Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (47 page)

There is one further spatial and geopolitical point to be made about Japan’s enormous territorial expansion during 1941 and 1942. It offered a fine example of what Liddell Hart had termed “an expanding torrent,” that is, an attack whose arc steadily widened the farther that advances were made. But Liddell Hart had thought of such an operational expansion as being carried out by a relatively small group of fast panzer units in western Europe, breaching an enemy line and then spreading out for a farther 100 to 200 miles.
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In the Pacific, as in Russia, the distances were to be measured in many thousands of miles. When the Japanese expeditionary forces moved toward Alaska, Midway, Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Gilberts, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Thailand, Malaya and Singapore, North Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, and beyond—to Burma, perhaps northern Australia—those few divisions were dispersing themselves across vast distances, while most of the army’s troops were pushing into central and southern China.

Logically, then, the farther that these Japanese units advanced across the Pacific and through Southeast Asia, the thinner became the
density
of occupying troops in captured territory. As we have seen above, this was not unlike the Wehrmacht’s contemporaneous dilemma. Hitler had insisted that the Nazi “torrent” expand to the north (Leningrad), center (Moscow), and south (Stalingrad) of the vast Russian plains, in addition to holding the Balkans, controlling all of western Europe, and maintaining a foothold in North Africa. Yet the distances involved across western Russia were nowhere as great as those between the Aleutians and Burma, and Hitler possessed far larger military and industrial resources when the counterthrusts came.

Thus, by the summer of 1942 Imperial General Headquarters in
Tokyo had overstretched itself and put most of its troops in the wrong place, but it didn’t recognize that. It had achieved enormous territorial gains, its homelands were intact, and the booty from its conquests was pouring back home. While the Allies had held the Japanese advances on various fronts, there were no breakthrough counterattacks; not yet.
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So to Imperial General Headquarters, things were not serious. The setbacks at the Coral Sea and in the jungles of New Guinea against MacArthur’s forces were unsettling, and the losses of four carriers at Midway were regrettable. But there were ample resources to make some farther if less dramatic advances, perhaps probing the Assam borders, or advancing down the Solomon Islands chain, to make the perimeter ring more solid. MacArthur’s slow progress in Papua and the tangled battles taking place around Guadalcanal seemed obscure, distant, and not of great import. In sum, by the closing months of 1942, alarm bells were not ringing; even a year later, one suspects that their sound was a very distant toll to Japan’s continentalist generals, schooled in the Prussian tradition that control of the mainland was the essence of a proper grand strategy.
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Thus, because Japan had more or less achieved what it wanted, and because the military leadership at Imperial General Headquarters did not particularly need to go very much further, the onus was upon the Allies to alter things; it was they who had to take the offensive and then compel a Japanese defeat. This, in essence, was the strategic logic of the entire war in the Pacific and East Asia from the summer of 1942 onward, and it was also the basic assumption of the leaders and planners at Casablanca six months later. But how and where and with what means did one crush the Japanese Empire?

Moving from a defensive strategic posture to an offensive one is always a complex challenge, even to the most efficient and imaginative organizations, and in this case geography also made the Allied task one of extreme difficulty. The blunt cartographical fact was that the home islands of Japan were a very long way from
any
enemy takeoff point, unless it was from Siberia/Manchuria (but Stalin, fighting for his life,
had no intention of opening up a second front while the Wehrmacht was still a thousand miles or more inside the Soviet Union). Thus, the turn of the tide in the Pacific was fundamentally different from that in Europe. Challenging though it was in military-operational terms, the task of crossing the English Channel to destroy Nazi domination of Europe was understandable and realizable, and was an operation that had been well rehearsed by the landings in North Africa and Sicily/Italy. By contrast, the defeat of Japan could not be planned for until the Combined Chiefs of Staff had decided upon the takeoff point—or points.

Ruling out the Siberia/Mongolia option, then, the Allies could choose from four attack routes from the perimeter to the Japanese core, since Tokyo’s expansionist drives from 1937 to 1942 fanned outward in so many different directions.
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The first alternative was to base the counteroffensive chiefly upon mainland China, the theater closest to Japan and most engaged in the fighting. The second would involve the recovery of Southeast Asia, that is, Burma, Thailand, Malaya/Singapore, French Indochina, Borneo, and the Dutch East Indies. The third would be to build upon the American-Australian command structure in the Southwest Pacific under MacArthur and push northward from Australia to New Guinea and the Solomon and Bismarck archipelagos to the Celebes and the Philippines themselves, which would then become a springboard to Formosa. From here, Allied armies might possibly link with Chiang Kai-Shek’s mainland forces or turn to assault Japan directly, from the south. In this scenario, Luzon and Formosa would resemble Britain’s own position as the launchpad for the Allied conquest of Nazi Europe. The fourth and final option would be to drive across the wide expanses of the Central Pacific, recovering the island groups that Japan had seized in 1942 (the Gilberts) and taking the empire’s important mandate islands (the Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas) as stepping-stones
to Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the invasion of Japan itself. It would be much more of a “blue water” strategy, and would be run chiefly by the navy and the air force, not the army, at least until the actual invasion of Japan itself.

Of course, it was not a zero-sum game; the options were not mutually exclusive. All four theater options had legitimate claims, which will be discussed below. More sensibly, it would have been militarily stupid for the Allies to commit to only a single line of advance in the Asia-Pacific theater, for that, in turn, would concentrate the Japanese defenses. Applying pressure in all four fields of conflict would not only disperse the enemy’s resources but also allow a switching of the more mobile Allied forces if a weak spot was detected.

