Isoroku Yamamoto - Actions After Midway

Actions After Midway

The Battle of Midway solidly checked Japanese momentum, but the IJN was still a powerful force and capable of regaining the initiative. They planned to resume the thrust with Operation FS aimed at eventually taking Samoa and Fiji to cut the American life-line to Australia. This was expected to short-circuit the threat posed by General Douglas MacArthur and his American and Australian forces in New Guinea. To this end, development of the airfield on Guadalcanal continued and attracted the baleful eye of Yamamoto's opposite number, Admiral Ernest King.

To prevent the Japanese from regaining the initiative, King ramrodded the idea of an immediate American counterattack through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This precipitated the American invasion of Guadalcanal and beat the Japanese to the punch, with Marines landing on the island in August 1942 and starting a bitter struggle that lasted until February 1943 and commenced a battle of attrition Japan could ill afford.

Yamamoto remained in command as Commander-in-Chief, retained at least partly to avoid diminishing the morale of the Combined Fleet. However, he had lost face in the Midway defeat and the Naval General Staff were disinclined to indulge further gambles. This reduced Yamamoto to pursuing the classic defensive Decisive Battle strategy he had attempted to overturn.

The naval and land battles at Guadalcanal caught the Japanese over-extended and attempting to support fighting in New Guinea while guarding the Central Pacific and preparing to conduct Operation FS. The FS operation was abandoned and the Japanese attempted to fight in both New Guinea and Guadalcanal at the same time. Already stretched thin, they suffered repeated setbacks due to a lack of shipping, a lack of troops, and a disastrous inability to coordinate Army and Navy activities.

Yamamoto committed Combined Fleet units to a series of small attrition actions across the south and central Pacific that stung the Americans, but suffered losses he could ill afford in return. Three major efforts to carry the island precipitated a pair of carrier battles that Yamamoto commanded personally at the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz Islands in September and October, and finally a wild pair of surface engagements in November, all timed to coincide with Japanese Army pushes. The timing of each major battle was successively derailed when the army could not hold up its end of the operation. Yamamoto's naval forces won a few victories and inflicted considerable losses and damage to the U.S. Fleet in several naval battles around Guadalcanal which included the battles of Savo Island, Cape Esperance, and Tassafaronga, but he could never draw the Americans into a decisive fleet action. As a result, the Japanese Navy's strength began to bleed off.

There were severe losses of carrier dive-bomber and torpedo-bomber crews in the carrier battles, emasculating the already depleted carrier air groups. Japan could not hope to match the United States in quantities of well-trained replacement pilots, and the quality of both Japanese land-based and naval aviation began declining. Particularly harmful, however, were losses of numerous destroyers in the foolish Tokyo Express supply runs. The IJN already faced a shortage of such ships, and these losses further exacerbated Japan's already weakened commerce defense. With Guadalcanal lost in February 1943, there was no further attempt to seek a major battle in the Solomon Islands although smaller attrition battles continued. Yamamoto shifted the load of the air battle away from the depleted carriers and to the land-based naval air forces.