Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Britain’s aircraft industry could not compete with America’s in terms of scale, but it proved innovative, robust and resilient. Inevitably, there were setbacks, failures and disappointments. The Spitfire’s structural complexity meant that initially it proved difficult to mass-manufacture, and it took much sweat and toil to resolve the problem; the Manchester heavy bomber’s single redeeming feature was that it led directly to the development of the Lancaster; and the Typhoon was to fall very short as a fighter even if it later found its metier as a ground attack aircraft and train-stopper. Withal, the British husbanded their resources well, designing and then assiduously developing some outstanding aircraft – the Spitfire and Hurricane, the Beaufighter and Mosquito, the Halifax and Lancaster – and producing them in substantial numbers. It was an impressive showing, and one that contributed significantly to the Allies’ victory.

  While historians have tended to concentrate on the war on land, and it was on land that the greatest contribution to the defeat of Germany was made, by the Red Army on the Eastern Front, without naval and air assets the British could not have stayed in the war beyond 1940, and the Americans could never have rolled back the Japanese expansion in the Pacific. The contribution of the Allied navies and air forces was immense and should not be underestimated.

  16

  THE AXIS RETREAT

  AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1944

  By the summer of 1944 the Germans and the Japanese were withdrawing on all fronts, but it was a controlled withdrawal, and by no means a rout. In Italy, the Germans were still tying down two Allied armies, giving up ground only slowly and as they chose, and by August were safely ensconced in the Gothic Line, the next major defence line across the Italian peninsula. On the Eastern Front, the Red Army had launched a major offensive against Finland, and, while at first the Finns were forced to pull back to a more easily held line, stubborn defence halted the Soviets, who themselves were forced on to the defensive. In France, the German Seventh Army had been destroyed in Normandy, while farther south 2 SS Panzer Division had massacred the entire population of the town of Oradour-sur-Glane in retaliation for British-inspired efforts by the Resistance to interfere with their movement to the front. In Asia, meanwhile, the Japanese had failed to capture the British Fourteenth Army’s administrative base in Assam and was pulling back, pursued by Stilwell’s Chinese–American force and Slim’s British (or, more properly, British Empire) army and harried by the Chindits. In the Pacific itself, although both MacArthur and Nimitz were making progress towards the home islands, Japanese garrisons were defending as fiercely as ever, with no quarter given and no thought of surrender.

  Up to now, the American approach to Japan via the northern route was by means of relatively modest hops, ensuring that each successive move was covered by land-based or carrier-borne aircraft and within reasonable distance of a logistic base. Now they would try the longest hop yet – the invasion and capture of the Marianas. The Greater Marianas, north of the Carolines and roughly halfway between Japan and Papua New Guinea, is a chain of fifteen islands but only three of them – from north to south, Saipan, Tinian and Guam – had any military significance. From the Allied point of view, the capture of the Marianas would provide yet another springboard on the way to Japan, and the plan, Operation Forager, was to land a combined US Army and Marines force on Saipan, then Tinian and finally Guam. Some 535 ships and 127,000 men were available for the task, but the logistic demands were formidable: Saipan was 1,000 miles west of the nearest American base in the Marshall Islands, the troops would be cooped up on board ship for some time and only carrier-borne air cover would be available. It was thought, however, that the overwhelming advantage in numbers would enable the islands to be captured relatively quickly.

  For the Japanese, this was the greatest challenge yet to their position in the Pacific. Saipan was vital to their ability to hold their inner defence perimeter, and it was regarded as part of the home islands. Should the Americans be able to take and hold the island, then not only would communications from Japan to her South Pacific conquests and the Philippines be severely interfered with or even cut, but also the USAAF would gain a base from which it could bomb Japan itself. The garrison of Saipan was 22,700 soldiers under Lieutenant-General Yoshitsugo Saito and a coastal defence small-boat flotilla under Vice-Admiral Nagumo, the hero of Pearl Harbor and the loser of Midway. In addition, there was the First Naval Air Fleet, which was actually land-based in the Marianas under Vice-Admiral Kanji Tsunoda and possessed around 1,000 aircraft of various types. Once the Japanese realized that the approaching American fleet was heading for the Marianas, they made attempts to reinforce Saito but American submarines sank the troopships. As it was, at 0844 hours on 15 June 1944 two American divisions of the available five landed on eight Saipan beaches over a four-mile frontage and immediately came under Japanese artillery and mortar fire. The initial bombardment had not had anything like the effect hoped for and, despite massive naval gunfire support, the Marines could make but slow headway as the Japanese contested every inch and sent in repeated counter-attacks.

