Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu (13 page)

It was a total slaughter. Only a few Japs got onto the ridge itself, and they pulled the bonehead stunt of using more flares to light up our lines as they came. Big mistake. Our machine guns and BARs finished them off.

About 2:30 AM on September 14, the worst of the Jap attacks had been beaten off, and Edson told division his men could hold. By daylight, the attacks had fizzled out altogether.

By some reliable estimates, the Nips lost at least half their 4,000-man force to death or wounds. They left over 600 bodies for the Marines to count on the slopes around the ridge alone. Several hundred more were killed in mopping-up operations by Edson’s men and the First and Fifth Marines. Even my Third Battalion, Fifth, got in a few licks as the retreating Japs passed our way. Others died from wounds or disease when they tried to claw their way to the coast through the dense jungle beyond our perimeter.

Total Marine casualties for September 12–14 were amazingly low, all things considered—31 dead, 104 wounded, and 9 missing.

Red Mike Edson and Captain Bailey were both awarded the Medal of Honor. As far as I’m concerned, no two American officers ever deserved it more.

I
N HIS BOOK
The Old Breed
, George McMillan called Edson’s Ridge “the most critical and desperate battle in the entire Guadalcanal campaign.”

I think he was right.

The largest Jap offensive on Guadalcanal so far had turned out to be a big fat failure. Of course, we knew damn well there’d be others, and none of us was dumb enough to think the Japs would just go away and leave us alone. We knew they’d try again. And again. And no telling how many times more.

But when I look back today on what happened on that island between August 20–21 and September 12–14, 1942, I honestly think the most important turning point of the whole Pacific war may have come right there in that twenty-four-day period.

Much bigger battles with much bigger enemy body counts would be fought later on in the Pacific. But those of us who were there on the ’Canal know how important the Battles of Edson’s Ridge and the Tenaru River were. It goes way beyond the number of Japs killed.

Before those battles, our mental state hadn’t been too good. We didn’t know if we could trust ourselves or not. But what happened at the Tenaru and the Ridge gave us a hefty shot of self-confidence—even for guys like me who weren’t directly involved.

After those battles, the Japs knew they couldn’t make us break and run with their banzai charges in the middle of the night. At first, the arrogant bastards didn’t think we’d stand and fight. They thought we were a bunch of pushovers.

Now they knew better—and so did we.

A
T 7 AM ON SEPTEMBER 18,
we got our first reinforcements on Guadalcanal since D-Day. A five-ship Navy convoy delivered the three infantry battalions of the Seventh Marines that morning, giving us a total of ten on the island. A second Raider battalion, another artillery battalion, and other small units were also landed, plus about two dozen more tanks.

The convoy brought a total of 4,157 more Marines to our garrison along with 137 vehicles, 4,300 barrels of fuel, and some much-needed food supplies. The transports also evacuated 160 badly wounded men along with the survivors of the beat-up First Parachute Battalion.

For those of us who’d already spent forty-plus days on the island,
it was a terrific morale boost to know we were getting this much help. But I also got a big personal lift out of the news because I was almost sure my old friend Remi Balduck was among those Seventh Marines reinforcements.

I thought it’d be great if I could get together with Remi, even for just a few minutes, but I figured the odds against it were pretty long. Where the guys from the Seventh were setting up was quite a distance from our sector, and none of us was likely to have much time for visiting.

Mostly, the First and Fifth Marines were still concentrating on defending the airfield at this point, and all these fresh bodies gave us a chance to put new muscle in our perimeter protecting the field and plug a lot of gaps that were still in our lines.

But, as it always seemed to happen, this good news came with plenty of bad news mixed in. Just three days before the reinforcements arrived, the aircraft carrier
Wasp
, part of a task force that had come back into our area for the first time since early August to give the convoy air support, was sunk by torpedoes from a Jap submarine. With the
Enterprise
at Pearl Harbor undergoing repairs to heavy damage suffered in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, this left us with only one active carrier, the
Hornet
, to face six Jap carriers in the South Pacific. Not very favorable odds, to say the least.

The destroyer
O’Brien
was fatally hit by torpedoes, too. It sank a couple of days later, and one of our new fast battleships, the
North Carolina
, was so badly damaged it had to limp back to a stateside shipyard to have a thirty-two-foot hole in its side repaired.

Thanks to our Navy, things were starting to look brighter on the island itself, but the Japs still held the upper hand in the seas around us. Just to drive the point home, the Nips shelled the airfield and our
defensive positions almost every night. Their destroyers and cruisers did most of the firing, but I remember one particular night when a Jap battleship opened up on us with fourteen-inch shells. One of them hit just a few yards from where I was holed up. Thank God it was an armor-piercing shell and not the high-explosive kind. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.

Most of the Jap gunners aimed at the airfield, but when they finished shelling it, they’d switch their sights to the west and shoot at our defenses. Since the ridge we were on ran east–west, sometimes we’d move over the top of the ridgeline and get on the south side of it, where we were shielded from the enemy fire. We’d hunker down there and watch their shells land out in the woods. Sometimes the whole jungle looked like it was jumping, but nearly all their stuff was falling in uninhabited territory.

In the meantime, off to the west of us, the Jap destroyers took turns landing more troops. When they finished unloading, they’d head off to the northwest as fast as they could go to get out of range of the Cactus Air Force. Some of them weren’t fast enough, though. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Mangrum’s squadron of Dauntless scout bombers was credited with sinking a Jap cruiser and destroyer and damaging four other destroyers.

