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

by Ian W. Toll

To land on a hostile shore was the most perilous of all major military operations.

For the first time since leaving the United States, the marines “realized that whatever we were going to do we were going to have a lot of friends with us.”

At 6:13 a.m., as veins of gray light spread from east to west through the overcast, the heavy cruiser Quincy trained her main battery on Lunga Point and opened fire. The blast force of her 8-inch guns punched craters into the sea alongside the ship. Heavy concussions reverberated across Savo Sound and echoed back from the hills on the surrounding islands. To Colonel Twining it was “an unforgettable moment of history”—the first Allied counterinvasion of the war, the first step on the long bloody road to Tokyo.

The best thing about Rabaul, according to an officer stationed there, was a bath house erected by the Japanese over the hot springs at the base of Tavurvur. Nothing boosted Japanese spirits like a hot bath.

Though suffering severe wounds, including a 7.7mm round that passed through his foot, Southerland managed to make his way overland to the American lines.

and he had won the stalwart loyalty of the native tribesmen, who gave him advance warning of any Japanese search parties. He was never caught.

MIKAWA ELECTED TO RETIRE AT HIGH SPEED TO THE NORTHWEST, rather than return to Savo Sound to engage the XRAY and YOKE transport groups. That was a fateful decision, and for the Americans a very lucky one. If the admiral had taken the more aggressive course, as some of his officers had urged, Turner’s fleet might have been wiped out. In that case, the logistical underpinning of WATCHTOWER might have collapsed, with bleak consequences for Vandegrift’s marines.

The analogy to Pearl Harbor was impossible to ignore. The earlier surprise attack had inflicted greater casualties and material damage, but the beating at Savo had been meted out in wartime, against ships operating in enemy-dominated seas, when their commanders and crews ought to have been hypervigilant to every likely threat. The navy’s honor, reputation, and self-respect were on the block.

The Scotsman would contribute invaluable intelligence through his native scouts—brave and steadfast fighters who could, when necessary, shed their uniforms and blend into the native population. Guadalcanal had been a campaign of extermination from the beginning, and the islanders understood that sort of fighting well. Traveling quickly and silently over secret paths through the jungle, they were to prove fearsome guerrilla fighters.

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.

In the aftermath of the battle, the marines quickly learned that the enemy owed no allegiance to the norms of “civilized war.” Wounded Japanese soldiers would call for medical attention and then shoot the corpsmen who came in response. Others would pretend to lie dead, clutching a grenade, hoping to take a marine with them to the afterlife. “I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting,” Vandegrift wrote the commandant of the Marine Corps. “These people refuse to surrender. The wounded will wait until the men come up to examine them and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade. You can readily see the answer to that.

Large maps of Europe and the Pacific were mounted on opposite walls. Smaller maps of Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, and North Africa were mounted between them. All were positioned low enough that the president could scrutinize them without rising from his wheelchair. Flags and multicolored pins marked the known locations of Allied and Axis naval, ground, and air forces. The current locations of the “big three” (Churchill, Stalin, and FDR himself) were indicated by special pins—a cigar for Churchill, a briar pipe for Stalin, and a cigarette holder for FDR. Updates were relayed hourly from the navy and war departments by secure dedicated telephone lines.

Yamamoto was one of the few Japanese of that era who found the courage to oppose war with the United States. As a younger man, he had twice been posted to America (once as an English student at Harvard, once as naval attaché in Washington), and he had made a close study of the country’s vast economic resources and industrial base. “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.”9 He foresaw that the Pacific War was likely to become a long, drawn-out conflict in which titanic American production would overwhelm Japan’s much smaller and less advanced war industries. Under no circumstances could Japan hope to inflict a total defeat on the United States. A war against the United States could be “won” only by a negotiated settlement favorable to Japanese interests.

It was his duty to wage war against the enemies of Japan. He would do so until the bitter end, whatever that might be and whenever it might come. He did not expect to survive it: “Within a hundred days,” he predicted in September 1942, “I will wear out my life entirely.”13

After the war, Hirohito would portray himself as a powerless figurehead, but in September and October of 1942 he continually goaded his army and navy ministers to take the offensive and drive the Americans off Guadalcanal. Appeals from the Showa Tenno (“Emperor of the Era of Illustrious Peace, Light, and Harmony”) were tantamount to commands handed down from heaven. But neither the army nor the navy needed much encouragement. The struggle for the island had become an issue of national will.

A sergeant keeled over in a dead faint as Nimitz approached to pin a medal on his chest. When he came to, he apologized and explained that he had “never seen a four-star admiral before and he was scared to death.”

Since August 9 they had been asking one another, “Where’s the fucking navy?” It was a rhetorical question, of course. They were marines; they could rely on no one but themselves. The 1st Marine Division had become the “1st Maroon Division.” “U.S.M.C.” stood for “Uncle Sam’s Miserable Children.” They had been played for suckers. By training and doctrine, they were elite shock troops—amphibious specialists brought in to storm an enemy beach and secure a beachhead. They had done their job. They were not supposed to be left to defend that beachhead for months on end.

No one slept. Vandegrift vowed that he would never judge a man suffering from combat fatigue or shell shock. No one who has not suffered under that kind of bombardment, he wrote, can “easily grasp a sensation compounded of frustration, helplessness, fear and, in case of close hits, shock.

The Bougainville-based coastwatchers continued to send their priceless forewarnings of southbound enemy air formations. Jack Read, whose beard had descended almost to the neck of his shirt, enjoyed the afternoon ritual of watching the surviving remnants of Japanese flights as they flew overhead in groups of two or three.36 The Japanese knew perfectly well that two Allied coastwatchers were hiding in the bush at the northern and southern ends of Bougainville, and were determined to get rid of them. Paul Mason learned from native spies that a hundred Japanese troops and a number of tracker dogs had gathered at Buin and would soon come after him. He called in an airstrike that killed the dogs in their cages. Both men had remarkable success in holding a tenuous grasp on the loyalty of native villages. Though their presence was known by hundreds of people in dozens of villages, none betrayed them to the Japanese.

In impromptu remarks to the island’s press representatives, Halsey first coined the bloody-minded motto that would make him famous: “Kill Japs, kill Japs, and keep on killing Japs!”

Officers would later say that they did not believe a single man on the Juneau could have survived the attack, and that impression was echoed by dozens of witnesses. In fact, 120 of her crew did survive the sinking. They drifted at sea for five days, clinging to three rafts connected by life nets, and dying one by one. Ten survivors washed up on Santa Catalina Island on November 18.

“In fighting it is bad to repeat a formula,” Musashi had written, “and to repeat it a third time is worse. When an effort fails it may be followed with a second attempt. If that fails, a drastically changed formula must be adopted. If that fails, one must resort to another completely different formula. When the opponent thinks high, hit low. When he thinks low, hit high. That is the secret of swordsmanship.”

Yamamoto’s plane had gone down about four miles inland, in remote jungle. Search parties took more than a day to find the site. There were no survivors. Yamamoto, according to eyewitnesses, was sitting upright, still strapped into his seat, with one white-gloved hand resting on his sword. A bullet had entered his lower jaw and emerged from his temple; another had pierced his shoulder blade. His corpse was wrapped in banyan leaves and carried down a trail to the mouth of the Wamai River, where it was taken to Buin by sea. There it was cremated in a pit filled with brushwood and gasoline. The ashes were flown back to Truk and deposited on a Buddhist altar in the Musashi’s war operations room.

The Japanese had won a tactical and strategic victory in this “Battle of Vella Lavella.” It was to be their last sea victory of the war.

Since the Japanese navy did not concede the inevitability of combat fatigue, neither pilots nor staff officers were ever rotated out of the theater:

By the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor, only the Arizona remained on the harbor floor. Divers had confirmed that her keel was broken, and the engineers had concluded that the great hull could not be raised intact. Bringing her up in sections was theoretically possible, but the job would be immensely difficult and the cost would far exceed her scrap value. It was decided to leave her where she lay. She lies there still.

Two decades later, following Nimitz’s death, Spruance told a reporter that fear was a near-universal human trait, a condition that even the bravest men labored to keep in check. But Nimitz was out of the ordinary: “He was one of the few people I knew who never knew what it meant to be afraid of anything.

Roger Bond, a quartermaster on the Saratoga, counted thirteen aircraft carriers in a single day. Less than a year earlier, the Saratoga and Enterprise had been the sole remaining American carriers left in the Pacific. To lay eyes on thirteen friendly flattops between sunrise and sunset, said Bond, made it “an awesome, awesome day.”

When a young major complained that his men would not follow him to the airstrip, Shoup reduced the problem to a simple formula: “You’ve got to say, ‘Who’ll follow me?’ And if only ten follow you, that’s the best you can do, but it’s better than nothing.

Holland Smith flew down to Tarawa in a PBY patrol plane on the morning of November 24. Looking down at Betio as the seaplane circled above the lagoon, he was shocked and saddened: “The sight of our dead floating in the waters of the lagoon and lying along the blood-soaked beaches is one I will never forget. Over the pitted, blasted island hung a miasma of coral dust and death, nauseating and horrifying.

Nimitz also heard directly from parents and wives of some of the slain marines. “You killed my son on Tarawa,” a mother wrote from Arkansas. The CINCPAC insisted on reading and answering all such letters. He told Lamar, “This is one of the responsibilities of command. You have to send some people to their deaths.

When the question was put to him many years later, Julian Smith was philosophical: “Well, I think it was just one of those things. War is war.” Whether Tarawa could have been safely bypassed or not, it was a victory. The navy and marines had learned valuable lessons that would be put to profitable use in future operations. If the Americans had not made those mistakes at Tarawa, they would have made them in the Marshalls, suffering proportionally higher casualties in the latter as a result. And the bloody conquest of Tarawa had proved an important point to both sides in the conflict. Japan’s grand strategy rested on the supposition that the American people would not stand for the losses required in a long war. But Tarawa served notice to the enemy that no price was too high, “and every one of those islands that they were fortifying became a base for us to bomb Japan and to carry the war farther on.

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.

The carrier duels of 1942 had been tense fencing matches in which the fortunes of war had often turned in unexpected directions. Opposing task-force commanders had played cat and mouse with weather fronts, always maneuvering to gain the most tactically favorable position with respect to the enemy. The impulse had always been to stay on the move, to get in and get out, to hit and run. In 1944, Task Force 58 could simply take station off an enemy-held island and batter its airfields into oblivion, brushing off the risk of counterstrikes. The immense size of the task force ensured its omnipotence in whatever part of the ocean it occupied.

“What do you think of the island?” one asked. The admiral drew a cheerful laugh by replying, “Gentlemen, it’s the worst scene of devastation I have ever witnessed—except for the Texas picnic.

When a government inspector passed through the Nagoya works in late 1943, he was surprised to learn that newly manufactured Zeros were still being hauled away from the plant by teams of oxen.

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.

The Taiho was obviously finished, but her captain hesitated to order the crew off the ship. That evening, shortly after six, the blazing wreck finally went down, taking more than 1,500 men with her. That concluded the maiden combat cruise of the Taiho

“In spite of tough talk, a lot of Marines were quite cooperative and even kindly toward prisoners, both civilian and military,” said Sheeks. “When they saw the miserable condition of refugees they tried to help them, gave them water, and bandaged them up. Most Marines were kind guys, basically.”

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.

Raymond Spruance, when discussing the war after it was over, often returned to the point that tactical decisions in major battles were less important than the superior logistics of American forces.

Guam was at the end of a 5,800-mile supply line stretching from the American mainland through Oahu, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok. It was a continental island, 210 square miles in area, with ample territory for airfields, barracks, warehouses, port amenities, fuel storage, training ranges, recreation facilities, and a new Pacific Fleet headquarters. It lay astride the main sea routes linking east to west and north to south, and was thus well situated to support the next offensive thrusts. It had been and would remain a U.S. territory, with a friendly and loyal native population, and would serve as a keystone of American military power in the region long after the defeat of Japan.

Even long after the end of the war, hundreds of Japanese remained stubbornly at large in the jungles of Guam. Small groups lived in caves and survived by hunting lizards, toads, and rats, trapping fish, and stealing food from local farms and villages. Chamorros, embittered by the Japanese occupation of 1941–44, tended to attack them on sight. The Japanese government sent emissaries, and a steady trickle of holdouts came out of the jungle each year throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The last Japanese straggler on Guam was Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, a native of Aichi Prefecture, who lived in a remote section of the Talofofo river valley until 1972.

His return to Japan caused a national sensation. Yokoi said that he had known the war was over since 1952, but had dreaded the disgrace of surrender. “I am ashamed that I have returned alive,” he told reporters. In a visit to the grounds of the Imperial Palace, he addressed himself to the emperor and empress: “Your Majesties, I have returned home. I deeply regret that I could not serve you well. The world has certainly changed, but my determination to serve you will never change.”

Like Kiyosawa, the Tokyo diarist Aiko Takahashi was disgusted by the harrowing account and refused even to call it bravery: “We should have the courage, come hell or high water, to give up the fight.”

The Pacific War had entered its endgame. But another 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and civilians would die before the heart was knocked out of the men who ruled Japan.

“During those years everything happened behind heavy doors, out of our sight,” wrote the novelist Michio Takeyama (author of Harp of Burma) after the war. “What’s become clear now was wholly unclear then. Day after day we simply trembled in fear, struck dumb with astonishment at incomprehensible developments.”48 Malnourished and overworked, driven like a herd of beasts, instructed how to act and what to think, deprived of any sound basis for rational judgment, threatened with torture and prison at the first divergence from enforced norms, the Japanese people were powerless to alter the doomed course chosen by their leaders. Having long since surrendered whatever rights and freedoms they had once possessed, they were fated to share in the coming Götterdämmerung of 1945.