The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944

by Ian W. Toll

In 1941, there were between 500 and 600 whites living in the entire archipelago, variously employed as plantation managers, shipping agents, traders, mining prospectors, storekeepers, doctors, colonial officers, and missionaries. Most looked forward to the day when their careers or economic fortunes would allow them to leave. The Solomons were a hardship post. The climate was sweltering and monsoonal. Rain-sodden jungles and mangrove swamps bred exotic fevers and skin disorders—malaria, dengue fever, blackwater fever, dysentery, filariasis, clysentery, leprosy, elephantiasis, prickly heat, and trench foot. Crocodiles and leeches lurked in the rivers and swamps; aggressive sharks patrolled the fringing reefs; scorpions, spiders, centipedes, and snakes stung and bit; knife-edged kunai grasses sliced into the flesh of those who walked through them; cat-sized rats scurried through the jungle underbrush. The best view of the islands, said the old hands, was from the stern of a departing ship. Those were the Solomons in 1941. A marginal outpost of the British Empire. An economic and political backwater. A strategic nonentity; an afterthought. That was to change, suddenly and violently, in 1942.

HENRY L. STIMSON, THE VETERAN REPUBLICAN STATESMAN WHO served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of war, left a well-aimed barb in his postwar memoir. Recounting the bitter rivalry between the army and the navy, a struggle for influence and resources that colored every phase of the Pacific War, Stimson thought the trouble “grew mainly from the peculiar psychology of the Navy Department, which frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true Church.”

The Pacific War was the largest, bloodiest, most costly, most technically innovative, and most logistically complex amphibious war in history. To roll back the tide of Japanese conquests, the Allies would be required to seize one island after another, advancing across thousands of miles of ocean in two huge parallel offensives on either side of the equator. The army, navy, and marines were compelled to work together in sustained and intricate cooperation. They would make many mistakes, and do their best to learn from them. But even when their operations were successful, the interservice feuding left scars that even victory could not heal.

In losing forty-three killed and fifty-seven wounded, the marines had annihilated Ichiki’s entire attacking force of 800 men. (The rest of the detachment, numbering about 120 men, had been left behind to the east as a rear guard.) The psychological repercussions of the Tenaru action were far-reaching. That victory, and the actions on Tulagi and Gavutu two weeks earlier, had put an end to the myth of the Japanese soldier as an untouchable jungle warrior. The fanaticism of the Japanese was unnerving, but it prompted them, again and again, to fight in tactically idiotic ways.

Within the constraints of his lofty rank, Nimitz was a genuinely warm and outgoing man. He was compulsively social and always used a personal touch. He let it be known that the commanding officers of all ships that put in to Pearl Harbor were expected to pay him a visit, and his office established an “open house” each day at 11:00 a.m. for the purpose. His command was vast—two and a half million men and more than a thousand ships—so these daily meetings were a tax on his time, but they kept him in direct touch with every level of the fleet. Nimitz was a natural-born warrior, one who always insisted on carrying the war to the enemy. He had the inborn military bearing of his Teutonic ancestors; his family had once held a title of nobility and coat of arms in rural Saxony. His chief of staff, Rear Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance, later attested that Nimitz was the only man he ever knew who seemed to be completely fearless, and added, “The one big thing about him was that he was always ready to fight. . . . And he wanted officers who would push the fight with the Japanese. If they would not do so, they were sent elsewhere.”

Halsey had brought several key members of his carrier task force staff with him to the South Pacific. Miles Browning, who had served for more than a year as his chief of staff, retained that role and title in the South Pacific. Others included Julian Brown (intelligence), Doug Moulton (air operations), and Bill Ashford (flag lieutenant). Marine General DeWitt Peck, who had served ably as a war plans officer since before the Guadalcanal landings the previous August, stayed on in that capacity. Harold Stassen, a former governor of Minnesota, came on board as assistant chief of staff in March 1943.

In his widely read memoirs, Reminiscences, MacArthur named himself the mastermind of the leapfrogging strategy. “I intended to envelop them, incapacitate them, apply the ‘hit ’em where they ain’t—let ’em die on the vine’ philosophy,” he wrote. “There would be no need for storming the mass of islands held by the enemy.”29 The truth is that MacArthur was a late convert to the cause. Robert Carney, chief of staff to Halsey’s “Dirty Tricks Department”—the insiders’ affectionate nickname for SOPAC headquarters—recalls obstinate opposition from his counterparts in Brisbane. “MacArthur felt that you simply couldn’t go away and leave strong forces . . . upon your flank or behind you. This thinking in his outfit was quite different from the thinking in ours.”30 MacArthur apparently adopted the leapfrogging philosophy some time after the bypass of Rabaul was ordered by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (the American-British supreme command) in August 1943. Even then, he initially opposed several bypassing maneuvers, notably Halsey’s leap past Kavieng in March 1944.

