War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

12 OCTOBER 1942

  0100 HOURS LOCAL

  The loss of half his operational carriers and battleships on 15 September stunned Nimitz and his staff in Hawaii. Ashore on Guadalcanal, the Marines were, however, heartened by the safe arrival of 4,200 more Marines from Samoa. These new arrivals were immediately fed into the narrow perimeter around Henderson Field and Fighter One. More than 1,000 of Vandegrift’s sickest and most seriously wounded casualties were evacuated.

  Unfortunately, the Japanese were also adding to their forces. On 18 September the Imperial General Staff ordered that retaking Guadalcanal be given strategic priority over the effort to seize Port Moresby. From that point on, the Tokyo Express landed between 500 and 1,000 fresh troops and supplies nightly on Guadalcanal. By 10 October, the Japanese had nearly 12,000 Imperial Army soldiers on the island—roughly the strength available to Vandegrift.

  The reinforcements General Kawaguchi received convinced him that he had sufficient strength to overwhelm the Henderson Field defenses—providing the Imperial Fleet could deliver enough fire to support his advance and keep the “Cactus Air Force” from launching against his troops. The attack was carefully planned for the night of 11–12 October, and a surface action group of three heavy cruisers and two destroyers commanded by Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto was dispatched from Rabaul. Once the cruisers opened fire on Henderson Field and Vandegrift’s command post on Bloody Ridge, Kawaguchi would launch his ground assault.

  Fortunately, in Hawaii, Station Hypo had succeeded in breaking enough of the new Japanese naval code to warn Admiral Ghormley of the impending attack. Ghormley immediately dispatched the only forces he had available—a cruiser-destroyer flotilla commanded by Rear Admiral Norman Scott—and ordered him to interdict the Japanese before they could open fire on the Marines.

  At 2305 on 11 October, Scott, aboard his flagship San Francisco and accompanied by the cruisers Helena, Salt Lake City, and Boise, and the destroyers Farenholt, Duncan, Laffey, Buchanan, and McCalla, practically bumped into the oncoming Japanese northwest of Cape Esperance. Scott’s force succeeded in “capping the ‘T’ ” of Goto’s little armada and immediately sank a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer and set a second cruiser afire. Within the hour, the Americans severely damaged the third cruiser, Goto’s flagship Aoba, as it fled north up the slot.

  The Americans weren’t completely unscathed. The USS Duncan, hit by both Japanese and American gunfire, sank shortly after the melee. The destroyer Farenholt and the cruiser Boise, damaged by Japanese shells, had to be taken out of action for repairs. But the attack had been turned away. Ashore, Kawaguchi cancelled his ground assault and the Marines around Henderson Field enjoyed their first night in over a month without Japanese naval gunfire or ground attacks. On the morning of 13 October their spirits were further buoyed by the arrival of a convoy from New Caledonia delivering new aircraft, food, ammunition—and, best of all, 3,200 fresh troops from the U.S. Army’s Americal Division.

  Unfortunately, the respite was all too brief. That night, the new arrivals were subjected to a brutal, ninety-minute barrage from two Japanese battleships that wrecked the “Cactus Air Force” aircraft, destroyed a bomb dump, some fresh food stores, a fuel dump, and blasted holes in the Henderson Field and Fighter One runways and aprons. The damage was so severe that heavy air raids by land-based bombers from Rabaul were practically unopposed the next day. Encouraged, Goto returned with two new cruisers and did more damage.

  By 15 October, there were fewer than a dozen flyable U.S. aircraft left on Guadalcanal. When Australian coast watchers reported that six Japanese transports were sneaking down the slot to deliver 4,500 troops to Kawaguchi that night, there were too few planes to mount a raid. By the morning of 16 October, when fifteen replacement Wildcats and Dauntlesses were flown in, the Seabees and Marines had patched the airfields but the Americans on Guadalcanal were once again outnumbered, scarce on ammunition, and living on half rations.

  With so few fleet assets available, Nimitz knew that the only way to hold Guadalcanal was to keep the fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes based at Henderson Field and the nearby Fighter One auxiliary strip flying. That required the infantry to protect the airfields—and the constant delivery of planes, parts, bombs, ammunition, fuel, and pilots.

