The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [147]
With more than a thousand Allied sailors dead, Crutchley’s stricken flotilla was forced to leave the environs of Guadalcanal, from which Fletcher had already removed the aircraft carriers Saratoga, Wasp and Enterprise after losing twenty-two fighters out of ninety-eight. This meant that the Japanese based at Rabaul had an opportunity to reinforce the island and attempt to fling the Americans off it. The Henderson Field bridgehead was subjected to day and night bombardment from Japanese naval vessels as well as aerial bombing from Rabaul, and on one day – Dugout Sunday – there were no fewer than seven air raids. The Cactus Air Force of nineteen fighters and twelve torpedo-bombers of the 23rd Marine Air Group did what they could, but until they were reinforced they could not protect the airfield adequately. On 17 August Lieutenant-General Haruyoshi Hyakutake landed from Rabaul with 50,000 men of the Seventeenth Army to attack on the ground. Rear-Admiral Razio Tanaka also began a series of landings of men and supplies along the Slot, a channel of islands between Rabaul and Guadalcanal, in a six-month series of often night-time operations nicknamed the Tokyo Express by the Marines who found themselves on its painful receiving end.
Instead of attacking simultaneously, which was difficult to do in the light of his lack of reinforcements, Hyakutake sent in assaults on Henderson Field piecemeal, which in desperate fighting the Marines managed to fight off and occasionally to counter-attack. In the battle of Tenaru River (which was actually fought on the Ilu river), Colonel Kiyono Ichiki’s attack of 917 men ended on 18 August with the loss of almost every man in the unit. Ichiki himself burnt the regimental standard and committed hara-kiri. On 12 and 13 September, during the hard-fought battle of Bloody Ridge, a mile to the south-west of the airfield, the Japanese got to within 1,000 yards of the runway. Yelling ‘Banzai!’ (One thousand years!) and ‘Marine, you die!’, 2,000 Japanese rushed out of the jungle and overwhelmed the right flank of Lieutenant-Colonel Merritt A. ‘Red Mike’ Edson’s Provisional Force of two battalions. Three Japanese even got inside Vandergrift’s bunker, where they were killed by his clerks. Edson won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valiant defence, in which 143 Americans were killed and 117 wounded, but 600 Japanese were killed and 500 wounded.
Although the Marines were finally reinforced by air on 20 August, Hyakutake received reinforcements via the Tokyo Express throughout September and October, and between 23 and 25 October his assaults were flung back with 2,000 killed against 300 American killed and wounded. After that Vandergrift felt he could expand the perimeter, and go on the offensive.18 Although malaria in the fetid conditions badly affected the American forces, the Japanese were hit by malaria and severe hunger too, and once the US Navy had won a four-day battle off the island on 15 November – the last of seven major naval engagements in the six-month campaign – the Japanese were reduced to releasing drums of supplies from passing destroyers, hoping they would float ashore and be retrieved.
On 8 December, a year and a day after Pearl Harbor, Vandergrift, ‘the Hero of Guadalcanal’, and his Marines were finally relieved by Major-General Alexander M. Patch’s US Army regulars, who forced the Japanese, in a ‘desperate