Solomons Campaign

by Fletcher Pratt

Published in 1944

Bloody Island

The initiative in war is a useful but evanescent asset, residing chiefly in the mind of the commander, and permitting him to decide no more than on what terms the next engagement shall be fought. At Pearl Harbor the Japanese had gained a wide strategic initiative in the Pacific. That they used it to increase their material resources by the seizure of an island-and-water empire in the Indies is incidental in its strategic significance. These resources could be translated into military power only at the close of a long period of development. The whole question of the war was who should do the developing.

The important immediate strategic facts were that the Japanese had in a practical sense destroyed the Allied forces opposing the southern and weakest face of their triangular empire; and that from observation posts in the region of Singapore and the Solomon Islands they could detect any effort to form new Allied concentrations in the south.

The enemy possessed an initiative resting on a consciousness that their forces were not tied down by a strategic necessity for defense and that their methods were sound. This initiative was by no means destroyed at Coral Sea, which was a tactical, not a strategic defeat—inflicted, so to speak, in defiance of the laws of gravity. With the mobile forces then available, they could have repeated the attempt of May 1942 to gain a lodgment at New Caledonia or in eastern Australia a month later with chances of success even improved, because they were now informed of the strength and character of our countermeasures.

At this point one runs into the over-advertised mystery of Oriental thought process. Modern Japan is an exemplification of Mahan’s general theory of sea power; it is also the only maritime nation by which his special theory of the means of attaining sea power is completely rejected. No Japanese plan of campaign ever called for a great slugging sea battle. Their method is a kind of naval encirclement, aimed at the enemy’s less obvious resources, particularly in bases, till he approaches any contest enfeebled, with less than his paper strength. After Coral Sea it was evident that the Japanese could make further progress in the southwest Pacific only at the price of a head-on clash with our fleet. They used the initiative they still had for the move on Midway to cut that fleet from its main harbor, and when the night of 6 June closed in, the initiative was gone.

The loss was evidently a temporary one, resting partly on the fact that the Japanese High Command would need time to analyze the causes of these two surprising successive defeats, partly on the material loss in aircraft carriers—a class of vessel round which their sea operations had hitherto revolved. They were completing more carriers; the appearance of these new ships or a reorientation of their strategy to be less dependent on carriers—either would enable our enemies to determine the nature and locale of the next campaign. In the meantime, we ourselves could make that determination; but only if we attacked at once, with whatever forces could be rapidly assembled, no elaborate planning; and only if we converted this temporary initiative into a permanent one by attacking something so interesting to the Japanese that they would be forced to abandon other plans in order to defend or to retake it.

These would appear to be the main concepts behind Admiral King’s decision to go into the Solomons. A series of considerations limited the incidence of the offensive. Along the Indonesian barrier from the Solomons to Sumatra we had no initiative because we could achieve no surprise. A move against the Marshalls would not have fulfilled the strategic objective because the Japanese could simply ignore it and go on with any plan of attack they themselves had; one toward Wake and Marcus would have stirred up the hornets indeed, but too many of them. It must be remembered that in July 1942 we could bring to any struggle in the Pacific only forces approximately equal to those of the Japanese (provided the lines of communication were about the same length).

The most astonishing feature of the Solomons campaign, in fact, was that the Japanese did not anticipate it. They knew full well that we had established base facilities at Nouméa, New Caledonia, and at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides; their submarines had been off these places. Our airplanes had been over Guadalcanal; they must have been aware that we had seen the landing strip they were building there, and they would have been idiots if they did not think that we could calculate how both Nouméa and Espiritu Santo would be under the cloud of their bombers when the strip was finished. The only tenable theory is that they did not think that we had stuff to come in on them at the only point geographically possible.

As a matter of fact, we didn’t. The Japanese could put in as much as they chose of their navy and the air forces supporting it and their army, running them by easy stages from Truk to Rabaul and down the Solomons chain. They could use as many troops as necessary, and our submarines had not yet cut their transport fleet to the point where it had to be hoarded.

In the Atlantic the German submarine campaign was at its height. We were on the threshold of the battles for North Africa; all the well-trained troops and the fast Army planes were needed for that enterprise. Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor had been notified that his allotment of cargo ships and anti-submarine craft, already down near the safety margin for mere defense, would have to be cut instead of increased. For the land operations only the 1st Division of Marines could be spared, much crowded in inadequate transports. At sea there was one of the new, fast battleships; three carriers with all their planes—Wasp, Hornet, Saratoga [the presence of Wasp and Hornet had been announced and the fact that the third carrier celebrated the 200,000th landing on her deck. The Ranger was the only other carrier then in commission and she was altogether too small and new to have had 200,000 landings at that time—about three divisions of heavy cruisers, one of them borrowed from the MacArthur command in Australia; a few light cruisers; and not enough destroyers.

Among commanders we had Major General A. A. Vandegrift of the Marines on land and on the water Vice-Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, Vice-Admiral Frank Fletcher, and Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner. Fletcher had been at Coral Sea; we know him. Ghormley was a sailor’s sailor, as they speak of a ballplayer’s player. His social contacts were few; his vocabulary was considered the most purple in a service where good swearing is valued as an art; his conversation was naval shop; he had few friends among the younger officers who had not heard him talk; he was known as the General Board’s man, with a perception, depth, and grasp of principle that left people astonished. In this campaign he was not a leader in the field war; he had general command of the area, back at the base—a good place for a thinker.

Admiral Turner was his anti-thesis—known in the service as “Terrible Turner,” a sundowner, a hard, driving personal leader who expected everyone to live up to his own impossible standards, precise, exacting. In his days as head of the War Plans Division of the Navy Department in peacetime, he habitually made appointments to see people at nine o’clock in the evening and later; his would be the only light burning in the long ramshackle building on Constitution Avenue. This time he had the amphibious force, with the delicate assignment of making it possible for the Marines to land and seeing that no one interfered with them till they were in full possession. Admiral Fletcher had the covering group, that is, the carriers and their attendant ships, to keep off long-range, large-scale interference.

The Solomons run over five hundred miles from northwest to southeast. Guadalcanal, the southeasternmost but one, the size of a fattish Long Island, is unique in being the scene of a very funny story by Jack London (“The Terrible Solomons”) and in having a rolling plain along its northern shore, behind which the ridges rise up to typical Solomons country—jagged limestone mountains in which the tropical rains have worn caves and ravines, covered with dense jungle growth. The only things that live there are gorgeous birds, insects which doubtless consider themselves gorgeous, and the “gooks,” fuzzy-looking natives who are good Presbyterians or good Catholics, sometimes both at once. The plain, called Lunga, is the reason why the Japanese moved in. It is the only place within three hundred miles (the extreme mange of a fighter) where an airfield can readily be built by hand labor.

There is no harbor. Cargo vessels must lie out a mile or so and lighter their loads in, but the holding ground is good, and the anchorage fairly well protected by Florida Island, some twenty miles north, which is precipitous to the water and useless for any other purpose. Between the two at the eastern end submerged reefs pinch in the narrow Sealark Channel; it broadens westward like a funnel and precisely in the center of the funnel mouth the little round island of Savo sticks its volcanic snout out of the sea.

Florida curves; inside the curve toward Guadalcanal lie other islands—Tulagi, Gavutu, Tanambogo—enclosing the fine, deep Tulagi Harbor, where a navy could lie and take care of itself if the shore establishments were all right. With Guadalcanal’s air cover, it makes one of the best naval base sites in the world, provided one overlooks the climate.

Before the day on 7 August 1942, our approaching fleet ran out of a region of heavy weather that had given it good concealment on the way down, and the navigating officers began to take starsights. A correspondent has commented that there was no special early breakfast, nothing unusual about this approach to battle. The men were veterans now; they had seen before the line of flickering blue lights across the deck of the carrier ahead where her planes were warming up, had seen them move up and away; and even seen the one that went down instead, to leave nothing but a memory and a ripple on the black water. The carriers and their retinue had split apart from the rest, running wide for the waters south of Guadalcanal to have sea room when the Japanese bombers should come down from Rabaul. A destroyer blinkered to a carrier about a torpedo wake under her stern. “Thanks,” replied the carrier; “we just saw a blackfish in the vicinity.”

Far to the west, though these men knew nothing of it, Flying Fortresses from the MacArthur command were at that moment close over Rabaul. The same first light through which our carrier planes were approaching their objective would see these bombers hammering the hangars and run-ways and dispersal areas with everything they had to keep the Japanese at home. In that first light Admiral Turner was rounding the northern cape of Florida with his cruisers. There was a Japanese signal station there with a radio mast; the Quincy opened the first gun of the campaign and brought down that mast so rapidly that it probably never got off a warning of our approach, though there was some grumbling on the flagship about this—they wanted to capture the station and use it as a communications link with Pearl Harbor.

The fleet split as it entered the funnel-mouth of Sealark Channel, the Astoria, Quincy, and Vincennes with the Australians’ Canberra heading toward the Guadalcanal side, while their Australia, bearing the flag of Vice-Admiral V. A. C. Crutchley, commander of the cruiser force, with the Hobart and about three of our cruisers stood toward Tulagi.

It was six o’clock; the island stood out clear in the long-shadowed early dawn. Just seventeen minutes later the Astoria opened fire against Guadalcanal, and as though the sound had called them up, our “dive-bombers started to streak over. There seemed to be hundreds of them.” They hit first at the seaplanes floating in Tulagi Harbor and the Japanese were crushed without getting a single machine into the air, so complete was the surprise, so rapidly had the Quincy’s guns cleared out the warning station. The Wasp’s group alone knocked out nine float Zeros, a four-motored bomber, and five big flying boats.

At Guadalcanal, where the strongest resistance had been expected round the airfield and to which the heaviest dive bomber formations had been assigned, the Japanese proved surprisingly weak. The combination of heavy guns and bombs silenced their shore batteries and killed off their anti-aircraft fire so thoroughly and so fast that at seven o’clock, a whole hour before the scheduled time, the transports moved in and the Marines had their boats in the water. At eight they formed up and pushed to the shore toward where the mouths of two little rivers, Ilu and Tenaru, offered practicable beaches.

There was no resistance but a little dripping sniper fire. Our landing parties came on a camp where breakfasts were still cooking and captured a number of wizened, undersized men who under questioning turned out to be labor troops, some of them Korean and all ill-fed. They said the Japanese soldiers had taken to the tall grass among the hills. No attempt was made on the airfield that day, which was devoted mainly to getting equipment ashore, setting up anti-aircraft guns and communications links, and preparing for a push in the morning. By ten o’clock the shooting on Guadalcanal was all over.

But Tulagi furnished a good example of the fact that any military plan can be modified by the enemy. Colonel Merritt Edson had been assigned to take it with the Raider Battalion, which is to the Marines as a whole what the Marines are to the ordinary military service—professional tough guys, specialists of peculiar skill in the art of murder. They got ashore at the north point, reaching the beach easily and by surprise, then began to work along both sides of the central keel of the island through tropic brush so thick that their pace was half a mile an hour. Two hours of this brought them against hills honeycombed with caves, each of which held a machine gun or bigger piece surrounded by Japanese who knew and used every weapon in the book. Gunfire from the ships was not very effective against these caves and had to be lifted as the Raiders advanced. When grenades were pitched into the cave mouths the Japanese threw them out again or hid behind interior barricades.

Toward afternoon the Marines had made so little progress on Tulagi that they stopped and organized for the night. At Gavutu the situation was much the same; and at Tanambogo, which is reached by a causeway from Gavutu, two attacks were sharply beaten off. One of them was led by tanks and supported by low-flying planes, but Japanese artillery bracketed the causeway from the caves and we lost the tanks, one of them after a desperate struggle which left twenty-three dead Japanese round a single burned-out vehicle.

Toward afternoon also the Japanese bombers did come storming down from Rabaul—twenty-five of them at high level which shed their missiles across the anchorage, ten dive bombers that may have had something to do with the decision to close down for the night, though they did no real damage ashore. Afloat they hit a transport and the destroyer Jarvis, the latter so badly that she had to pull out for Australia and repairs. No one ever saw her again or the men aboard; maybe because a submarine got her, maybe because she just cracked up and went down.

All told a good day; loss light and gain considerable.

That night the Japanese really started to fight the war. On both Gavutu and Tulagi they boiled out of their holes with knife, tommy gun, and grenade, screaming “American, you die!” or just screaming nothing at all. The Raiders on Tulagi were tough babies but except for a few incredible veterans like Lou Diamond (who is supposed to have served aboard the Bon Homme Richard under John Paul Jones) they had little physical experience of war. The Japanese broke through their lines, killed a lot of men, ruined all communications except by walkie-talkie, and isolated one company. It was a blind, savage struggle, really hand-to-hand, that would have gone the worse for us but for an ex-ball-player named Guidone with a good throwing arm and a supply of grenades.

The yells and shooting drifted out across the water where the ships of the inshore patrol hovered anxiously near, wishful to cut in with their guns but unable to get a fix on anything in the confused melee. All the men aboard were awake and at General Quarters, where they had been since before dawn, taking sandwiches, coffee, and half-hour naps at their duty stations; for Admiral Crutchley knew the Japanese habit of sneak attacks and did not want his ships in anything less than complete readiness. Some of the people were getting pretty fagged, for at General Quarters the ventilation system is off and such interior spaces as the engine room and plot were by now giving a fair approximation of hell.

