Nor was that all. The ’Canal was one of two successful campaigns waged for the defense of Australia. The other was in MacArthur’s theater, New Guinea. Coral Sea hadn’t discouraged the enemy there. In July 1942, he had seized a string of villages along the north shore of Papua, the New Guinea tail, and prepared to envelop Port Moresby, on the south shore, in a land-and-sea pincer. Coast watchers—British colonial officials hiding in the jungle with radios—warned us that the sea assault was headed for Milne Bay, at the tip of the peninsula; our troops got there first and threw the Nips into the sea. The land drive took off from Buna, one of the villages the Jap had seized. It was only a hundred miles to Moresby, but the Nips had to cross the awesome 13,000-foot Owen Stanleys on foot. Twenty miles from Moresby the Australians held them at Ioribaiwa and began a counteroffensive with our 32nd Division.
This ordeal, costlier in lives than the ’Canal, paid off when Eichelberger entered Buna on January 2, 1943, and the Aussies captured nearby Sanananda two weeks later. The Jap tried to reach Lae village with eight transports. On March third skip-bombing B-25’s caught the convoy in the Bismarck Sea and sank all eight, plus four escorts. In the grisly aftermath seven thousand Nips were drowned or deprived of their heads by islanders. The Jap decided he didn’t want Moresby.
But he had to keep Rabaul if he was going to hold the South Pacific. Rabaul was too strong to be assaulted, so we neutralized it. We began by moving into New Georgia in the summer of 1943 and pouncing at Munda. Our plans at Munda were botched. We landed too far from the field and had to attack by guesswork through thickets and over flooded rivers, against pillboxed Nips in steel vests. Still, the field fell in August, no thanks to the generals. We were moving up the Slot. Vaulting to Vella Lavella, we mopped up the Central Solomons, and on November first the 3rd Marine Division landed in Bougainville’s Empress Augusta Bay. This was a giant step. If we could somehow build an airfield in this green porridge, we would be within fighter range of Rabaul.
The Jap thought it unlikely. He buffeted us by air and sea but held back his best troops, thinking we would use the bay to stage a push elsewhere. On Christmas Day we finished our big strip, “Piva Uncle,” above the forks of the Piva River. The Americal and 37th divisions ringed it with a perimeter of steel, and when the Jap finally attacked with his élite 6th Division he was stopped cold. By then we had Rabaul just about surrounded. Emirau and the Green Islands had been occupied; we had taken Arawe, had occupied Cape Gloucester in New Britain, and were ashore in the Admiralties. Massive sorties from Piva Uncle were making Rabaul unlivable. The Jap evacuated his “consolation units”—Korean daughters of joy—and left the huge garrison to suffer as our bombers flew in daily overhead, unchallenged and unescorted.
So far we had only been nibbling at the edges of the enemy’s position. We had spent nine months moving 250 miles in the Central Solomons, and Tokyo was 5000 miles away. World War I weapons, however, were being replaced by rockets, amphibious tractors, flame throwers that could lick around corners. We had more of everything—fifty carriers now, led by the fast Independence class converted from cruiser hulls. If we could somehow get closer to Japan, our submarines, which had sunk a million tons of shipping the first year of the war, could destroy the Jap’s merchant marine. Soon we would even be able to reach Tokyo by air; the first B-29’s, with a range of 1500 nautical miles, would be on their way shortly. The solution was to open a new theater of war, the Central Pacific, and on November 20, 1943, the 2nd Marine Division did that. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. But no one anticipated a Tarawa.
Tarawa was the battle we nearly lost. The enemy commander boasted that Betio, the key island in the atoll, couldn’t be taken by a million men in a hundred years. We had problems: our naval bombardment was too light, the tides betrayed us, we missed H-hour, and at the end of the first day our beachhead was twenty feet wide. Officers stood waist-deep in water, directing the battle by radio and praying against a counterattack. Only the breakdown of Jap communications prevented one. The next day we drove through and split the defenses, but we had lost three thousand men. Next month we took Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls more cheaply. Yet all these battles in the Central Pacific were short and terrible—the 4th Marine Division, bloodied on Kwajalein, was in action only sixty-one days during the war, yet it suffered seventy-five percent casualties.
