For days we had scouted the area along the upper Lunga, but despite entirely negative results I was filled with a strange foreboding. The flabby attack at the sandbar was certainly not the work of the Sendai. But where were they? Recalling their predilection for dramatic and challenging feats of physical endurance, they might now be right out there in front of Puller. But they weren’t.
On the twenty-fourth we made an all-out patrol effort during the day. Near sunset Daniel Boone’s Scout Sniper Patrol came in. They had gone far and wide and found nothing. Boone sent his patrol on ahead to be home in time for chow. Sharing apprehensions like my own, he had gone back alone to take another look. Just after dark he came to the command post. Near the big bend of the Lunga he had spotted something. “It could have been a patch of evening mist, or it might be the smoke of many rice fires.” I thanked him, never saw him again, and never knew his real name. But I will always remember him. In war it is still the man—not men—that makes the difference.
I called 7th Marines at their old CP on the perimeter. They had left a skeleton regimental headquarters behind when they took off that morning. Lt. Col. Julian Frisbie, the regimental executive officer, was in charge. I told him what I had just learned from Boone. He replied that a straggler from a regimental patrol had reported seeing a Japanese officer scanning our positions with binoculars that afternoon. He had suspected the boy of telling a yarn to cover his embarrassment about getting lost and hadn’t passed it on. He would pass the word to Puller, who was busy getting ready for the night with his men sprinkled across a regimental front. Frisbie asked about withdrawing the strong outpost on the pinnacle covering Geiger’s secret dispersion strip. We decided to leave it in place with renewed instructions about withdrawing to the north—all the way to the beach before trying to reenter our lines. We would notify the people down there.
It was quiet for a while; then it started to rain heavily. At exactly 2130 on the twenty-fourth there was an abrupt outburst of intense firing coming from the area of the pinnacle outpost. In a minute or two it ceased. Suddenly I knew: The Sendai Division was knocking on our door.
Immediately, I gave orders for the closest division reserve battalion to start moving to Puller’s assistance. This was far beyond the limits of my authority as operations officer. I quickly reported my actions to General Rupertus and Jerry Thomas, who confirmed them without hesitation. The reserve battalion in that area was from the newly arrived 164th Infantry of the army’s Americal Division. Lt. Col. Robert K. Hall, USA, commanded the battalion. They were good people and, as Fletcher Pratt later described them, “an organization of stubborn Swedes from North Dakota just waiting to get even” for the bombardment they had received at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Navy on the night of their landing ten days earlier.
In the rain and darkness it would be a time-consuming process to effect the reinforcement. Meanwhile, Puller was on his own. I never had a moment of doubt. I did not feel we were outnumbered that night. To me, Puller’s presence alone represented the equivalent of two battalions. I had known him since 1926, when we were second lieutenants in the same company at Pearl Harbor. We were lifelong friends. I spent my last day in the Marine Corps visiting the Pullers at their home in Saluda, Virginia, with my wife, Vivian, who was a close friend of Chesty’s wife, Virginia.
The forty-one men at the outpost on the pinnacle held their fire and evacuated their position, moving northward to the beach. They reentered our lines at the government track examining post. Their casualties were one man missing, later presumed KIA. They had rendered a great service in the culminating moments of their hazardous assignment.
The Sendai reached our lines three hours later. It was a wild fight. They came through the tangled jungle in successive waves. There were nine battalions of them, led by the famed 29th Regiment, against one of ours. They had intended to come down the open ridge on the right of the regimental sector, just as Kawaguchi had done in September, but lost direction and came at us through the jungle north of the ridge. Our artillery performed in great style. Close-in artillery support in thick jungle is not practicable, but our artillery played a hunch they’d used down at the river. A rough road led to the center of our position, one we had built on 7 August, the day of our landing, and had then forgotten. Inevitably, and to their great sorrow, small units and individual soldiers drifted to this road as the best means of traversing the unfriendly jungle. Our murderous artillery concentrations laddered along this approach and inflicted shocking casualties on our unseen opponents. Their famed 29th Infantry Regiment was destroyed.
