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

by John Prados

  While the Americans ground ahead, the Japanese retired. Once Imperial Headquarters made its decision to evacuate, the course became clear. Some of Hyakutake’s regiments, formations that had landed with two thousand or more soldiers, were down to fewer than a hundred. The loss of effectiveness among the units could be added to other weaknesses as reasons the Army could not endure. The Imperial Navy did what it could to succor Hyakutake’s remnants. More submarines, more aerial resupply, and the Tokyo Express brought a few supplies. The fresh infantry battalion that delayed the Americans at the end was also there courtesy of the Navy. Given their situation, the Japanese fought very hard.

  Plans for the evacuation, code-named the “KE Operation,” were agreed between Combined Fleet and the Eighth Area Army on January 9. Commander Watanabe continued as the fleet’s action officer. Army war games at Rabaul evaluated the concept of lifting out the troops in several Tokyo Expresses. General Imamura estimated half the destroyers might be lost, and worried that the Navy’s extraction of a few men by submarine or barge would be used to excuse cancellation of the larger enterprise. Historian Richard Frank comments that such suspicions were not fair to the Navy, and he is right. The Imperial Navy remained solidly committed. Admiral Yamamoto blanched at the potential losses—he feared forfeiting up to a third of his destroyers—but he went ahead. Commander Watanabe took the prize for optimism, expecting that 80 percent of those on Guadalcanal could be saved.

  In a carefully parsed sequence, initial resupply came by all delivery modes, the new troops were sent, and General Hyakutake began recoiling toward the westernmost tip of the island. The Navy installed a barge base in the Russell Islands, between Guadalcanal and New Georgia. Five I-boats successfully delivered supplies between January 5 and 9, and the Tokyo Express was active after the tenth. Its missions on the nights of January 10–11 and 14–15 were opposed by PT boats. Two PTs were lost, against a destroyer damaged. Meanwhile, Japanese Army aircraft made their initial appearance in the Solomons. The JNAF reinforced Admiral Kusaka’s Eleventh Air Fleet. As part of this augmentation, the Navy for the first time deployed a medium bomber unit especially trained for mass night operations. In all there would be roughly 436 aircraft, including a hundred Army planes, sixty from the R Area Force, and an equal number from carrier Zuikaku, whose newly retrained air group advanced to Buin. At Shortland, Admiral Mikawa assembled a massive group of twenty-one destroyers for the transport missions. Heavy cruisers Chokai and Kumano plus the light cruiser Sendai stood by to contribute surface support. With the beginning of January, the Imperial Navy also went to a new version of its JN-25 fleet code.

  Yamamoto’s evacuation plan was predicated on a deception. Several times already the Japanese had attempted major operations to capture Henderson Field. Indeed, they had intended another such offensive until just recently. The Allies expected that, so the Imperial Navy would give them something to believe in. Eleven hundred miles to the east, in the Marshalls, the Japanese sent an air flotilla to make it appear that forces were gathering, sent the cruiser Tone to mimic the activities of a task force, and had a submarine shell Canton Island. To the west the JNAF resumed bombing Darwin in Australia and upped radio traffic to suggest activity.

  But the centerpiece was the Kido Butai. Yamamoto sent Admiral Kondo to sea, accompanied by Rear Admiral Kakuta’s Carrier Division 2 with the Junyo and Zuiho. Kondo’s two battleships, four heavy cruisers, and a screen completed the force. The Kondo fleet weighed anchor and began leaving Truk shortly before 7:00 a.m. on January 31. In the lagoon Yamamoto retained the Yamato and Musashi, plus fleet carrier Zuikaku. The Musashi was abuzz with excitement because the admiral was about to transfer Combined Fleet headquarters to her. Kondo, meanwhile, cruised northeast of the Solomons as the fleet had done so often. Each time before, this maneuver had accompanied a Guadalcanal offensive. The Japanese hoped the Allies would assume as much now. Ultra revealed Kondo’s sortie within forty-eight hours.

