All Hell Let Loose (71 page)

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JUNGLE-BASHING AND ISLAND-HOPPING

At the January 1943 Casablanca summit conference, the Western Allied leaderships reasserted the priority of defeating Germany, but agreed to devote sufficient resources to the war against Japan to maintain the initiative – the Americans committed themselves to a target figure of 30 per cent of their war effort. This compromised the doctrine of Germany First more than the chiefs of staff cared to admit, but reflected the imperative created by American domestic opinion, so much more strongly committed to Japan’s defeat than to that of Germany. US commanders thereafter decided that resource limitations ruled out an early assault on Rabaul. The USAAF was unwilling even to allocate long-range bombers to conduct a major air offensive against Japan’s key base in the south-west Pacific before 1944. The chiefs of staff thus agreed that in 1943 Allied forces would pursue modest objectives: advancing up the Solomons to Bougainville, while MacArthur’s forces addressed the north coast of New Guinea. The latter was an exclusively US Army and Australian operation, though dependent on naval support.

The US Navy and Marine Corps were unfailingly sceptical about southwest Pacific operations, directed towards ultimate recapture of the Philippines. They saw them as a sop to MacArthur’s ego rather than a path to victory. The admirals preferred instead to exploit naval and air power to thrust across the central Pacific through the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, the shortest route to Japan. It was a measure of the United States’s vast wealth that, instead of making a choice between these strategies, a decision was taken to undertake both simultaneously. Thereafter, Nimitz and MacArthur conducted parallel but separate and implicitly competitive campaigns.

The British, meanwhile, addressed themselves once more to Burma. Their retreat had ended in May 1942. In December that year, after the usual seasonal paralysis imposed by the monsoon, Wavell made a first tentative attempt to strike back, committing an Indian division against the port of Akyab, in the Arakan region of Burma facing the Bay of Bengal. Two attempted assaults failed, as did another thrust towards Donbaik in March 1943. The British field commander, Lt. Gen. Noel Irwin, held a reckless press conference at which he sought to explain Allied setbacks by asserting that ‘in Japan the infantryman is the
corps d’élite
’, while the British ‘put our worst men into the infantry’. It would take years, he said, to train Indian troops to the necessary standard to beat the Japanese. Allied censors smothered publication of his remarks, but they reflected the defeatism, incompetence and incoherence prevailing among British commanders in the East. Churchill minuted the chiefs of staff: ‘I am far from satisfied with the way the Indian campaign is being conducted. The fatal lassitude of the Orient steals over all these commanders.’

Although four million Indian soldiers eventually bore arms for the Allies and substantial British resources were deployed in the subcontinent, the generals were slow to renew effective operations. Churchill fumed about the large forces deployed in north-east India, achieving wretchedly little; he once described the Indian Army as ‘a gigantic system of outdoor relief’ because of the small number of fighting divisions it provided. Some 450,000 mainly Indian troops, along with some British units, confronted 300,000 Japanese holding Burma, but little useful was done to prepare this army for battle. Lt. Dominic Neill of the Gurkhas – Britain’s beloved Nepalese mercenaries – who arrived in India in 1943, said: ‘Neither I nor my Gurkha soldiers received any tactical training whatsoever until we came face to face with the Japanese.’

The only good news from Burma that year was generated by an operation far behind the enemy front, engaging 3,000 British troops led by the eccentric, indeed mentally unstable, Brigadier Orde Wingate. His ‘Chindits’ accomplished little of military value at a cost of 30 per cent losses, but created a highly serviceable propaganda legend. Their survival behind enemy lines, despite appalling sufferings, was held to demonstrate that British soldiers could sustain jungle warfare, a proposition many people had come to doubt. Before the Chindit columns left India, Wingate made it plain that no casualties could be carried, and thus badly wounded men must be put out of their misery. This policy might have been merciful, given their inevitable fate in Japanese hands, but it proved hard for Allied soldiers to fulfil. After one Chindit action, Gurkha Lt. Harold James found himself obliged to follow Wingate’s orders: ‘I had a wounded Gurkha, shot to bits in great pain, and dying. After agonizing for a bit, I gave him a lethal dose of morphia … The Gurkhas were amazing, they just accepted it … To my horror I found another very seriously wounded Gurkha. I said, “I’ve just had to do it.” George looked at me as if to say “You do it again.” I protested, “There’s no way I’m going to do it twice.” He gave the chap a lethal dose.’

