ALTHOUGH THE MOUNTAINOUS volcanic islands of the former British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) are thirty-five hundred miles from the great naval base at Singapore, they took on a strategic importance in 1941–42 that confounded the some five hundred Europeans who inhabited them. The geopolitics of war mystified the ninety-five thousand Melanesian natives who had lived under British administration since the late nineteenth century. A great island city of commercial and naval significance that shaped the history of all of South Asia, Singapore anchored the western end of the Malay Barrier. The islands of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies extended the Malay Barrier eastward along the Equator. The island chain—part of the great circle of volcanic lands that rings the Pacific Ocean—continued to Australian-administered Papua and New Guinea and thence to New Britain Island to the north, which ended in the port of Rabaul. Still west of the international date line, the Barrier continued with the Solomons. Whoever controlled the Solomons could interrupt maritime and air traffic from the United States to Australia. And for the United States the route to the Philippines passed through the Malay Barrier, for the Naval Arms Limitation Treaty of 1922 had conceded to Japanese control most of the islands between the international date line and Manila. The strategic linkage between the defense of Singapore and the Philippines doomed the Solomons to their improbable role as a major theater in World War II.
Within the global concepts for the defense of the British Empire after World War I, the defense of the Malay Barrier against Japan focused on Singapore, whose importance to Malaya was matched by its importance to the defense of Burma and India. The Imperial General Staff, a Commonwealth committee dominated by its British members, believed that an Australian commitment to Singapore was essential, even though the British assumed that they might get some help from France, the Netherlands, and the United States. None of these potential allies, however, seemed willing or able to contribute much to deter or defend against a Japanese offensive into what Tokyo called the “South Seas Resource Area” or, more grandly, the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
The coming of war in Europe in 1939, followed by the devastating defeat of France in 1940, threw all the plans for the defense of the Asia-Pacific British Empire into the trashbin designed for all strategic wishful thinking. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he brought a sense of strategic realism to the office, but not a complete conversion to facing facts. In his calculus, defense of the Mediterranean, the gateway to the overvalued resources of India, took priority over defense of Singapore, and he drew the bulk of the volunteer Australian Imperial Force into the maelstrom of war in the Middle East. Australia sent two divisions to the Middle East, its first formed for war in 1940, then a third. A fourth (the 8th Division) went to Malaya in 1941. Australian naval and air units also moved to the Middle East or, in the case of aircrews, all the way to Great Britain to participate in the defense of Great Britain or the strategic bombing of Germany. Before Pearl Harbor, Australian and New Zealand soldiers (the “Anzacs”) were fighting and dying in Greece, Crete, Libya, Somalia, and Egypt. Given the combination of apathy and sense of ravishment that characterized Australian defense policy in 1941, it is little wonder that the defense of New Guinea and the Solomons assumed almost no priority in Australian military planning.1
If the Australians had few forces with which to defend the Solomon Islands other than the white-officered native police and scratch formations of European militia, they could at least create an intelligence organization that could report enemy air and ship movements. After a 1922 review of Australian defense responsibilities conducted by an interservice committee, the Naval Intelligence Division of the Royal Australian Navy created a network of civilian observers throughout New Guinea and the Solomons, with similar positions along Australia’s northern coast. Since it did not have a reliable portable radio, the Naval Intelligence Division could do little to support its volunteer observers until, in the late 1930s, it purchased a battery-powered combination telegraph-voice radio for distribution to the coastwatchers. The system had limitations that made portability and communications relative terms. The “teleradio” could be broken down into a receiver section, a transmitter section, a speaker section, and other smaller modules, but it also required large batteries, a battery charger, chemicals for the battery charger, and other support equipment. With luck and strong porters, the teleradio might be divided into loads for ten men. It also worked best from higher elevations (line of sight), but even then its range still fell into a four-hundred-mile (voice) to six-hundred-mile (tapped code) envelope, which meant the establishment of many stations within relay range of one another. Nevertheless, the distribution of teleradios finally gave the coastwatchers some way to report their sightings in time-urgent terms.
With the outbreak of war in 1939, the director of the Naval Intelligence Division, Cdr. Rupert B. M. Long, RAN, assigned a fellow World War I naval veteran and enthusiastic Australian civil administrator in New Guinea, Lt. Cdr. Eric A. Feldt, to bring the coastwatcher organization to war readiness. A close friend of Feldt’s and a loose manager, Long gave the energetic, intense Feldt plenty of autonomy. Fortunately, he also gave him effective support. As a senior naval staff officer at Port Moresby, Feldt recruited more coastwatchers, conducted training sessions, distributed supplies, and infused a paper organization with a real sense of mission. Before the war with Japan, he visited almost every team in his network, which extended all the way to Rabaul, New Britain Island, and the straits south of New Ireland Island. As Long and Feldt predicted, any Japanese offensive would make Rabaul (defended by the only Australian Army battalion in the whole region) its principal objective. The southern Solomons were not a pressing priority. Under Feldt’s direction, the coastwatchers, collectively known as “Ferdinand” to honor the bull in the children’s story who watched and waited, numbered about one thousand in late 1941, manning one hundred stations linked by radio and resupplied by the Royal Australian Air Force. The cordon of observers stretched twenty-five hundred miles from the northern coast of New Guinea to the New Hebrides.2
The area covered by Ferdinand had six regional subdivisions, one of which was the southern Solomons, administered by Resident Commissioner William S. Marchant from his headquarters in Tulagi, the small port on an island of the same name. Marchant also headed the coastwatchers stationed on the larger islands of his domain: Ysabel, New Georgia, and Guadalcanal. Feldt concluded that Marchant had too many responsibilities, so he sent Sub-Lt. Donald S. Macfarlan, RANR, to Tulagi to take de facto control of Ferdinand. He later sent his most trusted assistant, Lt. Hugh Mackenzie, RAN, to Vila, Efate, New Hebrides, to establish a new central reporting site for the southern Solomons. Marchant’s station moved with the Resident Commissioner to Malaita when the Japanese approached. There Marchant’s professional radio operator received reports from Guadalcanal, recoded them, and sent them to Mackenzie. As Deputy Supervising Intelligence Officer, Solomons, Mackenzie reported directly to Feldt at his headquarters at Townsville, Queensland.
When the Japanese advanced into the southern Solomons and began to bomb Tulagi, Marchant displaced for Malaita and tried to take Macfarlan and his radio with him, but the determined young Scot refused to abandon his four subordinate posts. One of these coastwatchers was a middle-aged storekeeper on Savo, Leif Schroeder, who, betrayed by some Melanesians, eventually fled to the western tip of Guadalcanal. Macfarlan himself went to Aola, Guadalcanal, with Clemens and then organized his team (reinforced by a jungle-wise miner, A. M. Andresen) with Kenneth D. Hay. A veteran of World War I and known for his large appetite, Hay managed a plantation for Burns, Philp & Company (South Sea) Ltd., which, with Lever Brothers, dominated the island’s cash crop economy of coconuts and copra. This team observed the coastal plain of the Lunga River on the northern shore of central Guadalcanal. The second team, formed in late March near the island’s western tip, had another exotic, aging islander for its boss, F. Ashton “Snowy” Rhoades, also a plantation manager. Schroeder joined Rhoades after his escape from Savo. The third Guadalcanal coastwatcher team manned a station at the island’s administrative headquarters, the northeastern coastal town of Aola. This team had a leader of a much different sort, another Scot and a member of the British professional colonial civil service, District Officer Martin Clemens.
