Victory Fever on Guadalcanal: Japan's First Land Defeat of World War II
360
Victory Fever on Guadalcanal: Japan's First Land Defeat of World War II
360eBook
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Overview
The Japanese Army countered by sending to Guadalcanal a reinforced battalion under the command of Col. Kiyonao Ichiki. The attack that followed would prove to be the first of four attempts by the Japanese over six months to retake the airfield, resulting in some of the most vicious fighting of the Pacific War.
During the initial battle on the night of August 20–21, 1942, Marines wiped out Ichiki’s men, who—imbued with “victory fever”—had expected a quick and easy victory.
William H. Bartsch draws on correspondence, interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official war records, including those translated from Japanese sources, to offer an intensely human narrative of the failed attempt to recapture Guadalcanal’s vital airfield.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623492205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas A&M University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2014 |
| Series: | Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series , #147 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Sales rank: | 180,726 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
WILLIAM H. BARTSCH, a former United Nations development economist and independent consultant now exclusively researching and writing on the Pacific War, lives in Reston, Virginia. He is the author of three previous books published by Texas A&M University Press: Doomed at the Start: American Pursuit Pilots on the Philippines, 1941–1942, December 8, 1941: MacArthur's Pearl Harbor, and Every Day a Nightmare: American Pursuit Pilots in the Defense of Java, 1941–1942.
Read an Excerpt
Victory Fever on Guadalcanal
Japan's First Land Defeat of World War II
By William H. Bartsch
Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2014 William H. BartschAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-220-5
CHAPTER 1
"You Shitheads Are Here to Learn to Fight!"
AT 1215 ON A "clear, cold, but very windy day," twenty-three-year-old Bayard S. Berghaus was dropped off by his father and younger brother at the entrance to Marine Barracks, Philadelphia Navy Yard, after a ninety-six-mile trip east from the little town of Marietta, Pennsylvania. It was Monday, February 2, 1942, just eight weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Called to active duty, 2nd Lieutenant Berghaus had been ordered to Marine Corps Basic School at the Navy Yard for twelve weeks of instruction to prepare him for assignment to a combat unit.
After saying goodbye to his father—the Episcopalian minister in his hometown—and brother, Berghaus collected a footlocker containing helmet, gas mask, belt, and holster, headed over to Barracks 101 of the school, and entered room 3. One of his new roommates, Maurice Ahearn, a graduate of Tufts University, was already settled in, but the other had not shown up yet. Berghaus knew the second roommate wouldn't be his Washington and Lee University classmate Richard W. Smith, though. They were the only two W&L '41 graduates who had signed up for the Marine Corps' Eastern Platoon Leaders Class in 1938 and had spent six weeks each summer following their sophomore and junior years in basic training. Commissioned as Reserve second lieutenants upon graduation, Berghaus and Smith were now together again for further training at the Navy Yard as members of the 2nd Basic School Reserve Officers Class.
Instruction began two days later. Berghaus, who was serious, quiet, and reserved by nature, was wondering how the school would be able to "pack so much in so little time"—just three months for what he thought should be a nine-month course. When informed originally that he was going to Basic School, he had expected a much longer period of instruction that he felt was needed to prepare him as a platoon leader.
Two days before Berghaus and the other 189 members of his battalion began their classes on February 4, 2nd Lt. George Codrea commenced his own active-duty training as a member of the 7th Reserve Officers Class at Quantico, Virginia. Unlike the PLC officers at the Basic School, however, Codrea had no prior Marine Corps instruction during summers while a student at Akron University in Ohio. After a stint with B. F. Goodrich following his graduation in June 1940, the twenty-four-year-old of Rumanian heritage had signed up for the Marine Corps officers candidate class that began at Quantico on November 1, 1941, and along with the 318 other survivors of the three-month qualifying course was now a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve and assigned to an additional three months of training in the ROC.
"Mud, mud, and more mud!" Jack Rivers muttered to himself on the morning of February 18, 1942, as he poked his nose outside. It was biting cold. Only the smoking kerosene stove on the wooden floor provided any warmth for Rivers and his squad mates in the tent hut that was now his home at the Marine Barracks, New River, North Carolina.
But Rivers was not really complaining. Life was proving much easier than it had been at Parris Island, where the twenty-three-year-old recruit had endured five weeks of grueling boot camp before reporting in at New River on February 13, 1942. After graduating from high school and gaining employment at Bethlehem Steel, Rivers had taken up professional boxing and was in tip-top physical shape when he enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor and reported in at Parris Island on January 5. Dubbed in the boxing world "Indian Johnny Rivers," he could take any punishment the Marine Corps could dish out.
