After Edson’s return to Lunga Point, we held a long and detailed discussion with him in our D-3 (operation) section of the division staff. It seemed apparent that Kawaguchi was moving his forces inland and not along the coast as Ichiki had done. This could bring him opposite the weakly defended and highly vulnerable southern approach to the airfield, which was where an attack would be most dangerous to us. We again sought the general’s permission to turn the position around and face to the south, the direction of greatest danger. Vandegrift not only refused but also informed us that he was moving the 1st Marine Division command post to a spot south of the field, where it could operate more effectively than in its present location in the center of the Henderson Field bull’seye with all its dust, noise, confusion, and bombardment.
The general was certain that Kawaguchi would repeat Ichiki’s movement along the coast to the mouth of the Tenaru. Jerry, with his gift for indirection, scored a limited concession. The Raider and Parachute battalions, now presumably awaiting well-deserved evacuation, could be sent to a “rest area” south of the field, where their mere presence would discourage snipers or other minor enemy activity. To this the general agreed, and that is how the Ridge acquired its sardonic second name—Edson’s Rest Area. Edson laughed when we told him, but being the man he was, he accepted the dubious assignment without complaint.
Trouble started at once, with small attacks along the open ridge ending at the airstrip and running directly south in a series of low crests, a perfect avenue of attack for a night operation. The tempo and force of these small attacks grew each day and became increasingly dangerous at night.
On the day before the movement of the command post, Maj. Sam Griffith II, Edson’s executive officer, sought me out at the CP. The Raider and Parachute battalions had not been able to push the enemy back to the south during the day, so they found it necessary to readjust their own lines to hold what they occupied at daylight. This was alarming news.
I felt obligated to make these facts known to General Vandegrift and did so to avoid further involvement of Jerry Thomas, who had already pressed the point to the very limits of propriety. The general cut me off with a few well chosen words. And that was that.
We closed out the old CP in the afternoon of 10 September and simultaneously opened the new one on the Ridge. Jerry offered to give me a ride in his jeep as soon as he got back from a trip to the wing headquarters at the Pagoda where General Geiger handled the affairs of the Cactus Air Force. After the daily plane came in from Noumea, Jerry returned and gave me a letter to read that someone had tipped him off to pick up at the Pagoda. The letter was a copy of a top-secret dispatch from Ghormley to CinCPac and another addressee. We were not on the distribution list. It summarized in detail our large naval losses during the past month and concluded with a somewhat veiled statement questioning his— ComSoPac’s—ability to support further operations in the Solomons area. This could mean anything or nothing, but apparently it meant something to whoever sent us a copy via the scuttlebutt route.
The old man had located his new command post on a heavily wooded spur or shoulder extending eastward from the main ridge. It was a beautiful spot for a dacha in the hills but hardly suitable for a command post. I named it the Robbers’ Roost. There was little room. The necessary functions of command direction had to be carried out almost shoulder to shoulder. And there was no place to park vehicles. The engineers had built the general a little screened house with a small bedroom at each end and a larger living space in the middle to serve as an office and reception room.
All this activity caught the attention of the Japanese, who promptly shifted their bombardment to the Ridge and began to soften it up for their forthcoming attack. Snipers moved in at dusk, and small groups of infiltrators made the valleys between the spurs untenable. The engineers dug us in. It was remarkable to see them work; they had real shovels and strong arms. They could foxhole you in a matter of minutes. The engineer galley down in the adjoining ravine was supposed to feed us. They sometimes had to stage a minor counterattack with hand grenades to chase out wandering Japanese who holed up inside the galley. I remember only one meal— a “casserole” of mushy rice and fish served out of a garbage can.
Kelly Turner, elephant hat and all, came up for a visit. He was genuinely interested in our problems and brought along a bottle or two of Dewar’s. The admiral was accompanied by his military staffer, Col. Henry D. Linscott, and Congressman Mel Maas. Mel spent the afternoon talking with General Geiger about the air situation. He kept insisting that Geiger ask for more planes. Geiger declined. The field would support forty to sixty but not more without expansion. He did, however, stress the urgent necessity of promptly replacing our losses with planes from Espiritu Santo.
