Two days later Hirohito’s naval aide J departed Yokosuka on a six-week inspection tour of the Central and South Pacific theaters. Jo’s itinerary was a testament to the thinking of Japan’s military leaders, who in their March “Assessment of the World Situation” (and again in July and November) estimated that the earliest the Americans would be able to launch their main counteroffensive would be the second half of 1943;33 ergo, it was safe for Japan to continue its offensive below the equator. The enemy would not think it worth paying the price to reestablish the status quo over such vast distances.
J traveled first to Saipan in the Marianas Islands, then to Truk in the Carolines, and from there to Rabaul on New Britain Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, where the navy was establishing a major base that could be used to support advances further to the southwest. From there, he went to Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands, then to Wake, Guam, Palau (now Belau), Peleliu, and the new Japanese seaplane base at Davao, on Mindanao in the southern part of the Philippine Archipelago. He continued his tour by visiting the Dutch East Indies. His return trip took him to Subic Bay and Manila in the Philippines, and finally home by plane to Yokohama (stopping en route at Saipan) on April 23. During his long journey Jo sketched pictures of tropical flowers and collected seashells and American films for the emperor’s viewing, including Walt Disney cartoon films found on Guam.34 J’s diary conveys no sense of how radically overextended Japan’s lines of transportation and communication had become. Indeed, he seemed completely unaware of the enormous and insoluble logistical problem that maintenance of such a far-flung system of bases implied for a nation whose war power was so inferior to that of its enemies.
III
While Imperial Headquarters was still reeling from Midway, Nazi Germany came to the rescue in the form of the Wehrmacht’s summer offensive against Russian armies in the Soviet Union and General Rommel’s successes against the British in North Africa. As if in compensation for the shock of Midway, Hirohito and the officers of the high command seem once again to have invested Germany with much greater military and industrial power than it actually possessed.35 On June 26, 1942, Hirohito asked Kido: “Not only has the German army captured Tobruk in North Africa, it is continuing its advance into Egypt and has occupied Salûm and Sidi Barrani. Should we send the Führer a special imperial message congratulating him on his victories?”36 Kido dissuaded him because the Führer had never congratulated the emperor. Nevertheless, Hirohito and the high command had concluded it might be possible to contribute to an eventual German offensive coming from the Middle East by launching an attack on Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in the Indian Ocean.
On July 11 Hirohito sanctioned Nagano’s request to abandon the operation to capture strategic points in Fiji and Samoa, which Imperial Headquarters had decided—and he had approved—on May 18. During his briefing of the emperor, Nagano suggested a campaign to destroy enemy ships and communications in the Indian Ocean. Such an operation would “cut communications between the United States and Australia, prevent Australia from being used as a U.S. base to launch attacks against Japan…and make our defenses impregnable.”37
Meanwhile, five thousand sea miles from Tokyo, at Combined Fleet headquarters in Rabaul, plans were going forward to send construction troops and laborers to build an airstrip and naval facilities on Guadalcanal. As that work was nearing completion, on August 6 (two months after Midway) Sugiyama came to the palace to brief the emperor on the progress of the New Guinea campaign. The emperor used the occasion to make a disconcerting query: “I am not so sure the navy air [force] can count on effective enough army support in the landing operations in New Guinea. Don’t we need to send in the army air too?”38 It was just the sort of question that Hirohito, who knew the navy’s total losses in skilled pilots, would ask. Sugiyama replied that the army was not considering doing so. He might have added (though he apparently did not) that Imperial Headquarters Army Department was actually withdrawing army air force groups from the south (mainly Rabaul) in order to begin the offensive against Chungking, which the emperor had urged in May. Sending army fighter pilots to the distant New Guinea and Solomons area was certainly not something the army cared to do.
The very next day, August 7, American forces under Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur, the commander in charge of the Southwest Pacific Area, began their first, limited offensive thrusts against exposed Japanese positions in the south. Nineteen thousand U.S. Marines, divided into two groups, landed on the hot, wet, disease-ridden islands of Tulagi and neighboring Guadalcanal—ten degrees below the equator in the southern part of the Solomon chain. Two days later a nighttime naval battle took place off Savo Island, near Guadalcanal. Japanese shells and torpedoes sank four American heavy cruisers. The ensuing land and naval battles of Guadalcanal would continue for six full months, irrevocably crippling the Japanese navy air force and marking the first true turning point in the Pacific war.
