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

by John Prados

  Montgomery’s 199 aircraft stormed into Rabaul through rain. Kusaka’s defenses put up sixty-eight Zeroes to contest the airspace. In an echo of Santa Cruz, Jim Vose, who had planted the damaging bomb on the Shokaku’s flight deck that terrible day, was now a lieutenant commander leading the Bunker Hill dive-bombers. But Vose got no major decision this time. Not only was the weather uncooperative, but the pickings were nothing like they had been. Most important of them was the Agano. She sighted the attackers at 8:57 a.m. Captain Matsubara ordered his flak gunners into action ten minutes later. At 9:12 Avengers began their level runs for torpedo attack. One tin fish hit the bow but failed to explode. Another struck the after section and detonated in crew quarters, leaving part of the structure dangling in the sea. Dive-bombers achieved no results. With the detritus acting as a stationary rudder, Matsubara lost steering control. The Agano had many casualties. Heavy cruiser Maya, still repairing, emerged unscathed. The Yubari also rode at anchor. Captain Sakai Takumi’s light cruiser saw the approaching planes at 8:54. Sakai ordered his main battery into action and got off twenty-six 5.5-inch shells. But by 9:13, U.S. planes were close enough to strafe the Yubari and several tin cans with her. The cruiser’s luck held and only a couple of seamen were wounded. The destroyer Suzunami was caught while she was loading torpedoes. She sank near the entrance to Simpson Harbor. The Naganami reached Blanche Bay but suffered a torpedo hit and had to be towed back.

  Admiral Montgomery’s instructions were to make a second strike. He had begun rearming when Kusaka struck back. At least the JNAF waves were detected on radar more than a hundred miles away. Montgomery launched some of his follow-up strike planes beginning at 1:25 p.m., but shortly after that defensive action began to predominate. The Japanese force included sixty-seven Zeroes, twenty-seven Vals, and fourteen Kates, with a unit of Bettys trailing behind. By 1:54 action was joined. Montgomery canceled his second strike and concentrated on the air battle. For the first half hour Japanese dive-bombers held sway; then came the torpedo planes. Some Bettys that missed the carrier task force found Tip Merrill’s cruisers instead and put a torpedo into light cruiser Denver. But that would be it. The Japanese strike groups lost a few Bettys, all of their Kate torpedo planes, and all but ten of the Val dive-bombers. The loss of several dozen attack planes in exchange for a single torpedo hit against a nonessential U.S. warship measured Japan’s decline in the year since Santa Cruz.

  The air battles of November 11 marked the effective end of Rabaul as a Japanese offensive base. Combined Fleet recalled Ozawa’s Kido Butai aircraft the next day. The proud legions of the “sea eagles” were heavily thinned. Hirohito issued an imperial rescript congratulating the carrier-and land-based airmen on their achievements. Only after the war would the Japanese discover how meager these had been. But the numbers tell their own story: 173 planes had gone to Rabaul; fifty-three returned to Truk. The losses included half the fighter planes, 85 percent of the dive-bombers, 90 percent of the torpedo planes. Every single scout plane had been destroyed. Between damaged planes that had managed to land and airmen rescued, the personnel losses were not quite as bad: 50 percent of scout crews, 40 percent of the torpedo-plane crews, 30 percent of the fighter pilots. But among the dive-bomber crews, three of every four had perished. Fighter sorties were expensive, but effective to some degree. Attack sorties were prohibitively costly regardless of their effectiveness, which was considerably less than the Imperial Navy believed.

  Admiral Kusaka, unable to protect major warships any longer, ordered them to Truk. Captain Kato sailed with the Maya on November 12. The Agano also cleared harbor, with some help, then was torpedoed en route by the American submarine Scamp. She had to be rescued by the Natori and her destroyers, which towed Captain Matsubara’s ship the rest of the way. The Yubari was bombed at sea. Captain Arleigh Burke with his acclaimed destroyer squadron put the finishing touch on Japanese surface activity in the Battle of Cape St. George on November 25, when he annihilated three ships of a five-destroyer Tokyo Express bound for Buka. Thanks to Ultra, Admiral Halsey gave “31 Knot Burke” twenty-four hours’ advance warning of the Imperial Navy sally. Allied forces had achieved complete surface superiority.

