1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  When the exhausted Allied army men finally reached the Japanese positions on the New Guinea north coast they were in for another rude surprise. They had been informed, thanks to several intelligence reports, that most of the Japanese had been evacuated and that they would meet only token resistance. This was not at all true, as they would soon enough find out. The 10,000 Japanese had dug themselves into a pocket about ten miles long between the villages of Buna and Gona. The terrain surrounding this pocket was mostly waist-deep sago palm muck and jungle. The lanes of the only practical high-ground approaches had been strongly fortified by the Japanese with registered mortar fire and machine-gun nests and direct-fire artillery concealed in strong coconut-log bunkers, and with snipers everywhere. It was a most obnoxious position from the attackers’ point of view; in fact, the U.S. Army official history of the battle describes the Japanese position as “a masterpiece.”3

  This soon became apparent to MacArthur, who had now moved his headquarters to the former New Guinea governor-general’s elegant bungalow at Port Moresby, where he paced the veranda dressed in “a pink silk dressing gown with a black dragon painted on the back,” and “munched on one of the crisp heads of lettuce specially flown in by the crate.”4 He had already received disturbing reports of unmilitary conduct by members of his Thirty-second Division. They were said to be lackadaisical in performing attacks on the Japanese positions, throwing away their rifles, disobeying their officers, and so forth. In some ways you could hardly blame them; the area has been described as “literally a pesthole.” The average daily temperature was 96 degrees F, and in addition to the omnipresent malaria there was jungle rot, ringworm, dengue fever, typhus, and dysentery to contend with. Although the Allies had discovered and improved an airstrip about fifteen miles away, there was still difficulty getting needed supplies to the troops in the field. For this they employed loin-clothed native bearers (known to the Australians, because of their hair styles, as Fuzzy-Wuzzies) who, as they had no concept of money, had to be paid off in such things as pots and pans, utensils, tobacco, cloth, salt, and garden seed.* The problem with this was that all these goods also had to be transported by air through the already taxed facilities of the air force, struggling desperately to supply the men in the field.5

  In any case, MacArthur was still exceedingly unhappy with the reports of his infantry’s performance and so summoned to Port Moresby his newly arrived corps commander, Major General Robert Eichelberger, and told him to go to Buna and relieve the present commander of the Thirty-second Division. He also told him to relieve anybody else who wouldn’t fight, and replace him with somebody who would, even if it meant putting sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies. Then he gave the fifty-five-year-old Eichelberger perhaps the most extraordinary order ever issued in modern times by a commanding general to one of his senior officers: “Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive.” And, for added emphasis, MacArthur pointed a bony finger at Eichelberger’s startled chief of staff, who was standing there watching, and said, “And that goes for your chief of staff, too.” As Eichelberger recalled it later, “Well, that was our send off, and hardly a merry one.”6

  Contretemps between commanders and the long-standing interservice rivalries were of course not unknown, and were not helpful to the war effort. Admiral Ghormley, as has been seen, was opposed to the entire marine invasion of Guadalcanal, and took a consistently pessimistic (and some say foot-dragging) view of the operation. Good commanders, as history demonstrates, seek to overcome obstacles instead of complaining about why something can’t be done. Accordingly, Ghormley was relieved as commander of the South Pacific and in his place was put the irrepressible, fifty-nine-year-old William F. (Bull) Halsey.* Upon assuming his post on October 18, 1942, Halsey immediately called Vandegrift from Guadalcanal for a meeting and asked him if he could hold the island. Vandegrift replied that he could, if he could get better support from the navy. Halsey told him that, yes, he certainly would, beginning right away. This was very good news.

  Another unwelcome thorn in the side of the marines had become Admiral Kelly Turner, who was still in charge of the beachhead at Guadalcanal, funneling in men, food, weapons, and supplies. Turner was earnestly trying to be helpful, had defied Ghormley on several occasions, had performed miracles with the meager ships he had, but he also tended to meddle with the dispositions of infantry on Guadalcanal, something an admiral in the navy was not especially trained for. In particular Turner, who was de facto superior to Vandegrift, wanted to create more marine raider battalions out of regular marines, and to put them in locations outside of Henderson Field, out in the bush or in beachfront bivouacs where, presumably, they could intercept Japanese landings or disrupt their operations. At first glance, this was probably not a bad idea and the concept has been adopted in more modern military strategies. But faced with his own situation, Vandegrift was appalled at Turner’s persistence in these matters, branding them “dangerous nonsense.” His position on the island, Vandegrift asserted, was critical and defense of Henderson Field paramount. After all, without the airfield, what were they doing there anyway? And if they lost it they could not hold the island. His lines were thin enough as it was, and he needed every man available to defend the perimeter against further Japanese attacks.7

  Another dispute had broken out in MacArthur’s headquarters way back in Australia. Major General George Brett was commander of the U.S. Air Force there, such as it was. But MacArthur was in charge of everything, and his chief of staff, Brigadier General Richard Sutherland, presumably spoke for MacArthur, or at least he thought he did. Sutherland did not get along well with Brett or, for that matter, with a lot of people, who thought of him as high-handed, even rude. In Brett’s case it may have been a simple case of interservice rivalry, except that at the time the air force was still, technically, the U.S. Army Air Corps, and not a separate service, and Sutherland apparently made certain assumptions on the uses of airpower that rankled the airmen who had to carry out his orders.

