VI

BOMBARDMENT

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23

There is no laundry on Guadalcanal. It was one of the things the Japs forgot to provide. Apparently they did their own, as we must now do.

I turned to this morning with a wooden bucket and a cake of laundry soap and scrubbed several dirty items. After some hours of effort, I found the clothes were at least a tattletale gray, whereas they had formerly been a darker shade.

It was a pleasant morning. And noontime came and still there had been no air raid. It began to seem that we were going to enjoy one day of rest.

But in the afternoon there came a disrupting surge of “scuttlebutt.” A slew of Jap ships were on their way to Guadalcanal.

I checked the story with the best-informed sources, and found it was true. Our patrol aircraft had spotted a large Jap naval force, 150 miles off, heading in our direction. There were transports, cruisers and destroyers to a total of about fourteen ships.

A striking force of our dive-bombers went out to hunt the Japs. But before they could reach the enemy, the weather closed in so that they were unable to make contact. I was at our airport operations center when the pilots came back, looking brokenhearted about the matter.

“I feel like hell about it,” said the squadron leader, checking in with the operations chief. “But we just couldn’t get in there.”

“I never saw anything like it,” said another dive-bomber pilot. “I came back from Tulagi two feet over the water, trying to get under the overcast. Even then I couldn’t see anything.”

There was nothing more to be done about the matter, for the moment, except to leave our shoes on when we went to bed that night. Which we did.

MONDAY, AUGUST 24

The expected Japanese task force did not show up during the night. But a Japanese submarine came up off Kukum at about two o’clock this morning and threw shells into Guadalcanal.

When we heard the sound of the cannonading, Capt. Dickson, Capt. Narder and Major Phipps, my tent mates, rose up in the dark with a swift reflex and sneaked for our dugout, I with them.

It was some time before we discovered what was happening. We could see that the sky over Kukum was illuminated by white light while the shelling went on, and judging from the suddenness with which the light snapped off and on, we estimated it was a searchlight.

The sounds of cannonading were not alarming; we could hear the sound of the shell exploding before the whistle of the projectile passing through the air. And that was a good sign. It meant the shells were falling far short of us.

Ten minutes after it had begun, the shelling stopped. But the alarm was not yet over. We could hear the low-toned muttering of motorboat engines coming from the direction of Kukum.

Lieut. Wilson checked on the phone. “Jesus,” he said, “they ain’t ours. All our boats are beached, all crews inland.”

We sat in the CP, waiting and talking while the usual cigarettes glowed in the darkness. It was a scary situation, sitting in the dark, listening to the sound of motorboats, and wondering if that sound marked the coming of the much-expected Jap landing party. But humor does not desert Americans in such situations. We sat, waited and exchanged wisecracks.

Maj. Gannon (James J. Gannon of Philadelphia, Pa.), however, brought news which dampened our spirits for a few minutes. “Number four gun had almost a direct hit,” he said, tragically. “I lost two men and two wounded.” Our spirits sank. “It’s too bad,” he said. “But there it is.”

But later it developed that this first estimate, like a good deal of first news about casualties, was overly gloomy. We heard the verified fact in the morning: that only one man had been seriously wounded in the shelling.

I visited the spot in the morning with Col. Phipps. Three of those who had been slightly wounded were still on duty at the scene. They told me they still carried pieces of shrapnel in various parts of their arms and legs.

I asked one of the wounded, a husky lad named Kagle (Pvt. George R. Kagle of Abilene, Tex.) if his wounds did not hurt.

“Sure, they hurt some,” he said cheerfully. “Like a bee-sting. But outside of that they’re O.K.”

I looked at the spot where the one marine who had been seriously injured had been lying asleep at the time of the shelling. It was a squat shelter constructed of wooden boxes which were now partially splintered. There was a small, oval-shaped hole in the sand less than ten feet away. Here the shell had struck, sending a shower of fragments into the marine’s shelter.

“If he didn’t have the little house, he’d of been a dead duck,” said Pvt. Kagle.

At about 2:30 in the afternoon, our air-raid siren sounded, and we watched our swift fighter planes zooming into the overcast sky. They were straining to “get upstairs” before the Japs arrived.

I went to an open spot at a bend in the Lunga River to watch the fighting. I could see no planes for a few minutes, ours or theirs. But I distinctly heard the tat-tat-tat of machine guns, the tortured sound of zooming motors.

A plane swooped suddenly out of the sky, streaked over the tree-tops to my right. Then another behind it. The second was one of our Grumman Wildcats. His guns rattled and stopped, then rattled and kept rattling. The first plane, I realized, must be a Jap fighter. Was he strafing the airport? I had time to think only that, and then both planes were gone.

Then we heard the swishing sound of bombs falling, and a sharp, ground-shaking “crack-crack-crack” as they struck. From somewhere up in the gray continent of sky, the Jap bombers had dropped their sticks.

I went to the airport immediately after the “all clear” and waited for our fighters to come down. Most of them seemed almost hilariously elated as they taxied in one by one and jumped down from their cockpits. For most of them, it was a first victory over the enemy—although a few had made contact with some Zeros on the 21st.

A smiling, handsome lieutenant told me how he and another fighter pilot had knocked down two enemy bombers apiece. The pilot was Lieut. Ken Frazier (of Burlington, N.J.). “I took the left side of the formation and Carl [Lieut. Marion E. Carl of Hubbard, Ore.] took the right. I let one have all my guns and he exploded. Then I moved my sights up a little and let go at the second guy. A sheet of flame came out of one of his motors.”

Lieut. Frazier had, quite naturally, been excited by the experience. He could not say surely how many enemy bombers there had been or whether they were one or two motored craft.

A blond lad with very white teeth laughed as gaily as if he had been given a much-desired present, as he told his story. He was Lieut. J. H. King (of Brookline, Mass.).

“That bomber was flying along like a fat and happy goose,” said Lieut. King. “I dove at it and it just exploded at the first burst.”

He told me, laughing as if it were a huge joke, how he had been chased by a flock of Zeros. “I ducked into a cloud,” he said. “Each time I came out I found them sitting there buzzing around and waiting.”

Col. Fike, the graying executive officer of the marine fliers, was taking notes on their stories, arranging a tally of victory. The memo on his notebook pad showed a total of ten bombers and eleven Zeros shot down in the fight.

Two of our fighter planes were still unreported when we left the airport. Another pilot had been seen to bail out over Tulagi Bay. The rest had returned. It was not a bad score at all: three of our men missing, in exchange for twenty-one Japs shot down.

We drove across the airfield on the way back to our camp. The Japs had missed it completely, although the runways were obviously their target. In a neighboring meadow, we saw two fairly regular lines of large craters churned into the black earth, where sticks of bombs had struck.

A large trailer truck lay on its side, apparently overturned by the bomb blast, and the cab had been riddled, windshield shattered, by bomb fragments. But it was a captured Jap vehicle, and no one, said bystanders, had been in the cab at the time.

There were the usual rumors, this afternoon, that a large force of Japs were on their way in to attack Guadalcanal, and most of us went to bed again with our shoes on, and our helmets within easy reach. But I decided to be comfortable for once, despite the rumors, and took off pants, shirt, shoes and socks.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 25

My taking off my clothes last night, with a view to sleeping more comfortably, turned out to be a great mistake. Just after midnight this morning, my sleep was shattered by explosions coming very close. The instant reflex action took me out of bed and onto the ground, flat. I knew that the others were leaving our tent, dashing for the dugout. I fumbled for my helmet and couldn’t find it.

I could hear heavy gunfire, in a sequence that I knew instantly was ominous: the metallic, loud brroom-brroom of the guns going off, then the whistle of the approaching shells, then the crash of the explosions, so near that one felt a blast of air from the concussion.

I ran for the dugout, not stopping even for slippers, but hit the deck and stopped dead still just inside the tent flap when I heard more shells on the way. The crash of the explosions dented in my eardrums, and I could hear the confused sounds of debris falling.

Col. Hunt and I arrived at the dugout at the same moment. We bumped into each other at the entrance and then backed away and I said, “You go first, Colonel.” He said politely with a slight bow, “No, after you.” And we stood there for a few moments, arguing the matter, while the shells continued to fall. The colonel too had decided to sleep comfortably last night and now wore only his “scivvie” drawers and shirt. We must have made a comical couple, for I took a riding for the rest of the day about the Alphonse-and-Gaston act performed in underwear and under fire.

But the humor of that moment was soon gone. When the barrage halted, we could hear a blubbering, sobbing cry that was more animal than human. A marine came running to the dugout entrance to say that several men had been badly wounded and needed a corpsman. And the crying man kept on, his gurgling rising and falling in regular waves like the sound of some strange machine.

