Inferno - Max Hastings [168]
These were epic encounters, reflecting both sides’ massive commitment of naval surface forces—and losses: in the course of the Solomons campaign, around fifty major Japanese and U.S. warships were sunk. The men who fought became grimly familiar with long, tense waits, often in darkness, while sweat-soaked radar operators peered at 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, and 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 air power 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps lost 3,100 killed, a small price for a critical achievement. The Japanese suffered 29,000 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, and warship crews afloat displayed a resolve the Japanese had not believed Americans to possess. The U.S. 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 U.S. Pacific Fleet grew in proficiency as well as might. In the latter months of 1942, American airmen 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 Admiral 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