VII
BATTLE OF THE RIDGE
This morning Col. Edson told me that he is planning to make an attack on the Jap positions in the Taivu Point area tomorrow. If I wanted to go along, I was to be at a certain embarkation point at 3:45 this afternoon.
It was pelting rain when I arrived. But the Raiders, who seem to love a fight, were in high spirits. I had been assigned by Col. Edson to go with Col. Griffith aboard a tiny diesel-engined ship which was acting as an auxiliary transport for the occasion. As we stepped aboard, one happy marine said, “This is the battleship Oregon, I presume?”
The captain of the little craft was a jovial Portuguese who had formerly been a tuna captain on the American West Coast. His name, Joaquin S. Theodore. He still spoke in interesting Portuguese constructions, despite his rank as captain of a naval ship.
“We’ll have it coffee for everybody in the morning,” he said. Kindly, he warned against smoking on deck. “Tal your men I don’t like to smoke it on deck,” he said.
He wanted to clear away a space in the small ship so that the tight-packed marines might have a little more room. He pointed to a clothes line and said to his first officer, “Whoever this clothes belongs to I want it out of the lines.”
The ship was a tiny thing, with only limited supplies of stores. But Capt. Theodore passed out grub and all available cigarettes to the Raiders, and shared his little cabin with Col. Griffith.
As we put out onto a rough sea, the pink-cheeked, hearty Portuguese told me proudly about his two “’lil kids” back home and about the exploits of his ship.
Col. Griffith later went over the plans for our expedition: we are to land our troops to the east of a small village called Tasimboko, in the Taivu Point area, and advance from that direction on the town. Tasimboko is supposed to be the bivouac of a large group of Jap troops—estimated to number from 1,000 to 3,000. But the Japs are supposed to be lightly armed.
A bombing and strafing attack on Tasimboko, and shelling from the sea, will be timed to fit in with our attack.
Getting to sleep was a terrible job. The ship’s steaming hold, full of the noise of the engines, was crammed with marines; no room to sprawl there. Every nook about the deck seemed to be filled as well.
Finally I found a spot on the deck, which was partially shielded by a hatchway, and curled around it. But the ship rolled heavily, and rain began to fall. I found another spot on the forecastle deck and pulled the edge of a tarpaulin over me. The rain fell more heavily, and the wind grew cold. I stumbled along to the captain’s cabin and lay down on the floor in the stuffy room. It was better than sleeping in the rain.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8
Despite the hardships of sleeping aboard Capt. Theodore’s tiny tub, the Raiders were fresh and ready to go this morning when the time came for us to climb into our boats and shove off for shore.
Just as we were starting, there came a fortunate happenstance: a small convoy of American cargo ships, escorted by warships, passed very close to our own transports. They had no connection with us, and were bound for a different part of Guadalcanal; but the Japs, seeing our ships and the others together, evidently got the impression that a mass assault was coming. And so, fortunately, many of them ran.
But we naturally had no way of knowing this as we dashed for shore in our landing boats. We were ready for a real struggle, and a bit puzzled when there were no shots from shore.
We were more mystified, when, a few minutes after landing, as we were pushing along the trail toward Tasimboko, we found a fine, serviceable 37 mm. field piece, with the latest split-trail, rubber-tired carriage, sitting at the edge of the beach. It was complete with ammunition, and surrounded by Japanese packs, life-preservers, intrenching tools, new shoes, strewn in disorder on the ground.
As we moved along, we found more packs, more shoes, and life-preservers, and fresh-dug slit-trenches and foxholes in the underbrush. We also found another fine 37 mm. gun, which like the other was unmanned. This second gun was pointed toward the west, indicating we had possibly, as we had hoped, surprised the Japs by circumventing their positions and attacking from the east.
Or perhaps this was only the entrance to a trap. The Japs are supposed to excel at such tactics. We moved on cautiously, circled a small pond and crossed a ford in a river, wading in water up to our waists.
Beyond the ford, we passed a pile of clam shells, evidently freshly opened. “I’m thinking they’ve gone up for breakfast and knocked things off,” snapped Col. Edson with his humorless grin. But he did not relax. He moved his troops ahead fast, barked at them when they failed to take proper cover.
We heard the sound of approaching plane motors, then saw our dive-bombers come out of the sky and slant westward. A few seconds later we heard the thud of bombs falling.
There were strafing planes, too, the long-nosed Pursuits flashing overhead, and we could hear their guns rattling as they dived.
We moved along the shore through an overgrown cocoanut grove and in the brakes of underbrush; we found more foxholes, carefully camouflaged with palm leaves, and caches of food and ammunition.
Shortly after eight o’clock, we made our first contact with the Japs. I saw our people running in numerous directions at once, and knew that something had happened. I ran to the beach and saw what the others had seen: a row of Jap landing boats lying on the sand some distance away, and amidst the boats, a small group of men in brown uniforms, looking our way—Japs.
The colonel called “Nick,” quietly, and Maj. Nickerson (Floyd W. Nickerson of Spokane, Wash.) anticipated the order. “Open fire?” he said hopefully.
The colonel nodded his head.
“Nick,” who is as lean and hard as the colonel, called, “Machine-gun runner.” And when the man came up, which was almost immediately, he gave him the order. Within two minutes our machine guns were firing.
“Red Mike” (as the Raiders call their colonel for the obvious reason that he has red hair) is most taciturn. I asked him, at this juncture, what was happening.
“I think we might have caught a few,” he snapped. And that was all he said.
Now the Japs were answering our fire. I heard the familiar flat crack of the .25 rifle, and the repetition of the sound in long bursts of light machine-gun fire. Others of our men joined in the firing, and it swelled in volume. In the midst of the outburst, we heard the crash of a heavy explosion. I was lying on the ground under a bush, near Red Mike, taking thorough cover.
“Sounds like mortar fire,” he said, concisely.
The burst of firing stopped, and there was a lull for a few moments. Red Mike was on his feet immediately, moving ahead. He sent a message up to Maj. Nickerson, who was leading the advance elements of our troops.
“Nick’s got to push right on up,” he said, low-voiced. Then he was gone, tending to some military business in the rear. A few moments later he was back again, still moving fast. I had found the colonel to be one of the quickest human beings I had ever known.
Rifle and machine-gun fire burst out again, the Jap guns standing out in the chorus like a tenor in a quartet. The bullets were closer this time. I crawled under a wet bush and kept my head down.
A man was hit over to our left. I heard the cry, “Pass the word back for a corpsman,” felt the sickening excitement of the moment in the air. Our first casualty.
Then there came another loud crash from ahead, close and loud enough so that the earth shook under us. I was lying next to a private. “Sounds like a 90 mm. mortar,” he said.
Now the blasting concussion of the explosion was repeated, and we heard the furry whistle of a shell passing over our heads, heard it explode well to the rear. Was it a mortar or a field piece ahead of us? There was more than a possibility, it seemed, that we had run into a heavy Jap force, equipped with batteries of artillery.
I was more certain of it when the explosion was repeated. Again we heard a second crash a fraction of a moment later, well behind us. Now it seemed evident that these were artillery pieces firing, probably several of them.
The Jap artillery was answered by the lighter-toned firing of our own mortars, and another chorus of rifles and machine guns. The Jap guns crashed again, and then the firing stopped.
A runner came to Col. Red Mike, who was sitting for a brief second in a clump of underbrush. “Nick says to tell you there are people across the stream,” he said. A small stream ran parallel to the beach at this point, and that stream marked off our left flank. The Japs apparently were moving through the jungle on the inland side of the stream, planning to cut off our rear. “We can’t see ’em yet, but we can hear ’em,” said the runner.
The colonel called Capt. Antonelli. “Tony,” he said, “Nick says there’s somebody working back across the stream. Take a patrol. Flank ’em if you possibly can.”
There was other business for Red Mike: he wanted to check on the exact location of our companies; he got the “walkie-talkie” into action, sent runners out. He checked on the wounded by making a personal tour. Then he was back in time to get a report from Col. Griffith that a Jap field piece had been captured, unmanned.