I edged around a smashed tent toward the sound and found myself amidst a scene of frightfulness. One gray-green body lay on its back. There was a small, irregular red hole in the middle of the chest.

Nearby lay the wounded man who had been crying in the night. A big, muscular fellow, he lay on his right side, while a doctor bandaged the shredded remains of one leg, and a corpsman worked on the twisted, gaping mouth of a wound which bared the other leg to the bone.

His face and shoulders lay in the center of a sheet of gore. Face wounds rained blood on the ground. A deep excavation through layers of tissue had been made in one shoulder. The other shoulder, too, was ripped by shrapnel. I could see now how he made the terrible noise. He was crying, sobbing, into a pool of blood. The blood distorted the sound of his wailing, as water would have done, into a bubbling sound. The sound still came in cycles, rising to peaks of loudness. One of the wounded man’s hands moved in mechanical circles on the ground, keeping time with his cries.

There were others wounded. Two dim lights, set in a square dark shape, marked an ambulance, standing by. Corpsmen were loading it. The squeak of the stretchers sliding into place, a sound much like that of a fingernail scratched across a blackboard, I shall never forget.

Next to the smashed tent stood the splintered trunk of a palm tree. The top of the tree had fallen onto another tent, squashing one side of it. The tent walls which still stood had been torn by flying shell fragments.

Back at Col. Hunt’s headquarters shack, I found Capt. Hodgess, the Australian guide, telling how the treetop had fallen onto his bunk. He found humor in the matter. “First time I ever had a tree in bed with me,” he said. He was uninjured.

When the wounded had been carted off, we went tentatively back to bed. And we were glad to hear our planes taking off, obviously in an attempt to attack the Jap ships which had been bombarding us.

In the calm morning light, we found that our damage and casualties in the shelling had been amazingly slight when one considered the possibilities. Only the one shell, which had come so close to my tent, had caused any injuries. That missile had exploded when it struck the top of the palm tree. The downward blast of the explosion had killed the one marine who had died instantly. The marine whom we had heard crying in the night had also been hit by that shell. He had died of his injuries before morning. Two others had been seriously wounded but would not die. About ten had suffered slight wounds from the flying fragments. The damage had been confined to the two tents, a few holes in surrounding structures, and the broken palm tree. We made up for the tree to some degree by serving the hearts-of-palm, a choice part of the branch, for lunch today.

In general, it seemed amazing that the enemy could throw so many rounds of ammunition into our camp and do so little damage.

We had word from our shore observation posts this morning that the force which had shelled us consisted of three destroyers. Evidently the destroyers had been carrying troops which were landed at a point to the west of the airport, well beyond our lines. Then the small armada had swung along the shore to pay us their respects with high explosives.

At the airport operations headquarters, Lieut. Turner Caldwell (of San Diego, Cal.), the leader of a squadron of naval dive-bombers, told me that the marauding Jap ships had been spotted by our planes and a possible hit scored on one of the destroyers.

“Anybody that flew over the spot today could see an oil slick about twenty-five miles long,” he said. “It might be we sank the destroyer.”

While we were talking, there was an almost continual roar of planes taking off from the airport. They were going out to attack the large Jap task force of warships and transports which had been hovering in this area. More bombing flights went up all through the day. The results were encouraging: the Jap forces had been turned back and dispersed and one of their cruisers and two transports badly damaged.

At the aviation bivouac, I found a group of marine dive-bomber pilots sprawling under a tent canopy. They seemed exhausted, and most had wiry incipient beards and dirty faces; they had been flying since midnight this morning. Some of them told me they had slept in their planes.

They told their stories cheerfully. Maj. Richard C. Mangrum (of Seattle, Wash.), leader of the group, told me smilingly about the unusual way in which he had hit one of the Jap transports.

“I dived on the cruiser in our original attack,” he said. “But my bomb got stuck and wouldn’t come off. I didn’t know about it at the time.

“When we were flying back home after the attack was completed, the other guys told me my bomb was still on. So I left the formation and went back. I saw a transport then that we hadn’t even seen before. I guess it had been under a cloud.”

Maj. Mangrum’s radioman and rear gunner, Corp. Dennis Byrd, described the hit the major had scored. “The bomb seemed to hit near the fantail,” he said. “A big column of smoke and water went up.” Byrd said he was sure the steering apparatus of the ship must have been damaged.

The pilots said it is always hard to see your own hit, if you are a dive-bomber, because by the time the bomb strikes, you are too busy pulling out of your dive, and dodging anti-aircraft, to take time to look behind you. A radioman-rear gunner, who faces the rear, or a squadron mate, however, often has an excellent view.

Lieut. Lawrence Baldinus (of Yuma, Mich.) had not been able to see the hit he scored directly amidships on the largest Jap transport, which incidentally carried the large red flag of a Jap general or admiral, and might have been a flagship. But Lieut. Don E. McCafferty (of Hempstead, L.I.) said he had enjoyed a “fascinating view” of Baldinus’ bombing.

“The bomb hit right by the bridge,” he said, “and everything went up as if it was made of wood—like a model in the movies. I veered over to watch it, I was so fascinated, just everything spraying up and coming down.”

Maj. Mangrum said he had seen Baldinus’ transport, which was a big ship of about 14,000 tons, burning fiercely, and seen indications that the crew were abandoning ship. “There were small boats all over the water,” he said.

I found Lieut. Fink (Chris Fink of Gray Bull, Wyo.), the naval dive-bomber who had hit the enemy cruiser, a new vessel of the Jintsu class. He was a slow-speaking Westerner, and said, as the other pilots had said, that he had not had a chance to watch his bomb hit. But his radioman, Milo L. Kimberlin (of Spokane, Wash.), told the story: “The bomb hit right on the bridge and a sheet of flame and smoke went right up to the clouds. I could see the stack and bridge lift out of the ship and go kerplunk into the ocean. She was still burning when we left. You could see the smoke and flames for about forty miles.”

I was skirting the airfield en route to Col. Hunt’s CP this afternoon, when the air-raid alert sounded, and a few moments later, we heard the impressive sound of many powerful engines, and saw the usual thin silver line of Japanese bombers spanning the sky.

There were twenty-one of them, this time. I counted them; then, as they were almost overhead, I dashed for shelter behind a huge limestone rock. I heard the bombs coming down, and the swishing sound of their descent was louder than I had ever heard it before. I forgot technique—forgot the approved method of taking bomb cover, which is to support yourself a little on elbows to avoid concussion—and instead burrowed as deeply as possible into the ground. The crash of the stick of bombs was loud, and I felt the earth jerk with the impact. Clods of dirt came showering down. When the last “carrummp” had sounded, I waited a few seconds, then got up a bit shaken and looked across the grassy field at a row of fresh, clean-cut, black bomb craters. The ground everywhere around was strewn with small, cube-shaped clods of earth. I measured off the distance between me and the nearest crater. It was not much more than 200 yards.

Tonight I heard cheerful reports of an action between our naval forces and the Japs’, somewhere near Guadalcanal: our torpedo bombers from a carrier had attacked the Jap carrier Ryuzyo and probably sunk it; at the same time, eighty-one Jap planes had attacked one of our carriers and seventy-one had been shot down. Our bombers had scored hits on other Jap warships of unspecified number and type.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26

Bob Miller and I were standing at the edge of the airfield today when the now-routine Jap air raid occurred. We now have the timing of these matters pretty well organized. We know about how long we can afford to watch the bombers coming before taking cover. Today we heard the bombs screeching down as loud and close as they were yesterday. Then we piled into a small foxhole. This time I remembered to support myself slightly on my elbows, to avoid concussion, in case one came too close. Some of our people have been so badly shaken by close ones that they have suffered shock and prolonged bleeding from the nose.

The worst time in a bombing is the short moment when you can hear the bombs coming. Then you feel helpless, and you think very intensely of the fact that it is purely a matter of chance whether or not you will be hit. The chances vary with your location: the Japs are bombing such and such an area, so many acres; the circles of fragments from their bombs will cover a certain proportion of the total acreage. You wonder if your portion of the acreage will be overlapped by the acreage of the bombs.

If you are caught on the airport by a bombing, you can figure your chances for escaping injury are much fewer than elsewhere, for the airport always seems to be the Japs’ target. But even in other parts of the island, where odds may be greater, say, nine out of ten that you won’t be hit, you wonder if you will be the unlucky tenth case.

You will also think about those who have been cruelly wounded or killed by previous bombings, and in your imagination you suffer the shock of similar wounds. You also wonder why, instead of getting into a shelter which has a sandbagged roof, you stayed around to gawk and left yourself only time to get to an open foxhole or nothing at all for protection except the flatness of the earth. When you have nothing but the earth and your lack of altitude to protect you, you feel singularly naked and at the mercy of the bombs.

