All Hell Let Loose (45 page)

Two days later, Marine pilots of the ‘Cactus Air Force’, as the Henderson Field squadrons were known, caught a Japanese troop convoy en route to Guadalcanal and almost annihilated it, sinking seven transports and a cruiser, and damaging three more cruisers. That night, there was a dramatic clash between American and Japanese capital ships in which Admiral ‘Ching’ Lee’s
Washington
landed nine 16? salvoes on the battleship
Kirishima
, which foundered soon after, an acceptable exchange for damage to the US Navy’s battleship
South Dakota
. Only remnants of the Japanese landing force stumbled ashore at dawn, shorn of their heavy equipment, from the last four beached transports of the annihilated convoy. Off Tassarfonga Point on the night of 30 November, five American cruisers attacking eight Japanese destroyers on a supply run suffered one cruiser sunk and three more damaged by torpedoes. The Japanese lost only a single destroyer.

These were epic encounters, reflecting both sides’ massive commitment of surface forces – and losses: in the course of the Solomons campaign, around fifty major Japanese and US warships were sunk. The men who fought became grimly familiar with long, tense waits, often in darkness, while sweat-soaked radar operators peered into their screens for a first glimpse of the enemy. Thereafter, many sailors learned the terror of finding their ships suddenly caught in the dazzling glare of enemy searchlights, presaging a storm of shell. They witnessed the chaos of repeated encounters in which ships exchanged gunfire and torpedoes at close range, causing ordered decks, turrets, superstructures, machinery spaces to be transformed within seconds into flaming tangles of twisted steel.

They saw sailors leap in scores and hundreds from sinking vessels. Some were saved, many were not: when the cruiser
Juneau
blew up, Mr and Mrs Thomas Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, lost five sons. Pilots often took off from heaving flight decks knowing that perhaps a hundred miles away, their enemy counterparts were doing the same. Thus, they were never assured that when they returned from a mission they would find a flight deck intact to land on. Only the Americans’ possession of Henderson Field enabled them to deploy sufficient airpower to compensate for their depleted carrier force. The men who fought at sea and in the air off Guadalcanal in the latter months of 1942 experienced a sustained intensity of naval surface warfare unmatched at any other period of the struggle.

The Americans prevailed. After the battles of November, despite his squadrons’ successes Admiral Yamamoto concluded that Japan’s Combined Fleet could no longer endure such attrition. He informed the Imperial Army that his ships must withdraw support from the land force on Guadalcanal. It was a critical victory for the US Navy, and was hailed back home as a personal triumph for ‘Bull’ Halsey. The achievement of the American shore contingent was to hold out and defend its perimeter through months of desperate assaults. In December, some of the exhausted Marines were at last relieved by US Army formations. The Japanese were reduced to supplying their shrinking ground force by submarine. At the end of January 1943, after an American offensive had driven them back into a narrow western perimeter, 10,652 Japanese survivors were evacuated by night in destroyers.

To take and hold Guadalcanal, the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps lost 3,100 killed, a small price for a critical achievement. The Japanese suffered 29,900 ground, naval and air casualties, most of them fatal, including 9,000 men killed by tropical diseases, a reflection of their pitifully inadequate medical services. Every element of the American forces shared undoubted glory. The ‘Cactus Air Force’, infantry manning the perimeter, warship crews afloat, displayed a resolve the Japanese had not believed Americans to possess. The US Navy’s heavy losses were soon replaced, as those of the Japanese were not. For the rest of the war, the performance of Admiral Yamamoto’s squadrons progressively deteriorated, while the US Pacific Fleet grew in proficiency as well as might. In the latter months of 1942, American aircrew noted a rapid decline in the skill and resolve of enemy pilots. A Japanese staff officer asserted bleakly that the battle for Guadalcanal had been ‘the fork in the road which leads to victory’. Like Yamamoto, he knew that his nation was thereafter marching with ever-quickening step towards defeat.

