The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Halsey and MacArthur were still operating under the Joint Chiefs’ directive of July 1942, which had set a deadline of September of that year for the conquest of Rabaul. The headquarters in both SOPAC and SWPA had simply ignored that deadline, which was obviously so unrealistic as to be absurd. Task One had been completed with the expulsion of Japanese forces from Guadalcanal in February 1943; Tasks Two and Three called for a coordinated advance up the Solomons and New Guinea followed by the reduction of Rabaul. New orders and deadlines were needed, but Admiral King now proposed another characteristically audacious stroke. Why not penetrate deep into Japanese territory by bypassing all of the Solomons and all of New Britain, instead landing an invasion force in the Admiralty Islands west of Rabaul? The latter could be suppressed in an air offensive but never actually taken.

  Nimitz, Halsey, and MacArthur joined in opposition to the idea, arguing that the bypassed Japanese positions would represent thorns in the side of the elongated supply lines. MacArthur told the chiefs that he needed Rabaul as a forward naval base, and leaping over it “would involve hazards rendering success doubtful.”25 American carrier forces, much reduced in the sea battles of 1942, could not compensate for a lack of land-based air support. The Pacific commanders favored a stepwise advance, with a chain of newly constructed airfields supporting each new landing. King yielded to this united front of opposition, but his conception of the bypass would eventually be adopted by Halsey and MacArthur as a tactical linchpin in the South Pacific offensive.

  On March 28, 1943, the Joint Chiefs issued a new directive for the advance toward Rabaul. MacArthur and Halsey would push north and west in two parallel advances through the Solomons and up the coast of New Guinea, culminating in landings on western New Britain (MacArthur) and Bougainville (Halsey). The two-pronged operation was given the name CARTWHEEL.

  INTERSERVICE COORDINATION BETWEEN THE Japanese generals and admirals remained intermittent and largely ad hoc. General Imamura’s Eighth Area Army headquarters at Rabaul stood above Hyakutake’s Seventeenth Army, comprising three divisions spread over the Solomons and New Britain, and General Hatazo Adachi’s Eighteenth Army, which had another three divisions on New Guinea. Troop reinforcements were arriving in Rabaul, and the garrison there would soon exceed 90,000. Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka remained in command of navy forces at Rabaul and held responsibility for the defense of the central Solomons. Admiral Mineichi Koga had succeeded the slain Yamamoto as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, based at Truk. Nowhere in the theater was there a blended command; the army and navy had to coordinate their operations through a meticulous process of nemawashi, or “digging around the roots,” for a consensus. The Japanese moved new air units into the theater, including more of the elite carrier aircrews that had trained and honed their skills before the war—but the loss ratios in air combat continued to move sharply against the Japanese in 1943.

  Facing the growing effectiveness and confidence of Allied bombing runs, Japanese shipping became more vulnerable than ever before. Because of the distances involved, the Japanese army on New Guinea could be reinforced only by daylight convoys. In March 1943, USAAF and RAAF aircraft based at Moresby and Milne Bay slaughtered an entire convoy of transports attempting to land troops in the Lae-Salamaua area. The army bombers employed a new technique called “skip-bombing,” which involved attacking at masthead altitude and “skipping” bombs off the sea and into the sides of the target ships. Kenney’s Fifth Air Force bombardiers employed slow-fused bombs that gave the pilots time to pull up and get out of range of the explosions. Reiji Masuda, a crewman on the destroyer Arashio, left a vivid account of the harrowing attack:

  They would come in on you at low altitude, and they’d skip bombs across the water like you’d throw a stone. That’s how they bombed us. All seven of the remaining transports were enveloped in flames. Their masts tumbled down, their bridges flew to pieces, the ammunition they were carrying was hit, and whole ships blew up. . . . They hit us amidships. B-17s, fighters, skip-bombers, and torpedo bombers. On our side, we were madly firing, but we had no chance to beat them off. Our bridge was hit by two five-hundred-pound bombs. Nobody could have survived. The captain, the chief navigator, the gunnery and torpedo chiefs, and the chief medical officer were all killed in action. The chief navigator’s blackened body was hanging there, all alone.

