All Hell Let Loose (44 page)

At 0216, the Japanese ceased fire, having achieved a crushing victory inside half an hour. There was a heated debate on the bridge of the flagship about whether to press on and attack the now defenceless American transports beyond, off Guadalcanal. Mikawa decided that it was too late to regroup his squadron, make such an assault, then withdraw before daylight out of range of American carrier aircraft, which he wrongly supposed were at hand. Amid a sky dancing with lightning in a tropical rainstorm, the Japanese turned for home. Chaos among the stricken Allied shipping persisted to the end: at dawn, an American destroyer fired 106 5? shells at a cruiser before discovering that its target was the crippled
Canberra
. When it was decided that the Australian warship must be sunk, US destroyers fired a further 370 rounds into the hulk before being obliged to use torpedoes to end its agony. The only consolation for the Allies was that an American submarine torpedoed and sank
Kako
, one of Mikawa’s heavy cruisers, during its withdrawal after the action.

In the Guadalcanal anchorage, Admiral Turner continued offloading supplies for the Marines until noon on the 9th, when to the deep dismay of the men ashore he removed his transports until more air cover became available. Reviewing the disaster off Savo, he wrote: ‘The navy was still obsessed with a strong feeling of technical and mental superiority over the enemy. In spite of ample evidence as to enemy capabilities, most of our officers and men despised the enemy and felt themselves sure victors in all encounters under any circumstances … The net result of all of this was a fatal lethargy of mind … We were not mentally ready for hard battle. I believe that this psychological factor as a cause of our defeat was even more important than the element of surprise.’ The US Navy learned its lessons: never again in the war did it suffer such a severe humiliation. And the critical reality, which soon dawned on the Japanese, was that yet again one of their admirals had allowed caution to deprive him of a chance to convert success into a decisive strategic achievement. The lost Allied cruisers could be replaced; the landing force was able to hold on at Henderson Field because its supporting amphibious shipping remained unscathed, and soon returned to Lunga Bay. Savo would be redeemed.

The Japanese were slow to grasp the importance of the American commitment to Guadalcanal. They drip-fed a trickle of reinforcements to the island, who were thrown into repeated frontal attacks, each one insufficiently powerful to overwhelm the precarious Marine perimeter. The Americans holding Henderson Field and the surrounding tropical rainforests found themselves locked in an epic ordeal. Visibility amidst an almost impenetrable tangle of vines and ferns, giant hardwoods and creepers, was seldom more than a few yards. Even when gunfire was temporarily stilled, leeches, wasps, giant ants and malarial mosquitoes inflicted their own miseries. The intense humidity made fungal and skin infections endemic. Marines encountering the jungle for the first time were alarmed by its constant noises, especially those of the night. ‘Whether these were birds squawking … or some strange reptiles or frogs, I don’t know,’ said one man, ‘but we were terrified by any noise because we’d been told that the Japanese signaled each other in the jungle by imitating bird calls.’

Amid incessant rainstorms, they bivouacked in mud, which became a curse of the campaign, endured short rations and dysentery. Nervous men not infrequently shot each other. There was a steady stream of combat fatigue evacuees. A platoon commander who lost four men to hysteria, 15 per cent of his strength, reckoned this was typical. Experience of Japanese barbarism bred matching American savagery. Marine Ore Marion described a scene after a bitter night action: ‘At daybreak a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, whack off three Jap heads and jam them on poles facing the “Jap side” of the river.’ The regimental commander remonstrated fiercely that this was the conduct of animals. ‘A dirty, stinking young kid says, “That’s right Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals, what the fuck do you expect?”’

Some of the fiercest fighting took place on the Tenaru river, where both sides suffered heavily as the Japanese attacked again and again with suicidal courage and tactical clumsiness. As a green Japanese flare burst overhead, Robert Leckie described the scene: ‘Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness … booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell … The plop of the outgoing mortar with the crunch of its fall, the clatter of the machine guns and the lighter, faster rasp of the Browning automatic rifles, the hammering of fifty-caliber machine-guns, the crash of 75-millimetre anti-tank guns firing point-blank canister at the enemy – each of these conveys a definite message to the understanding ear.’ After hours of this, dawn revealed heaped enemy bodies and a few survivors in flight. But as night succeeded night of such clashes and counterattacks, the strain told on the Americans.

