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1 BATAAN

‘We cannot win this war until it…becomes a national crusade for America and the American Dream,’ wrote New York Times reporter James Reston in his 1942 book Prelude to Victory, which attained best-sellerdom. This was now, indeed, a global conflict. The American people’s initial response to finding themselves engaged in it was as muddled and well-meaning as had been that of the British in September 1939. There was a surge of enthusiasm for first-aid instruction – the most popular handbook sold eight million copies; thousands of high school students carved and glued wooden models of enemy aircraft for military trainers. Millions of citizens donated blood and collected scrap metal; resort hotels in Miami Beach and Atlantic City were turned over to army recruits. Bowing to the gravity of the new national circumstances, sport hunting and fishing, together with manufacture of golf and tennis balls, were temporarily banned. There was a boom in fortune-telling, checkers, sales of world maps and cookery books. Movies attained extraordinary popularity, partly because many people found more cash in their pockets: 1942 cinema audiences were double those of 1940. Prisoners in San Quentin volunteered for war-production duty, and began making anti-submarine nets.

From the outset, and aided by the fact that some big industrial commitments had already been made, America’s economic mobilisation awed visitors from poorer and less ambitious societies. Even intelligent and informed British people failed to recognise the almost limitless scale of the nation’s resources: ‘The Army…are aiming at a vast programme,’ British Air Marshal John Slessor wrote to the Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal from Washington back in April 1941, assessing the build-up of the US armed forces, ‘their present target being two million men, and they are now considering another 2 million on top of that. Who they are going to fight with an army of this size or how they are going to transport it overseas I do not know and very much doubt whether they would have aimed at anything like this if they had a really thorough joint strategic examination of their defence commitments and requirements.’

Such scepticism was dramatically confounded between 1942 and 1945. ‘After Pearl Harbor,’ Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, British chief planner for D-Day, said of the Americans, ‘they decided to make the biggest and best war ever seen.’ The secretary of the American Asiatic Association wrote to a friend in the State Department, ‘It will be a long, hard war, but after it is over Uncle Sam will do the talking in the world.’ The federal budget soared from $9 billion in 1939 to $100 billion in 1945, and in the same period America’s GNP grew from $91 to $166 billion. The index of industrial production rose 96 per cent, and seventeen million new jobs were created. Some 6.5 million additional women entered the US labour force between 1942 and 1945, and their wages grew by over 50 per cent; sales of women’s clothing doubled. The imperatives of America’s vast industrial mobilisation favoured tycoons and conglomerates, which flourished mightily. Anti-trust legislation was thrust aside by the pressures of war demand: America’s hundred largest companies, which in 1941 were responsible for 30 per cent of national manufacturing output, generated 70 per cent by 1943. The administration overcame its scruples about monopolists who could deliver tanks, planes, ships.

Everything grew in scale to match the largest war in history: in 1939 America had only 4,900 supermarkets, but by 1944 there were 16,000. Between December 1941 and the end of 1944, the average American’s liquid personal assets almost doubled. With luxuries scarce, consumers were desperate to find goods on which to spend their rising earnings: ‘People are crazy with money,’ said a Philadelphia jeweller. ‘They don’t care what they buy. They purchase things just for the fun of spending.’ By 1944, while British domestic production of consumer goods had fallen by 45 per cent from its pre-war levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 per cent. Many regions experienced severe housing shortages and rents soared, as millions of people sought temporary accommodation to fit their wartime job relocations. ‘The Good War myth,’ wrote Arthur Schlesinger, who then worked for the Office of War Information,

envisages a blissful time of national unity in support of noble objectives. Most Americans indeed accepted the necessity of the war, but that hardly meant the suppression of baser motives. In Washington we saw the seamy side of the Good War. We saw greedy business executives opposing conversion to defense production, then joining the government to maneuver for post-war advantage…We were informed that one in eight business establishments was in violation of the price ceilings. We saw what a little-known senator from Missouri [Harry Truman] called ‘rapacity, greed, fraud and negligence’…The war called for equality of sacrifice. But everywhere one looked was the miasma of ‘chiseling’…The home front was not a pretty sight at a time when young Americans were dying around the world.

Among the worst rackets uncovered was that of a primary war contractor, National Bronze and Aluminum Foundry Company of Cleveland, which knowingly sold scrap metal as parts for fighter engines; four of its executives were jailed. The US Cartridge Company of St Louis issued millions of rounds of defective ammunition, though such chicanery could cost lives. Citizens sought otherwise unavailable commodities through the black market, and many businesses evaded price controls. An American observed ruefully that Europe had been occupied, Russia and China invaded, Britain bombed; but the US among the great powers was ‘fighting this war on imagination alone’. Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews. Combat historian Forrest Pogue later observed wonderingly of Bradley’s army in France: ‘The men have no great interest in the war. You can’t work them up unless the Germans hit some of their friends.’ A behaviourist noted for his work with rats, Professor Norman Maier of Michigan University, suggested that Americans could be more effectively galvanised into a fighting mood by cutting off their gasoline, tyres and civil liberties than by appealing to their ideals. This was an overly cynical view, for some people displayed real patriotism, and on the battlefield many Americans would display much courage. But it was true that the remoteness of the United States from the fighting fronts, its security from direct attack or even serious hardship, militated against the passion that moved civilians of nations suffering occupation or bombardment.

After Pearl Harbor, America’s political and military leaders knew that they, like the British, must suffer defeats and humiliations before forces could be mobilised to roll back the advancing Japanese. There was much ignorance and innocence about the enemy, even among those who would have to fight them. ‘Suddenly we realized that nobody knew anything about the Japs,’ said carrier pilot Fred Mears. ‘We had never heard of a Zero then. What was the caliber of Jap planes and airmen? What was the strength of the Japanese Navy? What kind of battles would be fought and where? We were woefully unprepared.’ Many Americans had acknowledged for months the logic of their nation’s belligerence. Yet it is characteristic of all conflicts that until enemies begin to shoot, ships to sink and loved ones – or at least comrades – to die, even professional warriors often lack urgency and ruthlessness. ‘It was amazing how long it took to get the hang of it and to react instantly in the right way,’ American sailor Alvin Kiernan observed. ‘War, we gradually learned, is a state of mind before it can be anything else.’ Ernie Pyle wrote: ‘Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to become wholly at war. We had to go through that transition period of letting loose of life as it was, and then live the new war life so long that it finally became the normal life to us.’

All this makes it remarkable that, within six months of Pearl Harbor, American fleets gained victories which turned the tide of the Asian war. Germany dominated western Europe for four years, but by autumn 1942 the Japanese perimeter was already beginning to shrink. The speed of the American resurgence in the Pacific reflected the fundamental weakness of the Asian enemy. First, however, came the pain. In the weeks following 7 December 1941, the Japanese seized Wake after a fierce defence in which the first wave of attackers were repulsed with heavy loss. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanding the defence of the Philippines, rejected his air commander’s plea to strike back during ten hours which elapsed between news of Pearl Harbor and a devastating Japanese air assault that destroyed almost eighty US aircraft undispersed on the ground.

Next day, MacArthur began to make belated preparations to withdraw his Filipino and American troops to Luzon’s Bataan peninsula, which alone might be defensible. But it was a huge task quickly to shift supplies there: the general had dismissed proposals to do so before war came, scorning ‘passivity’. The army hastily bought rice from Chinese merchants and all the beef, meat and fruit it could get from local canneries. On 12 December, MacArthur belatedly informed President Quezon of the mooted withdrawal, which he began to implement on the 22nd. Doctors warned that Bataan was notoriously malaria-ridden, because of the prevalence there of the anopheles mosquito, but little was done to secure stocks of prophylactics. Meanwhile, Manila was bombed every day between noon and 1300, causing American officers to advance their lunch to 1100.

MacArthur expected a Japanese landing at the south end of the Lingayen gulf, and deployed some troops accordingly. Yet the Japanese invasion force got ashore at Lingayen gulf after brushing aside a challenge by ill-trained and poorly equipped Filipino troops. By 22 December, 43,110 men of Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma’s Fourteenth Army had established a beachhead with few casualties. Faulty American torpedoes caused the failure of all but one submarine attack on the troopships. A further 7,000 Japanese landed unopposed at Lamon Bay, two hundred miles south-eastwards. The Philippines army crumbled quickly. Air commander Gen. Lewis Brereton, most of his planes gone, prudently decamped to Australia. MacArthur issued a bombastic communiqué: ‘My gallant divisions are holding ground and denying the foe the sacred soil of the Philippines. We have inflicted heavy casualties on his troops, and nowhere is his bridgehead secure. Tomorrow we will drive him into the sea.’

In reality, the Japanese advanced on Manila against negligible resistance. In Washington, the US chiefs of staff wisely forswore any notion of reinforcing the defence. MacArthur enjoyed just one piece of good fortune: the invaders focused on occupying the capital, and made no attempt to frustrate his retreat to Bataan. Life photographer Carl Mydans watched from the Bay View Hotel as the first Japanese entered Manila on 2 January: ‘They came up the boulevards in the predawn glow from the bay riding on bicycles and on tiny motorcycles. They came without talk and in good order, the ridiculous pop-popping of their one-cylinder cycles sounding loud in the silent city.’

A week later, Homma launched his first attack on the American-Filipino line across the Bataan peninsula. In the days that followed, the defenders had little difficulty in repulsing successive assaults, though they suffered steady losses from air attack. From the outset, they were also hot and hungry, with 110,000 people to be fed – 85,000 US and Filipino troops and 25,000 civilian refugees. The Corps of Engineers set about gathering and threshing rice in the fields. Fish traps operated along the coast until destroyed by enemy fighters, and farm animals were slaughtered. Malaria swiftly reached epidemic proportions. Nurse Ruth Straub wrote in her diary: ‘I guess we are all self-imposed prisoners-of-war. All we’re doing is protecting our own lives.’

But the defenders of Bataan displayed more energy and initiative than the British in Malaya: several Japanese attempts to turn the Americans’ flank by landing troops on the coast behind the front resulted in their annihilation. One unit was forced back to the sheer cliffs of Quinauan point. ‘Scores of Japs ripped off their uniforms and leaped, shrieking, to the beach below,’ wrote Captain William Dyess. ‘Machine-gun-fire raked the sand and surf for anything that moved.’ When Japanese infantry punched through the perimeter and seized two salients at Tuol and Cotar on 26 January, after bloody fighting the line was restored by counterattack. Bombing inflicted remarkably little damage on American artillery positions. When fodder ran out for the cavalry’s horses, the garrison ate them. Almost every wild animal on Bataan was hunted down and thrown into the pot, while men picked mangoes, bananas, coconuts, papayas, and fished at sea with dynamite.

