The Second World War (88 page)

The Pacific Fleet’s sudden advance into the central Pacific dissipated Japanese complacency. Nimitz’s thrust was aimed like an arrow at the heart of Japan’s central position. Ultimately it threatened their control of the South China Sea – the Pacific ‘Mediterranean’ which washes the shores of China, Thailand, Malaya, the East Indies, Formosa and the Philippines – and that control was essential to Japan’s maintenance of its empire in the ‘Southern Area’. On 25 January 1944, therefore, imperial headquarters in Tokyo issued orders to General Iwane Matsui, the chief of staff in China, to undertake a large-scale offensive. The last offensive in China had occurred in the spring of 1943, when the North China Army had cleared the area west of Peking in Shansi and Hopei provinces. Now the plan was to occupy more territory in the south, with the object of both opening a direct north-south rail route between Peking and Nanking and clearing the south of American airfields in Chiang’s area, from which Chennault’s air force, which had reached a strength of 340 aircraft including strategic bombers, was harassing the Japanese Expeditionary Army throughout China.

This Ichi-Go offensive was to open on 17 April 1944. Earlier in the year an associated offensive, U-Go, had opened in Burma. Curiously the two Japanese plans were not co-ordinated in time, objectives or aims – except in the general and favoured Japanese aim of confronting the enemy with a complexity of thrusts – whereas the Allied campaigns in southern China and Burma did in fact interconnect. For one thing, Chiang’s armies based on Chungking were dependent on supply via the ‘Hump route’; secondly, Chinese troops, effectively commanded by Stilwell, were operating in southern China with the object of reopening the Burma Road; and, thirdly, Chinese troops were being trained in India as a means to improving the quality of Chiang’s army. Nevertheless imperial headquarters did not order General Renya Mutaguchi, commanding the Fifteenth Army in Burma, to make an attack up the Burma Road to lend assistance to the Ichi-Go offensive. Instead it directed him to undertake nothing less than a full-scale invasion of India, in an entirely different direction.

U-Go was an operation to which Mutaguchi was wholeheartedly committed. Between November 1942 and February 1943 his predecessor, Iida, had successfully turned back a British offensive into Burma down the Arakan coast on the Bay of Bengal. A subsequent irregular operation, mounted by the long-range penetration Chindit forces led by their creator, the messianic Orde Wingate, had also been defeated between February and April 1943. However, Mutaguchi had been rightly impressed by the success of Wingate’s troops in penetrating the Japanese front on the mountainous and roadless terrain of the Indo-Burmese frontier. He feared that where Wingate’s tiny penetration force had marched larger Allied armies might follow. He also saw that Wingate’s route was one his own hardy soldiers could take in the opposite direction, as the best means of defending Burma, interrupting the Allied efforts to reopen the Burma Road (on which American engineers were working from a roadhead in India at Ledo), quashing Stilwell’s increasingly intrusive thrusts from southern China, and so indirectly assisting Ichi-Go in China proper.

Mutaguchi’s offensive spirit was justified by the principle that the best form of defence is attack. South-East Asia Command, which had come into existence on 15 November 1943 with the dynamic Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten at its head, was indeed planning offensives of its own designed to re-establish Allied power in Burma. Among the operations planned was another offensive in the Arakan, a major offensive across the Indo-Burmese border from Assam to the river Chindwin, gateway to the Burmese central plains, two Chinese offensives into north-eastern Burma from the province of Yunnan, one of which was to be mounted by Stilwell’s Chinese troops with the support of Merrill’s Marauders, the other to be a Chindit operation into the Japanese rear at Myitkyina, at which Merrill’s Marauders were going to strike.

Mutaguchi’s operation was therefore not merely an offensive; it was also a pre-emptive attack. For this operation the whole Burma Area Army, commanded by General Count Terauchi, had been reinforced, in part with troops from Thailand, in part with the 1st Division of the Indian National Army, raised by Subhas Chandra Bose from 40,000 of the 45,000 Indians captured in Malaya and Singapore who had shown themselves sympathetic to his cause. However, Mataguchi’s spoiling attack was itself preceded by another one, for in November 1943 the British had resumed their attempt to penetrate the steamy Arakan. On 4 February, therefore, the Japanese 55th Division was launched into the British lines in the Arakan, with a mission to disrupt the advance. Only with the greatest difficulty was the 55th Division dispersed and driven back to its departure point at the end of the month. Meanwhile the Japanese 18th Division was dealing harshly with Stilwell’s advance towards Myitkyina, behind which Wingate’s second Chindit expedition was due to descend by glider in March.

