The Conquering Tide (20 page)

The tedious daily cycle spun without respite: long sleepless nights yielding to drowsy dawns, heavy airstrikes each midday, firefights and artillery duels all day long—an endless lethal routine of sniping, strafing, bombing, and shelling. When it rained, it rained hard and long, and the foxholes and trenches flooded and made everyone miserable. When the rain let up, the ground dried and clouds of dirty gray dust rose from the airfield and got into eyes and lungs and made everyone miserable. The men ate two meals a day and were always hungry. The food was awful—cold C rations, stale biscuits, powdered eggs, dehydrated potatoes, soggy boiled fish, and canned Australian sheep's tongue. They drank green, bitter coffee brewed in a rinsed-out fuel drum. Everyone lost weight, often at an alarming pace. Told to remain close to their planes, pilots tried slinging hammocks underneath the wings. In the middle hours of the day, the machines baked in the sun and a man could burn himself by touching the aluminum surface. For lack of enough ground personnel, the pilots had to learn how to do some of their own maintenance, but as one squadron leader recalled, most of them “didn't even know how to gas their airplanes.”
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Long-range airstrikes from Rabaul were a daily ordeal, but the Americans usually received two hours' warning from coastwatchers on Bougainville. Jack Read, from his fine vista at Porapora, scrutinized the Japanese formations as they were still climbing to altitude overhead. He would radio directly to Hugh Mackenzie's station KEN, located in a bunker on the edge of Henderson Field. On August 29 at 8:25 a.m., for example, this message came through: “
18 TWIN-ENGINE BOMBERS, 22 FIGHTERS NOW HEADING SOUTHEAST
.”
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Mackenzie relayed the contact by field telephone to Air Control, located in the pagoda-style administrative building a few hundred
feet north of the airfield, and to “D-2,” Vandegrift's intelligence staff. A white flag went up, signaling “condition yellow.” The Wildcats usually took off about fifty minutes before the enemy's expected arrival—enough time to climb to 30,000 feet, an altitude from which the heavy fighters could make diving attacks on the intruders. Two hours after the Japanese had come and gone, Read was back on the radio to report how many survivors had passed overhead en route back to Rabaul. In the second week of September, the marines finally installed an air search radar on Guadalcanal. But it was effective only to a distance of about eighty miles, and it did not provide ample warning to allow the F4Fs to claw to altitude. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Jack Read's coastwatching reports to the success of the air war over Guadalcanal.

Most of the interception work was done by Marine Fighter Squadron 223 (VMF-223), commanded by Captain John L. Smith. Smith's F4Fs took position at very high altitude, a few miles northwest of Henderson. The big formations of G4M “Betty” bombers generally arrived at about 25,000 feet. The Wildcats attacked in two-plane sections—diving runs from overhead, at an angle that kept them out of the G4M's machine-gun turrets' line of fire. The G4M was not nearly as tough as the B-17 Flying Fortresses or other American heavy bombers. The pilots soon learned to aim their .50-caliber fire into the engines or the wing root, where a short burst normally sufficed to set the aircraft afire or even blow it apart.

