Chapter Seven

IN THE THREE-DAY STRUGGLE KNOWN TO HISTORY AS THE “Naval Battle of Guadalcanal,” the Japanese navy had been soundly defeated and driven back up the Slot. But Admiral Tanaka’s beleaguered “Tokyo Express,” relying on fast destroyers darting into Ironbottom Sound under cover of darkness, had achieved the signal feat of putting more than a division of fresh troops ashore on the island. Added to the remnants of the Kawaguchi Corps, Japanese troop strength on Guadalcanal reached approximately 30,000 in mid-November. The Imperial General Headquarters had not anticipated that so many “sons of heaven” could fail to overrun the American position, but every successive assault on Vandegrift’s lines had been bloodily repulsed. Now the immediate problem was logistics. It was becoming terribly clear that the Imperial Japanese Navy, having strained its capabilities to put so many troops ashore, had no practical means of feeding so many mouths. Even as early as September, Japanese units on the island had begun to waste away for lack of provisions, medicine, and other supplies. By the first week of December, they were succumbing en masse to plague and famine. Guadalcanal, for its Japanese inhabitants, had become “Starvation Island.”^*

Newcomers who came ashore at Tassafaronga Point were taken aback. Wraithlike soldiers approached and begged for food. Their uniforms, little more than rags, hung from emaciated limbs; their hair had grown long and crawled with lice; their skin was dirty and pocked with open sores that were fed on by flies.¹ Many had thrown away their rifles because they either felt too weak to carry them or had no ammunition.

But the Japanese stationed along the coast were among the most prosperous on the island. There they could fish or forage for coconuts or plunder the meager supplies of rice brought ashore from the destroyers. Units posted deeper in the jungle had been reduced to eating lizards, snakes, worms, roots, grass, and insects. Trails into the hills were littered with the bodies of dead or dying men. Those immobilized by malaria, dengue fever, or beriberi were often abandoned to die where they lay. As one officer observed, food was the overriding obsession of starving men: “All senses, except hunger, went out. No laugh, no anger, no tear.”²

Japanese soldiers’ diaries, captured during and after the Guadalcanal campaign, told a pathetic story of deteriorating morale and wasted hopes. The malnourished soldiers were repeatedly exhorted to stir themselves to greater efforts: “We must by the most furious, daring, swift and positive action deal the enemy annihilating blows, [and] foil his plans completely. . . . It is necessary to arouse the officers and men to a fighting rage.”³ But the officers made too many promises they could not keep. A fleet of Japanese transports, laden with food and other supplies, was always just over the western horizon; Japanese warplanes would soon darken the sky; one more banzai charge would cause the cowardly marines to throw away their weapons and run for their lives. But for days or even weeks at a time, no Japanese aircraft appeared overhead and no Japanese ships were seen offshore. “Every day enemy planes alone dance in the sky, fly low, strafe, bomb, and numerous officers and men fall,” noted a diarist on December 23. Three days later, he added, “O friendly planes! I beg that you come over soon, and cheer us up!”⁴

Discipline collapsed. Soldiers bickered over their paltry rations. Food was stolen and hoarded. Enlisted men accused their officers of diverting extra portions to themselves. They refused to work, fight, or march unless fed. From the summit of Mount Austen, where a detachment of about 450 Japanese troops kept watch over Henderson Field, the lookouts watched miserably as American cargo ships anchored off Lunga Point and delivered a seemingly limitless quantity of supplies, weapons, and fresh troops into the American lines. A sub-lieutenant posted at the top of Austen devised a mortality table to predict each starving soldier’s remaining life span:

Those who can stand upright: 30 days.

Those who can sit: 3 weeks.

Those always lying down: 1 week.

Those who pass urine lying: 3 days.

Those who cannot speak: 2 days.

Those who cannot wink: On the morrow.⁵

On December 8, the Seventeenth Army headquarters on Guadalcanal reported that only 4,200 troops (about 15 percent of the total on the island) were strong and healthy enough to fight. Combat deaths were running at forty to fifty per day, mainly as a result of air attacks, but some three times that number were succumbing to disease or starvation.⁶

Tanaka’s mid-November resupply effort had been a debacle. He had lost eleven valuable transports in three days. From the four ships he had sacrificed by running them aground on the beaches, he had disembarked just 2,000 troops, 360 cases of ammunition for field guns, and 1,500 bales of rice.⁷ By consuming so many scarce cargo ships, the fight for Guadalcanal threatened to cripple the entire Japanese war economy, which could not function without raw materials imported into the home islands.

A new supply tactic was urgently needed. Tanaka’s hard-run destroyers would again be deployed as transports, this time using the “drum method.” Empty fuel drums were sterilized and filled with ammunition and provisions. The drums, linked together by ropes, were secured to the outboard railings of the destroyers. A column of destroyers would approach the island at high speed and cast away the drums, which would be retrieved by small craft (or even swimmers) and towed or hauled ashore. All supply drops would be attempted at night, as Tanaka dared not expose his ships to air attack.

The first run was attempted on November 30, 1942. Shortly after ten that evening, a single column of eight destroyers roared into Ironbottom Sound at nearly 30 knots. Admiral Tanaka knew that his ships had been spotted from the air, but hoped to launch the drums and withdraw up the Slot before daybreak. The weather was fair, with a gentle breeze and good visibility at the surface. Six of the eight ships were loaded with between 200 and 240 supply drums each. To offset the added weight topside, those six ships had sailed with only eight torpedoes (one per tube) and half their usual supply of main battery ammunition.⁸

American search flights had tracked Tanaka’s movements carefully. He had staged through Rabaul and the Buin and Shortland harbors, where a large increase in shipping during the last week of the month had clearly signaled another supply run. To counter it, Halsey dispatched Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright with a cruiser-destroyer force (Task Force 67) from Espiritu Santo. Wright passed through Lengo Channel at 9:45 p.m. and arrived in the waters north of Tassafaronga Point just as Tanaka closed from the north.

At 11:06 p.m., SG radar on the flagship cruiser Minneapolis discovered two ships at a distance of 23,000 yards. The blips gradually resolved into seven or eight ships on a southeasterly course. At about the same time, Japanese lookouts noted flares dropped from cruiser planes overhead, and obtained a visual fix on “what appear to be enemy ships, bearing 100°.”⁹ Without waiting for Tanaka’s order, the lead destroyer Takanami launched torpedoes and opened fire.

The Americans had brought superior firepower into the action—five cruisers and six destroyers matched against Tanaka’s eight destroyers, six of which were short of munitions and heavily loaded with supplies. But Wright was slow to give the order to open fire, and the delay mattered. The American torpedoes were fired at an awkward angle, and none struck home. Their 8- and 5-inch projectiles were better aimed, but they were concentrated on the lead ship Takanami, which was quickly set ablaze all along her length and began going down by the head. Takanami’s sacrifice effectively decided the action in favor of the Japanese, because she absorbed all the American gunners had to offer while her explosions and fires screened her seven sisters. No other Japanese ship suffered a direct hit in the battle, or even a destructive near miss.¹⁰

Tanaka ordered a hard port turn to take his column on a course parallel to that of Wright’s. As they rotated their broadsides toward the enemy, the undamaged Japanese destroyers launched their deadly spreads. The Long Lance torpedoes ran true. Beginning at about 11:27, as the warheads connected with their targets, the big cruisers at the heart of Wright’s column lurched upward and erupted in flames. The Minneapolis took two crippling blows on her port side. The first tore off the ship’s bow and ignited gasoline storage tanks; the second struck amidships and flooded her engineering spaces. Less than a minute later, the New Orleans was hit on her port bow. The explosion detonated her magazines, tore off a large section of her bow, and killed the entire crew of turret 2.¹¹ The Pensacola’s fuel tanks were ignited by a torpedo hit; she would burn through the night. The venerable Northampton, the last cruiser in Wright’s column, gave chase to the retreating Japanese ships and sent several 8-inch salvos after them. For that she was rewarded with two devastating torpedo hits that put an end to her. She was abandoned and sank early the next morning.

Not for the first time, the U.S. Navy had suffered a dreadful beating in a night torpedo action. In fifteen minutes, and at a cost of one destroyer, Tanaka had sent one heavy cruiser into the abyss and critically damaged three more. The naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, a free-handed critic but a miser with praise, rated Tanaka’s performance “superb.”¹² Admiral Nimitz ruefully observed that “we are made painfully aware of the Japanese skill, both in night and day action, in the use of guns and torpedoes. To date there has been no reason to doubt his energy, persistence, and courage.”¹³

Wright estimated that his force had sunk four Japanese destroyers and damaged two more. That rosy claim was viewed with suspicion even by the crews of his own ships, especially when dawn revealed no sign of enemy wreckage. If there was anything to console the Americans, it was the exceptional valor and skill of the damage-control parties that saved the Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Pensacola. The action had left the three cruisers ablaze and in near-sinking condition, but all somehow managed to quell the fires and hobble into Tulagi Harbor, and all would be returned to service later in the war.