At dawn the Japanese on the Tulagi side all popped back into their burrows; the Marines counted corpses, linked up their lines, and began to go for them. Captain Harry Torgerson was the star of the occasion. He got after the Japanese cave-dwellers by having four or five of his men cover him with rifle fire while he climbed up cliff faces and dumped into the cave mouths pieces of board with heavy TNT demolition charges tied to them and extremely short fuses so that the Japanese couldn’t throw them out. In the course of the day he used up twenty cases of TNT this way and blew his own pants off with a fuse that was a little too short; but some fifty caves were smashed in on their Japanese tenants.

A second wave of tanks got a foothold on Tanambogo and that island was overrun after the same kind of desperate fighting. On Guadalcanal the first landing parties pushed westward and got a grip on the airfield, though not until they had cleaned out an area of dugouts and machine gun posts behind log bunkers. Noon of the 8th, in fact, found us with a control of the whole area that was effective enough for General Vandegrift to set up his headquarters on shore, though it was still far from absolute. For two days afterward single Japanese rifles would crack on Tulagi and men would die obscurely, though again and again Marine patrols quartered every inch of the island.

Noon also saw the Japanese bombers back from Rabaul, about forty of them, mostly torpedo planes. There was warning; our carriers out to the south had kept good watch; the transports in the roadstead were under way for open sea with the warships among them and fighter patrols overhead. The attackers swept in at low level, the same whirlwind of action that had been seen at Coral Sea and Midway, with our fighters riding them down and knocking off a good third of them before they hit.

The others skimmed among our transports, long gray pencils, a dozen of which trailed smoke and dived or blew up. One of the dives brought a dying plane down on the foredeck of the transport George F. Elliott, and as luck would have it, into a hatch. The flame that burst forth seemed to dominate the whole strait; the Elliott was already being abandoned as the rest turned back to their anchorage, the sudden storm over. As the bombers retreated our carrier fighters cut most of the rest of them to pieces; a mere handful came back that afternoon and were also shot up.

The double action broke the back of the Japanese air forces within the area. On the 9th only thirty bombers came, one single raid; on the next day only ten. Before they could appear in force again they had to pull in reinforcements from other areas and fly them down along the island stages. By the night of the 8th everything was under control, and except for a minor alarm when a small Japanese patrol tried to work across the Tenaru there was nothing to report.

What happened that night will be argued as long as Jutland. The outlines, with no guarantee of completeness, are something like this:

In the afternoon a recon report ran in that a Japanese task force had been sighted, bound for the area. It included at least a couple of their fast Kongo-class battle cruisers, some light stuff, and a pair of unmistakable seaplane tenders. Its obvious purpose was to knock out our ships and retake Guadalcanal, the planes from the tenders giving local air cover to the gunnery vessels. Now a seaplane tender, even in the Japanese Navy with its predilection for speed, is a relatively slow craft. Given the distance they were coming, it was calculable that this task force could not arrive till an hour or two before dawn—a highly logical time for the Japanese to attack in any case, since they would seek very close night action to make free use of the torpedo and to nullify the advantage of the excellent American armor.

In our ships sleep or rest had been prevented during the day by the two air attacks and the necessity of firing gunnery support for the house-cleaning on Tanambogo. The men had been at action stations for seventy-two hours, say some accounts; anyhow at least since four a.m. of the 7th, in paralyzing heat and with little air. If they were to be more than half alive for an early morning battle, rest was imperative. On all the ships, therefore, “Condition Baker” was set, which opens ventilators, passages, and galleys and requires the manning of only half the fighting equipment—a wartime condition translatable into full General Quarters in a very few minutes.

That was the internal housekeeping arrangement. As to the exterior detail, a destroyer patrol was sent out to the wide part of the funnel between Guadalcanal and Florida. It seems to have been altogether insufficient; but one of the fundamental conditions of the campaign was that it had to be undertaken without enough destroyers. Many were needed to protect the precious carriers to the southward, where subs had already been reported nosing around; and the Jarvis had gone. Inside this destroyer screen the four heavy cruisers that had covered the Guadalcanal landing—Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes, Canberra—were on a low-speed, uneasy patrol from Guadalcanal to the tip of Florida and back. Admiral Crutchley had gone off in the Australia for a conference with Admiral Turner, apparently some distance down the eastern coast of Guadalcanal; he had left no one in charge. The night was black as a hole in a box, a low, tight overcast masking the crescent moon.

The best evidence indicates that quite a separate Japanese task force, estimated by one of the Astoria’s officers at three cruisers and seven destroyers, had slipped down into this pit of dark so close under the coasts of the upper Solomons that they escaped observation and just barely escaped the reefs. At 1:30, give or take a little, they charged through the passage south of Savo at twenty-eight knots. The sentinel destroyer there was at the other end of her too-long beat; her lookouts caught a glimpse of the Japanese as they swung sharply left to circle Savo, perhaps against some flicker of fire from Tanambogo, where there was still a little yipping going on, and she got off a radio message… Too late.

At the same moment Seaman Lynn Hager, in the sky control of Astoria, heard the growl of an airplane engine overhead and sent word to the captain. Before he had finished speaking a flare burst through the cloud and went off with its cushioned bang, throwing the four Allied ships into brilliant light. A searchlight pinned the Astoria; there was a terrific shock of guns; the Vincennes was hit right through the hangar and a fire burst out on her amidships. Three torpedoes struck the Canberra almost together; she reeled and dived into the smoke of her own burning, her guns already out of action from the loss of power, firing her torpedoes blindly in the general direction of the enemy.

On the Quincy a young officer at the forward 5-inch saw the searchlights flick on and had time to say, “Oh boy, here it comes; we’ll knock the devil out of those guys,” and will never forget that remark, for “The next moment I saw the Astoria get hit and start to burn all over, then the splashes walk up on the Vincennes and she goes, saw the airplanes hit and go up and the splashes walk up on my own ship; see the turrets swing and open fire. The next thing the forward turrets were hit and began to burn and then I was in blood an inch deep. When a thing like that happens, you realize you are taking a hell of a beating and it gives you a mighty funny feeling.”

Seconds later the Quincy took a torpedo hit, and whether from that or gunfire the ship blew up with a shock that roused the sleeping Marines on Guadalcanal, who thought it was a Japanese ship and cheered happily. She capsized slowly, the gaping hole left by the torpedo rising out of the water past the heads of men gripping life rafts, debris, ammunition cans, anything that would float.

On the Vincennes a man below speaks of no less than six torpedo hits (though some may have been shells from big guns); all the lights went out and the big cruiser tilted toward her doom. The hatch to the main deck opened on an inferno of flame. “There were forty-eight men in that area of the ship and Mr. Hansen said that those who wished to go could do so. Nine of us got out.”

The Astoria got no torpedoes and she was not quite burning all over, but she was in bad enough case, with the officers’ country ablaze where the wooden decks, transoms, and clothing in the rooms had caught fire. Her No. 1 turret was out of action, the ammunition in ready boxes for the smaller guns was going off from the heat and tearing things to pieces, men were dropping out of the sky control to the deck, and “even the 5-inch shells from the Jap destroyers were going through us like cheese” at ranges that ran down to little over a mile as the enemy roared past, taking so few hits and giving so many.

In less than half an hour they were gone; so was the Quincy, with many of her wounded trying to keep afloat in the lukewarm water, and a young ensign named Carter swimming around to gather strays toward the life rafts. At about 2:40 the Vincennes went down, tenanted only by her dead; with the day destroyers came pushing through the wreckage to pick up survivors and to take off the remaining people of the Astoria and Canberra.

For on the former their water mains were all gone, and they could not get the fires out with bucket brigades, though even so they came close to saving her. The Canberra loomed big and gray in the dawn, apparently intact save for a few scars, but her engines were hopelessly smashed, and it was over a thousand miles she would have to be towed to the nearest repair dock. They had to scuttle her. The Japanese had won their first real naval victory in this war.

They had regained their initiative, even though it was now a limited initiative which they were required to use for one predictable purpose. In less than twenty-four hours we had lost over a quarter of the combined American-Australian strength of nineteen heavy cruisers; for to make this disaster complete it was apparently in the thirty-plane attack of the morning after Savo Island that the Chicago caught a torpedo and had to be sent to a base for repairs.

The residue of strength seems to have been ample on our side, but the residue was not there and there was even some question whether it could be brought there. The landing at Casablanca had to be given big-gun cover, something had to be spared for the campaign in the Aleutians, now in its most active phase, and the carriers had to be provided with gunnery protection. Add this: that at such a distance from base as our ships were in the Solomons, one in every three must be going in for normal operational repairs or supplies—or covering the movement of supplies to the advanced post.

We had started the campaign with an irreducible minimum of heavy cruiser strength, all in the front line. It had been wiped out. To use 6-inch-gun light cruisers was to court disaster at the hands of the Japanese heavies and their fast battle cruisers, especially since these had shown they could manage unobserved approaches down the chain of the islands; and there is every reason to believe that Admiral Ghormley did not have light cruisers at hand even had he wished to take the chance.

There was in fact no cover at all that could be given the beachhead except that which could be provided fitfully and by daylight from our carrier force cruising to the south and that which the airfield could give itself when our Seabees had finished the lumpy coral airstrip. On the afternoon of the 9th the transports hastily sent ashore all the Marines and Seabees not yet landed, hoisted anchor, and were off out of an area now become red-hot.

A few tanks and anti-aircraft guns and some engineering equipment had already been landed. The quantities of tentage, ammunition, and food that were to make this an expedition fitted out in the normal sumptuous American style had not been landed. The need had not been felt; during the hectic fighting of the first few days, indeed, Marine officers had been forced to plead with boys in their first battle, quite unable to understand the physical weakness they were experiencing, to eat the canned rations they had carried ashore on their backs. “It was like sawdust. With those Jap snipers shooting at you from the trees you just don’t think about eating.”

Now, as the Marines of Guadalcanal pushed out patrols and Tommy-gunned coconut trees to bring down snipers, there was little food left but captured rice and bottles of a beverage labeled “Mitsubi-champagn cider.” Also, ammunition was unplentiful.

The Japanese seem to have achieved a fairly clear picture of the situation by at least the 12th, when one of their big submarines surfaced by daylight in Sealark Channel to find it empty and tried to shoot up a small boat crossing from Guadalcanal to Tulagi. But the original strategic surprise had been so effective, and the enemy had lost so much of their local strength aloft and on the ground in that first shock that they lacked the means to press their advantage—unless they were to bring the cruisers in again as on August 8th, to which the objection was that Admiral Fletcher lay somewhere in the offing with the carriers they had learned to dread. The Japanese had good reason to know these carriers had not left because on the 9th and again on the 10th the Japanese “area” planes had unpleasant and costly encounters with fighter patrols from these ships. Japanese reinforcements could come down only from Truk or in from the Indies to the west; and to feed them in slowly was asking for their piecemeal, ineffective destruction.

It had to be a major expedition. Until it arrived the Japanese on Guadalcanal, like our Marines, must maintain themselves with what they had plus emergency help sneaked in by air or sea.

This accounts for the desperate character of the fighting on the island during the next two weeks. It started with each party failing in a minor enterprise: the Americans in an effort to land near Matanikau on the night of the 12th—an effort from which only three men escaped—the Japanese in several tries at infiltration. This was followed by a week of ceaseless small-war during which each made discoveries about the other’s style of fighting, mostly unpleasant. The Japanese learned that, while his own sniper fire was inaccurate, and his small bullet often did not kill when it hit, the rifle work of the Marines was beyond all expectation deadly. Our people found they bunched too much, talked too much, moved too much.

Both learned that in those dense jungles the eye was nearly useless; friend could be distinguished from foe only by ear. The crack of a Japanese rifle was so much like that of our .45s that the Marines took to relying entirely on their Garands and Tommy guns, since the direction from which fire was coming offered no clue as to who was doing the shooting.

By the 18th this mutual investigation was over: General Vandegrift ordered an advance, an affair of strong patrols, against Matanikau village, which was taken after some dogged fighting. Tregaskis, the correspondent, was at the front; it was there that he first caught a sense of the mounting fury among our men, when a Japanese prisoner was led through the lines to an obbligato of shouts: “Kill the bastard! Kick him in the balls!” The prisoner guard grinned and conducted the scared little man past Marines who, having said how they felt, turned back to vent their anger on Japanese still in arms. During that first rush into camp round the airfield they had found a few pitiful trophies—a purse, a shaving set, marked with the names of friends who had been on Wake. In the Matanikau combat they had encountered wounded Japanese who cried for water, then pulled the pins from grenades and blew themselves up with the men who came to help them, and fully live Japanese who hoisted the white flag and then shot down the men who rose from hiding to accept their surrender.

That same night of the 18th saw the Japanese running in small transports and landing some of their own marines at both sides of the narrow area round the air strip for counterattack. There was a big destroyer with them; our men saw her from shore in Sealark Channel the next morning and saw a long-range B-17 go for her and hit her. It is possible that the Japanese preliminary reconnaissance for the big attack had shown them that our carriers were no longer in the area to the south, or they would hardly have dared leave ships in Sealark Channel by daylight.

