Leaving Guadalcanal: Richard Tregaskis in Action

It was the shirtless navigator on the B-17 Flying Fortress, the tanned Lieutenant Clinton W. Benjamin of Noxan, Pennsylvania, who was too busy with his own duties at the time, who gave the ostensibly noncombatant passenger permission to fire.

Seated in the cramped nose of the aircraft where Benjamin worked, war correspondent Richard Tregaskis had noticed through the transparent plexiglass a Japanese Zero floatplane stalking the American bomber. Flying just beyond the B-17’s maximum machine-gun range, the enemy pilot had been shadowing the Fortress, giving its speed and altitude to Japanese warships cruising on the water far below.

Benjamin told Tregaskis, “Go ahead,” and he cleared the .50-caliber machine gun and fired a few rounds at the enemy. “The Zero was far out and I could see my tracers, like golden balls on a string, curving aft of the enemy plane,” Tregaskis remembered. He corrected his aim and could see his tracers hit the Zero. The enemy pilot “heeled over and came straight toward me,” the reporter said. “I could see his tracers coming toward me like smoky zips or dashes, a kind of aerial punctuation.”

Tregaskis’s air battle with the Japanese came after spending seven weeks dodging shells and bullets with members of the U.S. Marine Corps on an island in the Solomons called Guadalcanal. Deciding to leave to start work on the book that became the best-selling Guadalcanal Diary, the International News Service correspondent had to wrangle his own ride off the island.

Planes out of Guadalcanal were “few and far between those days,” Tregaskis recalled, so when a B-17 Flying Fortress flew in from its base at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides on September 25, he asked its pilot, Captain Paul Payne of Des Moines, Iowa, if he could hitch a ride with him to Espiritu Santo, from where Tregaskis could start his long journey to Honolulu and begin to write his book. “Certainly, if you don’t mind going by way of Bougainville,” Payne told the reporter, as he and his rookie crew had to conduct a reconnaissance mission there the next day. It was a name that gave Tregaskis some pause, as Bougainville, the northernmost island of the Solomons, posed dangers to American aircraft.

The mission called for Payne’s lone B-17 from the 431st Squadron of the Eleventh Bomb Group to reconnoiter Buin Harbor at the southern tip of Bougainville; follow the coastline to Buka Island, on which the Japanese had an airfield; and then wind its way down Bougainville’s eastern coast to Kieta, where the enemy had built another airfield. All this was to be flown, Tregaskis pointed out, at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, “an extremely low altitude considering our vulnerability.” Later reconnaissance flights by lone B-17s were usually made at altitudes of 20,000 feet and above. As Payne later told the correspondent: “We just didn’t know any better. We were fool lucky.”

Although Tregaskis outlined his exchange with Payne in Guadalcanal Diary, including his decision to fly on the mission as a passenger, he failed to include an unusual question posed to him by the pilot: Could the correspondent handle a .50-caliber machine gun?  Tregaskis had no experience in handling such a weapon, but he told Payne he could. The next morning, fueled by a breakfast consisting of a chocolate bar and wearing a knapsack filled with his notebooks and large, ledger-sized black-leather diary (he preferred them because they were “hard to lose”), Tregaskis climbed into the bomber. The plane bounced down the runway, lifted off from Henderson Field, and headed over Tulagi Bay.

The adrenaline rush of combat came after hours of tedium on the way to the target. After leaving Guadalcanal, the bomber had passed up the Slot—the stretches of water between the islands that made up the Solomons. Tregaskis passed the time by looking down on the “jungly islands that slipped under our wings. Time dragged.”

The first Japanese plane appeared as the bomber neared Bougainville. Listening in over the communication circuit, Tregaskis could hear an unidentified crewman report contact with an aircraft moving in the opposite direction, about 2,000 feet overhead and to the right. “He was well out of range,” said Tregaskis. “I got a glimpse of him; then he was gone to the rear, out of our vision.” Suddenly, the tail gunner shouted that two Zeroes were coming at them from behind, but, after a few seconds, he reported that they had turned away. The fighters were respectful of the “formidable B-17,” Tregaskis noted, but he did begin to think about “our aloneness over enemy territory and the swarms of enemy planes which must be around.”

Two other Zeroes came up from below, but did not fire, Tregaskis, now on guard, spotted one of the enemy aircraft and opened fire. “The empties bounced out and clanged on the floor, and I remember the sharp smell of the burned powder,” he recalled. “I also remember the feeling of tremendous exhilaration—and at the same time fear, of kicking myself for coming on this flight when I didn’t have to. It seemed we were going to be shot down and not much chance of surviving this, because we were deep into Japanese territory.”