  If the Japanese could not reinforce Saito with men, then they must aid him with ships, and the Carrier Force, now commanded by Vice-Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, who had replaced Nagumo, steamed towards Saipan. On paper Ozawa was hugely outnumbered by the American fleet under Vice-Admiral Mitscher – there were nine Japanese aircraft carriers to fifteen American, five battleships to seven, thirteen cruisers to twenty-one and twenty-eight destroyers to sixty-nine – but Ozawa had the advantage of support from land-based aircraft, which the Americans did not, and the Japanese carriers, lacking the weight of extra armour plate and self-sealing fuel tanks, were faster and had a longer range, as did their aircraft. Finally, because of the prevailing wind, Ozawa could launch and recover aircraft while sailing towards the enemy, whereas the American carriers would have to turn away. On 19 June the two fleets clashed in what became the Battle of the Philippine Sea. It was the largest carrier battle in naval history and when it was over on 21 June the Japanese had lost their three largest carriers, numerous other smaller ships and 480 aircraft in what the Americans termed ‘The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot’. When Ozawa finally accepted defeat and withdrew, he had only thirty-four carrier-based aircraft left. No American ships were sunk, although the Japanese shot down fifty aircraft and a number of others were lost when on 21 June they had to return and land on their carriers in the dark. The Japanese had taken massive losses in naval aviators in their defence of Rabaul and the Marshall Islands, and many of the crews sent up in the Philippines Sea battle had been speedily trained and just as speedily killed. From now on, with dwindling numbers of aircraft and experienced pilots the Japanese air forces had few tactical options open to them, and they would choose to make use of the most extreme – that of suicidal attacks.

  On Saipan itself, numbers and firepower at last began to tell, and, as more and more of his infantrymen were being killed in charges led by sword-waving officers into the muzzles of American howitzers firing over open sights, Saito issued his final order of the day:

  Officers and men of the Imperial Army at Saipan… The barbarous attack of the enemy is being continued even though the enemy has occupied only a corner of Saipan, we are dying without avail under the violent shelling and bombing. Whether we attack or whether we stay as we are, there is only death… I will never suffer the disgrace of being taken alive, and I will calmly rejoice in living by the eternal principle. Here I pray with you for the eternal life of the Emperor and the welfare of the country, and I advance to seek out the enemy. Follow me… Banzai!83

  Saito and Admirals Nagumo and Tsunoda committed suicide and 8,000 soldiers and civilians, including women and children, followed suit, many of them leaping off cliffs to their deaths rather than surrender. On 9 July all resistance ceased – there was nobody left to resist – and the Americans counted the bodies of 24,000 dead Japanese soldiers and sailors, for a death toll of 3,426 of their own.84 On 21 July, after a savage
naval bombardment, the Americans landed on Guam, an American possession for forty years before the Japanese captured it, and this too was robustly defended, not falling until 12 August. (The last Japanese defender did not surrender until 1960.) In the interim, the central island, Tinian, was invaded on 24 July, when napalm* was used for the first time, and was in American hands by 12 August. The Marianas were now secure, and such was the blow to Japanese prestige and to her government’s conduct of the war that on 18 July General Tojo and his cabinet resigned. There had been mounting criticism of Tojo’s retention of the posts of prime minister, defence minister and chief of staff of the army, and of his conduct of the war. There were, in the way of the Japanese political process of the time, even plans to throw a bomb at his car, and had Tojo not resigned, he might well have been assassinated.

  Tojo’s replacement as prime minister was the retired general Kuniaki Koiso, a former governor of Korea, who was thought to be more amenable than Tojo had been to the idea of negotiating a peace. While Japan had often considered attacking the USSR, her attempts to do so in 1939 had met with failure and, despite German requests for Japan to attack Russia, Japanese diplomatic efforts thenceforth were aimed at keeping the USSR neutral, and on several occasions Japan proposed a German–Soviet peace, to be brokered by herself. This was simply wishful thinking: during the years of German successes on the Eastern Front there was no incentive for Hitler to seek a peace, and, now that the tide had turned against Germany, there was no incentive for Russia to do so. It was made clear to the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, that the only circumstances under which Japan would enter the war against the Soviet Union were if the latter granted bases in Siberia to the Allies from which they could bomb Japan, and there was no sign of that happening. The German–Japanese scheme to effect a land link-up through the Caucasus to Persia and on to India and Burma was now in tatters, and, while many Japanese politicians, and even some military men, could see that Japan could not now win the war, anyone who was found putting out peace feelers ran the risk of being assassinated by one or other faction of the armed forces. The only solution seemed to be to continue to resist everywhere, kill as many of the enemy as possible, and hope that the Allies could be forced to negotiate.

