by Paul Kennedy
The fourth factor was the units who built the bases, the installations, the assembly points, and the roads that carried the fight forward—in this particular case, the U.S. Navy’s Construction Battalions, the “Seabees.” Although created by the exigencies of this particular war, the job this new force did would have been recognized by military men of all ages. It is difficult to imagine a military victory without engineers, but all too often historians of grand campaigns take their work for granted and assume that troops, fleets, and air squadrons can be moved long distances by the stroke of a pen on a large-scale map.21 Yet to troops on the ground, however well equipped, mountains, rivers, swamps, deserts, and jungles geographically determine the nature of the battles that are to be fought. Nowhere was this more true than in the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. In sum, it needed Marine Corps amphibious doctrine and practice, the fast carrier groups, the B-29s, and the Seabees to cross the Pacific together. Just how those parts grew up and then came together forms the rest of this chapter, together with the somewhat separate story of a fifth element, the U.S. submarine service.
Hitting the Beach
The evolution of the U.S. Marine Corps’s form of amphibious warfare can be compared in many ways with the experiences of Allied amphibious warfare in Europe (see chapter 4), although there were also significant differences due to force organization and, above all, the geography of the Pacific. The Corps’s story is one of almost unremitting combat, from their landings at Guadalcanal in mid-August 1942 to the end of the resistance by the Japanese garrison on Okinawa in late June 1945. It was a story of learning the hard way, of fighting those same natural obstacles of jungle, weather, and disease that the British were encountering in Burma and MacArthur was dealing with in Papua New Guinea, and of fighting an enemy that would never surrender. As late as July 1945 American theater commanders in the Pacific were chafing at the slow progress being made in taking Okinawa, but how exactly did one make fast progress against such a dug-in enemy? Eventually MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command, after exceptionally laborious fighting during the first two years, figured out that they would win the war much more swiftly if they leapfrogged into positions where the enemy wasn’t. Yet there were always some places—the Solomons, the Gilberts, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—that they had to take, however strongly held. This was the marines’ saga.22
Why was it that the United States Marine Corps (USMC) came to occupy this special, legendary place in the annals of war? The simple answer was that the marines were the only people in post-1919 America who took a keen, active, and progressive interest in amphibious operations. Just as the RAF and U.S. Army Air Corps had to assert the claims of the value of strategic bombing to justify themselves as an independent service following the Great War, so also had the Marine Corps to explain why it was needed when American military budgets were being trimmed so hard after 1919. The result of their efforts was to be seen in a combination of convincing warfare doctrine, improved technological and logistical assets, and well-trained specialist units that forever identified the Corps with massive and effective assault from the sea. It also studied the recent past for helpful lessons; not for nothing do the two historians of the first comprehensive book on the U.S. Marines and amphibious warfare begin with an illuminating comparative essay titled “Success at Okinawa—Failure at Gallipoli.”23
Viewed retrospectively, it is rather remarkable that the amphibious operations concept survived at all. The USMC’s mother service, the U.S. Navy, remained obsessed about future wars on the high seas between battle fleets and had no desire for a secondary role in supporting landing forces. When the Washington Naval Treaties of 1921–22 forced further fleet cutbacks, the navy could only regard the marines as a rival charge upon its limited budgets, even as, curiously, its war plans against Japan required expeditionary forces to seize bases in the Pacific. The U.S. Army, for its part, emerged from the First World War with a deep resentment of the great publicity given to the Corps’s fighting on the Western Front and an angry feeling that its own monopoly on land warfare had been seriously challenged. What was more, there were senior marine officers who wanted to preserve that larger battlefront posture and feared being pushed back into a pre-1917 limbo, carrying out ancillary missions in distant waters. Finally, the drive for economies shriveled the Marine Corps to less than 15,000 officers and men, hardly enough for the menial duties of providing ships’ guards, protecting embassies, and holding American bases in the Caribbean. By 1921, marines were even deployed to guard U.S. mails against robbers, and must have felt a long way from the Halls of Montezuma.
