The Conquering Tide (2 page)

Those were the Solomons in 1941. A marginal outpost of the British Empire. An economic and political backwater. A strategic nonentity; an afterthought. That was to change, suddenly and violently, in 1942.

W
AR ARRIVED SIX WEEKS AFTER
P
EARL
H
ARBOR
, on the morning of January 22, 1942, when Japanese bombs first fell on Tulagi. The air attack was a bolt out of the blue. The British had not imagined that the Japanese would strike this far south and east, into the heart of the lower Solomons, especially when Allied fleets and armies were still giving battle thousands of miles closer to Japan, in the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The following day, a Japanese amphibious force landed at Rabaul—an Australian-held seaport and advanced airbase on the island of New Britain, 650 miles northwest of Tulagi—and swiftly overran the 1,500-man garrison stationed there. The British had precious little military presence of any kind in the Solomons, so it was instantly apparent that the Japanese could swallow up the entire archipelago any time they liked.

A similar pattern of conquest was unfolding throughout the Pacific. On December 7, 1941, Japan had launched a sea-air-land
Blitzkrieg
across a vast front, and advanced everywhere against feeble and confused Allied resistance. In every case—in Hawaii, the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, Burma, New Britain—they delivered the initial blows from the air. Japanese carrier- and land-based bombers struck suddenly and across unexpectedly long distances, pulverizing Allied airfields and naval bases and clearing the skies over landing beaches. Invasion forces followed in columns of troopships. Japanese infantry units went ashore and advanced quickly against poorly defended Allied airfields—often seizing them intact and without firing a shot. Japanese air groups flew in to the captured airfields and prepared to stage the next round of attacks on positions farther south or east. When pockets of Allied resistance held out behind fortified lines—notably, the joint American-Filipino forces on Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island in the Philippines—they were cut off and bypassed. By this rapid, tightly choreographed, leapfrogging pattern, the Japanese won an immense Pacific empire in little more than four months while sustaining only token losses.

Before December 1941, American and British aviation experts had arrogantly insisted that Japanese airplanes were poorly engineered knockoffs of Western technology, and Japanese pilots were laughably inept crash-test dummies. These delusions were upended in the opening weeks of the war, when Allied airpower throughout most of the theater was effectively wiped out. Only after the tide of conquest had washed over them did the Allies
begin to understand that they had been duped. Playing cleverly on the hubris and racial chauvinism of their Western rivals, the Japanese had disguised the formidable power of their air fleets and airmen.

The Imperial Japanese Navy was equipped with two very fine twin-engine medium bombers, the G3M (Allied code name “Nell”) and the G4M (“Betty”). Each could be configured to carry torpedoes or bombs with a payload capacity exceeding 1,700 pounds and a flying range of more than 2,000 nautical miles. They were often escorted by the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero,” Japan's superb single-seat fighter plane, which had been designed to outclimb, out-turn, and outmaneuver any other fighter aircraft of its era. Allied pilots who survived their initial dogfighting or “tail-chasing” contests with the Zero were staggered by the machine's capacity to turn sharply and climb away at high speed. Though it had been placed in service more than a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and had run up a high tally of easy victories against Chiang Kai-Shek's air force in the skies over China, the Zero had remained virtually unknown in the West. Allied aviators had received no forewarning of its capabilities and no tactical advice in countering it, and therefore were forced to discover this strange, acrobatic warplane in the unforgiving school of air combat.

The British had staked their Asia-Pacific empire on their great naval and air base at Singapore, the “Gibraltar of the East.” But from the first day of the war, when a Japanese invasion force landed on the northeast coast of the Malay Peninsula and Japanese bombers battered Royal Air Force (RAF) aerodromes throughout the region, the Malayan campaign brought a relentless succession of one-sided Japanese victories in the air, on the land, and at sea. Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese warplanes sank the battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battlecruiser
Repulse
off the Malayan coast—the first time in naval history that capital ships at sea had been destroyed by air attack. British commanders pulled their surviving aircraft back to Singapore, yielding the skies over northern Malaya to the enemy. Japanese army forces drove south with remarkable speed, routing British Commonwealth troops from their positions and sending them into disorderly retreat. The invaders combined raging frontal charges with flanking movements and infiltration tactics, in which small groups of lightly armed Japanese soldiers penetrated the jungles and mangrove swamps and attacked the British from behind. They leapfrogged down the coast by sea lifts in small craft. In the face of such a shrewd and agile enemy, and with Japanese aircraft attacking
with impunity from overhead, the British lines were quick to abandon their positions and flee.

