Challenge for the Pacific

itself, with Yamamoto aboard Yamato, would stand by in a supporting position a bit farther north. More submarines were to be fed into Torpedo Junction.

All of the uncommitted power of Imperial Japan was now pointed like a pistol at Henderson Field.

CHAPTER TWELVE

IN MARCH of 1942 the Army Air Force’s 67th Fighter Squadron arrived at Noumea, New Caledonia, by ship. They had their planes with them in crates. They took them ashore and uncrated them. To their astonishment they found an unfamiliar plane.

It was the P-400, an export version of the early models of the P-39, and originally built for Britain. None of the mechanics had ever worked on a P-400 before, and there were no instructions for assembly included in the crates. Nevertheless, the mechanics got the ships together and the 67th’s pilots learned to fly them.

On August 22 five P-400s led by Captain Dale Brannon and guided by a Flying Fortress flew across 640 miles of open water from Espiritu Santo to Henderson Field. Five days later nine more of them arrived. Cactus Air Force, already composed of the Marines of Smith’s and Mangrum’s squadrons and Turner’s Naval visitors from Enterprise, became a joint command.

Unfortunately, the Army fliers had come to the right place with the wrong plane. The P-400 lacked proper supercharger equipment and its oxygen system was of the high-pressure type. Since there were no bottles of high- pressure oxygen available on Guadalcanal, Cactus’s new pilots could fly only at low levels, usually ten to twelve thousand feet, well beneath high-flying Japanese bombers and Zeros. Moreover, even if they could have flown high enough, the plane was even less of a match for the Zero than the P-39 Airacobra which pilots such as Saburo Sakai and the others of Lieutenant Sasai’s squadron had slaughtered over New Guinea.

Nevertheless, Washington would continue to insist that the Airacobra was just the airplane for the Pacific. General Harmon on Noumea might write letter after letter to General Arnold in Washington pleading for the new, fast, and long-ranged P-38 or Lightning fighter, but General Arnold would not be moved.

In the meantime, the Airacobra’s lame sister—the P-400—was quickly shot from Solomons skies. Within six days only three of the original fourteen were operational. General Vandegrift withdrew them from aerial combat and assigned their pilots to bombing and strafing Japanese outside the Marine perimeter. Here, with its nose cannon and its light and heavy machine guns, with its ability to carry a 500-pound bomb, the P-400 proved itself a scourge of enemy ground forces. So would the Airacobra, and both planes were to become devastating after depth charges were slung under their bellies and dropped into enemy-held ravines. The concussions were dreadful; they literally blew the Japanese out of their shoes. Nevertheless, neither P-400 nor Airacobra was of much use against the aerial onslaught roaring daily south from Buka and Rabaul, and defense of that Henderson Field for which the Japanese were also now pushing in the blue chips became the sole concern of Captain Smith’s dwindling band of Marine pilots.

In one week these Marines blasted the legend of the invincible Zero into flaming wreckage. Within a week they were shooting down both bombers and fighters at a rate of six to eight for every one of their own lost. Saburo Sakai’s comrades, fighter pilots who had vaunted themselves as all-conquering in the skies, were sent crashing into jungle or plummeting into the sea. Lieutenant Junichi Sasai was the first to die, shot down in a fighter sweep on August 26: the second of the roaring-tiger belt-buckles had come to rest on the floor of Iron Bottom Sound. It was the turn of Ota next, and after him Sakai’s wingmen, Yonekawa and Hatori. Of eighty fighter pilots who had followed Commander Nakajima to Rabaul, only Nakajima himself, plus the peerless Nishizawa—who would live to surpass Sakai, but also to die in the Philippines—and six others would survive the deadly firepower of these stubby American fighters. Not all of these Japanese aces fell to the flaming wing guns of Captain Smith’s men alone, for more Marine fighter squadrons were to enter the battle; nevertheless, they did perish as a result of battle tactics devised by Henderson’s early defenders.

