The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  The Pacific theater alone gave the Allies grounds for optimism. Hopes centered on the plan to seize Tulagi, which the Japanese had occupied in May. As yet the island of Guadalcanal was of incidental interest to the planners, and the officer Nimitz had placed in charge of Task One, Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, first heard of the possibility of attacking it on July 7 when he was in Melbourne conferring with MacArthur. The information came in a radiogram from Nimitz revealing that the Japanese were building a small airfield on Guadalcanal and suggesting that it be taken simultaneously with Tulagi.

  Both MacArthur and Ghormley agreed in principle, but both expressed their objections to the immediate launching of Task One; there was a single amphibious division, not enough shipping and a dangerous scarcity of planes. Moreover, the carriers of the Amphibious Force would have to remain too long in the Guadalcanal-Tulagi area far beyond the range of Allied land-based air protection and at the mercy of Japanese land-based aircraft. The Joint Chiefs ignored their separate recommendations and ordered the invasion to take place as scheduled; only by taking such prompt action could the Americans capitalize on the victory at Midway and seize the initiative in the Pacific. The operation was given a symbolic name, Watchtower.

  Guadalcanal was Japan’s southernmost outpost, significant merely as a base for any naval action in the Solomon area. It was a quiet, peaceful island 10 degrees below the equator, ninety-two miles long and thirty-three miles wide, about twice the size of Long Island. From the air it looked like a tropical paradise of lush green mountains, forested shores and colorful coral reefs. In reality it was paradise lost, a study in dramatic contrasts—peaks, barren hills and dense dark-green jungles, white cockatoos and ferocious white ants, myna birds and malarial mosquitoes; bone-chilling torrential rains and insufferably hot, dusty plains. It was an island of bananas, limes, papayas—and crocodiles, giant lizards, fungus infections, poisonous spiders, leeches and scorpions. “If I were a king,” author Jack London once said, “the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.”

  A series of blue-green, jagged, quiescent volcanoes towering as high as 8,000 feet ran down the island like a backbone, and the only possible place for military operations was the narrow strip of rolling hills and plains running along the north coast. And even this area was forbidding, cut by many rivers and by ridges with stretches of razor-sharp grass.

  In late 1567 a young Spaniard, Don Alvaro de Mendaña, set sail from Peru to find King Solomon’s gold mines and after eleven weeks came upon a verdant group of islands. He named them the Solomons but they contained so little gold and were so inaccessible that there were few visitors in the centuries to follow.

  The natives—woolly-headed, coal-black Melanesians—paid little attention to those who did come. They preferred to carry on their own bloody wars and headhunting to wiping out the pale-skinned intruders. They listened politely to missionaries, and it wasn’t until 1896 that the first important confrontation between East and West occurred. In that year the Albatros Expedition, sponsored by the Geographical Society of Vienna, landed on Guadalcanal and marched across the plains and foothills to mile-high Mount Tatuve. The eighteen Austrians planned to scale it and ignored the natives’ warnings that everyone on the island would die if any man “conquered” the mountain of their Great Spirit. The Austrian leader, the eminent geologist Heinrich Foullon von Norbeeck, replied that they had come a long way to climb Tatuve and were going to do it. The next morning while the Austrians breakfasted, a great number of natives quietly surrounded them but felt such pity for those who were about to die that they let them finish their meal before they attacked. The Austrians, however, fought so desperately that they drove off the natives, at a cost of six dead, including their intrepid leader. Thus ended the first battle of Guadalcanal.

  At the time of Pearl Harbor the Solomons were an Australian mandate. Its capital on Tulagi consisted of a small hotel, a wireless station, a street of shops and a few neat bungalows for officials. Neighboring Guadalcanal couldn’t claim that much civilization—all it had were several Catholic missions, a few coconut plantations and a Burns Philp trading station. A single trail led along the north coast through the plantations, but inland there were only native footpaths and it was the rare white man who dared follow them.