Raised in a Lutheran orphans' home, Rivers now had a family for the first time: his buddies in the squad to which he'd been assigned and who shared the hut with him. Particularly close was Al Schmid, with whom he'd bonded from the time they together boarded the train from New Jersey that would take them to Parris Island. Both were assigned at New River on reporting in to a machine gun platoon, one of the three such platoons in H Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, following reactivation of the battalion on February 11, 1942.
In another hut in the H Company area, twenty-one-year-old Bob Leckie was wondering why he, a sports writer before he enlisted on December 8, 1941, had been selected as a machine gunner. On his arrival the night before, he was perfunctorily assigned to the 1st Marine Regiment, and the next day the H Company commander—whom Leckie would refer to as "Captain High-Hips"—in his very British manner assigned Leckie to a squad in a machine gun platoon. Unknown to Leckie, the moustached Capt. John Howland, a thirty-one-year-old graduate of Harvard University—BA in 1932 and LLB in 1936—had spent a year at Exeter College, Oxford, where he had evidently picked up his British mannerisms before enlisting in the Marine Corps and being called to active duty in 1940.
Howland's H Company—the weapons company of the 2nd Battalion—was comprised of three machine gun platoons, a mortar platoon, and a platoon of 37 mm antitank guns and .50-caliber machine guns. But for the time being the company had no officers other than Howland. Its veteran noncommissioned officers would be providing the training on the company's weapons and molding Rivers, Leckie, and the others into fighting men.
For seventeen-year-old Sid Phillips, being assigned to H Company's mortar platoon on his arrival by train from Parris Island appeared an arbitrary decision, too. He was just a high school kid from Mobile, Alabama, who like the others had survived the five weeks of "conceived nightmare" at Parris Island. On arrival at New River on February 13, Phillips and the others with him were marched off to stand in ranks outside a lighted hut that served as an office and then called in one at a time and interviewed by NCOs inside the hut. To Sid, it was "silly," because everyone was assigned to the 1st Marines. He was then additionally ordered to H Company's mortar platoon and to gun squad 4, which to his delight turned out with one exception to be comprised entirely of fellow southerners.
Sid Phillips may have thought that the formalities of assigning everyone to the 1st Marines was inane, but then he and the others reporting in with him to the 1st Marine Division were ignorant of the plight of the regiment in early February 1942. It had just been reactivated at New River and was being built up from scratch to meet the needs of the division for a third regiment other than just on paper. At the time of its reactivation, it had consisted of only 160 key personnel, just senior officers and veteran NCOs. Its 1st Battalion was the first to be reactivated, on February 7, followed by the 2nd Battalion on February 11 and the 3rd Battalion on February 16.
Pvt. John Joseph from Cambridge, Massachusetts, felt that his mastering of the M1903 Springfield rifle at Parris Island explained why he was assigned on February 13 to G Company, one of the three rifle companies of the 2nd Battalion. A self-described "city slicker," he had never fired a weapon other than a Daisy air rifle before enlisting in the Marine Corps. But instead of being selected for one of the rifle platoons, he had drawn G Company's Weapons Platoon, equipped with .30-caliber air-cooled machine guns and 60 mm mortars. He was pleasantly surprised to find that the platoon was being run by Cpl. Willis Accord, his old drill instructor at Parris Island, and another "Old Breed" NCO, Cpl. Stanley Necikowski. In fact, the only officer in G Company was the CO, Capt. James Sherman, a 1936 graduate of Tufts College from Somerville, Massachusetts, a Reservist, who had worked in the private sector for four years before being called to active duty in 1939.
Buddies Hugh Morse, from Auburn, Indiana, and Jack Gardner, from Syracuse, New York, were selected as Browning automatic rifle (BAR) men in a rifle platoon of the 1st Battalion's A Company. It was an assignment both sought to avoid, but they had qualified as sharpshooters on the BAR during their Parris Island boot training despite their best efforts to avoid the distinction. They knew "damned well that anyone who qualified was going to get stuck with carrying one of those monsters in a rifle company" when assigned afterwards to a unit. Hoping to boost the other's score and lower his own, Morse had fired on Gardner's target while Gardner fired on Morse's, but their strategy failed when both got top marks.
