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Challenge for the Pacific

Robert Leckie




  Praise for

  CHALLENGE FOR THE PACIFIC

  “[Leckie] has succeeded in compressing numerous tales into a readable story, but his greatest contribution is a unique feeling for combat.… His marines are living, brawling, obscene, blasphemous—and utterly believable. He has caught their gallows humor, their cockiness and their savagery in the business of battle.”

  —JOHN TOLAND, The New York Times Book Review

  “A stirring story of America’s survival in its grimmest hour … as readable and gripping as a novel.”

  —The Patriot Ledger (Massachusetts)

  “Here is a book to wrench the heart. It is a driving, relentless narrative that summons up all of the hideous color and clamor of battle. But, more than that, it is a timely evocation of what a nation must do in wars to preserve its freedom.… [This] book is a splendid weld of the strategies, views and experiences of soldiers, sailors and airmen.”

  —Newark News

  “Leckie is a brilliant war writer.”

  —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “[A] true winner … Excitement, action, fast narrative pace, and a deep respect for the rudiments of genuine patriotism mark the story.… [Leckie] presents the Allies and the Japanese as separate people, giving them the stature of human beings involved in desperate battle.”

  —Nashville Banner

  “Despite its scope, the story is told in individual terms—Japanese and American. Characters are very much alive on the printed page. Challenge for the Pacific is fast-paced and informative.”

  —Navy Times

  “An exceedingly good account of a feat of arms which remains unsurpassed … enthralling.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “[An] epic tale ably told … To those who were there this book will bring back vivid memories.… To those who were not there this book should bring some small realization of what it was like.”

  —El Paso Times

  “Detailed and dramatic … In these pages one can feel the frustration, despair and confusion experienced by both sides in the savage see-saw struggle.”

  —Tulsa World

  “Leckie puts flesh on the bones of history.… The book has the ring of authenticity.… It is intensely dramatic, vivid, broad, and yet intimate in detail, deeply moving in its portrayal of the human side of war. In the best sense, it is history made alive.”

  —Pasadena Star-News

  “A vivid portrayal … worthy of attention.”

  —Buffalo Courier-Express

  “Challenge for the Pacific is more than the battle of Guadalcanal. It is the living and dying of Americans and Japanese.… [Leckie] knows how a ground-pounding Marine thinks, talks and reacts.”

  —Leatherneck magazine

  “Leckie describes this outstanding American combined operation from an intensely personal yet well-documented angle.”

  —The Daily Telegraph

  2010 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1965 by Robert Leckie

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1965.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to include the following copyrighted material in this book:

  Excerpts from A Coastwatcher’s Diary by Martin Clemens. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Excerpts from The Battle for Guadalcanal by Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith II, copyright © 1963 by Samuel B. Griffith II. Published by J. B. Lippencott Company.

  Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  Excerpts from Strong Men Armed by Robert Leckie, copyright © 1962 by Robert Leckie; Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie, copyright © 1957 by Robert Hugh Leckie. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and the author.

  Excerpts from Once a Marine: The Memoirs of a General A. A. Vandegrift, U.S.M.C., as told to Robert B. Asprey, copyright © 1964 by A. A. Vandegrift and R. B. Asprey. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Excerpts from Japanese Destroyer Captain by Commander Tameichi Hara, with Fred Saito and Roger Pineau, copyright © 1961 by Captain Tameichi Hara, Fred Saito, and Roger Pineau. Reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90824-4

  Maps by Liam Dunne

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  To Bud Conley, Lew Juergens, and Bill Smith,

  my buddies on Guadalcanal

  PREFACE

  ON AUGUST 7, 1962—the twentieth anniversary of the landings at Guadalcanal—men of the First Marine Division Association received a message from Sergeant Major Vouza of the British Solomon Islands Police. Vouza said: “Tell them I love them all. Me old man now, and me no look good no more. But me never forget.”

  Neither would anyone else who had been on Guadalcanal, not the Japanese who tortured Vouza, and from whom this proud and fierce Solomon Islander exacted a fearsome vengeance, not the Americans who ultimately conquered. For Guadalcanal, as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison has said, is not a name but an emotion. It is a word evocative, even, of sense perception; of the putrescent reek of the jungle, the sharp ache of hunger or the pulpy feel of waterlogged flesh, as well as of all those clanging, bellowing, stuttering battles—land, sea, and air—which were fought, night and day, to determine whether America or Japan would possess a ramshackle airfield set in the middle of 2500 square miles of malarial wilderness.

