War Stories II: Heroism in the Pacific

by Oliver North

  We were taken out in work parties of 100 or 200 men. A few weeks later, 368 survivors of the USS Houston, an American cruiser that had been sunk off of the Java coast, joined us. The Japanese rounded up the sailors who made it to shore. When the Houston survivors joined us, it brought us to about 900 American POWs. All of us were put to work on building this railroad through the jungle.

  We called it the Siam Death Railway. Now, where we were made to work, it was a 260-mile stretch of total jungle. There were no towns, villages, or people.

  I was put to work on the crew that was preparing the rail bed. Our job was to make a railroad bed level by filling, digging, breaching streams, and carrying dirt and rock.

  The only tools we had to build this railroad were picks and shovels, and bamboo baskets and poles for carrying dirt. There was no machinery, nothing like a bulldozer. We didn’t even have wheelbarrows.

  They gave us each a quota of one cubic meter of dirt to be moved each day. Later, because we got behind schedule, they upped that to two cubic meters of dirt daily.

  The Japanese needed this railroad because they were mired down in northern Burma fighting the British. The Japanese were in dire need of an overland route to bring up troops and supplies.

  We heard about British troops out there in the jungle. And we kept hoping that they would come to get us.

  We never had enough food; we were always just on the verge of starving to death. We had to work up to eighteen hours a day, in rain, in mud and muck, and after a few months, the tropical diseases began to take hold of us.

  I had a huge ulcer on my right leg and the leg bone was exposed in two places. I was flat on my back for nearly six months. All of my friends thought I was going to die. I got sent back to Kilo 80 Camp, and was there about two or three months.

  It was a miserable, miserable existence. I’d get up before daylight, have a little cup of rice for breakfast, march out to the work site under the Japanese guards, where I’d work all day long until dark. And then, if we hadn’t completed the task that the Japanese thought that we should have, we’d have to build bonfires so we could have light to work in the dark.

  It was an excruciatingly hard, cruel work; it was slave labor. Death became more common than life, and for many of the guys who didn’t make it, death was more or less the route that they chose. It was easier to die than it was to live. But I had faith in my country and my God. I started out in a section crew of thirty-six guys. In less than a year, thirty-four of’em were dead.

  It all ended on 16 August 1945, the day after Japan surrendered. They had just moved me again—this time from Tarakan to another railroad work camp. The Japanese camp commander ordered all prisoners to assemble in front of our compounds. He got up on a box and in broken English announced to us that the war was over, that Japan had surrendered.

  AFTER ACTION REPORT

  1ST AIR COMMANDOS

  14 AUGUST 2004

  It was tragic that Wingate’s Chindits were never assigned a specific rescue mission for POW slaves consigned to work on the Japanese military rail system in Burma. There were times when LRP units were fewer than twenty-five miles from some of the 60,000 enslaved Allied prisoners of war building that infamous 260-mile-long railroad. In addition to the American, British, and Dutch POWs, the Japanese also conscripted 200,000 young Burmese men to work on the rail line—making the ratio simple: 1,000 slaves for every mile of track. At the completion of this particular rail line, 16,000 Allied POWs and 100,000 civilians were dead. Four hundred and forty-six men died on every mile of the Imperial Army’s Railway of Death from every conceivable cause: malnutrition, overwork, disease, dehydration, torture, and in some cases, brutal execution.

  Former POW Kyle Thompson survived, but he cannot forget. He says, “I was nineteen when we were captured, I had my twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third birthdays as a prisoner. So a pretty good part of my young life was sacrificed on the altar of the Japanese Imperial Army.

  “After the war, many who survived being POW slave laborers of the Japanese asked for compensation from Japan because the Germans were paying reparations to their slave laborers. Our group included survivors from the Philippine Islands and the Bataan Death March and civilian internees, and we got together and filed lawsuits against the Japanese industries that used us as slave laborers without compensation during World War II. Interestingly enough, some of the big Japanese industries that exist today were involved in it. Yet our own government opposes this. The State Department, when the suit was heard in federal court, came out and sided with the Japanese. It’s disappointing.”

