Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (54 page)

The obvious thing to note about the above statistics is that the surge in sinkings took place from the second half of 1943 onward, through 1944, and then petered out in 1945, as by then there were hardly any targets to sink. In consequence, virtually all of the top ten American submarine aces in the Pacific War made their kills after June 1943, almost the exact opposite to the story of their German U-boat counterparts in the Atlantic campaign.
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There were many other factors to explain the enormous damage that the U.S. submarine service wreaked upon Japan in the last two years of the war (for example, improved radar, more powerful warheads, better intelligence, better air-sea cooperation), but the single most important one was the creation of torpedoes that were reliable, efficient, and deadly. Something that worked came about because certain problem solvers in the middle had pushed things forward.

After the fall of the central Filipino island of Luzon in January 1945, and though Manila itself was not fully secured by MacArthur’s forces until March 4, Admiral Halsey reported that “the outer defenses of the Japanese Empire no longer include Burma and the Netherlands East Indies; those countries are now isolated outposts, and their products are no longer available to the Japanese war machine.”
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This was true, but in fact those Japanese sea-lanes were being systematically cut (and eventually would be totally interdicted) by the U.S. submarine service, at far less cost than fighting on land. When the war ended, some enthusiasts claimed that the subs alone could have brought an import-dependent Japan to its knees without the A-bombs or the massive landings planned for November 1945.
^h
That of course is a hypothetical, but it shows the long way that the U.S. submarine service had come since the unsuccessful days of 1942 and much of 1943.

Any account of submarine warfare in the Pacific also has to note the
amazing and catastrophic failure of the Japanese navy to use its own craft and to protect its own merchant marine. This is all the more puzzling, since Japan’s navy had from 1868 almost uniformly followed the Royal Navy’s best practices and ought surely to have drawn tactical lessons about underwater warfare from both the First World War and the current Battle of the Atlantic. The problem was not in the boats themselves—a considerable number of the Japanese submarines were, like their American equivalents, very large, with great cruising range, and possessing the famous “long lance” torpedoes—but in their deployment. There was blatant neglect by the naval high command of the submarine’s natural role as an independent and aggressive commerce destroyer; later, there came the further distortion of that role by Imperial General Headquarters. The battleship-dominated naval leaders were obsessed about using submarines to detect and destroy Allied warships, not their merchant marines. In this, they had some successes early in the war, especially in enclosed waters such as those in the Solomon Islands; the
Wasp
was sunk under precisely such circumstances, and a Japanese sub finished off the
Yorktown
after it was badly damaged at Midway.

But when U.S. antisubmarine warfare tactics improved, when miniaturized radar reached the aircraft and warships of the Pacific Fleet, when the ocean was flooded with dozens and dozens of new destroyers, and when the new fast battleships and fast carriers became the core of the American navy, the prospects of causing large U.S. warship casualties fell away. Japan’s huge subs (some of them designed to carry and deploy spotter aircraft, and several even to be submerged mini aircraft carriers) were easy to detect on the surface by radar and underwater by sonar; they were noisy and difficult to maneuver, and because their hulls were weak, they were easy to hit mortally. No “schnorkel” fast boats were developed along German lines, and a primitive form of radar was placed on the first boats only in mid- to late 1944. Air-sea cooperation was feeble. Before and during the war, Japanese yards constructed 174 oceangoing submarines, of which 128 were lost. Morale in the service was low, since its officers knew that they had no support in high places, and the service steadily shrank until it was a second-class instrument of war, in distinct contrast to the sub forces of the German, British, and American navies.
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It is therefore unsurprising that Japanese submarines were an indecisive factor in the Pacific fighting. Of the sixteen deployed during the Leyte Gulf battles, for example, only one managed a kill, of a destroyer escort. By that time, however, the Imperial Japanese Army was truly mangling the effectiveness of the submarine fleet by insisting that they act as cargo vessels, bringing food and munitions supplies to bypassed island garrisons. The more garrisons that were isolated by the American leapfrog tactics, the harder the submarine fleet had to work in this capacity, seriously diverting its skills and assets. Occasionally they were ordered to carry out symbolic acts, such as the offshore shelling of Vancouver Island in 1942. What if those same boats, with their powerful torpedoes, had sat off the harbors of Portland and Long Beach and inflicted the devastation in those waters that Doenitz’s U-boats were doing up and down the eastern seaboard in those same months? As it was, the Japanese submarine fleet sank a mere 184 ships during the entire war. The official American naval historian of the war, S. E. Morison, usually gentle in his comments, felt forced to describe Japan’s U-boat policy as “verging on the idiotic.”
⁶²
It is difficult to disagree.

