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

by John Prados

  Now the night cast Mikawa Gunichi as avenging angel. His cruisers lashed Henderson with 752 eight-inch shells. U.S. radio intelligence reported Mikawa at sea, probably in Chokai, that very day, but Cactus had had to choose between cruisers and convoy. While nowhere as destructive as Kurita’s battleship bombardment, Mikawa’s shells inflicted more damage on planes and renewed the craters that pockmarked airfields.

  To complete their mastery of Ironbottom, the Japanese may have sent a midget submarine sortie into the anchorage. Orders for the mission exist. It was to have been launched from seaplane carrier Chiyoda, which had shuttled eight of the craft to the Solomons. These small two-man subs, notably used at Pearl Harbor and at Sydney, Australia, were to invade the sound around midnight. But there is no evidence of their actual presence. Some American small craft, escorted by a pair of the new PTs, crossed undisturbed from Guadalcanal to Tulagi that night. Admiral Ugaki complained that plans for the midgets’ employment were incomplete, and notes that he ordered a study, puzzling since Combined Fleet staff had discussed using the subs in the very first days of Watchtower. Ugaki recommended putting the boats at Kamimbo and loosing them when there were suitable targets. It is not clear whether Yamamoto overruled him. The Japanese did set up a midget sub base at the designated place, and other sorties did run from there. Months later the American salvage ship Ortolan found a midget and raised her long enough to recover this day’s attack order and other documents, but a storm broke her grip and the submersible was lost.

  At dawn on the fifteenth, Marines were outraged to see Japanese transports unloading in broad daylight across the sound. But Cactus air was in disarray. Roy Geiger demanded his men find gas, and they did—an officer remembered fuel barrels had been cached in swamps and groves, and several hundred were found and laboriously hauled to the strips. That brought two days’ supply. Guadalcanal called upon SOPAC to fly gasoline aboard its daily flights and even bring a load on submarine Amberjack. Mechanics rushed repairs. Starting early, scratch flights of SBDs and Army planes took off to hit the transports at Tassafaronga Point. Fighters engaged R Area Force floatplanes and Japanese interceptors—ominously, from Kido Butai’s Carrier Division 2—to open the way, strafing ships when they had the chance.

  Mitsukuni Oshita, a chief petty officer on destroyer Hayashi, was impressed at the way the Americans pressed their attacks in the face of murderous flak. Half the Japanese transports, damaged, withdrew. The others, also damaged, were beached—hopefully to be emptied later. The Nankai Maru and Sasago Maru were hit by the first U.S. wave, Azumasan Maru in the second attack, the Kyushu Maru later. An American bomb wrecked the Kyushu Maru’s wheelhouse, killing her captain and all the bridge crew. Ignorant of this, the ship’s engineers kept her at full speed until she ran up on the beach. The ammunition aboard another ship cooked off and she blew up. The Nankai Maru, the only cargoman not to catch fire—and the only damaged ship that tarried to unload—would be the only vessel of this group to escape. Men of the Independent Ship Engineering Regiment struggled to unload the supplies. The Japanese estimated the ships were 80 percent emptied. They would be furious in turn when U.S. warships appeared to shell the stacked supplies, destroying many. Beach crews were heavily hit too, with the regimental commander killed and one of his companies wiped out but for eight men.

  Yet the Army troops had landed. They could not be stopped. With a Tokyo Express on October 17 the program was fulfilled. Captain Inui Genjirou brought his 8th Antitank Company, now without any guns, to help move the supplies. The men were so exhausted he had to rest them for a day, and they could do little to combat the fire that broke out in a nearby dump. But one of Inui’s companies, thrilled to get cigarettes, labored to move the rice sacks away. Inui himself enjoyed the first coffee he had had since leaving Java.

  General Geiger so focused on the supply battle that the day’s Japanese air raid went virtually uncontested. Come night the Imperial Navy returned. This time it was Rear Admiral Omori Sentaro with heavy cruisers Myoko and Maya. Commander Nagasawa Ko, whose home prefecture of Fukushima would be devastated by tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns of 2011, was Omori’s senior staff officer and recalled later that the Japanese had expected to be sunk. On the Myoko the crew were given rifles and instructed to get to shore and fight as naval infantry. Instead they faced no opposition. The warships pounded Henderson Field with 1,500 more eight-inch shells (some sources report 926). Yet next morning the Cactus Air Force could still fly ten dive-bombers and seven Army fighter-bombers. Geiger’s maintenance crews plus the Seabees literally saved Guadalcanal.

