Challenge for the Pacific

motor transport was hauled off the ships and placed in storage. Bulk supply—fuel, lubricants, rations—was cut to sixty days. Ammunition was reduced from fifteen to ten days of fire. And so the work of unloading and sorting and combat-loading went forward in those cold drenching rains.

Wellington’s spacious Aotea Quay was turned into an ankle-deep marsh of tons upon tons of cereal, cigarettes, candy, and little cans of C rations, whatever had spilled out of sodden and burst containers and had been churned into a pulpy mass by the feet of thousands of toiling Marines or the wheels of flat-bedded New Zealand lorries laboriously crawling through drifts of cornflakes. Here was bedlam made more chaotic by the sense of urgency energizing all those scurrying men in tan helmets and brown ponchos, made more nightmarish by wharf lights glowing ghostly throughout mackerel day and streaming night, and more lunatic by the sound of rain striking steel decks to counterpoint, with the monotony of a monstrous metronome, the whining of winches, the shouting of bosun’s mates, and the crying of Marines warning one another of huge hooks swinging free or of trucks, slung in cargo nets like toys, rising from the holds with dangerous rapidity and falling too quickly toward the dock. There were curses, too, yells of frustration whenever Marines stumbled over C-ration cans imbedded in the mess or sharp cries of pain uttered by men tearing their flesh on rolls of barbed wire.

“Goddlemighty damn! What’n hell we need barbed wire for? I thought we were going on maneuvers.”⁸

That was what they had been told. It was a necessary security precaution, and might also preclude against any of the unvaliant missing the outgoing ships. No leave was granted, of course, but almost all of the men managed to slip into Wellington to promenade the city’s quaint steep streets, to dance with New Zealand girls, to eat steak and eggs or to savor such exotic potions as rum-and-raspberry or gin-and-lemon. And as the rains continued, and order came marvelously out of chaos, General Vandegrift alerted the First Marines to stand by to transship upon arrival.

Clifton Cates commanded the First Marines. He was a man as trim as a whiplash, as suave as steel in his breeches and puttees and sun helmet, puffing calmly on a long cigarette holder with which he sometimes punctuated orders given in a pleasant Tennessee drawl. Colonel Cates was an Old China Hand who had fought in France in World War I. He had been wounded twice, gassed once, and had won seven medals for bravery. Having commanded a platoon, a company, and a battalion in battle, he now had this regiment—and he was both worried and enraged about it.

Colonel Cates was enraged because the ship John Ericsson carrying most of his men was little better than an African slaver. If Cates had had the power he would have put the ship’s owner and her master in their own brig and let them rot on what they fed the troops: spoiled meat, rancid butter, and rotten eggs without an ounce of fresh food.

John Ericsson stank like a floating head. Hundreds of nauseated men thronged her leeward rails and those who could not retch over the side vomited into their steel battle helmets. The heads belowdecks reeked like open cesspools. Men devoured by dysentery waited outside the heads in long lines; men who could not get to them in time also used their helmets. The war was just beginning and the profiteer was already battening on American misery like a leech sucking blood.

The worries which nagged Colonel Cates were of a less infuriating nature. He was concerned that the men might be going stale. From San Francisco to Wellington was a voyage of about three weeks, and that was time enough to soften muscles only recently hardened by a few months of training. The men were idle and bored. Either they played cards or lounged on top of covered hatches, sunning themselves and “batting the breeze,” or they lined the gunwales to watch the flying fish or stare vacantly into white wakes boiling off the fantails, their minds thousands of miles eastward among the scenes of childhood.

On some of the less crowded ships it was possible to organize calisthenics, and aboard the George F. Elliott the men of Cates’s Second Battalion held boxing matches.

Indian Johnny Rivers was frequently in the ring. He sparred lightly with his opponents, careful not to hit them too hard. But one day, as the convoy and its escort of circling warships plowed through the blue Pacific, Johnny Rivers heard his friend Al Schmid yelling, “Your right, Johnny—use your right!”

Rivers swung his right.

His opponent stiffened and his eyes became glassy and his knees buckled.

Rivers came back to his corner, ruefully shaking his head. “What’s the idea, Smitty? I didn’t want to hit him with my right.” Then the irrepressible Rivers grinned. “Boy, I sure hit him though, didn’t I?”⁹

So the men of the First Marines sailed on toward New Zealand, and far behind them came the men of the Second Marines under the formidable protection of the aircraft carrier Wasp. This great ship which Winston Churchill had hailed as the savior of Malta had been rushed from the Atlantic to the Pacific to escort this borrowed regiment to the First Marine Division’s rendezvous area in the Fijis.

Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher had sortied from Hawaii. His ships included carriers Saratoga and Enterprise, battleship North Carolina, one light and five heavy cruisers, sixteen destroyers and three oilers. After he had rendezvoused with Wasp and all the other warships and transports then at sea or in New Zealand, the force would number eighty-nine ships and 19,000 United States Marines. It would be the greatest invasion fleet yet assembled.

But Admiral Fletcher was not jubilant. He was thinking of the three carriers—all that America had in the Pacific—and how dangerous it would be to risk them in the narrow and uncharted waters of the Solomons. Admiral Fletcher did not like this operation at all. Back at Pearl Harbor he had openly predicted that it would “be a failure.”¹⁰ He had had nothing to do with planning it.

In such high hopes did Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher put out for the Fijis to take command of the entire Expeditionary Force.

Beneath Fletcher in the chain of command was Vice-Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner. He was a planner and perfectionist, Kelly Turner, a man of beetling brows and rimless glasses, of ferocious language and a tongue as caustic as a shaving stick; he was a leader so pedantic that he would not hesitate to tell a coxswain how to beach his boat. This was the admiral who was to command the Amphibious Force, and Major General Vandegrift who commanded only the Landing Force—that is, the 19,000 Marines who were to seize the objectives—soon found that this was also a sailor who often mistook his sextant for a soldier’s baton.

Of this Vandegrift was made aware on July 18, when, a few days after the First Marines had arrived in Wellington, Turner’s flagship McCawley sailed into the harbor and broke out the admiral’s two-star flag. Turner quickly told Vandegrift that he was keeping all but one battalion of the Second Marines for the seizure of unoccupied Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands east of the Solomons. Vandegrift replied that this was to be only a later phase of the operation, and that he was counting on the Second Marines for his reserve. If he could not have them, he said, then he would have to change his plans. The meeting ended on a note of impasse.

Four days later—July 22—Vandegrift and his Marines stood majestically out to sea, bound for the Fiji Islands.

On July 26, the top American commanders met.

Turner and Vandegrift risked a heavy sea to transfer from McCawley to the destroyer Dewey. Already aboard Dewey were Rear Admiral John S. McCain, who commanded all of Admiral Ghormley’s aircraft in the South Pacific, Lieutenant Colonel Twining, and Colonel Laverne (“Blondie”) Saunders, commander of the Army Air Force’s Flying Fortresses. Dewey made for Saratoga, Fletcher’s flagship, and came about beneath its towering beam. Admiral McCain seized a Jacob’s ladder and started up.

A garbage chute swung open and the little admiral was showered with milk.

It was an infuriating beginning foretelling an unfriendly conference.

Archer Vandegrift, who had once been startled to see the unruffled Ghormley acting like a drill sergeant, was now amazed to see that Fletcher looked tired and nervous, and he put it down to the admiral’s recent battles of the Coral Sea and Midway.¹¹ Next, he was surprised to learn that Fletcher had neither knowledge of nor interest in the Guadalcanal operation.¹² Finally, he was thunderstruck to hear him saying frankly that