The Island War
Pearl Harbor, like the Maine, is better remembered than the war it started. Most Americans know that the rising sun of Dai Nippon began its startling ascent in the red sky over Pearl, and that it splashed into Tokyo Bay forty-five months later after a surrender ceremony in which Douglas MacArthur used a lot of fountain pens. But the details between are hazy. One reason, of course, is that the country was also busy with Hitler. Another is geography.
Men on Iwo Jima got V-mail from relatives who thought they were still fighting in the “South Pacific.” Names from the European Theater were a familiar echo from schooldays, but who had heard of Yap? Where was Ioribaiwa? And what was the difference between New Britain, New Caledonia, New Guinea, New Ireland, New Georgia and the New Hebrides?
Geography teachers, unfortunately, hadn’t gone into that. Until the air age, islands like Wake, Midway and Iwo had been almost worthless, and as late as 1941 entire archipelagoes were of interest only to oil and soap companies. The United States Navy started the war using eighteenth century charts; sea battles were broken off because we didn’t know where the bottom was; the first land engagement on Guadalcanal was fought on the wrong river—marines thought it was the Tenaru, and discovered afterward it was the Ilu.
Most of what the public did know about the Pacific had been invented by movie-script writers. Even as the Japanese were pictured as a blinky-eyed, buck-toothed, Gilbert and Sullivan race, so the South Seas was an exotic land where lazy winds whispered in palm fronds, and Sadie Thompsons seduced missionaries, and native girls dived for pearls in fitted sarongs, like Dorothy Lamour. The girls were closer to Burl Ives than to Lamour, though most Pacific veterans can recollect scenes of great natural beauty—the white orchids and screaming cockatoos in Guadalcanal’s dense rain forests, or the smoking volcano in Bougainville’s Empress Augusta Bay, or Saipan’s lovely flame trees.
Unfortunately, we weren’t tourists; we were fighting a war, and the more breathtaking the jungle looked, the more ferocious the combat turned out to be. Some islands were literally uninhabitable—Army engineers sent to survey the Santa Cruz group for airstrips were virtually wiped out by cerebral malaria—and battles were fought under fantastic conditions. Guadalcanal was rocked by an earthquake. Volcanic steam hissed through the rocks of Iwo. On Bougainville, bulldozers vanished in the spongy bottomless swamps, and at the height of the fighting on Peleliu the temperature was 115° in the shade. Sometimes the weather was worse than the enemy. At Cape Gloucester sixteen inches of rain fell in a single day. In November 1944, the battle for Leyte was halted by a double monsoon, and a month later a typhoon sank three American destroyers.
Like any other war, this one had its special shapes and sounds, remembered now in a kind of blurred photomontage, like childhood or yesterday’s love. There was scratchy monotony on the ship PA systems (Sweepers, man your brooms) and sometimes high drama (This is the captain. We are going into battle). There were the blossoms of artillery crumps in the banyan jungles, the meatballs on Zero wings flashing under the equatorial sun, and the image of carrier pilots scrambling across a flattop deck, helmets flapping and chart boards clutched under their arms.
To a retired rifleman, however, the most poignant memory of all is that Just-Before-the-Battle-Mother feeling, in the small hours of Z-Day or A-Day or L-Day of a new operation, when you crept out of your sweaty transport bunk, toyed with your steak and eggs, watched the warships sock the shore with their fourteen-inch salvos, and then crawled down the cargo nets to the waiting Higgins boats with your pack tugging on your aching back. Peering nervously toward the purply land mass ahead, you highballed in toward Red Beach One or Green Beach Two, hoping this one would be no strain, no pain, no reefs, and knowing it would be another miserable blast furnace—wretched for infantry, yet touched, as all islands were, with a wild, unearthly splendor.
Lurid settings produced bizarre casualties. Twenty-five marines were killed at Cape Gloucester by huge falling trees; shipwrecked sailors were eaten by sharks. Japanese swimming ashore after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea were carved up by New Guinea headhunters, and others, on Guadalcanal, were eaten by their comrades. The jungle was cruel to defeated soldiers, who, as the war grew older, were usually Japanese. If they were surrounded, only ferns, snakes, crocodiles and cannibalism were left to them. Even when they had a line of escape the odds were against survival.
