Robert Leckie - Strong Men Armed

Dunn crawled back to Morrison in the thicket. They lay there, through the night, through the entire next day, among swarming mosquitoes and crawling ants while the terrible sweet stench of decaying flesh rose from the lumps that had been their comrades, while their tongues swelled in their mouths, and while Morrison burned in the fire of his pain and Dunn kept his hand clamped over his mouth to stifle his. groans.

At last it was night again and the Japanese had moved upriver. Dunn dragged Morrison down to the river. He pulled him behind a log caught in the shore underbrush and lowered him gently into the water. Then he lay down and rolled over, opening his mouth, allowing the river water to caress his burning palate. Morrison drank, too, for the first time in two days.

Now Dunn had Morrison on his back. He was crawling down the riverbank toward the sea and the Marine lines, keeping well inshore for fear of the crocodiles prowling the Lunga, yet shying clear of the enemy-infested jungle. He stopped frequently to rest, and crawled on again. Sometimes Morrison mumbled wildly in his delirium, sometimes he sank into unconsciousness. Occasionally Dunn would also lose his senses. But he would awaken and crawl on.

At daybreak they reached the Marine lines. Still bleeding, Morrison was rushed to the airfield and quickly evacuated to a base hospital. Dunn was taken to a field hospital, carried there—for he had passed out from exhaustion.

It was no longer the Bastard Air Force but Cactus Air Force, so called after the code word for Guadalcanal. It was under the command of a grizzled white bear of a brigadier general named Roy Geiger. He was a flying general, a pioneer of Marine aviation who had flown as a captain in World War One. General Geiger was also a student of land warfare. On Guadalcanal, he consistently visited the front lines to study Vandegrift’s dispositions. Geiger would one day become the only Marine to command an American army, but in those late September days on Guadalcanal he was still bringing Marine air power to its maturity.

Geiger came into Guadalcanal September 3 on the first transport plane to reach Henderson Field. Shortly afterward he was promoted to major general. He took up headquarters in a wooden shack called “The Pagoda” and located only 200 yards from the main runway. He quickly became known as The Old Man to that youthful flying fraternity which made up his command. For Cactus Air Force was actually a band of brothers who looked so much alike on the ground—the faces of each obscured in the shadow of identical long-billed blue baseball caps, the left breast of each bulky with the same automatic pistol stuffed into the same shoulder holster . strapped over identical faded khaki shirts—that it was not surprising to see them fighting like wing-joined twins in the skies.

Geiger’s men had learned never to dogfight a Zero. The Japanese fighter planes were too fast, too maneuverable. They would be in on the Wildcat’s tail and firing away. But the Wildcats had the armor and the firepower, and if one of them was no match for one Zero, two of them fighting together could take on five enemy. They watched each other’s tails, firing quick six-gun bursts at the attacking Zeros—and because the Japanese planes had thin skins and no self-sealing gas tanks, they flamed easily. The Marines had learned other things, among them the necessity of wiping their guns free of oil lest they freeze at altitudes above 25,000 feet, and the danger of coming in behind a bomber’s tail guns. They contented themselves with making overhead passes at the bombers, flashing past protecting Zeros with quick bursts, then diving for safety and a pull-out.

And while the Wildcats were mastering the Zero which had once been the scourge of the Pacific—slaughtering the Marine Buffaloes at Midway—Cactus Air Force’s Dauntless dive-bombers and Avenger torpedo-bombers ranged up The Slot to fulfill Vandegrift’s requests for strikes on the Tokyo Express.

On September 21 Lieutenant Colonel Albert Cooley led the bombers against the destroyer Kagero while she landed troops at Kamimbo Bay, a point roughly 30 miles west of the Marine perimeter.

On September 22 the bombers hit the Japanese massing-point at Visale, a few miles north of Kamimbo Bay. One of the dive-bombers was flown by fifty-seven-year-old Roy Geiger. He had become angered when his men complained that the runway was so pocked with bomb-blasts they could not take off safely. He lumbered from The Pagoda, squeezed his bulk into a Dauntless cockpit and roared north to drop a thousand-pounder on the enemy. That same date more bombers went after destroyer-transports in a night attack.

On September 24 Cooley’s planes bombed and strafed destroyer-transports Kawakaze and Umikaze in Kamimbo Bay.

But the troops were getting ashore, and this, together with patrol reports of increasing build-ups to the west, convinced General Vandegrift that before the Japanese could gather all their strength he had better break them up.

He attacked.

Vandegrift had two reasons for striking the Japanese west of the Matanikau River. He wanted to break them up before they could cross to the east bank, from which they could punish Henderson Field with their artillery and prepare an assault on his line at Kukum, and he wanted to occupy the east or inner bank of the river himself.

On September 23 Vandegrift ordered the famous jungle-fighter, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Puller, to take his First Battalion, Seventh Marines, on a reconnaissance-in-force into the hills south and west of the perimeter. The scouting expedition was to end by September 26, on which date the Raider Battalion, now under Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Griffith, was to cross the Matanikau River at its mouth and march about 10 miles farther west to the village of Kukumbona. The idea was that the Raiders could set up a patrolling base at Kukumbona. All this was to be preliminary to Vandegrift’s attack.

Nothing was heard from Puller until, on the night of September 24, he reported meeting the enemy near Grassy Knoll, about four miles south of the western half of the perimeter, and losing seven men killed and 25 wounded in the fight that followed. Because of rugged terrain, it required four men to carry back each of the stretchers on which the 18 seriously wounded lay. Vandegrift sent Puller the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, and told him he was on his own as far as continuing his mission or withdrawing was concerned.

The wounded were placed in the care of two companies from Puller’s own battalion under Major Otho Rogers. Then Puller led the rest of his force west of the Matanikau.

The night of September 24 Puller’s force bivouacked just short of the Matanikau’s east bank. Next morning the Marines reached the river and turned right, or north, to work down its east bank to the sea. In early afternoon, still several hundred yards short of the rivermouth, mortar shells fell on them from enemy positions across the river and near the coast. The Marines took cover and gradually crept down to the mouth of the Matanikau. But every attempt to cross the river was repulsed.

And now the Raiders who were to cross the Matanikau on their march to Kukumbona that very same day were obviously unable to do so. Vandegrift sent them up the east bank of the river. They were to move inland, or south, about 2,000 yards until they came to a log-crossing just beneath a fork in the river. They would cross there and come down on the Japanese right flank. This action was to begin the following day, September 27, with support from the air and from Marine artillery.

It began, but as the Raiders approached the log-bridge they were pinned to the ground by Japanese who had crossed the Matanikau at that point during the night and had occupied the east bank. The gallant Major Bailey was killed here and the Japanese kept the Raiders pinned down and cut them up with mortars.