Goodbye, Darkness (25 page)

The Marines' first break was the weather. On Wednesday, August 5, and Thursday, August 6, squalls and overcast skies grounded the Rabaul-based Jap pilots of long-range Kawanishes who had been flying routine air searches over the Solomons. Three Nip planes did take off from Tulagi on Thursday, but with ceilings as low as a hundred feet they were back in an hour. They reported, “Result of searches: Negative.” Thursday night the darkened American convoy glided through the strait between Savo and Cape Esperance, unseen by enemy crews manning howitzers on both sides. Friday morning coastwatcher Martin Clemens, in his remote jungle hideaway, heard the first roar of the U.S. naval bombardment. Two thousand sleeping Japanese on the north coast — Red Beach — were awakened by salvos from the U.S.S.
Quincy
bursting among them and demolishing forty of their warehouses. By the end of the afternoon 10,900 Marines were on the Canal and 6,025 on Tulagi, though most of their equipment was still aboard the ships. In me-fella-you-fella pidgin conversations with the natives, who had already been alienated by the Japanese, they quickly recruited guides. Fanning out professionally, the Marines dug their two- or three-man foxholes, wired themselves in for the night, and spread the password and countersign — “lollypop” and “lallygag,” because the Japs were said to have trouble pronouncing the letter l. (I never understood that. I think their problem was the letter r. They called us “Malines.”) The troops were all hyped up. Morison later wrote: “Lucky indeed for America that in this theater and at that juncture she depended not on boys drafted or cajoled into fighting but on ‘tough guys’ who had volunteered to fight and who asked for nothing better than to come to grips with the sneaking enemy who had aroused all their primitive instincts.”

The palms on the beach were bent seaward, curtseying toward Tulagi, but inland they stood tall and straight. Because the soap company needed the ground beneath them kept clear for harvesting the coconuts, the Marines had a clear run to the crushed-coral airstrip, which was swiftly taken and named Henderson Field after a Corps pilot who had died in the Battle of Midway. Repair sheds, hangars, and revetments were already finished. Obviously the enemy had expected to use the field within a week at the latest. The scoop was that the Japanese liked to fight in the dark, so Vandegrift expected a counterattack that first night. He was very vulnerable on Red Beach. Equipment had piled up alarmingly. When a Bougainville coastwatcher had radioed, “Twenty-four torpedo bombers headed yours,” sailors manhandling the crates had had to dive for shelter. Luckily the bombardiers from Rabaul were wildly inaccurate, merely inflicting minor damage on one U.S. destroyer. But the only disturbance on the Canal after darkness was from land crabs, screeching tropical birds, and a stampeding herd of wild pigs. Men whispered hopefully to one another that now, with the beachhead secure, GIs would relieve them, letting them return to the bars of Wellington. They studied the unfamiliar stars in the sky and dreamt their wistful dreams.

Red Beach, Guadalcanal, 1978

Across Ironbottom Sound the situation was very different. There the Marines were encountering their first real combat. Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo were honeycombed with caves and the leather necks were taking casualties. Hand grenades were almost useless; the enemy tossed them back. Merritt Edson's Raiders (First Raider Battalion) had forty-seven killed; the Marine Parachutists, eighty-four dead. It is a myth — inspired by the Iwo Jima flag raising — that every World War II Marine carried an American flag in his pack, but somebody on tiny Tanambogo had one of them, and for several hours the island resembled a nineteenth-century battlefield, with the Stars and Stripes snapping angrily over one end of Tanambogo and the Rising Sun over the other. After a noisy charge a Marine sergeant pulled down the Nip banner, and dynamiters sealed the caves one by one. That should have given the enemy's commanders pause — nothing like that had happened to them before — but their rear echelon was as overconfident as ours was fearful. Rabaul reassured Tokyo; the chief of the naval general staff donned his dress uniform and appeared at Hirohito's summer villa at Nikko to inform the emperor that there was no cause for worry. One banzai attack, he predicted, would drive the Marines into the sea. That Friday night four waves of crack Nip troops hit the Raider lines on Tulagi with mortars, grenades, and machine guns. A handful of attackers made it through the lines to the old British Residency but were killed back there when they were discovered hiding under the veranda. At dawn Pfc John Ahrens, an Able Company BAR man, was found covered with blood. He had been shot twice in the chest and bayoneted three times. Around him were the corpses of a Nip officer, a Nip sergeant, and thirteen Nip infantrymen. His huge company commander, Lewis W. Walt, picked up the dying youth and held him in his arms. Ahrens said, “Captain, they tried to come over me last night, but I don't think they made it.” Walt said softly, “They didn't, Johnny. They didn't.”

