THE JAPANESE did not consider the Battle of Cape Esperance to be an unmitigated defeat. Rather, they regarded the outcome as salutary: Admiral Scott had sailed his ships south and the way was now clear for heavier bombardment of Henderson Field.
Much, much heavier—for Combined Fleet was now ready.
On October 9 the big converted carriers Hiyo and Junyo with smaller Zuiho sailed into Truk lagoon, and Vice-Admiral Kakuji Kakuta—a Japanese giant standing six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds—left his flagship, Hiyo, to report to Admiral Yamamoto aboard Yamato.
With Kakuta’s arrival, Yamamoto now had five carriers, five battleships, fourteen cruisers and forty-four destroyers—backed up by about 220 land-based airplanes to deploy against the enemy. On October 10 most of these ships sortied from Truk as part of the Guadalcanal Supporting Forces commanded by Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo. Yamamoto, remaining behind, watched them go.
As always, it was a stirring sight. Out of the reef passages they sailed, battleships leading—standing to sea in a stately column of ships. Then they were in open water and the escort ships broke column, heeling over with strings of signal flags tautening in the wind, while the queens of the fleet—the carriers—steamed majestically into position surrounded by protecting rings of cruisers and battleships.
They sailed south to take up supporting positions north of the Solomons, and to carry out Yamamoto’s instructions: “… apprehend and annihilate any powerful forces in the Solomons area, as well as any reinforcements.”
A few days after they departed Truk, their own reinforcements began going aboard six fast transports in the Shortlands. These were the last of the Sendai and some of the soldiers of the 38th Division: about ten thousand men in all. They were to arrive at Guadalcanal the night of October 14–15, joining General Hyakutake’s 17th Army in time for the big push now scheduled for October 20. Before they sailed, Henderson Field would be knocked out to guarantee them safe passage.
That was why, a few days after the grand sortie from Truk, battleships Kongo and Haruna under Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita peeled off from Kondo’s forces and made for Guadalcanal. Each carried five hundred horrible fourteen-inch bombardment shells, plus ammunition of smaller sizes. Both were escorted by seven destroyers and flag cruiser Isuzu carrying Tanaka the Tenacious back to The Slot. These ships were also loaded to bombard, as were four heavy cruisers scheduled to deliver later attacks.
But The Night of the Battleships would be first: on October 13.
Kelly Turner’s luck had held.
While Norman Scott had been sailing south in triumph, Turner had pushed on to the north with 3000 soldiers of the 164th Infantry Regiment. The huge Japanese armada which Yamamoto had ordered to destroy American reinforcements had left Truk too late to intercept him. Fourteen Japanese submarines screening Torpedo Junction had somehow let his two transports filter through.
As dusk of October 12 approached, Kelly Turner sighed with relief. He had made it. At dawn next morning he would be off Lunga with the first American soldiers to join the first American offensive.
Oh, some PT’s do forty-five
And some do thirty-nine;
When we get ours to run at all
We think we’re doing fine.
Lieutenant Alan Montgomery’s four torpedo boats were truly not running at all when they arrived at Guadalcanal that afternoon of October 12. They had been towed from the New Hebrides by destroyers Southard and Hovey, entering the great battle of the Pacific and Iron Bottom Bay in a pedestrian style that delighted the hearts of the uninhibited deep-water sailors who greeted them.
“Rub-a-dub-dub, five gobs in a tub!”
“Tootsie-toys, yet! The Japs got the Tokyo Express and we got the Toonerville Trolley.”
Under tow the torpedo boats were indeed unlovely and unformidable sights, but once they had been freed and fallen astern and had drowned the taunts of their detractors in the great throaty roar of their powerful motors, they went thundering across the Bay with lifted prows, planing gracefully along and throwing out huge bow waves that showered torpedo tubes and machine-gun mounts with spume and trailed a thick wide wake of frothing white behind them.
With their arrival the battle for Guadalcanal became complete.
