1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  Meantime, the other American ships had resumed fire on their own. The major target for many was the Hiei, which began receiving shells from American cruisers and destroyers—eighty hits by one account—and her rudder was jammed. This was the flagship of the Japanese commander Admiral Hiroaki Abe,* who surveyed the damage and decided he had had enough. He ordered the Hiei and her sister battleship Kirishima to turn northward, out of the battle. This had the effect of breaking off the action for all intents.

  Thus the night action was over, but there were other dramas to be played out as the sun rose over the carnage. Ironbottom Sound was again littered with the debris of war and the bobbing heads of oil-soaked sailors in the shark-infested channel. The scenes aboard ships were frightful; mangled bodies and body parts were strewn over decks awash with blood. Fires raged in many ships helplessly adrift or crippled. One of those cripples was the cruiser Juneau, last in the American battle line, which had been fighting the good fight when she was suddenly struck by a torpedo from a destroyer and left nearly dead in the water. As she tried to limp south a Japanese submarine periscope rose above the surface, then fired two torpedoes, one striking Juneau. According to Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless, watching aboard the San Francisco, “Juneau didn’t sink—she blew up with all the fury of an erupting volcano. There was a terrific thunderclap and a plume of white water that was blotted out by a huge brown hemisphere a thousand yards across, while from within which came the sounds of more explosions.” Of the eight hundred sailors aboard Juneau only ten survived and among those who perished were the five Sullivan brothers.†

  The battleship Hiei, after making her desperate turn toward Rabaul, managed to get only to the north side of Savo Island, so badly was she mangled. And there, at sunup, the planes from Henderson Field found her. All day the Americans bombed and strafed her, even a squadron from the Enterprise, which was in the area to deliver the planes to Guadalcanal. Smoke and flames were visible from her stem to her stern, but still the Hiei did not go down. It was beginning to seem that she was unsinkable. She wasn’t. Japanese destroyers returned to take off her crew and after dusk she went down by the stern, scuttled—the first Japanese battleship lost in the war.

  The final tally for the first day of the naval Battle of Guadalcanal revealed this: one Japanese battleship and two destroyers sunk versus two American cruisers and four destroyers. American casualties had been far greater than those for the Japanese—1,300 sailors perished, including two admirals. But the U.S. Navy had prevented the Japanese from again shelling and wrecking Henderson Field, and that was its great strategic victory.

  Even as sporadic fighting and bombing continued over Ironbottom Sound and rescue parties fished American sailors out of the water, another large Japanese fleet was headed south to finish the job. With practically all the American ships that had engaged in the first night of the naval battle having been either sunk or badly damaged, there was little resistence to be offered and on the night of November 13 the Japanese bombarded Henderson Field with a thousand rounds of eight-inch shells from two cruisers, as well as smaller shells from destroyers. Americans on the receiving end “ran the gamut of profanity and prayers.”9

  Help, however, was on the way. It came in the form of Admiral Willis Lee’s battleship force, which was already steaming toward Guadalcanal but would not arrive before the night of November 14. Unaware of this, the Japanese had already debarked one of its strongest forces yet. Its first echelon was spotted just after dawn by pilots from Henderson Field: eleven troop transports with more than 13,000 men destined for Guadalcanal escorted by eleven destroyers. The American fliers had a field day, and by nightfall seven enemy troop transports had been sunk in the Slot and the rest badly damaged. Not only that but they sank one of the Japanese cruisers that had shelled Henderson Field the night before. The Japanese, however, managed to transfer about 10,000 of the soldiers off the sinking transports and place them on destroyers for the rest of the ride to Guadalcanal, alongside the remaining four transports. Some 3,000 more Japanese soldiers were killed when their ships sank.

  That night Admiral Lee finally entered Ironbottom Sound. His two brand-new battleships, the Washington and the South Dakota, were screened by four destroyers, which soon clashed with the screen of the Japanese fleet. As Lee entered the sound he tried to establish radio contact with Henderson Field, but as he had not yet been assigned a call sign he was told, “We do not recognize you.”

  Lee, staring into the darkness from the bridge of the Washington, growled out in a plain voice, “You tell your big boss [Vandegrift] that Ching Lee is here and wants information.” (Because of his somewhat oriental-looking features, “Ching” had been Lee’s nickname from his Naval Academy days and he knew his pal Vandegrift would recognize that!)10

  At eleven P.M. the Washington’s radar made contact with an unidentified ship, which was soon sighted through powerful gunnery telescopes. The ship was the Japanese cruiser Sendai, which had also sighted Lee’s force and which its captain reported back to fleet command as “two cruisers and four destroyers.” The Japanese captain was soon disabused of this notion when the mighty sixteen-inch guns of the Washington roared out at him. He immediately turned tail, made a smoke screen, and ran for cover.

  Lee’s destroyers had less luck, and for a while it seemed this night was going to be a repeat of the brutal action of November 12 and 13. The Japanese destroyers were steaming in the lee of Savo Island, and thus their silhouettes were not clear on the horizon. After a five-minute action three of the four American destroyers were sinking or sunk, with great loss of life.

  Worse, as Lee’s big ships closed with the Japanese battleship Kirishima and her four escorting cruisers, the South Dakota suddenly suffered a power outage, which put her in the dark and knocked out her radar. No sooner had this happened than she was caught in the powerful searchlights of two Japanese destroyers and seemingly all ships in the Japanese fleet opened up on her. Fortunally, her modern armament—an eighteen-inch belt of steel around her hull—saved her from catastrophe, but her lighter superstructure was blasted by the many calibers and weights of Japanese shells and more than a hundred men were killed. More fortunately, Admiral Lee, aboard the Washington, had spotted the South Dakota’s principal tormentor, the Kirishima, which was about five miles distant and happily sending salvo after roaring salvo at the hapless American ship. Lee suddenly opened on Kirishima with massive salvos of his own and within seven minutes the big Japanese battlewagon was aflame from stem to stern and staggered off out of the action, only to sink a few hours later. Ching Lee then turned his attention to the Japanese cruisers and blasted two of them, as did the South Dakota, whose power had been restored. With that the Japanese had again had enough and turned northward toward Rabaul.

  Admiral Tanaka, perpetually in charge of the Tokyo Express, had been waiting in the wings while the battle raged, his destroyers and troop transports crammed with Japanese soldiers destined for Guadalcanal. He knew that if he waited for them to unload they would all become ideal targets in the morning for the American planes, so he ordered the four remaining transports to sacrifice themselves by beaching while the troops got off. As for himself, he disgustedly sped back toward Rabaul behind his fellow sailors, his destroyers overflowing with soldiers who would not reach Guadalcanal that night, if ever.

  Even though several thousand Japanese soldiers managed to debark that night from the transports beached at the western end of Guadalcanal near Cape Esperance, they were bombed and strafed beginning at sunup and none of their critical supplies or heavy equipment got ashore. Again, the U.S. Navy had saved Henderson Field from a major bombardment and, though the Americans had no way of knowing it at the time, never again would the Japanese send their major warships down from Rabaul to strut around Ironbottom Sound, blasting Henderson Field at will.

  Now the tables were turning quickly, and Guadalcanal was becoming a sinkhole for Japanese soldiers, planes, and ships, which they could ill afford to lose. Howe
ver, during the coming weeks the Tokyo Express managed to sneak through again and again in the dark of night so that by the first of December Japanese troop strength on Guadalcanal totaled about 30,000. This was a formidable force, except for one thing: the Japanese had not figured out a way to keep them supplied, and they were beginning to starve. It is one thing to dash in with troops who can quickly jump off ship and go ashore; it is another to have to wait to unload the tons of supplies and food to keep that many men active in an offensive battle. The Japanese command tried everything they knew, including loading destroyers with thousands of big oil drums filled with food and ammunition, roped together on the decks. The theory was to get close enough to the beaches to heave them over and the men on shore could pick them up and tow them in. It did not work well: ropes sawed loose on sharp coral heads and most of the drums sank or washed out to sea.

  By the first of December it was apparent to Japanese authorities back at Rabaul that Guadalcanal must be evacuated, but since they had all made such a big production of it, and so many men and planes and ships had been lost, somebody was going to have to tell the emperor, and nobody wanted to. So the Japanese on Guadalcanal now had to go over to total defense, digging in and making the Americans pay for every yard. It was tough going for the American soldiers and marines, who now got their own taste of what it was like to attack well-fortified positions. Nevertheless, they pressed forward, driving the Japanese slowly west, well beyond the Matanikau and into the jungles and hills well south of Bloody Ridge. By this time Guadalcanal had acquired a name given by the Japanese who fought there: the Island of Death.

  In early December the U.S. South Pacific Command decided that the First Marine Division had done enough. It was about time, too. They had been on Guadalcanal four long months and almost everybody was suffering from malaria and any number of other tropical ailments. They had been under almost constant fire during that time, from ground attacks to air bombing and naval shelling, and everyone’s nerves were on edge. Combat fatigue had become an increasing problem. By the first week in December they were packing up, headed for Australia, and the rest of the U.S. Army’s Americal Division was moving in. Not only that, but the 16,000 soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry division, a regular army outfit that had been stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, was also alerted for Guadalcanal.*

  By the end of the year, Henderson Field had been modernized and permanant buildings were beginning to spring up; air strength now exceeded more than two hundred warplanes. Japanese bombing attacks had slacked off, not just because American aviators were shooting them down at such high rates but because they had already shot down so many there just weren’t enough left to send, as in weeks past. American transports could now off-load men and supplies almost with impunity, and they did. Engineers and Seabees had built roads over much of the area, bridging streams and ravines, so that men could now get to the fighting areas in trucks and jeeps and tanks and artillery could move up quickly.

  On New Year’s Eve, the Japanese emperor was finally told that Guadalcanal had to be evacuated. It was a sour thing, given all that had been lost there, but he gave his assent. Still, it would be another six weeks before a scheme could be put in place to accomplish this vast retreat. Meanwhile, the Japanese hung on, starving and emaciated and suffering from tropical diseases even more so than the Americans, since their medical care was not as efficient.

