The Second World War (121 page)

Stilwell read the memorandum with fierce pleasure when it arrived. He virtually barged into a meeting between the generalissimo and Major General Patrick J. Hurley, Roosevelt’s new envoy. Stilwell wrote triumphantly in his diary how he ‘handed this bundle of paprika to the Peanut and then sank back with a sigh. The harpoon hit the little bugger in the solar plexus and went right through him.’ Hurley, on the other hand, was appalled
by the tone of the communication and the loss of face it would cause.
Chiang Kai-shek
hid his anger. He simply said, ‘I understand,’ and ended the meeting.

The generalissimo later sent a message to Roosevelt through Hurley insisting on Stilwell’s recall. He was perfectly prepared to accept an American general to command the Chinese forces, Chiang said, as long as it was not Stilwell. Roosevelt no longer saw China as essential in ending the war against Japan, now that Stalin had committed the Soviet Union to invade Manchuria as soon as the war with Germany ended. So he simply assessed how the row would affect his standing in the presidential November elections.

The American press had now turned against the Nationalist regime, describing it as dictatorial, incompetent, corrupt and nepotistic. Newspapers accused it of refusing to fight the Japanese and of indifference towards the Chinese people, especially during the major famine in Honan the year before. The
New York Times
claimed that support for the Nationalists made America ‘
acquiesce in an unenlightened
cold-hearted autocratic regime’. Influential writers, such as Theodore White,
vilified Chiang Kai-shek
and contrasted him unfavourably with the Communists. In that era of New Deal liberalism, many State Department officials agreed.

Opinion polls in the United States during the presidential campaign showed that Roosevelt’s narrow lead over Thomas Dewey was slipping rapidly. So Roosevelt, afraid of the negative effect which a Chinese Nationalist collapse might have on his campaign, decided to recall Stilwell to Washington, giving the impression that the general had done his best to enlighten Chiang Kai-shek but could do no more. The truth that the Chinese had been abandoned in the face of the Ichig
Offensive was completely suppressed, as were Stilwell’s quarrels with Chiang, Chennault and Mountbatten.

General Marshall, who had appointed Stilwell in the first place and largely ignored his part in the disastrous state of affairs, drafted a reply to Chiang Kai-shek’s demand for his recall. ‘
A full and open explanation
of the reasons for General Stilwell’s recall will have to be made,’ Marshall wrote in his draft for Roosevelt to send to Chiang Kai-shek. ‘The American people will be shocked and confused by this action and I regret the harm that it will inevitably do to the sympathetic attitude of the American people toward China.’

In his message to Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt did not in the end use Marshall’s scarcely veiled threat to publicize the details behind Stilwell’s recall, but he certainly made sure that the American press was briefed. In any case, Stilwell put over his version of events to correspondents in Chung king before his departure. He also made sure that sympathizers
back in the States condemned Chiang as an unpleasant military dictator and accused him of not attacking the Japanese so that he could build up stocks of American weaponry to fight the Communists. The fact that Mao was deliberately husbanding his forces ready for outright civil war, and making secret deals with the Japanese, was not suspected.

Major General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had been serving as Mount-batten’s chief of staff, replaced Stilwell in October just as the Japanese renewed their offensive. The plight of the refugees mirrored that of the beaten troops. Chiang’s utterly demoralized and famished armies collapsed in chaos again, allowing the Japanese to take more air bases, all of which the Americans demolished just beforehand. By now, they were used to the routine of blowing up every hut, hangar and store, then planting thousand-pound bombs in the runway to crater it beyond use.

The position was so desperate that Wedemeyer agreed to the return of the Y-Force divisions and obtained the sudden transfer of all the air force formations supporting the Burma campaign. Yet the Japanese drive was coming to a natural end. Operation Ichig
had achieved its objectives, and winter was approaching. Thirteen American airfields were out of action, the Japanese had inflicted more than 300,000 casualties on the Nationalists, and their armies in China had linked up with their forces in Indochina.

The loss of all his air support was a nasty shock for General Slim, with his Fourteenth Army about to cross the great Irrawaddy. Some British officers suspected that the anglophobic General Wedemeyer was not keen on helping them anyway, now that they had played their part in helping secure the route of the Burma Road to China.

While MacArthur exulted in Roosevelt’s approval for his invasion of Luzon, which represented a victory over Admiral King, preparations went ahead for the preliminary landings on Leyte. But Admiral Nimitz had refused to cancel the assault on the island of Peleliu, which had the main Japanese airfield in the Palau Islands. Commanders assumed that the capture of Peleliu would take the 1st Marine Division just three to four days.

On 15 September the amphibious assault began, with the usual bombardment from the big guns of the battleships and dive-bombers from carriers. The round bows of the Landing Ship Tanks opened, and out spilled several hundred amtracs loaded with marines. Peleliu, less than eight kilometres long and less than three wide, looked on the map like the skull of a crocodile’s head with its jaws slightly open. It consisted of a hilly spine of sharp coral along the north-west shore, a flat centre on which lay the airfield, and mangrove swamps on the south-east shore. The island was ringed with coral reef which made the use of landing craft impossible. Only the amtracs could get over them.

