Instead, these planes, many with tanks filled with gasoline, remained on their catapults or on deck and became gigantic infernos when ignited by the first enemy projectiles, adding more death and horror to this indescribably dreadful night. In short, Turner had ample means of his own to detect Mikawa’s approaching cruisers, but he failed to use them. This is the irrefutable answer to the Battle of Savo Island controversy.
On the landing force side, Vandegrift turned in a competent performance of his assignment. The Marines, as always, had rendered an exact performance of the mission assigned them, the seizure of Tulagi and Guadalcanal: Tulagi with hard fighting and significant losses, Guadalcanal almost by default or, as Col. Jerry Thomas later described the initial landing, with “a blow at a lace curtain.”
By sunset on 9 October, Turner’s Task Force had cleared the Solomons, and “with this, Alexander Vandegrift and his Marines were left alone to conduct probably the greatest defensive stand in the annals of American Arms.”23
CHAPTER 7
The 1st “Maroon” Division Digs In
The night of 9 August was our first in the permanent division command post adjacent to the western end of the uncompleted airstrip. Butch Morgan was putting out bean soup and bull beef hash, the first hot food anyone had seen since that early breakfast aboard McCawley on the seventh. We gorged.
There had been skirmishes with the Japanese down at the Matanikau. We suffered a few casualties. Our small units engaged there had done well.
Our immediate problem was one of establishing exterior communications. Adm. Kelly Turner had failed to provide us with any long-range radio capability when he decided to leave with the surface forces instead of coming ashore. This was one of several problems that should have been settled at the Turner-Crutchley-Vandegrift conference. Lt. Col. Eddy Snedeker, our communications officer, jury-rigged a captured Japanese transmitter to span the distances but could get no response, although we knew Kelly Turner (Task Force 62) had broken radio silence with a message to ComSoPac early in the evening. But neither he nor Admiral Fletcher (TF 61) would respond.
Our command post was primitive. We found some Japanese tarpaulins, one for General Vandegrift and one for the headquarters equipment, consisting of two hand-operated field telephones, a field desk, and a small iron safe for securing classified items. We slept on the ground without blankets. Our other gear, such as it was, lay buried somewhere in the logistical rubble piled up by Reifsnider’s minions at Red Beach. We had no bugler. We needed none. Butch Morgan sounded reveille at each sunrise braying for his helper, Mantay, in a voice of brass, “Shorty, Shorty, git hot! Git hot now, Shorty, right away, or I’ll run ya up!”
My main occupation during the next few days was checking the development of defenses on the Lunga beaches. These represented a machine gunner’s dream. We emplaced our weapons to command long, unbroken tangents of smooth sandy shoreline, ideal for the employment of final protective lines and bands of overlapping and flanking machine-gun fire, capable of mercilessly mowing down anyone attempting to gain the jungle cover on the inland side. Such fire has the great additional advantage of coming from outside the hostile unit’s zone of advance. Maneuver against such positions is impossible without securing the assistance or permission of adjacent units, which are usually experiencing similar difficulties of their own.
Such a situation was to confront our 2d Marine Division when it landed at Tarawa in 1944. The landing force was unavoidably exposed for more than twenty-four hours to murderous long-range fire coming from an unopposed area to their left that had escaped destruction by naval gunfire and could not be reached for subjugation except by difficult, costly, and time-consuming movement ashore. This was finally accomplished, and the island was taken, but only after bloody struggles by heroic men.
Lunga Point itself permitted a plan of fires that looked like something out of the textbook, but the jungle positions on the Tenaru River, along the right flank of the 1st Marines, were quite the opposite. The thick jungle growth was an obstacle to observation and fire except frontally, and then only for a few yards. It was not machine-gun country. It required physical occupation of every yard in a defensive cordon, costly in manpower and weapons.
Both types of position were relatively easy to defend in daylight, but both could be effectively attacked at night, and we knew our enemy was particularly adept at this type of warfare.
