Battle for the Solomons E-Book

Ira Wolfert

• Herausgeber: The War Vault
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Battle for the Solomons is Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ira Wolfert's dazzling account of the fierce land, sea, and air fighting in the Solomon Islands during 1942. Wolfert was in the thick of it, facing death alongside the troops, and he reproduces events as they happen in real time, making for a tense, suspenseful read. Wolfert risked his life for the sake of authenticity, and survived to write this, one of the most remarkable combat memoirs of World War 2.

Leseprobe

Battle for the Solomons

Ira Wolfert

Published by The War Vault, 2019.

Copyright

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Battle for the Solomons by Ira Wolfert. First published in 1943.

Revised edition published by The War Vault, 2019.

All rights reserved.

EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-359-96955-5.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Nice Shooting Weather | Somewhere on the Pacific

Sky Road and Sea Road | In a Flying Fortress

The Loss of the Wasp | A base in the Guadalcanal sector

Slugging It Out | Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands

Round 3 | Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands

‘Git or Git Got’ | From a Base in the Guadalcanal Sector

Battle in Three Dimensions | A Base in the Guadalcanal Sector

The Tokyo Express | Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands

Jungle Battle | In the Jungles of Guadalcanal

The Fifth Battle of the Solomons | From Guadalcanal

The Sinking of the President Coolidge | Somewhere on the Pacific

Americans Can Fight | Somewhere on the Pacific

Further Reading: My Fighting Congregation

Nice Shooting Weather

Somewhere on the Pacific

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AT ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning, ship’s time, one of the escort vessels smelled something and went to find it. It had been mousing along up ahead of the convoy, whiskers twitching, as they say to indicate that its mechanical feelers were spreading restlessly and combing out the water for dynamite. Now it gave up fooling and went. The bow threw up white water in a snarl, a whole snootful of it, and made the ship look as if it were lunging with teeth bared.

All the steering wheels in the convoy went hard to starboard. A big Danish water-tender was sitting on an empty egg crate in the engine room, whetting a knife sleepily. He looked like a coil of hawser piled up there. The sharp turn dumped him off the box and he fell, still sitting, on the iron deck. He fell lightly, his muscles being powerful enough almost to hold him up in midair, but his face was all round and like a child’s with fright as he looked at me trying to keep from winding up against anything hot. When he picked himself up, he muttered something about there being ‘screwy nuts loose’ in the wheelhouse nowadays with all the college boys in the Merchant Marine, and went back to whetting his knife.

The black gang, not unexpectedly, is worried about being where it is when a torpedo hits. This ship has Scotch marine boilers on it and all the fellows know it. A few might tend to forget it occasionally, but the first assistant, a squinty-eyed little man with a paunch on him that he calls his poop deck and ornaments with tattooing, keeps reminding them. Marine boilers, unlike fused boilers, do not simmer or cook when poked up by high explosives but just blow with a great big wham and there you are, without time even to say goodbye.

This first assistant tangled with the Japs early in the war before the freighters had anything to throw except signal flares. The Japs were conserving torpedoes that day. They put twenty-four three-inch shells into his ship, once blowing a lifeboat right out from under him as it was being swung out on the davits, and blowing him back on deck. He spent eleven days in an open boat with thirty-four men, two of whom died and two of whom went crazy and had to be sat on to be kept quiet. He’s still got the look in his eyes of a fellow watching muzzle-flashes in the distance and waiting for the roar and smack to tell him whether he’s a dead pigeon or can still fly.

The oilers, wipers, firemen, and water-tenders all looked at me furtively as I walked along the narrow, open-sided companionway toward the ladder to topside. It was very quiet. Nobody said anything, but it was plain to see they hankered to go with me and see what was doing up above. I tried to walk calmly and deliberately. My heavy shoes rang against the iron way and the last thing I heard as I climbed the warm, greasy ladder was the first assistant helping a gang set in a flywheel on a refrigerator compressor and saying, ‘Easy now; easy does it.’ His voice sounded harsh and irritable.