Through February and March the Japanese made no headway, but the defenders were fast weakening from hunger, and anti-malarial quinine was running out. MacArthur escaped to Australia by PT-boat with his family and personal retainers, in obedience to an order from Roosevelt, leaving Gen. Jonathan Wainwright to direct the defence through its last weeks. By late March, a thousand malaria cases a week were being admitted to hospital. In civilian refugee camps behind the perimeter, according to Lt. Walter Waterous, conditions were ‘the most deplorable I have ever seen and the death rate was appalling’. Bombing wrecked almost every facility above ground on the fortress island of Corregidor; thousands of sick and wounded were crowded into its Malinta Tunnel.

Thirty-year-old Texan nurse Lt. Bertha Dworsky found that one of the worst aspects of her work was personal acquaintance with many of the terribly wounded men brought in: ‘They were usually people that we’d been with at the Officers’ Club, or they were our friends. It was a tremendously emotional experience. We just never knew who they were going to bring in next.’ The wounded often asked if they were going to survive, and doctors disputed whether it was best to tell them the truth. Dr Alfred Weinstein wrote: ‘The argument raged back and forth with nobody knowing the correct answer. Most of us followed a middle course, ducking the question…If a patient looked as if he might kick the bucket, we called in the chaplain to give him last rites, collect personal mementoes and write last messages…More often than not they didn’t have to be told.’

The condition of the besiegers was little better than that of the besieged: the Japanese, too, suffered heavy losses to malaria, beriberi and dysentery – more than 10,000 sick by February. Tokyo was increasingly exasperated by American defiance, and by the triumphalist propaganda which the saga of Bataan promoted in the United States. On 3 April, Homma’s reinforced army launched a major offensive preceded by a massive bombardment. Filipino units broke in panic before Japanese tanks; every movement by the defenders provoked strafing from the air; many men were so weakened by hunger that they could scarcely move from their foxholes. The Japanese pushed steadily forward, breaching successive American lines. On the evening of 8 April, Maj. Gen. Edward King on his own initiative decided he must surrender the peninsula, and sent forward an officer bearing a white flag to the Japanese lines. From jungle refuges all over Bataan, groups of defenders emerged, seeking paths towards Corregidor island, where Wainwright still held out.

On the morning of the 9th, King met Col. Motoo Nakayama, Homma’s operations officer, to sign a surrender. ‘Will our troops be well treated?’ King asked. The Japanese answered blandly, ‘We are not barbarians.’ Some 11,500 Americans and 64,000 Filipinos fell into enemy hands. The transfer of these debilitated men to cages became known to history as the Bataan Death March. Scores of Filipinos were casually killed, some used for bayonet practice. An American private soldier saw a weakened compatriot pushed under an advancing tank. Blair Robinett said: ‘Now we knew, if there had been any doubts before, we were in for a bad time.’ Sgt. Charles Cook described seeing captives bayoneted if they tried to get water. Staff-Sergeant Harold Feiner said: ‘If you fell, bingo, you were dead.’ More than three hundred Filipino prisoners were butchered in a ravine near the Pantingan river. Their killers explained that if the garrison had surrendered sooner they might have been treated mercifully, but as it was, ‘we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us.’ An estimated eleven hundred Americans and more than 5,000 Filipinos perished on the Death March.

The Japanese now concentrated artillery fire on Corregidor, little larger than New York’s Central Park; on 3 May Wainwright reported to MacArthur in Australia that every structure above ground had been levelled, the island denuded of vegetation. Conditions became unspeakable in the hot, stinking Malinta Tunnel, packed with fearful humanity. That night the submarine Spearfish evacuated the last party to escape safely to Australia, twenty-five strong, including thirteen women. A few hours later, the Japanese landed amphibious forces to storm Corregidor. At noon on 6 May, after two days of fighting, Wainwright surrendered all remaining US forces in the Philippines, first signalling to Washington: ‘With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander…Goodbye, Mr. President.’ An American navy doctor among the garrison, George Ferguson, sat down and wept, ‘just so disappointed in the good old U.S.A.’. Amid emotional and physical exhaustion, however, many men were simply glad the battle had ended. Only later did they discover that the ordeal had scarcely begun for 11,500 Americans who became prisoners of the Japanese.

The four-month defence of Bataan and Corregidor, which cost 2,000 American dead and 4,000 casualties among the invaders, was made possible in part by Japanese incompetence. The initial invasion force was weak, and composed of troops with nothing like the training and experience of Yamashita’s army in Malaya. If Homma and his officers had displayed more energy, the Philippines saga would have ended sooner, as Tokyo’s angry high command asserted. But nothing can detract from the gallantry of Wainwright, who did his duty more impressively than MacArthur, and of his garrison. They created a legend in which Americans could take pride – and of which Churchill was envious. To put the matter bluntly, US soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause.

Brigadier Dwight Eisenhower, who had served unhappily under MacArthur a few years earlier, wrote in his diary: ‘Poor Wainwright! He did the fighting…[MacArthur] got such glory as the public could find…MacArthur’s tirades, to which…I so often listened in Manila…would now sound as silly to the public as they then did to us. But he’s a hero! Yah.’ At home in the US, news commentators squeezed every ounce of glory from Bataan, from skirmishes at sea and manifestations of America’s embryo mobilisation. But in the Pacific, no one was fooled. Every Allied soldier, sailor and airman knew that the enemy was making the weather in every corner of the theatre. Lt. Robert Kelly of MTB Squadron 3, which evacuated MacArthur from Corregidor, said: ‘The news commentators had us all winning the war. It made us very sore. We were out here where we could see these victories. There were plenty of them. They were all Japanese. Yet if even at one point we are able to check an attack, the silly headlines chatter of a “victory”.’

Kelly, like Eisenhower, failed to grasp the importance of legends, indeed myths, to sustain the spirit of nations in adversity. American dismay in the face of those early defeats was assuaged by skilful propaganda. The United States had much less to lose in the east than did the British Empire. The epic of Bataan and MacArthur forged by Roosevelt and the US media was serviceable, even precious to the American people. The general was a vainglorious windbag rather than a notable commander, whose personality was repugnant. But his flight from Corregidor was no more discreditable than those of many wartime British commanders from stricken fields, including Wavell’s from Singapore. During the years that followed, MacArthur’s status as a figurehead for American endeavours in the southwest Pacific did much for morale at home, if less for the defeat of Japan. The 1942 Philippines campaign served no useful strategic purpose: the islands were indefensible by the small forces available, far from friendly bases. If the garrison had held out longer, domestic public opinion might have forced some doomed venture to relieve the siege of Bataan. The US Navy would have suffered a catastrophe, had it attempted to assist Wainwright in the face of overwhelming air and naval Japanese strength; Corregidor’s surrender relieved Washington of an embarrassment.

Thereafter in the Pacific, few ground actions came close to matching in scale those waged against Germany. The struggle engaged relatively few men, though it was conducted over vast distances and involved large naval commitments. Most of the Japanese army stayed in China. Tokyo’s Asian and Pacific conquests were achieved by small forces, dispersed across the hemisphere. The US, Australia and Britain, in their turn, contested mastery of islands and densely forested wildernesses with modest ground contingents of two or three divisions, while on Russian battlefields hundreds of formations clashed. The critical factors in each successive Pacific encounter were the supporting naval and air forces. Both sides’ soldiers and marines knew that their blood and sweat must go for nothing unless sea supply routes could be held open, dominance of the sky denied to the enemy. The United States Navy became the decisive force in the war against Japan.

2 THE CORAL SEA AND MIDWAY

In January 1942, the Japanese seized Rabaul, on New Britain, and transformed it into a major air and naval hub. In the full flight of euphoria following their triumphs – ‘victory disease’, as sceptics among Hirohito’s people came to call it – they determined to extend their South Pacific holdings to embrace Papua, the Solomons, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa. The navy persuaded the army to agree an advance to a new imperial outer perimeter with Midway atoll in the centre and the Aleutians in the north, which should be seized from the Americans. They would then have bases from which they could interdict supply routes to Australia, now the Allies’ main staging post for the Asian war.

Even before Corregidor fell, the Americans made a gesture which dismayed and provoked their enemies, because it provided an early hint of Japan’s vulnerability and lent urgency to their further endeavours. Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s 18 April air strike against Tokyo by sixteen B-25 bombers, launched from the carrier Hornet 650 miles from Japan, was materially insignificant but morally important. Heartening the Allied peoples in a season of defeats, it was an imaginative act of military theatre, of the kind in which Churchill often indulged. It persuaded the Japanese that they must seize Midway, America’s westernmost Pacific foothold, held since 1867. Once Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had aircraft based on Midway, these could frustrate further Doolittle-style adventures.

Japan’s objectives would prove disastrously over-ambitious; but the alternative, from Tokyo’s perspective, was to concede to the Americans freedom to mass forces for a counterstroke. Yamamoto and his colleagues knew that, unless the US could be kept under relentless pressure, Japanese defeat was inevitable. Their only credible strategy, they believed, was to strike at the Allies again and again, until Washington bowed to the logic of Japanese dominance and negotiated a settlement. Above all, the Imperial Navy sought to engage and destroy US warships at sea.

Before addressing Midway, the Japanese moved against Papua and the Solomons. At the beginning of May 1942, three invasion convoys set sail for Port Moresby, protected by powerful strike and covering forces including three carriers. Vice-Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, directing operations, hoped that an American fleet would seek to intervene, for he expected to destroy it. The amphibious force destined for Tulagi island in the south Solomons, a few miles off Guadalcanal, landed unopposed on 3 May. Next day, aircraft from the carrier Yorktown struck Japanese ships offshore, sinking a destroyer and two smaller vessels, but the destruction was disappointing, when the attackers enjoyed almost ideal conditions.

On 5 May a US fleet with a small Australian contingent, led by Rear-Admiral Frank Fletcher and forewarned by Ultra intelligence of Japanese intentions, steamed to intercept Inoue’s main force. At dawn on 7 May in the Coral Sea, Fletcher dispatched his cruisers, led by British Rear-Admiral John Crace, to attack the enemy’s transports. Fletcher was misinformed about enemy locations. US air squadrons, instead of finding the Japanese carriers, chanced upon Inoue’s amphibious force. Its transports promptly turned away, to await the outcome of the fleet encounter. Crace withdrew, on learning that he was advancing into empty ocean. Planes from Lexington scored an early success, sinking the small carrier Shoho. Meanwhile Fletcher’s carrier group had an extraordinarily lucky escape. The Japanese fleet was 175 miles astern of him; his own planes were absent when enemy aircraft sank and destroyed an American tanker and escorting destroyer which were trailing his task groups. If Inoue’s bombers had flown further and found the US carriers, these would have been exposed to disaster. As it was, on that first day both rival admirals groped ineffectually.

