The Conquering Tide (25 page)

Nor was this attitude of Pacific localism limited to the navy. When Arnold met with MacArthur in Brisbane the following day, the imperious commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific area demanded 500 more planes of any kind. When Arnold referred to commitments in Europe, MacArthur offered his professional opinion that “a sufficient number of air bases could never be established in England to provide air cover for a second front.”
³¹
Arnold was incredulous. “Germany-first” was the sanctioned basis of the Allies' entire global strategy, and here was a major Allied theater
commander who did not accept it even in theory. All subordinate commands, Arnold concluded, ought to be “indoctrinated with the idea that there is a United States plan—An Allied plan—for winning the war, and all must conform to it.”
³²

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
S
EPTEMBER
29, Nimitz boarded his Coronado for the three-hour flight to Espiritu Santo, the advanced air and supply base that provided direct support to the garrison on Guadalcanal. There he was greeted by Admiral Aubrey “Jake” Fitch, who had succeeded McCain as the commander of SOPAC air forces.

Nimitz could not have been surprised by the retrograde conditions at Santo. He had been well informed of circumstances on the airfield since it had been hewn out of the jungle two months earlier. Still, to see it with his own eyes must have made an impression. There were no circulating runways, no traffic control, not even a control tower. The aircrews lived in primitive huts and tents, getting very little recreation or rest. They were plainly exhausted, and many were sick. At Segond Channel, he watched as the fuel drums were dropped from the transports and “swum” into shore, then lifted onto the backs of trucks and dispersed to uncovered fuel dumps. Every day, 20,000 gallons of aviation fuel was landed on the island by these grueling means.

Nimitz awarded decorations to several marine and navy pilots, and a Distinguished Service Medal to Fitch. Then he and his retinue boarded an army B-17, provided by Fitch, for the 620-mile hop to Guadalcanal.

The B-17 had plenty of range to make the flight, and in case of a sudden ambush the Fortress was a rugged and well-defended airplane. But the young pilot flew into a weather front and soon admitted that he was not sure of his position. That was a gentle way of saying he was lost in the lowering white murk. All hands scanned the seascape below. Lieutenant Arthur Lamar fished a
National Geographic
map of the South Pacific out of his bag and tried to match it up to the contours of passing islands. They found Guadalcanal and flew up the north coast. Finally they glimpsed the small, muddy airfield littered with junked airplanes and surrounded by bomb craters and tent camps. A torrential rain was beating down as the aircraft sloshed and skidded to the edge of the runway. Nimitz stepped down into the downpour and was greeted by Vandegrift.

As the skies cleared that afternoon, the general took the admiral on a tour of the defense perimeter. Nimitz met several of the regimental commanders, who spoke in low tones about the action they had seen and their preparations for the future. He observed the still-unburied hundreds of Japanese dead strewn across the hill south of Edson's Ridge. In the Pagoda, General Geiger briefed him on the air campaign, and Nimitz took in the exhausted and hunted appearance of the airmen who had been on the island for a month or more. At the field hospital, he spoke to men wounded in battle and men laid low by malaria or other tropical ailments. “The grim appearance of the command noticeably impressed him,” Vandegrift wrote of his visitor; “I was not exactly sorry since I wanted Nimitz to see what we were up against.”
³³

The next morning, Nimitz was to award decorations, and Vandegrift's staff was up late that night writing citations. Lieutenant Herbert L. Merillat found the entire process shockingly arbitrary. The number of decorations to be handed out, he noted, was not determined by any impartial standard of heroism, but by “the number and types of medals the admiral totes along.” Officers lobbied on behalf of their units and horse-traded so that each received its share. Marginal cases were dressed up, and many deserving men were undoubtedly neglected. Merillat confided to his diary that he was relieved he did not have the responsibility to decide the awards, because “there are so many real heroes here.”
³⁴

The ceremony took place at 6:30 a.m. in a bamboo grove in front of Vandegrift's shack. Lieutenant Lamar read the citations as the admiral went down a line of marines and pinned medals to chests. The solemnity of the occasion was broken by some singing and shouting of marines up the hill, who were ignorant that a ceremony was taking place, and had to be told to quiet down. A sergeant keeled over in a dead faint as Nimitz approached to pin a medal on his chest. When he came to, he apologized and explained that he had “never seen a four-star admiral before and he was scared to death.”
³⁵
Vandegrift was genuinely surprised and moved when he received the Navy Cross.

