Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis

Author:Richard Tregaskis [Tregaskis, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

SATURDAY, AUGUST 22

This morning I went down to the Tenaru with Lt. Col. Buckley and Capt. Moran, the interpreter.

The stench of bodies strewn along Hell Point and across the Tenaru spit was strong. Many of them lay at the water’s edge, and already were puffed and glossy, like shiny sausages. Some of the bodies had been partially buried by wave-washed sand; you might see a grotesque, bloated head or twisted torso sprouting from the beach.

It was not pleasant to look at the piles of bodies on the spit. But that carnage was a pale painting, compared to the scene in the grove across the spit. That was a macabre nightmare. We saw groups of Jap bodies torn apart by our artillery fire, their remains fried by the blast of the shells. We saw machine-gun nests which had been blasted, and their crews shredded, by canister fire from our tanks. The tread tracks of one of our tanks ran directly over five squashed bodies, in the center of which was a broken machine gun on a flattened bipod.

Everywhere one turned there were piles of bodies; here one with a backbone visible from the front, and the rest of the flesh and bone peeled up over the man’s head, like the leaf of an artichoke; there a charred head, hairless but still equipped with blackened eyeballs; pink, blue, yellow entrails drooping; a man with a red bullet-hole through his eye; a dead Jap private, wearing dark, tortoise-shell glasses, his buck teeth bared in a humorless grin, lying on his back with his chest a mess of ground meat. There is no horror to these things. The first one you see is the only shock. The rest are simple repetition.

Walking among the clustered dead of the grove, we could see why it had been difficult to spot the Japs from across the river. They had been well dug in, with excellent foxholes. It had taken our tanks to flush many of them from their holes.

We found some interesting Jap equipment: several flamethrowers, which evidently had not been used; a small Jap field-piece on a little cart; bangalore torpedoes, long pipe-like bombs used to blow up barbed-wire impediments. The Japs’ packs contained canned heat, rice, cookies, soap; an extra pair of shoes and gas masks were strapped on the outside. And all the equipment was new; the Japs had been well equipped.

We saw our tank, which had been stopped by a Jap grenade or mortar. It was undamaged, except for the fact that one tread was broken clean in two. The machine was being towed away by a truck.

The snipers who remained in the grove yesterday afternoon had been almost completely cleaned out. Patrols were setting out to finish off the remainder. We could hear scattered shots coming from the eastern part of the grove.

Back at the airport, I found some long-nosed fighter planes, painted army brown, coming in for a landing. They were pursuit ships, the first Army planes to arrive in Guadalcanal. The planes bore bright insignia and spectacular individual crests.

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