Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  The plan was for the navy to clear the Solomon Islands and, once that had been done, for MacArthur to secure Papua New Guinea from any more Japanese adventures by capturing New Britain Island, north of Papua, where the Japanese had a major base at Rabaul, on the north of the island. Two things now intervened to upset the planning: the Japanese landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomons and began to build an airfield, from which they could severely disrupt the coming operation, and they also landed on the north-west of Papua with the aim of taking the capital, Port Moresby, their previous attempt to do so having been frustrated by the Battle of the Coral Sea in May. From their landing area at Buna, the Japanese force of two regiments had 250 miles to go to reach Port Morseby and would have to cross the 6,000-foot-high and jungle-covered Owen Stanley range of mountains. Japanese intelligence thought that there was a road across the mountains, the Kokoda Trail, which could take motorized traffic but this was in reality no more than an overgrown jungle track – a fact that did not hinder the Japanese for more than a few moments. Pushing aside a few Australian troops that were lurking near the beachheads, they cracked on and took Kokoda, on the top of the range, on 27 July, and, although hampered by supply problems caused by the terrain and the climate and by sheer exhaustion, they got to within twenty-five miles north of Port Moresby before a combination of the arrival of Australian and American reinforcements and the situation on Guadalcanal forced them to withdraw and consolidate around their beachheads on the north coast.

  The Solomon Islands, then divided between those islands taken from Germany after the first war and governed by Australia under a League of Nations mandate and the British Solomon Islands protectorate, are a string of islands that run roughly north-west to south-east for about 600 miles. They are only sparsely populated since their climate is unpleasant, being wet, hot, humid and malarial throughout the year, and the terrain is mountainous jungle or covered by lallang grass, which is tough, fibrous and liable to cut the unwary traveller. Guadalcanal is the southernmost island of the Solomons of any size, and, if the Allies wanted to invade New Britain and its surrounding islands, then they would have to clear the Solomons, beginning with Guadalcanal. On 7 August 1942, under the tactical command of Vice-Admiral Fletcher USN, a composite division of the United States Marine Corps effected landings on the north of Guadalcanal, near the Japanese airfield in the making, and on Tulagi and its associated islets twenty miles to the north, where the Japanese had established a garrison just before the Coral Sea battle. The Marines were supported by five American and three Australian cruisers and eleven destroyers, as well as by aircraft from three American carriers and by bombers from MacArthur’s Army Air Force. The landings on Guadalcanal were unopposed and the next day the Marines had the almost completed airstrip, to be named by them Henderson Field. On Tulagi, the Japanese were not caught napping and the Marine Regiment landed there met violent opposition. Nevertheless, the Marines captured the island in twenty-four hours with the loss of 108 killed, while of the Japanese garrison of 500 men nearly all fought to the last, refusing to surrender and committing suicide rather than be captured, as their military code demanded. On the neighbouring islands of Gavutu and Tanamdogo, the 500 Japanese went to ground in caves, some natural, some man-made, and had to be blasted out by grenades or flame-throwers. Only fourteen were captured, all the rest being killed, committing suicide or crawling into cover and dying of their wounds.

  From the Japanese headquarters 600 miles away at Rabaul, New Britain, reaction was swift. On 7 and 8 August, Japanese land-based aircraft attacked the American fleet off the landing areas, and the troops on shore. Thirty-three Japanese planes were lost to twenty-two American. The following day, on 9 August, a force of seven Japanese cruisers and a destroyer caught an Allied task force steaming through the ten-mile-wide channel between Guadalcanal and Savo Island and sank four cruisers, three American and one Australian, and damaged three other warships, at trifling cost to themselves; 1,270 Allied sailors were killed in explosions, drowned or perished in the shark-infested waters, for thirty-four Japanese deaths. On the evening of that same day, the ships supporting the landings, too vulnerable to attack from the air, withdrew away to the east, leaving the five Marine battalions on shore horribly exposed. With their seaborne supply chain interrupted, Marine rations were cut in half and work began to complete the airstrip. Although the US Marines were now unable to obtain the building materials that should have been landed with them, the Japanese engineers and their Korean labourers who had been working on the airfield had left most of their equipment and materials behind, and the Marines had the airfield completed and able to receive aircraft in two days – although it took another two weeks before any were available. The Japanese had seriously underestimated the size of the American force and, when two weak battalions of around 900 men – they had been landed by five destroyers twenty miles east of the American lodgement on Guadalcanal on the night of 18/19 August – attacked frontally two days later, they were massacred by American artillery and machine-guns and recently arrived fighters and dive-bombers. The Japanese commander, Colonel Kiyono Ichiki, went back to his makeshift command post, burned his regimental flag and shot himself.

