PART TWO
IT WAS at Tulagi that the American counteroffensive began.
Minutes after Tulagi radioed its last defiant message, shells from cruiser San Juan smashed the radio shack. Tulagi was never heard from again.
Out in the harbor men of the Yokohama Air Group frantically sought to save eight blazing Kawanishi flying boats caught on the surface like sitting ducks. A ninth, piloted by Lieutenant Commander Yoshio Tashiro, roared over the water and tried to flounder aloft, only to be tumbled back in flames by San Juan’s guns. Commander Tashiro and his roaring tiger belt-buckle—triplet to the one worn by his brother-in-law Lieutenant Junichi Sasai—sank to the bottom of Iron Bottom Bay.
Off Tulagi’s southern coast the men of the First Raider Battalion were debarking from destroyer-transports which had brought them from New Caledonia. Lieutenant Colonel Edson watched them going. Short, wiry, pale, and icy-eyed, his eyebrows mere wisps of that carroty red hair which had earned him the nickname of “Red Mike,” Edson stood with his hands on the butt of the big six-shooter he wore, Western style, smiling his cold smile while making sure that the men were stripped down for battle.
“Don’t worry about the food,” he told a company commander fretting about the absence of rations. “There’s plenty there. Japs eat, too. All you have to do is get it.”1
Edson was not leading the attack personally. Lieutenant Colonel Sam Griffith would do that. Griffith was another hard professional, but with an intellectual side. He was a Chinese scholar, a Marine who could write as well as fight. Shortly before eight o’clock, with the British Residency and other buildings on the southeastern tip enshrouded in smoke, Griffith and the Raiders sped for the northwestern end of the little, boot-shaped island. At eight o’clock their Higgins boats grated to a halt on coral shoals and assault riflemen leaped into the surf.
They sank into waist-deep water. Many of them floundered beneath heavy loads and went under. Others slipped on slimy coral underfooting and also sank. Yanked to their feet by their buddies, they struggled shoreward. They emerged with blood streaming from hands and knees torn by cruel coral. Fortunately, no enemy fire spat from the jungle and they plunged into its murk. At 8:15 A.M. Griffith signaled:
“Landing successful, no opposition.”
Now the Raiders moved swiftly. They were two thirds up the island. They scaled a steep grim cliff to their front and wheeled right. They drove southeastward along the cliff’s spine and sloping sides. Behind them, the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, under Lieutenant Colonel Harold Rosecrans crossed the same landing beaches and swung left. Rosecrans’s men were to clear the northwestern third. They struck out quickly and found the territory undefended. They turned again and moved in behind Griffith in support.
Throughout the morning the Raiders moved over rough, jumbled ground, working through rocks and trees, keeping clear of shore trails covered by enemy cliffs. At noon they spilled into the former Chinese settlement on the island’s north coast, and there the Japanese struck back.
Mortar shells began to fall. Marines toppled. Lieutenant (j.g.) Samuel Miles, a physician, rushed to help three badly wounded men and fell dead, the first casualty of the campaign. A company commander was wounded. The Marines moved more warily against these rickety Chinese shacks and the tempo of their advance slowed. Late in the afternoon, Edson, who had come ashore, called a halt.
The Marines held a line running roughly from Carpenter’s Wharf on the north to a small clubhouse south of the Residency. It was not really a continuous line, rather a position held by Raiders in hastily scooped two- or three-man foxholes—sometimes connected with each other, more often not—with the Second Battalion, Fifth, backing them up.
Red Mike Edson calculated that there were about three hundred Japanese defenders in front of his men, and he expected that they would counterattack that night.
Rabaul’s counterattack was already underway.
Upon receipt of the Tulagi message, Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa had ordered the 25th Air Flotilla to send twenty-four Betty bombers bound for New Guinea to Tulagi-Guadalcanal instead. Then he called in the Tainan Group’s fighter leader, Commander Tadashi Nakajima. He showed him the target area. Nakajima was thunderstruck. Six hundred miles to the target and six hundred back! Even if his Zeros could land at Buka on Bougainville on the way back, they would still be flying the longest fighter mission ever. Mikawa did not care.
