Challenge for the Pacific

by Robert Leckie

  Air, land, and sea, it was symbolic of this savage struggle to wrest this poisonous green hag of an island from the hands of the Japanese; and now it was ending that way, for the crucial, three-day naval battle of Guadalcanal was over. The Americans had won. They had lost two cruisers and five destroyers, but they had sunk two Japanese battleships, one cruiser and three destroyers, as well as eleven precious troop transports with almost all of a 3000-man Naval Landing Force and half of the 38th Division.

  Up on the ridges of Guadalcanal the Marines looked down at the beached and burning transports, and they smiled. It was full of savage satisfaction, that smile, nourished by a merciless and gloating glee. One hundred long days ago these aching, old-young men had begun this battle, and at any moment, upon any instantaneous hour, the black and bloody defeat symbolized by those burning transports could have been theirs.

  But they had held, these Marines, the Army had come in, the Navy had fought back, and now, on the morning of November 15, Guadalcanal was truly saved.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ON THE morning of November 15, Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift also knew that the Japanese were beaten, and he sent the following dispatch to Admiral Halsey:

  “We believe the enemy has suffered a crushing defeat. We thank Lee for his sturdy effort of last night. We thank Kinkaid for his intervention of yesterday. Our own air has been grand in its relentless pounding of the foe. Those efforts we appreciate, but our greatest homage goes to Scott, Callaghan and their men who with magnificent courage against seemingly hopeless odds drove back the first hostile stroke and made success possible. To them the men of Cactus lift their battered helmets in deepest admiration.”1

  Halsey agreed with Vandegrift’s jubilant estimate. Only minutes before he had showed his staff reports of destruction of the enemy transports, and told them: “We’ve got the bastards licked!”2

  But the enemy thought otherwise.

  Immediately after proclaiming a smashing Japanese victory in the naval battle of Guadalcanal, Imperial General Headquarters set about the actual destruction of those Americans whom they had just annihilated on paper. This time, the fifth, there was to be intelligent respect for enemy air power.

  Before any reinforcements were sent to Guadalcanal, an airfield was to be constructed in the Shortlands, the one recently completed in New Georgia was to be expanded, and a third base sought farther down the Solomons ladder.

  This plan, however, was quickly wrecked by the Americans.

  Cactus Air Force, at a top strength of 150 planes and still expanding by early December, bombed the Japanese base at Munda on New Georgia into twisted futility, showering a similar interdiction upon Japanese attempts to construct supporting bases. Far to the north, American submarines, gnawing for months on Japanese supply lines, had begun to bite through. Finally, Australian and American soldiers had pressed Japanese forces on New Guinea back toward Buna-Gona, where they were to suffer ultimate defeat and General MacArthur was to gain the springboard from which he would drive up the New Guinea coast.

  At bay on New Guinea, barely hanging on on Guadalcanal, the Japanese were not able to send the 51st Division and an independent brigade to the aid of Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake, as they had planned.

  They could only struggle to supply him, and this too became a costly ordeal.

  The first method of supply was by drums. They were filled with rice or other supplies, linked to each other by rope, lashed to the decks of destroyers for quick transit down The Slot, and then cast into the water off Tassafaronga where they would either be washed ashore or caught and pulled aground by waiting swimmers.

  The first attempt at drum-supply produced the Battle of Tassafaronga. On the night of November 30 the Tokyo Express, with Raizo Tanaka still at the helm, collided with a superior American force of cruisers and destroyers under Rear Admiral Carleton Wright. The cargo of drummed-rice had to be abandoned, but Tanaka the Tenacious gave the Americans another bloody lesson in night torpedo-fighting. His ships sank Northampton, put a hole big enough to admit a bus in the side of Honolulu, and knocked Pensacola, New Orleans, and Minneapolis out of action for nearly a year. For this, Tanaka only suffered the loss of destroyer Takanami.

  On December 7 a second drum-supply attempt was broken up by American aircraft and those torpedo boats, which, now arriving at Guadalcanal in numbers, were beginning to take over at night where Cactus Air Force left off by day. And while the American sea and air arms were blocking the Tokyo Express, the ground troops had gone over to the offensive.

