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Japan's Sea Lords in the South Paci c

By John Prados
September 2012 Naval History Magazine Volume 26, Number 5

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The U.S. Navy ag of cers who waged Guadalcanal’s naval battles are well
known. But who were the admirals who led the opposing forces?

Americans on Guadalcanal overwhelmingly remembered it as “the Night,” the

South Paci c evening when two huge Japanese battlewagons appeared offshore
and then blew them to hell and gone. That night, 13–14 October 1942, the Imperial
Japanese Navy came as close as it ever did to actually neutralizing the vaunted
cactus Air Force at Henderson Field. The fast battleships Kongo and Haruna used
special ammunition, cruised at leisure through the waters of Iron bottom Sound,
and in icted severe damage on the Marine positions on the ’canal. It was an
experience that Americans hoped never to repeat.

That much is received history. But barely understood—at least on this side of the
Paci c—is the meaning of that bombardment to the Japanese navy of cers and
sailors on the scene, or, for that matter, its role in Japanese strategy. Studies of
American activities during the Solomons campaign are legion. The actions of
probably every U.S. admiral in the South Paci c have been probed in some depth.
When it comes to the adversary, however, only Japan’s top leader, combined Fleet
commander-in-chief Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, and to a lesser degree his aircraft-
carrier-force commander, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, have been given
equivalent attention. The net result is that even today the story remains
incomplete. This article is a rst cut at replacing some missing pieces in the
Solomons story. Instead of focusing on the “usual suspects” we will study Japan’s
sea lords at Guadalcanal.

Consider the Night. Just two days earlier, another Japanese bombardment unit
coming down “the Slot,” as the waters between the Solomon Islands were called,
had been ambushed by an American cruiser-destroyer force lying in wait. That
action, the battle of cape Esperance, had featured the rst death in action of an
Imperial Japanese Navy ag of cer in World War II (an imperial navy admiral had
perished at Midway, but from his choice to go down with his agship rather than
from direct combat action). Vice Admiral Aritomo Goto had been a real seagoing
sailor and a hard-bitten cruiser-division commander. The Japanese navy task force
on the Night was bent on avenging his death.

Its leader, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, had been a classmate of Goto’s at the Imperial
Japanese Naval Academy at Eta Jima, and had graduated just two places ahead of
him academically. Kurita’s escort commander, Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, had
been a good friend of Goto’s, while the task-force commander’s senior staff of cer,
commander Kikunori Kijima, had had the same assignment under the deceased
admiral. He felt responsible for Goto’s death. And the battleship Kongo,
commanded by captain Tomiji Koyanagi, had been Goto’s rst billet as an ensign
fresh from training. Goto had once skippered the heavy cruiser Atago, and
Koyanagi had followed him by several years in that command.

What applied at the top level was true down the line in Kurita’s force. Admiral
Tanaka led an escort of the light cruiser Isuzu and nine destroyers. No fewer than
ve of the destroyer skippers were naval academy classmates of the morti ed
commander Kijima, who had considered suicide to atone for his supposed failure
at cape Esperance. Two of Tanaka’s skippers were classmates of the captains of the
carriers Kaga and Hiryu, which had been lost at Midway. A pair of the destroyer
captains had been classmates of captain Ishinosuke Izawa, who went down with
his carrier, the Shoho, at the battle of the coral Sea. Two senior of cers (the captain
of the Haruna and one of the destroyer-division commanders) had been at Eta
Jima with the skipper of light carrier Ryujo, sunk at the battle of the Eastern
Solomons. Another of Tanaka’s division leaders had actually been escorting the
Ryujo at the time.

And if that were not enough, many of the senior planners on the combined Fleet
staff—men anxious to regain Japanese ascendancy over the Allies—were products
of the Eta Jima class of 1923, which had also graduated several of Tanaka’s destroyer
captains. Two more were classmates of captain Shigenori Kami, the hyper-
aggressive senior staff of cer to the Japanese eet commander at Rabaul. What
these men heard from their comrades when anchored in port had to have
in uenced them. Without a doubt, Admiral Kurita’s subordinates were equally
determined to achieve a measure of vengeance.

So Japanese sailors on the Night were driven by avenging angels. But fast-forward
two years—to the Leyte Gulf battles—and the Imperial Japanese Navy’s
desperation played out with opposite consequences among some of the same
men. On the Night, Takeo Kurita led the Japanese force. At the famous battle off
Samar on 25 October 1944, Kurita again led the attacking force—with former
Kongo captain Koyanagi now staff chief. Vice Admiral Kazutaka Shiraishi, leading a
heavy cruiser division, had been chief of staff to Kurita’s superior at the time of the
earlier action. It is fascinating to speculate on the impact of one set of events on
the other. The lesson of the Night was that determination could be driven to
success; Samar taught that determination pressed to the point of pursuit but then
abandoned could lead to the destruction of the eet.

The Night formed only part of a much larger strategic scheme with which Admiral
Yamamoto intended to reverse the trending course of the war in the South Paci c.
Henderson Field had to be neutralized so the Japanese could move a large troop
convoy to Guadalcanal and mount a land offensive there. The combined Fleet
cruised to the east of the Solomons intending to pounce once the Japanese army
had advanced. Of course the plans had been brainstormed by Yamamoto; Rear
Admiral Matome Ugaki, his chief of staff; plus the specialist planners at
headquarters. Their scheme would be carried out by the admirals a oat, Chuichi
Nagumo and Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, whose maneuvers led to the battle of
the Santa cruz Islands on 26 October 1942. Here the success of Japan’s sea lords in
the South Paci c was crucially in uenced by the actions of subordinates whom
history has often ignored.

Japanese navy doctrine at that time continued to accord primacy to the battleship,
with the practical result that when carrier task forces and surface action groups
operated together, tactical command went to the surface leader. Thus Kondo of
the Second Fleet had overall control of the combined Fleet units heading into
battle. In the new aero-naval environment of the Solomons campaign, and given
that Kondo had no experience at all with carrier operations, this posed a potentially
signi cant problem.

Admiral Ugaki of the Combined Fleet, who was also educating himself in aerial
warfare, understood the dilemma. The same conditions had applied during the
battle of the coral Sea, the rst carrier battle. During the planning phase before
Santa cruz, Ugaki called in the of cer who had led the Japanese carriers at coral
Sea, Rear Admiral Chuichi Hara; he had also had to deal with a surface of cer in
overall command at the battle. Hara and Ugaki had several long conversations
about carrier operations and coordinating task forces with surface units.

Admiral Ugaki realized that surface warrior Nobutake Kondo needed an education
in these matters as well. Chuichi Nagumo, though a friend and Eta Jima classmate
of Kondo’s, was not a carrier specialist and not the man to teach air fundamentals.
Instead, Ugaki gave that job to Nagumo’s staff chief, Rear Admiral Ryunosuke
Kusaka. He was a true aerial-warfare specialist and, equally important, had known
Kondo since middle school. They shared birthdays and had been in the same
school in Osaka, where Kondo had taken Kusaka under his wing as a sort of
younger brother. Now Kusaka could return the favor. He gave Kondo the aerial
basics and obtained a concession that once the Japanese initiated carrier
operations Nagumo could act independently.

But it was within Nagumo’s force itself that Admiral Kusaka’s actions would be
decisive. Having also been Nagumo’s chief of staff during the Midway debacle,
Kusaka was determined to avoid the errors that had led to disastrous losses there.
The sinking of the carrier Akagi especially pained him. Not only had she been the
eet agship, Kusaka himself had commanded her in 1940. Within the Third Fleet,
now Japan’s carrier task force, Kusaka implemented measures to drain carriers’
aircraft fuel lines when combat was imminent, improving ship survivability. He also
regularized the practice of launching a two-wave dawn search pattern—a critical
failure at Midway. And Kusaka provided that a strike group should be spotted on
ight decks when searches went out in order to make instant use of any sightings.
These innovations were Kusaka’s, not Nagumo’s.

In the days before Santa cruz, another Kusaka concern—that the American carriers
would be poised to attack from the Japanese ank—also led to special search
operations by a detached cruiser group. And in the immediate prelude to the
battle, Kusaka would be instrumental in adding to Nagumo’s usual caution—to a
fault, in the opinion of the combined Fleet, which ordered the force to seek battle
in the face of Kusaka’s advice to delay. In any case Kusaka’s careful preparations
would afford some advantage to the Japanese at the battle of the Santa cruz
Islands.

As valuable as Kusaka’s advice on aerial warfare was to Admiral Kondo, it proved

critical to Japanese land-based air commanders in the Solomons. The Eleventh Air
Fleet, headquartered at Rabaul, conducted the Solomons air war. Initially Vice
Admiral Nizhizo Tsukahara led the air eet, as he had since before the war.
Tsukahara was the imperial navy’s most expert aviation commander and the only
of cer experienced at conducting long-range interdiction operations. But in the fall
of 1942, the admiral contracted malaria and had to be sent home. To replace him
the Japanese selected Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka, Ryunosuke’s older cousin.

Kusaka had no air-warfare experience at all. In December 1941 he had been

president of the naval academy and looking forward to retirement, but now he was
supposed to run an air war. His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Yoshimasa Nakahara,
was a Navy Ministry bureaucrat. Fortunately for the Japanese, Kusaka was a quick
study and had a exible mind, but he still operated at a disadvantage. The
Japanese high command sent captain Yoshitake Miwa, formerly of the combined
Fleet staff, as air of cer.

But the skill set remained thin. In the fall of 1943, when the Japanese tried a major
air offensive from Rabaul, the combined Fleet tried to make up for Kusaka’s
inexperience by assigning him its air operations mastermind, captain Sadamu
Sanagi, as air staff of cer and by bringing Ryunosuke Kusaka down from Japan as
chief of staff. By then, however, Rabaul was under siege and its value as a center for
aerial operations rapidly diminishing. Japanese air units were withdrawn from
Rabaul in February 1944. Two months later, Ryunosuke Kusaka followed them.
Promoted to vice admiral, he would take up the reins as chief of staff of the
Combined Fleet.

By far the best-known Japanese surface commanders in the Solomons were Vice
Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, victor at the battle of Savo Island, and Raizo Tanaka. Both
played key roles in Japanese surface operations, especially during the Guadalcanal
phase of the Solomons campaign. Mikawa, at number 41 on the navy’s seniority list,
ranked only a half dozen spaces behind Jinichi Kusaka, who would become his
direct superior in December 1942. That was when the Japanese created a
Southeast Area Fleet at Rabaul to control all naval and air forces in the Solomons.
Mikawa was a warrior of the Satsuma clan and an intellectual. Third in his class at
Eta Jima and a graduate of the staff college, he returned to the naval academy as
an instructor and later was chief of the instructional staff.

Interviewed by historian John Toland in the 1960s, Mikawa volunteered that he had
read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The In uence of Seapower upon History four times. As
a junior of cer he had been among the Japanese delegation to the Paris Peace
conference in 1919 and later served as assistant attaché in Paris and with
negotiators at the 1930 London Naval conference, for which he had been rewarded
with promotion to captain.

But Mikawa was a seaman too, known as a torpedoman and navigator. In

succession he had skippered the heavy cruisers Aoba and Chokai, then the
battleship Kirishima. It was he who had led the battleships that protected
Nagumo’s Kido Butai (Mobile Force) at Pearl Harbor, and he had commanded
another unit of that type with the assault force that was to have made the
Japanese landing on Midway. Mikawa had given up command of battleships—the
very vessels that would shell Guadalcanal on the Night—to establish the Eighth
Fleet in the Solomons. After that campaign ended in defeat, he would go on to
bigger things, leading the theater command (area eet) that defended the
Philippines in 1944. His value recognized, Mikawa was accorded the extraordinary
distinction of a personal audience with Emperor Hirohito.

But for all his skills and experience, Mikawa remained capable of error. Americans
are most familiar with his decision at the battle of Savo Island to give up any
pursuit once he had crippled the Allied cruiser force. That had squandered the
opportunity to smash the amphibious ships still landing supplies at Guadalcanal
and Tulagi. There were reasons for Mikawa’s command decision, of course, and one
can argue them. Less defensible is his behavior a few weeks later at the battle of
the Eastern Solomons, when on three separate occasions Mikawa countermanded
orders from Admiral Tsukahara to the transport force. Raizo Tanaka described
tremendous confusion resulting from the con icting commands, which left his
troopships and escorts vulnerable to Allied airstrikes that in icted critical damage.

Then there are the events of 13–14 November 1942, when a Japanese cruiser unit
under Rear Admiral Shoji Nishimura carried out another of those Guadalcanal
bombardment missions. Mikawa led an Eighth Fleet cover force, which, had it
helped shell Henderson Field, might actually have put the place out of action.
Instead he held back beyond Savo Island, and the next morning the cactus Air
Force plastered the Japanese, causing as much damage as the imperial navy’s
cruisers had suffered in any of the Guadalcanal surface battles. Mikawa’s vision
failed him that night.

Americans appreciate Rear Admiral Tanaka as an excellent ghting sailor. Japanese

are more divided. Take, for example, captain Toshikazu Ohmae, who served on
Gunichi Mikawa’s staff and had reason to defend the Eighth Fleet commander.
Ohmae was an exceptional of cer who after the war became a factotum for
foreigners seeking to research the Japanese side of the con ict. When shown the
draft of Volume 5 of Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval
Operations in World War II, which covered the Guadalcanal campaign, Ohmae
observed that Tanaka had been fond of radioing requests for air cover when there
was little hope of any, and on reaching port complaining of poor naval air force
cooperation. Ohmae characterized Tanaka as small-minded. While he conceded
that Tanaka had been a skilled squadron leader, he opined that the admiral’s
methods discouraged initiative among his captains.

This view contrasts with Admiral Tanaka’s record, though not with the imperial
navy’s treatment of its supposedly errant Hotspur. Tanaka was wounded twice in
running the vaunted “Tokyo Express” to Guadalcanal. His Destroyer Squadron 2,
considered the elite night- ghting unit of the Japanese navy, achieved signal
success in the 29–30 November battle of Tassafaronga. His ten destroyers—only
two of them stripped for battle—overcame an Allied cruiser force with every
advantage, including greatly superior strength, radar, and intelligence of the
destination and timing of Tanaka’s supply run.

Though lacking the intellectual stature of Mikawa, Tanaka had nonetheless

graduated in the upper third of his naval academy class and been alert to
possibilities for tactical and material innovation. Even before the war he had
listened to his destroyer captains’ arguments for changes in torpedo-attack tactics,
and it was Tanaka who had perfected the Japanese method of heading Tokyo
Express units with guard ships. His destroyermen also conducted the experiments
that enabled the Japanese to drop “strings” of supply drums offshore, permitting
them to of oad quickly and minimizing exposure in the target zone.

Admiral Tanaka himself recognized his error on the night of Tassafaronga of not
pressing ahead to actually unload the supplies on his destroyers. Given Japanese
concern at that point about their soldiers starving on Guadalcanal, that failure
probably accounts for what hap-pened to him. Tanaka was reassigned to a shore
billet and led base forces through the rest of the war. Replacing him in command
of Destroyer Squadron 2 was none other than the battleship Kongo’s former
commander, Tomiji Koyanagi, newly elevated to rear admiral.

Koyanagi’s destroyers would be instrumental in the nal episode of the

Guadalcanal campaign. In the rst days of February 1943, the Tokyo Express came
to rescue the surviving Japanese on the island. The mission was not actually
Koyanagi’s. He was slated for a supporting role as Rear Admiral Susumu Kimura led
the operation. But Kimura never made it to the ’canal. Instead he was injured when
the American submarine Nautilus (SS-168) torpedoed his ship a few days before the
evacuation.

The Japanese command next gave the assignment to Shintaro Hashimoto, the ag
of cer leading Destroyer Squadron 3. The change was more than a little ironic,
because Rear Admiral Hashimoto had been a friend and competitor of Raizo
Tanaka’s since naval academy days. When they graduated together in 1913,
Hashimoto had been just nine places behind Tanaka in the standings, and it had
been that way ever since. In 1940, when Hashimoto skippered the heavy cruiser
Chikuma, Tanaka was captain of the Kongo, but only four spaces ahead of his
comrade on the seniority list. At Guadalcanal their destroyer squadrons had played
tag-team for the Tokyo Express. Tanaka had had the duty in August, Hashimoto in
September-October, then Tanaka came back for November. Also like Tanaka,
Hashimoto had lost a ship in battle, in his case the destroyer Ayanami, which
succumbed to American shells in the Naval battle of Guadalcanal’s battleship
action.

