Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (21 page)

Yamamoto’s operation gathered momentum. Combined Fleet planned to wallop Henderson in conjunction with the sailing of the high-speed convoy. This would open with a battleship bombardment—the C-in-Cs notion of putting the
Yamato
alongside Guadalcanal—followed by heavy cruiser shellings on succeeding nights. In a way Yamamoto’s flagship
would
be at Guadalcanal—
Yamato
had sent expert lookout Lieutenant Funashi Masatomi to the island as an observer and installed him atop Mount Austen with radio gear.

The morning after Cape Esperance, Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo and his bombardment force, led by battleships
Kongo
and
Haruna
, left the main body. Suffering from fevers a few days earlier, Kurita was back on his mark. Rear Admiral Tanaka escorted. Battleship
Kongo
carried incendiary AA shells of a new type, tested at Truk in early October, which promised to be very effective.
Haruna
had older shells that could still be destructive. Theirs became the first opportunity to avenge Goto’s death.

For a prelude, Admiral Kusaka Jinichi sent his Rabaul bombers to hit Henderson, flying a course like the
Sterett
had seen—out to sea, avoiding coastwatchers and approaching from the south. This time the runway
was
damaged. Then the Japanese Army chimed in with the first shells from its 150mm howitzers, quickly christened “Pistol Pete,” impeding American efforts to repair the Marston matting. Kusaka followed with several night intruders that arrived at intervals, twin-engine Nells the Marines knew as Washing Machine Charlie.

Kurita arrived off Guadalcanal late in the evening of October 13. He made a high-speed circuit of Savo, set an easterly course past Lunga Point, then swung onto the reciprocal track, with the two battleships’ fourteen-inch guns pummeling Henderson and the U.S. positions for ninety minutes. Kurita launched floatplanes to illuminate the scene. The warships pumped out 918 shells, mixing their time-fused incendiaries with armor-piercing shells, both to destroy aircraft in the revetments and to dig under the runways. Captain Koyanagi Tomiji had his
Kongo
space her salvos at one-minute intervals. The pace allowed Lieutenant Commander Ukita Nobue, gunnery officer, to ensure accurate gun laying. Marine shore batteries that replied—they were beyond range anyway—were engaged by the battleships’ secondary armament, and searchlights were used to blind the Marine gunners.

Those on Guadalcanal remember this simply as “The Night.” General Vandegrift, who records that he used to go to sleep every evening about 7:00, after listening to the shortwave broadcast from San Francisco, refrains from commenting on The Night, though he surely must have awoken. In the same passage Vandegrift notes his first act every morning was to inspect the previous night’s damage. Marine Bud DeVere, a control tower operator at Henderson’s “Pagoda,” recalls a continuous ordeal of Pistol Pete shooting them up, Washing Machine Charlie harassing them, then the battleships. At Cactus Crystal Ball, radioman Phil Jacobsen was trying to relax in a bunker the Seabees had built to protect their intercept gear when he saw a star shell burst almost directly overhead. He had barely sought cover when all hell broke loose. After The Night, whenever it rained, their receivers went on the blink.

Lieutenant Bill Coggins, with 2/1 rifle battalion, located a full mile from Henderson, remembers the Marines had become inured to naval bombardments, but that, from the beginning, everyone realized this was different—star shells, tight six-gun salvos, heavy blast concussion. Far away though
they were, the baseplate of a fourteen-inch shell landed awfully near the E Company cookhouse. When greenies of the Army’s 164th Regiment arrived to replace Coggins’s men the next day, wily Marines frightened them with promises of greater horrors to come. Captain Nikolai Stevenson, whose C Company of the regiment’s 1st Battalion was relieved that night by Army newbies, pulled into reserve near Henderson. He was playing poker when the fireworks started. “All at once the murmuring night exploded into ghastly daylight…. The concussion knocked me halfway over as I dived headlong for the puny cover of the ditch, where I lay shaking among the fallen palm fronds.” Japanese shells roared and screeched, like subway cars tearing through a thousand bolts of cloth strung together. Warren Maxson, also of the 1st Marines, counted five air raids that night. Lieutenant Merillat of Vandegrift’s staff remembered the alarming series of “Condition Red” alerts—always announced by siren for incoming air raids—followed by the bombardment: “The shelter shook as if it were set in jelly. Bombs, artillery, big naval shells made it sheer hell.”