When I visited Australia in 1995 to teach a too-short session at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra, I wanted to meet Martin Clemens. As a historian of the United States Marine Corps and the biographer of Gen. Gerald C. Thomas, USMC, who had served on Guadalcanal as the operations officer and chief of staff of the 1st Marine Division, I regarded Clemens as one of the heroes of the Guadalcanal campaign. My judgment showed no originality. Every Marine I ever knew—personally or through his writings—regarded Martin Clemens with respect and affection because he had contributed so much to the division’s successful operations on Guadalcanal.
When I started to work on my biography of General Thomas, I learned very quickly a central lesson for all Guadalcanal historians: consult Martin Clemens. As I already knew from reading other people’s books, Clemens had kept a diary and notebook throughout his service on Guadalcanal, a priceless source of information and opinion on the American side of the campaign. I opened a correspondence with Major Clemens, and he very generously sent me portions of his diaries and notes as well as his opinions about the major commanders and staff officers of the 1st Marine Division. The more research I did, the more I found his views accurate, prudent, understanding, and candid. During our correspondence, I noticed that his address was “Toorak.” Somehow I assumed that Toorak must be an isolated ranch of sheep and cattle in Queensland or New South Wales. My hosts at ADFA, Professors Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, with great humor (was it humour?) told me that Toorak was an affluent and very smart suburb of Melbourne.
On the other hand, I found it appalling that Peter and Jeffrey did not know that Martin Clemens was—at least among Marines—the most famous Australian warrior of them all, a figure of greater consequence than Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blarmey, Breaker Morant, or Mel Gibson. Of course, I soon realized that Martin Clemens was not a “real” Australian, since he had “come out” from Great Britain as just another colonial administrator for the Solomons and had served, albeit with honor, on the periphery of the Australian war effort. Being a saint to the veterans of the 1st Marine Division did not automatically bestow on him a special place in the pantheon of heroes remembered in Canberra’s Australian War Memorial.
During a long weekend graciously granted by the ADFA history department, I finally met Martin Clemens at his home at Toorak in July 1995. As Peter and Jeffrey had predicted, my family and I found the Clemens home, Dunraven, anything but primitive. Anne and Martin Clemens could not have been more hospitable to my wife and me and our five-year-old daughter. The Clemenses wined and dined us, and we got some special tours of Melbourne, including the war memorial. Naturally, we talked a great deal about Guadalcanal and veteran Marines, many of whom Major Clemens had seen often at division reunions and trips to the United States since World War II. Though plagued with arthritic knees, Martin set the pace, full of enthusiasm for the World War II commemoration, golf, animal husbandry, the livestock business, children and grandchildren, and his comrades of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force. I found it easy to imagine Martin as he was when he walked out of the jungle on 15 August 1942 and into the life of the 1st Marine Division. Marine officers who saw him remembered him as active, highly intelligent, articulate, handsome, and obviously courageous in an understated way. At eighty, Martin Clemens was still the same man.
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 17 April 1915, Warren Frederick Martin Clemens grew up in a household of high standards and low means. His father played the organ and directed the choir at Queen’s Cross Presbyterian Church, but he died in 1924 when Martin was nine years old. His mother, a Martin from the herring fishing center of Peterhead, managed to send him to boarding school in England with the help of scholarships and her family. After nine years at Bedford School, Martin became a scholarship student at Christ’s College, Cambridge University. His university experience at Christ’s College mirrored his record at Bedford School. Not distinguished in any one thing, except rowing, he was very good at many. As a student in the natural sciences, he made marks good enough to win honors and the prestige of a “leaving exhibition.” He then did advanced work in animal husbandry and botany in an additional year beyond his graduation in 1937. Although he followed a scientific curriculum, he also enjoyed his course work in the arts and letters. The fact that his academic advisor was Sir Charles Percy Snow may have had something to do with his academic interest “in two cultures.” Martin was never an academic drudge, however. He rowed with distinction on the Cambridge crew and participated in a wide range of social activities and sports.
In 1937 Clemens sought and won an appointment in the British Colonial Service, which allowed him to remain a year at Cambridge for the service’s training course and some graduate study. He received a posting to the Solomon Islands in August 1938 for a three-year probationary appointment on the island of Malaita. He specialized in development projects such as road building and agricultural land use that directly helped the islanders. In due course he passed his qualifying examinations for full status in the Colonial Service and moved to San Cristobal as a district officer in November 1941.
Concerned that Great Britain was at war but he was not, Clemens volunteered for military service during a short leave to Sydney, which coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even a war with Japan did not alter his civil service status, but it did change his assignment. Clemens returned to the Solomons to evacuate the Europeans and Chinese from Tulagi, where he found the town in flames and chaos from a bombing by long-range Japanese four-engine amphibian patrol bombers. Meeting with Resident Commissioner Marchant and Lieutenant Macfarlan amid Tulagi’s ruin, he agreed to cross the Florida Strait to Guadalcanal and the island’s district headquarters at Aola and take over as district officer and coastwatcher on 28 February. Clemens’s first job was a challenge, for he had to finish off the evacuation of the Melanesian plantation workers to their home islands. Their European managers had left them in a rush.
Anticipating that the Japanese would soon reach Tulagi, Clemens organized his coastwatcher detachment around his Melanesian native police and administrative personnel and set up his radio (ZGJ4) and messenger contact with Rhoades and Macfarlan when they got organized. In March 1942 Clemens learned that he had been appointed a captain in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force (BSIPDF), a militia of police and volunteers that might conduct guerrilla warfare. The military rank, which Lieutenant Commander Feldt arranged for the coastwatchers, was supposed to protect the coastwatchers from charges of spying and to qualify them for pay and benefits under military regulations. Most of the coastwatchers became officers or enlisted men in the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve, but Clemens went into “the army.” Given Japanese treatment of prisoners, in uniform or not, the military rank would have meant little if Clemens had been captured in his role of behind-the-lines intelligence operative. In any event, he had no badges of rank, no uniform, and no military identification papers.
On 1 May 1942 Clemens received a coded message from Marchant that Tulagi, again under bombardment, could no longer serve as regional capital or a way station for messages to Feldt’s headquarters at Townsville. The Japanese landed on Tulagi two days later, part of the general advance to the south that was supposed to end with the capture of Port Moresby, New Guinea. The carrier task force of the Imperial Japanese Navy that entered the Coral Sea, however, ran into a similar U.S. Navy carrier task force (two fleet carriers) and fought a battle on 7 and 8 May. It was a tactical victory for the Japanese, since their naval aviators sank the Lexington and damaged the Yorktown at the loss of the light carrier Shoho, but with one of his fleet carriers damaged and half his carrier aircraft gone, Rear Adm. Hara Chuichi decided to fight another day. The First South Seas Offensive came to an end, but the Japanese did not withdraw from Tulagi, even though they themselves had been the target of an American air raid on 4 May, a raid that had caught the Japanese unloading enough equipment and food for a long and luxurious tropical occupation. Already prepared for working from the mountains above Guadalcanal’s coastal plain, Clemens and his scouts stayed along the coast long enough to rescue the two-man crew of an American torpedo plane, then took to the hills. Martin Clemens could hardly have known he was about to walk into a central role in the war against Japan.3
Although the Battle of the Coral Sea kept the Allied position along the Malay Barrier from becoming untenable, the Battle of Midway a month later (3–6 June) provided a momentary change in the strategic sea state of the Pacific war. No greater opportunists ever wore the uniform of the United States than Adm. Ernest J. King and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and no two senior commanders could be more persuasive and unrelenting in the pursuit of their military (and personal) goals. King and MacArthur—separated by the distance between Melbourne and Washington—could not have been closer in their conviction that America’s real war was the crusade against Japan, not the halting efforts of a coalition of national misfits against Nazi Germany. With the better part of the Japanese Combined Fleet’s carrier force hors de combat after Midway, King and MacArthur argued to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and through them to the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staffs that the Allies had a unique opportunity for an offensive in the South Pacific.4
Although the Joint Chiefs remained skeptical about the idea of a Pacific offensive, they could find no powerful reason to oppose the King-MacArthur concept, especially if it could be mounted with forces already in the theater. At the very least a limited offensive would preempt any additional Japanese move south to disrupt the sea lanes and base structure essential to the buildup in Australia. MacArthur had a more ambitious goal, the recapture of Rabaul, but only he viewed this objective as realistic, given the balance of forces in the South Pacific. When the Joint Chiefs approved a Pacific offensive on 2 July 1942, they expected only limited operations in eastern New Guinea and the southern Solomons.
