Challenge for the Pacific

his big plane on one wing and raced for Henderson Field. The Zeros took turns raking his tail. Cram began roller- coastering, rising and diving, rising and diving. He came over the main strip with his ship wailing through a hundred holes. But he was going too fast to land. He made for Fighter One. He began letting down, while Marine antiaircraft gunners shot two Zeros off his tail.

Then a third came after him, just as Lieutenant Roger Haberman brought his smoking Wildcat down with lowered wheels.

Haberman shot the Zero off Cram’s tail and Blue Goose went plowing up the strip in a pancake landing. Cram and his crewmen emerged unscathed, only to hear Geiger bellow:

“Goddamit, Cram! I ought to court-martial you for deliberate destruction of government property!” Then Geiger strode into the Pagoda to write out a recommendation for a Navy Cross.

And so the “safest” run of the Tokyo Express was all but wrecked. The three beached ships would eventually be turned into charred and rusting skeletons; many of General Hyakutake’s reinforcements were lost and the remainder would have to complete the southern movement by barge, ravaged by American torpedo boats at night, scourged by their aircraft by day. In all, about 4500 men would reach Hyakutake in time for the big push. But he would not get all his supplies. Many of them were already burning and American destroyers would set other depots afire. As the day came to an end, three Japanese transports had been lost, in effect, and five Zeros and three Bettys shot down; against the loss of seven of Geiger’s aircraft.

It had been a memorable fifteenth of October, and tomorrow McFarland and the barge-towing convoy would arrive.

Early in the morning of October 15 the Japanese fleet reached a station two hundred miles north of Guadalcanal. Admiral Kondo took personal command of heavy cruisers Myoko and Maya and led them toward The Slot. Meanwhile, Nagumo’s carriers flew off scout planes to search for the American fleet. They found no carriers, but at ten o’clock in the morning they reported sighting a force of one cruiser, two destroyers, and two transports at a point a hundred miles south of Guadalcanal.

Nagumo decided to attack, even though the target was three hundred miles distant. Twenty-seven Vals and Kates roared aloft from Zuikaku, speeding toward what was in actuality the barge-towing convoy from Espiritu.

But they would find only two targets.

Nagumo’s scout plane had already made transports Alchiba and Bellatrix, destroyer Nicholas and PT-tender Jamestown conclude that it would be wise to withdraw. Fleet-tug Vireo and destroyer Meredith plowed on. Shortly before eleven they beat off a two-plane attack. Then they received word that enemy ships were close by, and they, also, decided to reverse course.

But Vireo moved too slowly, and so, Meredith ordered her abandoned and prepared to sink her with torpedoes—just as Nagumo’s warbirds came tumbling out of the sky.

They fell on Meredith.

Bombed, torpedoed, and machine-gunned, the destroyer sank almost instantly. Her men took to the life rafts. One raftful succeeded in boarding drifting Vireo. But the others could not and these rafts became floating horrors. Wounded and dreadfully burned sailors lay in the boiling sun across the gratings while salt water washed across their open cuts and burned bodies. Other men clung to the lifelines, waiting for someone aboard to die so that they could take his place.

The sharks found them. They dragged the men on the lifelines under. One great scaly beast flipped onto a raft and tore a chunk of flesh from a dying man’s thigh before his horrified comrades could seize the flopping creature by the tail and heave it back into the sea again.

After three days and three nights of agony unrivaled, eighty-eight survivors of Vireo and Meredith were eventually rescued by destroyers. But 236 were not.

Thus did the Navy suffer to keep the Marines and soldiers on Guadalcanal alive and fighting.

They were out in the Bay again.

Heavies Myoko and Maya were there, with Admiral Kondo in command, and ordeal was renewed and red again.

Parading within less than five miles of the island, Kondo’s cruisers fired a crushing 1500 rounds of eight-inch shell into the American perimeter.

In the morning, General Geiger counted fifteen ruined Wildcats. His Cactus Air Force numbered only twenty- seven planes, and it was again out of gasoline.

Henderson Field’s only hope now rested in Lieutenant Colonel Harold (“Indian Joe”) Bauer’s fighter squadron at Espiritu Santo, alerted for movement north, and in McFarland, still bending it on for Iron Bottom Bay.

“I am your Commander-in-Chief, you are my strong right arms. Whether I shall adequately fulfill my duty to the Ancestors depends upon your fidelity… If you unite with me, our courage and power shall illuminate the whole earth.”

Tears streaming down their cheeks, the men of the Sendai Division stood outside the encampment at Kukumbona, their faces toward the Emperor and their ears filled with the familiar words of the Imperial Rescript.

They were marching against the Americans.

On this morning of October 16, while Roy Geiger contemplated the ruins of his air force, seven thousand of them prepared to march through the jungle to an assembly area south of Henderson Field.

As always, General Maruyama was supremely confident. Captain Oda and his engineers had sent back encouraging reports on the progress of the Maruyama Road. The Sendai should easily be in place by “X Day,” now tentatively set for October 22. So the general ordered his men to take only five days’ rations.

Then, stroking his thin line of supercilious mustache, he suggested to General Hyakutake that the appropriate place to receive the surrender of the American commander was at the mouth of the Matanikau River.

After which, at noon of October 16, he set out along the Maruyama Road.

A few hours later his rear guard heard the welcome sound of Japanese aerial bombs falling on American ships in Iron Bottom Bay.

McFarland got to Guadalcanal ahead of Joe Bauer’s fliers.

A floating gasoline dump and ammunition depot, the brave little ship entered the Bay on the morning of October 16. Her crew and her skipper, Lieutenant Commander John Alderman, were understandably eager to unload, and they quickly began lowering drums over the side into waiting lighters while dropping a fuel line to a barge which had come alongside.

Commander Alderman and his crew were not quite so eager to take aboard their return cargo: 160 hospital patients, half of whom were those exhausted and battle-fatigued men who were still, in those days, ungraciously described as “war neurotics.”

At five o’clock Alderman sighted a periscope and decided to get under way. He did, with the gasoline barge still alongside taking on fuel.

Some time later Colonel Bauer’s squadron of nineteen Wildcats, plus seven Dauntlesses, came winging overhead. They came in with fuel tanks almost empty, and they began lowering quickly down for a landing. Bauer would come in last.

And then nine Japanese dive-bombers fell without warning on McFarland.

Alderman rang up full speed and ordered the barge cast off. She was, in time to be holed and sunk.

Then an enemy bomb burst among the depth charges on McFarland’s fantail. Huge explosions racked the ship. The neurotics panicked. They stampeded through the passageways and tried to tear