1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  All of this was going on behind the scenes and the American people knew little or nothing of it from their newspapers and radio and, for that matter, still very little of what was going on at Guadalcanal, and certainly nothing yet about the terrible naval losses at the Battle of Savo Island. In fact, Admiral Ghormley and his staff, in overall charge of the Guadalcanal operation, continued to fear that the American force was not going to succeed.

  Thus even if the Americans had scored a great victory at Midway, as the end of summer 1942 rolled around, it was far from clear to the military commanders and their bosses in Washington whether that decisive battle was really the turning point of the war or just a fleeting ray of sunshine in the eye of a hurricane that would soon be upon them once again.

  Back on Guadalcanal, in addition to the daily air raids, nightly shelling from Japanese warships, and their half-starvation diet, the marines began to suffer terribly from tropical diseases: dengue fever, dysentery, gastroenteritis, and, most especially, malaria. Tropical ulcers caused by a nasty fungus ate holes in their skin big as quarters or even half-dollars, sometimes through to the bone. Usually the ulcers appeared after a man had received a cut of some kind, which could come from a nick by barbed wire or a slash from the razor-sharp kunai grass that abounded in the area. Dysentery, on the other hand, far more serious than normal diarrhea, was pervasive and it caused men to have to visit their crude latrines ten or more times a day. They became dehydrated, lost weight rapidly, and became so weak they frequently could not walk, even to the latrines. There was no remedy; it had to run its course. Then there was the gastroenteritis, which struck a man down suddenly, almost like a bullet, with horrible stomach pains, vomiting, fever, and often delirium.

  It was malaria, though, that caused the most trouble and at one point the division surgeon estimated that 70 percent of the marines had it in one form or another. The symptoms could be eased by quinine, but not cured, and the fever would return periodically to again strike the man down. It got to where a marine had to run a temperature above 103 degrees before he would even be placed in sick bay.

  They had now been on Guadalcanal for more than a month and everybody was asking, “Where is the army?” Under joint navy-marine-army doctrine, the marines’ task was to seize a beachhead by amphibious assault and, once it was secured, the army would relieve them and take over from there. Well, they argued, hadn’t they seized the Guadalcanal beachhead and secured it—but still no army? The reasons were severalfold. At that point there were three full U.S. Army divisions in the area, two under MacArthur in Australia (with another on the way) and one on New Caledonia, about fifteen hundred miles south of Guadalcanal. That was the Americal Division (standing for “Americans on New Caledonia”), only recently organized from a number of activated National Guard units. It had been placed there to protect New Caledonia and other islands along the South Pacific supply-and-communications route from the United States.

  At present, however, there was little or no notion being entertained in Washington to send any army troops to relieve or even reinforce the beleaguered marines on Guadalcanal. The reasons given by the joint planners changed almost daily, depending on the intelligence that was understood by them. After the calamity at Savo Island, the planners were at first astonished, then relieved, that the Japanese had not immediately sent forward an overwhelming force to retake Guadalcanal. Then in early September they suddenly learned of General Kawaguchi’s intentions to assault the marine positions, and at the same time came disturbing reports from MacArthur that on New Guinea the Japanese had undertaken the stupendous task of crawling across the vast Owen Stanley Range and were at that moment only twenty miles from Port Moresby. It seemed as though Washington was simply taking a wait-and-see attitude.

