by John Prados
On January 4, 1943, Imperial Headquarters made it official. Admiral Nagano issued Navy Directive No. 184, which foresaw an end to efforts to recapture Guadalcanal, mandated that the Army should defend the central and northern Solomons, and specified, “During the period from about the latter part of January to the early part of February, the Army and Navy will, by every possible means, evacuate the units on Guadalcanal.”
At Truk, gloom increasingly descended over Combined Fleet leaders. Still aboard the Yamato—though the C-in-C already anticipated moving his flag to the newer superbattleship Musashi—an ominous sign came with the New Year ceremony for 1943. Broiled sea bream and salt were put at the C-in-C’s table. The admiral’s steward was somehow off his excellent service that evening. Omi Heijiro placed the tai fish head to the left, both a breach of etiquette and, in Japanese culture, a portent of evil. Yamamoto shrugged it off with a smile. When the year changed, the admiral told his steward, a change of manners could be permitted. But for the Japanese starving on Guadalcanal everything remained the same.
Back at Cactus, on December 9, Marine Alex Vandegrift handed the command over to Major General Alexander Patch of the U.S. Army. The reinforcement proceeded apace, and the Army soon created the XIV Corps under Patch. Collins’s Americal Division resumed the offensive in mid-December, clearing some Japanese positions in the interior and beginning a drive toward the western end of the island. Faced with Allied dominance in the air, on December 27 the JNAF gave up its desultory effort to parachute supplies, but the fleet resumed submarine missions. Several Tokyo Express sorties also conveyed at least a modicum of comestibles and delivered a few fresh troops to help shield the retreat of the others. Mount Austen was threatened. General Patch issued orders for a last-phase offensive on January 5. His forces included the Americal and 25th Infantry Division, plus part of the 2nd Marine Division. The Marines pushed along the coast while the 25th Division slogged ahead inland. The offensive opened on January 10. The attacks made steady progress. So far the Americans were completely unaware that their adversaries were going to leave altogether.
THE CACTUS SPRINGBOARD
Despite the Tassafaronga disaster, a developing perception of advantage led to the revival of Allied debates over the future. General MacArthur, pressing hard at Buna and Gona, in parallel to the Guadalcanal campaign, agitated for activation of “Task Two” of the original U.S. Cartwheel plan, which would give him the supreme command. The SOWESPAC chief exerted pressure both at the local level, with Admiral Halsey, and with Washington headquarters. MacArthur wanted to redeploy SOPAC forces to expedite his New Guinea operations. Halsey’s units could afford him a seaborne supply line around the tip of New Guinea, and the seizure of Rabaul would be executed to protect MacArthur’s flank. Admiral Halsey remained leery of that idea. The Bull preferred to create a solid framework within which the reduction of Rabaul could be conducted with confidence. Halsey answered MacArthur in detail in a dispatch sent on November 28:
OUR COMMON OBJECTIVE IS RABAUL. UNTIL JAP AIR IN NEW BRITAIN AND NORTHERN SOLOMONS HAS BEEN REDUCED, RISK OF VALUABLE NAVAL UNITS IN MIDDLE AND WESTERN REACHES SOLOMON SEA CAN ONLY BE JUSTIFIED BY MAJOR ENEMY SEABORNE MOVEMENT AGAINST SOUTH COAST NEW GUINEA OR AUSTRALIA ITSELF. SEABORNE SUPPLY OF BASES WE TAKE ON NORTHERN COAST OF NEW GUINEA NOT FEASIBLE UNTIL WE CONTROL SOLOMON SEA, IN OTHER WORDS RABAUL. PURSUANT FOREGOING AND WITH HISTORY PAST MONTHS IN VIEW, CONSIDER RABAUL ASSAULT CAMPAIGN MUST BE AMPHIBIOUS ALONG THE SOLOMONS WITH NEW GUINEA LAND POSITION BASICALLY A SUPPORTING ONE ONLY. I AM CURRENTLY REINFORCING CACTUS POSITION AND EXPEDITING MEANS OF OPERATING HEAVY AIR FROM THERE. IT IS MY BELIEF THAT THE SOUND PROCEDURE AT THIS TIME IS TO MAINTAIN AS STRONG A LAND AND AIR PRESSURE AGAINST THE JAPANESE BUNA POSITION AS YOUR LINES OF COMMUNICATION PERMIT, AND TO CONTINUE TO EXTRACT A CONSTANT TOLL OF JAPANESE SHIPPING, AN ATTRITION WHICH IF CONTINUED AT THE PRESENT RATE HE CAN NOT LONG SUSTAIN. I BELIEVE THAT MY GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO OUR COMMON EFFORT WOULD BE TO STRENGTHEN MY POSITION AND RESUME THE ADVANCE UP THE SOLOMONS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
General MacArthur had also begun, as early as October, to press Washington to confirm his supremo status. MacArthur had emphasized his need for the command with Hap Arnold when the Army Air Force chief visited the South Pacific, and General Arnold’s report advocated a top command for the entire Pacific be placed under MacArthur. The recommendation embroiled the Joint Chiefs of Staff in questions of Pacific command and their corollary, the next steps in fighting the Japanese. By late November progress on Guadalcanal had begun to make it urgent to resolve these matters.
