KIYOTAKE KAWAGUCHI was as confident of victory as Colonel Ichiki had been. He had 6200 men ashore whom he would hurl at Henderson Field in a three-pronged attack.
1. The major blow would be led by himself. He would take a battalion of the 124th Infantry and the two remaining Ichiki battalions to the south of the airfield, wheel and attack north.
2. Another battalion of the 124th would strike west across the Tenaru.
3. From the vicinity of the Matanikau River two reinforced battalions under Colonel Oka would cross the Lunga River and hit the airfield from the northwest.
Meanwhile, the main blow was to be supported by naval gunfire and air strikes.
It was a tidy plan, worthy of any textbook or any army that marches on maps. General Kawaguchi had devised it in the Shortlands in between arguments with Admiral Tanaka. It did not occur to him then, as it did not now occur to him, that he might scout the battlefield and the enemy before drawing up a battle plan.
Like Colonel Ichiki, he was making free and fiery interpretation of General Hyakutake’s measured instructions to “view the enemy strength, position and terrain” to see if it was “possible or not to achieve quick success” with his present strength. An impatient man, Kawaguchi had no intention of wasting time studying the enemy. To him there was no question of quick success. The Americans were few in number and inferior in quality. Japanese “spiritual power” would triumph. Moreover, by stealing stealthily south, by “tunneling through the jungle” as he called it, he would come up on the American rear and surprise them. The map had shown him a hogbacked ridge which ran down into the airfield. It seemed to be undefended.
In such confidence, General Kawaguchi went sloshing southwest. The Ishitari Battalion moved off directly westward. Colonel Oka’s force, gathering at the Matanikau, marked time for the appointed hour on the night of September 12.
Left behind at Tasimboko were three hundred men guarding General Kawaguchi’s food, part of his artillery, and a trunk containing his dress whites.
After dark on September 7 the Raiders under Colonel Edson boarded two destroyer-transports and a pair of converted California tuna launches now dignified with the initials YP, meaning patrol boat and translated “Yippy.” The Marines sailed east to Tasimboko, their approach announced by showers of bright red sparks pouring from the Yippies’ funnels.
In a misty dawn, the Raiders clambered into their Higgins boats. The Japanese, aware of their presence, prepared to receive them with a pair of 47-mm antitank guns capable of blowing the American boats out of the water.
But then the shredding mists revealed the large transports Fuller and Bellatrix escorted by a cruiser and four destroyers. They were enroute to Lunga Point, but Kawaguchi’s rear guard thought they were coming to Tasimboko. The Japanese broke and ran, abandoning the antitank guns, their own weapons and their breakfasts.
Landing unopposed, the Raiders quickly removed the antitank guns’ breech blocks and hurled them into the sea. Then they struck inland half a mile and wheeled west through a coconut plantation.
In the meantime, General Kawaguchi’s panicky soldiers had informed the brigade commander that a major enemy landing was being made in his rear, and he, in turn, had notified Rabaul.
General Hyakutake was at last distressed. He ordered the 41st Infantry Regiment to mark time at Kokoda in New Guinea for possible transfer to Guadalcanal, and then he radioed Tokyo that Kawaguchi was “sandwiched.” Tokyo quickly notified two battalions in the East Indies to stand by, even as Admiral Mikawa planned a night bombardment with a cruiser and eight destroyers and the Tokyo Express shipped two battalions of the Aoba Detachment aboard.
It was a first-class flap which continued to flutter until word came from Kawaguchi suggesting that his earlier report had been exaggerated.
Nevertheless, General Kawaguchi could not turn to strike the Raiders. He was bogged down. Among other things he had underestimated the jungle. His engineers had not been able to hack out the clear straight “tunnel” that had been promised, and three thousand men of the Kawaguchi Brigade were strung out in a snaking column three miles long. They clawed up slime-slick slopes or stumbled through swamps sometimes armpit-deep, or were tripped at every turn by tangles of root and creeper and fern, ravaged, as they went, by clouds of stinging wings and all those jungle creatures that fall, fasten, and suck.
No, Kawaguchi could not turn; he could only send his rear guard the peremptory order:
“Confront the enemy.”
Plucking up their courage, they did. Two mountain guns and a pair of howitzers and numerous Nambu machine guns began firing from the coconut groves and Edson’s men were pinned down.
