The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The

  Conquering

  Tide

  War in

  the Pacific Islands,

  1942–1944

  IAN W. TOLL

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York London

  To Adam

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDEX

  LIST OF MAPS

  The South Pacific: July 1942

  The WATCHTOWER Landings: August 7, 1942

  Battle of Savo Island: August 8, 1942

  Battle of the Eastern Solomons: August 24, 1942

  Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands: October 25–26, 1942

  Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Phase One: November 13, 1942

  Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Phase Two: November 14–15, 1942

  Yamamoto Slain: April 18, 1943

  South Pacific Counteroffensive, Advance of MacArthur, Halsey: 1943 to 1944

  First Three Patrols of the Wahoo (SS-238): 1942–1943

  Central Pacific Theater

  Operation GALVANIC: November 20–23, 1943

  Operation FLINTLOCK: February 1, 1944

  Raid on Truk: February 17, 1944

  Invasion of Saipan: June 15, 1944

  The Turkey Shoot, Battle of the Philippine Sea, Phase I: June 19, 1944

  Mitscher in Pursuit, Battle of the Philippine Sea, Phase II: June 20, 1944

  PROLOGUE

  When aiming uncertainly for a landfall, somewhere in the blue immensity of the South Pacific, navigators watched for floating leaves or coconuts. They steered to follow seabirds overhead. They noted distant columns of thunderheads, which might be hovering over islands tucked beneath the horizon. They even lifted their noses and sniffed the breeze, because every so often—especially at night or in thick weather—land could be smelled before it could be seen. Nowhere was this more true than in the Solomons, an archipelago of fetid jungle-islands a few degrees south of the equator, flung diagonally along a 500-mile axis between the Coral Sea and Bougainville Island. The larger islands of the Solomons gave off an aroma of damp soil and rotting vegetation that could travel ten to twenty miles out to sea.

  To sailors on a ship approaching the source of that peculiar scent, the shoulders of the mountains loomed gradually out of the mist, even if the peaks remained hidden within impenetrable cloud caps. Plains and valleys, laid out in a patchwork of darker and lighter shades of green, spread beneath the mountains. Palm groves and mangrove swamps emerged along the shore. Finally they spied the beach, a white horizontal border between the island’s verdant overgrowth and the warm cerulean sea.

  The Solomons are dominated by a dozen large islands arranged in a double chain. Scattered among those mountainous landmasses are hundreds of small and mostly uninhabited islets or atolls, some rising barely 10 feet above sea level. The natural history of the region, which lies astride the southern arc of the Pacific Ring of Fire, has been fantastically violent. Subduction zones, where one part of the planet’s crust is shoved under another, and sea trenches plunge to depths of 20,000 feet or more, run parallel along the archipelago’s northern and southern flanks. But the islands themselves, thrust up from the seabed by the same sorts of tectonic and volcanic forces, ascend to peaks of 5,000 to 7,000 feet. Mount Popomanaseu on Guadalcanal, 7,661 feet above sea level, stands just seven miles (as the crow flies) from the island’s southern shore. If that same crow flew ten more miles out to sea, it would cross the edge of the South Solomon Trench, which plunges to a depth of 17,500 feet. Only on the Ring of Fire do such extremes of ocean deeps and high peaks occur in such proximity.

  On the eve of the Second World War, the Solomons were home to about 100,000 dark-skinned Melanesians, the descendants of ancient nomadic peoples who had migrated from Asia across Pleistocene land bridges or navigated across the sea in hand-carved canoes. They lived much as they had in centuries or millennia past—in small villages and isolated tribal and family units, wearing little or nothing, scratching out a Neolithic subsistence by hunting, fishing, foraging, raising pigs, and tending small plots of taro and yams. They spoke about a hundred different languages or dialects, which were, in many cases, so divergent as to be unintelligible even between neighboring tribes. Their lingua franca was a rough and ready derivative of English called “pidgin,” whose vocabulary ran to about 600 words. They did not share any sense of nationhood; they owed devotion only to their tribal kin, their ancestors, and their sacred places.