Marines and sailors, soldiers and fliers, Seabees, native scouts and Japanese laborers, every type of warrior or martial worker imaginable had fought above, around, and upon this island; they had struck and hacked and shot at each other on foot or from every type of ship or aircraft or vehicle, wielding every kind of gun or knife, fighting with spears and axes, with fists and with stones—and now the bold little cockleshells were here to round out the roster and complete the arsenal of modern arms. As they came into the fight, taxiing up to Government Wharf in Tulagi Harbor, the Skytrains of SCAT were overhead flying south with the last of that valiant band of Marine fliers who were the first to fight for Cactus Air Force.
Major Richard Mangrum was himself the only pilot of his bombing squadron able to walk away from the field. Seven other fliers were dead, four had been wounded, and the remainder flown out with malaria or other illnesses. Four of Mangrum’s reargunners had also been killed, and another wounded.
Major John Smith was going home as America’s leading ace: nineteen enemy warplanes shot down in less than two months. But six of Smith’s fighter pilots had been killed and six others wounded. Captain Carl was still alive, victor in sixteen aerial battles, and he, too, went home that afternoon of October 12—after the Skytrains had unloaded their cargoes of precious gasoline.
Fuel supplies were again critically short at Henderson Field. Although a Skytrain could fly in enough 55-gallon drums to keep twelve Wildcats aloft for one hour, what they brought in on October 12 would certainly be gone by October 13. Once again General Roy Geiger appealed to Nouméa, and an emergency barge-towing convoy was made up.
Cargo ships Alchiba and Bellatrix, PT-tender Jamestown, fleet tug Vireo and destroyers Meredith and Nicholas each towed a barge loaded with two thousand drums of gasoline and five hundred quarter-ton bombs.
They set out from Espiritu Santo late in the afternoon of October 12, a few hours after Japanese engineers began surveying a road to the south of Henderson Field.
Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama had graciously consented to Captain Oda’s request that the trail to the assembly areas be called “The Maruyama Road.” That had been on October 10. The next day Captain Oda and his engineers sat down with Colonel Matsumoto, the Sendai Division’s intelligence officer, to study aerial photographs of the route. They saw the roof of a solid jungle. It seemed straight going. Oda was sure he could blaze the trail to the upper Lunga without difficulty. Meanwhile, Colonel Matsumoto would continue to torture captured Americans to extract information from them. None of them had talked so far, much to the surprise of Matsumoto and the concealed admiration of Colonel Masajiro Furumiya of the 29th Infantry,1 and they had had to be beheaded in the honorable way. But more prisoners would be taken, and perhaps more forthright measures would produce better results.
Leaving Matsumoto, Captain Oda and his engineers cheerfully set out to cut The Maruyama Road.
“Hey, Lucky—the doggies are here!”
“Yeah, I know, Lew,” Lucky grunted. “They came in on the New York bus.”
“It’s the straight dope. They’re out in the Bay. You want to take a look?”
“We can’t. We’ve got to stand by to move out. We’re moving to new positions today or tomorrow.”2
It was true, both that the 164th Infantry Regiment had arrived safely off Lunga Point, and that this latest reinforcement had induced General Vandegrift to shift his troops again. He expected the gathering enemy to strike hard from west of the Matanikau and he was moving his strength in that direction. The Tenaru line to the east would be held by the newly arrived 164th under Colonel Bryant Moore. To the south of Henderson Field, farther inland and a little to the east of Bloody Ridge, Vandegrift stationed Chesty Puller’s battalion.
Almost exactly at the point where The Maruyama Road was to terminate.
“Condition Red!”
The cry was almost meaningless to these American soldiers hearing it for the first time on that afternoon of October 13, and it was raised too late.
