The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Yamamoto had represented Japan at the 1935 London Naval Conference, and advocated ratifying an extension of politically unpopular arms-control limitations. These and other positions had placed his life in jeopardy, as right-wing zealots explicitly threatened to assassinate him and attempted to do so on at least one occasion. In August 1939, he was transferred from the Navy Ministry in Tokyo to command of the Combined Fleet; the move was intended, at least in part, to place him beyond the reach of his would-be murderers. From his flagship, often moored in Hiroshima Bay, Yamamoto continued to insert himself into national policy debates. He opposed signing the Tripartite Pact (allying Japan to Nazi Germany and Italy), and had called for a withdrawal of Japanese troops from China.

  Yamamoto was one of the few Japanese of that era who found the courage to oppose war with the United States. As a younger man, he had twice been posted to America (once as an English student at Harvard, once as naval attaché in Washington), and he had made a close study of the country’s vast economic resources and industrial base. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later remark, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”9 He foresaw that the Pacific War was likely to become a long, drawn-out conflict in which titanic American production would overwhelm Japan’s much smaller and less advanced war industries. Under no circumstances could Japan hope to inflict a total defeat on the United States. A war against the United States could be “won” only by a negotiated settlement favorable to Japanese interests. Against such odds, Yamamoto could “see little hope of success in any ordinary strategy.”10 When it became clear that war was coming whether he liked it or not, he groped for a way to force it to a quick conclusion. His proposed raid on Pearl Harbor, he admitted, was “conceived in desperation.”11 The raid was an all-or-nothing gambit, a throw of the dice, designed to prompt a political calculation in Washington that war with Japan was not worth the cost: “We should do our best to decide the fate of the war on the very first day.”12

  The raid was a spectacular tactical success. All eight battleships of the Pacific Fleet were knocked out of action, and more than 180 American planes were destroyed, mostly on the ground. The Japanese carriers escaped with the loss of just twenty-nine planes. That success, and the rapid conquest of Pacific and Southeast Asian territories in the early months of the war, lifted Yamamoto to new heights of popularity and prestige. With the power to dictate his wishes to the Naval General Staff (NGS), he forced through a plan to hurl the entire force of the Japanese navy against Midway Atoll in June 1942. The Midway operation, like the raid on Pearl Harbor, was an attempt to force the war to a premature conclusion by inflicting a knockout blow on the U.S. Navy. Instead, the gambit ended with the loss of four Japanese aircraft carriers and all of their aircraft, one of the most cataclysmic defeats in the history of war at sea. Though the debacle was carefully hidden from the Japanese people, Yamamoto lost his leverage over the NGS. The Tokyo admirals recovered their primacy in strategic policy-making.

  The debacle at Midway left a mark on Yamamoto. His outlook grew gloomy, detached, and fatalistic. Japan was now engaged in precisely the war of attrition he had often warned against, without any means of escaping it short of abject surrender. Although he could never say so, Yamamoto must have known, by mid-1942, that his country was careening toward an apocalyptic defeat. In a sense, he would be vindicated by that defeat, but that could come as no comfort. He could no longer make his influence felt in Tokyo; he could do nothing but revert to his proper place as the navy’s top seagoing commander. It was his duty to wage war against the enemies of Japan. He would do so until the bitter end, whatever that might be and whenever it might come. He did not expect to survive it: “Within a hundred days,” he predicted in September 1942, “I will wear out my life entirely.”13

  In the ranks of the fighting navy, there was a good deal of irritated chatter about the Yamato’s long sojourns in port. She and her sister, the equally enormous Musashi, were the two largest warships in the world. Each weighed more than 70,000 tons when fully loaded, each carried a complement of 2,700 men, and each was armed with nine mammoth 18.1-inch guns. They had been constructed at grand expense by battleship admirals who believed that they would be the key to destroying the American battleships in a traditional naval gun duel, and thus winning the naval war. But neither of the leviathans had engaged in combat, and neither would until 1944. They had spent most of the war at anchor, first in Hashirajima anchorage in the Inland Sea, and now at the great southern fleet base of Truk. Yamato was derided as the “Hotel Yamato.” An officer of a freighter later observed, “We were always being sent to the very front lines, and those battleships never even went into battle. People like us . . . were shipped off to the most forward positions, while those bastards from the Imperial Naval Academy sat around on their asses in the Yamato and Musashi hotels.”14 The truth was that neither of the big battleships was of much use as a combatant vessel. In any theater of the war, they would likely come under air attack long before they could bring their guns to bear on an enemy ship. More significantly, the two superbattleships drank so much fuel (each had 6,300-ton tanks) that operating them at sea would strain the navy’s resources, especially as the American submarines were beginning to take a bite out of the seaborne oil-supply line.