From the outset the Imperial Navy’s landing operation on Guadalcanal had been poorly planned, and the emperor had worried about it. Would the services be able to overcome their jealousies and cooperate in consolidating their newly won positions in the Solomons and in eastern New Guinea, where preparations were underway for launching a ground attack on Port Moresby?39 When American naval, air, and ground forces attacked Guadalcanal, the high command in Tokyo was stunned. The chiefs of staff and the operations officers had assumed, correctly, that the major Anglo-American counteroffensive would not start until 1943. They were utterly unable to conceive that, in the interim, their enemy could execute with incredible speed the same sort of leap across the Pacific that they themselves had pulled off seven months earlier at Pearl Harbor.40
Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama agreed to the navy’s request for an immediate deployment of troops to Guadalcanal to prevent an American buildup, but not perceiving the seriousness of the situation, he threw in only one small unit from Guam.41 Most of this Ichiki Detachment (approximately fifteen hundred troops), was destroyed three days after landing on the island. In early September the army threw in a second small unit—the Kawaguchi Brigade (approximately three thousand soldiers)—from Palau, which attacked American positions on the night of September 13 and was also largely decimated. Later, early in October, the Seventeenth Army in the South Pacific decided to land its Second Division—some twenty thousand elite infantry troops—on Guadalcanal. Joining the starving survivors of earlier units, they soon launched two more suicidal attacks on American positions in the jungle; once again the outcome was failure. Thereafter the army landed more reinforcements, including parts of the Thirty-eighth Division.
Hirohito’s reaction to the various land, naval, and air battles associated with Japan’s loss of Guadalcanal is telling. When informed of the American landing, he immediately recognized the potential danger—“I wonder if this is not the start of the American-British counteroffensive?”42—but felt that Japan had to maintain its winning momentum while steadily building up its reserves of vital oil, rubber, and other resources. Despite his doubts about becoming locked in to a particular island battle, he continually encouraged his commanders in the Solomons to stay on the offensive and strike hard with all the weapons and men they could muster. Sugiyama had told the emperor on September 15, after the Ichiki Detachment had been effectively destroyed, that “I am sure it [Guadalcanal] can be held.” Hirohito sought to hold him and Nagano to their word by disclosing his doubts about whether the army and navy really had the will to do the job. His pressure on them strengthened their resolve to retake and secure the island, and thus contributed to the very thing he feared most: getting trapped in a war of attrition.
For Hirohito and Prime Minister Tj the first month of the Battle of Guadalcanal was also a time of political crisis. For months the army had been planning to establish a new Greater East Asia Ministry that would have jurisdiction over all Japanese-occupied territory in the southeast and China, with the exception of Taiwan, Korea, and Sakhalin. Foreign Minister Tg disagreed with the plan and ref
used to compromise on ceding further political authority to the army. Moreover, Tg had learned about the navy’s defeat at Midway and the battles on Guadalcanal, and may have secretly wanted to shake up the cabinet for failing to increase war power sufficiently.43 When, on August 29, 1942, Tj’s secretary informed Tg about the army’s plan to establish the Greater East Asia Ministry at the next cabinet meeting, Tg was firmly negative. Thereupon Tj went to the palace and explained the situation to the emperor. Hirohito immediately decided to block any effort by Tg to topple the cabinet. As far as Tj was concerned, that settled the matter.
Armed with Hirohito’s strong support, Tj brought the issue to a head during the September 1 cabinet meeting, at which time Tg threatened to resign. During the recess of the meeting, while Tg returned to the Foreign Ministry, Hirohito sent Navy Minister Shimada Shigetar to act as a mediator. Tg now proposed a compromise plan, but Tj high-handedly refused to consider it, whereupon Tg quit and Hirohito immediately accepted his resignation. The next day he allowed Tj (temporarily) to assume the portfolio of foreign minister. Determined not to let the cabinet fall while Americans were taking the offensive in the Solomons, Hirohito stood solidly behind Tj. Under Hirohito’s strong auspices, Tj was on the way to consolidating his “dictatorship.”44
Throughout the fall of 1942, while Hirohito was discussing with the high command, and privately with Kido, the chain of battles in the Solomons, the toll in Japanese fighter planes, warships, transports, and casualties mounted steadily. Though the troops on Guadalcanal were dying of untreated tropical sickness, fever, and starvation, Hirohito kept demanding greater efforts from them. Only toward the very end of 1942 did he finally abandon hope of eliminating the American presence on Guadalcanal. His tenacity and offensive spirit influenced the high command and perhaps inspired the sick, malnourished defenders in the Solomons, who fought bravely to the very end. At the same time, and more important, his unyielding determination to hold Guadalcanal, combined with the navy’s rigid notion of victory through a decisive sea battle, contributed to Japan’s long delay in shifting to a defensive posture in the Pacific.