One of the crew members on the B-17 was also worried about what might happen if the plane crashed. Payne’s copilot, Lieutenant James Norman Price, had just arrived in the Pacific. According to Price, Payne had let his previous copilot take his crew out several days before and they never returned. “When we got in there [Espiritu Santo] he latched onto my crew and I flew co-pilot for him for a while,” Price noted. 

On their first mission, because the navigator was busy counting the ships in the harbor, the civilian correspondent, Tregaskis, had to man one of the plane’s machine guns. Price worried that if the bomber had been shot down and they survived, the Japanese might learn that Tregaskis had operated one of the guns, would declare him a spy, and execute all the crew. The copilot remembered eight Zeros in all making attacks on his B-17. “They always come in nose to nose and they made several passes at us,” Price recalled. “They made a lot of passes at us and why they didn’t shoot us down I don’t know.”

Although untrained, Tregaskis proved to be relentless when it came to keeping his gun chattering away at the Zero. He saw the enemy plane, in a three-quarter frontal pass, curve along the bomber’s flank. As the Japanese pilot roared by, the other B-17 gunners brought their guns to bear, and “we all gave him plenty,” noted Tregaskis. “One of us hit him in the engine and he went down. Naturally, I think it was my shooting that did it.” The rear gunner reported that the floatplane had to make a forced landing on the water.

Other Zeroes made additional passes at the the bomber, but Tregaskis noted that they seemed to do so in a “half-hearted” manner. The crew also had to endure antiaircraft fire from the ships below, with shell fragments thwacking against the bottom of the aircraft’s fuselage and striking its right aileron. While all this was going on, Benjamin calmly counted the ships off the southern tip of Bougainville, reporting he saw twenty-seven of them. “We conducted the rest of our reconnaissance peacefully and ran into no more enemy aircraft or ships,” Tregaskis recalled.

At one point, the B-17 went as low as 350 feet, trying to catch a glimpse of the airfield and harbor at Kieta, but it was no use, as the cloud cover was too thick. Tregaskis felt fortunate the bad weather intervened, because at such a low altitude “we would have been an easy shot for any Zero who happened to be wandering about in the vicinity.” Hours later, the bomber landed safely at Espiritu Santo. Tregaskis remembered that he had “kicked himself,” at first, for risking his life on such a dangerous mission. He later changed his mind, recognizing that leaving Guadalcanal on a B-17, via Bougainville, seemed to be “highly appropriate when, as the marines would say, you considered how rugged our life had been on that f------ island.”

Tregaskis remained at the base at Espiritu Santo, codenamed Button, for only a short time. “Living there was primitive,” he noted. “But compared to the night-and-day misery called Guadalcanal, it was a pleasant rest camp.” There he began to shape the entries in his diary into a book.

Eventually, Tregaskis flew on to Nouméa, New Caledonia, a French colony that had grown to become a major facility for supporting the fighting on Guadalcanal and served as headquarters for Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, commander of the South Pacific Forces. Streams of military vehicles filled the streets “with their noise and motion,” Tregaskis remembered. The Grand Hotel du Pacifique, formerly one of the top hotels on the island, had been taken over by army officers and some of its rooms had been emptied of their comfortable iron beds and plumbing to serve as offices.

An enterprising French woman, Tregaskis noted, had opened a sidewalk soda bar—labeled as “le sandwich du soldat”—and offered “limonade” for four francs (ten cents), sickly milkshakes for six francs (fifteen cents), and sardine sandwiches for eight francs (twenty cents). Dubbed the “juice” by soldiers, the soda stand offered none of the usual properties of an American soda fountain—no shiny syrup knobs, no marble counter, no racks of garish-colored magazines or cellophane-packaged crackers.

Still, the proprietor had “caught the general idea at least,” said Tregaskis, and had cannily hired a bevy of local beauties to tend the bar. “At all times of day, soldiers and a less number of sailors stood in line at the cashier’s window, buying tickets, and lined the bar testing madame’s delights and trying to make time with the sandwich jerkers,” he recalled.

Tregaskis had not expected to be on New Caledonia for long, as he wanted to return to Pearl Harbor to begin writing his Guadalcanal book. He had a rude awakening, however, when he came upon two associates eager to tell him about the “sluggishness and unpleasantness of life in this American base.” One of the reporters went as far as to term the base the “world’s a-- hole,” with correspondents the “farthest people up the a--. The big shots around here treat us like poison.”

One of the biggest problems involved a rash of unnecessary paperwork insisted upon by Ghormley, including orders permitting Tregaskis to continue his journey. “He signs them himself,” one of the reporters told Tregaskis about the admiral. “He has to read them over first, too. Considering he has to read and sign practically every document, you’re lucky it only takes a week or so to get your orders.”
In addition to checking in with American military officials for orders, Tregaskis had to complete forms with both the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy “pledging allegiance and agreeing to submit my copy for censorship.” When he complained that he had already signed many of those same forms in Pearl Harbor, one of his informants replied that it did not matter—he would have to sign them all over again.