  American commanders recognized the crisis even if the Japanese did not. And they spoke up. Vandegrift cabled SOPAC and demanded every ounce of backing. Slew McCain, the AIRSOLS commander, did the same. Ghormley repeated the essence of their appeals in a dispatch to Nimitz. And the SOPAC had Rear Admiral George D. Murray’s Hornet task force mount a carrier raid on the R Area Force floatplane base at Rekata Bay. Results were indeterminate.

  At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz decided he had had enough. Ghormley’s dispatch struck him as more weak-kneed passing of the buck. Aircraft carrier Enterprise, having completed repairs, was rushing to the South Pacific to increase the Allies’ paper-thin strength. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, whom CINCPAC had appointed to lead the “Big E’s” task force, had gone ahead to get a feel for the situation. Nimitz huddled with his inner circle late into the night discussing the SOPAC command situation. On October 16, Admiral Nimitz asked Admiral King for authority to substitute Halsey for Ghormley. The COMINCH approved. Just as “Bull” Halsey reached Nouméa, Nimitz sent him a message: The Bull would supplant Bob Ghormley as theater commander. The aggressive Halsey led the next battle, the most important yet. Allied leaders already knew it was upon them.

  BLOOD UPON THE SEA

  Despite the Imperial Navy’s changed codes and communications, Allied intelligence assembled an increasingly alarming picture of its activities. Indications piled up from radio traffic analysis, from the coastwatchers, from combat intelligence, from observation and aerial reconnaissance, even a few from Ultra proper. After Cape Esperance—itself an intelligence windfall, because the Allies captured 113 survivors of the warships Furutaka and Fubuki, whom they plied for information—the picture darkened further. Starting the next morning, the Allies observed a rapid increase in the volume of messages sent on the Japanese radio nets, especially those used to report radio fixes on Allied ships. Meanwhile a snooper discovered Kido Butai, reporting carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers 400 miles northeast of Cactus. Intelligence also detected the enemy intercept of that scout’s message, plus Imperial Navy sighting reports, an increasing number of them from I-boats. The fighting around Cactus certainly indicated the Japanese were not giving in.

  The captured seamen revealed to Allied intelligence the actual Imperial Navy vessels engaged at both Cape Esperance and Savo, furnishing information that was accurate, if not at first believed, because it did not accord with the claims of U.S. commanders. Richmond Kelly Turner circulated this data on October 21. The prisoners knew nothing of Yamamoto’s current plans, but they possessed a wealth of knowledge of Japanese procedures, equipment, and operational methods.

  On October 15, codebreakers reported that the pattern of radio traffic showed Yamamoto had taken direct command of operations. Combined Fleet became a heavy originator of messages. Ultra also provided radio bearings for a fleet unit containing at least two aircraft carriers, and reported an unidentified radio emitter on Guadalcanal—likely Lieutenant Funashi’s Navy observation post—that had begun providing fairly accurate tabulations of Cactus air strength. The next day Ultra confirmed the traffic flow from Combined Fleet and reported that the Japanese appeared to have focused all their attention on the Solomons. Pearl Harbor was on edge. The CINCPAC war diary for October 17 read, “It now appears that we are unable to control the sea…in the Guadalcanal area…our supply of the position will only be done at great expense.” Nimitz did n
ot believe the situation hopeless, but it had become critical: “There is no doubt now that Japs are making an all-out effort in the Solomons, employing the greater part of their Navy.” Ultra noted quiet, or an unchanged Japanese situation, over several succeeding days. Starting on October 19, Ultra tabulated a reduction in high-level, high-priority message volume, ominously suggesting Yamamoto’s offensive was under way. The next day it furnished a new location for the Kido Butai and associated carrier commander Nagumo with surface fleet boss Kondo.

