Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (49 page)

The Japanese made some changes. Eighth Fleet headquarters moved forward to Buin. But the Imperial Navy no longer had the resources to accomplish wholesale unit rotation. A fresh fighter unit advanced to Rabaul—but the fighter component of the 582nd Air Group had to be disbanded. The air groups of carriers
Ryuho
and
Junyo
were also thrown into the meat grinder. Admiral Koga ordered a fresh destroyer squadron to Rabaul to replace the battered ships with the Eighth Fleet. But much like Captain Hara Tameichi’s destroyer division, its vessels farmed out to others, Rear Admiral Izaki Shunji’s 2nd Destroyer Squadron had a few original ships with a hodgepodge of others glommed onto it. The flotilla on July 12 included several destroyers that had fought with the 3rd Squadron, plus others drafted in from the outside. In the U.S. official history Samuel Eliot Morison complains of the late-inning addition of unfamiliar destroyers into Ainsworth’s force creating “once more the setup of Tassafaronga.” This condition had become the norm on the Japanese side.

Izaki’s force left Rabaul before dawn, loaded 1,200 troops at Buin, and stood down The Slot. He sailed in the light cruiser
Jintsu
with a covering unit of five destroyers. The transport unit with four more carried the load, departing Shortland in the afternoon. Captain Sato Torajiro’s cruiser launched a floatplane at 8:15 p.m. to scout Kula Gulf. After nightfall a bright moon lit the sea, enabling an Allied snooper to spot Izaki soon after midnight. The Catalina carried an observer from Task Group 36.1’s flagship, so premeditation is clear. Ainsworth was already within thirty miles of Izaki. The admiral had to have been expecting action. Izaki detached his destroyer-transports to slide by the Americans and they did so. Whether he based this on a general understanding of the combat environment—Izaki was an Etajima classmate of codebreaker Ushio Fujimasa, then heading the Owada Group—or on detecting Ainsworth’s radars is unknown. One destroyer,
Yukikaze
, carried her own radar and acquired the enemy thirty minutes before visual contact. The bright moon now worked to Japanese advantage. Izaki’s vessels saw the Americans before they had closed to optimal range.

Admiral Ainsworth instructed his ships to launch torpedoes before
shooting, but Izaki beat them to the punch—and Japanese torpedoes were faster and more powerful. Captain Sato’s
Jintsu
spit seven torpedoes, and the destroyers more. Sato ordered his ship to illuminate the enemy—as fatal here as it had been for the
Hiei
off Guadalcanal.
Jintsu
’s main battery had been in action only a couple of minutes when she was hit. The Allied cruisers pummeled her—2,630 six-inch shells in about twenty minutes. American light cruisers in particular had awesome firepower. At least ten hits slammed the
Jintsu
, and she was also struck by a torpedo. Seaman Toyoda Isamu, one of the ship’s oldest salts—he had been with
Jintsu
since the spring of 1939—was at his action station just forward of the aft smokestack when there was a tremendous explosion on the port side. Admiral Izaki, Captain Sato, and the ship’s executive officer were all killed. There were no fires.
Jintsu
listed slightly to port but then rolled to starboard. After just ten minutes, at 1:48 a.m. the cruiser broke in two and sank. A handful of men were rescued by the submarine
I-180
, and the Americans picked up a few more. Seaman Toyoda was captured on New Georgia four days after the battle. The vast majority of 484 sailors perished.

