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

by John Prados

  The Allies had also caught wind of Japan’s FS Operation: a CINCPAC intelligence report the same day observed that the Japanese Second Fleet—which had acted as the Midway occupation force—had a new, important mission. For a time intelligence debated a move on the Aleutians or New Guinea, but CINCPAC finally predicted action in the New Guinea–Solomons area. An American B-24 spotted several JNAF long-range patrol bombers between Fiji and New Caledonia. In a fleet intelligence summary on July 10, Captain Layton confidently asserted that the Japanese were assembling troops at Truk, naming Kavieng, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea as destinations. Pearl Harbor also observed the creation of the Eighth Fleet. In mid-July CINCPAC confirmed that the construction on Guadalcanal aimed to create an airfield.

  The Japanese indeed intended fresh operations. Fleet units screened Army troops landing at Gona on the New Guinea coast. They would try to march over the Owen Stanley mountains, doing by land what had failed by sea. Imperial Headquarters promulgated a new central agreement on New Guinea. Troops of the South Seas Detachment reached Kokoda by early August. Imperial Navy planners anticipated an amphibious move against Moresby once the Army threatened from the landward side. Some naval officers viewed the Kokoda Trail march as an Army stunt, not to be taken seriously, others as a waste of strength. When Commander Ohmae came to Rabaul as advance man for activation of the Eighth Fleet, he found Admiral Yamada doubtful, because of the engagements on New Guinea, that there were sufficient planes to put some at the new Guadalcanal airfield.

  In any event, the Japanese were in motion and the Allies knew it. The Allies also understood it would be only a matter of time before Japan consolidated its positions. This was the moment to strike. The Allies had a plan to do that. On August 5 the Owada Communications Group, the Imperial Navy’s radio intelligence organization, alerted all commands that Allied units were at sea. On the sixth, Guadalcanal informed Eighth Fleet that natives helping prepare the airfield had run away. But search planes saw nothing to the south. The next morning Rabaul and Truk received the frantic messages from Tulagi reporting invasion. Guadalcanal was silent. At Truk, where the Combined Fleet flagship was now moored, Ugaki Matome wrote, “This enemy employed a huge force, intending to capture that area once and for all. That we failed to discover it until attacked deserves censure as extremely careless.”

  THE CARTWHEEL FORMULA

  Allied invasion forces materialized with the dawn. This resulted from one of the most gigantic improvisations imaginable, makee learnee on a grand scale—none of the careful preparation that preceded D-Day at Normandy. Rather the ’Canal—or “Operation Watchtower,” to give it its proper code name—became the first major American amphibious landing of the war, an application of doctrines hitherto extant only on paper, practiced in small-scale exercises with rudimentary techniques and novel, unproven equipment. The landing boats, cross-shipping, and fire-support arrangements, plus much more that would be routine by D-Day, was mostly experimental at Guadalcanal. Moreover, Watchtower would be carried out by an untried area command, viewed with some suspicion by another theater boss quite zealous in protecting his own prerogatives. All of this amounted to something far less than a formula for success.

  The command structure and strategy that led to Watchtower began with the Allied Powers wrestling with the quandaries of warfare over the vast Pacific and Indian oceans. Japanese conquests rendered obsolete the initial arrangements that had distinguished between the United States in the Pacific, working out of Pearl Harbor, and a combined Allied command leading the fighting in East and South Asia. Reorganization of the theaters became essential. The broad oceanic expanse was the easy part. The United States designated the Pacific Ocean Area as a theater command early in April 1942 and made Admiral Chester W. Nimitz its commander in chief (CINCPOA) on April 20, in addition to his role in charge of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC). The Pacific Ocean Area, in turn, was subdivided into regions for the North, Central, and South.