Next morning, 8 May, as sunrise came at 0655, sailors in foetid confinement below took turns to snatch breaths of clean air from vents or scuttles, as waves of American and Japanese aircraft lifted off from their respective flight decks. Lt. Cmdr. Bob Dixon, who had led the previous day’s air attack on Shoho, again distinguished himself by locating the Japanese fleet. He lingered overhead to maintain surveillance, nursing his engine to save fuel – a constant preoccupation of naval fliers.

The first wave of US aircraft located and attacked the carrier Shokaku, inflicting significant but not fatal damage. Most of the torpedo-carriers and dive-bombers missed. The strikes were poorly coordinated. Dive-bomber crews suffered severe problems when their sighting telescopes and windshields misted up during the steep descent from ‘pushover’ at 17,000 feet to ‘pull-up’ at 1,500. Pilots fumed at their own lack of speed and defensive firepower against Japanese fighters. Commander Bill Ault got lost on his way home, a frequent and fatal error in that vast ocean. He sent a laconic farewell message before ditching and vanishing forever: ‘Okay, so long people. Remember we got a thousand-pound hit on the flat top.’ But Shokaku survived. Lt. Cmdr. Paul Stroop, a staff officer aboard Lexington, acknowledged ruefully, ‘We should have been more effective.’

And even as the Americans were diving on Inoue’s fleet, the Japanese struck Fletcher’s ships much harder. When radar reported enemy aircraft closing, the US carrier captains called for twenty-five-knot flank speed and began evasive action before meeting shoals of incoming torpedoes, a rain of bombs. Yorktown suffered a single hit which killed more than forty men, and a near-miss which momentarily blasted the ship’s racing screws clear of the water. Her captain asked the engine room if he should reduce speed, to receive the defiant answer: ‘Hell no, we’ll make it.’ But Lexington’s full helm turn as torpedoes approached failed to save her: the 40,000-ton carrier was struck with devastating effect. ‘It was pretty discouraging to see these Japanese launch their torpedoes then fly very close to the ship to get a look at us,’ said Paul Stroop. ‘They were curious and sort of thumbed their noses at us. We were shooting at them with our new 20mms and not hitting them at all.’ Blazes broke out which found plentiful tinder – inflammable bulkhead paint, wooden furniture such as no US warship would carry again. Half-naked sailors suffered terrible burns – ‘the skin was literally dripping from their bodies’. This was the last time American crews willingly exposed flesh in action. After just thirteen minutes the Japanese planes turned away, leaving a shambles which greeted Fletcher’s airmen returning from their own strike.

Heroic efforts were made to control Lexington’s fires: Lt. Milton Ricketts, sole survivor of a damage-control team wiped out by a bomb, was himself mortally wounded, but ran out a hose and began playing water on the flames before collapsing dead. Soon, however, in Stroop’s words ‘fires had gotten increasingly violent and we were beginning to get explosions…that sounded like a freight train rumbling up the hangar deck…A rushing wall of flame…would erupt around the perimeter of the elevator.’ Leaking gasoline fumes triggered a massive blast below decks: ammunition began to cook off; the decision was made to abandon the ship. Its senior officer, Admiral Fitch, walked calmly across the flight deck accompanied by a marine orderly clutching his jacket and dispatches, to be picked up by a destroyer’s boat below. Men in their hundreds began to leap into the water. The rescuers were so effective that only 216 of Lexington’s crew were lost out of 2,735, but a precious carrier was gone. Yorktown was severely damaged, though she was able to complete landing on planes two minutes after sunset. In the small hours of darkness, the dead were buried over the side, in expectation of renewed action next day.

The Battle of the Coral Sea

But the battle was done: both fleets turned away. Fletcher’s task groups had lost 543 lives, sixty aircraft and three ships including Lexington. Inoue lost over 1,000 men and seventy-seven aircraft – the carrier Zuikaku’s air group suffered heavy attrition. But the balance of destruction favoured the Japanese, who had better planes than the Americans and handled them more effectively. Amazingly, however, Inoue abandoned the operation against Port Moresby and retired, conceding strategic success to the US Navy. Here, once again, was a manifestation of Japanese timidity: victory was within their grasp, but they failed to press their advantage. Never again would they enjoy such an opportunity to establish dominance of the Pacific.

In the course of the war, the US Navy would show itself the most impressive of its nation’s fighting services, but it faced a long, harsh learning process. Several early commanders were found wanting, because they were slow to grasp the principles of carrier operations, which would dominate the Pacific campaign. American fliers’ courage was never in doubt, but at the outset their performance lagged behind that of their enemies. At Pearl Harbor, albeit against an unprepared and static enemy, Japanese planes achieved the remarkable record of nineteen hits and detonations out of forty torpedo launches, a record no other navy matched. When US carrier planes attacked Tulagi anchorage on 3 May 1942 against slight opposition, twenty-two Douglas Devastator torpedo-bombers achieved just one hit. Attacking Shokaku two days later, twenty-one Devastators scored no hits at all. Most American torpedoes, the Japanese said later, were launched too far out, and ran so slowly that they were easily avoidable.

Among US naval aircraft, the Coral Sea battle showed that the Dauntless dive-bomber was alone up to its job, not least in having adequate endurance. The Devastator was ‘a real turkey’, in the words of a flier, further handicapped by high fuel consumption. Worst of all, Mk 13 aerial and Mk 14 sea-launched torpedoes were wildly unreliable, unlikely to explode even if they hit a target. A most un-American reluctance to learn from experience meant that this fault, afflicting submarine as much as air operations, was not fully corrected until 1943.

War at sea was statistically much less dangerous than ashore for all participants save such specialists as aviators and submariners. Conflict was impersonal: sailors seldom glimpsed the faces of their enemies. The fate of every ship’s crew was overwhelmingly at the mercy of its captain’s competence, judgement – and luck. Seamen of all nations suffered cramped living conditions and much boredom, but peril intervened only in spasms. Individuals were called upon to display fortitude and commitment, but seldom enjoyed the opportunity to choose whether or not to be brave. That was a privilege reserved for their commanders, who issued the orders determining the movements of ships and fleets. The overwhelming majority of sailors, performing technical functions aboard huge sea-going war machines, made only tiny, indirect personal contributions to killing their enemies.

Carrier operations represented the highest and most complex refinement of naval warfare. ‘The flight deck looked like a big war dance of different colors,’ wrote a sailor aboard Enterprise. ‘The ordnance gang wore red cloth helmets and a red T-shirt when they went about their work of loading machine-guns, fusing bombs, and hoisting torpedoes…Other specialties wore different colors. Brown for the plane captains – one attached to each plane – green for the hydraulic men who manned the arresting gear and the catapults, yellow for the landing signal officer and deck control people, purple for the oil and gas kings…Everything was “on the double” and took place with whirling propellers everywhere, waiting to mangle the unwary.’ The US Navy would refine carrier assault to a supreme art, but in 1942 it was still near the bottom of the curve: not only were its planes inferior to those of the Japanese, but commanders had not yet evolved the right mix of fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-carriers for each ‘flat-top’ – after the Coral Sea, captains deplored the inadequate proportion of Wildcats. US anti-aircraft gunnery was no more effective than that of the Royal Navy. Radar sets were short-sighted in comparison with those of the later war years. Damage control, which became an outstanding American skill, was poor.

The US Navy boasted a fine fighting tradition, but its 1942 crews were still dominated by men enlisted in peacetime, often because they could find nothing else to do. Naval airman Alvin Kiernan wrote:

Many of the sailors were there, as I was, because there were few jobs in Depression America…We would have denied that we were an underclass…There wasn’t such a thing in America, we thought – conveniently forgetting that blacks and Asians were allowed to serve in the navy only as officers’ cooks and mess attendants. Our teeth were terrible from Depression neglect, we had not always graduated from high school, none had gone to college, our complexions tended to acne, and we were for the most part foul-mouthed, and drunkenly rowdy when on liberty…I used to wonder why so many of us were skinny, bepimpled, sallow, short and hairy.

Cecil King, chief ship’s clerk on Hornet, recalled: ‘We had a small group of real no-goodniks. I mean these kids were not necessarily honest-to-God gangsters, but they were involved in anything that was seriously wrong on the ship – heavy gambling and extortion. One night one of them was thrown over the side.’ For most men, naval service required years of monotony and hard labour, interrupted by brief passages of violent action. A few, including King, actively enjoyed carrier life: ‘I just felt at home at sea. I felt like that’s what the Navy’s all about. Many times I would wander around the ship, particularly in the late afternoon, just enjoying being there. I would go over to the deck edge elevator and stand and watch the ocean going by. I feel like I’m probably one of the luckiest people in the entire world…for having been born in the year that I was, to be able to fight for my country in World War II; this whole era…is something that I feel real privileged for having gone through.’

The expansion of the US Navy’s officer corps made a dramatic and brilliant contribution to the service’s later success, and some learned to love the sea service and the responsibilities it conferred on them. Most ordinary sailors, however – especially as ships began to fill with wartime recruits – did their duty honourably enough, but found little to enjoy. Some found it all too much for them: a sailor on Hornet climbed out on the mast yardarm, and hung 160 feet over the sea trying to muster nerve to jump and kill himself until dissuaded by the chaplain and the ship’s doctor. He was sent to the US for psychiatric evaluation – and eventually returned to Hornet in time to share the ship’s sinking, the fate of which he had been so fearful.

Those who experienced the US Navy’s early Pacific battles saw much of failure, loss and defeat. The horrors of ships’ sinkings were often increased by fatal delays before survivors were located and rescued. The Pacific is a vast ocean, and many of those who fell into it, even from large warships, were never seen again. When the damaged light cruiser Juneau blew up after a magazine explosion on passage to the repair base at Espiritu Santu, gunner’s mate Allan Heyn was one of those who suddenly found himself struggling for his life: ‘There was oil very thick on the water, it was at least two inches thick, and all kinds of blueprints and documents floating around, roll after roll of toilet paper. I couldn’t see anybody. I thought: “Gee, am I the only one here”…Then I heard a man cry and I looked around it was this boatswain’s mate…He said he couldn’t swim and he had his whole leg torn off…I helped him on the raft…It was a very hard night because most of the fellows were wounded badly, and they were in agony. You couldn’t recognize each other unless you knew a man very well before the ship went down.’ After three days, their party had shrunk from 140 men to fifty; on the ninth day after Juneau’s loss, the ship’s ten remaining survivors were picked up by a destroyer and a Catalina flying boat. Sometimes, vessels vanished with the loss of every man aboard, as was almost always the case with submarines.

The Japanese began the war at sea with a corps of highly experienced seamen and aviators armed with the Long Lance torpedo, most effective weapon of its kind in the world. Their radar sets were poor, and many ships lacked them altogether. They lagged woefully in intelligence-gathering, but excelled at night operations, and in early gunnery duels often shot straighter than Americans. Their superb Zero fighters increased combat endurance by forgoing cockpit armour and self-sealing fuel tanks. The superiority of Japanese naval air in 1942 makes all the more astonishing the outcome of the next phase of the war in the Pacific.

