D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  When told that there was still money in the ship’s safe, Yamaguchi, one of the greatest of the Japanese naval commanders, ordered it be left alone. “We’ll need money for a square meal in hell,” he said.98

  USS YORKTOWN, HIT AT MIDWAY (NA).

  Not wanting to fight a night battle with Yamamoto’s battleships and unknown numbers of carriers that might be in the area, Rear Admiral Spruance steamed east, away from the enemy he had hurt far more than he realized at the time.

  After reassembling his damaged but still dangerous battle fleet—two light carriers, eleven battleships, eight cruisers, and dozens of destroyers—Yamamoto, still hoping for a last-minute victory, waited for the Americans to reengage. Only when he determined that Spruance and Fletcher wanted no part of him did he turn west and sail for home. It was the eighth of June, one of the blackest days in Japanese history.

  The Japanese lost four fleet carriers in the Battle of Midway and the Americans only one, Yorktown. Abandoned by her crew, she was sunk two days later by a Japanese submarine as the Navy tried to tow her home. Midway was the Imperial Japanese Navy’s first major defeat since 1592. When Yamamoto ordered a withdrawal, he turned to his worried officers on the Yamato: “I’ll apologize to the Emperor myself.”99

  The Japanese people were not told of the shattering defeat at Midway. Even the Army was not informed of the extent of the losses. When Mitsuo Fuchida returned to Japan on a hospital ship, he was not taken ashore until dark “when the streets were deserted. I was taken to the hospital on a covered stretcher and carried through the rear entrance. My room was in complete isolation. No nurses or corpsmen were allowed in and I could not communicate with the outside. It was like being a prisoner of war among your own people.”100

  Military intelligence as well as military might won the Battle of Midway; two letters, AF, changed the direction of the Pacific war. “Had we lacked early information of the Japanese movements, and had we been caught with carrier forces dispersed … the Battle of Midway would have ended differently,” said Admiral Nimitz.101 Working a twenty-hour day in a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor, dressed in a red smoking jacket and slippers, Commander Joseph Rochefort had given Nimitz the key to victory. It was the most important intelligence coup of the Pacific war.

  The Battle of Midway changed the course of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese First Air Fleet, the most modern in the world, lost not only four of its most powerful carriers but, just as critically, fully a third of its crack pilots. From this point on in the war, just six months after Pearl Harbor, the Imperial navy was thrown back on the defensive by America’s newest weapon, the carrier task force. “After Midway,” recalled Japanese navy minister Mitsumasa Yonai, “I was certain there was no chance of success.”102

  Later that summer, back at Honolulu, James Jones, now a corporal, watched “the victorious carrier pilots of Midway drunk and having fist fights on the lawns of the Royal Hawaiian…. None of them expected to come back, and they wanted everything they could get of living on the way out, and that included fist fighting.”103

  NEW GUINEA

  While American carrier power was altering the direction of the Pacific war, General Douglas MacArthur was planning a major offensive against Japanese strongholds in the dense, mountainous jungles of New Guinea. Most of the forces available to him were Australian infantry; Americans had not yet arrived in this theater in any numbers. This was to be the starting point for his march of revenge to retake the Philippines and liberate the men he had left behind.

  MacArthur had arrived in Melbourne on March 17, 1942, to take charge of the pathetically weak Allied force in Australia. With enthusiastic bravado, he decided to defend Australia by going on the offensive. He would begin at Port Moresby with a force that was a corporal’s guard compared to the Japanese arrayed against him. But by late July his engineers had built airfields and bomber strips. Then they moved 150 miles down the coast to Milne Bay at the extreme southwestern tip of New Guinea, and in this “green hell” they cut an air base out of the jungle, a starting point for a drive on Japanese concentrations at Buna and Gona on the island’s northeast coast.

