by Jim McEnery
The first objective for our battalion was to gain a permanent foothold on the east bank of the Matanikau. We were told to set up our machine guns, mortars, and rifle squads when we got there, while some of our guys would pretend to be building a bridge. This was supposed to be a trick to draw the enemy to the river, but we never got a chance to do the part about the phony bridge because the Japs came along too soon.
We’d been on the march for about three hours and were still east of the Matanikau, with K Company on the left and I Company abreast of us on the right, when we ran into what looked like a full company of Nips.
Very quickly, we set up a line running east and west to try to keep the Nips from getting past us to the south, and within a few minutes we had a pretty hot firefight going. As K/3/5’s reconnaissance sergeant, I was spending most of my time as a runner out of the company CP taking messages back and forth between Captain Lawrence Patterson, K Company’s commander, and the leaders of our three rifle platoons.
On one of my running trips, I’d just been given a message to deliver to the platoons by Red Mike Edson, who was sending a company of his Raiders in to help us. I was pounding along when I caught the attention of a group of four or five Japs, and one of them threw a grenade right at me.
It was the first time this had ever happened to me—although it wouldn’t be the last—and I’ve got to admit it was pretty scary. The damn thing might’ve gotten me, too, only it hit a tree and bounced slightly off course. I ran the other way as hard as I could go and managed to get fifteen or twenty yards away from the grenade before it went off.
I breathed a big sigh of relief when I was sure it had missed me, and I just kept on running. I could hear bullets slapping the leaves on the bushes around me—probably from the same bunch of Japs—but I wasn’t about to slow down long enough to fire back at them with my ’03 Springfield.
At that point, all I wanted to do was deliver my message and get the hell out of there.
WITH THE HELP of the Raiders and the First and Second Battalions of the Seventh Marines, we were able to encircle some of the Japs and keep them from moving around us to the south.
That night, the Marines of 3/5 and 2/5 intentionally made a lot of noise with amphibious tractors. We called them amtracks. The idea was to make the Nips think we were getting ready to make a major river crossing into enemy-held territory. I don’t know if we fooled them or not, but they stayed remarkably quiet all night long.
A heavy rain started falling the next morning and stalled the biggest part of our operation. Except for a scouting unit commanded by Colonel William J. Whaling, which slipped across the river and made a hard march into the hills beyond, most of us sat where we were and tried to wait out the weather. Unfortunately, though, the rain kept pouring down all day, and our main force hardly moved at all.
About dusk that evening, the Japs east of the Matanikau tried to break out of the loop we’d closed around them. There was a nasty hand-to-hand fight between about a platoon of Raiders and a much larger enemy force. Most of the Raiders were killed, but they made the Japs pay a heavy price for breaking out of the loop. Sixty-seven Jap bodies were found the next morning tangled in a barbed wire barricade the Raiders had thrown up across a sandbar in the river.
Out on our right flank where I was running messages, there were dead Marines from I and K Companies and the Raiders scattered all over the place. I found the body of Private Emil Student, a Marine I knew fairly well, leaning up against a tree. He almost looked like he was asleep. There were about thirty Jap bodies out there, too, along with maybe a dozen other Marines.
By this time, two full months into the fighting on Guadalcanal, I’d gotten fairly used to being around dead Japs. Usually, I could just step over them and go on about my business. But it still upset me when the bodies belonged to Marines.
I mean, I could sit down and eat my C rations around dead Japs without even thinking about it. But I totally lost my appetite when dead Marines were lying there a few feet away.
That day, I couldn’t choke down a single mouthful of food.
THE NEXT MORNING, October 9, the Fifth Marines’ assignment was to hold the line on the east side of the Matanikau. Meanwhile, Whaling’s men and the Seventh Marines were supposed to cross the river and carry out a previously planned flanking maneuver to slip past the main enemy force. Once they got west of the Japs, they were to make a sharp turn north toward the sea to cut them off.
