The Battle of Rennell Island

At dusk on 29 January 1943, on the sea between Rennell Island and Guadalcanal, Japanese twin-engined torpedo bombers flying from land bases attacked Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen’s American cruiser force. Two torpedoes crippled the heavy cruiser USS Chicago, and the following afternoon four more sent her to the bottom. The Battle of Rennell Island was the last major clash between the two navies in the Guadalcanal campaign and one of the few occasions when land-based aircraft alone forced a strong surface force to retreat. War chronologies sum it up with the words “the Japanese defeated the Americans” – and so they did, although the stake was not Chicago alone: the battle covered the secretly prepared evacuation of Japanese troops from the island.

Linked to the battle is a report often recorded under 30 January: that “the last Japanese slipped away from Guadalcanal unnoticed”. In fact the evacuation was only just beginning at that point.

Two plans

At the end of January both sides were preparing moves on Guadalcanal that the enemy misread. The Japanese, following the decision to abandon the island approved by the Emperor on 31 December, were gathering the remnants of the Seventeenth Army at the western tip of the island as they fell back before the American final offensive on Guadalcanal. The plan for Operation Ke, whose naval part was the responsibility of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet, provided that from 28 January the army and navy air arms would begin a campaign for air superiority over the southern Solomons, so that no Allied ships or aircraft could interfere with the destroyers taking off the troops. Distant cover was provided by Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō’s force with two carriers and two battleships. According to Japanese sources, Yamamoto expected to lose at least half the destroyers assigned to the evacuation.

The Americans – who as late as 26 January were warning their commands of a new Japanese offensive codenamed “Ke” – took these preparations for the prelude to another attempt to retake the island. Admiral William Halsey, commander in the South Pacific, also urgently needed to relieve the 2nd Marine Regiment, which had been fighting on Guadalcanal and Tulagi since August. He decided to combine the two aims: on 29 January he sent a convoy of four transports carrying army troops towards the island, and ahead of and behind it five groups of warships – two fleet carriers, two escort carriers, three battleships, twelve cruisers and 25 destroyers. He reckoned that if the Japanese went over to the attack, the fleet would draw them into battle.

Giffen’s force

In the lead was Rear Admiral Giffen’s Task Force 18: the heavy cruisers Wichita (flagship), Chicago and Louisville, the light cruisers Montpelier, Cleveland and Columbia, two escort carriers, Chenango and Suwannee, and eight destroyers. On the evening of 29 January it was to meet four destroyers from Tulagi and the next day sweep the channel between the islands, covering the unloading of the transports. Giffen had only recently arrived in the Pacific – with Wichita and the escort carriers he had taken part in the landings in North Africa – and he did not know the Japanese way of fighting. Chicago had only just returned to the South Pacific after repairing the damage she had suffered six months earlier in the Battle of Savo Island.

The escort carriers, capable of 18 knots, could not keep up, so at 2 p.m. Giffen left them with two destroyers and pressed on at 24 knots. He was expecting submarines, not aircraft: he formed his cruisers in two columns with the destroyers in a semicircle ahead of them – an anti-submarine formation. Japanese submarines and reconnaissance aircraft had been shadowing the force since the afternoon, and 32 torpedo-armed bombers took off from Rabaul: 16 Mitsubishi G4Ms of the 705th Air Group and 16 older Mitsubishi G3Ms of the 701st Group (one turned back with a fault).

The attack at dusk

At sunset the radars of several ships detected unidentified aircraft about 100 kilometres to the west. Giffen, who had ordered complete radio silence, issued no orders, and the combat air patrol fighters from the escort carriers returned to their decks as they did every evening. The Japanese circled round the force to the south and attacked from the east, out of the dark side of the sky, while the American ships stood out against the still bright western horizon. The aircraft of the 705th Group struck at 7.19 p.m. and missed with all their torpedoes, losing one machine. Giffen concluded that the attack was over and ordered the ships to stop zigzagging and hold their course. Meanwhile a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft was marking the force’s course with flares and float lights.

At 7.38 p.m. the 701st Group attacked. Two torpedoes hit Chicago, which, badly damaged, came to a standstill; another struck Wichita but failed to explode. Anti-aircraft fire brought down two aircraft, including that of the group commander, Lieutenant Commander Jōji Hagai. At 8.08 p.m. Giffen reversed course, slowed down and ordered his ships to cease fire so that muzzle flashes would not give them away; after 11.30 p.m. the Japanese flew off. In total darkness Louisville took the damaged cruiser in tow and slowly led her south.

