It became necessary for Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge to fly to Australia in search of those islanders who had fled the Japanese advance. Goettge spent a week in Melbourne and a few days in Sydney, moving from the austerity of military offices to the jolly babble of the pubs to the secrecy of hotel rooms, talking to missionaries, blackbirders, sailboat skippers and one scar-faced giant of a planter named John Mather. They were South Sea characters straight out of a short story by Somerset Maugham, but their memories were all that Goettge had working for him. He brought eight of them back to Wellington with him.
Goettge also requested the Army’s 648th Engineer Topographic Battalion, then in Melbourne, to put on a “red-rush” aerial photo-mapping of Guadalcanal. The Army obliged. A photography flight was flown. Then, in the way of every army since Agamemnon’s, a transportation officer saw to it that the negatives were delayed ten days in reaching the map plant, after which his naval counterpart had the finished maps placed at the bottom of a steadily mounting pile of boxes in Auckland. The Marines in Wellington never got their maps, making one of their own from such catch-as-catch-can “intelligence” as could be produced during sessions in which anxious Americans prodded amiable Australians with questions and Scotch whisky. At one of the last of these a planter who had lived on Guadalcanal recalled having had to shoot a couple of cows which had fallen into the Tenaru River and could not get back up its steep banks. His appalled interrogator reminded him that he had said earlier that vehicles could cross the shallow Tenaru with ease. The Australian replied that he meant the mouth of the Tenaru, never suspecting that any troops would want to cross it upstream. But the Marines were crossing upstream and now they would need to bring along bridging material—and that meant unloading and reloading an entire ship.
An aerial reconnaissance made by Lieutenant Colonel Merrill Twining and Major William McKean produced one vital piece of information: that the landing beaches appeared usable. Twining and McKean went aboard an Army B-17 bomber in Port Moresby, New Guinea, and flew to Guadalcanal. A trio of growling float Zeros rose from Tulagi anchorage to welcome them. The Flying Fort’s gunners shot two of the Japanese down, but the third badgered the big bomber so persistently that it actually ran out of gas, riding a tail-wind home to Moresby to land with bone-dry tanks.
Yet, the First Marine Division remained confident of its ability to “occupy and defend” the objectives. The plan was to make five landings. The main body—First and Fifth Regiments—would land on the northern beaches of Guadalcanal at a point about 10 miles west of the center of its 90-mile length. Four smaller landings would be made 20 miles directly north. The First Marine Raider Battalion and a battalion of the Second Marines would hit tiny Tulagi, which was almost invisible from northern Guadalcanal for the bulk of Florida looming behind or north of it. A battalion of the Second Marines would secure Florida. The chuteless First Marine Parachute Battalion would hit Guvutu-Tanambogo, twin specks of rock joined by a causeway and lying a few miles east or to the right of Tulagi.
On July 22, eleven days following the arrival of the First Marines from San Francisco, the troopships stood out of the hill-girdled harbor at Wellington and made for the open sea. They reached the Fiji Islands with Vandegrift’s staff relieved to hear that D-Day had been pushed back to August 7, but concerned to learn that the Japanese had begun building an airfield on Guadalcanal. General Vandegrift himself was shaken to find that he could not expect Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher to keep his covering carriers in the battle area for more than three days. Fletcher would not risk the Japanese flying down from Rabaul and the upper Solomons. Nor would he stay in waters where five enemy flattops and a force of fast battleships could get at that precious trio of American carriers. The other warships under the over-all expeditionary command of Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner would remain as long as necessary.
At the Fijis also the mass rehearsals were called off when it was found that Koro Island’s sharp coral was cutting up the division’s landing boats, and it was at the Fijis that the Marines got the last and biggest surprise since Admiral Ghormley had looked at General Vandegrift and said, “You.”
Marine officers arriving in the Fijis by plane from New Zealand brought with them copies of the July 4 edition of the Wellington Dominion, which carried the following story:
HOPE OF COMING U.S. THRUST
South Pacific Marines
INTENSIFIED RAIDS IN NORTH
(Received July 3, 7 P.M.)
New York, July 2.
Operations to seize Japanese-held bases, such as Rabaul, Wake Island, and Tulagi, are advocated by the military writer of the New York Herald-Tribune, Major Eliot. One of the signs which suggest that the United Nations may be getting ready to capitalize on the naval advantage gained on the Coral Sea and Midway battles is the recent American bombing of Wake Island, he says. The other signs include the intensified raids on the Timor and New Guinea areas.
“Bombing alone is not enough, because at best it can only prevent the enemy from using the bases,” he continues. “What is needed is to drive the Japanese out of their positions and convert them to our own use. The only way to take positions such as Rabaul, Wake Island, and Tulagi, is to land troops to take physical possession of them.”
The New York Times suggests that Wake Island may be retaken “not only to avenge the Marines who died defending it but also because if we could take hold of the island our lines would be advanced more than 1,000 miles.”
The newspaper adds: “It may also be significant that the censor passed the news of the arrival of the completely equipped expeditionary force of American Marines at a South Pacific port recently, as Marines are not usually sent to bases where action is not expected.”
