Fighter Two airfield, Guadalcanal
Courtesy of the National Museum of the Pacific War
THEY CAME MAINLY BY TRAIN, A THREE-DAY RIDE DEPARTING from southern California and covering some 1,800 miles to the eastern side of Arkansas, just shy of the Mississippi border. They ogled natural wonders along the way as the transport train, filled to the brim, chugged across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. They traveled through the southwest desert, past painted mountain ranges, high plains, the Rio Grande, and the Colorado River. “The states had some pretty sights,” wrote one sixteen-year-old girl who’d come from a farm outside Los Angeles. Another teen recalled that some of the passengers had “bought homemade souvenirs from native Indian women when the train stopped in Yuma, Arizona.” By contrast, little excitement was felt about the final destination as the hundreds, thousands even, of Japanese Americans began arriving “dusty, hot and tired” to the Rohwer War Relocation Center, a euphemism for concentration camp.
It was early October 1942. Eighty miles away, across the Mississippi River, Noah Mitchell was tending to his pear crop in the tiny hamlet of Enid (“Over one thousand bushels for sale at low prices!”) while worrying about the fate of his pilot son stationed somewhere in the South Pacific. Thousands of miles away, Captain John Mitchell was touching down his P-39 on “Cactus,” where US forces were bracing for a new Japanese assault overseen by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Meanwhile, at Rohwer, wave upon wave of Japanese Americans arrived at the unfinished facility in the wooded swampland of rural Arkansas. The detainees were of all ages: issei, the Japanese term for first-generation Japanese immigrants, and nisei, their offspring, born in the United States and therefore citizens. “I peered out of the train window,” a third teen wrote, “and what I saw was a neatly laid out camp, and this camp was surrounded by barbed wire and there were guard towers at the intervals along the perimeter with search lights.” Rohwer was the easternmost of ten internment camps hastily built by the War Relocation Authority, the agency President Roosevelt had created for the purpose of forcibly removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Rohwer’s population eventually peaked at about 8,400, while nationwide nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry would be incarcerated.
Ten months had passed since the December 7 bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attack that had changed everything. “Right there and then the world seemed to crumble from under my feet,” sixteen-year-old Mary Kobayashi recalled in an essay titled “My Autobiography” that she wrote for English class in the school at Rohwer. In his essay, Nobuko Hamzawa described how he felt the day his family was taken from their tiny farm near Hayward, California: “I have never felt so helpless, unhappy and frightened in my life as I felt that morning.” Mary and Nobuko were among the more than two thousand youths now being held at the detention camp, about which another classmate complained, “This will be my home till this mess is over.” Yet another student, Takeo Shibata, was more outspoken than most about the chaotic upheaval in their lives: “There I was, just out of eighth grade, where I was taught that the Constitution guarded all the rights of its citizens. I had to forget all that was taught to me about our democratic country.” Takeo had lived in western Los Angeles with his younger brother, older sister, and pet dogs Blackie and Chico. He’d attended Belvedere Junior High School. His father had sold insurance. When word had come that they had to leave, they had sold off all their furniture and other household items. Now in confinement at Rohwer, Takeo was left to long for a better day. “I hope in the near future I will be free to go outside and lead a life like we used to in Los Angeles.
“To lead a life like any other red-blooded American.”
THE NIGHT JOHN MITCHELL ARRIVED ON GUADALCANAL, OCTOBER 7, Admiral Yamamoto presided over a dinner aboard his flagship Yamato at Truk Lagoon that was more business than pleasure. He was hosting an operational conference with ranking naval officers to go over the navy’s role in the imminent attack on Guadalcanal involving Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet and the Japanese Seventeenth Army. Using darkness as cover, Japanese ships had been passing largely unimpeded through “the Slot” between two chains of the Solomon Islands to unload troops and supplies on the north coast of Guadalcanal. The soldiers scrambled ashore west of the Matanikau River, where Japanese forces were concentrated following the invasion by US marines. Yamamoto’s destroyers provided cover by bombing nearby Lunga Point and Henderson Field. The Japanese ground forces on Guadalcanal would soon reach their largest numbers to date, exceeding 20,000 troops. Yamamoto’s responsibility was harnessing naval power to lead the way, and he had assembled the strongest sea force since the Battle of Midway. In all, Japanese military leaders had formulated a potent counteroffensive on relatively short notice. The one flaw in their planning—a key one—was the Seventeenth Army’s miscalculation of US strength. Contrary to its estimates of 7,500 troops, the total number of US troops on Guadalcanal was actually 19,000 by the end of September and still climbing, reaching 23,000 in early October.
Yamamoto was not his usual self during the dinner meeting, and he hadn’t been for some time. Still reeling from the loss at Midway, he revealed a grim fatalism in a private letter to an old friend late that summer: “I fear that I have perhaps one hundred days left to me, and that I must complete my life in their passage.” And as much as he tried to maintain an unwavering stoicism outwardly, his closest aides at the dinner could tell otherwise. The cherished admiral’s hair had turned grayer in recent months, and he was quiet—almost joyless—at a gathering that, in the past, would easily have turned social once the military business was done. When the group retired to Yamamoto’s cabin for an after-dinner whiskey, the best evidence of the admiral’s changing demeanor was his stab at gallows humor. When one aide casually asked about his postwar plans, Yamamoto replied, “I imagine I’ll be packed off either to the guillotine or to Saint Helena,” a reference to the island off the coast of Africa where Napoleon had died in exile in 1821.
THE FIRST THING MITCH DID UPON LANDING AT GUADALCANAL was report to Marine General Vandegrift, the commander who’d led the 1st Marine Division’s invasion and was now overseeing the hodgepodge of US forces—marine, navy, army, with a sprinkling of New Zealand pilots—defending their station. Mitch found the general at his dugout headquarters next to the airfield, and the general directed Mitch to join other Army Air Forces pilots at an airstrip known as Fighter One. The pilots were loosely organized into what would eventually become the 339th Fighter Squadron. Mitch already knew some of the men and was introduced to others, including First Lieutenant Besby Holmes, the skinny twenty-four-year-old San Francisco native who combined athleticism with smarts—a junior college swimmer and boxer as well as state champion chess player. Holmes had one of those Pearl Harbor stories that never paled in the retelling—how he’d been at church first thing that Sunday morning nursing a hangover when the surprise raid had started, how he’d fired at an enemy plane with a .45-caliber pistol and then given chase in a beat-up P-36 he’d found abandoned and unscathed on a runway. Until late summer, Holmes had been in Hawaii, and he had just arrived at Guadalcanal via New Caledonia. Like Wallace Dinn, Rex Barber, and Tom Lanphier, Holmes would prove to be Mitch’s kind of pilot—bold and fearless—and soon enough the two were flying together in the newly created 339th Fighter Squadron.
The US base was a small coastal pocket on a compact island—only ten square miles—that was otherwise covered in thick jungle. Flies and mosquitoes, millions of them, infested the rain-soaked jungle. “The minute the sun went down you had to get under the mosquito net,” one of Mitch’s pilots said. “When they landed on you, they would just stand up, drop their thing in there, and you could just see them fill up their bellies with blood.” The battle scarring from weeks of warfare was hard to miss. Many more bomb craters dotted the area than Mitch had seen from the sky, some having been converted to dumping pits for empty tin cans and other waste. Bullets had eaten holes in coconut tree stumps and tropical trees. Burnt hulks of Japanese planes lay on the periphery of the airstrip, along with various equipment left behind by exiting Japanese soldiers: shovels, mats, even a steamroller. The Americans were using as their control tower a rickety framed pagoda still standing on the strip the Japanese had built. Mitch quickly learned that to signal incoming Japanese planes a horn was sounded by ground crews and a captured rising sun flag was run up a pole at the pagoda.
The human battle scarring was hard to miss as well. The marines on Guadalcanal were edgy and weary, worn down by combat, sleep deprivation, illness, and the manic slapping at ankles, eyebrows, and elbows to ward off the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Initially the marines’ task had been to take over the airfield, and once that was accomplished, they were to have been replaced by army troops. “But now for almost two months, through ferocious attack after attack by the relentless Japanese, by land, by sea and by air, the landing force had had to fight on,” noted John Hersey after arriving on the same transport plane as one of Mitch’s pilots, Doug Canning. The day after Mitch got there, Hersey left camp with a marine patrol heading into a jungle valley five miles west of Henderson Field, part of a larger mission to confront the Japanese at the Matanikau River and prevent them from pushing any closer to Henderson Field. Hersey’s account of the three-day battle, which ended in a standoff and was known as the Third Battle of Matanikau, ran in Life magazine the next month, November 1942. While the Japanese lost upwards of seven hundred men, the marines suffered the most casualties so far on Guadalcanal—sixty dead—and John Hersey used the bloody, up-close combat at the river as a microcosm to inform readers back home “that Americans are not invincible.” Hersey saw firsthand “defeat, panic, flight. There had come a moment when the imminence of death simply overpowered a group of men, even though they were members of a hyper-proud service, were well-trained, and were veterans of terrible battles that had proven them brave.”
The neophyte war journalist also quickly appreciated the degree to which the marines despised their Asian enemy and would have preferred fighting Nazis over “Nips.” “Germans are misled, but at least they react like men,” one marine told Hersey. Fighting Germans was a contest between human beings, he said, akin to an athletic performance of matching one’s skill against the other’s. The Japanese soldiers, by contrast, were “like animals.” The marine explained, “Against them you have to learn a whole new set of physical reactions. You have to get used to their animal stubbornness and tenacity. They take to the jungle as if they had been bred there, and like some beasts you never see them until they are dead.”
