The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Upon receiving word of the American invasion in the Solomons, Rear Admiral Sadayoshi Yamada prepared to strike the American fleet. Twenty-seven twin-engine G4M bombers and nine Zero fighters had been fueled and armed for a scheduled attack on Rabi, an Allied airfield in New Guinea. Yamada now ordered that the flights be diverted to the Tulagi-Guadalcanal area, and launched immediately. He would not even allow the bombers to be rearmed with aerial torpedoes, which were far more effective against ships than land bombs, for fear that his planes might be caught on the ground and destroyed.

  When the Zero pilots examined their charts, they whistled in disbelief. Six hundred and fifty miles down, and then all the way back: their single-seat fighter had never flown a combat mission of that range. The flight leader told his men that conserving fuel must be their overriding concern. They would fly with belly tanks, which would diminish the Zeros’ performance in air combat, and they could afford only a brief visit to the enemy fleet. Under these conditions they would fight at a severe disadvantage.

  Shortly before 10:00 a.m. (Guadalcanal time), the big G4Ms began roaring down the runways, followed a few minutes later by the Zeros. The forty-five planes coalesced into an “arrowhead” configuration, with the bombers locked in three stepped-down “Vee of vee” formations and the Zeros trailing closely on either flank. The long flight took them directly over the large island of Bougainville, which was home to two intrepid coastwatchers who had pulled well back into the bush. W. J. “Jack” Read was concealed at an advanced observation post in the northern jungle hills. Paul Mason was ensconced in a remote hideaway called Malabita Hill, near the south end of the island. In preparation for WATCHTOWER, and to avoid coding delays, both men had been instructed to report hostile aircraft sightings immediately, by voice transmissions in plain language.

  Shortly before 11:00 a.m., Mason heard the drone of aircraft overhead. Looking up through the canopy of foliage, he saw an armada of Japanese bombers. He counted twenty-four. Immediately he transmitted, “FROM STO, 24 BOMBERS HEADED YOURS.”2 The report was copied in Port Moresby, relayed to Townsville, sent immediately to Pearl Harbor, and then broadcast to the WATCHTOWER task forces.

  In spite of its circuitous route, Mason’s message arrived on the Saratoga and the McCawley when it was just thirty minutes old. Flight time from south Bougainville to Guadalcanal was more than two hours, so Fletcher and Turner had plenty of time to react. Turner got his ships dispersed and underway for emergency evasive action, and the carriers launched fighters to intercept the incoming planes.

  Even with ample warning, Fletcher faced daunting logistical problems. His Grummans had to protect two task forces separated by sixty to seventy-five miles, requiring about thirty minutes of flight time. Dogfights would burn fuel and oblige their early return to the flattops—and once the fighters returned, there was the problem of clearing the flight deck so that they could land and be refueled. The day’s crowded flight-operations schedule placed heavy demands on all three flight decks. (It was essentially the same problem that had lost the Battle of Midway for the Japanese.) At 1:15 p.m., as the Japanese strike closed on Savo Sound, just eight Wildcats were in position to defend the amphibious fleet. They were at 12,000 feet, below an opaque layer of overcast. The Japanese G4Ms approached at 16,000 feet—above the cloud ceiling, thus invisible to the Wildcats. The fighter control circuits rang with radar warnings.

  All at once, the bombers broke through the clouds in a shallow dive. Lieutenant James J. Southerland, leader of a division of Saratoga F4Fs, radioed a “tally-ho”: “Horizontal bombers, three divisions, nine planes each, over Savo, headed for transports. . . . Let’s go get them, boys.”3 Southerland dropped to his left and opened a few bursts on the nearest Japanese aircraft, at a range of just 500 yards. He pressed this promising attack and sent one G4M down in flames, but seconds later the Zeros descended through the clouds and found three of his wingmen in their sights. Two Wildcats went spinning into the sea, and the others were forced to dive for their lives.

