Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (8 page)

But the main reason Fletcher was pulling his carriers out was this new threat from the approaching Jap strike force. Plus, there were other reports that a flock of Jap submarines was heading into the area.

Admiral Turner wasn’t happy at all when he found out what was about to happen. In effect, he told Fletcher, “Hey, I’m not leaving my transports here as sitting ducks if you bug out and take away all our air cover.”

Unless Fletcher changed his mind by 6 AM on August 9, Turner said he was ordering all his supply ships to safer waters, and they wouldn’t be back till they were guaranteed to have air support. Whatever hadn’t been unloaded by the time they left would just have to go with the ships.

At this point, close to half of the First Marine Division’s total supplies and equipment were still aboard those ships in the channel. So you can imagine how upset General Vandegrift, our division commander, was when Turner broke the news to him at a meeting that night on Turner’s flagship, the attack transport USS
McCauley
.

Vandegrift stayed aboard the
McCauley
arguing with Turner till almost midnight. The general said later he was “most alarmed” by Turner’s decision. He said he did everything he could to make Turner realize what a disaster it would be for the Marines ashore if the transports pulled out half-unloaded and with several Marine units still aboard. But Turner refused to budge. He wouldn’t change his mind.

Vandegrift felt like the Marines were being sold out—and rightly so—but Turner did have a point. If he hung around long enough to finish the job, he could lose every transport in the convoy. But his decision to pull out sure played hell with our hopes of making short work of the Guadalcanal campaign.

Fletcher took a lot of flak later on for not keeping his air cover in place, but maybe he had a point, too. The Navy had already lost one carrier at Midway and another one in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and Fletcher was scared shitless of losing a third one. If he had, it would’ve left only three U.S. carriers in the whole Pacific and given the Japs a big edge in naval airpower.

Still, it was pretty damn obvious that Fletcher thought more of his carriers than he did of the Marines he was leaving marooned in the middle of enemy territory.

As it happened, it was our fighting ships, not our transports, that took a battering from the Japs on the night of August 8–9 in what came to be called the Battle of Savo Island. Savo is a round chunk of
land near the west end of Sealark Channel and about ten miles off the northwestern tip of Guadalcanal.

The Japs sank three of our heavy cruisers, the
Vincennes, Astoria,
and
Quincy
, and one Australian heavy cruiser, the
Canberra
, that night. A fourth U.S. heavy cruiser, the
Chicago
, was badly damaged, along with two of our destroyers, the
Patterson
and
Ralph Talbot
. A total of 1,077 American and Allied sailors and Marines were killed, and another 700 were wounded.

For some unknown reason, another damaged U.S. destroyer, the
Jarvis
, limped away alone from the Savo Island battle that night. I guess the
Jarvis
’s captain had lost radio contact with the rest of the ships and was just trying to get the hell out of there.

Anyway, early on the afternoon of August 9, the
Jarvis
was spotted and sunk by Jap planes 130 miles southwest of Savo. None of her 160-man crew lived to tell about it, and nobody ever knew what happened to her until after the war.

Only three enemy ships—all cruisers—were even hit during the battle, and the damage they suffered was strictly the easy-to-repair kind. Jap casualties were just fifty-eight killed and seventy wounded.

After that terrible night, the brass changed the name of Sealark Channel to Iron Bottom Sound—for obvious reasons. Its floor was now paved with the wreckage of our ships.

T
HE ONLY THING
that didn’t go the Japs’ way that night was that, by some good maneuvering and maybe a small miracle, Admiral Turner’s transports, which were most likely the Jap strike force’s main target, got away clean.

I found out later that as soon as Turner heard gunfire that night he
ordered his ships to quit unloading and weigh anchor, and within five minutes they were all under way. To Turner’s credit, though, his ships stayed in the area the rest of the night and part of the next day while he begged Admiral Fletcher again for air support that never came.

Visibility in the channel was close to zero that night, and Turner managed to stay out of harm’s way by keeping his ships circling in the dense fog. The next morning, after the Jap strike force withdrew, his crews were able to unload quite a few supplies on Tulagi.

