Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  It is therefore unsurprising that Japanese submarines were an indecisive factor in the Pacific fighting. Of the sixteen deployed during the Leyte Gulf battles, for example, only one managed a kill, of a destroyer escort. By that time, however, the Imperial Japanese Army was truly mangling the effectiveness of the submarine fleet by insisting that they act as cargo vessels, bringing food and munitions supplies to bypassed island garrisons. The more garrisons that were isolated by the American leapfrog tactics, the harder the submarine fleet had to work in this capacity, seriously diverting its skills and assets. Occasionally they were ordered to carry out symbolic acts, such as the offshore shelling of Vancouver Island in 1942. What if those same boats, with their powerful torpedoes, had sat off the harbors of Portland and Long Beach and inflicted the devastation in those waters that Doenitz’s U-boats were doing up and down the eastern seaboard in those same months? As it was, the Japanese submarine fleet sank a mere 184 ships during the entire war. The official American naval historian of the war, S. E. Morison, usually gentle in his comments, felt forced to describe Japan’s U-boat policy as “verging on the idiotic.”62 It is difficult to disagree.

  While the Japanese submarine forces were frittered away, the surface navy showed an unbelievable myopia toward that most vital of maritime tasks, the protection of maritime commerce. In this regard, nothing could be more different than the attitude of the British and Japanese admiralties. Apart from confronting the few German and Italian battleships, and pushing through relief convoys to Malta and Egypt, the greater part of the Royal Navy was dedicated to getting Allied merchantmen safely across the high seas to the home island. By comparison, the Japanese simply assumed that the early conquests in the Pacific and Southeast Asia gave them control of the waters in between. Any insolent Allied intruder would be detected and sunk (and quite a few were, though the number of kills reported back to headquarters turned out to have been vastly inflated). They had nothing like Max Horton’s Western Approaches Command and no equivalent of RAF or RCAF Coastal Commands. They had no statistical or operational research department for analysis of the unfolding campaigns. There was very little weapons development: the depth charges they were using at the end of the war were roughly the same as those employed at the start of the conflict. Miniaturized radar, Hedgehogs, homing torpedoes, and hunter-killer groups were all missing.63

  By 1943–44, the Japanese naval high command was realizing that they had to cluster their merchant ships into convoys and provide a screen of escorts; but their tactics remained primitive. A sudden sinking of one of the Japanese merchant ships caused the escorts to rush around in all directions, haphazardly dropping depth charges, so the best thing the U.S. sub commander could do after firing his torpedoes was to lie on the ocean bottom (or at least go very deep) and wait for a few hours before resuming the stalking. Furthermore, following the great Philippine Sea and Marianas battles of June 1944, the American service commanders—especially Rear Admiral Lockwood at Pearl Harbor—had enough boats to group their submarines into small wolf packs. By September 1944 three such groups, each of three boats, were operating all around Formosan waters, including in the Straits, inflicting havoc on merchantmen and their destroyers alike. Apart from dropping dozens and sometimes even hundreds of depth charges—only a few of which hit these underwater predators—the Japanese navy had no other response, no new form of countermeasure. The statistics of Japanese merchant ship losses above show the extent of this abject failure.

  The American Surge

  Because the newly engineered tools of war, from torpedoes to landing craft to B-29 bombers, took so relatively long to produce in large numbers and reliable standard form, the American counteroffensive in the Pacific evolved much later than did the Allied comebacks in Europe: the Battle of the Atlantic was won, North Africa occupied, Sicily occupied, and southern Italy occupied before even the Gilberts operation (November 1943) began. But once the Americans had assembled and tested their newer systems, they struck at remarkable speed. It was a tribute to the Americans’ astonishing lift capacity that, at roughly the same time as the Allied counteroffensives began in North Africa and Europe, it could also be initiating a number of amphibious comebacks in theaters of war 8,000 miles away from Morocco. To the United States, the “Germany first” principle had never meant that they should hold back from aggressive actions in the Pacific once Japan’s own expansion had run out of steam, as had occurred as early as the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The main question, given the sheer distances involved between almost any two strategic points in the Pacific, and given the parallel need to train many more active divisions, receive many more aircraft and warships, and produce the all-critical landing craft in far larger numbers, was where the first recovery operations should be attempted. Until the highest authorities had made that decision, the most sensible thing to do, in the first instance, was to strengthen Allied positions in the Pacific and to acquire what Ronald Spector nicely described as “the seizure of Japan’s strategic points.”64

  The least significant of America’s counterblows, strategically, was the recovery of a couple of the Aleutian Islands (Kiska and Attu) from the Japanese garrisons that had been dropped off there as a sideshow to Midway. Even that reconquest did not take place until May–July 1943, amid constant fogs, and after a short while the Japanese abandoned those uninteresting atolls. Its navy offered resistance for half a day (the desultory Battle of the Komandorski Islands), then pulled back. Its army was not waiting at the beaches, so all American landings here were unopposed. The merit of this exercise was that it gave raw U.S. troops (100,000 of them) an opportunity for landing on distant shores, and the massive naval support—including bombardments by three battleships—an early chance to see how hard it was to do much damage to enemy troops holed up in distant hills. Its demerit was that it gave next to no chance—though there was some final resistance by Japanese troops on Kiska—to experience some fighting against an enemy determined to drive the landing forces back onto the reefs.65 Once having taken these storm-beaten, mist-clad islands, the American Joint Chiefs were content and turned elsewhere.