  One of these was District Officer Martin Clemens, a former Cambridge athlete of reknown, dedicated to keeping peace among the natives, who sometimes reverted to savage customs. Soon after the Japanese invasion he and four other men were stationed at various places on Guadalcanal as coastwatchers for the Royal Australian Navy. They were to radio reports on Japanese troop-ship and plane movements to the Directorate of Naval Intelligence in Australia. Like most of the other coastwatchers in the Solomons and Bismarcks, they were planters or civil servants who had lived for years in the area, and it was these intrepid men who had alerted Washington of the enemy build-up on the island. They continued to keep close watch on the enemy: there were 2,230 Japanese on the island, mostly laborers and engineers, and they had almost finished a primitive airfield for the Navy on the north coast.

  The overconfidence of the Japanese Navy that had led to Midway was not diminished by the defeat; the Navy high command did not expect a counteroffensive in the Pacific for months. Its false sense of security was not shared by Lieutenant Commander Haruki Itoh of the Naval Intelligence Center in Tokyo. Late in July his unit picked up two new Allied call signs in the southwest Pacific. Since both stations operated on the commander-in-chief circuit (4205 kc series) and both communicated directly with Pearl Harbor, Itoh deduced that either could be headquarters for a new enemy task force. On August 1 radio direction finders located one station in Nouméa, New Caledonia, and the other near Melbourne. The first, guessed Itoh, was the headquarters for Admiral Ghormley and the second the base of a British or Australian force. Consequently, he and his staff concluded that the Allies were about to start an offensive on the Solomons or New Guinea. An urgent warning was radioed to Truk and Rabaul, but it was ignored in both places.

  2.

  Though Ghormley was in nominal command of Operation Watchtower, he could not exercise tactical control from Nouméa, so he left this to Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, veteran of Coral Sea and Midway. Fletcher, as well as those who would have to carry out the assault, was not enthusiastic about Watchtower because of the meager forces available and the necessarily hasty preparations. It was nicknamed “Operation Shoestring.”

  On July 26 Fletcher summoned all unit commanders of the Expeditionary Force to a rendezvous in the South Pacific four hundred miles south of Fiji. The meeting on Fletcher’s flagship, Saratoga, opened on a note of comedy. A garbage chute inadvertently dumped milk over an admiral climbing aboard. At the conference in the wardroom, Major General Alexander A. (“Archie”) Vandegrift, the red-cheeked commander of the seventeen thousand Marines who would take Tulagi and Guadalcanal, found Fletcher lacking in “knowledge of or interest in the forthcoming operation.” Fletcher, who looked “nervous and tired,” openly discussed his doubt about the successful outcome of Watchtower. He was even more disheartened when he learned that it would take five days to disembark Vandegrift’s troops on Guadalcanal. Fletcher was the one flag officer present who had experienced the devastation of Japanese air attacks (he had lost Lexington at Coral Sea and Yorktown at Midway) and he blanched at the idea of exposing his three flattops (there was but one other heavy carrier in the Pacific) to such peril. “Gentlemen,” he said, “in view of the risks of exposure to land-based air, I cannot keep the carriers in the area for more than forty-eight hours after the [initial] landing.”

  Vandegrift controlled his temper; five days of air cover was cutting it dangerously thin. Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of the Amphibious Force, whose tongue was as sharp and whose nature was as crusty as King’s, concurred. But Fletcher’s sole concern was the possible end of American carriers in the Pacific. They would leave on D-day plus 3—and that was fin
al.

  Vandegrift was furious as he left the ship and his mood was not improved by a botched landing rehearsal in the Fijis. It was, he thought dejectedly, a complete bust, and he could only console himself that “a poor rehearsal traditionally meant a good show.”

  At dusk on August 6 Admiral Turner’s Amphibious Force approached the Solomons from the south. Four transports and four destroyer-transports were bound for little Tulagi while fifteen transports and cargo transports headed for Guadalcanal. They were escorted by eight cruisers (three of them Australian) and a destroyer screen. One hundred miles to the south lurked the Air Support Force: three carriers, a battleship, five heavy cruisers, sixteen destroyers and three oilers. At dawn the carriers would launch their fighters and bombers.

