hit-and-run raid and sent out a reconnaissance plane to see what was what. Just about that time practically every big gun in the U.S. Invasion Fleet opened up on the landing beaches. It was 6:14 A.M. and thousands of big six- and eight-inch shells were being hurled toward the Japanese airfield and surr
ounding areas. Richard Tregaskis was a young correspondent for the International News Service (INS) standing on the deck of one of the transport ships, waiting for word to climb down onto the landing boats.* “It was fascinating to watch the apparent slowness with which the shells, their paths marked out against the sky in red fire, curved through the air. Distance, of course, caused that apparent slowness. But the concussion of the firing shook the deck of our ship and stirred our trousers legs with sudden gusts of wind, despite the distance.”14
It did not take long for the Japanese radio operator on Tulagi to send his next and final message to Rabaul: “Enemy Forces Overwhelming. We Will Defend Our Posts to the Death, Praying for Eternal Victory.” This news got Admiral Yamada’s undivided attention and he immediately began organizing an air raid on the American armada: twenty-seven twin-engine bombers, to be escorted by eighteen Zero fighters. The commander of the Zeros protested that it was suicide to send fighters six hundred miles, fight off the enemy, and expect them to return; they would run out of gas.* Yamada didn’t care. He wanted to stop the invasion before it got started.
Here is also where the coast watchers came into play. From his hiding place far up the island chain, an Australian planter turned coast watcher radioed, “Twenty-seven Bombers Heading Yours.” That gave Admiral Turner plenty of time to stop his transports from unloading, clear the decks, pull up anchor, and begin fast evasive action: for the cruisers and destroyers to get into position to defend against the incoming Japanese aircraft and for launching fighter planes from Fletcher’s carriers, a mere hundred miles away, to flame the bombers and their Zero companions. In a quick and fierce action fourteen of the Japanese planes were shot down and the rest failed to score any hits and flew off back to (or, in any case, toward) Rabaul. Admiral Halsey later assessed it bluntly, as usual, stating, “The intelligence signaled by [the coast watchers] saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific.” Be that as it may, there was still a heap of fighting to do before Guadalcanal was saved, as the marines landing there and at Tulagi would soon find out.
This coast watchers’ warnings notwithstanding, Admiral Yamada kept sending down more and more of his bombers as they became available, torpedo bombers, dive-bombers, and so on, so that for the first day of the landing Turner had to stop unloading no less than four times to weigh anchor and run out to sea, maneuvering to keep his transports from becoming sitting ducks. The American carrier-based fighter planes and ship-based antiaircraft fire disposed of most of the enemy planes, but it took hours off the unloading schedule. This of course was eating gravely into Admiral Fletcher’s arbitrary time frame of spending no more than two days in support of the marines who were just now being landed on the unforgiving beaches at Guadalcanal.15
To the Americans’ grand amazement and relief there was little or no opposition from the 2,000 or so Japanese troops on Guadalcanal, most of whom were laborers working on the airfield.* As the first naval bombardment shells began to burst, they ran off into the jungles, leaving everything behind, including their half-finished breakfasts in their mess tents, still warm in bowls with chopsticks. Naturally, because of Fletcher’s severe dictum that he would depart with all his carrier-based fighter protection after forty-eight hours, the scene on the landing beach was a complete mess. Stores and equipment were piled up right out in the open because there was no time to properly move it inland and disperse it among the palm groves where it could not be so easily bombed by Japanese planes.
Absurdly, the Japanese for some reason did not molest this precious cargo, instead turning all their attentions to the navy’s ships; if they had, the situation for the marines on Guadalcanal might well have become untenable because Fletcher, going back even on his promise for the meager two days’ protection, got cold feet and announced he was pulling out twelve hours early, leaving the marines on shore to their fate. With only half their food, supplies, and weapons unloaded and sitting out in the open, if the Japanese planes had concentrated on this, instead of the ships, the marines probably would have had to be evacuated. Worse, with no fighter cover from Fletcher, Turner apologetically told Vandegrift that he would also have to withdraw his precious transport and supply ships next morning, else they be sunk at their undefended anchorages. Vandegrift reluctantly had to agree with him, but neither ever forgave Fletcher for his timidity in their time of peril.
