Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 22, 1993 TAG: 9305220285
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEE WINFREY KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This landmark of modern warfare is movingly recalled in "The Lost Fleet of Guadalcanal," a 2 1/2-hour documentary beginning at 9 Sunday on TBS. Stacy Keach narrates Kage Kleiner's well-written script.
"The Lost Fleet of Guadalcanal" is a mixture of film old and new. Roughly half is old black-and-white combat footage that is now more than a half-century old. The other half is contemporary color centered on Robert D. Ballard, a renowned undersea explorer, searching for the wreckage of 50 ships sunk off Guadalcanal during the long and bloody campaign in the South Pacific.
Ballard, who previously discovered and filmed the sunken wrecks of the Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck, found 14 ships in Iron Bottom Sound, the channel on the north side of Guadalcanal where the most fierce naval engagements were waged. They look eerie, most of their coral-encrusted guns still pointed upward, as though poised to fire at foes long gone.
Guadalcanal was an obscure British colony, part of the Solomon Islands chain, when the Japanese captured it and built an airfield on it. Pre-war life here was so primitive, Keach says, that "the first wheel that many Solomon Islanders ever saw came on the bottom of an airplane."
Because Guadalcanal brought the Japanese within bombing range of Australia, 11,000 U.S. Marines invaded on Aug. 7, 1942, the day after the airfield was completed. They captured the airfield and named it Henderson Field. The Guadalcanal campaign was essentially a fight to control this airstrip.
The initial American victory on land was followed by a shocking defeat offshore. In the Battle of Savo Island, centered on a small seaspeck north of Guadalcanal, the Japanese sank four Allied cruisers: the Quincy, the Vincennes, the Astoria and the Canberra. In less than an hour, more than 1,000 Allied sailors were killed.
After the Battle of Savo Island is described, Ballard finds the Quincy. His crew is headquartered on a research vessel called the Laney Chouest, and uses two undersea vehicles provided by the U.S. Navy to search along the ocean floor.
The Japanese were unable to follow up their victory at sea with triumph on land. On Aug. 20 and again on Oct. 24, they were thrown back from Henderson Field, with more than 2,000 of them killed. Among the dead was the commander of the first assault, Col. Kiyoano Ichiki, who committed hara-kiri after his crushing defeat in the Battle of Tenaru River.
In 1992, the year of Ballard's explorations, many Allied and Japanese veterans returned to Guadalcanal to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the campaign in which they fought. Several offer their recollections on this show, with some of the most vivid related by a former U.S. Marine, Harry Horsman, and a Japanese ex-pilot, Saburo Sakai.
Horsman's 19th birthday was Oct. 12. The next day, Japanese warships fired more than 900 shells at Henderson Field, sounding "like freight trains whizzing over your head." Horsman decided, "I'll only have one day of being 19." He was happy to be wrong.
Sakai, an air ace, had shot down 56 Allied planes when he was wounded by return fire from a dive bomber. He says he thought at that time, "I'd made others go through this many times, and now it was my turn." Like Horsman, he was happy to be wrong: Keach says Sakai flew for five hours, "drenched in his own blood," to get back to his home base on another island.
Through the fall of 1942, the Japanese navy controlled the waters around Guadalcanal and made it difficult to resupply the Marines. Food became short. Thousands caught malaria. Their only source of American music was Tokyo Rose's propaganda show. Typically, after playing the latest hit by Glenn Miller, she would tell the Marines the exact location of their units and sign off with, "Tomorrow you'll be dead."
In November, the battleship Kirishima led a fleet of 61 Japanese ships to Guadalcanal, planning to land an additional 7,000 troops on the embattled island. But in a fierce fight at night, they lost the Kirishima and another battleship, three destroyers, one cruiser and more than 1,800 men. American losses were comparable: seven destroyers, two cruisers, and more than 1,700 men. The United States was finally able to claim victory the next day, when it sank seven Japanese troop transports.
On Sunday's program, Ballard finds the Kirishima, the biggest ship in Iron Bottom Sound. He says it is the only sunken ship he has ever seen that is lying upside down on the ocean floor.
In December, the exhausted Marines were finally relieved by the U.S. Army, which completed the conquest of Guadalcanal in February 1943. Oddly, the army's operations are not described, nor are any soldiers interviewed. Fortunately, a remedy for this shortcoming is available: The finest novel about Guadalcanal is James Jones' "The Thin Red Line" (1963). Jones, the renowned author of "From Here to Eternity" (1951), was wounded on Guadalcanal.
Comments from former President George Bush open and close "The Lost Fleet of Guadalcanal." Speaking from the deck of the battleship Texas, the only surviving U.S. Navy ship to serve in both world wars, he calls Guadalcanal "one of the defining moments of World War II."
Bush did not take part in the Guadalcanal campaign, since he was in pre-flight training when it began and did not reach the Pacific until after it was over. On Sept. 2, 1944, while he was a pilot on the aircraft carrier San Jacinto, he was shot down while bombing Japanese radio towers on a small island. Three hours later, he was rescued by a U.S. submarine. A historic bit of film footage shows him being pulled from the water onto the sub's deck.
Like Harry Horsman, Saburo Sakai, and James Jones, Bush was one of the fortunate ones. On Guadalcanal, the total number killed on both sides of the battle was 38,000.
by CNB