Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (58 page)

Admiral Montgomery’s instructions were to make a second strike. He had begun rearming when Kusaka struck back. At least the JNAF waves were detected on radar more than a hundred miles away. Montgomery launched some of his follow-up strike planes beginning at 1:25 p.m., but shortly after that defensive action began to predominate. The Japanese force included sixty-seven Zeroes, twenty-seven Vals, and fourteen Kates, with a unit of Bettys trailing behind. By 1:54 action was joined. Montgomery canceled his second strike and concentrated on the air battle. For the first half hour Japanese dive-bombers held sway; then came the torpedo planes. Some Bettys that missed the carrier task force found Tip Merrill’s cruisers instead and put a torpedo into light cruiser
Denver.
But that would be it. The Japanese strike groups lost a few Bettys, all of their Kate torpedo planes, and all but ten of the Val dive-bombers. The loss of several dozen attack planes in exchange for a single torpedo hit against a nonessential U.S. warship measured Japan’s decline in the year since Santa Cruz.

The air battles of November 11 marked the effective end of Rabaul as a Japanese offensive base. Combined Fleet recalled Ozawa’s
Kido Butai
aircraft the next day. The proud legions of the “sea eagles” were heavily thinned. Hirohito issued an imperial rescript congratulating the carrier-and land-based airmen on their achievements. Only after the war would the Japanese discover how meager these had been. But the numbers tell their own story: 173 planes had gone to Rabaul; fifty-three returned to Truk. The losses included half the fighter planes, 85 percent of the dive-bombers, 90 percent of the torpedo planes. Every single scout plane had been destroyed. Between damaged planes that had managed to land and airmen rescued, the personnel losses were not quite as bad: 50 percent of scout crews, 40 percent of the torpedo-plane crews, 30 percent of the fighter pilots. But among the dive-bomber crews, three of every four had perished. Fighter sorties were expensive, but effective to some degree. Attack sorties were prohibitively costly
regardless of their effectiveness, which was considerably less than the Imperial Navy believed.

Admiral Kusaka, unable to protect major warships any longer, ordered them to Truk. Captain Kato sailed with the
Maya
on November 12. The
Agano
also cleared harbor, with some help, then was torpedoed en route by the American submarine
Scamp.
She had to be rescued by the
Natori
and her destroyers, which towed Captain Matsubara’s ship the rest of the way. The
Yubari
was bombed at sea. Captain Arleigh Burke with his acclaimed destroyer squadron put the finishing touch on Japanese surface activity in the Battle of Cape St. George on November 25, when he annihilated three ships of a five-destroyer Tokyo Express bound for Buka. Thanks to Ultra, Admiral Halsey gave “31 Knot Burke” twenty-four hours’ advance warning of the Imperial Navy sally. Allied forces had achieved complete surface superiority.

From Rabaul, Admiral Kusaka continued to throw his Eleventh Air Fleet against Bougainville and New Guinea, at enormous cost. JNAF losses in the Solomons for November 1943 are estimated at about 290 warplanes. Without the carrier aircraft, Kusaka’s attacks were even less potent. His effort almost immediately suffered cutbacks. Once Nimitz opened his Central Pacific drive—on November 20, barely a week after the second Rabaul carrier attack—the pressures on JNAF strength multiplied. Ironically, some of the last aerial reinforcements to Rabaul were planes drawn from JNAF forces in the Marshalls and Gilberts—precisely where Nimitz struck—and the less experienced fliers added little to Kusaka’s capability, while, in return, very soon the Combined Fleet withdrew the 26th Air Flotilla, removing some of Kusaka’s best air groups and reducing his serviceable strength to about 160 aircraft. Other reinforcements were composites, as in late December, when the three ships of Carrier Division 1 each sent seven fighters to augment the 253rd Air Group. That was the period of the largest JNAF defensive efforts, when formations of seventy-two, ninety-four, and even ninety-eight fighters attempted to blunt the raids. The Japanese enjoyed a degree of success through the end of the year.

While Kusaka did what he could, General MacArthur began to confect a siege ring, surrounding the beleaguered fortress with Allied garrisons
supporting air bases that kept up a constant rain of bombs. In December, MacArthur landed SOWESPAC troops at Arawe and Cape Gloucester, at the western tip of New Britain, for the first time putting Allied troops on the same island as Rabaul. In January 1944, the target was the Green Islands, to the east, which Halsey captured using New Zealand troops. At the air station planted there, Lieutenant Commander Richard Nixon served as a supply officer for the SOPAC Air Transport Command, his most substantive wartime assignment and one for which he received a citation. Nixon is said to have been popular with the natives. The supremo seized Emirau and Manus islands, west and north of Rabaul, in March 1944, completing the encirclement.