Meanwhile, the 1st Engineer Battalion was working frantically to complete the essential airstrip. Filling in a 200-foot gap in the center was their first objective. This would provide 2,600 feet of runway, enough for our fighter planes. Even this limited goal required the movement, largely by hand, of more than 7,000 cubic yards of material in the face of continual enemy hindrance.
Sgt. Stinky Davis, the bridge builder of D day, again found himself operating in the bull’s-eye of the target. He headed the small group that actually completed the field, placing the fill, grading it with a steel girder dragged by one of our trucks, and compacting it to runway density with the little Japanese road rollers. Japanese cruiser planes, apparently from Rekata Bay, interfered constantly with the work. Stinky’s group suffered casualties and was forced to dig foxholes alongside the project every few yards to facilitate taking cover. The Japanese pilots gave special attention to the nine little road rollers we’d captured. Their number was constantly being reduced by the necessity of cannibalizing damaged machines to repair the more serviceable.
On 10 August at 1330, twenty-five twin-engine Bettys escorted by sixteen Zeros circled the area at high altitude. Without bombing us, they disappeared to the east, obviously searching for naval targets. Thereafter hostile air strikes against the field continued on a daily basis or more. We suffered few casualties, primarily due to the effectiveness of antiaircraft fire from our 3d Defense Battalion; this was then our only defense against aerial attack. It forced the enemy to stay at higher altitude during their bombing runs.
The runway was completed on 12 August—just five days after we came ashore—and was extended to 3,800 feet by 18 August. Simultaneously, work started on the task of moving supplies from Red Beach to the Lunga Perimeter. The task was increased with the discovery of large numbers of barrels, crates, and boxes floating in the former transport area. This was probably cargo unavoidably jettisoned by landing craft to lighten them sufficiently to permit their being hoisted aboard the parent ships before they withdrew.
Our division dentist, faced with the prospect of practicing dentistry without his specialized tools, spotted a huge watertight box floating near the beach. It contained his dental chair and complete equipment. He used it throughout our time on Guadalcanal.
Our 100 LVTs proved to be worth their weight in gold as cargo movers. We had embarked only one-third of our heavy trucks at Wellington, and few of these were ever landed. We had captured many Japanese trucks, but only thirty-four could be made operable. These used a cheap grade of fuel not carried in our inventory, but the Japanese had considerately left us a large supply. The LVTs, with their tremendous cargo capacity and ability to travel off-road, on beach, reef, or sea, did the bulk of the work. Movement of our supplies was completed on 11 August.
I believe it was 10 August when the field received its name, Henderson Field, for Maj. Lofton R. “Joe” Henderson, USMC, who had been killed in a bombing run on a Japanese carrier at Midway. Maj. Kenny Weir, the division air officer, set the whole thing up on his own. There was a disabled Higgins boat beached near Block Four that had been abandoned. The boat ensign, a small stars and stripes, was still flying at the stern. Weir took it to Lunga, found a Japanese flagpole, and asked General Vandegrift to come to Pagoda Hill for the flag raising. The general went along with the idea, and the flag was raised over Henderson Field. Weir told me later, “I had to do it, or they would have named it after some potbellied old SOB behind a desk in the Pentagon.”
Later in the day, an authenticator message was received from ComSoPac. It did not acknowledge or refer to messages we
had already sent but said in part, “Report situation briefly. Authenticate reply by giving names of destroyer and carrier on which you last saw Callaghan.”
We were relieved to have established a communications link with the rear area, regardless of how tenuous and uncertain it might be. To Jerry and me it seemed to offer an inviting opportunity for the division to break off its stormy relationship with Turner and his Task Force 62 and return to our original status directly under ComSoPac, Vice Admiral Ghormley. General Vandegrift proved noncommittal. Looking back, I can see that a greater wisdom than ours had already weighed the alternatives: either lean on a broken reed for the support we would need or accept the “warts and all” solution of continuing our present prickly relationship with Kelly Turner, who had shown character, courage, great energy, and commitment to the business at hand. Our old man had already chosen the latter. Never were we to have any real reason to regret his choice.