  Admiral Ugaki left a running daily assessment of the war in his personal diary, which fortuitously survived the war. The invaluable document is a candid firsthand account of the Guadalcanal campaign as viewed from the flagship. In earlier pages, covering the beginning of the war through the Midway operation, Ugaki often recorded Yamamoto’s decisions and directives. By the summer of 1942, however, the commander in chief appears to have taken a step back from the management of daily operations, leaving his chief of staff to pick up the slack. Ugaki began to write in the first person (“I decided . . . ,” “I ordered . . . ”) and often issued directives in his own name rather than Yamamoto’s.

  On August 7, Ugaki fretted over the news that marines had landed on Guadalcanal, and opined in his diary that they must be driven off at once. But a month passed before he grasped that the struggle for Guadalcanal was the decisive campaign of the Pacific War, and that it must take precedence over every other operation, even if it required suspending the offensive against Port Moresby in New Guinea. He complained of poor radio communications, which caused delays in orders sent and reports received aboard the Yamato. All along, he was plagued by a recurring toothache, which seemed to multiply his despair at the repeated failures to recapture Henderson Field.

  Was the key to Guadalcanal the air war, the ground war, or the naval war? In Ugaki’s rolling analysis, he vacillated. On August 13, six days after the invasion, he wrote, “The most urgent thing at present is to send a troop [sic] there to mop up the enemy remnant, rescue the garrison, and repair the airfield.”15 A week later, on August 20, he was convinced that the “most urgent thing” was to “render the airstrip unavailable by launching air raids and night bombardments.”16 Four days later, he concluded that air reinforcements for Rabaul were “as urgent” as troop reinforcements for Guadalcanal, because the Japanese must “destroy the enemy air arm on the island as soon as possible.”17 He grasped that the great distance from Rabaul to Guadalcanal was encumbering the air campaign, but he was willing to accept heavy air losses. On September 1, however, he concluded that the American forces must be defeated on the ground: “In the end, Guadalcanal must be secured by land warfare, even with sacrifices. There is no other way.”18

  After the indecisive carrier skirmish of August 25, Ugaki wanted the Japanese fleet to remain in the forward area so that it could engage any new American attempt to resupply Guadalcanal by sea. He noted that Tokyo had finally “become aware of the gravity of the situation” and was rushing ships, aircraft, and troop reinforcements into the theater. But the supply problem was growing more critical, especially with respect to oil—tankers were in short supply, and the ma
jor fleet movements into the lower Solomons had consumed a tremendous quantity of fuel. Truk did not yet have any fuel storage capability ashore. Ships sometimes drew alongside the Yamato and drank from her cavernous tanks.

  Betraying a naval officer’s archetypal disdain for the army, Ugaki blamed a lack of aggressiveness on the ground for the repeated failures to break through Vandegrift’s lines. When Ichiki’s forces were wiped out on August 20–21, he assumed that the men had fallen under attack on the beachhead and should have “advanced recklessly.”19 The admiral had it exactly wrong. Ichiki had indeed advanced recklessly, against a heavily fortified riverbank, and his 800 men had been annihilated by the marines’ withering defensive fire. After what the marines called the Battle of the Bloody Ridge in mid-September, when General Kawaguchi’s forces were repulsed, with heavy losses, and forced to retreat to the west, Ugaki’s army liaison seemed “at a loss about what to do.” Ugaki surmised that the army had “made light of the enemy too much,” which was true enough.20 But neither he nor his army counterparts suspected that their estimates of American troop strength on Guadalcanal were too low. The Japanese believed that about 7,500 marines were on the island; actually there were more than 11,000, and another 4,000 arrived on September 18.

