If the Japanese patrol planes which came over at night and were called Washing-Machine Charley for the uneven beat of their motors failed to kill many of these pilots, they succeeded in keeping them awake. They circled the night sky for hours. When their gas was low and the patience of their victims nearly exhausted, they dropped their eggs and sauntered home.
To be replaced by another Charley, or far, far worse, to be supplanted by Louie the Louse. This was the name for all those scouting aircraft whose swaying flares heralded the arrival of the Tokyo Express off Guadalcanal. Louie’s droning motors and his flares were all the warning given. Then the sea-lying darkness flashed and the great naval shells wailed overhead and these pilots who were the very targets of the Japanese ships were flung gasping out of their cots while the roaring air squeezed their bodies like rubber dolls in the hand of a giant.
Only after the warships were gone, could the fliers of the Bastard Air Force sleep.
But they would rise again at dawn, greet the first light with scalding hot coffee to dissolve the rice lying in the belly like stones—greet it with the barely comprehended news of more men killed, more men wounded, and the wreckage of their tiny air force strewn up and down their mangled airstrip.
Still they flew on, taking to the skies in patched-up aircraft, flying wing-to-wing in that technique of fighting by pairs which they would bring to perfection. Within a week of their arrival, some of them were aces. By August 30, Major John Smith had five little red balls painted on his Wildcat fighter. By nightfall, there were four more.
August 30 was one of those rare days when only the Zeros came down to strike at Henderson Field. Major Smith shot one of them to earth quickly, coming in on the enemy pilot’s rear and killing him in his cockpit before he knew he was under attack. Then Smith banked toward a Zero attacking his wingman. The red ball flashed full in Smith’s sights. He pressed the button. The Zero flamed and crashed. Now a third Japanese fighter was coming up under Smith. His bullets were sewing stitches up and down his fuselage. Smith nosed over. He came at the Japanese head-on. A bullet struck Smith’s windshield and whined past his ear. He kept his thumb on the button. The Zero was coming apart in chunks. The two planes roared toward collision. They tore past each other not 15 feet apart.
Over his shoulder Smith could see the Zero spinning down, and its pilot bailing out. Then there was no time to watch for the flowering of the parachute, for Smith, running low on gas, had only a few rounds of bullets left for those six wing guns and here he was coming down on top of a fourth Zero hedge-hopping along the shore.
Smith skimmed over the coconuts with all guns blazing and the Zero fell into the sea in flames.
So it went into September, while the Bastard Air Force’s collective total climbed toward 100, while its fighters also flew the cover under which Major General Vandegrift withdrew the Raiders and other troops from Tulagi to meet a fresh emergency.
The Kawaguchis had slipped into eastern Guadalcanal by night barge and were marching through the jungle toward the gaps behind Henderson Field.
8
Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi had brought his dress whites to Guadalcanal with him. He had them in a trunk when his brigade landed at the village of Tasimboko, a mile or so west of the same Taivu area where Colonel Ichiki had landed. Kawaguchi had stowed the whites among his brigade’s supplies at Tasimboko against that day when, with the Rising Sun again waving above the island airfield, with his silk uniform facings gleaming in the sun, his braided cap clapped over his balding head, his handlebar mustache ends twisted briskly to attention, he would turn his face toward the Emperor and the photographers.
That had been September 6. Next day, after posting a rear guard of about company strength in Tasimboko, General Kawaguchi strode off into the jungle in khakis, confident that his men had landed undetected, assured that Japanese air and sea power would keep the Americans engaged until he had slipped into position to spring his surprise attack the night of September 12. By that time, too, his rear-guard would have joined him with his supplies, his remaining guns, and, of course, the whites.
Red Mike Edson and about 850 Raiders came ashore near Tasimboko at dawn of September 8. They landed a mile west of the village supported by the shelling of destroyer-transports and the strafing of Army P-400’s. They turned right to the village, dueled briefly with gunners of Kawaguchi’s rear-guard —and then swept through Tasimboko on the heels of an enemy broken on the anvil of encirclement. They killed 27 Japanese at a loss of two of their own killed, six wounded—and now they had the village.
They broke into a beer warehouse only to find that the last bottle had been issued the day before. Whereupon they burned the warehouse down and the village with it. They towed a battery of Kawaguchi’s guns into the sea, hurling the breech blocks into the water. They blew up supplies. They committed those unspeakable movements of spoliation upon the food which caused one Japanese diarist to write: “It is maddening to be the recipient of these insulting attacks by American forces.” And then Red Mike Edson’s Raiders found the fancy pants of Kiyotake Kawaguchi and carried them back to the airfield in triumph. Two days later they were climbing a ridge to plug one of the gaps behind Henderson Field.
That was where they were on the night of September 12 when Kiyotake Kawaguchi came furiously against Henderson Field, doubly determined to save his face, now that he had lost his pants.
9
Bald but for its kunai grass, nameless and bumpy, the ridge rose like a long thin island from the dark green sea of the jungle. It lay a short mile south of Henderson Field. It stretched perhaps a thousand yards on a northwest-southeast slant. It could be bombed and shelled, it could be easily approached, it could be turned, be overrun, cut off—but whoever held the ridge commanded Henderson Field, and whoever held the airfield held Guadalcanal.
It was here that Red Mike Edson brought his Marines on September 10, after General Vandegrift received reports which told him that the payoff battle was impending.
To the east of the Tenaru, patrols had found emplacements of Japanese mountain guns. They were carefully sighted in on the Marines’ defenses and thoughtfully smeared with grease against the corrosion of the jungle. They were left unguarded or only protected by a single soldier. But Vandegrift had learned not to be baffled by the enemy’s ways. He could judge now between what mattered and what seemed to matter. It mattered that these guns were new, not that they were undefended; that their sentries were well fed and well equipped, not that they were solitary. It mattered that the dump which Edson had destroyed at Tasimboko had been large, not that it was lightly guarded. It mattered that the Melanesian natives now swarming to the sanctuary of his perimeter were terribly frightened, not that their estimates of Japanese numbers were as usual unreliable; that they babbled of gun-point forced labor on a “tunnel” southwest through the jungle, not that they had actually seen or had not seen the torture and murder of missionary priests and nuns.
Vandegrift could now judge with certainty that the enemy had returned to Guadalcanal in force, that he was heavily armed, that he had lost his supplies and must therefore attack quickly, that he had disappeared to the southwest and was probably looking for a route to the airfield through one of the gaps behind it. That was why, on the tenth, Vandegrift sent Edson up to that ridge to plug the biggest gap. Also on the tenth, Vandegrift took the mounting fury of Japanese aerial bombardment to be one of the surest signs of approaching battle. But then, having judged the situation, he could not act.
He could not maneuver, for he had only a single battalion in reserve. He could not reinforce Edson or plug other gaps, for his specialists, truck drivers, pioneers and amtrack men had already been formed into rifle battalions and sent to hold isolated strong points. Nor dared he strengthen the ridge by weakening other points already spread disastrously thin and held by troops already melting away with malaria.
Next day, the eleventh, there was help. Twenty-four Navy fighters flew into Henderson Field, and rarely before had sailors been so warmly welcomed by Marines. There had been 46 Japanese bombers and fighters over the airfield that day and the Marines were down to 11 planes.