Five hours later Vandegrift boarded the Wacky Mac and was dealt another blow. An enemy fleet had been sighted leaving Rabaul. Fletcher was withdrawing three carriers from the Sound. Turner, who as a consequence would now lack air cover, had to weigh anchor and sail away with the transports bearing the Marines who had not yet debarked and most of the landing force's supplies — its sandbags, howitzers, coastal defense guns, most of its ammunition, and all but eighteen spools of its barbed wire. Vandegrift, deprived of his lifeline, would be left with a few days' rations, no more. He accused Fletcher of “running away,” but to no avail. Of course, he was told, the transports would soon return. That was certainly the navy's plan, but that night brought catastrophe. The armada steaming south from Rabaul was bigger and closer than had been thought, and it was commanded by one of Hirohito's most gifted admirals, Gunichi Mikawa. Leading seven cruisers and escorting vessels down the Slot, Mikawa, concealed by the cone of Savo Island, appeared undetected at 1:43
A.M.
and pounced on the Allied force which had been left to hold the Sound. He had already launched his torpedoes when a U.S. destroyer sounded the alarm. The forty-minute battle which followed was one of the most crushing defeats in American history. Of five Allied cruisers, four were sunk and the fifth crippled; of the American and Australian sailors in the water, 1,023 were killed, drowned, or eaten by sharks. The return of Fletcher's task force was postponed indefinitely, perhaps forever. The troops ashore were left bare-assed. Now the “Tokyo Express,” as they called it, would come roaring down the Slot to land Jap troops on the island around the clock and shell the Marines on shore from ships beyond the range of the Americans' pitifully small mortars and guns.

Bastogne was considered an epic in the ETO. The 101st Airborne was surrounded there for eight days. But the Marines on Guadalcanal were to be isolated for over four months. There have been few such stands in history. Over the millennia of war certain crack troops must be set apart, elite units which demonstrated gallantry in the face of overwhelming odds. There were the Greeks and Persians at Thermopylae, Xenophon's Ten Thousand, the Bowmen of Agincourt, the Spanish
Tercios
, the French Foreign Legion at Camerone, the Old Contemptibles of 1914, the Brigade of Guards at Dunkirk. And there was the olio of leatherneck units who fought on the Canal under the name of the First Marine Division. All but abandoned by the vessels which brought them there, reduced to eating roots and weeds, kept on the line though stricken by malaria unless their temperature reached 103 degrees, dependent for food and ammo on destroyers and fliers who broke through the enemy blockade, always at great risk, they fought the best soldiers Tokyo could send against them, killed over twenty thousand of them, and won. In an author's note accompanying
The Thin Red Line
, his novel about the Canal, James Jones wrote that “what Guadalcanal stood for in 1942-43 was a very special thing,” that he wanted to share with his readers the “special qualities which the name Guadalcanal evoked for my generation.” James Michener compared the fighting on the island to Valley Forge and Shiloh. Morison wrote: “Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion, recalling desperate fights in the air, furious night naval battles, frantic work at supply and construction, savage fighting in the sodden jungle, nights broken by screaming bombs and deafening explosions of naval shells.” Winston Churchill, after studying the battle, simply wrote: “Long may the tale be told in the great Republic.”

At the time, however, one wondered whether there would be anyone left to tell it. It should be added that, had it been told then, the teller's enthusiasm for Churchill's European war would have been tepid. One reason the struggles in the Pacific constantly teetered on the brink of disaster is that they were shoestring operations. At one point the United States was spending more money feeding and housing uprooted Italian civilians than on the Americans fighting the Japanese. The navy let the Marines on the Canal down because Washington was letting the navy down, devoting nearly all its resources to Eisenhower's coming invasion of North Africa. We knew that our theater was a casualty of discrimination, not because Tokyo Rose told us — though she did, again and again — but because our own government, appealing to its national constituency, which was almost entirely comprised of former Europeans and their descendants, boasted of it. The news about the Italian refugees, for example, was released by the State Department. It pleased Little Italys across the country. The Marines, MacArthur's GIs, and the bluejackets in the Pacific were less elated.