  The choices made in regard to the South Pacific and Australia, on the one hand, and the Indian Ocean, on the other, were most difficult. Much as special efforts rescued American codebreakers in the Philippines, another had been mounted to extract Philippine C-in-C General Douglas A. MacArthur, who reached Australia in March 1942. MacArthur’s future employment in a position commensurate with his stature became a concern. He appeared on the scene at a crucial moment, when the Allies had come to the final stages of their division of Pacific operational areas. The new Southwest Pacific Command (SOWESPAC), to be responsible for Australia, New Guinea, and the islands surrounding those places, was established on April 18, a couple of weeks after recognition of the area as a military theater of operations. Although Washington planners had envisioned a different officer heading SOWESPAC, MacArthur’s selection emerged as an easy solution, and he was duly appointed.

  General MacArthur organized the defense of Australia with alacrity and began building SOWESPAC forces into the juggernaut they became. Profiting from the presence of a body of U.S. troops and airmen, on their way to the Philippines when the war began, MacArthur created a maneuver force in Australia that soon intervened in the New Guinea campaign. MacArthur’s bombers quickly overshadowed Australian planes in aerial attacks on Rabaul, and SOWESPAC aircraft played a role in the Battle of the Coral Sea. But his command focused on checking the Japanese advance, which at this time meant halting Tokyo’s army in New Guinea.

  As a result of early agreements between the major Allies—the United States and Great Britain—the powers had adopted a “Europe first” strategy. Operations and forces would be concentrated to stop Hitler’s Germany and defeat the Nazis. The strategy provided for a defensive stance in the Pacific. Given that approach, the allocation of forces and of the stream of new tanks, trucks, and planes rolling off the production lines favored the Atlantic. The Pacific would be accorded only a fraction of the troops and equipment. This raised the concomitant question of where they should be sent. During the very first months, shipments were funneled to Australia because of its weakness, its undeniable importance as a base for an Allied counteroffensive, and the fact that a supply flow to the continent down under was already under way when hostilities began.

  As General MacArthur stocked his training camps, organized troops, and packed the air bases with planes, the SOWESPAC situation seemed less critical. But there remained the matter of defending the sea-lanes to Australia. Allied intelligence had found several indications of Japanese interest in a South Pacific offensive. There were a few New Zealand troops scattered among the islands, and the Australians had extended a defense umbrella over the Vichy French colony of New Caledonia in late 1940, placing a small garrison at Nouméa. American Marines held Johnston Island. The New Hebrides, Fiji, Samoa, Canton, Palmyra, Tonga, Bora Bora, and other places appeared vulnerable. Planners in Washington and Canberra devoted great energy to debating how to divide meager equipment among the many vulnerable, strategic places that required defense. More than 50,000 troops would eventually be deployed there.

  The first major dispute arose over these arrangements. The U.S. Army viewed the South Pacific islands as part of the SOWESPAC domain. Maintaining that the island bases were integral to preserving the sea-lanes, and that defense of sea frontiers was inherently a maritime mission, the Navy argued that the islands belonged under CINCPAC. Eventually the Army conceded. As a result the South Pacific command (SOPAC) emerged as one of CINCPAC’s operational sectors. Admirals King and Nimitz conferred at San Francisco on April 23, 1942, and there delineated SOPAC’s role. King had by then selected Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, recently returned from London, where he had headed the U.S. naval mission to Great Britain, as the new head of SOPAC.

  Beyond means and command there were inevitable practical questions. It was one thing for presidents and prime ministers to agree on a “Europe first” approach with their Combined Chiefs of Staff, quite another to decide what the available forces should actually do. The United States had spent decades tinkering w
ith its blueprint for fighting Japan, “War Plan Orange,” but that contingency assumed a focus on the Pacific, and some of the important forces for executing it had been wiped out at Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet and many Allied forces, including the British capital ships that formed the backbone of the Royal Navy’s Eastern Fleet, had then been destroyed in the futile effort to hold the Malay Barrier. There needed to be a new design to use existing Allied strength.

