by Toland, John
The Joint Chiefs stood firm. The road through the central Pacific was shorter and would make it easier to isolate Japan from her domain in the south. Protracted land battles involving large forces in New Guinea and the Philippines could be avoided. The key battles would be fought on atolls and small islands which the Japanese would have to defend with limited air and ground power. The U. S. Navy, on the other hand, had superiority in carrier-based air power and could easily support landings.
Nimitz’ drive had begun with two simultaneous landings in the Gilbert Islands, some two thousand miles southwest of Pearl Harbor. On the morning of November 20, two days before Roosevelt and Churchill met Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo, GI’s of the 27th Division waded up the beaches of Makin Atoll after a heavy naval barrage. There were fewer than eight hundred defenders, most of them labor troops, but it took the invaders, trained in a World War I style of combat by overage officers, four days to clear the atoll, at a cost of sixty-six dead.
At the same time, 105 miles to the south, men of the 2nd Marine Division began loading into landing craft and amphtracs (amphibious tractors) off Tarawa. The Marines joked and boasted to keep up their courage. “I should have joined the Boy Scouts,” said one. “I just want to spit in a dead Jap’s face,” said a youngster barely old enough to be out of high school. “Just open his mouth and let him have it.”
They faced a much more difficult task than the GI’s at Makin. Tarawa Atoll was heavily fortified and held by almost five thousand men, more than half of whom were well-trained combat effectives: the Sasebo 7th Special Landing Force of 1,497 troops led by Commander Takeo Sugai, and the 3rd Special Base Force, a naval landing unit of 1,122 men. The atoll commander, Rear Admiral Keijo Shibasaki, claimed that Tarawa could not be taken by a million men in a hundred years and issued orders “to defend to the last man all vital areas and destroy the enemy at the water’s edge.”
The defense was centered on Betio in the southwest corner of the atoll, a tiny island a few acres smaller than Monaco. Shaped like a bird, its legs a long jetty, it was protected by a wide shelf of coral. The landing would take place on both sides of the jetty, and the Marines would have to storm a four-foot-high sea wall made of green coconut logs and coral; behind it were well-constructed gun emplacements and trenches.
At dawn the Japanese batteries on Betio opened fire at the approaching armada. The Americans retaliated with three thousand tons of shells. After two and a half hours the entire island was blanketed in flames and it seemed impossible that any human being could have survived the bombardment. From a transport Time correspondent Robert Sherrod watched a shell splash near an LST (landing ship, tank). Another sent up a geyser just off his own ship’s stern. “My God, what wide shooting!” exclaimed Sherrod, who imagined the shells came from American destroyers. “Those boys need some practice.” “You don’t think that’s our own guns doing that shooting, do you?” a Marine major retorted.
By the time the first three assault waves began slogging ashore the Japanese were out of their shelters manning the sea wall. Their steady rifle and machine-gun fire cut down the Marines, covering the beach with dead and dying who could not be removed in the devastating fusillade. The commander of a platoon of medium tanks refused to grind away over the bodies and ordered his men to back out into the sea and make a detour. Four tanks sank out of sight into potholes, their crews trapped inside; the other two were easy targets for 40-mm. guns.
Shortly after noon 5,000 Marines were ashore, but heavy casualties left them disorganized and vulnerable to night attack. Half of Shibasaki’s troops were dead by dusk and his communications had been knocked out by naval gunfire. Consequently, few Japanese infiltrated American lines during the night. The following afternoon, after two more battalions landed, the Marines gained control of most of the island. Admiral Shibasaki was killed in his concrete command post, and his successor radioed Tokyo on November 22: OUR WEAPONS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED AND FROM NOW ON EVERYONE IS ATTEMPTING A FINAL CHARGE.… MAY JAPAN EXIST FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS!
It took four more days before the atoll was completely secured. Almost all the 5,000 defenders were dead; only 17 Japanese and 129 Korean laborers were captured. More than a thousand Americans had died for a few acres of coral, but its capture and that of Makin marked Nimitz’ first long stride toward Tokyo.