Admiral Yamamoto strove with all the urgency that characterised his strategic vision to force a big engagement. Less than a month after the bungled Coral Sea action, he launched his strike against Midway atoll, committing 145 warships to an ambitious, complex operation intended to split US forces. A Japanese fleet would advance north against the Aleutians, while the main thrust was made at Midway. Nagumo’s four fleet carriers – Zuikaku and Shokaku were left behind after their Coral Sea mauling – would approach the island from the north-west, with Yamamoto’s fast battleships three hundred miles behind; a flotilla of transports, carrying 5,000 troops to execute the landing, would close from the south-west.

Yamamoto may have been a clever man and a sympathetic personality, but the epic clumsiness of the Midway plan emphasised his shortcomings. It required him to divide his strength; worse, it reflected characteristic Japanese hubris, by discounting even the possibility of American foreknowledge. As it was, Admiral Chester Nimitz, the US Navy’s Pacific Commander-in-Chief, knew the enemy was coming. By one of the war’s most brilliant feats of intelligence work, Commander Joseph Rochefort at Pearl Harbor used fragmentary Ultra decrypts to identify Midway as Nagumo’s objective. On 28 May the Japanese switched their naval codebooks, which thereafter defied Rochefort’s cryptographers for weeks. By miraculous luck, however, this happened just too late to frustrate the breakthrough that betrayed Yamamoto’s Midway plan.

Nimitz made a wonderfully bold call: to stake everything upon the accuracy of Rochefort’s interpretation. Japanese intelligence, always weak, believed that Yorktown had been sunk at the Coral Sea, and that the other two US carriers, Hornet and Enterprise, were far away in the Solomons. But heroic efforts by 1,400 dockyard workers at Pearl Harbor made Yorktown fit for sea, albeit with a makeshift air component. Nimitz was therefore able to deploy two task groups to cover Midway, one led by Fletcher – in overall command – and the other by Raymond Spruance. This would be a carrier action, with Nagumo’s flat-tops its objectives; the slow old American battleships were left in Californian harbours. The navy’s planes were recognised as the critical weapons.

Almost a century earlier, Herman Melville, America’s greatest novelist of the sea, wrote: ‘There is something in a naval engagement which radically distinguishes it from one on land. The ocean…has neither rivers, woods, banks, towns, nor mountains. In mild weather, it is one hammered plain. Stratagems, like those of disciplined armies, ambuscades – like those of Indians – are impossible. All is clear, open, fluent. The very element which sustains the combatants yields at the stroke of a feather…This simplicity renders a battle between two men-of-war…more akin to the Miltonic contests of archangels than to the comparatively squalid tussles of earth.’

In 1942, Melville’s lyrical vision of the sea remained recognisable to another century’s sailors, but two factors had transformed his image of naval battle. First, communication and interception made possible ‘ambuscades and stratagems’, such as that which took place at Midway – the location and pre-emption of the enemy before his figurative sails were sighted. Superior American radar conferred another important advantage over the Japanese. Meanwhile, the advent of air power meant that all was no longer ‘clear, open, fluent’: rival fleets became vulnerable to surprise while hundreds of miles apart. But exactitude of knowledge was still lacking. In a vast ocean, it remained hard to pinpoint ships, or even fleets. Rear-Admiral Frank Fletcher said: ‘After a battle is over, people talk a lot about how the decisions were methodically reached, but actually there’s always a hell of a lot of groping around.’ This had been vividly demonstrated by the Coral Sea engagement; despite Commander Rochefort’s magnificent achievement, uncertainty and chance also characterised Midway.

The engagement was fought only six months after Pearl Harbor, when the US Navy still had fewer carriers than the British, though they carried many more planes. The two American task groups were deployed too far apart to provide mutual support, or effectively to coordinate their air operations. On 3 June, the first skirmish took place: at 1400, nine land-based B-17 Flying Fortresses delivered an ineffectual attack on the Japanese amphibious force. Early that morning also, Japanese aircraft launched a heavy attack on the Aleutians. For tens of thousands of men on both sides, a tense night followed. The garrison of Midway prepared to sell their lives dearly, knowing the fate that had already befallen many other island defenders at Japanese hands. On the US carriers three hundred miles to the north-east, aircrew readied themselves to fight what they knew would be a critical action. One of them, Lt. Dick Crowell, said soberly as they broke up a late-night craps game on Yorktown: ‘The fate of the United States now rests in the hands of 240 pilots.’ Nimitz was satisfied that the scenario was unfolding exactly as he had anticipated. Yamamoto was troubled that the US Pacific fleet remained unlocated, but he remained oblivious that any carriers might close within range of Nagumo.

Before dawn next morning, ‘a warm, damp, rather hazy day’, American and Japanese pilots breakfasted. Yorktown’s men favoured ‘one-eyed sandwiches’ – an egg fried in a hole in toast. Nagumo’s fliers enjoyed rice, soybean soup, pickles and dried chestnuts before drinking a battle toast in hot sake. At 0430 seventy-two Japanese bombers and thirty-six fighters took off to attack Midway island. At 0545, a patrolling Catalina signalled the incoming attack, then spotted Nagumo’s carriers. Fletcher needed three hours’ steaming to close within attack range. Meanwhile, Midway-based Marine and army torpedo-bombers and bombers took off immediately, as did Wildcat and Buffalo fighters. The latter suffered terribly at the hands of Zeroes: all but three of twenty-seven were either shot down or so badly damaged that they never flew again. But the Japanese attackers, in their turn, lost 30 per cent of their strength.

The Battle of Midway

Nagumo’s bomber attack, at 0635, inflicted widespread damage but failed to knock out Midway’s airfields. Its leader signalled the fleet: ‘Second strike necessary.’ Thereafter, nothing went right for the Japanese admiral. His first mistake of the day had been to dispatch only a handful of reconnaissance aircraft to search for American warships; one seaplane, from the heavy cruiser Tone, was delayed taking off – and it was vectored to search the sector where Fletcher’s carriers were steaming. Thus, Nagumo was still ignorant of any naval air threat when he received the signal from his Midway planes. At 0715 he ordered ninety-three ‘Kate’ strike aircraft, ready with torpedoes on his decks, to be struck below and re-armed with high-explosive bombs to renew the attack on the island, meanwhile clearing the way for the returning Midway planes to land on.

Even as they did so, ships’ buglers sounded another air-raid alarm. Between 0755 and 0820, successive small waves of Midway-based US aircraft attacked Nagumo’s fleet. They had no fighter cover, and were ruthlessly destroyed by AA fire and Zeroes without achieving a single hit. The gunfire died away, the drone of the surviving attackers’ engines faded. Meanwhile, the first of Spruance’s torpedo planes and dive-bombers were already airborne, heading for the Japanese fleet from extreme range. Although Tone’s scout plane belatedly spotted the American ships, only at 0810 did its pilot report that they seemed to include a carrier. Among Nagumo’s staff, this news prompted a fierce argument about how to respond, which continued even as the last of the US land-based attacks was repulsed.

The only achievement of the strikes from Midway, purchased at shocking cost, was to impede flight operations aboard the Japanese carriers. Nagumo was hamstrung by the need to recover his attack force, short of fuel, before he could launch a strike against Fletcher’s fleet; meanwhile, he ordered the ‘Kates’ in the hangars once more to be armed with torpedoes. By far his wisest course, at this stage, would have been to turn away and open the range with the enemy, until he had reorganised his air groups and was ready to fight. As it was, however, with characteristic lack of initiative he held course. At 0918, the Japanese flight decks were still in chaos as aircraft completed refuelling, when picket destroyers signalled another warning, and began to make protective smoke. The first of Fletcher’s planes were closing fast, and Zeroes scrambled to meet them.

Before the American fly-off, Lt. Cmdr. John Waldron, a rough, tough, much-respected South Dakotan who led Torpedo Eight from Hornet, told his pilots that the coming battle ‘will be a historic and, I hope, a glorious event’. Wildcat squadron commander Jimmy Gray wrote: ‘All of us knew we were “on” in the world’s center ring.’ Lt. Cmdr. Eugene Lindsey, commanding Torpedo Six, had been badly injured only a few days earlier when he ditched his plane after making a botched landing; his face was so bruised that it was painful for him to wear goggles. But on the morning of the Midway strike he insisted on flying: ‘This is what I have been trained to do,’ he said stubbornly, before taking off to his death.

The American attackers approached the Japanese in successive waves. Jimmy Gray wrote: ‘Seeing the white feathers of ships’ wakes at high speed at the far edge of the overcast, and realising that there for the first time in plain sight were the Japanese who had been knocking hell out of us for seven months was a sensation not many men know in a lifetime.’ The twenty escorting Wildcats flew high, while the Devastators necessarily attacked low. Over the radio, crackling dispute about tactics between fighters and torpedo-carriers persisted even as they approached the enemy. The Wildcats maintained altitude, and anyway lacked endurance to linger over the enemy fleet. The consequence was that when fifty Japanese Zeroes fell on the Devastators, these suffered a massacre. The twelve planes of Torpedo 3 were flying in formation at 2,600 feet and still fifteen miles from their targets when they met the first Japanese. Slashing attacks persisted throughout their run-in. One of the few surviving American pilots, Wilhelm ‘Doc’ Esders, wrote: ‘When approximately one mile from the carrier our leader apparently expected to attack, his plane was hit and it crashed into the sea in flames…I saw only five planes drop their torpedoes.’ Esders’ own Devastator was hit, his radioman fatally wounded; the CO₂ fire-bottle in the cockpit exploded; flak shells burst below them, while the Zeroes kept firing. The crew was extraordinarily lucky that the enemy planes turned away after following them homewards for twenty miles.

The Devastators ploughed doggedly towards their targets at their best speed of a hundred knots, until each wave in turn was shot to pieces and plunged into the sea. A bomber gunner heard Waldron talking over the radio as he led his planes in: ‘Johnny One to Johnny Two…How’m I doing Dobbs?…Attack immediately…There’s two fighters in the water…My two wingmen are going in the water.’ Waldron himself was last seen attempting to escape from his flaming plane. After the first wave had attacked, the Zeroes’ group leader reported laconically: ‘All fifteen enemy torpedo-bombers shot down.’ Many of the next wave were destroyed while manoeuvring to achieve an attack angle as the Japanese carriers swung wildly to avoid them. A despairing American gunner whose weapon jammed fired his .45 automatic pistol at a pursuing Zero.

