Squadron 121 with only a few weeks to go on his tour of duty. And all the talk was whether or not Joe would equal the 26 kills which had made Rickenbacker the American ace-of-aces in World War One.
On January 15 Captain Joe Foss became the ace-of-aces in the new war. On that day he tore into a formation of Zeros and shot down three of them. Foss’s score stayed at 26, while his squadron went on to record 164 kills against 20 of its own pilots lost. At the end of January Joe Foss’s tour of duty was over.
He went home to receive the Medal of Honor, the path of his homegoing convoy crossing that of those carriers and convoys coming out with a new weapon and a new outfit for the Marines’ war against Japan: the peerless Corsair fighter and the Third Marine Division.
The first of the Corsairs arrived at Guadalcanal on February 12. They came to Henderson Field with a bad reputation, for many Navy pilots swore they were “full of bugs” and at least one carrier commander refused to permit them aboard his ship. But the Marines made the Corsair their own, forgetting the stubborn Wildcat which had won the air battle of Guadalcanal in their jubilation at the range and staying power of this gull-winged, paddle- bladed killer. The big Corsairs could fly faster than anything Japan had, could climb nearly 3,000 feet a second, and range twice as far as the Wildcats. If they were difficult aboard ship they were not so ashore—and the Marine fliers would be landlocked for most of the rest of the war.
The Third Marine Division which entered the Pacific Theater almost simultaneously with the Corsair was not only new but also novel. It was a weld of raw recruit and battle-blooded. veteran. It made manifest the fact that the rewards of the Solomons offensive were not all strategic. Unlike Guam, Wake or the Philippines, Guadalcanal had ended in a victory that produced thousands of veteran warriors to drill and lead America’s cadres. Even the lowest ranks of the Third Division included men who had fought the Japanese on Guadalcanal. Having recovered from the wounds or malaria which had brought them home, they had been assigned to the Third. Many of the new division’s officers and top NCO’s were also veterans. They had been promoted and detached from the First to command in the Third.
Never again would a Marine division go into battle as green as the First had been at Guadalcanal. Every outfit would have its heavy quota of officers and men who knew the difference between the myth of the superman of the jungle and the fact of the tenacious enemy who fought so much with his heart, so little with his head. They could tell the boots and Ninety-Day Wonders of the Third that though the enemy was indeed “a tricky little bastard,” his tactics were so tied to trickery that he sometimes confused his means for his ends.
By April all of the Division’s units—the Third, Ninth and Twenty-First Marines, the Twelfth Marine Regiment of artillery, the Nineteenth of engineers—had been assembled in New Zealand. They began training at twenty-two separate camps in the vicinity of Auckland.
South of them, down at the capital of Wellington, was that older brother division, that angriest and most stridently war-like of all Marine divisions—the Second.
The Second Marine Division had come to Wellington from Guadalcanal with a chip on its shoulder. The chip was there for the First Marine Division to knock off. For the Second was sore. Its Second Regiment had been at Tulagi-Guadalcanal since the August 7 landings, had in fact been the first unit to take enemy soil in World War Two, and though it had not been in the thick of it thereafter, it had been forced to stay on Guadalcanal for more than a month after the glory-hounds of the First Division shoved off. The Eighth Marines and Tenth Marine Artillery had come onto the island in November. The Sixth had arrived in January. All had joined General Patch’s offensive without benefit of publicity, for no newspaper in the States seemed to have heard of the Second Marine Division. It was always the First that got the headlines.
So the Second Marine Division was sore and it was going into training to prove its superiority to those headline-hunters up in Australia. Its men were also determined to “pitch a liberty” that would even outdo what was already being called “The Battle of Melbourne.”
What Melbourne already was to the First, Wellington was becoming to the Second. It was another love affair, the only variations being Maori music supplanting “Waltzin’ Matilda” and the steep hills and canyons of North Island substituting for the featureless Victorian plain. In Wellington there were also steak-and-eggs and long-haired girls learning to jitterbug to an American beat—and there were also marriages. And though both New Zealander and American would exchange monuments and plaques on Aotea Quay after the war, the bond that now existed would be manifested by that odd tradition with which United States Marines would henceforth memorialize the people of the Antipodes. Hereafter they would go into battle on a breakfast of steak-and-eggs.
So the Marine Corps took a deep breath in the first quarter of 1943 while the war rolled elsewhere, while Australian and American soldiers drove the Japanese invaders north and west up the New Guinea coast, while the Allies in North Africa began the offensive which doomed Germany’s Afrika Korps, while the Third Reich caught its mortal cold in the Russian snows— and while Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto plotted a flaming revenge for the loss of Guadalcanal.
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It was called the “I” operation. It was intended to blast American bases to rubble, to sink American shipping, to set the American land forces back on their heels while the Japanese strengthened their defenses in the upper Solomons, New Guinea and New Britain. And it was meant to console Emperor Hirohito for the loss of Guadalcanal.
At the end of March—about a month after the Third Marine Raiders and Army units had moved into the undefended Russell Islands about 60 miles northwest of Guadalcanal—Admiral Yamamoto came down to Rabaul to put “I” into effect. He assembled 96 fighters, 65 dive-bombers and a few torpedo bombers aboard four carriers, and to this he added a land-based force of 86 fighters, 27 dive-bombers, 72 twin-engined bombers and a few more torpedo bombers. That was roughly 350 planes—a big force even by the standards of 1945, by those of 1943 enormous.
Yamamoto was going to hurl this thunderbolt at Guadalcanal, where his scout planes reported growing naval strength, and later at New Guinea. During the first week of April the land-based forces were built up at Rabaul and the carrier planes fleeted down to Buka, Kahili and Ballale in the Bougainville area. On April 7, with an early-morning report that four American cruisers, seven destroyers and 14 transports were in Iron Bottom Bay, Yamamoto let fly.
The first of four waves of Vals and Zeros roared aloft from Rabaul. Coastwatchers spotted them and flashed the word. At noon the task force standing out of Tulagi heard the warning and went streaking for the open sea at full steam ahead. But more than 30 smaller vessels were still in the Bay.
By one o’clock the planes from Rabaul had been augmented by three other waves and there were now 67 Vals and 100 Zeros roaring over The Slot. On Segi Point in New Georgia the coastwatcher Kennedy, the man who had rescued Joe Foss and many others, gaped in astonishment at their numbers. He couldn’t count them all. He could only signal “hundreds headed yours.”
By two o’clock the massive Japanese aerial armada was thundering over the Russells, turning the radar screens milky with pips, changing the earlier warning of “Condition Red” to an alert never made before or since.
“Condition Very Red!”
And then the Japanese swept over Tulagi, the dive-bombers making for the ships in the harbor, the fighters taking on the 76 Marine, Army and Navy planes that had been scrambled aloft in readiness. Among them was a Marine boot pilot named Jimmy Swett, the most amazing greenhorn of World War Two.
Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Swett had never been in combat before. At three o’clock that afternoon, he and three comrades flew their Wildcats toward Tulagi, their own yelps and rebel yells contributing to that crackling cacophony of “Heigh-ho Silver!” or “Tally-ho!” then drowning out the fighter director’s frantic plea of “Protect your shipping!—Protect your shipping!”
Fifteen minutes later Jimmy Swett had shot down seven enemy bombers. He flamed them so fast he had no recollection of their destruction. He shoved his Wildcat over and dove into the storm of antiaircraft fire flowing up
