THE 1ST RAIDER BATTALION, a specially trained unit (some of the officers and sergeants had completed Mountbatten’s commando course at Inveraray, in Scotland), had borne, along with the 1st Parachute Battalion, the brunt of the fighting on Tulagi and on Gavutu and Tanambogo. They were sent over to Guadalcanal for a rest, but the word “rest” had passed out of our vocabulary.
The Raiders’ commanding officer, Col. Merritt A. Edson (“Red Mike,” as he was known to his men), was a tough, shrewd leader who had developed his initiative against desperadoes in Nicaragua. He was a deadly shot, and wore a pair of pearl-handled revolvers. Another accomplished soldier was Edson’s executive officer, Lt. Col. Samuel B. Griffith II, with whom Dick Horton and Henry Josselyn had become firm friends; we shared a shelter during a couple of air raids, and “batted the breeze” about the fighting in Tulagi and about Inveraray and Scotland.
From scouting reports by Andrew and others on 31 August, it appeared that most of the Japanese to our east were concentrated round Tasimboko. We had very little idea of their strength and dispositions, however, until two scouts, Selea and Vura, returned on 3 September from a three-day reconnaissance to that area. From their report I concluded that there were about three hundred enemy soldiers occupying strong defensive positions west of Tasimboko village. Colonels Twining and Thomas1 drew up a plan to land the Raiders at Taivu Point and come in on the Japs from the rear.
At midday on 7 September, only hours before the force was due to depart, Vouza brought information that there were far more troops at Tasimboko than we had thought. I advised Buckley that there had been a sudden increase in the size of the garrison, and Edson might be facing two to three thousand well-armed Japanese. The D-2 staff, however, while conceding some increase in strength, had a low opinion of the enemy’s combat readiness, and the operation proceeded as planned. That evening the Raiders embarked in two destroyer transports and two patrol craft for the attack on Tasimboko. With them, over from Tulagi, was Dick Horton, who knew the area well. Selea and Olorere went along as guides, but I doubted the usefulness of scouts for amphibious operations, apart from locating the landing area. Vouza, who loved a scrap, had talked his way into going. I insisted that he not go ashore.
Vouza returned on one of the APDs late the next day. He had guided them into Taivu but had stayed on board. The Raiders, enjoying both naval and air support, had surprised the rear guard of a large enemy force and destroyed a massive quantity of equipment, ammunition, and stores, which were stacked as if the Japanese had just arrived. Though most of their troops had already moved off into the bush, Edson estimated that no fewer than four thousand men had very recently been at Tasimboko, and he came away with a healthy respect for the value of my scouts’ intelligence. As Marines could not be spared, I sent Deke and a scouting party to destroy the rest of the Japs’ equipment.
Aerial photographs had revealed that division headquarters, with all the tracks leading to it, stuck out like a sore thumb. We had taken a lot of casualties there, from both bombing and shelling, and on 9 September General Vandegrift ordered a move of his command post to a razor-backed hill—actually one spur of a long grassy ridge—about a mile south of Henderson Field. The lower slopes of the hill had convenient clumps of large trees, under which the division’s various staff sections could be hidden.
Looking back on it, this was a most inopportune time to move, as the Japanese obviously were preparing for something big. My scouts had reported that an enemy force of five thousand men was moving through the jungle, south to southwest from Tetere, in an arc that would leave it in a commanding position in the hills south of the airfield. These were the troops Edson had missed at Tasimboko. To the west, the Matanikau line was growing more active, and forces of unknown size had landed in Rhoades’s area.
For three or four days it was absolute hell, digging in at the new command post by day and then returning to the old area for the night. We were all exhausted when we started. I did not like the new site very much: it was far less accessible for my scouts, and the forward (southern) slope did not seem well protected. We were so busy with operations that I took the risk and kept as many scouts as possible at D-2 to get our “Ops” dugout completed. The one member of the section who had any pretensions toward either carpentry or engineering was a Marine named Barr, a strong, silent woodsman. He and the scouts worked day and night with a hammer, a Japanese saw, and a few picks and crowbars. There wasn’t a flat piece of ground anywhere, and a floor had to be leveled for our rickety old marquee; at least it was well hidden by trees. In a morning bombing raid on 11 September the Japs laid a stick right on the ridge, and nearly scuppered the road to the new CP. The nighttime shelling—it sounded like cruisers—started up again; this time, it seemed, they were trying to plaster the whole area, and the new command post in particular. I wondered why.
The relocation of division headquarters was accompanied by a move of Edson’s men to the southern part of the ridge. Ostensibly this was to provide them a rest area, for they had not had a night off since the August landings and were completely exhausted. Both his battalions2 were seriously under strength: the Raiders were down to about three hundred, the Parachutists even fewer, and many of those who were left had malaria or stomach trouble. In reality, however, the move was part of defensive preparations against a Japanese attack from the south against Henderson Field.
On 12 September, with the CP in a half-finished state, the Raiders were “resting” round about us. It was an uneasy rest, and the ever-alert Edson kept sending out patrols. That night his suspicions were justified. South of the command post the Raiders’ forward positions were attacked by the Japanese; these were obviously not stragglers, but part of a well-organized force. There was a melee in the jungle on the right bank of the Lunga River, and one Raider company got almost inextricably mixed up with a Japanese force. (It took them till morning to unravel themselves and retire.) Then an enemy cruiser and three destroyers opened up, and the whole thing became pandemonium.
