No Bended Knee

by Merrill B. Twining

  The relief of Col. LeRoy P. Hunt was a sad event, but indicative of Vandegrift’s military character and high sense of duty. The general was sending home one of his best friends and our most admired officer of World War I. In 1918 Hunt had been the captain selected to command the company of Marines storming the famed Essen Hook on Mont Blanc, opening the gate for the stalemated French Army.

  During this period aviation activity at Henderson Field was augmented by the opening on 9 September of Fighter One, an airstrip parallel to Henderson Field, and the arrival of 24 fighters from the Saratoga, which, damaged by a Japanese torpedo, was departing the area for repairs. Still more navy planes came in to bolster the hard-pressed Cactus pilots. Air action climaxed on 13 September, as did the ground action on the Ridge, by a resounding repulse of repeated Japanese aerial and ground threats. Losses of Marine and navy planes were severe, but enemy losses were catastrophic. Throughout this critical period, Geiger, by sheer force of personality and example, maintained effective control of a confused and rapidly changing situation.

  Jerry Thomas immediately showed himself to be a highly effective chief of staff. He organized the command post for the first time on a truly functional basis. The general was provided with more suitable accommodations, and the number of personnel in the CP was reduced by transferring nonessential functions to less congested areas.

  Butch Morgan moved his galley out of the blacksmith shop and into a screened enclosure at the insistence of our division surgeon, Capt. Warwick T. Brown, Medical Corps, U.S. Navy. Brown had waged a polite, quiet, determined, unrelenting war with Butch over proper sanitation beginning in North Carolina over a year before. The place eventually became almost pleasant, except for the incessant aerial bombings and naval bombardment, which almost totally destroyed the trees and undergrowth that had originally provided considerable cover and concealment.

  The first days after our return to the old CP were a time of uneasiness and concern. The air was full of messages, none addressed to us. Those that we intercepted indicated serious fighting at sea, with the loss of the carrier Wasp and the destroyer O’Brien and damage to the battleship North Carolina.

  Nevertheless, at dawn on 18 September, Rear Adm. Kelly Turner showed up with his beat-up old transports carrying our reinforced 7th Marines. They were doubly welcome. First, they were a fresh, well-armed, well-equipped, highly trained combat group. Second, they were thoroughly outfitted with a full allowance of supplies covering the entire spectrum of our logistical needs: rations, tools, construction implements, medical supplies, tentage, ammunition, barbed wire, and sandbags.

  This was undreamed-of wealth. We made the most of it. All hands turned to. The regiment was disembarked, and all its supplies were unloaded in the record time of twelve hours. Every truck on the island was employed. Even del Valle’s prime movers were put to work—a genuine lapse in the eyes of any cannoneer: “Never separate a gun from its prime mover.” Don Pedro complained, but his heart was not really in it. Half rations ended. Butch made pie for supper.

  Without further ado the general authorized us to turn the position around, facing inland rather than toward the sea. The complete perimeter was divided into ten defensive sectors, each of battalion size. The three beach defense sectors, now less vulnerable to surprise attack from the sea due to the presence of aircraft at Henderson Field, were manned only at night by units normally employed there during the day. These were the Pioneer Battalion (Shore Party), Amphibian Tractor Battalion, and Engineer Battalion.

  The remnants of the 1st Parachute Battalion were evacuated to Noumea. They had suffered appalling casualties: only eighty-nine survivors of the original battalion came off Edson’s Ridge on their own feet.

  The seven sectors facing the jungle to the east, south, and southwest were each assigned to a rifle battalion of the three regiments. Each regiment controlled two sectors. Lt. Col. Robert G. Hunt’s detached 3d Battalion of the 2d Marines from Tulagi occupied the remaining sector, with its left flank resting on the left bank of the Lunga River. In moving to its new position, this battalion suffered an extraordinary misfortune when planes from our Cactus Air Force intercepted a flight of enemy bombers and the Japanese pilots jettisoned their bombs and turned back before reaching Henderson Field. By sheer accident the jettisoned bombs struck Hunt’s column, moving under cover of the dense jungle canopy, totally unaware of the situation overhead. Serious losses were incurred.

  The 1st Raider Battalion, now commanded by Lt. Col. Samuel B. Griffith, was held in division reserve on Lunga Point in a bivouac east of Kukum. This afforded a strong position with all elements capable of mutual support. In addition, it gave each regimental commander a powerful mobile reserve in the form of its third and uncommitted battalion. These uncommitted battalions provided the division commander with a source of troops required for employment outside the Lunga Perimeter as a striking force in the active defense that the general intended to pursue against the enemy.

  Its disadvantage was that it entailed the adoption of the cordon defense, abandoned early in World War I in favor of defense in depth. This was the fundamental tactical decision of the Guadalcanal Campaign and one that was to have a wide effect. It was not made lightly.

  The ancient cordon defense affords initial resistance in its strongest form to enemy assault. It consists essentially of a single line of men and weapons able to bring to bear a sudden and overwhelming fire of all infantry weapons on an approaching force at close range. Only a small mobile reserve is held back out of the firefight for quick movement to repel a breakthrough or reinforce a threatened point.

