Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu

by Jim McEnery

  But there’d be no rest for the Raiders on the night ahead. No rest for the First Parachute Battalion, which was sent down by division headquarters to fill gaps in the line after Edson told the brass what he suspected. No rest on the night of the 12th. Or the 13th. Or the 14th, either.

  On those three nights, only the dead found rest on Edson’s Ridge.

  AT ABOUT 9 PM on September 12, the sky was lit up by a flare from a Jap float plane. Half an hour later, the enemy cruisers out in Iron Bottom Sound opened up with their eight-inch guns and pounded the ridge area for twenty minutes or so.

  As soon as the echo of the last Jap shell faded away, the troops on the ground attacked immediately. They aimed their main thrust at the right flank of C Company of the Raiders, who were spread out for 300 yards down the right side of the ridge, from the top of a spur all the way to the bank of the Lunga River.

  Fortunately, C Company had just gotten back its commander, Captain Kenneth Bailey, that morning. Bailey had been evacuated with serious wounds he’d gotten at Tulagi, and he’d been in a hospital at Noumea, New Caledonia, for two or three weeks.

  Actually, he’d skipped out of the hospital without being discharged by the medics and caught a ride on a plane back to Henderson Field. The guys in C Company worshipped Bailey, and they loved him even more because he’d been the one who brought along several bags of their mail that had piled up in Noumea. They fought their guts out for him that night.

  One platoon of C was forced to fall back along the riverbank, and B Company, behind them, was pushed back, too. But the Japs couldn’t score any kind of breakthrough, and they weren’t able to hold any of their gains. There was a lot of confusion in the jungle while the Japs milled around and tried to cut fire lanes through the heavy foliage. By daylight, the Raiders had reclaimed some of their lost positions, and the Japs were still basically back where they’d started.

  Edson was confident his men could hold, but division headquarters wasn’t so sure, and they had good reason for pessimism. After their losses of the night before, the Raiders were down to about 400 men, and although nobody knows to this day how many Japs were out there, some reliable estimates put the number at 4,000. In other words, Edson’s guys were outnumbered ten to one.

  Division tried to send the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines in to help, but like those of us in the Third Battalion, they were way out on the west end of our lines. It was a long march, and they had to cross the airfield to get there, which was impossible because the field was under constant heavy bombardment by the Nips. They did their best, but most of them didn’t get there until sometime on September 14.

  On the afternoon of the 13th, Edson called together as many troops as he could get within hearing distance and gave them a speech, although his voice was notoriously soft and whispery, and it probably didn’t carry more than a few yards.

  “Okay, this is it,” he said. “There’s nothing left between the Japs and Henderson Field but us. If we don’t hold, the field will be lost, and the whole Guadalcanal campaign will be a flop. I think we can hold the line because you’re the finest bunch of fighters I’ve ever known—but it’s up to you.”

  Edson’s audience was small, but the quiet sincerity in his voice must’ve deeply impressed the guys who heard it. “The men really turned to,” said one listener. “There was no more grumbling.”

  Instead, the Raiders got ready quietly and seriously for the second night. Edson chose the high point in the center of the ridge as the main line of resistance, and he shortened the perimeter by 1,800 yards, still a lot of distance to cover for 400 guys.

  As the light began to fade, the Raiders and Parachutists could hear the chattering from the Japs getting louder and louder. Some of the Marines later swore they heard the Japs yelling, “Gas attack! Gas attack!” There wasn’t actually any gas, just a series of smoky flares.

  At about 6:30 PM, the Japs charged. They hit the area held by B Company of the Raiders out on the right flank the hardest, and drove them back toward the top of the ridge. The Japs also surrounded one of B Company’s platoons, forcing them to retreat and leaving a sizable gap in the line.

  The situation was looking bad when Red Mike himself jumped in and took control of it. Around dusk, he’d already moved his CP forward to the nose of the ridge, where he was less than ten yards from the front-line machine guns. The area around him was under constant heavy enemy fire, and Edson had to lie flat on his belly to direct return fire from his gunners with a hand phone.