  Then a second air attack came in. We were hit by thirty shells from port to starboard. The ship shook violently. Bullet fragments and shrapnel made it look like a beehive. All the steam pipes burst. The ship became boiling hot. We tried to abandon ship, but planes flying almost as low as the masts sprayed us with machine-guns. Hands were shot off, stomachs blown open. Most of the crew were murdered or wounded there. Hundreds were swimming in the ocean. Nobody was there to rescue them. They were wiped out, carried away by a strong current running at roughly four or five knots.26

  At least 3,600 Japanese troops were killed in this “Battle of the Bismarck Sea.” MacArthur, in a statement released for radio broadcast in the United States, called it “one of the most complete and annihilating combats of all time.”27 He marked it as a signal moment in military history, when airpower had finally and forever asserted its preeminence over seapower.

  FAR TO THE NORTH, in the western reaches of the Aleutian archipelago, Japanese forces remained in possession of Kiska and Attu. The two bleak, fog-mantled islands had been seized in June 1942, during the Midway operation, by a task force under the command of Vice Admiral Boshiro Hosogaya. Thanks to a phenomenal effort by his radio intelligence analysts, Nimitz had known of the move against the Aleutians before it happened (just as he had known of the attack on Midway). Concluding that the islands would be of little value to the Japanese, and could be retaken in good time, the CINCPAC had chosen not to oppose the invasion.

  Both sides had once regarded the Aleutians as a potential route of invasion of northern Japan, by way of the Kurile Islands and Hokkaido. But the Americans eventually abandoned the northern line of attack, mainly because the dreadful weather conditions prevailing in those latitudes would pose severe challenges for sea and air operations. Since the islands lay near the “Great Circle” shipping route, the Japanese had imagined that they might serve as useful watch posts against naval incursions—but this theoretical advantage was defeated by persistently bad visibility over the surrounding seas. Possession of the two islands—the only incorporated territory of the United States to fall under enemy occupation during the war—provided the Japanese with a propaganda triumph of sorts. After the crushing defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway, Tokyo noisily acclaimed the capture of American territory and implied that the offensive would continue into mainland Alaska and beyond. In military terms, however, Attu and Kiska were never more than a liability. Provisioning and resupplying their garrisons consumed shipping and other resources that the Japanese urgently needed in other regions.

  The Aleutians were a terrible theater in which to live, to fight, or to get anything done at all. Soldiers, airmen, and sailors generally hated to be sent north. Flying conditions were among the worst of the war, and operational losses exacted a heavy toll on both sides. In the summer, the sea and islands were habitually carpeted by heavy fog. Planes lost their way and ditched at sea, or descended through a low cloud ceiling and flew directly into terrain. Between September and May, a frigid climate and long nights made for even more atrocious flying conditions—before an aircraft could even leave the ground, its engines had to be warmed with blowtorches, and ice had to be chipped off its wings. The great distances lying between the Japanese and American bases exacerbated the challenges on both sides. Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald, Commander of the North Pacific Area (COMNORPAC), was based in Kodiak, Alaska, 1,000 miles east of Kiska. USAAF bombers could reach Kiska from the U.S. airbase at Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska island—but the flying distance (about 500 miles) was too far to permit a fighter escort. Attu, some 190 miles west of Kiska, lay entirely out of air-striking range.


  Hosogaya lacked forces to mount any sort of eastward offensive, and remained chiefly concerned with repelling air attacks and securing his seaborne supply line against a gauntlet of American submarines. Efforts to build an airfield on Kiska were thwarted by a combination of weather, soft soil, and a dearth of equipment, materials, and labor. Air defense was chiefly provided by floatplane Zeros, which were cumbersome and easily destroyed in air combat; air reconnaissance was provided by flying boats, but many of these big aircraft were lost to accidents or navigation errors.

