Close Combat

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I gather it’s beneath the dignity of a United States senator to arrive at the White House in anything less than a limousine?” Pickering asked as he started to get in.

  “It is beneath this United States senator’s dignity to call upon the President soaked to the skin,” Fowler replied. “They would make you park your car yourself if you drove over there. And, you may have noticed, it’s raining.”

  Pickering didn’t reply.

  “How are you, Fred?” he cheerfully asked Fowler’s chauffeur.

  “Just fine, General, thank you.”

  The limousine was stopped at the gate. Before passing them onto the White House grounds, a muscular man in a snap-brim hat and a rain-soaked trench coat scanned their personal identification, then checked their names against a list on a clipboard.

  A Marine sergeant opened the limousine door when they stopped under the White House portico, then saluted when Pickering got out.

  Pickering returned the salute. “How are you, Sergeant?” he asked.

  The sergeant seemed surprised at being spoken to. “Just fine, Sir.”

  A White House butler opened the door as they approached it.

  “Senator, General. If you’ll follow me, please?”

  He took them via an elevator to the second floor, where another muscular man in civilian clothing examined them carefully before stepping aside.

  The butler knocked at a double door, then opened it without waiting for an order.

  “Mr. President,” he announced, “Senator Fowler and General Pickering.”

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt rolled his wheelchair toward the door.

  “My two favorite members of the loyal opposition,” he said, beaming. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Mr. President,” Fowler and Pickering said, almost in unison.

  “Fleming, how are you?” Roosevelt asked as he offered his hand.

  “Very well, thank you, Sir.”

  Pickering thought he detected an inflection in the President’s voice that made it a real question, not a pro forma one. There came immediate proof.

  “Malaria’s all cleared up?” the President pursued. “Your wounds have healed?”

  “I’m in fine shape, Sir.”

  “Then I can safely offer you a drink? Without invoking the rage of the Navy’s surgeon general?”

  “It is never safe to offer General Pickering a drink, Mr. President,” Senator Fowler said.

  “Well, I think I’ll just take the chance, anyway,” Roosevelt said.

  A black steward in a white jacket appeared carrying a tray with two glasses on it.

  “Frank and I started without you,” Roosevelt said, spinning the wheelchair around and rolling it into the next room. Fowler and Pickering followed him.

  As they entered, Knox rose from one of two matching leather armchairs. He had a drink in his hand. Admiral William D. Leahy rose from the other chair. He was a tall, lanky, sad-faced man whose title was Chief of Staff of the President. There was a coffee cup on the table beside him.

  The men shook hands.

  “How are you, General?” Admiral Leahy asked, and again Pickering sensed it was a real, rather than pro forma, question.

  “I’m very well, thank you, Admiral,” Pickering said.

  “I already asked him, Admiral,” Roosevelt said. “We apparently have standing before us a tribute to the efficacy of military medicine. As badly as he was wounded, as sick as he was with malaria, I am awed.” He turned to Pickering, Knox, and Fowler, smiled, and went on: “The Admiral and I have had our schedule changed. You will be spared taking lunch with us.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. President,” Senator Fowler said.

  “Oh, no you’re not,” Roosevelt said. “With me gone, you three political crustaceans can sit here in my apartment and say unkind things about me.”

  There was the expected dutiful laughter.

  “I hear laughter but no denials,” Roosevelt said. “But before I leave you, I’d like to ask a favor of you, Fleming.”

  “Anything within my power, Mr. President,” Pickering said.

  “Could you find it in your heart to make peace with Bill Donovan?”

  Is that what this is all about? Did that sonofabitch actually go to the President of the United States to complain about me?

  “I wasn’t aware that Mr. Donovan was displeased with me, Mr. President.”

  “It has come to his attention that you said unkind things about him to our friend Douglas MacArthur,” Roosevelt said.

  “Mr. President,” Pickering said, softly but firmly, “to the best of my recollection, I have never discussed Mr. Donovan with General MacArthur.”

