Goodbye, Darkness (26 page)

One Marine gunny taught a small class in Nipponese flower arrangement, using a superbly illustrated book recently published in Tokyo, and another NCO, who had liberated an ice plant which had been left in excellent condition by the departing enemy, erected two signs outside it. One read:

TOJO ICE FACTORY
UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT
— J. Genung, Sgt., USMC, Mgr.

The other sign was headed
today's score
. On it, after each air battle overhead, he used a Japanese brush to write U.S. aircraft losses and the number of enemy planes stitched, flamed, and splashed. If you were cowering in a foxhole near Henderson, you could often hear the hot 50-caliber cases falling from the sky. After a lull, when Condition Red was lifted, someone would say: “Ain't getting any more cases; let's go up to the ice plant.” The Seabees, whom every Marine adored, had arrived, extended and finished Henderson Field two weeks after the landing, and immediately started work on a two-hundred-yard grassy fighter strip parallel to it. On August 20, the first twelve SBD (Scott Bomber Douglas) Dauntless dive-bombers flew in from the east and landed on Henderson, followed by nineteen stubby-winged Wildcats. It was, Vandegrift later recalled, “one of the most beautiful sights of my life. I was close to tears and I was not alone.” Enemy pilots led by Vs of arrowing Aichi 99s covered by Zeroes raced down from Rabaul to challenge them. The field, shelled every night, was in deplorable condition. If rain was falling it was a mire; if the day was dry the runway was obscured by clouds of dust. Maintenance crews were constantly cannibalizing downed U.S. planes; otherwise they had no spare propellers, wheels, windscreens, or tires. Also lacking were machines to belt ammunition, bomb hoists, dollies, and tankers. The pilots were dead on their feet and weakened by their grim diet of beans, rice, and hash. Nevertheless, as the weeks passed the statistics showed that our fliers were outscoring the Japs and their Zeroes, Bettys, and Zekes. The Marine airmen called themselves the “Cactus Air Force,” after the code name for the Canal operation, and their aces — Pappy Boyington and Joe Foss especially — were heroes to the infantry.

Dogfights were daylight spectacles. The nights belonged to the Japanese fliers, chiefly two of them: “Louie the Louse,” a float plane which nightly dropped two to four drifting pale green flares over the beachhead, and “Maytag Charlie” or “Washing Machine Charlie,” so named for his whining toy engine, which sounded like an airborne Yippie. You could set your watch by Charlie. Each night he dropped his 250-pound bombs, too few to threaten the Marines' defenses, but enough to keep them awake, which was the idea. Colonel Robert Pepper's 90-millimeter antiaircraft guns sought Charlie in vain. Four American night fighters up there would have done the job in a few minutes, but somehow requests for them were always pigeonholed in Noumea. So when he came, you jumped from your soggy blankets and dove into your foxhole, which held as much as six inches of water. In the hot zinging iron that fell, men said they found American nuts, bolts, and screws — scrap iron the United States had sold to Japan before Pearl Harbor. One corporal claimed he recognized Eleanor Roosevelt's false teeth. Nobody laughed. Louie and Charlie weren't funny. Nights were feared on the Canal. You watched the beautiful tropical sunsets with dread.

The salvos from Nip warships also banished sleep; so, later, did the shells from “Pistol Pete,” a 15-centimeter enemy howitzer on the Grassy Knoll. Our counterbattery fire could never find him. Every time you tried to rest there would be a shot from Pete, the flashing guns of Nip destroyers, Louie's flares, Charlie's drone, or the wail of a siren — another item liberated from the Japanese — at Henderson. When coastwatchers on New Georgia warned that enemy aircraft were overhead there, the word was passed that Condition Yellow was in effect. When they approached the Sound, it was Condition Red. These aerial pests were, and were meant to be, blows at morale. The men on the line couldn't even
see
the bastards. Even the guys on the beach rarely caught a glimpse of the enemy. If they did, it was usually because the Japs wanted to heighten Marine anxiety with an insolent procession of warships just beyond the reach of Pepper's old five-inch naval guns. Once a Jap move backfired, though. Two Higgins boats, on a mail run from Tulagi to the Canal, seemed doomed when a black Jap submarine, unseen by the men on the boats but clearly visible to those ashore, suddenly surfaced in the Sound behind them. Nip sailors sprang from the conning tower and manned the sub's forward gun. At that moment, to the horror of the men on the beach, blue smoke rose from a malfunction on one of our boats and the other slowed to pick up her crew. The Nips bracketed them in two shots. The men in the boats seemed as good as dead. Then, out of nowhere, a newly arrived battery of Marine 75-millimeter artillery opened fire. The sub lurched toward one side, damaged. The Japs piled into their conning tower, the black hull vanished, and the Higgins boat bearing the shaken Marines glided into its berth at Carpenter's Wharf.

