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CABLING JOSEPH STALIN TO APOLOGIZE FOR MISSING A CONFERENCE in Moscow, President Roosevelt acknowledged the urgency of the Eastern Front and declared, as politics seemed to require, that “our real enemy is Germany.” As Soviets reeled before the assaults of the Wehrmacht, and the transatlantic convoys meant to save them withered under U-boat attack, FDR made the case for hope in the Pacific. “We have gained, I believe, a toe-hold in the Southwest Pacific from which the Japanese will find it very difficult to dislodge us.” The Japanese Army’s first concentrated attempt to do so began taking shape on the night of August 19, when a detachment of shock troops under Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki snuck ashore some fifteen miles east of Henderson Field.
The commander who carried Ichiki’s men to the island was a destroyerman who would become famous for running Japan’s fast resupply and reinforcement missions by cover of night, soon to be referred to as the “Tokyo Express”: Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka. He had studied the difficult novelties of amphibious operations. Without either surprise or a strong softening-up by naval or air bombardment, he “foresaw grave difficulties in my task and knew that we would suffer heavy losses.” He deemed his orders to bring down the Ichiki detachment “utterly unreasonable.” But he was underappreciating the extent of the Japanese command of the night. Under cover of darkness, Tanaka arrived with six destroyers off Taivu Point and put Ichiki ashore with nine hundred men.
Once assigned to seize Midway Island, Ichiki’s 28th Regiment was a veteran outfit whose experience and success would work against them now. As a company commander serving in China, Ichiki had helped instigate the infamous Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, a clash between Japanese and Chinese troops that some historians would identify as the first hostility of World War II. His intelligence service had warned him that frontal attacks on Guadalcanal might be costly. But Ichiki’s reputation preceded him, and that reputation, and the recklessness it inspired, would lead to his fall. Some called it “victory disease.” Ichiki expected a quick victory. As he advanced boldly on the Marine positions, he regarded them as easy marks.
Vandegrift knew enemy reinforcements had landed after one of his patrols routed an enemy probe and recovered their documents and diaries. Where their main strength lay no one knew, but the appearance of Japanese first-teamers was an alarming sign. Until Colonel Ichiki’s arrival, the marines had contended in most instances with poorly equipped labor battalions, or “termites” as they called them. Now experienced Japanese assault troops were out there somewhere. It worked on men’s nerves.
The night had a hundred ways to provoke a sentry to a startled fusillade: the rustling of lizards and crabs through the undergrowth; the birds whose calls sounded like wood blocks smacking together. Vandegrift’s largely unseasoned men had to cure themselves of the impulse to promiscuous firing. To keep their positions concealed, they learned the rigors of field discipline: discipline with their triggers, with their mess equipment, with their sanitation and patrol doctrine. They cultivated the patience to remain still and silent until the need came to uncork a sudden, lethal attack.
Late in the night of August 20, near a tidal lagoon that Martin Clemens and his scouts had christened Alligator Creek, Marine sentries heard movements, a buildup of some kind. Soon thereafter, in the first dark hours of the following day, a green flare burst overhead, then, spilling out of the brush and across the sandbar in Alligator Creek, came an assault force of two hundred Imperial Army shock troops.
Vandegrift’s riflemen were ready. Supported by well-placed anti-tank guns firing exploding canister rounds, and with carefully drawn lines of interlocking fire, Colonel Pollock’s 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, stopped Ichiki cold. The Japanese assault faltered then collapsed as artillery and mortar fire ripped into them. Admiral Tanaka likened the attack on the fortified position to “a housefly’s attacking a giant tortoise.” A counterattack by Colonel Clifton B. Cates’s 1st Regiment reserve began the rout. Lieutenant Colonel Lenard B. Cresswell’s 1st Battalion led the destruction of the trapped Japanese unit. Enveloped near the mouth of the lagoon, Ichiki’s men died by the score under attack by four Wildcats from Henderson, whose machine guns were a welcome addition to the order of battle for the marines. A trio of Cates’s tanks rolled in that afternoon. “We watched these awful machines as they plunged across the spit and into the edge of the grove. It was fascinating to see them bustling amongst the trees, pivoting, turning, spitting sheets of yellow flame. It was like a comedy of toys, something unbelievable, to see them knocking over palm trees, which fell slowly, flushing the running figures of men from underneath their treads, following and firing at the fugitives,” the correspondent Richard Tregaskis wrote. By 5 p.m., about sixteen hours after it had started, most of the Japanese force, more than eight hundred men, lay dead, for thirty-four marines killed and seventy-five wounded. Japanese prisoners numbered just fifteen. Only a few escaped back into the jungle, no doubt to tell sober tales of the Marine Corps’ proficiency with massed defensive firepower. Observing vacantly as the disaster unfolded, Ichiki himself appears to have been a suicide, last seen by one of his men walking straight toward the American lines.