The Joint Chiefs reliably split along service lines. General George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, supported MacArthur’s bid for control. A Pacific Theater command would be fine by him if MacArthur could have it. Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of Naval Operations, was more circumspect. The COMINCH regarded direct assault on Rabaul as a frontal attack doomed to failure or likely to bog down in an extended stalemate. King solicited Nimitz’s opinion, and the CINCPAC responded early in December along lines very similar to those Halsey had used directly to MacArthur. New Guinea suffered from poor overland communications (an understatement) and could not be a useful center of operations so long as its real transport lines—by sea—were flanked by Japanese bases in the Solomons. It would be tempting to bypass the intervening enemy positions to strike directly at Rabaul, but by now the enemy possessed an interlocking set of bases that were mutually supporting and could be used to outflank an advanced Allied force. CINCPAC felt that “Task One” of the original Joint Chiefs of Staff directive could not be considered fulfilled until the Japanese base network had been neutralized. Since that mission belonged to SOPAC, Admiral Halsey should retain control.
The CINCPAC also made an observation that soon figured in Admiral King’s arguments—that no Allied superiority in naval forces could be foreseen until at least the spring of 1943. In his exchanges with the Army, King broadened that observation: In fact, the truth was not just that naval forces were limited, but that the overwhelming majority of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was engaged in the South Pacific. When General Marshall pressed for a theater supreme command, Admiral King countered that CINCPAC held responsibility for naval defense throughout the ocean area, so that putting the Pacific Fleet under a ground officer in Australia would impinge on Nimitz’s ability to act anywhere else. The Army continued pressing for a Pacific supremo, at which point the Navy responded that it would agree if that officer were Admiral Nimitz. MacArthur could take over the SOPAC forces provided his orders came from Pearl Harbor. General Marshall was loath to agree to that formula—and Douglas MacArthur would undoubtedly have rejected it—so the end result was to preserve the existing command structure. Almost tacitly, though later confirmed by formal directive, SOPAC would conduct operations farther up the Solomons, first to complete securing Guadalcanal, then to prepare for the capture of Rabaul.
Neutralization of Rabaul remained an Allied goal, ratified at the Roosevelt-Churchill summit at Casablanca in January 1943. The next steps were important. In both Washington and at Pearl Harbor, some suggested a leap ahead to Buin to seize the Japanese base complex on Bougainville. But the truth was that at the moment, SOPAC/SOWESPAC forces remained weak while the enemy were strong. Japanese forces in the Solomons–New Guinea area in January 1943 were estimated at 132,000 troops in place, with 60,000 more on the way, along with 547 aircraft. The pendulum might be swinging toward the Allies, but it had not gone far.
Under the circumstances SOPAC needed an initial operation that would be unopposed or only lightly so. This led to the scheme for an amphibious landing in the Russell Islands, just a step up The Slot from Guadalcanal. Coastwatchers reported no Japanese there. It might be easily seized, and could become a new airfield bastion. As the end of January approached, both sides had plans in motion. These led to the next phase of the fight for the Solomons arena.
V.
INCHING FOR GROUND
Preparing to shoot the movie Tora! Tora!
Tora!, producers for the Japanese segments of the film built full-size wooden replicas of Imperial Navy warships, including the battleship Nagato, on a beach in Kyushu. That was in the late 1960s, and it was a huge project—the Nagato was 660 feet long and ten stories high. Had the Japanese had that building capacity in the 1940s, the Solomons campaign might have ended differently. Their nightmare began with an airfield built too slowly and deepened with the flimsiness of a network that left bases so far distant that losses multiplied. Only in the period after Santa Cruz, in planning a renewed offensive, had Navy leaders put their efforts into constructing a new field close to Guadalcanal. The site chosen was on the island group called New Georgia, at a place called Munda.
