Americans in Samoa

In the second half of January 1942 a convoy carrying almost five thousand US Marines sailed into the harbour of Pago Pago on the island of Tutuila. This was the 2nd Marine Brigade, one of the first large units the United States sent to the South Pacific after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Its task was to defend American Samoa, one of the island groups along the sea route from the United States to Australia and New Zealand.

Some chronologies place the landing on 24 January. According to the Marine Corps’ historical monograph, radar on Tutuila detected the convoy on 19 January and the troops went ashore on 20 January. The carriers covering the convoy’s passage remained in Samoan waters until 25 January, when they sailed north.

The route to Australia

After the disaster at Pearl Harbor and the loss of Guam and Wake, American planners feared that the Japanese would push further south-east and cut the links between America and Australia. Australia was to become the supply base for the fighting in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, and every soldier, aircraft and barrel of fuel had to travel there across thousands of kilometres of the Pacific. The route ran from California and Hawaii through scattered archipelagos: Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia.

Admiral Ernest King, who on 30 December 1941 took command of the entire United States Fleet, set the Pacific Fleet two main tasks. The first was to defend the Hawaii–Midway line and the communications with the West Coast. The second was to maintain communications with Australia by covering and defending the Hawaii–Samoa line, which was to be extended to Fiji as soon as possible. The man to carry this out was Admiral Chester Nimitz, who on 31 December replaced Admiral Husband Kimmel, relieved after Pearl Harbor, as Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. At the Arcadia Conference in Washington the Americans and the British confirmed that Germany remained the principal enemy, but agreed that the Japanese had to be stopped on a line from which an offensive could later be launched.

Samoa before the brigade arrived

The Samoan archipelago had been divided since the turn of the twentieth century. The eastern islands, with Tutuila and the best harbour in the region, Pago Pago, belonged to the United States and from 1900 were administered by the US Navy as a coaling station and base. The larger western islands, Upolu and Savaiʻi, were a German colony until 1914 (German Samoa), and after the First World War New Zealand administered them as a League of Nations mandated territory.

The defences were weak. Since the spring of 1941 Tutuila had been garrisoned by the Marines’ 7th Defense Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Lester Dessez, supported by a reserve battalion made up of Samoans. The airfield was still under construction. In Western Samoa the New Zealanders had only about 160 men for two large islands.

The war made itself felt on 11 January 1942, the same day on which the carrier Saratoga was torpedoed. In the darkness before dawn the Japanese submarine I-20 surfaced a dozen or so kilometres from the entrance to Pago Pago and shelled the naval station with its deck gun from beyond the range of the coastal guns. Most of the dozen or so shells missed, the damage was slight, and two men were lightly wounded, one of them a Samoan from the reserve battalion. It was the only enemy attack on American Samoa in the entire war.

The brigade arrives

The 2nd Marine Brigade was formed on 24 December 1941 at Camp Elliott near San Diego from units of the 2nd Marine Division. It comprised the 8th Marines, an artillery battalion of the 10th Marines and the 2nd Defense Battalion with coastal and anti-aircraft guns. It was commanded by Colonel, soon Brigadier General, Henry L. Larsen. The brigade was organised and embarked within two weeks. Construction equipment was bought in haste, since one of the most important tasks was to finish the airfield. On 6 January 4,798 officers and men sailed from San Diego.

The convoy was covered by the task force of the carrier Yorktown under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, which had just arrived from the Atlantic, while the Enterprise task force of Vice Admiral William Halsey came out from Hawaii to meet it. Japanese submarines were prowling nearby: a few days after shelling Tutuila, the same I-20 attacked the New Zealand armed merchant cruiser Monowai off Fiji. On 16 January a torpedo bomber from the Enterprise went missing; its three-man crew drifted in a rubber raft for more than a month until they reached Pukapuka atoll.

While still at sea Larsen was appointed military governor of American Samoa, responsible for the defence of the islands and for supervising the civil administration. As soon as the ships entered harbour, anti-aircraft machine guns were unloaded and set up on the hills around Pago Pago. The 8th Marines took over the beach positions from the 7th Defense Battalion, and the gunners began building permanent gun emplacements. The airfield, only a tenth complete when the brigade arrived, was built day and night under floodlights. For the first months the men dug more than they trained, and the tropical downpours of the rainy season repeatedly destroyed their work.

What came next

Larsen quickly turned his attention to Western Samoa. On 26 January his intelligence officer flew to Apia and, after a reconnaissance, reported that undefended Upolu was a first-class threat to Tutuila: if the Americans did not occupy it, the Japanese would. After talks with New Zealand, an agreement was signed on 20 March entrusting the Americans with the defence of all the islands of the archipelago. In May the 3rd Marine Brigade landed on Upolu, and at the end of May Marines also occupied the French island of Wallis. By early June more than 10,000 Marines were stationed in the Samoa area. The airfield on Tutuila was ready on 17 March.

Samoa became one link in an ever denser chain of bases. In February American garrisons were established on Canton atoll and Christmas Island; American fighters arrived in Fiji, until then defended by the New Zealanders; and in March American forces of almost divisional strength reached New Caledonia. Meanwhile, on 23 January, the Japanese took Rabaul on New Britain, which became their main base in the South-West Pacific.

Significance

The original Japanese war plan did not envisage a move against Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia. The Japanese navy began planning such a thrust, designed to cut off Australia, only in the spring of 1942, and abandoned it after the defeat at Midway in June. The Americans, however, could not have known this, and in January Samoa, with its handful of defenders, looked like an easy target.

The arrival of the 2nd Brigade was one of the first steps by which the United States, still in the midst of a run of defeats, began laying the foundations for a future offensive. The carriers that had covered the convoy carried out the first American strike against Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands on 1 February 1942. In the first year of the war Samoa became the main Marine Corps base in the Pacific. From there the 7th Marines went to Guadalcanal, where in August 1942 the Americans had opened their first offensive in the Pacific, in September, followed by the 8th Marines in November.