Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War

by Robert Leckie

  As they disembarked from the trains to board waiting ships, newsboys went among them hawking newspapers with great black headlines announcing that a vast air-sea battle was being fought at a place called Midway Island.

  The Japanese struck first.

  Confident that no American carriers could possibly reach the Midway area for two more days, Admiral Chuichi Nagumo launched his opening strike at Midway Island itself while flying off a merely routine search for enemy ships.

  On June 4, just before sunrise, 108 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers roared aloft from the decks of Admiral Nagumo’s four big carriers. Marine pilots at Midway rose to intercept them. They were slaughtered. Marines flying the near-useless Brewster Buffaloes had no chance against the superior Zero. Only pilots such as Captain Marion Carl flying the new Grumman Wildcats were able to battle the Zero on anything like even terms. In all, fifteen American fighters were shot down. But superb American antiaircraft fire prevented the enemy from damaging Midway’s runways, while downing or damaging dozens of enemy aircraft.

  One third of the Japanese attacking force was either shot down or badly damaged, and the formation leader radioed Admiral Nagumo that a second strike against Midway was required. Even as the report was being received, Midway’s land-based bombers came winging over Nagumo’s ships. They were driven off with heavy losses, the Japanese ships were not scratched, but the very appearance of the Americans served to underscore the report that Midway’s airfields were far from being knocked out.

  Nagumo ordered ninety-three planes, then armed for possible strikes against enemy ships, to be rearmed with fragmentation and incendiary bombs for use against Midway. As the armorers rushed to comply, a search plane reported ten American ships to the northeast.

  Chuichi Nagumo was thunderstruck. No American ships were supposed to be within a thousand miles of Midway! Shaken, pacing Akagi’s bridge with his white-gloved hands locked behind his back, Nagumo took a full quarter-hour to decide to order the ninety-three planes changed back to ship-bombs. By then, it was too late—the formations which had attacked Midway were returning and all flight decks had to be cleared to receive them. Still sailing toward Midway in box formation, the four big carriers—Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, and Kaga—began taking planes aboard.

  An hour later all decks were cleared. Nagumo ordered the second strike launched against the American task force.

  And in so doing he did exactly what the Americans expected him to do.

  Captain Miles Browning, Bull Halsey’s chief of staff on loan to Admiral Spruance, had calculated that Nagumo would keep steaming toward Midway and would launch a second strike at the island. He decided that the time to hit the Japanese would be while they were refueling planes on deck.

  At seven that morning, 175 miles from the enemy’s calculated position, Spruance ordered Enterprise and Hornet to launch planes. Twenty Wildcats, sixty-seven Dauntless dive-bombers, and twenty-nine Devastator dive-bombers—116 planes in all—went hurtling aloft. Admiral Fletcher delayed Yorktown’s launching on the chance that other targets might be discovered. Even so, by nine o’clock, just as the last of the warbirds from Enterprise and Hornet were airborne, Yorktown had thirty-five planes—six Wildcats, seventeen Dauntlesses, and twelve Devastators—in the skies.

  Most of them caught Nagumo. They found his four big carriers as expected, rearming and refueling.

  Hornet’s torpedo-bombers—her fighters and dive-bombers missed the enemy entirely—attacked first. They were annihilated. Of fifteen Devastators that struck, every one was shot down and only one pilot survived. Enterprise’s torpedo squadron skimmed in next, and was also slaughtered: ten out of fourteen destroyed. Then came Yorktown’s dozen Devastators, and only four survived.

  Not a single Japanese ship was touched.

  In about a hundred glittering seconds it seemed to Chuichi Nagumo that the war was won.

  And then the matchless American dive-bombers also found the Japanese.

  There were thirty-seven Dauntlesses from Enterprise under Lieutenant Commander Clarence McCluskey. McCluskey took half of them down on Kaga, while Lieutenant Earl Gallaher led the rest against Akagi.

  They sank them both.

  Next, seventeen Dauntlesses from Yorktown under Lieutenant Commander Max Leslie fell upon Soryu and left her a crippled wreck to be broken in two by the torpedoes of U.S. submarine Nautilus.

