ENTERPRISE had arrived in time to fight.
Guadalcanal’s tortuous terrain, General Maruyama’s overconfidence, his own and General Hyakutake’s failure to appreciate that plans possessing precision and power on paper often wobble and weaken in time and space—all these factors had conspired to grant the Americans the time they needed to double their carrier strength in the Pacific.
All these factors, and Vandegrift’s dauntless Marines; for even as Enterprise and her screen reached the rendezvous area 850 miles southeast of Guadalcanal at daybreak of that October 24, Admiral Kinkaid knew that the enemy’s latest attempt to seize Henderson Field had been repulsed. He knew also that the Marines were bracing for a far more furious attempt that night.
If they could hold again, could fight for just one more day’s grace, then perhaps Kinkaid’s ships would have the time to strike the enemy fleet.
And so, Enterprise and her escorts met the tanker Sabine, slipping two at a time to either side of the big fleet cow to fill their tanks with thick black oil. Later in the day, lookouts sighted the silhouettes of Hornet and her screen standing over the rim of the horizon with slow majesty. When they joined, Halsey had at sea two carriers, two battleships, nine cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers to oppose Admiral Yamamoto’s four flattops, five battleships, fourteen cruisers, and forty-four destroyers.
By three o’clock in the afternoon the American battleship group, Washington, three cruisers and seven destroyers commanded by Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee, had turned northwest to come up under Guadalcanal’s southern coast and patrol it, and the two carriers went racing northeast to intercept or trap the enemy.
Kinkaid’s orders were to take his ships north of the Santa Cruz Islands, which are almost due east of Guadalcanal, and then to turn them southwest to cut off the enemy fleet. With any luck, they might even get behind the suspecting Japanese to batter them beneath the waves as they had done at Midway.
Chuichi Nagumo sat in his cabin aboard flag carrier Shokaku. The marks of Midway seemed to have been etched deeper into his face. His skin was sallow and wrinkled and his hair was gray. Beside him on a table were the immaculate white gloves he always wore on deck. In his hands was a sheet of tabulated reports of enemy ship sightings.
“The enemy carriers have been missing for a week,” Nagumo muttered. “What does this mean?”1
He called for his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Jinichi Kusaka.
“Any reports on enemy carriers?” he asked.
Kusaka shook his head, and Nagumo began musing aloud: “At Midway, the enemy struck us at a time of his choosing. Now, too, there is no doubt that the enemy pinpoints our position as if on a chessboard, but we are running blind …”2
There was a tense silence, broken by a staff officer suggesting that Nagumo wire Yamamoto for instructions. Nagumo remained silent, but Kusaka closed his eyes and dictated a message: “May I suggest halting our southward advance until we receive definite word that the Army has captured Guadalcanal airfields? There seems to be a possibility of our being trapped if we continue going like this.”3
After a long delay Nagumo received Yamamoto’s reply: “Your Striking Force will proceed quickly to the enemy direction. The operation orders stand, without change.”4
Nagumo snorted while Kusaka bit his lip. “All right,” Chuichi Nagumo said with a shrug, “start fueling the carriers.”5
One of the results of the Japanese debacle on the Matanikau the night of October 23 was that it confirmed the Marines’ belief that the major assault was to come from the west.
Roy Geiger, now a major general and in command during Vandegrift’s absence, moved to reinforce there. He pulled Colonel Hanneken’s battalion out of the line south of the airfield and sent it marching toward the Matanikau.
Now Chesty Puller’s battalion had an entire front of 2500 yards to defend.
Masao Maruyama spent the morning conferring with his officers at his headquarters at Centipede-Shaped Ridge. At noon, he issued the following order:
The Division has succeeded in reaching the rear flank of the enemy in absolute secrecy.
In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy around the airfield in one blow.
Both left and right will begin the charge at five o’clock and penetrate the enemy lines.
I will stay at present location until three o’clock and will then head for the airfield behind the left unit.6
It was Kiyono Ichiki and Kiyotake Kawaguchi all over again, except that neither of these supremely self-confident men had ever dashed off such a masterpiece of vague bravado as “In accordance with plans of my own, I intend to exterminate the enemy … in one blow.” His private plans locked in his breast, Masao Maruyama followed his left wing toward the jump-off point.
And the monsoon came down in a torrent.
Rain fell with the rattle of rifle-fire. In a single sodden minute the jungle was a streaming, swishing, gurgling swamp and the Sendai Division was segmented. Companies were lost, platoons were lost, squads were lost. Communications went out. And as the rain came steadily down, it became apparent that there would be no five o’clock attack.
Colonel Oka was still not in position.
The commander who had attacked very timidly and very tardily at the Matanikau a month ago under General Kawaguchi, was again dragging his feet under General Hyakutake. He did not cross the Matanikau upriver to come down behind the American battle position. He explained his failure with the message: “The Regiment endeavored to accomplish this objective of diverting the enemy, but they seemed to be planning a firm defense of this region.”
It was not true. The Marine position in the west ended on Hill 67, where its left flank was refused, that is bent back and left dangling in the jungle. General Hyakutake knew this and could not accept Oka’s alibi. He came up to the front personally and ordered Oka to get moving.
He did, and he moved too far.
Marines on top of Hill 67 spotted Japanese soldiers moving across a lower ridge to their left. They reported it to headquarters.
Geiger quickly diverted Hanneken’s men then marching west toward the Matanikau, sending them south instead to organize undefended high ground about a thousand yards east of the refused left flank.
Before they swung left, these Marines passed through the headquarters area. With cots and tents and clean clothing, it seemed to them a lotus-eater’s land, a place where troops dined on Spam and powdered eggs and canned fruit and other dishes that were veritable delicacies compared to frontline fare. So they helped themselves to what they saw, having no faith in a chain-of-supply which begins with the cow at headquarters and ends with the tail at the front.
In the platoon of machine guns led by hard-jawed Sergeant Mitchell Paige a small can of Spam and a large can of peaches were thus “procured.”
Paige’s men trudged on, confident of “living it up” tonight, because for some of them, as they suspected, there would be no tomorrow.
Chesty Puller was spreading himself thin, trying to cover the entire 2500-yard sector which fell to him after the withdrawal of Hanneken’s battalion. Every man in Puller’s battalion except the mortarmen was put into line.
They seized strands of wire marking a jeep-road to their rear and strung it by winding it around trees, adorning it with cans filled with stones and grenades with half-pulled pins.
Throughout the morning and afternoon Puller roved his lines, chomping on his cold stump of pipe, removing it to bellow orders (“We don’t need no communications system,” his men boasted, “we got Chesty!”), or speaking through teeth clamped firmly around the stem. Puller’s manner was urgent because a young Marine who had fallen behind a patrol that morning had seen Japanese officers studying his position through field glasses. Puller urged his men to dig deeper, but when he came to one position he pulled his pipe from his mouth, pointed at the hole with it, and grunted, “Son, if you dig that hole any deeper Ah’ll have to charge you with desertion.”7
The Marine grinned, and Puller strode on, pleased to see that Manila John Basilone had fortified his pair of machine guns almost in the exact center of the line.
Colonel Puller returned to his “command post”—a field telephone hardly ten yards behind his lines—to repeat his request for permission to withdraw his outpost platoon. He was convinced that the enemy was coming, and he feared that the forty men on outpost would be needlessly sacrificed. But his arguments—generally couched in ungentle roars—were unavailing. The men stayed outside the line.
Finally, Puller had all of the field phones opened so that every company and platoon could hear every message.
And then the rains came down.
At seven o’clock that night the rains slackened. Sergeant Mitchell Paige crawled forward on the nose of the ridge which his section was to defend. It was dark. Paige felt about with his hands, hunting for a good position.
“Here,” he called softly. “Put the guns here.”
They moved with silent swiftness. Gunners with their 53-pound tripods, assistants with their 33-pound guns, ammunition carriers with 19-pound boxed belts in each hand, all burdened with their own weapons and equipment, they slipped forward without as much as the chink of gun pintle entering tripod socket.
“Chow time,” Paige whispered. “Where’s the chow?”8
The can of Spam was present but the can of peaches was absent without leave. Its bearer mumbled incoherently about its having slipped from his grasp to roll down the ridge. Paige hissed sharp guttural uncomplimentaries in the delinquent’s direction, and then he opened the Spam with his bayonet, tearing the thick soft meat into hunks and pressing it into outstretched hands.
They ate.
They sat hunched by their guns. It began to rain again. At midnight, the men on watch heard the sound of firing far to their left.
