squall was making up off Savo. It would work for Admiral Mikawa.
His patrol planes had already been catapulted aloft, prepared to drop illuminating flares. His men were at their battle stations in gun turrets above decks, alongside torpedo tubes below—ready to strike the Allied warships before falling upon the thin-skinned transports at their leisure.
At about eleven o’clock some of the Allied warships began picking up unknown airplanes on their radar. Others actually heard them droning overhead. Some mistook them for friendly aircraft, for the Japanese pilots had boldly turned on running lights. In that confusion which often precedes disaster, the reports were either misdirected, misinterpreted or ignored.
A few minutes before one o’clock in the morning of August 9, Mikawa’s lookouts spotted the American destroyer
On went Mikawa’s cruisers, hitting 24 knots… 26…
At half-past one, Mikawa’s lookouts sighted Savo. Three minutes more and Mikawa passed the battle order:
“All ships attack!”
In five minutes, they had gotten the range, had loaded the torpedo tubes. In one more, hissing fish were leaping from the sides of the Japanese cruisers, were cleaving the dark water toward those unsuspecting sentinel ships. Two more minutes, and Chokai had closed to within two miles of them, still undetected…
Now the warning came. Destroyer
“Warning! Warning! Strange ships entering harbor!”
It was forty-three minutes past one in the morning of August 9, and it was already too late.
Eerie greenish flares swayed down from the Japanese patrol planes and the harbor rocked to the roaring of the main batteries on Chokai,
The Japanese torpedoes had already given
Chicago’s bow was blown off. She was out of the fight, unable to hinder the enemy cruisers swinging left and making for the northern force, running up on
The Battle of Savo Island, which sailors and Marines more accurately called the Battle of the Five Sitting Ducks, wore on until dawn—when Mikawa took his cruisers out of Iron Bottom Bay and streaked for home. He left the American transports unmolested, but he had sunk four cruisers, damaged a fifth and also damaged a destroyer. His only losses were a direct hit on Chokai’s chartroom, plus some slight damage to
After Mikawa left, Admiral Turner also departed with the transports and their escorts.
In the sundown of August 9, men of the First Marines returning to the beaches from their toilsome, useless march inland, saw no ships in Iron Bottom Bay. Only a few blackened, smoking hulls were visible to their left, toward Savo as they faced the water. Otherwise there was nothing.
The Marines were all alone.
6
The fact of complete isolation had been accepted by Major General Vandegrift as early as the dawn of August 9. In that misty light, in a driving rain, he had assembled his staff officers, his regimental and battalion commanders.
The booming of the big guns could still be heard to the west of the Division Command Post near Alligator Creek. Concussions shook the palm fronds, showering those officers who stood beneath them to avoid the rain. Someone had made coffee over a smoking, sputtering fire. The hot black liquid was passed around in empty C-ration cans.
Offshore, lifting mists revealed the gray truncated shape of a prowless cruiser making slowly eastward between a pair of shepherding destroyers.
“Chicago,” someone said in awe.
There was a shocked silence, and then Colonel Gerald Thomas, the Division’s operations officer, broke the bad news swiftly.
The Navy was going, and no one could say when or if it would return. The Marines could presume loss of the air as well as the sea. They were not only isolated but separated, with nearly half of the combat battalions over on the harbor islands. That very loss of air and sea suggested that there would be no hope of getting these troops over to Guadalcanal. Tulagi had eight days’ supplies and Guadalcanal a few days more than that. Reinforcements, resupply, were only a hope. What were they going to do?
They were going to finish the airfield, get the supplies off the beach and dig in. They were going to hold a beachhead, which, when marked off on a map, made an oval shape extending about 3,500 yards inland at its deepest and 7,500 yards from west to east at its widest. Most of the small towns of America are bigger than this beachhead was. But it was all the Marines needed, for it contained the southwest-northern slant of Henderson Field at a point about 2,000 yards inland and equidistant from the eastern and western flanks. These flanks were represented by the Tenaru River on the east or right flank as the Marines faced the sea, and by the Kukum hills on the west or left flank. To the south, behind the airfield, the line was almost made of paper. Here was a series of local outposts, at their strongest as they drew curving back from the Tenaru and ran fairly straight west for about 3,000 yards to the Lunga River. Here, they curved again, following the crooked river line northwest or seaward for 2,500 yards until they ended at the artillery command post and Vandegrift’s new headquarters. The gaps to the rear of the airfield were numerous, but between the Lunga and the western hills there was one big gap about 2,000 yards wide. This was to be guarded by constant daily patrols, and to be very loosely “filled” at night by small outposts. The strongest point was the northern or seaward front, where the Marines dug in along the beach to defend against counterlanding.
This was the “perimeter” which was to be held by 10,000 foot soldiers with hand guns, mortars, some tanks and three battalions of light artillery against an enemy who possessed interior lines from Rabaul 640 miles north, as well as all the men, guns, ships and airplanes he needed to press the initiative which was now his. That was the situation which Colonel Thomas outlined to those commanders who stood grim-faced in the rain. And when he stopped speaking and the conference ended, the Battle for Guadalcanal passed from an offensive into a defensive operation.
United States Marines, trained to hit, were now being forced to hold.
Though Vandegrift’s commanders tried to keep the bad news to themselves, it was inevitable that the men would soon learn of their perilous isolation. But they only grasped its import gradually. That aching, empty, yearning sense of loneliness that characterized the stand on Guadalcanal would not seize them fully for yet another week. In the meantime, they frolicked.
They found and plundered a warehouse full of delicious Japanese beer and
