Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (39 page)

Rear Admiral Kimura Susumu of Destroyer Squadron 10 was to lead the first sortie. But he was injured when the U.S. submarine
Nautilus
torpedoed the
Akizuki
off Shortland some days earlier. Rear Admiral Hashimoto returned to mastermind the evacuation. Hashimoto, like Tanaka Raizo, had worked himself to exhaustion in the Solomons and had been moved to less demanding duty. But the KE Operation was
that
important. Koyanagi Tomiji, former skipper of battleship
Kongo
, had been promoted to rear admiral and given command of Destroyer Squadron 2. Having plied The Slot with the Express for six weeks, he also had been relieved, and arrived at Truk only to be sent back. Koyanagi led the transport unit. Hashimoto calculated that to make the schedule he would need to leave Shortland
unusually early—about 10:00 a.m. So they were passing Vella Lavella in the afternoon when they were spotted. Coastwatcher Josselyn reported the Japanese, which brought two powerful attacks by the Cactus Air Force. Though the Express had a strong combat air patrol, the U.S. planes overwhelmed it, but the best they could accomplish against the flotilla was to damage the destroyer
Makinami
, Admiral Hashimoto’s flagship. Koyanagi stepped up to take over, leaving a couple of ships to stand by Hashimoto. The latter transferred to
Shikinami
and rushed to catch up, but could not do so until much later. The Japanese were running late, and Koyanagi’s reassignment of ships to replace those detached from the screen left the transport unit understrength by two destroyers.

The next hurdle was a PT attack. Tulagi sent out eleven PT boats that night. Seven of them made the Japanese and in various combinations launched torpedoes. Several PTs bored in from behind the enemy at Cape Esperance. Lieutenant Yamamoto Masahide of the
Akigumo
recalls his ship firing her five-inch main battery directly over the stern at the PT boats. Yamamoto thought they blasted three. There
were
three boats lost that night—PTs
-111
,
-37
, and
-123—
but only one here. Another boat was actually destroyed by Louie the Louse—the greatest known combat exploit of the nighttime JNAF floatplane operation. Among the Americans missing was John H. Clagett, a legendary PT skipper. The PT boats achieved no clear results. Japanese destroyer
Makikumo
was lost after chasing
PT-124
, but whether the cause was a
-124
torpedo or a mine—Americans had laid 300 mines in these waters that day—remains in dispute.

Kusaka’s Eleventh Air Fleet also played its part, with pairs of Bettys shuttling over Henderson to keep Cactus Air Force heads down. They were unable to prevent some U.S. planes from taking to the air, or a morning attack on the retreating flotilla, but this time the Cactus aircraft achieved nothing. About noon the Tokyo Express reached Shortland. Nearly 5,000 Japanese soldiers had been saved. Admiral Koyanagi recorded that the survivors wore only shreds of uniforms, were sick with dengue and malaria, and so emaciated they could not stomach real food, only porridge. Aboard the
Akigumo
, Lieutenant Yamamoto found the men did not even ask to eat, only for cigarettes.

Meanwhile, General Patch’s Americans stolidly continued their advance. On the morning of February 2, word reached Cactus Crystal Ball
that a complete Japanese radio station, abandoned, had been captured undamaged. Crystal Ballers knew the enemy emitter at Tassafaronga had gone off the air a week before. Petty Officer Jim Perkins, radioman Phil Jacobsen, and a Marine intercept operator volunteered to recover the equipment. They set off in a two-and-a-half-ton truck, spent a full day bouncing along rutted trails, and finally reached their goal. What they found was strange: The Japanese radio and a generator were completely functional. The only document was a radio frequency list that U.S. intelligence knew all about. The enemy had clearly taken the trouble to secure their documents but had done nothing to destroy the equipment. Perhaps they had lacked the means? An Army officer raised the possibility that the enemy were withdrawing. Perkins and Jacobsen passed that along, but Commander McCallum decided against reporting it up the line, on grounds that Station AL would be exceeding its mandate as a direction-finding unit. Melbourne, Pearl Harbor, and Washington were left to draw their own conclusions.

