1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  The great admiral was so moved by the end of Tsuji’s report that he reversed himself and promised forthwith to send battleships to bombard Henderson Field. Thus, on the night of October 13, marines and other American troops were treated to something a participant later described this way: “They had lived through [bombardments] before, but they had never lived through anything like that and, praise God, would never have to again.”2

  The fourteen-inch shell of a battleship is almost as tall as a man, weighs 1,400 pounds, and is accurate up to sixteen miles. Its explosion is, exponentially, about ten times as powerful as that of a cruiser’s and far more than ten times that of a destroyer’s. For an hour and twenty minutes, the Japanese battleships lobbed more than a thousand of these monsters on and around Henderson Field. There was nothing the marines could do but take it. It was dark and they had no night-fighter capabilities; besides, the planes couldn’t take off anyway because of runway damage. Many Americans had their eardrums blown out; forty-one were killed, some of them atomized. Hundreds were wounded. Everyone was terrified, including General Vandegrift, who remarked later that “a man comes close to himself in those times.”3*

  Morning brought a horrific sight: Henderson Field was almost a total wreck. Considering that one thousand-pound bomb can sink an aircraft carrier, imagine what a thousand of these things could do. Deep craters and ruptured steel matting pockmarked the field. Seventy percent of the U.S. bombers had been blown up or put out of action. The field was a Dantesque inferno of burning planes and gasoline. Practically all the aviation fuel had been destroyed. Buildings and equipment, including the air control center, were demolished. It was almost as if they would have to start over again; indeed, it was surely a time that tried men’s souls.

  If October 13 had been a bad day, there was at least one bright spot, and a crucial one, too. That morning thirteen transports had arrived carrying the 164th Infantry Regiment of the U.S Army’s Americal Division, 3,000 well-equipped soldiers, and though they had not previously seen combat, they were a most welcome sight, at least to the marines.† The Japanese, too, gave them a most spectacular welcome. As Marine Major Hough pointed out, “If ever soldiers were pitchforked abruptly into battle, it was on this island.”4 First, just as the troops were debarking from the ships, the Japanese came over and bombed the army men trying to get ashore. No sooner had they gotten ashore than the big 150mm long-range howitzers, which the Japanese had recently registered from positions in the hills two miles away, opened up on the field. The soldiers were directed to a bivouac in a palm grove, but they hadn’t even finished pitching their tents when the Japanese battleships arrived with their screaming rain of hell to turn the whole place into a deafening holocaust. If they could have run off the island at that point, some probably would have, horrified that this was the way it would be every day. Who could have blamed them? But that was not an option; the transports had long since steamed away, and there they were.

  Next day, it was more of the same: the Japanese came back first with bombers, then the artillery, which was out of reach for the marines’ guns to reply, and again that night with another terrific bombardment by cruisers and destroyers. Vandegrift grimly sent a message to Allied headquarters at Noumea: “Enemy landed about 10,000 troops yesterday on [Guadalcanal] with considerable equipment and supplies bringing total force on shore to at least 15,000.” He went on to “urgently” request a major naval effort, air reinforcements, and a full army division. Everybody in the know understood this was the beginning of the big Japanese counterattack.5

  Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times correspondent who had visited Vandegrift and told him the American people did not fully understand the situation on Guadalcanal, had gone home to explain it to his readers. He compared it with Long Island. It was, he said, as if the marines were holding Jones Beach, and the Japanese controlled everything else.

  Kept up-to-date on the fighting, Roosevelt was extremely troubled by the marines’ perilous situation. “My anxiety about the Southwest Pacific,” he told Harry Hopkins privately, “is to make sure that every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal. And that having held it in this crisis, that munitions and planes and crews are on the way to take advantage of our success.”* Publicly, however, Roosevelt was less sanguine about success, what with all the glum news coming in. “We must not overrate the importance of our successes in the Solomon Islands,” he told reporters, “though we may be proud of the skill with which these local operations were conducted” (emphasis added). Hopkins’s biographer Robert Sherwood interpreted these remarks this way: “Roosevelt spoke thus cautiously of a critical battle because he knew, as the public did not, of the severe naval losses we had sustained and he was seeking to prepare the people for possible news that the Japanese had driven the Marines from the positions so precariously held on Guadalcanal.”6

