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.

The Reporter and the Raiders: Richard Tregaskis and the First Raider Battalion

The tip came from Lieutenant Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson to International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis on the morning of Monday, September 7, 1942. Edson and his men, the First Raider Battalion, assisted by the First Parachute Battalion, about 850 in all, were planning a mission to investigate reports of a Japanese buildup that had grown from an initial estimate of 300 troops to anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 in size.

Edson and marine intelligence officers on Guadalcanal had selected the small village of Tasimboko in the Taivu Point area as their target. They were to be ferried there from Kukum by two destroyer-transports (the Manley and McKean) and two smaller vessels classified by the navy as YPs (patrol craft), or “Yippies,” as the raiders called them. Undeterred by the pelting rain that greeted him at the embarkation point, or the small size of the craft in which he would make the journey, Tregaskis climbed aboard, accompanying Samuel B. Griffith, Edson’s executive officer, and a group of approximately one hundred high-spirited marines. One of them jokingly inquired, “This is the battleship Oregon, I presume?” after stepping on the deck of what had once been a California tuna boat.

Those high spirits were dampened a bit as the raiders and Tregaskis attempted to find enough room on the diesel-powered boat (YP 346) to get some rest before the next day’s attack. “Getting to sleep was a terrible job,” Tregaskis recalled. “The ship’s steaming hold, full of the noise of the engines, was crammed with marines; no room to sprawl there. Every nook about the deck seemed to be filled as well.” Those sheltering in the cramped engine room kept busy by “munching canned rations, and oiling up their guns,” Tregaskis reported, adding that in a marine’s estimation, food, guns, and ammunition “run a close tie” for premiere importance.

One of the raiders described the night as “the most miserable” he had ever spent, as rough seas caused some of his comrades to become seasick. At least the waves that cascaded over the deck helped to wash away the vomit of the men who had become ill. Although the ship’s cheerful Portuguese skipper, Joaquin S. Theodore, told those aboard that they should not smoke on deck, lest their lighted cigarettes alert the enemy, the marines questioned his reasoning. Griffith pointed out: “Belching showers of bright red sparks as they chugged eastward through the blackness with engines pounding, the Yippies announced their presence to all but the blind and deaf.” Unable to find a decent place on deck that could shelter him from the rain and the cold, Tregaskis stumbled his way to the stuffy captain’s room, collapsing on the floor and drifting off. “It was better than sleeping in the rain,” he noted.

Tregaskis accepted the discomforts of traveling on a ship that was little more than “a floating engine room” because he knew that wherever the hard-charging raiders went, he would be sure to encounter action intense enough to satisfy the curiosity of even the most jaded newspaper reader on the home front. Viewed as the American counterpart to the British commandos, the raiders depended upon speed and surprise for successful completion of their quick strikes deep behind enemy lines. They trained intensely to become experts in the art of combat—both armed and unarmed—and were in top physical condition after a punishing training regimen that included punishing hikes interspersed with runs at top speed. The raiders became an elite within an elite in the all-volunteer (at the time) U.S. Marine Corps, which held to the concept that every marine was a rifleman, whatever their specialty might be. As Robert L. Sherrod, a reporter from Time magazine, who followed the corps as its men leapfrogged their way across the Pacific, pointed out, “The Marines assumed that they were the world’s best fighting men.”

The raiders attracted the “most dedicated, aggressive, competitive, and ambitious Marines,” and so had little hesitation in considering themselves to be a superior fighting force. In covering the raiders’ activities on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, Tregaskis had become fascinated with their courage and fighting skills, as well as being particularly impressed by Edson’s deft leadership and bravery while under fire. “He knew his business was killing the enemy and making his men fight well,” Tregaskis said of Edson. “He was a devoted, loyal, honorable ‘Can-Do’ Marine, a brilliant officer—and when we needed his kind to protect us, he was in there swinging with every ounce of energy and brain power in him.”

Edson instilled in his men the belief that they had been trained to be the best—“second to none,” as a raider sergeant once told Tregaskis. No matter what kind of dangers they faced, Edson made his men believe they would prevail, which translated into a “terrific amount of confidence,” the sergeant recalled. For their part, the raiders also admired Tregaskis’s determination to risk his life alongside them, naming him, years after the war had ended, an honorary member of the battalion.

The expedition to Tasimboko came as a result of the most determined effort made yet by the Japanese to eliminate the Americans from Guadalcanal. Approximately 6,000 troops under the command of Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi had reached the island and were struggling through the jungle on their way to—they were confident—tear through the marines’ main line of resistance and capture Henderson Field. Kawaguchi reminded the soldiers of his Thirty-Fifth Brigade that the Americans feared their massed bayonet charges. “The strong point of the enemy is superiority of fire power. But it will be able to do nothing in the night and in the jungle,” Kawaguchi boasted. The general was so certain of victory that he packed his white dress uniform to wear when Japan’s Rising Sun flag was raised in triumph over Henderson Field.

Unfortunately for Kawaguchi, while his troops were positioning themselves for an attack on the American airfield, Edson and his raiders were on their way to hit Tasimboko, where the Japanese had left behind a large cache of supplies. Because intelligence reports indicated the enemy’s defenses faced west, Edson planned to land his men east of Tasimboko near Taivu Point and attack the encampment from the east.