  The invasion fleet—a total of eighty-two ships—probed north at 12 knots through a light haze. On the transports, engineers checked engines on landing craft as boatswain’s mates tested falls and davits. The air was sticky and it took little movement to bring on streams of sweat. The order Darken Ships went out. In the sleeping quarters men lolled on bunks fully clad, playing cards, reading, or writing letters home. The mess halls were jammed with Marines listening to the roar of jukeboxes and watching buddies jitterbug alone or with partners. On American Legion the man who would lead the first unit ashore at Guadalcanal, Colonel Le Roy P. Hunt, was entertaining his officers with a one-man show. A bemedaled veteran of World War I—wounded and gassed—he clogged away to his own vocal accompaniment of “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.”

  General Vandegrift was at the rail of Turner’s flagship, McCawley, a transport known as the “Wacky Mac,” trying to see through the darkness. He was in good spirits despite the “bleak” prospects. The invasion could be what Wellington called Waterloo—a “near-run thing.” They were going in with little and without knowing how strong the enemy was. He pushed away from the rail and groped his way back to his stifling little cabin to finish a letter home:

  Tomorrow morning at dawn we land in the first major offensive of this war. Our plans have been made and God grant that our judgment has been sound.… Whatever happens you’ll know that I did my best. Let us hope that best will be enough.

  By midnight the men who would have to make the first American landing of the war were in their bunks—sleeping or trying to sleep. Two hours later lookouts sighted a black pyramid in the distance. It was Savo, a small volcanic island lying north just off the western end of Guadalcanal. The haze had lifted and the ships of the Amphibious Force, still undetected, slipped into calm waters. At two-forty a message was relayed to the flagship that Cape Esperance, at the tip of Guadalcanal, was thirteen miles away. The transport groups separated, those bound for Tulagi continuing north beyond Savo and the rest making a sharp right turn into the channel between Savo and Cape Esperance. The still waters gave the men on watch “the creeps.” The land breeze, usually welcome after weeks at sea, was rank with the stench of swamp and jungle.

  At three o’clock reveille sounded on McCawley. Vandegrift ate breakfast, and as the eastern horizon grew bright, returned to the deck. There was no sign of the enemy. Was it some trap? The transports edged toward their destinations: Beach Blue on Tulagi, and Beach Red, located near the center of the north coast of Guadalcanal, just three miles from the almost completed airfield.

  Around six-fifteen three cruisers and four destroyers belched fire in unison. Standing on the bridge of American Legion, correspondent Richard Tregaskis watched “the red pencil-lines of shells arching through the sky” toward Guadalcanal. Two minutes later, through the din, he could distinguish another roar, more distant. A cruiser and two destroyers were flinging shells at Tulagi.

  There was still no movement along either Beach Red or Blue. The Japanese apparently had been caught completely off-guard. Within thirty minutes all transports were in position. Dive bombers and fighters from the three carriers appeared overhead and began strafing the beaches and bombing-target areas. They were met with desultory antiaircraft fire.

  “Land the landing force!” intoned the loudspeakers.

  On the transports Marines lined up at debarkation stations. Men who had been raucous were mute. A few joked and several uttered the usual “Well, this is it.” The 36-foot personnel landing craft were let down by hand. Booms gently lowered the 45- and 56-foot cargo craft while Marines in green dungarees—rifles slung over backs, canteens bulging from hips, heavy packs filled with everything from head nets to fend off mosquitoes to personal mementos—clambered down debarkation nets that slammed into the ships’ sides with each gentle roll.

  At Tulagi, Marines scrambled ashore but saw no one. It was as if the island were uninhabited. At eight-fifteen their commander signaled: LANDING SUCCESSFUL NO OPPOSITION. An hour later the first boat grounded off Beach Red on Guadalcanal and the men dropped into the warm shallow water. Everyone expected a withering blast, but as they crossed the bare beaches and plunged into the jungle, not a shot was fired at them.

  From McCawley, Vandegrift was scanning 1,500-foot Mount Austen, which reared up behind the airfield. A plantation manager had called it “a hill only a couple of miles from the coast” but it looked like Mount Hood and was much farther inland. Was all the information so inaccurate? His men were held up only by the humid heat and a rain forest. Dripping with perspiration, often with no scouts ahead or flankers on either side, they blundered forward. Fortunately they met no enemy. The bombardment had driven almost all the Japanese back into the hills.

