CHAPTER 9
(AUGUST 1942–FEBRUARY 1943)
GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS
1ST MARINE DIVISION COMMAND POST
7 AUGUST 1942
1740 HOURS LOCAL
As far as Major General Archer Vandegrift, the fifty-five-year-old commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, could tell, the first American ground offensive of World War II—Operation Watchtower—was going better than expected. After an air and naval gunfire “prep” of the landing beaches, his Marines had come ashore at 0910 on the northwest coast of Guadalcanal. The Japanese had not opposed the Marine landing craft when they hit the narrow beach. Now, though the offload of supplies and equipment was proceeding slowly, it was the best that could be expected considering the thick jungle, lack of roads, and minimal cleared space ashore.
Contact with the enemy had been light and sporadic in the eight and a half hours since the assault waves touched down in their new Higgins boats. By late in the afternoon, 10,000 of his 14,000 Marines were ashore on Guadalcanal and U.S. carrier-based aircraft had beaten off an attack by high-altitude bombers from the Japanese base at Rabaul.
Nineteen miles to the north, across the body of water soon to be known as Ironbottom Sound for the number of Allied and Japanese ships sunk there, the occupation of lightly defended Florida Island at 0740 had gone well, but Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo had been a different matter. Though the Tulagi landing at 0800 had been uncontested, Vandegrift had received reports of stiff resistance as the Marines moved to seize the high ground.
At Gavutu-Tanambogo, two islets connected by a causeway, the 0810 assault waves had been met with significant opposition from Japanese troops defending their seaplane base, despite strikes by U.S. Navy aircraft from the Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp. At 1200, Vandegrift had requested and received permission to commit his only reserves from Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commanding the amphibious forces, and Vice Admiral Jack Fletcher, the tactical commander of the expeditionary forces. Shortly after 1300, the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion was landed under heavy fire to help secure Gavutu-Tanambogo.
Major General Archer Vandegrift commanded the Marines at Guadalcanal.
Intelligence had indicated the presence of more than 7,000 Japanese troops on Guadalcanal, and several thousand more on the surrounding islands. Though that estimate would prove to be much too high, it appeared to Vandegrift and his Navy superiors that they had taken the Japanese completely by surprise. By 1700, Vandegrift began to hope that his hastily assembled, untested Marines would be able to quickly secure the airfield the Japanese were constructing on the Lunga plain in the northwest quadrant of Guadalcanal. Then, if all went according to plan, the island could serve as a jumping-off point for the Marines’ “island-hopping” offensive up the Solomons toward the big Japanese base at Rabaul on the northern tip of New Britain. It was not to be.
Though Vandegrift’s optimism in those first few hours of Operation Watchtower would soon be dashed, his initial confidence was well-founded. The appearance of a formidable eighty-three-ship U.S. naval armada in the waters of the Coral Sea—including three carriers, a cruiser-battleship surface action force, and the amphibious shipping for an entire Marine division—had caught the Japanese totally unprepared. But the Marine landings on the morning of 7 August had succeeded mostly because there were fewer than 2,500 unwary defenders on Guadalcanal and about the same number dug in on the nearby islands.
Ever since the disaster at Midway, the Japanese high command had been preoccupied with efforts to complete their outer defense perimeter. To consolidate their toehold on New Guinea, a step they deemed essential to protecting Rabaul, the Japanese army began pouring troops and aircraft originally intended for Midway into the fight to capture Port Moresby.
At the end of June, the Japanese army quietly landed infantry and construction troops on Guadalcanal with orders to build an airfield on the relatively flat plain along the northwest quadrant of the island.
On 21 July 1942, as construction of the air base on Guadalcanal neared completion, the Japanese army quietly landed 1,800 troops at Gona and Buna on the north coast of New Guinea. Their orders were to proceed over the Owen Stanley Range—the island’s spine—and attack Port Moresby. By 29 July, more than 13,000 Imperial troops had succeeded in hacking their way up the Kokoda Trail—despite the stubborn resistance by an outnumbered Australian brigade, supported by Papuan natives—and were within forty miles of their goal. From Australia, MacArthur rushed Australian and U.S. Army reinforcements into Port Moresby in an effort to hold the vital port and its airfields.
Once on New Guinea, the green American troops soon realized that the Japanese weren’t the only enemy they faced. The island’s yearly rainfall of ten feet or more, impenetrable, snake-infested jungles, malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and tropical diseases soon felled more soldiers than Japanese suicide attacks. These same conditions would soon start to claim Marines on Guadalcanal.
Guadalcanal was an unlikely objective for America’s first offensive operation in World War II. Had the Japanese not decided to build an airstrip on the island’s northwestern plain, it might well have been avoided altogether. Operation Watchtower—as developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff—had been a compromise in a campaign to eliminate the threat posed by the Japanese base at Rabaul. Both MacArthur, the southwestern Pacific area commander—and Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Ocean areas—recognized the strategic necessity of destroying Rabaul before retaking the Philippines. The question was how.
MacArthur favored a direct, carrier-supported assault by U.S. Army troops from Australia and Marines from New Zealand, where they had been training in amphibious operations. Nimitz, unwilling to risk his few carriers or surrender control of his Marines, preferred to use his amphibious forces to seize “unsinkable carriers”—small islands—from which land-based aircraft could pound Rabaul to rubble before any troops had to set foot ashore.
On 2 July, the Joint Chiefs in Washington—after lengthy discussions between General Marshall and Admiral King—resolved the acrimonious debate by placing Nimitz in charge of the first phase of the Rabaul campaign, ordering him to seize advance bases in the 900-mile-long Solomon Islands chain. Though none too happy with the decision, MacArthur would soon have his hands full simply trying to hold on to Port Moresby.
Things didn’t quite go as Nimitz had planned either. When a long-range patrol aircraft and Australian coast watchers reported that Japanese construction troops were building an airstrip on Guadalcanal, Nimitz had to quickly adapt to the changed situation. In addition to the known Japanese bases on Tulagi, Florida Island, and Gavutu-Tanambogo, he now had to allocate Marines, transports, and support ships to seize and secure an additional island.
Though the Joint Chiefs had insisted that Operation Watchtower commence on 1 August, the requirement to seize the airfield being built on Guadalcanal bought Nimitz an additional week of planning. He scrapped plans to secure Savo Island, which didn’t appear to have a Japanese garrison, but there was no way to increase the number of ships, planes, or troops dedicated to the endeavor. MacArthur had nothing to spare, and every other combatant vessel, transport ship, landing craft, aircraft, and soldier available in the U.S. was already committed to the invasion of North Africa in November. Nimitz would have to make do with what he had.
Scarce resources weren’t the only problem for Nimitz. In the aftermath of the victory at Midway, the Chicago Tribune, owned and published by FDR’s political adversary, Colonel Robert McCormick, ran a story on how the U.S. had broken the Japanese JN-25 code. It became front-page news across America, and Tokyo quickly replaced the compromised codes—leaving Nimitz and his forces in the dark regarding Japanese intentions. Roosevelt was fit to be tied and ordered Attorney General Francis Biddle to arrest McCormick, a World War I hero, and put him on trial for treason—a wartime crime punishable by death.
In Washington, Admiral King tried to calm things down, believing that a sensational trial would reveal even more classified information—particularly the U.S.–British “Ultra” project that was busily breaking German war codes. He succeeded in convincing FDR that the best damage control for Station Hypo and other cryptological efforts would be to let the story die.
