Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (56 page)

Inevitably the Allied riposte went against Rabaul itself. George Kenney’s air force returned determined to make good for the weather that had bedeviled its strikes. On November 2, Kenney’s airmen executed a large-scale low-altitude attack. Using B-25 bombers adapted for strafing, skip bombing, and all the tricks in the bag, the raid aimed at Simpson Harbor, not just the airfields. This was the action Kenney recalled as his toughest. More than a hundred JNAF fighters rose to fight, half of them crack carrier pilots. The assault formations had seventy-five B-25s and eighty P-38s—Japanese plane counters tabulated more than a hundred of each.

The Slot

Imperial Navy fliers had begun calling Rabaul the “graveyard of the fighter pilots,” and this battle shows why. Captain Jerry Johnston led the P-38s. His deputy was Dick Bong. Then the Army’s leading ace, Bong had splashed two Japanese during the October 29 attack. This time he came up empty-handed. “Fate determines at birth where and when you will die,” ruminated Petty Officer Tanimizu Takeo. “Since there was nothing I could do about it I didn’t worry too much.” P-38s of the 431st Fighter Squadron had a field day. Lieutenant Marion Kirby saw Zeroes hammering a B-25 and swung in on them, flaming two. The third got behind him, but wingman Fred Champlin came from nowhere and flamed it. Elsewhere a determined Japanese trying to ram P-38s was taken on by Leo Mayo of the 432nd. Mayo’s P-38 was actually crippled when the JNAF fighter exploded in front of him, shearing off his wing. Ensign Okabe Kenji off the
Shokaku
, an ace since the Coral Sea, added to his score. But the heavy flak made the air as dangerous for JNAF interceptors as for the Americans. Most of the action took place between 4,000 and 7,000 feet altitude, where even light AA could be lethal. Americans claimed forty-one Zeroes destroyed plus thirteen probables (with thirty-seven more destroyed or probables by the bombers). By Japanese count their loss amounted to twenty aircraft.

It was early afternoon, so the sun blinded pilots when the enemy dived on them from above. Petty Officer Tanimizu notes, “P-38s at low altitude were easy prey…. Their weakest spot was their tail. A 20mm hit and their tails would snap off.” The Japanese kept up the fight past the end of the attack, pursuing retreating aircraft for sixty miles beyond Rabaul. But no one had a lock on accurate reporting. The Japanese claimed to have downed thirty-six B-25s and eighty-five P-38s. General Kenney admits to nine bombers and ten fighters lost.

The bombing was another matter. Omori’s flotilla, just returned from the debacle at Empress Augusta Bay, was a juicy target. Captain Hara got his destroyers under way quite quickly. His
Shigure
sat right under the attackers’ flight path. “The enemy planes practically flew into our gunfire,” Hara
wrote. “I saw at least five planes knocked down by
Shigure.
” The bigger ships were equally alert. Captain Uozumi of
Haguro
had her on emergency standby and immediately raised anchor. He used all his guns—eighteen rounds of eight-inch fire, 158 shells from the high-angle weapons, more than 3,000 rapid-fire rounds—and claimed eight bombers. The
Myoko
recorded a dozen B-25s for twenty-seven heavy shells, seventy-seven rounds of high-angle fire, and 3,200 25mm and 13mm rounds. Captain Nakamura’s ship endured a near miss that cracked the cradle of a low-pressure turbine.

Major Raymond H. Wilkes, who led one of the B-25 squadrons and was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor, went in with the last attack wave. By now the Japanese were blanketing the harbor with flak. According to his citation, Wilkes blew up a destroyer with his 1,000-pound bomb, hit a transport, and then strafed a heavy cruiser to attract her fire and enable his mates to escape. Kenney claimed to have wrecked half of Rabaul, blown up depots with 300,000 tons of supplies, taken out thirty planes on the ground, and destroyed or damaged 114,000 tons of shipping. All of this in twelve minutes. George Kenney wrote, “Never in the long history of warfare had so much destruction been wrought upon the forces of a belligerent nation so swiftly and at such little cost to the attacker.” Given the evolution of the strategic balance, this hyperbole was not necessary. It was also transparent. Before Kenney wrote, developments such as the atomic bombs or the fire raids on Japan had occurred. Postwar record checks put actual losses at a minesweeper plus two small freighters aggregating 4,600 tons. Samuel Eliot Morison comments, “Never, indeed, have such exorbitant claims been made with so little basis in fact—except by some of the Army Air Forces in Europe, and by the same Japanese air force which General Kenney believed he had wiped out.”

