Guadalcanal Diaries : Saugus Veteran of WWII Campaign Will Join Others to Reminisce

It has been 53 years since the events of that desperate time in the mid-Pacific, 10 degrees south of the Equator.

The memories remain fresh, partly because Richard P. Bailey refuses to let them fade.

Millions of words have been written about the U.S. effort to secure Guadalcanal in one of the first American campaigns of World War II, between August, 1942, and Feb. 17, 1943.

Which is why Bailey, of Saugus, and 200 other veterans of that campaign who now live in the San Fernando Valley and surrounding areas will be heading for Tucson this month to reunite with more than 2,500 surviving members of what eventually became a 50,000-man force that secured the islands.

Each has a personal story to share.

Guadalcanal was particularly hellish for the first troops, the 11,000 Marines who came ashore at two locations on Aug. 7, 1942. Within four days, the support ships sailed off, leaving the men to fend for themselves.

There was little food or water. There was no replacement ammunition. For two months the troops survived on their ingenuity and wits.

Mostly volunteers in their late teens and early 20s, they had been sent there to thwart the Japanese plan to build an airfield from which bombers could disrupt shipping among Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Bailey was a 22-year-old corporal from Duluth, Minn., who waded ashore on the northern coast of Guadalcanal along with the rest of the 100-man I Company, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines on that steamy August day.

I Company traveled to the Solomons on ships equipped with bunks stacked six beds high. “It was swelteringly hot and there were inadequate bathing facilities,” remembers Bailey of the sea journey between New Zealand and the Solomons.

The sea voyage, unfortunately, was the easy part.

In the book “United States Marine Corps Story,” J. Robert Moskin describes the Solomons as one of the wettest places on Earth, the rotting vegetation in its jungles giving off a stink of decay.

Things did not look good when, four days after landing, the Marines watched their supply ships steam out of the harbor. “I didn’t know my heart could sink so low,” Bailey says.

He adds that after Pearl Harbor, the United States fleet was in such bad shape there was fear that the loss of more ships would completely disable the Navy. The straits between the Solomon Islands were a graveyard of sunken ships after a running series of naval battles.

“Because the Marine Corps was a part of the Navy, naval commanders had the final say on how the troops and ships would be deployed,” Bailey says.

The men stranded on the Solomons survived by eating rice, some of it stolen from the Japanese, mixed with tree roots or other vegetation. The island’s iguanas became lunch.

Water was rationed. Medicines were almost nonexistent. Because of the humidity and heat, the dead were buried where they fell.

The months stretched on until it seemed as though the men there had been forgotten. “It was tough keeping morale up when everyone was hungry and sick and fighting bullets as well,” Bailey says.

“We got to thinking that if the enemy or starvation didn’t get us, the malaria, jungle rot, beriberi or dengue [fever] would. Almost everyone got malaria. But the dengue was the worst. It came with a high fever and left you thinking every bone in your body was broken. When you got it, you just prayed to die,” Bailey says.

There were no organized camps. “We dug holes to live in. The Japanese were great night fighters, and would have easily . . . taken us if they had found us sleeping in tents.”

Bailey says the way the Japanese fought was not taught in his San Diego boot camp. “They would rather die than be captured. Even when we took their rifles away from them they would try to kill us with a hidden knife,” Bailey says.

In order to keep the Japanese from springing concealed weapons on them, U.S. troops took to making Japanese prisoners undress.

“Because we had no water to spare, one day a group of us decided to go bathe in the ocean. We left our clothes on the beach and went in to wash off. By the time we got out, the tide had come in and carried away our clothing.

“We were terrified. We were afraid we would be mistaken for escaped prisoners by our troops and shot,” he says.

After ships returned with supplies, he says, “the Army had a bakery which made fresh bread. You cannot imagine what that smelled like to us. We would go and get some bread and slather it with peach jam and make a feast of it. The only problem was keeping the flies off of it before you put it in your mouth.”

After being taken off of Guadalcanal late in February, Bailey was sent to a New Zealand hospital for treatment of malaria and other ailments, but his war was not over yet.

Bailey and his group went on to fight for the Gilbert Islands, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific Theater.

After being sent to military hospitals around the Pacific, he was discharged on Sept. 21, 1945, married a New Zealand woman and set up housekeeping in San Diego. After getting his bachelor’s degree on the G.I. bill, he became an insurance broker until he retired.

His first wife died, and in 1972 he married Alma Bailey, a hospital financial counselor, and settled in Saugus.

Although his wife helps him with his work as the Western states coordinator of the Guadalcanal veterans group, she was born after the war and doesn’t understand what the fellowship of veterans means to him, he says.

“Guadalcanal was a larger-than-life experience,” he says. “The men who went through it seem to need to keep talking about it.”