The Second World War (67 page)

With the Cactus Air Force dominating the sea approaches by day, the Japanese could run in reinforcements only by night. Aircraft losses meant that the Americans too had to land replacements after dark. The marines’ obsolete Wildcat fighters were no match for the Zeros, but they still managed to score an impressive number of kills. On the ground, Vandegrift’s marines lived rough in their gunpits on the jungle edge or in the coconut groves. Constantly bombed or shelled from the sea, they also fought running battles with small groups of Japanese. And every night a bomber, which they called ‘Washing Machine Charlie’, droned overhead keeping them awake. The Japanese, short of ammunition, would try to provoke the marines into revealing their positions at night, by cracking together two pieces of bamboo to simulate rifle fire. They would then creep up in the dark and leap into foxholes or gunpits with a machete, hacking in all directions, then leap out again hoping that in the confusion the survivors would kill each other.

Hunger was hardly mitigated by the supplies of worm-infested rice which they had captured from the Japanese. But their worst enemies were tropical fevers, dysentery and rotting flesh from tropical ulcers in the extreme humidity. Courage was an exhaustible currency. A few men broke down under the strain of bombardment, to the intense embarrassment of their comrades. ‘
Everyone looked the other way
,’ wrote the same marine, a former sports writer, ‘like millionaires confronted by the horrifying sight of a club member borrowing five dollars from the waiter.’

At the end of August, Admiral Tanaka managed to land a force of 6,000 men commanded by Major General Kawaguchi Kiyotake in night runs by destroyers. Their deployment to Guadalcanal instead of to Papua relieved the pressure on the Australians defending Port Moresby. The main force
was brought in where Ichiki’s regiment had come ashore, while another landed to the west of Henderson airfield. Kawaguchi was almost as arrogant and unimaginative as Ichiki. Without carrying out any reconnaissance, he decided to launch an attack from the south of Henderson Field.

As soon as he set out, a raiding force attacked his base and destroyed his artillery and radios; the marines then urinated all over the Japanese food supplies. Kawaguchi’s force, unaware of this attack, blundered on through the jungle, losing its way frequently. Finally, on the evening of 12 September, Kawaguchi began the attack on the low ridge to the south of Henderson Field. The marines, having heard that they could expect no help from the US Navy after the Japanese force at Rabaul had been reinforced, awaited the worst. If overrun, they would have no option but to break out into the hills and fight a guerrilla war from there. And they were already very short of food.

The Battle of ‘Bloody Ridge’ cost the marines a fifth of their strength, but the Japanese lost over half their men. Kawaguchi had to admit defeat when his other forces were also beaten off. The survivors had to retreat to the hills, where they and the remnants of Ichiki’s failed attack literally starved and their uniforms rotted. Guadalcanal became known in the Japanese forces as ‘starvation island’.

Admiral Yamamoto was outraged when he heard of the failure. The insult to Japanese arms had to be avenged, so forces were assembled from all directions to crush the American defenders. Admiral Turner came back with his task force to land reinforcements on 18 September in the shape of the 7th Marine Regiment, but the carrier USS
Wasp
was sunk by a Japanese submarine.

On 9 October, a much larger Japanese force commanded by Lieutenant General Hyakutake Haruyoshi was landed on the island. But two nights later Turner returned again to land the 164th Regiment of the Americal Division. He first had another plan in mind: to ambush what the marines called the ‘Tokyo Express’, the Japanese warships which brought troops and supplies to Guadalcanal. In this case it consisted of three heavy cruisers and eight destroyers. In the confused night action which followed, known as the Battle of Cape Esperance, the Japanese lost a heavy cruiser and a destroyer, and another heavy cruiser was severely damaged. The Americans suffered serious damage to just one cruiser. American morale soared, and Turner’s force landed the 164th Infantry and all the supplies safely. Marines slipped down to the beach to steal some of the ‘doggies’’ kit and barter with the sailors, using trophies taken from the Japanese dead. A samurai sword went for three dozen large Hershey bars. A ‘meat-ball’ flag of the rising sun achieved a dozen.