Edson immediately called for aerial support and sent a company led by Clemens’s scouts along a jungle trail to turn the enemy’s right flank. Then Captain Dale Brannon’s shark-nosed Klunkers arrived to strafe and bomb the Japanese. At noon, the encircling company had deployed in the Japanese rear. Caught in a crossfire, the enemy fled again. Twenty-seven dead bodies were found draped over six heavy machine guns. Most of Kawaguchi’s food supply was also discovered, and fifty men were detailed to jab their bayonets into cans of sliced beef and crabmeat while others dragged thousands of bags of rice into the surf. All Japanese weapons were destroyed and the field pieces towed into the Bay. Enemy maps, charts, and notebooks were gathered up and a powerful radio set was wrecked.
Then, with great hoarse shouts of joy, the Marines blundered into a thatched warehouse loaded with beer and sake. When they returned to their waiting ships late that afternoon they were loaded down with bottles and with cans of beef and crab, which, as they sheepishly explained to the gently inquiring Colonel Edson, they had somehow forgotten to destroy.
It is delicious to drink the enemy’s wine and to eat his sweetmeats, and it is glorious to make him grind his teeth, as the Raiders did, sailing west to Kukum with Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s fancy white duds nailed to the masthead.
Mr. Ishimoto had been in the vicinity of Tasimboko and he reacted swiftly to the American raid.
He rounded up the missionaries and demanded again that they advise the Americans to surrender. Father Oude-Engberink replied that he could not. As he had said to Martin Clemens, he was neutral. But it would be difficult for Ishimoto to consider white skin and large noses neutral, and he shouted:
“It is useless to resist the Japanese. They are too strong for you. You cannot win and you must leave Guadalcanal.”1
Again, the priests refused. Political affairs were not their concern. Ishimoto ordered them tied and thrown into a native hut where they were tortured and bayoneted to death. Old Sister Edmée, her body swollen and deformed by elephantiasis, was sent blundering off into the bush. But Sisters Sylvia and Odilia, both young, were also murdered.
After they were raped.2
The night of his return Red Mike Edson had gone to Colonel Thomas at Vandegrift’s headquarters. “This is no motley of Japs,” he said in his throaty whisper.3 Next morning, smiling his cold white smile, Edson was back. Thomas looked up from patrol reports and Intelligence interpretations of the captured Tasimboko documents. “They’re coming,” Thomas said.
Edson nodded. But from where? He pointed to a ridge on an aerial photograph and whispered: “This looks like a good approach.”4
Thomas was startled. Edson had fingered the very ridge to which General Vandegrift, tired of jumping in and out of airfield dugouts, was planning to move his command post. Edson was unperturbed. The ridge was a perfect approach to the airfield. It was a broken hogback running parallel to the Lunga River south of the airfield. South, east, and west—that is, front and both sides—it was surrounded by jungle; but to the north or rear it ran gently down into Henderson Field. What better approach, Edson argued, and Thomas, agreeing, took him to see the general.
Vandegrift was pleased to see the two men unfold their map and confidently pinpoint the avenue of enemy approach.
“Where is that?” he asked.
Respectful but reproachful, Edson said: “The ridge you insist on putting your new CP behind.”5
Vandegrift smiled softly. He had already rejected some rather profane objections from his staff regarding his new command post, and he was not now going to change his mind. Engineers were already at work building a pavilion 35 × 18 feet which would house the living and working quarters of Vandegrift and his chief of staff, Colonel Capers James. It was to have Japanese wicker furniture and a Japanese icebox run by kerosene and it would be surrounded by woods filled with the colorful parrots and macaws which Vandegrift found so delightful. No, he would not change his mind, even if he could immediately grasp the danger of leaving that ridge undefended. So the general courteously ignored the colonel’s respectful rebuke and ordered him to take his composite battalion of 700 Raiders and parachutists and block that open ridge.
Then the general returned to such urgent matters as his repeated request for reinforcements. He wanted at least one regiment, preferably, if he could get it, his old Seventh Marines.
The Seventh Marines had been in Samoa since the middle of May. Trained as an assault elite, they were withering as garrison troops. There was enchanted moonlight filtering through the branches of banyan trees and the soft plinking of native guitars. There was also a ration of two cans of beer daily and hot food from the galleys. And there was the tsetse fly that brings “mumu,” as the Samoans call elephantiasis.
None of these things are typical of a Corps dedicated to the principle that hunger and hardship are the school of the good soldier. “Nothing is too good for you,” the Marine Corps tells its men, adding: “But we’ll let you have it anyway.”
But on Samoa the Seventh was “living it up” in comparison to its brother regiments on Guadalcanal and the spectacle of Colonel James Webb—“Gentleman Jim” in his natty whipcord breeches and his gleaming low-quarter shoes—leading hikes in a station wagon was also not calculated to inflame its men with ardor.
It was up to the battalion commanders to try to keep their men battle-fit. One of these leaders was Lieutenant Colonel Herman Henry Hanneken, the veteran of the Banana Wars who had killed the Caco chieftain, “King” Charlemagne, in personal combat. Another was Major Chesty Puller.
At forty-four, Puller was already a Marine legend. He had won two Navy Crosses in Haiti and Nicaragua. He was that very rare bird of war: a man who actually loves combat and who is beloved by his men. Puller’s Marines delighted in repeating those numerous Pullerisms, true or false, such as his remark when he saw his first flamethrower: “Where do you fit the bayonet on it?” They boasted of his bullhorn voice and they claimed that his huge chest bulging from an otherwise spindly frame hardly five feet six inches high was capable of repelling enemy bullets. Puller’s military credo contained two articles: conditioning and attack.
On Samoa he repeatedly ordered his men out on long hikes beneath a brazen sun, instructing his officers: “Gentlemen, remember to have every man carry a one-inch square of beef suet in his pack. If they’ll grease their feet daily, and avoid so much washing, they’ll have no blisters. An old trick from the Haitian soldiers, and it never fails. You can’t march men without feet, gentlemen.”6
But Puller, like the other professional officers, soon began to mourn the Samoan confinement: “Here I am, stuck out here to rot on this damned island while other people fight the war. They’ve marooned us.”7 Hearing of the Battle of the Tenaru, he cried: “They mowed ’em down! One of these days we’ll be giving ’em hell like that. Better than that.”8
A few weeks later the Seventh Marines were ordered to Espiritu Santo. It was rumored that they were not going to Guadalcanal, but to New Guinea to fight for General MacArthur.
Admiral Ghormley pondered a most disturbing message. Admiral Nimitz was ordering Ghormley to turn over to General MacArthur one reinforced regiment of “experienced amphibious troops,” together with the ships required to mount them. Ghormley was puzzled. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had originated this order, surely must know that the only “experienced” amphibious troops in the Pacific were fighting for their lives on Guadalcanal. Could he mean the Seventh Marine Regiment, even then sailing toward Ghormley’s area? Ghormley asked the advice of Richmond Kelly Turner. He got a very straight answer:
“The only experienced amphibious troops in the South Pacific are those in Guadalcanal and it is impracticable to withdraw them.” Turner then laid it on the line:
“I respectfully invite attention to the present insecure position of Guadalcanal.… Adequate air and naval strength have not been made available. Vandegrift has consistently urged to be reinforced at once by at least one regiment … I concur.”
What might have been a very soft filching of Guadalcanal’s dwindling strength was thus prevented.
And Vandegrift’s strength was dwindling. Malaria was now ravaging his ranks as the enemy had not been able to do. Every day new shortages appeared—in bombs, bullets, starter cartridges, oxygen, tires, and lubricating oil—thus complicating old and constant shortages in food and fuel.
General Geiger’s strength was being whittled by shortages rather than by Zeros. Eight airplanes cracked up on take-off on September 8. Two of them were restored to readiness but the others were hauled off to the “boneyard” where sharp-eyed mechanics cannibalized them for spare parts.
On September 10 there were only eleven Wildcats available, and the enemy aerial onslaught was mounting. Combined Fleet’s sortie from Truk and the steady reinforcement of northern airfields were ominous signs. Admiral Nimitz did not fail to observe them. On that same September 10 he ordered all carrier aircraft “that could be spared” to be flown to Guadalcanal, thus contradicting the Navy’s doctrine that carrier aircraft should fly from carriers, as well as countermanding Ghormley’s promise to Fletcher that his fighters would not be committed to Guadalcanal. Pledges made in all sincerity in response to reasonable requests, the niceties of command prerogatives, military dogma, all had to go by the boards, now, for the enemy was obviously mounting a major bid to recover Guadalcanal.
Crisis had come.
General Vandegrift knew it as he moved into his new command post behind the ridge that would be called Bloody, and Red Mike Edson knew it going down to Kukum to tell his men that they were moving to a “rest area.”
“Too much bombing and shelling here close to the beach,” Edson said. “We’re moving to a quiet spot.”9 He smiled, enjoying the joke. The men moved out. Twice they were forced to take cover from air raids, but by two o’clock in the afternoon they were fortifying Bloody Ridge.
Edson put the parachutists under Harry Torgerson—the singed dynamiter of Gavutu—on his left or eastern flank. The Raiders took over the center and right with the right flank company strung out thinly toward the Lunga. Edson’s own command post was in a gully about a hundred yards south of Vandegrift’s new headquarters. Here he put his reserve, a depleted company of Raiders.
None of the men really believed that they had come to a “rest area,” and some of them were already cursing Edson as a glory-hound who hung around headquarters sniffing out bloody assignments for his men. None of them, however, actually suspected that they, and they alone, stood between an approaching enemy and that Henderson Field which was now the prize of the Pacific war. So some of these men did not dig so deeply as they might have, for to dig into coral with truncated entrenching tools which are little better than trowels can be so painful and exhausting that only the fear of death can impel some men to attempt it.
That fear came upon these Marines next morning. Stringing barbed wire and hacking out fields of fire in the undergrowth, they heard the cry “Condition Red!” Twenty-six Bettys with twenty escorting Zeros were on their way. The men kept on working. The target would be, as always, the airfield behind them.
But the target was Bloody Ridge.
That tan, humpbacked mound rearing out of the dark green jungle sea like the spine of a whale leaped and shuddered as though harpooned.
Those who had dug pits hurled themselves into them, those who had not stood erect or tried to run and were killed or maimed.
And then the raid was over. It was quiet on the Ridge, beneath the growl and whine of aerial combat in which Marine fliers destroyed seven enemy planes and in which Major Robert Galer, shot down in the Bay, survived to swim ashore. But the men on Bloody Ridge did not know this. They knew only that the enemy was after their Ridge and they brushed dirt from their dungarees and began to dig with desperate fury.
“Some goddam rest area,” a corporal snarled. “Some goddam rest area!”10
Out in the jungle, General Kawaguchi’s toiling column of three thousand men took comfort in the sound of Japanese bombs falling on American Marines. But it was small comfort. Their march to the battle area had become an excruciating torment. It was a blind blundering stagger through a malevolent green labyrinth. Kawaguchi had no guides. The policies of Mr. Ishimoto had seen to that. Nor did the general have accurate maps or aerial mosaics.
Nevertheless, he pressed on. General Hyakutake had insisted that September 12 was to be the night of the attack and Kawaguchi could not miss that rigid deadline. He closed his eyes to the sight of limping soldiers and took an iron grip on his confidence. He would still prevail. Two of the Ichiki battalions would make the breakthrough and then the powerful unit led by Lieutenant Colonel Kusukichi Watanabe would dash to the airfield. Kawaguchi’s forces to east and west would close in simultaneously.
And then the surrender ceremony that day …
Remembering his lost white uniform General Kawaguchi’s face darkened and his hand fell to his saber hilt.
Vice-Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner also heard those Japanese bombs. He flew in just before “Condition Red!” was sounded and the Japanese bombers who raked the Raiders’ ridge also introduced Kelly Turner to the grim realities of life on Guadalcanal.
He sat out the raid in Vandegrift’s dugout just a hundred yards north of the quaking Ridge. He was discomfited but after the bombers left, Vandegrift noticed that he still looked tense. He was. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and silently handed it to Vandegrift. Color drained from the general’s face. He winced. He was reading Admiral Ghormley’s estimate of the situation on Guadalcanal. Commander, South Pacific, summarized the enemy build-up: naval forces were gathering at Rabaul and Truk, aerial reinforcements were arriving daily, dozens of transports were in Simpson Harbor waiting to put troops aboard; an overwhelming push against Guadalcanal was likely. Then Ghormley scrutinized his own situation. He listed shortages in cruisers, carriers, destroyer-transports, and cargo vessels.
Admiral Ghormley concluded that he could no longer support the Marines on Guadalcanal.
Without a word Vandegrift handed the message to Colonel Thomas. The colonel read and looked up dumfounded.
“Put that message in your pocket,” Vandegrift told him. “I’ll talk to you about it later, but I don’t want anyone to know about it.”11
Thomas nodded, watching Admiral Turner pulling a bottle out of his bag. He poured three drinks, and said: “Vandegrift, I’m not inclined to take so pessimistic a view of the situation as Ghormley does. He doesn’t believe I can get the Seventh Marine Regiment in here, but I think I have a scheme that will fool the Japs.”12
Turner’s plan was simply to bring the Seventh over a course well to the east of the normal approach, while carriers Wasp and Hornet and their screen sailed out of sight of the transports as though on normal patrol.
