The Hooligans Page 3

  Things finally quieted down about five minutes later. I got out from under “my” tree trunk and patted it gratefully. I saw Greer pop his head out of a trench and scan the skies. There was a fierce gasoline fire out in the harbor and I thought it might be a bomber until I remembered the PT boat that had been coming our way. I finally made it over to the main medical tent and saw that their first strafing run on the field hospital had done a lot more than just stitch holes in the tents and the tin roofs of the outbuildings. They’d torn everything inside into junk, and there were still some small fires burning from incendiary rounds. The dead had been removed by the time we got there, but evidence of their demise was frightfully clear. Sixteen patients and the SMO had been killed. A series of popping sounds erupted as we stood there taking in the destruction. Everyone flinched, and then we realized what those noises were: the ropes supporting the tent were breaking and in just a few seconds we were all enveloped by the heavy canvas fabric as the tent fell in, pressing us down onto the ground.

  I ended up face-to-face with Greer under all that heavy canvas. He could only shake his head. We had to wait for some Marines to cut it off us. Once out, I told Greer we’d have to start over from scratch. “With what?” he asked plaintively, looking around at the crowd of hospitalmen and Marines trying to find someplace to put the wounded being brought out of the bomb shelters. Then I remembered those four longhouses I’d seen when we’d first crawled ashore after our PT boat sank. Wooden pole construction with palm frond roofs. Maybe forty feet long. I asked a Marine sergeant if he had comms with Captain VanPiet. If so, can he send a jeep?

  Fifteen minutes later a jeep appeared, grinding its way up the hill to our destroyed medical compound. But this wasn’t a jeep for me: this was Captain VanPiet’s personal jeep. He stood up in the passenger’s seat when he saw the collapsed medical tent, and then he saw Smythe. He began yelling orders at poor Smythe, who stared blankly back at him and tried awkwardly to salute from a sitting position. I hurried over and interrupted VanPiet’s gathering verbal fusillade. He asked where the SMO was, so I gave him the bad news. He started to calm down. I told him that I was the acting SMO, for better or worse. Then I pointed to the wrecked medical compound.

  “This can’t be fixed,” I declared. “They shot everything to pieces. We need a new location—and buildings, not tents.”

  “Oh, ya?” he responded. “And I would like a suite in downtown Amsterdam, soft beds, hot and cold running women, and a gallon of schnapps. Can you get me that, hanh?”

  “I want those buildings I saw up on the hill where we came ashore,” I said. “Longhouses. Four of them. I want them right now.”

  “The island people use those,” he explained patiently. “They were the local provincial headquarters buildings, before the Japs invaded, back when the Aussies were in charge. And they’re not buildings like you think. They’re more like meeting places where you might host a barbeque.”

  “Right now,” I said, “we have three slit trenches, thirty-six broken cots, a pile of broken medical equipment, and a fully air-conditioned tent.”

  “Air-conditioned?”

  “Yes, sir, as in there are more holes than canvas. We must get our more seriously wounded people under a roof. Then we’ll need generators. And screens. And a cemetery, I suppose.”

  That took the sarcasm right out of him. “Okay, Doctor, Okay. I’ll see what I can do. But my bosses in Nouméa have told me not to antagonize the natives if we can help it. We don’t need them taking sides with the Japs.”

  I looked around. The PT boat out in the harbor had gone down. There were two more out there now, probably looking for survivors. The one thing I didn’t see were any of the islanders. I asked VanPiet where they were.

  “Over there, I assume,” he said, pointing to a much larger island across the harbor. “That’s Florida Island. Behind that is Malaita. Most of the Tulagi people fled when the Marines came ashore. Supposedly Florida is secure, but the jungle bunnies tell me they’re still mopping up pockets of Japs in the area. The natives have mostly gone to ground, probably to see who wins. They’re not stupid.”

  That the Marines were still encountering Japs was not good news, but I was getting tired of arguing. “Well, they’re not here, Captain,” I said. “And we are, and we need basic shelter for our field hospital, such as it is. What if I just take over those four buildings? Nouméa’s a thousand miles from here. If someone at Navy headquarters objects, they can come out and evict us. And then we have to talk about standing up a surgery.”

