If American divisions had consistently performed in battle with superior effectiveness, their limited numbers would not have been serious, but such was not the case. The best American divisions were as good as any in the war; several infantry and armored divisions and the 82nd and 101st Airborne clearly fell into this category. But the majority of American divisions needed overwhelming artillery support (another logistical drain) and close air support to best their German opponents. Operations at night and in bad weather thus were not good risks. An infantry division also had only one attached tank battalion, which limited tank-infantry operations. American armored divisions had more tanks than the Panzer divisions but were outgunned by most German tanks in 1944–1945.
Army personnel assignment policy also penalized the ground forces and limited American combat effectiveness. From the war’s beginning the Army assigned people to military jobs on the basis of both intelligence and physical capability, but intelligence reigned supreme in allocating the physically fit to overseas duties. The most intelligent men went into technical billets, the others into the infantry. In 1944, 40 percent of the enlisted men in an American division were classified as below average in intelligence. This policy made it especially difficult to find and keep competent NCOs, who bore the brunt of combat leadership and suffered disproportionate casualties. The lack of small-unit leaders had not been a special problem in the divisions that had fought in the Mediterranean campaign, since they produced able leaders from their own ranks. The newer infantrymen, however, were younger and less intelligent than their 1943 comrades, which restricted the leadership pool. In France the rate of casualties among veterans and replacements alike eroded the quality of tactical leadership. Leadership problems, for example, contributed to a persistent American weakness: a minority of infantrymen fired their weapons in any one engagement.
Faced with such structural problems, Eisenhower was loath to attempt any dramatic battles in late 1944 until his American divisions (now two-thirds of his ground combat force) could regroup and his logistical system could catch up with the battlefield. He had no confidence that Montgomery would use his scarce combat troops with any greater competence than his American generals. His major adjustment was to adopt a variant of Montgomery’s strategy by committing the new 9th U.S. Army and most of the 1st U.S. Army north of the Ardennes while curbing Patton’s 3d U.S. Army and instructing the 6th U.S. Army Group to the south to limit offensive operations. With autumn mud and winter cold slowing forward movement and restricting air support, Eisenhower planned to capture at least a bridgehead over the Rhine before the year ended. With the once beaten Germans fighting with desperate effectiveness in the Hürtgen Forest, in Aachen, and the Roer Valley, the Allied campaign reverted to a war of attrition that resembled the Meuse-Argonne offensive of 1918. The battle for the Siegfried Line promised to offer nothing more than mounting casualties.
The Isolation of Japan
As its carriers and amphibious forces advanced to the western Pacific in 1944, the United States launched devastating attacks upon the economic life and morale of the Japanese people. The accumulative destruction ruined Japan’s ability to maintain a wartime economy, but not its will to fight on. The American assault on the home islands came in two forms: submarine warfare against the Japanese merchant fleet and bomber attacks on Japan’s highly flammable industrial cities. In a sense, the Japanese experienced the combined pain of the German U-boat attacks on Britain and the Allied bombing of Germany. So obvious were the effects of the submarine and bombing campaigns by 1945 that some American planners believed that economic collapse would make an invasion of the home islands unnecessary.
Beginning the war with no combat experience and limited numbers, the submarine force of the Pacific Fleet had every reason to be a “silent service.” Despite the heavy demands placed upon the submarines to attack the Japanese fleet, virtually every phase of the submarines’ early efforts was flawed. Despite its limited numbers (fifty boats, about evenly divided between Pearl Harbor and Cavite), the submarine force sortied against the entire periphery of the Japanese defensive area. When the Asiatic Fleet’s boats fell back to Australia in 1942, they patrolled the full length of the Malay Barrier while the Pearl boats roamed the Pacific from the home islands to the equator. Too few submarines patrolled too much ocean.
Doctrine and tactics combined to limit the effectiveness of American submarine attacks. Since submarine forces were supposed to concentrate on attacking warships, they planned to launch their torpedoes from deep beneath the sea. Surface attacks, even at night, were officially discouraged. The difficulty with deep submerged attacks was that American subs did not yet have adequate ranging sonars and computing and tracking equipment. Instead, the Navy had attempted to develop a torpedo that made a near miss as good as a direct hit: the Mk XIV torpedo with the Mk VI exploder. This theoretically deadly combination was supposed to explode when the torpedo entered the magnetic field of its target; it also carried a contact exploder in case the magnetic detonation did not take place. Submarine commanders discovered that neither of the exploders worked very well. Their 1942–1943 patrols experienced a bewildering number of problems: torpedoes that prematurely exploded, others that did not explode at all, torpedoes that ran underneath their targets (the Mk VI’s depth setting was also flawed), torpedoes that even circled back upon the submarines that had launched them. In a fit of anger at the designers, Rear Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of the Pearl submarines, suggested that the Navy design a special boathook with which submarines could rip off the sides of Japanese vessels.
Even with the hardiest of souls, the early submarine offensive would have had problems, but the submarine force was not commanded by the Navy’s fiercest warriors. Weighted down by the stress of command, the fear of losing their crews and boats, and their peacetime-bred operational conservatism, the submarine captains habitually failed to close with the enemy and sink ships. One-third of them were relieved in the war’s first year. The submarine force, however, had attractions that allowed the Navy to man its boats with its finest sailors, officers and enlisted men alike. Submarine sailors were all volunteers, attracted by the force’s elite standards, casual discipline, technical challenges, and extra pay. All volunteers had to pass rigorous physical, mental, and psychological tests to qualify for the demanding submarine training program, for the Navy knew that undersea warfare created stresses that weak personalities could not handle. With experience and the proper weapons, therefore, the submarine force had the human potential to carry the undersea war right into Japanese waters.
The Pacific submarine force spent much of 1942 and 1943 sorting out its problems and mustering its strength for a maximum effort in 1944. The size of the force doubled, and its commanders increased both the number and length of their patrols. The Navy finally fixed its errant torpedoes, and the quality of its boats and crews to endure and survive Japanese ASW attacks had been proved. Younger, more aggressive captains replaced their cautious seniors. Moreover, submarine planners had enough data to analyze operations and change them. With Admiral Nimitz’s approval (Nimitz himself was an experienced submariner) and encouraged by the accuracy of their signal intelligence, especially ULTRA derived from the broken Japanese Army Water Transport Code, the planners massed their patrols along constricted shipping routes in the western Pacific. The destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet became the submarines’ primary mission, and they deployed for fleet action only when a major engagement seemed likely. The submarine force also had sufficient influence to limit many of its secondary missions, like transporting guerrillas and raiders, carrying supplies to guerrillas behind enemy lines, and performing reconnaissance duties. One secondary mission that submariners actually relished was rescuing downed Allied airmen; daring snatches from underneath Japanese guns became an operational tour de force.
The statistics on operations for 1941–1943 demonstrated both the disappointments and achievements of the Pacific submarine force. In 700 patrol
s the Americans sank 515 ships of 2.25 million tons, but it required an average of ten torpedo firings to result in one sinking. The offensive, however, reduced Japanese merchant tonnage, which slipped from 5.2 million tons to 4.1 million tons by the end of 1943. In one critical vessel category—oil tankers—the Japanese actually increased their fleet from 686,000 to 863,000 tons with conversions and new construction. Oil tankers, then, were the optimal target for 1944. On the hopeful side—despite improved Japanese convoy operations—American submarine losses were bearable: twenty-two boats (and nineteen entire crews) in the war’s first two years.
In the war’s last two years the Pacific submarine force effectively ended the Japanese economy’s ability to sustain a major war effort with imports from Southeast Asia. Operating from new forward bases in the Marianas and Philippines, patrolling submarines could saturate the straits and inland seas from the home islands to Malaya. Enjoying new technological improvements in torpedo operations, the Pacific subs exacted a rising toll on merchantmen. In total tonnage the Japanese merchant fleet declined from 5 million to just over 2 million. Heroic efforts kept tanker tonnage about even, but only at the expense of all other building programs. In the war’s last year (September 1944–September 1945) the subs finally took out the tanker fleet, cutting it from almost 900,000 to under 200,000 tons. When the war ended, the Japanese merchant marine was reduced to less than 2 million tons, mostly wooden-hulled coasters and fishing boats of limited carrying capacity. By postwar reckoning based on Japanese figures, the submarine force destroyed 60 percent of the merchantmen and 30 percent of the Japanese warships sunk by the Americans. It inflicted these losses in exchange for 3,500 lives and forty-five boats lost on operational patrols. In no other part of the American war effort was the relationship between cost and great results so clear.
For all the statistics, submarine service in the Pacific remained a highly personal experience, filled with memories of the smell of sweat and oil, the wracking concussion of exploding depth charges, the controlled chaos of an emergency dive, the quick peek through a periscope at a flaming tanker or the peak of Mount Fuji, the bittersweet tension of a submerged attack amid a Japanese convoy. And, finally, there was the thrill of victory.
For the Japanese the growing signs of defeat in the maritime war—shortages of food and oil—paled in comparison with the direct impact of American bombs upon Japan’s cities. From the war’s earliest stages, American military planners viewed strategic bombardment as an essential element in Japan’s defeat. The instrument of the bomber offensive was the very long-range bomber, the B-29, rushed into production without full testing in 1943. The B-29 was a giant. With a wingspan of 141 feet and 99 feet long, the four-engined bomber could fly 2,000 miles and drop 10 tons of bombs from 30,000 feet. It carried machine guns and cannon enough to intimidate all but suicidal fighter pilots. Although plagued by mechanical problems, inherent in its shortened testing period, the B-29 gave air-war planners their weapon. Their major difficulty was to place the aircraft in range of the home islands.
In 1943 the best available site for bases was China. Already in operation, the 14th Air Force had been conducting bombing operations within the range of its B-24s and B-25s. In June 1944 the “Superfortresses” of the XX Bomber Command, controlled directly by the JCS, bombed Japan for the first time, while other B-29s in India attacked targets in Southeast Asia. The difficulties of supply and relations with the Nationalist Chinese made China an unattractive basing site, and after October 1944, B-29 operations in the CBI theater did not expand. Already in the process of redeploying to the Marianas, XX Bomber Command withdrew in greater haste in January 1945, when the Japanese launched a ground offensive that overran most of the USAAF bases in China. When the B-29s staged their last raid from China in March, they had mounted only forty-nine missions in all. Operation MATTERHORN ended as a molehill.
In 1944 the USAAF shifted the weight of its strategic air offensive against Japan to four major bases in the recently captured Marianas. At the same time that MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte, B-29s arrived on Saipan. XXI Bomber Command, whose parent 20th Air Force also controlled XX Bomber Command, began raids against Japan in November 1944. Using concepts borrowed from the air campaign against Germany, XXI Bomber Command ran precision-bombing, high-altitude raids against the Japanese steel and aircraft industries. Plagued more by weather and headwinds, engine problems, and low numbers than air defenses, the bombers did little damage. Poststrike analysis of the major raids showed that only 20 percent of the bombs landed on target. Impatient for results, General Arnold ordered Major General Curtis E. LeMay, a seasoned bomber commander from Europe and China, to the Marianas with orders to make the air war effective. After three months of experimentation and analysis, LeMay completely changed the character of the strategic bombing campaign.
Based on target analysis conducted in Washington and his own observations of B-29 operations, LeMay adopted—with Arnold’s encouragement—the night area-bombing operations pioneered by the RAF against Germany. In part, the city busting and burning had an economic objective, for Japanese factories and assembly plants were dispersed throughout the cities. Incendiary bombs rather than high explosives appeared to be the optimal weapons to destroy Japan’s military industries. The campaign also had larger purposes than weakening Japan’s military forces as a prelude to invasion. USAAF planners believed that the air-submarine campaign against Japanese shipping and strategic bombing would bring the Japanese to such a low state of morale and general poverty that the imperial government would surrender. An island nation dependent on imports, its industrial work force and factories concentrated in six major cities, Japan appeared especially vulnerable to strategic bombing. In a war that had already killed millions, little patience remained for ethical arguments. As one USAAF explanation of the campaign stated in 1945, “There are no civilians in Japan. We are making War and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which War is, and seeks to bring about an enduring Peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time.”
On March 9–10 XXI Bomber Command attacked Tokyo with incendiaries, passing over the city in a bomber stream of more than 300 B-29s. The low-altitude night attack devastated one-quarter of the city and killed 84,000 people. Despite its own growing losses, unavoidable in low-level attacks even with escort fighters, XXI Bomber Command expanded its raids until in June all of Japan’s major cities lay in ruins. LeMay worked his crews to the point of exhaustion, with weather and bomb shortages the only factors affecting scheduling attacks. As XXI Bomber Command increased in size toward 1,000 B-29s, it ran both night and daylight operations, pulverizing cities and military targets throughout the summer of 1945. The Japanese air force no longer contested the raids, husbanding its remaining planes for kamikaze assaults on the Navy. For all the suffering they endured, including as many as 900,000 deaths and the destruction of 80 percent of their cities, the Japanese people had no direct influence over their government, whose military diehards had not yet accepted defeat. Instead, the Japanese military steeled itself for a suicidal resistance against the Allied invasion. It would take even greater shocks than B-29 fire raids to end the war.
The Axis Last Stand
Satisfied with the grand strategic designs they had created in 1943–1944, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin saw no reason in late 1944 to rethink their approach to total victory. Even though he was predisposed to tinker with operations to the war’s closing days—largely for postwar political advantage—Churchill reminded his collaborators in August 1944 that everything they “had touched had turned to gold.” The war against Hitler had certainly taken its final shape, a vast east-west dual invasion compressing the Wehrmacht to its death within Germany’s prewar borders. The war against the Japanese had the most loose ends, complicated by the potential role of the British and Russians and the Americans’ divided command in the western Pacific. N
evertheless, in the autumn of 1944 the Allies saw victory ahead.
Given the overwhelming nature of their victories, the Allies had some reason to underestimate their foes’ capacity to resist, even when that capacity became apparent in the Philippines and along the Siegfried Line. Both political and military calculations led the Anglo-American leadership to misjudge the resilience of the German army and unconventional strategic instincts of Adolf Hitler. Conceding irreversible strategic losses to the Russians, Hitler ordered his limited tank production and manpower reserves into the skeleton divisions that had fallen back to the Rhine. Drawing his inspiration from the desperate defensive campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great, who also had faced implacable coalitions on two fronts, Hitler planned a massive offensive against the Anglo-American armies in the west. His geographic goal was the port of Antwerp, his psychological goal to divide the Allies in the confusion of defeat. Under his personal supervision, his commanders formed two Panzer armies and one infantry army of twenty-five divisions (250,000 men) capable of offensive action and deployed them in the Ardennes, weakly held by the 1st U.S. Army.
Although some American intelligence officers found signs of a counteroffensive, the timing, size, and place of the German attack remained obscure. The Germans masked their preparations with an elaborate deception plan and benefited from the fact that their internal communications had become more secure. Moreover, Hitler deceived the Allied generals by calling Gerd von Rundstedt from retirement to command his western armies. Rundstedt’s appointment pacified the German army high command, which favored (as did Rundstedt himself) a limited offensive to restore the breaks in the Siegfried Line. The Allies assumed that the aged Feldmarschall, a consummate professional, would fight a delaying action west of the Rhine rather than launch a major counteroffensive. German and Allied generals once more underestimated Hitler’s fevered fascination with the bold stroke.
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