It couldn’t have been very long between the time the ship lurched heavily to starboard and the time I reached the deck. The ships of the convoy were still wheeling in station. They were, for the most part, old iron tubs with asthmatic engines that made them bubble and wheeze in every seam. They were all straining now. The glaring sun was as unkind to them as it is to all old girls. But there was something very gallant about the way they wheeled and kept stations and fluffed themselves up martially at the smokestacks, like old soldiers on parade, trying to firm up and hide what they’d become.

One of the ships was far out of station, as it had been nearly all the way from port. It was a steam-schooner, one of those thirty-day wonders from the last war. Its heart was in the right place, as it proved by joining up in this war, but its heart had leaky valves and it just couldn’t keep from straggling out of every convoy. It had had its whole stern blown off once by a Jap torpedo and had made port, wallowing all the way and finally touching bottom in the harbor. Now its black gang was pouring it on. Black smoke was blasting out of its funnel and went streaking across the sky toward us, getting thinner and thinner until finally, when it reached us, it was as thin as a wail, like a distant, thinned-out cry of ‘Wait for me!’ Nobody was waiting.

‘They must be having the conniptions there,’ I said to the ordinary seaman standing next to me.

‘I don’t think so,’ the man said. He’s a fellow out of Lansing, Michigan, his studies having been detoured from college by the war. ‘It seems to work out in the Merchant Marine and in the Navy that if you’re the kind that gets conniptions you don’t ship out.’

The escort vessel was still boiling away at something. It was shimmering sullenly on the horizon of the brasslike sea, and you could see by its wake how fast it was going. Then it stopped, all hunkered down, whiskers twitching, feelers feeling, and stopped a long time and suddenly was off again. In a moment it was hull down on the horizon and in another moment it was out of sight. The fellows off watch stood silently, watching for the geysers to shoot up over the horizon that would tell of depth bombs. Then, Cookie, a Chinese who likes to wear his derby hat all the time and hangs it on a hook only when taking a shower, sounded chow time and the fellows all hotfooted it for the mess, their appetites plain on their faces.

Being a landlubber at sea at such a time is a nervous business because the Navy kids on the armed guard and the Merchant sailors like nothing better than to put a needle in you. You learn very fast that the great point about a contretemps is to be where it ain’t, that if you’re where the torpedo lands you haven’t got even the chance of a monkey in a dream by Frank Buck, and the only time you have a chance is if you’re aft when the torpedo strikes forward or forward when the torpedo strikes aft. Then the gunners and the sailors get into arguments as to where the subs like to hit first; the steering engine in the stern, or the engine room amidships or the bridge and control room forward.

You get to listening nervously to the arguments. You know there’s nothing you can do, and you just have to trust to luck, but you are tempted to press your luck anyway, especially when you have nothing else to do. But when you stay aft, you think of one thing and go to the waist of the ship and think of another thing and move forward, and what do you see there but the bridge, sitting up there like a tin duck in a gallery.

I think I covered the ship gingerly from bow to stern seven or eight times before I wound up on the bridge with the third mate. There was a hearty steam and clatter coming up from the officers’ mess below. The ship’s carpenter came clambering down from the flying bridge, holding his head where he had smacked it against a turnbuckle.

‘What’s the matter, Chips?’ asked the mate. Chips grinned and took off his dirty white cap, showing a small gash on his forehead.

‘The torpedo hit me here,’ he said, tapping the place and smiling.

The boatswain’s mate in charge of the armed guard yawned. ‘It looks like it might be a long night tonight,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll hit my sack and get ready for it.’

Some ordinaries and a few A.B.’s were out chipping and painting. ‘Don’t fall off,’ the captain called to them jocularly. ‘If you fall off I don’t stop for you, not for nothing.’ He spoke with the heavy contentment of a large man who has just eaten his fill.

The escort vessel that had disappeared was still patrolling around out of sight. I kept thinking of subs going along in step with us under the sea, waiting for twilight or moonlight to close in and kill. ‘Everybody is so damned casual around here,’ I said to the mate. ‘You’d think they were a bunch of limeys in some movie with Leslie Howard.’