Tanaka chose to withdraw to Shortland without attempting the supply drop. His reasons were sensible enough—his destroyers had expended all torpedoes, and he could expect attack from the air if he did not get well away to the west before morning. But the decision exacerbated the privations of the army on Guadalcanal, and apparently angered his superiors at Rabaul and Truk. He must try again, without delay. On the night of December 3, ten destroyers managed to drop 1,500 supply drums off Cape Esperance. But only a fraction, perhaps one-fifth of the drums, reached the Japanese army. The units assigned to recover them had been undermanned and physically exhausted. The following morning, American fighters flying from Henderson Field strafed and destroyed several hundred drums found drifting in Ironbottom Sound. Tanaka tried another run on December 7, but his ships were harried by bombers and fighters, then attacked and driven away by six PT boats west of Savo Island.¹⁴

Even in their anchorage at Shortland, the Japanese could not rest. B-17s and fighters raided the area every day. On December 10, two fuel tankers were struck and set afire, with heavy damage. Tanaka sortied with nine destroyers the following afternoon and managed to drop 1,200 supply drums. American PT boats swarmed out of Tulagi Harbor and launched torpedoes, one of which struck Tanaka’s flagship, the recently commissioned Teruzuki. “The ship caught fire and became unnavigable almost at once,” he wrote. “Leaking fuel was set ablaze, turning the sea into a mass of flames. When fire reached the after powder magazine there was a huge explosion, and the ship began to sink.”¹⁵ She was scuttled at 4:00 the next morning; more than half her crew went down with her. The eight surviving destroyers withdrew to Shortland. Tanaka, injured in the action and confined to a hospital at Buin, was disgusted to learn that only 220 of the 1,200 drums launched that night had been recovered by the army.

With the moon waxing, the PT boat attacks were growing more deadly every night, and Admiral Mikawa ordered a temporary halt to the supply runs. Tanaka privately advised him that the game was up—Guadalcanal must be abandoned. For his trouble, Tanaka received orders transferring him to an administrative post in Singapore. This talented officer, who had done his best to supply Guadalcanal with the limited tools at hand, and who had scored a mighty naval victory less than a month earlier, would never command at sea again.

Talk of pulling out of Guadalcanal was strictly taboo. The Japanese army, even more than the navy, had staked its honor and reputation on the recapture of Henderson Field. Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, recently arrived at Rabaul to assume command of Eighth Area Army, intended to summon the Sixth and Fifty-First Divisions from China and put them ashore on Guadalcanal by the end of the year.¹⁶ Senior naval commanders thought the plan absurd but were reluctant to say so. Even if 50,000 more troops could somehow be transported to the island, an unlikely prospect in light of November’s events, how could they be supported? If 30,000 men currently on the island were starving, how could 80,000 be fed?

In the privacy of his diary, Admiral Ugaki contemplated the inevitable. The interservice politics were extremely delicate, and considerations of “face” would certainly come into play. But it would not do to persist in a futile campaign for the sake of maintaining cordial relations between the army and the navy. On December 7, he wrote, “Deeming wrong as wrong and impossible as impossible, and without being obstinate because of face-savings or without coaxing others, we should deal with this important matter with the utmost frankness.” The army would have to arrive at the conclusion independently—“it is essential to let them realize its inevitability by themselves.”¹⁷ At any event, the question was out of his hands. Such a momentous change in policy could be decided only by the high command in Tokyo.

IN JAPAN AND OTHER POINTS WEST of the International Date Line, the eighth day of December marked the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The date was feted with the usual self-congratulatory bunkum. The Imperial Navy headquarters released a grossly inflated tally of enemy ships sunk in the first year of the “Greater East Asia War”: eleven aircraft carriers, eleven battleships, forty-six cruisers, forty-eight destroyers, and ninety-three submarines. (More accurately, it also reported a cumulative total of Japanese officers and sailors killed in action: 14,802.)¹⁸

Newspapers and magazines published annual retrospectives highlighting the notable victories achieved by Japanese forces. Kokusai Shashin Joho, the International Graphic Magazine, published gun camera photos depicting burning enemy ships and aircraft.¹⁹ In a speech carried over the airwaves, Foreign Minister Masayuki Tani declared that American leaders “are truly running their nation in a laughable manner. They may be high in producing capacity, but without the more essential qualities, such as lofty war ideals, America cannot win over us.”²⁰

Japanese servicemen returning from the South Pacific were confounded by the elation they found at home. No one in Tokyo seemed to grasp how precarious Japan’s position had become. There might be some compelling purpose in firing up the spirits of the public, but the boundaries dividing fact and fantasy were blurred even in the inner councils of power. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, in a December 8 speech to military leaders at the War Ministry, declared that the Allies “want obstinately to continue their counterattack, but making use of our great material resources, we are ready to annihilate them at any moment at any point on the globe.”²¹ That very week, as Tojo undoubtedly knew, the Imperial General Staff had begun a joint army-navy strategic review with an eye toward cutting losses and pulling out of Guadalcanal. In Truk, Admiral Ugaki judged that a visiting delegation of army staff officers “didn’t seem to have enough knowledge of the fervent fighting spirit of the American forces. Neither did they show much interest in comparative strength, theirs and ours.”²² Captain Tameichi Hara, who had returned to Japan for repairs to his ship, dined with a group of naval staff officers in mid-December. “I don’t know how you who are stationed here view things from the homeland, but it is hell at the front,” he told them. “As professionals you all know better than to base your judgments on the official bravado announced by headquarters in Tokyo. We have had some tactical victories, but we are suffering a strategic defeat.”²³ The mood grew tense, and one of the others told Hara that it was a social occasion and he ought to lighten up.

In mid-December, Colonel Joichiro Sanada of the Imperial Headquarters staff was dispatched on a fact-finding mission to the South Pacific. At Truk and Rabaul, he solicited and recorded the views of senior officers of both the army and the navy. Even accounting for what is lost in translation, one is struck by the temporizing, evasive, and subtext-laden character of the answers given. More than one officer remarked that recapturing the island “is difficult.” Several kicked responsibility up to the “ultimate authorities.” All were preoccupied with army-navy sensitivities. The army called for more ships; the navy called for more army airpower. Neither was willing to be the first to advocate giving up Guadalcanal, but neither was keen to commit its strength to a renewed offensive. “If the army can undertake it with confidence,” said a senior member of Yamamoto’s staff, in a typical reply, “the navy will pitch in, too.” General Imamura, who had recently spoken of landing two fresh divisions on Guadalcanal, offered Sanada this master stroke of equivocation: “At present, we are searching for a plan to lead us out of the difficulty, but we alone cannot say that the operational policy be changed. I hope that the central authorities will make a decision from the overall viewpoint after deliberating on the relationship with the navy.”²⁴

In conferences at the Imperial General Headquarters, it was customary for officers of the two services to sit on opposite sides of the table, an arrangement that could only dramatize the rift between them. Recriminations proceeded until all arguments were exhausted. The army blamed the navy for failing to maintain adequate supply lines. The navy criticized the ground tactics employed on Guadalcanal, and demanded more army air support. General Kenryo Sato recalled “heated discussions exchanging clenched fists over the table between the army and navy.”²⁵ Neither side could afford an impasse, however, and not only because both services were suffering ruinous losses in the Solomons. The emperor had lost patience with the sniping between his two military branches and had issued stern warnings against disharmony. The generals and admirals had no choice but to grapple toward some sort of face-saving consensus. Gradually it became clear that everyone was looking for a way out of Guadalcanal. As one conference followed another, and the regime stumbled toward a new accord, about 200 Japanese soldiers on the island perished each day.

Colonel Sanada reported to Tojo upon his return to the capital on December 29. His formal recommendation, couched in terms only slightly less paralytic than those he had heard in Rabaul and Truk, was that “it is not advisable to hurry the recapture of Guadalcanal Island.”²⁶ He had expected a furious rebuke, but was relieved to learn that Tojo had apparently reached the same conclusion. Sanada’s report and recommendation were “adopted much more readily than I had feared.”²⁷

According to Ugaki, an “understanding” had been reached between the services on December 16, 1942, but another two weeks passed before the issue was put to the emperor. At a conference at the Imperial Palace on the last day of the year, the high command offered a unanimous recommendation that Guadalcanal be abandoned. The navy would attempt to evacuate as many of the surviving army troops as possible. The emperor was displeased, and he questioned Admiral Nagano closely concerning the laggardly pace of new airfield construction in the South Pacific.²⁸ Hirohito gave his approval to the recommendation, as he always did when his advisers were unanimous, but added that it was “unacceptable” to pull out of Guadalcanal without simultaneously mounting a new offensive in New Guinea.²⁹ Japan’s forces must not be seen to shift to a merely defensive posture. Some days later, the man-god conveyed an imperial message to the high command, transmitted through his chief aide-de-camp: “The evacuation from Guadalcanal Island was regrettable. Further cooperation between the Army and Navy is requested hereafter for the attainment of operational objectives.”³⁰

Disguised though it was, the new policy called for a retreat to a new defensive line running north and south through the central Solomons. The army would fortify and garrison islands north of New Georgia and Santa Isabel. The navy would accelerate work on the new airstrip at Munda on New Georgia, making it the region’s principal forward fighter base. As for the remnants of the army on Guadalcanal, the navy would continue supply runs, but these would be little more than missions of mercy—there would be no further offensives against the American lines. Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi, with ten cruisers under his command, made supply drops on January 2 and January 10, 1943. As in the prior month, provisions were crammed into fuel drums that were dropped into the sea off Tassafaronga Point.³¹ More than half of these drums were apparently recovered, providing life-saving relief to the Japanese forces on the island, whose number had diminished to fewer than 15,000.

