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

anybody could stop them. They were hell-bent and determined to grab that airfield back, and that’s where they made one of their biggest mistakes.
    The first thing they did was try to bomb Henderson Field and its new crop of planes out of existence. All our troop movements in the vicinity of the airfield had to be suspended for a while because of constant dogfights, antiaircraft barrages, and Jap bombing runs.
    Our fliers got some valuable help in fighting off the Jap air attacks from a network of coast watchers at points all through the string of islands between Guadalcanal and the Jap bases at Rabaul and Truk. The watchers were mostly civilian natives hired by the Australian navy. When they spotted enemy planes headed in our direction, they radioed warnings that gave our slower, less agile F4Fs time to get off the ground and high above the altitude of the Jap raiders before their Zeros and Betty bombers reached the airfield.
    The results were amazing—five Jap planes shot down for every one we lost, even though ours were usually outnumbered by four or five to one.
    According to a commendation given to Marine fliers by General Vandegrift, their toll on enemy aircraft and shipping between August 21 and August 30 included twenty-one double- and single-engine bombers and thirty-nine Zero fighters shot down and threedestroyers sunk. Five other enemy ships—a cruiser, two destroyers, and two transports—were listed as “probably destroyed.”
    But the Japs made their biggest screwups on the ground. One of the first—and worst—of these was made by Colonel Kiyoano Ichiki, commander of the so-called Ichiki Detachment, an elite unit of the 17th Japanese Army.
    Using the standard Bushido tactic of screaming night attacks with swords and bayonets, the Ichiki Detachment had already overrun Allied defenders in a series of amphibious assaults in the Pacific. Because of the reputation they’d built, no one in Japan’s high command had any doubt they could do the same thing with ease at Guadalcanal.
    When Ichiki and his 2,100 shock troops were rushed from Guam to the Japanese base at Truk in mid-August, six destroyers stood ready to take them the rest of the way to Guadalcanal. Their orders were simple and straight to the point: Recapture the island’s airfield and destroy any upstart Americans who tried to stand in their way.
    Ichiki split his force into two echelons and sent the first one as an advance unit. But he didn’t actually think he’d even need the second, and larger, group to complete his mission.
    “Colonel Ichiki . . . was so confident when he arrived at Guadalcanal on the night of August 17 with his advance echelon,” wrote First Marine Division historian George McMillan, “he did not feel it necessary to wait for the second echelon of the detachment, some 1,200 more men, which was [traveling] in slower-moving transports. He was going right ahead. He was going to take Henderson Field with 900 men.”
    Yeah, like hell he was.
    What Ichiki actually did on the morning of August 21 was destroy half his detachment—and himself. He did it with blind, impatient overconfidence—but he got a helluva lot of help from the First and Second Battalions, First Marines.
    A CCORDING TO SOME EXPERTS, the bloodbath identified in history books as the Battle of the Tenaru River didn’t actually take place at the Tenaru River at all. Author Richard Frank, who wrote the longest book I ever saw on Guadalcanal, claimed it took place on Alligator Creek, which wasn’t really a creek at all. It was a muddy, sluggish tidal lagoon that only flowed after heavy rains.
    And by the way, there weren’t any alligators in Alligator Creek, either, but there were a good many crocodiles.
    If you think all this sounds confusing, you’re right. But it was the kind of confusion we had to put up with every day on Guadalcanal. On the maps we were given, almost none of the stream names were accurate. Some rivers were just creeks and some creeks were