‘Morale was very bad,’ said Marine Lt. Paul Moore, who won a Navy Cross. ‘But there was something about Marines – once we were ordered to attack we decided we damn well were going to do it.’ Swimming the Matanikau river with his platoon, the young officer glanced up and saw mortar bombs and grenades arching through the air above him, ‘as if it were raining, with bullets striking all around us’. Moore, a few months out of Yale, was shot as he threw a grenade to knock out a Japanese machinegun. The bullet hit him in the chest: ‘The air was going in and out of a hole in my lungs. I thought I was dead, going to die right then. I wasn’t breathing through my mouth, but through this hole. I felt like a balloon going in and out, going pshhhh. I was thinking to myself: now I’m going to die. And first of all it’s rather absurd for me, considering where I came from, my early expectations of a comfortable life and all the rest, for me to be dying on a jungle island in combat as a Marine. That’s not me … Shortly, a wonderful corpsman crawled up and gave me a shot of morphine, and then a couple of other people got a stretcher and started evacuating me.’

Guadalcanal set the pattern for the Pacific campaign, a three-year contest for a succession of harbours and airfields, refuges for ships and platforms for planes amid an otherwise featureless watery vastness. The Japanese were never able to reverse their early mistakes, rooted in an underestimate of American strength and will. Each island action was tiny in scale by the standards of the European theatre: at the peak of the Guadalcanal battle, no more than 65,000 Americans and Japanese were engaged with each other ashore, while 40,000 more men served on warships and transports at sea. But the intensity of the struggle, and the conditions in which the combatants were obliged to subsist amid swamps, rain, heat, disease, insects, crocodiles, snakes and short rations, caused the Pacific battlefield experience to become one of the worst of the war. Island fighting evolved into a bizarre and terrible routine: ‘Everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch,’ Corporal James Jones, one of the army men who eventually landed on Guadalcanal to reinforce the Marines, observed with fascinated revulsion.

Between August and October, the Japanese on Guadalcanal outnumbered their enemies, but thereafter American reinforcements and Japanese casualties progressively shifted the balance against the latter. Repeated headlong assaults failed against a stubborn defence: they were unable to wrest control of Henderson Field from the Americans, who had superior artillery and air support. This was small consolation to the defenders, however, when the Japanese navy intervened. Seldom in the course of the war did Allied troops have to endure naval bombardments of the kind the Royal Navy and US Navy routinely administered to the Axis, but the Americans on Guadalcanal suffered severely from the guns of Japanese warships. Hour after hour during four nights in October, enemy heavy ships delivered some nine hundred rounds of 14? fire, followed by 2,000 rounds from heavy cruisers. ‘[It] was the most tremendous thing I’ve been through in all my life,’ said a Marine afterwards. ‘There was one big bunker near our galley … a shell dropped right in the middle of it and practically everybody in the hole was killed. We tried to dig the men out but we saw it wasn’t any use.’ A correspondent wrote: ‘It is almost beyond belief that we are still here, still alive, still waiting and still ready.’ Many aircraft on Henderson Field were wrecked; the strip was rendered unserviceable for a week.

The Japanese were belatedly growing to understand the importance of the battle as a test of wills: ‘We must be aware,’ wrote an officer at Imperial General Headquarters, ‘of the possibility that the struggle for Guadalcanal … may develop into the decisive struggle between America and Japan.’ To the defenders, however, it sometimes seemed that they were a forgotten little army. ‘It was so lonely,’ wrote Robert Leckie. ‘… In an almost mawkish sense, we had gotten hold of the notion that we were orphans. No one cared, we thought. All of America’s millions doing the same things each day: going to movies, getting married, attending college commencements, sales meetings, café fires, newspaper drives against vivisection, political oratory, Broadway hits and Broadway flops, horrible revelations in high places and murders in tenements making tabloid headlines, vandalism in cemeteries and celebrities getting religion; all of the same, all, all, all, the changeless, daily America – all of this was going on without a single thought for us.’

