by William Marshall
In a corner of the Marine cemetery on the western end of Guadalcanal there stands a faded wooden tombstone. It is a marker not for one particular grave, but for all. On the wooden board, words burned into the plank with a hot soldering iron are now barely legible. They say:
St. Peter
Let These Marines Enter Heaven
They Have Served Their Time In Hell …
Guadalcanal
The man who burned those letters in the pathetic wooden tombstone spoke for all who had lived, suffered, and died on the dread island of Guadalcanal. That name is not a word to the Marines and GIs who fought there. It is an emotion. In it are compressed the ultimate depths of horror, fear, sickness, hate, violence, disgust, and death. That is the real meaning of Guadalcanal. That weather-beaten tombstone says it all.
Jungle war was new to the Americans who landed on “the Canal” in little Higgins boats. Coming ashore against no resistance, on the clustered islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Guadalcanal, it began quietly enough. This was 7 August 1942, and some of the green Americans still wore old World War I helmets as they began the Solomon Islands invasion. Battalions from the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions led the attack.
Incredible as it seems today, only a single battalion of 2nd Division Marines made the Tulagi assault landings. Another battalion of the 1st Marines formed the original landing force for Guadalcanal. In all, less than a thousand men launched the first American invasion of enemy-held territory. Close behind them came thousands more.
Pure luck saved them from massacre. There were less than a thousand Japanese on the islands then. Pouring quickly ashore at Lunga Point, on the north shore of Guadalcanal, the Marines quickly seized an unfinished airfield there. Beyond it, they met and engaged the enemy troops, in the jungle and barren uplands, in what was to become a seemingly endless struggle.
Reinforcements began to pour in, for both sides. From Bougainville and Rabaul, the Japanese started the famous Tokyo Express. Every night destroyers and troopships landed more and more men, building the defense force faster than it could be destroyed. From Efate and New Hebrides, the Americans brought in more shiploads of men of the 1st, 2nd, and 10th Marines, and the Army’s 25th Infantry Division and Americal Division.
The very day of the first landings, Japanese air and sea attacks began, in ever-increasing violence. Determined to cut off the invaders’ air and sea support, they threw whole fleets into the channel between Guadalcanal and Florida Islands. There, Yank and Japanese forces grappled in deadly combat, almost daily. Over fifty warships, and hundreds of planes, sank in the death-filled narrows, to earn a grim new name for the 15-mile-wide sea lane—Iron Bottom Sound.
Ashore, the unfinished airfield, a muddy morass, formed the crude, sticky base (Henderson Field) for Marine air support. From it, obsolete P 40s, manned by ferociously brave pilots, soon were to take to the air against overwhelmingly superior Japanese planes and shoot them out of the sky by sheer skill and courage.
First man to die was Private Russell L. Miller of New York City, a member of B Company, 2nd Marine Regiment. He was killed by a Japanese bullet, at his Lewis gun, on Florida Island. Right after that an American Navy shell, falling short, dropped on Miller’s little assault group and wiped it out. The misery of the invasion had begun, on a typically rotten note.
On the Canal, the Japanese quickly recovered from their surprise, and came forward to meet the invaders. Never before defeated, and full of propaganda about their invincibility, they hurled themselves on the Americans. Hysterical with almost religious ecstasy, they could not be stopped except by death. Here, for the first time, Americans faced combat with absolutely no choice but to kill or be killed.
In the jungle, death was everywhere. In hidden foxholes, behind trees, concealed in swamp hollows, or up in the trees, the Japanese waited. They were resigned to die if only they could shoot or grenade one American. Soon the Yanks learned the answer to those tactics as man after man fell, cut down by invisible snipers. Creeping and crawling forward, the Marines fired at every suspicious spot. They quickly learned to shoot first, and fast.
“Better waste a bullet on a coconut,” said Sergeant Jim Tatum of Miami, Florida, “than save it and find the coconut was a Jap.”
From the first minutes, the stinking rot of the jungle disgusted the men from the plains and mountains of America. Insects buzzed and crawled in swarms everywhere. Every man soon was covered with red, itching insect bites. And every man stayed that way. Sweat and filth became normal, and cleanliness was something only remembered from another world.