———
It was only about seven o’clock before General Maruyama’s commanders were able to bring any semblance of order out of the confusion caused by the rain. Over on the right wing, where Kawaguchi’s failure to cope with the terrain had cost him his command, Colonel Shoji, his successor, was also behind schedule. Shoji had also not reached his jump-off point.
Impatient, Maruyama ordered the left wing to attack.
Colonel Masajiro Furumiya took the 29th Infantry forward, and a few minutes later they were flowing around Colonel Puller’s outpost.
Sergeant Ralph Briggs and his men on outpost hugged the ground, while Briggs rang up Colonel Puller’s command post.
“Colonel,” he said softly, “there’s about three thousand Japs between you and me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. They’ve been all around us, singing and smoking cigarettes, heading your way.”
“All right, Briggs, but make damned sure. Take your men to the left—understand me? Go down and pass through the lines near the sea. I’ll call ’em to let you in. Don’t fail, and don’t go in any other direction. I’ll hold my fire as long as I can.”
“Yes, sir,” Briggs said, and hung up.9
Then the sergeant and his men began crawling slowly on their bellies to the left. All but four of them, whom the Japanese caught and killed.
At eleven o’clock it began to rain heavily again, and the Japanese came hurtling against Puller’s Marines.
Once again they were screaming:
“Blood for the Emperor!”
“Marine, you die!”
Once again the foulmouthed raggedy-tailed defenders of democracy were bellowing:
“To hell with your goddamed Emperor! Blood for Franklin and Eleanor!”10
The Japanese were charging by the thousands, so many of them that the sodden ground shook beneath their feet. They hit the barbed wire even as Marine guns erupted in a bedlam of firing.
Japanese fell on the wire, others hurled themselves upon it while their comrades used their bodies as bridges.
Colonel Furumiya was at the head of his troops, shouting and waving his saber. He led the color company—the 7th—through a break in the American wire and went racing with them toward the enemy’s guns.
Inspired by the breakthrough, willing to follow their colors into hell, the Japanese soldiers flowed toward the gap.
But the Marines closed it. Colonel Furumiya and the color company were cut off from the rest of the regiment.
Now the attack was veering toward dead center. The Japanese hordes were rushing at Manila John Basilone’s machine guns. They came tumbling down an incline, and Basilone’s gunners raked them at full-trigger. They were pouring out five hundred rounds a minute, the gun barrels were red and sizzling inside their water jackets—and the precious water was evaporating swiftly.
“Piss in ’em, piss in ’em!” Basilone yelled, and some of the men jumped up to refill the jackets with a different liquid.
The guns stuttered on, tumbling the onrushing Japanese down the incline, piling them up so high that by the time the first enemy flood had begun to ebb and flow back into the jungle, they had blocked Basilone’s field of fire. In the lull Manila John ordered his men out to push the bodies away and clear the fire lanes.
Then he ducked out of the pit to run for more ammunition. He ran barefooted, the mud squishing between his toes. He ran into Puller’s CP and ran back again burdened with spare barrels and half a dozen fourteen-pound belts slung over his shoulders.
As he did, Furumiya’s men drifted west. They overran the guns to Basilone’s right. They stabbed two Marines to death and wounded three others. They tried to swing the big Brownings on the Americans, but they only jammed them. They left the pit and drove farther to the rear.
Basilone returned to his pit just as a runner dashed up gasping:
“They’ve got the guys on the right.”
Basilone raced to his right. He ran past a barefoot private named Evans and called “Chicken” for his tender eighteen years. “C’mon, you yellow bastards!” Chicken screamed, firing and bolting his rifle, firing and reloading. Basilone ran on to the empty pit, jumped in, found the guns jammed, and sprinted back to his own pit.
Seizing a mounted machine gun, Basilone spread-eagled it across his back, shouted at half of his men to follow him—and was gone. A squad of men took off in pursuit. They caught Basilone at a bend in the trail, and blundered into a half-dozen Japanese soldiers. They killed them and ran on.
Then they were inside the silent pit, firing the gun which Basilone had brought, while Manila John lay on his back in the mud working frantically to free the jammed guns.
Beyond the wire in the covering jungle, the Sendai were massing for another charge.
Submarine Amberjack had nearly reached Guadalcanal.
