Challenge for the Pacific

Later the Sendai’s recruits were lined up on the parade ground to receive their rifles from the hands of an officer, who told them: “Conscripts, your rifle enables you to serve the Emperor just as the sword of the samurai made him strong and terrible in the Imperial service. You will keep its bore as bright and shining as the samurai kept his blade. On the outside it may, like yourselves, become stained with mud and blood, but within, like your own warrior’s soul, it will remain untarnished, bright, and shining.”²

And so, like knights receiving their spurs, the Sendai accepted their rifles, making a profound obeisance before them, and in the morning they were introduced to the harsh brutal life of the Japanese soldier, one so pitilessly purposeful that it would provoke the westerner to mutiny, but one which these youths, trained almost from the cradle in disciplined adversity, regarded as the penultimate step toward a glorious destiny: fighting and dying for the Emperor.

All day long they heard drill sergeants bellowing, “Wan-hashi, wan-hashi”— wan for the teacup which all Japanese hold in their left hands, hashi for the chopsticks grasped with the right. “Wan-hashi, wan- hashi. Teacup-chopsticks, teacup-chopsticks.”

It was a tantalizing chant for men accustomed to a crude and tasteless diet of soybean curd for breakfast; rice, pickled fish and sliced radishes for lunch; and raw fish, rice or beets and a cup of sake for dinner. But the Sendai’s menu was not devised to please but rather to inure men to privation. In the field it was worse: rice balls and soybean curd. On this, the men of the Sendai had been trained to endure as had no other troops in the world. Before they left Japan, the men of Colonel Furumiya’s 29th Regiment had marched 122 miles in seventy-two hours, carrying their weapons, 150 rounds of ammunition and a forty-pound pack, sleeping only four hours, and then, with the roofs of their barracks in sight, they had double-timed the last few miles.

This was the division and these were the men with whom Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake would at last crush the Americans. Although Hyakutake was no longer contemptuous of his enemy, he was still confident of defeating him; and he still underestimated his forces at about ten thousand after making allowances for the eight or nine thousand “killed” by Colonel Ichiki and General Kawaguchi. Nevertheless, he was not going to allow his forces to drift into battle piecemeal as formerly. He was going to concentrate them, and he had already ordered the 38th Division to move from Borneo to the Shortlands for shipment to Guadalcanal. Finally, he would no longer trust impetuous subordinates: General Hyakutake was going down to Guadalcanal to take personal command. He expected to arrive the night of October 9 with his 17th Army Headquarters.

In the meantime, he got the Sendai on their way. Admiral Mikawa’s ships had already landed one unit—the 4th Infantry Regiment—on western Guadalcanal in mid-September. The remainder under the Sendai’s commander, Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, would make three separate runs led by a cruiser also named Sendai.

The first, with Maruyama aboard, was to leave October 3.

Admiral Nimitz arrived in Noumea on the third of October. He conferred with Vice-Admiral Ghormley and was disturbed by what he learned. Nimitz was not so much impressed by the confused supply situation—which could not be blamed on a man who had been given an entire area tied in a shoestring—but by Ghormley’s deep pessimism about Guadalcanal. When the possibility of reinforcing the island was discussed, Ghormley protested. He said it would be unsafe to strip rear-area islands of their garrisons. The Japanese “might break through and attack our lines of communication.”

Nimitz did not challenge Ghormley’s convictions. After all, he was the man in charge. But Nimitz returned to Pearl Harbor wondering if perhaps there should not be someone else in command, someone more aggressive, someone who shared his own optimism about Guadalcanal.

It was very difficult for Chester Nimitz not to think of Bull Halsey.

That same October afternoon Martin Clemens was thinking that the time had come to rescue Snowy Rhoades and Bishop Aubin’s missionary party at Tangarare.