MITCH WOULD NEVER EXPERIENCE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN fighting Japanese and Germans, given that he would fight only in the Pacific. What he did know was that as the Third Battle of Matanikau got started, he was going to be right in the thick of things the only way he knew—in the sky. Less than forty-eight hours after his arrival, at dawn on October 9, he was put in charge of eight P-39s taking off from Henderson Field. One of Yamamoto’s naval groups, consisting of five destroyers and a cruiser, had been spotted returning up “the Slot” off the coast of New Georgia, an island about 150 miles north of Guadalcanal. The enemy ships had not been able to clear the Slot by daylight, and the Americans saw an opportunity to inflict damage on them. Mitch’s fighter planes were escorting navy dive-bombers known as SBDs, short for Scout Bomber Douglas, planes with strong maneuverability and hefty bomb loads. SBDs had played a critical role in sinking Japanese aircraft carriers at Midway.
To provide cover, Mitch took his flight slightly above the SBDs, to an altitude of about 12,000 feet. From there they easily spotted the Japanese ships, and the SBDs went into their dives. But Mitch also spotted at least five Japanese floatplanes—fighter planes equipped with floats for sea landings—accompanying the enemy ships. The floatplanes were at about 8,000 feet, which gave Mitch’s planes the advantage, attacking from above. He signaled his fliers to intercept them, and off they went.
This was it, the real deal, and for all the simulated dogfights and intensity he’d brought to bear in his training—such as the time he’d gotten so locked into a dogfight at Hamilton Field that he hadn’t even noticed the exercise had been called off—he was now facing live combat. He wasn’t feeling panicky, but as he picked the enemy plane to attack, he also had the sobering thought that he “was just a green kid.” His P-39 was armed with a 37 mm automatic cannon that fired through the plane’s nose, and during exercises on Fiji, Mitch had been unimpressed by its performance. The gun was slow firing, and during drills he could actually hear its sluggish chong, chong, chong—really that slow, but it was all he had, so that when he made his move and closed in to where he was only about 300 feet behind the Japanese floatplane, he cut loose.
The third shot was the one that hit, right where the float joined the fuselage. Mitch watched as “that sucker blew, must have blown into a million pieces.” Pieces of the shattered plane flew past him in the cockpit. Mitch was pumped up. “Man, this is great” was how he felt, and right away he looked around for a second target. Hungry for more, he suddenly spotted an enemy plane coming at him head-on. He told himself to stay calm, he was fine, not nervous and only thinking, Bring it on. The planes headed toward each other, as in a game of chicken. Mitch waited, and when he felt he was within range, he pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened. He could hear it go brrrrr. That was all he got out of the gun. The cannon had jammed. Fortunately, the Japanese fighter missed him as they flew past each other, but when Mitch saw two other floatplanes coming for him, he knew it was no place for him to be, not without a working gun. The SBDs were done anyway, although it wasn’t clear what harm their bombs had caused. It turned out that Mitch’s other pilots had also had trouble with their guns jamming. Everyone left.
They returned to Henderson Field before midday, everyone accounted for. Mitch had no time to savor the clash, however. He, Dinn, and others were in the air again that afternoon, escorting SBDs on another bombing mission. But that morning’s flight was one he would never forget: his first kill. “I won’t say you remember it like your first girlfriend,” he said afterward. “But it’s something like that, the first time you shoot down an airplane.”
IN BETWEEN A STEADY PACE OF FLYING, MITCH AND THE PILOTS he’d brought over with him from New Caledonia did their best to get settled in. They moved into tents burrowed into a hillside on the jungle’s edge overlooking Fighter Two, another airstrip the Seabees were building several miles west of Henderson Field. The new airfield was parallel to the coast and only about 150 yards off the beach, and it featured a semicircular taxi strip connecting the ends of the runway, as well as a plane revetment, or protected parking area, with blast walls on three sides. The four-man tents came with cots and mosquito nets, and below the tents were a mess hall and a makeshift operations building. Every pilot had access to a shallow foxhole, dug either inside the tent itself or right outside. There were larger foxholes covered with coconut logs and sheet iron nearby.
The army pilots immediately realized the necessity of the foxholes. Within days of their encampment, “Pistol Pete,” a nickname given to Japanese field cannons, made their noisy debut. The cannons were positioned on a ridge above the nearby Matanikau River—a location that kept changing to avoid detection—and began intermittently firing shells onto the US base. The shells sailed over the pilots’ tents on the hillside. They could hear the reports first, then the shells coming, then the shells landing, BLAM! The pilots had about ten seconds from the time they heard the shells to hustle into a foxhole.
