War and Remembrance (75 page)

TRANSLATORS NOTE
to the third edition, October 1973: The Viet Nam experience is making me wonder whether Roon is not absolutely right about this.—V.H.

On the other hand, for twenty years the United States Navy had been plotting to destroy Japan if American hegemony was ever challenged by “the yellow peril.” Assuming the Japanese would be maneuvered into striking first, their war games had produced a cut-and-dried plan of counterattack. After the war, as has been said, Chester von Nimitz claimed the U.S.A. had won the war along the exact lines planned at the Naval War College. The plan was:

1. Hold a line of communication to the main forward bases in Australia and New Zealand, with installations along a curve of islands outside Japanese aircraft range.
   
2. Batter northward through the archipelagoes of the southwest Pacific in flank attack.
   
3. Thrust the main assault westward across the Central Pacific atolls, in an island-hopping strike toward Luzon and Japan.
   

But King had trouble getting enough force in his theatre to execute the plan. General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, an able planner and organizer, was adamant on “Germany First,” and a full-scale invasion of France in 1943. He wanted to concentrate on an immediate buildup in England of American manpower and matériel.

Happily for King, all the British leaders from Churchill down kept waffling on the invasion. They remembered the Somme and Dunkirk all too well. In July 1942, Marshall in great disgust therefore recommended to President Roosevelt that the Americans throw their weight into the Japanese conflict. King seized this favoring moment to push the execution of a quick modest aggressive move in the Pacific: the capture of a Japanese seaplane base in the Solomons, the small island of Tulagi. Though already authorized, the Tulagi operation had stalled in an army-navy argument over supreme command. Now it went forward, with a complicated deal on command, which temporarily dodged the impasse. Soon afterward the American and British war planners settled on the North African landings called
“Torch,” but King’s operation meantime went ahead. It was called Operation Watchtower. His forces were so meager that in the field they dubbed it Shoestring.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
I omit here a long Roon analysis of the conflict between the Army and the Navy over the Pacific command issue and the Tulagi idea. MacArthur wanted to try a more ambitious shot, the capture of the big Japanese air base of Rabaul. Roon comments, “Vanity of leaders can divert or wreck campaigns. The divided command problem between MacArthur and Nimitz haunted the Pacific war and resulted in the stupendous botch at Leyte Gulf.” In a later chapter I include a controversial essay by Roon on the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
—
V.H.

Combat preparations for taking Tulagi were well along, when a coast-watcher intelligence report greatly raised the stakes of the operation. Only a few miles from Tulagi, the Japanese were building an airfield on the large island of Guadalcanal.

This was explosive news. Pacific combat turned on local air superiority, and air power meant either carriers or airfields in the battle zone. Flattops could move about, bringing power where needed; also, they could flee from strong threats. On the other hand, airfields were unsinkable, and land-based planes could fly farther than carrier aircraft, with heavier bombs. An operational airfield was the strongest piece in Pacific chess.

Seven hundred miles northwest of Guadalcanal, the Rabaul air base threatened the line to Australia and barred an advance toward Japan. Hence MacArthur’s dashing plan, which King had vetoed, to strike there. But an airfield as far south as Guadalcanal was a menace King could not accept. Denying it to the foe, he would gain local air superiority in the Solomons, and American airpower could trade punches at long range with Rabaul. Shoestring forces already embarked received added orders:
Capture and hold the Guadalcanal airfield.

And so America sidled, as it were, into its most arduous Pacific campaign.

Guadalcanal itself, a potato-shaped island a hundred miles long and half as wide, was never the prize. For months the land fighting raged along a narrow plantation strip of the northern coast flanking the airfield. The rest of the mountainous island was left to the mosquitoes, the jungle wildlife, and the natives, who were probably both frightened and entertained by the noisy flaming fireworks along the north shore.

The small, ill-equipped Shoestring expedition had little trouble captuing
Tulagi and the Guadalcanal airfield, but the severe counterstroke from nearby Japanese bases came fast. In a night action called the Battle of Savo Island, Japanese warships sank the entire U.S. fire support force, four heavy cruisers, and departed unscathed. They could have finished the job and extinguished Shoestring by sinking the helpless half-emptied transports, but they had to assume that American aircraft carriers were steaming close by in the darkness and would attack at dawn. So they left, giving the Americans the brief breathing spell that saved their campaign. In war, when a strong enemy is down, one is well-advised to cut his throat. In point of fact, Vice Admiral Fletcher was out of combat range with his carriers, preparing to fuel. Fearing air attack from Rabaul, he had left while the transports were still unloading.

Reprimanded by King earlier in the war for lack of aggressiveness, missing his chances in the Coral Sea, failing to launch all aircraft at once at Midway, Fletcher’s career seems to have had one good moment: when he signalled Spruance at Midway,
I will conform to your movements.
By abandoning the transports at Guadalcanal he nearly lost the campaign at the outset. Whenever danger impended, this admiral seems to have been seized by an uncontrollable urge to steam away a couple of hundred miles and fuel. He fades from sight after Guadalcanal.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
Roon continues to make a goat of Frank Jack Fletcher here. My cruiser
Northampton
missed the Battle of Savo Island, but I know that the Japanese leadership, gunnery, and torpedo fire were good at Savo, and ours were miserable. That was why we lost four cruisers. It is true that Fletcher might have struck a counterblow, and that his retreat was conservative. — V.H.

Like their navy, the Japanese army seems to have been plagued by overconfidence; probably they wrote off Midway as mere navy ineptness. After all, white men had yet to defeat the Japanese on land. Busy with plans to assault New Guinea and threaten Australia, the army committed troops only piecemeal to Guadalcanal, not enough and not adequately supported; and the United States forces formed a perimeter around the airfield, often dented but never broken by wild and bloody
banzai
charges.

Still, for a long time it was touch and go for the Americans. In effect they were stranded. Air bombardment, naval shelling, enemy night attack overland —and above all, malaria and other tropical illnesses —decimated them. Their weakened navy could sneak in only scanty supplies and reinforcements.
Hungry, thirsty, feeling forgotten and abandoned, they lived off captured Japanese rice, and burned Japanese gasoline. The few fresh aircraft and pilots that slipped in were quickly worn down or shot down. On one black day, Admiral Halsey’s account avers, there was
one operating aircraft
on Henderson Field. President Roosevelt began publicly talking of Guadalcanal as a “minor” operation, a most ominous and pusillanimous signal. But the beleaguered marines and exhausted airmen clung to the perimeter until the tide turned.

In view of the poor record of American soldiers elsewhere, this epic defense of Henderson Field is striking. These defenders were marines, the navy’s elite amphibious combat corps. The words of the American naval historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, perhaps explain all:
Lucky indeed for America that in this theater and at that juncture she depended not on boys drafted or cajoled into fighting but on “tough guys” who had volunteered to fight and who asked for nothing better than to come to grips with the sneaking enemy who had aroused all their primitive instincts.