‘It’s always like that,’ the mate said. ‘I made a few trips to Murmansk and once, when we got just fifteen miles of open water between the Germans and the ice, we pass two lifeboats full up with guys. We offer to take them aboard. “Hell, no,” they say. “We got ours once and we’ll stay where we are. You’re going to get yours soon.” In the four and a half hours we had to wait before getting ours, the ship was just like this one is; everybody minding his own business.’

I shook my head disbelievingly.

‘Hell,’ the mate growled. ‘You’re so sure we can’t lose the war. Everybody is so sure. How can you be so sure unless there’s American guys all over everywhere who don’t get all girly and goosey every time there’s a chance of their being killed?’

Still I didn’t believe that a twenty-five-year-old, even if he is a boatswain’s mate, first class, could prepare himself for a night of battle by going to sleep. But when I passed his sack, there he was, all stretched out, as deep in sleep as a baby, his chubby face all soft and pink with sleep.

The morning alarm, the convoy lurching off course, the escort going baying down the horizon and so forth, had been like the dropping of the first shoe. Now it was a question of lying still with eyes wide open waiting for the second shoe to drop.

The afternoon wore on slowly. I spent some of it picking up sunburn on the poop deck aft, along with a wiper out of the black gang who had been in the advertising business in Milwaukee making a hundred and forty dollars a week when Pearl Harbor batted him in the belfry. A gonzil, as they call the gunners, was taking clips of bullets out of ready-boxes and spreading them on deck and cleaning them with a stiff brush. He was a nineteen-year-old farm boy out of Missouri, and as he worked with pursed lips there spread out from him the slow, patient, drowsy atmosphere of chore time down on the farm.

‘I figured the Merchant Marine was the more important of the two, anyway,’ the ex-advertising man said. ‘I couldn’t get into the Navy on account of my eyes, and I couldn’t get a deck job here on account of my eyes won’t let me be any good on lookout. So, I’m down in the engine room, nervous there, let me tell you, boy, plenty nervous there, because who gets killed if not the engine room crew? You can see it yourself. When there’s trouble, who has the dirty, dangerous job of turning his back and trying to run away? Not the Navy, no; us, the Merchant Marine.’

I asked the gonzil if he was brushing off the bullets to keep the Japs from getting blood-poisoning.

‘Blood-poisoning will be the least of their troubles when these hit,’ he said.

‘Tonight?’ I asked.

‘Well, you can’t tell about the Japs,’ he said. ‘They throw rocks any time. They’re crazy for throwing rocks when you don’t expect them.’

After that I moved to amidships near the lifeboats and watched a bald-headed ordinary seaman who, two months ago, was wearing a boutonniere in his lapel as assistant manager of one of the large hotels in San Francisco. He was a curious sight as he assiduously tangled up his eleven-dollar pointed shoes and affable, deferential manner in stubborn deck gear. The afternoon wore on and wore on and then wore out, and general quarters sounded, and I went to the bridge with my pencil, prepared to go down with my pencil.

The twilight was remarkably beautiful. I did not pay much attention to it. The sun was finishing up with a purple passage, but I kept watching the troopship on ahead and wondering what was going on among those fellows. The Merchant Marine and the Navy had stacked up very nicely, showing plenty of guts in the emergency. But this was their war out here. They were the fellows fighting it, while the troops were just being carried out to their war and in the meantime had nothing to do but sit and watch and feel all sort of exposed, like pins in a bowling alley waiting for the ball to roll.

I had ridden across the country to this convoy with some of those troops and it hadn’t seemed to me that the country had done anything to build them up for the experience they were now going through. When the old A.E.F. shipped over twenty-five years ago, they sang it out, and singing makes a man feel like a flag flapping in his own wind. But the new A.E.F., if it sang, would have to sing like this:

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WHERE DO WE GO FROM here, boys?

Where do we go from here?

Anywhere from (restricted information)

To a (restricted information) pier.

