The Conquering Tide (43 page)

Pursuant to the conference directives, the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCOS) promulgated a revised plan entitled
RENO III
, which directed MacArthur to “seize or neutralize Eastern New Guinea as far west as Wewak and including the Admiralties and the Bismarck Archipelago. Neutralize rather than capture Rabaul.”
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The document reasoned that “direct attack to capture Rabaul will be costly and time-consuming. Anchorages and potential air and naval bases exist at Kavieng and in the Admiralties. With the capture and development of such bases, Rabaul can be isolated from the northeast.”
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The next and last major landmass on Halsey's road to Rabaul was Bougainville. Here the bypass principle would again save time and lives. The Japanese had poured troop reinforcements into its bases on and around the island—at Buin and Shortland in the south, and at Buka and Bonis in the north. By mid-October, total Japanese strength in these areas exceeded 40,000 men. Halsey and his Dirty Tricks Department elected to land forces on the west coast, at Cape Torokina in Empress Augusta Bay, where the enemy presence was negligible. By now the pattern was familiar. Assault
troops stormed ashore, heavy equipment and munitions followed behind them, the forces established a strong perimeter, and Seabees raced to build a working airfield. The Japanese army would naturally counterattack—but to do so they were obliged to struggle over primitive jungle terrain, their strength draining away by starvation and disease, before running up against well-entrenched American defenders.

For this operation (
CHERRY BLOSSOM
), Halsey could muster about 34,000 troops under the command of General Vandegrift—the 3rd Marine Division and the army's 37th Infantry Division, combined into the First Marine Amphibious Corps. As an immediate prelude to the landings, the New Zealand 8th Infantry Brigade Group seized the small Treasury Islands. On November 1 before dawn, 3rd Division marines stormed ashore at Cape Torokina from a dozen transports and swiftly overpowered the meager Japanese forces in that area. Furious air battles raged overhead throughout the day, but the AIRSOLS fighters managed to prevent any sustained attack on the beachhead. Kenney's Fifth Air Force poured an unprecedented amount of punishment down on Rabaul's airfields to suppress the Japanese air response. By nightfall, 14,000 troops were safely ashore with 6,000 tons of equipment, munitions, and supplies.

The Imperial Japanese Navy was determined to interrupt the operation. Kusaka organized a cruiser-destroyer task force at Rabaul and sent it south under the command of Rear Admiral Sentaro Omori. This force was discovered by air search as it steamed down the Slot, and Halsey ordered his only naval force in the area, Admiral Merrill's Task Force 39, to protect the beachhead. The crews of Merrill's four light cruisers and eight destroyers had been hard at it for more than twenty-four hours and were nearing the point of exhaustion, but no other forces were on hand. Merrill employed the tactic of deploying his destroyer divisions in a separate group to launch unseen attacks on the enemy's flank. His cruisers guarded the approach to the beaches, kept up a continuous fire with their 6-inch guns, and looped around in coordinated “figure-8” patterns to confuse the enemy and avoid his torpedoes. Arleigh Burke, recently promoted captain, commanded Destroyer Division 45. The tactics had been well rehearsed, and the commanders were perfectly attuned to one another.

James Fahey, a sailor on Merrill's flagship
Montpelier
, described a long night illuminated by lightning, flares, star shells, and muzzle flashes. “The big eight inch salvos, throwing up great geysers of water, were hitting very
close to us,” he recorded in his diary. “Our force fired star shells in front of the Jap warships so that our destroyers could attack with torpedoes. It was like putting a bright light in front of your eyes in the dark. It was impossible to see. The noise from our guns was deafening.”
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Merrill's ships destroyed a Japanese cruiser and destroyer and drove the intruders away, securing the beachhead. Two American ships were disabled, but none were lost.

Admiral Koga sent another cruiser-destroyer task force down from Truk, under the command of Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. When Kurita's ships were sighted by AIRSOLS scouts north of Rabaul on November 4, Halsey decided to deploy his two available carriers, the
Saratoga
and the light carrier
Princeton
. As heavy attacks on the airfields in and around Rabaul kept Japanese airpower on the defensive, the carriers charged into the Solomon Sea. On the morning of November 5, a massive ninety-seven-plane strike rained bombs down and launched aerial torpedoes on the Japanese fleet, inflicting ruinous damage on seven cruisers.

A week later, three American carriers on loan from the Fifth Fleet (then moving toward the Gilbert Islands to strike the opening blow in the central Pacific offensive) detoured south and launched another attack on the Japanese fleet at anchor in Rabaul's Simpson Harbour. One was the recently commissioned
Essex
, namesake of a new class of fleet carriers that would dominate the air war as the fight moved into the western Pacific in 1944 and 1945. More than a hundred Japanese aircraft attacked the carrier group, and the executive officer of the
Essex
, Fitzhugh Lee, recalled an edgy night in the ship's Combat Information Center: “We were trying to use our new radar, which worked well at long range in the early stages of the battle, but it soon became too much of a melee in which we didn't know whether we were shooting at our own planes or the Japanese planes.”
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Lee was surprised and relieved that the
Essex
avoided taking a single bomb or torpedo hit in the action, and that it came through unscathed except for a few bullet wounds in strafing runs. The Japanese lost forty-one of the planes committed to the attack. In Nimitz's view, the November 1943 carrier strikes on Rabaul “settled once and for all the long-debated question as to whether carriers could be risked against powerful enemy bases.”
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Admiral Koga summoned the surviving elements of his fleet back to Truk.

Beginning in December, the skies over Rabaul were darkened by Allied bombers from dawn to dusk. For the defenders on the ground, their only respite from unremitting aerial punishment came when the weather closed
in and cut visibility to zero. Kenney's Fifth Air Force pummeled the airfields and supporting installations. Marine Major General Ralph J. Mitchell took over as commander of AIRSOLS, but most of the previous staff was kept in place. (AIRSOLS had become, perhaps, the single-best-integrated multiservice command in the world.) Mitchell began moving units northwest from months-old airfields on New Georgia and Vella Lavella to his new airfields on the Treasury Islands and at Torokina on Bougainville. Shorter-legged navy and marine fighters and bombers could now comfortably reach Rabaul, and began pouring down destruction on the Bismarcks in hundreds of daily sorties. Admiral Koga continued feeding air reinforcements into the theater from Truk, including his last reserve of trained carrier airmen. The South Pacific had become a meat grinder for Japanese airpower.

Air officer Matasake Okumiya, who arrived at Rabaul from Buin on January 20, noted that exhaustion and despair permeated every rank. The ground crews were worked to the edge of collapse, and their aircraft gradually succumbed to mechanical failures. Night bombardments interrupted their sleep. At Kusaka's Twenty-Sixth Air Flotilla headquarters, officers and pilots were “quick-tempered and harsh, their faces grimly set. . . . The men lacked confidence; they appeared dull and apathetic. . . . Their expressions and actions indicated clearly that they wished to abandon Rabaul at the earliest possible moment.”
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The influx of inferior pilots degraded the quality of the squadrons that had flown together in the past. Japanese air resistance gradually deteriorated, whether measured by numbers of aircraft or by the prowess of the aircrews. The loss of so many elite flyers in air combat, day after day, plunged the entire staff into a paralyzing malaise. Okumiya remembered the heady days of early 1942, when the Japanese naval airmen were accustomed to sweeping their adversaries from the skies. Now he found “an astonishing conviction that the war could not possibly be won, that all that we were doing at Rabaul was postponing the inevitable.”
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Since the Japanese navy did not concede the inevitability of combat fatigue, neither pilots nor staff officers were ever rotated out of the theater:

American air pressure increased steadily; even a momentary lapse in our air defense efforts might lose us Rabaul and our nearby fields. The endless days and nights became a nightmare. The young faces became only briefly familiar, then vanished forever in the bottomless abyss created by American guns. Eventually some of our higher staff
officers came to resemble living corpses, bereft of spiritual and physical strength. The Navy would replace as quickly as it could the necessary flight personnel, but failed at any time during the war to consider the needs of its commanding officers. This was an error of tragic consequence, for no leader can properly commit his forces to battle when he does not have full command of his own mental and physical powers. Neither did the Navy ever consider the problems of our base maintenance personnel, who for months worked like slaves. From twelve to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, these men toiled uncomplainingly. They lived under terrible conditions, rarely with proper food or medical treatment. Their sacrifices received not even the slightest recognition from the government.
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Since mid-1943, MacArthur's forces had been advancing up the northern coast of New Guinea. Admiral Daniel E. Barbey's Seventh Amphibious Force, part of what was colloquially known as “MacArthur's navy,” had landed assault troops on Kiriwina and Woodlark Islands and at Nassau Bay, a few miles south of the Japanese stronghold at Salamaua. Allied troops were transferred up from Milne Bay in a series of small-craft sea lifts, which moved safely under cover of darkness and avoided the risk of using larger fleet units in waters infested with Japanese submarines. The Japanese at Salamaua were reinforced by troops rushed down from Lae, but MacArthur planned only a diversionary attack on Salamaua. His main objective was on the other side of Huon Gulf. Barbey's amphibians struck next on the night of September 3–4, landing 8,000 Australians east of Lae; the next day, 1,700 U.S. Army paratroopers jumped out of transports and captured an airstrip west of Lae. Lae was bracketed, and pulverized relentlessly by air in daylight and by sea at night. The surviving Japanese garrison abandoned the town and melted into the jungle, where hundreds would succumb to disease and starvation.

