I never ceased to be amazed at the growth that had taken place in the Guadalcanal area. From Aola Bay to Cape Esperance, there was an almost continuous chain of highly developed installations. Improved gravel roads extended everywhere. There were seven major runways and more abuilding to handle the needs of hundreds of aircraft of all descriptions. Tulagi was a major naval base, fleet anchorage, and seaplane harbor. There were even plans to bring in beer for 100,000 thirsty troops.
Food was now plentiful on Guadalcanal, but terribly monotonous: C rations, K rations, Spam, powdered eggs, and dehydrated potatoes and carrots were about the extent of it. Fresh meat and vegetables were seldom available. Malaria sufferers like myself found it extremely difficult to keep going and required continuous doses of Maalox to function. I soon found myself living on a menu consisting largely of milk toast.
I had long sessions each day with General Barrett, who combed through our lengthy operational study line by line and word by word. He seemed pleased with the detailed planning but had grave doubts about our ability to seize the Shortlands without incurring prohibitive losses. He did not adhere to General Vandegrift’s philosophy of doing what you are ordered to do and doing it to the best of your ability with the forces placed at your disposal. Knowing this, I had planned the initial landing at a remote and unlikely spot in order to get forces ashore before coming to full grips with the enemy. General Barrett understood this but still sought an easier way.
We considered landings at other points on Bougainville itself where the enemy would have to come through the swamps and jungle to meet us, thus forcing him to repeat his old mistakes we remembered from the Tenaru, Edson’s Ridge, and the hopeless attack of the Sendai Division on Puller’s sector of the main perimeter. But we found no acceptable landing points. Even Empress Augusta Bay seemed too fraught with uncertainty for General Barrett to consider.
This impasse continued for days. The general would send for me in the morning at around ten o’clock, and we would continue the discussion until long after midnight, fruitlessly looking for a better solution, one guaranteed to save the lives of many of our Marines.
This delay was also a great hindrance to the other staff echelons, which also had much preparatory work to do. Intelligence (C-2), Lt. Col. William F. Coleman, was concerned with the collection of intelligence data and photographs. Logistics (C-4), Lt. Col. Freddy C. Wieseman, was faced with the necessity of constructing large embarkation facilities at Cape Esperance, which required the services of one Marine Corps engineer battalion and one naval construction battalion. My own section, operations (C-3), was anxious to initiate a series of onshore patrols, which would be landed by our highly skilled submariners. None of this could be accomplished until the what, when, and where of our objective were definitely set.
I traveled widely around the island using the fine gravel roads that had replaced the indifferent government track of our earlier days. There was a vast army representation on the island embracing every conceivable type of unit and weapon. I even stumbled across an army regiment of pack artillery with hundreds of mules to carry the disassembled 75mm pack howitzers. This really shook me. I asked the island commander, Brig. Gen. Arch Howard, USMC, about it. He said the mules refused to eat the island grass, and he had to supply baled hay from Australia. He added, only half in jest, “They’ve got another regiment back there. If they send it up too, I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone the Bougainville show.”
The tentative status of the Bougainville operation continued to serve as a ball and chain, hindering our efforts to get the bandwagon rolling in the right direction. I went down to Lunga, where my brother, Maj. Gen. Nathan Twining, U.S. Army Air Force, was acting as Commander, Air Forces Solomons (ComAirSols), a rotating joint command of army, navy, and Marine air units. His headquarters was our own old 1st Division CP, and on his staff were two old friends and aviator classmates of mine, Cmdr. Charley Coe, USN, and Lt. Col. William G. Manley, USMC. It was nice to visit the old place again, but my plea for photographs fell on deaf ears. They could photograph every bomb crater on the Ballale Island airstrip twice a day but were much too busy to get us a single shot of the critical channel entrance to the Shortland Islands seven miles away.
Relations with the navy submarine people were more productive. Like all submariners I have ever met, they knew their business. I had had prewar experience in onshore patrolling and thought I knew something about it. These people were way ahead of me, at least in their knowledge of the ins and outs of landing and retrieving small groups of men under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions.
