Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun

by John Prados

  —John Prados

  Washington, DC

  July 2011

  ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

  AA Antiaircraft

  AIRSOLS Allied air command for the Solomons (also used for commander, AIRSOLS)

  Belconnen Station name for U.S. Navy codebreakers in Australia, 1942–1945 (aka FRUMEL)

  CAG Carrier Air Group

  Cast Station name for U.S. Navy codebreakers in the Philippines, 1941–1942

  C-in-C Commander in chief (Japanese)

  CINCPAC Commander in chief, Pacific Ocean areas

  COMINCH Commander in chief (U.S.—also the chief of naval operations)

  CUB Navy Base Unit

  FRUMEL Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne

  FRUPAC Fleet Radio Unit Pacific

  GC&CS Government Code & Communications School (British)

  GI Government-issue (common usage for a U.S. soldier)

  G-2 U.S. Army Intelligence (also Southwest Pacific Theater Intelligence)

  HMS His Majesty’s Ship (in a ship name)

  Hypo Station name for U.S. Navy codebreakers at Pearl Harbor, 1941–1943 (became FRUPAC)

  ICPOA Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean area

  IGHQ Imperial General Headquarters

  JNAF Japanese Naval Air Force

  MAG Marine Air Group

  NEGAT Station name for OP-20-G codebreaking activities

  NGS Navy General Staff

  ONI Office of Naval Intelligence

  OP-20-G Codebreaking organization of the Office of Naval Communications (aka Station Negat)

  SBD Douglas Dauntless dive-bomber

  SEFIC Seventh Fleet Intelligence Center

  SNLF Special Naval Landing Force

  SOPAC South Pacific Command (also used for commander, South Pacific)

  SOWESPAC Southwest Pacific Theater command

  TBF Grumman Avenger torpedo plane

  TBS Talk Between Ships (low-frequency intership radio net)

  USS United States Ship (in a ship name)

  VB Navy carrier-based dive-bomber squadron

  VF Navy carrier-based fighter squadron

  VMF Marine fighter squadron

  VMSB Marine scout bomber squadron

  VSB Navy carrier-based scout bomber squadron

  PROLOGUE

  THE JAPANESE AFTER MIDWAY

  The sky was fair, and aboard the battleship Yamato, flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s vaunted Combined Fleet, sailors traded winter uniforms for summer ones. The heat could be brutal in the Pacific’s middle latitudes where Yamato cruised. Rear Admiral Ugaki Matome saw the desirability of lighter clothing, but he remained attired in his old gear. He had other concerns.

  As fleet chief of staff, Ugaki struggled to understand what had just happened. Only days before, the Navy, with a huge preponderance of force, had advanced on Midway Island, to be dealt a stinging defeat by Americans inferior in almost every respect. This day, June 10, 1942, offered an opportunity to review the debacle with senior officers of the First Air Fleet, the carrier task force that had suffered stunning losses, also known as the Nagumo Force for its commander, Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, and by its operational nomenclature, the Striking Force, or Kido Butai. Light cruiser Nagara took advantage of a calm sea to approach the Yamato, lowering a boat to carry Nagumo across to the flagship. Officers were unceremoniously bundled into straw mats to be lowered to the waiting launch.

  For days since Midway little had gone well. Ugaki’s burdens were many. Fleet staff walked around in a daze. While serving the officers, steward Noda Mitsuharu noticed air staff officer Commander Sasaki Akira acting as if he were personally responsible for the Navy’s defeat. Sasaki’s eyes showed his lack of sleep, and, unshaven, he sat impassive in the operations room. The big boss, Combined Fleet commander in chief (C-in-C) Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, his own eyes glittering strangely, had disappeared after the final, horrific news. Yamamoto had taken to bed for several days, eating nothing. He’d now been diagnosed with roundworms.