Swarming Japanese ships in Iron Bottom Sound bombarded the Americans from the rear, while newly-landed artillery and mortars smashed at them from the jungle. High above, atop Mt. Austen, over-looking Lunga Point, Japanese artillery fired down on the invaders. There was no front, and there was no rear. It was an insane, mixed-up mess of infiltration and murderous raids by both sides.
On 20 August, the first big clash between massed forces exploded along the Tenaru River, not far into the jungle. So poor were the American maps that they did not know that the muddy stream actually was Alligator Creek, not the Tenaru River. But the name stuck to this first full-scale battle, only 3,000 yards east of Henderson Field.
In black darkness, yammering machine guns, roaring explosions and thudding mortar bursts made a hell of the thickly overgrown mud banks. On each side Japanese and American smashed at each other with every weapon. Morning revealed over nine hundred dead Japanese, as the defenders backed away into the jungle. Hundreds of dead Americans lined the other bank of the gloomy little creek. Here the Army’s 164th Regiment, fighting alongside the Leathernecks, won a typical Marine title of praise—the nickname of the “164th Army-Marines.”
Pressing slowly ahead, the Marines met constantly advancing Japanese reinforcements. Through the steaming muck, invisible from only a few yards away, little groups sought each other, grappled, and killed in gasping nightmare struggles. Marine Lieutenant Larry Hickson of Seattle, Washington, leading a crawling patrol, turned to call to one of his men, who seemed to be too far off to one side. It was a Japanese soldier. Both fired almost at the same time. The Japanese fell dead, hit in the heart, while a bullet smashed Hickson’s arm. That was how it went in the cloudy ground haze on the Canal.
On the hilltop, Marines found a Japanese flag flying from a post atop a hut. As they climbed up to remove the “meatball” ensign, an American plane dove down and bombed them, killing seven men. That was how things seemed to go on the accursed island.
It was well that the Americans had the will and guts to meet adversity. “Indian war” was the routine in the ever-damp, stinking jungle. Sudden ambush, sudden death—they were every day, and every night. A shot, and the rustle of leaves; a knife flash and the gurgle of blood choking a slit throat—that was Guadalcanal.
Dysentery was everyone’s curse—”the crud,” they called it. Every half-hour sick men, stomachs gripped by convulsive cramps, had to defecate. Many a man died in horrible ugliness and misery, shot or stabbed as he squatted to relieve himself.
Malaria and dengue racked the men. Shaking with fever and chills, thin and wan, men who should have been on hospital beds slithered through the disease-filled mud. Many who were still in their teens looked like old men. Their skins were furrowed and cracked, and red-rimmed eyes stared vacantly from dark eye sockets. Many men lost 40 or 50 pounds, and looked like living corpses.
Jungle rot—a leprous white or yellow rotten puffing—ate into the skin of almost every gyrene. Never dry, as sweat soaked them in the sticky humidity, men literally rotted in the terrible, steaming, tropical heat.
Not far from the native village of Tassafaronga, on 5 September, two light tanks accompanying a Marine advance ran into the kind of fighting that was a synonym for Guadalcanal.
Out of hidden holes, swarms of Japanese rose to meet the Marines, and machine guns sprayed so thickly through the undergrowth that clipped leaves and twigs rained down. Led by Lieutenant William Petoskey of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Marines charged with naked bayonets. Steel clashed with steel, as shrieking Nipponese dueled with the Americans, and the jungle echoed with screams of rage and fear. Then it quieted for a moment, to groans and horrible gurgling noises.
In one tank, Sergeant Ralph O’Connor of Boston, Massachusetts, raised his head to peer out, and got a bullet through his head. The tank bogged down in a mud hole, and the rest of the crew fought their way out against Japanese who swarmed over them with knives and bayonets.
The other tank jammed between two trees. Suicidal Japanese crawled up to it and drenched it with gasoline. While its commander, Sergeant Dave Abramowitz of Jersey City, New Jersey, fired its machine guns desperately, the Japanese set the stuck tank afire.
