Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (35 page)

Despite every precaution, submarine supply remained dangerous. The very first sub delivery had been cut short by the approach of American destroyer
McCalla
, which shot up the barges off Kamimbo and shelled the midget submarine base there. On the night of December 9, Lieutenant Jack Searles in the
PT-59
was on patrol off Kamimbo when he saw a surfaced I-boat, with barges shuttling from the shore. Commander Togami Ichiro’s
I-3
, on her fourth supply run, was out of luck. Searles fired a pair of torpedoes. One crumpled the sub’s stern. Togami’s boat sank with all hands. Before the end of the campaign at least three more submarines would be lost on Guadalcanal supply sorties, off the beach or while returning from their missions. PT boats also routinely looked for floating drums, which they sank with machine guns and automatic cannon.

The I-boat gambit can only be seen as an expedient. Submarines could never move the quantities required for subsistence, much less to wage battle. That could be done only by surface ships, hence the Tokyo Express. It did not take Admiral Mikawa long to realize this, and he promptly ordered new destroyer missions. Mikawa had a free hand, since, during the last part of November, Combined Fleet was preoccupied with the fighting at Buna. The Eighth Fleet commander assigned Rear Admiral Tanaka to the effort, and planned a series of five Tokyo Express runs at three-day intervals to be confined
to delivering supply drums. The critical inaugural sortie would establish the method.

Admiral Tanaka recalled destroyers on the Buna run and began preparations for his Tokyo Express. A practice exercise showed that the drum strings could be pushed overboard and recovered by barge operators. Tanaka summoned his officers to go over the mission. Briefings indicated that the Army had consumed its staples and would exhaust its supplies before the end of the month. Tanaka planned to take eight destroyers, six loaded with barrel strings, in all 1,089 drums. He himself would sail in Commander Kumabe Tsutae’s ship
Naganami.
There would also be a guardship, the
Takanami.
Both would carry full armament and be prepared to fight. The other vessels were stripped of torpedo reloads to reduce weight and free space for the drum strings. The Tokyo Express left Shortland soon after midnight on November 29–30. To outfox snoopers, Tanaka spent the morning steaming east before setting course for Cactus and Kamimbo Bay. Sure enough the aerial scouts kept watch. About noon the Tokyo Express changed its heading and went to twenty-four knots, and, hidden under rain clouds at midafternoon, accelerated to thirty knots.

SOPAC prepared a hot reception. Bull Halsey had reconstituted his cruiser-destroyer force as Task Force 67 under Admiral Kinkaid. The latter, finding the old problem of scratch units of ships that were strangers, had begun to whip them into shape when Nimitz suddenly recalled Kinkaid for the North Pacific command. Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright succeeded him at the head of Task Force 67. In between exercises at Espíritu Santo, he compiled a generic battle plan. At 7:40 p.m. on November 29, Admiral Halsey ordered Wright to raise steam to intercept a Japanese force of eight destroyers and, possibly, half a dozen transports. At 11:00 p.m. SOPAC sent the execute order, telling Wright to place his ships off Cape Tassafaronga twenty-four hours later.

Although research has yet to uncover the actual intercept, this information had to be from radio intelligence. The precision of the notice, enumerating Tanaka’s exact force and its expected position a day in advance, leaves no room for doubt. Even the error in the warning—the mention of transports—suggests that the codebreakers, whose garble had the correct numbers for both the overall force and the loaded ships, but mistook cargomen for destroyer-transports. Halsey’s staff, well aware of previous Japanese
attempts to get convoys to Cactus, filled in the blanks. The American PT boats at Tulagi were also ordered to stand down in the expectation that heavy ships would slug it out in Ironbottom Sound—more evidence of advance knowledge. Ultra had struck again. Wright left Espíritu only an hour later than Tanaka departed Shortland. By 3:00 a.m. on November 30, Wright’s Task Force 67 was at twenty-seven knots on its way through Torpedo Junction, where Japanese submarines had been thinned out.

Tanaka Raizo would not be taken by surprise. The simple fact that air reconnaissance had seen his Tokyo Express warned Tanaka that there could be opposition. At midafternoon he learned from JNAF scouts of numerous Allied destroyers off Lunga Point. The Eighth Fleet communications unit also warned Tanaka of transmissions indicating heavy ships in the vicinity. Tanaka had his destroyers clear for action and instructed them that if battle eventuated, the force would fight without thought of unloading.