While the Japanese submarine forces were frittered away, the surface navy showed an unbelievable myopia toward that most vital of maritime tasks, the protection of maritime commerce. In this regard, nothing could be more different than the attitude of the British and Japanese admiralties. Apart from confronting the few German and Italian battleships, and pushing through relief convoys to Malta and Egypt, the greater part of the Royal Navy was dedicated to getting Allied merchantmen safely across the high seas to the home island. By comparison, the Japanese simply assumed that the early conquests in the Pacific and Southeast Asia gave them control of the waters in between. Any insolent Allied intruder would be detected and sunk (and quite a few were, though the number of kills reported back to headquarters turned out to have been vastly inflated). They had nothing like Max Horton’s Western Approaches Command and no equivalent of RAF or RCAF Coastal Commands. They had no statistical or operational research department for analysis of the unfolding campaigns. There was very little weapons development: the depth charges they were using at the end of the war were roughly the same as those employed at the start of the
conflict. Miniaturized radar, Hedgehogs, homing torpedoes, and hunter-killer groups were all missing.
⁶³

By 1943–44, the Japanese naval high command was realizing that they had to cluster their merchant ships into convoys and provide a screen of escorts; but their tactics remained primitive. A sudden sinking of one of the Japanese merchant ships caused the escorts to rush around in all directions, haphazardly dropping depth charges, so the best thing the U.S. sub commander could do after firing his torpedoes was to lie on the ocean bottom (or at least go very deep) and wait for a few hours before resuming the stalking. Furthermore, following the great Philippine Sea and Marianas battles of June 1944, the American service commanders—especially Rear Admiral Lockwood at Pearl Harbor—had enough boats to group their submarines into small wolf packs. By September 1944 three such groups, each of three boats, were operating all around Formosan waters, including in the Straits, inflicting havoc on merchantmen and their destroyers alike. Apart from dropping dozens and sometimes even hundreds of depth charges—only a few of which hit these underwater predators—the Japanese navy had no other response, no new form of countermeasure. The statistics of Japanese merchant ship losses above show the extent of this abject failure.

Because the newly engineered tools of war, from torpedoes to landing craft to B-29 bombers, took so relatively long to produce in large numbers and reliable standard form, the American counteroffensive in the Pacific evolved much later than did the Allied comebacks in Europe: the Battle of the Atlantic was won, North Africa occupied, Sicily occupied, and southern Italy occupied before even the Gilberts operation (November 1943) began. But once the Americans had assembled and tested their newer systems, they struck at remarkable speed. It was a tribute to the Americans’ astonishing lift capacity that, at roughly the same time as the Allied counteroffensives began in North Africa and Europe, it could also be initiating a number of amphibious comebacks in theaters of war 8,000 miles away from Morocco. To the United States, the “Germany first” principle had never meant that they should
hold back from aggressive actions in the Pacific once Japan’s own expansion had run out of steam, as had occurred as early as the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The main question, given the sheer distances involved between almost any two strategic points in the Pacific, and given the parallel need to train many more active divisions, receive many more aircraft and warships, and produce the all-critical landing craft in far larger numbers, was where the first recovery operations should be attempted. Until the highest authorities had made that decision, the most sensible thing to do, in the first instance, was to strengthen Allied positions in the Pacific and to acquire what Ronald Spector nicely described as “the seizure of Japan’s strategic points.”
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The least significant of America’s counterblows, strategically, was the recovery of a couple of the Aleutian Islands (Kiska and Attu) from the Japanese garrisons that had been dropped off there as a sideshow to Midway. Even that reconquest did not take place until May–July 1943, amid constant fogs, and after a short while the Japanese abandoned those uninteresting atolls. Its navy offered resistance for half a day (the desultory Battle of the Komandorski Islands), then pulled back. Its army was not waiting at the beaches, so all American landings here were unopposed. The merit of this exercise was that it gave raw U.S. troops (100,000 of them) an opportunity for landing on distant shores, and the massive naval support—including bombardments by three battleships—an early chance to see how hard it was to do much damage to enemy troops holed up in distant hills. Its demerit was that it gave next to no chance—though there was some final resistance by Japanese troops on Kiska—to experience some fighting against an enemy determined to drive the landing forces back onto the reefs.
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Once having taken these storm-beaten, mist-clad islands, the American Joint Chiefs were content and turned elsewhere.