It was in a highly disturbed northern Burma, therefore, that Mutaguchi opened his U-Go offensive on 6 March, when his three divisions crossed the Chindwin river to invade India, the 31st heading for Kohima, the 15th and 33rd for Imphal.

These tiny places in the high hills of Assam had been centres of the tea-growing industry before the war. They provided no facilities for the basing of the large British-Indian army which now occupied the front and were poorly connected by road to the rest of India. Moreover, General William Slim, commanding the British Fourteenth Army, was preparing to go over to the offensive and was not in a position to receive attack. The Fourteenth Army, under his inspired leadership, had been transformed from the low state it had reached after the agonising retreat from Burma in the spring of 1942 and the humiliating withdrawal from the Arakan eight months later. It had not yet, however, fought a full-scale battle against Japanese troops at the peak of their aggression.

Slim had nevertheless scented a Japanese offensive in the offing and was not wholly surprised by it. He therefore persuaded Mountbatten to coax sufficient air transport out of the Americans to fly the 5th Indian Division, one of the most experienced in the British-Indian forces, up from the Arakan front between 19 and 29 March, and he himself sent forward supplies and reinforcements from the resources he had been gathering for his own offensive to the defenders on the border. He also gave his subordinate commanders strict instructions not to withdraw without permission from higher authority. Since the British defenders stood fast at the key points on the mountainous Indo-Burmese frontier, without attempting to defend its whole length, the Japanese succeeded in their object of encircling Imphal and Kohima, but could not take possession of the frontier roads that lead down into the Indian plain. Kohima was surrounded on 4 April, Imphal the following day. The fighting that ensued was among the most bitter of the war, as the two sides battled it out often at ranges no wider than the tennis court of the district commissioner’s abandoned residence which formed part of no man’s land on Kohima ridge. The British were supplied by airlift erratically at Kohima, rather more regularly at Imphal. The Japanese were not supplied at all; diseased and emaciated, they persisted in their attacks even after the coming of the monsoon. On 22 June, however, after over eighty days of siege, Imphal was relieved, and four days later Mutaguchi was forced to suggest to Terauchi that the Fifteenth Army ought now to retreat. In early July imperial headquarters gave its approval, and the survivors struggled off down roads liquefied by the tropical rains to cross the river Chindwin and return to the Burmese plains. Only 20,000 of the 85,000 who had begun the invasion of India remained standing; over half the casualties had succumbed to disease. The 1st Division of the Indian National Army, mistrusted as turncoats and therefore mistreated by the Japanese commanders, had ceased to exist.

The focus of the fighting in Burma now shifted to the north-eastern front, where the Japanese were holding their own with tenacity against both Stilwell and the Chindits; Slim meanwhile began to prepare the Fourteenth Army for its delayed offensive across the Chindwin to recover Mandalay and Rangoon. However, with the defeat of Mutaguchi’s U-Go offensive, Burma itself ceased to be a major preoccupation of imperial headquarters. Though the Ichi-Go offensive was proceeding satisfactorily in southern China – so much so that the American government had begun to entertain fears of Chiang Kai-shek’s imminent collapse – the situation in the southern and (more critically) central Pacific continued to worsen. In New Guinea, the fall of the Vogelkop peninsula in July was followed by the capture of the island of Morotai, midway between New Guinea and the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, on 15 September; the fall of Guam and Saipan was followed, also on 15 September, by the invasion of Peleliu, in the Palau islands, the closest point to the Philippines the Americans had yet reached on the central Pacific front. The invasion of the Philippines, which gave access to China, Indo-China and Japan itself, was now at hand.