  One of those pilots was a South Dakota farm boy named Joe Foss. He had become part of the “Cactus Air Force” on 9 October. At the ripe age of twenty-seven, Foss was one of the oldest pilots flying in the Pacific. Just four days after his arrival, he led sixteen Wildcats from Henderson Field to intercept thirty-two Japanese planes.

  CAPTAIN JOE FOSS, USMC

  Henderson Field

  Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands

  16 October 1942

  1400 Hours Local

  We would try to get off early. The coast watchers up the line told us how many airplanes were headed our way. And they’d give the numbers of the dive-bombers and Zeros. We had a pretty good idea about the time that they’d hit Guadalcanal.

  I went up with a flight of eight Wildcats and there were two flights of eight up there—sixteen airplanes. We’d start climbing up to get altitude. I was always aiming for 25,000 feet.

  Zeros were always sneaking around there. You never knew whether they came off a carrier or where they came from. They just swarmed down on us. They could gain altitude in a hurry and come back because the one thing they had was speed. Where we got our speed was to nose over at full throttle—you picked up speed with our heavier airplanes. The Wildcat weighed 8,900 pounds and the Zero weighed 5,900.

  In this case, I was right in the middle of a lot of Zeros and there were Zeros off to the right. Four airplanes were off to my left.

  I thought that I’d go for number one, because, old hunter that I am, in shooting down a goose or duck, if you get the leader, it sort of confuses the flock. In this case I got number one but somebody had “sprinkled” me with machine gun fire before I got there and evidently my radio went out. Well, I got this guy and swung wide, figuring that I’d get another one. But, these guys cut across and started giving me a good blast. So when I dived, that’s when pow! The son-of-a-gun hit the oil cooler, and it doesn’t take long for that engine to seize. When it did, the engine was running full throttle so that sudden stop caused by the seized engine twisted off the reduction gear and that caused a tremendous scream and vibration.

  When I leveled out I went to make a right turn around the field, then I came around to land toward the sea on Fighter One. And the Zeros were blasting me as I’m slowing down. I drop the gear the last minute just before I hit the ground. I just punched the handle to release the ratchet and then the whole thing goes plowing!

  The flaps didn’t work and the speed is above 140 knots. I was trying to preserve the airplane and applied as much brake as I could without going “end over appetite.”

  I was just sailing on that coral runway and the end of it was coming up. I went up between the palm trees in the only row where there were no trucks or anything stored and stopped. I thought, “Well, the score’s tied right now. I got one, they got one.”

  Joe Foss on LIFE magazine.

  They fixed my plane and most of the others. In the four times I got shot down, three times I landed on the field. So I always liked to stay right out there between the Henderson Field and Cape Esperance and fight.

  I personally shot down twenty-six planes and I had some smokers, too. Our squadron probably had as many smokers as confirmed kills. I just was happy to knock one off so he won’t be back to bother you tomorrow. After all, you’re fighting for your life. The idea was to get rid of them. I fight for keeps.

  Joe Foss’s “Flying Circus” holds the record of 208 aerial victories—a feat that is unlikely to ever be broken. He personally achieved twenty-six kills and tied Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I record. Foss was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his achievements at Guadalcanal.

  1ST MARINE DIVISION FORWARD PERIMETER

  BLOODY RIDGE, GUADALCANAL


  26 OCTOBER 1942

  2230 HOURS LOCAL

  On 18 October, Nimitz flew to Noumea to see Admiral Ghormley and learned that his deputy—though responsible for the Guadalcanal campaign—had never gotten within 1,000 miles of the battle. Dissatisfied with Ghormley’s explanations for not doing more to curtail the Tokyo Express or providing sufficient support for Vandegrift, Nimitz replaced his friend with a man who had a reputation for “going into harm’s way”—Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.

  “The Bull,” as the Marines and sailors called him behind his back, flew immediately to Henderson Field to meet with General Vandegrift. The Marine commander was blunt, telling Halsey that his Marines could hold Henderson Field, but that the Navy wasn’t doing enough to support them.