An American patrol knocked off a handful of Japanese marines on the 20th; that same day American fighters—Grummans—and light bombers came down on the now-completed landing strip and the Marines were mightily cheered. “Morale has gone up twenty points this afternoon,” one officer remarked. The field had been named Henderson after the commander of the Marine dive bombers at Midway.

It was as well that those planes got there. The same night the Japanese who had landed east of the airport came on in a formal if loosely articulated attack, while those round the rest of the seven-by-four-mile area held by the Marines maintained their pressure and their attempts at infiltration. The main Japanese column struck our lines along the banks of a river identified at the time as the Tenaru, from which the battle takes its name (it later proved to be the Ilu), and tried to flank them along a sandpit at the river’s mouth.

The Japanese ran into barbed wire—some of the equipment the Marines had landed instead of food; were surprised by it and simply crucified. At dawn the remainder of their force dug in, in a coconut grove a hundred and fifty yards from our lines with the little stream between. Colonel Cresswell led out a flanking party well supplied with mortars, while three light tanks crossed the sandpit. The Japanese were wiped out to the number of more than a battalion. One prisoner. The whole place began to stink at once.

The importance of our air help became apparent that afternoon when the Japanese tried to support their ground offensive from the skies. The Grummans drove them out, shooting down several, before any bombs were dropped and the next afternoon a handful of Army P-40s reached Henderson Field. They went out the morning after, 23 August, flying escort for our light bombers and dive bombers in response to a report of a Japanese naval movement out to the north, but came back disappointed by lowering weather and that night were shelled in their dispersal area by a Japanese sub that surfaced in Sealark Channel.

Nevertheless, the report was the goods. Out round the fifteen-hundred-mile semi-circle from Rabaul to the Gilberts our reconnoitering planes and submarines had caught for a week fleeting glimpses under fire of Japanese ships moving, moving. It was the counter-concentration to retake Guadalcanal before it could become another Pearl Harbor, and on the 24th of August it came sweeping down.

The Japanese force was nearly as powerful as the wave that had broken on the beaches of Midway, but there is evidence that it was an emergency fleet, hastily assembled. One of its carriers was the shallow-draft Ryujo, built for operation off the coast of China and not at home in great waters; its battleship cover was by the slow Mutsu class, not the high-speed Kongos which the Japanese normally use to support such moves.

The fleet came swinging down from the north under the clouds of a weather front in a formation designed to prevent such surprises as that of the 4th of June—a long chain of cruisers and destroyers in visual contact with each other at the edge of the cloud area, the carriers and their guard hanging like a series of pendants from this chain.

Where our forces were before the battle is not clear; they were probably at some distance. They came rushing toward the contact, apparently from the southeast, through a region of clear skies and small clouds with whitecaps beneath, on the morning of the 24th, a two-carrier group: Saratoga and the indestructible and fortunate Enterprise, shooting out scout planes to supplement those from Guadalcanal. There were some long-range Army planes about, which must have come from as far as Nouméa, since there are no other islands in that part of the world. The carrier group apparently found the easternmost pendant early in the morning, the one with the Ryujo in it. The picture of the Japanese chain and its other nodules had not yet come clear to our commander of the day, Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, but the Army men were locating another group far to the west with two big carriers and a battleship in it.

Kinkaid had been at Coral Sea and understood the limitations of these carrier attacks. He considered the Ryujo still too distant to be hit with effect; his pilots had lunch and sat down to wait, nervous in their ready rooms. Scouting reports kept coming in—from the Army or the Guadalcanal-based planes that had located the big group of Japanese ships; from various fliers who had seen enough of the enemy scouting chain to identify it for what it was. An Army man was over the Ryujo just about noon, missed her with his explosive egg, but reported, “This carrier is meat for dive bombers,” being so weakly supported.

She was the only target that could be reached; the admiral decided to take her. It would be mid-afternoon when the attack group left the deck and they had hardly climbed the stairs of the sky into their formation when the captain of one of our carriers called attention to a lump of cloud. “Looks like a snowfield,” he said; as they watched it a sleigh-track appeared cutting across the field—a four-motored Kawanishi plane coming up on our group from astern, which meant he had flown right round the American force. The combat patrol jumped him and he went down under a pillar of smoke, blowing up as he hit the water.

But now the Japanese presumably knew where our ships were and how many there were. A signaled report came across the formation from the opposite wing—another Kawanishi had been shot down and a two-float scout.

The decks of our carriers were cleared, the combat patrols doubled—none too soon, for in thirty-five minutes the Japanese were coming in two groups of eighteen bombers each, covered by a group of fighters. Sixty miles out or more, another of our patrols came on a second attack formation, bombers and torpedo planes. To arrive so quickly they must have had reconnaissance reports long before the first Kawanishi was shot down.

There followed the most violent air engagement of the war, according to pilots who were already veterans of Midway and Coral Sea: a double engagement, distant and close-in, whose boundaries overlapped. In the distant engagement eight of the fifteen Japanese torpedo planes were shot into the water far from our carriers and the rest could not bear it; they fled, hugging the surface close; the Japanese attack was robbed of its coordinated double effect and the close defense had only bombers to deal with.

On the carriers the loudspeakers emitted “confused shouting as the fighter pilots unconsciously screamed into their chest microphones as they dived to shoot the Jap bombers down.” To another observer the sky seemed streaked with smoke like a pattern on wallpaper as the enemy took their heaviest loss in any air attack of the war. Yet ten of the bombers got through to drop and two of them hit the Enterprise with heavy bombs, one right through into the hangar deck; then the battle was all over save for a few fitful combats among wandering planes of both sides.

Our own carrier attack group found the Ryujo just after four with only a cruiser and a couple of destroyers for escort—meat for dive bombers, as the Army man had said. Perhaps the Japanese were overconfident or their fighters busy elsewhere; nobody speaks of them as having combat patrols up and if they had them the patrols were insignificant.

The Japanese carrier went into a tight turn, throwing anti-aircraft fire into the sky; the planes hit high and low in a coordinated bomb-torpedo attack. She seems to have escaped the torpedo men, thanks to her own speed and the self-sacrifice of the cruiser, which moved in to take one of the fish for her. But the American dive bombers laid a row right down her deck. The deck peeled back like the skin of a sprouting onion, a stem of flame shot up into a big flower of smoke, and our planes were off for their mother ship, dangerously low on fuel.

There is a lack of clarity about the remainder of our attacks that day. Apparently, some of our carrier attack groups split up, in response to radioed orders after they took off or because they were forced to do so by the weather; and all along the curved front of Japanese ships, units from Guadalcanal as well as those from our carriers kept coming on isolated enemies. The Marine dive bombers from Guadal hit a destroyer and four “additional ships,” unidentifiable. Some of the Army bombers hit one of the big Japanese carriers, and a smallish attack unit found the Mutsu (or her sister) and punched her heavily. On the way home some of our dive bombers met and had a singular dogfight with Japanese planes of similar type which seemed to be wandering around in the twilight with no place to go, and three of the enemy were shot down. The Guadalcanal fighters were all in the air when a raid on that post developed, and they beat off the enemy with a score of twenty-six planes against three. Next morning the Guadalcanal dive bombers boiled out again with Major R. C. Mangrum—who was to make a tremendous name for himself—leading them; they slapped a couple of transports hard and blew the bridge off a new light cruiser.

That was the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. Now it was over—a scrambling, artistically ill-conceived, tactically unsatisfying affair, in which one might say nothing happened, unless one counts all the lost aircraft and the Ryujo, seen by one of our night recon planes dead in the water and abandoned, lighting up the whole ocean with her burning. For us the Enterprise was a sick ship, and we were too weak in carriers to risk a hot pursuit with the Japanese beginning to pour land-based planes through Rabaul and Bougainville. For them, they had lost the Ryujo and, more important still, all their floating air cover: ninety-six planes shot down in a genuine disaster. They turned back during the night; when Mangrum and his men hit them on the morning of the 25th they were all going north and west and our outpost on Guadalcanal was saved.

But it was like the heroine of an old-fashioned melodrama, who requires saving anew in every act. On the afternoon of the 25th, thirty-six land-based bombers gave Henderson Field a pounding; that night seven Japanese destroyers ran in, landed a lot of men at Cape Esperance, and came down the channel to shell our holdings. There was more trouble ahead.

The Tokyo Express

With the opposing fleets rocking north and south from where the carrier Ryujo burned to her doom and planes down all over the sea, the confused night of 24 August closed the first phase of the struggle for the Solomons. It left us with the possession of the field of battle, which is nine points of the law of war; but it was a possession precarious. The appearance of seven Japanese destroyers in Sealark Channel that same night marked the beginning of a new effort to shake loose our grip which was to turn the whole campaign into the nightmare pictured in Tregaskis’ Guadalcanal Diary.

Could that nightmare have been exorcised or prevented? The strategic thinkers who have dealt with the operations have largely assumed that it could have been and have severely criticized Admiral Kinkaid for not pursuing the Japanese to the death after the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, on the ground that this was the missing element in our tactics. Or they have criticized Ghormley for not using his cruiser-carrier forces to break up the enemy concentrations among the upper Solomons, which comes to the same thing.

It is an injustice; Kinkaid steamed south through the dark with only a single carrier in fighting trim and no reserves behind till repairs were completed at the terminus of a long journey. The cruisers? It does not appear that Admiral Ghormley, commanding the area, had any cruisers to speak of beyond the necessary escort for his carrier force. During those September days among the Solomons a damaged ship was for us a lost ship, with a thousand miles to tow. More cruisers, troops, airplanes, PT boats, supplies, were on the way; but for that time, at that place, our only game was to hold on, waiting for daylight. It takes ten days to load a freighter; from Frisco to the Solomons she must steam 6,000 miles, the distance across the Atlantic and back.

Per contra, the Japanese had all their goods in the front window. At the southern end of Bougainville among the upper Solomons, they had established a seaplane base and depot for stores in the area of Buin-Faisi. During August it was fortified, extended, and developed. At Munda in northern New Georgia they had hacked an airfield out of mangrove swamps with prodigious labor; beyond it they had a naval station at Vella Lavella on Kula Gulf, and another at Rekata Bay on the north side of Santa Isabel island, with a support point on Choiseul. To all these from Truk and Rabaul came a stream of small freighters with everything needed. Behind them other freighters bore goods and men to Truk and Rabaul, and so the line stretched clear back to Yokohama Bay, always by short stages, always under good protection.

In the upper Solomons bases, goods and men were transshipped to fast vessels—light cruisers and destroyers or those Japanese warship types intermediate between the two. (“Look,” said a Marine aviator once who had fought a lot of them, “when you see them fourteen thousand feet down on the water you can’t tell. So if it swings round a catapult and shoots a plane up at us, we call it a cruiser; if it don’t, it’s a destroyer.”) During the day, while our planes were active, these ships would hide out with their loads under the overhang of the jungle. At night they would assemble from several points and come flying down “the slot” formed by two parallel lines of islands. At Cape Esperance they landed their cargoes and reinforcements; they pushed on to the area of Henderson Field, shelled it, and rushed back to be in hiding by day.

This was the “Tokyo Express,” the basic enemy combination of the second phase of the campaign, designed to build up by inches strength enough to smash General Vandegrift’s slender force of Marines on Guadalcanal; and pending that happy day “not so much to kill us as to drive us crazy with devices compounded out of old Oriental experience in the psychology of horror and fatigue.

Our men were plagued by malaria and continual rain, they had nothing to smoke but Japanese cigarettes, “which is only not quite as bad as wearing Jap underwear,” and food was short. Every night a single Japanese submarine surfaced in Sealark Channel to see whether we had moved anything in and shelled our lines. Between twelve and two a single Japanese plane would buzz down, drop a single flare and a single ineffective but sleep-inhibiting bomb, then buzz off. Toward morning there might be a flight of Japanese bombers, high and fast, away before our fighters could get up for an air battle. In addition to explosives the Japanese dropped propaganda leaflets with luscious nude blondes on the covers. From the Japanese lines phonographs played “Home Sweet Home”; the enemy caught names and used them (“Mr. Manning, withdraw!”); and all night they kept up a drizzle of sniping and small raids that prevented sleep as thoroughly as the bombers that came by day.

In due course there were so many breakdowns among our men that the psychiatric cases equaled those hospitalized for wounds, but this was later, after many weeks of fighting in the jungle slime without relief. For the present the Marines’ defense was laughter. The Babu-English of the propaganda leaflets was irresistibly comic; they called the nightly sub “Oscar” and the plane “Louie the Louse” or “Washing-machine Charlie,” making jokes about them as old friends. They held mock ceremonies in which they decorated newspapermen from the crate of Imperial medals captured in the first attack; they taught parrots to screech “Hello, Tojo.” The prevailing atmosphere on the island was the slightly swaggering, hard cheerfulness with which Americans who know their business approach a difficult task. During August the men had learned the worst—heat, hunger, bombing, and nasty Japanese tricks such as firing from under flags of truce and wiring their own dead as booby traps. T’hell with that stuff, said the Marines; the command was forward.

