Strong Men Armed

him with whirling propeller blades in an attempt to chop him to pieces. He had cut off part of Logan’s right foot and left heel and was coming again to finish the job when a New Zealand pilot drove him off. Logan hit the water and was rescued. But his right foot had to be amputated. Even so, Logan flew again, for this indomitable Marine was the first American to receive permission to continue to fight and fly with what the Marines called “a store leg.”

So also would Lieutenant Gil Percy live to fight again, even though on that same afternoon of June 7 he had fallen into the sea from a height of 2,000 feet. Percy’s elevator control and wing tanks were shot out when he was flying at that altitude. He leaped from his cockpit and pulled the parachute cord. The chute didn’t open. It merely trailed after him to mark his plunge. Percy was certain he was dead in that obliterating instant when life seemed to be blotted out, but then he tasted salt water. He opened his eyes. There were bubbles all around him and then his head had burst into the light of day and the only things he had to worry about now were sharks and how to swim to a nearby island with a broken back, two sprained ankles and cannon wounds in one arm and both legs.

He began back-stroking toward an island a mile distant. Three hours later he reached an offshore reef. He dragged himself up on it and lost consciousness. At dawn the tide floated him into shore and he crawled up on the sand to be found by three Melanesians. One of them stood guard over Percy while the others went for help. Soon a motor launch with two doctors aboard came to the island. Percy went back to Guadalcanal, and then to a hospital in Auckland. One year later he was back in action.

Admiral Koga lost 23 pilots that day of June 7, and he lost 107 more when he sent 120 planes south on June 16. After the sixteenth, Guadalcanal was never again attacked by daylight.

The Japanese had had enough of Captain Donald Kennedy.

Among the most daring of all the coastwatchers, Captain Kennedy had kept most of the Melanesians on New Georgia hostile to the Japanese, using them to hide downed American flyers while he signaled for small boats or the big flying ships called Dumbos to come get them. Kennedy had also harried the Japanese on New Georgia incessantly-bursting from his mysterious jungle lair to strike swift blows, then melting back into the green tangle again—and he had repeatedly waylaid barges loaded with Japanese soldiers and massacred them.

Kennedy had only attacked when it became likely that Japanese patrols or barge movements might stumble on his Segi Point hideout and thus reveal the entire coastwatching apparatus, of which the Japanese still had no suspicion. Though he had only killed to keep his secret, he had done so with customary vigor and efficiency. Now Colonel Genjiro Hirata was going to use the entire First Battalion of his 229th Regiment to get rid of him.

Kennedy ambushed the first force sent against him and captured the inevitable diary describing Colonel Hirata’s plans for Captain Kennedy. Kennedy called for help.

At dusk of June 20 two companies of the Fourth Raiders boarded the destroyer-transports Dent and Waters and sped from Guadalcanal to New Georgia. By dark the two ships were gingerly picking their way through the shoal-filled channel to Segi Point. Kennedy lighted bonfires ashore to guide them in and cheerfully radioed, “Okay here.” It was not quite okay in the channel, for both ships had scraped bottom. But they worked free, and in the morning the Marines came ashore to seize the beachhead which opened the campaign in the Central Solomons. The long breathing spell between the end of fighting on Guadalcanal and the resumption of the American offensive was ending.

It was June 25 and a Dumbo had come for Staff Sergeant Bill Coffeen. The big PBY landed offshore from the native village and Coffeen went out by canoe to climb aboard.

The Melanesians had saved his life. They had nursed him through malaria. Their food had restored half of the roughly 40 pounds Coffeen had lost during the thirty-two days he had paddled about The Slot on his raft. They had even given the young American a pet parrot to take back to Guadalcanal with him. Coffeen waved his farewell and they waved back gaily, smiling warmly.

Then Bill Coffeen flew back to Guadalcanal, only to start “beating his gums” not ten minutes after his return.

It was not that Bill Coffeen was not grateful for his life, not that he minded the hunger or ulcers or sunburn or malaria so much, it was only that while he had been 72 days missing in action his buddies of Squadron 213 had finished their tour of duty, had “pitched one helluva liberty” in Sidney, and were now back on the ‘Canal ready to start their second tour with good old Bill Coffeen back aboard.

“We told the Aussie gals all about you, Bill,” his buddies said solemnly. “Usually while we were walking down to the pub.”

3

Take me somewhere east of Ewa
Where the best ain’t like the worst,
Where there ain’t no Doug MacArthur
And a man can drown his thirst—
Where the Army gets the medals
And the Navy gets the queens,
But the boys who get the rookin’
Are United States Marines.

It was the song of the Solomons and it had a chorus descriptive of the changed character of the aerial war against Japan. It went:

Hit the road to Gizo Bay
Where the Jap fleet spends the day.
You can hear the duds a’clunkin’
From Rabaul to Lunga Bay.
Pack your load up to Rekata,
Where the float-plane Zeros play,
And the bombs come down like thunder
On the natives cross the way.

For it was now the American bombers which went sweeping up The Slot. Marine airmen who roared that sardonic ditty while gathered at the Hotel De Gink for a convivial canteen cup of medical alcohol cut with grapefruit juice were bellowing their displeasure with the daily bombing missions aimed at knocking out the Bougainville airfields while the New Georgia offensive slugged ahead. That the De Gink-Guadalcanal’s famous shack for itinerant pilots—now resounded to the singing of a bombardier’s ballad was indicative of the change. Even the De Gink was new, for the old one had been destroyed in one of those shellings during the days when the fighter pilot was the photographer’s darling.

By the end of June the hot pilot was in demand again. The Army’s 43rd Division landed at Rendova while Marines and soldiers landed at Vangunu east of Munda, and the enemy’s attempts to get at the transports brought 170 Allied fighters swarming aloft to intercept 130 Japanese invaders. Dogfights swirled all over the Central Solomons in a wild, far-ranging struggle during which 100 enemy aircraft were shot down, as opposed to 14 American, and a new brood of Marine Corsair aces was born. Among them were Lieutenant Ken Walsh and Lieutenant Alvin Jensen, and a wisecracking, cigar-smoking fly-boy with the fanciful name of Murderous Manny Segal.

Like Walsh and Jensen, Lieutenant Segal had been a former enlisted naval pilot. Now he was a Marine