The Do-or-Die Men by George W. Smith

Author:George W. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

August 21 was an especially busy day on Guadalcanal. While some of the newly arrived aircraft participated in the mop-up of Ichiki’s forces to the east, all six APDs (Manley, McKean, Stringham, Little, Gregory and Colhoun) arrived off Lunga Point early in the afternoon with 240 tons of badly needed food and supplies. This was the second run to the island these “elderly” converted destroyer transports had made in the last week. The small, lightly armed APDs, along with a few escorting destroyers, were the only U.S. Navy ships to be seen anywhere near Guadalcanal since Admiral Fletcher pulled his forces away on August 9.

Now that he had some air cover, Vandegrift sent three of the APDs over to Tulagi to shuttle the reinforced 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines to Guadalcanal where they would become his division reserve. Attached to 2/5 was a 142-man battery of 105mm guns, a platoon of engineers, a platoon from the 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion and a forty-nine-man medical detachment.

Vandegrift now had six rifle battalions and 12,000 men on Guadalcanal.

He wanted more, however. He needed an offensive force to act as his eyes and ears, a sort of fire brigade to probe and upset the enemy’s future plans. He issued orders for the 1st Raider Battalion, along with the remnants of the1st Parachute Battalion, to prepare to embark for Guadalcanal. It would take ten days to get these units to Guadalcanal because of a lack of shipping and sufficient air cover. Half the contingent arrived on August 30 and the other half came over on the 31st.

One of the APDs, the Colhoun, had a special delivery for the Raiders—a trio of “wandering cooks.” It seems that when Admiral Turner was forced to quickly withdraw his transports from Sealark Channel back on August 9, three cooks from the 1st Raider Battalion were still aboard the Colhoun.

In subsequent trips back to Guadalcanal, the Colhoun had no opportunity to visit Tulagi and drop off the cooks. This time was different. The Raiders, who had to endure the concoctions of “amateur” chefs for three weeks, greeted their long-lost comrades with wild applause, doubly so because they brought along with them some food, “pogey bait” and a good supply of cigarettes.

The three cooks had helped out in the Colhoun ’s galley during their stay aboard and made many friends among the crew, a fact that caused much personal pain the next day when the ship was sunk following a successful delivery of Raiders to Guadalcanal.

The cloudy weather also allowed the transport Betelgeuse to sneak into Kukum Landing on September 1 with 393 members of the 6th Naval Construction Battalion. The “Seabees,” as they were called, went right to work improving Henderson Field. At the same time, they began construction of a nearby field called Fighter One. Two days later, Brig. Gen. Roy S. Geiger, a legendary fighter pilot during World War I, flew in to take charge of the “Cactus Air Force” on Guadalcanal.

The Leathernecks had a little fun with the

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