A Hot Island WAR, PEACE, AND ALL THAT JAZZ

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1 WAR, PEACE, AND ALL THAT JAZZ A Hot Island General Eisenhower, who was a likable fellow, wrote in his diary in March of 1942: "One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King." He was kidding. The King he was talking about was Admiral King. They disagreed on strategy. Do you think wars are easy to plan? Do Admiral Ernest King you think the leaders all agree on how to go was a stern, opinionated man who Most of our military leaders believed we about it? Not often. was hardly ever should fight the war in Europe first and then the known to smile. war in the Pacific. That made sense. Splitting your fighting forces is never a good idea. Besides, we didn't yet have enough supplies for two regions. But Admiral King said we couldn't just sit back and let the Japanese take over the Pacific. If we did, they would become so powerful that it would be almost impossible to win the war against them. When the Japanese started building an airfield on an obscure island in the Solomon Island chain, Admiral King said that the United States needed to go on the Do you remember when Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison about Patrick Henry? He said, "What we have to do, I think, is devotedly pray for his death." Patrick Henry was fighting some of Jefferson's ideas. Do you think Jefferson really wanted him dead?.' U.S. troops of the 160th Infantry Regiment going ashore from a landing boat at Guadalcanal. It seemed a paradise-until they got past the beach. 153

2 u.s. Marine Raiders and their dogs, which were used for scouting and sending messages. One platoon had specially trained dogs that tracked down Japanese hiding deep in the jungle. 154 offensive. So far-in Europe and the Pacific-we had been defensive fighters. King insisted that we take that island from the Japanese. It was an important decision. Not everyone agreed with it. It would cost many lives-american and Japanese. It turned out to be a decision that helped win the war. The obscure island was named Guadalcanal, and it was such an out-of-the-wayplace that no one even had a map of it. But it was the right spot for a war base. Find Australia on a map. Then look north, to New Guinea. To the east of New Guinea are the Solomon Islands. Guadalcanal is one of the southernmost of the Solomons. Anyone who has an airbase on Guadalcanal can make big trouble for ships and airplanes going to Australia, New Zealand, or even Japan (which was where the American military planned to go eventually). We couldn't let the Japanese put planes on that island. From the air, Guadalcanal looks like a heavenly place: very green, with high mountains, thick forests, and jungles filled with wild orchids and bright-feathered and beaked tropical birds. To that picture, add sandy beaches, coconut palms, and banana trees. Does it sound like a place you'd like to visit? Well, the men who fought there called it "a bloody, stinking hole." Guadalcanal is intensely hot (note the nearness of the Equator). Its jungles are filled with monster leeches, huge scorpions, poisonous centipedes, giant ants, writhing snakes, skulking rats, snapping crocodiles, and hungry anopheles (uh-nof-fuh-iees) mosquitoes (whose bites bring malaria). During the Spanish-American War, Walter Reed, an American doctor, discovered that quinine (KWY-nine) cures malaria. Quinine comes from a plant found in Java. The Japanese had captured Java. Doctors were working on synthetic quinine, but not fast enough for the troops who fought on Guadalcanal. Most of Guadalcanal is tropical rainforest-which means steamy, thick jungle, a whole lot of rain, and black, squishy mud that comes up to a man's knees. Where there isn't rainforest there is kunai (KOON-i) grass. Kunai grass blades are saw-toothed, stiff as

3 I remember exactly the way it looked the day we came up on deck to go ashore: the delicious sparkling tropic sea, the long beautiful beach, the minute palms of the copra plantation waving in the sea breeze, the dark green band of jungle, and the dun mass and power of the mountains rising behind it to rocky peaks. WHO -NOVELIST JAMES JONES, FOUGHT AT GUADAlCANAl wood, and often seven feet high. Walk through kunai grass and your arms and legs will be a mess of cuts. Do you get the picture? Does Guadalcanal sound like a great place to fight? Watch out, you can't even see the enemy hiding in the grass or behind those jungle trees. The 1st Marine Division landed in August of Marines are trained to fight on land or sea. The 1st Marine Division was a proud division-specially trained, and tough. They needed that toughness. Guadalcanal was one of the hardestfought battles in history. Remember the back-andforth slugfest at Gettysburg? This one was worse. It went on for six months. It combined jungle fighting with terrible sea and air battles. At first, things seemed easy. The marines surprised the Japanese on the island, who were mostly construction crews building an airfield. The marines captured the airfield. They named it Henderson Field, after a pilot who had been killed at Midway Island. At last, said President Roosevelt, we have a toehold in the Pacific." :.- - Above: Machine gunners in the jungle. Below: The fight for Henderson Field, the main objective of the entire battle of Guadalcanal. By the end, Japan had lost 600 aircraft and 24 warships. 155