Henderson Field
Newspaper stories about Midway weren’t a problem in Japan. There, the stunning defeat at Midway had been carefully covered up. Prime Minister Tojo had ordered that there be no news of their humiliation and no one involved was to even talk about it. Wounded sailors hospitalized in Japan were isolated so no one could ask them questions about what had taken place at Midway. Instead of news about the catastrophe, Japanese newspapers printed glowing reports about “fantastic Japanese victories” in the northern Pacific, where they’d bombed the islands of Attu and Kiska, two barren, icy dots in the long chain of Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska.
HQ 1ST MARINE DIVISION
LUNGA POINT, GUADALCANAL
8 AUGUST 1942
2000 HOURS LOCAL
By the afternoon of 8 August, General Vandegrift was satisfied that all his 1st Marine Division needed for success was to complete the offload of supplies from the transports lying at anchor offshore. On Guadalcanal, the uncompleted airfield was already in U.S. hands and renamed Henderson Field in honor of Major Lofton Henderson, who had been killed leading his bombing squadron during the Battle of Midway.
Nineteen miles north, across the water, Brigadier General William Rupertus reported that his Leathernecks had finally secured Tulagi—though it had required killing nearly all of the entrenched Japanese defenders. The Marines had withstood several determined banzai charges and desperate hand-to-hand combat over a period of thirty-one hours, but the Americans finally prevailed. Rupertus had lost 115 Marines and seven Navy medical corpsmen in the fight, but the Americans had killed ten enemy soldiers to every one of their own.
Admiral Richard K. Turner
Earlier in the day, a second Japanese aerial attack—this time by torpedo bombers—had been met first by U.S. carrier aircraft and then by overwhelming anti-aircraft fire from the fifty-five American transports, cruisers, and destroyers in the waters south of Savo Island. Though nearly all of the attackers were eventually downed, by the time the air battle was over, eighteen of Admiral Turner’s carrier aircraft had been lost, the transport USS Elliot had been sunk, and two destroyers were badly damaged. One of them—the USS Jarvis—headed for Noumea but sank en route. Though these losses weren’t insignificant, Vandegrift was more concerned that the two attacks had seriously disrupted the offload of supplies and equipment urgently needed by his Marines ashore.
As darkness fell on 8 August, few of the transports had landed more than 30 percent of their cargo. Vandegrift importuned Admiral Turner to have the transports remain in the anchorage for another forty-eight hours. Shortly after Turner approved, Admiral Fletcher informed him that he would have to take Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp well south of Guadalcanal to refuel, since the loss of eighteen aircraft that morning made replenishing his carriers that far north too risky. Just hours later, MacArthur’s headquarters belatedly informed Turner that an Australian patrol plane had spotted several Japanese ships, “probable seaplane tenders” headed toward Guadalcanal from Rabaul.
Lacking the kind of intelligence Station Hypo had provided at Midway, Turner and Vandegrift didn’t know that the Japanese group bearing down on them was actually a formidable surface action force comprising seven cruisers and a destroyer—all commanded by Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa. Operation Watchtower was about to come unraveled—and would soon live up to the nickname the Marines ashore had already given it—Operation Shoestring.
IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY FLAGSHIP CHOKAI
NORTH OF SAVO ISLAND, SOLOMON ISLANDS
9 AUGUST 1942
0530 HOURS LOCAL
The senior Japanese naval commander in the South Pacific, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, was bent on vengeance. He had been humiliated by the losses at Midway, and within hours of being informed of the Marine landings on Tulagi and Guadalcanal immediately decided to counter-attack. On the afternoon of 7 August, he ordered every available combatant at Rabaul to sortie after dark and follow him south in his flagship, the heavy cruiser Chokai, to engage the American ships at Guadalcanal.
A few minutes after 0100 on 9 August, Mikawa’s ships exited the southern end of the slot—the narrow passage between New Georgia and Santa Isabel islands—and entered Savo Island Sound north of Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal. The Americans, completely unprepared, first learned of Mikawa’s presence when his cruisers opened fire at close range with guns and torpedoes. The USS Chicago and HMAS Canberra were struck in the first volley and put out of action. Mikawa then split his force into two columns and swung north to engage the Vincennes, Astoria, and Quincy. Within minutes all three heavy cruisers were dead in the water, afire and listing heavily.
Gunichi Mikawa. His ships were dubbed the Tokyo Express.
At 0220, Mikawa, fearing an air attack, ordered his force to withdraw without engaging the now defenseless transports. As the Japanese cruisers passed north of Savo Island and raced back up the slot, they nearly collided with the U.S. destroyer Talbot. Without slowing down, every passing cruiser pumped heavy shells into the hapless picket ship—killing scores of sailors and wrecking her superstructure.
The engagement had lasted little more than an hour, but it had cost the Allies dearly. The U.S. heavy cruisers Vincennes and Quincy were on the bottom before dawn. The crippled Australian heavy cruiser Canberra was abandoned and had to be sunk by an American destroyer at 0800. The USS Astoria finally went down at 1145.
The Chokai had taken a single hit from an eight-inch gun—likely the Astoria’s—and Admiral Mikawa celebrated his victory. The engagement had cost the Japanese fifty-eight dead and fifty-three wounded. Though Mikawa didn’t know the full magnitude of the U.S. and Australian losses—1,023 dead and 709 wounded—he was certain that he had struck back hard at those who had inflicted such losses on the emperor’s fleet at Midway.
The Battle of Savo Island also convinced Mikawa that Japanese sailors were superior at night fighting. This impression would govern his tactics in the months to come as he sought to wrest control of Guadalcanal from the Marines. The Americans might have more carriers and the ability to control the skies in daylight. But he was determined that the Japanese—with years of night gunnery training—could dominate the seas in darkness.
1ST MARINE DIVISION COMMAND POST
GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS
21 AUGUST 1942
1600 HOURS LOCAL
For General Vandegrift and his Marines on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Florida, and Gavutu-Tanambogo, the days after the Battle of Savo Island were a matter of making do with less and less. On the afternoon of 9 August, Admiral Turner, fearing another night attack by Mikawa’s cruisers, had ordered the transports to withdraw to the south toward Noumea, carrying with them more than half the supplies and equipment as well as 2,000 of the division’s Marines.
On Guadalcanal and Tulagi, Vandegrift’s troops, already on half rations, cut food consumption by half again. Living in the jungle without shelter or the prospect of medical evacuation for the wounded, and compelled to conserve ammunition in every engagement, they nonetheless managed to finish the runway and parking aprons on Henderson Field. By 11 August they had also succeeded in eliminating most of the Japanese from the jungle surrounding the airfield. The Leathernecks were soon boasting, “We have done so much, with so little, for so long, that we now can do anything, with nothing, forever.”
But for Nimitz and the Marine planners in Hawaii, it was no laughing matter. Though a U.S. submarine had managed to sink one of Mikawa’s cruisers, the Kako, on 10 August, there was grave concern at Pearl Harbor that a determined counter-attack could spell disaster for the first American offensive of World War II.
On 12 August, in an effort to alleviate the crucial supply problems for the Marines on Guadalcanal, Admiral Turner was ordered to land the division’s remaining troops and supplies on Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides islands. That afternoon, a Marine C-46 transport aircraft flew from the Espiritu Santo airstrip to Henderson Field, delivering urgently needed medical supplies and evacuating a dozen seriously wounded Marines. On the night of 15 August, four little destroyer-transports raced into Ironbottom Sound and offloaded Marine aviation ground crews, ammunition, bombs, and aviation fuel in fifty-five gallon drums—but no food.