  CHAPTER 9

  DEATH BY INCHES: GUADALCANAL

  (AUGUST 1942–FEBRUARY 1943)

  GUADALCANAL, SOLOMON ISLANDS

  1ST MARINE DIVISION COMMAND POST

  7 AUGUST 1942

  1740 HOURS LOCAL

  As far as Major General Archer Vandegrift, the fifty-five-year-old commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, could tell, the first American ground offensive of World War II—Operation Watchtower—was going better than expected. After an air and naval gunfire “prep” of the landing beaches, his Marines had come ashore at 0910 on the northwest coast of Guadalcanal. The Japanese had not opposed the Marine landing craft when they hit the narrow beach. Now, though the offload of supplies and equipment was proceeding slowly, it was the best that could be expected considering the thick jungle, lack of roads, and minimal cleared space ashore.

  Contact with the enemy had been light and sporadic in the eight and a half hours since the assault waves touched down in their new Higgins boats. By late in the afternoon, 10,000 of his 14,000 Marines were ashore on Guadalcanal and U.S. carrier-based aircraft had beaten off an attack by high-altitude bombers from the Japanese base at Rabaul.

  Nineteen miles to the north, across the body of water soon to be known as Ironbottom Sound for the number of Allied and Japanese ships sunk there, the occupation of lightly defended Florida Island at 0740 had gone well, but Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo had been a different matter. Though the Tulagi landing at 0800 had been uncontested, Vandegrift had received reports of stiff resistance as the Marines moved to seize the high ground.

  At Gavutu-Tanambogo, two islets connected by a causeway, the 0810 assault waves had been met with significant opposition from Japanese troops defending their seaplane base, despite strikes by U.S. Navy aircraft from the Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp. At 1200, Vandegrift had requested and received permission to commit his only reserves from Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commanding the amphibious forces, and Vice Admiral Jack Fletcher, the tactical commander of the expeditionary forces. Shortly after 1300, the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion was landed under heavy fire to help secure Gavutu-Tanambogo.

  Major General Archer Vandegrift commanded the Marines at Guadalcanal.

  Intelligence had indicated the presence of more than 7,000 Japanese troops on Guadalcanal, and several thousand more on the surrounding islands. Though that estimate would prove to be much too high, it appeared to Vandegrift and his Navy superiors that they had taken the Japanese completely by surprise. By 1700, Vandegrift began to hope that his hastily assembled, untested Marines would be able to quickly secure the airfield the Japanese were constructing on the Lunga plain in the northwest quadrant of Guadalcanal. Then, if all went according to plan, the island could serve as a jumping-off point for the Marines’ “island-hopping” offensive up the Solomons toward the big Japanese base at Rabaul on the northern tip of New Britain. It was not to be.

  Though Vandegrift’s optimism in those first few hours of Operation Watchtower would soon be dashed, his initial confidence was well-founded. The appearance of a formidable eighty-three-ship U.S. naval armada in the waters of the Coral Sea—including three carriers, a cruiser-battleship surface action force, and the amphibious shipping for an entire Marine division—had caught the Japanese totally unprepared. But the Marine landings on the morning of 7 August had succeeded mostly because there were few
er than 2,500 unwary defenders on Guadalcanal and about the same number dug in on the nearby islands.

  Ever since the disaster at Midway, the Japanese high command had been preoccupied with efforts to complete their outer defense perimeter. To consolidate their toehold on New Guinea, a step they deemed essential to protecting Rabaul, the Japanese army began pouring troops and aircraft originally intended for Midway into the fight to capture Port Moresby.

  At the end of June, the Japanese army quietly landed infantry and construction troops on Guadalcanal with orders to build an airfield on the relatively flat plain along the northwest quadrant of the island.

  On 21 July 1942, as construction of the air base on Guadalcanal neared completion, the Japanese army quietly landed 1,800 troops at Gona and Buna on the north coast of New Guinea. Their orders were to proceed over the Owen Stanley Range—the island’s spine—and attack Port Moresby. By 29 July, more than 13,000 Imperial troops had succeeded in hacking their way up the Kokoda Trail—despite the stubborn resistance by an outnumbered Australian brigade, supported by Papuan natives—and were within forty miles of their goal. From Australia, MacArthur rushed Australian and U.S. Army reinforcements into Port Moresby in an effort to hold the vital port and its airfields.

