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.