  With growing naval and army forces at their disposal, the Japanese commanders prepared an all-out campaign to break the six-week deadlock and seize the airfield. The pressure for a decisive victory emanated from the throne itself. After the war, Hirohito would portray himself as a powerless figurehead, but in September and October of 1942 he continually goaded his army and navy ministers to take the offensive and drive the Americans off Guadalcanal. Appeals from the Showa Tenno (“Emperor of the Era of Illustrious Peace, Light, and Harmony”) were tantamount to commands handed down from heaven. But neither the army nor the navy needed much encouragement. The struggle for the island had become an issue of national will. The Japanese army, in particular, had suffered an intolerable loss of face. Two elite Japanese army detachments had been defeated by enemy troops that they had insisted on holding in contempt. In early October, Imperial General Headquarters committed a full division of the Seventeenth Army, some 20,000 troops, to the campaign. The navy’s Eleventh Air Fleet was heavily reinforced; a new fighter strip at Buin, on southern Bougainville, was made operational; and a new commander in chief, Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka, was dispatched to assume command in Rabaul. The navy would redouble and intensify its night bombardments, dispatching the battleships Kongo and Haruna with a large escort of cruisers and destroyers, to pulverize Henderson Field with 14-inch anti-personnel shells.

  On October 11, as Yamamoto and Ugaki watched from the Yamato’s weather deck, an enormous fleet steamed out of Truk’s north channel—four carriers, four battleships, ten cruisers, and thirty destroyers. The carriers would sweep north of the Solomons, hanging back until the airfield was overrun, and then race south or east to hunt down and destroy enemy fleet units. Ugaki confided in his diary that the coming offensive would commit “most of the Combined Fleet.” Failure was therefore unthinkable: “Whatever happens, we must succeed in the coming operation of recapturing Guadalcanal at any cost.”21

  CHESTER NIMITZ, THE FIFTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC), was a gentleman of the old school. Unlike Ernest King, who stood above him in the chain of command, Nimitz never yelled at a subordinate, drank to excess, chased women, or let a word of profanity fall from his lips. He had inherited a shattered, demoralized command after December 7, 1941, and very swiftly restored confidence and morale. He was the most respected naval officer of his generation; today he is fittingly revered as the greatest leader in American naval history. He was of medium height and had a ruddy complexion and pale blue eyes, set in striking contrast to a pair of white eyebrows and an equally white head of hair. Born and raised in a landlocked corner of Texas, Nimitz came from a humble family of German American innkeepers. As a boy he had spoken as much German as English. Long hikes, swims, and bouts of tennis kept him fit. For relaxation, he shot at targets with his pistol, tossed horseshoes, played cribbage, and listened to classical music on a phonograph.

  Within the constraints of his lofty rank, Nimitz was a genuinely warm and outgoing man. He was compulsively social and always used a personal touch. He let it be known that the commanding officers of all ships that put in to Pearl Harbor were expected to pay him a visit, and his office established an “open house” each day at 11:00 a.m. for the purpose. His command was vast—two and a half million men and more than a thousand ships—so these daily meetings were a tax on his time, but they kept him in direct touch with every level of the fleet. Nimitz was a natural-born warrior, one who always insisted on carrying the war to the enemy. He had the inborn military bearing of his Teutonic ancestors; his family had once held a title of nobility and coat of arms in rural Saxony. His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance, later attested that Nimitz was the only man he ever knew who seemed to be completely fearless, and added, “The one big thing about him was that he was always ready to fight. . . . And he wanted officers who would push the fight with the Japanese. If they would not do so, they were sent elsewhere.”22

  When Admiral King had first devised his ambitious and risky WATCHTOWER operation, Nimitz had kept his cards close to his vest. There is little in the historical record to indicate whether he agreed with King’s reasoning. When Ghormley and MacArthur recommended a deferral of the offensive, Nimitz again remained conspicuously silent, neither supporting nor disputing their arguments. But when King overruled their objections and reaffirmed WATCHTOWER, the CINCPAC threw everything he could into the operation. He knew that the position on Guadalcanal was precarious, but he thought Ghormley’s dispatches too pessimistic. Having lived through the menacing weeks after Pearl Harbor, and the knife’s-edge vicissitudes of Coral Sea and Midway, Nimitz was not easily shaken by the recurring setbacks in the South Pacific. The sinking of four Allied cruisers at the Battle of Savo Island was a heavy blow, as was the destruction of the Wasp. But even if Guadalcanal could not be held, the Japanese were frittering away their strength, little by little. In the long run they would stagger under the weight of America’s growing military power. “Remember this,” he had told his staff after learning of Lexington’s loss in the Coral Sea; “we don’t know anything about the enemy—how badly he’s hurt. You can bet your boots he’s hurt too. His situation is no bed of roses either.”23 He could have made the same point about the struggle for Guadalcanal.

  On September 24, Nimitz left Pearl Harbor for an extended inspection tour with half-a-dozen members of his staff. A big four-engine PB2Y Coronado flying boat roared down the East Loch and staggered into the sky, then banked south and set a heading for tiny Palmyra, 960 miles distant. Palmyra was one of several remote mid-Pacific atolls on the daisy chain of refueling stops and emergency airstrips that formed the air route to the South Pacific. The pilots flew a compass heading over eternally monotonous blue seascapes, aiming for a tiny horseshoe-shaped tendril of sand and scrub that was easily missed when cloud cover was thick. They flew through thunderheads that tossed the aircraft sickeningly. The navigator might hope to pick up a radio beacon, but when there was none, it was a matter of dead reckoning—watching the compass, keeping track of course and speed, and applying estimated corrections for cross winds, which might be guessed by watching the play of the wind on the waves. Nothing provided a more visceral sense of the immensity of the Pacific than flying across it in a World War II–era aircraft.

  The Coronado was a very large snub-nosed airplane with a single high wing and a cockpit positioned high and forward of the fuselage. Its range was only about 1,000 miles, but it was strongly armed and therefore better prepared than the Catalina PBY to ward off unfriendly advances by enemy fighters. Less than 200 miles from Palmyra, one of the engines on Nimitz’s aircraft conked out. The plane landed safely, but a replacement had to be summoned from Pearl, requiring a long delay. The next leg down to Cant
on Island, 800 miles southwest of Palmyra, passed without incident, and there Nimitz rendezvoused with Admiral McCain, who had been relieved as COMAIRSOPAC and was on his way north. McCain gave the CINCPAC his views about the air fight for Guadalcanal. He was more upbeat than Ghormley but urged that reserve planes be sent into Espiritu Santo and readied to reinforce the contested island. McCain also stressed the critical problems of aviation fuel supply and pilot fatigue.

  The next day brought another long hop to Fiji for refueling. The party arrived at Noumea on the afternoon of September 28 and went straight into a conference on Ghormley’s flagship, the transport Argonne, at 4:30 p.m.

  Ghormley did not look well. Nimitz had seen symptoms of fatigue in leaders before.* It was typically manifested in weight loss and a slightly manic gleam in the eyes. Ghormley appeared gaunt and hunted. His surroundings could not have helped. Unable to obtain suitable quarters and a staff headquarters from the French colonialists on the island, Ghormley had chosen to run his command from his overcrowded and sweltering flagship, berthed at a pier in Dumbea Bay. Nimitz learned that Ghormley had not left the ship in a month. When a staff officer handed Ghormley an urgent dispatch, he appeared shaken by whatever he read and was heard to murmur, “My God, what are we going to do about this?”24 The COMSOPAC’s nerves were brittle; he was not looking after his physical or mental health.

  The September 28 conference in the Argonne’s wardroom was one of the largest concentrations of senior Pacific commanders ever to sit around one table. General MacArthur had declined to travel outside his command area (as was his normal practice throughout the war, until he was ordered to meet the president in Hawaii in July 1944), but he sent his chief of staff, Major General Richard K. Sutherland, and his air commander, Lieutenant General George C. Kenney. SOPAC was represented by Ghormley, Turner, and Major General Millard F. Harmon, commanding general of U.S. Army Forces in the theater. General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the ranking officer of the USAAF and one of the four members of the Joint Chiefs, was passing through on an inspection tour.