Everything grew in scale to match the largest war in history: in 1939 America had only 4,900 supermarkets, but by 1944 there were 16,000. Between December 1941 and the end of 1944, the average American’s liquid personal assets almost doubled. With luxuries scarce, consumers were desperate to find goods on which to spend their rising earnings: ‘People are crazy with money,’ said a Philadelphia jeweller. ‘They don’t care what they buy. They purchase things just for the fun of spending.’ By 1944, while British domestic production of consumer goods had fallen by 45 per cent from its pre-war levels, that of the United States had risen by 15 per cent. Many regions experienced severe housing shortages and rents soared, as millions of people sought temporary accommodation to fit their wartime job relocations. ‘The Good War myth,’ wrote Arthur Schlesinger, who then worked for the Office of War Information,
envisages a blissful time of national unity in support of noble objectives. Most Americans indeed accepted the necessity of the war, but that hardly meant the suppression of baser motives. In Washington we saw the seamy side of the Good War. We saw greedy business executives opposing conversion to defense production, then joining the government to maneuver for post-war advantage … We were informed that one in eight business establishments was in violation of the price ceilings. We saw what a little-known senator from Missouri [Harry Truman] called ‘rapacity, greed, fraud and negligence’ … The war called for equality of sacrifice. But everywhere one looked was the miasma of ‘chiseling’ … The home front was not a pretty sight at a time when young Americans were dying around the world.
Among the worst rackets uncovered was that of a primary war contractor, National Bronze and Aluminum Foundry Company of Cleveland, which knowingly sold scrap metal as parts for fighter engines; four of its executives were jailed. The US Cartridge Company of St Louis issued millions of rounds of defective ammunition, though such chicanery could cost lives. Citizens sought otherwise unavailable commodities through the black market, and many businesses evaded price controls. An American observed ruefully that Europe had been occupied, Russia and China invaded, Britain bombed; but the US among the great powers was ‘fighting this war on imagination alone’. Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews. Combat historian Forrest Pogue later observed wonderingly of Bradley’s army in France: ‘The men have no great interest in the war. You can’t work them up unless the Germans hit some of their friends.’ A behaviourist noted for his work with rats, Professor Norman Maier of Michigan University, suggested that Americans could be more effectively galvanised into a fighting mood by cutting off their gasoline, tyres and civil liberties than by appealing to their ideals. This was an overly cynical view, for some people displayed real patriotism, and on the battlefield many Americans would display much courage. But it was true that the remoteness of the United States from the fighting fronts, its security from direct attack or even serious hardship, militated against the passion that moved civilians of nations suffering occupation or bombardment.
After Pearl Harbor, America’s political and military leaders knew that they, like the British, must suffer defeats and humiliations before forces could be mobilised to roll back the advancing Japanese. There was much ignorance and innocence about the enemy, even among those who would have to fight them. ‘Suddenly we realized that nobody knew anything about the Japs,’ said carrier pilot Fred Mears. ‘We had never heard of a Zero then. What was the caliber of Jap planes and airmen? What was the strength of the Japanese Navy? What kind of battles would be fought and where? We were woefully unprepared.’ Many Americans had acknowledged for months the logic of their nation’s belligerence. Yet it is characteristic of all conflicts that until enemies begin to shoot, ships to sink and loved ones – or at least comrades – to die, even professional warriors often lack urgency and ruthlessness. ‘It was amazing how long it took to get the hang of it and to react instantly in the right way,’ American sailor Alvin Kiernan observed. ‘War, we gradually learned, is a state of mind before it can be anything else.’ Ernie Pyle wrote: ‘Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to become wholly at war. We had to go through that transition period of letting loose of life as it was, and then live the new war life so long that it finally became the normal life to us.’
