Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Lieutenant Colonel Chesty Puller was also ready, though the fury of Dugout Sunday had not given his men much time to improve their positions; there had been time to resupply the 81-millimeter mortars, those unlovely stovepipe killers of which their gunners sang:

  We have a weapon that nobody loves,

  They say that our gun’s a disgrace,

  You crank up 200, and 200 more—

  And it lands in the very same place.

  Oh, there’s many a gunner who’s blowing his top,

  Observers are all going mad.

  But our affection has lasted,

  This pig iron bastard

  Is—the best gun this world ever had.

  Proof of the last line was to be given shortly. At eleven o’clock that night the men of the Sendai Division came padding up the narrow jungle trails into assembly areas south of Puller’s lines. Officers began to whip them into frenzy. Soon they were chanting, “U. S. Marine you going die tonight, U. S. Marine you going die tonight.”

  Marine mortars began falling among them. Shells flashed along the trails. The Japanese charged and the mortars stayed with them, whittling this heaviest of all Guadalcanal charges before it reached the wire. Soon the howitzers to the rear were booming.

  And the Sendai Division still charged.

  Colonel Oka’s men had at last made a direct attack.

  They struck heaviest at the ridge nose held by Sergeant Paige and his men. At two in the morning, Paige again heard low mumbling. It was much closer than the night before. The Japanese were floundering about in the bushes with less than Oriental stealth. Paige passed the word:

  “Use grenades. Don’t let ‘em spot the guns. Fire only when you have to.”

  They pulled pins and threw. They grasped grenades in both hands and tore out the pins with their teeth and rolled the yellow pineapple bombs down the slopes.

  Oka’s men came bowling up at them.

  “Fire!” Paige bellowed, but he needn’t have, nor could he have been heard above that sudden eruption of sound and light. All of his guns were hammering, spitting orange flame a foot beyond the flash-hiders. But the enemy was swarming in. It was hand to hand. Paige could see little Leiphart down on one knee, wounded, trying to fight off three charging shapes. Paige shot down two of them with his rifle. The third bayoneted Leiphart, killed him, and Paige killed his killer. Pettyjohn was shouting that his gun was out of action. Gaston was battling a Japanese officer, blocking with his rifle while the officer swung a saber, kicking wildly after the rifle had been cut to pieces. Now part of Gaston’s leg was gone. He kicked again. His foot slammed up under the officer’s chin and broke his neck. Now it was fighting without memory of a blow struck, a shot fired, a wound received; now it was mindless, instinctive, reflexive; the shapes struggling on the slopes, the voices hurling wordless atavistic battle shouts, “Aaa-yeee!”; the voices crying, “Kill! Kill!” and “Bonnn-zahee!”; the voices hoarse with death, shrill with pain—and beneath it all ran the cracking booming chorus of the guns.

  Then the attackers flowed back down the hill and vanished. The first wave had been shattered.

  Paige knew they would come again, and ran quickly to Pettyjohn’s disabled gun. He worked to dislodge a ruptured cartridge. He pried it free, slipped in a fresh belt of ammunition—and hot pain seared his hand. A Japanese light machine-gunner had fired a burst into the gun and wrecked it. With that burst came the second wave.

  Oka’s men flowed upward in a yelling mass. Grant, Payne and Hinson held out on the left, although they were all wounded. In Paige’s center, Lock, Swanek and McNabb were hit and carried to the rear by corpsmen. The Japanese moved into the gap in the center. Paige ran to his right, hunting for men to counterattack the Japanese, for another gun to put back in the center. He found the machine gun manned by Kelly and Totman. They were protected by a squad of riflemen. Paige ordered the machine-gunners to break down their gun, told the riflemen to fix bayonets, and then, with the cry “Follow me!” he led them back to drive the enemy out of the center. Paige set the gun up. He fired it until dawn, while Kelly and Totman fed it ammunition. At dawn, Sergeant Paige saw another of his platoon’s machine guns standing unattended on the forward nose of the ridge. There were short men in khaki and mushroom helmets crawling toward it. Paige got up and ran forward….

