Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (5 page)

Meanwhile Allied intentions were becoming a factor. Why the Japanese should have missed this remains a mystery. After all, the Allies had tried to mount a carrier attack on the main Solomons base, Rabaul, as early as February 1942. In May, when the Imperial Navy set up its seaplane installation on Tulagi, that too had been struck by American carriers even as the ships unloaded. The bombing became an opening chord in the Battle of the Coral Sea, in which American and Australian forces repulsed a Japanese attempt to conquer New Guinea. The salient points were that the Allies
were very sensitive to activity in the Solomons–New Guinea area, and that they often struck Imperial Navy bases. Preoccupied with fresh maneuvers in the Indian Ocean, belittling the South Seas as Tokyo had been wont to do, or discounting the potential for an Allied offensive, the Combined Fleet paid little heed to the other side of the hill.

Hard realities needed to be recognized. Admiral Mikawa sent Commander Ohmae to investigate conditions. At Truk the operations expert found Fourth Fleet staff had no indications of any American attack in the Solomons. Ohmae went on to the new fleet’s base, Rabaul, arriving at noon on the twentieth. A half-sunken wreck in Rabaul’s Simpson Harbor demonstrated the Allies’ interest in this target. Light smoke plumed from the crater of a nearby volcano. Ohmae found Imperial Navy officers suspicious of the new Outer South Seas command, and air officers anxious to leave. Base personnel laughed when Ohmae wanted a building to house fleet headquarters—a naval commander should be afloat. He countered that Admiral Mikawa wished to minimize risks to valuable warships. Captain Kanazawa Masao of the 8th Base Force reluctantly set aside a dilapidated wood-frame shack. Situated near Rabaul’s cricket field, Eighth Fleet headquarters did not even have a toilet.

Japan might be powerful, but defending the
soto nanyo
would pose challenges. Another was revealed when Ohmae reunited with Mikawa at Truk. The
Chokai
reached there on July 24. At Truk there was a banquet hosted by Fourth Fleet commander Vice Admiral Inouye Shigeyoshi in honor of both Admiral Mikawa and his Army counterpart, General Hyakutake Haruyoshi. The 17th Army, it turned out, had been formed with a strength of just nine battalions—the equivalent of a single infantry division. That thin strength Hyakutake intended to concentrate against New Guinea. The Solomons might as well be on another planet. Meanwhile Inouye, concerned with his responsibilities in the Central Pacific, wanted no part of the Solomons either. At midnight on July 26, his Fourth Fleet ceded authority for the Outer South Seas to Mikawa’s Eighth. After a couple of days listening to Inouye’s briefs, Mikawa departed for Rabaul in his cruiser. The
Chokai
steamed into Simpson Harbor on July 31. After depositing Mikawa, Ohmae, and others at their new home, the warship left for Kavieng, a nearby port on New Ireland.

Vice Admiral Mikawa barely had time to get used to Rabaul’s intense tropical climate. By early August the Japanese had almost completed the Guadalcanal airstrip. Then, one day at dawn, the waters offshore were filled with Allied vessels. Cruisers and destroyers bombarded Japanese positions on both Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Transports began to lower landing craft and fill them with troops. The campaign had begun.

^*
This obfuscation may have resulted partly from confusion over U.S. losses. The Imperial Navy left the Midway battle area under the impression that one American carrier had succumbed to air attacks and another to submarine torpedoes. Actually the
Yorktown
had been the target in all the successful air strikes but had remained afloat to be finished off by submarine
I-168.
The Navy may have thought it had reported American losses accurately, but the key point is that it was suppressing Japanese ones.

I.

ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

Every ship in the invasion armada was filled with men keyed to action. Aboard the command ship, USS
McCawley
, general quarters sounded at 3:00 a.m. Many were already awake. This was true for Colonel Clifton Cates, leading a regiment slated to land in the second wave, as well as for Lieutenant Herbert C. Merillat of the division intelligence staff. Aboard attack transport
American Legion
, war correspondent Richard Tregaskis awoke an hour later to find excited Marines already lining his ship’s railings. All the vessels were darkened, smoking lamps out for fear of alerting the enemy. The dank fastness of Guadalcanal appeared a little after 1:30. About the time the fleet went to battle stations it split, one section headed to the big island, Guadalcanal, another for Tulagi across the water. On the
McCawley
, Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, leader of the 1st Marine Division, and Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, fleet commander, were full of hope. The weather closed in as they approached. Low cloud ceilings had kept Japanese search planes away. They might achieve surprise in this, the first major Allied offensive of the war.

