by Paul Kennedy
Perhaps the best way to think about this, then, is to arrange the various aspects of amphibious warfare into first-order and second-order contributions. Thus, although offshore naval bombardments were impressive and on at least two occasions (Anzio and Omaha) really helped to blunt a counterattack upon a precariously held beach, only rarely did they destroy a determined enemy’s capacity to fight back from secure bunkers.
By contrast, command of the air over the landing areas and the approaches to them was always critical, and here, by the beginning of 1944, the Allied advantage was becoming steadily more obvious, at least in the European theater. Moreover, the types of aircraft used for close-air support over the beaches (Marauders, Typhoons, Thunderbolts) were also well equipped to destroy the enemy’s land forces during the breakout operations that followed.
Did the many improvements in amphibious weapons systems—ranging from Hobart’s Funnies in Europe to the U.S. Marines’ deployment of flamethrower and bulldozer tanks in the Pacific—constitute a first-order explanation for the increasing capacity to burst through an enemy-held shore? Yes, probably. Did the increasing employment of highly practiced advance units and of special forces such as the commandos and the Rangers help? Of course they did, and in some cases (taking the Orne River bridge, even the widespread scattering of the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions that so confused the German defenders) decisively so. There is also no doubt that the mass production of landing craft (whether the LVTs and infantry DUKWs, those carrying tanks or trucks, or those firing rockets) and of the equally important mother ships that brought them across the oceans to their offshore launch positions was absolutely critical. Indeed, take away those vessels and it is difficult to see how any of the larger landing operations described above could have occurred at all.49
There were other important aspects to amphibious warfare in play by 1944 that simply had not existed four years earlier. Having a command and control HQ offshore, separate both from the naval warships and from the landing forces, greatly reduced miscommunications and other errors. Having a single officer responsible for keeping order on the beach, and having much-improved wireless links back to the HQ ship for a forward directing unit to call in fire support, was another major advance. Having specialized underwater demolition teams and beach clearance groups was vital (just where did one dump all that barbed wire?). Having much smoother flow-through logistics greatly improved, though never fully eliminated, the predictable frictions involved in moving vast numbers of men, weapons, and supplies in the midst of battle.
But above them all, and orchestrating them all, sat an interservice, combined-operations organization (Ramsay’s, essentially, and in the Pacific, Nimitz’s) that had, after many setbacks and disappointments, figured out how to do it. If one had to point to a single feature of this story of the evolution of Allied amphibious warfare, it would probably be here, in the superior, even sophisticated ordering of the many moving parts. Orchestration is a term that might sum all this up. The multifaceted orchestra for a large and complex landing absolutely needed a conductor—and that could not be Churchill and Roosevelt, or the Combined Chiefs of Staff, or the powerful heads of the individual services. It had to be a different sort of person: an organizer, a planner, a problem solver.
The early American and British planners, operating under the shadow of Gallipoli and in times of acute fiscal severity, understood the special needs of amphibious operations from the beginning. The ideas that started with Pete Ellis and the other precocious Marine Corps planners in the 1920s, and a little later with the British Inter-Service Training and Development Centre in the 1930s, steadily metamorphosed via Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Command and the USMC Marine Expeditionary Forces, and through the sobering experiences of Madagascar, Guadalcanal, Dieppe, and the Gilberts, into an end product that had its apotheosis in the twin Normandy-Marianas assaults of June 1944. Isley and Crowl put it nicely in their 1951 classic The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War when they observe that a close examination of those early, difficult operations “shows that the chief shortcomings were not in doctrine, but rather in the means to put existing doctrine into effect.”50
It was simple, if one understood the basic operational principles. Amphibious warfare was a special kind of fighting that required many special ingredients: new interservice command structures, novel and often very weird-looking weapons systems, incredibly complex logistics, an extremely high level of battle training, very sophisticated low-altitude aerial support, and smart ways of directing masses of troops and vehicles on and off narrow beachheads. Getting all that right meant a very good chance of winning. But ignoring any of those critical requirements most likely would mean heavy punishment. And there was always the element of luck.
Had one brought back those early visionaries and planners to witness the first day or two of the June 1944 landings, they surely would have been staggered at the enormous size and intricacy of what was taking place before their eyes. But it is difficult to think of many features to which, conceptually, they had not given thought years before there was any prospect of realization. Like certain other strategic thinkers who had applied their great brains to the challenges posed by modern war, they were prophets before their time.
a The operation commenced on the same day as the Battle of the Coral Sea: an Allied comeback in two oceans.
b Both as a point of receipt for oceanborne supplies and millions of U.S. troops and as the takeoff point for so many maritime routes from Britain to the wider world, the Clyde (Glasgow) and the Mersey (Liverpool) played an extraordinarily significant strategic role throughout the Second World War. They were a long way from German bomber bases in France, they had very large port infrastructures (berths, docks, dry docks, warehouses, shipyards, connections to a dense railway system), and they had easy access to the Atlantic and beyond.
