Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Kondo’s plan had called for the shelling of Henderson on three successive nights. The first night, November 12, had been a failure ending in disaster—the loss of Hiei. The second night had been better, but no success when balanced against the daylight bombing of Admiral Mikawa’s bombardment group and the calamity befalling the ships and men of the Nagoya Division.

  Now it was the third night, that of November 14. Nobutake Kondo kept to his plan. He was headed for Henderson Field with battleship Kirishima, heavy cruisers Atago and Takao, two light cruisers and a flock of nine destroyers. He was loaded for bombardment, and he was not expecting a fight. Only those tiny torpedo boats which had buzzed Mikawa the night before might stand in his way, and the destroyers would make sukiyaki of these.

  Even if the Americans had capital ships available, he was sure they would not dare risk them in the narrow waters of Iron Bottom Bay.

  It was getting on to midnight as a trio of torpedo boats slipped out of Tulagi Harbor. They took up station at Savo’s north gate. They believed themselves to be all that was left to defend Henderson Field against the great fleet coming down. The sea was calm, the night air soft and fragrant. A first-quarter moon had set behind Cape Esperance. The pale gold gleaming beneath the violet vault of the heavens had vanished from the surface of the sea, and the lookouts peered anxiously into the dark.

  They stiffened. Two great shapes came gliding toward them.

  The Americans did have big ships and they were risking them in the narrow waters of Iron Bottom Bay.

  Bull Halsey had sent Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee charging north from Noumea with the new 16-inch-gunned South Dakota and Washington. and a hastily assigned screen of four destroyers. Lee had no battle plan or radio call-signal, and he had very little information other than that the Japanese heavies were coming down.

  Admiral Lee was hungering for intelligence as his ships swept west of Savo, turned north, swung east and put the hulking island off to the right, unaware that he had also put two little torpedo boats to his left. Admiral Lee signaled Guadalcanal, using the code word, “Cactus.” Back came the exasperating reply:

  “We do not recognize you.”

  Admiral Lee decided to play it by ear. Archie Vandegrift was his personal friend. He would remember Lee’s Annapolis nickname.

  “Cactus, this is Lee. Tell your big boss Ching Lee is here and wants the latest information.”

  Silence.

  And then, over the Talk Between Ships from the softly chatting torpedo boat skippers, came this:

  “There go two big ones, but I don’t know whose they are.”

  Unrecognized to his right, suspected to his left, Admiral Lee quickly called Guadalcanal.

  “Cactus, refer your big boss about Ching Lee. Chinese, catchee? Call off your boys!”

  Guadalcanal replied: “The Boss has no additional information,” and Admiral Lee took his battleships into the Bay. He about-faced and sailed west again. It was close to midnight when he addressed the startled PT-boat skippers:

  “This is Ching Lee. Get out of my way. I’m coming through!”

  The little boats scurried aside and the battleships went through.

  At sixteen minutes past one in the morning, Lee’s radar screens were covered with approaching pips and there was a babble of Japanese voices on the radio-telephone.

  It went hard at first for the Americans. Preston, Benham and Walke took the full brunt of shoals of Japanese torpedos and were sunk. South Dakota was pinioned like a big bug on the cold white shafts of enemy searchlights and was shuddering under the impact of their shells. But Lee’s flagship Washington had tracked mighty Kirishima and her terrible sixteen-inchers were tearing her apart. Kirishima was a mass of flames topside, and would soon join her sister Hiei on the bottom of the sea. And now South Dakota was helping Washington batter the heavy cruisers Atago and Takao. Her great guns flashed and smoked above the litter of dead and wreckage topside. The Japanese heavies dragged themselves out of the fight. They would not see action again for many, many months. The destroyers and lights fled after them.

  It was quiet on the Bay.

  Ching Lee sailed back to Noumea with triumphant Washington, with valiant South Dakota, with lucky little Gwin.

  Never again would Japanese battleships come out to fight until they sailed to their fiery Götterdämmerung in the narrow seas of Surigao Strait two years hence. The three-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal was over.

  The Marines had held, and now they were truly saved.