“Shall I go with Tony or get the gun?” asked Col. Griffith.
“Go get it, take it down to the water and shoot it,” said Red Mike.
Next, Red Mike disappeared into the foliage ahead. Now we were out of the cocoanuts, getting into thicker growth. But the colonel still moved like the wind. I followed and after a struggle found him at our foremost position, talking to Maj. Nickerson.
“I’m trying to locate that firing up ahead,” said Nick.
Our planes came in again, and dived and strafed the Jap village ahead of us. The Japs were not firing. We moved ahead.
We passed through a jungle brake which looked just like any other from the outside, but inside we found stacks of cases filled with medical supplies. “Opium,” said a marine, but I made note of the labels on some of the boxes and checked later. Most of the boxes contained “Sapo Medicatus,” which is a blood-coagulating agent.
The foxholes were growing more numerous as we progressed. They were everywhere, carefully camouflaged with leaves. And caches of supplies were also more numerous: crates of canned meat, sacks of crackers; there were more groups of new field knapsacks, with shoes strapped to them, and scores of gray life-preservers, indicating the Jap troops who had been here were probably freshly landed from boats.
Something moved in the bush ahead and to our left. “There are troops going through there,” said the colonel. “Find out who they are.”
Seven minutes later, firing burst out again. I flopped into thick cover, and none too soon. A bullet snapped into the underbrush very close behind me. I picked out the sounds of Jap .25’s, our automatic rifles and our machine guns. There was a torrent of Jap .25 machine-gun firing from the left.
“The boys got on the other side of us,” said the colonel, with one of his wry smiles.
Now came a terrific blast from only a few yards ahead. It was so loud it made my ears ring, and the concussion shook chips of wood on my head from the trees above. We heard the shell whiz just over our heads and burst a few hundred yards to the rear. We knew then that we must be right smack up against the muzzle of a Jap field piece.
The piece fired again, and again, and then there was another outburst of machine-gun fire, ours heavy-toned against the Japs’ cracking .25’s. Then silence.
Maj. Nickerson came back to tell the colonel that our men had “killed the gunners on a Jap 75. It’s only 150 yards ahead,” said Nick. “It was covered by machine-gun fire. We got the gun.”
But the Japs had more guns. We advanced only a slight distance, and another opened on us, as close as the last had been. At the time I was squatting in a thick jungle brake, a tangle of vines and dwarf trees, but the crash of the firing so close was scary, despite the good cover. Each time the gun went off, one felt the blast of hot air from the muzzle, and twigs rattled down from the trees above. But we knew we were safer here than back where the shells were falling. We could hear the explosions of the shells well behind us.
There was quite a cluster of us in this jungle grove: marines, squatting or sprawling unhappily in the green wet underbrush. Then it began to rain, and the rain came in sheets and torrents. The firing kept on. There were Jap riflemen around us too. (I later found that there had been one, not more than fifty feet from us. We found his body. Why he did not fire at us I don’t know.)
Nick shouted at the little group in the jungle brake. “Spread out,” he said, with the proper blistering expletives. “We lost one squad of the second platoon with one shell. One of those might come in here.”
I moved off to the right, to try to get a look ahead, and then moved back to the rear to see what damage the Jap shells were doing. I passed a marine who was lying on his back in a foxhole, his face very gray. His upper torso was wrapped in bandage, and I could see there was no arm where his left arm had been, not even a stump. A 75 shell had done the work.
A runner came back to report to Col. Red Mike, at 10:45, that a second Jap 75 had been put out of action and the crew killed.
It began to look as if we might have tackled a bigger Jap force than we could handle. The colonel was concerned about the Japs who might, he thought, be sneaking around our flank, cutting us off from the beach where we had landed. The colonel called for naval gunfire support.
A group of destroyers which had come down with us swung in close to shore and began to shell Tasimboko. I went out to the beach to watch the yellow flashes and the geysers of smoke and debris rising where the shells hit.
Then I went forward to look for Nick. Firing broke out again, torrents of it; but there were no more of the heavy crashes of artillery fire this time, only rifles and machine guns firing, and most of them, according to the sound, ours.
It had stopped raining. When the firing stopped a great quiet fell on the jungle. And in the quiet, we heard the desperate shouting of a man who was evidently in great trouble. He was shouting something like “Yama, Yama!” as if his life depended on it. Then the voice was smothered up in a fusillade of machine-gun and rifle fire. It was a Jap. But we never found out what he was shouting about.
The tide of our action seemed to be turning. We heard no more artillery, and a runner came back from Capt. Antonelli’s troops with the happy word, “We solved the problem, took the village.” Nick’s men sent back word that more Jap 75’s had been captured, unmanned.
Appropriately, the clouds were clearing and the sun was coming out. Fresh reinforcements for our troops were landing. But now we did not need them.
We marched on into Tasimboko without any further resistance. We found many more cases of Japanese food and sacks of rice, and ammunition for Jap machine guns, rifles and artillery pieces, totaling more than 500,000 rounds, Col. Griffith estimated. We burned the ammunition and destroyed the village of Tasimboko, including a radio station which the Japs had established there.
Looking over the bodies of the Japs who had been killed (about thirty), we found some interesting items: pictures of Javanese women, American ammunition with labels printed in Dutch. And we found that the gunsights with the 75’s were of English manufacture, and that some of the Japs had been armed with tommy guns. It seemed that some of these soldiers who had run so fast had been veterans of the Jap campaigns in the East Indies, and possibly Malaya too. Perhaps this was the first time they had been surprised. Or perhaps they had heard too much about what happened to the Japs who tried to cross the Tenaru.
Most of the loot we had captured was destroyed. But we transported the medical supplies back to headquarters, and our men helped themselves to large stocks of British cigarettes, bearing a Netherlands East Indies tax stamp.
The sun had set and there was only a faint reddish glow on the clouds over the horizon to light the darkening sky, when, in our transport ships, we reached a point offshore from the Tenaru River. We were heading toward home.
But the day’s excitement was not yet over. We got word that twelve Jap aircraft had been spotted. Our fighter planes were rising into the twilight sky.
The transports went into evasive maneuvers, and, fortunately, the sky grew quickly darker, and was black, except for high streaks of silver gray, when the Japs arrived.
They did not come to Guadalcanal. For once, they picked Tulagi as their target, and we saw cup-shaped bursts of bright white light rising from the direction of the island, just over the horizon rim. We heard the distant thudding of the bombs a few seconds later, and wondered if the Japs would spot our wakes in the dark. But they did not.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
Shortly after 12:30 this morning, I heard the others in my tent dashing for the shelter. Maj. Phipps shouted to me to come along, and I heard cannonading coming from the north, but I was too tired to move.
At breakfast this morning, I heard that a small group of Jap destroyers or light cruisers had shelled Tulagi—and hit Capt. Theodore’s little ship and set it afire.
Later in the day, I heard that Capt. Theodore had been wounded through the chest in the course of the engagement. But he had beached his little craft, and saved it from sinking, despite his wounds. I am glad to hear that he is expected to live.
This is the second time that I have left a ship in the evening and it has been attacked and lost before morning. This fact gives rise to the thought that my luck has been good, so far.
There were two air-raid alarms today. But the Japs never appeared. It was a quiet afternoon. We sat in Col. Hunt’s CP after lunch, talking of the reunion we will have ten years hence, and the tales we’ll tell about Guadalcanal, then, and how by that time our imaginations will have magnified our deeds immeasurably, and we will all be heroes.
Col. Hunt told us about some of his narrow escapes in the World War, when he commanded the Sixth Marines. Our casualties were very high, then, he said, and gave the figures. But the fighting at the Tenaru battle, he said, was about as concentrated and intense as in any engagement of the World War.
Tonight we were awakened, just before midnight, by the sound of heavy firing in the jungles. There were machine guns, rifles and, occasionally, the crash of a mortar.