George Gay, who flew from the Hornet at the controls of a Devastator, had a reputation in his squadron as a Texas loudmouth, but proved its only survivor. Shot down in the sea with a bullet wound and two dead crewmen, he trod water all day, having heard many stories about the Japanese shooting downed aircrew. At nightfall, he cautiously inflated his dinghy and had the fantastic good fortune to be picked up next morning by a patrolling American amphibian.

On the flight decks of Nagumo’s carriers, the Japanese experienced an hour of acute tension as the Devastators approached through a storm of anti-aircraft fire. But most of the torpedoes were dropped beyond effective range, and Mk 13s ran so slowly that the Japanese ships had ample time to comb their tracks. ‘I was not aware or did not feel the torpedo drop,’ said a Devastator gunner afterwards, adding that this was probably because his pilot was trying to jink. ‘A few days later I asked him when he dropped. He said when he realized that we seemed to be the only TBD still flying and that we didn’t have a chance of carrying the torpedo to normal drop range. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to do and the flak was really bad, so I yelled into the intercom, “Let’s get the hell out of here!” It is possible that my yell helped him make his decision.’

Just after 1000, the attackers had shot their bolt, having achieved no hits. Of forty-one American torpedo-bombers which took off that day, only six returned, and fourteen of eighty-two aircrew survived. Most of the survivors’ planes were shot full of holes. Lloyd Childers, a wounded gunner, heard his pilot say, ‘We’re not going to make it.’ The Devastator reached the fleet, but was prevented from landing back on Yorktown by a gaping bomb crater in its flight deck. The pilot ditched safely in the sea alongside, and Childers patted his plane’s tail as it sank, in gratitude for getting him back. Many survivors, however, were enraged by the futility of their sacrifice, and embittered by the lack of protection from their own fighters. A Devastator gunner who landed back on Enterprise had to be forcibly restrained as he threw himself at a Wildcat pilot.

American fighters had few successes that day. One of them was achieved by Jimmy Thach, who went on to become one of the foremost naval aviation tacticians of the war. Thach said he lost his temper when he saw Japanese aircraft boring into his neighbour: ‘I was mad because here was this poor little wingman who’d never been in combat before, had had very little gunnery training, the first time aboard a carrier and a Zero was about to chew him to pieces…I decided to keep my fire going into him and he’s going to pull out, which he did, and he just missed me by a few feet; I saw flames coming out of the bottom of his airplane. This is like playing “chicken” with two automobiles on the highway headed for each other except we were both shooting as well.’

The Americans had suffered a shocking succession of disasters, which could easily have been fatal to the battle’s outcome. Instead, however, fortune changed with startling abruptness. Nagumo paid the price for his enforced failure to strike at Spruance’s task force even when he learned it was near at hand. Moreover, his Zeroes were at low level and running out of fuel when more American aircraft appeared high overhead, a few minutes after the last torpedo-bombers attacked.

The Dauntless dive-bomber was the only effective 1942 US naval aircraft; what followed changed the course of the Pacific war in the space of minutes. Dauntlesses fell on Nagumo’s carriers, wreaking havoc. ‘I saw this glint in the sun,’ said Jimmy Thach, ‘and it just looked like a beautiful silver waterfall, these dive-bombers coming down. It looked to me like almost every bomb hit.’ In reality, the first three bombs aimed at Kaga missed, but the fourth achieved a direct hit, setting off sympathetic detonations among munitions scattered across the carrier’s decks and in its hangars. Soryu and Akagi suffered similar fates. Wildcat pilot Tom Cheek was another fascinated spectator as the dive-bombers pulled out. ‘As I looked back to Akagi hell literally broke loose. First the orange-colored flash of a bomb burst appeared on the flight deck midway between the island structure and the stern. Then in rapid succession followed a bomb burst amidships, and the water founts of near-misses plumed up near the stern. Almost in unison Kaga’s flight deck erupted with bomb bursts and flames. My gaze remained on Akagi as an explosion at the midship water-line seemed to open the bowels of the ship in a rolling, greenish-yellow ball of flame…Soryu…too was being heavily hit. All three ships had lost their foaming white bow waves and appeared to be losing way. I circled slowly to the right, awe-struck.’

Equally fascinated – and appalled – was Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, Japanese hero of the Pearl Harbor strike, now an impotent spectator on the deck of Akagi: ‘I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the midship elevator…Deck plates buckled in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up belching livid flames and jet-black smoke. Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks.’

The dive-bomber attack sank two Japanese carriers immediately, and the third flaming hulk was scuttled that evening. It was an extraordinary achievement, not least because two squadrons of dive-bombers and their Wildcat escort were sent on the wrong course and failed to engage. All ten pilots in Hornet’s Wildcat squadron Fighting Eight ran out of fuel and splashed into the sea without sighting an enemy; the ship’s thirty-five Dauntlesses landed on Midway, having missed the battle.

The Japanese were enraged by the loss of their carriers, and vented their spleen on every American within reach. Wesley Osmus, a twenty-three-year-old torpedo-bomber pilot from Chicago, was spotted in the sea by a destroyer lookout, retrieved from the water and interrogated on the bridge by an emotional officer waving a sword. Towards sunset the Japanese, losing interest in their captive, took Osmus to the fantail of the ship and set about him with a fire-axe. He was slow to die, clinging to the rail until his fingers were smashed and he fell away into the sea. The Imperial Japanese Navy was as profoundly and institutionally brutalised as Hirohito’s army.

At mid-morning Nagumo’s sole surviving carrier, Hiryu, at last launched its own attack, which fell on Fletcher’s Yorktown. American radar detected the incoming dive-bombers fifty miles out, and fighters began to scramble. Eleven ‘Val’ bombers and three Zeros were shot down by Wildcats, two more ‘Vals’ by anti-aircraft fire; three Japanese bombs hit Yorktown, but energetic damage control enabled the carrier to continue landing its dive-bombers, even as the crew fought huge fires. Admiral Fletcher transferred his flag to the cruiser Astoria, and surrendered overall command to Spruance.

At 1430, a wave of Japanese torpedo-bombers from Hiryu closed on Yorktown, which again flew off fighters. Ensign Milton Tootle had just cleared the deck of the carrier in his Wildcat when the attackers closed in. Tootle turned through the American anti-aircraft barrage, shot down an enemy plane, then was himself downed by a Zero after a flight lasting barely sixty seconds; he was lucky enough to be rescued from the water. Several attackers were shot down, but four launched their torpedoes, two of which struck the carrier. The ocean flooded in, and the ship took on a heavy list. Just before 1500, the captain ordered Yorktown abandoned. The decision was possibly premature, and the ship might have been saved, but in 1942 less was known about damage control than the US Navy had learned two years later. Destroyers rescued the entire crew, save those who had perished during the attacks.

At 1530, Spruance launched another strike of his own, by twenty-seven dive-bombers, including ten Yorktown planes which had landed on his flat-tops while their own ship was being attacked. Just before 1700, these reached Hiryu while its crew were eating riceballs in their messdecks. The ship had sixteen aircraft left, ten of them fighters, but only a reconnaissance plane was airborne, and the Japanese now lacked radar to warn of the Americans’ coming. Four bombs struck the carrier, starting huge fires. Little Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, the senior officer aboard, mounted a biscuit box to deliver a farewell address to the crew. Then he and the captain disappeared to their cabins to commit ritual suicide, while the remaining seamen were taken off. The stricken ship was scuttled with torpedoes: four of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor were now at the bottom of the Pacific. On the American side, Hornet’s ill-fortune persisted when a pilot, returning wounded, accidentally nudged his gun button as he bumped down heavily onto the flight deck. A burst of fire killed five men on the superstructure. The returning aircrew were shocked by their losses, but in Jimmy Gray’s words, ‘We were too tired and too busy to do more than feel the pain of an aching heart.’

The American sacrifice had been heavy, but victory was the reward. Admiral Nagumo opted for withdrawal, only to have his order countermanded by Yamamoto, who demanded a night surface attack on the Americans. This was frustrated when Spruance turned away, recognising that his fleet had accomplished everything possible. The disengagement was finely judged: Yamamoto’s battleships, of which the Americans knew nothing, were closing fast from the north. Spruance had achieved an overwhelming balance of advantage. His foremost priority was to maintain this, protecting his two surviving carriers. Yamamoto acknowledged failure, and ordered a Japanese retreat. Spruance again turned and followed, launching a further air strike which sank one heavy cruiser and crippled another. This was almost the end of the battle, save that on 7 June a Japanese submarine met the burnt-out Yorktown under tow, and dispatched her to the bottom. This blow was acceptable, however, set against the massive Japanese losses.

Both Nimitz and Spruance had displayed consummate judgement, contrasted with Yamamoto’s and Nagumo’s errors, even though it was Fletcher, and not Spruance, who made the important decision to launch the second strike that caught Hiryu. The courage and skill of America’s dive-bomber pilots overbore every other disappointment and failure. The US Navy had achieved a triumph. Nimitz, with characteristic graciousness, sent his car to bring Commander Rochefort to a celebration party at Pearl Harbor. Before his assembled staff, the Commander-in-Chief said: ‘This officer deserves a major share of the credit for the victory at Midway.’ Luck, which favoured the Japanese in the war’s first months, turned dramatically in favour of the Americans during the decisive naval battle of the Pacific war. But this does not diminish the achievement of Nimitz and his subordinates.

The Japanese fleet remained a formidable fighting force: in the months that followed, it inflicted some severe local reverses on the Americans in the Pacific. But the US Navy had displayed the highest qualities at a critical moment. Japanese industrial weakness made it hard to replace the losses of Midway. One of the cardinal misjudgements of the Axis war effort was failure to sustain a flow of trained pilots to replace casualties. The Americans, by contrast, soon began to deploy thousands of excellently trained aircrew, flying the superb new Hellcat fighter. Nimitz remained short of carriers until well into 1943, but thereafter America’s building programme delivered an awesome array of new warships. The pattern of the Pacific war was set, wherein the critical naval actions were fought between fleets whose major surface elements seldom engaged each other. Carrier-borne aircraft had shown themselves the decisive weapons, and the US would soon employ these more effectively and in much larger numbers than any other nation in the world. Marc Mitscher, captain of the Hornet, feared that his career was finished, so poorly had his ship’s air group performed at Midway; it is widely believed that he falsified the log record of his squadrons’ designated attack course, to conceal his own blunder, which kept them out of the battle. Nimitz and Spruance, together with the aircrew of Yorktown and Enterprise, were the heroes of Midway, but Mitscher went on to become the supreme American carrier leader of the war.

3 GUADALCANAL AND NEW GUINEA

The next phase of the Pacific campaign was driven by expediency and characterised by improvisation. The US, committed to ‘Germany first’, planned to dispatch most of its available troop strength to fight in North Africa. MacArthur, in Australia, lacked men to launch the assault on Rabaul which he favoured. Instead, Australian troops, slowly reinforced by Americans, were committed to frustrate Japanese designs on the vast jungle island of Papua New Guinea. Separated from the northern tip of Australia by only two hundred miles of sea, this became the scene of one of the grimmest struggles of the war.