The flight back to Espiritu Santo was delayed by the condition of Henderson Field, which remained a quagmire after the previous day's downpour. One thousand feet of the runway still lacked steel matting. The first of the two planes to attempt takeoff (it carried Nimitz) could not get airborne. It skidded down the last unmatted section of the strip, did a ground loop, and
came to a stop at the edge of a ravine. Nimitz descended from the plane and went to lunch with Vandegrift. They would wait for the sun to dry the strip. At midday they tried again, and this time the Fortress wobbled into the sky and droned away to the east.

T
HE MARINES ENDURED.
They suffered the enervating heat and humidity, the endless torture of insects, the hours of pelting rains that swamped their foxholes and tent camps. They sweated and shivered through the malarial fevers. When they had an hour or so of relief, they took a bar of soap and went down to the Lunga River. With their mates manning machine guns and watching for enemy soldiers or estuarine crocodiles, they scrubbed their bodies and their dungarees, washing themselves as thoroughly as they could in the brown water. But no amount of scrubbing did away with the “jungle rot,” the blisters and open sores that accumulated on their wrists, in their armpits, under their testicles. Scratching made it worse, and they warned themselves and each other not to scratch, but sooner or later the temptation overcame the will to resist. The “prickly heat,” as it was called, was just another inescapable annoyance of life on the stinking, godforsaken island. The marines carried away their dead and buried them respectfully, marking their graves with wooden crosses or a stick with a helmet slung on top. They stripped the Japanese dead of whatever valuables or interesting souvenirs were found on their persons, and even smashed out their gold teeth and pocketed them as spoils of war. The stench of their rotting flesh wafted on the breeze. The unburied bodies were overrun with ants. In time, nothing would be left but polished bone.

Since August 9 they had been asking one another, “Where's the fucking navy?” It was a rhetorical question, of course. They were marines; they could rely on no one but themselves. The 1st Marine Division had become the “1st Maroon Division.” “U.S.M.C.” stood for “Uncle Sam's Miserable Children.” They had been played for suckers. By training and doctrine, they were elite shock troops—amphibious specialists brought in to storm an enemy beach and secure a beachhead. They had done their job. They were not supposed to be left to defend that beachhead for months on end. The plan, as the officers and men had always understood it, called for the army to come in behind them and take over the position. The marines would be pulled back to a rear area for a period of rest, recuperation, and additional
training, and later deployed to another amphibious attack on another island closer to Tokyo. Two months after the invasion of Guadalcanal, a new question was on the lips of every marine: “Where's the fucking army?” It was another rhetorical question, of course. It was their lot to be left behind, as they had been at Wake Island. They were “George,” and the sister services had agreed to “Let George do it.” Singing voices rose in bitter unison from the foxholes. Their profane anthem had been adapted from the old British expeditionary soldiers' song “Bless 'em All”:

They sent for the Navy to come to Tulagi,

The gallant Navy agreed;

With one thousand sections

In different directions,

My God! What a fucked-up stampede!

(Chorus)

Fuck 'em all! Fuck 'em all!

The long and the short and the tall;

Fuck all the swabbies and dogfaces too,

Fuck all the generals and above all fuck you!

So we're saying goodbye to them all,

As back to our foxholes we crawl;

There'll be no promotion on MacArthur's ocean,

So cheer up marines, fuck 'em all!
³⁶

Turner's handful of suitable attack transports continued irregular runs between Noumea, Port Vila (Efate), Espiritu Santo, and Guadalcanal, but the supply shortfalls were endemic. Food was often in dangerously low reserve, and although the marines were never reduced to a starving condition, they were required to subsist on reduced rations, which sapped their energy and strength. Everyone lost weight, as much as twenty to thirty pounds. Ammunition was landed on Lunga Point and then distributed to caches as directed by the quartermaster. The reserves were usually low enough that the marines had to be warned not to waste a shot unless they were sure of hitting an enemy soldier. Even when the transports arrived in Ironbottom Sound, always a welcome sight, unloading them into the rudimentary port facilities at Lunga Point required meticulous attention and
backbreaking labor. Constant harassment by Japanese air attacks required the ships to raise anchor and maneuver at high speed in the sound, losing precious hours. The single most critical shortage, in early October, was aviation gasoline. So critical was the avgas situation that fifty-five-gallon fuel drums were flown into Henderson on DC-3 transports.