As they joined up with other units farther south, or entered the island-city of Singapore, they spread a terrifying new image of the enemy. The Japanese were super-warriors, preternaturally endowed with superior fighting traits and an ability to live roughly off the land. They could not be defeated in the jungle, or evidently in the air or at sea; they must be invincible, and they were coming. Among many of the British and British Commonwealth troops, an attitude of despondency and resignation took hold. They were sullen and scornful of their officers, who had failed utterly to prepare for a foe they had so recently insisted on holding in contempt. Morale caved in on itself. From the wharves of Singapore, civilians began a panicked exodus, clamoring for passage on any departing ship. Officers finagled orders to be transferred to Java or anywhere else. A week after Japanese forces crossed the Johore Strait and entered Singapore, General Arthur Percival surrendered about 80,000 troops to a Japanese army less than half that size. With Singapore gone, the fate of the Dutch East Indies was preordained. An overmatched multinational Allied fleet was swiftly defeated in naval actions at the end of February, and remaining air and ground forces on Java were evacuated to Australia.

Now, in the Solomons, a stampede of panicked white refugees poured south and east, hoping to find a ship to Australia. Colonial officials faced a similarly unmanageable state of affairs—except that in the Solomons, unlike in Malaya, there were no more than a handful of British troops in place to put up any resistance whatsoever. Protectorate officials did not pretend there was any realistic hope of stopping the next stage of the Japanese advance. The enemy would take the Solomons and eject the British, and months or perhaps years would pass before the Allies could return in force. The civilians of Tulagi and the adjoining islands packed up their belongings and fled. The resident commissioner, Britain's senior official in the islands, moved to Malaita, a large island farther east. Small schooners and cutters, usually under sail, carried evacuees from the northwest on the prevailing winds. A dilapidated coal steamer, the
Morinda
, made her last trip out of the Solomons in January. At the wharf on Gavutu, an island near Tulagi, a crowd of civilian refugees demanded to come aboard. After a near riot in which a doctor was injured, the captain took the terrified evacuees on board to be spirited away to Australia.
¹

By March 1942, most of the whites were gone from the Solomons, and civil order was crumbling. But the young district officers of the Colonial Service were told to remain and carry on with their jobs. The British government even arranged to have their applications for military service denied.

Martin Clemens was one such man. He was a twenty-six-year-old Scotsman, the son of an Aberdeen choirmaster, who had won scholarships to prestigious schools and graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge. Clemens had entered the Colonial Service in 1937, had been posted to the Solomons in 1938, and had served on two of the big jungle-islands in the Solomons archipelago—San Cristobal and Malaita. He was a rugged man, mustachioed and square-jawed, but he was also a product of his era, his schooling, and the class-bound society in which he had been raised. His staunch companion was a little black dog of uncertain breed named Suinao. Fastidious in his dress and personal grooming, disciplined in his habits, and stoic in the face of danger, Clemens kept a meticulous and perceptive personal diary in which he quoted Shakespeare and punctuated his observations with modish exclamations such as “Wizard!” and “Calloo, Callay!” In the trying months of Japanese occupation, he would prove resourceful, courageous, and resilient.

As the colonial administration cleared out of Tulagi, Clemens was ordered to take over the job of district officer on Guadalcanal. The island's administrative seat was at Aola, on the north shore—about twenty miles southeast of Tulagi, across the body of water that would later take the name “Ironbottom Sound.” Here Clemens moved into a modest white house built on wooden piles and thatched with palm leaves. Outside, amid frangipani and hibiscus plants and a small garden plot of yams and taro, he set up an observation platform at the top of a large banyan tree. A native scout was posted there throughout the daylight hours, watching for enemy airplanes.