To the south of the 1st Marine Regiment's site, near Verona, the camp of the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment—the artillery unit of the 1st Marine Division—looked to Pvt. Bill White like a Civil War encampment on his arrival there to take up his assignment in late January 1942. The sixteen-year-old native of Clarksdale, Mississippi, had lied about his age when he enlisted in September 1941 and now found himself assigned to the battalion's Headquarters Battery after finishing boot camp at Parris Island and training in telephone communications at Quantico. He found the living conditions at the camp primitive: no shower facilities, water trucked in, limited electricity. To fend off the bitter cold, he and the others were wearing overcoats over long johns, using towels for earmuffs, and sometimes blankets as covers.
"They're putting us through the mill all right," Jack Rivers wrote to his sister in mid-March. Training for the men of the 2nd Battalion in the flat, swampy area of New River was becoming more intense. "And the weather is getting hot as heck," he added.
Rivers, Al Schmid, and the others were now sharing the hut with their newly appointed squad leader, Cpl. LeRoy Diamond. Promoted from private first class on March 9, Diamond was then transferred to H Company's 3rd Machine Gun Platoon from his old G Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. Still in its rebuilding process, the 1st Marine Regiment needed more NCOs.
Over in H Company's 1st Machine Gun Platoon, newly promoted Pfc. Bob Leckie had become good friends with Pvt. Lewis Juergens, whom he would refer to later as "Chuckler" for his good-natured chortling. They were learning the mysteries of the heavy, water-cooled M1917A1 Browning machine gun. Juergens, as the gunner, would carry the fifty-four-pound tripod, and Leckie, as assistant gunner, the forty-pound gun. By mid-March the two had mastered use of the gun and could even take it apart and reassemble it blindfolded.
As was the case for all the other platoons in the 2nd Battalion, and in fact for the whole 1st Regiment, there still was no second lieutenant to lead the platoon. Sgt. Frank Stewart was in charge of them. Despite being only three months older than Leckie, he was a world apart in experience, having already served over three years as a regular since enlisting in September 1938 when he turned eighteen. Leckie would later refer to him as "Sgt. Thinface."
Sid Phillips and the other "stovepipers" of his squad in H Company's mortar platoon had now also mastered their weapon, the 81 mm mortar, with which they were now equipped some two weeks after being assigned to the platoon. Before then, they had had to make do with "imaginary weapons of lumber" in their training. By mid-March they could even quote the manual for the mortar by heart. Every day, all day, they were marching several miles out from their hut for gun drill and field problems, then marching back to their huts for the evening.
As Leckie had noted for his own squad, Phillips and his comrades regarded their squad as different from any other. It was its almost exclusive composition of Southerners that set their "rebel squad" apart from the others. In fact, in Leckie's view, the only common denominator of all the squads in H Company was their dislike of "officers and discipline."
Over at the 37 mm antitank platoon of H Company, Cpl. George Parker was continuing his earlier training as a 37 mm gun crewman, firing on the special range for the weapon. The twenty-year-old native of Cameron, West Virginia, had enlisted back in September 1940 and after Parris Island had been assigned to the 1st Marine Division at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, then moved on to Quantico, where he had begun his training on the 37 mm.
In the 2nd Battalion's G Company, Pvt. John Joseph and the men of his Weapons Platoon had graduated from refresher training on their Springfield '03s and bayonet use to operation of the air-cooled .30-caliber light machine guns and the platoon's two 60 mm mortars. There was a lot of simulated firing and drilling. But Joseph himself was mainly occupied as a runner between the platoon and G Company headquarters.
Communications exercises were keeping Pvt. Bill White busy three times a week at Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines. It was hard work for the sixteen-year-old, laying telephone lines and setting up radio circuits for artillery exercises. And when everything was in place and working, White and the others would have to take it all down and start over again.
On the afternoon of Monday, March 23, 2nd Lt. Bayard Berghaus received orders transferring him on temporary duty from Basic School at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to the State Military Reservation, Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, ninety miles northwest of Philadelphia, for "instruction in the practical use of infantry weapons." All 190 members of his 2nd Basic School ROC were to report in at the Marine Corps encampment there on March 29 to begin training that would extend over three weeks, topping off the eight weeks of basically classroom instruction at the school. This schedule implied that the twelve weeks' duration of the Basic School course was being shortened by a week.
