The American sacrifice had been heavy, but victory was the reward. Admiral Nagumo opted for withdrawal, only to have his order countermanded by Yamamoto, who demanded a night surface attack on the Americans. This was frustrated when Spruance turned away, recognising that his fleet had accomplished everything possible. The disengagement was finely judged: Yamamoto’s battleships, of which the Americans knew nothing, were closing fast from the north. Spruance had achieved an overwhelming balance of advantage. His foremost priority was to maintain this, protecting his two surviving carriers. Yamamoto acknowledged failure, and ordered a Japanese retreat. Spruance again turned and followed, launching a further air strike which sank one heavy cruiser and crippled another. This was almost the end of the battle, save that on 7 June a Japanese submarine met the burnt-out Yorktown under tow, and dispatched her to the bottom. This blow was acceptable, however, set against the massive Japanese losses.
Both Nimitz and Spruance had displayed consummate judgement, contrasted with Yamamoto’s and Nagumo’s errors, even though it was Fletcher, and not Spruance, who made the important decision to launch the second strike that caught Hiryu. The courage and skill of America’s dive-bomber pilots overbore every other disappointment and failure. The US Navy had achieved a triumph. Nimitz, with characteristic graciousness, sent his car to bring Commander Rochefort to a celebration party at Pearl Harbor. Before his assembled staff, the Commander-in-Chief said: ‘This officer deserves a major share of the credit for the victory at Midway.’ Luck, which favoured the Japanese in the war’s first months, turned dramatically in favour of the Americans during the decisive naval battle of the Pacific war. But this does not diminish the achievement of Nimitz and his subordinates.
The Japanese fleet remained a formidable fighting force: in the months that followed, it inflicted some severe local reverses on the Americans in the Pacific. But the US Navy had displayed the highest qualities at a critical moment. Japanese industrial weakness made it hard to replace the losses of Midway. One of the cardinal misjudgements of the Axis war effort was failure to sustain a flow of trained pilots to replace casualties. The Americans, by contrast, soon began to deploy thousands of excellently trained aircrew, flying the superb new Hellcat fighter. Nimitz remained short of carriers until well into 1943, but thereafter America’s building programme delivered an awesome array of new warships. The pattern of the Pacific war was set, wherein the critical naval actions were fought between fleets whose major surface elements seldom engaged each other. Carrier-borne aircraft had shown themselves the decisive weapons, and the US would soon employ these more effectively and in much larger numbers than any other nation in the world. Marc Mitscher, captain of the Hornet, feared that his career was finished, so poorly had his ship’s air group performed at Midway; it is widely believed that he falsified the log record of his squadrons’ designated attack course, to conceal his own blunder, which kept them out of the battle. Nimitz and Spruance, together with the aircrew of Yorktown and Enterprise, were the heroes of Midway, but Mitscher went on to become the supreme American carrier leader of the war.
3 GUADALCANAL AND NEW GUINEA
The next phase of the Pacific campaign was driven by expediency and characterised by improvisation. The US, committed to ‘Germany first’, planned to dispatch most of its available troop strength to fight in North Africa. MacArthur, in Australia, lacked men to launch the assault on Rabaul which he favoured. Instead, Australian troops, slowly reinforced by Americans, were committed to frustrate Japanese designs on the vast jungle island of Papua New Guinea. Separated from the northern tip of Australia by only two hundred miles of sea, this became the scene of one of the grimmest struggles of the war.
Meanwhile, six hundred miles eastwards in the Solomons, Japanese who had occupied Tulagi island moved on to neighbouring Guadalcanal, where they began to construct an airfield. If they were allowed to complete and exploit this, their planes could dominate the region. An abrupt American decision was made to pre-empt them, by landing 1st Marine Division. Such a stroke fulfilled the US Navy’s driving desire, promoted by Admiral Ernest King in Washington, to engage the enemy wherever opportunity allowed. The Marines were staging through Wellington, New Zealand, en route to an undecided objective. They found themselves ordered to restow their ships for an immediate assault landing; when the local dock labour force refused to work in prevailing heavy rain, Marines did the job themselves. Then, in the first days of August 1942, they sailed for Guadalcanal. In their innocence, many supposed that they were destined to wage war in a tropical paradise.