One more way Hashimoto and Tanaka were alike: both were aggressive of cers. On
14–15 November, the night he lost the Ayanami, Hashimoto had been the rst to
sight Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee’s battleships. Though he turned away initially,
Hashimoto later reversed course and carried out the scout mission off Lunga Point
that he had been assigned—despite the battlewagons thundering around him.

Still, Hashimoto had a bit of the hard-luck sailor in him. That night of the big ships,
the Ayanami had been the only Japanese destroyer lost. The Guadalcanal
evacuation drove home the point. On the rst rescue run, Hashimoto’s agship, the
destroyer Makinami, was damaged by the cactus Air Force during the approach.
The admiral was left to transfer his ag and rush to catch up with the speeding
Tokyo Express. For his second rescue run, on 4 February, Hashimoto sailed in the
destroyer Shirayuki. This time the ship’s engines gave out and Hashimoto was
obliged to transfer again. Only his third transport mission went smoothly, despite
damage in icted by Allied aircraft. Hashimoto’s operation evacuated more than
10,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors from Guadalcanal.

Both times Shintaro Hashimoto was left behind, the destroyer leader who took
charge was Rear Admiral Tomiji Koyanagi. A year behind both of the other
destroyermen at Eta Jima, Koyanagi never caught up. He had been number 300 on
the seniority list in 1940, almost 60 places behind Hashimoto, and only made rear
admiral in November 1942. On the other hand, Koyanagi had had a well-rounded
naval career. A staff-college graduate, unlike his peers, he had served in cruisers
and destroyers and on the staffs of a battleship division, the combined Fleet, and
on the Naval General Staff. As mentioned previously he had commanded the
battleship Kongo on the Night. It was Koyanagi, with Tanaka’s old squadron, who
had ranged the Slot during December 1942. He was resting at Truk a few weeks
later when Admiral Kimura suddenly had to be replaced. Rear Admiral Koyanagi
uidly assumed command of Destroyer Squadron 10 and then, with equal
presence, pursued the Guadalcanal evacuation missions when his colleague
Hashimoto was unavoidably detained.

Koyanagi led units of transport destroyers and got the troops off the shore with
great rapidity. When he returned to Truk after the withdrawal from Guadalcanal,
Admiral Yamamoto called him in and made a point of expressing his great relief
that the younger of cer had been on the scene. Guadalcanal marked Koyanagi for
bigger things. A few months later he would be appointed to the staff of the Second
Fleet. That was why he would be on the scene again at Leyte Gulf.

Japan’s sea lords conducted the Guadalcanal ght with skill and determination.
But it was their lot to be on deck when the war was changing, when the formulas
so successful during the months after Pearl Harbor stopped working, and when
the Imperial Japanese Navy was increasingly matched—then overmatched—by
American and other Allied forces that were equal in skill and bene ted from
technological prowess and intelligence superiority. Looking at the sailors on the
other side of the sea adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Solomons
campaign.

Sources:

David c. Evans, ed., The Japanese Navy in World War II, second edition (Annapolis,
MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986).

Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal: The De nitive Account of the Landmark Battle (New
York: Penguin Books, 1992).

Donald M. Goldstein and Kathrine V. Dillon, eds. Fading Victory: The Diary of
Admiral Matome Ugaki, 1941–1945, Chihaya Masataka, trans. (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1991).

Hara Tameichi, with Fred Saito and Roger Pineau, Japanese Destroyer Captain
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011).

Herbert C. Merrillat, Guadalcanal Remembered (New York: Avon Books, 1990).

Thomas C. Miller Jr.. The Cactus Air Force (New York: Bantam Books, 1981).

Samuel Eliot Morison, United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 5: The
Struggle for Guadalcanal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).

Samuel Eliot Morison Papers, Naval Historical center, Washington Navy Yard,
Washington, DC.

John Prados, Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of American Intelligence
and the Japanese Navy in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003).

John Prados, Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the
Rising Sun (New York: NAL/Castle, 2012).

John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire (New
York: Random House, 1970).

John Toland Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, National Archives

and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

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