Japanese surveyed the area and found a suitable location at a plantation on Munda Point. At Truk the fleet staff studied the project, and, about the time of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Admiral Yamamoto decided to proceed. The first thousand troops, with supplies, were delivered a week after the battle. When Combined Fleet staff officers visited IGHQ late in November, they obtained agreement, included in the next operational directive. Initially conceived as an emergency airfield, the IGHQ order envisioned Munda as an operating base. A convoy reached there in the face of Cactus air and PT boat attacks on November 24, and another five days later. The 17th Construction Unit and Sasebo 6th SNLF were the first to arrive. Captain Iwabuchi Sankichi took command from an interim leader, Commander Shimada. The flat terrain and carefully spaced plantation trees allowed rapid progress—already Imperial Navy construction had gained efficiency compared to Guadalcanal. By mid-December enough had been accomplished for the JNAF to carry out test landings using Zeroes and Vals. These were successful, and the fleet planned to deploy aircraft to Munda on December 22.
Coastwatchers supplied early indications of something afoot. Missionary schoolboys working for Donald Kennedy on New Georgia watched the first Japanese disembark. On nearby Vella Lavella, where Henry Josselyn and Jack Keenan spied, scouts saw barges loaded with heavy equipment and bags of cement, which sheltered in coves by day and continued to New Georgia at night. The Japanese also installed an outpost at Viru and a barge station at Vangunu, the island in this group closest to Guadalcanal, but the traffic didn’t seem right for those places. Halsey suspected the worst. The Bull ordered up scout planes, but they found little at first.
Meanwhile the Cactus Crystal Ball tracked enemy vessels stopping and not going on to Guadalcanal, and radio intelligence tracked several Japanese units to Munda. Within days of their arrival codebreakers had identified the construction unit and SNLF naval infantry. On December 3, after the coastwatchers’ barge warning, Allied aerial reconnaissance photographed Munda. Japanese engineers had disguised the airfield carefully, wiring fronds in place of removed trees to preserve an apparent canopy of coconut palms, but Commander Quackenbush’s photo interpreters penetrated the deception. By December 5 AIRSOLS had hard evidence of construction, including a runway and gun emplacements, demonstrating the synoptic impact when pillars of intelligence worked together.
Only 180 miles from the Cactus bases, Munda posed a threat to them. Slowing the enemy became Halsey’s goal. He committed SOPAC to early, sustained neutralization. Army fighter-bombers attacked on December 6, followed several days later by a B-17 strike. Night harassment began with a Catalina over Munda on December 13. Then the JNAF deployed a Zero detachment of the 252nd Air Group. Christmas Eve brought a fighter-escorted dive-bomber attack that caught the Japanese mostly on the ground. Pilots claimed ten planes destroyed taking off and a dozen smashed on the airfield, with half the eight combat air patrol Zeroes flamed in dogfights. “It’s deplorable indeed,” chief of staff Ugaki lamented, “that everything is on the way to retreat due to the inferiority of our airpower.”
Ultra struck again on December 14, with news of Japanese destroyer sorties planned for several succeeding nights. Decrypts included information on planned times of arrival and the course to be followed from Shortland. Using this data, SOPAC diverted the submarine Plunger, on her way from Australia to Pearl Harbor, and laid on strong coverage by the Cactus Air Force. Aircraft damaged destroyer Kagero on the night of the sixteenth, and the Plunger was credited with sinking a destroyer from that group and hitting, perhaps crippling, one from the next Tokyo Express, though Japanese records do not confirm it. In any event, Admiral Mikawa canceled the Tokyo Express scheduled for December 18. Around Christmas two more tin cans were damaged, one by collision with the freighter Nankai Maru after Cactus aircraft had hit her. During the final week of 1942, Ultra identified a rapid succession of fresh Japanese formations: the 15th Antiaircraft Unit, the Kure 6th SNLF, and—for the first time—Army units, including an infantry battalion, an artillery battery, and engineers.
