D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  At the same time, Marpi Point convinced many Americans that Japanese civilians were as “fanatical” as Japanese soldiers, and that Japan could be defeated only by a war of mass extermination, a war not only against combatants but also against noncombatants, as Robert Sherrod had suggested after Tarawa. That kind of war would be fought from the air, from bases in the Marianas, culminating in the flight of the Enola Gay from Tinian to Hiroshima. But another kind of total war had already begun at Tarawa and Saipan, a war to the finish with an enemy who would not surrender, no matter how badly he was beaten.

  This merciless island fighting was fed by inflamed racism. To the Japanese people, who prided themselves on being genetically “pure,” uncontaminated by immigration, Americans were mongrelized brutes—devils and demons. After the fall of Saipan the Japanese government stepped up its organized campaign of racial vilification. Here is an article from a popular Japanese magazine:

  IT HAS GRADUALLY BECOME CLEAR THAT the American enemy, driven by its ambition to conquer the world, is coming to attack us, and as the breath and body odor of the beast approach, it may he of some use if we draw the demon’s features here.

  Our ancestors called them Ebisu or savages long ago, and labeled the very first Westerners who came to our country the Southern Barbarians. To the hostile eyes of the Japanese of former times they were “red hairs” and “hairy foreigners.” and perceived as being of about as much worth as a foreign ear of corn. We in our times should manifest comparable spirit. Since the barbaric tribe of Americans are devils in human skin who come from the West, we should call them Saibanki, or Western Barbarian Demons.66

  Posters in classrooms and other public places exhorted students to “kill the American animal.” American soldiers in the Pacific, on the other hand, did not need propaganda slogans to feed their hatred of the enemy. Japanese atrocities against war prisoners and their suicidal banzai charges were seen as signs of their barbarity. The Marine Corps film shot on Tarawa depicted Japanese defenders as “living, snarling rats.” As one veteran of the Pacific fighting wrote: “The Japanese made a perfect enemy. They had so many characteristics that an American Marine could hate. Physically, they were small, a strange color, and, by some standards, unattractive. … Marines did not consider that they were killing men. They were wiping out dirty animals.”67

  After the fall of Saipan, Japanese military leaders knew the war was lost. Their weakened fleet was powerless to break the American naval blockade, which was able to pull the noose tighter from advanced bases on Saipan. And they had no air arm to protect their cities of wood from the long-range B-29s that would soon begin taking off from the Marianas. “Our war was lost,” said a Japanese admiral, years later, “with the loss of Saipan.”68 Yet Emperor Hirohito and his chief ministers refused to accept defeat; and out in the Pacific, the soldiers of the empire continued to fight with undiminished bravery, confident of victory.

  “Do you think Japan will win the war?” an Army interrogator in the Philippines asked a Japanese prisoner not long after the fall of Saipan.

  “Of course Japan will win the war.”

  “Why?”

  “Japan can beat anybody.”

  “What makes you think Japan will win?”

  “Japan has never lost a war. She cannot be beaten. All of Japan is one mind.”69

  How does one defeat such an enemy? Justice M. Chambers, a Marine at Marpi Point, answered for countless American troops in the Pacific. “[General William Tecumseh] Sherman was right. To win the war and get it over with, just kill off many of the other side, make it terrible, and the war will stop.”70

  That is what America eventually did. That is how the war against Japan was won. The debate over the morality of it was left to history.

  PACIFIC STRATEGY

  The invasion of the Marianas had supported MacArthur’s drive up the coast of New Guinea by luring the imperial Fleet into the Battle of the Philippine Sea. This prevented it from coming to the aid of Japan’s beleaguered garrison on the island of Biak, off the coast of New Guinea, the site of a strategically important airfield the enemy could not afford to surrender.

