The day before, he had led his battalion of Marines in the western push against Gavaga while Moore’s soldiers attacked from the south and Hanneken hit from the west. The enemy had replied with an artillery barrage.
Fragments from an exploding shell tore into Puller’s lower body and his legs. He was knocked flat. Bleeding freely, he called to a nearby Marine.
“Call headquarters, old man.”
“I can’t, sir. The line’s been cut.”13
Puller staggered erect to help repair the break, and a sniper shot him twice in the arm. Puller sank to the ground again. His men placed him on a poncho, dug a foxhole and lowered him gently into it. He spent the night there. In the morning a corpsman came to tie an evacuation tag to Puller’s uniform. Puller snatched it away, snarling:
“Go label a bottle with that tag! I can go under my own power.”14
Puller arose unsteadily and limped a thousand yards down the trail to the beach. He sank to the ground again. To his agonized dismay, he could not, in front of his men, go farther. His proud spirit could no longer goad his weakening flesh, and he had to crawl into the landing boat.
Sailing down the coast in a fog of pain, he could hear the firing signaling the beginning of the end for the enemy at Gavaga.
On November 9—while Chesty Puller was taken by jeep to the primitive hospital inside the perimeter— Admiral Halsey held a press conference. A newsman asked how long he thought the Japanese would continue to fight.
“How long can they take it?” Halsey snapped.15
Another reporter asked the admiral how he proposed to conquer.
“Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs,”16 he shot back.
Later, Halsey decorated some of Vandegrift’s officers and men. He met the general’s staff, and also Martin Clemens. Turning to drive to the runway, Halsey said: “Well, Clemens, you carry on. We’ve got to beat these goddamed little yellow bastards.”17
At the airfield, Halsey said farewell with twinkling eyes. “Vandegrift,” he said, “don’t you do a thing to that cook.”18
Then he was gone, and a few hours later Archer Vandegrift had resumed the attack in the west.
The arrival of the Eighth Marines under Colonel Hall Jeschke had prompted Vandegrift to renew his push toward Kukumbona. He sent this force to join Arthur holding the blocking position with his own Second Marines and a battalion of the 164th.
But the attack, begun in the afternoon, bogged down in a furious rainfall.
Next day the sun was blazing, and the Eighth Marines, like all new arrivals on Guadalcanal, wilted in its heat.
On the following day the sun shone even more fiercely. Although it did not deter the veteran units at Gavaga Creek—who finally reduced the enemy pocket, killing 350 Japanese at a loss of forty Americans dead and 120 wounded—the heat again slowed Colonel Arthur’s advance. So did General Hyakutake’s well-entrenched, stubborn, and enlarged forces.
By mid-afternoon only four hundred yards had been gained. By that time also, General Vandegrift had been informed by Admiral Halsey that a great fleet had sailed from Truk. Presumably, it was going to join other large forces gathering at Rabaul and in the Shortlands.
Later that day, two furious air raids signaled the end of the aerial doldrums and underlined Halsey’s warning.
Once again Archer Vandegrift was forced to shift from an offensive to a defensive stance. He recalled his troops from both fronts. He strengthened his lines. He tried to conceal his apprehension, but with little success. Anyone who had been on Guadalcanal long enough could read the signs. They knew—at Henderson Field, along the beaches and the riverbanks, atop the ridges and down in the gloom of the jungle—they knew as they had always known that the breaking point had to be reached some time.
And this was it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
FOR THE first time since the Japanese garrison on Tulagi had sent its last, heartbreaking message, “Praying for everlasting victory,” Japan’s Army and Navy had drawn up a plan that was concentrated rather than dispersed, detailed rather than complicated.
Admiral Yamamoto had placed Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo in command of an armada of two aircraft carriers, four battleships, eleven cruisers, forty-nine destroyers, eleven transports, and 14,000 men.
The troops were to augment General Hyakutake’s 17th Army, which, in mid-November, at last outnumbered Vandegrift’s forces by 30,000 to 23,000. Some 3000 of the reinforcements comprised a Combined Naval Landing Force, while the remaining 11,000 formed the main body of the 38th Division.
They were to land on the morning of November 13, after Henderson Field had been bombarded night and day. The first barrage was to be delivered on the night of November 12–13 by Vice-Admiral Hiroaki Abe with battleships
Throughout this operation, Admiral Kondo with carriers
Thus the major assault-and-landing plan, simplified at last, with the knockout blow to be delivered “all at once, in big ships,” as Gunichi Mikawa had argued in that late August of long ago. And among its details, finally, was the destruction of the Allied coast-watching network on Bougainville.
Japan now knew to what disastrous degree her movements of ships and aircraft had been made known to the Americans. Because she did, aircraft from Rabaul or New Ireland rarely flew above The Slot, now, and ships sailed south on three different routes.
Nevertheless, coastwatchers continued to operate close to fields such as Buin and it was very difficult to conceal the gathering of a great armada from those numerous native scouts who, as the Japanese also now realized, were not harmless “civilians” in lap-laps but rather very dangerous enemy spies. Since trapping the scouts themselves was obviously impossible, or at least impractical, the Japanese decided to strike at the organizing brains behind them.
Jack Read in the north of Bougainville and Paul Mason in the south at Buin were to be caught and killed.
Hunting dogs were shipped into Buin and kept there in a wire cage while a patrol of a hundred soldiers was brought up from the island’s southern tip at Kahili.
Mason’s scouts quickly discovered the dogs, and Mason signaled their location to the Americans. A Catalina flew over Buin and dropped a bomb.
“Killed the lot,” Mason signaled cheerfully, before departing Buin for the towering green-black mountains that ran down Bougainville’s north-south spine. After him came the Japanese patrol. Between the two moved the ever- faithful scouts, reporting every enemy movement or sending the patrol panting up the wrong slopes. Exhausted, convinced that no effete westerner could survive in such horrible terrain, the Japanese withdrew.
Paul Mason returned to his hideout in Buin. He resumed broadcasting with a report of the enemy’s failure. Then he sent this ominous message:
“At least 61 ships this area: 2