But while everything had been put on hold until the rain let up, a coast watcher near Rabaul radioed a warning to division headquarters that drastically changed the plan. According to the watcher, the Japs were getting ready to ship out a major new invasion force for Guadalcanal.
This news caused division headquarters to scale back the attack by the Whaling group and the First and Second Battalions of the Seventh. Instead of driving on into the heart of enemy territory, they were told to halt their attack at a certain point and return to the Matanikau perimeter, even if they were successful. The Fifth Marines would hold at the Matanikau until Whaling’s men and the two battalions of the Seventh got back to the east bank of the river.
But before he led his men back to the east, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. Puller, commander of 1/7, wrote the first chapter in what was destined to become a Marine Corps legend.
Colonel Puller was known to his troops as “Chesty,” partly because of his barrel chest and jutting chin and partly because of the hard-driving way he had about him. Two years later, when he was commanding the First Marines on Peleliu, Puller damn near got his whole regiment wiped out because he kept throwing his men against Japs holed up in deep caves. But on that day at Guadalcanal, it was the Japs who got slaughtered.
Puller brought his battalion to the top of a dominant ridge, where he set up his mortars and machine guns with a fine view of the coast and the surrounding countryside. And for reasons that are hard to understand, 1,000 or more Japs from the Imperial Army’s Fourth Infantry Regiment were ordered to attack head-on and uphill against Puller’s men in this strong position. It was pure Bushido bullshit. You’d think the Nips would’ve learned by now.
Only a handful of the attackers lived to regret it.
After their first costly attempt to climb to the top of the ridge, the Japs fell back to a narrow ravine at its base, where they were sitting ducks for the 1/7 mortar section. They tried to come up a second time and suffered even more ghastly losses. Then they retreated back to the death trap of the ravine, and the mortars chewed them up again. Finally, they tried to escape by climbing the opposite side of the ridge and ran straight into massed 1/7 machine guns.
“The diary of a Japanese field officer said 640 of his men were killed in this engagement,” wrote George McMillan in The Old Breed. “Our losses for the entire three-day period were 65 killed and 125 wounded, while total Japanese losses were estimated at above 900.”
Even more important than the enemy casualty figures was the fact that the Marines now held a well-fortified battle position along the Matanikau. But that’s not to say the Japs had given up trying to regain control of the river. They kept punching and probing at our Matanikau lines again and again during the rest of October, trying to find a weak spot, and we kept punching back at theirs.
All these attacks and counterattacks ended in pretty much of a stalemate with the Japs still holding on to the west bank and us still holding the east bank.
One main reason we were able to do this was because the mouth of the Matanikau was too wide and deep to be forded from either side. So as long as we could keep the Japs from getting past us to the south, where the river was so shallow you could walk across, we managed to hold them at bay.
The tragic thing is, a lot of good Marines were killed or wounded in this back-and-forth fighting. But the days when the Japs were sole owners of the Matanikau and everything west of it were over for good.
WE HAD A MIXTURE of good luck and extremely bad luck on October 13. We got word that day that our second large batc
h of reinforcements would be landing in a few hours. It was the 164th Infantry Regiment of the Army’s Americal Division. They were National Guard troops—and the first Army outfit we’d seen—so the Marines took their arrival as a sign that somebody in the U.S. command structure finally thought we were actually going to hold on to the island.
“Hell, they don’t send in the Army guys until the tough fighting’s over, and the Marines have the situation well in hand,” cracked one of the guys in the K Company CP. Some Marines never missed a chance to poke fun at the Army, but a lot of us were damn glad these new troops were coming to help us.
Most members of the 164th were from farming and ranching country in North and South Dakota, and none of them had ever come under enemy fire before, much less in a steamy shithole like Guadalcanal.
As the ships carrying the 164th approached the island, the Japs launched one of their heaviest air-artillery attacks of the war. It was the start of thirty hours of pure hell. No American who lived through what happened on Guadalcanal between noon on October 13 and the night of October 14 will ever forget it. I guarantee you I won’t.
