The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Air officer Matasake Okumiya, who arrived at Rabaul from Buin on January 20, noted that exhaustion and despair permeated every rank. The ground crews were worked to the edge of collapse, and their aircraft gradually succumbed to mechanical failures. Night bombardments interrupted their sleep. At Kusaka’s Twenty-Sixth Air Flotilla headquarters, officers and pilots were “quick-tempered and harsh, their faces grimly set. . . . The men lacked confidence; they appeared dull and apathetic. . . . Their expressions and actions indicated clearly that they wished to abandon Rabaul at the earliest possible moment.”38 The influx of inferior pilots degraded the quality of the squadrons that had flown together in the past. Japanese air resistance gradually deteriorated, whether measured by numbers of aircraft or by the prowess of the aircrews. The loss of so many elite flyers in air combat, day after day, plunged the entire staff into a paralyzing malaise. Okumiya remembered the heady days of early 1942, when the Japanese naval airmen were accustomed to sweeping their adversaries from the skies. Now he found “an astonishing conviction that the war could not possibly be won, that all that we were doing at Rabaul was postponing the inevitable.”39 Since the Japanese navy did not concede the inevitability of combat fatigue, neither pilots nor staff officers were ever rotated out of the theater:

  American air pressure increased steadily; even a momentary lapse in our air defense efforts might lose us Rabaul and our nearby fields. The endless days and nights became a nightmare. The young faces became only briefly familiar, then vanished forever in the bottomless abyss created by American guns. Eventually some of our higher staff officers came to resemble living corpses, bereft of spiritual and physical strength. The Navy would replace as quickly as it could the necessary flight personnel, but failed at any time during the war to consider the needs of its commanding officers. This was an error of tragic consequence, for no leader can properly commit his forces to battle when he does not have full command of his own mental and physical powers. Neither did the Navy ever consider the problems of our base maintenance personnel, who for months worked like slaves. From twelve to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, these men toiled uncomplainingly. They lived under terrible conditions, rarely with proper food or medical treatment. Their sacrifices received not even the slightest recognition from the government.40

  Since mid-1943, MacArthur’s forces had been advancing up the northern coast of New Guinea. Admiral Daniel E. Barbey’s Seventh Amphibious Force, part of what was colloquially known as “MacArthur’s navy,” had landed assault troops on Kiriwina and Woodlark Islands and at Nassau Bay, a few miles south of the Japanese stronghold at Salamaua. Allied troops were transferred up from Milne Bay in a series of small-craft sea lifts, which moved safely under cover of darkness and avoided the risk of using larger fleet units in waters infested with Japanese submarines. The Japanese at Salamaua were reinforced by troops rushed down from Lae, but MacArthur planned only a diversionary attack on Salamaua. His main objective was on the other side of Huon Gulf. Barbey’s amphibians struck next on the night of September 3–4, landing 8,000 Australians east of Lae; the next day, 1,700 U.S. Army paratroopers jumped out of transports and captured an airstrip west of Lae. Lae was bracketed, and pulverized relentlessly by air in daylight and by sea at night. The surviving Japanese garrison abandoned the town and melted into the jungle, where hundreds would succumb to disease and starvation.

  Another surprise sea lift put an Australian force ashore north of Finsch—hafen in late September, and the town was taken on October 2. With a reliable supply line by sea, the diggers pushed up the coast toward Sio and Madang. In a three-month campaign, MacArthur had deftly seized control of the Huon Peninsula, leaving the bulk of Japanese forces far to his rear, or as fugitives dispersed into the unforgiving jungle.

  From Finschhafen, it was a leap of less than fifty miles across the Vitiaz Strait to Cape Gloucester, the western extremity of New Britain. Though the chiefs had decreed that Rabaul (on New Britain’s opposite end) was to be bypassed, MacArthur wanted to capture the smaller enemy aerodromes on the western side of that island. Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Alamo Force landed a regiment at Arawe, a village on the southern coast, on December 15. The landing was a diversionary feint, intended to draw the enemy away from Cape Gloucester. The 1st Marine Division, proud veterans of Guadalcanal who had replenished their strength and spirits in Melbourne, stormed the beaches of Cape Gloucester on December 26, 1943. The weakly defended enemy airfields of western New Britain were quickly secured. Surviving Japanese forces retreated toward Rabaul and prepared for what they assumed would be the largest land battle of the South Pacific campaign.