Our strategic shift was one reason for this. New Jap tactics was the other. The masters of the amphibious offense had braced themselves to hold what they had. Imperial Headquarters radioed every outpost to prepare a last-man resistance. One of them did more than that. On Biak, an island near the head of the New Guinea bird, the Jap had ten thousand men. Their commander, Col. Naoyuki Kuzumi, decided dying on the beach was all very fine, but by holing up in caves his men could prolong the slaughter of Americans. Kuzumi had made the most murderous discovery of the island war.
Biak lay directly in the path of MacArthur’s drive on the Philippines. The general, in the spring of 1944, was using a new American tactic, the leapfrog. We had stumbled on leapfrogging in the Aleutians while retaking Attu and Kiska, which had been seized by Yamamoto as a diversion during the Midway operation. Lacking strength to attack both, we bypassed Kiska—and discovered, after Attu had been stormed, that the Jap had quietly evacuated it. MacArthur caught on. Late in April he leaped into Hollandia, and a month later the 41st Division hit Biak. Until now the cost of the offensive had been relatively light, but Biak’s cave defenders took a terrible toll; before the island was secured casualty lists were approaching Tarawa’s.
They might have been worse. The Jap navy, in hiding for a year, was preparing to come out and reinforce the garrison. The ships were already at sea, when, in mid-June, word reached Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa that our Central Pacific drive was aiming at Saipan, Guam, Tinian. This was a bigger threat, and bows were turned that way. The resulting Battle of the Philippine Sea was a long-distance duel that disappointed old line-of-battle salts. Nevertheless, we won a stunning victory. Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Hellcats knocked out the enemy’s land-based air power on Guam and, in eight hours of continuous fighting in the sky, beat off four massive attacks on our fleet. It was the greatest carrier battle of the war; by the end of the following day Ozawa’s air arm had shrunk from 430 aircraft to just thirty-five, and our subs had sunk two of his carriers, including the Taiho, Japan’s newest and largest. Ozawa fled and the emperor’s soldiers on Saipan were cut off.
Sensible men would have hoisted a white flag. The Nips, as usual, swore to make us pay the greatest possible price for the island. After three thousand of them had staged the war’s biggest banzai attack, driving GI’s into the surf, we wiped them out or waited while the suicides, including the admiral who had led the Day of Infamy raid on Pearl, saved us the trouble. Two weeks later marines were wetting their feet on Guam’s reefs, where Navy underwater frogmen left a “Welcome Marines!” sign. Guam was only half as expensive as Saipan, partly because the banzai was less effective; bottled up on Orote peninsula, the Nips unbottled their stocks of sake and synthetic Scotch on the night of July twenty-fifth and came staggering toward us under the light of spluttering flares, as shells ripped their ranks.
Tinian, where the Japs had not thought our north-shore landing at all possible, was less expensive. Yet three islands had cost 25,000 casualties. They were priceless, however. They gave us our first B-29 base, our first grip on Jap territory. Marine General Holland (“Howlin’ Mad”) Smith, the commander at Saipan, called this the decisive battle of the Pacific war. Tokyo agreed. Premier Tojo was fired, and Americans were heartened.
MacArthur, however, had mixed feelings. Since Bataan he had been cast in a strange role. He had become the most familiar Pacific figure to his countrymen at home, yet he was an Army commander in what was clearly a naval war. He had been against the invasion of the ’Canal, and these thrusts in the Central Pacific suited him even less. Now Admiral King was suggesting we bypass the Philippines. We had to keep faith with the Filipin
os, MacArthur insisted; it was a matter of honor. A matter of sentiment, King replied, and both appealed to Roosevelt. On July twenty-sixth, the President arrived at Pearl to settle things. A platoon of generals and admirals wearing dress uniforms snapped to attention for him, executed a right face—two sad sacks turned left—and departed, while MacArthur and Nimitz, representing the Navy, made their cases. At the end Roosevelt said, “Well, Douglas, you win. But I’m going to have a hell of a time with that old bear, Ernie King.”
The Philippine timetable called for early landings on Peleliu, Yap and Mindanao, but Halsey made a startling suggestion. Air strikes convinced him that the enemy’s air force was all through. He proposed we skip most of the preliminaries and charge right into Leyte. It was so decided, although the Peleliu operation went ahead as scheduled, with tragic consequences. Biak had become a magic word in Tokyo. It had been passed to Colonel Kunio Nagagawa, the Japanese commander on Peleliu, and like Generals Tadamichi Kuribayashi on Iwo and Mitsura Ushijima on Okinawa, he made his men moles. They burrowed in natural limestone caves linked by tunnels and cut the First Marine Division to pieces, giving us a bitter taste of what was to come. We took the island—for what it was worth.