For it was evident to General Vandegrift that his position was militarily far from sound for withstanding the close siege that would evidently be clamped down on him. He held the rolling Lunga plain. Behind it the ground rose through a series of draws and steep ridges to the mountains that his men had dubbed “Kayo” as the nearest approximation to the native name. These mountains both gave artillery positions from which our holdings could be shelled and, by way of the draws, covered avenues of attack. In a series of little operations, each a campaign with all the appurtenance of planning, scouting, lines of communication and movement, artillery support and infantry advance, he pushed southward to secure the outlets to the Kayo valleys.

Preferably our men operated by daylight to make the most of their cohesion and good rifle-work; always the fighting was hard, nerve-racking; the Japanese did not give up and some of the movements failed. But the Japanese system produces a soldier who, up to company command, is better prepared to die than to think how he may win without dying. By the second week of September General Vandegrift had chess-played his dogged, stupid opponents out of all the positions he thought he could hold against the inevitable counterattack.

You must imagine as the background of this warfare on Guadalcanal the constant running of the Tokyo Express by night and a series of tearing air battles by day. Our side ran a minor Tokyo Express of its own aboard some of the World War I destroyers which had been converted to fast transports, bringing in food, ammunition, and little contingents of Marines drawn from all over the Pacific islands.

On 26 August the Japanese hit an oil dump which went up in smoky flame; a big bomb just missed the General; four Zeros were shot down. On the 27th the Japanese lost seven bombers; on the 28th our dive bombers knocked off a couple of enemy torpedo boats that had not quite hidden themselves along the shores of Santa Isabel; on the 29th four Japanese bombers were downed and three Zeros. Next day our interceptors took the air in time to catch the Japanese planes coming in, shot down eighteen of the fighter cover, and drove off the bombers before they could drop their bombs; but that night the Japanese came back and in the falling twilight blew up our transport-destroyer Colhoun just as one of our other destroyers depth-charged a Japanese submarine. “Oscar,” the Japanese submarine, did not shell the encampment that night and all the Marines celebrated by eating the first bread on the island, baked in an oven that the Seabees had conjured up out of a captured Japanese safe.

On 2 September came another raid that knocked off a small ammunition dump with an effect like the Fourth of July. Three Japanese bombers and five fighters were shot down, one of them by Captain Marion Carl, who thus ran his score to ten. “You have to hand it to those Jap bomber pilots,” he said. “They hold their formation and fly right along, paying no attention till you hit one of them, and then the one behind closes up as if nothing had happened.” He had been in the thundering tumult at Midway—”but their fighters aren’t the same. Up there they had the first team in; they were as good as we. Now they just make one pass at you and, if they miss, pull out. Their work is rough on the turns, too; they skid and you can get inside them.”

The enemy were employing the old Japanese strategy of using to the hilt every weapon they had, but they were also fighting the clock; they knew that one day our fresh forces would come pouring gigantically down from Pearl Harbor, and they could not wait to sharpen the blade that had dulled at Midway.

Yet the blades they had were sharp enough and deadly enough. On the night of 4 September their light cruiser Yubari with a couple of the heavy destroyers ran down the slot. Lying off Savo were our destroyer-transports Little and Gregory. Overhead a flare burst; the third salvo demolished one of the Little’s two guns, the next one smashed the other, the Gregory’s bridge and guns were hit, and what was left of their crews pitched into the black water. The Yubari swept the area with searchlights and turned machine guns on the swimmers before she left.

Next morning groups of Japanese landing boats, small craft, were found on the beaches at both ends of the Marine position and there was a fight down near Taivu Point, where the newcomers tried to infiltrate. Our dive bombers caught some of the boats on the water, full of people, and gave the sharks a feed to the number of a thousand Japanese.

On the 7th an American convoy came in, a few small cargo craft with destroyers, and a force of our raiders attacked from the sea a native-hut village where the Japanese had landed a force, killing about thirty of them and capturing three 75’s plus a lot of English cigarettes and some American-made ammunition with labels in Dutch. That day the Japanese bombers slashed at Tulagi; several were lost. On each of the next four days there was a strong Japanese air raid of twenty to forty planes; the first two were unopposed but on the 11th and 12th our fighters got in among them and shot a total of sixteen out of the formation, with another brought down by ground artillery.

That night messengers went through our encampment on Guadalcanal ordering everyone up to the ridge southward. The Japanese had made several attempts to infiltrate and the flicker of their flares was now all round the horizon like heat lightning. They had some six thousand men ashore; a big attack was imminent.

The Japanese do not use their submarines as we do—or as the Germans do—for raiding purposes in the war of attrition. They are fleet elements, employed in concentration against the warships of the enemy. It would seem that we had hardly landed on Guadal before they began to rush undersea craft to the area. Already by the time of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons they were a serious nuisance; planes from the Enterprise sank one during the action.

Now one of the main reasons why the Japanese planes over Henderson Field were being slaughtered with so little loss to us was the presence of our patrols from carriers cruising out to the south. These scouts spotted the enemy in time for the slower American fighters to meet Japanese formations high in the sky, where American firepower and protection made deified dead out of a lot of Japanese aviators. There was, moreover, every reason for the enemy to suppose that when they launched a big land attack on Guadal our carrier planes would intervene with decisive effect. It was imperative for the Japanese to drive those carriers from the northern Coral Sea. The sub-marines were assigned to the job.

They very soon learned through their periscopes that we had nowhere near enough destroyers to give our ships adequate coverage, and they attacked with that determined spirit of the Japanese fighting man which is so peculiarly manifest when he discovers that his opponent has some disadvantage. We know little of the ensuing struggle save that it was carried out at a pace and intensity equaling the campaign on shore. But we know some illuminating details. For instance, twenty-two torpedoes were fired at the Hornet during this period and on 6 September the pilot of a torpedo plane from the carrier spied a Japanese torpedo headed for her side. He was loaded with depth charges; dropped one which exploded in time to deflect the torpedo and save the ship. When the torpedo planes, which are attack weapons, are used on anti-submarine defense, it can be taken that the situation is tight.

It is probable that the Japanese lost a good few submarines during this period; attacks made in their fashion usually produce losses. It is possible that we had some damage; there are tales of vessels coming in for repairs. But the grand climax of their submarine war came in mid-September, just as the Japanese land forces were closing round Henderson Field and the carrier Wasp was rushing through the patrol area to the rescue with a big convoy. The Wasp was torpedoed.

It was 3:09 in the afternoon. She had just flown off an attack group and taken in another; hangar and flight deck were full of planes, and her gasoline lines were running as they were refueled. Two Japanese torpedoes, the heaviest in the world, hit the Wasp in the same spot, a third nearby. All the gas lines caught, her own bomb magazine exploded, and fires ran like hurricanes through the ship.

They could not be checked, since the mains were gone; the other ships of the force could give no help, for they were engaged in a desperate pitched battle against as formidable a force of submarines as the Pacific ever saw; torpedo wakes were burning the brilliant water and depth charges were shaking the world till down below on the destroyers the engineers could hardly stand. (Some of them did not walk well for a week after.) One destroyer was hit, too—the O’Brien, which made port but broke up and sank later. The fight went on; toward evening they abandoned the Wasp under the pillar of smoke roiling from her side with (thank God) few casualties, since Captain Sherman had backed her clear of the area of burning oil. The fleet with its cripples and survivors turned sadly away from what was an effective defeat, even if half a dozen Japanese subs had paid for it.

“We’ll just have to develop better methods of detection,” the Exec of the flagship remarked.

Said a younger man with the looped chevrons of a chief: “I’m thinking of those boys on Guadal.”

He might well. On that day, the day of 15 September, the Marines were close to the edge. Just after midnight on the 13th the Japanese had launched a triple assault, one prong across the bloody Tenaru, one from the west against the lines on that side, the main effort through a wide gap in the mountains to the south against the low Lunga Ridge, where Edson’s Raiders were.

The group at the Tenaru was the one that had been cut up in its boats three days before; too weak for its purpose, it was pinned down, broken with heavy loss. On the other flank the Japanese attack became involved in barbed wire and rugged ground and petered out as an affair of sniping and counter-sniping that lasted for days. But in the center the Japanese lapped round Lunga Ridge, firing Roman candles, burning flares, emitting wild yells and “a loud, blubbering shout like a turkey gobbler’s cry” that was the banzai. There was savage knife and grenade work in the dark; one little party won through to General Vandegrift’s command post and killed a sergeant at his tent before they were downed. The whole front hung by a hair and was only saved by our artillery, which caught an attack forming and killed not far short of five hundred men. The attack was stopped but not altogether beaten; as it pulled back into the jungle with the dawn it left behind machine gun parties which placed the precious airfield under fire and killed some of the mechanics.

Now our planes could not use the field on this, the day that saw the end of the Wasp. Tokyo broadcast the news that Guadalcanal was won, and so it might have been, had the enemy been able to make one more effort. But their last reserves were in; on the island their broken remnants were already streaming back through the jungle when Vandegrift’s men counterattacked through clouds of snipers to wipe out their machine gun posts in the afternoon. Their air loss had been such that they could support their land forces with nothing but half a dozen old, slow float biplanes which were shot down by mere ground machine guns.

On the 16th our dive bombers took the air again from Henderson Field and near Choiseul popped a Japanese cruiser which seemed to be having trouble with her fuse settings. On the 18th the Wasp did not arrive but her convoy did; food, guns, and ammunition came ashore in a flood, with thousands of Marines in new uniforms.

The Battle of Lunga Ridge was followed by what A. Hitler calls a “constructive pause.” “Louie the Louse” was over the anchorage the night after the big convoy unloaded and left, but his playmates with the bombs did not come that night nor for many nights thereafter. They had been hit hard; and while we do not know the minds of the Japanese admiralty or the distribution of their strength, it seems probable that they were so short of planes that they had decided to lay off air-raiding till they could send concentrations heavy enough to force our fighters into unremitting combat, attrition, exhaustion, and collapse. Meanwhile the Tokyo Express was to be speeded up, building a force of troops with tanks and heavy artillery against which there could be no argument.

Far back at Truk and Rabaul fleets were assembled. At the moment of impact these would come down in a typical Japanese fast-moving, two-finger attack; would drive our Guadalcanal planes temporarily into the ground and our ships temporarily from Sealark Channel; would shell our positions into helplessness from the sea, and land men on the beaches while their forces on the island came down to re-capture the airfield in one great concentration from all sides. Once gained, the airfield could be maintained by the troops who took it while numerous planes swiftly flown down through the chain of bases in the upper Solomons would keep our floating air bases at arm’s length.

This was the Japanese pattern, of which, it must be emphasized, our command knew no more at the time than that the Japanese were using their constructive pause to build up their strength on Guadalcanal by means of the Tokyo Express. Our first efforts to upset its timetable were aerial, the work of Marine torpedo and dive bombers, with a few Army Flying Fortresses which apparently came in from bases to the south and gassed up at Guadal before taking off to strike at the enemy in places like Buka Passage, where the distance is uncomfortable to an SBD.

In the days following Lunga Ridge our planes tapped at Rekata Bay and Gizo in the New Georgias without finding any targets but some small buildings under the coconuts. At night the Tokyo Express ran. On 25 September one of our B-17s found new seaplanes on the water at Rekata—a sign of revived Japanese air strength in the upper islands. Next day that air strength came thundering down in a big raid on Guadalcanal, new in its technique to the extent that it had really heavy fighter cover. There was an air battle over the island and on the 27th another, when twenty-five bombers and eighteen Zeros came. The concentration method failed statistically on those two days, thirty-three Japanese being shot down without a loss to us. On 2 October they lost four fighters, and 3 October (when they really came strong—thirty Zeros to only five or six bombers) they lost nine more Zeros against one plane of ours.

Not much of a showing for the Japanese, one might conclude. But attrition in air war works through the accumulated fatigues that make pilots inefficient and all this time the Japanese offensive against our men’s nerves was being stepped up, with Oscar and Louie the Louse back every night, with stabbings in the brush on the outpost line, and with the running of the Tokyo Express, whose shells were the most nerve-racking of all. We had some slight success against the Express on 2 October when a formation of our dive bombers caught four destroyers off New Georgia and left one stopped and burning, and again on the night of 3 October when all the Guadalcanal planes boiled out to go for a particularly big train on the Express, got a torpedo hit on a cruiser, and smashed up some landing boats (with men in them) at the Cape Esperance beachhead. Nearly all the Japanese troops got ashore, however—probably enough to balance the gain we had made by our convoy of 18 September.

Clearly, the Japanese were forging ahead in the game which they had played since the beginning of the war—the game of accepting material loss to build up a strategically impregnable position. Our forces on Guadal had only enough teeth to wound without killing. More violent American intervention was necessary.

Admiral Ghormley, back at his base with an inadequate staff and no benefit of hindsight, perceived as much even before the demonstration of the night of 3 October. That night as the Japanese soldiers struggled ashore through the rain of bombs to bed down near Cape Esperance, one of our few remaining carriers, the Hornet, was running fast, fast to the northwest, parallel to the Solomon chain, with her patrols well out. Before the day of 5 October her attack group left the deck; and while the fliers of the MacArthur command pinned down the enemy bombers at Rabaul, the Hornet’s men swooped on the Bougainville anchorages.