  Whatever it was, the Guadalcanal marines remained on their own, still subsisting to some extent on captured Japanese rice, supplemented by what other meager rations and supplies could be shipped in between Japanese air raids from Rabaul.*

  General Kawaguchi had arrived on Guadalcanal in the dark of night, August 31, 1942. He and 2,400 of his men had been ferried down the Slot from Rabaul and entered Ironbottom Sound with no opposition from the U.S. Navy, which had abrogated its presence there. They landed on a beach at Taivu Point, about twenty-five miles east of the airstrip at Henderson Field — the same place where the unfortunate Colonel Ichiki had landed his thousand men less than a month earlier. Another of his regiments, 1,100 troops under Colonel Akinosuka Oka, riding in forty-eight slow barges, would come ashore in a few days at Kukumbona, ten miles east of Henderson Field. Kawaguchi’s plan was simple—or so he thought; once Oka’s men had landed, and once he had rounded up the remainder of Ichiki’s force plus whatever original defenders of Guadalcanal could be dragooned into the fight, they would storm the marine lines from three different directions and retake the airstrip in a single fell swoop. For the occasion Kawaguchi had brought along his brand-new white full-dress uniform, which he intended to wear at a ceremony at Henderson Field to dictate surrender terms to Vandegrift. As an additional bow to posterity he had also brought along a newsreel cameraman and newspaper photographer.

  Kawaguchi had been unreliably informed that the Americans had no more than 5,000 men defending Guadalcanal and he reckoned that his force would be at least equal to them. Had this enemy troop strength report been correct, he might easily have pulled off his scheme. Indeed, the Americans had more men than the Japanese suspected, but these had to be strung out over a large perimeter nearly five miles in circumference, while Kawaguchi’s force could attack in strength at any point or points along it. The plan called for capture of the airfield no later than September 12. These were his instructions from his boss, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, commanding the Japanese Seventeenth Army at Rabaul.

  Vandegrift’s people gave Kawaguchi a hot reception from day one. Alerted to their landing by Martin Clemens’s native scouts, planes from Henderson Field—when they weren’t fending off attacks from enemy air raids—strafed and bombed the area daily. Not only that but Vandegrift decided to send two battalions of crack marine raiders and parachutists under Colonel Merritt Edson to raid the suspected Japanese encampment. They arrived only an hour or so after Kawaguchi and his troops had marched off into the dark interior. After a brisk firefight Edson’s raiders killed about thirty of the enemy, while another 250 ran off into the jungle. Among the raiders’ prizes was the fancy white dress uniform belonging to General Kawaguchi.

  For four long and rainy days Kawaguchi’s thousands hacked their way through the thick, steaming jungle trying to get around to the south side of Henderson Field, all the time awaiting word from Colonel Oka as to whether he had landed and was in a position to attack. At one point General Kawaguchi stopped to address his officers with a toast of whiskey. “We are obviously facing an unprecedented battle,” he told them, “and so gentlemen, we cannot hope to see each other again after the fight. This is the time for us to dedicate our lives to the Emperor,” after which there was much shouting and rejoicing.24

  Meantime, Colonel Edson, back from his raid on Taivu Point, was surveying the situation vis-a-vis the marine perimeter around the airfield. Headquarters knew from intelligence reports received from native scouts that Kawaguchi had disappeared into the jungle and was marching, or struggling, southward in order to come around on the south side of the marine lines. Edson walked the southern positions and decided Kawaguchi’s attack would probably come along a large ridge that extended southeast about three-quarters of a mile from the airfield. The ridge itself was about a mile long and bulged out into the jungle in the shape of a diving humpback whale.* Assessing the precipitousness of the various fingers, Edson concluded that the Japanese attack would probably come at the far southern edge of the ridge, because this way afforded the easiest means up, and he ordered his men to dig in.

  By this time the marines were becoming more and more attenuated to jungle night fighting. They strung an apron of barbed wire in front o
f their positions, to which they attached tin cans and shell casings meant to alert them in the dark. They sent out listening posts to warn of an approaching enemy. They even deployed primitive listening devices out into the jungle. They put their machine guns in deep, fortified pits, cleared fields of fire, registered their mortars and big guns from the artillery regiment, and hauled up extra ammunition, grenades, rations, and water. Then they sat down to wait, sharpening their knives and bayonets.

