Preparing to get some rest one evening after a day spent talking to American pilots engaged in dueling with their Japanese opponents in the skies over the South Pacific, International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis, one of only two civilian reporters (along with Bob Miller of the United Press) covering the fighting on Guadalcanal in the Solomons, decided to take a chance, despite rumors about a possible attack, to sleep more comfortably for once. He pulled off his pants, shirt, shoes, and socks and climbed into his cot. It turned out to be a mistake.
What ensued was a bit of comic opera, as the correspondent and a U.S. Marine Corps officer, Colonel LeRoy P. Hunt, also clad in his skivvies, arrived at the dugout at the same time. “We bumped into each other at the entrance and then backed away and I said, ‘You go first, Colonel.’ He said politely with a slight bow, ‘No, after you,’” noted Tregaskis. They stood there for a few moments, arguing, as shells continued to rain down on their position, with one slamming into the earth close to Tregaskis’s canvas tent.
The comic aspects of the situation soon turned to horror. As the enemy barrage halted, Tregaskis could hear a “blubbering, crying sound that was more animal than human.” A marine ran up to the dugout’s entrance to report that several men had been badly wounded and required medical attention. The correspondent left the shelter, passed by a smashed tent, and found himself “amidst a scene of frightfulness.” He saw a body with a small, red hole in the middle of its chest. Another wounded man—the person who had been making the cries Tregaskis had heard—also lay nearby with a doctor and corpsman already attending to the man’s shattered legs. Additional wounds to the marine’s face “rained blood on the ground,” Tregaskis reported, noting that the stricken man’s shoulder had also been ripped apart by shrapnel. “He was crying, sobbing, into a pool of blood.
One of the wounded man’s hands moved in mechanical circles on the ground, keeping time with his cries.” Corpsmen loaded the wound into a nearby ambulance. Tregaskis long remembered the harsh squeaking of the wooden stretchers as they were loaded into the ambulance—“a sound much like that of a fingernail scratched across a blackboard.”
Tregaskis’s brush with death and destruction came a few weeks after he had landed on August 7, 1942, with the approximately 11,000 men of the First Marine Division tasked with the responsibility of taking from the Japanese the island of Guadalcanal, codenamed Cactus. The campaign was viewed by some U.S. military officials as foolhardy, believing as they did that there was “considerable room for doubt” that the marines could hold their ground. Even the marines’ commander, General Alexander Vandegrift, later noted that there were a “hundred reasons why this operation should fail,” and a First Marine Division report on the campaign lamented, “seldom has an operation begun under more disadvantageous circumstances.”
Aerial photographs and maps provided little help in planning, and the information offered by former colonial residents differed on geographical features and place names, so much so that the river called “Ilu” by the troops was actually the “Tenaru,” and vice versa. Lieutenant Herbert Merillat, the marines’ public relations officer on Guadalcanal, had a simple answer for all the campaign’s logistical difficulties: “The United States was simply not ready to support a major operation for the seizure, holding, and rapid development of an air and naval base open to heavy enemy counterattack.”
Until he left the island on September 26, Tregaskis endured the same dangers faced by the troops, including withstanding bombing by Japanese aircraft during the day and shelling from their navy—dubbed the “Tokyo Express”—most nights. The marines also had to deal with inadequate supplies of food and equipment, and the constant fear of being overrun by a single-minded foe. These hardships were matched by the difficulties of fighting on the island itself—an often impenetrable jungle that limited vision to just a few yards, jagged mountains climbing to a height of 8,000 feet above sea level, sharp-bladed kunai grass, pesky and venomous insects, dangerous crocodiles, screaming birds, swarms of mosquitos that brought with them tropical maladies that could incapacitate a man for weeks or months, nauseating odors, and hot, humid conditions that bred all sorts of funguses and infections that were lumped under the description “jungle rot.”
After a time, too, Tregaskis became hardened to scenes of
death and destruction, particularly those that happened to the enemy. “War
takes on a very personal flavor when other men are shooting at you, and you
feel little sympathy at seeing them killed,” Tregaskis observed. Even seeing
the horribly mangled bodies of the Japanese lying on the ground after a failed
attack prompted in him no disgust. “The first one you see is the only shock,”
he recalled. “The rest are simple repetition.”