Unfortunately for the hungry Marines, the Japanese weren’t just waiting for them to die of starvation. On the night of 17 August, four Japanese destroyers anchored off Taivu Point and landed 900 Imperial Army soldiers. Their mission: recapture Henderson Field.
The Japanese might well have succeeded but for Vandegrift’s remarkable ability to persevere in the face of overwhelming adversity. Wary of Navy promises to protect Guadalcanal with carrier-based aircraft, and despite his gnawing hunger and fatigue, the Marine general bombarded Admiral Robert Ghormley in Noumea and Nimitz in Hawaii with radio messages insisting that they send Marine squadrons to “Cactus”—the code word for Guadalcanal—to protect his troops. He pulled his defenses tight around the airfield to demonstrate that aircraft would be safe on the ground. His persistence was rewarded on 20 August when nineteen Grumman Wildcat F4F fighters and twelve Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bombers landed at Henderson Field, flown in from the deck of an escort carrier dispatched from Espiritu Santo.
Admiral Robert Ghormley, in charge of the Guadalcanal invasion, was replaced with Admiral “Bull” Halsey by Nimitz.
The planes arrived just in time. That night, just before dawn, the 900 Japanese troops launched a banzai attack across the Tenaru River in hopes of overrunning the airfield. The battle lasted for more than eight hours and was, for the Japanese, an unmitigated disaster. More than 800 of the attackers were killed in the assault and subsequent counter-attack—at a cost of 44 killed and 71 wounded from the Marines. Vandegrift’s line had held—and “Cactus” finally had its own air force. In the days ahead, both would be sorely tested.
BATTLE FOR THE EASTERN SOLOMONS
NORTH OF MALAITA AND GUADALCANAL
25 AUGUST 1942
1030 HOURS LOCAL
The horrific losses on the banks of the Tenaru persuaded Admiral Yamamoto that Guadalcanal could be retaken if Japanese reinforcements delivered to the island were sufficiently supported by adequate naval forces. To that end, he ordered Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka to take his flagship, the light cruiser Jintsu, three slow transports escorted by four patrol boats, and land 1,300 Imperial Army troops and marines on Guadalcanal. To support Tanaka, Yamamoto dispatched the entire Combined Fleet, under Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, from Truk to destroy the aircraft on Henderson Field, attack any U.S. ships in the area, and support the landing.
Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo commanded the Japanese Second Fleet at Guadalcanal.
Kondo’s fleet included two heavy carriers, Shokaku—now repaired from damage suffered on 8 May in the Coral Sea—and Zuikaku. He also had a light carrier, Ryujo, which he sent in advance to destroy the Marine and Army Air Corps aircraft on Henderson Field.
Early on the afternoon of 24 August, a long-range patrol plane out of Henderson Field spotted the Ryujo about 100 miles due north of Malaita Island. When he received the report, Admiral Fletcher was holding station 150 miles east of Guadalcanal with Enterprise and Saratoga. Though he had sent the Wasp carrier group south to refuel earlier in the day, Fletcher nonetheless ordered an immediate attack on the Japanese carrier by thirty dive-bombers and eight torpedo planes.
Ryujo was practically defenseless, having launched all her aircraft for the attack on Henderson Field. A well-coordinated bomb and torpedo attack sent her to the bottom in less than an hour. Her bombing raid on Henderson fared little better. Marine fighters, vectored by radar to intercept the attackers, downed several. Those who survived turned around but found only an oil slick where their carrier had been.
While the “Cactus Air Force” was beating off the Henderson Field raid, Wildcats from Enterprise and Saratoga were doing the same. In the gathering dusk, Kondo’s dive-bombers and torpedo planes from Shokaku and Zuikaku didn’t spot Saratoga, so they came in three fast waves against Enterprise. American fighters high overhead decimated the attackers, who then flew into a hail of anti-aircraft fire. The battle lasted fewer than ten minutes. When it was over, Saratoga had taken three bombs on her flight deck that damage control parties promptly dealt with—allowing her to recover her air wing and continue under way at twenty-four knots.
Admiral Raizo Tanaka was a brilliant naval strategist who escaped many Allied traps in the seas off Guadalcanal.
Fletcher’s dive-bombers and torpedo planes, unable to find Kondo’s two remaining carriers in the dark, attacked and sank the Chitose, a large seaplane tender, on their way back to the U.S. carriers. By midnight, Kondo, having lost a light carrier and more than ninety planes and pilots, turned around and headed back to Truk.
But the battle wasn’t over. Early on the morning of 25 August, the dawn patrol out of Henderson Field found Tanaka’s little group of transports preparing to disembark troops and supplies on Guadalcanal. The Marines scrambled their dive-bombers, and after a five-minute flight from Henderson Field, sank a troop transport and blasted the Jintsu—very nearly killing Tanaka. An hour later, Army Air Corps B-17s from Espiritu Santo arrived overhead and sank a destroyer.
This was enough for even the indomitable Tanaka. Taking advantage of a tropical downpour, he turned the remnants of his battered force back to the north and headed up the slot, staying beneath the clouds to avoid pursuit.
Unfortunately for Tanaka, he didn’t go far enough. Late on 27 August, Tanaka held up in an anchorage in the Shortland Islands, off the south coast of Bougainville. Assuming that he was beyond the range of any U.S. aircraft, he started repairs on Jintsu, the two surviving transports, and a destroyer, all of which had been damaged two days earlier. An Australian coast watcher reported the Japanese presence to Admiral Ghormley in Noumea, who in turn relayed the information to the Marines. At dusk on 28 August, a flight of six SBD dive-bombers from Henderson Field, having carefully conserved fuel on the 275-mile-long flight, appeared overhead and proceeded to sink one armed transport and damage two others. By the time the Marine aircraft landed back on Guadalcanal they claimed they were “flying on fumes.”
The “Battle of the Eastern Solomons,” as the engagement of 24–25 August came to be known, finally convinced Yamamoto that daylight reinforcement and resupply for the Japanese troops on Guadalcanal was too costly. From then on, it became Combined Fleet policy to have fast destroyer-transports, sometimes escorted by cruisers, loiter in the slot until dark and then dash south to disgorge their troops and cargo off the north or west coast of the island. After offloading their payload, the Japanese would swing around Cape Esperance into Ironbottom Sound, fire several salvos at Henderson Field, and race back up the slot before first light.
By early September the pattern became so regular that the Marines took to calling the nightly deliveries and attacks the Tokyo Express. Despite pleas from Vandegrift for night-fighters to interdict these nocturnal forays, there was little that Ghormley or Nimitz could do to help. On 31 August, a Japanese submarine sent a torpedo into the Saratoga’s side—sending her into the repair yards for three months. Nobody in Hawaii wanted to risk the Hornet and the Wasp—the only two undamaged carriers left in the Pacific—on a night engagement with the Japanese. The Marines would just have to dig their holes a little deeper and pray that some supplies could get through.
1ST MARINE DIVISION FORWARD COMMAND POST
BLOODY RIDGE, GUADALCANAL
13 SEPTEMBER 1942
0530 HOURS LOCAL
The effectiveness of the new Japanese night reinforcement strategy was felt almost immediately. Sustained contact with Japanese infantry patrols operating around the airfield increased significantly. On 3 September, Brigadier General Roy Geiger flew in from Espiritu Santo to take command of the Marine squadrons operating from Henderson Field and the nearby auxiliary strip known as “Fighter One.” That night, the newly arrived commander of the 1st Marine Air Wing was treated to a naval gunfire barrage by a Japanese destroyer, a strafing attack by a Mitsubishi Zero seaplane nicknamed “Louie the Louse,” a high-altitude bombing raid by a solo long-range bomber the Marines had dubbed “Washing Machine Charlie,” and, finally, a probe of the airfield’s perimeter defenses by Japanese infantry. The following morning Geiger discovered that only eleven of the fifty Wildcats delivered to the island were still flyable, due to the nightly bombardments.