  To the left of Paige’s position, where the second wave of Oka’s men had made a penetration, the fight had gone badly for F Company of the Second Battalion, Seventh. Oka’s men had forced F Company back and captured a ridge on the extreme left of the Second Battalion’s line. They put 150 men in position. They set up two heavy machine guns. They began raking the Marines from the flank.

  In that early-morning light in which Sergeant Paige had spotted the machine gun, Major Odell (Tex) Conoley could see vapor rising from the Japanese machine guns as the hot steel condensed the jungle water on the barrels. Conoley realized that the Japanese now had a strong penetration which could be built up for a breakthrough. He was the battalion executive officer, and only a few of the men around him were riflemen. But there were also at hand a few bandsmen serving as litter-bearers, a trio of wiremen, a couple of runners and three or four messmen who had brought up hot food the night before and had stayed. There were 17 in all. Tex Conoley formed this bobtail band and charged.

  They went in hurling grenades. They knocked out the machine guns before the Japanese could fire at them and they came in with such sudden force that they routed the startled defenders of the ridge crest. And then the mortarmen shortened range to draw a curtain of steel across the forward slope of the ridge while Conoley consolidated and received reinforcements.

  Daylight of October 26 lighted the destruction of the Japanese 2nd or Sendai Division.

  The assault against Puller’s lines had gone on all night, but it had produced not a single penetration. It ended at dawn with Japanese losses in proportion to the fury of their charge. It was the most savage assault, it became the most stunning defeat.

  The Sendai could not fight again as a unit on Guadalcanal.

  Sergeant Paige got to the gun first….

  He dove for the trigger, got it, squeezed it—and killed the crawling Japanese. A rain of enemy fire came down on Paige. Bullets spattered off the ridge shale, spurting, squealing away in richochet. Paige kept firing. Three men ran to him with ammunition belts—Stat, Reilly and Jonjeck. Stat went down with a bullet in the belly. Reilly reached the gun, took a bullet in the groin, and went down kicking—nearly knocking Paige off balance. Jonjeck came in with a belt and a bullet in the shoulder. As he stooped to feed the gun, Paige saw a piece of flesh go flying off Jonjeck’s neck.

  “Get the hell back!” Paige yelled.

  Jonjeck refused. Paige hit him on the jaw. Jonjeck obeyed.

  It was full light now, and Paige was scurrying back and forth, moving his gun to avoid the inevitable rain of grenades greeting each burst. In the tall grass below the ridge some 30 Japanese sprang erect. One of them put field glasses to his eyes. He signaled a charge.

  Paige triggered a long searing, sweeping burst and the Japanese vanished from sight like puppets pulled on a string. Then Sergeant Mitchell Paige charged himself. He called to his riflemen. He slung two belts of ammunition crisscross over his shoulders. He unclamped the gun, yanked it from its cradle and cradled the burning-hot water jacket across his left arm.

  “Let’s go!” he yelled.

  Straight downhill they charged, screaming their rebel yells —“Ya-hoo! Yaaaa-hoo!”—firing from the hip as they went, obliterating all before them while Paige aimed a disemboweling burst at the enemy officer who had popped up out of the grass. And then they were in the jungle and it was strangely quiet.

  It was the hush that comes upon the end of battle, as eerie as that long white snakelike blister that ran from the fingertips to the forearm of Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige.

  15

  On October 26, while land fighting sputtered out on Guadalcanal, the naval battle w
hich Admiral Yamamoto expected was fought in waters roughly 300 miles to the east.

  Yamamoto, who had always sought a major engagement with the American fleet, hurled his forces into the fight as eagerly as Bull Halsey, who sent Rear Admiral Thomas Kincaid into action with the signal: “Attack! Repeat—Attackl”

  But the air-sea engagement known as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands fell short of a clear-cut decision. The Americans lost the carrier Hornet and a destroyer to submarine attack, and 76 American planes went down. The unsinkable Enterprise was again hit. The Japanese suffered severe damage to two carriers and a heavy cruiser and lost 100 aircraft. Minor damage was about even.