Buin was empty of anything but anti-aircraft fire and at the supporting airfield of Kieta there was not much to do but pit the runways and soak the dispersal areas; there was no Japanese air opposition. At Faisi, however, there was a Japanese force making up for the run south; the Hornet’s planes hit a cruiser, a transport, a couple of cargo ships, and a seaplane tender, besides burning up the tender’s planes on the water.

But that night the Tokyo Express ran as usual, the Guadalcanal planes had a fight with it, and the next night the Japanese were back with a convoy at least as important as that of the 3rd. Our scouts spotted it in time for a lovely coordinated bomb and torpedo attack; one of the Japanese Kako-class cruisers was slowed up by a fish, then was bombed till she blazed for two days, maybe a total loss; and one of the Japanese destroyers was sunk then or the following day.

The fact remained that the Japanese plan still worked and the Hornet’s bold dash had done little to prevent it. Putting more carriers on permanent patrol south of the islands would be risking another Wasp tragedy. Something else was called for.

Something else was at hand; the Japanese had lost the first round of their battle with the calendar. On the evening of 11 October, after dark, four six-hundred-foot gray shapes slid up out of the water south of Guadalcanal and swung in line across Cape Esperance—San Francisco, Helena, Boise, Salt Lake City, cruisers of the United States fleet, two heavies and two lights, an assortment odd at any other time but not for those close waters and by night. Helena had been in the area at least since late August; it is probable that the others belonged to the wave of reinforcements. San Francisco led the line with the flag of Rear Admiral Norman Scott; Boise was the “reluctant dragon” of the Java Sea that had ripped her bottom or had some other accident whenever action was imminent until now. A few destroyers trotted along behind.

“I can still smell that heavy, lush tropical perfume,” says a young lieutenant of the Salt Lake City. “The night was clear but dark and tense”—and into it the cruiser catapulted her planes. Something went wrong; one of them exploded; in a burst of flame that lighted sea and sky and the black shores, the presence of our cruisers was a secret no longer, and on the Boise they cursed and stamped the deck over another opportunity lost through sheer mischance.

But it was not lost. The black shores remained silent—not a spark, not a sound; either the Japanese did not care or they failed to notify the Tokyo Express. For just before midnight down it came from the northwest, more ships than the Japanese had ever used before: destroyers out in front; four, five cruisers all in line; and behind them transports to the number of seven or eight. Admiral Scott’s line had just turned prows west at twenty-five knots; they were in that book position known as crossing the T, with the enemy as the vertical stroke of the letter, and only the leading ship able to bring her guns to bear.

“Pick out the biggest,” said Captain “Iron Mike” Moran of the Boise, and all down the line the captains said together, “Commence firing!”

Forty-nine heavy guns went off at once. “I saw our salvos going in like red box cars on a Jap heavy cruiser.” She burst out in brilliant flame amidships—to stand revealed as one of the Nachis—before Helena, Boise, and Salt Lake sent her down in whirlpools of flaming oil, one minute after the first gun. The Japanese ships plunged wildly in all directions trying to escape the trap of that crossed T, blobs of smoke from their funnels mingling with that of burning ships and exploding guns, in long level streamers that alternately hid and revealed the black charging shapes in the fitful glare of star shell, searchlight, and flame.

The first enemy shells were fragmentation, designed for the works on Guadal; their destroyers rushed to cover the uncoiling of the confusion with a torpedo attack. As Admiral Scott ordered a turn toward the enemy to avoid these missiles, Boise and Salt Lake each blew up one of the destroyers at a range of no more than fifteen hundred yards. Helena had caught another as it turned; “explosions occurred all over the enemy ship and it disappeared.”

The Japanese were shooting back; the Boise had taken an 8-inch hit in the captain’s cabin amidships. There was a momentary lull, in a blackness complete after the vivid illumination; into this darkness our own destroyers fired torpedoes at the mass of the enemy and saw a rewarding tall flame spring up beneath a waterspout at the side of an enemy cruiser that was probably the Kinugasa. Admiral Scott turned again to close the range.

The Salt Lake had found one of the Japanese transports and pumped seventy big shells into her, sending the ship down by the head with its propellers dripping in the glare of the searchlights. Splashes from the Helena’s guns walked after a Japanese destroyer, caught her, and stamped on her as she tried to run. Boise was just opening fire on a smallish enemy cruiser when, from somewhere abaft the beam, one of the Japanese heavy cruisers opened on her with 8-inch guns, “shooting beautifully.”

Too beautifully: turrets 1 and 3 on Boise were hit and lost nearly all their crews; a big shell went through below her waterline to explode right in the magazine of turret 2; and a mountain of fire sprang from the ship’s foredeck as she swung out of action to port, her rear guns still shooting. “I thought we had lost her,” said Admiral Scott. The Salt Lake leaped into the position the Boise had left, taking a hit that started a smoky fire amidships, but dealing out five quick salvos of which not a gun could have missed, for the first silenced the Japanese cruiser and the other four sank her.

The disaster of Savo Island was paid for; what was left of the Japanese had fled—but not to safety; for the next morning the dive bombers from Guadal caught a cripple of the Japanese armada near New Georgia and left her listing and afire, with the crew being taken off. Admiral Scott hunted for them a few moments, then spun his force on its heel and steamed south, regretful for the loss of the Boise. He could have spared his sorrow; for the Boise’s damage control parties had worked one of the miracles of naval history and she came through the night to join them, steaming at twenty knots. When the checkup was made only the destroyer Duncan was missing (she sank off the island in the morning) and the Japanese had lost, in addition to their transport, at least three cruisers, maybe four, and at least four destroyers.

It was an eventful night for more than one reason. Out at the fleet base Admiral Halsey, our best fighting leader, had arrived to relieve Ghormley, bringing reinforcements. Out somewhere on the ocean, approaching the Solomons, was a convoy with Army transports in it. They were to arrive in another twenty-four hours with more American troops for the relief of the hard-pressed Marines—including two hundred men, technically AWOL from units back at base, who had stowed away to get into the war. At the borders of Sealark Channel four American PT’s were pushing through the dark toward Tulagi, their crews watching the gun-lightning on the distant sky. As they came in, “I remember one haggard, red-eyed youngster with a Jap knife in his belt who said, ‘Just teach those bastards to stay at home in bed nights where they belong. Just do that and we’ll remember you in our prayers.’”

The Japanese is a fighting man of peculiar character; full of tricks and inventions, but singularly unwilling to depart from a plan once laid down; so persistent even in his mistakes that they sometimes bring success. The Tokyo Express had failed? By no means; it had only suffered some of the losses inevitable against an active enemy. On the night of 14 October it ran again, bigger and better than ever, with a fast battleship added to the cruiser cover. It landed troops and artillery and came down the slot to give our men more of that dreadful shelling which was the worst thing they had to bear.

As the Japanese ships made their turn through the Channel the newly arrived PT’s, the expendables, jumped them and sank one of those big cruiser-destroyers, getting away themselves by the ingenious device of dumping depth charges over their tails, which made pursuing Japanese destroyers think they were running into a minefield. At dawn the Japanese were bombed and lost a transport; but they treated the whole show as an incident and brought their Express back on the 16th, 18th, and 20th.

Had they been checked in the air? Not at all; they came down in bombing attacks heavier than ever, twice on the 14th, again on the 17th and on the 19th. Our new Lightning fighters struck nine of fifteen bombers on the first of those days; as the fragments rained down on Guadal our people remarked that there was no rust around the rivet settings, which told its own story of planes fresh from the factory; attrition had been eating the enemy down. But in exchange their torpedo planes got our new destroyer Meredith when she was convoying in some much-needed aviation gasoline, and one of their dive bombers blew the stern out of our destroyer-transport McFarland, killing some wounded Marines who were being taken home.

Were the Japanese beaten on the ground? Their patrols pushed hard along the Matanikau on the night of the 20th. From Kayo Mountain their new guns began to shell our encampment; a single piece that became known as “Pistol Pete” established itself to take pot shots at anything that moved in “Sleepless Lagoon” between Guadalcanal and Tulagi.

The fact was that the Japanese had spent nothing he could not afford if he got Guadalcanal back. He was working up to a grand climax of exchanging pawn and knight for the winning position. All day and all night of the 21st and 22nd there was pressure and constant fighting along our outpost lines, especially along the Lunga River and in the district known as “Coffin Corner,” and there were incidents like that of the Marine who was shot through the groin as he softly hummed “The St. Louis Blues” on post and had to lie there till his relief came forward. “If I’d shouted and the boys came, they would have got it, too,” he said later. On the 23rd there came a tremendous slam-bang bombing raid, the heaviest that Guadalcanal had seen since the beginning of the campaign. That night the Tokyo Express ran again—successfully, for our PT’s were laid up with mechanical belly-aches.

Just after midnight the Japanese attack came. It was no patrol action this time but the main event, with a furious artillery barrage, tanks leading the assault, Japanese howls and barbarity at the south side of the airfield. The attack was broken up, but not until our green Army troops had gone in to the last man, including cooks and bakers. At dawn, with the stinking smoke of five burning Japanese tanks drifting through the jungle, they tried once more and again were repulsed; but General Vandegrift had to use all his local planes in support of the troops, so there was no sortie against the concentrations of Japanese shipping that day. The MacArthur command had been appealed to in this battle of desperation; while the struggle at Coffin Corner was at its height, their big bombers hit Rabaul Harbor, scoring on a number of Japanese ships.

This must have been a support command that they hit, since the big train on the Tokyo Express was by this time far on its way toward Guadalcanal. Lieutenant Mario Sesso in an Army B-17 picked it up in the slot during the afternoon and stayed with it, chased by Zeros till his plane was a sieve of machine gun holes, reporting, reporting the numerous battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and transports. They came rumbling in after dark to Cape Esperance, landed any God’s quantity of troops and supplies, and pushed on to give our beachhead the most violent shelling ever. “My God, my God, will they never stop?” an Army man remembers his buddy sobbing. They did not stop; those guns were a signal and the first element in an attack from the land side, where the Japanese had for the first time superior numbers and all the planes that were overhead.

The Army men, who had begun to think themselves veterans, had never met anything like this. Some of them gave way; the Japanese rush carried through and took part of the airfield. When dawn woke on a battle where little knots of Japanese and Americans were entangled in inextricable confusion, the Japanese planes came back, and now there was almost nothing to stand them off. Most of our fighters had been smashed in the bays by the naval bombardments, all our men were tired, and some of them were beginning to be hopeless.

But so were the enemy. They had spent too many lives in getting that far. On the front occupied by our 164th Regiment alone there were seventeen hundred Japanese dead. “You couldn’t walk five feet in any direction without finding one of them.” And “the last [Japanese] charges were almost pathetic. Clusters of little men, all huddled together, would rise up and come forward, stooping over into our machine gun bullets and falling down dead.” To General Vandegrift came the report that some of those knots of Japanese were crying, “Tojo make mistake, Tojo make mistake.” With the coming of day he drew tight his shattered lines, summoned his men to one more effort, and with the 7th Marines leading; started a counterattack that not so much drove the Japanese back to the edge of the jungle as killed them where they lay.

Yet our side was still at the lip of despair. The Japanese troops that had come in during the big landing of the night had not yet fought, we were losing the battle in the air, and down from Truk in the north, huge and menacing, the main Japanese fleet was steaming with its carriers and battleships and cruisers. When they arrived—

A man did not have to be able to see far into a grindstone to know that something like this was due after the Japanese threw the book at us on Guadalcanal on 23 October. Since that afternoon Admiral Halsey had had PBY’s out all across the area north of the Solomons. Six of them were shot down, but not till they had sent in their reports. The reports were ominous: the Japanese were coming with the strongest force since Midway, perhaps stronger even than that—four fast battleships, any number of cruisers and destroyers, their carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, the best they had, with more on behind in an endless procession.

At the same hour when the big Tokyo Express was pulling out of Bougainville, Halsey’s own task force was running northward, far east of the Solomons—the carriers Enterprise and Hornet at its center, the new battleship South Dakota, the new anti-aircraft cruisers Atlanta and Juneau, with a retinue of other cruisers and destroyers—all the fast ships, the best we had. The whole fate of the war was being staked on one single clash against odds.

The Japanese, as usual, were running down a region of weather cover; as usual our fleet had a region of spotty clouds, through which now and again came Japanese scouts, which were almost invariably shot down but were able to get their messages away in their high-pitched peeping yap. On the afternoon of 25 October Mario Sesso’s report was picked up; and Enterprise flew off an attack group of planes, which went a long way out, decided to go still farther since they had not made contact, and came riding in on the carrier with their last drops of gas, some them making water landings in sight of the ship, where all the pilots were picked up.

A tense night; on the Hornet one of the lieutenants told a correspondent, “You better hurry and eat, it looks like action.” Our ships were hurrying northwest toward the enemy, with the Santa Cruz islands 260 miles under their lee, and all night long PBY reports kept coming in to be repeated on the ticker in the pilots’ ready room. The Japanese had swung west and away from our fleet—willing enough to fight, but only after they had retaken Guadalcanal; they were now probably pointing for the sea passage north of Florida Island. But they were not moving fast enough to slip us and they knew it. Toward dawn they turned back to fight, since fight they must; they disposed their ships and flew off planes from the carriers.

