somersaulted through the night. It fell hissing into the antitank dugout and filled it with roaring light and death. Riflemen jumped into the dugout and the 37 glowed red again.
The Ichiki charge rose in fury. Squad after squad, platoon after platoon, burst from the covering darkness of the coconut grove to dash against the line. They broke it. They came in on holes and gunpits, running low with bayoneted rifles outthrust for the kill. At a gap in the leftward wire, three Japanese rushed for big Corporal Dean Wilson in his foxhole.
Wilson swung his BAR toward them. It jammed. The Japanese rushed onward, screaming “Marine you die!” One of them drove downward for the thrust. Wilson seized his machete and slashed. The man sank to the ground, his entrails slipping through his clutching fingers. The others slowed. Wilson leaped from his hole and attacked, hacking them to death with his thick-bladed knife.
There was a Japanese inside Corporal Johnny Shea’s hole. His bayonet was into Shea’s leg, out again, in again—out and slashing upward. Shea kicked with his right foot, slamming the Japanese against the foxhole side while he yanked desperately at the bolt of his jammed tommy gun. The bolt snicked free and Shea shot his assailant to death.
There were hurrying squat shapes swarming around the foxhole where Lieutenant McLanahan lay with wounds in both arms, in his legs, in his buttocks—loading rifles and clearing the jammed weapons of those men who could still fire.
There were tall shapes mingling with the short ones, figures that closed, merged, became as one grotesquely whirling hybrid of struggling limbs, for now the battle had become that rarity of modern war, the close- in fight of clubbed rifles and thrusting blades, of fists and knees and gouging thumbs. Now there were more tall shapes than short ones, for Pollock had thrown in a reserve platoon, and the guttural cries of “Banzai!” were growing fainter beneath the wild keening of the battle, the crackling of rifles, the hammering of machine guns, the gargling of the automatics, and the jumping
The Ichikis were stumbling now over heaps of slain comrades strewn along the sandbar. They were themselves slumping into loose ungainly death, for the Marine fire had been multiplied from upriver where the guns had been swung seaward and trained on the sandspit. The last of the Ichikis were trapped. Marine mortars had drawn a curtain of fire behind them. Bullets ahead, shell-bursts behind—forward or backward was to die.
Some chose the river, where American bullets still sought and found them and where crocodiles found them in the morning. Some chose to run the gantlet of guns along the shore, peeling off to their right at the barbed wire, dashing through the surf only to be dropped where the incoming tide would roll their bodies and cover them with sand. Others chose the sea. They plunged into the water. They tried to swim back to the east, but it was now dawn and their bobbing heads were visible targets for those Marine riflemen who had left their pits and had thrown themselves flat to fire from the prone position.
“Line ‘em up and squeeze ‘em off!” roared Pollock, striding among his men. “Line ‘em up and squeeze ‘em off!”
The remainder of Colonel Ichiki’s elite was being wiped out within the coconuts.
“Cease fire!” came the order, up and down the line. “Hold your fire, First Battalion coming through!”
Over the river, green-clad men were flitting through the coconuts. The First Battalion, First, had crossed the Tenaru upriver and had fanned out into a flanking skirmish line. Now they were working seaward.
Downstream, Marine tanks rolled slowly over the sandspit. They reached the coconut grove and turned right.
By nightfall more than 700 Japanese bodies had been counted. There were 34 dead Marines and 75 wounded. The surviving Japanese had sought the treacherous sanctuary of the jungle, there to endure hunger, black nights and the slow dissolution of the rain forest. They wandered leaderless, for Colonel Kiyono Ichiki had already tasted “the fruits of victory.”
He burned his colors and shot himself through the head.
7
In all the Imperial Army there was no commander who could surpass Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutate in the peculiar Japanese custom of celebrating defeat with a loud cry of victory. General Hyakutate knew all those euphemisms whereby a setback became “a valiant advance” or the report of a rout reached the ears of the Emperor as “a glorious withdrawal of unshaken discipline.”
But the affair of the Ichikis was unique. There was no euphemism at hand to describe annihilation. Undaunted, General Hyakutate sent Tokyo this message: “The attack of the Ichiki Detachment was not entirely successful.” Then he drew up a plan for another attempt at recapturing Guadalcanal.
This time he would use the surviving rear-echelons of the Ichiki Battalion—around 1,100 men—together with the 6,000-man brigade commanded by Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi (the Japanese have no rank of brigadier general). This force would land on Guadalcanal supported by planes and ships of the Combined Fleet. The fact that it was still outnumbered by the 10,000 enemy troops to the south did not deter Hyakutate. He still refused to accept the Americans as worthy foemen. He believed the battle report that stated: “The American soldiers are extremely weak when they lack support of fire power. They easily raise their hands during battle and when wounded they give cries of pain.” So General Hyakutate ordered 5,000 Kawaguchis to join the remaining Ichikis on one of those nightly runs down The Slot which the Marines were already calling the Tokyo Express. He sent them south with the battle cry:
“Remember the Ichiki suicide!”
And they had to turn back.
On August 25, the day after the Japanese Combined Fleet met Admiral Fletcher’s carriers in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the Japanese convoy was sighted north of Guadalcanal by bombers from Henderson Field. A Dauntless piloted by Lieutenant Larry Baldinus dove down to plant an egg forward on the big escort cruiser,
Henderson Field, meanwhile, had withstood the aerial assaults which had been planned to make way for these troops. On August 24, the Marine fighter pilots shot down 11 Zero fighters and 10 bombers at a loss of three of their own planes. That date marked the beginning of the long epic defense of Guadalcanal’s skies, which was to match the stand being made on the ground. From August 24 onward, Marine fliers began shooting down Zeros and twin-engined Betty bombers at a rate of from six to eight kills for every one of their own men lost. They fought, of course, with the almost invariable assistance of Navy and Army airmen—but the Guadalcanal aerial war was in the main a Marine affair, fought by the self-styled Nameless Wonders of the Bastard Air Force. These men were galled almost nightly to hear the San Francisco radio speak of “Navy fighters” or “Army bombers” while only the enemy might know who rode the cockpits of “American aircraft” or “Allied planes.” And it was a Bastard Air Force, for if aerial combat is a gentleman’s war, if it is clean, quick and sporting to fight in the clouds with hot meals and soothing drinks and laundered bedsheets awaiting the survivors, this was not so on Guadalcanal. Here the fly-boys were like the foot-sloggers.
They lived next to Henderson Field, in the very center of the Japanese bull’s-eye. They rose an hour before dawn. If they cared to eat that common gruel of wormy rice and canned spam that passed for meals on Guadalcanal, they ate it standing up, spooning the detestable slop out of borrowed mess gear. They gulped hot black coffee from canteen cups while bumping jeeps drove them through the darkness to the airstrip, where they warmed up planes that had to be towed from revetments by tractor. Then it was dawn and they were roaring aloft, climbing high, high in the skies, sucking on oxygen. They went to battle in a sort of floating world where the only sounds were the roaring of their own motors and the hammering of their guns; where all the sights were the blind white mists of engulfing clouds, the sudden pain of reappearing sunlight bursting in the eyeballs, the swift dread glimpse of the red balls streaking by.