When it came to aerial victories, Captain Joe Foss of VMF-121 was Marine aviation’s all-time leader. Foss’s twenty-six kills tied the U.S. record set in World War I by the legendary Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and earned Joe both a Medal of Honor and a Navy Cross.

Several other Cactus fighter pilots also became aces at the ’Canal. Major John L. Smith was murder in his Grumman F4F Wildcat. He shot down nineteen Jap planes, and Captain Marion Carl was close behind with sixteen confirmed kills.

I’ll never forget Major Smith. He was a real morale builder to us grunts on the ground. Sometimes when he came back from a mission, he’d fly right over our positions at low altitude and do some barrel rolls. The troops loved that.

One day, an F4F flew directly above me while he was right on the tail of a Zero. About the time the Zero got over open water, the ’Cat started blazing away with its wing guns, and smoke started pouring out of the Zero.

“Oh good, he got him!” I said.

But then the smoke stopped, and I said, “Oh shit, he must’ve missed, after all!”

But a second or two later, the Zero just broke all to pieces and came floating down like big sheets of paper. The whole bunch of us on the ground punched the air and cheered.

The next day, being as we were set up so close to the airfield, I had a chance to go down and talk to a couple of the fighter pilots. I told them I really admired their guts for locking horns with those Zeros, and I described what I’d seen the day before.

“Oh, hell, that was General Geiger himself flying that ’Cat,” one of them said. “That old man’s fifty-seven years old, but he still flies like he was twenty-five.”

Maybe he was pulling my leg, but he sounded serious. He was talking about Brigadier General Roy S. Geiger, commander of the First Marine Air Wing, who’d come to the ’Canal on September 3 to take personal charge of the Cactus Air Force.

Geiger had flown every kind of military aircraft, from British Spads in World War I to the latest U.S. fighters, and “he commanded from the cockpit, not a desk,” as one writer put it. But the best thing about him from an infantryman’s point of view was his firm belief
that Marine air was in business mainly to support the riflemen on the ground.

Geiger realized the Cactus Air Force pilots had several important advantages over the Japs who came to bomb Henderson Field, and he was quick to capitalize on them.

For one thing, most of the enemy planes flying bombing missions against us were based at Rabaul, which was a hard four-hour flight away. That meant the pilots were less than fresh when they got to the ’Canal. For another thing, unless they wanted to take off or land in the dark, their flying time always put them over Henderson between about 11:30 AM and 2:30 PM, so the timing of their bombing runs was usually easy to predict.

The third advantage we had was those coast watchers I mentioned earlier. They kept Geiger’s staff so well informed of the Jap pilots’ progress that our Marine fliers usually knew at least forty-five minutes in advance when a raid was due. This gave the F4Fs time to climb up to interception altitude, and our other planes had time to take off and fly east to avoid the Jap bombs.

A
S FAR AS
I know, no man in K/3/5 ever killed another Marine by accident on Guadalcanal, but we did have some friendly fire casualties in our outfit caused by guys in other companies.

The worst case of friendly and fatal small-arms fire I remember was right after the Battle of Edson’s Ridge. K and I Companies were moving together along the coast road trying to head off the Jap retreat. When K Company cut into the woods to get in position between I Company and the Matanikau River, some of our scouts came under fire from I Company.

One bullet went right through the heart of PFC Jimmy Snodgrass, a damn good Marine, and killed him instantly. Then the same bullet continued on and hit Private Dick Tweedie, but he survived. (Later on, Tweedie got hit again at Cape Gloucester, this time by a Jap, but he lived through that shooting, too.)

A
T 7 AM
on October 7, the whole Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, moved out for a new strike across the Matanikau. We were assigned to lead the advance in the biggest American offensive operation yet on Guadalcanal. All told, our force included six infantry battalions out of the Fifth, Seventh, and Second Marines with 3/5 out in front and 2/5 close behind.

The first objective for our battalion was to gain a permanent foothold on the east bank of the Matanikau. We were told to set up our machine guns, mortars, and rifle squads when we got there, while some of our guys would pretend to be building a bridge. This was supposed to be a trick to draw the enemy to the river, but we never got a chance to do the part about the phony bridge because the Japs came along too soon.

We’d been on the march for about three hours and were still east of the Matanikau, with K Company on the left and I Company abreast of us on the right, when we ran into what looked like a full company of Nips.

Very quickly, we set up a line running east and west to try to keep the Nips from getting past us to the south, and within a few minutes we had a pretty hot firefight going. As K/3/5’s reconnaissance sergeant, I was spending most of my time as a runner out of the company CP taking messages back and forth between Captain
Lawrence Patterson, K Company’s commander, and the leaders of our three rifle platoons.

On one of my running trips, I’d just been given a message to deliver to the platoons by Red Mike Edson, who was sending a company of his Raiders in to help us. I was pounding along when I caught the attention of a group of four or five Japs, and one of them threw a grenade right at me.

It was the first time this had ever happened to me—although it wouldn’t be the last—and I’ve got to admit it was pretty scary. The damn thing might’ve gotten me, too, only it hit a tree and bounced slightly off course. I ran the other way as hard as I could go and managed to get fifteen or twenty yards away from the grenade before it went off.

I breathed a big sigh of relief when I was sure it had missed me, and I just kept on running. I could hear bullets slapping the leaves on the bushes around me—probably from the same bunch of Japs—but I wasn’t about to slow down long enough to fire back at them with my ’03 Springfield.

At that point, all I wanted to do was deliver my message and get the hell out of there.

W
ITH THE HELP
of the Raiders and the First and Second Battalions of the Seventh Marines, we were able to encircle some of the Japs and keep them from moving around us to the south.