With dawn a carefully choreographed sequence began with the order—the first of many times it would be issued—“Land the landing force.” Soon afterward, aircraft from American carriers one hundred miles away swept in to strafe the invasion beaches. At about 6:15 a.m., cruisers and destroyers added their gunfire to the din. The Japanese were discombobulated enough that more than half an hour passed before their base at Tulagi alerted the 25th Air Flotilla at Rabaul that a bombardment was under way and invasion preparations visible.

Events thereafter moved quickly. The attack transports glided to their assigned anchorages off Lunga Point and lowered Higgins boats and other
craft. Most were worked by U.S. Coast Guard coxswains. Marines began climbing down into the assault craft. Lieutenant Merillat descended a cargo net to his boat at about 9:00 a.m. By then two battalions of Colonel LeRoy P. Hunt’s 5th Marines were nearing Red Beach on Guadalcanal. On the Tulagi side the landing had already begun. Hunt’s last battalion, along with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion and the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion, had engaged the Japanese. Coast Guardsman Douglas Munro waded ashore there to supply Turner with field reports. Boats grounded at Red Beach at 9:10. Colonel Cates’s command group landed at 9:38, the initial echelon of division headquarters about twenty minutes later, among them Lieutenant Merillat, with reporters Richard Tregaskis and Jack Crane. Marines quickly seized the airfield and fanned out to establish a perimeter.

General Vandegrift wasted no time. He immediately ordered in Cates’s 1st Marines, and behind that the divisional artillery, the 11th Marines of Colonel Pedro del Valle. He even widened Red Beach to hasten the landing. Glenn D. Maxon, a young lieutenant, led a platoon of the 1st Marines aboard the transport
Alchiba.
They hit the beach at 10:45. Corporal James R. Garrett was an ammunition handler with I Battery of the 11th Marines. He too reached the shore around this time. Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Dwight H. Dexter brought in two dozen guardsmen early in the afternoon to implant a small boat unit, Naval Operating Base Guadalcanal. They set up shop at the manager’s house of a Lever Brothers coconut plantation east of Lunga Point. Marine commander Vandegrift landed at 4:00 p.m.
Alchiba
’s skipper later observed that the physical effort of getting troops into assault boats and moving them to the beach taxed his sailors. Ensign Jack Clark would have agreed. Aboard the transport
Fuller
, he worked one of the boats landing the 1st Marines. Clark went ashore as “beachmaster” for Red Beach, managing the circulation of landing boats and the arrival of supplies, getting them off the shore. Clark’s job became vital to the entire Allied enterprise in a way he could never have imagined. What supplies he landed would be all the Marines had.

The Japanese on Guadalcanal fled at the first sight of the invasion. That was probably understandable. The defense force consisted of only about 500 naval infantry. These Special Naval Landing Forces (SNLF) were tough troops, but they had no chance against more than 12,000 U.S. Marines. Captain
Monzen Kanae’s 1,700 construction workers, who made up the bulk of the Imperial Navy complement, hardly figured in the equation. In fact, the SNLF were responsible for their safety.

The t day ended with American control unchallenged save for some tough fighting on Tulagi and the adjacent islet of Tanambogo, where the SNLF fought hard. The most important enemy resistance was an air attack on the ships offshore—and there the Allies had a remarkable advantage—advance notice from “coastwatchers,” Australian and indigenous patriots who stayed behind Japanese lines and radioed warnings of enemy activities. The coastwatchers became a pillar of Allied intelligence in the Solomons.

BETWIXT PILLAR AND POST

Coastwatchers were able to hold on in the Solomons and New Guinea because of how the Japanese had occupied the islands. The Outer South Seas had never been Tokyo’s major priority. Reserving most of its combat strength for the war in China, the Japanese Army viewed the “strike south,” or Pacific war, primarily as an Imperial Navy venture. There is a backstory to Japanese interest in Australia that is rooted in the vagaries of national politics and the intense competition between Army and Navy for dominance in the government, but details are not necessary. It is sufficient to note that the Japanese Army sought to conduct its Pacific war as a sideshow, allocating just ten divisions to do everything—conquer Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies; garrison those places; and wage battle across the full range of Pacific islands. Thus the South Seas Detachment the Army set aside for the Bismarcks region—New Guinea and the Solomons—consisted of just 5,500 troops built around the three battalions of a single infantry regiment.