Ahead lay the Marshalls, 32 island groups and 867 reefs covering more than 400,000 square miles. The original plan had been to take the three most strategic atolls simultaneously but Marine General Holland Smith, after the resistance at Tarawa, considered this too dangerous. Admiral Spruance, the overall invasion commander, agreed. But Nimitz countered with a radical idea that dismayed both Smith and Spruance: leapfrog the first two atolls and assault the third, the heart of the Marshalls, Kwajalein. This was the largest coral atoll in the world, some one hundred islets forming a huge lagoon sixty-six miles long and twenty miles wide.
Spruance and Smith feared that a direct attack on Kwajalein would lay them open to air attack from nearby Japanese bases, but Nimitz persisted. On February 1, 1944, the main island of Kwajalein was subjected to the most concentrated bombardment of the Pacific war. Thirty-six thousand shells from naval vessels and field artillery emplaced on an outlying islet thundered down on Kwajalein. Above the trajectory of shells droned formations of Liberators which released their bombs into the holocaust. The effect was so devastating that one observer reported: “The entire island looked as if it had been picked up to 20,000 feet and then dropped.”
The leap into the center of the Marshalls came as a complete surprise to the Japanese. There were 8,500 men on the atoll, but most of them were rear-echelon personnel. Only 2,200 were combat-trained; and they had no defense against American armor. Frustrated officers would beat upon the turrets with swords while their men held grenades to the sides of the tanks until they exploded. They were convinced the Americans had a secret weapon, a device that could detect metal in the dark; every time someone left his hiding place he was killed. Word spread to take off helmets and ground bayonets after dusk. They still were killed; the “secret weapon” was concentrated and steady fire power. It was a hopeless battle for the Japanese but they fought almost to the last man, as at Tarawa. It was a week before the entire atoll was secured and it took the lives of 373 Americans.
Against the advice of his own commanders, Nimitz’ success at Kwajalein inspired him to propose yet another bold operation once the Marshalls were secured: a leap of more than twelve hundred miles beyond the Carolines all the way to the Marianas. He envisaged using these islands as a base from which the new B-29 Superfortresses could bomb Japan.
His proposal was attacked from all sides at a joint Army-Navy meeting at Pearl Harbor in January. MacArthur saw it as a further diminution of his own drive to Japan, and his representative, Major General Richard Sutherland, strongly urged that all resources be concentrated instead in the southwest Pacific area. He was supported by Lieutenant General George Kenney, who considered the idea of bombing Japan with Marianas-based B-29’s “just a stunt.” Even a Navy representative resisted. Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid declared that “any talk of the Marianas for a base leaves me cold.”
Nimitz was overridden, and emphasis once more shifted to MacArthur’s Route to Tokyo. But in Washington, the conclusions of the Pearl Harbor meeting struck Admiral Ernest King “with indignant dismay.” He wrote Nimitz: “The idea of rolling up the Japanese along the New Guinea coast, through Halmahera and Mindanao, and up through the Philippines to Luzon, as our major strategic concept, to the exclusion of clearing our Central Pacific line of communications to the Philippines is absurd. Further it is not in accordance with the decisions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
Early in February, Sutherland arrived in Washington to advocate MacArthur’s case. Without any basis in fact, he told the Joint Chiefs that Nimitz’ plans were “relatively weak and slow of progress.” MacArthur could be in Mindanao by December if given the resources.
King had no intention
of handing over more naval forces to the southwest Pacific theater. With some sarcasm he said that MacArthur had “apparently not accepted” the Cairo decision “and desires a commitment to an advance along a single axis. I do not think that this is a propitious time to change our agreed strategy.”
To avoid turning a strategic debate into a personal one, General Marshall suggested that the Joint Strategic Survey Committee study the matter again and report on which route to Japan was preferable. The committee recommendation came back almost immediately: the Central Route should be given priority “with operations in the Southwest Pacific cooperating with and supporting that effort.”
