Guadalcanal Diary Page 9

  They had encountered no opposition in landing, although they discovered traces of Japs in one or two native houses in the village. Leaving an outpost on a hill which commanded Haleta, Capt. Crane, Flight Officer Spencer and the larger part of these marine troops had left the area. They were then ordered to Gavutu to reinforce the embattled troops who had landed there at midday.

  “We reached Gavutu at about dusk,” said Flight Officer Spencer. “But by that time, Tanambogo was under control. The marines, however, had been unable to cross the narrow causeway leading to Tanambogo. The officer in charge told us to make a landing at Tanambogo.

  “We had about five minutes of naval gunfire support prior to landing. As we were coming in, the last shell hit a fuel dump on the beach, lighting up the beach like day. As we came in the Japs opened fire from their dugouts on the Tanambogo hill.

  “Only two boatloads of our men had got ashore. The coxswain of the third boat had been hit in the head by a bullet and killed, and there had been some confusion as to who was to take over the wheel. In the confusion, the boat got turned about and all the other boats followed.

  “We on shore were jammed between two piers. The only cover we could get was afforded by the side of the pier [the pier was concrete]. As soon as we opened fire the Japs spotted our tracers, and in addition we were silhouetted against the flaming oil of the fuel dump.”

  One of the two boats retired, taking wounded, and Flight Officer Spencer went with it. He came back to Tanambogo when the boat returned.

  “We found only six men in the boat which had been left at Tanambogo,” he said. “They said that the Japs had raided our positions along the piers, and that they considered Capt. Crane and the other marines had been wiped out. But Capt. Crane arrived with six of his men. They had escaped from the Japs by hiding in the bushes.

  “At nine or ten o’clock two more marines returned, swimming naked toward our boats. Our people fired. But the marines in the water yelled and were saved.”

  After that, said Flight Officer Spencer, the remnant of Capt. Crane’s forces withdrew, and a much larger detachment of marines, under Lieut. Col. Robert G. Hunt, landed the following morning at four o’clock and took Tanambogo.

  We talked also with kindly, affable Father James J. Fitzgerald, a Chicago priest who had accompanied the troopers on their attack at Gavutu. The moment he stepped ashore, under enemy fire, said Father Fitzgerald, the man ahead of him had been killed. After that, the priest had led a charmed existence, giving church rites to twenty-seven dead and forty-seven wounded on the open Gavutu beach, despite the fact that snipers were shooting fairly continuously.

  We were anxious to visit the Gavutu and Tanambogo battle grounds and secured permission to go. We went by landing boat. Our guide was a sturdy young man in high boots, a Capt. Stallings (Capt. George R. Stallings of Augusta, Ga.). He was the temporary commanding officer.

  I noticed that Capt. Stallings’ steady blue eyes looked weary almost to the point of being haunted. He spoke in a very low voice, as if he were still under fire and did not want to give away his position through loud talking.

  We sat on the floor of our boat en route from Tulagi to Gavutu, for we had to pass on the way through a narrow strait where, said Capt. Stallings, there were still snipers.

  When we had landed at the shattered concrete docks on Gavutu, Capt. Stallings gave us a concise outline of the attack there.

  Only a few hundred troops had come in on the assault against Gavutu, said Capt. Stallings, because it was expected that Jap opposition would be small. (By far the heaviest opposition had been expected on Guadalcanal.) But it had turned out that there were an estimated 1,370 Japs on Gavutu and the secondary objective, Tanambogo.

  Here as everywhere the Japs had been caught by surprise, said Capt. Stallings. The first company of the troops had landed with only sniper fire to harass them. The second company had met heavy fire from a distance 500 to 600 yards from shore, all the way to the beach. The third company had suffered heavy casualties while approaching the shore and landing.

  The troopers planned to take Gavutu first, then move on to Tanambogo, said Capt. Stallings. This meant they first had to storm a steep hill, 148 feet high, on Gavutu. This hill, and another 120 feet high on Tanambogo, commanded the docks where the assault troops landed. The hills, and particularly Gavutu Hill, were honeycombed with dugout fortresses like those which had been encountered on Tulagi. The Japs manning these dugouts were well armed with machine guns, rifles and automatic rifles.