Hand-to-hand fighting continued throughout the night. At 0500 the Sendai killed all the defenders in one locality and punched a small salient in our front. It looked ominous for a while, and we called on the “Old Reliables,” our 1st Combat Engineer Battalion, to set up a last-ditch defense on Pagoda Hill at the airstrip as insurance against a further breakthrough. It proved unnecessary. The salient was reduced later in the day.
By 0630 Hall’s battalion of the 164th had been completely inserted—and in the worst possible way, that is, in small groups sent in to plug holes in the weakening line. Under the extreme conditions of weather and visibility no other method was practicable. It was a matter of thickening a thin firing line. A navy chaplain proved a valuable guide in getting the new-comers into the front lines. He had learned his way around during his constant visits to the troops.
These troops were sorted out the next day. Hall’s battalion took over the left battalion sector, Puller’s the right. Both braced for a renewed attack.
Peculiar flaws in our organization had developed, simple things no one had ever thought of. We had experienced no difficulty in moving up ammunition and grenades in great abundance. The Old Fox, John Macklin, now division ordnance officer, saw to that. But there was a shortage of water— not to drink, but to cool the heavy Browning machine guns upon which we relied so greatly. If a water jacket ran dry, the barrel would become red hot and warp. Then it could not be withdrawn from the jacket for replacement and the gun became useless. Machine gunners were using their own urine as a means of keeping the guns operational. No one had ever thought of the water problem until we came face to face with it in the middle of the night. Of course we had water cans at the guns, but their numbers were totally inadequate for the unanticipated quantities of ammunition we were firing—thousands of rounds per gun. Gunners replaced shot-out barrels at frequent intervals during the night. It cost the taxpayers a bundle, but they got their money’s worth.
The twenty-fifth of October was “Dugout Sunday.” It was Condition Red all day, with continuous bombardment from warships, aircraft, and the Pistol Petes over in Indian Country. The word was passed to continue all essential operations regardless of enemy interference until further notice.
Fighting picked up anew that night and reached the same crescendo. The Sendai Infantry struck at the juncture of our two engaged battalions. Once more they were stopped at the wire by withering fire from both defending units, which inflicted heavy losses. Our losses were not great. Puller and Hall had the situation under control from the beginning, and the Sendai Division failed to make anything in the way of a penetration.
Our old friend Major General Kawaguchi, with two battalions, survivors of the force he had led at Edson’s Ridge, also participated in the attack, making an auxiliary effort in support of the Sendai. It failed, and again he refused to make the ritualistic self-sacrifice.
In Borneo, where Kawaguchi had first come to fame, he had achieved an easy success. However, he and his troops had distinguished themselves by the most bestial and revolting acts of extreme cruelty, including mass rape and the maiming and torture of helpless prisoners. If ever a man deserved to die it was Kawaguchi. The record shows that he was sent home and placed on the reserve list. It is to be fervently hoped that he was one of the numerous war criminals sent to the gallows by our forces following the surrender.
Until now no one on our side had even heard of �
�Maruyama’s road.” To keep secret his approach, Maruyama had his engineers cut a new trail far to the south of the existing native trail, which we had patrolled constantly. The time required for the road’s construction accounted for the days of inactivity before the attack. We should have recognized this as a possibility and sent patrols much deeper into the jungled mountains to the south. His ruse was nearly successful, but, on the verge of achieving complete surprise, Maruyama made his final bivouac at the big bend within a relatively short distance of Puller’s front and let his men make the rice fires that Daniel Boone sighted from afar. Puller would never have made that mistake.