  Stung by those straightforward words, Halsey promised Vandegrift that from now on he would get what he needed from the Navy. Before leaving Henderson Field, he decorated more than fifty of Vandegrift’s Marines.

  But the Bull didn’t stop at handing out medals. When he returned to Noumea, the code-breakers at Station Hypo informed him that Yamamoto was planning a major Combined Fleet operation to support another Imperial Army assault on the Guadalcanal airfields. Halsey directed the battleship Washington and its escorts to step up patrols north of Guadalcanal to interdict the Tokyo Express. He also ordered Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid to take the Hornet and the hastily repaired Enterprise and head northeast of Guadalcanal to intercept a Japanese carrier-battleship fleet headed south from Truk.

  On the island, the Marines prepared for the onslaught. On the rainy night of 25 October, a platoon led by Platoon Sergeant Mitch Paige was sent to cover a part of the perimeter on Bloody Ridge. Paige’s platoon consisted of just thirty-three men manning a line of water-cooled machine guns. He had no other troops because so many Marines from his battalion were tied up defending the line at the mouth of the Matanikou River or in sickbay, suffering from wounds, malaria, or other tropical diseases.

  Though Sergeant Paige couldn’t know it as he put his men in position, General Kawaguchi had more than 2,500 of his troops hiding below in the rain-soaked jungle, preparing to overrun the airfield closer than 1,000 yards away.

  SERGEANT MITCH PAIGE, USMC

  Second Battle of Bloody Ridge, Guadalcanal

  25 October 1942

  2230 Hours Local

  Every weapon that the Marines landed with on Guadalcanal in August 1942 was valuable, even if they were World War I surplus. Most had a 1903 Springfield five-round bolt-action rifle. But I felt that I probably had the best machine gun platoon in the Marine Corps.

  Everyone in my platoon could take apart, field strip, and put together a water-cooled machine gun, a .30-caliber light machine gun, a 1903 Springfield rifle, and a 1911-model .45-caliber pistol.

  By 25 October we had about 25,000 Marines, soldiers, and sailors on Guadalcanal. And the Japanese had about the same. On the island, these people were fighting for the little airstrip called Henderson Field. Every platoon leader was called down to Marine headquarters and the word I got was, “Sergeant Paige, this is all the ammo we have for your machine guns. And this is all the C-rations.”

  We were on the west side of the Bloody Ridge perimeter, on a finger that sloped down into Japanese territory. Twenty-four hours a day something was going on somewhere along that perimeter. As we moved into position it was raining and we were under artillery fire. Major Connelley came to my platoon and said, “Mitch, I want you to take your machine gun platoon to the ridge up there.”

  My platoon was sent to hold the high ground for the entire division. I told ’em, “Look, we’re going to fight this thing till we whip every one of them. There’s nobody in the world that can beat this platoon. Nobody! You’re the best machine gunners in the world.”

  We had eight water-cooled and eight light machine guns. We had worked on them to where we’d built up the rate of fire from 550 rounds a minute to 1,300 rounds a minute.

  This water-cooled machine gun sits on a fifty-one-pound steel tripod. Now the gun itself weighs forty-two pounds, plus seven pints of water. And each ammo belt is twenty-two pounds. This is a lot of weight.

  Every one of our machine guns were 1917 or 1918 model A-1 machine guns. All of our light machine guns were .30-calibers and air-cooled. These were used as a backup weapon for the water-cooled guns.

  You could stack fifteen sandbags on the water-cooled guns, and it would still vibrate a little bit.

  Marines would crawl and control the day, and the Japanese would do everything they could to control the night. Every man knew he had to kill or be killed. The Japs were battle hardened. They’d been fighting in China for almost ten years. Many of them were Mongolians over six feet tall, and weighing over 200 pounds.

  And I reminded my men, “They love to run bayonets through you first and then shoot you.”

  I lined up my machine guns as quietly as I could and warned the men that they couldn’t have anything rattling. “If there’s anything rattling, you wrap it with something. Don’t let ’em hear the machine guns, setting the gun on the tripod—nothing, you’re going to have to be very quiet.”

  I crawled from man to man and encouraged them. I told them, “Major Connelley says if there’s going to be an attack, they’re not going to attack G Company. You can expect an attack here.”

