The Conquering Tide (8 page)

When the third and fourth waves arrived later that morning, the beachhead was weirdly serene. An occasional rifle shot was heard in the distance, but no concentrated and sustained bursts that would suggest a firefight. On the incoming boats, marines lined up in leisurely fashion; one by one they leapt from the bow, over the surf, to avoid soaking their boots. Men were relaxing in the shade, smoking cigarettes, or trying to open coconuts with their knives or bayonets. A few had even stripped down to their underwear and plunged into the surf for a swim. Native huts with thatched roofs were being commandeered as shore-party command posts, and signs nailed to palm trees indicated where cargo handlers should stack and sort incoming equipment and provisions. A medical tent had been set up under a Red Cross banner, but at 10:30 a.m. the only casualty was a young man who had cut his hand while trying to open a coconut with a machete.
⁶⁰

It all seemed too easy, even a bit ominous. Did the Japanese hope to draw them into an ambush?

Chapter Two

A
WAKENED BY THE NAVAL BARRAGE, THE
J
APANESE ON
T
ULAGI HAD
been caught completely by surprise. Captain Shigetoshi Miyazaki, commander of the seaplane base, fired an initial radio warning to Rabaul. As the first landing boats scraped ashore on what the marines had designated Beach Blue, he and his small force of Special Naval Landing Force troops withdrew into the island's hilly interior, but not before sending a final spirited broadcast: “We will defend to the last man. Pray for our success.”
¹

Rabaul, 650 miles to the northwest, was headquarters of the Eighth Fleet, commanded by the newly arrived Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa—and of the Twenty-Fifth Air Flotilla, a land-based aviation command with about ninety operational aircraft, including bombers, reconnaissance planes, and Zero fighters. With two working airfields and two more in reserve, Rabaul was the axis of Japanese airpower in the region, the backstop to smaller satellite airfields at Kavieng, Lae, Salamaua, Buin, and Buka. It offered a superb natural harbor, a flooded caldera more than a mile in diameter. But the Japanese conquerors had little affection for the place. It was a hot, dusty, primitive township, disturbed by frequent earthquakes and choked with pumice and gray-black ash from the volcano Tavurvur, whose imposing black cone dominated the view to the south. Admiral Mikawa's headquarters was in a cramped, dilapidated colonial building. Enlisted men were quartered in crude barracks and fed mostly barley rice and
miso
soup, with open-pit cesspools for toilets. The best thing about Rabaul, according to an officer stationed there, was a bath house erected by the Japanese over the hot springs at the base of Tavurvur. Nothing boosted Japanese spirits like a hot bath.

Upon receiving word of the American invasion in the Solomons, Rear Admiral Sadayoshi Yamada prepared to strike the American fleet. Twenty-seven twin-engine G4M bombers and nine Zero fighters had been fueled and armed for a scheduled attack on Rabi, an Allied airfield in New Guinea. Yamada now ordered that the flights be diverted to the Tulagi-Guadalcanal area, and launched immediately. He would not even allow the bombers to be rearmed with aerial torpedoes, which were far more effective against ships than land bombs, for fear that his planes might be caught on the ground and destroyed.

When the Zero pilots examined their charts, they whistled in disbelief. Six hundred and fifty miles down, and then all the way back: their single-seat fighter had never flown a combat mission of that range. The flight leader told his men that conserving fuel must be their overriding concern. They would fly with belly tanks, which would diminish the Zeros' performance in air combat, and they could afford only a brief visit to the enemy fleet. Under these conditions they would fight at a severe disadvantage.

Shortly before 10:00 a.m. (Guadalcanal time), the big G4Ms began roaring down the runways, followed a few minutes later by the Zeros. The forty-five planes coalesced into an “arrowhead” configuration, with the bombers locked in three stepped-down “Vee of vee” formations and the Zeros trailing closely on either flank. The long flight took them directly over the large island of Bougainville, which was home to two intrepid coastwatchers who had pulled well back into the bush. W. J. “Jack” Read was concealed at an advanced observation post in the northern jungle hills. Paul Mason was ensconced in a remote hideaway called Malabita Hill, near the south end of the island. In preparation for
WATCHTOWER
, and to avoid coding delays, both men had been instructed to report hostile aircraft sightings immediately, by voice transmissions in plain language.