Things were no better for the ground troops, who were literally rotting in their foxholes on less than half rations. On the night of 4–5 September, a Japanese destroyer in Ironbottom Sound sank two U.S. ships attempting to deliver food, fuel, and ammunition to the beleaguered Leathernecks.
By 10 September, the Tokyo Express runs had brought Japanese troop strength on Guadalcanal up to more than 6,000. The next day, the naval gunfire and regular nightly air raids by land-based bombers from Rabaul, Bougainville, and the Bonin Islands forced General Vandegrift to move his command post, repair facilities, and hospital away from the beach to a high ridge leading upwards from the south to its crest, directly overlooking Henderson Field.
The Leathernecks had nicknamed the ridge after the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion commander, Merritt “Red Mike” Edson. “Red Mike” was Edson’s radio call sign and his troops used the name affectionately. Since his tough, parachute-trained Marines were protecting the division command post on the side of the mountain, the name Edson’s Ridge stuck.
By 12 September, General Kiyotaki Kawaguchi, the senior Japanese officer on Guadalcanal, had concluded that the 6,600 troops he had ashore were sufficient to dislodge the Marines protecting Henderson Field and to retake the airstrip. His reconnaissance patrols had pinpointed the relocated Marine command post on Edson’s Ridge. Kawaguchi reasoned that if he overran the post, confusion would ensue in the Marine ranks and the battle would be decided in his favor. But when he launched his attack that evening to force the Marines off the ridge, Edson’s Raiders were ready with massed machine gun, mortar, and artillery fire.
The battle along the ridgeline—some of it hand-to-hand—raged for more than twenty-four hours. When it was over—just after dark on 13 September—more than 1,500 of Kawaguchi’s troops were dead. The Marines had 40 killed in action and 103 wounded. From then on, they would call the scene of the battle “Bloody Ridge.”
For those in this and numerous other battles on the high ground overlooking Henderson Field, the suicidal enemy charges were horrific. There was nothing in the experience of these young Americans to prepare them for the carnage of massed bayonet charges by waves of Japanese soldiers, attacking through minefields and throwing themselves against machine guns. Captain John Sweeney, of Columbus, Ohio, was one of those who fought with Edson on Bloody Ridge, where he and his fellow Marines were outnumbered 600 to 1.
CAPTAIN JOHN SWEENEY, USMC
Edson’s Ridge, Guadalcanal
13 September 1942
1900 Hours Local
The Japanese held a toehold on our side of the Matanikou River. They were dug in very well, with lots of machine guns.
I found out I was the only officer left in the company. Red Mike said, “You’re now the CO. Take over. I’ll meet you back along the ridge to give you the orders for tonight and the next day.” I went back to the new position with the troops that we had. We’re out in front, knowing the jungle on each side could hold the enemy.
Henderson Field was located in the area just behind where the artillery was established, about a thousand yards away. On this particular night, some 600 Marine Raiders and 300 paratroopers defended this particular portion of the airfield
One of the fears that I had was knowing that something was going to happen right after dark, and steeling my own backbone to come up with the sort of leadership that was expected of me. And one of the things that kept running through my mind was a prayer or two that I wouldn’t fail my men.
Right in front of us, until that point, it was quiet. But we knew they were there and ready for the attack. It’d sweep up to the main ridge itself.
About two o’clock in the morning, the Japanese commander decided he was going to make a break for it and attack A Company’s flank.
Then it was hell, with screams—hollering from both Japanese and Marines. Flares are flying in the air, and fired over the ridge by the Japanese in order to illuminate the target as our wounded were evacuated by corpsmen. The banzai charge was a lot of yelling—and enough to scare anybody, except the people who were able to keep their cool, and keep their ammunition going.
We heard a rattle of a BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle], and rifle shots. And fortunately Van Ness, the BAR man, finished off the others that were with the gun crew of a Japanese machine gun. After that, the tide turned, and although we were bloodied up a couple of times, the Japanese in the area were picked off.
We had a few in our ranks who were killed that night, and they are the real heroes. Henderson Field was right behind us, and had the Japanese broken through our lines, they would’ve had the airfield. And if they’d seized the airfield, they might have won the war in this part of the Pacific.
I’m very proud of the citation. [Sweeney was awarded the Navy Cross for that night.] But the men who were killed that night are the real heroes. I participated in what is one of the shining moments of the Marine Corps. And that in itself was my satisfaction.
When it was over, Edson and his Marines had somehow managed to hold their ground. Their raw courage in the face of overwhelming odds saved Henderson Field. “Red Mike” Edson was awarded the Medal of Honor for his efforts, and Captain John Sweeney was awarded the Navy Cross.
A day after “Bloody Ridge,” the carrier Wasp, the brand-new battleship North Carolina, and the destroyer O’Brien were all torpedoed by Japanese subs. The North Carolina managed to limp back to Pearl Harbor for repairs, but the Wasp and O’Brien both went down—fortunately after most of their crews managed to abandon ship. These losses left only one operational carrier, the Hornet, and one battleship, the USS Washington, at sea in the Pacific—and made Admiral Chester Nimitz wonder if Guadalcanal could be saved. Within a month he would have even more reason to doubt the outcome.
BATTLE OF CAPE ESPERANCE
ABOARD USS SAN FRANCISCO
12 OCTOBER 1942
0100 HOURS LOCAL
The loss of half his operational carriers and battleships on 15 September stunned Nimitz and his staff in Hawaii. Ashore on Guadalcanal, the Marines were, however, heartened by the safe arrival of 4,200 more Marines from Samoa. These new arrivals were immediately fed into the narrow perimeter around Henderson Field and Fighter One. More than 1,000 of Vandegrift’s sickest and most seriously wounded casualties were evacuated.
Unfortunately, the Japanese were also adding to their forces. On 18 September the Imperial General Staff ordered that retaking Guadalcanal be given strategic priority over the effort to seize Port Moresby. From that point on, the Tokyo Express landed between 500 and 1,000 fresh troops and supplies nightly on Guadalcanal. By 10 October, the Japanese had nearly 12,000 Imperial Army soldiers on the island—roughly the strength available to Vandegrift.
The reinforcements General Kawaguchi received convinced him that he had sufficient strength to overwhelm the Henderson Field defenses—providing the Imperial Fleet could deliver enough fire to support his advance and keep the “Cactus Air Force” from launching against his troops. The attack was carefully planned for the night of 11–12 October, and a surface action group of three heavy cruisers and two destroyers commanded by Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto was dispatched from Rabaul. Once the cruisers opened fire on Henderson Field and Vandegrift’s command post on Bloody Ridge, Kawaguchi would launch his ground assault.
Fortunately, in Hawaii, Station Hypo had succeeded in breaking enough of the new Japanese naval code to warn Admiral Ghormley of the impending attack. Ghormley immediately dispatched the only forces he had available—a cruiser-destroyer flotilla commanded by Rear Admiral Norman Scott—and ordered him to interdict the Japanese before they could open fire on the Marines.