Philip Jacobsen, who retired as a lieutenant commander after a full career in signals intelligence, came away from Guadalcanal convinced the Allies had penetrated the secret of the enemy withdrawal. He points to the numerous position and mission reports put out by FRUMEL and FRUPAC as evidence. Movement reports, however, absent knowledge of Japanese intentions, could fit many interpretations. More striking was a partial Ultra decrypt of a message to one of the destroyer units assembling for the Tokyo Express. The Washington office that circulated this information commented that the KE Operation might be intended for evacuation. That very word appeared in a late-January dispatch regarding submarine movements. Jacobsen also recalls quiet rumblings among codebreakers at FRUMEL, but Duane Whitlock, who was on the scene at Melbourne, remembered no great excitement there at the time, the opposite of what one would expect if codebreakers held the view that the Japanese were escaping their grasp.

Whatever doubts existed never made their way into the intelligence summaries. Indeed, on February 1 in Washington, COMINCH released a cable for transmission to Nimitz, Halsey, and MacArthur: “INDICATIONS ARE THAT JAP OFFENSIVE OPERATION NOW IN FULL SWING ON MAJOR SCALE PRIMARILY DIRECTED AGAINST SOUTHERN SOLOMONS.” With the Tokyo Express in motion, Pearl Harbor intelligence, which had also predicted an offensive, and observed that it appeared more and more
probable, reported no change in its estimate, an observation repeated throughout the withdrawal. On February 6 the doubters in Washington finally managed to get out a cable that asked, “ARE THERE ANY INDICATIONS THAT RECENT TOKYO EXPRESSES MAY HAVE BEEN FOR THE PURPOSE OF EVACUATING NIP FORCES FROM GUADALCANAL?” Halsey’s SOPAC intel people answered the next day: “AS YET NOTHING DEFINITE.”

The second Tokyo Express, also under Admiral Hashimoto, left Shortland the morning of February 4. Its combat air patrol was again pushed aside by a big Cactus Air Force formation, some thirty-three Dauntlesses and Avengers. They damaged the destroyer
Maikaze.
Two ships in the Koyanagi unit suffered minor impairment. Once more Hashimoto’s flagship was crippled, this time by engine failure. But the armada voyaged to Cactus and loaded about 4,000 more men, including General Hyakutake and his staff. The third Express took place on February 7, with the strongest air escort yet—but was again overcome by the Cactus Air Force. Fifteen SBDs bombed Hashimoto. Lieutenant Commander Soma Shohei of the
Akigumo
startled his sailors with his bad mood. Soma had a premonition of doom. In fact, she came through fine. A different destroyer was knocked out, and another damaged insufficiently to stop her. Hashimoto closed the last Cactus evacuation beach, and Koyanagi led his second unit to pull out the men holding the barge station in the Russell Islands. The Japanese were gone. Estimates of the sum total of Japanese rescued from Starvation Island range from 10,652 to some 13,030. The Imperial Navy escaped with a single destroyer sunk and others damaged.

When Admiral Koyanagi returned to Truk, he reported to the Combined Fleet chief. Yamamoto confessed that he too had feared when he heard, early on, that Hashimoto had lost a destroyer to damage, but that he had consoled himself with the thought that Koyanagi Tomiji was on the scene. Yamamoto congratulated Koyanagi on a job well-done.

The date-time group on the SOPAC message replying to Washington’s query regarding a Japanese evacuation indicates that dispatch was sent twenty-nine minutes after the final Tokyo Express reached Shortland safely. Bull Halsey had kept his big ships for news of Yamamoto’s carriers and their expected offensive. Now it was too late. On February 5, a B-17 at
the limit of her search actually caught sight of the Kondo fleet. Halsey strung his bow to shoot it, but Kondo stayed beyond his reach.

Several days later, according to Lieutenant Commander Ito Haruki of Imperial Navy radio intelligence, the Japanese extended their deception, using the frequency of a Catalina patrol plane, whose own communications had become scrambled, to send a carrier sighting report in its name. Ito, who survived the war without participating in any other major battle, observed that “the fake message which helped the total evacuation of Guadalcanal will be my only consolation.” Senior officers reprimanded Ito for violating Imperial Navy security regulations with this gambit.