Over the next two nights, Japanese battleships sailing down
Iron-bottom Sound bombarded the airfield, destroying nearly half the Cactus Air Force and putting the runway out of commission for a week. But a second runway was under construction, and the reinforcements had made a great difference. The most comforting news for Vandegrift was Vice Admiral Halsey’s appointment as commander-in-chief South Pacific. Halsey, well aware that Guadalcanal had turned into a trial of strength between Japan and the United States, was prepared to cancel other operations in order to concentrate maximum force where it was most urgently needed. Roosevelt had exactly the same idea.

The rainy season began and the downpours filled weapon pits and fox-holes. Bearded men shivered, soaked to the skin for days on end. The great priority was to keep the ammunition dry. Vandegrift’s force managed to repel General Hyakutake’s attacks, which were no more subtle than the earlier ones. The marines had cleared scrub and
kunai
grass with machetes to create fields of fire in front of their foxholes and pits. Yet the struggle for Guadalcanal became even more of a battle royal at sea. A series of engagements from the end of October until the end of November turned into a naval war of attrition. American losses were heavier to begin with, and in mid-November clashes over three days ended with the Americans losing two light cruisers and seven destroyers. But they sank two Japanese battleships, a heavy cruiser, three destroyers and seven transports, in which 6,000 reinforcements for General Hyakutake were killed. By the beginning of December, the US Navy controlled the approaches to the island.

In the second week of December, the exhausted 1st Marine Division was evacuated to rest in Melbourne where it received a riotous welcome from the young women and a Presidential Unit Citation. It was replaced by the 2nd Marine Division, the Americal Division and the 25th Infantry Division commanded as XIV Corps by Major General Alexander M. Patch. Over the next two months, after bitter fighting for Mount Austen south of Henderson Field, Japanese destroyers on the last Tokyo Express evacuated the 13,000 remnants of Hyakutake’s 36,000-strong force. Some 15,000 of those who died had succumbed to starvation. The Japanese now referred to Guadalcanal as ‘the Island of Death’. For the Americans, Guadalcanal turned out to be the first of the ‘stepping stones’ which would eventually lead them across the Pacific towards Tokyo.

The events on Guadalcanal had also helped the Australians defending Port Moresby. The Japanese, unable to reinforce or resupply their troops, ordered them to withdraw to Buna on the north coast of Papua where they had landed. The Australians finally enjoyed numerical superiority with their 7th Division returned from the Middle East. For the starved and sick Japanese, their uniforms and boots in tatters, the retreat back through the mountain rainforest was a terrible experience. Many did not survive it.
Advancing Australians found that the Japanese had been eating meat from human corpses.

Yet when the Australians and Americans of the 32nd Infantry Division attacked the bridgehead at Gona and Buna, it proved a dangerous undertaking. The Japanese soldiers had constructed brilliantly camouflaged bunkers in the jungle, using the dense trunks of coconut palms which were impervious to machine-gun bullets. On 21 November, after General MacArthur had ordered the 32nd Infantry Division to ‘
take Buna today
at all costs’, his soldiers suffered for it. They lacked heavy weapons, were short of food and were also repeatedly bombed by their own air force. Their morale could hardly have been lower.

The 7th Australian Division attacking Gona had an equally bloody experience. On 30 November, part of the 32nd managed to infiltrate the Japanese positions at night by creeping through the tall, sharp
kunai
grass. But the battle for both Buna and Gona continued as a result of the desperate Japanese resistance. Only the arrival of some light tanks and more artillery to deal with the Japanese bunkers allowed the Allies to make headway at last. When the Australians finally took Gona on 9 December, they found that the Japanese had piled their own rotting dead as sandbags round their positions.

Only in January 1943 did the 32nd Division and the Australians finally crush the last resistance in the Buna area. The Japanese defenders had been living on wild grasses and roots. Many had succumbed to amoebic dysentery and malaria as a result of malnutrition, and the few prisoners taken alive were completely emaciated. MacArthur claimed a ‘
striking victory
’, and then blamed the ‘slowness’ of Australian commanders for it having taken so long. But both the Guadalcanal and Papuan battles, which coincided with the Stalingrad campaign in very different climatic conditions, had put an end to the myth of Japanese invincibility. They represented a psychological turning point in the Pacific war, even if the naval battle of Midway was the real one in strategic terms.

