Guadalcanal—into a jeep and drove off to Geiger’s tent. Geiger looked for his bourbon, and found that it was gone. Some pink-cheeked fly-boy with more red balls on his fuselage than hairs on his chin had made off with his general’s refreshments, and the general’s face beneath his thatch of snow-white hair was also round and red and his bleak blue eyes were icy with rage. Archer Vandegrift, Virginian though he was, decided that he was not now in Virginia: he would keep the Scotch. He gave his old friend two bottles, and departed; and Geiger took command of Cactus Air Force in a humor so foul that even Colonel Woods, accustomed to his chief’s harsh cold furies, was impressed.2 In such mood, Geiger drove his fliers from a splendid August into a superb September.
Henderson’s old-timers and the new arrivals of Colonel Wallace had already learned to fight together, having knocked down seven of forty enemy attackers on September 2, two of them falling to Major Galer’s guns; and the following day Leo Smith’s dive-bombers joined Mangrum’s to fall upon Colonel Oka and his thousand Kawaguchis barging down The Slot. On Geiger’s first day of command, Wildcats were sent to help the Dauntlesses make Oka’s passage even more harrowing than Admiral Tanaka had predicted, and on the ensuing two days scout-bombers went ranging 200 miles to the northwest to strike at Gizo Bay, the heretofore too-distant daylight hideout of the Tokyo Express. Gradually, Geiger’s inordinately bad temper subsided into his normal curtness. He became fond of his young fliers, jaunty in their dark-blue baseball caps and shoulder holsters. In turn, they ceased to think of him as ruthless but as single-mindedly aggressive and they called him the Old Man. A magnificent band of fighters had found the right leader, and it was well, for the Tokyo Express was recruiting cruisers and destroyers by the dozen and Rabaul and Buka were reinforced with aircraft to the extent that Geiger would be outnumbered 180 planes to seventy by mid-September. Nevertheless, the men of Cactus Air Force continued to whittle the enemy, growing in offensive spirit and gathering almost nightly at the Hotel de Gink, Henderson’s hostelry for visiting pilots, to toast each other in medicinal alcohol—or perhaps “borrowed” one-star bourbon—while bellowing out a popular parody of “On the Road to Mandalay”:
Meanwhile, as the Solomons aerial war grew fiercer, the Seabees began working on Henderson Field.
The Sixth Naval Construction Battalion arrived at Guadalcanal on September 1. Like all other Seabees—a nickname based on the initials CB—these men were experienced craftsmen. They were tractor drivers, carpenters, masons, dynamiters, electricians, shipfitters, machinists, and so on, who had volunteered to put their skills at their country’s disposal. Most of them were well past the draft age; some of them were veterans of World War I. Their average age of thirty-five was nearly double the age of many of Vandegrift’s Marines who watched the Seabees coming ashore and thought that they were being reinforced by their fathers.
“What the hell, pop! They running outta men at home?”
“Hey, pop—you get your wars mixed up or somethin’?”
“Hang onto yer false teeth, grandad—the Jap’s’re dropping sandwiches.”
The Seabees grinned weakly, until one of the Marines inevitably went too far, chortling: “Seabees, huh? Stands for Confused Bastards, you ask me. What’n hell you old geezers gonna do here?”
“I’ll tell you what, you mother’s mistakes,” a Seabee roared back. “We’re gonna protect the Marines!”3
It was not exactly true, but it had the effect of provoking sweet shouts of anguish from the indignant Marines. Thereafter—and throughout the Pacific war—both Seabees and Marines were drawn together in a rough but affectionate camaraderie based upon mutual respect.
Having been rushed to Guadalcanal, the Sixth Battalion’s men had very little equipment: two bulldozers, six dump trucks and a big, waddling carryall capable of scooping up twelve cubic yards of earth. But they also had Japanese trucks and tractors, graders and rollers, Japanese cement, and Japanese poles, lumber and soil pipe. With this, and with gradually increasing supplies of their own, they took over the job of completing and enlarging Henderson Field, while also repairing the strip after enemy air raids.
Repair was vital, and it had to be done quickly. The moment the Japanese approach was signaled, all of Henderson’s Wildcats roared aloft to intercept, while the Dauntlesses and P-400s—“Klunkers” as they were now called—took off either to fly out of range or to bomb and strafe the Japanese at either end of the island. But every plane which survived the raid would be coming back, returning to a field pocked with craters. One afternoon in early September, the Seabees watched in agony while seven fighters came in one after another, and cracked up.
So the Seabees discovered that the enemy’s 500-pound bomb usually tore up 1600 square feet of Marston steel matting, and packages of that much matting were placed alongside the strip. Trucks loaded with exactly the amount of sand and gravel required to fill such a crater were parked out of sight at strategic points. Compressors and pneumatic hammers to pack the fill were placed in readiness. Assembly lines for passing and laying matting were organized. At the moment of the enemy’s approach, all of the Seabees—cooks included—raced to their stations. The moment the bombers departed, sometimes while Zeros shrieked down to strafe, they made for the airstrip. Twisted matting was torn from the craters even as the loaded trucks roared up from the coconut groves. Fill was poured into the holes while men with hammers and compressors leaped in to pack it. New matting was passed, laid, and linked to undamaged strips. Inside forty minutes, the hole would be completely filled and covered.
Repairing shell-holes, of course, took longer. The Seabees had to wait before going to work; for as everyone on Guadalcanal knew, if the bombers left as quickly as they came, it seemed that the Tokyo Express would never leave.
It was next to impossible for Cactus Air Force to derail the Tokyo Express at night. The Japanese ships were only visible during periods of bright moonlight, and these, of course, were the nights when they usually stayed home. Moreover, weather conditions worsened during September and the moon was on the wane, and the wily Tanaka had instructed his skippers never to reveal position by firing on American aircraft at night. They only fired when they were ready to depart, sailing westward through the Bay, blasting Henderson and the Marine positions as they went, and hitting top speed as they cleared Savo and turned northwestward for home.
Nevertheless, Henderson’s pilots always took to the skies whenever the Tokyo Express was reported landing troops or supplies. They tried to illuminate the Bay with flares and sometimes they went down as low as five hundred feet looking for long dark shapes. But they seldom did more than keep the Japanese on the alert.
Warships equipped with radar might sink the enemy ships, but the American Navy had not been back in force since Savo. Nor were American sailors the equal of Japanese seamen in night-fighting. They were still cautious, fearful of firing on friendly ships; and they were not trained to recognize the enemy by silhouette as the Japanese were.