These thoughts pass very swiftly through your head during the short time that seems so long, the time when you hear the bombs swishing and rattling through the air on their way down to you. And while your mind is racing through these thoughts, your ears, without any conscious effort on your part, are straining to gauge the closeness of the bombs from the swishing and the rattling of them.

After the sticks have hit, you wait a few more minutes, suffering from a disinclination to get up immediately; you watch the ground, close in front of your eyes, very patiently, and wait to see if there will be another stick or more sticks. Usually, here on Guadalcanal, there are no more sticks after the bombers have made one run. They do not come back then because they are too busy trying to fend off our fighters.

When you finally get up to look around, you have butterflies in your chest and your breath is noticeably short and your hands feel a bit shaky. Those feelings do not seem to be avoidable by any conscious effort.

This morning Miller and I jumped up rather quickly after the sticks had cracked down, and before the dust columns of the explosions had settled saw reddish flames leaping into spreading brown smoke at the far edge of the field. Some of the bombs had hit one of our oil dispersal dumps. But there did not seem to be any other damage.

Gen. Vandegrift passed us in his jeep. He was anxious to see what damage, if any, the bombs had done to the airfield. Miller and I hitched a ride with him, and we dashed over toward the fires; but as we came close we could see that only a few barrels had been hit.

“I can see those Jap pilots turning in a report about how they turned the airport into a holocaust,” said Miller. “How they could see the flames for forty miles, etc.” We laughed, because undoubtedly that was just what the Japs did—those who got back.

Somewhere up in the sky the crescendo, protesting wails of zooming and diving motors could be heard, and the chatter of machine guns. We knew many of the Japs would never get back to make any report at all.

The general turned his jeep to another part of the airport, and that was fortunate, for a delayed-action bomb, a big fellow, blew up near the spot where we had turned, a few seconds after we left.

Miller and I hopped off at one of the shelter pens, the skeletal type of hangars the Japs had built on the airport, and waited for our fliers to come down.

Marion Carl came in, grinning happily, to tell us that he had shot down his fifth and sixth planes—both Zeros. The lads call him “the Zero man,” literally a very unflattering title, but in this connotation quite agreeable to Carl.

The other pilots seem to have great respect for Carl. They don’t mention it to him, but one of them told me today: “What a pilot! He’s a natural. Always relaxed.”

Carl was with the marine fliers on Midway, during the great battle, and shot down one Zero there. I asked him how the Zeros he was meeting over Guadalcanal compared with those at Midway.

“I dunno why,” he said, “but we got shot up a lot more there than we do here. Maybe the pilots were better than these.”

Capt. John L. Smith (of Lexington, Okla.), Carl’s squadron leader, is a more quiet type. He has the steadiest eyes I have ever seen; they are brown and wide-set and you fancy they would be most at home looking out over the great plains of the West.

Smith is a prairie type: tanned face, wide cheekbones, the erect head of a horseman, a thick neck set on square shoulders, a big, sinewy body. You get the impression that life must have a calm, elemental simplicity for him.

Capt. Smith did not say so, but he is the ace among the fliers on Guadalcanal. Already he has shot down nine enemy planes. And that success does not seem to have excited or perturbed him at all.

Back at my tent, I found Don Dickson and Lieut. McLeod (William J. McLeod of St. Petersburg, Fla.) sitting on a bunk, deep in conversation. They seemed to be working over some sort of document. Dickson, who usually has a wonderfully good temper, said rather curtly: “We have a little private matter here.”

I felt a little cut, but later found out what the conspiracy was. P.F.C. Tardiff informed me that I was under arrest, and two marines with fixed bayonets took me in tow. Dickson came by and said with mock gravity, “You’re a prisoner of war.”

Capt. Hodgess, the Australian, was also brought along under military guard. We stood side by side—“Stand at attention, Pvt. Tregaskis,” snapped Lieut. Wilson—while Col. Hunt marched out and gravely read a long “citation” for each of us. This document honored us for our speed in getting to a dugout amidst a bombardment and drafted us for membership in the “Lunga Point Shell-Dodging Marines.”

Don Dickson, who had been an artist and cartoonist in civilian life, had embellished our citations with comic drawings. Making them had been his “private matter” in the tent. The documents were embellished with official-looking seals made from Jap beer-bottle labels.

Col. Hunt solemnly pinned captured Japanese medals on Viv Hodgess’ chest and mine. It was the Eighth Order of Palenowa. “We found a case of those in the Jap tent camp,” said Col. Hunt. (Later he told me: “We had to put on some kind of show for the boys. They were getting a little bit glum.”)

Tonight was quiet. The Jap submarine which visits us nocturnally—we now call it “Oscar”—did not show up. Nor did the cruisers and destroyers which have often bothered us.

But I was not to have any rest this night, despite the quiet of the evening. I was awakened by the unpleasant symptoms of a local epidemic, which the doctors call gastro-enteritis.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 27

I thought I could sleep off my illness, but that was impossible. This was a formidable assault of the ailment. I generated a dizzying fever and nausea.

This morning the air-raid alert sounded. I felt too sick to move from my cot, whatever happened. Don Dickson came in and said the warning had become urgent, and asked if I wanted help in getting to the dugout. I told him I would stay where I was.

I heard the drone of planes in the sky and got my helmet and put it on, then turned face down on the cot. That way, I figured, I would have a maximum of protection.

But the bombers did not make a run today. They jettisoned their bombs somewhere in the backwoods. Evidently they are growing chary of our fighters. (Yesterday, according to the official count, our fighters downed seven Jap bombers and five Zeros.)

For some time I lay abed, feeling dizzier and sicker by the moment. I could hear the booming of cannon-firing batteries. Don Dickson told me it was our own batteries I heard. They were shelling the Matanikau-Kokumbona area. The Jap forces which had been landed piecemeal at nighttime had filtered back into those villages. We were going to blast them out. The artillery was softening the positions. Then a large body of troops was going to move in, later in the day.

Dr. Hopkins (Henry Hopkins, of Hyannis, Mass.) came in to give me some medicine; my nausea quickly disposed of it. After that, I was carried off feet first. I remember hearing the familiar squeak of the stretcher as I was put into the ambulance, the jouncy ride, losing my sense of direction, and reading, several times, the red letters “USN, MC” painted on the stretcher above mine, being placed on a cot that was too short for me, as most of them are, and then suffering through four or five hours of tortured sleep and being conscious that my fever was rising and nausea increasing. I had a bad case.

(Gastro-enteritis is marked by a combination of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and high fever. The organism, if there is one, has not been isolated. The doctors on Guadalcanal knew little of the cause of the matter, were too busy with more serious matters to bother about pathological research into this local plague.)

It was dark when I became conscious of movement and talking at the entrance to the tent. I heard the shuffling of feet, and somebody said: “His clothes are wet. Better get ’em off.” They had brought in a casualty. I was too sick to be interested. But the voices kept on.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Sunstroke.”

Then I heard grunts and groans. They were moving the man from the stretcher to bed.

“He’s a big ’un,” said a voice.

A doctor spoke in a pleasant, soft voice. “Were you out in the sun?” he asked.

The man spoke as if it were difficult to summon wind enough for words. “Chees,” he said. It was a sort of gasp. Then he said, “Chees,” again, and finally: “I’ve got a platoon. On the ridge.”

“You’re in the hospital now,” said the doctor. “I’m Dr. Lynch.” (Dr. George Lynch of Boston, Mass.)

The man said “Chees” again. And then, sick as I was, I recognized the voice. It was Lieut. Donoghue, of Jersey City, one of my shipmates on the transport which had brought me to Guadalcanal.

Finally the corpsmen brought Lieut. Donoghue to, and he told, between gasps of “Chees,” a foggy story of having been out on a ridge with his machine-gun platoon. They were advancing on Matanikau with the other troops, he said, when the commanding officer ordered him to take his platoon up onto a steep rocky ridge. “My men pooped out,” he said, “after we got up. I went down to look for Capt. Hawkins. I asked where he was. Next thing I remember, Dr. Claude giving me a drink.… Chees.”

Another of the men in the tent, a young lieutenant who was recuperating from gastro-enteritis, wanted to chat in the evening. He and the corpsman in charge talked about the fight for Matanikau. The corpsman said there had not been many casualties in today’s attempt to get into the town. He said there were some killed and wounded, but the wounded weren’t being brought here; they were being taken to another hospital.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 28

Lieut. Donoghue repeated his story this morning. He said he felt better, but he talked as if thinking and speaking were a great effort.