  From Rabaul, Admiral Kusaka continued to throw his Eleventh Air Fleet against Bougainville and New Guinea, at enormous cost. JNAF losses in the Solomons for November 1943 are estimated at about 290 warplanes. Without the carrier aircraft, Kusaka’s attacks were even less potent. His effort almost immediately suffered cutbacks. Once Nimitz opened his Central Pacific drive—on November 20, barely a week after the second Rabaul carrier attack—the pressures on JNAF strength multiplied. Ironically, some of the last aerial reinforcements to Rabaul were planes drawn from JNAF forces in the Marshalls and Gilberts—precisely where Nimitz struck—and the less experienced fliers added little to Kusaka’s capability, while, in return, very soon the Combined Fleet withdrew the 26th Air Flotilla, removing some of Kusaka’s best air groups and reducing his serviceable strength to about 160 aircraft. Other reinforcements were composites, as in late December, when the three ships of Carrier Division 1 each sent seven fighters to augment the 253rd Air Group. That was the period of the largest JNAF defensive efforts, when formations of seventy-two, ninety-four, and even ninety-eight fighters attempted to blunt the raids. The Japanese enjoyed a degree of success through the end of the year.

  While Kusaka did what he could, General MacArthur began to confect a siege ring, surrounding the beleaguered fortress with Allied garrisons supporting air bases that kept up a constant rain of bombs. In December, MacArthur landed SOWESPAC troops at Arawe and Cape Gloucester, at the western tip of New Britain, for the first time putting Allied troops on the same island as Rabaul. In January 1944, the target was the Green Islands, to the east, which Halsey captured using New Zealand troops. At the air station planted there, Lieutenant Commander Richard Nixon served as a supply officer for the SOPAC Air Transport Command, his most substantive wartime assignment and one for which he received a citation. Nixon is said to have been popular with the natives. The supremo seized Emirau and Manus islands, west and north of Rabaul, in March 1944, completing the encirclement.

  The war had reached a juncture where the Imperial Navy, even in its bases, could no longer be safe. For a Christmas present in 1943, Rabaul received another of Ted Sherman’s carrier attacks. Shortly after the New Year, fighter ace “Pappy” Boyington, hit over the fortress, had to ditch in St. George’s Channel and would be rescued by an I-boat. The pilot was held prisoner at Rabaul for some weeks and then sent on to Japan by way of Truk. In the meantime, flying from the brand-new U.S. airfield at Stirling in the Treasury Islands early in February, Marine photo planes took pictures of Truk. Admiral Koga viewed this as an omen of worse to come, and sailed away with his Combined Fleet. Sure enough, on February 17, Truk was subjected to a massive attack by the American fast-carrier task force. Prisoner Boyington’s air shuttle from Rabaul landed amid this chaos. Boyington became an American witness to the demise of Truk as a center of Japanese power.

  The Allied siege strategy was infinitely preferable to direct attack on Rabaul. By the time MacArthur completed his ring, the Japanese had had two years to fortify the place, and its defenses were formidable. The Japanese Army had 76,300 troops in two infantry divisions, two brigades, an artillery brigade, and a tank regiment. Supporting weapons included 237 big guns or howitzers, plus eighty-eight 75mm cannon. Special Naval Landing Forces contributed another dozen cannon, and the Navy had thirty-eight coast defense guns, almost half of them six-inch weapons. Kusaka’s naval personnel amounted to 21,570 men, including four garrison units and an SNLF. The forces possessed nearly 5,000 vehicles. There were 30,000 tons of ammunition and 45,000 tons of food. Stocks included roughly 2,900 tons of aviation gas and 3,600 tons of motor fuel. An invasion of Fortress Rabaul promised more heartache than anything ever done in the South Pacific.

