Guadalcanal Diary Page 4

  “The most beautiful poil in the woild,” one of the lads mimicked. But Babbin was used to that. He smiled and went on.

  “If a Jap jumped on you from a tree,” he asked, “what would you do?”

  “Kick him in the b– – – –,” answered a marine.

  “That’s right,” said Babbin. “You hit the nail on the head.”

  “You might see a Jap sniper hanging from the top of a tree, lookin’ dead,” the lieutenant continued, “because they tie themselves in with ropes. He might be playin’ possum. So, don’t hesitate to throw another .30 up there, bounce him off the tree again. That’s good stuff.”

  “Yeah,” somebody piped up, “it might hurt him.”

  After the meeting was over, Babbin said to me, “They’re a tough gang.”

  One of the sergeants told me: “That’s a weapon platoon, and they’ve got to carry about fifty pounds of stuff each, a lot of ’em. But they’ll keep up with anybody. Sometimes they get ahead of the infantry. Even with receivers, guns, and all that. They don’t give a s– – – for anybody. They say, F– – – you, if you can do it, so can I.”

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 4

  This day went slowly. We are still plodding toward our goal, in the open sea, and there is little to do but re-check preparations already made. Capts. Hawkins and Kaempfer, leaders of the assault companies, were in a huddle with their N.C.O.’s for three hours this afternoon. They passed out sector maps which had been prepared yesterday, drilled the details of their plans into their own minds and those of their subordinates.

  On deck the lads lounged about, still shooting the breeze, still sharpening knives. “I just want to kill a Jap, that’s all,” said one of them to me.

  Some of the men tossed empty tin cans over the stern and shot at them with .45 automatics and sub-machine guns, until the officers ordered an end to the matter.

  Many lads had written the word “Fight” in black ink on the backs of their jackets. Talk of ferocious designs on the Japs reached a new high.

  On the forecastle, a group of men sat around a howitzer, lovingly occupied with cleaning and greasing the parts. Next to them, a poker game went fast and furiously, with stacks of bills blowing in the wind.

  “A lot of the boys are putting money in the regimental safe to be sent home,” a marine told me. “One put in $450 today, and me, I cracked away 125 bucks. I thought of getting into a crap game, but then I thought if I won, I wouldn’t know what to do with the money.”

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5

  This morning at breakfast, Lieut. Cory said, “Two days more to go.” “Forty-eight hours,” said Lieut. Manterfield. And we all remarked that amazingly there are no cases of jitters evident anywhere. Except, somebody suggested, for one doctor. He, it was said, is scared to death. [Note. I was later to see this certain doctor acting with the greatest coolness and bravery under fire.]

  “Scuttlebutt”—the Navy and marine name for unfounded rumor—was rampant today. Naturally, it would be, for we are riding up to the climax of our expedition, and as yet there has been no action. We had expected some—and now busy imaginations are filling the gap.

  One story was that one of our accompanying cruisers had found, and sunk, a Japanese submarine traveling on the surface. A marine told me he had seen the flashes of gunfire himself. I checked the story with the ship’s executive officer. He laughed. “There was some heat lightning early this morning,” he said, “behind that cruiser.”

  Another story told how we had discovered a lifeboat full of natives, the remnant of the crew of colored sailors from a merchant ship which had been sunk by a Jap destroyer. This story was equally easy to track down. It originated this morning, when our task force slowed for a few minutes for a motor whale-boat, carrying dispatches from one transport to another. It is not clear by what process the boat’s crew became Negroes.

  This morning, in the bright sunlight of the ship’s upper deck, I watched Col. Hunt passing the time of day with his officers. He was in high spirits, going through the tap-dance routine he used to do, he said, when he was a student in Stanford University before the First World War. He sang his own accompaniment, a bass rendition of such tunes as “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.”

  The colonel could still turn in a very passable buck and wing. He was excellent, too, at the exit with the lifted straw hat. I decided his youthful exuberance arose because now he was getting into the zone of action. He had been one of the heroes of the First World War.