  Taking in the view from below the overcast, the Japanese airmen were astonished by the size of the American fleet. The bombers continued east, descending to 10,000 feet, and opened their payloads over the XRAY transports maneuvering at high speed off Lunga Point. The sky was mottled with the dark smudges of antiaircraft bursts, but the Japanese planes stayed in formation. As the sticks of bombs fell behind them in a glinting diagonal tail, the American helmsmen coolly steered to avoid them. Every bomb fell harmlessly into the sea near Lunga Point. The G4Ms banked west for the long run back to Rabaul.4

  A furious fighter melee continued over Savo Island and western Guadalcanal. Among the Zero pilots were two of the most lethal fighter aces in the Imperial Japanese Navy: Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, who would eventually be credited with eighty-seven kills, making him Japan’s top-ranked ace; and Saburo Sakai, who would survive the war with about sixty claimed kills. (Sakai authored a fascinating and credible postwar memoir, Samurai, which was translated into English in the 1950s.) Southerland, after flaming one of the G4Ms, went into a spiraling dive to avoid two pursuing Zeros. Lieutenant Joseph R. Daly’s aircraft, riddled with 7.7mm machine-gun fire, began to turn over and descend toward the sea. His fuel tank ignited and the flames spread into his cockpit: “My clothes were on fire; my pants and shirt burning: I could see nothing but red fire all around me.”5 Daly wrenched open the canopy and leapt out. He dropped through the cloud cover at 7,000 feet and pulled his chute.

  Saburo Sakai had never seen an F4F until this moment. Looking down, about 1,500 feet below, he saw a lone Wildcat in a skirmish with three Zeros. Lieutenant Southerland was flying a series of tight left spirals that denied his pursuers a clean shot at him. He repeatedly forced the Zeros to overtake him and peppered their wingtips with .50-caliber fire. Sakai dived into the fight, and was immediately taken aback by Southerland’s skill: “Never had I seen an enemy plane move so quickly or so gracefully before.”6 In a dance of snap rolls and sudden throttle-chops, Sakai and Southerland maneuvered for advantage, until both aircraft slipped into a vertical spiral, with one wing pointed down at the sea and the other up at the sky. Intense g-forces shoved both men into their seats and forced them to strain their necks to keep their heads erect. After the fifth spiral Southerland broke out into a loop, and Sakai locked on to his tail. “I had him,” Sakai wrote. “The Zero could outfly any fighter in the world in this kind of maneuver.”7

  Sakai fired a long burst of 7.7mm caliber rounds into Southerland’s cockpit, but the sturdy Grumman flew on, apparently unperturbed. The Japanese pilot then fed fuel to his engine and flew alongside the Wildcat. The two men made eye contact. Sakai saw that Southerland was badly wounded, with blood on his shoulder and chest. Southerland lifted his hand and waved; Sakai shook his fist and shouted for the American to fight on “instead of flying along like a clay pigeon.”8 But Southerland’s guns had jammed. His aircraft had been hit hundreds of time, and the aluminum skin of the fuselage and wings was shredded so badly that the frame was bared to Sakai’s view. His instrument panel was completely destroyed; his canopy was shattered; his radio was dead; his flaps were not responding; and oil was coursing into the cockpit. He had eleven separate wounds. He had no choice but to bail out. As Sakai fired several 20mm cannon rounds into the Wildcat’s wing root, setting the plane afire, Southerland unbuckled and got free of the cockpit. He had just enough altitude to pull his chute before hitting the treetops. Though suffering severe wounds, including a 7.7mm round that passed through his foot, Southerland managed to make his way overland to the American lines.

  Sakai then chased a formation of eight American dive-bombers, elements of VB-6 and VS-5 of the Enterprise. The SBDs held formation, and the rear-gunners concentrated their fire into the engine and cockpit of the oncoming Zero. A .30-caliber round grazed Sakai’s skull and blinded his right eye. Somehow he managed not only to survive this grievous wound, but to fly 650 miles back to Rabaul and land safely. Sakai would lose the eye but return to flight s
ervice in 1944.

  A flight of nine type Aichi D3A2 (Allied code name “Val”) dive-bombers, armed with sixty-kilogram bombs, dived on the XRAY transports off Lunga Point. One bomb hit the superstructure of the destroyer Mugford, killing twenty-one men but doing little damage to the ship. Wildcats chased the retreating dive-bombers and peppered them with .50-caliber fire. All the Vals were destroyed, either in air combat or by ditching at sea; twelve of eighteen crewmen were also lost.