  VanPiet just stared at me. “Anything else, mijn heer?” he asked finally.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll need four more of those longhouses. With walls, this time. By tomorrow would be nice.”

  VanPiet grinned, and then shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “But tomorrow might be difficult. Things don’t go fast here in the Solomon Islands.”

  “Bettys do,” I said.

  His face sobered. “Ya, that they do,” he said quietly. “Look: I have an idea for your surgery building. I took over a rubber plantation owner’s house as my headquarters after the landing. It’s about a mile from here. We have a generator. And walls. And screens on the windows, even. Get your surgery set up there and we’ll get some longhouses built next to that.”

  “You have Seabees here?”

  “No, but we have Marines. I’ll ask them for help. All you have to do is tell them it’s impossible and they work wonders. In the meantime, those longhouses up there are yours. I’ll get you some transport to move the wounded. What’s the matter with Lieutenant Smythe over there?”

  I told him, and he made a disgusted sound. “I’ll fix that,” he said. “We have no time for that bullshit. Japs’ll be back soon enough.”

  THREE

  Captain VanPiet delivered. We got trucks to move our wounded from the wreck of the field hospital to the longhouses. He galvanized LTJG Smythe into taking charge of the move. Greer, Miller, and I moved the surgical equipment trunk to the planter’s house with the help of VanPiet’s four-man staff and a squad of Marines. The sprawling, single-story plantation building had porches on all four sides, a large kitchen, four bedrooms, and an expansive living room. We decided to set up the surgical theater in the living room. The bedrooms had been turned into offices of sorts, with one of them being the island’s communications center. Captain VanPiet had kept one bedroom; the staff slept outside in one of those boxy, eight-man Marine tents.

  Most important, we had electricity. We took the dining room table, which was an eight-foot-long Philippine mahogany beauty imported many years ago, and made it into the operating table. The Marines kludged up a surgical light fixture by taking four headlights from a damaged truck and wiring them into one of the overhead fans. The surgical equipment trunk had all the essential stuff we needed to operate, but no way to sterilize the instruments. The Marines brought up two fifty-five-gallon oil hydraulic drums from the wreckage of the harbor. They’d cut the tops off and then filled them halfway up with black sand. Then they’d put them on a roller assembly for twenty-four hours, after which the insides fairly glistened. Then they’d cut them in half lengthwise, made a firepit, and set them up as boiling water sinks. That took two days, but then we were in business, but only for the most drastically urgent surgeries, such as amputations to prevent gangrene.

  Triage was a painful rite of passage into treatment. As casualties came in, the hospitalmen would scissor off the bandages to inspect the wounds. If they were already showing signs of infection, the patient would get a dusting of sulfa powder, something for the pain, and then be placed aside. The wound would be left unbandaged, on the theory that fresh air was better for it than a blood-soaked and probably contaminated dressing. With only one surgeon available, preference had to be given to casualties with no signs of sepsis. The sulfa powder worked, sometimes, and then the larger injury could be treated. Far too many of them died from general septicemia. Captain VanPiet was unaware of this procedure, but when I
explained it to him he sent a message to General Vandegrift on Guadalcanal, in which he summarized what we’d done and what we needed, which of course was everything: anesthetic and a second anesthetist, more bandages, oxygen tanks, sulfa pills and powder, blood plasma, an autoclave, and on and on.

  By then the Marines and some locals had erected four longhouses around the planter’s house so we could have, however primitive, pre-op and post-op facilities. They made beds using bamboo from the neighboring islands of Tanambogo and Gavutu, scenes of heavy fighting on Tulagi’s D-day. They wove netting made of strips of steamed palm leaves hung vertically, which would allow some air in and keep the larger insects out.

