War Stories II (39 page)

While Frank Holmgren was floating in the waters of Ironbottom Sound awaiting rescue, thousands of his countrymen were fighting to save Guadalcanal.

In the early morning hours of 14 November, Admiral Mikawa's bombardment force cruisers arrived offshore and proceeded to pound the airfield and the Marine positions around it. At dawn, “Cactus Air Force” planes and bombers from
Enterprise
found Mikawa's cruisers, sinking one and
damaging three others. Then U.S. planes pounced on Tanaka's troop transports, sending seven to the bottom, carrying more than 7,000 Japanese soldiers with them.

While U.S. aircraft were pounding Tanaka's transports and escorts, Halsey ordered the battleships
South Dakota
and
Washington
to detach from
Enterprise
and proceed at flank speed to intercept a new threat: Admiral Nobutake Kondo was heading back into the fight with the battleship
Kirishima
, four cruisers, and nine destroyers.

At 2315 on 14 November, the two American battlewagons, accompanied by four destroyers—all under the command of Rear Admiral Willis Lee aboard
Washington
—were on station south of Savo Island when Kondo's force emerged from the radar “shadow” of Savo Island. The Japanese struck the first blow, sinking two of Lee's destroyers with Long Lance torpedoes and so severely damaging the
South Dakota
with naval gunfire that she retired to the west escorted by the two surviving U.S. destroyers. Lee, aboard
Washington
, now faced Kondo's entire force alone. The battleship's crew, responding to their commander's courageous order to open fire and close with the enemy, rose to the occasion and hit the
Kirishima
more than fifty times with five- and sixteen-inch radar-directed shells—all in under seven minutes.

The barrage wrecked the Japanese flagship and Kondo decided he'd had enough. He ordered the
Kirishima
and a disabled destroyer scuttled and quickly fled north, providing a sufficient distraction for the tenacious Tanaka to beach his four remaining, badly damaged transports on the Guadalcanal coast. There he succeeded in disembarking 2,000 surviving Imperial Army soldiers—but not their supplies—before the ships were pounded to pieces by the “Cactus Air Force.”

By the end of the three days' battle, only 2,000 of the nearly 11,000 Japanese troops on the transport ships made it ashore, but with none of their necessities—ammunition, rations, and other supplies and equipment.

The two opposing forces withdrew and counted the costs. The Japanese had sunk eight American ships and damaged seven more. Almost 2,000 American sailors lost their lives—including 720 from the
Juneau
alone. Of the 725 men thrown into the sea when their ship went down, just five sailors survived.

The Americans sank five Japanese ships and damaged three others. But the loss in Japanese lives was horrific. More than 11,000 soldiers and sailors had died in the waters around Guadalcanal.

There would be one more major battle—the Battle of Tassafaronga—on 29–30 November. By then the Japanese had given up trying to retake Guadalcanal and concentrated on getting their troops off the island. They repeated their strategy of sending transports down the slot in Ironbottom Sound, but this time the eight Japanese ships were met by nine superior ships of the U.S. Navy. After the battle, each U.S. ship had sunk one Japanese ship, and the Americans suffered damage to three others.

The Japanese were on the run both physically and psychologically. Still, they eventually managed to evacuate 13,000 troops from Guadalcanal. Thousands of Japanese soldiers were left on the island to fend for themselves. Rather than surrender, they fought to the death, committed suicide, or died of starvation or disease before it all finally ended in early February 1943.

After the six-month series of battles for Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Kelly Turner was promoted to vice admiral, and Vice Admiral “Bull” Halsey was promoted to full admiral. When he put on his fourth star, Halsey credited it to the Marines and the courageous actions of Admirals Dan Callaghan and Norman Scott—both awarded posthumous Medals of Honor.

The final Japanese toll for Guadalcanal was catastrophic: 25,000 lives lost; more than two dozen ships sunk—including irreplaceable carriers and battleships—and the loss of at least 600 planes. The Japanese defeat at Guadalcanal also spelled the end of their efforts to take Port Moresby and the rest of New Guinea.