We lay awake and listened. And then cannonading started, to the north. We went to the dugout, and I sat on the sandbagged entrance with Maj. Phipps. The guns, we knew, were big ones, because of their heavy tone and the brightness of the flashes against the sky. But Bill Phipps was sure they were firing in the Tulagi area, not off our shore. He had measured the interval between the time of the flash and the time the related boom of the gun reached us. That interval, he said, was ninety seconds. Multiply the 90 by 1,100, the number of feet sound travels in a second, and you get 99,000 feet, or about twenty miles. Tulagi is twenty miles north of us.
Star shells glowed in the sky. The Japs were illuminating the Tulagi shore. One of our observation posts phoned in the report that there were three Jap ships, probably cruisers, and that they were firing salvos.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
This morning we heard that the Japs had shelled Tulagi harbor last night and again hit Capt. Theodore’s ship, which was still beached.
I went to the CP of Maj. Nickerson (the Raider officer) and talked to some of the men who did outstanding work on the excursion to Tasimboko, day before yesterday. Among them, two young corpsmen, Pharmacist’s Mate Alfred W. Cleveland (of South Dartmouth, Mass.) and Pharmacist’s Mate, second class, Karl B. Coleman (of McAndrews, Ky.). They told me how they had used a penknife to amputate the ragged stump of one Raider’s arm after it had been shattered by a 75 explosion; the wounded man had been the one whom I had seen, lying in a foxhole, just after he had been treated and bandaged. These two lads, Nick told me, had saved the wounded man’s life by amputating the remnants of his arm; the medicos themselves had said that the man would have died if the two lads had not done such a good and quick job in the field.
Pvt. Andrew J. Klejnot (of Fort Wayne, Ind.) told me how he had picked off one of the crew of one of the Jap 75’s.
“There were only two men on the gun,” he said. “I picked off one, and the other went and hid behind some boxes in a little ammunition dump. I fired into the dump and set it afire.”
I moved my worldly possessions from Col. Hunt’s CP out to Gen. Vandegrift’s headquarters today. The general has moved into the “boon-docks,” as the marines call the jungles; and the new spot is too much of a trek from Col. Hunt’s headquarters.
A tent has been put up for us correspondents, near the general’s headquarters. The members of our “press club” now are Bob Miller, Till Durdin, Tom Yarbrough, and there is a new arrival, Carlton Kent.
The Japs air-raided us at about noontime; twenty-seven of the usual silver-colored, two-engine type, flying lower than usual today. But the sticks of bombs fell a long distance from our location at the time.
The general’s new CP is located in the thick of the jungle. Sui, pet dog of the commissioner, Martin Clemens, proved it tonight by dragging an iguana, a small dragon-like lizard, into plain view as we sat at dinner over the crude board table tonight. Sui had unearthed the iguana at the jungle edge, which stands up straight and dense as a wall only a few feet from our mess table.
The tent which has been put up for correspondents is one of a number located at the foot of a ridge, facing the jungle. The general’s tent is atop the ridge. Tonight we were told to be on the alert, since the Japs had been reported infiltrating the jungle which we faced. We were told that if an attack came, we should retire up the ridge to the crest, where a stand would be made.
“I wish I had a pistol,” said Yarbrough, as we correspondents lay in our bunks, after dark. And the rest of us were nervous, and not anxious to go to sleep. We kept up a clatter of conversation to help our spirits.
The situation was not without an element of humor. For, as we lay awake, the mackaws sat overhead in the trees and bombed our tent. The plopping of their missiles was loud and frequent. The birds seemed to have singled out our tent for the heaviest bombardment. Maj. Jim Murray, the general’s adjutant, chided us about the fact. “Those birds have got the correspondents’ number, all right,” he said.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11
The Japs who were supposed to be investing the jungle in front of our tent did not put in an appearance last night. There was not even any firing out in the “boon-docks.”
In today’s air raid—by twenty-six Jap two-engined bombers—I had my closest escape from a bomb explosion. When the air-raid alert came in, Miller, Durdin and I went to the top of the ridge and walked down it, looking for a good high spot from which we could watch the bombers.
We found three or four men at work building a shelter at a spot several hundred yards away, where the ridge was bare of any foliage except grass, and one had a wonderful view of the sky. The incipient shelter, now only a pit, was just what we wanted in the way of a box seat for the show. It was deep and wide. We could sit on the edge until the bombers were just overhead, then still have plenty of time to dive for cover.
We did just that. The planes came as usual in a wide line that was a very shallow V, stretching across the sky. As usual, the antiaircraft guns put up bursts in the vicinity, and as usual the bombers plowed on steadily, holding their formation and course.
Then the bombs came. When we heard them rattling down, we piled into the pit, layer upon layer of humanity, and waited. The bombs made a slightly different sound this time, perhaps because they were closer than before. Their sound was louder and more of a whistle. And the explosions were deafening. You could hear fragments skittering through the air over the top of the pit, and in that second all of us must have known that if we had been lying on the bare ridge we would have been hit and hurt.
Till Durdin said, “Hot.” I saw that he was touching the sole of his shoe. He pulled a piece of metal out of the leather and held it gingerly between two fingers. It was a bomb fragment, still warm from the explosion.
Miller and I were anxious to see how close the craters had been this time. We spotted a small crater about forty yards from our pit. It was this missile, probably, that had thrown the fragments over our heads.
Beyond the small crater were other, larger holes. One of them must have been thirty feet across. That one lay about three hundred yards from our pit, fortunately beyond effective range. It was one of an irregularly spaced line of craters that led into the jungle beyond the grass.
Now, from the jungle, we heard excited shouting, and cries for a corpsman. We knew that meant that there had been some people hurt down there. We saw several being brought out on stretchers.
Our fighter planes were already avenging the casualties. We heard the sounds of a dogfight in the sky, and later came word that they had knocked down six of the bombers and one Zero.
Later this afternoon, our dive-bombers came in from a trip to Gizo. This time they had found a small ship, a patrol-boat type of craft, lying off the base, and had sunk it. They had also bombed the buildings of the base again.
At air-operations headquarters I found a box which had been sent me by plane, from my shipmates on a former task-force excursion. It included cans of beans, brown bread, salmon, peaches. Miller, Pvt. Frank Schultz, who drives our jeep, Jim Hurlbut (the Marine Corps correspondent) and I went down to the Lunga, taking the box along, and had a swim in the swift, clear water. Then we opened the cans and had a feast. .
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
This morning, as an urgent air alert was flashed, we of the Press Club decided to go down to Lunga Point to watch the show for today. So we piled into a jeep and our driver turned out one of the fastest cross-country records such a vehicle has ever achieved. He was not inclined to be caught on the road when the bombers arrived.
At the Point, Miller put on the headphones of the radio set and began calling out the interplane conversations of our fighters, who were by that time rising to search for the foe.
At 11:42 Maj. Smith called: “Control from Smith. They’re coming in from the south—a big squadron of ’em.” And then we saw them, the usual impressive span of two-motored silver bombers, Mitsubishi 96’s, moving like a slender white line of cloud across the blue sky.
This time the planes were set against an almost cloudless sky, and had a long course of blue to traverse before they reached dropping point over the airport. That chance gave the anti-aircraft an unusually good opportunity to range on them.
At first, the puffs of ack-ack fire were too high and ahead of the Japs. We saw the silver-bodied planes pass under the spotty cloud formed as the bursts spread out and merged. And then the AA began to come on the range. The flashes of the bursts came just in front of the silver-bodied planes; then one bomber in the left side of the formation was hit. We saw the orange flash of the explosion just under his wing, under the starboard motor nacelle, and then the motor began to trail a pennant of white smoke and the plane pulled off and downward, and left the formation.
Just as the plane pulled clear of the formation, another antiaircraft shell burst directly under the belly of one of the planes at the center of the formation. A tongue of flame spread across the middle of the plane, then receded and was swallowed in a torrent of black smoke, and, in an instant, the plane was nosing straight down toward the ground. Now I saw one wing sheer off as if it were paper, and flutter after the more swiftly falling fuselage. Then the plane simply disintegrated, chunks fluttering away and falling, while the center part of the plane plunged at ever-accelerating speed toward the ground.
By this time the remainder of the Jap bomber formation had passed on out to sea. But one of the planes, possibly crippled by anti-aircraft fire, had become separated from the rest. One of our fighters was quick to pounce on him.
