Air Power in the Southwest Pacific

In August 1942, US South Pacific (SOPAC) command headquarters was still reeling from defeat. At the Battle of Savo, four cruisers were sunk and the rest of the fleet retreated in confusion. Ashore on Guadalcanal, the Marines were trying to secure their beachhead, working desperately to turn an incomplete Japanese airstrip into Henderson Field. The Japanese Navy was coming back to Guadalcanal before the Allied fleets, but this time with an invasion force. At this point in the crisis, Washington sent a message: when could SOPAC get moving and support Douglas MacArthur’s taking of Rabaul, the port on the northern tip of the mountainous and jungle-covered island of New Britain that the Japanese had invaded earlier that year?

The key Japanese base in the south Pacific, Rabaul had to be captured outright or neutralized before Allied forces could advance westward along the New Guinea coast or move north, into the Philippines. In August 1942, Washington was totally out of touch, yet impatient with, the realities of what would today be termed multi-domain operations in the Solomons, islands that had previously been considered a priority by no one except the people that lived there. They now were being circled in red on situation maps everywhere. The war against Germany was receiving most Allied resources; what was available in the South Pacific had to be spread thin. The art of late-modern warfare was being learned simultaneously around the world.

The air operations covered in this book provide insights that are applicable to current thinking. Focus is again shifting to great power conflict among Pacific islands. Allied airpower, whether in the defensive (Guadalcanal) or offensive (against Rabaul), was the result of joint and coalition multidomain operations. But Rabaul also became one of the first of many targets – Mosul in Iraq has been one of the latest – where airpower could do tremendous damage and limit enemy operations but could not displace determined fighters digging into the rubble.

Rabaul was not taken. The Rising Sun flag came down only after V-J Day, when all the ships based there had been sunk and all the aircraft wrecked. The improvised strategy that led to Rabaul being bypassed, rather than assaulted as Washington (and MacArthur) had wanted (from a distance) in 1942 has, since then, been presented as an exemplar of a successful indirect approach, perhaps most memorably in the Victory at Sea television episode “Ring Around Rabaul”.

The reality was somewhat more complex and nuanced. In the decades since the war, an extensive and broad range of literature has appeared on this campaign, the hinge of the war in the Pacific. In this air campaign, with its hard-fought battles – unlike the one-sided results of 1941 or 1944-45 – colorful personnel and varied aircraft have attracted much of the writing. Specialized subjects such as intelligence and tactical development have also been covered. Some historians, drawing on Japanese sources, have been able to present a fairly complete picture of that side of the story.

This book describes the air campaign in the Solomons – as well as some of that in New Guinea – starting with the invasion of Guadalcanal in August 1942 and ending with the defeat of Japanese airpower based at Rabaul in February 1944. By the end, a cascade of Allied forces, ships and aircraft produced by mobilized American industry had overcome the threat from Rabaul. The Japanese were able to use Rabaul to assemble, project and sustain (albeit on multiple shoestrings) the forces that, in 1942, had made the fight for Guadalcanal so costly. The air campaign covered in this book prevented Japanese airpower from recovering from the 1942 battles; in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944, US numbers and qualitative superiority proved overwhelming.

The book has one map (of the Solomons) and several track charts of naval battles. While its primary focus is on air operations in the Solomons, it also covers in some detail the naval and ground battles of the 1942 Guadalcanal campaign, but only briefly treats those of the 1943 fighting and the advance up the island chain towards Rabaul. Fifth Air Force operations in New Guinea in 1942-43 are also covered.

The people appearing in the narrative are mainly familiar figures such as fighter aces, including the self-publicizing Marine ace Gregory Boyington and such unorthodox but innovative airmen as Major Paul “Pappy” Gunn who helped enable low-altitude anti-ship skip-bombing tactics that turned what the Japanese thought would be their surprise reinforcement of New Guinea into the disastrous March 1943 Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Bombers were modified for low-level attacks with additional machineguns and parachute-retarded fragmentation bombs that were used in counter-air strikes against airfields in New Guinea.

The book has no source notes. Its three-page bibliography is limited to 55 published sources, with no trace in the text of any use of archives, interviews, oral history or even the Internet. The three journal articles appearing in the bibliography were all written by the book’s author. While the bibliography includes 11 books published by this book’s publisher, it includes nothing in any language other than English nor any books by or about the substantial Australian and New Zealand or limited British participation in the air campaign (the British carrier HMS Victorious was rushed to the area when the US Navy was down to a single fleet carrier, another carrier returned to take Rabaul’s surrender).

Now, it is unfair to hold the absence of source notes or the physical size of a bibliography against an author. These often reflect editorial direction. Which is a shame as many books, encountered on the shelf in (increasingly rare) brick-and-mortar bookshops, tend be judged on characteristics these by the hard-core buyers of military history titles, numerically a small group but one that accounts for a large percentage of overall sales. If sources appear to be lacking, the potential buyer may replace the book on the shelf rather than look deeper to see compensating strengths. In a world of rapid-fire book-browsing, in-person or online, books that appear to lack depth in research (like those with historically inappropriate dust jacket illustrations) may not get a second chance, however much they may merit this.

