Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (43 page)

Rear Admiral Kimura, an experienced officer, had been in some tight spots already. He had had an important role in Kondo’s naval battles off Cactus, and was another of those who had witnessed the
Hornet
ablaze at Santa Cruz. Kimura was old-school, sporting a splendid mustache, and had risen through the ranks as a mine and torpedo expert, just recently promoted to flag rank. His experience might have helped, except that General Kenney had an enormous strike force, plus the benefit of a newly innovated technique called “skip bombing.” With this method an airplane would toss its bombs at an enemy vessel, like skipping a rock across a pond, resulting in a very flat trajectory and minimizing the ability of a ship to react. Bombs were armed with delayed-action fuses to permit the skip action to take effect. Kenney also modified his bombers with rigs of eight forward-firing machine guns to strafe as they made their attack runs. The Allies would suppress the flak gunners by having some fighters strafe alongside the bombers and by simultaneous attacks from low and medium altitude.

Familiarity with standard torpedo tactics would not help Admiral Kimura here, for turning into or directly away from an aircraft using skip bombing actually
increased
the target aspect. The old salt also would be poorly served by Japanese air cover. While the JNAF and the recently created Fourth Air Army had plenty of fighters to protect a westerly run to New Guinea, their bases were under SOWESPAC attack, and the nearest airfield on New Britain, at Gasmata, could not handle masses of aircraft. The headache of Japanese aircraft flying at extreme range repeated. The Army interceptors had less endurance than JNAF Zeroes. Some forty Navy and sixty Army fighters would patrol. Lieutenant Sato Masao brought the fighters of his
Zuiho
air group to Kavieng to be available for the operation. Despite preparations, Kusaka’s Eleventh Air Fleet found itself hard-pressed
to keep as many as forty fighters orbiting the convoy. They would be no match for Kenney’s Fifth Air Force. Admiral Kimura steamed into a trap.

Kimura set the time of departure from Rabaul shortly before midnight of February 27. The admiral flew his flag in destroyer
Shirayuki.
Senior Army commanders also sailed in the tin cans, General Adachi Hatazo of the Eighteenth Army in the
Tokitsukaze
, and General Nakano Hidemitsu in the
Yukikaze.
The first day passed peacefully, a deceptive prelude to hell. Admiral Weather helped the Japanese, with a storm front above New Britain—gale-force winds, recurrent rain, plenty of mist. But late on March 1, one of Kenney’s snoopers saw the Japanese convoy for the first time. SOWESPAC tried an immediate attack with some B-17s, but the weather closed in and they could not locate Kimura. The next morning Kenney had his scouts deliberately looking and found the convoy, leading to a bombing late that day by B-24 Liberators. Kusaka’s land-based Zeroes had some success distracting the bombers, but one transport, struck aft by a heavy bomb, settled and sank. Kimura’s destroyers hovered next to her and rescued many of the embarked soldiers and crew. That night Australian PBY Catalinas followed the convoy and made harassing attacks but obtained no results. Two of Kimura’s destroyers dashed ahead to land their Army troops, including General Nakano, at Lae. The warships rejoined the convoy early in the morning of March 3.

Aboard the
Tokitsukaze
, Yoshihara Kane, a lieutenant general and Adachi’s chief of staff, was up to greet the dawn. With the convoy rounding the Huon Peninsula, the general could see the coast of New Guinea for the first time. Suddenly he glimpsed a plane in the distance, coming up from the south, but it disappeared in mist. Yoshihara felt apprehensive, a premonition of evil, but this was an Imperial navy show. Any decision would be made by Kimura. The admiral could have put about, withdrawing, or made for Finschhafen, the nearest port. He radioed Rabaul for instructions. Shades of Eastern Solomons: neither Mikawa nor Kusaka made any immediate reply. Because an arrival time at Lae had been set, Kimura held his course. Bending on every ounce of steam, the convoy accelerated to nine knots.

General Yoshihara went below for breakfast. His impression was that that plane, rather than being some casual morning flight, had been looking for them specifically. As Yoshihara climbed back topside, the dawn mists were giving way to a sparkling day. All was calm, so he returned to his
cabin, then went to consult his senior staff officer on what they should do upon debarking. Ten minutes later, at about 10:00 a.m., sirens sounded and
Tokitsukaze
went to battle stations. Machine gun bullets from strafing planes began to perforate the destroyer’s unarmored hull. The ship groaned and vibrated as her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Motokura Masayoshi, maneuvered under the bombs. The
Tokitsukaze
shuddered with a blow. She lost way. Motokura thought they had been torpedoed. Yoshihara felt it miraculous that there had been no explosion, but there was no remaining aboard, so the nearby
Yukikaze
was asked to take the Army men off.

