Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (48 page)

After early inconclusive operations, his forces did smash the Japanese garrisons in Burma and push all the way down the Irrawaddy in 1945. But the advance would have been far swifter had the British been able to make a series of amphibious hops along the coastline, akin to the increasingly accelerated ones MacArthur’s units made from the Solomons to the Philippines in 1944. Yet since the landings at Anzio, Normandy, the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and Iwo Jima always got greater priority for landing craft, such plans for Southeast Asia were repeatedly postponed, if not canceled altogether. So jungle battles were the only way to go, and as American and Australian forces had found out in New Guinea, they were painfully slow. It was only in April and May 1944 that the Fifteenth Army won its major victory at Imphal-Kohima, but that was still on the Indian side of the border. The British would not take Mandalay until March 1945, and Rangoon only by early May. By the time they could seriously plan for ambitious forward moves upon Malaya and Singapore, the Japanese had shifted their remaining aerial and naval forces to the Pacific, Okinawa had fallen, and the Americans were preparing for the invasion of the home islands. The great novelist John Masters could, in his classic war memoir
The Road Past Mandalay,
rhapsodize about “the old Indian Army” bursting down the (at last) tarmac roads that led into Rangoon’s northern suburbs in the late spring of 1945, but to the Japanese—and the Americans, too—they were headed in the wrong direction. The Pacific War was won elsewhere.
¹³

These critical factors of distance, logistics, and topography all meant that the Southwest Pacific theater clearly offered a relatively better route for the defeat of Japan than did the China and Burma options. Here the recovery campaign could begin just a short distance north of Australia’s ports and air bases, and the American flow of troops and supplies could come fairly directly via Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, the northern
Australian harbors, and Port Moresby in southern New Guinea. Moreover, in the first year of the Pacific War this region simply had to be given a lot of attention by the Allies, because it was here—Papua, the Coral Sea, the central Solomon Islands—that the Japanese seemed intent upon cutting the American-Australian line of communications. As each side committed more and more troops, aircraft, and warships into the battles for Guadalcanal and New Guinea as 1942 unfolded into 1943, the urgency for a victory became an important factor, calling for even more resources. In addition, there was the powerful and intimidating figure of Douglas MacArthur himself, who (with enormous media and congressional attention) insisted that the fulcrum of the war against Japan was situated in his command.
¹⁴

The New Guinea campaign on one hand and the Mediterranean campaign on the other possessed the same basic strategic profile: neither of them was headed directly at the enemy’s heartland, but both built up such operational and political momentum that they could not be stopped. And, fortunately for the Grand Alliance, there were enough resources coming to the fronts by late 1943 and 1944 that the European and the Pacific campaigns could afford both the direct thrusts toward France and Honshu
and
the hugely expensive indirect campaigns as well.

There were some further strategic and operational advantages to be derived from the U.S. commitment to the Southwest Pacific theater. Until the Central Pacific island groups were captured and turned into advance bases, this more southerly region played to America’s productive strengths. It could send an uninterrupted flow of supply and support diagonally across the ocean from its West Coast factories. Even if the Solomon Islands were a long way from San Diego, they were also a very long way from Yokohama. Second, because the battles were small-scale as compared to the Somme or Kursk, the campaign did not attract the attention it deserved in Imperial General Headquarters, which kept feeding limited reinforcements to the Southwest Pacific, though never enough to knock back the Allied advances. Finally, as this theater gradually sucked in more and more midsized Japanese forces, it also helped to blood the newly recruited Allied units, steadily building up their experience both of jungle warfare and of landings from the sea. Thus, for example, the First U.S. Marine Division, which came ashore in
1942 at Guadalcanal, was three years later still in the thick of the fighting at Okinawa, and had fought many more battles in between. Army general Bob Eichelberger, whom MacArthur sent to take Buna (New Guinea) with orders to seize it or not come back alive, led his units all the way from the villages of Papua to the northern Philippines and was preparing them for the great amphibious invasion of Japan when the atomic bombs went off. Unsurprisingly, his later memoir was called
Our Jungle Road to Tokyo
.
¹⁵