The first patrol was sent out in early September to determine the exact character of a certain small beach and to find out if the channel leading thereto was mined or obstructed. Nothing more. You do not send out a patrol to make a search with involved, complicated instructions. Simplicity is the keynote. The secret of our first patrol was not well kept, and some high-level kibitzers horned in. One character was looking for airfield sites; another was interested in the “attitude” of the natives. The patrol leader was overwhelmed with the responsibility of protecting his joy riders: those interlopers who did not have a fundamental need for information. The patrol leader never got an opportunity to visit the vital beach area we were interested in. Fortunately the natives had a good attitude as they detected and located our patrol within two hours of its landing despite our every effort at concealment. They also provided highly effective cover during the patrol’s time ashore. Nothing worthwhile was accomplished, but at least all hands returned in safety.
General Barrett and his second in command, Brig. Gen. A. H. Noble, made several trips back to Noumea to discuss matters with Admiral Halsey, who seemed to be growing impatient at our indecision and lack of progress. I was asked to accompany them on one of these excursions. I regretted having to go because my only really productive work periods were during these times when I did not have to spend my working hours closeted with General Barrett in endless discussion.
In Noumea I was called in by one of the new planners on Halsey’s staff, a superannuated professorial Naval War College type who I judged was not the man taking part in making important decisions. He was mildly critical of all I had to say, and I soon realized that the thrust of his disenchantment was aimed not at our proposed operation plan but against the ComSoPac plan itself. He obviously disapproved of the idea of seizing the Shortlands, the objective chosen by his boss, not mine, so our views failed to mesh from the outset.
Before I finally left, he gave me a stern lecture on the obvious unsuitability of the beach I had tentatively selected for the landing. I noticed that he was holding his aerial photograph of the area upside down so that elevations appeared as depressions. I imagine this character ended the war in some back office reviewing recommendations for medals and awards or some other harmless task.
Upon returning from another one of these trips, General Barrett seemed almost jubilant about a suggestion given him by Lt. Gen. Millard F. Harmon, U.S. Army Air Corps, chief of Army and Army Air Forces in the South Pacific area. The idea was that IMAC should occupy Choiseul Island southeast of Bougainville. Having sensed our command problem, Harmon had cagily proposed palming the Marines into a diversionary handoff toward a less important objective while the army in turn would preempt the vital mission of seizing the Shortlands. I sensed the trap and made my views explicit. I expected to be relieved on the spot but was not. I realized that my usefulness was at an end.
I was also physically exhausted. You can’t live on Maalox and milk toast forever. A few nights later my tent mate Eddy Snedeker discovered me delirious and with a critical temperature. I was taken to the hospital. The doctors soon found that I did not respond to any form of malarial treatment and were at a loss as to my condition. I suspected a recurrence of the intestinal cancer that had laid me low in 1938.
The Navy Mobile Hospital, commanded by Capt. “Terrible Terry” Turville, Medical Corps, USN, an old “Marine” doctor, was a field hospi
tal and of course totally lacking in the equipment needed for establishing such a diagnosis. It was equipped to deal with only tropical diseases, wounds, and burns. Housed in carefully designed prefabricated buildings, these mobile hospitals were a remarkably successful innovation. Although they were equipped with modern plumbing, the toilets in ours were not hooked up, so we continued to use the slit trenches out behind, no easy feat for a sick or wounded man.
But suddenly the word was flashed, “Eleanor [Roosevelt] is coming—so shape up.” Suddenly burlap screens appeared around every latrine on the island. Men were cautioned about exposure. The worst places were closed or cleaned up. Terrible Terry did his part. He scorned burlap screens; we went first class. He turned the water on in every head in the hospital. We were elated. This was progress. Eleanor left the island at sunset, and Terry turned the water off again. Permanently.