For George Codrea and his 318 classmates at Quantico, it was a similar story. On his battalion's return on a Saturday morning from a field exercise, they "found a bit of astounding news waiting." Their three-month 7th Reserve Officers Class, scheduled to end on April 30, was being shortened by a full month. As they stood to receive their diplomas in the Quantico Marine Corps base on April 1, they realized that this was indeed no April Fool's joke. Codrea and most of the others were now being ordered immediately to New River, North Carolina, to join the 1st Marine Division.
"You shitheads are here to learn to fight!" Capt. Martin F. Rockmore bellowed as he swaggered up and down the line in front of Don Moss, an artist in civilian life, and the other assembled E Company men on April 6, 1942. They had just completed six weeks of basic training at Parris Island before reporting in to the 1st Marine Division at New River and being assigned to E Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, one of the battalion's three rifle companies. Private Moss had just completed art school and was working for a printing company when he had enlisted in the Marine Corps.
After glowering at his new charges, Rockmore—a thirty-four-year-old graduate in economics from Saint Lawrence University, Canton, New York, and a Reservist now on active duty—turned Moss and some forty of the others in the platoon over to 2nd Lt. Dean Stover, who had just arrived at New River, too, and had been assigned to lead E Company's 1st Rifle Platoon. The twenty-three-year-old native of Salina, Pennsylvania, had graduated from Penn State University in June 1940 and had decided to leave his shipping clerk job to join the Marine Corps and enter Officer Candidate Class to avoid being drafted.
Stover and the other second lieutenants accompanying him to New River from Quantico on April 5—graduates of the 7th Reserve Officers Class at Quantico—were finally providing the 1st Marine Division, and in Stover's case its 1st Marine Regiment, with many of the junior officers sorely needed to lead the platoons in each of the companies of the battalions. In addition to Stover, the 2nd Battalion was assigned six others, while another ten were ordered to the 1st Battalion.
Two of the newly arrived graduates of the 7th ROC going to the 1st Battalion were assigned to 1st Lt. Nick Stevenson's C Company. Until then, C-1-1 was without any platoon leader officers. John Rentz, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Jim Wagner, from Richmond, Virginia, were each given a rifle platoon to lead, leaving the positions of 3rd Rifle Platoon leader, Weapons Platoon leader, and executive officer (following the departure of 2nd Lt. Clarence Mabry) still to be filled.
Stevenson, who was two weeks short of his twenty-third birthday, had been appointed CO of C Company only weeks earlier, when the only officer in the Company was the executive, Lieutenant Mabry (a January 31, 1942, graduate of the 6th ROC). A 1940 graduate of Columbia University, Stevenson had signed up for OCS that fall, and on graduation from the 4th ROC on June 1, 1941, he had been assigned as a platoon leader in the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, at Parris Island. When his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Julian N. Frisbie, was transferred to command the 1st Marine Regiment at New River on March 23, 1942, he brought Stevenson and two other junior officers from his 3rd Battalion with him to the 1st Marines. Frisbie gave Stevenson a company command position despite the fact that Stevenson was still only a second lieutenant, a problem of rank that would be rectified on April 14 when Stevenson was promoted to first lieutenant.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Victory Fever on Guadalcanal by William H. Bartsch. Copyright © 2014 William H. Bartsch. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations and Maps,Foreword by Richard B. Frank,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Prologue,
Chapter 1. "You Shitheads Are Here to Learn to Fight!",
Chapter 2. "Vandegrift, I Have Some Very Disconcerting News",
Chapter 3. "I'm Beginning to Doubt Whether There's a Jap on the Whole Damned Island",
Chapter 4. "May I Retake Tulagi Too?",
Chapter 5. "The Bastards Are in the Trees!",
Chapter 6. "Was This Going to Be the Real Test?",
Chapter 8. "Crying, Praying, and Cursing All at the Same Time",
Chapter 9. "Goddamn, They Got Me in the Eyes!",
Chapter 10. "We Aren't Going to Let Those People Lay Up There All Day",
Epilogue,
Appendix A. Officers, 1st Marine Regiment, Combat Group B (Reinforced), Tenaru River Subsector, August 20, 1942,
Appendix B. Officers, 1st Marine Regiment, Combat Group B (Reinforced), South Subsector, August 20, 1942,
Appendix C. US Marine Casualties, Battle of the Tenaru, August 21, 1942,
Appendix D. Officers and Staff, First Echelon, Ichiki Detachment,
Notes,
Glossary,
Sources,
Index of Military Units,
General Index,
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