The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Russell offered “very strong representations” to his superiors about the importance of the pilot ready rooms, which he thought ought to be far more comfortable than those on the older aircraft carriers. They should be air-conditioned, well lighted, and placed as near as possible to the deck spots for each squadron’s aircraft. Russell wanted large leather reclining chairs, arranged to face toward a blackboard and a teleprinter linked to Air Plot, so that each pilot could remain seated comfortably while working at his navigation board. He argued that men would be better rested and more effective if they could prepare for their flights in “peace and comfort . . . . instead of standing up and getting on each others’ toes, with very poor lighting and poor ventilation as in the ready rooms on the old carriers.”40 The point was brilliantly vindicated when the Essex and her sisters went into service.

  The new carriers were matched with a new generation of carrier fighters and bombers. By June 1943, the Grumman F6F Hellcat had replaced the obsolete F4F Wildcat. The Hellcat was a very large aircraft, weighing 1,200 pounds unloaded, but it was powered by a monstrous 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engine and climbed at 3,500 feet per minute. Its flying range was just short of 1,000 miles. The cockpit, slickly faired into the fuselage, was heavily armored. The F6F carried six electrically charged .50-caliber guns and about twice the ammunition of the F4F.

  The Wildcat had lagged behind the Japanese Zero fighter in climbing speed and maneuverability. The Hellcat would match the Zero’s climbing speed below 14,000 feet and outpace it in a climb at higher altitudes. Its speed on the level or in a dive was superior to that of the Zero at any altitude.

  On first impression, many assumed that the massive blue aircraft must be a bomber. Indeed, the new Grumman could be configured to carry 4,000 pounds of bombs or rockets, and it was sometimes used in the role of a fighter-bomber. “The plane was a monster,” wrote Bill Davis, who first encountered it in August 1943. His squadron, VF-19, checked out in the F6F at Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in California. From the moment the engine fired, Davis was thrilled and amazed. “There was a thunderous backfire as flames shot out of the exhaust pipe. A sailor with a fire extinguisher moved toward the plane, but the engine quickly caught and the flames disappeared as the engine started to purr with a mighty roar. I could feel the power through the throttle as well as my ears and every quaking fiber of my body.” Davis taxied to the end of the runway, checked the magnetos, and paused for a moment. He was a bit apprehensive, and had to summon his nerve before opening up the throttle. His description of that first check-out flight is worth quoting in its entirety:

  The noise was fantastic. The response was instantaneous. Correcting for the torque of the giant engine, I started straight down the runway. I glanced at the instruments and couldn’t believe that I had only applied half the engine’s power. I pushed the throttle against the stop; the surge of power and speed was incredible.

  The tail came up immediately as I eased the stick forward. A slight pull back and I was in the air. Instantly I hit the switch and pulled the wheels up so that anyone watching would know I was a hot pilot. Crossing the end of the field, I was already at five hundred feet. This thing really sang the song of the birds. I was really flying, and I had six .50-caliber machine guns, unloaded at the moment, but I knew I was ready for those Japs. Revenge would be mine.

  I put the plane through every maneuver I knew, and a few more. It was amazingly responsive for a plane its size. It flew like a small fighter. Approaching the field, I made a tight turn into final approach, I knew everyone would be watching. Rolling out of the turn, I stalled it at the beginning of the runway. Pulling the flaps up as I taxied to the flight line, I knew I was home. This is what I’d been training for; I was ready.41

  In order to retire the Wildcat and supply the rapidly expanding carrier fleet with new fighters, the Bureau of Aeronautics had pressed Grumman for a terrific ramp-up in production. In the month of July 1943, the Grumman plant in Bethpage, Long Island, turned out 250 Hellcats, and it was on pace to turn out 500 per month by 1944.42 But Grumman fell behind in its production of spare parts, and when the shortages grew critical in the fall of 1943, the bureau took the drastic step of refusing to accept delivery of new planes until the backlog was filled.43

