also murdered.
After they were raped.2
The night of his return Red Mike Edson had gone to Colonel Thomas at Vandegrift’s headquarters. “This is no motley of Japs,” he said in his throaty whisper.3 Next morning, smiling his cold white smile, Edson was back. Thomas looked up from patrol reports and Intelligence interpretations of the captured Tasimboko documents. “They’re coming,” Thomas said.
Edson nodded. But from where? He pointed to a ridge on an aerial photograph and whispered: “This looks like a good approach.”4
Thomas was startled. Edson had fingered the very ridge to which General Vandegrift, tired of jumping in and out of airfield dugouts, was planning to move his command post. Edson was unperturbed. The ridge was a perfect approach to the airfield. It was a broken hogback running parallel to the Lunga River south of the airfield. South, east, and west—that is, front and both sides—it was surrounded by jungle; but to the north or rear it ran gently down into Henderson Field. What better approach, Edson argued, and Thomas, agreeing, took him to see the general.
Vandegrift was pleased to see the two men unfold their map and confidently pinpoint the avenue of enemy approach.
“Where is that?” he asked.
Respectful but reproachful, Edson said: “The ridge you insist on putting your new CP behind.”5
Vandegrift smiled softly. He had already rejected some rather profane objections from his staff regarding his new command post, and he was not now going to change his mind. Engineers were already at work building a pavilion 35 ? 18 feet which would house the living and working quarters of Vandegrift and his chief of staff, Colonel Capers James. It was to have Japanese wicker furniture and a Japanese icebox run by kerosene and it would be surrounded by woods filled with the colorful parrots and macaws which Vandegrift found so delightful. No, he would not change his mind, even if he could immediately grasp the danger of leaving that ridge undefended. So the general courteously ignored the colonel’s respectful rebuke and ordered him to take his composite battalion of 700 Raiders and parachutists and block that open ridge.
Then the general returned to such urgent matters as his repeated request for reinforcements. He wanted at least one regiment, preferably, if he could get it, his old Seventh Marines.
The Seventh Marines had been in Samoa since the middle of May. Trained as an assault elite, they were withering as garrison troops. There was enchanted moonlight filtering through the branches of banyan trees and the soft plinking of native guitars. There was also a ration of two cans of beer daily and hot food from the galleys. And there was the tsetse fly that brings “mumu,” as the Samoans call elephantiasis.
None of these things are typical of a Corps dedicated to the principle that hunger and hardship are the school of the good soldier. “Nothing is too good for you,” the Marine Corps tells its men, adding: “But we’ll let you have it anyway.”
But on Samoa the Seventh was “living it up” in comparison to its brother regiments on Guadalcanal and the spectacle of Colonel James Webb—“Gentleman Jim” in his natty whipcord breeches and his gleaming low-quarter shoes—leading hikes in a station wagon was also not calculated to inflame its men with ardor.
It was up to the battalion commanders to try to keep their men battle-fit. One of these leaders was Lieutenant Colonel Herman Henry Hanneken, the veteran of the Banana Wars who had killed the Caco chieftain, “King” Charlemagne, in personal combat. Another was Major Chesty Puller.
At forty-four, Puller was already a Marine legend. He had won two Navy Crosses in Haiti and Nicaragua. He was that very rare bird of war: a man who actually loves combat and who is beloved by his men. Puller’s Marines delighted in repeating those numerous Pullerisms, true or false, such as his remark when he saw his first flamethrower: “Where do you fit the bayonet on it?” They boasted of his bullhorn voice and they claimed that his huge chest bulging from an otherwise spindly frame hardly five feet six inches high was capable of repelling enemy bullets. Puller’s military credo contained two articles: conditioning and attack.
On Samoa he repeatedly ordered his men out on long hikes beneath a brazen sun, instructing his officers: “Gentlemen, remember to have every man carry a one-inch square of beef suet in his pack. If they’ll grease their feet daily, and avoid so much washing, they’ll have no blisters. An old trick from the Haitian soldiers, and it never fails. You can’t march men without feet, gentlemen.”6
But Puller, like the other professional officers, soon began to mourn the Samoan confinement: “Here I am, stuck out here to rot on this damned island while other people fight the war. They’ve marooned us.”7 Hearing of the Battle of the Tenaru, he cried: “They mowed ’em down! One of these days we’ll be giving ’em hell like that.
A few weeks later the Seventh Marines were ordered to Espiritu Santo. It was rumored that they were not going to Guadalcanal, but to New Guinea to fight for General MacArthur.
Admiral Ghormley pondered a most disturbing message. Admiral Nimitz was ordering Ghormley to turn over to General MacArthur one reinforced regiment of “experienced amphibious troops,” together with the ships required to mount them. Ghormley was puzzled. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had originated this order, surely must know that the only “experienced” amphibious troops in the Pacific were fighting for their lives on Guadalcanal. Could he mean the Seventh Marine Regiment, even then sailing toward Ghormley’s area? Ghormley asked the advice of Richmond Kelly Turner. He got a very straight answer:
“The only experienced amphibious troops in the South Pacific are those in Guadalcanal and it is impracticable to withdraw them.” Turner then laid it on the line:
“I respectfully invite attention to the present insecure position of Guadalcanal.… Adequate air and naval strength have not been made available. Vandegrift has consistently urged to be reinforced at once by at least one regiment… I concur.”
What might have been a very soft filching of Guadalcanal’s dwindling strength was thus prevented.
And Vandegrift’s strength was dwindling. Malaria was now ravaging his ranks as the enemy had not been able to do. Every day new shortages appeared—in bombs, bullets, starter cartridges, oxygen, tires, and lubricating oil—thus complicating old and constant shortages in food and fuel.
General Geiger’s strength was being whittled by shortages rather than by Zeros. Eight airplanes cracked up on take-off on September 8. Two of them were restored to readiness but the others were hauled off to the “boneyard” where sharp-eyed mechanics cannibalized them for spare parts.
On September 10 there were only eleven Wildcats available, and the enemy aerial onslaught was mounting. Combined Fleet’s sortie from Truk and the steady reinforcement of northern airfields were ominous signs. Admiral Nimitz did not fail to observe them. On that same September 10 he ordered all carrier aircraft “that could be spared” to be flown to Guadalcanal, thus contradicting the Navy’s doctrine that carrier aircraft should fly from carriers, as well as countermanding Ghormley’s promise to Fletcher that his fighters would not be committed to Guadalcanal. Pledges made in all sincerity in response to reasonable requests, the niceties of command prerogatives, military dogma, all had to go by the boards, now, for the enemy was obviously mounting a major bid to recover Guadalcanal.
Crisis had come.
General Vandegrift knew it as he moved into his new command post behind the ridge that would be called Bloody, and Red Mike Edson knew it going down to Kukum to tell his men that they were moving to a “rest area.”
“Too much bombing and shelling here close to the beach,” Edson said. “We’re moving to a quiet spot.”9 He smiled, enjoying the joke. The men moved out. Twice they were forced to take cover from air raids, but by two o’clock in the afternoon they were fortifying Bloody Ridge.
Edson put the parachutists under Harry Torgerson—the singed dynamiter of Gavutu—on his left or eastern flank. The Raiders took over the center and right with the right flank company strung out thinly toward the Lunga. Edson’s own command post was in a gully about a hundred yards south of Vandegrift’s new headquarters. Here he put his reserve, a depleted company of Raiders.