Zeros flew high cover over the G4Ms, but they were often positioned too far behind the bombers to interfere with the Wildcats' initial diving attacks. Day after day, the Zeros entered the fray only after the Americans had sent several bombers down in flames. Joe Foss, a marine fighter ace, scratched his head at the tactics employed by his Japanese counterparts. Most were obviously highly skilled, but they failed to adapt to changing tactics and became predictable: “They tried the same thing all the time.”
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The Americans had long since learned to avoid “chasing tails” with the quick and maneuverable Zeros, and did not hesitate to dive out of a dogfight if the enemy gained an advantage. Foss praised the sturdy construction of the F4F and noted that many Americans claimed aerial victories after their planes had been shot up. “We were hit with Japanese cannons as well as their machine guns,” he said. “This was unable to knock us down unless it happened to hit the oil cooler or some oil line or gas line in the motor. On a head-on run at each other, we would usually blast the opponent out of the sky and when he was
on our tail our armor plating kept the pilot from getting injured, and at no time did any Grumman blow up.” The Zero, by contrast, was agreeably easy to destroy: “At any time that you got a direct hit at the base of the wings, the plane exploded like a toy balloon.”
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For most of the six-month air campaign over Guadalcanal, the Japanese airstrikes flew all the way from Rabaul and back, covering more than 600 miles each way in a single combat flight. It was too much time in the cockpit, too wearing on the Japanese pilots. “My God!” exclaimed Alex Vraciu, a navy fighter ace with Fighting Squadron Six (VF-6). “That's one thousand miles total both ways, plus any air action over the target area. That's a lot of time. Fighter pilots don't like to sit on their seats for too long a stretch. Three hours in a combat air patrol is enough.”
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Some of the Zero pilots behaved strangely and even seemed to avoid combat. They flew inexplicably acrobatic maneuvers, almost as if they were trying to impress their foes. “Oh, they put on lots of acrobatics, slowovers, loops,” Foss said. “The only reason that we could figure out for their doing all those stunts, they wanted to show us just how ‘hot' they were. So, we showed them how hot we were, and shot them down.”
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One afternoon over Ironbottom Sound, Jack Conger of VMF-223 had a Zero riding his tail and thought he might be finished. But then:

he did the damnedest thing you ever saw. He came down from above and behind, and instead of riding it out on my tail and filling me full of bullets, he let himself go too fast so that he went by me. He should've dodged off to one side and got out of there, but instead of that the fool rose right up under my nose and did a roll. What was he trying to do? Impress me with his gymnastics? I don't know. Apparently those fellows have been told that they were the best flyers in the world, and so they were like little children with toys; they had to show their tricks when they had an audience. Or maybe he thought I couldn't hit him if he kept his plane tumbling like that. As a matter of fact, he was just making himself a bigger target. I used a three second burst, and he was dead before I stopped firing. . . . He made a splash no bigger than a porpoise. Then he was just part of the soup.
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Zeros sometimes flew surprise strafing runs at treetop altitude directly over Henderson Field. Men scattered and dived into the nearest foxhole;
some were inevitably cut down in their tracks. Strafing runs also damaged or destroyed parked aircraft. On August 23, eight Zeros suddenly strafed Henderson, sending men running for cover. Eventually, these runs were effectively countered by P-400s of the Army Air Force's 67th Fighter Squadron. The P-400s—a slightly modified version of the P-39 Airacobra—were practically useless at altitude, but they were fast and maneuverable close to the ground. Marine Clifford Fox was driven into his trench by a strafing Zero when a P-400 appeared suddenly over the trees and “caught the Jap plane with his cannon and the Zero disintegrated in the air. It floated right down into this ravine in the jungle in front of us. You could see the pilot and the engine of this Zero coming down together. They were the heaviest objects and going forward the fastest. The rest of the plane was sort of floating earthward, shot to smithereens. We were all cheering.”
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Vandegrift and his marines had a friend in Admiral John S. “Slew” McCain, Commander of Aircraft South Pacific (COMAIRSOPAC), who was determined to saturate Henderson Field with air reinforcements. A week after the 1st Division landed on Guadalcanal, he became the first high-ranking visitor to the island, dropping in for an overnight stay with a bottle of bourbon under his arm. That night, an enemy destroyer lobbed 5-inch shells into the perimeter from Ironbottom Sound, driving the general and the admiral (both dressed in skivvies) into Vandegrift's bomb shelter. “By God, Vandegrift, this is your war and you sure are welcome to it,” McCain said. “But when I go back tomorrow I am going to try to get you what you need for your air force here.”
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Before he left the next morning, McCain told Colonel Twining that the 1st Division's fight was not really about Guadalcanal. It was not, as Twining paraphrased, “a grudge fight between some raggedy-assed Marines and the Japanese. . . . In the admiral's view, Guadalcanal was a rampart, not an outpost. Its successful defense could lead to the destruction of Japanese naval power in the Pacific.”
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McCain wrote in the same vein to Nimitz and King shortly after returning to Espiritu Santo. If adequately reinforced, Guadalcanal could become “a sinkhole for enemy air power.”
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So long as the Japanese arrogantly insisted on sending airstrikes across 600 miles of sea, the long flights alone would whittle down their numbers. Guadalcanal could finish the process begun at Coral Sea and Midway—the gradual extinction of Japan's remaining cadre of irreplaceable veteran aviators.

