Jack Henry Gardner

Although he registered for Selective Service in the summer of 1941, Gardner decided to throw in his lot with the Marine Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor. He volunteered for a four-year hitch starting on 9 January 1942, and was soon sweating out boot camp. He made fast friends with another trainee, Indiana-born Hubert “Stub” Morse, and the two stuck together all through their time at Parris Island. Both boys were good marksmen, especially with the Browning Automatic Rifle, but didn’t want to “get stuck carrying one of those monsters in a rifle company.” At qualification time, they conspired to shoot at each other’s targets in hopes of sneakily scotching their scores – but this backfired when they received the highest marks in their platoon.^[2] Their predictions came true when they joined Company A, First Battalion, 1^st Marines, and were assigned duty as automatic riflemen.

While training in North Carolina, Gardner got to know Marines from all over the country, including Private John C. Buckhalt of Miami. He also received a promotion to private first class, which helped lessen the burden of the BAR.

In the late spring of 1942, the 1^st Marines crossed the country by train and boarded the USS Barnett – “an old bucket of bolts… a Marine-swallowing monster who could ingest a thousand or so troops with all their equipment and supplies at one gulp.”^[3] They sailed from San Francisco in mid-June, enduring a three-week journey of rough weather, crowded living, and the depredations of King Neptune’s Court as they crossed the equator. PFC Gardner arrived in New Zealand as a “Trusty Shellback,” but had little time to enjoy the unfamiliar sights of Wellington. The Marines were put to work unloading and re-loading their ship, in preparation for an amphibious assault just weeks away. They re-boarded the Barnett on 22 July, and this time were told their destination: Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands. Officers briefed the men: this was the real deal, the battle they had trained for, and that casualties in the first waves were expected to reach eighty percent.

The Barnett arrived at Guadalcanal early on the morning of 7 August 1942. Some of the Marines were anxious ahead of their trial by fire, as Stub Morse remembered:

There was a flurry of those “close friend pacts” being arranged… “if I don’t make it, send this suff to my mother. It’s all addressed, and I’ll do the same for you!” Jack Gardner wouldn’t participate. He scoffed at the whole thing and said he would take his things home by himself. He seemed to refuse to face the fact that he might not survive. But none of us really wanted to believe that, so we didn’t fault him for it.^[4]

Much to everyone’s surprise, the landing was completely unopposed. Instead of their first taste of combat, Gardner and his buddies enjoyed their first taste of tropical coconuts on the landing beach.

The 1^st Marines struggled through the jungle, cutting through vines and underbrush and ducking at the occasional sniper shot from up ahead. The days were exhausting and the nights nerve-wracking – full of unfamiliar sounds and the ever-present fear of a sudden Japanese attack. They reached Henderson Field and, finding it already conquered, moved in to defensive positions. It seemed that the few Japanese troops had withdrawn towards the Matanikau River in the west; in the eastern sector, there seemed to be nothing but jungle. Marines griped about the lack of food, the dull working parties, the heat, and the bugs. “We had started going out on patrols,” commented George Lundgren of A/1/1, but “we found them tame affairs.” This would soon change dramatically.

On the evening of 18 August 1942, Able Company skipper Captain Charles Brush put out the word for volunteers to make a combat patrol the next morning. Second Lieutenant John Jachym, leader of the First Platoon, simplified the issue by “volunteering” his entire unit. A few squads of heavy machine guns and mortars joined up; four Melanesian scouts led the way.^[5] “Stub” Morse recalled their departure.

We moved out at first light through the barbed wire entanglements strong along the edge of Alligator Creek, trudged across the sandbar that formed a lagoon there and into the palm grove that followed the shoreline. Birds screeched, non-coms shouted “Spread out, one shell will get you all!” We could hear other voices from guys in the gun emplacements calling out “Good luck!” and others saying “You’ll be sorry!” Some of us grinned at the secret knowledge that we were sorry already. This would be no practice hike.^[6]

Morse was right. “Patrols were always with our weapons at the ready for many miles,” recalled Corporal Ernie Dobbins.^[7] The Marines slogged through the loose sand along the shoreline; grit got into their boondockers and rubbed their feet raw. Light perspiration turned to drenching sweat, and men cursed and swatted at gnats that buzzed around their eyes. Moving inland to the government track made walking easier, but the heat and insects got worse. “We trudged along cursing the heat, the insects, and the guy who dreamed up the whole damn deal,” said Morse. “By noon we were foot-weary, bone tired, and hungry.”^[8] The village of Papanggu was just ahead; an orange grove offered a perfect place to rest and eat. Morse declared he would march on his hands to get some fresh fruit.

Unbeknownst to the Marines, a Japanese patrol was heading down the path in the opposite direction, “boldly and carelessly” in the words of a Marine report.^[9] This group, part of a detachment under Colonel Kiyoko Ichicki, had recently arrived on Guadalcanal; they carried radios and a communication line to establish an outpost at Alligator Creek. Both parties were ignorant of each other’s presence – but the scouts, born and raised on Guadalcanal, could tell when a stranger was close.

One of the natives in a half-whisper warned us, “Me smell Japs!” We took this warning seriously. He should know, he’s been living with these people for quite a long time, he should know what they smelled like. It never entered into my nostrils at the time. We were sure glad he was there.^[10]

A few seconds later, American and Japanese scouts spotted each other. Jachym quickly pulled his platoon off the trail and sent his runner, Private George H. Grazier, to inform the company commander. Brush wasted no time in ordering a flanking maneuver to trap the Japanese in a pocket along the coast, and his Marines began to move into position.