With the pleasant surprise that the Japanese would not contest their landing, the marines began exploring their newfound domain and were delighted to find that the Japanese left them many blessings. Wandering among the coconut groves they found some one hundred trucks, a Japanese imitation of the Chevrolet type, gasoline-storage tanks, bulldozers, paving machines, many tons of concrete, and a repair shop, as well as the small narrow-gauge railroad train, which the engineers soon put to good use.* The Japanese had nearly completed the airfield runway; they had been working at it from both ends and only a two-hundred-foot section in the middle was left to finish. There was a gasoline generator—run ice house, an aircraft control structure the marines named “the pagoda,” and goodly stores of rice, tinned fish, medical kits, and, best of all, Japanese beer and sake. By nighttime a drenching rain began to fall, but all considered it had been a good day on Guadalcanal, though not so good on Tulagi, and soon not so for the remaining U.S. Navy fleet of surface warships, the only force left to protect the marines who had been left stranded by Fletcher’s abrupt departure.
Soon after they learned of the American landings, the Japanese dispatched to Guadalcanal not only air strikes but a powerful surface fleet consisting of seven big cruisers and escorting destroyers under Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa. This movement was reported several times to the U.S. Navy but in all cases failed to achieve an appropriate response. An army B-17 radioed a report early on but failed to properly identify the ships or give their speed. An American submarine also spotted the Japanese fleet but it was still too close to Rabaul to determine its destination. An Australian air force pilot saw the fleet next morning as it raced down the Bougainville Strait toward the Slot, but instead of breaking radio silence and immediately filing a report the pilot finished his patrol and headed back to his base on New Guinea, where he stupidly took his “tea” before telling anyone what he had seen. By now it was almost sunset, too late for Turner to send out any search planes, even if he had them, which he didn’t because Fletcher had sailed away, leaving him “bare-assed.”16
The Allied naval force at Guadalcanal at this time consisted of one battleship (gone off with Fletcher’s force), six cruisers, nineteen destroyers, and eighteen transports. It was the transports that Mikawa wanted, and the warships must first be brushed off to get at them. After nightfall, August 8, the Allied cruiser force was patrolling Ironbottom Sound, which is roughly thirty by fifty miles in area; its centerpiece was the volcanic cone of Savo Island. Everyone aboard the patrolling ships was completely exhausted from the repeated Japanese air attacks over the past two days and to a man they were hoping the night would be quiet. This was not to be.
The Allied force was divided into two sections; one, consisting of the Australian cruiser Hobart, the American cruiser San Juan, and two destroyers, was the Eastern Force, covering the waters between Guadalcanal and its landing beaches and Tulagi. Second was the Northern Force, cruisers Astoria, Quincy, and Vincennes, with two destroyers, operating north of Savo Island and commanded by Captain Frederick Riefkohl. And finally the Southern Force, the U.S. cruiser Chicago and two Australian cruisers, the Canberra and Australia, patrolled the Guadalcanal coast from the landing site at Lunga Point to Cape Esperance on the far western tip of the island, commanded by the British Rear Admiral V. A. C. Crutchley.
The night was hot, humid, and squally with occasional lightning flashes lighting up the ominous-looking cone of Savo. As an additional precaution the U.S. destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot, both equipped with radar, had been sent forward as pickets to guard the approaches to the sound, each cruising a rectangular back-and-forth course. On pape
r it was a good and solid plan, but soon things began to go very wrong.
For one thing Turner, in the Guadalcanal anchorage, summoned both Crutchley and Vandegrift to a midnight conference aboard his flagship to discuss the unpleasant repercussions of Fletcher’s early retirement. This of course pulled Australia, Crutchley’s flagship, out of the line, and Crutchley, as commander, away from his command. Meantime, a little after eleven P.M., Mikawa steaming at nearly thirty miles per hour, and approaching Ironbottom Sound, launched a number of floatplanes from his cruisers to scout and at the appropriate time to drop illuminating flares on the Allied warships. The Japanese were highly skilled night fighters with superior night glasses, searchlights, and heavy training in night pyrotechnics. Their cruisers and destroyers also were equipped with the deadly two-foot-thick “long lance” torpedo. Near midnight, one of the Japanese floatplanes was sighted and identified by the picket destroyer Talbot, which radioed an emergency warning to the fleet but failed to say it was a floatplane, which would have meant that it had probably come from an enemy cruiser. Other Allied ships heard the planes overhead but did not report them. The American commander Riefkohl assumed that the plane reported by the Talbot was friendly, since it had fired on no one, and he had not been informed of Fletcher’s departure, meaning that it might be one of the planes from the U.S. carrier force. But assumption is often the mother of much grief and it turned out to be so in this instance.