The organization of the Allied war effort in the South Pacific encouraged caution. MacArthur commanded all Allied forces (Australian, American, and the remnants of the Dutch defenders of the East Indies) in the Southwest Pacific theater. President Roosevelt needed a hero to defeat Japan, not a goat for the fall of the Philippines, so MacArthur, darling of the “Asia First” Republicans, stayed and returned. Control of the sea lanes to Australia, however, was Navy business, and King had no desire to give MacArthur or any other general permanent control of any major portion of the Pacific Fleet, commanded from Honolulu by Adm. Chester W. Nimitz and a new hero after Midway. The South Pacific theater, which included the southern Solomons, remained under Nimitz, who also held the joint command of commander-in-chief, Pacific Ocean Areas. Nimitz’s regional commander was Vice Adm. Robert L. Ghormley, USN, who regarded the King-MacArthur offensive plan as near-madness. When it came to precise plans and the assignment of forces, MacArthur and Ghormley were bidding for many of the same air and naval assets. One of the most precious of these assets was intelligence, and when it came to “information warfare,” the Allied commanders had much to trade, provided they decided to keep the Japanese, not each other, the primary enemy. Part of the intelligence domain that now had to serve two masters was Ferdinand, whose members waited, watched, and tried to avoid the Japanese.
Admiral Ghormley’s headquarters did not pay much attention to Lieutenant Mackenzie’s observers’ reports because it, like the rest of the U.S. Navy, had come to believe that the best intelligence came from Japanese radio messages, analyzed by the staff of the Navy’s Communications Security Service, Office of Naval Communications (Op-20-G). For two decades the work of the radio intelligence experts in the Navy had grown in credibility while the Office of Naval Intelligence had fallen in usefulness and esteem, in part because it lost some of its best (and scarce) Japanese-language experts to the radio intelligence business. Although the radio intelligence community deserved part of the responsibility for the surprise at Pearl Harbor, the sum of the intelligence failures of December 1941 rested on the more conventional intelligence experts who ran air and submarine patrols, collected reports from military and civilian human intelligence agencies like the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI, and scrutinized photographs and newspapers. The victories at the Coral Sea and Midway, moreover, gave the radio intelligence experts a halo of success and indispensability. The combination of radio traffic analysis and cryptography became the coin of the intelligence realm in the Pacific war, and the U.S. Navy controlled most of this treasury, codenamed ULTRA.5
MacArthur, however, was not without his own assets, including some ULTRA material, and they included several agencies tied to the Australian armed forces and then into the Allied Intelligence Bureau (AIB). MacArthur appointed an Australian Army colonel as AIB head with an American colonel as deputy. Ferdinand fell under the general supervision of the AIB, even that part of Ferdinand which operated in the South Pacific theater. As the AIB developed its own ULTRA organization in 1942, Col. Spencer B. Akin, the U.S. Army’s Signals Intelligence Service representative in MacArthur’s headquarters, sent a special intercept detachment to Townsville, where it established a post near Feldt’s Ferdinand station. Although this arrangement gave Akin some advantages in his code-breaking and traffic-analysis operations, it also provided the ULTRA operation some useful “cover” since allies and enemies alike might assume that Ferdinand alone was generating all the communications business in Townsville. Under MacArthur’s bureaucratic protection, Mackenzie’s team in Vila could operate with considerable autonomy, and what information and analysis it shared with Ghormley’s staff (information flowing both to and from Townsville) was a free good for ComSoPac. Although Ghormley had his shortcomings as a commander, he appreciated good intelligence work, had good relations with British naval intelligence from earlier assignments, and had served as a pioneer of naval aviation photography. Ghormley soon concluded that the Ferdinand observers knew their business since their reports proved accurate—that is, planes that took off from the airfields on New Britain, Buka, and Bougainville arrived over targets to the south as predicted. His staff could also see that coastwatchers’ reports matched their own radio intelligence and sometimes filled its voids, especially when the Japanese Navy changed its call signs and codes in JN-25, the Operational code that American cryptographers could read—in time and in parts. By July 1942 ComSoPac accepted Ferdinand reports as gospel.6
As it started to form in the fertile mind of Rear Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner, USN, the chief operational planner of King’s staff, the Navy concept for an operation in the southern Solomons assumed that Tulagi, now a Japanese anchorage for patrol craft and amphibian aircraft, should be recaptured. Turner’s eyes rode the waves and scaled tall mountains with a single glance without settling on any other focus of effort. Assigned to command the amphibious task force in the South Pacific, Turner and his staff could not decide where to take their landing force, the 1st Marine Division, recently arrived in New Zealand for extended training. Using Mackenzie’s reports from the three Guadalcanal teams, Ghormley convinced Turner that the key objective was the northern coastal plain at the Lunga River, where the Japanese had started to build an airfield. Through June 1942 small parties of Japanese had examined the region, and on 6 July the engineer forces and supporting troops arrived in strength. In accordance with IGHQ Navy Director 109 from Tokyo, Operation SN had begun. At a minimum the new base on Guadalcanal would anchor the defense of the southern Solomons, and it might serve as an essential part of a second South Seas offensive. Operation SN was about to meet Operation Watchtower.
From his varied observation posts from the mountains south of the Lunga plain, Martin Clemens watched the Japanese go to work on their airbase. The two other teams watched and reported, too. All three teams faced a common problem, a shortage of supplies and a growing sense that the Melanesian population, much of it impressed as laborers on the airfield, was shifting its loyalty to the Japanese. Outdoor living on the run wore the coastwatchers down, including Clemens, who bore the official responsibility for keeping the peace with his native constables. There were still Europeans on the island, priests and nuns of several Catholic missions, some gold miners, and people who had simply missed an opportunity to leave Guadalcanal. The Japanese became one of two enemies, as Clemens and his team found their caches looted and their movements observed by Melanesians of doubtful loyalty. Mackenzie’s messages demanded more and more information about the Japanese situation and details about the terrain and weather. Macfarlan told Clemens “something big” was in the offing. The coastwatchers grasped this warning with fervent hope. The frequency of their transmissions, however, gave Japanese radio intelligence teams a greater opportunity to locate their transmission sites and to send patrols after them.7
Clemens’s information-gathering system on Guadalcanal depended upon cooperative native islanders, who would make reports of Japanese activity to an island police officer or government agent, who then forwarded the information to Clemens for consolidation, evaluation, and communication by radio to Malaita and then on to Vila. The key position was the “sub-coastwatcher,” and Clemens worried about the enthusiasm of some of his “police boys.” In June 1942, Malaita District Officer C. N. F. Bengough sent him a formidable reinforcement, Jacob Charles Vouza (1900–1984), a police sergeant major, who had joined the BSIP Armed Constabulary in 1916 and retired in 1941. Clemens thought that Bengough had done him no favor, since he knew from personal experience that Vouza liked being his own boss and imposed his own justice on the islanders. Moreover, although Vouza came from the village of Volonavua, near Koli Point, he had served on Malaita for more than twenty years, and Clemens doubted that he had the personal contacts and intimate knowledge of the area his duties required. Trusting in loyalty and experience, Clemens sent Vouza off to cover the crucial Koli Point region. Vouza proved to be his most effective subordinate, although he still fought his war as he saw fit.