Ultimately, one of these return routes proved to be decisive, but it is worth taking some time to examine the other three options, not just to understand better why they were less vital but also to see what light those operations shed upon the overall challenge of defeating Japan. All three pinned down enormous numbers of Japanese troops and aircraft (and, in the case of the Southwest Pacific campaign, Japanese warships) that otherwise would have been free to contest the chief American line of attack.

Advancing upon Japan via the China theater made a lot of sense at first sight. Although this was where the bulk of the Japanese army was fighting, it was also a place where the United States probably could build up a fair-sized air force, and it was difficult for the deadly Japanese carrier-borne air squadrons to reach. It was important for America to give support to the Chinese Nationalist armies, because, practically speaking, keeping China in the war consumed so many Japanese divisions. There were also significant sentimental aspects at play here as well. President Roosevelt was a strong supporter of the U.S.-China relationship. The American general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was Chiang Kai-Shek’s chief military advisor. Claude Chennault’s group of glamorous volunteer airmen, the “Flying Tigers,” was there. So were a large number of American missionaries, teachers, and traders. From the viewpoint of the Army Air Corps planners, aware that Doolittle’s squadron had actually landed in China after making its daring raid on Tokyo in April 1942, it was obvious that certain Chinese air bases were close enough to allow the strategic bombing of Japan’s cities and industries.
Moreover, American bombers based there would also be able to interdict Japanese maritime routes down the China Sea as they headed for Southeast Asia.

So why was the China option not taken, or taken only for a while, and with inadequate resources? The answer again is chiefly explained by geography. Inland China was simply too far away from the U.S. productive base and therefore too hard to supply in large numbers. Since all the waters of the Western Pacific and the Indonesian archipelago were dominated by the Japanese navy, the only Western material assistance could come from British India, over the “hump,” that is, the enormous mountain peaks of the eastern Himalayas, and at a disproportionate logistical cost—even just carrying the gas supplies for U.S. bombers in China caused massive wear and tear and was highly uneconomical. Nor would this work for the deployment of U.S. ground forces. Since the consumption levels of an American army division, let alone of an army corps, were fantastically greater than those of any other armed force in the world, there was no way of putting such large units into southern China and supplying them by air.

Furthermore, given the Japanese high command’s obsession with winning whatever the cost, it was bound to pour fresh divisions against U.S. and Chinese Nationalist forces and in particular against identified B-17 or, later, B-29 air bases in the south and west of the country—and, for once, the Japanese lines of supply would be shorter and easier. Looking back, and with the privileged knowledge of the massive American punch that was being assembled in the Central Pacific, it is hard to understand the Japanese army’s continental thrusts in 1943 and 1944, driving the Chinese Nationalist forces farther southwest, and in turn sucking in its own brigades. This handed an advantage to the United States, for while it could not put heavy forces onto the Asian continent, it certainly could do enough to distract the bulk of the Japanese army. By giving a degree of support to the Chinese Nationalist government, in the form of vital munitions and medical supplies, plus Stilwell and other military advisors and the later B-29 squadrons, the United States kept the Chinese resistance going and helped to pin down millions of Japanese troops on the mainland. And as 1944 unfolded, those enormous forces found themselves being steadily cut off from their supplies by American submarines and aircraft.
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The Southeast Asia route was another alternative that had its advocates, especially in London and Delhi. It
was
an important theater, and not just for emotional and symbolic reasons, such as the desire (especially Churchill’s) to regain Singapore. It was a significant region of the overall war, and attacking there did mean that Britain was showing a commitment to the struggle against Japan and not leaving everything to the Americans and Chinese (with Australian contributions). It would pull a lot of Japanese soldiers and aircraft from the Pacific realm, and the recovery of Malaya’s tin and rubber and of the oil from Sumatra, Java, and North Borneo would have brought Japan’s war machine to a halt. Moreover, and for the logistical reasons described above, it would be impossible to do anything significant in the China theater unless the Allied airfields in Assam and northern Burma were developed and properly protected.

But the campaigning by the forces of Southeast Asia Command under Mountbatten and his predecessors suffered from two great disadvantages. The first was that starting off the counteroffensive from the Assam/Burma border and then advancing through such inaccessible places as Imphal and Kohima left the armed forces a very long way from Tokyo Bay, and the topographic, logistical, and health obstacles would have remained immense even if far greater resources had been allocated to this theater than they had been at Casablanca and the other critical Allied conferences. The nature of this vast jungle-clad terrain simply excluded certain forms of warfare that were commonplace elsewhere. There were no real industrial targets for strategic bombing (unless one wanted to blast Rangoon and Singapore), and even the increasingly efficient tactical air squadrons, which did have targets, were always last in line to receive the newer types of planes and equipment. There were no great tracts of open ground, as in North Africa and the Ukraine, where the allocation of, say, 250 Sherman tanks would have made a difference; there were few metallic roads through the rain forests, and the wooden bridges were simply too weak for tanks—often, getting even a medium-sized artillery piece across a river required the use of ropes and pulleys. The airborne divisions were allocated to Europe. Special Forces in the jungles of Burma, like Wingate’s legendary Chindits and Merrill’s Marauders (their American equivalent) played a distracting role but could not sway the outcome. Even when Mountbatten’s
regular units were finally strengthened in late 1944, the jungle continually blunted his matériel advantage. The seasonal monsoons were a nightmare that bogged down everybody’s armies. Not even William Slim, arguably the best general the British Army produced in the war, could find an easy answer to flooded river valleys, impenetrable jungles, and the curse of tropical diseases; fighting the Japanese was easy by comparison.
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