the bush swinging axes and spears. Terrified, the Japanese bent to seize stones—and they were slaughtered to a man.
Saku’s merciless band repeated the same tactics against nine more Japanese soldiers, and they fought a pitched rifle battle with another dozen. Eventually they killed thirty-two of the last of the Kawaguchi stragglers still making their pitiful way west, and they buried a hundred of their rifles. Along the route of the Kawaguchi retreat they found heaps of whitening bones and in the jungle they discovered wrecked and rusting red-balled aircraft with charred skeletons in flight suits still erect in their seats.
The jungle wept at the enemy’s misery, but Saku’s band continued to hunt him without pity.
Pity was also not a quality describing Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama. Haughty was a better word; haughty, irritable, and unbending—and the commander of the Sendai Division had found the situation on Guadalcanal one calculated to make these characteristics quickly known to Colonel Oka and General Kawaguchi.
First, Maruyama was displeased that these two officers had allowed the Americans to get away from the Point Cruz trap so easily. But he was above all infuriated to find that they had allowed the wretched veterans of this miserable campaign to mingle with men of his fresh 4th Infantry Regiment and to spread their tales of horror among them. On October 5—the day that Saku began slaughtering Japanese—Colonel Nomasu Nakaguma had brought Maruyama a letter written by one of the 4th’s soldiers. It said:
The news I hear worries me. It seems as if we have suffered considerable damage and casualties. They might be exaggerated, but it is pitiful. Far away from our home country a fearful battle is raging. What these soldiers say is something of the supernatural and cannot be believed as human stories.5
Lieutenant General Maruyama promptly issued a general order to all troops:
From now on, the occupying of Guadalcanal Island is under the observation of the whole world. Do not expect to return, not even one man, if the occupation is not successful. Everyone must remember the honor of the Emperor, fear no enemy, yield to no material matters, show the strong points as of steel or of rocks, and advance valiantly and ferociously. Hit the enemy opponents so hard they will not be able to get up again.6
Then General Maruyama began planning an advance to the east bank of the Matanikau River. He, too, had recognized the advantages to be had from that position. He could put artillery there and shell Henderson Field and he could use the east bank as a jumping-off point for the grand attack scheduled for October 17.
Maruyama ordered Colonel Nakaguma to take the 4th Infantry across the Matanikau early in the morning of October 7.
Then he sat down at his field desk, mopped his streaming face with a towel, and resumed the study of his maps. The mouth of the Matanikau, it seemed to him, would be the most suitable place for the American commander to surrender his sword.
General Vandegrift also studied the mouth of the Matanikau on his maps that October 5. It occurred to him that the river and the terrain offered the same possibilities which Robert E. Lee had exploited at the Chickahominy. He would make a demonstration at the river mouth while other forces crossed the Matanikau upriver to swing right and close the trap at the rear.
This time he would use five full battalions.
Two battalions from the Fifth Marines would mass at the river mouth under Edson.
Two battalions of the Seventh—Puller’s and Herman Henry Hanneken’s—and a battalion from the Second Marines reinforced by Colonel William Whaling’s scout-snipers would make the march inland. Whaling would be in command. He would be the first to cross Nippon Bridge, wheel north and march toward the sea. Hanneken would cross the river next, and move farther west before turning to the sea himself. Then Puller would cross and make the deepest western penetration, swinging round to march toward Point Cruz. Once Puller held that point, the Fifth would charge west across the river mouth.
The attack was to commence October 7, the same day that Maruyama had chosen for Nakaguma’s attack.
On that morning the two forces collided.
Edson’s men met Nakaguma’s men at the river mouth and Whaling encountered Japanese while still east of the river and marching toward Nippon Bridge. Edson called for help and Vandegrift sent him the remnant of the First Raiders. Under Silent Lew Walt, now, these exhausted Marines entered their last battle. They helped the Fifth push the enemy into a pocket, and when the desperate Japanese attempted to break out that night in a banzai charge they killed sixty of them.
October 8 it rained. It came down in monsoon sheets and both forces lay mired in the muck and murk of a Solomons downpour. Then Vandegrift learned, as had happened so often before when he attempted to break up enemy concentrations, that an enemy task force was bearing down on Guadalcanal. He would have to trim his ambitions.
Next day the three battalions crossed the Matanikau upriver as planned, but with instructions to swing east once they had reached the sea. Then they would pass through the Fifth Marines at the river mouth and enter the perimeter.
They did, but before they did Chesty Puller flushed an entire battalion of the enemy.
Marching north toward Point Cruz his scouts caught sight of large numbers of enemy soldiers at the bottom of a ravine. It looked like a bivouac area. Puller called for artillery fire and set his battalion on high ground to watch.
The Japanese were trapped.
Shells from the Marine 105-mm howitzers shrieked and crashed among them. They came without warning, and because they did they devastated the enemy and made terrified, milling cattle of them. They sprinted in terror for the sanctuary of a ridge behind them, but as they broke from cover the Marines drove them back into the ravine with mortars and machine-gun fire. Back they tumbled, back into thickets of flashing death. Up toward Puller’s position they flowed, and once again the mortars and the machine guns swept death among them.
And so it went, back to be blasted or torn apart, up to be riddled to pieces—and very few of them survived.
No less than seven hundred men fell in that slaughter-pen of a ravine, and General Maruyama’s first meeting with the Marines ended in sharp defeat. His 4th Infantry Regiment was shattered, for another two hundred men had been killed by the other American forces.
And so the Third Matanikau came to an end on a familiar critical note. With 65 dead and 105 wounded, Vandegrift’s battalions came back along the coastal road to resume positions along that Henderson Field perimeter that was now threatened as never before. As they did they heard airplane motors thundering overhead. Looking up they saw twenty Wildcats. Major Leonard (Duke) Davis was bringing his squadron into Guadalcanal. General Geiger would now have forty-six fighters to hurl into an aerial battle even then blazing up with unprecedented fury.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THUS did the Marines on Guadalcanal bawl out their derision of the Army, singing, to the tune of “Bless ’em All,” an uncomplimentary and inaccurate estimate of why it was that they were still alone after two months of