Up north Japanese patrols had at last flushed the coastwatchers from their hideouts. Paul Mason and Jack Read were on the run, unable to warn Guadalcanal, and Henderson Field’s new radar had also been remiss. And so, twenty-four Bettys with escorting Zeros came thundering over the big runway and Fighter One while forty-two Wildcats and thirteen P-400s and Airacobras hung roaring on their noses in a desperate attempt to gain altitude. Eventually, one bomber and one fighter would fall to their guns, but not before huge gashes were torn in both runways, parked aircraft were blasted apart, five thousand gallons of gasoline were set afire, and the men of the 164th Regiment had felt the first scorching licks of a baptism of fire that none of Vandegrift’s Marines had ever experienced.
Some of the bombs fell on Colonel Moore’s men only a few minutes after they set foot on Guadalcanal. Corporal Kenneth Foubert was killed—the first American soldier to die on the island—and two other men were wounded. Casualties mounted during another savage raid—again without warning.
All of the planes of the second raid got safely away, except for the Zero which fell to the flaming wing guns of a square-jawed, cigar-smoking Marine captain named Joseph Jacob Foss. Then Foss took a bullet in his oil pump and came rocketing down from 22,000 feet to a dead-stick landing while a trio of Zeros took turns trying to shoot off his tail. It was Captain Foss’s first victory, and it was a hair-raising flying feat which was to be typical of Henderson’s newest and greatest fighter pilot.
Individual victories, however, were of small solace to Archer Vandegrift on that black-bordered day of October 13. Henderson Field was now out of action for the first time. Geiger had almost no gasoline. The fury of the enemy onslaught suggested that a period of comparative lull had ended and that the Japanese were now opening their third and heaviest bid for victory. Far away in Australia General Douglas MacArthur was planning an all-out defense of the island continent in the event that the Solomons were lost, a huge Japanese bombardment force had been reported on its way south, forcing Admiral Turner to flee for the New Hebrides again, and as dusk introduced The Night of the Battleships, Archer Vandegrift heard a new voice speaking over Henderson Field.
Sergeant Butch Morgan was preparing the general’s dinner when Pistol Pete spoke.
His first shell screamed over Vandegrift’s pavilion and struck the big runway with a crash. Sergeant Morgan seized his World War I helmet and raced for the dugout. Another shell screeched overhead. Morgan slammed on his helmet and dove for cover.
Crrrrash!
General Vandegrift looked up in thoughtful surprise.
“That wasn’t a bomb,” he said. “That’s artillery.”3
Sergeant Butch Morgan came out of the dugout, his face a crimson match for his red walrus mustache. He looked around him furtively to see if any boots had witnessed the discomfiture of the Old Salt who had fought in France and knew all about artillery barrages.
“Aw, hell,” Morgan muttered, taking off his helmet and going back to his makeshift stove. “I mean, only artillery …”
If it was “only” artillery, it was still authoritative enough to reach the airfield and to introduce a new element of danger into the harried lives of the Seabees there. Formerly, after attack from bombers or warships, repairmen might rush to the torn-up runway to fill the craters without fear of lightning striking twice in the same place. But now, Pistol Pete could fire one shell, wait until the Seabees were at work, and then drop another in the very same place.
Moreover, Vandegrift’s heretofore matchless artillery was now outranged. Even his biggest guns, five-inch rifles, were of lesser bore than these six-inch howitzers of Hyakutake’s; and his field pieces, 105- and 75-mm howitzers, that is, roughly four- and three-inch cannon, were far outweighed by them. Nevertheless, the Marine artillerymen were unafraid to duel the Japanese in counter-battery firing; if only they could locate them. The Marines had no sound-and-flash ranging equipment on Guadalcanal, and General Geiger could not consume precious gasoline keeping observation planes aloft.
Pistol Pete would speak for many, many days, unsilenced even by the five-inch rifles of visiting destroyers; speak as he was speaking now in the fading light of October 13, churning up the runways and forcing Marine ground crews to dare his flying fragments while moving parked aircraft to the comparative safety of Fighter One, ranging in on Kukum to chew up naval stores, hurling desultory shells into the Marine perimeter and moving from there, accidentally, into the heart of the 164th Infantry’s bivouac area, raining shells upon these soldiers with such ferocity that one of them—a sergeant—crawled about begging his men to shoot him.