  Insult had been added to injury when destroyer Isonami ran down another screening ship, Uranami, during a routine course change to avoid suspected submarines. At Midway the Imperial Navy had lost a prized heavy cruiser, the Mikuma, when she was crippled by collision with another warship and could no longer evade the enemy bombers.

  Admiral Yamamoto finally reappeared on the Yamato’s compass bridge sipping rice gruel. Ugaki professed joy, for Yamamoto was the soul of the fleet, acknowledged as its most brilliant leader. Isonami’s collision brought back sour thoughts of the Mikuma, but both men knew the really disastrous result was the destruction of Kido Butai’s main strength—all four fleet carriers committed to Midway. Now they would review the battle with Nagumo’s officers.

  Among those who boarded the Yamato were Kido Butai’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Kusaka Ryunosuke, air staff officer Commander Genda Minoru, operations chief Captain Oishi Tamotsu, and the flag secretary. Their transfer had been simplified, ironically, because Nagumo and his staff had evacuated to the Nagara when their own flagship, the aircraft carrier Akagi, had had to be abandoned. Kusaka suffered minor leg wounds. But Genda was the one officer Admiral Yamamoto worried about. The power of Kido Butai air strikes, with which Yamamoto had struck Pearl Harbor and virtually swept the Pacific, derived precisely from Commander Genda’s championing of concentrated carrier forces and his innovating tactics to employ the airpower. Now the crucial question was whether Midway called those tactics into question. The Imperial Navy did not know at the time that Allied codebreakers had divined the Japanese plan, enabling Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the American Pacific commander, to position his fleet in ambush.

  Nagumo’s officers arrived early in the morning, and the staff conference dragged into the afternoon. Admiral Ugaki started on a conciliatory note, saying, “As the Combined Fleet headquarters, we realize our own fault, for which we extend our regrets.” Specialists on both staffs then broke off to discuss their respective areas of concern. Combined Fleet and First Air Fleet seniors mulled over the vagaries of underway refueling, dangers of radio emissions under precombat conditions, and the shortcomings of Kido Butai’s dawn airborne search pattern. Mistakes had been made in arming the waves of strike aircraft, delays waiting to recover planes rather than launch fresh ones, and there were problems inherent in the overconcentration that had been built into the plan. Ugaki remarked that it would be good to have some carriers for fleet air defense entirely equipped with fighters. The chief of staff could see Admiral Kusaka afflicted by guilt and tried to buck him up, pressing yen and other gifts into his hands and extending assurances. Yamamoto, who had told his own staff at the height of the catastrophe, “I am the only one who must apologize to His Majesty,” rejected proffered apologies from Nagumo’s officers. “This present setback has not made us at all pessimistic,” Ugaki told Kusaka. “We still intend to try the Midway operation again and also to carry out the southern operation.”

  Admiral Ugaki understood the war situation in the wake of Midway perfectly. “Above all,” he told Kusaka, “to rehabilitate the fleet air force is imperative.” That was the main reason for the Yamato confab, as well as why Yamamoto ordered Genda to go ahead to Japan in a seaplane as soon as his ship reached flying range of the Empire. The commander would manage the reorganization of carrier air groups. The Japanese officers correctly marked Midway as a serious defeat, but they were also right not to regard it as a crippling one. And the Navy already had another plan, the “southern operation,” on the drawing board.

  Captain Tomioka Sadatoshi later told friends of the dour atmosphere at the Navy General Staff as the news arrived dispatch upon dispatch. But the horror among his colleagues—Baron Tomioka was operations chief—flowed as much from dawning realization of Midway’s implications for the South Pacific scheme as it did from the sheer tragedy. Whatever the concrete effects, the Navy General Staff (NGS) treated Midway as an embarrassment. The high command began by delays informing Emperor Hirohito of
events. Hirohito received his first news only when the Kido Butai’s power had been broken, half its carriers sunk, the others floating derelicts soon to founder or be scuttled. It is not clear that NGS fully admitted the losses. Lord Privy Seal Marquis Kido, possibly the emperor’s closest associate, heard from a naval aide twenty-four hours later. Hirohito spent almost a day closeted with Navy officers, and Kido met with Japanese aeronautical experts and industrial leaders. The emperor saw Marquis Kido only on June 8. Hirohito strove to minimize the crisis, indicating to Kido the losses were serious—deplorable—but the Navy must carry on. Speaking to Admiral Nagano Osami, chief of the General Staff, the emperor demanded he continue boldly and work to prevent falling morale.