In our fleet the combat patrols went up with the day. The ships spread, with South Dakota and some of the destroyers covering Enterprise, while the heavies and the new anti-aircraft cruisers were assigned to Hornet. Sure information on the position of the Japanese came through the tickers; our own attack groups took the air at 8:40. Less than half an hour out from our ships they were crossed by a Japanese attack group coming in, and the Zeros of its escort shot down one or two of them. Then the Japanese were in on our carriers with as many planes as they ever had in action, 135 machines.

Our outer patrols had time to make only a pass or two. Our inner patrols, at fourteen thousand feet, slashed at the Japanese as they came by from above and sent some of them spinning down, then snapped aside in quick loops and wingovers to avoid the perfect wave of fire that rose from our dodging ships below.

Over the Enterprise one flier heard another gasp into his microphone, “My God, she’s on fire!” but she was not; neither was the South Dakota, similarly aureoled in flame. In the fire of scores of our guns the Japanese attack on this group withered and collapsed, one plane pitching so close in the water by the battleship’s side that her Japanese pilot crawled on a wing to fire a pistol (he was cut to pieces by a Filipino machine gunner), and another plane dropping in the wake, with its torpedo just missing her stern. Still another plane, mortally hit, smashed into the forecastle of the destroyer Smith and exploded there. The ammunition in the Smith’s ready boxes went off and a column of flame rose a hundred feet high, but as the volcano shot past his face, Lieutenant Commander Hunter Wood on the bridge gave her full speed and hard rudder into the turbulent wake of the battleship. The destroyer pitched her nose under, a white-capped mass of water boiled across the foredeck, the fire was out, the Smith was saved.

The greatest fury of the Japanese attack was reserved for the Hornet—the carrier which, months before this, had flown off the planes for the bombing of Tokyo. They came in on her from four angles, bombers and torpedo planes together, in one of the most formidably coordinated attacks Japan ever made. Our men count fifty planes shot down in that attack, though how any count could be taken in that tumult is a mystery. It was not enough; an armor-piercing bomb hit the Hornet forward; from one of the covering destroyers sixteen torpedo wakes toward the carrier were counted, and two of them hit, in the engine rooms. A dying Japanese bomber crashed the signal bridge and killed everyone on it, spreading fire across the flight deck and shedding a 500-pound bomb, which miraculously went down through three steel bulkheads without exploding. Another plane hit the Hornet’s side beneath the flight deck, sheared its wings against the stanchions, shot across the hangar and burned inside, turning red-hot the deck above the gasoline storeroom.

The Hornet had no engines now and no fire mains. A bucket brigade was organized (the men sang as they handled the water); a destroyer came alongside to pump; the cruiser Northampton worked under her bows to take a tow. Above, levels of overcast had blown in; among them our fighters were wrangling with a few stray Japanese planes which, for some reason unknown to those then present, did not seem wishful to return to their own carriers. At 12:15 another attack group of Japanese planes gathered up what strays were left and came on in an attack of the same furious intensity as the first. Hornet’s fires had been gotten under, but the towing cable snapped loose and was lost as the Northampton jerked in the renewed battle.

From their seats in the sky the Japanese could see how crippled the Hornet was; they were after the Enterprise now, and the big black battleship covering her. The carrier took two bomb hits this time and plunged in the fountains of near misses till she had thirty feet of water in her forward spaces; the destroyer Porter was sunk. But the Japanese did not even put Enterprise out of action and their attack on the South Dakota was a dreadful failure. Only one bomb hit—on the roof of number 2 turret, a splinter wounding Captain Gatch—and for that blow the battleship repaid them so heavily that out of twenty-four dive bombers and nine torpedo planes in the wave, only one got away. Count this one of the real victories of ships over planes.

The reason why the Japanese bombers were so unwilling to go home after using up their missiles was that they no longer had homes to go to. Like their pilots, ours had been briefed for the carriers. On the way thither they passed a Japanese battleship division, then one of cruisers. One pilot thinks these were decoys, to engage our planes and save their carriers. It worked to a certain extent; a group of torpedo and dive bombers went for a battleship of the Kongo class, and it can be taken that they sent her to dock, for they hit her with two big bombs and a torpedo that left her ablaze and with a list, though the leader of the planes found the results “very disappointing.”

Lieutenant Commander Gus Widhelm was leading the Hornet’s group as it climbed to attack level into “a cloudful of Zeros.” As he noted how the Japanese cruiser-destroyer screen was disposed forty miles—too far—from the Shokaku and Zuikaku which they were covering, one of the Zeros put a bullet through his oil return line. Pressure dropped; Widhelm shucked his big bomb and went into a glide. Just before he hit he looked over his shoulder to see the Shokaku smoking through holes in her deck made by a pair of our 500-pounders, “while the other carrier was making frantic turns to avoid my dive bombing boys. I saw eleven of them pour six heavy bombs into that carrier. Our bombs peeled the carrier’s deck right back and the ship burst into flame from stem to stern. I got out my boat and the radioman and I prepared to make the best of a tough situation.”

Somehow most of the Enterprise men never reached the Japanese carriers (orders? failing gas? uncertain information?) and turned to on the cruiser formation. We have no account of that attack; we know only its results. Widhelm in his rubber boat, now below the skyline from the ruined enemy carriers, saw those results—a cruiser crawling past with one turret blown right off, her catapult “fused into a mess that looked like a quart of taffy spilled over a kitchen range.” They were steaming northwest and away now, away from the fight and away from Guadalcanal. Every now and then one more of their homeless planes would splash in the water beside an escaping ship, sometimes for the pilot to be rescued, sometimes not.

These planes evidently had not gas enough to reach the other Japanese carrier, probably a converted job, that was somewhere in the rear. Its planes came over in the afternoon to the number of seventeen (of which twelve were shot down) and determined our Admiral to scuttle what was left of the Hornet. Another effort to tow having failed, the Hornet’s planes had homed to the deck of the damaged Enterprise and most of them now left that refuge for Henderson Field.

Our fleet was hurt, no question, with practically all its carriers now out of the war. It had to go home to base. But it went victorious and nothing else mattered. The Japanese carriers were out of it too; their big force from the sea had never fired a gun at Guadal.

All day on that island and above it there was fighting as savage as any the world had seen, with one Marine plane ramming a Japanese plane and the pilots trying to kill each other in the water as they struggled with their parachutes. But the Hornet’s planes came; they gave Guadal its air support; and they caught the Tokyo Express in the slot, sank two of its destroyers, and so battered the pair of cruisers that they took no more interest in the proceedings. Under the rapid red tropical twilight General Vandegrift’s weary men counterattacked, and by another dawn the Stars and Stripes were everywhere going forward.

Decision by Night

By 28 October enough information about the double Battle of Santa Cruz had drifted in by radio from smoking Guadal and by the ships that limped in from sea to enable the Japanese admiralty staff to take stock of their position. Twice now they had tried sweeping movements down from the north with battleships, cruisers, and carriers. Land-based planes from Henderson Field had turned the first brew sour; it had been a minor Midway, only prevented from being worse by the (to them) inexplicable unwillingness of the Americans to pursue.

A happy combination had kept the American land planes out of the second concoction and it was gratifying to know that the detested Hornet had been eliminated not only from this but from all future campaigns. Yet the Japanese had to admit that the sea fight at Santa Cruz had been no better than a bloody and violent draw. This was unsatisfactory, since Santa Cruz ashore had become a defeat for them through the failure of the high-sea forces to intervene. But once again, the Americans had demonstrated a certain timorousness, a lack of moral courage about using their forces afloat for true offensive action; a desire to avoid narrow waters and close contact save in the necessary business of covering convoys to Guadalcanal. The Japanese torpedo, as carried by plane, surface ship, or submarine, had evidently given them the jitters.

This is not to say that the Japanese opinion was correct; but that they held it, and based a new campaign for the recovery of Guadalcanal on exploiting the American weakness for exchanging left jabs from across the ring. The forces running down the slot from Bougainville had suffered losses; but (if one included the 8 August affair) they had given about as good as they took on the water, their guns had put our planes out of action at a crucial moment, and the troops and artillery they had brought had held us to the defensive by land. Very strong forces on such a run not only suffered no loss proportionate to their size; they were also able to weaken the opposition by night gunfire and to make the next day at least safe for movements that could not otherwise be undertaken. Besides, there were now no more Japanese carriers that could lead a new attack from sea—all were spent, their flight decks back for long repair, their squadrons wiped out.

Among the islands that cluster round the foot of Bougainville the Japanese accordingly assembled what was to be the greatest of all the Tokyo Express assaults. It had four battleships in it, three of them the fast Kongos, which are battle cruisers. There is evidence that the fourth ship of this class had been replaced by a slower, more powerful vessel, maybe Ise, named for the shrine of the sun goddess and therefore a supremely lucky ship. It had cruisers, just which we are not sure, save that the most indubitable proof was later given that some of them were 8-inch gun heavies, some of them the old light cruisers mounting 5.5’s. It had destroyers, large and small. Most indicative of all, it had as many as twenty or thirty transports, not the spitkits that usually carried minor reinforcement parties, but big seagoing marus like those that took the major army of invasion to Malaya. There were enough of them for three full divisions of troops, maybe more.

It takes time to assemble a concentration like this and the staff work is not light. While the Japanese forces were gathering the Americans were to be pinned in their poke around the airfield by the old, tried recipe of bombings by day and shellings by night from small cruiser-destroyer forces that also landed munitions and some reinforcement. The grand attack was set for…

Here one suddenly plunges from the domain of cold logical calculation into that of wild fantasy, with its reminder that the Japanese are still a medieval people. It has been remarked that Ise was a lucky ship because of her name; the fact that she bore it is one of the reasons for believing that she was the vessel chosen from four of her class to lead the attack. Nor can the curious repetition of dates in the Japanese attacks escape attention: 24 August, 24 September, 24 October for the big moves by open sea; 12 August, 13 September, 12 October for the main efforts down the slot. Coincidence, the fact that it took just so long to gather supplies, might explain such a concatenation once or twice, but here it grows beyond accident, and it is not accident.

It is astrology; those were lucky days. Now one of the luckiest of all dates for such an enterprise as was now contemplated was the period from 13 to 15 November. These days are sacred to the willow and to the sage Ono-no-tofu, who in the immemorial past stood under the streaming rains of November and learned persistence by watching a tree frog seven times leap for a leaf, undiscouraged by previous failure. The gods were being mobilized in support of this greatest of efforts against Guadalcanal.

In the days just following Santa Cruz the largest American convoy since the original landing steamed into “Sleepless Lagoon” and put its troops ashore. It would be about this time that the huge liner President Coolidge struck a pair of mines and sank off the island, without loss but in the midst of an intense atmosphere of controversy, for her captain and several of the crew maintained that the mines were American and that the guiding destroyer had given the ship her go-ahead into the area where she went down. The point is not important in itself—such accidents are as inevitable in war as autos locking wheels in city streets—but it may provide a clue to why “Oscar”—the single Japanese sub that, earlier in the campaign, had been a nightly visitor—came no more into Sealark Channel to surface and shell our lines. A submarine in a minefield is the world’s most helpless war-ship. The fact that there could be an American minefield is also an indication of the increased force we were putting in.

Japanese shells were still falling in the area as the fresh troops came ashore. Both for the sake of more elbow room and to give them a safe landing General Vandegrift staged an offensive as of 1 November. It was a creeping affair of strong patrols in the underbrush and draws; when it ended we had bridgeheads across the rivers both east and west of the airfield and so much of the ground that had been fought over in the desperate battles of late October that the Japanese dead could be counted and buried. There were over two thousand. The new Army men looked at them curiously, asking a variety of questions about the Japanese who spoke English or fought tied to trees, but they got little satisfaction. Both categories belonged to the Imperial Marine Corps and by this time most of the members of that organization on the island were dead.

Daytimes our men sunned themselves in shorts outside dugouts, and at night they found sleeping easier than they had been led to expect; but the idyll did not last. On 4 November the Tokyo Express ran again, depositing some 1,500 men, part east and part west of the airfield. Those on the east started some fighting in the brush which they regretted, for the Army reinforcements were on that front, feeling full of beans, and slugged them hard. There were combats all through the 5th and 6th; with one fairly heavy Japanese air raid on the first day that came in so fast through clouds our fighters could not get to it. More Flying Fortresses arrived, our forces had opulent support from the sky, and by night of the 6th the battle had become a punch into jelly. There was no more real resistance anywhere along the line; scouts reported that the remains of the 1,500 new Japanese had taken to the hills.

There were eight motor-torpedo boats now and a base ship for them, which had been run into a bay of Tulagi and decorated with potted palms till she looked like the lobby of a General Grant hotel. The PT’s went out every night, partly into Sealark Channel to keep the Japanese from landing at Taivu, partly to the “bitch patrol” where Cape Esperance looks on open sea and they were rocked by the waves of the stormy season. People mostly have the wrong idea about the PT boats. They do not come roaring in with open cutouts like a charge of cavalry; they are assassins which sneak up soft-shoe on throttled motors, strike once, and use their speed on the getaway. On that night of 6 November Lieutenant “Stilly” Taylor’s boat on the bitch patrol fired its fish and got an explosion, but it was only a possible; the missile may have hit the rocks of Savo Island.

