Alone on Guadalcanal

by Estate of Alexandra C. Clemens

Overview

This remarkable memoir tells the compelling story of the near-mythic British district officer who helped shape the first great Allied counteroffensive. Scottish-born and Cambridge-educated, Martin Clemens managed to survive months behind Japanese lines in one of the most unfriendly climates and terrains in the world. After countless partisan and spy missions, in 1942 he emerged from the jungle and integrated his Melanesian commando force into the heart of the 1st Marine Division's operations, earning the unfettered admiration of such legendary Marine officers as Vandegrift, Thomas, Twining, Edson, and Pate. This book is based on a journal Clemens kept during the war and might well be the last critical source of analysis of the Solomon's campaign. His eyewitness accounts of harrowing long-distance patrols and life on the run from shadowy Japanese intelligence operatives and treacherous islanders are unmatched in the literature of the Pacific war. First published in 1998, the story, with an introduction by Allan R. Millett, is essential and enjoyable reading.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591141242
Publisher:	Naval Institute Press
Publication date:	01/15/2013
Series:	Bluejacket Books
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Martin Clemens served as a British colonial administrator in the Pacific, Palestine, and Cyprus, specializing in political administration and antiterrorism

Read an Excerpt

Alone on Guadalcanal

A COASTWATCHER'S STORY

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By Martin Clemens

Naval Institute Press

Copyright © 1998 Martin Clemens
All right reserved.

Chapter One

Guadalcanal and Martin Clemens

by Allan R. Millett

Although the mountainous volcanic islands of the former British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) are thirty-five hundred miles from the great naval base at Singapore, they took on a strategic importance in 1941-42 that confounded the some five hundred Europeans who inhabited them. The geopolitics of war mystified the ninety-five thousand Melanesian natives who had lived under British administration since the late nineteenth century. A great island city of commercial and naval significance that shaped the history of all of South Asia, Singapore anchored the western end of the Malay Barrier. The islands of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies extended the Malay Barrier eastward along the Equator. The island chain-part of the great circle of volcanic lands that rings the Pacific Ocean-continued to Australian-administered Papua and New Guinea and thence to New Britain Island to the north, which ended in the port of Rabaul. Still west of the international date line, the Barrier continued with the Solomons. Whoever controlled the Solomons could interrupt maritime and air traffic from the United States to Australia. And for the United States the route to the Philippines passed through the Malay Barrier, for the Naval Arms Limitation Treaty of 1922 had conceded to Japanese control most of the islands between the international date line and Manila. The strategic linkage between the defense of Singapore and the Philippines doomed the Solomons to their improbable role as a major theater in World War II.

Within the global concepts for the defense of the British Empire after World War I, the defense of the Malay Barrier against Japan focused on Singapore, whose importance to Malaya was matched by its importance to the defense of Burma and India. The Imperial General Staff, a Commonwealth committee dominated by its British members, believed that an Australian commitment to Singapore was essential, even though the British assumed that they might get some help from France, the Netherlands, and the United States. None of these potential allies, however, seemed willing or able to contribute much to deter or defend against a Japanese offensive into what Tokyo called the "South Seas Resource Area" or, more grandly, the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere."

The coming of war in Europe in 1939, followed by the devastating defeat of France in 1940, threw all the plans for the defense of the Asia-Pacific British Empire into the trashbin designed for all strategic wishful thinking. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he brought a sense of strategic realism to the office, but not a complete conversion to facing facts. In his calculus, defense of the Mediterranean, the gateway to the overvalued resources of India, took priority over defense of Singapore, and he drew the bulk of the volunteer Australian Imperial Force into the maelstrom of war in the Middle East. Australia sent two divisions to the Middle East, its first formed for war in 1940, then a third. A fourth (the 8th Division) went to Malaya in 1941. Australian naval and air units also moved to the Middle East or, in the case of aircrews, all the way to Great Britain to participate in the defense of Great Britain or the strategic bombing of Germany. Before Pearl Harbor, Australian and New Zealand soldiers (the "Anzacs") were fighting and dying in Greece, Crete, Libya, Somalia, and Egypt. Given the combination of apathy and sense of ravishment that characterized Australian defense policy in 1941, it is little wonder that the defense of New Guinea and the Solomons assumed almost no priority in Australian military planning.

