Battle Cry - Leon Uris [118]
“First to land against Japan,” Seymour started, “the First Marine Division hit Guadalcanal, and the Second Regiment and paratroopers hit the islands across Skylark Channel—Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanembogo, all three nestled in a cove of Florida Island. We came in with about twenty hours’ rations.” His voice broke suddenly. “Let me tell you guys something, I studied military campaigns, lots of them…”
“You a college boy?” I asked.
“Cornell, class of thirty-eight.” He snickered sourly. “There may be bigger and bloodier battles than Guadalcanal, but when the book comes out, Guadalcanal will always be the first one.”
Seymour began to tell his long terrible story, which I knew would be part of the folklore of our country for all time. The beginning was sad, with a handful of brave men on a tiny foothold, pitted against the might of the Japanese Empire.
He reached for a cigarette and cupped his hands to keep them from shaking. We leaned forward and hung on his every word.
“The Navy dumped us there and ran. The Army and Dugout Doug sat back and waited.”
“To hell with them.”
“You can say that again,” Seymour snapped. He told of the frantic Japanese efforts to push the Marines into the sea. Gigantic air strikes and but a few crippled Marine planes against them, planes obsolete in everything but the guts of the pilots. Flyers like Joe Foss, Carl, and Boyington’s Bastards to stop them. And then came the Tokio Express! The Imperial Fleet to shell them at point-blank, with nothing in their way but a handful of plywood PT boats.
Jap reinforcements landed past Marine lines by the thousands as they helplessly sat and watched. And the battles. The Tenaru, the Matanikau—yet their lines never fell. Japs stacked up like cordwood in the rivers but on they came. Marine heroes born each minute. A blind man given instructions where to fire a machine gun by a paralyzed man.
“We scratched back where we could. Sent our patrols to rove and disorganize them. Maybe fifty would start out, maybe five would come back. We fought by night, mostly in the jungle, on the river banks with bayonets and fists. They’d scream for our blood in the dark. Those Marines that didn’t get cut down by bullets got cut down by malaria and yellow jaundice and crud.”
Seymour smashed out the cigarette and a strange look came into his eyes. “I saw them lying there in the grass near the river with a hundred and four fever, so weak with dysentery they couldn’t stand, but they’d stick at their posts as long as they could squeeze a trigger.”
At last help came. An Army unit of National Guards who fought like Marines, the never to be forgotten 164th Regiment. Many times when reinforcements came they had to wait for a Jap landing party to unload first.
The Eighth Marines, sick with mumu from Samoa, had been forced to retreat, Seymour told us.
“The Sixth will never retreat,” Burnside said.
And then came the terrible night that the Tokio Express caught four cruisers like sitting ducks and sank them all. Seymour related the subsequent caution of our Navy in trying to lure the Japs into open water instead of coming into the Slot. The Japs knew this and hugged land.
“We were up to our ass in blood, and sick and beat out. The Tokio Express was heading in in full battle array, and only the gutty little PTs to stop them.” He lit another cigarette. “It was November 15th when the voice from the Lord came. Ching Lee on the U.S.S. Washington led the fleet into the Slot and we caught the Japs cold turkey.” From a high-pitched crescendo, his voice trailed off. “The Jap navy never came back and we could at last get out of the foxholes and go after them.”
There were several moments of silence in the smoke-filled head. Finally Andy spoke up. “What’s there now?”
“It’s going to be a long war, buddy. Look at the map. It’s mean terrain and there’ll be Japs there forever. The First Division is either on the way or going to Australia and the Second and Eighth Marines are corked out. You’ve got thirty miles to go.”
“Wake Island, here we went.”
Seymour threw his cigarette butt into