But by this time Rear Admiral Ainsworth’s battle plan had already gone wrong. Captain Shimai Zenjiro of the
Yukikaze
took charge of the remaining Japanese warships. He turned away under a squall and ordered torpedoes reloaded, a vital chore completed at 1:36 a.m. Twenty minutes later Shimai’s destroyers regained sight of the Allies. They flung thirty-one torpedoes at 2:05. At about that moment Ainsworth, confused over the identity of the targets on his radar, ordered star shell illumination. Shortly thereafter, within a hellish six minutes Long Lances detonated against cruisers
Leander
and
St. Louis
, Ainsworth’s flagship
Honolulu
, and the destroyer
Gwin.
Both American cruisers’ bows were opened to the sea. The
Leander
had a starboard list. As a final act, the PBY that had been observing all this made her own bombing run against the retiring Japanese. She missed. The damaged warships returned to Guadalcanal under their own power, but
Honolulu
and
St. Louis
would be out of action for four months and the
Leander
laid up the better part of a year. The destroyer
Gwin
sank. At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz decided that Pug Ainsworth had handled a succession of difficult situations with aggressiveness and skill. At Rabaul, learning the details, Hara Tameichi concluded this had been a greater victory even than Tassafaronga. But not all Imperial Navy officers were so pleased. Another
destroyer captain, Hanami Kohei of the
Amagiri
, emphasized the technological balance: “While night fighting had long been regarded as a unique prowess of the Japanese Navy, the results now had become entirely the reverse. This was because US forces were using radar and we were powerless from preventing them from approaching us suddenly with…guns blazing.”

The young John F. Kennedy’s story epitomizes this moment, its trials and anguish, and the relentless rhythm of the conflict. Kennedy had arrived at Tulagi under the hammer of Japanese air attack, a fresh-faced PT boat officer hungry for a command. The boat he would skipper,
PT-109
, claimed to have downed one of the Japanese raiders that day. The tender
Niagara
, serving the PT boat base, claimed seven. Patrol boat methods and missions were changing to reflect burgeoning Allied strength and the new texture of the war. PT patrols that had been a matter of one or a few boats from Squadron 3 on Tulagi first became mass sorties to block the Express at Guadalcanal, then switched to a variety of activities. Flotilla One, a collection of squadrons, replaced the single unit. Tulagi harbor became a receiving center. The need for room drove the PT flotilla to set up a satellite base on Florida Island. Lieutenant Kennedy spent his early weeks at Sesapi on Florida with Squadron 2, integrating his basic training with the practical experience PT boat hands had acquired and now passed along. Florida too had become a backwater. The advance up The Slot moved the nexus of PT operations first to the Russells, then Rendova.

PT-109
, the boat Jack Kennedy made famous, distinguished herself in the Russells invasion before he arrived. She recovered some of the scouts sent to reconnoiter the islands. During the landing phase the PTs, including the
109
, turned out en masse to help screen the transports. Two-boat sections of PTs then patrolled Russells waters. But Squadron 6 became the denizens of the Russells base, while Squadron 2 pulled back to Sesapi for the boats to be overhauled, their hulls scraped. The
109
’s radar proved troublesome, but in itself this detail shows the difference between sides in this war: The Allies now had radars even in individual patrol boats, whereas this crucial technical development was only beginning to trickle down to reach Japanese destroyers. Lieutenant Commander Rollin Westholm, flotilla operations
officer and a former skipper of
PT-109
, assigned Jack Kennedy as her new captain. He took command on April 25. Her crew included only a couple of men from the boat’s original complement, and some sailors boarded with Kennedy himself.

For a period of weeks Lieutenant Kennedy made familiarization patrols and did shake-down runs with
PT-109.
He was off Lunga Point on April 18 when fighter pilot Tom Lanphier, returning from the Yamamoto shoot-down, made a celebratory rollover down the runway of the airfield to mark his success. Kennedy’s patrol boat investigated strange lights on Savo Island, charted water obstacles, and looked for stray supply drums off the coast. Kennedy experienced the dangers of cruising in fog—near zero visibility, throttling up the PT boat’s three engines was an invitation to disaster—and the fear of seeing a light at sea that might turn into a Japanese warship. At Sesapi Kennedy lived in a native hut and employed a Melanesian houseboy, who confessed that he’d helped eat a missionary. The Melanesians were friendly and the houseboy helpful, but one day he disappeared. Scuttlebutt had it that he had been apprehended by authorities who sought to punish indigenous cannibalism.

