No Bended Knee

by Merrill B. Twining

  Everybody made mistakes. Orders miscarried. Communications failed. Execution was sluggish. It became apparent that we were running on an empty tank in more ways than one. The rations, never quite sufficient, improved but were always of poor quality. Loss of weight and strength continued through early November. For the first time the number of fall-outs from men unable to shoulder their packs became a significant factor in moving troops. At least 90 percent of the original force to land on Guadalcanal were suffering from malaria, suppressed but not prevented or cured by the Atabrine administered on a daily basis as a substitute for quinine. The secondary symptoms of the disease were apparent on nearly every countenance: yellow jaundice replacing healthy skin color and the same ghastly hue pervading the whites of the eyes. This was accompanied by anemia and frequent recurrence of periods of debilitating fever. Only life-threatening cases were evacuated to rear-area hospitals. The vast majority of cases, those who could stand on their feet and carry on, were treated and returned to duty. These are the medical statistics alone; they do not take into account the hundreds, less severely attacked, who never answered sick call at all but stoically bore their burden as just part of the cost of doing business on “The Canal.”

  There was little in the way of formal division of duties among the four sections of the division staff. As D-3, I performed certain D-4 (logistics) functions such as distribution of arms, ammunition, and defensive materials. Sometimes we all had a hand in decision making—not according to the book, of course, but it served the purpose of the moment.

  On one such occasion I was more than happy to be left out of the loop. General Vandegrift had received a letter from a missionary located in the remote interior of Guadalcanal who had rescued a downed Japanese aviator. Although both injured and wounded, the pilot had somehow survived when his fighter crashed in the jungle. Well cared for by his rescuer, he began to recover. As the pilot gained strength, he became increasingly hostile, until the missionary felt threatened with the loss of his own life. What would the general recommend that he do? I was certainly happy not to take part in that decision. We all agreed that it was strictly a matter for personnel (D-1), Capt. James C. Murray, and the rest of us kept clear.

  With the coming of the November rains, the Lunga Perimeter became a singularly unpleasant place to live. There was little shelter. Clothing and equipment molded. Thousands of unburied Japanese dead hidden in the dense jungle filled the air with a cloying, sickening odor, which even spread to our drinking water. The doctors assured us it was entirely free of pollutants, due to added chemicals and the purification process, but even in the heat of the jungle you had to be inordinately thirsty to drink it.

  The rats came—big and fat. The ever resourceful Seabees brought in expert exterminators, who surprisingly soon got the upper hand in one of our few victories over nature. Everything possible was done to improve living conditions. And they did improve, although very slowly. The priorities of war had to be served—stocks of aviation gasoline (avgas), ammunition, defensive materials, medicine, and supplies took precedence in ships or planes over such things as tents, cots, and other organizational property, which were limited to occasional driblets. Other common supplies were simply nonexistent. Everybody griped but few complained; there is a difference.

  It has been said that the siege is the rudest test of man. I can well believe it. Unlike a single great battle or even a campaign of many battles, there is no compensating interval of respite to recoup body and soul in a return to normalcy. The burden is always there, and its weight increases day by day even though the actual hazard at any given moment may not be particularly acute. It is a burden common to all those engaged, and no one who ever served throughout the lengthy Guadalcanal episode escaped it, at least to some degree or in some form. In many cases it left permanent psychological scars.

  During the first days after the landing, our D-3 operations were conducted under the shelter of a Japanese canvas tarpaulin rigged on a frame made of poles cut from nearby trees. This held off the rain, but it was nearly impossible to operate there at night or while under air attack or naval bombardment. When we came back from our foxholes, it was often to find our place of business a shambles.

  We got Japanese bamboo matting, rice bags, and shovels and started to build a shelter. All of us worked at it: Maj. Bill Buse, Capt. Ray Schwenke, and Sergeants Brant and Kuhn, assisted by Corporal Northrop, our jeep driver. The men stacked their rifles nearby, and I draped my pistol belt on top. We were joined by a second jeep driver, a new man whose name I never learned. He seemed a little bewildered and insecure but fell to with the rest of us, filling bags and stacking them in a crude revetment braced against the coral wall behind us. Midafternoon came, and we had built up the wall to a height of three feet.

  The siren went off announcing Condition Red. A dirty little enemy cruiser plane came in at treetop level, sprayed us with slugs, and dropped a fifty-pound frag bomb within a few feet of our position. There was a heavy concussion, but nobody was hit. Our half-built sandbag wall had saved us. The new man, who had been sitting shoulder to shoulder with me, suddenly pitched forward, toppled to the ground, and started kicking and flailing his arms in spasm. Two navy medical corpsmen carried him away. He had come to us from a forward unit, where they thought he had been “slipping.” The near miss pushed him the rest of the way. An act of intended humanity had backfired.

  Our rifle stack had been blown to smithereens. We found a few small chunks of Springfield rifle barrels, chopped into two-inch lengths like sausage rounds, but there was not the slightest trace of my Colt .45. In 1935 I had used it to win first gold in the annual Marine Corps pistol match.

  Few cases were as dramatic as this. Usually the victim simply became increasingly withdrawn and aloof, inattentive and preoccupied. This invariably resulted in a marked decline in effectiveness and performance of duty.

