Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (49 page)

The third factor was the introduction of the long-range B-29 Superfortress, a bomber so advanced that not only could it carry an immense bomb load thousands of miles but its maximum altitude (30,000 feet) made it inaccessible to enemy fighters and antiaircraft shells. No doubt the American reconquest of the Western Pacific could have crept forward, in an indirect way, from New Guinea to the Celebes to the northern Philippines, perhaps then to the Chinese coastlands, then to Okinawa, allowing the construction of further airfields from which the B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators could increase the aerial assault upon Japan. But a new bomber with unprecedented range and destructive power, that is, the Superfortress, together with the astonishingly suitable position of the Marianas, combined to offer an enormous shortcut to a war that many planners originally thought might go on until 1946 or 1947 and would have to include a giant Allied invasion of mainland Japan.

The dropping of the atomic bombs cut short all those invasion
scenarios, but absent the B-29s and the capture of the Marianas, when would those bombs have been dropped, and where from? The B-29 was an excellent example of what Hitler termed a “wonder weapon,” yet by 1943–45 only the United States could afford to build such an aerial monster. The electrical wiring and the aluminum for a single plane were probably equivalent to that needed to construct a squadron of Messerschmitts.

The fourth factor was the units who built the bases, the installations, the assembly points, and the roads that carried the fight forward—in this particular case, the U.S. Navy’s Construction Battalions, the “Seabees.” Although created by the exigencies of this particular war, the job this new force did would have been recognized by military men of all ages. It is difficult to imagine a military victory without engineers, but all too often historians of grand campaigns take their work for granted and assume that troops, fleets, and air squadrons can be moved long distances by the stroke of a pen on a large-scale map.
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Yet to troops on the ground, however well equipped, mountains, rivers, swamps, deserts, and jungles geographically determine the nature of the battles that are to be fought. Nowhere was this more true than in the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. In sum, it needed Marine Corps amphibious doctrine and practice, the fast carrier groups, the B-29s, and the Seabees to cross the Pacific together. Just how those parts grew up and then came together forms the rest of this chapter, together with the somewhat separate story of a fifth element, the U.S. submarine service.

The evolution of the U.S. Marine Corps’s form of amphibious warfare can be compared in many ways with the experiences of Allied amphibious warfare in Europe (see
chapter 4
), although there were also significant differences due to force organization and, above all, the geography of the Pacific. The Corps’s story is one of almost unremitting combat, from their landings at Guadalcanal in mid-August 1942 to the end of the resistance by the Japanese garrison on Okinawa in late June 1945. It was a story of learning the hard way, of fighting those same natural obstacles of jungle, weather, and disease that the British were encountering
in Burma and MacArthur was dealing with in Papua New Guinea, and of fighting an enemy that would never surrender. As late as July 1945 American theater commanders in the Pacific were chafing at the slow progress being made in taking Okinawa, but how exactly did one make
fast
progress against such a dug-in enemy? Eventually MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command, after exceptionally laborious fighting during the first two years, figured out that they would win the war much more swiftly if they leapfrogged into positions where the enemy wasn’t. Yet there were always some places—the Solomons, the Gilberts, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—that they had to take, however strongly held. This was the marines’ saga.
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Why was it that the United States Marine Corps (USMC) came to occupy this special, legendary place in the annals of war? The simple answer was that the marines were the only people in post-1919 America who took a keen, active, and progressive interest in amphibious operations. Just as the RAF and U.S. Army Air Corps had to assert the claims of the value of strategic bombing to justify themselves as an independent service following the Great War, so also had the Marine Corps to explain why it was needed when American military budgets were being trimmed so hard after 1919. The result of their efforts was to be seen in a combination of convincing warfare doctrine, improved technological and logistical assets, and well-trained specialist units that forever identified the Corps with massive and effective assault from the sea. It also studied the recent past for helpful lessons; not for nothing do the two historians of the first comprehensive book on the U.S. Marines and amphibious warfare begin with an illuminating comparative essay titled “Success at Okinawa—Failure at Gallipoli.”
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Viewed retrospectively, it is rather remarkable that the amphibious operations concept survived at all. The USMC’s mother service, the U.S. Navy, remained obsessed about future wars on the high seas between battle fleets and had no desire for a secondary role in supporting landing forces. When the Washington Naval Treaties of 1921–22 forced further fleet cutbacks, the navy could only regard the marines as a rival charge upon its limited budgets, even as, curiously, its war plans against Japan required expeditionary forces to seize bases in the Pacific. The U.S. Army, for its part, emerged from the First World War with a deep resentment of the great publicity given to the Corps’s fighting on the
Western Front and an angry feeling that its own monopoly on land warfare had been seriously challenged. What was more, there were senior marine officers who wanted to preserve that larger battlefront posture and feared being pushed back into a pre-1917 limbo, carrying out ancillary missions in distant waters. Finally, the drive for economies shriveled the Marine Corps to less than 15,000 officers and men, hardly enough for the menial duties of providing ships’ guards, protecting embassies, and holding American bases in the Caribbean. By 1921, marines were even deployed to guard U.S. mails against robbers, and must have felt a long way from the Halls of Montezuma.