  MacArthur hoped to move troops there by air. He did not believe it possible to mount an offensive over the towering, jungle clothed Owen Stanley Mountains that divide New Guinea as the breastbone divides a chicken, for only a single narrow trail leading through the village of Kokoda crossed this forbidding range. The Japanese thought otherwise. In July they ascended the Kokoda Trail from the Buna area and, on reaching the reverse slope, began to drive MacArthur’s Australian outposts before them. The fighting was prolonged and vicious. On August 25, Australians, reinforced by elements of the American Army, repulsed an attempted Japanese landing at Milne Bay, in what was the first Allied land victory in the Pacific war, and the first time a major Japanese amphibious landing had been stopped ashore. But it was not until mid-September that starvation, bombing, and stiff resistance on the ground halted the Japanese advance against Port Moresby and the Australians began chasing them north, back across the forbidding Kokoda Trail.

  RETREAT IN BURMA

  If the outlook in the Pacific was somewhat brighter late that summer, it was positively gloomy in Burma, where the Japanese had routed the undermanned Allies.

  Burma, a British colony, was one of the vital points in the Far East. From Lashio in the northeast ran the Burma Road, connecting at one end with Mandalay and Rangoon, at the other with Chungking in China. After the Japanese occupied the main Chinese seaports in 1937-38, this road was China’s lifeline to the outside world. Burma was also the key to India.

  By December 1941, Japan had massed some 200,000 troops in Siam (Thailand) and Indochina and had powerful air forces operating from bases in Siam. The invasion was launched in December but the main attack was made late in January by Siamese puppet troops. The British fell back on Rangoon, Burma’s largest port. Pounded by air, they called upon the Flying Tigers, the volunteer American pilots commanded by Claire Chennault.

  The Flying Tigers had been hired by Chiang Kai-shek in the summer of 1941 to defend the Burma Road. Flying obsolete P-40s, they had destroyed over 300 Japanese planes. When the Japanese invaded Burma, they shot down another forty-six planes, but there was no stopping the enemy onslaught. Late in February, the Japanese drove British Indian troops back toward Rangoon, which was evacuated in March, severing all supply routes for Allied troops in the interior. Chinese forces under American general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell came down from the north to help hold the line, but the Japanese brought another army in from Siam, cut the Burma Road north of Lashio, and forced Stilwell to retreat through an almost impenetrable jungle filled with king cobras and other vipers. “The retreat from Burma,” wrote correspondent Jack Belden, who was with Stilwell, “was one of the bitterest retreats in modern times…. Remnants of the Allied armies, six months after the finish of the Burma campaign, were still lost in the jungles, wandering at the base of the Tibet fastness, fed by airplane drops, but slowly dying of malaria, exhaustion, starvation, still unable to escape.”104

  By the end of May the Japanese conquest of Burma was complete, and so, too, the isolation of China. With the Burma Road gone, the only supply route to China was by air “over the Hump,” the Himalayas—one of the most hazardous air routes in the world.

  With Great Britain’s energies concentrated in Europe, North Africa, and the Atlantic, where it was fighting for both its Mediterranean empire and its very survival, it was never able to sufficiently supply its beleaguered forces on the Asian mainland or lend more than token assistance to the American naval effort in the Pacific. The Pacific war—not the war in China or Burma—became increasingly an American war, run by American commanders and fought mostly by American men, with invaluable assistance in the South Pacific from the Australians. And in the late summer of 1942 it was a war the Japanese were still winning.

  The Hard Way Back

  GUADALCANAL

  The first phase of the battle for the
Pacific ended at Midway. The second began with Guadalcanal, a remote island in the Solomons chain, ten degrees below the Equator. An epic land, air, and naval struggle, the Guadalcanal campaign stopped Japan’s triumphant expansion and put America on the offensive for the first time in the war. Guadalcanal was also the only Pacific campaign that American forces came perilously close to losing.

  From the sunny deck of his incoming troopship, Corporal James Jones looked out at what he thought was a piece of paradise: “the delicious sparkling tropical sea, the long beautiful beach, the minute palms of the copra plantation waving in the sea breeze, the dark band of jungle, and the dun mass and power of the mountains rising behind it to rocky peaks.”

  But when he landed, Jones found himself in “a pestilential hellhole.”1 It was oppressively hot and humid, with torrential downpours that soaked the men’s clothing and bedding and led to appalling outbreaks of skin infection and fungal diseases. The vine-choked rain forest blocked out the sun and was filled with slimy mud and rotting vegetation. This damp undergrowth gave off a vile, unforgettable smell and was a breeding farm for voracious insects and dozens of debilitating jungle diseases. And everywhere there were snakes and scorpions, and spiders as big as a man’s fist.

