In three hours, the 230th Infantry Regiment, vanguard of the 38th or Nagoya Division, came ashore with supplies and guns—and the cruiser, destroyer and transport which had brought them sailed away.
Next morning, Hanneken decided to attack. His mortars opened up. The Japanese replied with an artillery barrage and themselves began attacking. They came down the beach in superior force and Hanneken withdrew. He got back behind the Metapona, set up, and was attacked again.
A destroyer had put a Japanese landing party ashore in front of Hanneken’s Marines.
At about the same time west of the Matanikau, the Fifth Marines closed in on a few hundred Japanese caught in a trap around Point Cruz and destroyed them with bayonets. Next day the Fifth was to sweep on to Kukumbona.
But they would not. That night they were under orders to return to the perimeter next day, for Lieutenant Colonel Hanneken’s radios had at last begun to function and the beleaguered commander had asked for reinforcements. Vandegrift was calling off his western offensive again, and planning a trap for the Japanese 230th Infantry.
The Marine general ordered the First Battalion, Seventh, east by boat to reinforce Hanneken, who was even then successfully forcing his way west of the Nalimbiu River. The unit which landed in front of him was not large enough to contain him. Hanneken set up a beachhead 400 yards wide and 300 yards inland and at midnight the reinforcing battalion arrived and joined his defense line.
Next Vandegrift ordered his air to strike everything the Japanese had in the east, especially with an eye toward protecting the Aola Bay airfield-construction force which had also landed November 3.
Finally, he sent the 164th Infantry Regiment on a march southeast. This was begun November 4, even as Hanneken’s force attacked eastward again and recrossed the Nalimbiu. When the 164th was far enough southeast, or behind the Japanese, it would wheel and face north to the sea. Hanneken, meanwhile, would turn the enemy inland. Thus, the soldiers of the 164th Infantry would become the anvil on which the hammer blows of the Seventh Marines would shatter the enemy.
As a final touch, to cut off and annihilate any Japanese who might burst out of the trap, Vandegrift was going to place another force still farther south. He had just the outfit to do it.
Carlson’s Raiders.
They specialized in private wars, these men of Carlson’s. They had made the hit-and-run raid on Makin Island on August 25, and though they had been wildly acclaimed in the States, their score of roughly 100 enemy dead had failed to impress the dogged, sardonic defenders of Guadalcanal. For the “Gung Ho Boys” of Evans Carlson were not popular with brother Marines. They regarded themselves as an elite of an elite, they had volunteered for the Raiders’ special mission of staging commando-style raids, they had all answered “Yes” to their commander’s unique question, “Could you cut a Jap’s throat without flinching?”—and because of this, because of Makin, because they could march and fight on an unchanging ration of rice, tea and bacon, they thought themselves tougher than the ordinary Marine.
But the “ordinary” Marine, if such exists, could not agree. They now knew to the last cruel degree of adversity the difference between the unromantic foot-slogger who hits-and-holds and the dashing beach-leaper who hits-and-runs. Even the Raiders’ motto of “Gung Ho”—the Chinese phrase for “Work Together” which Carlson had learned during his prewar service with the Chinese Eighth Route Army—was not likely to thrill or awe these ordinary Marines. It was more likely to call forth sarcasm. If the Marine Corps’ own slogan of “Semper Fidelis” was often interpreted to mean “I got mine, how’d you make out?” the Raiders’ flamboyant “Gung Ho!” could receive the sneering twist, “Which way’s the photographers?”
Carlson’s Raiders were now at Aola Bay. On November 5 they moved west toward the Japanese who had attacked Hanneken. They sloshed up the trails following that tall, lean, long-nosed, passionate man who had given them their individuality and their battle cry, unaware, as he was unaware, that “Gung Ho!” now must prove itself beneath the eyes of the most critical audience they knew—the ordinary Marines of Guadalcanal.
On November 8, while Vandegrift’s eastward forces were still maneuvering to spring their trap, Vice Admiral Halsey came to Guadalcanal.
He came in without fanfare. He put on Marine dungarees and boondockers and rode in a jeep around the perimeter. His staff officers begged him to stand up, to wave, to do anything that would let the men know that Bull Halsey was there. He refused.
