Challenge for the Pacific

there. Both admirals looked at each other, to say with one voice: “Let’s turn around.”⁷

On the bridge of his destroyer Amatsukaze—the ship whose men made such cruel sport with rats and falcons—Commander Tameichi Hara saw Shokaku blink the signal: “All ships turn 180 degrees to starboard!”

Nagumo’s carriers were swinging north again, fearing a concentrated air raid which never came. But this second turnaround would work to their advantage. With dawn of October 26 they would not be where Admiral Kinkaid expected them to be.

With that dawn of October 26, while Sergeant Mitchell Paige raced the enemy for a machine gun, an enemy force in company strength captured a vital ridge between Paige and Puller. They set up machine guns on it and began raking the Marine flank.

Major Odell (Tex) Conoley could see vapor rising from the enemy guns as the jungle water on the barrels was condensed by hot steel. Conoley saw that the enemy’s penetration could be expanded to a breakthrough. He rounded up a party of bandsmen who were serving as litter-bearers, a trio of wiremen, two runners, and three or four cooks, and charged.

There were seventeen of them in all, but they went up hurling grenades and they drove the Japanese off the ridge. Then Conoley called for mortars to lay a curtain of steel between him and the enemy while he consolidated his position, and awaited reinforcements.

They arrived to be greeted by a strutting cook who boasted of having brained an enemy officer.

“What’dja do?” a rifleman jeered. “Hit him with one of yer own pancakes?”

…Mitchell Paige reached the gun first.

He dove for it, squeezed the trigger, and killed the crawling Japanese.

A storm of bullets fell on Paige, kicking up spurts of dust. Paige fired back. Stat, Reilly, and Jonjeck ran to him with belts of ammunition. Stat fell with a bullet in his belly. Reilly went down kicking, almost knocking Paige off his gun, and Jonjeck came in with a belt and a bullet in his shoulder. Jonjeck bent to feed the belt into the gun, and Paige saw a piece of flesh go flying off his neck.

“Get the hell back!” Paige yelled.

Jonjeck shook his head. Paige hit him in the jaw, and Jonjeck left.

Paige moved the gun back and forth to avoid enemy grenades. He saw about thirty men rise in the tall grass below him. One of them put binoculars to his eyes and waved his hand for a charge.

Paige fired a long burst.

The enemy vanished.

Paige called to his riflemen. He slung two belts of ammunition across his shoulders, unclamped his gun, cradled the searing-hot water jacket in his arm, and went down the ridge yelling, “Let’s go!”

“Ya-hoo!” the Marines yelled. “Yaaaa-ho!”

And they went racing down the hill after the dispersing enemy. The officer with the glasses popped up out of the grass and Paige disemboweled him with a burst, and then he and his Marines had burst into the jungle.

It was silent and empty.

The enemy was gone. The battle of Henderson Field was over. General Maruyama had already ordered a full retreat. Colonel Shoji was taking the remnant of the Sendai right wing to the east, Maruyama was leading the reeling left wing to the west. Marine bulldozers were already clanking toward the front to gouge out mass graves in which to inter the reeking carcasses of 2500 dead, Colonel Furumiya and his companions lay despairing in the bush, and Mitchell Paige and his men were trudging slowly back to the ridge.

They sat down wearily. Paige felt the sweat drying coldly on his body. He watched vapor rising from his machine-gun jacket. He felt a burning sensation in his left arm. He looked down. From fingertips to forearm a long white blister was forming, swelling as thick as a rope to mark the place where flesh had held hot steel.

Out in the Bay behind him, submarine Amberjack had at last surfaced, had finally delivered her cargo of fuel, and was now sailing eagerly away to Australia.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

BATTLES on land, sometimes entire campaigns, often have depended upon the outcome of a naval battle; but seldom has a great fight been fought at sea because of what happened ashore.

Yet, the battle of Henderson Field was directly responsible for the savage carrier conflict called The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

Successive postponements of the 17th Army’s major assault on Guadalcanal had not only cost the Japanese the services of carrier Hiyo but had given the Americans time to double their carrier forces; and carrier power varies as the square: two carriers are four times as powerful as one. General Maruyama’s premature message of victory had also left Admiral Yamamoto teetering on a tightrope of indecision and had very nearly sent his carriers tearing into the trap which Admiral Halsey had planned for them.

But Admiral Nagumo’s two turnarounds had kept him well north of Hornet and Enterprise as they slanted northwestward from their run around the Santa Cruz Islands. Throughout the night of October 25–26, while the Sendai Division made rendezvous with ruin, the two American flattops raced along an aggressive northwestward course toward the enemy. Hornet had a deckload of aircraft ready for a moonlight strike, all of the ships were alerted for immediate action—but the Japanese carriers were never found.

Nagumo had been frightened into his second and most fortuitous turnaround by the fruitless attack on Zuikaku. After he had reversed course, the Vanguard Group of battleships and cruisers had also turned north.

Shortly before three o’clock in the morning of October 26, thirteen scouts went zooming aloft from the Japanese carrier decks. A few minutes later the entire fleet—Vanguard gunfire ships, Nagumo’s three carriers, and Admiral Kakuta in Junyo about 130 miles to the north—turned south again.

About five o’clock on the bridge of Amatsukaze Commander Hara heard his radio- room voice tube come to life with the message: “Shokaku scout plane reports a large enemy force at KH17. Force consists of one Saratoga-class carrier and fifteen other ships heading northwestward.”¹ Commander Hara gasped. KH17 was an area 210 miles away on a bearing slightly to the left. The Americans were not directly ahead, or even to the right between the Japanese and the Solomons, as Nagumo’s officers expected. They were to the left. Without those two turnarounds and runs north, the Japanese would have been far to the south and the Americans would have been in behind them.

On Shokaku’s flag bridge, the white-gloved Nagumo grinned broadly. He ordered immediate strikes. Planes began roaring down the decks. To the rear, Admiral Kakuta grimaced angrily to discover the enemy was 330 miles away. He rang up top speed and big Junyo’s boilers built her speed to twenty-six knots in a record ten minutes. Junyo even sprang ahead of her destroyers, much to their astonishment, while Kakuta ordered a strike readied. Although he was far away from the enemy, his pilots could return to the closer Zuikaku or Shokaku. And by the time he was prepared to launch a second strike, he would be much closer.

Ahead of him, forty dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers escorted by twenty-seven Zeros were airborne and burning up the miles between Nagumo’s three carriers and the Americans to the south.

ATTACK. REPEAT, ATTACK.

It was only three words, but it was in the style characteristic of Bull Halsey, and it had the effect of opening the sleep-gummed eyes of sailors gulping pre-dawn breakfast on the American ships, of electrifying pilots being briefed on carrier decks, and of making everyone in Kinkaid’s force aware that today there would be a battle.