Navy Secretary Knox and Admirals Nimitz and Halsey on Guadalcanal
WWII Database/public domain
A LIGHT SNOW FELL IN WASHINGTON, DC, AS PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. Roosevelt entered the House of Representatives chamber to deliver a wartime State of the Union address aimed at shoring up the nation’s spirit. “The coming year will be filled with violent conflicts,” he told the joint session of Congress, “yet with high promise of better things.” Looking back at 1942, he honored the bravery of the 1.5 million soldiers, sailors, and marines fighting overseas: “the heroes, living and dead, of Wake and Bataan and Guadalcanal, of the Java Sea and Midway and the North Atlantic convoys.” He cheered the fact that in Europe the Nazis’ superior airpower, which at the war’s start had enabled the relentless bombing of London, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry, was no more. Said FDR, “the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and they are going to get it.” In the Pacific Theater, the president singled out the Battle of Midway as a critical turning point, a victory halting Japan’s expanding dominance in the region: “We know that as each day goes by, Japanese strength in ships and planes goes down and down, and American strength in ships and planes is going up and up,” he said in a message that was rebroadcast in twenty-six languages.
Eight thousand miles away, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto celebrated the changing year aboard the flagship Yamato, anchored at the main naval base at Truk Lagoon in the central Pacific. He dined with his officers on a New Year’s soup called ozoni, but his mood could hardly be called celebratory. Gloomy was more like it, as he considered the prospects for the upcoming winter and beyond. “I am distressed,” he wrote a friend in early January. “Things here look about as bad as they could.” In another letter written a few weeks later to an old navy comrade, Yamamoto was just as blue, if not more so: “I have acquaintances and beloved subordinates both in this world and the next. Part of me feels that it wants to go and meet them again, and another part feels that there are things it still wants to do here.”
Reluctantly, Japan’s military leaders, including Yamamoto, had by year’s end concluded that Guadalcanal was a lost cause. They had unanimously recommended to Emperor Hirohito that the navy devise plans for removing army soldiers from the island. The propagandists and media in Japan, taking their cue from the government, would spin the evacuation not as a retreat but as a tactical move to deploy military assets elsewhere in the Pacific. Indeed, while assenting to the withdrawal, the emperor had also insisted that plans for a new operation against New Guinea be conceived so that Japan would still be seen as being on the move. But Yamamoto knew the truth: the abandonment of Guadalcanal was a major blow. The numbers told the story: more than 14,700 Japanese soldiers had been killed or gone missing during the six months of fighting on the tiny tropical island, with another 9,000 men dying from disease or starvation. The death toll of nearly 25,000 did not include another 4,300 men who had died at sea aboard transport vessels while trying to reach Guadalcanal. By contrast, the US marine and army combat fatalities numbered 1,600, with another 4,300 men felled by tropical disease—a total of not quite 6,000. Both sides had lost about the same number of planes—more than six hundred—but the Japanese had lost many more pilots and crewmen than the United States and its allies had. Yamamoto, the advocate of carriers and airpower who’d guided the navy to dominance in that area, was acutely aware of the difficulty of replacing the 1,260 pilots and crew killed in the South Pacific. “The enemy’s replacement rate is three times ours,” he noted in a letter written during the last raid on Henderson Field. “The gap between our strengths is increasing every day.”
To accomplish the new year’s evacuation, called Operation KE, the Japanese bluffed the Americans into thinking that their navy and army were marshaling resources for yet another attack on Henderson Field. Bombing raids were ordered to make it seem as though something major was in the works. False and misleading radio messages were sent to hoodwink US commanders into thinking that the mobilization of warships was for an offensive operation when, in fact, it was to shuttle troops off the island. The gambit worked; US Army and Marine soldiers on Guadalcanal, now numbering more than 50,000, made ready to defend against new troop landings—an invasion that never came. The remaining Japanese, instead of advancing, hustled to the northwest corner of the island, where, beginning on the night of February 1 and continuing for two more nights, they departed in a series of evacuation runs. By February 8, an estimated 13,000 men—less than a third of the 36,000 soldiers who’d once made up the Japanese ground force—had been saved from “Starvation Island.” There wasn’t much left to them; they were so emaciated, undernourished, and sickly that they resembled prisoners of war. But they had gotten away, and Yamamoto was relieved. “You did it very well, indeed,” he told the admiral in charge of the large-scale removal. “The Army will be pleased to know we can send back its soldiers in great mass.”
