by Toland, John
Both Roosevelt and Churchill stayed at the Anfa Hotel, a modern building four miles outside the city, atop a hill, surrounded by tropical gardens and luxurious private villas, a visual paradise with bougainvillea and begonia in bloom and the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean as a background. The entire hotel area was fenced in by barbed wire and protected by an army of military police. Squads of security agents lurked around the grounds, and most of the Moroccan servants had been replaced by GI’s and Tommies.
The American military leaders—the Joint Chiefs of Staff—held preliminary discussions at the hotel on January 13. Unexpected triumphs had come in the past two months on both sides of the world, and it was time to take another look at global strategy and make long-range plans for victory in Europe and the Far East. The British wanted a limited war in the Pacific; only after Hitler was defeated should full attention be turned to the Far East. The American Chiefs, spurred by the thorny Admiral King, felt that the British underestimated the Japanese, and decided to call for both offensive and defensive operations in the Pacific and Burma.
The next day they met with their British counterparts. From the first, King took the offensive; only 15 percent of Allied resources was going into the Pacific and this was far too little to keep the Japanese from consolidating their initial victories.
The British Chief of Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, with his habitual air of barely concealed irritation, replied that the Japanese were definitely on the defensive. Moreover, the situation in the West was now so favorable that victory was possible before the end of the year—but not if forces and matériel had to be diverted to places like Burma.
King retorted that Japan was still powerful, and if the Burma campaign was not pressed Chiang Kai-shek might pull out of the war. Seizure of the Philippines would probably have to wait for the defeat of Hitler, but the prompt capture of Truk and the Marianas was mandatory.
King’s rugged eloquence had little effect on the British. They had come to Casablanca determined to have their own way, and moreover, had arrived elaborately prepared to get it. Anchored a few miles away was a 6,000-ton liner, their staff headquarters and communications center. It also contained “technical mechanism for presenting every quantative calculation that might be called for.”
In private King urged his compatriots to be firm, and at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs on January 17 Marshall threatened the British: if the Pacific did not get 30 percent of Allied resources it “would necessitate the United States regretfully withdrawing from the commitments in the European theater.” The British, somewhat shaken, countered by suggesting that operations in the Far East be limited in 1943 to the seizure of Rabaul and Burma.
King would not give up on the Marianas. There were already enough forces in the area for a campaign and it would be a waste of manpower to let them sit idle. Besides, the operation wouldn’t drain off any resources intended for Europe.
The British reaction was lukewarm. Nothing should be undertaken in the Pacific that might weaken the attack on Germany. King’s response was icy; it was up to the Americans alone to decide where and when to attack in the Pacific.
His words left no doubt that the Pacific was closest to the hearts of Americans. The names Pearl Harbor, Bataan and Guadalcanal stirred them more than Rome, Paris and Berlin. A reasonable compromise, taking into account this national pride (and shame) would have to be worked out.
Brooke was dejected. He feared that nothing the British could ever say would have “much effect in weaning King away from the Pacific.” The war in Europe was “just a nuisance that kept him from waging his Pacific War undisturbed.” At lunch he despairingly told Sir John Dill, “It is no use, we shall never get agreement with them.”
The objective Dill had often acted as a buffer between Brooke and the Americans since Christmas 1941, when he became the British representative in Washington of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. “You have already got agreement on most of the points,” he placated the general. “It only remains to settle the rest.”
“I won’t budge an inch,” Brooke said.
“Of course you will,” Dill coaxed him with a smile. “You know you have to reach an agreement or else put the whole thing up to the Prime Minister and the President. And you know as well as I do the mess that they would make of it.”
By evening the planners for both sides had worked out an agreement outlining the Allied objectives for 1943 in such general terms that both Brooke and King were satisfied. It stated that “operations in the Pacific shall continue with the object of maintaining pressure on Japan” (which pleased King) but that such operations should not excessively drain resources from Europe (which pleased Brooke). However, it was the American Chiefs of Staff who would decide whether they were a drain. When Harry Hopkins read the agreement he wrote Dill: “I think this is a very good paper and damn good plan—so I am feeling much better.”