  On December 9, command on Guadalcanal passed from the Marine General Vandegrift to the Army General Patch. Patch wisely decided to wait until he had sufficient forces before attacking. Eventually he would have an entire corps—the XIV—consisting of the Americal Division, the 25th Infantry Division, the Second Marine Division, and, later on, but not committed to combat, the 43rd Infantry Division. With these troops, Patch went out after Hyakutake and his diseased and hungry 17th Army.

  The Japanese resisted stubbornly, nevertheless a slow, grinding, overwhelming American assault—supported by air and artillery—eventually dislodged them from their positions west of the Matanikau. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, staff officers exchanged blows during bitter debates over whether Guadalcanal was to be reinforced or evacuated.3 The evacuation party, led by Premier Tojo, gradually gained the upper hand. Finally, at a conference of Imperial General Headquarters convened in the Imperial Palace, Japan admitted defeat. It was decided to evacuate.

  The date of that historic decision was December 31, 1942, and by that time, most of the men who had landed at Guadalcanal on August 7 had left the island.

  They had begun going out to their ships in late December, these men of the First Marine Division, and their departure would continue through early January. Some of them had been on the lines more than four months without relief, and they came down to the beach at Lunga ragged, bearded, and bony. Some of them had hardly the strength to walk to the boats, and yet, before they left, all of them had visited their cemetery.

  It was called “Flanders Field,” and it was a neat cleared square cut into the Lunga coconut groves. Each grave was covered with a palm frond and marked with a rough cross onto which mess gear and identification tags were nailed. Departing Marines knelt or stood there in prayerful farewell, wondering, dazedly, how it was that there were so few graves.

  In all, 774 Marines of this division had died, 1962 had been wounded, and another 5400 had been stricken with malaria. Ultimately, the Second Marine Division casualties would reach 268 dead and 932 wounded, so that all Marine ground losses would total 1042 dead and 2894 wounded. Army casualties would total 550 dead and 1289 wounded, making a grand total in American ground casualties of 1592 dead and 4183 wounded. American naval casualties, never to be compiled, would certainly equal, perhaps even surpass this, while the much smaller losses among the airmen would also never be known.

  Yet, the Japanese would lose 28,800 soldiers on Guadalcanal itself, many thousands more would die at sea, 2362 pilots and airmen would be lost, and unknown thousands of sailors would also perish—in all, a probable 50,000 men lost in the unsuccessful struggle to recover “this insignificant island in the South Seas.”

  But victory, as these Marines knew, is not always measured by casualties, nor do casualties describe how victory is gained. Sacrifice and valor and doggedness and skill, these gain victory, and these, though unmeasurable, at least may be described. In their cemetery, these Marines found an epitaph describing this greatest of Pacific victories and most glorious of American stands. It was a poem. Its words had been painfully picked out on a mess gear with the point of a bayonet. It said:

  And when he gets to Heaven

  To St. Peter he will tell:

  “One more Marine reporting, sir—

  I’ve served my time in Hell.”

  So they went out to their ships, with “hell” etched on their faces and evident in their sti
cks of bones and ragged dungarees. They went out so weak that they could not climb the cargo nets and the sailors, weeping openly, had to haul them aboard or fish them from the Bay into which they had dropped. They lay on the grimy decks of these blessed ships, gasping, but happy. And then they heard the anchor chains clanking slowly up the hawse pipes and they struggled to their feet for a last look at Guadalcanal.

  They could not see, below the eastern horizon, that Aola Bay where Martin Clemens had begun an ordeal that was to end, in early December, with evacuation and a furlough in Australia. But they could see Red Beach, where they had landed, and Koli Point, where so many enemy had landed. There, still to their left, was the Tenaru, that evil green lagoon and sandspit in which the Japanese myth of the superman had been buried, and for the loss of which Colonel Ichiki had killed himself. To the right lay Henderson Field and all around it those sister airfields busy with two-way aerial traffic. Beyond it was Bloody Ridge which Red Mike Edson and the Raiders had held against the Kawaguchi Brigade, but the fields of kunai fertilized by the blood of the Sendai Division were not visible. Grassy Knoll was, though, rearing its tan hillside above the jungle roof, still, as it had been since August 7, an unattainable first-day’s objective. On the right, west of Lunga Lagoon and those rapidly rising piles of food and supplies, lay the broad mouth of the Matanikau, and west of that, the hook of Point Cruz, and then, stretching far away to the western horizon, Kukumbona and Tassafaronga, and the last of the Japanese landing places from which, on an early February night, the Tokyo Express would depart on its last run, taking with it the last men of the first Japanese army in history to submit to the disgrace of evacuation.