  At supper tonight there was a mimeographed message placed under each plate. “The—[name of ship] has been singularly honored to be entrusted with getting ashore the first assault wave of the first U.S. ground force offensive action in the present war,” it said. “Our ship has a good name. I expect it to have an honored and revered name after this coming action.” The message was signed by the captain. Another note was also printed on the sheet. “We may expect sudden attack from submarines or bombers at any time from now on.”

  In the cabin, I found Capt. Hawkins busily oiling his submachine gun and his cartridges. He did not seem nervous. In the course of conversation I asked him how he felt about being one of the leaders in the assault wave. “I don’t feel funny about it,” he said. “I don’t feel any more nervous than if I were being sent out to do a tough job in civilian life—you know, like trying to sell a big order, when there’s a lot of sales resistance.” The captain had once sold groceries, wholesale, in Boston.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 6

  It was easy to see that this was the day before the big event. Sailors were busy rigging big booms to the heaviest of our landing lighters, so that they could be quickly launched. At several parts of the ship, canned rations were being issued: concentrated coffee and biscuits, meat and beans, vegetable stew, chocolate bars—enough for two or three days’ subsistence until field kitchens can be rigged on Guadalcanal.

  In the ship’s armorer’s shop, working single-mindedly at the benches, giving their weapons a last-minute check of adjustment, were a crowd of officers and men.

  At luncheon, one of my table-mates, Lieut. Patrick Jones of Kansas City, said that he expected to transfer to another ship tomorrow before going ashore. The ship, he said, is carrying our reserve of ammunition, and gasoline. It would be too bad if she were hit by a bomb or shell.

  “As I fly over Kansas City,” said Lieut. Jones, “I’ll drop off a souvenir, saying ‘From Pat.’”

  We all wondered at the fact that our task force, now well within range of the Japs, was not attacked by submarine, plane or surface craft. But there was not even an alarm.

  The weather has been greatly in our favor. All day today, there was a heavy overcast, and visibility was very short. Unless the Japs had come very close, they could not have spotted us. But still, we were amazed, and I, for one, wondered if the Japs might have prepared a trap for us to walk into.

  Dr. Malcolm V. Pratt, the senior medical officer aboard, who won distinction in the First World War, told me an amusing story this afternoon.

  “I went below to look around in the hold last night,” he said, “expecting to find the kids praying, and instead I found ’em doing a native war dance. One of them had a towel for a loin cloth and a blacked face, and he was doing a cancan while another beat a tomtom. In one corner of the room, there were about four or five boys wrestling around, but no one paid any attention to them.”

  As the afternoon wore on, I saw marines tying up their packs, with blanket rolls neatly folded over the top, and standing the finished products in tidy rows along the bulkheads. Men carrying armfuls of black-cased hand grenades hurried up and down the companionways. On deck, working parties were breaking out medium-heavy artillery ammunition.

  Tonight at dinner, some of the officers betrayed signs of nerves. One was sure he heard the anti-aircraft machine guns firing on our upper deck. Another said he could hear it too. But it was merely the sound of heavy drums being moved about.

  It was announced tonig
ht that breakfast will be served at 4:30 A.M. We will reach our launching point at about 6:20. The zero hour has not yet been set, but it will be somewhere near 8:30.

  After dinner, I talked to Col. Hunt, in whose assault boat I will be going ashore. He said that Col. Maxwell and some of the other officers would be going in another boat. “No use putting all your eggs in one basket,” he said, and that had an uncomfortably hazardous sound.

  In the men’s mess hall, center of most of their activities including church, I found a close-packed crowd of marines with a sprinkling of sailors. Most of them sat on the benches—talking loudly in order to be heard against the jazzy boom of a juke box, and filling the air with cigarette smoke. A marine jitterbug, minus his shirt, his torso shiny with sweat, cut racy jive steps near the juke box, while another marine danced the part of the girl. After a few moments two sailors joined in the fun, themselves cut a rug or two.

