Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun

by John Prados

  Vice Admiral Mikawa barely had time to get used to Rabaul’s intense tropical climate. By early August the Japanese had almost completed the Guadalcanal airstrip. Then, one day at dawn, the waters offshore were filled with Allied vessels. Cruisers and destroyers bombarded Japanese positions on both Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Transports began to lower landing craft and fill them with troops. The campaign had begun.

  * This obfuscation may have resulted partly from confusion over U.S. losses. The Imperial Navy left the Midway battle area under the impression that one American carrier had succumbed to air attacks and another to submarine torpedoes. Actually the Yorktown had been the target in all the successful air strikes but had remained afloat to be finished off by submarine I-168. The Navy may have thought it had reported American losses accurately, but the key point is that it was suppressing Japanese ones.

  I.

  ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

  Every ship in the invasion armada was filled with men keyed to action. Aboard the command ship, USS McCawley, general quarters sounded at 3:00 a.m. Many were already awake. This was true for Colonel Clifton Cates, leading a regiment slated to land in the second wave, as well as for Lieutenant Herbert C. Merillat of the division intelligence staff. Aboard attack transport American Legion, war correspondent Richard Tregaskis awoke an hour later to find excited Marines already lining his ship’s railings. All the vessels were darkened, smoking lamps out for fear of alerting the enemy. The dank fastness of Guadalcanal appeared a little after 1:30. About the time the fleet went to battle stations it split, one section headed to the big island, Guadalcanal, another for Tulagi across the water. On the McCawley, Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, leader of the 1st Marine Division, and Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, fleet commander, were full of hope. The weather closed in as they approached. Low cloud ceilings had kept Japanese search planes away. They might achieve surprise in this, the first major Allied offensive of the war.

  With dawn a carefully choreographed sequence began with the order—the first of many times it would be issued—“Land the landing force.” Soon afterward, aircraft from American carriers one hundred miles away swept in to strafe the invasion beaches. At about 6:15 a.m., cruisers and destroyers added their gunfire to the din. The Japanese were discombobulated enough that more than half an hour passed before their base at Tulagi alerted the 25th Air Flotilla at Rabaul that a bombardment was under way and invasion preparations visible.

  Events thereafter moved quickly. The attack transports glided to their assigned anchorages off Lunga Point and lowered Higgins boats and other craft. Most were worked by U.S. Coast Guard coxswains. Marines began climbing down into the assault craft. Lieutenant Merillat descended a cargo net to his boat at about 9:00 a.m. By then two battalions of Colonel LeRoy P. Hunt’s 5th Marines were nearing Red Beach on Guadalcanal. On the Tulagi side the landing had already begun. Hunt’s last battalion, along with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion and the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion, had engaged the Japanese. Coast Guardsman Douglas Munro waded ashore there to supply Turner with field reports. Boats grounded at Red Beach at 9:10. Colonel Cates’s command group landed at 9:38, the initial echelon of division headquarters about twenty minutes later, among them Lieutenant Merillat, with reporters Richard Tregaskis and Jack Crane. Marines quickly seized the airfield and fanned out to establish a perimeter.

  General Vandegrift wasted no time. He immediately ordered in Cates’s 1st Marines, and behind that the divisional artillery, the 11th Marines of Colonel Pedro del Valle. He even widened Red Beach to hasten the landing. Glenn D. Maxon, a young lieutenant, led a platoon of the 1st Marines aboard the transport Alchiba. They hit the beach at 10:45. Corporal James R. Garrett was an ammunition handler with I Battery of the 11th Marines. He too reached the shore around this time. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Dwight H. Dexter brought in two dozen guardsmen early in the afternoon to implant a small boat unit, Naval Operating Base Guadalcanal. They set up shop at the manager’s house of a Lever Brothers coconut plantation east of Lunga Point. Marine commander Vandegrift landed at 4:00 p.m. Alchiba’s skipper later observed that the physical effort of getting troops into assault boats and moving them to the beach taxed his sailors. Ensign Jack Clark would have agreed. Aboard the transport Fuller, he worked one of the boats landing the 1st Marines. Clark went ashore as “beachmaster” for Red Beach, managing the circulation of landing boats and the arrival of supplies, getting them off the shore. Clark’s job became vital to the entire Allied enterprise in a way he could never have imagined. What supplies he landed would be all the Marines had.

