Challenge for the Pacific

ordered for the night. As the ships swung into line an American submarine was sighted. It was the veteran S-38 under Lieutenant Commander H. F. Munson. Mikawa ordered his ships to turn east to avoid it. Munson let them go. He had been so close to the enemy column that he could feel his vessel shuddering under their powerful wash. Nor could he, Munson, maneuver. Nevertheless he could see that something big was brewing. He decided to patrol St. George Channel, and meanwhile, he sent off the report: “Two destroyers and three larger ships of unknown type, heading 140 degrees True, at high speed, 8 miles west of Cape St. George.” Although Munson had miscounted the number of ships, he had still given Guadalcanal a valuable warning.

Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner did not heed the warning, just as he had dismissed the earlier report of Goto’s ships made by a Flying Fortress. Turner was not troubled because he considered a surface sea attack on the night of August 7 to be a practical impossibility. He was, however, deeply concerned about attack on August 8— either day or night. Because of this he had expressed doubts about plans to search The Slot and had requested Admiral McCain to make sure that Flying Fortresses would patrol that sea-corridor in the morning.

Otherwise, Turner was confident. The first day of invasion had gone off beautifully. Perhaps 17,000 Marines had been landed. Fletcher’s carriers were still to the south and would not depart until Sunday, August 9. On that clear calm Friday night of August 7 sailors on watch could congratulate themselves on being safe at sea and not ashore like the Marines on Tulagi, whence came the sounds of battle.

Red Mike Edson had expected the Japanese to counterattack at night, and they did.

Marines in their shallow foxholes could hear the enemy assembling. The Japanese crawled noisily out of their caves and dugouts. They shouted their war cry “Banzai!” in a kind of gurgling turkey- gobbler whoop. They howled threats which, they had been assured, would turn American hearts cold with fear.

“Japanese boy drink American boy’s blood!”

“Blood for the Emperor!”

They attacked, coming in ragged bands or sometimes as solitary infiltrators. They fired their rifles as they charged, deliberately trying to draw giveaway fire so that they might grenade the source of muzzle flashes. Where they threw grenades they were grenaded, where they closed with knives they were met with knives. Four times they charged, striking savagely at Marine positions in the center.

Here they came against Private First Class Johnny Ahrens and his Browning Automatic Rifle, and each time Ahrens and his chattering BAR broke them up. Just before dawn the Japanese were finally repulsed.

Captain Lewis (“Silent Lew”) Walt came quickly to the foxhole held by Ahrens. He found the youth dying. He was covered with blood. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly. There were bullet holes in his chest and thick blood rose slowly from three deep bayonet wounds. Next to Ahrens lay a dead Japanese sergeant. A dead officer was sprawled across his legs. Around his foxhole thirteen more Japanese bodies lay crumpled in grotesque, ungainly death. Johnny Ahrens lay dying, still clinging to his BAR, and Walt, a big, powerful man, bent to lift the youth in his arms.

“Captain, they tried to come through me last night,” Ahrens gasped, “but I don’t think they made it.”

“They didn’t, Johnny,” Walt replied gently. “They didn’t.”¹¹

The attack on Tanambogo had re-commenced.

At 8 A.M., August 8, the Third Battalion, Second Marines, landed on Gavutu to help mop up. By noon Gavutu was cleared and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hunt signaled that he was ready to attack Tanambogo. He asked for an air strike. Six Dauntlesses came swooping down—to drop their bombs on Gavutu! Three Marines were blown apart and six others badly wounded. Enraged and helpless, Colonel Hunt hurled a stream of invective at the departing “friendly” planes. Then San Juan stood into the harbor to shell Tanambogo briefly and withdraw. Next another group of carrier bombers arrived. They were going to knock out a Japanese position crowned by a Japanese flag. Once again, several bombs fell short—and more Marines on Gavutu were killed and wounded.

Hunt asked that he be spared further air “support.”

At four o’clock he called on the destroyer Buchanan to attempt short-range fire. Buchanan ran boldly inshore and blasted Tanambogo so thoroughly that a company of Marines were able to land standing up. An hour later they tore down the flag that had so disastrously intrigued the dive-bombers, and next day mopping-up operations cleared both Tanambogo and Tulagi of the remaining Japanese.

About 750 Japanese had died defending Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo, while 144 Americans were killed and 194 wounded. Capture of the harbor islands had not been costly—as “prices” are measured in the heartless business of war—and yet it seemed so when compared to the effortless conquest of Guadalcanal.

CHAPTER SEVEN

VANDEGRIFT’S main body—some 10,000 Marines—hit the middle of Guadalcanal’s northern coastline shortly after nine o’clock the morning of August 7.

Two battalions of Colonel Hunt’s Fifth Marines came in abreast, fanning out on a front of 2000 yards to cover for Colonel Cates’s First Marines landing behind them in a column of three battalions.

They were unopposed.

The Americans were stunned. Many of these youths had sincerely expected to fight for their lives from behind a barricade formed by the bodies of fallen comrades. Instead they had trotted into an exotic grove of coconut palms, and some of them celebrated this pleasant introduction to modern war by shinnying up the palms to throw down coconuts to their buddies. Bayonets honed razor-sharp were drawn to cleave, not enemy skulls, but the outer husks of coconuts, and next to puncture softer inner shells yielding a cool and tasty milk.

“Knock off openin’ them coconuts!” screamed an outraged sergeant who had memorized the “Know Your Enemy” manual by heart. “They might be poisoned!”

“Damfine poison,” Lew Juergens murmured, drinking happily, and Lucky shot back disdainfully, “Who’n hell’s gonna poison a whole damn grove of coconuts?”¹

A few minutes later, the Fifth Marines wheeled west to work toward the village of Kukum, and the First Marines plunged south toward Grassy Knoll, or Mount Austen, a high patch of ground which dominated the airfield from the south. Grassy Knoll was supposed to be only two miles inland across passable terrain. Actually it was four miles away and over the sort of tortuous terrain with which Martin Clemens—still crouching by his radio at Matanga—had become painfully familiar.

Throughout the day men whose bodies had softened during weeks of shipboard life scrambled up the faces of muddy hills and slid down the reverse slopes. Rifles rang against canteens and falling helmets rattled on the stones. Gasping in humid heat, bathed in a stream of enervating sweat and burdened with packs and ammunition loads that were far too heavy, the First Marines moved through dripping rain forests with all the stealth of a traveling circus. They blundered through fields of sharp kunai grass as tall as a man and sometimes became lost in them or shot at each other there. They forded what seemed to be river after river but what was actually one or two streams doubling back on themselves. Half of the time they had no scouts out ahead of them and most of the time they had no flankers probing the jungle to either side, and if the Japanese had chosen to sit in ambush that day there could have been a slaughter.

But the enemy was absent. Only a few—Mr. Ishimoto among them—were east of the Tenaru River. Most of them—about 1700 naval laborers, with their protectors of a Naval Landing Force—had fled to the west of that Lunga River against which the Fifth Regiment was advancing.

The Fifth was also moving slowly, but without the excuse of difficult terrain. They were attacking, as General Vandegrift angrily told Colonel Hunt, as though they expected to encounter the entire Imperial Army. Hunt passed the general’s rage along to his leading battalion commander, and the Fifth finally reached the day’s objective about two miles west of the landing beach.

Both regiments dug in to pass nights made miserable by rain and mosquitoes, and fitful by the wild firing of