Then it was dark.
Pistol Pete thundered on, red flares shot up from the jungle, enemy bombers roared overhead—flashing in and out of Marine antiaircraft fire and thick pencils of searchlight crisscrossing the sky—and everywhere there was a thumping and lashing of tortured earth and a whistling of invisible steel, while dazed and sleepless men stumbled in and out of their pits and foxholes, bracing for the enemy to appear once the uproar ceased.
At half past eleven Louie the Louse planted a green flare directly over Henderson Field and The Night of the Battleships began.
Screened fore and aft, and flanked to each side by Isuzu and Admiral Tanaka’s seven destroyers, battleships Haruna and Kongo raced down The Slot at twenty-five knots.
Just before midnight, west of Savo, speed was dropped to eighteen knots. Gunnery officers could see the first of many flares burning brightly over Henderson Field. They began calculating the mathematical problems. At half past one, at a range of about ten miles, sixteen great fourteen-inch guns swiveled toward Henderson, gouts of flame gushed from their muzzles, and huge red blobs went arching through the blackness with the effect of strings of lighted boxcars rushing over a darkened hill.
Henderson Field became a sea of flame.
Fires and explosions were visible from the darkened bridges of the Japanese ships. Sailors cried out in glee and excitement. To Admiral Tanaka the battleships’ pyrotechnic display seemed to make the famous Ryogoku fireworks show a pale candle by comparison.4
Ashore the Americans were passing through an agony not to be repeated in World War II. It was a terror of the soul. It was as though the roar of colliding planets was exploding in their ears. Self-control was shattered, strong faces went flabby with fear, men sobbed aloud or whimpered, others put their pistols to their heads. It was not possible to pray.
It was possible only to crouch in gunpits to watch, through the rectangles of the gun embrasures, a horizon quivering with gun flashes, and to hear the soft, hollow thumping of the enemy’s salvos—
Pah-boom, pah-boom. Pah-boom, pah-boom, pah …
—to feel the dry constriction of the throat and to hear the great projectiles wailing hoarsely overhead,
Hwooo, hwoo-ee,
and then to be thrown violently to earth and feel the stomach being kneaded as though by giant fingers of steel, while the eardrums rang and the head ached and the teeth were rattled by the perfection of sound, a monster clanging as though the vault of heaven were a huge casque of steel and giants were beating on it with sledgehammers, beating one-two, one-two-three, as the salvos came crashing in from two-gun turrets, three-gun turrets, and the flogged earth leaped and bucked and writhed.
It went on for an hour and a half, while Henderson Field’s airplanes were blown to bits or set afire or crushed by collapsing revetments, while Tanaka’s destroyers thickened the battleships’ fire with their own five-inch shells, while Marine shore-batteries on Guadalcanal and Tulagi bravely but vainly attempted to drive off an enemy far out of range, and while Lieutenant Montgomery’s bold little PT boats came racing out of Tulagi Harbor to challenge the intruders. Even the Japanese were astonished at these impetuous waterbugs charging at a pair of whales, although they recovered from their surprise in time to swing ponderously about and comb the American torpedo wakes. Then the destroyers turned on their searchlights and drove them off.
Kongo and Haruna bellowed on. Until, at three in the morning, a sudden quiet came over Guadalcanal.
At dawn the Americans came sleepwalking from their holes to gaze in awe upon huge baseplates and shell fragments and to congratulate the Japanese gunner who had zeroed-in on a ration dump, making mince of cases of Spam to feed it, bit by detestable bit, to Guadalcanal’s populous colony of rats. Otherwise, there was nothing to laugh about.
Forty-one men—many of them pilots—had been killed, and a score more were wounded. Many men were buried alive and had to be dug out, among them Michael, Martin Clemens’s cook, who was pulled out of a collapsed dugout with his face streaming blood.
