Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (45 page)

For these reasons it isn’t possible to point either to a single breakthrough (like the long-range escort fighter in early 1944) or to a coincidental cluster of improvements in systems and weapons (as in detecting and destroying U-boats in the middle of 1943) that would organize the argument here on how the Allies eventually learned to land on an enemy-held shore. The circumstances varied from case to case: for example, the factor of surprise was important to MacArthur’s leapfrogging campaign, and deception played a big role before D-Day, yet on Saipan and Guam, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the entrenched Japanese garrisons just sat and waited for the assaults that were to come, with no space for maneuver. Bombarding the Normandy beaches for seven
whole days, as was to occur at Okinawa, probably would have been disastrous—by the time the Allies landed, they might have faced twenty or more fully alerted German divisions on the other side of the hedgerows. Again, minute-by-minute orchestration of the beachhead was vital in many operations such as Normandy, but rather less so in Sicily, where the beachhead opposition was so small. Fluctuating clouds and fogs always made airpower more or less useful. An unusually low tide caused havoc at Tarawa; an unanticipated swell pushed the Utah Beach troops toward a safer part of the coast. There was no perfect recipe for a successful strike from the sea, however well one prepared for it.

Perhaps the best way to think about this, then, is to arrange the various aspects of amphibious warfare into first-order and second-order contributions. Thus, although offshore naval bombardments were impressive and on at least two occasions (Anzio and Omaha) really helped to blunt a counterattack upon a precariously held beach, only rarely did they destroy a determined enemy’s capacity to fight back from secure bunkers.

By contrast, command of the air over the landing areas and the approaches to them was always critical, and here, by the beginning of 1944, the Allied advantage was becoming steadily more obvious, at least in the European theater. Moreover, the types of aircraft used for close-air support over the beaches (Marauders, Typhoons, Thunderbolts) were also well equipped to destroy the enemy’s land forces during the breakout operations that followed.

Did the many improvements in amphibious weapons systems—ranging from Hobart’s Funnies in Europe to the U.S. Marines’ deployment of flamethrower and bulldozer tanks in the Pacific—constitute a first-order explanation for the increasing capacity to burst through an enemy-held shore? Yes, probably. Did the increasing employment of highly practiced advance units and of special forces such as the commandos and the Rangers help? Of course they did, and in some cases (taking the Orne River bridge, even the widespread scattering of the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions that so confused the German defenders) decisively so. There is also no doubt that the mass production of landing craft (whether the LVTs and infantry DUKWs, those carrying tanks or trucks, or those firing rockets) and of the equally important mother ships that brought them across the oceans to their offshore
launch positions was absolutely critical. Indeed, take away those vessels and it is difficult to see how any of the larger landing operations described above could have occurred at all.
⁴⁹

There were other important aspects to amphibious warfare in play by 1944 that simply had not existed four years earlier. Having a command and control HQ offshore, separate both from the naval warships and from the landing forces, greatly reduced miscommunications and other errors. Having a single officer responsible for keeping order on the beach, and having much-improved wireless links back to the HQ ship for a forward directing unit to call in fire support, was another major advance. Having specialized underwater demolition teams and beach clearance groups was vital (just where did one dump all that barbed wire?). Having much smoother flow-through logistics greatly improved, though never fully eliminated, the predictable frictions involved in moving vast numbers of men, weapons, and supplies in the midst of battle.

But above them all, and orchestrating them all, sat an interservice, combined-operations organization (Ramsay’s, essentially, and in the Pacific, Nimitz’s) that had, after many setbacks and disappointments, figured out
how to do it
. If one had to point to a single feature of this story of the evolution of Allied amphibious warfare, it would probably be here, in the superior, even sophisticated ordering of the many moving parts.
Orchestration
is a term that might sum all this up. The multifaceted orchestra for a large and complex landing absolutely needed a conductor—and that could not be Churchill and Roosevelt, or the Combined Chiefs of Staff, or the powerful heads of the individual services. It had to be a different sort of person: an organizer, a planner, a problem solver.