  The battle for the island of Biak had been preceded by some of the most inspired campaigning of the war by a sixty-two-year-old military marvel who had lost nothing to time. On April 22, 1944—less than two months before D-Day on Saipan—Douglas MacArthur had sent General Robert L. Eichelberger on an audacious 600-mile leap over several enemy strongholds to desolate Hollandia, on the north coast of Netherlands New Guinea. After taking Hollandia and another airstrip at Aitape, just to the east, the Americans withstood a furious counterattack by the Japanese Eighteenth Army, weakened and depleted by its long jungle march to reach the enemy that had just bypassed them. In weeks of murderous fighting, the Eighteenth Army lost nearly 9,000 men to enemy fire and tropical disease, leaving no Japanese force of consequence to stop MacArthur from completing the conquest of New Guinea.

  The American Army had then continued to sweep westward and northward along the coast, in search of hard ground in the rain-soaked region on which to build airstrips for the heavy bombers MacArthur needed for his reconquest of the Philippines. That May, MacArthur’s forces had finally secured firm terrain for General Kenney’s bombers on the coastal island of Wakde and, MacArthur thought, on the larger, heavily defended island of Biak, east of New Guinea’s Vogelkop Peninsula. But Biak would not be pacified. With the enemy holed up in cave-pocked ridges and gorges, the fighting there was as rough as anywhere in the Pacific. It turned into a stalemate that could easily have been an American disaster had the enemy brought in reinforcements and naval gunpower. But just as Japan’s two largest battleships were steaming southward to bombard the American beachhead, word reached Tokyo of Admiral Spruance’s arrival in the Marianas. The Biak operation was abruptly abandoned and the Combined Fleet headed out to meet its fate in the deep waters of the Philippine Sea, dooming Biak’s starving cave dwellers.

  And now it was nearly over—MacArthur’s two-year-long campaign over a distance of 2,000 miles, through some of the most fearsome terrain and weather on earth. His plan had unfolded almost flawlessly. And his officers, William Manchester writes, “now thought of him as almost supernatural, a view he of course encouraged.”71

  That summer and early fall, after taking the island of Noemfoor, some sixty miles west of Biak, and the village of Sansapor on the extreme western tip of New Guinea, MacArthur’s forces leaped ahead to the island of Morotai, bypassing a Japanese garrison of 25,000 troops on the large island of Halmahera. With the securing of Morotai, all of New Guinea was isolated and the interminable battle—the longest of the war—ended, except for the still lethal process of cleaning out the remaining enemy troops, a thankless job left to the Australians. Of the over 157,000 Japanese soldiers sent to fight in New Guinea, only 10,000 or so survived. Most of the dead succumbed to starvation and disease.

  On September 15, just after his troops landed unopposed on Morotai, Douglas MacArthur arrived to inspect his new island outpost, only 300 air miles from the Philippines. “He gazed out to the northwest,” an aide remembers, “almost as though he could already see through the mist the rugged lines of Bataan and Corregidor.”72 Then he said, “They are waiting for me up there. It has been a long time.”73

  As MacArthur pondered his next move, America’s Pacific strategy was shifting under his feet. The issue was where to strike next. MacArthur’s plan had been to climb the ladder of the Philippine archipelago from Mindanao, at the southernmost tip, to Leyte, and finally to Luzon. Admiral Ernest King, however, wanted to bypass the huge island group, which would be difficult to conquer and hold, and invade Formosa, which was closer to Japan.

  For a time, the President, George Marshall, and most of the Joint Chiefs had sided with King, but in July 1944, at a stormy strategy session with MacArthur and Nimitz in Hawaii, Roosevelt had given “the nod, though no final decision, to Luzon.”74

  MacArthur had been insistently persuasive. As he
told Roosevelt, he had promised both his imprisoned troops and the conquered Filipino people that he would return to liberate them. “Promises must be kept,” he pleaded with Roosevelt, his voice cracking with emotion; this was as much a moral as a military issue.75

  The general also made his case on solid strategic grounds, and this was probably more persuasive. It would be better to control the Philippines than far smaller Formosa. From the long archipelago, American forces could command the 700-mile-wide South China Sea, completely cutting off Japan from her southern conquests. And the Filipino partisans, who had been waging a ceaseless guerrilla war against 400,000 Japanese occupation troops, would greatly aid the liberation movement. What’s more. Luzon could not be easily bypassed on the way to Formosa, as King proposed; it was simply too big. Any attempt to sail around its flanks would expose American ships to bomber attacks from the island’s excellent airfields.