Tregaskis’s journey to his first experience with ground combat and a Japanese army yet to be defeated in battle had not been easy. After securing the necessary paperwork from the public relations office at Pacific Fleet headquarters in Hawaii, he had been a passenger on the USS Enterprise as it and the escorting vessels of Task Force 16 sailed for a rendezvous with the Guadalcanal invasion force in the Tonga Islands. Although armed with the required official documents, Tregaskis had considerable difficulty making the transfer from the Enterprise to the troop transports. First, the carrier’s executive officer sent him to the wrong ship, a navy tender, and, upon returning to the Enterprise, the correspondent discovered that none of the ships’ boats were available to take him to the transports.
A desperate Tregaskis sought out Rear Admiral Thomas C.Kinkaid, commander of Task Force 16, who kindly gave the correspondent a letter securing him a place on one of the transports and also commandeered for him a ride to the USS Crescent City, a converted civilian ocean liner that had become the temporary home of the Second Marine Regiment. “Once aboard, I was able to relax with a feeling of satisfaction,” Tregaskis remembered. “This was at least the right ship. It was filled with Marines, and they knew they were heading for a landing operation somewhere, though they did not yet know where; nor did even their commanding officer, Col. John M. Arthur.”
Colonel Arthur and his executive officer, Major Cornelius Van Ness, both made a calculated guess that the expedition was on its way to the Solomons, and the marines’ objective would be either the island of Guadalcanal or Tulagi. “The colonel and the major spent hours pouring over charts of Tulagi and the surrounding islands,” Tregaskis said, “and of Guadalcanal, picking beach-heads and speculating over ways and means to land troops. Maj. Van Ness said he had drawn up tentative plans for a landing operation, just in case this particular group of Marines should win the Guadalcanal assignment; which struck me as being the height of enterprise.”
A push by American forces into the Solomons had been on the mind of Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet in Washington, DC, as early as February 1942, with the eventual goal of proceeding from the Solomons into the Bismarck Archipelago to seize Rabaul. Planning for the operation intensified when reports from Australian coast watchers and aerial photographs indicated that the Japanese had begun to build an airfield on Guadalcanal’s northern coast, making the little-known island—ninety miles long, thirty miles wide, and located just sixty miles south of the equator—a key objective. King came to an understanding with General George Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff, to adjust the boundaries previously set as the operating influences between the U.S. Navy and General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific so that the navy could handle the operations in the Solomons.
Admiral Chester Nimitz selected Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley as the commander of the South Pacific Forces, and he eventually established his headquarters on Nouméa, the capital city of the French territory New Caledonia. Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had charge of the amphibious force responsible for getting Vandegrift’s approximately 19,000 marines ashore on Guadalcanal and its surrounding islands (Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo) and supplying them. Vice Admiral Frank “Jack” Fletcher, a veteran of both the Coral Sea and Midway battles, controlled the carrier force consisting of the Enterprise, Saratoga, and Hornet (Task Force 61), which provided aerial protection for the operation.
Vandegrift viewed it as “unfortunate” that Fletcher had been given tactical command, as he was “not available during the planning phase.” When he met Fletcher, Vandegrift remembered thinking that the admiral looked “nervous and tired,” probably due to the strain of his recent battles against the Japanese. “To my surprise,” said Vandegrift, “he appeared to lack knowledge of or interest in the forthcoming operation. He quickly let us know he did not think it would succeed.”
The Marine general's operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Merrill Twining, described Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner as a “loud, strident, arrogant person who enjoyed settling all matters by simply raising his voice and roaring like a bull captain in the old navy.” Twining added that Turner’s peers understood the admiral’s moods and accepted them with “amused resignation because they valued him for what he was: a good and determined leader with a fine mind—when he chose to use it.” Twining’s commander, Vandegrift, possessed just the right attitude to deal with Turner’s bombast, as the general was a “classic Virginia gentleman. I have heard him harden his voice, but I never heard him raise it—not even at me,” Twining said.