The war had reached a juncture where the Imperial Navy, even in its bases, could no longer be safe. For a Christmas present in 1943, Rabaul received another of Ted Sherman’s carrier attacks. Shortly after the New Year, fighter ace “Pappy” Boyington, hit over the fortress, had to ditch in St. George’s Channel and would be rescued by an I-boat. The pilot was held prisoner at Rabaul for some weeks and then sent on to Japan by way of Truk. In the meantime, flying from the brand-new U.S. airfield at Stirling in the Treasury Islands early in February, Marine photo planes took pictures of Truk. Admiral Koga viewed this as an omen of worse to come, and sailed away with his Combined Fleet. Sure enough, on February 17, Truk was subjected to a massive attack by the American fast-carrier task force. Prisoner Boyington’s air shuttle from Rabaul landed amid this chaos. Boyington became an American witness to the demise of Truk as a center of Japanese power.

The Allied siege strategy was infinitely preferable to direct attack on Rabaul. By the time MacArthur completed his ring, the Japanese had had two years to fortify the place, and its defenses were formidable. The Japanese Army had 76,300 troops in two infantry divisions, two brigades, an artillery brigade, and a tank regiment. Supporting weapons included 237 big guns or howitzers, plus eighty-eight 75mm cannon. Special Naval Landing Forces contributed another dozen cannon, and the Navy had thirty-eight coast defense guns, almost half of them six-inch weapons. Kusaka’s naval personnel amounted to 21,570 men, including four garrison units and an SNLF. The forces possessed nearly 5,000 vehicles. There were 30,000 tons
of ammunition and 45,000 tons of food. Stocks included roughly 2,900 tons of aviation gas and 3,600 tons of motor fuel. An invasion of Fortress Rabaul promised more heartache than anything ever done in the South Pacific.

The reduction of Rabaul by means of aerial attack posed far fewer difficulties. This became the main function of AIRSOLS and the Thirteenth Air Force. The air campaign began immediately after the carrier raids. During November, the Thirteenth Air Force flew forty-one sorties against Rabaul, but a month later the overall scale of Allied effort increased to 394 flights, and in January 1944 to 2,865. This was overwhelmingly an effort of the South Pacific forces—George Kenney sent exactly nine airplanes to Rabaul from the time of his Fifth Air Force raids through November 1944. Within SOPAC, Marine Corps airmen carried much of the burden. The height of the suppression campaign occurred between January and July 1944. It peaked in February, when 4,552 sorties dumped 3,324 tons of munitions on the Japanese. To put that figure a different way, at this level of effort the Allies were hitting Rabaul with a 150-plane raid every day, rain or shine. Marine air flew more sorties against the fortress in every month except May, and its effort amounted to nearly 44 percent of the
entire
Allied tally. After April the Rabaul missions were considered “milk runs.” Targeteers divided the town into more than a dozen sectors, and strikes tried to level them. Efforts to burn out the town were abandoned once photo interpreters determined that just 122 buildings were still standing—less than 10 percent of the town. Through July, Allied air forces delivered an average of more than 1,800 tons of bombs on Rabaul every month. From July 1944 through the end of the war, the Allies kept heads down with some hundreds of sorties each month. By the end of the war the Allies had plastered Rabaul with 30,000 tons of munitions.

The weight of that attack could not fail to have effects. In January 1944, Koga sent in the planes of Carrier Division 2 once more, recalling some of the land-based air units. Shortly after the American carrier raid on Truk, the Japanese pulled out these planes, plus the last of their 26th Air Flotilla. As many mechanics as possible left with them, and some more departed by submarine or the few aircraft and blockade runners that sneaked in. Several hundred mechanics of the 751st Air Group crowded onto a pair of ships at Rabaul on February 20. Its commander, Captain Sato, boarded an escorting subchaser. AIRSOLS planes sank both the transports north of New Ireland
the next day. Sato’s subchaser escaped. Tug
Nagara
rescued a number of survivors. She, in turn, was caught and sunk by Arleigh Burke’s destroyers not far away a day later. Burke’s “Little Beavers” picked up about half the Japanese survivors, including more than forty men of the 751st Group. Others drowned themselves or resisted capture. Rabaul was truly isolated. Operation Cartwheel had succeeded.