As if that weren’t enough, at 0800 a jeep suddenly arrived from the 5th Marines down at Kukum with Reverend Stibbard and half a dozen native pupils, who had endured a seven-day bush walk after the enemy had taken over his mission station at Maravovo. He was in a dreadful state, as they had neither eaten nor slept for three or four days and two of his lads had been shot by the Japanese en route. Rowley, his offsider, with whom Stibbard had temporarily separated, arrived with five other boys two hours later; I could hardly recognize him, with his shrunken face and his eyes popping out of his head. All I could do was give them six feet of floor space and tell them to lie down and stay down.
After that, everything began to happen very quickly. It looked as if we were the mugs again. Edson, well up with the game and knowing we could not form a continuous defensive line, had his chaps digging strong points all afternoon; the remains of the Parachute Battalion were committed on his left, almost in the D-2 section. At 1600 a company of Pioneers, apparently the only screen to the southwest between us and the river, withdrew through the CP before a large enemy force, believed to be at least twenty-five hundred strong, that was advancing to the attack.
The ridge on which the command post was being erected extended southeast about fourteen hundred yards before dropping steeply into the jungle. From the battle that ensued, it was given various names, but I always remember it as Raiders’ Ridge. It was impossibly steep for normal defense, and quite out of the question for maneuver. The headquarters camp commandant, Colonel Gannon,3 handed out more weapons to us chair-borne types and ordered all my scouts into the command post defense line. This was indeed an honor, but it signified that the situation was extremely grave. Gloom was rampant, and we knew we were in for a dirty night.
D-2 was buzzing with messages, but everyone, when he had a chance, sneaked down to the Ops dugout for a little determined digging. The Raiders’ line was less than two hundred yards from us, and we were getting the Japanese “overs.” My post, which I shared with a paratroop captain, was just below the Ops dugout, where the land fell steeply; a half dozen scouts held the line in the jungle at the foot of the hill, covering a gap and trying to prevent infiltrators. Earlier that day, our artillery, which had been emplaced on the Matanikau front, had been hastily pulled up, and soon the registration shots were whistling directly over our heads. The shells only just cleared the treetops; one, coming in a bit too low, blasted off the top of a tree just above the scouts and about level with our dugout. They had a narrow escape. The sky was full of tracers, and mortar explosions lit up the trees.
Our line fell back until it was just forward of the command post. Edson, lying on his belly only ten yards behind the line of attack, directed the whole thing. We heard the Japs yelling as they charged the Raiders with bayonets. It was a hell of a night.
Dawn broke to find the forest, our beautiful cover, a mass of leafless skeletons, mere firewood. A sigh of relief went up that we had withstood all that the Japanese had thrown at us throughout the night, but we had not reckoned with the snipers who had sneaked into our lines, and all that morning we had to operate on our bellies as bullets went whistling above. A loud bang revealed a sniper caught in what was to be General Vandegrift’s new closet.
Several attempts were made to get a scratch breakfast to the men, but every time a few of them collected to pick it up somebody got winged by a sniper secreted in a thick glade right inside our position. My lads searched all day, and eventually got him.
There were several suicide efforts. Near D-1 (Administration and Personnel), a Japanese officer dashed out in the clear morning light and cut a sleeping Marine to ribbons with his sword before a Marine officer dispatched him. Another enemy soldier drew the attention of Marine Gunner Sheffield Banta, who was calmly typing. As calmly, Banta pulled out his pistol, shot the Jap dead, and, so the story had it, went on with his work.
It was a bit too hot for some of the newsmen, who were anxiously inquiring when the next boat would leave. A garrulous correspondent, whose name I did not get, arrived off a plane, saying that he had come all the way from London to get a story. I told him he had got here just in time. A bullet whanged past, and he only just got his head down. As he rammed his feet in my face, I discovered that he was wearing purple pajamas under his khakis. We found out nothing further about him, however, as he disappeared in the direction of the airfield and was not seen again!
By 1530 the last sign of resistance was over. We had lost an awful lot of men. Raiders and paratroopers sat around with hunched shoulders, faces gray and drawn, far too tired to speak. They were whacked to a standstill, and could not have lasted much longer. A few lucky ones read their mail, which had come the previous day. The slope at the south end of the ridge was a ghastly mess: the Japanese had charged time and again, only to be repulsed, and there were dozens of them lying there in grotesque attitudes in death. There were Marines there too.
Our artillery had arrived in the nick of time, for the Japs had a considerable number of mountain guns, and they were just about to open fire when our first salvo landed on their batteries. We were very lucky. Their headquarters, which was hit early on, had been hurriedly evacuated, yielding up a rich haul of code books and other important information. It was evident that we had been attacked by almost a whole brigade. They had marched at least twenty miles to the ridge, manhandling their guns.
Later we found out that the force landed at Tasimboko had been a strongly reinforced brigade of about five thousand men, commanded by a General Kawaguchi.4 While we were busy on the ridge, one of their battalions attacked the strongly entrenched 1st Marines on the Tenaru, and was badly mauled. A sortie against the 5th Marines on the western perimeter fared no better. The attempt to attack us on three sides at once had narrowly failed.