  Although the wily President had not committed himself, MacArthur had left Pearl Harbor confident that the two Pacific offenses—his own and Nimitz’s—would converge at Luzon, not Formosa.

  Several MacArthur biographers have suggested that the general and the President, both master schemers, may have struck a covert deal in Hawaii—Roosevelt to back the Luzon invasion in return for MacArthur’s agreement to issue a stream of press releases announcing great battlefield successes in the Pacific achieved with Washington’s unwavering support.76 Since there are no official transcripts of the meeting, this plausible idea is improvable. But MacArthur had been overpowering in his own defense. “Give me an aspirin before I go to bed,” the President called to his physician after three hours in the general’s company. “In fact, give me another aspirin to take in the morning. In all my life nobody has ever talked to me the way MacArthur did.”77

  PLANNING THE PACIFIC OFFENSIVE IN HAWAII, JULY 1944. LEFT TO RIGHT: GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, PRESIDENT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, ADMIRAL WILLIAM LEAHY, AND ADMIRAL CHESTER NIMITZ (SC).

  That September, at the time of the Morotai operation, the Combined Chiefs of Stall gave MacArthur the official go-ahead to invade Mindanao in November and Leyte in December. A final decision on the next objective would be made later, but Formosa was now off the table. A recent Japanese offensive against the Chinese Nationalists deprived the Allies of the China air bases they had been counting on to subdue Formosa. This forced even King to waver, but he did not relent until he was informed by Allied planners that the conquest of Formosa would require air bases on Luzon and more troops than MacArthur and Nimitz, together, had at their disposal.78

  To protect MacArthur’s right flank, the Navy and Marines would take Japanese-held Peleliu in the Palau Islands, 550 miles east of Mindanao, knocking out its excellent air base and building a support facility for initial operations in Mindanao. But within a week almost everything changed. In conducting softening up carrier raids on the Philippines and nearby islands, Admiral Bull Halsey downed an incredible 500 planes and met unexpectedly light resistance. Seeing an opportunity here, he immediately sent a top secret message to Nimitz recommending that the Mindanao operation be canceled and that MacArthur strike at Leyte as soon as possible. This, he argued, would make the invasion of Peleliu, which he feared would be “another Tarawa,” unnecessary.79 Nimitz sent Halsey’s recommendation, with his approval only of the acceleration of the Philippines operation, to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, which were meeting in Quebec. After getting MacArthur’s consent, they changed the timetable. MacArthur would bypass Mindanao and make an amphibious assault on Leyte on October 20.

  Nimitz’s decision not to call back the Peleliu invasion force, which was only three days from the island, was a major mistake. The rationale for the invasion had disappeared. He might have been trying to appease MacArthur, who wanted all the air support he could get, but Nimitz had also been informed by American intelligence that Peleliu would be easy to take, a two-or three-day operation.

  It was one of the worst intelligence blunders of the war. When finally subdued after months of fighting, Peleliu was virtually worthless. The swiftly advancing Pacific war had passed it by, turning it into a backwater fuel depot. But the cost of taking it was unconscionable—almost 10,000 Marines and Army infantry killed or wounded in perhaps the most savage major battle of the Pacific theater. “The only difference between Iwo Jima and Peleliu,” remarked General Roy Geiger, who commanded the assault troops at Peleliu, “was that at Iwo Jima, there were twice as many Japs on an island twice as large, and they had three Marine divisions to take it, while we had one Marine division to take Peleliu.”80

  The defenders of Peleliu put up a sign. “We will build a barrier across the Pacific with our bodies.”81 That foretold the ferocity of the fight.