“Operation KE” was the name given to the evacuation and the covering operations that disguised it. On January 14, a fresh infantry and artillery battalion (the “Yano Battalion”) was landed on the island to act as a rear guard. Naval and air forces moved down the Solomons in strength. These were discovered (as the Japanese knew they would be) by Allied air reconnaissance. Daylight and nighttime air attacks against Henderson Field rose sharply. Radio traffic analysis misled American intelligence to believe that the Japanese were mounting another naval offensive and troop landing, and the American commanders reacted accordingly. Major General Alexander Patch of the army (who had relieved General Vandegrift as commander of American ground forces on the island on December 7) had some 50,000 army and marine troops under his command. Patch began to press into the hills south of the village of Kokumbona, the Seventeenth Army headquarters on the island’s north coast. The Americans found Japanese resistance surprisingly light, and elements of the 25th Infantry Division walked into the village unopposed on January 23. The Japanese were evidently withdrawing in a hurry to the west, but Patch did not commit to a pursuit in force, as he still believed another large-scale amphibious landing was at hand. Halsey deployed his remaining cruisers and carrier task forces to the waters in and west of Ironbottom Sound. On January 30, Japanese air attacks destroyed the cruiser Chicago.

On February 1, as the Japanese evacuation runs began, the Americans received a cascade of sighting reports from coastwatchers and scouting aircraft. Some twenty Japanese destroyers were headed down the Slot. A small Japanese infantry force had been put ashore in the Russell Islands, a small group just thirty miles west of Guadalcanal (and visible from the high bluffs on the western shore, where the colorful Australian coastwatcher Snowy Rhoades had once lived in his airy lodge). Allied flights over the Japanese anchorage off Buin noted a sharp increase in the number of ships. Japanese air activity intensified to levels unseen since December. Halsey asked MacArthur for “all air support possible against an expected major offensive following the same general pattern as that of mid-November.”³² The COMSOPAC sent most of his remaining American naval forces south of Guadalcanal to await the expected incursion.

Given the wasted condition of their forces, the withdrawal of Japanese units to the northwest corner of the island was surprisingly deft. The evacuation order was disseminated at first only to a small circle of officers, who kept their men in the dark. Most Japanese soldiers expected to be reinforced right up until the moment they were told to abandon their positions. (The misdirection was thought necessary to keep the men at their posts until the last minute.) The Thirty-Eighth Division fell back toward Cape Esperance, covered by the Second Infantry Division and the Yano Battalion. The rear guard, once safely disengaged, followed to the west. Men immobilized by disease or malnutrition were persuaded to take their own lives.

The first evacuation run was completed on the night of February 1. Twenty-one Japanese destroyers, under the command of Rear Admiral Shintaro Hashimoto, lifted 4,935 soldiers off the island, nearly half those remaining. On the night of February 4–5, Hashimoto returned with twenty destroyers. Fighting off air and PT boat attacks, he nonetheless embarked 3,921 troops of the Second Division and returned them safely to Bougainville the next day. The third run, on the night of February 7–8, lifted 1,796 men off Guadalcanal and the Russell Islands.

The bodies of some 16,800 Japanese were left behind on Guadalcanal, many unburied. Those who were rescued were little more than scarecrows. Their knees and elbows bulged out from their shrunken limbs. Their hair and fingernails had stopped growing. Their buttocks had wasted away to the extent that their anuses were exposed, and they suffered uncontrollable diarrhea. Some carried urns with the ashes of their dead comrades.³³ Yahachi Ishida, a young soldier posted on Bougainville, helped some of the starving men from the landing barges:

Waiting at the shore, we gently lifted out the soldiers retreating from Guadalcanal one by one and laid them on the sand. What a sad and pitiable sight they presented. Hardly human beings, they were just skin and bones dressed in military uniform, thin as bamboo sticks. They were so light, it was like carrying infants. Only their eyes were bright; they must have been living on their strong will alone. When I put a spoon with some lukewarm rice gruel to their mouths, large teardrops rolled down their faces, and they said thank you in tiny mosquitolike voices. I too felt something hot unexpectedly welling up in my eyes. My blood roiled with anger at those who had given the orders to these men.³⁴

Patch held back, expecting to meet resistance in force at any moment. The general and his staff continued to believe that the enemy had been landing fresh reinforcements throughout the past week. As American forces advanced along the north and west coasts of the island, however, they encountered no one but a few Japanese stragglers, mostly sick and dying, and some bewildered natives. At Tassafaronga, the Americans captured the deserted remains of a major Japanese base, including ten artillery pieces, a machine shop, medical stores, and a radio station. In the late afternoon of February 9, the two columns met at the village of Tenaro on the west coast. Patch finally realized that he had been swindled. He radioed Halsey: “Total and complete defeat of Japanese forces on Guadalcanal effected 16:25 today . . . the Tokyo Express no longer has a terminus on Guadalcanal.”³⁵

The Guadalcanal campaign was over, and it had ended in a humiliating defeat for the Japanese. Yet at least they had saved 10,652 men of the approximately 36,000 who had landed on the island. The evacuation was a small Dunkirk, an unlikely tactical getaway right under the noses of superior ground, air, and naval forces. The Japanese had accomplished the bold rescue operation with the loss of just one destroyer sunk and three damaged. American radio intelligence, which had so often divined the enemy’s intentions, had failed to foresee the evacuation. Admiral Yamamoto congratulated Koyanagi, adding, “You did it very well, indeed. . . . The Army will be pleased to know we can send back its soldiers in great mass.”³⁶

Yamamoto’s opposite number, Chester Nimitz, was equally generous in his praise. “Until almost the last moment it appeared that the Japanese were attempting a major reinforcement effort,” he wrote in his report to Admiral King. “Only skill in keeping their plans disguised and bold celerity in carrying them out enabled the Japanese to withdraw the remnants of the Guadalcanal garrison. Not until after all organized forces had been evacuated on 8 February did we realize the purpose of their air and naval dispositions; otherwise, with the strong forces available to us ashore on Guadalcanal and our powerful fleet in the South Pacific, we might have converted the withdrawal into a disastrous rout.”³⁷

King could not have faulted Nimitz or Halsey or any of the other American commanders on the spot. He had expected another major offensive against Guadalcanal, and had predicted it in an off-the-record interview with a group of journalists on December 2, 1942. The COMINCH had told the newsmen that the Japanese “had lost a lot of face, and were set on regaining [Guadalcanal] by hook or by crook.”³⁸

IN THE SIX-MONTH FIGHT OVER GUADALCANAL, the two sides had suffered roughly equivalent naval and air losses. Sixty-seven ships had been sunk in the contest over the island—twenty-nine Allied, thirty-eight Japanese. The Japanese had destroyed two valuable American aircraft carriers and damaged another (leaving the Enterprise the sole remaining Allied carrier in the theater), but the Americans had claimed two light aircraft carriers and two battleships. Both sides had lost many cruisers, destroyers, and noncombatant transports and cargo ships that could not be easily replaced. On several occasions, the Japanese navy had given proof of its excellence in night surface combat, but its advantages had gradually given way to the Americans’ adroit use of radar for range finding and fire control. By the fall of 1942, an American ship could land its first salvo on an unseen enemy without the benefit of searchlights or flares. That was a valuable technical advantage over the Japanese, and it largely offset the superior skill, training, and torpedo weaponry of the Japanese surface fleet.

Each side lost between 600 and 700 aircraft in the campaign, but the fraction of downed aviators who were recovered told a different story. The Allies lost about 420 pilots and aircrew in the Solomons; the Japanese, more than three times that number. Since the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, Japanese aircrew losses had consistently exceeded those of the Allies, often by a wide margin. The stark disparity could be partly explained by circumstances—throughout the period, but especially during the fight for Guadalcanal, air combat had been concentrated in skies closer to Allied than to Japanese air and naval bases. It is also true that the Japanese had not devoted much effort to search-and-rescue operations, a failure that must be attributed (at least in part) to the influence of bushido, the traditional samurai warrior code that exalted an honorable death in combat.