MacArthur’s role would have been permanently diminished had it not been for the fact that his old antagonist, Marshall, too, was dissatisfied with the committee’s conclusions, and after a month’s discussion, the Joint Chiefs emerged with a compromise between the central Pacific and southwest Pacific concepts of strategy. On March 12 they issued a directive to Nimitz and MacArthur ordering the former to occupy the Marianas by June 15 and the latter to invade Mindanao with the support of the Pacific Fleet exactly five months later.
2.
The new American thrusts had forced Imperial Headquarters to readjust their defenses. The desperate scramble of the Army and Navy for appropriations, strategic materials and factories centered on plane production, since both services agreed that the way to victory lay in the air. They agreed to share equally the 45,000 planes to be produced the following year. But a month later, in early January 1944, the Navy requested more than their allotment—26,000 planes.
The Navy’s case was persuasive and Tojo acquiesced. “This is too great a problem to settle so quickly,” protested his friend and adviser, Kenryo Sato. Until this time the Supreme Command had depended on the Navy to win the Decisive Battle against America on the seas, but now that dream was over. Henceforth the Army would have to play the major role, and the small islands that lay between the advancing Americans and Japan would have to be the “unsinkable carriers,” bases for future land battles. The majority of planes, therefore, would have to go to the service that fought these battles, the Army.
Tojo realized that his first decision had been prompted by a desire to keep peace with the Navy. Sato was obviously right and Tojo told him to inform the Navy of the change in priorities. The Navy, in turn, refused to accept the reversed decision. On February 10 the battle was openly joined at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staffs and their advisers at the Palace. Admiral Nagano maintained that the crucial battles with the enemy would still take place at sea. He was challenged by Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama, who had been promoted to field marshal. “If we gave you all the planes you want, would this battle turn the tide of war?”
Nagano bristled. “Of course I can’t guarantee anything of the kind! Can you guarantee that if we gave you all the planes, you would turn the tide?”
Distracted by a suggestion from Admiral Oka that they all take a break for tea, the antagonists calmed down, but the problem remained unsolved until Sato came up with an ingenious if questionable solution: concentrate production on fighters to the exclusion of bombers. Then an additional 5,000 planes, a total of 50,000 for equal distribution, could be manufactured, only 1,000 shy of the Navy’s demand for 26,000 planes. To make up for this deficit, Sato offered 3,500 tons of aluminum. The Navy accepted.
The tempest was over but not the military problems which had aggravated it. The American advance through the central Pacific continued unchecked. On February 17 Nimitz’ amphibious force leapfrogged from Kwajalein to the Eniwetok islands at the western limit of the Marshalls, by-passing four atolls where the Japanese had air bases. That same day and the next, American carrier planes also attacked Truk in the Carolines, the home of Combined Fleet, destroying seventy planes on the ground and sinking two auxiliary cruisers, a destroyer, an aircraft ferry, two submarine tenders and twenty-three merchant ships—200,000 tons of shipping in all.
These successive disasters prompted Sato to give Tojo some more unsolicited advice: “We should withdraw to the Philippines, and there gamble on the final decisive battle.”
“Is that the opinion of the General Staff?” Tojo asked grimly.
“No, it is my personal opinion.”
“Did you consult the General Staff?”
“That’s just the point: the General Staff would certainly oppose such a plan. It’s my conviction that we should simply override the military.” And the first thing to do was abandon the Carolines and the Marianas and fall back to the Philippines.
Tojo got red in the face. “Last year at an imperial conference we made the Marianas and Carolines our last defense line! Do you mean to say that six months later we should give them up without a single fight?”
Sato held his ground. There were only seven airfields in that area and they could easily be neutralized by the Americans before any invasion. But in the Philippines there were hundreds of islands that could be used as bases. “This should be the last battlefield of the war, since if that battle is lost, we won’t be able to fight another. That’s why we should concentrate all our efforts on one last struggle—and then start a peace offensive.” By “peace” he meant to settle for any conditions that would let Japan retain her honor.
Tojo interrupted him. “Don’t ever again mention the phrase ‘peace offensive.’ If you or I ever breathed the words ‘wa’ or ‘wahei’ [peace] the morale of our troops would deteriorate.”