The mass evacuation was one of the few successes in Japan’s otherwise humiliating failure at Guadalcanal. The pullout not only marked Japan’s first land defeat but also relinquished control of the sea and air south of the Solomon Islands to the Americans. “Guadalcanal is now ours,” the Washington Post editorialized on February 11. “The Japanese Imperial headquarters insist that the withdrawal of Japanese forces was only carried out ‘after their missions have been fulfilled.’ But this is obviously a verbal smoke screen put up in order to hide a major disaster.” Bull Halsey, the admiral recently put in charge of US forces in the Solomons, had come to view the South Pacific islands as rungs in a ladder ascending to Tokyo. For him, Guadalcanal was the first rung, and, having climbed it, the only direction to go now was up. On Guadalcanal itself, Yank magazine reporter Mack Morriss captured the elation of the men at Henderson Field when they realized that the Japanese, instead of attacking, had fled. “People are going around with grins on their faces,” he scribbled in his diary as he was sorting out the significance of the moment. “I wonder if this is really the end of organized resistance,” he continued. “On its face it could be nothing else. Where could any more Japs be—further around the coast on the south side? It doesn’t seem likely. In the hills? Possibly a few.” Morriss could only arrive at a single, momentous conclusion: “that Guadalcanal, scene of the first U.S. offensive blow, is at last really ours after six months and two days.”
WITHIN DAYS OF THE EVACUATION, YAMAMOTO OFFICIALLY moved from the Yamato to a new ship anchored at Truk, the recently commissioned Musashi. Like the former flagship, the Musashi was a colossal battleship, weighing 71,000 tons. The difference was that the new ship’s bridge and admiral’s suite were customized, enlarged, and air-conditioned to befit its service as the flagship of the commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet. Yamamoto’s arrival was a formal affair, with a military band playing Japan’s national anthem as he boarded the ship and, outfitted in white uniform and gloves, reviewed the ship’s crew. Joining him was his valued confidant, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, and in the weeks to come they began haggling with army and other military leaders about the new offensive mission that, in part, had been mandated by the emperor as the next step after abandoning Guadalcanal.
Ugaki and others continued to notice the shadow, first detected in the fall, over their beloved admiral’s mood. His physical well-being was becoming an added concern. It wasn’t just that his hair had turned gray and he seemed to have aged quickly; to be sure, he was about to turn fifty-nine, on April 4, 1943. Rather, he was experiencing swelling in his legs and numbness in his hands. When he turned to one of his favorite pastimes, composing poetry or letters with a writing brush, his hand sometimes shook. Long gone were the days of surprising his crew by performing a headstand on a ship’s railing. He was also keeping to his cabin for larger chunks of time, far more than his staff officers were accustomed to, and he rarely joined in the lighter moments, such as a game of ring toss on deck. Yamamoto himself noted that he’d barely left the ship since the start of the fight over Guadalcanal. “I’ve been ashore four times since August to visit the sick and wounded, to attend services for the dead, and so on,” he wrote a friend. “But apart from that I’ve been stuck on board.”
The commander in chief seemed depressed, as if he were privately bearing the full weight of Japan’s reversal of fortune in the Pacific war. His staff wondered what to do, and there was talk of attending to his personal needs. Not in terms of his wife and family—there is little evidence that Yamamoto stayed consistently in touch with them after the outbreak of war. They were thinking instead of his lover, Chiyoko Kawai. Yamamoto missed her; he hadn’t seen her since just before the Midway disaster the previous May. They corresponded regularly, and Yamamoto learned that Chiyoko had made a major decision; at the end of 1942, she had stopped managing a brothel, severed her ties with the geishas she had employed, and settled into her home in the Kamiyacho neighborhood in eastern Tokyo. Though Yamamoto had not returned to the mainland during the past year, several staff officers had, and they had visited with Chiyoko and brought news of her back to their admiral. What if, his officers pondered, they flew Chiyoko in from Tokyo to boost his spirits?
The reunion never panned out. Instead, for the remainder of February and into March plans for the next military operation were hashed out, and, with the prospect of a new battle, Yamamoto’s manner, at least outwardly, seemed to pick up. The internal machinations of Japan’s military establishment were rarely harmonious, meaning that Yamamoto, Ugaki, and their staff tangled with the army’s leaders about how best to go after New Guinea. Yamamoto argued that prior to an invasion they would need to ensure the security of their existing bases in the Solomon Islands—at Rabaul on New Britain Island and on Bougainville Island, for example. The best way to accomplish that, he said, would be to again attack the Americans at Guadalcanal, not to retake the island but to contain the US forces there and hinder their interference with the New Guinea operation. But the army wanted to go full bore, and its leaders complained that Yamamoto was not showing enough support for the notion of taking New Guinea without delay. In the debate, the army, which generally possessed more influence than the navy at Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, was not helped by its failure in early March to capture an airport on New Guinea. US planes had intercepted and destroyed a convoy of eight Japanese ships loaded with troops, as well as a number of accompanying destroyers. Three thousand soldiers had been killed. Yamamoto was then given the green light for his plan to cripple Henderson Field from the air.