  “The emplacements had to be blasted with TNT,” said Capt. Stallings. “But it was hard to finish off the Japs. A good many of the caves were connected, and made a sort of labyrinth. You’d shoot at a Jap in one hole, and he’d come up in another.”

  From the dock we had a good view of the two hills, for in fact they seemed to occupy practically all of the land space on the two small islands. It was as if an overgrown beehive or anthill had been planted on each island. The two land bodies are connected by a long, narrow causeway apparently built of sea shells.

  We passed several concrete-walled, metal-roofed buildings as we left the dock. They had evidently been storehouses for a certain large soap company. Now the walls and roofs had been riddled by bullets and shell fragments.

  One of the larger buildings along the shore had been a company store. The marines had used it as a hospital. “Dr. Burke, Dr. Eisenberg and Dr. Thorne worked here continuously for three days,” said Capt. Stallings, “under heavy fire. The Japs took special pains to throw a lot of fire into the place.”

  Incidentally, said Capt. Stallings, our casualties in the Gavutu-Tanambogo campaign were seventy-seven: twenty-seven killed and fifty wounded. The Japs had probably lost more than 800 troops; a few boatloads of them had escaped to neighboring Florida Island, and “about five” had been taken prisoner. (A later count revealed there were nine.)

  Capt. Stallings told us the stories of some of the heroes of Gavutu as we climbed the exceedingly steep hill on the island. One of the first marine casualties, he said, had been Maj. Robert H. Williams (of New Bern, N.C.), who had led the first wave of troops trying to storm this very hill.

  But the outstanding hero had been Capt. (now Maj.) Harold L. Torgerson (of Valley Stream, L.I.), who had blasted more than fifty Jap caves with homemade dynamite bombs. His method was to tie thirty sticks of dynamite together, run to the cave mouth while four of his men covered it with rifles and sub-machine guns, light the fuse, shove the TNT in amongst the Japs and run like hell.

  In his day’s work Capt. Torgerson had used twenty cases of dynamite and all the available matches. His wristwatch strap had been broken by a bullet which creased his wrist. Another grazing bullet had struck his rear end. But that did not stop his pyrotechnic campaign.

  On one occasion, said Capt. Stallings, the wild and woolly Torgerson had attached a five-gallon can of gasoline to one of his homemade bombs, “to make it better.” That bomb went off with a great roar, knocked Torgerson down and blasted away most of his pants—as well as blowing in the roof of a Jap dugout. Torgerson’s only comment, said Capt. Stallings, was, “Boy, that was a pisser, wasn’t it!”

  Two other troopers had distinguished themselves in disposing of Japanese dugouts, said Capt. Stallings. Corp. Ralph W. Fordyce (of Conneaut Lake, Pa.) had cleaned up six Jap emplacements in each of which there had been at least six Japs. In one case he had dragged eight Jap bodies from a dugout which he had just entered with his sub-machine gun. Corp. Johnnie Blackman had blown in five dugouts with TNT; Sgt. Max Koplow (of Toledo, Ohio) had disposed of the Japs in two dugouts connected by tunnels; he had earlier killed three Japanese who were “playing dead” amongst the corpses on Gavutu beach.

  Platoon Sgt. Harry M. Tully (of Hastings, Neb.) had picked off three members of a Japanese machine-gun crew at an extraordinarily long range.

  The Japs had fought with almost unbelievable stubbornness. Some of them cached their rifles, then swam out into the water and returned at n
ight to pick up their arms and snipe at our troops.

  But the marines had fought with the greatest ferocity. Corp. George F. Grady (of New York City) had charged a group of eight Japs on Gavutu Hill, by himself. He had killed two with his sub-machine gun; when the gun jammed, he used it as a club to kill one more Jap, and then, dropping his gun, had drawn the sheath knife he carried on his belt and stabbed two more of the enemy, before he was himself killed by the three Japs who remained unharmed.

  P.F.C. Ronald A. Burdo (of Detroit, Mich.) had charged the hilltop, firing his automatic rifle from his hip, and had killed eight Japs.

  There were others in the long chronicle of heroism recited by Capt. Stallings as we climbed and paused at the top of Gavutu Hill, but these were outstanding.