There was quite a group of us on the Point this day, watching the “show.” Now they were cheering like a crowd at a football game. “Whoooo-ee,” shouted someone, “look at that fighter. He’s got him.”
The tiny speck of the fighter, looking like a bumblebee in comparison to the bigger, clumsier bomber, was diving now. And we heard the rattlesnake sound of his guns. The bomber slewed, came up in a whipstall, and fell off in a steep dive toward the ocean.
The other bombers had disappeared somewhere in the blue, but we could hear our fighters going after them.
In the beautiful amphitheater of the sky, the kill of the isolated bomber by the fighter was continuing. We saw the bomber diving straight toward the sea, vertically, but the fighter, like a malevolent mosquito, hovered about the larger object, watching for signs of life.
The bomber dived a few thousand feet, and then, suddenly, pulled out of the dive and climbed straight up into the sky, up and up, like an animal gasping for air in its death struggle.
Quickly, the fighter closed and its machine guns rattled again, for seconds on end in a long burst. And then the bomber paused, fell off on one wing and with spinning wings fluttered vertically toward Tulagi Bay.
A few seconds later the spinning plane hit the water, and from the spot where it struck came a great backfire of ruddy flame and black smoke. And the watchers on the shore cheered madly, as if our side had made a touchdown.
Back at the airport, we found that the final score for the day was ten bombers and three Zeros; another goodly addition to a total that is mounting much too fast to please the Japs.
Capt. Smith came in to report that he had downed his fourteenth and fifteenth planes today; he did not say so, but it was told at the airport that he has been promoted to the rank of major, an award richly deserved.
We found that Lieut. Ken Frazier (Kenneth D. Frazier of Burlington, N.J.) was the pilot who had destroyed the crippled bomber so spectacularly while we watched from Lunga Point. He had shot down another plane as well.
“The first one went down in flames,” he said. “The straggler was simple. I dived on him, saw the tracers falling a little short, pulled up a little, and then watched the chunks fly off the plane.”
On one edge of the airfield, we found pieces of the Jap bomber which had disintegrated while we watched. There was quite a large section of the fuselage. The metal seemed much more fragile than the skin of the American bombers I have seen.
The cocoanut grove at one edge of the airfield had been struck by a stick of large bombs. The craters were huge. But the bombs had hit nothing of value. A 100-pound bomb had smashed directly into a shack, killing one man, destroying some radio equipment. That was the only visible damage of the bombing.
When somebody came into our tent, at about nine o’clock, and shouted, “Get up, fellas, we’re moving up the ridge,” we did not waste any time, but grabbed helmets and shoes and left. Only a few minutes later, from the ridge-top, we saw a pinpoint of bright green light appear in the sky to the north. The light spread into the glow of a flare, and then we heard the mosquito-like “double-hummer” tone of a Jap floatplane. It was “Louie the Louse”—a generic name for any one of the Jap floatplanes which come to annoy us at night.
“Louie” flew leisurely, as he always does, over the island, dropping more flares, and then we saw the distinctive flashes of naval gunfire coming from the direction of Kukum.
Just as we heard the boom of the gun, the shell whizzed over our heads and crashed a few hundred yards around. There was a second’s pause, and then more flashes followed, so continuously that the sky seemed to be flickering constantly, and shells whined overhead almost in column. They kept coming for minutes on end, fortunately hitting into the jungle several hundred yards beyond us, skimming over the trees under which we were lying. We simply lay there clutching the side of the ridge and hoping the Japs would continue to fire too high.
The barrage kept up for about twenty minutes, then halted. And we waited in silence—the general and the rest of us lying on the ground, waiting to see if the firing would begin again.
We had just got to our feet when an outburst of rifle and machine-gun fire came from the south, apparently only a few hundred yards away. We wondered then if another big Jap effort to break through our lines had begun.
The firing continued, and the noise was augmented by mortar explosions. Then there came the flash of naval gunfire again, this time from the direction of the Tenaru. We hit the deck pronto, but the shells were not coming in our direction. The sound of the explosions indicated they were falling along shore.
Our observation posts reported that four Jap warships—cruisers and destroyers in the usual force—were swinging along the beach, bombarding the shoreline at their leisure, then turning back and making the run in the opposite direction to repeat their performance.
Then the shelling stopped, and, gradually, the small arms and mortar fire coming from the south dwindled in volume. But we did not go back into the valley to sleep this night. I slipped my poncho over my head, put on my mosquito head-net and my helmet, and lay down on the top of the hard ridge to sleep.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13
We heard this morning that a Jap patrol nipped off one end of our outpost line, last night, a few hundred yards south of the general’s CP, on the ridge. That was the firing we heard. The Raiders, who hold the line, are falling back to a better position today, in case a big Jap push develops today or tonight. Last night’s fighting was only a minor sort of engagement.
Miller and I went to Kukum this morning to watch the daily air raid, which came in at about noon, on schedule. Interception was good. The bombers got frightened and jettisoned their loads. And Zeros and our Grummans had a terrific dogfight. From Kukum, we could see them dodging in and out of the towering cumulus clouds, occasionally diving down over the water. We saw one Wildcat (Grumman) come diving down like a comet from the clouds, with two Zeros on his tail. He was moving faster than they, and as he pulled out of his dive and streaked across the water, he left them behind. They gave up the chase and pulled sharply back up into the sky. We had a good view of their long, square-tipped wings, and the round red ball of the rising sun insignia, as they turned. They appeared, as the pilots had told me, to be very maneuverable planes.
Many planes were dogfighting in and about the masses of cumulus clouds. I watched two planes, one chasing the other, pop out of the tower of cloud, describe a small, precise semi-circle, and go back in again.
A few moments later they made another circle, like two beads on the same wire. Other planes popped in and out of their levels in the cloud structure, and the whole area of the sky resounded with the rattling of machine guns. With so many guns firing at once, there was a cumulative effect as loud and magnificent as thunder.
Back at air headquarters, we waited for the tally of today’s score. It was four bombers, four Zeros.
We went to bed in our tents tonight, but were shortly told to move out and up to the ridge-top. This time I had enough foresight to take along a blanket, and my satchel full of notes.
We could hear rifle fire coming from our front lines a few hundred yards to the south. Then machine guns. Flares went up occasionally and shed a glow over the sky.
I spread out my poncho and blanket and tried to sleep. I was awakened by the blasting of our own artillery batteries, to the north of us. The shells were whirring just over our position in the ridge-top, skimming over the trees, then hitting and exploding a few hundred yards to the south, apparently in the area where the fighting was going on.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14
Shortly after midnight this morning the din of firing grew so tremendous that there was no longer any hope of sleeping. Our batteries were banging incessantly, the rifle and machine-gun fire from the direction of the Raider lines had swelled into a cascade of sound, Louie the Louse was flying about, and flares were dropping north, south, east and west.
We were drawing up a strong skirmish line on the ridge-top. Reinforcements were on their way up. We knew that the Raiders, Col. Edson’s people, out on the ridge, had their hands full. We knew then that a major Japanese effort to break through our lines and seize the airport had begun.
Another storm of rifle, machine-gun and mortar fire came now from the direction of the Tenaru. Was this another attempt to break through? For the present there was no way to find out.
Naval gunfire began to boom from the north. But it was not coming near us.
The general said to Col. Thomas: “Say, Jerry, ask air headquarters is it feasible to send a plane to see if there are any transports—just to see.” The general was as calm and cheery as usual.
Some “shorts” from our own artillery fell in the valley where our tents are located. The flashes were as bright as day. One man standing near where I sprawled on the ground was knocked down by the concussion. We thought at first that the shells were Jap projectiles from their ships, ranging on the CP.
The sounds of firing had now become a din. A gray mist began to drift in among the trees on the ridge. It was thicker in the valley. Was it smoke from our artillery? It might be gas. (It was smoke, released by the Japs to create a gas scare.)