c While the number of Allied troops involved in the initial Sicily landings was greater than those landed on June 6, 1944, on the Normandy beaches, the latter operation involved millions more follow-on troops.
d General Eberhard von Mackensen had been chief of staff of one of the German armies invading Poland in 1939 and of another army invading France in 1940. By the next year he was with Army Group South on the Eastern Front. By 1943 he was in charge of the First Panzer Army at the critical Battle of Kharkov. He was then moved to command the German Fourteenth Army in Italy. In other words, he probably had more battlefield experience than all of the Allied divisional commanders at Anzio put together.
e Or in Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1953).
f Allied military units, for example, were barracked in 1,108 camps across England and Wales. How did one get them all to the southern invasion ports in good order?
g The prime minister’s October 1940 reproof to the War Office for not using Hobart’s talents should be memorized by all commanders in chief and CEOs: “I am not at all impressed by the prejudice against him in certain quarters. Such prejudices attach frequently to persons of strong personality and original view.… We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to officers who have excited no hostile comment in their career.”
CHAPTER FIVE
HOW TO DEFEAT THE “TYRANNY OF DISTANCE”
The Japanese offensive plan, and action, had profited greatly by the strategic advantage of Japan’s geographical position.… [T]he outcome of their rapid conquests was that they had covered Japan with concentric rings of defence that provided formidable obstacles to any countermove toward Japan that the Western Allies attempted.
—B. H. LIDDELL HART, History of the Second World War
[Admiral] Koga’s intention [was] to give battle anywhere along the new defence line. Without the initiative and any control over the timing of operations, [his plan] was as good as any that could be devised, but its most obvious weakness … was that the American carriers could descend on any single part of the line and overwhelm it before
it could be effectively supported.
—H. P. WILLMOTT, The Great Crusade
Like other massive campaigns of military conquest in modern times, most notably those directed by Hitler or by Napoleon, the extraordinary Japanese offensives of 1941–42 were within a relatively short time to become the victim of what one historian has termed “the tyranny of distance”: that is, they failed to recognize the natural limits upon human endeavor imposed by geography.1 The Japanese high command overreached itself. It would have been difficult to convince the frightened inhabitants of Darwin and Brisbane (or their equally nervous equivalents in San Francisco and Bombay) of that geopolitical fact in the spring of 1942, when what had been an incremental Japanese challenge to the Anglo-American hegemony in East Asia and the Pacific during the 1930s finally burst into a violent, all-consuming fury of aggression coming ever closer to their shores.
Yet it was true. Japan, which had never been beaten in war before, went too far. As the present chapter will show, however, this was not simply an innate matter, like the waxing and waning of a tide. In contrast, Japan’s vast empire was brought to its end by external means, chiefly through the impressive deployment of American resources, personnel, and weapons systems. The two combatants did not spar in a fixed space, like a boxing ring, but across a vast geographic arena in which the exploitation of distance, time, and opportunity by each combatant’s leaders and planners was just as important as the morale of their fighting forces and the quality of the weapons. There was an invaluable bonus to be secured by the side that best understood, and best prepared for, the peculiar geopolitics of the gigantic Pacific sphere. In this situation, the maritime-oriented Americans had a clear advantage over a Japanese military leadership fixated upon land campaigns across China.
It was scarcely surprising, however, that imperial Japan should seek to expand abroad once its centuries of self-imposed isolationism were replaced after the 1868 Meiji Restoration by a drive to modernize, though not liberalize; in this regard, it was simply imitating earlier successful colonial powers, especially those of the West.2 An impressive turn toward industrialization and export-led growth massively increased its productive capacities and provided the basis whereby it alone among the states of Asia and Africa possessed, by the 1920s, a modern army, navy, and air force—in fact, among the best in the world. All this created a critical and growing dependence upon foreign foodstuffs and raw materials and spurred Japan’s nationalists to argue for acquiring secure sources of supply, like those enjoyed by the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
The real measure of comparison for Japan—in fact, the only comparison—was Great Britain, the other politically coherent island state that broke beyond its coastal limits to become something much larger, a nation that had organized its navy and army to ensure control of distant sources for supply of the homeland. Since getting that tin, rubber, iron ore, copper, timber, and (especially) oil was essential, the only question remaining for Tokyo was whether those sources could be obtained with the acquiescence of the established powers or had to be gotten against their wishes, which obviously raised the risk of war. The debate among the Japanese political and military/naval elites was, therefore, not whether their country should become another world actor on the lines of Britain and Germany but how and when to achieve that natural goal. A long-standing member of the Japanese house of notables such as Yamagata Arimoto, looking back over the previous five decades from 1920, might occasionally have wondered at the transformation of Japan’s international position since his youth—wondered not just at the transformation of medieval cities such as Yokohama to look ever more like Southampton and Baltimore, but also at the steady array of overseas acquisitions by a nation that had virtually cut itself off from the world for over three centuries. Yet neither he nor anyone else in power questioned Japan’s right to expand.3
The transformation was remarkable. The 1894–95 war with China had not only crushed the disorganized armed forces of that decrepit empire but also brought to Japan the strategically vital island of Taiwan. In 1904–5 Japan shocked the world by defeating czarist Russia, at sea (Tsushima) and on land (Port Arthur, Mukden), thus gaining both southern Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. The most remarkable battle of that war was the overwhelming victory of the Japanese navy over the Russians at Tsushima (May 1905); Admiral Tojo’s achievement inspired the service for decades to come. Nine years later, invoking in a very liberal sense the terms of its alliance with Britain, Tokyo took advantage of the outbreak of the First World War in Europe in 1914 to seize Germany’s eastern empire, that is, the treaty concessions in northern China, Shantung and Tsingtao, plus the Central Pacific island groups of the Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas—obscure enough at the time, but absolutely vital in the Pacific War thirty years later.4 At this stage, Japan’s geopolitical position was very strong. With the European Great Powers embroiled in war and Woodrow Wilson’s America trying very hard to stay out of things, Tokyo had a free hand across the entire region.
Yet Arimoto and his fellow nobles were, in temperament, not unlike their British aristocratic equivalents or the Prussians after 1871: they knew when to stop, when to display moderation, and, in Japan’s case, when to compromise with great powers who in military-industrial terms were much bigger than they were. In 1915 the Japanese Foreign Office had made its infamous “21 Demands” upon China (which would have led to a virtual Japanese suzerainty) but backed away quite swiftly following vigorous American diplomatic protests. It was surely more important to get international recognition of its takeover of the German colonies, which it duly did at Versailles. There was also great prestige for any Asian nation that occupied a prominent place among the “big five” in the Paris negotiations, and to take equally prominent membership in the League of Nations.
The older Japanese elites were, therefore, as willing as those in other governments to settle for compromise solutions in the Washington treaties of 1921–22: all participants accepted recognition of the territorial status quo across the entire East Asian and Western Pacific region, promises about the nonfortification of bases, and, in particular, very strict limitations on the number, size, and tonnage of the world’s leading navies. But that was probably the limit of Japanese willingness to proceed by negotiation. The refusal of the West to agree to a racial equality clause regarding all peoples at Versailles, the British abandonment of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1922, the passing away of the old genro (the traditional aristocrats, somewhat like the English Whigs), the rise of new nationalist ideas about the country’s special culture and special place in the world, the radicalization of the junior army officer corps, and the inherent weaknesses at the very top of the political system pushed Japan away from being a status quo power to being a revisionist power, just a few years ahead of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.a
The revisionist events followed helter-skelter upon each other: the Kwantung Army’s coup in Manchuria from 1931 onward, the seizure of those massive lands, the decision to defy world opinion and leave the League of Nations in the same year (1933–34) as Hitler’s Germany did, the notification in 1935 that Japan would no longer consider itself as being bound by the Washington and London naval treaty restrictions, the adhesion to the Anti-Comintern Pact and the large-scale move into China proper in 1937, and the various efforts (including “accidental” bombings of their warships) to push the West out of East Asia. By 1940–41 there occurred another major coup, the takeover of French Indochina from a very reluctant but helpless Vichy regime, a move that in turn not only threatened Chinese Nationalists along a new flank but gave Japanese naval airpower control over the South China Sea and beyond.
Up to this point, things had gone extremely well for Japan.5 Then came the decision by Roosevelt in July 1941, supported by the British and the Dutch, to freeze all Japanese commercial assets, essentially cutting off Japan’s consumption of oil (88 percent of which was imported). The empire of the Rising Sun could either buckle under or
strike out to gain its needed energy supplies and other vital war materials. If it did not strike, its economy would grind to a halt, and its China campaign would crumble. The air force’s planes would sit quietly on the runways, and the navy’s warships would remain at their moorings. Unless it resisted this foreign pressure, the argument went, Japan would be tumbled back to its pre-Meiji, medieval condition.
Accepting second-class status was simply inconceivable to this generation of Japanese military and naval leaders. Virtually all of them—Admiral Nagumo (who was to head the Pearl Harbor operation), General Tojo (who pushed so hard for the war), the brilliant Admiral Yamamoto (who headed the navy in 1941)—had been young officers in the First World War; they had witnessed Japan’s advances then, and had seen it recognized as a great power in the Versailles territorial carve-ups. They could only go forward, to fulfill the national destiny and end the West’s dominance in East Asia. The military logic followed from this political and economic rationale. Thus the compelling commercial need to gain the oil and rubber and tin of Sumatra and Malaya led to the operational decisions to strike at Hong Kong, the Philippines, Borneo, Java, and Singapore, eliminating American, British, and Dutch armed forces and seizing their bases. And the strategic need to defend all the newly acquired lands in turn led to the idea of a garrisoned “perimeter rim” that swept from the Aleutian Islands to the Burma-India border.