But the amphibious warfare doctrine persisted throughout the interwar years and slowly became an operational possibility for two reasons, one strategic and the other more personal and fortuitous. The strategic reason was, quite simply, the prospect of a future war with Japan. Planning for a conflict to resist Japanese expansionism in East Asia and the Western Pacific had been carried out by American strategists since the first decade of the century. The elimination of the German navy in 1919, plus the parallel recognition that an Anglo-American war was highly unlikely, meant that the only feasible great-power enemy could be Japan. Its extensive gains of Central Pacific islands—the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas—during the war, its stubborn negotiation stance over battleship numbers and fleet bases at the Washington Conference, and its continued
pénétration pacifique
of China all enhanced American suspicions. What was more, the modern Japanese navy was the only rival large enough (assuming British nonhostility) to justify the size and expense of the U.S. Navy. Unsurprisingly, then, the chief of naval operations warned the commandant of the Marine Corps as early as January 1920 that War Plan Orange would henceforth determine the navy’s plans and programs, and the Corps should prepare accordingly for possible amphibious operations across the Pacific.
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Although shrinking numbers of personnel made this utterly impossible in practice, the strategic statement was there and would not go away as long as suspicions of Japan’s intentions remained. The marines’ claim to be a special fighting force, not just a second-level gendarmerie, relied upon the Japanese threat.