The next three or four days were almost as bad as the battle, especially for us at D-2. There was no time to recover and no respite, as we were hard at work analyzing all the information and moving the CP back to our old spot. This time we dug in properly, but we still worked at Raiders’ Ridge and then trudged down the hill to sleep. Everyone was desperately hungry, as the cooks had been continuously on the move, and the occasional cup of coffee and some crackers were about all we could get. The naval shelling continued, but we were so tired that we turned over and went to sleep in spite of it. “Too tired to write,” I scribbled in my diary on 15 September. It was a dangerous state in which to be.
We were in very poor condition. Expected reinforcements could not get in, and trouble sought us out at every turn. As if fighting for our own survival wasn’t bad enough, signals poured in asking for assistance all round. Rhoades was in dire distress, but as the western end of Guadalcanal seemed to be filling up with Japs it was impossible to assist him. There was no news of the Ruavatu missionaries, and the mob at Gold Ridge was hungry again!
At last, on 18 September, the 7th Marines managed to sneak in, bringing with them a good whack of supplies. We were terribly excited, and licked our chops at the prospect of a square meal. After getting Stibbard safely away to Vila on the convoy (Rowley and the pupils would be sent to Bishop Baddeley on Malaita), I returned from the beach, only to find two more people to look after. One was Butcher Johnstone, last seen going south in the Ruana; the other was John Mather. Mather, a great big, cheerful chap who had been a planter in the islands, had been working with the Australian forces. They were to report to Colonel Buckley, but were not quite sure what they were supposed to do. Johnno was in good form: when we got back to the old command post to sleep, he started looking a bit shifty and, fumbling in his pocket, whispered that he was in a dilemma. He had half a bottle of whiskey with him, but did not know what to do with it, as it would not suffice to give all the D-2 officers a drink! After a whispered conference in the dark, he sidled up to the colonel and gave him a good slug; his duty done, we then sneaked off toward the latrines and had a good crack at what was left. It was my first drink of the real McCoy, and very good for morale!
For the next few days I didn’t know whether I was on my head or my feet. There were countless different matters to deal with, and the operational situation got no better. The 7th Marines, who had taken over Raiders’ Ridge, were having sleepless nights with snipers and parties of stragglers. We also seemed to have drifted into intermittent action with the Japanese in the Matanikau area; it appeared to be a deadlock, for they held the commanding heights across the river and none of the Marine units could get across without casualties. This situation involved me in the problem of how to get an attacking force round the enemy’s landward flank. Unfortunately, most of the land to be traversed was trackless virgin bush, and very few scouts knew anything about it.
Then Eroni arrived. He had sneaked through the fracas in his tiny launch with Capt. Marion Carl, a Grumman pilot, as passenger. Carl, one of our leading aces, had come down in the water off Aola and been rescued by Eroni’s men. It was arranged for Eroni to take Pfc. Harry M. Adams, a Marine radio operator who had been working with Mackenzie, to Marau. There the two of them were to run another coastwatching post, with a special lookout for enemy submarines, which had begun to turn Marau into a “torpedo corner.” There was a slight holdup over Eroni’s departure, and a certain amount of soreness, as Mackenzie not only had been annoying about giving the necessary assistance (I had been so busy that I did not have stores ready for Eroni to take with him) but also had failed to get permission for Adams to go, and that rubbed Colonel Buckley the wrong way. The two men finally departed on 21 September.
Snowy Rhoades was having an awful time. With the Japanese spread all over north Guadalcanal, he had packed up and flitted to Tangarare, the more southerly Roman Catholic mission station. On the way he had run into Bishop Aubin, whose headquarters at Visale had been occupied by the enemy. The Japs had elbowed the missionaries out of the way and forced them to seek refuge in the bush. In accordance with the bishop’s neutrality policy, the Catholics had not hidden any stores, and the Japanese had smartly confiscated everything. As a result the bishop had nearly died from dysentery, and his whole party was in a very weak state.
Another little job I had to attend to was to lecture the 7th Marines the following evening. Colonel Buckley had asked me to go and chat with their colonel about night tactics and noises, as his men were spooked by opossums in the trees—they sounded like snipers—and their jittery shooting kept other units tense too. When I arrived, I was alarmed to find all the officers and some of the NCOs drawn up on a grassy bank under the trees. Though quite unprepared—for a few moments I was bereft of speech—I managed to say something apposite and ended by making them laugh. They kept asking questions for another hour. I hope it did them some good.
The air boys were having a great time round the north end of Guadalcanal, bombing and strafing landing craft and dumps of supplies. The Japanese were definitely building up in that area, and we could not stop them. There was even an enemy party on the north end of Malaita; I helped John Mather to make up a plan for attacking it that would give Bengough a chance to participate.
We had at last stopped moving backward and forward, and had settled at the old command post. As there had been no air raids all day, John and I did the work lying on our stomachs in a slight depression on top of the coral ridge above D-2. This, much to his embarrassment, had been christened “Mather’s Hole.” On the second day after he arrived, the air raid warning went and John, in his breezy way, sauntered up to the top of the ridge and said, “I think I’ll have a dekko at what goes on from here.” “No, you bloody well don’t,” I replied, “you jolly well come down here.” After some rude banter, Mather eventually climbed down and joined us below ground. During the raid, bombs fell all round, and after it was over we had the greatest pleasure in showing him the hole that had been made by a light antipersonnel bomb on exactly the spot he had chosen! He stood and looked at it for about ten minutes, his mouth open in shocked amazement.
