Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (53 page)

The 2nd Parachute Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Victor H. Krulak, got the Choiseul assignment. Code-named “Blissful,” the operation was anything but. Krulak was to make as much noise as possible. It was the battalion’s first assault landing—and the men were green troops too. But Krulak was first-rate, and he had the benefit of a personal meeting with coastwatcher Seton, who came to Vella Lavella with two native guides to brief the Marine commander. There were only a couple of weeks to prepare. Some 650 paramarines landed at Voza bay the night of October 27. The Marines drove the enemy out of a barge base, but Krulak and others were wounded. His deputy took a strong patrol toward the north end of the island. They got lost. The boss radioed for PT boats to rescue them. The Marines’ plea went to Navy Lieutenant Arthur H. Berndtson, whose torpedo boat detachment had moved forward to Lambu Lambu Cove on Vella
Lavella. Berndtson had just two PT boats immediately available, and one of them,
PT-59
, was refueling at the time. Her skipper was John F. Kennedy.

After his ordeal, Kennedy had demanded another command. Superiors gave him the
PT-59
, among those rearmed as a gunboat. Lieutenant Kennedy, four of his original crew still aboard, had shaken down the boat and took it into action. It was Kennedy’s
PT-59
with another that saved the Marine patrol.
PT-59
plus
PT-236
sailed from Lambu Lambu Cove. With his fuel tank just one-third filled, Kennedy had the gas to get to Choiseul but not enough for the return trip. From the beginning the plan was for the other craft to take her in tow when the time came. The PTs charged into the bay on the afternoon of November 2, guns ablaze. They covered two landing craft that managed to extract the desperate paramarines. One craft smashed up on reefs, and
PT-59
took aboard her passengers, whom they returned to Krulak’s camp. A Marine too badly wounded to move stayed in Kennedy’s bunk for the transit across The Slot. He died at sea, just before
PT-59
ran out of gas. Kennedy was towed back to Lambu Lambu, where Lieutenant Berndtson now had orders to take all five of his boats to shield the evacuation of Krulak’s Marines. The entire force loaded into landing craft. Krulak’s diversion had run its course. A couple weeks later, following several more missions, Lieutenant Kennedy was examined by a doctor and ruled physically and mentally exhausted. He was invalided home. Kennedy would miss the curtain rising on the last act of the Solomons campaign. There could be no doubt who had the advantage, but even now the Imperial Navy refused to concede defeat.

VII.

FORTRESS RABAUL

In important ways the diminutive General Kenney, a bantam rooster with an aggressive, perhaps bombastic streak, complemented Douglas A. MacArthur. Kenney gave MacArthur his real education in the use of airpower, and the two forged strong links in the fires of New Guinea. MacArthur had always wanted Rabaul. More than a year had passed since Kenney promised to burn it to the ground. That never happened. Preoccupied with SOWESPAC’s New Guinea struggle, for two months during the high summer of 1943, the Fifth Air Force sent not a single bomber against the Japanese bastion. But as summer turned to fall and SOPAC girded to invade Bougainville, Rabaul’s outer redoubt, the moment for action fast approached. Both generals realized that for Halsey to operate so close to the fortress he was going to need the strong arm of Kenney’s bombers.

MacArthur wanted Bougainville too, because Allied aims in the South Pacific had changed again. Since June, Admiral Nimitz had been pressing for an offensive across the Central Pacific to match MacArthur’s thrust from the south. The Joint Chiefs accepted CINCPAC’s bid. Conducting a Central Pacific offensive, among other things, required drawing away Marines plus amphibious shipping from the South Pacific, as well as most newly arriving warships. The 2nd Marine Division, specifically slated for an invasion of Rabaul, went away. Reduced emphasis on the South Pacific meant changing the Cartwheel concept from capturing Rabaul to simply masking it by means of a ring of air bases. Strikes from them would suppress the enemy and make it impossible for the Japanese to supply the place. In August a meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved that strategy.

Bougainville, with its complex of bases around Buin plus facilities on the eastern and northern coasts, protected Rabaul and had to be smashed. At
meetings between SOWESPAC and SOPAC staff, and in direct contacts with MacArthur, the general made it clear the capture of Bougainville was Halsey’s highest priority. The Japanese withdrawn from the Central Solomons had mostly been deposited on Bougainville. Though Halsey had not been able to stanch the pullout, SOPAC intelligence understood the new dispositions. Admiral Kusaka would react promptly and in force to any move against that island. His response would come from Rabaul. Hence the need for a serious effort to contain the Japanese fortress.