  Meantime, on Guadalcanal (or just the Canal, as the marines and soldiers had come to call it), all preparations were being made to fend off the next enemy assault, which they had every reason to believe would be powerful indeed. The fortunate thing was that by now they had had ample time to strengthen and fortify their positions. Double and sometimes triple belts of barbed wire had been strung along the entire perimeter; fields of fire had been carefully cut out and artillery preregistered on all likely avenues of approach. Extra supplies of ammunition and other critical items had been brought forward and double communication wires run. Strong entrenchments had been dug and fast reaction reserves placed at critical points. The Seabees and engineers had repaired Henderson Field and, mercifully, new planes were arriving, many of them soon to come from the carrier Hornet, which was sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, but not before they’d gotten most of the planes off.

  There was delicious irony in this, for the battle of the nearby Santa Cruz Islands was fought by the Japanese to keep the Americans from reinforcing Guadalcanal, but aside from sinking the Hornet all it accomplished for them was to have the Hornet’s planes arrive at Guadalcanal, from where they could more closely bomb the Tokyo Express and shoot Japanese bombers out of the sky. In any event, all that could be done by the Americans had been done. There was only now to sit and wait.

  The blow began to fall on October 23, with an attack near the mouth of the now infamous Matanikau River. General Hyakutake’s battle plan was apparently to divert the Americans’ attention with this assault on the far western side of the perimeter, while the main attack would fall just east of Bloody Ridge with about 6,000 troops.* So confident was the Japanese commander that he had prepared an order of instruction as to how the surrender of Henderson Field would be handled: once it had been overrun, Lieutenant General Massao Maruyama, leading the attack, was to march Vandegrift and his staff to the mouth of the Matanikau, where the formalities would take place, after which they would be flown to Japan and paraded in disgrace through the streets of Tokyo.7

  The attack on the Matanikau began near sundown when nine Japanese tanks rolled out of the jungle toward the sand spit that blocked the mouth of the river and afforded its only crossing. Marines had heard the tanks rumbling in the jungle for the past day or so and were waiting on the other side with 37mm antitank guns. As the tanks emerged the marines blasted them one after the other with armor-piercing phosphorus shells. Eight of them were almost immediately destroyed and the ninth, as it slowly made its way forward, was attacked by a lone marine, who pitched a grenade into its track and ducked: the explosion blew off the track and the tank wobbled off across the sand spit and into the surf, where a big 75mm gun from a marine half-track used it for target practice. Not only that but the marines were savvy enough to understand that tanks do not operate without infantry and, assuming these were not far behind, an enormous preregistered artillery barrage was walked back and forth through the jungle in the direction from which the tanks had come. In between explosions, the marines could actually hear an unearthly chorus of screaming from the jungle. Later, several hundred Japanese bodies were
found there. So ended the “diversionary” phase of General Hyakutake’s assault.

  Next afternoon, from the marine position on Bloody Ridge, a Japanese officer was spied at the edge of the jungle, observing the ridge and surrounding area through binoculars. Understandably this raised suspicions, and the marines were ready, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lewis (Chesty) Puller, who had prepared his positions well.

  The Japanese attack was to have been led by that old Guadalcanal hand General Kawaguchi, who had already had his fill of the Bloody Ridge and wanted no more of it, but his strident arguments to move the assault farther to the east only got him sacked. At three A.M. the now familiar Banzai! was shouted from thousands of throats as the Japanese stormed out of the jungle toward the lower slopes. They were mowed down by the hundreds. Those who were left ran back into the jungle to regroup, work themselves up into another bloodthirsty frenzy, then swarm out again, only to receive another dose of the same medicine. They did this time and again until daybreak, when they gave up and marched back westward through the jungle from whence they came. At places the Japanese had made inroads, and there had been hand-to-hand fighting, but the marine line remained intact. In the part of the line held by the army’s newly arrived 164th Infantry Regiment, the Japanese were met with a particularly fierce fire. This was because the soldiers came equipped with the new M-l Garand, an eight-shot, semiautomatic rifle that replaced the old 1903 bolt-action rifle the marines had been using. It was to remain the standard infantry weapon for another twenty-five-years, until the Vietnam War era.