  On the American side, with the Marianas, from where bombers could reach the Japanese homeland, now secure, there was much debate as to where to go next. On the southern route, MacArthur had rightly decided that rather than incur heavy casualties by attacking them, he would let the Japanese garrisons in Rabaul and the surrounding islets wither on the vine: they were cut off, could not be reinforced and were incapable of supporting military operations elsewhere. He now wanted to go for the Philippines, whereas the US Navy’s view was that, rather than get bogged down in a slogging match there, MacArthur’s army should be subordinated to Admiral Nimitz and together they should go for Formosa (Taiwan), bypassing the Philippines altogether. MacArthur, who was a master of rhetoric and unafraid to deploy every emotional argument in his extensive armoury, argued that to leave the Philippines to its fate would be to betray the vast majority of Filipinos who had remained loyal to the USA and had suffered starvation, deprivation and ill-treatment as a consequence. After making personal appeals to Roosevelt, MacArthur was ordered to attack Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Philippines, while the island-hoppers would continue to push ever closer to Japan by going for Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands, which were Japanese home territory and the last step before Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan proper. MacArthur had got his way, and would have his own Sixth Army and Vice-Admiral Thomas Kincaid’s Seventh US Fleet under command, but it is probable that the stark realities of America’s war effort carried more weight in the councils than MacArthur’s powers of oratory: the number of divisions considered essential to take Formosa would not be available until after the European war was over.

  The Philippines consist of 7,000 islands that stretch for 1,200 miles from Mindanao in the south to Luzon in the north. Essential to any attempt to land on Mindanao was the capture of the Palau Islands, part of the Western Carolines, and in September Marines landed on Peleliu. This resulted in some of the fiercest jungle fighting of the whole war: the island was rocky and riddled with caves and carefully camouflaged dugouts, all defended by Japanese who were not going to give in, come what may. In a month of fighting, the US Marines suffered over 1,100 dead, it took 1,500 rounds of ammunition to kill one Japanese* and only the use of flame-throwers that could be fitted to tanks enabled the Americans to winkle out the defenders or burn them alive in their caves. Having done all that the emperor could have asked of him, and with his men either dead or so badly wounded that they could fight no more, the Japanese commander, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, committed suicide. Then Vice-Admiral William Halsey, double-hatted as commander of the US Third Fleet in the Pacific, and thus responsible for the Western Pacific Task Forces, musing over maps and charts in his cabin aboard the battleship USS New Jersey, suggested that, rather than land on Mindanao and work north, the objective should be Leyte, slap in the middle of the Philippine archipelago and with thirty miles of beaches along the Gulf of Leyte on the east of the island. MacArthur agreed and plans were rapidly amended.

  In Japan there was much debate as to where MacArthur might land next and, after it had been concluded that it would be in the Philippines rather than Formosa, there was further debate as to how the archipelago might be defended. Previously, Japanese doctrine had espoused the destruction of invasion forces on the beachheads, but this had become increasingly unworkable because of the enormous firepower that American battleships could bring down for shore bombardment, and it was now proposed that landings should be allowed to take place; the attackers would be then defeated when they ran up against stout Japanese defences inland. In the Philippines, it was impossible to predict exactly where the Americans might land first (although Mindanao was an obvious choice), so rather than try to defend every island, the Japanese would concentrate their main force on Luzon while leaving strong subsidiary garrisons elsewhere. The capital, Manila, was situated here and there were also good roads, which made the island easy to defend. Lieutenant-General Shigenori Kuroda, commanding Fourteenth Area Army responsible for the Philippines, was sacked on the grounds that he played too much golf* and replaced by the Tiger of Malaya, General Yamashita, who had been recalled from virtual exile in Manchuria: his popularity with the Japanese public after his capture of Singapore was such that he had been seen as a possible threat to Tojo and the army high command. Yamashita had little time to make his presence felt, for two weeks after he arrived the Americans landed on Leyte. He had wanted to abandon that island as being of no strategic significance but the thought of giving up any territory without fighting for it was unacceptable to Yamashita’s superior, the sixty-five-year-old Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi, who had speedily removed his headquarters from Manila to Saigon.

