The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  Two years earlier, Ernest J. King had insisted on launching an early Pacific counteroffensive in the Solomon Islands. Relying on his influence with the navy-minded Roosevelt and his tense rapport with General Marshall, King had secured approval from the Joint Chiefs for Operation WATCHTOWER. He had rebuffed the objections of Admiral Ghormley and General Vandegrift, the local navy and marine commanders to whom it fell to carry out the precarious operation, and had ridden roughshod over General MacArthur, who wanted the Pacific campaign consolidated under his singular authority. Warned that the Americans did not yet have sufficient naval power, airpower, or logistics capability to begin a major amphibious operation in the South Pacific, King trusted his aggressive instincts. He pointed out that the Japanese were at a similar disadvantage. More time might allow the navy and marines to improve their margin of superiority, but time would also strengthen the defenders, who were gradually digging themselves into the territory they had seized.

  Had the Americans been pushed off Guadalcanal, as had seemed likely in September and October of 1942, King might have lost his command and the Pacific War might have taken a different course. But Operation “Shoestring,” as WATCHTOWER was ruefully nicknamed by the men who carried it out, vindicated King’s philosophy of the early counterattack. In subsequent operations of 1942 and 1943, north and south of the equator, planners had been forced to work against oppressive deadlines and commanders had been forced to rely on deficient or awkward logistics. But the Americans had always appeared before they were anticipated, and the Japanese had been obliged to fight earlier than they would have liked. “Everywhere, I think, you attacked before the defense was ready,” Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura told interrogators after the war. “You came far more quickly than we expected.”103 On many other islands where the defenses were mature, the Americans merely leaped past them and let the defenders “wither on the vine.”

  By early 1944, the fully mobilized American war economy had put an end to the era of shortfalls. Amphibious operations of previously unimaginable scale were now possible. On Saipan, American ground forces occasionally complained that specific items were needed but unavailable. For example, their portable radio packs were often inoperable for lack of spare batteries. The batteries were there, in the holds of Turner’s transports and in sufficient numbers. Delays in getting them into the hands of the radiomen could be blamed on the customary and inevitable snafus. An intricate choreography was required to move materials from the ships offshore to the beachhead supply dumps to infantry units in advanced positions. In some cases it was a matter of better paperwork and record-keeping—if the beachmasters did not know exactly what they had on the beach, and where to find it, they could not very well get it to the front lines. Inefficiencies were being identified and corrected; procedures steadily improved as all personnel learned from experience.

  Raymond Spruance, when discussing the war after it was over, often returned to the point that tactical decisions in major battles were less important than the superior logistics of American forces.104 A sea of ink has been spilled on Spruance’s controversial determination to keep his carriers near Saipan on the night of June 18–19, 1944. Another small ocean has been spilled on Halsey’s even more controversial decision to chase the Japanese carriers north on the night of October 24–25, 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In each case, different tactics might have altered the result of the battle at hand, but neither could have had a lasting influence on the course of the war. The Americans had developed the capability to project overwhelming force into the distant frontiers of the western Pacific, and no tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the combatants.

  On July 17, when Nimitz and King flew into newly pacified Saipan, both admirals took pains to assure Spruance that his performance in the Battle of the Philippine Sea had been entirely satisfactory. “Spruance, you did a damn fine job there,” said King, upon stepping off his plane. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.”105 He had hewn closely to his orders, which were to protect the beachhead at all costs. With a wide margin of superiority—and that margin growing inexorably each passing month—the high command had no use for brash tactical gambits that might provide an opening for an improbable Japanese victory. Surveying grand strategy from a high perch, the COMINCH and CINCPAC instinctively understood that the last phase of the Pacific campaign would be won “by the numbers.”

  The capability of Service Squadron Ten to provide logistical support with no meaningful shore establishment had enabled the Fifth Fleet to operate from desolate central Pacific atolls. Now, in the Marianas, a sophisticated and permanent forward base of operations would backstop the final assault on the Philippines and Japan’s home islands. Guam was at the end of a 5,800-mile supply line stretching from the American mainland through Oahu, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok. It was a continental island, 210 square miles in area, with ample territory for airfields, barracks, warehouses, port amenities, fuel storage, training ranges, recreation facilities, and a new Pacific Fleet headquarters. It lay astride the main sea routes linking east to west and north to south, and was thus well situated to support the next offensive thrusts. It had been and would remain a U.S. territory, with a friendly and loyal native population, and would serve as a keystone of American military power in the region long after the defeat of Japan.

  The transformation began while the battle for Guam was still hot, when the garrison beach party and the port director came ashore under fire and began directing boat traffic onto the landing beaches. Several thousand tons of material was landed each day. Most supplies and equipment were left in open-air supply dumps, as few warehouses had survived the aerial and naval bombardment of the previous weeks. Lion Six, an advanced naval base-building unit commanded by Captain Adolph E. Becker Jr., began clearing Apra Harbor and preparing it to receive large cargo ships. The jetty was extended, a submarine net raised, and temporary pontoon piers linked to the shore by a coral-filled causeway. The first Seabees to arrive on the island, the 5th Naval Construction Brigade, upgraded and extended the airfields and paved and widened the roads. Vice Admiral John H. Hoover, the low-profile admiral who had been Nimitz’s commander of shore-based air, assumed overall command of the Marianas. A new Island Command assumed authority on Guam. Most of the transport fleet and many of the warships pulled out and sailed for Pearl Harbor.

  Working and living conditions were wretched in those early days of the base-building struggle. Men were quartered in tents, but their bivouac areas were prone to flooding in the frequent torrential rains, and it was essential to construct platform tents both for lodging and for office space. Canned rations fed the men until a makeshift galley was established in a Quonset hut. A reservoir in the island’s interior provided water to the coastal towns, but the pipelines had been destroyed by naval bombardment, so all freshwater had to be brought in from the fleet in five-gallon cans. Flies and an awful stench rose from the shallow graves of dead Japanese, so the dead had to be dug up and burned. Mosquitoes and the tropical diseases they carried caused a health and sanitation emergency; the construction teams had to drain swamps and other areas of standing water and spray them with disinfectant. Fuel was brought ashore in fifty-five-gallon drums and stored in open-air dumps. Several of those dumps went up in flames, causing spectacular explosions and conflagrations that lasted days. Thousands of Japanese mines were scattered around the beaches and footpaths, and several men were killed by walking into an area not yet cleared by mine disposal units.

  Tens of thousands of American combat and construction troops had to be fed. A naval reserve lieutenant who had worked in hotels and restaurants organized the first large mess hall, in which the galley took up all of a small Quonset hut and the food was served directly into mess kits through small windows. Men often waited as long as two hours to be served. American forces had also assumed responsibility for feeding and sheltering the island’s 24,000 native Chamorros. Many of their ho
mes and villages had been destroyed or were not yet safe from the enemy. In early August, about 18,000 civilian inhabitants were living in three refugee camps near the coast.

  The island’s unpaved roads were churned up by tanks, jeeps, and trucks, and when the rainy season set in, they were transformed into impassable quagmires. Many vehicles were stranded in the mud and abandoned. The primitive oxcart tracks and footpaths had to be widened, extended, and paved over. But trucks were needed to haul coral rock to primitive cement-mixing areas, and there were never quite enough trucks, or enough mechanics and spare parts to maintain them. The trucks operated twenty-four hours a day, with their drivers working in shifts. Roads to the coral pits were given first priority for improvement, as no major construction could begin anywhere until vast quantities of coral cement became available. The roads were to be built to last, and the builders adhered to the same standards they would meet in building a road in the United States. Rocky outcroppings and ridges were blasted out and inclines were regraded. A four-lane road between Sumay and Agana was underway before the island was declared secure. Before the war’s end, more than 103 miles of new paved roads were completed on Guam.

  During the enemy’s two-and-a-half-year occupation, labor troops had built a 4,500-foot coral surface airstrip at Orote Peninsula. Seabees cleared the wrecked planes away by shoving them into great mountains of dirt and debris on the sides of the runways. “They were wrecks of twisted aluminum and steel,” wrote the sailor James Orvill Raines, who marveled at how high the wreckage towered over the working strip. “They had the appearance of piled junk.”106 The island’s northern third was dominated by a limestone plateau, providing suitable terrain for B-29 fields, each 8,500 feet long and 200 feet wide. As 1945 began, construction teams began hacking the two big runways out of the jungle.

  A base construction officer later recalled a predicament on Guam: “There were always too many men and too few men—too many for the housing that was finished, and too few for the work to be done.”107 Men living in tents were often felled by exhaustion and tropical diseases. The prefabricated Quonset hut provided the answer, and thousands of the corrugated steel kits were landed at the new pontoon piers in Apra Harbor. Because the construction units were overtaxed on larger projects, and the huts required no special machinery to build, many American marines and soldiers were told, “There are your homes—build them.”108 The sections were plainly labeled and easily screwed together. The quality of accommodations gradually improved. Showers and scrub racks were included in all barracks. By early 1945, the entire area around Apra Harbor and Orote Peninsula was covered with symmetrical rows of Quonset huts and larger prefabricated administrative buildings, warehouses, and hangars. Visiting officers and civilians were quartered in double-decked BOQs (bachelor officer quarters) that were comfortably furnished and attended by navy orderlies.

  Within six months, the detritus of battle had been shunted to the sides of roads and the edges of the jungle, and Guam began to take on the look of an established base. A huge tank farm and pipeline system accommodated half a million barrels of fuel oil, and another 328,000 barrels of aviation gasoline.109 Hundreds of big steel arch-rib warehouses were crammed to the rafters with munitions and equipment. Fresh provisions were stored in 68,000 cubic feet of refrigerated storage. Large passenger aircraft of the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS) arrived and departed by the hour, giving the airfield at Orote the look of a major commercial airport in the United States. Prior to Operation FORAGER, some had predicted that Apra Harbor could not handle more than ten or twenty large vessels, but after extensive improvements and the extension of a long jetty, it was found to accommodate as many as 231 commissioned ships.110 A sophisticated water system provided twelve million gallons per day of fresh, potable water from sixty-seven springs and reservoirs. Five hospitals supplied beds for 9,000 patients. A Quonset hut housed an advanced infectious-disease research laboratory, staffed by leading doctors in the field. Blood and fecal samples were flown into Guam from other Pacific islands. The doctors reproduced the diseases in white mice, identified the viruses, and cultivated inoculations.

  Ernie Pyle, a combat journalist who had made his name in the European theater, traveled to Guam in the spring of 1945. The island’s old coastal towns remained in ruins, and the heaps of charred rubble reminded him of Western Europe. Just around a bend in the road, however, one found a sprawling landscape of blinding white concrete and long rows of Quonset huts, a scene that would not have looked out of place on Oahu. Pyle marveled at the quantity of provisions, supplies, and munitions stored in the warehouses of this remote Pacific outpost. “You could take your pick of K rations or lumber or bombs,” he wrote, “and you’d find enough there to feed a city, build one, or blow it up.”111

  Nimitz and a small portion of his staff moved to Guam in January 1945. His new advanced headquarters and residence were built on CINCPAC Hill, a bluff overlooking the ruins of Agana. Arthur Lamar, the flag lieutenant, described the new CINCPAC residence as a “beautiful white clapboard cottage with four bedrooms and four baths opening onto a square court with grass and flowers in the middle. We had a large living room-dining room and a long screened porch right on the edge of a cliff overlooking the harbor.”112 As in Pearl Harbor, a horseshoe court and shooting range were built in the yard. A nucleus of the CINCPAC planning and operations staff accompanied the chief to Guam, but the bulk of the organization remained behind, in Pearl Harbor. Nimitz, who always preferred a small staff and had resisted the inexorable growth of his organization, was pleased with the new setting. He adopted the “no ties” policy that had prevailed at SOPAC headquarters in Noumea but never at Pearl Harbor. Khaki uniform shorts, never approved in Oahu, were deemed suitable in Guam; Nimitz often wore them himself, to the surprise and amusement of others.

  Sprawling encampments eventually accommodated more than 165,000 troops, including several marine and army divisions. Before V-J Day, the total number of American personnel on Guam surpassed 200,000. For lack of transportation, most troops never left their own camps. They had no reason to do so—each camp was equipped with many of the comforts, conveniences, and entertainments of home. Civilian visitors from the United States were surprised to learn that more than 200 movies were screened on an average night. Nearly all were shown outside, often on the side of a hill where the terrain formed a natural amphitheater, and the men sat on crates, logs, or old fuel drums. Movie reels were traded from one camp to another, but inevitably men were obliged to watch the same films twenty or thirty times, and could recite the dialogue as it left the actors’ lips. Baseball diamonds, football fields, and basketball courts sprouted up in recently cleared minefields, and an athletics office organized large and sophisticated sporting leagues. There were thirty-five boxing arenas, and one well-promoted fight attracted 18,000 spectators.

  Thousands of radios were distributed to the camps. A “Pacific American Expeditionary Forces Station” provided news and entertainment, but many listeners still preferred the popular jazz and buffoonish propaganda of Radio Tokyo. There was a brisk trade in Japanese souvenirs, and prices of certain items (especially enemy battle flags and samurai swords) eventually rose to extravagant heights. Traveling USO camp-shows were performed on outdoor stages ringed with benches. The hardworking entertainers often put on four or five identical shows per day, moving from one camp to another on buses. The navy shipped forty pianos into Guam. Troops put on lavish in-house productions, which often poked fun at their own commanding officers. Several dozen stores or PXs offered cigarettes, candy bars, magazines, soda foundations, ice cream, toiletries, and native souvenirs. The shelves were swept clean each day, often before noon, and in some of the larger camps it was deemed necessary to establish two duplicate stores in one location so that one could be restocked while the other was open for business. Beer was rationed, two cans per man, in large recreation huts and beer gardens. Cash circulated, from paymasters to men to stores and back to paymasters. On an average day, $30,000 wa
s sent back to the United States.113

  In the densely vegetated hills overlooking these trappings of an ultramodern, omnipotent, and prosperous military civilization, Japanese stragglers watched, starved, and considered their alternatives. Now and again an American was ambushed or felled by sniper fire, but most surviving Japanese seemed preoccupied with food and survival. Recognizing that malnutrition and disease would gradually reduce the threat posed by enemy holdouts, the island commanders took a patient approach to rounding them up. Loudspeaker trucks lumbered over the dirt tracks in the northern hill country, broadcasting their rhythmic appeals for honorable surrender. Leaflets were dropped from airplanes. Japanese POWs were sent back into the jungle to persuade their comrades to give themselves up.

  Driven to desperation by hunger, many Japanese drew in close to the American encampments and looked for opportunities to steal food. Sentries often killed or captured these emaciated intruders around the edges of ration dumps, warehouses, or mess halls. In one often-related incident, a Japanese soldier was found sitting among a company of marines watching an outdoor movie. When discovered, he grinned broadly and raised his hands. Another surrendered to a marine sitting on a privy, later explaining that those circumstances seemed to offer the best odds of not getting shot. When a Japanese straggler was spotted one night on CINCPAC Hill, Nimitz’s marine guards chased the man back into the jungle and Nimitz, dressed in pajamas, emerged from the house with a pistol in hand.

  Even long after the end of the war, hundreds of Japanese remained stubbornly at large in the jungles of Guam. Small groups lived in caves and survived by hunting lizards, toads, and rats, trapping fish, and stealing food from local farms and villages. Chamorros, embittered by the Japanese occupation of 1941–44, tended to attack them on sight. The Japanese government sent emissaries, and a steady trickle of holdouts came out of the jungle each year throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.