The Conquering Tide (9 page)

S
HORTLY BEFORE THREE THAT AFTERNOON,
General Vandegrift went ashore. A Higgins boat filled with senior officers of the 1st Division churned in toward Beach Red, picking its way through dozens of boats plying the waters between the anchored transports and cargo ships. As he set foot on Guadalcanal, the general noted that cargo was beginning to pile up on the beach. There were too few men available to handle it properly. The problem would have to wait, however; his first concern was the state of his defensive perimeter. Units were advancing inland and along the shore, but the enemy was nowhere to be seen. “I'm beginning to doubt whether there's a Jap on the whole damned island,” he remarked.
¹²

To the west, forward elements of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had halted on the bank of the Ilu River. Vandegrift, coming up from the rear in a jeep, found them “moving as if it were about to encounter the entire Imperial Army.”
¹³
He ordered them across. Engineers were summoned to improvise a makeshift bridge. They laid spare lumber over the riverbed with the help of an amphibious tractor. It was not much to look at, but it bore the weight of jeeps and artillery.

Beyond the Ilu, the natural terrain barriers of Guadalcanal began to work against them. Troops wielded machetes to hack a four-foot-wide path,
wide enough for ammunition carts to follow, but soon became bogged down in a huge mangrove swamp. To the east, advance parties pushed along the coconut-strewn beach, through abandoned native villages, to the Tenaru River. They hesitated to cross. The absence of enemy resistance seemed bizarre and even ominous. Major Dickson thought the men “expected to bump into the Japs any minute and were wondering why they didn't. . . . [T]hey said, ‘These damn Japs are setting a trap for us and we are going to walk into this trap one of these minutes.' That wasn't a very pleasant feeling.”
¹⁴

A wealth of first-rate assets had been left behind by the enemy—two power houses supplied with new electrical generators and ample fuel; a radio receiver station stocked with equipment and spares; 50,000 to 60,000 gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel; a fleet of trucks; two working water pumps; nine road rollers; and several tons of cement.
¹⁵
Weapons of various categories and calibers fell into the Americans' hands, including two working antiaircraft batteries. A hospital tent, stocked with excellent medical supply kits and water purification tablets, was commandeered by navy corpsmen.

In a laborer's camp across the Ilu River, Sergeant James Hurlbut found a hot iron left on a pair of officer's trousers. It had burned all the way through to the ironing board. Half-eaten meals had been left on dining tables with “chopsticks left propped on the edges of the dishes, or dropped in haste on the floor mat.”
¹⁶
All around the camps was evidence of the terrific cannonading delivered earlier that morning—coconut palms torn to pieces and tents shredded by high explosive fragments.

Major Dickson's unit was the first to reach the Japanese headquarters building near the airfield.
¹⁷
Among the officers' possessions, they found a souvenir-hunter's bonanza—swords, medals, capes, and starched white uniforms. In an adjoining quartermaster's supply building was a large supply of rice, dried fish, canned crab, beer, sake, candy, and cigarettes. A guard was posted to prevent looting.

The main Japanese wharf at Kukum was placed under the direction of a coast guard detachment, and rear echelon units—engineers, motor transport operators, radiomen—began claiming the huts and tents left by the Japanese. By nightfall on August 7, the little village was beginning to look like a conventional ship-to-shore depot.

On Tulagi, across Savo Sound, the marines had likewise gone ashore unopposed. The naval barrage had been superb—the cruiser
San Juan
had
put some 800 rounds of 5-inch shells into the high ground above Beach Blue prior to the landing, and then lifted the onslaught precisely three minutes before the first boats touched the beach. Beach Blue had been left completely undefended by the Japanese, who apparently had concluded that the shallow coral heads offshore would discourage any landing attempt there. The raiders crossed the narrow waist of the island without much difficulty, taking the little settlement known as Sasapi village—but when they turned east, resistance stiffened. Japanese snipers had concealed themselves in trees and the underbrush. The rattle of machine-gun fire was heard offshore and even on Guadalcanal, twenty miles away, where Colonel Twining recalled, “We felt left out.”
¹⁸