Tulagi and the RAF installations on nearby Gavutu and Tanambogo were bombed every morning, as regularly and predictably as a Tokyo train schedule. Big four-engine Kawanishi flying boats flew high overhead almost daily, and often doubled back at treetop altitude for a hard, close look at Clemens's house.

One of Clemens's duties was to report these flights through a radio network known as the “coastwatching service,” an arm of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). The coastwatchers were first conceived as an informal, all-volunteer organization to provide early warning of enemy shipping
and air movements. The watchers were to radio their sighting reports to a receiver station in Townsville, on the northern coast of Australia. Each man was equipped with a Type 3B “teleradio,” a device that could send voice transmissions to a range of about 400 miles or tapped code (Morse) to a range of about 600 miles. A specially cut crystal enabled the machines to transmit in the seldom-used 6 MHz frequency, chosen in the vain hope that Japanese eavesdroppers might miss the transmissions. The greatest drawback to the apparatus was its size. It included more than a dozen separate elements, including a receiver, a transmitter, antennae, a loudspeaker, a set of aerials, and a large supply of spare parts. It was powered by a pair of heavy six-volt automobile batteries that had to be recharged frequently, requiring a gasoline generator and a fuel supply.

Clemens made his transmissions each day. He also listened to the broadcasts of other coastwatchers on islands up the Solomons chain, who recorded the relentless progress of Japanese forces as they swept down from the northwest. Positions fell, garrisons were routed, and coastwatchers snuck into the jungle interior. The Japanese pushed into Buka Passage, north of Bougainville, forcing the small RAF detachment there to scatter into the bush. On April 5, a surprise landing at Kangu Beach, on southern Bougainville, forced coastwatching station DMK at Buin off the air.
²
In the following week, the Japanese expanded their grip on the area around Buin and seized nearby Shortland Island.

Clemens tried to maintain civil order on Guadalcanal, but he could not be everywhere at once, and the abandoned plantations were looted and vandalized by natives and white refugees. He arrested looters, took witness testimony, and removed abandoned supplies to secure government storehouses. Much of his time was consumed in arranging food, shelter, and ship passage for groups of refugees, or repatriating native workers from other islands who had been idled by the abandonment of the plantations.

That the white inhabitants of the islands were fleeing in panic could not be concealed from the natives, who told one another, “Altogether Japan 'e come.”
³
The tribal bigmen traveled to Aola from villages all over the island and put their questions to Clemens. Why were most of the whites falling all over themselves to escape the island? What would become of their villages under Japanese occupation? In his memoir, Clemens recounted his speech (in pidgin) to a delegation of chiefs in March 1942: “No matter altogether Japan 'e come, me stop long youfella. Business belong youfella boil'm, all 'e
way, bymbye altogether b'long mefella come save'm youme. Me no savvy who, me no savvy when, but bymbye everyt'ing 'e alright.”
⁴
(Even if the Japanese come in strength, I will stay here with you. Stick with me and eventually the Allies will return and save us from the enemy. I don't know who will come, or when, but we'll all be fine in the end.) Clemens recalled that he had made the promise with a “sinking heart,” but the chiefs appeared to accept it.

In early April, Clemens sailed his schooner to the northwestern tip of Guadalcanal to pay a visit to a plantation manager named F. Ashton “Snowy” Rhoades. Rhoades, a hardy, stubbornly independent Australian, had watched the exodus of most of the island's other white residents with imperious disgust, and refused to join it. He had nothing but contempt for the British colonial government, which (he wrote in his diary) had simply “collapsed.”
⁵
From his house high on a cliff at Lavoro, he commanded a broad vista of the sea and sky to the west, the direction from which Japanese ships and planes must come. Clemens convinced Rhoades to join the coastwatching network, and set him up with a teleradio.