The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  As dawn broke, Clemens swept the sound with his binoculars. He counted more than fifty ships, including several heavy cruisers that were raining 8-inch projectiles down on Japanese installations around Lunga Point. Buildings and fuel dumps blazed fiercely and discharged huge columns of oily black smoke. Green-clad troops descended from transports into landing boats, which then motored in toward beaches west of Lunga. It was the largest amphibious landing that Clemens—or anyone else—had ever witnessed. His teleradio was failing rapidly, the inevitable result of rough handling and humidity. But Martin Clemens did not need a radio to tell him the Yanks had come to stay.

  The Conquering Tide

  Across the sea, water-drenched corpses;

  Across the mountains, grass-covered corpses.

  We shall die by the side of our Emperor,

  We shall never look back.

  —“UMI YUKABA” (Across the Sea)

  Anthem of the Imperial Japanese Navy

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

  I will fear no evil.

  PSALM 23

  Chapter One

  HENRY L. STIMSON, THE VETERAN REPUBLICAN STATESMAN WHO served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of war, left a well-aimed barb in his postwar memoir. Recounting the bitter rivalry between the army and the navy, a struggle for influence and resources that colored every phase of the Pacific War, Stimson thought the trouble “grew mainly from the peculiar psychology of the Navy Department, which frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true Church.”1

  A navy partisan would not lack for ripostes—the messianic fantasies of General Douglas MacArthur come quickly to mind—but Stimson’s characterization should not be too lightly dismissed. During past eras of peace, the navy had tended to become insular, inward looking, and parochial. Every flag officer (admiral) had passed through the same way stations: Annapolis, the Naval War College, a series of commands ashore and at sea. Whereas the army’s wartime chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, had attended Virginia Military Institute (VMI) rather than West Point, there was not an admiral in the navy who had not graduated from the Naval Academy. Every senior naval commander had lived his entire adult life in the navy, beginning at the tender age of seventeen or eighteen. He had been steeped in the seapower doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the eminent naval historian and strategic theorist. He had been taught to revere the heritage and traditions of the institution, to owe it his fierce and undying allegiance: “The Navy: first, last, and always.”2

  Interservice enmity was not a specifically American predicament. Indeed, it was far more impassioned in Japan, where the generals and admirals regarded one another as virtual enemies, and a deadlock between them had been at the heart of that nation’s reckless lurch into a calamitous war. But the American military leadership, thrust unexpectedly into war in 1941, was largely unprepared to function in an integrated high command. The army and navy had interacted very little in peacetime and had neglected the challenges of planning and executing joint operations. Until 1947, there was no such thing as a Department of Defense, or a secretary of defense—the navy and war departments were independent and coequal, each headed by a civilian cabinet secretary who reported directly to the president. Before December 1941, there was no such thing as a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)—that body was convened as an ad hoc committee for the first wartime summit with the British. With no other mechanism on hand for interservice cooperation, the JCS continued to meet regularly for the duration of the war, but it functioned without formal statutory authority and without an official chairman. Admiral Ernest J. King, the highest-ranking officer in the navy, was not subordinate to Marshall, or vice versa. The military chiefs either muddled toward a consensus or were obliged to appeal their disputes to President Roosevelt.3

  The acrimony was found at every rank. Vicious brawls erupted nightly between sailors, marines, and soldiers on the streets of San Francisco and Honolulu. Sailors and soldiers taunted one another as “swabbies” and “dogfaces” and settled the issue with their fists. Infantrymen begrudged sailors their hot meals and clean bunks, amenities that seemed criminally lavish when compared to the squalor and privations of war on land. The bad feeling between sailors and marines had been notorious since the founding of both services during the American Revolution. Insults crept into the “padding” inserted at the beginning and end of encrypted radio messages—for example, “U.S. Marine Corps, seagoing bellhops, ya, ya, ya.”4 On naval bases across the world, guardhouses and gates were manned by scowling marines whose customary hail to all sailors was, “Where in the hell do you think you’re going?”

  Senior army officers regarded the entire Marine Corps as a plot hatched by the navy to usurp their rightful function, and did their best to asphyxiate it, or at least limit its deployments to units no larger than a regiment. Naval aviators grumbled that the Army Air Forces (USAAF) handed out medals like after-dinner mints. Pilots of different services took satisfaction in “buzzing” a rival’s airfields and aircraft, or (when on the ground) holding down their brakes while gunning their engines in order to blow clouds of dirt and dust onto their adversaries.

  Every major action early in the Pacific War involved a dimension of interservice rancor. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Navy Secretary Frank Knox often stressed that the army had been assigned primary responsibility for the air defense of Oahu. After the spirited (and ultimately futile) defense of Wake Island, navy and marine public relations offices vied for public acclaim. MacArthur declared that the fall of the Philippines was “due fundamentally” to a “lack of seapower in the Pacific.”5 The Doolittle Raid, an operation in which army B-25 bombers were launched from an aircraft carrier to strike Japan in April 1942, was a rare successful example of cooperation between army and naval air units. But Colonel James H. Doolittle’s airmen later faulted Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. for ordering them to launch too early, when the task force was still nearly 700 miles from Japan. At the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 4–8, 1942), MacArthur’s Australian-based USAAF planes were blamed for inaccurate sighting reports and for dropping bombs on units of the Allied fleet, having mistaken them for Japanese ships. (All fell harmlessly into the sea.)

