Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (112 page)

The Imperial Headquarters Conference was held on December 31, 1942. The chiefs of staff reported they would cancel the attempt to recapture Guadalcanal, and the withdrawal of troops would begin at the end of January. Hirohito sanctioned that decision but insisted, “It is unacceptable to just give up on capturing Guadalcanal. We must launch an offensive elsewhere.” Sugiyama promised to “take the offensive in the New Guinea area and restore the morale of the troops.”
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By placing their hopes on a new offensive in New Guinea, Hirohito and the General Staff delayed once again Japan's strategic shift to the defensive in the Pacific.
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On New Year's Day 1943 the new head of the First Department, Maj. Gen. Ayabe Tachiki, flew to Rabaul to transmit the emperor's Guadalcanal withdrawal order.
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At Hirohito's insistence the high command now planned to secure strategic points in the Solomons north of New Georgia and Santa Isabel, and north of the Stanley
Mountains, which run like a spine down the length of New Guinea. The focus of battle would shift to New Guinea. The navy would defend New Georgia, Santa Isabel, and some other small islands in the central Solomons; the army was to defend in the northern Solomons area, including the islands of Buka, Bougainville, and Shortland.
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T
j
, in his combined role as army minister and prime minister, had had to apply enormous pressure on the high command to bring about this change. Accepting, if not satisfied by, his commanders' promises, Hirohito now authorized withdrawal of the Japanese survivors from Guadalcanal (more than eleven thousand mostly broken men from a force that at its peak had numbered approximately thirty thousand). He thereafter closely attended the progress of the difficult evacuation, which the navy completed on February 7, 1943.
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IV

The United States had ended the overstretched Japanese offensive in the Pacific by taking Guadalcanal. The war was now entering the phase of protraction and defense. Imperial Headquarters nevertheless still delayed any major contraction of its Pacific defense lines. American, Australian, and New Zealand forces confronted reinforced Japanese troops in jungle fighting at Lae, Salamaua, and Finschhafen in New Guinea, pushing the Japanese back on the defensive before they had time to consolidate their gains. Hirohito and his chiefs of staff studied their maps and decided to strengthen their remaining strategic positions in New Guinea and the Solomons. The Army General Staff in Tokyo was aware of the treacherous terrain and climate the troops had to operate in, as well as their deficiencies in transport, air power, provisions, artillery, and ammunition. So too, in a distant, more abstract way, was Hirohito. Yet on January 26, 1943, he opposed any retreat from the Munda airfield on New Georgia (some 180 miles from Guadalcanal) since
that would mark a movement back from the line of defense agreed to only three weeks earlier. Admiral Nagano, chief of the Navy General Staff, reaffirmed the navy's intention to hold at Munda, though he had earlier hinted to the emperor that Munda, under American naval bombardment since early January 1943, could well be abandoned.
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A few weeks later, in mid-February, Hirohito put pressure on Nagano for air attacks and a naval bombardment of Guadalcanal from bases on Munda and Koronbangara. “There is no sign of any attacks. Why aren't you carrying them out?” he asked.
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Imperial Headquarters soon drafted concrete plans for prolonged defense in the central and northern Solomons. American forces landed on New Georgia in early June, and an estimated ten thousand Japanese defenders, heeding their emperor, managed to hold out for nearly three months.
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Thereafter Bougainville remained the last major island in Japanese hands.

As the situation along Japan's entire defense perimeter in the central and northern Solomons deteriorated steadily, the emperor continued to demand that the navy fight decisive battles, regain the initiative, and provide supplies to the various island garrisons so that they would not be left totally isolated. During a briefing on March 3, at which he was informed that the navy's attempt to reinforce at Lae had failed, he remarked, “Then why didn't you change plans immediately and land at Madan? This is a failure, but it can teach us a good lesson and become a source of future success. Do this for me so I can have peace of mind for awhile.”
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“Do this for me” had become the signature message of the fighting generalissimo.