At first Major Mangrum, the dive-bomber squadron commander, missed the significance of the affair. “We thought it was just a Fourth of July celebration about a mile and a half from us, and went on to sleep. We found the next day that our Marines had killed some 830-odd Japs over there, and then we figured that it was really somebody shooting at somebody!” The stout performance of Vandegrift’s men enabled Mangrum to get about his own work without delay. His pilots flew four-plane patrols all the next day to acquaint themselves with the area. August 20 and 21 were a boost to marines who had been largely unsupported by U.S. airpower for two weeks. Boasting their first victory in close-quarters fighting and now in possession of an air force all their own, they readied themselves for the struggle ahead with hopeful and defiant hearts.
When news of the Army’s failure reached Truk, it “shook Yamamoto,” wrote one of his destroyer captains, Tameichi Hara. Meeting in his cabin aboard the super battleship Yamato with task force commanders Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo and Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, Yamamoto directed the Combined Fleet to gather its considerable assets and head south to confront what was clearly a significant commitment of American force. He drew up a complex and powerful order of battle. Down from Truk, into the seas east of the Solomons chain, would steam four separate combat task forces: a Striking Force under Nagumo with the large carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku and their escorts; Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe’s Vanguard Group, with the battleships Hiei and Kirishima,three heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and six destroyers; the Diversionary Group, consisting of the light carrier Ryujo, a cruiser, and two destroyers; and the Support Group, with the old battleship Mutsu, a seaplane tender, and four destroyers.
Clinging to an unrebuttable belief that the destroyed landing force under Colonel Ichiki would somehow yet seize the airfield, the 17th Army decided to send down the remaining fifteen hundred men of Ichiki’s regiment. An additional thousand Japanese marines—a Special Naval Landing Force—were embarked in three transports escorted by eight destroyers of Admiral Tanaka’s Destroyer Squadron 2. The Japanese carriers would operate east of the Slot, sweeping the seas of their American counterparts, then turn in support of Tanaka’s landing force. This Japanese force nearly rivaled in combat power the group sent to seize Midway. Neither side had a firm idea where the other’s carriers were. Fletcher and his flattops were steaming about 250 miles southeast of Guadalcanal, staying beyond range of enemy air attack, where they could refuel when necessary and send air search patrols over the Slot to supplement the work of the longer-range PBYs and B-17s. Scout pilots flying from Henderson Field faced maddening technical difficulties. One day their radio communications were in perfect tune two hundred miles out from base; the next day they were utterly garbled or silent within twenty miles.
Effectively, two parallel but separate naval campaigns were developing. The seas immediately around Guadalcanal would be the setting for a campaign of surface fights between light forces for control of the seas. Farther out to sea, generally to the north and east of the Solomons, a less geographically constrained campaign would be fought as the roaming aircraft carrier forces made themselves selectively available to duel, striking with their planes but never coming within sight of each other.
On the night of August 21, the marines on Guadalcanal were witness to a quick, fiery encounter between light naval forces in Savo Sound. On that night the destroyers Blue and Henley, having brought two cargo ships into Guadalcanal, caught an enemy destroyer, the Kawakaze, bent on intercepting the U.S. cargomen, which had been sighted that afternoon. Before the American duo knew anything was awry, the Kawakaze had put six torpedoes in the water. The radar set on the Blue had only just revealed the enemy’s presence about three miles away when the American ship was racked by a torpedo. The blast removed most of her stern, killing nine men and leaving her to be scuttled the next night.
But Admiral Yamamoto had much more than destroyer skirmishes to worry about. The assignment to send his carriers against a U.S. island airdrome when the American carriers were unaccounted for must have given him an unsettling flashback to June, when he had tackled a similar dual threat, Midway and three enemy carriers, and paid a heavy price. If Yamamoto’s carriers met the Americans again, it would be a rematch between the commanders Fletcher and Nagumo, who had traded blows eleven weeks earlier off Midway.