Tregaskis had a pleasant voyage with the Second Marines as they sailed from the Tongas to the Fijis for a planned landing rehearsal on Kore Island. His ship, the Crescent City, which had carried passengers and freight between New Orleans and Buenos Aries, had been launched in 1940 and retained some of its former elegance. On its way to the Fijis, the Crescent City met a large fleet of transports, supply ships, cruisers, destroyers, carriers, and other warships “spread out over the whole horizon circle and beyond,” Tregaskis remembered. Those on the transport made a game of trying to identify the different types of ships stretching out before them. “We were conscious of the fact that this was one of the largest and strongest groups of war vessels ever gathered,” he noted, “certainly the largest and strongest of this war to date. The thought that we were going into our adventure with weight and power behind us was cheering.”
The next day, a boat came up alongside the transport to deliver dispatches that Tregaskis guessed included information about the fleet’s destination. After lunch, Tregaskis received an invitation to Colonel Arthur’s cabin “for a spot of tea.” Once there with a beverage in hand, Arthur told him, “Well, it looks as if we’re not going to have as much excitement as we first thought,” as his men would not be part of the attack on the Japanese-held territory, but instead would serve as a reserve force. If Tregaskis wanted to accompany beachhead troops, Arthur advised him to transfer to another ship. “I had come out here for action,” said the correspondent, so, after dinner, he packed his bags in his blacked-out cabin. “It took some resolution to do the job, for in the evening I had learned that the forces I would join are going to attack the Japanese strongholds on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, in the Solomon Islands,” he recalled.
The top officers for Operation Watchtower met on the USS Saratoga, Fletcher’s flagship, on July 26. What occurred at the conference has been hotly debated over the years, with some involved describing it as “one long bitter argument” between Fletcher and Turner, with others remembering the conversations as “animated rather than stormy.” The main issue centered on how long it would take to land the troops from the transports and their supplies from the cargo ships (Turner estimated five days), and how long Fletcher would provide air support for the operation with his carriers. At the time of the Guadalcanal campaign, Fletcher’s carriers represented three-quarters of the U.S. fleet’s assets for that essential vessel, with no replacements for them from American shipyards expected for many months.
According to some accounts, Fletcher had said to those assembled: “Gentlemen, in view of the risks of exposure to land-based air[craft], I cannot keep the carriers in the area for more than 48 hours after the landing.” Vandegrift recalled that he had to force himself to remain calm, informing Fletcher that the “days of landing a small force and leaving were over,” and he could hardly be expected to “land this massive force without air cover—even the five days mentioned by Turner involved a tremendous risk.” According to Vandegrift’s account, although Turner backed him, Fletcher refused to budge, “curtly” announcing the Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp would only stay until the operation’s third day, and curtly ending the conference.
Years later, Fletcher could remember no bitterness involved in the discussions on the Saratoga, instead merely noting there were a variety of opinions “vigorously expressed” as to what could or could not be done. Twining, who said Vandegrift accepted Fletcher’s edict with “the best grace he could muster,” did give credence to the admiral’s cautious approach, noting that Fletcher had “seen U.S. carriers sunk in battle and was loath to risk our best carriers in action against a greatly superior force.”
A few days after the spirited conference on the Saratoga, Tregaskis left the Crescent City for Turner’s flagship, the USS McCawley, nicknamed the “Wacky Mac” by its sailors, to secure permission for his transfer to a transport carrying troops assigned to combat. The correspondent discovered that the McCawley’s wardroom was “clogged with Marine officers of all shapes and sizes, mulling over maps, mumbling secret advices and arguing moot points in groups at the tables. . . . . Officers with intent expressions passed in steady streams up and down the corridor leading to the admiral’s office.”
Although Turner was far too busy to see Tregaskis, the admiral’s marine aide, Colonel Harold Harris, took pity on him, took the reporter’s credentials to Turner, and obtained the admiral’s approval for Tregaskis to join one of the two transports carrying the assault troops for the landing on Guadalcanal. Tregaskis also had the opportunity to meet Vandegrift, who stopped to “exchange a polite word; he was cordial and cheerful, as I later found him to be, however desperate the situation, on Guadalcanal.”
