Inferno - Max Hastings [165]
Some of the fiercest fighting took place on the Tenaru River, where both sides suffered heavily as the Japanese attacked again and again with suicidal courage and tactical clumsiness. As a green Japanese flare burst overhead, Robert Leckie described the scene: “Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness … booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell … The plop of the outgoing mortar with the crunch of its fall, the clatter of the machine guns and the lighter, faster rasp of the Browning automatic rifles, the hammering of fifty-caliber machine-guns, the crash of 75-millimetre anti-tank guns firing point-blank canister at the enemy—each of these conveys a definite message to the understanding ear.” After hours of this, dawn revealed heaped enemy bodies and a few survivors in flight. But as night succeeded night of such clashes and counterattacks, the strain told on the Americans.
“Morale was very bad,” said marine lieutenant Paul Moore, who won a Navy Cross. “But there was something about Marines—once we were ordered to attack we decided we damn well were going to do it.” Swimming the Matanikau River with his platoon, the young officer glanced up and saw mortar bombs and grenades arching through the air above him, “as if it were raining, with bullets striking all around us.” Moore, a few months out of Yale, was shot as he threw a grenade to knock out a Japanese machine gun. The bullet hit him in the chest: “The air was going in and out of a hole in my lungs. I thought I was dead, going to die right then. I wasn’t breathing through my mouth, but through this hole. I felt like a balloon going in and out, going pshhhh. I was thinking to myself: now I’m going to die. And first of all it’s rather absurd for me, considering where I came from, my early expectations of a comfortable life and all the rest, for me to be dying on a jungle island in combat as a Marine. That’s not me … Shortly, a wonderful corpsman crawled up and gave me a shot of morphine, and then a couple of other people got a stretcher and started evacuating me.”
Guadalcanal set the pattern for the Pacific campaign, a three-year contest for a succession of harbours and airfields, refuges for ships and platforms for planes amid an otherwise featureless watery vastness. The Japanese were never able to reverse their early mistakes, rooted in an underestimate of American strength and will. Each island action was tiny in scale by the standards of the European theatre: at the peak of the Guadalcanal battle, no more than 65,000 Americans and Japanese were engaged with each other ashore, while 40,000 more men served on warships and transports at sea. But the intensity of the struggle, and the conditions in which the combatants were obliged to subsist amid swamps, rain, heat, disease, insects, crocodiles, snakes and short rations caused the Pacific battlefield experience to become one of the worst of the war. Island fighting evolved into a bizarre and terrible routine: “Everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch,” Corp. James Jones, one of the army men who eventually landed on Guadalcanal to reinforce the marines, observed with fascinated revulsion.
Like a business. Like a regular business. And yet at the bottom of it was blood: blood, mutilation and death … The beach was literally