Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War, Page 2

  The Navy’s cooler heads found the proposal ridiculous.

  The men of the Army General Staff thought it was impossible.

  The Army, they explained, could never scrape together the ten divisions or more required for such an operation. The Navy officers nodded reflectively, saying nothing of their underlying suspicion that the Army, optimistic about Germany’s chances against Russia that spring, was secretly hoarding its forces for use on the continent. The Army, as they knew, regarded the Soviet Union as the number one potential enemy.3 Therefore, the Army, looking northwestward, could not be expected to be enthusiastic about committing troops in the southeast.

  So the Naval General Staff decided that instead of invading Australia it would be more feasible to isolate Australia. The flow of American war matériel to the island continent could be blocked by seizing eastern New Guinea and driving through the Solomons into the New Caledonia–Fijis area. What did the Army think of this?

  The Army approved. It promised to furnish its South Seas Detachment for the operation. These decisions also were reached in March. On the eighth day of that month, Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea were invaded. Two days later Finschhafen was occupied.

  Unknowingly, Imperial General Headquarters had pointed its baton at the island called Guadalcanal.

  Among the forces gathering for the operation to isolate Australia was the Japanese Navy’s 25th Air Flotilla. Its mission was to hammer at Port Moresby, the big Allied base on New Guinea which lay only a few hundred miles north of the Australian continent.

  But in early March the 25th Air Flotilla was understrength. One of its three components, and perhaps the best in quality, the Tainan Fighter Wing, was still far away on the fabled island of Bali in the East Indies. Orders were dispatched to Bali alerting the Tainan Wing for movement.

  Saburo Sakai was the crack pilot of the crack Tainan Fighter Wing. Saburo was not only a born fighter, he was born into a fighting caste. He was a samurai, the scion of professional soldiers, and he could trace his ancestry to those samurai who had invaded Korea in the sixteenth century. Saburo regarded himself as a samurai even though that caste had been abolished by the great Emperor Meiji at the end of the last century. Saburo was proud that his ancestors were among those haughty warriors of the city of Saga who had refused to give up their twin swords and had risen in revolt. And if, because of Imperial rescript, the proud and cruel samurai could no longer be cruel, no longer swing their heavy two-handed sabers to sever, at a single slash, the body of some poor defenseless Eta or pariah who had offended them,4 they could always remain proud. Saburo Sakai’s people had remained proud, scratching out a bare subsistence on a tiny farm near Saga, still scorning money, still wearing the emblem of the two sabers symbolic of their caste, and still priding themselves on their stoic indifference to pain and the strength of their sword hands.

  Then, in the 1930s, the military adventurers seized power in Japan. The samurai was again in favor; his knightly code of bushido—a mixture of chivalry and cruelty—was adopted as the standard for all the young men of Japan. In 1933, at the age of sixteen, Saburo enlisted in the Navy. He endured the purposeful torture called “recruit training” in the Japanese Navy, went to sea on the battleships Kirishima and Haruna, applied for the Navy Flier’s School, and was accepted.

  Saburo, a youth of normal Japanese height, which is about a half foot shorter than that of the normal American, possessed an iron body. Though his nature was warm and good-humored, his will was of the same unbending metal. He became the outstanding student pilot of the year. He could hang by one arm from the top of a pole for half an hour, swim fifty meters in well under thirty seconds, stay underwater for two and a half minutes, and because a fighter pilot’s movements need to be quick, he had so conditioned his reflexes that he could catch a fly in a single lightning lunge.

  At the end of 1937 Saburo was graduated as the outstanding student of the Thirty-eighth Non-Commissioned Officers Class. Of seventy-five handpicked candidates for that class, only twenty-five had survived. One day Japan would rue this policy of training only an elite of an elite, of providing itself with no reserve of skilled pilots to offset combat losses, but in the Sino-Japanese War of the mid-1930s the Japanese pilots fought with such clear superiority as to indicate that they would have a long combat life indeed.

