Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (12 page)

We need to get the hell out of here
, I remember thinking,
before they pick us all off one at a time.

But I forced myself to stay down and keep still a little longer. While I tried to make myself invisible, I grieved for those two dead corpsmen.

The medics assigned to Marine rifle companies were some of the
bravest guys in the world. It tore me up to think that two of them had been killed a few feet from me within about thirty seconds of each other.

All our corpsmen wanted to do was help people that were hurt. I figured out later that was why the Japs liked to target them so much. I think they actually got a bigger kick out of killing corpsmen—who were mostly Navy pharmacist mates second class—more than high-ranking officers. This was because they thought the more corpsmen they killed, the more of our wounded would die from lack of treatment.

And the saddest part about it was they were right.

When firing slacked off a little, I managed to get Blakesley on a stretcher and move him a few yards to a spot with better cover than the one where he and the medics had been hit. Then a couple of the guys that had come up to the line with me carried him back to the rear. They had to drop the stretcher and take cover three or four times to keep from getting hit themselves.

The firefight we were in that day lasted for two or three hours, and before it was over, the whole company was involved. But some Marine Raiders and guys from the Marine Parachute Battalion were sent up to bolster our line, and the 11th Marines came through with some artillery support. Finally, the Japs that were left withdrew back to the west side of the Matanikau.

Our fight wasn’t nearly as big as the one on the Tenaru, but the Japs’ goal had been exactly the same—to take back the airfield—and we knew they weren’t about to give up trying anytime soon.

I found out later that day that PFC Blakesley was still alive when they got him to a field hospital. That night, I couldn’t get the kid off my mind. I kept remembering the day we went on patrol and he
lost the bolt out of his rifle. He’d had a round in the chamber, and the bolt was up. It must’ve caught in a bush while we were moving through some heavy undergrowth and just pulled out.

We’d probably gone a quarter-mile before he realized the bolt was gone, and by then there was no way to ever find it. The rifle was basically useless without it, and we had to get Blakesley a new weapon when we got back to camp.

I especially remembered how I chewed his ass out over it, up one side and down the other. I did it mainly in hopes that giving him a hard time might help save his life someday. He just kept saying, “I’m sorry, Mac, I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again, I promise.”

Later on, he brought me a piece of chocolate as a kind of peace offering. He was that kind of kid, and I knew I was going to miss him.

As time went by, I often wondered what became of him and if he’d ever completely recovered from his wound.

After the war, I had a chance to go through a complete list of Marines who were killed in action or died of wounds on Guadalcanal, and I felt relieved when I didn’t find Kenny’s name there.

But I never saw him or heard from him again, and sometimes at night I still wake up and wonder whatever happened to him.

S
OUTH AND SLIGHTLY
east of Henderson Field there’s a twisting snake of a ridge that runs from northwest to southeast for about 1,000 yards. I’m not sure if it even had a name before September 12–14, 1942. But ever since then, it’s been called Edson’s Ridge—and for damn good reasons.

The ridge is named for Colonel Merritt A. Edson, commander of
the First Marine Raider Battalion. This was the outfit that had given the Japs one helluva beating on the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo across Iron Bottom Sound from Guadalcanal back in August.

In early September, they’d landed on Savo Island and secured it, then raided a village called Tasimboko near the Lunga River east of our defensive perimeter, where natives reported seeing about 400 Japs. After they flushed a small party of enemy soldiers out of the village, the Raiders found large stores of food, ammo, and weapons, including machine guns and 75-millimeter howitzers.

On September 10, after all the fighting and traveling Edson’s men had done, General Vandegrift thought the Raiders deserved at least a few days’ rest, so he decided to send them down to a bivouac area inland from the airfield that seemed fairly quiet and safe.

But “Red Mike” Edson, as he was known to his troops because of his carrot-colored hair, wasn’t so sure any place on Guadalcanal was really going to stay quiet and safe for long. Because of what his men had discovered at Tasimboko, he was sure a much larger enemy force was lurking somewhere in the area.