The remaining enemy troops, bottled up in the southeast corner of the island, went to ground in dugouts and caves. Demolition teams were brought up to destroy those positions, but many were connected by subterranean tunnels. The fight for Tulagi was savage and bloody. As Major Justice Chambers recalled, “When you would blast them out of one dugout, you would find that there was nobody in there and you would find a hole through which they had crawled to another place.” That night, Japanese soldiers “were sniping, shouting at us, throwing grenades at us, whistling, and carrying out all the tricks of the trade we had read about in the pamphlets, but I suspect none of us ever believed.”
¹⁹

East of Tulagi lay the minuscule islands of Gavutu and Tanambogo, connected to one another by a wooden causeway. Some 500 Japanese naval infantrymen (sometimes called “Japanese marines”) were on these islands, dug into trench lines and artillery emplacements, and they put up an even more desperate fight than their comrades on Tulagi. A pre-landing naval bombardment leveled most of the trees and buildings, but the defenders emerged as soon as the marines went ashore on Gavutu's northeast coast, and pinned the invaders down in a mangrove swamp.

The marines put two tanks ashore on Tanambogo, but one was destroyed almost immediately. George Kittredge, a gunnery officer on the
Chicago
, watched through his turret's periscope as a platoon of Japanese troops swarmed over the tank, poured gasoline over it, and set it afire. The hatch opened and a marine emerged. He was knocked down immediately and beaten to death with rifle butts. A Japanese soldier dropped a grenade into the tank, killing the remaining occupant. Kittredge's 8-inch gun fired, and in the next moment the entire scene had vanished—no tank, no enemy
soldiers, “just a pall of white smoke and a very large hole in the ground.”
²⁰
Seventy marines would give their lives in the conquest of these islands, which were not secured until midday on August 8.

Guadalcanal remained largely peaceful that first night. Scattered gunfire along the perimeter kept the marines on edge, but no counterattack developed. At dawn on the eighth, increasingly confident that the Japanese did not intend to make a stand at all, they advanced in force onto the Lunga Plain and took possession of the unfinished airstrip. They encountered no one but a few unarmed Korean workers, who broke and ran at the first sight of the marines. Those who surrendered told the same story: the Japanese troops had fled to the west. The airfield was nearly finished; only a few hundred feet in the middle section remained to be filled in and graded. Another week of work would bring it to completion.

At sunrise, Task Force 61 cruised south of Guadalcanal at 8 knots. It looked to be another day of light easterly winds, requiring the task force to run at high speed to create sufficient wind over the decks for flight operations. The
Wasp
air group would fly search patterns to the north and west, while the
Saratoga
's planes remained deckbound in case an enemy carrier group should appear in striking range. After the previous day's losses, Fletcher would be operating with an acute shortage of fighters. Fuel limitations would require their frequent return to the carriers. The air protection scheme was beginning to fray, and there was every reason to expect another round of air attacks from Rabaul.

F
ROM HIS HIDEOUT IN THE JUNGLE HILLS
of northern Bougainville Island, coastwatcher Jack Read watched over the Buka Passage, a narrow and strategically vital seaway between Bougainville and Buka Island. A dark, sinewy, thickly bearded lieutenant of the Australian Royal Navy, Read had served for more than a decade in South Pacific postings as a patrol officer. His observation post lay directly in the flight path between Rabaul and Guadalcanal, and that alone made him a critical node in the coastwatching network. Constant movement was a precaution against being caught by the Japanese, who were hunting him diligently. On August 8, Read was preparing to move to a new post at a remote native village named Porapora. After a regularly scheduled radio check-in with station VIG (Port Moresby), he dialed in to a 7-megacycles frequency in hopes of picking up stray aviation
communications. Immediately his ears were filled with radio chatter of the American carrier pilots. It did not take Read long to put the pieces together: the Americans had descended in force on the southeastern Solomons.