Hirohito intervened a second time on the Guadalcanal front after the Imperial Army launched another unsuccessful offensive there on October 23–24. This was followed a few days later by a second major sea battle in which the Imperial Navy engaged the American fleet, sinking the aircraft carrier Hornet and a destroyer.45 According to the diary of Vice Admiral and Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet Ugaki Matome, on October 29 Hirohito issued an imperial rescript addressed to Combined Fleet Commander Yamamoto Isoroku. The rescript stated: “We are deeply pleased that this time in the South Pacific the Combined Fleet has inflicted great damage on the enemy fleet.” Hirohito added an extra line: “However, we believe the war situation is critical. Officers and men, exert yourselves to even greater efforts.”46
Ugaki went on to write that a separate radio message came to him later that evening saying that after the emperor had handed Nagano the rescript intended for Admiral Yamamoto, his majesty had cautioned him: “What I want to tell you now concerns the latter part of my rescript. Guadalcanal is the focal point of the war and an important base for the navy. So don’t rest on small achievements. Move quickly and recapture it.”47 When the emperor’s rescript and verbal warning to Nagano were radioed to the Combined Fleet Headquarters on Rabaul, Ugaki immediately replied, “We are dismayed by the concern our failures on Guadalcanal have caused the emperor. Only the quickest possible achievement of our goals can excuse us before his majesty.”48 The navy was not only unable to improve on its “small achievements,” but within two weeks it lost the battleships Hiei and Kirishima to a radar-equipped American battle group in the third great engagement in the Solomons.
Throughout the bitterly fought ground and sea battles for Guadalcanal, the emperor put constant psychological pressure on his naval commanders to recapture the island, and on three different occasions—September 15, November 5, and November 11—he pressed the army high command to throw in more troops and planes to assist the hard-pressed navy.49 At first Sugiyama was reluctant—partly because army pilots were inexperienced in transoceanic combat but also because he planned to reinforce the North China Area Army and employ it, supported by the army air force, in a major offensive to reach Chungking.50 However, the emperor’s persistence forced his senior generals to relent. After his second request for army air force participation on the Solomons front, Sugiyama reported to him the next day that the army had decided to deploy its air power to New Guinea and Rabaul. This change in an ongoing operation had been opposed by both upper-and middle-echelon officers. Hirohito, nevertheless, forced the change.51
When Sugiyama reported on September 15 that “not much can be expected from the landing” of a second detachment of troops on Guadalcanal, the emperor not only pressed him to order the army air force into the battle but jumped far ahead by asking when it might be possible to occupy Rabi, the easternmost corner of New Guinea. Even while worried about Guadalcanal, Hirohito was already projecting a fresh offensive in New Guinea.52
In conveying his feelings to the fighting forces throughout the fall of 1942, Hirohito pointedly praised the navy for its successes in the sea battles of the Southwest Pacific, thereby making it extremely difficult for the navy to call a halt to the Guadalcanal campaign. Hirohito kept the same pressure on the army, telling the troops in one rescript, “try to live up to my trust in you,” implying that the troops were not yet meeting his expectations.53 Nevertheless, by November 1942, it had become clear to the emperor and Tj that the recapture of Guadalcanal was impossible, and that its abandonment would not necessarily unravel the whole Solomons front. Indeed, it might facilitate operations at other strategic points.
Hirohito’s worries about the Solomons campaigns and the war situation in Europe, which was also worsening for the Axis, caused the army, around this time, to cancel its preparations for Operation Gog. Yet at Eighth Area Army headquarters in Rabaul, where distrust of the navy was strong, most senior staff officers were too full of pride to admit openly the need to withdraw from Guadalcanal, let alone reorganize the entire army so that it might profit from its defeats.
