Fire and Fortitude by John C. McManus

Author:John C. McManus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

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As this climactic drama played out in Papua, the unforgiving probabilities of modern warfare turned, like a fickle lover, on the Japanese at Guadalcanal. The mid-November destruction of the 38th Division convoys had inflicted irreparable damage upon the Japanese. Over the following weeks, US air and sea forces grew progressively stronger while the Japanese grew weaker. The ripple effect of this turnabout inevitably weakened Japanese ground forces, since they could no longer be adequately reinforced and resupplied. Theoretically, Japanese commanders still hoped to go on the offensive, seize Henderson Field, and eject the Americans from the island. But the moment for that had passed. Realistically, as American planes and ships steadily assumed control of the skies above the island and the waters around it, any hope of a new Imperial Army offensive was merely a fantasy.

General Hyakutake still had about twenty-five thousand troops on Guadalcanal. By and large, they were in poor condition. According to an Americal Division intelligence report, “sickness, lack of proper food, and the rigors of jungle fighting under adverse conditions were taking a rather serious toll.” Malaria control was almost nonexistent, as were disease-prevention measures as a whole. Dysentery, beriberi, malnutrition, and malaria had claimed the lives of thousands. Food was becoming uncomfortably scarce. Front-line soldiers were subsisting on one-third rations, comprising perhaps a third of a pint of rice per day. They scrounged for coconuts, ferns, roots, bamboo sprouts, wild potatoes, and even grass just to fill their stomachs. Rather than talking about women or family, they conversed, in excruciating detail, about the sumptuous meals of rice dumplings and rice cakes they had once consumed back home. They now routinely called Guadalcanal “Starvation Island.” Many, like Private Takeo Kinamoto, were suffering from hunger edema. “My body has swelled up from below the waist, especially my legs,” he told his diary. “My testicles swell up and I wonder whether I am alive.” One soldier looked around at his comrades and wrote privately, “From the color of their faces, one might wonder whether they were alive or not.” Another hungry soldier plaintively asked his diary, “What on earth are we to eat?”

In hopes of finding a way through the tightening American air and sea net, the Japanese used Tokyo Express destroyers to ferry supplies in nocturnal voyages to Guadalcanal. Sanitized fuel drums were packed with rice, powdered miso, powdered soy sauce, matches, candles, and other supplies. They were then bound by ropes into batches of fifty drums and lashed to the decks of the destroyers. When the ships approached a preselected spot on the coast, crewmen dumped the drums overboard. “Then motor boats would tow the drums ashore, where waiting work crews of about two hundred men would pull them up on the beach,” wrote General Miyazaki, the 17th Army’s chief of staff. The system rarely worked so smoothly. Tow ropes often broke. Drums got hung up and wrecked on coral reefs. Some of the drums simply disappeared at sea. In daylight hours, Allied fliers shot up quite a few.

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