PART FIVE
FOR NEARLY three months, now, both sides had been frustrated in a war of blacks and whites: black for the nights in which the Japanese attacked, landed troops and supplies or shelled the enemy; white for the day in which the Americans attacked, landed troops and supplies or flew off airplanes to intercept bombing raids preparing the way for the enemy’s movement at night.
But now, now it was November—the crucial month, the fourth month of battle—and both sides entered it with redoubling arms and confidence in ultimate victory.
In Tokyo, Imperial General Headquarters prescribed, for the third time, a massive co-ordinated assault by the Army and Navy. Tactically, there would be a difference. Surprise night attacks were to be abandoned in favor of steady driving operations launched from the Japanese platform west of the Matanikau.
The remnant of the Sendai Division was to assemble on that platform while awaiting the arrival of the 38th Division, and, later, the 51st Division then in China, and a mixed brigade, also in the Far East. Once the Sendai had recovered from its mauling at the hands of the Americans, and all of these units were in place, the offensive would be renewed.
Despite three bloody and unmitigated defeats, the Army betrayed no doubts about its ability to recover Guadalcanal, and with it, the Japanese offensive in the Pacific. The Army felt this way because it continued to believe Navy reports of smashing victories at sea, particularly the last exaggeration: two American carriers and three battleships sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.
Many admirals were not nearly so sanguine. They were not because they knew the truth of their own frightful losses in both carrier and land-based air, and because they appreciated, better than the generals, the terrible risks involved in putting men and supplies ashore in the face of enemy land-based air.
Some admirals, among them Gunichi Mikawa and Raizo Tanaka, argued against reinforcing while Henderson Field remained operative. They wished to suspend operations until Rabaul could be expanded as a rear base and a forward base near Buin could be established. Then, with Henderson Field truly knocked out, then and only then, they would renew the attack.1
Tokyo could not agree. Reinforcement was to commence immediately, in the customary way: nightly runs of the Tokyo Express preceded by daylight bombing of Henderson Field and accompanied by night surface bombardment so furious as to make The Night of the Battleships seem, in comparison, a veritable rosy dawn. Already, at his base in Truk, Admiral Yamamoto was at work on a plan drawing heavily from his formidable array of battleships.
Reinforcement was also an American concern, but as much, if not more, with aerial as with ground strength. Land-based air, the Americans knew, with all respect and admiration for General Vandegrift’s skill and the doggedness of his doughty troops, was holding Guadalcanal. Accordingly, aircraft and pilots were being gathered to replenish a Cactus Air Force which, on October 26, the day of Santa Cruz, was down to twenty-nine combat planes.
On October 19, five days before President Roosevelt had ordered the Joint Chiefs to rush all available weapons to Guadalcanal, General Marshall had alerted the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division under the command of Major General J. Lawton Collins for movement from Hawaii to the South Pacific. Moreover, Admiral Halsey had canceled the Ndeni operation which Richmond Kelly Turner had found so attractive, and which Alexander Archer Vandegrift had considered so inimical, and he had ordered the 147th Infantry Regiment, the Eighth Marine Regiment, the Second Marine Raider Battalion, long-range artillery, and a battalion of Seabees forward to Guadalcanal.
However, American reinforcement had encountered two setbacks: one, the sinking of President Coolidge with an Army regiment’s equipment, and, two, Kelly Turner’s penchant for playing general. Balked on Ndeni, Turner, a persuasive man, convinced Admiral Halsey that another airfield should be constructed at Aola Bay, about fifty miles to the east of Lunga Point. Turner approached Halsey aware that Vandegrift’s engineers, and Martin Clemens, who had lived at Aola, considered the area impossible as an airfield site. Turner also made his proposal without Vandegrift’s knowledge or acquiescence, and so, a battalion of the 147th Infantry, half of the Raiders, all of the Seabees, artillery from the Americal Division, as well as Marine coastal and antiaircraft guns, were to go into Aola rather than into Vandegrift’s perimeter.
Vandegrift protested, and though his arguments would ultimately move Halsey to withdraw the Aola expedition, they did not prevent the immediate loss of men and guns upon which the general had been relying. To lose the Seabees was an especially stiff jolt, for all of their skills and heavy equipment were very badly needed at Henderson Field; while long-range artillery could have been turned against Pistol Pete, again shelling the runways, and the Raiders and another battalion of infantry would naturally make the ground defenses that much stronger.
After the defeat of the Sendai, Vandegrift had about 23,000 Marines and 3000 soldiers in his command. But of these, 4000 Marines were with Rupertus on Tulagi, and the others—particularly the men who had landed on August 7—were very close to exhaustion.
They were shadow troops. Three months of uninterrupted ordeal such as no American troops had ever sustained, before or since, such as few soldiers in history have experienced, had made them walking skeletons of parchment flesh and quivering nerve. They were the young ancients, the old-young, staring with a fixed thousand-yard stare out of eyes that were red-rimmed and sunken. Their bodies were taut rags of flesh stretched over sticks of bone. They had come to Guadalcanal muscular and high-spirited young men, but now each had lost at least twenty pounds, some had lost fifty, and their high fervor had ebbed and nearly flowed away. They were hanging on by habit only, fighting out of the rut of an old valor.
They were lonely. It was an utter, aching, yearning loneliness, it was a feeling of what has been called “expendability,” a conviction that their country had set them down, alone, in the heart of an enemy camp and then forgotten them. They could not comprehend the contradiction of their own total commitment to the war and news of labor strikes at home or, worse, of ships lying unloaded in their own Bay because merchant seamen wanted extra pay to unload them.
And they were losing hope. Hope, which had nourished their spirits better than enemy rice had kept their bodies, was all but gone now. It had been eroded like an island in a stormy sea. Tide after tide of adversity had washed over it, each time it had emerged intact—but with shrunken shores. Now hope was a cluster of sea-washed rocks and scraggly palm trees standing in the path of a new tidal wave of calamity gathering in the north.
Without hope, these men turned in upon themselves. They rarely spoke except to close friends. Squad by squad, they kept apart; they became tribal or clannish. Some men who had spent as much as two months in the same foxhole along the same river or on top of the same ridge could not, except by dire threats from NCOs or direct orders from officers, be made to move as much as fifty yards away from their holes. It was as though they feared to displease the local deity. Much as they might explain that bombs and shells fell in showers and instantaneously on this dreadful island, and that a man was a fool to be caught very far from shelter, they acted, actually, from an atavistic dread; three months of modern war in the primitive jungle had stripped away the acquired vesture of civilization and left them naked and trembling again before a tutelary god. In this hole they had survived, and they would not leave it.
Such men would not even leave their holes to go to chow, and other men could not go because the galleys were generally located so far to the rear that they had not the strength to get there and back. Their comrades brought food to them, just as they brought food to hundreds of men who burned with malarial fires but who were not considered sick enough to be admitted to the hospitals in the rear. And malaria was now also a scourge. In the First Marine Division there had been 239 cases of malaria in September, there were 1941 in October, and before November ended there would be 3200 more.
Malaria and dengue fever, yellow jaundice and dysentery, tropical ulcers that ate into the outer covering of the bone and the rot of fungus festering and leaving flesh encrusted and oozing pus by the canteen-cup, these were also enemies; foes as real as the Japanese with all their troops and ships and airplanes; adversaries as authentic as the miasmic jungle and those formless fears of the imagination which trooped into a man’s mind each night, as dusk deepened into darkness, and remained there until dawn.
Dawn sometimes found men out of their minds; most often men who, losing hope, had also lost their sense of humor. For humor was the last rampart. More than hope, even, it stood between a man and insanity; and with all else gone, or going, these Americans held onto their humor.
It was not a dainty mirth. Men moved by it could shout with laughter to hear that a Marine’s collection of enemy ears, pinned on a clothesline of enemy rope, had been lost in a single dissolving cycle of rain-and-sun; they could chuckle while sawing enemy leg bones in sections with a bayonet, prying out the marrow and shaping a grisly ring to grace their true love’s fingers; or they could smile to hear of the two Japanese soldiers who had been found sitting in serene confidence in the center of the beehive that was Henderson Field, waiting there, as they had been ordered, “to rendezvous with the main body.”
Private Phil Chaffee also possessed this grim sense of humor. It sustained him on his numerous overnight patrols into the enemy positions around Grassy Knoll. Twice a week, accompanied by a taciturn red-bearded sergeant, Chaffee came down the ridge held by Lucky and Lew Juergens, bantering with them as he walked toward the jungle between the ridge and Grassy Knoll.
“Hey, Chaffee, got your pliers?”
“You know me, boy, I’d sooner forget m’ rifle.”
“How about it, Chaffee? I’ll give you ten bucks for that Bull Durham sack around your neck.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. How about a pint of my blood, too, huh?”
“How many teeth you got in that sack?”
“That’s my business.”
“A hundred?”
“Guess again, boy. Guess up a storm.”2
Chaffee would vanish into the rain forest, reappearing a few days later with a triumphant grin and a heavier Bull Durham sack, and one day he came back from Grassy Knoll wagging two fingers and bursting with pride.
“Two Japs!” Juergens snorted. “Who’n hell ain’t shot two Japs?”
Chaffee feigned surprise. He twirled the ends of his handlebar mustache, and asked, “With the one bullet?”3
Thus these Marines faced November, the month of decision which Archer Vandegrift began by attacking to the west once more.
General Vandegrift wanted to upset his temporarily beaten enemy before he could consolidate west of the Matanikau again. He also wanted to knock out Pistol Pete and to force General Hyakutake to use landing beaches much farther west, thus complicating his supply problems.
Vandegrift’s objective was the Poha River, a mile and a half west of Hyakutake’s 17th Army headquarters at Kukumbona. To take it, the Marine general collected a force of five thousand Marines—the Second Marines less a battalion under Colonel John Arthur, the Third Battalion, Seventh, reinforced by the Scout-Snipers, and the Fifth Marines—all to be commanded by Red Mike Edson.
The Fifth Marines were to cross the Matanikau at Nippon Bridge while the Third Battalion, Seventh, crossed farther inland and punched farther west.
At midnight of October 31 engineers began throwing three foot bridges across the Matanikau. Then Marine artillery and cruisers San Francisco and Helena, with destroyer Sterett, began pounding the enemy. At dawn, the warships came in close to shell Point Cruz, and the attack went forward.
General Hyakutake fought desperately to hold his position. He plugged his riddled front with service troops, walking wounded, sick, typists, clerks, and cooks, mustering every able-bodied man who could fight. But the Marines drove them back toward Point Cruz. The night of November 1, Edson halted just short of the Point. Behind him, engineers threw a ten-ton vehicular bridge over the Matanikau. In the morning, Edson called upon Silent Lew Walt to wheel his battalion north and drive to the sea on the other side of Point Cruz.
Walt’s men drove quickly into place. The Japanese at Point Cruz were now hemmed in on three sides with their backs to the sea. Edson ordered his men to attack in one of the Pacific war’s rare bayonet charges. The Marines swept forward with a yell to kill every one of the 350 enemy soldiers caught in the trap.
And then General Vandegrift’s third attempt to clear his western flank was again interrupted by events in the east.
On November 2, Vandegrift was informed by Admiral Halsey’s intelligence section that the Japanese would land near Koli Point to the east that night.
Vandegrift decided to intercept them. He would mark time in the west while clearing the east. Once that was done, he could throw all his strength into the Matanikau thrust.
So Red Mike Edson returned to the perimeter, leaving a blocking force west of Point Cruz under Colonel Arthur, and Herman Henry Hanneken’s tired but trusty battalion was pulled out of the line and sent on a forced march toward Koli Point.
Hanneken’s Marines reached Koli before dusk, fording the Nalimbiu River which debouches into the Bay there, and pushing on to the east bank of the Metapona River a few miles farther east.
Hanneken organized a coastal perimeter and tried to reach Vandegrift by radio. But he could not. The river crossings had soaked his radios. There was nothing to do but sit down to await the arrival of the Tokyo Express.
Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo had been relieved of his command. He was going home, and Commander Tameichi Hara came to see him before he left Truk. Hara was surprised to see that the hero of Pearl Harbor looked so haggard.
“You don’t look good, Admiral,” he blurted.
Nagumo tried to make light of his appearance. “Just a touch of flu,” he said. “Once back home, I’ll be in good shape.”
Hara nodded. “Sasebo’s climate will cure you,” he said. “And you deserve a rest. Compared to your duty, sir, I’ve been on a pleasure cruise.”
“Well, you’ll have a tougher time from now on,” Nagumo said grimly, informing his visitor that all but two of Combined Fleet’s carriers were going home for repairs. Hara was astounded, and then dumfounded to hear Nagumo admit that although Santa Cruz had been a Japanese tactical victory, it was “a shattering strategic loss for Japan.” To offset American replacement capacity, Nagumo explained, Japan had to win every battle overwhelmingly.
“This last one,” he said, “was not an overwhelming victory.”4
Saddened, Commander Hara returned to Amatsukaze. He knew that he would soon be sailing his destroyer from Truk as part of the Guadalcanal bombardment fleet. And now, as Nagumo told him, Japan’s precious warships were to be risked without aerial cover.
The next day, November 3, Commander Hara stood on his bridge to watch cruisers Isuzu, Suzuya, and Maya and eight destroyers sortie from Truk. Standing on Isuzu’s flag bridge was Hara’s old chief, Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka. He was taking his squadron to the Shortlands. Tanaka the Tenacious was returning to the helm of the Tokyo Express, and even as he sailed, the Express’s first run in the new reinforcement operation was making for Koli Point.