On the 7th, 19,000 Americans landed first on the outlying islands, then on Guadalcanal proper, in the face of slight opposition following a heavy naval bombardment. ‘In the dirty dawn … there were only a few fires flickering, like the city dumps, to light our path to history,’ wrote Marine Robert Leckie. Australian coastwatcher Captain Martin Clements watched exultantly from his jungle hideout as the Americans came ashore, writing in his diary, ‘Wizard!!! – Caloo, Callay, Oh! What a day!’ On the beach, men vastly relieved to find themselves alive split coconuts and gorged on the milk, heedless of implausible warnings that the Japanese might have poisoned them. Then they began to march inland, soon parched and sweating prodigiously. The Japanese, following another huge intelligence failure, had not anticipated the Americans’ arrival. In what would prove a critical action of the Pacific war, the landing force quickly seized the airstrip, christened Henderson Field in honour of a Marine pilot hero of Midway. Some men liberated caches of enemy supplies, including sake which allowed them to become gloriously drunk during the nights that followed. Thus ended the last easy part; what followed became one of the most desperate campaigns of the Far Eastern war, characterised by small but bloody battles ashore, repeated clashes of warships afloat.
Two days after the initial assault, at sea off Guadalcanal the US Navy endured a humiliation. Admiral Fletcher had signalled Nimitz that he believed local Japanese air power presented an unacceptable threat to his three aircraft carriers, and recommended their withdrawal. Without waiting for approval, he set course north-eastwards. Rear-Admiral Kelly Turner, commanding the transports inshore, made plain his belief that the carrier commander had deserted his post of duty, and Fletcher’s reputation suffered lasting harm. But modern historians, Richard Frank notable among them, believe that Fletcher made an entirely correct decision to regard the safety of his carriers as the foremost strategic priority.
In the early hours of the following morning, 9 August, Allied naval forces suffered a surprise which revealed both command incompetence and a fatal paucity of night-fighting skills. Japanese Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa led a heavy cruiser squadron into an attack on the offshore anchorage, which was protected by one Australian and four American heavy cruisers, together with five destroyers. The enemy ships had been spotted the previous afternoon by an RAAF Hudson, but its sighting report was not picked up at Fall River on New Guinea because the radio station was shut down during an air raid. Even when the Hudson landed, there was an inexcusable delay of several hours before word was passed to the warships at sea.
The Americans were deployed off Savo island in anticipation of a Japanese strike, but in the darkness Mikawa’s cruiser column steamed undetected through the western destroyer radar picket line. Within three minutes of the Americans belatedly spotting Chokai, the leading Japanese ship, at 0143 the Australian cruiser Canberra was struck by at least twenty-four shells which detonated, in the words of a survivor, with ‘a terrific orange-greenish flash’. Every man in the boiler rooms was killed and all power lost; Canberra was unable to fire a shot during the subsequent hours before being abandoned. There is some contested evidence that the cruiser was also hit by a torpedo from the American destroyer Bagley, aiming at the Japanese.
The destroyer Paterson found itself in a perfect firing position, but amid the deafening concussion of its guns, the ship’s torpedo officer failed to hear his captain’s order to trigger the tubes. At 0147 two Japanese to
rpedoes hit Chicago. Only one of these exploded, in the bow, but it crippled the ship’s fire-control system. Astoria fired thirteen salvoes without effect because she too failed to see Mikawa’s ships, and her gunnery radar was defective. The cruiser was wrecked by Japanese gunfire at a range of three miles, and abandoned next day with heavy loss of life.
Vincennes was likewise devastated, and already on fire when her own armament began to shoot. Her commanding officer, Captain Frederick Riefkohl, had no notion the enemy was attacking, and supposed himself a victim of friendly fire. As Mikawa’s huge searchlights illuminated the American cruiser, Riefkohl broadcast angrily over his voice radio, demanding that they should be switched off. Thereafter, he concentrated on trying to save his ship, hit by three torpedoes and seventy-four shells which reduced it to a flaming hulk. Only belatedly did the American captain acknowledge that the Japanese were responsible, and order destroyers to attack them – without success. Quincy fired starshells which proved ineffective because they burst above low cloud, while a Japanese seaplane dropped illuminant flares beyond the American squadron, silhouetting its ships for Mikawa’s gunnery directors. The hapless Quincy’s captain was killed a few moments after ordering an attempt to beach the ship, which sank with the loss of 370 officers and men. Chokai suffered only one hit, in its staff chartroom.