They actually beat on the tank’s sides with fists and knives, screaming wildly. Abramowitz was stabbed to death as he climbed out of the tank, but the other crewmen escaped under the cover of his machine gun. Later, thirty-eight dead Japanese were counted under the sweep of the dead tank’s gun.
Rain poured down almost daily, turning the already damp earth into a deep slime. On both sides of Iron Bottom Sound, on the Canal and Tulagi, the fighting went on, and the misery grew endless. How men could rise to bursts of violent courage, in that sodden muck, is hard to understand.
Take Sergeant Jesse Glover, of the 6th Marines. He was on Gavutu, one of the many shore fringe islands. One morning he and his squad came upon a native hut, in a clearing. It was impossible to tell whether or not there were any Japanese in it.
Glover, an “old pro” who called the Corps his home, quietly bawled out his squad for hesitating. Then he took some extra hand grenades and started towards the hut, all alone. Waiting at the edge of the clearing, the men saw him dash to the door of the hut. He kicked it open, and plunged inside.
As he disappeared into the hut they heard the crack of a grenade, and part of the straw hut blew out. Above the echoes they heard Glover’s bull-throated voice bellowing joyously:
“Good morning, you bastards!” — Blam!
“Good morning, you bastards!” — Blam!
“Good morning, you bastards!” — Blam!
Each explosion, and the flying straw walls, told of Glover’s passage from room to room of the hut. When his squad came up to join him, they found the sergeant happily surveying his work. He was un-harmed, but in the wreaking havoc of the hut lay the torn parts of nine Japanese soldiers.
But joyous carnage like that was not the rule of the dark and bloody islands. Especially on the big one, the Canal, there was little laughter—except by the psychos, who sometimes broke down in insane cackling, as their minds gave way under the grisly horror. The men in the line didn’t ever laugh very much. They didn’t remember how.
Many men were hit and lost in the dense underbrush. Invisible from a few feet away, and unable or not daring to call for help, they gasped their lives out there. No one will ever know how many men, of both sides, died like stricken animals on Guadalcanal’s tangled floor. Other men, like Lieutenant Jim Snell of Enid, Oklahoma, of Edson’s Raiders, suddenly collapsed, overcome by heat and exhaustion, and lay helplessly paralyzed.
Only a few Japanese civilian laborers surrendered. All other Japanese preferred death to the shame of surrender. At Matanikau, one of the coastal villages, Marines were test-firing a captured pom-pom gun, when suddenly a white flag appeared near the village. A group of terrified Nipponese laborers, who thought they were being fired on, came out to surrender. They were the only ones to give up, except stunned or helpless Japanese.
After a while, the atmosphere of killing destroyed all normal thoughts of mercy. One Marine saw six Japanese come running toward him, apparently unarmed. Taking no chances, he opened up with a BAR, and cut them all down. Later, examination of the bodies revealed no weapons on them. Perhaps they were trying to surrender. No one will ever know.
More often, there were no doubts. A man would spot an enemy running, and the cry would go up, like the baying of hounds: “There he goes! Get the bastard! Kill the SOB!” Rapping rifle fire would follow the terrified Japanese, cut him down, and then tear holes in his twitching body. Mercy was too dangerous, when “dead” or wounded Japanese would suddenly come to life and attack corpsmen who stopped to bind up their wounds.
Many times the Marines found enemies holed up in caves, from which they emerged now and then to shoot and run. Here began the sickening task that was to continue all across the Pacific—the blasting shut of cave entrances, with dynamite, sealing the inhabitants alive in their tombs. In one cave a wounded Japanese officer was found still alive. An interpreter called to him to surrender. The answer was a grenade. And the last word was a satchel charge that sealed the cave mouth, entombing the fanatical officer. In another cave, three Japanese were cornered. They had only one pistol, which they kept firing. The last three shots seemed to be inside the cave. Later, it was seen that they had used their last three bullets to kill themselves.
So it went on the Canal, as the stench of disease, death, and rotting corpses turned the humid air to poison. The stink of Guadalcanal was something never to be forgotten. It was the smell of hell on earth.