  Savage wars were recorded in their oral traditions. In the span of a few generations, history became legend; in the span of a few more, legend became myth. Young men, upon reaching a certain age, took up arms to settle their legendary and mythic blood feuds. Descending suddenly on rival tribes and villages, they killed, beheaded, and ate their enemies. Headhunting and cannibalism were rife throughout the nineteenth century, an era when the natives first came into regular contact with European seafarers. Unscrupulous whites practiced an illegal slave trade known as “blackbirding”—tricking or forcing natives aboard their ships to be transported to Australia, where they were put to work on cane plantations. The victims’ tribesmen were inclined to retaliate against anyone who looked like the malefactors. A white man who went ashore thus risked being beheaded and roasted for a feast. Afterward, his severed head might be shrunken and kept by his killer as a souvenir. Before the British took control of the Solomons in 1893 (vowing to put an end to blackbirding, headhunting, and cannibalism alike), the archipelago had earned a reputation as one of the most dangerous places on earth.

  Putting aside for a moment the issues of self-determination, economic exploitation, and political legitimacy, history will show that half a century of colonial rule achieved a Pax Britannica in the Solomons. London governed the islands as a “protectorate” rather than a crown colony, asserting a relatively narrow authority over the affairs of its indigenous people. The islanders lived much as they had in the past, under the village authority of their tribal chiefs (“headmen” or “bigmen”) and according to their own inherited customs and laws. Rather than resorting to arms, the bigmen appealed to colonial officials to mediate their disputes, and were generally willing to be bound by the judgments rendered. A tribe running short of food could petition for relief, and would be fed or resettled in a place with arable land or fishing rights. It is impossible to know at this remove what proportion of the natives genuinely welcomed the British government, but by the 1930s, very few hated it enough to oppose it outright. Even in the earlier years of the protectorate, organized revolts against British authority were scattered and short-lived. By 1941, there were none, and on most islands no standing force was needed to maintain order. The Solomons natives were simply overawed by the whites—by their weapons, their ships, their technology, and perhaps most of all, their airplanes. Such unfathomable power lay beyond their ken. To think of opposing it was absurd; better to acquiesce and make the best of it. Many islanders were fervently loyal to the British, and would have occasion to prove it in the impending Pacific War.

  The seat of colonial government was the somnambulant little island of Tulagi in the Nggela (or Flor
ida) island group, twenty miles north of the much larger island of Guadalcanal. On Tulagi, three miles long and shaped like an hourglass, the British had assembled all the requisite trappings of colonial life—an officers’ club, a barracks, a hotel, a stately official residence, a small golf course, a cricket pitch, a wireless station, and a waterfront with rudimentary seaport amenities. The larger outlying islands were divided into districts, and each district was administered by a district officer (DO)—generally a young, unmarried man on the first rung of a career in the British Colonial Service. The district officer had to brave primitive living conditions, suffocating heat, and recurring attacks of malaria. He lived alone, in a modest house on the coast, near the best natural harbor available. More often than not, his house doubled as the local government headquarters. His portfolio of responsibilities was very broad, but he had no staff other than the natives he recruited, trained, and employed. He was a governor, judge, police chief, coroner, tax collector, civil engineer, record-keeper, harbormaster, paymaster, and postmaster. All public funds were funneled through his hands, and he was expected to account for every penny in his official record books. He trudged from village to village on muddy jungle footpaths, or sailed a small wooden schooner along the coast, where most of the population was concentrated.

  The district officer, like every other typical white islander, was absolutely sure of his innate authority over the natives, who were (after all) “only just down from the trees.” (The repugnant phrase, often heard in primitive outposts of the British Empire, put the colonialist rationale in a nutshell.) But the British were well practiced in the arts of colonial oppression and shrewd enough to rule through rather than over the existing social order. The seasoned district officer made a show of consulting respectfully with the village bigmen, and he always deferred to local laws and customs when they did not collide with British authority.

