20,000 Japanese Soldiers Trapped on Guadalcanal. 15,000 Starved Before Anyone Came…(53) 20,000 Japanese Soldiers Trapped on Guadalcanal. 15,000 Starved Before Anyone Came… – YouTube Transcripts: In August of 1942 on the island of Guadal Canal, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hiakutake ordered 20,000 Japanese soldiers onto an island to take back one airfield. 15,000 of them never left. Not because the Marines defeated them, because the Navy stopped [music] sending food. The supply ships came less and less. Then they stopped entirely. The men on the island ate their rations in the first weeks. They ate the vegetation. They ate insects. They ate bark. They ate things that no army manual had ever described as food because no army manual had ever accounted for what happens when 20,000 men are left on an island with no supply line for 6 [music] months. When the evacuation ships finally arrived in February of 1943, the sailors on those ships described the men who walked down to the beaches in terms their officers later asked them not to repeat. They weighed less than the rifles they had stopped being able to carry weeks earlier. Some of them could not walk. Some of them could not stand. Some of them had to be carried onto the ships by sailors who had expected to find soldiers and found something else. 20,000 landed. 5,000 were evacuated, 15,000 remained on the island. They were not defeated in battle. They were abandoned by a supply chain that Hiakutake had been promised would hold and a navy that had decided the island was no longer worth the ships it was costing to keep them alive. This is untold war tales. If you are new here, subscribe and turn on notifications. New documentaries every single day. To understand why 20,000 men were sent to Guadal Canal and then left there, you have to understand what the island represented in the summer of 1942 and why both sides were willing to spend men and ships on a piece of jungle that most of the officers making the decisions had never seen. Guadal Canal sat on the supply line between the United States and Australia. An airfield on Guadal Canal meant aircraft that could reach the convoys carrying everything Australia needed to remain in the war. Japan understood this. Japan had begun building an airfield on the northern coast of the island in June of 1942 for exactly this reason. The Americans understood it too. On August 7th, 1942, the First Marine Division landed on Guadal Canal, scattered the construction troops, and captured the airfield before it was finished. They named it Henderson Field. They finished it themselves, and the aircraft that flew from it within days of its completion began doing exactly what Japan had feared they would do. Henderson Field was the reason for everything that followed. every ship that went to the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound. Every marine who fought in the ridges south of the airfield, every Japanese soldier who was sent to the island to take it back. The airfield was the objective. The island was the cost of holding it. Lieutenant General Hiakutake commanded the 17th Army from Rabbal. He had been told by Imperial General Headquarters that the recapture of Guadal Canal was a priority of the highest order. [music] He had been told that the Navy would support the operation with surface forces capable of contesting the waters around the island and with a supply chain that would keep his men fed and armed and reinforced for as long as the campaign required. He had been told these things by men who believed them when they said them and who would stop believing them within weeks of the first soldiers going ashore. The first Japanese reinforcements reached Guadal Canal in mid August 1942. aboard destroyers running at high speed through the waters north of the island. The operation that American sailors came to call the Tokyo Express was the Navy’s answer to a problem that surface ships and submarines and air power had made conventional supply convoys impossible to sustain. Destroyers loaded with drums of rice and ammunition and medical supplies would race down the slot between the Solomon Islands at night, drop their cargo offshore, and race back before dawn, brought American aircraft from Henderson Field. It worked for a time. The men who landed on Guadal Canal in those first weeks landed with what they carried and what the express delivered and the promise that more was coming. Colonel Keono Ichiki landed with 917 men and the confidence that the Marines could be broken by a single determined assault. [music] He was wrong about this and 785 of his men paid for his confidence on a sand spit at the Tenneroo River in a single night. Major General Kiyotaki Kawaguchi landed with 6,000 men and a plan to attack Henderson Field from three directions simultaneously. His men spent days cutting through jungle so dense that units lost contact with each other before they reached the starting positions. The assault hit a ridge south of the airfield that nobody had named yet. 800 Marines held it. By morning, 1,500 Japanese soldiers were on the ground, and the airfield was still flying. The ridge has been called Bloody Ridge ever since. Each failure brought more men. Each wave of reinforcements arrived with the same promise. The navy would supply them. Reinforcements would follow. The airfield would fall. Hiakutake eventually committed over 20,000 men to the island across multiple landings through the autumn of 1942. The men arrived. The supplies that were supposed to follow them did not arrive in anything close to the quantities that 20,000 men required to sustain combat operations on a tropical island against an enemy that held the airfield and the air above it. The Tokyo Express had never been adequate. it had been sufficient. There is a difference that matters when the margin between sufficient and inadequate is measured in calories per man per day and the number of men is 20,000. A Japanese soldier in the field required a minimum daily ration that the supply system had been designed to deliver through conventional logistics. Conventional logistics meant cargo ships operating on regular schedules to established ports. Guadal Canal had no established port for Japanese forces. The waters around the island were contested by American surface ships that had radar and American aircraft that flew from the airfield the Japanese were trying to capture. Every supply run was a combat operation. Every destroyer that made the run was a destroyer that could not be used elsewhere. Every destroyer that was lost on the run was a destroyer that could not be replaced. The Navy began calculating the cost of feeding Guadal Canal in ships. The arithmetic was not favorable. By October of 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost more tonnage in the waters around Guadal Canal than the island’s strategic value could justify by any calculation that did not include the institutional impossibility of admitting that the campaign had been a mistake. The express runs became less frequent. The quantities delivered on each run became smaller. The drums dropped offshore drifted with currents and tides, and a percentage of every delivery was lost before the men on shore could retrieve it. What reached the soldiers was a fraction of what had been loaded onto the destroyers. And what had been loaded onto the destroyers was a fraction of what 20,000 men needed. Sergeant Tadashi Suzuki was a supply NCO attached to the second division on Guadal Canal. He kept records because keeping records was his function and because the institutional habits of a professional soldier do not stop when the institution that created them has stopped providing the materials the records are meant to track. His records for November 1942 show daily rice distributions declining from 800 gram per man to 400 to 200 to what he recorded in the first week of December as an amount he described with a single word that translates most accurately as insufficient. By December of 1942, the supply line to Guadal Canal had not collapsed. Collapse implies a sudden failure. What happened was a progressive reduction that the men experiencing it tracked not in reports from above but in the spaces between their own ribs and in the time it took to walk distances that had taken half the time a month earlier. The human body on reduced caloric intake does not simply become hungry and then become more hungry. It follows a sequence that military medical literature has documented with the clinical precision that medical literature applies to processes it can describe but could not in the conditions of Guadal Canal in late 1942 do anything to reverse. The first stage is the consumption of stored fat. A healthy soldier arriving on Guadal Canal with the body composition that Japanese military training had produced would have had enough stored energy to sustain reduced activity for approximately 2 weeks on minimal intake. The second stage is the consumption of muscle tissue. The body receiving insufficient fuel from external sources begins converting its own structure into energy. Strength declines, endurance declines. The ability to carry equipment, to dig positions, to move through jungle terrain that requires constant physical effort declines in a way that is measurable in the performance of every task a soldier is required to perform. The third stage is what the Japanese soldiers on Guadal Canal experienced from January 1943 onward. Organ function begins to degrade. The immune system weakens to the point where diseases that a healthy body would manage become conditions that a starving body cannot survive. Malaria, dissentry, and tropical infections that the garrison had been managing with medication and physical resilience became the primary cause of casualties on the island. Not because the diseases became worse, but because the men became unable to resist them. Private first class Kenji Harada arrived on Guadal Canal in October 1942 weighing approximately 140 lbs. He was 22 years old. He had been in the Imperial Japanese Army for 3 years. He was fit in the way that Japanese infantry training made men fit [music] which was thoroughly. By January of 1943, he weighed less than 90 lb. He described the process in an account he gave to a military historian in 1954. without drama and without self-pity because the account was a description of something that had happened to him physically and the physical facts did not require emotional language to convey their weight. He said the hunger stopped being hunger after the first month. It became something else. It became the way you were. The body adjusted not to being fed but to not being fed. The adjustment was not comfortable but it was the condition and the condition was what it was. The men on Guadal Canal in the final weeks of the campaign were not an army in any operational sense. They were a population of starving men organized in the remnants of military units that had ceased to function as military units because the men in them could no longer perform the physical tasks that military operations required. Hiyakutake had received orders from Imperial General Headquarters that the island was to be held. He had communicated these orders to his division commanders. His division commanders had communicated them to their regimental commanders. The orders traveled downward through a chain of command that was still functioning as an administrative structure while the men it administered were physically incapable of executing what the orders required. A soldier who cannot stand cannot defend a position. A soldier who cannot carry a rifle cannot fire it. A soldier who has not eaten in 4 days cannot be ordered to advance and be expected to advance. The orders continued. the capacity to execute them did not. Suzuki’s records from January 1943 note that organized supply distribution had effectively ceased. Men were finding their own food. What this meant in practice was that soldiers who still had the strength to move were searching the jungle for anything that could be consumed. Roots, leaves, grubs found in rotting wood, coconuts from trees that had already been stripped to the height a starving man could reach. The jungle around the Japanese positions had been picked clean in a radius that expanded daily as the men moved further from their positions to find what the closer ground no longer had. The sick and the weakest did not search. They stayed in their positions because they could not leave them. The men around them shared what they found when there was something to share. When there was nothing to share, the men in the positions waited. What they were waiting for had stopped being specific. They were not waiting for food or reinforcement or orders or rescue. They were waiting because waiting was what remained when everything else that a soldier does had become impossible. In late December of 1942, Imperial General Headquarters made a decision about Guadal Canal that the men on the island would not learn about for another month. The decision was to evacuate, not to reinforce, not to resupply, to remove what remained of the garrison and abandon the island to the Americans. The decision was made by officers in Tokyo who had access to the same supply arithmetic that Suzuki had been recording in his notebook for months. 20,000 men, a supply line that could no longer sustain them, an enemy that held the airfield and the sea approaches and the air above both. The arithmetic had been clear since November. The decision took another month because the institutional machinery that had committed Japan to Guadal Canal was the same institutional machinery that would have to admit the commitment had been a mistake and institutional machinery does not process its own errors at the speed the men paying for those errors require. Operation K was the plan. Three runs by destroyer flatillas into the waters of Guadal Canal to extract the garrison in stages. The operation required the same navy that had been unable to supply the garrison to now risk destroyers to evacuate it. The operational planning was precise. The execution was extraordinary. The first run went in on the night of February 1st, 1943. The destroyers arrived off Cape Esperance after dark. The men who were capable of walking made their way to the beaches. What the sailors on those destroyers found when the first soldiers reached the evacuation points is recorded in accounts that share a common quality. The accounts struggle for language adequate to describe what they saw. Men who had been soldiers 3 months earlier and were now something the sailors had no reference for. Men whose uniforms hung on frames that the uniforms had not been made to fit. men who moved at speeds that the evacuation timetable had not accounted for because the timetable had been written by officers who had not seen what starvation does to the speed at which a man can walk a 100 yard on a beach. Three nights, February 1st, 4th, and 7th, approximately 10,800 men were evacuated. The number that remained on the island, the men too sick to reach the beaches, the men too weak to be moved, the men who had already stopped being counted in any roster that still functioned was approximately 9,000. Some of these men were found by American forces in the weeks that followed in conditions that the American medical personnel who treated them described in their own clinical language that carried the same weight as Suzuki’s single word. Harada was evacuated on the second night. He walked to the beach under his own power because he had decided he would walk to the beach under his own power and because the alternative to walking was staying. The distance was approximately 2 mi. It took him 3 hours. He described the walk in his 1954 account as the longest distance he had traveled in his life, which was not a metaphor. He meant it literally. Two miles on a beach in the dark, on legs that had spent three months forgetting how to carry the body above them, felt longer than any march he had made in training or in combat, or in the 3 years of service that had brought him to this island, and to this night and to this walk. He reached the destroyer. A sailor reached down and pulled him aboard. Harada weighed approximately 85 lb. The sailor who pulled him up later said he had expected to be lifting a man and had nearly fallen backward because what he was lifting weighed less than the ammunition crates he had been handling all evening. Hiakutake was evacuated on the final night. He had stayed until the last run because the commander does not leave before the men he commands. This is doctrine and Hiakutake followed it. He stepped onto the destroyer and did not look back at the island. What he was leaving behind on Guadal Canal was not a military defeat in the way that defeats are recorded in operational histories. It was 9,000 men who would not be evacuated and an arithmetic problem that he had watched develop for 6 months and that the institution above him had taken 6 months to acknowledge. The island of Guadal Canal was secured by American forces in February of 1943. The campaign had lasted 6 months. The American cost was approximately 7,100 casualties. The Japanese cost was approximately 30,000 men committed across all services, of whom roughly 20,000 were ground troops on the island. Of those 20,000, approximately 5,000 were evacuated. Approximately 15,000 remained. The 15,000 is not a single number. It is the accumulation of every man who was lost in the assaults on Henderson Field, and every man who went into the water at the Teneroo River, and every man who was found by an American patrol in a position he could no longer leave, and every man who lay in a jungle clearing too weak to reach the beach on the nights the destroyers came. And it is every man whose cause was not a bullet or a shell, but the progressive failure of a body that had not received what it needed to continue functioning because the ships that were supposed to bring it had stopped coming. Sergeant Suzuki survived. He was evacuated on the first night with his records still in his pack. He kept the notebook for the rest of his life. In 1958, a Japanese military historian asked to see it. Suzuki opened it to the December entries and pointed at the word he had written when the daily ration figure had dropped below what he could express as a number. The historian copied the word into his own notebook and asked Suzuki what he wanted people to understand about Guadal Canal. Suzuki said he wanted them to understand that the men on the island had not refused to fight. They had not broken. They had not surrendered. They had simply reached a point where the body could no longer do what the orders required and that the orders had continued arriving after that point because the men sending the orders were in Rabbal and Tokyo and had not been on the island and did not know what the word in his notebook meant because they had never had to write it. 20,000 Japanese soldiers were sent to Guadal Canal to take back one airfield. They were promised supplies that stopped coming, reinforcements that could not land, and a navy that decided the island was no longer worth the cost of feeding the men it had put there. 15,000 of them did not leave, the island took them the way islands take things that are left on them without protection. Quietly, completely, without any single moment, where it became clear that the taking had become irreversible. The men who were evacuated carried what Guadal Canal had done to them home. The men who were not evacuated remained. The jungle grew back over the positions they had held. The island does not remember them. The notebook does. This is untold war tales. If this story meant something to you, hit the like button. It is the single best way to push this story to someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe if you are not already here. New documentaries every single day. Drop a comment telling us where you are watching from and whether anyone in your family served in the Pacific.