Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (55 page)

Hence the postmortems over the shocking American combat losses in the Gilberts operation are at least as numerous as those over Dieppe, often to the point of forgetting that the islands
were
captured. Still, it was a sobering experience. Neither the distant naval bombardment nor the aerial attacks did much to harm the low-lying Japanese bunkers or to knock out many of the garrison’s guns. Command and control was ragged. Rear Admiral John R. Hill, in charge of the southern (Tarawa) operation, was located in the battleship USS
Maryland,
whose salvoes kept knocking out its own radio communications. The bombardment ceased too early, just as at the Somme and Gallipoli, so the defenders were able to resume their posts and pour fire on the attacking troops. Worst of all, the water level across the coral-filled lagoon was unusually low, which meant that the landing craft were stuck on the outer reef, and consequently the marines had to wade 700 yards to the shore—and were slaughtered. The very green army units on Makin made it to the beaches, but then were pinned down in the coconut groves. Finally, with reserve battalions brought in for both battles, the Americans prevailed, assisted greatly by the Japanese habit of suicidal counterattacks near the end. But the cost of the three-day battle for Tarawa was high: more than 1,000 American dead and 2,000 wounded, all to capture an island of less than 3 square miles. The press photos of dead marines floating in the water or lying across coral reefs was the most startling evidence yet to the American public that the Pacific War was going to be long and hard.

What a difference from the seizure of the Mariana Islands, a mere
eight months later, but by then the Marine Corps had figured out its amphibious-warfare techniques, the fast carriers were ranging around, the Hellcats were aloft, the Seabees were constructing gigantic runways made of bulldozed coral, and the B-29s were soon to be flying in. The marines at Tarawa had paid a price, but it would never need to be repeated.

Thus, a mere nine days after the Normandy landings, an enormous force of American troops (127,000 of them, chiefly marines) began to land on the Mariana Islands, thirteen time zones eastward from the English Channel. This was the single most important amphibious operation in the Pacific War, and far more threatening to Japan than MacArthur’s hops along the north coast of New Guinea on his way to the Philippines. By taking Saipan and also Guam—the first American possession to be reoccupied—Central Pacific Command was able to acquire, at last, air bases for the long-range strategic bombing of the Japanese homeland. Once the islands were seized and the surrounding waters made safe, there was very little Tokyo could do about it. This operation, coming as it did between the strikes against the Caroline Islands and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, was critical.
⁶⁷

The early operations by the U.S. carrier squadrons around the Marianas had given Nimitz’s forces command of the air. The two-day naval bombardment was of a much heavier variety than that carried out off Omaha Beach, and more in the measured British style; the distant firing by the nine brand-new American battleships didn’t do much, but when the slower battleships and heavy cruisers came closer inland, some of them to within 1,500 yards, the shellings began to count. Still, even close-in firing could not crush well-built positions, and the Japanese were able to inflict lots of damage upon the experienced but mislanded 2nd Marine Division, while many amphibious craft (i.e., the LVTs) could not surmount the beach obstacles. But the Americans battered their way in. They had 8,000 marines onshore in the first twenty minutes, and 20,000 men on Saipan at the end of the first day; in that regard, it was somewhat like Utah Beach in Normandy. Supporting aircraft were overhead, and the battleships were firing from close-in positions. The beaches were clearly marked out by color codes. Eventually there was a separate channel for return traffic: empty landing craft,
damaged vessels, and hospital ships with their dead and wounded. There was no external interference, due to the smashing of Japanese naval airpower in the battle of the Philippine Sea.