“Take every Zero that will fly,” he said.
Nakajima protested. “This is the longest fighter mission in history. Not all of my men are capable of making it. Let me take only my twelve best pilots.”2
His eyes blazing, Mikawa shoved the Tulagi farewell over the table. Nakajima read it and stiffened. Very well, then: eighteen Zeros for Guadalcanal. Nakajima left the shack and told an orderly to recall the men waiting in cockpits for the New Guinea mission. They came back—Sakai, Nishizawa, Ota, Lieutenant Sasai—the best of Japan’s aces, and they wondered at the anger on Nakajima’s face. Handing out maps of the Solomons, he told them quickly of the American strike. Lieutenant Sasai’s face blanched. He stared straight ahead and said softly: “My brother-in-law was assigned to Tulagi.”3 Nakajima ignored him and rapped out the distance to the target. The men gave low whistles of disbelief. Nakajima ignored them too and snapped: “We will take off at once for Guadalcanal.”
The pilots broke up into trios. Saburo Sakai turned to his wingmen, Yonekawa and Hatori. “You’ll meet the American Navy fliers for the first time today. They are going to have us at a distinct advantage because of the distance we have to fly. I want you both to use the greatest caution. Above all, never break away from me. No matter what happens, no matter what goes on around us, stick as close to my plane as you can. Remember that—don’t break away.”4
Yonekawa and Hatori nodded. Why break away anyway? Saburo Sakai had never lost a wingman.
Turning, the three pilots joined the others sprinting for their Zeros. They climbed into cockpits and watched two dozen Bettys go thundering down the runway ahead of them. At last Commander Nakajima lifted his hand over his head. Within ten minutes all of his fighters were airborne.
In Tokyo, reports of the American invasion did not unduly disturb Imperial General Headquarters. Army General Staff’s chief reaction was one of surprise to find that the Navy had been building an airfield on “this insignificant island in the South Seas, inhabited only by natives.”5 An intelligence report from the Japanese Military Attaché in Moscow claimed that there were only 2000 Americans involved and that they intended to destroy the airfield and withdraw.6 The enemy operation was nothing but a reconnaissance-in-force. The report was believed, although both Army and Navy agreed that the Americans should be ousted before they could put the airfield into operation.
General Gen Sugiyama, chief of Army General Staff, spent the morning hunting for a unit to do the job.
Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of Naval General Staff, passed a more active day. First, he had received Admiral Mikawa’s radioed request for approval of his proposal to launch a night surface attack against the American fleet. Nagano had been appalled. A night attack in the narrow, uncharted water of The Slot seemed too risky. But his staff, arguing that this was a chance to hit the Americans hard, persuaded him to approve Mikawa’s plan. He signaled:
“Execute.”
Next, Nagano directed Combined Fleet to give first priority to the recapture of Guadalcanal. Admiral Yamamoto immediately set up a supreme Southeast Area Force and notified Vice-Admiral Nishizo Tsukahara on Saipan to take charge of it. Tsukahara, commander of the Eleventh Air Fleet, quickly made provisions to lead the cream of his command to Rabaul for action next day. Tsukahara now superseded Mikawa.
Admiral Yamamoto also began gathering all available ships and planes for a massive sortie. Characteristically, he considered the Solomons invasion as one more chance to destroy the enemy fleet. It was not Guadalcanal that was important to him; it was the fact that the American Navy was gathered there in force and could be annihilated in decisive battle.
Thus the importance of Guadalcanal to Japan’s military leaders: General Sugiyama, echoed by General Hyakutake, thought it a mere nuisance which might interfere with the Port Moresby operation and must therefore be quickly squelched, Admirals Nagano and Yamamoto saw it as an opportunity to regain the naval edge lost at Midway.
Nevertheless, Nagano thought enough of the event to report it to Emperor Hirohito. Putting on dress whites, Nagano went to the Emperor’s summer villa at Nikko. Alarmed, more prescient than his admirals, Hirohito said he would return to Tokyo.
“Your Majesty,” Nagano protested, “it is nothing worthy of Your Majesty’s attention.”7 Nagano showed the Emperor the report from Moscow, and Hirohito stayed in Nikko.
