1942: The Year That Tried Men's Souls

by Winston Groom

  The struggle for Guadalcanal was won by the Americans through tenacity, superior infantry tactics, and almost unimaginable sacrifices by its navy to keep the Japanese fleet at bay. It was lost by the Japanese because of incomprehensible infantry tactics and an almost criminal lack of combat intelligence regarding U.S. troop strength on the island. Thus the Japanese attacked headlong time and again with inferior forces and paid the cost, while Henderson Field became stronger day by day.*

  The importance of the Battle of Guadalcanal can hardly be overstated. First it stopped the huge Japanese Pacific offensive in its tracks. It helped make Australia safe from Japanese air attacks on its sea-lanes of communication and supply. It sucked up Japanese troops destined for the New Guinea campaign. It gave the Allies a solid, strategic forward base from which to launch the long and bloody war across the Pacific to Tokyo. It relieved the menace to shipping lanes from the United States to Australia and New Zealand and protected vital U.S. outposts such as Fiji, Samoa, and the Hebrides. And, finally, it confirmed for the American public and its fighting troops that the Japanese army was not the invincible machine they had been led to believe.

  From the Japanese perspective all of this at last became painfully clear. Admiral Tanaka, architect of the Tokyo Express, summed it up later:

  “There is no question that Japan’s doom was sealed with the closing of the struggle for Guadalcanal.” After the war, when he was asked by a U.S. interrogator when he first thought “the balance had swung against you,” Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, one of the most respected of the Imperial Navy’s senior commanders, did not hesitate.

  “Guadalcanal,” he replied.13

  Chapter Eighteen

  As the big land battles on Guadalcanal were winding down, General Eichelberger arrived on the northern coast of New Guinea, with MacArthur’s admonition, “Take Buna or don’t come back alive,” still ringing in his ears. What he found was the U.S. Army’s Thirty-second Infantry division in deplorable condition and disarray, physically and mentally. It was composed mostly of National Guardsmen from Michigan and Indiana who, not having Navajo code talkers like the marines, often spoke their immigrant parents’ Scandanavian or Dutch over field radios to confuse and baffle the Japanese.

  Every man in the division was running a malarial fever; they suffered from jungle rot, dengue fever, ringworm, and ulcers. They were subsisting on a third of a ration a day, some less than that. One of the inspecting officers wrote, “They wore long dirty beards. Their clothing was in rags. Their shoes were uncared for, or worn out. There was little discipline or military courtesy. When Martin and I visited a regimental [headquarters] to observe what was supposed to be an attack, we found it four and a half miles behind the front line. The regimental commander and his staff went forward from this location rarely, if ever. The attack had been ordered, and it could be entered on the headquarters diary, but it didn’t exist.”

  Eichelberger visited the front only to find there was no front; units were so jumbled up nobody could figure out who was who or what was what. He came across troops lying along trails doing nothing, and when he urged them forward they gaped at him like he was crazy. When Eichelberger got back to his tent camp that night he ordered all fighting stopped for two days in order to straighten out the mess. Then he started firing people, beginning with the division commander. Orderlies had pitched Eichelberger’s tent “alongside a small crystal clear creek” and as he finally lay down, exhausted, for a good night’s sleep, it began to rain. “Next morning, I found the creek inside my tent,” he reported, “and within an inch of the bottom of my cot. Various personal possessions floated around like chips in a millstream. I waded knee-deep to get to my shaving mirror, which hung on a bamboo tree outside. In Buna that year, it rained about a hundred and seventy inches.”*1

  As Eichelberger soon found out, the weather and terrain were as much an enemy as the Japanese. After the two days of military housekeeping were up, he ordered an immediate attack on Buna. “In any stalemate,” Eichelberger recalled later, “it was obvious the Japanese would win, for they were living among the coconut palms along the coast on sandy soil, while our men lived in swamps.”2 Eichelberger himself took a personal hand, sending companies forward, coordinating various aspects of the assault.3 But they were met with murderous fire from the Japanese and, though Eichelberger rightly told MacArthur that the troops had fought well, one of his regimental commanders reported, “We have hit them, and bounced off.”

  The Japanese were fighting from behind the most formidable bunkers seen since the Western Front of World War I. Trenches, shored up with coconut logs, cement, and sand-filled oil drums, were reinforced on top by more logs—and steel, if they could find it. Earth was then shoveled on top and then camouflaged with palm leaves and grass so as to be almost invisible and mostly impervious to artillery or all but the largest bombs. A dozen or more men would occupy these, firing machine guns and rifles from small slits. It was almost impossible to pick them out from more than a few yards away. The Allied troops were repelled to the point of nausea by odors from these positions, blown directly at them by a prevailing onshore ocean breeze. What they found when they captured one was revolting.

  “Rotting bodies, sometimes weeks old, formed part of the fortifications. The living fired over the bodies of the dead, slept side-by-side with them. Inside one trench was a Japanese who had not been able to stand the strain. His rifle was still pointed at his head, his big toe on the trigger, and the top of his head blown off. ... Everywhere, pervading everything, was the stench of putrescent flesh.” In some of the bunkers, the stench was so bad the Japanese had to put on gas masks.4 Almost worse, there were obvious signs of cannibalism. The Japanese were even more poorly fed than the Americans and carved-up bodies—many of them Allied soldiers, whom the Japanese preferred to eat before eating their own—were scattered about the rear of many entrenchments. After the war, incidents of Japanese cannibalism were found to have been widespread, shocking the Allied world.*

  On one of Eichelberger’s visits to the front, as he was attempting to get close enough to Buna to observe the Japanese, a near tragedy occurred. Eichelberger’s party consisted of General Albert Waldron, who had just been appointed the new commander of the Thirty-second division, two colonels, and his longtime aide, young Captain Daniel Edwards, of whom Eichelberger said, “My regard for him was akin to that of a father for a son.” Moving forward on a jungle trail, the party came on a kind of marshy no-man’s-land, which was filled with Japanese snipers. First, Waldron was shot in the shoulder by a sniper, so seriously that it ended his military career.

  No sooner had Waldron been carried off than Eichelberger, standing under a tree with Edwards, felt a bullet whiz by, which struck Edwards in the side. “It was like a slow-motion picture,” Eichelberger recalled. “Slowly his knees began to bend and then he fell forward, calling to me to keep cover.” Since the stretcher bearers had just carried out General Waldron, Eichelberger had a hard time finding another. When he did and Edwards was loaded on it, “all hell broke loose.” Machine guns from Buna opened up, as well as all the Japanese snipers who had been hiding in trees. The stretcher bearers kept having to drop Captain Edwards on their torturous trip to the rear, where there was a makeshift aid station.

  Eichelberger then returned to the front to help direct the action but, as we have seen, to no avail. They had gotten right up against the defenses at Buna but could not break through. That afternoon he went back to the aid station, where he was given bad news. The bullet that had struck Captain Edwards was one of the explosive types, Japanese sniper ammunition designed to do maximum damage. It had entered his abdomen and blown a “gaping hole near his spine.” The doctor told Eichelberger that Edwards was going to die; “that there were no facilities that far forward to take care of a man so severely wounded ‘and, Edwards,’ he said, ‘was too ill to be moved.’

  “Right then and there I decided to take Edwards back to the field hospital. If he was going to die, he
might as well die on the hood of my jeep,” Eichelberger recounted. “We carted him out like a sack of meal, lashed him to the hood, and started down the trail. Much of it was corduroy road; coconut logs had been imbedded in the mud to give our jeeps traction. Edwards took a terrific and painful jolting but he offered only one protest. Once he said, ‘Could you just stop a minute and let me rest?’” Finally Eichelberger got him to the field hospital, where he was operated on. “The operation,” reported the very relieved Eichelberger, “saved his life.”5

  While the Americans had been smashing up against Buna, an Australian division, with great loss of life, had managed to take a similar Japanese redoubt at the village of Gona, about eight miles north along the beach. This was a relief but not for long, for many of the Gona Japanese escaped down the beach and set up another position halfway between Gona and Buna, where a river ran into the sea.

