Challenge for the Pacific

pilots and crews, had been lost. After Santa Cruz, Japan’s carrier-based aircraft would no longer be a factor at Guadalcanal. Perhaps Emperor Hirohito, again more prescient than his admirals, was aware of the strategic loss; for the Imperial Rescript issued to celebrate the victory was the very model of a cautious vaunt.

“The Combined Fleet is at present striking heavy blows at the enemy Fleet in the South Pacific Ocean,” Hirohito said. “We are deeply gratified. I charge each of you to exert yourselves to the utmost in all things toward the critical turning point in the war.”

Even as the Rescript was announced to the people of Japan, on Guadalcanal itself the men of the Emperor’s own division were passing through an ordeal duplicating the travail of the Kawaguchi Brigade before them. Retreating east and west, the Sendai also clawed at trees for bark, or drank from muddy puddles, or gnawed their rifle slings.

Behind them, Colonel Masajiro Furumiya had decided that suicide was the only resort. He and Captain Suzuki had not been able to escape on the night of October 26–27. American fire had forced them back to their hideout. They were alone, for the others had been killed. Weak with hunger, Furumiya and Suzuki had barely enough strength to tear the 29th Infantry’s colors into bits of bright red and white silk and to grind them into the mud. Then Colonel Furumiya wrote a letter which Suzuki was to deliver to General Maruyama, if he survived.

“I do not know what excuse to give.…

“I am sorry I have lost many troops uselessly and for this result which has come unexpectedly. We must not overlook firepower. When there is firepower the troops become active and full of spirit. But when firepower ceases they become inactive.

“Spirit exists eternally.

“I am going to return my borrowed life today with short interest.”³

Colonel Furumiya paused. He wrote his last line: “The mission of a Japanese warrior is to serve his Emperor!”⁴

Masajiro Furumiya tottered to his feet. He straightened. He bowed profoundly in the direction of the Emperor, and the captain put the pistol to the colonel’s head and pulled the trigger.

PART FIVE Crux

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

FOR NEARLY three months, now, both sides had been frustrated in a war of blacks and whites: black for the nights in which the Japanese attacked, landed troops and supplies or shelled the enemy; white for the day in which the Americans attacked, landed troops and supplies or flew off airplanes to intercept bombing raids preparing the way for the enemy’s movement at night.

But now, now it was November—the crucial month, the fourth month of battle—and both sides entered it with redoubling arms and confidence in ultimate victory.

In Tokyo, Imperial General Headquarters prescribed, for the third time, a massive co-ordinated assault by the Army and Navy. Tactically, there would be a difference. Surprise night attacks were to be abandoned in favor of steady driving operations launched from the Japanese platform west of the Matanikau.

The remnant of the Sendai Division was to assemble on that platform while awaiting the arrival of the 38th Division, and, later, the 51st Division then in China, and a mixed brigade, also in the Far East. Once the Sendai had recovered from its mauling at the hands of the Americans, and all of these units were in place, the offensive would be renewed.

Despite three bloody and unmitigated defeats, the Army betrayed no doubts about its ability to recover Guadalcanal, and with it, the Japanese offensive in the Pacific. The Army felt this way because it continued to believe Navy reports of smashing victories at sea, particularly the last exaggeration: two American carriers and three battleships sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

Many admirals were not nearly so sanguine. They were not because they knew the truth of their own frightful losses in both carrier and land-based air, and because they appreciated, better than the generals, the terrible risks involved in putting men and supplies ashore in the face of enemy land-based air.

Some admirals, among them Gunichi Mikawa and Raizo Tanaka, argued against reinforcing while Henderson Field remained operative. They wished to suspend operations until Rabaul could be expanded as a rear base and a forward base near Buin could be established. Then, with Henderson Field truly knocked out, then and only then, they would renew the attack.¹

Tokyo could not agree. Reinforcement was to commence immediately, in the customary way: nightly runs of the Tokyo Express preceded by daylight bombing of Henderson Field and accompanied by night surface bombardment so furious as to make The Night of the Battleships seem, in comparison, a veritable rosy dawn. Already, at his base in Truk, Admiral Yamamoto was at work on a plan drawing heavily from his formidable array of battleships.

Reinforcement was also an American concern, but as much, if not more, with aerial as with ground strength. Land-based air, the Americans knew, with all respect and admiration for General Vandegrift’s skill and the doggedness of his doughty troops, was holding Guadalcanal. Accordingly, aircraft and pilots were being gathered to replenish a Cactus Air Force which, on October 26, the day of Santa Cruz, was down to twenty-nine combat planes.

On October 19, five days before President Roosevelt had ordered the Joint Chiefs to rush all available weapons to Guadalcanal, General Marshall had alerted the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division under the command of Major General J. Lawton Collins for movement from Hawaii to the South Pacific. Moreover, Admiral Halsey had canceled the Ndeni operation which Richmond Kelly Turner had found so attractive, and which Alexander Archer Vandegrift had considered so inimical, and he had ordered the 147th Infantry Regiment, the Eighth Marine Regiment, the Second Marine Raider Battalion, long-range artillery, and a battalion of Seabees forward to Guadalcanal.

However, American reinforcement had encountered two setbacks: one, the sinking of President Coolidge with an Army regiment’s equipment, and, two, Kelly Turner’s penchant for playing general. Balked on Ndeni, Turner, a persuasive man, convinced Admiral Halsey that another airfield should be constructed at Aola Bay, about fifty miles to the east of Lunga Point. Turner approached Halsey aware that Vandegrift’s engineers, and Martin Clemens, who had lived at Aola, considered the area impossible as an airfield site. Turner also made his proposal without Vandegrift’s knowledge or acquiescence, and so, a battalion of the 147th Infantry, half of the Raiders, all of the Seabees, artillery from the Americal Division, as well as Marine coastal and antiaircraft guns, were to go into Aola rather than into Vandegrift’s perimeter.

Vandegrift protested, and though his arguments would ultimately move Halsey to withdraw the Aola expedition, they did not prevent the immediate loss of men and guns upon which the general had been relying. To lose the Seabees was an especially stiff jolt, for all of their skills and heavy equipment were very badly needed at Henderson Field; while long-range artillery could have been turned against Pistol Pete, again shelling the runways, and the Raiders and another battalion of infantry would naturally make the ground defenses that much stronger.

After the defeat of the Sendai, Vandegrift had about 23,000 Marines and 3000 soldiers in his command. But of these, 4000 Marines were with Rupertus on Tulagi, and the others—particularly the men who had landed on August 7—were very close to exhaustion.

They were shadow troops. Three months of uninterrupted ordeal such as no American troops had ever sustained, before or since, such as few soldiers in history have experienced, had made them walking skeletons of parchment flesh and quivering nerve. They were the young ancients, the old-young, staring with a fixed thousand- yard stare out of eyes that were red-rimmed and sunken. Their bodies were taut rags of flesh stretched over sticks