Altogether more significant strategically were the earlier American-Australian counteroffensives in the Southwest Pacific theater, that is, in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands (especially Guadalcanal). General MacArthur’s dogged series of amphibious landings and moppings-up of nearby Japanese garrisons was different from the Allied assaults against the shores of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France, just as they were, operationally, often a different tale from Central Pacific Command’s efforts to capture the Gilberts, Marianas, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.
On the whole, the landings in the Southwest Pacific theater occurred at points along the enemy’s coastline that were
not
protected by troops, gun emplacements, and minefields. Of course the Japanese responded promptly and viciously to such Allied intrusions, but the local garrison was often a long way from where MacArthur landed, so the sheer physical problem of getting Allied troops from ship to shore in the face of massive resistance was rarely experienced during these campaigns. Even in the bloody struggle for Guadalcanal (August 1942–February 1943), the greatest gain came from being able to put 11,000 out of the 19,000 U.S. marines onshore on a single day without immediate opposition, thus enabling them to consolidate lines inland, grab the airfield, and then, encamped under the trees, to cause the Japanese to consistently underestimate the size of the American garrison for the rest of that grim battle.
⁶⁶

Landings without direct opposition, at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, had their own important lessons for future assaults. While the marines were probably better prepared than any other forces for amphibious operations, that preparation had all been done in theory and as summer exercises. They, along with MacArthur’s army divisions in New Guinea and New Britain, were to benefit enormously from experimenting with preinvasion intelligence gathering, beachhead control, logistical follow-up, fire support (if necessary), aerial patrols, and, in general, effective command and control when they landed unopposed. They also were beginning to learn how to deal with coral reefs and mangrove swamps, with rain forests 8,000 feet in altitude, with constant mists, and with very high rates of sickness, especially dysentery. It really was useful to begin a counteroffensive in places where the enemy wasn’t. It was better to push a mile or five inland before the enemy rudely showed up.

There is one other illuminating point of comparison with the European amphibious operations of this time. In September 1943 Admiral Nimitz created a new operational command to be responsible for the seizure of the Gilbert Islands, the first step forward in the Central Pacific thrust. The story of the U.S. Marines’ attack upon Tarawa in late November is recorded earlier in this chapter, but as a landing roughly contemporaneous to the Sicily/Italy operations, it deserves a cross-reference here. Eisenhower took no chances in committing 478,000 troops to Sicily. In the Gilberts, another massive invasion force would
be deployed. While the smaller island of Makin would be assaulted by 7,000 U.S. Army troops, a full 18,000 men of the 2nd Marine Division were to take Tarawa—and at long last Pete Ellis’s vision would unfold, but in far greater dimensions than he imagined. Supporting the amphibious forces for the Gilbert operations was an armada of brand-new and older battleships, fleet and escort carriers, squadrons of heavy cruisers, dozens of destroyers, 850 carrier aircraft, and 150 USAAF medium bombers. This naval force was already the largest fleet in the world. And all this for an island group (defended by a mere 3,000 naval troops on Tarawa and 800 on Makin) that was not even part of the critical external perimeter as defined by Imperial General Headquarters.