At 2305 on 11 October, Scott, aboard his flagship San Francisco and accompanied by the cruisers Helena, Salt Lake City, and Boise, and the destroyers Farenholt, Duncan, Laffey, Buchanan, and McCalla, practically bumped into the oncoming Japanese northwest of Cape Esperance. Scott’s force succeeded in “capping the ‘T’ ” of Goto’s little armada and immediately sank a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer and set a second cruiser afire. Within the hour, the Americans severely damaged the third cruiser, Goto’s flagship Aoba, as it fled north up the slot.
The Americans weren’t completely unscathed. The USS Duncan, hit by both Japanese and American gunfire, sank shortly after the melee. The destroyer Farenholt and the cruiser Boise, damaged by Japanese shells, had to be taken out of action for repairs. But the attack had been turned away. Ashore, Kawaguchi cancelled his ground assault and the Marines around Henderson Field enjoyed their first night in over a month without Japanese naval gunfire or ground attacks. On the morning of 13 October their spirits were further buoyed by the arrival of a convoy from New Caledonia delivering new aircraft, food, ammunition—and, best of all, 3,200 fresh troops from the U.S. Army’s Americal Division.
Unfortunately, the respite was all too brief. That night, the new arrivals were subjected to a brutal, ninety-minute barrage from two Japanese battleships that wrecked the “Cactus Air Force” aircraft, destroyed a bomb dump, some fresh food stores, a fuel dump, and blasted holes in the Henderson Field and Fighter One runways and aprons. The damage was so severe that heavy air raids by land-based bombers from Rabaul were practically unopposed the next day. Encouraged, Goto returned with two new cruisers and did more damage.
By 15 October, there were fewer than a dozen flyable U.S. aircraft left on Guadalcanal. When Australian coast watchers reported that six Japanese transports were sneaking down the slot to deliver 4,500 troops to Kawaguchi that night, there were too few planes to mount a raid. By the morning of 16 October, when fifteen replacement Wildcats and Dauntlesses were flown in, the Seabees and Marines had patched the airfields but the Americans on Guadalcanal were once again outnumbered, scarce on ammunition, and living on half rations.
With so few fleet assets available, Nimitz knew that the only way to hold Guadalcanal was to keep the fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes based at Henderson Field and the nearby Fighter One auxiliary strip flying. That required the infantry to protect the airfields—and the constant delivery of planes, parts, bombs, ammunition, fuel, and pilots.
One of those pilots was a South Dakota farm boy named Joe Foss. He had become part of the “Cactus Air Force” on 9 October. At the ripe age of twenty-seven, Foss was one of the oldest pilots flying in the Pacific. Just four days after his arrival, he led sixteen Wildcats from Henderson Field to intercept thirty-two Japanese planes.
CAPTAIN JOE FOSS, USMC
Henderson Field
Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands
16 October 1942
1400 Hours Local
We would try to get off early. The coast watchers up the line told us how many airplanes were headed our way. And they’d give the numbers of the dive-bombers and Zeros. We had a pretty good idea about the time that they’d hit Guadalcanal.
I went up with a flight of eight Wildcats and there were two flights of eight up there—sixteen airplanes. We’d start climbing up to get altitude. I was always aiming for 25,000 feet.
Zeros were always sneaking around there. You never knew whether they came off a carrier or where they came from. They just swarmed down on us. They could gain altitude in a hurry and come back because the one thing they had was speed. Where we got our speed was to nose over at full throttle—you picked up speed with our heavier airplanes. The Wildcat weighed 8,900 pounds and the Zero weighed 5,900.
In this case, I was right in the middle of a lot of Zeros and there were Zeros off to the right. Four airplanes were off to my left.
I thought that I’d go for number one, because, old hunter that I am, in shooting down a goose or duck, if you get the leader, it sort of confuses the flock. In this case I got number one but somebody had “sprinkled” me with machine gun fire before I got there and evidently my radio went out. Well, I got this guy and swung wide, figuring that I’d get another one. But, these guys cut across and started giving me a good blast. So when I dived, that’s when pow! The son-of-a-gun hit the oil cooler, and it doesn’t take long for that engine to seize. When it did, the engine was running full throttle so that sudden stop caused by the seized engine twisted off the reduction gear and that caused a tremendous scream and vibration.
When I leveled out I went to make a right turn around the field, then I came around to land toward the sea on Fighter One. And the Zeros were blasting me as I’m slowing down. I drop the gear the last minute just before I hit the ground. I just punched the handle to release the ratchet and then the whole thing goes plowing!
The flaps didn’t work and the speed is above 140 knots. I was trying to preserve the airplane and applied as much brake as I could without going “end over appetite.”
I was just sailing on that coral runway and the end of it was coming up. I went up between the palm trees in the only row where there were no trucks or anything stored and stopped. I thought, “Well, the score’s tied right now. I got one, they got one.”
Joe Foss on LIFE magazine.
They fixed my plane and most of the others. In the four times I got shot down, three times I landed on the field. So I always liked to stay right out there between the Henderson Field and Cape Esperance and fight.
I personally shot down twenty-six planes and I had some smokers, too. Our squadron probably had as many smokers as confirmed kills. I just was happy to knock one off so he won’t be back to bother you tomorrow. After all, you’re fighting for your life. The idea was to get rid of them. I fight for keeps.
Joe Foss’s “Flying Circus” holds the record of 208 aerial victories—a feat that is unlikely to ever be broken. He personally achieved twenty-six kills and tied Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I record. Foss was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his achievements at Guadalcanal.
1ST MARINE DIVISION FORWARD PERIMETER
BLOODY RIDGE, GUADALCANAL
26 OCTOBER 1942
2230 HOURS LOCAL
On 18 October, Nimitz flew to Noumea to see Admiral Ghormley and learned that his deputy—though responsible for the Guadalcanal campaign—had never gotten within 1,000 miles of the battle. Dissatisfied with Ghormley’s explanations for not doing more to curtail the Tokyo Express or providing sufficient support for Vandegrift, Nimitz replaced his friend with a man who had a reputation for “going into harm’s way”—Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.
“The Bull,” as the Marines and sailors called him behind his back, flew immediately to Henderson Field to meet with General Vandegrift. The Marine commander was blunt, telling Halsey that his Marines could hold Henderson Field, but that the Navy wasn’t doing enough to support them.
Stung by those straightforward words, Halsey promised Vandegrift that from now on he would get what he needed from the Navy. Before leaving Henderson Field, he decorated more than fifty of Vandegrift’s Marines.
But the Bull didn’t stop at handing out medals. When he returned to Noumea, the code-breakers at Station Hypo informed him that Yamamoto was planning a major Combined Fleet operation to support another Imperial Army assault on the Guadalcanal airfields. Halsey directed the battleship Washington and its escorts to step up patrols north of Guadalcanal to interdict the Tokyo Express. He also ordered Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid to take the Hornet and the hastily repaired Enterprise and head northeast of Guadalcanal to intercept a Japanese carrier-battleship fleet headed south from Truk.
On the island, the Marines prepared for the onslaught. On the rainy night of 25 October, a platoon led by Platoon Sergeant Mitch Paige was sent to cover a part of the perimeter on Bloody Ridge. Paige’s platoon consisted of just thirty-three men manning a line of water-cooled machine guns. He had no other troops because so many Marines from his battalion were tied up defending the line at the mouth of the Matanikou River or in sickbay, suffering from wounds, malaria, or other tropical diseases.
Though Sergeant Paige couldn’t know it as he put his men in position, General Kawaguchi had more than 2,500 of his troops hiding below in the rain-soaked jungle, preparing to overrun the airfield closer than 1,000 yards away.