With his aides, Yamamoto devised what they called Operation I-Go. Given the goal of immobilizing Henderson Field, as opposed to invading it, no ground forces were involved, only airpower. Yamamoto ordered five aircraft carriers to Rabaul, and by late March the number of Japanese planes that had been assembled constituted the largest Japanese aerial force to date in the South Pacific. The start was set for early April, and Yamamoto decided that he and Ugaki would temporarily move the Imperial Navy’s headquarters from Truk Lagoon to Rabaul in order for him to initiate and oversee the operation personally. On April 2, the night before his departure, he wrote Chiyoko one of his longest letters ever, thanking her for her two letters of March 27 and March 28 and also for hosting several members of his staff during their recent trip to Tokyo. “Their stories made me feel that I myself had returned home for a while and enjoyed a visit with Chiyoko.” He insisted that he’d begun to feel much better and was now in “excellent condition with the blood pressure equivalent to persons in their thirties.” The numbness he’d suffered in his fingers, he said, “was completely cured after I was given forty injections of vitamins B and C combined.” She need not worry any more about his health or about the fact that he was leaving for the front line the next day. He was feeling energized, he said, in large part because of her endless love. “I will go in high spirits since I have heard about you,” he wrote. Moreover, he was animated about Operation I-Go: “I am delighted to be going to launch attacks on the enemy a bit.” With that, he cautioned that he would not be able to write again for two weeks, and he enclosed a freshly cut lock of his hair along with a two-line poem he had composed for her: “If I think of you as ordinary passion dictates / Could I have had a dream of only you every night?”
The next morning, April 3, Yamamoto, his staff, and Vice Admiral Ugaki left Truk for Rabaul in two seaplanes. The split into separate planes was for security purposes, so that the two high-ranking commanders would not be flying together. Yamamoto arrived at Rabaul Field that same afternoon, in time for the final preparations for the aerial attacks on Henderson Field, where the Army Air Forces’ John W. Mitchell and other fliers, along with more than 50,000 troops, had solidified their occupation. As for the letter Yamamoto had written to Chiyoko, it would turn out to be his last to her.
DURING THE WINTER, THE US ARMY AIR FORCES ON GUADALCANAL saw their operational structure reorganized. The bomber and fighter squadrons on “Cactus” were blended into the newly activated Thirteenth Air Force, whose main base of operations was set up on the island of Espiritu Santo six hundred miles south of Guadalcanal. The Thirteenth would report to the Navy’s Bull Halsey, the commander of all South Pacific forces, or COMSOPAC, who was stationed further south at New Caledonia, while Halsey would report to Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief, US Pacific Fleet, or CINCPAC, who was at Pearl Harbor.
Halsey created an advance command team on Guadalcanal to oversee the air units for the three services there: Army, Navy, and Marines. The team’s offices were several tents just west of Henderson Field toward the Lunga River, over a slippery, muddy hill that offered protection from enemy shelling and was reached by jeep slithering through the ever-present muck. The command team would run the three airfields, each now with a distinct use: Henderson Field mainly for navy SBD bombers and transport planes; Fighter One, on the interior side of Henderson Field, for navy fighters and marine Corsair fighter-bombers; and Fighter Two, nearly two miles away and parallel to the coast, for the Navy’s Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters and the Army Air Forces’ P-39 fighters and new P-38 Lightnings. Right next to each strip was an operations office—a dank, smoke-filled dugout lined with coconut logs. Under the new structure, each plane grouping was assigned an operational commander. The bombers, for example, got a bomber commander, while the fighter planes were overseen by a fighter commander. Taking up the latter duty during the winter was an officer Mitch and the other army fighter pilots knew well, Lieutenant Colonel “Doc” Strother. Meanwhile, their old squadron commander, Vic Viccellio, was made fighter operations officer, working alongside Strother. Vic also won a promotion to lieutenant colonel. Though on paper the airfields at Guadalcanal seemed to be bulging with aircraft, the fact was, as one officer later said, that “there were rarely more than 138 operational aircraft available on any one day, including search, photo and other non-combat types.”
To acknowledge the changing balance of power in the region, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox made a much publicized inspection tour at the end of January, covering some 20,000 miles and including stopovers at Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Fiji. Escorted by dozens of fighter planes and accompanied by Nimitz and Halsey, he arrived on Guadalcanal in a twin-engine amphibian patrol bomber the morning of January 21. He immediately began chatting up the men and reporters surrounding him, describing how the previous night at “Buttons,” code name for Espiritu Santo, there had been an enemy air attack—the first against the Thirteenth Air Force’s new headquarters. Somehow the Japanese had known that the high-ranking cabinet official from Washington, DC, was there. “How the Japs got the information we don’t know,” Knox said. “But they didn’t do us any harm.” That night at Guadalcanal, there was a second, heavier bombing, and although few of the men got any sleep, no casualties resulted. Knox toured the base with Halsey and Nimitz, visiting troops on the perimeter, where he announced what the men already knew. “We have dissipated the threat of the Japanese ground troops,” he said. “We are now dominating the island.”
