and sometimes getting in a tipsy state that would account for more than one outburst of “trigger-happy” firing on the lines.
In the morning, the trigger-happy might find that the “enemy” against whom they had battled so valiantly in the dark was one of those blundering mammoth land crabs in which Guadalcanal abounded or perhaps some scarecrow of a plantation cow.
There was also, in this gay interlude between the real thing of the landing and the impending real thing of the Japanese counterattack, the nightly comedy provided by men who had difficulty pronouncing the passwords.
All of the passwords—“Lallapaloozer,” “Lollipop,” “Lallygag” —were loaded with L’s because the Japanese normally cannot make that sound, turning it into a liquid R instead. But polysyllabic passwords could also tie the tongues of Marines such as the one who had arisen in the night to relieve himself and was having trouble with “Lilliputian.”
“Halt!” came the sentry’s cry.
“Fer Gawd’s sake, don’t shoot. It’s me, Briggs.”
“Gimme the password.”
“Lily-poo… luly…”
“C’mon, c’mon! The password, or I’ll let yuh have it.”
“Luly-pah… lily-poosh…” Silence, and then, in outrage: “Aw, shit—shoot!”
Of course the sadistic sentry did not shoot, for he and all the men around him were already collapsed with laughter, a bawdy mirth that continued throughout that naive week until Lieutenant Colonel Goettge led out a patrol to accept a Japanese surrender and was ambushed and massacred.
It was Goettge who had organized the helter-skelter gathering of information prior to the landings. He was a man of great vigor and daring. He was also a man of compassion, and this, when offered to an enemy as compassionate as a crocodile, was a fatal virtue.
On August 12, a Japanese naval rating had been captured behind the western lines. He was questioned. He was a sour little crab-apple of a man, making his answers sullenly and with great reluctance. But he admitted that many of his fellows west of the Matanikau River—a stream lying a few miles to the west of the Kukum Hills line— were sick and starving, and that they might be persuaded to surrender. To this was added a patrol report of a “white flag” flying at a Japanese encampment west of the Matanikau.
Hearing this, Goettge was moved. He took personal charge of a patrol that was to have scouted the Matanikau that day. He included in this patrol the Fifth Marines’ surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm L. Pratt, and Lieutenant Ralph Cory, an interpreter. Goettge cleaned out the Division Intelligence Section and borrowed veteran NCO’s from its regimental counterpart in the Fifth. After dark, under a moonless, starless night, leading the ill-natured Japanese by a rope, Goettge and 25 men left by Higgins boat for the “surrender area.”
They landed opposite Matanikau Village. They moved quickly inland about 20 yards, halting before a cluster of grass huts set in a fringing wood. They built up a perimeter. Goettge and a few men went forward to reconnoiter and were struck to the ground by converging streams of rifle and machine-gun fire. Goettge was killed instantly, shot in the head. The Japanese fire rose in fury. Commander Pratt was mortally wounded. A sergeant with the prophetic name of Custer was shot in the arm, then killed.
The Marines were pinned down, unable to move, firing back blindly while the enemy fire raked them mercilessly. The Japanese were so close that the Marines could feel the hot air of their muzzle blasts. But the enemy did not approach. He was content to toy with this rainbarrel full of fish.
At one in the morning Sergeant Monk Arndt was ordered to swim back for reinforcements. He stripped. He crawled back to the water, naked but for shoes and helmet, under which he had tucked his pistol, hooking its butt on the chin strap. He swam breaststroke along the beach. The Japanese fired, raising little spurts of water all around him. Arndt felt foolishly exposed, as though his nakedness had left him without armor. He swam out to sea, crawling over the cruel subsurface coral that tore and tattered his flesh like pinking shears. He turned shoreward again. He found a beached native boat. One end was riddled with bullet holes. He pushed the boat out and got in the other end, paddling with a plank lying on its bottom. He paddled past the Marine lines, shouting “Million! Million!” for though he had forgotten the password, he knew that million had a million L’s. As dawn came and the mists swam up from the sea, Arndt had reached the Marine boat base. He waded ashore, the red of his blood streaming from multiple slashes below the hips, the knucklebones of his fingers laid bare.