  Santa Cruz was a disappointment to both sides, but neither side allowed the stand-off to weaken its resolve to fight on for Guadalcanal.

  Already, in the final days of October, while the surviving ships of both nations steamed north to Truk and south to Noumea, the Americans were sending more ships to the South Pacific area and Marine and Army units were under orders for movement to the island.

  Up in Rabaul, Lieutenant General Hyakutate was taking the last shot from his locker. He was calling on the 17th Army’s reserve division, the 38th. Hyakutate had already fed in the Ichiki Detachment, the Kawaguchi Brigade, the Sendai Division, and a handful of lesser units. Now he would send roughly 15,000 troops down The Slot, the bulk of that 38th or Nagoya Division commanded by Lieutenant General Tadayoshi Sano.

  On Guadalcanal itself in the final days of October, the broken remnants of the Sendai Division, together with the survivors of all those other units which had come to the island since early August, were streaming westward through the jungle. They were disorganized, starving, wounded and sick. Some 5,000 Japanese died beneath Marine guns in those attacks which began on October 21, and which, after Maruyama’s main thrust was shattered on October 24-26, erupted sporadically in small local actions or jungle skirmishes until the month ended.

  Among these dead was Colonel Furumiya. He and his staff officer had not been able to find their way back to the jungle south of the American lines. They had not eaten for days. They had barely enough strength to tear the 29th’s colors into bits and grind them into the mud with their feet. They had not burned the flag because the smoke might give them away. Then Colonel Furumiya wrote a letter which the staff officer was to deliver to Maruyama, although it would actually be taken from the officer’s dead body by the Marines who killed him. Furumiya wrote:

  …I do not know what excuse to give…

  I am sorry I have lost many troops uselessly and for this result which has come unexpectedly. We must not overlook firepower. When there is firepower the troops become active and full of spirit. But when firepower ceases they become inactive. Spirit exists eternally.

  I feel sleepy because of exhaustion for several days.

  I am going to return my borrowed life today with short interest.

  Colonel Furumiya straightened. He placed a pistol to his head. He bowed in the direction of Tokyo and the Emperor, and the staff officer pulled the trigger.

  Chesty Puller was also writing a letter, composing it mentally while he lay on a hospital cot with seven pieces of shrapnel in his legs.

  Puller had been helping wiremen repair communications wire in a patrol to the east of the Tenaru when an enemy shell burst among them, wounding Puller. A Navy corpsman quickly gave him aid and began to write out an evacuation tag.

  Chesty tore it from the corpsman’s hand and flung it at him. “Go label a bottle with that goddam tag!” he roared.

  But Puller had been forced to accept hospital treatment. Now he lay on his cot, thinking. He had had a close call with the corpsman. He could have been evacuated and sent Stateside, out of the war. Automatically, the words of a request to Headquarters began forming in his mind: “… therefore I respectfully request… duty overseas with a combat unit… for the duration of the war…”

  He would write it as soon as he returned to his men, with all but one of the shrapnel pieces pried from his legs, which would be at the end of that dreadful black month of November.

  16

  It was in November that the Marines of Major General Alexander Vandegrift came close to losing their minds.

  A bitter aching fatigue had come upon them. They had met the enemy on the beaches, in caves, atop the hills, down in the jungle swamps—and they had defeated him. They had been battered by every weapon in the arsenal of modern war. They had been blown from their holes or been buried in them. They had not slept. They had been ravaged by malaria, weakened by dysentery, nagged by tropical ulcers and jungle rot, scorched by the sun or drenched by the rain. They had met each ordeal with the hope of victory, and had survived only to prepare for greater trial. They had come to Guadalcanal lean and muscular young men, and now there was not one of them who had not lost twenty pounds, and there were some who had lost fifty. They had come here with high unquenchable spirit, but now that blaze of ardor was flickering low and there was a darkness gathering within them and their minds were retreating into it.