  Saburo Sakai fought in that war. He became famous for his ardor and daring. Wounded once during a surprise enemy air raid, he ran for his plane streaming blood, taking off to pursue the Chinese bombers and to cripple one of them before he was forced to return to base. By December 7, 1941, Saburo Sakai was already an ace. He flew from Formosa in the first strikes against Clark Field in the Philippines. He was the first Japanese pilot to shoot down an American fighter over those islands. He was the first to flame a Flying Fortress, the very bomber piloted by Captain Colin Kelly, America’s first war hero. By March of 1942, Saburo Sakai had shot down thirteen aircraft: Chinese, Russian, British, Dutch, and American. By that time also he and his comrades had reassembled at Bali. They were there to rest, but inactivity only made them restless. They became irritable. They fought with the soldiers who guarded their base. They drank or visited those brothels without which no Japanese military force can long endure. Saburo Sakai did neither, for he was a fighter pilot and a samurai who stuck to his code. Nevertheless, he also fretted, wondering if he would ever get home to see his family.

  On March 12 came the great news. Rotation! The men with the longest time overseas were being relieved to go home, and Saburo had more time out than any of them.

  But the new leader of the Wing, Lieutenant Commander Tadashi Nakajima, did not call Saburo’s name. Crushed, Saburo asked him if there had been a mistake.

  “No, you do not go home with the other men,” Nakajima said. “I need you, Sakai, to go with me. We are advancing to a new air base. It’s Rabaul—on the island of New Britain—the foremost post against the enemy. You’re the best pilot in the squadron, Sakai, and I want you to fly with me.”5

  There was no appeal, not for an enlisted man in the Japanese Navy. Heartbroken, Saburo Sakai became one of eighty pilots who were herded aboard a tiny, stinking, decrepit freighter for the 2500-mile voyage to Rabaul. Only a 1000-ton subchaser escorted them. Indifferent to human suffering, and therefore blind to human value, Japan had placed a good portion of her finest naval fliers aboard a rusty old derelict and exposed them to the very real peril of a single torpedo or 500-pound bomb.

  But the rattler made Rabaul. It entered spacious, horseshoe-shaped Simpson Harbor and discharged its passengers. The pilots were appalled. Vunakanau Airfield was little more than a narrow, dusty airstrip set in the shadow of a live volcano. From time to time a deep rumbling shook the field and smoke and stones spouted from the crater’s mouth. Nevertheless the men took heart when a seaplane tender delivered twenty of the latest models of the Zero fighter. They went back into action, and Saburo Sakai was again the scourge of the enemy. He flew on fighter sweeps to Port Moresby or escorted twin-engine “Betty” bombers on raiding forays over the big Allied base, and he shot down enemy planes with astonishing ease. The American P-39s and P-40s—Bell Airacobras and Curtiss Warhawks—were no match for the Japanese Zeros. The Zero was faster and much more maneuverable; and no one could cut inside an enemy fighter’s turn so sharply as Saburo Sakai, bringing the American or Australian pilot under the full aimed fire of twin 20-mm. cannon and a pair of light machine guns.

  Saburo’s squadron always flew west toward New Guinea. But there were other planes of the 25th Air Flotilla which flew southeast to the Solomon Islands. Beginning with big Bougainville about two hundred miles southeast of Rabaul, the Solomons run on a southeast tangent for roughly another four hundred miles. They form a double chain of islands—actually the peaks of a great drowned mountain range—facing each other at near-regular intervals across a straight blue channel from twenty to one hundred miles wide.

  The objective of the Japanese bombers was the tiny island of Tulagi,
the site of the headquarters of the British Resident Commissioner—for Britain held the Southern Solomons—and now used by the Royal Australian Air Force as a seaplane base. There was also a radio station on Tulagi. The Japanese bombed it regularly. They could not know that their explosives were merely convulsing the rubble of ancient and inadequate radio equipment. The operator, a retired Australian seaman named Sexton, had continually complained to headquarters: “If the Japs come here and ask me where the radio station is, and I show them this, they’ll shoot me for concealing the real one.”6

  Tulagi had an excellent anchorage, formed between the island’s northern shore and the bigger bulk of Florida Island to the north. Sometimes, after the Japanese pilots had watched their bomb-hits making yellow mushrooms on the radio station, or their misses forming white rings in the black of the bay, they banked lazily to fly low over a large long island twenty miles directly across the channel behind or to the south of Tulagi-Florida.