By winter’s end, Halsey sent a career naval officer to Guadalcanal to take over the team there, his official title being Commander of Air Forces in the Solomon Islands, or COMAIRSOLS. He was Marc “Pete” Mitscher, a fifty-six-year-old, battle-tested rear admiral who was all business and known for the long-billed cap he always wore to block the tropical sun. Halsey championed Mitscher’s tenacity. With much of the fighting in that region turning into an air war, he wanted Mitscher in charge. “I knew we’d catch hell from the Japs in the air,” Halsey said. “That’s why I sent Pete Mitscher up there. Pete was a fighting fool.”
IMPLEMENTING A COMMAND STRUCTURE THAT HAD BEEN LACKING during much of the Guadalcanal campaign was a good and necessary move, but bureaucratic matters weren’t the concern of fighter pilots like Mitch and his men. It was above their pay grade, for one thing, but mainly they simply wanted to get on with the war. Mitch got his eighth kill on February 2, when he shot down a Zero that tried to interfere with bombers he and three other P-38 pilots were escorting. He was already over the five kills required of an ace pilot; he was the first ace in his fighter group. “Boy, am I gonna have a sore arm from patting myself on the back!” he told his wife a few days later. “Anyhow, ol’ darling, I’m in there giving them all I’ve got and every time I burn one of them I say there’s one for Annie Lee and ‘Junior.’” His record earned him a special honor, a Distinguished Service Cross, awarded on March 9 for “having shot down a total of eight confirmed, destroyed an undetermined number on the ground and water during strafing strikes at Rekata Bay and Munda Point, and led numerous other missions in addition to those specifically mentioned, in over 150 hours of combat flying time as Flight Commander.” He penciled the medal onto stationery so Annie Lee could see it. “I’m no artist,” he told her, but “you get a general idea of how it looks. The ‘bird’ in the middle of course is an eagle.” His promotion to major finally became effective, too, and it took getting used to. “When someone says major this or that I look around to see who they are talking to, to find it’s me!” he said. But it was true: John W. Mitchell, from the tiny hamlet of Enid, Mississippi, was now twenty-eight-years old, a major in the Army Air Forces, and an ace pilot with a Distinguished Service Cross. He marveled to Annie Lee what a difference a year had made: “Guess it’s going to seem funny to you seeing me as a major when I was only a 1st lieutenant when I left.”
Other fliers in the group were also showing off their stuff, eager to engage the enemy as they mastered the new twin-engine P-38 Lightnings and strapped “belly tanks” onto their planes for added fuel on longer missions. Rex Barber, Tom Lanphier, and Besby Holmes all racked up kills throughout the winter months, although Holmes became sidelined with an awful case of jungle rot. To stay airborne, he sat in the dispensary tent between flights soaking his feet in a bucket of potassium permanganate, a chemical compound used as a fungicide. The rot got so bad, however, that he was finally sent to a hospital in New Caledonia in March to cure it. The pilots were also pleased with their handling of the quirks of their designated airstrip. Because Fighter Two ran parallel to the beach, offshore winds blew constantly onto the strip at a right angle. The army pilots managed the crosswinds in the P-38 Lightnings handily enough and were bemused by the fact that the Navy’s F4F Wildcat fighters were not as adaptable. They took to razzing their navy counterparts for awkward landings featuring wavering tail skids and for sometimes having to pull up for a second try. In all, Mitch and his cohort of pilots from the 339th Fighter Squadron and the former 70th Squadron were making their mark at Guadalcanal, “as outstanding as any combat airmen I ever saw anywhere,” their former commander, Vic Viccellio, said. “There were no bars, no women and the Japs were moving everywhere and so we had plenty of incentive.” Indeed, when a transport plane landed one morning in early March and a woman happened to step out—a blond army nurse named Mae Olson—the men at Henderson Field were agog. “There’s a woman aboard!” shouted one soldier at the sight of the twenty-six-year-old lieutenant from Little Falls, Minnesota. Mae Olson was the first woman to have arrived on Guadalcanal since the war had begun, there to help remove the wounded and sick. Even though she was there for only about a half hour, she drew a crowd, the soldiers rubbernecking her every move, with one flippantly saying later that “two generals and several colonels went scurrying for cocktails.”