  Sunrise revealed a horrific sight in front of the American positions: thousands of Japanese lay dead on the slopes, sprawled in seemingly every grotesque position imaginable. All day long the air above was filled with fighting planes, and the marines and soldiers, in between sharpening their trench knives and cleaning their weapons, watched in fascination as Japanese plane after Japanese plane was flamed out of the sky. Newly arrived Lieutenant Joe Foss became an ace in one day! That afternoon and into the night there was more fighting to the west, between the Matanikau and the main marine perimeter, led by the Japanese colonel Oka, who must have been a trial to his superiors, as he had done nothing right since he had arrived on the island. He didn’t do it right this time, either; he had only to attack a very thin position held by a single marine battalion, which he outnumbered three to one. After several furious assaults he was thrown back with heavy losses, but this was not entirely without its tribulations. At one point Oka’s troops succeeded in breaking a part of the line, but they were soon kicked out by an assortment of cooks, bakers, jeep drivers, clerks, band members, and other headquarters personnel, hastily armed and dragooned into action by the battalion’s executive officer.

  The night of October 25 brought renewed attacks around Bloody Ridge, which met the same fate as those previous. In the middle of all this somebody foolishly told General Maruyama that Henderson Field had been conquered. Relishing the thought of marching Vandegrift and his staff down to the mouth of the Matanikau for the prearranged surrender ceremony, Maruyama signaled this news to the powerful Japanese fleet under Admiral Nobutake Kondo, which had been steaming restlessly in the Slot north of Guadalcanal, to come and take possession of the airfield and all its American prisoners. Dawn, however, told a different story to one of the admiral’s floatplanes, which had flown over Henderson Field just to make sure. It received a warm reception from American antiaircraft fire.

  In the end, Hyakutake’s attack had been a revolting bloodbath, owing to the stubbornness of the Japanese command, which seemed to have learned nothing from the previous lessons and continued with the suicidal tactic of human-wave assaults. The sheer number of dead posed an immediate problem since in the tropics bodies begin to decompose within hours, attracting flies that carry all kinds of diseases associated with rotting flesh. By morning, the wrecked Japanese army had slunk off, perhaps to fight another day, while the marines called in bulldozers from Henderson Field to dig trenches for a 3,500-man mass burial. General Vandegrift got his picture on the next cover of Time magazine.

  With Admiral Halsey now in overall command, the U.S. Navy returned to the bloodstained waters around Guadalcanal. It was a good thing, too, because despite the utter defeat of Hyakutake’s army, the infuriated Japanese became more determined than ever to eject the Americans from the island. They concluded that in order to do so they needed more men, ships, planes—everything—and to that end they began shipping in on the nightly Tokyo Express two full divisions, 24,000 strong. Fortunately, the Americans had received reinforcements too: more army regiments and a marine regiment, bringing Vandegrift’s strength up to about 22,000 effectives. Heavy artillery had also been landed to counter the big 150mm Japanese guns. Not only that, but U.S. fighter strength at Guadalcanal was now up to ten full squadrons, marine, navy, and army. This began to put a serious dent in the bomber groups the Japanese were sending down from Rabaul to plaster Henderson Field. The fighting continued daily throughout October and into November, though not with the intensity of the big battle just launched by Hyakutake. Vandegrift now felt confident enough to go over to the offensive and there were many clashes around that perpetual hotbed the Matanikau River. At first glance it would seem the Americans were getting things under control, except for one thing: the Japanese navy. So long as they could land troops and supplies every night and shell Henderson Field with impunity, the issue would remain in doubt. The issue was soon to be resolved, however, though with a terrible price to pay.

  The naval Battle of Guadalcanal was actually three separate battles on succeeding nights, November 13 to IS, 1942. It was one of the most ferocious naval battles in history, involving only surface ships: battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. It took place where the previous battles had erupted, in the waters of Ironbottom Sound around the dark cone of Savo Island.