If the Australians had few forces with which to defend the Solomon Islands other than the white-officered native police and scratch formations of European militia, they could at least create an intelligence organization that could report enemy air and ship movements. After a 1922 review of Australian defense responsibilities conducted by an interservice committee, the Naval Intelligence Division of the Royal Australian Navy created a network of civilian observers throughout New Guinea and the Solomons, with similar positions along Australia's northern coast. Since it did not have a reliable portable radio, the Naval Intelligence Division could do little to support its volunteer observers until, in the late 1930s, it purchased a battery-powered combination telegraph-voice radio for distribution to the coastwatchers. The system had limitations that made portability and communications relative terms. The "teleradio" could be broken down into a receiver section, a transmitter section, a speaker section, and other smaller modules, but it also required large batteries, a battery charger, chemicals for the battery charger, and other support equipment. With luck and strong porters, the teleradio might be divided into loads for ten men. It also worked best from higher elevations (line of sight), but even then its range still fell into a four-hundred-mile (voice) to six-hundred-mile (tapped code) envelope, which meant the establishment of many stations within relay range of one another. Nevertheless, the distribution of teleradios finally gave the coastwatchers some way to report their sightings in time-urgent terms.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, the director of the Naval Intelligence Division, Cdr. Rupert B. M. Long, RAN, assigned a fellow World War I naval veteran and enthusiastic Australian civil administrator in New Guinea, Lt. Cdr. Eric A. Feldt, to bring the coastwatcher organization to war readiness. A close friend of Feldt's and a loose manager, Long gave the energetic, intense Feldt plenty of autonomy. Fortunately, he also gave him effective support. As a senior naval staff officer at Port Moresby, Feldt recruited more coastwatchers, conducted training sessions, distributed supplies, and infused a paper organization with a real sense of mission. Before the war with Japan, he visited almost every team in his network, which extended all the way to Rabaul, New Britain Island, and the straits south of New Ireland Island. As Long and Feldt predicted, any Japanese offensive would make Rabaul (defended by the only Australian Army battalion in the whole region) its principal objective. The southern Solomons were not a pressing priority. Under Feldt's direction, the coastwatchers, collectively known as "Ferdinand" to honor the bull in the children's story who watched and waited, numbered about one thousand in late 1941, manning one hundred stations linked by radio and resupplied by the Royal Australian Air Force. The cordon of observers stretched twenty-five hundred miles from the northern coast of New Guinea to the New Hebrides.

The area covered by Ferdinand had six regional subdivisions, one of which was the southern Solomons, administered by Resident Commissioner William S. Marchant from his headquarters in Tulagi, the small port on an island of the same name. Marchant also headed the coastwatchers stationed on the larger islands of his domain: Ysabel, New Georgia, and Guadalcanal. Feldt concluded that Marchant had too many responsibilities, so he sent Sub-Lt. Donald S. Macfarlan, RANR, to Tulagi to take de facto control of Ferdinand. He later sent his most trusted assistant, Lt. Hugh Mackenzie, RAN, to Vila, Efate, New Hebrides, to establish a new central reporting site for the southern Solomons. Marchant's station moved with the Resident Commissioner to Malaita when the Japanese approached. There Marchant's professional radio operator received reports from Guadalcanal, recoded them, and sent them to Mackenzie. As Deputy Supervising Intelligence Officer, Solomons, Mackenzie reported directly to Feldt at his headquarters at Townsville, Queensland.

When the Japanese advanced into the southern Solomons and began to bomb Tulagi, Marchant displaced for Malaita and tried to take Macfarlan and his radio with him, but the determined young Scot refused to abandon his four subordinate posts. One of these coastwatchers was a middle-aged storekeeper on Savo, Leif Schroeder, who, betrayed by some Melanesians, eventually fled to the western tip of Guadalcanal. Macfarlan himself went to Aola, Guadalcanal, with Clemens and then organized his team (reinforced by a jungle-wise miner, A. M. Andresen) with Kenneth D. Hay. A veteran of World War I and known for his large appetite, Hay managed a plantation for Burns, Philp & Company (South Sea) Ltd., which, with Lever Brothers, dominated the island's cash crop economy of coconuts and copra. This team observed the coastal plain of the Lunga River on the northern shore of central Guadalcanal. The second team, formed in late March near the island's western tip, had another exotic, aging islander for its boss, F. Ashton "Snowy" Rhoades, also a plantation manager. Schroeder joined Rhoades after his escape from Savo. The third Guadalcanal coastwatcher team manned a station at the island's administrative headquarters, the northeastern coastal town of Aola. This team had a leader of a much different sort, another Scot and a member of the British professional colonial civil service, District Officer Martin Clemens.

When I visited Australia in 1995 to teach a too-short session at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra, I wanted to meet Martin Clemens. As a historian of the United States Marine Corps and the biographer of Gen. Gerald C. Thomas, USMC, who had served on Guadalcanal as the operations officer and chief of staff of the 1st Marine Division, I regarded Clemens as one of the heroes of the Guadalcanal campaign. My judgment showed no originality. Every Marine I ever knew-personally or through his writings-regarded Martin Clemens with respect and affection because he had contributed so much to the division's successful operations on Guadalcanal.

When I started to work on my biography of General Thomas, I learned very quickly a central lesson for all Guadalcanal historians: consult Martin Clemens. As I already knew from reading other people's books, Clemens had kept a diary and notebook throughout his service on Guadalcanal, a priceless source of information and opinion on the American side of the campaign. I opened a correspondence with Major Clemens, and he very generously sent me portions of his diaries and notes as well as his opinions about the major commanders and staff officers of the 1st Marine Division. The more research I did, the more I found his views accurate, prudent, understanding, and candid. During our correspondence, I noticed that his address was "Toorak." Somehow I assumed that Toorak must be an isolated ranch of sheep and cattle in Queensland or New South Wales. My hosts at ADFA, Professors Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, with great humor (was it humour?) told me that Toorak was an affluent and very smart suburb of Melbourne.

