The only good news from Burma that year was generated by an operation far behind the enemy front, engaging 3,000 British troops led by the eccentric, indeed mentally unstable, Brigadier Orde Wingate. His ‘Chindits’ accomplished little of military value at a cost of 30 per cent losses, but created a highly serviceable propaganda legend. Their survival behind enemy lines, despite appalling sufferings, was held to demonstrate that British soldiers could sustain jungle warfare, a proposition many people had come to doubt. Before the Chindit columns left India, Wingate made it plain that no casualties could be carried, and thus badly wounded men must be put out of their misery. This policy might have been merciful, given their inevitable fate in Japanese hands, but it proved hard for Allied soldiers to fulfil. After one Chindit action, Gurkha Lt. Harold James found himself obliged to follow Wingate’s orders: ‘I had a wounded Gurkha, shot to bits in great pain, and dying. After agonizing for a bit, I gave him a lethal dose of morphia … The Gurkhas were amazing, they just accepted it … To my horror I found another very seriously wounded Gurkha. I said, “I’ve just had to do it.” George looked at me as if to say “You do it again.” I protested, “There’s no way I’m going to do it twice.” He gave the chap a lethal dose.’
Another survivor of the 1943 Chindit foray, Dominic Neill, was among those who realised how little the columns accomplished, beyond creating a legend of suffering and sacrifice. ‘The newspapers back in India had banner headlines about Wingate’s expedition. We couldn’t believe our eyes. We had achieved absolutely nothing, we had been kicked out by the Japs again. The publicity was the work of the authorities in GHQ Delhi grasping at any straws after the defeat in 1942, closely followed by the disastrous Arakan campaign of 1942/43.’ But Churchill thrilled to the exploits of the Chindits, which seemed to provide an honourable contrast to the inertia that suffused the main army in India.
In August 1943, the Japanese achieved a useful propaganda coup by declaring Burma an independent state. Many Burmese were briefly seduced, their enthusiasm increased by Japanese success in repulsing Britain’s Aykab offensives. But in Burma as elsewhere, the occupiers’ arrogance, cruelty and economic exploitation progressively alienated their subjects. However eager were the Burmese to throw off British rule, evicting the Japanese became a more pressing concern. In the first half of the Asian war, only hill-dwellers assisted British arms. By 1944, the Japanese faced the hatred of Burma’s townspeople as well as guerrilla activity by the tribes.
The autumn monsoon put an end to each year’s campaigning season on the India–Burma frontier as effectively as did the spring thaw in Russia. Thus, after the failure of British and Indian forces to break through in the Arakan, 1943 passed without significant progress on the Burma front. Churchill was obliged to content himself with using Indian formations to assist the Allied campaigns in North Africa and Italy. Critics of the Indian Army argued then, and have maintained since, that its romantic reputation was significantly higher than its performance justified. Some units, Gurkhas notable among them, displayed skill, courage and tenacity. Others did not. British imperial endeavour against the Japanese persistently lagged behind that of the United States.
Yet even in the Pacific, until massive resources reached the theatre during 1944, there were long pauses between successive American initiatives. In June 1943, MacArthur and South-West Pacific Area Commander Admiral William Halsey began their new campaigns in New Guinea and the Solomons. The seizure of New Georgia took a month of tough fighting. Thereafter, Halsey leapfrogged several Japanese-defended islands to land 4,600 men on Vella Lavella. By December, the Americans had secured positions on Bougainville and captured Cape Gloucester at the western end of New Britain. By January 1944 a major air offensive against Rabaul had rendered the base almost useless to Japanese ships and aircraft. Its 100,000-strong garrison became strategically irrelevant; since the troops could move nowhere, they could safely be left to rot.
The expansion of the US Navy made possible a growing Pacific buildup in the course of 1943. Four huge Essex-class fleet carriers and five light carriers provided the core of fast task forces which included battleships and cruisers for shore bombardment, destroyers for radar picket and anti-submarine escort duties. A vast fleet train of oilers and supply vessels enabled the fighting ships to sustain up to seventy days of continuous operations, far beyond the Royal Navy’s capabilities. There were also escort carriers to provide close support for the amphibious armadas, hundreds of PT-boats for inshore work, together with repair and hospital vessels. Though these ships were overwhelmingly manned by landsmen without previous seagoing experience, officers and crews displayed skills of navigation, gunnery and seamanship which entirely outclassed those of their enemies. The steep decline in the Japanese Combined Fleet’s operational performance, from high professionalism in December 1941 to faltering ineptitude a year or two later, was one of the strangest and most notable phenomena of the war.
Those Japanese pilots who got close enough to see an American task force below them were awed by its size, covering hundreds of square miles of ocean. The US Navy in the last two years of the war projected long-range power such as the world had never seen, and grew larger than all the other combatant navies put together. Substantial elements of this fleet were deployed in support of each of the island assault operations that dominated the latter phase of the eastern war. Nimitz’s central Pacific offensive opened in November 1943, with landings on the tiny atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. There was no scope for strategic deception, because the only credible objectives for American assault were a handful of island air bases. The US Navy and Marine Corps advanced from one foothold to the next, knowing that the Japanese had fortified them all in anticipation of their coming.
Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Gilberts armada included nineteen carriers, twelve battleships and their support vessels, together with an invasion force of 35,000 Marines and 6,000 vehicles. The Americans at sea that day, contemplating the display of their nation’s power around them, felt invincible. US carrier aircraft wrecked every local Japanese airfield with bombs and gunfire; before the landings, Spruance’s heavy guns bombarded the island for three hours, delivering 3,000 tons of shells. Yet the experience that followed proved one of the most bitter of the US Marine Corps’ war. On Betio, the main islet, less than two miles long and seven hundred yards wide, the Japanese had created bunkers of concrete, steel and felled palm trees which were almost impervious to bombs and shells. Marine Karl Albrecht was shocked by his first sight of the beach as his craft approached: ‘It was lined with amphtracs, all of which appeared to be burning and smoking … The attack appeared to have dissolved in confusion. I was terror-stricken and amazed at the same time. We were Americans and invincible. We had a huge armada of warships and a division of Marines. How could this be happening? I discovered the rows of Marines along the beach weren’t lying there waiting for orders to move. They were dead.’
A wide offshore reef checked the assault boats, so that thousands of Marines were obliged to wade the last few hundred yards to the shoreline with agonising sluggishness, under Japanese fire. A navy pilot gazing down on the scene said later: ‘The water never seemed clear of tiny men, their rifles over their heads, slowly wading beachwards. I wanted to cry.’ Four days of fighting followed, among blasted palm trees and skilfully camouflaged defences. When the shooting stopped, the Marines had suffered 3,407 casualties and almost all the 4,500 Japanese defenders were dead – just seventeen prisoners were taken. Every participant in the battle was shocked by its intensity. It was a painful experience for the American people, as well as for the Marines, to discover how hard they must fight to overcome a sacrificial defence. National hubris, the doctrine of American exceptionalism, was affronted by the revelation that a primitive enemy could resist overwhelming firepower, that the path to victory made close-quarter combat and its sacrifices mandatory. Though significant tactical lessons were learned from Tarawa, the same infantry experience would be repeated in later isl
and battles. From a global and especially Russian perspective, US losses were small for important strategic gains, but they seemed very terrible when the prizes were mere atolls of coral and palm trees.
Nothing could alter the campaign’s fundamentals: to defeat Japan, US forces must seize strongly defended Pacific air and naval bases. No application of superior technology and firepower could avert the need for American soldiers and Marines to expose their bodies to a skilful and stubborn foe. Even now that it was plain the Allies would win the war, Japan’s commitment remained unshaken. Japanese strategy, such as it was, required extraction of the highest possible blood-price from the Americans for every small gain, to erode their will and persuade them to negotiate. It is often claimed that Japan’s militarists alone insisted on continuing the war, but the generals enjoyed powerful support from conservative politicians, many fervent Japanese nationalists, and from the Emperor. In November 1943, at the first conference of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in Tokyo, Hirohito was warned that the Solomons were about to fall. His response was to goad his generals: ‘Isn’t there some place where we can strike the United States? When and where are you people ever going to put up a good fight? And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle?’
Cultural revulsion underpinned the hatred which characterised Allied conduct of the Asian war. Japan’s savagery towards its prisoners and subjects was now well known, and often repaid in kind. Japanese willingness to fight to the death rather than surrender, even in tactically and indeed strategically hopeless circumstances, disgusted Allied troops. American and British soldiers were imbued with the European historical tradition, whereby the honourable and civilised response to impending defeat was to abandon the struggle, averting gratuitous bloodshed. Americans in the Pacific, like British soldiers in Burma, felt rage towards an enemy who rejected such civilised logic. The Japanese, who had been merciless in victory, now showed themselves determined to cull every possible human life from their inexorable descent towards defeat.
If the Allies had confronted their foe on a major landmass where there was scope for motorised manoeuvre, they would have achieved victory much more quickly: overwhelming US superiority in tanks, artillery and air power would have smashed the relatively primitive Japanese army, as did the Russians in Manchuria in August 1945. As it was, however, the long series of Pacific battles, miniature in scale by European standards, enabled the Japanese to exploit their defensive skills and sacrificial courage, without suffering much disadvantage from lack of artillery and air support. They excelled in camouflage and harassment – ‘jitter tactics’. Even in Japan’s years of defeat, its soldiers retained a remarkable psychological dominance of the battlefield. The US Marine Corps was probably America’s finest fighting ground force excepting the army’s airborne divisions, and achieved remarkable things in the Pacific, but Americans never matched the skills of their opponents, or indeed of the Russians, as night-fighters. The more urban and ‘civilised’ a society, the harder it is to train its soldiers to adapt to the lifestyle imposed by infantry fighting amid raw nature. The higher the input of technology to a branch of war, the more emphatic was American excellence: their carrier pilots, for instance, had no superiors. Peasants, however, often make the most stoical riflemen.
Once US planes could operate from Tarawa, they swiftly destroyed Japanese air capability throughout the Marshall Islands. In early February 1944, the Marines were pleasantly surprised by the ease with which they captured Majuro, Kwajalein and Roi-Namur atolls, a personal triumph for Nimitz, who overruled all his subordinates to insist upon attacking the central Marshalls, rather than the heavily defended easternmost islands. They then took Eniwetok, at the extreme north-western end of the Marshall chain, while Spruance’s carrier aircraft devastated the key Japanese base at Truk in the Carolines. The speed of these successes enabled Nimitz to advance the timetable for the next phase of his campaign, scheduling an attack on the Marianas for June rather than September 1944.
A powerful competitive element entered US conduct of the struggle. MacArthur became fearful that the New Guinea campaign would become a backwater, and accelerated his own operations. His troops seized the Admiralty Islands three months ahead of schedule, thus encircling Rabaul and forcing the Japanese to withdraw up the north coast of New Guinea. In April 1944, he staged his most daring and dramatic coup of the war, capturing Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea, bypassing 40,000 Japanese troops, and in June repulsing a strong Japanese counter-attack along the Driniumor river. His forces also captured the Vogelkop peninsula at the western end of New Guinea, together with the nearby island of Biak, which became an important air base.
There is a persuasive argument, advanced by the US Navy at the time and by many historians since, that MacArthur’s campaign became redundant at the end of 1943; that the only purpose of his subsequent bitter and bloody campaign in the Philippines was to fulfil the personal ambitions of its commander, at the expense of many Filipino lives, along with those of several thousand Americans. US dominance of air and sea had become so great that Japanese forces in the south-west Pacific were incapable of transporting troops to threaten Allied strategic purposes. In late 1943 US submarines, decisive contributors to victory, began to wreak havoc upon Japan’s supply links to its over-extended empire. Many Japanese island garrisons were starved of weapons and ammunition as well as food.
Yet it is characteristic of all wars, and especially of the greatest in human history, that events and personalities acquire a momentum of their own. MacArthur existed. He held a grand title, and had been exalted by propaganda into the most famous of American warlords. His public-relations machine was the most effective branch of his headquarters. Though Roosevelt and his associates, together with most of the nation’s military leaders, thought him a charlatan, when a 1945 poll asked Americans whom they considered their greatest general, 43 per cent replied MacArthur against 31 per cent for Eisenhower, 17 per cent for Patton and 1 per cent for Marshall. SWAPO’s Supreme Commander had a physical presence, strength of will and personal authority greater than those of the US chiefs of staff. Although MacArthur was never given the massive resources he demanded, he exercised a political and moral influence which sufficed to sustain his campaign and enable him to pursue his chosen personal objectives. Rationally, the United States might have halted its ground operations against Japan in 1944, once the Marianas had been secured. From its air bases, the USAAF’s Superfortress bombers could reduce the enemy’s homeland to ashes. Together with naval blockade, which crippled Japanese industry and above all oil supplies, irresistible air bombardment made eventual Japanese capitulation inevitable. America’s last bloody island campaigns of 1944–45, like the belated British advance into Burma, did little to advance the outcome of the war.
But this is a perspective accessible only to posterity. At the time, it would have seemed unthinkable – save to the airmen fiercely ambitious to show that they could defeat Japan on their own – to halt ground operations. The US Marine Corps and army divisions deployed in the Pacific expected to keep fighting, and so did their commanders and the nation at home. Once great peoples are committed to the business of killing, there is a bleak inevitability about the manner in which they continue to do so until their enemies are prostrate. In the spring of 1944, the Japanese were still far from acknowledging defeat.
Italy: High Hopes, Sour Fruits
1 SICILY
In September 1939, wiseacres in Britain said, ‘The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.’ To this Evelyn Waugh responded with characteristic waspishness, ‘How is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?’ His question, while mischievous, was entirely to the point. To defeat Nazi Germany, it was indispensable for its enemies to destroy the Wehrmacht. It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for doing this, accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three majo
r powers of the Grand Alliance. In 1940–41, the British Empire defied Hitler alone. Thereafter, the United States made a dominant material contribution to Germany’s defeat, by supplying aid to Russia and Britain which assumed massive proportions from 1943 onwards, and by creating great air and naval armadas. The Anglo-American bomber offensive made an increasingly heavy impact on Germany. The Western Allied armies, however, by deferring a major landing on the Continent until 1944, restricted themselves to a marginal role. The Russians eventually killed more than four and a half million German soldiers, while American and British ground and air forces accounted for only about 500,000. These figures emphasise the disparity between respective battlefield contributions.
For Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s soldiers to have played a decisive role in the ground war against Germany, they would have needed to land on the European continent at least forty divisions, and probably more, in 1943 before the Russians achieved their great victories. These armies did not exist, with the length of training and scale of equipment that American and British military leaders deemed essential. Equally important, shipping was lacking to transport such a force to the Continent and keep it supplied thereafter. The Luftwaffe remained relatively potent: its nemesis came in the following year, at the hands of the USAAF’s Mustang fighters over Germany. Allied dominance of French air space, which proved absolute in 1944, would have been contested had the Allies landed earlier.
All Hell Let Loose Page 59