The Conquering Tide (42 page)

Troops assigned to seize Attu were drawn from the army's 7th Infantry Division, which had completed an amphibious training course overseen by Marine General Holland “Howlin' Mad” Smith. Task Force 51, consisting of more than fifty ships, with 34,000 troops embarked in transports, closed in on the island before dawn on May 11. A small scouting force landed on the
northern coast, near Holtz Bay, from submarines and a destroyer transport. The main landings were to follow in the south, at Massacre Bay—but the southern group was forced to wait most of the day for the fog to lift, and the first units did not reach the shore until about 3:30 p.m. They encountered little opposition, however—and by nightfall, 1,500 troops were ashore in the north and another 3,500 in the south.

The Japanese defenders did not contest the landing, remaining in defensive positions on high ground. Colonel Yasuyo Yamazaki, the Japanese commander, concentrated his 2,650 troops in the hills between the two landing sites. Knowing that he could not defeat the Americans, and that he could count on no naval or air support from Japan, he burned all sensitive documents. The American naval task force pounded the island from off the shore, but Yamazaki's force was strongly entrenched and the persistent fog helped to conceal the Japanese positions. Throughout the afternoon of May 11 and into the following night, Japanese artillery rained projectiles down on the American troops of the southern force. The Americans advanced steadily inland, but their progress was impeded by the difficult terrain. The island's spongy soil would not support the weight of trucks and armored vehicles. On May 17, Holtz Bay was cleaned out and the first contingents of the northern and southern forces made contact.

The last Japanese troops retreated to a ridge above Chichagof Harbor. At dawn on the twenty-ninth they broke out of their position in an all-out
banzai
charge. The mass of men moved through the American lines and penetrated deep into the rear areas. In a fierce battle, including much hand-to-hand fighting, nearly the entire Japanese garrison was killed.

The Americans had not yet mastered their skills in amphibious warfare, and the Attu operation exposed many shortcomings. The force did not have enough landing craft. It had not prepared sufficient contingencies for bad weather and poor visibility. The assault troops were not adequately equipped with cold-weather uniforms and gear. Key supplies were late to the beach or were not landed at all. The American casualties were 580 killed and 1,148 wounded in combat; another 1,200 suffered frostbite and other cold-related injuries.

The landing on Kiska, ten weeks later, was one of the greatest anticlimaxes in the history of amphibious warfare. For a week in August the island was battered by bombing raids and heavy naval gunfire. On August 15, a big transport fleet arrived and put 34,000 Canadian and American
troops ashore. (The invasion force was twice the size of the one that had participated in the
WATCHTOWER
landings in the Solomons a year earlier.) The invaders advanced inland cautiously, but they found no one and encountered no hostile fire at all. The Japanese garrison had been evacuated under cover of fog two weeks earlier.

Considering the expenditure of naval ordnance and aerial bombs on an island that had been vacated by the enemy, and the tremendous investment of shipping and troops in a bloodless invasion, the Kiska operation had been slightly farcical. In Pearl Harbor, the news was received in good humor. Nimitz liked to tell visitors how advance elements of the huge invasion force, creeping inland with weapons at the ready, were warmly greeted by a single affable dog that trotted out to beg for food.

I
N THE
S
OUTH
P
ACIFIC
, the Munda operation began on June 30, 1943, when Admiral Turner's Third Amphibious Force put troops ashore on Rendova Island, five miles south of the assault beaches on New Georgia. This island would have offered an ideal platform for artillery fire directed onto the landing site, but the Japanese had not secured it and the small garrison was swiftly overrun.

With the cover provided by newly installed batteries, landing boats ferried army and marine units across the sound to New Georgia. AIRSOLS put hundreds of planes into the air to support the landing. Japanese air attacks were brushed off with little trouble, but the American ground troops ran into forceful resistance as they closed the ring around the Munda airfield. The 4,500-man Japanese garrison had dug in deeply and well, and the terrain was abysmal. The Munda campaign was a photonegative of the fight on Guadalcanal, with the Japanese and Allied positions reversed. Now it was the American soldiers and marines who struggled through swamp and underbrush, losing contact with adjacent units and suffering heavily under harassing attacks by the enemy. Japanese units launched nighttime
banzai
attacks, accompanied by shouted profanities and taunts in broken English. Two green American army regiments broke and ran, throwing down their weapons; several were shot by other American soldiers who mistook them for enemy, and several dozen had to be evacuated because of “psychoneurosis.” One officer recalled that fear was like a disease that spread through the ranks, eventually transmuting into mass panic. Discipline
and morale crumpled. “By morning, in an unmanageable mass, men were huddling in groups along the trails to the rear and pursued savagely by the enemy that caught up with many of them and—to use an archaic phrase—put them to the sword.”
²⁸

