A World at Arms (69 page)

The minimal American Pacific counter – attack that seemed feasible after Midway was itself hastened forward by the receipt of news in
Washington that the Japanese had not only seized the base at Tulagi but were beginning to construct a major air base in the northern portion of the nearby large island of Guadalcanal. As the advances of the Allies and of the Japanese had inter-acted on New Guinea, so now the Solomons operation was rushed forward, lest the Japanese so entrench themselves there as to threaten not only any United States action in the islands but open the way for further Japanese advances to cut the route to Australia.
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Although the available resources in trained men, shipping, and air power were really not adequate, it seemed wiser to President Roosevelt and Admiral King to move quickly before the Japanese on Guadalcanal could become so strong that even a larger force would be likely to fail. The ensuing battle showed how closely the scales were balanced.

On August 7, the 1st U.S. Marine Division with some added units, escorted by much of the Pacific fleet, staged its landings on Tulagi and several small adjacent islands as well as on the north shore of Guadalcanal. The fighting on and near Tulagi was soon ended by the destruction of the Japanese forces there, but on Guadalcanal, everything turned out very differently from what either side had expected. The Japanese were completely surprised there as on Tulagi, and they did not realize for weeks either the substantial size of the American force committed or their determination to hold on. The Americans, on the other hand, not only were poorly informed about the terrain features of the island but did not anticipate the extent and continuity of the Japanese fixation on recapturing their positions.
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At first, all went very badly for the American landing force. As the Japanese reacted, the American carriers pulled away, leaving the marines without naval air support. The United States navy made a serious error in not immediately completing construction of the airfield, named in honor of Major Loften R. Henderson who had lost his life at Midway.
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Henderson Field became a critical base for the Americans – as it was expected to be for the Japanese – and became the focus of marine corps aviation as of Japanese recapture attempts for months. Even more disastrous for the Americans ashore was the decision to withdraw the transports with many of the supplies not yet unloaded as well as a portion of the marine division. Most spectacular of all was the naval battle off Savo Island in the night of August 8-9, when a Japanese naval force of five heavy and two light cruisers in short order sank three American and one Australian cruisers with almost no loss or damage to themselves. The worst defeat the United States navy had ever suffered exposed the transports to attack, but the Japanese commander, Admiral Mikawa Gunichi, decided that, in the absence of clear knowledge of what other United
States naval forces were in the area, it would be best to withdraw.
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The marines were now isolated, but began to be reinforced first by isolated ships and small groups of planes flown into Henderson Field, later by convoys. The Japanese in turn on August 17 initiated a major effort to reinforce their small remaining land forces on Guadalcanal.
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A long and bitter series of engagements followed as each side, determined to win the struggle, poured in additional forces. Repeatedly the Japanese sent convoys of transports and warships loaded with men to the island; repeatedly they shelled and bombed Henderson Field; repeatedly their troops assaulted the marines’ positions.
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The fighting on land, in which the marines learned under the most difficult terrain and weather conditions how to cope with the Japanese, slowly turned in favor of the Americans, who reinforced and eventually relieved the marines with army units.
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In October the situation looked so critical to the Americans that planes and supplies were rushed in to avert disaster;
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thereafter the issue was not in doubt.

During the six months of fighting on the island, there was a series of naval battles in the area. Japanese and American navy task forces covering reinforcing convoys clashed, with the Americans by now again often warned of the approaching danger by breaks into the Japanese codes and by “coast-watchers,” civilians who lived on the islands. In addition, the warships – usually destroyers-which were utilized by both sides to rush reinforcements for the land battle to the island were attacked by the air force, submarines and, occasionally, the navy of the other side. In this fighting both sides suffered substantial losses. First the Japanese and then the Americans lost a carrier; then the Americans lost still another carrier while two Japanese carriers were damaged;
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finally in an engagement running over several days in mid-November, the Japanese lost two battleships. In most of these engagements, both sides also lost cruisers and destroyers as the Japanese first did well and later began to suffer heavily in night engagements. The naval battle of attrition was being won by the Americans in October-November, even as the land battle turned against the Japanese.
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The repeated land assaults, sometimes combined with naval bombardments, had not crushed the American landing force; the Japanese navy
was increasingly dubious about the steady lasses in ships; the losses of naval and army airplanes were becoming more difficult to replace. At the end of December, 1942, the Japanese high command decided to begin an evacuation of what was left of their army on the island and, fooling the Americans into thinking that a new reinforcement offensive was about to be launched, succeeded in pulling out something over 10,000 men out of the more than 40,000 who had fought on Guadal-cana1.
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On February 7, 1943, the half-year-long battle was over. What did it all mean?

The fighting itself would be remembered by the survivors as one long nightmare; it took a full year’s rehabilitation before the 1st Marine Division could again be committed to battle. On the broader canvas of war, there were broader implications. The Americans learned here as in Papua that the Japanese were hard fighters but not invincible. When the odds were reasonable, and the leadership competent, the Allies could hold and defeat the seemingly invincible Imperial army and navy. But obviously only at great cost. It would be a very long and a very tough fight. As for the Japanese, they had seen that their basic strategy of defending the perimeter of their newly won empire was evidently not working the way they had planned. The assumption had been that the Americans would be unwilling to pay the price in blood and treasure to retake islands of which they had never heard, to be returned to allies for whose colonial empires they had only disdain. Here was proof that they would; and, in the face of this, the leaders in Tokyo displayed a bankruptcy of strategic thinking.

The Americans were committed to building up forces in England and at home for an assault on Germany. The Europe First strategy meant that there was little option for the United States but to send a steady trickle of reinforcements to the South Pacific in the hope that these could avert disaster, make up for losses, and begin to push the Japanese back. It is critical to note that the October crisis and the November victory on and near Guadalcanal coincided with the final preparations for an early landing and fighting in Northwest Africa. The leaders in Tokyo, however, did have choices. Once the major outlines of battle were drawn by late August, early September, 1942, the Japanese could do one of three things. They could write off Guadalcanal and concentrate their forces elsewhere, either on New Guinea or, probably more promising, in the Indian Ocean. A second possibility open to them, as it was not for the United States, was to allocate massive reinforcements, providing sufficient superiority to crush the American forces in the Solomons. At a time when the mass of Japan’s navy was intact and most of her army neither engaged nor about to be engaged elsewhere, this was
an obvious possibility. The third possible course of action – and the one adopted – was to do by choice what the Americans were doing by necessity, and that was to keep putting more and more resources in, never enough to overwhelm the enemy but in the end allowing only a salvage of what could be saved. This course of action lost Japan not only tens of thousands of men, hundreds of planes along with experienced crews, and numerous warships, but above all it lost her the strategic initiative for the whole second half of 1942. This meant that the opportunity to meet her European allies by an advance into the Indian Ocean slipped by unutilized; it was an opportunity which both Tokyo and Berlin saw at the time and which never came again.

The Germans and Japanese were in any case finding it difficult to cooperate; the troubles of the Western Allies with the Russians and with each other were harmony itself compared with the frictions between the Germans and the Japanese. The Japanese did not want any German economic or other presence in their newly won empire, and they resisted all efforts, whether by private firms or by government agencies, to restore or expand German activities and interests of any kind in Southeast Asia. Frictions, suspicions and anxieties resulted; and even Hitler’s ruling that there was to be no German interference in the economic affairs of Southeast Asia never completely calmed the troubled waters.
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Not unrelated to the friction over possible German economic interests in South and Southeast Asia were the difficulties in the direct economic relations between the Tripartite Pact partners. The practical problems of implementing any cooperative exchange between them will be reviewed in the next chapter, but the negotiations conducted for an economic agreement were certainly anything but friendly.
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Political cooperation also proved extraordinarily difficult. As already mentioned, they went back and forth on the subject of utilizing the Indian collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose.
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The project for sending him to East Asia came to be mixed up with an endless argument about the organizing of direct flights between the European and Far Eastern Axis partners, the thought being that Bose and others would fly East while a special delegation of high-ranking Japanese appointed by the Emperor and hence referred to as the Tenno-delegation could fly West.
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In spite of the success of one Italian plane in making the trip to Japan and the return journey as well in July 1942, or perhaps because there was undesirable publicity about this feat, the whole project came to nothing.
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One of the issues raised in the talks, however, illuminates a key divergence between the strategies of Germany and Japan in the war.

The Germans were at war with the Soviet Union and preparing a
major new summer offensive which they believed would succeed in fatally weakening Soviet power. A flight route to East Asia across the northern reaches of the Soviet Union seemed entirely appropriate to them. Furthermore, once they had launched their summer offensive, not only von Ribbentrop but Hitler too suggested to Tokyo late in June 1942 that now was the time for Japan to attack the Soviet Union and meet the Germans in Central Asia. The Japanese, on the other hand, hoping to recover from the setbacks at Coral Sea and Midway, looked to a renewed offensive against the United States and did not feel they could take on any additional enemy. Extraordinarily sensitive to any air attacks on the home islands after the April raid on Tokyo, they were worried that any overflight of the Soviet Union on a route between Europe and East Asia might lead the Russians to permit American use of Siberian bases. They had assured themselves of Russian neutrality before attacking the United States, Britain, and the Dutch, and they were not about to do anything that might offend their powerful neighbors, least of all as they were now obviously locked into a bitter and lengthy war with America.
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If the obvious signs of a continuing war with the United States, which did not end after six months as the Japanese had once anticipated, kept Tokyo from giving serious thought to the German request for an attack on the Soviet Union, the fierce campaign in the Solomon Islands and the way in which it pre-occupied the Japanese for half a year also determined how that war could and could not be waged.
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The main German interest in Japan’s conduct of the war in 1942 was not the fleeting suggestion in the summer that she attack Russia but the pressure all year for a major offensive into the Indian Ocean.
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As already mentioned, this had been Japan’s great opportunity and the Allies’ great worry in the first half of 1942, and the Germans kept repeating to their East Asian ally the urgency of such a step. Here was the opportunity to cut off the supply route to Russia across Iran and to the whole British North African theater. Hardly a single meeting between German and Japanese representatives in Berlin or Tokyo took place in 1942 without this topic on the agenda (and without the Allied cryptographers afterwards reading the Japanese telegraphic reports).
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The possibility came to the fore even more in the summer of 1942 for two reasons. In the first place, there is evidence to suggest that the Japanese themselves began to focus more distinctly on this question, in part because the British action on Madagascar showed how seriously the latter regarded that threat, in part because the insistence of the Germans made a small dent in the essentially provincial perspective of many in the Japanese military and naval hierarchy.

The second and perhaps more significant reason for renewed Japanese attention to this issue was the great German triumph in North Africa in June 1942. That campaign is examined later in this chapter, but its spectacular character and the grand visions it opened up for the Germans and Japanese must be seen in the context of a global conflict. Here appeared to be an opportunity for the Germans and Japanese to collaborate and even meet, and the Japanese under these circumstances did change their attitude of the first half of the year.
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They moved a substantial number of submarines to the western part of the Indian Ocean to interfere with the vital British supply route to Egypt (as well as to the India-Burma theater and to the Russians across Iran) and they promised to make a major effort in that direction in the fall.
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