All this makes it remarkable that, within six months of Pearl Harbor, American fleets gained victories which turned the tide of the Asian war. Germany dominated western Europe for four years, but by autumn 1942 the Japanese perimeter was already beginning to shrink. The speed of the American resurgence in the Pacific reflected the fundamental weakness of the Asian enemy. First, however, came the pain. In the weeks following 7 December 1941, the Japanese seized Wake after a fierce defence in which the first wave of attackers were repulsed with heavy loss. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanding the defence of the Philippines, rejected his air commander’s plea to strike back during ten hours which elapsed between news of Pearl Harbor and a devastating Japanese air assault that destroyed almost eighty US aircraft undispersed on the ground.
Next day, MacArthur began to make belated preparations to withdraw his Filipino and American troops to Luzon’s Bataan peninsula, which alone might be defensible. But it was a huge task quickly to shift supplies there: the general had dismissed proposals to do so before war came, scorning ‘passivity’. The army hastily bought rice from Chinese merchants and all the beef, meat and fruit it could get from local canneries. On 12 December, MacArthur belatedly informed President Quezon of the mooted withdrawal, which he began to implement on the 22nd. Doctors warned that Bataan was notoriously malaria-ridden, because of the prevalence there of the anopheles mosquito, but little was done to secure stocks of prophylactics. Meanwhile, Manila was bombed every day between noon and 1300, causing American officers to advance their lunch to 1100.
MacArthur expected a Japanese landing at the south end of the Lingayen gulf, and deployed some troops accordingly. Yet the Japanese invasion force got ashore at Lingayen gulf after brushing aside a challenge by ill-trained and poorly equipped Filipino troops. By 22 December, 43,110 men of Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma’s Fourteenth Army had established a beachhead with few casualties. Faulty American torpedoes caused the failure of all but one submarine attack on the troopships. A further 7,000 Japanese landed unopposed at Lamon Bay, two hundred miles south-eastwards. The Philippines army crumbled quickly. Air commander Gen. Lewis Brereton, most of his planes gone, prudently decamped to Australia. MacArthur issued a bombastic communiqué: ‘My gallant divisions are holding ground and denying the foe the sacred soil of the Philippines. We have inflicted heavy casualties on his troops, and nowhere is his bridgehead secure. Tomorrow we will drive him into the sea.’
In reality, the Japanese advanced on Manila against negligible resistance. In Washington, the US chiefs of staff wisely forswore any notion of reinforcing the defence. MacArthur enjoyed just one piece of good fortune: the invaders focused on occupying the capital, and made no attempt to frustrate his retreat to Bataan. Life photographer Carl Mydans watched from the Bay View Hotel as the first Japanese entered Manila on 2 January: ‘They came up the boulevards in the predawn glow from the bay riding on bicycles and on tiny motorcycles. They came without talk and in good order, the ridiculous pop-popping of their one-cylinder cycles sounding loud in the silent city.’
A week later, Homma launched his first attack on the American-Filipino line across the Bataan peninsula. In the days that followed, the defenders had little difficulty in repulsing successive assaults, though they suffered steady losses from air attack. From the outset, they were also hot and hungry, with 110,000 people to be fed – 85,000 US and Filipino troops and 25,000 civilian refugees. The Corps of Engineers set about gathering and threshing rice i
n the fields. Fish traps operated along the coast until destroyed by enemy fighters, and farm animals were slaughtered. Malaria swiftly reached epidemic proportions. Nurse Ruth Straub wrote in her diary: ‘I guess we are all self-imposed prisoners-of-war. All we’re doing is protecting our own lives.’
But the defenders of Bataan displayed more energy and initiative than the British in Malaya: several Japanese attempts to turn the Americans’ flank by landing troops on the coast behind the front resulted in their annihilation. One unit was forced back to the sheer cliffs of Quinauan point. ‘Scores of Japs ripped off their uniforms and leaped, shrieking, to the beach below,’ wrote Captain William Dyess. ‘Machine-gun-fire raked the sand and surf for anything that moved.’ When Japanese infantry punched through the perimeter and seized two salients at Tuol and Cotar on 26 January, after bloody fighting the line was restored by counterattack. Bombing inflicted remarkably little damage on American artillery positions. When fodder ran out for the cavalry’s horses, the garrison ate them. Almost every wild animal on Bataan was hunted down and thrown into the pot, while men picked mangoes, bananas, coconuts, papayas, and fished at sea with dynamite.
Through February and March the Japanese made no headway, but the defenders were fast weakening from hunger, and anti-malarial quinine was running out. MacArthur escaped to Australia by PT-boat with his family and personal retainers, in obedience to an order from Roosevelt, leaving Gen. Jonathan Wainwright to direct the defence through its last weeks. By late March, a thousand malaria cases a week were being admitted to hospital. In civilian refugee camps behind the perimeter, according to Lt. Walter Waterous, conditions were ‘the most deplorable I have ever seen and the death rate was appalling’. Bombing wrecked almost every facility above ground on the fortress island of Corregidor; thousands of sick and wounded were crowded into its Malinta Tunnel.
Thirty-year-old Texan nurse Lt. Bertha Dworsky found that one of the worst aspects of her work was personal acquaintance with many of the terribly wounded men brought in: ‘They were usually people that we’d been with at the Officers’ Club, or they were our friends. It was a tremendously emotional experience. We just never knew who they were going to bring in next.’ The wounded often asked if they were going to survive, and doctors disputed whether it was best to tell them the truth. Dr Alfred Weinstein wrote: ‘The argument raged back and forth with nobody knowing the correct answer. Most of us followed a middle course, ducking the question … If a patient looked as if he might kick the bucket, we called in the chaplain to give him last rites, collect personal mementoes and write last messages … More often than not they didn’t have to be told.’
The condition of the besiegers was little better than that of the besieged: the Japanese, too, suffered heavy losses to malaria, beriberi and dysentery – more than 10,000 sick by February. Tokyo was increasingly exasperated by American defiance, and by the triumphalist propaganda which the saga of Bataan promoted in the United States. On 3 April, Homma’s reinforced army launched a major offensive preceded by a massive bombardment. Filipino units broke in panic before Japanese tanks; every movement by the defenders provoked strafing from the air; many men were so weakened by hunger that they could scarcely move from their foxholes. The Japanese pushed steadily forward, breaching successive American lines. On the evening of 8 April, Maj. Gen. Edward King on his own initiative decided he must surrender the peninsula, and sent forward an officer bearing a white flag to the Japanese lines. From jungle refuges all over Bataan, groups of defenders emerged, seeking paths towards Corregidor island, where Wainwright still held out.
On the morning of the 9th, King met Col. Motoo Nakayama, Homma’s operations officer, to sign a surrender. ‘Will our troops be well treated?’ King asked. The Japanese answered blandly, ‘We are not barbarians.’ Some 11,500 Americans and 64,000 Filipinos fell into enemy hands. The transfer of these debilitated men to cages became known to history as the Bataan Death March. Scores of Filipinos were casually killed, some used for bayonet practice. An American private soldier saw a weakened compatriot pushed under an advancing tank. Blair Robinett said: ‘Now we knew, if there had been any doubts before, we were in for a bad time.’ Sgt. Charles Cook described seeing captives bayoneted if they tried to get water. Staff-Sergeant Harold Feiner said: ‘If you fell, bingo, you were dead.’ More than three hundred Filipino prisoners were butchered in a ravine near the Pantingan river. Their killers explained that if the garrison had surrendered sooner they might have been treated mercifully, but as it was, ‘we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us.’ An estimated eleven hundred Americans and more than 5,000 Filipinos perished on the Death March.
The Japanese now concentrated artillery fire on Corregidor, little larger than New York’s Central Park; on 3 May Wainwright reported to MacArthur in Australia that every structure above ground had been levelled, the island denuded of vegetation. Conditions became unspeakable in the hot, stinking Malinta Tunnel, packed with fearful humanity. That night the submarine Spearfish evacuated the last party to escape safely to Australia, twenty-five strong, including thirteen women. A few hours later, the Japanese landed amphibious forces to storm Corregidor. At noon on 6 May, after two days of fighting, Wainwright surrendered all remaining US forces in the Philippines, first signalling to Washington: ‘With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander … Goodbye, Mr President.’ An American navy doctor among the garrison, George Ferguson, sat down and wept, ‘just so disappointed in the good old U.S.A.’. Amid emotional and physical exhaustion, however, many men were simply glad the battle had ended. Only later did they discover that the ordeal had scarcely begun for 11,500 Americans who became prisoners of the Japanese.
The four-month defence of Bataan and Corregidor, which cost 2,000 American dead and 4,000 casualties among the invaders, was made possible in part by Japanese incompetence. The initial invasion force was weak, and composed of troops with nothing like the training and experience of Yamashita’s army in Malaya. If Homma and his officers had displayed more energy, the Philippines saga would have ended sooner, as Tokyo’s angry high command asserted. But nothing can detract from the gallantry of Wainwright, who did his duty more impressively than MacArthur, and of his garrison. They created a legend in which Americans could take pride – and of which Churchill was envious. To put the matter bluntly, US soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause.
Brigadier Dwight Eisenhower, who had served unhappily under MacArthur a few years earlier, wrote in his diary: ‘Poor Wainwright! He did the fighting … [MacArthur] got such glory as the public could find … MacArthur’s tirades, to which … I so often listened in Manila … would now sound as silly to the public as they then did to us. But he’s a hero! Yah.’ At home in the US, news commentators squeezed every ounce of glory from Bataan, from skirmishes at sea and manifestations of America’s embryo mobilisation. But in the Pacific, no one was fooled. Every Allied soldier, sailor and airman knew that the enemy was making the weather in every corner of the theatre. Lt. Robert Kelly of MTB Squadron 3, which evacuated MacArthur from Corregidor, said: ‘The news commentators had us all winning the war. It made us very sore. We were out here where we could see these victories. There were plenty of them. They were all Japanese. Yet if even at one point we are able to check an attack, the silly headlines chatter of a “victory”.’
Kelly, like Eisenhower, failed to grasp the importance of legends, indeed myths, to sustain the spirit of nations in adversity. American dismay in the face of those early defeats was assuaged by skilful propaganda. The United States had much less to lose in the east than did the British Empire. The epic of Bataan and MacArthur forged by Roosevelt and the US media was serviceable, even precious to the American people. The general was a vainglorious windbag rather than a notable commander, whose personality was repugnant. But his flight from Corregidor was no more discreditable
than those of many wartime British commanders from stricken fields, including Wavell’s from Singapore. During the years that followed, MacArthur’s status as a figurehead for American endeavours in the southwest Pacific did much for morale at home, if less for the defeat of Japan. The 1942 Philippines campaign served no useful strategic purpose: the islands were indefensible by the small forces available, far from friendly bases. If the garrison had held out longer, domestic public opinion might have forced some doomed venture to relieve the siege of Bataan. The US Navy would have suffered a catastrophe, had it attempted to assist Wainwright in the face of overwhelming air and naval Japanese strength; Corregidor’s surrender relieved Washington of an embarrassment.
Thereafter in the Pacific, few ground actions came close to matching in scale those waged against Germany. The struggle engaged relatively few men, though it was conducted over vast distances and involved large naval commitments. Most of the Japanese army stayed in China. Tokyo’s Asian and Pacific conquests were achieved by small forces, dispersed across the hemisphere. The US, Australia and Britain, in their turn, contested mastery of islands and densely forested wildernesses with modest ground contingents of two or three divisions, while on Russian battlefields hundreds of formations clashed. The critical factors in each successive Pacific encounter were the supporting naval and air forces. Both sides’ soldiers and marines knew that their blood and sweat must go for nothing unless sea supply routes could be held open, dominance of the sky denied to the enemy. The United States Navy became the decisive force in the war against Japan.
All Hell Let Loose Page 32