Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  In the centre of the island, the Americans pushed Yamashita’s men slowly back into the mountains, while clearing the area surrounding Manila Bay. On 16 February the Bataan peninsula fell relatively easily, but that was not the case with the island of Corregidor, defended stoutly by the Americans and Filipinos in 1942 and defended as stoutly now that the roles were reversed. The 4,500-strong Japanese garrison retreated into the maze of caves and tunnels, made the Americans fight for every one of them and, when there was no hope left, exploded their ammunition dumps, taking attacker and defender alike to glory. It took ten days and a subsidiary airborne landing to subdue Corregidor, and another two days to mop up. Now the Philippines were secure, all that was left was for MacArthur to clear the remaining Japanese from the island of Mindanao, which fell in July, and from the northeast of Luzon. There Yamashita held out, impotent and unable to do more than defy the Allies, who were happy to allow him to stay in his jungle hideout to be mopped up when convenient, and there he remained until the end of the war.

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  Iwo Jima is a tiny island of less than twelve square miles in the Bonin Group, 700 miles from Japan and about halfway between Japan and the Marianas. Apart from Mount Suribachi, a 560-foot-high extinct volcano in the south, the island is relatively flat and thus an ideal site for air bases, of which there were two. To the Japanese, it was psychologically important, being part of the Japanese homeland as opposed to a colony or captured territory, and militarily important as a staging post between Japan and the South Pacific – an importance that was enhanced when the Japanese lost the Marianas in 1944. To the Allies, Iwo Jima was also vital ground because from it they could bomb Japan with land-based aircraft which could be escorted by fighters, and because it could also be used as a mounting base for an eventual invasion of Japan. The Japanese were well aware of the significance of Iwo Jima and in early 1944 Major-General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and 21,000 men of 109 Division were sent there with instructions to turn it into an impregnable fortress. Unusually, he was bade farewell by the emperor in person and it was clear that he was not expected to return. The construction of defences and a third airstrip began immediately and by the end of 1944 there were dug-in tanks, concrete emplacements, bunkers, trenches, tunnels, wire obstacles, mines offshore and on the beaches and concealed artillery pieces covering all the possible landing areas. Kuribayashi, of samurai descent, was a fluent English-speaker who quoted Shakespeare, had been an assistant military attaché in Washington (where he ridiculed the Western custom of standing up for ladies) and was opposed to the war from the beginning. He was well aware that he could not prevent a landing, nor an eventual capture of the island; what he could do, he thought, would be to kill so many Americans and delay them for so long that they would realize that an invasion of Japan proper would be too expensive to contemplate.

  Admiral Nimitz delegated the capture of Iwo Jima to Vice-Admiral Spruance and his fleet, which was no longer needed by MacArthur now that he had the Philippines. Spruance had replaced Halsey in February – the latter was now enjoying well-earned shore leave, although he would return to the Pacific before the end of the war* – and in view of the immense strength of the defences he decided upon day and night bombing by Seventh Air Force from 31 January to 15 February, followed by three days of intensive naval bombardment before the US Marines would land on D-Day, 19 February. Diversionary air raids were also mounted against Tokyo by carrier-borne aircraft, and, although bad weather prevented them from doing very much damage, it was the first time a carrier force had come so close to Japanese shores and the raids caused alarm at Imperial Headquarters as a sign of things to come. At Iwo Jima the bombing and the naval gunfire ripped off much of the camouflage over the defences, but the garrison was sheltered in concrete bunkers and trenches and survived relatively unscathed: many of the artillery positions were exposed, but as many were not. At 0900 hours on 19 February the three Marine divisions of the USV Amphibious Corps landed on the southeast side of the island. The Japanese defences made little reply until the first wave was ashore, and then opened up with artillery and mortar fire. At first the Marines were pinned down and unable to move, their problems compounded by worsening weather that made the landing of tanks and vehicles a difficult and dangerous undertaking. Massive naval gunfire and air support prevailed, however, and although casualties were heavy (about 2,500), by nightfall the Marines had established a beachhead a mile long and 1,000 yards deep. Then began some of the most vicious fighting of the Pacific war. Infantry with flame-throwers and engineers with explosives had to blast every Japanese defender out of his bunker or tunnel and it was not until 23 February that Mount Suribachi was scaled and the iconic photograph of the raising of the Stars and Stripes taken. That was by no means the end of the battle, for it took until 1 March before the two southern airstrips were taken, and still Kuribayashi and his men fought on. By 16 March they had been forced into two enclaves on the north and north-east of the island and only on the 26th did resistance cease, when all that was left of the garrison alive were 200 men wounded so badly that they could neither fight nor kill themselves. Kuribayashi’s last letter apologized to the emperor for failing to defeat the landing, and said that he and his men would fight to the end. He had lived up to the expectations of his samurai tradition, and his body was never found.

