leading aces—went into action behind their beloved Lieutenant Sasai.
One after another they made their passes. They selected individual targets, pushed their engines onto overboost, and went roaring at three hundred miles an hour toward the Fort’s nose—triggering cannon shells at the enemy’s wing tanks. Saburo could not believe his eyes. The great steel birds seemed to be disappearing in flames. One… two… three… Then, on his second pass, Saburo caught a Fort trying to race away. It was still encumbered by its bomb load. Saburo dove to gain speed. He came up beneath the bomber, angling on its big left wing. He watched his shells exploding, tearing off chunks of metal. Now they were moving toward the bomb bay.…
The sky became a turbulent sea of blinding white light. Saburo’s plane was hurled upward. It flipped over on its back. Saburo’s ears rang and his nose began to bleed, and when he looked for the enemy plane he saw that it had vanished. Groggy but jubilant, Saburo decided that he had hit the enemy’s bomb load. Brushing the blood from his lips, he joined Nishizawa in attacking the fifth Fort. This, too, seemed to go up in flames.
His own plane crippled, a piece of shrapnel in his palm, Saburo flew back to Lae and a wild ovation from the ground crews. The mechanics whooped and shouted with glee while Saburo and the others related how they had shot down five Flying Fortresses in a single afternoon.
But they had not. They had shot down only one and damaged another, while losing one of their own pilots.2 Nevertheless their elation seized them like a joyous fever, for they sincerely believed that the smoke and flames of American gunfire had been the enemy bombers’ funeral pyres. They were irresistible, they thought, the best fighter pilots in the world, and they thirsted for a shot at the American naval pilots whom they had never fought.
Next day they were transferred to Rabaul.
On August 6 Martin Clemens came very close to despair. In the past few weeks he had seen the Japanese tightening their grasp on Guadalcanal and heard reports that all the natives had begun to loot the plantations. On August 4 his food gave out and all that his scroungers could bring to him at his new hideout at Matanga was seventy-five pounds of stringy yams and a few pumpkins. It was barely enough to warm the bellies of Clemens and his twenty-four scouts; nevertheless it would have to serve to keep them alive for days.
On August 5 the scouts had reported that the airfield was finished. There might be Japanese planes landing on it on Friday, the seventh. That, Clemens thought grimly, would just about tear it. It meant that he and Snowy and the others might soon be running for their lives, if not fighting for them.
Clemens felt a sudden hot rush of resentment. They had radioed information on every last blasted piece of equipment that the Japanese possessed. And what happened? Nothing. Nothing but a few Flying Fortresses laying a few desultory eggs and that was all. When would it end? Were they expected to carry on like this forever? Wasn’t
“Massa,” Michael said gently, “you sick too much. More better you
“Which way me
Instantly ashamed of his petulance, struggling against breakdown, Clemens pushed the food away. He turned his face down on his bedroll and let the clamor of a flooding river swell in his ears like the rising roar of doom.
The bombers which Clemens missed so bitterly over Guadalcanal were the Flying Fortresses of Colonel Blondie Saunders’ 11th Bombardment Group. They were based on Espiritu Santo in the New Heb rides, about 600 miles to the southeast. If Clemens could have known what had kept these bombers away, he would have joyfully forgiven them: the Forts had been flying daily over 1600 miles of open water, searching for enemy ships—especially aircraft carriers—which might endanger the vast American convoy stealing up on the Solomons.
On the sixth of August bad weather had grounded both Japanese and American planes. On that day Brigadier General William Rose, Colonel Saunders, and all available hands worked for twenty hours in a driving rainstorm, forming a bucket brigade to put 25,000 gallons of gasoline aboard the Forts that would fly tomorrow— rain or shine—to support the Guadalcanal invasion.
It was getting to be dusk of the sixth of August and a quiet was coming over the ships.
Throughout the day the men had been preparing for battle. The winches had been started and the hatches thrown open. On the artillery transports 75- or 105-mm howitzers were hauled aloft and trundled to the gunwales; coils of rope for towing them inland were looped about their stubby barrels. Winchmen on the assault transports brought boxes of ammunition, mortar shells, spare gun parts, and roll after roll of barbed wire on deck. Everywhere was the spluttering sound of landing-boat motors being tested. Their coxswains—many of them from the Coast Guard—stood at the throttle even as these low wooden craft were unlashed and swung out on davits.
The skies were overcast, the air moist and sticky. Sweat oozing from the bodies of men at work made dark patches on the Marines’ pale green twill dungarees and blotched the sailors’ light blue shirts. Tension made the sweat come faster, and the strain seemed more evident on the faces of the sailors. They had been inclined to belittle their passengers. They had scoffed at these “foot-sloggers” who lived like cattle in stifling holds, sleeping on five-tiered mats with their packs for pillows and their noses but a few inches beneath the bulkheads or the bunks above. Sailors accustomed to regular meals and quarters with individual bunks, clean linen, and fresh water could not help but feel superior to men who took salt-water showers and ate on their feet in steaming, pitching mess- halls where the decks were slippery with sweat and spilled coffee, and the food was a kind of tasteless though sanitary swill. But now, on the day before the battle, the sailors saw the Marines sharpening bayonets and knives, inspecting grenade pins and canteens, blacking rifle sights or applying a last light coat of oil to rifle bores; they saw machine gunners carefully folding long, 250-round belts of ammunition in oblong green boxes, or men of their own Navy—doctors and pharmacist’s mates of the Medical Corps—checking the kits and medications with which they expected to bind wounds and perhaps save lives during the morning’s fight. Seeing this, the sailors felt a sudden humility. They felt that they and their ships were secondary and that the true purpose of the war was to get these men to battle, to bring them to the beaches where the width of a shirt rather than of a ship’s armor plate stood between them and the enemy’s steel.
The Marines themselves were in a mood of sardonic gaiety. They listened for the last time to officers gravely informing them that the Japanese soldier was “the greatest jungle-fighter in the world,” a strong, cruel stoic who tortured and killed in the name of an Emperor he believed to be divine, a superman able to subsist on a handful of rice while marching farther and enduring more than any other soldier in the world. Because these Marines had heard this hysterical hokum since it began after Pearl Harbor eight months ago and had finally tired of it, they began to crack jokes or to interrupt the speakers.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” a freckled Southerner on the
“Yah-vo, Jawgia,” Johnny Rivers boomed. “But we won’t have to coax them monkeys out of the trees with corn-pone like we did you.”4
On
A fresh burst of laughter was silenced by the impersonal voice blaring from the ship’s bullhorn:
“Darken ship. The smoking lamp is out on all weather decks. All troops below decks.”
Aboard all the troopships the men went below. They descended to holds far below the water line, the Catholics to go to confession and the Protestants to chaplain’s services, others to write the last letter home, and
