The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  As for the marines already on the island, Turner believed that they should take the offensive. On September 28, he urged Vandegrift to storm across the Matanikau River and hunt down the “nests of enemy troops” lurking along the coast to the west: “I believe you are in a position to take some chances and go after them hard.”37 The embattled marines were understandably irked by the suggestion that they had been too passive. Moreover, a ground offensive at that stage of the campaign was neither feasible nor sensible. The 1st Division lacked the equipment, weaponry, and ammunition to pursue the Japanese down the coast. The marines controlled the island’s only airfield, and their overriding priority should be to defend that asset and keep it supplied with adequate airpower. The Japanese, true to form, would continue to hurl themselves against the well-fortified American lines—and if those lines held, the attackers would suffer disastrous losses, as they had in the past.

  But Turner would not be dissuaded. In early October, the argument flared up again over the deployment of the 164th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army’s Americal Division. Vandegrift wanted the regiment on Guadalcanal, as reinforcement; Turner wanted to land it on Ndeni. Ghormley at first gave tentative approval to Turner’s plan. But General Harmon, on October 6, weighed in strongly in favor of sending it to Guadalcanal. Ndeni, he told Ghormley, would be “a diversion from the main effort and dispersion of force.” He warned that “the Jap is capable of retaking CACTUS-RINGBOLT [Guadalcanal-Tulagi] and . . . will do so in the near future unless it is materially strengthened.”38 Ghormley overruled Turner, and the 164th was landed at Lunga Point on October 13.

  The landing of the Americal troops led to another night naval action off Savo Island—eerily similar to the Battle of Savo Island two months earlier, but with a result more pleasing to the Americans. The transports carrying the Americal troops had been accompanied by a small task force of four cruisers and five destroyers, under the command of Rear Admiral Norman Scott. On the night of October 11–12, Scott’s warships ambushed a Japanese column of three cruisers and two destroyers as they headed into Iron-bottom Sound to bombard Henderson Field. The surprise attack destroyed a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer and heavily damaged another cruiser. The Japanese commander, Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto, was critically wounded and later died. Scott lost a destroyer, the Duncan, and suffered damage to the cruisers Boise and Salt Lake City. The short, vicious fight, which would pass into history as the “Battle of Cape Esperance,”‡ was a tactical victory for the Americans, though not by the margin they apparently believed. (Scott reported that he had sunk three Japanese cruisers and four destroyers. That inflated result was reported as fact in the American press.) But the victory, such as it was, did little good for the marines. Later the same night, another of Tanaka’s convoys successfully landed troop reinforcements and supplies (including artillery field pieces) near the cape that gave the battle its name. Two nights later, a larger Japanese surface force would pour the heaviest barrage of the campaign down on Henderson Field.

  Between bombing raids by day and naval shelling at night, nothing could be done to stop the Japanese from punching holes in Henderson Field. But the airfield was kept in reasonably good repair by the diligent exertions of the Seabees, who filled in the craters as soon as they appeared. Each Seabee unit manned a repair station directly alongside the airfield. When a bomb landed on the runway, the nearest unit raced to the smoking hole, tore up the ruined Marston matting, and hauled it away. They dumped dirt and gravel into the hole from a dump truck, then hauled in the replacement steel and laid it over the fill. “We found that a 500-pound bomb would tear up 1,500 square feet of a Marston mat,” said one, “so we placed packages of this quantity of mat along the strip, like extra rails along a railroad.”39 When the work was interrupted by low-flying, strafing Zeros, they dived for cover into trenches alongside the field—or into the bomb crater itself, if that was possible.

  Marine, navy, and army air reinforcements flew in every few days to replace aircraft lost or damaged beyond the possibility of repair. The Cactus Air Force now included more than a dozen USAAF pursuit planes, but the workhorses of the air campaign remained the carrier-type aircraft—F4F Wildcats, SBD Dauntlesses, and TBF Avengers, flown by marine and navy aircrews. Aircraft designed to operate from carriers were equipped with landing gear that could sustain plenty of punishment, and that suited them to a beaten-up airfield like Henderson. In a month on Guadalcanal, the navy pilots flew more combat hours than they would fly during six months of typical carrier operations.

