Colonel Thomas still believed that the large enemy formations were to the east. Clemens’s scouts continued to report a Japanese build-up at the village of Tasimboko, about a mile west of Taivu. In fact, Thomas and Colonel Twining had already begun to plan a raid on Tasimboko, and Colonel Edson came to headquarters to propose just such an operation. The night of September 6, Thomas informed Edson that he could go ahead with it.
“We must not overrate the importance of our successes in the Solomons,” the President was saying warningly in his annual Labor Day speech to the nation, “though we may be proud of the skill with which these local operations have been conducted.”
Franklin Roosevelt was preparing America for bad news. Even as Vandegrift’s men marched toward their ships to attack Kawaguchi’s men at Tasimboko, the President in the White House was minimizing the campaign with the deprecating phrase “local operation.” Then, the announcement of Japanese victory on Guadalcanal would not come like the crack of doom.6
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
KIYOTAKE KAWAGUCHI was as confident of victory as Colonel Ichiki had been. He had 6200 men ashore whom he would hurl at Henderson Field in a three-pronged attack.
1. The major blow would be led by himself. He would take a battalion of the 124th Infantry and the two remaining Ichiki battalions to the south of the airfield, wheel and attack north.
2. Another battalion of the 124th would strike west across the Tenaru.
3. From the vicinity of the Matanikau River two reinforced battalions under Colonel Oka would cross the Lunga River and hit the airfield from the northwest.
Meanwhile, the main blow was to be supported by naval gunfire and air strikes.
It was a tidy plan, worthy of any textbook or any army that marches on maps. General Kawaguchi had devised it in the Shortlands in between arguments with Admiral Tanaka. It did not occur to him then, as it did not now occur to him, that he might scout the battlefield and the enemy before drawing up a battle plan.
Like Colonel Ichiki, he was making free and fiery interpretation of General Hyakutake’s measured instructions to “view the enemy strength, position and terrain” to see if it was “possible or not to achieve quick success” with his present strength. An impatient man, Kawaguchi had no intention of wasting time studying the enemy. To him there was no question of quick success. The Americans were few in number and inferior in quality. Japanese “spiritual power” would triumph. Moreover, by stealing stealthily south, by “tunneling through the jungle” as he called it, he would come up on the American rear and surprise them. The map had shown him a hogbacked ridge which ran down into the airfield. It seemed to be undefended.
In such confidence, General Kawaguchi went sloshing southwest. The Ishitari Battalion moved off directly westward. Colonel Oka’s force, gathering at the Matanikau, marked time for the appointed hour on the night of September 12.
Left behind at Tasimboko were three hundred men guarding General Kawaguchi’s food, part of his artillery, and a trunk containing his dress whites.
After dark on September 7 the Raiders under Colonel Edson boarded two destroyer-transports and a pair of converted California tuna launches now dignified with the initials YP, meaning patrol boat and translated “Yippy.” The Marines sailed east to Tasimboko, their approach announced by showers of bright red sparks pouring from the Yippies’ funnels.
In a misty dawn, the Raiders clambered into their Higgins boats. The Japanese, aware of their presence, prepared to receive them with a pair of 47-mm antitank guns capable of blowing the American boats out of the water.
But then the shredding mists revealed the large transports
Landing unopposed, the Raiders quickly removed the antitank guns’ breech blocks and hurled them into the sea. Then they struck inland half a mile and wheeled west through a coconut plantation.
In the meantime, General Kawaguchi’s panicky soldiers had informed the brigade commander that a major enemy landing was being made in his rear, and he, in turn, had notified Rabaul.
General Hyakutake was at last distressed. He ordered the 41st Infantry Regiment to mark time at Kokoda in New Guinea for possible transfer to Guadalcanal, and then he radioed Tokyo that Kawaguchi was “sandwiched.” Tokyo quickly notified two battalions in the East Indies to stand by, even as Admiral Mikawa planned a night bombardment with a cruiser and eight destroyers and the Tokyo Express shipped two battalions of the Aoba Detachment aboard.
It was a first-class flap which continued to flutter until word came from Kawaguchi suggesting that his earlier report had been exaggerated.
Nevertheless, General Kawaguchi could not turn to strike the Raiders. He was bogged down. Among other things he had underestimated the jungle. His engineers had not been able to hack out the clear straight “tunnel” that had been promised, and three thousand men of the Kawaguchi Brigade were strung out in a snaking column three miles long. They clawed up slime-slick slopes or stumbled through swamps sometimes armpit-deep, or were tripped at every turn by tangles of root and creeper and fern, ravaged, as they went, by clouds of stinging wings and all those jungle creatures that fall, fasten, and suck.
No, Kawaguchi could not turn; he could only send his rear guard the peremptory order:
“Confront the enemy.”
Plucking up their courage, they did. Two mountain guns and a pair of howitzers and numerous Nambu machine guns began firing from the coconut groves and Edson’s men were pinned down.
Edson immediately called for aerial support and sent a company led by Clemens’s scouts along a jungle trail to turn the enemy’s right flank. Then Captain Dale Brannon’s shark-nosed Klunkers arrived to strafe and bomb the Japanese. At noon, the encircling company had deployed in the Japanese rear. Caught in a crossfire, the enemy fled again. Twenty-seven dead bodies were found draped over six heavy machine guns. Most of Kawaguchi’s food supply was also discovered, and fifty men were detailed to jab their bayonets into cans of sliced beef and crabmeat while others dragged thousands of bags of rice into the surf. All Japanese weapons were destroyed and the field pieces towed into the Bay. Enemy maps, charts, and notebooks were gathered up and a powerful radio set was wrecked.
Then, with great hoarse shouts of joy, the Marines blundered into a thatched warehouse loaded with beer and sake. When they returned to their waiting ships late that afternoon they were loaded down with bottles and with cans of beef and crab, which, as they sheepishly explained to the gently inquiring Colonel Edson, they had somehow forgotten to destroy.
It is delicious to drink the enemy’s wine and to eat his sweetmeats, and it is glorious to make him grind his teeth, as the Raiders did, sailing west to Kukum with Kiyotake Kawaguchi’s fancy white duds nailed to the masthead.
Mr. Ishimoto had been in the vicinity of Tasimboko and he reacted swiftly to the American raid.
He rounded up the missionaries and demanded again that they advise the Americans to surrender. Father Oude-Engberink replied that he could not. As he had said to Martin Clemens, he was neutral. But it would be difficult for Ishimoto to consider white skin and large noses neutral, and he shouted:
“It is useless to resist the Japanese. They are too strong for you. You cannot win and you must leave Guadalcanal.”1
Again, the priests refused. Political affairs were not their concern. Ishimoto ordered them tied and thrown into a native hut where they were tortured and bayoneted to death. Old Sister Edmee, her body swollen and deformed by elephantiasis, was sent blundering off into the bush. But Sisters Sylvia and Odilia, both young, were