At that time, when the Japanese infantrymen were attacking the Marine perimeter from all sides, our defensive arc was about four miles wide. Its eastern anchor was the juncture of the Ilu and Tenaru rivers and the sea. From there it ran down to a ridge a thousand yards south of Henderson and reached its other anchor at the mouth of the Lunga River to the west. This parabola may be roughly compared to a human face, with the Ilu at the left eye, the ridge at the nose, and the Lunga at the right eye. Generally this semicircular line clung to the high ground. Ideally it should have been an iron cordon, sandbagged and shielded by a double-apron barbed-wire fence with heavy reconnaissance patrols probing westward beyond the village of Kukum to the banks of the broad, ominous Matanikau River, about five miles from the Lunga. Later that was in fact done, but with so few Marines ashore in those first weeks, only heights could be strongly defended. There, on the jungly slopes, the men on the line would wire themselves in at night. Between them and the enemy were entrenched Marines in listening posts. The listening posts would report sounds of Jap movement. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, volunteered to spend the night in a listening post.

But there was really no safe spot within the perimeter. Cooks, bandsmen, and runners were rushed into gaps when enemy breakthroughs seemed imminent. One night a Japanese officer brandishing a samurai sword came within a few yards of the pagodalike structure which served as Vandegrift's command post. The general, pacing the muddy wooden floor, turned, startled. “Banzai!” screamed the Jap, disemboweling a gunny. Nearby, Sergeant Major Shepherd Banta was giving one of his men unshirted hell. Banta drew his pistol, killed the Jap with one shot, and, turning back, continued his tongue-lashing. Anyone, anywhere on the beachhead, might, at any given moment, win a Purple Heart. Feverish or not, if men could walk then they were ineligible for sick bay. Every man was needed. Redheaded Sam Griffith, then Edson's executive officer and later my commanding officer, remembers: “In the South Pacific the navy was no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel. That had been done.” In any event, that was the explanation of the navy brass. Actually Fletcher had idle Wildcats in the New Hebrides. He just didn't believe in reinforcing failure. The enemy seemed to know that the embattled Marines had been all but disowned. Admiral Mikawa was assembling Jap aviation ground crews to be landed on Henderson as soon as the island had been surrendered by the Marines. Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, leading a brigade ashore west of the Matanikau, had drawn up the instrument of capitulation for Vandegrift's signature. He had brought a dress uniform to be worn at the ceremony. Even the date had been set: September 13, 1942. The Marines didn't know the size of the forces being moved from New Guinea to the Canal, but some canisters dropped from Zeroes for enemy infantry fell within our lines. All bore the same message: “Help is coming, coming, coming.”

Meanwhile our force was shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. It is somehow unfair that only those disabled by wounds were eligible for Purple Hearts. Victims of malaria suffered just as much — some writhed through recurring attacks until the early 1950s — and there were two of them for every one who fell in battle. But if it came to that, every Marine on the island deserved a decoration just for being there. Those spared by malaria and Jap guns and bombs were afflicted with other fevers and with dysentery, virulent fungus infections, and malnutrition. The corpsmen did what they could. Marines lined up for emergency rations, salt tablets, quinine, and, starting on September 10, the malarial suppressant Atabrine. Everyone was ordered to swallow Atabrine tablets daily. Many mutinied at this; the drug left its takers sicklied o'er with a pale yellow cast, and scuttlebutt had it that it made men impotent. In the end the pills were doled out in chow lines. A corpsman popped a tablet on your tongue, then peered down your throat to be sure you had swallowed it. Still, there were those who managed to avoid it, and those who gulped it down and then worried about it. Personally I wasn't troubled by the pills. Being potent hadn't done me much good.