  Lieutenant Commander Garr responded quickly, again using the PT boat squadron. They sent four hospitalmen and a full bag of surgical supplies, but no docs. About the time we thought we had what we needed to expand our care, a cruiser was towed into the harbor, dangerously down by the bow and showing signs of being worked over by heavy-caliber gunfire. The first eighty feet of the ship’s front end had been blown right off by a Japanese torpedo. The cruiser would have normally carried a medical complement of one or maybe even two ship’s doctors, a chief hospitalman anesthetist, and four hospitalmen. Unfortunately, they, along with twenty-four patients, had been killed in the battle by a direct eight-inch hit on the main sick bay.

  Two destroyers, who had been her escorts, came in with her. We had to send most of their seriously wounded patients over to Henderson Field on a large landing craft escorted by three PT boats. Between what was left of the cruiser’s crew and the crew aboard the two tin cans, they made the big ship seaworthy enough to get to Nouméa in New Caledonia. There they would attach a temporary bow structure, sufficient for her to make the long voyage back to one of the West Coast shipyards.

  We did what we could for her wounded, which was mostly a triage process, but after our first report to the bosses across the strait, the Navy finally recognized that one surgeon working in a Tulagi planter’s dining room wasn’t going to cut it. Guadalcanal had no harbor. Damaged ships were ordered to pull in close to shore off Lunga Point and put their casualties ashore with the help of Marine landing craft. Too many of the ships were coming in with double crews: their own and the bloodied survivors from ships that had been sunk out in what they were now calling Ironbottom Sound. Garr and his teams could stabilize the most serious cases, and then seaplanes from Nouméa could transport them to the real hospital that had gone operational there. Once they’d off-loaded their casualties, damaged warships could come into Tulagi harbor and catch their breath. VanPiet’s mission now became one of being in charge of a temporary shipyard.

  That left my little medical team with a more manageable workload. The Marines had just about cleared out all the remaining Japs, so most of my work came from that PT boat squadron across the harbor. We weren’t told anything about what they did operationally, but almost every morning there were stretcher jeeps coming from the harbor to the planter’s house. The biggest problems were burn cases. The PT boats had three gasoline engines that used super-high-octane aviation gas. In the hot tropics of the Solomons, burn cases usually did not make it.

  A four-man Marine recon unit came to the headquarters and reported something interesting a week after that cruiser limped out of the harbor. They’d been on Tanambogo, combing the island for the remnants of the Japanese naval infantry who’d put up such a fight when the Americans landed. They’d discovered a cleverly disguised observation post inside a hillside cave. The Japs manning it would have had a clear view of just about everything going on over on Tulagi, which was connected to Tanambogo by a tidal causeway. After killing the four Japs inside with a grenade, they’d found detailed drawings of the installations on Tulagi, including our efforts to rebuild the harbor facilities and our makeshift hospital, and an HF radio. They couldn’t read the Japanese script, but it was obvious that Rabaul was being kept well informed.

  “Why haven’t they sent Bettys?” VanPiet wondered.

  “Probably waiting for you to make it worth their while,” the young Marine first lieutenant replied laconically.

  That night Captain VanPiet held a council of war. He pointed out that the sudden silence from Tanambogo would probably provoke the Japs into attacking the Tulagi base again. He went around the table, asking his Marine counterpart, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Bates, USMC, how we could beef up our defenses. That led to a discussion about bomb shelters and dispersal of docked supplies. It was Randy Smythe, of all people, who came up with an idea. Captain VanPiet had forcefully shared his thinking with him after his “fainting spell,” and he’d come back on the line, helping me in the surgery when not managing the clutch of patients out in the longhouses.

  “What about the PT boats?” he asked.

  “What about them?” VanPiet said.