  In the officers’ ward-room, three groups of officers entertained themselves with three separate, polite games of hearts.

  I walked the deck in the dark, damp night. There was no trace of a moon—fortunately. At ten o’clock I came back to the men’s mess hall and the officers’ ward-room. The lights were out. All the life was gone from both places.

  II

  LANDING

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 7

  It was no trouble to get up at four o’clock this morning, without benefit of alarm clock, for my mind had been trained for this day for a long time.

  Everyone was calm at breakfast. We knew we must be very near our objective by this time, probably at the moment passing directly under the Jap shore guns. And the fact that we had got this far without any action made us feel strangely secure, as if getting up at four o’clock in the morning and preparing to force a landing on the enemy shore were the perfectly normal things to do of an August morning in the South Seas. We had a heavy breakfast and passed a normally humorous conversation.

  Up on the deck the situation was the same. Everyone seemed ready to jump at the first boom of a gun, but there was little excitement. The thing that was happening was so unbelievable that it seemed like a dream. We were slipping through the narrow neck of water between Guadalcanal and Savo Islands; we were practically inside Tulagi Bay, almost past the Jap shore batteries, and not a shot had been fired.

  On the deck marines lined the starboard rail, and strained their eyes and pointed their field glasses toward the high, irregular dark mass that lay beyond the sheen of the water, beyond the silently moving shapes that were our accompanying ships. The land mass was Guadalcanal Island. The sky was still dark; there was yet no pre-dawn glow, but the rugged black mountains were quite distinct against the lighter sky.

  There was not much talking among the usually vivacious marines. The only sounds were the swish of water around our ship, the slight noises of men moving about on the forward deck.

  Up on the bridge I found the ship’s officers less calm than the marines. Theirs was the worry of getting the ship to anchorage without her being sunk, and they seemed high-strung and incredulous.

  “I can’t believe it,” one lieutenant said to me. “I wonder if the Japs can be that dumb. Either they’re very dumb, or it’s a trick.”

  But there was no sign of any tricks as we plowed on into the bay, and the sky began to throw light ahead of us, and we could see even the misty outline of Tulagi and the Florida group of islands squatting to the east and north.

  Now the rugged mass of Guadalcanal Island, on our right (to the south), was growing more distinct, and the sharp shoulders of the high mountains could be seen. But there was no sign of any firing from shore, nor were any enemy planes spotted.

  Suddenly, from the bridge, I saw a brilliant yellow-green flash of light coming from the gray shape of a cruiser on our starboard bow. I saw the red pencil-lines of the shells arching through the sky, saw flashes on the dark shore of Guadalcanal where they struck. A second later I heard the b-rroom-boom of the cannonading. I should have been ready for that, but was nervous enough so that I jumped at the sound.

  Our naval barrage, which was to pave the way for our landing, had begun. I looked at my watch. The time was 6:14.

  Two minutes later, a cruiser astern and to our starboard side began firing. There were the same greenish-yellow flashes as the salvo went off, the same red rockets arching across the sky, geysers of red fires where the shells struck shore, a terrifying rumble and boom of the explosion.

  Now, fore and aft, the two cruisers were hurling salvo after salvo into the Guadalcanal shore. It was fascinating to watch the apparent slowness with which the shells, their paths marked out against the sky in red fire, curved through the air. Distance, of course, caused that apparent slowness. But the concussion of the firing shook the deck of our ship and stirred our trousers legs with sudden gusts of wind, despite the distance.

  At 6:17, straight, slim lines of tracer bullets, a sheaf of them, showered from the bay in toward the shore, and simultaneously we heard the sound of plane motors. Our planes were strafing, we knew, though in the half-light we could not make out the shapes of the aircraft.

  Then there were more showers and sheafs of tracers needling into the dark land-mass, and we could see the red lines forming into shallow V’s, as, after they struck into their targets, they ricocheted off into the hills.

  A moment later my heart skipped a beat as I saw red showers of machine-gun tracers coming from low on the shore and apparently shooting seaward at an angle toward our ships. Was this the answering fire of the Japs? Was heavier firing going to follow? Was this the beginning of the fireworks?