  In September 1942, as days shortened and temperatures plummeted, it became clear that the Japanese could not be driven off the islands until the spring of 1943 at the earliest. As the Guadalcanal campaign heated up, it pulled the sea and air forces of both combatants south. American submarines continued to claim a few victims, American cruisers and destroyers periodically shelled the Japanese garrisons from offshore, and Theobald’s air forces continued to pester Kiska with regular air raids.

  In Kodiak, service frictions between the navy and the Army Air Forces deteriorated steadily through the fall of 1942. Admiral Theobald pressured his USAAF subordinates to bomb at lower altitude—descending below the cloud ceiling for the sake of accuracy—but that drove up operational losses. The Americans needed air strips farther west, nearer to the enemy objectives, but the two services could not agree on a location for a major new airbase—the navy wanted Adak, the Army Air Forces insisted on nearby Tanaga. The issue was appealed to the Joint Chiefs, who chose Adak. But that island was so often shrouded in fog that another one was needed for an emergency strip. In January 1943, an advance force landed on Amchitka, which lay only ninety miles east of Kiska.

  When the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo learned of the new airfields on Adak and Amchitka, it made the belated decision to pour resources into Kiska and Attu in hopes of fortifying them against an expected counterassault. But the rigors of winter and a tenuous supply line continued to hobble the Japanese airfield construction program. Coastal defenses were improved on Kiska and to a lesser extent on Attu, but the Japanese had been late off the mark and were racing against the calendar. Late spring would bring better weather for air and sea operations.

  Washington was determined to recapture the islands in 1943, if only to silence the outcry in Congress—members of the Washington and Oregon delegations were warning that the Japanese might land in Alaska and sweep down on Seattle. That scenario was incredible, but no one could say so in public without tipping off the enemy to American indifference. Moreover, should the Soviet Union enter the war against Japan, the Aleutians would provide a useful staging area for aircraft deliveries to Siberia. Nimitz’s planners estimated that sufficient forces could be assembled by May for a landing on Attu, but there would not be enough to attempt a landing on Kiska until midsummer. In March, Nimitz requested and received clearance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to aim the first landing at Attu instead of Kiska, even though the former was 190 miles west of the latter.

  That month a radio intercept revealed that a Japanese supply convoy was inbound for the Aleutians. Rear Admiral Charles “Soc” McMorris, a future chief of staff to Nimitz, took a cruiser-destroyer squadron north from Pearl Harbor in hopes of intercepting and destroying the enemy freighters. Contact was made at dawn on March 26. The winds were light and the seas unusually mild. Under a 2,500-foot cloud ceiling, visibility was extraordinarily clear. McMorris’s flagship, the cruiser Salt Lake City, obtained radar returns on five ships several miles due north. As light came up, lookouts gradually perceived the profiles of several destroyers and at least one cruiser. The Japanese column turned southeast to engage, and McMorris continued gamely into range. The enemy force included four cruisers and four destroyers, altogether commanding about twice McMorris’s aggregate firepower. He had not expected to encounter enemy warships, certainly not a powerful surface force.

  At 8:40 a.m., the Japanese cruiser Maya opened fire from long range, about 20,000 yards. The second salvo straddled the Salt Lake City. That was unnervingly accurate shooting. The Salt Lake City returned fire and landed two hits on the cruiser Nachi. McMorris turned to port, and the American ships began “chasing salvos” to avoid taking hits—that is, continuously altering course toward the last splash in order to foil the enemy gunners’ targeting corrections. The two columns fought a long running battle. Salt Lake City was battered by the Nachi’s and Maya’s 6-inch shellfire, taking several hits between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. Seawater entered her boilers and shut them down, leaving her dead in the water with a 5-degree list. Several American destroyers closed around her and began making smoke.