But any hope Turner had of unloading more stuff on Guadalcanal ended late on the afternoon of August 9, when he got reports of a huge flight of Jap bombers headed his way. About sunset, he gathered up his transports and sailed south as fast as he could go. He didn’t stop till he got to the port of Noumea on the island of New Caledonia.

In case you’re not too familiar with the geography of the South Pacific, New Caledonia lies off the east coast of Australia and more than 1,100 miles southeast of Guadalcanal.

There was no way we were going to see anything else of Turner’s ships and the supplies they carried for a long, long time. We were being left high and dry, like they say.

In
The Old Breed
, author George McMillan’s classic history of the First Marine Division, he put it this way: “The only sign of the American Navy the men of the First Division got on the morning of August 9 was the sight of burning and damaged ships. And this was more than they were to get for many mornings after that.”

That report on the Jap bombers turned out to be a false alarm, by the way. They never showed up.

O
NCE WE FOUND
out what had really happened in the big navy battle, our confidence sank down to about the same depth as those sunken hulks in Iron Bottom Sound. Less than a day before, we’d thought we were almost home free. Now we knew we were in trouble up to our eyeballs.

The ships and planes of our Navy had disappeared and left us stranded on Guadalcanal with barely enough supplies to survive on. The Japs were in full control of the air and the sea around us. There was nothing to stop them from sending in as many supplies and reinforcements as they needed to pin us down and bleed us to death.

What it boiled down to was that the First Marine Division was surrounded by the enemy. Beyond our perimeters, the Jap troops already on the island could move freely wherever they wanted to go and hit us whenever and wherever they chose. And we didn’t have anywhere near enough fortifications and fixed defenses to hold off a Jap amphibious landing, even if it was right under our noses.

For the time being, though, there was nothing for K/3/5 to do but follow orders and move west in a hurry. We still didn’t have but one unit of fire per man for our ’03 Springfields. We heard there might be some additional ammo at the Third Battalion command post, but that was a good half-mile away. So we just marched with what we had.

In my case, that was five clips that held five rounds apiece on each side of my belt. That came to fifty-five rounds total, including the clip in my rifle. Some of the guys who’d been shooting at phantoms those first two nights ashore had considerably less.

“Conserve your ammo,” Lieutenant Adams told us as we started out along the beach road. “When we make contact with the enemy,
don’t waste a single round. Make every shot count. Use your bayonets whenever you can.”

By now, almost everybody in the company was down in the mouth and moping. Some guys started talking about Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines and comparing our sorry situation to the one those poor devils had faced three or four months ago.

A private in the K/3/5 mortar section was walking beside me when we moved out that morning. He had an expression on his face that looked like somebody had just kicked him in the nuts. “Oh Jesus, Mac,” he said, “you think we’ll ever get off this damn island?”

He must’ve asked me that same question at least a hundred times over the next four months. I always tried to give him a positive answer, even though sometimes I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.

This was definitely one of those times.

“Yeah, yeah,” I told him. “We’ll be fine.”

R
OUGHLY AN HOUR
into the march, the road along the beach led us just north of the airfield, which was to our left, and still within sight of the water to our right. It had been quiet all the way so far with no sign of enemy activity.

Then, all at once, we saw a submarine surface out in the channel maybe a hundred yards from shore.

“That’s a Jap sub!” somebody yelled. “Hit the deck!”

We did exactly that, but like the Zeros that had flown over us twice before, the sub paid no attention to us. It opened fire toward the airfield with its one deck gun, and we could hear the shells whizzing over our heads. We could also hear the explosions as the shells hit off to the south. The sub kept firing for two or three
minutes. Then it moved away and slipped out of sight under the waves.

I almost felt like laughing. Here I was in an infantry rifle platoon, and the first and only Jap I’d seen was flying over me in a Zero at treetop level. Now I’d just come under fire—well, sort of—from a Jap submarine. But I still hadn’t seen a single enemy soldier on the ground. It all seemed nutty as hell to me, and I couldn’t help wondering what the odds were of something like that happening.