The fifty-four-year-old George Kenney knew when his boss was serious, and it was clear that MacArthur was serious about Bougainville. SOWESPAC had spent a year pushing up the northern New Guinea coast, but before MacArthur could go much farther, Rabaul had to be dealt with. Kenney might be bombastic, but he was also resourceful and imaginative. An MIT grad who had honed his skills at the air engineering school and led the Army Air Corps technology development command, Kenney had put his Fifth Air Force in a position to undertake a serious aerial assault. The general not only had backed skip bombing, but he introduced new weapons, like incendiaries and the latest innovation, the parachute-fragmentation (“parafrag”) munition, designed to enable bombers to hit from very low altitude without being blasted by their own ordnance. Kenney eagerly pressed for P-38 aircraft in his Fifth Air Force, and he prevailed on his airmen to accept the newer, even more powerful P-47 Thunderbolt, which SOWESPAC fliers initially resisted as inadequate. In April 1943 the Fifth Air Force had had 516 aircraft. Kenney planned for 1,330 before the end of the year, with a reserve of 25 percent on top of that. He sought a crew-to-aircraft ratio of two to one. General Kenney also obtained bases for the assault on Rabaul, championing the amphibious landings at Woodlark and Kiriwina islands, where other SOWESPAC staff viewed these as diversions from the war in New Guinea. Construction started within days of the June landings. Army engineers built the airfields at Kiriwina; Seabees, those on Woodlark. The first airplane alighted at the latter barely two weeks after the beginning of site clearance. Australian air force wings were based on the islands, and they served as recovery points for damaged aircraft or those low on gas.

Airmen had no illusions about Rabaul. The place was formidable. It was defended by 376 flak guns, both Navy and Army, including 118 of large caliber. The Japanese had nearly two dozen radars with ranges up to ninety
miles. And there were fighters to repel the attacks. One B-25 pilot for the Fifth Air Force recalled, “Rabaul was the hardest target without a doubt.” Years later at a squadron reunion a friend remembered how the crews looked scared to death before their first sortie against the fortress. General Kenney himself, writing of one of these Rabaul strikes, recorded it as “the toughest, hardest-fought engagement of the war.” Though they flew for AIRSOLS, not Kenney’s outfit, Halsey’s aviators agreed. They began to hit Rabaul starting in November, when MacArthur, eager to return his focus to New Guinea, made the fortress an AIRSOLS concern. Edward Brisck recalled, “You would just grit your teeth and hold your position in the formation and concentrate on your job.” Or LeRoy Smith: “In the early days when we hit Rabaul, it was a real killer.” Or Charles Kittell: “You’d look around and you couldn’t see the other airplanes because the sky was so full of flak.” But the airmen went back again and again. They understood their purpose.

The men of the “Black Sheep Squadron,” Marine Fighter Squadron 214, are representative. Led by the effervescent Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, VMF-214 was a first-team unit that could fight anybody. They reached the Russells in August and went on their initial mission against Bougainville on September 16. The squadron flew from Munda and Vella Lavella. Pappy Boyington, himself shot down over Rabaul just after the New Year, spent the last part of the war in prison camps. Boyington’s intelligence officer, Frank E. Walton, later wrote, “Rabaul was the keystone to the entire Southwest Pacific. If we were able to neutralize it…the enemy would have to pull in their horns all the way back to the Philippines and the Marianas.”

Allied airmen began their siege of Rabaul on October 12, when Kenney sent everything he had that could fly and go that far. The general had told one of Halsey’s staffers that by the twentieth Rabaul would be “dead.” That did not happen, but the fortress would be sorely tried. Kenney’s strike force included 87 B-17 or B-24 heavy bombers, 114 B-25 mediums, 125 P-38 fighters, some 349 warplanes in all. Only fifty-six Japanese interceptors opposed them. Kenney thought there had been massive destruction to Japanese shipping, several of Rabaul’s airfields, and other targets. The field at Vunakanau, at least, was indeed hit hard. There the Japanese 751st Air Group suffered its worst ground losses of the campaign. Caught in the open
servicing planes, more than twenty of its scarce maintenance men were killed and more than fifty wounded. Adding to Captain Sato Naohiro’s difficulties, a single squadron of his group lost a half dozen Bettys—and more 751st aircraft were undoubtedly among the thirty bombers smashed at Vunakanau that day.