By then, we Marines had been shelled so many times in the sixty-seven days we’d been there that we thought we’d seen everything the Nips could possibly throw at us. We’d seen the jungle look like it was dancing under Jap barrages, and I’ve already mentioned that fourteen-inch shell that almost landed in my lap.
Under the circumstances, we figured, what else can they possibly do for an encore?
Well, they showed us.
The bombardment by the Nip navy and air force started about noon on the 13th, and it didn’t let up for more than a few minutes at a time until early evening on the 14th.
This time, they blasted away with not one, but two, battleships—the Haruna and the Kongo—accompanied by a supporting cast of cruisers and destroyers out in Iron Bottom Sound. The whole island shook under the pounding.
At almost the same time the naval bombardment started, twenty-four twin-engine Betty bombers, shadowed by a flock of Zeros, showed up over the airfield and dumped full loads of bombs. Somehow, these planes had slipped past the network of coast watchers, and for once, they caught the Cactus Air Force with its pants down.
Two hours later, fifteen more Bettys bombed the field again. They blew up a huge storage tank of aviation gasoline and sent flames spewing in all directions. The damage from the explosion and fire wasn’t nearly as serious as the loss of the fuel itself. It left our pilots on short rations at one of the most critical points in the Guadalcanal campaign.
And right in the midst of all this, the little eight-ship convoy carrying the fresh-faced, clean-uniformed troops of the 164th Infantry came steaming in. Fortunately, the Jap planes were too busy blasting the airfield to notice the convoy until the new troops were disembarking. But once they did, those Army guys started getting their first casualties almost as soon as they set foot on dry land.
Then, about dusk, the 150-millimeter guns the Japs had brought onto the island three days earlier joined the bombardment. It was the first time that shells from enemy land-based artillery had reached Henderson Field.
A little later, the 150s turned their sights on the Navy’s operating base on the coast near the village of Kukum. Then they dropped hundreds of rounds along our defensive perimeter before finally shifting toward the transports that had just unloaded the 164th.
At this point, we were dug in as deep as it was humanly possible to get, so we suffered only a few casualties out on the line. But the constant explosions tore our nerves to shreds and made us ache for some way to fight back.
There wasn’t any, of course. All we could do was lie there and take it.
At 1:30 AM on October 14, a series of star shells lit up the whole sky, and the Japs cut loose with everything they had. Every gun on every ship in the sound and every land-based battery started firing at once. You couldn’t hear any individual explosions. It was just one constant, rumbling roar.
The ground trembled under us and around us as we huddled face-down in the deepest parts of our foxholes. It was the beginning of the heaviest artillery barrage the U.S. Marines would ever face during World War II.
It lasted for eighty minutes that seemed like forever. I lay there face-down in the deepest part of my foxhole, hugging my arms around my head. At times, I prayed. At other times, I tried to think about home and visualize my mother’s face. Eventually, I just went so numb all over that I couldn’t think about anything.
When one incoming round miraculously missed us, there wasn’t even time for a sigh of relief before we had to brace ourselves all over again for the next one. I saw guys crying like babies and beating their fists against the ground, but it was more out of frustration than actual fear.
“Just shoot me, goddamn it!” I heard one Marine yell out above the shell bursts. “I can’t stand this shit any longer!”
We lost a good two-thirds of our Cactus Air Force that night. It was later reported that those two Jap battleships hit Henderson Field and the surrounding area with close to 1,000 fourteen-inch shells. That, plus all the other heavy stuff dumped on the field by other enemy ships, planes, and land-based artillery, destroyed every last one of our Avenger torpedo bombers at Henderson. We also lost a dozen of our forty-two F4F fighters and all but seven of our thirty-nine Dauntless dive-bombers. And with all that aviation fuel now gone up in smoke, there was barely enough to keep what planes we had left in the air.
It was probably just as well that those of us on the ground didn’t realize just how bad the situation was at Guadalcanal after that horrible night.