That is exactly what happened. Tanaka’s two transport units had broken formation and were on the verge of putting out their drum strings when, at 11:12 p.m., Commander Ogura Masami’s
Takanami
came on the radio to report enemy ships, shortly afterward seven destroyers. Admiral Tanaka suspended unloading and ordered battle stations. Aircraft flares suddenly illuminated the Japanese and, at 11:20, Wright’s warships began shooting. Commander Kumabe’s
Naganami
turned to parallel the Americans.
Takanami
launched her torpedoes, and both destroyers, plus Lieutenant Commander Shibayama Kazuo’s
Suzukaze
, replied shell for shell, setting two American destroyers ablaze. The U.S. fleet shone in the light of the burning ships. Tanaka’s destroyers put their Long Lances into the water all down the line.

Admiral Wright plotted his assault carefully. The heavy cruiser
Minneapolis
actually acquired the first target at 11:06, and the force commander adjusted his dispositions. Ten minutes later Wright’s destroyer leader asked to make the torpedo attack. Judging the range, then 14,600 yards, excessive for U.S. torpedoes, Wright asked him to wait. He delayed, in part, due to his own confusion—sailors assured him the Japanese were destroyers—there were no transports to be seen. The distance was down to 7,600 yards at 11:20 when the admiral freed everyone for a general assault.

The battle had all the confusion and floundering that characterized night combat, save that Japanese tactics worked while American ones did
not. Tanaka’s lookouts erroneously identified a battleship among Wright’s fleet, which had only cruisers and destroyers. American cruiser
Pensacola
picked out a Japanese
Mogami-
or
Yubari-
class cruiser to shoot, yet no such ships were present. The
Pensacola
was really firing at light cruiser
Honolulu.

Japanese Long Lances ran hot and true. Admiral Wright’s flagship, the heavy cruiser
Northampton
, practically blew up, the consequence of a magazine explosion following a Long Lance hit. Three of Wright’s other big ships, heavy cruisers
Minneapolis
,
New Orleans
, and
Pensacola
, were all torpedoed. American destroyers waited their tin fish launches but eventually made them. The
Naganami
, at least, had to evade torpedoes. Tanaka emerged feeling that only high speed—Commander Kumabe had raced at thirty-five knots—prevented
Naganami
from being hit. Not so the
Takanami
, carrying the chief of Destroyer Division 31, Captain Shimizu Toshiro. Splitting off from the rest, Shimizu deliberately ordered her into danger. American shells blasted
Takanami
to smithereens.

Typical track charts drawn for this battle portray the Tanaka force acting in concert as a single unit. Yet according to Japanese records compiled after the war, this wasn’t the case. In addition to
Naganami
’s turn to port,
Kawakaze
and
Suzukaze
split to starboard, while the four vessels of Captain Sato Torajiro’s Destroyer Division 15 continued ahead, eventually breaking into two groups and advancing toward the Americans. Captain Toyama Yasumi, Tanaka’s chief of staff, exercised the tactical command through these evolutions. Given chart positions, times of launch, and when U.S. ships recorded hits, the Long Lances that inflicted the most grievous harm came from Tanaka’s flagship, Lieutenant Commander Wakabayashi Kazuo’s
Kawakaze
, and Commander Hajime Takeuchi’s
Kuroshio
, though several of her torpedoes seem to have detonated in transit. All operated independently at the moment of launch. Sato’s ships divided into two groups, and
Oyashio
with
Kuroshio
probably loosed the torpedoes that sank
Northampton.

By about 2:00 a.m., Admiral Tanaka had re-formed his unit and begun withdrawing. Most torpedoes had been used up, and he was low on ammunition. The remaining Japanese destroyers arrived at Shortland at 10:30 a.m. the next morning. Under Rear Admiral Mahlon S. Tisdale in the
Honolulu
, the American fleet licked its wounds back in Ironbottom Sound, preparing damaged warships to get them to Nouméa, where preliminary repairs could be accomplished.

This Battle of Tassafaronga, undeniably a Japanese victory, had been won despite the Allied intelligence advantage, considerable U.S. material superiority, the technological marvel of radar,
and
SOPAC’s preparation of the battlefield. But the Imperial Navy delivered no supplies that night. Tanaka Raizo never lived that down. Years later, visited by one of his former ship captains, Tanaka shed tears for the
Takanami
, which absorbed all the punishment during the first critical moments, making the rest possible. “It was an error on my part not to have delivered the supplies on schedule,” Tanaka told Hara Tameichi in 1957. “I should have returned to do so. The delivery mission was abandoned simply because we did not have accurate information about the strength of the enemy.”

