Inferno - Max Hastings [166]
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. Their 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 U.S. 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 900 rounds of 14-inch 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 U.S. Marine Corps, which expanded from its prewar 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 general 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,