In his headquarters at the Hotel Cecil in Wellington, New Zealand, Maj. Gen. Alexander Archer Vandegrift, USMC, had just survived a local earth tremor when he received a no less thunderous message from Admiral Ghormley to fly to Auckland the next day, 26 June 1942. Known throughout the Marine Corps as “Sunny Jim” for his calm disposition in moments of stress, Vandegrift already suspected why Ghormley wanted to see him. His communications security officer, 1st Lt. Sanford B. Hunt, USMC, had been reading ComSoPac’s most classified incoming message traffic, even “information” copies, and Hunt had seen Admiral King’s message of 24 June to Admiral Nimitz that King believed the Joint Chiefs of Staff would approve his proposal for an offensive in the southern Solomons (Tulagi) and the nearby Santa Cruz Islands. King told Nimitz that MacArthur and Ghormley should work out the detailed plans and organize the task forces for the offensive, which might begin as soon as 1 August.
Vandegrift said nothing to the three staff members he took with him to Auckland: Lt. Col. Gerald C. Thomas, USMC, the division operations officer; Lt. Col. Frank B. Goettge, USMC, the division intelligence officer; and Lt. Col. Edward W. Snedeker, USMC, the division communications officer. The Marines found Ghormley and his staff appalled by the implications of King’s message. Vandegrift’s staff judged the implied mission—that the 1st Marine Division would land somewhere against the enemy in five weeks’ time. The division’s first convoy had barely reached New Zealand, and other units were still at sea. Moreover, all the ships had been loaded for an administrative landing, not an amphibious assault, and in any case were not numerous enough to carry all the division’s personnel, weapons, and equipment. In addition, the division was really untrained above the battalion level, and it lacked one whole reinforced infantry regiment (the 7th Marines), which had been sent earlier to defend Samoa. The conferees urged Ghormley to see MacArthur and at least get the Joint Chiefs to lengthen the preparatory period. One immediate task that faced the Marines was to learn as much as possible about the Solomons. “There was little information immediately available either as to the character of the theater of operations or the enemy strength and activity therein.”8
Vandegrift and Thomas returned to Wellington to start the awesome task of preparing their division for an amphibious assault, but they dispatched Goettge to Melbourne to learn as much about the Solomons as possible. The preliminary meeting in Auckland identified Guadalcanal as a potential objective, more important than Tulagi since it could provide an airfield. Ghormley’s own intelligence staff had seen some AIB analysis that suggested that the Japanese had an airfield underway. In his first “appreciation” of the situation, Colonel Thomas identified Guadalcanal as the key objective. In the first week of July 1942, Guadalcanal (codenamed Cactus) became the focus of Allied planning. During his intelligence odyssey to Australia, Goettge looked for Guadalcanal experts, and the AIB started rounding up plantation personnel, South Seas mariners, and assorted visitors to the island’s northern coast. Goettge learned about Ferdinand and asked the AIB for more information from the coastwatchers, but he did not have the time for a trip to Townsville to see Feldt before returning to Wellington with his gaggle of self-proclaimed experts on 15 July. Vandegrift wanted more information, and Thomas thought the islanders provided more questions than answers. Having a proposal to send a ground reconnaissance team to Guadalcanal vetoed by Ghormley, they settled for a photographic and aerial reconnaissance by two trusted associates, Lt. Col. Merrill B. Twining and Maj. William B. McKean. A former brigade intelligence officer, Twining was Thomas’s assistant D-3, and McKean served as the Marine planner on the staff of the commander, Transport Divisions, South Pacific Force, Capt. Lawrence F. Reifsnider, USN.
By taking an exciting ride over Guadalcanal on a B-17P stationed at Port Moresby, Twining and McKean closed the contact between the 1st Marine Division and Ferdinand, for they had to fly to Townsville to get their copies of the aerial photographs, supplemented by the most recent information provided by the Guadalcanal coastwatchers. They came away from their meeting with Feldt convinced that his organization could provide the answers to most of their questions, and Feldt gave them very good news when he said he thought AIB’s and ComSoPac’s estimate of the Japanese force ashore on the Lunga plain was much too large, closer to three thousand than five thousand. He gave Twining detailed sketch maps of Lunga, Tulagi, and Gavutu that showed gun positions, fortifications, and support installations. He told the Marines that he had already instructed Mackenzie at Vila to communicate directly with his American counterparts there, which included the headquarters of all ground-based Navy aviation. This headquarters in turn prepared target lists and photographic guides for the carrier air groups that would support the landing, now scheduled for 7 August. In their talks with Feldt, the Marines learned that one of their sources was Martin Clemens. Feldt identified Clemens by name and gave Twining the code and authenticating information that would allow the Marines to call Clemens directly when they went ashore. He also gave Twining the impression that Clemens was injured. (Actually the injured party was Macfarlan, who had broken his foot and might need rescue.) The Marines began to think of Clemens as their local intelligence officer.9
In his aerie in the mountains, Martin Clemens waited impatiently for more information, more signs of an Allied operation. Except for mounting Japanese work on the airfield, he could see nothing that indicated that the Japanese expected an invasion. Understandably, neither Mackenzie nor Feldt told him anything about the landing. Running short of patience and supplies, Clemens tried to cajole the Melanesians into cooperation; he trusted only his personal staff and police, and he feared that even some of them might be ready to switch allegiance. Clemens had no instructions except to survive, provide information on the Japanese by his weakening radio, and wait.
In the meantime, the 1st Marine Division staff put the finishing touches on its operations order, which it sold to Ghormley as ComSoPac OpO 1–42 on 15 July 1942. Admiral Turner arrived to find that his nominal superior and his landing force commander had produced a fait accompli at his expense, but he could not find enough time or flaws to change the order. It called for simultaneous landings on Tulagi and Guadalcanal on the morning of 7 August. The actual landings, which stressed speed and surprise, would be preceded by a brief but brisk air attack from the carriers of Vice Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher’s Task Force 61 and a shore bombardment by the warships of Rear Adm. Victor A. C. Crutchley, RAN, whose six cruisers and fifteen destroyers would escort Turner’s amphibious force.