Madness seized some men. Sergeant Angus Goss of Detroit, Michigan, had a hard time with one cave. Every grenade he pitched in came sailing back out. Then he pushed a satchel charge into the entrance. The Japanese threw it out, near Goss. The explosion ripped the skin from his leg. Streaming with blood, and wholly maddened, Goss sprang to his feet. His Tommy gun firing steadily, he leaped into the cave, spraying bullets into it. Eight Japanese went down before the hail of flying lead. Unharmed, Goss emerged from the cave, eyes blazing with fury. Questioned later, he said “I just got mad. Everything got red in front of my eyes. I had to kill those damn Japs.”
Back on Henderson Field, the few available old Grumman Marine and Navy planes did unbelievable flying against new Zeros that could out-speed, out-climb, and out-maneuver them. Just to refuel a plane took hours of labor, when gasoline had to be hand bailed out of 55-gallon drums. Poor radios limited communications to a 20-mile range. Fliers lived on cold Spam, like the GIs in the line. Even so, such great pilots as Captain Joe Foss were there, and they took a fearful toll of Japanese planes.
On 25 October, the Japanese launched a massive attack in a desperate effort to smash the Americans. By then thirty thousand Nipponese troops were available, and all of them were used. Failure to coordinate the assault on the flanks led to its failure. Fanatically brave as ever, the Japanese launched wave after wave of screaming banzai attacks, led by sword-swinging officers. Delayed and confused in the thick jungle, each wave struggled forward only to be cut to pieces by waiting Marine and Army units.
For two days and nights the attacks continued, only to be beaten back by the haggard, red-eyed Yanks. When the Americans were on the verge of exhaustion, almost unable to fight back, the attacks suddenly stopped. The Japanese had lost nearly four thousand men, and were retreating.
Dead bodies and bloody pools littered the murky jungle, like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Bodies rotting on the jungle floor bloated like overstuffed sausages and burst to emit a nauseating stench that hung like a cloud. Millions of maggots crawled over and in the dead bodies.
Again the grim advance resumed, and the blasting of caves of holed-up enemy began again. Marine Captain Harold Torgerson of Valley Stream, Long Island, New York, alone blasted forty caves. His method was to run to a cave mouth, while some of his men covered him. Then he would light his dynamite fuse, shove the charge into the hole, and run. Sometimes he tied gasoline cans to the charge, “for added flavor.” Once he was blown 15 feet by one explosion, and his clothes were almost ripped off. Arising, he remarked calmly, “Boy, that was a beaut! Even better than the Fourth of July!”
Marine Sergeant Max Koplow of Toledo, Ohio, tangled with three Japanese, killed one with one shot, and was seized by the others. Unable to point his gun, he used it as a club, and killed the other two with its butt. Then, as he lay panting, two more Japanese leaped on him. In a brutal wrestling bout with them, while they stabbed at him with knives, he turned one attacker’s knife against its owner, and killed him with it. Finally, one knee holding down his last enemy’s knife hand, he strangled the Japanese with his bare hands. Then he collapsed with eight knife wounds in his body.
Disease became rampant. Shattered Japanese food stores of canned fish stank horribly in the tropic heat. No latrines could be built, and the thousands of dysentery and malaria-racked men relieved themselves and vomited where they could. Nauseating mounds of human excrement were everywhere. All this, and rotting bodies cooked and steamed in the fierce heat. A pestilential miasma of foulness covered everything.
In this sickening stench, swarms of flies traveled from fish to excrement, to maggoty corpses, and to food, as the men forced them-selves to eat. Soon every man was haggard with fever, while medical stores ran out. Then food was cut down to one can of C rations per day, as the Tokyo Express sank incoming supply ships. Few men tried to shave any longer. On all their grimy, deeply-lined, stubbled faces there was “the look” of soul-sick combat veterans.
Guadalcanal was all this. The island stank and reeked with ugliness, death, disease, and horror. No nightmare of hell could possibly have been worse. Men who lived through it still grow silent and staring-eyed at the memory of that horrible, awful place.