The continuing drain on men and matériel, which led to the decision to withdraw from Guadalcanal, opened a new phase of sharp discord between the services over the allocation of ships and scarce raw materials. Japan’s losses in naval warships were roughly equivalent to those sustained by the Americans. However, in just two months of fighting around Guadalcanal—October and November 1942—the Imperial Navy lost fifty-nine merchant ships, amounting to 324,000 tons, as compared to thirteen to fifteen, or 61,000 tons, lost monthly between the start of the war on December 8, 1941, and the end of September 1942. Most of the sunken vessels were transports loaded with troops, weapons, and supplies. As a result, conflict arose between the Army Ministry and the General Staff over whether to use as troopships and weapons carriers those transports that had been specially designated to move raw materials from Southeast Asia.54
Apart from its losses in naval and merchant ships, the Japanese navy lost 892 planes and 1,882 pilots during the six-month-long Guadalcanal battles from August 1942 to the final withdrawal in early February 1943. Yamada notes that this was “two and a half times the number of planes and fifteen times the number of pilots lost at Midway.”55
Despairing over these enormous losses in a battle of attrition he had wanted to avoid but had actually helped to bring about, Hirohito made a special two-day trip to worship at Ise Shrine on December 12, 1942.56 On December 28 he told his chief aide, General Hasunuma, that he remained dissatisfied with the plans of the chiefs of staff, who had just made a formal report summarizing the war situation for 1942. They had promised to submit their plans for withdrawal from Guadalcanal, complained the emperor, but “[w]hat I want to know is how they propose to force the enemy to submit. The situation is very grave indeed. I believe we should now convene an imperial conference in my presence, and it makes no di
fference whether we hold it at the end of this year or the start of next. I am ready to participate at any time.”57
The Imperial Headquarters Conference was held on December 31, 1942. The chiefs of staff reported they would cancel the attempt to recapture Guadalcanal, and the withdrawal of troops would begin at the end of January. Hirohito sanctioned that decision but insisted, “It is unacceptable to just give up on capturing Guadalcanal. We must launch an offensive elsewhere.” Sugiyama promised to “take the offensive in the New Guinea area and restore the morale of the troops.”58 By placing their hopes on a new offensive in New Guinea, Hirohito and the General Staff delayed once again Japan’s strategic shift to the defensive in the Pacific.59
On New Year’s Day 1943 the new head of the First Department, Maj. Gen. Ayabe Tachiki, flew to Rabaul to transmit the emperor’s Guadalcanal withdrawal order.60 At Hirohito’s insistence the high command now planned to secure strategic points in the Solomons north of New Georgia and Santa Isabel, and north of the Stanley Mountains, which run like a spine down the length of New Guinea. The focus of battle would shift to New Guinea. The navy would defend New Georgia, Santa Isabel, and some other small islands in the central Solomons; the army was to defend in the northern Solomons area, including the islands of Buka, Bougainville, and Shortland.61 Tj, in his combined role as army minister and prime minister, had had to apply enormous pressure on the high command to bring about this change. Accepting, if not satisfied by, his commanders’ promises, Hirohito now authorized withdrawal of the Japanese survivors from Guadalcanal (more than eleven thousand mostly broken men from a force that at its peak had numbered approximately thirty thousand). He thereafter closely attended the progress of the difficult evacuation, which the navy completed on February 7, 1943.62
IV
The United States had ended the overstretched Japanese offensive in the Pacific by taking Guadalcanal. The war was now entering the phase of protraction and defense. Imperial Headquarters nevertheless still delayed any major contraction of its Pacific defense lines. American, Australian, and New Zealand forces confronted reinforced Japanese troops in jungle fighting at Lae, Salamaua, and Finschhafen in New Guinea, pushing the Japanese back on the defensive before they had time to consolidate their gains. Hirohito and his chiefs of staff studied their maps and decided to strengthen their remaining strategic positions in New Guinea and the Solomons. The Army General Staff in Tokyo was aware of the treacherous terrain and climate the troops had to operate in, as well as their deficiencies in transport, air power, provisions, artillery, and ammunition. So too, in a distant, more abstract way, was Hirohito. Yet on January 26, 1943, he opposed any retreat from the Munda airfield on New Georgia (some 180 miles from Guadalcanal) since that would mark a movement back from the line of defense agreed to only three weeks earlier. Admiral Nagano, chief of the Navy General Staff, reaffirmed the navy’s intention to hold at Munda, though he had earlier hinted to the emperor that Munda, under American naval bombardment since early January 1943, could well be abandoned.63
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan Page 47
