The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The promised airplanes were those of Marine Aircraft Group 23 (MAG-23), which included two squadrons of F4F Wildcat fighters and two of Dauntless (SBD) dive-bombers.37 They had been training since May at Ewa Field in Oahu. The skipper of Marine Fighter Squadron 223 was Captain John L. Smith, who had just recently transferred from a dive-bombing squadron. Most of his pilots were second lieutenants, recently out of flight training; a few were lucky survivors of the air defense of Midway the previous June. Their combat experience to date had given them little cause for confidence. Marine Bombing 232 was manned by aviators just out of flight school, many of whom had never dropped a live bomb from an SBD. The marine squadrons were dangerously green, but circumstances did not allow for more training. They were needed on Guadalcanal immediately. As Nimitz’s CINCPAC headquarters war diary observed on August 13, “Opinion here is that no squadron is ever sufficiently trained. . . . At any event they are well enough trained to go to work down south.”38

  The marine F4Fs and SBDs launched by catapult off the escort carrier Long Island (which had ferried them down from Pearl Harbor) on the afternoon of August 20. The carrier lay about 190 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, about an hour’s flight to Henderson Field. About fifteen minutes after takeoff, the island’s green mountains loomed over the horizon.

  Loren D. “Doc” Everton, one of the most experienced fighter pilots in the group, gazed down at the unfolding northern plains and was struck by how peaceful and beautiful the island appeared from the air. But as they arrived over Lunga, neither he nor his wingmen liked the look of Henderson Field. The approach had been cleared of tall coconut palms, leaving a meadow strewn with stumps and heaps of rotting foliage. At 3,600 feet, the field was long enough but very rough and uneven, with patches of mud amid the gravel. David Galvan, a marine radioman-gunner on an SBD, recalled seeing “a very small pasture with a whole lot of holes in it. . . . I mean a narrow one too. When you come into Guadalcanal there was a grove of coconut trees, maybe three-quarters of a mile, then you go into an opening: a little kind of meadow that extended from Tenaru River running east by southeast. On the opposite side was jungle—thick jungle: a solid mass of trees and brush.”39

  About 4:00 that afternoon, men on Guadalcanal first caught the distant drone of aircraft engines. Many moved instinctively toward their trenches and foxholes, but these planes were approaching from the east rather than from the west (as the enemy planes usually did). The antiaircraft gunners tensed but held fire. Then the drone ascended to a roar, and thirty-one blue carrier planes flew low over the field and then circled back to line up their landing approaches. Shouts of joy rose up all throughout the perimeter, and men waved their helmets above their heads. “I just looked up and grinned till I felt the mud crack on my whiskers,” a marine remarked. “It looked so damn good to see something American circling in the sky over the airfield. It was like being all alone, and the lights come on, and you’ve got friends from home in the same room with you.”40

  Nineteen Wildcats and twelve Dauntlesses lined up in an orderly pattern and touched down one by one. Most bounced once or twice before settling on the field. The thirty-one propellers threw gravel pebbles and kicked up clouds of dust that hovered in the air even after they cut their engines. As the planes taxied to a stop, men clambered onto the wings to greet the pilots with handshakes and backslaps. Vandegrift, overcome with emotion, took the hand of Major Dick Mangrum, commander of Marine Bombing 232, and said, “Thank God you have come.”41

  No event of the Guadalcanal campaign lifted morale so much as the arrival of those first planes. The “Cactus Air Force,” as it was immediately dubbed, offered protection against attack by air, sea, and land. It gave Vandegrift eyes over the shipping approaches to the northwest. Martin Clemens wrote that the planes’ arrival was “a gladsome sight, and gave me a tingle right down the spine.”42 Colonel Merrill Twining thought it “one of the great turning points” of the campaign.43

  Climbing from their planes, the marine aviators were greeted by their new ground crews—sailors of CUB-l, a navy mobile advanced base construction team. The unit had no special training to work on airplanes, but they were mechanically gifted and quickly learned what they needed to know. Their work was complicated by the primitive conditions at Henderson. All fueling was done by hand pumps fastened to gasoline drums. Bombs were transported on trucks to the airfield from ammunition caches hidden in the palm groves; they had to be muscled up to the underbellies of the SBDs by hand. It was backbreaking, exhausting work. Henderson had no taxiways, no revetments, and no drainage. Steel matting had not yet been laid, and the middle section of the field was soft and uneven. Carrier aircraft, built to withstand hard impact on a flight deck, would stand up to the abusive landings at Henderson. More delicate types were likely to suffer considerable wear and tear.