  Perceiving this in the years before World War I, General Von Schlieffen, head of the German Imperial General Staff, secretly created the great strategic surprise of that war: unheard of masses of artillery available in support of the attacking infantry. The massed fires of these unexpected guns literally blasted vast gaps in the French defensive cordons, and the German shock troops poured through into open country. France was saved only because of an irresolute Moltke, Gallieni’s taxicab army, and the miracle of the Marne.

  These events of World War I created defense in depth more as an instinctive act of battlefield survival than a studied response. The cordon was abandoned. Units large and small were distributed in defense of suitable terrain features. Depending upon their size, they were known as combat groups or strong points. These were established in bands of mutually supporting posts, sometimes miles in depth, which relied almost entirely on the fire of machine guns and were “wired in” for all-around defense. As time permitted, they were connected by a labyrinth of communication trenches. This was the Western Front, and the phrase defense in depth became an article of faith in the minds of those who served there.

  According to General Wainwright, MacArthur kept enjoining the defender of Bataan to “fight in depth, depth, depth.” In his book, General Wainwright does not challenge the injunction and may well have attempted to carry it out.27 There is no lucid account of what occurred there or at other places where the enemy prevailed in the early days. But one thing is certain: A defense in depth could never have succeeded.

  The Japanese had apparently studied our defensive tactics in great detail. They mastered the process of isolating units and overwhelming them one by one under cover of darkness or low visibility.

  The terrain of Flanders was ideal for defense in depth; it was open country with small ground forms and low relief— optimum country for the employment of barbed wire, machine guns, and mutual support. On Guadalcanal we were fighting in the tangled jungle at point-blank range. The small size of the perimeter provided no room for depth without interference with our vital installation, Henderson Field. Artillery? We already knew that the Japanese were poor cannoneers. All our handbooks on the Japanese Army commented on that. Even our own artillery, largely 75mm pack howitzers with a high angle of fire, had sometimes, as at the Matanikau River, been unable to cover certain areas. However, our older officers, who entered World War I in the
Verdun sector, were still supportive of defense in depth. Colonel Cates was particularly insistent.

  One of General Vandegrift’s great characteristics was to base decisions on what I believe Winston Churchill once referred to as “the naked event, the event itself”; he had that rare faculty of deciding every case on its own merits. Turning to Edson, Vandegrift asked, “How great a distance do you believe we could leave between separate combat groups and still prevent infiltration at night?”

  “Fifteen yards!” Edson replied instantly.

  I was instructed to draft the order on the basis of a cordon defense.

  This order continued in effect during the remainder of our presence on the island without material change. It also contained another statement: The defense of Guadalcanal will be primarily by air. Our tacit tribute to the role of Henderson Field, General Geiger, and the Cactus Air Force, it may well have been a first in the history of the U.S. armed forces.

  Our positions were now well dug in, with standing foxholes for the crews of heavy weapons. For the first time, men and weapons were well protected with bands of barbed wire that had come in with the 7th Marines. No longer would we be dependent on a single strand of trip wire salvaged from coconut plantation fences.

  But best of all was a massive increase in firepower brought about by the cumulative effect of a fortuitous error in judgment made by some zombie back in Headquarters Marine Corps. Our amphibian tractors (LVTs), at that time not even accorded a combat capability, had each been given an armament of five machine guns: one .50 caliber and four .30 caliber. There were 100 LVTs in the battalion. These 500 machine guns exceeded by many times the division’s entire normal allotment. Manna from heaven! These guns were distributed along the front and placed in the hands of gunners extemporized on the spot and taught the rudiments if not the refinements of their new trade. This single increment, I believe, was the decisive element in the unbroken success of our defense, even though we were invariably greatly outnumbered by the Japanese at the point of contact, which was a point they had the option of selecting and attacking in overwhelming initial force. One Japanese officer who had apparently been around the track a few times left us a note in his diary: “Their position is like the hard shell of a giant tortoise, which emits fire and flame wherever it is touched.”

  General Vandegrift was reassured by the progress of our defenses, but characteristically he was the first to point out the danger of acquiring the barbed wire mentality that had paralyzed the Western Front in 1917. He insisted we take advantage of our increased freedom of action by adopting an active defense aimed essentially at dominating the adjacent outlying area, although we lacked the numbers to occupy and hold it. Quite logically, he felt that this activity would be the most effective safeguard against incurring a siege mentality. I was set to work on a plan for a related series of large-scale sweeps into Indian territory to find out what was going on.

  The active defense period was also characterized by the intensification of efforts to improve individual and small-unit standards of independent action. Scout sniper training was made division wide and placed under the able direction of Col. Bill Whaling, a lifelong and highly capable woodsman and one of the finest marksmen in the Corps. He quickly developed a group of operators known as the Scout Sniper Detachment. It was a popular, almost enviable, temporary assignment. Men returning to their regular units spread the warrior gospel. Combat morale and effectiveness rose continually despite losses.