  Iwo Jima cost the US Marines 6,800 dead, over a third of the total of Marine dead in the whole war. The American fleet did not emerge unscathed either. Kamikaze attacks damaged the carrier USS Saratoga so badly that she had to be sent back to America for extensive repairs, and they sank the carrier USS Bismarck Sea. But the Americans wasted no time, and by 8 March the USAAF was operational on Iwo Jima. Now Japan could be attacked by B-29 bombers escorted by fighters from Iwo Jima, and Nimitz’s next target would be Okinawa.

  With a population of around 400,000 in 1945, Okinawa, sixty miles long and four to five miles wide, is the largest island of the 600-mile-long Ryukyu chain which runs from the northern tip of Formosa to Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Japanese home islands. At some 350 miles from Japan, it was an obvious target for the Allies and the Japanese had drawn up plans to defend it which hinged round holding the island long enough for the huge Allied fleet that must be assembled to be destroyed by air attack. In the event, and fortunately for the Allies, the Japanese had not reckoned on the Americans reacting as quickly as they did after the capture of Iwo Jima, and from 18 March American and British aircraft began attacking airfields in southern Japan and shipping in the Inland Sea. The Americans had assembled the largest military force yet seen in the Pacific: not far short of that mounted for Overlord in Normandy, it mustered 1,440 naval and merchant ships, including the British Pacific Fleet, the US Fast Carrier Force, the Joint Expeditionary Force and the Gunfire and Covering Force, which between them had nineteen battleships, fifteen fleet and six light carriers, thirty cruisers and 107 destroyers, there to support the fifty-nine-year-old Lieutenant-General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr’s US Fourteenth Army consisting of three Marine and five army divisions.

  The defence of Okinawa was entrusted to Lieutenant-General Mitsuru Ushijima and his Thirty-Second Army. After garrisons on the outlying islands were deducted, Ushijima had around 60,000 combat troops and another 20,000 local militia who were used for labouring duties in the preparation of defences, and, knowing that he could not defend the whole island, he decided to concentrate in the south with defences in depth, positions concreted in and with the usual mix of tunnels and caves. In addition, he had a number of Sea Raiding battalions armed with a naval equivalent of the kamikaze, small patrol boats packed with explosives which were intended to be driven at speed into enemy warships and then detonated.