Another survivor of the 1943 Chindit foray, Dominic Neill, was among those who realised how little the columns accomplished, beyond creating a legend of suffering and sacrifice. ‘The newspapers back in India had banner headlines about Wingate’s expedition. We couldn’t believe our eyes. We had achieved absolutely nothing, we had been kicked out by the Japs again. The publicity was the work of the authorities in GHQ Delhi grasping at any straws after the defeat in 1942, closely followed by the disastrous Arakan campaign of 1942/43.’ But Churchill thrilled to the exploits of the Chindits, which seemed to provide an honourable contrast to the inertia that suffused the main army in India.

In August 1943, the Japanese achieved a useful propaganda coup by declaring Burma an independent state. Many Burmese were briefly seduced, their enthusiasm increased by Japanese success in repulsing Britain’s Aykab offensives. But in Burma as elsewhere, the occupiers’ arrogance, cruelty and economic exploitation progressively alienated their subjects. However eager were the Burmese to throw off British rule, evicting the Japanese became a more pressing concern. In the first half of the Asian war, only hill-dwellers assisted British arms. By 1944, the Japanese faced the hatred of Burma’s townspeople as well as guerrilla activity by the tribes.

The autumn monsoon put an end to each year’s campaigning season on the India–Burma frontier as effectively as did the spring thaw in Russia. Thus, after the failure of British and Indian forces to break through in the Arakan, 1943 passed without significant progress on the Burma front. Churchill was obliged to content himself with using Indian formations to assist the Allied campaigns in North Africa and Italy. Critics of the Indian Army argued then, and have maintained since, that its romantic reputation was significantly higher than its performance justified. Some units, Gurkhas notable among them, displayed skill, courage and tenacity. Others did not. British imperial endeavour against the Japanese persistently lagged behind that of the United States.

Yet even in the Pacific, until massive resources reached the theatre during 1944, there were long pauses between successive American initiatives. In June 1943, MacArthur and South-West Pacific Area Commander Admiral William Halsey began their new campaigns in New Guinea and the Solomons. The seizure of New Georgia took a month of tough fighting. Thereafter, Halsey leapfrogged several Japanese-defended islands to land 4,600 men on Vella Lavella. By December, the Americans had secured positions on Bougainville and captured Cape Gloucester at the western end of New Britain. By January 1944 a major air offensive against Rabaul had rendered the base almost useless to Japanese ships and aircraft. Its 100,000-strong garrison became strategically irrelevant; since the troops could move nowhere, they could safely be left to rot.

The expansion of the US Navy made possible a growing Pacific buildup in the course of 1943. Four huge
Essex
-class fleet carriers and five light carriers provided the core of fast task forces which included battleships and cruisers for shore bombardment, destroyers for radar picket and anti-submarine escort duties. A vast fleet train of oilers and supply vessels enabled the fighting ships to sustain up to seventy days of continuous operations, far beyond the Royal Navy’s capabilities. There were also escort carriers to provide close support for the amphibious armadas, hundreds of PT-boats for inshore work, together with repair and hospital vessels. Though these ships were overwhelmingly manned by landsmen without previous seagoing experience, officers and crews displayed skills of navigation, gunnery and seamanship which entirely outclassed those of their enemies. The steep decline in the Japanese Combined Fleet’s operational performance, from high professionalism in December 1941 to faltering ineptitude a year or two later, was one of the strangest and most notable phenomena of the war.

