“With a nurse on hand, we’re all set,” Izaki joked, but his smile looked forced, and his daughter looked at him anxiously. “I had such confidence in my physical strength when I was young. When I was at Rabaul, I was the same age as Seiichi is now.”
Seiichi’s expression stiffened momentarily.
“Izaki-san, it sounds like you had strong ties with our grandfather,” Keiko said.
“As I mentioned before, it’s entirely thanks to the fact that I was Flight Leader Miyabe’s wingman that I survived. And precisely for that reason, I came to fear death. I only say this now, but when I first arrived at Rabaul I was totally unafraid of death. A kid of nineteen can’t possibly understand how sacred life really is. This is a slightly odd analogy, but it’s like someone with only a little money going out gambling and, assuming he’ll lose anyway, happily betting everything he has. But then somehow he keeps on winning, and as the jackpot grows he becomes fearful and starts to not want to lose.”
“I think I understand, sir.”
“Beginning in the fall of 1942, veteran aircrew who’d survived Midway were transferred from the interior to Rabaul. But even for those seasoned aviators, Rabaul was a harsh place.”
“It was the Airmen’s Graveyard, right?” Keiko asked.
Izaki nodded. “But even so, Saeki-san, we were among the fortunate. The ones who really went through hell were…” Izaki paused and sighed quietly, “the Imperial Army soldiers who fought at Guadalcanal.”
Do you know about the battle fought by the Imperial Army soldiers at Guadalcanal?
No? Ah, I see. Well, I guess young people these days wouldn’t know anything about it.
This is getting off the topic of Flight Leader Miyabe, but I want you to hear about those soldiers that fought at Guadalcanal. In fact, I don’t want any Japanese to forget about that tragedy. I definitely want Seiichi, here, to know about it, too.
And unless you know about the Army’s battle at Guadalcanal, you won’t be able to comprehend why the Rabaul Air Corps, to which Flight Leader Miyabe and I belonged, fought so hard grinding down our very lives.
It wasn’t until after the war, though, that I became fully informed as to what had happened on the island. And when I finally learned the full story, I realized that Guadalcanal was a microcosm of the Pacific War. The foolishness of Imperial General Headquarters and the Japanese military came into full play in the battle for that island. No, it was Japan, as a country, that laid bare its worst weaknesses on that battleground.
That’s exactly why I want all Japanese people to know about Guadalcanal!
This battle that spanned six months was the very turning point of the Pacific War.
When the U.S. forces attacked Guadalcanal on August 7th, the Imperial General HQ apparently assumed the conflict would be local. They seemed to have concluded that the U.S. merely wanted to score an easy hit on a weakly defended island. This, too, I only learned after the war was over.
As I just said, those of us in the Rabaul Air Corps immediately attacked their troop transports when the island first fell. But the following month, the Imperial General Headquarters sent Army soldiers to recapture the airfield on Guadalcanal. That was the beginning of the tragedy.
After sizing up the U.S. forces to number about two thousand without properly reconnoitering them, IGHQ sent an attack wave of just over 900 troops. It’s a mystery as to where they got “2,000,” but what’s shocking is that they thought a force less than half as strong could recapture the island and airfield. Maybe they believed the Imperial Army was simply that powerful. However, it turned out that there were 13,000 U.S. Marines on the island.
After the war, I read in a book that the night before the assault, the Army’s landing forces were in celebratory spirits as if they had already won the battle. The commander, Colonel Ichiki, was a cocksure man himself. Apparently, when he received his orders he asked his superior, “Can we attack Tulagi to the north of Guadalcanal as well?”
That battle was the first showdown between the Imperial Army and the U.S. Marines. It seemed that our soldiers went into battle thinking they would kill every last one of those spineless Yanks. Back then, it had been drilled into our heads that Americans were total cowards and sissies. That they put their families first and had cushy lives waiting for them back home. That they all hated war and valued their own lives above all else. They’d all surrender without hesitation if the fighting got too fierce. They lacked the fearless resolve of Imperial troops who would opt for a hero’s death over the lot of a captive. So defeat wasn’t possible. It was thanks to such a bias that they figured a force half the expected strength of the enemy would be perfectly sufficient. So I can’t really blame the troops in Ichiki Expeditionary Force for laughing and thinking that an easy victory awaited them the next day.
But the results—it pains me even to say this, but Ichiki Expeditionary Force was totally annihilated when they mounted their first night raid. The Japanese military’s assault charge was utterly ineffective in the face of the U.S.’s overwhelming firepower.
Back then, the Imperial Army’s basic tactic was the bayonet charge. Troops threw caution to the wind, rushed the enemy’s position, and stabbed the enemy with their bayonets to kill them. Meanwhile, the Americans used heavy artillery, as well as heavy and light machine guns. The U.S. forces rained shells on and inundated with machine-gun fire the charging Japanese troops.
There was no way our side could win. The Japanese ground forces at Guadalcanal were like the Takeda Cavalry challenging Nobunaga Oda’s musket lines during the Battle of Nagashino centuries ago. Why on earth had our side chosen to carry out such a stupid operation? What was the IGHQ staff thinking? On what grounds did they conclude that such medieval battle tactics could defeat the Americans? I just can’t fathom the idiocy of it all.
After the war, I saw a photograph taken in the immediate aftermath of that battle. It showed countless Japanese soldiers strewn along the sandy shore the morning after. The bodies had no blood on them; perhaps the waves had washed them clean. The photo clearly depicted their expressions. They’d all had fathers and mothers back in their hometowns, even wives and children waiting back home. I could barely see it after a while because my eyes welled with tears.
Of the approximately 800 troops who participated in the charge, it’s said that 777 died, on that one night. Colonel Ichiki burned the battle flag and committed suicide. It is said that casualties on the American side could be counted on one hand.
Upon receiving news of Ichiki Expeditionary Force’s fate, IGHQ said, “Well, in that case,” and decided to send in a much larger attack force, of 5,000. That would surely do?
But the Americans outdid us. They’d repelled the Japanese forces, but predicting that we’d strike again with more troops, they increased their garrison to 18,000 troops.
The General Staff’s plans were entirely haphazard. At first, they didn’t bother finding out the size of the enemy’s forces, made assumptions that worked in their favor, and thought they could win back the island with an expeditionary force of less than a thousand. When that failed, they simply concluded that five thousand should do the job. Sending in troops as they come instead of amassing them is a tactic that should be avoided at all costs, but the elite staff at IGHQ didn’t even know the ABCs. Sun Tzu’s Art of War famously states: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” They were fighting without knowing the enemy, which was out of the question. Pity the soldiers who were used like pawns in such a haphazard operation.
The second wave of Japanese troops was thoroughly defeated too, and many fled into the jungle, where they were beset with starvation. Guadalcanal had been Ga Island for short, but the character for “starve” is used for that first syllable off and on because of this. IGHQ continued to commit separate waves of troops, and most of them, too, faced starvation, dying not from battle but from malnourishment.