Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [113]
Then an escalation, and the arrival of a waking nightmare:
“Outside, a thousand rockets burst in the sky. The tent snapped taut. The blast blew me from my bunk. I groped for my shoes. This was a shoes-off night, the major had said. The light died out in a shower of sparks. Somebody shouted, ‘Star shell!’ Another crushing blast! A heavy salvo landed on the other side of the ridge. Trees snapped. Men up there cascaded off the cliff. Major Mather in pajamas. We hit the hole and sat, eleven of us, in a nine-foot-square hole.”
The alert to Condition Red sounded. Henderson Field’s defenders poured from their mosquito-netted tents into a battlefield of biting malarial insects. On instinct and reflex, a thousand combat-seasoned men were racing for cover.
A gunner’s mate assigned to the Naval Operating Base, Bill Kennedy, recalled the night of October 13 the way everyone would, as a terrifying holocaust. “The exploding gunfire from the ship was so loud and the concussion so great that we were literally blown out of our bunks. Shaving mirrors and what little glass we had around was broken. Running from tent to foxhole was like running a new kind of obstacle course; when a salvo was fired, the concussion threw you to the ground. Then when you got up, the concussion from the exploding salvo on the airstrip threw you down again.”
The unseen ships that were hitting them were unnervingly close to shore. The trajectory of their gunfire was tellingly flat. The marines could feel on their skin the heat of the projectiles ripping by overhead, trimming the fronds from the tops of palm trees and blowing coconuts loose from their high groves. Fear paralyzed even the most proven veterans. “The air was filled with a bedlam of sound: the screaming of shells, the dull roar of cannonading off shore, the whine of shrapnel, the thud of palm trees as they were severed and hit the ground, and in the lulls from the big noises, the ceaseless sifting of dirt into the foxhole.”
Soule scrambled into a shelter roofed with logs and steel plates and sandbags, smartly sited in the defilade of a ridge. “Our single light bulb swayed as salvos shook the ground.… Wham! Another salvo close by, then silence. There we sat—the colonel, the major, all of us—sitting on palm-log seats, staring at the too-low ceiling. Nobody spoke.… The plane was overhead now, and there was that flash again, red and fiery. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. Let’s see. Count to twenty-eight. We waited and counted. My knees wouldn’t stop shaking.… The earth heaved. Heavy pieces thudded on the roof. My stomach caved in. My head swam. The light went out. Or was I blind? I choked on the dust now thick in the air. We all coughed, gasped, coughed again, and sat there dazed.”
Someone tried to light a lamp. The phone rang and someone moved to answer it. “Again the earth heaved. The roof bounced. The steel plates rang. One of the logs cracked but didn’t give. Dirt crashed into the entrance behind me. A tinkle of glass got through the blast. I smelled kerosene. Because we were in the center of the impact area, there was no whine, no shriek, no sound like a train, just the blast. It came all at once—the noise, the punch of wind, the dust. I guess we all blacked out.”
The terrible march of the naval bombardment proceeded away from them now, having spared neither enlisted man nor general officer. No shelling they had ever taken came close to this. Japanese field artillerymen suffered from a serious shortage of ammunition that limited their output to less than a dozen rounds per day. Many of their guns were worn from prior service in China and Manchuria. Their Navy was another story. The battleships’ enormous guns were well maintained and well within their range. The Marine fighter ace Joe Foss found himself seized physically by the experience. “It