SERGEANT MITCH PAIGE, USMC
Second Battle of Bloody Ridge, Guadalcanal
25 October 1942
2230 Hours Local
Every weapon that the Marines landed with on Guadalcanal in August 1942 was valuable, even if they were World War I surplus. Most had a 1903 Springfield five-round bolt-action rifle. But I felt that I probably had the best machine gun platoon in the Marine Corps.
Everyone in my platoon could take apart, field strip, and put together a water-cooled machine gun, a .30-caliber light machine gun, a 1903 Springfield rifle, and a 1911-model .45-caliber pistol.
By 25 October we had about 25,000 Marines, soldiers, and sailors on Guadalcanal. And the Japanese had about the same. On the island, these people were fighting for the little airstrip called Henderson Field. Every platoon leader was called down to Marine headquarters and the word I got was, “Sergeant Paige, this is all the ammo we have for your machine guns. And this is all the C-rations.”
We were on the west side of the Bloody Ridge perimeter, on a finger that sloped down into Japanese territory. Twenty-four hours a day something was going on somewhere along that perimeter. As we moved into position it was raining and we were under artillery fire. Major Connelley came to my platoon and said, “Mitch, I want you to take your machine gun platoon to the ridge up there.”
My platoon was sent to hold the high ground for the entire division. I told ’em, “Look, we’re going to fight this thing till we whip every one of them. There’s nobody in the world that can beat this platoon. Nobody! You’re the best machine gunners in the world.”
We had eight water-cooled and eight light machine guns. We had worked on them to where we’d built up the rate of fire from 550 rounds a minute to 1,300 rounds a minute.
This water-cooled machine gun sits on a fifty-one-pound steel tripod. Now the gun itself weighs forty-two pounds, plus seven pints of water. And each ammo belt is twenty-two pounds. This is a lot of weight.
Every one of our machine guns were 1917 or 1918 model A-1 machine guns. All of our light machine guns were .30-calibers and air-cooled. These were used as a backup weapon for the water-cooled guns.
You could stack fifteen sandbags on the water-cooled guns, and it would still vibrate a little bit.
Marines would crawl and control the day, and the Japanese would do everything they could to control the night. Every man knew he had to kill or be killed. The Japs were battle hardened. They’d been fighting in China for almost ten years. Many of them were Mongolians over six feet tall, and weighing over 200 pounds.
And I reminded my men, “They love to run bayonets through you first and then shoot you.”
I lined up my machine guns as quietly as I could and warned the men that they couldn’t have anything rattling. “If there’s anything rattling, you wrap it with something. Don’t let ’em hear the machine guns, setting the gun on the tripod—nothing, you’re going to have to be very quiet.”
I crawled from man to man and encouraged them. I told them, “Major Connelley says if there’s going to be an attack, they’re not going to attack G Company. You can expect an attack here.”
And I said, “When they come at our line, don’t fire because if you fire too soon they’ll pull back and wait, let you expend all your ammunition, and then charge when you run out. But when they start their attack, and they hit our line, they’re committed. They’re not going to turn around and run back.”
There was a Jap patrol right within twenty yards of us. We didn’t want to give away the machine guns’ position so we threw hand grenades. We heard all this screaming and hollering and figured we got about eighteen or nineteen of ’em with the hand grenades.
I always carried a long line with me, rolled up in a bag. And I had some empty C-ration cans that were blackened in the fire. I tied ’em just ten feet in front of my whole line of guns. I put one empty .30-caliber cartridge in each one of ’em—as a noise-making trip wire. They’d have to go through me first to get to Henderson Field.
Suddenly flares lit up and we saw nothing but bayonets coming at us. They would scream “Banzai!” and “Blood for the Emperor!” It was horrible.
Meanwhile mortars are going off, and 105s that they were firing over us into the jungle. Soon, they were coming up, elbow to elbow. When we first heard those trip wire cans, I screamed out, “Fire, fire, fire! All machine guns fire!”
They hit my line and dove right into the guns and we just literally wiped out a whole batch of them, right there. They were scattered all over the place, and I was tripping over them. I recall vividly one of ’em impaling Sam Liepardt—ran a bayonet right through him—on their first banzai assault.
I had a .45-caliber pistol, which I fired until it was empty. As I threw it down, I saw this bayonet coming towards me, aimed for my neck. And all I had left was my K-bar [knife]. I reached for it and stuck my other hand out, and his bayonet went right through my hand, and just split everything—my finger and all. Everything happened so fast and he lost his balance. I did too, but I got my K-bar and put it in his left side.
So then I took off down the line, to see how the rest of the platoon was holding up. As I saw Liepardt, I knew he was dead. I ran over to the next gun just as Charlie Locke was killed by a Jap gunner who fired point-blank and hit him. Charlie was hit right in the front as this guy splattered him with his submachine gun. Blood was flying all over the place. I was just covered with blood, and I learned later that one of his bullets went through my pistol belt, and through my side, where it took a chunk out.
Men were trying to come up with ammunition, crawling up from George Company. Fox Company was taking casualties. I sent two men back there to tell them, “Hold the line, but don’t shoot straight ahead because you’ll be killing us!”
Scarp and Pulawski from my platoon were both killed, and there were hundreds of enemy soldiers coming up and charging over the hill. You just couldn’t kill them fast enough.
Gaston was down, and this Jap was whacking at him with his samurai sword. Gaston’s a big Marine, about 210 pounds. With his foot that wasn’t being whacked on, he kicked the Japanese under his chin, broke his neck, and killed him.
I was literally walking into some of these Japanese, and they were bumping into me. I thought they’d overrun us.
Our entire position would soon be isolated, and they could just knock off and annihilate the entire division. They stopped right on the crest of the hill, and began going down toward Connelley.
I grabbed a gun from George Company and it was just about the first good break of my day. I just sprayed that whole area, and all these guys never knew what hit them. The next morning, Connelley and I looked at them; they had holes in the back of their heads, in their backs, the soles of their feet, and every Japanese was dead.
I don’t know how many attacks there were, it just seemed like it was constant. There was wave after wave. And we’re fighting and shooting. I was running from gun to gun and the first thing I knew, nobody was on the guns. I was the only one alive on the guns.
And at that precise moment, up from the jungle, about ten yards away from the edge of our perimeter, I saw a place where somebody could crawl up and fire. If they got up that close, we could knock them off with either hand grenades or swing a gun over that way. But when I look again, there’s a Japanese with a light machine gun there. He’d plunked his gun down to my left. I grabbed hold of one of our machine guns, and there was no ammunition in it. And this guy is sitting there, aiming at my head. He’s ready to pull the trigger.
But when I looked down, somebody had brought some more ammo up so I reached down, picked up a belt of ammunition, and fed the 250 rounds into the gun. I pulled the cover down, pulled the cocking handle twice to lock and load the gun. Then all I had to do was put my finger on the trigger.
But while I was loading, a Jap gunner has me in his sights from my left, and he’s got me cold. Before I could swing my gun around he fired all thirty rounds from his light machine gun at me and missed. I could feel the warmth of the bullets going past. I immediately fired one burst, and he was gone.
I got ready to go down the hill and a guy jumps up, an officer. He had his revolver out, and I ran toward him, bouncing and running down the hill, firing. He and sixteen or seventeen guys came out of the kuni grass, and with one big burst, I just mowed them down. The officer, firing at me, hit my helmet twice. He threw his revolver down and reached for his samurai sword, and as he started to pull it out, I was on top of him. I gave him a burst, and later, I thought, “That’s exactly what poor Charlie Locke got.”