The raiders could always tell by looking at their commander’s face that he had managed to find them another dangerous assignment, noted Lieutenant Houston Stiff. He remembered fellow raiders exclaiming, “Oh, Christ! The Old Man’s got that so-and-so grin on his face again. Now there’ll be hell to pay!” Later, a few of the raiders grew disenchanted with Edson’s eagerness to involve them in hazardous missions, referring to him by the unflattering nickname Mad Merritt the Morgue Master.

Tregaskis and the raiders had some good fortune early in the morning of September 8 as they climbed into the Higgins boats taking them to shore. A small convoy of American cargo ships, escorted by a cruiser and four destroyers, passed close by them on their way to another part of the island, Lunga Point. With what seemed to be a large armada approaching their position, many of the Japanese—about 300 members of Kawaguchi’s rear echelon—panicked. They abandoned their positions and fled into the jungle, leaving unmanned two antitank guns that could have decimated the American force. “But we naturally had no way of knowing this as we dashed for shore in our landing boats,” Tregaskis reported. “We were ready for a real struggle, and a bit puzzled when there were no shots from shore.”

Robert C. Miller of United Press, who also joined the raid; he remembered the twenty minutes it took for him to make it to shore as the longest twenty minutes of his life. “I made the mistake of being in the front of the boat and got pushed ashore first—unarmed,” Miller reported. “Ran like hell for the bush and found four Marines had beaten me to it.”

Tregaskis and the raiders were mystified again when, shortly after landing, they found along a trail not only a “serviceable 37 mm field piece” complete with ammunition, but also full packs, life preservers, entrenching tools, and shoes “strewn in disorder on the ground.” There were also fresh foxholes dug in the black jungle earth and camouflaged with palm leaves. “I’m thinking they’ve gone up for breakfast and knocked things off,” Edson said to Tregaskis.

The group pushed on, hurrying through a small village with only two huts and others “in skeletal condition (having been burned),” noted the correspondent. Tregaskis could hear aircraft engines in the distance—dive-bombers and fighters from Henderson Field attacking Tasimboko from the air. As the Americans circled around a small pond, forded a stream, and struggled through the jungle’s thick, tangled vines and leaves, they remained puzzled, Tregaskis noted, by the lack of any Japanese resistance, fearing they might be walking into a trap.

Shortly after eight in the morning the raiders encountered their first enemy resistance. Tregaskis could see the marines running around “in numerous directions at once,” and knew immediately that something had happened. He ran to the beach and encountered a line of Japanese landing boats lying on the sand, and with them a small group of figures clad in brown uniforms. Edson quietly called out for Major Floyd Nickerson, who anticipated his commander’s order to open fire. Soon, raider machine-gun crews hammered at the enemy, who responded in kind. “I heard the familiar flat crack of the .25 [caliber] rifle, and the repetition of the sound in long bursts of light machine-gun fire,” said Tregaskis, who sought cover by burrowing deep into the wet jungle foliage as bullets whirred among the leaves behind him. “Others of our men joined in the firing and it swelled in volume. In the midst of the outburst, we heard the crash of a heavy explosion,” he said. 

Edson, who had taken cover, told the correspondent that it sounded like mortar fire. With a lull in the firing, which Tregaskis said seemed to be a common occurrence in jungle warfare, Edson hurried ahead, and the reporter struggled to keep pace, noting that he found the colonel to be “one of the quickest human beings” he had every known.

The firing started up again, and Tregaskis heard cries calling for a corpsman to tend to a wounded raider. The Americans came under fire from what seemed to be a heavy artillery piece (they turned out to be 75-mm field guns). Tregaskis could hear the “furry whistle of a shell” passing over his head and heard it explode a couple of hundred yards to the rear. “It was so loud it made my ears ring, and the concussion shook chips of wood on my head from the trees above,” he reported.

As the raiders killed the crew manning one of the guns, another took its place, continuing to fire on the Americans. Tregaskis, who had taken cover among a tangle of vines and dwarf trees, could feel a blast of hot air from the gun’s muzzle each time it fired. He also had to keep an eye out for Japanese riflemen, later learning that one had been no more than fifty feet away from where he had been—all this while being soaked by a sudden rainstorm. “There’s nothing worse than lying in a jungle, wringing wet, with a war going on around you,” joked Miller.

At about 10:45 a.m. a raider reported to Edson that the second Japanese 75-mm gun had been put out of action. “It began to look as if we might have tackled a bigger Jap force than we could handle,” noted a concerned Tregaskis. Edson called for naval gunfire support for his men, and the Manley and McKean responded and shelled Tasimboko. “I went out to the beach to watch the yellow flashes and the geysers of smoke and debris rising where the shells had hit,” Tregaskis said. He learned later that one of the marines, Corporal Maurice Pion, had suffered a shattered left arm in the shelling. Pharmacist Mates Alfred W. Cleveland and Karl B. Coleman used a penknife to amputate what remained of Pion’s arm, saving his life in the process. Private Andrew J. Klejnot used his skills as a marksman to shoot and kill one of the two Japanese soldiers manning one of the guns. The other tried to hide behind some boxes in a small ammunition dump, Klejnot told Tregaskis, so he “fired into the dump and set it afire.”