  In six minutes, Nagumo had lost his own flagship—having to transfer to the cruiser Nagara—and two other carriers. But he retaliated by ending the career of Yorktown. And while the bold Japanese Kates were breaking through Yorktown’s antiaircraft screen to put three torpedoes into the great ship’s hull, twenty-four Dauntlesses led by the formidable Gallaher found Hiryu, fell upon her, and put her on the bottom.

  Well to the rear with Yamato and the Main Body, Isoroku Yamamoto read reports of the battle in stunned silence. His entire fast carrier group—four big flattops—had been lost, against only one American carrier sunk. With them went their complement of 250 planes, and 2200 officers and men. Although the smaller northern force had seized bases in the Aleutians, it had failed in its chief mission: to lure the Americans away from Midway.

  Yamamoto recognized disaster when he saw it, and he ordered a general retirement. For the first time in 350 years Japan had suffered a naval defeat. At one blow—in a single day’s fighting—the advantage gained at Pearl Harbor had been lost and parity in carrier power was restored in the Pacific.

  All of the Japanese ships reversed course. Isoroku Yamamoto went to his cabin and stayed there for the remainder of the voyage. Tight-lipped and sorrowing, Admiral Tanaka and Commander Hara escorted a bewildered Colonel Ichiki back to Guam.

  Never again was the word Midway mentioned in the Japanese Navy.

  Ernest King saw his chance.

  The Japanese had been checked at Midway and it was now time for the Americans to seize the offensive. The question was: Where? By the middle of the month King had decided that Tulagi-Guadalcanal in the Solomons was the proper place. He proposed the operation to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  But General Marshall and General Arnold were firmly committed to the build-up of the U.S. forces in England—Operation Bolero, as it was called. On May 6, President Roosevelt had told them: “I do not want Bolero slowed down.” They were cool to King’s proposal, even though Cominch backed it up with intelligence reports that the Japanese were moving into Guadalcanal. After much debate, with some reluctance, they agreed.

  But who would command?

  Marshall wanted General MacArthur and King wanted Admiral Nimitz. It would be a Navy show with the Navy’s Marines, King argued, even though the Solomons did lie within MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area. Finally, again after debate, the Solomons were included in the South Pacific Area which Admiral Ghormley was developing under Nimitz’s control.

  On June 25 the Joint Chiefs notified Ghormley to confer with MacArthur on the operation.

  Next day Ghormley, in Auckland, telephoned General Vandegrift in Wellington.

  Wakefield had entered Wellington’s beautiful harbor on a Sunday, June 21. Marines crowding the rails saw a great round of deep blue water girdled by an amphitheater of sloping green hills dotted by white houses with red-tile roofs.

  But there was bad news in Wellington.

  Lieutenant Colonel William Twining, chief of Vandegrift’s advance party, came aboard with the report that the unloading of the cargo ships which had preceded them was far behind schedule.

  “What in hell is wrong?” Vandegrift exploded.

  “They work differently from us,” Twining replied. “They stop for morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea. If it’s raining they don’t work at all.”11

  Vandegrift met the impasse with characteristic directness. Heedless of the sensitivities of socialist unions basking in the favor of a Labor Government, he ordered his Marines to form working parties and unload the ships themselves. It was fortunate that he had acted thus and so quickly, for five
days later he received Ghormley’s telephone call, and on the next day he and his staff were flying to Auckland.

  Vandegrift was astounded when he entered Ghormley’s office. He had known the admiral as a suave and gracious diplomat. But Ghormley appeared harassed. His manner was brusque.

  “Vandegrift,” the admiral said, “I have some very disconcerting news.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Admiral,” the general said.

  But the admiral merely handed the general a top-secret dispatch and grunted, “You will be more sorry when you read this.”12

  Archer Vandegrift could not believe what he read. It was the Joint Chiefs’ directive and it specified that the First Marine Division—his, Vandegrift’s—would seize Tulagi and Guadalcanal. They were to land August 1. Five weeks away!

  Vandegrift read the dispatch again, slowly, in a tense silence broken by the drumming of Ghormley’s slender fingers on the table.

  At last Vandegrift looked up and expostulated: his division was fragmented, one third in Samoa, one third in Wellington, one third at sea; most of his men had not been in uniform six months; most of his equipment was new and needed to be broken in; his supplies would now need to be unloaded, sorted, and combat loaded; he knew nothing of Guadalcanal, not even its location. He concluded:

  “I just don’t see how we can land anywhere by August first.”

