In The Shadows of Guadalcanal by Phillip Parotti

Author:Phillip Parotti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781636241630
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The freighter did not need assistance; some oil drums had been set afire on her foc’sle, and once her crew managed to push those over the side, the fire the attack had started didn’t spread, so that after another hour’s steaming, she was able to drop her anchor in the waters just off Tulagi’s northern coast and begin unloading there into some LCMs that were quickly dispatched to her side.

The LCI managed to get herself alongside a makeshift pier that Marine engineers and Seabees had constructed. In less than thirty minutes, she debarked the troops she had been carrying, and after an hour more, she also managed to offload most of the supplies that they had brought with them. In the meantime, PC-450 had managed to tie up alongside the single tender that was sheltering under the antiaircraft umbrella that the island provided, and there, without hindrance, Tony saw his ship refueled.

The immediate problem, however, that had to be tended to was that of two men who had been wounded during the Japanese attack. Stokes, one of the men helping to man the K-guns, had been sliced across the left arm by a fragment from one of the Jap rounds which had splintered against the ship. One of Ted’s people, a machinist striker who had been climbing the ladder toward the main deck when the attack came in, had been struck by another fragment that had ricocheted off a hatch combing, penetrated his thigh, forced him to fall several feet back into the engine room, and added insult to injury by causing him to break his ankle.

“I’ll be sorry to lose this man,” Tony said to the Navy doctor who attended the sailor, “but it’s a cinch that we can’t take him back with us.”

“No,” said the Navy doctor. “He can’t keep his feet. We’ll bed him down with the wounded coming over from the Canal and send him out of here tomorrow night. We’ve got a landing ship that comes in here every three days in order to pick up the seriously wounded and ship them back to the hospital at Nouméa. And after that, I don’t know where they’re sent. You may get him back, and you may not.”

“Just as long as he recovers,” Tony said.

“No worries about that. He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “And get a purple heart into the bargain.”

By noon that day, the PC and the LCI were refueled and ready to depart, but on orders from the naval commander on the island, both ships remained where they were, with guns manned but with instructions not to depart until the sun had set and their chances for getting back out into Indispensable Strait without being attacked from the air had improved. As a result, when the Japs threw in another air raid later that afternoon, the gunners aboard PC-450 and the LCI added their rounds to the antiaircraft fire that the guns on the island threw up and had the satisfaction of seeing at

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