  Admiral Ernest J. King, the COMINCH or commander in chief of the U.S. Navy, took the lead in Pacific strategy debates. King won his point when arguing at the Arcadia conference for defense of the South Pacific islands. As early as February, a planning paper written by King’s staff suggested that an island in the Solomons be taken and held to link the Allied bases. Admiral King did not stop there. Not willing to countenance a passive posture, King prodded CINCPAC to engage in offensive action to the extent possible, mentioning the Bismarcks-Solomons area in this specific context. The carrier raids Nimitz initiated in February and March 1942, including the abortive mission to Rabaul, and the raid actually carried out on New Guinea, accorded with King’s concept. Even before interservice agreement on a Solomons operation, King instructed Nimitz to prepare a major amphibious attack to be carried out between the areas of SOPAC and SOWESPAC. The King-Nimitz meeting at San Francisco in April—the same one where the CINCPAC explained his determination to fight in the Coral Sea—confirmed the offensive. Days after that confab Admiral King ordered the creation of a South Pacific Amphibious Force built around the 1st Marine Division. In a sense SOPAC was established for the specific purpose of carrying out a Solomons offensive.

  British prime minister Winston Churchill also encouraged a U.S. Pacific offensive to prevent the Japanese from concentrating on Burma and India. As the British discovered obstacles to early action in Europe or North Africa, they agitated even more for an offensive simply in order that the Allies be seen as combating the enemy. Not long before the Battle of Midway, Admiral King capitalized on these attitudes, pointing out that the Japanese were focusing on the front that arced from Australia around to Hawaii and Alaska in the eastern Pacific. Offensive action would be the appropriate counter. Toward the end of June, flush with the enthusiasm from victory at Midway, Admiral King directed CINCPAC to prepare to invade the lower Solomons with U.S. Marines. King and Nimitz met again at San Francisco in early July. As they conferred, Station Hypo codebreakers supplied a decrypt revealing Japanese troops and construction units on Guadalcanal. The admirals instantly zeroed in on that area. The enemy base at Tulagi, which COMINCH wanted taken before the Imperial Navy could consolidate, became a specific objective. King’s formal directive made this a priority.

  Meanwhile, after the Coral Sea, General MacArthur also weighed in. The SOWESPAC chieftain proposed to concentrate almost all Allied resources under himself to strike past New Guinea to the Philippines, then on to Japan. While this grandiose scheme was not feasible, it put MacArthur, too, on record favoring an offensive. When departing the Philippines he had promised to return. But a straight-up northerly advance, leaving Rabaul untouched on his right flank, would be extremely hazardous. SOWESPAC foresaw capturing the Japanese base outright using a single amphibious division. That did not seem doable either. MacArthur and Nimitz worked with Washington to refine concepts, and “Operation Cartwheel” emerged, intended to capture or isolate Rabaul as an adjunct to the SOWESPAC battle on New Guinea. The disputes between SOWESPAC and CINCPAC need not detain us except to note that relations between General MacArthur and his colleagues remained touchy throughout. But due to the amount of naval activity required to attack the lower Solomons, MacArthur agreed to cede a portion of his theater to give SOPAC authority over the waters in which a Solomons operation would occur. That became “Task One” of Cartwheel, to proceed to later phases—culminating in the direct attack on Rabaul—over which SOWESPAC would again hold sway.

  Fredericksburg, Texas, is not quite a two-horse town, but it is a place where Main Street still means something. There are just a couple of major intersections and a population of less than seven thousand people, many of them, like Chester W. Nimitz himself, of German immigrant stock. It was much smaller—just a few streets—when Nimitz was born in a white frame house there in February 1885. Nearly 200 miles from water, above all this town could be considered unlikely to produce an admiral of the ocean seas. But that would be to ignore the determination of the man, his hard-boiled common sense, and the influence of his grandfather—a former German merchant seaman. In fact, the practical Nimitz sought a college education and saw the service academies as the way to obtain his degree. Nimitz chose the Army and applied to West Point, only to discover no appointment was available. So he entered and won a competition sponsored by his congressman for an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Nimitz graduated from Annapolis seventh in the class of 1905, initially serving aboard the battleship Ohio. He was commissioned two years later.

