Challenge for the Pacific

gave tragic demonstration of these failings the night after the Battle of the Tenaru. With another destroyer, Henley, she tried to intercept a Japanese landing. Four minutes after her sonar and radar had made a contact on a strange ship, and just as she was bringing her guns and torpedo tubes to bear, she was racked by a Long Lance from the enemy destroyer Kawakaze, which had just put troops ashore. Blue lost several feet of her stern and had to be scuttled.

After this, although perhaps not on account of this, there were fewer and fewer American warships entering Iron Bottom Bay at night.

Little and Gregory were two of a rare kind at Guadalcanal: ships that stayed. Sisters of sunken Colhoun, they were old fourstack destroyers converted into fast transports. They had brought Red Mike Edson and the Raiders and Parachutists from Tulagi to Guadalcanal, and on September 4 they took aboard a party of Raiders under Colonel Griffith to patrol Savo Island.

Aboard Little a lookout cried “Periscope!” and the ship prepared to close with depth charges before the “periscope” was sheepishly recognized as the mast of a sunken American ship. Ashore on Savo, the Raiders found no Japanese but only charred and oily debris and the mounds of shallow graves, still more grim testimonials to the efficiency of Admiral Mikawa’s ships. A native named Allen-luva told the patrol that the Japanese had not been on Savo since July.

“Take bananas, chicken, pumpkin, everything,” Allen-luva said angrily.

“Him talk pidgin?” someone asked.

“Like drunk man,” Allen-luva snorted. “Him talk ‘aeroprane’ and ‘Guadarcanar.’”⁴

The Marines laughed and went back aboard Gregory and Little. They returned to Guadalcanal at dusk. Because it was an extremely dark night, Little and Gregory did not go back to Tulagi Harbor as was customary. Commander Hugh Hadley in Little decided to patrol off Lunga Point.

At one o’clock next morning the Americans observed gunfire flashes in the east near Taivu.

Destroyers Yudachi, Hatsuyuki, and Murakumo were to provide diversionary bombardment while transports put the last of General Kawaguchi’s men ashore at Taivu. At about one o’clock in the morning, they began. And then the startled gunners looked to the west where two small American destroyer-transports were beautifully outlined in the light of five beautiful American flares.

Little and Gregory both thought the gunflashes were from a Japanese submarine. They sped eastward, and then, a Catalina on patrol a half mile ahead also saw the flashes and also thought that they came from a submarine, and helpfully dropped a string of flares to mark the target.

In that light the three enemy destroyers, each nearly as big as a light cruiser, began battering Americans mounting only one four-incher, some 20-mm guns and a few light and heavy machine guns. Little and Gregory fought bravely, but within a few salvos of feelers the Japanese had the range. Commander Hadley was killed on Little’s bridge. Gregory was shredded by salvos of five-inch shells and set blazing from stem to stern. Both ships were blazing wrecks, but the Japanese made certain of their destruction. They sailed between them, hurling shells to both sides. Many Americans in the water were killed by those shells. Some of them dove deep to get beneath burning oil, to avoid flaming embers cascading down from their ships. They tried to swim out of seas of fire, and sometimes, if they were lucky, water which had risen into the sky in long geysering plumes came raining down to put out the fires around them. Others, such as Lieutenant Commander Harry Bauer, skipper of Gregory, were not so fortunate. Badly wounded, Bauer struggled to escape both burning oil and the suction of his sinking ship. Two men—Clarence Justice and Chester Ellis—swam to his side to pull him free. Bauer heard a sailor cry out that he was drowning. He directed his rescuers to the man’s aid, and he was never seen again.

Once more tragedy had overtaken American ships and men on the dark brooding surface of Iron Bottom Bay, and far to the west Lieutenant Richard Amerine heard the thundering and saw the flashing and he wondered what was happening now on this satanic paradise.

The Japanese had not seen Amerine parachute into the jungle around Cape Esperance. No one had come for him. But Amerine was growing weak. He had been subsisting for five days on snails and insects. He knew which ones were edible because he was an entomologist. In fact, he had seen such an astounding variety of insects that he had been brokenhearted not to have a butterfly net with him.

That day, though, he would have traded it for a rifle.

He had nearly blundered into a party of Japanese. Luckily, he had found one enemy soldier sleeping beside a track and he had seized a boulder and smashed the man’s head like a china doll’s. Then he took the dead soldier’s pistol with which he killed two more of them, shooting one and battering the other with the pistol butt.

Now, in the early darkness of September 5, he lay in the whispering, dripping jungle and wondered if there were more Japanese between him and the Marine lines.

With daylight, he arose and began walking east again.

There was “pogey-bait” on Guadalcanal.

It would seem absurd that during a time of critical shortages in fuel and goods and ammunition anyone should bother to bring in candy, and yet, on September 5, a Skytrain flown by Lieutenant Colonel Wyman Marshall came in under fire loaded with pogey-bait and cigarettes. Then Colonel Marshall flew out with a load of wounded.

Next day more Skytrains arrived, carrying drums of fuel, ammunition, machine guns, and mortar shells— departing, again, with wounded. Thus was begun the famous shuttle operation called Scat after South Pacific Combat Air Transportation Command.

Meanwhile, the Marines were issued pogey-bait at the rate of one bar of candy to a squad. Rather than divide it and provide too little for all, the men drew lots. The blushing winners took their prizes and went slinking into the bush to devour it beyond the reproachful eyes of the losers.

Combined Fleet had returned to Truk.

After ten days of useless cruising north of Guadalcanal, fifty-odd ships led by great Yamato sailed into the lagoon to refuel.

Admiral Yamamoto called a conference aboard his battleship. He was taciturn as he spoke to his commanders. For the first time he cautioned against underestimating American fighting strength, and he issued two simple orders:

1. Keep the location and movements of Japanese carriers unknown to the enemy.

2. Make initial air assaults against the enemy as strong as possible.

These instructions were to cover Combined Fleet’s support of Major General Kawaguchi’s attempt to capture Henderson Field. The all-out aerial assault was to be launched September 12 in concert with Kawaguchi’s attack.

Commander Tameichi Hara came back from the conference to his destroyer Amatsukaze. Lieutenant Kazue Shimizu, his gunnery officer, met him with a doleful face.

“What’s the matter with you?” Hara snapped.

“We failed to catch a single fish today,” Shimizu said. “This super fleet of ours has exterminated every fish in the atoll in just three days.”⁵

On September 9 the super fleet shoved off again, bound for the Solomons.

Lieutenant Amerine had come back from the dead. On September 6, gaunt and staggering, he wandered into Marine lines at Kukum. He was brought to Vandegrift’s headquarters to inform Intelligence of what he had seen. But Amerine had little to tell. The Japanese he had killed had been stragglers and he had not come upon any large bodies of enemy troops.