Tregaskis had two shocks after leaving the Crescent City. He learned that the landing rehearsal on Kore Island had been a mess. The troops involved ran into problems with a coral reef that prevented many from making it to the beach; the transports drifted and came close to tangling with one another at the debarkation line; the landing boats were ponderous, experienced engine troubles, and roughed up their propellers on the reef; and the timing of the preliminary naval bombardment was off. Vandegrift, who later described the exercise as a “complete bust,” consoled himself with the thought that a “poor rehearsal traditionally meant a good show.”
The American Legion’s deck was black with slime and grit because, as he later discovered, the ship had no modern equipment for pumping water. “The marines cramming the deck were just as dirty,” he noted. Tregaskis met with the Fifth Marine Regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Leroy P. Hunt, a World War I veteran, in the officer’s cabin, which at least had a clean floor. Hunt said his men might be unkempt and looked like gypsies because there was no water available to clean up, but he believed they would fight when called upon to do so. “They got it here,” Hunt told Tregaskis, tapping his chest in the region of his heart.
As the American Legion sailed south on the big sweep that would take it into Guadalcanal, Tregaskis got to know more about the marines and their commander. Hunt and his officers tried to be realistic about their chances, believing from intelligence reports that there were anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 enemy troops on the island, most of them labor troops, numbers that proved to be greatly inflated. The Japanese would probably be able to bring some large guns to bear upon the American landing craft on their way into the landing beaches located five miles east of Lunga Point, as well as machine-gun fire and mortar rounds.
Zealous map
interpreters, Tregaskis recalled, straining their eyes over aerial photo-mosaic
maps, believed they had identified evidence of intense enemy defensive preparations
on the beach chosen for the landing. “The interpreters said they saw worn truck
tracks, indicating movement in the vicinity of the beach,” he recalled, “and
conjured machine gun positions out of minute combinations of shadows in the
beach area.”
One of Hunt’s aides confided to Tregaskis that he and the other officers expected about a third of the assault boats to be destroyed and a quarter of the combat troops would be casualties during the landing. The officers were also sure that Japanese reconnaissance planes would spot the U.S. armada long before it reached its destination and would send planes to bomb and strafe the ships, with the Japanese fleet not be far behind. “This estimate did not improve the pleasantness of the prospect of accompanying the assault troops in their attack,” the correspondent noted. Hunt remained confident that whatever might happen, the marines in the fifteen ships of Transport Group X-Ray, destined for Guadalcanal, would take the beachhead and “secure the problem.” When Tregaskis suggested the possibility of failure, Hunt was prompt in his reply, telling the reporter, “You mustn’t ever think of it that way. We’ll do the job.”
Although the enlisted marines were dirty and roomed in quarters no better than a dungeon, Tregaskis said they displayed a tremendous esprit de corps and supreme confidence in their ability to handle any assignment. One afternoon Tregaskis watched a group of enlisted men, most of whom came from either New York or Boston, cleaning and checking their weapons on the ship’s forward deck, treating them with an almost motherly care. Some of the men were also sharpening their bayonets, which, he noted, “seemed to be a universal pastime.” Others checked over their Springfield rifles and sub-machine guns, and a few busied themselves by fashioning homemade blackjacks—canvas sacks filled with lead balls to be used for “infighting,” he reported. A large part of the marines’ conversation during this time included tough talk about what they expected to do to the enemy.
Everyone seemed calm at breakfast on August 7, 1942, eight months to the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The lack of any response by the Japanese to the invasion fleet made Tregaskis and the others on the American Legion feel “strangely secure, as if getting up at four o’clock in the morning and preparing to force a landing on the enemy shore were the perfectly normal things to do of an August morning in the South Seas.”
