screams of pain or the hoarser trailing cries of death. Now a grenade sailed into the antitank position. It exploded in a flashing roar. The gun fell silent. But a squad of riflemen leaped into the pit and the gun glowed red again.
Now the Ichiki charge was mounting in its fury. It flowed up against the barbed wire and seemed to be dammed up there. Baffled, jabbering, the Japanese milled around—and Marine fire struck them down and stacked their bodies high. But some of the Japanese got through. They closed with Marines in their pits. Three of them made for the hole held by Corporal Dean Wilson. Wilson brought his BAR around. It jammed. “Marine you die!” a Japanese soldier screamed, hurtling toward Wilson with lunging bayonet. Wilson seized his machete and swung it. The Japanese sank to the ground with his intestines squirting through his fingers. Wilson swung his thick-bladed knife twice more, and disemboweled two more enemy.
A Japanese jumped into Corporal Johnny Shea’s hole. He drove his bayonet twice into Shea’s leg. He lifted it to slash upward through the groin, and Shea kicked and jammed the Japanese against the foxhole, struggling to free his jammed tommy gun. The bolt sprang home and Shea shot the man to death.
The bolt on Johnny Rivers’ machine gun raced madly back and forth. Johnny had unclamped the gun and was firing freely. But the enemy was fighting back. They had spotted the American position. They poured bullets into it. Sand and log chips flew about the pit. Rivers hunched forward, searching for the enemy gun. There was a little grin on his face, the same expression Schmid had seen there when Johnny got hit in the ring.
A burst of bullets tore into Johnny Rivers’ face. Blood spurted from the holes and he fell backward dead.
Al Schmid jumped into his place. He fought on, dueling the Japanese gun located in an abandoned Marine amtrack a hundred yards upriver. Corporal Diamond was shot in the arm, but he stayed alongside Schmid. Eventually, they silenced the enemy. And then a grenade sailed sputtering into the pit to fill it with roaring light. Al Schmid was thrown flat on his back. He could not see. He put his hand to his face and felt blood and pulp. He was blind. He felt for his pistol and waited for the enemy rush. If he could not see, he could still smell. At the first whiff, he would…
But the Ichiki charge had been annihilated. Only a few dazed bands of the five hundred men who began it had survived; they dragged themselves east across the torn and lifeless bodies of their comrades, crawling over sand that was thick and clotted with blood.
At about five o’clock in the morning, Colonel Ichiki struck again.
This time he tried to get around the sandspit. His mortars and some light cannon pounded Marine positions while a reinforced company waded out beyond the breakers. Then they moved west, wheeled to face the beach, and came charging through the surf with bared bayonets. And the second carnage was more bloody than the first.
Running erect and with no attempt to get below the American fire, the Japanese soldiers were cut down by Marine machine guns firing from the west. Artillery strikes came whistling and crashing down upon them. Balked by the wire, struck from the side by bullets and from the sky by shells, the Japanese perished almost to a man—falling one upon another until they lay three deep in death for the tide to bury them in the morning.
With daylight, a crackling rifle fire began along the line. The Marines lay on their bellies to pick off the remaining Ichikis flitting among the coconuts. Colonel Pollock came down to the river to stride among his marksmen, shouting: “Line ’em up and squeeze ’em off!” Seeing a man being treated for a wound in the groin, Pollock grinned and called: “I hope the family jewels are safe.”8
All along the line automatic rifles and machine guns were pouring bullets into the grove where Colonel Ichiki and his wretched remnant lay. Sometimes enemy soldiers jumped into the water to swim away, as though they preferred death by drowning to being stung by the swarms of invisible bees buzzing among the coconuts. Their heads bobbed on the surface like corks, and the Marines shot them through the head.
Far to the right four terrified Japanese came sprinting along the Tenaru’s east bank, and Lucky jumped on the unemplaced machine gun to cut down three of them with a swift, swinging burst. Then the machine gun broke down, plowing up earth with bullets. Lucky seized a rifle to shoot the fourth.
“Cease fire!” came a command from farther right. “First Battalion coming through.”
Gradually the line fell silent while Marines of Vandegrift’s reserve battalion crossed the river and fanned out through the coconuts. Vandegrift had released them to Colonel Cates after Cates and Thomas agreed that the time had come to swing his right at Ichiki and drive the enemy into the sea. Slowly, like an inexorable broad blade, the right flank swung to the north.
General Vandegrift came to Cates’s command post. He listened to reports of the fighting. He swore softly after he heard of how wounded Japanese would lie still until American medical corpsmen came up to examine them, and then blow themselves and their benefactors to bits with hand grenades. The only answer to that, Vandegrift told himself, was war without quarter9; and he gave Cates a platoon of light tanks to finish off the treacherous foe.
The tanks completed the slaughter. They clanked across the sandspit after the American battalion had driven Ichiki’s remnant into a pocket where Marine artillery and the newly arrived Marine aircraft could shell and strafe them. Like the scything chariots of the Persians, the tanks ground remorsely over dead and wounded alike. They chased Japanese while belching canister and spraying machine-gun bullets. They ran up to enemy positions to take them under muzzle-blasting fire or butted coconut trees to shake down Japanese for riflemen to shoot. Those Japanese whom they could not shoot or flail with canister they ran over, until, with all the literal and gory reality of that battle for Guadalcanal which was now irrevocably without quarter, their rear ends resembled meat grinders.
The first organized Japanese counterthrust at Guadalcanal had ended in disaster. Some 800 of Colonel Ichiki’s men lay dead, and there were very few of the survivors who were not wounded; some of whom would also die. Marine casualties were less than a hundred, of whom forty-three were dead. Most important of all, the legend of the Japanese superfighter had been shot into a sieve and would no longer hold water. Emperor Hirohito’s “devil- subduing bayonets” had been broken by a foe superior in Japan’s own vaunted “spiritual power” as well as in firepower. The soft, effete Americans had shown how savage they could be.
That afternoon, even as Sergeant Major Vouza began his amazing recovery, even as Al Schmid—who would regain part of his sight years later—was taken out to a destroyer, the last of the Japanese were finished off. Souvenir-hunters began swarming among the dead. Phil Chaffee was one of them. He had begun prospecting. Moving warily, he kicked dead mouths open; he flashed his light inside them, his eyes darting about until they came upon what he sought—and then he put in his pliers and yanked. Thus, one of the victors taking one of the grislier trophies.
Far to the east Colonel Kiyono Ichiki tasted his own “fruits of victory.” He burned his colors and shot himself through the head.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN COLONEL ICHIKI and his men sped south in six fast destroyers on August 16 they set in motion Admiral Yamamoto’s Operation Ka.
Although Ichiki had failed in his rash decision to destroy the Americans “at one stroke,” Ka was continuing as planned. Two slow transports carrying the remaining 1500 Ichikis continued south from Truk, followed by the faster and bigger transport
Tanaka, the veteran destroyer leader who had commanded the Landing Force at Midway, had been placed in command of the Guadalcanal Reinforcement Force and assigned to Eighth Fleet at Rabaul. And “Tanaka the Tenacious,” as he would one day be called by his admiring enemies to the south, had not liked his new assignment any more than he had favored the ill-fated expedition against Midway. He considered that landing troops in the face of an armed enemy was the most difficult of military undertakings and He was dumbfounded that Imperial General Headquarters was attempting such operations without prior rehearsals or even preliminary study.1But his opinion had not been asked, nor would it ever be—a fact which also irked him—and so Tanaka the Tenacious took over as ordered, convinced that Guadalcanal reinforcement would be a failure and certain that Eighth Fleet did not know what it was doing.2