  “Well, the ones I’ve been on have two twin 50-caliber machine gun mounts, a 20 mm anti-aircraft cannon, and two single 50-caliber mounts. The last time the Bettys came in, they came from the east, over Florida Island. There are twelve PT boats over there across the harbor. Why not station them in the waters between Florida and Tulagi so they can welcome the Bettys when they show up? That’s a lot more firepower than we have here on the island. The boats go out at night, but the Bettys come during daylight hours, so at least some of them should be available.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Bates thought that was a great idea. He pointed out that we’d need warning that the Bettys were inbound. It would also be nice to have a couple of fighters from Henderson Field in the area. That meant we had to tie into Henderson Field’s warning network. Captain VanPiet told Bates to take charge and make that happen. I later learned that that was about all you had to say to a Marine officer. I wondered how much time we would have now that the Japs’ observation post had been eliminated. I also wondered about the PT boats’ availability. If they’d been out all night, they’d need rest and repairs during the day. I’d seen enough casualties from that squadron to know that they didn’t just go out for a moonlight cruise. Captain VanPiet told me my part in this endeavor was to organize a way to quickly move patients from the longhouses to bomb shelters. He then thanked Smythe for his idea, causing that young man to positively beam. Redemption had been achieved.

  We got one day and night to make our preparations. We’d chosen not to mark the hospital area or buildings with red crosses as this seemed to only attract the murderous bastards. The problem was that the Japs had been watching all the activity around the planter’s house from that hill on Tanambogo. They had to know that it had become a worthy target for the bombers, along with the new pontoon piers and some ship repair Quonset huts that were going up. Bates came to see me the morning after our meeting. He told me it wasn’t possible to dig out real shelters without Seabees and their equipment. He suggested another approach: make the Tulagi medical compound, the planter’s house and the longhouses, into an anti-aircraft position. In his planning sessions with the PT boat people he’d learned that when one of their boats came in torn up beyond reasonable repair, they’d strip her for parts and then discard the hull. If two engines were damaged but the third one wasn’t, they’d extract that engine. Same with guns, radar sets, radios. Everything would go into storage for another day.

  “Thing is, Doc,” Bates said, “they have three sets of rescued twin-barreled 50-cals over there. Assuming the bombers are coming soon, I suggest you and your people dig out three AA positions facing east, toward Florida Island. We’ll get you some gunners and a bunch of sandbags. Three of those twin mounts can put out a total of forty-five hundred rounds a minute, which damn well oughta make a pilot go somewheres else.”

  I liked the idea. In fact, we could probably get some of our wounded-getting-better guys to help. I’d have preferred having some deep underground bomb-shelter bunkers under the house, but Bates was right: that would take the Seabees.

  “The PT boat guys gonna play?” I asked.

  He grinned. “Hell, yes, they are. I found out whe
n I was over there that the Japs have equipped a bunch’a Kawanishis for night flying. Apparently, they cruise around the Sound until they see a PT boat’s wake in the dark. Water here is really phosphorescent at night. They get behind them, quiet down their engines, fly up the wake, and then bomb the boats. Those boys over there got them a serious hate-on for those big seaplanes. They said they’d need about an hour’s advanced warning to get set up, but they’ll come out on ten minutes’ notice if that’s all they can get.”

  The next morning a Marine major came over from Henderson Field to brief us on the latest intelligence regarding Jap aviation units and warships up at Rabaul on New Britain Island. Captain VanPiet called a quick unit-commanders meeting to hear him out.

  “The Japs are masters of the night-fight when it comes to ship engagements,” the major began, “as we’ve so painfully learned. Their cruisers and destroyers are faster than ours, more heavily armed, and they both carry what the Japs call the Long Lance torpedo. Our torpedoes, well, lemme just say, are seriously inferior to the Long Lance. Worse, we think their battleships are gonna get into the game here. You’ve seen the pictures: great big black monsters with guns everywhere and those big pagoda superstructures up front. But: like all big ships, they’re vulnerable to air power, so they like to come down through the Solomon Island chain late in the afternoon so as to get here at night, when our planes can’t see ’em and they have all the advantages.

  “It’s the opposite for their bomber force. They have to fly five, six hundred or so miles just to get here, and they need daylight to do their work. So: they launch at oh-three-hundred from Rabaul to arrive down here at sunup, do their work, and then get the hell out of here before our guys can come up and tear them up. In practical terms, this means the Navy ships can expect to fight at around midnight. Anybody who qualifies as Betty-meat can expect an attack in the morning, within an hour after sunrise.”