No Bended Knee

by Merrill B. Twining

  Feldt informed us that their man on Guadalcanal, Maj. Martin Clemens, an officer of the British Solomon Islands Police, was out of communication at the moment because an injured leg made it impracticable to move his radio equipment and native scouts after each transmission to avoid detection. Feldt had reason to believe Clemens would be transmitting again by 1 August. He told me to tell our communications people to contact Clemens directly using a certain code and code word, which he asked me not to write down but not to forget. I was careful not to forget. I remember them to this day; they were the Playfair code and the code word “Fisherwoman.”

  We were billeted that night in a small Townsville hotel. News had just arrived of an Australian military success somewhere in North Africa, and people were celebrating for the first time in a long and dismal period. The bar was jammed four deep with rugged characters from the outback who had made it into town for the great occasion. McKean and I enjoyed it immensely. No one would let us buy a beer. It was a case of, “ ’Ow about another one, Yank, ’taint every dy we kills a hog.”

  In the midst of all this I suddenly found myself face to face with an old friend, Comdr. Mort Mumma, whom I knew well at Annapolis, where we shot together for years on the Academy Rifle Team. (He later became a rear admiral and retired to become president of the National Rifle Association.) It was a pleasant reunion. He volunteered the information that he had some boats down in the harbor. What kind I did not ask but assumed they were submarines. (I now know they were PT boats.)

  Mumma obviously knew what McKean and I were up to. I surmised he was operating his boats in support of Feldt’s Coast Watchers. We walked outside and quickly struck a deal. If I could get ComSoPac’s approval and provide men for a patrol, he would land it at Aola Bay on Guadalcanal to contact Martin Clemens and get additional fresher information on Japanese strength and dispositions.

  Two days later at nightfall McKean and I reached Noumea where we tried to find Lt. Col. Merritt Edson, who was supposed to have just arrived with his 1st Raider Battalion. The town was blacked out. It was difficult to move around and impossible to get information. Argonne could give us the name of every ship in port, but no one had ever heard of Edson’s 1st Raider Battalion. That would soon change.

  Next morning we found a Marine officer who told us the battalion was embarked on three APDs. These ships were flush-deck, four-stack destroyers of World War I vintage converted to high-speed transports by removing the two forward boilers and stacks, then changing these spaces into accommodations for 175 men and officers. The addition of davits and landing craft completed their transformation. We located Edson aboard Little (APD-4). He took us to meet the squadron commodore, Hugh Hadley from The Dalles, Oregon, whom I had known at the Naval Academy. Our families were friends back home. I am sorry to say that I was soon to see him, with his flagship and its crew, go down after a few seconds of overwhelming fire during night action with a powerful enemy force.

  The story of these little ships has never been told. They lived in harm’s way from day to day. Few survived. Their casualty rate in KIA and missing was staggering, undoubtedly the highest of any segment of the four services that fought in the Pacific.

  Edson enthusiastically accepted Mumma’s offer to land a patrol to contact Martin Clemens. He also thought I should call on Maj. Gen. Alexander M. Patch, commanding the U.S. Army’s Americal Division, and took me to the headquarters in Noumea. General Patch seemed interested in our activities and pressed us for information. As we left the building, the general’s aide overtook us and asked that I alone return to General Patch’s office for a moment. The general said, “Twining, I have a message for you to deliver to General Vandegrift. Tell him that my division will be unable to participate in the upcoming operation because we have not yet had any training in amphibious warfare.”

  I felt this would not be a matter of too great concern to General Vandegrift. From the beginning it had been clear that the army strongly opposed the plan—and not without some justification. We had therefore excluded them from our planning at the very outset. The JCS-approved plan had provided that the army relieve us in time for our attack on Bougainville, but their time-space-distance factors were so incredibly skewed that we had ignored the idea in its entirety from the beginning. It is pertinent to point out that the requirement placed on the Americal Division by the JCS was for an administrative movement for purposes of occupation only. There was no requirement whatsoever for amphibious training of the troops involved.