Another surprise sea lift put an Australian force ashore north of Finsch—hafen in late September, and the town was taken on October 2. With a reliable supply line by sea, the diggers pushed up the coast toward Sio and Madang. In a three-month campaign, MacArthur had deftly seized control of the Huon Peninsula, leaving the bulk of Japanese forces far to his rear, or as fugitives dispersed into the unforgiving jungle.

From Finschhafen, it was a leap of less than fifty miles across the Vitiaz
Strait to Cape Gloucester, the western extremity of New Britain. Though the chiefs had decreed that Rabaul (on New Britain's opposite end) was to be bypassed, MacArthur wanted to capture the smaller enemy aerodromes on the western side of that island. Lieutenant General Walter Krueger's Alamo Force landed a regiment at Arawe, a village on the southern coast, on December 15. The landing was a diversionary feint, intended to draw the enemy away from Cape Gloucester. The 1st Marine Division, proud veterans of Guadalcanal who had replenished their strength and spirits in Melbourne, stormed the beaches of Cape Gloucester on December 26, 1943. The weakly defended enemy airfields of western New Britain were quickly secured. Surviving Japanese forces retreated toward Rabaul and prepared for what they assumed would be the largest land battle of the South Pacific campaign.

As an airbase, Rabaul had been very nearly neutered by unrelenting air attacks. But with units streaming into the lines from points west, Japanese troop strength approached 100,000. Surrender was beneath consideration, of course, so the garrison began to prepare for a climactic fight to the last man. Defeat might be inevitable, but it would be honorable. Heaven beckoned—they would sell their lives dearly, and take plenty of American soldiers and marines with them. For almost two years the Japanese had been building and improving their defensive fortifications, their intricate networks of subterranean bunkers and tunnels, and they were well stocked with provisions and ammunition for a long siege.

So they waited. And waited. And waited. And the Americans did not come. The defenders were denied even the consolation of dying for the emperor. A Japanese intelligence officer interviewed after the war admitted that the Japanese “hated” the leapfrogging strategy, perhaps because it offended their sense of honor; but he added that they respected it and understood its wisdom. “The Japanese Army preferred direct assault, after the German fashion, but the Americans flowed into our weaker points and submerged us, just as water seeks the weakest entry to sink a ship.”
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The weak points, in this case, were the lightly garrisoned island groups north and west of New Britain. MacArthur and Halsey seized and secured a ring of bases around Rabaul that rendered the once-formidable bastion entirely impotent. Nor would Kavieng, Rabaul's principal satellite naval base on New Ireland, fall to direct assault. In February 1944, Halsey's Third Amphibious Force put New Zealand troops ashore on the Green
Islands, about midway between Bougainville and New Ireland. Then, in mid-March, the Third Amphibious Force leapt all the way north to Emirau Island, seventy miles northwest of Kavieng, in the Bismarck Archipelago. “The only casualty we had was some marine sprained his ankle jumping out of the boat,” said Carney. “But it placed us athwart their line of communication from Truk or from the westward. And from that time on, Kavieng was a dead bird. They stayed there and rotted.”
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Carney added that leapfrogging destabilized the psychology and morale of the Japanese fighting forces. “Once the Japanese had launched a plan,” he remarked, “he apparently had no alternative plan, because in his mentality, in his psychology, there could be no such thing as failure. There could be no such thing as turning back, once committed.” When the Americans went around a Japanese position, rather than attacking it directly, “his whole military campaigning morale collapsed.”
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