  On 26 March the Americans seized the Kerama Retto islands, eleven miles west of Okinawa and with natural harbours where repair and refuelling facilities could be established. On the same day, air raids and naval bombardment of Okinawa began, with no great effect on the well-dug-in defenders. On 1 April the first w
aves of the US Fourteenth Army landed on the west of the island to little opposition, and by last light the two airfields were in their hands and operating aircraft the following day. By 6 April the whole of the centre of the island was in American hands, whereupon the first major Japanese retaliation began. This took the form of massed kamikaze attacks on the great concentration of shipping around Okinawa, and should have begun as soon as the fleet appeared, but disagreement between the Japanese navy, which saw Okinawa as the vital battle of the war to which every consideration should be subordinated, and the army, which thought that Okinawa could not be held and wanted to keep the aircraft back for the defence of the homeland, caused a delay. Up until now, there had been kamikaze attacks but they had been sporadic, and by 5 April had sunk an escort carrier, a destroyer and three landing craft, and damaged other ships. On 6 April, however, came a mass wave of 660 kamikazes, supposedly coordinated with a foray by the 60,000-ton Yamato, the world’s largest battleship, which headed for Okinawa with a light cruiser and eight destroyers. In their tanks were the last drops of fuel oil the Japanese could find and Yamato had enough to get there but not to return. It was a suicide mission, and all her crew knew it, and it achieved nothing: spotted by an American submarine on 7 April, she was attacked by aircraft of the Fast Carrier Force and she, the cruiser and four of the destroyers were sunk, her captain and nearly all her crew going down with her. It was the last hurrah of the once mighty Imperial Japanese Navy.

  The kamikaze attacks mounted between 6 and 8 April hit twenty-five ships, sinking eight and damaging another ten so badly that they were out of action for the rest of the war. Then, on 11 April, a kamikaze attack was coordinated with a counter-attack launched by Ushijima. The counter-attack failed with heavy losses, but another two ships were sunk. Now Admiral Nimitz ordered USAAF bombers to switch from bombing Tokyo to eliminating the airfields in Kyushu from where the kamikaze were operating. Worrying though the suicide attacks were, increasing numbers of aircraft were being shot down, and the statistics – twenty attacks (and therefore twenty aircraft lost) for each ship damaged – were telling: this was simply not an effective use of scarce aircraft and scarcer pilots. That said, by 16 April the Allies had lost a total of one carrier, six destroyers, three landing craft and two ammunition ships sunk and thirty-one ships so badly damaged that they were out of action for long periods, including four carriers and a battleship. The British carriers were less vulnerable because their heavy deck armour plate prevented the diving aircraft from penetrating into the bowels of the ship, but they still suffered damage and the destruction of any aircraft exposed on the flight deck.

  On land, the Japanese took to landing parties of engineers well equipped with explosives behind the American lines with instructions to cause as much damage as possible, while more massed kamikaze attacks built up to a peak from 23 to 25 May. Now another aerial weapon appeared: the Japanese sent five twin-engined bombers with a platoon of infantry packed into each one, ordered to crash-land on the Okinawa airfields and cause as much mayhem as possible. The Americans shot four of them down, but a fifth belly-flopped on to the strip and, before the occupants could be killed, they managed to inflict considerable damage on parked aircraft and installations, as well as setting on fire an aviation fuel storage depot.

  At sea Admiral Spruance handed over to Admiral Halsey once again on 27 May, and on land torrential rain slowed up even further the infantry’s already tortuous progress in reducing the Japanese defenders in their tunnels and caves. Now tanks could not operate in the mud and even amphibious vehicles had problems, but the weather hindered both sides and the Japanese were running short of ammunition and rations, their artillery was nearly all destroyed or had been abandoned through lack of shells, and even small arms were in short supply. Thousands of leaflets telling the Japanese that their situation was hopeless and urging them to give themselves up were dropped all over southern Okinawa, and Japanese-speaking Americans invited surrender over loudspeakers. Thirty-Second Army was reduced to around 10,000 combatants and for the first time in the war Japanese prisoners were being taken, as men surrendered an intolerable position – admittedly most of them were militia or wounded, but it was a sign that the belief in invincibility was wearing thin, and that the end of the battle might be in sight. General Buckner did not live to see the victory that his men won at terrible cost, for on 18 June a shell from one of the few remaining Japanese artillery pieces hit an observation post from where he was surveying progress and killed him. He was replaced by ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, now aged sixty-two and brought back from rustication to Washington, where he had been since the previous November. On 21 June, Ushijima realized that, having held out for three months, there was nothing more he could do. He ordered his remaining soldiers to break out individually to the north of the island and carry on the war as guerrillas, and he and his chief of staff committed ritual suicide by cutting open their stomachs with short swords and then being decapitated by their respective ADCs. Around 80 per cent of the Japanese army defenders were killed, around two thirds of the militia and countless civilians, many of whom committed suicide rather than be captured by the Americans. The Japanese had lost around 8,000 aircraft including 2,000 kamikazes. For the Allies, the death toll was 12,520 Americans killed, 763 aircraft lost, thirty-four ships sunk and another seventy that could not be repaired before the war’s end. It was an expensive victory, but a very necessary one. Now the Americans had the bases and airfields they needed to prepare for the final invasion of the Japanese main islands.