  Before MacArthur’s men could land on the Philippines, it was essential to neutralize the Japanese air fleet based in Formosa, and from 12 October Admiral Halsey’s Third US Fleet, using aircraft from nine fleet carriers and eight light carriers, began a devastating series of raids on Formosan air bases and support installations. In three days they destroyed 500 Japanese aircraft, either on the ground or in the air, and numerous freighters and small craft as well as oil depots, ammunition dumps and shore maintenance establishments. The Japanese aviators did their best to strike back, but could only cause slight damage to three ships; they did, however, shoot down seventy-nine American aircraft, albeit with considerable losses of their own. Inexperience and wishful thinking, however, led them to report that they had sunk eleven American carriers, two battleships and three cruisers and that they had shot down 112 American aircraft. In Japan a great victory was proclaimed, the emperor ordered a national celebration and the announcement that 312 Japanese aircraft ‘had not yet returned’ was glossed over. The high command briefly assumed that the invasion of the Philippines would n
ot happen. They were to be swiftly disabused.

  Leyte was held by 20,000 men of the Japanese 16 Division, an inexperienced formation of wartime conscripts hitherto regarded as suitable only for static duties, and initially all went well for the Americans. On 18 October all the little islands around the mouth of the gulf were secured and, on 20 October, Sixth US Army, commanded by Lieutenant-General Walter Krueger, began to land on the beaches, against no opposition. MacArthur waded ashore and broadcast to the Filipino people: ‘I have returned.’ MacArthur’s progress from landing craft to beach had, in fact, to be re-enacted several times until the cameramen were sure they had caught it, and only then could MacArthur, the saviour of his people, climb into his Jeep and begin to accept the cheers and adulation of the islands’ population. Despite these complications, by midnight on 20 October 132,000 men and 200,000 tons of supplies had been landed on Leyte.

  The Japanese now realized that their victory celebrations had been premature, and Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commanding the Combined Fleet, decided on one last gamble that at best would annihilate the invasion force on Leyte, destroy the American fleet and halt the American advance towards Japan, and at worst might yet reduce the odds against Japan and grant her some breathing space. His plan was for Admiral Ozawa and his carriers to lure Admiral Halsey and his powerful Third Fleet with its battleships and carriers away from Leyte, leaving only the weaker US Seventh Fleet, which other Japanese naval formations would then pounce on and destroy. The American troops on Leyte would now be cut off from reinforcement and lack naval gunfire support, and the Japanese garrison could mop them up.

  Nearly all of Japan’s remaining warships were involved in the operation, and the resulting series of engagements fought between 23 and 26 October, known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, was by a considerable margin the largest naval battle of the war. The Japanese almost succeeded. They changed their naval code just before the ships sailed and strict radio silence was enforced, thus eluding Allied intercepts and giving the Americans no warning of what was coming. Admiral Halsey was indeed persuaded to steam away to the north towards Ozawa while three Japanese striking forces attempted to converge on Leyte, leaving Admiral Kincaid’s Seventh Fleet greatly outnumbered. The eventual result was, however, a shattering defeat for the Japanese. They simply did not have enough aircraft or well-trained pilots to protect their ships, their communications were poor and finally, when Vice-Admiral Takeo Kurita’s First Striking Force did penetrate Leyte Gulf after losing a battleship, the Musashi, and two heavy cruisers sunk and one badly damaged, he threw away his advantage by ordering his remaining ships to attack individually rather than as a coordinated formation. For their part, the Americans benefited from greatly superior fire-control radar that allowed them to take on targets they could not see, especially by night, and they made skilful use of radar-equipped PT boats as an early-warning screen. They were also lucky: sudden rain squalls appeared just as Kincaid’s light carriers were about to be blown into very small pieces by Kurita’s battleships. None the less, when the surviving Japanese ships had retired, the United States Navy had lost three carriers to the Japanese four, but the Americans still had twenty-two left to the Japanese four. The US Navy lost no battleships, the Japanese three out of seven; the Americans and Australians lost no cruisers, the Japanese ten out of seventeen; and the Americans four destroyers out of eighty, the Japanese twelve out of thirty-seven. All the Japanese had managed to achieve was to land 2,000 army reinforcements on the west side of Leyte, but this was the last time they would seriously challenge the Allies at sea, and it also saw the first appearance of a weapon of last resort – the suicide bomber.