Even as the Marines were fighting on Guadalcanal, the most protracted land campaign of the Far Eastern war was unfolding on Papua New Guinea – after Greenland, the largest island in the world. The Japanese began establishing small forces on the eastern coast in March 1942, with the intention of seizing Port Moresby, capital of Australian-ruled Papua, two hundred miles distant on the south-west shore. Initially the Japanese intended an amphibious descent on Moresby, but this was frustrated by the Coral Sea actions. American success at Midway a month later denied the Japanese any prospect of a swift capture of New Guinea through seaborne landings. Tokyo’s local commander, Col. Tsuji, made a personal decision instead to secure the island the hard way, by an overland advance, and forged an order supposedly from Imperial headquarters to authorise his operation. MacArthur, Allied Commander-in-Chief for the South-West Pacific, deployed his limited strength to frustrate this.

Australian units began moving towards Papua’s north coast in July 1942, but the Japanese secured footholds there first, and began to build up forces for an advance over the Owen Stanley mountain range to Port Moresby. The ensuing battles along its only practicable passage, the Kokoda Trail, were small in scale, but a dreadful experience for every participant. Amid dense rainforest, men struggled for footholds, scrambling through deep mud on near-vertical tracks, bent under crippling weights of equipment and supplies; rations arrived erratically and rain almost daily; disease and insects intensified misery.

‘I have seen men standing knee-deep in the mud of a narrow mountain track, looking with complete despair at yet another seemingly unsurmountable ridge,’ an Australian officer wrote to his former school headmaster. ‘Ridge after ridge, ridge after ridge, heart-breaking, hopeless, futile country.’ The need to manpack all supplies and ammunition rendered the Kokoda Trail campaign a colossal undertaking: every soldier bore sixty pounds, some a hundred. ‘What a hell of a load to lump uphill all the way through mud and slush,’ wrote Australian corporal Jack Craig. ‘Some of us lose our footing and finish up flat out. One feels like just lying there for ever. I don’t think I have been so exhausted in all my life.’ Many men suffered agonies from bleeding haemorrhoids as well as more deadly tropical diseases.

As for the Japanese, an Australian shrugged that ‘This is not murder, killing such repulsive-looking animals.’ But one of his comrades, detailed by an officer to finish off a hideously wounded enemy soldier, wrote afterwards: ‘Then came the beginning of some of the terrible things that happen in combat … I have lived to this day with those terrified eyes staring at me.’ A young chaplain wrote from the rear areas of the Papuan front:

Observations such as this came from the heart, and were characteristic of a witness who, in the nature of things, could make no comparison with the plight of combatants fighting in Russia, the central Pacific, Burma – the other notably dreadful theatres of war. Conflict in a hostile natural environment, where amenities and comforts were wholly absent, imposed greater miseries than fighting in North Africa or north-west Europe. But the experience of combat for months on end, prey to fear, chronic exhaustion and discomfort, loss of comrades, separation from domestic life and loved ones, bore down upon every front-line fighter, wherever he was. Many, especially in the Pacific theatre, deluded themselves that their enemies found the experience more acceptable. Allied troops believed the Japanese to be natural jungle warriors in a way they themselves were not. Yet many of Hirohito’s soldiers used language to describe their experiences and sufferings little different from that employed by their Australian, British and American foes.

The Japanese repulsed the Australians on the Kokoda Trail, then harassed them relentlessly as they retreated with ambushes and outflanking movements. Many stragglers died: ‘Confusion was the keynote,’ wrote Sergeant Clive Edwards. ‘No one knew exactly what was happening, but when the sounds of battle came from in front we were told that the others were trying to fight their way through … It was pitiful – the rain was coming down, and there was a long string of dog-tired men straining the last nerve to get wounded men down and yet save their own lives too. Bewilderment … showed on every face and as the long line faltered and halted those at the back became affected and sent messages … to “Keep moving, the Jap is on us.”’ The Australians were eventually pushed back to within a few miles of Port Moresby.