The typical Marine on the island ran a fever, wore stinking dungarees, loathed twilight, and wondered whether the U.S. Navy still existed. He ate moldy rations and quinine. He alternately shivered and sweated. If he was bivouacked near Henderson, he spent his mornings filling in craters left by enemy bombers the night before. If he was on his way back to the line, he struggled through shattered, stunted coconut trees, scraggy bushes, and putrescent jungle, clawing up and down slopes ankle-deep in mud, hoping he could catch a few hours of uninterrupted sleep in his foxhole. Usually he was disappointed. Even when there were no Jap bayonet charges, every evening brought fireworks. One night Nip bombers hit a Marine ammunition dump; another night Pepper spent over an hour trying to hit Charlie with AA fire; at dawn on a day which came to be known as “Dugout Sunday,” enemy six-inch guns tried to pin down Grumman pilots long enough for a fleet of bombers from Rabaul to arrive overhead unchallenged. The Jap tin cans were silenced by counterbattery fire, thanks to information about their location brought through the lines by natives, striking men who wore only the lavalava and whose frizzled hair rose eight inches above their forehead. The battle couldn't have been won without these islanders. Virtually every report from them was reliable. There were, however, exceptions.

On the first Wednesday after the landing an English-speaking Japanese seaman was captured alive. Plied with medicinal alcohol, he disclosed, apparently with reluctance, that hundreds of other Japs, starving in the bush, were ready to quit. A native guide and several termites entering the perimeter confirmed this, and a young Marine officer returning from patrol reported that a white flag was flying over an enemy camp near the Matanikau. That was good enough for Vandegrift's G-2, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge. He told the general he wanted to board a Higgins boat with a patrol of his own and land beyond the Matanikau. Vandegrift agreed, though not without misgivings. Goettge picked his patrol — the prophetically named Stephen A. Custer, a sergeant, and twenty-five other intelligence men, among whom, I am glad to report, I was not.

It was a trap. Goettge, Custer, and their men left Kukum after night fell that same day. At midnight they landed somewhere west of the big river — no one knows just where, for the survivors were in deep shock. The enemy had a reception committee on hand. After a firefight which lasted less than five minutes, the patrol was overwhelmed. Three Marines escaped by swimming away from the beach and then crawling back to our lines over cruel coral. They reached our outposts at daybreak, bleeding and exhausted. Before they lost sight of the shore, they said, they had seen samurai swords flashing in the moonlight, beheading their comrades. This was the Marines' first encounter with Bushido, “the way of the warrior.” After several other examples of it, Vandegrift wrote the Marine Corps Commandant in Washington: “General, I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting. These people refuse to surrender. The wounded will wait until men come up to examine them … and blow themselves and the other fellow to death with a hand grenade.” Having been introduced to the enemy's code of total resistance, defiance to the last man, the Marines had no choice; they had to adopt it themselves. From then until the end of the war, neither side took prisoners except under freakish circumstances. It was combat without quarter: none was asked, none was given.

After the ambush of Goettge's patrol, the first major clash between the Japanese and the Americans occurred at the mouth of a stream on the other side of the perimeter. It is characteristic of our grasp of the island's geography that we called the creek the Tenaru; later we found that it was the Ilu. Most of the battle was fought on a ninety-foot sandspit where the Ilu flows into the Sound, and the first warning of what lay ahead came at midnight on August 18, when Marines ashore heard the splash and hiss of phosphorescent surf— evidence that a warship was racing past their beach, just beyond shoal water. By dawn, everyone within the perimeter had heard the scuttlebutt: the Japs were making night landings. It was true; the first thousand Nip troops had already been put ashore from destroyers. Martin Clemens told one of his natives, Jacob Vouza, to patrol the coconut groves east of the perimeter. Vouza was to become one of the battle's heroes. Before the enemy arrived on Guadalcanal, he had been the island's chief of police; his first impulse, when the Nips had come on June 29, was to arrest them, but Clemens told him to hole up and wait for the friendlier Americans. A powerfully built islander, absolutely fearless, Vouza had been quickly accepted by the Marines as one of them. They had given him an American flag (until Pearl Harbor he had never heard of either Japan or the United States) to show as his safe-conduct when he returned to their outposts from his scouting expeditions. Now, paddling his canoe toward Koli Point, he found that there were, in fact, strong new Japanese forces. Unfortunately he was caught by them on his next patrol. Finding the Stars and Stripes in his pocket, they demanded information about the Marine strong-points. He wouldn't tell them. Furious, they tied him to a tree with straw ropes, bayoneted him seven times in the chest and throat, and left him for dead. But Vouza, no ordinary man, bit through his ropes and crawled nearly three miles on his hands and knees, bleeding all the way, into our lines. He was near death when brought in, but he refused treatment until he reported all he had seen. Miraculously, navy doctors brought him back from the brink of death. Vandegrift awarded him a Silver Star and made him a sergeant major in the Marine Corps.