  The venerable Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber, which had destroyed four enemy carriers at the Battle of Midway and served as a vital workhorse in the air battle for Guadalcanal, was overdue for retirement. With a top speed of 260 miles per hour, the much-loved Dauntless could not keep pace with the TBF Avenger and the new Hellcat, and its bomb load capacity (1,200 pounds in most configurations) was insufficient. But its heir, the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver (an acronym for “Scout Bomber, Design Number 2, Curtiss”), had been plagued with problems from the start of its career, and its introduction into the fleet was delayed by more than a year. Early prototype SB2Cs suffered from longitudinal instability and structural weaknesses, especially in the tail and main wing beam, and several early test flights ended in crashes. Design modifications addressed some of these problems while creating others. In carrier trials, the SB2C’s landing gear often collapsed and its tailhook often missed the arresting cables (or worse, snagged the cable and was wrenched out of the fuselage). The plane was prone to stalls, leaks, hydraulic failures, electrical shorts, and flat tires.

  It was a demanding airplane to fly, with high stick forces and a weak aileron response. Pilots did not trust it in a dive and tended to release their bombs high, at the expense of accuracy. The Helldiver was especially balky at low airspeeds, as on a carrier landing approach. The aviators saddled the new plane with various unflattering nicknames: the “Bladder,” the “Big-Tailed Beast,” the “Ensign Exterminator,” the “Son of a Bitch 2nd Class.” The Dauntless pilot Samuel Hynes hated everything about the SB2C, even its name, which he supposed had been chosen by some “public relations man.” The Helldiver, wrote Hynes, “was as showy and as phony as the name, like a beach athlete, all muscle and no guts. It was a long, slab-sided, ugly machine, with a big round tailfin. . . . We were all afraid of the SB2Cs, and we flew them as though they were booby-trapped.”44

  Harold Buell, a veteran dive-bomber pilot who had recently taken command of VB-2, checked the Helldiver out in early 1944. He liked the large bomb load and faster airspeed and was not concerned about his own ability to handle the plane. But Buell worried about his squadron’s less experienced pilots: “My first reaction was that the Beast, as this Curtiss monster was called, would be trouble for the squadron. Compared to the steady, forgiving SBD, this aircraft required much more pilot ability to fly both operationally and as a dive-bombing weapon.”45

  But in late 1943, after long delays, the Bureau of Aeronautics was determined to force the SB2C into service despite the risks, and began pressuring carrier and squadron commanders to cooperate. The plane was justly unloved and no fun to fly, but it did offer essential benefits over the Dauntless, notably its 295-mile-per-hour maximum airspeed (which would allow it to fly coordinated strikes with the other carrier planes), and its much higher bomb load (an internal bomb bay held 2,000 pounds of bombs, and a 500-pound bomb could be carried under each wing). The Helldiver, unlike the SBD, had folding wings, a feature considered indispensable in the new-generation carriers. For all its early problems, the SB2C could be produced rapidly and in the needed quantities. “It was a very complex plane, a very difficult plane to maintain, but there was the capability of ‘cranking them out,’ ” said Lieutenant Commander Herbert D. Riley, a planner with the Bureau of Aeronautics. “That’s what we had to have, building capacity. It was never a question of money; we could always get the money in those days. It was a question of the capacity of American industry to produce airplanes.”46

  By early 1944, the Curtiss plant in Columbus, Ohio, was turning out more than 300 Helldivers per month, and a Goodyear plant in Akron began producing them from Curtiss blueprints later in 1944.47 Eventually, 7,140 Helldivers were built. As dive-bombing squadrons became mor
e accustomed to the aircraft, they grew to tolerate its idiosyncrasies and even began to resent criticism directed against their aircraft. Despite its shortcomings, the SB2C would inflict plenty of punishment on the enemy in 1944 and 1945.

  FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES, since the presidential administration of Theodore Roosevelt, analysts at the Naval War College in Newport had studied and planned for a prospective war against Japan. In successive iterations of the “Orange” and “Rainbow” war plans, the navy had contemplated a westward naval-amphibious offensive through the heart of the Pacific. The American fleet would sortie from Pearl Harbor and hop from island to island through the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana groups. When it penetrated Japan’s “outer defense” ring, it would meet and destroy Japan’s main battle line. That decisive naval victory would trigger the war’s endgame. Japan would be cut off from its territories on the Asian mainland and in the South Pacific. Starved of imported raw materials, the Japanese economy would collapse. An invasion of Japan might or might not be necessary, but in either case victory would follow as a matter of course.