When the first Japanese appeared, Lundgren noted “a rustle of excitement” among the Marines. “They didn’t know we were within miles of them, as we were carefully hidden from their view…. Our bullets whipped into them, and the Japs ran in all directions, taking cover where they could.” Overcoming their initial confusion, Ichicki’s men brought up a machine gun and gave the Marines “a little trouble.”^[11] In the ensuing firefight, Carmen “Buck” Buckhalt was killed by a shot to the head – right in front of “Stub” Morse, who struggled to control himself from the “nauseating, gut-wrenching hatred” he now felt for his enemies. After “what seemed an eternity” to Morse but was really less than an hour, Captain Brush’s men wiped out most of the Japanese patrol. A few survivors escaped and reported the disaster to Colonel Ichicki.^[12]

As the Marines hurried about tending their own dead and wounded, Morse spotted a motionless figure hunched over a Browning Automatic Rifle. A few empty magazines and a pile of spent brass gave mute testimony to the Marine’s final moments. Morse recognized Gardner, his best boot camp buddy, at once.

I was reaching out to touch his face when I felt the wet. I puked. I was kneeling in his brains.^[13]

With a cache of important intelligence documents – and three wounded men to treat – Captain Brush prepared to head back to the Marine perimeter. First, however, he had to addend to his dead Marines. George Grazier, John Buckhalt, and Jack ardner were buried in shallow graves; Brush had his men leave the boondocker-clad feet exposed “to aid in the anticipated recovery effort.”^[14] Their friends bade a somber, tearful farewell. “Someone said we made arrangements in a native village nearby to have our dead temporarily buried,” said Stub Morse, a close friend of both Buckhalt and Gardner. “I really don’t remember that.”

I didn’t have to say much about the patrol. The guys around us could read the story in the face of every man who came back. Later, when I tried to recall the details of the fight, they seemed to be fragmented and jumbled together in little pieces of terror and reality. It didn’t matter, I’ll never forget that day as long as I live. It is seared into my memory with blood, cordite, and sorrow.^[15]

At the time of the patrol, Captain Brush’s men lacked a reliable map of Guadalcanal and were unable to accurately plot the location of the graves. They expected to return within a few days – but subsequent events, including the infamous attack and slaughter of the Ichicki Detachment a few days later, rendered such an expedition out of the question. The three Marines were simply reported as buried “in the Hills” with no further explanation.

In 1947 and again in 1949, search and recovery teams from the 604^th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company attempted to locate the bodies of Grazier, Gardner, and Buckhalt. They had an additional clue from the Buckhalt family – a photo of a grave marker and a set of cryptic instructions.

At the first bend in river approximately 200 to 250 yards inland, grave was about 10 yards from river bank on right side going upstream. Grave was marked by white cross made out of coral and placed flat across center of it. There was also an identification tag tied to a bayonet.

The source for the family’s information is not known – and, as the GRS men tersely pointed out, the name of the river was not given.^[16] After making a few general searches along several rivers, they gave up and declared the remains non-recoverable.

However, they were not the first troops to attempt the recovery of remains in the area. Immediately after the firefight in 1942, Ichicki’s men went in search of their own dead friends. As they prepared the men for burial, they noted:

…the bodies of three men that were much larger than the others and had been wrapped in ponchos. When they examined the remains more closely in the light, they realized that these were the corpses of American Marines, not Japanese. They concluded that the Marine commander had left them behind in making a “hasty return” to the Marines’ defensive position.^[17]

The ultimate disposition of Grazier, Gardner, and Buckhalt’s remains is not currently known. It is believed that they still lie in isolated graves along the north coast of Guadalcanal, in the vicinity of Koli Point.

CENOTAPHS
Manila American Cemetery and Memorial

[1] While this detail is not known for certain, the name “Jack Gardner” appears on an In Memoriam list of deceased alumni servicemen in the 1944 “Academy” yearbook, and the school is less than a mile from his childhood home.
[2] William H. Bartsch, Victory Fever on Guadalcanal: Japan’s First Land Defeat of World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014) 11.
[3] Hugh Morse & George Head, A-1-1 Pearl Harbor to Peleliu (A-1-1 Book Committee, 1993), 21.
[4] Ibid, 28-29.
[5] Corporal Ernie Dobbins (A/1/1) estimated “approximately 45 to 48 Marines, [plus] 4 natives including Corporal Daniel Pule.” Historian William Bartsch claims 65 (Jachym’s entire platoon, plus 11 mortarmen and 12 machine gunners from D/1/1. (Barstch, Victory Fever on Guadalcanal, 95).
[6] Hugh Morse & George Head, A-1-1 Pearl Harbor to Peleliu (A-1-1 Book Committee, 1993), 32.
[7] Ibid., 103.
[8] Ibid., 104
[9] 1^st Marine Division, Headquarters, “Division Commander’s Final Report on Guadalcanal Operation, Phase III: Organization of the Lunga Point Defenses, 10 August – 21 August,” 13 July 1943, (RG 127, NARA), 10.
[10] Morse & Head, 103.
[11] George Lundgren and Arthur Peavy, “Flagler Street on Guadalcanal,” serialized story in the Miami Herald (June 13-26 1943), part 10.
[12] Morse & Head, 33.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Bartsch, Victory Fever, 107.
[15] Morse & Head, 33.
[16] Ibid., 34.
[17] The river is likely the Ngalimbiu (or Malimbiu in 1940s records) based on the direction and destination of the patrol.
[18] Bartsch, 114.