It was another of those beautiful evenings when even the snipers were quiet. Everybody turned in early. I had the first watch on the phones in our blackout tent, contrived from old Japanese tarps and adjacent to the general’s screened shack. About 2200 the din of naval gunfire sounded close at hand. Kelly Turner was the first to sound off:
“Vandegrift, what are you shooting at?”
(Reply inaudible.)
“No, those are not Japanese guns. They are U.S. Navy fiveinch fifty-ones. I know them well.”
(Reply inaudible.)
“I have to bring all this ammunition in here, and I don’t want to see it wasted.”
By this time I had gotten Maj. Henry H. Crockett down at our five-inch naval gun battery on Lunga on the phone. He informed me the Japanese ships were still out of range and he had not fired a single round. No use to pass the message to the high command. They had just gotten the word. The second salvo straddled us in our CP. Everybody foxholed. I have it on good authority that as the admiral headed for his hole, along with the rest of us, he was still clutching a half bottle of Dewar’s. He seemed to enjoy the situation immensely.
The brief naval bombardment set off a series of probes at Edson’s forward positions. We responded with artillery and heavy mortars. It was another noisy, sleepless night. We suffered four minor casualties in the command post, resulting from fire of the enemy destroyers.
Turner spent part of the next day looking over our positions and departed safely in the interval between two bombing attacks in the afternoon. Before leaving he told Vandegrift that he did not share Ghormley’s extreme views of the situation and thought he saw a way to bring in the 7th Marines. If he did, Vandegrift could land them wherever he felt they were most needed.
This promise was a great relief. Heretofore Turner had insisted on landing them at Aola Bay, forty miles to the east, to cover the building of a second airfield. Better to let the regiment remain in Samoa. At Aola they would just be alligator bait. We could not support them. They could not help us. Even if we could build a field there, the Japanese would eventually be the beneficiaries of our efforts. There was ample room for more fields in the Lunga Point–Koli Point area— land we already held. In July 1943 I counted seven fields we had built there. Nothing was ever built at Aola. It was totally unsuited for any military purpose. Aola simply represented one of Turner’s strange obsessions, like Ndeni, enemy PT boats, seaplane tenders, and mines.
Shortly after Admiral Turner left, Jerry Thomas came into the D-3 tent. He was quite upset and produced from his shirt pocket an “eyes only” note from Admiral Ghormley to General Vandegrift, apparently given to the general by Turner just before he departed. It was written by hand on social note paper. It briefly stated the situation confronting him as ComSoPac resulting from heavy losses at sea and went on to say that he could provide no further support for Guadalcanal and that we were on our own. He specifically authorized the general to make any necessary “decisions” or “arrangements.” I am not positive which word was used. In either case, the meaning was clear. Jerry was quite annoyed.
In a minute or two General Vandegrift entered, visibly perturbed. The tent was only dimly lit, and I do not believe the general knew I was standing there. His nigh
t vision was already failing, the condition aggravated no doubt by our execrable diet. He told Jerry, in effect, “As long as I am here there will be no surrender of this place. We will continue as we are. Tell Bill Twining to prepare a plan of withdrawal up the Lunga using our amphibian tractors if it becomes necessary.”
This was the only occasion I ever heard General Vandegrift use the word “surrender.” The quite evident emotional state of both indicated to me that they had only moments before read Ghormley’s note. There can be no doubt as to what Ghormley’s note meant to them. The meaning was all too clear. As far as Ghormley was concerned, we were being cut adrift to shift for ourselves.