An artillery observer came into our communication dugout and reported to Col. Thomas, who was busy with phone calls, checking on the latest information from all outposts, giving orders. The observer said his telephone line, reaching farther toward the front, had been blown out. He had come back to relay firing instructions to our artillery batteries. He said the Japs were trying to advance down the ridge, but that our artillery fire, coupled with determined resistance from the Raiders on one of the knolls of the ridge, was holding up the enemy.
The observer found a line open from this point back to our batteries. “Drop it five zero and walk it back and forth across the ridge,” he said. Then we heard the loud voice of the officer directing the battery: “Load … fire!” Then the bang of the cannon, the shells whizzing overhead.
The barrage continued. And after a few minutes, a runner came back from Col. Edson’s lines. “Col. Edson says the range is perfect in there,” he said, breathlessly. “It’s right on. It’s knocking the hell out of ’em.”
Snipers were moving in on us. They had filtered along the flanks of the ridge, and taken up positions all around our CP. Now they began to fire. It was easy to distinguish the sound of their rifles. There were light machine guns, too, of the same caliber. Ricocheting bullets skidded amongst the trees. We plastered ourselves flat on the ground.
I went to the communication dugout to see if there might be any room inside. But the shack was filled. I picked a spot amidst some sparse bushes at the foot of a tree. A bullet whirred over my head. I moved to another tree.
A stream of tracer bullets arched through the trees from behind us. We heard Jap .25’s opening up from several new directions. It seemed now that they were all around.
The whispered word went round that the Japs were landing parachute troops (later proved false). More reinforcements came through our position on the ridge, while the Japs were firing. But we wondered if we could hold our place. If the Japs drove down the ridge in force, and broke through Col. Edson’s lines, they would be able to take the CP. If they had already cut in behind our position, as we suspected they had, they would box us in, and perhaps capture the general and his staff.
But the general remained calm. He sat on the ground beside the operations tent. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “it’s only a few more hours till dawn. Then we’ll see where we stand.”
Occasionally, he passed along a short, cogent suggestion to Col. Thomas. He was amused at my efforts to take notes in the dark.
The telephone line to Col. Edson’s front had been connected again. The colonel called Col. Thomas to say that the Raiders’ ammunition was running low; he needed a certain number of rounds of belted machine-gun bullets—and some hand grenades. Col. Thomas located some of the desired items by phone after a quick canvass. They would be sent over soon, he told Col. Edson.
But at about three o’clock Col. Edson called again to say that he was “almost out.” The ammunition had not arrived.
We were wondering if the Raider line was going to cave in when more Jap planes came over. There were probably two of them. They dropped more flares.
The sounds of heavy firing to our left rear had broken out again. Col. Thomas checked by phone. “It’s in McKelvy’s area,” he said. “The Japs got into his wire.”
Snipers were still popping at us from all sides. We had our hands full. But then Col. Edson called back to say that ammunition and grenades had arrived, and the news had a good effect on morale.
At about four o’clock the snipers were still shooting into our camp, but they had not attacked our skirmish lines on the ridge. Our artillery fire had slackened a little. And the sounds of firing in the Raider area were sporadic. I rolled myself in blanket and poncho (for the early mornings on Guadalcanal are always chill) and lay down in some underbrush on the slope of the ridge. I was able to sleep for about an hour.
As the first light of dawn came, the general was sitting on the side of the ridge, talking to some of his aides. A Jap machine gun opened up, and they high-tailed for the top of the ridge, with me right behind. We were heading for a tent, where we would at least have psychological shelter. Just as we reached the tent, a bullet clanged against a steel plate only two or three feet from us. It was amusing to see the rear ends of the dignified gentlemen disappearing under the edge of the tent. I made an equally undignified entrance.
It was not safe to walk about the camp this morning. Snipers had worked their way into camouflaged positions in trees through the area, and there were some machine gunners, with small, light .25 caliber guns. One had to watch one’s cover everywhere he moved.
There were large groups of Japs on the left or east side of the ridge, in the jungles. There was a lot of firing in that area. We had a firing line of men extending south from the CP, out along the ridge, facing those groups of Japs. The men lay along the edge of a road that ran down the exposed top of the ridge, protected only by grass. The Japs were firing at them from the cover of the jungle.
Beyond that firing line, the ridge curved and dipped. It rose like the back of a hog into a knoll, beyond the dip. It was on this knoll that the Raiders had been doing their fiercest fighting.
I worked my way out along the ridge to the firing line, to get a look at the knoll where the Raiders had been fighting. I lay flat next to a machine gunner while the Japs fired at us with a .25 light gun. A man to our right, farther out on the ridge, was wounded. We saw him crawling back toward us, a pitiful sight, like a dog with only three serviceable legs. He had been shot in the thigh.
Beyond the bend in the ridge, the machine gunner told me, there were several more wounded. A group of six or seven of our men had been hit by machine-gun fire. Two of them were dead.
In the jungle at the foot of the ridge we heard our own guns firing as well as the Japs’. Some of our troops were pushing through there, mopping up the groups of Japs.
It was evident that the main Jap attempt, down the top of the ridge, had failed. I moved out a little farther along the ridge, nearly to the bend in the road where the wounded lay, and I could see the knoll where the fighting had been going on. It was peopled with marines, but they were not fighting, now.
We heard the characteristic whine of pursuit planes coming. Then we saw them diving on the knoll, and heard their machine guns pop and rattle as they dived. “They’ve got a bunch of Japs on the other side of the hill,” said a haggard marine next to me. “That’s the best way to get at ’em.”
I worked my way back to the CP and got some coffee. I was cleaning my mess cup when I heard a loud blubbering shout, like a turkey gobbler’s cry, followed by a burst of shooting. I hit the deck immediately, for the sound was close by. When the excitement of the moment had stopped, and there was no more shooting, I walked to the spot, at the entrance to the CP on top of the ridge, and found two bodies of Japs there—and one dead marine. Gunner Banta told me that three Japs had made a suicide charge with bayonets. One of them had spitted the marine, and had been shot. A second had been tackled and shot, and the third had run away. These three had been hiding in a bush at the edge of the ridge road, evidently for some time. I had passed within a few feet of that bush on my way out to the firing line and back. The animal-like cry I had heard had been the Jap “Banzai” shout.
Col. Edson and Col. Griffith, the guiding powers of the Raiders, came into our CP this morning to make a report to Gen. Vandegrift and shape further plans. The mere fact that they had come in was a good sign. It meant that the fighting was at least slackening and perhaps ending, for they would not have left their front lines if there had been any considerable activity.
Maj. Ken Bailey, one of the Raider officers and a hero of the Tulagi campaign, also appeared, dirty and rumpled but beaming like a kid on the night before Christmas. Bailey loved a fight. He showed us his helmet, which had been pierced front and back by a Jap bullet. The slug had grazed his scalp without injuring him.
The Raider officers’ conversations with the general and Col. Thomas were held in the general’s secret sanctum. But I talked to Col. Edson as he left the shack. He said that the large main body of the Japs, who had been trying to drive down the ridge, had fallen back.
He said that a force of between 1,000 and 2,000 Japs had tried to storm the ridge, with lesser forces infiltrating along the base. His estimate of the Jap casualties, at that time, was between 600 and 700 in the ridge area alone. Our artillery fire, he said, had smacked into the midst of a large group of Japs and wiped out probably 200 of them. Our own casualties had been heavy, for the fighting was furious.
The colonel gave the impression that the big battle of the ridge had ended; that the only fighting in the area now was the mopping up of small, isolated Japanese groups by our patrols.
But snipers were scattered through the trees of the area. I had a brush with one of them during today’s first air raid.
I was sitting on the side of the ridge that looks over the valley where our tents are located. A throng of Zeros were dogfighting with our Grummans in the clouds and I was trying to spot the planes.
Suddenly I saw the foliage move in a tree across the valley. I looked again and was astonished to see the figure of a man in the crotch of the tree. He seemed to be moving his arms and upper body. I was so amazed at seeing him so clearly that I might have sat there and reflected on the matter if my reflexes had not been functioning—which they fortunately were. I flopped flat on the ground just as I heard the sniper’s gun go off and the bullet whirred over my head. I then knew that his movement had been the raising of his gun.
