Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [28]
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Nothing Worthy of
Your Majesty’s Attention
WHEN WORD OF THE AMERICAN LANDINGS ON GUADALCANAL reached Japan, Emperor Hirohito, vacationing at the imperial villa north of Tokyo, told his advisers he would return to the palace immediately to consider the implications. Admiral Osami Nagano, the chief of the Naval General Staff, went to him first. “It is nothing worthy of Your Majesty’s attention,” he said. An intelligence report from the Japanese military attaché in Moscow reported that only two thousand American troops were on Guadalcanal. The number suggested that American ambitions were modest: merely to raid the installation, destroy the airfield, and withdraw. Imperial intelligence was expecting a major Allied attack elsewhere, on Papua, where Japanese troops were advancing through a treacherous mountain jungle toward Port Moresby. The attack on Guadalcanal was thought a diversion.
Other officers were less blasé. Admiral Matome Ugaki, the Combined Fleet’s chief of staff, fumed at the totality of the surprise. He saw the landings as a threat to Japanese operations in New Guinea, and even to Rabaul. At the very least, Ugaki surmised, this was good reason to postpone pending operations in less critical areas such as the Indian Ocean, much as the June defeat at the Battle of Midway had forced the cancellation of Japanese plans to attack New Caledonia and Samoa.
Ugaki’s superior, Admiral Yamamoto, felt that Guadalcanal had little strategic value. Though the Americans saw it as a threat, the Japanese had no plans to develop it as one. Its seizure had been dilatory, the construction of an airstrip a halfhearted half measure. He had no planes ready to base there in any event. Its real importance, Yamamoto would come to see, was America’s interest in it. Imperial Navy planners had long espoused the “decisive battle” that would allow them to break the U.S. fleet after a prolonged campaign of attrition. Perhaps the enemy could be lured to the South Seas. If so, it would be a chance to concentrate Japan’s naval forces and redeem the disaster of June.
At the end of July, senior Japanese commanders had held a conference at Truk, the great naval base that served as headquarters for the Southest Area Force. This meeting, like the American gathering on the Saratoga, brought to light important divergences of interest among the services. The Southeast Area Force consisted of the 8th Fleet, headquartered closer to the front, at Rabaul, the 17th Army, and a flotilla from the Navy’s 11th Air Fleet. Throughout the critical early weeks of the Guadalcanal campaign, the commanders of the 17th Army were mostly concerned with the fight for Port Moresby and had, according to a high-ranking Japanese naval officer, “absolutely no concern with the Solomons.”
An agreement between the services had made the defense of the Solomons the IJN’s responsibility. But the gravity of that task was not fully appreciated. When the commander of the 8th Fleet, Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, later expressed concern that the U.S. landings at Guadalcanal might represent a major operation, he was dismissed by headquarters staff as an anxious arriviste. Even after Midway, American forces were lightly regarded by naval commanders. Army commanders were confident they could recapture Guadalcanal at their leisure and disdained cooperation with the Navy.
Japanese failures of intelligence would become a pandemic. The Army’s unbridled optimism—it had urged war against the United States on the assumption that a German defeat of Russia and a Japanese defeat of China would free up forces to use against America—was matched only by its paranoia concerning the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Army did not