Midnight in the Pacific by Joseph Wheelan

Author:Joseph Wheelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2017-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE CEASELESS ATTACKS ON HENDERSON Field, Yamamoto believed, would enable the navy to land thousands of infantrymen as well as tanks and artillery, and to build up Japanese forces so that in mid-October, General Hyakutake’s Seventeenth Army could crush the Marines and capture the airfield.

Most of the more than ten thousand newly landed soldiers belonged to the Sendai (2nd) Division, but they also included two battalions of the 230th Infantry Regiment of the 38th Division. Besides putting reinforcements ashore, the Tokyo Express runs, carried out by ninety-two destroyers, seven cruisers, and four seaplane carriers, also landed eighty artillery pieces from Major General Tadashi Sumiyoshi’s 4th Heavy Field Artillery Regiment, forty-six hundred boxes of supplies, and ammunition—160 tons in all, according to historian Richard Frank.

Counting Kawaguchi’s and Ichiki’s remnants from the two failed offensives, along with service and support troops, there were now about twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal facing twenty-three thousand Marines and soldiers.

“The victory is already in our hands,” Hyakutake messaged headquarters in Rabaul. So confident was he of success that he had chosen the Matanikau River mouth as the place where he would accept the surrender of Vandegrift, who would be required to approach with a white flag and an American flag. Before the Bloody Ridge fiasco General Kawaguchi also had had a surrender plan, as well as the dress uniform he intended to wear for the occasion.102

On October 16 the Sendai Division, led by Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama, began advancing with the harrowed Kawaguchi Brigade toward staging points south and west of the American perimeter. Each soldier carried sixty pounds of food, ammunition, and artillery shells. Ten days’ rations were expected to sustain the Sendai during its thirty-five-mile trek to Bloody Ridge’s approaches. Maruyama believed that his men would be ready to attack on October 22.

In an exhortatory message to his men the general wrote, “This is the decisive battle between Japan and the United States in which the rise or fall of the Japanese Empire will be decided. If we do not succeed in the occupation of these islands, no one should expect to return alive to Japan.… Hit the proud enemy with an iron fist so he will not be able to rise again.”103

The 2nd Division dated to the Imperial Japanese Army of the 1870s. It recruited youths from the Sendai region north of Tokyo, and its headquarters was at Sendai Castle in the Tohoku District—hence, its better-known name. Its recruits were treated more harshly than nearly any soldiers in any army. Beaten and poorly fed to accustom them to privation, the Sendai, before being deployed, marched 122 miles in seventy-two hours with forty-pound packs and 150 rounds of ammunition, running the final miles to their barracks. The division had fought in all of Japan’s wars. In 1931 it helped lead the invasion of Manchuria and battled Soviet troops during the 1939 Nomonhan campaign. In March 1942 it had landed at Bantam Bay in Java. Pledging absolute fealty to the emperor, the Sendai’s motto

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