Evening star., 1942-10-01


Solomons battle, he here aiues
Ass impressions OF the japanese
HdDy and its strategy.)
BY CLARK LEE,
Wide World.
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1-Prior
to December if you had asked an
American Naval officer his opinion
Of the Japanese Navy you probably
would have been told:
Their discipline and ship han
ding are good but their gunnery i;
poor and their strategy is lacking
in Imagination and daring"
That opinion was shared by such
outstanding American naval men as
Admiral Harry Yarnell, former COM
mander in chief of the Asiatic Fleet
1t was based partly on the fact that
each year when the United States
Asiastic Fleet was summering at
Chefoo, Tsingtao and other points
on the North China coast, the Jap
anese would stage nearby gunnery
practice, and they missed their tar
gets badly.
1t is evident now that this was
deception.
The. fact is that the japanese
Navy is good in everything, espe-
cially in gunnerv and willingness to
take long chances, as was the case
at Pearl Harbor and frequently
since.
Only Two Seafights.
So far in this Pacific War there
have been only two seafights in the
traditional style-between surface
ships without planes. The Japanese
won both-the Battle of Macassar
Strait in January and the Battle of
the Java Sea in February.
The Macassar battle was a series
OF running engagements in which
our original claims to have sunk
and damaged some 60 japanese
ships were whitfield down by a later
check to four enemy ships damaged.
In the Java Sea the japanese
sank the majority of an Allied force
consisting of Dutch, British and
United States destroyers and cruis-
ers. The japanese outnumbered us
and outshot us. In addition, two
Dutch cruisers were sunk through
a tragic miscalculation, apparently
by running into their own mine
fields.
Even so, the Java Sea battle was
to my mind one of the most gallant
fights OF the war. The Dutch rear
admiral, K. w. F.. M. Doorman, led
the Allied force out to fight to the
finish, to win or lose, to sink or be
sunk.
Some OF our naval men think that
Doorman was foolhardy and should
have saved his ships by running for
Australia. But for Doorman to have
done that would have been the
equivalent of our Navy retiring to
South America if the enemy fleet
approached San Francisco.
Example of Jap Daring.
Doorman's withdrawal would have
left the Netherlands East Indies
open to invasion whereas fighting
meant a long slim chance that the
Japanese would be turned back. So
he fought.
In the Solomons battle of August
we outnumbered the japanese but
they outguessed and outgunned us
Our losses were the Australian
cruiser Canberra sunk and one
American cruiser damaged. We dc
not claim that any Japanese ships
were damaged.
That action was a good example
OF japanese daring and they have
given further demonstrations BY
sending cruisers and destroyers into
the narrow waters between Tulagi
and Guadalcanal to shell our Ma
rines.
However, in the near future, il
not already, our defenses in the
SolomonS should be sufficiently well
rounded to prevent the Japanese
from making such forays with i'm
punity and also to prevent their
landing troops on Guadalcanal.
Our seizure of Guadalcanal and
Tulagi was start on a policy under
which all our operations in the Pa
ciflc will be offensive. This was
definitely promised by Admiral
Chester w. Nimitz. commander in
chief of the Pacific Fleet, in speech,
recently in which he said:
We will win this war only by
fighting. All the Nations produc.
tive output will be to no avail un-
less we come to grips with the
enemy =. Our tactics must be
such that our objectives will be
gunned, bombed or torpedoed to
destruction"
Cautious Attitude Reversed.
Those words undoubtedly will 20
far toward reversing the cautious
attitude which has governed the
actions of many high-ranking naval
men. Many of them carried into
wartime the old concept of the Navy
as the first line of defense" and
the peacetime bugaboo under which
an officer who lost his ship wrote
fms to his career.
Some of them were stunned by
Pearl Harbor and confused by the
emergence of the airplane as the
dominant weapon. Their reaction
was to adopt the defensive and that
attitude cost us the chance to save
Wake Island and to do in the first
weeks of the war what we did later
at Midway.
Of course, a certain amount OF
caution was necessary because we
couldn't afford to lose Hawaii and