  Now that American aircraft were on Guadalcanal and their transport ships were vulnerable, the Japanese took to landing more men from destroyers. Warships are not designed to carry passengers, and each destroyer could only carry 150 men, but by nightly dashes by six or seven destroyers, which took around ten hours and were known to the Americans as the ‘Tokyo Express’, the Japanese were able to assemble a force of around 6,000 men to the east of the American perimeter. The campaign now became one of successive overland attacks by the Japanese supported by naval bombardment and accompanied by clashes between the two navies. Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo ordered a shutdown of the attempt to reach Port Moresby until Guadalcanal had been cleared of Americans, and continued to land troops on the island. At one stage, with the Saratoga put out of action and the Wasp so damaged that she had to be scuttled, the Americans had only one operational carrier in the South Pacific, but the Japanese navy suffered too. On 11 October, in the confused – and confusing – Battle of Cape Esperance a Japanese task force of three heavy cruisers, two destroyers and two seaplane carriers landing tanks and heavy artillery was eventually seen off by the US Navy and its commander, Admiral Goto, killed. When the remnants got back to Japan, Goto’s second-in-command was sacked. On 14 October two Japanese battleships bombarded the airfield with 900 shells, setting fire to ammunition dumps and fuel tankers and destroying fifty parked aircraft. Although the battleships were eventually chased away by American PT boats, their 14-inch shells had churned up the runway so much that it could not be used for several days. This was probably the nearest the Americans ever came to losing Guadalcanal, and the Japanese landed another 4,500 men the following night, using transports this time, bringing the total to 22,000 or only slightly less than the American invaders turned defenders.

  The American position around Henderson Field, which was well dugin and protected by barbed wire and covered by artillery, was not at risk from even 22,000 Japanese, but the Marines were tired, still on short rations and beginning to go down with malaria, whereas the Japanese troops were reasonably fresh. This was not to last. A Japanese offensive on 23 October turned into a bloodbath. The approach march to get within striking distance of the Americans was along thirty miles of mountainous jungle path and in the event took eight days. Each soldier had to carry an artillery shell as well as his own weapon and equipment, and light artillery pieces were dragged along by the men. The weather was atrocious and the path, such as it was, quickly turned into a quagmire. Heavy weapons and equipment had to be abandoned, the engineers had to expend all their efforts in constructing a track along which the ten light tanks could move, the men went on to half-rations and zero hour for the attack was postponed several times. A diversionary attack went in a day early, the commander not having received news of yet another postponement, and resul
ted in 650 Japanese dead for no purpose. When the main attack did go in on the night of 25/26 October, the light tanks were easily disabled or destroyed and 900 Japanese were killed, shot down on the American wire.

  The Japanese garrison in Guadalcanal would now be expanded by the bulk of Eighteenth Army, commanded by General Hyakutake, who would launch a fourth, and it was hoped final, attack on Henderson Field and the American lodgement. Thirteen and a half thousand troops with 10,000 tons of ammunition and supplies were concentrated at the mounting base in the north-western Solomons. The plan was to ship the men and supplies to Guadalcanal in eleven troop transports escorted by battleships and cruisers and covered by Zero fighters from carriers cruising to the north of the Solomons and land-based bombers from Rabaul. The force left Shortland, one of the Solomon Islands, on 12 November and in negotiating The Slot – the Solomon Islands channel – ran into an American task force of five cruisers and eight destroyers. There was pandemonium as the Japanese rushed to replace the high-explosive shells intended for a bombardment of Henderson Field with armour-piercing shells for use against warships, and as aircraft tried to identify which ships were Japanese and which American. Despite being caught unawares, the Japanese inflicted heavy damage on their opponents, killing two admirals and sinking three cruisers, largely because the American destroyers fired their torpedoes too early, but were nevertheless crippled themselves. Between then and 14 November one Japanese battleship, the Hiei, was sunk and seven of the troop transports were sunk in The Slot by American bombers, although destroyers picked many of the men up from the water and returned them to Shortland, while the Japanese continued to bombard Henderson Field, dashing off before they could be attacked.

  On 15 November the three remaining Japanese troop transports were run ashore and beached, and the 2,000 Japanese soldiers still aboard were landed on Guadalcanal. Off shore, one American battleship, the USS South Dakota, whose radar had broken down, was caught by the Japanese, badly shot up and driven off, while another, the USS Washington, so seriously damaged the Japanese battleship Kirishima that she had to be scuttled by her crew. Far from being able to launch a major offensive, the Japanese were now on the defensive, short of ammunition, rations and medical supplies. Only prodigious efforts by Admiral Tanaka to provide at least some supplies by the Tokyo Express, parachute air drops and the lashing of containers to rafts launched from submarines, allowed the troops to exist at all, while on the other side of the island the very tired and now malaria-riven 1 Marine Division was withdrawn and replaced by fresh troops. At last reality began to dawn on the Japanese high command, and this despite their navy’s success on 31 November and 1 December when, for the loss of only one destroyer, they sank three American cruisers and set two on fire, with only the USS Honolulu escaping unscathed. When Admiral Tanaka was badly wounded on 12 December, the impetus went out of the supply effort and, after bitter argument in Tokyo, which saw army and navy officers coming to blows as each blamed the other for the situation in Guadalcanal, the order went out to withdraw. The orders were slow in getting there, and by mid-January 1943 the Japanese were confronted by 40,000 American troops under the fifty-four-year-old Major-General Alexander ‘Sandy’ Patch.* Then, on 19 January, Patch’s men went on the offensive along the island.