  All of these landmarks these men could see in that last long searching look made half of hatred and half of a warrior’s poignant love for the battlefield that made him. And they could see also, while motors throbbed beneath their feet, while the transports made the customary sunset departure for the covering darkness of the open sea, they could see a round red sun beginning to set behind Cape Esperance.

  It was sinking, like the Rising Sun of Japan, into the dark Pacific.

  NOTES

  PART ONE: THE CHALLENGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 35.

  2. Fuchida, Capt. Mitsuo, and Okumiya, Masatake, Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1955), p. 48. (Imperial General Headquarters was composed of two sections or divisions. The Navy Section was presided over by the Chief of the Navy General Staff and the Army Section by the Chief of the Army General Staff. These two sections “consulted” on strategy, operations, and allocation of forces. After an agreement was reached, a “Central Agreement” was drawn up and signed by the section Chiefs. Each Chief issued orders to his subordinates and they, in turn, were to consult each other at the lower, implementing level. Thus, the Japanese military operated on the basis of “cooperation” rather than on the American basis of “control” or “unity of command,” and this, as will be seen, was not always conducive to clarity.)

  3. Ibid, p. 11.

  4. Clear, Lt. Col. Warren J., Close-up of a Jap Fighting Man (Infantry Journal, November 1942), p. 16.

  5. Sakai, Saburo, with Caidin, Martin, and Saito, Fred, Samurai: Flying the Zero in WW II with Japan’s Fighter Ace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), p. 72.

  6. Feldt, Cmdr. Eric A., R.A.N., The Coastwatchers (New York and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 78.

  7. Clemens, Martin, A Coastwatcher’s Diary (Unpublished manuscript on file at Research & Records [R&R], Historical Branch, G-3, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps), p. 4. (In this passage, and all other quotations in pidgin English, I have taken the liberty of altering Clemens’s faithful presentation of that lingua franca as it is spoken by the Solomon Islanders to what I believe may be a more readable form of pidgin.)

  8. Halsey, Fleet Adm. William F., and Bryan, Lt. Cmdr. J., III, Admiral Halsey’s Story (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1947), p. 101.

  9. Vandegrift, General Alexander A., and Asprey, Robert B., Once a Marine: The Memoirs of General A. A. Vandegrift (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 61.

  10. Pierce, Lt. Col. P. N., The Unsolved Mystery of Pete Ellis (Marine Corps Gazette, February 1962), pp. 34, 40.

  11. Smith, General Holland M., Coral and Brass: Howlin’ Mad Smith’s Own Story of the Marines in the Pacific (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), p. 177; and Davis, Burke, Marine!: The Life of Chesty Puller (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), pp. 71, 72.

  12. Davis, op. cit., pp. 71, 72.

  13. Vandegrift and Asprey, op. cit., p. 25.

  14. Author’s recollection.

  15. Ibid.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Ito, Masanori, The End of the Imperial Japanese Navy (New York: Norton, 1956), p. 18.

  2. Ibid, p. 19.

  3. Ibid, p. 36.

  4. Fuchida and Okumiya, op. cit., p. 57.

  5. Ibid, p. 60.

  6. Vandegrift and Asprey, op. cit., p. 100.

  7. Halsey and Bryan, op. cit., p. 103.

  8. Fuchida and Okumiya, op. cit., p. 71.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. Clemens, op. cit., p. 17.

  2. Ibid, p. 34.

  3. Hara, Cmdr. Tameichi, with Saito, Fred, and Pineau, Roger, Japanese Destroyer Captain (New York: Ballantine Books, 1961), p. 97.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid, p. 99.

