Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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in jungle hideouts on Japanese-held islands played a critical role in alerting the air force to enemy shipping movements. Meanwhile in deeper waters offshore, opposing squadrons of carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers manoeuvred for advantage like boxers circling each other in darkness in a giant ring. The challenge was almost always to locate the enemy, then to fire first. Attrition was awesome: the 24 August Battle of the East Solomons cost the Japanese a carrier and heavy aircraft losses in exchange for damage to the Enterprise; a week later, the carrier Saratoga suffered such severe torpedo damage that it was obliged to quit the theatre for an American dockyard. The Americans inflicted heavy losses on the enemy off Cape Esperance on the night of 11–12 September, but on the 15th Japanese submarines sank the carrier Wasp and damaged the new battleship North Carolina.
Vice-Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, who assumed command of regional naval operations on 18 October, found himself committed to some of the heaviest fleet actions of the war. At Santa Cruz on 26 October, the Japanese lost over a hundred aircraft and the Americans seventy-four, more than the rival forces on any day of the Battle of Britain. Destruction of the carrier Hornet left the Americans for some weeks solely dependent on the damaged Enterprise for naval air operations. On the night of 12 November Vice-Admiral Hiroake Abe, leading a squadron dominated by two battleships to bombard the Americans on Guadalcanal, met an American cruiser force. Though he inflicted heavy damage, sinking six ships for the loss of three, with familiar caution he chose to retreat after a twenty-four-minute action, only to lose one of his battleships to American aircraft next morning.
Two days later, Marine pilots of the ‘Cactus Air Force’, as the Henderson Field squadrons were known, caught a Japanese troop convoy en route to Guadalcanal and almost annihilated it, sinking seven transports and a cruiser, and damaging three more cruisers. That night, there was a dramatic clash between American and Japanese capital ships in which Admiral ‘Ching’ Lee’s Washington landed nine 16″ salvoes on the battleship Kirishima, which foundered soon after, an acceptable exchange for damage to the US Navy’s battleship South Dakota. Only remnants of the Japanese landing force stumbled ashore at dawn, shorn of their heavy equipment, from the last four beached transports of the annihilated convoy. Off Tassarfonga Point on the night of 30 November, five American cruisers attacking eight Japanese destroyers on a supply run suffered one cruiser sunk and three more damaged by torpedoes. The Japanese lost only a single destroyer.
These were epic encounters, reflecting both sides’ massive commitment of surface forces – and losses: in the course of the Solomons campaign, around fifty major Japanese and US warships were sunk. The men who fought became grimly familiar with long, tense waits, often in darkness, while sweat-soaked radar operators peered into their screens for a first glimpse of the enemy. Thereafter, many sailors learned the terror of finding their ships suddenly caught in the dazzling glare of enemy searchlights, presaging a storm of shell. They witnessed the chaos of repeated encounters in which ships exchanged gunfire and torpedoes at close range, causing ordered decks, turrets, superstructures, machinery spaces to be transformed within seconds into flaming tangles of twisted steel.
They saw sailors leap in scores and hundreds from sinking vessels. Some were saved, many were not: when the cruiser Juneau blew up, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, lost five sons. Pilots often took off from heaving flight decks knowing that perhaps a hundred miles away, their enemy counterparts were doing the same. Thus, they were never assured that when they returned from a mission they would find a flight deck intact to land on. Only the Americans’ possession of Henderson Field enabled them to deploy sufficient airpower to compensate for their depleted carrier force. The men who fought at sea and in the air off Guadalcanal in the latter months of 1942 experienced a sustained intensity of naval surface warfare unmatched at any other period of the struggle.
The Americans prevailed. After the battles of November, despite his squadrons’ successes Admiral Yamamoto concluded that Japan’s Combined Fleet could no longer endure such attrition. He informed the Imperial Army that his ships must withdraw support from the land force on Guadalcanal. It was a critical victory for the US Navy, and was hailed back home as a personal triumph for ‘Bull’ Halsey. The achievement of the American shore contingent was to hold out and defend its perimeter through months of desperate assaults. In December, some of the exhausted Marines were at last relieved by US Army formations. The Japanese were reduced to supplying their shrinking ground force by submarine. At the end of January 1943, after an American offensive had driven them back into a narrow western perimeter, 10,652 Japanese survivors were evacuated by night in destroyers.