  The reduction of Rabaul by means of aerial attack posed far fewer difficulties. This became the main func
tion of AIRSOLS and the Thirteenth Air Force. The air campaign began immediately after the carrier raids. During November, the Thirteenth Air Force flew forty-one sorties against Rabaul, but a month later the overall scale of Allied effort increased to 394 flights, and in January 1944 to 2,865. This was overwhelmingly an effort of the South Pacific forces—George Kenney sent exactly nine airplanes to Rabaul from the time of his Fifth Air Force raids through November 1944. Within SOPAC, Marine Corps airmen carried much of the burden. The height of the suppression campaign occurred between January and July 1944. It peaked in February, when 4,552 sorties dumped 3,324 tons of munitions on the Japanese. To put that figure a different way, at this level of effort the Allies were hitting Rabaul with a 150-plane raid every day, rain or shine. Marine air flew more sorties against the fortress in every month except May, and its effort amounted to nearly 44 percent of the entire Allied tally. After April the Rabaul missions were considered “milk runs.” Targeteers divided the town into more than a dozen sectors, and strikes tried to level them. Efforts to burn out the town were abandoned once photo interpreters determined that just 122 buildings were still standing—less than 10 percent of the town. Through July, Allied air forces delivered an average of more than 1,800 tons of bombs on Rabaul every month. From July 1944 through the end of the war, the Allies kept heads down with some hundreds of sorties each month. By the end of the war the Allies had plastered Rabaul with 30,000 tons of munitions.

  The weight of that attack could not fail to have effects. In January 1944, Koga sent in the planes of Carrier Division 2 once more, recalling some of the land-based air units. Shortly after the American carrier raid on Truk, the Japanese pulled out these planes, plus the last of their 26th Air Flotilla. As many mechanics as possible left with them, and some more departed by submarine or the few aircraft and blockade runners that sneaked in. Several hundred mechanics of the 751st Air Group crowded onto a pair of ships at Rabaul on February 20. Its commander, Captain Sato, boarded an escorting subchaser. AIRSOLS planes sank both the transports north of New Ireland the next day. Sato’s subchaser escaped. Tug Nagara rescued a number of survivors. She, in turn, was caught and sunk by Arleigh Burke’s destroyers not far away a day later. Burke’s “Little Beavers” picked up about half the Japanese survivors, including more than forty men of the 751st Group. Others drowned themselves or resisted capture. Rabaul was truly isolated. Operation Cartwheel had succeeded.

  After February the JNAF managed to field only a guerrilla air force, a handful of planes assembled from the boneyard, patched together with parts from the wrecks that littered Rabaul’s airfields. The Imperial Navy gave up trying to maintain Lakunai Airfield in July 1944. Several other fields of the fortress complex fell into disrepair much earlier. Strenuous efforts kept Vunakanau operational through the end of the war. It was last used on May 27, 1945, when the JNAF slipped two bombers into Rabaul to stage a raid on Allied shipping in the Admiralties. Japanese soldiers and sailors went into farming, raising food to supplement their rations. The emperor’s expressed fears of brave men starving had proven prescient. Admiral Kusaka and General Imamura exerted themselves to buck up morale. The Army had the best farms, and they graciously shared food with the Navy. As Fortress Rabaul declined to an isolated backwater, left behind by a ferocious war, the Japanese Army and Imperial Navy finally achieved cooperation.

  VIII.

  SOUTH PACIFIC DREAMS

  So it was that the Solomons became the grave of Japan’s dream. Here the pendulum of the Pacific war began to swing against Tokyo. The Battle of Midway robbed the Japanese of momentum and stripped their aura of invincibility. But after Midway the pendulum hung in balance. Japan retained numerical superiority and some distinct qualitative advantages. The dream was still attainable. In the Solomons the war was fought to a decision. In the months beginning with July 1942 it remained open to the Japanese, more specifically to the Imperial Navy, to blunt Allied progress. Instead Tokyo frittered away its forces in vain efforts to reverse, and then simply to halt accelerating adverse trends. The Japanese achieved momentary advantage at least twice, but each time squandered the opportunity. The Allies worked at a steady pace and eventually equaled, then surpassed their foe. The drama of the rise and fall of Fortress Rabaul encapsulates that progression.

  Japanese commanders believed they could fight in the Solomons on the cheap. A few men, planes, and ships would suffice to control the Outer South Seas. Once the Allies contested their dominance, the Solomons absorbed greater and greater Japanese attention until it became the main arena of confrontation. But Japan’s devotion to the battle continued to suffer—from a contradiction between the logic of its basic strategy and the expression of that in combat action, and also from a disconnect between the operations and the Imperial Navy’s traditional battle doctrine. Not so the Allies. The United States, Australia, and New Zealand had no doubt the campaign was a matter of life or death, and no hesitation at a full measure of commitment.