My two brothers on the island visited me frequently. Ed, a retread (returned to service) from the U.S. Army Field Artillery of World War I, now a major in the intelligence branch of the U.S. Army Air Force, regaled me with reminiscences of our fishing and hunting days in the Oregon of our youth. Later, near the end of the Solomons Campaign, Ed was wounded.
Nathan, a rising star in the Air Force and now ComAirSols, drew me out and listened politely (or should I say amusedly?) to my long harangues on why we weren’t winning the war fast enough. I think I did convince him of one fact of life that had become abundantly clear to me—we could never win unless all branches of our armed services were willing to cooperate in every way to fight the enemy to the best of our abilities, at all times, and in all places.
Nathan also had had personal difficulties in the South Pacific. Shortly after mid-January 1943, while on a flight from Guadalcanal to Noumea, his B-17 had to be ditched. The crew took to two life rafts and drifted for six days before being found and rescued after an intensive air and sea search. During this time their only food was a seagull Nate bagged with the last round in his .45 pistol. Of course, Ed insisted on being aboard one of the search planes. I knew nothing about this until after Nate and the crew were found.
General Barrett came by to tell me that I was being sent back to a base hospital in Noumea. He bore me no ill will and was very kind. Just before my evacuation to Noumea and eventually to the U.S. Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland, the general asked me for recommendations for the permanent corps staff positions.
I recommended Lt. Col. Eddy Snedeker as my own relief, based on his demonstrated ability, energy, and military character. For C-4, a vital spot, I recommended Lt. Col. Freddy Wieseman, who as a junior member of the 1st Division staff had brought the logistics of Guadalcanal under control and whose capacity to learn seemed boundless. I also recommended that Lt. Col. Bill Coleman and Maj. James C. Murray continue in their present positions on the corps staff. I thought that General Barrett was asking for my opinions only, as a matter of undeserved kindness to me, but I was heartened to learn that all these officers were confirmed in the slots I had recommended. They performed admirably throughout the Bougainville campaign and served with distinction during the remainder of the war as well. Even as I wrote this paragraph, a telephone call from Headquarters Marine Corps informed me of the death of Freddy Wieseman, who retired as a major general. The others, Snedeker, Coleman, and Murray, still survive.
The fortunes of IMAC continued to deteriorate. Admiral Halsey, of course, rejected the Choiseul Island plan and proposed instead a version of the Empress Augusta Bay (Cape Torokina) operation. Even this plan, which afforded many advantages as compared to the Shortland Islands operation, was unacceptable to General Barrett in his unending quest to avoid casualties. Despite all of his brilliance, personality, and leadership, he increasingly allowed his humanitarian instincts to prevail over every dictate of a dire military necessity. In short, he had forgotten why he and his Marines were there.
Again confronted with a command problem in IMAC, Admiral Halsey for the second time sent for his old friend Vandegrift to straighten out matters in IMAC. Vandegrift was on his way to Washington when the call came to retrace his steps. It was too late to save General Barrett. When informed of Halsey’s intentions, he returned to his quarters in Noumea, where a few hours later he was found lying in the courtyard, dead of injuries suffered in a fall from a second story window.
The Empress Augusta Bay operation went forward successfully, commanded first by Vandegrift, then by Lt. Gen. Roy Geiger, USMC, who stayed in the Pacific theater for the remainder of the war. As a master of both air and ground warfare, Geiger was able to impart an air-ground expertise to his troops that served them well from Guam to Okinawa. He was another in that long list of the Old Breed—both officers and men—who never permitted themselves to lose sight of what their country expected them to do.
Upon arriving in Noumea, New Caledonia, after leaving Guadalcanal on 13 December 1942, I was the guest of my brother Brig. Gen. Nathan F. Twining, U.S. Army Air Force, who was chief of staff of all U.S. Army Forces, air and ground, in the South Pacific under command of Lt. Gen. Millard T. Harmon, U.S. Army Air Force.