As he was pondering the significance of this development, one of his native scouts heard the drone of aircraft engines overhead. Through a break in the jungle canopy, a large formation of torpedo-armed G4Ms came into direct view, only a few hundred feet above their heads. Read counted twenty-four. He immediately got back on the teleradio, raised VIG, and blurted out in plain English: “Bombers now going southeast.”
²¹

For the second consecutive day, a coastwatcher had provided vital forewarning of an incoming airstrike. It was a pattern that would continue throughout the Solomons campaign. Every day, or nearly so, the Japanese sent airstrikes down from Rabaul—and every day, Jack Read or Paul Mason spotted the southbound formations overhead and relayed the warning. Read was especially well situated for this purpose, because his vantage point at Porapora commanded a panoramic view of all of Buka Island to the north, the eastern sea channels leading down the “Slot” (the body of water between the double file of islands that formed the Solomons archipelago), and the skies through which Japanese aircraft must pass. “The whole lay before you as a huge mosaic of detail and tropical splendor,” he wrote in a 1943 report to the Australian navy.
²²
Moreover, Read's lookout camp at Porapora was difficult to approach overland, and he had won the stalwart loyalty of the native tribesmen, who gave him advance warning of any Japanese search parties. He was never caught.

R
EAD'S TRANSMISSION WAS PICKED UP
at Pearl Harbor and relayed to the American commanders, who received it twenty-five minutes after it was broadcast. That provided ample time for Turner's transports and screening ships to get underway for evasive action, and for the carrier planes to gain altitude so as to be in proper attacking position when the enemy arrived.

The twin-engine bombers, painted green with the rising-sun disk on their fuselages, made a shrewd approach. The low-flying formation approached from the north, over Indispensable Strait, concealing themselves in the radar shadow of the Nggela island group, then turned back over Sealark Channel to attack from the east. The American fighters were at 27,000 feet above Savo Island, far out of position to repel the attack. At precisely noon,
the intruders were spotted by gunners on the cruiser
Australia
. They were roaring in over the reefs, just 20 to 30 feet above the sea. Richard Tregaskis, watching from Guadalcanal, saw “flat sinister shapes, prowling low over the water, darting among the transports.”
²³
The fleet was wheeling and circling in anticipation of the attack. As the enemy planes came into close range, the heavy repeating concussions of the big antiaircraft guns were joined by the higher rattle of the shorter-range weapons.

All but five of the Japanese planes blew up, broke into pieces, cartwheeled, or dived into the sea. Only three managed to launch a torpedo, and only one of those struck home—the destroyer
Jarvis
was hit near the bow. (She limped away and was later sunk by a second air attack, resulting in the loss of her entire crew.) American Grummans, diving from high altitude, chased the survivors as they withdrew to the west. A stricken G4M crashed into the upper deck of one of the transports, the
George F. Elliott
. The ship's marines had disembarked, so casualties were limited, but she burned fiercely from stem to stern, and trailed a plume of thick black smoke into the sky.

Two hours later, as the remnants of the flight passed over northern Bougainville, Jack Read counted only eight survivors.

V
AST QUANTITIES OF MUNITIONS, EQUIPMENT,
and supplies remained to be brought ashore. A thousand drums of aviation gasoline for Gavutu, 1,500 drums for Guadalcanal; small arms and machine-gun ammunition; aviation lubricating oil, engine spares, radio equipment, water distillation equipment, and water cans. Semaphore flags, Aldis lamps, smoke signaling devices, binoculars, typewriters, pencils, message blanks. Sixty days' rations for all troops.
²⁴
Crates and drums had been landed haphazardly on Beach Red, and the shoreline was so congested with unsorted supplies that General Vandegrift had to ask Turner to suspend landing operations. With no advanced port facilities available, everything had to be transferred into small craft, manhandled up the beach, and sorted into supply dumps. Two days of air attacks had left barely a scratch on the fleet, but the recurring threats had required Turner's ships to maneuver evasively for hours on end, during which time nothing could be unloaded.

The danger of beach congestion had been anticipated, but in the rush to plan and execute
WATCHTOWER
, the commanders had never faced it squarely. The landing craft were poor substitutes for proper cargo lighters.
Navy beachmasters had neither the training nor the experience to do the job properly—but even if they had, there were not enough laborers. Turner's operation plan specified that “Shore Party Commanders will call upon troop commanders in their immediate vicinity for assistance in handling supplies from landing beaches to dumps. Prisoners and stragglers will be used to assist in this task.”
²⁵
But no marine unit had been detailed to the task in advance, and the navy boat crews were not numerous enough to do the work. More hands were needed on the beaches.