The Pacific (22 page)

At last a truck arrived and they loaded up. The truck broke down. The group started to hike back in the direction of the airfield. With no moonlight, it became so dark it turned black. Without flashlights, they got lost. They wandered around, in and out of the perimeter and through several company CPs.
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Everybody knew this was a good way to get shot by one of the many trigger- happy marines out there.
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Furious, Puller demanded guides from these other units, but the guides promptly got them turned around again. At last they stumbled into marines from the First Regiment. They knew that those men held the Seventh's left flank, so they followed the First's line to the right.

Those taking their shift on guard after midnight watched as the final Charlie men stumbled into their positions. Next they heard the voice of Chesty, who was at his battalion HQ a few hundred yards away. Though he obviously had a phone in his hands, Chesty yelled, "I and the remnants of my battalion have returned!" Evidently the person on the other end asked for a repeat, so he bellowed the same thing even louder.
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Around him, the 1/7 shared a chuckle.

In the morning, there was time to piece together the story. Sergeants tallying the men for their muster rolls reported to the battalion HQ that the 1/7 had lost five killed and more than twenty wounded on the patrol. Charlie Company and the attached men from Dog Company had carried their dead out, but Chesty had ordered others buried where they fell, on the IJA side of the river.
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Manila's friend Steve had been wounded in the leg bad enough to be evacuated.

The emperor's troops had paid dearly. Manila could tell his friends in Dog Company that they had gotten the Japanese dead to rights and hundreds of them had dropped and then, all of a sudden, orders came and C/1/7 had pulled out. Marines who had been up to battalion would have added the missing piece: Charlie Company's flank had been left wide open when the 2/7 had been ordered to pull out. The move had been ordered by the regimental commander, who had been well to the rear of Chesty's command post (CP). Chesty had yelled over the phone to regimental HQ something about getting off their asses and getting up to the front before issuing orders, but it had been too late to stop the pullout. No wonder Chesty had blown his stack when he finally made it back.

Manila and the rest of the returnees also got some news from the men who had stayed behind to hold the 1/7's front line: a convoy of IJN ships and transports had been spotted sailing toward the Canal.

W.O. HAD NOT ONLY RECOVERED FROM HIS DYSENTERY, HE ALSO HAD BECOME adept at theft. The rest of the #4 gun squad paid no attention when he slipped off, leaving them to dig emplacements, because he returned with goodies: four pounds of bacon on one trip, and a few days later, almost two gallons of dough. As if to put W.O.'s skill in proper perspective, that same day the battalion PX issued to each squad "one package of gum, 1 and 3/4 ounces of candy, four cans of tobacco," to complement each man's allotment of Japanese rice. Deacon happily took the dough and made biscuits; the next day he added jam to bake pies, and later slathered it in syrup for pancakes. The cook's biggest challenge was keeping W.O.'s dirty hands out of the process.

As their new positions took shape, the company commander ordered the mortars to have gun drill with live rounds. The first section of 81mms opened up and rained shells down near Fox Company. No one was hit. Deacon muttered something about Duffy in first section being a "crackpot." Second section, which included the Rebel squad, laid down a systematic barrage that earned the praise of the platoon's officers.

With their emplacements dug and their aiming stakes in, the work tapered off for the 81mms. Aside from the occasional working party down at the beach, Sid's squad waited for the next battle. Out beyond their lines, patrols from the 2/1 often ran into enemy patrols; they found two Japanese 75mm guns about eight thousand yards from the 2/1's lines, and someone said a patrol had captured two Japanese women snipers. The two or three air raid alerts a day seemed normal. Above their gun pit, "planes fought like wild men right over our heads." In one raid, they counted "17 zero fighters and 23 bombers" shot down, and they calculated the "approximate loss to the Nip was $6,770,000, the loss of the bombs not included."