On 23 September, Colonel Puller and his battalion5 set off to try to outflank the Japanese at Matanikau. Puller, a fellow pipe smoker, naturally appealed to me. He was a tough old soldier, and if anyone could get round the Japs he was the man. Peli went with them, and later Selea went out with the Raiders. The scouts were getting pretty thin on the ground, as they were attached to operations on both our eastern and our western sides, and there was still all the normal coverage to do outside the perimeter.
Dick Mangrum, now a lieutenant colonel, called to see us that afternoon, as there was no alert and his planes did not have to scatter. He brought with him a senior officer, Col. Charles L. Fike, the executive officer of MAG-23 and Mangrum’s SBD wing commander. The colonel appeared greatly interested in the Solomon Islanders. One of his many questions unintentionally raised a laugh. He asked me whether they had been able to write before the advent of the white man; I replied, quite unwittingly, that they could not have done so as they had no paper. Colonel Buckley and the D-2 watch nearly burst themselves laughing! “He’s got you there, colonel,” they said, and I am certain that our guest was never quite sure whether I had pulled his leg or not.
Mangrum told us the air boss, General Geiger,6 was tearing out his hair over a new dive-bombing squadron. The squadron had attacked the enemy’s nightly destroyer resupply runs off Cape Esperance, but had not much to show for it. When the destroyers returned on 24 September, the SBDs once more attacked, again with little results, and the old brigadier, shaking in his camp chair with rage, told the pilots to keep going out until they had sunk something! They went at it again and again, badly damaging two ships and forcing the others to turn back from their destination. For a couple of days it was relatively quiet, and Art Claffey and I went over to Henderson Field to return Mangrum’s visit. By the side of the runway the Japs had left a small hillock, on top of which they had erected a wooden shack with a traditional-style roof. This, duly christened “the Pagoda” by the marines, became “Air Ops.” Beside it was the radar van, which, owing to its unfortunate habit of warning us of a raid ten minutes after it occurred, had given rise to the expression “Go on, someone, buy the radar boys a cream puff.” They had a shaky bamboo mast that could just be seen from D-2. When enemy planes were in the area, they hauled up a Japanese flag, and it was “Condition Yellow.” When you saw someone rush out, haul down the red and white, and, if he had time, haul up the black flag, it would be “Condition Red,” which meant that planes were overhead. (Incidentally, if you weren’t a damned fool you were underground by now anyhow, having seen them overhead yourself!) It was nice to see so many aircraft scattered round the strip. I was especially interested in the torpedo bombers: they were called Avengers, but, owing to their shape and the fact that they carried their torpedoes inside the plane, some wag had described them as pregnant dormice!
For the next two weeks there was a lull in the land fighting east of the Matanikau, as organized enemy units had been either exterminated or thrown back in considerable disorder. Our job, therefore, was to repel boarders and stop the Japs from landing more fighting units on the island. This was not so easy, as they had temporarily abandoned the remains of Kawaguchi’s force to the east and were busy consolidating to the west and north. We could keep the seas covered with our planes during the day, but the Japanese had many methods of sneaking troops in during the night.
They had landing craft bases hidden at different points from Bougainville down to Guadalcanal. On the lines of “grandmother’s footsteps,” their barges would pop out as soon as it was dark and make one stage farther south along the sound, whose waters became known as “the Slot.” Kennedy and Kuper were kept busy trying to locate these boat stages. The Japs also used fast destroyers and even cruisers to sweep close in to shore and land their troops, who were cast over the side, together with sealed drums full of rice, and left to swim ashore. This sort of thing was difficult to detect. Our naval strength was not such that we could risk battles with this nightly service, known by us all as the “Tokyo Express,” and consequently we were wide open to being shelled. The enemy warships would drop their human cargo near Cape Esperance, steam down at high speed, throw a couple of salvoes at us, and disappear again, out of range of our dawn patrol.
The Japs to the east were mostly wandering about in search of food, which worried the islanders. In order to preserve their sense of martial superiority, they would attack us at night; the uncertainty of their activities kept the Marines, in large numbers, on the alert twenty-four hours round the clock.
None of us got very much rest, but we were able to get some semblance of order restored at D-2. We actually got a new tent with a raised wooden floor made of Japanese bed boards, and were still busy digging a proper dugout for the duty crew. Each morning everyone would start working on it, but as the day wore on Marines and scouts would gradually be drawn off for other jobs, and Tabasui, who had now become an assistant quartermaster, would be left to work on his own. He adopted the job cheerfully, and soon became clerk of the works, foreman, and labor force, all rolled into one. All the Marines used to stop by and razz him, but without him we would never have got the job done.
Mackenzie and Horton had been laboring away at a similar task. They were very proud when they finished theirs first, and the two of them dragged me out of bed to go and christen their new toy with a hell-brew made of ethyl alcohol tempered with grapefruit juice. After a death-defying jeep ride down the muddy edge of the airfield in the pitch dark without lights, we arrived safely under ground, and the honors were done. What a drink! It was lucky that “Washing Machine Charlie” was having a rest that night. I eventually got back safely to D-2 without getting lost, much to the annoyance of everyone I stumbled over in the dark!