Mitch kept Annie Lee up to date as best he could about that and other news, as their letters to each other grew into the hundreds. Annie Lee continued to send Mitch piles of magazines, described Hollywood movies she’d watched, and said she was learning to play bridge. Mitch sent Annie Lee a photo of himself sporting the mustache he’d grown, which he shaved before winter was out, and he regularly sent money to her and also to his father and stepmother in Mississippi. “I hope to someday fix them up with water works there in Enid,” which was his way of saying that Noah Mitchell’s house lacked running water and toilets. When Mitch got hold of a new watch, he acted as if he’d won the jackpot. “Have just drawn a beautiful wrist watch from supply,” he exclaimed about the critical piece of equipment for any pilot but especially for a flight leader tasked with keeping everyone in sync. The maker was the Elgin National Watch Company outside Chicago, one of the oldest watchmakers in the United States, dating back to the 1860s, when Mitch’s forebears were first homesteading in Mississippi. “It’s an Elgin,” he said, “and keeps perfect time!” The one favor he asked of Annie Lee was that she send him a new wristband, given that bands rotted quickly from constant perspiration in the tropical heat. “Cloth or leather would be fine,” he said.
Mitch talked about movies, too, as they now had the luxury to screen films since the Japanese evacuation and the ground combat around Henderson Field had ended. They’d gather in a palm grove, swatting mosquitoes and keeping one eye on the screen while keeping another toward the sky just in case there was an unexpected raid. Mitch watched Mrs. Miniver, a romantic drama set in England during the war, directed by William Wyler (Wyler being one of five prominent Hollywood moviemakers, including Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, and John Ford the others, who had begun making war films as a way to help the cause). Mitch also saw lighter fare, such as Sullivan’s Travels, a comedy directed by Preston Sturges and featuring Veronica Lake in one of her first major roles. “I thought it very good,” offered Mitch as amateur film critic. “I see Veronica has what it takes,” he said coyly, adding “She can’t hold a candle to you though!” And of course he wrote about the bright full moons over Guadalcanal. “Gosh, it’s pretty tonight!” he said one winter night when, unable to sleep, he had left his tent. “I sat and looked at the moon for a while, naturally my thoughts were of you.” No matter how far apart he and Annie Lee were, a shared moon in the big nighttime sky served as his way to connect their love, as if they were actually seated side by side. “Reminds me of several occasions where in the moonlight I have held you close in my arms,” he said, adding, “There will be another day when I shall do just that again.”
Therein lay the rub. Annie Lee was always joyous and relieved to hear from him, reading his news and his proclamations of love, but the one theme running through their letters of late 1942 and early 1943 was Annie Lee asking her husband when he was coming home. Most every letter involved that question one way or another, and Mitch tried to reassure her as he juggled his desire to be with her and his duty to fight. “If it were not for you I would try to get them to let me stay on here the rest of the war,” he said at one point about the impossible tug of love and war. Though he loved her without a doubt, he was also a fully committed army fighter pilot. He sometimes tried humor to counter her complaint that the length of their separation kept growing. “Don’t you worry a minute about us feeling like strangers,” he said. “Just remember Mrs. Mitchell we’ve been married nine months already, so we’ll be old married folks!” Joking was all well and good, Annie Lee replied, but the fact was that after their hurried marriage they’d been together for only a few weeks, and she still wanted to know when he’d get to come home.
“You keep asking about my return,” he said late in the fall. “I still know no more than before.” Then, to his surprise, there was suddenly talk at headquarters that he might be able to return to Texas during the holidays. But just as quickly word came down that there was no way he’d be home by Christmas. Trying to remain hopeful, he offered, “I might be home around March 1—or a little sooner.” Just before 1942 expired, he further raised her expectations, writing that his homecoming hopefully “won’t be long after the first of the year.” Annie Lee was ecstatic. “He stated everybody tells him he should be home in January!” she told her Aunt Ludma. If that was true, Annie Lee said, “that means I’ll only have three more Sundays to spend alone.” She could barely contain herself. “I’m so proud of him I hardly know what to do, and I’m all set to spoil him good when he comes home—I feel that anyone who has done what he has and has been away so long deserves to be spoiled.”
But once again hopes of a reunion were dashed, as January came and went and Mitch remained stationed at Guadalcanal. It got to the point where Mitch wrote a midwinter letter six pages long that was part pep talk—asserting that his love for her was boundless—and part admonition—that she needed to quit obsessing over his return.
“You seem to be living with only one thought in mind,” he said, “and while it is flattering to me I do not think it is by any means the best thing for you.” He encouraged her to get out—visit Aunt Golda, go bowling, go to dinner or to the movies with her friends. For one week he wanted her to try not thinking about him. “I’m afraid you are getting in a rut and just thinking that until I come home nothing else matters.”