The young lieutenant who is recuperating talked with the corpsman about how good the “chow” was at this camp. The lieutenant said he wished he could stay awhile. Possibly by accident, he smoked a cigarette just before his temperature was to be taken. This upset the corpsman, who accused the lieutenant of gold-bricking, which, after some confusion, the lieutenant cheerfully admitted.

Lieut. Donoghue, at the opposite extreme, begged the doctor to let him go, as his mind cleared at about midday. “I hate to lie down in one place, Doc,” he said.

I still suffered from nausea and vomiting and fever, and was not inclined to be interested in any of these goings-on, or even curious when later in the afternoon a lot of our planes took off, and there was a great, excited passing of “scuttlebutt” about a huge Japanese task force which was supposedly on its way to attack Guadalcanal. (I got the news next day that a force of one small Jap destroyer and three larger ones had been spotted by a patrol of our dive-bombers near Santa Isabel Island. The dive-bombers had attacked the small destroyer and set it afire. And a striking force—the other planes which we had heard taking off—had found the small destroyer listing and burning, and had attacked two of the others. Both of these had been hit; one exploded and sank, and the second burned and was apparently heavily damaged.)

Lieut. Donoghue talked about the advance on Matanikau. He said that en route he had passed the mutilated body of a young woman lying by the side of the trail. He said that the girl had been raped and her torso hacked.

Tonight the other patients in the tent, who were with one exception in better shape than I (the exception was a sick officer who was being checked for possible malaria), spent an interminable time yarning about the Solomons campaign to date. Some of the stories were fairly interesting; like the one about the Jap who, in the first night on Tulagi, was challenged by a marine sentry. The Jap said in English that he was the corporal of the guard. “O.K., bud,” said the marine, and opened up with his pistol. There was no such thing as a corporal of the guard in that organization.

Another story, which I had heard before, was about the Japs in one of the dugout caves on Tulagi. An interpreter went out to ask them, in Japanese, to surrender; one of the Japs had stuck his head out of the entrance and answered in colloquial English.

That led to other yarns about the Japs’ ability to speak English, and the alleged fact that many of the dead wore American high-school rings. Then, there were stories about the American mementoes that had been found on Jap bodies. American cigarette cases, etc. Then the yarning turned to our first days on Guadalcanal, the large amount of shooting at shadows during the first few nights ashore and how, allegedly, the general had issued an order that no shots should be fired, that only the bayonet should be used, and that this measure had cut down the unnecessary firing—that was the story.

And so the yarning went on, and finally somebody told the classic story about the two marine jeep drivers on Guadalcanal, supposedly a true story, very true, anyhow, in its essential American psychology. It was about two jeeps passing in the night, one with proper dim-out headlights, the other with glaring bright lights. So the driver of the dim-light car leans out as they pass and shouts to the other driver: “Hey! Put your f– – – – –g lights out!” To which the other replies: “I can’t. I’ve got a f– – – – –g colonel with me!”

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29

This morning at about four o’clock I heard somebody shout “Air raid!” and slid out of bed and through the folds of my mosquito net and onto the floor just as the bombs came swishing down. The crack of their explosions, however, was not loud, and I surmised they were small ones. We found after the excitement was over that some Jap floatplanes had made a sneak attack. The bombs had fallen far from the airfield and caused only a few casualties.

From 9:30 on, we spent the morning dragging ourselves to a dugout and back; there were three air-raid alarms. The shelter was crammed with sick people. The feverish, emaciated wrecks, most of them suffering from gastro-enteritis, were a pitiful sight.

The Japs did not show up until noontime. Then there were twenty-four bombers with an escort of twenty-two Zeros. I climbed out of the murky air of the dugout—I was feeling well enough to haul myself around without help by this time—and watched our anti-aircraft bursting in the sky. Then came a shower of bombs, and I could see the dark-brown smoke of their explosions rising above the treetops.

Our fighters caught the Japs. I heard the familiar sound of diving or zooming motors and rattling machine guns in the clouds. And then one plane came tearing down out of the sky in the most awful power dive I have heard. The sound accelerated and rose in a crescendo that filled the sky. I never saw the plane, but it seemed a certainty that it was coming down directly on top of us. But I heard the plane crash some distance away, and a cloud of black smoke edged up over the trees to the south.

It was a Jap bomber. Visitors who came later in the day to our tent said that the plane had come down vertically and must have been going well over 600 miles an hour when it hit the ground, and that it disintegrated like a bomb on impact. Apparently the pilot had been killed, and in his dying efforts, had jammed the controls forward. The total tally of our pilots for the day was three Jap bombers downed and four Zeros. We had lost no planes in the fighting.

A marine who came in to bring some clothes to one of the inmates of our tent told us that Matanikau had been successfully occupied by our troops, but that the resistance indicated that the Japs had been landing troops and supplies. And the impression had been confirmed by the discovery of large stores of fresh ammunition and food cans.

It is rather easy for the Japs to build up strong forces, piece by piece, on other parts of this island—if the transporting ships can reach our shores unharmed, which they have been able to do.

We hold a tiny strip of this island, a toehold, a piece about seven miles wide and four miles deep, centering around the airport. The Japs can move about the remainder of the island, which is ninety miles long and thirty miles deep, almost at will.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 30

We were roused at 1:30 this morning by an alert, and went over to the air-raid shelter in the moonlight. But no aircraft appeared, and at 1:45 we went back to bed. I helped a feverish gastro-enteritis sufferer from the steaming dugout and found his arm hot to the touch. I was glad that I had shaken the disease.

After breakfast I got my discharge from the hospital and went down to Kukum. Two ships were lying offshore, one a freighter, the other the auxiliary transport Calhoun.

We had an air-raid alert soon after, and the two ships up-anchored and hustled off to sea, where they would have more room to maneuver evasively if attacked.

Lieut. Comdr. Dexter told us we would have a good view of the raid from the beach. “We have the best spot on the island,” he said. “We see the approach, the anti-aircraft fire, watch the bombs drop, see the dogfights, and send boats out to pick up the aviators who get shot down.”

But today there was a low ceiling of heavy, dark cumulus clouds, and a beneficent rain-squall covered the Calhoun and the freighter. They were blotted out of sight even from shore.

No bombers appeared, but we heard the sounds of a furious dogfight coming from the high banks of clouds. It lasted for about ten minutes.

At the airport, we talked to the fighter pilots as they came in from the raid. Capt. Smith told us he had had his biggest day of fighting, had shot down four Zeros, three of them, he said, in a minute and a half.

“I dove on one, shot him down, and saw another on my wingman’s tail,” he said, calmly. “I slewed over and picked off that one. Then I saw one coming at me from below and ahead. I nosed over and dove right at him and let all my guns go. I had a tough time avoiding crashing him head on. I could see the prop shatter, and I came so close I could see his damned head—his helmet and goggles. He was trying to climb out of the ship then, and I guess he used his chute.”

After that, said the captain, he had ammunition left for only one gun. He lit out for the airport, trying to sneak in low over the water. “I was flat-hatting along the beach at about fifty feet,” he said, “when I saw two Zeros ahead and to the right. I made a run on one of them with my one gun and saw him fall off and dive into the water. The other one took off as fast as he could go. I did too, because I’d used up all my ammo.”

Capt. Carl also had a good day’s dogfighting; he told us happily that he had shot down three more Zeros, making his total score nine, to date.

At Gen. Vandegrift’s headquarters, we got the official word that eighteen of the Zeros encountered that day had been shot down. Gen. Vandegrift was happy about it. Today, he said, interception had been perfect; the bombers were driven off and most of the Zeros destroyed.

But the afternoon was not yet over; suddenly we got word of a surprise air raid and raced for cover. Then we felt the ground shake, from deep down, as if there were an earthquake. There was a succession of tremors, and we heard deep, dull booming sounds coming from the direction of Kukum. I raced for the open and saw a towering black cloud mushrooming over the trees in the direction of Kukum.

The cloud of smoke mounted higher into the sky, and then we heard the news: the Calboun had been hit by Jap bombers. They had come in three waves, a total of sixteen bombers, and the little auxiliary transport had been hit squarely by three bombs. She had sunk almost immediately.

Miller and I set out for Kukum immediately in a jeep, but it was impossible to get there. The roads were jammed with trucks bringing in survivors and wounded. We gave up the project of getting to Kukum, and I contented myself with talking to Dr. Bill Duell (of Hackensack, N.J.), who had seen the bombing.

The deep explosions which we had felt shaking the earth, he said, had been caused by depth charges. A submarine had been hovering in the vicinity at the time the bombers attacked the Calhoun. One of our destroyers had dropped a series of depth charges at the same time the Calhoun was being bombed.

