The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  On February 1, as the Japanese evacuation runs began, the Americans received a cascade of sighting reports from coastwatchers and scouting aircraft. Some twenty Japanese destroyers were headed down the Slot. A small Japanese infantry force had been put ashore in the Russell Islands, a small group just thirty miles west of Guadalcanal (and visible from the high bluffs on the western shore, where the colorful Australian coastwatcher Snowy Rhoades had once lived in his airy lodge). Allied flights over the Japanese anchorage off Buin noted a sharp increase in the number of ships. Japanese air activity intensified to levels unseen since December. Halsey asked MacArthur for “all air support possible against an expected major offensive following the same general pattern as that of mid-November.”32 The COMSOPAC sent most of his remaining American naval forces south of Guadalcanal to await the expected incursion.

  Given the wasted condition of their forces, the withdrawal of Japanese units to the northwest corner of the island was surprisingly deft. The evacuation order was disseminated at first only to a small circle of officers, who kept their men in the dark. Most Japanese soldiers expected to be reinforced right up until the moment they were told to abandon their positions. (The misdirection was thought necessary to keep the men at their posts until the last minute.) The Thirty-Eighth Division fell back toward Cape Esperance, covered by the Second Infantry Division and the Yano Battalion. The rear guard, once safely disengaged, followed to the west. Men immobilized by disease or malnutrition were persuaded to take their own lives.

  The first evacuation run was completed on the night of February 1. Twenty-one Japanese destroyers, under the command of Rear Admiral Shintaro Hashimoto, lifted 4,935 soldiers off the island, nearly half those remaining. On the night of February 4–5, Hashimoto returned with twenty destroyers. Fighting off air and PT boat attacks, he nonetheless embarked 3,921 troops of the Second Division and returned them safely to Bougainville the next day. The third run, on the night of February 7–8, lifted 1,796 men off Guadalcanal and the Russell Islands.

  The bodies of some 16,800 Japanese were left behind on Guadalcanal, many unburied. Those who were rescued were little more than scarecrows. Their knees and elbows bulged out from their shrunken limbs. Their hair and fingernails had stopped growing. Their buttocks had wasted away to the extent that their anuses were exposed, and they suffered uncontrollable diarrhea. Some carried urns with the ashes of their dead comrades.33 Yahachi Ishida, a young soldier posted on Bougainville, helped some of the starving men from the landing barges:

  Waiting at the shore, we gently lifted out the soldiers retreating from Guadalcanal one by one and laid them on the sand. What a sad and pitiable sight they presented. Hardly human beings, they were just skin and bones dressed in military uniform, thin as bamboo sticks. They were so light, it was like carrying infants. Only their eyes were bright; they must have been living on their strong will alone. When I put a spoon with some lukewarm rice gruel to their mouths, large teardrops rolled down their faces, and they said thank you in tiny mosquitolike voices. I too felt something hot unexpectedly welling up in my eyes. My blood roiled with anger at those who had given the orders to these men.34

  Patch held back, expecting to meet resistance in force at any moment. The general and his staff continued to believe that the enemy had been landing fresh reinforcements throughout the past week. As American forces advanced along the north and west coasts of the island, however, they encountered no one but a few Japanese stragglers, mostly sick and dying, and some bewildered natives. At Tassafaronga, the Americans captured the deserted remains of a major Japanese base, including ten artillery pieces, a machine shop, medical stores, and a radio station. In the late afternoon of February 9, the two columns met at the village of Tenaro on the west coast. Patch finally realized that he had been swindled. He radioed Halsey: “Total and complete defeat of Japanese forces on Guadalcanal effected 16:25 today . . . the Tokyo Express no longer has a terminus on Guadalcanal.”35