The hand-to-hand combat lasted probably four or five hours. I looked around, and nobody was moving. And it was as quiet as a cemetery. All our machine guns were still hot—absolutely red hot and steaming. But they were still able to fire. They’d fired beautifully, with no stoppages.
No writer has ever written about it because nobody knows anything about it except my platoon, but we were the first and closest to the enemy, and we killed over 1,000 Japanese that night.
A few nights later I watched five Jap ships come in. They were going to land their troops right near my platoon on the beach, fourteen miles inside enemy territory.
They started down the beach but something had told me to put my machine guns on the beach, in an echelon, instead of lining up four guns. When they hit the surf, we were supposed to kill them all as they came ashore.
I told my platoon, “We’re here, and we’re going to hold this ground. I know our machine guns are going to work well. We’ve got the best weapons in the world.”
Meanwhile, “Chesty” Puller’s outfit had 800 Marines on his line. Nimitz had sent us 1,400 men of the Army’s 164th Infantry Division. They did a fabulous job.
When it was all over the colonel came through and said, “Sergeant Paige, you’re now Lieutenant Paige.”
Mitch Paige never mentioned it, but one of the decorations he received for the action that night was the Purple Heart. The other was the Congressional Medal of Honor.
NORTHEAST OF SANTA CRUZ ISLAND
NEAR 165° LATITUDE, SOUTH PACIFIC
26 OCTOBER 1942
2130 HOURS LOCAL
A few hours after Mitch Paige and his desperately outnumbered Marines had prevailed in fighting for their lives to hold Bloody Ridge, Admiral Kinkaid and the sailors and airmen of the Enterprise and Hornet battle groups found themselves engaged in a battle of their own—with about the same odds. Admiral Nobutake Kondo had departed Truk with an armada of four aircraft carriers, five battleships, fourteen cruisers, and forty-four destroyers, intending to support General Kawaguchi’s ground offensive.
Admiral Thomas Kinkaid commanded the USS Enterprise task force and later commanded MacArthur’s 7th Fleet.
But he arrived too late. At about 0300 on the morning of 26 October, a PBY out of Espiritu Santo detected Kondo’s carriers shortly after he had turned north after receiving word that Kawaguchi’s ground attack had failed.
Halsey, hearing the patrol plane’s report and looking at his plotting board in Noumea, sent a three-word “flash” precedence message to Kinkaid: “ATTACK. REPEAT—ATTACK.”
At dawn on 26 October, aircraft from the Enterprise found Kondo’s fleet northeast of the Santa Cruz Islands and promptly holed the flight deck of the light carrier Zuiho. But the Japanese counter-attacked immediately, pounding Hornet with bombs and torpedoes, leaving the carrier dead in the water, afire and listing.
By midday the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands was over. U.S. bomb and torpedo attacks had crippled the heavy cruiser Chikuma and seriously damaged the carrier Shokaku. The American pilots and anti-aircraft gunners—particularly those on the battleship South Dakota—had killed 102 of Kondo’s airmen. But a Japanese sub managed to slam a torpedo into the side of the destroyer Porter, and the final air raid of the engagement had put three bombs into the flight deck of the Enterprise.
The Porter had to be scuttled and Hornet went down after dark—joining the remains of seventy-four U.S. Navy pilots who had been downed in the fight. As the Enterprise and her escorts limped back to the south as Kondo retired toward Truk, for the first time since the war began, the U.S. Navy had no operational carriers in the Pacific Ocean.
NAVAL BATTLE OF GUADALCANAL
NEAR GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS
13 NOVEMBER 1942
2330 HOURS LOCAL
The stunning Japanese losses ashore on Guadalcanal—roughly ten killed for every American casualty—did nothing to diminish Tokyo’s insistence that the island be recaptured. By 12 November the Tokyo Express had brought Kawaguchi’s ground forces up to nearly 30,000 troops—more than the Americans had ashore. The Japanese continued their persistent probes and contact patrols, creating casualties on both sides every day and night. But they never again mounted another major ground offensive against the airfields.
At sea, however, it was a different story. For the remainder of October and up through the first days of November, the Tokyo Express continued an established pattern of nighttime deliveries of troops and supplies—then blasting away with naval guns at the U.S. Marines and Army troops ashore—before scooting back up the slot to safety. But on 5 November, Station Hypo code-breakers deciphered a lengthy message ordering another major attack. Cruisers, carriers, battleships, and eleven transports escorted by an equal number of destroyers were directed to deliver 13,500 fresh Japanese troops to Kawaguchi.
After seeing this intelligence, Nimitz called for help. Bombers and fighters were flown out from Hawaii. A regiment of Marines from the 2nd Marine Division and 6,000 more soldiers from the Americal Division recently arrived from the U.S. were rushed to shore up Vandegrift’s defenses. Repairs to the Enterprise were hastily completed and she was dispatched with the battleships Washington and South Dakota in company to seek out and destroy the enemy counter-invasion force.
On the afternoon of 12 November, a hastily assembled U.S. cruiserdestroyer force, designated as Task Force 65 and commanded by Rear Admiral Dan Callaghan, took up station at the southern end of the slot to intercept the Japanese Combined Fleet. Task Force 65 consisted of two heavy cruisers: the USS San Francisco (Callaghan’s flagship, damaged when a Japanese pilot crashed his flaming plane into her) and USS Portland; three light cruisers: Atlanta (Admiral Scott’s flagship), Helena, and Juneau; and eight destroyers: Barton, Monssen, O’Bannon, Cushing, Laffey, Sterett, Aaron Ward, and Fletcher—thirteen ships in all. They were no match for the two battleships, heavy cruiser, and fourteen destroyers under the command of Admiral Hiroaki Abe.
It was clear but moonless at 0200 on 13 November when the two forces met at close range in the waters between Guadalcanal and Savo Island. In a furious thirty-minute melee, which the Marines watched from ashore, both Admirals Callaghan and Scott were killed, four American destroyers were sunk, and the cruiser Atlanta was set afire from bow to stern and had to be scuttled. The cruiser Portland and another U.S. destroyer were left dead in the water and the cruiser Juneau, struck by a torpedo, was forced to retire to the south.
But the Japanese didn’t fare that well, either. Two of Abe’s destroyers, Akatsuki and Yudachi, were sunk outright and three more of his destroyers were seriously damaged. And his flagship, the battleship Hiei, was so badly damaged that she became a crippled, defenseless target for bombers from Henderson Field, who sent her to the bottom.
By dawn of 13 November, the remnants of Abe’s force were fleeing north, pursued by aircraft from Henderson Field and B-17s from Espiritu Santo. The violent encounter might have escaped notice in the U.S. press but for the fate of the Juneau. As the damaged heavy cruiser limped south thorough Ironbottom Sound, she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and went to the bottom with more than 700 aboard—including the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa. They had all enlisted in December 1941 to avenge the death of their friend Bill Ball, who was killed at Pearl Harbor.
The five Sullivan brothers killed in the sinking of the Juneau.
Seaman Frank Holmgren was a nineteen-year-old captain’s orderly aboard the Juneau and was with his high school buddy Charlie Hayes when the Japanese torpedo hit the ship’s number-one engine room.
