Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War

  A few days before General Douglas MacArthur made his dramatic escape by torpedo boat from Corregidor, the big carrier Enterprise dropped anchor in Pearl Harbor after a successful bombing raid on Japanese-held Marcus Island. On her bridge was a pugnacious admiral with a huge commanding head and a craggy bristling face. He was William F. (Bull) Halsey, perhaps the most aggressive admiral in the American Navy. Bull Halsey had already led the strikes on Wake and the Marshalls, and was already famous at home for his hatred of the enemy and his salty contempt for fainthearted sailors. The day Admiral Halsey had sailed into Pearl Harbor and seen the horrible wreckage of the fleet in Battleship Row, he had snarled through clenched teeth: “Before we’re through with ’em the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” A few days later, at sea again and infuriated by a bad case of jitters developing in his task force, he signaled his ships: WE ARE WASTING TOO MANY DEPTH CHARGES ON NEUTRAL FISH.

  Halsey and the Enterprise were not to remain long in Pearl, for Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander of the Pacific Ocean Area, had an assignment for him. The white-haired Nimitz explained it briskly to his most valued commander: in January of 1942, Admiral King had conceived the idea of staging a spectacular diversionary raid on Japan. King’s proposal had received the enthusiastic support of General Arnold of the Army Air Force. Arnold had agreed to provide sixteen long-range Mitchell medium bombers under command of Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. They were to be trained to take off from Navy carriers. That force was now ready.

  Nimitz asked Halsey, “Do you believe it would work, Bill?”

  “They’ll need a lot of luck.”

  “Are you willing to take them out there?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Good!” Nimitz said. “It’s all yours!”8

  Bull Halsey left Nimitz’s headquarters to confer with Doolittle. They agreed that they would try to sneak to within 400 miles of Japan, but that they would launch the planes from farther out if they were discovered. They agreed also, gleefully, that the attack would rattle the enemy’s front teeth, even though it was far from making a real war of it with Japan.

  War with Japan, the United States Marine Corps had maintained for three decades, would be a naval war, an island war, an amphibious war. In 1921, one of the Marines’ most thoughtful officers, Lieutenant Colonel Earl (“Pete”) Ellis, wrote a prescient essay which began with the words:

  “Japan is a World Power and her army and navy will doubtless be up to date as to training and matériel. Considering our consistent policy of non-aggression, she will probably initiate the war; which will indicate that, in her own mind, she believes that, considering her natural defensive position, she has sufficient military strength to defeat our fleet.”

  From this, Ellis concluded:

  “In order to impose our will upon Japan, it will be necessary for us to project our fleet and land forces across the Pacific and wage war in Japanese waters. To effect this requires that we have sufficient bases to support the fleet, both during its projection and afterwards.”9

  Bases meant islands, Ellis argued, and many of these would be defended. No matter, they would have to be seized; and Ellis went on to forecast, with remarkable accuracy, the kind and size of force that would be needed to do it. Unfortunately, Ellis lost his life while on an espionage mission in the Pacific, murdered, some investigators suggest, by the Japanese within their Caroline Islands bastion.10 But Ellis’s conclusions were not forgotten by the officers who were to command the Marine Corps in the years between the wars.

  Chief of all, these men refused to accept the dreary dictum which the British debacle at Gallipoli in World War I seemed to have laid down: that hostile and defended shores cannot be seized from the sea. The Marines argued that they could; moreover that it was not necessary to capture ports with all their ship facilities but that invasions could be made across open beaches. Most brass ears were deaf to this doctrine. Many generals, and some admirals, regarded Marines as nothing but beach-jumpers11 who were unfit to command more than a platoon,12 let alone evolve and develop new military doctrine. After all, the Marine Corps was a mere auxiliary force of scarcely twenty thousand men; it was only, in the favorite phrase of its detractors—one which President Harry Truman was to make notoriously erroneous in the Korean War—“the Navy’s police force.”

  But the Marines persevered. They had to. Without amphibious warfare they had no reason to be regarded as anything else but naval police. Fighting for their existence, they developed amphibious tactics and equipment. The New Orleans boatbuilder, Andrew Higgins, was encouraged to continue experimenting—sometimes at his own expense—with better and better types of landing craft; and from the inventor Donald Roebling came the Alligator, a tracked boat able to crawl over land obstacles, which was to be the forerunner of the famous “amtrack.” Practice landings were made whenever the Navy could be persuaded to make a few ships available. And anything that was done had to be done on a shoestring, for American Congresses between world wars were as bellicosely pacifist as the Cold War Congresses have been meekly militarist. Military budgets were gleefully meat-axed to the starry-eyed approval of a nation naively convinced that if you turn your back on war it will go away. Foremost in this American between-wars custom of “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep” was the Senate Armed Forces Committee that sought to embarrass the Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, by inquiring if the Army really needed all of that toilet paper it had ordered. In such surroundings, caught between two fires, as it were, the Marines worked out their ideas on amphibious warfare.

  Meanwhile, the Marines—unlike other branches of the service—were consistently in action between the wars. They were fighting the “Banana Wars,” learning, in the jungles of Haiti and Nicaragua, all the lessons of jungle warfare that would be applied on a much larger and more vital scale in the wildernesses of Oceania. Service on the Navy’s capital ships taught them to appreciate the importance of seapower, as well as of ship-based air power, and duty at troublesome China stations enabled them to study the Japanese at first hand and to learn—most valuable lesson of all—not to underestimate them.

  It was a hard school, but out of it came a stream of tough and seasoned professionals fired with a sense of mission. One of them was Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift.

  Tall, strong, hard-jawed, and extremely courteous, Archer Vandegrift was of old Virginia stock, the grandson of Confederate soldiers. He had spent his boyhood listening to their stories, and he could never forget the grandfather who had prayed to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.”13 Archer Vandegrift was in the mold of Stonewall Jackson. He was both wary and audacious, seldom without a plan. He had been a Marine officer for thirty-three years, having spent some of his most instructive ones under General Smedley D. Butler, the celebrated and legendary “Old Gimlet Eye” of the Banana Wars. Butler had given him the passing nickname of “Sunny Jim” because Vandegrift had ridden the cowcatcher of a rickety old Nicaraguan locomotive, “to look for mines” as Butler had ordered, and had come back to report with a grin on his face.

  Two decades later, on March 23, 1942, at New River, North Carolina, General Vandegrift received both his second star and the command of the First Marine Division. He had already been its assistant commander, having helped plan and conduct practice landings, one of which was an oddly prophetical exercise at Solomons Island on Chesapeake Bay. But now he had full charge and he poured all his energies into raising it from about 11,000 men to its full strength of 19,000. Each of the four regiments—First, Fifth, and Seventh rifle regiments, the Eleventh of artillery—was understrength.

  From all over the Marine Corps the old salts and China hands came pouring into New River. There were NCOs yanked off soft “planks” at the Navy yards. There were grizzled old gunnery sergeants who had fought in France or chased “Cacos” in Haiti or “bandidos” in Nicaragua. There were inveterate privates who had spent as much time in the br
ig as in barracks. Gamblers, drinkers and connivers, brawlers who had fought soldiers and sailors of every nationality in every bar from Brooklyn to Bangkok, blasphemous and profane with a fine fluency that would astound an Australian coastwatcher, they were nevertheless professional soldiers who knew their hard calling in every detail from stripping a machine gun blindfolded to tying a tourniquet with their teeth. They were tough and they knew it, and they exulted in that knowledge. No one has described them better than Colonel John W. Thomason: “They were the Leathernecks, the old breed of American regular, regarding the service as home and war as occupation, and they transmitted their temper and character and viewpoint to the high-hearted volunteer mass.”

  And those high-hearted volunteers, the new breed, were also streaming into New River, to flesh out the division and to transmit to the old breed something of their own temper: their gaiety and their zest.

  These were the youths fresh from boot training at Parris Island. They knew almost nothing about war, but they knew why they had gone to one. In their late teens and early twenties, they had stormed the recruiting centers after the news of Pearl Harbor had been broadcast. Some of them had come straight from basketball games and bowling matches, still clutching the little canvas bags containing their uniforms or bowling balls. They were angry. Their country had been attacked without warning. Standing in line to be examined by the doctors, they had muttered over and over, “The little yellow bastards, the little yellow bastards.”14 They wanted to kill Japs, they told the officers who questioned them. These were not refined or oblique or delicate young men, these youths who were filling the ranks of the First Marine Division that spring; no, they were mostly “tough guys”—some of whom could be fairly described as juvenile delinquents—whose primitive instincts had been aroused by the infamy of the enemy.

  Yet, they were idealistic, too. They felt vaguely that they were being noble by volunteering to fight their country’s battles on the very day of disaster. Unfortunately, they had no battle cry to express their inmost feelings. They were not able to shout, like the enemy they would meet, “Blood for the Emperor!” Few of them had heard of the Four Freedoms, and those who had were not likely to proclaim them in combat—instinctively aware that conclusions, however accurate and humane, can never rally men to battle—and so they had to substitute the next best, or perhaps even a better thing: their sardonic sense of humor.

  And this was well expressed by the youth who came to the Federal Building in New York on the night of December 7, 1941, only to be told by the doctor that he could not be accepted by the Marines, unless, to conform to certain health standards, he had himself circumcised.

  “Circumcised!” the startled youth burst out. “What in hell do you think I’m gonna do to the enemy?”15

  Nevertheless, the doctor was adamant, and the youth departed to have the operation performed. A month later he was in Parris Island, where he was given the nickname of “Lucky,” and in March of 1942 he had joined the flood of Marines flowing to New River.* With such men, old breed and new, with his veteran battalion and regimental commanders, Archer Vandegrift hoped to forge a fine amphibious striking force.

  They should be ready to go, he thought, at about the end of the year.

  * Ed. note: Lucky is the author.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO had dropped a blockbuster. The Commander-in-Chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet had proposed the capture of Midway Island only 1130 miles from Hawaii, and he was demanding approval of this daring plan over Naval General Staff’s own modest operation to isolate Australia.

  Staff was both appalled and disconcerted; appalled because the dangers of this long thrust into American waters seemed so obvious, disconcerted because, even though Staff was superior to Fleet and could veto the Midway plan, in those days of Japan’s victory fever it would be a bold admiral indeed who would challenge Isoroku Yamamoto.

  His popularity and prestige were enormous. He was the idol of the fleet, this iron admiral of the shaven head and square fighting face; he was revered as a combat sailor who had lost two fingers of his left hand serving under Admiral Togo at Port Arthur, and admired as a strategist and planner who was beginning to rival even that immortal of Japanese history.

  Moreover, Yamamoto’s reputation for integrity was invincible. All of the generals and admirals of Imperial General Headquarters were aware that Yamamoto, almost alone among ranking officers, had warned Japan against going to war with America. In 1940 the fire-breathing young Army officers of Tojo’s War Party so hated Yamamoto that he was deliberately relieved as Navy Vice-Minister and sent to sea as chief of Combined Fleet because, in the words of a member of the Supreme War Council, “he would have been assassinated if he had stayed in Tokyo, and that would have been a great loss to our country.”1 In that same year Yamamoto was asked by former Premier Prince Konoye if Japan had a chance against the United States, and he replied: “I can raise havoc with them for one year, but after that I can give no guarantee.”2 Yamamoto knew America, the character of its people and its incredible industrial potential, for he had served as a Naval attaché in Washington where his renown as a cool and daring poker player was rivaled only by his obvious hatred for his hosts. Nevertheless, in a letter that the Americans were even then misquoting and misinterpreting, Yamamoto had written to a friend: “If we should go to war against the United States we must recognize the fact that the armistice will have to be dictated from the White House.”3 By this he meant merely that Japan had no hope of victory, and not, as the American press was then proclaiming, that this “arrogant little monkey-man” expected to coil his tail in the White House. Yet, once the decision for war was made, Isoroku Yamamoto served his Emperor with single-minded devotion. More than any man, he had been responsible for the strategy of striking America suddenly and hard, of pushing her so far back in the Pacific and so crippling her power to retaliate, that by the time she recovered she would be faced with a long and costly war—one that she would be eager to terminate by negotiation. Thus, Yamamoto had pursued what was virtually his own policy, when, directing Combined Fleet from his flagship, the mighty battleship Yamato, he had delivered those “First Phase” sledgehammer blows. And now the time for the Second Phase was at hand, and Isoroku Yamamoto was reaching out again.

  On April 2 Commander Yasuji Watanabe, operations officer of Combined Fleet, came to Tokyo to present Yamamoto’s plan. He met Commander Tatsukichi Miyo, representing Navy General Staff. Like most Staff officers consulting the victory-men of Fleet, Miyo was carefully courteous. He did not decry but plead. He was almost in tears as he tried to warn Watanabe of the dangers of the Midway operation.4 But Watanabe was obdurate, and the debate continued for three more days. On April 5, as though weary of the wrangle, Watanabe arose from the conference table to place a direct call with Admiral Yamamoto aboard Yamato. He returned to state Yamamoto’s uncompromising position:

  “In the last analysis, the success or failure of our entire strategy in the Pacific will be determined by whether or not we succeed in destroying the United States Fleet, more particularly its carrier task forces. The Naval General Staff advocates severing the supply line between the United States and Australia. It would seek to do this by placing certain areas under Japanese control, but the most direct and effective way to achieve this objective is to destroy the enemy’s carrier forces, without which the supply line could not in any case be maintained. We believe that by launching the proposed operations against Midway, we can succeed in drawing out the enemy’s carrier strength and destroying it in decisive battle. If, on the other hand, the enemy should avoid our challenge, we shall still realize an important gain by advancing our defensive perimeter to Midway … without obstruction.”5

  It was obvious that Isoroku Yamamoto was determined that his plan should carry. With great reluctance Rear Admiral Shigeru Fukudome turned to Vice-Admiral Seiichi Ito to ask in a low voice: “Shall we agree?”

  Ito nodded silently, and Watanabe le
ft the conference room beaming.

  Nevertheless, Naval General Staff’s approval was not wholehearted. Bickering over the date began. Fleet wanted Midway to take place in early June, Staff rather more like early July. And this may have been because the Naval General Staff’s operation against Australia was already begun.

  The Japanese aerial onslaught against Port Moresby and Tulagi was mounting. To help press it, Saburo Sakai’s squadron had been transferred on April 8 to the new base at Lae on New Guinea. Lae was closer to Port Moresby. It was also a pesthole. Its airfield was even smaller and bumpier than Vunakanau at Rabaul and the food was abominable.

  Each morning the pilots arose at three-thirty to gulp down an unpalatable breakfast of rice, soybean-paste soup, dried vegetables, and pickles. Then, at eight o’clock, they flew either patrol or fighter missions. Back for lunch of rice and canned fish or meat, which was repeated for dinner, the pilots either went on standby duty, or roared aloft to intercept sudden enemy attacks, until, at five o’clock, they assembled for calisthenics. After supper they read or wrote letters home or held impromptu concerts with accordions and harmonicas and guitars.

  It would have been a dull and deadly routine but for the constant thrill of aerial combat. Day after day, for four months, Saburo Sakai gunned his mud-brown Zero aloft from the strip at Lae, climbing high into the sky to go winging over the towering 15,000-foot Owen Stanley Mountains standing between Lae and Port Moresby, and to fall upon the enemy with flaming guns. Steadily his score of kills mounted: twenty … thirty … forty … fifty … It seemed incredible. Saburo was easily Japan’s greatest ace, and his fame went far and wide through the homeland and the South Seas.