  18

  It was December 9 and command of Guadalcanal was passing from the Marines to the Army.

  Major General Vandegrift had again put together an offensive to the west and had finally seized the high ground he wished to hold. The Army would direct the clean-up of the island.

  The last weeks of November and early days of December were relatively quiet, though the enemy continued to sneak in a few thousand troops by barge. On November 30 Japan sent down the last supplies by sea, and won the Battle of Tassafaronga when the torpedoes of eight of her destroyers drove off the American force trying to intercept them.

  Aerial battles sputtered sporadically, there were infrequent bombings, but Henderson Field was gradually shaping up as the great forward bastion of American air power in the Pacific. From the 31 Marine aircraft with which Cactus Air Force was launched on August 20, Henderson’s strength had slowly risen through September, had sunk to that disastrous low of 14 after the Night of the Battleships, and was now climbing toward 150.

  Troop strength had increased concurrently. Vandegrift now commanded his own First Marine Division as well as all but one infantry regiment of the Second Marine Division and the Army’s Americal Division. With these went supporting troops and specialists.

  As Major General Alexander Vandegrift handed over command to Major General Alexander Patch on this day of December 9, the men who had done so much to make the Rising Sun stand still—the men of Vandegrift’s First Marine Division —were coming down from the hills.

  Some of these Marines had spent as many as 122 consecutive days on the lines without relief. They gaped in astonishment at the mountains of food heaped within supply dumps behind their perimeter, for they had only dreamed of this while their sodden bellies growled with rice and Argentine corned beef. They saw big trucks raising clouds of dust along the coastal road, great four-engined bombers roaring off the airfield, ships of all sizes in the Bay. They saw the new cemetery, serried ranks of white crosses broken here and again with stars of David. They were astounded to hear that there was an open-air movie near the airfield, and most of them refused to go—for they wanted nothing of a luxury that belittled their own hard memories of this island.

  Then they marched down to the beach to take ship. The Fifth Regiment left first on December 9, the First Marines by December 22, the Seventh Marines before January.

  But they could not really march. They stumbled. They were ragged, bearded, sick, emaciated. They had not the strength to climb the cargo nets. Sailors had to pull them over the gunwales, fish them out of the water where they had fallen—doing it gladly and with open tears. They were sticks of men and their sunken eyes stared wonderingly at that island they were leaving, where General Vandegrift, Manila John Basilone, Red Mike Edson, Mitchell Paige and the fallen Major Bailey had won Medals of Honor; where 621 of the Division’s men died, where 1,517 more were wounded and another 5,600 had been stricken with malaria. It seemed such a small cost to balance against the 30,000 soldiers Japan lost at Guadalcanal. But who would count that other cost, that toll of suffering and sacrifice told in shrunken necks and knobby joints and stark rib cages and faces made of bone and parchment flesh?

  They couldn’t tell. They could only go below to the Marine’s reward of a hot meal and a clean bunk, while the great ships shuddered and made for the open sea.

  Behind them, General Patch’s soldiers and Marines were already moving against General Hyakutate’s remnant, men now scourged beyond belief by
malaria and beriberi, men who were now clinging, as the Marines had clung, to the hope of reinforcement. It had been often promised in propaganda leaflets tucked inside those pitiful few sacks of rice or cases of bullets air-dropped to them from the skies:

  “The enemy is collapsing before your eyes.”

  “We are convinced of help from Heaven and Divine Grace. Respect yourself and by no means run away from the encampment.”

  “We, too, will stick to it.”

  But they did not. Though there had been bitter conferences between the Army High Command and the War Ministry, though staff officers came to blows in the quarrel over whether Guadalcanal should be reinforced or evacuated, it was the War Ministry’s resolve to evacuate that carried.

  Once again swift destroyers swept down The Slot. On three February nights 20 destroyers skillfully took off Haruyoshi Hyakutate and most of the 13,000 men remaining in his 17th Army. On the afternoon of February 9, 1943, at a village west of the Tenamba River, a patrol of soldiers from the 132nd Infantry joined with another patrol from the 161st Infantry. They had reached the island’s west coast and found no enemy.