  A massive wall of blue-green mountains cut the island lengthwise, and in places coral ridges reached down from them to sweeping white beaches. Kunai grass grew on these ridges and looked splendid blowing in the tropical breeze. But the blades of the grass cut like a knife and the grass grew so high it sawed at men’s throats. And bordering the magnificent beaches were swamps infested with malaria-bearing mosquitoes. “If God ever created a hell-on-earth contest the island … would have made it to the finals,” said one Marine.2

  Guadalcanal was thinly populated by about 25,000 Melanesians and had no economic value. But recently and unexpectedly it had become the most important strategic spot in the Pacific. The Japanese had occupied the Solomons in the spring of 1942, and during that summer their army had begun constructing an airfield on Guadalcanal. Thanks to the intelligence of Commander Rochefort, the Americans learned of the airstrip even before the Japanese navy did. If the Japanese completed the airfield by August, as expected, their land-based bombers would control American shipping lanes to Australia, over which great amounts of men and supplies were moving weekly to reinforce Australian units that were being called back from North Africa. Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the United States Navy, was determined that this 6,500-mile long lifelife not be severed, and it was he who pressed for and prosecuted the first major American offensive in the Pacific theater, using every ship and Marine at his disposal.

  In the gray morning light of August 7, exactly eight months after Pearl Harbor, the 1st Marine Division, commanded by Major General Alexander A. “Archie” Vandegrift, a veteran of jungle warfare in Central America, landed 19,000 troops on Guadalcanal and the tiny neighboring islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo. It was the first American D-Day of World War II and America’s first large-scale amphibious landing since the Spanish-American War. Opposition was unexpectedly tough on Tulagi, where, with the exception of a mere twenty-three men captured, the garrision of nearly 900 combat troops and laborers fought to the last in bunkers, caves, and tunnels, showing what General Vandegrift called an “astonishing” willingness to die defending a small seaplane base.3 But the Guadalcanal landing was unopposed and the Marines moved inland to seize the airfield that was abandoned that morning by the badly outnumbered Japanese. The Marines named it Henderson Field in honor of a Marine pilot killed at Midway, and from this day it became the focus of the campaign.

  When the Marines landed, the Japanese had only about 2,300 men on an island not much larger than the state of Delaware, most of them construction workers at the crushed coral airfield. But in the coming months, both sides poured in reinforcements—the Americans to hold the airfield, the Japanese to retake it.

  MARINE CAMP, GUADALCANAL (USMC).

  HENDERSON FIELD, GUADALCANAL. THIS “PAGODA” WAS HEADQUARTERS FOR U.S. MARINE AND NAVY FLIERS (USMC).

  At first, things went badly for the Marines. A carrier force commanded by Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, a veteran of the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, covered the initial landing operations by a task force headed by Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, the tactician who would plan and direct most of the great Marine amphibious assaults in the Pacific. Fletcher feared his three carriers were sitting targets for Japanese aircraft in the area and abruptly left a day earlier than planned. This necessitated the withdrawal, as well, of Turner’s transports, which at the time were bringing in supplies and almost 2,000 additional men. It was a cowardly decision, and it left the abandoned Marines short of artillery, ammunition, and food—and without air cover and those extra 2,000 fighting men. After the Navy left, “there was a lot of talk about Bataan,” said one Marine.4 It was a siege now, and not even Washington was confident the Marines could be saved.

  Enemy reaction to the American landing was swift and devastating, for the American invasion was seen as a threat to Rabaul on New Britain and to Japanese plans for further expansion in the South Pacific. The next evening a naval strike force came racing through the Slot, the Americans’ name for the deep channels through the central Solomons, and pounced on the unsuspecting fleet that was in Savo Sound screening the American beachhead. Marine combat photographer Thayer Soule was nearby in a troopship waiting orders to head in to the beach. Most of the men had gone to bed. “At 0200 we were awakened by general quarters. The Japanese had arrived early. The sky near Savo [Island] was ablaze with orange and white flashes. Tremendous explosions shook our ship. After only a few minutes, the firing stopped. We could hear only the rain falling on the canvas overhead…. Except for the glow of a burning ship, the night was black once more.”