  Careful preparations were required, since the Allies were now much more powerful than had been the case in October–November. The Saratoga gave SOPAC a fully capable aircraft carrier, while the Enterprise—still with her damaged elevator—provided a second, less effective flight deck. A half dozen of the small “jeep”—or escort—carriers were now in the Pacific. Halsey incorporated a pair of them into one of his cruiser groups. With thirteen cruisers Halsey had enough to create two separate cruiser-destroyer forces plus furnish escorts. Three fast battleships and forty-five destroyers completed his fleet, which SOPAC divided into no less than a half dozen task forces. Compared to where the South Pacific command had been a few months earlier, Admiral Halsey possessed a veritable armada. Enough, in fact, for offensives of his own.

  Long anxious to reach beyond Cactus, Halsey was well aware of the strategic debates on the “tasks” of Operation Cartwheel. Like Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, he did not feel strong enough to strike directly at Rabaul. Command boundaries remained in flux. Even New Georgia lay outside the SOPAC region, falling within MacArthur’s domain. Halsey made a start with the cruiser bombardments on Munda in early January, and at Vila toward the end of the month. The Saratoga task force covered that sortie. But Admiral King agitated for more action. Chester Nimitz visited in late January, accompanied by Navy Secretary Knox. The night of their arrival, staging through Rekata Bay, a couple of JNAF patrol bombers struck Espíritu Santo, startling the brass. Halsey and Nimitz agreed on a small foray to capture the Russell Islands, just thirty miles past Guadalcanal. While SOPAC completed preparations, the Japanese began their evacuation.

  With Admiral Nimitz headed back to Pearl, the Imperial Navy conducted a series of strong fighter sweeps against AIRSOLS. On January 25, with eighteen Bettys as bait, seventy-six Zeroes came hunting. Some turned back in soupy weather, and the bombers wheeled away short too, but dozens of fighters went on to dogfight Cactus defenders. Two days later the bait was nine Army medium bombers and the hammer seventy-four Army fighters. Neither mission inflicted much damage, but the strikes, the first major raids since November, were the latest piece of the intelligence puzzle to fall into place. Aerial reconnaissance had found large Japanese shipping concentrations at Rabaul for weeks—as many as ninety-one ships on December 30. With the first big air raid, CINCPAC immediately warned of an imminent offensive. On January 29 the fleet intelligence summary noted that one “impended,” speculating on whether carriers would be involved.

  Bull Halsey deployed his strength to counter the offensive. He ordered the Enterprise task force into the Solomon Sea, and sent a cruiser unit to make a daylight incursion up The Slot. With fighter cover from SOPAC’s jeep carriers, and the “Big E’s” bombers to back them, this force could break up an enemy fleet. Led by Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen, the cruiser unit aimed to pass Guadalcanal and enter The Slot. Among the crews was Seaman James J. Fahey, an antiaircraft gunner aboard the recently arrived light cruiser Montpelier. Like so many others, Fahey found life trying in the South Pacific. Too hot to sleep below deck, sailors lay down topside on the hard steel. Fahey put his cap atop his shoes for a pillow. Walking brought the danger of stumbling over crewmates slumbering in every conceivable place. After a long day of combat exercises on January 28, Fahey conked out as accustomed, only to be soaked when it rained in the middle of the night.

  Seaman Fahey was soon glad of the battle practice. Giffen’s ships were spotted by Japanese scouts off Rennell Island, south of Cactus. On January 29, Admiral Kusaka canceled a planned Henderson raid in favor of striking the cruisers. For this he relied on the new night attack force drawn from the 701st and 705th air groups. They reached the target amid gathering darkness and attacked into the night. For an instant Fahey thought another rehearsal was under way, but then he saw fountains of water erupting into the sky, planes all over the place, and an enemy peppering the ships with machine guns as they passed. Strings of tracers from flak and the lightning bolts of the five-inch dual-purpose guns lit the darkening sky. One five-inch mount was right next t
o Fahey’s quadruple 40mm, and when the heavy flak spoke, it was tremendous. Cotton-stuffed ears didn’t help. The concussion made him feel like the insides of his chest and throat were being ripped out. The previous day’s combat exercises gave Fahey confidence in his comrades. Their 40mm mount made Montpelier’s first score of the war, a JNAF torpedo plane. But the Japanese were determined—and good. Fahey felt his ship struck by a tin fish, a dud. Heavy cruiser Louisville evaded another torpedo by combing its wake, but when a second wave of Japanese attacked twenty minutes later they hit her—fortunately also a dud. Something was wrong that day with Japanese torpedoes, if not airmen. A third dud hit light cruiser Wichita. Not so lucky was heavy cruiser Chicago. She lost engines and power and began listing after two torpedoes struck home. Damage control restored some power, and late that night the Louisville successfully rigged a towline. The Chicago was being pulled to safety the next day, surrounded by half a dozen destroyers, with Enterprise fighters overhead for cover, when the Japanese returned to blow the cruiser out of the water.