  Guadalcanal was secured.

  But not until October 27, 1947, did the last of those most tenacious Japanese soldiers surrender. He came out of his cave, his hair long and matted, his uniform in tatters, a broken Australian bayonet stuck in his belt, a shovel in one hand, a water bottle in the other. His feet were bound in rags and wire, and as he approached a member of the British constabulary, he bowed deeply from the waist.

  He inquired about the war and about the Americans, those ferocious Marines whom Tokyo Rose always called “the butchers of Guadalcanal.” He was told that they had sailed away nearly five years ago.

  And gone charging on to westward.

  II. All Their Blood

  Song for a Pilot

  Who plows the sky, said a wise man,

  Shows himself a fool;

  But he went out to plow it—

  Taught in a different school.

  Who sows the wind, says Scripture,

  Must reap and reap again;

  But he went out to sow the wind—

  And reaped the bitter grain.

  He took his death like charity,

  Like nothing understood;

  He freshened all the oldest words

  With all his blood.

  —Captain Richard G. Hubler

  1

  Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong

  Under the shade of a coolibah tree.

  And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,

  “You’ll come a waltzin’ Matilda with me.”

  It was a great tune to march to, a rollicking one to bellow at top voice while rolling merrily home through the quiet broad streets of Melbourne—that spacious airy Australian city where the First Marine Division had begun to recuperate from Guadalcanal.

  The Marines arrived in Melbourne in early January, 1943, and were at once clasped to the hearts of its people. They were looked upon as the saviors of Australia, for they had preserved the country’s lifeline to America. They were treated as saviors, in spite of their being men of another nation as well as mere human beings inclined to take advantage of the savior status. But there seemed to be nothing that these Marines could do to outrage their hosts, and gradually, after the Marines’ inevitably exuberant response to the delights of civilization became contained, there developed between host city and guest army a friendship so warm and understanding as to be unique.

  Australian soldiers or “Diggers” who might have been miffed, at first, to find the pubs closing early a few times weekly because the Yankee Marines had again drunk the town dry, also found that they were perpetually welcome at the wet canteens or “slop-chutes” of the Marine camps. Complaints that the Americans’ voracious appetite for steak-and-eggs was making beef hard to come by were tempered by the realization that the Yanks were generous with their coveted cigarettes and that they frequently arrived at Australian homes bringing a pound of precious butter. Soon the Aussies were saying “okay” for “good-o” and their movie theaters played “The Marines’ Hymn” as often as “God Save the King,” while over in the Marine camps—where the band often played “Waltzin’ Matilda” on ceremonial parade—the Yanks called their friends “cobber” and spoke of riding a “tram” to keep a date with some “shiela.” Before the division departed Melbourne there was many a Yankee ring on an Australian finger, and during the nine months of that truly remarkable rest the Marines thought less and less of the alternating hell of fear and fire which they had left behind them, remembering it only when a comrade looked up from a Melbourne newspaper account of the war in North Africa or New Guinea and exclaimed:

  “I wonder what it’s like back on the ‘Canal?”

  Back on the ‘Canal in that early January of 1943 the war had lost its spectacular quality. Over at Tulagi there was a sign which, in letters two feet high, proclaimed Bull Halsey’s battle creed: KILL JAPS, KILL JAPS, KILL MORE JAPS. But most of the killing would have to be done farther north, for Hyakutate’s men had already pulled back preparatory to their evacuation and Japanese naval strength no longer ventured south.

  The coastwatchers who occupied the lonely high peaks of Guadalcanal were being called in. Among them was the erstwhile planter K. D. Hay, a veteran of World War One and easily the fattest man in the South Pacific. Yet he had hung on to his station at the mountain mining camp known as Gold Ridge. But now, in January, he was coming down, bringing with him the aged nun who was the sole survivor of a Japanese mission massacre and whom Hay had cared for. Melanesian bearers brought the nun down. Hay made his own panting descent. By the time he had reached the coastal road he was near collapse. He sent word to the Americans requesting a jeep. He explained that he was “knocked up,” innocently unaware that the Australian slang for being exhausted was also American slang for being pregnant.