Americans who researched this claim found that a PBY had been in the area but could not verify that any Allied command had circulated the phony report. The CINCPAC intelligence summary for that day actually noted that the major enemy fleet appeared to be returning to Truk. The summary for February 9, twenty-four hours later, is worth quoting:

At 4:25 p.m. that day, General Patch’s GIs completed clearing Cactus. He messaged Halsey: “‘TOKYO EXPRESS’ NO LONGER HAS TERMINUS ON GUADALCANAL.” Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s observations are also noteworthy:

POLISHING APPLES

Quite close to the end, an event took place that had a huge impact on the war. This was the loss of the submarine
I-1
off Kamimbo Bay on January 29. Fresh from the dockyards, where the
I-1
had gone to repair balky engines, this I-boat represented a more thoughtful approach to the “mole” (
mogura
) submarine supply duty. The boat’s after deck gun had been removed and substituted with a waterproofed
Daihatsu
landing barge. After tests in Empire waters and at Truk, Lieutenant Commander Sakamoto Eichi’s
I-1
went on a mole run to Guadalcanal with supplies and sixty soldiers.

Ultra intervened. A series of late-January messages had mentioned I-boat cruises to Cactus on several succeeding days. The
I-1
appeared in the traffic. Though only one decrypt confirmed a
mogura
mission, and two others actually spoke of cancellation, SOPAC warned Guadalcanal to be alert for subs over a three-day period. Several radio direction-finding stations in New Zealand tracked I-boat transmissions showing subs nearing Guadalcanal. Based on this, Cactus naval command alerted all units to a Japanese sub off Kamimbo. On the night of the twenty-ninth when Commander Sakamoto surfaced, lookouts reported torpedo boats in sight. The
I-1
dived. But the “torpedo boats” were actually the New Zealand corvettes
Moa
and
Kiwi.
The latter detected the sound of Sakamoto’s I-boat. Lieutenant Commander Gordon Bridson’s
Kiwi
dropped depth charges. The
I-1
, now with damaged steering, engines, batteries, and leaks, went into an uncontrolled dive far past her design depth. Desperate to save his ship, Sakamoto managed to regain control and blew his ballast tanks to bring the
I-1
to the surface, where he rushed toward shore on his one good engine, trying to beach the submarine.

Commander Bridson went to full speed, intending to ram. He rejected the complaints of officers who warned of the danger of collision damage,
holding out the possibility of shore leave during repairs.
Kiwi
’s four-inch gun, illuminated by star shells from
Moa
, set afire the landing barge on
I-1
’s deck and killed Sakamoto and most of those on the conning tower. The executive officer, Lieutenant Koreda Sadayoshi, took command and tried to defend the boat, now unable to submerge. Bridson rammed the
I-1
three times. During one of these collisions the sub’s navigator tried to board the New Zealand corvette and attack with his sword, but ship movements shook him loose and he fell into the sea, rescued to enter the POW cages. The sub ran aground on a reef 300 yards from the Guadalcanal shore.

Loss of the
I-1
set back the Imperial Navy’s effort to develop specialized transport subs—but far worse was the loss of secrets of enormous value. Of the Japanese soldiers, nineteen survived. Of the sailors, forty-seven reached shore, taking with them papers that included the current version of the JN-25 code, alternately reported burned or buried. But later they realized that a case of documents had been left behind. With little time, a working party of Koreda and a couple of crewmen, along with sailors from the Japanese evacuation flotilla, were unable to demolish the sub. The survivors left with the destroyers. Koreda reached Rabaul, where NGS officers questioned him. Now the Japanese were anxious to gut the wreck with its secret trove. By February 8, Ultra had intercepted a message expressing dismay that codes had been compromised. On February 10, a strike by Buin-based Vals of the 582nd Air Group made a bomb hit on the wreck, though most planes failed to find it. The next day Lieutenant Koreda sailed from Shortland aboard Lieutenant Commander Inada Hiroshi’s
I-2
in yet another desperate attempt. Ultra revealed that too, and the Allies interfered. The wreck eluded the
I-2
twice. On the first try Inada could not find her in the dark bay at night; on the second, during the night of February 15, PT boats depth-charged Inada’s sub and an aircraft finally drove him away.