Henderson Field was a ruin. Smoke still curled skyward from burning fuel dumps, jagged sections of steel runway matting lay hundreds of yards away from cratered airstrips, part of the hospital was wrecked, tents flapped in the wind like canvas sieves, and there were great swathes cut in the coconut groves where the trees stood in serried rows of serrated stumps.
Neither of the runways was usable. General Geiger had had thirty-nine Dauntlesses operational when he went to bed the night before, but when he tumbled groggily to his feet on this morning of horror, he had only five. Sixteen of his Wildcats were twisted ruins, and every one of the twenty-four remaining required repairs. Most of the Avenger torpedo-bombers recently arrived were useless, and the Army aviators, whose P-400s and Airacobras were still usable, received this chilling briefing from a Marine colonel:
“We don’t know whether we’ll be able to hold the field or not. There’s a Japanese task force of destroyers, cruisers, and troop transports headed our way. We have enough gasoline left for one mission against them. Load your planes with bombs and go out with the dive-bombers and hit them. After the gas is gone, we’ll have to let the ground troops take over. Then your officers and men will attach yourselves to some infantry outfit.
“Good luck and good-by.”5
Up went the Army craft beside four Dauntlesses. They found the enemy convoy and they attacked. But they failed to sink them and the Japanese ships pressed on.
Back at Henderson Field, Seabees and Marine engineers drove themselves to repair the airfields. Squadron commanders conferred anxiously with their repair officers.
“What’s left, Lieutenant?”
“You’d need a magnifying glass to find it, Colonel.”
“Well, start using one then. How about Number 117?”
“Her? Oh, she’s great—wasn’t even scratched. Except that she needs an engine change. Other than that, all she needs is both elevators, both stabilizers, the right auxiliary gas tank, right and center section flaps, right aileron, windshield, rudder, both wheels and the brake assembly. But she’s still in one piece, sir, and I guess we can get her up in six days.”
“Six days!”
“Dammit, Colonel, back in the States it’d take six months to do it!”
“All right, all right—but let’s keep those junk-pickers of yours busy.”6
Henderson’s mechanics patched up ten more bombers that day. They did it even as bombs fell upon them from twenty-five unchallenged Betty bombers which came winging in at noon; an hour later, when fifteen more bombers and ten Zeros arrived overhead, they had twenty-four fighters aloft and waiting. Nine bombers and three Zeros were shot down, at a cost of two Marine pilots and one Army flier.
And then it became clear that Cactus Air Force was out of gas.
Admiral Ghormley’s headquarters was aware of the critical situation at Henderson Field. General Vandegrift’s urgent message requesting twenty bombers “immediately” had been received by Vice-Admiral Aubrey Fitch—who had replaced Admiral McCain as commander of South Pacific Air—but the best Fitch could do was send six more Dauntlesses to Guadalcanal.
In Espiritu Santo, Admiral Turner readied another emergency shipment of gasoline. Destroyer McFarland, now converted to a seaplane tender, was loaded with 40,000 gallons of gasoline, in tanks below and in drums topside, together with a dozen torpedoes, airplane flares and supplies of 37-mm shells.
McFarland would get to Guadalcanal about the same time as the slower barge-towing convoy which had set out from Espiritu two days before.
Admiral Yamamoto was elated by Admiral Kurita’s reports of the destruction of Henderson Field. His carriers could now venture close to Guadalcanal without fear of land-based air, and he notified Admiral Kondo to move toward the island at top speed.
Kondo’s mission was to destroy the American naval forces which Yamamoto mistakenly believed to be in the vicinity, and to support General Hyakutake’s attack on the American airfield.
In the meantime, Admiral Mikawa would pick up where Kurita had left off.
Again Louie the Louse, again the flares, again the long sleek shapes gliding down The Slot—and once more Guadalcanal’s earth quivered while cursing Americans blundered blindly through the darkness toward their holes.