  Patch knew that the only way to defeat the Japanese infantry was to kill them, preferably by blowing each man into very small pieces, so his advance was slow, methodical and exceedingly detailed. After a heavy artillery bombardment, the US Marines would advance over the ground that had been shelled, deal with any Japanese who survived and then stop and dig in. Another stretch of ground would be shelled and the process would be repeated. On the night of 1/2 February the Japanese evacuation began once a fresh battalion had been landed to act as rearguard. By 8 February 12,000 men had been taken off, and when the Americans closed in they were opposed only by snipers, hidden in trees, who would not surrender and had to be hunted down and killed. By 10 February there was no resistance anywhere. Guadalcanal had been a disaster for the Japanese. A campaign that both sides expected to last little longer than a week at most had cost the lives of 30,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors: half killed in action or dying from their wounds, and half dead from disease or malnutrition. The Imperial Navy had lost twenty-three warships and sixteen transports, 100,000 tons in all, and over a thousand Japanese aircraft had been shot down or had crashed into the sea. The American casualties amounted to 5,000 navy and 1,592 army dead, and 15,000 wounded or sick. The US Navy had lost twenty-five warships and three transports sunk. The significance of Guadalcanal, however, was far greater than the simple arithmetic of the butcher’s bill: the confidence of the Japanese in their ability to continue a string of uninterrupted victories was badly shaken; the navy’s and army’s dislike and distrust of each other – already there, if usually muted – was exacerbated, and the Americans had obtained a secure base and staging area for their island-hopping strategy that would eventually lead to Allied control of the entire South Pacific. Henderson Field, the objective of the furious Japanese land, sea and air assaults, was now transformed into a major all-weather complex, and it was from there that on 18 April 1943 eighteen American P-38 Lightning fighters took off. Thanks to information garnered from US naval intelligence decrypts, they duly intercepted two Mitsubishi ‘Betty’ bombers and their escort of six Zeros over Bougainville, some 500 miles to the north. Both bombers were shot down, and one of them was carrying Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Japan’s naval victories, even if he never really believed that they would not be overturned. Yamamoto’s body was found the next day.

  Meanwhile, on Papua, MacArthur’s force of one Australian division, one Australian division less one brigade and one American regiment was closing up on the eleven-mile-long Japanese lodgement on the north coast. Since late September 1942 this force had been commanded by an Australian, General Sir Thomas Blamey, who was fifty-eight and a man of distinctly dubious character. The son of a cattle drover, Blamey obtained a rare commission in the tiny Australian Staff Corps, a cadre of regular instructors who oversaw the part-time militia, attended the Indian Staff College and served in the first war with the Australian Imperial Force at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, both as a staff officer and in command of a battalion and then a brigade. After the war he continued to serve on the staff in Australia and as the Australian representative on the Imperial General Staff in London. He left the permanent force in 1925 and was appointed Commissioner of Police for the state of Victoria, while also a major-general of militia. Blamey was knighted in 1935 but after a series of scandals involving abuses of authority by him* he ‘resigned’ in 1936 and became a journalist. With the outbreak of war in 1939, Blamey was recalled to the colours and commanded first an Australian division and then, on promotion to lieutenant-general, the Australian Corps in Palestine. A corps commander in the Greek caper, he got out at the very end in the last RAF flying boat, giving the last remaining seat to his son, a major on his staff. Given the non-job of Deputy Commander-in-Chief Middle East, he became a thoroughgoing nuisance, referring anything he did not like concerning the deployment of Australian troops to the Australian government and being considerably more of a hindrance than a help to Wavell and Auchinleck, to both of whom he was thoroughly disloyal. On the recall of Australian troops from the Middle East, Blamey, now promoted to general, went too and became Commander-in-Chief Australian Military Forces and Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces South-West Pacific, under MacArthur.

  Blamey got his men over the Owen Stanley range, mainly on foot in appalling conditions but with a flanking force inserted north of the mountains by air. Supply was by Papuan porters and air drops, with the wounded being evacuated on stretchers carried by porters. Again, as happened so often when fighting Japanese troops in defensive positions, the operation took far longer than had been hoped. Blamey replaced his original Australian troops by fresh units flown in, and the Americans increased their contribution to a complete division. The Japanese attem
pted to supply their men around Buna using destroyers, but Allied air power made this a very risky business and only a tiny proportion of food, medicines and ammunition got through. Conditions were atrocious, with the ravages of weather, disease and terrain affecting Allied and Japanese alike, the difference being that the Allies could evacuate their wounded and supply their troops, whereas the Japanese could not. All that said, the Japanese continued to fight stubbornly to the last, although it was clear to even the most junior soldier that the situation was hopeless. Finally, fighting through each individual Japanese position in driving rain, the Australian and American troops got the upper hand, and by the last week in January 1943 Papua was completely cleared of the Japanese, who reported 9,390 dead. It was the end of another six-month campaign and had cost 5,700 Australian and 2,800 American casualties, of which around a quarter were deaths by enemy action or disease, but now both Guadalcanal and Papua were free of Japanese and any residual threat to Australia was gone.