On the other hand, I found it appalling that Peter and Jeffrey did not know that Martin Clemens was-at least among Marines-the most famous Australian warrior of them all, a figure of greater consequence than Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey, Breaker Morant, or Mel Gibson. Of course, I soon realized that Martin Clemens was not a "real" Australian, since he had "come out" from Great Britain as just another colonial administrator for the Solomons and had served, albeit with honor, on the periphery of the Australian war effort. Being a saint to the veterans of the 1st Marine Division did not automatically bestow on him a special place in the pantheon of heroes remembered in Canberra's Australian War Memorial.

During a long weekend graciously granted by the ADFA history department, I finally met Martin Clemens at his home at Toorak in July 1995. As Peter and Jeffrey had predicted, my family and I found the Clemens home, Dunraven, anything but primitive. Anne and Martin Clemens could not have been more hospitable to my wife and me and our five-year-old daughter. The Clemenses wined and dined us, and we got some special tours of Melbourne, including the war memorial. Naturally, we talked a great deal about Guadalcanal and veteran Marines, many of whom Major Clemens had seen often at division reunions and trips to the United States since World War II. Though plagued with arthritic knees, Martin set the pace, full of enthusiasm for the World War II commemoration, golf, animal husbandry, the livestock business, children and grandchildren, and his comrades of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Defence Force. I found it easy to imagine Martin as he was when he walked out of the jungle on 15 August 1942 and into the life of the 1st Marine Division. Marine officers who saw him remembered him as active, highly intelligent, articulate, handsome, and obviously courageous in an understated way. At eighty, Martin Clemens was still the same man.

Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 17 April 1915, Warren Frederick Martin Clemens grew up in a household of high standards and low means. His father played the organ and directed the choir at Queen's Cross Presbyterian Church, but he died in 1924 when Martin was nine years old. His mother, a Martin from the herring fishing center of Peterhead, managed to send him to boarding school in England with the help of scholarships and her family. After nine years at Bedford School, Martin became a scholarship student at Christ's College, Cambridge University. His university experience at Christ's College mirrored his record at Bedford School. Not distinguished in any one thing, except rowing, he was very good at many. As a student in the natural sciences, he made marks good enough to win honors and the prestige of a "leaving exhibition." He then did advanced work in animal husbandry and botany in an additional year beyond his graduation in 1937. Although he followed a scientific curriculum, he also enjoyed his course work in the arts and letters. The fact that his academic advisor was Sir Charles Percy Snow may have had something to do with his academic interest "in two cultures." Martin was never an academic drudge, however. He rowed with distinction on the Cambridge crew and participated in a wide range of social activities and sports.

In 1937 Clemens sought and won an appointment in the British Colonial Service, which allowed him to remain a year at Cambridge for the service's training course and some graduate study. He received a posting to the Solomon Islands in August 1938 for a three-year probationary appointment on the island of Malaita. He specialized in development projects such as road building and agricultural land use that directly helped the islanders. In due course he passed his qualifying examinations for full status in the Colonial Service and moved to San Cristobal as a district officer in November 1941.

Concerned that Great Britain was at war but he was not, Clemens volunteered for military service during a short leave to Sydney, which coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Alone on Guadalcanal by Martin Clemens Copyright © 1998 by Martin Clemens. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Forewords	ix
	Preface	xiii
	Guadalcanal and Martin Clemens	1
1	"And there we were ..."	31
2	In Harm's Way	53
3	Clearing the Decks	61
4	Visitors, Welcome and Otherwise	69
5	A Watcher in the West	80
6	A European Murdered	87
7	In Which We Prepare for the Worst, and the Enemy Arrives	97
8	The Battle of the Coral Sea	106
9	Some Unexpected Guests	111
10	"The district officer has gone."	119
11	"Japan 'e come 'long Guadalcanal"	126
12	"When creeping murmur...!"	133
13	"Devil b'long Chimi sing out!"	142
14	Retreat to Vungana	153
15	"Oh! Lord, how long?"	162
16	Watch and Pray	174
17	The Marines Have Landed	188
18	Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire: The Battle of the Tenaru	201
19	Attacked on All Sides	224
20	Backs to the Wall	246
21	Nip and Tuck	256
22	Advance to the Rear	268
23	Hammer and Tongs	276
24	All's Well That Ends Well	301
	Epilogue	308
	Maps	313
	Notes	321
	Glossary	331
	Index	335

Editorial Reviews

British district officer and veteran of Guadalcanal Martin Clemens writes a lively memoir, based on his diaries, of the early years of the war behind enemy lines in one of the most unfriendly climates and terrains in the world. B&w photos. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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