  Ghormley nodded. “I don’t see how we can land at all, and I am going to take it up with MacArthur. Meanwhile, we’ll have to go ahead as best as we can.”13

  Archer Vandegrift began going ahead immediately. He summoned his staff to Ghormley’s headquarters, learning that he would be able to replace the missing Seventh Regiment with the Second Marine Regiment, that he would also have Edson’s Raiders—reclaimed rather than received, he thought dryly—as well as the Third Defense Battalion. These units, of course, were widely scattered: the Second Marines were aboard ship in San Diego, Edson was in Samoa, and the defense unit was in Hawaii. Nevertheless, they could rendezvous at sea. The most pressing matter at the moment, even more so than licking in weeks a logistics problem that normally required months, was to find out something—anything—about Guadalcanal Island.

  * Rice wine, pronounced to rhyme with rocky.

  * There were no brigadier generals in the Japanese Army. A Japanese lieutenant general was only equal to an American major general.

  * Naval artillery is measured by the diameter of the shells fired.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  ON GUADALCANAL the month of June had come to an end in a howling midnight rainstorm. At first light of the first day of July, young Constable Dovu came slogging up the slime-slick trail to Paripao, slipping and catching at bushes to keep his balance, calling out breathlessly:

  “Massa, massa! Japan he come along Guadalcanal!”

  Clemens burst from his hut, his beard dripping like a blond teardrop, and Dovu rushed on:

  “One thousand Japan-man come ashore along Lunga. Gottem big fella machine gun.” Dovu paused for breath, and Clemens cut in sharply.

  “Which way you savvy one thousand he stop along Lunga?”

  Stung, Dovu explained: “Me sit down along scrub. Catchem ten fella stone along hand, and me countem Japan-man come ashore.”1

  Annoyed, suddenly realizing that the Japanese had probably landed from the cruiser he had seen in the Bay only two days ago, Clemens snapped out an order for Dovu to return to Lunga to observe the Japanese there.

  Dovu spun and went sliding down the track, his dark arms outstretched for balance, the mud spurting between his big prehensile toes. He and the other scouts would be back repeatedly within the next week. On July 5, they reported that the Japanese had begun to burn off the tall kunai grass in the plains behind the Lunga coconut groves. Clemens instantly divined that the enemy was building an airfield. He radioed the news to Commander Feldt, unaware that this information, relayed to Washington, had electrified the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Meanwhile, Clemens decided to move farther back into the bush. He withdrew to Vungano about halfway across the island. In streaming rain, fording rivers in flood, tightrope-walking over razorbacked ridges, and plastered with mud that worked itself into the eyes and nose and mouth or got into his boots and lay between his toes in coarse cold clots, Clemens plodded dismally along in the track of about a dozen carriers balancing boxed components of his teleradio on their powerful shoulders. Glum though he was, Clemens could at least take consolation from the fact that Sergeant Major Vouza was with him.

  Vouza was a real acquisition. He had been in the police service for twenty-five years and had only just retired. He had volunteered to help Clemens. In his forties—close to old age for a Melanesian—Vouza was still a splendid human being, with his broad, deep, muscular torso, his keen, piercing eyes, and a face which shone with loyalty and courage. Clemens put Vouza in charge of all the scouts.

  Meanwhile, the Japanese were relieving Clemens of his greatest concern: whether or not the natives would go over to the new masters of the Solomons. Eager to obtain laborers for the new airfield, the Japanese recruited them at bayonet point. They plundered the natives’ vegetable gardens and they strutted. Mr. Ishimoto arrived at Aola Bay and proclaimed himself, in effect, the new District Officer. He had orders typed up and issued in all coastal villages. They said:

  JAPANESE OFFICIAL issued in 16th July, 1942, to inhabitants of Guadalcanal.

  Notice No. 1. All of the inhabitants of this island must be ordered by Japanese Government to co-operate for Japan. Any inhabitants against it should be severely punished by Japanese martial law.