Vandegrift was encouraged at the thought of receiving 4000 fresh troops, but in Turner’s next breath he was dismayed. The admiral was playing general again. Because he was still Amphibious Force Commander, and because Guadalcanal had not yet taught the Americans that Landing Force Commanders such as Vandegrift must be at least the equal of the Amphibious Force Commanders when on the ground, Kelly Turner was still Archer Vandegrift’s superior. In that capacity he wanted to use the Seventh Marines to carve out little American enclaves on Guadalcanal. He was hopeful of establishing another airfield at Aola Bay, the point far to the east where Martin Clemens had had his district office. Vandegrift protested. Henderson Field was the prize. It was protected by a perimeter. All troops should be used to hold that perimeter until it was time to go on the offensive to drive Japan from the island.
The two men could not agree, and their discussion of how to use the Seventh Marines ended in stalemate.
That afternoon reinforcements of a different order arrived: twenty-four Wildcats from crippled Saratoga flew into Henderson Field led by Commander Le Roy Simpler.
That night the Tokyo Express was on schedule. For almost two hours Japanese naval shells combed Bloody Ridge. Once again the coral shivered and shook and Edson’s men dug their noses into damp coral and prayed. Once again Kelly Turner took shelter in Vandegrift’s dugout. He heard the shells whispering hoarsely overhead, heard them crash and felt their shock waves rattle the dugout. He had time to reflect on his earlier criticism of Vandegrift as being “unduly concerned” for the safety of his perimeter.13
In the morning Vandegrift showed him the carnage, especially the field hospital struck by a big shell. Before Turner departed he told Vandegrift: “When I bring the Seventh in I will land them where you want.”14
Aboard Saratoga in Pearl Harbor that afternoon, Admiral Chester Nimitz was about to present decorations. All hands were lined up on the flight deck. Nimitz stepped to the microphone and said, “Boys, I’ve got a surprise for you. Bill Halsey’s back!”
A storm of applause greeted Admiral Halsey as he stepped on deck, and the light blue eyes beneath the bristling gray eyebrows filled with tears. Halsey was ready for his new assignment, command of a carrier task force built around Enterprise; but his ships were not ready, yet. In the meantime, he would tour the South Pacific on an itinerary that would take him, he hoped, to Guadalcanal.
General Vandegrift had seen Admiral Turner safely off. Now he was walking back to his command post with Colonel Thomas. Vandegrift was preoccupied, thinking of Ghormley’s gloomy estimate. Then his jaw lifted and he said:
“You know, Jerry, when we landed in Tientsin in 1927, old Colonel E. B. Miller ordered me to draw up three plans. Two concerned the accomplishment of our mission, the third a withdrawal from Tientsin in case we got pushed out.” Vandegrift’s words came soft and slow. “Jerry, we’re going to defend this airfield until we no longer can. If that happens, we’ll take what’s left to the hills and fight guerrilla warfare. I want you to go see Bill Twining, swear him to secrecy and have him draw up a plan.”15
Thomas went to see Twining. “We can’t let this be another Bataan, Bill. We’ll go to the headquarters of the Lunga. We’ll take our food and bullets.”16 Twining agreed. He went to his tent and wrote out, by hand, an operation order which had neither date nor serial number. He put it in his safe.
Over at the Pagoda, Archer Vandegrift spoke to Roy Geiger. He told him that the Marines were staying on Guadalcanal, Navy or no Navy. “But if the time comes when we no longer can hold the perimeter I expect you to fly out your planes.”
Geiger said, “If we can’t use the planes back in the hills, we’ll fly them out. But whatever happens, I’m staying with you.”17
Vandegrift nodded appreciatively, and then, the siren wailed and the cry arose: “Condition Red!”
Forty-two enemy airplanes were winging down from the north. To meet them Cactus Air Force sent eleven Marine and twenty-one Navy fighters thundering skyward. Sixteen enemy planes were knocked down at a loss of one American ensign killed in a dead-stick landing. But some of the bombers got through. Once more Marines on the Ridge dove without hesitation into their holes, again sticks of 500-pound bombs and strings of daisy-cutter fragmentation bombs walked the Ridge—killing, maiming, stunning.
Now the men of Red Mike Edson drove themselves to complete their fortifications. Spools of wire stripped from less-threatened positions were brought up and hastily strung. Extra grenades and belted machine-gun ammunition were put into the pits. To the rear, batteries of 105-mm howitzers had been moved to new positions to give Edson close support. Artillery fire plans had been drawn and maps gridded. An artillery observer was stationed in Edson’s command post on the southern snout. Communication wire ran backward to a fire direction center and Vandegrift’s headquarters.
The general’s slender reserve, the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, moved into supporting positions. Its officers scouted approach routes which they might have to follow in darkness.
Every gun, every Marine on Guadalcanal was now committed. It was now up to the Raiders on the Ridge. The enemy was coming that night, Vandegrift was certain. Clemens’s scouts had come in with reports of three thousand men moving toward assembly points on the Lunga’s east bank.
Darkness came quickly as it does in the tropics. In swiftly dying sunlight homing birds lost the brilliance of their plumage. Above the Ridge the skies were clouding over. Soon that long knobby peninsula was blending into the black of the jungle flowing around it. It was silent. The last spade had clinked on coral, the last command had been shouted. Marines in their holes closed and reopened their eyes to accustom them to darkness. They listened for the regular sounds of men among the irregular sounds of nature. Sometimes their mouths twitched to hear an iguana bark or the crrrack of the bird whose cry was like the clapping of wooden blocks.
It began to rain.
General Kawaguchi’s iron confidence was rusting in the rain forest. The jungle had scattered his detachments. He was not ready to attack, and yet he must. Rabaul was counting on it. He would like another day to prepare, but he could not ask for it, even if he had dared, because the Americans had destroyed his radio at Tasimboko. Helpless, he put his available forces along the Lunga opposite the Marine right flank and awaited the naval bombardment that was to precede his attack.
Louie the Louse droned overhead.
Around nine o’clock he dropped a flare.
A half hour later a cruiser and three destroyers shelled the Ridge. Some of their projectiles crashed around the Marine positions, some fell short, but most of them exploded harmlessly in jungle west of the Lunga.
Edson’s men tightened their grip on their weapons.
The shelling ceased twenty minutes after it began, a rocket rose from the jungle, machine-gun and rifle fire broke out like a sputtering string of firecrackers, and the Kawaguchis came pouring out of the black.
“Banzai!” they screamed. “Bonnn—zaaa—eee!”
“Marine you die!” they shrieked. “Marine you da—eee!”
They drove the Raiders back. They sliced off a platoon on the far right flank, cut communications wire and went slipping farther down the Lunga to attempt an encirclement.
On the left the Japanese struck the parachutists half a dozen times, punched holes in their front and broke them up. And then they milled wildly about, unable to capitalize on the impetus of their blows, and before dawn Edson was able to pull back his left flank and re-form it.
But General Kawaguchi had no such control. His troops battled beyond his reach. Their attacks became purposeless and fragmented. On the right where they had gained the greatest success, they lost their way once they had departed the straight going of the riverbank. They thrashed and fell in the underbrush. Their jabbing bayonets met empty air or dug up earth. Meanwhile, Marine mortars flashed among them and Marine artillery whistled down into pre-plotted areas and found Japanese flesh there as anticipated.
Gradually, the American platoon that had been cut off fought its way back to the right slope of the Ridge.
At dawn the Japanese melted back into the jungle.
The Marines rose up and counterattacked to regain lost ground.
Bloody Ridge had held.
That morning, Red Mike Edson called a conference of staff officers and company commanders. They sat around him in a semicircle, drinking coffee and smoking. Red Mike sat on a log, his legs crossed, spooning cold hash from an open can. He chewed slowly as he talked.
“They were testing,” he said. “Just testing. They’ll be back. But maybe not as many of them.” He smiled. “Or maybe more.” He paused, his jaws chewing. “I want all positions improved, all wire lines paralleled, a hot meal for the men. Today: dig, wire up tight, get some sleep. We’ll all need it.” His officers rose. “The Nip will be back,” Red Mike said. “I want to surprise him.”18
Major Kenneth Bailey was among the officers who set to work preparing Edson’s surprise: a pullback from the previous night’s positions. Bailey had been wounded at Tulagi and sent to a hospital in New Caledonia. Leaving without permission and before his wound was fully healed, he had hitchhiked an airplane ride back to Guadalcanal in time for the battle.
Edson’s pullback served to tighten and contract his lines. It improved the field of fire for automatic weapons, and it confronted the Japanese with a hundred yards of open ground over which they must move to close with the Marines.
Many of those Marines had the look of sleepwalkers by afternoon of this September 13. They stumbled along the Ridge, lifting their feet high like men in chains. Seventy-two near-sleepless hours—hours of shock and sweat and pain beneath the enemy’s bombs and shells, in the face of his bullets—had numbed them. They had expected to be relieved by Vandegrift’s reserve, but intermittent aerial attacks had kept that battalion under cover.