Operation Forager was not a perfect job. Amazingly, there still was not an interservice HQ ship like the
Largs
or
Bolulu;
overall command for ship-to-shore movement rested with a very competent Commodore Thiess in a large patrol craft, but that was not the same and certainly would not have worked off Normandy.
⁶⁸
The LVTs were feebly powered and, as noted, often could not reach their destinations over craggy ranges of coral and rocks. Naval shelling was much less useful than the aerial strafing of the beaches, but even the latter was ragged and often distracted to ancillary missions. What was needed (and would not arrive for another year) were escort carriers specifically tasked for beachhead support and not called away for possible high-seas battles. The Japanese garrisons fought as vigorously as ever and would never surrender; it took three days of tough combat to secure the northern beachheads of Saipan, during which one particular U.S. Army division (the 27th New York National Guard) faltered and was sharply criticized by the overall commander (a marine general), causing an interservice row. Yet the results were not in doubt, and the island fell on July 9. A little later all opposition on Guam was eradicated. Within another several weeks, the Seabees had started construction of those ultralong B-29 airstrips, their bulldozers tolling the end for many Japanese cities and for the Japanese Empire itself.

Perhaps we can forgive Samuel Eliot Morison, that patriotic Harvard professor turned into the official U.S. naval historian by his former student FDR and sent off to the Pacific War, for his proud statement summing up this operation just a few years after the war: “Added together, ‘Overlord’ in Europe and ‘Forager’ in the Pacific made the greatest military effort ever put forth by the United States or any other nation at one time. It should be a matter of pride and congratulation to the American and British people that their united efforts made June of 1944 the greatest month yet in military and naval history; that simultaneously they were able to launch these two mighty overseas expeditions against their powerful enemies in the East and the West.”
⁶⁹

Rokossovski and Konev, battling their way across the Dnieper against two dozen Wehrmacht divisions, may have ranked this achievement
differently, but in the history of amphibious warfare operations Morison was surely correct. Perhaps the shadows of the Spanish Royal Marines were there at the appropriately named Caroline and Mariana island groups, once the possessions of Philip of Spain. The Allies had at last figured out how to land on an enemy-held shore.

Amphibious warfare was at the center of everything, and by 1944 the landing operations were becoming ever larger and more ambitious. Realizing that his Southwest Pacific Command was in danger of being relegated to secondary status and determined to lead an American return to the Philippines, MacArthur had begun to accelerate his pace of advance from November 1943 (Bougainville) onward, ignoring and isolating the great Japanese base at Rabaul, and skipping along the north shore of New Guinea. But the advance forces of his command did not reach the far end of that massive island until July 1944, and by that time so much else had happened, mainly in the Central Pacific theater.

The rest of the Pacific War thus consisted of an unfolding of American amphibious power against tenacious and suicidal Japanese resistance: in the Philippines from December 1944 to March 1945, at Iwo Jima from February to March 1945, and at Okinawa from April to June 1945. On April 7 the first P-51 long-range Mustangs flew from Iwo Jima bases as escorts to the B-29s attacking Japanese cities. By this stage in the war, however, there was little for these high-flying, long-range fighters to do; the bombers were razing those cities to the ground with impunity.

With the surrender of the Third Reich on May 7, 1945, the Second World War became, essentially, amphibious warfare against Japan. Of course, British Empire troops under Slim were racing into Rangoon and preparing to leap farther south, to Malaya and Singapore, and there was still mopping up to be done elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Borneo, Mindanao). Fighting continued unabated in much of mainland China. American submarines and long-range bombers were ripping the Japanese economy to shreds. But the most important operation strategically—following the occupation of Saipan and Guam—was the taking of Okinawa, then to be converted into an enormous forward base for the final assault upon Japan. In a narrower, operational sense, too, the Okinawa campaign was significant and symbolic, justifying
Isley and Crowl’s play upon the many contrasts between this assault from the sea and that at the Dardanelles (see
this page
). So much about the nature of amphibious warfare had changed since those Gallipoli landings thirty summers before—the carrier raids, the B-29 bombings, the special equipment of the landing forces. Yet the ancient difficulties remained, above all that of getting onto beaches that were manned by an enemy, be it Turks or Japanese, determined to give no ground. By the end of the formal fighting in late June, American casualties on Okinawa totaled 49,000 men (12,500 killed), by far their heaviest campaign loss in the war in the Pacific, and a grim hint to Nimitz and MacArthur of what was to come.