  Halsey, recognizing the Japanese naval threat, had sent northward to the Solomons three powerful armadas of ships: two task groups consisting of six cruisers and thirteen destroyers and a full task force with two modern battleships escorted by four destroyers. The task groups were under command of rear admirals Daniel Callaghan and Norman Scott, and the task force of battleships was led by Rear Admiral Willis Lee. With a force this size, Halsey could have intended only a showdown, because intelligence indicated that a powerful Japanese fleet, including two battleships, was now bearing down on Guadalcanal to conduct another bombardment of Henderson Field.

  The forces under Callaghan and Scott—five cruisers and eight destroyers would see action—arrived off the island on November 12, escorting a flotilla of transports and supply ships. After unloading, they steamed away southward. The warships, under overall command of Callaghan, then steamed westward into Ironbottom Sound to find the enemy, who at that point had not yet arrived; so, just after nightfall, Callaghan set up his ships in a snakelike line of battle and began to patrol. Professor Morison, the navy historian, sets the scene: “A nine knot easterly breeze scarcely rippled the surface. The stars shone brightly and jagged flashes of lightning over the islands fitfully illuminated low lying clouds. The new moon had vanished below the dark horizon. Sailors peered from darkened bridges, waited in crowded plotting rooms and sweated in stifling engine rooms,* wondering what the score would be.”8 At 1:24 A.M. the cruiser Helena reported radar contact with a large group of strange ships steaming fast into the sound from the northwest, straight down the Slot from Rabaul. It was Friday the thirteenth.

  Admiral Callaghan, known to his crew as Uncle Dan, was a charismatic figure. He had been Roosevelt’s naval aide in the White House before joining Ghormley as his chief of staff. In that capacity it was Callaghan who had sat silently in Ghormley’s place in the crucial admirals’ meeting before the Guadalcanal landings, in which Admiral Fletcher decreed he would stay for only forty-eight hours after the landings to protect the invasion force.

  The radar blip that appeared on the Helena’s screen was about sixteen miles northwest, and getting cl
oser by the second, since the two fleets, each steaming at about twenty knots, were closing on each other at nearly fifty miles per hour. Instead of moving off to the flank and launching a torpedo attack, Callaghan decided to pitch right into the Japanese. Perhaps this was because he was aware of the woeful deficiencies of American torpedoes; in any case, the die was cast—the Americans knew the Japanese were coming, and the Japanese were as yet unaware of the American presence. But here Callaghan seemed to have faltered. It was not until 1:45 that he gave the order, “Stand by to open fire.” By now the Americans were actually within sight range of the Japanese ships, which were steaming in two parallel columns. Callaghan’s course pitched him right between them and a melee ensued.

  The whole ghastly business took no more than fifteen minutes. At 1:50 Japanese searchlights suddenly flashed on, illuminating the bridge of the cruiser Atlanta, Admiral Scott’s flagship. Atlanta began firing at the offending light, but it had already worked its evil; a salvo from one of the Japanese ships crashed into the Atlanta’s bridge, killing Admiral Scott and most of his staff. Then a torpedo exploded amidships, “lifting her bodily out of the sea”; when she settled back, she was dead in the water and sinking. It was then that Callaghan was overcome with confusion, and he gave an order, “Cease firing own ships!” It proved to be a fateful order.* With all the maneuvering and blasting and radio chatter, the admiral obviously believed that his ships were firing on their own—one of the major dangers in a night naval action—but he seems to have been wrong.

  In any case, no such order was given by the Japanese commander who, aboard the battleship Hiei, spied Callaghan’s flagship, San Francisco, just about the same time that San Francisco spied him. San Francisco fired first, but her salvo fell short. When Hiei fired, she was short also. Then, traveling parallel to each other at flank speed, the two ships blasted away in a duel that has been compared with naval actions of the seventeenth century. The San Francisco definitely made some devastating hits on her three-times-larger antagonist, with Admiral Callaghan shouting into the radios, “We want the big ones! Get the big ones first!” Then, suddenly, the San Francisco found herself caught in powerful searchlights, probably from a destroyer, and a stupendous salvo from the Hiei crashed into her bridge, killing Admiral Callaghan and all his staff as well as the ship’s captain and putting the San Francisco temporarily out of the action.