  The Japanese on Guadalcanal fled at the first sight of the invasion. That was probably understandable. The defense force consisted of only about 500 naval infantry. These Special Naval Landing Forces (SNLF) were tough troops, but they had no chance against more than 12,000 U.S. Marines. Captain Monzen Kanae’s 1,700 construction workers, who made up the bulk of the Imperial Navy complement, hardly figured in the equation. In fact, the SNLF were responsible for their safety.

  The t day ended with American control unchallenged save for some tough fighting on Tulagi and the adjacent islet of Tanambogo, where the SNLF fought hard. The most important enemy resistance was an air attack on the ships offshore—and there the Allies had a remarkable advantage—advance notice from “coastwatchers,” Australian and indigenous patriots who stayed behind Japanese lines and radioed warnings of enemy activities. The coastwatchers became a pillar of Allied intelligence in the Solomons.

  BETWIXT PILLAR AND POST

  Coastwatchers were able to hold on in the Solomons and New Guinea because of how the Japanese had occupied the islands. The Outer South Seas had never been Tokyo’s major priority. Reserving most of its combat strength for the war in China, the Japanese Army viewed the “strike south,” or Pacific war, primarily as an Imperial Navy venture. There is a backstory to Japanese interest in Australia that is rooted in the vagaries of national politics and the intense competition between Army and Navy for dominance in the government, but details are not necessary. It is sufficient to note that the Japanese Army sought to conduct its Pacific war as a sideshow, allocating just ten divisions to do everything—conquer Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies; garrison those places; and wage battle across the full range of Pacific islands. Thus the South Seas Detachment the Army set aside for the Bismarcks region—New Guinea and the Solomons—consisted of just 5,500 troops built around the three battalions of a single infantry regiment.

  The Imperial Navy focused on the Mandates, or South Seas proper, and its prewar plans had not envisioned a Solomons campaign. Once it happened, forces were sufficient to garrison only a few posts. Except for small islands like Tulagi or big bases like Rabaul, the Japanese could do little more than patrol from their enclaves. Australian coastwatchers went on living on the same islands. Knowing the land better, and with the help of Melanesian friends, they evaded Japanese patrols with impunity. The Japanese selected their posts through staff studies. Vice Admiral Inouye Shigeyoshi of the Fourth Fleet had held war games at Truk a couple of months before Pearl Harbor. The nanyo commander realized that unless Japan held some positions in the Bismarcks, he would have a long open flank exposed to Americans or Australians. His war games showed the need for protection by air bases at key points. Inouye selected Rabaul and Gasmata on New Britain, Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea, and Tulagi in the lower Solomons as the most desirable positions. When IGHQ agreed to this aspect of the war plan, on November 10, 1941, the port of Kavieng on New Ireland was added. A few days later the Army’s South Seas Detachment issued a pamphlet to familiarize its soldiers with the Bismarck Archipelago. The detachment’s initial operation, immediately after Pearl Harbor, had been to capture the island of Guam in the Mandates. On December 9, as that battle ended, Australian coastwatcher Cornelius Page reported Japanese scout planes flying toward Rabaul, the first confirmed report from the Bismarcks. Rabaul, defended by just a pair of Australian antiaircraft
guns, was bombed by big Japanese flying boats at the end of December.

  On January 4, 1942, the Combined Fleet ordered Admiral Inouye to execute the Bismarcks offensive, code-named the “R Operation.” A Japanese Army companion order alerted the South Seas Detachment. The same day twenty-two medium bombers attacked Rabaul. Australian planes there, ten Wirraway fighters and four Hudson bombers, did not catch them. Inouye issued his operations order on the fifth. An Australian plane that managed to reconnoiter Truk four days later discovered preparations in full swing, with a dozen cruisers and destroyers plus another large vessel at anchor. Land-based bombers continued to raid Rabaul, losing only one plane. The Army troop commander, anxious for better intelligence, got one of his staff attached to the Fourth Fleet and sent that man on a pair of Rabaul missions to photograph defenses. Army troops were supplemented by three battalion-size units of the SNLF, the Japanese Marines.