  Altogether more significant strategically were the earlier American-Australian counteroffensives in the Southwest Pacific theater, that is, in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (especially Guadalcanal). General MacArthur’s dogged series of amphibious landings and moppings-up of nearby Japanese garrisons was different from the Allied assaults against the shores of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France, just as they were, operationally, often a different tale from Central Pacific Command’s efforts to capture the Gilberts, Marianas, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. On the whole, the landings in the Southwest Pacific theater occurred at points along the enemy’s coastline that were not protected by troops, gun emplacements, and minefields. Of course the Japanese responded promptly and viciously to such Allied intrusions, but the local garrison was often a long way from where MacArthur landed, so the sheer physical problem of getting Allied troops from ship to shore in the face of massive resistance was rarely experienced during these campaigns. Even in the bloody struggle for Guadalcanal (August 1942–February 1943), the greatest gain came from being able to put 11,000 out of the 19,000 U.S. marines onshore on a single day without immediate opposition, thus enabling them to consolidate lines inland, grab the airfield, and then, encamped under the trees, to cause the Japanese to consistently underestimate the size of the American garrison for the rest of that grim battle.66

  Landings without direct opposition, at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, had their own important lessons for future assaults. While the marines were probably better prepared than any other forces for amphibious operations, that preparation had all been done in theory and as summer exercises. They, along with MacArthur’s army divisions in New Guinea and New Britain, were to benefit enormously from experimenting with preinvasion intelligence gathering, beachhead control, logistical follow-up, fire support (if necessary), aerial patrols, and, in general, effective command and control when th
ey landed unopposed. They also were beginning to learn how to deal with coral reefs and mangrove swamps, with rain forests 8,000 feet in altitude, with constant mists, and with very high rates of sickness, especially dysentery. It really was useful to begin a counteroffensive in places where the enemy wasn’t. It was better to push a mile or five inland before the enemy rudely showed up.

  There is one other illuminating point of comparison with the European amphibious operations of this time. In September 1943 Admiral Nimitz created a new operational command to be responsible for the seizure of the Gilbert Islands, the first step forward in the Central Pacific thrust. The story of the U.S. Marines’ attack upon Tarawa in late November is recorded earlier in this chapter, but as a landing roughly contemporaneous to the Sicily/Italy operations, it deserves a cross-reference here. Eisenhower took no chances in committing 478,000 troops to Sicily. In the Gilberts, another massive invasion force would be deployed. While the smaller island of Makin would be assaulted by 7,000 U.S. Army troops, a full 18,000 men of the 2nd Marine Division were to take Tarawa—and at long last Pete Ellis’s vision would unfold, but in far greater dimensions than he imagined. Supporting the amphibious forces for the Gilbert operations was an armada of brand-new and older battleships, fleet and escort carriers, squadrons of heavy cruisers, dozens of destroyers, 850 carrier aircraft, and 150 USAAF medium bombers. This naval force was already the largest fleet in the world. And all this for an island group (defended by a mere 3,000 naval troops on Tarawa and 800 on Makin) that was not even part of the critical external perimeter as defined by Imperial General Headquarters.

  Hence the postmortems over the shocking American combat losses in the Gilberts operation are at least as numerous as those over Dieppe, often to the point of forgetting that the islands were captured. Still, it was a sobering experience. Neither the distant naval bombardment nor the aerial attacks did much to harm the low-lying Japanese bunkers or to knock out many of the garrison’s guns. Command and control was ragged. Rear Admiral John R. Hill, in charge of the southern (Tarawa) operation, was located in the battleship USS Maryland, whose salvoes kept knocking out its own radio communications. The bombardment ceased too early, just as at the Somme and Gallipoli, so the defenders were able to resume their posts and pour fire on the attacking troops. Worst of all, the water level across the coral-filled lagoon was unusually low, which meant that the landing craft were stuck on the outer reef, and consequently the marines had to wade 700 yards to the shore—and were slaughtered. The very green army units on Makin made it to the beaches, but then were pinned down in the coconut groves. Finally, with reserve battalions brought in for both battles, the Americans prevailed, assisted greatly by the Japanese habit of suicidal counterattacks near the end. But the cost of the three-day battle for Tarawa was high: more than 1,000 American dead and 2,000 wounded, all to capture an island of less than 3 square miles. The press photos of dead marines floating in the water or lying across coral reefs was the most startling evidence yet to the American public that the Pacific War was going to be long and hard.

  What a difference from the seizure of the Mariana Islands, a mere eight months later, but by then the Marine Corps had figured out its amphibious-warfare techniques, the fast carriers were ranging around, the Hellcats were aloft, the Seabees were constructing gigantic runways made of bulldozed coral, and the B-29s were soon to be flying in. The marines at Tarawa had paid a price, but it would never need to be repeated.