  But Allied intelligence was not omniscient. As had happened before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, there were doubts about the Japanese aircraft carriers. The Combined Fleet had five of these ships, with the large carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, plus the light carrier Zuiho in Carrier Division 1, and the slower fleet carriers Hiyo and Junyo in Carrier Division 2. At the end of September, Washington’s weekly estimates located Carrier Division 1 not far from Rabaul, when it rode at anchor at Truk, except possibly the Zuikaku, which intelligence believed en route to Yokosuka. A week later it put the Zuiho also in Japan—and continued to believe the Zuiho in Empire waters right through the estimate of October 20, the last to appear before the battle. The Zuikaku the Allies estimated back in Truk on October 13, and they continued to place Carrier Division 1 there a week later, even though Japanese carriers had already been seen at sea, with locations for them repeatedly remarked in Ultra.

  The record for Carrier Division 2 was worse. It was continuously placed in Empire waters right through the estimate of October 27, the day after the impending battle. The combat intelligence unit at Pearl Harbor wavered on locating these carriers, indicating they were in Japan on October 6, reporting a “slight” possibility of the Philippines on October 11, and a possibility the two ships might be in Empire waters a week later. In reality, Rear Admiral Kakuta Kakuji’s Carrier Division 2 had sailed from Japan for Truk on October 2 and sortied for the operation with the rest of the fleet nine days later. At least Pearl Harbor consistently believed that two big carriers were involved, and held them to be Shokaku and Zuikaku. On October 23, Pearl Harbor intelligence shifted to declare that “at least” two carriers must be among the enemy fleet.

  Estimates for surface gunnery ships were skewed because Admiral Norman Scott reported inflicting much greater losses at Cape Esperance than was true. There was also another complication, according to Commander Bruce McCandless: ONI mistakenly believed all four Aoba-class cruisers lay at the bottom of the sea. When Scott claimed on October 18 to have sunk three heavy cruisers and four destroyers and possibly dispatched another tin can and a light cruiser (actual losses had been one heavy cruiser and one destroyer), these were scored to units other than the Imperial Navy’s Cruiser Division 6, which had the Aobas. This effectively minimized Japanese heavy cruiser strength. When the Myoko and Maya bombarded Cactus, ONI believed the former was anchored at Yokosuka and the latter at Palau. As for battleships, the October 20 estimate carried as “possibly damaged” one of Admiral Kurita’s vessels that had smashed Cactus on The Night, placed the Yamato and Mutsu as possibly at Rabaul, and credited the fleet in the Solomons—again “possibly”—with the Ise, then in Empire waters.

  Fortunately other pillars of intelligence clarified. The combination continued to furnish a clearer picture. Rabaul would be covered by aerial photography at least a half dozen times during the last ten days before the battle. Estimated aggregate tonnage there ranged between 170,000 and 250,000 tons. At the high point, Simpson Harbor contained two oilers and forty-one merchant ships, with a light cruiser, a minelayer, three destroyers, and several aviation tenders. General Kenney’s SOWESPAC B-17s finally kicked off their Rabaul bombing on October 22, claiming to have blasted a cruiser, a destroyer, and eight merchantmen for 50,000 tons, and, two nights later, to have left the Nisshin wreathed in flames from a direct hit amidships, claiming her utterly destroyed. The Nisshin was at Shortland that night and no ship of her type lay at Rabaul.

  As for Admiral Kakuta’s carriers, the first to intervene at Guadalcanal when he sent fighters to help screen the high-speed convoy while it unloaded, a scout plane signaled a carrier northwest of Kavieng on October 16, which put new light on the arguments over Carrier Division 2’s location.

  The Japanese center of gravity had to be the Shortland-Buin complex, and there Allied intelligence benefited from coastwatchers as well as aerial spies. Reports covered that area virtually every day. Interestingly, the several separate forces counted here on October 15 totaled two aircraft carriers, four battleships, seven heavy and an equal number of light cruisers, twenty destroyers, and three aviation ships. An oiler and seventeen cargomen were reported the next day. If the intelligence estimates on Imperial Navy disposition were to be believed, those figures could not be accurate. But Kurita’s battleships stopped here briefly after The Night, Kondo’s fleet with Kakuta’s carriers were in the area, and Shortland was the center of Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet operations, with his typical tally some cruisers, aviation ships, and a dozen or so tin cans. The net impression, perfectly correct, was of Japanese might assembled for a big blow.