  6. Morison, Samuel Eliot, Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Action, Vol. IV. “History of the United States Navy in the Second World War” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), p. 98.

  7. Clemens, op. cit., p. 43.

  8. Ibid, p. 50.

  9. Butterfield, Roger, Al Schmid: Marine (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), p. 57.

  10. Ibid, p. 58.

  11. Vandegrift and Asprey, op. cit., p. 102.

  12. Ibid, p. 105.

  13. Ibid, p. 111.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. Clemens, op. cit., p. 52.

  2. Fuchida and Okumiya, op. cit., p. 75.

  3. Ohmae, Capt. Toshikazu, The Battle of Savo Island (United States Naval Institute Proceedings, December 1957), p. 1264.

  4. Ibid, p. 1266.

  5. Newcomb, Richard, Savo: The Incredible Naval Debacle off Guadalcanal (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961), p. 53.

  6. Ibid, p. 53.

  7. Vandegrift and Asprey, op. cit., p. 46.

  8. Author’s recollection.

  9. Butterfield, op. cit., pp. 64, 65.

  10. Griffith, Brig. Gen. Samuel B., II, The Battle for Guadalcanal (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1963), p. 35.

  11. Vandegrift and Asprey, op. cit., p. 120.

  12. Ibid, p. 120.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Griffith, op. cit., p. 35.

  15. Author’s recollection.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. Shigemitsu, Premier Mamoru, Japan and Her Destiny (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), p. 271.

  2. Intelligence Summary No. 22, Headquarters, U.S. Army Air Force, Southwest Pacific Area; History of 28th Bombardment Squadron (19th Bombardment Group), 8 Dec. 1941–1 Feb. 1943, p. 16.

  3. Clemens, op. cit., p. 124.

  4. Author’s recollection.

  5. Vandegrift and Asprey, op. cit., p. 19.

  6. Leckie, Robert, Strong Men Armed (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 18.

  7. Clemens, op. cit., p. 125.

  8. Japanese Eighth Fleet War Diary, Office of Naval Records and Library (ONRL), Document No. 161259, p. 6; Newcomb, op. cit., p. 23.

  PART TWO: ALONE

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. Griffith, op. cit., p. 46. (General Griffith, then a lieutenant colonel, was Edson’s executive officer.)

  2. Newcomb, op. cit., p. 23.

  3. Sakai et al., op. cit., p. 146.

  4. Ibid, p. 147.

  5. Griffith, op. cit., p. 44.

  6. Hara, op
. cit., p. 104.

  7. Ibid, p. 104.

  8. Tregaskis, Richard, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Popular Library, 1959), p. 77.

  9. Leckie, op. cit., p. 23.

  10. Sakai et al., op. cit., p. 156.

  11. Griffith, op. cit., p. 47.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1. Author’s recollection.

  2. Griffith, op. cit., p. 42.

  3. Ohmae, op. cit., p. 1272.

  4. Newcomb, op. cit., p. 92.

  5. Ohmae, op. cit., p. 1273. (Note: All subsequent Japanese battle orders quoted at Savo are from the same source.)

  6. Vandegrift and Asprey, op. cit., p. 130.

  7. Ibid.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1. Roscoe, Theodore, United States Destroyer Operations in World War II (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1953), p. 153.

  2. All these and similar quotations are from monitored Japanese broadcasts on file in the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  3. Letter, Commanding General, South Pacific, to Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, August 11, 1942. OPD 381, PTO1. World War II Archives, Alexandria, Va.

  4. Letter, Commanding General, South Pacific, to Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, August 11, 1942. OPD 381, PTO1. World War II Archives, Alexandria, Va.

  5. The Americans had a biblical precedent for this ruse. In a dispute with the men of Ephraim, the Israelite leader Jephte set guards at the fords of the Jordan with orders to ask each passerby if he were an Ephraimite. Each man who said “No” was asked to pronounce “shibboleth,” the word for an ear of corn or a flood or stream. Inasmuch as the Ephraimites could not make the sound “sh” they always answered “sibboleth,” thus betraying their identity. That is how the word shibboleth came first to mean a password, then a party slogan, and, finally, the sham or hackneyed rallying cry of some fashionable or partisan cause.