By then General Yoshihara could already see smoke rising from more than half the surrounding vessels. The air assault succeeded brilliantly. As it happened, Kenney’s planes struck just as the JNAF fighter patrol was to hand over to the next unit. Fighters of the 253rd Air Group had had the first shift, reinforced by planes of the 204th later. Around 10:00 a.m. there were twenty-six land-based Zeroes orbiting at 20,000 feet as eighteen
Zuiho
aircraft approached. Some of the patrolling Zeroes had started for Gasmata. Hearing panic on the radio, the interceptors returned. American and Australian fighters engaged them as the strike waves pounced. Half the Zeroes were lost. B-17 Flying Fortresses attacked from medium altitude, while B-25s and A-20s came in very low to skip bombs. Much of the carnage took place in just twenty minutes, though follow-on attacks occurred throughout the day. The American official historian estimates that twenty-eight of thirty-seven 500-pound munitions from the skip bombers hit, an amazing success rate. Fifth Air Force losses were a mere three P-38 fighters and a single B-17.

On the Japanese side the toll was horrendous. There were six transports and two cargo ships in the convoy. Every one disappeared beneath the waves. In addition to
Tokitsukaze
, Kimura lost his flagship and two more destroyers, half his total escort. In all, the losses amounted to eight merchantmen, four destroyers, and about fifteen aircraft. In his memoirs, George Kenney claimed the losses as six destroyers or light cruisers sunk, two more damaged, eleven to fourteen merchantmen sunk, and ninety-five aircraft definitely or probably destroyed or damaged. Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison investigated this huge discrepancy after the war and discovered that captured documents had revealed the true strength of the Japanese convoy before the end of March 1943. The inflated numbers appeared in
pilot claims—always exaggerated—and had been used in MacArthur’s press releases, soon to be corrected. Yet even after the war General Kenney repeated the demonstrably false claims.

Back at the battle, Admiral Kimura was wounded when his flagship
Shirayuki
had her fantail blown off. Commander Kawahashi Akifumi brought his
Shikinami
alongside and rescued the crew. When General Yoshihara came aboard to consider what to do, Kimura lay on a couch in
Shikinami
’s wardroom, blood seeping through the bandages covering his arm. Yoshihara wanted the destroyers to take his men on to New Guinea. Kimura agreed that might be desirable, but his warships were now low on fuel, and he had no desire to risk them on the anvil under the Allied planes. They were still wrestling with this decision when orders came to return to Rabaul immediately. In Tokyo, informed of the disaster, Emperor Hirohito immediately asked Yoshihara’s question: Why had the Navy not immediately shifted gears and landed the troops elsewhere than Lae? The high command had failed to learn the lessons of the Guadalcanal convoy battles.

Kimura’s remaining destroyers saved as many as they could. A couple of submarines in the area,
I-17
and
I-26
, also helped, rescuing 275 men. That night New Guinea–based PT boats came to finish off the derelicts. In at least one case, the PTs drove an I-boat underwater and machine-gunned refugees who had thought themselves saved. Some 2,734 Japanese soldiers were taken aboard rescue vessels. A couple hundred destroyer crewmen were recovered later. More than 900 troops had already been deposited at Lae. Some 3,000 men of the 51st Division were missing. The lucky few survived. Yamada Masayoshi drifted for ten days and finally reached Goodenough Island, only to be captured by Australians. Two more soldiers, Lieutenant Iki and Sergeant Namiki, who rescued the battle flag of the 15th Regiment, endured a whole month and providentially reached shore near Gasmata. Most of the missing men perished. The Imperial Navy never sent another transport convoy to New Guinea.