  There were signs that afternoon of an impending attack on the eastern flank of the American lines. A night earlier, ships had been heard passing through the sound from west to east. Some minutes later, several large waves washed up on the beach. Three hours later, another set of waves washed up on the beach, and ships were heard to return to the west. It did not require clever deduction to conclude that Japanese troops had probably landed somewhere to the east of the marine lines. (A detachment of 916 troops under Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki had landed at 11:00 p.m. that night.) Throughout the twentieth, Japanese cruisers and destroyers operated in Ironbottom Sound with complete impunity, unchecked and unmolested. Clemens had received native reports of a Japanese force “of unknown size” down the coast to the east. On the afternoon of August 19, he sent a patrol under the native constable Jacob C. Vouza to creep across the American lines into the heavily forested ridge south of Henderson Field, and then to turn east and back north to the coast, in hopes of gaining information about Japanese movements in that area.

  Vandegrift strengthened his lines on the right bank of the Tenaru River by summoning reinforcements from Tulagi, where the fighting was finished. As darkness fell, the marines were on edge. Any sound in the jungle beyond their lines was liable to signal the beginning of an enemy attack. At midnight, the floatplane “Washing Machine Charlie” arrived on his normal schedule, dropped a single bomb, and then continued circling noisily overhead. At 2:00 a.m., the plane dropped a brilliant green parachute flare over the sandbar at the mouth of the Tenaru. Observers discerned shadows moving through the underbrush. Marine outposts on the far side of the river were withdrawn to the defensive lines on the right bank.

  At 2:30 a.m. came the first “banzai charge”—several hundred screaming Japanese hurtled across the sand spit and breeched the marine lines. A cacophony of machine-gun, rifle, and mortar fire rose from the engaged front. That charge was bloodily repulsed, with about 200 enemy soldiers hung up in barbed wire and cut down by enfilading machine-gun fire. The Japanese tried again, this time north of the river’s sand spit; this too was stopped dead, with heavy losses to the attackers. Japanese positions east of the river concentrated light mortar and rifle fire on the point at which they had first attempted to break through, but the line held fast as reserves were brought up.

  The screams of “Banzai!” intermingled with the rattle of machine-gun fire and the repeating crescendos of mortar and artillery fire. The .50-caliber guns, held down in long bursts, made a sustained roar. The .30-caliber guns made a sharper staccato sound. The American mortars thumped deeply. The Japanese 25mm bursts were shorter and higher pitched. To men who could recognize the different weapons by their sounds, one thing was agreeably obvious—the Americans were generating a much greater volume of fire. Clemens watched from the intelligence division headquarters adjacent to the airfield, half a mile away: “Tracers ricocheted up into the sky, together with red and white flares as Japanese columns came into the attack. We could see the coconut palms silhouetted in pink flashes and, in that strange light, debris being thrown heavenward. Everything appeared to be going all right, but it all seemed dangerously near, and as the din increased I had th
e eerie feeling that the battle was creeping closer.”44 For the newly arrived aviators, still settling into their new accommodations, the battle was an eye-opener. Doc Everton had moved into a Japanese tent and fashioned a bed with woven rice straw bags, two deep. Though he knew he needed sleep, he sat up all night with his .45 sidearm in one hand and his helmet in the other. He kept his shoes on.