But Arndt had arrived too late. It was already all over for the patrol to the west. Two other Marines escaped, swimming east to safety. One of them who left just before daybreak turned for a parting look as the sun came up. He saw sabers flashing in the sun.
It ran like a rallying cry all along the Kukum ridges, sweeping east through the coastal gunpits and foxholes, turning right to race up the barbed-wire line of the Tenaru, bursting in the ears of the airfield outposts, among the artillerymen, the amtrack drivers, the tankers, and the engineers grimly bulldozing the airstrip which only the day before had received its first American plane. It had the power to chill hearts, but on Guadalcanal those hearts were swelling with rage. The Marines could not have known that the “surrender flag” was actually a Japanese battle flag accidentally hanging limp and thus obscuring its red center, or that the Goettge mission was conceived in an error compounded by compassion. They only knew that Marines had risked their flesh to help the enemy and had been slaughtered in reward.
All light bantering ceased. Timid patrols turned aggressive and savage. Marines hoped openly for battle, and because they had also not yet known it, talked loudly of wanting the enemy to come because they wanted to kill him and chop him up with his own sabers. There would also come a time when these same men would dread recurrent battle, but now, after the Goettge patrol, they wanted it.
They would get it. It came, at first, down The Slot. Destroyers, sometimes cruisers, sneaked into the bay during darkness to pound the airfield or the men crouching in pits, turning at dawn to streak back to Rabaul. Submarines surfaced between Guadalcanal and Tulagi, firing deck guns to sink every small American ship in sight, chasing Higgins boats back to the anchorage. Sometimes the Marines dueled the enemy warships with their puny 75-millimeter pack howitzers or with the .75 rifles mounted on half-tracks run down to the water. Once the celebrated Gunnery Sergeant Lew Diamond offered to take an 81-millimeter mortar aboard a Higgins boat and go after a submarine which was shelling Guadalcanal with five-inch guns. The offer was declined. But Gunny Lew’s proposal was reflective of the new aggressive spirit which had seized Vandegrift’s Marines after the Goettge patrol, and which kept them on their guns even as the bombs came wailing and crashing down on Henderson Field during increasing aerial bombardment of Guadalcanal.
Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate, then assembling his 17th Army at his headquarters in Rabaul, was of one mind with Imperial Headquarters in its conviction that the Americans would tire quickly of war. To this end Admiral Nagumo had sailed to Pearl Harbor. Strike the Americans hard, set them back so far that by the time they had changed from the manufacture of playthings to the making of munitions the resource-rich booty of the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia would have been consolidated under the Reign of Radiant Peace. Then, when the Americans attempted to come back, Japan would make it so costly that they would quit the war in a negotiated peace.
Until recently, General Hyakutate’s mission in the over-all scheme of conquest laid down by the militant Premier Hideki Tojo had been to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea, which was just to the north of Australia. But then Port Moresby was given to the 18th Army while Hyakutate’s 17th was told to recapture Guadalcanal. The change annoyed General Hyakutate. Port Moresby seemed by far the more important operation. Nor was the general—a small, thin, testy man—pleased with the army which Imperial Headquarters had given him to do the job at Guadalcanal. As so often happened with the Japanese military, the 17th Army’s 50,000 men had been given to Hyakutate unassembled. The famous 2nd Division——called the Sendai after the city near Tokyo from which most of its men were recruited—was in Java and the Philippines; the 38th Division was in China, along with 17th Army antitank units as far away as Manchuria; the Kawaguchi Brigade, actually close to a division, was in the Palaus; and the Ichiki Detachment was on Guam.
The Ichiki Detachment, which, in the Japanese manner, took the name of its commander, Colonel Kiyono Ichiki, was a reinforced battalion with a strength of about 2,000 men. General Hyakutate decided to use this unit to