  Seen from the sky, it was a beautiful island; about ninety miles in length and twenty-five at its wide waist, and traversed end to end by lofty mountains, some as high as 8000 feet. The mountains crowded steeply down to the sea on Guadalcanal’s southern or weather coast, abruptly joining reefs and rocks where a thunderous tall surf pounded eternally: no boats could land on that coast, and very few could hold at anchor there. But the northern coast, ah!, there was a long and gentle shore upon which the smallest boats might beach. Here, groves of seaward-leaning coconut palms threw star-shaped shadows upon white beaches scoured by murmuring wavelets; here the island’s numerous swift and narrow rivers came tumbling down to the sea or were penned by impassable sandbars into deep lagoons; and here the sun sparkled on water, glinted off the brilliant plumage of jeweled birds, glittered on sand and beamed upon mountainsides dappled by broad patches of tall tan grass.

  At night—on one of those high, soft, star-dusted southern nights when a white wand of a moon enchanted all in violet and silver—it broke the pilots’ hearts.

  It was a lovely island, as exotic as its Spanish name; a word which contained two of those outlandish L-sounds which, on Japanese lips, usually come forth as R. And so the Flotilla’s pilots referred to their enchanted island as “Katakana.”

  And that, of course, is Japanese for Guadalcanal.

  Martin Clemens was on Guadalcanal. He was the British District Officer. He was as British as a young and charming and ambitious civil servant can be. In his late twenties, Martin was a dashing figure: tall, blond, and handsome in his slouch hat and khaki shorts, a small pistol at his hip, a fine military mustache upon his lips and a radiant golden beard beginning to burgeon upon his chin.

  Martin Clemens had been three years in the Southern Solomons, having trained there as a cadet and served as a District Officer on San Cristoval, southernmost of the chain, and Malaita on the opposite side of the channel. Clemens knew the loneliness of these sparsely inhabited islands. He had spent days in the wilderness of the jungles, seeing only his native scouts and carriers; coming suddenly upon those tiny “villages” which were often only clusters of thatched huts set upon the cliff of some abyss or the bank of some wild river. There the District Officer was respected because British law was feared; but there also no able-bodied male was ever without his tomahawk or spear.

  Clemens also thought that Guadalcanal was beautiful. On the outside.

  On the inside, he knew, she was a poisonous morass. Crocodiles hid in her creeks or patrolled her turgid backwaters. Her jungles were alive with slithering, crawling, scuttling things; with giant lizards that barked like dogs, with huge red furry spiders, with centipedes and leeches and scorpions, with rats and bats and fiddler crabs and one big species of landcrab which moved through the bush with all the stealth of a steamroller. Beautiful butterflies abounded on Guadalcanal, but there were also devouring myriads of sucking, biting, burrowing insects that found sustenance in human blood: armies of fiery white ants, swarms upon swarms of filthy black flies that fed upon open cuts and made festering ulcers of them, and clouds of malaria-bearing mosquitoes. When it was hot, Guadalcanal was humid; when the rains came she was sodden and chill, and all her reeking vegetation was soft and squishy to the touch. No, she was neither enchanting nor lovable; and Martin Clemens had not liked her since he came to Aola Bay on Guadalcanal’s northeast coast at the end of January.

  Now, at the end of March, he was in charge of the entire island and faced with the problem of what to do with a native population whose loyalty seemed to be wavering. Three months ago there had been peace and order. But then, with the Japanese occupation of Rabaul, all had changed to chaos. Most of the Europeans had fled and many of their habitations had been wrecked by natives either resentful or parading resentment as an excuse for looting. Some of the older natives could remember that the Germans had been ousted from Bougainville in World War I. Some of them were wondering aloud if the detested Japanese—those short tan men who plundered the pearl shell on the natives’ reefs—were actually tough enough to do the same to the British. Were men like Ishimoto to replace the District Officers? Mr. Ishimoto, the surly little carpenter who had worked for the Lever Brothers Plantation on Tulagi, would he be back with his conquering countrymen? What would happen to them all then? What would the Japanese do to them?

  Up north, they had heard, the Japanese had slaughtered cattle and requisitioned food. They had forced the natives to work for them. They had killed missionaries and closed the mission schools, opening their own where the only thing they taught was how to bow low. And the Japanese were coming. This they knew. Their minds were not so simple as to mistake the meaning of the bombing raids on Tulagi.