  Combat fatigue was not entirely new to us. Long tours of duty overseas and in the tropics, even in peacetime, took their toll. We called the major symptom “the thousand-yard stare,” and the person afflicted was described as “gone Asiatic” or said to have “missed too many boats” and was sent home.

  First fully recognized in World War I, combat fatigue was given considerable attention. Sir B. H. Liddell Hart, an authoritative military writer of that conflict and an experienced participant therein, said that it appeared to him that the “sergeant major types” were particularly vulnerable. It did seem to us that what we would describe in the Corps as “squared-away” persons were more frequently hit. These were the exceptionally serious, orderly, self-disciplined individuals who do so much to maintain the standards of a peacetime force. Such men may find a special difficulty in adjusting to the exigencies of battle: the uproar, chaos, waste, destruction, and disorganization accompanying prolonged combat. To them these events ran counter to all the values they had ever known. Less rigid types, freer of the iron restraints of the peacetime military mold, found it easier to adapt. For example, a man like the irrepressible Sgt. William “Stinky” Davis, outgoing, voluble, and enthusiastically contributing to the effort of the moment, would never have to worry about combat fatigue.

  Somewhere between these extremes lay the rest of us. Evening was the evil hour. All hands, tired and distraught by the alarms of the day, faced another night of uncertainty. Mistakes were made. Accidents occurred, sired by fatigue and the inability to concentrate.

  In the command structure, “purple shadow” decisions were all too frequent. Two highly decorated and able officers, who had faced the enemy unshaken in bloody battles in two wars, committed their reserves at sunset in the face of no indication of any hostile presence or move. In one case the unit concerned lay in second line behind extensive wire barriers and with a strong friendly force to its front.

  This forced General Vandegrift to issue orders placing a hold on the commitment of regimental reserves without authorization from division headquarters. Given a few hours’ rest, a cup of coffee, and a ca
n of C rations, these officers’ mood of apprehension would pass. In desperate battle I had seen these same officers totally unaffected by surrounding circumstances of the most daunting character.

  In another incident a battalion commander, an old friend, called me directly at two o’clock in the morning and asked for tank support. He believed the Japanese were moving down the Lunga along his right flank, actually using the river itself. It was during a torrential downpour, and the Lunga was in full spate. Commitment of tanks at that hour and that place was out of the question. I called the commander of a battalion occupying the adjoining position across the river. He told me there were no Japanese, just logs and snags washing down the boiling stream. The officer who asked for tank support had been engaged for three days of continuous fighting against a major Japanese force. He and his men had triumphed, but at the cost of a devastating physical and psychological fatigue that would take more than a good night’s sleep to repair. These officers were outstanding beyond compare in their courage, leadership, and battle acumen. They were the best we had, and each proved it on every encounter with the Japanese enemy. Their feats are legendary; they will be remembered as long as the Corps exists. But there is a limit to human endurance, and some had nearly reached it.

  Ernest Hemingway, himself seriously wounded in World War I, displays his understanding of and concern for psychological damage in his short story “A Way You’ll Never Be.” This tale is the classic account of the moral and mental deterioration that is the inevitable accompaniment of unreasonably long contact on a remote front with an unrelenting antagonist. My experience with an over-the-hill Marine was an uncanny reenactment, even to the stench, which lingered in the dugout for hours. Hemingway’s text provides an excellent example of the psychological relationship to the siege mentality as set forth in this chapter. Guadalcanal’s environment also brought on instances of psychological deterioration as diverse as Vandegrift’s gloom and orders to prepare a plan to move up the Lunga to Butch Morgan’s rage at his best friend. Anyone who served on Guadalcanal would understand what I am saying.

  Late in the Guadalcanal campaign, two Marines, both in normal condition, brought in a third, describing him as a man missing from a patrol that had returned a few days earlier. He was in bad shape: ragged, gaunt, filthy, soaking wet, and smelling horribly of the dank, corpse-strewn battlefield where he had somehow existed for days. The man was lucid only to an extent but conveyed to me the message that he had located a Japanese battery of two guns on the lower northern slopes of Mt. Austen to our south. The guns were deserted, and he believed ammunition was buried nearby. This information checked with a suspected location, and the rest of the account was consistent with the strange Japanese practice of leaving their guns unguarded. I then asked if the breech mechanisms of the guns had been removed. My questions as to this particular detail seemed to disconcert him. I told him to go back to his organization and later called his company commander. The man had never checked in. He was eventually listed as “missing, presumed KIA.” Much later and to my great sorrow I learned that he had apparently misinterpreted my questions about the breech mechanisms as a criticism of his performance of duty and had gone back to remove them.

  With all this going on, I had made little or no progress on preparing a plan for withdrawal up the Lunga River, as earlier directed by General Vandegrift during the chaotic period characterized by Edson’s famous stand on the Ridge that was to bear his name.31

  However, one drizzly morning Jerry Thomas phoned and told me, “The Old Man is talking again about going up in the hills and falling on his sword. He’s coming up to see you. For Chrissake, be careful about what you say.” The sky was alive with scudding dark clouds. I didn’t need Jerry’s gloomy message. Besides, why was the general coming to see me instead of vice versa?

