Can Do! (eBook)

IT WAS A WET DAWN IN the Solomons. July 1, 1943. D-Day, H-Hour at Rendova. Through murky half-light, tropical rain fell in sheets. Heavy, flat-bellied tank lighters battered down the waves—krrump, krrump—as they pushed from the transports toward East Beach. In the boats, tight-lipped Seabees, Marines and soldiers (Amphibian Task Force 31, composed of the 24th Naval Construction Battalion, [1,079 men and 32 officers] the Ninth Defense Marines and the 172nd Infantry Combat Team) crouched by the wet flanks of bulldozers and watched the palm-fringed beach edge closer. After eleven months of conquest and consolidation at Guadalcanal, our forces were at last reaching up the “slot” of the Solomons for the big Jap air base at Munda on New Georgia Island. From Rendova, Munda would be within reach of our heavy howitzers.

The high whine of Jap .25-calibers cut across the water as the bandy-legged rats in the palms began sniping at our coxswains. The men cursed, crouched lower, gripped gun-butts harder. As though the rain weren’t enough, salt water drenched the men as the boats churned through heavy surf. The boats skidded in soft sand; ramps dropped; there was a brief, fierce skirmish; and the Japs who were left alive faded back into the coconut groves. Automatic weapons troops pushed in two hundred yards to form a defense arc, while the Seabees began furiously unloading trucks, tractors, heavy guns, ammunition and supplies.

The Jap ground forces had been dispersed easily. Now the real battle was joined; the battle against nature and time and the inevitable Jap bombers. Men and supplies are vulnerable while they are in landing craft; they are even more vulnerable during the period they are on the open beach. So, in every beach operation the Seabees must drive hard to get ashore; drive even harder to unload; then exert the last drop of energy to get the supplies off the beach, dispersed and hidden.

Leading the Seabees was 48-year old Commander H. Roy Whittaker (Civil Engineer Corps, USNR, Philadelphia, Pa.), a pint-sized construction veteran with the energy of a jackhammer. He described the action:

“Where we landed the soil was unbelievably marshy,” he said. “The mud was deep and getting deeper. A swampy coconut grove lay just back of the beach, and we had to cut road through there. Guns had to be transported from our beach over to West Beach so that shells could be hurled across the narrow strip of water onto the Jap positions at Munda. And still that rain poured.

“All day long we sweated and swore and worked to bring the heavy stuff ashore and hide it from the Jap bombers. Our mesh, designed to ‘snowshoe’ vehicles over soft mud, failed miserably. Even our biggest tractors bogged down in the muck. The men ceased to look like men; they looked like slimy frogs working in some prehistoric ooze. As they sank to their knees they discarded their clothes. They slung water out of their eyes, cussed their mud-slickened hands, and somehow kept the stuff rolling ashore.

“A detachment under Irv Lee (Lieutenant Irwin W. Lee, CEC [Civil Engineer Corps], USNR, Monmouth, Ill.) fought to clear the road to West Beach. The ground was so soft that only our biggest cats could get through. The Japs were still sniping, but in spite of this the men began felling the coconut palms, cutting them into twelve-foot lengths and corrugating the road. Our traction-treaded vehicles could go over these logs, but the spinning wheels of a truck would send the logs flying, and the truck would bury itself. To pull the trucks out we lashed a bulldozer to a tree, then dragged the trucks clear with the ’dozer’s winch.

“When night came, we had unloaded six ships, but the scene on the beach was dismal. More troops, Marines and Seabees had come in, but the mud was about to lick us. Foxholes filled with water as rapidly as they could be dug. There was almost no place near the beach to set up a shelter tent, so the men rolled their exhausted, mud-covered bodies in tents and slept in the mud. As the Japs would infiltrate during the night, the Army boys holding our line in the grove would kill them with trench knives.

“Next day, at 1330, without warning, the Jap planes came in with bomb bays open. All of us began firing with what guns had been set up, but most of the Seabees had to be in the open on the beach and take it. We tried to dig trenches with our hands and noses while the Japs poured it on us.

“The first bombs found our two main fuel dumps, and we had to be there in the mud and watch our supplies burn while the Japs strafed us. One bomb landed almost under our largest bulldozer, and that big machine just reared up like a stallion and disintegrated. Then every man among us thought that his time had come. A five-ton cache of our dynamite went off, exploding the eardrums of the men nearest it. That soggy earth just quivered like jelly under us.