It would be “too damn theatrical,” he said, it would be an affront to the weary men who had held this island for three months.
At noon Halsey went to Vandegrift’s headquarters for lunch.
It was a surprisingly good meal. There was even apple pie. Admiral Halsey was so impressed that he wished to compliment Vandegrift’s cook.
“Sergeant,” Vandegrift called, “the Admiral would like to speak to you.”
Butch Morgan came out of his tent-galley. He drew a tat-toed forearm across his glistening handlebar mustache and grimy stubble of beard. He carefully wiped his hands on his T-shirt.
“Sergeant,” Admiral Halsey said grandly, “I want to compliment you on your cooking. Especially the apple pie. It was terrific!”
Sergeant Morgan shifted his feet sheepishly while that awful thing called a blush colored his wrinkled, weather-leathered face. He looked at his general in agony, and then he burst out:
“Oh, bullshit, Admiral—you don’t have to say that!”
The admiral and the general exchanged glances, and the sergeant was mercifully dismissed. The next day Bull Halsey flew back to Noumea, heartened to hear that Archie Vandegrift still thought he could hold, convinced that men fed by such cooks could never be defeated.
One day later, November 10, those men of Alexander Vandegrift had pulled the string on the Japanese to the east. They killed 350 of them, against their own losses of 40 dead, 120 wounded. They captured 15 tons of rice, 55 boats and much of the enemy’s artillery. But most of the 230th escaped, pouring through a gap blasted in the inland line held by the 2nd Battalion, 164th. They fled westward toward Hyakutate’s reorganizing remnants, moving over the trail which the Kawaguchi Brigade had cut around the Marine perimeter in September. Following them like a scourge came Carlson’s Raiders.
Another private war had begun. With only an occasional air-drop of ammunition and rice, disdainful of help or the barest report which might acknowledge the fact of the larger war raging seaward, Carlson’s Raiders began to whittle the retreating 230th Regiment.
They struck the Japanese column twelve times, falling savagely on the flanks and rear, vanishing almost as suddenly as they had appeared—employing that simple guerrilla tactic which Carlson had learned from the Chinese. The Raider main body marched in a line parallel to the retreat of the Japanese main body, sometimes on the right side, sometimes on the left. Directly behind the Japanese came Raider patrols. Each time the patrols ran into large numbers of Japanese they opened fire. Whereupon the enemy would begin to rush reinforcements to his rear. As he did, Carlson’s main body struck from the flank with concentrated firepower.
Carlson’s Raiders killed 500 men of the 230th Regiment with this tactic, and when they returned to the Marine lines 30 days after they had set out from Aola Bay, with only 17 of their comrades fallen, they found that “Gung Ho!” was no longer a cry of derision among their brother Marines. They also found that their private war had run concurrently with the general war they had left—for the tide of battle on Guadalcanal had at last turned.
And it turned at sea.
17
“Commence firing!” Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan shouted. “Give’em hell, boys!”
Callaghan’s little stopgap fleet drove ahead; his ships plunged straight into the flaming guns of the mighty Japanese fleet which had come south to pulverize Henderson Field. Guns roaring, sterns down, keels carving hard white wakes in the glittering obsidian waters of Iron Bottom Bay, they rushed on to destruction
—to the fiercest surface battle of the war.
Callaghan’s fleet had come north to escort the Army’s 182nd Infantry Regiment to Guadalcanal. There were his own flagship, the cruiser San Francisco, the other cruisers Atlanta— with Rear Admiral Norman Scott aboard her—Portland, Helena and Juneau; and the destroyers Laffey, Cushing, Sterrett, O’Bannon, Aaron Ward, Barton, Monssen and Fletcher. They covered the 182nd’s landing November 11, and when 32 Japanese torpedo bombers and fighters came winging over The Slot the afternoon of November 12, their antiaircraft guns joined Henderson’s fighters in knocking all but one of them from the skies.
In the afternoon succeeding that fifteen-minute flurry came word of the Japanese bombardment fleet sweeping down from the Shortlands: the battleships Hiei and Kirishima, the cruiser Nagara, and 14 of those big Nipponese destroyers.
To stop them Admiral Turner had only Uncle Dan Callaghan and his five cruisers and eight destroyers. He ordered Callaghan to attack.