  Frank Knox coughed.

  “Then tell me this, Fleming,” the President said. “If I asked you to say something nice to Douglas MacArthur about Bill Donovan, would you?”

  “I’m not sure I understand you, Mr. President.”

  “Frank will explain everything,” Roosevelt said. “And when you see Douglas, give him my very best regards, won’t you?”

  The President rolled himself away before Pickering could say another word.

  III

  [ONE]

  Guadalcanal

  Solomon Islands

  0450 Hours 13 October 1942

  Major Jack (NMI) Stecker, USMCR, commanding officer of 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marines, woke at the first hint of morning light. He was a large, tall, straight-backed man who could look like a Marine even in sweat-soaked utilities—as the Commanding General of the 1st Marine Division recently noted privately to his Sergeant Major. The rest of the Division, including himself, the General went on to observe, looked like AWOLs from the Civilian Conservation Corps.

  Major Stecker had been sleeping on a steel bed and mattress, formerly the property of the Imperial Japanese Army. A wooden crate served as Stecker’s bedside table; it once contained canned smoked oysters intended for the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal.

  The “tabletop” held a Coleman lantern; a flashlight; an empty can of Planter’s peanuts converted to an ashtray; a package of Chesterfield cigarettes; a Zippo lighter; and a U.S. Pistol, Caliber .45 ACP, Model 1911, with the hammer in the cocked position and the safety on.

  On waking, Major Stecker sat up and reached for the pistol. He removed the magazine, worked the action to eject the chambered cartridge, and then loaded it back into the magazine. He let the slide go forward, lowered the hammer by pulling the trigger, and then reinserted the magazine into the pistol.

  It was one thing, in Major Stecker’s judgment, to have a pistol in the cocked and locked position when there was a good chance you might need it in a hurry, and quite another to carry a weapon that way when you were walking around wide awake.

  Before retiring, he had removed his high-topped shoes—called boondockers—and his socks. Now he pulled on a fresh pair of socks—fresh in the sense that he had rinsed them, if not actually washed them in soap and water—and then the boondockers, carefully double-knotting their laces so they would not come undone. When he was satisfied with that, he slipped the Colt into its holster and then buckled his pistol belt around his waist.

  He pushed aside the shelter-half that separated his sleeping quarters from the Battalion Command Post.

  The Battalion S-3 (Plans & Training) Sergeant, who was sitting on a folding chair (Japanese) next to a folding table (Japanese) on which sat a Field Desk (U.S. Army), started to get to his feet. Stecker waved him back to his chair.

  “Good morning, Sir.”

  “Good morning,” Stecker said with a smile, then walked out of the CP and relieved himself against a palm tree. He went back into the CP, picked up a five-gallon water can, and poured from it two inches of water into a washbasin—a steel helmet inverted in a rough wooden frame.

  He moved to his bedside table and reached inside for his toilet kit, a battered leather bag with mold growing green around the zipper. He lifted out shaving cream and a Gillette razor. Then he went back to the helmet
washbasin, wet his face, and shaved himself as well as he could using a pocket-size, polished-metal mirror. He had come ashore with a small glass mirror, but the concussion from an incoming Japanese mortar round had shattered it.

  He carried the helmet outside, tossed the water away, and returned to his bedside table. He reached inside for a towel, then wiped the vestiges of the shaving cream from his face.

  His morning toilette completed, he picked up a U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30-06, Ml that was beside his bed (one of the few M1s on Guadalcanal). It had a leather strap, and the strap had two spare eight-round clips attached to it.

  The M1 rifle (called the Garand, after its inventor) was viewed by most Marines as a Mickey Mouse piece of shit, inferior in every way to the U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30-06, M1903 (called the Springfield, after the U.S. Army Arsenal where it was manufactured). Every Marine had been trained with a Springfield at either Parris Island or San Diego.

  Major Stecker disagreed. In his professional judgment, the Garand was the finest military rifle yet developed.