  A puzzled U. S. Army officer drove up the road. He saw Hay. He saw his belly. He clapped his hand to his forehead and swore:

  “My God, it’s true!”

  In mid-January Japanese aerial attacks on Henderson Field began to increase, giving Captain Joe Foss his chance to break Captain Eddie Rickenbacker’s record.

  Foss was back on Guadalcanal. He had recovered from the malaria which had stricken him November 24, the day after he had shot down his twenty-third plane. He had been evacuated to Sydney, but now he was back with Squadron 121 with only a few weeks to go on his tour of duty. And all the talk was whether or not Joe would equal the 26 kills which had made Rickenbacker the American ace-of-aces in World War One.

  On January 15 Captain Joe Foss became the ace-of-aces in the new war. On that day he tore into a formation of Zeros and shot down three of them. Foss’s score stayed at 26, while his squadron went on to record 164 kills against 20 of its own pilots lost. At the end of January Joe Foss’s tour of duty was over.

  He went home to receive the Medal of Honor, the path of his homegoing convoy crossing that of those carriers and convoys coming out with a new weapon and a new outfit for the Marines’ war against Japan: the peerless Corsair fighter and the Third Marine Division.

  The first of the Corsairs arrived at Guadalcanal on February 12. They came to Henderson Field with a bad reputation, for many Navy pilots swore they were “full of bugs” and at least one carrier commander refused to permit them aboard his ship. But the Marines made the Corsair their own, forgetting the stubborn Wildcat which had won the air battle of Guadalcanal in their jubilation at the range and staying power of this gull-winged, paddle-bladed killer. The big Corsairs could fly faster than anything Japan had, could climb nearly 3,000 feet a second, and range twice as far as the Wildcats. If they were difficult aboard ship they were not so ashore—and the Marine fliers would be landlocked for most of the rest of the war.

  The Third Marine Division which entered the Pacific Theater almost simultaneously with the Corsair was not only new but also novel. It was a wel
d of raw recruit and battle-blooded. veteran. It made manifest the fact that the rewards of the Solomons offensive were not all strategic. Unlike Guam, Wake or the Philippines, Guadalcanal had ended in a victory that produced thousands of veteran warriors to drill and lead America’s cadres. Even the lowest ranks of the Third Division included men who had fought the Japanese on Guadalcanal. Having recovered from the wounds or malaria which had brought them home, they had been assigned to the Third. Many of the new division’s officers and top NCO’s were also veterans. They had been promoted and detached from the First to command in the Third.

  Never again would a Marine division go into battle as green as the First had been at Guadalcanal. Every outfit would have its heavy quota of officers and men who knew the difference between the myth of the superman of the jungle and the fact of the tenacious enemy who fought so much with his heart, so little with his head. They could tell the boots and Ninety-Day Wonders of the Third that though the enemy was indeed “a tricky little bastard,” his tactics were so tied to trickery that he sometimes confused his means for his ends.

  By April all of the Division’s units—the Third, Ninth and Twenty-First Marines, the Twelfth Marine Regiment of artillery, the Nineteenth of engineers—had been assembled in New Zealand. They began training at twenty-two separate camps in the vicinity of Auckland.

  South of them, down at the capital of Wellington, was that older brother division, that angriest and most stridently war-like of all Marine divisions—the Second.

  The Second Marine Division had come to Wellington from Guadalcanal with a chip on its shoulder. The chip was there for the First Marine Division to knock off. For the Second was sore. Its Second Regiment had been at Tulagi-Guadalcanal since the August 7 landings, had in fact been the first unit to take enemy soil in World War Two, and though it had not been in the thick of it thereafter, it had been forced to stay on Guadalcanal for more than a month after the glory-hounds of the First Division shoved off. The Eighth Marines and Tenth Marine Artillery had come onto the island in November. The Sixth had arrived in January. All had joined General Patch’s offensive without benefit of publicity, for no newspaper in the States seemed to have heard of the Second Marine Division. It was always the First that got the headlines.