  Their superiors in Rabaul had heard about the invasion before the first shell fell. The radio operator at Tulagi signaled: LARGE FORCE OF SHIPS, UNKNOWN NUMBER OR TYPES, ENTERING THE SOUND. WHAT CAN THEY BE? It was obviously a hit-and-run raid, but Rear Admiral Sadayoshi Yamada, commander of the 25th Air Flotilla, sent out long-range search planes to investigate. Before they could report, another message came in from Tulagi—the last: ENEMY FORCES OVERWHELMING. WE WILL DEFEND OUR POSTS TO THE DEATH, PRAYING FOR ETERNAL VICTORY.

  Yamada summoned his squadron leaders and informed them that the scheduled attack on New Guinea was canceled; instead they were to hit the Guadalcanal area at once with every medium bomber, dive bomber and fighter that could get into the air. Tadashi Nakajima, commander of the fighters, protested. Guadalcanal was almost six hundred miles to the southeast and he would lose at least half his planes. The most experienced pilots alone could survive a mission of that range. The two men argued vehemently until Nakajima agreed to send eighteen planes.

  He told his men they were going to fly the longest fighter operation in history. “Stick to your orders, and above all, don’t fly recklessly or waste your fuel.” The pilots waited in their Zeros until the twin-engine bombers—twenty-seven in all—roared down the runways. Nakajima signaled his men and guided his own tiny fighter down a narrow strip covered with a layer of dust and ash from the active volcano rising in the background. Some days its violent eruptions threw rocks high into the air threatening the planes on the field, but today all that issued from the cone was a streamer of smoke.

  The bombers swept low over Bougainville on their way to Guadalcanal. A planter named Mason counted them and radioed Australia on the “X” frequency for emergency traffic: TWENTY-SEVEN BOMBERS HEADED SOUTHEAST. It was picked up by a number of stations, including Port Moresby, which relayed it to Townsville, Australia, and from there to the powerful transoceanic station at Pearl Harbor. Within minutes every American ship off Guadalcanal and Tulagi was ready.

  As the bombers neared their targets, the fighters caught up with them. Saburo Sakai, who had already shot down fifty-six planes, including Colin Kelly’s Flying Fortress, saw an awesome sight spread out before him—at least seventy enemy ships clustered off the beaches. The bombers swung around for their runs. All at once half a dozen enemy fighters appeared high above in the sun. They were new to Sakai, chubbier than any other American fighter he’d seen: they must be the Grumman Wildcats, a type reportedly in the area.

  The c
arrier-based Wildcats swept toward the bombers which were dumping their loads on ships near Savo Island. Sakai watched in frustration as the bombs fell around the ships throwing up harmless geysers of water. How stupid to expect to hit moving ships from four miles up! Why hadn’t they been armed with torpedoes?

  The Grummans made one pass through the bomber formation before they were driven off by the Zeros. Sakai was puzzled by the American pilots’ lack of aggressiveness—then he noticed a single Wildcat successfully holding off three Zeros. He gaped. Every time a Zero got the Wildcat in his sights, the American would flip his stubby plane away wildly and get behind the Zero—never had Sakai seen such flying. He loosed a burst at the Grumman; it rolled, came around in a tight turn and climbed straight up at Sakai. He snap-rolled but the American clung on. It took a series of tight loops before Sakai could get the Wildcat in his sights again. He sprayed between five and six hundred rounds into the plane.

  The Wildcat did not come apart or catch fire. How could it stay in the air? Where had the Americans got such planes and pilots? He opened his cockpit window and stared at his opponent, a big man with a fair complexion. He challenged his adversary with a gesture of “Come on if you dare!” but the pilot must have been seriously wounded, for he did not attack despite his advantageous position. Sakai felt admiration for the dauntless foe and reluctantly turned his 20-mm. cannon on the Grumman. The plane exploded, and far below Sakai could see the pilot drifting toward land in his parachute.

  The bombers had done no damage, and the transports headed back to the beaches to unload. But within an hour a second wave of bombers forced the transports to scatter again. In two strikes the Japanese had succeeded merely in delaying the landing operation for several hours. The same number of bombs could have blown up most of the supplies stacked on the beaches and jeopardized the troops on shore.