The Bismarck Sea slaughter stunned the Imperial high command, Combined Fleet, and everyone else. Despite precautions, the convoy had been crushed. That showed the swing of the pendulum, but it also raised leadership questions. The Navy decided to revamp its command structure and
recalled Mikawa Gunichi. Samejima Tomoshige, a baron and vice admiral, replaced him. Until the previous October, when the fifty-four-year-old Samejima went to Truk to head the Fourth Fleet in the Central Pacific, he had been Emperor Hirohito’s senior naval aide-de-camp. The question of an Imperial Navy gambit to placate Emperor Hirohito is relevant here. The emperor’s impatience had become increasingly apparent from his repeated, if indirect, criticisms. Much of our knowledge of Hirohito’s anxieties resides in the diary of Samejima’s associate Captain Jyo Eiichiro, another Navy aide, of whom the monarch was quite fond, and with whom Hirohito even relaxed, playing cards and other games. Jyo, an aviator, exemplified the thoroughly modern element of the Navy. When off duty he explored facets of science, which fascinated Hirohito as well. The two were close enough for Captain Jyo to furnish informal advice. Although this is speculative, it is possible the aide encouraged the emperor to get his own observer near the front by inducing the Navy to send Samejima to the Central Pacific, where he could keep an eye on the Combined Fleet command. Aware of Hirohito’s concerns from his remarks, as well as Captain Jyo’s reports, the Navy Ministry no doubt saw an advantage in assigning an officer close to the imperial household to a command position from which the emperor might obtain a deeper understanding of the challenges facing the fleet.

Admiral Samejima was renowned for leading Navy troops at Shanghai during a 1932 incident that had prefigured war with China. He had skippered cruisers and battleships, and led an aircraft carrier division. Samejima’s combination of surface and aeronaval experience could be useful. But at Truk, Vice Admiral Samejima had outranked Combined Fleet chief of staff Ugaki, something of a delicate personal situation. The same arguments that lay behind posting the admiral to the fleet applied to sending him to Rabaul, at the very tip of the spear. And there were other advantages: The baron was an Etajima classmate of Kusaka Jinichi’s, which might improve relations among the brass at Rabaul. The baron’s assignment was also desirable because, having come from Truk, he was au courant with the furious strategic planning then under way. Within weeks of Baron Samejima’s arrival, the hotheaded staff officer Kami Shigenori was packed off home. Given mounting losses, the Imperial Navy needed to fight deftly, not rush around out of control.

At Tokyo, the IGHQ huddled to craft a fresh strategy. In mid-February,
Emperor Hirohito had questioned why there were no signs of Japanese offensive action. He pressed Admiral Nagano to use the bases at Munda and Kolombangara to bomb Guadalcanal. That concept was already pregnant with the notion of an aerial onslaught in the South Pacific. On March 25, the Navy General Staff promulgated Directive No. 209. This conceded that the war had entered a new, third phase. Unsurprisingly, the order called for thorough steps to protect convoys, and now made formal the arrangement whereby supplies to forward posts would be carried by submarines or fast warships. More important, the directive provided that “enemy fleets in advance bases will be raided and destroyed,” that immediate efforts should be made to establish air superiority, with the main strength of the JNAF dispatched to the South Pacific for that purpose. In the Solomons, Allied strength would be annihilated by seizing the initiative.

In a separate NGS order (No. 213) issued directly to Yamamoto the same day, Imperial Headquarters provided for the fleet to cooperate closely with the Japanese Army and concentrate their main effort in New Guinea. Army air forces were to relocate there, while the Navy would defend the islands and the Bismarck Archipelago with the ground forces allotted them. The fleet should expand large-scale air operations and secure a network of airstrips and supply transit bases. Imperial Headquarters wanted the Navy and Army to work as one unit—a fantasy—but it did assign explicit responsibility to the Army for the Rabaul area (New Britain) and Bougainville, and to the Navy for the Central Solomons. Admiral Nagano’s staff also alluded obliquely to a specific air campaign to consist of counterair missions, attacks on Allied transportion, interception of enemy attacks, and defense of communications lines. This instruction became the genesis for Admiral Yamamoto’s last, fateful operation.

Because of what happened to Yamamoto, the fact that Ugaki did not survive the war, and the loss of the latter’s diary for this period, the specific planning for what became a huge enterprise is obscure. It is known that Kusaka and JNAF commanders had agitated for the assignment of carrier air groups to land bases. Until then carrier aircraft had flown from land only as a temporary expedient or when their ships were sunk or put out of action. As early as February, Commander Ohmae had personally raised the issue.
Kido Butai
officers insisted on the integrity of the carrier force, and Ohmae’s fervid appeals were denied. It is likely that right after the Bismarck
Sea debacle, Ugaki put staffers to work on how to counter the Allied air advantage, with conversations at a staff level between Truk and Rabaul, and that Combined Fleet staffers carried the results to Imperial Headquarters. It is known that Watanabe of the fleet staff visited Tokyo at this time. In any case, the concept went into the NGS directives. The offensive, to be called the “I Operation,” was on. Regardless of what IGHQ might say about priorities of New Guinea versus the Solomons, Yamamoto fully intended to hammer both.