This time it was Gunichi Mikawa with flagship Chokai and big Kinugasa, the lucky battler of Cape Esperance. They began shelling even as six transports from the Shortlands began unloading troops and supplies off Tassafaronga, only fifteen miles west of the Marine perimeter.
Chokai and Kinugasa hurled 750 eight-inch shells into the American beachhead. Racing north unmolested, Mikawa jubilantly radioed Yamamoto that the enemy airfield was zemmetsu: wiped out.
With dawn of October 15, Marines on the southern ridges could look west past Kukum and see, with chilled hearts, the Japanese ships calmly unloading, while destroyers screened them to seaward and enemy planes patrolled the skies above them.
Behind these dispirited but not yet despairing Marines there was a ruined airfield, only three Dauntlesses that could fly, and not a drop of gasoline.
“No gasoline?” Roy Geiger thundered. “Then, by God, find some!”7
Then Geiger radioed Espiritu Santo to fly in nothing but fuel that day, while his startled supply officers hurried from the Pagoda to start hunting gasoline. First, they drained the tanks of two wrecked Flying Fortresses, getting four hundred gallons out of one of them, and next someone remembered four hundred drums of Japanese aviation gasoline that had been cached outside the airfield’s outer rim during the early days.
It was enough to contradict Admiral Mikawa’s estimate of Henderson Field’s fighting capacity.
“Always pray,” Lieutenant Anthony Turtora had written to his parents, “not that I shall come back, but that I shall have the courage to do my duty.”8
Shortly after daybreak on October 15, Lieutenant Turtora climbed into one of Henderson’s three flyable Dauntlesses. His motor roared and the stubby powerful ship went zigzagging down the bomb-pocked runway, struggling aloft while ground crews watched with caught breath. Then Turtora flew down to Tassafaronga to do his duty. He did not return, but after him came scores of pilots who also had the courage to do their duty.
They should not have been airborne, by every law of logic Admiral Mikawa should have been right; and yet, all day long the ragtag Cactus Air Force struck at the enemy transports. Flying on gasoline supplies which were always on the verge of giving out, until another Army or Marine transport roared in from Espiritu, the Wildcats and P-400s and Airacobras tangled with Japanese Zeros or swept in low to strafe enemy troops. Seated in the cockpits of Dauntlesses and Avengers which Henderson’s magnificent mechanics had patched together in fulfillment of their vow to salvage everything but the bullet holes, the bombers showered the enemy ships with 1000- and 500-pound eggs, or dove down through streamers of antiaircraft fire to strafe and to blast supply dumps.
Late in the day Flying Fortresses came up from Espiritu to join the Tassafaronga assault, their majestic formation provoking cries of delight from Marines atop the ridges who had been cheering on the airmen throughout the day. And then a great shout broke from their lips. They had seen a clumsy Catalina lumbering west with two torpedoes tucked under its belly.
It was the Blue Goose, General Geiger’s personal plane, and Mad Jack Cram was at the controls.
Major Cram had flown into Guadalcanal to deliver torpedoes. He had begged the use of one of them, and an ensign who had already been down to Tassafaronga told him he could have both. Then Cram gathered his crew and climbed back into Blue Goose.
He nursed the awkward Cat into the sky. He made for a rendezvous with eight fighters and a dozen Dauntlesses a few miles east of Henderson. Beneath him, Major Duke Davis and his Wildcats were cakewalking down the runway between the bursts laid down by Pistol Pete.
Blue Goose was roaring along with the Dauntlesses and Wildcats toward the transports and thirty Zeros flying cover above them. Then the dive-bombers were going over, flashing down through the flak, and big bulky Blue Goose was going over with them.
She was built to make 160 miles an hour, this Catalina, but she was diving at 270. Her great ungainly wings shook and shrieked in an agony of stress. She would surely fall apart.