Three separate air raids struck at Henderson Field that day. But there were now ample fighters on hand to meet them. Wildcats had come in from carriers Hornet and Wasp and Guadalcanal received its first torpedo-bombers with the arrival of six Avengers. Although Admiral Ghormley was as pessimistic about Guadalcanal as he had been at the start, he was nevertheless giving the beleaguered Marines all the air he had: in toto, sixty planes.
But Rabaul got more.
On September 12 the 26th Air Flotilla which was to have relieved the riddled 25th came into the Guadalcanal battle as reinforcement instead, and 140 aircraft were added to those already based at Rabaul and Bougainville.
Next day many of them were on the runways, propellers turning, while pilots sat in ready huts awaiting word to fly south. Loaded troop transports stood by with idling engines. All was in readiness for the surrender ceremonies.
But there was no word from General Kawaguchi.
Neither General Hyakutake nor Admiral Tsukahara had been able to communicate with Kawaguchi since the enemy landing at Tasimboko. He had, of course, sent them his message of September 11 in which he notified them of his intention to take possession of the airfield the night of September 12–13. Since then, nothing …
Tsukahara sent four scout planes south. They came back with bullet holes suggesting that the Americans were still in possession of Henderson. Rabaul’s top commanders postponed the fly-down for the surrender ceremony one day. The customary attacks were renewed on Henderson, but it was considered unsafe to attack the Ridge. Instead, it was decided to strike the enemy force which had landed at Tasimboko to “sandwich” Kawaguchi.
Twenty-six Bettys and a dozen escorting Zeros thundered south. They came in low over Florida Island and pounced on Kawaguchi’s rear echelon. In one moment these Japanese were dancing for joy to see the sun flashing off the red balls on their comrades’ wings, in the next they were being blown flat or apart or were dragging themselves to the beaches to stop the slaughter by spreading their own red-balled flags out on the sand. The Zeros only strafed them where they lay, and one day Martin Clemens’s scouts would bring these bullet-pierced and blood-caked flags into the perimeter as souvenirs.
Out at sea Combined Fleet’s scout planes had also reported the Americans in possession of the airfield, thereby contradicting Rabaul’s message claiming that it had been captured.
Admiral Yamamoto was as annoyed as the commanders in Rabaul. Where was Kawaguchi?
He was grinding his teeth in the jungle and preparing a fresh attack.
At one time during last night’s abortive assault General Kawaguchi found himself alone but for his adjutant, his orderly and a few soldiers. The assault had been that haphazard.
Moreover neither Colonel Oka in the west nor the Ishitari Battalion in the east had attacked as scheduled.
But tonight, Kawaguchi thought grimly, they would. He had seen to that, contacting both commanders. Moreover, he had been able to get some kind of order into his own force, still well over 2500 men. Once again he would strike with two reinforced battalions until a hole had been ripped open for Colonel Watanabe’s elite. It was unfortunate that his artillery had been lost at Tasimboko and that the Americans had captured the Ishitari guns supposed to batter the Ridge; nevertheless, Japanese spiritual power should still suffice to overwhelm these contemptible Americans.
Of whom, unknown to General Kawaguchi, there were only 400.
“Gas attack!”
A cloud of vapor drifted over the Marine right, and the too-precise voice came again:
“Gas attack!”
But there was no gas, only smoke, an attempt to mask that 100-yard approach, and a trick to shake American nerves.
But the Marines held to their holes, watching the jungle while flares made a ghoulish day of the night. And then the jungle spewed out short, squat shapes.
Two thousand men, launching two major attacks, they came sprinting toward the Marines in waves. They came on to a rising, shrieking chant:
“U.S. Marines be dead tomorrow.”
“U.S. Marines be dead tomorrow.”
“You’ll eat shit first, you bastards!” a BAR-man screamed, and the Ridge erupted with the mad wail of battle.19
Japanese fell, but still they came on. Platoon after platoon, company after company, flowed from the jungle and went bowlegging it through the flickering green light. They bent back the Marine lines like a horseshoe. But they could not break them. Marines fought back individually. Pfc. Jimmy Corzine saw four Japanese setting up a machine gun on a knob. He rushed them. He bayoneted the gunner, and swung the gun around to spray the enemy with his own death. Then Corzine was killed.
On the right the Japanese were once again chopping up the Americans into small groups. Captain John Sweeney’s company was cut up into small pockets of resistance. His own right flank was gone and he was down to sixty men, and on the left a mortar barrage and another Japanese charge was splintering Torgerson’s parachutists.