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  In Burma, ‘Uncle Bill’ Slim had never been in favour of frontal attacks, and, given that reinforcements for the Far East were a low priority, he knew he could not afford costly battles of attrition. All the signs were that General Kimura, the Japanese commander of the Burma Area Armies, intended to fight on the other, east, side of the Irrawaddy and that a direct attack on him would bring on just the sort of battle Slim wanted to avoid and just the sort that the Japanese were good at. Yet Slim had turned the battered and defeated army of 1943 into a well-honed, confident and well-led team that after its victory at Imphal and Kohima knew that the Japanese soldier was not invincible and that he could be beaten. It was very much an imperial army, with just over 75 per cent of the troops being Indian, Gurkha and East or West African. Slim now decided to recast his plans for 1945 and embark on a strategy he could not possibly have contemplated a year before but which, if it succeeded, would win the war in Burma. The Japanese supply lines to the Fifteenth and Thirty-Third Armies in central Burma ran north through the town of Meiktila to Mandalay. Meiktila was seventy-five miles south of Mandalay and in and around the town were Japanese hospitals, ammunition and ration dumps, repair workshops and airstrips, while the main road and the railway from Rangoon to Mandalay ran through it. If Slim could capture Meiktila and hold it, then Kimura’s position to the north would become untenable and he could be defeated in detail. The key was secrecy: if Kimura had an inkling of Slim’s intention, then he would reinforce Meiktila and the plan would fail. Slim’s orders were for XXXIII Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir Montague Stopford, to cross the Chindwin and make for the Irrawaddy and Mandalay, with the aim of drawing the maximum Japanese forces on to him, while Lieutenant-General Frank Messervy’s IV Corps would go south, cross the Irrawaddy and take Meiktila. With the distances to be covered and the lack of roads, resupply would be a problem, but the army could rely on overwhelming Allied air supremacy and its engineers were capable of prodigious feats. The army was experienced in using mules as pack animals and could transport supplies by river craft on the Chindwin itself. Slim’s staff calculated that, provided they captured airfields as they went along, the two corps could be maintained – just.

  Then, when it appeared that all was set, Chiang Kai-shek threw a chopstick in the works when, without any warning, he demanded that all Chinese and American troops in Northern Area Combat Command be returned instantly to China – where the Japanese had launch
ed an offensive to try to salvage something from their increasingly precarious position – and that they were to be flown out by the USAAF. This would mean losing three squadrons of transport aircraft, or seventy-five Dakotas, which would seriously compromise Slim’s resupply plan and might even jeopardize the whole operation. Protests and appeals from Mountbatten to the Joint Chiefs secured a partial stay of execution: two squadrons would be returned to Slim and would remain in support of Fourteenth Army until the capture of Rangoon or until the end of June 1945, whichever was the earlier. Meanwhile, since it was critical that the move of IV Corps, heavily augmented with tanks, self-propelled artillery and troop-carrying vehicles, was not discovered by the Japanese, extensive deception measures were implemented, including the setting up of a dummy corps headquarters at Tamu in the north, and the routing of all communications through it, thus ensuring that Japanese intercepts could not pinpoint the real location of the corps. When the Japanese did detect some movement to their south, they were convinced that it was either a diversion to make them move troops south from Mandalay or a probe farther south towards the oil fields, an impression strengthened by Slim’s dropping of dummy parachutists well south of IV Corps’s line of advance.