  Kawaguchi was not particularly happy with his situation. First, although Colonel Oka had finally shown up, he apparently would not be in position to launch his attack until September 13, a day later than planned. Second, his men were suffering greatly from lack of food and the travails of marching in the jungle. But by dusk on the twelfth he was coming, ready or not, and gave his junior officers the same speech about giving their lives for the emperor. Then they, too, sat down to wait for darkness.

  A lone destroyer tends to the stricken Yorktown before she sinks at Midway, (inset) Admiral Raymond Spruance, credited with the victory at Midway, June 1942, at which four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and the war in the Pacific began to turn to the Allies.

  Chinese soldiers bring the crew of one of Doohttle’s bombers to their village after their plane had wrecked, April 18, 1942. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey (center), operational commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, aboard the U.S.S. Saratoga.

  The PURPLE decoding machine that “hissed and sputtered and sometimes threw out a shower of sparks” but managed to break the Japanese code, leading to American victories at Midway and elsewhere.

  As the battle raged, there was always office work to be done in the notorious Malinta Tunnel. This photo, taken by someone from the last submarine to stop at Corregidor, shows the finance office and, farther back, the Signal Corps message center.

  The “Dog Army” was one of several “win-the-war-quick” schemes, along with the “death ray” and the “bat bombers.” Shown here, on top-secret Cat Island off the Mississippi coast in 1942, are some of the thousands of dogs that were proposed to be unleashed on unsuspecting Japanese during the Pacific invasions.

  The last few miles of the Bataan Death March in which thousands of Americans perished. Here those too weak to walk are carried by their companions.

  General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright surrenders to Japanese General Masaharu Homma (right center) after the fall of Corregidor. Wainwright spent three years starving in a Japanese prison camp before being liberated to be present at the Japanese surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay. In 1946 Homma was hanged by an Allied war tribunal for his role in the Bataan Death March.

  Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malaya,” who was later put in charge of the Philippines. An Allied war commission sent him to the firing squad for the so-called “rape of Manilla” as the American army closed in.

  Claire Phillips (aka “High Pockets”), American spy and owner of the Tsubaki Club in Manila, was a godsend to U.S. prisoners for the medicines and other essential items she managed to smuggle into the POW camps.

  Banzai! Japanese soldiers celebrate victory on Bataan in the Philippines on Good Friday, 1942.

  American soldiers surrender on Corregidor at the rubble-strewn entrance to the Malinta Tunnel.

  The famous B-17 was the workhorse heavy bomber in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during the early years of the war. It could take a lot of punishment, yet thousands were shot down.

  Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza, a celebrated Solomon Islands coast-watcher scout who, after being beaten, stabbed, and left for dead by the Japanese, managed to make his way to the marine lines and warn U.S. soldiers of an impending attack.

  Catholic marines on Guadalcanal receive communion.

  Japanese soldiers had a rendezvous with death on the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal. The Ichiki Detachment was the first of several failed Japanese attempts to wrest control of Guadalcanal and its vital airfield from the U.S. Marines.

  General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, who led the First Marine Division through its ordeal on Guadalcanal in 1942. He later became commandant of the Marine Corps.

  A Solomon Islands coast watcher with some of his scouts at Guadalcanal, August 1942.

  Typical day at a marine camp on Guadalcanal, 1942

  Admiral Norman Scott, killed during the naval Battle of Guadalcanal.

  Admiral Daniel Callaghan, President Roosevelt’s former naval aide, was killed during the disastrous naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942.

  Toward the end of 1942, the U.S. Army finally began arriving to replace the marines. Here, troops of the Thirty-fifth Infantry leave the line after twenty-one days of jungle fighting. The expression on the lead man’s face tells it all.

  The day after the Battle of Bloody Ridge on Guadalcanal, September 13, 1942. Here, a marine looks at the foxholes where Colonel Merritt Edson’s raider battalion slew thousands of Japanese banzai chargers.

  A Japanese troop shipwrecked by U.S. planes during the naval Battle of Guadalcanal, November 13–15, 1942.