Gunichi Mikawa was overjoyed to receive Naval General Staff’s order to attack. He had already ordered Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto to sortie from New Ireland with Eighth Fleet’s big sluggers, heavy cruisers Chokai, Aoba, Kinugasa, Kako, and Furutaka, along with destroyer Yunagi. Mikawa intended to board Chokai to lead his force, plus light cruisers Tenryu and Yubari then in harbor at Rabaul, south to the Solomons.
Mikawa had also attended to reinforcements for the Solomons garrisons. Hyakutake had been of no help, as Mikawa had expected, insisting that he could not spare a man from the Port Moresby operation. So the admiral had had to scrape up 410 men from the Fifth Sasebo Special Naval Landing Force and from the 81st Garrison Unit. He put them under Lieutenant Endo with instructions to board transport Meiyo Maru and sail south for Guadalcanal next day.
Mikawa realized that this was not very many men, but he expected them to do some good; for he, too, believed that there were only about 2000 Americans to the south.
Japanese bombers flying to Guadalcanal from the airfield at Kavieng on New Ireland usually passed over Buka Passage in the northern Solomons—where they could be seen by the coastwatcher, Jack Read.
Bombers flying from Rabaul passed over Buin on Bougainville—and there they could be spotted by the coastwatcher, Paul Mason.
At half-past ten that morning of August 7 the bespectacled and benign Mason sat serenely within his palm-thatched hut on Malabite Hill and heard the thunder of motors overhead. He rushed outside and counted the Bettys preceding the Zeros down to Guadalcanal. He ran back inside and signaled:
“Twenty-four torpedo bombers headed yours.”
Twenty-five minutes later, aboard the Australian cruiser Canberra down at Iron Bottom Bay, sailors heard the bullhorn announce:
“The ship will be attacked at noon by twenty-four torpedo bombers. All hands will pipe to dinner at eleven o’clock.”
The “bonzer boys up north,” as the Australians described their countrymen of the coastwatchers, had given the convoy’s sailors time to line their bellies for battle, and Admiral Fletcher’s fighter pilots time to climb high over Savo Island to await the oncoming enemy.
Commander Nakajima’s fighters were flying at 13,000 feet. Sixty miles south of Rabaul they passed over Green Island. Saburo Sakai looked down in astonishment. He had never seen such incredibly green hills before. He noticed that the island was horseshoe-shaped and he filed the landmark in his brain.
Over Bougainville the sun beat so harshly upon the canopy of Saburo’s airplane that it made him thirsty. He took a bottle of soda from his lunchbox. Forgetting the high-pressure altitude, Saburo slit the cork—and the soda came foaming into his cockpit, covering everything until it was dried by the cockpit draft. But there was a coating of dried sugar left on Saburo’s goggles and his windscreen and controls. He had to rub them clean. As he did, his Zero wandered all over the formation, and he missed the beauty of The Slot as they winged southeastward over that broad, blue sea-corridor.
Over New Georgia the formation began climbing, crossing the Russells at 20,000 feet. Fifty miles ahead of them the pilots could see Guadalcanal. Next they saw Iron Bottom Bay and gasped at the spectacle of so many ships, such a vast armada cleaving white, crisscrossing wakes in the water. Then they saw the Wildcats. There were six of them, stubby, powerful craft painted olive but for the white underside of their wings. They came plunging down out of the sun. But they ignored Saburo and his comrades. They were diving on the torpedo bombers, heedless of the popping black bursts of antiaircraft fire which rose from the American ships and kept the Bettys respectfully high.
Some of the Zeros raced ahead, firing to distract the Americans. But the Wildcats rolled together and disappeared in dives. They forced the Bettys to bomb wildly, to make foolish attempts to hit moving ships from four miles up. Saburo ground his teeth and wondered why the bombers had not been carrying torpedoes. Perhaps it was because they had been loaded for land bombing against New Guinea. Whatever, it was a waste—and now the Wildcats were growling and spitting among the Bettys. Some of the Japanese planes fell blazing into the Bay.