Sato left, encouraged by the Prime Minister’s sympathetic reaction, but his counsel helped lead to an unexpected consequence. Later that evening Tojo suggested to Chief of Staff Sugiyama that he resign. In this “critical situation,” Tojo explained, it would be best if he himself concurrently held the posts of war minister and chief of staff.
“That would be a violation of our long tradition,” Sugiyama protested. One man shouldn’t be responsible for both political and military decisions. The catastrophe at Stalingrad, he pointed out, had resulted from Hitler’s concentration of power.
“Führer Hitler was an enlisted man,” said Tojo. “I am a general.” He assured the marshal that he had been giving as much thought to military affairs as political. “You don’t have to worry on that score.”
“That’s easy to say, but when one man handles two jobs and is torn by a conflict of interest between them, to which does he give the greater importance?” Moreover, it would establish a dangerous precedent for the future.
“In such an unprecedented and widespread war as this, we must take every measure even if it means breaking precedent.”
Sugiyama was losing his patience. “If you do this, it will be impossible to maintain order in the Army!”
“That won’t happen” was the tight-lipped answer. “If anyone complains, we’ll replace him. No objections will be allowed.”
The following day, February 21, Tojo relieved Sugiyama as Army Chief of Staff and took the post himself; he also replaced Navy Chief of Staff Nagano with Navy Minister Shigetaro Shimada. The four most important military posts in the nation were now concentrated in the hands of two men.
Sato burst into Tojo’s office shouting, “Mr. Prime Minister, what you have done is tremendous!” Tojo was already wearing the braid of the chief of staff. Since becoming prime minister he had discovered that the independence of the Supreme Command was a “big factor” in Japan’s military reversals. He was obviously pleased by Sato’s reaction and permitted himself a brief smile. “If some of the young officers cause any disturbance about this,” he said sternly, “I will not let them get away with it.” Gekokujo would not be tolerated. “Keep an eye on them.”
For the next few hours Sato was engrossed in plans for the last decisive battle in the Philippines. He was interrupted by a phone call from Tojo, who spoke in his new role as chief of staff. “I am going to defend the Marianas and Carolines,” he announced curtly.
Tojo’s arbitrary consolidation of power, which he and Sato regarded as a curb on the autocratic contro
l of the military, was interpreted by others as a dangerous step toward military dictatorship. Prince Chichibu, the eldest of the Emperor’s three brothers, did not believe the same man should be prime minister, war minister and chief of staff. Like Sugiyama, he put this question to Tojo: “What will you do when the General Staff and the War Ministry do not agree on the conduct of war?” Tojo angrily replied in writing: “The most important thing before us at this stage is to achieve victory with all our national resources. So I’ll thank you to discuss personal affairs after the war is over.… As for the current move, it is only natural that there be much criticism and opposition, since the measure is an unprecedented one. Let us leave it to future historians to determine the right or wrong of this step. Actually, the co-operation between the high command and the government is going very well and there is no trouble at all. My conscience would never let me violate the basic principle of the fundamental character of Japan. If you have any questions on this point, I’ll be glad to answer them. If I should ever feel that I am no longer loyal to the Emperor. I will offer my sincere apology and commit hara-kiri in his presence.”*
The jushin (the former premiers) shared Prince Chichibu’s concern. To them, moreover, Tojo’s leadership was responsible for Japan’s plight. They all wanted Tojo removed as prime minister, and two of their number, Prince Konoye and Admiral Okada, went further—his replacement must be a man who would make immediate peace overtures to the Allies. Konoye tried to enlist Marquis Kido in the cause for peace. The Privy Seal was sympathetic but refused to help; privately he thought it would be precipitous to use his influence on the Emperor.
There were even those in the military working for peace, but for different reasons. The most important was Rear Admiral Sokichi Takagi, a brilliant research expert who had been ordered by Admiral Shimada to conduct a thorough study of the mistakes made in the war as reflected in top-secret files. His analysis of air and shipping losses led him to the inevitable conclusion that Japan could not win the war. Appalled by the extent of the collapse in the Pacific, he saw as the only solution Tojo’s dismissal and an immediate quest for peace no matter what the consequences.