The army also prohibited reporters from visiting airfields or hospitals, a regulation that tripped up Tregaskis when he tried to visit Colonel Sam Griffith, a friend of his who had been shot in the arm on Guadalcanal and was recuperating in a Nouméa hospital. An army colonel refused permission for him to see his friend, “even though I promised I wanted to see him for personal reasons only,” Tregaskis recalled.

Getting to see Ghormley proved to be a problem. The admiral worked out of a converted merchant ship, the USS Argonne, anchored in Nouméa’s harbor. On the ship, Ghormley, eventually replaced by the more aggressive Vice Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, had to contend with mountains of paperwork. “He worried about everything,” the admiral’s chief of staff said, “and I can’t say that I blame him.”

To get out to the flagship, Tregaskis needed to hitch a ride on a boat that did not have a set schedule for such trips. “It might take all day to get out to the ship and back,” he noted. If he made it to the Argonne, he had to check in with the flag secretary, a person often quite busy with paperwork and someone who possessed an uncertain temper and had to be handled with diplomacy. “Eventually one’s petition for order would be taken to the admiral, and orders might result,” Tregaskis said. Meanwhile, one of his fellow reporters warned him, “you have to wait in this a—hole.”

The rigmarole with orders and permissions seemed like a “slap in the face” to Tregaskis, especially considering his hazardous stay on Guadalcanal. On the island he had become used to something new in his life—men acting “without their masks, without posing; men being themselves and trying to accomplish things directly without delay, as they must in such situations of dire peril.” Life at this advanced base, where the rulebook reigned supreme, came as a shock to him. A friend of his later described the situation at New Caledonia and other bases safe behind the lines as “not war, not peace,” a description that Tregaskis found to be accurate the more he saw of such locales. Under the circumstances, since he badly wanted to get out of Nouméa and back to Pearl Harbor as soon as possible, Tregaskis realized there was little he could do “except go through the necessary forms and immerse myself in the prescribed reams of red tape.”

While waiting for his orders, Tregaskis secured living space in a one-room flat for a dollar per day from a French woman, Madam Rougon, and tried to settle down to do some writing. For days, however, he found himself out of sorts, with his vitality sapped by “a great desire to sit still, to just be quiet, to vegetate.” Being yanked away from the unending danger of bombing and shelling was “a sudden and tremendous change,” he reflected, as well as being a great letdown. “I wanted to stay where I did not have to move and where no one would speak or make any sound,” he remembered. Talking to others who had similar experiences in the field, Tregaskis discovered that his reaction was “quite normal.”

After some time on Nouméa, the effects of his adventures in Guadalcanal began to fade, and Tregaskis returned to writing what became Guadalcanal Diary, getting a “good bit of work” accomplished. He recalled that the writing went “fairly fast,” but the memory of his time under fire on Guadalcanal, and the way it shaped his behavior, continued. “Even in Noumea, I found that my nervous system put me automatically in a state of alertness whenever lightning flashed in the sky or distant thunder rumbled,” Tregaskis remembered. “These phenomena had become associated with gunfire, in my consciousness, and my instant impulse was to look for cover.”

Tregaskis believed there was nothing “abnormal” about his reaction, as “one develops certain habits which fit any type of existence to which he is exposed, if he is exposed long enough, and it is just as natural for a man who has been living in a fighting zone to view thunder and lightning cautiously, as it is for a city dweller to look up and down before he crosses the street.”

Finally, Tregaskis’s orders arrived and he made prepartions for his journey to Pearl Harbor. He was anxious to get back as quickly as possible because he had heard a rumor (unfounded, as it turned out) that the U.S. Marine Corps was preparing to make a raid on Wake Island, the former American base captured by the Japanese early in the war. “I wanted to go along on the Wake jaunt, if there was actually to be one,” he noted.

When he left Noumea for the airbase where he was to catch a U.S. Army B-24 Liberator long-range bomber that was to fly him to Honolulu, Tregaskis had only four dollars in his wallet. He had cabled the International News Service’s New York office asking for additional funds, but, as he later discovered, the “cable had moved with the speed of a turtle, as most cables from the South Pacific did in those days, and the money had not been sent until just about the time I was leaving Noumea.” (The needed funds finally arrived a month later.) He was able to borrow a money order for ten dollars, but found that nobody would cash it for him without, he joked, signed authorization from Secretary of War Henry Stimson or Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. He saw himself being reduced to “becoming a beachcomber and being devoured by cannibals.” Tregaskis landed in Honolulu with just fifty cents to his name.