The extent and rapidity of MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s success had, however, so surprised the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their planners in Washington that the exact nature of the invasion was now once again a matter for debate. As in the European theatre, where in 1943 the chiefs of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander Designate had laid down a timetable for the advance to the German border which the actual pace of events then overtook with unanticipated speed, all sorts of operations which had once seemed important now faded into insignificance. In Europe events had made irrelevant the capture of the Atlantic ports, as points of supply from the United States for an American army fighting in central France, as well as the invasion of southern France. In the Pacific it was the capture of ports on the south China coast to supply Chennault’s air bases, the invasion of Formosa and the occupation of the southern Philippines island of Mindanao that lost their significance. Two of these projects cancelled themselves. The success of Ichi-Go in southern China had led to the loss of most of Chennault’s airfields near the coast, thereby making the capture of nearby ports irrelevant; and the invasion of Formosa, an island twice the size of Hawaii and defended by the highest sea cliffs in the world, was calculated to require so many troops that it could not be undertaken until the war in Europe was over. The attack on Mindanao was abandoned on 13 September after Halsey’s carriers encountered only light resistance in the area. He urged instead that a landing be made first in Leyte, in the centre of the archipelago, and that the troops proceed thereafter to the northernmost island, Luzon, in December, two months ahead of schedule. As this timetable suited MacArthur, who thought the approach of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral King, over-ponderous, it carried his support. The debate had run between president, Joint Chiefs of Staff and operational commanders since 26 July; it was ended on 15 September, when the joint chiefs authorised MacArthur to begin landings on Leyte on 20 October.

The Japanese in the Philippines were ill prepared to withstand invasion. Indeed, the Japanese forces as a whole were now suffering the consequences of their own earlier success. Having passed what Clausewitz calls ‘the culminating point of the offensive’, they found themselves in possession of more territory than they could closely defend and were confronted by an enemy who was on the rampage and whose resources were growing by the month. Though the manpower available to the US Army in the Pacific and to the Marine Corps was limited by the demands of the war in Europe, the USAAF had been acquiring more and better aircraft throughout 1944, particularly the B-29 Superfortress, which had the range to bomb the Japanese home islands from the old bases in southern China and the new bases on Saipan. The United States Navy, whose particular theatre was the Pacific, enjoyed almost an embarrassment of riches; it had new battleships, cruisers and destroyers, fast attack transports, landing craft large and small, but above all new carriers: twenty-one Essex-class carriers had come into service since 1941 or were about to do so, and the total carrier fleet provided flight-deck space for over 3000 aircraft, an embarked naval air force three times the size of the Japanese at its largest.

Japan, by contrast, had already passed the high point of its war production. Its army had been fully mobilised since 1937 and was stuck at a size of about fifty divisions. Its navy had been continuously in action since 1941, had suffered heavy losses and could not make them good from the output of its shipyards. Only five fleet aircraft carriers were launched between 1941 and 1944. Losses in Japan’s merchant fleet were far higher and threatened the collapse of the Japanese system. Because Japan could not feed itself or supply its own raw material needs, free use of the western Pacific seas was essential to the running of its economy; it was also necessary to the sustenance, reinforcement and movement of garrisons within the Southern Area. During 1942 American submarines had sunk 180 Japanese merchant ships, totalling 725,000 tons deadweight, of which 635,000 tons was replaced by new building; the tanker tonnage actually increased. In 1944, however, because the skill of American submarine captains had increased and they were operating from bases much further forward in New Guinea, the Admiralties and the Marianas, the total of sinkings increased to 600, or 2.7 million tons, more than had been sunk in the years 1942 and 1943 combined. By the end of 1944 half Japan’s merchant fleet and two-thirds of her tankers had been destroyed, the flow of oil from the East Indies had almost stopped, and the level of imports to the home islands had fallen by 40 per cent.

The destruction of the merchant fleet obliged the navy to use destroyers instead of merchantmen to ship and provision units, and this seriously impeded the movement of troops between threatened spots, thus affecting Japan’s defence of the Philippines. Imperial headquarters had correctly divined that the Americans planned to invade first the southernmost island of Mindanao, from New Guinea, and then the northernmost island of Luzon, as a stepping-stone to Japan; but they had not anticipated that the Americans would change their plan in the light of events. In consequence, Leyte was left even more weakly garrisoned than Mindanao. Although on 20 October 1944 there were 270,000 Japanese troops in the Philippines, Tomoyoku Yamashita, the conqueror of Singapore and commander of the Northern Area, had only the weak 16th Division on Leyte itself. With only 16,000 men, it was no match for the four divisions of General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army, which began to go ashore in Leyte Gulf that morning.