Cram pulled the stick back. He leveled off at one thousand feet. Then he went over again. Blue Goose came thundering over two transports at seventy-five feet. She shuddered and bucked in their flak blasts. Cram sighted off his bow at a third transport. He yanked the toggle release. His first torpedo hit the water and began running straight and true. He yanked again, and the second fell. It porpoised, righted—and followed the first into the transport’s side.
Blue Goose had broken the transport’s back. She was done. Her skipper drove her up on the beach. Soon two more transports were beached, and the other three had turned and raced back toward the Shortlands.
Now Blue Goose was fighting for her life. Five Zeros went after her. Cram stood his big plane on one wing and raced for Henderson Field. The Zeros took turns raking his tail. Cram began roller-coastering, rising and diving, rising and diving. He came over the main strip with his ship wailing through a hundred holes. But he was going too fast to land. He made for Fighter One. He began letting down, while Marine antiaircraft gunners shot two Zeros off his tail.
Then a third came after him, just as Lieutenant Roger Haberman brought his smoking Wildcat down with lowered wheels.
Haberman shot the Zero off Cram’s tail and Blue Goose went plowing up the strip in a pancake landing. Cram and his crewmen emerged unscathed, only to hear Geiger bellow:
“Goddamit, Cram! I ought to court-martial you for deliberate destruction of government property!” Then Geiger strode into the Pagoda to write out a recommendation for a Navy Cross.
And so the “safest” run of the Tokyo Express was all but wrecked. The three beached ships would eventually be turned into charred and rusting skeletons; many of General Hyakutake’s reinforcements were lost and the remainder would have to complete the southern movement by barge, ravaged by American torpedo boats at night, scourged by their aircraft by day. In all, about 4500 men would reach Hyakutake in time for the big push. But he would not get all his supplies. Many of them were already burning and American destroyers would set other depots afire. As the day came to an end, three Japanese transports had been lost, in effect, and five Zeros and three Bettys shot down; against the loss of seven of Geiger’s aircraft.
It had been a memorable fifteenth of October, and tomorrow McFarland and the barge-towing convoy would arrive.
Early in the morning of October 15 the Japanese fleet reached a station two hundred miles north of Guadalcanal. Admiral Kondo took personal command of heavy cruisers Myoko and Maya and led them toward The Slot. Meanwhile, Nagumo’s carriers flew off scout planes to search for the American fleet. They found no carriers, but at ten o’clock in the morning they reported sighting a force of one cruiser, two destroyers, and two transports at a point a hundred miles south of Guadalcanal.
Nagumo decided to attack, even though the target was three hundred miles distant. Twenty-seven Vals and Kates roared aloft from Zuikaku, speeding toward what was in actuality the barge-towing convoy from Espiritu.
But they would find only two targets.
Nagumo’s scout plane had already made transports Alchiba and Bellatrix, destroyer Nicholas and PT-tender Jamestown conclude that it would be wise to withdraw. Fleet-tug Vireo and destroyer Meredith plowed on. Shortly before eleven they beat off a two-plane attack. Then they received word that enemy ships were close by, and they, also, decided to reverse course.
But Vireo moved too slowly, and so, Meredith ordered her abandoned and prepared to sink her with torpedoes—just as Nagumo’s warbirds came tumbling out of the sky.
They fell on Meredith.
Bombed, torpedoed, and machine-gunned, the destroyer sank almost instantly. Her men took to the life rafts. One raftful succeeded in boarding drifting Vireo. But the others could not and these rafts became floating horrors. Wounded and dreadfully burned sailors lay in the boiling sun across the gratings while salt water washed across their open cuts and burned bodies. Other men clung to the lifelines, waiting for someone aboard to die so that they could take his place.
The sharks found them. They dragged the men on the lifelines under. One great scaly beast flipped onto a raft and tore a chunk of flesh from a dying man’s thigh before his horrified comrades could seize the flopping creature by the tail and heave it back into the sea again.