Well before the shooting stopped on Okinawa, American planners had been preparing for the greatest amphibious operation of all time: that on the home islands of Japan, to take place possibly as early as November 1945. The figures involved in this assault were going to be enormous, surpassing Overlord by an impressive degree: some 500,000 men, arranged in four gigantic army corps, all American, were being organized to overwhelm the southern, vital island of Kyushu, to be followed by an even larger amphibious force against the Tokyo region in the early spring of 1946. To that end, most of the U.S. military units, warships, and air squadrons that had fought in the European theater were now directed toward the Pacific. In the event, these strikes from the sea were not necessary. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) forced the end of the Pacific War. To the millions of American servicemen, and to the smaller number of Australian, British, Canadian, Dutch, French, Indian, and New Zealand units already in or being sent to the Far East, the relief felt at the end of the war was palpable; almost every memoir mentions that feeling, the slow ebbing of strain. The fighting men of the western lands had had enough of being thrown onto a hostile shore. It was time to go home.

The taking of the Mariana Islands in the middle of 1944 was not just another step forward in America’s war in the Pacific, or merely a nice coincidence with the invasion of Normandy. In strategic terms, it was
the key to the Central Pacific campaign, and a far more significant move toward the defeat of Japan than any other action across this vast theater. For it was those Mariana outcrops—Saipan, Guam, and especially that nondescript flat island of Tinian—that gave the U.S. Air Force a massive and indestructible aircraft carrier for the annihilation of Japan’s industries and cities. Little else in the Pacific counted in that same positive way. Holding on to Hawaii counted, for the obvious reason that virtually everything went through there. Midway and Guadalcanal counted in 1942, for it was there that the expansionism of the Japanese navy and army, respectively, was blunted. Tarawa counted in late 1943, negatively, because it taught the United States the real costs and possibilities of amphibious operations. But the capture of the Marianas was a true turning point, comparable more to Normandy or Stalingrad-Kursk than to the battles for Egypt, Sicily, and Rome.

Taking those islands in June 1944 did not, of course, mean the war against Japan was over. Many events were to occur in the thirteen months that followed—the assault upon the Philippines, the enormous, sprawling, and intensive battles of Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and the relentless firebombing of Japanese cities and industry, culminating in the dropping of the two atomic bombs in August 1945. Yet much of that would have been significantly harder, perhaps altogether impractical, without the Marianas bases. When Mussolini learned of the Anglo-American landings in Italy, he famously declared, “History has seized us by the throat.” The same might be said of the American capture of the Marianas. After learning of the loss of those islands and the irrecoverable damage inflicted on their naval and air forces around Rabaul and in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese cabinet resigned. It was time to go; time, even, for some of the Japanese leaders to secretly communicate with Moscow about terms for surrender.

Recently the scholar James B. Wood posed the question of whether defeat was inevitable. His thoughtful book complements much of the analysis presented in the pages above, albeit from a Japanese perspective. By “defeat,” Wood does not mean the total crushing of August 1945; rather, he asks whether the Japanese leadership might not, by
different policies, have left Tokyo with an inner “rim” of possessions, a reasonably self-sufficient economy, and a continuing status as a great power, thus achieving a solution reasonably close to the one Admiral Yamamoto desired.
⁷⁰

Meticulously, then, Wood goes through the checklist: What if the Japanese navy had convoyed its merchant marine from the beginning? What if its own formidable submarines had been deployed to cut Allied mercantile communications? What if it had paid even more attention to naval air forces and less to battleships? What if Imperial General Headquarters had appreciated that it could not conquer about a quarter of Asia and the Pacific with a mere dozen divisions? What if, especially, Japan had been content with building up a really formidable inner defensive rim (the Marianas to the Philippines to Borneo) instead of pushing arrogantly toward Midway, the Aleutians, the Solomons, Australia, and northeast India? After all, if it had not been punished so badly in the first two or three years of the war by trying to defend its outer ramparts, could it not have retained the capacity to blunt American assaults to the point that some “non-total-war” compromise was possible, as was common in all of the great-power conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why not pursue that option, with smarter operational and tactical policies?