Replacement pilots emerging from Japan’s wartime training pipeline lacked the skill or confidence to carry on the air war effectively. As early as November 21, 1942, Admiral Yamamoto confessed to a visiting army officer that Japan was losing the air war in the Solomons. “In the Navy they used to say that one ‘Zero’ fighter could take on five to ten American aircraft, but that was at the beginning of the war. Since losing so many good pilots at Midway we’ve had difficulty in replacing them. Even now, they still say that one ‘Zero’ can take on two enemy planes, but the enemy’s replacement rate is three times ours; the gap between our strengths is increasing every day, and to be honest things are looking black for us now.”³⁹ Blacker even than he knew or cared to admit, for the American fighter pilots had already learned how to neutralize the Zero’s advantages in maneuverability and climbing speed.

Most striking was the disproportion in troop losses. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps had suffered casualties of 5,875, of whom 1,592 were killed in action. The Japanese army had lost two full divisions on the island, and the great majority were killed (or died of other causes) rather than wounded and evacuated—14,700 killed or missing in action, an estimated 9,000 dead of starvation or disease, and more than 4,300 lost at sea while in transit to or from the island. That asymmetric result debunked the myth of the Japanese army’s fanatical and invincible “fighting spirit.” Guadalcanal was not the name of an island, concluded General Kawaguchi. “It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese army.”⁴⁰

Insofar as the Japanese people were permitted to know, the withdrawal from Guadalcanal was a tactical redeployment. Tenshin, roughly translated as “advance in a new direction,” was the euphemism offered by the Imperial General Headquarters. Japan’s attacking naval, air, and ground forces had merely “turned” toward another sector of the front, where they would undoubtedly achieve new triumphs in short order. Japan’s state-controlled news media had long since acquiesced to the regime’s Orwellian abuse of truth, and had adopted the necessary tone of elation and righteous zeal. But there were many servicemen who had returned to the home islands from the theater of combat, and their hushed accounts did not sustain the official version of events.

Several Japanese officers who survived the war later recorded their unvarnished postmortems. Even with the benefit of hindsight, and allowing for the likelihood that English-translated accounts were self-serving and shaped to fit the preconceptions of the victors, Japanese officers who had participated in the campaign offered keen and hard-hitting critiques of their nation’s strategic failures. Captain Hara judged that the Japanese navy really lost the war as a result of a “series of strategic and tactical blunders by Yamamoto after Midway.” The commander in chief had failed to commit the bulk of his naval power immediately after the marines’ invasion, and had instead “flung into the area one small fleet unit after another. His strategy seems ridiculous when judged by hindsight.”⁴¹ Admiral Nobutake Kondo, commander of the Imperial Navy’s Second Fleet, agreed that Yamamoto should have thrown everything he had at Guadalcanal in August, even if it required abandoning the offensive against southeastern New Guinea. He quoted a Japanese proverb: “He who pursues two hares catches neither.”⁴² The seventeenth-century samurai and philosopher Miyamoto Musashi, whose Book of Five Spheres was an essential text for Japanese officers of both services, had written of “arresting shadows.” To hold a psychological edge over a weaker opponent, a combatant must “arrest the enemy’s action at the point of the very impulse to act.” That is, the enemy must know immediately that his attack will be opposed and foiled; he must not be permitted to think that he will gain the advantage by his initiative: “If you show the adversaries strongly how you control the advantage, they will change their minds, inhibited by this strength.”⁴³

The Guadalcanal campaign had exposed all of the internal rifts and rivalries that divided the Japanese military regime and paralyzed its ability to craft coherent strategies. Major decisions, especially those involving joint action by the army and navy, were reached gradually. Consensus had to be given time to congeal. Considerations of “face” were always near the surface. The Japanese army had first discounted the significance of the enemy’s move into Guadalcanal, assuring themselves and their navy counterparts that the Americans could be dislodged at any time. Piecemeal and ineffective troop landings followed. First, a lightly equipped regiment was sent in and annihilated; then a lightly equipped brigade; eventually a full division, but without adequate munitions, equipment, or provisions. Again and again, frontal attacks on strongly fortified marine lines were beaten back, with devastating losses to the attackers. Even within the ranks of the navy, command rivalries were debilitating. More than once, Admiral Raizo Tanaka received contradictory orders from the Eleventh Air Fleet and the Eighth Fleet. One headquarters had dominion over the entire region, and the other stood directly above Tanaka in the chain of command. Each seemed to regard the other as an interloper, and they tussled over issues large and small. Tanaka thought it “inconceivable” that the two commands did not confer effectively with one another, since both were (usually) seated at Rabaul. “When their orders were conflicting and incompatible, it was embarrassing at least, and utterly confounding at worst.”⁴⁴

Once a course of action was chosen, a prevailing inertia inhibited modification. The rigidity inherent in Japanese operations led to repeating patterns that could be analyzed and predicted by the Allies. Even when communications intelligence failed to discover the Japanese intentions, American commanders could often foretell when, where, and how the enemy would mount his next assault. “In fighting it is bad to repeat a formula,” Musashi had written, “and to repeat it a third time is worse. When an effort fails it may be followed with a second attempt. If that fails, a drastically changed formula must be adopted. If that fails, one must resort to another completely different formula. When the opponent thinks high, hit low. When he thinks low, hit high. That is the secret of swordsmanship.”⁴⁵

GUADALCANAL WORE THE SCARS of the long, vicious conflict that had raged on, over, and around it. The Lunga Plain was pockmarked with craters and strewn with broken and splintered palm trees. Everywhere there was wreckage, shoved to the edges of roads or airstrips or lying half-awash on the beaches. Foliage was beginning to creep over the rusting remains of smashed tanks and crashed aircraft. Copper telephone wire was draped haphazardly over standing palms. West of Point Cruz, the bows of Tanaka’s four bombed-out transports jutted up onto the beach. Even months after the last naval action, Ironbottom Sound was still littered with floating debris, and brown coils of fuel oil marked the sites of sunken wrecks.

On the ridges south of Henderson Field, trees and foliage had been mowed down by artillery and machine-gun fire. Beyond the coils of barbed wire marking the American lines, the bloated and stinking remains of Japanese soldiers lay half-buried in the muck. The stench was awful, but the Americans were in no hurry to bury the enemy dead. The Japanese had been known to booby-trap the corpses of their fallen friends. Ants and other scavengers would eventually strip them to the bone.

Among these relics of past carnage were ambitious new building projects. It has been cleverly observed that the bulldozer was one of the most significant weapons of the Pacific War, and the point was never better showcased than on Guadalcanal in 1943. Ten new 1,100-man Seabee battalions arrived to join the pioneering 6th and 14th (which had landed under fire in November 1942), and all were reorganized into the 18th Naval Construction Regiment. Airfields were expanded, regraded, and resurfaced with concrete made of coral or red volcanic rock. Networks of taxiways connected them to revetments, machine shops, barracks, warehouses, and camouflaged munitions dumps. The hills inland of Koli Point were leveled and developed into “Carney Field,” a new airbase for USAAF bombers. Tank farms mushroomed around Lunga Point and Henderson Field, and were linked by miles of piping to the airfields and wharves. Bulldozers uprooted the trees and flora around Koli, Lunga, and Cruz Points, where modern seaport complexes—concrete piers, cranes, pipelines, narrow-gauge railways running into warehouses—would serve the constantly arriving transports and tankers. Fresh troops, airmen, maintenance crews, and civilians poured into the island day by day, arriving on ships or on the big Douglas C-47s of the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command (SCAT). Paved roads were built through recently impenetrable jungle; steel-framed bridges were flung across rivers; electrical power lines were strung between utility poles; tent cities appeared suddenly in palm groves and kunai fields. The social nexus of the growing community was the “Hotel De Gink,” a row of Quonset huts providing lodging for transient airmen and other visitors. A spacious dining hall served coffee and hot meals around the clock.

As the counteroffensive rolled up the Solomons, the island groups to the south and east—New Caledonia, New Hebrides, the Santa Cruz group, Samoa, the Fijis—were demoted to the status of holding zones, rest areas, and way stations. The war had passed them by, but they remained populated by large and growing numbers of Allied personnel. Pacific War memoirs tend to dwell at length on these tropical paradises, safely removed from the fighting, where young servicemen (and women, particularly nurses) sojourned for weeks, months, or years of their lives. They were the setting for James Michener’s postwar novel Tales of the South Pacific, a thinly fictionalized series of vignettes drawn from the author’s experiences as a reserve naval lieutenant stationed on Espiritu Santo and other islands east of the Solomons.^† Life in those quiescent islands figures very little in histories or even films about the war, but it retains a potent hold on the memories of the men and women who were there.

Visitors who set foot on those remote shores were easily enchanted by the exotic beauty of the region—by the azure lagoons and white beaches; by the brilliantly colored fish, flowers, and birds; by the soft rustle of palm fronds and the metrical thump of the surf. Limes and lemons grew wild along the beaches. Flying fish leapt from the wakes of passing boats. Sunsets were unlike anything they had seen before: a sublime palette of colors ranging from blue to orange to green to red to purple. The stars were wrong, at least in the southern half of the sky. One might find a familiar constellation near the northern horizon, but it would appear upside down. Wartime letters, diaries, and memoirs are full of such observations.