In any engagement he participated in during the war, Tregaskis noted that there came a time, always a “very pleasant one,” when his doubts and fears suddenly cleared away, and he could see a successful conclusion nearing. Such a time came in the raid on Tasimboko at about noon. A raider from a company led by Captain John J. Antonelli came into Edson’s command post to report, “we secured the problem and took the village.” The clouds that had been unleashing torrents of rain, cleared, and Nickerson indicated that his forces had also reached the village. Once they were in Tasimboko, the marines set about destroying numerous cases of Japanese food and sacks of rice (urinating on the contents or spilling it on the ground), as well as burning approximately 500,000 rounds of ammunition, Griffith estimated, and destroying radio equipment.

As they neared the bamboo huts in which the ammunition was stored, Tregaskis heard Nickerson tell his men: “All right. Here you go. In here and start burning, you arson artists.” Miller joined in, helping the marines torch the huts. “It was fun,” he told his readers. “Especially when I remembered I would have gone to jail back home for doing the same thing. . . . . Had more fun later, towing some Japanese artillery pieces out into the ocean and leaving them there to rust.” Raider Marlin “Whitey” Groft recalled that he and other members of his team picked through the pockets of the dead Japanese for whatever they could find, including documents, possible souvenirs, and even photographs and letters from the soldiers’ families in Japan. Groft added that some of the more “stalwart” raiders used their knives or stilettos to cut out gold teeth from the dead men’s mouths. “It’s funny how in war,” he remembered, “men do things they would never consider doing under normal conditions.”

According to Griffith, Tregaskis, whom he described as the “lanky I.N.S. correspondent adopted by the Raiders,” also lent a hand, poking around the village and filling a Japanese blanket with papers, notebooks, maps and charts that were later used by marine intelligence officers to gain a better understanding about the pending Japanese offensive.

The raiders suffered eight casualties (two killed and six wounded), counted twenty-seven Japanese bodies, and estimated they had killed a total of fifty. A pleased Griffith described the raid as “one of the really very successful small operations of World War II.” The marines left Tasimboko late in the afternoon for the return to Kukum, with officers and enlisted men, Griffith remembered, “sagging under a load of tinned crab and sliced beef packed in soy.” Twenty-one cases of Japanese beer and seventeen half-gallon flasks of sake, he added, were also smuggled aboard.

Tregaskis reported that the raiders also helped themselves to large numbers of British-made cigarettes, still bearing Netherlands East Indies tax stamps, and brought back captured Japanese medical supplies. As a final insult to the enemy, the raiders liberated the dress uniform Kawaguchi had intended to wear at his expected victory ceremony at Henderson Field. Tregaskis credited Corporal Phil A. Oldham with coming up with the classic line of the excursion when, upon seeing an enemy soldier pop up in front of his platoon, he shouted: “Don’t shoot him. Let me get him. He’s mine!”

With the setting sun only a reddish glow in the sky, Tregaskis and the raiders had a final bit of excitement as the transports and YPs neared their homeport. A report passed among the marines that a dozen Japanese aircraft had been spotted. Fortunately for them, the enemy aircraft did not strike Guadalcanal, but selected Tulagi as their target. The correspondent could see “cup-shaped bursts of bright white light rising from the direction of the island, just over the horizon rim,” as well as hearing the “distant thudding of bombs” a few seconds later.

The tension and exhaustion of the operation hit Tregaskis early that morning as he tried to get some rest. He could hear others in his tent dashing outside to a nearby shelter. An officer with the Fifth Marines, Major Bill Phipps, shouted for him to join them, but Tregaskis was “too tired to move,” and remained behind.

At breakfast the next morning he heard that Japanese ships had shelled Tulagi, hitting Captain Theodore’s tuna boat, setting it afire and wounding him through the chest; the Portuguese sailor was expected to live. “This is the second time that I have left a ship in the evening and it has been attacked and lost before morning,” Tregaskis observed. “This fact gives rise to the thought that my luck has been good, so far.”

Using documents captured on the Tasimboko operation, Edson consulted with General Alexander Vandegrift and his intelligence staff to devise a strategy to blunt the Japanese offensive. The raiders and parachutists were to be sent to defend the bare slopes of ridge located about 2,000 yards south of the vital airfield. Griffith described the new position as “a broken, rugged, kunai-covered coral hogback which paralleled the Lunga [River] south of the airfield. Jungle lapped at its south, east, and west slopes; to the north the ground gave off gently toward battered Henderson.”

On September 10 Edson told his men that there had been too much bombing and shelling around their position in a grove near the abandoned Lever Brothers coconut plantation, and they would be moving to “a quiet spot.” If the raiders expected a rest, they were soon jolted back to reality. Their suspicions were heightened when they saw forward artillery observers from Colonel Pedro del Valle’s Eleventh Marines identifying probable target areas for their guns, as well as a scattering of other officers scouting the territory. “On top of this,” noted a raider sergeant, “were our own officers and NCOs [noncommissioned officers] constantly pushing us in the laying of barbed wire, digging foxholes, building machine gun emplacements and cutting fire lanes.”

