Challenge for the Pacific

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.

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 materiel 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