1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  More waves of Japanese emerged from the jungle and started up the hill, lit up by the pale flickering light of flares. By now it was evident they were there in overwhelming numbers. The racket was deafening and surreal; artillery bursts, machine-gun and rifle fire, grenades and mortars boomed and flashed and there was all kinds of hollering and shouting. Edson yelled out an order over his field telephone for the marines to pull back to the next defensive position and called for the artillery to bring its barrage in closer.

  Within an hour or so the attack subsided, leaving the slopes of the ridge, soon to be officially known as Bloody Ridge, washed in a sea of dead and dying Japanese. Those who could retired back into the jungles, but only to reorganize for another assault, which was not long in coming. Again at midnight came the screaming banzai charges, again the bursts and din and racket and moans of the battlefield, and again the Japanese were stopped in a hail of bullets and a curtain of steel laid down by the big 105mm howitzers beyond the crest of the ridge, with Edson yelling back into his field phone, “Closer, bring it in closer!”

  This went on for most of the night, with Edson’s men outnumbered four to one. Some people said there were at least twelve separate assaults, but nobody knows for sure. Each Japanese charge was announced with a flare and frequently the fighting was hand-to-hand. At two-thirty in the morning the Japanese fell back again and Edson contracted his lines too; it was just about the last position he could take before being forced off the ridge. But he said into his field phone, “We can hold,” to the great relief of everyone in Vandegrift’s command post, which had already begun sending up the last marine reserves.

  In between attacks desultory firing was unceasing. The marines would learn that this was the way the Japanese fought: they did not simply attack and, if defeated, run away; those who remained alive were sure to set up a fire of some kind to keep everyone on edge. Japanese who were left on the field, lying under a log or whatever else they could hide behind, also kept up their chorus of “Maline you die,” answered by a corresponding chorus of “You’ll eat shit first, you bastards!”28 Somebody shouted out, “Tojo eats shit!” and it echoed back from the enemy lines, “Roosevet eat shit!” Then it was, “The emperor eats shit,” answered by, “Babe Ruth eat shit.” Then it got down to the basics: “Fuck Ereanor Roosevet!,” which was answered, “Fuck Tokyo Rose!” and “The emperor’s wife eats shit!” Finally, from one or more Japanese, came perhaps the most original of all: “Fuck Roy Acuff!”*

  At one point during the battle Edson was talking on his field phone when a voice broke in and said in stilted English: “Our situation here, Colonel Edson, is excellent. Thank you sir.”29 Clearly this was not anyone authorized by the marines to talk on their line. With units spread out all over the place, and all the phone lines connecting them to their commander, and thence to Vandegrift’s headquarters, it would not be unusual for Japanese infiltrators to have crawled up and tapped into a phone grid or snatched messages out of the air from a field radio, both to listen in and to give out phony information. To counter the former, the Marine Corps had devised a truly ingenious plan.

  Philip Johnson, a World War I veteran, had grown up the son of a missionary to the Navajo Indian tribes in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. He remembered that the U.S. military had once used the Choctaw Indian language to create secret codes and it occurred to him that Navajo was, of all Native American languages, the most difficult to penetrate. For one thing, it was unwritten. There is no alphabet—not even symbols—and it has such unique pronunciations that the only way to become familiar with it was to have lived with the Navajos. Few had.

  Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Johnson took an idea to the marines: why not utilize the particular abilities of Navajos to communicate among one another to create an unbreakable field code. For unit commanders in the heat of battle who could not wait the excruciatingly long time it took cryptographic machines to encode, transmit, and decode messages, this truly would be a godsend. The marines were enthusiastic and tests showed that the Navajos could send and decode a short message in thirty seconds when it would have taken an encoding machine a half hour to perform the same task. They quickly set up a special school for members of this small, civilized, and educated tribe at the marine base at Camp Pendleton, California. Four hundred Navajo volunteers were put through a crash course in which they were taught to assign to English words a Navajo meaning that had no English equivalent in their language. Such words as “tank” became chay-da-gahi (tortoise) in Navajo, but it could also be several other things as well. Only the Navajos knew—and they weren’t telling.