The early American and British planners, operating under the shadow of Gallipoli and in times of acute fiscal severity, understood the special needs of amphibious operations from the beginning. The ideas that started with Pete Ellis and the other precocious Marine Corps planners in the 1920s, and a little later with the British Inter-Service Training and Development Centre in the 1930s, steadily metamorphosed via Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Command and the USMC Marine Expeditionary Forces, and through the sobering experiences of Madagascar, Guadalcanal, Dieppe, and the Gilberts, into an
end product that had its apotheosis in the twin Normandy-Marianas assaults of June 1944. Isley and Crowl put it nicely in their 1951 classic
The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War
when they observe that a close examination of those early, difficult operations “shows that the chief shortcomings were not in doctrine, but rather in the means to put existing doctrine into effect.”
⁵⁰

It was simple, if one understood the basic operational principles. Amphibious warfare was a special kind of fighting that required many special ingredients: new interservice command structures, novel and often very weird-looking weapons systems, incredibly complex logistics, an extremely high level of battle training, very sophisticated low-altitude aerial support, and smart ways of directing masses of troops and vehicles on and off narrow beachheads. Getting all that right meant a very good chance of winning. But ignoring any of those critical requirements most likely would mean heavy punishment. And there was always the element of luck.

Had one brought back those early visionaries and planners to witness the first day or two of the June 1944 landings, they surely would have been staggered at the enormous size and intricacy of what was taking place before their eyes. But it is difficult to think of many features to which, conceptually, they had not given thought years before there was any prospect of realization. Like certain other strategic thinkers who had applied their great brains to the challenges posed by modern war, they were prophets before their time.

L
ike other massive campaigns of military conquest in modern times, most notably those directed by Hitler or by Napoleon, the extraordinary Japanese offensives of 1941–42 were within a relatively short time to become the victim of what one historian has termed “the tyranny of distance”: that is, they failed to recognize the natural limits upon human endeavor imposed by geography.
¹
The Japanese high command overreached itself. It would have been difficult to convince the frightened inhabitants of Darwin and Brisbane (or their equally nervous equivalents in San Francisco and Bombay) of that geopolitical
fact in the spring of 1942, when what had been an incremental Japanese challenge to the Anglo-American hegemony in East Asia and the Pacific during the 1930s finally burst into a violent, all-consuming fury of aggression coming ever closer to their shores.

Yet it was true. Japan, which had never been beaten in war before, went too far. As the present chapter will show, however, this was not simply an innate matter, like the waxing and waning of a tide. In contrast, Japan’s vast empire was brought to its end by external means, chiefly through the impressive deployment of American resources, personnel, and weapons systems. The two combatants did not spar in a fixed space, like a boxing ring, but across a vast geographic arena in which the exploitation of distance, time, and opportunity by each combatant’s leaders and planners was just as important as the morale of their fighting forces and the quality of the weapons. There was an invaluable bonus to be secured by the side that best understood, and best prepared for, the peculiar geopolitics of the gigantic Pacific sphere. In this situation, the maritime-oriented Americans had a clear advantage over a Japanese military leadership fixated upon land campaigns across China.

It was scarcely surprising, however, that imperial Japan should seek to expand abroad once its centuries of self-imposed isolationism were replaced after the 1868 Meiji Restoration by a drive to modernize, though not liberalize; in this regard, it was simply imitating earlier successful colonial powers, especially those of the West.
²
An impressive turn toward industrialization and export-led growth massively increased its productive capacities and provided the basis whereby it alone among the states of Asia and Africa possessed, by the 1920s, a modern army, navy, and air force—in fact, among the best in the world. All this created a critical and growing dependence upon foreign foodstuffs and raw materials and spurred Japan’s nationalists to argue for acquiring secure sources of supply, like those enjoyed by the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

The real measure of comparison for Japan—in fact, the only comparison—was Great Britain, the other politically coherent island state that broke beyond its coastal limits to become something much larger, a nation that had organized its navy and army to ensure control of distant sources for supply of the homeland. Since getting that tin,
rubber, iron ore, copper, timber, and (especially) oil was essential, the only question remaining for Tokyo was whether those sources could be obtained with the acquiescence of the established powers or had to be gotten against their wishes, which obviously raised the risk of war. The debate among the Japanese political and military/naval elites was, therefore, not whether their country should become another world actor on the lines of Britain and Germany but how and when to achieve that natural goal. A long-standing member of the Japanese house of notables such as Yamagata Arimoto, looking back over the previous five decades from 1920, might occasionally have wondered at the transformation of Japan’s international position since his youth—wondered not just at the transformation of medieval cities such as Yokohama to look ever more like Southampton and Baltimore, but also at the steady array of overseas acquisitions by a nation that had virtually cut itself off from the world for over three centuries. Yet neither he nor anyone else in power questioned Japan’s right to expand.
³