America at War: Concise Histories of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexingtonto Afghanistan

by Terence T. Finn

  One of the Allied ships sunk belonged to Australia. Perceiving this English-speaking nation as an obstacle to its imperial ambitions, Japan hoped to neutralize Australia either by blockade or invasion. To accomplish either, Japan needed to take control of Port Moresby. This was a harbor town located on the southern coast of New Guinea, not far from Australia itself.

  To seize Port Moresby, the Japanese assembled an invasion fleet that set sail early in May. Protecting these ships were powerful warships, including two fleet carriers, both of which were veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and one small aircraft carrier. Aware of the threat to Port Moresby, the United States Navy responded. It dispatched an equally powerful fleet to Australian waters. The results of the ensuing battle favored the Japanese. They sank one of America’s most important warships, the carrier USS Lexington, plus a fleet oiler and a destroyer. Additionally, they shot down more than sixty American aircraft. United States forces were able only to destroy the light carrier and damage one of the two large fleet units. Strategically, however, Coral Sea was a victory for the Americans because the Japanese invasion fleet turned around and went home. Port Moresby would remain in Allied hands.

  The Battle of the Coral Sea was the first naval engagement in history in which the opposing navies never came within sight of each other. All of the fighting, on both sides, was conducted by naval aircraft.

  Despite the losses, America’s naval aviators had done well in the battle, better perhaps than Uncle Sam’s sailors realized. Not only had the aviators depleted the ranks of Japanese naval aircraft by 104 machines, they had heavily damaged one of the large enemy carriers, thus reducing the number of aircraft carriers the IJN had available for the next major engagement at sea.

  This would be the Battle of Midway, and it would be one of the most decisive clashes ever waged between two nations at war.

  ***

  Some eleven hundred miles west of Hawaii lay the tiny islands of Midway, comprising little more than two square miles. In 1942 the islands were an American possession (they still are today). On one of them was an airfield, plus a modestly sized garrison of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines. Midway was but a spot in the ocean, but it was of great strategic value.

  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of Japan’s powerful navy, decided to strike at Midway. The architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, his prestige within Japan was enormous. Like others in the Imperial Japanese Navy, Yamamoto was embarrassed by the Doolittle raid. He felt that once the Japanese were in control of Midway, it would not be possible for such a raid to take place again. More important, by targeting Midway, Yamamoto understood that he would force the remaining U.S. carriers into battle. The admiral was convinced he would win such a fight. He then easily could occupy Midway, which would serve as a strong defensive outpost for the empire he faithfully served.

  Early in June 1942 Yamamoto sent his fleet toward Midway. The fleet’s main punch was four aircraft carriers, all veterans of the strike at Pearl Harbor. American intelligence services, however, had broken Japan’s naval code and were aware of the Japanese plans. Yamamoto believed the Americans had but two carriers left. In fact, they had three: Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown (the latter damaged but not destroyed at Coral Sea). Commanding the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet was Admiral Chester Nimitz (for whom the current class of American nuclear supercarriers are named). He ordered the three warships and their escorts to ambush the Japanese. In charge of the American task force was Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.

  The Battle of Midway began when Japanese naval aircraft struck the island’s airfield and garrison, causing much destruction. These planes then returned to their carriers to refuel and rearm. Additional aircraft, held in reserve, also were on board. These were being readied for flight operations. Thus, as Yamamoto’s carriers were preparing for follow-on attacks, they had on board more than two hundred airplanes, all full of highly flammable aviation gas, that were armed with bombs and torpedoes.

  Just then, planes from the American carriers arrived on the scene. They were Douglas TBD Devastators, single-engine torpedo bombers that carried a crew of three, and there were forty-one of them. Attempting to sink the enemy carriers, the Devastators flew low, just above the water, and released their “fish.” But the American plane was slow and lightly armed. Above the carriers were numerous Japanese fighters. They were providing essential air cover for Yamamoto’s ships. Seeing the American torpedo planes, they swooped down and attacked. All but five of the Devastators were destroyed. None of their torpedoes struck home. The attack of the Devastators was a total failure. Loss of life among their crew was extensive. In one squadron all fifteen planes were shot down and only one man, out of forty-five, survived.

