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After the Rennell Island action, the Tokyo radio said: "It is plain that the U.S. can never regain her sea strength." At week's end Secretary Knox said that U.S. losses had been "minor in everything . . . moderate . . . nothing significant." Apparently no battleship was lost, and probably not much in the way of cruisers or destroyers. Even the Tokyo radio changed its tune: it said that the U.S. had ten battleships, ten aircraft carriers and 20 heavy cruisers in the Solomons area, that the Japanese fleet was "numerically inferior."
Nagano's Arc. The pattern of these skirmishes, both naval and verbal, indicated that both sides have some pretty heavy plans for the South Pacific. On the Japanese side, the man responsible for plans was the man who had Secretary Knox on the edge of his chair—Chief of Staff Osami Nagano. He must orient his plans, whatever they may be, to the situation in which Japan now finds herself. It is an excellent defensive position. To the east there is a stretch of Pacific across which the U.S. would hesitate to send an all-out amphibian invasion, knowing what carrier and land-based forces were able to do to such an invasion when the Japs tried to take Midway. To the north there is a temporary security which rests on the virtual certainty that Russia would not be willing to let the U.S. move on Japan over her soil—at least until after the defeat of Hitler. To the west, the mass of China could well base hostile air and land forces, but China is of limited use to Japan's enemies until they own Burma, and the stalemated minor campaign there indicates that that is not now a danger. To the south there lies a great arc of air and naval bases, one sector of which is threatened at the Solomons.
The logic of this defensive pattern imposes on Admiral Nagano an ironclad duty: he must, either by defensive or offensive measures, make the southern arc secure. Because the U.S. now grows strong south of his arc, he will have to fight to do his duty. The only way to guess how he will fight is to know how all Japs fight. By last week, officers returning from the South Pacific had told some of the truth about how Japs fight.
Hasamoto's Choice. Probably the greatest misconception about Japanese fighters is the belief that they will never surrender. It is true that when trapped they fight with a burrowing, rodent tenacity, but it is a mistake, say these officers, to credit their stubbornness to fanatic religious beliefs. It is just animal fight. Both on sea and on land, they are capable of giving up.
In the naval Battle of Guadalcanal (Nov. 13-15), Jap surface ships hightailed it out of range of U.S. ships and planes, leaving the Jap transports and their thousands of soldiers to be slaughtered. U.S. aviators later confessed they were sickened at having to bomb that helpless mass.