  Japanese tanks destroyed on a sand spit at the mouth of the Matanikau River on Guadalcanal, October 1942.

  The navy’s Dauntless dive-bomber was primarily responsible for the American victory at the Battle of Midway.

  There were no true rest areas on Guadalcanal but from time to time marines were allowed to bathe in the rivers. The machine-gun guards are on the lookout not only for Japanese soldiers but for the man-eating crocodiles that inhabit the waters.

  U.S. Army landing in Morocco, October 1942.

  German Panzer tanks attacking from the desert near El Guettar. The white puffs around them are explosions of U.S. artillery shells. After half a day’s fight, the Germans retired, giving the Americans one of their first significant victories in the Battle for North Africa.

  George S. Patton on the Moroccan beaches, October 1942.

  U.S. soldiers inspect a wrecked German tank during the Tunisian Campaign, winter 1942.

  A funeral for U.S. soldiers killed in action in Algeria in 1942. MP’s had to post guards at the cemeteries because Arabs often tried to dig up the dead for their clothing.

  Vandegrift, who had moved his command post up to the far end of the ridge, also had reason to be worried. For one thing, the Japanese had dramatically stepped up their air raids and night naval bombardments of Henderson Field, damaging many planes. Worse, Admiral Kelly Turner had shown up a couple of days earlier and relayed to Vandegrift some very bad news from his boss Admiral Ghormley, way back in Nouméa, fifteen hundred miles south. It came in two parts: first, intelligence and aerial photography had determined that the Japanese were massing for “a huge amphibious effort against us in two or three weeks"; and second, that because of the lack of shipping, supplies, airplanes, and the like, the United States Navy “no longer could support the Guadalcanal operation.”

  Coming as this did in the face of an impending attack by a powerful enemy infantry force, a lesser man might have quavered, but Vandegrift didn’t bat an eye. He handed Turner’s message from Ghormley to his own operations officer and told him, “Put this in your pocket. I’ll talk to you about it later, but I don’t want anyone to know about it.” Then he took a drink of scotch and prepared to meet the immediate danger.25

  Kawaguchi’s fears were soon realized, and although Vandegrift’s were not he had no way of knowing it at the time. On the night of September 12, Kawaguchi launched a heavy probe at the marine position. It was beaten back, but the forward companies decided to withdraw to a more defensible line farther up the ridge. Next day Edson, sitting on a log and eating from a can of cold hash and potatoes, called in his company commanders and told them, “They’re testing, just testing. But they’ll be back. Maybe not as many of them. Or maybe more. I want all positions improved, all wire lines paralleled, a hot meal for the men. Get some sleep; we’ll all need it.”26

  At nine P.M., September 13, “Washing Machine Charlie” clattered in the night sky and droppe
d a pale green parachute flare over Henderson Field. Moments later seven Japanese warships in Ironbottom Sound opened up on the airstrip with a huge barrage. Simultaneously, Kawaguchi launched his 2,400 men out of the jungle against Edson’s 600 marines defending the far end of the ridge. They came on screaming banzai—“Maline you die!” and other things not immediately intelligible to the defenders.

  The marines met them not with words but with a curtain of fire and steel unleashed by the American artillery, mortars, rifles, and machine guns. Marine parachute flares illuminated the battlefield. Lieutenants rushed from position to position checking on their men, exhorting them to hold. Artillery blasted many of the attackers into oblivion—more than two thousand rounds were fired that night, until the barrels of the guns were so hot they nearly began to melt; automatic-weapons and rifle fire mowed down others, but still they came on. No sooner had one wave collapsed under the fire than another rushed out from the jungle’s edge and some even broke through into the marine positions; then it became a deadly brawl with pistols, rifle butts, shovels, bayonets, knives, fists. A few marines panicked and ran. Colonel Edson stopped two of them and hurled them back into the line, screaming, “Go back where you came from! The only thing the Japs have that you don’t is guts!”27