The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Stilwell showed little sympathy, either to his own men or to the Chin-dits. But with his reinforced Chinese divisions now surrounding the town, the Japanese became the besieged. And on 24 June a simultaneous attack by Chinese troops and the Chindits of Brigadier Michael Calvert’s severely weakened 77th Brigade seized the key town of Mogaung to the west. Yet it would take until the beginning of August before the Japanese commander in Myitkyina committed seppuku, and his surviving troops slipped away into the jungle across the Irrawaddy. At last work on the Ledo Road to China could be started, and US transport aircraft were able to fly a much shorter and less dangerous route, almost doubling the tonnage of supplies delivered to China.

  As the great battle round Imphal continued against Mutagachi’s 15th Army, Allied regiments counter-attacked. But they, like the Americans, were astonished and appalled by the Japanese talent for excavation into hills to make bunkers. A newly arrived subaltern joining the 2nd Border Regiment was told by his platoon sergeant: ‘By Christ, them little bastards can dig. They’re undergound before our blokes have stopped spitting on their bloody hands.’

  General Slim’s prediction that the monsoon would harm the Japanese supply routes far more than his own proved true. His Fourteenth Army could rely on air drops, while Mutagachi’s men were starving. Lieutenant General Tanaka Noburo, who had arrived on 23 May to take over command of the 33rd Division in the south, wrote in his diary: ‘Both officers and men look dreadful. They’ve let their hair and beards grow until they look exactly like wild men of the mountains… They have had almost nothing to eat–they’re undernourished and pale.’ By June his division had lost 70 per cent of its strength. Some of his men went for days on end with nothing to eat but wild grass and lizards. Their officers had secured what few supplies there were for themselves. In many cases, they attacked in the vain hope of finding tins of bully beef in Allied trenches.

  Japanese soldiers were by no means immune from combat fatigue and psychosis, but only a small number were evacuated. Sufferers unable to take the strain any more committed suicide. Japanese soldiers had various names for paralysing fear, such as ‘losing your legs’ or ‘samurai shakes’ for uncontrolled trembling. They tended to cope with fear by adopting one of two extremes: either profound fatalism, with the acceptance that they were bound to die, or else denial, convincing themselves that they were invulnerable. On their departure for the army, most had been presented with a ‘thousand-stitch’ scarf by their mothers which was supposed to ward off bullets. But as Japan’s defeat became more evident, fatalism became almost obligatory since field service regulations forbade any soldier to allow himself to be taken prisoner, even if badly wounded.

  General Mutagachi was becoming deranged. He called for attack after attack, but his divisional commanders ignored his orders. On 3 July, the Imphal Offensive was finally called off. The Japanese retreat across the Chindwin left a trail of horror. Allied troops on their advance passed abandoned Japanese wounded, infested with maggots. In most cases they simply put them out of their misery. Mutagachi’s 15th Army had lost 55,000 men. Around half of their casualties were due to starvation or disease. Both General Kawabe Masakusu, the commander-in-chief of the Burma Area Army, and Mutagachi were relieved of their commands. Allied casualties during the battles for Imphal and Kohima amounted to 17,587 killed and wounded.

  In China, the Ichig Offensive had begun in April. It was the largest operation that the Imperial Japanese Army had ever undertaken, with 510,000 men out of the total of 620,000 men in the China Expeditionary Army. But for once the Japanese did not have air superiority. In fact by the beginning of 1944 relative strengths had been reversed. The Nationalists had 170 aircraft and the US Fourteenth Air Force 230, while the Imperial Japanese Navy had only a hundred, the rest having been withdrawn to make up for the disastrous losses in the Pacific. Chennault believed that he had enough aircraft to defend his bases, but Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo authorized the doubling of air strength for the forthcoming operations.

  The main objective of the Ichig Offensive was, as Chiang had also warned, to eliminate the airfields of the Fourteenth Air Force. The first phase, the Kog Offensive, came from the Japanese 1st Army in the northeast, heavily reinforced from the Kwantung Army in Manchukuo. The Japanese did not attack Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces based on Yenan to the west, which had done little for some time except kill collaborators. The Japanese were interested only in crushing the Nationalists.