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Tregaskis’s boat finally headed for shore at 8:34 a.m.,
following, not far behind, the first wave of landing craft. Although he could
not see the first men to reach the beach, he did see signals that the landings
had been successful. Early that morning a Japanese radio operator on Tulagi had
sent a message to Rabaul asking his superiors what was happening, asking:
“LARGE FORCE OF SHIPS UNKNOWN NUMBER OR TYPES ENTERING SOUND WHAT CAN THEY BE?”
Later, the commander on Tulagi, under assault by the men of the First Raider
Battalion led by Lieutenant Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, radioed that the
enemy forces appeared to be landing in overwhelming numbers. Despite the odds,
the Japanese commander vowed to remain on the island and defend his post “to the death.”
At 9:50 a.m. Tregaskis finally reached the island. “I jumped carefully from the bow and got only one foot wet, and that slightly; hardly the hell-for-leather leap and dash through the surf, with accompaniment of rattle machine guns, which I had expected,” he remembered. Instead of standing and fighting, the approximately 600 Japanese soldiers and 1,400 laborers based on Guadalcanal had fled their camps and disappeared into the jungle. Tregaskis credited the surprise of the Americans’ attack, and the fury of the naval and air bombardment preceding the landing, as the joint causes of the “precipitous retreat” the enemy made.
As darkness fell on that first day ashore, however, jittery sentries confronted any noise they heard with orders to “Halt!” that were “followed almost immediately by volleys of gunfire,” said Tregaskis. Close to midnight, the correspondent awoke to the sounds of a submachine gun firing near to the grove of tall coconut trees he had bedded down under with Hunt’s command. Numerous rifle shots rang out afterward, with five or six guns firing at once. He could see the bright, white tracers “zipping in several different directions over the grove where we slept. Some of the slugs whined through the trees close by. And then the firing fell off, and died, and we went back to sleep again.”
On his way to the airfield that afternoon, Tregaskis had his first encounter with the enemy when he came upon two marines herding three prisoners to the rear. These Japanese did not appear to be seasoned warriors. “None of them was more than five feet tall, and they were puny,” Tregaskis noted. “Their skins were sallow. The first two in line had shaved heads and were bare from the waist downward; the marines had been diligent in their search for weapons.” An interpreter told the correspondent that the prisoners were members of a navy labor battalion and had been captured in a tent camp that lay directly ahead.
Reaching the former enemy facility, Tregaskis rummaged through one of the large tents and discovered serving dishes on a table still filled with meat stew, rice, and cooked prunes. Half-eaten bowls of food remained on the table, with chopsticks propped on the dishes or dropped on the floor. In other tents he found shoes, mosquito nets, toilet articles, soap, and other essentials. The Japanese at the camp had removed the ignition keys from many of the hundred-odd trucks and cars found there, but did not take the time, Tregaskis noticed, to damage the vehicles so that they could not be used by the Americans.
At Japanese headquarters at Kukum, Hunt’s troops uncovered large stores of food left behind—boxes of sweet biscuits; tins of hardtack; cases of soda; two varieties of Japanese beer; canned pears, peaches, and pineapple; goulash; crab meat; and shredded fish and salmon, “hardly the primitive diet on which the Japanese is traditionally supposed to subsist,” Tregaskis observed. He noted that the Japanese were obliging enough to also leave behind their cooking kettles.
A pleased Vandegrift described the bounty the marines had captured: “A power house, an alternate one, a radio receiver station with six sets with remote control to a sending unit 3 miles away, innumerable pieces of machinery such as generators, engines, pumps, etc. 9 Road Rollers, over 100 trucks so far found of the Chev[rolet] 2 ton types, Anti-air guns, loaded and locked—can you beat that. Tons of cement, some fifty or sixty thousand gals. of gas and oil and double that much destroyed by bombs.”
A stirring ceremony occurred at Hunt’s command post that had been established at the old Japanese headquarters. Lieutenant Evard J. Snell of Vineland, New Jersey, a middle-aged World War I veteran on the colonel’s staff, had been brought in on a stretcher by corpsmen. Snell, accustomed to handling his commander’s paperwork, had been overcome by the heat and exertion four times that day, gamely struggled on with the marching column, and now could not move.
