between World Wars, when Congress slashed military budgets with a belligerence matched only by the ferocity of its pacifism, he had been among those officers who fought to fulfill a vision of the Marine Corps as a highly trained assault force with a special mission of making ship-to-shore landings on enemy-held terrain. To such professionals, the seeming setback was the normal condition of career. And Vandegrift was a professional, a soft-spoken, tough- minded commander in the mold of Stonewall Jackson. Intelligent enough to be appalled by the task confronting him, sensible enough to mask that dismay before his staff, he set that staff to work at organizing America’s first full- scale amphibious invasion—imparting to them some of his own sense of urgency that was the surest guarantor of unpleasant surprise.
It was a surprise to find that the totality of the war did not impress the Wellington longshoremen’s union controlling work on the huge Aotea Quay provided by the New Zealand government. The union still believed that the longer a job takes the longer the pay lasts. All cries for speed elicited the scornful rejoinder “Not half!”—and the unloading of ships moved at a crawl. So the union was ignored and the Marines were used as dock-wallopers. Enormous working parties of 300 men each were placed on around-the-clock shifts, unloading and loading their own ships. For the problem was one of unloading as well as loading.
Most of these ships had come to Wellington stuffed with supplies for a division assembling for training in a civilized country. But now this division was bound for combat in one of the world’s wildest places, a place where priority belonged to bullets, beans and barbed wire, where such niceties as field cots and mattresses landed on the bottom of the heap, beneath drums of gasoline, water cans and mosquito nets. All of these supplies were in bulk lots. They had to be piled on the wharf, classified in the order of their importance and either reloaded or sent inland.
The cold driving rains of the Down-Under winter poured from mackerel skies. Shore winds whipped the rain up and down the great dock in sheets, drenching the Marines in their brown ponchos and tan sun helmets, making a mush of tons upon tons of cornflakes, cigarettes, candy, C-rations—of anything packed in those thin paper cartons that seemed to melt like snow beneath the downpour. Drifts of cornflakes were so deep that the flat-bedded New Zealand lorries could barely butt their way through the mess. Men stumbled or slogged through a churned-up marsh of paper, tobacco and food, sometimes kicking with savage glee at the detested little cans of C-rations which lay glistening in the glow of wharf lights that were seldom doused. Sometimes these Marines drifted to the landward end of Aotea Quay, vanishing in the darkness only to reappear in “browned-out” railroad stations, there to slip off poncho and dungarees covering those neatly pressed green uniforms in which they roamed the steep streets of Welhngton, determined that a rain-soaked dock and a mush of ruined supplies would not be the only memory of the first foreign land which most of them had seen. But they came back to join their working parties, and when the division sailed off to battle there were not a dozen deserters among 19,000 men.
At Division Intelligence, meanwhile, that old marine chart and Jack London’s short story had been augmented by nothing more than a few oblique aerial photos taken five years before the Japanese occupation, plus a half-dozen postcards made from bad pictures taken years ago by missionaries. True, fliers from the Yorktown had photographed the target area in May, but Yorktown had been sunk in the Battle of Midway. If the pictures had survived, no one knew anything about them. Worse, the Australian coastwatchers—those intrepid islanders who had remained in Japanese-seized territory to report the enemy’s movements—were at present in bad shape on Guadalcanal. The only reliable informant there was Captain Martin Clemens of the British Solomon Islands Defense Force, and he had sprained an ankle and been ordered to hole up in the hills until it healed. Earlier coastwatcher reports had provided an estimate of 1,500 Japanese troops on Tulagi and the twin islets of Guvutu-Tanambogo, and 5,000 more on Guadalcanal. Beyond this, nothing.
It became necessary for Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge to fly to Australia in search of those islanders who had fled the Japanese advance. Goettge spent a week in Melbourne and a few days in Sydney, moving from the austerity of military offices to the jolly babble of the pubs to the secrecy of hotel rooms, talking to missionaries, blackbirders, sailboat skippers and one scar-faced giant of a planter named John Mather. They were South Sea characters straight out of a short story by Somerset Maugham, but their memories were all that Goettge had working for him. He brought eight of them back to Wellington with him.
Goettge also requested the Army’s 648th Engineer Topographic Battalion, then in Melbourne, to put on a “red-rush” aerial photo-mapping of Guadalcanal. The Army obliged. A photography flight was flown. Then, in the way of every army since Agamemnon’s, a transportation officer saw to it that the negatives were delayed ten days in reaching the map plant, after which his naval counterpart had the finished maps placed at the bottom of a steadily mounting pile of boxes in Auckland. The Marines in Wellington never got their maps, making one of their own from such catch-as-catch-can “intelligence” as could be produced during sessions in which anxious Americans prodded amiable Australians with questions and Scotch whisky. At one of the last of these a planter who had lived on Guadalcanal recalled having had to shoot a couple of cows which had fallen into the Tenaru River and could not get back up its steep banks. His appalled interrogator reminded him that he had said earlier that vehicles could cross the shallow Tenaru with ease. The Australian replied that he meant the mouth of the Tenaru, never suspecting that any troops would want to cross it upstream. But the Marines were crossing upstream and now they would need to bring along bridging material—and that meant unloading and reloading an entire ship.
An aerial reconnaissance made by Lieutenant Colonel Merrill Twining and Major William McKean produced one vital piece of information: that the landing beaches appeared usable. Twining and McKean went aboard an Army B-17 bomber in Port Moresby, New Guinea, and flew to Guadalcanal. A trio of growling float Zeros rose from Tulagi anchorage to welcome them. The Flying Fort’s gunners shot two of the Japanese down, but the third badgered the big bomber so persistently that it actually ran out of gas, riding a tail-wind home to Moresby to land with bone-dry tanks.
Yet, the First Marine Division remained confident of its ability to “occupy and defend” the objectives. The plan was to make five landings. The main body—First and Fifth Regiments—would land on the northern beaches of Guadalcanal at a point about 10 miles west of the center of its 90-mile length. Four smaller landings would be made 20 miles directly north. The First Marine Raider Battalion and a battalion of the Second Marines would hit tiny Tulagi, which was almost invisible from northern Guadalcanal for the bulk of Florida looming behind or north of it. A battalion of the Second Marines would secure Florida. The chuteless First Marine Parachute Battalion would hit Guvutu-Tanambogo, twin specks of rock joined by a causeway and lying a few miles east or to the right of Tulagi.
On July 22, eleven days following the arrival of the First Marines from San Francisco, the troopships stood out of the hill-girdled harbor at Wellington and made for the open sea. They reached the Fiji Islands with Vandegrift’s staff relieved to hear that D-Day had been pushed back to August 7, but concerned to learn that the Japanese had begun building an airfield on Guadalcanal. General Vandegrift himself was shaken to find that he could not expect Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher to keep his covering carriers in the battle area for more than three days. Fletcher would not risk the Japanese flying down from Rabaul and the upper Solomons. Nor would he stay in waters where five enemy flattops and a force of fast battleships could get at that precious trio of American carriers. The other warships under the over-all expeditionary command of Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner would remain as long as necessary.
At the Fijis also the mass rehearsals were called off when it was found that Koro Island’s sharp coral was cutting up the division’s landing boats, and it was at the Fijis that the Marines got the last and biggest surprise since Admiral Ghormley had looked at General Vandegrift and said, “You.”
Marine officers arriving in the Fijis by plane from New Zealand brought with them copies of the July 4 edition of the
New York, July 2.
Operations to seize Japanese-held bases, such as Rabaul, Wake Island, and Tulagi, are advocated by the military writer of the New York