  Without losing a single ship, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa#8217;s expert night-fighting force, equipped with Long Lance torpedoes, the most devastating underwater weapons in the world, sank four heavy cruisers and inflicted nearly 1,800 casualties. Predatory sharks tore into the men as they hit the water. Sailors pulled out of the sea were so badly burned that corpsmen could find no place to stick hypodermic needles. It was the most devastating defeat suffered on the high seas by the U.S. Navy. Yet it could have been worse. “They could have crushed our landing, marooned our troops, destroyed our supplies, and crippled our navy for months to come. But they sailed away,” Soule wrote later.5 Mikawa had not dealt the “mortal blow” because he feared American carrier planes would hit him at first light. It was one of the great mistakes of the war, for Fletcher was fleeing south, out of range of Mikawa.

  That was thin consolation for the Marines who watched the last of the transports leave the next evening. “Bastogne was considered an epic in the ETO [European Theater of Operations],” writes historian William Manchester, a Marine veteran of the Pacific Theater. “The 101st Airborne was surrounded there for eight days. But the marines on Guadalcanal were to be isolated for over four months. There have been few such stands in history.”6

  The correspondent Hanson Baldwin summed up the Marines’ predicament after the Battle of Savo Sound. “It is as if the marines held Jones Beach, and the rest of the Long Island were loosely dominated by the enemy.”7

  Back in Washington, when Admiral King was awakened by a duty officer and handed a dispatch describing the disaster at Savo Sound, he couldn’t believe it. “They must have decoded the dispatch wrong. Tell them to decode it again,” he told the duty officer. As King said later, “That, as far as I am concerned, was the blackest day of the war. The whole future then became unpredictable.”8

  Douglas MacArthur wired Chester Nimitz recommending that the Marines be evacuated. Nimitz disagreed.9

  Thereafter the battle for Guadalcanal was a seesaw affair, a series of ferociously fought sea and air engagements and a long, punishing land campaign. Except in the mountains and jungles of New Guinea, Americans had never waged war under harder conditio
ns than those that the Marines—and later Army infantry reinforcements—encountered on Guadalcanal.

  The Marines had to hold the airstrip until they had enough men to drive the Japanese off the island. The Navy had to resupply and reinforce Guadalcanal and stop the Tokyo Express, the swift-running destroyer convoys that brought troops and supplies down the Slot from Rabaul. The Marines helped out with their own small air arm, the Cactus Air Force, commanded by Major General Roy S. Geiger. The pilots at Henderson Field lived on meager rations, battled malaria and dysentery, and were pounded day and night from both sea and air. Led by their ace, Captain Joseph J. Foss, who downed twenty-six enemy aircraft and won the Congressional Medal of Honor, they covered the naval supply effort and did excellent work against Japanese bombers and Zeros. They were helpless, however, to prevent the Tokyo Express from building up Japanese troop strength on the island. The Tokyo Express brought in reinforcements at night; the Marine and Navy pilots could fly effectively only in daylight. They flew every day and the pace and ferocity of the action began to wear them down. “When the medics used to tell us about pilot fatigue,” a haggard pilot told a war reporter, “I used to think they were old fuds. But now I know what they meant. There’s a point when you just get to be no good; you’re shot to the devil—and there’s nothing you can do about it.”10

  Some airmen broke under the strain, but most continued to fly, and their efforts helped the Marines to hold on. As two historians of the battle write, “During the time when adjacent waters were in dispute (which was also the critical period of the fighting ashore), it was marine airmen, assisted by navy and army pilots, who were instrumental in saving Guadalcanal by making it difficult for the Japanese to land reinforcements,” forcing them to rely on the Tokyo Express, which came under steady attack by American naval vessels as they gained proficiency in night fighting.11 When American carriers were sunk or knocked out of action in the waters of the Solomons, their orphaned fighters, dive-bombers, and torpedo planes flew to Henderson Field and operated from there. As one American Army officer cynically put it, “What saved Guadalcanal was the loss of so many carriers.”12