Surrender was out until the Son of Heaven ordered it, and even then diehards skulked in caves for years. “The Jap,” as MacArthur called the enemy—the rest of us usually called Japanese “Nips”—considered it a disgrace to be taken alive. When defeat loomed officers would round up everybody for a banzai (hurrah) suicide charge. Men without rifles were issued clubs, men unable to walk were given hand grenades or land mines and told to blow themselves up. No one was exempted. The Saipan commander was too senile to kill himself, so an aide shot him, like an old horse; and it was on Saipan that five-year-old Japanese children formed circles and tossed grenades back and forth until they exploded.
Suicide had always been highly regarded in Japan, but to the samurai warlords last-ditch resistance also made military sense. The idea was to get a negotiated peace. “We will build a barricade across the Pacific with our bodies,” said a crudely lettered sign over the Jap dead on Peleliu. The closer we came to their homeland, the more determined they became. Tokyo mobilized suicide boats, human torpedoes, and kamikaze suicide planes. On the eve of capitulation they were still broadcasting their final slogan: “One hundred million people die in honor!”
They also thought it rather shameful for us to surrender. Captured Allies were not kindly treated. Japs raped nurses in Hong Kong, beheaded marines captured at Makin, and left bayoneted Australian prisoners at Milne Bay with placards reading “It took them a long time to die.” The result was that we also became savage. The United States Navy waged unrestricted submarine warfare; in the Admiralty Islands, Nips who preferred starvation to surrender were left in the bush and used for target practice. It was a hard war. General and flag officers were as bloodthirsty as riflemen. MacArthur told General Robert L. Eichelberger that if he didn’t take Buna he needn’t come back alive, and when our intelligence reported the whereabouts of Japan’s great Admiral Yamamoto, we deliberately sought him out with P-38 fighter planes and killed him. That was in the early, South Pacific phase of the war, when all we had was a toehold on Guadalcanal and another in New Guinea—when the Japanese had taken a tenth of the globe in half the time they had allowed.
By late July of 1941, when Washington had courted the Pacific war by freezing Japanese assets and cutting off their oil, their fleet had been stronger than the combined Allied forces in the Pacific. At Pearl Harbor they had sunk our battlewagons, and by spring they were strong enough to shell Sydney, Australia, and reconnoiter Seattle by air. Their ships were faster, their guns bigger, their torpedoes superior. Their Zeros outflew anything we had, and there were many more of them. On Guadalcanal “Condition Red,” the air-raid warning, at times became “Condition Very Red.” An empire that hadn’t been defeated since 1592 had dealt us the most smashing blow in our history. Since we had decided to defeat the Nazis first, there were strategists in Washington who thought it might take ten years to beat Japan.
***
The commanders at Pearl were given leather medals, but the real trouble was that no one had taken Dai Nippon seriously. There had been omens. In 1937 the American gunboat Panay had been deliberately bombed and sunk in the Yangtze. For years the Nips had been building up their mandated islands. Other nations thought the Gallipoli fiasco of 1915 proved amphibious warfare impractical. Not the Jap; he had special landing craft in mass production. In 1941 he had taken advantage of Vichy weakness to pour troops into French Indochina, and we thought he might trespass in Thailand, though no one knew the corrupt Thai government would surrender to him in three hours.
Indeed, it seemed inconceivable to us that Japan would attack at all. Congress refused to fort
ify Guam; Tokyo might misunderstand. The few planes we had on Hawaii and Luzon were lined up wing tip to wing tip, inviting attack, while the Army and Navy took solace in the fiction that any red-blooded American could lick any ten Orientals. Illusions die hard. Even after the ax fell, Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., the Patton of the Pacific, predicted Japan would be crushed by 1943, and at home jukeboxes rasped, “Good-by mama, I’m off to Yokohama,” and “I’m gonna slap a dirty little Jap.”
Actually, things were just the other way around. Starting with the raid on Pearl, it was the Jap who slapped us. Of all our prewar errors in the Pacific the most grievous was our conviction that the enemy wasn’t strong enough to mount more than one invasion at a time. Certainly nobody in Washington dreamed Japan capable of simultaneous assaults on Hong Kong, Malaya, the Philippines, Guam and Borneo, which is precisely what happened in that month of nightmares after the raid on Pearl. General Hideki Tojo, the new premier in Tokyo, was outblitzing Hitler.