He understood that there had been moments when it had seemed as though he might be on his way, and then he wasn’t—and now his latest update was simply going to add to that roller coaster. “Things have changed here,” he said, “and I see March 1st fast arriving and leaving without me being on my way home.” Pilots were being sent on short leaves to New Zealand and Australia and then returning for another round of combat, and that was the way it was. “You mustn’t forget there are some who have been here longer than have I—also, and most important, this is a war we are in and not just something to inconvenience us. It’s much bigger than you or me, much bigger than all of us.” There was a new factor, too, he needed to mention—one that was good for him careerwise but that would postpone his homecoming. “My promotion and recent acquisition of a squadron are going to slow my return,” he said, and he implored Annie Lee not to fret and to understand that he “must and should stay” as long as he was needed. He restated what had emerged as a mantra of sorts to deal with his dual devotions: “Frankly there’s only one reason that I want to come home—that of course is you. Otherwise I would just as soon stay here until the war is over.”
WITH THE ISLAND UNDER US CONTROL AND THE MEN AT HENDERSON Field no longer under threat of constant attack, the winter months saw a more balanced mix of flying and frolicking. That was especially true in early March, when a lull in the air war lasted several weeks. It was summer in the South Pacific even though the calendar said winter, and the men dressed more casually than ever, trying to keep cool—in loose-fitting khaki trousers or shorts, T-shirts or fatigue jackets, with canteens attached to their belts like handguns, as they had to drink up to a gallon of water daily to stay hydrated. Mitch set up a radio inside his tent, and when the reception was clear he could pick up favorite songs along with new releases, the latter often reminding him how out of touch and far away they were from the United States. “The announcers occasionally come out with ‘one of the most popular tunes of the year’ and we won’t even have heard it before,” he said. There were now nearly a hundred army air forces pilots on hand, and they converted one tent into a club of sorts, featuring a record player. Their record collection wasn’t extensive, so they got the most out of what they had, playing Glenn Miller’s “Harbor Lights” and “Serenade” over and over again, as well as a tune distinctly apropos for flyboys, “He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings,” by Kay Kyser and his orchestra, which had been the hottest hit for four weeks the previous year. Dinah Shore recorded a version, crooning “Although some people say he’s just a crazy guy/To me he means a million other things/For he’s the one who taught this happy heart of mine to fly/He wears a pair of silver wings.” Some of the songs were more risqué, including Johnny Mercer’s “Strip Polka,” with its line “Take it off.” The Andrews Sisters sang a version, and, according to Rex Barber, “We played it till it wore out.” The men sat around late into the night listening to music, talking, and drinking—preferably American beer, if available, or, on rare occasions, cheap whiskey mixed with grapefruit juice. Some started card games, but the gambling was never as constant as it had been on Fiji, when they had been idle so much of the time that poker games had lasted for days. The later the hour the more likely they’d break out into song themselves. For one sing-along, they adapted the old folksy tune “Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet” to their own circumstances, composing new lyrics that, like the Kay Kyser piece, were about the glory of being a fighter pilot:
Tell the U.S. Marines and the fighting Philippines;
And the boys in Manila Bay;
That the Air Corps’ comin’, with their big bombers hummin’;
And we’ll fight all the harder;
When we think of Pearl Harbor;
And we’ll make those yellow bastards pay.
Even with the March lull, however, the brutality of the recent Guadalcanal campaign was always at hand—literally over their shoulders. No one could miss the cemetery the men unofficially called Flanders Field, after the World War I burial ground in Belgium. It was created in the center of a grove of trees near Lunga Point, and it kept expanding as more dead marines were brought back from the jungle, some exhumed from the hills, for a proper burial at the US base. The graves were dug in rows, each with a cross and a palm leaf resting on the earthen mound. The markers on more than fifty graves read UNIDENTIFIED, while the rest bore the names of the fallen. Some had mess kits, bullet-ridden helmets, and even propeller blades cemented into the ground. Inscriptions ranged from a few words—KILLED IN ACTION or OUR BUDDY—GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN—to more ambitious remembrances. One marine honored a fellow leatherneck with a well-known war epitaph: WHEN HE GOES TO HEAVEN / ST. PETER HE WILL TELL / “ANOTHER MARINE REPORTING, SIR / I’VE SERVED MY TIME IN HELL.” The marines had paid their respects en masse with a special service on the morning of New Year’s Eve day; under a blistering sun two columns of soldiers, each carrying a rifle and wearing a helmet, had marched in silence to the graveyard. Following a bugle’s call, a band had played sorrowful music and a priest had said a memorial Mass, chanting in Latin. A makeshift altar had been constructed using spent Japanese shell casings for supports. The music carried throughout the base, and near the end of the service one marine bugler playing “Taps” was answered softly by a second bugler farther away. The service for the dead ended with the band playing the “Marines’ Hymn.” Robert Cromie wrote, “I wish every person back home could walk between the crosses, see the names and read the inscriptions.”
