The success of these operations was made possible first by the Allies’ strength, and second by absolute command of the air, which denied the Japanese opportunities for reconnaissance; from beginning to end of the campaign, Kimura was befogged about British movements and intentions. Slim’s forces, advancing from Assam inside India, began to cross the Chindwin river, where so many tragic scenes had taken place during the 1942 retreat from Burma, in December 1944. In the north, Stilwell commanded a force of five Chinese divisions, driving for the key airfield of Myitkyina. On 5 March, 9,000 men of Major-General Orde Wingate’s ‘Chindits’ began to fly in to jungle landing zones behind the Japanese front. Wingate himself died in a crash, but during the months that followed his units fought a succession of bitter battles. On 17 May, the Chindits and Chinese linked at Myitkyina, where they seized the airfield; the sufferings and casualties of Wingate’s men were appalling, but they diverted significant Japanese forces from Slim’s main advance.
Thereafter, some 40,000 tons of supplies and equipment were flown to Myitkyina, for onward shipment to China. These deliveries could do little to remedy the infirmity of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, which remained incapable of inflicting much harm on the Japanese, and chiefly enriched the Nationalist warlords who stole most of the materiel before it reached their troops. Though the Japanese paid a heavy price for continuing their occupation of eastern China throughout the war, committing a million soldiers to control its vastnesses, they had little difficulty in defeating barefoot, half-starved Nationalist troops wherever they fought them. Mao Zhedong’s communist forces in the north enjoyed some success in persuading Westerners that they were engaging the Japanese more effectively, but in reality Mao conserved his strength for the looming domestic struggle for control of China.
An Indian formation crossed the Irrawaddy north of Mandalay in mid-January. During the following month, three divisions staged the main crossing west of Sagaing, much further south. The river was a mile wide, and the British wholly lacked the engineering and amphibious resources Eisenhower’s armies deployed in Europe. But, with most Japanese forces committed further north, they secured a bridgehead by dogged improvisation and some striking displays of courage. The ruins of Mandalay fell to the British on 20 March. This was an important symbolic victory, but Kimura was already falling back to fight the critical battle at Meiktila.
Nationalist leader Aung San’s Japanese-sponsored Burma Defence Army prepared to change sides. Some British officers resisted the notion of providing arms to his nine battalions, fearing these would soon be used against themselves. However, Mountbatten, Allied Supreme Commander, overruled them and ordered SOE officers to work with the BDA, saying, ‘We shall be doing no more than has been done in Italy, Romania, Hungary and Finland.’ Aung San met Slim, apologising for his inability to speak English. The general responded with characteristic courtesy that the embarrassment was on his side, for being unable to speak Burmese. They agreed to fight together, and on 27 March, when Slim’s army was within a hundred miles of Rangoon, BDA units suddenly attacked Japanese positions. Many Burmese welcomed the opportunity for revenge on a people they had welcomed as liberators in 1942, but who had since become their oppressors. One of them, Maung Maung, wrote: ‘Partisans, young men from villages, left their homes to march with us. We ate the food that the villagers offered us, wooed their daughters, brought danger to their doors and took their sons with us.’ This was a romanticised view of a tardy and cynical switch of allegiance, comparable with the conduct of many French people in the summer of 1944; but it helped to create a legend which Burma’s nationalists would later find serviceable.
By 29 April the British were at Pegu, fifty miles from Rangoon, amid torrential rain, harbinger of the coming monsoon. On the south coast, an Indian division staged the amphibious assault Churchill had always wanted, and pushed forward to the capital against slight resistance. The Japanese army was shattered, and had lost almost all its guns and vehicles. It maintained isolated pockets of resistance to the end of the war, but faced slaughter as shattered units sought to break through Slim’s army, which was finally deployed along the Sittang river to cut off their escape into Siam. In the last months, the British suffered only a few hundred casualties, while the 1945 Burma campaign cost their enemies 80,000 dead.
But the main business of closing the ring on Japan was meanwhile being done in the Pacific. On the morning of 19 February, three US Marine divisions began to land on Iwo Jima, an island pimple 3,000 miles west of Pearl Harbor and less than seven hundred south of Japan. An American watching the pre-landing bombardment said: ‘We all figured nothing could live through that, and the carrier planes were giving it hell, too.’ But the defenders were well prepared and deeply dug in. Carnage was severe – proportionately worse than that on D-Day: at nightfall, 30,000 Marines were ashore, but 566 were already dead or dying. The living trudged through volcanic ash up to their knees, in a moonscape devoid of cover; a rainstorm worsened their plight. Marine Joseph Raspilair wrote: ‘In all my life I do not think I have been as miserable as I was that night. All you could do was lay in the water and wait for morning so you could get out of the hole.’ Weeks of painful fighting followed. Cpl. George Wayman, a bazooka man, was in such pain from wounds as he lay for hours in a shellhole that he felt tempted to draw his bayonet and kill himself; he was eventually evacuated only after hours exposed to the Japanese fire that pounded the Marine perimeter.
Replacements trudged forward to reinforce line units, where many were hit before even learning the names of their comrades. Lt. Patrick Caruso kidded one such young man about being under age; soon afterwards the boy was killed, after just two hours on the island, without unslinging his rifle from his shoulder or glimpsing the enemy. The defenders’ ingenuity seemed boundless: a Marine was amazed to see a hillside suddenly open before his eyes, to reveal three Japanese pushing out a field gun. It fired three rounds, then was dragged back into the cave. Mortars eventually destroyed the gun, but a hundred such positions had to be taken out before the defences were overwhelmed. Officers learned to discourage men from seeking souvenirs, which the Japanese often booby-trapped. ‘The best souvenir you can take home is yourself,’ a laconic Marine commander told his company.
By 27 March, when Iwo Jima was secured, the Americans had suffered 24,000 casualties, including 7,184 dead, to capture an island one-third the size of Manhattan. Its airfields proved useful to B-29s returning from missions damaged or short of fuel, but they were little used for offensive operations. Geographically, Iwo Jima seemed a significant landmark on the way to Japan; but strategically, like so many hard-won objectives in every campaign, it is hard to argue that its seizure was worthwhile – the Marianas were vastly more important. The US Navy’s almost absolute command of the sea made it impossible for the Japanese to move forces from Iwo Jima, or indeed anywhere else, to impede American operations. Japan was bleeding from a thousand cuts. All that was now in doubt was how its rulers might be induced to acknowledge their defeat, and in the spring of 1945 they still seemed far from confronting reality. Japan’s generals believed that a negotiated peace could be won by imposing on the Americans a heavy blood-price for every gain; and above all, by convincing Washington that the cost of invading the Japanese mainland would be unacceptably high. They sought to emphasise this by mounting a rising tempo of kamikaze air attacks against the US Navy.
Commander Stephen Juricka, navigating officer of the 27,000-ton carrier Franklin, was one of thousands of shocked witnesses of the devastation wreaked by suicide bombers. ‘I saw … destroyers get hit, burst into flames, men jumping over the side to avoid flames … It did not take long for the crews of the picket destroyers to feel that they were being put out there as bait.’ Early on the morning of 19 March 1945, it was Franklin’s turn to fall victim. Two Japanese bombs struck the flight deck, prompting a huge explosion below: ‘The planes just behind the elevator were spotted, ready for take-off, engines going, fully loaded with Tiny Tim [rockets], 500-and 1000
-pound bombs. Sheets of flame came up and then we really started to smoke … Men were jumping off the flight deck … Two destroyers were picking people up out of the sea directly behind us … a lot of them injured, burned … We were exploding and on fire until the middle of the next afternoon.’ Father O’Callaghan, the ship’s Catholic chaplain, was giving extreme unction to a dying man when a Tiny Tim rocket ignited and flew over his head. Most of the 4,800 crewmen on Franklin were evacuated in the first hours after the attack, but 772 stayed aboard, waging an epic struggle to keep the ship afloat. The US Navy had learned much about damage control since 1941, and all of it was put to use saving the carrier. As ever, some men behaved wonderfully well – and others less well.
Stephen Juricka said: ‘I was amazed at some of our big, good-looking officers whom you would expect to be towers of strength turned out to be little pipsqueak people who needed bucking up all the time, and some other little nondescript 135-pounders turned out to be real tigers … It was the little people who really came through … Seven officers left the Franklin over the highline [a breeches-buoy link to the cruiser Santa Fe] in spite of orders to return to the ship, and Captain Gehres reported every one of them and recommended court-martial.’
As early as 1939, the USAAF’s Gen. Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz had anticipated using America’s embryo B-29 Superfortress bomber to attack Japan. Sporadic air raids took place in 1944, some launched from India, others from fields constructed at huge cost and in the face of painful local difficulties in China. A combination of technical difficulties with the early B-29s, the distance to Japan, together with shortcomings of leadership, navigation and bomb-aiming, caused the USAAF’s efforts to make little impact. Only in 1945 was the offensive dramatically transformed and intensified, first by establishment of a huge network of bases on the Marianas; second, by large deliveries of aircraft; and finally, by the ascent of Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay to leadership of XXIst Bomber Command.
LeMay was architect of the first great fire-raising raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945. He dispatched 325 aircraft to attack by night at low level – between 6,000 and 9,000 feet. Torrents of incendiaries fell and exploded with their characteristic sharp crackle. Only twelve bombers were lost, most destroyed by updrafts from the blazing city. Forty-two suffered flak damage, but the Japanese defences were feeble. A pilot wrote laconically next day: ‘We took off last night at 1835 and after a dull trip hit the coast of Japan at 0210. Even before we made landfall we could see the fires at Tokyo. We were at 7,800 and there was smoke towering above us. The radar run was perfect and we dropped in an open spot visually. The city was a “Dante’s inferno”. One night fighter made a run on us but we turned into him and lost him.’ He added in a letter home: ‘Fires were everywhere and the destruction wrought this night could have been nothing less than catastrophe.’ The airman was right: around 100,000 people were killed, and a million rendered homeless. More than 10,000 acres of the city, a quarter of its area, were reduced to ashes. Tokyo on the morning of 10 March looked to Philippines veteran Major Shoji Takahashi ‘like the biggest and most devastated battlefield one could imagine – Leyte on a gigantic scale’. He was stunned and disgusted when, in one of many reconciliatory gestures by the post-war Tokyo government to the United States, LeMay was given a Japanese decoration.
USAAF chiefs displayed an admiration for XXIst Bomber Command’s forceful new supremo that was untinged by any moral scruple. Gen. Lauris Norstad said apologetically to LeMay’s sacked predecessor, Gen. Heywood Hansell, ‘LeMay is an operator, the rest of us are planners. That’s all there is to it.’ In the nights that followed, similar incendiary raids were launched against Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and other cities. Even when the bombers began to strike in daylight, losses remained low, and a hundred new B-29s a month were arriving from America’s factories. The airmen reluctantly acceded to navy requests to divert some effort to offshore mining operations: Operation Starvation, which began at the end of March, achieved dramatic results, for the Japanese were as short of minesweepers as of everything else. The first nine hundred mines to splash into the seas around Japan imposed further drastic cuts on its imports; when merchantmen were ordered to brave the sub-surface menace, a spate of sinkings followed. By the war’s end, B-29s had laid 12,000 sea mines, which accounted for 63 per cent of all Japanese shipping losses between April and August 1945.
But the Superfortresses’ main effort was directed against cities. Some daylight raids against aircraft factories provoked a strong response – one formation was met by 233 fighters. But so poor was the performance of both Japanese planes and their pilots that the bombers sustained a loss rate which never rose above 1.6 per cent, negligible by European standards. After one raid the Japanese claimed twenty-eight B-29s destroyed, when the real figure was five. In their desperation, the defenders also adopted kamikaze tactics, with Japanese fighters ramming American bombers. Even this expedient was not always successful against the huge, heavily armoured Superfortresses: one plane returned after suffering a suicide attack with the loss of only an engine. Its flight engineer, Lt. Robert Watson, said, ‘There was surprisingly little jolt when the Jap hit us, and our navigator didn’t even know we’d been rammed.’ Weather and atmospheric conditions troubled crews more than did the enemy defences: thermals created freak effects – one Superfortress landed on Saipan in July with a section of tin roof flapping from a wing leading edge.
Much historical attention has focused upon the willingness of Japan’s pilots to sacrifice themselves, but by this stage of the war few of those who flew conventional fighters showed much appetite for the fray: American aircrew often remarked upon their lack of aggression. Tokyo was attacked again and again. On 5 June, when Kobe suffered once more, defending aircraft made their last significant appearance; the enemy had decided to husband his dwindling aircraft and crews to meet American invasion, when it came. On the night of the 15th, a raid on Osaka destroyed 300,000 homes and killed thousands of people. The USAAF found itself struggling to identify worthwhile targets still intact: oil refineries were bombed, though these were marginal when the Japanese had little oil left to process; bomber losses fell to 0.3 per cent.
Moral issues troubled the Superfortress crews no more than their commanders: with characteristic youthful facetiousness, every member of the 330th Bomb Group was presented with a certificate declaring that he, ‘having visited the Japanese emperor a total of … times to pay his respects with H.E., incendiaries and C-ration cans, having helped to clear the Tokyo slums and having aided in the spring plowing is hereby inducted into the royal and rugged order of EMPIRE BUSTERS’. In the fourteen months of the USAAF bombing campaign against Japan, 170,000 tons of bombs were dropped, most of them in the last six months; 414 B-29s were lost and 3,015 crew killed; about a hundred Japanese died for each American flier, and sixty-five Japanese cities were reduced to ashes. The 1944–45 air offensive took place chiefly because the B-29, conceived in the very different circumstances of 1942, had been created to carry it out – the Superfortress programme cost $4 billion, against $3 billion for the Manhattan Project. America’s airmen were determined to demonstrate their ability to make a decisive contribution to victory. The fire-raising attacks did not match the impact on Japan’s economy of the submarine blockade, because they took place when industry had already been crippled by lack of fuel and raw materials; but they convinced all but the intractable militarists in the Tokyo leadership that the war was lost. LeMay’s role in punishing Japan for launching a war of aggression was more significant than his contribution to enforcing its surrender.
The American landing on Okinawa was designed to pave the way for what threatened to be the bloodiest battle of the Asian war – invasion of the Japanese mainland. The island, a sixty-mile sliver of fields and mountains, lay midway between Luzon and Kyushu. Okinawa was inhabited by 150,000 people who had Japanese nationality, though they were culturally distinct. The assault that began on 1 April, Easter Sunday, after days of intense bombardment, was under Nimitz
’s overall command. More than 1,200 vessels offloaded 170,000 soldiers and Marines of Tenth Army, while a vast covering fleet of aircraft carriers, battleships and lesser warships cruised offshore. To the Americans’ surprise, the initial assault was unopposed. The Japanese had learned the lessons of earlier island battles, and withdrawn beyond range of the naval bombardment; only after a week of skirmishing inland did advancing US troops meet fierce machine-gun and artillery fire. The south of Okinawa had been transformed into a fortress, successive lines of positions deeply dug on high ground. In the first twenty-four hours thereafter, the US XXIVth Corps received 14,000 incoming shells.
At the point of collision between the rival armies, the island was only three miles wide. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima had concentrated his 77,000 Japanese and 24,000 Okinawan auxiliaries where they were almost impregnable to frontal attack, as the Americans discovered in the weeks that followed. Heavy rain set in, churning the battlefield into a sea of mud. Again and again, US soldiers and Marines thrust forward – and were repulsed. Their generals demanded that they try harder: on 6 May a corps commander visited a divisional command post and said he noted its units had suffered fewer casualties than any other formation. Officers interpreted this as a compliment until he added, ‘To me, that means just one thing – you’re not pushing.’ In its first twenty-four days on Okinawa, the division had advanced 25,000 yards and reckoned to have killed almost 5,000 Japanese; in the succeeding sixteen days,, it gained only 2,500 yards.
With the war in Europe coming to an end and the power of the United States everywhere triumphant, it seemed to Americans at home intolerable that their boys should die in thousands to wrest from fanatics a remote and meaningless piece of real estate: there was intense public anger, directed less against the enemy than towards their own commanders. By May 1945, with Hitler vanquished, Americans took for granted impending victory in the Pacific, and were increasingly cynical about the war. To prick public complacency, the US Navy urged people to take a vacation on the west coast and visit the dockyards where lay crippled and blackened warships brought back from Okinawa. But the American Red Cross found itself struggling to muster volunteers to prepare surgical dressings, and there was a chronic shortage of manpower to work in weapons plants. War weariness was a dignified phrase to describe the American domestic mood: it might instead have been categorised as boredom, the disease of democracies, whose patience is always scarce.
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