All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [160]
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