After a time the men became dull-eyed, nearly numb killing machines, almost beyond feeling or thought. The ultimate example was Private “Red” Van Orden of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, of the 2nd Marines, age eighteen years. He and a buddy crawled slowly all one morning, to knock out a machine gun nest. Van Orden found it and killed its crew of four, finishing the last one with a gun butt smash. Then, returning to his lines, he reported the incident to his commanding officer. The officer, with wry irony, jokingly asked, “Why didn’t you bring back the machine gun?” The tired Marine listened seriously.
Numbly, Van Orden went out again, and returned a little later. Silently, he laid the Japanese machine gun at the captain’s feet. Later, in January, the quiet young man was killed by a shell burst in the last drive to secure the island.
Curiously, after all the Marines’ suffering, it was an Army division that broke the back of the Japanese defense. At Mt. Austen, which dominated Henderson Field, the Americal Division locked in massive lines of combat with the core of the defense force, early in December. Seven times the 132nd Infantry charged up the barren slopes. Seven times the crack Oka Regiment, defending the mountain, counterattacked. The GIs’ last charge broke the defense lines. From then on the Japanese defeat was certain.
On 16 December, a 1st Marine night infiltration patrol found some sixty Japanese quietly camped around a fire far behind the battle lines. Silently the patrol ringed the peaceful scene. At a signal from Lieutenant Claude Grout of Athens, Georgia, they all fired at once, killing every one of the stunned enemy. Then they moved in and shot the fallen Japanese again—just to be sure. Minutes later the patrol moved on. Behind them the campfire still flickered, its lights and shadows dancing over the still bodies of sixty dead men. That was how death struck on the Canal.
On another patrol, out of Edson’s Raiders, a squad was hit by mortar fire, leaving only three men alive. One of them, his stomach torn open, and losing blood fast, was Private Ray Herndon of Walterboro, South Carolina. Knowing that he was dying, he told the others to go back, as they heard Japanese slithering through the brush to finish them off. He propped his gun up, facing the enemy, and told the others: “You guys get out of here. I’m done for anyhow. I’ll get some of the bastards before I pass out. Now scram!”
Early in December the malaria-ridden, staggering men of the 1st Marines were relieved. Many were too weak to climb the nets to board the transports back to Lunga. Soon after, the 10th and 2nd Marines also were pulled out. They were so sick and exhausted that their combat value had become dangerously low. The Army’s 25th and Americal Divisions went on with the dirty business.
It was to take a full year before the 1st Marine Division could again be brought back to fighting condition. The 2nd Marines, having had comparatively little fighting on Guadalcanal, were able to move out late in the year to the deadly Tarawa landings. There, in November 1943, their brutal training at the Canal paid dividends.
In January and February the Army divisions pressed forward to finish the miserable job. As days passed resistance became weak, though it flared up violently every once in a while. In the last days the big island became a grisly killing ground. Methodically, the GIs killed off the fanatical Japanese, while the Tokyo Express struggled to evacuate the defeated Imperial Army. Eleven thousand Japanese did escape, but nearly thirty thousand were butchered when they stubbornly refused to surrender. By February the gloomy mud of the island was blood-soaked, from one end to the other. In mid-February it was over. Guadalcanal was secure. The blood-letting was done with.
With the taking of the Canal, the march towards Tokyo and victory began. Counting the price, the leaders of the American fighting forces shook their heads gloomily. It was too costly. The fighting men said nothing, hardly believing that they were still alive.
Yet, very soon, the optimism that is so typical of the Americans flared up again. If they had won through hell itself—and Guadalcanal was literally hell on earth—then what could stop them now? Nothing. And the Japanese knew that they could never win. If they had lost when hell itself fought for them, when could they ever win? Never.
So it happened, in fact. The men who served their time in hell, on Guadalcanal, had served for all the Americans. With their suffering they had brought the assurance of victory.
They looked back with haunted eyes at the terrible, unnatural island, as on a nightmare. For the rest of their lives they would shudder inwardly when they heard the name of Guadalcanal.
Surely the men who sleep forever in the cemetery there deserve the pity and gratitude that no longer can reach them. But for the living, the name of that awful island always will mean one thing—the heartsick emotion of men facing death in a stinking hell… Guadalcanal.