But there was no time to reflect on that fact either. I retreated behind a tent. And then anger caught up with me. Again the war had suddenly become a personal matter. I wanted to get a rifle and fire at the sniper. Correspondents, in theory at least, are non-combatants. Several of our men, however, fired into the crotch of the tree where the sniper was located.
Miller had come in from Kukum, where he spent last night. He and I went out on the ridge, later in the day, to have a look at the battleground. We climbed the steep knoll where our troops had made their stand and turned back the main Jap drive.
The hill was quiet now. Small fires smoldered in the grass. There were black, burned patches where Jap grenades had burst. Everywhere on the hill were strewn hand-grenade cartons, empty rifle shells, ammunition boxes with ragged, hasty rips in their metal tops.
The marines along the slope of the hill sat and watched us quietly as we passed. They looked dirty and worn. Along the flank of the hill, where a path led, we passed strewn bodies of marines and Japs, sometimes tangled as they had fallen in a death struggle. At the top of the knoll, the dead marines lay close together. Here they had been most exposed to Jap rifle and machine-gun fire, and grenades.
At the crest of the knoll we looked down the steep south slope where the ridge descended into a low saddle. On this steep slope there were about 200 Jap bodies, many of them torn and shattered by grenades or artillery bursts, some ripped, a marine told us, by the strafing planes which we had seen this morning. It was up this slope that the Japs had sent their heaviest assaults many times during the night, and each time they tried they had been repulsed.
Beyond the saddle of the ridge rose another knoll, and there we could see more bodies, and the pockmarks of shelling. The whole top of this knoll had been burned off and wisps of smoke still rose from the smoldering grass.
Miller and I still stood on the open crest of the knoll. “Better watch it,” a marine said. “There’s a sniper in the jungle over there.”
We moved away from the hill crest and had walked about fifty feet when we heard a shout behind us. A man had been hit, at the spot where we had been standing. He had a bad wound in the leg. Our luck was holding.
We went to Kukum to watch for further air raids. But no more planes appeared until late in the afternoon. In the meantime, we heard heavy artillery pounding into the jungle near Matanikau, and saw smoke rising in great clouds above the trees. We heard that a large body of Japs were trying to make a breakthrough in that area. The first reports had it that casualties were heavy, but later we found that the fighting here had been only a protracted skirmish and our casualties were few.
It was dusk when Jap seaplanes made a low-altitude attack. Three of them, monoplane float aircraft, passed back and forth over Kukum, drawing streams of anti-aircraft fire. Others swung over the beach farther to the east, and the island became alive with ack-ack; the sky was trellised with the bright lines of tracer.
Again the Japs dropped many flares, and once we saw an extremely bright white light flaming over the Tenaru, which we thought was a flare—and found out later that it was caused by two Jap planes burning simultaneously.
The Jap planes, we learned at air operations headquarters, had tried to make a bombing attack on the airport. A group of fifteen to twenty Jap seaplanes, slow, ancient biplanes, had sneaked over the mountains in southern Guadalcanal, and tried to make a low-altitude attack. But they had been caught by our Grummans, and nine of them shot down. Four Zero floatplanes had also been shot down. And in the earlier raid of the day, two Zeros and one bomber had been downed—and the bombers had been turned back long before they reached Guadalcanal. The Jap air attacks of the day, like their land effort of last night, had been a failure.
Tonight the general and his staff had moved from the old CP on the ridge to a slightly safer spot, and of course there had been no time during the day to erect tents, cots or the other elementary comforts of Guadalcanal living. So for the third successive night I slept on the bare ground. The senior surgeon of all Gen. Vandegrift’s medical troops lay down nearby; he, too, had only a poncho for a mattress, and took the discomfort without complaint. “I’m afraid I’m going to have my joints oiled up a bit if this keeps on,” he said. And that was his only comment.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15
Yarbrough and Kent have shoved off. They sailed aboard a small ship which came in today and made for a rendezvous with a larger craft. Durdin seems to be somewhat pessimistic about the general situation. Miller and I, being somewhat punch-drunk, are more inclined to view the future cheerfully.
This morning we corraled Col. Thomas and asked him to give us a quick outline of the big battle which has been going on for the last two days. He gave us a lucid summary.
The Japs had assembled three large units of troops, by a process of slow accumulation, said the colonel. Two of these large units, totaling 3,000 to 4,000 and possibly more (the figures were estimates based on the observations of our patrols), were massed to the east of the airport; the third, a smaller group, to the west.
“We couldn’t get at them because of the terrain,” said the colonel, “although we did raid the landing area of the two eastern detachments.” (That was the raid which Col. Edson’s troops had made on Tasimboko.)
The three groups made three separate attacks, said the colonel. The principal of these was a drive toward the airfield from the south along the top of Lunga Ridge. It was here that the Raiders had had their tough fight.
Two other, much lighter, attacks were made: one from the west, from the Matanikau area; and the second from the east, which was apparently intended to flank our positions along the Tenaru.
Our patrols discovered several days ago that the two eastern groups were moving in, one on our flank, one swinging around to make an attack from the south, our rear.
“On the night of the 12th and 13th,” said the colonel, “the Japs came up from the rear [the south] and infiltrated our lines, but did no damage.
“Then, our outpost line being too long, it was withdrawn several hundred yards. One hour after dark on the night of the 13th–14th, groups of 50 to 100 men each broke through the line and attacked the ridge. Col. Edson moved his men 300 to 400 yards to the rear and took up a position on a rugged hill [the steep knoll we had visited on the ridge]. At about eleven o’clock in the evening, the Japs charged in large numbers. Edson had a few hundred men, the Japs about 2,000. Our artillery fire was laid down, causing many casualties. From then on until 6:00 A.M. the Japs made many assaults on the hill, including bayonet charges. They lost 500 men.”
On the same night the Japs attacked our eastern flank, but ran into barbed-wire entanglements and retired, leaving about thirty dead Japs in the wire, said the colonel. The attack from the west did not come until yesterday, and, thanks to our artillery and stubborn resistance by our troops, that attempt was also pushed back.
Miller, Durdin and I made another swift survey of the high knoll where Edson’s men had fought, and decided that since it had no other name, it should be called “Edson Hill” in our stories.
Later in the day we went to Col. Edson’s headquarters to get his story of the battle. He told us about the individual exploits of his men and their collective bravery, but did not mention the fact that he himself had spent the night on the very front line of the knoll, under the heaviest fire.
He did not mention it, but the fact was that two bullets had actually ripped through his blouse, without touching him. Another Raider officer whispered that information to me and I nodded absently, then was startled to see that the colonel was still wearing the garment. Bullet holes marred the collar and waist.
The Raiders told us some good stories of valor; about a sergeant named John R. Morrill (of Greenville, Tenn.), who with two buddies had been cut off from the rest of the marines by a Jap advance. And how Sgt. Morrill had walked with impunity through the Jap positions during the darkness.
Then there was a private, first class, named Ray Herndon (of Walterboro, S.C.), whose squad occupied a very exposed position on the south side of Edson Hill at the time the Japs made their heaviest attacks. The Jap firing hit right into the squad and left only four of them alive, three unwounded, and Ray, hit mortally through the stomach. And then Ray, knowing he was hit badly, had asked one of his buddies to give him a .45 automatic, and said: “You guys better move out. I’m done for anyhow. With that automatic, I can get three or four of the bastards before I kick off.”
Then there was a young, round-faced lad from Greensburg, Pa., named Corp. Walter J. Burak, the colonel’s runner, who had twice during the night traversed the exposed crest of the ridge the whole distance from the knoll to the general’s CP, under the heaviest fire. He had made the first trip with a telephone wire, when the line had been blown out. And the second trip, toting a forty-pound case of hand grenades, when in the early hours of the morning, the shortage of that item became pressing.