Admiral Kondo had to be held off for at least one night, for mighty Enterprise had been repaired and was tearing north with a load of warplanes to hunt out the Japanese transports bringing the rest of the Nagoya Division to Guadalcanal. The planes would need to land at Henderson Field. Therefore Henderson must not be bombarded.
Turner’s decision was made after the twilight in which Callaghan’s ships stood out to sea. They returned at midnight. At a quarter of two in the morning of November 13 Callaghan stood on San Francisco’s bridge and shouted his rallying cry and the battle was joined.
It was as though the world were being remade. It was cataclysm ripping matter apart like paper. Searchlights slashed the star-shell-showered night. Gunflashes flitted like bolts of summer lightning. The wakes of speeding ships were crisscrossed by the thin foaming lines of racing torpedoes, blotted out by the flaming geysers of their collision. And above the smoking roar of battle, Admiral Callaghan was crying over the Talk Between Ships:
“We want the big ones, boys, we want the big ones!”
Little Laffey took on a big one. She ran in under great Hiei’s mighty 14-inch turrets and peppered her bridge. She was so close that Hiei’s pagoda silhouette seemed to sway above her. Hiei thundered and Laffey lurched and began to burn. San Francisco was dueling Hiei, hurling salvo after salvo into her superstructure. Hiei thundered again. A full salvo of 14-inchers tore into San Francisco’s bridge, killing Callaghan and every other man there. San Francisco’s gun turrets began firing on local control, and her salvos were rocking crippled Atlanta. Admiral Norman Scott was dead; the commander who had won the Battle of Cape Esperance had fallen from our own fire. Silhouettes plunging in and out of smoke were difficult to determine. American fired on American, Japanese on Japanese—and every ship but Fletcher was hit. Barton blew up. Monssen sank. So did Cushing, Laffey—and the cruisers Juneau and Atlanta.
But the Japanese were running. Every one of them had been staggered. Destroyer Yudachi was going down. So would Akatsuki. Admiral Kondo’s ships were streaking north, and limping behind them, rudderless, her hull rent with jagged holes from the twin torpedoes of little Sterrett, her superstructure a mass of wreckage from 85 shell hits, came great Hiei.
After her came the fighters and bombers from Henderson Field. Though Callaghan and Scott and many of their men had died, though the Americans had lost six ships, Henderson had not been scratched. The battle which Fleet Admiral King called “the fiercest naval battle ever fought” had served its purpose, the preservation of the airborne Marine fighters and bombers that were now coming to kill Hiei. They slashed down on the eight Zeros sent south to cover her and shot them down. Major Joe Sailer planted a bomb on Hiei’s remaining antiaircraft turrets and knocked them out. Captain George Dooley’s quartet of Avengers sent another torpedo flashing into the great ship’s hull. Seven Dauntlesses fell upon her with thousand-pounders. Nine Avengers from Enterprise joined the assault, and full five more attacks were made on Hiei that day. Still the great sea monster wallowed in the swells, glowing cherry red, sailing an aimless circle, now making for Guadalcanal, now drifting north again—refusing to go under.
At night the Japanese scuttled her. By morning only a shining oil slick two miles long marked the sun-dappled seas off Savo, marking the place where great Hiei sank.
But before that morning, the Japanese Navy again came to Henderson Field. Gunichi Mikawa, who had won the Battle of the Five Sitting Ducks three months before, led six cruisers and six destroyers down to Savo again. They arrived at midnight. Standing off the island’s cone, Mikawa sent in Suzuya and Maya while his flagship Chokai and the others covered for them. The two heavies hurled 1,000 shells into the island. They would have hurled more, but six little torpedo boats crept from the creeks and coves of Tulagi Harbor and came with a roar at the big ships. They loosed a spread of torpedoes, hit cruiser Kinugasa and drove the rest away.
Gunichi Mikawa, who had passed up the chance to sink the American transports three months ago, sinking their escorts like a wolf killing the dogs and letting the sheep go, was once again departing Savo Island with that high speed which the exultant torpedo-boaters described as the act of “hauling ass.”
Then it was full morning, and in the daylight of November 14 the Wildcats and Dauntlesses and Avengers were up early to hunt out Mikawa’s force. The Japanese shelling had destroyed only two planes and damaged 16 others, and Fighter One had been manhandled swiftly into shape.