  Several related versions of this blueprint sat on the shelves at Navy Headquarters in Washington. It had been evident, following the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, that the navy and its sister services lacked the necessary sea, air, or ground forces to undertake such a massive operation in 1942, and would not be able to assemble them until 1943 or 1944, if even then. But it always remained the navy’s view—that is to say, the view of Ernest J. King—that the Pacific War would eventually be won by executing the strategy outlined in War Plan Orange. There would be a direct westward assault from Hawaii on Japanese-held islands in the central Pacific. It would be carried out by the Pacific Fleet and the Marine Corps, with the U.S. Army and U.S. Army Air Forces in subsidiary roles. Nimitz and his admirals would be in charge; MacArthur would have no part of it. The only issue to be decided was when such a campaign should begin.

  Characteristically, King wanted to get the show on the road as early as possible, and he had exerted all his influence to send the needed forces to Nimitz. As usual, his efforts were doggedly opposed by the British, who wanted a concentration of all available Allied forces for the defeat of Germany, and by MacArthur, whose preferred road to Tokyo ran through the Philippines, and who wanted no competing offensive to the north. But King eventually succeeded in bringing his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs around to his way of thinking and gradually won their undivided backing. William Leahy, who had taken a direct hand in developing the Orange and Rainbow plans during his long naval career, was an instinctive ally. George Marshall was anxious about the state of the South Pacific and determined to keep Japan on the defensive. Throughout late 1942, King worked behind the scenes to persuade Marshall of the strategic importance of the Marianas, which lay directly astride sea routes linking Japan’s home islands to the resource-rich East Indies. The Marianas would provide suitable airfields for the army’s B-29 “Superfortresses,” which would enter service in 1944 and could carry 10,000 pounds of bombs to a radius of 1,600 miles. From Guam and Tinian in the Marianas, the heavy bombers could strike major Japanese population centers and industrial areas. “I finally got General Marshall to understand,” King wrote after the war.48

  In the Allied conferences of early and mid-1942, the British military chiefs had hoped to win Marshall and the U.S. Army leadership over to their concept of a minimalist and purely defensive war in the Pacific, pending the final defeat of Germany. But when the high command met in Casablanca, French Morocco, in January 1943, it was immediately clear that Marshall and King had reached an understanding, and were in agreement that the Pacific required more reinforcements.

  In the first meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCOS), at Anfa Camp on the morning of January 14, Marshall proposed to allocate Allied troops, shipping, and munitions by a formula of “ 70 percent in the Atlantic theater and 30 percent in the Pacific theater.”49 King spoke immediately after Marshall, leaving little doubt that the two Americans were reading from the same playbook. According to his estimates, said King, the Allies were engaging “only 15 percent of our total resources against the Japanese in the Pacific theater,” a proportion that “was not sufficient to prevent Japan consolidating herself and thereby presenting ultimately too difficult a problem.”50

  General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, was knocked back on his heels. He had long since marked King as an irredeemable Anglophobe and a “Pacific-firster,” and now the ruthless admiral had apparently cast a spell over George Marshall. Brooke asked, Upon what basis had the Americans computed the 30 percent formula? King replied, somewhat lamely, that it “was a concept rather than an arithmetical computation,” but in any case 15 percent was insufficient to do more than hold the lines in the Pacific. Brooke held his tongue but later told his diary that the proposed figure was “hardly a scientific way” of fixing allocation between theaters.51

  The official minutes of the Combined Chiefs meetings, recorded in strictly anodyne terms, tended to disguise the heated subtext of the debate. The British had lost much of their Asia-Pacific empire and wanted it back. In Malaya, especially, they had been disgraced; in order to retrieve their prestige in the region, they must have a role in the defeat of Japan. But until Germany was knocked out of the war, Britain could offer no meaningful contribution to the Pacific theater. If the Americans closed in on Japan too early, British military power might be rendered strategically irrelevant in the Pacific, with portentous consequences for the future of the empire. But Ernest King was not at all interested in the future of the British empire, and he even appeared to take an unseemly relish in the humbling of British seapower.

  In his diary, General Brooke confided a sour loathing for the “shrewd and somewhat swollen headed” admiral, whose objective seemed to be “an ‘all-out’ war against Japan instead of holding operations.”52 At dinner that night, Brooke watched in amusement as King drained one glass too many and became “nicely lit up.” “With a thick voice and many gesticulations,” the admiral remonstrated stridently with Churchill, to the prime minister’s evident embarrassment.53 Two days later, after another round of punishing negotiations, Brooke concluded wearily, “It is a slow and tiring business which requires a lot of patience. They can’t be pushed and hurried, and must be made gradually to assimilate our proposed policy.”54

  The scale of the Pacific effort was only one dimension of their quarrel. Marshall’s view, shared by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and to varying degrees by the other American service chiefs, was that Germany could be defeated only by a direct invasion across the English Channel, the operation code-named ROUNDUP. The British feared a debacle in northern France and preferred new operations in the Mediterranean. In 1942, Churchill and his generals had persuaded FDR to back their proposed invasion of North Africa (TORCH), over the sharp objections of Marshall and Stimson. Marshall, still smarting from that reversal, now wanted a firm commitment to execute ROUNDUP in the summer of 1943. The British refused to commit to a date for ROUNDUP, and were dubious that such an operation was feasible before 1944. But still, they asked for an immediate buildup of forces in England so that ROUNDUP could be launched if and when opportunity offered—that is, if and when the Red Army gained the upper hand on the eastern front, and a German collapse appeared imminent. Meanwhile, they favored further efforts in the Mediterranean, perhaps an invasion of Italy. Marshall did not much like this proposed southern line of attack, regarding it as a diversion from the “main plot” and a “suction pump” that would draw strength away from ROUNDUP.55

  Selected excerpts of minutes of the Combined Chiefs meeting at Casablanca put across the substance of the opposing arguments, and show the degree to which King and Marshall now spoke with one voice on the importance of the Pacific:

  ADMIRAL KING stated that the Japanese are now replenishing Japan with raw materials and also fortifying an inner defense ring along the line of the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines.
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  SIR ALAN BROOKE inquired how far forward the U. S. Chiefs of Staff envisaged it would be necessary to go in order to prevent the Japanese from digging themselves in. He feared that if operations were too extended it would inevitably lead to an all-out war against Japan and it was certain that we had not sufficient resources to undertake this at the same time as a major effort against Germany.

  GENERAL MARSHALL explained that it had been essential to act offensively in order to stop the Japanese advancing. For example, in New Guinea it had been necessary to push the Japanese back to prevent them capturing Port Moresby. In order to do this, every device for reinforcing the troops on the island had had to be employed. The same considerations applied in Guadalcanal. It had been essential to take offensive action to seize the island. Short of offensive action of this nature, the only way of stopping the Japanese was by complete exhaustion through attrition. It was very difficult to pause: the process of whittling away Japan had to be continuous.

  SIR CHARLES PORTAL [RAF chief] asked whether it was not possible to stand on a line and inflict heavy losses on the Japanese when they tried to break through it. From the very fact that the Japanese continued to attack, it was clear that they had already been pushed back further than they cared to go.

  GENERAL MARSHALL spoke of our commitments in the Pacific, of our responsibilities, with particular reference to the number of garrisons we have on small islands and the impossibility of letting any of them down. He insisted that the United States could not stand for another Bataan.

  SIR ALAN BROOKE stated that we have reached a stage in the war where we must review the correctness of our basic strategic concept which calls for the defeat of Germany first. He was convinced that we cannot defeat Germany and Japan simultaneously. The British Chiefs of Staff have arrived at the conclusion that it will be better to concentrate on Germany. Because of the distances involved, the British Chiefs of Staff believe that the defeat of Japan first is impossible and that if we attempt to do so, we shall lose the war.