But the amphibious warfare doctrine persisted throughout the interwar years and slowly became an operational possibility for two reasons, one strategic and the other more personal and fortuitous. The strategic reason was, quite simply, the prospect of a future war with Japan. Planning for a conflict to resist Japanese expansionism in East Asia and the Western Pacific had been carried out by American strategists since the first decade of the century. The elimination of the German navy in 1919, plus the parallel recognition that an Anglo-American war was highly unlikely, meant that the only feasible great-power enemy could be Japan. Its extensive gains of Central Pacific islands—the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas—during the war, its stubborn negotiation stance over battleship numbers and fleet bases at the Washington Conference, and its continued pénétration pacifique of China all enhanced American suspicions. What was more, the modern Japanese navy was the only rival large enough (assuming British nonhostility) to justify the size and expense of the U.S. Navy. Unsurprisingly, then, the chief of naval operations warned the commandant of the Marine Corps as early as January 1920 that War Plan Orange would henceforth determine the navy’s plans and programs, and the Corps should prepare accordingly for possible amphibious operations across the Pacific.24 Although shrinking numbers of personnel made this utterly impossible in practice, the strategic statement was there and would not go away as long as suspicions of Japan’s intentions remained. The marines’ claim to be a special fighting force, not just a second-level gendarmerie, relied upon the Japanese threat.
That clear identification of the future foe in turn pushed a small number of individual planners and midlevel officers into problem solving: how, practically, would they take the fight to a Japanese foe 5,000 miles across the Pacific? Although he was certainly not the only American pondering on that problem, Major Earl H. “Pete” Ellis of the USMC began to figure it out in a serious of reworked memoranda between 1919 and 1922. It would have to be a specialized service—the larger, heavier army couldn’t do it, and probably wouldn’t be interested. It had to be the marines, which was fortuitous because all naval/amphibious operations are under naval command, and the USMC was also the advanced base force of the navy. And, as Ellis put it in his famous July 1921 memorandum on advanced base forces in Micronesia, it had to involve specific tasks: “the reduction and occupation of the [Japanese-held] islands” and “the establishment of the necessary bases therein.”25
By the same logic, the service charged with carrying out this task—as the USMC was formally defined in an army-navy agreement of 1927—had to prepare to implement it at ground level, in the precarious approaches to an enemy-held shore, and in the establishment of a secure beachhead upon it. And the early USMC planners understood that specially trained amphibious units required special platforms and special weaponry (this was now about 340 years after the Spanish marines’ operations to capture the Azores). Ellis’s own early memoranda called for landing craft with bow guns, for specially equipped signals troops, for demolition experts to neutralize beach obstacles and minefields, for marine aviation to strafe the beaches. Some other ideas were going to be less useful—motorboats towing barges, for example—but the man was remarkably far-seeing, his mysterious death in the Caroline Islands in 1923 making him even more romantic and intriguing.26
Even at the time of Ellis’s death, other innovative Marine Corps majors and colonels were als
o at work trying to figure out how to get things done. This was not easy. Annual exercises along America’s own southern shores, in Panama (Culebra), and in the Caribbean, all of which were important in the longer term but which initially threw up enormous shortcomings, confirmed the gap between theory and reality when trying to land on a shallow beach or into mangrove swamps. Millett’s wonderful history of the USMC has a tart comment upon the “fiasco” of the winter 1923–24 exercises off Culebra: “The Navy coxswains did not reach the right beach at the proper time; the unloading of supplies was chaotic; the naval bombardment was inadequate; and the Navy’s landing boats were clearly unsuitable for both troops and equipment. The exercise, however, identified enough errors to keep the Corps busy for fifteen years.”27
On the other hand, the glaring need to have better equipment itself stimulated a constant search for new ideas and techniques. As early as the mid-1920s, observers strolling along the banks of the Potomac River or the Hudson might have seen an amphibious tank crossing those waters, yet another product of the eccentric tank designer J. Walter Christie, whose greatest contribution to the Second World War (see chapter 3) would be in designing the suspension and chassis of a vehicle that one day would become the Soviet T-34. Christie’s novel, river-crossing tank foundered in less protected (offshore) waters, but the idea of building an engine-powered, forward-shooting, amphibious vehicle would reappear more than a decade later, to the Allies’ advantage, often as the LVT. In much the same way, great dissatisfaction at the inadequacies of early prototypes of motored landing craft simply caused more imaginative Corps officers to search for newer ideas, one of which was the inventor Andrew Higgins’s flat-bottomed boat, originally designed for use in the bayous of the Florida Everglades. Its later version, the landing craft vehicle, personnel (LCVP), would carry hundreds of thousands of soldiers and marines to the beaches from 1942 onward.
