Musashi
Midway, had sapped Yamamoto’s confidence,
and thereafter conservation rather than expenditure of force became the
watchword in the imperial fleet. On June 4, the admiral had sat on Yamato’s
flag bridge digesting every morsel of the Kido Butai’s disaster with groans of anguish.
Putting in at Truk several months later with his fleet on the way to the
Solomons, Yamamoto seems to have had a premonition of impending personal as
well as national calamity, writing to a friend, “I sense that my life must be
completed in the next hundred days.” So Yamamoto, the supreme gambler, lost his
nerve. Instead of throwing his two finest battleships into the fight for
Guadalcanal at its climactic moment, he dispatched the old battle cruisers Kirishima
and Hiei. The sea-air battles of mid-November that concluded with a dramatic
night duel between capital ships sealed Japan’s fate. Hiei was mauled by
Callahan’s gallant cruisers and destroyers on the night of the twelfth, then
bombed to death the next morning. Kirishima, returning two nights later at the
head of another cruiser-destroyer force, led by Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo,
found the fast new battleships Washington and South Dakota waiting along with
four destroyers. The battle did not go all the Americans’ way. The destroyer
force was wiped out, and South Dakota suffered a massive failure to its
electrical system that kept it useless for long moments while Japanese gunfire
pummeled its upper works. But that left Washington free to shoot Kirishima to
pieces, and the battle cruiser was scuttled the next morning. Kondo, on the
bridge of the cruiser Atago, had had enough and rushed away. The Japanese would
never again send a battleship force against Guadalcanal and Henderson Field.
Historians can profitably imagine what
would have happened if Admiral Willis Augustus Lee on the nights of November
14–15, 1942, had confronted both—or even one—of Japan’s superbattleships.
Standing out of range of American 16-inch guns, Yamato and Musashi would have pounded
Washington and South Dakota under the water before turning their huge 18-inch
batteries on Henderson Field. With the Cactus Air Force ripped to pieces, the
two Japanese ships could have returned night after night until the U.S. Marines
and Army units would have either surrendered or evacuated. The battleship might
well have resumed its place as queen of the seas. Instead, by refusing to risk
his most precious ships in admittedly perilous circumstances, Yamamoto lost
Hiei, Kirishima, the battle, the campaign, and whatever faint chance Japan
might have had to keep its fledgling oceanic and East Asian empire through
stalemate.
Yamamoto’s faintheartedness reflected a
peculiar aspect of the Japanese character that contributed to that island
nation’s defeat. To the people of Nippon, enmeshed in both a warrior culture
and a scarcity economy, warships were sacred entities. Each of the big carriers
and battlewagons carried a portrait of the emperor, and the loss of any one of
these vessels was deemed a national disaster spiritually as well as
economically. Crews believed their ships to be irreplaceable, and they fought
those ships to the bitter end; the few who at last abandoned a sinking or
burning vessel did so in tears. Not so the Americans. Ships, however much they
might be a temporary or even long-term home, were, in the last analysis, pieces
of machinery that were expendable. When they could no longer function, they
were abandoned, with regret to be sure but with anticipation that a replacement
would soon be on the way. Although a few men wept at seeing their ship go down
or burn uncontrollably, the great majority seem to have taken the attitude of
two sailors on the sinking Hornet at Santa Cruz. As they went down the lines
from the fatally stricken carrier, one asked the other if he would reenlist.
“Goddamit, yes,” the other replied. “On the new Hornet.” The supreme irony of
Yamato and Musashi was that their very existence as the world’s greatest
battleships precluded their effective use. By the end of January 1943, the
Japanese conceded defeat, moved their fleet back to Truk, and over a two-night
period removed the last of their by now starving and tattered troops from
Guadalcanal.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was burdened by
more than the low morale of its commander during the Solomons campaign. It
simply did not possess the detailed intelligence of enemy strength and movement
available to the Americans through the breaking of the Purple Code. Throughout
the Pacific war, the Japanese navy fought blind in many ways on many fronts:
its intelligence was poor to nonexistent, its radar belated and crude, and its
antisubmarine instruments rudimentary. In technology as in so many other areas,
the Japanese were simply overwhelmed, as Yamamoto surely understood.
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