When Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher reported on August 8, 1942, that his carriers had just 21 operational aircraft left out of 99 and raised the question of fuel, the decision that followed emptied the waters off Guadalcanal. The operation plan had given cargo ships four days in the target area, and the 1st Marine Division had built its supply expectations around that timeline. That evening, a boat carried General Alexander Vandegrift to the flagship McCawley, where Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner informed him that every troopship and cargo ship would weigh anchor at 6:00 the next morning. With the carriers leaving, Turner refused to leave ships loaded with ammunition, rations, and medical stores sitting in an open roadstead with no air cover.
Vandegrift argued the point and lost. The beach itself had already broken down before anyone mentioned departing. Cargo had been coming ashore faster than it could be moved off the sand since the first afternoon. The shore party’s labor section had been sized according to a plan that underestimated how many men it takes to empty a boat, and no one was available to make up the difference because the units that might have supplied the muscle were in the jungle searching for an enemy who had already fled.
At one point on August 8, 100 loaded boats sat on the sand while 50 more circled outside the surf waiting for a place to land. By 11:30 that night, the shore party commander signaled the general that unloading had gone entirely out of hand and asked that the ships stop sending cargo until the beach could be cleared. Three hours later, the amphibious force commander agreed to hold everything where it was. So the withdrawal, when it came, took away ships that were still largely full.
By sundown on August 9, the water was empty. What remained on that shoreline, besides 11,000 Marines and a captured airstrip no aircraft had yet used, was a scatter of wooden landing craft and the men who steered them. Those men were not sailors of the United States Navy. Most of them belonged to the Coast Guard, and many of the coxswains had spent their working lives at life-saving stations on the American coast, launching pulling boats through surf to rescue drowning people.
That was the whole of their profession, and it turned out to be exactly the skill the Navy had no reserve of anywhere. They had been doing the work from the first hour of the operation. The ship that took the column into the anchorage off Beach Red on the morning of the 7th was the Hunter Liggett, a former Army troop ship with a Coast Guard captain and crew, carrying 700 men and just under 40 landing craft. The order that sent the first waves in went up from her halyards.
At Tulagi that same morning, four Coast Guard coxswains took the first Raider Battalion in under fire from an old four-stack destroyer converted to carry Marines. The Navy gave all four of them the Silver Star for it. The next day, the Liggett shot down four Japanese bombers and took no damage. The arrangement that put them there was almost new.
In the spring of 1941, the Chief of Naval Operations proposed moving the Coast Guard under the Navy Department. The objection came not from the Navy but from the Treasury, which owned the service and did not want to give it up. The president signed the order in June. Through that spring and summer, surfmen came in from life-saving stations all over the country to learn the new landing craft, training in Chesapeake Bay off a Maryland village called Solomons and on the North Carolina coast at Onslow Bay.
By September, the two service chiefs had agreed to hand across 2,100 officers and men to man troop ships. On November 1, the whole service went over. That history matters because it corrects the story people often tell. The Navy did not have the Coast Guard forced on it and did not want it out of the way.
The Navy asked for it and was turned down by a different cabinet department. What nobody in the fleet wanted was the job the Coast Guard then got handed. A Coast Guard officer writing in the Naval Institute’s journal in 1946 put the arrangement in a single line. Serving with the Navy meant being fit for any task that did not involve heavy guns and that nobody else wanted.
Getting men out of a ship and onto a beach sat near the top of that list. It carried no prize money, no gunnery pennant, and no prospect of a command at sea, and it was performed in a plywood boat with an engine in the back. Which raises the question the surviving paperwork has to answer. A boat pool is a cargo handling organization.
It exists to shuttle stores and men between anchored ships and dry land, and it has no other purpose written down anywhere. Inside a month, the one at Guadalcanal was hunting submarines, standing picket in the middle of the sound at night, running mail, salvaging wrecks, carrying scouts behind enemy lines, and fighting its way onto a defended shoreline. None of that is boat pool work. The base itself went in earlier than most accounts suggest.
