Strong Men Armed

and so still, that all those Marines who came to her shores on the morning of August 7 cursed and swore to feel the vitality oozing from them in a steady stream of enervating sweat.

Vandegrift’s main body, some 10,000 men of the First and Fifth Marines, had hit Red Beach almost at the center of Guadalcanal’s northern coastline. The Fifth landed first, with two battalions abreast. Unopposed, they jabbed inland, then wheeled to their right, or west, to work along the shore toward Japanese installations near the Lunga River. A Japanese laboring force of about 1,700 men had fled when the first of the American shells and bombs crashed among them as they sat at breakfast. Marines bursting into their encampment found bowls of still- warm rice on tables. More important, the Japanese had abandoned an airfield nearly complete with hangars, blast pens and a dirt runway 3,600 feet long. This was named Henderson Field after Major Lofton Henderson, who gave his life crash-diving a Japanese warship at the Battle of Midway. There was not only Henderson Field but also a complex of wharves, bridges, ice plants, radio stations and power and oxygen plants which the Japanese had succeeded in throwing up since work began July 4. There were tons and tons of rice —wormy, despicable rice which the Marines spurned but fortunately did not destroy, for it would one day stand between them and starvation. These were not all discovered the first day, although the airfield was captured by the First Marines on August 7.

This regiment (Marine regiments are always called “Marines” in the way that Army regiments are known by their arm, as in “4th Cavalry” or “19th Infantry”) followed the Fifth ashore. One battalion turned right to overrun the undefended airfield. The other two plunged into the steaming morass beyond or south of it.

All day long the men of these battalions toiled up slime-slick hills and slipped and slid down the reverse slopes, with the machine-gunners breaking the rule of silence by yelps of pain whenever heavy tripods banged cruelly against their necks. They thrashed through fields of sharp-edged kunai grass as tall as a man, sometimes shooting at each other. They forded swift cold jungle streams, often stooping to slosh the blessed water against their faces, even lying full-length in the shallows to let it fall into open mouths—ignoring the officers crying, “Don’t drink! It may be poisoned!” Back came the unfailing reply: “Fer gawd’s sake, lootenant—even the Japs can’t poison a whole damn river!”

If there had been an organized enemy in the Guadalcanal jungle that day, there might have been an American catastrophe. For these Marines were far from professionals as they blundered onward toward their objective: a high clear height called Grassy Knoll, or Mount Austen, which commanded Henderson Field from the south.

But if the jungle dissolved Marine discipline, it did not dampen Marine humor. That night, after the men had dug foxholes in the dank earth, they began to ask each other what it was all about. What did General Vandegrift want with Grassy Knoll?

“Maybe,” said a private, “it’s because it’s the only place with a view.”

“So?”

“Where else they gonna put the officers’ club?”

Then they fell silent, half of them to stand guard in that blind, black whispering jungle, the other half to attempt sleep beneath ponchos that failed to keep out the rain because of the big hole for the head, or behind little veils of mosquito netting that could not keep mosquitoes off because they were plastered to their faces.

They awoke in the morning—puff-eyed, bitten and soaked —and began sloshing south again.

At ten minutes of nine on the morning of August 8, the Australian Jack Read stood on a hill overlooking Buka Passage and counted 45 Japanese bombers flying overhead. They had come from Kavieng. Before the sound of their motors had faded behind him, Read was in his shack and at his radio.

“Forty-five bombers going southeast.”

A half-hour later Pearl Harbor again broadcast a warning to the Solomons fleet, and General Vandegrift decided that the noon arrival of the enemy bombers would be just the time to give his beach working parties a rest.

There were just a few hundred of these working-party men, and they were all headquarters troops and specialists. There were no stevedoring battalions to do the job, and Vandegrift dared not risk detaching any combat troops for it. Though the beach was a jumbled confusion of crates and boxes, though he had received the message “Unloading entirely out of hand,” though nervous cargo captains were badgering him for more men, Vandegrift would not weaken his line troops. So these makeshift stevedores worked on, sweat streaming from naked torsos, and at noon, with some of them already passed out from exhaustion, they took a break.

Just as half the Japanese bombing force came in low over Florida and went wolfing among the transports.

Then they came in a straight line, torpedo-laden Kates counting on surprise. But they were struck by a storm of sound and flame that obliterated 12 of them. Only one was successful, launching a torpedo which flashed into the hull of the destroyer Jarvis, sending her limping from the battle—to be sunk later by Japanese aircraft.

Next the dive-bombing Vals came plummeting down. They too counted on surprise, unaware that fighters from Wasp had taken high stations a half-hour before and were now riding them down, risking their own antiaircraft fire polka-dotting the skies with deadly black puffs; unaware, until .50-caliber bullets chopped off their tails, sheared off their wings, set gasoline tanks ablaze, and started them on the long straight fall to oblivion.

Far up north the coastwatcher Read crouched by his radio while an excited voice broadcast the results of his alert: “Boy, they’re shooting them down like flies… one… two… three… I can see eight of them in the water right now.”

But one of them fell in flames into an open hold of the transport George F. Elliott. The big ship was set hopelessly afire. She was scuttled at twilight, the first major American ship to rest beneath that body of water which would be known as Iron Bottom Bay for the scores of vessels which would join her on its floor. Fortunately, Elliott’s troops had gone ashore the preceding day—but she went down with a battalion’s supplies.

Night began to fall and General Vandegrift went aboard McCawley with a feeling of satisfaction. Though one transport was gone, though one destroyer was apparently only out of action, the Japanese had lost more than three-quarters of their planes, and they had not harmed those piles of precious supplies that were at last beginning to disappear inland. All of Vandegrift’s Marines were safely ashore, the airfield was his, the harbor islands were almost secured, and he could count on a few more days of unloading.

But he could not.

Admiral Turner was going to take the supply ships away in the morning.

The powerful Japanese surface force which he and Admiral Fletcher had feared was coming down The Slot.

5

The Slot was the sea corridor running 400 miles from Bougainville to Guadalcanal. It was a watery passage between the Solomon Islands, which faced each other in two near-orderly rows at near-regular intervals of from 50 to 60 miles. Japanese ships based at Rabaul had about 240 miles to go before they reached The Slot’s northwest terminus at Bougainville. They entered it at midday, planning to arrive off the southeast terminus at Guadalcanal under cover of darkness.

A task force of seven cruisers led by Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa entered The Slot at about midday on August 8. They came down it in column of battle: Mikawa’s flagship Chokai leading, followed by the heavy cruisers Aoba and Furutaka, next two more heavies, and then a pair of light cruisers. They were sighted almost immediately by an American search plane. But by half-past eleven on the night of August 8, the search plane’s warning had not been received by all of the ships patroling Savo Island.

With their picket destroyers, cruisers Chicago and Canberra guarded the south gate between Savo and Guadalcanal, while the north gate was held by Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria and their pickets. It was getting on to the midnight change of watches aboard these ships. Weary sailors tumbled out of their bunks, gulped hot coffee and groped their way on deck to relieve the eight-to-twelvers. The new watch could see faint flashes of lightning over the western horizon. A rain