There was more, but the Marines could only think of the earlier phrase: Rabaul, Wake Island, and Tulagi. And here they were, sailing to Tulagi, a name which both Japanese and Down-Unders found synonymous with Solomon Islands. It was incredible, but it was not, of course, treachery. It was something equally destructive: stupidity. Still, there was nothing for these Marines to do but to fire off an abundant arsenal of oaths. A few days more, July 31, and the ships weighed anchor and sailed away.
To Tulagi.
2
Daylight of August 6, 1942, had turned to dusk.
Among the ships of the American fleet, the motors of the winches and the landing boats had fallen silent. The open mouths of the hatches made darker pools in the gathering gloom. Men stood at the rails of their ships, talking in low voices, gazing at the horizon where the slender silhouettes of flanking destroyers were rapidly becoming invisible.
“Darken ship. The smoking lamp is out on all weather decks. All troops below decks.”
It had come for the last time, this order. It had been heard for many nights, by some men for months of nights, but it had never before possessed such capacity to chill hearts.
They went below, with little of the accustomed horseplay, without the usual ineffectual insults hurled at the bullhorn that had ordered them down. They descended to troopholds far below the water line, where five-tiered bunks were slung from bulkheads and the air could become one with the foul reek of the heads if the blowers should break down. Many of them took showers, in fresh water if they were lucky enough to be aboard a ship that could spare it, but generally in salt water which left their bodies sticky and unrefreshed. Some men gathered at final Protestant services, others went to confessions being heard by Catholic chaplains. Weapons were wiped free of excess oil that might gather sand and clog them. Packs were checked for the last time, filled with mess gear, clean socks and underwear, shaving gear, rations—here a Bible, there a pack of letters-from-home, an unfinished paperback book, a crumpled photo of a pin-up girl—all those individual extras which men put in their packs as whim and character might direct. Now the men were banging the chained bunks down from the bulkheads, crawling into them fully dressed—for no one removed his clothes that night. The showdown games had ended and the ultimate winn
ers were choosing between stowing the money on their persons or sending it home via the ship’s post office. Attempts at humor were falling flat and fading into tight-lipped silence, lights were going out below decks, and all was quiet save for the steady throbbing of the ships’ motors. Lulled by this and the gentle rise and fall of the ships, the men of the First Marine Division sought sleep.
In the wardrooms above, lights still burned. Shadows formed grotesque patterns on big maps plastered to the bulkheads, and fell in long dark shafts across green-covered tables at which the officers sat with cards and chessboards. Aboard Admiral Turner’s flagship McCawley both Turner and General Vandegrift were grateful for the darkness closing on them as they reached Guadalcanal’s back door. They could not know, but they could suspect, that bad weather during the last two days had grounded enemy seaplanes at Tulagi, allowing them to sail along the southern coast of Guadalcanal undetected.
At two o’clock in the morning of August 7, by the light of a moon emerging just as the American force rounded Cape Esperance at Guadalcanal’s northwestern tip, men on the weather decks could make out the bulk of Savo Island rising from the mists ahead.
Because of Savo, a round cone which sat like a brooding sentinel at the western mouth of Sealark Channel, the invasion fleet had to split in two. Ships carrying the main body turned immediately east or right to sail between Savo and Guadalcanal and take up stations off the Guadalcanal beaches. The other sailed north or above Savo before making their eastward turn, moving to stations off Tulagi, Florida and Guvutu-Tanambogo.
Both sections were in position before daylight.
Aboard the troopships the men were going to the galleys fully armed. They ate beans for breakfast and climbed the ladders topside. They came on deck, blinking in what was now broad and sunny day, startled to hear the thundering of the American cruisers and destroyers or the crashing of bombs dropped by the warplanes of Admiral Fletcher’s carriers.
The bombs fell on those Japanese on both sides of the channel who had awakened in terror to find their waters stuffed with enemy ships. Seaplanes in Tulagi Harbor were caught before they could rise, and were turned into floating torches. One of them tried to take off and was tumbled back into the water by a cruiser’s guns. Fires were started on both sides of Sealark Channel. Marines moving to their battle stations gazed with satisfaction at flickering shorelines to north and south. At shortly after seven o’clock the assault troops of both sections were ready to launch simultaneous attacks.
“F Company stand by to disembark. First platoon stand by to disembark.”
“All right, you men—down them cargo nets!”
Antlike they went over the side, clinging to the rough rope nets that swayed out and in against the warm steel sides of the ships. They stepped on the fingers of the men below them and felt their own hands squashed by men above. Rifles clanged against helmets. Men carrying heavy machine guns or mortar parts ground their teeth in the agony of descending to the waiting boats with 30 or 40 pounds of steel boring into their shoulders. And the boats rose and fell in the swells, now close in to the ships’sides, now three or four feet away.
The men jumped, landing in clanking heaps, then crouched beneath the gunwales while the loaded boats churned to the assembly areas, forming rings and circling, finally fanning out in a broad line at a few minutes before eight and speeding with hulls down and frothing wake straight for the shores of the enemy.