At half past 2:00 on the afternoon of August 8, while the beach behind was still jammed and a full day before the ships left, Lieutenant Commander Dwight Dexter came ashore from the Hunter Liggett with 30 Coast Guardsmen and set up what the Navy called a naval operating base. The code word for Guadalcanal was Cactus, so that became the name. Dexter put his headquarters in the manager’s house of the Lever Brothers coconut plantation at a village called Kukum, just west of Lungga Point, and his men built a tool shed beside it because the boats broke every day and there was nowhere else within 600 miles to fix them. The decision had not been taken on the beach in a panic.
Three weeks before the landing, the force had practiced its assault at Koro in the Fiji group, and the rehearsal had gone badly. Out of that failure came a firm conclusion. Whatever else happened, there would have to be an organization ashore that owned the landing craft, maintained them, and ran them, rather than each ship keeping its own boats and taking them away when it left. The planners saw the problem for what it was.
Then they answered it with one lieutenant commander, 30 men, and whatever small craft the departing ships happened to leave behind. The number would grow to about 50, including a handful of Navy enlisted men. It remains the one naval operating base in American history manned and run by the Coast Guard. In the paperwork, it also carried a second and much longer title: Local Defense Force and Anti-Submarine Patrol, Guadalcanal and Gavutu, which gives some idea of how many jobs had been added to the first one.
At its height, the base worked about 50 craft. Something over 30 were Higgins boats and their ramp successors, and a dozen were the larger tank lighter. The Higgins boat was plywood, carried 36 men, made nine knots flat out, and had two light machine guns mounted forward. Men went over the sides of it.
That was the entire fighting equipment of the organization now responsible for keeping a Marine division alive. The submarine business started at once. There were no patrol craft at Guadalcanal, none at all. So for the first 10 days, the base hung depth charges on a landing craft, set them for 50 feet, and sent it out at night to look for Japanese submarines.
On one of the first patrols, a submarine switched on a floodlight and lit the boat up. It crash dived before anyone aboard could do anything about it, which cost that crew the distinction of being the first landing craft in history to sink a submarine. Then it stopped being funny. On another night, a Japanese destroyer ran down one of the patrol boats, machine-gunned the crew in the water, and left.
One man survived by floating face down until the ship had gone, then swam for the nearest island in American hands. The Coast Guard’s own historian puts that swim at 13 miles to Tulagi. Another account of the same night has it at 12 miles and a different island. Nobody has settled which is right.
The man himself got back to the base afterwards by stowing away on an aircraft. In the middle of August, the base started a mail and shuttle run across the 18 miles of water to Tulagi. On the first day, a submarine surfaced behind the boat and opened fire with its deck gun. The boat was losing the race when marine artillery on Tulagi dropped shells around the submarine and drove it under.
The run stopped there until aircraft could cover it. The crews also fitted themselves into the gaps nobody had planned for. Sailors went into the water almost every week that autumn from both navies because that sound filled up with sinking ships faster than any water in the war. After the night actions, the landing craft went out and picked men up, Allied survivors and Japanese prisoners alike, and brought in bodies for burial ashore.
When aircraft came down within reach, they went out for the pilots. On one of those trips, the crew pulled in an American flyer and then went after the Japanese pilot he had shot down, who tried to shoot the American with a pistol that had been in salt water, then tried to shoot himself, then tried to swim into the boat’s propellers. They hauled him aboard before he could manage it. By September, the boats were putting parties of native scouts and Marines ashore at night under the direction of a British colonial officer, and Dexter had detached one of his signalmen to run the water side of it.
They carried Marine detachments 60 miles across open sea to the Russell Islands and went back for them afterwards. They positioned boats in the middle of the sound at night, 10 miles from land in either direction, as pickets to report Japanese warships coming down. They ate well enough by the standards of the island because somebody worked out that a hand grenade thrown into a school of fish made dinner. They were shelled about 30 times, a good deal of it by a Japanese gun in the hills the Marines had named Pistol Pete, which wrecked the coconut log signal tower the base used for daylight signaling to ships offshore.