Both Churchill and Roosevelt accepted it almost without question. Churchill was high in his praise of the Combined Chiefs and said, “There never has been, in all of the interallied conferences I have known, anything like the prolonged professional examination of the whole scene of the world war in its military, its armament production and its economic aspects.”
But the differences had merely been masked by compromise; it was a bandage over a deep wound.
On the last day of the conference Prime Minister and President, basking in the hot African sun, chatted in generalities with the reporters about the course of the war. Then, without preliminaries, Roosevelt made an announcement. “The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power,” he said deliberately and thoughtfully, “means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan.”
It was a bombshell to everyone but Churchill, who had heard Roosevelt utter the phrase the previous day at a private luncheon attended by Hopkins and Elliott Roosevelt. Churchill had first frowned, then he broke into a grin and said, “Perfect! And I can just see how Goebbels and the rest of ’em’ll squeal!”*
But it was soon apparent that Hitler and Tojo had been handed an invaluable piece of propaganda to incite their people to resist to the end. Moreover, many in the Allied camp, particularly the military, were disturbed by the pronouncement. Admiral William O. Leahy, for example, reasoned that now the enemy had to be destroyed; diplomacy had been abandoned and the Allies were set on the rigid course of unlimited war.
2.
In the Pacific, Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura decided to use the lull after Guadalcanal to his advantage and reinforce the garrison at Lae, now the capital of New Guinea, with 6,400 troops. This strategic town, some 150 miles west of Buna on the north coast, was important to the defense of Rabaul itself. At midnight, on the last day of February, a convoy of eight transports and eight destroyers under Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura left Rabaul on a counterclockwise course around New Britain into what would soon be called the Bismarck Sea. As the ships plowed through stormy waters the next afternoon, a B-24 sighted them. The following day they were found again and attacked by twenty-nine heavy bombers. One transport was sunk and two others set afire, but the convoy continued on course.
The U. S. Fifth Air Force (formerly the Allied Air Force) in New Guinea, however, was stronger than the Japanese knew. There were at the time 207 bombers and 127 fighters in the area and General George Kenney had drastically modified his bombers as part of a revolutionary attack technique against surface vessels. The noses of B-25’s had been stripped and outfitted with eight .50-caliber machine guns for strafing from as low as 200 feet. The pilots could also get down almost to sea level and release their bombs just before reaching the target. The bombs, which would either hit the ship or skip into its side, were equipped with five-second delay fuses, allowing the attackers to be at a safe distance before the explosions. Kenney had been waiting for the proper time to try out this skip bombing and Kimura’s convoy was the perfect opportunity.
At ten o’clock in the morning on March 3, eighteen B-17 Flying Fortresses
and twenty medium bombers made a conventional run on the transports from 7,000 feet, followed by eighteen Australian Beaufighters strafing the line of ships. Kimura was undeterred. Then a dozen B-25 skip bombers swooped in a few yards above the waves. The Japanese captains assumed they were torpedo bombers and had begun to turn their ships away when the multiple machine guns in the noses of the B-25’s sprayed the troops crowded on the decks. It was slaughter. At the last minute bombs tumbled down from masthead level. Almost half the bombs, seventeen of them, found their mark.
A dozen more planes came in low. These were light bombers, but instead of launching torpedoes they, too, “skipped” their bombs and raked the decks with machine guns in their noses as they hurdled over the transports. Their bombing score was better, eleven out of twenty. Every ship was hit in the first few minutes, and either sunk or badly damaged. One destroyer went down and three others were left crippled.
The attack continued through the afternoon. The damaged ships were finished off, and the survivors in rafts and lifeboats ruthlessly strafed. The attackers were in no mood to fight a gentleman’s war. They had heard too many stories from Australians whose buddies had been bayoneted after capture and left to perish with placards reading: “It took them a long time to die.”†
The debacle, together with the sinking of four freighters and a tanker by American submarines, discouraged Imamura from sending further reinforcements to New Guinea by convoy. He could not afford to let that island become another Guadalcanal.