Disputes over results aside, there could be no doubt Rabaul was besieged. If the October strikes had not made that clear, the attack of November 2 put the writing on the wall. With grim determination Combined Fleet now poured its most mobile surface asset into this cauldron. Admiral Koga believed himself following up on Omori’s achievements—to save face the latter had reported sinking and damaging cruisers and destroyers. Koga wanted to send Vice Admiral Kurita’s fleet to administer the coup de grâce. Area commander Kusaka, aghast at the vulnerability revealed in the latest attack, tried to dissuade the C-in-C. Koga let the maneuver proceed. The
heavy cruisers of Kurita Takeo’s Second Fleet sailed. About to put his head into the lion’s mouth, Kurita believed in victory. The Kurita fleet weighed anchor at 9:00 a.m. on November 3, departing by Truk’s south channel.

BROKEN ARROW

Admiral Kurita’s voyage at first went without incident. Unknown to him, however, before the day was out so was his secret. In his memoir William F. Halsey makes a point of noting that the first he learned of the Kurita fleet, “the most desperate emergency that confronted me in my entire term,” was when it was sighted by a scout plane. Written soon after the war, this was for public consumption, intended to preserve the Ultra secret. In reality, as early as October 28, Halsey exchanged messages with Nimitz predicting a Japanese fleet move from Truk in response to the Bougainville invasion. Nimitz promised a carrier group to reinforce the South Pacific, but it was still on the way. Ultra furnished concrete opportunity to craft an actual plan—on November 3, with the Second Fleet barely out of Truk, the codebreakers placed Kurita at sea headed south. Better than that, they reported his time of departure and the precise composition of Kurita’s force—eight heavy cruisers plus Destroyer Squadron 2. Ultra had again broken into JN-25.

The CINCPAC war diary records Halsey’s request for fast battleships as a result of “information that a force of cruisers and destroyers left Truk headed south.” Halsey’s dispatch noted that Merrill’s task force, while still effective, needed rearming. Nimitz sent some additional cruisers and destroyers to the South Pacific but warned he would have to call them very quickly to the Central Pacific. He added, “IN CIRCUMSTANCES BELIEVE REINFORCEMENTS BEING FURNISHED COUPLED WITH HEAVY AIR SUPERIORITY HELD BY COMSOPAC AND CinCSOWESPAC WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS.”

In return Halsey objected that actions would undoubtedly be fought at night, when air superiority could not be applied, that the Japanese could reinforce from Truk more quickly that he from Efate, and that fighting on many fronts “usually” prevented “consistent attacks on Rabaul.” The date/time group on this cable, sent on November 3 from the South Pacific, makes clear that SOPAC was lining up an air assault against Rabaul before Kurita’s
cruisers ever arrived there. Until then the conventional wisdom saw carrier units at a disadvantage striking powerful land bases, but Rabaul had been battered already, and the opportunity to wipe out Kurita was too good to pass up. Halsey ordered Ted Sherman to prepare the carrier attack. The premeditated nature is clear in what the Halsey memoir
does
say—that he had sufficient time to coordinate with Kenney for a near-simultaneous Rabaul strike by the Fifth Air Force. Halsey’s dispatch to Nimitz finished: “AS IN THE PAST WE WILL HURT JAPS AND ATTACK THEM WITH EVERYTHING WE HAVE BUT HATE TO GIVE THEM AN EVEN BREAK.” Thus the admirals planned a trap for the Imperial Navy.

Kurita Takeo steamed blithely into this iron storm. That an aerial snooper had not simply made a preliminary sighting that November 4 might have become clear when an air attack followed almost immediately. North of New Ireland the two tankers detailed to fuel the Kurita fleet were set upon. Both were damaged, one badly enough to be towed into Kavieng. The other returned to Truk accompanied by heavy cruiser
Chokai
and a pair of destroyers.
Chokai
was lucky. Otherwise she would have been on the hook with the rest of Kurita’s vessels. Half past noon the cruiser
Mogami
actually fired her main battery at a scout 23,000 yards distant. No one attacked except a snooper near New Ireland late that night. Allied aircraft avoided the Second Fleet for a reason. A warship maneuvering at sea always had better odds against aircraft than one tied up in port. Halsey
wanted
the Kurita fleet inside Rabaul.

