‘Tokyo Express no longer has terminus on Guadalcanal.’
So cabled General Alex Patch to Vice Admiral Bill Halsey on 6th February 1943. Patch commanded US ground forces during the last phase of the bloody campaign for control of the Pacific island; Halsey was his opposite number in the US navy. Both had cause to celebrate the termination of the ‘Tokyo Express’, American military vernacular for the Japanese navy’s concerted attempts to reinforce the island with troops and supplies using destroyer-transports. The operation was mostly headed by a tenacious rear-admiral by the name of Raizo Tanaka. Although the efforts of Tanaka and the Tokyo Express could not prevent an ignominious strategic defeat for the Japanese military, they proved a relentless thorn in the side for the Americans on land and at sea.
Guadalcanal lies towards the southern end of the Solomon Island chain, which extends roughly in a south-easterly direction away from the Bismarck Archipelago above New Guinea. The island group was named by a 16th century Spanish explorer, Alvaro de Mendana de Neira, as was Guadalcanal, after his hometown in Andalusia. [1] The peanut-pod shaped island is approximately 80 miles long and 25 miles wide with mountains in the east rising to 8,000ft. Guadalcanal and the other islands to the chain encircle a narrow waterway called New Georgia Sound, or as it became known to American servicemen, ‘The Slot’. Between Guadalcanal and two smaller islands to the north is another stretch of water that to earn the epithet ‘Ironbottom Sound’ owing to the large number of US and Japanese warships sunk there.
The Solomon Islands became a key theatre in the Pacific War owing to their strategic position between Rabaul, the forward base of Japanese military operations in Oceania, and Espiritu Santo, an island in the New Hebrides that the Americans were utilising for counteroffensive operations. The two navies had already clashed in the region at The Battle of the Coral Sea in May of 1942, an inconclusive carrier action that had nonetheless thwarted a planned Japanese invasion of New Guinea. As part of this operation, the Japanese had established a seaplane base on Tulagi, and scouting in the area commanders found a suitable site for an airfield at Lunga Point, a site approximately midway along Guadalcanal’s north coast. When allied reconnaissance spotted construction activity at Lunga Point, US war planners saw the opportunity to pre-empt further Japanese expansion into Oceania.
In an operation codenamed ‘Cactus’, a large force of US marines under the command of General Alexander Vandegrift began landing on Guadalcanal on August 1st 1942. The small Japanese force on the island was taken completely by surprise and quickly routed. Moreover, the Americans immediately took over construction of the Japanese airstrip, renaming it Henderson Field.[2] Within two weeks of the first American landings, Henderson was operational, with a small contingent of aircraft informally referred to as Cactus Air Group (CAG). Conditions were to say the least arduous. Mud and dust clogged aircraft engines. Munitions had to be hand-loaded, fuel, hand-pumped. The runway was an unstable mix of gravel and coral. On its first day of operations, the CAG lost three aircraft to accidents.
Japanese endeavours to wrest back control of the island began with a notable naval victory. At The Battle of Savo Island on the night of August 9-10th, an American and Australian cruiser force screening another wave of US landings, was surprised by cruisers and destroyers under the command of Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa. The subsequent engagement led to the destruction of one Australian and three American cruisers, an unprecedented loss for the modern US navy.[3] However, Mikawa failed to press home his advantage by attacking the US landing ships further to the east, by which point over 15,000 army personnel had been put ashore.
By August 23rd, Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) commander-in-chief Isoroku Yamamoto had assembled a powerful expeditionary force comprising battleships and aircraft carriers from its base in Truk as well as a convoy of army reinforcements. In addition to enabling a landing of troops and supplies Japanese military objectives were to defeat any American naval forces in the area and destroy Henderson field. The reinforcement convoy was led by 50-year-old Raizo Tanaka. A graduate of The Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, Tanaka had for a brief period commanded the battleship Kongo, but most of his training and experience had been centred on destroyers and torpedo warfare.
By the beginning of World War Two, the Japanese navy possessed some of the fastest and most powerful destroyers in the world. ‘Special Type’ classes as the Fubuki and Kagero could reach speeds of 36 knots and carried an armament of 5-inch guns. Moreover, these newer destroyers were fitted with what was by far the most effective torpedo then in service with any navy – the Type 93 ‘Long Lance’. In addition to carrying a reliable explosive charge of almost 500kg, this weapon was powered by compressed oxygen that reduced its bubble-trail making it harder to spot. But what really marked the Long Lance out was its effective range, which at 40km was almost three times that of existing American torpedoes and well outside the limits of searchlight illumination.
At the subsequent Battle of the Eastern Solomons, fought on 24/25 August, none of the Japanese military objectives were met. Having succeeded in knocking out an American aircraft carrier, the Japanese battlefleet was peremptorily withdrawn, leaving Tanaka’s slow moving troop convoy unprotected. By this time there were already more than 30 aircraft – primarily F4F Wildcat fighters and SBD dive bombers – working out of Henderson. After coming under repeated attack by this aerial force, including a bomb hit on his flagship, the old cruiser Jintsu, that knocked him briefly unconscious, Tanaka swiftly reversed course for Rabaul, his convoy losing one troopship and the old destroyer Mitsuki in the process.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 