  Once on New Guinea, the green American troops soon realized that the Japanese weren’t the only enemy they faced. The island’s yearly rainfall of ten feet or more, impenetrable, snake-infested jungles, malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and tropical diseases soon felled more soldiers than Japanese suicide attacks. These same conditions would soon start to claim Marines on Guadalcanal.

  Guadalcanal was an unlikely objective for America’s first offensive operation in World War II. Had the Japanese not decided to build an airstrip on the island’s northwestern plain, it might well have been avoided altogether. Operation Watchtower—as developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff—had been a compromise in a campaign to eliminate the threat posed by the Japanese base at Rabaul. Both MacArthur, the southwestern Pacific area commander—and Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Ocean areas—recognized the strategic necessity of destroying Rabaul before retaking the Philippines. The question was how.

  MacArthur favored a direct, carrier-supported assault by U.S. Army troops from Australia and Marines from New Zealand, where they had been training in amphibious operations. Nimitz, unwilling to risk his few carriers or surrender control of his Marines, preferred to use his amphibious forces to seize “unsinkable carriers”—small islands—from which land-based aircraft could pound Rabaul to rubble before any troops had to set foot ashore.

  On 2 July, the Joint Chiefs in Washington—after lengthy discussions between General Marshall and Admiral King—resolved the acrimonious debate by placing Nimitz in charge of the first phase of the Rabaul campaign, ordering him to seize advance bases in the 900-mile-long Solomon Islands chain. Though none too happy with the decision, MacArthur would soon have his hands full simply trying to hold on to Port Moresby.

  Things didn’t quite go as Nimitz had planned either. When a long-range patrol aircraft and Australian coast watchers reported that Japanese construction troops were building an airstrip on Guadalcanal, Nimitz had to quickly adapt to the changed situation. In addition to the known Japanese bases on Tulagi, Florida Island, and Gavutu-Tanambogo, he now had to allocate Marines, transports, and support ships to seize and secure an additional island.

  Though the Joint Chiefs had insisted that Operation Watchtower commence on 1 August, the requirement to seize the airfield being built on Guadalcanal bought Nimitz an additional week of planning. He scrapped plans to secure Savo Island, which didn’t appear to have a Japanese garrison, but there was no way to increase the number of ships, planes, or troops dedicated to the endeavor. MacArthur had nothing to spare, and every other combatant vessel, transport ship, landing craft, aircraft, and soldier available in the U.S. was already committed to the invasion of North Africa in November. Nimitz would have to make do with what he had.

  Scarce resources weren’t the only problem for Nimitz. In the aftermath of the victory at Midway, the Chicago Tribune, owned and published by FDR’s political adversary, Colonel Robert McCormick, ran a story on how the U.S. had broken the Japanese JN-25 code. It became front-page news across America, and Tokyo quickly replaced the compromised codes—leaving Nimitz and his forces in the dark regarding Japanese intentions. Roosevelt was fit to be tied and ordered Attorney General Francis Biddle to arrest McCormick, a World War I hero, and put him on trial for treason—a wartime crime punishable by death.

  In Washington, Admiral King tried to calm things down, believing that a sensational trial would reveal even more classified information—particularly the U.S.–British “Ultra” project that was busily breaking German war codes. He succeeded in convincing FDR that the best damage control for Station Hypo and other cryptological efforts would be to let the story die.

  Henderson Field

  Newspaper stories about Midway weren’t a problem in Japan. There, the stunning defeat at Midway had been carefully covered up. Prime Minister Tojo had ordered that there be no news of their humiliation and no one involved was to even talk about it. Wounded sailors hospitalized in Japan were isolated so no one could ask them questions about what had taken place at Midway. Instead of news about the catastrophe, Japanese newspapers printed glowing reports about “fantastic Japanese victories” in the northern Pacific, where they’d bombed the islands of Attu and Kiska, two barren, icy dots in the long chain of Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska.

