U.S.S.
Vandegrift told his story. The facts marched forth as gaunt and unpolished as his Marines. Halsey asked:
“Are we going to evacuate or hold?”
“I can hold,” Vandegrift said. “But I’ve got to have more active support than I’ve been getting.”
Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner was stung. He commanded the Amphibious Forces Pacific, and Kelly Turner could not accept that Marine rebuke without reply. He spoke quickly in the Navy’s defense. There were getting to be fewer transports and cargo ships, fewer warships to protect them. There were no sheltering bases at Guadalcanal, and the Solomons’ landlocked waters were too narrow for maneuver. There were enemy submarines.
Halsey heard him out. But he had made up his mind.
“All right,” he told Vandegrift. “Go on back. I’ll promise you everything I’ve got.”
Even as Vandegrift flew back to Guadalcanal, Lieutenant General Hyakutate had decided to press the attack on the Matanikau. His irritation had not been mollified by Maruyama’s nice touch about the surrender. The Navy had grown churlish. Kondo and Nagumo were badgering him: would soldiers never learn that ships sail on oil? The Combined Fleet could not remain much longer at sea. Hyakutate had better get on with it.
He did. On the afternoon of October 21, he ordered Pistol Pete to begin pounding the Third Battalion, First Marines, atop the ridges overlooking the sandbar at the rivermouth. With night, the tanks would roll.
But that afternoon Pistol Pete found himself in a fight with the five-inch rifles of the Third Marine Defense Battalion. Two of the Japanese 150’s were silenced, and the others were forced to change position.
When Colonel Nakaguma’s 4th Regiment came at the Marines that night with their tanks and their gobbling cries of death, the big howitzers joined the lighter ones to destroy the lead tank and send the remaining ten rumbling back into the jungle with the 4th’s infantrymen swarming after them.
The Japanese repulse was so swift, the flare-up so brief, that General Vandegrift considered the entire engagement a patrol action.
It had not been, of course, it had only been Colonel Oka again. Not ten minutes after the tanks had rolled, Lieutenant General Hyakutate had learned that Oka was twenty-four hours behind schedule. He not only had not gotten into position east of the river upstream, he hadn’t gotten over the river.
Hyakutate quickly called off the attack.
Next day the commander of the 17th Army arrived at the Matanikau front in a rage of command. He signaled Oka and told him that he had better get across the Matanikau and be prepared to attack the exposed left flank of the Marine line by the night of October 23. Men who malingered were to be dealt with ruthlessly.
The assault was going to be made the night of the twenty-third no matter what, and with any luck, it might just happen that Maruyama—from whom nothing had been heard since October 20—would strike at the same time.
But General Maruyama had not yet reached his point of attack on that black night of October 23, and Colonel Oka was still dragging his feet. Only Colonel Nakaguma attacked, and it would have been better for the Japanese cause if he had not. For Nakaguma was another of those Japanese officers who pressed home attacks that were no better than massed deathswarmings. They could not fight and run away, these commanders. They would not fight another day. They would look on death before defeat.
The 4th Regiment rushed into the massed fire of 10 batteries of Marine artillery, into the murderous interlocking fire of machine guns, rifles and automatic weapons. They were like moths, seeking to obliterate the light with their exploding bodies. They matched flesh against steel and were torn apart.
Only one of Nakaguma’s 10 medium tanks succeeded in crossing to the east or Marine bank. It held the tank company leader, Captain Maeda. It raced over the sandbar, rolled over the barbed wire, crushed a pillbox and swung right to come clanking down on a foxhole held by Private Joe Champagne.
Champagne ducked. He fumbled for his grenade. The tank’s underbelly blotted out the night. Champagne reached up, slipped the grenade into the tank’s treads. He huddled down again.
Captain Maeda’s tank sloughed around out of control. A Marine half-track rolled out on the sandbar. Its 75- millimeter rifle flashed. Maeda’s tank lurched. The half-track fired again.
A sheet of flame gushed from Maeda’s tank. The half-track had hit the ammunition locker and the tank was blown 20 yards into the sea, where it was finished off.
Now, one by one, Marine half-tracks rolled down to the sandbar and destroyed the remaining tanks.
The attack which had begun with dark was over by ten o’clock in the night. Morning revealed a hideous spectacle on that sandbar. Nothing moved among jagged coconut stumps, twisted blackened tanks, whole tops of trees lying in broken-headed ruin among the heaps of dead—nothing moved but the bloated crocodiles swimming lazily downstream.
14
The day after the 4th Regiment met
“The Regiment endeavored to accomplish the objective of diverting the enemy, but they seemed to be planning a firm defense of this region.”
It was not true, there was no defense on the left of the Marines opposite Nippon Bridge, and Lieutenant General Hyakutate could not accept Oka’s alibi. The colonel had again played the part of Ferdinand the Bull. But by late afternoon of October 24 the general was at last able to goad Oka into getting across the river and moving down toward that exposed left.
Oka did and moved too far.
Men of the Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, on top of the ridge where the Marine left was refused spotted Japanese soldiers moving across a lower ridge to their left. They reported it to headquarters.
General Vandegrift acted quickly. The Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, was even then moving out of reserve to relieve the Third Battalion, First, which had fought at the rivermouth the night before. Vandegrift turned this battalion south and sent it up to the undefended high ground lying about 1,000 yards east of the refused left flank.
The Marines of the reserve began moving south just as the sun began to fade from the sky to their right.
The dying sun of October 24 was on the left of Lieutenant General Maruyama’s main body as it at last moved north on its march to battle. Maruyama’s men had made their left turn, had quit the tortuous ravines, and were coming in undetected on the Marines who held the hills between them and Henderson Field. They could hear their own bombs exploding within the Marine perimeter a few miles in front of them. Maruyama was pleased that radio contact was being renewed with Hyakutate and that the naval liaison officer present at the Kukumbona headquarters would be able to relay news of the airfield’s capture to Admiral Yamamoto, thus sending the Combined Fleet into action.
General Maruyama was confident of victory. Like Colonel Oka, he believed that he was moving on a weak point in the enemy lines. He trusted in the map provided by Matsumoto. There was no reason not to. How could Maruyama know that the map taken from the dead Marine was an American copy of a map taken from a dead Japanese early in August? How could he suspect that the American lettering on it marked positions held by the Japanese prior to the Marine landing?