But the outstanding story was Lewis E. Johnson’s of De Beque, Colorado. Lewis was wounded three times in the leg by fragments of a grenade, and at daybreak placed in the rear of a truck with about a dozen other wounded, for evacuation. But as the truck moved down the ridge road, a Jap machine gunner opened up and wounded the driver severely. The truck stopped. Then Johnson painfully crawled from the rear of the vehicle, dragged himself to the cab, got into the driver’s seat and tried to start the motor. When it would not start, he put the car in gear, and, using the starter for traction, pulled the truck a distance of about 300 yards over the crest of the ridge. Then he got the engine going and drove to the hospital. By that time, he was feeling so refreshed that he drove the truck back to the front and got another load of wounded.
To get the story of the attacks on the other two fronts, we went first to Col. Cates’ headquarters, to cover the attack that had come from the east, and then to Col. Hunt’s for news on the attack which had come from the west, the direction of Matanikau.
Col. Cates referred us to Lieut. Col. McKelvy (William N. McKelvy of Washington, D.C.), the immediate commander of the troops who had held back the Japs attacking from the east.
“The entire attack was delivered against a road called the Overland Trail,” he began.
“On the night of the 13th–14th, at about 10:15, I heard shooting. At 10:30 Capt. Putnam [Robert J. Putnam of Denver, Col.] called to say that one of his listening posts had been jumped. He said that a man came in to his CP, and as he arrived he said, ‘They got ’em all,’ and fainted.
“At about eleven o’clock, Capt. Putnam called and said the Japs had put out a few bands of fire—a few rifle shots, but that there was nothing serious yet.
“Then everything opened up. There was a terrific outburst of firing, and Capt. Putnam said, ‘They’re inside the wire. They’re being bayoneted.’ We found twenty-seven bodies on the wire in the morning.
“We were putting down our big mortars and all the rest. All the activity was on that one flank. The Japs were trying hard to take the road.”
The colonel stopped to get a large map and point out the road, a trail which led from the east into our lines, toward the airport.
“At 5:30 the attack stopped and the Japs withdrew. They didn’t want to be caught in daylight.
“That morning—that was the 14th—we were given a reserve of six tanks. There was high grass across from our positions and we were afraid the Japs were lying doggo in there. While the tanks were in, one of our own lieutenants jumped on one of the tanks. He was a Lieut. Turzai [Joseph A. Turzai of Great Neck, L.I.], who had been wounded by shrapnel, and stayed surrounded by Japs all night.
“Lieut. Turzai told us there were Jap machine guns in a shack in the high grass. Later in the day we sent the tanks after them. They accomplished their mission, with some losses. [We lost three tanks when the Japs opened fire at point-blank range with anti-tank guns.]
“At eleven o’clock last night, the Japs hit us again. It was a minor attack. They shelled us with light mortars.
“Just at daybreak this morning we spotted about 300 Japs in a group. We had our artillery batteries laid for a concentration in that area; the fire fell right on them. They undoubtedly lost a lot of people there.”
At Col. Hunt’s CP, Lieut. Wilson gave us an outline of the fighting in the Matanikau vicinity. That, too, had been of a minor character compared to the finish fight that had raged along the ridge.
“Yesterday morning, just at daybreak, there was mortar and machine-gun fire into our left flank positions,” he said. Col. Biebush (Lieut. Col. Fred C. Biebush of Detroit, Mich.) was commanding our troops.
“At about 8:30 A.M. there came a bayonet charge. But it was repelled with heavy losses for the Japs. The Japs tried it again at 10:30.
“The Japs tried a breakthrough between two groups of troops on our left flank. They were trying to see how far our wire extended. They were beaten back.
“At about noontime, a patrol went out to reconnoiter the enemy position. Maj. Hardy [former Capt. Bert W. Hardy], who led the patrol, sent back a message, saying, ‘The woods are infested with snipers and automatic riflemen. I am pushing forward.’
“Information gathered by our reconnaissance enabled us to put down a heavy concentration of mortar and artillery fire which stopped the attack.”
I slept in a shack at Kukum tonight, on the bare board floor. I came awake, once in the night, to hear people shouting. I asked a man next to me what was happening. He grunted. “Those silly sailors don’t secure their boats,” he said, “so when Oscar goes by, they all bust loose when his wake hits ’em.” But he was wrong. It was not Oscar who had gone by, but a couple of Jap destroyer-type warships, apparently paying us a visit after landing troops at Cape Esperance, to the east.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
We had some copy to get to Gen. Vandegrift’s headquarters for censorship this morning, and were about to start out for the CP, when an air alert came in. But there was no raid, and we reached our destination with our stories and got them off. Till Durdin feared they would be our last.
Today our dive-bombers and torpedo planes from Henderson Field went north on an attack mission. We checked at the airport later in the day and found that they had been after some Jap cruisers and destroyers located between Bougainville and Choiseul. It was believed they got one torpedo hit on a cruiser and got a bomb hit on a second.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17
Till Durdin’s worry that our story on the Jap attack might be our last, fortunately is not being substantiated. Things seem to be calming down on Guadalcanal. Our patrols on all our fronts contacted no Japs today, and to the east and south, it seems, they have withdrawn a goodly distance. Along Col. McKelvy’s front, we heard, our troops have found abandoned mortars and machine guns, some of them in brand-new condition, indicating the Japs fled in some haste.
Nor was there any air raid today, although our fighters, Pursuits and Grummans, went down to Cape Esperance on a strafing mission. Again they had found Jap landing boats on the shore there but no Japs visible. Evidently they had landed at night on the regular schedule and had time to take good cover.
The dust is getting thick on Guadalcanal. If you move on the roads now, you stir up a cloud of the dirty gray stuff. Planes and trucks moving across the airport trail huge triangular black clouds. You put on clean clothes at nine o’clock and walk down the road and at 9:30 you look like a chimney sweep. When you ride in a car the dust of passing vehicles chokes your lungs and blots out your vision. We now ride about with our helmets held over our faces in an attempt to keep them relatively clean. Schultz has dug up a pair of fancy polaroid goggles somewhere. Also, incidentally, a cowboy-effect belt set with large paste-stones, ruby- and emerald-colored. Where he collects such items on Guadalcanal is a mystery. He has also adopted the glamorous sun-helmet which Yarbrough left behind. Schultz’s ambition is to be a state cop in Illinois (he’s from Chicago) or a border patrol trooper, after the war.
At air headquarters today we saw a complete tabulation of the number of planes shot down by our fighters to date. The total is 131; of these, our marine fighters (Grummans) have knocked down 109; the Army Pursuiters, four; our Navy fighters (also Grummans), who have been here only a short time, seventeen; and one of our dive-bombers got a Zero. Our anti-aircraft batteries, in addition, are credited with five.
Of the 131 enemy planes destroyed, about half were fighters or other single-engine planes, and about half the fast, two-motored Mitsubishi 97’s.
Today I talked to a Coast Guard seaman named Thomas J. Canavan (of Chicago, Ill.), who had just got back after recuperating from a terrible adventure. That adventure happened about a month ago, when Canavan was out on anti-submarine patrol; there were three small boats in the patrol, and they were surprised by three Jap cruisers and sunk. Canavan was the only survivor. He saved his life by floating in the water, playing dead while one of the cruisers came close by and looked over his “body.” Then he swam for seventeen hours, trying to get to Florida Island. He finally made the shore.
Canavan, who still looked and talked as if he could feel a ghost looking over his shoulder, said he had only a cocoanut for nourishment during two days on Florida. This he promptly upchucked. He saw fierce-looking natives with spines of bone stuck through their noses and ran from them, but he found later they had been cordially inclined. For when he woke up after falling asleep exhausted on the beach, he found someone had covered him with palm fronds to protect him from the rain and nightly cold. He tried twice to swim to Tulagi Island, and the first time was thwarted by tides. The second time he succeeded.
Our dive-bombers and torpedo planes laden with bombs went out today to target the buildings of the Cape Esperance area where the Japs have been landing. They reported they set the buildings afire.
There are two persistent reports on the “scuttlebutt” circuit today: one is that reinforcements are coming to Guadalcanal—and, on that count, estimates of numbers vary; and the other is that our aircraft carrier Wasp has been sunk.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18
The rumor that reinforcements were en route to Guadalcanal was substantiated today, when they arrived. Early this morning, a certain colonel told me: “I can’t say anything more about it, but I’d recommend that you go for a walk on the beach.” I went to the beach and saw cargo- and warships and transports steaming into sight.