  Order No: 2. Men only of 14 years of old or less than fifty years have to work for Japanese troops at some places on this island. During work for Japanese troops they will be given meals, etcetera.

  Gradually, Mr. Ishimoto’s “etcetera”—a euphemism for oppression—solved the native problem. The Japanese became hated. When Ishimoto went patrolling for Martin Clemens during the last few days of July, the natives sent him sloshing down the wrong track. Clemens wisely withdrew deeper into the bush—barefooted this time, to save his remaining pair of tattered boots—achieving the dubious distinction of becoming the first white man to enter the precincts of Vuchikoro, a community of about ten miserable thatched huts perched like a ragged eagle’s nest on the edge of an abyss.

  As July ended and August began, the rains came.

  It should not have been raining, for the monsoons were not due until November. It was the time of the southeast trades, and there should have been little rain; yet, the rains were pouring down from New Zealand to Rabaul, marching up and down the Coral Sea in slanting gray sheets, making an utter mush of the First Marine Division’s piles of supplies lying naked on the Wellington docks, and drumming out a tattoo of welcome to Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa as he sailed into Simpson Harbor at Rabaul to occupy the headquarters of his newly activated Eighth Fleet.

  Mikawa’s command had been activated after the Midway debacle had forced cancellation of the invasion of New Caledonia and the Fijis. Japan was now going to concentrate on “the Outer South Seas,” that is a huge area encompassing New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomons, with headquarters at Rabaul. Mikawa’s new Eighth Fleet would relieve the Fourth Fleet of responsibility in this theater, and Mikawa would thereafter support General Hyakutake’s 17th Army in the paramount operation against Port Moresby.

  Gunichi Mikawa was a combat veteran. He had been second in command at Pearl Harbor and had led a battleship division at Midway. He was gentle and soft-spoken, in appearance one of those “British admirals” in which the Japanese Navy abounded. Having taken the British Royal Navy as their model, many Japanese officers had also patterned themselves on the English gentleman2; often equating the gentlemanly with a kind of amiable reticence. Fortunately for Emperor Hirohito, Gunichi Mikawa was not one of them: his silken manner sheathed the sword of a samurai.

  On July 14, Admiral Mikawa called Commander Toshikazu Ohmae
to his modest home in Setagaya, an outlying ward of Tokyo. Ohmae, considered one of the Japanese Navy’s outstanding planners, was to be the Eighth Fleet’s operations officer. The two men sat among the bright leaves sipping tea. Mikawa expressed his delight in exercising independent command.

  “I want you to go out to the forward areas for a first-hand look at the situation,” he told Ohmae. “Survey local conditions at our bases.”3

  Ohmae departed two days later. On July 20 his flying boat taxied into the seaplane base at Rabaul. It was a clear day. A bright sun sparkled on the blue waters of Simpson Harbor, glinting off the red hull of a half-sunken freighter. Ohmae was impressed by this testimony to American bombing accuracy, but he was not impressed by Rabaul. Small vessels were bunched together with no thought for protection against air raids. Ashore there was interservice bickering, and hostility toward Japan’s new Eighth Fleet. Ohmae’s request for headquarters was countered with the insinuation that any genuine naval commander should prefer to command afloat. He replied that Admiral Mikawa wanted to keep his forces safely to the rear—behind New Ireland to the north while directing operations ashore at Rabaul. Grudgingly, the base force set aside a ramshackle building without even toilet facilities.

  Talks with officers of the 25th Air Flotilla also depressed Ohmae. This outfit—which included such famous pilots as Saburo Sakai, Nishizawa, and Ota—had been carrying on the gruelling air war against Port Moresby. It seemed to Ohmae that the 25th Air Flotilla was interested in nothing but relief.4 Worse, no one—Army or Navy—seemed concerned about the southern Solomons. Ohmae was gratified, however, to learn that an airfield was under construction on Guadalcanal Island.

  Leaving Rabaul, Captain Ohmae flew north to the great sea bastion at Truk. There, he was invited to a dinner in honor of Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake. He was dismayed to find that Hyakutake had not the slightest interest in the southern Solomons. Hyakutake cared only for the Port Moresby operation. Even the Truk admirals joined the general in dismissing Ohmae’s fears of an enemy invasion of the Solomons as the anxiety of a newcomer.