4 A HISTORY OF US Words made up from initialletters, like SNAFU, are called "acronyms." Some other acronyms are WASP ("white Anglo-Saxon Protestant") and NOW (National Organization for Women). Do you know other acronyms? First Lt. ThomasJ. "Stumpy" Stanley became a company commander in the 1st MarineDivision.''We thought highly of Stumpy and respected him greatly," wrote E. B. Sledge in a book about the Pacific war called With the Old Breed. Tom Stanley was my brother-in-law (and a real hero). 156 The Japanese were determined to knock that toe into the sea. We wanted to plant both feet on the island. To tell the story of what happened next would take a whole book. Here is some of it: Let's begin with the military word for a mistake. It is SNAFU, a combination of letters for Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. It means that someone goofed.. Who goofed on Guadalcanal? Both sides. It happens all the time in warfare. The pressure and fear of battle often lead to mistakes. Most of our soldiers and even our officers were amateurs. They had not fought in a war before. They had to learn on the job. One captain, unloading marines onto the beach, didn't want to risk a Japanese attack on his ships. So he pulled out before the loading was finished, taking supplies and U.S.marines with him. He stranded the marines already on the island. That was just one of the goofs. The Japanese officers matched our snafus. They were too sure of themselves. An old Chinese proverb says, "A lion uses all his strength to fight a rabbit." The Japanese were lions in 1942, but they must not have heard of that proverb. They kept sending small forces to Guadalcanal. They thought Japanese fighters were unbeatable. They thought Americans were not good fighters. They were wrong. When the marines wiped out the first group of Japanese soldiers, their leader was so ashamed he committed suicide. The next Japanese commander arrived on the island with a starched white uniform in his trunk. It was for the surrender ceremony he expected to conduct. After he and his men were destroyed, a marine found the trunk and dressed up in his uniform. In six months, the marines, and the army units that came to fight with them, lost 1,598 men on Guadalcanal. Japanese war records show an incredible 23,800 deaths. Many Japanese deaths came in suicidal charges. Surrender was considered shameful. The Japanese also suffered many deaths from tropical disease. Our medical care was much better. Most of the battle for Guadalcanal was fought at sea. There the statistics were more even. Each side lost 24 big ships and many smaller ones. The water near Guadalcanal was so full of sunken ships that it was called "Ironbottom Sound." It should have been called Graveyard Sound. About 20,000 American and Japanese sailors went down there with their ships. The first of the sea fights-off nearby Savo Island-was the worst disaster in United States naval history. We were whipped. After that it was a seesaw of a conflict. It was bizarre: control switched every 12 hours. The Japanese were skilled fighters in the

5 WAR, PEACE, AND ALL THAT JAZZ The battles at Guadalcanal, at Bougainville, Tarawa, and in Papua and New Guinea turned marines into seasoned jungle fighters. These Raiders posed in front of a Japanese dugout on Bougainville, near Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. dark; at night they were masters of water and air. During the night Japanese planes dropped bombs on Henderson Field; Japanese ships lobbed shells at the field. In the mornings the Americans took over. Sea bees (construction crews) repaired the holes in the airfield. Then our planes took off after Japanese ships and troops. Our pilots were superb during the daytime. The battles on the island were ferocious. The Japanese were a brave foe. They had not lost a war in 400 years. But the marines outfought them. When it was all over, a doctor examining the marines wrote: The weight loss averaged about 20 pounds per man... Many of these patients reported being buried in foxholes, blown out of trees, blown through the air, or knocked out. The important thing was that they didn't give up. They held Guadalcanal. The marines ended the myth that the Japanese were invincible. Guadalcanal was a turning point in the war. We went from defense to offense. The Japanese went from offense to defense. A captured Japanese document said, "Guadalcanal Island... is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or us." We took the right road. It would lead to Japan. Of 36,000 Japanese sol-. diers who fought on Guadalcanal, only 12,000 returned home alive. 157,:~..'