  Off the weather coast of Guadalcanal, the mood in Task Force (TF) 61 was decidedly upbeat. A destroyer officer watched the first wave of planes as they returned to the Wasp: “Jubilant pilots circled us, rocking their wings and waving as they passed overhead.”9 As the planes recovered, the word spread quickly—the initial bombing and strafing attacks had put every Japanese plane in the area out of action before they could get into the air. But the carriers’ air operations were only beginning. Between first light and dusk, the three flattops completed an extraordinary 704 plane launches and 686 recoveries. Beginning long before dawn, with a bleary-eyed breakfast, followed by the call to General Quarters at 0500, the crews had worked to the brink of exhaustion. Flights had been planned in painstaking detail and down to the minute—Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, commander of Task Force 16, compared the day’s operations to a “railroad schedule.”10 Planes were landed, refueled, rearmed, replenished with oxygen, respotted, and sent back up at a record-breaking pace. In one case, the Wasp turned around an eight-plane squadron in sixteen minutes.11 Inevitably, there were mishaps. Planes spun into the sea or catapulted over the crash barrier and had to be jettisoned over the side. Some failed to find their carriers on the return and were forced to ditch at sea.

  The air groups had successfully protected Turner’s fleet, but the day’s fighter losses were worryingly high. Fifteen Grummans had been destroyed or forced to ditch, and five more had been badly damaged. In the initial melee with the Zeros, which were piloted by some of the top aces in the Japanese navy, the Wildcats had suffered 50 percent losses. The superior speed and maneuverability of the Zero remained a grave concern. Grummans were needed over the carriers to provide air protection; they were needed to protect Turner’s fleet in Savo Sound; they would be needed to escort any outbound airstrike, should Japanese carriers appear on the scene. Eighteen fighter planes per carrier were “nowhere near enough,” Admiral Kinkaid concluded, and the fighter complement would be doubled by the end of 1942. For now, however, Fletcher had to do the best with what he had, and he had good reason to wonder whether he had enough fighters to cover the fleet on D-Day plus one.

  SHORTLY BEFORE THREE THAT AFTERNOON, General Vandegrift went ashore. A Higgins boat filled with senior officers of the 1st Division churned in toward Beach Red, picking its way through dozens of boats plying the waters between the anchored transports and cargo ships. As he set foot on Guadalcanal, the general noted that cargo was beginning to pile up on the beach. There were too few men available to handle it properly. The problem would have to wait, however; his first concern was the state of his defensive perimeter. Units were advancing inland and along the shore, but the enemy was nowhere to be seen. “I’m beginning to doubt whether there’s a Jap on the whole damned island,” he remarked.12

  To the west, forward elements of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had halted on the bank of the Ilu River. Vandegrift, coming up from the rear in a jeep, found them “moving as if it were about to encounter the entire Imperial Army.”13 He ordered them across. Engineers were summoned to improvise a makeshift bridge. They laid spare lumber over the riverbed with the help of an amphibious tractor. It was not much to look at, but it bore the weight of jeeps and artillery.

  Beyond the Ilu, the natural terrain barriers of Guadalcanal began to work against them. Troops wielded machetes to hack a four-foot-wide path, wide enough for ammunition carts to follow, but soon became bogged down in a huge mangrove swamp. To the east, advance parties pushed along the coconut-strewn beach, through abandoned native villages, to the Tenaru River. They hesitated to cross. The absence of enemy resistance seemed bizarre and even ominous. Major Dickson thought the men “expected to bump into the Japs any minute and were wondering why they didn’t. . . . [T]hey said, ‘These damn Japs are setting a trap for us and we are going to walk into this trap one of these minutes.’ That wasn’t a very pleasant feeling.”14

  A wealth of first-rate assets had been left behind by the enemy—two power houses supplied with new electrical generators and ample fuel; a radio receiver station stocked with equipment and spares; 50,000 to 60,000 gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel; a fleet of trucks; two working water pumps; nine road rollers; and several tons of cement.15 Weapons of various categories and calibers fell into the Americans’ hands, including two working antiaircraft batteries. A hospital tent, stocked with excellent medical supply kits and water purification tablets, was commandeered by navy corpsmen.

  In a laborer’s camp across the Ilu River, Sergeant James Hurlbut found a hot iron left on a pair of officer’s trousers. It had burned all the way through to the ironing board. Half-eaten meals had been left on dining tables with “chopsticks left propped on the edges of the dishes, or dropped in haste on the floor mat.”16 All around the camps was evidence of the terrific cannonading delivered earlier that morning—coconut palms torn to pieces and tents shredded by high explosive fragments.