Our position on Lunga Point was in the shape of a giant horseshoe facing the sea, with the inland base wide open. This was our back door, covered by an outpost line established by the units operating in the rear of the Lunga beach lines: artillery batteries, the engineer battalion, and the amphibious tractor battalion. This area to the south was still infested by numbers of Okinawan construction troops, cut off from the Japanese main body and now in a starving condition. They would slip through the outpost line at night and into the beachhead in search of food.
For two successive evenings the outposts engaged in noisy “intramurals,” precipitated at sunset by minor clashes with these Okinawan “termites,” as the men called them. The uproar greatly annoyed General Vandegrift. After the second night the old Trojan in him came to the fore. He took away their ammunition and double manned each post with two Marines armed with only fixed bayonets. There were no more intramurals.
With all projects well under way, the regiments were able to increase patrol activity and regain contact with the enemy forces on both flanks. On the Matanikau River, a few miles west of Lunga Point, a series of small clashes occurred on a daily basis. The former garrison of Kukum had apparently reestablished itself at Kokumbona and was holding positions along the left (west) bank of the river. This force was essentially a battalion of the Japanese Special Landing Force, an organization somewhat similar to our own Fleet Marine Force but composed of navy personnel wearing the naval uniform. They were determined men, like all those we encountered. Their reason for abandoning Kukum on 7 August has never been revealed. They obviously had few resources of any kind and their naval uniforms were unfit for jungle warfare. The Marines began referring to them as the Kokumbona Vagabonds.
The most reasonable surmise as to why they abandoned their tents at Kukum without a fight is that their commander thought the appearance of our vast task force off Lunga Point heralded only a raid. Accordingly, he took pains to make it easier for us and, in the long run, less dangerous to himself. So he opened his safe, set out the occupation currency, effected other steps to facilitate our easy access, and hoped for our prompt departure, whereupon he could go back to work having suffered little real damage. I believe his conclusion was facilitated and expedited by the volume of eight-, six-, and five-inch naval gunfire that was thunderously pounding on Lunga Point at that moment. No such development occurred on Tulagi, possibly because over there, there was no place to go, so they fought to the finish, as they did throughout the war.
At this time initial contact was made with Sgt. Maj. Jacob Vouza and his small group of native scouts, who were to render such valuable service throughout the operation. I was in the 5th Marines area when they first appeared, bringing in a lieutenant from Saratoga’s Fighter Squadron 5 who had been shot down on 7 August. He had multiple bullet wounds in the shoulders, now crawling with maggots. I was alarmed until our division surgeon, Capt. Warwick Brown, USN, assured me that the presence of maggots was quite normal under the circumstances and in fact served a useful purpose in the absence of regular therapy. The natives were rewarded with rice and some Japanese canned fruit. These were better rations than ours.
On the twelfth, the field was operable on a limited basis, and Admiral McCain, ComAirSoPac, lost no time in sending his aide, Lt. William Sampson, USN, in a PBY-5A to check it out. Accompanying him was Capt. Walter Schindler, USN, seeking information from us concerning the Savo battle. We had little to give. The captain brought us ten pounds of frozen strawberries from the admiral’s mess. When he left, the general sent for Butch, put him in the two-star jeep, and said, “Take these berries over to the hospital for the wounded people.” So ended our first day on half rations.
Patrol reports of 5th Marines over several days indicated the Japanese were developing a defensive position along the west bank of the Matanikau. There were repeated references to the sighting of white flags in the vicinity of the sandbar at the river’s mouth. At that time we lacked detailed knowledge of our enemy’s habits. Our intelligence section (D-2) concluded that these flags were signals of a willingness to surrender or at least a desire to talk. We were then unfamiliar with the Japanese soldier’s custom of carrying a small white flag in his pack and did not know that these were usually displayed to taunt opponents or to identify their own positions. No one had noticed that these flags always had a red meatball in the center.