Torgerson rallied his faltering men. He went among them and taunted them. He held roll call on the Ridge and challenged each man to go forward by name. They went. They fought back with machine guns. But the Japanese singled out the automatic weapons and lobbed grenades down on them. Sergeant Keith Perkins crept over the Ridge searching for ammunition for his two machine guns. One by one, his gunners were struck down. Perkins jumped on his last gun and was also killed.
Now there was another iron tongue baying over Guadalcanal.
Even as the Raiders were resisting that first fierce charge, Louie the Louse flew over Henderson Field. He cut his motors, coasted, dropped his flare, and seven destroyers in Iron Bottom Bay began shelling the field. They fired for an hour, their voices thrumming like a bass viol beneath the clatter and screaming of the Ridge, the jabbering of the Japanese and the coarse cursing of the Marines.
Then the Japanese ships fell silent. They had heard firing south of the airfield. They waited for the flare from General Kawaguchi signaling its capture. Then they heard firing from the east.
The Ishitari Battalion was attacking the Third Battalion, First Marines. They had crossed the Tenaru River upstream and emerged into a broad field of kunai grass. They formed and charged. Halfway across they ran into barbed wire and the massed fire of Marine guns. American 75-mm howitzers rained shells among them. They broke and fled. They re-formed east of the field for a stronger attack, and came again.
Once more they hit the wire and were torn apart. But some of them got through. Captain Robert Putnam rang up Lieutenant Colonel William McKelvy, to report:
“Some Japs just got inside my barbed wire.” There was a pause, and then Putnam concluded: “There were twenty-seven of them.”20
Squat dark shapes were running low toward the Ridge when Red Mike Edson’s telephone jangled. A voice said cautiously:
“What name do you identify with Silent?”
“Lew,” Edson whispered.
“That is correct,” Captain Lew Walt said, and began his report. Another voice broke in:
“Our situation here, Colonel Edson, is excellent. Thank you, sir.”21
Edson swore softly. It was the enemy. They had cut the wire and Captain Sweeney on the right was still cut off. How to reach him? Red Mike seized an iron-lunged corporal and sent him forward. The man cupped his hands to his lips and bellowed:
“Red Mike says it’s okay to pull back!”22
Out in the wild spitting blackness of the right flank Sweeney’s isolated remnant fought back to the contracted Marine line.
For Red Mike Edson was shortening his position. The battle had come to crux and he was taunting his men to win it. He lay within ten yards of his foremost machine gun. He lay with his arm curled about his telephone and shielding his face against fragments whizzing from the blasts that lifted him up and slammed him to the ground. He saw men drifting toward the rear and he ran at them. He seized them and spun them around and pointed his finger at the enemy and snarled: “The only thing they have that you don’t is guts!”23
Major Bailey also darted at retreating Marines. He had been running back and forth from the Ridge to the rear for grenades and ammunition. He crawled over the bullet-swept Ridge to bring them to Marine foxholes. He caught at the arms of dazed men and slapped them, screaming: “You! Do you want to live forever?”24
It was the cry of old Dan Daly echoing across the decades from Belleau Wood, and it made another generation of young Americans ashamed of what they were about to do. They turned and went back.
They fought on while Colonel Edson lay on his belly bringing his own artillery in closer and closer to the charging enemy. A corporal named Watson who would be Lieutenant Watson in the morning spotted the enemy for him. He marked the Japanese rocket signals and directed redoubled fire to break up the enemy’s massing points.
“Closer,” Edson whispered. “Closer.”25
The Ridge shook and flashed. A terrible steel rain fell among Marines and Japanese alike. Terrified enemy soldiers dove into Marine foxholes to escape death above ground. Marines knifed them and pitched them out again. The night was hideous with the screams of the stricken, for artillery does not kill cleanly: it tears men’s organs with jagged chunks of steel, it blows off their limbs and burns their faces black.
But now the Kawaguchis were falling back again. Now the short squat shapes were springing to their feet and sprinting back into an opaque wall of darkness, jabbering once they had gained cover—for it was the chief failing of these jungle-fighters that they could not keep silent in the jungle. At two o’clock they came again behind another mortar barrage which cut wires to Vandegrift’s headquarters and the artillery.
“Marine you die!” the Japanese shrieked again, but with a notable lack of their former fervor, and the Marines, already exultant with the scent of victory, replied with strings of obscene oaths and streams of bullets, and they cut the enemy down.
At half past two in the morning of September 14 Red Mike Edson called headquarters and said:
“We can hold.”26