  Major Dickson’s unit was the first to reach the Japanese headquarters building near the airfield.17 Among the officers’ possessions, they found a souvenir-hunter’s bonanza—swords, medals, capes, and starched white uniforms. In an adjoining quartermaster’s supply building was a large supply of rice, dried fish, canned crab, beer, sake, candy, and cigarettes. A guard was posted to prevent looting.

  The main Japanese wharf at Kukum was placed under the direction of a coast guard detachment, and rear echelon units—engineers, motor transport operators, radiomen—began claiming the huts and tents left by the Japanese. By nightfall on August 7, the little village was beginning to look like a conventional ship-to-shore depot.

  On Tulagi, across Savo Sound, the marines had likewise gone ashore unopposed. The naval barrage had been superb—the cruiser San Juan had put some 800 rounds of 5-inch shells into the high ground above Beach Blue prior to the landing, and then lifted the onslaught precisely three minutes before the first boats touched the beach. Beach Blue had been left completely undefended by the Japanese, who apparently had concluded that the shallow coral heads offshore would discourage any landing attempt there. The raiders crossed the narrow waist of the island without much difficulty, taking the little settlement known as Sasapi village—but when they turned east, resistance stiffened. Japanese snipers had concealed themselves in trees and the underbrush. The rattle of machine-gun fire was heard offshore and even on Guadalcanal, twenty miles away, where Colonel Twining recalled, “We felt left out.”18

  The remaining enemy troops, bottled up in the southeast corner of the island, went to ground in dugouts and caves. Demolition teams were brought up to destroy those positions, but many were connected by subterranean tunnels. The fight for Tulagi was savage and bloody. As Major Justice Chambers recalled, “When you would blast them out of one dugout, you would find that there was nobody in there and you would find a hole through which they had crawled to another place.” That night, Japanese soldiers “were sniping, shouting at us, throwing grenades at us, whistling, and carrying out all the tricks of the trade we had read about in the pamphlets, but I suspect none of us ever believed.”19

  East of Tulagi lay the minuscule islands of Gavutu and Tanambogo, connected to one another by a wooden causeway. Some 500 Japanese naval infantrymen (sometimes called “Japanese marines”) were on these islands, dug into trench lines and artillery emplacements, and they put up an even more desperate fight than their comrades on Tulagi. A pre-landing naval bombardment leveled most of the trees and buildings, but the defenders emerged as soon as the marines went ashore on Gavutu’s northeast coast, and pinned the i
nvaders down in a mangrove swamp.

  The marines put two tanks ashore on Tanambogo, but one was destroyed almost immediately. George Kittredge, a gunnery officer on the Chicago, watched through his turret’s periscope as a platoon of Japanese troops swarmed over the tank, poured gasoline over it, and set it afire. The hatch opened and a marine emerged. He was knocked down immediately and beaten to death with rifle butts. A Japanese soldier dropped a grenade into the tank, killing the remaining occupant. Kittredge’s 8-inch gun fired, and in the next moment the entire scene had vanished—no tank, no enemy soldiers, “just a pall of white smoke and a very large hole in the ground.”20 Seventy marines would give their lives in the conquest of these islands, which were not secured until midday on August 8.

  Guadalcanal remained largely peaceful that first night. Scattered gunfire along the perimeter kept the marines on edge, but no counterattack developed. At dawn on the eighth, increasingly confident that the Japanese did not intend to make a stand at all, they advanced in force onto the Lunga Plain and took possession of the unfinished airstrip. They encountered no one but a few unarmed Korean workers, who broke and ran at the first sight of the marines. Those who surrendered told the same story: the Japanese troops had fled to the west. The airfield was nearly finished; only a few hundred feet in the middle section remained to be filled in and graded. Another week of work would bring it to completion.

  At sunrise, Task Force 61 cruised south of Guadalcanal at 8 knots. It looked to be another day of light easterly winds, requiring the task force to run at high speed to create sufficient wind over the decks for flight operations. The Wasp air group would fly search patterns to the north and west, while the Saratoga’s planes remained deckbound in case an enemy carrier group should appear in striking range. After the previous day’s losses, Fletcher would be operating with an acute shortage of fighters. Fuel limitations would require their frequent return to the carriers. The air protection scheme was beginning to fray, and there was every reason to expect another round of air attacks from Rabaul.