Meanwhile, six hundred miles eastwards in the Solomons, Japanese who had occupied Tulagi island moved on to neighbouring Guadalcanal, where they began to construct an airfield. If they were allowed to complete and exploit this, their planes could dominate the region. An abrupt American decision was made to pre-empt them, by landing 1st Marine Division. Such a stroke fulfilled the US Navy’s driving desire, promoted by Admiral Ernest King in Washington, to engage the enemy wherever opportunity allowed. The Marines were staging through Wellington, New Zealand, en route to an undecided objective. They found themselves ordered to restow their ships for an immediate assault landing; when the local dock labour force refused to work in prevailing heavy rain, Marines did the job themselves. Then, in the first days of August 1942, they sailed for Guadalcanal. In their innocence, many supposed that they were destined to wage war in a tropical paradise.

On the 7th, 19,000 Americans landed first on the outlying islands, then on Guadalcanal proper, in the face of slight opposition following a heavy naval bombardment. ‘In the dirty dawn…there were only a few fires flickering, like the city dumps, to light our path to history,’ wrote Marine Robert Leckie. Australian coastwatcher Captain Martin Clements watched exultantly from his jungle hideout as the Americans came ashore, writing in his diary, ‘Wizard!!! – Caloo, Callay, Oh! What a day!’ On the beach, men vastly relieved to find themselves alive split coconuts and gorged on the milk, heedless of implausible warnings that the Japanese might have poisoned them. Then they began to march inland, soon parched and sweating prodigiously. The Japanese, following another huge intelligence failure, had not anticipated the Americans’ arrival. In what would prove a critical action of the Pacific war, the landing force quickly seized the airstrip, christened Henderson Field in honour of a Marine pilot hero of Midway. Some men liberated caches of enemy supplies, including sake which allowed them to become gloriously drunk during the nights that followed. Thus ended the last easy part; what followed became one of the most desperate campaigns of the Far Eastern war, characterised by small but bloody battles ashore, repeated clashes of warships afloat.

Two days after the initial assault, at sea off Guadalcanal the US Navy endured a humiliation. Admiral Fletcher had signalled Nimitz that he believed local Japanese air power presented an unacceptable threat to his three aircraft carriers, and recommended their withdrawal. Without waiting for approval, he set course north-eastwards. Rear-Admiral Kelly Turner, commanding the transports inshore, made plain his belief that the carrier commander had deserted his post of duty, and Fletcher’s reputation suffered lasting harm. But modern historians, Richard Frank notable among them, believe that Fletcher made an entirely correct decision to regard the safety of his carriers as the foremost strategic priority.

In the early hours of the following morning, 9 August, Allied naval forces suffered a surprise which revealed both command incompetence and a fatal paucity of night-fighting skills. Japanese Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa led a heavy cruiser squadron into an attack on the offshore anchorage, which was protected by one Australian and four American heavy cruisers, together with five destroyers. The enemy ships had been spotted the previous afternoon by an RAAF Hudson, but its sighting report was not picked up at Fall River on New Guinea because the radio station was shut down during an air raid. Even when the Hudson landed, there was an inexcusable delay of several hours before word was passed to the warships at sea.

The Americans were deployed off Savo island in anticipation of a Japanese strike, but in the darkness Mikawa’s cruiser column steamed undetected through the western destroyer radar picket line. Within three minutes of the Americans belatedly spotting Chokai, the leading Japanese ship, at 0143 the Australian cruiser Canberra was struck by at least twenty-four shells which detonated, in the words of a survivor, with ‘a terrific orange-greenish flash’. Every man in the boiler rooms was killed and all power lost; Canberra was unable to fire a shot during the subsequent hours before being abandoned. There is some contested evidence that the cruiser was also hit by a torpedo from the American destroyer Bagley, aiming at the Japanese.

The destroyer Paterson found itself in a perfect firing position, but amid the deafening concussion of its guns, the ship’s torpedo officer failed to hear his captain’s order to trigger the tubes. At 0147 two Japanese torpedoes hit Chicago. Only one of these exploded, in the bow, but it crippled the ship’s fire-control system. Astoria fired thirteen salvoes without effect because she too failed to see Mikawa’s ships, and her gunnery radar was defective. The cruiser was wrecked by Japanese gunfire at a range of three miles, and abandoned next day with heavy loss of life.

Vincennes was likewise devastated, and already on fire when her own armament began to shoot. Her commanding officer, Captain Frederick Riefkohl, had no notion the enemy was attacking, and supposed himself a victim of friendly fire. As Mikawa’s huge searchlights illuminated the American cruiser, Riefkohl broadcast angrily over his voice radio, demanding that they should be switched off. Thereafter, he concentrated on trying to save his ship, hit by three torpedoes and seventy-four shells which reduced it to a flaming hulk. Only belatedly did the American captain acknowledge that the Japanese were responsible, and order destroyers to attack them – without success. Quincy fired starshells which proved ineffective because they burst above low cloud, while a Japanese seaplane dropped illuminant flares beyond the American squadron, silhouetting its ships for Mikawa’s gunnery directors. The hapless Quincy’s captain was killed a few moments after ordering an attempt to beach the ship, which sank with the loss of 370 officers and men. Chokai suffered only one hit, in its staff chartroom.

At 0216, the Japanese ceased fire, having achieved a crushing victory inside half an hour. There was a heated debate on the bridge of the flagship about whether to press on and attack the now defenceless American transports beyond, off Guadalcanal. Mikawa decided that it was too late to regroup his squadron, make such an assault, then withdraw before daylight out of range of American carrier aircraft, which he wrongly supposed were at hand. Amid a sky dancing with lightning in a tropical rainstorm, the Japanese turned for home. Chaos among the stricken Allied shipping persisted to the end: at dawn, an American destroyer fired 106 5″ shells at a cruiser before discovering that its target was the crippled Canberra. When it was decided that the Australian warship must be sunk, US destroyers fired a further 370 rounds into the hulk before being obliged to use torpedoes to end its agony. The only consolation for the Allies was that an American submarine torpedoed and sank Kako, one of Mikawa’s heavy cruisers, during its withdrawal after the action.

In the Guadalcanal anchorage, Admiral Turner continued offloading supplies for the Marines until noon on the 9th, when to the deep dismay of the men ashore he removed his transports until more air cover became available. Reviewing the disaster off Savo, he wrote: ‘The navy was still obsessed with a strong feeling of technical and mental superiority over the enemy. In spite of ample evidence as to enemy capabilities, most of our officers and men despised the enemy and felt themselves sure victors in all encounters under any circumstances…The net result of all of this was a fatal lethargy of mind…We were not mentally ready for hard battle. I believe that this psychological factor as a cause of our defeat was even more important than the element of surprise.’ The US Navy learned its lessons: never again in the war did it suffer such a severe humiliation. And the critical reality, which soon dawned on the Japanese, was that yet again one of their admirals had allowed caution to deprive him of a chance to convert success into a decisive strategic achievement. The lost Allied cruisers could be replaced; the landing force was able to hold on at Henderson Field because its supporting amphibious shipping remained unscathed, and soon returned to Lunga Bay. Savo would be redeemed.

The Japanese were slow to grasp the importance of the American commitment to Guadalcanal. They drip-fed a trickle of reinforcements to the island, who were thrown into repeated frontal attacks, each one insufficiently powerful to overwhelm the precarious Marine perimeter. The Americans holding Henderson Field and the surrounding tropical rainforests found themselves locked in an epic ordeal. Visibility amidst an almost impenetrable tangle of vines and ferns, giant hardwoods and creepers, was seldom more than a few yards. Even when gunfire was temporarily stilled, leeches, wasps, giant ants and malarial mosquitoes inflicted their own miseries. The intense humidity made fungal and skin infections endemic. Marines encountering the jungle for the first time were alarmed by its constant noises, especially those of the night. ‘Whether these were birds squawking…or some strange reptiles or frogs, I don’t know,’ said one man, ‘but we were terrified by any noise because we’d been told that the Japanese signaled each other in the jungle by imitating bird calls.’

Amid incessant rainstorms, they bivouacked in mud, which became a curse of the campaign, endured short rations and dysentery. Nervous men not infrequently shot each other. There was a steady stream of combat fatigue evacuees. A platoon commander who lost four men to hysteria, 15 per cent of his strength, reckoned this was typical. Experience of Japanese barbarism bred matching American savagery. Marine Ore Marion described a scene after a bitter night action: ‘At daybreak a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, whack off three Jap heads and jam them on poles facing the “Jap side” of the river.’ The regimental commander remonstrated fiercely that this was the conduct of animals. ‘A dirty, stinking young kid says, “That’s right Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals, what the fuck do you expect?”’

Some of the fiercest fighting took place on the Tenaru river, where both sides suffered heavily as the Japanese attacked again and again with suicidal courage and tactical clumsiness. As a green Japanese flare burst overhead, Robert Leckie described the scene: ‘Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness…booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hell…The plop of the outgoing mortar with the crunch of its fall, the clatter of the machine guns and the lighter, faster rasp of the Browning automatic rifles, the hammering of fifty-caliber machine-guns, the crash of 75-millimetre anti-tank guns firing point-blank canister at the enemy – each of these conveys a definite message to the understanding ear.’ After hours of this, dawn revealed heaped enemy bodies and a few survivors in flight. But as night succeeded night of such clashes and counterattacks, the strain told on the Americans.

‘Morale was very bad,’ said Marine Lt. Paul Moore, who won a Navy Cross. ‘But there was something about Marines – once we were ordered to attack we decided we damn well were going to do it.’ Swimming the Matanikau river with his platoon, the young officer glanced up and saw mortar bombs and grenades arching through the air above him, ‘as if it were raining, with bullets striking all around us’. Moore, a few months out of Yale, was shot as he threw a grenade to knock out a Japanese machinegun. The bullet hit him in the chest: ‘The air was going in and out of a hole in my lungs. I thought I was dead, going to die right then. I wasn’t breathing through my mouth, but through this hole. I felt like a balloon going in and out, going pshhhh. I was thinking to myself: now I’m going to die. And first of all it’s rather absurd for me, considering where I came from, my early expectations of a comfortable life and all the rest, for me to be dying on a jungle island in combat as a Marine. That’s not me…Shortly, a wonderful corpsman crawled up and gave me a shot of morphine, and then a couple of other people got a stretcher and started evacuating me.’