“That bunch at Tasimboko was no motley [group] of 400 Japs but 2,000 to 3,000 well-organized soldiers,” Edson said later. “When they sent us out toward the ridge, I was firmly convinced we were in the path of the next Jap attack.”

He decided this was no time for a routine bivouac. So without even giving his men time to read the first letters from home they’d gotten in the Solomons, Edson ordered them to dig in along this unnamed ridge and send out patrols just as if they were still on the front lines.

As it turned out, they were.

The first patrols went out on September 11 and poked around in the jungle without finding anything. But on the 12th, Red Mike sent them out again, and this time they made a contact.

It was nothing big or serious. Just a brief skirmish with a small party of Nips that seemed to be right at home in the area. But it convinced Edson he’d better act fast. He put his men on full alert and ordered them to set up no-bullshit lines of defense for that night.

“Put them as far forward as you can get,” he told them.

It was a good defensive setup. Any attackers trying to approach the ridge faced deep ravines on both sides, and some of them were so heavily wooded that the Japs would have to cut their way through. Several rugged spurs that stuck out on either side of the ridgeline offered good visibility of the countryside and great vantage points for Marine machine gunners.

The downside was that Edson didn’t have enough men to form a continuous line, so he ordered small strongpoints to be set up, hoping the combination of heavy fire from them, plus the tough terrain, would keep the Nips from penetrating the line in strength.

Some of the men grumbled about the new orders. Marines do that sometimes, even Marine Raiders. I know from talking to some of them that they would’ve followed Red Mike over the edge of a cliff if he’d led the way. Still, they’d been through a lot. They were tired. They wanted to open their packages from home and read their letters. They’d been promised a rest break—and they deserved one if any outfit in the Corps ever did.

But there’d be no rest for the Raiders on the night ahead. No rest for the First Parachute Battalion, which was sent down by division headquarters to fill gaps in the line after Edson told the brass what
he suspected. No rest on the night of the 12th. Or the 13th. Or the 14th, either.

On those three nights, only the dead found rest on Edson’s Ridge.

A
T ABOUT 9 PM
on September 12, the sky was lit up by a flare from a Jap float plane. Half an hour later, the enemy cruisers out in Iron Bottom Sound opened up with their eight-inch guns and pounded the ridge area for twenty minutes or so.

As soon as the echo of the last Jap shell faded away, the troops on the ground attacked immediately. They aimed their main thrust at the right flank of C Company of the Raiders, who were spread out for 300 yards down the right side of the ridge, from the top of a spur all the way to the bank of the Lunga River.

Fortunately, C Company had just gotten back its commander, Captain Kenneth Bailey, that morning. Bailey had been evacuated with serious wounds he’d gotten at Tulagi, and he’d been in a hospital at Noumea, New Caledonia, for two or three weeks.

Actually, he’d skipped out of the hospital without being discharged by the medics and caught a ride on a plane back to Henderson Field. The guys in C Company worshipped Bailey, and they loved him even more because he’d been the one who brought along several bags of their mail that had piled up in Noumea. They fought their guts out for him that night.

One platoon of C was forced to fall back along the riverbank, and B Company, behind them, was pushed back, too. But the Japs couldn’t score any kind of breakthrough, and they weren’t able to hold any of their gains. There was a lot of confusion in the jungle
while the Japs milled around and tried to cut fire lanes through the heavy foliage. By daylight, the Raiders had reclaimed some of their lost positions, and the Japs were still basically back where they’d started.

Edson was confident his men could hold, but division headquarters wasn’t so sure, and they had good reason for pessimism. After their losses of the night before, the Raiders were down to about 400 men, and although nobody knows to this day how many Japs were out there, some reliable estimates put the number at 4,000. In other words, Edson’s guys were outnumbered ten to one.

Division tried to send the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines in to help, but like those of us in the Third Battalion, they were way out on the west end of our lines. It was a long march, and they had to cross the airfield to get there, which was impossible because the field was under constant heavy bombardment by the Nips. They did their best, but most of them didn’t get there until sometime on September 14.

On the afternoon of the 13th, Edson called together as many troops as he could get within hearing distance and gave them a speech, although his voice was notoriously soft and whispery, and it probably didn’t carry more than a few yards.

“Okay, this is it,” he said. “There’s nothing left between the Japs and Henderson Field but us. If we don’t hold, the field will be lost, and the whole Guadalcanal campaign will be a flop. I think we can hold the line because you’re the finest bunch of fighters I’ve ever known—but it’s up to you.”

Edson’s audience was small, but the quiet sincerity in his voice must’ve deeply impressed the guys who heard it. “The men really turned to,” said one listener. “There was no more grumbling.”

Instead, the Raiders got ready quietly and seriously for the
second night. Edson chose the high point in the center of the ridge as the main line of resistance, and he shortened the perimeter by 1,800 yards, still a lot of distance to cover for 400 guys.

As the light began to fade, the Raiders and Parachutists could hear the chattering from the Japs getting louder and louder. Some of the Marines later swore they heard the Japs yelling, “Gas attack! Gas attack!” There wasn’t actually any gas, just a series of smoky flares.

At about 6:30 PM, the Japs charged. They hit the area held by B Company of the Raiders out on the right flank the hardest, and drove them back toward the top of the ridge. The Japs also surrounded one of B Company’s platoons, forcing them to retreat and leaving a sizable gap in the line.

The situation was looking bad when Red Mike himself jumped in and took control of it. Around dusk, he’d already moved his CP forward to the nose of the ridge, where he was less than ten yards from the front-line machine guns. The area around him was under constant heavy enemy fire, and Edson had to lie flat on his belly to direct return fire from his gunners with a hand phone.

Now and then, he jumped up and ran at a crouch to rally men who seemed too scared and confused to fight back. When he found some Marines milling around dangerously on top of the ridge, he gave them an ass-chewing they’d never forget.

“Listen, you guys,” he yelled, and for once they could’ve heard him from a hundred yards away. “The only thing those Japs have got that you don’t have is guts! Now get the hell over there and get to firing!”

Then he grabbed them and pulled them behind him until he had them back in firing positions.

Meanwhile, Captain Bailey, the CO of C Company, gave Edson
plenty of support. Even though Bailey was still pale from his wounds, he seemed to recover every bit of his strength and then some.

“He was the big guy that was all over the place,” said one of his Marines. “He kept running around that night and grabbing guys by their sleeves and yelling in their faces. ‘What the hell you wanta do?’ he’d say. ‘Live forever?’”

At one point that night, the Marines on the ridge were down to one box of grenades for the whole bunch. But Bailey made it his business to see they got more. He made about a dozen trips down to a small supply dump at the foot of the ridge to get fresh supplies of grenades and haul them up.

Edson gave Captain Harry Torgerson, the Parachute Battalion’s executive officer, credit for getting his depleted companies back on the line when some of them were down to just thirty or forty men still able to fight. He called them by name and challenged them individually to move forward and stand their ground.

“He instilled the will to fight into a lot of men who didn’t want to fight anymore,” Edson said after the war. “He did it with his voice. He started with two or three, and it just spread.”

At 10 PM on the 13th, Edson sent word to division that his force on the ridge was down to 300 live and unwounded Marines, but he still thought he could hold. Division wasn’t nearly so confident. Occasional Jap sniper fire was already hitting the division CP.

Thirty minutes later, the Japs launched a new charge with fresh troops at what was left of the beat-up Parachute Battalion. The strength of this new attack was too great for the Parachute guys to withstand, and they had to give ground—quite a bit of ground.

And that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The artillery men of the 11th Marines had been standing helplessly by their guns for hours, but they hadn’t been able to fire a single round because the Jap and Marine lines were so close together.

Now, with the Parachute guys pulling their whole line back and re-forming it higher on the ridge, it gave the artillery the opening they’d been waiting for. Our 105s opened up with the heaviest barrage anybody on Guadalcanal had ever seen, and the Japs helped out by stupidly firing off red rockets before each of their assaults so the 11th’s gunners knew right where they were.