They were bombed more than 110 times. A floatplane came over most nights and circled for hours, dropping a bomb now and then to keep everyone awake, and the men named the lagoon they lived beside Sleepless Lagoon. Dexter kept a captured three-barreled Japanese machine gun near his headquarters for air raids and is credited with bringing down at least one aircraft with it. Two of his signalmen slept in a shelter 5 feet by 8 built out of packing crates with a tent for a roof.
On September 27, the base got the job it had not been built for. Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Puller put three companies of the 7th Marines into landing craft at Lunga and had them set down in a small cove west of Point Cruz behind the Japanese line. Point Cruz was enemy ground, and the Japanese had been using it to watch the base’s boats going about their work. The Marines got ashore unopposed in the afternoon and pushed inland to a ridge.
Their gunfire support was the destroyer Monssen, which had to pull off station within the hour when 17 bombers arrived overhead. At almost the same moment, a Japanese force came in hard from the west and broke the Marines up. The officer commanding the landing party was killed, and one of the company commanders was hurt. The battalion, which had gone ashore behind enemy lines without taking a radio, had no way of telling anyone.
What they did instead was take off their undershirts and arrange them on the ridge to spell the word “help. ” A Marine dive-bomber pilot saw it. Second Lieutenant Dale Leslie passed the word by radio to a Marine unit that could act on it, which is how the division came to learn that a battalion it had put ashore that morning was being pushed back into the water. By 4:00 in the afternoon, Puller had gone aboard Monssen to direct the covering fire himself.
At Kukum, the crews readied the boats. The same craft that had carried the Marines out that morning went back for them. The fire that met them came from three positions at once: from Point Cruz on one side, from the high ground the Marines had abandoned, and from the ground to the east. It broke up the first wave and hit the crews, who had nothing to answer with but two light machine guns apiece and no armor of any kind.
The boats behind hesitated. Leslie brought his dive-bomber down over them and pushed them in, strafing the shoreline as he went. They took the battalion off. A signalman named Douglas Monroe put his boat between the enemy and the last men waiting out, which is what a life-saving crew is trained to do when the sea is the thing trying to kill the swimmer.
A single bullet caught him in the head with the last of them aboard. Japanese fire hit two Navy coxswains in the same operation, and both of them received the Navy Cross. Admiral Halsey recommended Monroe for the Medal of Honor, and no other Coast Guardsman has ever been given one. The Marine Division’s own report gives the battalion’s loss for that afternoon as 24 killed and 23 hurt.
The war diary of the amphibious force, written up the same month, gives 42 killed and 129 hurt. The division sat nearer to the event, and its figures are the ones historians take. Both figures sit in the files, and each of them is somebody’s honest tally. So the answer to why a cargo handling outfit was doing all of that work is not complicated.
The paperwork gives it without much comment. There is nothing else. There were no patrol craft, no small warships, no harbor organization, and no shore establishment of any other kind on Guadalcanal in the autumn of 1942. Between the ships that came in and left again fast and the men in the jungle, the one thing under American control that floated night and day, week after week, was a wooden boat with a Coast Guard coxswain in it.
Every job that touched the water therefore arrived at the same 50 men, and they took it because nobody had arranged an alternative. The answer the fleet had ready for the hardest problem of its first offensive was 30 men and a tool shed. Everything that reached that island crossed a few hundred yards of open water in a boat. Somebody else was steering, and that short leg was the part of the operation nobody had planned for.
By November, the first men were finished. Malaria took Dexter home on the 5th of that month, and it took the signalman who had stood beside Monroe at Point Cruz, who left with a Navy Cross and a commission as an officer. Other men came in and the base carried on, and Lunga Point stayed the working anchorage of the Solomons long after the fighting there had ended. The unit’s own ledger for the Guadalcanal months is short.
The base collected one Medal of Honor, one Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star, two Commendation Medals, and a number of Purple Hearts. When the President gave the 1st Marine Division its unit citation, the award went to the division “reinforced,” and that single word is the whole of the official acknowledgement that the boats and the men in them were part of it. At least five of Dexter’s men never left the island.