  Now and then, he jumped up and ran at a crouch to rally men who seemed too scared and confused to fight back. When he found some Marines milling around dangerously on top of the ridge, he gave them an ass-chewing they’d never forget.

  “Listen, you guys,” he yelled, and for once they could’ve heard him from a hundred yards away. “The only thing those Japs have got that you don’t have is guts! Now get the hell over there and get to firing!”

  Then he grabbed them and pulled them behind him until he had them back in firing positions.

  Meanwhile, Captain Bailey, the CO of C Company, gave Edson plenty of support. Even though Bailey was still pale from his wounds, he seemed to recover every bit of his strength and then some.

  “He was the big guy that was all over the place,” said one of his Marines. “He kept running around that night and grabbing guys by their sleeves and yelling in their faces. ‘What the hell you wanta do?’ he’d say. ‘Live forever?’”

  At one point that night, the Marines on the ridge were down to one box of grenades for the whole bunch. But Bailey made it his business to see they got more. He made about a dozen trips down to a small supply dump at the foot of the ridge to get fresh supplies of grenades and haul them up.

  Edson gave Captain Harry Torgerson, the Parachute Battalion’s executive officer, credit for getting his depleted companies back on the line when some of them were down to just thirty or forty men still able to fight. He called them by name and challenged them individually to move forward and stand their ground.

  “He instilled the will to fight into a lot of men who didn’t want to fight anymore,” Edson said after the war. “He did it with his voice. He started with two or three, and it just spread.”

  At 10 PM on the 13th, Edson sent word to division that his force on the ridge was down to 300 live and unwounded Marines, but he still thought he could hold. Division wasn’t nearly so confident. Occasional Jap sniper fire was already hitting the division CP.

  Thirty minutes later, the Japs launched a new charge with fresh troops at what was left of the beat-up Parachute Battalion. The strength of this new attack was too great for the Parachute guys to withstand, and they had to give ground—quite a bit of ground.

  And that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

  The artillery men of the 11th Marines had been standing helplessly by their guns for hours, but they hadn’t been able to fire a single round because the Jap and Marine lines were so close together.

  Now, with the Parachute guys pulling their whole line back and re-forming it higher on the ridge, it gave the artillery the opening they’d been waiting for. Our 105s opened up with the heaviest barrage anybody on Guadalcanal had ever seen, and the Japs helped out by stupidly firing off red rockets before each of their assaults so the 11th’s gunners knew right where they were.

  It was a total slaughter. Only a few Japs got onto the ridge itself, and they pulled the bonehead stunt of using more flares to light up our lines as they came. Big mistake. Our machine guns and BARs finished them off.

  About 2:30 AM on September 14, the worst of the Jap attacks had been beaten off, and Edson told division his men could hold. By daylight, the attacks had fizzled out altogether.

  By some reliable estimates, the Nips lost at least half their 4,000-man force to death or wounds. They left over 600 bodies for the Marines to count on the slopes around the ridge alone. Several hundred more were killed in mopping-up operations by Edson’s men and the First and Fifth Marines.
Even my Third Battalion, Fifth, got in a few licks as the retreating Japs passed our way. Others died from wounds or disease when they tried to claw their way to the coast through the dense jungle beyond our perimeter.

  Total Marine casualties for September 12–14 were amazingly low, all things considered—31 dead, 104 wounded, and 9 missing.

  Red Mike Edson and Captain Bailey were both awarded the Medal of Honor. As far as I’m concerned, no two American officers ever deserved it more.

  IN HIS BOOK The Old Breed, George McMillan called Edson’s Ridge “the most critical and desperate battle in the entire Guadalcanal campaign.”

  I think he was right.

  The largest Jap offensive on Guadalcanal so far had turned out to be a big fat failure. Of course, we knew damn well there’d be others, and none of us was dumb enough to think the Japs would just go away and leave us alone. We knew they’d try again. And again. And no telling how many times more.