3
It was Tulagi, not Guadalcanal, where the Japanese made their first defensive stand of the war.
Tulagi had been typically British, the seat of the British Solomon Islands with a cricket field, a “Residency” and an Anglican bishop. But now this boot-shaped little island with its magnificent anchorage was Japanese, and its occupants were about to demonstrate that blind bitter tenacity with which they would cling to every fortress across the chain of island empire.
They were dug in on Tulagi, with most of their defenses concentrated at the foot of the boot, the southeastern tip. They were in hillside caves, squeezed into the fissures pocking the island’s generous outcropping of rock. Against them came that splendid First Raider Battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson, a short tough man of hard jaw and soft voice, of smiling lips and large cold unsmiling eyes. Red Mike, the men called him, for his thinning wisps of carroty hair.
Tulagi’s southeastern beaches were dense with smoke and a small Jap boat blazed against the shore when Red Mike’s Raiders leaped from their boats into the surf and charged across a narrow beach into the murk of the jungle. Enemy bullets whispered among them, but no men fell. The Raiders drove swiftly across the island at a point two-thirds up the boot. Behind them came the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, who turned left and quickly overran the lightly defended northwestern third of the island.
The Raiders wheeled right to drive down the island’s spine to the lowlands, working through rocks and trees, keeping clear of shore trails covered by enemy cliffs. They attacked four companies abreast. They began to take a withering sniper fire —snipers under houses, tied into the tops of trees, dug in beneath those forest giants with huge buttressing roots four and five feet high. Sniper fire came from the rear too, for the Japanese soldier was already using his trick of lying doggo until the enemy had passed and he might shoot into his rear. Now the Raiders on the southern shore of the island were pinned down by fire from a concentration of machine guns atop a hill. Mortars crunched among them. Caves spat fire. There were casualties, among them a company commander. It took an hour to get that hill, it took rifles and grenades of the men who inched forward under covering fire until they had reached the point when they might come erect and charge the cavemouths. Then Edson’s men moved down to the cricket field set between two hills, east and west. Here the Japanese fought skillfully from caves and crevices. Here they could not be budged and the Marines dug in, for it was now twilight and obvious that the island could not be taken that day.
That night came the first banzai charge.
Marines lying in hastily scooped-out foxholes could hear the enemy assembling. The Japanese crawled noisily out of their caves and holes. They came running in scattered bands, their officers leaping before them and waving long samurai sabers. They howled in their native tongue or shrieked those quaint English oaths, which, they had been told, would melt the hearts of the Americans.
“Japanese boy drink American boy’s blood!”
“Death for the Emperor!”
The Japanese fired their rifles as they charged, deliberately trying to draw giveaway fire, but they were met by grenades spiraling silently through the black to flash among them with flesh-rending crashes. In twos and threes, they tried to infiltrate in the dark, to close with knives—and where they did they were met with knives. They punched a hole between two companies on the southern flank, but were beaten down in individual combat. They swirled savagely around Marine positions in the center, coming five times against a rise in ground. Mortar shells thumped and crashed among them throughout the night, breaking them up as they assembled, driving them into Raider guns. In the end, they failed. In the morning, the Marine counterattack swept forward and squeezed the Japs to death among the limestone hills of the southern third of the island.
Tulagi was taken by nightfall of August 8.
There had been no difficulty in securing Tulagi’s western offshore flank represented by Haleta Village on the southwestern tip of big Florida Island. Company B of the First Battalion, Second Marines, had landed without opposition at twenty minutes before eight o’clock on D-Day morning. Private Russell Miller was the first of these Marines to touch land, becoming the first American to tread Japanese-held soil in World War Two. And Florida fell without a shot fired.
The eastern offshore flank represented by Guvutu-Tanambogo was not so cheaply won. It was not possible to land at more than one or two points on either of these Siamese-twin islets, for both rose steeply from the sea and were ringed with coral. The only landing place on G
uvutu, the southernmost or lowest of these two isles connected on a north-south axis, was the seaplane ramp and pier on the northeastern tip. Invaders had to sail around the little islet to get in at it.
At noon of August 7, after Guvutu had been pounded from the sea and sky, Higgins boats carrying the First Parachute Battalion under Major Robert Williams roared straight for the seaplane ramp.
They were struck hard by enemy fire.
The Marines could not land at the ramp, because naval gunfire had turned it into a jumble of concrete. The boats slanted toward the dock. Out leaped the men, some of them to scamper ashore. But most were pinned down in the lee of the pier. They were like men lined up against a cellophane wall, shot at from both sides. Fire came from trenches behind the pier, from a Guvutu hill to their left and from across the causeway on Tanambogo to their right. One boat ground ashore to the left, bringing a section of mortars to the rescue. Soon the mortar shells were leaving the stovepipes with a metallic plop, landing with a crrrunch-whummp in the enemy trenches. The assault swept forward again, group after group gaining the pier and charging forward to ram headlong against the steep, cave-pocked defenses of Guvutu.
Strong Men Armed Page 2