But, given the astonishing and accelerated pace of Admiral Nimitz’s planned thrust out of Pearl Harbor and through the Central Pacific by late 1943, and the comparative shortness and ease of that route,
^c
it is difficult to argue that MacArthur’s 1943–44 campaigns along the north shore of New Guinea had primary strategic relevance, even when the American-Australian divisions began to quicken the pace of things by leapfrogging over Japanese military strongpoints and thereby isolating them. By the time MacArthur’s troops had finally taken Biak Island (August 1944) off the northwest shores of New Guinea, the Marianas had already been seized and the preparations for softening up Japan’s inner defenses via the seizure of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and by strategic bombing, had begun. It might fairly be argued that most of the Philippines could have been left neglected, and that Southwest Pacific Command could have joined much earlier in the northward turn toward Japan. It was not to be. As Liddell Hart noted, “Political considerations, and MacArthur’s natural desire for a triumphant return to the Philippines, prevailed against such arguments for by-passing the great islands.”
¹⁶

Perhaps the stronger operational reason for the Chiefs of Staff agreeing to support the Southwest Pacific drive so fully was not so much that they accepted MacArthur’s personal imperative but that they appreciated that these twin advances kept Tokyo perpetually off-balance—the best example being that of the Japanese main fleet rushing backward and forward over hundreds of miles between Biak and
the Marianas in June 1944 as news (some of it erroneous) of the enemy’s moves kept suggesting that the main threat was coming from the other direction.
¹⁷
With the Japanese navy beginning to run short of fuel and its aircraft being destroyed both around Rabaul and across the Philippine Sea by the forces of Southwest Pacific Command, it could hardly be said that MacArthur’s forces played an insignificant role, but their greatest function overall was to distract the enemy leadership, wear down enormous numbers of Japan’s armed forces, and give Nimitz and Central Pacific Command a vastly improved chance of going directly for the homeland.

So the three alternative theaters all contributed much to the defeat of Japan. The totals of the respective Japanese personnel losses (169,000 in India and Burma and a massive 772,000 in the South Pacific, compared to 296,000 in the Central Pacific) tell us that.
¹⁸
And by the end of the war large Japanese garrisons were strewn across Southeast Asia, the Dutch East Indies, isolated Pacific islands, the southern Philippines, Manchuria, and, above all, China: millions of men, protecting the wrong approach routes and weakening Japan’s central defenses.

Since it was most unlikely that Japan would have been brought to its knees through Allied campaigns from mainland China and Southeast Asia, and since the route from Guadalcanal and Port Moresby via Manila was so laborious, there might seem a powerful inevitability about the remaining geopolitical option: an American drive across the Central Pacific in a series of thrusts that went from east to west, and virtually all north of the equator. Many authors are insistent: “In the end, only one campaign counted: Nimitz’s thrust of the U.S. Navy across the Pacific to bomb Japan. Every other campaign, however bitter, however desperate, was either ancillary to this or a sideshow.”
¹⁹

Further geopolitical considerations confirm that assumption. By 1941–42 it was obvious that only the United States could end Japanese military domination of this vast region; neither Britain nor the USSR, both embroiled in the titanic struggle against the Third Reich, could possibly divert the resources necessary to deal with Japan. What was more, the munitions base of the powerful American war machine was
increasingly to be found along the West Coast, roughly between thirty and fifty degrees north, which was exactly Japan’s latitude. Since there was no intervening land directly between San Francisco and Tokyo harbors, and since an Aleutian route possessed the weather-related difficulties mentioned earlier, it made sense to advance along an axis that was somewhat south of the Tropic of Cancer, from the Hawaiian bases to the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and then to the Carolines and Marianas, before turning northward to the Japanese mainland.

There was also the great benefit of America’s interrupted possession of Hawaii, which, with its air bases, dockyards, and repair works, had an inestimable strategic capacity to control the Central Pacific, both as a bulwark against further Japanese expansion eastward
and
as a gigantic staging point for any return. Had Japan ever succeeded in seizing the Hawaiian islands, even if it planned no further moves toward the West Coast of the United States, its possession of bases on Oahu could have set back an American counterstroke for years and made the operational connection to Australia much more difficult. Retained in American hands, however, Hawaii was the sortie point for the occupation of the Gilbert and Marshall Islands to the southwest, and for everything that followed after that.