By the time the jagged ridges north of Peleliu airfield had been cleared, four American divisions were swarming over the beach at Leyte Gulf. Less than an hour after the main landings on October 20, 1944, the 382nd Infantry had the Stars and Stripes up; four days later General Walter Krueger’s 6th Army command post was ashore and Yamashita’s 35th Army was marching against it. Halsey had miscalculated. The Japs still had plenty of planes. Besides, we were fighting in the wettest part of the Philippines, at the wettest time of the year, and the land we had taken was too soggy for air strips. The Jap was ferrying planes down from Japan and tripling his Leyte garrison; Krueger seemed stuck in the mud; and in Leyte Gulf the stage had been set for the greatest naval battle of all time.
Yamamoto was dead, but the Jap navy still cherished his hope for a decisive action at sea, preferably while our ships were covering a landing. This was the hour. Four separate Jap forces sailed against Halsey’s powerful main fleet, which was protecting the operation, and Thomas Kinkaid’s weaker group of old battleships and small carriers. The enemy admirals knew they couldn’t match our new power—we had 218 warships, they had less than 100—so they hatched a brilliant plan. Leyte Gulf could be reached through two straits, San Bernardino to the north and Surigao to the south. Their center force, led by Admiral Takeo Kurita, was to head for San Bernardino while two southern forces churned into Surigao. At the same time, the fourth force, Ozawa’s, was to lure Halsey away to the north. Kinkaid would be helpless. Banzai.
The southern prong had no luck. Admiral Jesse Oldendorf had Surigao Strait corked. Torpedoes and gunfire exterminated the first Jap column; the second turned back after firing at radar pictures which turned out to be islands. In the beginning Kurita’s luck seemed bad too. Submarines destroyed two of his heavy cruisers; his largest battleship was sunk by planes. Actually these losses were a break for Kurita. Halsey, learning of them, thought him finished, and when Ozawa’s decoy was sighted Halsey took off after the bait—leaving San Bernardino Strait unguarded. In the darkness of October twenty-fourth Kurita slipped through unobserved. The following dawn he sprang on Kinkaid’s frail carriers.
What followed was one of the most remarkable engagements in the history of naval warfare. The carriers’ only protection was their screen—destroyers and destroyer escorts, the latter being puny vessels used for antisubmarine work and manned mostly by married draftees. The destroyers counterattacked Kurita’s battleships, and then their gallant little escorts steamed toward the huge Jap guns, firing their own little guns and launching torpedoes. Kurita’s Goliaths milled around in confusion as the persistent Davids, some of them sinking, made dense smoke. The carriers sent up everything that could fly, and Kurita, with the mightiest Jap fleet since Midway, turned tail. The rout was complete, for Halsey was thorough in his error; he chewed up Ozawa’s decoy. In the final reckoning the Jap lost three battleships, four carriers and some twenty other warships. The emperor’s sea power was finished.
On Leyte the push in the mud sloshed on, with the 6th and 8th Armies pulling a drawstring around the enemy bag. GI’s hit the island of Mindoro on December twelfth; three weeks later four divisions made an almost unopposed landing at Luzon’s Lingayen Gulf. Bataan was attacked; then Corregidor, with a joint paratroop-amphibious assault. Yamashita lived to surrender his sword at the end of the war, when MacArthur sent Percival to receive it.
In Luzon we were, as an Army officer wryly remarked, “right back where we started.” B-29’s were scarring the Jap homeland, but it was still a remote fortress. Bringing it closer was the task of the other American pincer—the Central Pacific thrust that had driven from Tarawa, through the Marshalls, to Saipan. Its next target was the volcanic pile of Iwo Jima. Saipan was 1270 miles from Tokyo, just within B-29 range; Superforts had to limit bomb loads to two tons; those damaged in raids couldn’t get back. If we held Iwo, 660 miles from Japan, they could carry seven tons, and Tokyo would miss raid warnings from Iwo’s radar.