Two rather contradictory points emerge. The first is that this was never a dream progression for the U.S. Marines, but a constantly impeded and all too frequently suspended pursuit of a doctrine ahead of its time. It was not just that there was little money for developing this form of warfare or that there were massive obstructions from certain circles in the army, the navy, and even the Corps itself; it was that penury, plus other calls upon the service, plus the politics of isolation frequently put the whole idea into suspense—operations in China and Nicaragua essentially depleted the Corps of its active units for long periods at a time. For almost all of the 1930s, the basic doctrinal manual was most appropriately termed the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. Even as late as 1939 the USMC commandant agreed that they should stress the marines’ base-defense role when asking Congress for additional funds, since expeditionary forces would be regarded as “interventionist.”28 The more positive aspect, however, was that, having established a doctrine of amphibious warfare and persuaded the Joint Chiefs to recognize the Corps’s special role in implementing it, survival was ensured even when the tools of war were missing. All that was needed was further Axis aggression and a consequent heightening of public alarm, both of which were to be forthcoming. All military organizations benefit from having real or perceived enemies.
But there was of course a second amphibious army in the Pacific during this war, namely, the U.S. Army itself. This is easily explained by the fact that the army was already substantially in that theater, that is, in the Philippines and Hawaii, when the Japanese attacked in December 1941. MacArthur’s presence there, the fact that he insisted that he lead the Allied riposte against Japan, and the equally important fact that the American Joint Chiefs didn’t want him anywhere else meant that considerable army divisions would be sent to the Pacific. Then there was the practical matter that the Marine Corps, even if expanding rapidly, was far too small to do all the land fighting in the Pacific. Since neither the navy nor the army would admit to allowing the other service to have the supreme command across this massive theater, there came about a compromise: MacArthur would run the new Southwest Pacific Command, a heavily army-run enterprise (though with considerable air and naval elements), and Nimitz would run Central Pacific Command as a U.S. Navy fiefdom, although with substantial army participation. It was clumsy—wouldn’t they spend more time competing for resources than combining to beat Japan? asked Churchill at Casablanca—but on the whole it worked.
It was not easy for the army. A whole generation of its officers and NCOs whose focus had been upon European-style fighting had to start thinking about using landing craft rather than battalions of heavy tanks. Some units had begun to experiment with amphibious warfare techniques in the late 1930s (chiefly crossing rivers), but it was nonetheless hard for an army officer to think that he had to learn from the marines, or borrow equipment, or on some occasions be under a U.S. Marine Corps general. And the army’s expansion in numbers after December 1941 was so much larger than that of any other service in absolute terms that it was bound to have lots of raw divisions fighting alongside, say, the marines’ more experienced 1st or 2nd Divisions (as in the Marianas campaign). But the army learned fast at this challenge of fighting across coral reefs. The apotheosis probably came at the great battle for Okinawa, where on April 1, 1945, two marine and two army divisions (covered, it might be noted, by more than forty aircraft carriers of different types) came ashore together near the small village of Hagushi. To the Japanese defenders, it made no difference which of the oncoming battalions, debouching from similar landing ships into similar landing craft, belonged to which enemy service. The invaders were all part of a vast amphibious force coming from the sea to the land.29
Controlling the Oceans and the Skies Above
All sorts of aircraft contributed to the increasing American control of the skies over the Western Pacific from 1943 onward, and it would be wrong not to acknowledge the importance of the squadrons of P-38 Lightnings, P-47 Thunderbolts, B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, B-24 Liberators, and so on. Yet it is fair to argue that the two greatest contributions to gaining aerial supremacy over Japan in those vast spaces west of Hawaii and north of New Guinea—a distance much larger than that from Ireland to Ukraine—were the Essex-class aircraft carriers and the F6F Hellcat fighters designed for work from those warships. They tipped the balance partly because they came into full service in that critical year of mid-1943 to early 1944, just when the American counterattack was building up speed, but also because they complemented each other, the Hellcat being a great defender of the carrier system that had launched it, as well as a terror to the enemy.