During this same time Colonel Oka had been trying to redeem his fallen fortunes by hammering away at Hanneken’s 2d Battalion, 7th Marines, stretched to the utmost limit along the ridge and blocking Oka from hitting the rear of Williams’s 3d Battalion, 7th Marines, which was still in position along the river. Oka gained several temporary local successes by massing strong forces against our widely separated groups manning the ridge. Finally, Oka seemed to have secured a firm foothold at one point. Then at 0200, the executive officer of 2d Battalion, 7th Marines, Maj. Odell M. Conoley, led a jury-rigged counterattack composed of headquarters dog robbers, cooks, and messmen plus some members of the 7th Marines regimental band who had been laboring all day nearby as stretcher bearers getting wounded Marines off the ridge.
The counterattack succeeded in driving the Japanese off our position, and they were unable to get a further foothold as daylight increased the effectiveness of our fire. Sgt. Mitchell Paige, for a while the lone defender of the ridge, was awarded a well-deserved Medal of Honor for maintaining a machine-gun position and fighting off the enemy until Conoley’s counterattacking force reached the scene.
By the morning of the third day the Sendai was destroyed. Survivors carried the wounded back to Kokumbona over the Maruyama road. They would never again constitute a serious threat.
A few days later Colonel Sims came to see me at the command post. Accompanying him was the 7th Marines band leader, who reported his casualties in the following manner: “I lost my first trumpet, second trombone, one drum, and second chair in the clarinet,” or words to that effect. Like all bandsmen he was a musician at all times and in all places.
Sgt. John Basilone, of Puller’s battalion, received the Medal of Honor for his heroic performance as a machine gunner during that first night of fighting. He was later to lose his life on Iwo Jima. I recommended that Lieutenant Colonel Puller also receive this award but was overruled. Why, I cannot imagine.
Hyakutake had planned a three-pronged attack against us. The attack from the west, potentially the most dangerous, was stopped initially at the sandspit, and finally when Oka was thrown off the long ridge by Conoley’s counterattack. The attack from the south by the Sendai was stopped by Puller and Hall before it could reach Henderson Field. But there was no simultaneous attack from the east. We hoped it would never come but soon received a message from Pearl to the effect that Admiral Yamamoto and General Hyakutake would land advance elements of the 38th Division east of Koli Point beginning at midnight of the following day.
One thing we did not want was to have Japanese forces astride the government track on both east and west flanks. I obtained grudging permission to send Hanneken’s 2d Battalion, 7th Marines—with one battery of field artillery attached— east to the Koli Point area. Brig. Gen. Pedro del Valle went into a tantrum when I asked for artillery support. He put on a real act. To hear him tell it, we had already used up all his ammunition, and he didn’t have enough left to fire the cannon salute for one rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Symphony. I dared not carry the matter up to higher authority. Our Ultra information was sketchy, and also del Valle was not cleared to receive it under the stringent need-to-know restrictions.
We had already launched a new large-scale attack across the Matanikau to exploit our recent successes before what remained of the Sendai could get back to Kokumbona. Apprehensive that permission to move to the east might be cancelled if I persisted in asking for artillery, I chickened out, and Hanneken took his exhausted, understrength battalion on a forced march to Koli Point without artillery. Most of our communications strength was supporting the new attack on the other side of the Matanikau River, and through lack of manpower and phone wire we were unable to maintain telephone communications beyond Red Beach. Preoccupied with the larger operation on the west (right flank) and hearing nothing from Hanneken to the east, I assumed he had made no contact during the night.
Next morning I heard a little gunfire, but a low cloud ceiling distorted the sound and I could not establish its direction. I asked Henderson Field to send a plane to Koli Point to take a look. The pilot reported that there was no sign of enemy activity. We heard no more firing, and I assumed that Hanneken was simply “telling ’em nothing,” adhering to the code of the old Coconut Warrior on patrol.
Later, we got a phone call from Red Beach—where we had landed on D day—not very informative and giving us an inaccurate location. Only one thing was certain: The enemy had made some sort of landing during the night, and Hanneken was in the middle of it but was not in serious trouble. His radios began working and we regularized communications. Air attacks were laid on, but we were hampered by erroneous position reports.