  The bombers and torpedo planes flew long daily scouting missions to the northwest. In the late afternoon, they might discover Japanese shipping inbound for Guadalcanal—the “Tokyo Express coming down Broadway”—and if they did, General Geiger launched an airstrike with whatever planes he could muster. Those long daily flights “up the alley” were grueling and dangerous, and not only because the Japanese shot back. In the Solomons, visibility could deteriorate quickly and at any time. Swede Larsen badgered his VT-8 pilots to write down their navigational checkpoints. Memory was unreliable, especially under the strain of combat flying: “You would see points of land in low visibility when the Russell Islands or the lower tip of the New Georgia islands would look like Cape Esperance. The first thing you knew, if you were not actually checking yourself in speed, time and distance, you would be lost; it’s very easy to do.”40

  When the cumulus clouds descended almost to sea level, the aviators flew on instruments, in formation, shrouded in mist and rain showers. They struggled to maintain contact with their wingmen, keeping their eyes locked on the blue exhaust flames of the planes ahead. When one young TBF pilot lost visual contact with the plane ahead, he would “rudder back and forth until I felt the slip stream, and then I crept slowly straight ahead until I picked the exhaust up again.”41 Planes in formation drifted apart, lost contact, and turned back alone. Now and again, flashes of light cut through the gloom. Were they gunfire flashes? Lightning? Flares? Was a friendly plane flashing his running lights to guide his wingmen back in? It was often hard to tell. Under the stress of such flying, pilots sometimes misread their altimeters and flew into the sea.

  Four or five weeks of daily combat flying was about the limit of the aviators’ endurance. The routine was physically, mentally, and emotionally punishing. After six weeks, even the toughest among them seemed to buckle under the strain. Aviation and medical authorities were coming to accept that “pilot fatigue” was a real and unavoidable syndrome that must be countered by rotating squadrons out of the theater every four to six weeks. Aviators pushed past the limit became listless, haggard, and hollow-eyed; they lost weight rapidly even if well fed; they crashed more often, or made navigation errors and got lost; their reflexes slowed and their aggressiveness diminished. In extreme cases, pilots were known to crawl under the wings of their airplanes, curl up in a fetal position, and cry like children. When coaxing and threats failed, they had to be literally kicked until they staggered to their feet and climbed back into their cockpits.

  Admiral Kelly Turner had once dismissed talk of pilot fatigue, supposing it sounded too much like coddling, but now he declared himself a believer: “When the medicos used to tell us about pilot fatigue, I used to think they were old fuds. But now I know what they meant. There’s a point where you just get to be no good; you’re shot to the devil—and there’s nothing you can do about it.”42

  Joe Foss, one of the mentally toughest aviators in the South Pacific, told a navy panel that pilots could endure no more than six weeks in combat. “The fourth week you start to slip,” he said. “And the fifth week you’ll lose a lot of men that are really good men that just get a little bit tired and dope off so that will result in their being shot down.” Moreover, Foss added, when pilots were rotated back into the theater after an extended rest, “you’ll find that you tire a lot easier. . . . On our second trip in I noticed that the second week the boys seemed to be failing again.”43

  The stoic Larsen took a
less forgiving view. He believed the fault was to be found in poor training and leadership. Fear was natural and inevitable, but it had to be managed. If the pilots understood their own fear and anticipated it, they would be better prepared to master it. Speaking for himself, Larsen observed, “I know that I felt a reaction to my first engagement for a couple of days afterwards; you get filled up with a lot of nervous tension which gradually wears off. After we had made a few attacks on Guadalcanal, however, the nervous reaction would last only from 10 to 15 minutes after you landed. That is, you were excited and keyed up; then it would die away and you wouldn’t feel especially tired.”44 Larsen suggested a whiskey ration at the end of each flight: “I know that might sound strange, but if you give a man a drink of whiskey after an attack, he thinks it’s fine. . . . Those little extra privileges make the men feel a hell of a lot better.”45