Shortly before 11:00 a.m., Mason heard the drone of aircraft overhead. Looking up through the canopy of foliage, he saw an armada of Japanese bombers. He counted twenty-four. Immediately he transmitted, “F
ROM
S
TO
, 24 B
OMBERS
H
EADED
Y
OURS
.”
²
The report was copied in Port Moresby, relayed to Townsville, sent immediately to Pearl Harbor, and then broadcast to the
WATCHTOWER
task forces.

In spite of its circuitous route, Mason's message arrived on the
Saratoga
and the
McCawley
when it was just thirty minutes old. Flight time from south Bougainville to Guadalcanal was more than two hours, so Fletcher
and Turner had plenty of time to react. Turner got his ships dispersed and underway for emergency evasive action, and the carriers launched fighters to intercept the incoming planes.

Even with ample warning, Fletcher faced daunting logistical problems. His Grummans had to protect two task forces separated by sixty to seventy-five miles, requiring about thirty minutes of flight time. Dogfights would burn fuel and oblige their early return to the flattops—and once the fighters returned, there was the problem of clearing the flight deck so that they could land and be refueled. The day's crowded flight-operations schedule placed heavy demands on all three flight decks. (It was essentially the same problem that had lost the Battle of Midway for the Japanese.) At 1:15 p.m., as the Japanese strike closed on Savo Sound, just eight Wildcats were in position to defend the amphibious fleet. They were at 12,000 feet, below an opaque layer of overcast. The Japanese G4Ms approached at 16,000 feet—above the cloud ceiling, thus invisible to the Wildcats. The fighter control circuits rang with radar warnings.

All at once, the bombers broke through the clouds in a shallow dive. Lieutenant James J. Southerland, leader of a division of
Saratoga
F4Fs, radioed a “tally-ho”: “Horizontal bombers, three divisions, nine planes each, over Savo, headed for transports. . . . Let's go get them, boys.”
³
Southerland dropped to his left and opened a few bursts on the nearest Japanese aircraft, at a range of just 500 yards. He pressed this promising attack and sent one G4M down in flames, but seconds later the Zeros descended through the clouds and found three of his wingmen in their sights. Two Wildcats went spinning into the sea, and the others were forced to dive for their lives.

Taking in the view from below the overcast, the Japanese airmen were astonished by the size of the American fleet. The bombers continued east, descending to 10,000 feet, and opened their payloads over the XRAY transports maneuvering at high speed off Lunga Point. The sky was mottled with the dark smudges of antiaircraft bursts, but the Japanese planes stayed in formation. As the sticks of bombs fell behind them in a glinting diagonal tail, the American helmsmen coolly steered to avoid them. Every bomb fell harmlessly into the sea near Lunga Point. The G4Ms banked west for the long run back to Rabaul.
⁴

A furious fighter melee continued over Savo Island and western Guadalcanal. Among the Zero pilots were two of the most lethal fighter aces in the Imperial Japanese Navy: Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, who would eventually be
credited with eighty-seven kills, making him Japan's top-ranked ace; and Saburo Sakai, who would survive the war with about sixty claimed kills. (Sakai authored a fascinating and credible postwar memoir,
Samurai
, which was translated into English in the 1950s.) Southerland, after flaming one of the G4Ms, went into a spiraling dive to avoid two pursuing Zeros. Lieutenant Joseph R. Daly's aircraft, riddled with 7.7mm machine-gun fire, began to turn over and descend toward the sea. His fuel tank ignited and the flames spread into his cockpit: “My clothes were on fire; my pants and shirt burning: I could see nothing but red fire all around me.”
⁵
Daly wrenched open the canopy and leapt out. He dropped through the cloud cover at 7,000 feet and pulled his chute.

Saburo Sakai had never seen an F4F until this moment. Looking down, about 1,500 feet below, he saw a lone Wildcat in a skirmish with three Zeros. Lieutenant Southerland was flying a series of tight left spirals that denied his pursuers a clean shot at him. He repeatedly forced the Zeros to overtake him and peppered their wingtips with .50-caliber fire. Sakai dived into the fight, and was immediately taken aback by Southerland's skill: “Never had I seen an enemy plane move so quickly or so gracefully before.”
⁶
In a dance of snap rolls and sudden throttle-chops, Sakai and Southerland maneuvered for advantage, until both aircraft slipped into a vertical spiral, with one wing pointed down at the sea and the other up at the sky. Intense g-forces shoved both men into their seats and forced them to strain their necks to keep their heads erect. After the fifth spiral Southerland broke out into a loop, and Sakai locked on to his tail. “I had him,” Sakai wrote. “The Zero could outfly any fighter in the world in this kind of maneuver.”
⁷

Sakai fired a long burst of 7.7mm caliber rounds into Southerland's cockpit, but the sturdy Grumman flew on, apparently unperturbed. The Japanese pilot then fed fuel to his engine and flew alongside the Wildcat. The two men made eye contact. Sakai saw that Southerland was badly wounded, with blood on his shoulder and chest. Southerland lifted his hand and waved; Sakai shook his fist and shouted for the American to fight on “instead of flying along like a clay pigeon.”
⁸
But Southerland's guns had jammed. His aircraft had been hit hundreds of time, and the aluminum skin of the fuselage and wings was shredded so badly that the frame was bared to Sakai's view. His instrument panel was completely destroyed; his canopy was shattered; his radio was dead; his flaps were not responding; and oil was coursing into the cockpit. He had eleven separate wounds. He had
no choice but to bail out. As Sakai fired several 20mm cannon rounds into the Wildcat's wing root, setting the plane afire, Southerland unbuckled and got free of the cockpit. He had just enough altitude to pull his chute before hitting the treetops. Though suffering severe wounds, including a 7.7mm round that passed through his foot, Southerland managed to make his way overland to the American lines.

Sakai then chased a formation of eight American dive-bombers, elements of VB-6 and VS-5 of the
Enterprise
. The SBDs held formation, and the rear-gunners concentrated their fire into the engine and cockpit of the oncoming Zero. A .30-caliber round grazed Sakai's skull and blinded his right eye. Somehow he managed not only to survive this grievous wound, but to fly 650 miles back to Rabaul and land safely. Sakai would lose the eye but return to flight service in 1944.

A flight of nine type Aichi D3A2 (Allied code name “Val”) dive-bombers, armed with sixty-kilogram bombs, dived on the XRAY transports off Lunga Point. One bomb hit the superstructure of the destroyer
Mugford
, killing twenty-one men but doing little damage to the ship. Wildcats chased the retreating dive-bombers and peppered them with .50-caliber fire. All the Vals were destroyed, either in air combat or by ditching at sea; twelve of eighteen crewmen were also lost.

Off the weather coast of Guadalcanal, the mood in Task Force (TF) 61 was decidedly upbeat. A destroyer officer watched the first wave of planes as they returned to the
Wasp
: “Jubilant pilots circled us, rocking their wings and waving as they passed overhead.”
⁹
As the planes recovered, the word spread quickly—the initial bombing and strafing attacks had put every Japanese plane in the area out of action before they could get into the air. But the carriers' air operations were only beginning. Between first light and dusk, the three flattops completed an extraordinary 704 plane launches and 686 recoveries. Beginning long before dawn, with a bleary-eyed breakfast, followed by the call to General Quarters at 0500, the crews had worked to the brink of exhaustion. Flights had been planned in painstaking detail and down to the minute—Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, commander of Task Force 16, compared the day's operations to a “railroad schedule.”
¹⁰
Planes were landed, refueled, rearmed, replenished with oxygen, respotted, and sent back up at a record-breaking pace. In one case, the
Wasp
turned around an eight-plane squadron in sixteen minutes.
¹¹
Inevitably, there were mishaps. Planes spun into the sea or catapulted over the crash barrier and
had to be jettisoned over the side. Some failed to find their carriers on the return and were forced to ditch at sea.

The air groups had successfully protected Turner's fleet, but the day's fighter losses were worryingly high. Fifteen Grummans had been destroyed or forced to ditch, and five more had been badly damaged. In the initial melee with the Zeros, which were piloted by some of the top aces in the Japanese navy, the Wildcats had suffered 50 percent losses. The superior speed and maneuverability of the Zero remained a grave concern. Grummans were needed over the carriers to provide air protection; they were needed to protect Turner's fleet in Savo Sound; they would be needed to escort any outbound airstrike, should Japanese carriers appear on the scene. Eighteen fighter planes per carrier were “nowhere near enough,” Admiral Kinkaid concluded, and the fighter complement would be doubled by the end of 1942. For now, however, Fletcher had to do the best with what he had, and he had good reason to wonder whether he had enough fighters to cover the fleet on D-Day plus one.