  Soon (some say at the doings of Sutherland), Brett was replaced by Major General George C. Kenny, a diminutive and feisty two-star pilot-general who set Sutherland straight the first time he met him. Waiting for a meeting with MacArthur, Kenny found himself in Sutherland’s office on the receiving end of a lecture about how he should deploy his air force, now that he was under MacArthur’s command. Kenny listened for a while, then went over to Sutherland’s desk and picked up a sheet of blank paper and a pencil. On the paper he tapped a little dot in the center with the pencil, then handed it to MacArthur’s chief of staff: “That dot I just put there represents what you know about the use of airpower. All the rest of this sheet of paper represents what I know about airpower!” he told the flabbergasted Sutherland. After that he had little trouble from Sutherland, which was probably a good thing, too, for Kenny proceeded to orchestrate an ongoing display of the proper use of an air force throughout the Pacific war, which soon helped save the faltering New Guinea campaign.

  Back on Guadalcanal, despite the complete repulse of General Kawaguchi’s attack at Bloody Ridge, the situation was not at all a happy one. Nobody put it better than Marine Major Frank Hough, who observed that “no clairvoyant was needed to figure out the shape of things to come.”8 The Japanese strategy was becoming clear to everyone: with the U.S. Navy now seemingly out of the picture, they would come in at night with warships and shell hell out of Henderson Field to keep U.S. planes from taking off after them. At the same time the Japanese could land troops to build up for another attack. This they would do almost every night, and there was little the marines could do about it, as they landed their soldiers anyplace on the island they wanted—except for the tiny marine perimeter—to the east of the marines, to the west, and, if they wished, in the south. From a variety of intelligence reports, including aerial reconnaissance of the ships assembling at Rabaul, it was apparent the next Japanese attack was going to be far larger than those previous. The Japanese also m
anaged to ship in a battery of big 150mm artillery, heavier and with a greater range than anything the Americans had to knock them out with. Moving these from place to place in the jungles and on the ridges, the Japanese now shelled the airfield with impunity, night and day. If nothing else, this kept everyone’s nerves even more on edge than they already were, which was considerable.

  As we have seen, the Marine Corps had been established as a small amphibious assault force: to take a beachhead and hold it. Then, in a week or two, the much larger U.S. Army would come in and take over from there. The marines were neither trained nor equipped as a defense force, but that is precisely what they had become for more than two long months on Guadalcanal. By now almost everyone on the island was running a high fever from malaria and/or other tropical ailments for which there was little proper treatment or cure. They had been shelled by Japanese naval ships or artillery, bombed from the air, or otherwise attacked night and day, practically since the moment they arrived. Even during World War I, in the grisly trenches of the Western Front, soldiers had to serve only forty-eight hours at a time before being rotated out to the rear, the lesson having been learned early on that any longer would lead to crack-ups. On Guadalcanal this was simply not possible. For one thing, there was no rear.

  That meant of course that there was no place for R & R or any other kind of amusement or relief, except for dodging bombs, shells, and bullets. Men could go occasionally to the beach or to the Lunga River for bathing, but they took the chance of being strafed, bombed, shelled, machine-gunned, or, for that matter, eaten by crocodiles. Armed guards had to be posted on both banks of the Lunga to prevent Japanese snipers from shooting the bathers, and they kept a sharp lookout for the crocodiles, too. The marines were still down to two meals per day, and nothing much appetizing at that, but eating was about the only pleasure the men had; everything else was either work, illness, or terror. Most men had by now lost between 10 and 15 percent of their body weight during the two months they had been there. Lunch was not an option. There was no mail from home; it was difficult enough just to ship in rations and ammunition. Some units, particularly the raiders, had been riddled with casualties. The pilots and their crews were under an enormous strain, flying mission after mission in beat-up planes, most of which required maintenance that no one could properly perform.

  Looking at it now from the standpoint of military science during World War II, the servicemen on Guadalcanal were little better than guinea pigs, or lab rats, whose trials and sufferings would be officially filed under “lessons learned” for future operations. From a standpoint of troop morale, it was pathetic, but there wasn’t much anybody could do about it. The marines understood this, as most combat troops eventually do; they simply reached into themselves for their own accommodation.

  The late Pulitzer Prize—winning author John Hersey* had been sent to Guadalcanal as a correspondent for Time and Life magazines. He went into a battle one day with a company of marines trying to clean out a pocket of Japanese along the by then infamous Matanikau River, which had been a painful thorn in the side of those trying to hold Henderson Field. They marched practically all day, using up most of their canteen water in the wretched heat, then plunged into the fetid steaming jungle toward the river. First they were beset by Japanese snipers who had hidden themselves in trees; then they were hit with machine guns, and then blasted by prereg-istered mortar fire. In the end they ran into what amounted to a serious ambush. The marines fought it out until it became obvious they were getting the worst of it in a well-prepared Japanese position, and would continue to do so unless they withdrew. A dozen marines in that company were killed and many more wounded. All told, more than sixty were killed in the entire two-day, two-battalion operation. The Graves Registration people were called in to carry the bodies out to the blossoming cemetery created around Henderson Field.