For marines who had fought in most of the island battles, Peleliu was the worst. The heat was stifling, sometimes rising to 46 degrees Centigrade. The water in their canteens could have come from a standing kettle, but they drank it all the same. Thirst and dehydration became a major problem. The shortage of water on the island was such that old oil barrels which had not been cleaned out were filled on board the ships in the fleet and brought ashore. Their contents tasted of rust and oil and made men feel sick, but it was all there was. Heat prostration caused many men to collapse in the first twenty-four hours.

Marines had reached the edge of the airfield, and soon afterwards they heard tanks. At first they assumed that they were American. When they realized that a dozen Japanese tanks had emerged from hiding, all hell broke loose. They had few armour-piercing weapons with them, but some Shermans and fighter-bombers soon reduced the obsolete armoured ve hicles to smoking hulks.

The marines had arrived hoping that the Japanese would soon ‘pull a
banzai
’, which meant making a mass suicide charge as they had on other islands, since that would end things quickly. But the enemy had changed his tactic. Digging in with the solid coral was impossible. Worst of all, the sharp fragments blasted in all direction by shellbursts greatly increased their lethal effect. The only shelter was provided by bomb craters. With casualties spread all over the place, and Japanese machine guns covering the area, evacuating the wounded led to even greater losses. Eventually a young officer grabbed the reluctant driver of an amtrac, and with a pistol to his head forced him to drive around to collect the fallen.

The coral ridge on the far side of the airfield running north-east up the island was honeycombed with tunnels between natural caves in the coral. The Japanese had positioned their field guns inside with sliding steel doors. They had even installed electric fans to disperse the cordite fumes when firing. To get to grips with the defenders, the marines first had to cross the airfield and deal with blockhouses and barracks, which had been turned into a concrete fortress. In the opinion of many, Guadalcanal now seemed like a holiday outing.

On the morning of 16 September four battalions attacked in a charge across the no-man’s-land of the airfield. Running forward bent low, men collapsed in a sprawl when hit. But the buildings were taken and their defenders despatched. The 1st Marine Division had suffered more than a thousand casualties since landing. Worse was to come when they began to tackle ‘Bloody Nose Ridge’, the name they gave to the coral spine sixty to ninety metres high. They seldom managed to get much sleep at night. During the hours of darkness Japanese soldiers would infiltrate their lines, singly or in pairs, either to stab machine-gunners or mortar-teams in their
gunpits, or else to tie themselves high in trees to act as snipers when dawn came.

Clearing Bloody Nose Ridge was an arduous affair in which grenades and flamethrowers were vital tools. Its caves provided the Japanese with interlocking fields of fire, and the fighting was such that the bulk of the island was not cleared until the end of September. It was not finally secured until the end of October. By then the 1st Marine Division’s casualty rate had risen to 6,526, of which 1,252 were killed. And the 81st Division, which had to be brought in as reinforcements, lost another 3,278. Yet Peleliu could have been bypassed altogether. It was one of Nimitz’s rare mistakes.

Another mistake was about to be made by Admiral Halsey in the largest naval engagement of the whole war, but fortunately for the US Pacific Fleet a Japanese admiral failed to seize the opportunity offered. The Japanese had expected an assault on the Philippines and they intended, when it came, to turn it into a decisive battle.

The remaining battleships of their Combined Fleet were based close to their main source of oil in the Dutch East Indies. US submarines had sunk too many fuel tankers to allow many alternatives. Their last few carriers were kept closer to the home islands. Admiral Fukudome Shigeru on Okinawa, who had experienced a severe raid by the US Third Fleet in October, was horrified by the casualty rate of his under-trained pilots when more than 500 Japanese aircraft were shot down. He described them as ‘
so many eggs
thrown at the stone wall of the indomitable enemy formation’. Yet the Japanese compulsion to avoid loss of face made them try to portray the disaster as a victory. They claimed two battleships and eleven carriers sunk, although the Allies had suffered only damage to two cruisers during the engagement. Emperor Hirohito called for national celebrations. The Imperial Japanese Navy also failed to tell their colleagues in the army the truth about the engagement. As a result Field Marshal Terauchi Hisaichi decided that they could after all defend the island of Leyte as well as Luzon, and he managed to persuade Imperial General Headquarters to change their plans accordingly.

General MacArthur, certain that his moment of destiny was at hand, boarded the cruiser USS
Nashville
to join the US Sixth Army’s invasion transports. They were protected by Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, with eighteen escort carriers and six old battleships. Predictably, the Seventh Fleet was known as ‘MacArthur’s Navy’. They would approach Leyte from the south. Halsey’s Third Fleet, with sixteen fast carriers, six fast battleships and eighty-one cruisers and destroyers, would guard the north-eastern approaches. Altogether, the US Navy was putting to sea for the Leyte operation with 225 warships.