Nakajima’s Zeros formed up and escorted the bombers as far north as the Russells. Then they turned back to Guadalcanal. And the Wildcats jumped them. Time after time the Americans came plunging out of the sun, fired, rolled back and vanished far below. Each time they fired quick bursts from six .50-caliber machine guns mounted in the wings of each plane. After each pass, the Wildcats climbed into the sun to make their single, massed, slashing attack, and to bank and climb again. Such tactics astounded Nakajima’s pilots. They cut his formation to pieces, and they forced him to flee for safety.
Saburo Sakai was also shaken. Japan’s leading ace gaped at the spectacle of a single Wildcat taking on three Zeros in a wild left-spiraling dogfight. The American had come out on the tail of a Zero and was stitching its wings and tail with bullets when Saburo dove and drove him off. It was then that Saburo Sakai became engaged in the dogfight of his life. Spin for spin, roll for roll, spiral for spiral, the American matched the Japanese master. They fought each other and also those tremendous G pressures which pushed each pilot down in his seat, investing flying suits with the weight of lead and heads with the senseless density of iron. At last Saburo got the upper hand. Again and again he cut inside the American, he wounded him, and then, as the man flew on like a bleeding automaton, Saburo drove in for the kill with a stream of cannon shells that sent the Wildcat spinning seaward in flames and its pilot drifting limply toward Guadalcanal’s beaches beneath a blossoming, billowing parachute.
It was Saburo Sakai’s fifty-ninth kill and within a few minutes he had his sixtieth—a Dauntless dive-bomber.
His blood up, Saburo climbed to 13,000 feet to hunt for further game. He sighted eight aircraft over Guadalcanal. He gunned his motor to come up on them in surprise. He would take the Wildcats on the right and leave the others for three Zeros following him. But the American planes were not Wildcats. They were Avengers, heavy, sturdy torpedo-bombers; they had .50-caliber gunners in top and belly turrets; and they were waiting for Saburo Sakai.
Saburo saw the trap too late. He tried to fireball out of it with overboosted engine and flaming guns. The Americans opened fire.
From twenty yards away Saburo Sakai could see the stuttering muzzles of those massed guns, and then a terrible power smashed at his body, searing spikes went driving into his brain, and his Zero nosed over and fell toward the sea.
Before Tulagi had been assaulted it had been necessary to secure the island’s left flank. This had been accomplished at 7:40 in the morning when B Company of the First Battalion, Second Marines, landed at Haleta Village on Florida Island. Private Russell Miller was the first Marine ashore, thus becoming the first American to tread Japanese-held soil in World War II.
Next it was required to protect the right flank of Gavutu-Tanambogo by occupying the tip of Halavo Peninsula on Florida. Other Marines of the same battalion carried out this mission. Both operations were unopposed.
It was different at Gavutu-Tanambogo. These Siamese-twin islets, joined by a narrow causeway, were both tiny; Gavutu barely 500 by 300 yards, Tanambogo even smaller. Both were steep, ringed by coral, pocked by armored caves, and defended by troops sworn to go down fighting. Marines of the First Parachute Battalion were to take these objectives, beginning with Gavutu. They had to sail around the island to get at the only landing place, a seaplane ramp and pier on the northeastern tip.
About noon of August 7, almost coincidental with the arrival of the Japanese airplanes, Major Robert Williams and his Paramarines sped toward the seaplane ramp.
Automatic fire struck them in the boats. They found that naval shelling had torn the ramp into jagged pieces. Swerving wildly, the boats made for the pier. Some men jumped onto it, getting inland. Most of them were pinned down beside the pier. A hail of fire came from three sides: from a Gavutu hill to the left, from trenches behind the pier and from Tanambogo on the right. Major Williams was hit and command passed to Major Charles Miller. Riddled, the Paramarines called desperately for naval gunfire to knock out the enemy positions. But the covering destroyers dared not run close in uncharted, shoal-filled waters.
A landing boat full of mortars roared to the rescue. Mortarmen vaulted over gunwales and bent swiftly to the task of setting up their unlovely stovepipe killers. Soon shells were plop-plopping from tubes to fall with a killing crrrunch-whummp in enemy trenches. Enemy fire fell off and the assault swept forward. Fresh units came in to join it. The Japanese fought doggedly from their trenches. Corporal George Grady charged eight of them, firing his Thompson submachine gun as he ran. Two fell dead and Grady’s tommy gun jammed. He swung the weapon like a club and smashed an enemy soldier to the ground. He drew his sheath knife and stabbed two more. And then the others were upon him to exact his own life.