  In a few minutes the general appeared, looking craggier than usual and wearing his grim, no-nonsense expression. He took me aside, saying, “I want you to prepare a plan for withdrawal up the Lunga using our amphibian tractors.”

  Apparently he had forgotten his 13th of September directive to Jerry up at Robbers’ Roost. I didn’t remind him of it.

  He then issued peremptory orders to burn all of our classified files and all our other records except what could be carried in one mailbag. He stayed right there while Sgt. Bob Brant started a fire and we began the burn. Then he left with Captain Compton, USN, who had come to discuss matters connected with the newly established naval station on Guadalcanal. Sgt. Dick Kuhn got a mailbag from the sergeant major. I gave my two enlisted assistants a lame excuse about raising security levels, which forbade us to continue holding such materials in our shrapnel-torn, old field safe.

  This burn, however justifiable at the time, represented a tremendous loss of historical material, especially in the case of our daily operational report to ComSoPac and his messages to us. I particularly regretted the loss of Carlson’s reports on his famous Guadalcanal raid.

  When the old man left me after giving his instructions, I tried in vain to figure out what change in our circumstances had brought these desperate orders about. I knew of nothing alarming on the horizon to cause it and simply assumed he was privy to some highly classified eyes-only material that he could not divulge to me or even to Jerry, his chief of staff. I still don’t know.

  General Vandegrift had borne a deadening burden of responsibility and concern for too long. It was disheartening to witness the decline in the optimism that had sustained him throughout these months of travail. Admiral Halsey’s assumption of command had given us all our first great hope, yet his was a stormy course as well, fraught with dismaying losses as well as triumphs at sea. There were moments of doubt along the way that all of us shared.

  The idea of a withdrawal up the Lunga to a final defensive position was totally impractical, and my task seemed hopeless, but I was determined to give it a try. I inquired discretely among those who would have to be critically involved.

  Martin Clemens had never been all the way up the Lunga, as I recall, but he indicated that the route would be rough going even for foot soldiers unless they were in extremely fine condition and carrying only light loads. Even his native scouts considered it a very difficult route, and already our Marines were beginning to show the weakening effects of malaria, suppressed only by their daily doses of Atabrine.

  I had been on a short patrol up the river with Lt. Col. Bill Whaling early in the game. Once the Lunga approached the hills, it became a boulder-strewn mountain stream. Use of wheeled transport was out of the question. The only artillery that could accompany us were the 75mm pack howitzers broken down into their separate loads and carried by hand. Lt. Col. John Bemis indicated what I already knew: Moving the guns over long distances was a job for hardy mules, not exhausted men.

  As for the LVTs, Lt. Col. Walter W. Barr, their commander, agreed that the best LVT yet made did not possess the all-terrain capability that would be required for the proposed route. Many of them had been used as improvised pontoons for bridging; others had been cannibalized for parts. Each had already been stripped of its five-machine-gun armament to provide a priceless augmentation of our firepower along the perimeter. General Vandegrift definitely knew the condition of these vehicles, for in early November he informed the commanding general of I Marine Amphibious Corps (IMAC), newly established at Noumea, that “as you know, the amphibian tractors are shot.”32

  Yet another circumstance militating against a successful withdrawal up the Lunga (if one were needed) was the fact that the river veered to the west into territory accessible to the enemy at all times and at every point. In fact the Japanese already dominated the area, although they did not have a strong military presence. This was the Big Bend country where Daniel Boone had spotted the smoke of many rice fires on the evening of 24 October.

  The trail up the Tenaru, which was in use even during this time by Australian gold miners, did not suffer from this disadvantage. It was an easier and shorter route and had been improv
ed by the miners. Furthermore, its distance to the east of Lunga Point offered the depth necessary for organizing the march into the hills. The Tenaru trail was relatively out of reach of the Japanese, whereas the Lunga route would become a veritable fire sleeve, with our slender column exposed to hostile observation and fire along every yard of its forlorn journey to oblivion.

  The clincher, of course, was the fact that a withdrawal inland would cut us off from contact with our navy forces, thereby denying us any possibility of reinforcement, resupply, or even evacuation by sea. Such help would be a reasonable expectation if we could preserve contact and maintain ourselves as a credible fighting force still in being—a force that bolder souls than Ghormley might consider worth salvaging.

  I therefore began work on an alternate plan involving a slow retrograde movement eastward along the coast. This plan permitted withdrawal through flat, easily traversable terrain, an important consideration in view of the deteriorating physical condition of the command. The same favorable terrain factors would allow full use of our wheeled transportation in moving artillery and supplies, enable employment of tanks and half tracks, and permit employment of the remaining LVTs on the type of terrain for which they had been designed. Some resupply by air could be continued by means of airdrop or even the possible construction of temporary dirt landing strips in the numerous large, open, grassy plains to the east. Last, but by no means least, would be the continued availability of our large boat pool, operated by Lieutenant Commander Dexter, Coast Guardsman turned navy turned Marine. It had already become a key element in our logistics and would be of great value in any movement along the coastal strip.