A second threat followed: a Japanese pilot nicknamed “Washing Machine Charlie” commenced nocturnal bombing raids. “It’d go ga-doink, ga-doink, ga-doink, that’s the way it sounded,” Mitch said. “One of those whining, whing-whang engines.” The Japanese had intentionally monkeyed with the plane’s twin engines to make a racket. Every night the men would be lying in their cots, trying to get a little sleep after flying all day, and then that despised pilot would arrive and drop a bomb. The plane came from Rekata Bay, a base the Imperial Navy had built on the northeast coast of Santa Isabel Island 170 miles away to use for offensive operations against the US forces. The nightly raids began soon after Mitch arrived and continued throughout the fall of 1942. They hardly constituted a full-on assault on the US installation. In fact, it was a bonus for the Japanese if the single bomb—or two—that Charlie dropped on the solo runs smashed anything. The raids were instead designed to torment the Americans, ruin their rest, and drive them to distraction.
The strategy wasn’t a bad one. The men, hunkered down in tents, would hear the grinding engine off in the distance. Mitch would lie there, telling himself “I’m not going to get up. I gotta sleep.” He’d turn over and try to sleep until “finally when that damn bomber is getting pretty close, you’d get up and run for a foxhole and jump in the hole, an open pit thing, you’d hit it on the run, squat there for a minute or so, and he’d go on.” Not only was a night’s rest ruined, but Washing Machine Charlie had succeeded in getting the Americans out from under their mosquito nets, exposing them to the malaria-carrying insects. “When we’d go for the foxholes in skivvies they’d chew on us.” The marines returned fire, but that only made matters worse; the antiaircraft guns were located on a hill not far from where Mitch and the pilots slept, and the guns shook the tents whenever a round was shot. Further, even though searchlights roamed the dark sky and sometimes even held a light on Charlie at 25,000 feet, the noisy guns never succeeded in hitting their mark. Among Pistol Pete, Washing Machine Charlie, and the antiaircraft guns, the wear and tear was evident on the men’s faces at breakfast. Doug Canning was one pilot who got fed up with all of the jumping from cot to foxhole. “I just moved my cot down and slept in the fox hole from then on and until I left Guadalcanal. That was my home, a foxhole up on a hillside.”
The waking hours gave Mitch plenty of time to think about the first kill. He’d felt a surge of adrenaline, that’s for sure, and afterward he wanted a repeat of the rush that had come from squaring off in the sky. Of his enemy he said, “He’s a flying machine armed and capable of killing you, just the same as you are capable of killing him.” He recognized, though, that it wasn’t like the ground fighting, which was marked by a butchery that had become commonplace, as wave after wave of Japanese rushed the marines who were dug in and holding the perimeter. Corpses littered the areas surrounding Henderson Field, body limbs tossed about, faces mangled, soldiers who’d been cut in two by machine guns. Battle-weary marines, stunned and exhausted by all the bloodshed, took on the dark, vacant look that came to be tagged “the Guadalcanal, or 1,000-yard stare.” The disposal of the dead near the Matanikau River became such a problem that engineers tried blasting an overhanging cliff to bury a pile of bodies at the bottom. A few weeks later, there was a night when Mitch tossed fitfully on his cot, unable to sleep because of the all-night gunfire between the marines and the charging enemy. In the morning he was in the mess tent getting breakfast when one of the marines he’d befriended waved him over. “Mitch, you want to see something?” The soldier took Mitch to the site of the previous night’s fighting, right down to the battle line, and showed him the Japanese bodies stacked up after a banzai charge. Mitch winced. The sun was hot, and the Japanese corpses had begun to rot. He turned away.
“I couldn’t eat breakfast.”
Ground combat was almost personal: a soldier took aim at a guy in his sight and shot him through the head. It wasn’t like that in the sky. One pilot never really saw the other when he hit his “flying machine.” The shooter saw the plane burst into flames or a wing come off, or maybe the plane started to spin and he saw it crash. But it wasn’t as though the shooter sat there in his cockpit and followed his target all the way down. Because if he did, he was going to get shot. The shooter was usually past the target by that time anyway, looking around for other planes that he could be attacking. Mitch could see that shooting down airplanes wasn’t anywhere near as intimate as killing on the ground and was more businesslike. There was a certain anonymity to it. But even with that clinical distance, Mitch made no bones about his single-minded focus on destroying his enemy, especially this one. If he did see a Japanese pilot bail from a plane he’d blasted, he wouldn’t hesitate to finish the job. “I’d shoot him, too, if I had the time.” It was kill or be killed, that simple. No mercy.
“War is not an ethical thing,” he said. “It’s a horrible thing.”