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

by John Prados

  Tanaka Raizo would not be taken by surprise. The simple fact that air reconnaissance had seen his Tokyo Express warned Tanaka that there could be opposition. At midafternoon he learned from JNAF scouts of numerous Allied destroyers off Lunga Point. The Eighth Fleet communications unit also warned Tanaka of transmissions indicating heavy ships in the vicinity. Tanaka had his destroyers clear for action and instructed them that if battle eventuated, the force would fight without thought of unloading.

  That is exactly what happened. Tanaka’s two transport units had broken formation and were on the verge of putting out their drum strings when, at 11:12 p.m., Commander Ogura Masami’s Takanami came on the radio to report enemy ships, shortly afterward seven destroyers. Admiral Tanaka suspended unloading and ordered battle stations. Aircraft flares suddenly illuminated the Japanese and, at 11:20, Wright’s warships began shooting. Commander Kumabe’s Naganami turned to parallel the Americans. Takanami launched her torpedoes, and both destroyers, plus Lieutenant Commander Shibayama Kazuo’s Suzukaze, replied shell for shell, setting two American destroyers ablaze. The U.S. fleet shone in the light of the burning ships. Tanaka’s destroyers put their Long Lances into the water all down the line.

  Admiral Wright plotted his assault carefully. The heavy cruiser Minneapolis actually acquired the first target at 11:06, and the force commander adjusted his dispositions. Ten minutes later Wright’s destroyer leader asked to make the torpedo attack. Judging the range, then 14,600 yards, excessive for U.S. torpedoes, Wright asked him to wait. He delayed, in part, due to his own confusion—sailors assured him the Japanese were destroyers—there were no transports to be seen. The distance was down to 7,600 yards at 11:20 when the admiral freed everyone for a general assault.

  The battle had all the confusion and floundering that characterized night combat, save that Japanese tactics worked while American ones did not. Tanaka’s lookouts erroneously identified a battleship among Wright’s fleet, which had only cruisers and destroyers. American cruiser Pensacola picked out a Japanese Mogami- or Yubari-class cruiser to shoot, yet no such ships were present. The Pensacola was really firing at light cruiser Honolulu.

  Japanese Long Lances ran hot and true. Admiral Wright’s flagship, the heavy cruiser Northampton, practically blew up, the consequence of a magazine explosion following a Long Lance hit. Three of Wright’s other big ships, heavy cruisers Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Pensacola, were all torpedoed. American destroyers waited their tin fish launches but eventually made them. The Naganami, at least, had to evade torpedoes. Tanaka emerged feeling that only high speed—Commander Kumabe had raced at thirty-five knots—prevented Naganami from being hit. Not so the Takanami, carrying the chief of Destroyer Division 31, Captain Shimizu Toshiro. Splitting off from the rest, Shimizu deliberately ordered her into danger. American shells blasted Takanami to smithereens.

  Typical track charts drawn for this battle portray the Tanaka force acting in concert as a single unit. Yet according to Japanese records compiled after the war, this wasn’t the case. In addition to Naganami’s turn to port, Kawakaze and Suzukaze split to starboard, while the four vessels of Captain Sato Torajiro’s Destroyer Division 15 continued ahead, eventually breaking into two groups and advancing toward the Americans. Captain Toyama Yasumi, Tanaka’s chief of staff, exercised the tactical command through these evolutions. Given chart positions, times of launch, and when U.S. ships recorded hits, the Long Lances that inflicted the most grievous harm came from Tanaka’s flagship, Lieutenant Commander Wakabayashi Kazuo’s Kawakaze, and Commander Hajime Takeuchi’s Kuroshio, though several of her torpedoes seem to have detonated in transit. All operated independently at the moment of launch. Sato’s ships divided into two groups, and Oyashio with Kuroshio probably loosed the torpedoes that sank Northampton.

  By about 2:00 a.m., Admiral Tanaka had re-formed his unit and begun withdrawing. Most torpedoes had been used up, and he was low on ammunition. The remaining Japanese destroyers arrived at Shortland at 10:30 a.m. the next morning. Under Rear Admiral Mahlon S. Tisdale in the Honolulu, the American fleet licked its wounds back in Ironbottom Sound, preparing damaged warships to get them to Nouméa, where preliminary repairs could be accomplished.

  This Battle of Tassafaronga, undeniably a Japanese victory, had been won despite the Allied intelligence advantage, considerable U.S. material superiority, the technological marvel of radar, and SOPAC’s preparation of the battlefield. But the Imperial Navy delivered no supplies that night. Tanaka Raizo never lived that down. Years later, visited by one of his former ship captains, Tanaka shed tears for the Takanami, which absorbed all the punishment during the first critical moments, making the rest possible. “It was an error on my part not to have delivered the supplies on schedule,” Tanaka told Hara Tameichi in 1957. “I should have returned to do so. The delivery mission was abandoned simply because we did not have accurate information about the strength of the enemy.”

  As the Japanese on Guadalcanal continued to starve, Bull Halsey poured it on. The 5,500 troops landed during the period of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal gave the Allies an edge. The Cactus Air Force grew to 188 aircraft—and Halsey hastened preparations for B-17 heavy bombers to fly from Cactus on a routine basis. The Army’s 164th Regiment would be followed by the full Americal Division, led by Major General J. Lawton Collins. Some units of the 2nd Marine Division also went to Cactus. General Vandegrift was told to prepare his men to pull out beginning on November 26. The idea that the Americans on Guadalcanal could rotate their troops, while the Japanese could not even feed theirs, confirms the changed strategic balance. Commander Ohmae Toshikazu of Mikawa’s staff went to the island after Santa Cruz to help organize a renewed offensive. There Ohmae encountered the ubiquitous Colonel Tsuji. The fit, well-fed figures of Ohmae and his assistant disgusted Tsuji, who saw walking skeletons all around him.

  Meanwhile the pendulum began to acquire momentum. SOPAC commanders pushed hard. An advance across the Matanikau River began just as the battleship guns fell silent. Except for some Marine preliminaries, this weeklong attack would be carried out by U.S. Army troops. Among the Japanese soldiers driven back was the 16th Infantry, hailing from Admiral Yamamoto’s home prefecture. At Truk, trying to lighten the mood surrounding the Combined Fleet staff’s initial meetings with the new leaders of the Southeast Area Army and Eighteenth Army, Yamamoto tried to joke about his hometown regiment. Admiral Ugaki told him to shut up.

  Strength returns in late November showed that little more than 40 percent of the Japanese Army and Navy troops on Guadalcanal were still in the ranks. There were more than 6,000 wounded and sick. By early December, General Miyazaki would note later, Japanese troops were in such need of ammunition they hardly shot back except in the direst circumstances. Captain Monzen Kanae, the Navy’s senior officer on Guadalcanal, sent a note to Admiral Ugaki by the hand of Lieutenant Funashi, who was returning to the Yamato, reporting shortages that had gone beyond the limit of endurance.

  With supplies more critical than ever, the Navy ran another Tokyo Express on December 3. This time Tanaka brought ten destroyers. Despite coastwatcher warnings, the only opposition came from the Cactus Air Force, which inflicted slight damage on Commander Hitomi Toyoji’s Makinami. Admiral Tanaka took a dozen destroyers on the Express run of December 7, when Allied aircraft were joined by PT boats. Whereas the first sortie had gone off without a hitch, this time PTs induced part of Tanaka’s force—Captain Sato’s Destroyer Division 15, which had covered itself in glory at Tassafaronga—to give up its resupply mission. For the successful destroyers, ropes attaching some barrel strings broke and made them impossible to recover. Two tin cans were damaged. After this fiasco, Navy officers from the Solomons and the Combined Fleet informed Army staff at Rabaul that the Tokyo Express would have to stand down. Horrified, General Imamura Hitoshi, the new Eighth Area Army commander, appealed to Tokyo and begged the Navy to relent. The Army-Navy differences sharpened after December 9, with the loss of the I-3, when the fleet susp
ended submarine transport as well.

  Admirals Kusaka and Mikawa agreed on one more Tanaka unit mission. Aviation ship Chitose, which had furnished air cover for both previous operations, needed to leave for Empire waters for conversion to an aircraft carrier. The new Express required stronger escort, so five of the eleven vessels on the December 11 run functioned as guard ships. Tanaka took no chances—good for him, since this time Ultra warned SOPAC and precisely outlined Tanaka’s force.

  As a result of the Tassafaronga disaster, however, Bull Halsey no longer had a usable cruiser force to put against the Express. But the aggressive SOPAC commander had no problem with that. Marine dive-bombers accosted Tanaka coming down The Slot, but they came away with no score. That night the PTs went out and boats -37, -40, and -48 let fly their torpedoes, gaining a solid hit on flagship Teruzuki. The fish impacted her stern, wrecking the rudder and one propeller shaft, and ignited a fire that spread to an after magazine, which exploded. Admiral Tanaka, wounded, transferred to destroyer Naganami. Only a few of the barrel strings ever reached the troops. Tanaka, once recovered, was reassigned to Singapore. Command of the Reinforcement Unit was realigned. On December 20 the JNAF began diverting some bomber aircraft to parachute supply bundles on moonlit nights. The Navy’s cancellation of Tokyo Express stuck.