From an American point of view the one good aspect of The Night was that it marked the appearance of a new piece on the board, the Patrol Torpedo (PT) boat. These high-speed seventy-foot craft, each armed with .50-caliber machine guns, a 20mm cannon, and torpedoes, would contest Ironbottom Sound full-time. The convoy that brought Army troops had also deposited the first elements of PT Squadron 3. They based at Tulagi. Four PTs came out to fight Kurita’s fleet, attacking shortly before the bombardment ended. Commander Ukita on the
Kongo
recalled the PT boats’ intervention, but stoutly insisted Kurita’s worst fear was of running aground on the treacherous shoals and reefs in the channels. Destroyer
Naganami
contemptuously brushed off the PTs, but those gnats would be back, gnawing painfully at the Imperial Navy.

By morning Cactus had descended into crisis—Henderson Field holed, Fighter 1 damaged. Only seven SBDs and thirty-five fighters could fly; forty-one men were dead, including two more of those Admiral Nimitz had decorated so recently. The Pagoda was demolished. Roy Geiger ordered it bulldozed. Aviation gas was mostly destroyed, enough left for just one mission. Mechanics worked desperately on crippled planes. This was the day of the high-speed convoy, which had left on the thirteenth with six transports and eight destroyers. Scout bombers found both it and a fresh Japanese
surface force—Admiral Mikawa with cruisers
Chokai
and
Kinugasa—
the latter bouncing right back to seek vengeance for Cape Esperance. Naturally, Japanese bombers struck at midday. Only late that afternoon did Cactus scrape together a flight of four SBDs and seven Army fighter-bombers to fling at the convoy. Draining the gas out of a couple of B-17s permitted a second wave of nine SBDs before dark. They achieved nothing save the loss of one plane and the crash of another.

Now the night cast Mikawa Gunichi as avenging angel. His cruisers lashed Henderson with 752 eight-inch shells. U.S. radio intelligence reported Mikawa at sea, probably in
Chokai
, that very day, but Cactus had had to choose between cruisers and convoy. While nowhere as destructive as Kurita’s battleship bombardment, Mikawa’s shells inflicted more damage on planes and renewed the craters that pockmarked airfields.

To complete their mastery of Ironbottom, the Japanese may have sent a midget submarine sortie into the anchorage. Orders for the mission exist. It was to have been launched from seaplane carrier
Chiyoda
, which had shuttled eight of the craft to the Solomons. These small two-man subs, notably used at Pearl Harbor and at Sydney, Australia, were to invade the sound around midnight. But there is no evidence of their actual presence. Some American small craft, escorted by a pair of the new PTs, crossed undisturbed from Guadalcanal to Tulagi that night. Admiral Ugaki complained that plans for the midgets’ employment were incomplete, and notes that he ordered a study, puzzling since Combined Fleet staff had discussed using the subs in the very first days of Watchtower. Ugaki recommended putting the boats at Kamimbo and loosing them when there were suitable targets. It is not clear whether Yamamoto overruled him. The Japanese
did
set up a midget sub base at the designated place, and other sorties did run from there. Months later the American salvage ship
Ortolan
found a midget and raised her long enough to recover this day’s attack order and other documents, but a storm broke her grip and the submersible was lost.

At dawn on the fifteenth, Marines were outraged to see Japanese transports unloading in broad daylight across the sound. But Cactus air was in disarray. Roy Geiger demanded his men find gas, and they did—an officer remembered fuel barrels had been cached in swamps and groves, and several hundred were found and laboriously hauled to the strips. That brought two days’ supply. Guadalcanal called upon SOPAC to fly gasoline aboard its
daily flights and even bring a load on submarine
Amberjack
. Mechanics rushed repairs. Starting early, scratch flights of SBDs and Army planes took off to hit the transports at Tassafaronga Point. Fighters engaged R Area Force floatplanes and Japanese interceptors—ominously, from
Kido Butai
’s Carrier Division 2—to open the way, strafing ships when they had the chance.