  Whaling’s assistants were two notable characters. One was our postmaster. Just why Guadalcanal had the slightest need for a postmaster has never been revealed. But this middle-aged man, a skilled deer hunter from the mountains of the south, knew why he was there. He had something to settle with the enemy: His son, Capt. Henry T. Elrod, a Marine fighter pilot, had bombed and sunk the Japanese destroyer Kisaragi and won the Medal of Honor, then had been killed while fighting on the ground at Wake Island before the surrender.28

  The other man, Whaling’s unofficial first sergeant known only as Daniel Boone, was a rugged, powerful mountain man with fiery red whiskers. He lived up to his cognomen, spending more time out of the perimeter than in it. Boone would take a patrol out and days later return it to the lines tired and gaunt, then turn around and go back alone on a renewed quest. Later, one such solitary venture was to produce information of immeasurable value at a decisive moment in the defense of the Lunga Perimeter.

  The general’s plan for active defense also called for successive one-battalion sweeps of the jungle areas outside our lines. This would provide the threefold benefits of offensive action, experience in field maneuver, and the acquisition of more certain information as to enemy location and strength. The latter objective was quickly accomplished, but not in the way we anticipated.

  On 25 September, Lt. Col. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller was sent out on his first foray of the war with his 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. He carried one of our atrocious maps of Guadalcanal based on photographs taken by a rear area photographic airplane during a single flight on a cloudy day. Cloud-covered areas were outlined and blanked out, and the word “cloud” was inserted in the center of each to indicate why no ground detail was shown. Puller’s first minor contact occurred in such an area, and he sent me the initial message of his eventful career on Guadalcanal. It read, “Killed Japanese patrol under cloud 6,000 yards south of Lunga Point.” Future historians will wonder.

  Then proceeding west, across the northern slopes of Mt. Austen, he soon made contact with a much larger enemy force occupying a defensive position barring his advance. A firefight resulted in which significant losses were incurred on both sides. Our casualties were seven killed, twenty-five wounded. The Japanese withdrew during the night.

  Two of Puller’s companies were sent back with the wounded to carry their stretchers over the difficult and exposed terrain.

  As reinforcement, 2d Battalion, 5th Marines (McDougal), was sent out to join Puller for the remainder of the mission. Puller continued west to the upper Matanikau. But in view of the delays already incurred, he decided to come down the river on the east bank instead of the west bank in order to turn over the continuation of the patrol to the 1st Raider Battalion (Griffith), at the time specified in the division order. This was an unfortunate decision. It forfeited the chance to strike the right flank of the main enemy position, established on the high ground along the west bank. Instead, Puller was forced to march across the entire enemy front to reach the mouth of the river. Despite cover provided by the dense jungle along the river, he was subjected to harassing mortar fire all the way to the government track on the coast.

  While Puller was slogging through the mud, a round hit within a few feet of him, but its fuse failed to activate in the soft ground. Had it exploded it would have killed him. “Goddamned dud,” Puller remarked contemptuously. Always the ultimate Marine, he was disgusted with any professional lapse, even on the part of the enemy.

  This would have been a fine time to cease fire and come home. We had been told quite plainly what we wanted to know. But we refused to believe it. We were not confronted with a gaggle of Kokumbona Vagabonds reinforced by a few “stale Japs,” survivors of Edson’s Ridge who had drifted westward. These were fresh Japanese, full of fight, holding a strong position along the west bank of the river. The decision, to be executed the next day, was to move 1st Raider Battalion up the river to effect a crossing and, enveloping the enemy’s south (right) flank, attack in the direction of Matanikau Village. The 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, was to deliver a holding attack across the river at its mouth.

  Colonel Edson was placed in overall command. Artillery and air were to support each attack. The 3d Battalion, at the mouth of the Matanikau, was stopped by heavy fire. This was foreseen, as it was essentially a holding attack, and no serious attempt to cross on the sandbar was made because of the certainty of heavy casualties. As a holding attack, it succeeded in pinning down the defenders and occupying their attention. Unfortunately, the enemy positi
on could not be effectively covered by artillery because the trajectory of our fire could not be adjusted to fall into the small area near the river mouth where the Japanese invariably placed their machine guns.

  At this point we received a message from 1st Raider Battalion that Maj. Ken Bailey, the executive officer, had been killed, and Lt. Col. Sam Griffith, the battalion commander, had been wounded in the shoulder but was still in command. The message also indicated that the battalion had effected a crossing and was in the position planned for its attack northward toward Matanikau Village. Edson received the same message and interpreted it in the same way. His proposal was to continue the attack at 1330, assisted by a landing near Point Cruz of 1st Battalion, 7th Marine (less one company), recommitted by means of landing craft from Kukum. Puller got on the phone and expressed agreement with the proposal. Edson still did not believe there was a strong enemy presence. I gave qualified approval in order to initiate preparation for the embarkation and movement contingent upon General Vandegrift’s authorization. On returning to the command post, the general approved the idea. The partial battalion, under command of Maj. Otho L. Rogers, battalion executive officer, embarked promptly and moved out. Ballard (AVD-10), an old four-stacker converted to an aviation support vessel, covered the movement and provided naval gunfire support.