Preceded by a bombardment from cruisers and destroyers, Kawaguchi’s forces struck the raiders’ defensive line on the ridge on the evening of September 12. Tregaskis and his fellow correspondents were bivouacked in Vandegrift’s command post, located about a hundred yards from Edson’s position. At about nine o’clock that evening a marine poked his head into their tent and told them, “Get up, fellas, we’re moving up the ridge.” The reporters wasted no time in grabbing their helmets and shoes and leaving. From their vantage point on the ridge top, they could see the distinctive flashes of naval gunfire coming from the direction of Kukum. “Just as we heard the boom of the gun, the shell whizzed over our heads and crashed a few hundred yards around,” Tregaskis recalled. “There was a second’s pause, and then more flashes followed, so continuously that the sky seemed to be flickering constantly, and shells whined overhead almost in column. They kept coming for minutes on end, fortunately hitting into the jungle several hundred yards behind us, skimming over the trees under which we were lying. We simply lay there clutching the side of the ridge and hoping the Japs would continue to fire too high.”

Edson told Vandegrift the next morning that he believed the enemy had been just “testing us” when they had hit his men. The raider commander expected Kawaguchi’s forces to try again that night. “He [Edson] spent the day moving back his front, tying in automatic weapons, improving fields of fire and laying more communication wire,” Vandegrift recalled. At Edson’s request the general moved his reserve force—the Second Battalion, Fifth Marines—closer to the raiders’ lines, while marine artillerymen pinpointed possible targets for their fire and the Cactus Air Force received reinforcements, including two dozen Wildcat fighters and additional dive-bombers and torpedo planes. The Japanese commander Kawaguchi felt only frustration. He had fully intended to make his main attack against the Americans on the evening of September 12, but had been impeded by the “devilish jungle,” which caused his forces to be “scattered all over and completely beyond control. In my whole life I have never felt so helpless.”

As the raiders prepared for another onslaught by the Japanese against the ridge, Tregaskis had the foresight to, when told once again to move from his tent to the ridge top, take along a blanket and his satchel full of notes. He spread his poncho and blanket on the ground and tried to get some sleep, but was jolted awake shortly after midnight on September 14 by the noise of action that has welled into a “cascade of sound” from the raider lines. He saw a gray mist drift in among the trees on the ridge and wondered if it might be smoke from the Eleventh Marines’ howitzers (he later learned it had been smoke released by the Japanese to fool the Americans into thinking they were using gas, the dreaded weapon from World War I).

Enemy snipers infiltrated Vandegrift’s command post, causing Tregaskis to hug the ground to avoid ricocheting bullets that skidded among the trees. In all the commotion, with rumors that the Japanese had landed parachute troops, Tregaskis noted that Vandegrift remained calm, sitting on the ground outside of the operations tent and cheerfully observing, “Well, it’s only a few more hours till dawn. Then we’ll see where we stand.”

Calls came in from Edson’s command with urgent requests for more machine-gun ammunition and hand grenades, while at about midnight Vandegrift learned that one of his battalions dug in along the upper Tenaru River had been hit as well. Tregaskis reported that a marine from the outpost under attack eventually staggered into Vandegrift’s headquarters, gasped out, “They got ’em all,” and promptly fainted. Snipers continued to pepper the command post from all sides. “We had our hands full,” Tregaskis noted.

So did the marines on the ridge. The situation grew so desperate that Edson had to call in artillery fire almost directly on top of his positions. Terrified Japanese soldiers tried to escape the withering fire by jumping into their enemy’s foxholes; the marines pitched them back into the maelstrom. The artillerymen fired more than 2,000 rounds during the battle, and a grateful raider later acknowledged, “They saved our asses.” 

Edson seemed to be everywhere on the ridge, rallying his men with harsh words when they seemed to be wavering. Groft remembered seeing his commanding officer yank his .45 automatic from his holster and threaten to shoot any man who dared flee to the rear. “The only thing they have that you don’t have is guts,” Groft quoted Edson as saying. “Get back in line. You’ll die in your foxholes.” 

Major Ken Bailey also proved to be an indomitable presence on the ridge, delivering badly-needed ammunition and shoving his men back to the positions, yelling out a question made famous by another Marine in World War I: “Do you want to live forever?” (Edson and Bailey both later received the Medal of Honor for their actions on the ridge.) The raiders and parachutists held their ground, strengthened by reserve forces from the Second Battalion of the Fifth Marines. When daylight finally appeared, P-400 fighter aircraft from Henderson Field swooped down upon the Japanese that remained to unleash additional carnage upon the battlefield.

Although the marines had triumphed, pockets of resistance remained. Tregaskis remembered returning to Vandegrift’s command post for a cup of coffee after working his way to catch a glimpse of the battlefield only to hear a loud, blubbering shout, “like a turkey gobbler’s cry, followed by a burst of shooting.” When the commotion had died down he walked to the spot and saw the bodies of two dead Japanese and one dead marine. Three Japanese, who had been hiding in a bush at the edge of the ridge road, decided to make a suicide charge against the Americans.

