their third and heaviest bid for victory. Far away in Australia General Douglas MacArthur was planning an all-out defense of the island continent in the event that the Solomons were lost, a huge Japanese bombardment force had been reported on its way south, forcing Admiral Turner to flee for the New Hebrides again, and as dusk introduced The Night of the Battleships, Archer Vandegrift heard a new voice speaking over Henderson Field.
Sergeant Butch Morgan was preparing the general’s dinner when Pistol Pete spoke.
His first shell screamed over Vandegrift’s pavilion and struck the big runway with a crash. Sergeant Morgan seized his World War I helmet and raced for the dugout. Another shell screeched overhead. Morgan slammed on his helmet and dove for cover.
General Vandegrift looked up in thoughtful surprise.
“That wasn’t a bomb,” he said. “That’s artillery.”3
Sergeant Butch Morgan came out of the dugout, his face a crimson match for his red walrus mustache. He looked around him furtively to see if any boots had witnessed the discomfiture of the Old Salt who had fought in France and knew all about artillery barrages.
“Aw, hell,” Morgan muttered, taking off his helmet and going back to his makeshift stove. “I mean, only artillery…”
If it was “only” artillery, it was still authoritative enough to reach the airfield and to introduce a new element of danger into the harried lives of the Seabees there. Formerly, after attack from bombers or warships, repairmen might rush to the torn-up runway to fill the craters without fear of lightning striking twice in the same place. But now, Pistol Pete could fire one shell, wait until the Seabees were at work, and then drop another in the very same place.
Moreover, Vandegrift’s heretofore matchless artillery was now outranged. Even his biggest guns, five-inch rifles, were of lesser bore than these six-inch howitzers of Hyakutake’s; and his field pieces, 105- and 75-mm howitzers, that is, roughly four- and three-inch cannon, were far outweighed by them. Nevertheless, the Marine artillerymen were unafraid to duel the Japanese in counter-battery firing; if only they could locate them. The Marines had no sound-and-flash ranging equipment on Guadalcanal, and General Geiger could not consume precious gasoline keeping observation planes aloft.
Pistol Pete would speak for many, many days, unsilenced even by the five-inch rifles of visiting destroyers; speak as he was speaking now in the fading light of October 13, churning up the runways and forcing Marine ground crews to dare his flying fragments while moving parked aircraft to the comparative safety of Fighter One, ranging in on Kukum to chew up naval stores, hurling desultory shells into the Marine perimeter and moving from there, accidentally, into the heart of the 164th Infantry’s bivouac area, raining shells upon these soldiers with such ferocity that one of them—a sergeant—crawled about begging his men to shoot him.
Then it was dark.
Pistol Pete thundered on, red flares shot up from the jungle, enemy bombers roared overhead—flashing in and out of Marine antiaircraft fire and thick pencils of searchlight crisscrossing the sky—and everywhere there was a thumping and lashing of tortured earth and a whistling of invisible steel, while dazed and sleepless men stumbled in and out of their pits and foxholes, bracing for the enemy to appear once the uproar ceased.
At half past eleven Louie the Louse planted a green flare directly over Henderson Field and The Night of the Battleships began.
Screened fore and aft, and flanked to each side by
Just before midnight, west of Savo, speed was dropped to eighteen knots. Gunnery officers could see the first of many flares burning brightly over Henderson Field. They began calculating the mathematical problems. At half past one, at a range of about ten miles, sixteen great fourteen-inch guns swiveled toward Henderson, gouts of flame gushed from their muzzles, and huge red blobs went arching through the blackness with the effect of strings of lighted boxcars rushing over a darkened hill.
Henderson Field became a sea of flame.
Fires and explosions were visible from the darkened bridges of the Japanese ships. Sailors cried out in glee and excitement. To Admiral Tanaka the battleships’ pyrotechnic display seemed to make the famous Ryogoku fireworks show a pale candle by comparison.4
Ashore the Americans were passing through an agony not to be repeated in World War II. It was a terror of the soul. It was as though the roar of colliding planets was exploding in their ears. Self-control was shattered, strong faces went flabby with fear, men sobbed aloud or whimpered, others put their pistols to their heads. It was not possible to pray.
It was possible only to crouch in gunpits to watch, through the rectangles of the gun embrasures, a horizon quivering with gun flashes, and to hear the soft, hollow thumping of the enemy’s salvos—
—to feel the dry constriction of the throat and to hear the great projectiles wailing hoarsely overhead,
and then to be thrown violently to earth and feel the stomach being kneaded as though by giant fingers of steel, while the eardrums rang and the head ached and the teeth were rattled by the perfection of sound, a monster clanging as though the vault of heaven were a huge casque of steel and giants were beating on it with sledgehammers, beating one-two, one-two-three, as the salvos came crashing in from two-gun turrets, three-gun turrets, and the flogged earth leaped and bucked and writhed.
It went on for an hour and a half, while Henderson Field’s airplanes were blown to bits or set afire or crushed by collapsing revetments, while Tanaka’s destroyers thickened the battleships’ fire with their own five-inch shells, while Marine shore-batteries on Guadalcanal and Tulagi bravely but vainly attempted to drive off an enemy far out of range, and while Lieutenant Montgomery’s bold little PT boats came racing out of Tulagi Harbor to challenge the intruders. Even the Japanese were astonished at these impetuous waterbugs charging at a pair of whales, although they recovered from their surprise in time to swing ponderously about and comb the American torpedo wakes. Then the destroyers turned on their searchlights and drove them off.
At dawn the Americans came sleepwalking from their holes to gaze in awe upon huge baseplates and shell fragments and to congratulate the Japanese gunner who had zeroed-in on a ration dump, making mince of cases of Spam to feed it, bit by detestable bit, to Guadalcanal’s populous colony of rats. Otherwise, there was nothing to laugh about.
Forty-one men—many of them pilots—had been killed, and a score more were wounded. Many men were buried alive and had to be dug out, among them Michael, Martin Clemens’s cook, who was pulled out of a collapsed dugout with his face streaming blood.
Henderson Field was a ruin. Smoke still curled skyward from burning fuel dumps, jagged sections of steel runway matting lay hundreds of yards away from cratered airstrips, part of the hospital was wrecked, tents flapped in the wind like canvas sieves, and there were great swathes cut in the coconut groves where the trees stood in serried rows of serrated stumps.
Neither of the runways was usable. General Geiger had had thirty-nine Dauntlesses operational when he went to bed the night before, but when he tumbled groggily to his feet on this morning of horror, he had only five. Sixteen of his Wildcats were twisted ruins, and every one of the twenty-four remaining required repairs. Most of the Avenger torpedo-bombers recently arrived were useless, and the Army aviators, whose P-400s and Airacobras were still usable, received this chilling briefing from a Marine colonel:
“We don’t know whether we’ll be able to hold the field or not. There’s a Japanese task force of destroyers, cruisers, and troop transports headed our way. We have enough gasoline left for one mission against them. Load your planes with bombs and go out with the dive-bombers and hit them. After the gas is gone, we’ll have to let the ground troops take over. Then your officers and men will attach yourselves to some infantry outfit.
“Good luck and good-by.”5