Eventually, all available reserves were committed to the capture of Munda. Three army divisions required a full five weeks to secure the airfield; 1,195 Allied servicemen were killed in the effort. Most of the defenders died or took their own lives, but a few managed to evacuate by sea to Vila airfield on nearby Kolombangara.

As if more evidence was needed, the Allies now had another exhibit in the case against the wisdom of frontal attacks on strongly entrenched island positions. The road to Rabaul was not open. The Japanese had another dozen airfields, large and small, on islands to the north, east, and west. The complex on southern Bougainville, in particular, would require a long and bloody effort to capture. Commanders in Washington, Pearl Harbor, Noumea, and Brisbane began to study and debate the concept of bypassing or “leapfrogging” strongly defended positions, as a means to speed the campaign and contain the cost in Allied lives. Ernest King's proposal (in March 1943) to pole-vault over Rabaul to the Admiralties had been an idea ahead of its time, but it would soon be adopted as the centerpiece of the Allies' grand strategy in the Pacific.

In his widely read memoirs,
Reminiscences
, MacArthur named himself the mastermind of the leapfrogging strategy. “I intended to envelop them, incapacitate them, apply the ‘hit 'em where they ain't—let 'em die on the vine' philosophy,” he wrote. “There would be no need for storming the mass of islands held by the enemy.”
²⁹
The truth is that MacArthur was a late convert to the cause. Robert Carney, chief of staff to Halsey's “Dirty Tricks Department”—the insiders' affectionate nickname for SOPAC headquarters—recalls obstinate opposition from his counterparts in Brisbane. “MacArthur felt that you simply couldn't go away and leave strong forces . . . upon your flank or behind you. This thinking in his outfit was quite different from the thinking in ours.”
³⁰
MacArthur apparently adopted the leapfrogging philosophy some time after the bypass of Rabaul was ordered by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (the American-British supreme command) in August 1943. Even then, he initially opposed several bypassing maneuvers, notably Halsey's leap past Kavieng in March 1944.

Immediately northwest of New Georgia was the island of Kolombangara,
a perfectly round stratovolcanic cone soaring out of the sea to an altitude of 5,800 feet. A Japanese garrison was dug in at Vila Airfield, on the island's southern shore. Admiral Kusaka expected the next amphibious landing to fall on Vila, and had been reinforcing the position for weeks. Japanese troop strength in the perimeter had reached about 10,000 troops, more than double the number the Allies had faced at Munda. On August 15, the Third Amphibious Force instead circumvented Kolombangara and seized a beachhead on the island of Vella Lavella, about fifty miles north, where the enemy garrison numbered only 250 men. The invasion force suffered minimal casualties, and the Seabees had a new airfield operating within three weeks. Realizing that Kolombangara was to be ignored by the enemy, Admiral Kusaka ordered the garrison evacuated to Bougainville, under cover of darkness, by submarines and destroyers.

In attempting to reinforce their beleaguered positions in the New Georgia group, Japanese cruiser and destroyer squadrons clashed with Allied task forces in several minor naval battles. The Japanese retained their customary excellence in night torpedo actions, and their Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes remained the best weapons of their kind in the theater, but the Americans were learning to use their superior radar systems to advantage. Each ship now correlated information from radar and other sources in the Radar Plot, which later evolved into the Combat Information Center (CIC). During this period the U.S. Navy also benefited from the exceptional leadership of seagoing commanders such as Rear Admirals Walden Lee “Pug” Ainsworth and Aaron Stanton Merrill, and Commander Frederick Moosbrugger and Captain Arleigh “31-Knot” Burke. During the battle for Munda, Admiral Ainsworth twice intercepted inbound Japanese forces at the Battles of Kula Gulf (July 6) and Kolombangara (July 13). In each engagement, the Americans approached in a single column with cruisers in the center, fired on the lead ships in the Japanese column, and then turned away to avoid the inevitable torpedoes. In both battles, the Allies and Japanese suffered in about equal measure; in each, the Japanese force was beaten back and failed to reinforce Munda.