Mitsukuni Oshita, a chief petty officer on destroyer
Hayashi
, was impressed at the way the Americans pressed their attacks in the face of murderous flak. Half the Japanese transports, damaged, withdrew. The others, also damaged, were beached—hopefully to be emptied later. The
Nankai Maru
and
Sasago Maru
were hit by the first U.S. wave,
Azumasan Maru
in the second attack, the
Kyushu Maru
later. An American bomb wrecked the
Kyushu Maru’
s wheelhouse, killing her captain and all the bridge crew. Ignorant of this, the ship’s engineers kept her at full speed until she ran up on the beach. The ammunition aboard another ship cooked off and she blew up. The
Nankai Maru
, the only cargoman not to catch fire—and the only damaged ship that tarried to unload—would be the only vessel of this group to escape. Men of the Independent Ship Engineering Regiment struggled to unload the supplies. The Japanese estimated the ships were 80 percent emptied. They would be furious in turn when U.S. warships appeared to shell the stacked supplies, destroying many. Beach crews were heavily hit too, with the regimental commander killed and one of his companies wiped out but for eight men.

Yet the Army troops had landed. They could not be stopped. With a Tokyo Express on October 17 the program was fulfilled. Captain Inui Genjirou brought his 8th Antitank Company, now without any guns, to help move the supplies. The men were so exhausted he had to rest them for a day, and they could do little to combat the fire that broke out in a nearby dump. But one of Inui’s companies, thrilled to get cigarettes, labored to move the rice sacks away. Inui himself enjoyed the first coffee he had had since leaving Java.

General Geiger so focused on the supply battle that the day’s Japanese air raid went virtually uncontested. Come night the Imperial Navy returned. This time it was Rear Admiral Omori Sentaro with heavy cruisers
Myoko
and
Maya
. Commander Nagasawa Ko, whose home prefecture of Fukushima would be devastated by tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns of
2011, was Omori’s senior staff officer and recalled later that the Japanese had expected to be sunk. On the
Myoko
the crew were given rifles and instructed to get to shore and fight as naval infantry. Instead they faced no opposition. The warships pounded Henderson Field with 1,500 more eight-inch shells (some sources report 926). Yet next morning the Cactus Air Force could still fly ten dive-bombers and seven Army fighter-bombers. Geiger’s maintenance crews plus the Seabees literally saved Guadalcanal.

American commanders recognized the crisis even if the Japanese did not. And they spoke up. Vandegrift cabled SOPAC and demanded every ounce of backing. Slew McCain, the AIRSOLS commander, did the same. Ghormley repeated the essence of their appeals in a dispatch to Nimitz. And the SOPAC had Rear Admiral George D. Murray’s
Hornet
task force mount a carrier raid on the R Area Force floatplane base at Rekata Bay. Results were indeterminate.

At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz decided he had had enough. Ghormley’s dispatch struck him as more weak-kneed passing of the buck. Aircraft carrier
Enterprise
, having completed repairs, was rushing to the South Pacific to increase the Allies’ paper-thin strength. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, whom CINCPAC had appointed to lead the “Big
E
’s” task force, had gone ahead to get a feel for the situation. Nimitz huddled with his inner circle late into the night discussing the SOPAC command situation. On October 16, Admiral Nimitz asked Admiral King for authority to substitute Halsey for Ghormley. The COMINCH approved. Just as “Bull” Halsey reached Nouméa, Nimitz sent him a message: The Bull would supplant Bob Ghormley as theater commander. The aggressive Halsey led the next battle, the most important yet. Allied leaders already knew it was upon them.

BLOOD UPON THE SEA

Despite the Imperial Navy’s changed codes and communications, Allied intelligence assembled an increasingly alarming picture of its activities. Indications piled up from radio traffic analysis, from the coastwatchers, from combat intelligence, from observation and aerial reconnaissance, even a few from Ultra proper. After Cape Esperance—itself an intelligence windfall, because the Allies captured 113 survivors of the warships
Furutaka
and
Fubuki
, whom they plied for information—the picture darkened further. Starting
the next morning, the Allies observed a rapid increase in the volume of messages sent on the Japanese radio nets, especially those used to report radio fixes on Allied ships. Meanwhile a snooper discovered
Kido Butai
, reporting carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers 400 miles northeast of Cactus. Intelligence also detected the enemy intercept of that scout’s message, plus Imperial Navy sighting reports, an increasing number of them from I-boats. The fighting around Cactus certainly indicated the Japanese were not giving in.