  I should have liked to hunt up and talk to some of the surviving heroes of the Gavutu campaign, but our coxswain was anxious to be on the move back to Tulagi before sunset.

  “The marines shoot anything that moves after dark,” he said.

  We had only a little time left, then, so we decided to round up our excursion with a quick trip to Tanambogo.

  Climbing down the steep Gavutu Hill, I wondered how the troops had ever succeeded in taking this island. Looking down from that precipitous hill to the strip of docks where the marines had landed gave one the commanding feeling of looking into the palm of one’s own hand. I thought then: if I did not know that the marines had taken this island hill, I would have said that the job, especially against a well-armed, numerically superior force, was impossible.

  We rode in a boat from Gavutu to Tanambogo, bypassing the long connecting causeway, where the marines had tried without success to effect a crossing. We landed on the Tanambogo docks, where other marine troops had finally come ashore. We passed two burned-out American tanks. These, said Capt. Stallings, were the vanguard of the American landing. The defending Japs had jammed the treads with crowbars, swarmed over the tanks, and set them afire with rags soaked in gasoline.

  “The Japs screamed and hollered, and actually beat on the tanks with their fists and knives,” said Capt. Stallings. One of the tank commanders, he said, had opened the hatch and killed twenty-three of the swarming Nips with a machine gun, before he was stabbed to death. “I counted the bodies myself,” said Stallings.

  On a board ramp on Tanambogo shore, we saw the remnants of two of the Zero floatplanes which had been set afire by our strafing Navy fighters.

  Then it was time to go back to Tulagi; the sun was beginning to go down and the coxswain of our boat was growing more and more anxious.

  Back at Tulagi, there was business to attend to. We were scheduled to leave for Guadalcanal at 4:30 tomorrow morning, and I wanted to make sure that we would have a fast boat for the return trip. I was certain that the Jap who had chased us today would be lying off the harbor entrance, waiting.

  We got the boat. For Gen. Rupertus had heard of our narrow escape this morning, and knew our predicament. But the longer I thought about the trip, the more convinced I became that it would be suicidal. I was sure that the Jap would be so placed that it would be impossible to escape from him as we left the harbor. His detector would locate us easily. And, of course, our little boat, with only machine guns as protection, would be no match for the sub.

  We bedded down on the floor of a shack very near the Tulagi dock, so that when we moved in the morning we would not have to pass a line of sentries. I lay awake for hours, tortured by the thought that if we were not fools, we would wait until we could make the trip by air. How about the PBY which had flown into Guadalcanal this morning? was the thought that suddenly occurred to me.

  I stepped over the sleeping officers in the shack, waked one who would know, and asked if the PBY could be called on to ferry us back. He said no, that the PBY had already left Guadalcanal and returned to base. I suggested that we might wait until air support arrived at Guadalcanal airport. That would make our trip safe.

  But we were carrying dispatches back to Guadalcanal, and could not wait an indefinite period of time until our aircraft showed up. We would have to take our chances.

  I felt better then, knowing that we had no alternative except to run for it. But it seemed to me inevitable that we would be caught and sunk, for the sub had obviously decided, this morning, that we were some sort of official boat, worth chasing—and worth waiting for.

  I sat on the front steps of the shack, under the soft white stars, and thought that this would be my last night of life. I thought that, all in all, it had been a good life, although it seemed to be ending a little early.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 13

  We were up at 4:00 this morning, and down to the dock in the dark. The night had turned cold, as is usual in this climate. The sky had been blacked out by a low overcast.

  There were to be two boats in our fleet. One was our own landing boat; the other, a small eighty which was to carry Jap prisoners back to Guadalcanal. Now the prisoners, their hands up, were being led into the small hold of the lighter.

  There were ten prisoners, three of them Navy troops, the other seven uniformed laborers. They took their places silently, obediently, as if they expected to be taken out into the bay and drowned, and were resigned to their fate. (Two of them later told an interpreter that they had expected to be killed when captured.)

  And so we started out, showing a prearranged signal to warn outposts against shooting at us. And once past the line of sentries we crept along at a low speed, hugging the cover of the shoreline. The water was rough and, despite our low speed, we were drenched by spray.