On the night of August 6–7, Commander Moosbrugger led a division of six destroyers in two parallel columns (the tactic had been developed by Burke, recently recalled to higher command) against another incoming Japanese squadron. One column fired a spread of torpedoes and turned away. As the Japanese fired on the withdrawing ships, the second column
crossed the enemy's “T” and opened a devastating salvo of gunfire. Three Japanese destroyers, crammed with troops intended for Kolombangara, blew up and went down. One spectacular explosion, as described by one of the American action reports, “took the form of a large semicircle with the water as the base, extended six to seven hundred feet into the sky.”
³¹

A thousand Japanese soldiers and sailors were killed in the explosions or drowned afterward. Tameichi Hara, commanding the one Japanese destroyer to escape the action, concluded that “the enemy had ambushed us perfectly.”
³²
The tactics employed by the Americans in this “Battle of Vella Gulf,” faithfully executed by Moosbrugger, served as a template for several surface actions to come in the fall of 1943.

The tide of battle in the South Pacific had decisively turned. Japanese naval operations became increasingly concerned with evacuating troops as their positions grew hopeless. During the retreat from Kolombangara, the Japanese had established a staging base for barges and landing craft at Horaniu, on the northeast shore of the island of Vella Lavella. An Allied landing at Horaniu on September 14 dislodged the 600-man Japanese garrison and sent them in a disorderly overland retreat to Marquana Bay on the northwest shore. Admiral Kusaka ordered a rescue operation. Rear Admiral Matsuji Ijuin sailed from Rabaul with a force of six destroyers and two transport groups, the latter including three transport destroyers. About twenty small craft joined up from Buin on southern Bougainville.

On October 6, this small armada—seemingly disproportionate to the task at hand—was discovered by American air search. Six American destroyers were in the area, and they moved to intercept, but they were divided into two divisions separated by about twenty miles. The northern group—the
Selfridge
,
Chevalier
, and
O'Bannon
, under Captain Frank R. Walker—charged into action without waiting for Captain Harold O. Larson's southern group (the
Ralph Talbot
,
Taylor
, and
La Vallette
). Since the days of John Paul Jones, American naval lore had honored and applauded the bold attack on superior enemy forces. In this case, however, Walker's daring proved rash. His three-destroyer squadron advanced on Ijuin's nearest division of four destroyers and fired projectiles and torpedoes. Ijuin turned away and blew a smoke screen to cover his withdrawal, but one of his destroyers, the
Yugumo
, continued toward the Americans and exchanged fire as she closed. She was lit up by at least five 5-inch shell hits and quickly exploded into flame. A few minutes later, Walker's ships ran into a deadly
spread of Long Lances. The
Chevalier
and the
Selfridge
each had their bows torn off, and the
O'Bannon
was unable to avoid colliding with the injured
Chevalier
. The
Selfridge
continued firing gamely on the second division of enemy ships, passing in column at a range of about 11,000 yards, but took a torpedo in her port side at 11:06 p.m. The
Chevalier
was finished, while the heavily damaged
O'Bannon
and
Selfridge
managed to hobble back into Purvis Bay. As the Americans cleared the area, the Japanese small craft completed the evacuation of the troops at Marquana Bay. The Japanese had won a tactical and strategic victory in this “Battle of Vella Lavella.” It was to be their last sea victory of the war.

At the first Allied conference in Quebec (code-named
QUADRANT
and held in August 1943), the British chiefs—tilting toward any arrangement that would release more forces to the campaign against Nazi Germany—had backed King's case to consolidate offensive resources into a single drive across the central Pacific. That would have sidelined the South Pacific operations and marooned MacArthur in a strategic backwater. FDR was swayed by Marshall's insistent demands to continue the southern push toward the Philippines. The president was likely influenced by MacArthur's political weight and his implicit threat to accept the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1944.