Guadalcanal set the pattern for the Pacific campaign, a three-year contest for a succession of harbours and airfields, refuges for ships and platforms for planes amid an otherwise featureless watery vastness. The Japanese were never able to reverse their early mistakes, rooted in an underestimate of American strength and will. Each island action was tiny in scale by the standards of the European theatre: at the peak of the Guadalcanal battle, no more than 65,000 Americans and Japanese were engaged with each other ashore, while 40,000 more men served on warships and transports at sea. But the intensity of the struggle, and the conditions in which the combatants were obliged to subsist amid swamps, rain, heat, disease, insects, crocodiles, snakes and short rations, caused the Pacific battlefield experience to become one of the worst of the war. Island fighting evolved into a bizarre and terrible routine: ‘Everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch,’ Corporal James Jones, one of the army men who eventually landed on Guadalcanal to reinforce the Marines, observed with fascinated revulsion.

Like a business. Like a regular business. And yet at the bottom of it was blood: blood, mutilation and death…The beach was literally alive with men, all moving somewhere, and seeming to undulate with a life of its own under their mass as beaches sometimes appear to do when invaded by armies of fiddler crabs. Lines, strings and streams of men crossed and recrossed it with hot-footed and apparently unregulated alacrity. They were in all stages of dress and undress…They wore all sorts of fantastic headgear, issue, civilian, and homemade, so that one might see a man working in the water totally naked with nothing adorning his person except his identity tags.

Between August and October, the Japanese on Guadalcanal outnumbered their enemies, but thereafter American reinforcements and Japanese casualties progressively shifted the balance against the latter. Repeated headlong assaults failed against a stubborn defence: they were unable to wrest control of Henderson Field from the Americans, who had superior artillery and air support. This was small consolation to the defenders, however, when the Japanese navy intervened. Seldom in the course of the war did Allied troops have to endure naval bombardments of the kind the Royal Navy and US Navy routinely administered to the Axis, but the Americans on Guadalcanal suffered severely from the guns of Japanese warships. Hour after hour during four nights in October, enemy heavy ships delivered some nine hundred rounds of 14″ fire, followed by 2,000 rounds from heavy cruisers. ‘[It] was the most tremendous thing I’ve been through in all my life,’ said a Marine afterwards. ‘There was one big bunker near our galley…a shell dropped right in the middle of it and practically everybody in the hole was killed. We tried to dig the men out but we saw it wasn’t any use.’ A correspondent wrote: ‘It is almost beyond belief that we are still here, still alive, still waiting and still ready.’ Many aircraft on Henderson Field were wrecked; the strip was rendered unserviceable for a week.

The Japanese were belatedly growing to understand the importance of the battle as a test of wills: ‘We must be aware,’ wrote an officer at Imperial General Headquarters, ‘of the possibility that the struggle for Guadalcanal…may develop into the decisive struggle between America and Japan.’ To the defenders, however, it sometimes seemed that they were a forgotten little army. ‘It was so lonely,’ wrote Robert Leckie. ‘… In an almost mawkish sense, we had gotten hold of the notion that we were orphans. No one cared, we thought. All of America’s millions doing the same things each day: going to movies, getting married, attending college commencements, sales meetings, café fires, newspaper drives against vivisection, political oratory, Broadway hits and Broadway flops, horrible revelations in high places and murders in tenements making tabloid headlines, vandalism in cemeteries and celebrities getting religion; all of the same, all, all, all, the changeless, daily America – all of this was going on without a single thought for us.’

Yet the myth of the invincibility of the Japanese army was shattered on this island, just sixty miles by thirty, where the US Marine Corps, which expanded from its pre-war strength of 28,000 to an eventual 485,000 men, first staked a claim to be considered the outstanding American ground force of the war. The Japanese, by contrast, laid bare their limitations, especially a shortage of competent commanders. Even during Japan’s victory season, while Yamashita conducted operations in Malaya with verve and skill, the campaigns in Burma and the Philippines suggested that his peers lacked initiative. When defending a position, their ethic of absolute conformity to orders had its uses; but in attack, commanders often acted unimaginatively. Man for man, the Japanese soldier was more aggressive and conditioned to hardship than his Allied counterpart: British Gen. Bill Slim characterised the enemy condescendingly as ‘the greatest fighting insect in the world’. Until 1945, Hirohito’s men displayed exceptional night-fighting skills. Collectively, however, the Japanese army had nothing like the combat power of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army – or the US Marine Corps.

It was a reflection of the fantastic Japanese capacity for self-delusion that, after their first stunning wave of conquests, their army commanders proposed establishing small garrisons to hold their island bases, while redeploying most troops to China – which they regarded as their nation’s main theatre of war. Short of trained manpower, they had scraped the barrel for forces to conduct the South-East Asia and Pacific island offensives; the long China campaign had weakened and demoralised the army even before Pearl Harbor took place. Thereafter, Japan’s generals were obliged to find soldiers from a shrinking pool, then dispatch them into battle with barely three months’ training. Japanese strategy had been rooted in a conviction that the United States would treat for peace after a brisk battlefield drubbing. When this hope was disappointed, the army spent the rest of the war struggling to defend Nippon’s overblown empire with inadequate means and inferior technology. The important reality of the Pacific war was that the Americans and Australians eventually prevailed on every island they assaulted. Only in Burma and China did the Japanese army maintain dominance until the last phase of the war.

Throughout the campaign on Guadalcanal, an equally relentless and bloody struggle was conducted at sea. The Savo battle was only the first of a series of dramatic naval encounters, almost all precipitated by Japanese attempts to reinforce and supply their troops ashore, and to impede the matching American build-up. Destroyers of the ‘Tokyo Express’ sought to run men and stores by night through ‘the Slot’, the narrow approach to Guadalcanal. Australian coastwatchers manning radios in jungle hideouts on Japanese-held islands played a critical role in alerting the air force to enemy shipping movements. Meanwhile in deeper waters offshore, opposing squadrons of carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers manoeuvred for advantage like boxers circling each other in darkness in a giant ring. The challenge was almost always to locate the enemy, then to fire first. Attrition was awesome: the 24 August Battle of the East Solomons cost the Japanese a carrier and heavy aircraft losses in exchange for damage to the Enterprise; a week later, the carrier Saratoga suffered such severe torpedo damage that it was obliged to quit the theatre for an American dockyard. The Americans inflicted heavy losses on the enemy off Cape Esperance on the night of 11–12 September, but on the 15th Japanese submarines sank the carrier Wasp and damaged the new battleship North Carolina.

Vice-Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, who assumed command of regional naval operations on 18 October, found himself committed to some of the heaviest fleet actions of the war. At Santa Cruz on 26 October, the Japanese lost over a hundred aircraft and the Americans seventy-four, more than the rival forces on any day of the Battle of Britain. Destruction of the carrier Hornet left the Americans for some weeks solely dependent on the damaged Enterprise for naval air operations. On the night of 12 November Vice-Admiral Hiroake Abe, leading a squadron dominated by two battleships to bombard the Americans on Guadalcanal, met an American cruiser force. Though he inflicted heavy damage, sinking six ships for the loss of three, with familiar caution he chose to retreat after a twenty-four-minute action, only to lose one of his battleships to American aircraft next morning.

Two days later, Marine pilots of the ‘Cactus Air Force’, as the Henderson Field squadrons were known, caught a Japanese troop convoy en route to Guadalcanal and almost annihilated it, sinking seven transports and a cruiser, and damaging three more cruisers. That night, there was a dramatic clash between American and Japanese capital ships in which Admiral ‘Ching’ Lee’s Washington landed nine 16″ salvoes on the battleship Kirishima, which foundered soon after, an acceptable exchange for damage to the US Navy’s battleship South Dakota. Only remnants of the Japanese landing force stumbled ashore at dawn, shorn of their heavy equipment, from the last four beached transports of the annihilated convoy. Off Tassarfonga Point on the night of 30 November, five American cruisers attacking eight Japanese destroyers on a supply run suffered one cruiser sunk and three more damaged by torpedoes. The Japanese lost only a single destroyer.

These were epic encounters, reflecting both sides’ massive commitment of surface forces – and losses: in the course of the Solomons campaign, around fifty major Japanese and US warships were sunk. The men who fought became grimly familiar with long, tense waits, often in darkness, while sweat-soaked radar operators peered into their screens for a first glimpse of the enemy. Thereafter, many sailors learned the terror of finding their ships suddenly caught in the dazzling glare of enemy searchlights, presaging a storm of shell. They witnessed the chaos of repeated encounters in which ships exchanged gunfire and torpedoes at close range, causing ordered decks, turrets, superstructures, machinery spaces to be transformed within seconds into flaming tangles of twisted steel.

They saw sailors leap in scores and hundreds from sinking vessels. Some were saved, many were not: when the cruiser Juneau blew up, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, lost five sons. Pilots often took off from heaving flight decks knowing that perhaps a hundred miles away, their enemy counterparts were doing the same. Thus, they were never assured that when they returned from a mission they would find a flight deck intact to land on. Only the Americans’ possession of Henderson Field enabled them to deploy sufficient airpower to compensate for their depleted carrier force. The men who fought at sea and in the air off Guadalcanal in the latter months of 1942 experienced a sustained intensity of naval surface warfare unmatched at any other period of the struggle.

The Americans prevailed. After the battles of November, despite his squadrons’ successes Admiral Yamamoto concluded that Japan’s Combined Fleet could no longer endure such attrition. He informed the Imperial Army that his ships must withdraw support from the land force on Guadalcanal. It was a critical victory for the US Navy, and was hailed back home as a personal triumph for ‘Bull’ Halsey. The achievement of the American shore contingent was to hold out and defend its perimeter through months of desperate assaults. In December, some of the exhausted Marines were at last relieved by US Army formations. The Japanese were reduced to supplying their shrinking ground force by submarine. At the end of January 1943, after an American offensive had driven them back into a narrow western perimeter, 10,652 Japanese survivors were evacuated by night in destroyers.

To take and hold Guadalcanal, the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps lost 3,100 killed, a small price for a critical achievement. The Japanese suffered 29,900 ground, naval and air casualties, most of them fatal, including 9,000 men killed by tropical diseases, a reflection of their pitifully inadequate medical services. Every element of the American forces shared undoubted glory. The ‘Cactus Air Force’, infantry manning the perimeter, warship crews afloat, displayed a resolve the Japanese had not believed Americans to possess. The US Navy’s heavy losses were soon replaced, as those of the Japanese were not. For the rest of the war, the performance of Admiral Yamamoto’s squadrons progressively deteriorated, while the US Pacific Fleet grew in proficiency as well as might. In the latter months of 1942, American aircrew noted a rapid decline in the skill and resolve of enemy pilots. A Japanese staff officer asserted bleakly that the battle for Guadalcanal had been ‘the fork in the road which leads to victory’. Like Yamamoto, he knew that his nation was thereafter marching with ever-quickening step towards defeat.

