Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  THE JAPANESE EMPIRE’S EXPANSION AT ITS PEAK, 1942

  Like the German conquests in Russia, another case of overstretch.

  Click here to download a PDF of this map.

  Even today, few Western readers understand the logic chain of Japanese military thinking or Tokyo’s sense of priorities. The decisive act was not the simultaneous strikes against Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Hong Kong on December 7–8, 1941. The major move had been made back in the summer of 1937, with the Japanese army’s invasion of mainland China. Everything else that followed was, in a way, merely an operational or diplomatic consequence: the tightening of ties with Nazi Germany, the maintenance of neutrality toward the USSR (despite severe border clashes in northern Manchuria), the 1941 move into the southern parts of French Indochina, the decision to go for the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies, the operational need to take out British and American bases in Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippines, and—as a final security measure—the decision to destroy the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor to prevent it from blocking this drive to the south. But the big show, from the standpoint of the Japanese military, was in China itself.

  Thus, the June 1941 German attack on the USSR and the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor less than six months later, however much we link them in our present understanding of the Second World War, could not be more different in terms of the military resources allocated. For Operation Barbarossa, Hitler committed as much as three-quarters of all Axis divisions. For the war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Imperial General Headquarters committed less than one-quarter of its million and a half troops. This bald comparison explains much of the unfolding of the 1941–45 struggle across that vast region.

  In terms of comparative military effectiveness, Japan’s leaders could be well pleased with themselves, perhaps too pleased. Determined never to be dominated or intimidated by Western practices, the Japanese had had no hesitation in copying foreign technologies, personnel structures (including ranks), command structures, and the like. While the people’s standard of living was still far lower than those in Europe and America, the massive national savings of Japan were directed to a “hothouse” development of industry, science, modern warships, steadily improved aircraft, and extraordinarily high levels of training in their officer corps.

  Like all interwar militaries, the Japanese forces possessed varied strengths and weaknesses. The army had been the dominant service since the successful Russo-Japanese War and was oriented toward the Asian continent, with a particular concern about a coming war with the USSR. Thus the Americans and British were of much less interest to the generals, until, of course, their economic blockades crippled the Japanese war machine. The army was large and disciplined, and both its choice of weapons systems and its training pointed to its vision of future conflicts. There was little effort to follow Liddell Hart, Fuller, Guderian, Tukhachevsky, and other Western advocates of fast armored warfare, for where could one deploy main battle tanks in Asia when no bridges were strong enough and few metalled roads existed? On the other hand, there was an increasing interest in preparing for and practicing landings from the sea, river crossings, and jungle and mountain warfare in Southeast Asia. Taking distant Pacific islands was not on their mind. Nor was there any point in creating an expensive long-range strategic bombing force, since what modern industrial targets were there to bomb—the wooden shanties of Shanghai? The fishing wharfs of Vladivostok?

  The army’s relations with the Japanese navy were fractured, and this wasn’t just because of those typical interservice quarrels of the 1920s and 1930s about budgets. It was a far deeper quarrel about the nation’s strategic purpose, since the navy thought a large entanglement on the Asian continent was folly and, having thoroughly imbibed the doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, called instead for a focus upon the threat from the Western sea powers. The army, by contrast, was imbued with the Prussian military tradition and particularly impressed by the Elder Moltke’s three swift land victories (1864, 1866, 1870–71) that led to the unification of Germany. Since neither side would concede to the other’s viewpoint, the two services tended to go their own ways. While this threatened to make any larger military policy incoherent, it helped the navy in other respects. Above all, it meant that it could develop its own naval air arm, with a carrier fleet and suitable planes. Because the navy was much more invested than the army in twentieth-century technologies, and therefore more knowledgeable than their army equivalents about America, Britain, and Germany, some naval leaders (above all Yamamoto, who had been a naval attaché in Washington) were concerned about Japan’s overall economic disadvantage. Still, when the decision for war was made in late 1941, the services felt they were ready.6

  The amazingly wide Japanese tide of conquest lasted a mere six months, from December 1941 until June 1942. By that time, the Japanese Fifteenth Army had reached the border between Burma and Assam, in British India; it could go no farther. The carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy had struck hard against Ceylon and the inadequate British naval forces in the Indian Ocean during early April 1942 and had the capability to move farther westward, against Aden and Suez; but they were pulled back from that intriguing possibility (which the army never liked) for operations elsewhere.7 The navy’s slightly later foray toward Australasia was blunted by the Battle of the Coral Sea (off southeast New Guinea) on May 7–8—where neither side won decisively, but which prompted the Japanese to withdraw northward for a while. The Japanese army’s move from the north shores of New Guinea toward Port Moresby in the south was held in the mountainous jungles by hastily assembled American and Australian divisions under General Douglas MacArthur. Most important of all, the prospect of a Japanese drive across the Central Pacific, seizing Hawaii and thus threatening the American West Coast, was crushed at the vital carriers-only battle near Midway Island on June 4, 1942. Pearl Harbor was in large part revenged in the waters hundreds of miles west of Hawaii.

  Such setbacks, however, were not regarded by Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo as disastrous, perhaps not even as serious. In fact, while the naval leadership might be yearning to finish off the Allied (chiefly American) fleets once and for all, the dominant army faction could view the situation in Southeast Asia and the Pacific with some equanimity. Japan’s armed services had done what was wanted, which was to tumble the hated Americans, British, and Dutch out of their own future Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They had seized the absolutely critical oilfields of Java, Sumatra, and North Borneo, which meant that Tokyo’s most important strategic mission could be pursued more energetically than ever—that is, the subjugation of China and achievement of unchallenged primacy over mainland East Asia. Amazingly, the Japanese army had deployed a mere eleven of its fifty-one divisions to achieve this vast array of conquests across the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia. All that was necessary now was to strengthen the outer perimeter rim with a series of island strongpoints and beat off any impertinent Western counterattacks. Once American and British noses had been bloodied, the effete democracies would recognize this strategic fait accompli and negotiate a peace in a year or two’s time.

  There is one further spatial and geopolitical point to be made about Japan’s enormous territorial expansion during 1941 and 1942. It offered a fine example of what Liddell Hart had termed “an expanding torrent,” that is, an attack whose arc steadily widened the farther that advances were made. But Liddell Hart had thought of such an operational expansion as being carried out by a relatively small group of fast panzer units in western Europe, breaching an enemy line and then spreading out for a farther 100 to 200 miles.8 In the Pacific, as in Russia, the distances were to be measured in many thousands of miles. When the Japanese expeditionary forces moved toward Alaska, Midway, Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Gilberts, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Thailand, Malaya and Singapore, North Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, and beyond—to Burma, perhaps northern Australia—those few divisions were dispersing themselves across vast distances,
while most of the army’s troops were pushing into central and southern China.

  Logically, then, the farther that these Japanese units advanced across the Pacific and through Southeast Asia, the thinner became the density of occupying troops in captured territory. As we have seen above, this was not unlike the Wehrmacht’s contemporaneous dilemma. Hitler had insisted that the Nazi “torrent” expand to the north (Leningrad), center (Moscow), and south (Stalingrad) of the vast Russian plains, in addition to holding the Balkans, controlling all of western Europe, and maintaining a foothold in North Africa. Yet the distances involved across western Russia were nowhere as great as those between the Aleutians and Burma, and Hitler possessed far larger military and industrial resources when the counterthrusts came.

  Thus, by the summer of 1942 Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo had overstretched itself and put most of its troops in the wrong place, but it didn’t recognize that. It had achieved enormous territorial gains, its homelands were intact, and the booty from its conquests was pouring back home. While the Allies had held the Japanese advances on various fronts, there were no breakthrough counterattacks; not yet.9 So to Imperial General Headquarters, things were not serious. The setbacks at the Coral Sea and in the jungles of New Guinea against MacArthur’s forces were unsettling, and the losses of four carriers at Midway were regrettable. But there were ample resources to make some farther if less dramatic advances, perhaps probing the Assam borders, or advancing down the Solomon Islands chain, to make the perimeter ring more solid. MacArthur’s slow progress in Papua and the tangled battles taking place around Guadalcanal seemed obscure, distant, and not of great import. In sum, by the closing months of 1942, alarm bells were not ringing; even a year later, one suspects that their sound was a very distant toll to Japan’s continentalist generals, schooled in the Prussian tradition that control of the mainland was the essence of a proper grand strategy.10

  Allied Strategic Options in the War Against Japan

  Thus, because Japan had more or less achieved what it wanted, and because the military leadership at Imperial General Headquarters did not particularly need to go very much further, the onus was upon the Allies to alter things; it was they who had to take the offensive and then compel a Japanese defeat. This, in essence, was the strategic logic of the entire war in the Pacific and East Asia from the summer of 1942 onward, and it was also the basic assumption of the leaders and planners at Casablanca six months later. But how and where and with what means did one crush the Japanese Empire?

  Moving from a defensive strategic posture to an offensive one is always a complex challenge, even to the most efficient and imaginative organizations, and in this case geography also made the Allied task one of extreme difficulty. The blunt cartographical fact was that the home islands of Japan were a very long way from any enemy takeoff point, unless it was from Siberia/Manchuria (but Stalin, fighting for his life, had no intention of opening up a second front while the Wehrmacht was still a thousand miles or more inside the Soviet Union). Thus, the turn of the tide in the Pacific was fundamentally different from that in Europe. Challenging though it was in military-operational terms, the task of crossing the English Channel to destroy Nazi domination of Europe was understandable and realizable, and was an operation that had been well rehearsed by the landings in North Africa and Sicily/Italy. By contrast, the defeat of Japan could not be planned for until the Combined Chiefs of Staff had decided upon the takeoff point—or points.

  Ruling out the Siberia/Mongolia option, then, the Allies could choose from four attack routes from the perimeter to the Japanese core, since Tokyo’s expansionist drives from 1937 to 1942 fanned outward in so many different directions.b

  The first alternative was to base the counteroffensive chiefly upon mainland China, the theater closest to Japan and most engaged in the fighting. The second would involve the recovery of Southeast Asia, that is, Burma, Thailand, Malaya/Singapore, French Indochina, Borneo, and the Dutch East Indies. The third would be to build upon the American-Australian command structure in the Southwest Pacific under MacArthur and push northward from Australia to New Guinea and the Solomon and Bismarck archipelagos to the Celebes and the Philippines themselves, which would then become a springboard to Formosa. From here, Allied armies might possibly link with Chiang Kai-Shek’s mainland forces or turn to assault Japan directly, from the south. In this scenario, Luzon and Formosa would resemble Britain’s own position as the launchpad for the Allied conquest of Nazi Europe. The fourth and final option would be to drive across the wide expanses of the Central Pacific, recovering the island groups that Japan had seized in 1942 (the Gilberts) and taking the empire’s important mandate islands (the Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas) as stepping-stones to Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the invasion of Japan itself. It would be much more of a “blue water” strategy, and would be run chiefly by the navy and the air force, not the army, at least until the actual invasion of Japan itself.

  THE FOUR OPTIONS FOR ALLIED COUNTERATTACK AGAINST TOKYO AFTER 1942–43

  Given the ferocious weather of the Aleutian Islands of the North Pacific, there were four possible routes for an Allied advance upon Japan. The Central Pacific one turned out to be by far the easiest.

  Of course, it was not a zero-sum game; the options were not mutually exclusive. All four theater options had legitimate claims, which will be discussed below. More sensibly, it would have been militarily stupid for the Allies to commit to only a single line of advance in the Asia-Pacific theater, for that, in turn, would concentrate the Japanese defenses. Applying pressure in all four fields of conflict would not only disperse the enemy’s resources but also allow a switching of the more mobile Allied forces if a weak spot was detected.

  Ultimately, one of these return routes proved to be decisive, but it is worth taking some time to examine the other three options, not just to understand better why they were less vital but also to see what light those operations shed upon the overall challenge of defeating Japan. All three pinned down enormous numbers of Japanese troops and aircraft (and, in the case of the Southwest Pacific campaign, Japanese warships) that otherwise would have been free to contest the chief American line of attack.

  Advancing upon Japan via the China theater made a lot of sense at first sight. Although this was where the bulk of the Japanese army was fighting, it was also a place where the United States probably could build up a fair-sized air force, and it was difficult for the deadly Japanese carrier-borne air squadrons to reach. It was important for America to give support to the Chinese Nationalist armies, because, practically speaking, keeping China in the war consumed so many Japanese divisions. There were also significant sentimental aspects at play here as well. President Roosevelt was a strong supporter of the U.S.-China relationship. The American general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was Chiang Kai-Shek’s chief military advisor. Claude Chennault’s group of glamorous volunteer airmen, the “Flying Tigers,” was there. So were a large number of American missionaries, teachers, and traders. From the viewpoint of the Army Air Corps planners, aware that Doolittle’s squadron had actually landed in China after making its daring raid on Tokyo in April 1942, it was obvious that certain Chinese air bases were close enough to allow the strategic bombing of Japan’s cities and industries. Moreover, American bombers based there would also be able to interdict Japanese maritime routes down the China Sea as they headed for Southeast Asia.

  So why was the China option not taken, or taken only for a while, and with inadequate resources? The answer again is chiefly explained by geography. Inland China was simply too far away from the U.S. productive base and therefore too hard to supply in large numbers. Since all the waters of the Western Pacific and the Indonesian archipelago were dominated by the Japanese navy, the only Western material assistance could come from British India, over the “hump,” that is, the enormous mountain peaks of the eastern Himalayas, and at a disproportionate logistical cost—even just carrying the gas supplies for U.S. bombers in China caused massive we
ar and tear and was highly uneconomical. Nor would this work for the deployment of U.S. ground forces. Since the consumption levels of an American army division, let alone of an army corps, were fantastically greater than those of any other armed force in the world, there was no way of putting such large units into southern China and supplying them by air.

  Furthermore, given the Japanese high command’s obsession with winning whatever the cost, it was bound to pour fresh divisions against U.S. and Chinese Nationalist forces and in particular against identified B-17 or, later, B-29 air bases in the south and west of the country—and, for once, the Japanese lines of supply would be shorter and easier. Looking back, and with the privileged knowledge of the massive American punch that was being assembled in the Central Pacific, it is hard to understand the Japanese army’s continental thrusts in 1943 and 1944, driving the Chinese Nationalist forces farther southwest, and in turn sucking in its own brigades. This handed an advantage to the United States, for while it could not put heavy forces onto the Asian continent, it certainly could do enough to distract the bulk of the Japanese army. By giving a degree of support to the Chinese Nationalist government, in the form of vital munitions and medical supplies, plus Stilwell and other military advisors and the later B-29 squadrons, the United States kept the Chinese resistance going and helped to pin down millions of Japanese troops on the mainland. And as 1944 unfolded, those enormous forces found themselves being steadily cut off from their supplies by American submarines and aircraft.11