“When the Japs had exhausted their ammunition they flew off, leaving us to put out the fires and treat our wounded. I’ll never forget the scene on that beach. In our outfit, two of our best officers (Lieutenant Lee and Lieutenant George W. Stephenson, CEC, USNR, Klamath Falls, Ore.) and twenty-one men were dead. Many more were wounded, others were missing, and a number were out of their heads. Our galley equipment, most of our supplies, and all the men’s sea bags and personal belongings were destroyed.

“‘Okay, men,’ I yelled. ‘We got nothing left but what we got on, so let’s get back to work.’

“All that night, Doctor Duryea (Lieutenant Commander Garrett Duryea, Medical Corps, USNR, Glen Cove, N.Y.) worked with our wounded. The biggest job was to get them clean. That’s one thing about being a Seabee. Aboard ship you bathe, wash down with antiseptic, and put on clean clothing before an action. In the Air Force you can take a bath before you take off. But when a Seabee gets hit, he’s usually on a beach in the mud. Mud seems to be our element. When we die, we die in the mud.

“Next day, while we worked in relays, chaplains from the Army and Marines helped us bury our dead. Three more had died during the night. Not one of those boys would have ever thought of himself as a hero, but I felt proud to have been their commanding officer. They were construction men, most of them from the oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas, and, with never a complaint, they had died in the mud trying their damnedest to get a job done. In any story of the Seabees they deserve to be named.

They were Edgar Barton, Seaman first, Tecumseh, Okla.; William S. Byrd, Machinist’s Mate second, Lookeba, Okla.; Robert K. Evans, Chief Carpenter’s Mate, Holdenville, Okla.; Charles Gambrell, Seaman first, Vain, Okla.; William P. Rogers, Gunner’s Mate first, Wynnewood, Okla.; Tom Thompson, Machinist’s Mate second, Oklahoma City; Gustav F. Dresner, Chief Carpenter’s Mate, Houston, Tex.; Ralph C. Wendell, Boatswain’s Mate second, Rockport, Tex.; Lee Arthur Wilson, Chief Carpenter’s Mate, Del Rio, Tex.; George W. Coker, Boatswain’s Mate first, Shreveport, La.; William H. Perkins, Shipfitter first, Keithville, La.; Raymond R. Lovelace, Carpenter’s Mate first, Martel, Tenn.; Joe Wheeler Plemons, Machinist’s Mate first, Harriman, Term.; Robert Dixie Roach, Seaman second, DeQueen, Ark.; Stacy Romine, Seaman second, Menlo, Ga.; Clarence G. Lambesis, Chief Storekeeper, Chicago, Ill.; Max J. Grumbach, Shipfitter third, Hoboken, N.J.; Robert S. Milligan, Storekeeper second, Summit, N.J.; Harold D. Rosendale, Shipfitter first, Sandusky, Ohio; Edward W. Labedz, Seaman first, West New Brighton, N.Y.; Charles H. Long, Fireman first, Flushing, N.Y.; Joseph M. Tabaczynski, Seaman second, Woodbridge, N.Y.; and John M. Young, Shipfitter first, Garden City, N.Y.

“By the morning of the fourth day, we had opened the road to West Beach, but what a road it was! We had literally snaked those big 155’s [155 mm artillery] through two miles of mud, and the Marines began setting them up. We were also developing a storage area some distance from the beach and were trying desperately to reduce our hazards on the beach. It takes men with real guts to unload on an open beach without air cover.

“Our men had been under constant strain for ninety hours; at least fifty of them were running high temperatures from constant exposure to mud and water; they could only jump between gasoline drums and powder barrels when the Japs came over; and the beach, as always, was a potential torch with ammunition, diesel oil and gasoline everywhere. The mud was too deep for trucks. To move the inflammable stuff back into the storage areas, the men had to emplace themselves in the mud in bucket-brigade fashion. For hours they’d work that way, passing the heavy packages back into the camouflage area and sinking deeper into the mud each time they handled a package. And still the rain poured.

“Late that afternoon we got our first big thrill. From over on West Beach, the Marines opened up on Munda with the 155’s. Our men stopped work and cheered almost insanely. The others stationed with bulldozers and winches along the road to West Beach joined in the cheer. No group of men had ever endured more in order for guns to begin firing. It hurts American construction men down deep to have to lie in mud and be strafed by Japs; and now those 155’s were giving it back to the Japs with interest. The firing was a tonic to us. The men went back...