  So they came crowding around Clemens, these headmen, their dark bodies glistening with sweat, their strong white teeth stained red with betel-nut juice, their huge fuzzy heads bleached pink with lime and fire-ash, their broad, seamed faces alive with anxiety and doubt.

  “Japan he come, Massa,” they said. “You stop along us?”

  Clemens nodded gravely.

  “No matter altogether Japan he come,” he said. “Me stop along you-fellow.” Their tense faces relaxed, and Clemens continued: “Business belong you-fellow all the same follow me. All the way. By an’ by, altogether man belong me-fellow come save you-me. Me no savvy who, me no savvy when, but by an’ by everything he all right.”7

  It was not a very spectacular promise, especially on the lips of a stranger most of them had never met before; but it was all that Clemens could say: stick with me and you won’t be hurt.

  The headmen left with quiet murmurs. Clemens could only hope they would stick. Meanwhile, he thought with gentle irony, my orders remain: “Deny the resources of the district to the enemy.” How? With whom? He was alone, but for a few goldminers up on Gold Ridge. D. S. MacFarlan, the Australian naval officer who had taught him how to use the teleradio, had already “upsticked and away,” taking with him Ken Hay, the manager of Berande Plantation. Clemens smiled at the thought of the two of them back in the bush: MacFarlan in his immaculate whites, Hay—one of the fattest men he had ever seen—puffing up a jungle track. Then there was Snowy Rhoades. Snowy was at the northwest end of the island. Snowy, with his bushy hair and cold eyes and prizefighter’s stance; he was tough enough, too tough in fact. He liked the idea of the Japanese coming, so that he could kill a few of them. The difficulty with Snowy would be to keep him and his police boys quiet. If they were going to be of any use as coastwatchers, they had to lie low.

  Martin Clemens looked at the teleradio MacFarlan had brought him. This and his police scouts would be about all he had, not to “deny the enemy,” but to spy on the enemy—once they came.

  For Martin Clemens, besides being a British District Officer, was also a coastwatcher for the Royal Australian Navy.

  Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt of the Royal Australian Navy directed the coastwatchers, that unique organization of brave and resourceful men who operated inside Japanese-occupied territory to report on enemy movements. I
t was Commander Feldt who had sent MacFarlan south to instruct Clemens and the others in the use of the teleradio and to teach them code. They were not of much use at the moment, but they would be, for the enemy operation obviously preparing in Rabaul would most certainly engulf the Southern Solomons.

  Coastwatchers of the Northern Solomons, and on the tiny islands off-lying Rabaul and her sister base of Kavieng on New Ireland, were already operating. It was they who had reported the Japanese invasion build-up, and their signals describing enemy aerial formations had been invaluable in alerting bases such as Port Moresby to the danger of air raids.

  In choosing his coastwatchers, Feldt had generally selected “islanders”—mostly Australians—who scorned to wear any man’s collar and had found the independence they prized in the untamed islands of Melanesia. They were planters, ship captains, goldminers, or unmitigated scamps, with here and there a black-birder or slave-trader. They drank very, very hard, loved widely and freely, looked down upon the natives with a protective paternalism—and spoke a language which, bristling with “bleddy” this and “baaastid” that, was unprintable in the extreme, especially when it relied upon a famous four-letter word which was used to modify everything except the sexual act that it described. Missionaries were always shocked to discover that the pidgin English they were expected to use was studded with these words. Ashes, for example, were described as “shit-belong-fire” and an enemy bombing raid reported as, “Japan he shit along sky.”

  However their shortcomings, the islanders were intensely loyal. They could be relied upon to hate the Japanese with the fine and fruitful ferocity of the free man who has his back to the wall. Because of this, they were chosen by Feldt; and it was a wise choice.

  By the end of March a coastwatching chain extending from New Ireland down to San Cristoval at the southern end of the Solomons was complete. The men in the perilous northern stations, absolutely dependent upon the fidelity of their native scouts—none of whom would ever betray them—skillfully eluded Japanese patrols while continuing to feed precious information into the Allied Intelligence network functioning in Australia under the command of General MacArthur.