Challenge for the Pacific

twisted an old football knee leaving McCawley for Admiral Crutchley’s barge. Crutchley had offered to take him to Southard. As they parted, the admiral said: “Vandegrift, I don’t know if I can blame Turner for what he’s doing.”⁶ The general made no reply. Reproach, at this moment, was beyond him; even if he did think that the behinds of his Marines were somewhat barer than Turner’s, who was leaving in the morning.

Vandegrift was going to Tulagi to see if Rupertus had been able to get any supplies ashore. Guadalcanal had received something less than half of its sixty-day ration, but Tulagi, busy fighting, surely had less.

In Southard’s wardroom Vandegrift gratefully sipped hot coffee, until a sailor’s voice came booming through the bridge tube: “Commodore, you better come up here. All hell’s broke loose!”⁷

Racing topside unmindful of his bad knee, Vandegrift came on deck to see flares burning far off Southard’s stern and hear the boom of naval guns. He was elated. He thought that the Americans were winning. It might not be too long before Turner would be back.

Suddenly the beams of powerful searchlights slashed the western night.

Astoria was last in column. In 1939 Astoria under Captain Richmond Kelly Turner had carried the ashes of Ambassador Hirosi Saito to Japan from America. Now, in the morning of August 9, Chokai’s big guns were saying thanks. Salvo after salvo of eight-inch shells tore into Astoria. The big ship shuddered and bucked. Like Canberra, like all the other Allied ships and unlike the Japanese, Astoria was heavy with flammable wood, with upholstered wooden wardroom furniture, and her decks and bulkheads were thick with paint and linoleum. Within a few minutes Astoria was a blazing shambles and would sink at noon that day.

It was Aoba who had turned on her searchlights. She caught luckless Quincy with her guns still pointing fore and aft. Quincy swung her guns and fired. Her shells crashed into Chokai’s chartroom. But now Quincy was caught between Mikawa’s two columns. Piece by piece and man by man, Quincy came apart. Her captain died just after he had ordered her helmsman to try to beach the burning cruiser on Savo. She began to turn over. “Abandon ship!” Men scrambled over her side, and some were still clinging to her, like ants on a sinking can, at 2:35 A.M., when Quincy rolled over and dove—the first American warship to sink to the floor of Iron Bottom Bay.

In the lead, Vincennes was the last to be caught. Searchlights picked her out, too, but she fought back. As Kako’s near-misses sent geysers of water pluming above her, Vincennes hurled shells at Kinugasa and hit her. But then Japanese shells exploded the airplanes on the American’s fantail and Vincennes was doomed. One after another the Japanese cruisers swept by the staggering, burning American ship to rock her with more torpedoes and gunfire. Vincennes sank a few minutes after the death of Quincy.

In thirty-two minutes the Japanese had destroyed four Allied heavy cruisers and damaged another. As they sped toward the regrouping rendezvous northwest of Savo, their wakes washed over a thousand oil-covered American seamen clinging desperately to empty shell cases, life rafts, orange crates—to any piece of flotsam or jetsam that might keep them afloat. Marine Corporal George Chamberlin, wounded five times by shrapnel, was saved when a sailor named Carryl Clement swam to his side, removing Chamberlin’s shoelaces and tying the wounded man’s wrists to ammunition drums. Other wounded were not so fortunate, for Savo’s shores abounded in sharks. Blood attracted them. Throughout the night men vanished with horrible swiftness. At dawn rescue operations would begin and sailors and Marines would stand on the decks of rescue craft to shoot sharks while others hauled 700 survivors aboard, blanching, sometimes, to see men with streamers of tattered flesh flopping on the decks like octopus or others so badly burned that corpsmen could find no place to insert hypodermic needles. But Gunichi Mikawa’s guns had taken the lives of 1270 men and wounded 709 others.

Meanwhile, northwest of Savo, Mikawa prepared to make short and bloody work of the thin-skinned American transports. It was clear to him that he had destroyed the sheep-dogs and the sheep were now his to devour. But then, he faltered.

It was not that he feared any of the remaining warships; he would have been overjoyed to put more enemy combat vessels on the bottom. Mikawa was just not aware of either Admiral Scott’s Eastern Force or Admiral Crutchley in Australia. Mikawa honestly believed that he had sunk five cruisers and four destroyers, almost all of the American warships that his planes had not reported “destroyed.” No, it was the American dive-bombers that Gunichi Mikawa feared. He, too, had been at Midway. All the way down The Slot his chief fear had been for the American carriers. It had seemed incredible to him that he could enter the Bay unchecked. Now, he would not stretch his luck. He would not tarry to be destroyed by American air with the advent of daylight. Like Admiral Fletcher, Admiral Mikawa fled his fears.

At 2:40 A.M. he ordered his ships to make full-speed north for Rabaul.

That afternoon Admiral Turner’s amphibious fleet upped anchor and made full-speed south for New Caledonia.

An hour later a battalion of the First Marines moved from Henderson Field to the beach to take up new positions. The men gaped in amazement at empty Iron Bottom Bay. Even the most obtuse private could grasp the meaning of that vacant expanse of shimmering blue water.

They were all alone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

KELLY TURNER stood on McCawley’s lower bridge yelling through a megaphone to Archer Vandegrift standing below him in a tossing small boat.

Turner did not know the details but Crutchley’s covering force had been badly mauled. Turner was leaving as soon as his boats had finished fishing survivors from the water. Turner did not say when he would be back. Turner waved and Vandegrift waved, and then the general’s boat beached on Guadalcanal and Vandegrift limped ashore.

He called a meeting of his staff and all regimental and battalion commanders.

They came straggling through the rain to the Division Command Post near Alligator Creek. They were colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors. New beards were sprouting raggedly on their chins. Their eyes were bloodshot and their baggy dungarees were stained with mud. They stood watching the rescue operations on the Bay or speculating on what all the shooting had been about last night. Coffee had been brewed over a smoking, sputtering fire and the hot black liquid was passed around in C-ration cans. Some of the officers cursed when the hot metal burned their lips. Others swore when concussions from the west shook the palm fronds and showered them with rainwater. The explosions were from Canberra being scuttled by torpedo and Astoria dying by compartments.

Offshore, the mists lifted to reveal the foreshortened shape of a prowless cruiser making slowly eastward between two destroyers.

“Chicago,” someone said in a shocked voice.

Archer Vandegrift came out of his tent.

He spoke quickly and bluntly. The Navy was leaving and no one knew when it would be back. Only God could say when and if they would get air cover. They were now open to every form of attack: troops by land, bombs from the air, shells from the sea. And they were to inform every officer and man in their command of this unlovely truth: they were all alone.

But, said Archer Vandegrift softly, his strong jaw lifting, they would also tell their men that Guadalcanal would not be another Bataan. Marines had been surviving such situations as this since 1775. Here also they would survive—and that was all the general had to say.

Now Colonel Gerald Thomas, the division’s operations officer, took over. Thomas said they would now: