Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (111 page)

(temporarily) to assume the portfolio of foreign minister. Determined not to let the cabinet fall while Americans were taking the offensive in the Solomons, Hirohito stood solidly behind T
j
. Under Hirohito's strong auspices, T
j
was on the way to consolidating his “dictatorship.”
⁴⁴

Throughout the fall of 1942, while Hirohito was discussing with the high command, and privately with Kido, the chain of bat
tles in the Solomons, the toll in Japanese fighter planes, warships, transports, and casualties mounted steadily. Though the troops on Guadalcanal were dying of untreated tropical sickness, fever, and starvation, Hirohito kept demanding greater efforts from them. Only toward the very end of 1942 did he finally abandon hope of eliminating the American presence on Guadalcanal. His tenacity and offensive spirit influenced the high command and perhaps inspired the sick, malnourished defenders in the Solomons, who fought bravely to the very end. At the same time, and more important, his unyielding determination to hold Guadalcanal, combined with the navy's rigid notion of victory through a decisive sea battle, contributed to Japan's long delay in shifting to a defensive posture in the Pacific.

Hirohito intervened a second time on the Guadalcanal front after the Imperial Army launched another unsuccessful offensive there on October 23–24. This was followed a few days later by a second major sea battle in which the Imperial Navy engaged the American fleet, sinking the aircraft carrier
Hornet
and a destroyer.
⁴⁵
According to the diary of Vice Admiral and Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet Ugaki Matome, on October 29 Hirohito issued an imperial rescript addressed to Combined Fleet Commander Yamamoto Isoroku. The rescript stated: “We are deeply pleased that this time in the South Pacific the Combined Fleet has inflicted great damage on the enemy fleet.” Hirohito added an extra line: “However, we believe the war situation is critical. Officers and men, exert yourselves to even greater efforts.”
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Ugaki went on to write that a separate radio message came to him later that evening saying that after the emperor had handed Nagano the rescript intended for Admiral Yamamoto, his majesty had cautioned him: “What I want to tell you now concerns the latter part of my rescript. Guadalcanal is the focal point of the war and an important base for the navy. So don't rest on small achievements. Move quickly and recapture it.”
⁴⁷
When the emperor's rescript and
verbal warning to Nagano were radioed to the Combined Fleet Headquarters on Rabaul, Ugaki immediately replied, “We are dismayed by the concern our failures on Guadalcanal have caused the emperor. Only the quickest possible achievement of our goals can excuse us before his majesty.”
⁴⁸
The navy was not only unable to improve on its “small achievements,” but within two weeks it lost the battleships
Hiei
and
Kirishima
to a radar-equipped American battle group in the third great engagement in the Solomons.

Throughout the bitterly fought ground and sea battles for Guadalcanal, the emperor put constant psychological pressure on his naval commanders to recapture the island, and on three different occasions—September 15, November 5, and November 11—he pressed the army high command to throw in more troops and planes to assist the hard-pressed navy.
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At first Sugiyama was reluctant—partly because army pilots were inexperienced in transoceanic combat but also because he planned to reinforce the North China Area Army and employ it, supported by the army air force, in a major offensive to reach Chungking.
⁵⁰
However, the emperor's persistence forced his senior generals to relent. After his second request for army air force participation on the Solomons front, Sugiyama reported to him the next day that the army had decided to deploy its air power to New Guinea and Rabaul. This change in an ongoing operation had been opposed by both upper-and middle-echelon officers. Hirohito, nevertheless, forced the change.
⁵¹

When Sugiyama reported on September 15 that “not much can be expected from the landing” of a second detachment of troops on Guadalcanal, the emperor not only pressed him to order the army air force into the battle but jumped far ahead by asking when it might be possible to occupy Rabi, the easternmost corner of New Guinea. Even while worried about Guadalcanal, Hirohito was already projecting a fresh offensive in New Guinea.
⁵²

In conveying his feelings to the fighting forces throughout the fall of 1942, Hirohito pointedly praised the navy for its successes in
the sea battles of the Southwest Pacific, thereby making it extremely difficult for the navy to call a halt to the Guadalcanal campaign. Hirohito kept the same pressure on the army, telling the troops in one rescript, “try to live up to my trust in you,” implying that the troops were not yet meeting his expectations.
⁵³
Nevertheless, by November 1942, it had become clear to the emperor and T
j
that the recapture of Guadalcanal was impossible, and that its abandonment would not necessarily unravel the whole Solomons front. Indeed, it might facilitate operations at other strategic points.

Hirohito's worries about the Solomons campaigns and the war situation in Europe, which was also worsening for the Axis, caused the army, around this time, to cancel its preparations for Operation Gog
. Yet at Eighth Area Army headquarters in Rabaul, where distrust of the navy was strong, most senior staff officers were too full of pride to admit openly the need to withdraw from Guadalcanal, let alone reorganize the entire army so that it might profit from its defeats.

The continuing drain on men and matériel, which led to the decision to withdraw from Guadalcanal, opened a new phase of sharp discord between the services over the allocation of ships and scarce raw materials. Japan's losses in naval warships were roughly equivalent to those sustained by the Americans. However, in just two months of fighting around Guadalcanal—October and November 1942—the Imperial Navy lost fifty-nine merchant ships, amounting to 324,000 tons, as compared to thirteen to fifteen, or 61,000 tons, lost monthly between the start of the war on December 8, 1941, and the end of September 1942. Most of the sunken vessels were transports loaded with troops, weapons, and supplies. As a result, conflict arose between the Army Ministry and the General Staff over whether to use as troopships and weapons carriers those transports that had been specially designated to move raw materials from Southeast Asia.
⁵⁴

Apart from its losses in naval and merchant ships, the Japanese
navy lost 892 planes and 1,882 pilots during the six-month-long Guadalcanal battles from August 1942 to the final withdrawal in early February 1943. Yamada notes that this was “two and a half times the number of planes and fifteen times the number of pilots lost at Midway.”
⁵⁵

Despairing over these enormous losses in a battle of attrition he had wanted to avoid but had actually helped to bring about, Hirohito made a special two-day trip to worship at Ise Shrine on December 12, 1942.
⁵⁶
On December 28 he told his chief aide, General Hasunuma, that he remained dissatisfied with the plans of the chiefs of staff, who had just made a formal report summarizing the war situation for 1942. They had promised to submit their plans for withdrawal from Guadalcanal, complained the emperor, but “[w]hat I want to know is how they propose to force the enemy to submit. The situation is very grave indeed. I believe we should now convene an imperial conference in my presence, and it makes no difference whether we hold it at the end of this year or the start of next. I am ready to participate at any time.”
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