One cruiser, three destroyers and one transport were bringing more men and supplies to Colonel Toshinaro Shoji at Tetere. Shoji had arrived at this village east of Koli Point—the place where Mr. Ishimoto murdered the missionaries—after an agonizing march from the October battleground. He brought with him 2500 starving and exhausted men, the remnant of the Sendai Division’s right wing. He expected his badly needed supplies to arrive early in the morning of November 3.
Or roughly at the same time Admiral Kelly Turner’s airfield-building expedition would arrive farther east at Aola.
Martin Clemens was at Aola.
With him were a handful of Marines and his cook, Michael, who had just been discharged from the hospital, his dark face pocked with pink shrapnel scars as mementoes of The Night of the Battleships. Clemens had brought his party to his old headquarters to provide landing beacons for Kelly Turner’s Aola expedition. Three pyramids of logs twelve feet high were built on the beach at intervals six hundred feet apart. At three o’clock in the morning of November 3, in a pouring rain, they were set ablaze.
Clemens and his men stood watching the fire. Firelight made grotesque silhouettes of their lumpy, poncho-swathed figures. The cold rain made their teeth chatter. Then, from the east, Clemens saw the swell of high-speed ships washing over the beach. The wash continued west toward Koli Point. Clemens gazed at the beacons in apprehension.
“I hope they don’t draw crabs,” he muttered.
The Japanese ships had sailed north of Florida Island. They rounded its eastern tip and entered the Bay. Landing beacons were noticed at Aola, but they were considered an enemy trap—a very clumsy one—and the ships pressed west to anchor and unload at Gavaga Creek, midway between Koli and Tetere.
Colonel Hanneken was chagrined. He could see the enemy putting men and supplies ashore, but they were too far away for immediate action. He decided to attack at dawn.
He did, and his Marines collided with Japanese soldiers marching west to Koli. Both sides recoiled, but the Japanese snapped back faster. They struck the Americans with light howitzers and mortars, while working a force around to their rear.
Hanneken withdrew. He pulled back across the Metapona to the west bank of the Nalimbiu, where he had communications wire connecting him with the perimeter. He notified Vandegrift of his predicament and was told to expect aerial assistance.
It came, and it hit Hanneken’s men.
Hanneken called for an end to aerial “assistance,” and it was canceled. And then Vandegrift ordered Hanneken to hold while General Rupertus came over from Tulagi to take command.
Martin Clemens watched his second set of signal pyramids lose its brilliance with the arrival of first light of November 4. Then he saw a quartet of old American four-stack destroyers entering the Bay. Farther out were transports guarded by destroyers. Soon landing boats swung out from the four-stackers and the Raiders of Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson went down into them. They came roaring ashore, and the Raiders leaped out to go racing up the beach with fixed bayonets.
They had been told to land as though opposed, and they fanned out quickly into the jungle.
Martin Clemens watched them in amusement, for he was, by then, one of the Old Breed of American Marine. He had been there “when the stuff hit the fan,” and he had the right to say, as the first Marine in history is reputed to have said to the second Marine, “Lissen, boot, you shoulda been here when it was really rough.” And so he was prepared when a Raider racing toward him and Michael came to an astonished halt at the sight of the Englishman in his slouch hat and the native with the face full of scars.
“What kinda disease is that?” the Raider asked, pointing at Michael.
“Bomb disease!”5 Clemens snorted, turning to watch, with tolerant disdain, the arrival of the rest of Admiral Turner’s well-dressed and well-fed Johnny-come-latelies.
Not all of the American transports stopped at Aola. Some moved farther west to Lunga Point, bringing General Vandegrift a pair of welcome acquisitions: the Eighth Marine Regiment and two batteries of 155-mm “long Tom” rifles.
The long Toms meant that the days of Pistol Pete’s unchallenged reign were numbered, for the 155 rifles could outshoot the Japanese 150-mm howitzers. The Eighth Marines meant that the attack in the west could be renewed, as soon as Rupertus could clear up the situation in the east.
Listening to reports from Hanneken and Clemens’s scouts, General Rupertus wisely concluded that there were quite a few Japanese to the east. He decided to hold at the Nalimbiu until Chesty Puller’s battalion could come downcoast by boat to take the enemy in his seaflank while Colonel Bryant Moore took the 164th Infantry south to turn north and take the Japanese on his landward flank.
Late that day—November 4—the operation began.
To the west that same day—November 4—soldiers of the 228th Infantry Regiment of the Japanese 38th Division were marching to General Hyakutake’s rescue.
Seventeen destroyers had landed them at Kamimbo and Tassafaronga early that morning. As they came ashore, Major General Takeo Ito, the 38th’s infantry commander, turned them east to Kukumbona.