Gradually the Marines gained the upper hand. By midafternoon they held the highest land on the islet and the American flag was flung to the wind there. But the Marines stood atop a volcano. Beneath their very feet was a series of about two dozen impregnable coral caves, and around these a fierce battle began.
Improvising swiftly, the Marines strapped explosives to the end of long poles. They fitted them with five-second fuses and pushed or hurled them into cave mouths. Big blond Captain Harry Torgerson led the attack. His first charge sealed off an enemy position and blew his pants off. “Boy, that one was a pisser!”8 Torgerson yelled, running back for more explosives.
“Goddam, Captain,” an irreverent Marine called, “you done lost the seat of yer pants.”
“Screw the pants,” Torgerson bellowed, “get me more dynamite!”9
One by one the caves fell to Torgerson and his pole-chargers and Gavutu was conquered before nightfall.
A strong cold wind blowing through his shattered windshield restored Saburo Sakai to consciousness.
He felt his plane falling, plummeting like a stone. But he could see nothing, only red, only a world of scarlet. Flames? No. He felt no heat. He groped for the stick with his right hand. He pulled it back gently. Pressure pushed him back into his seat. The Zero was coming out of its dive.
But where was he? What was he to do?
He tried reaching for the throttle with his left hand. He could not. He worked his feet on the rudder bar. Only the right one moved, and the Zero skidded violently.
Saburo’s left side was paralyzed.
He began to weep.
Tears flowed from the samurai’s eyes and suddenly the red thinned and vanished and he saw sunlight again. He had wept away the blood that had gummed his vision.10
Even so he could see only dimly. Once he had lost sight of the water, and the great black shapes sliding by beneath his wings, he realized vaguely that he was lost. His instruments were sometimes clear, sometimes a blur—and he had to trust to touch. Fits of madness or a terrible overpowering desire to sleep seized him. But he flew on, thinking suddenly that the blood must have come from a wound. He raised his right hand to snap off his glove and felt his head. There was a slit in his helmet, there was a hole in his head. He could feel the thick sticky blood inside it, feel his skull, and he feared to feel deeper.
His Zero droned on and he discovered that he was flying at 200 miles an hour. The wind dried his face. Then his right eye flamed in pain. He put his hand before it, withdrew it, and discovered that his vision had not changed. He was blind in his right eye. Wave after wave of pain passed over him. He became conscious of loss of blood. With only one hand, he tried to use his four service bandages. The wind tore them away. He unwound his silk muffler. He pushed it beneath his helmet. Agonizing inch by agonizing inch he shoved it up and into his wound.
Saburo Sakai flew on. His vision and his thinking gradually clearing, he found himself on a 330-course bound for the middle of the Pacific. He corrected it and flew on, the samurai of the sky. He flew on, fighting drowsiness and despair, he flew on racked with pain and aware that he probably did not have enough gas to reach a Japanese-held island. Then he saw beneath him that strikingly green, horseshoe-shaped island.
Green Island!
He was only sixty miles south of Rabaul.
Saburo Sakai’s hand trembled on the throttle. He could make it! And there was a big island dead ahead. There was a mountain. Saburo cursed. He recognized the mountain. He was over New Ireland. He would have to cross this 2400-foot mountain peak to come down at Rabaul on the other side. He would have to climb and consume more gas. But he would have to, and he flew on—his Zero now rocked by the lash of a rain squall.
Saburo came down over St. George Channel between New Ireland and Rabaul and saw the great foaming wakes of two big ships blow beneath his wings. He saw the ships—heavy cruisers—steaming south at full speed.
But then he saw tiny Vunakunau beneath his wings. He saw the narrow runway and decided to try to ditch off the beach. He was only a few feet above the water when he changed his mind. The impact might knock him unconscious and he would drown. He had to climb again, he had to circle the field four times, in all, before he finally lowered down. A sharp jolt, a skid, an abrupt halt—and then a blessed blackness engulfed him.