“I saw a lot of little puffs traveling along the surface where the depth charges were going off,” he said. “You could feel the ground shake; it was terrific, out there on the beach. And then the black bow of the sub just reared out of the water like a whale and sank back.”

Losing the Calhoun seemed like a terrible tragedy at the moment. But later in the evening, we heard that the loss of life aboard the ship had been slight. We had recovered about 100 of the crew, lost only about thirty-eight.

Tonight there was none of the usual “scuttlebutt” about an enemy task force being on its way into our island, but late in the evening we heard the sounds of many of our planes taking off and surmised that some sort of contact had been made.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 31

This morning at operations headquarters on the airport (which now, incidentally, is being called Henderson Field after the heroic marine flier of the Midway battle), we heard that four Japanese troop-carrying destroyers had been spotted last night trying to land forces at Koli Point, about twenty miles to the east of our positions.

The two fliers who had spotted the ships were on patrol at the time. They had dropped their bombs, but the visibility was poor and they were undergoing heavy anti-aircraft fire at the time; the combination had made it hard for them to observe the effects of their bombing.

After that the patroling pilots had called by radio for supporting aircraft, but the striking force which we had heard taking off had failed to intercept the enemy. Evidently, they had hauled out of the area after the attack of our two patrol planes.

I heard that one of the two patrol fliers had been wounded. Then I learned that he was an ensign whom I had met on a previous Pacific war adventure, “Spike” Conzett (Elmer E. Conzett of Dubuque, Iowa). I went down to the field hospital to see “Spike.”

One of his long legs was bandaged, in the region of the knee, and he looked a bit drawn. He said he had a chunk of shrapnel in there, and that it pained a bit now.

“I didn’t even see those birds until they opened up with antiaircraft, and I got this,” he said, motioning toward his leg. “They shot out my instrument panel, filled the cockpit full of holes, and scared the hell out of me.”

Spike said that the other flier up with him, a Capt. Brown of the marines (Capt. Fletcher L. Brown of Pensacola, Fla.), had spotted the enemy ships before he did. Brown had dived on one of the ships.

“The weather was pretty thick up there,” said Conzett, “but I made an approach and dived and let my bomb go, too.

“On the way back here I got lost and thought I’d never get out of it. I was trying to fly by what instruments I had left, and that didn’t work out very well. I got into a spin and spun down from 8,000 to about 4,500 before I could pull out of it. My radioman said he was figuring on getting out and hitting his chute. It was that bad.”

But after he got out of his spin, said Spike, things straightened out a bit and he found his way back to Guadal but, he added, “I was pretty feeble when I reached here, and I couldn’t find the runway. I was lucky to get in at all.”

There were three air-raid alarms today. But none of them developed, and enemy planes reached Guadalcanal only on the second alarm. They were frightened by our fighters and jettisoned their bombs in the jungles to the southwest and then retreated precipitously.

The longest air-raid alarm lasted from 12:30 to 1:30. I picked out a comfortable foxhole by a bend in the Lunga and lay on my back, watching the sky. It was pleasant there, lying beside the swift-moving water, infinitely preferable to the hot dugouts where most of our people go for such occasions.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

Good news today that our coast defenses are being strengthened by extra artillery of large caliber. This news heightens the general air of optimism, which is engendered by a combination of other circumstances.

The fact, for instance, that for the last two days the Jap bombers have shown themselves to be frightened and cautious; they have turned back and unloaded their bombs.

And then the fact that last night was particularly calm, with no shellings either by “Oscar” or the usual force of Jap destroyers or cruisers.

Furthermore, things have been quiet along our land fronts, and large numbers of Japs have been coming in to surrender. Apparently their food is getting short.

Increased numbers of ships have been coming in with supplies of late, including food as well as ammunition. Soon, we hope, we may be able to start eating three meals a day, getting away from our present scanty schedule of two meals.

We are also becoming a little more comfortable in our island quarters. A few elementary necessities like privies have been slammed together, mostly made from prefabricated Japanese housing sections which we captured here.

Our privy, at Col. Hunt’s command post, is called “McLeod’s Masterpiece,” after Lieut. McLeod, who built it. A rope set on stakes has been constructed leading from the command post to the masterpiece, so that one may find his way in the dark. Lieut. Wilson has labeled this the “McLeoderheim Line,” and set up a poster celebrating the fact.

We also have an oven which has been fashioned from a captured Japanese safe, so that Juan Morrera, our cook, can make bread. Bread, however, is still so scarce that it is received with whoops of joy and eaten with as much relish as if it were cake.

It is startling to think how one’s standards of values change under the continued impetus of living conditions such as ours on Guadalcanal. Things like bread and privies, considered the barest necessities at home, become luxuries. One thinks of warm water, the smooth water-closet seat of civilization, and a bed with sheets as things that exist only in a world of dreams.

Miller and I went to Kukum at about noon today to watch for an air raid. There was an urgent alert, but again the Japs did not appear. We went for a swim in the beautiful clear water along Kukum Beach. The swimming was superb, but would have been more enjoyable if we had not found it necessary to look out for sharks. Sharks are the principal hazard of swimming in salt water hereabouts—that and the hazard of getting fungus infections in the ear, just as crocodiles impinge on one’s contentment while swimming in the Lunga River.

This afternoon trucks came to dump a pile of gray canvas sacks at Col. Hunt’s CP. It was mail—the first to reach the troops since we landed on Guadalcanal! Each man seemed as happy as if you had given him a hundred-dollar bill at the mere thought of getting mail. And that evening was an orgy of reading. Most of the men had three or four letters each; they sat about in circles and read them several times, and read pieces of them to each other.

Guy Narder dashed into our tent with a letter in his hand and shouted: “I’m a mother!” The girl’s name, he said, was Geraldine, and she had been born on the 27th of June.

Don Dickson stood at the tent door, watching more mail being sorted out for delivery. “Mail should have priority before food,” he said.

Col. Hunt had three letters. “They’re from Dear Mom,” he said, “and no bills.”

Sgt. Charlie Morris had a bill, however. It was from the Book-of-the-Month Club.

I saw a circle of marines clustered about one of the lads who had a reputation for being a demon with the gals. These, he said, were letters from his Number One girl.

“That’s the only dame he could never make,” said one of his admirers good-naturedly. “He wants to marry her.”

The Sheik only chuckled. “F– – –you, Mac,” he said, indulging in the marines’ favorite word. “The trouble with you is you never met a virgin.”

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

Guy Narder, who is a communications officer, waked me at 2:30 this morning to ask if I wanted to come to the radio dugout.

“They’ve got an enemy contact,” he said. “Want to listen to the calls?”

“They caught some ships that were landing troops,” he said, as we probed our way through the night.

We climbed down into the lantern-lit dugout and Narder gave me an earphone. The set was tuned to our inter-air frequency.

We could hear planes taking off from the airfield. But there was no sound in the earphones, except the crackling of static. Nearly an hour later, we heard the message:

“To all planes from control. Plane Two is in the target area. He will drop flares. He will drop flares.”

A few minutes later: “Over enemy ships dropping flares”—a report from Plane Two, on the job.

But the other planes were having trouble trying to spot the enemy.

“I am down to 1,000 feet trying to pick up enemy. Visibility very poor.”

I had begun to realize before this how difficult are flying weather conditions around Guadalcanal, how hard it is for our planes to spot enemy ships at night unless the moon is very bright.

Now we heard some of the planes, having difficulty in the thick overcast, calling Control in an attempt to find out the exact enemy position.

One pilot heard the calls and reported: “During initial dive on the cruiser it was heading due east. That was fifteen minutes ago. She was making twenty knots. I haven’t located them since.”

“How many miles east of the field?” asked Control.

“Twenty miles,” was the answer.

“The enemy is landing troops at Taivu Bay, twenty miles east of the airport,” reported Control to all planes.

A few minutes later we heard inter-air conversations of pilots who were evidently on the scene but could not locate the enemy.

“Let’s go down to 500 feet,” said one voice. “They should be directly under us around here.” But there was no contact. Weather conditions out there must have been abominable. I took off the earphone and looked out the dugout door. The night was black; there was no trace of a moon.

It was after four o’clock when we heard the news of a contact relayed to headquarters: “Control from Plane Three: three large landing boats sighted east of Taivu Point.”

Plane Twenty-seven corrected: “One mile west of Taivu Point.” But the weather was evidently too thick for interception.

I gave up the long night watch at about 5:00 and went back to bed. I was just getting to sleep when I heard the sudden rattle of bombs on their way down. I shouted, “Hit the deck!” and the others in the tent were so well trained that we all landed on the tent floor at about the same moment—the moment that we heard the crack of the bombs exploding.

