Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [228]
On December 11, Tanaka led what would be the final run of the Tokyo Express. The mosquito fleet intercepted his force of nine destroyers between Cape Esperance and Savo Island. Tanaka’s flagship, the Teruzuki, took a torpedo that detonated her depth charge stowage, sinking her. Fewer than one in five of the twelve hundred drums thrown overboard reached the beach.
Victory did not come by way of a shattering decisive battle. It came through attrition, exacted relentlessly, night after night. Victory, when it came, did not march on parade. It announced itself more subtly, through a return to normalcy and a reemergence of human behaviors that tended to disappear in periods of emergency, when the urgent struggle for survival concentrated minds. At the ice plant within the Marine perimeter, some enterprising leathernecks made a robust black market selling a slushy grog made from papayas, limes, fruit juice, and a surplus of torpedo fuel. When the fresh and generously supplied men of the Americal Division arrived, veteran riflemen suckered them mercilessly, selling to credulous souvenir seekers counterfeit Japanese battle flags manufactured at the parachute loft. On Red Beach that December, discipline among the beachmaster’s boat crews teetered on the brink of breakdown. Cargo ships carrying shipments of beer quickly found themselves swarmed by lighters jockeying to unload them. Nets swung from the booms of ammunition ships full of bombs and howitzer projectiles and machine-gun ammunition and canned pineapple, but few boats volunteered to take them. Beer received higher priority. Delighted to find a Liberty ship carrying thirty thousand cases, thieves loaded up their boats and spirited the suds up the beach to a secret depot that was quite secure from discovery owing to its location several miles behind Japanese lines—“a fiasco which would be rather deplorable if it weren’t so humorous,” Lloyd Mustin said. “The boat crews knew it too, but by George, they were going to land some beer in a private cache known only to them.”
The new commanding officer of American ground forces on Guadalcanal, General Patch, let the whole thing slide. He reportedly allowed fantastic quantities of surplus to pile up for off-the-books requisition. Just one in six cases of beer ferried ashore reached the quartermaster dump. Much as the Army supply clerks might have protested, no complaints ever came from Patch, who seemed to regard the theft as a generous toast to his brothers in arms who had served so well since August.
Under Patch, Guadalcanal would begin its transformation to a rear-area base, a place dense with storage depots, hospitals, baseball games, fire trucks, and ration dumps with beer stacked higher than two men could stand. There would be automotive maintenance shops, chapels, water carnivals and regattas with clowns on surfboards, forestry companies, performances by Bob Hope and Jerry Colonna, gardens tended by Japanese POWs, kennel shows, and visits by Eleanor Roosevelt. An armed forces radio affiliate known as The Mosquito Network would flourish there. Its program supervisor, hired out of Hollywood, would create a musical segment called the “Atabrine Cocktail Hour,” promoting faithful use of the anti-malaria medication. Troops coming ashore would do so now as rehearsals for landings farther north and westward.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had lost the ability to impose its will on the waters of Savo Sound. Ashore, the position of the 17th Army, desperately drawn in to hold small parts of the island