After February the JNAF managed to field only a guerrilla air force, a handful of planes assembled from the boneyard, patched together with parts from the wrecks that littered Rabaul’s airfields. The Imperial Navy gave up trying to maintain Lakunai Airfield in July 1944. Several other fields of the fortress complex fell into disrepair much earlier. Strenuous efforts kept Vunakanau operational through the end of the war. It was last used on May 27, 1945, when the JNAF slipped two bombers into Rabaul to stage a raid on Allied shipping in the Admiralties. Japanese soldiers and sailors went into farming, raising food to supplement their rations. The emperor’s expressed fears of brave men starving had proven prescient. Admiral Kusaka and General Imamura exerted themselves to buck up morale. The Army had the best farms, and they graciously shared food with the Navy. As Fortress Rabaul declined to an isolated backwater, left behind by a ferocious war, the Japanese Army and Imperial Navy finally achieved cooperation.

VIII.

SOUTH PACIFIC DREAMS

So it was that the Solomons became the grave of Japan’s dream. Here the pendulum of the Pacific war began to swing against Tokyo. The Battle of Midway robbed the Japanese of momentum and stripped their aura of invincibility. But after Midway the pendulum hung in balance. Japan retained numerical superiority and some distinct qualitative advantages. The dream was still attainable. In the Solomons the war was fought to a decision. In the months beginning with July 1942 it remained open to the Japanese, more specifically to the Imperial Navy, to blunt Allied progress. Instead Tokyo frittered away its forces in vain efforts to reverse, and then simply to halt accelerating adverse trends. The Japanese achieved momentary advantage at least twice, but each time squandered the opportunity. The Allies worked at a steady pace and eventually equaled, then surpassed their foe. The drama of the rise and fall of Fortress Rabaul encapsulates that progression.

Japanese commanders believed they could fight in the Solomons on the cheap. A few men, planes, and ships would suffice to control the Outer South Seas. Once the Allies contested their dominance, the Solomons absorbed greater and greater Japanese attention until it became the main arena of confrontation. But Japan’s devotion to the battle continued to suffer—from a contradiction between the logic of its basic strategy and the expression of that in combat action, and also from a disconnect between the operations and the Imperial Navy’s traditional battle doctrine. Not so the Allies. The United States, Australia, and New Zealand had no doubt the campaign was a matter of life or death, and no hesitation at a full measure of commitment.

A multitude of factors help explain the outcome in the Outer South Seas. Japanese expansion into the Solomons, first conceived as a protection
for the Empire as Tokyo ran the board in the Pacific, became something much more. When Tokyo strategic planners began to think in terms of isolating or invading Australia, they were reframing the South Pacific as a major combat theater. Yet they deployed no additional forces. The mismatch between strategy and force was a major error. Tokyo should have known the Allies would perceive Japan in the South Pacific as a threat. To leave the Solomons so sparsely held invited attack. Here Japan inserted a contradiction into its war strategy.

It is important to bear in mind the dimensions of this conflict. A Japanese victory did not mean the defeat of the Allies, in particular the Americans. With its huge territory and enormous economy, the United States was impervious to capture by Japan. The same was true of the British Empire. In coalition warfare alongside Germany and Italy, Tokyo might hope to fight the Allies to a standstill and force a negotiated termination of hostilities. Yamamoto’s maxim about marching into Washington and dictating peace terms in the White House referred to this reality: Victory was bounded by the possible. Japanese leaders understood that. The transcripts of the Imperial Conferences before Pearl Harbor, the succession of meetings at which Japan decided on war, clearly show Tokyo believed its limited capabilities were just then at a maximum relative to those of the Allies. Leaders differed on how much leeway Japan possessed. Yamamoto Isoruku put the period of “going wild” at six months to a year; Nagano Osami felt the nation could fight for three years before ending hostilities became a necessity.

Distilled to its essence, this meant that to maintain the relative position of December 1941, the Japanese had to eliminate enough of the enemy to shave the margin by which Allied strength must increase. That represented an enormous task. The Japanese had a fair sense of Allied productive capacity and an exact knowledge of their own. Between December 1941 and June 1943, American shipyards delivered four new battleships, two heavy and thirteen light cruisers, six fleet and five light carriers, seventeen escort carriers, and 150 destroyers. Imperial Navy construction programs brought additions to the fleet as well. Through the end of 1943 these included one battleship, two fleet and two light carriers, five light/escort carrier conversions, four light cruisers, and twenty-four destroyers. Japanese aircraft carrier deliveries—specifically the conversions—would actually have been
fewer except for Midway, which convinced Japan to expedite carrier construction. As a rule of thumb, the Imperial Navy needed to eliminate three or four warships for each one it lost.