A prisoner taken on the previous day, a man in his thirties, powerfully built and of surly demeanor, was interrogated at the command post and seemed to give evidence substantiating our erroneous view. He was a naval enlisted man of some sort, probably from the Special Naval Landing Force unit driven from Kukum. He was tied to a tree at the CP for most of the day with a hawser-size length of manila line around his waist. He wore blue trousers and a white blouse with a blue cape collar like our own navy’s old-style dress whites.
Lt. Col. Frank Goettge, our intelligence officer, got permission from General Vandegrift to take a patrol of some twenty-five men to the Matanikau River to establish contact. They left by boat after nightfall, taking the prisoner with them. Landing somewhere near Point Cruz, they moved ashore and were straightaway ambushed near the beach. Frank, leading the patrol, was the first casualty. Only three of our men survived. No bodies were found when Marines investigated the area the following morning, and no significant trace of the patrol was ever located.
This loss was a blow to all hands. Frank, a football player of national renown, was a much respected and admired officer. He had been a decorated member of the old Marine Brigade in France and was wounded in the Argonne. With him on this patrol were the most active and experienced intelligence personnel of both the division and the 5th Marines. It would be hard to replace these men, so qualified in providing contact intelligence at the troop level. General Vandegrift felt the blow keenly in every way. I am sure he blamed himself for not restraining Frank’s well-intentioned but ill-advised undertaking. The lesson we learned was that the scope of military intelligence should not be extended to include the conduct of field operations.
The next few days were a period of considerable confusion. None of the records are in agreement on what or when or in what order events occurred—they defy all attempts at reconciliation. Japanese air and surface attacks were continuous and without discernible pattern. The 3d Defense Battalion mounted an extremely and increasingly effective antiaircraft defense. Japanese aircraft losses were forcing the enemy to resort to high-altitude bombing of the airfield instead of the sudden low-level attack method used by their cruiser planes.
There was also a constant enemy naval presence in the immediate area. Boat communication with Tulagi was effectively severed by submarines, which used their deck guns to subject both Guadalcanal and Tulagi to nuisance bombardments at any hour of the day or night.24 Enemy destroyers were also usually present. However, our losses were not significant in any category.
There was little contact with our own forces during this period. A B-17 would “drag” our field every afternoon. It was a welcome sight. On one occasion I saw the B-17, still at l
ow altitude, score a direct hit on an enemy destroyer south of Florida Island. The destroyer lay dead in the water belching smoke and steam, finally getting under way and proceeding eastward out of Sealark Channel at an impressively slow speed. We had no shore-based artillery, airplanes, or surface craft available to sink this disabled enemy.
Following the ambush of the Goettge patrol and in view of the lessening of the once-imminent threat from Rabaul, there was increased activity by each regiment on its exposed flank. The first well-organized attack was made by three companies of the 5th Marines, operating independently and at widely separated points. The plan was as follows:
B Company (Hawkins) would attack straight across the mouth of the Matanikau River.
L Company (Spurlock) would cross the river at a point 1,000 yards upstream and attack Matanikau Village, situated on the coast, from the south.
I Company (Hardy), embarked in landing craft, would force a lodgment onshore west of Kokumbona and attack eastward toward the Matanikau River.
It would have been a complex operation even for more experienced troops. It came off surprisingly well, much to our relief at division headquarters. Hawkins, at the river mouth, received heavy enfilading fire from machine guns on the ridge to his left front and reported to his regimental commander that he was “pinned down” on the sandbar. This expression caught the eye of General Vandegrift, who determined to find out for himself. He found Hawkins effectively carrying out his mission and coolly covering the enemy positions with fire. Hawkins showed the general two holes in his helmet and his submachine gun’s shot-away wooden stock. The old man later told me: “He was pinned down, all right.”
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