My own landing, much later, was typically inglorious. As our wave circled nauseously, a cloud no larger than a turd appeared in the sky. It grew. At the instant my boondocker hit the gray sand, the skies opened and ten inches of hard, driving, torrential rain began to pour down like that San Diego lioness pissing on a flat rock.
Guadalcanal is shaped like a paramecium, or a fat limp letter
S
on its side. Though different in dimensions, and though mostly uninhabitable, the Canal is about the size of Long Island. The right tip droops down toward New Caledonia, eight hundred miles away, then the closest Allied stronghold. The left end rises to a tip, Cape Esperance, which, on a map of New York, would put it in the vicinity of Long Island's Great Neck. North of the cape lies the volcanic isle I had mistaken for the Canal, Savo Island — White Plains on the New York map. To Savo's right are the Florida Islands, chiefly Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo — near Bridgeport, Connecticut, if the map analogy is held. The body of water between the Canal, Savo, and the Floridas may be compared to Long Island Sound. Before the fighting it was known as Sealark Channel. After more than thirty-five ferocious naval battles had been fought there, with, among others, sixty-five major warships sunk — roughly half American and half Japanese — Sealark was rechristened Ironbot-tom Sound. During my seven months on Guadalcanal the Sound and its surrounding islands became as familiar to me as an Amherst apple orchard. I especially remember one wreck. During a midnight, moonless, hull-to-hull slugging Samarra off Tassafaronga Point in which two of our fighting admirals were killed — Dan Callaghan and Norman Scott — three Jap transports were run aground. One day long afterward, I decided to board one of these hulks. It was not one of my brighter ideas. I dove through a shell hole beneath the waterline and found myself in a compartment full of water. My head hit the overhead: no air. My lungs were bursting when, by blind luck, I found the original shell hole and darted through it, bleeding from a half-dozen cuts. Then I remembered the warning about sharks. The Australian crawl was invented by a Solomon Islander, Alex Wickham, but I doubt that he could have matched my dash to shore.
The first European to sight these waters was Alvaro de Mendaña de Neyra in 1597. Looking for King Solomon's legendary islands and failing to find them, he named the archipelago “Islas de Salomón” and the Canal itself after his Spanish birthplace, Guadalcanal. It is an extraordinary fact that until our landing, the Japanese army's general staff hadn't even heard of the island; the Jap navy had been managing affairs in the Solomons, and the army-navy split was even greater in Tokyo than in Washington. But no one could really be expected to keep all of Mendaña's
islas
straight. There were archipelagos within archipelagos: 1,001 isles in the Russell subgroup alone, and even more in the New Georgias. Altogether, the Solomons sprawl across nine hundred miles, roughly forming two chains. The channel between these chains, leading down to the Canal, became known as the Slot. It was a natural funnel for planes and ships lunging southeastward from the great Nip bastion of Rabaul to the northwest. Even better, from the Japanese point of view, their approaching armadas coming down the Slot would be masked, for those defending our reconquest of the Canal, by Savo.
Informed that the Marines were ashore on the Canal, a senior colonel on Hirohito's general staff wondered aloud what the Americans could possibly want with “an insignificant island inhabited only by natives.” The colonel's superiors and his opposite numbers in the Japanese navy could have told him. Their men had been on the Canal for six weeks, bossing Korean laborers — “termites” was our word for the Koreans — who were building the airfield. That field was what the Americans wanted. News of its construction by the Japs, radioed to New Caledonia by Australian coastwatchers who had stayed on their islands and gone bush, meant Australia itself was on the Jap hit list. It must be remembered that at the time Dai Nippon's troops had not once tasted defeat. Victories had become a Nip narcotic. Until Guadalcanal, their only encounters with the Marine Corps had ended in defeat for us: the loss of Wake Island, the surrender of the Fourth Marines on Corregidor, and an inept submarine-borne raid on the Gilbert Islands by Carlson's Raiders (Second Raider Battalion), where nine men left behind by Carlson were beheaded. “Where,” Tokyo Rose jeered after that, “are the United States Marines hiding?” Convinced now that they were invincible, the Japanese were taking dead aim on the landing beaches nearest Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, the population centers of the last surviving Allied power in the South Pacific. It was the threat to Australia that triggered American seizure of Guadalcanal. That audacious move was as desperate as Hitler's losing gamble that same year at Stalingrad. Its chances of success were dim at the outset. They were to grow dimmer.