The sinking of Chicago

Halsey did what he could to save the cruiser. At dawn on 30 January fighters from the escort carriers were circling over Chicago, the carrier Enterprise’s task force was approaching from the south, and at 8 a.m. the fleet tug Navajo took over the tow. Until early afternoon the fighters drove off successive Japanese reconnaissance aircraft, but these had already reported the ship’s position. At noon eleven G4Ms of the 751st Air Group took off from Kavieng on New Ireland. An Australian coastwatcher warned the Americans and predicted their arrival for 4 p.m. Halsey then ordered the remaining cruisers to withdraw to the base at Efate in the New Hebrides; six destroyers stayed with Chicago and Navajo.

At about 4 p.m. the bombers arrived. Fighters from Enterprise and the destroyers’ fire shot down two of them before they could release their torpedoes, and six more after they had done so. One torpedo hit the engine room of the destroyer La Vallette, killing 22 sailors. Chicago took four torpedoes – one forward of the bridge and three in the engine rooms. Captain Ralph O. Davis ordered the ship abandoned, and twenty minutes later she sank stern first. 1,049 survivors were picked up from the water; 62 men were killed. The next wave of Japanese aircraft failed to find the ships, and Navajo towed La Vallette to Espiritu Santo.

The two days’ balance was painful for the Americans: they had lost a heavy cruiser and had a destroyer put out of action for a long time, against – according to American figures – a dozen or so Japanese aircraft. Japanese propaganda announced the sinking of a battleship and three cruisers. The Americans concealed the loss of Chicago for some time; Admiral Chester Nimitz is said to have threatened to “shoot” any staff officer who leaked it to the press. Halsey and Nimitz blamed Giffen and recorded it in his fitness report, but it did not harm his career: he commanded task forces until 1944 and rose to the rank of vice admiral. As earlier in the night Battle of Tassafaronga, the Americans paid for underestimating Japanese skill in torpedo warfare – this time not that of destroyers but of aircraft.

The convoy nevertheless reached its destination: in the last days of January the transports landed the army units and took off the last Marines of the 2nd Regiment. Halsey’s other forces, including the fleet carriers, took up positions in the Coral Sea, waiting for a Japanese offensive that never came.

The evacuation nobody noticed

Under 30 January one often reads that “the last Japanese slipped away from Guadalcanal unnoticed”. This is a simplification that runs more than a week ahead of events. On 30 January the remnants of the Seventeenth Army were still holding out on the Bonegi River and assembling around Cape Esperance, and not a single soldier had yet left the island. The evacuation proper took place on the nights of 1/2, 4/5 and 7/8 February: each time some twenty destroyers under Rear Admiral Shintarō Hashimoto approached the shore at night and took aboard the hungry, sick soldiers ferried out by landing craft. According to Japanese figures, 10,652 army soldiers were taken off the island. The Japanese lost only one destroyer in the process, Makigumo, which struck a mine; the Americans lost, among others, the destroyer De Haven, sunk by aircraft on 1 February, and three PT boats.

It is true, however, that the withdrawal went unnoticed. To the end the Americans took the movements of the Japanese destroyers for the delivery of reinforcements, and the pursuit on land advanced cautiously. Only on 9 February did two American columns meet at the western tip of the island and find that the enemy was gone. That day General Alexander Patch reported to Halsey the “total and complete” defeat of the Japanese forces on Guadalcanal.

The Battle of Rennell Island played its part in this. After Giffen’s force withdrew, few Allied ships remained near the island that could have intercepted the Japanese destroyers, and Halsey’s carriers were waiting in the Coral Sea for an offensive that did not exist. The Japanese command could not, however, have foreseen this in detail; the air attacks were part of the Ke plan, but the success of the evacuation was decided just as much by the American misreading of the enemy’s intentions.

Place in the war

Rennell closed the long series of naval battles around Guadalcanal, in which each side lost dozens of ships – so many that the waters between Guadalcanal, Savo and Tulagi became known as Ironbottom Sound. Although a tactical Japanese victory, it did not change the outcome of the campaign: the island and Henderson Field remained in American hands, and for the first time in this war Japan gave up territory it had captured. At the same time the battle showed how dangerous land-based Japanese naval aviation remained, and how much the US Navy still had to learn about anti-aircraft defence and cooperation between warships and escort carriers. The following months brought Japanese air offensives over the Solomons and New Guinea, which Yamamoto directed personally from Rabaul – during one of the inspections connected with this campaign, in April 1943, the Americans shot down his aircraft. The Guadalcanal campaign opened the way to the Solomon Islands campaign and to the slow Allied offensive against Rabaul.