Finally, around 3 AM, the firing tailed off, but at 5:30, it started again, and Jap planes continued their bombing runs until daylight. Then it was over.
In the silence that followed, we crawled out of our foxholes like drunks after an all-night binge. We shook our heads to try to clear them and stared at each other like a bunch of total strangers. For a while, my ears were ringing so bad I couldn’t hear anything else.
Then that private from K/3/5—the one who was always asking the same stupid question every time I saw him—came wandering up.
“Oh God, Mac,” he said. “You think we’re ever gonna get off this damn island?”
I just stared back at him for a second while I fought off the urge to punch him in the face.
“Damn right,” I said. “I’ll get off this son of a bitch, and you can make book on it—but I ain’t so sure about you.”
IN LATE OCTOBER, my old First Platoon lost one of the best front-line leaders I ever knew when Lieutenant Scoop Adams was transferred to the K/3/5 command post to become the company exec. He actually just swapped jobs with Lieutenant Rex McIlvaine, the former K Company exec, who took over for Adams as leader of the First Platoon.
At the time, I was assigned to the CP myself as company reconnaissance sergeant, so the change didn’t have much direct effect on me. I still saw Scoop every day, but the rest of the First Platoon was bound to have missed him.
McIlvaine, who was from someplace in Ohio, was a good officer and a regular guy, but he was also on the quiet side, and the guys in the platoon didn’t feel the same kind of closeness with him as they had with Adams.
The word was that Adams was stressed out from nearly three months of constant combat conditions and just needed to get off the line for a while. But I think he was physically sick at the time, too.
As anybody who’s been in combat can tell you, a platoon leader’s job is the toughest one any commissioned officer can have, and the casualty rate’s also the highest. The reason for this is that most other commissioned officers spend their days and nights in a company or battalion or regimental CP that’s located anywhere from a hundred yards to a mile or more behind the front lines and better constructed than an ordinary foxhole.
Platoon leaders, on the other hand, are never much more than a grenade toss from enemy troops in combat situations.
Unfortunately, in Lieutenant Adams’s case, h
e came down with a really bad strain of malaria within a few days after his transfer. It affected his brain somehow, and he had to be evacuated to one of the big military hospitals. He was gone before I knew what happened, and I never saw him again until after the war.
Malaria was almost as widespread on Guadalcanal as trench foot and jungle rot. They fed us bunches of quinine tablets to try to keep us from getting it—I remember swallowing up to five tablets a day at one point—but most of us were hit with it sooner or later, anyway. In fact, the only Guadalcanal Marine I knew of that never got malaria at all was Sergeant T. I. Miller, who served as platoon guide for the First Platoon.
For most people, symptoms of the disease come and go. You’ll be burning up with fever or shaking with chills one day and up playing Ping-Pong the next. But in some people, it can turn into a potential killer, and that seemed to be how it was with Scoop Adams.
FOR THE REST of October, we slugged it out with the Japs along the Matanikau again and again. Practically the whole First Marine Division, as well as the Army’s 164th Infantry, saw action in a series of tough fights.
On the night of October 21, it was the Third Battalion, First Marines, that came under heavy fire from Jap artillery, then faced a tank-supported infantry attack across the sandbar at the river’s mouth. This attack was beaten off, and an answering artillery barrage by some of our huge 155-millimeter howitzers that had just been delivered killed an estimated 600 bunched-up Japs.
Division headquarters was well aware by this time that at least a full division of enemy troops was now operating on the ’Canal, and our brass couldn’t understand why they kept hitting us in fairly small-scale attacks instead of throwing one big knockout punch at us. The brass also played a constant guessing game about where the Japs would attack next.
Since the flank of our advanced position along the Matanikau seemed the likeliest target for a major Nip assault, General Vandegrift ordered two battalions of the Seventh Marines to leave their position on a ridge south of the airfield to reinforce the Matanikau flank. The problem was, this left only Colonel Chesty Puller’s 1/7 to man our defenses on the ridge.