At 0216, the Japanese ceased fire, having achieved a crushing victory inside half an hour. There was a heated debate on the bridge of the flagship about whether to press on and attack the now defenceless American transports beyond, off Guadalcanal. Mikawa decided that it was too late to regroup his squadron, make such an assault, then withdraw before daylight out of range of American carrier aircraft, which he wrongly supposed were at hand. Amid a sky dancing with lightning in a tropical rainstorm, the Japanese turned for home. Chaos among the stricken Allied shipping persisted to the end: at dawn, an American destroyer fired 106 5? shells at a cruiser before discovering that its target was the crippled Canberra. When it was decided that the Australian warship must be sunk, US destroyers fired a further 370 rounds into the hulk before being obliged to use torpedoes to end its agony. The only consolation for the Allies was that an American submarine torpedoed and sank Kako, one of Mikawa’s heavy cruisers, during its withdrawal after the action.
In the Guadalcanal anchorage, Admiral Turner continued offloading supplies for the Marines until noon on the 9th, when to the deep dismay of the men ashore he removed his transports until more air cover became available. Reviewing the disaster off Savo, he wrote: ‘The navy was still obsessed with a strong feeling of technical and mental superiority over the enemy. In spite of ample evidence as to enemy capabilities, most of our officers and men despised the enemy and felt themselves sure victors in all encounters under any circumstances … The net result of all of this was a fatal lethargy of mind … We were not mentally ready for hard battle. I believe that this psychological factor as a cause of our defeat was even more important than the element of surprise.’ The US Navy learned its lessons: never again in the war did it suffer such a severe humiliation. And the critical reality, which soon dawned on the Japanese, was that yet again one of their admirals had allowed caution to deprive him of a chance to convert success into a decisive strategic achievement. The lost Allied cruisers could be replaced; the landing force was able to hold on at Henderson Field because its supporting amphibious shipping remained unscathed, and soon returned to Lunga Bay. Savo would be redeemed.
The Japanese were slow to grasp the importance of the American commitment to Guadalcanal. They drip-fed a trickle of reinforcements to the island, who were thrown into repeated frontal attacks, each one insufficiently powerful to overwhelm the precarious Marine perimeter. The Americans holding Henderson Field and the surrounding tropical rainforests found themselves locked in an epic ordeal. Visibility amidst an almost impenetrable tangle of vines and ferns, giant hardwoods and creepers, was seldom more than a few yards. Even when gunfire was temporarily stilled, leeches, wasps, giant ants and malarial mosquitoes inflicted their own miseries. The intense humidity made fungal and skin infections endemic. Marines encountering the jungle for the first time were alarmed by its constant noises, especially those of the night. ‘Whether these were birds squawking … or some strange reptiles or frogs, I don’t know,’ said one man, ‘but we were terrified by any noise because we’d been told that the Japanese signaled each other in the jungle by imitating bird calls.’
Amid incessant rainstorms, they bivouacked in mud, which became a curse of the campaign, endured short rations and dysentery. Nervous men not infrequently shot each other. There was a steady stream of combat fatigue evacuees. A platoon commander who lost four men to hysteria, 15 per cent of his strength, reckoned this was typical. Experience of Japanese barbarism bred matching American savagery. Marine Ore Marion described a scene after a bitter night action: ‘At daybreak a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, whack off three Jap heads and jam them on poles facing the “Jap side” of the river.’ The regimental commander remonstrated fiercely that this was the conduct of animals. ‘A dirty, stinking young kid says, “That’s right Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals, what the fuck do you expect?”’