  At about five o’clock, we thought the jig was up. A white point of light like a bright star appeared in the sky to the south, and then the star burgeoned into a greater brightness, casting a flickering sheet of light over the whole sky. It was a flare. The sub, we thought, was looking for us.

  Another flare, closer and more directly ahead of us, followed a few moments later. We went through certain maneuvers, which for security reasons cannot be described, to confuse the Japs who at that moment were probably listening to our propeller beat and trying to fix our location through their detector.

  We resumed our course, some fifteen minutes later, and there were no more flares. But several times more we went through maneuvers designed to throw off the enemy.

  It was six o’clock in the morning, and the sky was growing uncomfortably light, when we passed the last protecting shoulder of land and headed out into the open bay. There would be no land within easy swimming distance now until we had nearly finished our trip. This was our dash for life; the coxswain opened the throttle wide and we pounded hard into the short, high, choppy waves. Solid water began to sluice over the bow in sheets. We were drenched anew with each wave, and the wind was chilling, but we did not slow down. This was no time for comfort.

  Somewhere, we had lost a lot of time, fallen far behind our schedule. We had planned to be out in the middle of the bay by 6:30. But at that time we were only a few hundred yards away from the shores of the Tulagi group of islands.

  But the submarine—we thank our stars—did not appear. We found later that he had been sighted across the bay, along the Guadalcanal shore, at about that time.

  Halfway across the bay the coxswain turned to me and said: “Our chances are about one in three of getting there now.” But whatever our chances at that moment, they had certainly improved greatly. The high cloud-girdled mountains of Guadalcanal were becoming more and more distinct ahead of us. We would be there soon—if we did not spot a sub.

  Then we were close enough to Guadalcanal to see isolated palm trees clearly against the skyline and rows of bamboo shacks; we knew we were going to make it.

  Back at Col. (LeRoy) Hunt’s command post, where I am billeted, I heard some bad news; that Col. Goettge, Lieut. Cory, Capt. Ringer, and several others of our personnel are missing on an excursion to Matanikau. Also old Dr. Pratt, the incorrigible adventurer, who went along with the expedition for the fun of it.

  The story i
s that a Japanese prisoner (there are more than 100 on Guadalcanal by this time, mostly labor troops) offered to take Col. Goettge to the village, with the contention that the Japs were willing to surrender.

  So Col. Goettge took a party of twenty-six officers and men, and set out in a landing boat for Matanikau. The party made a night landing, ran smack into the middle of a Jap ambush. Col. Goettge was the first man hit.

  Only three of the party escaped, by swimming down the coast to Kukum. They were Corp. Joseph Spaulding (of New York City), Sgt. Charles C. Arndt (of Okolona, Miss.), and Sgt. Frank L. Few (of Buckeye, Ariz.). Few and Arndt killed three Japs each in the course of the fight.

  Sgt. Few is a swarthy, twenty-two-year-old half Indian, vastly respected by the men because he is, as the marines say, “really rugged.” This means he is a tough hombre, and Few certainly looks the part; he has fierce dark eyes, a wiry, muscular body, and he moves with the swift ease of a cat. A flashing white smile, sideburns and scraggly black beard and mustache only intensify the effect.

  Sgt. Few told me the story of the ill-fated expedition to Matanikau. He was still a little shaky from the experience. “They got Col. Goettge in the chest right quick. Spaulding and I went up to him, but when I put a hand on him I knew he was dead.

  “Just then I saw somebody close by. I challenged him, and he let out a war whoop and came at me. My sub-machine gun jammed. I was struck in the arm and chest with his bayonet, but I knocked his rifle away. I choked him and stabbed him with his own bayonet.”

  Knowing Col. Goettge was dead, said Few, he started back to join our other marines who had landed. Then he suddenly spotted a Jap in the fork of the two trees. “My own gun was still jammed,” he said, “so I borrowed Arndt’s pistol and shot the Jap seven times.

  “I got my gun to working after that, but I couldn’t use the magazine. I had to stick a cartridge in the chamber each time I wanted to shoot. I could only fire one shot at a time. Just then I saw another Jap. I let one go, and it hit him in the face. Then I bashed him with the butt of my gun.”