  A Marine at Peleliu

  WITH THE OLD BREED

  The 1st Marine Division was given the ugly assignment of taking Peleliu, the main island of the Palaus, an eighty-mile are of islands halfway between Guam and the Philippines. D-Day was scheduled for September 15, 1944. That summer the division was in rest camp on Pavuvu in the Russell Islands, eighty miles from Guadalcanal. The 1st Marine Division had done most of the fighting in the epic battle of Guadalcanal and had just completed a tough assignment with General MacArthur, taking Cape Gloucester, on the island of New Britain, in miserable jungle fighting at the peak of the monsoon season. They were a spirited, veteran outfit, nicknamed the Old Breed, even though over three quarters of the men had not yet reached the age of twenty-one. Already legendary among their warriors was Colonel Chesty Puller, whose reckless audacity had won him a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart on Guadalcanal.

  One of their newest replacements was a skinny, soft-voiced twenty-year-old from Mobile, Alabama, named Eugene B. Sledge, “Sledgehammer” as he was known to his buddies in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. Sledge was a doctor’s son, a quiet, thoughtful boy who read widely and knew what the war was about and wanted to get into it. Impatient to see combat, he had deliberately flunked out of a Marine officer training program at Georgia Tech to become an enlisted man. By the time he finished officer training the war might be over, he told his protesting parents. He had joined the Marines, he said, to fight not to study. Even so, he wondered if he could face up to combat—and whether he could kill.

  Sledge was patriotic and deeply religious. He neither smoked nor drank, and one of his passions was bird watching. After the war he became a professor of biology, specializing in ornithology, at a small Alabama college. There, in his free moments, he completed the war memoir he had begun immediately after returning from Peleliu, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. Published in 1981, it has become a small classic, one of the finest personal accounts of combat ever written.

  The book is based on a secret diary Sledge kept during the war. “My parents taught me the value of history,” he told the writer Studs Terkel after the war. “Both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army. They didn’t talk about the glory of war. They talked about how terrible it was.

  “During my third day overseas, I thought I should write all this down for my family. In all my reading about the Civil War, I never read about how the troops felt and what it was like from day to day. We knew how the generals felt and what they ate.

  “We were told diaries were forbidden, because if we were killed or captured, any diary might give the Japanese information. So I kept little notes, which I slipped into the pages of my Gideons’ New Testament….

  “Some of the supervisors never knew I was keepin’ notes: ‘We just thought you were awfully pious.’”1

  When Sledge joined the 1st Marine Division as a mortarman in a rifle company the men were “bone-tired and decimated from the bloody fighting on the rain-drenched jungle island of New Britain, off the eastern coast of New Guinea,” recalls another new replacement, James D. Seidler. “Most of the division was dumped on Pavuvu Island, which had been a British coconut plantation before the war, so there were four years of rotting palm fronds and coconuts, along
with thousands of land crabs, huge rats, snakes, and other assorted critters. And mud. It took three months’ hard work to make it habitable.”2

  EUGENE B. “SLEDGEHAMMER” SLEDGE (LRP).

  Years later, Sledge described the place: “Huge fruit bats came out all night and flew around and got into fights with rats in the palm trees right above our tents. Land crabs scuttled through the tents all night and each day you had to shake your shoes out to get them out. Morale should have been low, but most of us were in our teens and early twenties and were part of an elite and proud outfit.

  “There was no recreation except Volleyball, base ball, and B grade movies we watched on log seats in a coconut grove. But I think this is one of the things that bonded us all so closely together…. We didn’t have any distractions. We had to lean on each other.” In a recently published sequel to With the Old Breed, Sledge writes that the veterans “treated us replacements like brothers—with the understanding we had to prove ourselves in combat. They were the best teachers in the world in how to kill Japs because, simply said, that is the infantryman’s job, to kill the enemy….

  “A passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all the Marines I knew.” When Sledge asked a veteran of Guadalcanal why, he got an unbelieving stare and this emphatic reply, “Because they’re the meanest sonabitches that ever lived.”3