  To call the remaining fighting “desultory” would be a grave disservice to those who had to do so. The army divisions, as well as elements of the Second Marine Division, had to continue cleaning out pockets of well-entrenched Japanese who would not surrender. Weak and sick as they were, they could still fire their machine guns and throw grenades, of which they had plenty, and many Americans died trying to root them out. Using intelligence compiled by the marines, army commander General Alexander Patch began a systematic offensive to rid the island of Japanese. Aerial reconnaissance revealed key terrain features and the army gave them picturesque names such as the Galloping Horse and Sea Horse. These were bombarded relentlessly by planes from Henderson Field and by artillery; then the soldiers went in with flamethrowers and employed methodical fire-and-maneuver tactics practiced by the U.S. military.

  The departing marines presented a poignant and disturbing picture to arriving soldiers as they marched down off the ridges toward the beach, past the growing new cemeteries with their neatly arranged white wood crosses and Stars of David. The newly arrived soldiers looked at them askance and almost in embarrassment at their tattered, filthy utility uniforms and worn-out shoes, at their scraggly beards and hollow, haunted, emaciated expressions. Out in the harbor lay one of the old Dollar Line ships, the President Wilson. Also known as the President’s Line, these former trans-Pacific liners were named for presidents of the United States, but after Pearl Harbor they had been commandeered by the military and turned into troopships. Robert Leckie, whose battalion had been in the line for four months, described the scene.

  “We were so weak that many of us could not climb up the cargo nets. Some fell into the water—pack, rifle and all—and had to be fished out. Others clung desperately to the nets, panting, fearful to move lest the last ounce of strength depart them too, and the sea receive them. These had to be rescued by nimble sailors swarming down the nets. I was able to reach the top, but could go no further. I could not muster the strength to swing over the gunwale and I hung there, breathing heavily, the ship’s hot side swaying away from me in the swells—until two sailors grabbed me by the armpits and pulled me over. I fell with a clatter among the others who had been so brought aboard, and I lay with my cheek pressed against the warm, grimy deck, my heart beating rapidly, not from this exertion, but from happiness.”

  Once aboard, Leckie and a friend went below to get a cup of coffee, where they encountered a newly arriving soldier who had not yet debarked. He asked them how it was.

  “Guadalcanal? It was rough,” they both answered. Then they asked the soldier if he’d ever heard of the place before, since they had gotten no news whatsoever from America during the time they were there.

  “Guadalcanal! Hell yes!” the soldier replied. “The First Marines—everybody’s heard of it. You guys are famous. You guys are heroes back home.”

  Leckie and his friend quickly went off in opposite directions, each not wanting the other to see the tears in his eyes.11

  Rumor had it among the First Marines that they might be going home for Christmas. Like most rumors it was untrue, and they were taken first to the island of Espiritu Santo, where they spent Christmas Eve in close order drill, running through the manual of arms. Several more Christmases would pass before they would see home again.

  Meantime, bitter fighting remained for those at Guadalcanal. General Patch now had under his command about 40,000 men of all arms, while the Japanese force under General Hyakutake had dwindled from 30,000 to 25,000 and downward from there as American airpower, artillery, and ground troops as well as disease and starvation took their toll. By the end of January all Japanese frontline troops who were able were ordered to move silently to the rear, and to the beaches near Cape Esperance on the western tip of Guadalcanal. Those too weak to make the move were ordered to hold their positions, put up a good fight, and die for their emperor.

  The vast fleet of Japanese warships gathering south of Rabaul had been duly noted by coast watchers and was falsely interpreted by Halsey’s headquarters as signaling a new reinforcement of Hyakutake’s army. Consequently, General Patch pulled back large numbers of his men from the jungle fighting toward Henderson Field, in preparation for defending it against attack. Nobody expected a Japanese evacuation.12

  Thus, on two moonless nights beginning February 4, nearly 12,000 Japanese officers and men were secretly loaded aboard twenty destroyers of the Tokyo Express, which had brought them there, and turned full steam back toward Rabaul. They had narrowly escaped an amphibious pincer movement organized by Patch, in which a sizable American force had been loaded
into LSTs and sailed around Cape Esperance to land just southwest of it, while others pushed along the northern beaches toward the cape. When the two forces finally met up on February 9, everyone involved realized that the Japanese had gone.

  Theirs was a textbook demonstration of withdrawal under fire, perhaps the most difficult military maneuver on the books. While there was a sense of disappointment among the American command at not having bagged the lot of them, all were nevertheless relieved. It was finally over.

  The Japanese had left more than 24,000 soldiers dead on Guadalcanal, many of them from disease. At least that many more were killed in the Slot on their way from Rabaul, victims of American airpower, or they had died in battle on sunken warships. Two Japanese battleships, a carrier, four cruisers, and twelve destroyers had been sent to the bottom. As bad if not worse for the Japanese, they had lost 1,827 warplanes and 2,362 pilots and crews during the struggle for Guadalcanal, a testimony to the dogged persistence and ferocity of the American pilots of Henderson Field. The superiority of U.S. fighter tactics against the much-vaunted flying characteristics of the Zero is grimly illustrated by the fact that 909 Zeros were shot out of the skies over the Solomons and nearby waters.