Yet the myth of the invincibility of the Japanese army was shattered on this island, just sixty miles by thirty, where the US Marine Corps, which expanded from its pre-war strength of 28,000 to an eventual 485,000 men, first staked a claim to be considered the outstanding American ground force of the war. The Japanese, by contrast, laid bare their limitations, especially a shortage of competent commanders. Even during Japan’s victory season, while Yamashita conducted operations in Malaya with verve and skill, the campaigns in Burma and the Philippines suggested that his peers lacked initiative. When defending a position, their ethic of absolute conformity to orders had its uses; but in attack, commanders often acted unimaginatively. Man for man, the Japanese soldier was more aggressive and conditioned to hardship than his Allied counterpart: British Gen. Bill Slim characterised the enemy condescendingly as ‘the greatest fighting insect in the world’. Until 1945, Hirohito’s men displayed exceptional night-fighting skills. Collectively, however, the Japanese army had nothing like the combat power of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army – or the US Marine Corps.

It was a reflection of the fantastic Japanese capacity for self-delusion that, after their first stunning wave of conquests, their army commanders proposed establishing small garrisons to hold their island bases, while redeploying most troops to China – which they regarded as their nation’s main theatre of war. Short of trained manpower, they had scraped the barrel for forces to conduct the South-East Asia and Pacific island offensives; the long China campaign had weakened and demoralised the army even before Pearl Harbor took place. Thereafter, Japan’s generals were obliged to find soldiers from a shrinking pool, then dispatch them into battle with barely three months’ training. Japanese strategy had been rooted in a conviction that the United States would treat for peace after a brisk battlefield drubbing. When this hope was disappointed, the army spent the rest of the war struggling to defend Nippon’s overblown empire with inadequate means and inferior technology. The important reality of the Pacific war was that the Americans and Australians eventually prevailed on every island they assaulted. Only in Burma and China did the Japanese army maintain dominance until the last phase of the war.

Throughout the campaign on Guadalcanal, an equally relentless and bloody struggle was conducted at sea. The Savo battle was only the first of a series of dramatic naval encounters, almost all precipitated by Japanese attempts to reinforce and supply their troops ashore, and to impede the matching American build-up. Destroyers of the ‘Tokyo Express’ sought to run men and stores by night through ‘the Slot’, the narrow approach to Guadalcanal. Australian coastwatchers manning radios in jungle hideouts on Japanese-held islands played a critical role in alerting the air force to enemy shipping movements. Meanwhile in deeper waters offshore, opposing squadrons of carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers manoeuvred for advantage like boxers circling each other in darkness in a giant ring. The challenge was almost always to locate the enemy, then to fire first. Attrition was awesome: the 24 August Battle of the East Solomons cost the Japanese a carrier and heavy aircraft losses in exchange for damage to the
Enterprise
; a week later, the carrier
Saratoga
suffered such severe torpedo damage that it was obliged to quit the theatre for an American dockyard. The Americans inflicted heavy losses on the enemy off Cape Esperance on the night of 11–12 September, but on the 15th Japanese submarines sank the carrier
Wasp
and damaged the new battleship
North Carolina
.

Vice-Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, who assumed command of regional naval operations on 18 October, found himself committed to some of the heaviest fleet actions of the war. At Santa Cruz on 26 October, the Japanese lost over a hundred aircraft and the Americans seventy-four, more than the rival forces on any day of the Battle of Britain. Destruction of the carrier
Hornet
left the Americans for some weeks solely dependent on the damaged
Enterprise
for naval air operations. On the night of 12 November Vice-Admiral Hiroake Abe, leading a squadron dominated by two battleships to bombard the Americans on Guadalcanal, met an American cruiser force. Though he inflicted heavy damage, sinking six ships for the loss of three, with familiar caution he chose to retreat after a twenty-four-minute action, only to lose one of his battleships to American aircraft next morning.