  In April, the 1st Army attacked south across the Yellow River to meet up with part of the 11th Army advancing north from round Wuchang– Hankow. This cleared the Peking–Hankow railway, establishing the first part of the corridor. The Nationalist troops in Honan province recoiled in disorder. Officers fled, commandeering military trucks, carts and oxen to evacuate their families and all the booty they had looted from towns and in the countryside. Outraged peasants who had been robbed of their food and pathetic belongings disarmed officers and soldiers. They killed many, even burying some alive.

  Their hatred for the local authorities and the army was more than understandable. A severe drought in 1942, made worse by the Nationalist food taxes in kind, and exacerbated by the cynical exploitation of local officials and landowners, had led to a terrible famine that winter and into the spring of 1943. Three million out of thirty million people in the province are thought to have died.

  Chiang Kai-shek’s worst fears had come to pass, and his best-equipped divisions were tied down at American insistence in the Burma–Yunnan campaign. After Chennault had taken the lion’s share of the supplies, and Stilwell had allocated the rest to X-Force and Y-Force, little had been left to re-equip other Nationalist armies. Those in central and southern China lacked weapons and ammunition, and in many cases had not been paid. When Chiang had asked Roosevelt for a billion-dollar loan to keep his forces going, Washington instantly saw it as a form of blackmail to obtain money for himself, as the price of keeping Nationalist China in the war.

  In January, Chiang’s reluctance to commit Y-Force on the Salween front for fear of a Japanese offensive had prompted Roosevelt to threaten to cut off Lend–Lease completely. And once the Ichig Offensive began, Roosevelt did not want Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force or the recently arrived 20th Bomber Command’s B-29s to be used in support of Nationalist troops, even though Chennault’s attacks had been a major factor in provoking the Japanese onslaught. Roosevelt, despite all his championship of the Nationalist Chinese, was cynical and dismissive of anything which did not speed the triumph of American arms in the short term. Convinced that the United Nations led by America and the Soviet Union would be able to solve everything afterwards, he had a dangerous disregard for post-war consequences.

  On 1 June, once the Chinese army of 300,000 men in Honan had crumbled away, the Japanese drive south from Wuchang to Changsha began. South of Changsha and Heng-yang, the US air base at Kweilin was a key Japanese objective. Japanese intelligence knew every detail about it from their agents, working through the mass of prostitutes catering to USAAF personnel in the town. General Hsueh Yueh, the Cantonese commander whose forces had successfully defended Changsha three times already, was bitterly disappointed. His armies had seen no American supplies, yet were still expected to defend the Fourteenth Air Force. As even Theodore White, that most bitter critic of the Nationalists wrote: ‘Hsueh defended the city as he always had, with the same tactics and the same units, but his units were three years older, their weapons three years more worn, the soldiers three years hungrier than when they had last seen glory.’

  Chennault did not hesitate to throw his Mustang fighters and B-25 bombers into night attacks on the Japanese columns advancing down the road from Changsha. His bases there and at Heng-yang were at risk. Flying three or four missions a day, and sustained by coffee and sandwiches, pilots of the Fourteenth Air Force certainly did what they could. The Japanese drive to push on increased when on 15 June B-29 Superfortresses flying from Chengtu in the west began a series of heavy ra
ids on the home islands of Japan. These rapidly tailed off when they ran short of aviation fuel.

  General Hsueh followed the same tactics as before at Changsha, giving in the centre, then attacking on the flanks and in the rear. But his malnourished soldiers lacked the strength to hold back the Japanese, while quarrels among commanders led to disaster. The Japanese seized Changsha and all Hsueh’s artillery at minimal cost. The commander of the Chinese Fourth Army, who escaped in a convoy of military trucks taking his personal belongings and booty, was arrested on Chiang Kai-shek’s order and shot. South-western China lay open and the US air base at Heng-yang fell on 26 June.

  While the Japanese stepped up their offensive to destroy the American air bases on mainland China, they had no idea that their efforts were soon to become irrelevant. Admiral Spruance’s Fifth Fleet was the largest in the world with 535 warships. It was heading for the Mariana Islands to turn them into airfields, from which B-29 Superfortresses could bomb Japan. With the Fifth Fleet sailed Vice Admiral Turner’s Joint Expeditionary Force with 127,000 men.