The Imperial Navy focused on the Mandates, or South Seas proper, and its prewar plans had not envisioned a Solomons campaign. Once it happened, forces were sufficient to garrison only a few posts. Except for small islands like Tulagi or big bases like Rabaul, the Japanese could do little more than patrol from their enclaves. Australian coastwatchers went on living on the same islands. Knowing the land better, and with the help of Melanesian friends, they evaded Japanese patrols with impunity. The Japanese
selected their posts through staff studies. Vice Admiral Inouye Shigeyoshi of the Fourth Fleet had held war games at Truk a couple of months before Pearl Harbor. The
nanyo
commander realized that unless Japan held some positions in the Bismarcks, he would have a long open flank exposed to Americans or Australians. His war games showed the need for protection by air bases at key points. Inouye selected Rabaul and Gasmata on New Britain, Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea, and Tulagi in the lower Solomons as the most desirable positions. When IGHQ agreed to this aspect of the war plan, on November 10, 1941, the port of Kavieng on New Ireland was added. A few days later the Army’s South Seas Detachment issued a pamphlet to familiarize its soldiers with the Bismarck Archipelago. The detachment’s initial operation, immediately after Pearl Harbor, had been to capture the island of Guam in the Mandates. On December 9, as that battle ended, Australian coastwatcher Cornelius Page reported Japanese scout planes flying toward Rabaul, the first confirmed report from the Bismarcks. Rabaul, defended by just a pair of Australian antiaircraft guns, was bombed by big Japanese flying boats at the end of December.

On January 4, 1942, the Combined Fleet ordered Admiral Inouye to execute the Bismarcks offensive, code-named the “R Operation.” A Japanese Army companion order alerted the South Seas Detachment. The same day twenty-two medium bombers attacked Rabaul. Australian planes there, ten Wirraway fighters and four Hudson bombers, did not catch them. Inouye issued his operations order on the fifth. An Australian plane that managed to reconnoiter Truk four days later discovered preparations in full swing, with a dozen cruisers and destroyers plus another large vessel at anchor. Land-based bombers continued to raid Rabaul, losing only one plane. The Army troop commander, anxious for better intelligence, got one of his staff attached to the Fourth Fleet and sent that man on a pair of Rabaul missions to photograph defenses. Army troops were supplemented by three battalion-size units of the SNLF, the Japanese Marines.

The Australians suffered no illusions. For weeks authorities had been gathering the small numbers of citizens who lived in the villages and plantations dotting the islands, moving them to Rabaul, where at least there was a garrison, in the form of Lieutenant Colonel John J. Scanlan’s Lark Force, about 1,400 troops built around the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry, Australian Imperial Forces. There were some militia from the New Guinea
Volunteer Rifles, plus a true oddity, a battalion band recruited entirely from members of the Salvation Army. Small detachments had been posted to the Solomons, including at Gasmata and on Tulagi. Bougainville also had an independent infantry company. As civilians regrouped, a few planters, managers, and missionaries stayed behind, marking the beginning of the coastwatcher network.

Before the war there had been roughly a thousand Australian civilians at Rabaul. Now there were several times that many. By mid-January most women and children had been evacuated, along with some men. The rest, plus twelve hundred Chinese residents, a handful of Japanese, and the native population numbering more than ten thousand, stayed where they were. The Japanese were coming. The only question was when.

Meanwhile the Imperial Navy detailed its formidable striking force to help the invaders. Admiral Nagumo sailed on January 5 with four
Kido Butai
carriers. After a stop at Iwakuni to take on aircraft, he cruised on to Truk, arriving on January 14. Seaman Kuramoto Iki, a lookout aboard carrier
Kaga
, had dreamed of the
nanyo
since he was a boy, imagining naked natives dancing under palm trees. But the blazing sun broiled the inside of the ship and shattered those fantasies. Suddenly Iki longed for home. At Truk the crews changed to tropical uniform, a welcome relief. Kuramoto had never imagined he would look forward to rain—squalls and wind dissipated some of the heat. Evening breezes also brought respite. The
Akagi
installed armored shields on its AA guns to protect the gunners. After replenishing, the fleet left Truk on the seventeenth. Seaman Kuramoto gazed at the night sky and marveled at the brilliant stars of the Southern Cross constellation—it is remarkable how often South Pacific veterans from both sides invoke the Southern Cross as somehow defining their experiences. Kuramoto, for one, lay on his back on the upper deck, among the machine guns, and never closed his eyes. On the flag bridge Vice Admiral Nagumo likely had similar thoughts.