In a practical sense, too, the losses and gains of the Pearl Harbor and Midway battles helped to push the American armed forces further toward a Micronesian strategy. The devastation of many of the slow First World War battleships at Pearl had compelled the U.S. Navy, to a large extent unintentionally, into a carrier-centric force, a shift of weapons system that the Coral Sea and Midway contests so quickly confirmed as wise. But the lesson that those forceful aircraft carrier admirals such as Marc Mitscher and William “Bull” Halsey drew from the Pearl Harbor catastrophe was that it was always safer for the fleet to be at sea rather than constricted in port; in an age of sudden, swift airpower, a protected harbor actually offered very little protection, but was an invitation to attack. Yet if American carriers and their escorting cruisers and destroyers were to remain for lengthy periods on the high seas, they needed to create a sophisticated and mobile “fleet train” to follow and nourish the warships wherever they went. In the nineteenth century the Royal Navy had solved its supply problems by use of a vast network of naval bases and coaling stations, from Portsmouth and Gibraltar all the
way to Sydney and Hong Kong. The twentieth-century U.S. Navy was to pursue a different logistical plan, which made large-scale operations across the Central Pacific possible for the first time ever. Still, the existence of the fleet train only gave the navy’s flotillas longer “legs” while at sea; it could not itself form bases for long-range strategic bombing or for massive invasion forces. That required strategically located islands, to provide airfields and harbors. Fortunately, there were a small number of them, to the west and west-southwest of Hawaii, available for the taking.

The final reason a Hawaii-based operational drive through Micronesia was preferred by the navy was because the area commander would be an admiral (Nimitz) and not the difficult and imperious MacArthur. This was of vital concern to the chief of naval operations, Fleet Admiral King, a tough, unrelenting character determined to see the U.S. Navy remain an independent service, neither reduced to a fetch-and-carry force for MacArthur’s drive from New Guinea to the Philippines nor playing second fiddle to the British, the American air force, or the Marshall-and-Eisenhower wing of the U.S. Army in support of their Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Normandy/Germany campaigns. Unsurprisingly, then, Central Pacific Command received most of King’s attention and, when the new fast carriers and battleships were launched, the bulk of the navy’s warship allotments. It also received many of the desperately required landing craft. By late 1943, the tools were at hand to carry out that move across the Central Pacific, which was designated War Plan Orange.
²⁰

What were those tools or fighting systems? The first, chronologically, was the U.S. Marine Corps, with its plan to seize bases in Micronesia—that is, the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana island groups, which Japan had taken over from imperial Germany during the First World War. Any competent general staff, confronted with the geostrategic nightmare of getting 6,000 miles across the Pacific, would have recommended a stage-by-stage method, like moving across a sort of gigantic chessboard. The planners at Newport and Quantico had thought this through well before Pearl Harbor, and an impressive number of midlevel officers had worked on weapons systems and tactics that could
turn an amphibious-warfare theory of seizing difficult, prickly coral reefs into a viable operation, thus converting those islands into strategic assets.

The second factor was the evolution of fast carrier groups. The U.S. Navy had been swift to understand the strategic and operational implications of the early British experiments of launching aircraft from a reconstructed “flattop” warship, and thus had pushed ahead in the 1930s with the building of a few capacious carriers that had no equal in fighting punch—except for their equivalents in the Japanese fleet. The carrier enthusiasts were constantly blocked, or at least slowed down, by the much larger pro-battleship lobby in the service, but, there being no independent American air force at the time, they did not suffer the fate of the Fleet Air Arm in the bruising Royal Navy–Royal Air Force procurement battles of the interwar years. When war came, therefore, the U.S. Navy had dependable carriers with decent planes, which gave them a good fighting chance against the Japanese—who had excellent carriers with excellent aircraft. And the spectacular attack on Pearl Harbor opened everyone’s eyes to the amazingly destructive reach of carrier-borne airpower. The type of ships that had allowed the Japanese to hit Hawaii could, in their American version, obviously also be used to lead the counterattack westward.