The battle's architect was Admiral Ernest J. King, the U.S. chief of naval operations. The documents of that year indicate that King's fellow service chiefs could not decide whether their goal in the Solomons should be to stop the Japs there or merely to harass them. But the admiral was determined to drive them back. Unfortunately the old sundowner picked as his campaign commander Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, a poor selection because Ghormley was convinced the situation in the Solomons was hopeless. Alexander A. Vandegrift, the soft-spoken Marine Corps general who would head the hodgepodge of leatherneck units making the landing, had been told that he needn't expect a combat assignment before January 1943. Various convoys were carrying his troops — reinforced regiments from two Marine divisions and miscellaneous battalions — toward New Zealand when Vandegrift was told he must recapture Guadalcanal and its surrounding islands — “denying the area to Japan” — on August 1. That was less than a month away. Appalled, the general begged for a postponement. King moved the date back to August 7, but that, he said, would be his last concession.
One difficulty in re-creating the past is that the reader knows how it will turn out, so that events have an air of inevitability. That was not true at the time, especially in the case of the Canal. Vandegrift's men were in wretched shape. Most were suffering from dysentery; rations condemned as unfit in Panama, and returned to the United States for destruction, had inexplicably been shipped to the Marines. In Wellington, New Zealand, where their advance echelon landed, the annual rains had begun. Wellington's longshoremen chose this astonishing moment to go on strike. Drenched, sick Marines — New Zealand was in the middle of a flu epidemic — had to load their own ships in eight-hour shifts under dim lights, wrestling with soaked cardboard cartons which frequently burst open, leaving a swamp of soggy cornflakes, beans, clothing, and miscellaneous debris. Because of the strike they would have to attack with only ten days of ammunition and, in the words of a divisional order, other “items actually required to live and fight.” “All wharfees is bastards,” one Marine wrote on the wall of a dockworkers' toilet. That wasn't the Corps' last quarrel with organized labor. After Ghormley had moved his flag to Noumea, in New Caledonia, sixty American merchant ships dropped anchor there. They were carrying rations for the Marines, who by then were starving on the Canal. The crews, on the advice of their union leader, refused to sail to the Canal unless granted exorbitant pay for overtime and for service in “combat zones.” Their demands were rejected. The Marines went hungry. If the ghost of Joe Hill had appeared on the Canal, he would have been shot again.
But the chief target of the men's resentment was the navy brass. After the long battle was over, some veterans of it struck a medal showing an arm bearing admiral's stripes dropping a hot potato into the hands of a kneeling Marine. The motto was “Faciat Georgius” — “Let George do it.” There was no need to identify the admiral. It was Frank Jack Fletcher. Fletcher had let the Corps down once before, when he had been sent to relieve the beleaguered men on Wake Island and had turned back pleading lack of fuel, though his own logs prove he had plenty. (“Always fueling,” was Samuel Eliot Morison's judgment of Fletcher.) Now Ghormley singled out this dismaying man to direct America's first landing of the war. With the task force preparing to sail for the Solomons, Fletcher called a conference aboard his flagship
Saratoga
and asked how many days would be needed to put Vandegrift's men ashore. Told that about five days would be necessary, he said flatly that he would leave after two days “because of the danger of air attacks and because of the fuel situation … if the troops can't be landed in two days, then they should not be landed.” Vandegrift, aghast, again pleaded for more time. The admiral said that he would entertain no objections. He then closed the conference. There were those in the Marine Corps who thought that Fletcher wanted to add a fourth color to the American flag.
