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

by Ian W. Toll

A reasonable share of culpability must be attributed to WATCHTOWER’S cumbersome and ambiguous command arrangements, and thus to King himself.

The fanaticism of the Japanese was unnerving, but it prompted them, again and again, to fight in tactically idiotic ways.

After the war, Hirohito would portray himself as a powerless figurehead, but in September and October of 1942 he continually goaded his army and navy ministers to take the offensive and drive the Americans off Guadalcanal.

He quoted a Japanese proverb: “He who pursues two hares catches neither.”

General George C. Kenney, who relieved George Brett as commander of Allied Air Forces in the theater in August 1942, resolved to confront MacArthur’s despotic chief of staff, General Sutherland, directly early in his tenure. When Sutherland began issuing orders to the air groups, infringing on what Kenney believed to be his rightful purview, he drew a dot on a blank sheet of paper and told Sutherland, “The dot represents what you know about air operations, the entire rest of the paper what I know.”

The Japanese retained their customary excellence in night torpedo actions, and their Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes remained the best weapons of their kind in the theater,

The president was likely influenced by MacArthur’s political weight and his implicit threat to accept the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1944.

Admiral Koga continued feeding air reinforcements into the theater from Truk, including his last reserve of trained carrier airmen. The South Pacific had become a meat grinder for Japanese airpower.

Since the Japanese navy did not concede the inevitability of combat fatigue, neither pilots nor staff officers were ever rotated out of the theater:

insisted that the war was a conspiracy to enrich politicians and fill the coffers of their capitalist benefactors.

Spruance’s command philosophy was to delegate any task that he did not absolutely have to do himself. He later observed, with worthy candor, “Looking at myself objectively, I think I am a good judge of men; and I know that I tend to be lazy about many things, so I do not try to do anything that I can pass down the line to someone more competent than I am to do it.”

Spruance did not micromanage; he picked good men, gave them authority, and held them accountable.

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.

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.

Essential wartime deliveries of replacement aircraft thus hung on the fate of a diminishing herd of underfed beasts. Mitsubishi engineers at length discovered that Percheron horses could haul the aircraft to Kagamigahara faster and required less to eat. These ludicrous exertions, when compared at a glance to the arrangements at Boeing, Douglas, or Grumman, tell most of the story of Japan’s defeat.

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.

Raymond Spruance, when discussing the war after it was over, often returned to the point that tactical decisions in major battles were less important than the superior logistics of American forces.

The Americans had developed the capability to project overwhelming force into the distant frontiers of the western Pacific, and no tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the combatants.

“If we ever lose Saipan, repeated air attacks on Tokyo will follow,” Hirohito told Tojo. “No matter what it takes, we have to hold there.”18 In a late-afternoon meeting at the Imperial Palace on June 20, he directed Tojo and Shimada to muster all available naval and air forces for another desperate attack on the American fleet, to be followed by troop landings on the contested island.