Now Bull Halsey sent in the big boys, taking a page from the Imperial Navy playbook with a bombardment of Munda carried out by Rear Admiral Walden L. “Pug” Ainsworth soon after midnight on January 5, 1943. Halsey had grabbed Pug, then holding an administrative billet at Pearl Harbor, as the latter visited SOPAC, much as Halsey himself had suddenly been drafted as theater commander. Admiral Halsey put Ainsworth in charge of Task Force 67, the unit smashed so badly at Tassafaronga. By January, Pug Ainsworth had rebuilt the cruiser-destroyer group and would lead it with distinction. The Munda bombardment represented its coming-out party. In less than an hour, Ainsworth’s warships hammered the Japanese with more than 3,000 six-inch shells and another 1,400 rounds of five-inch fire. Air scouts reported Munda heavily damaged the next morning, but on the evening of January 6 one of Ainsworth’s light cruisers, the New Zealand ship Achilles, lost a six-inch turret to a direct hit from a JNAF Val dive-bomber, one of four that made a sudden attack and were likely from Munda. All the other airplanes scored near misses on U.S. cruiser Honolulu. Perhaps the Japanese now had their own Henderson Field. On the ground, Lieutenant Yunoki Shigeru, formerly of the Hiei and now a flak gunner at Munda, found his men restive under shelling, but the damage did not appear serious. Munda seemed destined for an important role in the next phase of the war.
LAST ROUND ON GUADALCANAL
Bull Halsey liked fighting Marines but had a soft spot also for solid soldiers. One of his favorites was Joseph—or “J.”—Lawton Collins, whose rise in the Army at that moment was meteoric. In barely a year Collins had gone from instructor at the Army War College—as a lieutenant colonel—to major general leading the Americal Division, the first big Army unit in the South Pacific. Along the way he had been chief of staff of the Army’s Hawaiian Department, while Halsey, recuperating from serious dermatitis, marked time at a Pearl Harbor desk as commander, aircraft, Pacific. The quiet Collins turned up whenever CINCPAC and the Army held talks, and Halsey was impressed with his unflappable competence. The Bull had gone to the South Pacific when Collins, upon promotion to temporary general’s rank, was given the division command. Collins understood the Americal was intended for MacArthur, but Admiral Nimitz drew him aside to warn that he might be diverted. When Lawton Collins reached Nouméa, Bull Halsey invited him to dinner, where the Army general was surprised to also encounter Alex Vandegrift. The Marine, on his way to Australia to arrange rest camps for his men, described conditions on the ’Canal. General Collins was happy to go wherever SOPAC wanted him, asking only for time to combat-load his transports and cargo ships. Admiral Halsey replied the Americal was indeed going to Guadalcanal, leaving the next day.
After December 9, the Army took the lead. General Alexander Patch commanded, and in early January formed the XIV Corps. Lawton Collins’s troops would be his original division-size unit. One Americal regiment, the 164th Infantry, plus most of the 182nd, were already on Cactus. The Americal was unique in that it had been scratch-built outside the U.S., its name a contraction of “America” and “New Caledonia.” The troops with General Collins were primarily divisional artillery and support units. His 132nd Infantry Regiment had landed from the transports that took away the initial tranche of Marines. By mid-December, Patch had ordered
the Army men to take Mount Austen. Also under Patch were the 25th Infantry Division, the Army’s 147th Infantry, and two regiments of the 2nd Marine Division, plus assorted other units. By January, even with the departure of Vandegrift’s troops along with the 7th Marine Regiment, there were more than 50,000 Allied troops on Cactus, the vast majority Americans. A Japanese intelligence appreciation at the end of that month estimated Patch’s strength accurately: three divisions with more than 118 guns, 44 flak guns, and about 300 mortars.
Generals Patch and Collins made a good team. Patch had been on Cactus long enough to learn the lay of the land, while Collins brought energy and enthusiasm. Together they ground away at Hyakutake’s Japanese. The difficulties of the terrain were enormous. Even with the enemy’s meager supplies and the huge Japanese losses, by January, Patch was still throwing troops against Mount Austen. The hitherto fresh 132nd Infantry sustained enough casualties fighting for one of Austen’s bastions, and had so many succumb to sickness that it became ineffective. General Collins had to substitute other troops. The final fall of Mount Austen on January 16 eliminated the last Japanese position east of the Matanikau. It had taken more than a month.
Patch did not wait long before renewing his offensive. He selected his least-weakened units, relying upon a composite Army-Marine division. Once this force linked up with the 25th Infantry Division around Kokumbona, Patch stopped fighting for the rugged interior and advanced along the coast. The fall of Kokumbona showed the campaign nearing its end. But, concerned lest the Japanese renew their attacks, Patch instructed Collins to concentrate on defending the Lunga Point airfield complex—by now no fewer than two satellite airfields supplemented Henderson. Lawton Collins was intensely disappointed at these orders, for he wanted to finish off the enemy. Others would do that. His cameo appearance in the Pacific nearly completed, Lawton Collins would soon leave for Europe. General Patch persisted to the final fight, but he too neared the end of his Pacific involvement. Both went on to great things in the war against Germany.