During this lull I managed to get my scouting organization brought up to date and put on a regular pay basis. As many of the men were in other parts of the island and obviously could not be brought in, Daniel Pule did most of the hard work, writing notes to all the section leaders to get the nominal rolls completed.
My education in American slang and customs was developing with the assistance of the enlisted men at D-2. I no longer asked whether breakfast was ready, I merely said, “When’s chow?” I also found out that when it was ready the master cook would announce, “Chow is down,” not “Duff is up,” as in the British Army. The sergeant major of the Headquarters Company was a hatchet-faced Brooklyn native called Hank Moran. To start with, I couldn’t understand a word he said. When I called to find out if my scouts were being adequately fed, Moran would tell me, “We’s cookin’ wid gas, on de front boiner.” (This indicated that things were going well.) I threatened to start a “front boiner” club!
Then there were the particularly Marine expressions, linked in many cases with their great tradition. The greatest of these was “the word.” Some of the earliest Marines had continued to shoot from the maintop of John Paul Jones’s flagship long after everyone else had given up. Their excuse afterward was that no one had passed “the word.” Hence you asked what “the word” was—on reinforcements arriving, for example, or when we were going to be relieved. If it was merely the latest rumor you were inquiring about, however, or the latest figures for Japs at Tasimboko, you said, “What’s the scuttlebutt?” or “What’s the dope?” It probably originated at “the head,” the Marine term for latrine. Following the nautical vein, senior officers would wave you into their bell tent from the mud outside with “Happy to have you aboard, sir!”
Someone would make a naive inquiry such as, “You Marines serve on board ship, don’t you?” The reply would be, “Hell, yes!” Or, if someone asked them if they had anything to do with the Army, the reply would be, “Them dogfaces? Hell, no!” The way they said it exhibited their pride in their Corps; it had bags of expression! We also had the more local forms of American to deal with. There was the boy from “Okie Finokie” (Okefenokee), who told me, in his Elizabethan drawl, that his captain “done gone went” to HQ. Then there was “Wimpy” Wendling from Kentucky, who told us all about “shilling-on-the-stump moonshine.”
During the frequent periods of waiting for attacks, we had plenty of time to “bat the breeze.” In the circle one night was Lieutenant Colonel Twining, who had taken over Operations (D-3) as Thomas had been promoted to colonel and become General Vandegrift’s chief of staff. We had been discussing the well-worn topic of colonialism in America, and had just about got the Boston Tea Party put “on a paying basis,” when Twining suddenly cut up rough. “What’s the matter, Bill?” Colonel Buckley asked. “It was our goddam tea they threw in the harbor!” Twining replied, in injured tones. On another occasion it took us some little time to convince the Wisconsin native that they grew apples in California.
My little black dog with the funny prick ears, Suinao, had been grand company in the bush; as I could not leave him behind, he had joined the Marines, and had got more or less used to military life. He would trot at my heels when we were on foot, but when I was jeep-borne he preferred to balance aggressively on the flat bonnet. As for air raids and bombardments, he soon learned to sense danger; like everyone else, when we got Kennedy’s morning message—for example, “22 Bettys, yours 1100,” meaning that twenty-two bombers would be over us in, say, twenty minutes—he would seek out the nearest tree, do his business, and be ready to go down below as soon as Condition Red was sounded! The detonations of bombs or shells used to hurt his ears, and the poor creature would sit in my lap, whimpering gently, and let me hold my hands over them. On patrol, however, he was usually the first to sense danger, and if there were Japs within two hundred yards he would pause like a pointer, his hackles would rise, and he would emit an almost soundless growl. He was a fine companion, and most of the Marines were quite prepared to put up with him. It was not long before he was christened “Sui, the jeep hound.”
Someone, in a flash of brilliance, suggested that eating fish would make up for the lack of fresh stuff in our diet. There was nothing wrong with the idea, but to catch a regular supply of fish for fifteen thousand men under front-line conditions was a major operation. I paid a visit to the beachmaster, Commander Dexter, of the Coast Guard.7 He was quite keen, and we decided to do some experimental trolling from a landing craft. It was with a certain amount of misgiving that we went down toward Matanikau three days later. I felt that we were being watched by a thousand eyes, and if the engine stopped the Japs would be only too eager to dispatch us. Fortunately, we got back all right; unfortunately, we caught nothing, because the boat was too fast and noisy and there was oil on the water from the many ships that had been sunk in the neighborhood. We decided that hand grenades thrown into the water whenever shoals of fish appeared would fill the pot much quicker. For this purpose the grenades were designated “Nobel spinners”!
The lull enabled us to get all available scouts out checking the state of the Japs to the east. After a bit we had a pretty clear picture, but it seemed that the only static lot was the party at Gorabusu. This consisted of the fifty men who had settled at Taivu Point and who, just before the marines arrived, had sailed down to Marau, where they had interrogated the Catholic fathers and brothers. After their lugger was sunk, they had walked up the coast, accompanied by my scout Laena, who was still keeping an eye on them. The party was still in radio contact with the Japanese Navy, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that they were being contacted from time to time by submarine. It was decided that they should be put out of action, together with any other small parties in the area. The troops would come from Tulagi; I was to be responsible for scouting out the details, for getting our force into contact with the Japanese, and for supplying the necessary scouts and carriers.