Next night, the 7th, a Japanese destroyer came down to Taivu, moving fast. One of the expendables fired at him; his lookouts were good, they spotted the torpedo wakes, switched on searchlights, and changed course lightning fast—to run straight into a fan of four torpedoes fired by Lieutenant Lester Gamble from another. That same night on the bitch patrol we lost a boat, hit in the bows by a Japanese destroyer’s star shell and all chewed to pieces. She made port toward morning, having used her smoke well, but was pretty definitely out of the campaign. Three nights later there was another encounter in the slot, with a hit on a Japanese vessel everybody took for a destroyer, but two more of our boats were disabled, one by gunfire, one by engineering casualty.

Torpedo boats are like bombers; should be used in quantity with constant replacement—only there was neither quantity nor replacement to be had and the boys who operated them began to feel lonely and beaten down.

In the air war the pace was being stepped up as the day of Ono-no-tofu approached. Our planes on the 7th found a big Tokyo Express way up near New Georgia, a cruiser and ten destroyers moving into position for the night run on which they clashed with the PT’s. Instead of hiding the Japanese called up their planes from the new nearby air bases and tried to fight through. There was an air battle; they had the cruiser badly hit and lost sixteen planes against four, a proportion that need not surprise, since they brought only floatplanes and they fed those in piecemeal.

When our planes came home from mission they found everyone at Henderson talking excitedly with an Army lieutenant named Dinn, who had just arrived by canoe. He had flown an Airacobra in a raid against Rekata Bay on Santa Isabel on 28 October and had been knocked down by flak. The natives gave him a portable throne when they found out he was a birdman, fed him the honorific foods, and made him shake hands with everyone in the villages through which he passed. He taught them “You Are My Sunshine” as an addition to their one-song repertoire, “Jesus Loves Me”; they captured a Japanese for him, who was taken along to the encampment and installed as foreman of the grave diggers’ squad.

But all this was the overture. The curtain for the big show rose with day on 12 November, when still another American troop convoy steamed in under a forest of masts with the guardian arms of warships around them. Norman Scott was there, who had led at Cape Esperance, this time flying his flag in the new anti-aircraft cruiser Atlanta. But he was not in command of the group; that office belonged to Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan, “Uncle Dan,” the former White House naval aide, loved by everyone down to the meanest mess boy, not least by the captains who knew that more than half of tactics is in his “Follow Me.” He was on the bridge of San Francisco; there was another heavy cruiser, Portland; there were eight destroyers, Atlanta’s sister Juneau, and that workhorse light cruiser, the Helena, which went into action at once.

For the Tokyo Express was also a freight train. It had brought a consignment of 6- and 5-inch guns which the Japanese had set up near the mouth of the Kokumbuna River for just such an occasion as this. As the transports began to unload, these guns croaked all together and splash-fountains rose among the ships. Helena steamed off to deal with them, the fastest-shooting ship in the fleet with her battery of fifteen guns and a file of destroyers to help her, of which Buchanan got hit and lost five men. They put the Japanese batteries to silence and moved along the shore, shooting up Japanese artillery positions where they lay along the reverse slope of ridges perpendicular to the sea, and were having a lovely time with about thirty landing craft which the enemy had not had time to hide under the jungle edge, when TBS flashed a recall—Japanese planes coming.

Helena turned back. All the ships had steam, the transports were disposed in lines parallel to the direction of the Japanese approach with the warships circling around them, and twenty-eight Grummans took off from Henderson Field. Against the bright sky over Florida Island they were silhouetted for a moment like flies on a windowpane, and then a long, thin ribbon of Mitsubishi torpedo planes came pouring over and down as though they had been shot out of a hose.

As they cleared the island they started to spread for the classic all-angles attack, but they never made it. The Grummans had ridden them hard, their fighter cover was stripped, sixteen of the bombers were already flaming down when the ships opened with their 40’s in a tumult of fire that only one of the attackers lived through. But three torpedoes were dropped and those in desperation. One fatally hit plane swooped in a sharp curve toward San Francisco. She dodged; the plane missed the bridge, but hit Bat II, the secondary control station that overlooks number 3 turret. There was a sharp explosion, a spray of burning gasoline that took the lives of thirty men and seriously wounded the exec, Commander Mark Crouter.

Ten minutes from the first gun there was no trace of battle but the plume of smoke from the cruiser and that single Japanese plane running north with its engine on fire and a Grumman buzzing angrily after it. The Japanese had lost thirty-two out of thirty-three, the same score as in the attack on South Dakota during the Santa Cruz battle, but that time at least they got a bomb hit and on this occasion nothing.

That night our transports left the bay, which tells its own story of how fast and well the Seabees had worked to unload them. The cruisers saw them out. Ashore the word went round that Tojo was coming, and strong; he had battleships in his train and an NYK liner of 18,000 tons, the biggest in the Oriental world, besides other ships. Our planes had tracked him all day through changing weather. General Vandegrift was happy enough; our latest arrivals, he said, had put it past the power of the Japanese to land enough men for victory in any single operation. But the old hands, the Marines, made themselves small in foxholes they dug deeper that day, and swore. “Where’s our Navy?” they asked.

They could see San Francisco and Portland, Helena, the anti-aircraft cruisers and destroyers, riding in to Sleepless Lagoon after taking the transports out, and it did not look to them like the kind of fleet with which a man in his senses opposes an enemy who has battleships. Perhaps it was not; but it was the fleet Uncle Dan Callaghan had and would do his best with. He formed them after dark, the destroyer Cushing leading the line with Commander Edward Parker, who had skippered another destroyer through that wild night in Badung Strait off Java when all the Japanese ships went down and they fired at each other. Behind Cushing came Lieutenant Commander W. B. Hank’s Laffey, O’Bannon, Buchanan, then Atlanta, San Francisco, Helena, Portland, Juneau and more destroyers—an arrangement symmetrical, with the strong ships all at the center of the line, whereas the schools of tactics teach that they should occupy the extremities. But what is a strong ship? In the murk of night, in those close waters, Admiral Callaghan judged it to be a ship that could use the torpedo as its first and deadly weapon.

Having given his men some rest the Admiral turned northwest along the Guadal coast, pointing toward the more southerly of the gaps around Savo Island. The planes had been flown off and were over at Tulagi to keep them from burning on the catapults in action as they had during the August battle. It was after midnight and the rich voice of the Admiral came through the speakers outlining the desperate venture of battle in which they were about to be engaged, and ending as Callaghan always did with “Let’s go get ‘em.” Then it was one o’clock, it was after one o’clock, and the ships passed Point Cruz, turning right angles in succession to a northerly course. It was half past the hour when the TBS from Helena carried word to all ships, “Here they come,” with something about an enormous fleet south of Savo Island.

Callaghan swung sharp left to close the range, then sharp right again to stay across the bows of the enemy rushing down at top speed, and shouted “Commence firing! Give ‘em hell, boys!” Before the last words left his lips Helena’s fifteen guns went off all together and in ten seconds the air was full of the glare of star shell and the water full of level gun flashes. Two Japanese scout planes had gone up to cast flares; caught in that first blaze of light they were targets for every pompom in the fleet and came crashing down as the converging courses of the two squadrons carried them together into a melee the like of which had not been seen since Jutland.

It is impossible to view that three-ring circus save through the eyes of individual ships; and not always then. At the head of the line Cushing found herself in action with two or three destroyers coming in on her port side; hit them and was herself hit almost at once. Commander Parker felt his ship’s speed fall off and could not raise the forward engine room by phone; ordered a spread of torpedoes from number 3 tube, but as he did so the torpedoman was hit and got off only one of his fish, which missed.

He looked from the bridge wings; off the port quarter, clearly outlined against a glare of gunfire and now-burning ships, was the hulking form of a Japanese battleship—not one of your Kongos with their funnels pinched together in a mass of midship superstructure but with tower distinct, a gap, then funnel, then a tower again—big game, Fuso or Ise.

He gave his dying ship full rudder and as she came round in a sharp curve he noted how one, two giant waterspouts sprang up on the far side of that battleship, their spray turned red by flame within and behind. Torpedo hits. “Action starboard,” he said and fired his torpedoes; there was a hit, maybe more than one, then Cushing herself was hit again and began to go down.

The hits Parker saw had been from our destroyer Laffey, which spotted the Japanese battleship first and charged straight for her bows, firing her spread on the run in. They almost collided; the destroyer’s wheel went down, she cut under the forefoot of the monster by a margin that seemed no more than ten feet, shooting out the Japanese’s bridge with her 5-inch but in return taking heavy punishment from secondaries, turning left toward Savo to get away. The next flashes showed another battleship broad on the beam and two big Japanese destroyers off the port bow. Both swung to fire torpedoes; the guns opened up and Laffey’s people saw a flame spring from the leading Japanese forecastle with the oil-well pres-sure behind it that indicated a burning magazine. Then a torpedo hit Laffey aft, she began to go, but the three guns still remaining tore at the wounded Japanese from a range where misses were impossible. Down she went, but now Laffey was done too and her crew abandoned ship just as the second Japanese battlewagon opened up on them with 14-inch shell.

Atlanta was just making the final northward turn when her lookouts picked up something on the starboard bow. As her guns swung in that direction the ship was abruptly caught in a searchlight beam from the other side. The turrets spun fast, she fired six quick salvos at the searchlight ship, a three-funneled cruiser, hitting and being hit, but getting all the best of the exchange, for the Japanese had no such battery as this new cruiser. The searchlights went out, the three-funnel job heeled over and began to burn, and just then three Japanese destroyers foamed across Atlanta’s bow no more than 600 yards away. The first two got past but “We opened on the third and just went to town, hitting her every four seconds with all the guns that would bear. She blew up and disappeared. Then we were torpedoed.”

Two of the torpedoes hit Atlanta, in the engine rooms, killing all power, and the ship drifted round to a southerly course away from the action which for her had lasted something less than a minute. Away behind, ships were burning all over the water or blowing up; the waves of their movement heaved the little cruiser around like those of a full gale, though the action had started with the lagoon as calm as a bathtub. It was dark; out of that dark astern to the north suddenly plunged a heavy cruiser which threw a light on Atlanta and hit her with nineteen big shells, all over, wrecking everything. Captain Jenkins ran to the port wing of the bridge to see whether he could get a torpedo off; too many men had been killed aft and he could not, but the effort saved his life, for one of those big shells hit the bridge and killed everyone on it, including Norman Scott.

San Francisco seems to have encountered the leading Japanese ships bow to bow while still pointing west. The first was a cruiser; the American flagship hit it with six salvos; Helena and the cruiser following hit it. It began to burn throughout its length; San Francisco shifted to a flotilla leader and had hit that a couple of times when the battle glare threw up the leading Japanese battleship with Laffey’s torpedoes exploding against her sides.

“Get on that goddam pagoda!” shouted someone on the bridge. Cruiser and battleship fired together; at that 2,500-yard range San Francisco’s shells went right through her big antagonist’s armor and must have torn her all to pieces inside, but she was shooting back with 14-inch, and though the guns could not be depressed enough to hit our ship on the waterline, the shells went off in the bridge structure and blew out that brain of the ship. Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless in the port wing of the bridge was knocked off his feet and half stunned by a fragment that gave him a wound. As he picked himself up to find Captain Young and Commander Crouter dead, the conning tower was hit by another big shell that killed Admiral Callaghan, and Bat II by still another that wiped out everyone there.

McCandless grabbed a phone to tell Lieutenant Commander Herbert Schonland of Damage Control that he was the senior surviving officer, but Schonland was in the midst of his own desperate fight to keep the cruiser afloat against the water pouring in through shell holes in her side. “Con the ship,” he snapped back, and McCandless found himself commander of the ship and admiral of a fleet scattered through the night.

Fortunately the big cruiser’s power plant was intact, though one section of blowers had been knocked out and the other brought so much smoke into the engine spaces that the men there had to work in gas masks. McCandless found that neither main nor secondary steering control was working, but the phone to central station, far below, was in order. Giving directions over it, he kept his ship’s head west between the double column of Japanese while Helena and Portland behind her pumped shells into the enemy battleship till it ceased fire and turned away north. As the tail ends of the lines swept past each other there were stabs of gunfire and the rush of more torpedoes; Juneau got one amidships, Portland took one that smashed her rudder, and two more of our destroyers were fatally hit, Barton and Monssen, but not till one of them had soaked a torpedo into some big Japanese never clearly identified, probably the second battleship. Then the enemy were away around the north of Savo, leaving two cruisers and four destroyers on the bottom.

The action had lasted a little better than seventeen minutes.

It was not entirely over. What was left of our battle line, now under guidance of McCandless, came down to the cover of our batteries on the northern shore of Guadalcanal. Dawn comes early in those waters; in the first half-light Portland spied a Japanese destroyer trying to crawl slowly away just this side of Savo Island, swung round her turrets and while the damage control parties labored below, put out six quick salvos that sent the Japanese to the bottom. The shells passed over the heads of hundreds of swimmers, Japanese and American. Higgins boats were already out to pick up survivors but the Japanese fired at them from the water and the rescuers had to carry machine guns. They only got twenty-five live prisoners and they could see along toward the usual Japanese landing beaches that some new boats had put in during the night, apparently while the battle was going on.