For the past few weeks Rhoades had been reporting a steadily deteriorating situation at the mission station on the southwest coast. Both he and Schroeder, the frail old Savo storekeeper turned coastwatcher, were down with malaria. Dysentery had all but done for Bishop Aubin, and the entire party was without food. The Japanese, unimpressed by the bishop’s policy of neutrality, had taken it all.

Clemens asked Vandegrift if it would be possible to divert a Catalina flying boat to the rescue. The general, preparing a third offensive west of the Matanikau, was annoyed at being distracted by what he called “a bunch o’ nuns.”³ But then Rhoades signaled, “Bishop requests also evacuation of native nuns as if left behind they will be raped,”⁴ and Vandegrift consented to Clemens’s request.

On the afternoon of October 3, however, the Ramada sailed over from Malaita and Clemens dropped his plans for the Catalina. Ramada was the old Guadalcanal District vessel, a wooden schooner forty feet long and powered by a diesel engine at a speed of six knots. Her hull was black and her awnings gray and she was marked by two white crosses.

Ramada had come to Guadalcanal with three Japanese airmen who had been captured after their bomber crashed, and Clemens asked her skipper, Peter Sasambule, if he would make the rescue trip to Tangarare. Sasambule demurred. Even though he was among the best of the native captains, a sailor who could creep like a cat among the uncharted Solomons waters, he did not like the prospect of sailing his flimsy craft past enemy-occupied territory by day and by night through the southern terminus of the Tokyo Express. But Clemens persuaded him. Early that afternoon, escorted by a fighter-plane, Ramada swung wide off the Guadalcanal coast and went chugging northwest.

Two hours later a coastwatcher radioed that six Japanese destroyers led by Sendai were 140 miles distant from Cape Esperance. They would arrive there about four o’clock the next morning.

Marine and Navy dive-bombers immediately prepared to strike. They took off before dusk. In the half-light of a dying day they found the Japanese convoy and came screaming down to plant a direct hit on Sendai and another on a destroyer.

Nevertheless, the ships carrying General Maruyama and his troops pressed on. At four o’clock in the morning they set Maruyama and another Sendai regiment safely ashore on Guadalcanal.

Ramada, which had turned Cape Esperance around midnight, also made a safe passage to Tangarare. On October 4 she sailed back under the friendly square wings of a Wildcat fighter. She arrived off Lunga after supply ships Fomalhaut and Betelgeuse and their destroyer escorts had entered Iron Bottom Bay from the other direction on a daring run of the Torpedo- Junction gantlet. Landing boats and lighters were swarming on the Bay and destroyers were prowling up and down the coast when Ramada made her entry, steaming sedately along loaded to the gunwales with Rhoades, and Schroeder; Bishop Aubin, frail and weak in his white soutane, a pectoral cross on his breast and his umbrella grasped in his hands; six priests, six European nuns and double that many native sisters, all of them dressed in white habits. The sailors gaped as Ramada dropped anchor and the Wildcat overhead dipped its wings in salute and flew away.

Martin Clemens came aboard and quickly put the six priests on one of the supply ships. They scrambled up the bosun’s ladder. The European sisters, however, offered a different problem. A mail boat was lowered, the nuns stepped into it, and then the little craft was drawn neatly aboard to the cheers of all within view. Bishop Aubin came ashore to spend the night with General Vandegrift, who received him graciously. In the morning, he returned to Ramada. Together with the native nuns, and a party from the Church of England mission on Tulagi, he sailed for Buma Mission on Malaita.

In a war without quarter, neutrality had not been possible.

On the day that the missionaries left Tangarare, a group of far-from-neutral natives set out from the abandoned mission station. Led by Constable Saku, one of Clemens’s best scouts, they were out to kill Japanese.

Two days later—October 5—they came upon ten Japanese soldiers gathering wild nuts by a river. The soldiers had piled their rifles on a rock. Saku and his comrades crept up to the rock, took the rifles and hid. Saku warned his men not to shoot and thus draw help to the enemy. The Japanese returned, and the natives leaped from