According to Tregaskis’s report about the attack, Master Technical Sergeant John McAdams had spotted the trio’s leader, fell upon him, and shot him in the side. Another marine, Corporal Harvey W. Skaugen, threw his rifle at another charging Japanese, knocking him to the ground, and Sergeant Major Shepherd Banta interrupted his dressing down of a clerk long enough to fire the shots that finished off the invaders, then returned to finish his reprimand.

In the battle that the correspondents on Guadalcanal had agreed to call “Edson Hill” in their stories, and later also came to be known as Edson’s Ridge and the Battle of Bloody Ridge, the raiders suffered 135 casualties and the parachutists lost 128; of those numbers, fifty-nine were dead. The Japanese left behind approximately 700 to 800 men killed on the ridge, with another 500 wounded, who did their best to join the other survivors struggling through the unforgiving jungle. 

The six-mile-long retreat to Point Cruz took the tattered remnants of Kawaguchi’s command five days; some barely subsisted by eating roots and tree bark and quenched their powerful thirst by drinking from puddles or unhealthy river water. A Japanese naval officer later noted regretfully that the army “had been used to fighting the Chinese.” For his part, Edson, usually guarded when it came to praising his men, felt only satisfaction about the raider’s performance. The morning after the fight, he borrowed a cigarette from one of his men, sat down beside him, and commented, “Now I know I have a real fighting outfit.”

 

 

"I Bomb": Malcolm Browne and the Air War in Vietnam

The creation of the North American Aviation company, the F-100 Super Sabre jet fighter earned a distinction as the first U.S. Air Force plane to be able to reach supersonic speed in level flight. With the American buildup to fight the Vietnam War, however, the F-100 often flew strike missions against enemy targets on the ground instead of air-to-air dogfights.

One such mission occurred on October 15, 1965, as a flight of five F-100s took off from Bien Hoa Air Base, located about fifteen miles from Saigon, to bomb a hamlet in the Mekong River Delta that intelligence reports indicated housed 200 Viet Cong guerrillas. For this sortie, however, one of the aircraft on the mission included a two-seat F-100F dubbed Lillian. Riding with the pilot that day was Malcolm W. Browne, the head of the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau, who had been reporting about the conflict in Southeast Asia since 1961.

While he thrilled to the memories of dramatic World War I dogfights and the high stakes of the Battle of Britain during World War II, Browne pointed out that while still dangerous, the air war in Vietnam more often consisted of “dull routine than high drama, and nothing decisive seems to come of it, despite the great hopes America has pinned to it.”

Browne, an aviation fan who constructed his own model airplanes as a hobby, donned a white helmet, a “G” suit, and a parachute before climbing into the F-100F. The tightly fitting “G” suit helped pilots from “blacking out” due to high centrifugal forces when making high-angle dive bombing runs and steep turns.

The pilots from the 481st Tactical Squadron carefully examined their planes before taking off. “With difficulty, each man climbed the ladder hooked into the side of his plane and swung his legs over into the cockpit,” Browne remembered. “The idea is to stand on the seat first and then slide in.”

Once inside his F-100F, piloted that day by First Lieutenant Rod Dorr, Browne had to spend time buckling himself in, including not only the usual seat belt, but dealing with a shoulder harness, straps around each calf (to secure his legs in case of an emergency ejection), and various fastenings to the ejection seat. “There also is a compressed air coupling for the G suit to hook up to, a communications cable to hook into the helmet for earphones and microphone, and the oxygen tube for the face mask,” he noted.

Once securely strapped into place, Browne said that he felt about “as free and comfortable as a condemned man in the electric chair. Besides the discomfort of confinement, the heat in the cockpit of a fighter waiting to take off from a Vietnamese airfield is nearly unbearable.” One of the pilots confided to the newsman that he regularly lost two pounds every mission due to excessive sweating.

With his helmet secured and earphones in place, Browne discovered that sounds from outside the aircraft were blotted out, especially after the canopy was lowered and locked into place. While the air outside the plane could be rent with “the shattering hypersonic blasts of an after-burning jet engine,” the pilot and his passenger heard none of that. “In the earphones there is almost constant technical chatter between planes, ground control and forward air observers,” Browne said. “Besides that, there is an eerie moaning sound in the earphones, produced by the complicated electronic gear in the plane.” He also reported:

“To hear only the moaning sound, like the sighing of wind around the corner of a house when bomb blasts are erupting and huts disintegrating just below, or when napalm splashes so close below as to scorch the plane’s paint, is a phenomenon pilots call ‘cockpit isolation.’ Outside there is the din and horror of jet-age war; inside there is the calm an quiet of a computer room. The pilots are glad to be spared the sounds they create. I have sometimes wondered whether it might not be better for some Air Force officers to be better acquainted with the ugly cacophony of warfare.”

Dorr and Browne had to wait about ten minutes to take off, as a long line of transport planes and aircraft were ahead of them. When their turn came, each man pulled a set of safety pins from their ejection seats, arming them. Browne learned from his talks with the American pilots that they regarded their ejection seats with “a mixture of gratitude and fear.” While being shot out of a disabled jet might save their lives, it could also “break one’s back, or at least result in permanent injury as the result of severe spinal compression,” he said.