Fortunately, they were not close to our camp, and fortunately the Jap attackers did not make another “run” on our positions. But there came salvos of gunfire a few minutes later, which apparently landed far down our shores to the east.

Miller and I hustled to the headquarters building at the airport to find out whether any damage had been done to the Jap ships which were apparently landing troops at Taivu last night. Col. Fike said misty weather had interfered with the contact, but added that three large Jap landing boats had been strafed by our Navy and marine fliers.

An Army captain came in to report that his flight of Pursuits, which had just returned from a patrol, had found six large Jap landing boats on the beach near Taivu (the Pursuits went back later in the day to strafe the boats). He reported there was no activity in the area, no people visible, and no sign of the Jap ships which had launched the boats.

Col. Fike said there was no definite information as to the number or type of ships. But probably they were several of the now-familiar, troop-carrying type of destroyer, and probably at least one cruiser, for the two planes which had come over and dropped bombs just before daylight this morning had been cruiser-type aircraft.

At Col. Cates’ CP we heard that there had been only one casualty in this morning’s early raid, and that casualty had been a man who lost his leg in the explosion of a delayed-action bomb. Our people are becoming more expert at taking cover; with the exception of those who stay out to watch the show, few are being injured or killed.

Two more correspondents have come in to Guadalcanal. They are Tom Yarbrough and Tillman Durdin. They have glamorous fresh uniforms and make Miller and me feel like street urchins, for our hand-washed clothes are scarcely clean and our faces stand in need of a good scrubbing with hot water.

This afternoon we had two air-raid alerts, and after the second, eighteen Jap bombers appeared and dropped their sticks. Three bombers and five fighters were shot down in the mêlée that followed.

For a few minutes after the bombers had dropped their sticks, we heard the rattle of small arms fire and heavier explosions sounding like mortar or artillery shells, coming from the direction of the Tenaru. We wondered if the Japs were making another attempt to break through our lines, but Lieut. Wilson checked by phone and looked contented as he reported: “It’s only a small ammo dump. Bombs set it afire.”

Col. Hunt has one of the few desks in the Solomons—an item captured from the Japs. Some of the officers of the Raiders came into the CP this afternoon and asked if they might use the desk. Then they spread out maps and started a deep discussion. I found they were laying plans for an expedition to Taivu, where the Japs last night apparently landed troops and supplies, and where, according to our scouts, there is now a good-sized task force. That should be an interesting excursion. I may go along.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

We were awakened at fifteen minutes after midnight this morning by guns booming offshore, from the direction of Kukum. I sat outside the dugout and watched the flashes lighting the sky, heard the haughty voices of the cannon. The shells were not coming in our direction at all this time. Others came out of the dugout and we watched the firing.

Lieut. Wilson checked with Kukum, and told us the beach watchers had spotted three subs lying off Savo Island (which is off the western end of Guadalcanal). One of the subs, which lay closest to Guadalcanal, was doing the shelling. Comdr. Dexter said that there were small fires burning along the shore near Matanikau, apparently signals to the Jap subs.

The shelling lasted about ten minutes more, then stopped. And Wilson said, “Oscar’s tired.” So were we. We went back to bed.

There were several air-raid alarms this morning, and Miller and I went out to Kukum to watch. But the Japs did not come. They were growing exceedingly timid, and that was encouraging.

Back at Col. Hunt’s CP, I found the Raider officers at work over their maps. But, they told me, their plans, for the time being, had been changed; they were going to make a landing at Savo Island first, and put off the Taivu expedition until after that.

It seemed that mysterious fires, possibly signal fires, had been seen on Savo Beach of late. And one flier thought, but was not sure, that he had been fired on by a machine gun as he flew over the island. A large group of Raiders were being sent to conduct a reconnaissance in force. They were leaving this afternoon.

Miller and I stopped in at Col. Edson’s CP (he had moved his people from Tulagi to Guadalcanal) and got permission to accompany the expedition to Savo.

The auxiliary transports Little and Gregory were going to carry this group of Raiders to Savo. Miller and I were told to be at a certain embarkation point at four o’clock to get aboard one of these ships. But we were late. The ships were pulling out as we arrived.

Col. Edson was standing on shore at the time. He was not going along on this trip. Lieut. Col. Sam Griffith, Edson’s executive, was leading the show.

Col. Edson said: “You’re too late.” But he was helpful. “Get aboard the cargo ship,” he ordered, “and you can get aboard the transports later.

“Better get going,” he snapped, “or you’ll miss it.” We did not understand at all how we could get aboard one ship, which was leaving, by getting aboard another which was not leaving. But Col. Edson was the leader; we obeyed his instructions.

The mystery became clear soon after we went aboard the handsome cargo ship. She was going to put to sea in a few minutes, and later in the night would have a secret rendezvous with the two transports. Then we would be able to change over to the Little.

We were not sorry to be aboard the cargo ship. She was clean and brightly modern. A friendly officer showed me to his bath and gave me a clean towel, and I was able to wash in hot water for the first time in five weeks. It was balm.

I had dinner in the ward-room afterward, and felt like the country-mouse come to visit his sophisticated cousin. I found my values had grown so primitive on Guadalcanal that I was dazzled by the white tablecloth and shining silverware. I wondered if unconsciously I would put the silverware into my pocket after the meal, for on Guadalcanal, one carries his own spoon, and knows that if he loses it, he will probably have to rely on his fingers for feeding purposes.

We got aboard the Little later that night, according to plan. The leader of the excursion, Col. Sam Griffith, and his officers received us hospitably in the ward-room.

Col. Griffith, a handsome young officer, tall and broad-shouldered, with reddish mustache, cursorily went over the plans for the expedition. A warhorse from ’way back, with a distinguished record in Nicaragua and China, and also at Tulagi, he did not seem at all nervous about tomorrow morning’s landing.

The other officers shared his calm. Evidently they did not think we would meet much opposition on Savo.

Our plan, said the colonel, is to land at the northern tip of the island. There we will divide into two groups, one of which will reconnoiter the eastern half of the island; the other the west, and the two will meet at the southern tip after the work is done.

The island, said the colonel, who expresses himself well and easily, is shaped like a walnut, with the points at the north and south extremities. It is about nine miles from northern to southern tip along either shore. That hike should take all morning and part of the afternoon. “If,” said the colonel, “we don’t run into any Nips.”

The captain of the ship, who did not share the colonel’s suave good nature, viewed Miller and me with suspicion. He asked for our credentials and told us not to talk to any of the crew of the ship. He seemed upset because we had no written orders to make the trip. Miller and I had visions of ourselves in the brig, but the prospect did not bother us. By this time we were past being annoyed by the idea of physical discomfort.

Finally the matter with the captain was straightened out, and he unbent and became quite friendly. We decided that he had merely been carrying out routine procedure. We—the captain, the colonel, some of the other officers, Miller and I—sat in the captain’s little office, yarning.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

After a wonderful hearty breakfast, up to the bridge to find that we are zigzagging. “Stand by for depth charges,” was the word that crackled from the ship’s speaker system.

We were making full speed. The crew went tensely, hurriedly about the business of preparing to fire depth charges.

“We’ve sighted a periscope,” the officer of the deck told me, “dead ahead.”

But before any “ashcans” could be fired, the ship slowed and the air of tension relaxed. “It’s only a mast of one of the ships we lost out here,” said the O.O.D. “Every time we see it, we think it’s a periscope.”

We were getting near to Savo Island. I went below and got my gear together and came back up on the bridge. We all stood silently watching the small, humpbacked island grow larger. The regular “bong, bong” of the depth finder was a hollow, eerie sound in the stillness.

General quarters sounded, and the speaker system droned, “Man your boats. Stand by, all boat crews.”

I went to my assigned boat and climbed aboard, jamming my way among tight-packed marines. Our engines rumbled and coughed, then started, and we were off for shore.

It seemed odd to be going through the same experience of landing on a strange shore again, as I had done at Guadalcanal. The movements were the same—our sitting low in the boat, our strung-out lines of landing craft streaking in toward the beach, and even the growing distinctness of the island, as palms began to stand out against the sky and thatch huts became visible, seemed something like routine. But there remained the breathless suspense, wondering when and if machine guns would open up on us from the shore, and in those moments of wondering, as usual, one imagined the arrival of bullets and the prospect of men being hit in the boat.

But none of these things happened, and we came to shore and made our landing without having been fired on. We advanced cautiously up the beach, but there were no Japs and no shots fired.

We came almost immediately to a row of bamboo and thatch huts which constituted a village. The houses sat amidst wide-spaced palms, and in the grove black natives stood and watched us as we advanced. Most of them wore only bright-colored loincloths.