  These “code talkers” served in every marine campaign in the Pacific, including Guadalcanal, and the frustrated Japanese never did manage to crack their communications, despite laborious attempts. After the war the secret of the Navajo military code was considered so important that it was strictly classified for nearly forty years. In 2001 the Navajo code talkers were awarded medals by the U.S. Congress for their unique and priceless service.30

  Meantime, General Kawaguchi’s plan had fallen to pieces before his eyes. He idiotically kept ordering assaults on the ridge across ground littered with his own dead, but these became feebler and feebler as the night wore on and dawn approached. He was enraged at one point to learn that, in the confusion, one of his battalions had not even gotten into the battle at all, and he screamed at its commander, when he finally showed up at Kawaguchi’s headquarters, “Coward! Commit hara-kiri!”31 Worse, the battalion-sized force of Colonel Ichiki’s remnants, which Kawaguchi had sent to attack across the Tenaru several miles to the north, had gotten off late and was repulsed and practically annihilated by the First Marine Regiment. Worse still for the Japanese, Colonel Oka’s battalion, about eight miles west, which was supposed to assault simultaneously near the Matanikau River, presumably to draw off the marine reserves, had failed to do so, and when he finally got around to attacking later that afternoon, Oka’s force was blasted back into the jungle.

  Kawaguchi’s battle plan had been a miserable failure and there was nothing but to organize what was left of the troops and hack a path back through the jungle away from the horrid scene of the ridge. He had gotten to about a thousand yards from the airfield, but no more. Instead of returning to Taivu Point along the trail he had just chopped out he decided, probably wisely, not to return to that place, but instead to hack his way westward, toward Colonel Oka, near the Matanikau, and thence beyond. This became a wretched, excruciating journey lasting six long days, with men trying to drag the more than five hundred wounded on litters through the twisted, fetid jungle.

  There was practically nothing for the retreating Japanese to eat, since they had planned on eating the marines’ food once they captured the airfield—such had been their hubris. Soldiers drank rain or dew water from jungle vines and ate whatever berries, roots, leaves, or grass they could find. Much of this proved disagreeable; some even fatal. Men were dying at an alarming rate, especially the wounded, and practically all heavy equipment was thrown away or buried along the trail. More than six hundred of Kawaguchi’s men lay rotting in the tropic sun in front of the marine positions on Bloody Ridge; out of the 2,400 Kawaguchi had ordered into his main attack, only 800 remained unscathed. Another couple of hundred from the remnants of the Ichiki force lay dead along the crocodile-infested banks of the Tenaru. The marines called them “gator bait.”

  At last Kawaguchi’s pathetic little band emerged into a coconut grove at the edge of Ironbottom Sound, where at least there were coconuts to eat and their milk to drink. The humiliated Kawaguchi, as filthy, tattered, and hungry as the rest, prepared to find transportation to Rabaul to face the medicine.

  Admiral Kelly Turner, who had stayed through the initial stages of the fight, departed on his flagship the day of the big battle, but not before informing everybody that “things would get worse before they get better.” Nevertheless, Turner promised Vandegrift that, despite Ghormley’s pessimistic appraisal of the situation, he wo
uld reinforce Guadalcanal with another 4,100-man marine regiment, a promise he kept, to Vandegrift’s great relief, astonishment, and gratitude.32

  A couple of days after the Bloody Ridge action, the venerable New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin showed up. He informed Vandegrift that the American people were getting a warped view of the situation on Guadalcanal. The people understood, he told the general, that the marines were holding most of the ninety-mile-long island and were “strongly entrenched.”

  Vandegrift filled him in on the true situation, which was that they were hanging on to their tiny airstrip only by a MacArthurian eyelash, that the daily Japanese air raids were choking off much of their supply and the nightly, unopposed Japanese naval bombardments were wrecking his war-planes almost as fast as they could be brought in, and also that the Japanese could transport their own troops to Guadalcanal at their own pleasure and were, in fact, planning a far larger invasion in a few weeks. After Vandegrift concluded this litany of agony and grief, reporter Baldwin asked him, “Are you going to hold this beachhead? Are you going to stay here?”