Totaling up enemy losses felt good, so during one three- hour-long air raid they moved on to enemy ships. Using the best scuttlebutt available, they calculated the IJN had lost "60 ships in 60 days." Positive rumors fed their hopes. Word came that forty-five thousand of "Dugout Doug's boys" (the U.S. Army) had landed on the island of Bougainville, on the western end of the Solomon Island chain. The rumor that fresh army regiments would replace marine regiments in the next few days, allowing the marines to return to San Diego, recurred regularly, so it had some credibility. Sid's squad also continued to augment its rations. When the barley they received "smelled like japs," Deacon traded his IJA bayonet to some swabbies in Kukum for cheese, beans, Spam, and bread. Another night he managed to create hole-less doughnuts before the squad began another of their sing-alongs.

Humor moved Sid more than songs, though. On the night of October 12, he heard the guns of the Seventh Marines banging away and someone say it "must be some starving japs trying to give up." The next day, the army landed at Kukum, some thirty-five hundred strong. The first air raid siren sounded at ten thirty, the second at noon. Both waves of planes dropped thousands of pounds of high explosives. Sid's squad sent W.O. and others down to Kukum to see what could be stolen or traded from the doggies and the swabbies.

THE PROSPECTS FOR SWINDLING AND STEALING ALSO ATTRACTED MANILA JOHN. He and his friend Richard walked down, hoping to trade some "jap booty" for "torpedo juice" (grain alcohol). "Let's start a rumor," John said.

"What the hell do you want . . . ," Richard began, before the two came upon another marine. John said, "Hey, they found Amelia Earhart and her navigator and four kids on an island." The two walked on, sharing a laugh. The trip did not prove successful and they returned to camp and learned the 1/7 would go in reserve near the airport and the 3/7 would replace them. They also heard a pilot had been dispatched to the far side of the island to pick up Amelia Earhart and her family.
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The shelling began with the IJA's artillery firing from the other side of the Matanikau. It moved around methodically, saturating the marine perimeter in general and the airfield in particular. Heavy shelling cued the arrival of Jockstrap to Dog Company. A Dalmatian, Jockstrap belonged to the assistant division commander, General Rupertus, who likely had named his dog something else. Jockstrap, however, preferred to be with Dog Company, particularly Sergeant Conrad Packer, when the shit hit the fan. Each explosion caused the dog to dig deeper underneath Packer.
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Tonight's shelling had Jockstrap digging hard when Washing Machine Charlie appeared overhead and dropped flares. Flares provided an aiming point for the enemy's ships.

It started with what sounded like a door slamming. Somewhere out in the channel, a door hanging ten thousand feet in the air had just slammed. In the moment it took to realize how preposterous the notion was, the whistling of the first shells began to grow in pitch and volume until it sounded like a subway car entering a station. The detonation thundered like nothing the marines had ever heard. Well back from the airfield and in a bunker, John felt the threat turn to panic around him as colossal eruptions wiped other thoughts and concerns from his consciousness. In an hour and a half, the ships fired about a thousand shells into the area of the airfield. "The din and concussions were unbelievable. Good brave men gave way and sobbed."
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In the morning of October 14 they learned the shelling had come from two enemy battleships firing fourteen-inch shells. Each shell weighed more than two thousand pounds. No one in the Fifth Marines or in the First Marines denied that what they had all endured had been the worst ever. John could only say it had been "an ordeal of torture."
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Two Dog Company second lieutenants, Richards and Iseman, had been killed by a direct hit on their bunker.
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Ten men from Charlie Company, who had been on a working party unloading ships, had been killed in the shelling. The 1/7 moved down to the airfield, in reserve off the front line, but in the target zone. Fires raged. The largest came from the gasoline storage areas. Great holes had been torn into the runway. In the afternoon, the enemy artillery across the Matanikau began shelling them. Dog Company and their dog Jockstrap started digging again.

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 14 THE PILOTS OF BOMBING SIX LEARNED THAT the night before the Imperial Japanese Navy had shelled Henderson Field and the marine positions around it. Some forty men had been killed, most of the planes had been rendered inoperable, and a big gasoline dump had gone up in flames. The IJN had prepared the way for another push to take the island. The need was great. The eight planes of Bombing Six, along with a like number of spare Dauntlesses, were the last reinforcements immediately available in the South Pacific.
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Bombing Six, the briefing concluded, will depart for Cactus today.