  But when I look back today on what happened on that island between August 20–21 and September 12–14, 1942, I honestly think the most important turning point of the whole Pacific war may have come right there in that twenty-four-day period.

  Much bigger battles with much bigger enemy body counts would be fought later on in the Pacific. But those of us who were there on the ’Canal know how important the Battles of Edson’s Ridge and the Tenaru River were. It goes way beyond the number of Japs killed.

  Before those battles, our mental state hadn’t been too good. We didn’t know if we could trust ourselves or not. But what happened at the Tenaru and the Ridge gave us a hefty shot of self-confidence—even for guys like me who weren’t directly involved.

  After those battles, the Japs knew they couldn’t make us break and run with their banzai charges in the middle of the night. At first, the arrogant bastards didn’t think we’d stand and fight. They thought we were a bunch of pushovers.

  Now they knew better—and so did we.

  JAPAN’S OFFENSIVE HITS A WALL

  AT 7 AM ON SEPTEMBER 18, we got our first reinforcements on Guadalcanal since D-Day. A five-ship Navy convoy delivered the three infantry battalions of the Seventh Marines that morning, giving us a total of ten on the island. A second Raider battalion, another artillery battalion, and other small units were also landed, plus about two dozen more tanks.

  The convoy brought a total of 4,157 more Marines to our garrison along with 137 vehicles, 4,300 barrels of fuel, and some much-needed food supplies. The transports also evacuated 160 badly wounded men along with the survivors of the beat-up First Parachute Battalion.

  For those of us who’d already spent forty-plus days on the island, it was a terrific morale boost to know we were getting this much help. But I also got a big personal lift out of the news because I was almost sure my old friend Remi Balduck was among those Seventh Marines reinforcements.

  I thought it’d be great if I could get together with Remi, even for just a few minutes, but I figured the odds against it were pretty long. Where the guys from the Seventh were setting up was quite a distance from our sector, and none of us was likely to have much time for visiting.

  Mostly, the First and Fifth Marines were still concentrating on defending the airfield at this point, and all these fresh bodies gave us a chance to put new muscle in our perimeter protecting the field and plug a lot of gaps that were still in our lines.

  But, as it always seemed to happen, this good news came with plenty of bad news mixed in. Just three days before the reinforcements arrived, the aircraft carrier Wasp, part of a task force that had come back into our area for the first time since early August to give the convoy air support, was sunk by torpedoes from a Jap submarine. With the Enterprise at Pearl Harbor undergoing repairs to heavy damage suffered in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, this left us with only one active carrier, the Hornet, to face six Jap carriers in the South Pacific. Not very favorable odds, to say the least.

  The destroyer O’Brien was fatally hit by torpedoes, too. It sank a couple of days later, and one of our new fast battleships, the North Carolina, was so badly damaged it had to limp back to a stateside shipyard to have a thirty-two-foot hole in its side repaired.

  Thanks to our Navy, things were starting to look brighter on the island itself, but the Japs still held the upper hand in the seas around us. Just to drive the point home, the Nips shelled the airfield and our defensive positions almost every night. Their destroyers and cruisers did most of the firing, but I remember one particular night when a Jap battleship opened up on us with fourteen-inch shells. One of them hit just a few yards from where I was holed up. Thank God it was an armor-piercing shell and not the high-explosive kind. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.

  Most of the Jap gunners aimed at the airfield, but when they finished shelling it, they’d switch their sights to the west and shoot at our defenses. Since the ridge we were on ran east–west, sometimes we’d move over the top of the ridgeline and get on the south side of it, where we were shielded from the enemy fire. We’d hunker down there and watch their shells land out in the woods. Sometimes the whole jungle looked like it was jumping, but nearly all their stuff was falling in uninhabited territory.

  In the meantime, off to the west of us, the Jap destroyers took turns landing more troops. When they finished unloading, they’d head off to the northwest as fast as they could go to get out of range of the Cactus Air Force. Some of them weren’t fast enough, though. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Mangrum’s squadron of Dauntless scout bombers was credited with sinking a Jap cruiser and destroyer and damaging four other destroyers.