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SO THE NEW A.E.F. DOES not sing. A lot of us took off for here from the Pennsylvania Station in New York. It was nearly midnight. The station was gloomy on account of the dimout. There was a big crowd pushing around in it, but everybody was quiet, and it was easy to pick out the fellows who were there to say, ‘Good-bye, mama; hello, war,’ and easy to pick out their girls. They weren’t fooling when they kissed, but were hungry and earnest. When they put their faces together, it was a moment like a bugle blowing, all solemn and with the whole heart standing at attention.

‘Come back, boy,’ you could hear one side saying with their silence, and the other side saying silently, ‘I’ll come back all right, I think.’

Then the train started to pull out and girls and women and fathers walked along the platform, some smiling a little, but most just trying to look brave, walking faster and faster with the train while the soldier boys stood in the vestibules or crouched in their berths, faces pressed against the glass, looking out until the lights ended and the tunnel began and there was nothing to look at.

This wasn’t a troop train. The troop train was on ahead and this was some kind of a mixed-up something for the leftovers and casualty replacements. A lot of the fellows felt restless and lonely and headed for the club car to get some painkillers. But the space there was all taken up by businessmen and so forth. The businessmen hadn’t had anybody to look out the window after until the last minute and were experienced travelers, so they had beat it for the club car fast. They had got all the seats there were and the comfortable standing room, too, and were drinking nightcaps and bellyaching about this and that, mostly the new taxes.

A lot of the soldiers stood around, first on one foot and then the other, listening to the bellyaching and hoping some windbag would get up and make room. But more of them shacked up in the little smoking-rooms, sitting on suitcases and duffle bags and washbasins, not talking, just listening to whatever was said.

They were afraid to talk because this was not a troop train, not one of those gorgeous ‘Tokyo or bust’ trains that nobody ever seems to get a ride on, and everybody was supposed to keep his destination secret from everybody else.

That gray goodbye feeling lasted all through the country, and the beer never did get to taste really fine and mellow until Nebraska. Nebraska was the white spot. It was the only state between New York and California that spent any time gingering up kids who were sitting lonely in a crowd and wondering if they’d ever live long enough to become twenty-five years old. All the other states stayed home, feeling shy, no doubt, about making a fuss over some guy when they didn’t know where he was going, maybe home on a pass or to Ruby, Arkansas, to guard a power station. But in Nebraska they didn’t care a hoot where a kid was going so long as he was on his way. In all the little towns there, they had women and girls in bright dresses and in their best church social manners running up and down alongside the trains with baskets of fruit, throwing oranges at every uniform they saw, and friendliness and a feeling of excitement. It lifted up the whole train.

But by night the train was out of Nebraska and into that gray goodbye feeling again. Going on the ship was like going on the train, except there was nobody to say goodbye to. There was no singing or laughing, just the businesslike clop-clop of G.I. shoes clumping up the gangplank and, when the ship let go its lines, it gave a sallow little hoot, a kind of hoot-in-hell thing, and went slopping and splashing out into the stream and that was all there was to it. This is a story that is going to be the first chapter of half the novels of the next twenty-five years, but that’s all there was to it. Not like the old days at all when a soldier got enough razzle-dazzle on his way to the ship to carry him through to where the nervousness could go out of him because he was given work to do.

A few hours out of port, the little tell-tale splashes could be seen along the sides, telling of fellows being seasick. In a ship as crowded as that when one gets sick everybody does. And altogether, all the way down the line from Penn Station to mid-ocean, it seemed to me an especially punk way to start a bunch of guys off for a fight. Necessary, true, but punk just the same, particularly so now when we were all standing around waiting for the Japs to drop the other shoe.

Nothing happened at twilight and then it was dark, real black dark. The captain said he liked black nights, the blacker the better. It gave him the feeling of cuddling up snug under a blanket, he said. He is a man who likes to sleep with a blanket pulled right over his eyes.

But the blackness did not last long. The moon poked up over the horizon and was so big and swollen it looked blistered all over. There wasn’t a cloud to hide it. It looked like one of those moons on a Pacific cruise poster and the captain swore at it with real bad language.

‘Nice shooting weather,’ I said, and the captain stamped sullenly up and down the bridge.