  More important, historically, Guadalcanal was the place at which the tide in the Pacific War turned against Japan. Although this distinction has often been conferred upon Midway, the fact remains that the naval air battles fought at Midway did not turn the tide, but rather gave the first check to Japanese expansion while restoring, through the loss of four big Japanese aircraft carriers as against only one American, parity in carrier power.

  After Midway the Japanese were still on the offensive. They thought that way and they acted that way. “After Coral Sea and Midway, I still had hope,” said Captain Toshikazu Ohmae, operations officer for the Japanese Eighth Fleet, “but after Guadalcanal I felt that we could not win.” Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, commander of the Guadalcanal Reinforcement Force, goes even further, declaring: “There is no question that Japan’s doom was sealed with the closing of the struggle for Guadalcanal.” Captain Tameichi Hara, a destroyer commander who fought under Tanaka at both Midway and Guadalcanal, shares his chief’s opinion, writing: “What really spelled the downfall of the Imperial Navy, in my estimation, was the series of strategic and tactical blunders by (Admiral) Yamamoto after Midway, the Operations that started with the American landing at Guadalcanal in early August, 1942.” And from the Japanese Army, as represented by Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi, commander of Japan’s first major attempt to recapture the island, comes this categorical statement: “Guadalcanal is no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history. It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese Army.”

  Guadalcanal was also the graveyard for Japan’s air force. Upwards of 800 aircraft, with 2362 of her finest pilots and crewmen, were lost there. Perhaps even more important, the habit of victory deserted the heretofore invincible Japanese pilots there, and before the battle was over Japanese carrier power ceased to be a factor in the Pacific until, nearly two years later, the invasion of Saipan lured it to its effective destruction. Japanese naval losses were also high. Even though Japan’s loss of 24 warshi
ps totaling 134,389 tons was hardly greater than the American loss of 24 warships totaling 126,240 tons, Japan could not come close to matching the American replacement capacity. Finally, the total American dead was, at the utmost, only about one tenth of the Japanese probable total of fifty thousand men.

  However, neither comparative statistics nor the number of men and arms engaged can measure a battle’s importance in history. Only a few hundred fell when Joan of Arc raised the siege of Orléans and changed the course of events in the west, while Marathon, Valmy, Saratoga and Waterloo—to name a few other decisive battles—would not, in combined casualties, equal the number of those whose blood stained one of Genghis Khan’s forgotten battlefields. A battle is only great because after it has been fought things are never the same. The war has been changed in its direction, its mood, its attitudes, its men, and sometimes its very tactics. Finally, in changing a war, a great battle alters the course of world events.

  This condition and its corollaries are fulfilled by Guadalcanal. After Guadalcanal the Pacific War that had been moving south toward Australasia-Fijis-Samoa turned north toward Japan, and the United States, having been starved for victory, never again tasted defeat. More simply, after Guadalcanal the Americans were on the offensive and the Japanese were on the defensive.

  It was at Guadalcanal that such myths as the invincibility of the Japanese soldier or Zero fighter-plane were destroyed, that such devices as radar-controlled naval gunfire were introduced, and that such reputations as those of Chuichi Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor, or the idolized Isoroku Yamamoto were either ruined or tarnished while those of such Americans as Halsey, Kinkaid, and Richmond Kelly Turner among the admirals, Alexander Patch and Lightning Joe Collins among the Army generals, and Archer Vandegrift and Roy Geiger among the Marines, were being made. From Guadalcanal came the tactics—land, sea, and air—which were to become American battle doctrine throughout World War II, and out of this struggle emerged the seasoned young leaders who were to command the ships and regiments and squadrons which were to strike the Axis enemy everywhere.

  Guadalcanal wrecked Japan’s grand strategy. Imperial General Headquarters had deliberately hurled the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor to prevent the United States Navy from interfering with the Japanese timetable of conquest in the Pacific. By the time America had recovered from Pearl Harbor, it was believed, Japan would have built a chain of impregnable island forts around her stolen empire.

  America, tiring of a costly and bloody war, would then be willing to negotiate a peace favorable to Japan. But Guadalcanal shattered this dream. There, barely a year after Pearl Harbor, the Americans stood in triumph with their faces turned toward Japan.

  And once it was clear that Guadalcanal was lost, the sober heads at Imperial General Headquarters knew that all was lost. The countries of Southeast Asia, the lush, rich islands of the Southern Seas—all of these “lands of everlasting summer”—were to be taken away from them.

  After Guadalcanal, as the Japanese knew in their despair, as the Americans realized with rising jubilation, the Pacific War could never be the same.