Fighting picked up again at the end of March, with bombing raids aimed at disrupting and disabling the Japanese bases on the islands north of Guadalcanal. The army air forces pilots worked as tag teams, one group piloting the new P-38 Lightnings while the other took leave. Lanphier and Barber had traveled mid-March to Auckland, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia, where, Lanphier said, the men “sampled the entire menu of delights available, each to his own device—or vice. For myself, I got out to the beach at Bondi for a couple of days and blew two months’ pay on a photo finish at Royal Randwick race course. I hit a few bars and knocked back a gallon or two of that muscular ale they use for sustenance down there.”
The more combat hours they flew, the savvier Mitch and the others became about piloting the P-38s, continuing a shift in the balance of airpower that Admiral Yamamoto worried about privately in letters to friends. The shift, which accelerated as Japan struggled to replace its flying corps, was something Mitch tracked as well. “Early they had good Navy carrier pilots,” he said, crediting the fliers trained under Yamamoto’s command. “They were hot then, but when those had thinned out, it was easier for us. We got better as they got poorer, and our scores went up.” The enemy pilots of the previously dominant Zeros had taken to calling the twin-engine P-38 “the fork-tailed devil.”
Lanphier and Barber, having just returned from leave in mid-March, went on a particularly successful raid that did justice to the plane’s nickname. They were tasked with attacking thirty enemy flying boats and Zeros that a US reconnaissance plane had spotted anchored in the Faisi lagoon, a channel running between the Shortland Islands and Faisi Island. Lanphier, now a captain, led eight P-38s, with eight marine F4U Corsair fighter planes assigned to fly with them. They took off in the dark from Fighter Two on March 29 for a surprise attack at sunrise, but severe weather complicated matters. When they reached the Faisi lagoon, Lanphier and Barber looked around to see that the original attack force of sixteen planes was down to six. Several P-38s and all but one marine Corsair had returned to Guadalcanal, due to either the bad weather or engine troubles.
Lanphier organized the remaining planes into formation, and the P-38s made several strafing runs that set fire to at least seven planes while managing to avoid enemy antiaircraft guns. They exited ahead of a counterattack and soon spotted what looked like a Japanese destroyer. “We got some ammunition left,” Lanphier radioed the others. “We got some gas—let’s strafe him a little.” The six planes circled and made diving runs, strafing the stern, the midship, and the bow with machine-gun fire. Heavy smoke began billowing from the ship. The army pilots could see sailors starting to jump overboard. They lined up for a final run, and as Barber began his dive, he got so locked in that he experienced “target fixation,” in which a pilot’s focus becomes fanatical. He kept firing, unaware of how rapidly the distance was shrinking between him and the target, until suddenly he realized that he was so close that the side of the ship was in front of him. He pulled back on his controls as hard as he could. The Lightning slid across just above the deck, and although he managed to avoid full impact he did not come away unscathed. His left wing clipped the ship’s radio mast, tearing about forty-four inches off the tip of the wing. The impact almost threw him into the ocean, but he managed to right the airplane, and after he trimmed it up, it flew okay. He offered no excuses: “This was being a little bit stupid, but I did get back.”
Word of the successful raid, and especially of Barber’s near crash, spread quickly, and all six pilots were later awarded the Silver Star. Bull Halsey sent an airmail-gram to the men featuring the admiral’s “attaboy” bluntness: “Congratulations on a nice Faisi roast.” The coverage back in Washington, DC, took a different slant, however. “Capt. Lanphier Cited in Fight on Jap Vessel,” read the headline in the Washington Post. The article was all about Tom, starting with the opening sentence: “One of the fighting and flying Lanphiers of Washington and Detroit has just had his name inscribed high on the Army Air Forces’ roll of honor by crippling and probably sinking a Japanese ship by aerial gunfire.” The raid was cast as practically Lanphier’s alone. And in the retelling, an inflated tally of his overall Pacific record was included, reporting that to date Lanphier had destroyed “17 Nipponese planes—nine shot down in air combat and eight wrecked on the ground.” It was an article that had his father’s fingerprints all over it. Colonel Thomas Lanphier, Sr., was stationed in Washington and was known to chat up reporters. In all, the article’s one-sidedness served to highlight a tendency to buff up Lanphier’s exploits at the expense of others. No mention was made of Rex Barber or any other P-38 pilot; rather the newspaper reported that Tom Lanphier was “one of the most effective fighter pilots in the United States Army Air Forces.”
