Challenge for the Pacific

By seven o’clock in the morning, the Sendai had stopped coming.

Nearly a thousand of them had stopped living. They lay in sodden heaps outside and partly within the American wire. One column of Japanese dead lay opposite Captain Fuller’s antitank guns. They were in perfect formation, each man laying halfway atop the man in front of him—felled in a single scything sweep like a row of wooden soldiers.

Within the jungle, General Maruyama beheld his survivors: bands of dazed and hollow-eyed men stumbling woodenly back to their assembly areas. Nowhere could Maruyama find Colonel Furumiya. Obviously, the airfield was still American.

Masao Maruyama got off a message to General Hyakutake indicating that he was “having difficulty” capturing the field.

And then Dugout Sunday began.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

OCTOBER 25 was to be known as Dugout Sunday because most Americans on Guadalcanal sat out that reverberating sabbath below ground.

It was set in motion by Masao Maruyama’s premature paean of victory. By the time he had retracted it and admitted that Henderson Field was still in enemy hands, Admiral Mikawa had sent the Koli Detachment destroyers speeding down The Slot, while cruiser Yura and five destroyers went sweeping to the north to come around Florida Island and bombard Koli Point.

Flights of Bettys were bombed-up and fueled at Rabaul, and escorting Zeros at Buka and Buin stood at the ready with idly spinning propellers.

Admiral Yamamoto had also been electrified by Maruyama’s “Banzai!” He had ordered carrier Junyo under Admiral Kakuta to fly off planes to land on the airfield, notified Nagumo’s carriers to move south, and alerted Kondo’s battleships to steam south to destroy Admiral Lee’s battleship force and chew up the American supply line.

Then came the message suggesting that the airfield was not quite captured—to be followed in the afternoon by an outright admission of defeat—and the angrily perplexed Yamamoto ordered Kakuta to fly off bombing strikes instead, canceled the battleship attack, and left Nagumo more bewildered than ever.

And so, the Koli Detachment ships opened Dugout Sunday services, to the dismay of a very attentive audience in submarine Amberjack.

Amberjack entered Iron Bottom Bay at about daybreak. Her periscope lookouts could see the old four-stack destroyers Trever and Zane steaming out of Tulagi Harbor, to which they, too, had brought gasoline. Fleet-tug Seminole was moving slowly toward Lunga Point, carrying, of course, a load of gasoline for Henderson Field.

Amberjack’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander J. A. Bole, decided that Iron Bottom Bay was getting congested. He reversed course.

Thirty minutes later his periscope displayed three big Japanese destroyers racing into the Bay, hull-down, shelling Marine positions as they came. They were Akatsuki, Ikazuchi, and Shiratsuyo, and they carried the men of the Koli Detachment.

Amberjack could not risk her cargo by entering battle. She could do only one thing: she went down.

As she did, the Japanese destroyers spotted little Trever and Zane. They broke out battle signals, rang up flank speed, and swung around to a collision course with all guns firing. Trever and Zane fled, firing back with their little three-inchers. A Japanese shell exploded on Trever’s after gun, demolishing it and its crew. Trever swerved hard left and then right again, and ran into the shoals of a channel between Savo and Florida. Zane followed. Both these ancients were now rattling along at twenty-nine knots. Trever’s No. 2 boiler casing burned through. The Japanese closed.

And then three Wildcats came screaming down from the skies. They had somehow managed to take off from sodden, soupy Fighter One—their wheels throwing out arcs of spray as they thundered along, spinning as they rose—and then they were airborne and saw the enemy below about to finish off Trever and Zane. They had no bombs, only bullets, but they turned the Japanese destroyers around and sent them fleeing west.

Right into Seminole and Yippie 284 making with agonizing slowness for the sanctuary of Tulagi Harbor.

Akatsuki, Ikazuchi, and Shiratsuyo nearly rammed the little Americans, they were so close—and at point-blank range they needed only two minutes to put the Yippie under and turn Seminole into a floating holocaust.

Then the Japanese were in trouble. Marines with five-inch naval rifles opened up from Guadalcanal. They scored hits. Smoke poured skyward from the destroyers. Putting out smoke of their own to screen themselves, the Koli Detachment destroyers fled up The Slot.

Meanwhile, Yura and her five destroyers still swept around Florida. They intended to come around the island’s eastern tip, and swing south toward Koli Point. But an unarmed search plane spotted them as they approached Florida. At the Pagoda on Henderson Field, Yura and her steel brood were marked for action—once the field had dried.

Dugout Sunday was turning hot and clear.

Far to the north, Chuichi Nagumo’s ships were still taking on oil.

Nagumo was dozing in his cabin, when an orderly dashed in with a message from a patrol plane:

“I have shot down an enemy plane, apparently a scout.”¹

Nagumo leaped erect, shouting:

“Cut refueling! Turn the carriers around and head north!”²

Both the Nagumo trio of carriers and Admiral Kakuta in Junyo turned about and headed north at twenty knots.

Chuichi Nagumo had failed to turn his carriers away at Midway; but he was not going to make the same mistake at Guadalcanal.

The sun which warmed sailors of both fleets quickly dried the moldy uniforms of Chesty Puller’s soldiers and Marines at work refortifying their positions for the anticipated renewal of battle that night. By mid-morning, the sun was blistering hot. Its scorching rays shone with dissolving intensity upon the corpses lying outside the lines beneath buzzing, conical swarms of black flies. Already, these bodies were beginning to turn lemon yellow, to swell and burst like overripe melons; already the sticky-sweet smell of corrupting flesh rose sickening and overpowering in the nostrils of these sweating Americans.

At Henderson Field, ready pilots kept glancing nervously between the quickly drying airfield and the blue skies overhead, where carrier Zeros circled unmolested, radioing the good news to Rabaul that the deadly Wildcats were up to their hubcaps in mud and would not be airborne that day.

But the Japanese, also contending with bad weather, were not able to respond quickly. By the time sixteen Bettys and escorting Zeros came roaring in, Henderson Field had dried sufficiently to allow the Wildcats to scramble aloft. Captain Joe Foss and Lieutenant Jack Conger were among those who struck at the enemy formation. Foss shot down two of three Zeros destroyed in a flight of six. But then, his fifth plane riddled beneath him, he was forced to go down for another one. Going up again, he tore into the Zeros escorting a fresh contingent of enemy bombers. He shot down two more—and he dove for home with fifteen kills to his credit during the sixteen days he had been on Guadalcanal.

Jack Conger also shot down a Zero in the second attack. Banking, he went thundering after another. He