  HQ 1ST MARINE DIVISION

  LUNGA POINT, GUADALCANAL

  8 AUGUST 1942

  2000 HOURS LOCAL

  By the afternoon of 8 August, General Vandegrift was satisfied that all his 1st Marine Division needed for success was to complete the offload of supplies from the transports lying at anchor offshore. On Guadalcanal, the uncompleted airfield was already in U.S. hands and renamed Henderson Field in honor of Major Lofton Henderson, who had been killed leading his bombing squadron during the Battle of Midway.

  Nineteen miles north, across the water, Brigadier General William Rupertus reported that his Leathernecks had finally secured Tulagi—though it had required killing nearly all of the entrenched Japanese defenders. The Marines had withstood several determined banzai charges and desperate hand-to-hand combat over a period of thirty-one hours, but the Americans finally prevailed. Rupertus had lost 115 Marines and seven Navy medical corpsmen in the fight, but the Americans had killed ten enemy soldiers to every one of their own.

  Admiral Richard K. Turner

  Earlier in the day, a second Japanese aerial attack—this time by torpedo bombers—had been met first by U.S. carrier aircraft and then by overwhelming anti-aircraft fire from the fifty-five American transports, cruisers, and destroyers in the waters south of Savo Island. Though nearly all of the attackers were eventually downed, by the time the air battle was over, eighteen of Admiral Turner’s carrier aircraft had been lost, the transport USS Elliot had been sunk, and two destroyers were badly damaged. One of them—the USS Jarvis—headed for Noumea but sank en route. Though these losses weren’t insignificant, Vandegrift was more concerned that the two attacks had seriously disrupted the offload of supplies and equipment urgently needed by his Marines ashore.

  As darkness fell on 8 August, few of the transports had landed more than 30 percent of their cargo. Vandegrift importuned Admiral Turner to have the transports remain in the anchorage for another forty-eight hours. Shortly after Turner approved, Admiral Fletcher informed him that he would have to take Saratoga, Enterprise, and Wasp well south of Guadalcanal to refuel, since the loss of eighteen aircraft that morning made replenishing his carriers that far north too risky. Just hours later, MacArthur’s headquarters belatedly informed Turner that an Australian patrol plane had spotted several Japanese ships, “probable seaplane tenders” headed toward Guadalcanal from Rabaul.

  Lacking the kind of intelligence Station Hypo had provided at Midway, Turner and Va
ndegrift didn’t know that the Japanese group bearing down on them was actually a formidable surface action force comprising seven cruisers and a destroyer—all commanded by Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa. Operation Watchtower was about to come unraveled—and would soon live up to the nickname the Marines ashore had already given it—Operation Shoestring.

  IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY FLAGSHIP CHOKAI

  NORTH OF SAVO ISLAND, SOLOMON ISLANDS

  9 AUGUST 1942

  0530 HOURS LOCAL

  The senior Japanese naval commander in the South Pacific, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, was bent on vengeance. He had been humiliated by the losses at Midway, and within hours of being informed of the Marine landings on Tulagi and Guadalcanal immediately decided to counter-attack. On the afternoon of 7 August, he ordered every available combatant at Rabaul to sortie after dark and follow him south in his flagship, the heavy cruiser Chokai, to engage the American ships at Guadalcanal.

  A few minutes after 0100 on 9 August, Mikawa’s ships exited the southern end of the slot—the narrow passage between New Georgia and Santa Isabel islands—and entered Savo Island Sound north of Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal. The Americans, completely unprepared, first learned of Mikawa’s presence when his cruisers opened fire at close range with guns and torpedoes. The USS Chicago and HMAS Canberra were struck in the first volley and put out of action. Mikawa then split his force into two columns and swung north to engage the Vincennes, Astoria, and Quincy. Within minutes all three heavy cruisers were dead in the water, afire and listing heavily.

  Gunichi Mikawa. His ships were dubbed the Tokyo Express.