On the eleventh, Major General Kawaguchi decided that the guns lost at Tasimboko meant that he would cancel a thrust at the Tenaru scheduled to coincide with his surprise attack. Otherwise, he would go ahead and surprise the Americans whom his scouts had sighted on the ridge.
On the eleventh, the Marines on the ridge had their first mail call in two months. Major Kenneth Bailey, hardly recovered from his Tulagi wound, had gone over the hill from the hospital in New Caledonia and brought the outfit’s mail with him. There were bundles of letters, hometown newspapers, food packages from home. The men grinned happily. At last they were getting a rest. They could read letters, munch pogey-bait, loaf, or perhaps stroll up to the ridge crest to enjoy the spectacle of fierce dogfights growling over the airfield. They scattered when the Zeros sighted them and came snarling down with bullets digging up dirt, their empty cartridges tinkling to earth in a chilling fugue.
Also on the eleventh, Colonel Red Mike Edson scouted the jungle to his front and became alarmed at signs of an enemy build-up. On the twelfth he was among his men, softly urging them forward on the ridge, ordering them to stow their mail, dig in, string barbed wire, for this was it as it had never been before.
Red Mike could guess that his men were bitter. They had fought at Tulagi, patroled Savo, fought at Tasimboko. They had gambled against the law of averages, the only law that bound them, and had survived that awful lottery. Now, seeking the respite in which they might forget the mounting odds, they were being asked to toss their numbers in again. Their numbers. Not those of the other outfits below them, fresh outfits, fat outfits, outfits that had yet to risk the odds—but the Raiders again, the Paramarines again. They cursed Red Mike for a “glory hound.” They muttered that he hung around Division to hunt up new assignments for the outfit, more medals for himself. But they dug.
Soon only a singularly stupid man wasted his breath cursing the brass. He saved it for the moment he had struck his pick mattock on the ridge shale and the frail tool snapped in his hands, or when the barbed wire tore his flesh and left it festering and unbandaged, for no adhesive tape would stick to bodies slippery with sweat.
They fortified the southern nose of the ridge where it sank into the jungle between steep wooded ravines falling away to right and left. In the right ravine a company was strung out a half-mile west to the Lunga River. On the left another line stretched east a similar distance and ended with an exposed flank in the jungle. The men in the ravines cut fields of fire, strung single strands of wire from tree to tree. On the ridge, artillery observation posts were set up, machine guns emplaced, reserve companies put into position.
The aerial battle began over Henderson Field again, and the shriek of diving airplanes, the sharp cracking of the antiaircraft bursts, the hammering of guns and wailing of bombs took on dread significance for these Marines: the Betty bombers laid sticks of eggs all down the long axis of their ridge.
Then the clamor of aerial battle ended and the ridge became silent but for the clinking of picks, the rasping of shovels, the soft urgent calls attuned to gathering dusk. Men straightening on the ridge could see the last flights of parakeets skimming over the jungle roof, the brilliance of their plumage vanishing with the fading light. Night came clear and moonless. The jungle seemed to flow around the ridge like a silent dark sea. Men in the ravines squeezed their eyes tight shut to accustom them to the night, and were startled to hear the cry of the bird which barked like a dog, the
The ridge was ready.
At nine o’clock that night a green flare fell from a Japanese patrol plane droning over Henderson Field. A half-hour later a Japanese cruiser and three destroyers stood off the mouth of the Lunga to pound the ridge with eight- and five-inch shells. In twenty minutes more a rocket rose in front of the Marines on the right or Lunga side of the ridge.
Firecrackers exploded, random shots rang out, mortars fell and the Kawaguchis struck with a howl.
They had marched down the bank of the Lunga, swung right toward the ridge, and then, silhouetted in the swaying light of their parachute flares, had come sprinting on in waves. Grenadiers first, riflemen, light machine- gunners, coming in columns stretching as far back as the Marines could see, they came on to a cadenced slapping of rifle butts, a rising, rhythmic chant:
They drove the Raiders back. In the blackness that followed the dying flares, they split the center of Edson’s lines, sliced off a platoon to the far right flank, cut communications wire, and moved down the Lunga to attempt an encirclement. If General Kawaguchi had chosen to follow quickly upon that first shattering rush, he might have overwhelmed the ridge. But his men merely flowed up against its right side, thrashing about in the jungle that had engulfed them, tripped them, confused them, once they had left the straight going of the riverbank. The battle that had been joined so swiftly became fragmented almost immediately.
Groups of Marines struggling to restore their lines blundered into groups of Japanese milling about trying to cut fields of fire in the undergrowth. The shooting was wild, the grenades fell among friend as well as foe, the bayonet jabbed against the sound of a strange tongue and found only air. It was a battle fought beyond the direction of either commander. Even a fresh Japanese naval bombardment after midnight did not drastically alter the deadlock established after the first fierce charge. It smoldered on until daybreak, a mindless fight, but it ended in a victory for General Kawaguchi.
His men had cut communications between the Marine companies and forced them back. They spent the daylight of the thirteenth fortifying their positions for the final blow that night.
Red Mike Edson’s men were stunned. They stumbled as they walked, lifting their feet high as though fatigue had weighted them with lead. They mumbled as they talked, licking cracked dry lips with swollen tongues. They had been thrown back, and they did not like to remember it. They had attempted to drive off the Japanese with a morning counterattack, but they had failed again. They had expected to be relieved or reinforced by the Second Battalion of the Fifth Marines, but intermittent attacks on Henderson Field had kept this force under cover. The men of the Fifth could not reach the ridge until dusk, after the dogfights over Henderson Field ended and enemy guns from land and sea had fallen silent. Even then they would only be able to take up supporting positions.
It was up to 400 men holding a shortened line 1,800 yards long against 4,000 Japanese—one man every five yards against 10 of the enemy. Red Mike Edson gathered a small group of men in late afternoon, a few minutes after they had eaten their first food since the day before, and he spoke to them like a professional.
“This is it,” he said softly. “It is useless to ask ourselves why it is we who are here. We are here. There is only us between the airfield and the Japs. If we don’t hold, we will lose Guadalcanal.”
The men returned to their gunpits. But this time there was no cursing.
Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi had lost more men than he had anticipated, but he had successfully forced his way past that deadly American firepower. He was in close, where the “spiritual” power of Bushido was unstoppable. His men had been pleased to hear the sound of friendly bombs falling upon the Americans. Tonight, he would attack earlier than usual. He wanted to have the airfield cleared of Americans before Admiral Mikawa’s cruisers arrived at midnight. Then the honor of retaking Guadalcanal would belong to the Army. Also, he had ordered the Ishitari Battalion then east of the Tenaru to strike the river line at midnight. Then, he, Kiyotake Kawaguchi, would wheel his three battalions right or east from the airfield and crush the Tenaru Americans from the rear.
General Kawaguchi sent a radio message to Tokyo. It was not as premature as had been the diary entry of Colonel Ichiki, but it did suggest that if Radio Tokyo were to announce the recapture of the airfield, Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi would back them to the hilt on it.
At half-past six that night he attacked.
“Gas!”
Smoke rolled over the Marine right. Again the flares, again the jabbering, and again that voice, precise and un-American:
