Richard Tregaskis: With the Marines on Guadalcanal

One of the men peering over the side of the Higgins landing boat saw it first—a long, low black shape moving slowly about a mile away in the bay between the islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomons.

The American flotilla that included two landing craft and a bargelike lighter filled with gasoline drums had several miles yet to travel before it reached its destination, Carpenter’s Wharf on Tulagi. Once there, the boats were set to disgorge their passengers, which included U.S. Marine Corps officers seeking information about the fighting on Tulagi from the First Marine Raider Battalion, as well as Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service and Bob Miller of the United Press. They were the only two civilian reporters who had accompanied the men of the First Marine Division as they landed on Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942, and had stayed with them on the island to face the inevitable counterattacks from the Japanese.

Now, five days later, exposed on the open water, the U.S. vessels had already endured one close call when an unidentified airplane appeared overhead. “I suppose in that moment we all realized how helpless is a small boat under the attack of a well-armed aircraft,” Tregaskis recalled. “One felt suddenly very much alone, out there in the middle of the bay, with at least ten miles of water on every side.”

Fortunately, it was an American plane—a Consolidated PBY Catalina headed to make the first landing on the recently completed airfield on Guadalcanal. “It’s ours,” one of the gunners on Tregaskis’s boat announced, and the correspondent and his companions began to “breathe freely again.”

Unfortunately, the second sighting turned out to be a deadly menace to their safe passage—an enemy submarine. At the moment the Americans spotted the submarine, it saw them, swinging around on an interception course. “I thought things couldn’t happen like that except in the movies,” said Tregaskis. “But there we were . . . racing with a Japanese submarine, trying to reach land before he cut us off—and he was winning.”

Desperate to survive, the boats attempted to outrun the enemy, going so fast the occupants were “practically drowned in spray,” according to Tregaskis. He could also see geysers of water rising up near them, each one closer than the last, representing shells fired at them from the submarine’s deck gun. “The first water spouts, the first sharp sounds of explosions, were far short,” he remembered. “But each successive shot crept closer.”

Confusion reigned onboard at what course to take until the coxswain on Tregaskis’s boat swung around sharply to the right. “There was a chance, we thought, that we could make the eastern tip of Florida Island, or at least come somewhere near it, before the submarine caught us,” Tregaskis remembered. Seeing their comrades’ plight, the marines on Tulagi did all they could to drive off the submarine, firing on it with their 75mm pack-howitzer artillery. Undeterred, the submarine continued its relentless pursuit, with its shells falling closer and closer to its prey.

The Americans’ chances at survival seemed dim when one of their vessels suffered engine trouble. Tregaskis could see the men in the other boat waving wildly at them and a haze of smoke issuing from its motor. His boat pulled alongside the stricken one, and they bumped and banged into each other as they tried to run at top speed. “The crew of the other craft fell, slid and vaulted into our boat,” Tregaskis said. A marine public relations officer, Lieutenant Herbert Merillat, ordinarily “quite a dignified young man,” tumbled in with great haste, leaving behind his shoes in the excitement.

Tregaskis found it a comical sight even at such a dangerous moment. But his relief turned to apprehension when he realized that they had lost precious time in picking up the other crew and the submarine had kept up its relentless pursuit.  “I told myself that this was my last day of existence, as it seemed certain to be,” Tregaskis recalled.

Fortunately, the artillery fire from Tulagi had come closer to the Japanese, with several shots hitting only yards from the submarine’s conning tower. Fearing for its safety, the submarine turned away, heading west for the open sea. The Americans had survived their ordeal, chugging without further incident into Tulagi’s harbor. “It was distinctly a pleasure to set foot on land again,” said Tregaskis.

After talking to the marines who wrested the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo from Japanese control, Tregaskis and his companions stayed the night on Tulagi. The near-fatal encounter with the submarine, however, had shaken Tregaskis. Although scheduled to make his return with his companions to Guadalcanal the next morning at 4:30, well before sunrise, he was convinced that the Japanese submarine that had pursued them before “would be lying off the harbor entrance, waiting.”

Tregaskis and the others in his party took shelter for the night on the floor of a shack near the Tulagi dock so they would not have to pass a line of vigilant marine sentries in the dark. But the correspondent could not fall asleep. He lay awake for hours, fretting that instead of risking a sea voyage, they should make their return by air. “‘How about the PBY which had flown into Guadalcanal this morning?’ Was the thought that suddenly occurred to me,” he noted.

The correspondent stepped over the sleeping officers in the shack, woke one of them—Captain James C. Murray—and asked if the PBY could be called upon to ferry them back? The answer was no. The PBY had left Guadalcanal long ago, taking with it a few wounded men. “I felt better then, knowing that we had no alternative except to run for it,” Tregaskis remembered. “But it seemed to me inevitable that we would be caught and sunk, for the sub had obviously decided, this morning, that we were some sort of official boat, worth chasing—and worth waiting for.”

For the rest of the evening, Tregaskis sat on the shack’s front steps, looking up at the soft white stars overhead and thinking it would be his last night on earth. “I thought that, all in all, it had been a good life, although it seemed to be ending a little early,” he recalled.

Tregaskis’s fears did not come to pass; he and the others had a tense, but uneventful, return to Guadalcanal the next morning. The submarine did not reappear. It was not the last time, however, that he came close to injury and death in the Solomons. Until he left the island on September 26 to work on a book about his experiences, he withstood almost daily attacks by enemy bombers and nightly visits by another Japanese submarine, dubbed Oscar by the Americans, which let loose with an occasional potshot with its deck gun into the marines’ bivouacs.

The correspondent and others also had their sleep interrupted by harassing flares and bombs from aircraft nicknamed Louie the Louse and Washing-machine Charlie, named so by the marines for the distinctive sound made by the plane’s engine. These attacks caused only minor damage, except, that is, to “the nerves of exhausted men who yearned to sleep,” recalled Merillat.

Maneuvering through the jungle during the day, Tregaskis and others had to be on the lookout for cleverly concealed snipers. He admitted years after the war that while on the island both he and Miller—contrary to U.S. War Department regulations that forbade them to carry and use weapons—armed themselves with M1911 .45-caliber pistols. He knew that an enemy sniper could not possibly distinguish between a combatant marine and a noncombatant correspondent. He was right.

While covering the aftermath of what became known as the Battle of Bloody Ridge, Tregaskis looked across a ravine into the thick jungle foliage and saw a sudden movement—a Japanese sniper swinging his gun toward him. He could see that the sniper wore a camouflage suit, shaggy and brown, that looked like coconut husks. “He was sitting in the crotch of a tall tree and his movement had been to bring his gun to bear on me,” Tregaskis recounted. “I hit the bushes underfoot and he fired three or four times, missing me every time, and I moved away from there fast to a more sheltered spot where three or four Marines were lying.”

Tregaskis and Miller, through sheer repetition, honed their survival instincts, particularly when it came to Japanese air raids. They learned how long they could observe the bombers overhead before seeking shelter in a convenient foxhole or dugout, as well as how to adjust their bodies—supporting themselves slightly on the elbows—to avoid concussion in case a bomb struck nearby. “The worst time in a bombing is the short moment when you can hear the bombs coming,” Tregaskis said. “Then you feel helpless, and you think very intensely of the fact that it is purely a matter of chance whether or not you will be hit.”

Such chances varied by location, with the airfield—Henderson Field—a favorite target. “But even in other parts of the island, where odds may be greater, say, nine out of ten that you won’t be hit, you wonder if you will be the unlucky tenth case,” Tregaskis noted. While under attack, his thoughts sometimes drifted to those who had been badly wounded or killed in previous bombings, and in his imagination he suffered “the shock of similar wounds.”

Tregaskis also castigated himself for not immediately running for cover to a dugout with a sandbagged roof. Instead, the approaching bombers had transfixed him, leaving only enough time for a quick dash to leap inside an open foxhole, crouch behind a handy limestone boulder, or fling himself to lie flat on the bare ground. “When you have nothing but the earth and your lack of altitude to protect you,” Tregaskis recalled, “you feel singularly naked and at the mercy of the bombs.” He could feel the ground jerk with the bombs’ impact, followed by dirt clods showering down on his supine body.

Often shaken by the experience, Tregaskis would arise to see before him rows of “clean-cut, black bomb craters,” and the ground everywhere around him strewn with “small, cube-shaped clods of earth.” Measuring the distance once between his position and the nearest bomb crater, he discovered it “was not much more than 200 yards.” As for Miller, Tregaskis noted that the UP reporter’s “courage and cheerfulness never seemed to leave him, not even when the bombs were rattling down on Henderson Field, or snipers were trying running shots at us."