  AFTERWARD, THE MARINES WOULD REMEMBER IT simply as “The Night.”46 It was the night, October 13–14, when the battleships Kongo and Haruna stood into Ironbottom Sound and rained 14-inch shells down on Henderson Field for an hour and a half. The marines had long since grown accustomed to night bombardments, but never before had they been on the receiving end of such monstrous projectiles, which made every previous encounter seem picayune by comparison. Each of the two battleships had been armed with 500 rounds of a new type of shell designed to inflict the greatest possible damage on parked aircraft and fortified positions. Firing tests in Truk Lagoon had demonstrated that these shells (a thin casing loaded with incendiary and shrapnel, instantaneously fused) were most effective when striking the target at an angle of 25 degrees.47 That gave the Kongo and Haruna their ideal firing range: 16,000 meters, or about ten miles. At that distance, the American shore batteries had no prospect of returning effective fire.

  The Night had been preceded by an afternoon of relentless and unusually heavy airstrikes. For some reason, coastwatcher alerts had not been timely, and several F4F Wildcats were caught on the ground and destroyed. Aerial bombing punched craters in Henderson Field and the auxiliary grass field at Fighter One. An avgas fuel dump took a direct hit and went up in a mushroom cloud of blue-orange flame. At sunset, when the western sky lit up in a typically majestic palate of tropical colors, a new sound was heard to the west. “Pistol Pete,” the marines’ nickname for a Japanese 150mm artillery battery, was shelling the airfield from an unseen position at the base of Mount Austen. General Geiger ordered his grounded planes to taxi to Fighter One, out of range.

  As darkness fell, Japanese floatplanes circled overhead and dropped stray bombs here or there, nothing more obnoxious than usual. Shortly after eleven, the sirens signaled “Condition Green” (all clear), and men dragged themselves out of the foxholes and dugouts and back to wherever they were sleeping. “Pistol Pete” was intermittently active throughout the night. Men snatched sleep in twenty- to thirty-minute increments. At about one, the sirens sounded “Condition Red,” and men went wearily back to their shelters. At 1:30 a.m., a cruiser plane dropped a flare, and then a star shell fired from a ship offshore burst directly over the airfield.

  Then came an ascending scream often compared to a freight train’s whistle, and a series of gigantic detonations that seemed to turn the night into day. They were, Lieutenant Merillat recorded in his diary, “the heaviest blasts I have ever heard.”48 Each explosion gouged a truckload of soil out of the ground and flung it into the air. Entire trenches were buried in showers of earth and rock. The air was choked with dust and smoke that worked its way into the men’s noses, ears, eyes, and throats. Ensign Mears was in a foxhole with several other pilots:

  We could see the flash from a salvo light the sky, hear the report, then the whistle of the shells, and finally the terrible crack-crack of the shell exploding. Coconut trees split off and crashed to the ground, shrapnel whirred through the air, a few duds came crashing and bounding through the jungle without exploding. We smelled the powder of detonating shells. The sky was now ghostly, now brilliant with fires which had been started and with pin-wheel star shells. Some of the shells hit not more than twenty or thirty feet from our dugout. When a big one struck, the walls of the dugout trembled the way chocolate pudding does when someone spats it with a spoon.49

  Even in the deepest and best-constructed bomb shelters, the immense concussions lifted men into the air and hurled them against the walls. A crowded dugout was preferable to an empty one. Where there were enough men, they could hang on to one another for mutual support—but if a man found himself alone, a Seabee noted, “you’d rattle around in your foxhole like a ping-pong ball.”50 General Vandegrift and several of his staff were in the command post’s bomb shelter when an explosion outside “bowled us down like a row of ten pins.” The general picked himself up, “unhurt except in dignity.”51 Each salvo shook dirt loose from the coconut log roofs. Colonel Twining recalled that “the earth seemed to turn to the consistency of Jell-O, making it difficult to move or even remain upright.”52

  At the height of the barrage, some of the men in Mears’s shelter laughed uncontrollably. One pilot was overcome with violent trembling. Another struggled physically to burrow under the other men. The top of a nearby tree was severed from its trunk and crashed down across the foxhole.

