Fortress Rabaul (52 page)

Few Allies, if any, fretted about the double standard. The Japanese were regarded as murderous and cruel for gunning down Moore’s crew, whereas the Allied airmen believed their own actions were justified. Few probably stopped to consider what would have happened if Moore’s crew had
not
been strafed. In basic terms, the outcome would have been the same. The parachutists had no alternative but to come down in the midst of the burning, sinking enemy convoy—and there was virtually no possibility of rescue by an Allied plane. Any survivors who fell into the hands of the Japanese would have been treated with inconceivable brutality, which means the men of Moore’s crew were doomed, no matter what.

So the slaughter went on. Some airmen used revenge as a motive; others rationalized that the enemy had to be prevented, by any means, from reaching New Guinea. Among most of the aircrews, no one objected
to the strafing of helpless Japanese. To the contrary, according to the 63rd Bomb Squadron’s war diary, “
Every man in the squadron
would have given two months’ pay to be in on the strafing.” Pilots in RAAF 30 Squadron allegedly found it “distasteful,” but they participated.

EXCEPT FOR THE TASK of mopping up small groups of survivors, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea concluded on March 4 when Japanese aircraft finished off the drifting
Tokitsukaze
. General Kenney, scheduled to leave at dawn for a trip to Washington, D.C., awakened MacArthur at 0300 and informed him of the victory. Basing his information on the early reports from Port Moresby, Kenney told MacArthur that Allied aircraft had sunk six destroyers or light cruisers and eleven to fourteen merchantmen, shot down sixty enemy planes and “probably destroyed” twenty-five more, and killed upwards of fifteen thousand Japanese. The cost: four Allied planes shot down and two crash-landed, with casualties of thirteen dead and twelve wounded.

Kenney had never seen his boss so happy. MacArthur immediately drafted a message to the participating units, which Kenney forwarded to General Whitehead along with a personal endorsement: “
Congratulations on that stupendous success
. Air Power has written some important history in the past three days. Tell the whole gang that I am so proud of them I am about to bust a fuse.”

Three days later MacArthur issued a communiqué in which some of the claims had been reduced, others revised upward. Soon thereafter the victory was hailed in newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts all across America. The Japanese had allegedly lost three light cruisers, seven destroyers, twelve merchant ships, more than one hundred aircraft, and fifteen thousand troops. “
Our decisive success
cannot fail to have a most important effect on the enemy’s tactical plans,” stated MacArthur. “His campaign, at least for the time being, is completely dislocated… . Merciful Providence has guarded us in this great victory.”

The victory against Operation 81 had been absolute—that much was true—as all eight transports and four of the eight destroyers were at the bottom of the sea. However, aerial claims had been greatly exaggerated. A total of eight Zeros had been destroyed on March 3, while thirteen Oscars were damaged. The following day, seven Oscars were shot down and three others damaged. But the most devastating effect on the Japanese was the
loss of many tons of equipment and supplies—materiel that the garrison at Lae desperately needed.

Accounting for the number of Japanese killed is less precise. Estimates vary regarding the number of survivors pulled from the water on March 3 and returned to Rabaul, ranging from a low of 1,400 men to a high of 2,700. Imperial Navy submarines rescued about 275 more, and over the next few weeks several small groups of survivors fetched up on nearby islands. Many of the castaways were subsequently killed or captured. One group sailed hundreds of miles to Guadalcanal in a lifeboat, only to be cut down by an American patrol. In the final tally, probably between 3,000 and 3,500 soldiers and sailors perished during what became known as the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. More importantly, of the 6,000-plus troops embarked, only about 900—including those rescued from
Kyokusei Maru
on March 2—reached their destination.