  In compliance with our original orders, we proceeded to Auckland by PBY and reported to ComSoPac Headquarters. Colonel Peck informed us that the 1st Marine Division had left Wellington and reached the rehearsal area at Koro. We told him about the tentative arrangement for the Edson-Mumma patrol operation. He seemed favorably inclined and left to take the matter up with Admiral Ghormley.

  We wandered around trying to locate the Guadalcanal maps that Eric Feldt was positive had been sent to this headquarters. No luck. I have reason to believe they were in the building in the possession of the intelligence officer, a totally inexperienced and untrained person who failed to comprehend their importance.

  We met again with Colonel Peck, who informed us that Admiral Ghormley disapproved of the proposed Guadalcanal patrol, saying, “It would be too dangerous.” Dangerous? I thought everybody realized that this whole war business was dangerous. After our recent experiences, McKean and I were particularly aware of it.

  Over the years our Marine historians have attempted to rationalize this feeble decision by saying that the admiral must have meant dangerous in the sense of loss of operational initiative and surprise if our intentions were revealed. At that time neither McKean nor I entertained any such impression for a moment, and I feel certain that the same was true of Colonel Peck. Onshore patrols were then, and still are, a recognized and approved incident of amphibious warfare and were regularly used in operations beginning with Bougainville in August 1943. There was even a slender chapter devoted to the subject in our amphibious bible, FTP 167. This particular patrol would have been a piece of cake for Edson’s men. They would have been landed under friendly cover at Aola Bay, miles from the closest Japanese and could have— from unexposed positions and in utmost safety—radioed information gathered by Clemens’s native scouts. Even when operating under far more adverse conditions, I know of no case where a patrol member was ever taken prisoner or compromised an operation.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sour Success

  The next day Rear Adm. Daniel J. Callaghan, Admiral Ghormley’s chief of staff, was scheduled to leave for Koro, Fiji Islands, our rehearsal area, to represent ComSoPac at a command conference to be held aboard the carrier Saratoga (CV-3) prior to the sortie from Koro to our objective in the Solomons. Colonel Peck arranged for us to accompany the admiral’s party aboard a PBY to Suva and thence by destroyer to Koro Island.

  At Suva we overnighted in the same hotel where I had stayed on my way down from Pearl months before. Nothing had changed. The East Indian staff members were as surly as ever, quite confident that their Japanese “liberators” were just over the horizon and would soon be taking over. The British management was still despairing and apologetic.

  Next day we were picked up by the destroyer Hull (DD-350) and taken on the short run to Koro, where I reported to General Vandegrift aboard McCawley (AP-10), Admiral Turner’s flagship, which had also embarked Division Headquarters and the 3d Battalion, 1st Marines, commanded by Lt. Col. William “Spike” McKelvy.

  As a rehearsal the Koro Island dry run was a complete fiasco. It was simply impossible to land over those coral beaches. The area had been selected by navy planners in Washington, but one glance at the chart in Wellington convinced us of the site’s total unsuitability. Concern over this lapse was basically the reason why McKean and I had been sent on our just-completed reconnaissance.

  I don’t think the impossibility of landing on Koro mattered greatly. What we really needed was training in ship-to-shore
movement with the boats and boat crews of our attack ships. This enforced change of plans gave us an unexpected opportunity for repeated practice, resulting in greatly improved performance of our ship-to-shore technique. Admiral Turner was shocked at the poor condition of the boats and the performance of their crews. His immediate and forceful steps to correct these deficiencies resulted in our D-day personnel landings on Guadalcanal being the smoothest and best executed of any such operations I have ever participated in before or since, war or peace.

  We had tried to find better beaches on Koro when the very able Capt. Ray Schwenke, USMC, departed for Koro at the time McKean and I set out for the Guadalcanal trip. At Koro, Schwenke was confronted with a most parochial U.S. Army general who resented the navy’s visit as an unauthorized incursion into his private domain and refused to assist or cooperate in any way.