Yet he and Ghormley were not alone in believing that the offensive was doomed. MacArthur, usually hawkish, said the plan was “open to the gravest doubts.” Major General Millard F. Harmon, the senior army officer in Ghormley's area, reported to George Marshall after we had established our beachhead: “Can the Marines hold it? There is considerable room for doubt.” At a time when a dozen high-altitude fighter planes would have saved Marine lives, Hap Arnold, the chief of the air force, refused to send any on the grounds that they would be sacrificed in vain. Delos Emmons, who was Arnold's air general in the South Pacific, reported categorically that the island could not be held. Ghormley, all but writing the campaign off, refused to strengthen the landing there, to the point of ignoring an order from King to do so. Even Vandegrift later said he himself could have listed “a hundred reasons why this operation should fail.” Vandegrift's plight may be measured by his surprise and gratitude when Alexander Patch, commanding the American division in New Caledonia, withdrew twenty thousand pairs of shoes from his quartermaster's shelves and sent them to the Canal so Marines would no longer have to fight barefoot. It took a presidential order and a scrappy admiral — William Halsey, who replaced the timid Ghormley — before the troops began to receive real support from their rear echelon. FDR knew the risks; he had begun preparing Churchill and Stalin for the loss of the island. (He didn't know that the Marines had decided not to surrender — that rather than give the enemy “another Bataan” they were prepared to slip into the hills and fight on as guerrillas.) But Roosevelt also realized that the Canal was shaping up as one of those decisive battles, like Waterloo, Gettysburg, and Dien Bien Phu, in which both sides have resolved upon a showdown and prestige transcends strategic position. Forced to choose between New Guinea and the Canal, which were being fought simultaneously, the Japanese decided to try to hold the line in Papua and reinforce the Canal. Therefore the President wheeled his wheelchair into his White House map room, spent a half hour studying his charts of the South Pacific, and then directed his admirals and generals “to make sure that every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal.”
In the Islamic world there is said to be one night, called the Night of Nights, upon which the secret gates of the sky open wide and the water in the jugs tastes sweeter. Conversely, in each of our amphibious convoys, once it had reached the open sea, there came a moment of moments when the human cargo in the holds learned of its destination, whereupon the water from the scuttlebutts tasted rancid and sour. We knew we would hate the answer to our questions, but, masochistically, we speculated endlessly on our fate. On Wednesday, July 22, 1942, when the Canal-bound seventy-five-ship expeditionary force sailed from Wellington, it was floating on rumors as much as on the Tasman Sea. The fleet was said to be headed for a half-dozen destinations; this being the first anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Russia, one story had it that the troops were going to join the Red Army and fight the Germans. As the coast of New Zealand shrank and then vanished, all eyes were on the leading vessel, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner's flagship, the U.S.S.
McCawley
, soon to become known to all Marines in the South Pacific as “Wacky Mac.” Then Wacky Mac hoisted the signal: the fleet was bound for Guadalcanal.
Nobody had ever heard of it. On the nineteen APAs the guys had a thousand queries for their officers. What was the target island like? Any bars? Any tail? They were told that it was part of a British Solomon Islands Protectorate. That sounded impressive; in those days the British Empire still inspired respect. But that was about all the men could be told. Turner himself knew little more. The only figures on enemy strength came from reports radioed about by coastwatchers, who, though on the spot, were hiding deep in the bush and could therefore offer only the vaguest of estimates. One of Vandegrift's colonels, desperate for intelligence, had studied seventeenth-century sailing charts and interviewed missionaries, traders, schooner captains, and Lever Brothers employees, all refugees from the Solomons. Based on what they had told him, he had drawn a rough map of the Canal's northern coast, where the airfield was being built. It proved to be unreliable, almost worthless, showing, among other things, 1,350-foot Mount Austen — which we came to know as the “Grassy Knoll” — to be two miles inland when in fact it was nearly four. Vandegrift had expected to seize it the first day. In the Canal's tropical wilderness an Indian file of husky men could cover less than four hundred yards a day even without Japanese opposition, which, in the case of Mount Austen, would mean over two weeks. Vandegrift changed his mind as soon as he saw the island. (Austen and its adjoining ridges, Gifu, Sea Horse, and Galloping Horse, would not fall until after more than four months of fighting.) Two American officers had flown over the island in a B-17. Jumped by three Zeroes, they flamed two, fled back with the third on their tail, and reported that the airstrip was almost finished and there appeared to be no obstacles on the landing beaches. Yet better sources of information were available, or should have been. It is characteristic of relations between America's armed forces at this time that MacArthur's G-2 (intelligence), having completed a detailed photo-map of the Canal nearly three weeks earlier, mailed it to Ghormley. The package was improperly addressed and lost in the Auckland post office.