THE RAID OF MARCH 29 CAME JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE YAMAMOTO, stationed at the base on Rabaul, intended to commence Operation I-Go, the all-out attack to cripple Henderson Field. On the morning of April 4, Yamamoto’s birthday, he and his vice admiral, Matome Ugaki, appeared at Rabaul Field to see the departing fighter squadrons off. “Now we are approaching the difficult battle, a sequel to the last one,” he told his men from a platform erected at the airfield. “However difficult a time we are having, the enemy also has to be suffering.” Fierce tropical squalls and relentless rain forced the planes to return that day, and continued bad weather over the next several days led to similar false starts. Each day, however, Yamamoto appeared at the airfield, dressed impeccably in a snow-white uniform with gold braid, Ugaki at his side, waving his cap to send them off or, when the pilots were told to turn back, to greet their return in pouring rain. The admiral’s repeated appearances at the airfield and his commitment to his men were characteristic, the very things that over the course of a career had fostered deep loyalty—a devotion that remained steadfast even after the devastating loss at Midway and the abandonment of Guadalcanal. He was “the personification of the Navy,” one of the pilots at Rabaul that day wrote later. Whether in rain or intense tropical heat, “Yamamoto was every inch the perfect military figure, and conducted himself on occasions with military reserve and aplomb.”
The weather finally cleared on April 7, allowing squadrons of Japanese fighters and bombers—nearly two hundred planes in all—to attack Henderson Field and other US airfields on nearby islands, as well as Allied ships gathered around Guadalcanal. By that time, with help from Allied code breakers who’d picked off bits of enemy intelligence, the US forces at Henderson Field were alert to an imminent Japanese attack. “Condition is red,” Yank magazine writer Mack Morriss wrote in his diary that day. “Anticipation of some 100 Bogies coming down. Seems like everything we’ve got is in the air. This should be a dilly.” The initial wave of Yamamoto’s attack squadrons was indeed confronted in the skies over Guadalcanal by every plane that Pete Mitscher, the newly arrived air commander at Henderson Field, had on hand: seventy-six fighters from the three services, Wildcats, Corsairs, Warhawks, and, most notably, twelve P-38 Lightnings. Rex Barber, Tom Lanphier, and their army air forces comrades once again distinguished themselves. That first day, they rode their P-38s to about 30,000 feet, higher than the Zeros could fly, and waited for the enemy fighters escorting the bombers to show up. When eleven of them appeared, the army pilots paired up and dived in formation, firing and picking them off. In minutes, they shot down seven Zeros, with Lanphier accounting for three and Barber for two. Marine pilots, meanwhile, targeted the Japanese Val bombers, with one marine pilot downing seven of them.
The fighting continued for nearly a week. Yamamoto remained at Rabaul to see off waves of attackers and then kept busy while awaiting results. During the day he met regularly with Ugaki and other officers to go over matters concerning the fleet or to enjoy a game of shogi. He walked the sprawling base so that his presence was known and made a point of going to the hospital to visit with the wounded and sick. To relax, he returned to the cottage where he was staying, up on a hill overlooking the base. Day after day, Yamamoto was given updates from returning pilots that made it seem they were achieving fantastic results—first at Guadalcanal and then in raids on Port Moresby and on New Guinea. Japanese bombers did indeed sink a US destroyer, the Aaron Ward, in the waters off Guadalcanal, but the fliers’ reports of shooting down hundreds of US planes and sinking dozens of ships were gross exaggerations. In truth, the United States’ losses were far less than Japan’s. Besides the Aaron Ward, the tally was two transport ships, one tanker, and twenty-five planes, while Yamamoto’s naval air force lost at least forty aircraft. But believing that Operation I-Go had achieved its goals, and with congratulatory messages coming in from the emperor and Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, Yamamoto was ready to cease offensive operations.
It was at that moment that Yamamoto decided to head south to see his men at various forward bases before heading north to the flagship, Musashi, at Truk Lagoon. He figured they deserved to see him and hear directly how proud he was, how valiantly they’d fought, and he saw an efficient one-day inspection of bases at Ballale, the Shortland Islands, and Buin on the southern tip of Bougainville as a morale booster. He was especially interested in making a first stop at Ballale, a small island off Bougainville, where the depleted troops under Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama’s command were recovering after fleeing Guadalcanal; they were soldiers who had survived the slog through the virtually impenetrable jungle during the failed November attack on Henderson Field. Yamamoto wanted to thank them personally. No surprise, his closest aides were taken aback and voiced concern about his last-minute change of plans. Being at Rabaul, weren’t they already close enough to the actual fighting? Why take any chances, possibly moving into harm’s way? But Yamamoto had made up his mind, and he set Sunday, April 18, 1943, as the day for his departure. His staff hurried to put together an itinerary and choose the aircraft and crews that would make up the admiral’s flight. Once everything was arranged, his detailed schedule was transmitted to the appropriate officials at the various destinations. But the moment it was sent, the radio transmission was intercepted by unintended recipients, meaning that the minute-by-minute description of the trip and the flight routes to be taken by the commander in chief of the Japanese Imperial Navy fell smack into enemy hands.