Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [89]
A Navy Dauntless pilot who had been strafing Japanese positions, Lieutenant Maxwell Leslie, guided the boats to the landing area. As the Monssen’s brain trust peered out through the clearing smoke through their glasses, the boats closed the beach. The coming of darkness would soon give them cover. With the setting of the sun, bright red slashes of tracer bullets could be seen reaching out from the jungle, splashing all around the departing vessels. One of the coxswains of the landing party, a Coast Guard signalman named Douglas A. Munro, lingered during the evacuation to support his mates with his craft’s light machine gun. A Japanese machine gunner drew a bead on Munro’s boat and opened fire, killing him.
After Puller and the marines rescued from the island were dropped off in a waiting boat at Lunga Point, Smoot took the Monssen away from Guadalcanal. The destroyer joined the Alhena for the nighttime run out to sea, away from the threat of nighttime surface attack. The next day the two ships returned for a final day of unloading, and the Alhena evacuated many of the wounded rescued the previous day. With a lull in the fighting ashore and the skies free of air raids, the day was quiet and the ships retired again late that afternoon for Espiritu Santo.
Their traditional griping could not mask the fact that the marines needed their fleet for much more than just transportation. The Monssen’s display of fighting spirit restored some of their faith. And many had had enough of a taste of life at sea to know they wanted no part of it. After Smoot had given Puller his parting gift the day before—a steak dinner in the wardroom, a hot shower, a seabag full of clean clothes, and a stash of cookies and cigarettes—the infantryman took his leave from the ship. Smoot was glad to be of some help to the Marine Corps. “Everything we could do to help in their rugged life ashore, we did.” Puller thanked him, then said, “God, I wouldn’t have your job for anything in the world.”
At this, Smoot raised an eyebrow. “You mean to tell me you’d go back and go into that messy stuff over there and get yourself filthy and live on c-rations? You’ve come to see the kind of life I lead out here and you prefer yours?”
“I sure do. When you get hit, where are you? When I get hit, I know where I am.”
Like most of the other commanders in Operation Watchtower, Roland Smoot could not know where getting hit would leave him. For the time being, the storm of war had settled its eye on the fetid island. It had not yet come directly for him. When it did, as would almost always be the case, the little tin cans would take its brunt.
15
The Visit
SEPTEMBER WAS A MONTH OF PREPARATION, OF CONSOLIDATION, OF preliminary reckoning. “Today,” Admiral Matome Ugaki wrote in his diary on the thirtieth, “September is going to pass. Looking back, I find nothing has been accomplished this month.” That judgment may have been just deserts for being slow to grasp the significance of the American move into the Solomons. The Japanese were finding themselves outgunned at the point of contact and hamstrung by the geometry of the inter-island campaign. A shortage of fuel at Rabaul forced them to be sparing and selective in the use of their major warships.
The Americans had their own problems, some of them similar, but they were confronting them with active, troubleshooting minds. The fleet’s Service Squadron, the command that operated the tankers and transports and tenders and supply ships, had moved its headquarters north, from Auckland to Nouméa. The Navy was solving the algorithms that would determine how many tons of supplies, ammunition, fresh water, and food were needed per capita to keep an operation