  It became unpleasantly obvious to Eichelberger that no amount of artillery or bombing was going to dislodge the Japanese from their bunkers; that the only way to beat them was to go in and root them out hand to hand or with bayonets, rifles, and grenades. And this is what the Americans and Australians finally did. A large roadblock was set up to prevent the Japanese force that had escaped from Gona from linking up with the Buna garrison. Then the soldiers began the bloody process of reducing Buna bunker by bunker. Almost to a man, the Japanese fought to the last, exacting a terrible toll on U.S. troops. This shocked American commanders, who deemed it beyond all reason in the world of military science. General George Kenny, who had put MacArthur’s chief of staff Sutherland in his place a few weeks earlier, wrote to his superiors in Washington, “There are hundreds of Buna’s ahead of us,” and forecast that defeating the Japanese “may run to proportions beyond all conception.”6

  The fighting on the north coast of New Guinea went on for another dreadful month as the Americans and Australians tried to dislodge the 7,000 Japanese who had escaped from Gona and set up along the beach between the two villages. MacArthur, in one of his now famous dispatches, callously classified this as a mopping-up operation, yet it was anything but that to the soldiers on the ground. As they had at Guadalcanal, the Japanese command at Rabaul tried to reinforce and resupply their troops on New Guinea with fast destroyers carrying men and oil drums full of food and other equipment. Three times the U.S. air forces turned them back, leaving a wake of burning ships. Finally, in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the Japanese advance was halted for good.

  Even as their last remaining troops were being evacuated from Guadalcanal, the Japanese command at Rabaul decided on a major effort to reinforce New Guinea. Six thousand Japanese soldiers were placed aboard eight troop transports, escorted by eight destroyers, with a host of Zero fighters hovering above. Japanese weather forecasters assured senior officers that bad weather would mask the convoy for most of the trip. General Kenny received intelligence of this convoy making up at Rabaul and ordered more than two hundred bombers—mostly heavy, four-engine B-24s from Australia—to New Guinea to make sure it did not arrive safely. In fact, it did not arrive at all.

  The Japanese meteorologists were wrong by a day, but that’s all it took. As the clouds over the Bismarck Sea began to clear, waves of American planes appeared from the south. Japanese antiaircraft gunners on the destroyers rushed to their weapons, only to be startled by a sight they had never seen before. The big bombers came in at mast-top level, like torpedo bombers, and released their bombs into the sea in an amazing demonstration of skip bombing, which had been tried without success at the Battle of Midway six months earlier but had been perfected by Kenny’s air force. The bombs hit the water and “dapped,” like stones skipped across the surface of a calm flat pond.

  All eight of the troop transports sank, as well as four of the eight destroyers. Not only that, but sixty of the escorting Zeros were shot out of the sky by American fighters. Only 2,000 of the 6,000 Japanese soldiers aboard the transports were rescued by the remaining four destroyers, which then turned tail and sped back toward Rabaul fast as they could. When news of this disaster reached Rabaul, it ended further attempts to reinforce the Japanese army on New Guinea, which sealed its fate. No attempt was made, as at Guadalcanal, to evacuate the troops. And since surrender was not an option they were simply left there, as were the sick and weak on Guadalcanal, to die for the emperor.

  Admiral Yamamoto had predicted from the beginning that if Japan made war on the United States he could “run wild” for the first six months, but he had no confidence in what might happen next. Now his worst nightmare was coming true: American industrial might and moral outrage, which was beginning to send planes and ships, guns and men into the Pacific at a rate that presently amounted only to a trickle but had been enough to halt the Japanese advance and, soon enough, as Yamamoto and others well knew, that trickle would become a flood.

  In the meantime, the joint American-British Germany First doctrine was about to be tested in the severest way. So many of those troops, ships, tanks, planes, and guns that might have eased the strain on the marines and soldiers fighting on Guadalcanal and New Guinea during the battles of October and November 1942 were now on their way across the Atlantic Ocean in a convoy of hundreds of ships, bound for French Morocco on North Africa’s Atlantic coast, and for its neighbor Algeria on the Mediterranean. Soldiers who might have enjoyed the movie Casablanca* were now about to see the place for themselves.