There has always been some confusion as to exactly what occurred in this incident. Two documents were involved; not one. The official document was Ghormley’s dispatch to CinCPAC, a copy of which came to us unofficially, as I have described, on 10 September, two days before Turner arrived. Vandegrift was apparently officially informed of its existence by Turner on the twelfth or thirteenth. The longhand “eyes only” note written on social stationery was given to Vandegrift probably on the thirteenth and read after Turner left. Turner’s parting statement to Vandegrift was to the effect that he didn’t share Ghormley’s pessimistic views of our situation and would try to bring in the 7th Marines. Jerry, on more than one occasion, said he was given the document by Vandegrift to keep and had it in his shirt pocket. If it had been an official document, it would have automatically and properly gone to the classified document files, never into Jerry’s shirt pocket. The document described by General Vandegrift in his memoirs is not the one Jerry pulled from his shirt pocket and showed me.
The intensity of fighting along the Ridge increased sharply on 12 September and well into the night as Kawaguchi increased the pressure of his attacks by committing additional forces. During the early morning hours a gap developed on the right of Edson’s line, but fortunately it was not exploited by the enemy, who was seemingly unaware of its existence. Fighting continued unabated on the thirteenth, although no general attack was launched during daylight hours.
The constant enemy pressure was taking its toll on the hard-pressed Raiders. I went to Edson’s command post at midafternoon to assess the situation. Edson seemed terribly fatigued, but he was in far better shape than anyone else up there. Edson commanded a group of exhausted men—men who were nevertheless active and alert, intent on fulfilling their defensive mission; their awareness of the gravity of the situation was obviously far greater than our own.
Alarmed, I returned to the division CP and recommended the immediate commitment of the division reserve, 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, presently commanded by Col. William J. Whaling, who had taken over when Lt. Col. Harold E. Rosecrans, the regular commander, was badly injured by a bomb during an air raid the previous day. The movement was ordered at once, but its execution was delayed by a series of heavy, low-level carrier-based plane strikes against Henderson Field that prevented Whaling’s force crossing the open plain surrounding the strip. They did not reach the northern end of the Ridge in time to be committed in an orderly daylight relief. They were posted in partial deployment in position to establish a reserve line in case of a breakthrough.
I remembered that this was the same battalion I had joined the day after graduating from the Naval Academy, and it was this same battalion that Lt. Col. Frederic M. “Fritz” Wise had deployed across the Paris-Metz highway on 6 June 1918 to stop the German drive into Paris—the closest they ever came. That was when old Fritz told a French staff officer, “Retreat, hell! We just got here!” I think Bill Whaling remembered that day too—he had been among those present.
At dusk the fighting, which had slowed down during the late afternoon, picked up rapidly as Kawaguchi moved ahead at full strength. The understrength parachute companies, utterly lacking the firepower of heavy weapons, were pulled back to the base of Edson’s hill, a combination command post, observation post, and final defensive position where Edson and Maj. Ken Bailey personally directed the close-in fighting that characterized this successful last stand. Edson notified me of the movement of the paratroopers with the news that we were now uncovered back at the division CP and warned us that the Japanese, if they saw fit, could come through us “like shit through a tin horn.”
Quite apparently Edson felt that we had written him off and that he was very much on his own. He rounded up every man in the area in an effort to augment his dwindling forces. He stood there at the highest point of the Ridge bellowing into the night, “Raiders, parachuters, engineers, artillerymen, I don’t give a damn who you are. You’re all Marines. Come up on this hill and fight!”
The concluding sentence took on a symbolic life of its own. I even used it once as filler in a message to Ghormley. Jerry Thomas scratched it—fortunately for me. Nevertheless, it has always epitomized the desperation of those days, and that night in particular.
The confused fighting continued along the Ridge, now assailed at several additional points. A friend, Maj. Robert S. Brown of the Raiders, lost a hand trying to intercept a Japanese hand grenade. While sitting in an ambulance near the division command post awaiting evacuation he was wounded a second time, fatally, as close-range enemy machine-gun fire swept the area.
I was reassured to encounter advance elements of the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines, proceeding along the Ridge ready to take over at first light. Lt. Col. Jack Bemis, executive officer of the 11th Marines (artillery), was nearby, busy turning around a few drifters cut off from their parent unit. They went back to fight again. Returning to the command post, I saw the bodies of a Japanese captain and two soldiers at the entrance. Lying nearby was Gunnery Sergeant Beasley, who had headed the command post security unit, killed by the Japanese captain who had hurled his sword like a spear. In turn, Division Sgt. Maj. Sheffield M. Banta had killed the Japanese officer with his pistol. Somebody else shot the two soldiers. Beasley was one of the last of the “Old Breed” Marine NCOs. He literally “died by the sword.”