Over the next week Port Moresby was socked in, precluding further attack, though the Japanese struck Oro Bay and mixed it up in dogfights over Wewak. Low cloud cover turned back most of the fighter escort on October 18, but fifty-four B-25s made it to Rabaul. From October 23 to 25, the Fifth Air Force raided the fortress every day. For the Japanese during the second of these raids, the ace Nishizawa Hiroyoshi led one of the intercepting formations. On the twenty-fifth the three P-38 squadrons of “Satan’s Angels,” the 475th Fighter Group, swept over Rabaul with the bombers and wreaked havoc. The JNAF opposition proved somewhat weaker than in the first big raid. Distances and aircraft range were such that escort fighters typically had to refuel at Kiriwina on their return leg before flying on to Dobodura. Another bombing took place on October 29. The weather zeroed out a Halloween attack. Though weather repeatedly interfered with planned raids, during October some 416 sorties by Kenney’s bombers dumped 683 tons of munitions on Rabaul. Kenney’s aerial offensive combined with Halsey’s invasion to confront Kusaka with his greatest challenge.

PRELUDE TO DISASTER

Baron Tomioka had known Admiral Kusaka Jinichi since before the war. Tomioka thought him a cool customer, great in a crisis, never flinching. Kusaka needed all his powers now. In the Solomons the Imperial Navy faced oblivion. The difficulty of conducting surface operations had mounted steadily. But the dangers to ships almost paled next to those confronting the Japanese Naval Air Force. In the summer, already beset by mounting losses, the Navy had committed its Carrier Division 2, flying from Buin. The carrier men shared the Bougainville bases with the fliers of Rear Admiral Kozaka’s 26th Air Flotilla. Half a dozen air strikes were carried out against the Allies on Vella Lavella and four against Rendova. As the planes flew off and did not return, the Navy finally merged the remnants of both flotillas and put Division 2 commander Rear Admiral Sakamaki Munetaka
in charge of the combined unit, re-creating the carrier air groups in Singapore. With the merger, Commander Okumiya Masatake, Sakamaki’s air staff officer, who had been planning the night missions, now found all distinction between day and night gone. The men ran on fumes. Malnutrition added to exhaustion, with particular effect on pilots, whose peripheral vision, nerves, and alertness were affected. Okumiya mourned one officer, a well-known ace, flying since the China Incident, who simply crashed into an Allied plane. Okumiya suspected the pilot had never even seen the aircraft with which he collided.

The warplanes themselves were worn out and beset with problems. Maintenance crews could hardly keep up with the damage. Spare parts were scarce and being run into Rabaul aboard destroyers. On paper the Eleventh Air Fleet was supremely powerful, with 144 Betty medium bombers, 96 Val dive-bombers, 24 Kate torpedo planes, an equal number of patrol aircraft, and 312 fighters, an aggregate of 608 aircraft. Yet Admiral Kusaka’s serviceable strength amounted to barely 200 airplanes. Two-thirds of his flying machines were useful only as a boneyard to scavenge for parts to keep others in the air.

Commander Okumiya presently departed to help reorganize the Carrier Division 2 air groups. In the Solomons the fight went on. Heavy fighting over the Buin complex took place almost daily. By late July AIRSOLS was striking with eighty bombers at a time accompanied by more than a hundred fighters. In mid-September JNAF interceptors had to repel five air raids in a single day. The cumulative effects told. “Prior to the beginning of 1943,” noted Chief Petty Officer Iwamoto Tetsuzo, Rabaul’s top ace, “we still had hope and fought fiercely. But now we fought to uphold our honor…. We believed that we were expendable, that we were all going to die. There was no hope of survival—no one cared anymore.” In a postwar study for the Occupation, former Imperial Navy officers, considering morale at this stage, chose to compare mid-1943 with that fall in order to set a baseline permitting them to conclude that until this point morale had remained stable.

Equally problematic, losses among the dive-bomber and torpedo plane units, combined with low production, condemned the JNAF to a critical shortage of striking power. That spring, attack formations like those in Yamamoto’s big offensive were already being sent off with two to four fighters per bomber. By the fall, ratios of fighters to attack planes as low as two
to one were unheard-of. Five or more fighters per bomber had become typical. Partly attributable to JNAF desperation to penetrate the curtains of Allied air patrols, partly to simple numbers of available aircraft, the trend took hold. Since the Zero had yet to evolve any significant fighter-bomber capacity, this deficit in Japanese attack capability was even greater than raw aircraft numbers suggest.