  As an airbase, Rabaul had been very nearly neutered by unrelenting air attacks. But with units streaming into the lines from points west, Japanese troop strength approached 100,000. Surrender was beneath consideration, of course, so the garrison began to prepare for a climactic fight to the last man. Defeat might be inevitable, but it would be honorable. Heaven beckoned—they would sell their lives dearly, and take plenty of American soldiers and marines with them. For almost two years the Japanese had been building and improving their defensive fortifications, their intricate networks of subterranean bunkers and tunnels, and they were well stocked with provisions and ammunition for a long siege.

  So they waited. And waited. And waited. And the Americans did not come. The defenders were denied even the consolation of dying for the emperor. A Japanese intelligence officer interviewed after the war admitted that the Japanese “hated” the leapfrogging strategy, perhaps because it offended their sense of honor; but he added that they respected it and understood its wisdom. “The Japanese Army preferred direct assault, after the German fashion, but the Americans flowed into our weaker points and submerged us, just as water seeks the weakest entry to sink a ship.”41

  The weak points, in this case, were the lightly garrisoned island groups north and west of New Britain. MacArthur and Halsey seized and secured a ring of bases around Rabaul that rendered the once-formidable bastion entirely impotent. Nor would Kavieng, Rabaul’s principal satellite naval base on New Ireland, fall to direct assault. In February 1944, Halsey’s Third Amphibious Force put New Zealand troops ashore on the Green Islands, about midway between Bougainville and New Ireland. Then, in mid-March, the Third Amphibious Force leapt all the way north to Emirau Island, seventy miles northwest of Kavieng, in the Bismarck Archipelago. “The only casualty we had was some marine sprained his ankle jumping out of the boat,” said Carney. “But it placed us athwart their line of communication from Truk or from the westward. And from that time on, Kavieng was a dead bird. They stayed there and rotted.”42 Carney added that leapfrogging destabilized the psychology and morale of the Japanese fighting forces. “Once the Japanese had launched a plan,” he remarked, “he apparently had no alternative plan, because in his mentality, in his psychology, there could be no such thing as failure. There could be no such thing as turning back, once committed.” When the Americans went around a Japanese position, rather than attacking it directly, “his whole military campaigning morale collapsed.”43

  MacArthur took Los Negros, 220 miles from Kavieng, in the Admiralty Islands. From there it was a short step across a narrow channel to Manus, which offered a superb natural anchorage in Seeadler Harbor. There the Seventh Fleet would gather its strength for MacArthur’s next giant step to the west—Operation RECKLESS, which would take him to Hollandia. The Bismarcks barrier had been shattered and the route back to the Philippines was wide open.

  Admiral Koga finally understood that Rabaul was now a liability, and he ordered his remaining air units flown back to Truk. His reasoning was certainly helped along by the Fifth Fleet’s devastating surprise carrier air raid on Truk on February 16–17, 1944.

  At the end of 1943, Allied victory in the South Pacific appeared certain. What remained in doubt was the cost to be paid in lives, and (relatedly) the time it would take. The Allies had bypassed and rendered impotent about 125,000 Japanese troops. The cream
of the Japanese navy’s air arm had perished, and the rookie successors were undertrained and underprepared for war. The Japanese had lost more than 2,000 aircraft in the South Pacific campaign, and their economy had no realistic prospect of replacing those losses. The remaining Japanese carriers had been pulled back to the home islands, presumably because the enemy knew they would be destroyed if committed to battle. New and better U.S. ships, aircraft, and weapons were arriving in the Pacific as the American war economy approached peak production.

  Among the American rank and file, morale rode at a new high. An officer writing from the Pacific in the last month of the year observed, “We’ve got so much equipment in the Pacific now, it’s like shooting ducks out of your front living room.”44 Lieutenant Bonnell, veteran of several horrific sea fights in Ironbottom Sound, noted that the “cynicism” prevalent in those desperate months of 1942 had given way to a pervasive confidence and optimism. The fleet was expanding rapidly while simultaneously becoming qualitatively better in training, experience, doctrine, and technology. Officers and sailors knew what they had to do, and they knew how to do it. “In other words,” he said, “they’re sending out men to do boy’s jobs now where it used to be boys to do men’s jobs.”45

  Chapter Nine

  THE HILLS OF SAN FRANCISCO MADE A MOCKERY OF WARTIME SECRECY. Except when the fog was in (as it very often was, at any time of year), any citizen, sightseer, or spy could ascend to some commanding urban vista and survey the ships as they stood out to sea. Warships, troopships, freighters, oilers, submarines—more ships went under the Golden Gate Bridge than ever before in history. San Francisco and its eponymous womblike bay, once the continent’s “back door,” had become the vital supply and transshipment hub for the Pacific War.