  Hersey had made friends with the company’s commander, a Captain Charles Alfred Rigaud, in his mid-twenties, who was raised in upstate New York and, like so many company-grade officers, was the son of a middle-class family who wanted nothing more than a decent career in some proper job, with a wife and family, far away from the killing and mayhem in the South Pacific. Right after the battle Hersey found Rigaud, muddy, exhausted, and hollow-eyed. Hersey asked if there was anything he could do for the captain when he got back to the States. Captain Rigaud asked if Hersey might at least phone up his parents and tell them he was okay, and then Rigaud asked if Hersey planned to be going to New York City. Of course, Hersey told him, yes, since the Time-Life offices were there. And here is what the captain asked next:

  “I want you to take a hot bath. In a bath tub. Long one, about twenty minutes. Then put on a soft white shirt, with a good-looking tie, and a double-breasted blue suit. And then go out and—what’s a good bar in New York?”

  “Oh,” Hersey said, “I don’t know, there are lots.”

  “Well,” Captain Rigaud told him, “go to one of them that’s good and walk up to the bar and order two Tom Collinses, tall ones. One is for you, and one belongs to Captain Charles Rigaud. I don’t care how you drink yours; gulp it for all I care; but Captain Rigaud’s drink, sip it, take a half an hour if you got to. And you may as well mumble something formal, like a toast. Drink a toast to Company H. If they aren’t on Guadalcanal, they’ll be way the hell and gone out to somewhere. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Do that.”9

  Today, looking back, when you speak of military morale, you had best take into account the morale of Captain Charles Alfred Rigaud, and all the other marines, sailors, and soldiers who fought the fight around that weird, bitter little island in the middle of the South Pacific, in the doubtful year of 1942. And the situation was getting more uncertain by the day, because the Japanese were now coming down in force, with two full infantry divisions, to attack Vandegrift’s men.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After the resounding defeat of General Kawaguchi’s force, the Japanese command at Rabaul, as well as the General Staff in Tokyo, finally realized that the American landings in the Solomons were far more dangerous than they had imagined. Worse, the tactical situation had changed dramatically, and it was at last understood that the U.S. Marines would be formidable to defeat.

  Much of the reason for this was the continued American operation of Henderson Field. From it, with new warplanes arriving as fast as they could get there, transport and supply of Japanese troops to Guadalcanal became problematic. The simple math became obvious to Japanese planners. To bring in troops they had to load them on either slow transports traveling at about twenty miles per hour or fast destroyers traveling at more than forty miles an hour. And it was six hundred miles—round-trip—from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, half of this distance in daylight hours when the U.S. planes could get at them. Either way—destroyer or troop transport—it was a risky proposition, because the American Dauntless dive-bombers, so deadly to Japanese ships at Midway, had a range of about eight hundred miles, that is, about four hundred miles each way from takeoff to return. Henderson Field was an aircraft carrier the Japanese could damage but not sink.*

  Now the problem for the Japanese was that, once they got to Guadalcanal, by transport or destroyer, there were of necessity many hours of debarking men and unloading of food, artillery, tanks, ammunition, supplies: all the equipment needed to keep an army in the field. And because daylight at that latitude lasted from about six A.M. to six P.M., there was simply no way they could get the ships and supplies from Rabaul to Guadalcanal and have them off-loaded without exposing themselves to attacks from the American planes the next morning. This had been strikingly proven during the Kawaguchi buildup when marine dive-bombers blew up a Japanese transport destroyer in the Slot, killing about six hundred soldiers and sailors. Such was their dilemma.

  The Japanese pondered the question and came up with a bold plan. They simply had to destroy Henderson Field, or, at a minimum, keep it out of operation when they made their Tokyo Express runs. Since daily bombing and nightly shell
ing from smaller warships had proved inconclusive, they would bring in—battleships! It seemed the only thing that might work, except for one problem: there were no battleships available. They were all under command of Admiral Yamamoto, who was languishing up at the great Japanese naval base on the island of Truk, waiting for his chance to lure the Americans into his fantasy of the Great Sea Battle, in which he would need all his battleships.

  There then appeared on the scene a familiar figure, the ubiquitous Colonel Tsuji—instigator of the murders of thousands of Chinese on Singapore and of the Bataan Death March—who had become more ubiquitous than ever, if that was possible. He had been sent by officials in Tokyo to find out what was going on and so, risking life and limb, he traveled to Guadalcanal to visit the troops. Here is what he found: “Our troops have been cut off for more than a month. Officers and men have to dig grass roots, scrape moss and pick buds from the trees, and drink seawater to survive.” Tsuji managed to get back to Rabaul and then by plane to Truk, where he found Admiral Yamamoto in his cabin aboard the leviathan battleship Yamato painting pictures, his hobby. Tsuji imparted his information to him, describing the Guadalcanal soldiers as “thinner than Gandhi.”1