Miller and I went to the landing point to watch the ships unload. All along the beach our weary veterans stood and watched the process, passively. We had been talking about reinforcements, and waiting for a long time.
They were marines, these new troops, thousands of them, boatload after boatload; they wore clean utility suits and new helmets, and talked tough and loud as they came ashore.
One of our veterans told me he had been talking to some of the new arrivals. “Chees,” he said, “these guys want to tell us about the war.” And we knew then that it would take some time with these men, as it had with us, to get rid of that loud surface toughness and develop the cool, quiet fortitude that comes with battle experience.
Two correspondents came in with the shiploads of reinforcements. They are Jack Dowling and Frank McCarthy, who is relieving Miller. Miller was delighted and made much noise about the fact that when he hit the deck of the ship that would take him out of here, he was going to shave off his beard. We all cheered, for Miller’s beard is one of the true horrors of Guadalcanal. It is almost as raggedy as my mustache.
A very reputable source told me today that the report of the Wasp’s having been sunk is true. He said she took two torpedoes in an isolated attack by a submarine (actually she took three), and was abandoned by her personnel.
Another persistent rumor these days is that our naval forces and the bulk of the Jap Navy in this area have fought a great battle somewhere to the north. But there is no confirmation from any official, or even informed, direction. The truth seems to be that there has been no major naval action by surface forces since the battle of Savo Island.
Durdin and I sat on the beach most of the afternoon, waiting for the Jap air raid which we thought was inevitable. Our fleet of cargo and transport ships would make excellent targets. But the Japs, fortunately, did not come this afternoon.
They did come tonight, a force of ships estimated to range from two to six. They were too late, for our ships had gone. But Louie the Louse flew over for some time, dropping flares, looking for our ships, and the Jap ships, probably cruisers, lay well offshore and lobbed shells into our coastline.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
At the airport operations building this morning, we watched our dive-bombers taking off for some mission to the north. Probably bombing Gizo, or Rekata Bay, or one of the other Jap bases in the Solomons. Our people have been attacking some such objective frequently during the last few days, but have not had much luck in catching the Japanese ships, although they have damaged shore installations.
I checked over my records in an attempt to find out just how many ships our dive-bombers are credited with sinking since the first group of planes arrived here nearly a month ago. The total of ships sunk, I found, is three destroyers, one cruiser, and two transports. Probably a dozen other ships, mostly cruisers and destroyers, have been damaged by hits or near misses; altogether, a good score, considering the fact that poor weather conditions and night operations generally make the location of the enemy difficult.
Still the enemy landings at Guadalcanal go on. Bit by bit, they are building up their forces—even now, so soon after their second big attack to break through our lines and take the airport has failed. Last night the group of ships which came in and shelled us probably also landed their daily load of troops.
This afternoon we talked with some of the Raiders about the Battle of the Ridge, and heard some interesting stories about the Japs, how, for instance, they often ask to be killed when they are captured, but seem relieved when we do not oblige. Then they feel they have complied with their part of the death-before-dishonor formula, and make no further attempt to deprive themselves of life.
Several of the Jap prisoners captured on the ridge, it seems, said “Knife” when they were captured, and made hara-kiri motions in the region of the belly. But when no knife was forthcoming, they seemed relieved, and after that made no attempt to kill themselves.
Later this afternoon we heard that a large body of our troops is going out tomorrow to conduct a reconnaissance in force to the south of the airport, to try to find out how far the Japs have fallen back. Durdin, McCarthy, Dowling and I decided to go along.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
Our reconnaissance started at about five o’clock this morning, and after that, for thirteen solid hours, we plowed through jungle and slipped and slid up and down the steepest ridges I have ever climbed. It was a lesson in the geography of Guadalcanal which I will not forget.
Much of the time we were hiking was spent in traversing the sides of ridges. The trails were muddy and slippery from rain which fell early this morning, and I found that a tripod posture, the three supports being formed by two legs and one arm, was the best way to stay on your feet.
We also spent considerable time in the thickest and most unpleasant jungles I have seen. We followed trails most of the time, but even these were covered with tangles of brambly vines, prickly leaves and tree branches protected by long spines.
But our group of troops, led by Col. Edson, at least did not run into any Japs. Other groups which joined in our reconnaissance found a few snipers. A group of our new reinforcements fired continuously, as we had done when we first came to Guadalcanal; they were as chary of shadows and as “trigger-happy” as we had been.
We found evidences that the Japs had moved away in a great hurry and in great disorganization. We found bivouac areas where they had left packs, shoes, flags behind. And I spotted a pile of canvas cases by the side of one trail and found they were filled with the parts of a serviceable 75 mm. pack howitzer. And others found rifles and ammunition. We found the shattered remains of a few Japs who had been hit by our artillery, and others who had evidently died of their wounds.
Today our dive-bombers and torpedo planes had gone out to bomb Rekata Bay, we found on getting back to camp. They had bombed and strafed the base, and uncovered a cruiser nearby and got a hit which damaged, but did not sink, it.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
The ships which brought us reinforcements, also brought supplies, including clothes. I went to the quartermaster depot this morning, got some clothes that smelled delightfully like the dry-goods department in a store, and went up to the Lunga and had a good bath before putting on the new things. Then to Juan Morrera’s mess, which the marines call the Book-Cadillac, and afterward felt like a new man.
We sat about at Col. Hunt’s CP and talked about the reason for the slackening in the Jap air raids. The optimists said the Japs had taken such a drubbing from our fighters that they had no planes left. The pessimists said the foe were simply consolidating their forces for another and bigger effort; perhaps they would send over more planes less frequently, instead of twenty-five or twenty-seven every day.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
At Kukum this afternoon, I saw Dick Mangrum (now a lieutenant colonel) and Lieut. Turner Caldwell, who led, respectively, the original marine and naval dive-bomber groups which came to this island to work out of Henderson Field. Both Turner’s and Dick’s original squadrons have been largely supplanted by new, fresh groups, but the two leaders continued to fly until recently.
They had both grown thin as scarecrows, since I last saw them, and their faces were haggard. They told me they were exhausted from the night-and-day stint of work they had been doing.
“When the medicos used to tell us about pilot fatigue,” said Turner, “I used to think they were old fuds. But now I know what they meant. There’s a point where you just get to be no good; you’re shot to the devil—and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I heard tonight that both Turner and Dick are going to be sent out of Guadal soon for a rest in some peaceful region.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
“Signs of civilization are coming to Guadalcanal,” said Gen. Vandegrift this morning. He told me how an engineer had come into his quarters and asked where he wanted the light. The general said he was surprised to find that the engineer was actually towing an electric wire behind him. The Jap power house which we had captured was in working order, and they had extended a line to the general’s camp.
The general said that he felt our situation on Guadalcanal was brightening a bit. The reinforcements had been a great help, he said, and he seemed assured that the naval protection of our shores would improve. I found out later in the day that a group of motor torpedo boats are on their way to help protect our coastline from the continued Japanese landings.
There is much “scuttlebutt” about more reinforcements coming into Guadalcanal. But the general feeling seems to be that if Army troops are brought in, they will only reinforce, not supplant, the marines, at least for the time being. The old dream of being home for Christmas is fading.
Many of our officers, however, are being sent home, to rest, and to train new groups of troops. That is another sign that we have reached at least a “breather.” And the Japs have confirmed the impression by abstaining from air-raiding us for another day, and failing even to send in the usual landing force of troop-carrying warships this evening.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
We went to the Raiders’ CP for breakfast this morning, and had a good time yarning over pancakes. We talked about some of the close escapes we have had during this campaign, and Maj. Ken Bailey, one of the heroes of Tulagi and the battle on the ridge, said something touching about taking chances.
“You get to know these kids so well when you’re working with ’em,” he said, “and they’re such swell kids that when it comes to a job that’s pretty rugged, you’d rather go yourself than send them.”
(Maj. Bailey was killed three days later during a patrol action.)