  American air reconnaissance on October 17 recorded two cruisers and seven destroyers, and noontime aerial photography on October 20 revealed a heavy cruiser, four light cruisers, and seventeen destroyers. The other vessels were gone. Additional overhead imagery the next day disclosed the presence of five additional warships, with a different mixture of the cruiser types. On October 24 there was nothing at Shortland but a few tin cans. Over subsequent days sightings of all kinds showed Mikawa’s base reverting to its usual strength. The specifics could have been mistaken. What was inescapable was the sense of a mission force assembled, then launched.

  Chester Nimitz did not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. SOPAC’s forces were divided among its cruiser-destroyer group, a unit with new battleships Washington and South Dakota, now titled Task Force 64, and the Hornet’s carrier group. The Enterprise group, steaming as fast as possible, promised to reach the theater in time. By October 17, Nimitz knew the Japanese had seen Task Force 64. CINCPAC remained in doubt regarding locations of enemy fleet units, but he knew they were out there, and Ultra had provided some carrier positions and even radio call signs. On October 20, via COMINCH, Nimitz appealed to the British Admiralty for an Indian Ocean offensive to distract the Japanese from the Solomons.

  The next day, in conjunction with new SOPAC chief Bull Halsey, the plans were set. The Enterprise (Task Force 16) and the Hornet (Task Force 17) would join on the twenty-fourth as Task Force 61 under Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, and sweep north of the Santa Cruz islands, on the flank of any approaching Japanese fleet. At first CINCPAC foresaw the task force as being unable to act until the following day, but later it seemed they might be ready shortly after uniting. The battleships were sent on a midnight romp through Ironbottom Sound. No Japanese were found, so they moved to strengthen the carriers’ defenses. On the twenty-second a snooper saw the Kido Butai. Nimitz foresaw that for at least several weeks the Japanese would be able to throw more troops, planes, and ships into a battle than SOPAC. That could not be avoided. CINCPAC would apply calculated risk. “From all indications,” Nimitz’s war diary recorded on October 22, “the enemy seems about ready to start his long expected all out attack on Guadalcanal. The next three or four days are critical.”

  In Truk lagoon on the morning of October 11, Yamamoto and Ugaki witnessed a momentous event from the fantail of the Yamato. Admiral Nagumo’s ships raised anchor and gingerly began their egress. Dark gray warships disappeared beyond the coral reefs of Truk’s north channel. After lunch the towering battleships of Admiral Kondo’s fleet, with Kakuta’s Carrier Division 2, departed south-side. Yamamoto, so sensitive of late, had begun micromanaging, questioning details. One big one was that the operations plan did not cover what to do in case of failure. Ugaki justified that with the comment that the fleet could not afford to fail. Everything had been done to ensure victory. Now was the time. The de
termined reinforcement program had put major Army units on Guadalcanal, and Navy efforts were near to suppressing Henderson Field. The day after the fleet sailed, Seventeenth Army chief of staff General Miyazaki and Navy staff officers Genda and Ohmae came up from Rabaul to plead for a battleship bombardment of Cactus. They were startled to learn one had already been laid on and was about to occur. Victory—that had a nice ring, rolled off the tongue easily, and it seemed close.

  But Imperial Navy doctrine could be an obstacle. Under Yamamoto’s plan, Nagumo’s Striking Force of carriers would sail alongside Kondo’s battleships and cruisers of the Advance Force. Japanese doctrine accorded primacy to battleships, making Vice Admiral Kondo the overall commander. There were many aspects of carrier employment that would seem peculiar to a surface warfare specialist, and Kondo Nobutake had no experience of aeronaval operations. This might prevent success.

  The fleet command was aware of the problem. Admiral Hara Chuichi had encountered it at Coral Sea and Eastern Solomons. After the second action Ugaki had Hara in for a long talk. Distilling his experiences, Hara sensitized Ugaki to the dangers in traditional doctrine. Though Hara sailed now as a cruiser commander, his contribution had been helpful. In the course of planning this operation, Ugaki brought Kondo and Nagumo together several times. The two were Etajima classmates and friends, so they were inclined to cooperate. But the reticent Nagumo was not the man to educate Kondo, gracious as he was, in carrier operations. That role fell to Third Fleet chief of staff Kusaka Ryunosuke, who had known Kondo since they had been boys in middle school together. Before leaving Truk, Kusaka coached Kondo on the finer points of aircraft use, and he induced the force commander to agree that in matters involving carriers, Nagumo would exercise control.