The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The elite Japanese naval air corps that launched the Pacific War had been trained in a small, super-exclusive program at the Kasumigaura Naval Air Training Center, the “Japanese Pensacola,” near the city of Tsuchiura, about fifty miles north of Tokyo. The trainees had received two years of classroom instruction, flight training, and gunnery training, followed by an additional year of training in a forward operational unit. Recruits were selected from among recent graduates of Etajima (the naval academy), noncommissioned officers in the fleet, and civilian students between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Screening criteria were extremely and even excessively rigorous. Even so, fewer than half those accepted survived to the end of the training program. When naval warrant officer Saburo Sakai applied for flight training in 1937, he was one of seventy chosen from a pool of 1,500 applicants. In primary flight training, each instructor was responsible for just three students. Lesser performers were pared from the program at every stage. Of the seventy men in Sakai’s class, forty-five washed out before receiving their wings.16 Most cadet pilots accumulated more than 500 cockpit hours before they were permitted to attempt a carrier landing.

  The small and selective program produced some of the best aviators in the world, but it did not generate enough of them. In the mid-1930s, the Imperial Navy was producing only about a hundred new pilots per year. That figure grew after the China Incident (1937), but not rapidly enough to fulfill the navy’s internal goals. Even in the early stages of the Pacific War, when the Japanese naval air squadrons ruled the skies throughout the theater, senior aviation officers were concerned about the supply of replacement aircrews. The navy had about 3,500 trained pilots in front-line service at the start of the Pacific War. Reserves were thin, and attrition would immediately begin to strain the system. Three months before Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Navy optimistically adopted a plan to train 15,000 new pilots. Masatake Okumiya, serving as an air staff officer at Kasumigaura, pointed out that the navy did not have enough combat airplanes to continue training pilots like they did in peacetime—that is, by sending the Kasumigaura graduates to advanced units to perform an additional year of “on-the-job” training. Moreover, even if the funnel was opened to a much larger training pipeline, “We would not feel the effect of the mass-training program for at least another two to four years.”17

  Japan’s flight-training system was simply not designed to expand. The small size of the aviation industry and the existing pool of flyers were inflexible constraints. Ninety percent of Japanese pilots were enlisted personnel or warrant officers. A navy-sponsored civilian flight-training program had been founded in 1934, drawing from the ranks of university students, but it was too small to matter until 1943. The sensitivities and prerogatives of the naval officer corps were a barrier to new recruitment avenues—the Etajima clique stalwartly resisted the influx of reservist pilots and treated them poorly when they were assigned to front-line units. The Yokaren program, which recruited adolescents directly out of secondary schools, was expanded rapidly, and new training centers established throughout the Japanese islands. But these young men often had little education in the sciences and no prior experience handling machinery, and they needed as much as two and a half years of ground instruction before starting primary flight training.

  The dearth of qualified and experienced instructors was a bottleneck. The prewar student-instructor ratio of three to one was obviously unsustainable. In 1941, each instructor took on eight students; in 1942, twelve. More than twelve was deemed impracticable. The navy’s veteran aviators were desperately needed in front-line units, and they were rarely sent back to Japan for assignment as instructors. The Imperial Navy did not acknowledge the existence of such a syndrome as “pilot exhaustion,” preferring to believe that all such frailties could be solved by an appeal to the purified warrior spirit (Senshin), and never adopted a general policy of rotating pilots out of the combat zone. “They won’t let you go home unless you die” was the Japanese aviator’s mordant lament. But if veterans were not reassigned as flight instructors, men in the training pipeline could not benefit from their hard-won expertise.

  Saburo Sakai, one of the few aces to be brought back to Japan as a wartime instructor (he had been wounded over Guadalcanal), was disgusted by the attitude of the young ensigns and lieutenants under his charge. Sakai and other noncommissioned officers were required to address the Etajima graduates as “Honorable Ensign” or “Honorable Lieutenant.” The officers behaved with self-aggrandizing disdain toward enlisted combat veterans, including wounded heroes and aces who had shot down dozens of enemy planes. “Hey, you!” they shouted rudely. “How’s my skill coming along?”18 Enlisted pilots were assigned menial tasks after hours, such as mess cooking and peeling potatoes, while the officers partied at restaurants and tea houses and got drunk on high-shelf liquor. Even in advanced combat squadrons, officers treated their more skilled and experienced enlisted wingmen like members of a lesser caste. The effect on unit cohesion was predictable. Long after the war, Sakai remained bitter:

  I never learned anything from those officers who graduated from the Naval Academy about how to search out and spot the enemy, or how to outmaneuver and shoot them down. Instead, we learned from fellow noncoms, and the noncoms learned from the old noncoms, and the old noncoms learned from the warrant officers who were themselves learning from the special-service officers at the bottom of the officer heap. We became like brothers, looking after each other. Yet those officers, graduates of the Naval Academy, unskilled, lacking in any technique, they were officially our leaders. The nation does not know this. How many of their precious men were killed because of the misjudgments and lack of military acumen of those men! It was horrific, let me tell you!19

  In 1943, as the Japanese naval air corps was macerated in the South Pacific, the Imperial Japanese Navy made a despairing bid to expand all its flight-training recruitment channels simultaneously. Selection standards for the Yokaren program were relaxed, and about a dozen new regional training centers were established. For example, Otsu Yokaren Class No. 19 admitted 1,500 recruits in December 1942. The following class, No. 20, admitted 2,951 young men in May 1943.20 The brightest and most capable candidates were put into an accelerated track and rushed into primary flight training. Inevitably, the duration and quality of their training deteriorated. The amount of flight time required to graduate declined steadily. By early 1944, the average was fewer than 150 hours. Gunnery training and target shooting were dropped from the program; the cadet pilots would have to learn how to shoot after arriving in forward units. In retrospect, it was suddenly clear that the navy’s unduly restrictive prewar recruiting standards, and its practice of ousting so many apparently competent students from Kasumigaura, had been shortsighted and self-defeating. Sakai was undoubtedly right when he judged that the “forty-five pilots expelled from my own student class at Tsuchiura were superior to those men who completed wartime training.”21

  The navy also began recruiting large numbers of university students into flight schools. The students were enthusiastic; the navy received 20,000 such applications by mid-1943. It seemed as if all the young men at the top universities (Tokyo, Keio, Waseda) were clamoring to become naval aviators. The scholar and diarist Kiyoshi Kiyosawa worried that the naval air war would devour the nation’s future leadership. “Japan was expecting great future contributions from these young people. These youths will be destroyed. . . . In the present war this is of the greatest concern.”22

  Kiyosawa was disturbed to hear that many of the young men were severely beaten and abused after enlisting in the navy. Inductees were forced to stand on tip-toe for an hour or more. If they failed, they were beaten savagely with bamboo rods, shoes, and leather sword straps. In May 1944, he recorded “reports that in the navy the thrashing of young recruits is widespread. It is particularly extreme toward student conscripts. I hear that they thrash them with clubs and a great many suffer broken hip bones.”23 Later that year, he lamented the fate of new inductees at Y
okosuka Naval Base: “According to friends, the recruits are cruelly beaten with clubs and other things, and because of this many become deformed. When one man said things in the wrong way, the entire squad was beaten and knocked down. Is there anywhere in the world a place as barbaric as this?”24

  AS A FORMER CHIEF OF NAVAL PERSONNEL, Admiral Nimitz held decided views about administration and staffing. Decades of experience had taught him that headquarters staffs, if allowed to drift unchecked, would grow inexorably until they were bloated, listless, and unwieldy. New branches and subdepartments would sprout like mushrooms after a hard rain. Growth in one department would elicit demands for more manpower from the others. New administrative strata would creep into the organizational charts. Departments would burst out of their appointed office spaces and surge into building annexes. Fiefdoms would arise and rivals would fall on one another in bitter internal disputes. Nimitz had seen it all before, and he was determined not to see it happen in Pearl Harbor. He let it be known that headcount was to be kept to a manageable minimum. He enforced the edict himself, if necessary, by hauling his department heads into his office and compelling them to explain and justify the addition of officers or enlisted men to the headquarters roster.

  But Nimitz’s theater command was expanding rapidly as new ships, hardware, and personnel flooded into the theater from the mainland. A small staff, desirable as it was, could not handle the immense complexities of planning, command, and administration. A CINCPAC annex housed the staff functions for the management of logistics and the maintenance of the fleet. An ever-expanding array of subordinate commands built up their staffs. Whenever possible, those organizations took in members of all branches of the armed services.

  Among Nimitz’s greatest priorities was to manage and contain the internal tensions and astringent personal rivalries inherent in the multiservice theater command. In this respect he was about as successful as any leader could have been. He frowned on open bickering between the services, and was scrupulously even-handed in hearing every man’s point of view. Even the stormiest discussion was guided to a constructive conclusion. No matter how virulently they argued, men left his office on cordial terms. Many who worked with Nimitz later recalled his shrewd use of the well-applied joke. While winding down a testy planning session in the spring of 1944, the admiral said he was reminded of history’s “first amphibious operation,” conducted by Noah. “When they were unloading from the Ark, he saw a pair of cats come out followed by six kittens. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘Ha, ha,’ said the tabby cat, ‘and all the time you thought we were fighting.’ ”25

  The antagonisms could be soothed, but they could not be banished altogether. Several individual relationships were strained to the breaking point. Kelly Turner and Holland Smith occasionally behaved like the best of friends, but when they were forced to commit themselves to the details of planning an operation, there was always the risk of a new eruption. In February 1944, Turner was promoted to the three-star rank of vice admiral, and Raymond Spruance was promoted to full admiral with four stars, but Holland Smith was left behind in the two-star rank of major general. They had all worked together in the successful Gilbert and Marshalls operations. Smith had suspected that the navy would take care of its own while keeping the marines in their place, and here was stark confirmation. “You people ought to be proud of making stars,” he spat at Turner. “You people going around and getting a star. . . . Every time the marines go into battle, you’re liable to get a star.” Turner replied, “Yes, and I’m proud to get stars for my command of the marines.”26 In Washington, General Vandegrift pushed Admiral King to approve the well-deserved promotion. Smith received his third star in May 1944.

  The army continued to chafe under the setup that placed Smith in command of the Fifth Amphibious Corps (VAC). Before Operation GALVANIC, General Robert C. Richardson had tried and failed to extract his amphibious 27th Infantry Division from Holland Smith’s command. Now he returned to the theme with redoubled determination. Saipan and Guam, next stop on the road to Tokyo, were not mere ribbons of coral sand, like the central Pacific atolls—they were large and ruggedly mountainous islands. The marines, according to the army view, were specialized assault troops trained to seize a beachhead. Warfare on larger landmasses was the army’s area of special expertise. Thus an army general should command the VAC, or at least the army troops therein. Nimitz gave Richardson a respectful hearing, but then he rejected his proposals on the grounds that one does not fix what is not broken. But the CINCPAC had to keep Admiral King closely advised of these disputes, because there was always the possibility that they would be appealed to General Marshall, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, or even President Roosevelt.

  Nor was the Army Air Forces pleased with its lot in Nimitz’s theater, which was to be stuck fast under Rear Admiral John H. Hoover, Nimitz’s commander of shore-based aircraft. Hoover was at loggerheads with his principal USAAF subordinate, General Willis Hale, over various issues related to procedures on airbases with mixed army, navy, and marine air units. Richardson had inserted himself into that dispute as well, and the reverberations had reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff through the Army Air Forces chief Hap Arnold. Hoover and Hale were said to cordially hate one another, though both denied it when queried by Nimitz. Hale had even failed to call on Hoover when passing through Funafuti, where Hoover had his headquarters—a serious breach of decorum. General Arnold would later demand local command of the islands serving chiefly as USAAF bases, and Nimitz would refuse. Arnold felt strongly enough to take the issue up with his fellow joint chiefs, who had little inclination to intervene in a local issue of command relationships. Stimson bluntly advised Arnold to stop rocking the boat.

  The relationship between Nimitz and his deputy, the aviator John Towers, remained strained. Towers and the brownshoes had continued to press their case for greater recognition of the ascendancy of carrier aviation. Towers wanted action to rectify the disparity in decorations awarded to army and navy pilots, he wanted more real power for aviators on all planning staffs, and he wanted to permit more press coverage of the American carrier raids deep into enemy waters. War correspondents in Pearl Harbor did what they could to stoke the flames. Wartime censorship limited what they could actually write about the discord, but they liked to goad the aviators into complaining about the surface officers. When Admiral Nimitz learned that one of his staff officers had been asked, “What camp do you belong to?” he realized that the aviators had been airing the navy’s dirty laundry in the presence of newsmen. Not for the first time, or the last, the CINCPAC read Towers the riot act.

  But the issues raised by Towers were substantive, and they demanded to be addressed. Admiral King (himself an aviator) had asked retired Vice Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, something of a legend in the navy, to conduct a thorough survey and submit recommendations for future personnel policies. Yarnell had solicited the written and oral testimony of most of the navy’s major commanders in the Pacific, and produced a report, which was delivered to King in the fall of 1943. His chief recommendation, that the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet should be an aviator, was deemed unacceptable inasmuch as it would require relieving Nimitz of command. But the collected views of the admirals did lend strength to the aviators’ case. A few ambitious brownshoes demanded sweeping all of the non-aviators, including Nimitz and Spruance, out of their jobs. But most leading figures (including Halsey, Spruance, Kinkaid, Turner, Calhoun, and Fitch) stressed that aviation must be welded into an effective component of the fleet and naval commands. Aviators should be strongly represented on all planning staffs and in every major command, and take a leading role in planning deployment of the carrier task forces. But the situation in the Pacific did not call for a general purge of blackshoe officers. Indeed, some senior line officers worried that the navy had been too hasty in moving young aviators up the career ladder. They could not suddenly acquire the skills and experience needed to command a big ship at sea. Time and again, remarked the blac
kshoe Carl Moore, aviators had been rushed through seagoing commands with the sole purpose of making them eligible to skipper a carrier. “So they put them in a tanker for a year and then they give them command of a 50,000-ton carrier, and they terrify everybody else in the same ocean.”27

  On April 28, 1944, Navy Secretary Frank Knox died of a heart attack. He was succeeded by his undersecretary, James Forrestal, the former bond salesman who had been recruited out of the Wall Street firm Dillon Read in 1940. Forrestal had championed the cause of the aviators. He had often run afoul of Ernest King, who resented the civilian’s aggressive interest in policy-making. The two men did not get along at all. But before Knox’s death, Forrestal and King had agreed on a significant new personnel policy. All non-aviation officers in important commands must take an aviator as chief of staff, and all aviators in important commands must take a blackshoe as chief of staff. It was a compromise intended to spread the aviators’ views and expertise into every command, but without forgoing the contrasting perspective of surface officers.

  The announcement brought protests from many who were content with the status quo. Among the two most prominent duos broken up by the new policy were Raymond Spruance and Carl Moore (Fifth Fleet), and Marc Mitscher and Truman Hedding (Task Force 58). Neither Spruance nor Mitscher wanted to lose their incumbent chiefs of staff, and both asked that an exception be granted. Both were refused, though Moore was not forced out until the summer of 1944. Mitscher’s new chief of staff was Arleigh Burke, who made his name commanding a destroyer squadron in the Solomons. Burke reported aboard Mitscher’s flagship, the Lexington, in March 1944.