Challenge for the Pacific

some to lie fully clad on their bunks (no one would undress that night) alone with their reveries or their forebodings. In the heads, where the air was blue with tobacco smoke and loathsome with the reek of human refuse, the “showdown” games were being held between the lucky—or skillful—hands into which most of the money had finally settled. Hundreds of dollars would be bet upon the flip of a single card, and when the games ended, the winners would either send the money home via the ships’ post offices or stuff it into money belts bought in San Francisco against just such eventuality.

Up on American Legion’s officers’ deck Colonel Leroy Hunt entertained his officers with a stylish buck-and-wing, singing his own accompaniment in a deep bass voice. Hunt commanded the Fifth Marines. Like Colonel Cates, he was a distinguished veteran of the fighting in France in World War I, having also been wounded twice, gassed once, and been awarded a half-dozen medals. Hunt’s Fifth Regiment would lead the assault on Guadalcanal next day, with Cates’s First Marines coming in behind him.

It was almost dark now. Major General Vandegrift stood at the rail of McCawley peering into the gathering gloom. Vandegrift was relieved. They had been able to come up on the Solomons’ back door undetected. Surprise should be his. He would need that advantage, Vandegrift thought, because he expected a hard battle. Nevertheless, he was in good spirits. He had done all that he could and now there was nothing more to be done. His conscience clear, Archer Vandegrift felt relieved. Suddenly he became aware of the darkness and of his own bad night vision. He called for an officer to assist him to his quarters, and sat down to finish a letter to his wife.

“Tomorrow morning at dawn we land in the first major offensive of this war. Our plans have been made and God grant that our judgment has been sound. We have rehearsed the plans. The officers and men are keen and ready to go. Way before you read this you will have heard of it. Whatever happens you’ll know that I did my best. Let us hope that best will be enough.…”⁵

Belowdecks the lights were out. All was silent save the throbbing of the ships’ motors, the steady breathing of men relaxed in sleep, the quicker gasping of men tense and wide-eyed in the dark. Above, the lights began to go out in the wardrooms. Officers put away their cards and chessboards.

Steaming steadily at twelve knots, the invasion force slipped along Guadalcanal’s southern coast. In the early hours of August 7, 1942, the ships were off Cape Esperance at the island’s western tip. At two o’clock in the morning, by the light of a quarter moon just then emerging, lookouts on the weather decks could make out the round brooding bulk of Savo Island standing sentinel at the entrance to Iron Bottom Bay. Great gray shapes sliding toward an unsuspecting enemy, the ships entered. They split into two groups. The Tulagi force sailed on the northern side of Savo, the Guadalcanal force on the southern. And there was still not a sign from the foe.

One hundred miles to the south, Admiral Fletcher’s aircraft carriers were turning slowly into the wind. Dauntlesses, Avengers, and Wildcats—the great warbirds of the American Navy—all were out on flight decks. No more the Devastator or Vindicator or Buffalo. The Japanese had annihilated them, seen to it that they were scrapped, and had inadvertently done a great favor for the young men smoking and drinking coffee in the pilots’ ready rooms.

Outside, the motors were started. Props swung, caught and spun briefly, stopped and caught again, while the engines coughed blue smoke. Engines cleared and began idling. Blue halos encircled the cowlings. Each of the carriers—Wasp, Saratoga, and Enterprise—might have been marked from the air by those bright blue rings on their decks. But there was no enemy in the sky above them. One hour before sunrise, the great ships began launching.

Up at Iron Bottom Bay it was getting daylight and the ships were at their stations. The Japanese were still sleeping. They did not awake until, at 6:13 A.M., the first shells from the cruiser Quincy’s turrets hurled America’s reply to the nation which had contrived Pearl Harbor.

Aboard the ships, Marines were coming up on deck, their bellies full of Navy beans and their eyes blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight.

“F Company stand by to disembark! First platoon stand by to disembark!”

“All right, you men—down them cargo nets.”⁶

They went over the side. Bandoliers slung crisscross over their breasts, cartridge belts bulging with bullets, carrying machine-gun and mortar parts weighing up to fifty pounds or loaded down with automatic rifles, with helmets bumping over their eyes and the muzzles of slung rifles digging into their necks or pistols flapping at their hips, heavy and awkward with the habiliments of war, they went clambering down the cargo nets. They clung to the coarse ropes with desperately clutching hands while the movement of the ships banged them mercilessly against steel hulls. They waited like patient armored ants while man after man let go and jumped into the Higgins boats wallowing below, until, at last, they were all embarked, bayonets were fixed, heads were ducked below the gunwales, and the boats taxied slowly toward the landing circles.

And now the iron voices of the bombardment ships were bellowing, now the six- and eight-inch muzzles spouted orange, now great gobbets and gouts of flame and splintering debris shot into the air from the shores of both Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and now columns of black smoke rose into the air while the Dauntlesses dove and dove relentlessly and the Avengers skimmed in low.

High up at Vungano, Sergeant Major Vouza saw it all and hastened downtrail to tell his master.

Below him at Matanga, Martin Clemens was on his feet shouting in exultant joy. He had bounded from his bedroll at the first crash of Quincy’s guns, instinctively aware of its meaning, tired no longer, and crowing: “Calloo, callay, oh what a day!”⁷ Vouza found the District Officer crouched gleefully beside a radio crackling with the voices of American pilots spotting targets for the gunfire ships, of others shouting to one another or begging their ships for new missions. One after another the scouts came down from Matanga. Grinning broadly, they related how favorite targets, ones that they had scouted for Clemens and his radio, had gone up in flames and smoke.

Out on the Bay the landing boats were fanning out into assault waves. Power was poured to the motors. Sterns dug deep into the waves. Hulls down, white wakes creaming out behind them, the Marines sped north and south toward palm-fringed shores.

Six hundred miles to the northwest, Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa read a message from Guadalcanal, “Encountered American landing forces and are retreating into the jungle”; and one from Tulagi, “The enemy force is overwhelming. We will defend our positions to the death, praying for everlasting victory.”⁸ Reacting swiftly, Admiral Mikawa began collecting ships and men for a counterstroke.

Even as the Americans entered the Solomons, the Japanese began preparing to throw them out again.

PART TWO Alone

CHAPTER SIX

IT WAS at Tulagi that the American counteroffensive began.

Minutes after Tulagi radioed its last defiant message, shells from cruiser San Juan smashed the radio shack. Tulagi was never heard from again.

Out in the harbor men of the Yokohama Air Group frantically sought to save eight blazing Kawanishi flying boats caught on the surface like sitting ducks. A ninth, piloted by Lieutenant Commander Yoshio Tashiro, roared over the water and tried to flounder aloft, only to be tumbled back in flames by San Juan’s guns. Commander Tashiro and his roaring tiger belt-buckle—triplet to the one worn by his brother-in-law Lieutenant Junichi Sasai—sank to the bottom of Iron Bottom Bay.

Off Tulagi’s southern coast the men of the First Raider Battalion were debarking from destroyer-transports which had brought them from New Caledonia. Lieutenant Colonel Edson watched them going. Short, wiry, pale, and icy-eyed, his eyebrows mere wisps of that carroty red hair which had earned him the nickname of “Red Mike,”