exposure, greater damage on the enemy.”
Meanwhile, the American pilots were searching the Pacific. On June 3, Ensign Jack Reid lifted a Catalina flying boat off Midway and headed for the very sector at which Nimitz expected the enemy forces to converge. Seven hundred miles out he saw a cluster of specks come crawling over the rim of the horizon.
“Do you see what I see?” Reid yelled to his co-pilot.
“You’re damned right I do!” the co-pilot shouted, and Reid ducked into a cloud.6
Someone besides Snowy Rhoades to the west and Martin Clemens to the east, and all the missionaries and Melanesians between them, had at last taken notice of Guadalcanal.
The Japanese had come.
On May 28 a scouting party arrived from Tulagi, landing at Lunga midway on the northern coast. In the early days of June they paid more visits, accompanied by Mr. Ishimoto. They slaughtered plantation cattle with machine guns and butchered them with great waste. At other times Ishimoto asked the natives the whereabouts of the District Officer, for Clemens had withdrawn from Aola Bay to the bush village of Paripao.
“Him he gone,” the natives replied. “Him no more.”7
Such evasive replies infuriated Ishimoto. He lectured the natives on their duty to the Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere, and he was encouraged by some of the men in the front rank who nodded their heads vigorously. Ishimoto’s claque, of course, was composed of Martin Clemens’s “plain-clothes men.”
The District Officer had stripped his scouts of all distinguishing badges. They wore ordinary lap-laps like the other natives and their instructions were to mingle with the Japanese, to work for them, and to spy on them. They had become proficient in reporting enemy ships. It was no longer, “One big-fellow war he stop,” but “One fellow cruiser gottem gun ’long six inch.” There had been difficulty in identifying the caliber of the antiaircraft guns on Tulagi, until Clemens hit upon the idea of keeping small logs of varying diameter in his hut at Paripao.
The scouts would paddle over to Tulagi in their graceful gondolas and climb the enemy guns at night, carefully grasping the barrels in their hands or hefting the shells. Back at Paripao they would squat with closed eyes and expressions of pained concentration on their faces while Clemens placed log after log in their hands. Then, with faces brightening and the exclamation, “Him no more, massa!,” one or another of them would burst out: “Gottem shell like small fellow beerbottle.”
“A three-incher!” Clemens would exclaim, and the information would go off to Australia.
One day in June, Clemens received an ominous message from Snowy Rhoades, which went:
“Japs at Savo (Island) with one machine gun and tin hats, enquiring for whereabouts of white men on Guadalcanal. Said they would go there in about two weeks time.”8
In other words, they were coming to Clemens’s island to stay.
The First Marines were leaving New River.
With the Seventh Marines still on detached duty in Samoa, with the Fifth Marines and most of the artillery still sailing toward New Zealand, the last of Vandegrift’s echelons was heading for the West Coast under Brigadier General William Rupertus, the division’s assistant commander. The night before the departure by rail, the men gave themselves a farewell party. They went down to the “slop chute” and bought cases of canned beer and carried them back to those rickety, stifling, mosquito-ridden squad huts that they detested. They began to drink, and then, to sing. They sang songs like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” or “Merrily We Roll Along” or other favorites such as “The Old Mill Stream” or “A Tavern in the Town” before turning to the serviceman’s repertoire of regional songs, “Dixie,” “The Wabash Cannonball”:
“Birmingham Jail,” “Red River Valley,” after which, as an inevitable sign of insobriety they began bawling out bawdies and dirty songs, but then, because only a few lewdly dedicated minds among them actually knew all the words, they had to fall back on the college ballads which everyone knew, ending with the sentimental “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” and being, by that time, so sentimentally drunk, there was nothing left to do but blubber about “My Mom” and “M Is for the Million Things She Gave Me,” until, at the conclusion of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” some of them were weeping openly and others so outraged by the realization that they would
Up at the Second Battalion, one of the machine gunners had begun to punch holes in the huts’ wallboard sides. The man was Indian Johnny Rivers, a powerfully built youth of about medium height, half Indian and half English, who had been raised in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. He had been a professional prizefighter before the war, and he was, with his keen good humor and laughing black eyes, a great favorite with both men and officers. The gunners cheered and whooped as Johnny staggered from hut to hut, crouching and unleashing his famous right, yelling “Here’s another one for the goddamned mosquitoes to come in!”9
It was a marvelous method of letting off the steam which months of boredom and frustration can generate in such exuberant spirits. Soon other gunners joined Rivers in ventilating the despised shacks, symbols of all that they had hated during those weeks upon weeks of marching, marching, marching, of sleeping in the rain or eating a sodden slop for chow, of sitting for monotonous hours in wallowing Higgins boats while seasick men threw up to windward, or of repeatedly jumping into the surf and running up the beach with heavy, squish-booted step to fall on the sand and crawl forward with cradled rifle and become coated in grit like a fish in flour. Punching holes in flimsy walls should square away those “chicken” captains and corporals and every other regulation martinet who insisted upon doing things by the book—like the enraged Gunny Jim Blalock who at that very moment was bawling “Knock if awff!” and promising them that they would all “see the man” in the morning.
They did. But Lieutenant Colonel Al Pollock, Rivers’s battalion commander, was helpless, on the day of departure, to do more than give the men a tongue-lashing and put them on restriction. This was merely a disciplinary tautology, because as Rivers’s buddy, Private Al Schmid, a short, stocky brashness with an irrepressible blond cowlick, explained the situation: “We were on restriction already!”
“Yah-vo!” said Johnny, and that afternoon he and Smitty and the rest of the First Marines went aboard their train.10
They were astonished. Here was no grimy, crowded troop train but a line of Pullman cars with a separate berth for each man, with porters and a luxurious dining car in which waiters in white jackets served their individual tastes on clean plates and starched linen. Very few twenty-one-dollar-a-month privates have gone so opulently to war.
Five days later—having traversed that vast and gloriously varied country which most of them had never seen before—having been charmed by gophers gaping at them from prairie holes, having marveled at the primitive pure beauty of the Ozarks or the myriad million fireflies that seemed to set the Kansas wheatfields blazing, having missed the Mississippi by a night crossing but having caught their breath at the grandeur of the Rockies, they climbed the Sierra Nevadas like a long slow roller-coaster and went racing down the reverse grades to San Francisco and the sea.
As they disembarked from the trains to board waiting ships, newsboys went among them hawking newspapers with great black headlines announcing that a vast air-sea battle was being fought at a place called Midway Island.
The Japanese struck first.
Confident that no American carriers could possibly reach the Midway area for two more days, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo launched his opening strike at Midway Island itself while flying off a merely routine search for enemy ships.
On June 4, just before sunrise, 108 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers roared aloft from the decks of Admiral Nagumo’s four big carriers. Marine pilots at Midway rose to intercept them. They were slaughtered.