No clear and complete account of what occurred there has ever been written. Several different stories were submitted by agencies all the way back to CinCPac. The more remote the writer, the more certain he was of his “facts”: “The Japs landed”; “The Japs did not land; they just landed supplies”; “There were no fresh Japs there, just a small force of stragglers from Kawaguchi’s old force”; and so on.
I was there. I was deeply involved. To this day I have never heard a comprehensive and logical account. Inadvertently, I made my own contribution to confuse history. An uncorrected typo in the 1st Division Final Report, where “retrograde” was converted to “rear guard” by the typist, led to an altogether misleading interpretation. Out of the murk and fog characterizing this bizarre encounter, few facts have ever been verified beyond contradiction.
In view of this alarming enemy force buildup to the east, the very promising operation that elements of 5th Marines and 164th Infantry had initiated west of the Matanikau was suspended. The Japanese were not fighting with the same degree of steadfast determination that had heretofore characterized them. In places they were cornered and overcome with relative ease, but we could not afford to exploit these minor successes at the expense of imperiling our eastern flank. It was mandatory that whatever enemy force was there be quickly destroyed.
In these October battles we had defeated some of the finest forces in the Japanese military. Their plan was too elaborate. The three attacks were not coordinated. We were able to concentrate on these efforts one at a time. Had all three struck us at once, we would have been in great difficulty. I can only surmise that the root cause lay in the difficulties arising from inferior radio equipment or that interservice differences prevented unity of action. The Japanese suffered a severe blow to their morale when their blue-ribbon, semisacred Sendai warriors were stopped in their tracks by Puller and his understrength, malaria-ridden battalion. The odds were nine battalions (eleven counting Kawaguchi’s force) to one against us when the fight began, but our firepower prevailed over the spiritual armor of their Bushido creed. In one captured diary the deceased had written, “The Imperial Staff must reconsider the matter of firepower.”
On 26 October General Vandegrift returned from Noumea after his conference with Admiral Halsey, held only five days after Halsey relieved Ghormley at ComSoPac. We had been on Guadalcanal over ten weeks, and neither Ghormley nor his chief of staff had shown enough interest to visit us or even ask for a personal report from General Vandegrift. Vandegrift brought us the good news that Halsey had promised him “to get you everything I have.” At about this same time two favorable but unforeseen developments helped us back in the nation’s capital. People were becomi
ng alarmed about the state of affairs in the Solomons, and midterm elections loomed. President Roosevelt addressed individual letters to each member of the Joint Chiefs directing him to furnish immediately all assistance within his power to the defense of our position in the South Pacific regardless of other priorities. This broke the log jam and brought about the ultimate victory.
CHAPTER 12
Carlson “Gung Ho” and a Touch of Genius
With the Japanese now holding coastal positions on both flanks of the Lunga Perimeter, reorganization of our forces became a matter of urgent priority. Brig. Gen. Edmund B. Sebree, U.S. Army, who had come up to supervise the eventual takeover by the relieving U.S. Army forces, was placed in tactical command of all forces along the Matanikau on the right (west) flank. Brig. Gen. William H. Rupertus, USMC, was summoned from Tulagi to take over command of all units operating outside the perimeter on the left (east) flank. These latter forces had been increased to five infantry and two artillery battalions, all employed against the fresh Japanese troops recently landed on Koli Point.
After a series of confused actions, this force, an element of the Japanese 18th Division, was finally surrounded, only to escape inland through a gap in our lines on the night of 11–12 November. It had not been a particularly brilliant affair. Mistakes were made at every level of command. We had employed overwhelming force against a weak opponent—and he had gotten off the hook. But we had accomplished a vital major purpose, that of forestalling a hostile buildup ashore on our left flank. However, the experience brought us to realize for the first time that we had become an exhausted, worn-out division. Even Chesty Puller was down and in the hospital with, as he put it “a fanny full of ‘scrapnel.’ ”
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