When the fliers went out to look for the ships from which these boats had come they found the pot of gold. The big Japanese battleship had taken a little more than even a battleship can stand from the light craft we had in action; she was just beyond Savo, making for home at no more than five knots, low in the water and with five destroyers around her. The news spread electrically through the encampment where the survivors of our lost ships were finding themselves treated as victors and saviors, with all the little carefully hoarded delicacies—a bar of chocolate, a cigar, a hidden bottle of Japanese beer. All the torpedo and dive bombers on the island were hastily readied and took off into the rising sun. Torpedo 8 was there, the squadron whose carrier section had been wiped out at Midway, now led to revenge by “Swede” Larsen; Captain Joe Foss was there, the Marine fighter ace, who had run his score of Japanese planes to twenty-one the day before—and others, a truly formidable concentration of the best in U. S. Naval Air.

But it turned into a singular and for some time an inexplicable operation. There was no Japanese air cover and the weather was favorable to the attack, with low overcast and fits of rain. In the very first exchange Marine Major Sailer wiped out one of the Japanese ship’s anti-aircraft positions with a dive bomb just as it was manned to beat off a torpedo attack led by Larsen. Larsen got a hit; half an hour later there was another and then two more, all torpedoes. The battleship crept on. Two more torpedoes toward noon; she kept going.

They were talking of the “unsinkable battleship”; one pilot wiped sweat from his face and ejaculated, “the damn thing apparently will float till the war’s over.”

“We’ve got to sink her,” said another. “We’ve just got to, or the admirals will stop building carriers and start building battleships all over again.”

The afternoon went by like that. Out in the channel they had finally fixed up the heavy cruiser’s rudder and scuttled Atlanta as beyond repair. What was left of Admiral Callaghan’s fleet gathered itself together and steamed out to the south. The returning fliers brought word that the unsinkable ship was still moving, just barely, down by the stern now and with only a couple of guns working.

It is said that a Marine major solved the mystery, suddenly clapping his hand to his forehead. All those torpedoes—they had been set for shallow runs, to take the bottom out of a Japanese destroyer or one of their light-draft transports, and with that battleship down deep they must be exploding against her armor belt, piling up damage but not killing. The last flight of the day went out with torpedoes in deep settings and got three hits. The battleship stopped in the twilight, its whole stern red from internal fires, with men being taken off. In the morning there was nothing on the spot or near it but a two-mile slick of iridescent oil. Sunk.

We had a loss too, in the last act of the day when our fleet pulled southward with the cruisers all pretty well smashed and the remaining destroyers in company so much abused that their sound gear was out of commission. They were making twenty knots, which is too fast for submarine approach, but luck or clever calculation by the Japanese would take the column right into an area where they had a U-boat waiting to pick on cripples. The men on our other ships heard a violent explosion and saw a column of oil go up at the side of Juneau, opposite the point where she had taken the torpedo in the night. Under it the ship simply disintegrated. “I saw a piece of the mainmast coming down and doubled up to protect myself. I remember a sharp pain. A second later I dropped over the rail to the main deck, twenty feet below, but I was already in water up to my chest.” The other ships had to steam on out of the danger area; all planes were fighting and so without good rescue there were only thirteen survivors.

A bad end to a good day, but it turned worse by night, when the Japanese poured another whole division of their fleet down the slot where there were now no American ships to oppose them and gave Guadalcanal a thorough shelling. “The worst one ever, with all that 14-inch; it just drives you crazy,” commented one man who lay beneath it. In some of the shell holes men were crying or talking about how to make coffee, or Rita Hayworth’s legs, or anything to give a sense of human companionship and existence under that storm of steel. But in the technical sense it was nervous exhaustion more than damage. Unlike the October shellings this one caused few casualties—only three planes smashed; and though seventeen others were damaged, they were in the air before night of 15 November and the motor torpedo boats raided the Japanese armada as it whirled past, getting a fish into a fine cruiser.

Perhaps that torpedo hit sent the bombarding squadron away before it intended to go, before it had accomplished its purpose of crippling the Henderson Field planes. If so, it can be regarded as one of the decisive minor events of the campaign.

There are military advantages in the Japanese system of politico-religious fanaticism; it produces in the subject a self-sacrificing devotion which keeps him at the guns, as cool as at target practice, with the world collapsing around. It permits the home authorities to concentrate production on pure fighting equipment without having to bother with such details as life jackets for warship crews or parachutes for those of airplanes. But the cool assumption that all lives are forfeit in war leads to the forfeiture of many that might be saved for use, and that is what happened on the morning of 15 November.

On the previous day the scouting planes that stumbled over the unsinkable battleship had flown on into the upper Solomons. It will be remembered that their mission was to look for transports. They found them—not the small craft from which landing boats had presumably reached the beaches during the battle, but something much more important, the NYK 18,000-tonner with seven others of which the smallest was 10,000 or 12,000 tons, and four cargo vessels of similar dimensions. Their decks were black with men, at least two divisions, maybe more. They spent all that day, the 14th, jigging around just beyond bomber range. During the night they began to move in, for even a fast transport is slower than a warship and the run through the American bomber belt would have to be made at least partly by daylight.

According to Japanese calculation there should have been no effective bomber belt left by the 15th. Henderson Field would have had one massive shelling on the night of the 13th and another on the 14th. A single bombardment of much less intensity than either had left the field practically without planes at the time of the battle of Santa Cruz, three weeks before. But Admiral Callaghan’s death ride had altogether canceled the bombardment of the 13th and that of the 14th was turned into a half-baked performance by the attack of the motor torpedo boats. We had planes; they were in the air; and when the Japanese expeditionary force was located only 150 miles from Guadalcanal shortly before noon, our planes went hunting.

Some officers thought they detected evidence of a small Japanese carrier, an auxiliary, somewhere in the background. It could not have amounted to much, for when the fighters with which our attack force was liberally provided had shot down eight Zeros at a cost of only one of their own, any remaining Japanese planes ran way and the transports were stripped of air cover. Their protecting warships (all small) also cleared out like good Oriental realists, leaving those ships and all the men they contained with no protection but the ordinary armament of vessels not intended to fight.

It was massacre, it was horrible, it was war. Our pilots came back calling themselves “buzzards,” hating themselves a trifle, to tell how in the first attack two of the big ships had gone down to leave the water for half a mile around full of little men in khaki uniforms who gradually disappeared; how the bombs went down through decks and the ships burned inside till the details of their machinery were picked out as though with magenta-colored paint. The convoy had its orders; it crept remorselessly toward Guadalcanal into the flame. Our bombers went back to refuel and took off again; our fighters came down and tore their decks to pieces with .50-caliber machine gun fire. Ship after ship went down till the sun sank and a crescent moon rose; and when the exhausted pilots staggered to their dugouts for a rest only four of that convoy were left, two of them burning.

But we were not out of the woods; we were far from it. Under that early moon word of the destruction of more than 20,000 Japanese troops was accompanied by other and more ominous tidings. One of the last scouts in had spotted the Japanese battleship force that had given the encampment so dreadful a shelling on the previous night, sliding down the slot toward Guadalcanal for another blow. “Where the hell is the goddam Navy?” asked angry men and men tired to the limit of endurance.

They heard the news over at Tulagi too, where the PT’s were based. Some of the boats had been injured on the night of the 14th and two had been in collision. There were just three left that could move; and they moved out to the area of the bitch patrol to tackle a Japanese battle fleet with the air of Sydney Carton going to the scaffold.

They were still there with throttled motors after eleven o’clock when darker shadows among the shades round Savo Island told them the Japanese were on the way. Just at that moment a voice not heard before came through their speakers:

“This is Ching Chong Lee,” it said. “Get out of the way; I’m coming through.”

Ching Chong Lee was that half-fabulous admiral who had spent so many years on the China coast. He commanded battleships.

Willis Augustus Lee, born Natlee, Kentucky, 1888. Expert rifleman at Annapolis, in charge of the U.S. rifle team at the Belgian Olympics in 1920, set a lot of records. Graduated from small guns to big, a student of shooting in all its aspects, and spent most of his time at it after his period in China aboard the old gunboat Helena with the high stack, that rolled eighty degrees. A small man, quiet and reserved, with glasses, whom few knew; the type who could come into a room and go out again without anyone being aware of his presence.

Now he stood on the bridge of a battleship running along the Guadal capes. Behind him moved another—16-inch gun battleships, fast new battleships. The second was South Dakota with Captain Gatch, still wound around with bandages from the wound he had received at Santa Cruz. The name of Lee’s flag is not given, but by her official picture she was either Washington or North Carolina; there are only two like that in the world. Eleven o’clock. “It was very quiet” as the battleships circled Savo from the south side of Guadalcanal, turned down into the passage, then back on a northwest course. “The gardenia smell came so strong from Florida Island that I thought it was a gas attack and started to put on my mask.” Eleven-twenty and here they come, one Japanese ship round the north flank of Savo, two more around its southern rim, a scouting group, big flotilla leaders, half-cruisers.

“You may fire when you are ready,” said Willis Augustus Lee on TBS and at that same moment the flagship’s guns ripped out such a flame as had never been seen in battle before.

South Dakota joined; both hit with the first fire. From the flagship’s bridge, from the mountain stations on the island, they could see the two enemy ships “begin to glow like the end of a cigarette.” Black smoke billowed out under the futile star shells they fired too short, the glow spread until it engulfed the ships entire, and with reports that would have been deafening but for the thunder of the guns they blew apart. The third Japanese turned; the flagship’s guns caught him on the turn and he slid into the rocks of Savo, a flaming wreck.

All the radio receivers bore a sudden wild flood of Japanese appeal and chatter; out from under cover of the island rushed a group of Japanese destroyers with a cruiser to lead them for a torpedo counterattack, and Lee’s covering destroyers charged to beat them off, with the battleships firing secondaries over their heads. One of the Japanese burst into flame; so did Preston, Benham, and Walke of ours, and on another of ours, a sailor who came through picked a piece of 8-inch out of his helmet with the remark that he had served twenty years in the Navy during the last two minutes.

The 35,000-ton battleships sidestepped the torpedoes like dancers and rushed on past Savo. There was a five-minute lull, in which must have fallen that incident described by Chairman Byrnes of War Mobilization: “In the night of November 15th off Guadalcanal there lay a Japanese battleship. Eight miles away was a ship of our fleet. With the use of radar our ship laid her guns on the Japanese as the latter thrust inquiring searchlight beams across the water.” The American battleships opened up together; six salvos, 108 shells of over a ton apiece poured into the Japanese rapid fire, and the watchers on the hilltops caught their breath at the most awe-inspiring sight in naval history, for that formidable mechanism spouted a huge flame amidships, then turned over on her side so rapidly that the last unchecked shells went through her bottom to explode among the decks as she vanished. That would have been one of the Kongos.

But she was not the only Japanese ship in action; it was a fleet larger than the fleet of the 13th. There was another battleship in the background, shooting at and hitting South Dakota with shells that sent up fountains of sparks and ringing steel. One hit her belt; it did not penetrate. Another struck the base of number 3 turret and put a dent in its armor steel that it was past the part of the dockyard men to remove. It did not penetrate either. The American flagship was dueling fiercely with this vessel, hitting her again and again, so hard that our people to this day insist she ceased fire because she went down, nor could our fliers find any trace of her the following morning; but the Navy makes no claims beyond damage done to this ship.

It does make claims on the other members of that fleet, the cruisers that rushed to support their battleships, plastering South Dakota’s upper works with 5.5- and 8-inch shell, first by the glare of the searchlights which they threw on her when their battleships’ lights went out, then by light of the fires that broke out on our ship. “The Santa Cruz air attack had been a holiday by comparison”; the sky control was knocked out, everyone there killed or wounded, there was a fire beneath Bat II that made the deck red hot, a steam line was cut and the upper spaces of the ship were filled with it.

But on the Japanese cruisers it was worse. One broke in two and went down, bow and stern sticking from the water, another oddly collapsed in the opposite direction, bow and stern under, the torn midships section spouting crossed fires. Then South Dakota twisted out of the last searchlight beam, it was dark all around, the fires extinguished and the battle over. Half an hour; of all those Japanese radio babblings only three or four voices were left, one of those identifiable as a Guadalcanal shore station.

“They set a trap for foxes, but we didn’t think it would hold bears,” said Captain Gatch later. The Japanese South Pacific fleet had in fact ceased to exist as a military entity, and Guadalcanal was ours.

The enemy had ships left and men and planes; there were many weary weeks of fighting still ahead, ships to sink and men to die. The Japanese would not surrender, but then neither would an army of rats attacked by cats; there was no more question about the result, no more doubt in anyone’s mind. Their officers knew it and no longer led attacks, not even by way of honorable suicide. They waited to be picked up in the slow advance across the ridges. Their artillerists knew and from the batteries that bore on our encampment fired exactly eighteen shells. The batteries were not there long, for our men had no doubts either now; the next morning they began the attacks that carried them to the limits of the island and beyond into the upper Solomons and to everything that flowed there from.