The Americans lost 1,600 lives in the land, sea, and air battles for Guadalcanal. U.S. ship and aircraft losses equaled Japan's twenty-four ships and 600 aircraft. For those who fought on Tulagi and Guadalcanal, it was indeed a tropical hell. The grisly hand-to-hand combat would become the blueprint for action in later Pacific island battles. But Admiral Halsey best summed up the overall result of the fight: “Before Guadalcanal, the enemy advanced at his pleasure. After Guadalcanal, he retreated at ours.”

T
he failure of the Japanese efforts to retake Guadalcanal was paralleled by their collapse on New Guinea's Papuan Peninsula. By mid-January, MacArthur had more than 30,000 Australian and American troops committed to overrunning 12,000 Japanese in the “Buna Pocket.” At the end of the month, just before Guadalcanal was finally secured, the last surviving Japanese defender was killed or captured—at a cost of more than 3,000 Allied lives—nearly double the U.S. losses to take Guadalcanal.

In Washington, the Joint Chiefs seized on the moment to establish priorities for the next offensive steps against Japan. Recognizing that the European theater was still the main war effort, they nonetheless developed what they called the “Strategic Plan for the Defeat of Japan.” It called for:

Nimitz wasted no time in implementing his part of the grand design. On 26 March, before the Strategic Plan even received its final approval, he launched an attack aimed at ejecting the Japanese from Attu and Kiska—the two Aleutian islands seized in June 1942 during the Battle of Midway. By 30 May 1943, the U.S. Army's 7th Infantry Division had retaken Attu—but not before the Japanese killed scores of wounded American soldiers in a final banzai charge on the hospital. Before the Americans could invade Kiska in August, the Japanese succeeded in evacuating their garrison—undetected by the Americans—who unwittingly proceeded to conduct an uncontested full-scale amphibious assault against the island.

While the warlords in Tokyo were willing to write off the territory in the Aleutians, that was certainly not the case in the South Pacific. While Nimitz and MacArthur paused to build up their forces for their dual drives on Rabaul, Yamamoto was busy shoring up its outer defenses. But despite his best efforts, the tide had turned.

In early March, during the three-day Battle of the Bismarck Sea, his once vaunted fleet lost seven of eight transports and four of eight destroyers—along with 3,650 men and twenty-five aircraft—during an attempt to reinforce the Japanese garrison at Lea on the north coast of New Guinea. A subsequent bombing raid in late March against Guadalcanal—already becoming a major American and Allied naval and air base—by more than 300 aircraftcost him forty aircraft and their experienced pilots. Now, increasingly concerned about the state of readiness for an anticipated American offensive against Bougainville, Yamamoto decided to see for himself how prepared his forces really were. It was a deadly mistake.

The coded radio message with Yamamoto's detailed itinerary was intercepted and passed to Station Hypo code-breakers. With President Roosevelt's personal authorization, U.S. Army Air Force P-38s launched from Henderson Field to intercept and kill the mastermind of Japan's naval strategy.
At 0935 on 18 April 1943, one year to the day since Jimmy Doolittle's daring raid on Tokyo, the man who planned the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was himself surprised. As the “Betty” bomber in which he was a passenger approached Bougainville at 4,500 feet, sixteen P-38s pounced out of the sun. According to postwar reports, Yamamoto was dead before his flaming plane hit the ground.

Yamamoto's successor as head of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Mineichi Koga, quickly devoted himself to the same task as his deceased predecessor: protecting Rabaul. He clearly understood that the heavily defended base on the north coast of New Britain—with its 100,000 battle-tested Japanese troops and 600 aircraft spread over five different airfields and naval facilities—was the primary American objective in the South Pacific. He set out to do everything in his power to keep the Americans from realizing their goal—or failing that, to make it as costly as possible.

His first steps were to continue reinforcing the islands between Guadalcanal and Rabaul—and to slow MacArthur's advance to the east on New Guinea as much as possible. He reinvigorated nighttime deliveries by the Tokyo Express, even relying on submarines to deliver supplies and reinforcements when necessary. By mid-June Koga convinced his reluctant staff to try a major air raid against Guadalcanal—even though the once-contested island now had five air bases, more than 300 aircraft, scores of anti-aircraft batteries, and a major port operation with U.S., Australian, and New Zealand combatants in the roadstead, all with alert anti-aircraft gunners.