To take and hold Guadalcanal, the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps lost 3,100 killed, a small price for a critical achievement. The Japanese suffered 29,900 ground, naval and air casualties, most of them fatal, including 9,000 men killed by tropical diseases, a reflection of their pitifully inadequate medical services. Every element of the American forces shared undoubted glory. The ‘Cactus Air Force’, infantry manning the perimeter, warship crews afloat, displayed a resolve the Japanese had not believed Americans to possess. The US Navy’s heavy losses were soon replaced, as those of the Japanese were not. For the rest of the war, the performance of Admiral Yamamoto’s squadrons progressively deteriorated, while the US Pacific Fleet grew in proficiency as well as might. In the latter months of 1942, American aircrew noted a rapid decline in the skill and resolve of enemy pilots. A Japanese staff officer asserted bleakly that the battle for Guadalcanal had been ‘the fork in the road which leads to victory’. Like Yamamoto, he knew that his nation was thereafter marching with ever-quickening step towards defeat.
Even as the Marines were fighting on Guadalcanal, the most protracted land campaign of the Far Eastern war was unfolding on Papua New Guinea – after Greenland, the largest island in the world. The Japanese began establishing small forces on the eastern coast in March 1942, with the intention of seizing Port Moresby, capital of Australian-ruled Papua, two hundred miles distant on the south-west shore. Initially the Japanese intended an amphibious descent on Moresby, but this was frustrated by the Coral Sea actions. American success at Midway a month later denied the Japanese any prospect of a swift capture of New Guinea through seaborne landings. Tokyo’s local commander, Col. Tsuji, made a personal decision instead to secure the island the hard way, by an overland advance, and forged an order supposedly from Imperial headquarters to authorise his operation. MacArthur, Allied Commander-in-Chief for the South-West Pacific, deployed his limited strength to frustrate this.
Australian units began moving towards Papua’s north coast in July 1942, but the Japanese secured footholds there first, and began to build up forces for an advance over the Owen Stanley mountain range to Port Moresby. The ensuing battles along its only practicable passage, the Kokoda Trail, were small in scale, but a dreadful experience for every participant. Amid dense rainforest, men struggled for footholds, scrambling through deep mud on near-vertical tracks, bent under crippling weights of equipment and supplies; rations arrived erratically and rain almost daily; disease and insects intensified misery.
‘I have seen men standing knee-deep in the mud of a narrow mountain track, looking with complete despair at yet another seemingly unsurmountable ridge,’ an Australian officer wrote to his former school headmaster. ‘Ridge after ridge, ridge after ridge, heart-breaking, hopeless, futile country.’ The need to manpack all supplies and ammunition rendered the Kokoda Trail campaign a colossal undertaking: every soldier bore sixty pounds, some a hundred. ‘What a hell of a load to lump uphill all the way through mud and slush,’ wrote Australian corporal Jack Craig. ‘Some of us lose our footing and finish up flat out. One feels like just lying there for ever. I don’t think I have been so exhausted in all my life.’ Many men suffered agonies from bleeding haemorrhoids as well as more deadly tropical diseases.
As for the Japanese, an Australian shrugged that ‘This is not murder, killing such repulsive-looking animals.’ But one of his comrades, detailed by an officer to finish off a hideously wounded enemy soldier, wrote afterwards: ‘Then came the beginning of some of the terrible things that happen in combat…I have lived to this day with those terrified eyes staring at me.’ A young chaplain wrote from the rear areas of the Papuan front:
I do not believe there has ever been a campaign when men have suffered hardship, privation and incredible difficulties as in this one. To see these men arrive here wounded and ill from terrible tropical diseases,