That clear identification of the future foe in turn pushed a small number of individual planners and midlevel officers into problem solving:
how, practically, would they take the fight to a Japanese foe 5,000 miles across the Pacific? Although he was certainly not the only American pondering on that problem, Major Earl H. “Pete” Ellis of the USMC began to figure it out in a serious of reworked memoranda between 1919 and 1922. It would have to be a specialized service—the larger, heavier army couldn’t do it, and probably wouldn’t be interested. It had to be the marines, which was fortuitous because all naval/amphibious operations are under naval command, and the USMC was also the advanced base force of the navy. And, as Ellis put it in his famous July 1921 memorandum on advanced base forces in Micronesia, it had to involve specific tasks: “the reduction and occupation of the [Japanese-held] islands” and “the establishment of the necessary bases therein.”
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By the same logic, the service charged with carrying out this task—as the USMC was formally defined in an army-navy agreement of 1927—had to prepare to implement it at ground level, in the precarious approaches to an enemy-held shore, and in the establishment of a secure beachhead upon it. And the early USMC planners understood that specially trained amphibious units required special platforms and special weaponry (this was now about 340 years after the Spanish marines’ operations to capture the Azores). Ellis’s own early memoranda called for landing craft with bow guns, for specially equipped signals troops, for demolition experts to neutralize beach obstacles and minefields, for marine aviation to strafe the beaches. Some other ideas were going to be less useful—motorboats towing barges, for example—but the man was remarkably far-seeing, his mysterious death in the Caroline Islands in 1923 making him even more romantic and intriguing.
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Even at the time of Ellis’s death, other innovative Marine Corps majors and colonels were also at work trying to figure out how to get things done. This was not easy. Annual exercises along America’s own southern shores, in Panama (Culebra), and in the Caribbean, all of which were important in the longer term but which initially threw up enormous shortcomings, confirmed the gap between theory and reality when trying to land on a shallow beach or into mangrove swamps. Millett’s wonderful history of the USMC has a tart comment upon the “fiasco” of the winter 1923–24 exercises off Culebra: “The Navy coxswains did not reach the right beach at the proper time; the unloading
of supplies was chaotic; the naval bombardment was inadequate; and the Navy’s landing boats were clearly unsuitable for both troops and equipment. The exercise, however, identified enough errors to keep the Corps busy for fifteen years.”
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On the other hand, the glaring need to have better equipment itself stimulated a constant search for new ideas and techniques. As early as the mid-1920s, observers strolling along the banks of the Potomac River or the Hudson might have seen an amphibious tank crossing those waters, yet another product of the eccentric tank designer J. Walter Christie, whose greatest contribution to the Second World War (see
chapter 3
) would be in designing the suspension and chassis of a vehicle that one day would become the Soviet T-34. Christie’s novel, river-crossing tank foundered in less protected (offshore) waters, but the idea of building an engine-powered, forward-shooting, amphibious vehicle would reappear more than a decade later, to the Allies’ advantage, often as the LVT. In much the same way, great dissatisfaction at the inadequacies of early prototypes of motored landing craft simply caused more imaginative Corps officers to search for newer ideas, one of which was the inventor Andrew Higgins’s flat-bottomed boat, originally designed for use in the bayous of the Florida Everglades. Its later version, the landing craft vehicle, personnel (LCVP), would carry hundreds of thousands of soldiers and marines to the beaches from 1942 onward.

Two rather contradictory points emerge. The first is that this was never a dream progression for the U.S. Marines, but a constantly impeded and all too frequently suspended pursuit of a doctrine ahead of its time. It was not just that there was little money for developing this form of warfare or that there were massive obstructions from certain circles in the army, the navy, and even the Corps itself; it was that penury, plus other calls upon the service, plus the politics of isolation frequently put the whole idea into suspense—operations in China and Nicaragua essentially depleted the Corps of its active units for long periods at a time. For almost all of the 1930s, the basic doctrinal manual was most appropriately termed the
Tentative Manual for Landing Operations
. Even as late as 1939 the USMC commandant agreed that they should stress the marines’ base-defense role when asking Congress for additional funds, since expeditionary forces would be regarded as “interventionist.”
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The more positive aspect, however, was that, having
established a doctrine of amphibious warfare and persuaded the Joint Chiefs to recognize the Corps’s special role in implementing it, survival was ensured even when the tools of war were missing. All that was needed was further Axis aggression and a consequent heightening of public alarm, both of which were to be forthcoming. All military organizations benefit from having real or perceived enemies.

But there was of course a second amphibious army in the Pacific during this war, namely, the U.S. Army itself. This is easily explained by the fact that the army was already substantially in that theater, that is, in the Philippines and Hawaii, when the Japanese attacked in December 1941. MacArthur’s presence there, the fact that he insisted that he lead the Allied riposte against Japan, and the equally important fact that the American Joint Chiefs didn’t want him anywhere else meant that considerable army divisions would be sent to the Pacific. Then there was the practical matter that the Marine Corps, even if expanding rapidly, was far too small to do all the land fighting in the Pacific. Since neither the navy nor the army would admit to allowing the other service to have the supreme command across this massive theater, there came about a compromise: MacArthur would run the new Southwest Pacific Command, a heavily army-run enterprise (though with considerable air and naval elements), and Nimitz would run Central Pacific Command as a U.S. Navy fiefdom, although with substantial army participation. It was clumsy—wouldn’t they spend more time competing for resources than combining to beat Japan? asked Churchill at Casablanca—but on the whole it worked.