The islands also had a sinister aspect. Observers described dark volcanoes shrouded in steaming mists. Land crabs the size of dinner plates scurried around their tents at night. Fruit bats with four-foot wingspans took flight at sunset. Insects were relentless, and the mosquitoes carried malaria. Americans and other Westerners were alternately fascinated and repelled by the natives—their loincloths and bare breasts, their betel-reddened incisors filed to sharp points, the vaguely intelligible version of English they spoke. Rumors circulated that the tribesmen still practiced headhunting and cannibalism, a prospect both enthralling and hideous. Long pig was the pidgin word for human flesh. Harold Buell recalled that islanders on Espiritu Santo liked to joke about cannibalism. “A favorite native joke was to pinch your arm or stomach and state solemnly: ‘You makeum fine long pig.’ They would then grin broadly showing their front teeth.”⁴⁶ Americans would barter handsomely for a shrunken head, and at least a few of those gruesome souvenirs were smuggled aboard ships and taken back to the United States.

Units left on rear-area islands for weeks or months suffered paralyzing boredom. Poker games went on for days, as they did in every other part of the Pacific. Men played checkers, backgammon, and cribbage, and read months-old magazines, comic books, and newspapers. Bloody “grudge matches” were fought between feuding soldiers or sailors of rival ships, with wagers placed on the outcome. Everyone lived for mail, which arrived more regularly as the war progressed; reading letters, however, only took up a fraction of their time, and wartime censorship limited what they could write. Movies were screened each night in makeshift outdoor amphitheaters, with the men sitting on the ground or on coconut logs, but because new reels were scarce, the men were often condemned to watch the same film twenty or more times. They often recited the dialogue mechanically, in unison with the actors. Eventually, on the better-developed islands, the Seabees built tennis courts, horseshoe pits, and baseball diamonds. USO tours stopped at the larger islands, and the shows got bigger and more lavish in the final two years of the war. The smaller islands were lucky to receive any entertainment at all. Marine Private John Vollinger, who spent eight months on a lesser island in the Samoa group, saw “only one U.S.O. show consisting of two old vaudeville guys that told dirty jokes while juggling. Back in the States they would have been booted off the stage, but we wanted entertainment in any form.” ⁴⁷

Heavy drinking was a time-honored outlet. Every island had an officers’ club, though on smaller islands it might amount to a wooden table covered by a thatched roof. Admiral Aaron Stanton Merrill liked to say that “if we could find a palm tree and a bottle we’d set up an officer’s club.”⁴⁸ Enlisted men had to work harder to procure a supply. Throughout the Pacific, one could find an illicit trade in “torpedo juice,” the high-proof fuel used in torpedoes. Beer was usually rationed at two cans a week. When a larger quantity of beer was obtained by backhanded means, it could be chilled by taking it to high altitude for thirty minutes. Pilots would provide that service in exchange for a share of the spoils. Whiskey was more scarce and expensive, but there was a price for everything on the black market.

“War everywhere is monotonous in its dreadfulness,” wrote the newsman Ernie Pyle, when he toured the theater later in the war. “But in the Pacific, even the niceness of life gets monotonous. . . . [T]he days go by in their endless sameness and they drive men nuts. It’s sometimes called going ‘pineapple crazy.’ ”⁴⁹ Morale in the South Pacific boondocks was a growing concern in 1943. The Joint Chiefs discussed the problem at length. General Marshall worried about the state of mind among army garrisons on rear island bases, and thought it essential to move them forward into combat areas as soon as it became feasible. His views on this subject likely factored in the support he often gave to King’s demands for offensive action in the Pacific.

ADMIRAL HALSEY, WHO PRESIDED OVER the far-flung islands from his COMSOPAC headquarters in Noumea, was one of those rare military leaders who did not attach much importance to his own dignity. He laughed out loud at jokes made at his expense. He wore khaki shorts that flaunted his pale, spindly legs. He was not too proud to admit that he had graduated in the bottom third of his Naval Academy class of 1904, or that he had run up enough demerits to put his career there in peril. He had been a star fullback, he often said, on the worst football team in the navy’s history. (The team lost to Army every year he played, always by lopsided scores.) Halsey agreed with Ernest King’s maxim that a sailor who didn’t drink, smoke, or chase women was not to be entirely trusted. His bony hands were usually clutching a cigarette. He once stepped off a plane in Espiritu Santo and kissed his girlfriend, an army nurse, while a row of officers stood at attention. Now and again he drank until the break of dawn, slept for four hours, then grumbled about his hangover at the 9:00 a.m. staff meeting: “It seemed like a good idea last night.”⁵⁰ Liberty with Halsey, said the admiral’s long-term chief of staff, was “more damned fun than a circus.”⁵¹

Halsey had a fine sense of the absurd. He threw out wisecracks that would not have been out of place in a Bob Hope monologue. Overhearing one sailor tell another, “I’d go through hell for that old son of a bitch,” Halsey accosted the pair and said, “Right here I want to tell you that I object to being called ‘old.’ ”⁵² In 1945, upon receiving word of Japan’s surrender, he sent the following instructions to all carrier air groups: “Investigate and shoot down all snoopers—not vindictively, but in a friendly sort of way.”⁵³ He was willing to be kidded about his lack of fortitude under fire. When the Enterprise was attacked by Japanese warplanes off the Marshall Islands in February 1942, Halsey threw himself flat on deck, forsaking the grandeur of his three-star rank. As he picked himself up, he noticed that one of his young signalmen was stifling a laugh. “Who the hell are you laughing at?” he asked. “You don’t have rank enough to laugh at an admiral.” As the man began to apologize, perhaps fearing he was in serious trouble, Halsey cut him off, saying, “I’m going to make you a Chief Petty Officer—that will make it look better.”⁵⁴

Halsey knew perfectly well that stories of these antics would circulate widely, with variations and embellishments, all up and down the ranks. Together they crafted an image of a happy warrior, a fighting man who loved war and wanted everyone else to have as much fun as he was having. There was plenty of truth in that representation, but it was not complete. More than any other major military commander of the Pacific War, Halsey wore his emotions on his sleeve. He wept openly, frequently, and without pretense. When inspecting ships returned from battle, or visiting wounded men in hospital wards, or pinning medals to men’s chests, or stepping up to a microphone to address the crew of a ship, he was never far from tears. Upon receiving the Distinguished Service Medal for leading a carrier raid into the Marshall Islands, he choked up and told the officers and men of the Enterprise that they had won it for him. His peculiar style of leadership was full of contradictions: simultaneously cold-blooded and tender-hearted, bombastic and coolly logical, overbearing and self-deprecating, sentimental and ridiculous. Whatever it was, it resonated powerfully. Sailor James J. Fahey of the Montpelier undoubtedly spoke for the fleet when he told his diary, in November 1943, “The men would do anything for him.”⁵⁵

He was taller than average, with broad shoulders and an exceptionally large head. His eyes were pale blue and crowned with graying, disheveled eyebrows. He had an old sailor’s complexion, weather-beaten and spotted. His posture was not his greatest virtue; the cameras often caught him with his hands on his broad hips and his head set very far forward on his shoulders. Unlike King, Nimitz, Turner, or Spruance—in fact, unlike any other senior figure in the U.S. Navy—Halsey always made a point of smiling for photographers. He was a warm and cheerful man who liked people, even journalists. He was far more obliging with newsmen than either Nimitz or King, and always quick with a quotable line. They reciprocated his affection and gave him plenty of good copy. The press (and perhaps the American people) appeared eager to cast someone in the role of a Hollywood admiral. Halsey never auditioned for the role, but he did not recoil when it was thrust on him.