This is a good place to spend a moment on the impact of the war on this primitive society. Throughout the Solomons lived tribes of headhunters, fishermen, or others who practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. Shell money remained standard currency. Many Melanesian ways had not changed in decades, if not centuries. Excepting those who crewed island steamers, most experiences of the outside world were limited to contacts with missionaries, colonial officials, and plantation owners or overseers. New Zealand and Australian colonial authorities, in succession to the British, and in particular missionaries like the Seventh Day Adventists, whose South Seas Evangelical Mission made them possibly the most enthusiastic proselytizers in the islands, introduced a modicum of modernization. The main island of the New Georgia group suggests the degree of missionary penetration: It had settlements called Jericho and Nazareth. Developers came to the Solomons to install plantations, primarily for coconuts and gum trees. This led to a reduction in nomadization, some wage-based employment, the growth of villages into towns around the ports, and the
establishment of new settlements, particularly around missions. The colonizers introduced notions of “law” and legal norms that clashed with traditional adjudication and lineal descent, not to mention the concept of “property” as against tribal lands. Traditional ways were diluted, though not eliminated. Close connections among the islands remained. An example springs from Jack Kennedy’s experience when his PT boat was later smashed and the young officer worked desperately to save his crew. Years afterward Kennedy thanked the islanders who helped rescue them. By then the ten men lived on seven different islands. Two resided at Munda, another at Rendova. One had taken the name “Moses.” One, Eroni Kumana, later donated a bracelet made of seashells to the Kennedy Library, asking that it be laid on the former president’s grave. That was done in 2009. In the Solomons the cream-colored shells were money still. Modernity had arrived in the islands, yet tradition remained strong.

The clash of cultures did not come to the Solomons because of World War II, though war accelerated many trends and brought tremendous agitation. Sophisticated ships and planes, cannon, mechanisms people had hardly seen, and alien men with guns who tried to enlist the natives or demanded they take sides were major features of the indigenous experience. The sheer scale shocked the Melanesians. On Guadalcanal the indigenous population amounted to perhaps 15,000 people. The warring sides flooded the island with soldiers numbering many times that—and more men died there than the entire native community. Some indigenous people took the war as an opportunity to better their lot, others to break free of the colonial mold; still others sought to flee.

With a colonial tradition already spanning decades, the Melanesians mostly sided with the Allies, who represented the whites they had long known. Vicious Japanese reprisals for real or imagined slights made that choice easier. Coastwatchers, in particular, depended on these traditional loyalties. Roughly 400 Melanesians served alongside the coastwatchers on the various islands. Such cooperation explains how Australian coastwatchers could be active on New Georgia while the Japanese held bases on the same islands. In addition there was a Solomon Islands Protectorate Defense Force that carried 680 natives on its rolls. Some of these people, like Sergeant Vouza, fought with the Americans on Guadalcanal. The war sparked demands for native labor. Indigenous men from Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Florida,
and Malaita became the mainstay of supply handling for the huge Allied bases on Cactus. Eventually this phenomenon would be recognized by the establishment of an official Solomon Islands Labor Corps in which 3,200 Melanesians served.

But the war also challenged the fabric of indigenous society. Malaita Island—never invaded, never occupied, never a battleground—gives the example. The closest Malaita came to the war was the quiet presence there of a couple of Australian coastwatchers. Natives returning from work on Guadalcanal brought tales contrasting their treatment with that meted out by plantation overseers. Even African-Americans in the U.S. forces—themselves visibly oppressed—behaved more graciously than the compradors. An emancipation movement formed on Malaita and spread through the Solomons. After 1945, protectorate security authorities regarded these self-government advocates as revolutionaries, which led to a hysterical response.

The Allied commanders at least took some pains to avoid the worst of culture shock. Native villages were typically off-limits to Allied troops. Often there were only chance contacts, or ceremonial occasions when officers were invited to native rituals. Most outsiders, both American and Japanese, were left with their fantasies of half-naked natives frolicking at village festivals. Some encounters were less convivial. When PT boats moved to the new Russells base, a couple of sailors who had rustled up a skiff with an outboard went off exploring a little river. Startled by black snakes, they ran away from the boat and saw some native women, only to confront tribesmen with spears, who followed them, pounding their spears on the ground in the manner of Zulu tribesmen in the British-African colonial wars. The sailors hightailed it for their skiff, ignoring vines and snakes alike.