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

by Toland, John

  Nearby the heavy cruiser Quincy was also on fire from a hit on a scout plane and its store of fuel. The cruiser made a perfect target and was caught in a devastating crossfire. “We’re going down between them,” Captain S. N. Moore phoned his gunners. “Give them hell!” Shells tore into Quincy, and Moore finally ordered the signalman to beach the doomed ship on Savo, four miles to port. A shell exploded on the bridge, flinging bodies like dolls, killing almost everyone. Moore lay near the wheel, mortally wounded. He tried to get up but fell back with a moan. The ship heeled rapidly to port and began sinking by the bow.

  The commander of the Northern Force, Captain Riefkohl of Vincennes, still didn’t know a battle was going on. He had heard Ralph Talbot’s report of a plane overhead just before midnight, but assumed like so many others that it was friendly and went to bed. The roar of guns, he surmised, had been set off by some small Japanese ship trying to steal past the Southern Force. From his bridge Riefkohl felt two underwater explosions and saw gun flashes and made another bad guess: the Southern Force was shooting at enemy planes.

  He was annoyed—but not perturbed—when searchlights illuminated the three cruisers of the Northern Force at 1:50 A.M. He radioed the Southern Force to shut them off. As if in reply, spouts shot up five hundred yards away. Captain Riefkohl at last realized he was in a fight. Vincennes’ 8-in. guns bellowed and one salvo hit Kinugasa, but the scout planes on Vincennes’ stern burst into flame and she, like Quincy, became an easy target. Riefkohl ordered a zigzag course to avoid the deadly assault, but two, perhaps three torpedoes exploded in a port fire room. Steam pressure dropped steadily. Another torpedo hit the No. 1 fire room. Vincennes wallowed in the water. Shell after shell ripped along the decks. Fires broke out in the movie locker and searchlight platform. Riefkohl was wondering if he should abandon ship. Then the Japanese searchlights blacked out. The firing ceased as abruptly as it had started. It was 2:15 A.M.

  Mikawa signaled: “All ships withdraw.” On every side he could see flaming wreckage. It reminded him of the water lantern festival at Lake Hakone. He was tempted to turn back and attack the transports, but his own ship had been hit three times and his fleet was scattered. It would take more than an hour to get back into battle formation; by the time he sank the transports it would be dawn and he would have to make the long run back to Rabaul in broad daylight at the mercy of American carrier-based planes. He remembered what Admiral Nagano had told him before he left Japan: “The Japanese Navy is different from the American Navy. If you lose one ship it will take years to replace.” He also remembered how contemptuously the 17th Army in Rabaul had talked of the U. S. Army; how easy it was to beat them in battle. Why then should he risk his precious fleet just to sink Army transports? He gave the order to make for Rabaul.

  Mikawa’s concern about the carrier planes was logical, but he need not have worried. Fletcher had already turned his back on the Solomons and within an hour would get Ghormley’s permission to retire completely from the area.

  Mikawa had inflicted on the U. S. Navy its most humiliating defeat at sea. Shortly after she started up The Slot, the battered Quincy went down, and a quarter of an hour later Vincennes took her final plunge. Then Astoria and Canberra—burning furiously in the cold, driving rain—sank beneath the waters of what would be known as Ironbottom Sound.

  At dawn the waters around Savo were heavy with oil, wreckage and half-dead men clinging to bits of flotsam. It was more crushing than the debacle at the Java Sea. The Japanese, who had not lost a ship, had destroyed four modern heavy cruisers, killed 1,023 men and wounded another 709. And though Mikawa had not attacked the transports, he left such terror in his wake that every Allied ship—warships as well as transports, cargo vessels and minesweepers—fled the area toward Nouméa; the abandoned Marines of Guadalcanal and Tulagi were short of ammunition and had enough food for little more than a month.

  What happened at Savo was bitterly debated and recollected with rancor and shame by the men of the U. S. Navy. No one was punished as a result of an official investigation, but Captain Riefkohl emerged a broken man who went about like the Ancient Mariner telling his story over and over of how Vincennes had kept Mikawa from destroying the transports by putting a shell into Chokai’s chart room. Captain Bode committed suicide.

  * The quotes came from a postwar interview between Marshall and his official biographer, Forrest Pogue. “With Chennault in China and MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific,” Marshall reminisced wryly, “I sure had a combination of temperament.”

  15

  Green Hell

  1.