In the following weeks, McCain lobbied persistently for air reinforcements.
He asked for additional army planes, particularly P-38s (which performed much better than the P-39/P-400 at higher altitudes). He summoned air reinforcements from throughout his COMAIRSOPAC domain and asked Nimitz and MacArthur for more. Aviation gasoline, bombs, ammunition, spare parts, tools, and ground personnel were urgently needed. VMF-223 ran out of oxygen canisters three days after the squadron's arrival on the island. The transport
William Ward Burrows
would carry a large load of supplies and the marine air group's ground personnel to Guadalcanal. In the interim, the marine Wildcats were serviced by sailors attached to the CUB-1 base construction facility. Turner sent another battalion of Seabees to the island to upgrade and lengthen Henderson Field so that it could handle B-17s. Land immediately northeast of Henderson was cleared and graded for a shorter auxiliary grass airstrip to be called “Fighter One.” When aviation gasoline stocks dipped dangerously low, fuel drums were loaded onto B-17s and flown into the island. The
Hornet
had come south with a squadron of unassembled fighters stored overhead in her hangar deck. They were assembled and flown into Henderson. From August through November, the Cactus Air Force would field a total of eight fighter, twelve dive-bomber, and two torpedo squadrons from three branches of the armed services.

Enterprise
and
Saratoga
squadrons, orphaned by the maiming of their ships, were sent into Guadalcanal and told to operate from Henderson until further notice. Lieutenant Commander Harold H. “Swede” Larsen led his squadron of TBF Avengers, Torpedo Squadron Eight (VT-8), into Henderson in mid-September. McCain urged that the bombers be sent on late-afternoon and evening missions up the Slot to destroy Japanese ships before they could land troops and supplies on the island. “Your whole existence up there,” he wrote Vandegrift and General Roy Geiger (commander of air forces on Guadalcanal) on September 14, “depends on hitting those Jap ships consistently
before
they get there, while they are there, or during departure.”
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Four days later he added, “The planes must find those ships that come in and hit you at night, and must strike them before dark. Should I die now, those words will be found engraved on my heart.”
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Each morning, marine and navy SBDs flew “the milk run,” a long scouting patrol up the Slot. Every plane at Henderson typically scrambled aloft at midday, if only to avoid being caught on the ground during an airstrike. In the late afternoon, a flight of six to eight SBDs again left Guadalcanal
to scout up the Slot for incoming Japanese shipping. These late-day flights were productive, as they forced enemy ships to hang back in the northwest until dark, and thus limited the amount of time they could spend in Ironbottom Sound. The Cactus Air Force also began flying night missions by the light of the moon. Dive-bombing at night was still a fairly low-percentage game, however, and operational losses were high. Swede Larsen's torpedo planes flew scouting and attack missions, but they were rarely able to press home a coordinated attack with dive-bombers, and the hit rate was frustratingly low throughout September. In a debriefing recorded at the Navy Department in January 1943, Larsen recommended “fighting a war that is a very aggressive war. . . . If you can possibly attack and continue attacking—which means a continuous series of replacement supplies and aircraft and provisions, you certainly ought to do it. It was a black eye that we had to let a lot of those Jap ships get away from there, but there really wasn't anything to do about it.”
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A
FTER THE ANNIHILATION OF
I
CHIKI'S FORCE
at the mouth of the Tenaru, General Vandegrift asked his brain trust—Colonel Twining and Colonel Gerald C. Thomas—to consider where the Japanese might attempt their next attack. The colonels had previously expressed concern about an amphibious landing on the beaches around Lunga Point. But the Japanese did not possess the amphibious equipment to make a hostile landing under fire, and any fleet large enough to mount such an attack would inevitably be discovered from the air. With good roads around Lunga Point, moreover, reinforcements could be moved into that area quickly.

A more worrisome problem was the exposed ridge directly south of Henderson Field. In that direction, the jungle provided cover for an enemy approach by stealth. With a concerted attack, the Japanese might break through to the airfield, which lay only a few hundred yards north of the perimeter.