  And I said, “When they come at our line, don’t fire because if you fire too soon they’ll pull back and wait, let you expend all your ammunition, and then charge when you run out. But when they start their attack, and they hit our line, they’re committed. They’re not going to turn around and run back.”

  There was a Jap patrol right within twenty yards of us. We didn’t want to give away the machine guns’ position so we threw hand grenades. We heard all this screaming and hollering and figured we got about eighteen or nineteen of ’em with the hand grenades.

  I always carried a long line with me, rolled up in a bag. And I had some empty C-ration cans that were blackened in the fire. I tied ’em just ten feet in front of my whole line of guns. I put one empty .30-caliber cartridge in each one of ’em—as a noise-making trip wire. They’d have to go through me first to get to Henderson Field.

  Suddenly flares lit up and we saw nothing but bayonets coming at us. They would scream “Banzai!” and “Blood for the Emperor!” It was horrible.

  Meanwhile mortars are going off, and 105s that they were firing over us into the jungle. Soon, they were coming up, elbow to elbow. When we first heard those trip wire cans, I screamed out, “Fire, fire, fire! All machine guns fire!”

  They hit my line and dove right into the guns and we just literally wiped out a whole batch of them, right there. They were scattered all over the place, and I was tripping over them. I recall vividly one of ’em impaling Sam Liepardt—ran a bayonet right through him—on their first banzai assault.

  I had a .45-caliber pistol, which I fired until it was empty. As I threw it down, I saw this bayonet coming towards me, aimed for my neck. And all I had left was my K-bar [knife]. I reached for it and stuck my other hand out, and his bayonet went right through my hand, and just split everything—my finger and all. Everything happened so fast and he lost his balance. I did too, but I got my K-bar and put it in his left side.

  So then I took off down the line, to see how the rest of the platoon was holding up. As I saw Liepardt, I knew he was dead. I ran over to the next gun just as Charlie Locke was killed by a Jap gunner who fired point-blank and hit him. Charlie was hit right in the front as this guy splattered him with his submachine gun. Blood was flying all over the place. I was just covered with blood, and I learned later that one of his bullets went through my pistol belt, and through my side, where it took a chunk out.

  Men were trying to come up with ammunition, crawling up from George Company. Fox Company was taking casualties. I sent two men back there to tell them, “Hold the line, but don’t shoot straight ahead because you’ll be killing us!”

  Scarp and Pulawski from my
platoon were both killed, and there were hundreds of enemy soldiers coming up and charging over the hill. You just couldn’t kill them fast enough.

  Gaston was down, and this Jap was whacking at him with his samurai sword. Gaston’s a big Marine, about 210 pounds. With his foot that wasn’t being whacked on, he kicked the Japanese under his chin, broke his neck, and killed him.

  I was literally walking into some of these Japanese, and they were bumping into me. I thought they’d overrun us.

  Our entire position would soon be isolated, and they could just knock off and annihilate the entire division. They stopped right on the crest of the hill, and began going down toward Connelley.

  I grabbed a gun from George Company and it was just about the first good break of my day. I just sprayed that whole area, and all these guys never knew what hit them. The next morning, Connelley and I looked at them; they had holes in the back of their heads, in their backs, the soles of their feet, and every Japanese was dead.

  I don’t know how many attacks there were, it just seemed like it was constant. There was wave after wave. And we’re fighting and shooting. I was running from gun to gun and the first thing I knew, nobody was on the guns. I was the only one alive on the guns.

  And at that precise moment, up from the jungle, about ten yards away from the edge of our perimeter, I saw a place where somebody could crawl up and fire. If they got up that close, we could knock them off with either hand grenades or swing a gun over that way. But when I look again, there’s a Japanese with a light machine gun there. He’d plunked his gun down to my left. I grabbed hold of one of our machine guns, and there was no ammunition in it. And this guy is sitting there, aiming at my head. He’s ready to pull the trigger.

  But when I looked down, somebody had brought some more ammo up so I reached down, picked up a belt of ammunition, and fed the 250 rounds into the gun. I pulled the cover down, pulled the cocking handle twice to lock and load the gun. Then all I had to do was put my finger on the trigger.