On March 22, in the middle of his visit to the United States, George Kenney was featured on the front cover of
Life
magazine. With its accompanying story on the Bismarck Sea victory, the magazine coverage made him, at least briefly, the most famous man in America. Having reached that zenith, Kenney had no intention of modifying his boastful claims. Neither did MacArthur. Both generals not only declined to make changes, they lashed out defensively when the validity of the initial communiqué was questioned. Five months later, informed that the original communiqué had to be revised because it contradicted an extensive study completed by MacArthur’s own staff, they still refused to back down.

MacArthur later softened his position, but not Kenney. In his 1949 memoir he held firmly to the same numbers he had first given MacArthur. He also embellished details about the strafing of Moore’s crew, writing that “
about ten Jap fighters
dove down and shot all seven as they were hanging in their parachutes.” Conveniently, he mentioned nothing about the reciprocal killing of Japanese soldiers and sailors in the bloodstained Huon Gulf.

No matter how much Kenney exaggerated, the annihilation of the Japanese convoy remains one of the most spectacular aerial victories of the war. Kenney illustrated what could be accomplished by aggressive aviators attacking at low level, a point that was affirmed in the official postwar history produced by the USAAF: “
The fact that counts
is that a major effort to reinforce Lae was turned back with mass destruction inflicted upon an enemy who never thereafter dared renew the effort.”

The failure of Operation 81 to reach Lae had far-reaching ramifications for the Japanese. Not only did the loss of the convoy force them to rethink their entire strategy for the Southeast Area, it acted as the catalyst for an even more disastrous chain of events.

CHAPTER 26

Operation I-Go: Yamamoto’s Last Offensive

T
HE DESTRUCTION OF THE
Operation 81 convoy was a severe blow to the Combined Fleet Staff, especially because it came hard on the heels of the defeats at Buna and Guadalcanal. Admiral Yamamoto, who had been reluctant to commit eight destroyers to the convoy in the first place, “
was greatly incensed
” by the disaster, remembered Lieutenant General Yoshihara.

The most likely recipient of Yamamoto’s wrath was Vice Adm. Jinichi Kusaka. In late December 1942, all naval forces in the New Guinea and Solomon Islands areas had been combined into the Southeast Area Fleet, with Kusaka in command. He was therefore responsible for the actions of the Eighth Fleet as well as the Eleventh Air Fleet, both of which had failed to protect the convoy. Yamamoto perhaps intended to censure various members of the associated headquarters for allowing such a devastating defeat to happen, but he “
was gradually mollified
.”

Although Yamamoto’s temper was defused, the spate of defeats in the Southeastern Area had both him and his staff deeply concerned, particularly about the status of land-based aviation. In the seven months
since the Guadalcanal campaign had begun, the Eleventh Air Fleet had lost the great majority of its original aircrews. “
The land-based air groups
at Rabaul were not effective, largely because there were only a few experienced pilots,” stated Cmdr. Toshikazu Ohmae of the Southeast Area Fleet staff. Yamamoto’s chief of staff was even harsher. As early as December 1942, Vice Admiral Ugaki had written: “
[W]e cannot expect much of the land-based air force partly because of a passive atmosphere among them
.”

Ugaki did not elaborate on what he meant by “passive atmosphere,” but he was probably referring to a couple of serious issues affecting the air groups. The first was poor health. The previous commander of the Eleventh Air Fleet, Vice Admiral Tsukahara, had been invalided to Japan only a few months earlier, and his case was far from isolated. In fact, the health of the entire Rabaul garrison was declining. The most widespread disease, by far, was malaria. Fully 95 percent of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen at Rabaul suffered at least one bout of malaria during their deployment, and one man out of five was incapacitated by it. Other chronic diseases included dengue fever, respiratory disorders, and kidney infections. It is worth noting that Tsukahara’s replacement, Vice Admiral Kusaka, suffered from chronic diarrhea, a common problem at Rabaul.