Once airborne, the five planes on the mission grouped themselves into a loose formation in the crystal-clear sky with the Mekong Delta spread out below them. Reaching 15,000 feet, Dorr and the other pilots were in communication with “Beaver 79,” a L19 light plane far below serving as a forward air controller spotting the target. “Beaver 79 had found our hamlet and told us he would indicate it with a smoke rocket,” Browne recalled, “one of several he had on racks under his wings. We broke into a wide circle and watched Beaver 79 sail along a canal firing a puff of smoke into a cluster of thatched huts. From where I was sitting I could see no sign of life. Pilots tell me they rarely see people on the ground.”

The first fighter broke out of the formation and started his bombing run, announcing to the group, “I bomb.” One after the other, the planes made their attacks. “The dive down seems vertical,” Browne noted, “and at one point the ground actually seems to rotate over one’s head.” The reporter could see flames coming from the tiny objects on the ground and Dorr prepared to make a strafing run. “While we still were what seemed to be a long distance above the ground, our cannon began to fire,” Browne reported. “Actually, I heard very little but the moaning in the earphones, but the whole plane vibrated from the firing, like an electric massager.” He could see streams of shells rip into the huts below, as well as flashes of light as the shells exploded.

Browne could not believe how much his body was strained to its limits by dive bombing. He noted that the speed was so great that everything happened within a few seconds. Timing had to be perfect. A dive from 15,000 feet to almost sea level produced "excruciating pain in the eardrums as the result of the terrific air pressure change. This pain persists through the rest of the mission." Also, the downward crush of a pull-out almost paralyzed the lungs, pulled the flesh on one's face downward, and made arms and legs weigh six or seven times what they normally would. "Hands on stick and throttles and feet on rudder pedals become monstrous weights," Browne added, "and it is all a pilot can do to hold them in place, much less keep them under control in the delicate movements required in a pull-out."

Dorr repeated his firing passes several times and Browne observed that the target “looked properly battered.” In his official report about the mission, Beaver 79 indicated that the F-100s had destroyed eight structures, damaged six others, and destroyed 30 percent of the target area.

On the return flight to Bien Hoa, Dorr let Browne take the controls for a bit. The journalist was surprised by the “lightness and responsiveness of the stick. Lighting the engine’s afterburner in level flight produced an exhilarating thrust forward, and I could imagine that the F100 must be very pleasant to fly, or, rather, ‘drive,’ as its pilots insist on saying.”

Upon hitting the runway, Dorr deployed his aircraft's tail parachutes to help slow it down. Taxiing to the flight line, Dorr and Browne climbed out of the cockpit, both drenched in sweat. As yellow tractors hooked up to the F100s to haul them off to a hangar for refueling, rearming, and servicing, the pilots unloaded their gear, reported to their superiors about the mission’s results, and showered at their billeting area. “In the evening after chow at the officers’ mess there would be time for a movie, a few beers and perhaps a letter home,” said Browne.

Miles to the south of Bien Hoa, Browne pointed out that the embers of a Vietnamese community were “still smoldering and the blood was still fresh from the death that had struck from the sky that afternoon.” Pilots, however, rarely thought or talked much about the results of their work, he noted, except in terms of the military targets hit. “Sometimes these raids kill enemy guerrillas. Sometimes they merely kill women and children cringing in improvised shelters,” reported Browne. “Pilots have no way of telling which, and they are at the mercy of forward observers and men sitting at desks who take coffee breaks and make human mistakes.”

Browne recalled that the worst mistakes happened because of map coordinates. On military maps, square sections of land were designated by two letters (for example, WR). “A mention of the two designator letters roughly locates an area,” he said. “Following these two letters are six numbers, three each for coordinates reading across a vertically. A complete coordinate, consisting of two letters and six numbers (i.e., WR825439) locates any spot in the world to within a few hundred feet.”

When a pilot is ordered to bomb a coordinate, he assumes that the coordinate is accurate and marks a military target. Unfortunately, said Browne, sometimes the same “slovenly work attitudes that prevail in the United States extend to the American military, even in war theaters.” If care was not taken, two or more numbers in a map coordinate could be accidentally transposed, which could lead to a pilot being off by a few miles.

Such inaccuracy could lead to tragedy. Browne noted that on one mission such a transposition happened, and U.S. planes swooped down on the village of Lang Vei on the evening of March 2, 1967. Located approximately 400 miles north of Saigon, Lang Vei was “a hard-working little community considered friendly to the Saigon government,” he noted. When relief workers arrived at the village after the bombing raid, they discovered eighty dead and 120 wounded civilians. “America promptly apologized to the South Vietnamese government, and sent blankets and rice for the survivors of Lang Vei,” Browne reported. Sometimes U.S. planes also mistakenly hit friendly troops in the field.

While government officials in Washington, DC, often touted the “surgical precision” of bombing and strafing attacks made by the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps in North and South Vietnam, from what Browne observed of the air war, such claims were “grossly exaggerated.”
 

Creating "The New Face of War": Malcolm Browne and the Bobbs-Merrill Company

During its heyday, the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis stood as the largest publishing house located west of the Allegheny Mountains, releasing works from such varied authors as James Whitcomb Riley and Ayn Rand. In April 1964 Bobbs-Merrill’s editor in chief,William Raney, working out of the firm's New York office, sought to add another author to the firm’s list.