The Jap thought a lot of Iwo’s eight square miles. We had taken some rough spots the past year, but none this rough. The Navy’s seventy-four days of preinvasion bombardment scarcely jarred the enemy; he had no barracks above ground. Most of his caves were shielded by at least thirty-five feet of overhead cover. Nearly all of his weapons could reach the beach, and some were new to the war: rockets nine feet long, as big as battleship shells—marines called them “Bubbly-Wubblies,” “floating ashcans” and “Screaming Mimis.” The first two hours ashore were comparatively easy; then the beachhead was blanketed with mortars. Despite this, Mount Suribachi and Motoyama Airfield No. 1 were taken in the early days of the battle, and that should have been it. Everyone waited for the Nips to form a banzai charge and come in to be slaughtered. They didn’t. They stuck to their pillboxes and ravines for twenty-six days, and when the end came in March the grim abacus showed over 20,000 marine casualties.
The abacus was grimmer for the enemy. The Japanese equivalent of “It never rains but it pours” is “When crying, stung by bee in the face.” Stinging Superforts were swarming low over the homeland, beginning a methodical destruction of eighty Japanese cities, killing a hundred thousand people in a single day with the great Tokyo fire of March 9, 1945. One by one the big Jap warships were being picked out from the air. Halsey’s carriers had broken into the South China Sea, cutting the enemy’s oil and rice lines. The Emperor’s merchant navy was a skeleton; soon the American submarine score would be over a thousand ships. Shantytowns were rising in Yokohama and Osaka, Jap civilians were racked with tuberculosis and malaria, and there was no food for their ration cards. Yet the Jap’s morale showed no signs of cracking. Old men and children were being armed with bamboo spears. Come and get us, Tokyo Rose taunted.
To oblige we needed one more invasion base: Okinawa. Intelligence tried to see to it that Tokyo thought that we were after Formosa. The Jap wasn’t fooled. He had been so sure we needed Okinawa that General Ushijima, the commander there, had guessed that we would land near Yontan Airfield on April first. He was right. April first was Easter Sunday; it was also April Fool’s Day—and Ushijima had a surprise for us. There didn’t seem to be any Nips around. We walked in standing up and examined the quaint, horseshoe-shaped burial vaults in the low hillsides. No one then guessed that it would take nearly three months to conquer the island, or that Okinawa would be the bloodiest battle of the war.
Ushijima had a hundred thousand soldiers concentrated in the southern third of the island. It was another Iwo. The burial vaults had been converted to pillboxes; caves masked heavy artillery that could be rolled in and out on railroad tracks. Ushijima expected to win, too. The Jap strategy was to wait until General Simon Bolivar Buckner’s 10th Army was ashore, knock out the fleet with kamikaze bombers, and slaughter the soldiers and marines at leisu
re.
The war’s final Gethsemane had a terrible magnificence. Both generals committed crack troops in the critical struggle for the hills dominated by Okinawa’s Shuri Castle. Ushijima sent in picked veterans of Manchuria, and Buckner countered with the Army’s 7th, 27th, 77th and 96th Divisions and the marines’ 1st and 6th—in one regiment of the Sixth there were two complete All-American football teams. Even the weather caught the spirit with a three-week-long cloudburst. Offshore the Navy had 1400 ships, the largest naval force ever assembled. It was just as well Nimitz sent that many, for the “green hornets,” as bluejackets called kamikazes; mauled the fleet. Before Ushijima disemboweled himself in his last command post—a shell had killed Buckner a few days before—the Navy had lost ten thousand men. Nearly two thousand suicide bombers had damaged more than two hundred vessels, including four flagships. Nearly two score of our ships were on the bottom of the sea.
The warlords thought they had found the weapon that would win the war. Radio Tokyo announced that the whole nation would follow the kamikaze example. Dead pilots were promoted two or three ranks posthumously, Jap newspapers interviewed little boys who wanted to grow up and commit suicide, and on Honshu, the main Japanese island, a million soldiers of the Emperor dug in for the American invasion. Kyushu in November, Honshu in March—that was our program unless the Son of Heaven quit, which his generals said he was not about to do. Fortunately some of the Son’s advisers were civilians. Their faith in victory diminished daily. The British had recaptured Burma, the Australians Borneo; Chiang Kai-shek was attacking in China, and eight-hundred-plane Superfort raids were pounding Dai Nippon around the clock. Jap peace feelers were relayed to Washington via Bern and Moscow. Then, on August sixth, the first atomic bomb blotted out Hiroshima. In the next three days the second hit Nagasaki and Russia declared war on Japan.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 16