For Vandegrift there was still the problem of the scheme of maneuver on Guadalcanal, for which he remained directly responsible. The Tulagi-Gavutu landings would be commanded by his assistant division commander, Brig. Gen. William H. Rupertus. Since the Tulagi landing looked (and was) the most immediately difficult, given the defenses of the 3d Kure Special Naval Landing Force, Vandegrift assigned Rupertus his toughest infantry, the 1st Raider Battalion (Lt. Col. Merritt A. Edson), the 1st Parachute Battalion (Maj. Robert H. Williams), the 1st Battalion, 2d Marines (Lt. Col. Robert E. Hill), and the 2d Battalion, 5th Marines (Lt. Col. Harold E. Rosecrans). Since Admiral Turner would not release the two remaining battalions of the 2d Marines (a regiment borrowed from the 2d Marine Division) to the 1st Marine Division, Vandegrift had only five infantry battalions to land on Red Beach, the landing site east of the Lunga River. He had no margin for error—and he still didn’t feel as if he had a good grasp of the terrain.10
The Australian and British islanders of Ferdinand and other units of the AIB might have helped, but accident of timing and personality deprived Vandegrift of the best available Allied advisors. In Vila, Mackenzie assigned two young, bright RANVR officers to Rupertus’s headquarters, Dick D. (C.) Horton and Henry Josselyn, in order to establish a new reporting team on Tulagi and to set the stage for the reestablishment of the colonial government. Horton had been Clemens’s predecessor as the Aola district officer and knew Guadalcanal well since he had been a “walking” D.O. Of the Australians who accompanied Vandegrift—or were assigned out to his regimental commanders—the most assertive was Charles Widdy, the manager of the Lever Brothers plantation at Lunga, quickly commissioned a temporary pilot officer (second lieutenant) in the Royal Australian Air Force. Widdy may have known coconuts, but he knew little about the distances on Guadalcanal, the names of rivers, or the relative heights of two pieces of key terrain, the “grassy knoll” that thrust up from the jungle east of the Lunga, and Mount Austen, a considerable ridge miles from the objective area. Suspecting that Widdy had confused them all, Vandegrift and Thomas had Goettge arrange more aerial photographic coverage of the area, but the photographs went astray in the military mails between Australia and the amphibious task force. In sum, Vandegrift still needed more local help.11
Although the landings of 7 August went more or less as planned, Vandegrift and his staff found little cause for optimism about their future on Cactus in the next week. First, Admiral Fletcher, arguing that he was short of fighters and fuel, cut his carrier task force’s presence from four to two days while the Japanese air counterattacks took no holiday. Next, a Japanese naval force of cruisers and destroyers slipped into the area and devastated Admiral Crutchley’s covering force, which lost five of six cruisers and two destroyers in a night action off Savo Island, 8–9 August 1942. Now completely naked to air attack, Turner ordered his captains to unload as much as they could and weigh anchor on 9 August. With Turner’s task force went much of Marine direct access to ULTRA intelligence, for the U.S. Navy’s advanced base communications unit did not disembark, which, given the peril of the situation, was understandable. Not until 15 September did Navy communicators feel that Guadalcanal was secure enough for a naval communications station that could process ULTRA transmissions. Then the Japanese, who had switched to a different variant of JN-25 on 14 August, proved to be reluctant victims. The only good news was that the airfield, named Henderson Field by the Marines, became marginally operational on 13 August, which meant that the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing (Brig. Gen. Roy S. Geiger) could begin operations, including some reconnaissance flights, a week later. It also meant more contact with the outside intelligence world, at least by messenger. Unfortunately, the 1st Marine Division crippled its own intelligence operations through Frank Goettge’s enthusiasm and Vandegrift’s lapse of judgment when presented with a plan “to do something.” This episode—the ambush and massacre of the Goettge patrol on 12–14 August—created a special need for Martin Clemens, whose only thought at the time was to get into the Marines’ lines and get some rest and decent food—as well as a real bath.12
Desperate for prisoners as soon as he landed on Guadalcanal, Frank Goettge found the first POWs produced by the Marines a disappointing source of information since they were either Korean laborers or low-ranking Japanese naval construction personnel. He learned that the defenders (still uncounted to his satisfaction) had fled to the west, beyond the Matanikau River, like the Lunga a major waterway from the mountains to the sea. A handful of prisoners from Tulagi offered no help. Meeting with his senior subordinates on Guadalcanal on 9 and 11 August, Vandegrift impressed them with his firmness and confidence in ultimate victory, but it was also clear that information about the Japanese force from any source was in short supply. Goettge’s D-2 section, led by a charismatic intelligence chief, 1st Sgt. Stephen A. Custer, looked for more POWs. Spurred by the testimony of one Japanese naval engineer rating that some of his comrades along the Matanikau would surrender, Custer volunteered to take a Marine patrol to the place he thought he would find more defectors. Frank Goettge persuaded Vandegrift that the patrol was a risk worth taking. Even so, the composition of the patrol showed poor judgment since Goettge chose himself as the patrol leader, assisted by Sergeant Custer (an ominous name for an intelligence expert) and Capt. Wilfred Ringer, the 5th Marines intelligence officer. Other officers and enlisted men of the division and 5th Marines intelligence section joined the patrol, including a medical officer and 1st Lt. Ralph Corry, a Japanese language officer and former radio intelligence cryptographer. Ambushed as soon as it came ashore at the mouth of the Matanikau, the patrol fought until annihilated. Only three enlisted men managed to escape by swimming along the coast, an experience made so harrowing by the sea, sharks, and Japanese that one of them went mad. Two relief expeditions found no bodies, but lots of hostile Japanese.13
Now having lost the bulk of his division’s intelligence section and that of one of his two infantry regiments, Vandegrift still did not have a sense about what sort of opposition his division and Roy Geiger’s airmen faced. The 5th Marines pushed patrols out to the Matanikau and confirmed a Japanese force to the west, and the 1st Marines patrols to the east on 13 August discovered an American Catholic missionary, who said the natives had seen Japanese east of the Marines’ perimeter. The division needed someone far more knowledgeable about the terrain and the situation than the British-Australian “advisors” who had accompanied the division ashore. To be fair to Charles Widdy and his colleagues, Goettge had recruited them for their knowledge of the beaches, tides, sandbars, currents, and access roads, not their tactical knowledge and great experience off the coast, of which they had little. Widdy’s credibility fell when he got the creeks and rivers east of the Lunga confused in name and fordability. It seemed obvious that one of the two coastwatcher teams near the Marines’ perimeter should come in, but just how this task should be accomplished left a great deal to doubt and chance.
The Marines had received more news about Clemens on 10 August, when Sergeant Major Vouza and ten islanders came into their positions with a Navy pilot whom they had rescued. Assured by their British-Australian advisors that the Melanesians were friendly and part of the Ferdinand scout system, Vandegrift issued orders to his Marines that the Melanesians were valued allies and should be hurried to the D-2 section whenever they came in, which would be in daylight hours only. Frank Goettge, still alive on 10 August, probably played the key role in alerting the division that there were “friendlies” outside their lines. Vouza also reported that Clemens was available, mobile, and eager to reach the perimeter for food and supplies. He volunteered to meet Clemens outside the perimeter and bring him in.14
Aware that Japanese stragglers fleeing the Lunga plain might run into his coastwatchers or that unfriendly Melanesians might betray the teams to the Japanese, Mackenzie radioed the three teams to consider working their way to the Lunga perimeter, but he gave them no further guidance. In truth, the Rhoades-Schroeder team (VQJ8) was too far away and now burdened with refugee Catholic missionaries; they would have to be evacuated by sea, a sea largely controlled by the Japanese. The Macfarlan-Hay-Andresen team (VQJ10) had two Europeans who could travel overland only with great difficulty, Macfarlan with his bad foot and Hay with his great stomach. Clemens, on the other hand, had two good but sore feet (he had no boots) and a stomach that got smaller every day. Although he had been battling a jungle fever, he thought he could get into the perimeter if someone would summon him and give him directions on when and where to meet the Marine outposts. He certainly needed some advice about how to avoid the wandering Japanese. In the meantime, Mackenzie had much more pressing business. The disaster at Savo Island and the prospect of growing Japanese naval and air attacks, even a counterlanding, created a critical need for prompt coastwatcher warnings from the northern and central Solomons. On 14 August Mackenzie and a team of three arrived by plane with a radio and supporting equipment and set up station KEN in a dugout near the northwest corner of Henderson Field, with phone lines to the division headquarters and to the Marine Air Group 23 operations center, which coordinated air defense.