  It was a minimalist government, but it was all that was needed. In the great game of imperial empires, the Solomons had never amounted to much. They were remote and inaccessible, even by the standards of the Pacific. They offered little in the way of trade or natural wealth. Few Europeans visited, and fewer could be induced to stay. In 1941, there were between 500 and 600 whites living in the entire archipelago, variously employed as plantation managers, shipping agents, traders, mining prospectors, storekeepers, doctors, colonial officers, and missionaries. Most looked forward to the day when their careers or economic fortunes would allow them to leave. The Solomons were a hardship post. The climate was sweltering and monsoonal. Rain-sodden jungles and mangrove swamps bred exotic fevers and skin disorders—malaria, dengue fever, blackwater fever, dysentery, filariasis, clysentery, leprosy, elephantiasis, prickly heat, and trench foot. Crocodiles and leeches lurked in the rivers and swamps; aggressive sharks patrolled the fringing reefs; scorpions, spiders, centipedes, and snakes stung and bit; knife-edged kunai grasses sliced into the flesh of those who walked through them; cat-sized rats scurried through the jungle underbrush. The best view of the islands, said the old hands, was from the stern of a departing ship.

  Those were the Solomons in 1941. A marginal outpost of the British Empire. An economic and political backwater. A strategic nonentity; an afterthought. That was to change, suddenly and violently, in 1942.

  WAR ARRIVED SIX WEEKS AFTER PEARL HARBOR, on the morning of January 22, 1942, when Japanese bombs first fell on Tulagi. The air attack was a bolt out of the blue. The British had not imagined that the Japanese would strike this far south and east, into the heart of the lower Solomons, especially when Allied fleets and armies were still giving battle thousands of miles closer to Japan, in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The following day, a Japanese amphibious force landed at Rabaul—an Australian-held seaport and advanced airbase on the island of New Britain, 650 miles northwest of Tulagi—and swiftly overran the 1,500-man garrison stationed there. The British had precious little military presence of any kind in the Solomons, so it was instantly apparent that the Japanese could swallow up the entire archipelago any time they liked.

  A similar pattern of conquest was unfolding throughout the Pacific. On December 7, 1941, Japan had launched a sea-air-land Blitzkrieg across a vast front, and advanced everywhere against feeble and confused Allied resistance. In every case—in Hawaii, the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, Burma, New Britain—they delivered the initial blows from the air. Japanese carrier- and land-based bombers struck suddenly and across unexpectedly long distances, pulverizing Allied airfields and naval bases and clearing the skies over landing beaches. Invasion forces followed in columns of troopships. Japanese infantry units went ashore and advanced quickly against poorly defended Allied airfields—often seizing them intact and without firing a shot. Japanese air groups flew in to the captured airfields and prepared to stage the next round of attacks on positions farther south or east. When pockets of Allied resistance held out behind fortified lines—notably, the joint American-Filipino forces on Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island in the Philippines—they were cut off and bypassed. By this rapid, tightly choreographed, leapfrogging pattern, the Japanese won an immense Pacific empire in little more than four months while sustaining only token losses.

  Before December 1941, American and British aviation experts had arrogantly insisted that Japanese airplanes were poorly engineered knockoffs of Western technology, and Japanese pilots were laughably inept crash-test dummies. These delusions were upended in the opening weeks of the war, when Allied airpower throughout most of the theater was effectively wiped out. Only after the tide of conquest had washed over them did the Allies begin to understand that they had been duped. Playing cleverly on the hubris and racial chauvinism of their Western rivals, the Japanese had disguised the formidable power of their air fleets and airmen.