  At the Battle of Midway (June 4–6, 1942), navy dive-bombers flying from the Enterprise and Yorktown attacked and destroyed four of Japan’s finest and largest aircraft carriers. But initial press reports mistakenly credited army B-17s flying from airfields on Midway. “BIG BOMBERS WON” was the front-page headline in the New York Times on June 12, 1942. Brigadier General Willis H. Hale announced that “the Battle of Midway was primarily won in the blasting by Flying Fortresses of a Japanese naval task force, including carriers, off the island on the morning of June 4.”6 History would eventually determine that no bomb dropped by any army plane had struck any Japanese ship. But in the immediate aftermath of the victory, the B-17 crews returned first to Honolulu and regaled news correspondents with their claims of spectacular and numerous hits on the enemy fleet. Navy pilots who knew what had really happened were incensed. When aviators of the two services came face to face at the Moana Hotel in Honolulu a week after the battle, arguments escalated into fistfights. Ensign Fred Mears, a Hornet torpedo pilot, noted that the navy aviators “had seen their friends risk and sometimes lose their lives going below 1,000 feet to dive-bomb, torpedo, and sink Jap warships while the army stayed at a safe 20,000 feet and not only missed but sometimes dropped on our own craft. That’s why they got mad at the army.”7

  Marine General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, in a score-settling postwar memoir, indicted the navy for “mental arteriosclerosis.”8 He cited a range of offenses. The navy had failed to provide enough gunfire and aviation support in amphibious operations. It had forced the marines to make due with second-rate, cast-off, obsolete equipment and weaponry. Admirals in offshore task forces had interfered with
marine commanders’ authority on the beachheads. Smith’s umbrage was shared by men down the ranks. Marine infantrymen, carried to enemy beaches in navy transports, took offense at injustices large and small. Their memoirs and oral histories are rife with grievances—accounts of unequal mess privileges and berthing arrangements; of being denied the right to purchase candy or cigarettes at the ship’s store; of leaving their personal effects in care of the navy and never seeing them again; of being barricaded in the lower decks and cut off from fresh air or sunshine; of being forced to abide by ridiculous rules “for the safety of the ship.” Marines left a sardonic note for the crew of a navy transport that had brought them to Peleliu, site of one of the bloodiest amphibious assaults of the war:

  It gives us great pleasure at this time to extend our sincere thanks to all members of the crew for their kind and considerate treatment of Marines during this cruise. We non-combatants realize that the brave and stalwart members of the crew are winning the war in the Pacific. You Navy people even go within ten miles of a Japanese island, thereby risking your precious lives. Oh how courageous you are!9

  More than any other type of military operation, amphibious warfare—striking an enemy on land by way of sea—exposed and aggravated the frictions between the services. The Pacific War was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative, and most logistically complex amphibious war in history. To roll back the tide of Japanese conquests, the Allies would be required to seize one island after another, advancing across thousands of miles of ocean in two huge parallel offensives on either side of the equator. The army, navy, and marines were compelled to work together in sustained and intricate cooperation. They would make many mistakes, and do their best to learn from them. But even when their operations were successful, the interservice feuding left scars that even victory could not heal.

  ON JUNE 13, HAVING LEARNED OF THE AMERICAN VICTORY at the Battle of Midway, British prime minister Winston Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “This is the moment for me to send you my heartiest congratulations on the grand American victories in the Pacific which have very decidedly altered the balance of the naval war. All good wishes to you and friends.”10

  Even in a routine congratulatory telegram, Churchill chose his words carefully. The battle had “altered the balance” of the Pacific War; it had not turned the tide. The Imperial Japanese Navy had lost the carriers Hiryu, Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi with all of their aircraft, and more than 3,000 veteran officers, sailors, and airmen had been killed in action. Even so, Japan retained a numerical advantage in most categories of deployed naval and air strength. The Combined Fleet could still muster five aircraft carriers to the Americans’ four and had several more under construction. Except for the cruiser Mikuma, destroyed in mopping-up operations two days after the sinking of the four carriers, Japan’s surface naval forces were intact. Midway had claimed none of Japan’s redoubtable battleships, submarines, destroyers, troopships, or flying boats, or any of its potent land-based medium bombers. All but about 110 of Japan’s veteran carrier aviators survived the battle, even while losing their planes, and ample numbers of replacement aircraft were still coming off the assembly lines in Nagoya, Yokosuka, Musashino, and Kure. Midway hardly diminished the violence or energy of the Japanese offensive in the South Pacific, where naval, ground, and air forces based at Rabaul on New Britain island were pushing south and east and keeping local Allied forces on a tenuous defensive.