In Burma, on the other hand, no turning point was imaginable after the 1,800-kilometre retreat to Assam. For the Allied troops forced back into India, the war in Europe could have been on another planet, even if it affected them directly by reducing their call on reinforcements, air support and supplies. Churchill recognized that the Burma theatre was not central to the war against Japan, except to reopen the road to China. He was interested in recapturing the country only to wipe out the humiliation of defeat and restore Britain’s very tarnished prestige.

Field Marshal Wavell, aware that he could not keep troops idle for too long, decided on a limited offensive to recapture the Mayu Peninsula on
the Bay of Bengal and the island of Akyab over eighty kilometres down the coast from the frontier. The first offensive in Arakan took place in country consisting of ‘
steep little hills
covered with jungle, of paddy fields and swamps’. The mangrove swamps and little creeks made much of the coastal strip almost impassable.

This operation was seen as a pre-emptive strike to forestall a Japanese invasion of India. The plan was for the 14th Indian Division to advance from Cox’s Bazaar down to the Mayu Peninsula, while the 6th Infantry Brigade was to land at the mouth of the Mayu River to take Akyab with its Japanese airfield. In the event, no landing craft were available as a result of Operation Torch and American needs in the Solomon Islands. General Noel Irwin, the commander of the Eastern Army, had refused to use Slim’s XV Corps out of personal antipathy, because Slim had sacked a friend of his in 1940 in the Sudan. He was unbelievably rude to Slim, and when the latter complained, Irwin retorted: ‘
I can’t be rude
. I’m senior.’

The advance down the coast was blocked by the Japanese between Maungdaw and Buthidaung, and exceptionally heavy rain made movement extremely hard. The smaller Japanese force then withdrew in December. The 14th Indian Division pushed on, both down the Mayu Peninsula and on the east side of the Mayu River to Rathedaung. But the Japanese had brought in reinforcements, who blocked the peninsula at Donbaik and counter-attacked near Rathedaung.

Like the Americans and Australians elsewhere, the Indian battalions on the peninsula, now reinforced with the British 6th Brigade, suffered heavy casualties from Japanese in well-camouflaged bunkers round Donbaik. In March 1943, a Japanese thrust across the Mayu River threatened the rear of their position, and forced the British to withdraw. One force from the Japanese 55th Division even managed to capture the headquarters of the 6th Brigade and its commander. Eventually the exhausted British and Indian troops, riddled with malaria, retreated back into India. Their 3,000 casualties were twice those of the Japanese. A contemptuous General Stilwell decided that the British were as reluctant as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to fight the Japanese.

On 17 January 1943, Britain and the United States officially gave up any rights to the international settlements, which had been forced upon China in the ‘unequal treaties’ signed after the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. This agreement, reluctantly conceded by the British, was an attempt to keep China in the war while the main offensive against Japan was fought in the Pacific. The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942 from the carrier USS
Hornet
, with the surviving aircraft landing on the Chinese coast, had
provoked a Japanese offensive which destroyed one town and wrecked a Nationalist air base.

Stilwell, perhaps influenced by his responsibility for the disaster which had led to the loss of Mandalay, became obsessed with recapturing Burma. His long-term plan, once the Burma Road was reopened, was to rearm and retrain Chiang Kai-shek’s forces to defeat the Japanese in China. On 7 December 1942, General Marshall in Washington decided that America’s only interest in retaking northern Burma was to reopen the supply route, not to reinforce Chiang Kai-shek’s armies. He wanted only ‘
the rapid build-up
of air operations out of China’.

Marshall was impressed by the reports of Chennault’s former Flying Tigers, which became the US Fourteenth Air Force after Pearl Harbor. ‘Already the bombing attacks, with very light US casualties,’ he added, ‘have done damage out of all proportion to the number of planes involved.’ Chennault, writing directly to Roosevelt, had claimed that he could destroy the Japanese air force in China, attack Japan’s supply lines in the South China Sea and even launch raids on Tokyo itself. Chennault was convinced that he could ‘
accomplish the downfall of Japan
’, rather as Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris in Britain believed that Bomber Command on its own could defeat Germany. Although Washington did not swallow such excessive optimism, a China-based air campaign seemed a much more encouraging proposition than Stilwell’s hopes of building up Chinese armies later. Stilwell was outraged at being sidelined and began a feud against Chennault. Marshall had to write him a stiff letter in January 1943, urging him to assist Chennault, but it did little good.