Even as the Marines were fighting on Guadalcanal, the most protracted land campaign of the Far Eastern war was unfolding on Papua New Guinea – after Greenland, the largest island in the world. The Japanese began establishing small forces on the eastern coast in March 1942, with the intention of seizing Port Moresby, capital of Australian-ruled Papua, two hundred miles distant on the south-west shore. Initially the Japanese intended an amphibious descent on Moresby, but this was frustrated by the Coral Sea actions. American success at Midway a month later denied the Japanese any prospect of a swift capture of New Guinea through seaborne landings. Tokyo’s local commander, Col. Tsuji, made a personal decision instead to secure the island the hard way, by an overland advance, and forged an order supposedly from Imperial headquarters to authorise his operation. MacArthur, Allied Commander-in-Chief for the South-West Pacific, deployed his limited strength to frustrate this.

Australian units began moving towards Papua’s north coast in July 1942, but the Japanese secured footholds there first, and began to build up forces for an advance over the Owen Stanley mountain range to Port Moresby. The ensuing battles along its only practicable passage, the Kokoda Trail, were small in scale, but a dreadful experience for every participant. Amid dense rainforest, men struggled for footholds, scrambling through deep mud on near-vertical tracks, bent under crippling weights of equipment and supplies; rations arrived erratically and rain almost daily; disease and insects intensified misery.

‘I have seen men standing knee-deep in the mud of a narrow mountain track, looking with complete despair at yet another seemingly unsurmountable ridge,’ an Australian officer wrote to his former school headmaster. ‘Ridge after ridge, ridge after ridge, heart-breaking, hopeless, futile country.’ The need to manpack all supplies and ammunition rendered the Kokoda Trail campaign a colossal undertaking: every soldier bore sixty pounds, some a hundred. ‘What a hell of a load to lump uphill all the way through mud and slush,’ wrote Australian corporal Jack Craig. ‘Some of us lose our footing and finish up flat out. One feels like just lying there for ever. I don’t think I have been so exhausted in all my life.’ Many men suffered agonies from bleeding haemorrhoids as well as more deadly tropical diseases.

As for the Japanese, an Australian shrugged that ‘This is not murder, killing such repulsive-looking animals.’ But one of his comrades, detailed by an officer to finish off a hideously wounded enemy soldier, wrote afterwards: ‘Then came the beginning of some of the terrible things that happen in combat…I have lived to this day with those terrified eyes staring at me.’ A young chaplain wrote from the rear areas of the Papuan front:

I do not believe there has ever been a campaign when men have suffered hardship, privation and incredible difficulties as in this one. To see these men arrive here wounded and ill from terrible tropical diseases, absolutely exhausted, clothes in tatters and filthy, long matted hair and beards, without a wash for days, having lain in mud and slush, fighting a desperate cruel foe they could not see, emaciated through having been weeks in the jungle, wracked with malaria and prostrated by scrub typhus, has made me feel that nothing is too good for them…I have seen so much suffering and sorrow here that more than ever I have realised the tragedy of war and the heroism of our men.

Observations such as this came from the heart, and were characteristic of a witness who, in the nature of things, could make no comparison with the plight of combatants fighting in Russia, the central Pacific, Burma – the other notably dreadful theatres of war. Conflict in a hostile natural environment, where amenities and comforts were wholly absent, imposed greater miseries than fighting in North Africa or north-west Europe. But the experience of combat for months on end, prey to fear, chronic exhaustion and discomfort, loss of comrades, separation from domestic life and loved ones, bore down upon every front-line fighter, wherever he was. Many, especially in the Pacific theatre, deluded themselves that their enemies found the experience more acceptable. Allied troops believed the Japanese to be natural jungle warriors in a way they themselves were not. Yet many of Hirohito’s soldiers used language to describe their experiences and sufferings little different from that employed by their Australian, British and American foes.

The Japanese repulsed the Australians on the Kokoda Trail, then harassed them relentlessly as they retreated with ambushes and outflanking movements. Many stragglers died: ‘Confusion was the keynote,’ wrote Sergeant Clive Edwards. ‘No one knew exactly what was happening, but when the sounds of battle came from in front we were told that the others were trying to fight their way through…It was pitiful – the rain was coming down, and there was a long string of dog-tired men straining the last nerve to get wounded men down and yet save their own lives too. Bewilderment…showed on every face and as the long line faltered and halted those at the back became affected and sent messages…to “Keep moving, the Jap is on us.”’ The Australians were eventually pushed back to within a few miles of Port Moresby.

A new threat to the Allied position in Papua was fortunately preempted. Ultra decrypts revealed a Japanese plan to land at Milne Bay, on the south-eastern tip of the island. An Australian brigade was hastily shipped there and deployed. When the Japanese landed on the night of 25 August, they met fierce resistance, and on 4 September their survivors were evacuated. But the situation on the Port Moresby front remained critical. MacArthur displayed a contempt for the Australian showing which reflected his ignorance of conditions on the Kokoda Trail. The Japanese battered the Allied perimeter relentlessly, and a disaster beckoned. This was averted chiefly by air power: USAAF bombing of the enemy’s over-extended supply line created a crisis for the attackers which worsened when some troops were diverted from New Guinea to Guadalcanal.

The local Japanese commander was ordered to pull back to the north shore of Papua. The Australians found themselves once more struggling up the Kokoda Trail and across the Owen Stanleys, this time pressing a retreating enemy in conditions no less appalling than during the earlier march. ‘Our troops are fighting in the cold mists of an altitude of 6,700 feet,’ wrote Australian correspondent George Johnston, ‘fighting viciously because they have only a mile or two to go before they reach the peak of the pass and will be able to attack downhill. This means a lot to troops who have climbed every inch of that agonizing track, who have buried so many of their cobbers, and who have seen so many more going back weak with sickness or mauled by the mortar bombs and the bullets and grenades of the enemy, men gone from their ranks simply to win back a few hundred yards of this wild, unfriendly and utterly untamed mountain…The men are bearded to the eyes. Their uniforms are hotch-potches of anything that fits or is warm or affords some protection from the insects…In the green half-light, amid the stink of rotten mud and rotting corpses, with the long line of green-clad Australians climbing wearily along the tunnel of the track, you have a noisome, unforgettable picture of the awful horror of this jungle war.’

In November, MacArthur launched coastal landings by two US regiments, to take Buna. The green Americans, shocked by their first encounter with the combat environment of Papua, performed poorly. Meanwhile, the Australians were exhausted by their efforts on the Kokoda Trail. Thousands of soldiers on both sides were weakened by malaria. But Buna was finally taken at the beginning of January 1943, and residual enemy forces in the area were mopped up three weeks later. The Japanese had lost almost two-thirds of their 20,000 men committed, while 2,165 Australians and 930 Americans died. Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger, a US divisional commander, wrote: ‘It was a sly and sneaky kind of combat, which never resembled the massive and thunderous operations in Europe, where tank battalions were pitted against tank battalions and armies the size of city populations ponderously moved and maneuvered…In New Guinea, when the rains came, wounded men might drown before the litter-bearers found them. Many did. No war is good war and death ignores geography. But out here I was convinced, as were my soldiers, that death was pleasanter in the Temperate Zone.’

The Papua operations were characterised by Allied dissensions and heavy-handed interventions by MacArthur. Disdain and mistrust between Australians and Americans caused bitterness, and belated success at Buna brought little joy. Hard fighting persisted throughout 1943, the battlefields slowly shifting northwards up the huge island. The Japanese, defeated on Guadalcanal, exerted themselves to their utmost to hold a line in New Guinea, feeding in reinforcements. But in March they suffered a crippling blow, during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. George Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, alerted by Ultra, launched a succession of attacks on a Japanese convoy which sank eight transports and four escorting destroyers en route from Rabaul, destroying most of a division intended for Papua New Guinea.

After months of seesaw ground fighting, a decisive breakthrough came when Kenney secretly constructed a forward airstrip from which his fighters could strike at the main enemy airbases at Wewak. This they did to devastating effect in August 1943, almost destroying Japanese air power in the region. Thereafter, a force that eventually comprised one US and five Australian divisions launched a major offensive. By September 1943, the major enemy strongholds had been overrun, and 8,000 Japanese survivors were straggling away northwards. The Huon peninsula was cleared in December, and Allied dominance of the campaign became explicit. Ultra revealed the location of the remaining Japanese concentrations, enabling MacArthur to launch a dramatic operation to bypass them and cut off their escape by landing at Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea on 22 April 1944. Fighting on the island persisted until the end of the war, Australians providing the main Allied effort. Some 13,500 Japanese emerged from the jungle to surrender there in August 1945.

The New Guinea campaign remains a focus of controversy. It inflicted misery on all its participants, many of whom doubted its usefulness, especially in the later stages. For a few brief weeks before the Coral Sea and Midway, it seemed a possible Japanese stepping stone to Australia, but by June 1942 this prospect was already dead. In some respects, the campaign became thereafter an Asian counterpart of Britain’s North African and 1942–44 Burma operations. Once the US Navy and USAAF had gained strategic dominance, the Japanese faced insuperable difficulties in sustaining and supporting their New Guinea operations at the end of a long line of maritime communications. From an Allied viewpoint, the campaign’s principal strategic merit was that it provided a theatre in which the enemy could be engaged, when Allied land forces were too small to strike a decisive blow.

But the critical operations against Japan remained those of the US Navy, committed to its own thrust across the central Pacific. Month by month across a battlefield of several hundred thousand square miles, American planes, surface ships and submarines inflicted crippling attrition on Japanese naval power – vital to the maintenance of their long, long supply chains. In 1942–43 the Allies needed airfields on Papua New Guinea, which had to be fought for and won. In 1943–44, however, it was probably unnecessary to launch the costly operations to clear the Japanese from the north coast, once their offensive and air capabilities had been destroyed. The Papua New Guinea campaign, like so many others in the course of the war, gained a momentum and logic of its own. Once thousands of troops were committed, lives lost and generals’ reputations staked, it became progressively more difficult to accept anything less than victory. The only senior officer to emerge with an enhanced reputation from the New Guinea operations was the US air chief, Kenney, one of his service’s outstanding commanders.

Within a year of Pearl Harbor, the arrest of Japan’s Asian and Pacific advances, and the beginnings of their reversal, made its doom inevitable. It is remarkable that, once Tokyo’s hopes of quick victory were confounded and American resolve had been amply demonstrated, Hirohito’s nation fought blindly on. Japanese strategy hinged upon a belief in German victory in the west, yet by the end of 1942 this had become unrealistic. Thereafter, peace on any terms or even none should have seemed to Tokyo preferable to looming American retribution. But no more in Japan than in Germany did any faction display will and power to deflect the country from its march towards immolation. Shikata ga nai: it could not be helped. If this was a monumentally inadequate excuse for condemning millions to death without hope of securing any redemptive compensation, it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.