  The Navy followed the emperor’s lead, minimizing the public face it put on the disaster, but it is equally probable the naval authorities did this for their own reasons. Everything about Midway was held in the strictest secrecy. Sailors on returning ships were restricted on shore leave and ordered to say nothing. Yamamoto’s battleship force, the Main Body, reached its anchorage at Hashirajima on June 14. More than six hundred wounded and injured crewmen brought home aboard the hospital ships Mikawa Maru and Takasago Maru were taken by night and kept incommunicado in hospitals at the Sasebo and Kure naval bases. Other injured seamen were treated at Yokosuka naval hospital under identical protocols. On June 10 the Navy released an official communiqué on Midway, describing it as a victory, admitting to the loss of a single flattop as against two American ones. The true situation was that the Imperial Navy had lost four fleet carriers and a heavy cruiser and the Americans a single equivalent, the Yorktown.* Emperor Hirohito discussed issuing an imperial rescript that would honor participants—and naturally add to the misinformation—but courtiers dissuaded him.

  The Navy’s dissimulation crossed the line when it avoided telling the Japanese Army the true state of affairs. In Tokyo’s system the Navy and Army were equal partners in an Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ), and policy was not so much coordinated as carried out in parallel, with each service contributing as necessary to achieve the jointly agreed aims. The services negotiated “central agreements” on operations and were then to furnish requisite forces. By not providing accurate information, the Navy left Army planners under the impression that Japan possessed more capability than it did. There is conflicting evidence on whether Japanese prime minister Tojo Hideki, an Army general, knew the real score, but that knowledge did not extend very far within the Army. At an IGHQ liaison conference coincident with release of the Navy communiqué, the NGS briefed its sister service. The presentation hardly went beyond the public information. Judging from subsequent IGHQ decisions it seems likely the Japanese Army for a time remained ignorant. This set the ball rolling down a path of myopic strategic planning which led to fresh disasters.

  Aboard the Yamato other meetings took place that held the key to post-Midway operations. The day after his arrival in port, Yamamoto convened those most heavily involved on his flagship. This brought back Kusaka Ryunosuke as well as Nagumo Chuichi—who had visited briefly when the task force anchored to present his own apology. Also there were destroyer commanders; the leader of the seaplane unit; and the commander of the Second Fleet, Vice Admiral Kondo Nobutake, with staff chief Rear Admiral Shiraishi Kazutaka. It was Kondo’s force, supposed to execute the actual Midway invasion, that had lost the Mikuma and now had Mogami, instigator of the collision leading to that loss, in dry dock to replace her bow. Yamamoto and Ugaki assembled the group to discuss future plans.

  The most important project on the table was the southern operation, which the Japanese code-named the “FS Operation.” The FS plan aimed at isolating Australia by occupying islands enabling Japan to threaten its coast and break the sea-lanes linking the United States to the southern continent. FS, which referred to Fiji and Samoa, was a compromise solution to Tokyo’s debate about invading Australia. Midway had been a Yamamoto initiative, carried out over the objections of the General Staff once the Combined Fleet commander threatened to resign. Now Midway was done—with appalling consequences—and the FS Operation was next up.