  Before the war, as Sergeant Major Stecker, he participated in the testing of the weapon at the Army’s Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia. And he concluded then that if he ever had to go to war again, he would arm himself with the Garand. Not only was it at least as accurate as the Springfield, but it was self-loading. You could fire the eight cartridges in its en bloc clip as fast as you could pull the trigger. And then, when the clip was empty, the weapon automatically ejected it and left the action open for the rapid insertion of a fresh one. The Marine Corps’ beloved Springfield required the manipulation of its bolt after each shot, and its magazine held only five cartridges.

  Although there were in those days fewer than two hundred Garands in Marine Corps stocks, it had not been difficult for the sergeant major of the U.S. Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, to arrange to have one assigned to him. For one thing, he was the power behind the U.S. Marine Corps Rifle Team, and for another, sergeants major of the pre-war Marine Corps generally got whatever they thought they needed, no questions asked.

  When Sergeant Major Stecker was called to active duty as a Captain, USMC Reserve, he briefly considered turning the Garand in…. He decided against it. If he turned the Garand in, he reasoned, it would almost certainly spend the war in a rifle rack at Quantico. If he kept it, the odds were that it would be put to its intended use—bringing accurate fire to bear upon the enemy.

  By the time the 1st Marine Division reached the South Pacific, Jack (NMI) Stecker was a major…. He had in no way changed his opinion about the Garand rifle—far to the contrary. Although there were few in the 1st Marines who felt safe teasing Major Stecker about anything, three or four brave souls felt bold enough to tease him about his rifle. The last man to do it was Brigadier General Lewis T. Harris, the Assistant Division Commander. They were then on the transport en route to Guadalcanal.

  General Harris was a second lieutenant in France in 1917 at the time Sergeant Stecker, then nineteen, earned the Medal of Honor. And they had remained friends since. General Harris, for instance, was the man who talked Stecker into accepting a reserve commission in the first place. And it was Harris who later arranged his promotion to major and his being given command of Second of the Fifth—against a good deal of pressure from the regular officer corps, who believed that while there was a place for commissioned ex-enlisted men in the wartime Corps, it was not in positions of command.

  On the transport, General Harris looked at Stecker and observed solemnly: “I’m willing to close my eyes to officers who prefer to carry a rifle in addition to the prescribed arm,” which was the .45 Colt pistol, “but I’m having trouble overlooking an officer who arms himself with a Mickey Mouse piece that will probably fall apart the first time it’s fired.”

  Stecker raised his eyes to meet the General’s. “May the Major respectfully suggest that the General go fuck himself?”

  They were alone in the General’s cabin, and they went back together a long way. The General laughed and offered Stecker another sample of what the bottle’s label described as prescription mouthwash.

  The comments about Jack (NMI) Stecker’s Mickey Mouse rifle died out after the 2nd Battalion of the Fifth Marines went ashore on Tulagi (at about the same time the bulk of the Division was going ashore on Guadalcanal, twenty miles away). The word spread that the 2nd Battalion’s commanding officer, standing in the open and firing offhand, had put rounds in the heads of two Japanese two hundred yards away.

  Jack Stecker put his helmet on his head and slung the Garand over his shoulder.

  “I’m going to have a look around,” he said to the G-3 sergeant.

  The field telephone rang as he crossed the room. As Stecker reached the entrance, the G-3 sergeant called his name. When Stecker turned, he held out the telephone to him.

  Stecker took the telephone, pushed the butterfly switch, and spoke his name.

  “Yes, Sir,” he said, and then “No, Sir,” and then “Thank you, Sir, I’ll be waiting.”

  He handed the telephone back to the sergeant.

  “The look around will have to wait. I’m having breakfast with The General. He’s sending his jeep for me.”

  There were several general officers on the island of Guadalcanal, but The General was Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, who commanded the First Marine Division.

  “Whatever it is, Sir,” the G-3 sergeant said, “we didn’t do it.”

  “I don’t think The General would believe that, Sergeant, whatever it is,” Stecker said, and walked out of the command post.