  The Imperial Japanese Navy was equipped with two very fine twin-engine medium bombers, the G3M (Allied code name “Nell”) and the G4M (“Betty”). Each could be configured to carry torpedoes or bombs with a payload capacity exceeding 1,700 pounds and a flying range of more than 2,000 nautical miles. They were often escorted by the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero,” Japan’s superb single-seat fighter plane, which had been designed to outclimb, out-turn, and outmaneuver any other fighter aircraft of its era. Allied pilots who survived their initial dogfighting or “tail-chasing” contests with the Zero were staggered by the machine’s capacity to turn sharply and climb away at high speed. Though it had been placed in service more than a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and had run up a high tally of easy victories against Chiang Kai-Shek’s air force in the skies over China, the Zero had remained virtually unknown in the West. Allied aviators had received no forewarning of its capabilities and no tactical advice in countering it, and therefore were forced to discover this strange, acrobatic warplane in the unforgiving school of air combat.

  The British had staked their Asia-Pacific empire on their great naval and air base at Singapore, the “Gibraltar of the East.” But from the first day of the war, when a Japanese invasion force landed on the northeast coast of the Malay Peninsula and Japanese bombers battered Royal Air Force (RAF) aerodromes throughout the region, the Malayan campaign brought a relentless succession of one-sided Japanese victories in the air, on the land, and at sea. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese warplanes sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off the Malayan coast—the first time in naval history that capital ships at sea had been destroyed by air attack. British commanders pulled their surviving aircraft back to Singapore, yielding the skies over northern Malaya to the enemy. Japanese army forces drove south with remarkable speed, routing British Commonwealth troops from their positions and sending them into disorderly retreat. The invaders combined raging frontal charges with flanking movements and infiltration tactics, in which small groups of lightly armed Japanese soldiers penetrated the jungles and mangrove swamps and attacked the British from behind. They leapfrogged down the coas
t by sea lifts in small craft. In the face of such a shrewd and agile enemy, and with Japanese aircraft attacking with impunity from overhead, the British lines were quick to abandon their positions and flee.

  As they joined up with other units farther south, or entered the island-city of Singapore, they spread a terrifying new image of the enemy. The Japanese were super-warriors, preternaturally endowed with superior fighting traits and an ability to live roughly off the land. They could not be defeated in the jungle, or evidently in the air or at sea; they must be invincible, and they were coming. Among many of the British and British Commonwealth troops, an attitude of despondency and resignation took hold. They were sullen and scornful of their officers, who had failed utterly to prepare for a foe they had so recently insisted on holding in contempt. Morale caved in on itself. From the wharves of Singapore, civilians began a panicked exodus, clamoring for passage on any departing ship. Officers finagled orders to be transferred to Java or anywhere else. A week after Japanese forces crossed the Johore Strait and entered Singapore, General Arthur Percival surrendered about 80,000 troops to a Japanese army less than half that size. With Singapore gone, the fate of the Dutch East Indies was preordained. An overmatched multinational Allied fleet was swiftly defeated in naval actions at the end of February, and remaining air and ground forces on Java were evacuated to Australia.

  Now, in the Solomons, a stampede of panicked white refugees poured south and east, hoping to find a ship to Australia. Colonial officials faced a similarly unmanageable state of affairs—except that in the Solomons, unlike in Malaya, there were no more than a handful of British troops in place to put up any resistance whatsoever. Protectorate officials did not pretend there was any realistic hope of stopping the next stage of the Japanese advance. The enemy would take the Solomons and eject the British, and months or perhaps years would pass before the Allies could return in force. The civilians of Tulagi and the adjoining islands packed up their belongings and fled. The resident commissioner, Britain’s senior official in the islands, moved to Malaita, a large island farther east. Small schooners and cutters, usually under sail, carried evacuees from the northwest on the prevailing winds. A dilapidated coal steamer, the Morinda, made her last trip out of the Solomons in January. At the wharf on Gavutu, an island near Tulagi, a crowd of civilian refugees demanded to come aboard. After a near riot in which a doctor was injured, the captain took the terrified evacuees on board to be spirited away to Australia.1