The story of the evolution of the U.S. fast carriers goes back to the early 1920s. American observers had been deeply impressed by the Royal Navy’s original action of converting certain older vessels, such as halfway-built battle cruisers, from gunships into flattops—vessels stripped of their entire superstructure to become horizontal takeoff and landing ships that would release fighters, high-altitude bombers, torpedo bombers, and dive-bombers, which could fly several hundred miles to hurt the enemy’s ships and then return to the mother craft. The renowned Admiral William Sims, generally regarded as the father of the U.S. carrier service, told a congressional committee as early as 1925: “A Fleet whose carriers give it command of the air over the enemy fleet can defeat the latter.… [T]he fast carrier is the capital ship of the future.”30
While the Royal Navy’s carrier service fell behind during the interwar years, in Japan and America—neither of which had an independent air service as a “third force”—the fleet air arm advanced, despite the usual prejudices of pro-battleship senior admirals. The endless miles of ocean beyond their coastal cities fueled this need to have carriers and their aircraft on the high seas for long-range protection of their respective homelands. In the early to mid-1930s, worried about a surprise attack out of the blue, some elements in the Japanese navy pitched the case for the universal abolition of carriers, fearing that this revolutionary weapons system could inflict more damage upon their country than it could inflict upon others—as in
deed turned out to be the case. But the notion was rejected in the international naval disarmament negotiations of the 1920s, and so Japan felt it had little else to do but build more carriers and better aircraft.
The Japanese naval air arm and their designers were extremely good, and their capacity to take a Western design and improve on it was remarkable. By 1930 their shipyards had produced the 60-plane Akagi and the 72-plane Kaga, both extremely fast and capacious; there was nothing like them in the West, though the United States was catching up. At the end of that decade those early but still effective prototypes were being reinforced by the Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku; and more carriers were to come. The ultra-efficient head of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, and the dynamic air wing commander Minoru Genda (who would later lead the Pearl Harbor attack) pushed for the carriers to be liberated from their original, static, homeland-defense role into a much more aggressive, freewheeling one. Yamamoto also pushed for increased production of newer Japanese aircraft, especially the formidable Mitsubishi Zero. By early December 1941, when its six large carriers struck at Pearl Harbor, it was the best naval fast carrier force the world had ever seen.31
But the war had just begun and the Americans would be coming back with carrier forces in such numbers as defied the imagination. The U.S. Navy, too, like the British and the Japanese, had been grappling with what turned out to be the largest technical-logistical-material problem of all, namely, if the power, speed, size, and shape of all aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s were exploding upward, as they were, far larger decks for the carriers’ tops were needed, far larger storage space to put the aircraft below, far more fuel holdings for eighty or more aircraft, far bigger antiaircraft protection systems, far more room for a vastly expanded crew, and so on. What was needed was a ship that was at least 850 feet long and had a propulsion system powerful enough to move the giant vessel at high speeds (over 30 knots) for days, even weeks. Designers would have to think through the challenges of creating a hull and a landing/takeoff deck that would be stable in all weather conditions and when fully laden with well over 5,000 tons of aircraft and fuel. Finally, the enormous losses suffered by the Royal Navy to Luftwaffe attacks in the Norway and Crete campaigns were a wake-up call to admiralty designers everywhere to double or even treble the number of antiaircraft guns (and crews) on board ship. All this made for very complex and highly expensive weapons systems.