Very early these men realized that the Zero was still able to outclimb, outspeed, and outmaneuver the Wildcat. Just because of this superiority the Japanese pilot was still fond of individual combat; he had no appreciation of team tactics. The Americans, flying a sturdier plane mounting more firepower—a Zero could not take two seconds fire from a Grumman, but the Grummans could take as much as fifteen minutes from a Zero— began flying in pairs. Alone they could not stand up to the Zero, but flying wing-to-wing two Wildcats could take on four or five enemy fighters. It was thus that they fought: warned by the coastwatchers, and later by radar, they climbed high into the sun awaiting the enemy bombers—still their prime target—to come flashing down in a direct overhead or high-side pass calculated to avoid the Bettys’ tail stingers, and then, after a quick flaming burst at an intercepting Zero, they dove for home.

Home was a cot and a tent pitched in the mud under shrapnel-scarred coconuts surrounding Henderson Field. It was a mash of dehydrated potatoes and rice and hunks of sodden Vienna sausage spooned from mess gear borrowed from the foot Marines. Home was the center of the Japanese bombers’ bull’s-eye, the heart of the target for the nightly shells of the Tokyo Express. It was a black and airless dugout in which men who had fought at high altitudes all day crouched to hear the whispering whistle of the bombs dropped by Washing Machine Charley, those nocturnal prowlers so named for the sound of their offbeat motors, or, worse, to listen to the droning approach of Louie the Louse—a cruiser scout-plane—and to see the greenish light of flares filtering through the dugout’s burlap door and to realize that the long dark shapes out on the Bay now had their targets spotted and in a moment there would be a giant roaring and thundering all around them and that for some inexplicable reason it would be difficult to keep the mouth open to reduce concussion and to pray to God at the same time. That was home, and in the dirty gray morning they were up, aching from fatigue induced by vitaminless diets or from sucking on oxygen all day; up to down the blessed cups of scalding black coffee and to walk to the runways where sometimes tractors had to tow their Wildcats from concealing coconut groves; up to squeeze into cockpits and to see the first light glinting weakly off spinning propellers, to inhale lungfuls of blue smoke swirling from coughing motors and to feel it souring the stomach where clots of undigested sausage lay like bits of rubber; and then they were feeding power to the motors, racing down the runway to go climbing, up, up, and up, showing the sea the sky-gray of their bottoms and the sky the sea-blue of their tops, climbing from extreme heat into those high cold altitudes where guns can freeze, climbing from solid earth into a floating world where the neck must swivel like a feeding bird’s, where the only sounds are the thunder of motors or hammering of the guns, where there is cloud mist on the windscreen in one instant and the sparkle of a drying sun in the next, and where, from time to time, a pilot’s eyes dart toward his wingman’s tail to see if there are mud-brown wings and a round red ball and smoking cannon there.

That was the pilots’ life at Henderson Field, a sun-blistered desert of black dust that fouled motors, or a rain-drenched slop of sticky black mud from which aircraft took off with all the easy grace of a fly rising from molasses.¹ Dust or mud, Dauntless dive-bombers equipped with hard rubber wheels for carrier landings churned up this strip like plowshares when they landed. Here was an airfield at its most primitive: when the Dauntlesses took off, their 500-pound bombs had to be lugged and loaded by hand, for there were no hoists; and just to refuel aircraft was an operation of several hours undertaken with 55-gallon drums and a handpump and a chamois strainer, or else by wheeling planes beneath drums slung in the rafters of the rickety hangars built by the Japanese.

And yet, six days after that August 24 on which they began Henderson’s defense by shooting down sixteen of Rabaul’s and Ryujo’s airplanes, most of these men were aces with five kills to their credit. Captain Smith was by then one plane shy of being twice an ace, for on that August 30 he destroyed four Zeros.

Sixteen Bettys heavily protected by Zeros had come winging over Iron Bottom Bay in a vee-of-vees, promptly sinking Colhoun, one of the two transports which the moonstruck Captain Murakami had ignored the night before. Turning to flee, they were attacked by Smith’s Marines. Smith shot down his first Zero easily, coming up on the enemy’s rear with such terrible speed that the pilot never knew what killed him. Smith picked the second Zero off his wingman’s tail, banking sharply to catch him full in his gunsight. The third nearly shot down Smith. Hanging on its nose, the Zero struck straight up under Smith’s belly. His bullets were stitching the Wildcat’s fuselage. Smith nosed over and came at the Zero nose-to-nose. An enemy bullet hit Smith’s windshield but missed Smith. Chunks of steel were flying from the Zero as both planes roared toward each other. They tore past each other fifteen feet apart, and Smith looked over his shoulder to see the Zero start spinning earthward out