  Things were not going well for us on board McCawley. Kelly Turner was a loud, strident, arrogant person who enjoyed settling all matters by simply raising his voice and roaring like a bull captain in the old navy. His peers understood this and accepted it with amused resignation because they valued him for what he was: a good and determined leader with a fine mind—when he chose to use it. Vandegrift was a classic Virginia gentleman. I have heard him harden his voice, but I never heard him raise it—not even at me.

  Things had gone well in the beginning. The admiral had reached Wellington without a plan of operations. He and his staff were glad to work backward from our plan as a basis of their own, a reversal of the usual progression. Turner accepted the inclusion of Guadalcanal as an objective after some discussion and seemed genuinely pleased with our scheme of maneuver—the two simultaneous attacks on Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Like Vandegrift, he chose to quietly ignore the manic JCS injunction to “be in New Britain, repeat New Britain, by 20 September.” But he insisted on a subsequent objective of his own, occupation of the island of Ndeni, a malaria-infested fever hole lying some 300 miles to the east of Guadalcanal, and using our 2d Marines for the purpose. This regular unit had been assigned to us from the 2d Marine Division at San Diego to take the place of our own 7th Marines already deployed in Samoa. The 2d Marines joined us at Koro, combat loaded on attack transports (APAs).

  CRUDE SKETCH MAP used in the planning and early operational phases of the Guadalcanal campaign by units of the 5th Combat Team; it is an adaptation of a map prepared by the D-2 Section and typifies the scarcity of reliable terrain information available to the 1st Marine Division when it left New Zealand.

  The JCS directive made no mention of Ndeni, and no one has ever explained why it was necessary to go there. Ernie King, I believe, described it as a place that did you no good if you had it and that you were bound to lose anyway if Guadalcanal folded. However, this was none of our business, and Vandegrift realized it. What was our business was to preserve the viability of our attack plan by retaining operational control of our division reserve, the 2d Marines, throughout the forthcoming battle. If the estimate of enemy strength furnished us was anywhere near correct, we would need a substantial reserve to insure decisive victory without unduly prolonging the operation.

  On 26 July the general, accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Goettge, D-2 (intelligence), Jerry Thomas, and myself, traveled on board the destroyer Hull to the Saratoga to attend the vital conference of flag officers called by the senior task force commander present, Vice Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher, USN.

  The actual designated commander of the operation was Vice Admiral Ghormley, who chose to send his chief of staff, Rear Adm. Dan Callaghan, to represent him. As a very junior rear admiral he had little personal influence, especially since it was becoming increasingly evident that Ghormley himself disapproved of the entire undertaking or at best gave it faint support.

  Admiral Fletcher indulged in a few generalities and then dismissed all present except flag and general officers. I tried to play the dumb Marine who didn’t get the word and stayed on. I was already alarmed and figured that I could be of assistance later, being probably the best qualified of our group to interpret the precise meaning of the upcoming navy lingo. To no avail. Admiral Fletcher came over to where I was seated, spoke to me by name, and politely suggested I “go down to the wardroom and get myself some coffee or lemonade.”

  In the wardroom I found Jerry Thomas deep in conversation with Representative Melvin Maas, a World War I Marine and now an officer in the Marine Corps Reserve. Maas was aboard Saratoga as a participant in some congressional orientation project and was interested in what we had to say.

  When the conference ended we could see that General Vandegrift was deeply disturbed and in no mood to talk. The sea was making up, and it took a long time for our group to transfer back to the lively destroyer. I elected to go via breeches buoy and got thoroughly soaked when Saratoga and the destroyer rolled slightly out of sync.

  The Hull’s wardroom was full of VIPs, so I decided to stay on the weather deck. There I met Col. LaVerne “Blondie” Saunders of the U.S. Army Air Corps, already a highly regarded officer. He was bringing ten to twelve B-17s down from Hawaii to stage a series of pre-D-day strikes against Tulagi and Guadalcanal and was worried for fear it was a waste of effort. He said, “We’re putting a lot into this. Do you Marines really have anything?”

  “Yes, sir. The 1st Marine Division, reinforced.”