Slipping past the leering guns of the Nip cordon, American destroyers managed to meet the Canal's crying need for ammunition and, later, artillery. Food was another matter. The average leatherneck lost twenty-five pounds during the siege. Night blindness became a serious problem for the men on the line; they simply weren't getting enough vitamin A. To his Raiders, men of machismo who resembled the British commandos, Colonel “Red Mike” Edson gave a quintessential piece of Marine Corps advice. “There's plenty of chow,” he said, grinning wickedly. “The Japs have it. Take it away from them.” Red Mike's mordant wit became part of the Canal legend. So did the incident of Admiral Halsey's bully beef. When Halsey took over he changed the momentum of the battle with a few words. Visiting the Canal — something Ghormley had never done — he held up two fingers and told Vandegrift, “Give me two days. I'll have AKA's here in two days.” A war correspondent accompanying him asked if he thought the Marines could hold on. Halsey jerked his thumb toward the Japanese lines. “How long do you think
they
can take it?” he asked. During his day on the Canal the island was bombed by Bettys and shelled by Jap cruisers firing eight-inch guns at a range of ten thousand yards. Vandegrift was anxious to get the admiral off the Canal after dark. He was worried, not only about Halsey's safety, but also about his digestion. Vandegrift knew how appalling the chow would be. The admiral wouldn't go. He dined, as Vandegrift and his officers dined, on thin, gummy bully beef. In an obvious attempt to boost morale, he said enthusiastically: “You know, this is the best bully beef I've ever tasted. I wish the men in my galley could do as well. Let me talk to your mess sergeant.” The man appeared, trembling in the presence of so mighty an officer. Halsey raved on and on about the bully beef. Then he stopped. Vandegrift nudged the mess sergeant. “Say something to the admiral,” he whispered. Still quaking, the man stuttered: “Bul-Bullshit, Admiral. Bul-Bullshit.”

Edson's joke about taking Japanese supplies proved to be wisdom in disguise. Fleeing into the bush, the enemy had left large stocks of soy sauce, rice, tinned sliced beef, canned Japanese seaweed, crab meat, canned vegetables, and beer, and Marines enthusiastically digested it all. Cooks preparing it warmed chow on field stoves burning Japanese kerosene. The meals were eaten from Jap bowls with Jap chopsticks. After the entrees the leathernecks sucked Jap hard candy and drank sake from delicate Jap cups. The enemy's cornucopia, in those early days, seemed inexhaustible. Red Mike himself found diversion in an English translation of a “Short History of Japan”; his mess was enlivened by Nip phonograph records played on a captured Victrola. Men were issued Japanese occupation money to buy Japanese souvenirs. At Henderson Field, two large Japanese air stations, an air-compression plant for torpedoes, machine shops, and two electric-light plants proved to be invaluable. Nip girders and Nip piles were used to build bridges and piers. Everyone smoked Japanese cigarettes. The chances of mailing letters were slight, but men wrote then anyhow — on Japanese rice paper. Some calculated the number of days left in their enlistments with Japanese abaci. Heads were built of Nip lumber and shielded from flies by Jap screening. Since Fletcher had fled with all the toilet paper, and since Tokyo Rose seemed to be the only reliable source of information, Marines completed their toilet rites at the head by wiping themselves with copies of the
New York Times
which had somehow made it through the blockade. One issue was so used with particular relish. It reported that the Marines were
tightening their grip
on the Solomons
as navy keeps supplies flowing in
. On the strength of this dispatch, the troops were thrilled to learn, the Dow-Jones stock average had gained 4.93 points. But the most priceless news story, too precious for disposal in the head, appeared on page 25 of
Time
's August 24 issue. Reporting on the Battle of Savo Island, it revealed: “Japanese cruisers and destroyers tried to smash the invasion fleet. Then came what U.S. tars had long prayed for: the first real gun-to-gun test of U.S. and Japanese surface sea power. Result: a licking for the Japs.”