  At this stage, McMorris’s prospects appeared grim. Two Japanese cruisers and several destroyers were closing the range on his port quarter. They would undoubtedly fire torpedoes on the immobilized flagship when they came within optimal range. The admiral ordered his three destroyers to charge the approaching enemy and launch a spread of torpedoes. Before the destroyers could get into range, however, the Japanese ships broke off contact and turned away to the west. The Americans watched in surprise as the enemy withdrew over the horizon. By noon, the Salt Lake City’s boilers were back in operation and the ship was able to make 30 knots. McMorris’s squadron retired toward Dutch Harbor.

  The six-hour “Battle of the Komandorski Islands”—named for a Russian island group that lay some miles north—had nearly ended in an American debacle. If Admiral Hosogaya (who had personally led the Japanese force from his flagship Nachi) had pressed his advantage, he would likely have destroyed the Salt Lake City and might have claimed several of her consorts as well. Hosogaya later explained that he had withdrawn because he expected an American airstrike at any moment. Some of his crew had mistaken the Salt Lake City’s high-explosive shells for bombs dropped from above the cloud ceiling. The Japanese ships were also low on fuel and ammunition. Nevertheless, Hosogaya’s conservative decision was condemned by superiors, and the admiral was forced into retirement.

  McMorris’s force had suffered damage to three ships and had lost seven men, all killed. Two Japanese cruisers were damaged, later repaired; casualties were fourteen men killed and twenty-six wounded. The Battle of the Komandorski Islands marked the last attempt of the Japanese to resupply the Attu and Kiska garrisons with surface ships; all future supply runs would be made by submarines.

  Attu, among the most remote and inhospitable places on earth, was a lump of treeless muskeg plains rising to bare, bleak peaks about 2,500 feet high. Though it was American territory, the Americans knew almost nothing of the island’s interior terrain. The best and most recent maps covered only part of the island, and only to a distance of about 1,000 yards inland. The offshore approaches were not well charted.

  Troops assigned to seize Attu were drawn from the army’s 7th Infantry Division, which had completed an amphibious training course overseen by Marine General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. Task Force 51, consisting of more than fifty ships, with 34,000 troops embarked in transports, closed in on the island before dawn on May 11. A small scouting force landed on the northern coast, near Holtz Bay, from submarines and a destroyer transport. The main landings were to follow in the south, at Massacre Bay—but the southern group was forced to wait most of the day for the fog to lift, and the first units did not reach the shore until about 3:30 p.m. They encountered little opposition, however—and by nightfall, 1,500 troops were ashore in the north and another 3,500 in the south.

  The Japanese defenders did not contest the landing, remaining in defensive positions on high ground. Colonel Yasuyo Yamazaki, the Japanese commander, concentrated his 2,650 troops in the hills between the two landing sites. Knowing that he could not defeat the Americans, and that he could count on no naval or air support from Japan, he burned all sensitive documents. The American naval task force pounded the island from off the shore, but Yamazaki’s force was strongly entrenched and the persistent fog helped to conceal the Japanese positions. Throughout the afternoon of May 11 and into the
following night, Japanese artillery rained projectiles down on the American troops of the southern force. The Americans advanced steadily inland, but their progress was impeded by the difficult terrain. The island’s spongy soil would not support the weight of trucks and armored vehicles. On May 17, Holtz Bay was cleaned out and the first contingents of the northern and southern forces made contact.

  The last Japanese troops retreated to a ridge above Chichagof Harbor. At dawn on the twenty-ninth they broke out of their position in an all-out banzai charge. The mass of men moved through the American lines and penetrated deep into the rear areas. In a fierce battle, including much hand-to-hand fighting, nearly the entire Japanese garrison was killed.

  The Americans had not yet mastered their skills in amphibious warfare, and the Attu operation exposed many shortcomings. The force did not have enough landing craft. It had not prepared sufficient contingencies for bad weather and poor visibility. The assault troops were not adequately equipped with cold-weather uniforms and gear. Key supplies were late to the beach or were not landed at all. The American casualties were 580 killed and 1,148 wounded in combat; another 1,200 suffered frostbite and other cold-related injuries.