The ferocity of Kawaguchi’s onslaughts diminished as daylight approached. Edson held his hill. An enemy force sent down the right bank of the Lunga failed to contact the battalion right wing, where Griffith, in command, was not assailed. At daylight Griffith counterattacked to the south, driving the enemy into difficult terrain, where they offered stout resistance. Prompt support from the Army Air Corps P-400s was effective, and the last of Kawaguchi’s organized resistance crumbled.
Isolated groups of enemy were moving aimlessly around down in the ravines. Snipers worked the place over night and day. There were several casualties.
It had been a close thing. Our command post was located in a position where it could ill support the defense. We lost communications almost at once. When a call did go through you might find yourself talking to an English-speaking Japanese. It became necessary to turn the telephones over to the Navajo talkers who transmitted messages in their native tongue, totally secure against Japanese code breakers. These remarkable Navajos had been meticulously trained and could transmit in their ancient language involving messages re-translatable into precise military terminology. “Machine-gun fire,” I remember, came out as “constant rain.”
After two more days the general returned to the old CP down at Henderson Field. When we moved I gave Butch Morgan a ride in my jeep. Halfway down the side of Henderson Field a gaggle of low-flying Japanese carrier-based planes came in. They were mean and very personal about it. My driver, Northrup, Butch, and I hit the dirt. I spent the next twenty minutes with Butch in a shared foxhole near the old Japanese hangar, which caught fire. We let it burn. Supper was late.
My most vivid recollection of this period is the failure of the division command to maintain a proper awareness of Edson’s situation and to render timely and effective assistance. Our lapse could have led us into a disastrous situation of our own making. There were several contributory causes: the removal of the command post to an exposed point totally unsuited to its requirements; distraction from the
performance of our mission by command problems emanating from the rear areas; disregard of the clear indications that Kawaguchi’s attack would be a major thrust fully capable of reaching Henderson Field; and, most important of all, not listening more attentively to Edson’s views and estimates of the threat confronting him. Before we realized it, the situation had arisen around us, imperceptible as an evening mist, unheeded until the optimum time for action had passed.
Henceforth the Ridge was known as Edson’s Ridge in honor of those intrepid men who fought there.
Edson’s and Bailey’s Medals of Honor were well deserved.
Kawaguchi, who survived the battle, did not seek the “honorable death.” He lived to fight and lose again and to author this statement: “Guadalcanal is not the name of an island; it is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese Army.”
CHAPTER 9
Abandoned Mission
Immediately following the Battle of Edson’s Ridge, sweeping changes were made within the division. Recent promotions had made us overstrength in senior ranks, and the commandant of the Marine Corps directed General Vandegrift to make readjustments. These promotions made the process somewhat less painful. Col. Jerry Thomas, who had been spot promoted, became chief of staff. He had been performing most of those functions for a long time anyway as General Vandegrift had lost confidence in his predecessor. The commanding officer, 5th Marines, and two of his three battalion commanders were also detached. Colonel Edson was given command of the regiment. Maj. Bob Ballance was assigned command of the Pioneer Battalion (Shore Party). Its commander, Col. George Rowan, was considered to have done extremely well, but his age and rank were disproportionate to a small command. Despite his low rank, Capt. Jim Murray was deservedly made D-1 (personnel), a job he had been performing as division adjutant in the absence of Col. Robert C. Kilmartin Jr., who was serving as Rupertus’s chief of staff on Tulagi. General Vandegrift called me aside, sternly gave me a little good advice, and told me, somewhat to my surprise, that I would take over as the operations officer (D-3). This unexpected reward reminded me of the story about the dog that bit Frederick the Great. The king not only forgave the offender but also gave him a piece of cheese.
No Bended Knee Page 14
