He smiled, very pleased with himself, and all he had come to learn through means he would not discuss. He had many contacts in the Army web, chief among them being the irascible General Nishimura at Singapore. Together the two men had shared a growing curiosity about the strange ship that had appeared, the Takami, and the men who commanded it. They learned Ivan Volkov was also very interested in that ship, and that he had come to Japan to learn more about it, and to make the unprecedented request for an audience with Emperor Hirohito. Whatever else was discussed the “Yellow River Accord” as it was soon to be called, was going to change the face of the battle in the Pacific War. Japan was consolidating and limiting its position and operations in China, and the Army was looking more and more to securing the resources they had seized in those halcyon first six months of the war in the South Pacific.
Strangely, four of the five divisions Imamura had mentioned did eventually find their way to the Pacific Theater. Only the powerful 3rd Division had remained in China throughout the war, but now it was coming south. This could not help but have a dramatic effect on the campaign now underway.
The Americans had just transitioned from the strategic defensive to their first real offensive operations on both land and sea, and Halsey had learned that it wasn’t enough to simply operate against the Japanese carriers. Now he also had to cover the movement of troops and supplies to contested islands, and the Japanese had this same consideration to take into their planning.
As January ended, Halsey had only two carriers at sea, and was planning to head to Sydney to join Lexington and Yorktown. All the lighter carriers were back in Pearl, except the hybrids that went to Suva for emergency repair work there. He did have one of the new escort carriers, the Nassau, but it was built to be more of an aircraft ferry than anything else. This was going to leave a gap in carrier coverage that could span the first two weeks of February. As he considered the situation, it now appeared that both sides had reached a similar pause in ground operations on all of the islands being contested. The US had Noumea, but not the main airfield that was still being guarded by Colonel Ichiki.
On Efate, the 8th Marine Regiment had been challenged by the Japanese 79th Regiment of their 20th division just in time to prevent that island from falling. Now the US controlled the main anchorage at Port Vila, and the Japanese had Havana Harbor in the north.
On Fiji, Collins was mustering his division at M’ba, and slowly reorganizing to shift his weight to the left flank, eyeing that saddle in the highlands as his only route to pressing the attack further. The rains continued unabated, swelling the streams leading into the M’ba River and making that largely impassable, and the Japanese held that sugar mill overlooking both bridges, digging in behind the river in a very good defensive position.
To the south, Patch was just a few kilometers south of Nandi, and if anything could be done, it would be his division that would have to do it in the short run. To that end, another regiment of the 37th Division on Vanua Levu was now making ready to hop over to Suva and take Queen’s Road to reinforce Patch. This was the only expedient reinforcement at hand since MacArthur had sent the 41st to Noumea. It would give him five regiments to press his attack in February.
Elsewhere, the Japanese had taken Ndeni, called Nendo today, in the Santa Cruz Islands. The small airfield there had once been a lifesaving place for US airmen to land in the carrier duels fought around the New Hebrides, but it could no longer serve in that role.
With the 41st Division safely delivered to Noumea, Halsey met with MacArthur when he arrived in Sydney, and the two men discussed further plans.
“I told you we could take Noumea with no difficulty,” said MacArthur. “We should have done it long ago. Then our planes would have cut off the Japanese supplies to Fiji.”
“Should of? That horse never won a race,” said Halsey. “It was a matter of not having adequate carrier support. Now we’ve got the flattops back, and we’ll get results, I can assure you of that.”
“Yes… but I’m told the fleet had another bad round with the Japanese, and those two out there in the repair yards are evidence of that.”
“Yes, they hurt us,” said Halsey. “Wasp was the hardest blow. But we’ll have Yorktown and Lexington back in a week to ten days, then I can sortie with four fleet carriers again and conduct business. Anything I should know about?”
MacArthur lit his pipe, considering. “With the 41st at Noumea, our first order of business will be to get that airfield. We’ll take it this week. There looks to be only one good battalion holding it now, reinforced with engineers. We cut off everything they had south of the harbor, but a recon plane spotted them moving north up the eastern coast road. I can kick them out of Tontouta and get the engineers to work on that field. We’ll need secondary fields as well, closer to the harbor.”
“Then no major troop movements I need to cover?”
“Not for the time being. What’s the situation in the New Hebrides?”
“It looks like they’re going to fight for Efate and Luganville. So when I leave here, I head for Pago Pago to escort the 6th Marine Regiment to Efate. That will double team them there. After that, Nimitz says he’ll use the 1st Marine Division and hit Luganville with two regiments, the third being held in reserve.”
“What about Fiji? You were all dead set on clearing that before I went to Noumea.”
“That will take time. I intend to squeeze them hard, and I’ll damn well contest the movement of any supplies to that island from this point forward. They know that, and the Kido Butai isn’t finished with us yet either. So a lot of this planning with the Marines will depend on what the Japs do. In the meantime, there was an incident at Truk yesterday.”
“Truk? That’s their main Pacific support base.”
“Correct,” said Halsey, “and it got hit—but we had nothing to do with it, and it certainly wasn’t the British.”
“Well then who?” MacArthur tamped down his tobacco, and relit the pipe.
“Intel thinks it’s that Siberian raider, the ship that was covering their landings on Kamchatka and Sakhalin. They’ve tangled with it twice already, but haven’t put it under, which surprises me, given the carrier power they could use.”
“Interesting… How much damage did they do?”
“Just a knock on the door,” said Halsey, “but the fact that they could even do that much is pretty amazing. This is the ship that is using those hot new naval rockets. Japs have them too, which is worrisome, because they’re pretty damn lethal against our planes. The odd thing is that no one can figure out how the Russians and Japanese could get so far ahead of us with that stuff.”
“Russians?”
“Well, we figure they were the ones that really built this Siberian ship. There isn’t a shipyard worth the name in all of Siberia.”
“Well, it’s likely no more than a nuisance,” said MacArthur. “I don’t see how it could impact our operations here.”
“True,” said Halsey. “But that damn ship could start an arms race and we don’t even have a ticket to the stadium. If the Japs start popping off fireworks and put missiles on all their cruisers and battleships, this war could look really different. At the moment, the deployment of those weapons seems very limited. In fact, our pilots report they were fired from only one ship. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We need to be vigilant on this.”