Meanwhile, General Hyakutake radioed Colonel Shoji at Tetere and ordered him to join him in the west.
Shoji was dismayed at having to forgo the chance to avenge the Sendai. Nevertheless, he left a rear guard of five hundred men at Gavaga Creek and began swinging around Henderson Field along the trail cut by the Kawaguchi Brigade.
Rupertus tried to cut him off with Colonel Moore’s two battalions of the 164th Infantry. But these units, having blundered into each other at night and fought a bloodless battle between them, were unable to halt more than a handful of Shoji’s men. The main body, perhaps three thousand men, had escaped.
Gung ho!
In Chinese it means “Work together,” and Evans Carlson had learned it during his prewar service with the Chinese Eighth Route Army. After taking command of the Second Raiders—and weeding out the fainthearted with the question “Could you cut a Jap’s throat without flinching?”—Carlson gave them Gung ho! as both slogan and battle cry. One day the phrase would come to mean a Marine esprit bordering on chauvinism, and that would be partially as a result of the fury with which Carlson’s Raiders scourged the men of Colonel Shoji’s column in a month-long private war of their own.
Guided through the jungle by native scouts under the command of Sergeant Major Vouza, depending upon native carriers to lug the ammunition and rations of rice, raisins, and bacon that were periodically parachuted to them along the way, they killed five hundred of Shoji’s men at a loss of only seventeen of their own. And they did this with a single, simple tactic which Carlson had also learned in China.
His main body marched, unseen, in a column parallel with the Japanese. His patrols followed directly behind the enemy. Each time the patrols encountered large numbers of Japanese, they opened fire. As Colonel Shoji began to rush reinforcements to his rear, Carlson’s men struck from the flank with all their firepower.
Then they vanished.
Twelve times Carlson’s Raiders savaged the enemy in this fashion, and by the time Colonel Shoji’s haggard and reeling column reached Kukumbona, Guadalcanal was known in their language not only as Ga Shima, or Hunger Island, but also as Shih Shima.
Death Island.
On November 5—the day the lean and passionate Carlson led his men in pursuit of Colonel Shoji—Admiral Tanaka arrived in the Shortlands. Two runs of the Tokyo Express had already made those landings at Gavaga Creek and in the west, and Tanaka immediately prepared another one.
On November 7, eleven destroyers were to take 1300 men of the 38th Division to Tassafaronga. Tanaka hoped to lead the sortie personally, but Admiral Mikawa insisted that he remain in the Shortlands. Tanaka was needed to plan additional runs of the Tokyo Express scheduled for November 8, 9, and 10. In all, two cruisers and sixty-five destroyers were to be involved in these shipments. Finally the biggest convoy of all, eleven big fast transports carrying half the 38th Division, was to leave on November 13, after Admiral Kondo’s battleships and cruisers had made powder and hash of Henderson Field.
So the eleven destroyers set sail without him, taking the northern route above the Solomon chain.
They would arrive at Tassafaronga at midnight of November 7.
November 7 dawned bright and hot. Martin Clemens decided it was a good day to return to the perimeter from Aola. The Army battalion there had set up a defensive line and the Seabees were already at work building roads. Clemens decided there was nothing more that he could do, and he was anxious to resume his interrupted duties as chief recruiter and straw boss for a force of native stevedores. He had planned to bring back a prisoner or two with him, but “Wimpy” Wendling, an exuberant Marine marksman, had shot holes in that hope.
Wendling and four scouts had gone to Koilotumaria to round up a few of the Japanese missed in the last foray. They had found four, but instead of capturing them they had killed them. Wendling reported that he had attempted to persuade a wounded, English-speaking officer to surrender. The officer refused. Wendling advanced offering a chocolate bar. The Japanese whipped out his saber and swung.
Fortunately, Wimpy explained, his finger was still on the trigger.
So Clemens led his party into their landing boat and sailed west for Lunga.
A mile offshore the lookout called, “White water to starboard.”
Clemens was surprised. He knew there were no reefs in the vicinity. He raised his glasses to look for the “white water” and saw a bubbling wake leading straight into the side of the supply ship Majaba. A huge column of water spouted into the sky followed by a roar. Majaba listed, holed by the Japanese submarine I-20. Sinking fast, she staggered ashore and beached herself, later to be salvaged and patched up.
Destroyers dashed about, their sterns digging deep into the water, depth-charges arching off their fantails and geysers of water marking the underwater explosions. Dive-bombers came hurtling down, too, and Wendling jumped up on the prow to wave a huge American flag—just in case some inexperienced Dauntless pilot should mistake a Higgins boat for an enemy barge.