Today he is best remembered for his exuberant loathing of the enemy, summed up in his signature slogan: “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and then kill more Japs.”⁵⁶ His messages to the fleet typically concluded with the refrain “Keep ’em dying.” In a private letter to Nimitz, written shortly after he took command in the South Pacific, Halsey vowed that he was “obsessed with one idea only, to kill the yellow bastards and we shall do it.” In the same letter he proposed new submarine operations as a means of “securing more monkey meat.”⁵⁷ Killing enemy soldiers and sailors was the duty of every man in uniform, and Halsey was not the only senior Allied leader to indulge in exterminationist wartime rhetoric. But Halsey, more than any other officer of his generation, made himself famous (or infamous) for fudging the distinction between Japanese fighting forces and civilians, and for seeming to advocate a vengeful occupation of postwar Japan. “When we’re done with them, the Japanese language will only be spoken in hell” was his (probably apocryphal) remark upon returning to Pearl Harbor the day after the December 7 attack. He told reporters, in early 1944, “When we get to Tokyo, where we’re bound to get eventually, we’ll have a little celebration where Tokyo was.”⁵⁸ In private, Halsey suggested (presumably in jest) that the Allies should castrate all Japanese males and spay all Japanese women. He told Kelly Turner that he looked forward to parading Isoroku Yamamoto in chains through the streets of Washington, “with the rest of you kicking him where it would do the most good.”⁵⁹ In several publicly reported remarks, he seemed to imply that Hirohito, the Showa emperor who was adored by ordinary Japanese as a benevolent father-god, would be executed following the Japanese defeat. On January 2, 1943, Halsey shared his vision for the postwar occupation of Japan: “We will bypass all smaller towns and let [occupation forces] loose in Tokyo. That will be a liberty town they’ll really enjoy.”⁶⁰

Words are not deeds, and there is no reason to believe that Halsey, given the opportunity, would actually order a city sacked, a population neutered, or a prisoner degraded and abused in defiance of the Geneva Convention. Halsey’s hatred of the enemy was genuine, and his sentiments were widely shared by servicemen and civilians of the Allied nations. In the peculiar context of a savage war, his more outlandish rants are best understood as figurative rallying cries rather than literal threats. Behind the bellowing thespian was a complicated man with a nuanced conscience. The crowning irony of his career came after the Japanese surrender in 1945, when Halsey (of all people) publicly criticized the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The more interesting questions are practical ones. How, if at all, did Halsey’s virulent wartime rhetoric serve the Allied cause? Did it do any harm? After the war he explained that his purpose had been to embolden his fighting forces by deflating the myth of the Japanese “super-warrior,” an artifact of Japan’s extraordinary triumphs in the opening phase of the war. But it seems more likely (based on a reading of his wartime correspondence, and the opinions of those who worked closely with him) that Halsey’s swashbuckling oration had no calculated purpose at all. He simply gave vent to his feelings without pausing to think through the consequences. He apparently never considered that he might be playing directly into the hands of Japanese propagandists, who could more or less truthfully report that an American theater commander had threatened to wipe out the entire Japanese race.

Dehumanization of the enemy was one of war’s necessary evils, but it was every officer’s responsibility to arrest the descent into bestiality. On Guadalcanal, a small minority of American infantrymen had engaged in the practice of mutilating enemy dead. Most common was the practice of extracting teeth for the value of their gold fillings—but there were also instances of men wearing severed ears on their belts, of necklaces made of teeth, of heads erected on poles, of skulls mounted on tanks. As early as September 1942, Nimitz had ordered that “no part of the enemy’s body may be used as a souvenir,” and warned that violators would face “stern disciplinary action.”⁶¹ That order was subsequently reinforced by several directives issued by the Joint Chiefs. But the practices of mutilation and trophy-taking continued throughout the war, and they were even reported in the American press. In May 1944, a Life magazine picture of the week depicted a woman admiring a Japanese skull sent to her as a gift by her boyfriend, a navy lieutenant. A month later, FDR was presented with a letter-opener carved from the bone of a Japanese soldier’s arm. (The president accepted it at first, but later returned it with the request that it be buried.)

The Japanese news media was quick to seize on such reports. Cross-edited with excerpts of Halsey’s bloody-minded tirades, they provided plenty of grist for the mill of Japanese wartime propaganda. Truth was cleverly combined with fiction. The Americans were represented as beasts, savages, and demons. Surrender to such a foe was unthinkable. The fight to protect the homeland must therefore be waged to the last man, woman, and child. In 1944 and 1945, when the inevitability of Japan’s defeat was no longer in doubt, the cost would be paid in American as well as Japanese lives.

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1942, Halsey met with a group of reporters aboard his flagship Argonne in Noumea Harbor. Asked for a preview of the war to come in 1943, he obliged. “Victory,” he declared. “Complete, absolute defeat for the Axis powers.”⁶² Pressed to elaborate, he was unequivocal: the Allies would be in Tokyo by the end of the year. The reporters, presumably stunned by their good fortune, filed their copy, and the rash prophecy was splashed across the front pages of newspapers across America. In New Zealand two days later, Halsey stuck to his guns. “We have 363 days left to fulfill my prediction,” he told The New Zealand Herald, “and we are going to do it.”⁶³

In his postwar memoir, Halsey confessed that he had known that the promised timetable was impossible. The war could not be won in 1943, or even in 1944. He had offered the spurious prediction as a means to bolster the morale of his forces and to fortify the political standing of New Zealand’s prime minister, Peter Fraser. Within a matter of weeks, he began to understand that he had hoisted himself with his own petard. Draft boards complained. American production leaders feared that workers would leave the factories. Secretary Knox and Admiral King were obliged to deny rumors that Halsey had been drunk when he spoke to the press. The admiral’s batty prediction would be flung back in his face, again and again. Eventually he would be forced to disavow it, to his own embarrassment and the glee of the Japanese copywriters.

According to DeWitt Peck, a marine officer who served in the COMSOPAC headquarters, Halsey’s loose tongue and high-spirited blustering were strictly for public consumption. “The impression that people got from newspaper stories and so on [was] that he was impulsive and a damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead type. He wasn’t. . . . I never saw him making a lightning damn-the-torpedoes decision at all. He was a thoughtful, intelligent, forceful leader.”⁶⁴ Halsey insisted on a full airing of views before any decision. He wanted to hear every possible objection, every counterargument, and he encouraged even junior officers and enlisted men to speak up if they had something to say. As a strategist he was bold but not reckless. He had a fine command of details; he saw the entire picture; he weighed risks properly. A British officer who visited Halsey in Noumea was amused by the admiral’s appearance and manner—his informality, his folksy humor, his shorts, his plain khaki shirt without insignia. “I remember thinking that he might well have been a parson, a jolly one, an old-time farmer, or Long John Silver. But when I left him and thought of what he had said, I realized that I had been listening to one of the great admirals of the war.”⁶⁵

Halsey had brought several key members of his carrier task force staff with him to the South Pacific. Miles Browning, who had served for more than a year as his chief of staff, retained that role and title in the South Pacific. Others included Julian Brown (intelligence), Doug Moulton (air operations), and Bill Ashford (flag lieutenant). Marine General DeWitt Peck, who had served ably as a war plans officer since before the Guadalcanal landings the previous August, stayed on in that capacity. Harold Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota, came on board as assistant chief of staff in March 1943. Rear Admiral William L. Calhoun, Nimitz’s service force commander, came south to take over logistics in the South Pacific. Captain John R. Redman took over as COMSOPAC communications officer. Even with this talented line-up, however, the SOPAC headquarters organization remained shorthanded and overstressed until late 1943. More than once, Nimitz had to prod Halsey to provide timely action reports.⁶⁶ In Ray Spruance’s tactful opinion, “Bill Halsey was a great fighter and leader of men, but he did not shine as an administrator.”⁶⁷

Halsey was determined not to repeat Ghormley’s mistake of allowing himself to be bogged down in details. He would delegate as much authority as possible to others, preserving his time and energy for essential decisions. He received his fourth star shortly after taking over in Noumea, making him the sixth admiral to hold that eminent rank. It gave him leverage in Washington, which he employed to prevent the recall of some of his key officers to the capital, while demanding that more be sent to him. He also lobbied for promotions, and then threatened to promote officers on his own authority if his requests were not granted in timely fashion. The SOPAC organization grew steadily, eventually numbering over 300 officers and enlisted men of the navy, marines, and army. Halsey had an extraordinary ability to remember names and faces; he called enlisted men by their first names and summoned from memory minor details of their past service. He had an “open door” attitude. One of his officers recalled, “Halsey would see the janitor if he wanted to come in.”⁶⁸

The SOPAC staff developed a vital esprit de corps, symbolized by their practice (decreed by Halsey) of not wearing neckties. “He wants his men to be comfortable,” a sailor observed in his diary. “He doesn’t go in for this regulation stuff.”⁶⁹ The “no-ties” policy was not entirely for the sake of physical comfort in a sweltering climate, however—army officers did not normally wear them, and Halsey did not want them to become a symbol of service divisions. “I don’t want anybody even to be thinking in terms of Army, Navy, or Marines,” he told his officers. “Every man must understand this, and every man will understand it, if I have to take off his uniform and issue coveralls with ‘South Pacific Fighting Force’ printed on the seat of his pants.”⁷⁰

Noumea was a languid little colonial capital, a bit tumbledown but still charming in contrast to almost any other seaport in the South Pacific. Vandegrift recalled it as “ramshackle in a pleasantly unpainted way with galleries encircling the second stories of residences and louvered doorways flanked by brilliantly blooming flowers.”⁷¹ Being French, the town offered good food and wine to those who could afford it. Plantation grandees lived in airy mansions on hills, flanked by elegant rows of coconut palms. Their daughters, usually dressed in immaculate white silk dresses, were local icons. Thousands of Americans who had never met them nonetheless knew their faces and names, but they were accessible only to officers and available only for marriage. The French colonialists were not overjoyed by the inundation of Americans, but granted that if they had to be overrun by Allied servicemen, better the Americans than the British.