  The Guadalcanal campaign was over, and it had ended in a humiliating defeat for the Japanese. Yet at least they had saved 10,652 men of the approximately 36,000 who had landed on the island. The evacuation was a small Dunkirk, an unlikely tactical getaway right under the noses of superior ground, air, and naval forces. The Japanese had accomplished the bold rescue operation with the loss of just one destroyer sunk and three damaged. American radio intelligence, which had so often divined the enemy’s intentions, had failed to foresee the evacuation. Admiral Yamamoto congratulated Koyanagi, adding, “You did it very well, indeed. . . . The Army will be pleased to know we can send back its soldiers in great mass.”36

  Yamamoto’s opposite number, Chester Nimitz, was equally generous in his praise. “Until almost the last moment it appeared that the Japanese were attempting a major reinforcement effort,” he wrote in his report to Admiral King. “Only skill in keeping their plans disguised and bold celerity in carrying them out enabled the Japanese to withdraw the remnants of the Guadalcanal garrison. Not until after all organized forces had been evacuated on 8 February did we realize the purpose of their air and naval dispositions; otherwise, with the strong forces available to us ashore on Guadalcanal and our powerful fleet in the South Pacific, we might have converted the withdrawal into a disastrous rout.”37

  King could not have faulted Nimitz or Halsey or any of the other American commanders on the spot. He had expected another major offensive against Guadalcanal, and had predicted it in an off-the-record interview with a group of journalists on December 2, 1942. The COMINCH had told the newsmen that the Japanese “had lost a lot of face, and were set on regaining [Guadalcanal] by hook or by crook.”38

  IN THE SIX-MONTH FIGHT OVER GUADALCANAL, the two sides had suffered roughly equivalent naval and air losses. Sixty-seven ships had been sunk in the contest over the island—twenty-nine Allied, thirty-eight Japanese. The Japanese had destroyed two valuable American aircraft carriers and damaged another (leaving the Enterprise the sole remaining Allied carrier in the theater), but the Americans had claimed two light aircraft carriers and two battleships. Both sides had lost many cruisers, destroyers, and noncombatant transports and cargo ships that could not be easily replaced. On several occasions, the Japanese navy had given proof of its excellence in night surface combat, but its advantages had gradually given way to the Americans’ adroit use of radar for range finding and fire control. By the fall of 1942, an American ship could land its first salvo on an unseen enemy without the benefit of searchlights or flares. That was a valuable technical advantage over the Japanese, and it largely offset the superior skill, training, and torpedo weaponry of the Japanese surface fleet.

  Each side lost between 600 and 700 aircraft in the campaign, but the fraction of downed aviators who were recovered told a different story. The Allies lost about 420 pilots and aircrew in the Solomons; the Japanese, more than three times that number. Since the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, Japanese aircrew losses had consistently exceeded those of the Allies, often by a wide margin. The stark disparity could be partly explained by circumstances—throughout the period, but especially during the fight for Guadalcanal, air combat had been concentrated in skies closer to Allied than to Japanese air and naval bases. It is also true that the Japanese had not devoted much effort to search-and-rescue operations, a failure that must be attributed (at least in part) to the influence of bushido, the traditional samurai warrior code that exalted an honorable death in combat.

  Replacement pilots emerging from Japan’s wartime training pipeline lacked the skill or confidence to carry on the air war effectively. As early as November 21, 1942, Admiral Yamamoto confessed to a visiting army officer that Japan was losing the air war in the Solomons. “In the Navy they used to say that one ‘Zero’ fighter could take on five to ten American aircraft, but that was at the beginning of the war. Since losing so many good pilots at Midway we’ve had difficulty in replacing them. Even now, they still say that one ‘Zero’ can take on two enemy planes, but the enemy’s replacement
rate is three times ours; the gap between our strengths is increasing every day, and to be honest things are looking black for us now.”39 Blacker even than he knew or cared to admit, for the American fighter pilots had already learned how to neutralize the Zero’s advantages in maneuverability and climbing speed.