It would not have taken them long to get ready for takeoff. They had been expecting to go into action and they did not have very much with them. Micheel, who had been promoted to lieutenant junior grade two weeks earlier, took off with a new gunner in his rear seat, Aviation Machinist's Mate Second Class Herman H. Caruthers. The flight lasted more than four hours. As they neared the airfield, they would have seen plumes of smoke, some of which were rising from the airfield. From a thousand feet up, a pilot could see two airstrips. The larger one, Henderson, ran east to west in a wide plain. The western tip ended just short of a river.

Almost 4,000 feet in length, 150 feet wide, and mostly covered by a steel mat, the gravel airstrip had been created by the Japanese for their big land- based bombers. After the last month on Efate and Espiritu Santos, Mike had become accustomed to the dust and gravel kicked up during a squadron landing. Following his skipper, he would have turned off the landing strip onto the taxi strip. The ground crews directed the airplanes to parking areas, or hard stands, spaced out in intervals along the edges of the runway. Some of the coconut trees had been left in and around the hard stands in order to obscure the planes from above. It was rough terrain to move a plane around in. Mike would have seen a fair number of wrecked planes scattered about, some perhaps still smoldering.

Soon after climbing out of their planes, the new pilots would have realized that they had entered a chaotic situation. Everyone there had been greatly affected by the previous night's cataclysm. Six pilots and four enlisted men had been killed. The marine general in charge of all flight operations, Roy Geiger, was busy moving the operations center. The rude wooden building left by the Japanese, called the pagoda because of its distinctive roofline, had been blown to bits. The new operations center was a tent not far away. The ground crews and veteran pilots had to shake off the effects as fast as possible because there was a lot of work to do: assess the damage, bury the dead, clean up the wreckage, and fight the oncoming enemy.

Two waves of Japanese bombers and fighters had struck the field by the time Mike arrived.
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The first raid had dropped its bombs unchallenged; the Wildcats had not been able to get into the air in time. The U.S. fighters had been ready for the second wave, which had arrived overhead at 1:03 p.m. They had shot down fifteen bombers and three Zeros. The waves of enemy planes had been attempting to knock out the airfield in preparation for the arrival of their ships. The updated scouting report at four p.m. revealed one imperial battleship, three cruisers, and four destroyers bearing down on Guadalcanal on course 130 degrees at a speed of twenty-five knots; while this powerful force was still 180 miles out, another force of destroyers and troop transports was even closer. In the early evening, two groups of Dauntlesses rose from Henderson Field, their target the troop transports and destroyer escorts. While these thirteen dive- bomber pilots confronted the enemy, the new arrivals started getting orientated.

The Dauntless dive-bombers shared the use of the main airstrip with the torpedo planes and any PBYs or B-17s that came through. The Wildcats did not fly off of Henderson. They used the smaller airstrip, designated Fighter One but appropriately called the Cow Pasture. Today, however, the dive- bombers used the Cow Pasture because an enemy field piece was shelling Henderson. As the men of Bombing Six were introduced, Mike realized "we had a mishmash of everybody." To the Marine Corps squadrons had been added pilots from each of the three U.S. carriers to have been damaged or sunk recently:
Enterprise, Saratoga
, and
Wasp
. Some of the men Mike had met on Espiritu Santos. Only one squadron had arrived recently as a complete unit. The others, like Mike's Bombing Six, had arrived in dribs and drabs. All told, there were about twenty- three Dauntlesses ready to fly, but there was very little gasoline.

Spread out under the coconut trees on the northern side of the field was Mosquito Gulch, as the pilots referred to their quarters. Being shown a tent with six cots for living quarters came as no surprise. The foxholes and trenches that had been dug near every tent got the new guys' attention. After a visit to the mess tent for the evening meal, it came time to hit the rack because the next day would demand just as much from them. The two Dauntless strikes had returned before dark, having scored a combined total of five possible hits on the enemy transports.
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The screening warships had fired up a lot of flak. Everyone expected another attack soon. The unrelenting heat made a blanket unnecessary. Sleep came slowly to the guys lying in their clothes or in their skivvies. Keeping some clothes on, they had been warned, made it easier to run for the nearest bunker when the shelling started.