On Sunday, 27 September, Colonel Buckley and I were sitting outside D-2, quietly discussing the Gorabusu “do” with Colonel Arthur,8 whose Marines were slated for the job. Suddenly, the quiet of that peaceful afternoon was rudely shattered by Japanese planes, which scattered a mass of antipersonnel bombs throughout our area. We dove for our new dugout just in time, and when we emerged we found that bombs had gone off on either side of us, only twenty yards and twenty-four yards away. One had made holes through everything in our operations tent, including our beautiful, up-to-the-minute information maps and the colonel’s cot, which had already suffered on several previous occasions. The other bomb had landed three yards from where the door of our tent had been; our gear, camp beds, bed boards, and tent had been blown back against the coral ridge and smashed to smithereens.
Of the eight officers using the tent, most lost everything. What we collected hardly filled half a kit bag. Of my gear, all I salvaged was a small haversack full, together with my three volumes of Shakespeare and my diary, which were badly splintered. Three red-hot pieces of jagged metal had entered the bottom of my kit bag and gone systematically through everything, ending up in a canvas mend-all at the other end. Everything had to be thrown away, but I kept a handkerchief that had been in the path of the shrapnel: when unfolded it displayed a charming lacework pattern! I thought I had saved my bedding roll, but the kapok mattress was full of hot splinters, and after twenty minutes it was on fire. What hurt me most was the loss of two good pipes and my RAAF wideawake hat. They were irreplaceable.
As we had no warning we were very lucky that no one in the section was killed, but the officers now had no tent, no floor, no nothing—just a big hole. The kunai grass, which had been eighteen inches high where it wasn’t trampled, had been shaved off close to the ground as clean as a whistle for fifty yards on either side. As a final insult there remained but two articles on our telephone-wire wash line. These were a pair of knee-length woollen stockings, to wear with shorts, which I had acquired from a departing correspondent and which I had just washed. They had been sheared off about six inches above the ankle, and the feet were nowhere to be found. Jolly mean, I called it. We were all highly indignant. It was Sunday, too! There were more than fifty planes, which had come over in two waves; our only satisfaction was that the bombers were thoroughly shot up by the Grummans, and several didn’t get back.
By some mischance of fate, Eroni and Pfc. Adams had not yet got to Marau to open up the antisubmarine radio watch. They had set out in Eroni’s launch, but it was grossly overloaded, and they were forced to return. I then got a landing craft under our Coast Guard coxswain, Ray Evans, to escort them to Aola. Adams set up the wireless there—it was my old set, carried down from Paripao—but it would not work, so he had to bring it in for repairs. Bingiti brought him up in the small launch. Evans returned to Aola with Adams and the repaired set, together with five Raiders, under Sergeant Pettus,9 whom we had borrowed from Colonel Edson. They had orders to make a preliminary reconnaissance of the Japs at Gorabusu and, as we could contact them through Adams, do any specific scouting jobs that we might find necessary. Thus, unknowingly, Adams and my old set became the nucleus of our second line of defense, based on the cadet’s house behind the station.
On 1 October Admiral Nimitz,10 Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CinCPac, as he was known telegraphically), who had flown in the night before in a Flying Fortress, held a “formation” at General Vandegrift’s hut at six thirty in the morning. Everyone was very pleased to see him, and we got the idea that he was quite pleased with the Marines’ performance. The admiral started by pinning a Navy Cross onto General Vandegrift’s breast. The general went quite pink in the face, and appeared “fair dumbfounded”—it seemed he knew nothing about it. Colonel Edson got a Navy Cross for Raiders’ Ridge; Colonels Cates and Pollock, for the Tenaru.
The air boys were well represented. Colonel Mangrum was awarded the Navy Cross, for the huge tonnage of shipping he and his men had sunk under such trying conditions. Major Smith, the leading fighter ace, Major Galer,11 the CO of VMF-224, and Captain Carl, who would have equaled Smith’s performance had he not had to spend a few days with Eroni at Aola, were similarly decorated. Everyone was in combat dress with helmets, except for the admiral, who wore the standard combination cap, and the fighter boys, who had on the dark blue baseball caps that they wore in the air.
As for Rhoades, his position was getting “wusser and wusser.” He and Schroeder were both suffering from malarial fever, and with Bishop Aubin and his party also at Tangarare their food situation was pretty bad. Snowy had no freedom of movement—he was liable to be picked up at any time—so he could not give us much useful information. I managed to arrange for a Catalina to go round and rescue them, but the trip had to be canceled a couple of times owing to a shortage of planes for reconnaissance.
Following these delays, the bishop started agitating to have the fathers and sisters evacuated as well. This put me in a very awkward position, as he had previously refused to evacuate and had promised me that he would not call for help. Now, when we had practically no facilities for this sort of thing, I had to go and ask General Vandegrift to divert combat materiel to get him out.
The general, quite rightly, was infuriated that we had to consider a rescue mission in the middle of a war. “A goddam bunch o’ nuns,” he kept muttering. Rhoades’s last signal, however, sounded a note of urgency: “Bishop requests also evacuation of native nuns, as if left behind will be raped.” That tipped the scale in the prelate’s favor, and another Catalina was approved.