  Radioman 2nd Class Philip Jacobsen had the watch at Station AL, the Cactus Crystal Ball, when they began to intercept Japanese aviation transmissions. The excitement in the stream of contact reports was almost palpable. A message soon reported the destruction by torpedo of a battleship. Because the JNAF were still using the aircraft code captured on the destroyer Smith at Santa Cruz, decryption was fast and accurate. Ensign C. A. Sims’s mobile radio unit on the Enterprise copied the same transmissions. By noon, January 30, the Japanese had rectified their identification mistake. There was no doubt of the result: A further intercept specified the target as the Chicago. Bull Halsey was furious. In Washington Admiral King took it hard, for Giffen had been a favorite of his and had now messed up. At Pearl Harbor, Chester Nimitz was unusually acerbic—possibly because he was coming down with malaria after his recent South Pacific visit. The CINCPAC exhibited a fury more typical of Ernie King. Nimitz had been upset several times previously when U.S. warship losses—the destroyer Porter and the carriers Wasp and Hornet—had been revealed before families of crews were notified. Now Nimitz threatened to kill anyone who spoke of the Chicago’s sinking.

  Immediately after these events, CINCPAC issued an all-hands warning of an enemy offensive. The fleet intelligence bulletin that day was the first to put a time frame on the expected attack: between January 29 and February 12. Ultra yielded a tabulation of available JNAF air strength: 142 at Rabaul (including forty-nine twin-engine bombers and seventeen dive-bombers) plus forty-nine to sixty-nine at Buin (including thirty-five to fifty-five dive-bombers). There were also the carrier air groups, plus significant Japanese Army air strength. On January 31 the intelligence mavens became quite explicit:

  A major action…is expected soon. This will probably consist of an attempt similar to the one on November 13–15 where transports attempted to land at Guadalcanal covered by fleet units. Whether or not carriers will be [i]nvolved is unknown as yet. It is known that a detached group of carrier aircraft is now operating in the Shortland area.

  The intelligence bulletin now put timing at February 3 or 4. The next day analysts added that “the major operation predicted yesterday appears more and more probable.”

  On the Japanese side, the naval attack delayed the Henderson neutralization provided for in the KE plan. Admiral Kusaka requested postponement. Suspicious as ever, the Army wanted none of that. So the Tokyo Express would run on time, starting the next day. But the Chicago diversion proved a blessing in disguise. The ship’s destruction told Halsey he could not yet hazard heavy ships in The Slot. That precluded surface interdiction. Fooled by the warnings of an offensive, Halsey now determined to hold his cards and see what developed before committing his forces.

  This put the onus on the Cactus Air Force, now under Marine Brigadier General Francis Mulcahy. He had eighty-one planes, among them roughly sixty-five bomber types. There were far more in the South Pacific, but not at the tip of the spear. About eighty patrol planes based in the New Hebrides had sufficient range to participate, and SOWESPAC had thirty B-17s that could contribute. Halsey’s choice to hold back his carriers took 161 planes off the table, slightly more than 200 if the two jeep carriers are included. There were more than that number of additional U.S. aircraft in SOPAC, but merely to replace warplanes lost from Guadalcanal. Events put the Cactus Air Force at the center of battle. Only the planes and PT boats would oppose the Japanese withdrawal.

  Imperial Navy planners were very precise with their arrangements. Pickup would take place exactly at midnight. The arriving Express would flash a blue signal light. Every destroyer carried five rubber boats preloaded with supply drums and powered by a dependable (American) Johnson outboard motor. Crewmen would push the drums overboard about 600 yards from shore and continue to the beach. The troops would wade out and hoist themselves into the boats, then use rope ladders to climb to the destroyers’ decks. Every ship would carry two or three hundred men. The loading had to be completed quickly. With no time to spare, the rubber boats would be left for later missions and finally abandoned.

  Rear Admiral Kimura Susumu of Destroyer Squadron 10 was to lead the first sortie. But he was injured when the U.S. submarine Nautilus torpedoed the Akizuki off Shortland some days earlier. Rear Admiral Hashimoto returned to mastermind the evacuation. Hashimoto, like Tanaka Raizo, had worked himself to exhaustion in the Solomons and had been moved to less demanding duty. But the KE Operation was that important. Koyanagi Tomiji, former skipper of battleship Kongo, had been promoted to rear admiral and given command of Destroyer Squadron 2. Having plied The Slot with the Express for six weeks, he also had been relieved, and arrived at Truk only to be sent back. Koyanagi led the transport unit. Hashimoto calculated that to make the schedule he would need to leave Shortland unusually early—about 10:00 a.m. So they were passing Vella Lavella in the afternoon when they were spotted. Coastwatcher Josselyn reported the Japanese, which brought two powerful attacks by the Cactus Air Force. Though the Express had a strong combat air patrol, the U.S. planes overwhelmed it, but the best they could accomplish against the flotilla was to damage the destroyer Makinami, Admiral Hashimoto’s flagship. Koyanagi stepped up to take over, leaving a couple of ships to stand by Hashimoto. The latter transferred to Shikinami and rushed to catch up, but could not do so until much later. The Japanese were running late, and Koyanagi’s reassignment of ships to replace those detached from the screen left the transport unit understrength by two destroyers.

  The next hurdle was a PT attack. Tulagi sent out eleven PT boats that night. Seven of them made the Japanese and in various combinations launched torpedoes. Several PTs bored in from behind the enemy at Cape Esperance. Lieutenant Yamamoto Masahide of the Akigumo recalls his ship firing her five-inch main battery directly over the stern at the PT boats. Yamamoto thought they blasted three. There were three boats lost that night—PTs -111, -37, and -123—but only one here. Another boat was actually destroyed by Louie the Louse—the greatest known combat exploit of the nighttime JNAF floatplane operation. Among the Americans missing was John H. Clagett, a legendary PT skipper. The PT boats achieved no clear results. Japanese destroyer Makikumo was lost after chasing PT-124, but whether the cause was a -124 torpedo or a mine—Americans had laid 300 mines in these waters that day—remains in dispute.

  Kusaka’s Eleventh Air Fleet also played its part, with pairs of Bettys shuttling over Henderson to keep Cactus Air Force heads down. They were unable to prevent some U.S. planes from taking to the air, or a morning attack on the retreating flotilla, but this time the Cactus aircraft achieved nothing. About noon the Tokyo Express reached Shortland. Nearly 5,000 Japanese soldiers had been saved. Admiral Koyanagi recorded that the survivors wore only shreds of uniforms, were sick with dengue and malaria, and so emaciated they could not stomach real food, only porridge. Aboard the Akigumo, Lieutenant Yamamoto found the men did not even ask to eat, only for cigarettes.

  Meanwhile, General Patch’s Americans stolidly conti
nued their advance. On the morning of February 2, word reached Cactus Crystal Ball that a complete Japanese radio station, abandoned, had been captured undamaged. Crystal Ballers knew the enemy emitter at Tassafaronga had gone off the air a week before. Petty Officer Jim Perkins, radioman Phil Jacobsen, and a Marine intercept operator volunteered to recover the equipment. They set off in a two-and-a-half-ton truck, spent a full day bouncing along rutted trails, and finally reached their goal. What they found was strange: The Japanese radio and a generator were completely functional. The only document was a radio frequency list that U.S. intelligence knew all about. The enemy had clearly taken the trouble to secure their documents but had done nothing to destroy the equipment. Perhaps they had lacked the means? An Army officer raised the possibility that the enemy were withdrawing. Perkins and Jacobsen passed that along, but Commander McCallum decided against reporting it up the line, on grounds that Station AL would be exceeding its mandate as a direction-finding unit. Melbourne, Pearl Harbor, and Washington were left to draw their own conclusions.