Trying to cheer up his aide, Hunt took from Snell’s pocket a small American flag the lieutenant had been carrying with him during his service with the marines in China and the Philippines and had it hoisted atop a now bare Japanese flagpole. “It was touching to see the little flag, proud but pitifully small, ride up the mast, to see Snell’s eyes watching it, and his mouth twisting and contorting as he tried to smile,” Tregaskis remembered.
As Tregaskis bedded down for the evening on August 8, sharing a poncho with Father Thomas Reardon, it looked as if the worst he could expect would be a storm. Rain started to thunder down upon him shortly after midnight, and the correspondent awoke and took shelter in one of the captured Japanese tents, which was already “fairly well filled with marines.”
Just as he dropped off to sleep again, he heard cannonading coming from offshore. “It had stopped raining. We stood in a quiet group under the palms, listening and watching,” Tregaskis recalled. “The flashes of the gunfire were filling the sky, as bright and far spreading as heat lightning. And a few seconds after each flash, we could hear the booming of the guns that had caused it.” He and the others realized they could be watching a battle that could decide their fate. If the Japanese won, it meant a desperate fight for survival, and soon.
Tregaskis felt helpless: “One had the feeling of being at the mercy of great accumulated forces far more powerful than anything human. We were only pawns in a battle of the gods, then, and we knew it.” The booming of the guns continued for more than an hour, and during that time the correspondent and the marines speculated among themselves just what was happening. By about 3:00 a.m. the firing stopped and Tregaskis left the crowded tent for the comfort of an abandoned Japanese sedan that had been left by the side of the road. “The soft cushions felt good,” he said. “Except for the slight disturbance of being bitten by mosquitoes, I was quite comfortable for the rest of the night.”
The sea battle Tregaskis witnessed from Guadalcanal had been a disaster for the U.S. Navy and the last in a chain of setbacks that left the marines’ position in the Solomons extremely perilous. At about 6:00 p.m. on August 8 Fletcher had sent a message to Ghormley that read: “Fighter-plane strength reduced from 99 to 78. In view of the large number of enemy torpedo planes and bombers in this area, I recommend the immediate withdrawal of my carriers. Request tankers sent forward immediately as fuel running low.” Before Ghormley could respond to his request, Fletcher took his carriers away from the danger zone. The news of Fletcher’s withdrawal, and the loss of air support, stunned Turner, who believed he had been left “bare-arse.” The admiral decided he had no choice but to begin withdrawing his transports and supply ships the next day, and informed Vandegrift of his decision during a conference on the McCawley in which he also shared Fletcher’s message.
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The marines on Guadalcanal had about a four-day supply of ammunition and enough food for seventeen days, plus an additional three days on C rations and ten more days if they used the captured Japanese supplies, according to U.S. officers on the scene. The Americans were without the heavy equipment needed for completing the airfield and such essential defensive supplies as sandbags, barbed wire, and long-range coastal defense guns. For weeks to come the troops, and Tregaskis, had to exist on two unappetizing meals a day. “God only knew when we could expect aircraft protection much less surface craft; with the transports gone the enemy would shift his attacks against us and we could expect surface attacks as well,” Vandegrift said. They would have to fight alone, living, as Tregaskis remembered, day after day, “under the shadow of dire peril.”
Tregaskis remembered Vandegrift putting on a brave face after the naval disaster and the transports’ departure. The general did caution Tregaskis that it might be a “long time before there would be another chance to make my exit,” the reporter remembered. Tregaskis walked to the beach where the last load of supplies was being dropped. “I watched the last craft shoving off one by one and then heading out down the line of Admiral Turner’s supply ships,” he noted. “I remember cudgeling the problem of whether to stay put and get that good story written, or to hightail it to the nearest cablehead with something like a news scoop.”
Being the indecisive type, “and phlegmatic to boot,” Tregaskis said, he hesitated until only a few transports were left on the beach, and, with his “usual Anglo-Saxon disinclination to sparkle,” trudged off into the jungle to rejoin the marines.
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