An Australian guide who accompanied us set to work to secure some native boys who would lead us through the trails around the island. The big chief of the island was not in the vicinity, but one black man who spoke the Solomon Islands pidgin English was soon located. Like the rest, he wore a bright flannel loincloth and his hair was crinkly—and red. (I found later that native dandies dye their hair with lime-juice.)

The native’s manners were mild. He raised his hand in greeting and smiled, showing stumpy teeth thickly covered with tartar and stained reddish-brown by betelnut.

While the Australian and the native talked, marines crept out into the surrounding woods with guns at the ready. We did not want to be ambushed in the village by the Japanese.

A line of five or six natives stood behind the black man who spoke English. They smiled childishly. Some of their black bodies were tattooed. One of them wore a necklace of bright-colored beads.

“Me fella lookum Japanese man,” began the Australian.

But the native shook his head and smiled benignly. “No Jap’nee man island,” he said.

We must have looked incredulous, for the row of natives behind their spokesman raised their right hands, shook their heads, and smiled, reinforcing his argument.

Our aviators on reconnaissance had spotted roads and objects resembling tents on Savo Island. The Australian brought up the matter.

“This fella Jap’nee have tent,” he said. “You savvy tent?”

The native looked mystified. “Him small house, him calico,” explained the Australian.

But the native insisted there were no Japs on the island. Four Japs, he said, had come to the island some time before in a small boat. But they had left on Sunday.

But we would have to see for ourselves whether or not the native was telling the truth. The Australian explained that we needed two guides.

“Big master want sendum half man go around this way,” said the Australian. “Half sendum round this way. Me fella need two good boys, savvy?”

Two native boys who spoke pidgin were soon located. The Australian gave them instructions. “If you lookum Japan man you fella no run all about quick time,” he said, “but all same stop and we fella killum.”

The two natives nodded enthusiastically. “Byumby you fella getting good chow long government,” he promised.

I chose to go with the group of Raiders who were covering the east coast of the island. They were being led by Capt. John W. Antonelli (of Lawrence, Mass.).

The guide assigned us was of typical native pattern: stumpy, dirty teeth, red hair, childish manners—and he smiled apologetically when he spoke. He told us he had learned English on Tulagi, where he had been a cook for an Englishman. He had come back to Savo to get married. He said his name was Allen-luva.

As we started out through the coastal cocoanut grove, working along a trail, Allen-luva told us the Japs who had come to Savo (which he pronounced “Sabu”) “take bananas, fowl, pumpkin, everything.” A large group of Japs had come in July, he said, in two “launce” (launches), and had been here two weeks.

“Him speak English?” we wanted to know.

“Like drunk man,” said Allen-luva and laughed. “Him talk ‘aeroprane’ and ‘guadarcanar.’”

We passed through a succession of native villages as we pushed along the coast. They were similar: each located amidst wide-spaced cocoanut groves, looking out over a lovely vista of beach and aquamarine-colored sea; each with rows of neat bamboo-walled, thatch-roofed houses; each with a larger bamboo structure serving as a church; some of these churches with handsome altars neatly woven in two-tone fiber, white and black—which had all the elegance of ebony inlaid with ivory; but the effect was spoiled by cheap, colored religious prints pinned to the walls.

There were song and prayer books in these churches, on the crude benches. Allen-luva told us that the islanders went to church twice a day. There were two sects, Anglican and Roman Catholic.

We passed through the villages of Septatavi and Pokelo, and then we found the first of the debris. It was the debris of ships—life rafts, oil drums, life-belts—our ships which had been sunk in the great battle of the night of Aug. 8–9 (now called the Battle of Savo Island).

The debris was washed up on the beach, and even now, nearly a month after the battle, the water’s edge was still stained with oil. Stones and branches farther up the beach were still coated with oil, some of it a quarter or half inch thick.

Allen-luva said the battle had occurred close to shore. Evidently he had been greatly frightened by it, for he looked scared as he mentioned it now, and all he would say was, “Fires, great fires.”

Farther to the south, we found debris strewn more thickly along the shore: an oil-coated, rubber life-raft from the Quincy, a soggy notebook kept by an officer on the Astoria, the propeller of one of the catapult planes which the Canberra had carried, crates marked “Australia,” more pieces of wooden life-rafts, more life-belts, inflated and uninflated. But there were no Japs, although our men were constantly on the look-out for them.

At about noon we had traversed about half the distance from north to south. We halted for a short rest. The jungle had grown thicker as we progressed south, and the trail ran up and down many steep hills. We were dripping with perspiration. It was time to take a swallow of water—and a salt pill (a necessity in the Solomons).

We heard the sound of many airplane engines in the sky. Capt. Antonelli looked at his watch. “Time for the daily air raid,” he said, and grinned. “It’s going to be good to watch one from a distance, for a change.”

But the planes were ours. Soon we saw them swinging north past Savo Island, a large formation of our dive-bombers, probably heading for Bougainville or Rekata Bay or Gizo, Japanese bases.

In midafternoon, we met the other group of troops, who had traversed the other side of the island. We had reached the southern tip, walked our nine miles.

Col. Griffith, who had led the other group, said they had run into no Nips anywhere. But they had found an abundance of debris, and oil, along shore, as we had, and had passed the grave of the captain of the Quincy.

The sea grew rough in the afternoon, and the sky overcast, and we had some difficulty in getting back to our transports. But the childish natives gave us a hand, and waved, grinned and shouted “Cheerio!” as we started for the ships.

When we reached Guadalcanal, there was some debate as to whether we should stay aboard the Little and Gregory that night. There was a possibility, it seemed, that we might be going down to Taivu tomorrow. But it was finally decided that we should go ashore.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5

At one o’clock this morning we were routed out of bed by the sounds of heavy, close shelling. The guns were cracking close offshore in the direction of Kukum, and the shells sighed over our heads and seemed to be crashing far back in the woods.

I sat on the edge of the dugout and watched the bright flashes of light rising high in the sky, heard the haughty, metallic voices of the cannon. Sitting like this, virtually in the lap of a shelling attack, one felt as if he were at the mercy of a great, vindictive giant whose voice was the voice of thunder; the awful colossal scale of modern war has brought the old gods to life again.

The shelling continued for about five intense minutes, and then, suddenly, stopped. A few seconds pause, and the sounds and flashes of cannonading began again, doubled and redoubled in volume. But the shells were no longer passing over our heads, no longer directed against Guadalcanal. We surmised then that a naval engagement must have begun.

Ten minutes later, the cannonading continuing at a furious pace, we heard the sound of an airplane motor. Then a pinpoint of green light appeared over the beach to the east. The light grew brighter, then became a bright sheet of green-white, flickering over the whole side of the sky. It was a flare.

More flares followed, east and west, while the blasting of the guns continued, and then a white light snapped the sky over Kukum suddenly into illumination. It was a searchlight glare, probably from naval vessels, ours or theirs, illuminating the opponents.

The gunfire kept on, and the searchlight went out as suddenly as it had come on. Then it started again. And there was more cannonading.

These wonders continued until 2:08, when they ceased sharply, and there were no more sounds, no more flares, no more searchlights.

From Kukum, by phone, we heard the “dope”: that there had been a furious naval engagement off Savo Island, with about five ships participating. That two ships had been hit and were still afire. But we did not then know whether they were ours or theirs.

With daylight I hurried to Kukum to see what had happened. En route I passed several ambulances going the other way. They were loaded.

Comdr. Dexter told me the Little and Gregory had been sunk. Boats were out now, bringing in survivors.

I found survivors scattered all over the beach: some on stretchers, with doctors working busily over them; some with lesser wounds, sitting dejectedly on the sand, waiting treatment; others, in scant, torn clothing, many of them still smudged with oil, standing in silent groups.

Boats lined the shore and wounded were being taken from these on stretchers; other boats dotted the water a few hundred yards offshore, moving like busy waterbugs.

At the back of the beach they were still loading ambulances. Some stretcher bearers passed me with inert, white-bandaged wounded.

I talked with one of the “walking wounded,” who sat in his underwear on a pile of gear while a gash in his lower leg trailed a small trickle of blood on the sand. He had been hit by a chunk of H.E.

A corpsman came up and said to the sailor: “You better get that fixed.”

“I’ll wait until they”—the sailor motioned toward a badly wounded man on a stretcher, now being tended by a doctor—“get through.”

The sailor told me he had been on the Little, and was a chief bosun’s mate. His name was Ralph G. Andree and he came from Wheelersburg, Ohio.