Then we discovered that Mackenzie, unbeknownst to anybody and without authority, had arranged with Bengough12 for the Ramada to go and pick up Rhoades, Schroeder, and Bishop Aubin and his party. This was even more confusing—now the general would think that Mackenzie and Bengough intended to land the missionaries at Lunga and leave the rest to him. He saw red, and Colonel Buckley and I had to take Mackenzie in to be hauled over the coals.
As the Ramada had already left Malaita, the Catalina was canceled. The schooner was unarmed; her sides and awnings were painted black and gray, respectively, and she was marked with two white crosses for identification. Ramada’s diesel engine gave her a speed of six knots. She was captained by Peter Sasambule, one of the senior native skippers, who could find his way blindfolded into almost every anchorage in the Solomons. He arrived on 3 October with three Japanese in custody, whom Bengough had picked up from a crashed airplane; two of Bengough’s lads, Baethisara and Tome, remained on board as guards until I could transport them. Peter was not at all keen when he heard what his orders were, but he was slightly reassured when told that Dick Horton would accompany him.
The trip was rather risky. As they had to go past so much enemy-occupied territory, they headed out into the open channel early in the afternoon with the intention of making a horizon circle, and with one of our fighter planes keeping an eye on them. They had been gone only two hours when Kennedy signaled that six Japanese destroyers had been spotted about 140 miles away.13 This meant that the enemy would be at the north end of Guadalcanal by 0400. The Dauntlesses and Avengers, though not equipped for night flying, kept going out until well after dark; they harried the Japs quite successfully, and early next morning Snowy signaled that the Ramada had arrived safe and unharmed.
With enemy destroyers in the vicinity, we kept our heads pretty low that night, but did not receive the expected shelling. (The troops they had landed no doubt would attack us at some later date.) When we were lucky enough to expect shelling, as opposed to being blown out of bed by it, I had the technique “wrapped up.” Taking a waterproof cape to lie on, I would turn in on the parapet of our dugout, and when either we got the word or the first salvo exploded, or a star shell illuminated the scene, I would roll almost automatically over the brow. If awake, I would make my way into the dugout; if still comatose, I’d get swept in by the crowd.
While we were getting Horton and the Ramada away, a signal came in that Macfarlan, at long last, was coming to join us. The following morning a truck arrived with several scouts; they had a white man with them, but he was not the one we were expecting. Mac had had a touch of malaria, and the party had proceeded without him. They brought a U.S. Navy flyer, Bill Warden,14 who had made a forced landing in the Slot near Ysabel on 7 August. Taken south by the current, he fetched up in the Russell Islands, luckily at a different bay from that occupied by the Japanese. A few days later he paddled across to the northwest coast of Guadalcanal, where friendly islanders brought him to Rhoades and he was taken in by Father de Klerk at Tangarare. The Japanese were starting to close in, and Warden, having recovered from his privations on Catholic chicken and pineapple, felt it his duty to report for service. Against all advice he walked to Gold Ridge, rigged up in Father de Klerk’s rather clerical clothes; it was no wonder that when he arrived no one could recognize him! As the scouts had managed to avoid meeting any enemy troops, and as they had brought in some carriers, I got busy collecting rations to go back to the hungry hunters at Gold Ridge.
Later, the Ramada returned safely with Snowy Rhoades, well bearded; Lafe Schroeder; a rescued airman; Bishop Aubin, dressed in white and clasping his umbrella; six priests; six European nuns; and the native nuns. Our supply ships, having run the gauntlet of the Japanese Navy, were offloading fuel and supplies and onloading hospital cases and prisoners as fast as they could. Landing craft went busily back and forth from the shore, and the screening destroyers steamed silently up and down the channel.
Into the midst of this activity came the tiny Ramada, loaded to the waterline with her heterogeneous cargo. As they dropped anchor, the fighter plane that had escorted them dipped low in salute to a good job, well done. We were standing by in a landing craft to direct unloading, and soon we had the fathers scrambling up the bosun’s ladder onto the Fomalhaut, one of the cargo ships. Next were the sisters, who, in spite of the climate, were in typical nuns’ robes; in any case, most were of such an age as made it impossible for them to go up the bosun’s ladder. After a lot of shouting and waving of arms, the little mail boat was lowered and the nuns transferred to it. It was then smoothly hauled up the tall side of the ship by block and tackle, to the resounding cheers of all around. As the boat reached the deck, the anchor came up and the convoy slipped away into the gathering darkness.
The native nuns remained on the Ramada overnight; at D-2 we sarcastically speculated whether they were really safer with Sasambule and his crew than they would have been with the Japanese! While Rhoades and company were swept away by Mackenzie, I took Bishop Aubin to call on General Vandegrift.
The general had worked up a good head of steam. When the bishop arrived, however, his wrath evaporated: the poor man, who had undergone great privations, looked haggard and emaciated, and on his last legs. General Vandegrift could not help but be kind to him. He greeted the bishop with the greatest courtesy, poured a generous dram of Old Crow, and even managed (as I had daringly urged him) not to mention the “bunch o’ nuns.” The bishop stayed the night; bright and early in the morning we got him and the native sisters off to Malaita in the Ramada, en route picking up Rowley and his pupils, who had got as far as Tulagi. Thus was satisfactorily completed Operation “Bunch o’ Nuns.”