  Most striking was the disproportion in troop losses. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps had suffered casualties of 5,875, of whom 1,592 were killed in action. The Japanese army had lost two full divisions on the island, and the great majority were killed (or died of other causes) rather than wounded and evacuated—14,700 killed or missing in action, an estimated 9,000 dead of starvation or disease, and more than 4,300 lost at sea while in transit to or from the island. That asymmetric result debunked the myth of the Japanese army’s fanatical and invincible “fighting spirit.” Guadalcanal was not the name of an island, concluded General Kawaguchi. “It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.”40

  Insofar as the Japanese people were permitted to know, the withdrawal from Guadalcanal was a tactical redeployment. Tenshin, roughly translated as “advance in a new direction,” was the euphemism offered by the Imperial General Headquarters. Japan’s attacking naval, air, and ground forces had merely “turned” toward another sector of the front, where they would undoubtedly achieve new triumphs in short order. Japan’s state-controlled news media had long since acquiesced to the regime’s Orwellian abuse of truth, and had adopted the necessary tone of elation and righteous zeal. But there were many servicemen who had returned to the home islands from the theater of combat, and their hushed accounts did not sustain the official version of events.

  Several Japanese officers who survived the war later recorded their unvarnished postmortems. Even with the benefit of hindsight, and allowing for the likelihood that English-translated accounts were self-serving and shaped to fit the preconceptions of the victors, Japanese officers who had participated in the campaign offered keen and hard-hitting critiques of their nation’s strategic failures. Captain Hara judged that the Japanese navy really lost the war as a result of a “series of strategic and tactical blunders by Yamamoto after Midway.” The commander in chief had failed to commit the bulk of his naval power immediately after the marines’ invasion, and had instead “flung into the area one small fleet unit after another. His strategy seems ridiculous when judged by hindsight.”41 Admiral Nobutake Kondo, commander of the Imperial Navy’s Second Fleet, agreed that Yamamoto should have thrown everything he had at Guadalcanal in August, even if it required abandoning the offensive against southeastern New Guinea. He quoted a Japanese proverb: “He who pursues two hares catches neither.”42 The seventeenth-century samurai and philosopher Miyamoto Musashi, whose Book of Five Spheres was an essential text for Japanese officers of both services, had written of “arresting shadows.” To hold a psychological edge over a weaker opponent, a combatant must “arrest the enemy’s action at the point of the very impulse to act.” That is, the enemy must know immediately that his attack will be opposed and foiled; he must not be permitted to think that he will gain the advantage by his initiative: “If you show the adversaries strongly how you control the advantage, they will change their minds, inhibited by this strength.”43

  The Guadalcanal campaign had exposed all of the internal rifts and rivalries that divided the Japanese military regime and paralyzed its ability to craft coherent strategies. Major decisions, especially those involving joint action by the army and navy, were reached gradually. Consensus had to be given time to congeal. Considerations of “face” were always near the surface. The Japanese army had first discounted the significance of the enemy’s move into Guadalcanal, assuring themselves and their navy counterparts that the Americans could be dislodged at any time. Piecemeal and ineffective troop landings followed. First, a lightly equipped regiment was sent in and annihilated; then a lightly equipped brigade; eventually a full division, but without adequate munitions, equipment, or provisions. Again and again, frontal attacks on strongly fortified marine lines were beaten back, with devastating losses to the attackers. Even within the ranks of the navy, command rivalries were debilitating. More than once, Admiral Raizo Tanaka received contradictory orders from the Eleventh Air Fleet and the Eighth Fleet. One headquarters had dominion over the entire region, and the other stood directly above Tanaka in the chain of command. Each seemed to regard the other as an interloper, and they tussled over issues large and small. Tanaka thought it “inconceivable” that the two commands did not confer effectively with one another, since both were (usually) seated at Rabaul. “When their orders were conflicting and incompatible, it was embarrassing at least, and utterly confounding at worst.”44

