Strong Men Armed

“What do I do now?”

Kiwi—as Marine yardbirds were now called in honor of that New Zealand bird which also does not fly—Kiwi was marched topside by a gunnery sergeant bellowing, “Grenade! Grenade! Git outta my way—grenade!” It was only after the gunny had cleared the fantail of the ship and had commanded Kiwi to hurl the grenade into the ocean, and had hit the deck alongside him, it was only after this that the gunny turned and booted Kiwi all the way forward and down the hatch to the head.

It was in the heads that the big poker games were played. The money had found its inevitable way into a few skillful hands and the big winners gathered for showdown games in lavatories deep below decks, places in which the air was such a foul compound of the reek of human refuse and cigarette smoke that a man coughing in revulsion blew holes in those blue clouds.

Above decks on one of the transports a young Marine skipped half dollars across the flat gray surface of the sea. A sergeant raged at him and the youth replied with a shrug:

“So what’s the use of money where we’re going?”

Aboard all the troopships platoons of men attended classes on the subject “Know Your Enemy.” For perhaps the twentieth time they listened while lieutenants, few of whom had ever seen combat, read to them from hastily assembled manuals celebrating those qualities which made the Japanese soldier “the greatest jungle fighter in the world.” Mr. Moto, said the manuals, could swim miles underwater while sucking air from hollow reeds, he could sneak stealthily through the jungle on split-toed, rubber-soled shoes, and he could climb trees like a monkey, often tying himself to the trunks and fighting from the treetops. He was tricky, capable of booby-trapping the bodies of his friends, and he often cried out in English to lure the unwary into ambush. At night the Japanese soldiers set off strings of firecrackers to simulate numerous machine guns and frighten their opponents into giving away their position, or they signaled to each other by rifle shot. Finally, this strong, stoic Oriental, who tortured and slaughtered in the name of an Emperor he believed to be divine, was also able to march farther, eat less and endure more than any other soldier in the world. Though some of this was true, much of it was hysterical hokum born of the Pearl Harbor psychosis, and because they had been fed it so often and in such large doses, many of these Marines had come to wonder aloud if every last son of Nippon had been suckled by a wolf.

“All right,” said a young lieutenant aboard one troopship, “if a Jap jumped from a tree what would you do?”

“Kick him in the balls!” came the answer, almost in concert, and the lieutenant grinned and dismissed his class.

Below decks, many other Marines had joined the sailors in preparing the ships for battle. They sweated in stuffy supply holds, often straining their heads aloft to the open hatches while winches swung the heavy hooks and cargo nets among them, sometimes cursing when beads of sweat which had formed on their eyebrows fell into their eyes, blinding them. Men could be badly hurt by swinging hooks, and one Marine had already been killed by them.

Above the whining of the winches rose the spluttering roar of landing-boat motors being started. Their coxswains were testing them, even as they were being freed of their lashings and swung out on davits. Brassy- voiced bosun’s mates shouted at their men, and the harder the sailors worked, the louder the bosun’s mates yelled—for it is characteristic of their calling that they sweat only about the mouth.

On the artillery transports, boxes of shells were lifted on deck and placed in readiness to go over the side next day. Seventy-five- or 105-millimeter howitzers were trundled to the gunwales and coils of rope for hauling them inland were looped about their barrels. Winchmen on the assault transports hauled boxes of rifle ammunition, mortar shells, spare gun parts and roll after roll of barbed wire on deck.

So much barbed wire puzzled the men. It was defensive warfare material, and they, as they thought, were strictly offensive troops. Once they had seized Guadalcanal, they would turn it over to a garrison of soldiers and move on to assault another island. So they had been told, and the great stores of barbed wire bewildered them almost as much as the outlandish nature of the island they were to capture.

“Who ever heard of Guadalcanal?” one of them growled. “Whadda we want with a place nobody ever heard of before?”

It was a common complaint, and it had been raised since July 31 when the troopships had made rendezvous with the warships off the Fijis and the men had been informed of their destination. They had been startled, but their surprise had far from rivaled the astonishment of their commander, Major General Alexander Vandegrift, when he, too, had been abruptly made aware that he was going to Guadalcanal.

When Vandegrift had come to Auckland in New Zealand on June 26, his First Marine Division had already been fragmented by the problem of moving men and munitions across the vast reaches of the Pacific. His Seventh Regiment had been detached from his command and sent to Samoa. His Fifth Regiment was encamped outside the New Zealand capital of Wellington, his First Regiment was sailing from San Francisco for Wellington, the Third Defense Battalion assigned to his division was in Pearl Harbor, his Eleventh Regiment of artillery was divided among these fragments, along with other supporting troops, and the Second Regiment, which would be detached from the Second Marine Division to replace Vandegrift’s missing Seventh, was in San Diego Harbor. More gravely, not half the men in this division had been a year in uniform. They were mostly boys in their late teens and early twenties. Though they were high-hearted volunteers, tough and sturdy youths who had flocked to the Marines in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, they were still barely better than “boots.” Some had been with their units only a week before departure from New River, North Carolina. They were in great need of training, for all their zest and bounce. So were their junior officers, those “Ninety-Day Wonders” just out of the Officer Candidates School in Quantico. Many of the senior NCO’s and officers at company and even battalion level were reservists, men who had trained in armories one night a month and spent an annual two weeks in summer camp. But the division was heavily salted with seasoned NCO’s, as well as with many of the battle-blooded officers in the Marine Corps. With these-and with six months’ grace—Vandegrift was confident that he could field a fine fighting force in early 1943.

In this mood of confidence, Vandegrift came to Auckland and sat at a table across from Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, commander of the South Pacific Area. Ghormley handed him a dispatch from America’s supreme command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It said:

Occupy and defend Tulagi and adjacent positions (Guadalcanal and Florida Islands and the Santa Cruz Islands) in order to deny these areas to the enemy and to provide United States bases in preparation for further offensive action.

Vandegrift read, deeply interested. Perhaps, when this base was assaulted and secured, he would be able to train his division there.

“Who will do the occupying?” asked the general.

“You,” said the admiral.

There was an interval, and then:

“When?”

“The first of August.”

If Alexander Vandegrift had glanced at his watch, he could not have been exaggerating the urgency of that moment. August 1! Between the present date and August 1 were thirty-seven days. But it would take six days to sail from New Zealand to the Fiji rendezvous area, and it would take another seven days to sail from the Fijis to the objective in the Solomons. That left twenty-four days in which to await the arrival of troops from California and Hawaii, to reconnoiter the objective, to study its terrain and map it, to get Intelligence working at an estimate of probable enemy defenses and troop strength, to load 31 transports and cargo carriers with 19,000 men and 60 days’ combat supply—and then to conduct joint rehearsals before the day of assault. Twenty-four times twenty-four hours to go, and there was not even a battle plan begun. There was not a scrap of information on the objective beyond a Navy hydro-graphic chart made thirty-two years ago and Jack London’s short story The Red One, which, though set in Guadalcanal, was already suspect by spelling it Guadalcanar. If General Vandegrift had been asked to land his Marines upon the moon, he could not have had less knowledge of the battleground.

But Vandegrift was a Marine accustomed to adversity and skilled in the art of improvising. In those years