  The events of mid-November did not dissuade Imperial General Headquarters. The concept for a big new offensive was refined into a formal plan that the Navy General Staff promulgated in its Directive No. 159 on November 18. This called for the preparation of new airfields in the lower Solomons that, when ready, would enable the Japanese to regain air superiority over Guadalcanal, after which Army troops could capture Henderson Field and Tulagi. Operations on New Guinea would follow. The offensive would be timed for January 1943. Admiral Yamamoto’s early conversations with General Imamura had focused on this scheme. But barely a month later IGHQ reversed itself. During this period of five weeks, Tokyo conducted its first true strategic review of the war.

  At Truk, the assumptions built into the plan did not sit right with Ugaki Matome, though the Fleet proceeded assiduously with such elements as building a new lower Solomons airfield. Admiral Ugaki feared that the Army’s fixation on Guadalcanal might pull the Navy into a bottomless quagmire. He recognized New Guinea as more important, but reinforcing there seemed hopeless. Japanese estimates were that SOPAC supplied Cactus at a rate averaging two merchantmen a day, while the Japanese managed only their paltry submarine runs. Not wanting to miss an opportunity for strategic change, Ugaki put Captain Kuroshima’s team to work assessing the conditions that would make recapture of Guadalcanal impossible, and the moment these might occur. Admiral Yamamoto, in a notable divergence with Ugaki, was not sure how to proceed. The C-in-C had pursued the campaign determinedly and had never yet abandoned a position.

  On November 26, just a few days after the Army-Navy conversations about an offensive, Ugaki resolved to ask the NGS to send its senior operations planner to Truk to consider the opposite course—withdrawal. Not willing to commit these thoughts to a dispatch others might see, the fleet chief of staff sent a letter to Vice Admiral Fukudome Shigeru, recently appointed head of the NGS Operations Bureau, delicately probing his view. As a first step the fleet wished to reorient operations, sending the Army’s 51st Division to New Guinea instead of Cactus. If Fukudome did not detail Baron Tomioka to Truk, Ugaki would order Kuroshima to Tokyo. Ugaki entrusted his letter to a visiting flag officer on his way home.

  The initial response seemed not to take Ugaki’s concerns seriously. Baron Tomioka asked the Combined Fleet to send someone to Tokyo, but to study the movement of the 51st Division to Guadalcanal instead. On December 5, Fukudome finally answered Ugaki directly, warning him against infecting the field forces with pessimism. Fukudome would dispatch an emissary to Truk, but not until the end of the month. Meanwhile, an Army-Navy conference at Truk brought a slight break in the stalemate, with Tomioka’s assistant, Commander Yamamoto Yuji, newly reassigned from Kondo’s staff, informing the group that IGHQ had approved sending some 51st Division troops to New Guinea.

  The resupply fiascos of early December, plus the Army’s appeal to Imperial Headquarters, brought the dilemma to a head. Prodded by Admiral Fukudome, Nagano of NGS insisted on war gaming the supply flow. Colonel Tsuji, irrepressible as ever, saw such studies as more delay while men starved. But the war games, carried out at Rabaul, showed that barely a quarter of the matériel should be expected to arrive. Yamamoto of the NGS and Watanabe of the Combined Fleet were in Rabaul when the December failures occurred, and they witnessed the war game. General Imamura had no confidence in the Solomons effort. While he refused, as did many of his staff, to speak directly of withdrawal, Imamura vowed to do everything necessary to save the men at the front. He also war gamed an evacuation and found it dangerous but doable.

  Commander Watanabe observed. When he reached Truk, Watanabe found Admiral Yamamoto reluctant to accept these conclusions. The C-in-C pressed his staff officer to explain why Guadalcanal’s recapture had become impossible. Watanabe cited the war game. To Yamamoto this fell short of a personal assurance. The next day Watanabe Yasuji was back on a plane to Rabaul. Imamura’s associates thought he looked like a ghost. Watanabe met Imamura’s chief of staff, who forthrightly declared that the Army could not recapture Guadalcanal, but went on to say that the general could not assert that. Puzzled, Watanabe asked why. He was told that Imamura had been appointed in audience before the emperor for the declared purpose of retaking Guadalcanal. Several Army staffers confirmed this. When he heard it, Yamamoto remarked upon how difficult it could be to say a true thing. The admiral finally gave way on the issue of withdrawal.