  All the world was circumscribed by their perimeter. Guadalcanal had become Thermopylae multiplied by ninety days. There might be ninety more, for all they knew, for there seemed no way out, around or through. This was that “feeling of expendability” of which so much has been written, but which, like a toothache, can never be understood but only felt. It was a long shuddering sigh of weariness with which men rehearsed in their minds what had gone before, wondering dully, not that it had been sustained, but in what new hideous shape it would reappear. It was a sense of utter loneliness made poignant by their longing for encouragement from home, which never seemed to be forthcoming, by their hope of help, which was always being shattered. It seemed to these men that their country had set them down in the midst of the enemy and left them there to go it alone. They could not understand—had no wish to understand—that high strategy which might assign a flood of men and munitions to another theater of war, a trickle to their own. They reasoned only as they fought: that a man in trouble should get help, and here they were alone.

  So they turned in upon themselves. They developed that vacant, thousand-yard stare—lusterless unblinking eyes gazing out of sunken, red-rimmed sockets. They drew in upon themselves in little squad groups, speaking constantly in low voices to each other, rarely to men of other units. They avoided those top NCO’s and officers who might put them on working parties unloading ships. They were not shirking duty, they were saving strength—for the daily patrols, for the ordeal of the night watch with its terrors of the imagination, terrors fancied but real. Some of these men had not the strength to go to the galley to eat, for galleys usually lay in the lowlands behind the lines. Weakened men might get down to the galley, but they could not get back up. Their friends brought them food, just as men brought food to buddies sickened by malaria but not sick enough to occupy a precious cot in the regimental sick bays. Men with temperatures a few points above 100 were not regarded as bona fide malaria cases. There had been only 239 of these in September, there had been 1,941 of them in October—and before November ended there would be 3,200 more.

  So these men faced the month of November, forgetting the outside world, forgetting even that they were Americans—mindful only that they were Marines and trying always for those flashes of rough comedy which could nourish their spirit.

  Sometimes men stood on the hills and shouted insults at an unseen or nonexistent enemy in the darkened jungle. They called Emperor Hirohito “a bucktoothed bastard.” They dwelt at loving length on the purity of his lineage. They yelled unprintables at Premier Tojo while ascribing to him every vice in the book of human depravity. And there came an astonishing night when a thin reedy voice shrilled up at them in outraged retaliation:

  “F—— Babe Ruth!”

  So went November on Guadalcanal, the month which General Vandegrift began with another offensive west and a counterinvasion move east.

  On November 1 a force of roughly 5,000 Marines moved ac
ross the Matanikau. Vandegrift was again hoping to prevent an enemy build-up to the west, as well as to destroy the disorganized survivors of the October battles. He hoped also to raise morale with a successful offensive and to knock out Pistol Pete, now firing again, and all other enemy artillery to the west. The western force moved cautiously at first, striking along the coast toward Kukumbona.

  On the same day another force of Marines was trucked to the Tenaru preparatory to crossing the river next day. Admiral Halsey had already notified Vandegrift that Koli Point, about a dozen miles east of the Tenaru, was probably going to be the next enemy landing place. Halsey was also worried about the security of Aola Bay, 18 miles east of Koli Point, where he hoped to build another airstrip and where engineers and the newly arrived Second Raider Battalion were to land on November 3. An enemy unit at Koli Point could cut communications between the perimeter and the Aola Bay force. So Vandegrift was sending troops east to prevent a Koli Point landing.

  The eastern force was the same Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, which had stopped Oka. It was led by Lieutenant Colonel Herman Henry Hanneken, the “King of the Banana Wars” who had fought as a sergeant in Haiti, meeting the Caco leader, King Charlemagne, in personal combat and killing him.

  The next morning, November 2, Hanneken’s battalion crossed the Tenaru and began a forced march to Koli Point. They reached it before dusk, crossed the Nalimbiu River which cuts through it, and then also crossed the Metapona River another few miles east. They set up a coastal defensive perimeter on the east bank of the Metapona. And then, in the fading light of day, they saw three Japanese ships slip into the lee of the coast another mile east and begin unloading troops. Hanneken watched helplessly. Rain had put his radios out of commission, and he had strung communications wire no farther east then the Nalimbiu.