  Japanese positions on Saipan, the largest and first target island, had been bombed by land-based aircraft for some time. By early June, Japanese air strength in the Marianas had been greatly reduced. But the defending force of 32,000 men was still far greater than expected. Admiral Mitscher’s Task Force 58 provided a two-day bombardment with its seven battleships before the marines went in, but it was not very effective. It smashed conspicuous targets such as a cane-sugar processing plant, but failed to hit the bunkers near by.

  On the morning of 15 June, the first waves of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions began to land on Saipan in armoured amtracs against artillery, mortar and heavy machine-gun fire. The idea was for the amtracs to storm right across the beaches, but few made it. There were too many obstacles, and they lacked sufficient armour in front against the Japanese shells. But at least the infantry avoided the heavy casualties of the past when wading in through the surf. By nightfall, a beachhead with nearly 20,000 men had been established on the twenty-two-kilometre-long island. The Japanese sent in two suicidal infantry charges, but with US destroyers firing illuminating shells overhead, the marines were able to gun them down.

  That night, 2,400 kilometres to the west, the submarine USS Flying Fish sighted part of the Imperial Japanese Navy off the Philippines in the San Bernardino Strait. She surfaced to get off her warning signal to the Fifth Fleet. Vice Admiral Ozawa Jisaburo’s First Mobile Fleet was to be reinforced with the heavy battleships Yamato and Musashi. He would have almost all the main Japanese warships afloat in the Pacific–nine carriers with 430 aircraft, five battleships, thirteen cruisers and twenty-eight destroyers–for a decisive battle. Admiral Spruance, on the other hand, had fifteen fast carriers with 891 aircraft in Mitscher’s Task Force 58, and Ozawa did not know that most of the land-based Japanese aircraft in the region had been eliminated. Ozawa’s greatest weakness, however, lay in his pilots’ lack of experience. Few had served for as long as six months, and most had little more than two months’ flying training.

  Spruance sent Mitscher’s task force off to intercept Ozawa’s fleet 290 kilometres to the west of the Marianas, but then pulled them back towards Saipan in case the Japanese split their forces. Ozawa’s search planes sighted the task force on 18 June, and early next morning he sent off a first strike of sixty-nine aircraft. They were picked up on radar by Mitscher’s screen of destroyers out in front. Hellcat fighters on a raid over Guam were summoned back to their carriers, while bombers were despatched to Guam to wreck the runways, in case Ozawa’s pilots tried to land there. The Americans now made use of their huge advantage in numbers. With their fifteen carriers they had enough aircraft to maintain a fighter umbrella overhead the whole time.

  At 10.36 hours, a patrol of Hellcats sighted the incoming attackers and dived. They shot down forty-two out of the sixty-nine aircraft, for the loss of only one of their own. As the second wave of 128 planes came in later, the US Navy’s fighter pilots shot down another seventy. Ozawa, unable to admit defeat, sent in two more waves. Altogether 240 Japanese carrier-launched aircraft were shot down as well as nearly another fifty planes from Guam. American warships suffered only a couple of minor hits, while US submarines sank two carriers, the Shokaku and Ozawa’s flagship, the Taiho.

  When the majority of his aircraft failed to return, Ozawa made a fatally mistaken assumption. He thought that most of them had landed on Guam and would soon return to their carriers, so he kept his fleet in the area. Admiral Mitscher obtained Spruance’s agreement to go in pursuit the next day. Finally, late in the afternoon of 20 June, one of Mitscher’s reconnaissance planes spotted the Japanese fleet. The enemy was at extreme range and it would soon be dark, but this was their last chance. The flat-tops turned to the wind and managed to launch 216 aircraft in twenty minutes. The Hellcats soon dealt with Ozawa’s fighter screen, shooting down another sixty-five aircraft, while the dive-bombers and torpedo bombers sank the carrier Hiyo and two oil tankers, and caused serious damage to other warships.

  Despite the threat of submarines, Mitscher ordered his ships to turn on their lights, searchlights and fire flares to guide in the returning aircraft. One pilot described the scene as ‘a Hollywood premier, Chinese New Year and the Fourth of July all rolled into one’. Many planes were running out of fuel. Altogether eighty crashed on landing, or ditched into the sea–four times as many aircraft as were lost in their attack. It was a chaotic ending, but the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, as the navy flyers liked to call it, had cost the Japanese more than 400 aircraft and three carriers. It could have been more if Spruance had not played safe by keeping Mitscher’s task force so close to Saipan.

  The battle for the island also became known for the way Lieutenant General Holland Smith, the corps commander from the Marines, sacked the US Army general in charge of the 27th Division, a National Guard formation. Furious at its slow, cautious and ill-coordinated attack which held up his two Marine divisions, Holland Smith was backed by Admiral Spruance. The basic problem was that the Marine Corps had a very different and direct approach to fighting.

  The Japanese were neverthless forced back to the northern point of the island, and early on 7 July the survivors launched the largest banzai attack of the war. More than 3,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors, charging with bayonets, swords and grenades, descended on two battalions of the 27th Division. Marines and soldiers alike could not shoot fast enough as the Japanese swept on at them. The battle ended two days later. The American invasion force suffered 14,000 killed and wounded, while the Japanese forces left 30,000 corpses on the island. Added to them were around 7,000 Japanese civilians out of 12,000, most of whom committed suicide by throwing themselves from cliffs into the sea. Appeals to them by interpreters through loudspeakers not to kill themselves were largely ignored.

  After Saipan, the islands of Tinian and Guam were invaded. Tinian was taken in a clever coup de main, with two Marine regiments landing unexpectedly while a major feint was made on the other side of the island. Guam, the first US territory to be recaptured, witnessed another mass Japanese counter-attack. But this time the Japanese ran straight into a concentration of artillery batteries, which fired over open sights. The airfields on Guam were secured before the end of July, and soon engineer battalions and Seabees were extending the airfields to take the B-29 Superfortresses. The Marianas offered far better bases for the bombing of the Japanese home islands than those in mainland China. They were unthreatened by Japanese ground forces, and at the same time ordnance, spare parts and aviation fuel could arrive by sea rather than having to be flown over the Himalayas. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo could see clearly that the endgame had begun.

  38

  The Spring of Expectations

  MAY–JUNE 1944

  After all the delays, detailed planning for Operation Overlord had begun in earnest in January 1944. Much valuable work had already been carried out by a group headed by Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morg
an, under the acronym COSSAC, or chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander. But since they had been working without a supreme commander, key decisions had been hard to make.

  Both Eisenhower, the supreme commander, and Montgomery, the commander of 21st Army Group, had the same reaction on examining COSSAC’s draft invasion plans for Normandy. Three divisions were not enough, they concluded, and the Allies needed more beaches. They had to widen the invasion area to include the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. Eisenhower also insisted that he had to have full control over the Allied air forces. This signalled an interference in the bombing of Germany which neither Harris nor Spaatz, the ‘bomber barons’, welcomed.

  Lieutenant General Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, had much to thrash out with Montgomery. The postponements of D-Day had as much to do with the shortage of landing craft as with British reluctance to commit to the invasion. Overlord was now an imminent reality, even if Brooke and Churchill still had their private fears. Senior British officers, who were privy to the wider picture, could not resist observing that American commitment to the ‘Germany first’ policy was rather hard to credit after the massive diversion of men, shipping, weaponry and equipment to the Pacific. The US Navy and MacArthur had won that battle in Washington. The Pacific theatre even managed, with General ‘Hap’ Arnold’s connivance, to grab the new B-29 Superfortresses to attack Tokyo, while Ira Eaker’s Eighth Air Force received none to bomb Germany.

  The other problem which Bedell Smith tried to deal with during Eisenhower’s brief return home was the question of Operation Anvil, the invasion of southern France. Eisenhower felt that the United States had made a ‘very considerable investment’ in re-equipping the French army and that ‘a gateway for them into France must be obtained’. But the shortage of landing craft, partly caused by Churchill’s insistence on the Anzio landing, suggested that a simultaneous invasion of the south of France would weaken Overlord. Bedell Smith agreed with the British that Anvil should be dropped or at least postponed. Eisenhower was very angry at any suggestion that ‘Anvil [would] have to be sacrificed’. But, despite his obstinacy on the point, he was forced to acknowledge that it might have to be pushed back.