The Tokyo Express, variously known to the marines as the “Cactus Express” or the “Tojo Express,” landed small numbers of Japanese troop reinforcements and supplies on the beaches west of the American perimeter night after night. Tanaka's fast destroyers continued to do double duty as transports. Their speed allowed them to hang back until nightfall, far up the Slot, beyond the flying range of the Henderson-based bombers, and then race in under cover of darkness. If they unloaded quickly enough, the destroyers managed to lob a few shells into the marine perimeter and then race westward to be out of range again by daybreak.

But Tanaka's destroyers could not land an entire division, at least not on the timetable demanded by the ambitious Japanese plans. Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, commander of the Seventeenth Army, needed proper troop transports to do the job. The Japanese had learned through bitter experience that they could not bring transports into Ironbottom Sound as long as planes based at Henderson Field could attack them as they approached. It followed that the Japanese must find some means of putting Henderson out of business long enough to land a division of troops. They had been trying to do exactly that for two months, and thus far failed. This time they would not fail—or to put it more precisely, they
could
not fail, because the emperor himself had insisted that they succeed.

V
ANDEGRIFT REPEATEDLY APPEALED
for more troop reinforcements. But Admiral Turner, who stood above him in the chain of command, held very different ideas about the deployment of ground forces. Again and again the two commanders found themselves at cross-purposes. Turner was inclined to disperse ground forces across many islands or beachheads, whereas Vandegrift and his staff preferred the virtues of concentration. The admiral obstinately insisted on holding back the 2nd Marines (assigned to replace the 7th Marines, which had been deployed in Samoa) for a subsequent landing on Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands, 300 miles east of Guadalcanal. Vandegrift's officers thought Ndeni irrelevant and urged Turner to hold troops
in reserve to reinforce Lunga if the fight grew hotter than expected. Only after the admiral had personally witnessed the ferocious combined ground assault and naval bombardment of Henderson on September 11 (taking a bottle of scotch with him to his foxhole, as one marine staff officer noted) did he agree to deliver the regiment to Lunga.

As for the marines already on the island, Turner believed that they should take the offensive. On September 28, he urged Vandegrift to storm across the Matanikau River and hunt down the “nests of enemy troops” lurking along the coast to the west: “I believe you are in a position to take some chances and go after them hard.”
³⁷
The embattled marines were understandably irked by the suggestion that they had been too passive. Moreover, a ground offensive at that stage of the campaign was neither feasible nor sensible. The 1st Division lacked the equipment, weaponry, and ammunition to pursue the Japanese down the coast. The marines controlled the island's only airfield, and their overriding priority should be to defend that asset and keep it supplied with adequate airpower. The Japanese, true to form, would continue to hurl themselves against the well-fortified American lines—and if those lines held, the attackers would suffer disastrous losses, as they had in the past.

But Turner would not be dissuaded. In early October, the argument flared up again over the deployment of the 164th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army's Americal Division. Vandegrift wanted the regiment on Guadalcanal, as reinforcement; Turner wanted to land it on Ndeni. Ghormley at first gave tentative approval to Turner's plan. But General Harmon, on October 6, weighed in strongly in favor of sending it to Guadalcanal. Ndeni, he told Ghormley, would be “a diversion from the main effort and dispersion of force.” He warned that “the Jap is capable of retaking
CACTUS-RINGBOLT
[Guadalcanal-Tulagi] and . . . will do so in the near future unless it is materially strengthened.”
³⁸
Ghormley overruled Turner, and the 164th was landed at Lunga Point on October 13.