  We returned to McCawley before Vandegrift gave us the bad news. Fletcher insisted on regarding the operation as an amphibious raid rather than the seizure of a permanent foothold. He doubted that it could succeed in any event and would not agree to expose his forces for more than forty-eight hours. Pressed sharply and stoutly by Turner, he refused to entertain any of the latter’s concerns about the fate of our amphibious forces, especially the fate of the landing force left ashore.

  The stage was rapidly being set up with all the props needed for a first-class disaster. Admiral King and the others of the Joint Chiefs had moved correctly and commendably to take advantage of the Midway victory to seize the initiative. However, the decision to descend in strength at this time on the Eastern Solomons was not entirely sound. The great overriding and controlling factor that makes such an operation possible is firm control of the sea in and around the objective area on a permanent rather than a transitory basis. This sine qua non was entirely absent, and either its absence was disregarded or its effect was not understood at the Washington level.

  Whether he realized it or not, Fletcher was responding to this dictate when he treated the operation as a raid. It was incumbent upon him to exercise control of the sea, as he alone possessed the means of enforcement. But his initial superiority would diminish rapidly as the Japanese, with more numerous carriers, reached the scene. Their bases were close at hand; Fletcher’s base was Pearl Harbor, thousands of miles away. He had seen U.S. carriers sunk in battle and was loath to risk our last carriers in the Pacific in action against a greatly superior force.

  This was Fletcher’s view on the strategic level, and in a way it was correct. But his somewhat brutal conduct of the Saratoga conference was totally incorrect from every point of view, and that damage was compounded by Ghormley’s flagrant evasion of his plain duty to be present at and conduct the Saratoga conference in person. Had he done so, Fletcher’s opposition would have resulted in a standoff, with the inescapable, if painful, necessity of presenting the matter to higher authority for resolution if he, Ghormley, was unwilling to make the decision. This of course, would have involved Nimitz (CinCPac), who somehow had been able to maintain a strange if knowing silence about and avoidance of an obvious command problem.

  General Vandegrift accepted Admiral Fletcher’s edict with the best grace he could muster and set about the business at hand—the final preparations for the landing. The last two days were devoted to naval gunfire support. Marine officer spotters and pilots operated with and augmented our cruiser planes and adjusted fire on the coastline, a most difficult target, much like shooting at a horizontally stretched string with a pistol: shots were
either over or short. Our onshore naval gunfire support teams could not be used effectively because of the terrain. Necessity forced us to use antiaircraft ammunition against terrestrial targets. Bombardment shells were not available, and the cruisers had little or none of the common ammunition we had expected to use. Armor-piercing projectiles would have been almost totally ineffective against earthen beach defenses. The gunfire was rapid and accurate, and it was a morale-building spectacle for our embarked Marines.

  I will never forget the Australian cruiser squadron, Australia , Canberra, and Hobart. They made the last firing run of the day, each beautiful ship flying a tremendous white Australian naval ensign from the mainmast, flags at least four times the size of our largest. These firing ships were accompanied by their single spotter plane, an ancient Walrus biplane, a relic of World War I. The old string-bag strutted proudly along at its top speed of about eighty knots. The ships’ gunnery was excellent. I wondered if they would fly the big ensigns again on D day; they didn’t, but the Walrus came close to being a victim of friendly fire.

  We sortied from Koro at sunset and began the long trip to Guadalcanal. I think all hands felt that they had done the best they could with what they had and the outcome was in the hands of God. We were favored by good weather—thick clouds and rain that concealed our movement.

  The McCawley was not and never had been a particularly happy ship. Like the other transports, she was a dirty ship, something I had never encountered in my previous service in or with the navy. She was commanded by a superannuated hypochondriac who, as a lieutenant commander, had been my battalion officer at the Academy in 1919. He was in no physical condition to command a ship.

  As a result, actual command was exercised by his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Riley, a Marine-hating mustang, a sadist determined to haze Marines. He worked at it twenty-four hours a day. During maneuvers the previous summer he had been able, among other things, to bring about the professional ruin of one of our ablest officers, an embarked battalion commander who was trying to protect his men from extreme abuse at the exec’s hands.