On October 9 the coastwatchers up north sent word of a great invasion force making up in Rabaul. Vandegrift was forced to shave his ambitions. Even though Whaling’s men had begun to make good progress seaward that day and Edson was across the Matanikau, Vandegrift decided that he would not strike at Kukumbona but be content with battering the enemy in the Point Cruz-Matanikau Village area before withdrawing to the east bank of the river and fortifying it.
It was then that the First Battalion, Seventh, was ordered out on reconnaissance again.
Lewis Burwell Puller was the battalion commander’s full name, but he was simply “Chesty” to his men. This was the famous Chesty Puller who had already blooded his battalion in the Matanikau defeat and who had chafed at the order to withdraw. He was a man of only five feet six inches in height, but with an enormous rib cage stuck on a pair of matchstick legs—the barrel chest crowned by a great commanding head with strong outthrust jaw. At forty- four Puller was only a “light” colonel, for in him there was none of the guile that slips up the ladder of promotion. Chesty had become notorious among brother officers for insisting that regimental staffs were too large and the distance between command posts and front lines was too long. When he came to Guadalcanal leading the First Battalion, Seventh, he was already legendary for battles which had won him two Navy Crosses and for a salty tongue which had won him the affection of his men. Asked why Nicaragua patrols were slow, he had snapped: “Because of the officer’s bed roll!” Shown his first flame-thrower, he had growled: “Where do you fit the bayonet on it?” Flunked out of Pensacola flying school on the unique report, “Glides too flat, skids on turns, climbs too fast,” he had merely been relieved that he might return to the riflemen where “all the fightin’s on foot.”
And now he was on foot again during the afternoon of October 9, leading his battalion over a series of grassy ridges west of the Matanikau near the coast. Atop a high ridge Puller saw that a ravine below him was swarming with Japanese. At the same moment he received orders to scout the coastal road toward Kukumbona and to avoid combat. He asked and obtained permission to stay where he was for he had found a whole battalion under his guns.
The ravine became a slaughter-pen.
Marine mortar shells fell with dreadful accuracy. Death swept suddenly and invisibly among those Japanese, devastating them. They swarmed blindly up the hill against Puller’s men. They were raked with small arms. They fled back down into the ravine, rolling down the slope, sprinting in terror through that hell of mortar fire and up the side of an opposing ridge, only to re-emerge on the crest in full view of Puller’s Marines. They were riddled.
Again they fled down into the ravine, again they tried to come up through Puller’s men again, were halted, turned, and sent through the reverse gantlet once more—and now the carnage was multiplied by the aerial bombs and artillery shells which Chesty Puller had called down into the ravine.
There were few Japanese who survived.
Seven hundred fell in that awful trap, and Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama’s attempt to seize the east bank of the Matanikau met with disaster. For there were roughly 200 more casualties inflicted on the 4th Regiment as the converging Whaling and Edson forces drove briskly into Point Cruz-Matanikau Village. The 4th was shattered and now Nakaguma’s men had terrifying tales of their own to spread among comrades sailing south to the place they would call Death Island.
Marines withdrawing east from the river, bringing back their 65 dead and 125 wounded, heard the welcome roar of massed motors overhead. Major Leonard (Duke) Davis was leading Squadron 121 to the Cactus Shivaree.
Riding the cockpit of one of those 20 Wildcats was a cigar-smoking, blunt-featured, high-spirited Marine captain by the name of Joseph Jacob Foss.
12
It was clear that the Matanikau had eclipsed the Tenaru in importance. The Japanese no longer landed on eastern Guadalcanal but came ashore in the west. It was vital that the Marines’ western boundary be extended to the east bank of the Matanikau River to stop the inevitable thrust from the west.
Because he had not enough men to hold all the river line, Vandegrift decided to defend the two main crossings—at the mouth of the river and at the upriver crossing which the Marines called Nippon Bridge from the Japanese characters
The river block became a shallow horseshoe. Fortifications at the mouth “refused” the right flank, that is, exposed it in a backward curve to the beach behind it. Then the line ran slightly more than 2,000 yards along the river past Nippon Bridge to refuse the left flank, which was drawn back across a ridge and down into the jungle and allowed to dangle there.
Vandegrift knew it was possible to cross the river at other points farther inland than Nippon Bridge. But he was making shift with what he had. He could spare two battalions. The Third Battalion, Seventh, went in line on the left and the Third Battalion, First, on the right. They could be reinforced and supplied along the coastal road connecting them with the original perimeter still held intact a few miles back east. Artillery was placed in support.
All this was done in the few days following the victory gained across the Matanikau October 7-9, done while that big invasion force of which the coastwatchers had sent warning was sailing down The Slot.
The Japanese ships were bringing Pistol Pete to Guadalcanal.
This was the collective nickname which the Marines were to bestow on those 150-millimeter howitzers with which General Maruyama hoped to chew up the runway at Henderson Field, as well as to batter the American lines.
On October 10 four of these big guns went aboard a seaplane tender at Rabaul.
Next day they sailed south in that task force which included destroyer-transports bringing more of the Sendai Division to Guadalcanal, cargo ships, a protecting screen of destroyers and a division of cruisers to shell Henderson Field while guns, men and supplies were being put ashore.
Waiting for them off Cape Esperance was Rear Admiral Norman Scott with four cruisers and five destroyers of his own.
Again the island of Guadalcanal was quivering like a live thing. Once more the night glowed with the glare of burning ships while concussions rolled unimpeded over blackly gleaming water. Marines ashore were throwing aside ponchos and blankets and rushing for their holes in frantic, jostling groups. And Alexander Vandegrift was entering his headquarters tent to sit in battle vigil beneath the light of a single blue electric bulb.
The Battle of Cape Esperance had begun.
Pistol Pete and the bombardment force coming down had collided with Rear Admiral Norman Scott’s cruisers and destroyers coming up. And Scott “crossed the T.” He swung wide of western Guadalcanal to cover the Savo Island water gate and at midnight his ships were standing broadside to the Japanese, all their guns swiveled and trained starboard upon the perpendicular of an enemy column “now visible to the naked eye.
Heavy
But a dozen miles west to Kukumbona, General Maruyama gave orders for the emplacement of four big guns with their tractors. If many ships and men had not survived the crossing of the T—Pistol Pete had.