The first big show was in Malaya. Staging from Thailand, three big columns invaded the peninsula under an umbrella of planes from Indochina, driving the British back and back. The Jap didn’t really need that much muscle, but he hoped to lure the British navy into a trap. It worked fine. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips went for the bait with the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse. His one carrier ran aground; he had lost his eyes; and on the third day of the war Jap torpedo bombers sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, the only two Allied capital ships west of Hawaii. Nothing could save Malaya now. Winston Churchill learned to his horror that the great guns of Singapore pointed only toward the sea.
That was the Jap’s first team in Malaya, captained by General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Tojo sent Lieutenant General Masahuru Homma’s second team against the Philippines, landing the first troops on Luzon December 10, the day unfortified Guam fell to the Nips. In two and a half weeks Homma was ashore at nine points, MacArthur had declared Manila an open city (it was immediately bombed), and American soldiers and Filipino scouts were retreating into Bataan peninsula. They hadn’t enough troops even to hold that—the only United States regiment on Bataan, the 31st Infantry, had a front-line strength of 636 men—so they withdrew toward the island fortress of Corregidor, supported by ten obsolete planes and a few PT boats. The ranking naval officer, Admiral Tom Hart, left the day after Christmas flying his four-star flag from the biggest warship he had, the submarine Shark.
Hong Kong had fallen; so had Wake, after a valiant two-week stand by five hundred marines under Major James Devereux, who beat off a landing and then waited, in vain, for relief. Wake was important to us, and could have been saved. A relief expedition actually sailed from Pearl but the ships were ineptly handled and didn’t get there; and after two thousand Nips swarmed ashore all the major could do was hoist a bed sheet. By New Year’s Day, when Admiral Hart surfaced off Java and joined Field Marshal Wavell’s Allied command, the Jap had bypassed Singapore and was headed for Java and Sumatra. Wavell looked at his war map and flew off to India, leaving the Indies, as the angry Dutch said, to their fate.
It was a bitter fate. Led by a Dutch admiral whose orders had to be painfully translated to our captains, seventeen Allied warships without air cover sailed out to stop the invasion of Java. The largest among them were two cruisers, and looming over the horizon were the pagodalike masts of seventy-four Jap ships, including four battlewagons and five carriers. In the seven-hour Battle of the Java Sea half the Dutchman’s ships went down with him; Jap planes polished off most of the rest.
Now the rising sun was blinding. Singapore had capitulated on February seventeenth (“All I want to know from you,” Yamashita told Britain’s General Percival, “is yes or no.”), and fourteen of her Vickers naval guns were moved to an atoll in the Gilbert Islands called Tarawa. Burma followed swiftly. By the second week in March the Nips were on the road to Mandalay, which they took on May Day, sealing off China. These were big names; their loss was shocking. Less familiar, but more vital, was Rabaul, an Australian outpost in New Britain captured in January. One hundred thousand troops moved in, five airfields were paved, and Rabaul was built into an impregnable fortress, the key to a chain of strongholds in New Ireland, the Solomons and New Guinea. Jap pilots were striking at Australia; Darwin, on the north coast, had to be evacuated. In New Zealand every man under sixty-five was called up, and the country’s pursuit planes were readied for combat—all nine of them. The Prime Minister of Australia warned his people to expect invasion hourly. In Washington, Ernest J. King, the new Admiral of the Fleet, was arguing against the abandonment of these two countries. “The Pacific situation is now very grave,” Roosevelt cabled Churchill, and Tokyo Rose jeered, “Where are the United States Marines hiding?”
Apart from the southern Solomon Islands, Port Moresby, near the eastern tip of New Guinea, and dying Corregidor, the Jap controlled the entire Pacific west of Midway and north of the Coral Sea. He had expected at least twenty percent casualties, and he had scarcely been touched—one of his fleets had sunk five Allied battleships, a carrier, two cruisers and seven destroyers without receiving a scratch. MacArthur, evacuated to Australia, spoke brave words. King ordered Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who had been hastily sent out in civilian clothes as the Pacific Navy’s new commander, to hold the Midway-Samoa-Fijis-Brisbane line “at all costs.” Yet this seemed like whistling in the dark.