The failure of the navy to fully commit in the sea battles of Guadalcanal, and especially the heavy air losses throughout the Solomons, troubled Hirohito. On March 30, 1943, Kido noted in his diary a morning audience in which “[t]he emperor talked to me for an unusually long time about the prospects for the war, the future, and other matters.”
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What they discussed were the navy's
losses since the defeat at Midway, and the emperor's fear that if such losses continued, the navy would lose control of the sea-lanes, making it impossible to sustain the far-flung outer defense perimeter.
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Gradually, the emperor's changed attitude toward the navy became clear. The easy victories were months ago, the current picture one loss and defeat after another. When the 2,500-man garrison on Attu Island in the Aleutians was destroyed on May 29, he dressed down Sugiyama and Nagano, telling them at their separate briefings on the Aleutian front that they should have foreseen what was coming—instead, “after the enemy landed on May 12” they took “a week to devise countermeasures.” Lack of foresight, derived from misjudgement and overconfidence, irritated the emperor. “They're making excuses about how heavy the fog was,” he told General Hasunuma, but:

And again Hirohito fumed for a decisive naval victory:

To appreciate the significance of Hirohito's disillusionment with his navy, it should be remembered that from early in the 1930s, he had positioned himself as a relative centrist within the Japanese political milieu. The “liberals” and “moderates” whom he had favored—Prime Ministers (and retired admirals) Sait
Makoto and Okada Keisuke and later Yonai Mitsumasa and Suzuki Kantaro—were, in fact, hard-line imperialists. By endorsing them, he had placed himself firmly in support of territorial aggrandizement and aggression in China. Later the leaders of the navy became more passionate than their army counterparts about expanding the fighting in China. Their changed posture influenced his attitude. Now, in the latter half of 1943, though the navy was still quite powerful despite its heavy losses, the army was in the process of taking over the main defensive role along the Pacific perimeter, and Hirohito's confidence in his admirals had waned.

As the withdrawal through the Solomons proceeded, Hirohito gave that operation close attention but also followed far-off events in Europe and North Africa, where German and Italian forces had also been thrown on the defensive. His first premonition that Germany might lose came when the Allies landed in Sicily on July 10, 1943, and then, several weeks later, on the Italian mainland. Mussolini became the first Axis leader to fall, and be carted off to jail. On September 8 the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, and the government of Gen. Pietro Badoglio fled from Rome to the south and surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. German armed forces moved into Rome. Overnight the Axis became bipartite, and the Italian armed forces were transformed from allies to the enemy—in theory at least.

Hirohito had, of course, visited Italy at the age of twenty. But more than twenty years had passed since that European tour, and his initial reaction to Italy's surrender was mostly concern about the Rumanian oil fields which fueled Germany's war economy. Would they now come under Allied air attack from bases in southern Italy?
Hirohito's uneasiness about Hitler's Rumanian oil was probably also a geographically displaced concern about Japan's own newly won oil resources in the Dutch Indies.
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As the Japanese Pacific defense perimeter slowly contracted, space was traded for time; but traded also were lost warships, transports, and decimated air squadrons with their irreplaceable veteran pilots. This trade-off could not be sustained much longer. In August 1943 the American advance through the Solomons accelerated, bypassing many islands and leaving their garrisons stranded and helpless. On the fifth, Hirohito was informed by General Sugiyama that everything in the Solomons and Bismarck Sea area was in peril. The emperor, always looking for opportunities to attack, attack, attack, responded: “Isn't there someplace where we can strike the United States?…When and where on earth are you [people] ever going to put up a good fight? And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle?” Sugiyama apologized for the way the situation had turned out. Hirohito responded angrily, “Well, this time, after suffering all these defeats, why don't you study how
not
to let the Americans keep saying ‘We won! We won!'[emphasis added]”
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Hirohito no longer hid his dissatisfaction with Admiral Nagano either. On August 24 he berated the navy chief of staff for the navy's cowardly performance in the sea battle off Bela Bela Island: “[Admiral,] the other day when the army dispatched a large unit, I heard that four of your destroyers guarding the troopships fled.”
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Hirohito's complaints were becoming increasingly specific and acerbic, as in this exchange with General Sugiyama on September 11: