The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

have accepted the loss of Guadalcanal and chosen a more favourable battlefield closer to Rabaul. In practice it fell between two stools. Japan was determined to recapture Guadalcanal, but tried to do it with minimum forces when an all-out effort was required.

      Yamamoto ordered major naval reinforcements and slowly landed a sizeable force of infantry. However, the Americans, holding the only air base on Guadalcanal, could help to protect their own supply convoys and make extremely risky the embarkation of Japanese men and supplies from proper troop transports. Thus, although the Japanese landed a large number of men from small ships and barges, they were always desperately short of artillery, ammunition, medicine and food. Trying to compensate for superior US firepower with spirit and guile, the Japanese launched a number of night ground assaults on the Marine perimeter. All were crushed by American firepower and courage.

      While the ground and air struggle at Guadalcanal was taking place, both sides established the pace of naval operations that existed with some variation throughout the Pacific War. The great fleet engagement that mesmerised a generation on both sides of the Pacific would not take place. Instead, aircraft proved mortal enemies to the most powerful warships during the day, making airbases the most important places in the Pacific. At night, if the fleets were close enough, warships could engage in violent and helter-skelter night surface actions.

      Also, the many battles that took place, including all of the carrier engagements of the Pacific War, dealt with the attack or protection of an invasion fleet. This did not fit with pre-war doctrine, particularly in Japan. In ‘classic’ actions like Tsushima or Jutland, fleet fought fleet unencumbered with troop convoys. During the Pacific War there was not even a small Jutland. In each clash, one side was trying to bring in troop ships and the other side was trying to keep them out. Even Midway, despite Yamamoto’s intentions, fits this description.

      The two carrier battles of the South Pacific and all of the night surface actions of 1942 were directly connected with troop reinforcement to Guadalcanal. These were deadly affairs. The US Navy lost nearly 5,000 men killed off Guadalcanal, several times the number of infantry deaths due to action. Japanese manpower and tonnage losses were worse. The major work off the well-named ‘Iron Bottom Sound’ off Guadalcanal, the graveyard for nearly 50 warships from both sides, was done by the cruisers and destroyers of the US and imperial fleets in night battles. The Japanese proved for a time to be better at night combat. Superior Japanese training proved more valuable than early American radar, and US destroyers, submarines and aircraft were crippled by miserable torpedoes until late 1943.

      Ted Blahnik was a crewman on the American cruiser Helena and participated in one of the largest naval battles off Guadalcanal in November 1942. A three-day affair, the Imperial Navy deployed a large force, including two battleships, intended to bombard into oblivion American air units at Guadalcanal. With their small window of superiority, Tokyo planned to land two more divisions with large troop transports and destroy the Marines. It was a plan by the Japanese that should have been tried two months earlier, but it resulted in a naval bloodbath, as recalled by Blahnik:

      ‘My battle station was on a 20mm anti-aircraft mount. Like most ships then, Helena had seen its share of air attacks. When planes struck, I cannot remember fear. Everyone was so busy there was hardly time to think, although you got a little shaky after the action was over. It was very different when Helena went in on the night of Friday the 13th, 1942. I was still at my 20mm, but we all knew that anti-aircraft weapons would play no part of the battle. Instead we were passive observers. Because we weren’t doing anything, all of us were scared as hell – inactivity does that. The battle was extraordinary. At night the main armaments firing like crazy and emitting huge sheets of flame from every gun. The noise was deafening. When a large shell leaves a gun at night, the heat of the barrel gives it a glow that you can see as it flies off. In the distance you could see other ships firing and searchlights scanning for the enemy. Everyone fired at everyone and we later found out that some of our ships had been firing at friendly vessels. Ships blew up or caught fire. All of this took place in a relatively short period of time and men who watched things but didn’t shoot were caught between a deep fear and tremendous awe. We lost two admirals and several ships. What was left of our task force headed for home in the early morning. We had, however, left one sinking Japanese battleship and other victims.’⁴

      Blahnik’s description was accurate. Two nights later the fleets came together again and the Japanese had the indignity of losing a second battleship. Imperial destroyers wrought terrible havoc, and not for the last time. Nevertheless, the Japanese troop convoy heading to Guadalcanal was obliterated by American airmen. Accepting the obvious, Japan ordered an evacuation of Guadalcanal in late January 1943 at the same time that Buna was in its death agony. (Ominously, so was the German force at Stalingrad.) East and West, the Empire had been defeated and would never again make another major offensive move.

      By the time Guadalcanal and Buna were finally cleared, the terrible dynamic of ground combat in the Pacific War was all too obvious. Since the war, scholars have often attempted to ascribe the extraordinary ferocity of combat in the Pacific to racism on both sides. No doubt an abstract racism added fuel to the fire and contributed greatly to the American and Canadian Governments’ shameful decision forcibly to relocate citizens and residents of Japanese descent living on the West Coast to camps inland. However, at the point of fire, grim lessons learned on the battlefield, many sadly true, were far more important than pre-war racial antagonism in turning the conflict between the United States and Japan into something resembling a war of annihilation.

      At the root of the terrible dynamic of savagery in the Pacific War was the unique and tragic military ethos propagated by the Japanese Government and military in the generations before Pearl Harbor. By 1941 Japan was the most intensely militarised nation in the world. Military service or training was a part of life from cradle to grave. The time spent in these programmes in any given year was often not great. Yet indoctrination and discipline were stressed, as were the twin notions of self-sacrifice for the nation and obedience to the Emperor.

      In the famous Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors promulgated by the Emperor Meiji in 1882 (and carried by every Japanese fighting man in the Second World War) a set of virtues similar to the traditional samurai code of bushido was enumerated to serve as a guide for the Japanese soldier. The paramount duty was loyalty, even at the cost of one’s life: ‘Duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.’ In the same period the Emperor dedicated the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, a place where the Meiji and his successors came to pray for the spirits of those who died in the service of the Emperor. Thus, a connection was made between the military, the people and the Emperor. Over the years, this connection took on an increasingly mystical quality, initially generated by pride, eventually by desperation.

      These conditions had important military ramifications. Many Japanese officers realised that their army could not hope to match the firepower of a Western army. The Japanese therefore were forced to make the best of a bad situation. They did so by trying to develop advanced infantry tactics, and by increasing indoctrination through personal example and spiritual training.

      It is essential to understand the Japanese concept of ‘spirit’; it did much to shape the nature of battle in the Pacific. Educators, following government guidance, taught Japanese youth that they belonged to a special race that was culturally and morally superior to the decadent and materialistic West. Officers and nationalist educators passed on to recruits their contempt for American and European soldiers. (The Japanese defeats suffered in 1939 against the Red Army were a closely kept secret.) The spectacular victories at the start of the war seemed to confirm the lessons learned in school and training camp.

      But the notion of ‘spirit’ had a deeper connotation. It included the belief that the human will could surmount physical circumstance. Japanese officers taught their men, and most themselves believed, that they could do things no other army could simply because Japanese troops would not be denied. All Japanese recruits knew of great acts of heroism in both the distant and recent past of Japanese history. Most icons had one thing in common: they and their followers died in battle. Death in battle was portrayed as an honour to the family and a transcendental act on the part of the individual. Surrender was a disgrace to the soldier, and a disgrace to the family. No doubt some soldiers believed