  Vandegrift didn’t hesitate: “Well hell, yes. Why not?”33

  Chapter Sexteen

  During the dog days of August and September of 1942, while American marines were fighting and dying on Guadalcanal, and the Germans were knocking at the gates of Russian Stalingrad, a kind of near panic had taken hold in Australia. Because of the steady Japanese encroachment across the Owen Stanley Range on nearby New Guinea, those who could in northern Australia began relocating their families and possessions southward for fear of an invasion. There was much talk in political circles of abandoning northern Australia altogether and setting up a defensive line farther south, to protect the heavily populated areas around Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Canberra.

  General MacArthur and, for that matter, the Australian army were having none of this. The army intended to stop the Japanese in their tracks in New Guinea’s mountainous jungles or die trying, or at least send troops to the island to die trying, which is what they did. MacArthur by now had more than 100,000 American soldiers on the southern continent, though only one-third of them were combat infantry troops. Still he was loath to send any of them to help out the beleaguered marines on Guadalcanal. He was worried, and rightly so, that the Japanese overland movement from northern to southern New Guinea portended a dangerous and immediate threat to Australia and New Zealand and thus America’s shipping lifeline to them. If Australia and New Zealand were taken out of the play, quite literally there would have been no place except Hawaii—which was too small—from which the Allies could launch an effective counterinvasion to get at the Japanese mainland, far away as it was.

  New Guinea is the second largest island in the world (after Greenland); about the size of California, it is shaped like a large turkey, or, some say, a peacock. It is mostly a hot, steamy rain forest, punctuated by a spine of mountains known as the Owen Stanley Range, which rise to heights of 15,000 feet or more, and some are actually capped in snow most of the year. Below are swamps, jungles, and inhospitable territory inhabited by malaria-carrying mosquitoes, scorpions, crocodiles, poisonous snakes such as the taipan and death adder, and huge constrictors like the python. As on Guadalcanal, hundreds of miles away, the natives were thought to be both cannibals and headhunters. In short, it was a place where civilization had not made appreciable inroads. Early explorers gave the place a wide berth for centuries. Then, as in the Solomon Islands, in the nineteenth century missionaries and coconut plantation farmers began to arrive, but settled only in the coastal areas.1

  Frustrated by the Battle of the Coral Sea in their attempt to land an invasion force to take Port Moresby, the Japanese instead tried to take the Allied airstrip town of Milne Bay, at the very southern tip of New Guinea, but they were surprised and frustrated again, in fact flat kicked out, by a determined battalion of Australian troops. Then the Japanese decided to regroup with a much larger army and go back against Port Moresby the hard way—by the land route over the formidable Owen Stanley Range from their new base on the north side of New Guinea near the coastal villages of Buna and Gona. Nobody believed they would even try it, but they did. The stakes were high, because if the Japanese conquered the southern coast of New Guinea they would solidify their air control of the Coral Sea as well as gain the freedom to bomb Australia at their pleasure and even to invade it.

  There were only two rough native trails over the Owen Stanleys, and foot trails they were, thousands of feet up and down, amid perhaps the most frightful and disagreeable landscape in the world. The New Guinea natives themselves believed that the trails were haunted. It rained practically all the time, up to 300 inches a year, and knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep mud was omnipresent. For soldiers on either side carrying heavy rucksacks that contained all their food and other gear there was a constant danger of toppling over backward with any misstep; men frequently slept in these steeps by hanging or roping themselves onto jungle plants, vines, or trees. Depending on the altitude it was either steaming hot or freezing cold and changes of clothing were out of the question. One man was found, so the story goes, after being attacked while asleep by a large constricting python. His body was said to be completely flattened, like a deflated balloon, as if every bone in it were crushed by the enormous snake.

  By September 20, a Japanese force of more than 5,000 had crossed the Owen Stanleys and were perched just twenty miles from Port Moresby when they were suddenly ordered by their army headquarters at Rabaul to halt, and then were called back. The reason for this was the U.S. Marines’ resounding defeat of General Kawaguchi’s force on Guadalcanal; the Japanese finally woke up and decided to put all their resources into annihilating U.S. forces in the Solomon Islands. Port Moresby would have to wait.

  The Japanese at this point had just under 10,000 men in that part of New Guinea, and their new instructions were to retreat to their bases between Buna and Gona on the north coast and fortify and hold them, pending some clarification of the situation at Guadalcanal. But MacArthur and his people were not content to allow this. He had two U.S. infantry divisions and one Australian division, and he decided to try and kick the Japanese out of eastern New Guinea altogether. This, as it turned out, as with so much else, was far more difficult than expected.

  First was the problem of just how to get at the Japanese force, now ensconced in positions on New Guinea’s north coast, about a hundred miles from Port Moresby. A seaborne invasion was out of the question—there wasn’t enough shipping—and so it was decided to send Allied infantry along the same mountainous trail that the Japanese had come across. Actually, there were two trails, the Kokoda and the Kapa Kapa. The Australians were to use the Kokoda and the Americans the Kapa Kapa, which was so remote no white man had been known to climb it since 1917. As at Guadalcanal, things got off to a bad start.

  First, the American infantry divisions were woefully undertrained for their task. Both were federalized National Guard units that had been shifted from pillar to post in the wake of Pearl Harbor, at first destined for the European theater, then ordered to garrison Ireland, and then told to head to the South Pacific. Thus they had scant time between all this moving around to establish proper training facilities. This had left them un-“hardened,” the military expression for being out of shape, and certainly not up to the rigors of climbing for days on end along the wild leech-infested jungle trail they were soon to endure. So many could not stand up to the constant ascending and descending (with no place to rest since the trail was generally narrowed to only a few feet) that they were left strewn prostrate along the way, and others had to step over them. Such was the exhaustion that officers sent to the rear to push along stragglers were simply not able to move them. At one point along the trail, which “reeks with the stench of death, the remains of an enemy soldier lie on a crude stretcher, abandoned by the Japanese retreat. The flesh is gone from his bones, and a white bony claw sticks out of a ragged uniform sleeve, stretching
across the track.”2

  Worse, their food was no good. Most of it consisted of Australian Bully Beef (corned beef in five-pound tins), which had soon rusted out in the hot humid climate and spoiled the beef. They either ate it or starved, and those who ate it often got horrible diarrhea or dysentery so bad that they had to rip out the seats of their trousers in order to quickly take care of their needs. Even considering their woefully shabby circumstances, one thing any combat infantryman, anywhere, anytime, looks forward to every day is the ability to take a good, clean shit, and now even this small dignity was no longer available to them. The rain was such that practically all meals had to be eaten cold and raw since fires were not possible. Matches and all toilet articles were soon soaked, including toilet paper, and antimalaria pills disintegrated within a day or so. They tried parachute airdrops to resupply the troops but most of these drifted off course and were not recoverable.*

  Look at the photographs taken on New Guinea during this period and you will not see happy or smiling soldiers, as you might see even in photographs of men at Guadalcanal; instead you will be struck by the haunted, hollow, almost frightened look of civilian soldiers being pressed to their utmost limits by strange and gross vicissitudes, with no apparent end in sight. The Japanese, crawling over the mountains first southward, then back to the north coast, did not fare much better. They and their supply lines were relentlessly bombed by Allied planes and their food was not much better, but being smaller people, perhaps only half the weight of an American soldier, they could subsist on much less, mostly rice, though they had already stripped the native villages along their tortured path of any and all garden produce: yams, beans, pumpkins, sugarcane, melons, bananas. And they were battle hardened, having fought in China, Malaya, or the Philippines, but the soldiers on both sides nevertheless gave a name for all these trials: the Green Hell.