  The Australians suffered no illusions. For weeks authorities had been gathering the small numbers of citizens who lived in the villages and plantations dotting the islands, moving them to Rabaul, where at least there was a garrison, in the form of Lieutenant Colonel John J. Scanlan’s Lark Force, about 1,400 troops built around the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry, Australian Imperial Forces. There were some militia from the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, plus a true oddity, a battalion band recruited entirely from members of the Salvation Army. Small detachments had been posted to the Solomons, including at Gasmata and on Tulagi. Bougainville also had an independent infantry company. As civilians regrouped, a few planters, managers, and missionaries stayed behind, marking the beginning of the coastwatcher network.

  Before the war there had been roughly a thousand Australian civilians at Rabaul. Now there were several times that many. By mid-January most women and children had been evacuated, along with some men. The rest, plus twelve hundred Chinese residents, a handful of Japanese, and the native population numbering more than ten thousand, stayed where they were. The Japanese were coming. The only question was when.

  Meanwhile the Imperial Navy detailed its formidable striking force to help the invaders. Admiral Nagumo sailed on January 5 with four Kido Butai carriers. After a stop at Iwakuni to take on aircraft, he cruised on to Truk, arriving on January 14. Seaman Kuramoto Iki, a lookout aboard carrier Kaga, had dreamed of the nanyo since he was a boy, imagining naked natives dancing under palm trees. But the blazing sun broiled the inside of the ship and shattered those fantasies. Suddenly Iki longed for home. At Truk the crews changed to tropical uniform, a welcome relief. Kuramoto had never imagined he would look forward to rain—squalls and wind dissipated some of the heat. Evening breezes also brought respite. The Akagi installed armored shields on its AA guns to protect the gunners. After replenishing, the fleet left Truk on the seventeenth. Seaman Kuramoto gazed at the night sky and marveled at the brilliant stars of the Southern Cross constellation—it is remarkable how often South Pacific veterans from both sides invoke the Southern Cross as somehow defining their experiences. Kuramoto, for one, lay on his back on the upper deck, among the machine guns, and never closed his eyes. On the flag bridge Vice Admiral Nagumo likely had similar thoughts.

  Kido Butai took position northeast of New Ireland, steaming back and forth across the equator, heading north in the daytime to avoid possible Australian air action, and south at night to attain attack position. At dawn on January 20, it flung ninety planes at Rabaul. Commander Fuchida Mitsuo, master of the Pearl Harbor attack, led the air groups. They launched from 200 miles away. There was little resistance. The base had two airfields then. The Japanese encountered a pair of Australian aircraft attempting to flee, and Zeroes quickly destroyed them. (Australian sources maintain that eight of Squadron Leader John Lerew’s No. 24 Squadron fighters intercepted the strike, and that six of Lerew’s planes were lost, including the two mentioned by Fuchida.) Dive-bombers blew up the only ship in the harbor, a merchantman. Fuchida led the level bomber unit himself, and they demolished the only target they could find, the single coast defense gun emplacement at the entrance to Simpson Harbor. “If ever a sledge hammer had been used to crack an egg,” Fuchida later reflected, “this was the time.”

  Admiral Nagumo divided his force the following day, with deckload strikes from one carrier division against Kavieng, and from the other on Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea. Once again there were no targets worth speaking of. On January 22 the planes smashed Rabaul all over. Fuchida felt the operations misguided, exposing the striking force to possible enemy attack, plus aircraft wastage, for few results. As for Seaman Kuramoto, he felt crestfallen that Kido Butai had never seen an enemy.

  The sailors and troops aboard the invasion flotilla bound for Rabaul were no doubt grateful for carrier air support. Their path was smoothed, for example, by destruction of the Australian coast defense battery. Carrier fighters shot down the Australian patrol plane that sighted the heavy cruiser unit slated to support the landings. A coastwatcher also reported the flotilla as it negotiated the strait between New Britain and New Ireland on January 22. The Lark Force commander, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front in 1917, knew the dangers of artillery bombardment and accurately surmised that Japanese strength was several times his own. Not willing to see his men slaughtered by naval gunfire, Jack Scanlan ordered them to new positions at the edge of Rabaul and the southern point of Blanche Bay. Later that day, following the second round of carrier air strikes, Scanlan realized his most vital installations were gone. With the remnants of the Australian air unit withdrawn, he gave orders to blow up remaining positions and concentrate to the west and south.