Since the beginning of October the weather had changed. We had several days of heavy rain, during which the whole area was turned into a sticky bog of black mud. It made life in our sleeping quarters intolerable, but whenever we could we got down to the Lunga River and washed it all away.
There was no rest for the wicked. I provided detailed instructions for Evans, who had to go and pick up the Raider recce party from Aola. Once the Japs attacked us from the west it would be a fight to the death, and we might not be able to spare anyone for operations like Gorabusu. Then the carriers for Gold Ridge had to be got away; poor old Mackenzie, who was just as overworked as we were, got very snappy because they had to leave before he had got his letters ready for Hay, who was to continue to operate Macfarlan’s teleradio as an air warning post at Gold Ridge.
Back at D-2, Rhoades and Schroeder gave us their information on the occupied northwest. We made them put it on our map while two stenographers took down everything they said. Snowy had had a rough time, with malaria and stomach problems into the bargain; he was in poor shape, but he had certainly earned his keep. We did not vote him many marks for his beard, however, as, although it had grown well, it was part blond and part gray! Although he had lost a lot of weight, the addition of a khaki-topped naval cap gave Snowy a jaunty air, and he cut a great figure when I took him to call on the general, who congratulated him on his work.
Not to be outdone, Macfarlan, accompanied by four scouts (Deke, Vura, Tabasui, and Sepo), finally came in from Gold Ridge at 1630 on 5 October. He was dressed in his “fin de siècle” whites, but the pièce de résistance was his terrific black beard: in Australian slang, it was a real “boomer.” Mac got a wonderful reception, and it was definitely “old home week” at D-2 as he, Snowy, and I got down to swapping our experiences. The next day, while we were busy getting the two of them suitably clothed, the reconnaissance party returned from Aola with splendid coverage of Gorabusu and the two or three other small Japanese posts nearby. Legu Legu also reported in, having patrolled as far as Koli Point with a company of Cates’s marines. As expected, they had met few enemy troops, since most of the Japs were well off the coast.
To complete the picture, John Mather, who had managed to get across to Malaita in the Grumman Duck after about six false starts, returned at last with a master plan for putting the Japs there out of action. He had done his best to explain to Bengough how things were with us, but it did not stop the latter from writing me a note casually asking me to send him over a thousand cigarettes! As the twenty-seven of us at D-2 had carefully shared out two hundred between us the day before, and we were lucky to get them, I wondered whether Bengough thought I was a magician!
The Japs’ efforts to build up their forces on Guadalcanal for another attack had been unremitting; there was no doubt that something pretty solid was looming. One positive development in the situation was that our air force was becoming much stronger, and the daily raids of between fifteen and thirty enemy bombers were regularly losing a significant number of planes. We had no need to exaggerate the number of aircraft shot down, as Read, sitting close to their home airfield, used to let us know how many got back the same evening. Since 7 August, Japanese losses in the air had amounted to three or four hundred planes.
Although the Japanese planes continued to hammer away at Henderson Field, they were beginning to show an interest in mowing us down too. Every now and then a group of Zeros would zoom in at low level and let fly with explosive bullets, all over the shop. If they thought they were lowering our morale, they were wrong. If anything, they raised it. You couldn’t do that sort of thing to Marines without inviting a reply. Everyone opened up with whatever they had, rifles and machine guns, and even we at D-2 would dash out and bang away with our pistols as the Zeros dived across no higher than the top of the coconut trees. “Hell, yes!”
It was a highly dangerous sport, but there is no doubt that it paid off, for quite often a Zero would crash through the palms, untouched by our bigger guns, and hit the ground with a satisfying thump. I used to enjoy it most when I was down at the naval base: I would sit with my back to a coconut tree and take them from left to right with a tommy gun as they strafed the plantation house at Kukum, which was Commander Dexter’s headquarters. Dexter himself had a monster weapon, well dug in and protected by sandbags. It was a three-barreled Jap machine gun, a veritable Chicago piano, and until the ammunition ran out it did great service.
My education in American slang was added to by the arrival of Snowy Rhoades. He kept talking about the bush, going into the bush, hiding in the bush, etc., and Colonel Buckley said to him one day, “Hey, Snow, what is all this bush?” Snowy, in quite serious vein, described at length the country behind Lavoro. The colonel laughed and said, “Oh, you mean the boondocks.” (The term “boondocks” was apparently used fairly generally in America for “unimproved ground”; thus, by extension, “boondockers” were boots specially made for pioneering, and to go “boondocking” was to make a bush trip.) Rhoades, completely stumped, pulled his pipe out of his mouth and sat eyeing the colonel suspiciously. In return, Snowy obtained the everlasting admiration of the Marines for the delightful intonation he gave to a much-used Australian word. He would tell a long tale of the iniquities of the Japs in his area, and at the end, raising his eyebrows slightly, he would softly mutter, “B-a-a-astards.” Everyone at D-2 practiced it for days!
Macfarlan, Rhoades, and Schroeder were to be sent off on leave via Tulagi when opportunity offered, as none was in good shape and it looked as if life was going to be pretty tough. They had had their share. The pressure of work at D-2 was relentless, however, so, wearily waving them goodbye, we got down to it again.