  Nimitz was perceptive, resourceful, and smart as a whip. As a young ensign in the Philippines he skippered the gunboat Panay, and got a destroyer command when his contemporaries were mostly still division officers. Nimitz remained unaffected by the court-martial required when he ran his destroyer aground at Batangas. That kind of incident could finish a less talented officer. But his admiral downgraded the proceeding to a board of inquiry, which issued a reprimand, and then rejected any public upbraiding, confining the reprimand simply to its statement in the board report. With submarines in their infancy in the U.S. fleet, Nimitz became a submariner—under protest, it is true (he had wanted a battleship billet), but a key career development. Barely four years out of Annapolis, Nimitz led a submarine flotilla as a lieutenant. His evident ability and ease at making friends served Nimitz well.

  He was also intrepid and resourceful, as shown when Nimitz rescued a sailor fallen overboard. On a different occasion he saved another seaman from drowning. An engineering specialist, Nimitz championed diesel power to replace gasoline engines in the submarine fleet. Later he survived a potentially fatal accident with a diesel engine, losing part of a finger but saved by his Academy class ring, which jammed the works and prevented the machine from sucking in his arm. Nimitz participated in the first underway refueling ever conducted by the Navy, was an aide to top admirals commanding the entire U.S. fleet, and established the Navy’s first reserve officer training corps unit. He captained a cruiser with the Asiatic Fleet; submarine, cruiser, and battleship divisions; and made rear admiral in 1938. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was in charge of the Navy’s personnel department when, ten days after the Pearl Harbor attack, he was suddenly ordered to the stricken base to breathe life into the still-stunned Pacific Fleet. In a highly unusual tribute to his qualities, Chester Nimitz was promoted from rear directly to full admiral as he took up the Pacific Fleet command.

  The wrecks of the warships devastated by the Japanese still smoldered as Nimitz arrived at Pearl. He raised eyebrows, holding his change-of-command ceremony on the deck of a submarine—the first time a fleet command had ever transferred on an undersea boat—and more by refusing to relieve officers on the Pacific Fleet staff. Already the dispute over who was “responsible” for Pearl Harbor had ignited a witch-hunt for scapegoats. Admiral Nimitz proved equally loyal to subordinates and superiors—a crucial element in restoring the fleet’s confidence. He did fire a few men, most important some of those responsible for the fiasco during an attempt to reinforce Wake Island, but only after careful consideration.

  Admiral Nimitz coupled this consideration with smarts and a tactically aggressive stance. His carrier attacks materially annoyed the Japanese. Nimitz had no problem with the improvised scheme to fly land-based B-25 bombers off an aircraft carrier for the Doolittle raid. He appreciated the information from Captain Layton, his fleet intelligence officer, and Commander Rochefort of Station Hypo. The admiral’s response laid the basis for the Coral Sea and Midway actions. While higher-ups were still disputing theaters and commanders, it was Nimitz,
in the spring of 1942, who first suggested taking a Marine Raider battalion and using it against the Japanese at Tulagi. Then, four days after the Battle of the Coral Sea, Admiral Nimitz issued guidance to Vice Admiral Ghormley at SOPAC. The orders instructed Ghormley to prepare a major amphibious offensive against Japanese-held positions. Guadalcanal had yet to become the target.

  Thus Chester Nimitz set the stage. In the South Pacific, Vice Admiral Ghormley spent a month familiarizing himself with the area and visiting the key players, from General MacArthur to Australian government officials and French colonials in Nouméa, where SOPAC headquarters would be located. Ghormley assumed command of SOPAC on June 19. He planned to drive the Japanese off Tulagi and occupy a suitable airfield site on adjacent Guadalcanal. In mid-July Ghormley was joined by Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, who left his post as a Washington planner to take over the South Pacific Amphibious Force. Together they would mount the actual landing on Guadalcanal. By then there were just two weeks left before the invasion’s target date.

  Alexander Archer Vandegrift was a fighting Marine. The Guadalcanal landing force would be his own 1st Marine Division plus some extra units, but less a regiment in Samoa. When called into Ghormley’s office and told to arrange for an assault landing on August 1, Vandegrift did not even know where Guadalcanal was, much less have the detailed knowledge to plan an invasion. But Major General Vandegrift set out to obtain it. The push to nail down the facts on Guadalcanal helped enshrine the last two pillars of intelligence, overhead photography and combat intelligence—the kind of data provided by willing private citizens or prisoner interrogation.