  In Tokyo the victory at Savo overshadowed the significance of the American seizure of Guadalcanal. All the same, it was an annoyance to the Navy and with reluctance they informally asked Army General Staff operations officers if they would mind clearing the island. The Army asked how many troops would be needed for the operation. Not too many, said the Navy. The American invasion was little more than a nuisance involving a mere 2,000 Marines; the enemy could not possibly mount a major counterattack up through the Solomons for a year.

  The Army operations officers agreed to recommend the plan to Tojo, and before the end of the week the Army General Staff radioed General Hyakutake in Rabaul to mop up Guadalcanal with 6,000 men—a Special Naval Landing Force of 500 men; the Kawaguchi Detachment of 3,500, and the Ichiki Detachment, the 2,000 men who had been scheduled to seize Midway and were now back on Guam.

  Kiyotake Kawaguchi—the mustached general who had tried in vain to save Chief Justice Santos—was on Koror, one of the Palau island group some six hundred miles east of Mindanao, and from the moment he read his change of orders sending him to the Solomons, he instinctively guessed the import of the American invasion. He showed Nishino, the Mainichi reporter, a map of the Solomons and pointed to a tiny speck. “This is our new destination—Gadarukanaru. I know you think this might be small-scale warfare. It’s true there will be nothing heroic in it, but I’d say it will be extremely serious business.” Kawaguchi somberly predicted that the island would be the focal point in the struggle for the Pacific. “If you decide to continue on with us, you must put your life in my hands. Both of us will probably be killed.” Nishino said he would go and they shook hands.

  Two nights later, on August 15, Kawaguchi instructed his squad leaders to distribute three months’ pay to the troops. They were embarking on “a very important mission” and many would die. “Have the men send most of the money home and spend the rest on eating and drinking so they can enjoy their last night here.”

  Soon after dawn the 3,500 men of the Kawaguchi Detachment, still feeling the effects of their all-night celebration, began boarding two 10,000-ton transports. The decks of Sado-maru were hot from the tropical sun and burned Nishino’s feet through his sneakers. He watched the soldiers file into the spacious hold and pack themselves into the bunks. Electric fans brought blasts of warm air, so Nishino returned topside. The decks were steaming from a recent squall.

  As the ship weighed anchor, a large black dog paddled from the shore and scrambled up the last loading platform. He darted frantically around until he found his master, a young lieutenant named Ueno. “All right, I was wrong,” the lieutenant said apologetically to the dog; he had given him away the night before.

  For three days the transports plowed southeast toward Rabaul at 16 knots. The soldiers jogged around the decks singing military songs, lounged, did setting-up exercises. Their spirits were high despite the enervating heat. At supper they were issued warm beer, which put them in an exuberant mood: They had no fear of the Americans, they boasted; all they had to do was attack them at night. Their training manual said: “Westerners—being very haughty, effeminate and cowardly—intensely dislike fighting in the rain or mist or in the dark. They cannot conceive night to be a proper time for battle—though it is excellent for dancing. In these weaknesses lie our great opportunity.” They reminisced about their easy conquest of Borneo. “After we got through firing there wasn’t a blad
e of grass,” said one youngster. “I’m not going to let any grass grow on Dakarunaru.”

  “It isn’t Dakarunaru, it’s Gadarukanaru,” a sergeant corrected him. “Remember the name, will you?”

  Six destroyers—they carried the first echelon of the Ichiki Detachment—made a landfall off Taivu Point on the north shore, only twenty-five miles east of the Guadalcanal airstrip. Boats were lowered and just before midnight—it was August 18—Colonel Kiyono Ichiki and 915 men came ashore. Like the Marines, they met not a single round of fire.

  WE HAVE SUCCEEDED IN INVASION, Ichiki radioed Rabaul. His orders were to wait until the second half of his detachment arrived a week later and then retake the airstrip which the Japanese had almost completed in July. But he was so confident that he left 125 men to guard the beach and struck off up the coast.

  His presence on Guadalcanal was known to the Marine commander but only from inconclusive evidence—the wake of the destroyers. However, combined with reports of enemy landings west of the airstrip (this was the 500-man Special Naval Landing Force, which never became significantly involved in the fighting), it was sufficient to convince General Vandegrift that a major counterattack was imminent. He sent out probing patrols to the west, east and southeast. He also asked a native sergeant major named Vouza (he was a scout for Martin Clemens of the Australian Coastwatching Service) to take a patrol south, then circle back north to the coast.

