Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman's Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu by Bill Sloan, Jim McEnery

clock, and their destroyers were pulling in close to shore to shell the airfield and our positions around it. Our Navy was still somewhere else far away, so the Nips were landing reinforcements just about every night with no opposition, and until we got some naval or air support, there was nothing we could do about it.
    But when the second of those two major battles ended in mid-September, over 1,700 banzai-charging Nips were dead, and our fighter planes and bombers were flying missions out of the former Jap airfield. The Marines renamed it Henderson Field in honor of Major Lofton Henderson, a Marine pilot killed at the Battle of Midway.
    Things got a little brighter after that, and we could finally feel the tide beginning to turn our way. But they couldn’t have looked much lousier than they did at the time I was writing that letter.
    Now don’t get me wrong. We still had a long way to go. But when the Marines won those two big fights—the history books call them the Battle of the Tenaru River and the Battle of Edson’s Ridge—we began to see a few glimmers of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel we were in.
    T HERE’S NO CANAL on Guadalcanal in spite of what a lot of people seem to think. But there’s a shallow little river there that I’ll never forget. It was more like a creek than any of the rivers I ever saw in America. I mean, in most places you could wade all the way across it without ever getting wet much above your shins.
    It’s called the Matanikau, and I couldn’t even pronounce its name for a long time. I thought it was “Makanakow” or something like that. But this puny excuse for a river turned out to be what the brass called the “most strategically important natural geographic feature” on the whole damn island.
    It was more important than other streams we fought along, like the Tenaru or the Lunga or Alligator Creek, for one simple reason. Everything west of it was owned by the Japs, while Henderson Field and the territory on the east side of the Matanikau were held by the Marines. And like I said before, the Japs wanted that airfield really bad.
    Beginning in late August, the First Marine Division had set up its main defensive perimeter in a big semicircle that followed the Tenaru River inland from the sea, then curved to the west south of the airfield until it reached the sea again about two miles from the Matanikau. After making several moves to the west, K/3/5 and the rest of the Fifth Marines were dug in along a low ridge that facedthe Matanikau from the east. From there, the lines swung north through a coconut grove to the waters of Iron Bottom Sound.
    Things started getting hot and heavy on August 18. That’s when three companies from the First and Third Battalions, Fifth Marines, were sent across the Matanikau for the first time to strike at enemy forces on the west side of the river, where the Japs were strongly in control.
    When word filtered down that General Vandegrift was planning this attack, a lot of us in K/3/5 hoped our company would be one of the ones picked to go, but it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, the outfits assigned to this mission were Company B of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, and our sister companies, I and L, of the Third Battalion.
    Company L, commanded by Captain Lyman Spurlock, kicked off the action by advancing to a river crossing about 1,000 yards inland, killing ten Japs along the way. Late on the afternoon of the 18th, they set up their defenses on the west side of the river.
    But the next morning, August 19, the going got tougher. Company L had a hard time hacking its way through the jungle, and the men came under heavy fire from a ridge several hundred yards to the west. One of the platoon leaders was killed, and when Lieutenant George Mead, the company executive officer, took over the platoon, he was killed, too.
    Still, the company made slow but steady progress until about two o’clock that afternoon, when they encircled Matanikau