By the war’s end, the Pacific submarine force would sink more than 1,100 marus, amounting to more aggregate tonnage than Japan had possessed on December 7, 1941. With fewer than 2 percent of all naval personnel, the submariners could claim credit for more than half of all Japanese ships sunk during the war, and 60 percent of the aggregate tonnage. Although their primary strategic purpose was to destroy the enemy’s seaborne commerce, the submarines also sent 201 Japanese warships to the bottom, with a combined tonnage of 540,192.81 These triumphs were not achieved cheaply. Fifty-two World War II submarines “remain on patrol,” to borrow the submariners’ poignant euphemism. Forty-one boats are known to have been destroyed by enemy attack. The submarine force was very small when compared to the rest of the navy—the submarine service had a wartime average personnel strength of just 14,750 officers and enlisted men. About 16,000 men altogether made at least one war patrol. Of these, 375 officers and 3,131 men gave their lives—a mortality rate of 22 percent, higher than that for any branch of the armed services.

Five of the eight battleships damaged in the Japanese attack had been repaired and returned to service. Salvage work continued on the Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah. The reclamation of those wrecked leviathans had been one of the most stupendous challenges ever encountered by engineers, comparable in scale or complexity to the construction of great bridges, dams, or canals. With their hulls ripped open by Japanese aerial torpedoes, several of the great steel ships had come to rest on the harbor floor. To raise and maneuver them into dry docks, where they could be repaired and rebuilt, the salvage teams first had to patch the submerged holes in their sunken hulls, then pump enough water out to raise them to a draft of 35 feet. Thousands of tons of ordnance, weaponry, equipment, and debris had to be removed before the ships could be raised. Noxious and explosive gases built up in the enclosed compartments, posing the constant threat of fire or poisoning. Workers who descended into the interiors of the damaged ships wore rubber boots and coveralls and carried portable breathing gear. They lit their way with heavy battle lanterns and communicated with the surface by telephone lines connected to air hoses. Powerful suction blowers ventilated the ships, but as new hatches were opened, hydrogen sulfide gas often rushed out with enough force to blow men off their feet. The ships were flooded with an unspeakable black sludge made up of seawater and fuel oil. Badly decomposed corpses w...

Professional divers, including both naval personnel and civilian contractors, did the difficult and dangerous job of inspecting, measuring, and patching the underwater damage. They mapped the flooded interiors, opened and closed watertight doors, disarmed unexploded ordnance, and removed debris and bodies. They worked in perfect darkness, feeling their way through the sludge-flooded innards of the sunken ships, where electric light was useless because it would only reflect back into the small glass ports on their heavy copper helmets. It was grisly work. Edward C. Raymer, a navy diver who wrote a vivid memoir of his work in the sunken battleships, dreaded colliding with the dead sailors who floated through the flooded compartments. He claims to have sensed the proximity of bodies before coming into contact with them, describing the intuition as a “strange feeling that I was not alone.”

The official minutes of the Combined Chiefs meetings, recorded in strictly anodyne terms, tended to disguise the heated subtext of the debate. The British had lost much of their Asia-Pacific empire and wanted it back. In Malaya, especially, they had been disgraced; in order to retrieve their prestige in the region, they must have a role in the defeat of Japan. But until Germany was knocked out of the war, Britain could offer no meaningful contribution to the Pacific theater. If the Americans closed in on Japan too early, British military power might be rendered strategically irrelevant in the Pacific, with portentous consequences for the future of the empire. But Ernest King was not at all interested in the future of the British empire, and he even appeared to take an unseemly relish in the humbling of British seapower.

Admiral Spruance, when interviewed by historians after the war, often remarked that strategy and tactics never approached the importance of logistics in the transpacific campaign.

It was the proudest and the most terrible day in the history of the Marine Corps. Men fought with extraordinary courage, returning to the line of fire even after having been wounded several times. “They’d fight with broken arms, gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds,” recalled Vern Garrett, a Yorktown pharmacist’s mate. “I’d patch them up and tell them to go back to the ship and they’d say, ‘I’m all right,’ and they would just keep on fighting.”40 Lieutenant William D. Hawkins, a Texan, was one of those rare men who seemed entirely indifferent to danger. He dashed across exposed firing fields with wild-eyed, manic courage; he personally attacked one enemy pillbox or machine-gun nest after another, throwing grenades into firing ports; he refused to be evacuated even after suffering serious shrapnel wounds. Hawkins commandeered an amtrac, loaded the remains of his platoon into it, and charged into concentrated machine-gun fire. A witness told Sherrod, “I’ll never forget the picture of him standing on that amtrac, riding around with a million bullets a minute whistling by his ears, just shooting Japs. I’ve never seen such a man in my life.”41 Shortly after noon a bullet caught him in the shoulder and severed an artery. He died in minutes. Later, Betio’s captured airfield would be named Hawkins Field, and the lieutenant’s mother would accept a posthumous Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt.