  A multitude of factors help explain the outcome in the Outer South Seas. Japanese expansion into the Solomons, first conceived as a protection for the Empire as Tokyo ran the board in the Pacific, became something much more. When Tokyo strategic planners began to think in terms of isolating or invading Australia, they were reframing the South Pacific as a major combat theater. Yet they deployed no additional forces. The mismatch between strategy and force was a major error. Tokyo should have known the Allies would perceive Japan in the South Pacific as a threat. To leave the Solomons so sparsely held invited attack. Here Japan inserted a contradiction into its war strategy.

  It is important to bear in mind the dimensions of this conflict. A Japanese victory did not mean the defeat of the Allies, in particular the Americans. With its huge territory and enormous economy, the United States was impervious to capture by Japan. The same was true of the British Empire. In coalition warfare alongside Germany and Italy, Tokyo might hope to fight the Allies to a standstill and force a negotiated termination of hostilities. Yamamoto’s maxim about marching into Washington and dictating peace terms in the White House referred to this reality: Victory was bounded by the possible. Japanese leaders understood that. The transcripts of the Imperial Conferences before Pearl Harbor, the succession of meetings at which Japan decided on war, clearly show Tokyo believed its limited capabilities were just then at a maximum relative to those of the Allies. Leaders differed on how much leeway Japan possessed. Yamamoto Isoruku put the period of “going wild” at six months to a year; Nagano Osami felt the nation could fight for three years before ending hostilities became a necessity.

  Distilled to its essence, this meant that to maintain the relative position of December 1941, the Japanese had to eliminate enough of the enemy to shave the margin by which Allied strength must increase. That represented an enormous task. The Japanese had a fair sense of Allied productive capacity and an exact knowledge of their own. Between December 1941 and June 1943, American shipyards delivered four new battleships, two heavy and thirteen light cruisers, six fleet and five light carriers, seventeen escort carriers, and 150 destroyers. Imperial Navy construction programs brought additions to the fleet as well. Through the end of 1943 these included one battleship, two fleet and two light carriers, five light/escort carrier conversions, four light cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers. Japanese aircraft carrier deliveries—specifically the conversions—would actually have been fewer except for Midway, which convinced Japan to expedite carrier construction. As a rule of thumb, the Imperial Navy needed to eliminate three or four warships for each one it lost.

  That basic logic translates into a strategic necessity for an objective important enough to force the Allies to fight on Japanese terms. The Solomons became an arena of decision precisely because Yamamoto and his cohorts considered that their threat to Australia would pull the Allies into battle. Unlike Midway, however, where the Imperial Navy brought the weight of its forces to bear, the admirals resisted putting down chips commensurate with their stake. That failure
created the most fundamental contradiction in Japanese strategy: between its basic logic and the admirals’ application of it. The Allied South Pacific and Southwest Pacific commands also waged war on a shoestring at first, but Allied commanders could look ahead to a future of plenty once they passed the present of penury. SOPAC needed to do its best with what it had.

  One reason the Imperial Navy resisted making a proper correlation between the dimensions of strategy and the forces required to carry it out lay in traditional doctrine. For decades the Navy had planned, trained, and designed ships for a “decisive battle”—a very particular engagement, in which Japan, in a defensive mode, would progressively weaken an advancing American fleet and then face and destroy it in a single cataclysmic combat. This precise engagement concept was what Emperor Hirohito had referred to in speaking with military leaders at an August 1943 meeting. Carrying out such an action required husbanding naval power until the very eve of battle. The disconnect came between this approach to decisive battle versus the aim of preserving relative Japanese strength: Force was necessary to impose losses. The essence of traditional doctrine lay in withholding force, and that effectively conceded the initiative to the adversary. But an enemy with the initiative could choose not to engage until his military attained overwhelming superiority.

  Preserving relative strength, to the contrary, required an offensive posture, reversing the traditional direction of Japanese doctrine. Only on the offensive could the Imperial Navy compel the Allies to fight often enough and in sufficient strength to be whittled away. Historians and observers after the war who traced Japan’s defeat to “victory disease”—in its essence an unrelenting offensive posture—have neglected to think through the dimensions of the Japanese strategic problem. Although Imperial Navy officers were overconfident, the truth is that Japan’s basic policy required that stance. More useful is to question the assumptions in Japan’s decision for war—that the basic policy could be carried out in the real world, and that the Imperial Navy could adapt to the different requirements of this strategy.