  It took the bandy-legged Vouza and his men little more than a day to reach the sea. On August 20 they discovered the Ichiki Detachment. (It was within ten miles of the airstrip and Ichiki’s latest message to Rabaul had indicated his optimism: NO ENEMY AT ALL. LIKE MARCHING THROUGH A NO MAN’S LAND.) Vouza tried to creep in closer for more information but was captured and brought to Ichiki. When he was stripped a tiny American flag, a souvenir, fell out of his loincloth. Vouza refused to answer questions. He was tied to a tree; his face was beaten almost to a pulp by rifle butts. He stubbornly shook his head. He was bayoneted twice through the chest. Still he said nothing. A soldier thrust a bayonet through his throat.

  But Vouza was not dead, and at dusk when Ichiki and his 790 men moved on along the beach, he began chewing through his ropes. Finally he freed himself and with determination managed to crawl back to the Marine lines. He gasped out that “maybe two hundred and fifty, maybe five hundred” Japanese were approaching their perimeter. He fainted but came to long enough to say, “I did not tell them.”

  Ichiki was forming his troops in a coconut grove on the east bank of a sluggish stream between him and the airstrip, little more than a mile away. This was the Ilu River (mistaken for the Tenaru by the Marines), which formed a natural defense line, and Ichiki was certain there were Marines on the other side. At the mouth of the Ilu he found a narrow 45-yard-wide sand bar which penned up its green, stagnant water and formed a bridge almost to the other side.

  He was sure he had achieved surprise but the Americans were well dug in across the river waiting for him, alerted by Vouza and a Marine patrol which had captured enemy maps. At about one-thirty in the morning Ichiki gave the order to attack. Mortars arched their rounds toward the Americans and machine guns raked the jungle beyond the river. Then several hundred Japanese burst out of the grove and headed for the sand bar with fixed bayonets and cries of “Banzai!” On the run they fired from the hip and lobbed grenades.

  A volley of rifle fire met them head-on, followed by a whiplash of machine-gun fire. The first Japanese, officers brandishing sabers, were cut down. Canister shots from a 37-mm. gun toppled scores of men. A few made it across the Ilu but the fusillade forced the survivors to flee back to the coconut grove.

  Vandegrift was already mounting a counterattack from the south with his reserve battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Cresswell. By dawn Cresswell was across the river and leading his men down the east bank. At two o’clock in the afternoon he approached the coconut grove. Ichiki was cut off.

  But the Japanese would not surrender. Wounded men would cry out, and Americans who went forward to help were blown up by grenades or picked off by sharpshooters. The Marines were encountering a new kind of war, one without quarter. Vandegrift decided, therefore, to send in a platoon of light tanks.

  Late that afternoon five tanks clanked over piles of Japanese bodies on the sand bar and made for the grove, blasting canister shots from their 37-mm. guns. They butted into palm trees, knocking down snipers, and ran down cornered Japanese until the treads of the tanks looked like “meat grinders.” First Lieutenant Sakakibara and an enlisted man barely escaped being crushed by scrambling into the sea and hiding with their noses just above the water level.

  By dusk there was only a handful of Japanese left in the grove. They clustered around the wounded Ichiki, who clutched the regimental flag. “Burn the colors,” he ordered. The colorbearer poured gasoline on the flag, which was soaked with Ichiki’s blood, and set a match to it just as a tank found the little group. Before Ichiki could be mowed down with the others he drew his sword and committed hara-kiri.

  Pieces of bodies, blown to bits by Marine howitzers or shredded by canister, littered the grove. The trail of tanks could be followed by tread tracks over mangled bodies. There was not a sign of life in the grove. Almost 800 Japanese had been killed, at the cost of 35 dead and 75 wounded Americans. When it was dark the sole Japanese survivors, Lieutenant Sakakibara and his companion, crept out of the sea and headed back along the coast to their 125 comrades who had been left to guard the supplies.

  For the first time both Army and Navy leaders in Tokyo began to take the American presence in Guadalcanal seriously. The Army plan to retake the island now also had Admiral Yamamoto’s full support. He saw Guadalcanal as another opportunity for Combined Fleet to lure the Americans into the decisive sea battle.