Allied troops were already moving in force toward Lae; from there they could leap across the strait between New Guinea and New Britain and launch a ground assault on Rabaul itself. MacArthur’s ambitious plan necessitated an additional eighteen hundred planes and five fresh divisions.
His request called for a major reassessment of priorities, and representatives of each of the Pacific commands were summoned to Washington to participate in the Pacific Military Conference. Inevitably it revived the continuing debate over theater priorities. The Army Air Force representative did not support MacArthur; he claimed that the Casablanca agreement gave the bombing offensive against Germany first priority. The Navy just as vigorously called for seizure of Rabaul as well as “adequate forces” to keep the Japanese on the defensive.
Unanimity was impossible and the problem was brought to the Joint Chiefs. Here the debate resumed, with Admiral King predictably championing the Pacific and General Arnold’s deputy refusing to let up on the air raids over Germany. Each used the vague Casablanca decisions to support his argument. But settlement had to be reached and it was eventually agreed to limit the drive on Rabaul but prepare for the “ultimate seizure of the Bismarck Archipelago.”
MacArthur accepted the compromise with uncharacteristic equanimity and set his planners to work on Operation Cartwheel. It was a complicated, yard-by-yard offensive involving thirteen separate phases. It would begin about the middle of June and conclude in December with a combined Army-Navy assault on Rabaul.
New Guinea was a point of contention at Imperial Headquarters as well. The Army wanted to defend it in force; it would make an excellent stage for massive ground operations. To the Navy, the Solomons were far more important. Its islands had many more air bases than New Guinea, and if Bougainville fell, Rabaul—and Truk itself, headquarters of Combined Fleet—would be endangered. The Army insisted that New Guinea was more significant; if it was lost, the Philippines and Java would be cut off. Strategic logic was on the side of the Navy, and it had already been proved how costly it was to send convoys to New Guinea. But the more skillful Army advocates prevailed. On March 25 Admiral Yamamoto and General Imamura each received a directive giving priority to New Guinea.
For both Americans and Japanese it was a time for planning and preparation rather than combat; in the lull each side strengthened bases and brought up reinforcements. The Imperial Navy had lost the argument, but it was Admiral Yamamoto who was ordered to deliver the first strikes against the enemy. His task was to destroy Allied air and sea power in the entire area, and he devised I-Go (Operation I), which would first concentrate on the Solomons, then New Guinea.
Early in April he moved to Rabaul with Ugaki, Kuroshima, Watanabe, and other key members of his staff, to take personal charge of the offensive. On April 7 Guadalcanal was hit with the greatest air concentration since Pearl Harbor—224 fighters and bombers. The pilots returned, as usual, with enthusiastic reports, and as usual, little damage had been done. One destroyer and two smaller ships had been sunk, and seven Marine fighter planes shot down.
Yamamoto then turned his attention to New Guinea and launched three big strikes within four days at Oro Bay, Port Moresby and Milne Bay. Pilots reported that 175 planes had been destroyed and one cruiser, two destroyers and twenty-five transports sunk. No more than five Allied planes had been eliminated, one transport and one merchantman sent to the bottom and another beached, but the reports led Yamamoto to believe that the aims of I-Go had been achieved.
Before returning to Truk, he scheduled a one-day inspection tour of defenses in the Solomons. His first stop would be Ballale, a small island off southern Bougainville, for a brief visit with troops from General Maruyama’s division who were recuperating from their ordeal on Guadalcanal. He wanted to thank them in person for their sacrifices.
General Imamura had misgivings about the tour and told Yamamoto of his own narrow escape from an American fighter plane near Bougainville. But Yamamoto was insistent; even the commander of the Eleventh Air Fleet could not dissuade him. Commander Watanabe wrote out the schedule by hand and personally took it to Eighth Fleet headquarters. He wanted the information delivered by courier, but a communications officer said it had to be sent by radio. Watanabe protested; the Americans would pick up the message and perhaps decode it. Impossible, said the communications officer. “This code only went into effect on April first and cannot be broken.”