Some of the fiercest fighting took place on the Tenaru river, where both sides suffered heavily as the Japanese attacked again and again with suicidal courage and tactical clumsiness. As a green Japanese flare burst overhead, Robert Leckie described the scene: ‘Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness … booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell … The plop of the outgoing mortar with the crunch of its fall, the clatter of the machine guns and the lighter, faster rasp of the Browning automatic rifles, the hammering of fifty-caliber machine-guns, the crash of 75-millimetre anti-tank guns firing point-blank canister at the enemy – each of these conveys a definite message to the understanding ear.’ After hours of this, dawn revealed heaped enemy bodies and a few survivors in flight. But as night succeeded night of such clashes and counterattacks, the strain told on the Americans.
‘Morale was very bad,’ said Marine Lt. Paul Moore, who won a Navy Cross. ‘But there was something about Marines – once we were ordered to attack we decided we damn well were going to do it.’ Swimming the Matanikau river with his platoon, the young officer glanced up and saw mortar bombs and grenades arching through the air above him, ‘as if it were raining, with bullets striking all around us’. Moore, a few months out of Yale, was shot as he threw a grenade to knock out a Japanese machinegun. The bullet hit him in the chest: ‘The air was going in and out of a hole in my lungs. I thought I was dead, going to die right then. I wasn’t breathing through my mouth, but through this hole. I felt like a balloon going in and out, going pshhhh. I was thinking to myself: now I’m going to die. And first of all it’s rather absurd for me, considering where I came from, my early expectations of a comfortable life and all the rest, for me to be dying on a jungle island in combat as a Marine. That’s not me … Shortly, a wonderful corpsman crawled up and gave me a shot of morphine, and then a couple of other people got a stretcher and started evacuating me.’
Guadalcanal set the pattern for the Pacific campaign, a three-year contest for a succession of harbours and airfields, refuges for ships and platforms for planes amid an otherwise featureless watery vastness. The Japanese were never able to reverse their early mistakes, rooted in an underestimate of American strength and will. Each island action was tiny in scale by the standards of the European theatre: at the peak of the Guadalcanal battle, no more than 65,000 Americans and Japanese were engaged with each other ashore, while 40,000 more men served on warships and transports at sea. But the intensity of the struggle, and the conditions in which the combatants were obliged to subsist amid swamps, rain, heat, disease, insects, crocodiles, snakes and short rations, caused the Pacific battlefield experience to become one of th
e worst of the war. Island fighting evolved into a bizarre and terrible routine: ‘Everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch,’ Corporal James Jones, one of the army men who eventually landed on Guadalcanal to reinforce the Marines, observed with fascinated revulsion.
Like a business. Like a regular business. And yet at the bottom of it was blood: blood, mutilation and death … The beach was literally alive with men, all moving somewhere, and seeming to undulate with a life of its own under their mass as beaches sometimes appear to do when invaded by armies of fiddler crabs. Lines, strings and streams of men crossed and recrossed it with hot-footed and apparently unregulated alacrity. They were in all stages of dress and undress … They wore all sorts of fantastic headgear, issue, civilian, and homemade, so that one might see a man working in the water totally naked with nothing adorning his person except his identity tags.
Between August and October, the Japanese on Guadalcanal outnumbered their enemies, but thereafter American reinforcements and Japanese casualties progressively shifted the balance against the latter. Repeated headlong assaults failed against a stubborn defence: they were unable to wrest control of Henderson Field from the Americans, who had superior artillery and air support. This was small consolation to the defenders, however, when the Japanese navy intervened. Seldom in the course of the war did Allied troops have to endure naval bombardments of the kind the Royal Navy and US Navy routinely administered to the Axis, but the Americans on Guadalcanal suffered severely from the guns of Japanese warships. Hour after hour during four nights in October, enemy heavy ships delivered some nine hundred rounds of 14? fire, followed by 2,000 rounds from heavy cruisers. ‘[It] was the most tremendous thing I’ve been through in all my life,’ said a Marine afterwards. ‘There was one big bunker near our galley … a shell dropped right in the middle of it and practically everybody in the hole was killed. We tried to dig the men out but we saw it wasn’t any use.’ A correspondent wrote: ‘It is almost beyond belief that we are still here, still alive, still waiting and still ready.’ Many aircraft on Henderson Field were wrecked; the strip was rendered unserviceable for a week.
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