SEAMAN SECOND CLASS
FRANK HOLMGREN, USN
Near Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands
13 November 1942
0330 Hours Local
In November, we were assigned to a group that was going to take more Marines and supplies to Guadalcanal. Around one o’clock in the morning I could hear this boom, boom, boom. I thought they were planes dropping bombs. I had no idea that the Jap fleet was coming in. And here we are, right in the middle of them.
I got to my station and in five minutes or so we were hit in the number-one fire room. And the firemen were trying to keep the bulkhead from collapsing and trying to get men out of there. Then all the lights went out. I’m not a very good swimmer. I was scared to death.
I got up to the second deck and I didn’t know until we got topside that we were really in among the ships of the Jap fleet. And I could see they were still firing.
The San Francisco got hit at the stern, right through the fantail. They must have been right in the middle of it, too. We saw what was left of the thirteen ships that went in, and I remember seeing the Helena. The Portland was hurt. And the San Francisco. I didn’t even see the destroyers because they were out. After we got hit I was thinking that we’d have to go back to Pearl Harbor for repairs. While Charlie and I were sitting there, we noticed three life rafts tied down to the deck. So since we’d been hit and in bad shape and didn’t want to “go down with the ship,” we untied them.
It was just about then, when everything seemed quiet, that we were hit by another torpedo. The ship blew up in my face. And the next thing I know I’m in the air. When I come back down on the ship my hand hit a life jacket so I wrapped it around me, got up on my feet, and held on to a gun mount.
I looked back at the fantail and there was nothing there! And then all of a sudden I heard the roar of the ocean and I said, “I’m gonna die!”
I went down with the ship. How far down I went, I don’t know. But I thought I was dead at the time. And the next thing I know, I’m coming up out of that water. And I could see light. The life jacket was bringing me back up, and when I popped to the surface there was fuel oil, all over.
I looked around and saw some guys on a raft, so I made my way over to them. They were the three rafts that Charlie and I untied on the deck of the ship just before we were hit. They were the only rafts that got off the ship.
I remember someone saying, “The ships are leaving us!”
They kept on going; they didn’t come back and pick us up.
I think it was the second day that an Army plane came down low and dropped a rubber raft but no supplies. All the guys were really hurt badly and passing out. I remember somebody taking the dog tags off of someone before they rolled him off into the ocean. The sharks came then and after they got one, they went after more. People were dying, left and right.
As the days went by, we didn’t have anything to eat and we had sharks all around us. Every so often it would rain, so we’d get some water to drink. But some of the guys were going out of their heads from drinking salt water. Others went out of their heads and jumped off the raft even though the sharks were waiting for them.
On the fourth day somebody else jumped off, and as he did I saw a shark take him. That left just five of us.
That afternoon things were getting bad. Then we heard this seaplane coming in. The pilot landed in the water and they finally pulled us in. The first thing I said to the pilot was, “Did you find those cork nets out there?” I knew my buddy Charlie Hayes was on one, but he said no. That’s how I learned Charlie never made it. That’s when I passed out.
They took us back to Guadalcanal. How many survivors? After that torpedo hit it was seventy-five, or maybe a hundred. Now there were just five of us.
I just had confidence that I was gonna make it.
NAVAL BATTLE OF GUADALCANAL
NEAR GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS
14 NOVEMBER 1942
2330 HOURS LOCAL
While Frank Holmgren was floating in the waters of Ironbottom Sound awaiting rescue, thousands of his countrymen were fighting to save Guadalcanal.
In the early morning hours of 14 November, Admiral Mikawa’s bombardment force cruisers arrived offshore and proceeded to pound the airfield and the Marine positions around it. At dawn, “Cactus Air Force” planes and bombers from Enterprise found Mikawa’s cruisers, sinking one and damaging three others. Then U.S. planes pounced on Tanaka’s troop transports, sending seven to the bottom, carrying more than 7,000 Japanese soldiers with them.
While U.S. aircraft were pounding Tanaka’s transports and escorts, Halsey ordered the battleships South Dakota and Washington to detach from Enterprise and proceed at flank speed to intercept a new threat: Admiral Nobutake Kondo was heading back into the fight with the battleship Kirishima, four cruisers, and nine destroyers.
At 2315 on 14 November, the two American battlewagons, accompanied by four destroyers—all under the command of Rear Admiral Willis Lee aboard Washington—were on station south of Savo Island when Kondo’s force emerged from the radar “shadow” of Savo Island. The Japanese struck the first blow, sinking two of Lee’s destroyers with Long Lance torpedoes and so severely damaging the South Dakota with naval gunfire that she retired to the west escorted by the two surviving U.S. destroyers. Lee, aboard Washington , now faced Kondo’s entire force alone. The battleship’s crew, responding to their commander’s courageous order to open fire and close with the enemy, rose to the occasion and hit the Kirishima more than fifty times with five- and sixteen-inch radar-directed shells—all in under seven minutes.
The barrage wrecked the Japanese flagship and Kondo decided he’d had enough. He ordered the Kirishima and a disabled destroyer scuttled and quickly fled north, providing a sufficient distraction for the tenacious Tanaka to beach his four remaining, badly damaged transports on the Guadalcanal coast. There he succeeded in disembarking 2,000 surviving Imperial Army soldiers—but not their supplies—before the ships were pounded to pieces by the “Cactus Air Force.”
By the end of the three days’ battle, only 2,000 of the nearly 11,000 Japanese troops on the transport ships made it ashore, but with none of their necessities—ammunition, rations, and other supplies and equipment.
The two opposing forces withdrew and counted the costs. The Japanese had sunk eight American ships and damaged seven more. Almost 2,000 American sailors lost their lives—including 720 from the Juneau alone. Of the 725 men thrown into the sea when their ship went down, just five sailors survived.
The Americans sank five Japanese ships and damaged three others. But the loss in Japanese lives was horrific. More than 11,000 soldiers and sailors had died in the waters around Guadalcanal.
There would be one more major battle—the Battle of Tassafaronga—on 29–30 November. By then the Japanese had given up trying to retake Guadalcanal and concentrated on getting their troops off the island. They repeated their strategy of sending transports down the slot in Ironbottom Sound, but this time the eight Japanese ships were met by nine superior ships of the U.S. Navy. After the battle, each U.S. ship had sunk one Japanese ship, and the Americans suffered damage to three others.
The Japanese were on the run both physically and psychologically. Still, they eventually managed to evacuate 13,000 troops from Guadalcanal. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were left on the island to fend for themselves. Rather than surrender, they fought to the death, committed suicide, or died of starvation or disease before it all finally ended in early February 1943.
After the six-month series of battles for Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Kelly Turner was promoted to vice admiral, and Vice Admiral “Bull” Halsey was promoted to full admiral. When he put on his fourth star, Halsey credited it to the Marines and the courageous actions of Admirals Dan Callaghan and Norman Scott—both awarded posthumous Medals of Honor.
The final Japanese toll for Guadalcanal was catastrophic: 25,000 lives lost; more than two dozen ships sunk—including irreplaceable carriers and battleships—and the loss of at least 600 planes. The Japanese defeat at Guadalcanal also spelled the end of their efforts to take Port Moresby and the rest of New Guinea.
The Americans lost 1,600 lives in the land, sea, and air battles for Guadalcanal. U.S. ship and aircraft losses equaled Japan’s twenty-four ships and 600 aircraft. For those who fought on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, it was indeed a tropical hell. The grisly hand-to-hand combat would become the blueprint for action in later Pacific island battles. But Admiral Halsey best summed up the overall result of the fight: “Before Guadalcanal, the enemy advanced at his pleasure. After Guadalcanal, he retreated at ours.”