  Ships were berthed at every finger pier and wharf from Fort Mason to Hunters Point. The longshoremen worked in shifts, around the clock, under floodlights at night. Retailers and landlords sustained the city’s Gold Rush traditions of price-gouging and rent-gouging. Movie theaters ran films around the clock, but still managed to sell out every showing. Long lines of hungry citizens and servicemen stretched outside of restaurants, down sidewalks, and around corners. Inside, the waiters badgered the customers to eat up and get out. Hotel stays were limited by house policy to one or two nights. (Generals and admirals could usually wangle an exception.)

  At the foot of the hills in the city’s northeast quadrant, on the dirty streets of the Tenderloin, Chinatown, and North Beach, a sea of men clad in green, white, or khaki went looking for whatever was on offer in one of the world’s most renowned liberty ports. They had money in their pockets and good reason to wonder if they would ever have another chance to spend it. On streets lit by garish neon, crowds elbowed into seedy nightclubs, burlesque joints, and all-night tattoo parlors. The military police and shore patrol worked to keep the peace, patrolling in pairs and armed only with nightsticks. It was perilous work because no one liked to see a mate arrested. Two men with nightsticks could not hold back a mob determined to liberate a malefactor. Once or twice a night, the riot squad and paddy wagon were summoned and a mass of men were hauled into the Hall of Justice on Kearney and Washington Streets, which had been converted into a military jail for the duration.

  Eleven o’clock was closing time, when well-served crowds flooded out onto narrow sidewalks. It was the most dangerous moment of the night. Brawls pitting sailors against marines (or soldiers against sailors, or marines against soldiers) were always a prospect, but all-navy crews of rival ships were likewise liable to mix it up. In early 1942, the piers along the Embarcadero north of the Ferry Building were converted into the new Battleship Row, as the big ships torpedoed at Pearl Harbor underwent lengthy repairs. “Market Street commandos” was the derisive sobriquet attached to the sailors of those long-berthed warships, but a man flinging the term at a battleship sailor had better be willing to back it up with his fists. “You could start a fight pretty easy that way,” recalled Floyd Beaver of the cruiser Indianapolis.1

  As the war matured, San Francisco (and every other American liberty town overrun with servicemen, including Honolulu and San Diego) became jaded and unfriendly in a way that Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne never did. Theodore C. Mason, a battleship sailor and memoirist, left a poignant impression of wartime Market Street:

  From the Ferry Building tower to the Civic Center more than a dozen long blocks away, San Francisco’s broad, dirty and noisy main stem was always awash with the flotsam of a large city—the lame, the misshapen, the poor, the blind, the self-appointed soul-savers. Now they had to compete for sidewalk space with a flood tide of uniforms in Navy blue, Army khaki, and Marine green. Most of the uniforms were worn by seamen or privates fresh from boot camp or recruit training who had little money and even less sophistication about the ways of sinful San Francisco. Generally, they were too young even to buy a drink.

  Restlessly they roamed the great, world-weary street, past the bars, pawn shops, and movie-theater marquees, the hotels, office buildings, and restaurants, each hoping he would beat the odds and meet a girl like (or perhaps very unlike) the one he had left behind. Unless he was a “jive hound” who lucked out at the El Patio Ballroom, the only girl he was likely to meet was a streetwalker, or a “conductorette” who collected 10-cent fares on one of the four streetcar lines that kept Market Street perpetually aroar.

  The harshly lighted coffee shops offered a last chance at romance. The waitresses, however, were as blasé as the street itself. They had heard the pitches and propositions of these young men from the hills and farms and towns many times before. Rejected again, the boots and recruits were reduced to congregating at the Fun Center, a penny arcade where they could vent their frustration by shooting Japanese Zeros and warships, drawing a bead on Adolph Hitler, or posing with buddies in front of a cardboard battleship. San Francisco, I learned, could be a cold city indeed.2

  In the panicked weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Twelfth Naval District had moved with preemptive swiftness to seize whatever land it wanted or felt it needed to meet the emergency. The navy had taken over Treasure Island in April 1942, before having worked out the details of a lease with the City and County of San Francisco. The issue was acrimonious. Certain grandees of the city’s political elite wanted the 300-acre island as an airport, and they were unsatisfied with the navy’s offer of $44,801 to remunerate the city for prior improvements. Threats of litigation were quashed by the filing of a “declaration of taking and deposit,” signed the same day by a federal judge. That hard-hitting legal maneuver transferred title to the navy. Civilian officials were unaccustomed to being manhandled in such fashion. The Twelfth Naval District likewise decided that it must have the shipyard at Hunters Point, and not just the docks and yard facilities but the entire adjoining neighborhood. One hundred civilian families were told to be prepared to move at forty-eight hours’ notice. In the East Bay, the navy absorbed an old Bethlehem Steel Company shipyard and expanded the Alameda Naval Air Station by plunking landfill into shoal water.

  The North Bay was home to teeming shipbuilding complexes in Sausalito (Marinship Corporation) and Richmond (Kaiser Shipyards). A quarter-mile-long Ford Motor Company plant was speedily retooled to assemble jeeps and tanks, which were loaded onto transports at a 500-foot concrete pier. Winehaven, a compound of great stone wine cellars and port facilities erected at the turn of the century, was converted into a naval fuel depot, and pipelines ran up to brown fuel tanks that sprouted like mushrooms on the hills above Richmond. The huge factories and shipyards were surrounded by chain-link fences topped with coils of barbed wire and guarded by armed men. Their daily rhythms were punctuated every eight hours by the shift change, when a multitude entered by one gate and another emerged on the opposite side. Exhaust-belching buses discharged a full load at the first gate, then drove around and took on another. And so it went on, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until the Axis was crushed.

  As in every other wartime boomtown, it was a se
ller’s market for labor. A job applicant who could not read and had dug ditches all his life could be working on an assembly line the following morning. Wage prospectors, chasing paychecks double or triple what they had ever dared to expect, crowded into the region on trains or buses, in their cars, or by their thumbs. People crammed into makeshift shantytowns reminiscent of a decade earlier, or “hot-bedded” in overcrowded apartments (where roommates arranged their schedules to work different shifts and alternate in the same beds), or lived in their cars, parked alongside roads or in vacant lots. Henry Kaiser apportioned part of his manic energy into throwing up new wartime housing projects, such as the 450 duplexes and quadplexes of Atchison Village in Richmond.

  Native Californians had not yet forgotten their inborn contempt for “Okies” and “Arkies,” the Dust Bowl migrants who had arrived in overwhelming numbers the previous decade. Now they turned that same brand of scorn on the hayseeds who came seeking “big money jobs” in the war industries, and aimed those same shopworn epithets at all rural migrants, whether from Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, or North Carolina. Families newly arrived from the hinterlands, with children barefoot and braided, looked around in open-mouthed astonishment. They had never seen such congestion, so many cars and people, or such a paucity of manners. Laura Briggs, a young girl fresh from Idaho, was amazed to learn that urban neighbors did not automatically offer greetings. “In the morning they’d walk right by you—‘Walk right by you!’ my dad said—and not even say hello, not even acknowledge you were there.”3

  Men, women, and racial minorities were thrown together and compelled to work in conditions of enforced intimacy. The West Coast’s reputation for racial tolerance and moderation was a beacon to African Americans, who migrated to California in great numbers during the war. By executive order, the shipyards and factories were integrated, and photographs of cafeterias in munitions plants depict men and women of different races sitting shoulder to shoulder, with no evidence of segregation or hostility. But blacks were subjected to humiliations and injustices, large and small, in step with the racial attitudes prevailing in the 1940s. Generally they found themselves stranded at the bottom of the “shipyard pecking order.” Bay Area shipyards and factories also hired many tens of thousands of women. “Wendy the Welder” was the title favored at Kaiser, more than the now-familiar “Rosie the Riveter.” At first, shipyard union bosses insisted that women receive lesser wages, but soon realized that the disparity would only incentivize management to hire more women. Misogynistic paroxysms were chronic and contagious. Salacious rumors made the rounds: lurid tales of philandering and trick-turning in the dark recesses and interior compartments of factory floors and ships under construction. Female shipyard workers were pressured to wear head scarves and to remove jewelry, lipstick, and nail polish. The dress codes were policed indirectly by men and directly by self-appointed guardians among the women workers. Katherine Archibald, who worked at the Moore Dry Dock Company in Oakland, wrote a trenchant memoir after the war. “Like soldiers infiltrating enemy lines,” she wrote, “women in the shipyards had to be camouflaged lest the difference in sex be unduly noted and emphasized.”4