All the army generals lived together in a joint mess established in a house on the outskirts of Noumea. I was astonished to find a violent resentment of what had been accomplished at Guadalcanal. The generals heatedIy complained that the operation represented “an unwarranted intrusion” into the role of the U.S. Army involving a wasteful duplication of military resources. They insisted that there could be no such thing as a “naval campaign” and that the proper role of the navy was limited to the support of army forces ashore.
The commander of the army’s 25th Division, Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins, U.S. Army, who was of the company, was particularly insistent and predicted that congressional action would be taken after the war to provide a national defense organization that would prevent it from ever happening again.
I was alarmed at what I had heard and informed General Vandegrift. He listened attentively but made no comment. There was a war to be won. There was no time or strength to squander on any internecine struggle.
General Collins was good as his word. The infamous “merger bill” introduced into the U.S. Congress immediately after the war was to be known as the “Collins Plan” in his honor. It was a one-page power grab that would have had the effect of diminishing the constitutional control of Congress over the armed forces of the United States.
General Vandegrift must have remembered the report I gave in Noumea, for when the Collins Plan was introduced into Congress, I was summoned to Headquarters Marine Corps and put in charge of the effort to tell our side of the unification story.
The future of the Marine Corps was under attack by the U.S. Army general staff and a hostile White House. Unlike the army and navy, the Marine Corps has always led a “zero-sum ” legislative life in that it has been required, in effect, to justify its very existence before each Congress. The year 1946 was no exception. Despite our commendable contribution to the victory of 1945, we were bitterly attacked, sometimes by the very persons who had lavished fulsome praise upon us at the time of our hard-fought victories in the Pacific. One faction claimed that there would never be another amphibious operation; another, that the Marines would be an anachronism in the proposed national defense reorganization based on the militaristic trielemental theory advanced by a German writer, Dr. Alfred A. Vagts, that the army should control everything on land, the navy on the sea, and the air force in the air. This simplistic Prussian idea had helped Germany lose two world wars.34
After a long struggle, the Congress in 1947 exercised its power and responsibilities with respect to the armed forces and enacted a national defense act clearly defining the role and missions of each of the services, thus putting an end to the questionable political activities and aims of the old War Department general staff. This legislation, embodying much of the original Marine Corps position, has served the nation admirably for about half a century, providing effective joint action in war and security of our democratic
institutions in time of peace.
In the period immediately following World War II, few of the vital lessons learned were overlooked. The Marine Corps did not, as some recent writers have charged, continue to “fight the last war” for the simple reason that we could not afford to.
Gen. A. A. Vandegrift, commandant, U.S. Marine Corps, realized that the real problem faced by the Corps was that amphibious warfare as conducted in the world war just ended would be a suicidal exercise in the face of atomic attack. For example, at Iwo Jima, the entire naval attack force, including the landing force ashore, could have been totally destroyed by a single accurately placed atomic bomb. This was not politics but a reality extending to the vital interests of the United States, and the Marine Corps realized it.
A senior board of general officers at Headquarters Marine Corps, headed by Lt. Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd, USMC, was appointed to devise ways and means to meet this atomic threat. A working group was also appointed by the commandant, consisting of officers at Quantico, to initiate full-time studies and make recommendations for the consideration of the senior assembly in Washington. I was appointed to head the working group, which consisted of Col. Edward C. Dyer, USMC, a distinguished officer and experienced Marine aviator, and Col. Samuel Shaw, a highly regarded officer just now returning from the Pacific after notable combat service. He would join us in a few days.
In our first conversation, Dyer asked me if we had ever seriously considered helicopters. We had. A year before Col. (now retired Lt. Gen.) Victor H. Krulak, who was then working with me, had proposed that we look into their use as troop transports. He showed me a one-page typewritten brief of the proposed subject of inquiry. I immediately called the officer in charge of the Marine Corps rotary wing section at Marine Aviation Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and was told that the matter of helicopter transports had been carefully evaluated and that such a large craft had been found to be “an aerodynamic impossibility.”
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