“Okay, the sub’s gone,” Lieutenant Adams said. “Show’s over. Let’s move out.”

We brushed ourselves off and started marching west again. We continued on for a couple of miles until we were ordered to stop and start setting up a new defensive perimeter near an outcropping of land called Lunga Point, where the Lunga River emptied into the sea.

From there, our Fifth Marines perimeter would be tied in a lot more securely with the lines of the First Marines. The Fifth’s lines ran along a ridge and through some coconut plantations, but the First’s were mostly in the jungle. At least we were both in better positions now to protect the airfield and hold our ground if the Japs decided to attack us with something bigger than a submarine.

And, sure enough, they did.

Their planes came first, and since there weren’t any American ships left to target, they concentrated on the airfield they’d given up and our troop concentrations. It hadn’t taken them long to realize a couple of things. First, our carriers were long gone. Second, until the airport was finished, we wouldn’t have any planes of our own to fight back with.

At the moment, all we had to protect the airfield were a few outdated 90-millimeter antiaircraft guns and a couple of searchlights.
Our .30-caliber machine guns in K/3/5 and the other infantry companies were about as effective as peashooters against enemy bombers. What few 50-calibers we had were with the Third Battalion weapons company a considerable distance away.

The number of Jap planes in the formations that targeted the airfield ranged from five or six to a couple of dozen. They’d aim a few bombs at our positions in passing, but they saved most of what they had for the airfield. We were well dug-in and had pretty good cover from the coconut palms, so we hardly had any casualties to speak of.

But the bombings jangled our nerves and kept us on edge. Especially the ones at night. After dark, they’d send over just one plane at a time. The pilot would come in slow and leisurely, like he didn’t have a care in the world. He must’ve known we didn’t have a damn thing bigger than a .30-caliber or a BAR to fire at him. He’d circle around for a while, then drop one bomb and fly away. A couple of minutes later, another plane would show up and go through the same routine.

The thing that hurt worst was they kept us awake most of the night. Plus they were such arrogant, infuriating sons of bitches. They knew there was nothing we could do against them. It was like they were just toying with us and getting a big kick out of it. We called all the Jap pilots by the same name—“washing-machine Charlie.”

About 1 AM one morning, I heard a frustrated Marine cussing the third or fourth low-flying “Charlie” of the night from a couple of foxholes away.

“Damn you, you asshole!” he yelled. “I’d give a hundred-dollar bill for thirty seconds with a .50-caliber machine gun right now!”

I knew exactly how he felt.

I
N BETWEEN AIR
raids, we did finally get something to eat.

As far as I remember, the first time we had what you’d consider a full meal was late on the afternoon of August 10 (D-plus-3). Up to that point, the only chow I’d had was a few captured Nip candy bars. But that evening, I got a mess kit full of boiled rice with some dried fish mixed in and a can of tangerines. Naturally, it was all Japanese.

The rice was okay, and it was filling, but the tangerines were really great. I don’t think I ever ate anything before or since that tasted so good. Of course, the fact that I’d gone over three and a half days with almost no food probably had a lot to do with how much I enjoyed them.

With the small amount of edible stuff—mainly just coffee—that had been unloaded from the ships, plus the large supply of Jap rice our guys had found stored near the airfield, we supposedly had enough food to last us about fourteen days. That was only figuring on two meals a day, though. Like I said earlier, our breakfasts were at least 90 percent black coffee—no cream, no sugar—and there was no such thing as lunch.

By this time, some of our guys were getting fairly adept at busting open coconuts. And God knows, there were enough of those. According to the rumors we heard, the Japs were living almost totally on coconuts, now that they’d lost their rice supplies. I can tell you for sure we didn’t feel sorry for them.

The one big break we got in the food situation during those first couple of weeks came in the form of a steer that wandered into our area. For several days, we watched it grazing in a grassy open space down below the ridge where we were set up. None of us had had a bite of real meat since we’d left the troopship.