  The instant Commander Watanabe returned to Truk, Ugaki sent him on to Tokyo. The fleet’s strategy study went ahead of him. Given the growing interservice animosities, Ugaki was anxious that the initiative come from the Army, which necessitated IGHQ involvement. “The time for changing the future policy might come sooner than expected,” he speculated on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The chief of staff widened the circle, briefing Captain Miwa, about to leave Truk to become senior staff officer for the Eleventh Air Fleet. By December 10, hardly three weeks after Kondo’s phantom naval “victory,” Ugaki’s view had hardened: The most urgent operational problem was to find some way to rescue the men on Starvation Island.

  Soul-searching in Tokyo accelerated. On December 12, Emperor Hirohito began an unusually extended visit to worship at the Ise Shrine. That same day the NGS signaled its doubts. Not only were Baron Tomioka and Admiral Fukudome now in accord with Combined Fleet views, but they reported the Army General Staff as having initiated its own study. Truk was privately informed that the two armed services had reached a preliminary agreement. The Army General Staff sent planners on a South Pacific fact-finding mission, led by incoming operations section chief Colonel Sanada Joichiro, Tsuji’s replacement. At Rabaul, Kusaka Jinichi advocated fighting for New Guinea and not “hurrying” efforts to retake Guadalcanal. Mikawa’s senior staff officer, Captain Kami Shigenori, said that which was necessary: “To withdraw from Guadalcanal island temporarily to stabilize the general situation…must be considered.” Colonel Tsuji had been agitating for a pullout for weeks.

  Passing through Truk on his way back to Tokyo, Colonel Sanada admitted that the situation was even bleaker than he had expected. But the Army still wanted to send 10,000 replacements to Guadalcanal in January and two full divisions for an offensive in February. Stunned, Admiral Ugaki brought up the need to decide on the basis of the overall situation, not the simple desire for a successful outcome at Guadalcanal. Colonel Sanada “took him to be talking through his hat,” but a colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Imoto Kunao, at one time Ugaki’s student at the war college, accepted his analysis. That night Ugaki had several staffers warn the Army men of the fleet’s weakness. Captain Kuroshima told them, “If the present situation continues, the Navy will not be able to move at all.” Before leaving, Colonel Sa
nada told Ugaki that, after all, he would recommend that the fight for New Guinea be pursued without respect to the Solomons. An IGHQ directive to this effect could be expected.

  The Army fell into line with the “New Guinea first” proposition before any decision on the Solomons. Bitter fights over the allocation of shipping had been ongoing in Tokyo since November. The Army had gotten its way, but the Tojo government warned that the additional merchant ships added to the Army roster would necessarily limit raw material imports, reducing Japanese steel production by nearly 15 percent in 1943. Losing more ships in the Solomons was unacceptable. An interim directive IGHQ issued on December 23 aimed entirely at New Guinea—just in time, for MacArthur’s attacks captured Buna shortly afterward.

  Tokyo’s studies proceeded. On December 25, General Hyakutake of the Seventeenth Army reported that supplies were gone. He could no longer even send out scouts. Hyakutake asked to be allowed to die an honorable death by flinging his whole army at the Americans. Imperial Headquarters considered the situation. Major reinforcements—with convoys—the Allies were sure to resist in strength. Shipping losses were already a headache, and a renewed Solomons effort meant even more vessels lost.

  Colonel Sanada’s return with the results of his inspection settled the last doubts. The importance of the decision is signified by Admiral Nagano and General Sugiyama’s audience with Emperor Hirohito on December 27. The next day the emperor expressed frustration to his military aide. Grave as was the situation, Hirohito complained, the supreme commanders had said nothing regarding how they intended to force the Allies to submit. He wanted an imperial conference to consider the matter, and professed himself ready for one at any time. The meeting was held on New Year’s Eve. The group included Prime Minister Tojo. The emperor almost never spoke on these occasions, but here he stepped out of character. Hirohito demanded to know what would be done to stem the losses. The emperor said explicitly that withdrawal from Guadalcanal must be accompanied by offensive action elsewhere. Hirohito received reports on that point, but with no alternative, he approved the new policy. On New Year’s Day, the Army operations chief left for Rabaul to announce that Japan would evacuate Guadalcanal, defend the Central Solomons, and move forward in New Guinea.