The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944

by Ian W. Toll

While this last act of the Battle of the Tenaru River was playing out, Jacob C. Vouza crawled back into the American lines. He was nearly dead for loss of blood. His patrol had run into an advance scouting force of the Japanese invasion group. Vouza had been brutally interrogated, enduring prolonged torture while tied to a tree. He had been smashed repeatedly in the face by rifle butts, and his face was a swollen bloody mass; he had been stabbed by bayonets and was bleeding freely from the throat and chest. Against the odds, his torturers had struck no vital artery, and he had managed to chew through the ropes and crawl back to the American lines. Taken to the field hospital, he was stitched up and fed blood intravenously. In twelve days he recovered and returned to duty. His heroism was recognized by two nations: the United States awarded Vouza the Silver Star and Legion of Merit, and the British knighted him and named him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

“Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later remark, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”

Waiting at the shore, we gently lifted out the soldiers retreating from Guadalcanal one by one and laid them on the sand. What a sad and pitiable sight they presented. Hardly human beings, they were just skin and bones dressed in military uniform, thin as bamboo sticks. They were so light, it was like carrying infants. Only their eyes were bright; they must have been living on their strong will alone. When I put a spoon with some lukewarm rice gruel to their mouths, large teardrops rolled down their faces, and they said thank you in tiny mosquitolike voices. I too felt something hot unexpectedly welling up in my eyes. My blood roiled with anger at those who had given the orders to these men.

Overhearing one sailor tell another, “I’d go through hell for that old son of a bitch,” Halsey accosted the pair and said, “Right here I want to tell you that I object to being called ‘old.’

His peculiar style of leadership was full of contradictions: simultaneously cold-blooded and tender-hearted, bombastic and coolly logical, overbearing and self-deprecating, sentimental and ridiculous. Whatever it was, it resonated powerfully. Sailor James J. Fahey of the Montpelier undoubtedly spoke for the fleet when he told his diary, in November 1943, “The men would do anything for him.”

Longer than a football field, the World War II submarine was in point of fact a ship, not a boat, and it rarely operated with the fleet. Naval tradition being impregnable, however, the submarine was and is the only ship that can properly be called a boat.

Later, the skipper allowed the pharmacist’s mate to dispense a ration of “depth charge medicine”—that is, a shot of three-star Hennessy brandy.

On October 20, 1942, the Trigger, while submerged at a depth of about 100 feet, fired a torpedo at an unescorted tanker. The weapon’s rudder jammed and it ran in a circle, a failure that should have destroyed the Trigger. But the boat was saved by a second defect in the boomeranging torpedo. The detonator, which should have detected the Trigger’s magnetic field and activated the warhead upon reaching its strongest point, instead exploded at a distance great enough to leave the boat intact. The weapon had suffered two unrelated failures, the second providentially neutralizing the first. Meanwhile

Admiral Spruance, when interviewed by historians after the war, often remarked that strategy and tactics never approached the importance of logistics in the transpacific campaign.

The hard-run bulldozers were called into service to finish the job. They approached with blades raised as armor against fire, and shoved a small mountain of sand and coral up to cover the entrance and firing slots. A few marines climbed to the top of the structure and poured gasoline down the air vents. A single hand grenade was enough to convert the blockhouse into a kiln. The remains of 300 Japanese were later excavated from the interior.

O’Hare’s loss was headline news in the United States. He was one of the most famous flyers in the American armed forces, a singular hero to Irish Americans, and one of the most respected and best-liked men in the carrier navy. A Solemn Pontifical Mass of Requiem was held at the Basilica of Saint Louis in Missouri. O’Hare received a posthumous Navy Cross and gave his name to the busiest commercial airport in the world.

On the field Ozawa was giving the commander’s speech of instruction that customarily followed an operation. Afterward I heard from some fliers about the speech. Ozawa had climbed the platform to address them and, being overcome with dismay at how few of his men had survived, was unable to utter a word. He stood there on the platform in silence for a very long time, weeping bitterly.5

Essential wartime deliveries of replacement aircraft thus hung on the fate of a diminishing herd of underfed beasts. Mitsubishi engineers at length discovered that Percheron horses could haul the aircraft to Kagamigahara faster and required less to eat. These ludicrous exertions, when compared at a glance to the arrangements at Boeing, Douglas, or Grumman, tell most of the story of Japan’s defeat.

THOUGH AMERICANS WERE SLOW TO APPRECIATE IT, they had just won the decisive victory of the Pacific War. Capture of the Marianas and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower were final and irreversible blows to the hopes of the Japanese imperial project.