  Shortly after midnight Japanese soldiers began landing in Simpson Harbor, near the town, and in Keravia Bay, under the lip of Vulcan volcano, aiming at Vunakanau airfield. The landings went without incident, illuminated by parachute flares. An Australian first saw the Japanese onshore at about 2:30 a.m. A brief firefight occurred at Keravia Bay, but the Australians could not stop the invaders. Japanese troops quickly moved off the beaches, and with dawn their transports entered the harbor and began to disgorge equipment. JNAF aircraft swept over to strafe anything that moved. Close air support cost the Kido Butai one level bomber and one dive-bomber.

  Colonel Scanlan’s units were out of touch with one another except by messenger. Rumors of large Japanese forces were rife, and truck convoys were actually spotted. Bit by bit the Australians retired until Scanlan ordered a withdrawal. By midafternoon the company holding Vunakanau airfield had been driven back. Japanese reported the capture of 6,000 bombs and sixty drums of aviation gas. Rabaul town and Lakunai airfield had already fallen. Japanese losses were sixteen dead and twenty-five wounded. A desultory war of patrols took place across New Britain, until Japanese troops massacred roughly 160 Australian soldiers at Tol Plantation on February 4. Hearing of the atrocity, his supplies dwindling, Scanlan donned dress uniform and emerged from the bush to surrender his men.

  One Australian company got away in good order, and scattered bands of others did too. Coastwatchers organized secret evacuations. Roughly 400 soldiers and civilians escaped New Britain. Approximately 1,050 Australian troops were taken captive and held in a camp at Rabaul through summer, when most were sent to Japan. Sadly a great many were aboard the steamer Montevideo Maru when the American submarine Sturgeon torpedoed her on July 1, 1942. Jack Scanlan survived the war, becoming a prison warden in Hobart.

  Rabaul would be the big base of the soto nanyo. At Truk, Admiral Inouye ordered JNAF units there, including the Yokohama Air Corps of patrol bombers, plus a formation of medium bombers and fighters. The fleet created a special base force for the Outer South Seas with 8,800 seamen, engineers, stevedores, maintenance and repair specialists, plus SNLF troops. Rear Admiral Goto Aritomo brought the four heavy ships of his Cruiser Division 6 to Simpson Harbor, where they dropped anchor on January 30. A unit of Zero fighters reached Vunakanau airfield that very day. Starting the day after Rabaul fell, the Australians bombed it every other night through early Febr
uary.

  Simultaneous with the Rabaul attack, another Japanese flotilla captured Kavieng. There the invasion began shortly after midnight. The assault unit was the 2nd Maizuru SNLF. The town fell at about the time Japanese troops started landing at Rabaul. Kavieng had been held by only part of a single infantry company, which withdrew except for a few men who stayed to destroy supplies. The rest moved into the interior, circled back to the coast, and made a heroic attempt to escape to Port Moresby aboard a patched-up island steamer, the Induna Star. Their harrowing voyage deserves more attention than we can give it. Almost caught by a Japanese destroyer, they were bombed in early February while crossing the Solomon Sea some ninety miles south of Rabaul. The ship actually surrendered to aircraft, which watched them for hours until a destroyer arrived to take off the men and tow the captive vessel.

  Other enclaves followed Rabaul and Kavieng. On New Ireland, the latter functioned as a satellite port. Little time had passed by January 29, when the Navy General Staff ordered the occupation of Tulagi, Lae, and Salamaua. The NGS directive instructed Fourth Fleet “to invade strategic points in the Solomon Islands and the eastern part of New Guinea in order to cut communications between these areas and the Australian mainland and to neutralize the waters north of Eastern Australia.”

  The next Japanese enclave became Gasmata on the southern coast of New Britain. A coastwatcher there, P. Daymond, had alerted Port Moresby to the first air raid against it from Rabaul. The Japanese discovered him when Australian commercial radio broadcast news that the strike had been seen over Gasmata. The Japanese promptly bombed and strafed. Daymond got away before the enemy invasion ships arrived on February 9. SNLF troops landed with the 4th Engineer Unit, which began that indispensable element of warfare in the South Pacific, an airstrip.