Hubert Mee, 76, a gray-haired petroleum engineering consultant from Sacramento, stood on the bridge of the World Discoverer as it cruised past Cape Esperance, the northern tip of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
The ship entered Iron Bottom Sound, aka Savo Strait, a channel between Guadalcanal and Savo Island in the Florida Group.
”It was an emotional thing for me,” said the soft-spoken Mee as he looked out at Savo, a green hump rising sharply out of the sea. ”I haven`t been here for 49 years. I came on this trip to see this. It was a significant milestone in my life.”
The last time Mee was here, he was a lieutenant junior grade in the U.S. Navy standing on the bridge of USS Quincy, a 10,000-ton heavy cruiser. It was Aug. 8, 1942, a day after the Marines landed at Guadalcanal, which they took to calling simply ”the Canal.” The Quincy was one of five U.S. and two Australian cruisers, along with destroyers, acting as a screening force.
The Japanese, provoked by the U.S. invasion, dispatched five heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and a destroyer through a passage called ”the Slot” toward the landing area. A series of U.S. foul-ups led to one of the U.S. Navy`s worst defeats.
”As the Japanese approached the northern group (of U.S. cruisers that included the Quincy), they momentarily employed their searchlights to illuminate their targets and then opened fire at point blank range,”
according to an official naval account. ”So overwhelming was the Japanese fire that the heavy cruisers Quincy and Vincennes sank within an hour, and the Astoria the next morning.”
The Japanese also sank the Canberra, badly damaged the cruiser Chicago and damaged the destroyer Ralph Talbot, while losing no ships.
Mee recalled that the Quincy`s bridge received at least ”one major calibre hit.”
”It wiped out everyone on the bridge except myself. I couldn`t see anyone else. The captain, who was behind the wheel, and the navigator were killed. Fires were out of control. The ship was heeling to port. I knew it was going to roll over and go down. I got to the gun deck, pulled a seaman off. The ship went down at 2:30 a.m. about three miles off Savo.
”I was a strong swimmer. I was able to join other people, and we held on to 5-inch ammo cans. The USS Elliot, a destroyer, slowed down and took on a huge number of wounded. Later we were transferred to a transport ship, American Legion. I lost some hearing. Of the 1,050 people aboard the Quincy, 370 were killed, 150 were wounded and the remaining sailors survived uninjured.”
Earlier in the morning, Mee and a group of veterans conducted a memorial service aboard the World Discoverer and threw a wreath into the sea.
Iron Bottom Sound was appropriately named. Around Cape Esperance and Savo and along the Guadalcanal coast rest more than 50 ships and planes belonging to the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
Of all the islands on this cruise, Guadalcanal`s name is magic in the annals of World War II in the Pacific. Guadalcanal, according to David Kennedy, Stanford University`s on-board history professor, was one of four pivitol points in the Pacific war after Pearl Harbor, along with the battles of Midway, Tarawa and Okinawa.
”Guadalcanal was the first successful American offensive,” he said.
”For the Marines, Guadalcanal was remembered as an epic struggle,”
wrote John Keegan in ”The Second World War.”
”Men who had fought there bore an aura of endurance which veterans of almost no other Pacific campaign acquired. In terms of casualties it had nevertheless been a comparatively cheap victory. The Japanese had lost 22,000 killed or missing; the 1st and 7th Marine Divisions, which bore the brunt of the fighting, only a little over a thousand dead.”
Keegan described the island as ”plagued by leeches, tropical wasps and malarial mosquitoes” and wrote, ”American pilots at Henderson Field lasted only 30 days before losing quickness of hand and eye necessary to do battle.” It was in this great historic context that passengers-veteran and non-arrived at Honiara, capital of the Solomons and Guadalcanal`s main city-non-existent in 1942.
Honiara, with a population of approximately 30,000, also is the provincial capital of Guadalcanal, the Solomon`s largest island (90 miles long and 30 miles wide) with a population of 98,000.
From the ship`s deck, the signs of Honiara`s growth was apparent:
substantial warehouses at the dock, fuel storage tanks, hillsides deforested for housing and for agriculture.
Once ashore, buses wisked us past a sampling of Honiara along Mendana Avenue-provincial offices, a market, Mandarin Restaurant, a new hospital, Chinatown, Church of England, Hot Bread Kitchen and a rush of color-red, white, pink and purple hibiscus, frangipani and bougainvillia.
En route to the Solomon Peace Memorial Park, we stopped at the site of a U.S. memorial, at the time not yet started. A sign on the plot overlooking the countryside read: ”Site of United States WW II Memorial. Property of the American Battle Monuments Commission and Guadalcanal-Solomon Islands War Memorial Foundation USA. Tabu-Please Keep Out.” (The U.S. monument is scheduled to be dedicated Aug. 7, 50th anniversary of the landings.)
About half way up Mt. Austin is the austere white Solomon memorial and statue, erected by Japanese veterans in 1981. The park affords a terrific panorama of Guadalcanal. Under leaden skies, our guide pointed out the World War II sites from this point overlooking Honiara, Iron Bottom Sound and Savo Island.
”That`s Iron Bottom Sound,” said guide Martin Nielson. ”Not less than 60 ships-Japanese, American and Allied-are down there. A lot of people are down there.”
”Oh, gosh!” someone whispered.
”That`s Lungga Point, the plantation down there. And the airfield which the Japanese were building in August 1942 when the Americans landed. That`s Henderson Field, only the runway is longer now.”
One Guadalcanal veteran recalled that the valley between us and Henderson Field, now dotted with homes, was all jungle back then.
”Just northeast of Henderson Field-see that bay-is Red Beach (where 16,000 U.S. Marines came ashore over several days),” Nielson said. ”Bloody Ridge (where the Marines and Japanese fought a fierce battle) is up on the hill south of Henderson Field. We`ll be going to Red Beach, Henderson Field and Bloody Ridge.”
And that`s what we did. We walked along Red Beach, serene and peppered with tiny sea shells. A rusty mounted gun stood in the surf, pointing out to sea, a gun most likely placed there for tourists. We went to Bloody Ridge, now a pastoral ridge occupied by several families who live in thatched huts on stilts and overlook farmland.
A modest marker explained that during the six-month battle for Guadalcanal, from Aug. 7, 1942, to Feb. 9, 1943, the battle for Edson`s Ridge (Bloody Ridge) stands out as one of the most fiercely contested engagements, with troops commanded by Col. Merritt A. Edson defeating the Japanese who were trying to recapture the airfield.
And we went to Henderson Field, now a modern airport where Solomon Airways twin-engine turboprops were parked on the ramp and where you can rent an Avis or a Budget car and fill up the tank with Mobil gas. Plaques in the terminal listed Medal of Honor winners such as Capt. Joseph J. Foss, Col. Merritt A. Edson and Maj. Gen. Alexander A. Vandergrift, extraordinary heroes of their day. A rickety steel structure, once the old Henderson Field control tower, still stands.
After the bus tour I walked through undistinguished downtown Honiara and found a sign that told of an ongoing war. The sign urged residents to keep Honiara clean, healthy and beautiful and warned of disease-carrying insects:
”Every house must have proper rubbish bins for the storage of waste. Keep food safe from flies and cockroaches. Make them your enemy. Kill them. Keep your bedding, cooking and eating utensils clean. Burn and bury rubbish.” Among other somber things, malaria still plagues Guadalcanal, often described as the most heavily malaria-infested island in the world.
For veterans and non, Guadalcanal remains a place you remember forever, no matter how brief the stay.
