Challenge for the Pacific

• Organize the defense of Guadalcanal.

• Get the supplies inland.

• Finish the airfield.

• Patrol.

They were going to hold a perimeter roughly 7500 yards wide from west to east and penetrating inland about 3500 yards. It would be bounded on its eastern or right flank by the Tenaru River and on the west or left by the Kukum Hills. Its northern or seaward front would be the most heavily fortified, because it was here that Vandegrift expected the Japanese to counterattack. Its landward rear would be the most lightly defended, for here the terrain was jungle and jumbled hills and could be held by outposts tied together by roving patrols. The First Marines were to hold the Tenaru and the beach line west to the Lunga River. The Fifth Marines would hold the beach from the Lunga west to Kukum and around back to the Lunga. Colonel Pedro del Valle, commander of the Eleventh Marines, would set up his 75-mm and 105-mm howitzers in central positions from which to strike any point on the line. The 90-mm antiaircraft guns of the Third Defense Battalion were to emplace northwest of Henderson Field, and the 75-mm half-tracks were to dig in north of the airfield to be ready for movement to prepared positions on the beach. In the meantime, Vandegrift would hold his tank company and one battalion from the First Marines in reserve.

This was the line which the Marines were to hold in isolation against an enemy who now possessed the initiative and all the ships, airplanes, guns, and men required to press it. Trained to hit, United States Marines were now being forced to hold.

Except for the damage to Chokai’s chartroom, Admiral Mikawa’s ships had escaped the battle of Savo Island unscathed. Not a plane had pursued them as they sped up The Slot. They were jubilant. At midday of August 9, Mikawa signaled Goto to make for Kavieng with Aoba, Furutaka, Kinugasa, and Kako, while he led the remaining ships to Rabaul.

Early next morning Goto’s ships proceeded confidently toward Kavieng Harbor. As they went, they passed through the eye of a periscope clutched in the hands of Lieutenant Commander J. R. (“Dinty”) Moore aboard submarine S-44. Dinty Moore was excited. The cruisers seemed huge to him. He decided to attack the last in column, Kako. He waited until he was close enough to see the Japanese officers on Kako’s bridge, a distance of about seven hundred yards, and then he fired a spread of four torpedoes and dove.

Thirty-five seconds later the first of Moore’s torpedoes struck Kako with a thunderous explosion. One by one the others hit.

Kako’s boilers blew up. Far below the stricken cruiser, American sailors looked at each other with fearful eyes, listening to the hideous water noises of a disintegrating ship. Kako’s death rattle was worse than the enemy depth charges. It was as though giant chains were being dragged across the submarine’s hull.¹ But the submarine survived, as Kako did not, although this solitary American underwater victory of the Guadalcanal campaign was omitted from the paeans of praise which the Japanese press had begun to pour out on the victors of Savo Island.

Eventually and in private, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto would reprimand Gunichi Mikawa for his failure to sink the American transports. In public and immediately, however, Mikawa and his men were hailed as heroes. Victory parades were held in every city, and in Tokyo exulting crowds thronged the streets.

Headlines proclaimed “great war results… unrivalled in world history,” Australia had “absolutely become an orphan of the southwest Pacific.” Twenty-four warships and eleven transports “filled to capacity with Marines” had been sunk.²

The House of Peers directed that a certificate of gratitude be presented to the Minister of the Navy, and English-language broadcasts coyly announced that there was still “plenty room at bottom of Pacific for more American Fleet—ha! ha!”

In America there was silence. There were also disturbing estimates such as the one sent to General Marshall by Major General Millard F. Harmon, commander of Army forces under Admiral Ghormley. On August 11, Harmon wrote: “The thing that impresses me more than anything else in connection with the Solomons action is that we are not prepared ‘to follow-up’… Can the Marines hold it? There is considerable room for doubt.”³

Admiral King may also have had doubts. He betrayed the possibility of their existence by his exasperated refusal to comment on Japan’s exaggerated reports of Savo. After his public information officer asked him what he should tell Washington’s importunate reporters, King snapped: “Tell them nothing! When it’s over, tell them who won.”⁴

The Marines on Guadalcanal were the least impressed by reports of their impending doom. Hearing Tokyo Rose describe them as “summer insects which have dropped into the fire by themselves,” they hooted in derision or made uncharitable estimates of the virtue of Japan’s lady propagandist. The truth was that Vandegrift’s Marines were actually on a kind of ignorantly blissful frolic.

They had already made light of Savo by renaming it “The Battle of the Five Sitting Ducks,” and they gave proof of how little they understood the consequences of that naval disaster by talking confidently of returning to New Zealand in three weeks, or whenever it was that the Army, the lowly “dogfaces,” would arrive to relieve them, the heroes of the Pacific. Then these invincible young warriors—most of whom had yet to see the silhouette of the enemy’s mushroom helmet—would bask in the tender and accommodating admiration of the young ladies of Wellington while consuming acres of steak-and-eggs and quaffing cool oceans of down under beer. In the meantime, they gamboled.

They discovered and plundered a warehouse stuffed with quarts of Japanese beer and balloon-like half-gallon flasks of Japanese sake. They buried the loot in the cool sands of the sea, digging it up at night to drink and revel just like the good old moonshining days at New River; and sometimes, because they had underestimated the power of enemy wine, there were ferocious night “battles” fought between tipsy sentries.

Almost every night there was the burlesque provided by men who could not pronounce the passwords. All of the passwords—Lollipop, Lallapaloozer, Lolligag—were loaded with L’s because of the Japanese difficulty with that sound.⁵ But polysyllabic passwords also sat awkwardly on the tongues of Marines such as the rifleman who awoke to relieve himself on the night the password was “Lilliputian.”

“Halt!” the sentry cried.

“Fer Gawd’s sake, Lucky, don’t shoot. It’s me, Briggs.”

“Gimme the password.”

“Lily-poo… luly…”

“C’mon, c’mon! The password, or I’ll let you have it.”

“Luly-pah… lily-poosh…” Silence, and then, in outrage: “Aw, shit—shoot!”⁶

The Guadalcanal frolic was not uninterrupted. General Vandegrift’s supplies had to be moved inland and this meant working parties toiling in the alternating extremes of drenching rains or blistering sun. Men were also needed to bury ammunition on the edges of Henderson Field, and the field itself required the unrelenting labor of Marine engineers working with Japanese equipment. On August 12, Henderson was pronounced operational, or at least able to receive a Catalina flying boat piloted by an aide of Admiral McCain’s. Actually, Henderson Field was only 2600 feet long, it was muddy and bumpy, it had no covering of steel matting or taxiways, and it was not drained. But the admiral’s aide optimistically rated it suitable for fighter operation.

Meanwhile, to conserve food, the island had gone on a twice-daily ration composed chiefly of captured enemy rice, a wormy paste which nauseated some of the daintier spirits among the conquerors until they came to realize that they would have to swallow it—“fresh meat” and all—or starve. Occasionally the mess was spiced by a few lumps of Argentine bully beef or a dubious delicacy described as New Zealand lamb’s tongue, and sometimes a marksman among the Marines would bring down a plantation cow. Phil Chaffee shot one. He had not yet caught a gold-toothed enemy head in his sights, but he shot a cow through the eye at 200 yards.

Gradually, the mood of innocent gaiety gave way to one of grim wariness, starting on August 9 when the Emperor’s “glorious young eagles” came winging down from Rabaul to make Guadalcanal shiver and shake with 500-pound bombs and those grass-cutting fragmentation bombs which kill and maim; gradually the fact of isolation