As Halsey’s staff expanded and the hot southern summer approached, it became increasingly evident that the flagship Argonne could not accommodate a major command. Local French officialdom had been uncooperative in responding to Ghormley’s requests for quarters ashore, but Halsey was determined to succeed where his predecessor had not. He sent Colonel Julian Brown as an emissary to the French governor, His Excellency Marie Henri Ferdinand Auguste Montchamp. Having previously served in French forces, Brown had been awarded a fourragère and the Croix de Guerre, which he wore when he went to meet the governor. Brown asked for suitable housing in town or elsewhere on the island. “What do we get in return?” asked Montchamp. Brown replied, “We will continue to protect you as we have always done.” At a subsequent meeting Brown added, “We’ve got a war on our hands and we can’t continue to devote valuable time to these petty concerns. I venture to remind Your Excellency that if we Americans had not arrived here, the Japanese would have.”⁷²

To his credit, Halsey did not behave with the hubris of a conqueror. He took a personal liking to Governor Montchamp, whom he thought “a nice old boy, a good and tried soldier—albeit a bit futile.”⁷³ But Charles de Gaulle’s man in the South Pacific was Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, the High Commissioner for Free France in the Pacific, who was often away and generally unresponsive to American wishes. Among the local colonists there were layers of intrigue that Halsey and his officers only gradually fathomed. The politics were complicated by political tensions between those sympathetic to the Vichy regime and those loyal to de Gaulle’s Free French. The French had about 2,000 troops in New Caledonia, and Halsey thought they could easily be moved into one or two barracks. Halsey offered to feed all French troops in the island in return for an allocation of space—but when the question was appealed directly to de Gaulle, the answer was negative. “This whole situation is really a pain in the neck,” Halsey wrote Nimitz on January 8, 1943. “We have very few dealings with them fortunately, but every time we do they are inclined to get in our hair. . . . It is the usual story: we do all the giving and they reciprocate by doing all the taking.”⁷⁴

Promises and small concessions followed. Eventually, the French allowed the COMSOPAC staff to relocate into an old barracks building near town. For living quarters, Halsey and his senior staff moved into the former Japanese consulate, a modest but comfortable brick house on a hill overlooking the harbor. The consul, who had been interned in Australia, had left behind his furniture, art, and housewares. Halsey relished living among paintings and embroideries depicting geishas, carp, and Mount Fuji, especially when a marine color guard raised the American flag over the house each morning. “We are enjoying his silverware, china and many other comforts,” he told Nimitz. “Unfortunately the furniture (chairs, sofa, etc.) was designed for those short bandy-legged bastards. We must perforce sit on the back of our necks.”⁷⁵ When a Filipino mess attendant broke a piece of the consul’s china, Halsey told him, “The hell with it! It’s Japanese.”⁷⁶

Captain Miles Browning, the chief of staff, had served with Halsey since 1938. He was one of the navy’s early aviators, having earned his wings in 1924, and had done as much to develop aircraft carrier doctrine and tactics as any man in the service. Browning had always been an irritable character with an explosive temper, but in early 1943 he seemed to be cracking under the strain of prolonged service. He was drinking heavily, feuding with various officers, and attempting to restrict others’ access to Halsey. He was rumored to have had an affair with another naval officer’s wife, a grave offense. When Secretary Knox visited Noumea in January 1943, he was taken aback at Browning’s brusque and disrespectful behavior. Complaints reached all the way to navy headquarters in Washington, and Admiral King, over Halsey’s passionate objections, recalled Browning to the States, where he would take command of the new USS Hornet (CV-12). The new COMSOPAC chief of staff was Robert B. Carney, who would serve with Halsey for the rest of the war.

THE NEW SUPERBATTLESHIP MUSASHI, whose colossal proportions matched those of the Yamato, put in to Truk Lagoon on January 23.^‡ She entered by the North Channel at low tide and anchored among the other big ships of the Combined Fleet, not far from her twin sister. Like the Yamato, she was manned by an elite, handpicked crew, was armed with a main battery of mammoth 18.1-inch guns (the largest naval weapons in the world), and was said to be “unsinkable.” Like her sister, the Musashi would spend most of the war at anchor, draped in anti-torpedo nets. At the high cruising speed required for naval combat operations, the two behemoths drank prodigious quantities of fuel—and by 1943, Japan’s oil supply was a matter of life or death to the empire.

One day after the final evacuation of Japanese forces from Guadalcanal, Admiral Yamamoto shifted his flag from the Yamato to the Musashi, the latter having been specially outfitted to function as the Combined Fleet’s flagship. His launch brought him aboard while a military band played the national anthem. He passed in review, dressed as always in a pristine white uniform with gold braid and white gloves, and moved into his new suite of air-conditioned cabins, as upscale and spacious as those on the Yamato. Ugaki followed later that afternoon.

Yamamoto had aged considerably in the fourteen months since the raid on Pearl Harbor. His close-cropped hair had turned almost completely gray, and his eyes appeared discolored. Rarely did he emerge from his quarters, and when he did, it was only briefly, usually to acknowledge (with cap waved in the air) a departing ship or a squadron of aircraft. Occasionally he joined his staff officers for a game of ring-toss on deck. In a letter written at the end of January 1943, he claimed to have set foot ashore only four times since the previous August, and only to visit sick or wounded men at the hospital or to attend funeral services. Other sources suggest Yamamoto was a regular patron of a “naval restaurant” on an island in the lagoon. The establishment was actually a franchised satellite of a well-known brothel near Yokosuka Naval Base in Tokyo Bay.

The commander in chief seemed resigned to his fate. When he was asked, in October 1942, what he would do after the war, he replied, “I imagine I’ll be packed off either to the guillotine or to St. Helena.”⁷⁷ On other occasions he declared that he did not expect to live through the war. He mourned the loss of so many of the fleet’s officers and sailors, and was especially saddened by the loss of commanders who refused to leave their doomed ships. Yamamoto had campaigned to reform the principle that a captain could not honorably survive the destruction of his ship—but to little avail, as the belief was deeply inculcated in the Japanese naval officer corps. He was prone to existential ruminations. To a friend he wrote, “I wonder what heaven must think of the people down here on this small black speck in the universe that is earth, for all their talk about the last few years—which are no more than a flash compared with eternity—being a ‘time of emergency.’ It’s really ridiculous.”⁷⁸

Though he could not say it overtly, Yamamoto must have known Japan was staggering toward a catastrophic defeat. He had thrown the entire weight of his considerable political influence against the decision to wage war on the United States. He had warned that the great industrial power of America must eventually overwhelm Japan. His attack on Midway in June 1942 had been a gambit aimed at forcing the war to an early conclusion. The failure at Midway had ensured that the conflict would become a prolonged war of attrition that Japan could not hope to win. He often criticized the “facile optimism” that Japanese commanders in the navy and especially the army carried into battle against the Americans.

On the morning of April 3, 1943, Admirals Yamamoto and Ugaki, accompanied by more than a dozen officers of the Combined Fleet staff, boarded two Kawanishi flying boats and flew to Rabaul. From there they would supervise “I-Go,” an aerial counteroffensive against Allied shipping and bases in the southern Solomons and New Guinea. Yamamoto was quartered in a cottage high on a hill behind Rabaul town. He spent the following week inspecting airfields and other military installations, and meeting with local army and navy commanders in the various headquarters concentrated on New Britain. As always, he bid good luck to the departing air squadrons by standing in some prominent vantage point and waving his uniform cap over his head.

For ten consecutive days, heavily reinforced bomber and fighter groups attacked Allied shipping and airfields on Guadalcanal, Port Moresby, Milne Bay, and the Russell Islands. More than 200 aircraft attacked Guadalcanal on April 7, a raid larger than any attempted during the five months the Japanese had contested the island’s ownership. As usual, the Japanese aviators and aircrews returned with fantastically exaggerated claims of success: they had destroyed dozens of ships and hundreds of planes. (In fact, I-Go claimed twenty-five Allied planes, one destroyer, one corvette, one oil tanker, and two transports. The Japanese lost forty aircraft in the operation.) Yamamoto, his spirits buoyed by the ostensible triumph, ordered the operation wound down. He announced that he would conduct a one-day tour of forward bases at Buin, Ballale, and Shortland Island on the eighteenth. The commander in chief’s itinerary was radioed from Rabaul to those commands on April 13.