  Shortly before dawn, the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel L. B. Creswell, was ordered across the river to attack the enemy’s left flank and rear. The battalion crossed the river about a mile above its mouth and enveloped the Japanese forces entirely, cutting off their retreat. The remaining enemy soldiers, about 500 men, were trapped in a coconut grove and slaughtered methodically throughout the morning of August 21. At first light, F4F fighters took to the air and flew strafing runs over the enemy position. By late afternoon, it seemed that the few remaining Japanese troops could be overrun in a concerted counterattack across the river.

  While this last act of the Battle of the Tenaru River was playing out, Jacob C. Vouza crawled back into the American lines. He was nearly dead for loss of blood. His patrol had run into an advance scouting force of the Japanese invasion group. Vouza had been brutally interrogated, enduring prolonged torture while tied to a tree. He had been smashed repeatedly in the face by rifle butts, and his face was a swollen bloody mass; he had been stabbed by bayonets and was bleeding freely from the throat and chest. Against the odds, his torturers had struck no vital artery, and he had managed to chew through the ropes and crawl back to the American lines. Taken to the field hospital, he was stitched up and fed blood intravenously. In twelve days he recovered and returned to duty. His heroism was recognized by two nations: the United States awarded Vouza the Silver Star and Legion of Merit, and the British knighted him and named him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

  In the aftermath of the battle, the marines quickly learned that the enemy owed no allegiance to the norms of “civilized war.” Wounded Japanese soldiers would call for medical attention and then shoot the corpsmen who came in response. Others would pretend to lie dead, clutching a grenade, hoping to take a marine with them to the afterlife. “I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting,” Vandegrift wrote the commandant of the Marine Corps. “These people refuse to surrender. The wounded will wait until the men come up to examine them and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade. You can readily see the answer to that.”45

  A platoon of light tanks was deployed to finish off the remaining survivors. They fired canister shot into the fields of dead and wounded, and ran over the bodies with their treads. Vandegrift, visiting the scene late that afternoon, remarked that “the rear of the tanks looked like meat grinders.”46 Another marine officer had this recollection: “Japanese bodies lay piled together in stinking heaps—burned, crushed, and torn. A tide flowed and ebbed before all could be buried, and here an arm, there a head, stuck up through the new-washed sand on the beach.”47 In losing forty-three killed and fifty-seven wounded, the marines had annihilated Ichiki’s entire attacking force of 800 men. (The rest of the detachment, numbering about 120 men, had been left behind to the east as a rear guard.)

  The psychological repercussions of the Tenaru action were far-reaching. That victory, and the actions on Tulagi and Gavutu two weeks earlier, had put an end to the myth of the Japanese soldier as an untouchable jungle warrior. The fanaticism of the Japanese was unnerving, but it prompted them, again and again, to fight in tactically idiotic ways.

  Vandegrift lost no time in circulating word of the victory. Attacked by a large force, the marines on the Tenaru “defended their position with such zeal and determination that the enemy was unable to effect a penetration of the position in spite of repeated efforts throughout the night. The 1st Marines, counterattacking at daybreak with an envelopment which caught the enemy in the rear and on the flank, thus cutting off his withdrawal and pushing him from inland in the direction of the sea, virtually annihilated his force and achieved a victory fully commensurate with the military traditions of our Corps.”48

  IN TWO PREVIOUS CARRIER DUELS, Frank Jack Fletcher had enjoyed timely intelligence about the enemy’s plans. Now the picture was murkier. The Japanese had updated their naval code again on August 13, setting the cryptanalysts back by several weeks. Radio traffic analysis had detected the southward movement of naval forces from Japan’s home waters to Truk, which might presage a move into the lower Solomons, but the Americans lacked hard evidence of the whereabouts of the Japanese carriers. Commander Joseph Rochefort, chief of Pearl Harbor’s codebreaking unit, who had set up the American victory at Midway, believed they were in Japan’s Inland Sea.49 No data had emerged to challenge that theory, and if Nagumo’s task force was practicing good radio discipline, it might have moved south to Truk or even into the Solomons. Ghormley radioed Fletcher on August 22: “Indications point strongly to enemy attack in force CACTUS area 23–26 August.” COMSOPAC believed the enemy fleet might include one or two battleships, fifteen cruisers, and many destroyers: “Presence of carriers possible but not confirmed.”50

