Strong Men Armed

Battalion, Seventh, and had overwhelmed an observation post.

Paige crawled forward on the ridge. He heard low mumbling in the jungle below. There were Japanese down there. Paige decided to force them to attack before they could discover his position. He pulled the pin from a hand grenade. His men, hearing that snick, pulled their own pins. Paige threw. The men handed him their primed grenades and he threw these too. There were explosions, Hashes—screams.

Paige’s men scuttled back to their guns, bracing.

But no one came.

At half-past three in the morning the Sendai came rushing again at Lieutenant Colonel Puller’s line, and at that time also the men of the 164th Infantry went into battle with the Marines.

Led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hall, the regiment’s Third Battalion had marched from bivouac behind the Tenaru to Puller’s battlefront to the southwest. They came sloshing in through the darkness, guided by the yelling and jabbering and hammering of the fight. Lieutenant Colonel Hall quickly found Lieutenant Colonel Puller, who was brief.

“I’m in command here,” Chesty snapped, “and I’m feeding youah men in piecemeal whether you like it or not.”

Hall had heard of Puller and this was obviously not the moment to quibble over seniority.

“Go ahead,” Hall said, and the 3rd Battalion, 164th, went into line.

The soldiers went in by squads, moving in alongside squads of Marines, sometimes having to be led by hand, it was so dark, the ground was so slippery. They also held, helping to halt and shatter that third and final onslaught of the Japanese.

By seven o’clock in the morning the Sendai stopped coming, and Admiral Yamamoto’s aide had flashed the word that the airfield was still American. By then also the rain had stopped.

The sun was out, falling with ghastly illumination on the sodden heaps of lifeless flesh lying sprawled before Puller’s lines, warming the Marines and soldiers, setting the jungle steaming.

It was Dugout Sunday.

That thundering sabbath of the twenty-fifth of October, during which only stretcher-bearers, ammunition- carriers or airfield crews dared stay long erect, was set in motion by that prematurely jubilant «Banzai!“ which the naval officer at Kukumbona had flashed to Yamamoto at half-past one in the morning.

His subsequent messages were vague. Before he could send off the seven o’clock admission that the airfield was still American, the Japanese Combined Fleet had begun its end of the coordinated land-sea-air attack which was to crush the Americans.

Carriers flew off airplanes to obliterate remaining American air strength on Henderson Field and to sink whatever ships were found in Iron Bottom Bay. A cruiser-destroyer force made for a point behind Florida Island to enter the battle on call. Three big destroyers—Akatsuki, Ikazuchi and Shiratsuyo—sped down The Slot to shell the Guadalcanal shore and to attack shipping. And then, as the liaison officer began tempering his original jubilation, Yamamoto kept the remainder of the Combined Fleet sailing a circle 300 miles north of Guadalcanal. The situation had not only become unclear, the Japanese admiral had received reports indicating that American carrier and surface forces were coming up to Guadalcanal from southern bases.

Dugout Sunday’s services began at ten in the morning, which was when Akatsuki, Ikazuchi and Shiratsuyo showed up. They steamed into the Bay with all guns going and pounded Marine coastal installations. They sank the tugboat Seminole and made wreckage of other little harbor craft. They looked hungrily about for other victims, and then, to their great surprise, geysers of water rose around them.

Gunners of the Third Marine Defense Battalion were blasting at the Japanese destroyers with five-inch rifles. They were scoring hits. Soon black clouds were boiling off the destroyers’ sterns. Sending up a screen of smoke, Akatsuki, Ikazuchi and Shiratsuyo streaked for home.

The airplanes arrived at half-past two.

The Japanese pilots attacked thinking the airfield had been knocked out. If they had come in the morning their belief would have been correct, in effect, for the rains of the preceding night had made a mire of both runways. But General Geiger put his repair crews to work while placing a call for help with American air bases in the south, and the Seabees and engineers, aided by a hot, drying sun, had the runways operable by midafternoon. Then there began that daylong jolting rhythm of flying, fighting, landing, refueling, rearming —and flying again.

Captain Joe Foss and Lieutenant Jack Conger were among those Marine fighter pilots who struck ferociously at the first Japanese flight of 16 heavy bombers, plus escorting Zeros. Foss had been on Guadalcanal only 16 days and he was already a legend. He had shot down 11 enemy planes—had flamed four bombers on October 23 alone —and now on Dugout Sunday, riding his cockpit with a dead cigar stub clenched in his teeth, he was climbing aloft to duplicate that feat. In the first scramble Foss and three others took on six Zeros. Foss got two of the three knocked down. But his Wildcat was so riddled by bullets he had to go down for another one, bringing his pilots down with him to refuel. They went back up to close with nine of the dozens of Zeros leading a fresh formation of bombers over the field. Foss shot down two more, and dove for home again, just one plane shy of a kill for every day he had spent on the island.

Lieutenant Jack Conger fought until he ran out of ammunition. He had escorted a crippled comrade back to Henderson, fighting off Zeros all the way. He shot one down, but now, as he turned and screamed up toward an enemy fighter, the pressure of his thumb on the gun button brought no response from his wing guns. Still he flew upward at the Zero. He brought his whirling propeller blades under its tail. The Zero turned frantically, and broke in two.

Conger’s plane was also staggered. It was going over, falling. Conger couldn’t bring it out. That huge obliquely-sliding mirror which was the surface of Iron Bottom Bay seemed to flip up toward him. Conger strained at his escape hatch. He couldn’t get out, he thought he would never get out, and that monster mirror was about to slap him. With a great wrench, Conger was free. He was barely 150 feet above the water when his parachute billowed, jerking him. He could see his plane plummet down among the coconuts, then he was into the mirror, jolted and jarred as though it possessed the very density and opaqueness of glass.

Conger surfaced, treading water. He slashed at the smothering shroud of his parachute. He glanced up to see another Zero falling in flames. He gaped in astonishment as its pilot floated down to water not 20 feet away from him.

Now there was a rescue boat speeding toward Conger. It came alongside, its exhaust putt-putting hollowly in the swells. Conger was hauled aboard. The boat slewed around and made for the Japanese pilot. Conger called to him, made surrender motions. The flier dived under. He came up beside the boat, kicked with both feet against its hull, and tried to swim away. The boat pursued. Conger grabbed a boathook and caught the flier by his jacket. The man struggled. Conger leaned forward. They contemplated each other, warbirds of East and West, the one rescuing, the other refusing—and the Japanese pulled out a Mauser pistol, pressed it against Conger’s face and pulled the trigger.

Click!

Conger sprawled backward. I’m dead! he thought. But he was not, nor was the Japanese pilot, who, failing to return death for life, had placed the pistol to his own head and produced another click. Conger seized a water can and slammed it down on the flier’s head. Limp and unconscious, the Japanese was hauled into the boat.

In all, 26 Japanese planes fell to Marine fighters and antiaircraft gunners. Marine bombers went up too, and from the hilarious shouts of their returning pilots, even the imprisoned little flier might have guessed that they had caught the Japanese ships behind Florida and left a cruiser sinking.

And yet, the flier’s confusion could never match the consternation of that naval liaison officer then composing a fourth report for Admiral Yamamoto. The Army’s night attack had failed. There had been “difficulty in handling the force in the complicated terrain,” he reported, but General Hyakutate was going to try again that night. The Army was ready.

The Army had better be ready, the Navy thundered. There was a naval battle