He spoke dully, stoically, about the action in which his ship had been sunk. “We only got about three or four rounds out of each gun,” he said. “And the Japs shot through us like paper. They couldn’t have been more than a couple of thousand yards away.

“The first shot they fired hit a fuel tank and set us afire. Then they turned the searchlights on and kept on firing until they had us afire all over.

“Then they went over and sank the Gregory and it looked like they came back and gave it to us again after that.”

A young lieutenant, wrapped in a blanket, a little blue from the cold but otherwise unharmed, told me he had been officer of the deck aboard the Gregory at the time of the sinking. He was Lieut. (JG) Heinrich Heine, Jr., of San Diego, Cal.

“Judging from the searchlights and the gunfire,” he said, “I’d think there were about five Jap ships. There was at least one cruiser because they were firing three at a time—salvos.

“It was like about forty kinds of hell breaking loose. Put ’em together and you get the picture.”

Lieut. Heine gave a very coherent account of the events of the fight as he had seen them.

“We were patroling offshore and about to make a turn,” he said, “when somebody dropped flares. Then there were searchlights, and then hell.

“The Japs opened fire with the Little as a target, until we opened fire. Then the Japs shifted to both ships.

“One of our four-inch guns and two smaller-caliber guns fired on the Jap astern. We put out the searchlights. But they came on again. And by that time we were ready to abandon ship.

“I was stationed at Boat No. 3. I tried to get one of our machine guns to bear on the Jap searchlights, then realized that was foolish. I saw several hits on the bridge, and went there to see if there were any wounded. I found only one officer.

“Then I went to the well deck to see what could be done about extinguishing the fires. I then went back to the boat stations and lowered No. 2 and No. 3 into the water.”

Lieut. Heine talked as formally as if he were writing an official report. “I collected approximately twenty men,” he said, “and we launched a life raft. I had all hands in the water swim to the raft.

“The Jap continued to fire. He was at the time about 100 yards from the Gregory, on the side opposite from ours. Several shells came over the ship and landed twenty to twenty-five yards from the raft.

“The ship was burning amidships. She had taken a shot through the fire room. But a member of the fire-room crew had pulled the fires and secured the main steam stop, and prevented the ship from blowing. He was John Maar, water tender, first class.”

One of the few survivors who appeared energetic and chipper was Lieut. (JG) Paul F. Kalat, of Worcester, Mass., who had been the engineering officer on the Little. After his ship had sunk, he had spent some eight hours in the water, and the Jap warships, he said, “just missed me by a whisker—about twenty-five to thirty feet.” Lieut. Kalat said he believed the Jap ships were cruisers, and that they were new vessels. Ensign William M. Newton, of Gastonia, N.C., said there were two cruisers and a destroyer, at least.

We went back to Gen. Vandergrift’s CP and from there to airfield headquarters to see what damage the dive-bombers, which we spotted yesterday, heading north, had done. We found they had bombed and strafed thirty-six landing boats which had been spotted bringing Jap troops into Cape Esperance.

Dive-bombers and Army and marine fighters had gone out this morning to strafe fifteen Jap landing boats trying to get ashore at dawn.

Apparently both groups of boats—those at Cape Esperance and those at Taivu—were badly damaged, and many Japs killed in the attack. But the discouraging fact remains that some Japs are getting through our cordon and landing. (Later we found that the Japs were using small boats to transport troops all the way from Bougainville to Guadalcanal—nearly 500 miles. The boats moved at night in small jumps from Bougainville to Choiseul to Santa Isabel. In this way, by constant effort, they were trickling forces into our island. Eventually those landings, coupled with the landings being made from larger ships, would mount up—unless we could find some way to stop them. But in any case, our air activities did have the effect of making such landings difficult.)

We were still at headquarters on the airfield when an air alert was sent out. So we of the Guadalcanal Press Club—Miller and I plus the two new members, Yarbrough and Durdin—climbed into a jeep and sped down to Lunga Point to watch the show.

There was a radio available here. Miller clamped on the headphones and listened in on the interplane messages, calling them aloud so that we had a blow-by-blow description of the fighting.

The first exciting call came at 12:32:

“Planes off the starboard bow …”

Then, “Morrell [a call to Lieut. Rivers J. Morrell of San Diego, Cal.], have you sighted the enemy?” And Morrell’s answer:

“They are up on the left side above you. See ’em?”

“I’m going in, going in,” called Morrell, signaling his attack.

Then other groups of fighters spotted the enemy, in quick succession:

“There are twenty-six bombers coming in from the south.”

“I’m going over there where the mess is going on.”

“I’m starting to go in.”

“There are Zeros with those bombers. Watch out.”

“Watch it, there, watch it.”

“Six Zeros just passed over us. Look out for ’em.”

We heard the sounds of dogfighting in the sky but the planes were too high in the clouds to be seen. We also heard booming explosions, which we at first took for anti-aircraft, but later realized were bombs. We found out later the Japs had jettisoned their bombs after interception and fled without making a run.

“We got one bomber,” called one pilot. “Bracket!”

Then one of our casualties called in, “I’m in trouble and I don’t mean maybe. I’m going down.” A few moments after, we saw him coming in, his motor streaming smoke and his propeller sitting still on the nose of his plane. A “dead stick” landing.

“Hope he makes it!” shouted Miller.

Back at the airport, we found that this flier had made it, and that our fighters had shot down two of the Jap bombers and one Zero.

This afternoon, at about four o’clock, we heard scary news on the “scuttlebutt” circuit: that thirty-three Jap ships were on their way toward Guadalcanal, off Lord Howe Island, and at their present rate of speed would be here at four o’clock tomorrow morning.

Before we went to bed, however, we heard that the alarm was another false one. The root of the report had been a radio message from a B-17, which had spotted three Jap ships heading north near Lord Howe Island. The message had simply been misunderstood.

Still, the night was not to be calm. At nine o’clock, I woke up to find my cot shaking, as if someone had a grip on one end and was trying to jostle me. It was an earthquake—which, they say, is a fairly common occurrence hereabouts.

Later, we were awakened by the sounds of machine-gun and rifle fire, and there were two louder explosions which sounded like mortar shells. Had the Japs broken through? I wondered. But after a while one grows bored with the incessant repetition even of thoughts like these. I went back to sleep.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

This morning we heard at Col. Hunt’s CP that the Japs had fired mortar shells into the tractor camp last night. But when our men had answered with heavy fire, the Japs had withdrawn. Apparently they were a small patrol trying to feel out our positions.

We arrived at the airport this morning just in time to hear the tail end of an address by a general to the pilots. They were gathered in a circle around him. And the general was saying: “And I don’t want you to think that those people back there at home don’t appreciate what you are doing. They do appreciate it.”

“What was the rest of the speech about?” I asked one of the fighters.

“You heard it,” he said, disconsolately. “It was that last sentence, repeated a few times.” What the fighters would like to hear, obviously, is news of some relief. Some of them have been flying eight to ten hours almost every day under combat conditions, for the last three weeks. And their rest is disturbed by the Japs practically every night. They would like a little rest in some relatively peaceful country.

Col. Fike gave us the results of today’s raid by our dive-bombers. The target for today was the Jap base on Gizo. The dive-bombers found no aircraft or ships there, but bombed a group of buildings, and probably destroyed a radio station.

Some of our pilots lost their way in the “soup.” Ensign Walter W. Coolbaugh (of Clarks Summit, Pa.) could not even find Gizo, because of the thickness of the overcast; but, nothing daunted, he did find Santa Isabel, and bombed that.

Lieut. Richard R. Amerine (of Lawrence, Kans.), a marine flier, came wandering into our lines today, thin as a ghost, to say he had been out in the jungles, dodging Japs and existing on red ants and snails for seven days. He had parachuted from a fighter plane when his oxygen apparatus went out, a week ago, and had landed at Cape Esperance on the northwest corner of the island. Trying to find his way back, he had run into a large group of Japs. He had found one Jap asleep by the side of a trail, killed the Jap by beating his head with a boulder, taken the Jap’s pistol and shoes, killed two more Japs with the butt and one with a bullet, and finally reached our lines safely. Having once studied entomology, the science of bugs, he was able to subsist on selected ants and snails. He knew which were edible.

There’s a tide of “scuttlebutt” tonight that relief is on the way for the marines here on Guadal, that a huge convoy of ships is en route carrying enough Army troops so that the marines will be able to ship out and perhaps go home.

There is also a less credible rumor that President Roosevelt has promised in a fireside chat—which nobody heard—that the marines on Guadal will be back home in the United States by Christmas. The fact of the matter seems to be that Walter Winchell said something to that effect on one of his broadcasts, but he did not mention the President or link him to the “tip” in any way. So “scuttlebutt” groweth.