  Two weeks after Midway, Admiral King traveled from Washington to Annapolis to address the 611 midshipmen of the Naval Academy’s class of 1942. Theirs was the largest class in the academy’s ninety-seven-year history. The class was being graduated a year early, their course of study having been cut to three years from four, to feed the expanding fleet’s demand for new officers. Standing behind a rostrum in Dahlgren Hall, the admiral warned the young men that they were to be thrown into the “greatest war in history” and that the effort would require “unremitting labor and a multitude of heartaches and sacrifices such as this country has never before known.”11

  King was the most powerful admiral in American history, the first to occupy simultaneously the two most powerful posts in the service—those of Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet (COMINCH) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). A tall, dark-haired man with a narrow face and sharply cleft chin, he was unusual among his colleagues in having risen from working-class origins. He had been born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, where his father had worked as a foreman at a railroad machine shop.

  King was more respected than liked by his colleagues. Disdaining the tradition of clubby collegiality that bound Annapolis graduates to one another, he had made it his personal business to rid the service of men he regarded as indolent or inept. The admiral, according to an aide, would “tolerate almost anything in an officer except incompetence, laziness, or verbosity.”12 King was direct to the point of obnoxiousness, and he did not bother to conceal his contempt for those who opposed him. General Marshall remarked after the war, “I had trouble with King because he was always sore at everybody. He was perpetually mean.”13 In his private wartime diary, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in the same vein, but less delicately: “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully.”14

  The British military chiefs tended to suspect King of conspiring to divert forces from Europe to the Pacific. General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, noted in his diary during the Casablanca conference in early 1943:

  King . . . is a shrewd and somewhat swollen headed individual. His vision is mainly limited to the Pacific, and any operation calculated to distract from the force available in the Pacific does not meet with his support or approval. He does not approach the problem with a worldwide war point of view, but instead with one biased entirely in favor of the Pacific. Although he pays lip service to the fundamental policy that we must first defeat Germany and then turn on Japan, he fails to apply it in any problems connected with the war.15

  The truth was more nuanced. King never questioned the strategic wisdom of “Europe-first,” the Allies’ plan (agreed to in early 1941, reaffirmed after the attack on Pearl Harbor) to direct the lion’s share of their collective effort against Germany. The German Wehrmacht was engaged on the eastern front, in the most cataclysmic ground war ever waged. Should it prevail, forcing a Russian surrender or collapse, Hitler could redeploy a hundred divisions or more to western Europe. Conversely, if Germany could be overpowered, the defeat of Japan and Italy must inevitably follow.

  But the “Europe-first” (or “Germany-first”) policy, stated in the abstract, left a host of subsidiary questions unresolved. If the Pacific theater was to receive a lesser share of Allied strength, what exactly should that proportion be? Ten percent? Or something closer to 30 percent? What did it mean to “hold” against an enemy that could attack anywhere across a vast ocean front? There were no foxholes at sea, no trenches or defensive fortifications. Even after its reverse at Midway, Japan posed a threat to Allied territories throughout the South Pacific, and until the theater could be stabilized, there was no prospect of the hypothetical holding action pictured in Allied planning documents. The danger was imminent, and the need to counter it imperative.

  In the spring of 1942, King had pressed his colleagues to reinforce the sea route between North America and Australia. Acknowledging the scarcity of Allied troops, as well as shipping and military assets of every kind, with the unavoidable upshot that his plans might hinder the campaign against Germany, King told the other joint chiefs that the South Pacific emergency was “certainly the more urgent—it must be faced now. Quite apart from any idea of future advance in this theater, we must see to it that we are actually able to maintain our present positions.”16 He repeatedly steered discussions back to the need for “strong points,” particularly in Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, and Tonga.17 Those islands cou
ld be held only with concentrated reinforcements of garrison troops, aircraft, and labor and equipment for airfield construction. On May 12, King asked Marshall to transfer at least three army bomber groups—with ground crews, spare parts, fuel, and ammunition—from Australia and Hawaii to New Caledonia, Efate, and Fiji.18

  As always, however, King would not be satisfied with a purely static defense. When enough force was concentrated into this network of South Pacific strong points, the Allies should launch a more ambitious program—a northwest counteroffensive, staged from bases in the New Hebrides, into the Solomons and the Bismarck Archipelago, “after the same fashion of step-by-step advances that the Japanese used in the South China Sea.”19 On June 24, he cabled an early warning of his contemplated offensive to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPAC). Nimitz should muster naval and air forces for “the seizure and initial occupation of Tulagi and adjacent islands.”20 The following day King added that the offensive would begin “about August 1.”21

  Five weeks to launch the biggest amphibious assault since Gallipoli? In one of the most primitive and inaccessible theaters of the war? For the past several months, King had been lobbying the Joint Chiefs and the White House for a Solomons offensive, but he had never intimated that it could be launched as early as August. The timetable seemed implausibly premature.