  Once a course of action was chosen, a prevailing inertia inhibited modification. The rigidity inherent in Japanese operations led to repeating patterns that could be analyzed and predicted by the Allies. Even when communications intelligence failed to discover the Japanese intentions, American commanders could often foretell when, where, and how the enemy would mount his next assault. “In fighting it is bad to repeat a formula,” Musashi had written, “and to repeat it a third time is worse. When an effort fails it may be followed with a second attempt. If that fails, a drastically changed formula must be adopted. If that fails, one must resort to another completely different formula. When the opponent thinks high, hit low. When he thinks low, hit high. That is the secret of swordsmanship.”45

  GUADALCANAL WORE THE SCARS of the long, vicious conflict that had raged on, over, and around it. The Lunga Plain was pockmarked with craters and strewn with broken and splintered palm trees. Everywhere there was wreckage, shoved to the edges of roads or airstrips or lying half-awash on the beaches. Foliage was beginning to creep over the rusting remains of smashed tanks and crashed aircraft. Copper telephone wire was draped haphazardly over standing palms. West of Point Cruz, the bows of Tanaka’s four bombed-out transports jutted up onto the beach. Even months after the last naval action, Ironbottom Sound was still littered with floating debris, and brown coils of fuel oil marked the sites of sunken wrecks.

  On the ridges south of Henderson Field, trees and foliage had been mowed down by artillery and machine-gun fire. Beyond the coils of barbed wire marking the American lines, the bloated and stinking remains of Japanese soldiers lay half-buried in the muck. The stench was awful, but the Americans were in no hurry to bury the enemy dead. The Japanese had been known to booby-trap the corpses of their fallen friends. Ants and other scavengers would eventually strip them to the bone.

  Among these relics of past carnage were ambitious new building projects. It has been cleverly observed that the bulldozer was one of the most significant weapons of the Pacific War, and the point was never better showcased than on Guadalcanal in 1943. Ten new 1,100-man Seabee battalions arrived to join the pioneering 6th and 14th (which had landed under fire in November 1942), and all were reorganized into the 18th Naval Construction Regiment. Airfields were expanded, regraded, and resurfaced with concrete made of coral or red volcanic rock. Networks of taxiways connected them to revetments, machine shops, barracks, warehouses, and camouflaged munitions dumps. The hills inland of Koli Point were leveled and developed into “Carney Field,” a new airbase for USAAF bombers. Tank farms mushroomed around Lunga Point and Henderson Field, and were linked by miles of piping to the airfields and wharves. Bulldozers uprooted the trees and flora around Koli, Lunga, and Cruz Points, where modern seaport complexes—concrete piers, cranes, pipelines, narrow-gauge railways running into warehouses—would serve the constantly arriving transports and tankers. Fresh troops, airmen, maintenance crews, and civilians poured into the island day by day, arriving on ships or on the big Douglas C-47s of the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command (SCAT). Paved roads were built through recently impenetrable jungle; steel-framed bridges were flung across rivers; electrical power lines were strung between utility poles; tent cities appeared suddenly in palm groves and kunai fields. The social nexus of the growing community was the “Hotel De Gi
nk,” a row of Quonset huts providing lodging for transient airmen and other visitors. A spacious dining hall served coffee and hot meals around the clock.

  As the counteroffensive rolled up the Solomons, the island groups to the south and east—New Caledonia, New Hebrides, the Santa Cruz group, Samoa, the Fijis—were demoted to the status of holding zones, rest areas, and way stations. The war had passed them by, but they remained populated by large and growing numbers of Allied personnel. Pacific War memoirs tend to dwell at length on these tropical paradises, safely removed from the fighting, where young servicemen (and women, particularly nurses) sojourned for weeks, months, or years of their lives. They were the setting for James Michener’s postwar novel Tales of the South Pacific, a thinly fictionalized series of vignettes drawn from the author’s experiences as a reserve naval lieutenant stationed on Espiritu Santo and other islands east of the Solomons.† Life in those quiescent islands figures very little in histories or even films about the war, but it retains a potent hold on the memories of the men and women who were there.