They reached Lunga and found that they had beached right next to a Japanese torpedo. It lay on the beach, long, silvery, and wicked, still hot and steaming from its futile run at Majaba. A bomb-disposal officer was at work dismantling it. Clemens walked back to his tent wondering if it were possible to find a safe spot or pass a dull day on Guadalcanal.
November 7 had seemed like a dull day at Henderson Field. It seemed that the aerial doldrums, begun after the Battle of Santa Cruz, were going to continue—until coastwatchers radioed reports of eleven enemy destroyers slipping down the top of the Solomons.
Major Paul Fontana led his newly arrived squadron of Marine fighters aloft first, and after him came Captain Joe Foss with more Wildcats. About 150 miles to the north Foss saw the specks of the enemy ships crawling over the flat obsidian surface of the sea like a file of ants. Then he saw six float Zeros flying escort. The Zeros struck boldly at the American bombers, trying to ruin their aim as they screamed down on Admiral Tanaka’s skillfully maneuvering ships.
Some of their bombs scored direct hits on destroyers Takanami and Naganami, inflicting major damage and killing troops, but no ships were sunk and the Tokyo Express sailed on toward Tassafaronga.
The Zeros were not so fortunate.
“Don’t look now,” Joe Foss yelled by radio to his pilots, “but I think we have something here.”6
They went zooming down in attack, practically jostling each other, giving each other the aerial elbow in their eagerness not to be left out in the scramble of seven Wildcats for six Zeros. Foss shot the first one, blowing it into an aerial dust bag. And then they were all gone. Foss looked up. He could see five empty parachutes ballooning gently downward. He wondered where the pilots were. Then he saw a sixth chute with an enemy pilot dangling from the harness.
The pilot unbuckled himself and plummeted head-first into the sea, and there were six clouds of empty silk swaying gently in the sky.
Strange enemy indeed, Foss thought, and prepared to go down to strafe the destroyers. Grasping the stick, he made his customary quick survey of the clouds—and saw a pontoon protruding from a bit of fluff above him.
He went up after it and found a single-motored biplane scout. He came in close, missed, and was raked by the scout’s rear-gunner. Wind came howling through a hole in his windscreen. Foss came back and shot the scout into the sea. He caught a second scout by surprise and sent it down like a torch.
And then his motor began to fade and spout smoke, and Foss realized that he was far from home and coming down into the sea near Malaita Island.
Two or three miles offshore, his tail hooked into the water, his plane skipped, bounced, came down hard, nosed over and began to sink like a stone.
Foss was trapped. Water poured into his cockpit with the force of a sledgehammer, knocking him groggy. The plane was plunging toward the bottom of the sea, but Foss could not get out. He had forgotten to unhook his parachute leg strap, and now water was underneath both his chute harness and his inflated life vest, making him so buoyant he could not reach the leg strap.
Still descending, he became frantic and caught his foot under the seat. He was going to drown if he did not calm himself. Holding off death with iron self-control, he straightened, pushed down with all his strength, freed the foot and strap—and shot upward through a crushing weight of water.
But the leg straps of the chute harness were still buckled. They brought Foss to the surface behind-up and face-down. He gulped mouthfuls of sea water. He swallowed more, unbuckling the straps. Then his preserver shot up over his mouth and he took in more.
Still thrashing about, Foss undid his shoes and felt himself become more buoyant. He tried to swim toward Malaita. But the current was too strong and he was barely staying in place. A big black tail fin cut the water a few feet to the side of him. Another slid past on the other side. Foss remembered the chlorine capsule in his pocket. It was supposed to keep the sharks away. He grasped it and broke it.
In another hour it was dark, and the sharks were back. They were all around him.
Within the darkening stadium in Washington, D.C., the floodlights were just coming on. They came on at about the time that Joe Foss and his fellow Marines roared aloft to intercept the Tokyo Express. And as the stadium blossomed with light and the uniforms of the football players became more brilliant and the thick carpet of grass beneath their feet turned a brighter green, the loudspeaker crackled and blared: “The President of the United States announces the successful landing on the African Coast of an American Expeditionary Force. This is our second front!”7
A single great cry of national pride went reverberating around the arena. The football players went cartwheeling and hand-springing down the middle of the field. America, agonizing over prospects of fresh disaster in the Pacific, was looking eagerly away to a new theater.
Then the whistle blew and the sobering players lined up for the kickoff.
Little splashes of phosphorescence indicated to Joe Foss the places where the sharks were. He barely moved, fearing that if he extended an arm to swim, he would withdraw a spouting stub. Other splashes became audible farther away. They sounded like paddles. Peering through the murk, Foss saw a canoe and a native gondola coming toward him.
Were they Japanese?
Foss stayed motionless among the sharks and his fears. The boats passed to either side. Foss saw a lantern. For nearly a half hour, the lantern swayed eerily about him as the canoe and the gondola continued their search.
A voice said, “Let’s look over ’ere,” and Joe Foss’s heart leaped.
“Yeah!” he bellowed. “Right over here!”
The lantern winked out and on the gondola above him Foss thought he saw natives raising war clubs and he knew he heard them jabbering wildly.
“Friend!” Foss yelled. “Birdman! Aviator! American!”8
Suddenly there was the man with the lantern above him, and friendly arms were outstretched toward him. Foss grasped them. They were those of Tommy Robinson, an Australian sawmill operator, and he pulled Foss into the canoe. Another man, in clerical clothing, said, “I’m Father De Steinberg,” just as a flying fish leaped from the sea and smashed the lantern.
Foss gaped at the fish. It was twenty inches in length with a long, sharp needle of a bill.
“I should have kept this thing down,” Robinson said apologetically. “But I guess I got the wind up a bit. Many a bloke has lost his eyes at night because of holding lights.”9
Foss shuddered and instinctively put his hand over his eyes, shivering again while Robinson cheerfully advised him that he had been wise to remain offshore with his friends, the sharks. If he had come ashore at the point he had been hoping to reach, he would have had to ford a stagnant stream full of crocodiles.
The boats made for Buma Mission. Foss was welcomed ashore by Bishop Aubin, and another bishop who was Russian, as well as a Norwegian planter, four priests from as many different countries, and two brothers—one from Emmetsburg, Iowa—and eight sisters, one from Boston.
They fed him and gave him dry clothes and a bed. It was not really a bed, rather the lumpy pad of an ascetic monk with a rocklike sack for a pillow, but Joe Foss slept well on it.
Except for a bad few minutes at midnight when he awoke sick and retching from the sea water he had swallowed.
“It smells of exhibitionism,” Bull Halsey said. “To hell with it!”10
The admiral was on Guadalcanal. He had come there Sunday, November 8, and he was, with customary bluntness, rejecting his staff’s suggestion that he stand up in his jeep and wave or do something to make his presence known to the island’s ragged defenders.
Halsey would not, for he had seen their faces, and he would not insult them by crowing, in effect: “Give a cheer, Halsey’s here.” So he drove without fanfare to Vandegrift’s headquarters. Vandegrift took him on tour of the battlegrounds, and treated him to a dinner which so impressed the admiral that he asked to see the cook.
Butch Morgan appeared. His red mustache was carefully brushed. He wore clean khaki trousers and his skivvy shirt was immaculate. He stood ramrod straight while Commander, South Pacific, praised his cooking, until, reddening and fidgeting apace with the admiral’s encomiums, he finally burst out: “Oh, bullshit, Admiral—you don’t have to say that!”11
Joe Foss also enjoyed his dinner that Sunday.
He had been to the thatched chapel and he had also been put on display for the benefit of curious natives. The fathers had asked him to stand between two huts while the Malaitans passed by to examine him. Short, with powerful muscles rippling beneath purply black skin, they not only made a striking contrast to the tall fair American, they seemed very much amazed that there was a difference at all.
One of the priests explained that many years before the war an American schooner had stopped at Malaita with a crew of southern Negroes. They had told the Malaitans that they were Americans, and so, the islanders had expected Foss to be black.
Foss was not surprised. One of the sisters he had spoken to had never seen an automobile, and the first airplanes she saw were those that flew and fought overhead. Hardly any of the missionaries knew anything of the war going on across The Slot, to say nothing of what had happened in the world during the past few decades, and that was why, as Foss sat down to dinner, they pressed him to stay with them for two weeks.
Foss thought he might stay a week—he could fish and inspect the wrecked Japanese planes in the hills—until he heard the familiar roar of a Catalina’s motors and he rushed down the steps of the dining hall built on stilts to find that his friend, Major Jack Cram, had come for him.
Joe Foss went back to the war. He left his silk parachute for the sisters to sew into clothing, he promised to bring his hosts some tobacco, and he went out to the Catalina in a native canoe—returning to that Henderson Field from which, during the weeks to come, he would rise to score his twenty-sixth aerial victory and tie the record set by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I.
Behind him the Malaitans had begun to chant vespers.
Across the Bay, Washing Machine Charley and the Tokyo Express bellowed a martial vespers to introduce Admiral Halsey to Guadalcanal at night.
The admiral sat out the performance in General Vandegrift’s dugout, rising, during a lull, to strike a sandbag with a knuckly fist.
“Stout structure you have here, Archie,” Halsey grunted, and then the All-Clear sounded, and both men left.
Behind them, staff officers stared in wonderment at the stout sandbag which had just burst and was pouring sand on the floor with a weary sigh.
The departure of Charley and the Express did not mean that Marines on the ridge directly behind Vandegrift’s dugout could also go back to sleep, as had the admiral and the general. No, it meant, rather, that now they could emerge in dripping discontent from the watery pits in which they had taken shelter, to pass a few unharassed hours squatting on their haunches while hoping the customary but rarely fulfilled hope that the rain would stop and they might dry off.
Private Juergens began to swear. He swore at the enemy with an ardent fluency, making masterly use of that ugly four-letter word without which most Marines, like handcuffed orators, are speechless. Suddenly they were all on their feet howling foul epithets at the enemy, real or imagined, in the dark jungle below them. They called Emperor Hirohito a “bucktoothed bastard” and they suggested that Premier Tojo impale himself upon the Japanese caudal appendage, and then, up from the jungle a reedy high voice screeched back in outrage:
“F——— Babe Ruth!”12
Chesty Puller was being evacuated from Gavaga Creek.
The day before, he had led his battalion of Marines in the western push against Gavaga while Moore’s soldiers attacked from the south and Hanneken hit from the west. The enemy had replied with an artillery barrage.
Fragments from an exploding shell tore into Puller’s lower body and his legs. He was knocked flat. Bleeding freely, he called to a nearby Marine.
“Call headquarters, old man.”
“I can’t, sir. The line’s been cut.”13
Puller staggered erect to help repair the break, and a sniper shot him twice in the arm. Puller sank to the ground again. His men placed him on a poncho, dug a foxhole and lowered him gently into it. He spent the night there. In the morning a corpsman came to tie an evacuation tag to Puller’s uniform. Puller snatched it away, snarling:
“Go label a bottle with that tag! I can go under my own power.”14
Puller arose unsteadily and limped a thousand yards down the trail to the beach. He sank to the ground again. To his agonized dismay, he could not, in front of his men, go farther. His proud spirit could no longer goad his weakening flesh, and he had to crawl into the landing boat.
Sailing down the coast in a fog of pain, he could hear the firing signaling the beginning of the end for the enemy at Gavaga.
On November 9—while Chesty Puller was taken by jeep to the primitive hospital inside the perimeter—Admiral Halsey held a press conference. A newsman asked how long he thought the Japanese would continue to fight.
“How long can they take it?” Halsey snapped.15
Another reporter asked the admiral how he proposed to conquer.
“Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs,”16 he shot back.
Later, Halsey decorated some of Vandegrift’s officers and men. He met the general’s staff, and also Martin Clemens. Turning to drive to the runway, Halsey said: “Well, Clemens, you carry on. We’ve got to beat these goddamed little yellow bastards.”17
At the airfield, Halsey said farewell with twinkling eyes. “Vandegrift,” he said, “don’t you do a thing to that cook.”18
Then he was gone, and a few hours later Archer Vandegrift had resumed the attack in the west.
The arrival of the Eighth Marines under Colonel Hall Jeschke had prompted Vandegrift to renew his push toward Kukumbona. He sent this force to join Arthur holding the blocking position with his own Second Marines and a battalion of the 164th.
But the attack, begun in the afternoon, bogged down in a furious rainfall.
Next day the sun was blazing, and the Eighth Marines, like all new arrivals on Guadalcanal, wilted in its heat.
On the following day the sun shone even more fiercely. Although it did not deter the veteran units at Gavaga Creek—who finally reduced the enemy pocket, killing 350 Japanese at a loss of forty Americans dead and 120 wounded—the heat again slowed Colonel Arthur’s advance. So did General Hyakutake’s well-entrenched, stubborn, and enlarged forces.
By mid-afternoon only four hundred yards had been gained. By that time also, General Vandegrift had been informed by Admiral Halsey that a great fleet had sailed from Truk. Presumably, it was going to join other large forces gathering at Rabaul and in the Shortlands.
Later that day, two furious air raids signaled the end of the aerial doldrums and underlined Halsey’s warning.
Once again Archer Vandegrift was forced to shift from an offensive to a defensive stance. He recalled his troops from both fronts. He strengthened his lines. He tried to conceal his apprehension, but with little success. Anyone who had been on Guadalcanal long enough could read the signs. They knew—at Henderson Field, along the beaches and the riverbanks, atop the ridges and down in the gloom of the jungle—they knew as they had always known that the breaking point had to be reached some time.
And this was it.