The Marine fliers found Mikawa’s ships under a cover of fleecy clouds. They put torpedoes into crippled Kinugasa, planted bombs on two more cruisers and a destroyer—and then, calling for Enterprise’s fliers to come north to finish Kinugasa and batter the others, they flew back to Guadalcanal in time to launch the slaughter of the Nagoya Division known as the Buzzard Patrol.
Commander Tadashi Yamamoto stood on the bridge of his destroyer Hoyashio as it plunged south under empty blue skies. It looked as though the convoy was going to make it undetected. There were no enemies aloft and none over the horizon. Eleven transports stuffed with about 12,000 men, plus 12 escorting destroyers, seemed destined to arrive safely off western Guadalcanal that night.
It had been so predicted. Admiral Mikawa had radioed the utter destruction of Henderson Field and reported the absence of enemy surface ships.
This was well. Even Commander Yamamoto, accustomed to his nation’s indifference to the comfort of its soldiers, felt uneasy at the sight of those troopships looking like drifting logs aswarm with ants.
It was a little after noon. There were less than six more hours to go. And then Yamamoto heard the motors.
The Americans came hurtling down from the skies, every last precious airplane which Henderson Field could put aloft. Major Joe Sailer, Major Bob Richard and the Navy’s Lieutenant A1 Coffin were among the first to strike. Thousand-pound eggs tucked beneath their Dauntless bellies fell away, described that dreadful yawning parabola—and exploded on crowded decks in leaping sheets of flame and flying steel. Two such bombs gave one of the transports its mortal wounds, six more left another troopship dead in the water, two others crippled a destroyer.
Flights now came from everywhere, from Enterprise, from Espiritu Santo, from the Fijis. They flew in, dropped their bombs, launched their torpedoes, strafed and flew away—sometimes to their own base, sometimes to Henderson for rearming. Zeros roared down from Rabaul to intercept them, but there were Marine fighters such as Captain Joe Foss and Lieutenant Colonel Joe Bauer flashing among them, shooting them down or driving them away from the diving Dauntlesses or skimming Avengers. Nor could the Zeroes tarry long. The range was now in the Americans’ favor. When they left, Marine and Navy pilots, the Army Lightning fighters lately come to Guadalcanal, swooped down at masthead level to rake decks already slippery and running red with blood.
Even the sea about those listing, settling, burning transports was incarnadine with Japanese blood. The water was dotted with thousands of bobbing heads—men blown overboard, men who had jumped to flee the fires only to f
eel the bullets sting and sear among them. It was merciless, it had to be merciless. Every Japanese safely ashore on Guadalcanal was another soldier a Marine must kill. Men vomited in their cockpits to see the slaughter they were spreading. They dove and saw with horror how the decks and bunks and bulkheads visible through jagged, gaping holes were glowing red with heat.
It went on until nightfall, until seven of the transports were sunk or sinking. The remaining four staggered shoreward in flames to beach themselves near Kukumbona, putting a few hundred leaderless soldiers ashore before they were destroyed by Marine fliers, the destroyer Meade and the five-inch batteries of the Marine Third Defense Battalion. Of the 12,000 men of the Nagoya Division who sailed south, something less than 5,000 survived the scourging of the Buzzard Patrol. Most of these were taken aboard the destroyers and carried north. Some reached Guadalcanal by boat. Others were scattered in ragged dispirited groups throughout the Central Solomons. And of all the supplies which General Hyakutate sent south, only five tons got ashore.
It was a stunning victory, almost absolute, but for the loss of the incomparable Joe Bauer, who was shot down and never seen again.
To Vandegrift’s Marines it seemed that they had been saved. The great enemy convoy had been destroyed at sea. They would be reinforced, they would be relieved, they would sling their rotted field packs on their shoulders, seize their rusted rines—and sail away from this horrible island forever.
But not yet.
If the virtue of the Japanese warrior was his tenacity, as it was, then the defect of that virtue was his inflexibility.
Among those admirals whom the great Admiral Yamamoto had sent to reinforce Guadalcanal or to knock out Henderson Field, none was more tenacious than Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo. Nor more inflexible.
Strong Men Armed Page 13