On a recommendation from a friend, Raney wrote a young Associated Press reporter, Malcolm W. Browne, AP’s bureau chief in Saigon, South Vietnam, to gauge his interest in producing a book about his experiences in that war-torn country. Browne had been in South Vietnam since November 1961 and had spent more time there than any other American correspondent, earning the title of the dean of the Saigon press corps.

Raney’s correspondence proved timely. In early May Browne learned that he and David Halberstam of the New York Times had shared the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their articles about the war and the coup that had toppled the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Browne proved to be quite enthusiastic about tackling a book about the Vietnam conflict. “Viet Nam is, of course, a news hot spot in which America is fighting a war,” Browne wrote Raney. “As an advisor over there told me recently, ‘It ain’t much of a war, but it’s the only one we got.’ In fact, it is a very important war, the importance of which goes far beyond the trickle of casualties incurred by Americans so far.”

Browne had received international attention with his photographs of the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, protesting the supposed anti-Buddhist policies of the Catholic-dominated Diem administration. The journalist’s time in the country had led him to believe that the conflict there threatened to “put our system to its toughest test since World War II. As Spain’s civil war of the 30s was the precursor to World War II, I think Viet Nam is the forerunner of a long, ugly campaign we shall have to wage in Africa, Latin America and the rest of Asia. Our enemies have said so, and there is no reason to doubt them.”

As Browne later explained to former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., in a letter asking him to contribute a forward for his book, he did not intend the work to be “an ax-grinding opus,” nor a historical account. “It is built mostly on vignettes and my own body of personal experience in the field,” he told Lodge.

For the next six months, while still reporting about the war for the AP, Browne worked on his book, turning in a completed manuscript to Bobbs-Merrill in October 1964. In his stories for the news service, Browne noted that specific images—the smell of battle, the experience of a single soldier or guerrilla, and the sights and sounds of a hamlet at war—had more effect “on readers than generalities, however well reasoned.”

While traditional news writing depended upon a “pyramid” style, proceeding from the general to the specific, Browne said it was sometimes “more effective to reverse the order, leading the reader into a complicated situation almost through a succession of pointed anecdotes, all depending mainly on images.” As he had discovered with his images of Quang Duc’s fiery death, “photographs carry more of an initial impact than words.”

Browne told Raney that although he hoped to impart to readers the “feel” of Vietnam and its problems and did not intend to merely put together a collection of “impressions thrown together under one cover.” He wanted to cover such potential topics as “Women in Viet Nam and the Phenomenon of Madame Nhu,” “Making Foot Traps for Fun and Profit,” and “Opium as a Social and Political Force.” Browne suggested as a title “The New Face of War,” which Bobbs-Merrill settled on for the book. “Beyond informing,” Browne noted, “I want it to be a book that will be interesting to read, even when and if the Viet Nam crisis is resolved.”

The new kind of war Browne wrote about included fighting not merely by weapons but through politics, diplomatic blackmail, propaganda, and terror—methods that had unsavory connotations in the minds of Americans, who were not used to involvement in a conflict in which “nice guys finish last.” He pointed out that the “experiences of most of America’s military tradition” seemed to be inapplicable for what soldiers faced in Vietnam, including ambushes, sniping, and boobytraps. “The only glory anyone is likely to get out of it is the satisfaction of carrying a bundle of human enemy heads, suspended by wires stuck through their ears,” Browne concluded. “There will never be the handing over of a sword by a beaten general to his victor. If there is victory, the fighting will merely die down to a few isolated incidents.”

The contract Browne signed with Bobbs-Merrill on May 7 called for him to provide a manuscript of 80,000 to 90,000 words on or before October 1. The publishing firm paid Browne an advance of $1,000 upon signing its contract, followed by an additional $1,000 upon delivering his manuscript, and established a royalty rate of 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies sold; 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies sold; and 15 percent on all copies sold thereafter.

In addition to writing the book, Browne also selected several photographs for inclusion. Unfortunately, even though he had taken most of the photos while on assignment for the AP, the organization’s photo division, Wide World Photos, charged him for their use, totaling $312.50, a bill Browne grudgingly paid.

Because Browne had contributed so much to paying for the images, Bobbs-Merrill paid to produce the book’s index—cost, $140. “According to our standard contract,” Geoffrey C. Ryan, a Bobbs-Merrill editor, wrote to Browne, “this is an expense to be borne by the author, but we never anticipated your going for so much on the photographs.” Ryan also noted that the firm was also able to waive the indexing fee because True magazine had recently agreed to pay $5,000 for a 23,000-world excerpt for its May 1965 issue. “This sort of thing is not only good for the money involved in the deal itself, but it has tremendous promotion value and helps the sale of books,” Ryan wrote Browne.

Browne faced a few challenges trying to complete his manuscript. By late September, he had written approximately 45,000 words and could have “easily” finished the rest in “one week of solid writing,” but instead had to deal with “one damned crisis after another, including a coup, dangerous rioting that nearly demolished my office, a pickup in the Viet Cong war, etc., etc. ad nauseum.” 

