Inferno - Max Hastings [162]
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 U.S. Navy had displayed the highest qualities at a critical moment. Japanese industrial weakness made it hard to replace the carrier losses of Midway, and 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 superbly trained airmen, flying the 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 rival fleets whose major surface elements seldom engaged each other. Carrier-borne aircraft had shown themselves the decisive weapons, and the United States 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 airmen of the 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 United States, 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 200 miles of sea, this became the scene of one of the grimmest struggles of the war.
Meanwhile, 600 miles eastwards, in the Solomons, Japanese who had occupied Tulagi Island moved on to neighbouring Guadalcanal, where they began to construct an airfield. If allowed to complete and exploit this, their planes could dominate the region. An abrupt American decision was made to preempt them, by landing the 1st Marine Division. Such a stroke fulfilled the U.S. Navy’s driving desire, promoted by Adm. Ernest King, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Fleet, 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 7 August, 19,000 Americans began to land, 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 a marine, Robert Leckie. The Australian coast watcher 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