  Thus was operation Torch conceived by the British both as a way to eject the Germans and Italians from North Africa and to allay the chaffing and insistent demands by Stalin for a second front to relieve his beleaguered armies. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff did not at first buy into this idea; they, like Stalin, wanted to prepare immediately to invade France from the English Channel coast and drive the Germans back into Germany at the earliest possible moment. To the chagrin and annoyance of the Roosevelt administration, American communists had begun using their news organs, as well as slogans painted on walls and fences in their strongholds in the Northeast, to demand a “Second Front Now!”

  Even though he was also against a North African invasion at first, Roosevelt was slowly brought around by the persuasions of Churchill. Neither America nor Britain, the prime minister told the president, currently had the strength to invade France, while they did have the strength to oppose the Germans and Italians in North Africa. And it was important to do so, because if the Germans managed to push the British out of Egypt, they could pass unmolested into the oil-rich Middle East and thence to India, where they could link up with the Japanese. The Germans and Italians already controlled most of the Mediterranean, blocking British convoys from using the Suez Canal to resupply their armies in Africa, the Middle East, India, and Burma.

  Furthermore, in the back of Churchill’s devious mind was the notion that after expelling the Germans from North Africa the Allies could then attack through the soft underbelly of Europe—Italy—knocking her out of the war, thereby gaining total control of the Mediterranean and isolating Germany. This would also have the effect of stabilizing Britain’s colonial possessions in the region. The British prime minister was also savvy enough to realize he had best not bring this up to the Americans as yet; they had much on their plate for the moment, and it was enough to get them into the fight right now.

  The Torch plan was to land an initial force of 100,000 men, most of them Americans, in the French colonies of Morocco and Algeria, now controlled by the German puppet government at Vichy. Through these colonies, the Vichy French were supplying the German North African armies of General Erwin Rommel (whom the press had dubbed the Desert Fox) with everything from food to gasoline. It was hoped that once French Morocco and Algeria were secured, American and British troops would hurry east to capture Tunisia and trap Rommel’s army between there and the British army fighting them in Egypt and Libya. It was a bold scheme on a very large scale, complicated by a dogging political issue: What would the Vichy French do?

  The Ger
mans had allowed the French to organize and keep a well-supplied army of 120,000—nearly ten divisions—in their North African colonies, just to prevent something like Torch from happening. This freed up German troops to fight the British farther east, but one great fear of the Allies was that the Germans would somehow learn of the invasion plans and begin heavily reinforcing the defenses of western North Africa, which then would have made Torch impossible. That they did not was testimony to the solid planning and strict security imposed by the Allies; it was said that only about eight hundred people out of the hundreds of thousands who would eventually fight there actually knew what the plan entailed and when it was scheduled to come off.* The overall commander of this vast enterprise was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, operating from the British bastion of Gibraltar, which guarded the narrow straits leading into the Mediterranean.

  Like so many Allied operations at the beginning of the war, Torch got off to a rocky start. First, there was simply not time enough to train the U.S. Army troops properly for an amphibious landing, since it had been determined by meteorologists that November 8 would be about the last possible date for the invasion. After that the huge surf created by winter Atlantic storms would foreclose landing on the Moroccan coast until the middle of the following year. Marines had been training for amphibious operations for decades but, as we have seen, they were almost completely tied up in the Pacific, in particular at Guadalcanal. The army and navy tried a number of rehearsals, but because of the German U-boat menace along the American Atlantic coast they had to do their practicing inside, within the calm confines of the Chesapeake Bay, which presented none of the problems associated with the large surf and rough weather they would encounter on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

  Be that as it may, the American armada sailed October 24 and 25,1942, in three separate groups out of Norfolk, Virginia, and Portland, Maine. For days it wove a crazy quilt of courses to confuse and deceive any Nazi submarines that might try to attack or even guess its destination. More troopships sailed from England, all timed as daintily as a minuet to arrive simultaneously near the Atlantic coast ports of Casablanca and Safi in French Morocco and the French Mediterranean ports of Algiers and Oran in Algeria.