The ailments were difficult to overcome. Petty Officer Igarashi of Air Group 705 was grounded for weeks because of malaria. “
I had a mysterious fever
since this morning,” he lamented on March 19. “Now malaria is really showing itself. It is said that there are 50,000 parasites in a drop of blood. I cannot stand the idea of being ruined by malaria parasites. To what height can people bear fever? Fever seems to affect the brain. I don’t feel clear-headed. From 5 to later than 10 o’clock I tossed and turned. I can’t describe how hard it is to sleep. I am about to give in to this disease. I feel helpless, as I know that this suffering will continue.”

Igarashi was declared fit enough to resume flying on March 30. “I took off in high spirits,” he wrote that evening, “but in the afternoon I had to go back to the hospital again because of an acute pain in my left ear.” Igarashi was grounded again, this time by an ear infection. “I felt very beaten by diseases, one after another,” he continued. “I am not only sorry but also embarrassed … I’ve become familiar with hospital rooms. I am not proud of this. I am ashamed of myself because I feel like I am being a pest to my section.”

An even greater problem affecting the air units at Rabaul was attrition. By early 1943 most of the original veterans had been killed or wounded, and the quality of the replacements left much to be desired. “
Their present skill
cannot be regarded as more than one-third of that of the past,” wrote Ugaki. “In a newly arrived fighter group, forty-four pilots out of sixty have had no experience with the Zero fighter. Most of them are only trained in the Type 96 fighters, so they have to be trained again after their arrival.”

The example Ugaki highlighted was symptomatic of a fleet-wide trend. In trying to accelerate the flow of replacement aircrews to the front lines, the Imperial Navy shortened the training syllabus for commissioned and enlisted pilots by two months. To achieve this reduction, the amount of instructional time devoted to skill areas such as gunnery, tactics, and formation flying was reduced or in some cases eliminated.

Yamamoto himself was troubled by the decline. In November 1942 he had confided to General Imamura: “
[T]hey used to say that one ‘Zero’
fighter could take on five to ten American aircraft, but that was at the beginning of the war. Since losing so many good pilots at Midway we’ve had difficulty in replacing them. Even now, they still say that one ‘Zero’ can take on two enemy planes, but the enemy’s replacement rate is three times ours; the gap between our strengths is increasing every day, and to be honest things are looking black for us now.”

Four months later, the situation was even worse. The defeats at Guadalcanal and Buna weighed heavily on Yamamoto, just as the steady attrition of veterans affected the morale of the air groups. For example, after seven months of combat only four Zero pilots from the original 2nd Air Group (renamed Air Group 582 in late 1942) were still alive.

The strain of facing death every day became a terrible burden, recalled WO Kazuo Tsunoda, one of the four survivors. In his postwar memoir, he described the mental breakdown of FPO 1st Class Hisamatsu Matsunaga, one of the other remaining pilots. Starting out in the third position of a three-plane section, Matsunaga had advanced rapidly to
shotai
leader due to attrition. As the death toll rose, he eventually became a
chutai
leader, responsible for nine aircraft. But the replacements he led were comparatively inferior to the originals, and many were lost. In early March, about the time that the Zeros of Air Group 582 advanced to Buin airfield on Bougainville, Matsunaga became withdrawn and refused to fly. He remained at Rabaul, holed up in a senior enlisted man’s quarters. The
group’s commanding officer and vice commanding officer tried to reason with him, but Matsunaga refused to cooperate. There was talk of sending him to Japan for a court-martial, which would likely result in his execution, but Matsunaga did not care.

The problem was ultimately resolved when Tsunoda returned to Rabaul on March 9 and met with the troubled flyer. Realizing that Matsunaga was carrying far too much responsibility on his young shoulders, Tsunoda offered to take him into his own division. “I will kick in the gate of Enma, the Lord of Hell. Follow me to the bottom of Hell,” Tsunoda said, borrowing a war cry used by his own former division leader. It worked. Matsunaga had been virtually paralyzed by depression but agreed to fly again, though not as a leader: he simply needed someone to remove the yoke of responsibility. “I do not like Hell,” he replied, “but with you, I will go there.”