Inside her sausage-shaped belly were nine thousand gallons of aviation gasoline destined for Henderson Field tanks that were again nearly bone-dry. She also carried two hundred 100-pound bombs. She had departed Espiritu Santo more than two days ago, and now, sliding along at her top submerged speed, she expected to make Lunga Point by daybreak.
But then her orders were changed. From Guadalcanal came instructions to put in at Tulagi with her cargo. Henderson Field was under major attack, the issue was in doubt, and it would be foolish to make the enemy a gift of the gasoline.
Chesty Puller called Colonel del Valle to request all the artillery support possible.
“I’ll give you all you call for, Puller,” del Valle grunted. “But God knows what’ll happen when the ammo we have is gone.”
“If we don’t need it now, we’ll never need it. If they get through here tonight there won’t be a tomorrow.”
“She’s yours as long as she lasts.”11
Both men hung up and the Marine artillery began glowing red again.
“Colonel,” Captain Regan Fuller said over the telephone to Puller, “I’m just about running out of ammo. I’ve used almost three and a half units of fire.”
“You got bayonets, haven’t you?” Colonel Puller asked.
“Sure. Yes, sir.”
“All right, then. Hang on.”12
It was half past one in the morning and the Sendai were coming again, there was a white breath around the muzzles of the Marine 105s, and Manila John Basilone had his guns fixed.
Basilone rolled from gun to gun, firing, exhausting first one belt and then another, while his men worked wildly to scrape the mud from cartridges that had been dragged along soggy trails. And the Sendai rolled forward in even greater strength, with both wings charging, now, punching holes in the Marine lines, forcing General Geiger in the rear to counter with his reserve, and leading General Maruyama to radio the one signal that all Japan was waiting for:
“Banzai!”
General Hyakutake heard it with elation back in Kukumbona and he relayed it north to Admiral Gunichi Mikawa in Rabaul. Mikawa immediately ordered three large destroyers carrying the Koli Detachment to land these troops on eastern Guadalcanal as scheduled.
And Combined Fleet’s carriers turned south again.
Some time after two o’clock in the morning of Sunday, October 25, Sergeant Mitchell Paige and his men heard firing to their right.
A band of Colonel Oka’s soldiers had slipped through the draw between Paige and Hill 67 and had overwhelmed an outpost.
Paige slipped forward on his ridge. He heard mumbling below him. He pulled the pin of a hand grenade and heaved the bomb into the jungle. His men pulled their pins and handed Paige their grenades, and he threw these bombs, too.
There were flashes and screams.
But no one came.
At half past three General Maruyama hurled his third charge at the Americans—and this time his men heard for the first time the eight-round semiautomatic firing of Garand rifles in the hands of American soldiers.
The 164th Infantry was in action.
General Geiger had fed its Third Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall into the battle. Hall’s soldiers marched from their bivouac behind the Tenaru to the front, sloshing through the streaming darkness guided by a Navy chaplain, Father Keough, the only man at headquarters who knew the way. Puller went to meet them.
“Here they are, Colonel,” Keough called, and Puller shook his hand, grunting: “Father, we can use ’em.” Then he turned to Hall: “Colonel, I’m glad to see you. I don’t know who’s senior to who right now, and I don’t give a damn. I’ll be in command until daylight, at least, because I know what’s going on here, and you don’t.”
“That’s fine with me,” Hall said, and Puller continued:
“I’m going to drop ’em off along this road, and send in a few to each platoon position. I want you to make it clear to your people that my men, even if they’re only sergeants, will command in those holes when your officers and men arrive.”
“I understand you,” Hall said. “Let’s go.”13
They went. The soldiers went into the fight, sometimes having to be guided in by hand, in that slippery darkness, and they too, held, when the Sendai came flowing toward its third futile attempt to annihilate the Americans.
By seven o’clock in the morning, the Sendai had stopped coming.
Nearly a thousand of them had stopped living. They lay in sodden heaps outside and partly within the American wire. One column of Japanese dead lay opposite Captain Fuller’s antitank guns. They were in perfect formation, each man laying halfway atop the man in front of him—felled in a single scything sweep like a row of wooden soldiers.
Within the jungle, General Maruyama beheld his survivors: bands of dazed and hollow-eyed men stumbling woodenly back to their assembly areas. Nowhere could Maruyama find Colonel Furumiya. Obviously, the airfield was still American.
Masao Maruyama got off a message to General Hyakutake indicating that he was “having difficulty” capturing the field.
And then Dugout Sunday began.