  ROBERT LECKIE

  Mountain Lakes, New Jersey

  September 10, 1964

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  PRAISE FOR CHALLENGE FOR THE PACIFIC

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  LIST OF MAPS

  PART ONE: THE CHALLENGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO: ALONE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PART THREE: AT BAY

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART FOUR: CRISIS

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  PART FIVE: CRUX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MAPS

  Area of Action in the Solomons

  The Pacific Ocean with Insert of Area of Action

  Guadalcanal

  Battle of the Tenaru

  Battle of Bloody Ridge

  Battle of Henderson Field

  Matanikau Action

  PART ONE

  THE CHALLENGE

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  THE ADMIRAL was tall, hard, and humorless. His face was of flint and his will was of adamant. In the United States Navy which he commanded it was sometimes said, “He’s so tough he shaves with a blowtorch.” President Roosevelt was fond of repeating this quip in the admiral’s presence, hoping to produce, if there had been no reports of fresh disaster in the past twenty-four hours, that fleeting cold spasm of mirth—like an iceberg tick—which the President, the Prime Minister of England, and the admiral’s colleagues on the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff were able to identify as a smile.

  If levity was rare in Admiral Ernest King, self-doubts or delusions were nonexistent. He was aware that he was respected rather than beloved by the Navy, and he knew that he was hated by roughly half of the chiefs of the Anglo-American alliance. Mr. Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War, hated him; so did Winston Churchill and Field-Marshal Sir Alan Brooke and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham.1 Nevertheless, Admiral King continued to express the wish that was anathema in the ears of these men, as it was also irritating or at least unwelcome in the ears of General George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, and General H. H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Force.

  Admiral King wanted Japan checked.

  He wanted this even though he was bound to adhere to the grand strategy approved by Roosevelt and Churchill: concentrate on Hitler first while containing the Japanese.

  But what was containment?

  Containing the Japanese during the three months beginning with Pearl Harbor had been as easy as cornering a tornado. The Japanese had crippled the U.S. Pacific Fleet and all but driven Britain from the Indian Ocean by sinking Prince of Wales and Repulse. Except for scattered American carrier strikes against the Gilberts and Marshalls the vast Pacific from Formosa to Hawaii was in danger of becoming a Japanese lake. Wake had fallen; Guam as well; the Philippines were on their way. Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” had already absorbed the Dutch East Indies with all their vast and precious deposits of oil and minerals, it had supplanted the French in Indochina and evicted the British from Singapore. Burma, Malaya, and Thailand were also Japanese. The unbreachable Malay Barrier had been broken almost as easily as the invincible Maginot Line had been turned. Japan now looked west toward India with her hundreds of millions; and if Rommel should beat the British in North Africa, a German-Japanese juncture in the Middle East would become a dreadful probability. Meanwhile, great China was cut off and Australia—to which General Douglas MacArthur had been ordered should he succeed in escaping from Corregidor—was threatened by a Japanese invasion of New Guinea. At that moment in early March, as Admiral King knew, the necessary invasion force was being gathered at Rabaul, the bastion which the Japanese were building on the eastern tip of New Britain.

  All this—all this ferocious speed and precision, all this lightning conquest, this sweeping of the seas and seizure of the skies—all this was containment?

  Admiral King did not think so. He thought it was rather creeping catastrophe. He thought that the Japanese, unchecked, would reach out again. They would try
to cut off Australia, drive deeper eastward toward Hawaii; and build an island barrier behind which they could drain off the resources of their huge new stolen empire. It was because King feared this eventuality that he had, as early as January 1942, when the drum roll of Japanese victories was beating loudest, moved to put a garrison of American troops on Fiji. Already forging an island chain to Australia, he was still not satisfied: in mid-February he wrote to General Marshall urging that it was essential to occupy additional islands “as rapidly as possible.” The Chief of Staff did not reply for some time. When he did, he asked what King’s purpose might be. The Navy Commander-in-Chief, Cominch as he was called, answered that he hoped to build a series of strong-points from which a “step-by-step” advance might be made through the Solomon Islands against Rabaul.

  That was on March 2. Three days later, Admiral King addressed a memorandum to President Roosevelt. He outlined his plan of operations against the Japanese. He summarized them in three phrases:

  Hold Hawaii.

  Support Australasia.

  Drive northwestward from New Hebrides.

  Admiral Ernest King was not then aware of it, but he had at that moment put a tentative finger on an island named Guadalcanal.

  Japan was preparing to reach out again.

  At Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo the faces of the planners were bright with victory fever.2 Who could blame them, really? Who else might bask so long in such a sun of success without becoming slightly giddy? Of course, some of the officers of the Naval General Staff had passed from fever into delirium. Some of them—conscious that it was the Navy which had brought off the great stroke at Pearl Harbor, which had played the greater role in the other victories, which had shot the enemy aviators from the skies—some of them were proposing that Australia be invaded.