Those Japanese pilots who got close enough to see an American task force below them were awed by its size, covering hundreds of square miles of ocean. The US Navy in the last two years of the war projected long-range power such as the world had never seen, and grew larger than all the other combatant navies put together. Substantial elements of this fleet were deployed in support of each of the island assault operations that dominated the latter phase of the eastern war. Nimitz’s central Pacific offensive opened in November 1943, with landings on the tiny atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. There was no scope for strategic deception, because the only credible objectives for American assault were a handful of island air bases. The US Navy and Marine Corps advanced from one foothold to the next, knowing that the Japanese had fortified them all in anticipation of their coming.

Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Gilberts armada included nineteen carriers, twelve battleships and their support vessels, together with an invasion force of 35,000 Marines and 6,000 vehicles. The Americans at sea that day, contemplating the display of their nation’s power around them, felt invincible. US carrier aircraft wrecked every local Japanese airfield with bombs and gunfire; before the landings, Spruance’s heavy guns bombarded the island for three hours, delivering 3,000 tons of shells. Yet the experience that followed proved one of the most bitter of the US Marine Corps’ war. On Betio, the main islet, less than two miles long and seven hundred yards wide, the Japanese had created bunkers of concrete, steel and felled palm trees which were almost impervious to bombs and shells. Marine Karl Albrecht was shocked by his first sight of the beach as his craft approached: ‘It was lined with amphtracs, all of which appeared to be burning and smoking … The attack appeared to have dissolved in confusion. I was terror-stricken and amazed at the same time. We were Americans and invincible. We had a huge armada of warships and a division of Marines. How could this be happening? I discovered the rows of Marines along the beach weren’t lying there waiting for orders to move. They were dead.’

A wide offshore reef checked the assault boats, so that thousands of Marines were obliged to wade the last few hundred yards to the shoreline with agonising sluggishness, under Japanese fire. A navy pilot gazing down on the scene said later: ‘The water never seemed clear of tiny men, their rifles over their heads, slowly wading beachwards. I wanted to cry.’ Four days of fighting followed, among blasted palm trees and skilfully camouflaged defences. When the shooting stopped, the Marines had suffered 3,407 casualties and almost all the 4,500 Japanese defenders were dead – just seventeen prisoners were taken. Every participant in the battle was shocked by its intensity. It was a painful experience for the American people, as well as for the Marines, to discover how hard they must fight to overcome a sacrificial defence. National hubris, the doctrine of American exceptionalism, was affronted by the revelation that a primitive enemy could resist overwhelming firepower, that the path to victory made close-quarter combat and its sacrifices mandatory. Though significant tactical lessons were learned from Tarawa, the same infantry experience would be repeated in later island battles. From a global and especially Russian perspective, US losses were small for important strategic gains, but they seemed very terrible when the prizes were mere atolls of coral and palm trees.

Nothing could alter the campaign’s fundamentals: to defeat Japan, US forces must seize strongly defended Pacific air and naval bases. No application of superior technology and firepower could avert the need for American soldiers and Marines to expose their bodies to a skilful and stubborn foe. Even now that it was plain the Allies would win the war, Japan’s commitment remained unshaken. Japanese strategy, such as it was, required extraction of the highest possible blood-price from the Americans for every small gain, to erode their will and persuade them to negotiate. It is often claimed that Japan’s militarists alone insisted on continuing the war, but the generals enjoyed powerful support from conservative politicians, many fervent Japanese nationalists, and from the Emperor. In November 1943, at the first conference of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in Tokyo, Hirohito was warned that the Solomons were about to fall. His response was to goad his generals: ‘Isn’t there some place where we can strike the United States? When and where are you people ever going to put up a good fight? And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle?’

Cultural revulsion underpinned the hatred which characterised Allied conduct of the Asian war. Japan’s savagery towards its prisoners and subjects was now well known, and often repaid in kind. Japanese willingness to fight to the death rather than surrender, even in tactically and indeed strategically hopeless circumstances, disgusted Allied troops. American and British soldiers were imbued with the European historical tradition, whereby the honourable and civilised response to impending defeat was to abandon the struggle, averting gratuitous bloodshed. Americans in the Pacific, like British soldiers in Burma, felt rage towards an enemy who rejected such civilised logic. The Japanese, who had been merciless in victory, now showed themselves determined to cull every possible human life from their inexorable descent towards defeat.