  As the American torpedo bombers were crashing into the sea, more U.S. Navy aircraft appeared, well above the Japanese carriers. These were dive-bombers, and with Japanese fighters down low attacking the torpedo planes, they had a clear run at the enemy ships. The results, for the Japanese, were catastrophic. The dive-bombers scored direct hit after direct hit, creating massive explosions aboard the carriers. Three of the big warships were destroyed. Five hours later, the fourth carrier was struck and it too sank. In but a few hours on one day, June 4, 1942, the primary weapon of Yamamoto’s fleet, four large aircraft carriers, was sent to the bottom of the sea. For the Japanese, Midway was a staggering blow. No longer would Yamamoto and his navy move with ease across the Pacific. For America, Midway was a stunning triumph.

  Despite his defeat, Yamamoto remained in command of the IJN’s combined fleet. Indeed, his prestige within Japan seems to have suffered not at all. In April 1943, the admiral was at Rabaul and decided to inspect Japanese air units on Bougainville, an island some 180 miles to the southeast. His staff sent word ahead, providing full details of the trip. U.S. intelligence intercepted the message and informed Admiral Nimitz. Because Yamamoto’s destination was within range of American P-38 fighters, a mission to intercept Yamamoto’s aircraft was feasible. At first, Nimitz was reluctant to approve such a mission, not wanting to compromise U.S. intelligence capabilities. When assured that steps would be taken to safeguard these capabilities, Nimitz gave the go-ahead. On April 18, 1943, sixteen Army P-38s took off to intercept Yamamoto’s aircraft. They flew to where the admiral’s plane was scheduled to be, and right on time the airplanes—there were two of them—appeared. Only six Japanese fighters were on station serving as escorts. The Americans attacked and easily shot down the two planes. The admiral was killed, along with everyone else on board. Only after the war, did the Japanese learn that Yamamoto’s death was not the result of an unlucky coincidence.

  Isoroku Yamamoto’s strategy for Midway included an assault on the Aleutian Islands. This was intended to divert Nimitz from concentrating his ships where the principal Japanese effort was to be made. On June 3, the IJN’s Northern Force raided the American outpost at Dutch Harbor on one of the Aleutian Islands. Four days later, Japanese troops occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska, farther west.

  A chain of desolate islands approximately twelve hundred miles long, the Aleutians form stepping stones between Japan and the United States. In 1942, Japanese and American leaders feared the other side would use the islands as a route of invasion. Hence the need arose in both Tokyo and Washington to control them. Many Americans perceived a Japanese presence in the Aleutians as a direct threat to the continental United States. However, the army’s top general in Alaska, Lieutenant General Simon Buckner, took a more realistic view, commenting, “They might make it, but it would be their grandchildren who finally got there, and by then they would all be American citizens.”

  Buckner’s perception notwithstanding, the United States mounted a major effort to seize the two islands. On May 11, 1945, the Army’s 7th Division, some eleven thousand soldiers, went ashore on Attu, supported by a fleet of warships that included three battleships. The weather on the Aleutians was atrocious. Fog, high winds, frigid
cold, and stormy seas made living difficult and fighting even more so. The Americans persevered, taking control of the island by the end of the month. Japanese resistance was fierce, and fanatical. Of a garrison of twenty-three hundred men, none survived save for twenty-nine taken prisoner. U.S. casualties numbered 1,697, of whom 549 were killed.

  Kiska was next. A huge force was assembled. Some thirty-four thousand troops, including fifty-five hundred Canadians, invaded the island on August 15, 1943. To their surprise—and relief—there was no one there. The Japanese had withdrawn. The fighting in and for the Aleutians, truly a dreadful place for combat, was over.

  ***

  A different but equally dreadful place to fight was Guadalcanal. This is a small island in the Solomons, a tropical rain forest where malaria and the jungle combined to constitute a formidable foe. When U.S. intelligence learned that the enemy was building an airfield on the island, the Marine Corps was given the job of seizing Guadalcanal. On August 7, 1942, the marines went ashore. The resulting six-month battle was a difficult, bloody affair. Some fourteen thousand Japanese were killed, nine thousand more died of disease. American casualties numbered fifty-eight hundred, of whom sixteen hundred died in battle. In 1959, the National Broadcasting Company produced a television documentary on the Second World War. It was called Victory at Sea. Of the fight for Guadalcanal, the narrator spoke the following of the American marines:

  They kept their rendezvous—these men, these grim men, these young old men. And on Guadalcanal there is a lonely grave with an epitaph for each who lost his youth there—

  . . . when he goes to heaven

  To St. Peter he will tell:

  Another Marine reporting, Sir

  I’ve served my time in hell!

  The struggle for Guadalcanal took place not just on land, but also in the air and on the seas surrounding the island. At night, the Japanese would bring reinforcements to the island as well as warships to pound the Americans. The U.S. Navy, less adept at night warfare but having the advantage of radar, would attempt to stop them. More than a few sea battles took place—especially effective were the Japanese long-range torpedoes fired from surface ships—and while the Americans eventually triumphed, they did not always win. Between August 1942 and April 1943, twenty-four U.S. naval vessels were sunk, including two aircraft carriers and six cruisers.

  One of the sea battles deserves particular mention. On the night of November 14, a squadron of ten IJN warships led by a battleship steamed south to bombard the marines on Guadalcanal. To prevent them from doing so, the Americans dispatched two new battleships, the USS South Dakota and the USS Washington, and their escorts. In the fight that ensued the three battleships traded salvos. The South Dakota was hit forty-two times but survived. The Washington, however, pummeled the Japanese ship, which sunk soon thereafter. That night, no bombardment of U.S. marines took place. The battle was one of the few naval engagements of the Pacific War in which battleships, once the primary weapon afloat, traded gunfire with one another.

  For the Americans, Guadalcanal was a significant victory. Unlike their triumph at Midway, which, as had the battle at the Coral Sea, halted Japan’s military expansion, the success at Guadalcanal represented the first step in taking back territories the Japanese had conquered. In effect, the road to Tokyo started at Guadalcanal. For the United States the battle had not been easy. But once achieved, victory meant Japan was on the defensive. As to this obscure island in the Solomons, it became enshrined in American military history. When historians write of decisive battles fought by the United States they write not just of Saratoga, Gettysburg, and Normandy, but of Guadalcanal as well.

  Concurrent with the struggle for Guadalcanal, General MacArthur, from Australia, was directing U.S. and Australian forces on New Guinea, where, save for Port Moresby and environs, the Japanese were well entrenched. His goal was to drive off the enemy and then seize the island of New Britain. As he did so, to decidedly mixed reviews, U.S. marines and army troops moved up the Solomons from Guadalcanal, taking control of New Georgia, Vella Lavella, and Bougainville. This force, as well as the ships and airplanes that supported it, was commanded by Admiral William Halsey. As with MacArthur, his objective was New Britain. For on the island stood the town of Rabaul, a major base of the Japanese armed forces.

  Command of the U.S. forces fighting Japan in the Pacific was divided. General MacArthur was in charge of the Southwest Pacific. Admiral Nimitz (to whom Halsey reported) was in command of the Central Pacific. They competed for resources and proposed different strategies. MacArthur wanted to focus on the Philippines. He saw the army as the nation’s primary military force. In the general’s view, the navy’s role was to support his soldiers. Admiral Nimitz, with Admiral King’s full backing in Washington, believed the war against Japan was essentially a maritime conflict, and therefore the navy should lead the endeavor. King, in particular, wanted to advance to Japan via the islands of the Central Pacific. He and Nimitz believed that naval forces would so weaken Japan that an invasion would not be necessary.

  Neither the general nor the admiral would budge. In fact the dispute—and it was very real—was between the United States Army and the United States Navy. For each service the stakes were high, and neither intended to give way. The only person capable of resolving the dispute was Franklin Roosevelt.

  The president, however, did not resolve the dispute. He simply agreed to let each service proceed as it wished. MacArthur received permission to invade the Philippines (to which, with exaggerated gravitas, he had vowed to return). Nimitz was ordered to seize the islands he had targeted in the Pacific. The arrangement was far from perfect, but it worked.

  On December 26, 1943, General MacArthur’s troops crossed over onto New Britain. They secured their immediate objective, Cape Gloucester, and prepared to slug it out with the 135,000 Japanese soldiers remaining on the island. Then U.S. commanders reached an important but unusual decision. They decided to bypass Rabaul and leave New Britain to the Japanese. The soldiers there had few airplanes and no means of resupply. They posed little threat. Why then waste time and men in an effort to dislodge them? Besides, Douglas MacArthur’s primary goal was to liberate the Philippines.

  An archipelago of some seven thousand islands, the Philippines was an essential step in any effort to defeat Japan. The Philippines had been an American colony and its citizens enjoyed a close relationship with the United States. Its liberation was an American imperative, and no one was more anxious to return there than MacArthur.

  The first invasion—there were several on different islands—took place on October 10, 1944. Approximately two hundred thousand soldiers ultimately participated, as did much of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. The fighting was brutal and the death toll high. Capturing Manila alone cost the Americans six thousand casualties while, in defending the capital, the Japanese had sixteen thousand men killed. The city itself was devastated. So too were the island’s citizens. In MacArthur’s nine-month-long campaign to free the Philippines some one hundred thousand Filipinos lost their lives.

  The Imperial Japanese Navy fully perceived the threat posed by the American presence in the Philippines. In response, their admirals mounted a last-ditch effort to destroy U.S. naval forces supporting the invasion. If the American ships could be eliminated, the soldiers ashore would be easy pickings. The IJN assembled most of its remaining warships, including four carriers, and set sail. The carriers were to act as decoys. They had few airplanes on board. Three years of fighting had depleted their supply of both aircraft and pilots. The four ships, steaming north of the islands, were to draw off the Americans’ aircraft carriers, leaving the other American ships without protective air cover. These would be sunk by powerful Japanese squadrons sailing from the south and west.

  The resulting battle is called the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It was the largest sea battle of the Second World War. Commanding the American carriers was Admiral Halsey (an aggressiv
e commander, the press had nicknamed him “Bull” Halsey, although no one in the navy ever had called him that). Halsey fell for the trap and took his carriers north, leaving the beaches undefended. But the Japanese failed to take advantage of the situation. In two major engagements, their strike forces were defeated by American warships. Among the latter were four battleships, the California, the Maryland, the Pennsylvania, and the West Virginia. Each had met the Japanese three years before, at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

  The Battle of Leyte Gulf was decisive. For the Americans it meant the invasion of the Philippines could unfold as planned and that Japan’s navy no longer could contest the seas. For the Imperial Japanese Navy, once the most powerful fleet in the world, it meant the war had been lost.

  ***

  Well before the invasions of the Philippines had begun, Admiral Nimitz launched his campaign to seize islands in the Central Pacific. First on the list was Tarawa. This was a flat coral reef, just half the size of New York City’s Central Park. Defending this real estate were 2,600 Japanese. Well entrenched, they were willing to die for their emperor, which all but 17 did. In the seventy-six hours it took to secure the island the United States had 1,056 of its marines killed. The American public was shocked by this number. General MacArthur argued that Tarawa proved that his strategy and approach to combat were preferable to that of Nimitz and the navy’s.

  But the navy, Admiral Nimitz, and the United States Marine Corps learned from Tarawa. When the marines subsequently attacked Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands and later Saipan, Guam, and Tinian in the Marianas, their casualties were less.

  The pattern for these operations were similar. The islands first would be bombarded from the air. Then a large amphibious force would arrive offshore. After battleships and cruisers pounded the island in question, marines would motor to the beaches in small landing craft. By 1944, America’s navy and its maritime soldiers were extremely proficient at this type of operation.