Taking the designation DSIO Lunga, Mackenzie established contact not only with his agents to the north, but also with teams VQJ10 and VQJ8 in the mountains. He ordered these teams to stand fast and report any Japanese movement reported to them along the Lunga perimeter. Presumably, he would have given similar orders to ZGJ4, but Clemens’s radio had quit working for lack of power, and Clemens himself had already entered the 1st Marines’ lines east of the Lunga River along the misnamed “Tenaru River,” which was actually the Ilu. Clemens came in from the hills believing he had permission to do so. On 10 August Macfarlan had forwarded a message from Widdy that the Marines wanted more local expertise in their headquarters. The same message promised that further instructions and an “execute” would follow. Macfarlan told Clemens to be ready to move since he could and Macfarlan couldn’t. He sent Clemens his dress shoes. Clemens needed little urging, but he heard nothing more until 13 August, when a Melanesian messenger brought a sodden note directly from Widdy. A 1st Marines patrol would meet Clemens along the eastern coastal track. First met by a party of fifty Melanesian policemen and bearers led by Jacob Vouza, a bearded Martin Clemens and his ten “boys,” Clemens wearing Macfarlan’s dress shoes and tattered bush clothes, joined the 1st Marine Division on 15 August 1942.15
Martin Clemens’s contributions to the operations of the 1st Marine Division are described in his own diary and autobiography and the personal and official testimony of his Marine comrades. At his own suggestion, the 1st Marine Division asked Resident Commissioner Marchant to appoint him British liaison officer to the division headquarters while he retained his civil post as district officer, Guadalcanal, which probably pleased Charles Widdy, whose first priority was the survival of the Lever Brothers property and his Melanesian workforce. What is also clear is that Clemens was no longer a member of Ferdinand and played no role in Mackenzie’s operations during the campaign for the southern Solomons. Mackenzie managed to bring Macfarlan and Andresen in from the hills in early October. Without the knowledge and approval of Vandegrift, he sent a commando party led by Dick Horton from Malaita (without Marchant’s knowledge) to a rendezvous on the northwestern tip of Guadalcanal to rescue Rhoades, Schroeder, thirteen priests and nuns, and one U.S. Navy aviator. Clemens and his BSIPDF scout force had no part of the operation since they belonged to Vandegrift, who was furious when he learned of Mackenzie’s action.16
As the island’s senior civil servant, Clemens had a delicate dual mission that could be accomplished only in close collaboration with the Americans, which was to eject the Japanese while at the same time saving Guadalcanal’s civilians and property. The wise direction of the Melanesians meant reducing their exploitation by the Japanese, who eventually flooded into Guadalcanal at a total strength of 31,400 soldiers of the 17th Army. It also meant keeping the Melanesians out of the considerable harm’s way created by American artillery and airpower. The best way for Clemens to aid his people and the Marines was to integrate himself and his native police force into the very heart of the operations of the 1st Marine Division, which is precisely what he did. His release from Ferdinand, as well as his close working relationship with the division staff, probably influenced his dealings with his fellow British islanders and the Australians on Guadalcanal, some of whom probably misunderstood his sudden appearance on 14 August.
Vandegrift himself took an immediate liking to the young Scot, a Commonwealth companion to Capt. James C. Murray Jr., the intense, cerebral Yale graduate who served as Vandegrift’s adjutant. Vandegrift remembered Clemens as “a remarkable chap of medium height, well built and apparently suffering no ill effects from his self-imposed jungle exile.” On 17 August a correspondent with the Marines, Richard Tregaskis, found Clemens scrubbed, clean-shaven, and newly clothed in someone else’s shorts and stiff khaki shirt—and even wearing rank tabs. He had joined the division headquarters and was telling charming stories at his own expense about his life in the bush. He told the correspondent nothing about his intelligence role, only that he was supposed to govern the Melanesians. 1st Lt. Herbert C. Merillat, USMCR, the division press officer and historian, thought Clemens might have set off a wave of envy among the other Anglo-Australian officers because of his quick admission to Vandegrift’s inner circle. A former Rhodes Scholar who shared many of Clemens’s interests in sport and the arts, Merillat became a close friend. He shared the other officers’ appreciation of Clemens’s grace under fire, but also understood that he was an essential member of the division staff, not some court jester who traded his charm for access to Vandegrift’s outdoor shower, whiskey supply, and food. In fact, the division headquarters staff lived little better than a battalion headquarters, and it had to endure the same bombing and shelling.17
In an assignment he largely defined for himself, Martin Clemens became an essential part of the 1st Marine Division “brain trust” that ran the ground war. The key members of this group were Thomas, Twining, and Snedeker from start to finish of the division’s service on Guadalcanal, which ended in December 1942. Clemens worked most closely with the reconstituted division intelligence section, headed by Lt. Col. Edmund J. Buckley, USMCR, the intelligence officer of the 11th Marines, the division’s artillery regiment. Buckley was an amateur, and it showed, but Thomas and Twining, both former intelligence officers, easily filled the void. The analysis of Japanese documents and the interrogation of prisoners (still in very short supply) remained with Capt. Sherwood F. “Pappy” Moran, USMCR, a former missionary and YMCA secretary in Japan. Clemens sent his scouts forth to find material for Moran to work on. The headquarters group obtained another member when Lt. Col. Merritt A. Edson brought his 1st Raider Battalion over from Tulagi. Later, as colonel of the 5th Marines, Edson remained a key advisor.18
In a major division reorganization in late September, Clemens gained another ally and lifelong friend, Col. William J. Whaling, who enjoyed a Corps-wide reputation as a hunter, woodsman, crack marksman, and fearless combat veteran from World War I. Promoted out of his billet as 5th Marines executive officer, Whaling remained on Guadalcanal when Vandegrift sent some other colonels home because Thomas, now the division chief of staff, wanted Whaling to command a special group of scout-snipers, reinforced by Clemens’s police scouts and bearers. The “Whaling Group” would have few permanent cadre, but it would train and deploy Marine volunteers, who then returned to their parent battalions as thoroughly schooled patrol leaders. Whaling’s principal training device was actual long-range patrols of several days’ duration and night operations in which the Melanesians played a central role as scouts and bearers. They also proved the scourge of Japanese stragglers and unwary sentries. With Marchant’s political support and arms and equipment furnished by the Marines, Clemens’s force grew to number several hundred Melanesians, and Clemens quickly replaced Widdy and Father Emery de Klerk, S.M., as the islanders’ key representative. Marchant even sent Clemens an assistant, 1st Lt. David Trench, a British officer seconded to the BSIPDF. Even the arrival of Maj. John V. Mather, AIF, the liaison officer with the 7th Marines, did not reduce Clemens’s role at headquarters.
Clemens made an immediate impact on the 1st Division staff’s ability to checkmate the Japanese encirclement of the Henderson Field perimeter. Under the concealment of darkness and facing no effective naval opposition, the Japanese 17th Army started to land reinforcements on 19 August. Clemens provided essential information on the terrain east and south of the perimeter, and his scouting network brought in daily sightings. The first Clemens contribution was in correcting and amplifying the crude sketch map the division staff used, supplemented eventually with aerial photographs. Clemens’s scouts then reported that a reinforced Japanese infantry battalion had landed at Taivu Point, a report verified by a patrol from the 1st Marines. Captured on 20 August on a scouting mission, Jacob Vouza survived torture, questioning, and “execution” to return to the perimeter with more warning. Expecting an attack, the 1st Marines prepared a blazing welcome for the “Ichiki Detachment,” which it slaughtered along the Tenaru River on the night of 20–21 August. Marine morale and confidence soared.