As the Japanese on Guadalcanal continued to starve, Bull Halsey poured it on. The 5,500 troops landed during the period of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal gave the Allies an edge. The Cactus Air Force grew to 188 aircraft—and Halsey hastened preparations for B-17 heavy bombers to fly from Cactus on a routine basis. The Army’s 164th Regiment would be followed by the full Americal Division, led by Major General J. Lawton Collins. Some units of the 2nd Marine Division also went to Cactus. General Vandegrift was told to prepare his men to pull out beginning on November 26. The idea that the Americans on Guadalcanal could rotate their troops, while the Japanese could not even feed theirs, confirms the changed strategic balance. Commander Ohmae Toshikazu of Mikawa’s staff went to the island after Santa Cruz to help organize a renewed offensive. There Ohmae encountered the ubiquitous Colonel Tsuji. The fit, well-fed figures of Ohmae and his assistant disgusted Tsuji, who saw walking skeletons all around him.

Meanwhile the pendulum began to acquire momentum. SOPAC commanders pushed hard. An advance across the Matanikau River began just as the battleship guns fell silent. Except for some Marine preliminaries, this weeklong attack would be carried out by U.S. Army troops. Among the Japanese soldiers driven back was the 16th Infantry, hailing from Admiral Yamamoto’s home prefecture. At Truk, trying to lighten the mood surrounding the Combined Fleet staff’s initial meetings with the new leaders
of the Southeast Area Army and Eighteenth Army, Yamamoto tried to joke about his hometown regiment. Admiral Ugaki told him to shut up.

Strength returns in late November showed that little more than 40 percent of the Japanese Army and Navy troops on Guadalcanal were still in the ranks. There were more than 6,000 wounded and sick. By early December, General Miyazaki would note later, Japanese troops were in such need of ammunition they hardly shot back except in the direst circumstances. Captain Monzen Kanae, the Navy’s senior officer on Guadalcanal, sent a note to Admiral Ugaki by the hand of Lieutenant Funashi, who was returning to the
Yamato
, reporting shortages that had gone beyond the limit of endurance.

With supplies more critical than ever, the Navy ran another Tokyo Express on December 3. This time Tanaka brought ten destroyers. Despite coastwatcher warnings, the only opposition came from the Cactus Air Force, which inflicted slight damage on Commander Hitomi Toyoji’s
Makinami.
Admiral Tanaka took a dozen destroyers on the Express run of December 7, when Allied aircraft were joined by PT boats. Whereas the first sortie had gone off without a hitch, this time PTs induced part of Tanaka’s force—Captain Sato’s Destroyer Division 15, which had covered itself in glory at Tassafaronga—to give up its resupply mission. For the successful destroyers, ropes attaching some barrel strings broke and made them impossible to recover. Two tin cans were damaged. After this fiasco, Navy officers from the Solomons and the Combined Fleet informed Army staff at Rabaul that the Tokyo Express would have to stand down. Horrified, General Imamura Hitoshi, the new Eighth Area Army commander, appealed to Tokyo and begged the Navy to relent. The Army-Navy differences sharpened after December 9, with the loss of the
I-3
, when the fleet suspended submarine transport as well.

Admirals Kusaka and Mikawa agreed on one more Tanaka unit mission. Aviation ship
Chitose
, which had furnished air cover for both previous operations, needed to leave for Empire waters for conversion to an aircraft carrier. The new Express required stronger escort, so five of the eleven vessels on the December 11 run functioned as guard ships. Tanaka took no chances—good for him, since this time Ultra warned SOPAC and precisely outlined Tanaka’s force.

As a result of the Tassafaronga disaster, however, Bull Halsey no longer had a usable cruiser force to put against the Express. But the aggressive SOPAC commander had no problem with that. Marine dive-bombers accosted Tanaka coming down The Slot, but they came away with no score. That night the PTs went out and boats
-37
,
-40
, and
-48
let fly their torpedoes, gaining a solid hit on flagship
Teruzuki.
The fish impacted her stern, wrecking the rudder and one propeller shaft, and ignited a fire that spread to an after magazine, which exploded. Admiral Tanaka, wounded, transferred to destroyer
Naganami.
Only a few of the barrel strings ever reached the troops. Tanaka, once recovered, was reassigned to Singapore. Command of the Reinforcement Unit was realigned. On December 20 the JNAF began diverting some bomber aircraft to parachute supply bundles on moonlit nights. The Navy’s cancellation of Tokyo Express stuck.