  Since his withdrawal on August 9, Fletcher’s mandate had been to fly cover over the sea-lanes linking bases in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides to the Solomons, and to assist in transferring aircraft to Henderson Field. He had taken care to keep his ships well fueled, in case of any sudden contingency. Receiving news of the Japanese ground attack on the Tenaru River, he turned north on the night of August 19–20 and advanced to an aggressively far northwest position, just east of the island of Malaita. But radio intelligence continued to posit that the Japanese carriers remained at Truk, more than 1,000 miles northwest—and if that was so, the earliest they could be expected to give battle was August 25. Fletcher, supposing he had a two-day refueling window, sent the Wasp and her escorts south to rendezvous with a fleet oiler. As it happened, she would not return in time to join the impending battle.

  On August 22 and 23, as each combatant probed for the other, the skies above the region were congested with reconnaissance planes. Admiral McCain’s PBYs and B-17s flew long missions from Espiritu Santo; marine dive-bombers spread out from Henderson Field; six more PBYs operated from a lagoon on Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands. From Rabaul, big four-engine Kawanishi flying boats radiated out in 700-mile search vectors to the south and east.51 On August 22, shortly before 11:00 a.m., the Enterprise radar scope picked up a blip to the southwest. Four fighters were sent to investigate. They tracked a Kawanishi and quickly sent it down in flames.

  The next morning brought a confusing flood of contact reports. PBYs from Ndeni reported a column of four transports escorted by four destroyers east of Bougainville Island, about 300 miles north of Guadalcanal. This was Tanaka’s occupation force. Aware that he had been snooped, and fearing a punishing air attack on his vulnerable transports, Tanaka turned north. Radioing from his flagship Yamato, Admiral Yamamoto ordered Nagumo to send the “Diversionary Force”—light carrier Ryujo, heavy cruiser Tone, destroyers Amatsukaze and Tokitsukaze—to race south and attack Henderson Field the following morning. The scheduled date for Tanaka’s troop landings was pushed back to August 25.

  With the PBYs’ sighting report in hand, Fletcher launched a powerful strike from the Saratoga, thirty-one dive-bombers and six TBF Avenger torpedo planes, to attack Tanaka’s column. Commander Harry D. Felt, the Saratoga air group commander, led the flight. They were joined en route by another nine SBDs, one TBF, and thirteen fighters from Henderson Field. The formation ran into a wall of impenetrable wet white haze. Felt arrayed his planes by sections in a line abreast, flying just 50 feet above the sea. No one could see anything but the sea below and the planes on either side. “We must have flown in this stuff for an hour,” Felt remembered, “and all of a sudden, broke through into an open area, and there was the whole damned group right there. Just magnificent discipline!”52

  Tanaka having dodged north to avoid just this attack, Felt and his sq
uadrons found no sign of the enemy fleet. The Saratoga planes followed the marine planes back to Guadalcanal, where they managed to land on the muddy field in the failing light. The exhausted Saratoga pilots spent the night in their cockpits, ready to take off at dawn.

  The two carrier forces were mutually blind. They were only 300 miles apart, just beyond extreme air-striking range, but neither had pinpointed the other’s location. Between 5:55 and 6:30 a.m. on August 24, the Enterprise launched twenty-three SBDs. From the carrier’s position, 200 miles east of Malaita, they fanned out in a 120-degree arc to the north and west. The PBYs at Ndeni were also in the air before first light. The Japanese fleet, converging on Guadalcanal from the west, was still just beyond the edges of the American morning search, and none of the Enterprise planes reported a contact. But one of McCain’s PBYs spotted the Ryujo force roaring south at 9:05 a.m., and another found the heavy surface warships of Kondo and Abe’s force half an hour later.