was grasped by even the most facetious, for the Tokyo Express had begun to run and each night Japanese destroyers or cruisers slid into the Bay to shell Americans cringing in sodden holes, and each day submarines surfaced to sink everything in sight; gradually, these lighthearted young men began to realize that they were all alone with only a few pounds of rice and the bullets in their belts to keep them alive—and then came the massacre of the Goettge patrol and they knew that they were at war.
Lieutenant Colonel Frank Goettge was Vandegrift’s intelligence officer. It was Goettge who had gone to Australia to scrape together all available information on Guadalcanal, and it was Goettge who, on August 12, decided that the Japanese to the west might be willing to surrender.
On that day a Japanese seaman was captured. He was a sour little man, answering questions in a surly voice until a few ounces of medicinal brandy improved his manners and brought the admission that hundreds of his comrades were starving in the jungle and were anxious to surrender. This intelligence was coupled with a report the previous day that a Japanese “white flag” had been seen at a Japanese position west of the west-lying Matanikau River.
That night Goettge asked General Vandegrift if he might investigate. Vandegrift looked up from his meal of cold beans and shook his head. Goettge pressed him, and the general reluctantly agreed.
Twenty-five men, the cream of the Division Intelligence Section, as well as some of the best scouts in the Fifth Marines, were chosen to accompany Goettge. Shortly before midnight, under a moonless sky, leading the Japanese seaman by a rope around his neck, the Goettge patrol departed by Higgins boat for the “surrender area.”
They landed opposite Matanikau Village. They moved inland to set up a perimeter opposite a group of huts. Goettge and a few others went forward to reconnoiter and were cut down by converging streams of machine-gun fire. One by one, the others received their mortal wounds. Only three men survived. They escaped by swimming. They tottered into Marine lines with blood streaming from flesh slashed and torn by coral. One of them reported that as he fled just before daybreak he turned for a last look and saw sabers flashing in the sun.
That was the phrase and the image that carried Vandegrift’s men from a merry to a murderous mood. So the enemy had chopped up wounded Marines who had come on a mission of mercy to save the wretched enemy. So be it. Now let the enemy come so that these Marines—products of a soft and effete civilization—could also kill, could also chop up wounded; and with their own sabers.
Patrols that had been cautious to the point of timidity now turned aggressive. Marines who would one day dread recurrent combat now hoped openly for battle. No longer would the cry “Condition Red!” send men flying to their dugouts and air-raid shelters to sit out, with fear and prayer, the daily wail and crash of enemy bombs; no, they remained aboveground to watch with gleeful hate while Henderson’s antiaircraft gunners brought down Betty after Betty and gradually forced the enemy to escalate their bombing runs from a devastating ten thousand feet to an ineffective twenty-five thousand. Sometimes, now, Marines dueled enemy warships with their puny 75-mm howitzers or ran half-tracks down to the beach to engage the enemy’s arrogant submarines, and once old Gunny Lew Diamond attempted to pursue a red-balled submarine with an 81-mm mortar mounted on a Higgins boat. Fortunately for Lew, he was restrained; but his gesture nevertheless reflected the rising ardor among his younger comrades.
These enraged young men had no way of knowing that the enemy “surrender” flag luring Goettge to disaster had actually been a Japanese flag hanging limp, thus concealing the rising sun at its center. It would never be known whether or not the captured Japanese seaman had been a deliberate plant. Nor would anyone think of criticizing Goettge for allowing curiosity or compassion to cripple his common sense. No, all that these Marines could consider was those inhuman sabers flashing and dripping and they swore that they would have their revenge.
From now on there would be no quarter.
Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake was annoyed.
On August 13, the day on which the Goettge patrol was slaughtered, Imperial General Headquarters directed him to squelch the pests in the southern Solomons. He would, of course, continue his operation against Port Moresby. But, under a new Central Agreement signed by General Sugiyama and Admiral Nagano, his 17th Army would have to attend to Guadalcanal first.
The new orders irritated Hyakutake because he was in a hurry to get on with his beautiful new plan for conquering Moresby and because he considered the “insignificant” Guadalcanal incursion a distraction. Moreover, the general was having difficulty rounding up troops. As was common among the Japanese, the 50,000 men comprising his 17th Army had been presented to him unassembled. The famous 2nd Division—called the Sendai after the city near Tokyo in which it was recruited—was in Java and the Philippines; the 38th or Nagoya Division was in the Dutch Indies; some 17th Army antitank units were as far away as Manchuria, and other units were engaged in New Guinea; the 35th or Kawaguchi Brigade was in the Palaus; and the crack Ichiki Detachment which was to have captured Midway was still on Guam.
It seemed to Hyakutake that Colonel Ichiki’s force would be enough to take care of the two thousand Americans to the south. After all, Ichiki had two thousand highly trained men, the elite of the famous 28th Infantry Regiment which had fought Russians at Nomonhan during the unproclaimed—and unpublicized—Russo-Japanese border war of 1939, and which had thereafter battled Chinese in Manchuria. Two thousand battle-hardened Japanese against two thousand soft Americans? It was like sending a man on a boy’s errand.
With contempt and with confidence Lieutenant General Hyakutake ordered Colonel Kiyono Ichiki to proceed to Guadalcanal.
Martin Clemens was coming down at last.
On August 12 a scout had brought him a message directing him to enter Marine lines. Next day, bestowing a fond farewell pat on the teleradio that had been his companion for five months, presenting the village headman’s aged father with a pair of gorgeous yellow corduroy shorts, Clemens departed for the Tenaru River accompanied by ten scouts.
They encountered Sergeant Major Vouza enroute. Vouza proudly told Clemens of his private war against the Japanese on eastern Guadalcanal. At Koli Point he had invited three Japanese into a hut for refreshments. After the door closed Vouza and his comrades subdued their guests, slung them on poles like dressed pigs, and carried them down to American headquarters. Grinning with happy cruelty, Vouza explained that he had decided to bind his captives because, “They walk slow too much.”
Clemens and his scouts passed the night in a deserted village. On the morning of the fourteenth they struck out through kunai grass five feet high. Clemens still carried his only pair of shoes, padding along on sore and swollen feet sheathed in heavy woollen miner’s socks. Coming around a bend in the coast, Clemens saw the green, scum-crested Tenaru. Across it he could see Marines in light green dungarees hauling supplies along the beach.
Clemens halted his ragged band. He adjusted the pistol on his hip and glanced at his rifle-bearer to make sure he was carrying the weapon smartly. They dressed ranks. Clemens put on his shoes. He straightened and gave the order to move out.
There was a lump in his throat and he could barely whisper his name to the guards, but Martin Clemens came marching in.
Bull Halsey was well again.
Dermatitis had kept him invalided for two months in hospitals at Pearl Harbor and in Virginia, but he had finally been certified as fit for duty and he was returning to the Pacific. Before he did, he took a short leave. Hoisting a convivial drink with friends at his family’s home, he was astonished to see one of his grandsons come tearing into the room shouting:
“Look, Granddaddy! You’re famous! Here you are in the funny papers!”7