  Thus, a mere nine days after the Normandy landings, an enormous force of American troops (127,000 of them, chiefly marines) began to land on the Mariana Islands, thirteen time zones eastward from the English Channel. This was the single most important amphibious operation in the Pacific War, and far more threatening to Japan than MacArthur’s hops along the north coast of New Guinea on his way to the Philippines. By taking Saipan and also Guam—the first American possession to be reoccupied—Central Pacific Command was able to acquire, at last, air bases for the long-range strategic bombing of the Japanese homeland. Once the islands were seized and the surrounding waters made safe, there was very little Tokyo could do about it. This operation, coming as it did between the strikes against the Caroline Islands and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, was critical.67

  The early operations by the U.S. carrier squadrons around the Marianas had given Nimitz’s forces command of the air. The two-day naval bombardment was of a much heavier variety than that carried out off Omaha Beach, and more in the measured British style; the distant firing by the nine brand-new American battleships didn’t do much, but when the slower battleships and heavy cruisers came closer inland, some of them to within 1,500 yards, the shellings began to count. Still, even close-in firing could not crush well-built positions, and the Japanese were able to inflict lots of damage upon the experienced but mislanded 2nd Marine Division, while many amphibious craft (i.e., the LVTs) could not surmount the beach obstacles. But the Americans battered their way in. They had 8,000 marines onshore in the first twenty minutes, and 20,000 men on Saipan at the end of the first day; in that regard, it was somewhat like Utah Beach in Normandy. Supporting aircraft were overhead, and the battleships were firing from close-in positions. The beaches were clearly marked out by color codes. Eventually there was a separate channel for return traffic: empty landing craft, damaged vessels, and hospital ships with their dead and wounded. There was no external interference, due to the smashing of Japanese naval airpower in the battle of the Philippine Sea.

  Operation Forager was not a perfect job. Amazingly, there still was not an interservice HQ ship like the Largs or Bolulu; overall command for ship-to-shore movement rested with a very competent Commodore Thiess in a large patrol craft, but that was not the same and certainly would not have worked off Normandy.68 The LVTs were feebly powered and, as noted, often could not reach their destinations over craggy ranges of coral and rocks. Naval shelling was much less useful than the aerial strafing of the beaches, but even the latter was ragged and often distracted to ancillary missions. What was needed (and would not arrive for another year) were escort carriers specifically tasked for beachhead support and not called away for possible high-seas battles. The Japanese garrisons fought as vigorously as ever and would never surrender; it took three days of tough combat to secure the northern beachheads of Saipan, during which one particular U.S. Army division (the 27th New York National Guard) faltered and was sharply criticized by the overall commander (a marine general), causing an interservice row. Yet the results were not in doubt, and the island fell on July 9. A little later all opposition on Guam was eradicated. Within another several weeks, the Seabees had started construction of those ultralong B-29 airstrips, their bulldozers tolling the end for many Japanese cities and for the Japanese Empire itself.

  Perhaps we can forgive Samuel Eliot Morison, that patriotic Harvard professor turned into the official U.S. naval historian by his former student FDR and sent off to the Pacific War, for his proud statement summing up this operation just a few years after the war: “Added together, ‘Overlord’ in Europe and ‘Forager’ in the Pacific made the greatest military effort ever put forth by the United States or any other nation at one time. It should be a matter of pride and congratulation to the American and British people that their united efforts made June of 1944 the greatest month yet in military and naval history; that simultaneously they were able to launch these two mighty overseas expeditions against their powerful enemies in the East and the West.”69

  Rokossovski and Konev, battling their way across the Dnieper against two dozen Wehrmacht divisions, may have ranked this achievement differently, but in the history of amphibious warfare operations Morison was surely correct. Perhaps the shadows of the Spanish Royal Marines were there at the appropriately named Caroline and Mariana island groups, once the possessions of Philip of Spain. The Allies had at last figured out how to land on an enemy-held shore.

  Amphibious warfare was at the center of everything, and by 1944 the landing operations were becoming e
ver larger and more ambitious. Realizing that his Southwest Pacific Command was in danger of being relegated to secondary status and determined to lead an American return to the Philippines, MacArthur had begun to accelerate his pace of advance from November 1943 (Bougainville) onward, ignoring and isolating the great Japanese base at Rabaul, and skipping along the north shore of New Guinea. But the advance forces of his command did not reach the far end of that massive island until July 1944, and by that time so much else had happened, mainly in the Central Pacific theater.

  The rest of the Pacific War thus consisted of an unfolding of American amphibious power against tenacious and suicidal Japanese resistance: in the Philippines from December 1944 to March 1945, at Iwo Jima from February to March 1945, and at Okinawa from April to June 1945. On April 7 the first P-51 long-range Mustangs flew from Iwo Jima bases as escorts to the B-29s attacking Japanese cities. By this stage in the war, however, there was little for these high-flying, long-range fighters to do; the bombers were razing those cities to the ground with impunity.