The troops on Ga Island developed a metric for determining the lifespans of their comrades: “If he can stand, he has thirty days to live. If he can sit, he has three weeks. If he’s bedridden, he has one week. If he wets himself while sleeping, he has three days. If he can no longer speak, he has two days. If he no longer blinks, he has one day left.”
In total, we sent over 30,000 troops to attack Guadalcanal, out of which 20,000 lost their lives. Of that number, 5,000 perished in battle. The rest died of starvation. They say even the living were ridden with maggots. You can imagine just how deplorable the situation was.
By the way, there were other Japanese military operations that resulted in soldiers suffering starvation. Tens of thousands of officers and grunts died of starvation in New Guinea, Leyte, Luzon, and Imphal.
Why did they starve? Because the military hadn’t prepared rations. In all these instances, they sent the troops into battle with only the amount of provisions stipulated in the operation plan. The thinking was that the troops would take the enemy position in so many days; they could seize the encampment’s provisions and be resupplied via the captured base. Perhaps the brass thought soldiers without food would fight with blind fury, their only option to win. The Kawaguchi Expeditionary Force sent in after Ichiki’s is said to have referred to the U.S. provisions that they were counting on acquiring as “Roosevelt’s grant.”
But war rarely goes simply according to plan. On the battlefields that I just mentioned, instead of wiping out the enemy our forces ended up getting pulverized, and those who survived fought starvation. Logistics is basic to war. It means supplying rations and ammunition and such. They say that generals of our Warring States period considered logistics to be of the utmost importance. Yet, the staff at IGHQ didn’t even think of such essentials. Top graduates of the Army War College, they were all exceptionally bright, too. The Army War College’s top graduates back then were on par with the cream of the cream of Tokyo University’s elite Law Department.
That was how 30,000 officers and soldiers ended up isolated and abandoned on Guadalcanal. But we couldn’t leave them to die. The IJN did send many ships to replenish their supplies of ammunition and food, but before the slow-moving transports could reach the island, planes launched from the airfield on Guadalcanal attacked and sank them. At long last, in a desperate measure, high-speed destroyers were deployed to deliver provisions. Rice and other staples were packed into metal drums which were then allowed to drift to shore at night via ropes. “Rat Transportation,” the destroyers’ captains self-deprecatingly nicknamed it. But even with this risky method, a single destroyer could only deliver several days’ worth of provisions for the more than 20,000 troops. A number of these destroyers, too, were sunk in enemy ambushes. Plus, come morning, many of the supply drums would be strafed by American fighter planes and sink, riddled with machine-gun bullets.
Eventually, submarines unloaded the torpedoes that were more valuable to them than life itself in order to ferry in rice.
During this period the IJN fought many battles in the seas around the Solomon Islands. In some battles, the Combined Fleet managed to defeat the Americans, while in others the U.S. forces sank our vessels.
Actually, we had had a good chance to claim victory in the early stages of the naval battle at Guadalcanal.
I mentioned that the Americans launched a surprise attack on Guadalcanal on August 7th. The IJN’s Eighth Fleet, located at Rabaul at that time, immediately headed out to attack the enemy’s transport convoy. The night next, on August 8th, they happened upon an American fleet escorting the convoy off the coast of Savo Island. This would later be referred to as the First Battle of the Solomon Sea. Led by Gunichi Mikawa, the Eighth Fleet trounced the American cruisers by pulling off a surprise attack by night, a specialty of the IJN.
But Mikawa Fleet immediately withdrew. If they had taken the opportunity to press forward and attack the transport ships, they probably could have destroyed most of the convoy.
Even though Captain Hayakawa of the cruiser Chokai strongly suggested pushing forward to wipe out the transport convoy, Fleet Commander Mikawa chose to withdraw instead.
Reportedly, he feared U.S. aircraft carriers. He thought that even if they managed to destroy the convoy, if carrier-based planes attacked them come morning, a fleet that lacked a fighter escort would be in dire straits.
However, at that time the three U.S. aircraft carriers he was worried about were far away from Guadalcanal. That is because their fighter squadrons had sustained heavy damage from Rabaul’s Zeros. Petty Officers Sakai and Nishizawa and others had fought bravely the day before, and that very morning Flight Leader Miyabe and I had participated in a desperate attack. The commander of the carrier air group, Admiral Fletcher, felt that Japanese carriers were approaching, and judging that he wouldn’t be able to fend off an attack since he’d already lost many fighters, he retreated eastward. Those two days of do-or-die fighting on the part of the Zeros had driven away the enemy carriers.
But Mikawa Fleet let this chance at victory slip away. The enemy’s transport ships hadn’t yet offloaded their heavy artillery and such, so if only Mikawa Fleet had attacked, they could have sunk much of the convoy’s weapons and ammunition. Had that happened, the engagements of the Ichiki and Kawaguchi expeditionary forces would likely have taken totally different courses. The foot soldiers on the front line were risking their lives in combat, yet the weakness of those in charge caused such an outcome. So very unfortunate…
Here’s something else I learned after the war: when Fleet Commander Mikawa was appointed to lead the Eighth Fleet, General Staff Chief Nagano apparently told him, “Our country’s manufacturing industry is quite small, so do your best to keep our ships from sinking.” What a philosophy. Perfectly fine with treating soldiers and airmen like sacrificial pawns, they treasured the expensive warships with utmost devotion.
There’s another ugly rumor that I heard. The Order of the Golden Kite, the highest honor that could be bestowed on a commander of a military fleet, was granted based on sinking enemy warships in battle more than anything else. Battleships were worth the greatest number of points, followed by cruisers, destroyers, and so on. But transport ships didn’t count for any, no matter how many you sank. Moreover, losing any of your own ships meant a significant deduction. Is it much of a stretch to imagine that after sinking the cruisers and destroyers, Fleet Commander Mikawa withdrew without so much as a glance at the transport convoy for precisely this reason?
In any case, Mikawa Fleet’s withdrawal was a terribly regrettable decision in the Battle of Guadalcanal.
Subsequently too, the Navy managed to deal some crushing blows to the American fleet. Our submarine, I-26, torpedoed the Lexington-class carrier Saratoga, rendering her incapable of combat. Another sub, I-19, sank the aircraft carrier Wasp in September.
During the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on October 26th, in the first carrier showdown since the Battle of Midway, our carrier-based pilots fought like fiends, sinking the U.S. aircraft carrier Hornet and badly damaging the Enterprise. The Hornet had carried out an air raid on Tokyo. Our pilots sortied knowing the mission was a long-range attack from which most would not return alive, and sank the Hornet at the cost of a very high number of casualties.