_Ichabod Paddock, Whaling
Instructor--and “Wes” Baker,
Guadalcanal Hero_
Tom Baker is mail carrier for the Yarmouthport, Cape Cod, postoffice.
An elderly man, wiry, with quick-moving gait, he makes his appointed
rounds in fair weather and foul. A younger man who held the job is in a
war plant.
When Guadalcanal was taken, Tom Baker’s son--19-year-old Pvt. 1st Cl.
Thomas Wesley Baker--raced up the beach in the first invading wave of
Marines.
I talked with him when he came home--an invalid, with jungle malaria in
his system. His Guadalcanal experience had cost him 40 pounds.
It was 3 o’clock in the morning when the Japs advanced up the beach.
Wes Baker was taut and scared, because this was to be his first
experience in actual combat.... “We saw them first. They came in
columns of four. The highest ranking officers were right out in front.
Later, we found that none of the Japs was less than corporal and in
their clothing was a lot of American and English money. They were
picked troops and the biggest Japs I ever saw, all of them close to
six feet tall. They came through a little lagoon, waist high in water.
There wasn’t any barbed wire up, so they kept coming on. They were no
more than 200 yards away when we opened fire. There were 1500 of them
and they were all killed. We lost 29 and 80 were wounded. We’d charge
and they’d go into the water, trying to swim out of range. We picked
them off like ducks. When their officers were killed, they didn’t know
what they were doing.”