With his fleet carrier
Saratoga
and light carrier
Princeton
taking on fuel from oiler
Kankakee
not far from Rennell, Admiral Sherman received Halsey’s dispatch late in the afternoon of November 4. Sherman was to make an all-out attack on shipping in Rabaul and to the north of it. The SOPAC commander, in keeping with his private Ultra, explicitly made cruisers, then destroyers the priority targets. Halsey did not reveal his source, but the reference to cruisers and the instruction to focus on Rabaul plus the waters north of it—the sea between that fortress and Truk—are a dead giveaway. To maximize striking power, he directed AIRSOLS to furnish Sherman’s defensive cover, freeing all of Task Force 38’s planes for the attack. Ted Sherman sped through the night, coming up from the south. The weather cooperated.
Overcast protected the carriers from JNAF snoopers, and calm seas enabled destroyers to keep station. At Sherman’s maximum practicable speed of twenty-seven knots he reached a dawn position 230 miles southeast of Rabaul in time to put a morning strike over Simpson Harbor.

Carriers began launching at 9:00 a.m. Air Group 12, of the
Saratoga
, sent out twenty-two SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, sixteen TBF Avenger torpedo planes, and thirty-three F-6F Hellcat fighters under air group boss Commander Henry H. Caldwell. The
Princeton
’s Air Group 23 put up seven TBFs and nineteen F-6Fs under Commander Henry Miller, its chief. The rain and cloud at the launch point gave way to clear skies as the aircraft thrummed toward New Britain. Approaching Rabaul, visibility was estimated at fifty miles. It was a brilliant day for a killing. The strike wave swung into St. George’s Channel on its final approach shortly after 11:00 a.m. Commander Caldwell led the overall force and directed it from his Avenger torpedo bomber.

Admiral Kurita also voyaged through the night. His Second Fleet skirted the eastern coast of New Ireland, crossed north of Bougainville, and entered St. George’s Channel to make Simpson Harbor. Predictably, around dawn there was another aircraft contact. The fleet began entering Blanche Bay, Rabaul’s roadstead, around 8:00 a.m. Kurita had with him the heavy cruisers
Atago
,
Takao
,
Maya
,
Suzuya
,
Mogami
, and
Chikuma
, the light cruiser
Noshiro
, and destroyers. Within fifteen minutes of entering Simpson Harbor, the first ships, cruisers
Chikuma
and
Noshiro
, thirsty for oil, were tying up alongside tanker
Kokuyu Maru
. At 11:16 a.m., flagship
Atago
and the
Maya
took their places. Captain Takahashi Yuji’s
Suzuya
was gulping fuel from fleet oiler
Naruto.
Some destroyers fueled from cruisers.
Takao
apparently pulled away shortly before the moment of crisis. Kurita wanted to be ready to sail that evening.

There is some confusion about Japanese warning. Morison’s official history indicates that the Rabaul area command issued a brief warning at 11:10.
Suzuya
’s action record, however, records first sighting of aircraft at 11:15, notes verification of identity and
then
the alert by 8th Base Force at 11:18. Cruiser
Chikuma
’s record agrees the sighting was at 11:15;
Mogami
makes the time 11:16;
Maya
11:20; the
Noshiro
puts the clock at 11:21. Light cruiser
Yubari
, just back from an escort mission to Kavieng, saw enemy planes at 11:23. Other ships’ action records are missing or lack detail. In any case the
key point is that the Americans achieved surprise. Rabaul on November 5, 1943, would be Pearl Harbor in reverse.

Lack of warning impacted Japanese air defense. The number of fighters on patrol is variously cited as fifty-nine or seventy. JNAF pilots are reported to have held back, expecting escorts to break away to engage them, whereupon they could pounce on the bombers. Instead, American fighters stuck to the strike aircraft right into Simpson Harbor. Japanese air patrols were effectively useless. The escort fighters made their own contribution. One Hellcat peeled off to strafe the small boat carrying Commander Ohmae Toshikazu out to flagship
Atago.
The staff officer’s routine delivery of a message from Kusaka to Kurita almost cost him his life.