Japan’s greatest ace had come home on his iron will and his unrivaled flying skill, but he had lost the sight of one eye and would not fly again until the last days of the war. Attrition had begun in the invincible Tainan Air Group, in the 25th Flotilla. Although there was sudden joy in the faces of the men who lifted unconscious Saburo Sakai from his bloody and riddled cockpit, behind their eyes lay an older, deeper grief.
Of fifty-one aircraft that left Rabaul that August 7, thirty had not come back.
The Americans could not possibly take Tanambogo from Gavutu. Every so often bursts of daisy-cutting machine-gun fire came whistling over the causeway from this smaller of the twin islets. No one ventured near the causeway above ground.
Brigadier General William Rupertus, who commanded the operations in the harbor islands, decided to take Tanambogo from the sea. He called upon Company B of the Second Marines, the outfit which had seized Haleta on Florida Island without firing a shot.
Air strikes were called down on Tanambogo. Destroyers pounded its installations. A Japanese three-inch gun was blown into the air in full view of the Marines coming to the assault. Daylight was fading fast as the coxswains pointed their prows shoreward and gunned the motors.
From a hilltop crowning Tanambogo came a terrible, withering fire. Private Russell Miller, the first American to land on Japanese soil, fell dead at his Lewis gun. A destroyer shell fell short and exploded among the boats. A coxswain was wounded and torn from the wheel of his boat. The craft yawed wildly, swinging around and heading back to Gavutu. Others followed it. Only three boats dared the Japanese fire and only one got ashore. Its occupants were pinned down and chopped up by Japanese fire. Under cover of night, friendly boats slipped in to take off dazed American survivors.
Tanambogo was very tough, Rupertus admitted. He would have to have more men. He appealed to Vandegrift who in turn appealed to Admiral Turner. Another battalion of the Second Marines—one which Turner had been holding back for the Ndeni operation—was released to Rupertus. At dawn of August 8, the attack would be renewed.
The two cruisers seen by Saburo Sakai were Aoba and Kinugasa. They were part of the force of five heavy cruisers and one destroyer which Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto had brought south from Kavieng under Admiral Mikawa’s orders. Before Saburo saw them they had also been sighted by an American B-17, which radioed the sighting back to Australia. After that Goto had detached Chokai and the destroyer Yunagi to pick up the Eighth Fleet commander while he continued on in Aoba with the others.
Chokai sailed into Simpson Harbor at two o’clock. Admiral Mikawa and his staff came aboard and Eighth Fleet commander’s red-and-white striped flag was broken from the masthead. A half-hour later, with Yunagi and the two light cruisers, Mikawa’s flagship stood out of the harbor.
It was a fine clear day. A sea as calm as a mirror lay glimmering in the sunlight. On Chokai’s bridge the officers chatted in high spirits. The men were excited. Everyone knew that they were sailing to battle.
Gunichi Mikawa was confident, even though he was aware of the terrible risks that he ran. His returning pilots had already informed him of the vastness of the American fleet. They had seen no aircraft carriers but Mikawa knew that carriers had to be somewhere in the vicinity. Mikawa dreaded the carriers, and he hoped to avoid aerial attack.
Throughout the afternoon and night of August 7, Mikawa intended to steam toward Bougainville. Next day, August 8, would be spent marking time north of Bougainville, well out of range of carrier aircraft. With dusk the ships would enter The Slot. They would come up on the enemy under cover of darkness, destroy him, and then race north again to be out of carrier range by daylight of August 9.
Mikawa’s eight ships were to strike like a wolfpack falling on a flock of sheep. First they would destroy the sheep dogs, the American warships, after which the sheep, the transports, could be devoured at leisure.
Three hours out of Rabaul, Mikawa’s and Goto’s ships made rendezvous. “Alert cruising disposition,” was ordered for the night. As the ships swung into line an American submarine was sighted. It was the veteran S-38 under Lieutenant Commander H. F. Munson. Mikawa ordered his ships to turn east to avoid it. Munson let them go. He had been so close to the enemy column that he could feel his vessel shuddering under their powerful wash. Nor could he, Munson, maneuver. Nevertheless he could see that something big was brewing. He decided to patrol St. George Channel, and meanwhile, he sent off the report: “Two destroyers and three larger ships of unknown type, heading 140 degrees True, at high speed, 8 miles west of Cape St. George.” Although Munson had miscounted the number of ships, he had still given Guadalcanal a valuable warning.
Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner did not heed the warning, just as he had dismissed the earlier report of Goto’s ships made by a Flying Fortress. Turner was not troubled because he considered a surface sea attack on the night of August 7 to be a practical impossibility. He was, however, deeply concerned about attack on August 8—either day or night. Because of this he had expressed doubts about plans to search The Slot and had requested Admiral McCain to make sure that Flying Fortresses would patrol that sea-corridor in the morning.
Otherwise, Turner was confident. The first day of invasion had gone off beautifully. Perhaps 17,000 Marines had been landed. Fletcher’s carriers were still to the south and would not depart until Sunday, August 9. On that clear calm Friday night of August 7 sailors on watch could congratulate themselves on being safe at sea and not ashore like the Marines on Tulagi, whence came the sounds of battle.
Red Mike Edson had expected the Japanese to counterattack at night, and they did.
Marines in their shallow foxholes could hear the enemy assembling. The Japanese crawled noisily out of their caves and dugouts. They shouted their war cry “Banzai!” in a kind of gurgling turkey-gobbler whoop. They howled threats which, they had been assured, would turn American hearts cold with fear.
“Japanese boy drink American boy’s blood!”
“Blood for the Emperor!”
They attacked, coming in ragged bands or sometimes as solitary infiltrators. They fired their rifles as they charged, deliberately trying to draw giveaway fire so that they might grenade the source of muzzle flashes. Where they threw grenades they were grenaded, where they closed with knives they were met with knives. Four times they charged, striking savagely at Marine positions in the center.
Here they came against Private First Class Johnny Ahrens and his Browning Automatic Rifle, and each time Ahrens and his chattering BAR broke them up. Just before dawn the Japanese were finally repulsed.
Captain Lewis (“Silent Lew”) Walt came quickly to the foxhole held by Ahrens. He found the youth dying. He was covered with blood. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly. There were bullet holes in his chest and thick blood rose slowly from three deep bayonet wounds. Next to Ahrens lay a dead Japanese sergeant. A dead officer was sprawled across his legs. Around his foxhole thirteen more Japanese bodies lay crumpled in grotesque, ungainly death. Johnny Ahrens lay dying, still clinging to his BAR, and Walt, a big, powerful man, bent to lift the youth in his arms.
“Captain, they tried to come through me last night,” Ahrens gasped, “but I don’t think they made it.”
“They didn’t, Johnny,” Walt replied gently. “They didn’t.”11
The attack on Tanambogo had re-commenced.
At 8 A.M., August 8, the Third Battalion, Second Marines, landed on Gavutu to help mop up. By noon Gavutu was cleared and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hunt signaled that he was ready to attack Tanambogo. He asked for an air strike. Six Dauntlesses came swooping down—to drop their bombs on Gavutu! Three Marines were blown apart and six others badly wounded. Enraged and helpless, Colonel Hunt hurled a stream of invective at the departing “friendly” planes. Then San Juan stood into the harbor to shell Tanambogo briefly and withdraw. Next another group of carrier bombers arrived. They were going to knock out a Japanese position crowned by a Japanese flag. Once again, several bombs fell short—and more Marines on Gavutu were killed and wounded.
Hunt asked that he be spared further air “support.”
At four o’clock he called on the destroyer Buchanan to attempt short-range fire. Buchanan ran boldly inshore and blasted Tanambogo so thoroughly that a company of Marines were able to land standing up. An hour later they tore down the flag that had so disastrously intrigued the dive-bombers, and next day mopping-up operations cleared both Tanambogo and Tulagi of the remaining Japanese.
About 750 Japanese had died defending Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo, while 144 Americans were killed and 194 wounded. Capture of the harbor islands had not been costly—as “prices” are measured in the heartless business of war—and yet it seemed so when compared to the effortless conquest of Guadalcanal.