which he was bringing with him. On September 16—which would be September 17 back in Washington—he decided to push on to Guadalcanal.
He was favored by overcast skies. General MacArthur came to his assistance with a series of bombing raids on Rabaul, and so did Admiral Yamamoto by sailing back to Truk.
Turner slipped through Torpedo Junction to stand off Lunga Roads at dawn of September 18. Four thousand fresh Marines with all their equipment came flowing ashore, while destroyers
That night Kawaguchi’s men prepared to rest in a ravine south of Mount Austen. Soldiers hacked a clearing in the jungle. The wounded were laid on the ground to the rear so that their cries and the horrible smell of their gangrenous wounds would not keep the others awake. Then the able tottered to their feet to search for food.
The men had become ravenous since the rice gave out. They tore bark from trees or grubbed in the earth for tree roots. They drank from puddles and in a few more days they would gnaw their leather rifle slings. Some of them had already buried their mortars and heavy machine guns, but they had been too weak to bury hundreds of comrades dying along the way. The dead were left beside the trail to become moving white mounds of dissolution, true “corpses rotting in the mountain grass.”
That night as these barefoot and ragged scarecrows sucked on their agony in insect-whirring blackness, someone switched on a shortwave radio to a patriotic mass meeting held in Hinomiya Stadium in Tokyo. Captain Hiraide of the Naval Staff announced the recapture of the airfield on Guadalcanal and a great gust of cheering drowned out the moans of the Kawaguchi wounded. Hiraide said:
“The Marines left in the lurch have been faring miserably since they were the victims of Roosevelt’s gesture.” There was more applause, and again Hiraide’s voice: “The stranded ten thousand have been practically wiped out.”5
It was well that it was dark, so that no one need look the other in the eye.
In the morning, while the Kawaguchis swung west to cross the upper reaches of the Lunga River, abandoning helmets, packs, light machine guns—all but their rifles—a decrepit old launch wheezed up to the beachmaster’s jetty at Kukum.
Corporal Eroni held the tiller while Captain Carl brought the balky old engine to a coughing silence. Both men calmly stepped out to introduce themselves to a band of startled Marines. Then they borrowed a jeep and drove to General Geiger’s headquarters. Carl strode into the Pagoda. Geiger looked up in glad surprise. Carl had been given up for dead. Then Geiger grinned slyly.
“Marion,” he said, “I have bad news. Smitty has fourteen planes, now. You still have only twelve. What about that?”
Carl stroked his lantern jaw, hesitating. Then he burst out, “Goddamit, General, ground him for five days!”6
Corporal Eroni had gone from the Pagoda to see his old friend, Sergeant Major Vouza, and his chief, Martin Clemens.
Vouza had completely recovered from his wounds. In fact, shortly after his throat had been sewn up, he had asked for something to eat. Now, as September turned toward October, Vouza was back at work scouring the trails for Japanese prisoners. He could deliver them on schedule and to order, always trussed and slung, perhaps a bit more painfully tight than heretofore, because Vouza had scars on chest and neck to remind him of Mr. Ishimoto.
Vouza was highly popular among the Marines. He wore their dungaree uniform when inside the base, the medal they had given him pinned proudly on the jacket.
Martin Clemens was also a favorite, something like a celebrity whom Intelligence kept trotting out for the entertainment of visiting personages. The day Eroni arrived a colonel was brought to see Clemens. The colonel seemed very interested in the natives. He asked if they had known how to write before the advent of the white man.
“Not very well,” Clemens replied. “You see, they had no paper.”7
Even Eroni joined the shout of laughter, and then he left, accompanied by a Marine radio operator, bound for Marau on the eastern tip of Guadalcanal. The Marine’s mission was to set up a coastwatching station for submarines.
After the ships of the Tokyo Express streaked up The Slot, they were replaced by Japanese submarines which entered the Bay from the other end. They lay there to fire their torpedoes at transports anchored off Lunga Roads. Sometimes they surfaced to attack smaller vessels with their deck guns. At other times they duelled Marine 75-mm howitzers on Tulagi. The Marines had smaller cannon but they usually could drive the submarines down by shelling their gun crews.
All of these actions were clearly visible to men on the beach defenses, or to other Marines who had come down to the shore to take a swim—in the way that Pfc. Richard McAllister went swimming near Lunga in late September while a small cargo vessel was being unloaded. McAllister saw an enemy periscope break the water. He saw a torpedo go flashing toward the cargo ship. Then he saw it come curving just off the ship’s stern and come running straight at him.
McAllister turned and swam. His arms flailed the water like a racing windmill. He swam wondering if there was enough metal in his dog tags to draw the torpedo toward him. He looked back wildly and saw the torpedo coming closer. He looked ahead and saw a beach working party scattering and taking for the coconuts.
He looked again backward and saw the torpedo’s steel snout only a few feet behind him. He swerved and dug his face into the water and flailed. His feet felt the sand beneath him just as the torpedo skimmed past him and drove up on the beach not three feet to his side.
But McAllister did not pause to measure the miss. Nor did he tarry for his clothes. His legs were now free and pumping and he entered the coconut grove going very, very fast. Later, this precious Long Lance would be disarmed and shipped home to instruct American manufacturers in the things that they did not know about torpedoes.
The military correspondent told General Vandegrift that the American people did not know what was going on at Guadalcanal. He said that they had been led to believe that the Marines were firmly entrenched and occupied almost the entire island. Today, September 19, the correspondent said, he had discovered that this was far from true. It was obvious that American troops were besieged within a small perimeter at the end of a riddled supply line.
Moreover, he said, in Washington the high command seemed about ready to give up on Guadalcanal, and in Noumea a spirit of defeatism had seized Admiral Ghormley’s headquarters. There were at that moment upwards of sixty ships lying unloaded in Noumea because of the confusion at Ghormley’s headquarters and because the ships’ officers and crews, already drawing exorbitant “combat-zone” pay, wanted to be paid overtime rates to unload them. The correspondent had seen all this and he wanted to know what the general thought about it.
Vandegrift said that he did not like it at all. He would like the American public to know what had been done, that Japan had been stopped for the first time. He discussed the situation pro and con and concluded firmly that the enemy had actually been hurt more. He said he would like the public to know how his men had stood up to ordeal, and especially with what magnificent high spirit they continued to hang on. The correspondent was surprised. He examined the general shrewdly.
“Are you going to hold this beachhead?” he asked. “Are you going to stay here?”
“Hell, yes!” Archer Vandegrift snorted. “Why not?”8
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
