adjoining a concrete pier.
“Follow me!” cried Lieutenant Smith, darting across the sand and plunging into a thicket.
But his men could not follow. Though Smith had gotten past that crossfire of bullets converging on the three boats, his men could not. They were as though nailed to the beach. They slipped leftward, wriggling through water, until they could link up with Captain Crane at the pier.
Inside the thicket, Lieutenant Smith was all alone. He could hear firing on the beach behind him. He began working back to it, moving from scrub to scrub. He saw someone lying beneath a palm tree. “Come on, Marine,” he whispered. The figure came erect, lips parted and bright teeth flashing like his bayonet. Smith shot him dead, whirled, and raced back to the beach.
He returned to a desperate situation. Captain Crane and his men could not fight past the pier. Their machine-gunners had set up to help, but had been silhouetted by the light of the burning oil dump. Jap gunners riddled them. They were forced to withdraw by boat. As night fell, more boats came in to take off B Company’s mounting number of wounded. A dozen men hung on at the pier, covering the withdrawal, until darkness came and they slipped across the causeway to Tanambogo.
With that dawn of August 8, the Third Battalion, Second, began the fierce fight which took Tanambogo. First the battalion landed on Guvutu to assist in mopping up that island. Then its companies began the land-sea assault which sent one force advancing across the causeway from Guvutu on foot and the other making a landing from Higgins boats.
The waterborne attack was launched with the support of two tanks commanded by Lieutenant Robert Sweeney. They landed and rolled inland with bullets clanging off their steel sides. Some 50 Japanese came swarming at them, charging with turkey-gobbler shrieks, running low with outthrust pitchforks, with pipes or crowbars which they hoped to ram into the tanks’ treads. The tank guns blazed. A few of the Japanese fell. The others came on. Lieutenant Sweeney opened his tank turret to direct fire. He was shot in the forehead. A Japanese thrust a crowbar in the treads of the other tank. It stalled. The Japanese began hurling Molotov cocktails against the tank’s side. It began to burn. Tankers came popping out the open turret, jumping through the flames, fighting their way, one by one, through a crowd of knife-swinging, pitchfork-jabbing Japanese.
Marine riflemen were rushing up to take the Japanese under fire. Private Kenneth Koons began picking off enemy soldiers from the throng milling around the other tank, which had become wedged between two coconut trees. He saw one of them slam a pitchfork down its open turret. ,He saw the Japanese scream and grab his hand where the tank commander had shot him. Koons took aim and finished him off.
Another Japanese jumped on top of the embattled tank. Inside it, Pfc. Eugene Moore aimed his .45 at a round tan face framed like a bull’s-eye within the ring of the uncovered turret. He squeezed the trigger. The face flew out of sight. The tank worked free, lurched, and halted. A crowbar had been jammed in the wheelers. Moore seized a tommy gun and poked his head out of the turret and fired.
A hurtling object struck him, fell inside the tank. There was a flash and a roar. It had been a hand grenade. It killed the tank commander. Now Molotov cocktails were bursting on the sides of the tank, setting it on fire. Now Moore’s own neck was ablaze. He ducked below.
“Let’s get out of here,” yelled the driver, and leaped from the turret.
He was shot through the head.
Private Koons was able to kill the driver’s killer, but now, as he pressed a fresh clip into his rifle he gaped in astonishment. The last man—Pfc. Moore—was coming out the tank feet first. And the Japanese went wild. They seized him and punched him. They stuck him with pitchforks. They knifed him. They kicked him in the face and in the stomach. They tore the hair from his head. They ripped his pockets apart and took his money. And then, in a final maniacal outburst, unaware of how steadily their numbers had been dwindling under the methodical fire of Private Koons and other riflemen, one of the Japanese grabbed Moore by the feet and another by the arms —and they swung him to and fro against the tank, trying to beat the life out of him until Marine bullets found them and it was they, not Moore, who were dead.
The Japanese died to a man—42 of them—with Koons shooting most of them himself. And Pfc. Moore was hurriedly carried to a battalion aid station, where his numerous wounds and bruises were bandaged and he awoke to hear the news that Tanambogo was also falling.
In late afternoon, while the tankers made their stand just inland of Tanambogo’s beaches, the force from Guvutu began advancing across the causeway. A spray of bullets whittled them. They ran forward, some of them falling, at last closing with the Japanese defenders, who jumped from their holes swinging bayonets and brandishing knives. The Marines cut them down and moved on to Tanambogo. By seven o’clock that night the land force had secured the Tanambogo end of the causeway.
By that time also the Marines driving inland from the tank beachhead had captured two-thirds of the islet. Cave after cave fell to the style of attack first improvised by Captain Torgerson on Guvutu. Gunnery Sergeant Orle Bergner earned the nickname of “The One-Man Stick of Dynamite” as he led the way.
Next day mopping-up operations secured the last of the harbor islands. About 750 Japanese had been killed defending them, a score of prisoners had been taken and about 60 more Japanese had escaped by swimming to Florida Island. The islands had been captured at a cost of 144 Americans killed and 194 wounded, an unusually high proportion of dead to wounded which gives testimony to the savagery of the battle. There was also testimony to the spirit which had won it, and this was given by a communications sergeant named Robert Bradley.
Bradley had been perched in a balcony of the Lever Brothers plantation store on Tanambogo. He was a forward observer for a mortar section. Enemy fire pierced his throat, smashing his voice box. Blood gushed from his wound, and as a naval doctor rushed to stop the flow, Bradley began making frantic writing motions. The doctor gave him a pencil. Bradley wrote:
“Will I live?”
The doctor nodded, and Bradley wrote once more:
“Will I speak again?”
The doctor hesitated, then nodded a second time. Bradley grinned. Almost with a flourish, he wrote:
“What the hell’s the use in worrying!”
That was the sardonic spirit that took Tulagi, and it would be this—during the four-month ordeal ahead—that would hang on to Guadalcanal.
4
Guadalcanal.
She was beautiful seen from the sea, this slender long island. Her towering central mountains ran down her spine in a graceful east-west keel. The sun seemed to kiss her timberline, and lay shimmering on open patches of tan grass dappling the green of her forests. Gentle waves washed her beaches white, raising a glitter of sun and water and scoured sand beneath fringing groves of coconut trees leaning langorously seaward with nodding, star- shaped heads.
She was beautiful, but beneath her loveliness, within the necklace of sand and palm, under the coiffure of her sun-kissed treetops with its tiara of jeweled birds, she was a mass of slops and stinks and pestilence; of scum- crested lagoons and vile swamps inhabited by giant crocodiles; a place of spiders as big as your fist and wasps as long as your finger, of lizards as long as your leg or as brief as your thumb; of ants that bite like fire, of tree-leeches that fall, fasten and suck; of scorpions without the guts to kill themselves, of centipedes whose foul scurrying across human skin leaves a track of inflamed flesh, of snakes that slither and land crabs that scuttle —and of rats and bats and carrion birds and of a myriad of stinging insects. By day, black swarms of flies feed on open cuts and make them ulcerous. By night, mosquitoes come in clouds—bringing malaria, dengue or any one of a dozen filthy exotic fevers. Night or day, the rains come; and when it is the monsoon it comes in torrents, conferring a moist mushrooming life on all that tangled green of vine, fern, creeper and bush, dripping on eternally in the rain forest, nourishing kingly hardwoods so abundantly that they soar more than a hundred feet into the air, rotting them so thoroughly at their base that a rare wind—or perhaps only a man leaning against them—will bring them crashing down.
And Guadalcanal stank. She was sour with the odor of her own decay, her breath so hot and humid, so sullen