  When it came to aerial victories, Captain Joe Foss of VMF-121 was Marine aviation’s all-time leader. Foss’s twenty-six kills tied the U.S. record set in World War I by the legendary Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and earned Joe both a Medal of Honor and a Navy Cross.

  Several other Cactus fighter pilots also became aces at the ’Canal. Major John L. Smith was murder in his Grumman F4F Wildcat. He shot down nineteen Jap planes, and Captain Marion Carl was close behind with sixteen confirmed kills.

  I’ll never forget Major Smith. He was a real morale builder to us grunts on the ground. Sometimes when he came back from a mission, he’d fly right over our positions at low altitude and do some barrel rolls. The troops loved that.

  One day, an F4F flew directly above me while he was right on the tail of a Zero. About the time the Zero got over open water, the ’Cat started blazing away with its wing guns, and smoke started pouring out of the Zero.

  “Oh good, he got him!” I said.

  But then the smoke stopped, and I said, “Oh shit, he must’ve missed, after all!”

  But a second or two later, the Zero just broke all to pieces and came floating down like big sheets of paper. The whole bunch of us on the ground punched the air and cheered.

  The next day, being as we were set up so close to the airfield, I had a chance to go down and talk to a couple of the fighter pilots. I told them I really admired their guts for locking horns with those Zeros, and I described what I’d seen the day before.

  “Oh, hell, that was General Geiger himself flying that ’Cat,” one of them said. “That old man’s fifty-seven years old, but he still flies like he was twenty-five.”

  Maybe he was pulling my leg, but he sounded serious. He was talking about Brigadier General Roy S. Geiger, commander of the First Marine Air Wing, who’d come to the ’Canal on September 3 to take personal charge of the Cactus Air Force.

  Geiger had flown every kind of military aircraft, from British Spads in World War I to the latest U.S. fighters, and “he commanded from the cockpit, not a desk,” as one writer put it. But the best thing about him from an infantryman’s point of view was his firm belief that Marine air was in business mainly to support the riflemen on the ground.

  Geiger realized the Cactus Air Force pilots had several important advantages over the Japs who came to bomb Henderson Field, and he was quick to capitalize on them.

  For one thing, most
of the enemy planes flying bombing missions against us were based at Rabaul, which was a hard four-hour flight away. That meant the pilots were less than fresh when they got to the ’Canal. For another thing, unless they wanted to take off or land in the dark, their flying time always put them over Henderson between about 11:30 AM and 2:30 PM, so the timing of their bombing runs was usually easy to predict.

  The third advantage we had was those coast watchers I mentioned earlier. They kept Geiger’s staff so well informed of the Jap pilots’ progress that our Marine fliers usually knew at least forty-five minutes in advance when a raid was due. This gave the F4Fs time to climb up to interception altitude, and our other planes had time to take off and fly east to avoid the Jap bombs.

  AS FAR AS I know, no man in K/3/5 ever killed another Marine by accident on Guadalcanal, but we did have some friendly fire casualties in our outfit caused by guys in other companies.

  The worst case of friendly and fatal small-arms fire I remember was right after the Battle of Edson’s Ridge. K and I Companies were moving together along the coast road trying to head off the Jap retreat. When K Company cut into the woods to get in position between I Company and the Matanikau River, some of our scouts came under fire from I Company.

  One bullet went right through the heart of PFC Jimmy Snodgrass, a damn good Marine, and killed him instantly. Then the same bullet continued on and hit Private Dick Tweedie, but he survived. (Later on, Tweedie got hit again at Cape Gloucester, this time by a Jap, but he lived through that shooting, too.)

  AT 7 AM on October 7, the whole Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, moved out for a new strike across the Matanikau. We were assigned to lead the advance in the biggest American offensive operation yet on Guadalcanal. All told, our force included six infantry battalions out of the Fifth, Seventh, and Second Marines with 3/5 out in front and 2/5 close behind.