Colonel Shoup, who wore a mask of dust and dirt like every other marine on the island, summed up the situation that afternoon: “Well, I think we’re winning, but the bastards have got a lot of bullets left. I think we’ll clean up tomorrow.”57 He was plainly exhausted, having slept not at all the previous night. He was still bleeding through his bandage. His report to General Julian Smith would enter Marine Corps lore: “Casualties many; percentage of dead not known; combat efficiency: We are winning.”

When a government inspector passed through the Nagoya works in late 1943, he was surprised to learn that newly manufactured Zeros were still being hauled away from the plant by teams of oxen.

The president knew, but could not yet disclose, that another great amphibious flotilla was underway in the Pacific. If not for the invasion of northern France (OVERLORD), the Pacific operation (FORAGER) would have surpassed all previous amphibious landings in scale and sophistication. That two such colossal assaults could be launched against fortified enemy shores, in the same month and at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, was a supreme demonstration of American military-industrial hegemony.

Records enumerated 40,000 discrete categories of supplies and munitions in the holds of the transports. These had been combat-loaded so that they could be removed and transferred to the beachhead quickly and in exactly the quantities requested by the troops ashore. For every one marine or soldier in the landing force, the transport fleet carried more than a ton of supplies and equipment. A single supply ship brought rations to feed 90,000 men for a month. Mitscher’s task force carried eight million gallons of aviation fuel, and would burn more than four million barrels of bunker oil during the operation.

Of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Shokaku was the fifth to go into the abyss. Now only the Zuikaku remained.

Saipan, June 1944.

Throughout the day, as the air groups made their reports to Mitscher, the number of claimed kills climbed to extravagant proportions. Even accounting for the usual exaggerations and double counting, it was evident that Task Force 58 had scored a victory on a magnitude that no one had expected or foreseen. Of the 373 aircraft launched by Ozawa’s carrier force, only 130 had returned intact. Approximately 50 more had been destroyed after taking off from Guam or Rota. The Americans had lost just twenty-five Hellcats, four by operational accidents.52 The ratio of kills had been about eleven to one. In the Task Force 58 ready rooms, the pilots were celebrating as if they had won the war. “Medicinal” brandy was served and glasses were raised in toasts. On the Lexington, a euphoric fighter pilot remarked, “Hell, this is like an old time turkey-shoot.”53 The remark was often repeated, and the name stuck. Historians would call it the first day of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, but to the aviators it was always the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.”

Before his ritual disembowelment, General Saito had declared that it was their duty to avoiding falling into captivity—that is, to take the same way out as General Saito. Families were bound by the oyaku-shinju (parent-child death pact). They were obligated to take their lives and those of their kin by any means at hand. Cyanide capsules were given out until there were no more. Soldiers offered to shoot civilians in turn, and did not always wait to be invited. In a crowded cave, one grenade might do the work of twenty bullets. Sword-wielding officers beheaded dozens of willing victims. There were reports of children forming into a circle and tossing a live hand grenade, one to another, until it exploded and killed them all. In a cave filled with Japanese soldiers and civilians, Yamauchi recalled, a sergeant ordered mothers to keep their infants quiet, and when they were unable to do so, he told them, “Kill them yourself or I’ll order my men to do it.” Several mothers obeyed.94 As the Japanese perimeter receded toward the island’s northern terminus at Marpi Point, civilians who had thus far resisted the suicide order were forced back to the edge of a cliff that dropped several hundred feet onto a rocky shore. In a harrowing finale, many thousands of Japanese men, women, and children took that fateful last step. The self-destructive paroxysm could not be explained by deference to orders, or by obeisance to the death cult of imperial bushido. Suicide, the Japanese of Saipan e...

THOUGH AMERICANS WERE SLOW TO APPRECIATE IT, they had just won the decisive victory of the Pacific War. Capture of the Marianas and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower were final and irreversible blows to the hopes of the Japanese imperial project.

Even long after the end of the war, hundreds of Japanese remained stubbornly at large in the jungles of Guam. Small groups lived in caves and survived by hunting lizards, toads, and rats, trapping fish, and stealing food from local farms and villages. Chamorros, embittered by the Japanese occupation of 1941–44, tended to attack them on sight. The Japanese government sent emissaries, and a steady trickle of holdouts came out of the jungle each year throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. The last Japanese straggler on Guam was Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, a native of Aichi Prefecture, who lived in a remote section of the Talofofo river valley until 1972.

The Pacific War had entered its endgame. But another 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and civilians would die before the heart was knocked out of the men who ruled Japan.