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

Village, near the mouth of the river, and heard Jap voices jabbering and yelling “Banzai!” This alerted Captain Spurlock that an enemy attack was forming up, and he quickly alerted his troops to get ready.
    A few minutes later, when the Japs charged with fixed bayonets, his Marines met them with volleys of hot lead.
    After a firefight that lasted close to two hours, the Japs bugged out, and when Spurlock’s men went into the village, they found sixty-five enemy bodies there. Their own losses were four dead and eleven wounded.
    All three Marine companies pulled back across the river after that, so the attack didn’t really gain any permanent ground for us. But the best thing that came out of it for the men of L Company was bloody, positive proof that banzais don’t win battles.
    Bullets do.
    And L Company’s experience was just a small sample of what happened next.
    Action along the Matanikau continued later in the day on August 19, when a company-size patrol from the First Marines also crossed the river looking for a Jap force reported on the west side. They surprised an enemy patrol in another small village, and another firefight broke out. When it ended about an hour later, thirty-one of the thirty-four Japs in the patrol were dead, and only a handful of Marines were wounded.
    This was good, but when the Marines took a close look at the bodies, they could tell by the Japs’ uniforms that a lot of the dead ones were officers. Division headquarters decided this was a strong indication that enemy reinforcements were being landed on Guadalcanal. Actually, there hadn’t been much doubt about it before, but this evidence pretty well convinced the brass that the Japs were steadily increasing their strength.
    This wasn’t good news, but before word about it spread to the grunts in the foxholes, we all had another reason to celebrate.The next day, August 20, we watched our first two Marine air squadrons circle over Henderson Field and come in for a landing. VMF-223 arrived with nineteen F4F Grumman Wildcat fighters, and VMSB-232 showed up with twelve SBD-3 Douglas Dauntless scout bombers.
    Boy, were they a sight for sore eyes! In K/3/5’s sector of our defensive perimeter about a mile southwest of the airfield, everybody started cheering and waving their arms and throwing their helmets up in the air. Some of the guys actually got all teary-eyed at the sight of those planes. As for me, I didn’t shed any tears, but the planes gave me a better feeling in my gut than I’d had since we landed.
    The first thing I did when I saw them was get down on my knees and say, “Thank you, Lord.”
    The planes and pilots based at Henderson Field immediately became known as the Cactus Air Force because “Cactus” was the military code name for Guadalcanal. But it was a really appropriate nickname for other reasons, too, because they sure turned out to be a thorn in the Japs’ side.
    It meant an awful lot to us just to know they were there and that we had air support again. Now maybe those “washing machine Charlies” wouldn’t act so damn comfortable on their raids anymore.
    N ATURALLY, THE PRESENCE of the Cactus Air Force drew a lot of attention from the Japs, too, because it meant a lot of trouble for them. To tell the truth, I think the idea of having to deal with our planes drove the Nips a little nuts, judging from the bone-head moves they made over the next thirty-six hours.
    With a few hundred enemy reinforcements slipping in almostevery night and no U.S. fighting ships in the area to stop them, the Nip commanders had figured on kicking us off the island in short order. When our planes showed up, though, that whole picture changed, and as long as Henderson Field stayed operational and in our hands, it was going to stay changed.
    That’s not to say the Japs weren’t still plenty cocky. They were cocky enough to do some really dumb things. They’d been having their way in the Pacific for so long they didn’t think