  The answer was not clear. When the firing was repeated a few seconds later, it looked more like ricochet than it had before.

  Whatever the firing was, it stopped shortly after that, and from then on, there was no visible Jap resistance.

  At 6:19 another cruiser, dead ahead of us, began firing. A moment later other warships joined, and the flash of their firing, and the arcs of their flying shells, illumined the sky over a wide span ahead.

  Other ships of our force—the group under Gen. Rupertus—had turned to the left toward Tulagi, and there were the heavy reports of cannonading coming from them now.

  At 6:28, I noticed a brilliant white spot of fire on the water ahead, and watched fascinated, wondering what it was, while it burgeoned into a spreading sheet of red flame. Planes were moving back and forth like flies over the spot.

  “It’s a Jap ship,” said the ship’s officer standing next to me. His field glasses were leveled on the flames. “Planes did it,” he said. “They were strafing.”

  Now the sheet of red flame was creeping out into a long, thin line, and then it was mounting higher and higher into a sort of low-slung, fiery pyramid. For long minutes we watched the flames while the din of our thundering naval guns increased and reached a climax around us.

  Ahead of us, to the left of the still brightly burning Jap ship, I saw a bright, white pinpoint of light blink into existence. It was a masthead light riding atop the Australian cruiser which had led our procession into the bay. (The Canberra, sunk in subsequent naval action in the Solomon Islands area.)

  Our ship was still moving forward, however, and the flaming ship ahead was growing nearer. In the light of the red-orange flames we could see that it was not a large ship, and that it was low in the water. Possibly it was 120 feet long. “What kind of ship is it?” I asked a deck officer.

  “They say it’s a torpedo boat,” he said. But it was in fact a schooner which had been carrying a load of oil and gasoline—whence the flames.

  Our dive-bombers were swooping low over the beach. In the growing daylight you could see the color of the explosions where bombs were landing. Some, which struck at the edge of the water, had a bluish tinge. Others, hitting farther back in the sand and earth, were darker.

  As the planes dived, they were strafing. The incandescent lines of their tracers struck into the ground, then bent back ricocheting toward the sky to form the
now-familiar shallow V.

  Our ship and one other, the vanguard of the transport fleet, slowed and stopped. Immediately, the davits began to clank as the boats were lowered away. There were a hubbub of shouts and the sound of many men moving about the ship. On the forward deck, a donkey engine began to chuff and puff. It was time for the beginning of our landing adventure.

  It was daylight, but ahead the mass of flames that was the burning Jap boat glowed as brightly as in the dark of night. There were new explosions, as we watched, within the fire—probably gasoline tanks. A burning oil slick spread across the water astern of the boat. And the thought crossed my mind that if there had been anyone alive aboard that ship, he certainly was not alive now.

  Our ship and the other transports had swung bow-in toward Guadalcanal, and landing boats were in the water. More were on the way down to the tune of clinking davits. All around us, we could hear the muffled thrumming of engines; boats were cutting in and out at every angle, circling, sliding close alongside. It was cheering to see that each boat carried a small American flag at the stern.

  Troops, a mass of moving green uniforms, jammed the forward deck. A sailor leaned over the rail with a signal flag, beckoning landing boats to come up beside the rope nets that served as dismounting ladders. There was something peaceful about the bustle of activity. For a moment one almost forgot about the Japs who might be waiting on shore with machine guns and artillery to blast us out of the water as we came in for a landing.

  Our accompanying cruisers, which had stopped firing for a few moments, were opening up again. One, lying astern and to our starboard side, was sending salvo after salvo into a dark point of land. A column of dense black smoke was rising from the spot where the shells were landing. And as we watched, the base of the column glowed red and orange, and the boom of a distant explosion came to us.

  We knew a gasoline or oil dump had been hit, because the red flames continued to soar at the base of the smoke column, and from time to time there were new explosions, so that the flames leaped momentarily higher into the sooty black smoke.