A new threat to the Allied position in Papua was fortunately preempted. Ultra decrypts revealed a Japanese plan to land at Milne Bay, on the south-eastern tip of the island. An Australian brigade was hastily shipped there and deployed. When the Japanese landed on the night of 25 August, they met fierce resistance, and on 4 September their survivors were evacuated. But the situation on the Port Moresby front remained critical. MacArthur displayed a contempt for the Australian showing which reflected his ignorance of conditions on the Kokoda Trail. The Japanese battered the Allied perimeter relentlessly, and a disaster beckoned. This was averted chiefly by air power: USAAF bombing of the enemy’s over-extended supply line created a crisis for the attackers which worsened when some troops were diverted from New Guinea to Guadalcanal.

The local Japanese commander was ordered to pull back to the north shore of Papua. The Australians found themselves once more struggling up the Kokoda Trail and across the Owen Stanleys, this time pressing a retreating enemy in conditions no less appalling than during the earlier march. ‘Our troops are fighting in the cold mists of an altitude of 6,700 feet,’ wrote Australian correspondent George Johnston, ‘fighting viciously because they have only a mile or two to go before they reach the peak of the pass and will be able to attack downhill. This means a lot to troops who have climbed every inch of that agonizing track, who have buried so many of their cobbers, and who have seen so many more going back weak with sickness or mauled by the mortar bombs and the bullets and grenades of the enemy, men gone from their ranks simply to win back a few hundred yards of this wild, unfriendly and utterly untamed mountain … The men are bearded to the eyes. Their uniforms are hotch-potches of anything that fits or is warm or affords some protection from the insects … In the green half-light, amid the stink of rotten mud and rotting corpses, with the long line of green-clad Australians climbing wearily along the tunnel of the track, you have a noisome, unforgettable picture of the awful horror of this jungle war.’

In November, MacArthur launched coastal landings by two US regiments, to take Buna. The green Americans, shocked by their first encounter with the combat environment of Papua, performed poorly. Meanwhile, the Australians were exhausted by their efforts on the Kokoda Trail. Thousands of soldiers on both sides were weakened by malaria. But Buna was finally taken at the beginning of January 1943, and residual enemy forces in the area were mopped up three weeks later. The Japanese had lost almost two-thirds of their 20,000 men committed, while 2,165 Australians and 930 Americans died. Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger, a US divisional commander, wrote: ‘It was a sly and sneaky kind of combat, which never resembled the massive and thunderous operations in Europe, where tank battalions were pitted against tank battalions and armies the size of city populations ponderously moved and maneuvered … In New Guinea, when the rains came, wounded men might drown before the litter-bearers found them. Many did. No war is good war and death ignores geography. But out here I was convinced, as were my soldiers, that death was pleasanter in the Temperate Zone.’

The Papua operations were characterised by Allied dissensions and heavy-handed interventions by MacArthur. Disdain and mistrust between Australians and Americans caused bitterness, and belated success at Buna brought little joy. Hard fighting persisted throughout 1943, the battlefields slowly shifting northwards up the huge island. The Japanese, defeated on Guadalcanal, exerted themselves to their utmost to hold a line in New Guinea, feeding in reinforcements. But in March they suffered a crippling blow, during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. George Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, alerted by Ultra, launched a succession of attacks on a Japanese convoy which sank eight transports and four escorting destroyers en route from Rabaul, destroying most of a division intended for Papua New Guinea.

After months of seesaw ground fighting, a decisive breakthrough came when Kenney secretly constructed a forward airstrip from which his fighters could strike at the main enemy airbases at Wewak. This they did to devastating effect in August 1943, almost destroying Japanese air power in the region. Thereafter, a force that eventually comprised one US and five Australian divisions launched a major offensive. By September 1943, the major enemy strongholds had been overrun, and 8,000 Japanese survivors were straggling away northwards. The Huon peninsula was cleared in December, and Allied dominance of the campaign became explicit. Ultra revealed the location of the remaining Japanese concentrations, enabling MacArthur to launch a dramatic operation to bypass them and cut off their escape by landing at Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea on 22 April 1944. Fighting on the island persisted until the end of the war, Australians providing the main Allied effort. Some 13,500 Japanese emerged from the jungle to surrender there in August 1945.