Watanabe’s fears were justified. Moments after the message had been transmitted it was intercepted and delivered to Combat Intelligence headquarters at Pearl Harbor. The men in the cellar, who had helped win the Battle of Midway, labored most of the night and by dawn of April 14 had a decoded plain text in Japanese. Lieutenant Colonel Alva Lasswell, a Marine language officer, and his staff filled in the blanks and identified the code symbols for the place names. RR, for example, meant Rabaul, and RXZ was Ballale.
At 8:02 A.M. Commander Edward Layton, the fleet intelligence officer, was admitted to Admiral Nimitz’ office. “Our old friend Yamamoto,” said Layton and handed over the message. The admiral read that Yamamoto would leave Rabaul at 6 A.M., April 18, in a medium bomber escorted by six fighters, and would arrive at Ballale Island at 8 A.M. He looked up with a smile. “Do we try to get him?”
“He’s unique among their people,” Layton replied. Yamamoto was idolized by the younger officers, and by the enlisted men as well. “You know the Japanese psychology; it would stun the nation.”
“The one thing that concerns me is whether they could find a more effective fleet commander.” The answer was that Yamamoto was “head and shoulders” above all other Japanese admirals. “It’s down in Halsey’s bailiwick,” said Nimitz finally. “If there’s a way, he’ll find it. All right, we’ll try it.”
Nimitz wrote out a message for Halsey authorizing him to “initiate preliminary planning.” The mission was approved by both Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and the President, and on April 15 Nimitz radioed Halsey final approval with a “good luck and good hunting.”
Sunday, April 18, dawned clear and humid. Exactly two years before, Doolittle had bombed Tokyo. Yamamoto, methodical as ever, was ready. His aides had persuaded him to wear green fatigues rather than his more conspicuous dress whites. As he approached his plane, a Mitsubishi bomber, he turned to the naval commander in Rabaul, Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka (cousin of Nagumo’s chief of staff), and handed him two scrolls to give to the new commander of the Eighth Fleet. They were poems by Emperor Meiji, copied out by Yama
moto.
The admiral’s plane left Rabaul at exactly 6 A.M., Tokyo time. With him was his secretary, the fleet medical officer and the staff officer for air. A second Mitsubishi took off with Chief of Staff Ugaki and several other staff officers. Commander Watanabe watched both planes disappear, disappointed that he was not in the party.
The two bombers headed south at 5,000 feet, so close that Ugaki feared their wings might collide. Six Zero fighters hovered protectively overhead. It was a pleasant, uneventful trip, and soon after Bougainville appeared on the left the planes began to descend for a landing at the Kahili airfield.
From the south, sixteen tightly grouped P-38 Lightning fighters from Henderson Field were approaching Bougainville at 2,000 feet. Their commander, Major John W. Mitchell, looked at his watch. It was 9:34 (an hour later than Tokyo time). They had flown more than six hundred miles over open water, extra fuel tanks strapped onto the wings, on an indirect course with only a compass and an air-speed indicator to guide them—and, incredibly, had reached the interception point at the right moment. Hopefully, Yamamoto’s plane would appear in one minute. It should be about three miles to the west. There wasn’t a plane in sight.
“Bogey’s eleven o’clock.” It was one of Mitchell’s pilots breaking radio silence in a low voice. “High.”
Mitchell counted eight enemy planes. Two were bombers. There should have been one. Could the four Lightnings in the “killer” group knock down both bombers? The leader of this group, Captain Thomas G. Lanphier, Jr., was also counting the Japanese planes. They looked like bursts of antiaircraft fire. He switched to internal fuel, dumping his auxiliary tanks. The Japanese came on, unsuspecting. Two miles from the coast Lanphier noticed silvery belly tanks falling from the Zeros. The ambushers had been discovered. The two Japanese bombers began diving toward the jungle.