The signal was picked up by Allied listening posts. Cryptanalysts in Pearl Harbor went to work on it immediately, and it soon gave up its secrets. Major Alva B. Lasswell, duty officer at Joseph Rochefort’s Combat Intelligence Unit (“Station Hypo”), translated the first version of the decrypt and pronounced it a “jackpot.”⁷⁹ That the message referred to Yamamoto was easily deduced, and the geographic designators for Rabaul, Ballale, and Buin were quickly extracted. Better than that, the message contained the specific information that Yamamoto would travel on a medium bomber escorted by six fighters, and would “Arrive at RYZ at 0800.” That would put the admiral’s plane over the southern end of Bougainville on the morning of the eighteenth. The location was just within fighter range of Henderson Field. Lasswell and intelligence analyst Jasper Holmes took the decrypt to CINCPAC headquarters and handed it to the fleet intelligence officer Ed Layton, who laid it on Nimitz’s desk a few minutes after eight on the morning of April 14.

Nimitz scrutinized the chart on his wall and confirmed that Yamamoto’s plane would enter airspace that could be reached by American fighters operating from Guadalcanal. “Do we try to get him?” he asked Layton.⁸⁰

The question could be broken into two parts.

First, was it wrong to target the Combined Fleet chief based on a conventional understanding of military chivalry? Like most naval officers of his vintage, Nimitz had interacted socially with Japanese officers in the prewar period. He was not a particularly vengeful or bloody-minded man. In eras past, an American flag or general officer would certainly have refused to single out his opposite number for assassination. Under no conceivable circumstance would George Washington have ordered a hit on William Howe, or Robert E. Lee on Ulysses S. Grant. But war in the twentieth century was not war in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Even by the standards of the Second World War, the Pacific campaign had been unremitting in its brutality. Japan had not waged a limited war in the Pacific, nor had it asked for one. As recently as the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Japanese ground and naval forces had strictly adhered to the rules of war. Russian prisoners had been housed comfortably, fed well, and provided with excellent medical care. Their requests for cigarettes, spirits, and reading materials had been readily granted. Those few who died in captivity had been buried with military honors. Had Japan carried those chivalrous inclinations into the present war, Nimitz might have hesitated to give the order. But the behavior of Japanese forces in China, the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, the East Indies, and the Solomons had simplified the issue.

The second question was strategic. Was it wise to kill Yamamoto? This was the man who had planned and executed the disastrous foray against Midway, losing four aircraft carriers with all their aircraft. Yamamoto had badly mismanaged the Guadalcanal campaign by deploying air and troop reinforcements in piecemeal fashion. He was evidently doing a fine job of losing the war. Shouldn’t he be permitted to continue? But Layton, who had known Yamamoto personally, argued that he was the best-respected military leader in Japan, and that his death would strike a “tremendous blow” at the enemy’s morale. “You know, Admiral Nimitz, it would be just as if they shot you down,” he said. “There isn’t anybody to replace you.” Nimitz, persuaded, sent Halsey an “eyes only” message alerting him to the break and ordering a fighter interception. He concluded, “Best of luck and good hunting.”⁸¹

As it happened, Halsey had already learned of the operation in a chance encounter in Melbourne, Australia. Halsey, who was inspecting naval facilities in that city, had dropped in to the communications intelligence office. A yeoman, Kenneth A. Boulier, was working on one of the draft decrypts when the COMSOPAC stopped at his desk and asked, “What are you working on, son?” When Boulier explained, Halsey raised his voice and addressed the entire unit: “Goddamit, you people knock off this Yamamoto business! I’m going to get that sonofabitch myself!”⁸²

Southern Bougainville lay more than 400 miles from Henderson Field, but the planes would have to take a roundabout route to evade detection. The mission would require about 1,000 miles of flying, a range that would test the capabilities of even the longest-legged American fighters. The marine air commander on Guadalcanal assigned the job to the army’s 339th Fighter Squadron, whose Lockheed P-38 Lightnings had a range comparable to that of the much lighter Zero. With a lean fuel mixture and drop tanks, the P-38s could (just) make the long flight. But the timing would have to be precise, as the planes would not have fuel to burn while awaiting the appearance of the enemy planes. Major John Mitchell of the 339th was assigned to lead eighteen P-38s piloted by handpicked airmen. Four of those aircraft were designated as “killers,” the ones that would attack the medium bombers carrying Yamamoto and other high-ranking officers; the others would fly cover against the escorting Zeros. Mitchell’s flight plan would put the squadron directly over the final approach to Ballale airfield at 9:35 a.m.

Yamamoto and his party arrived at Rabaul’s Lakunai Field a few minutes before six. They climbed into the two waiting G4M “Betty” medium bombers—Yamamoto into one, Ugaki into the other. The men wore green khaki uniforms with airmen’s boots. (Yamamoto’s customary white dress uniform was thought too formal for the front lines.) The planes roared down the runway and climbed past the gray caldera guarding the entrance to the harbor. The weather was clear, with excellent visibility above and below a high ceiling of intermittent cumulus. Leveling out at about 6,500 feet, the two bombers flew in such close formation that Ugaki could clearly see Yamamoto through the windshield of the other plane, and even feared that the wingtips might collide. Zero escorts converged alongside, and drifted in and out of view. They droned on to the southeast for an hour and a half, hugging the southern coast of Bougainville.⁸³

Ugaki nodded off as the group began its descent toward Ballale. At 9:43 a.m., he awoke to find his plane in a steep diving turn. The pilot was unsure of what was happening, but the sudden evasive maneuvers of the escorting Zeros had alerted him that something was awry. The dark green canopy of the jungle hills reached up toward them. The gunners opened up the gun ports to prepare for firing, and between the wind blowing in and the sound of the machine guns, things got very noisy. Ugaki told the pilot to try to remain with Yamamoto’s plane, but it was too late; as his plane banked south, he caught a glimpse of his chief’s plane “staggering southward, just brushing the jungle top with reduced speed, emitting black smoke and flames.” His view was again obscured, and the next time he looked, there was only a column of smoke rising from the jungle.⁸⁴

Ugaki’s pilot flew over Cape Moira and out to sea, descending steadily to gain speed. Two Lightnings were in close pursuit, however, and .50-caliber rounds began slamming into the wings and fuselage. The pilot tried to pull up, but his propellers dug into the sea and the plane rolled hard to the left. Ugaki was thrown from his seat and slammed against an interior bulkhead. As the water entered the sinking aircraft, he thought, “This is the end of Ugaki.”⁸⁵ Somehow, however, he and three other passengers managed to get free and swim toward the beach. They were helped ashore by Japanese soldiers and transported to Buin.

Yamamoto’s plane had gone down about four miles inland, in remote jungle. Search parties took more than a day to find the site. There were no survivors. Yamamoto, according to eyewitnesses, was sitting upright, still strapped into his seat, with one white-gloved hand resting on his sword. A bullet had entered his lower jaw and emerged from his temple; another had pierced his shoulder blade. His corpse was wrapped in banyan leaves and carried down a trail to the mouth of the Wamai River, where it was taken to Buin by sea. There it was cremated in a pit filled with brushwood and gasoline. The ashes were flown back to Truk and deposited on a Buddhist altar in the Musashi’s war operations room.

News of Yamamoto’s death was at first restricted to a small circle of ranking officers, and passageways around the operations room and the commander in chief’s cabin were placed off limits. But the truth soon leaked out to the Musashi’s crew. Admiral Ugaki was seen in bandages; the white box containing Yamamoto’s ashes was glimpsed as it was carried on board; and the smell of incense wafted from his cabin. Admiral Mineichi Koga was quickly named the new commander in chief, and flew in from Japan on April 25. At last an announcement was made to the crew. In Japan the news was kept under wraps for more than a month.

On May 22, Yamamoto’s death led the news on NHK, Japan’s national radio network. The announcer broke into tears as he read the copy. A special train carried the slain admiral’s ashes from Yokosuka to Tokyo. An imperial party, including members of the royal household and family, greeted its arrival at Ueno Station. Diarist Kiyoshi Kiyosawa noted, “There is widespread sentiment of dark foreboding about the future course of the war.”⁸⁶

On June 5, 1943, the first anniversary of the Battle of Midway, a grand state funeral was held in Hibiya Park. Hundreds of thousands came to pay their respects. Pallbearers selected from among the petty officers of the Musashi carried his casket, draped in a white cloth, past the Diet and the Imperial Palace. A navy band played Chopin’s funeral march. The casket was loaded into a hearse and driven to the Tama Cemetery, on the city’s outskirts, where it was lowered into a freshly dug grave alongside that of Admiral Togo.

Yamamoto’s old friends and colleagues waved away talk of establishing a “Yamamoto Shrine.” Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai recalled that the admiral had always deplored the deification of military officers. “Yamamoto hated that kind of thing,” said Yonai. “If you deified him, he’d be more embarrassed than anybody else.”⁸⁷

^* The name is a play on the term Gato, the abbreviated Japanese name for Guadalcanal, and Ga, which translates as “hunger” in certain inflections.

^† Michener’s book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, bears little resemblance to the better-known musical stage and screen adaptations. Tales was his first book, perhaps his best. He turned forty the year it was published, but somehow managed to turn out fifty more books before his death in 1997.

^‡ The ship was named not for the samurai-author, but for Musashi Province (an ancient name for a region encompassing part of Tokyo and points south).