Due to his busy schedule working for the AP, he had to request a month extension on his deadline—a request Bobbs-Merrill approved. In the process, Browne learned that his editor, Raney, had been found dead in a New York hotel room. Police listed his death as an apparent suicide, with a medical examiner ruling that Raney’s death had been the result of an overdose of “an unidentified toxic substance.”

After finishing his manuscript, Browne discovered that Bobbs-Merrill had made unfortunate choices on whom they sent galleys in the hope that they would “say all kinds of wonderful things about the book so that we can quote them in publicity releases and ads, etc.,” as Ryan explained to Browne. The firm had sent galleys to Halberstam, who had a book about Vietnam of his own to promote (The Making of a Quagmire); columnist Joe Alsop; U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam Maxwell Taylor; and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

“Halberstam . . . was and is a tough competitor of mine (in view of his reporting here and his competitive book) with whom I have never been on friendly terms,” Browne wrote Ryan. “If he says anything nice it will be only to show he is a good sport, but this is fairly unlikely.”

Browne described Alsop, a firm supporter of America’s involvement in Vietnam, as “a personal enemy of mine,” adding that in Alsop’s junkets to Saigon he had charged him, “among others, with ‘selling out the United States’ and bringing down the pillar of our defenses in Southeast Asia, Ng Dinh Diem.” The bitterness between the two newsmen would, Browne said, “eclipse even an instinct toward being a good sport, which I doubt Alsop would display in any case.”

While Browne knew Taylor well, they had also “crossed swords fairly often,” Browne noted. He did not believe that the new ambassador would enjoy his “implied praise” for his predecessor, Lodge. “As for McNamara,” Browne wrote, “who I also know, the entire book is, in a certain sense, a criticism of his handling of the war in Viet Nam from its inception.”

Browne offered some alternatives for Bobbs-Merrill to consider, including Homer Bigart of the Times, a veteran war correspondent who had also covered Vietnam, “and for whom I have the highest respect,” and Bernard Fall, a renowned expert on Indochina. Browne’s other suggestions included Secretary of State Dean Rusk and U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield, “who has repeatedly defended me and some of my colleagues on the Senate floor.”

Bobbs-Merrill agreed with Browne’s suggestions. One of those suggestions, Mansfield, paid off, with the senator writing the reporter that he had read the book’s proofs with “great interest,” as Browne had successfully “drawn a graphic and illuminating picture of the war in Viet Name and your book cannot but be useful to those who seek to understand and aid that unhappy country.”

Released by Bobbs-Merrill on April 26, 1965, The New Face of War shared the stage with Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire. The two books were often reviewed together, and reviewers, particularly those who were journalists themselves, pointed out how the two newsmen became unpopular with U.S. officials by digging up material that contradicted the optimistic view they were trying to present to the public about the war’s progress.

Not surprisingly, opposing viewpoints appeared, especially regarding Halberstam’s effort. Veteran war correspondent Richard Tregaskis, who had spent time in Vietnam for his own book, Vietnam Diary (1963), in a review for the Chicago Tribune, complained that Halberstam’s fundamental attitude in covering the war seemed to be “that something must be wrong rather than right with it.” Tregaskis also included a much harsher quote from an unnamed embassy official calling Halberstam a “young punk who’d never seen a war before and thought it should always go well. He just didn’t know about wars. It didn’t seem to occur to him that in all our American wars in the past, we had to run a little short of absolute complete democracy for the sake of winning.”

Instead of Halberstam’s book, Tregaskis recommended Browne’s work as “a more temperate example of the new books on Viet Nam.” Although Pulitzer Prizes awarded in previous years had often been “inept,” Tregaskis noted that when the committee split the award, honoring Halberstam, “they gave the other half to Browne—a safe and sensible bet.”

Initially, The New Face of War did well for Bobbs-Merrill, selling approximately 7,500 copies by July 7, 1965, out of the 12,000 it had printed. The firm’s chairman, Howard Sams, had been so impressed by Browne’s book that he sent sixty copies to his friends in the business world at his own expense “in the belief that his book is of supreme importance at the moment.” (Sams mailed an additional ninety-three copies, again at his own expense, in September.)

As time passed, however, Browne came to believe that Bobbs-Merrill had been slow in paying him his owed royalties and had not done enough to promote the book, particularly when it came to selling it in Vietnam. In February 1966 Browne wrote Robert Amussen, Bobbs-Merrill editor in chief, that a Vietnamese book dealer he knew had offered a few copies of his book for sale and they always sold out in an hour or so.

“There will soon be one quarter million American servicemen here, all vitally interested in the war in Viet Nam,” Browne wrote Amussen. “I can’t help feeling this would be a very substantial and profitable market if only the books were brought into the country some how. I get dozens of requests a week personally, and all I can suggest is that families back in the States ship them. I really wish this could be looked into, especially since there are growing numbers of Vietnamese book stores in Saigon specializing in American books.”

Although Bobbs-Merrill produced a revised edition of Browne’s book in 1968, he never seemed satisfied with his relationship with the firm, believing that the first edition had “virtually no paid advertising, and its success resulted wholly from good reviews and general interest in the subject.” He probably would not have been surprised by a quote made by a former Bobbs-Merrill publisher, David Laurance Chambers, who had noted: “One of the trials of life is the necessity of constantly showing an accommodating spirit to authors.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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."