  [TWO]

  The 1st and 3rd Battalions of the Fifth Marines, First Marine Division, had come ashore near Lunga Point on Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, on 7 August. Simultaneously, the 1st Marine Raider Battalion and the 2nd Battalion of the Fifth Marines had landed on Tulagi Island, twenty miles away; and the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion on the tiny island of Gavutu, two miles from Tulagi.

  This operation was less the first American counterattack against the Japanese—since that would have meant the establishment on Guadalcanal of a force that could reasonably be expected to overwhelm the Japanese there—than an act of desperation.

  From a variety of sources, Intelligence had learned that the Japanese would in the near future complete the construction of an airfield near Lunga Point on the north side of the island. If it became operational, Japanese aircraft would dominate the area: New Guinea would almost certainly fall. And an invasion of Australia would become likely.

  On the other hand, if the Japanese airfield were to fall into American hands, the situation would be reversed. For American aircraft could then strike at Japanese shipping lanes, and at Japanese bases, especially those at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain. A Japanese invasion of Australia would be rendered impossible, all of New Guinea could be retaken, and the first step would be made on what publicists were already calling “The March to Japan.”

  General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, South West Pacific Ocean Area, and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, very seldom agreed on anything; but they agreed on this: that the risks involved in taking Guadalcanal had to be accepted. And so the decision to go ahead with the attack was made.

  The First Division was by then in New Zealand, having been told it would not be sent into combat until early in 1943. Nevertheless, it was given the task. It was transported to Guadalcanal and Tulagi/Gavutu in a Naval Task Force commanded by Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.

  The initial amphibious invasion, on Friday, 7 August 1942, went better than anyone thought possible. Although the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion on Gavutu was almost literally decimated, both Gavutu and Tulagi fell swiftly and with relatively few American casualties. And there was little effective resistance as the Marines went ashore on Guadalcanal.

  But then Admiral Fletcher decided that he could not risk the loss of his fleet by remaining off the Guadalcanal beachhead. His thinking was perhaps colore
d by the awesome losses the Navy had suffered at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. And so he assumed—not completely without reason—that the Japanese would launch a massive attack on his ships as soon as they realized what was happening.

  Admiral Fletcher summoned General Vandegrift to the command ship USS McCawley on Saturday, 8 August. There he informed him that he intended to withdraw from Guadalcanal starting at three the next afternoon.

  Vandegrift argued that he could have the Japanese airfield ready to take American fighters within forty-eight hours, and that he desperately needed the men, and especially the supplies, still aboard the transports. He argued in vain.

  The next morning, Sunday, 9 August, Fletcher’s fears seemed to be confirmed. In what became known as the Battle of Savo Island, the U.S. Navy took another whipping: the cruisers USS Vincennes and USS Quincy were both sunk within an hour. The Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra was set on fire, and then torpedoed and sunk by an American submarine to save it from capture. A third American cruiser, USS Astoria, was sunk at noon.

  At 1500 that afternoon, ten transports, one cruiser, four destroyers, and a minesweeper of the invasion fleet left the beachhead for Noumea. At 1830, the rest of the ships sailed away. On board were a vast stock of weapons and equipment, including all the heavy artillery and virtually all of the engineer equipment, plus rations, ammunition, and personnel.

  If it had not been for captured stocks of Japanese rations, the Marines would have starved. If it had not been for captured Japanese trucks, bulldozers, and other engineer equipment (and American ingenuity in making them run) the airfield could not have been completed.

  And it was not a question of if the Japanese would launch a major counterattack to throw the Marines back into the sea, but when.

  In Jack Stecker’s view, the next few days were going to be a close thing for the Marines on Guadalcanal. For a number of reasons. For one, he had been a longtime observer of the Japanese military. Before the war, he did a tour with the 4th Marines in Shanghai, where he soon realized that the Japanese were not small, trollish men wearing thick glasses whom the United States could defeat with one hand tied behind them; that they were in fact well trained, well disciplined, and well armed.