Dead Reckoning: The Story of How Johnny Mitchell and His Fighter Pilots Took on Admiral Yamamoto and Avenged Pearl Harbor by Dick Lehr

Author:Dick Lehr [Lehr, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062448521
Google: eLeoDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2020-06-08T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Moon over Guadalcanal

Navy Secretary Knox and Admirals Nimitz and Halsey on Guadalcanal

WWII Database/public domain

A LIGHT SNOW FELL IN WASHINGTON, DC, AS PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. Roosevelt entered the House of Representatives chamber to deliver a wartime State of the Union address aimed at shoring up the nation’s spirit. “The coming year will be filled with violent conflicts,” he told the joint session of Congress, “yet with high promise of better things.” Looking back at 1942, he honored the bravery of the 1.5 million soldiers, sailors, and marines fighting overseas: “the heroes, living and dead, of Wake and Bataan and Guadalcanal, of the Java Sea and Midway and the North Atlantic convoys.” He cheered the fact that in Europe the Nazis’ superior airpower, which at the war’s start had enabled the relentless bombing of London, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry, was no more. Said FDR, “the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and they are going to get it.” In the Pacific Theater, the president singled out the Battle of Midway as a critical turning point, a victory halting Japan’s expanding dominance in the region: “We know that as each day goes by, Japanese strength in ships and planes goes down and down, and American strength in ships and planes is going up and up,” he said in a message that was rebroadcast in twenty-six languages.

Eight thousand miles away, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto celebrated the changing year aboard the flagship Yamato, anchored at the main naval base at Truk Lagoon in the central Pacific. He dined with his officers on a New Year’s soup called ozoni, but his mood could hardly be called celebratory. Gloomy was more like it, as he considered the prospects for the upcoming winter and beyond. “I am distressed,” he wrote a friend in early January. “Things here look about as bad as they could.” In another letter written a few weeks later to an old navy comrade, Yamamoto was just as blue, if not more so: “I have acquaintances and beloved subordinates both in this world and the next. Part of me feels that it wants to go and meet them again, and another part feels that there are things it still wants to do here.”

Reluctantly, Japan’s military leaders, including Yamamoto, had by year’s end concluded that Guadalcanal was a lost cause. They had unanimously recommended to Emperor Hirohito that the navy devise plans for removing army soldiers from the island. The propagandists and media in Japan, taking their cue from the government, would spin the evacuation not as a retreat but as a tactical move to deploy military assets elsewhere in the Pacific. Indeed, while assenting to the withdrawal, the emperor had also insisted that plans for a new operation against New Guinea be conceived so that Japan would still be seen as being on the move. But Yamamoto knew the truth: the abandonment of Guadalcanal was a major blow. The numbers told the story: more than 14,700 Japanese soldiers had been killed or gone missing

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