  Four slow transports, already bound for Guadalcanal with the rest of the Ichiki Detachment and five hundred sailors trained as infantrymen, were instructed to turn back and rendezvous with the Guadalcanal Supporting Forces, which had hastily been assembled by Yamamoto and was sailing south toward the Solomons. In the lead were six submarines, followed closely by the overall commander, Vice Admiral Kondo, and a group of six cruisers and a seaplane carrier. Behind steamed the newly formed Kido Butai, still led by Nagumo, but with only two big carriers, Zuikaku and Shokaku, and an escort of two battleships and three heavy cruisers. Accompanying them was the Diversionary Group—the light carrier Ryujo, a heavy cruiser, and two destroyers—which was to be sent out at the psychological moment as bait for the American carriers.

  It was not long before the Americans learned of the formidable surface force advancing toward them from the north and they were forced to meet this new threat head-on. Admiral Ghormley sent out Admiral Fletcher to do battle with Task Force 61—three large carriers (Enterprise, Saratoga and Wasp), seven cruisers and eighteen destroyers. By dawn on August 23 Fletcher was less than 150 miles east of Guadalcanal, in perfect position to block the Japanese charge. Several hours later an American patrol plane sighted the four Japanese transports and their immediate escort—a light cruiser and five destroyers under the command of an obstinate rear admiral, Raizo Tanaka—and radioed back that troopships were heading for Guadalcanal. Tanaka was as wily as he was aggressive. He kept bearing south until 1 P.M., then put the transports out of range of aerial attack by reversing course. Five hours later Kondo’s large force, which was forty miles to the east and still undiscovered, did the same.

  Tanaka’s move misled Fletcher into assuming that there wouldn’t be a major engagement for several days and he sent the Wasp group south to refuel. It was an unfortunate decision that deprived him of one third of his power on the eve of battle.

  Just before dawn on August 24, the Diversionary Group swung back south to tempt Task Force 61. Then the rest of the Japanese armada also reversed course, lurking out of sight and waiting for Fletcher to take the bait. At 9:05 A.M. an American patrol plane discovered the little carrier and her three escorts 28
0 miles northwest of Task Force 61. Fletcher hesitated even after it was reported two and a half hours later that the Diversionary Group was less than 250 miles away. But at 1:30 P.M. his skepticism vanished when his radar blips showed planes heading for Guadalcanal.

  They were fifteen fighters and six bombers from Ryujo bound for the airfield on Guadalcanal. Recently completed (named Henderson Field after Major Lofton Henderson, who was killed at Midway), it was the base for two Marine squadrons—nineteen Wildcat fighters and a dozen Dauntless dive bombers—and fourteen P-400’s from an Army fighter squadron.

  Fletcher moved fast, and within fifteen minutes thirty dive bombers and eight torpedo bombers were launched from Saratoga. In two hours the Dauntlesses found Ryujo and began diving at her from 14,000 feet. In the midst of the attack, six Douglas Devastators swept in and released their torpedoes from 200 feet. At least four bombs and one torpedo smashed into the little carrier. She listed 20 degrees to starboard and came to a dead stop.

  Ryujo was doomed but she had accomplished her main purpose; she had diverted Fletcher’s attack and allowed Kido Butai to locate Saratoga and Enterprise. Fifty-one Wildcats tried to screen the two carriers, but twenty-five Aichi dive bombers broke through. At exactly 5:14 P.M. a bomb penetrated through five decks of Enterprise and exploded in the chief petty officers’ quarters. Two more bombs with instantaneous fuses ripped up the flight deck. By the time the raging fires were brought under control, seventy-six men had died and Enterprise was forced to retire toward Pearl Harbor for major repairs.

  With a single carrier left, Fletcher did not relish a night battle and wisely decided to turn south. Nagumo chased him until 8:30 P.M., then gave up. The Battle of the Eastern Solomons was over. Like Coral Sea, it appeared to be inconclusive. A small Japanese carrier had been sunk, while Fletcher had been deprived of the services of Enterprise for at least two months. More important, however, Fletcher lost seventeen planes to Nagumo’s seventy, and the Japanese could not afford the loss of so many experienced crews. As at Coral Sea, the Japanese imagined they had inflicted heavy losses on the Americans. Returning pilots reported they had sunk or heavily damaged three carriers, a battleship, five heavy cruisers and four destroyers. And one of these carriers was allegedly Hornet (she wasn’t in the battle); Doolittle’s sneak attack on Tokyo had been avenged.