After three days and three nights of agony unrivaled, eighty-eight survivors of Vireo and Meredith were eventually rescued by destroyers. But 236 were not.
Thus did the Navy suffer to keep the Marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal alive and fighting.
They were out in the Bay again.
Heavies Myoko and Maya were there, with Admiral Kondo in command, and ordeal was renewed and red again.
Parading within less than five miles of the island, Kondo’s cruisers fired a crushing 1500 rounds of eight-inch shell into the American perimeter.
In the morning, General Geiger counted fifteen ruined Wildcats. His Cactus Air Force numbered only twenty-seven planes, and it was again out of gasoline.
Henderson Field’s only hope now rested in Lieutenant Colonel Harold (“Indian Joe”) Bauer’s fighter squadron at Espiritu Santo, alerted for movement north, and in McFarland, still bending it on for Iron Bottom Bay.
“I am your Commander-in-Chief, you are my strong right arms. Whether I shall adequately fulfill my duty to the Ancestors depends upon your fidelity … If you unite with me, our courage and power shall illuminate the whole earth.”
Tears streaming down their cheeks, the men of the Sendai Division stood outside the encampment at Kukumbona, their faces toward the Emperor and their ears filled with the familiar words of the Imperial Rescript.
They were marching against the Americans.
On this morning of October 16, while Roy Geiger contemplated the ruins of his air force, seven thousand of them prepared to march through the jungle to an assembly area south of Henderson Field.
As always, General Maruyama was supremely confident. Captain Oda and his engineers had sent back encouraging reports on the progress of the Maruyama Road. The Sendai should easily be in place by “X Day,” now tentatively set for October 22. So the general ordered his men to take only five days’ rations.
Then, stroking his thin line of supercilious mustache, he suggested to General Hyakutake that the appropriate place to receive the surrender of the American commander was at the mouth of the Matanikau River.
After which, at noon of October 16, he set out along the Maruyama Road.
A few hours later his rear guard heard the welcome sound of Japanese aerial bombs falling on American ships in Iron Bottom Bay.
McFarland got to Guadalcanal ahead of Joe Bauer’s fliers.
A floating gasoline dump and ammunition depot, the brave little ship entered the Bay on the morning of October 16. Her crew and her skipper, Lieutenant Commander John Alderman, were understandably eager to unload, and they quickly began lowering drums over the side into waiting lighters while dropping a fuel line to a barge which had come alongside.
Commander Alderman and his crew were not quite so eager to take aboard their return cargo: 160 hospital patients, half of whom were those exhausted and battle-fatigued men who were still, in those days, ungraciously described as “war neurotics.”
At five o’clock Alderman sighted a periscope and decided to get under way. He did, with the gasoline barge still alongside taking on fuel.
Some time later Colonel Bauer’s squadron of nineteen Wildcats, plus seven Dauntlesses, came winging overhead. They came in with fuel tanks almost empty, and they began lowering quickly down for a landing. Bauer would come in last.
And then nine Japanese dive-bombers fell without warning on McFarland.
Alderman rang up full speed and ordered the barge cast off. She was, in time to be holed and sunk.
Then an enemy bomb burst among the depth charges on McFarland’s fantail. Huge explosions racked the ship. The neurotics panicked. They stampeded through the passageways and tried to tear weapons and life jackets away from sailors struggling desperately to save their ship.
Above, Joe Bauer saw McFarland plodding along at barely five knots. She was a helpless target for about five Vals which had still to make their dive. With his gas tanks nearly empty, Bauer went wolfing swiftly among the enemy.
He shot down four of them before he came down with bone-dry tanks.
McFarland was saved, as well as her precious cargo of ammunition.
Rugged Joe Bauer, Indian Joe Bauer, one of the most inspirational of flying leaders, and also the pilot whom all Marines regarded as “the greatest,” had brought off the most astonishing single feat of aerial arms in the annals of Guadalcanal. In the words of his adoring wingman:
“The Chief stitched four of the bastards end to end.”9