  The FS offensive, in fact conceived by Baron Tomioka, had been enshrined in an IGHQ central agreement. Tomioka was third-generation Imperial Navy, born while his father superintended the naval academy at Etajima. Tomioka himself graduated the academy fifteenth in his class in 1917, and had been top among his cohort at the Navy War College. Later he taught strategy there. Captain Tomioka was brilliant—and one of few noblemen in naval service—but Combined Fleet’s opposition to FS mystified him. Yamamoto argued that Japan would be overextended if it occupied the South Pacific islands, but did not apply that logic to his own scheme to take Midway as a preliminary to invading Hawaii. Tomioka was not averse to a Midway-Hawaii offensive after the FS Operation, and Combined Fleet ultimately accepted the reverse compromise. The South Pacific offensive would follow Midway. Yamamoto’s concession at least brought Fleet plans back into line with the IGHQ concept.

  Preparations for the Fiji-Samoa offensive were complete by the end of April. Strategists debated the alternatives. Under an NGS directive of May 18, the “southern operation” was tentatively set for early July. The companion Army document specified that Navy units were to assemble at Truk beginning on June 18. The Kido Butai would sail on July 1. It would support invasions of New Caledonia (July 8), Fiji (July 18), and Samoa (July 21). Yamamoto issued orders nominating Admiral Kondo as primary executor, with his Second Fleet backed by land-based aircraft of the Eleventh Air Fleet plus Nagumo’s Kido Butai. The Japanese Army would provide troops for the invasions. It was immediately clear that this timetable could not be kept. When Admiral Nagano briefed Emperor Hirohito on June 8, he had finished with proposals to modify plans, including a two-month postponement of the FS Operation.

  None of the Japanese, neither Yamamoto nor his NGS counterpart, Nagano, had any idea that their concern about southern waters might lead to a clash of arms. Decisions made on the other side of the world, in Washington, were drawing American attention to the same region. Both sides thought their South Pacific plans aimed at a backwater the adversary ignored. No one imagined themselves in a race for strategic position. That universal ignorance meant the actors stumbled blindly into what became the decisive campaign of the Pacific war.

  Yamamoto Isoroku had earned his reputation the hard way. Over a long career the admiral had been fearless in advocating his causes, no matter how unpopular; perceptive in recognizing evolving technological and operational dynamics, working to incorporate or overcome them; and pragmatic in difficult circumstances. Yamamoto had been a central figure in the development of Japanese naval aviation, now crucial to the war. Before that he had backed naval arms limitation despite bitter cleavages regarding disarmament within the fleet. At the Navy Ministry during the turbulent 1930s, dismissing threats of assassination, Yamamoto had stood up to the political machinations of the Japanese Army. He was full of insights, some developed during three tours in the United States, one to study, the others as a naval attaché. Yamamoto appreciated the enormous energy and productive capacity of a nation against which the Imperial Navy had planned for decades.

  When Tokyo began considering war, Admiral Yamamoto had counseled against initiating conflict. It was Yamamoto again who warned that in such a war Japan might explode for six months or a year—“go wild” was his phrase—but then go down to defeat. His view on an armed struggle, encapsulated in the aphorism that war with America would have to be ended by dictating peace terms in the White House, added up to the idea that Japan, after seizing what it could, would defend it so well an exhausted United States might desist. When a concept came to him for attacking Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto had recognized its possibilities—and he had overridden existing war plans to champion that, threatening the unthinkable—to resign as C-in-C—if his preferred course were not approved. The Midway maneuver had been a repeat performance. An April 1942 profile published in Harper’s magazine considered Yamamo
to “America’s Enemy No. 2,” right after Adolf Hitler.

  In a way the admiral was now hoist on his own petard. The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, so enraged Americans that they were not likely to stop until they could dictate terms in Tokyo. Startled by the pinpricks of early U.S. carrier raids in the Central Pacific, goaded by the mid-April Doolittle raid directly on Japan, Yamamoto had demanded the Midway invasion. Following almost exactly six months of struggle, triumphing everywhere, the Imperial Navy suddenly suffered staggering losses in a single fight. Defeat had eliminated two-thirds of Japan’s fleet carriers, her most powerful weapons. How Yamamoto responded would determine much that happened in the next phase of the war.