At home American morale was braced with cheerful lies: that Colin Kelly had sunk the Haruna (he hadn’t); that a naval brush in Makassar Strait was a great victory for us (it wasn’t); and that the Marines on Wake had radioed, “Send us more Japs” (they certainly hadn’t). Guadalcanal and nearby Tulagi were easily taken by the Japanese May third. On May seventh an amphibious force of Nips steamed into the lovely Coral Sea, intent on capturing Port Moresby and heartened by the surrender of Corregidor the day before.
The battle that followed, the first carrier-vs.-carrier action of the war, was a curious engagement. We were desperate; to save Australia we had to save Moresby, and two of our four Pacific flat-tops were sent to block the way. For the Jap, however, this was a sideshow. Yamamoto was saving his big blow for the Battle of Midway. Even so, the Nips outfought us in the air over the Coral Sea. They sank the Lexington and crippled the Yorktown. We got a light carrier. A draw, at best. Yet Moresby was saved. The pagoda masts turned back, and at Pearl it took 1400 mechanics, working around the clock, less than two days to repair the Yorktown in time for Midway.
Now came the crisis. To the Nips, Midway looked easy. They had twice as many ships as we had; they bulled through the water gaily singing war songs, and Jap marines, who were to land, were issued beer. Yamamoto counted on annihilating our fleet and then using Midway to jump off for Hawaii. Nimitz, however, was expecting him. U.S. cryptography experts had broken the enemy’s code. Every foot of the island was crammed with troops, and every warship we could spare was at sea, including our three carriers. In the first hours of the battle it didn’t seem enough, but we had two breaks: Yamamoto didn’t know where our fleet was, but we had spotted him, and the Jap carrier commander had cleared his decks to recover his Midway strike, leaving him almost defenseless at the instant our planes arrived overhead.
American Devastator torpedo-bombers went in first that morning of June 4, 1942—and they were massacred by flak. Of forty-one, only six survived; none scored a hit. The pilots sacrificed themselves as surely as any kamikaze, and they died believing it was in vain. But they had provided the edge of victory. The Jap carriers, frantically wagging their fantails to dodge the Devastators’ fish, hadn’t been able to get any planes off, and the Zeros that were in the air were down low, intercepting. At that decisive moment Lieutenant Commander Clarence McClusky’s two squadrons of Dauntless bombers from the Enterprise arrived high overhead and swooped down in seventy-degree dives. They blew three carriers apart, jumped another that afternoon and sent her down too. Four carriers were all Yamamoto had brought with him, and he had to retire; he had los
t his umbrella. He sat slumped on his bridge, listlessly sipping rice broth.
Eight weeks later the United States Marines were in the Fijis, rehearsing the first American offensive of the war. They waded ashore on Tulagi and Guadalcanal August seventh and immediately wished they hadn’t. The ’Canal, as it was to be known evermore, had been accurately described by former colonial residents as a “bloody, stinking hole.” Supporting airfields were hurriedly hacked out of the bush in the Fijis, New Hebrides and New Caledonia; and the campaign, christened Operation Shoestring, was launched. We had luck that first day. Only a handful of Nips were on the beach; they fled, leaving us their 3600-foot airstrip. But the second night a Jap task force from Rabaul came hissing down the Slot, the channel between the Solomons, and gave our Navy one of the worst beatings in its history. Next day our unprotected transports broke off unloading and departed. The 1st Marine Division was left with a four-day supply of ammunition, and the “Tokyo Express” started landing Nips from Rabaul—900 a night; 4500 one night.
For six months the issue was in doubt. The Jap decided to make the ’Canal a test of strength. Emperor Hirohito declared that it would be “a decisive battle.” Six major naval engagements were fought around the island; sixty-five warships were sunk. To sailors the waters offshore were “Ironbottom Sound”; to marines, “Sleepless Lagoon.” Each month the Jap made an all-out attempt to recapture the airstrip; he was thrown back every time, once within yards of the field. Secretary Knox prepared the public for the worst, and President Roosevelt had to intervene with the Joint Chiefs of Staff before reinforcements were sent. Convoy by convoy they came—the Americal Division, the 25th, and the 2nd Marine—until Radio Tokyo announced that it didn’t want the island anyway. On the night of February 1, 1943, the last Nips pulled out, leaving 25,000 dead. For the first time in the war the Jap had gone on the defensive.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 15