  When the big guns fell silent, at about 3:00 a.m., men on the ground could make out the familiar rattle of “Washing-Machine Charlie” overhead. Bombs continued to fall at erratic intervals for the rest of the night. Those blasts were puny compared to the battleship shells, but they were steady and dangerous. No one slept. Vandegrift vowed that he would never judge a man suffering from combat fatigue or shell shock. No one who has not suffered under that kind of bombardment, he wrote, can “easily grasp a sensation compounded of frustration, helplessness, fear and, in case of close hits, shock.”53

  Dawn exposed the carnage. Bleary-eyed men stumbled out of their trenches and dugouts, some dressed and some half-naked, some barefoot and some bleeding. They gratefully sipped coffee brewed in fuel drums, the bitter brown fluid comforting their jangled nerves. Sifting through the wreckage, men found heavy steel base plates larger than dinner plates, and sections of 14-inch casing, some weighing nearly twenty pounds.54 Dugouts adjoining the airfield were entirely buried by earth and trees torn out of the ground, and men still trapped inside had to be excavated.55 Martin Clemens discovered, within a hundred-yard radius of his position, “six tremendous craters, any one of which could have hidden a jeep.”56

  Blackened, smoking, deformed lumps of aluminum wreckage occupied the aircraft parking areas around Henderson Field. An inventory of the Cactus Air Force revealed that five SBDs and perhaps seven or eight Wildcats remained in flyable condition. No Avenger could fly without major repairs. VT-8’s chief mechanic judged all but three TBFs a total loss, and of the three that might be salvaged, only one could be repaired inside of a week. The surviving planes had to be dispersed to less vulnerable positions and, if possible, hidden from the enemy. Wrecked planes were lined up in neat rows, wingtip to wingtip, in hopes of diverting the enemy’s attention. A new aircraft parking area was established near the eastern extremity of the perimeter, and a strong force of marines posted to guard it.

  Several of the Avenger airmen, made redundant by the loss of their machines, walked back to their camp and found it a near-complete loss. Every tent had either vanished or been left in a heap of shreds, and all their contents of “mosquito netting, cots, tables, and papers and luggage, had been riddled and tangled and scattered by shrapnel holes and explosions.” The survivors were tense, but also a bit giddy. Ensign Robert E. Ries Jr. drew a laugh from his squadron mates by “pulling the corners of his eyes toward his ears and saying, ‘So sorry. Which way to Henderson Field, please?’ ”57

  Hundreds of drums of precious avgas had gone up in flames. An urgent appeal went out to quartermasters and supply officers to hunt down any reserves. Many small fuel dumps had been dispersed and hidden in small caches around the field and in the woods. Several hundred drums were
discovered, and another 200 were transferred from Tulagi. At one point, Geiger reported that his entire reserve had been pumped into the tanks of the flyable planes on the island. Another night of similar bombardment, he warned, might put the entire air force out of action.

  Forty-one men lay dead. That figure was lower than it might have been, a testament to the depth and strength of the bomb shelters and the determination of all to keep their heads down for the duration of the barrage. One dugout took a direct hit, killing nine men at one blow. A newly arrived marine dive-bombing squadron had lost both its commanding officer and its executive officer.

  Heavy air attacks, artillery fire, and nighttime naval barrages (though not by battleships) continued throughout the next several days and nights. On the morning of October 15, Americans standing on the bluff above Kukum watched six Japanese troop transports “brazenly unloading” off Tassafaronga, about ten miles west. Japanese destroyers patrolled protectively in the sound, little more than a mile offshore. Clemens observed the incoming troops through his field glasses as they mustered in smart lines. He could not tell how many there were, but their numbers certainly ran into the thousands. Geiger managed to throw his few operable SBDs against the Japanese transports and set two afire, but only after they had unloaded their cargos and troop reinforcements.