More islander reports to Clemens confirmed the massing of another assault force, the better part of the Imperial Japanese Army’s crack 35th Brigade ashore at Tasimboko on 1–5 September. With Martin Clemens and his scouts, Merritt Edson and two Raider companies raided Tasimboko on the night of 7–8 September and fought a stiff battle with the rear elements of the “Kawaguchi Detachment” before withdrawing by sea. The documents and material captured at Tasimboko convinced Thomas, Twining, and Edson that the Japanese would attack the thin Marine lines on the southern edge of the perimeter, east of the Lunga. The redeployment of the 1st Raider Battalion with the rifle companies of the 1st Parachute Battalion countered the Japanese and produced the ferocious three-day battle remembered variously as the Battle of Edson’s Ridge, Raiders’ Ridge, or Bloody Ridge, on 12–14 September.19
Although scout reports assisted 1st Marine Division operations west of the Lunga perimeter, “the Matanikau Front,” in September and October, Clemens made his greatest contribution by helping plan and execute joint Marine-Army operations against the Japanese positions between Koli Point and Aola. Although the Japanese no longer posed a great offensive threat from this sector, they maintained their own intelligence network of observers and radios along the coast and into the jungle, including observation posts along the long spine of Mount Austen itself. They also maintained an enclave of two thousand soldiers at Koilotumeria. In addition to the Japanese, General Vandegrift also had to cope with Admiral Turner, who thought that if one enclave was good (Henderson Field—Lunga), then two would be better (Aola). Building another airfield and defending it with stray Marine and Army reinforced infantry regiments became Turner’s obsession. Vandegrift could not persuade him that the Aola enclave was unsuitable because of soil and drainage problems and a dispersion of scarce combat troops. Clemens joined the debate as a guest expert and helped reinforce the engineers’ assessment that Aola would be a builder’s nightmare. Turner, however, already had troops ashore, so Vandegrift’s challenge was to get them out of Aola and up to the Lunga enclave. Again, Clemens helped sway the argument in Vandegrift’s favor.
Working with Thomas, Twining, and Buckley, Clemens participated in a scheme to cleanse the Aola-Koli region of Japanese intelligence outposts and one regimental base camp and to recover some of the troops at Aola. The plan involved the 2d Raider Battalion (Lt. Col. Evans F. Carlson), whose August raid to Makin Island had produced ambiguous results and ambivalent feelings about Carlson, a controversial commander who enjoyed a personal friendship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Carlson’s executive officer was Maj. James Roosevelt, USMCR.) The 2d Raider Battalion had a tough mission: mop up any Japanese who escaped on offensive from the Lunga enclave. Reinforced with Clemens’s scouts and bearers, commanded by John Mather, the 2d Raider Battalion left Aola on 4 November and reached Henderson Field on 4 December, having marched 150 miles through the jungle. The raiders left piles of dead Japanese behind them, killing about 450 with the loss of only 17 Marines. Aroused by Jacob Vouza, the Guadalcanal islanders in effect rose in rebellion and added uncounted more Japanese dead to the score. By the time the 2d Raider Battalion reached the Lunga perimeter, the Japanese presence in eastern Guadalcanal had ended and the Aola enclave was as dead an issue as the Japanese.20
As the American presence on Guadalcanal increased to include the better part of two Marine divisions and two Army divisions, Clemens’s own role expanded and set the stage for the rest of his distinguished wartime service. He became British liaison officer to the U.S. 14th Corps, the Army command that completed the campaign for Guadalcanal in January 1943. Promoted to major in December 1942, Clemens also became the commanding officer of the Special Service (Commando) Battalion, BSIPDF, a composite battalion formed of Solomon Islanders, Fijians, and Tongans and officered by Europeans, some of them junior officers in the British Army. Clemens’s battalion opened a jungle warfare school on Guadalcanal for all Allied reconnaissance and commando units. Attached to American and New Zealand units, the South Pacific Scouts, as the battalion became known, served with distinction in the landings in the central Solomons. Clemens himself led a desperate mission into the jungles of western New Georgia to find the isolated 1st Marine Raider Regiment and make a full appreciation of its situation. Making the fifteen-mile trek with one American bodyguard and one BSIPDF sergeant, Clemens found the Marines, then returned with Col. Harry B. Liversedge’s recommendation that he not just be resupplied (he was), but reinforced (he wasn’t) or be withdrawn (he was). For this action and his work on Guadalcanal, the commanding general, U.S. 14th Corps awarded Clemens the Legion of Merit for distinguished service. His own government had already awarded him a Military Cross for Heroism on Guadalcanal.21
Clemens remained in the Solomons as a civil administrator after the campaign withered away in early 1944 with the isolation of the Japanese bases on Bougainville and New Britain islands. (Until the end of the war Australian forces besieged these sick and starved garrisons, even though the crucial Pacific war operations had moved thousands of miles westward.) By the time the war with Japan ended in September 1945, Clemens had become fully engaged in the political, social, and economic reconstruction of the Solomon Islands until he finally received permission to take some leave in Great Britain. Even though he had to find a ride home in New Zealand, he first had to go to Australia to retrieve his passport. The trip had fateful consequences since he met Miss Anne Turnbull of Melbourne, the daughter of a prominent “squatter” or large landholder and cattle and sheep rancher. The Turnbull family had paid a high price in World War II since Anne’s fiance had perished in the air war against Germany, and both of her brothers were lost in the war against Japan. Anne and Martin Clemens were married in 1948 after Clemens’s service as deputy district commissioner, Samaria and district commissioner, Gaza, Palestine Protectorate. Danger and political challenges continued to follow the Clemens family, which eventually included one son and three daughters.
Before his retirement from the British colonial service in 1960, Martin Clemens served for twelve years on Cyprus, where he became the commissioner of Nicosia and Kyrenia (1951–57) and defense secretary (1958–60), with a year off to attend the Imperial Defence College, London (1958). Placed on the Queen’s Honors List in 1956 as an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), he moved to the rank of commander (CBE) upon his retirement. Clemens’s retirement at the age of forty-five while he still had a bright future in the British Colonial Service had its roots in the fading fortunes of the Turnbull family. Under Australian land-use regulations, a male heir or a reasonable substitute thereto (sons-in-law qualify) had to assume responsibility for the grazing lands held in leasehold from the government. In addition to providing a more secure social and educational life for their children, Anne and Martin Clemens had to return to Australia to keep an eye on their family business. Given his education and experience in the Solomons, Martin Clemens quickly established himself in the Australian stock-raising community, winning many awards for the excellence of his cattle and sheep. Dividing his time between his home in Toorak and his stations in Queensland, he continued his passion for boating, golf, trout fishing, horseback riding, and the arts. He became a Liberal Party organizer and a major participant in veterans’ associations. He found special meaning in two of these groups, the Guadalcanal Solomon Islands War Memorial Trust and the 1st Marine Division Association. He never overlooked an opportunity to help the Melanesians who had served under his command in the BSIPDF, and he worked with success to obtain a knighthood in 1979 for Jacob Vouza, his stalwart sergeant major who had survived capture and torture by the Japanese on Guadalcanal. Upon Sir Jacob’s death in 1984, Clemens organized the drive to place a memorial in his home village.22
Postwar recollections enhanced Martin Clemens’s stature to Homeric proportions. The novelist T. Grady Gallant, serving as a young Marine artilleryman in 1942, remembered that his battery commander briefed his men before the 7 August landing that a special British officer and his Melansian scouts awaited them on Guadalcanal. This officer would supply critical information on the terrain and Japanese.23 In the official Marine Corps commemorative history of the fiftieth anniversary of the Guadalcanal campaign, Clemens became “a fabled character . . . strolling out of the jungle into the Marine lines. He had watched the landing from the hills south of the airfield and now brought his bodyguard of native policemen with him.”24
Once upon a time, Marines all over the world stood to attention whenever a veteran of the harrowing Samar, Philippines campaign (1901) appeared in a mess. “Stand, gentlemen, he served on Samar!” The tradition died with the veterans. Perhaps someday the veterans of Guadalcanal will receive the same honors, although Marine Corps tastes in social matters have turned distinctly egalitarian. Nevertheless, Guadalcanal veterans—and the people who write books or make movies—still recognize that we should all stand, rhetorically speaking, for Martin Clemens, one of the men who shaped the first great Allied counteroffensive in the Pacific war.
1. Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 125–61.
2. “Coastwatchers,” in The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, ed. Peter Dennis, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, and Robin Prior (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), 154–55; Eric Feldt, The Coast Watchers (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1946); Walter Lord, Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons (New York: Viking Press, 1977). See also Peter Ryan, Fear Drive My Feet (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books, 1992).
3. Interviews with W. F. Martin Clemens, Toorak, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 21–23 July 1995, supplemented with contemporaneous scrapbooks and correspondence and amplified by Clemens in an autobiographical summary, December 1996, in the author’s possession.
4. Grace Person Hayes, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II: The War Against Japan (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1982), 136–53; Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985), 184–87; H. P. Willmott, The Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies, February to June 1942 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1983), 3–170.
5. Ronald Lewin, The American MAGIC: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982); W. J. Holmes, Double-Edged Secrets: U.S. Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific during World War II (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1979); John Winton, ULTRA in the Pacific (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993); Jeffrey M. Dorwart, Conflict of Duty: The U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Dilemma, 1919–1945 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1983); John Prados, Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II (New York: Random House, 1995); and Capt. Wyman H. Packard, USN (Ret.),A Century of U.S. Naval Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1996).
6. Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Col. Allison Ind, USA, Allied Intelligence Bureau: Our Secret Weapon in the War Against Japan (New York: David McKay, 1958), 3–64.
In addition to the secondary sources above, see Office of Naval Communications, “The Role of Communication Intelligence in the American-Japanese War,” vol. 3, “The Solomon Islands Campaign,” 21 June, 1943, NSA/CSS Cryptologic Documents, World War II, RG 457, NA, copy in the historical files, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; and “Intelligence,” Commanders in Chief United States Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas, Command History, 1941–1945, Operational Archives, Naval Historical Division.
7. Feldt, Coast Watchers, 58–87, and Clemens diaries and autobiography.
8. Headquarters 1st Marine Division, “Division Commanders Final Report on the Guadalcanal Operation,” pts. 1–5, June 1943, copy in the Marine Corps Historical Center Archives, Washington Navy Yard (hereafter cited as 1st Mar-Div, “Final Report”). The quote is from pt. 1, 3.
For the Guadalcanal campaign as experienced by the 1st Marine Division, the official history is Lt. Col. Frank O. Hough, Maj. Verle E. Ludwig, and Henry I. Shaw Jr., History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, vol. 1, Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal (Washington, D.C.: Historical Branch, G-3, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1958), 235–374.
Of all the secondary accounts, two stand out: Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Griffith II, USMC (Ret.), The Battle for Guadalcanal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963) and Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal (New York: Random House, 1990), both of which use Japanese sources and formerly classified intelligence documents. I have also used many of the personal letters and oral histories provided by the 1st Marine Division’s staff officers when I wrote In Many a Strife: General Gerald C. Thomas and the U.S. Marine Corps, 1917–1956 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1993), a biography of the division operations officer (D-3) and chief of staff in the Guadalcanal campaign, especially my correspondence with the late Gen. Merrill B. Twining, USMC, the assistant D-3 and D-3 for the same period (June-December 1942). These sources are described in detail in In Many a Strife.
Of the memoir literature, one is in a class by itself: Gen. Merrill B. Twining, USMC (Ret.), No Bended Knee: The Battle for Guadalcanal (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1996). General Twining died on 11 May 1996 at ninety-three, almost simultaneously with the appearance of his memoirs.
9. Oral memoir (1966), Gen. G. C. Thomas, USMC, 221–24, Oral History Collection, Marine Corps Historical Center; Twining, No Bended Knee, 33–41, 1st MarDiv, “Final Report,” pt.1, 23 and Annex E, “Intelligence.”
10. 1st MarDiv, “Final Report,” pt. 2, 1–14 and Annex G, “Intelligence.” Thomas, oral memoir, 261; Maj. Gen. A. A. Vandegrift, memoir, 1962, Marine Corps Historical Center; Gen. M. B. Twining, “Vandegrift” and “Critical Decisions of the Guadalcanal Campaign,” memoranda prepared for the author and in his possession, 1987. For reprises of their manuscript memoirs, see Gen. A. A. Vandegrift, with Robert Asprey, Once a Marine: The Memoirs of General A. A. Vandegrift (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), and Twining, No Bended Knee, 42–60.
11. Thomas, oral memoir, 266–71; Feldt, Coast Watchers, 74–87.
12. Herbert Christian Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1982), 91–100, which is based on his diaries and notes kept while an officer on General Vandegrift’s personal staff; Col. Sanford B. Hunt, USMC (Ret.) to the author, 17 July and 8 August 1988, 8 and 9 February 1997; Martin Clemens, “A Coastwatcher’s Diary,” manuscript memoir, n.d. [1954], copy in author’s possession, 69–72.
13. 1st MarDiv, “Final Report,” pt. 4, 19 and Annex A, “Intelligence.”
14. Ibid.; Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 91–100.
15. Clemens, “Coastwatcher’s Diary,” 133–42; Feldt, Coast Watchers, 88–96.
16. Feldt, Coast Watchers, 96–97; Ind, Allied Intelligence Bureau, 38–41.
For their service in the Solomons campaign, MacArthur awarded Macfarlan, Rhoades, and two coastwatchers in the northern Solomons (Jack Read and Paul E. Mason) the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest award for heroism in combat.
17. Vandegrift, Once a Marine, 135–37; Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Random House, 1943), 107–8; Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 88–90, 140, 150.
18. Millett, In Many a Strife, 182–92; Twining, No Bended Knee, 73–87; Maj. Jon Hoffman, USMCR, Once a Legend: “Red Mike” Edson of the Marine Raiders (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1994), 165–209; Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 101–12; Clemens, “Coastwatcher’s Diary,” 142–68.
19. Clemens, “Coastwatcher’s Diary,” 168–75; 1st MarDiv, “Final Report,” pt. 4, 8–13; Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 129–45; Thomas, oral memoir, 356–65; Twining, No Bended Knee, 88–102.
For an authoritative history of the Raider battalions, see Maj. Jon T. Hoffman, USMCR, From Makin to Bougainville; Marine Raiders in the Pacific War (Washington, D.C.: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1995).
20. Thomas, oral memoir, 449–60; Twining, No Bended Knee, 139–46; Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 222–23.
21. Clemens interview, documents, and autobiographical summary provided to the author, July 1995, confirmed by the service records, Australian War Memorial.
22. Ibid.
23. T. Grady Gallant, On Valor’s Side (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 206.
24. Henry I. Shaw Jr., First Offensive: The Marine Campaign for Guadalcanal (Washington, D.C.: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1993), 18.