What does need to be considered in assessing this book is that the text – which is what really matters – did not apparently use the full range of sources about this campaign. No history book is completely comprehensive. The reason why people that write history books get paid big bucks is that they make hard decisions about what they should include in limited available space, all the while remembering, as Walt Whitman famously wrote, that the real war will never get into books. While the book’s emphasis is on a mission-level narrative, for example, it does not cover the unsuccessful 5 October 1942 attack on Rabaul by the carrier Hornet’s air group, an attempt to disrupt at its source the “Tokyo Express” naval resupply to Guadalcanal. This was an important operation; the Hornet was being risked, brought within striking range of Rabaul’s shore-based aircraft when it was the only fleet carrier in-theatre.

Nor is there an attempt to analyze the operations and tactics on both sides, to show how they evolved during the campaign and worked or failed. If the reader does not know air tactics going in, they may not understand much more coming out, even though the narrative describes significant air battles. For example, the Japanese ace Saburo Sakai, in his first encounter with US Navy fighters, had to use all his skill to survive against a pair of F4F Wildcats using the “Thach Weave” for mutual support. When the Royal New Zealand Air Force starts sending their P-40 squadrons to Rabaul in 1943, they appear not to be using the effective tactics for this fighter that the Fifth Air Force had improvised.

Similarly, while the development of some of the more significant US aircraft in the campaign – the North American B-25 Mitchell bomber and Vought F4U Corsair fighter – is described, how the other types – especially the Japanese ones – are mentioned in the narrative, but without explaining how they fit into the broader context of their users’ operations and tactics and how they succeeded or failed. Inconsistencies in what is covered and how information – like ship and aircraft designations – is presented could have been avoided by an additional pass through the manuscript with a red pen.

There is an absence of tabulated information. Air operations, more than any other domain, are expressed and analyzed in terms of data. The number of aircraft available, sorties, days of bad weather, orders of battle, losses, bombing accuracy, all could provide insights for the reader.

Many history books, like this one, focus on subjects that have been extensively covered in the past. Relying on a restricted set of sources is likely to impede the challenge any author faces of saying something new or presenting what happened in 1942-44. If you want combat narratives, the source for them is in the reports, ship logs and squadron operation record books in the archives. Looking at these is only the first step. Because this area has been so extensively covered in print, some of the air battles described here – Saburo Sakai over Guadalcanal, Ira Kepford’s escape from Zeros over Rabaul – have been written up repeatedly over the years. The narrative of some specific air battles has been extensively revised in historical works, some of which appear among this book’s 55 published sources. If readers know more about battles such as Sakai’s, it is because historians – most notably the late Henry Sakaida – did original research that showed how what was published in the past was by no means the complete story. There is still room to say something new.

To provide new information or a different view of subjects or events the reader may already know, or provide a viewpoint that is different, can be powerful and effective. The existing record can be examined through different perspectives or looking at different aspects that have not been emphasized in the past. There are many ways to approach a familiar historical event. In recent years, books such as Shattered Sword, by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, provided new information and revised the narrative on the Battle of Midway.

Lord Trenchard had it right; airpower is indivisible. An air campaign is much larger than the combat aircraft that are its cutting edge. Many air campaigns have been shaped by logistics and terrestrial sensors including radar, radio intercept and the all-important coastwatcher network. Combat-focused histories tend to push these, along with non-kinetic air operations, to the margins. Yet transport aircraft flying in 55-gallon drums of aviation gasoline kept the fighters defending Henderson Field even when the Japanese had succeeded in interdicting seaborne resupply. The Allied advance in Papua was made possible by transport aircraft dropping supplies and evacuating casualties. As this phase of the campaign against Rabaul ended, The Japanese were already transitioning from their previous reliance on increasingly nonsurvivable fighters for their defensive airpower and instead were forced to look to anti-aircraft guns and passive defenses in the face of increasing Allied airpower. Books about airpower do not tell the whole story when they focus on combat aircraft without wider context.

Creative, popular, trade or mass-market history – call it what you will – as differentiated from high-test, industrial, official or academic stuff, does not require less research. Popular books are no less sophisticated than academic books, they are just more accessible, and, if done properly, may very well require more research into a broader range of sources. Some approaches that have been successful in the past may be impossible to reproduce today. Stephen Ambrose’s best-selling Band of Brothers was possible to write because the participants were there to be interviewed rather than having to rely on archival and published sources.

The author of creative history wants to – needs to – make historical figures as compelling and as engaging as those in fiction but – a big but – can make absolutely nothing up. To write history in the form of scenes – dramatic when possible – that show rather than tell requires the writer to research things that might be below the horizon of other historians, to recreate a historical experience the reader can share.

There are subjects that will continue to attract the attention of readers over the years – indeed, centuries. These present a challenge to the historian, how to make use of existing material while making an original contribution. But without bringing new material, new perspectives or saying what is already known in a new way, it becomes difficult to distinguish a book from those already on the shelf.

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Note: Under the Southern Cross is also available in e-editions.

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