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by
Ian W. Toll
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October 21 - November 22, 2021
A week after Japanese forces crossed the Johore Strait and entered Singapore, General Arthur Percival surrendered about 80,000 troops to a Japanese army less than half that size.
The tribal bigmen traveled to Aola from villages all over the island and put their questions to Clemens. Why were most of the whites falling all over themselves to escape the island? What would become of their villages under Japanese occupation? In his memoir, Clemens recounted his speech (in pidgin) to a delegation of chiefs in March 1942: “No matter altogether Japan ’e come, me stop long youfella. Business belong youfella boil’m, all ’e way, bymbye altogether b’long mefella come save’m youme. Me no savvy who, me no savvy when, but bymbye everyt’ing ’e alright.”4 (Even if the Japanese come in
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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.”1
Until 1947, there was no such thing as a Department of Defense, or a secretary of defense—the navy and war departments were independent and coequal, each headed by a civilian cabinet secretary who reported directly to the president. Before December 1941, there was no such thing as a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)—that body was convened as an ad hoc committee for the first wartime summit with the British. With no other mechanism on hand for interservice cooperation, the JCS continued to meet regularly for the duration of the war, but it functioned without formal statutory authority and without an
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General Marshall remarked after the war, “I had trouble with King because he was always sore at everybody. He was perpetually mean.”13 In his private wartime diary, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in the same vein, but less delicately: “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully.”14
Almost every night, a floatplane circled over the marine perimeter, dropping occasional bombs here or there. Collectively known to the Americans as “Washing Machine Charley” or “Louie the Louse,” these nocturnal visitors usually did little damage. But they kept the marines awake, and that may have been their purpose.
At the Battle of Midway, four Japanese carriers had taken similar punishment and been destroyed by secondary explosions and uncontrollable fires. Aboard the Enterprise, damage-control measures quickly brought the fires under control, and the ship continued to maneuver deftly and keep pace with the task force.
“He was just not a routine executive,” said Robert H. Jackson, who served as Roosevelt’s attorney general and was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1941. “He certainly was not accomplished as an administrator and in normal times . . . it is doubtful if he could have been a distinguished president.”
It is taken for granted that if an official is out of place, his functions may be removed but that he will remain. This makes intrigue, indirection, and slickness a habit in getting things done, good things and bad things alike. If everything has to be done by beating around the bush, men lose the habit of going forward on a straight line.
The OPA alone churned out more paper between 1940 and 1945 than the entire federal government had generated since 1789.8
General Sir Alan Brooke, the acerbic chief of the British Imperial General Staff, left some choice observations in his diary on the subject. Even if an Allied expeditionary force could get ashore safely, he had asked Marshall on April 15, what would they do? “Whether we are to play baccarat or chemin de fer at La Touquet, or possibly bathe at Paris Plage is not stipulated! I asked him this afternoon—do we go east, south or west after landing? He had not begun to think of it!”
As a matter of fact, he was just making himself a bigger target. I used a three second burst, and he was dead before I stopped firing. . . . He made a splash no bigger than a porpoise. Then he was just part of the soup.
Security required that the arrival of such an exalted figure as COMSOPAC never be announced in advance. There was no “Potemkin village” effect—no sprucing up, no turning the men out in their best uniforms, no parade-ground reviews.
Gradually it became clear that everyone was looking for a way out of Guadalcanal. As one conference followed another, and the regime stumbled toward a new accord, about 200 Japanese soldiers on the island perished each day.
He quoted a Japanese proverb: “He who pursues two hares catches neither.”
When a larger quantity of beer was obtained by backhanded means, it could be chilled by taking it to high altitude for thirty minutes. Pilots would provide that service in exchange for a share of the spoils.
Words are not deeds, and there is no reason to believe that Halsey, given the opportunity, would actually order a city sacked, a population neutered, or a prisoner degraded and abused in defiance of the Geneva Convention. Halsey’s hatred of the enemy was genuine, and his sentiments were widely shared by servicemen and civilians of the Allied nations. In the peculiar context of a savage war, his more outlandish rants are best understood as figurative rallying cries rather than literal threats. Behind the bellowing thespian was a complicated man with a nuanced conscience. The crowning irony of
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Dehumanization of the enemy was one of war’s necessary evils, but it was every officer’s responsibility to arrest the descent into bestiality.
The second question was strategic. Was it wise to kill Yamamoto? This was the man who had planned and executed the disastrous foray against Midway, losing four aircraft carriers with all their aircraft. Yamamoto had badly mismanaged the Guadalcanal campaign by deploying air and troop reinforcements in piecemeal fashion. He was evidently doing a fine job of losing the war. Shouldn’t he be permitted to continue?
The Battle of the Komandorski Islands marked the last attempt of the Japanese to resupply the Attu and Kiska garrisons with surface ships; all future supply runs would be made by submarines.
The Japanese had won a tactical and strategic victory in this “Battle of Vella Lavella.” It was to be their last sea victory of the war.
Union leftists, veterans of the labor struggles of the 1930s, insisted that the war was a conspiracy to enrich politicians and fill the coffers of their capitalist benefactors. Archibald writes of “an atmosphere of lassitude” that “flooded like a heavy vapor over the yards, and everywhere was evidence of an incredible waste of time.”6 Loafing was widespread, and it was organized. Newspapers were smuggled into the yard and passed around. In out-of-the-way corners of the ships and machine shops, men and women played cards, threw dice, or exchanged gossip. Lookouts were posted at doors, and coded
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Reasoning that there was no better way to learn a boat’s systems than to take a direct hand in installing them, the navy assigned officers and crew to supervise the latter stages of construction and commissioning.
English, like Admiral Ralph Christie (Fife’s predecessor in Brisbane), gave the back of his hand to reports of malfunctioning torpedoes. To one returning skipper he ludicrously claimed, “SUBPAC has never had a premature explosion.”65 The Bureau of Ordnance was intolerant of criticism and sought to turn it back on the fleet by blaming reports of malfunctions on skippers, crews, and torpedo handlers.
In 1943, the figure rose to 23; in 1944, it was 132; and in the first eight months of 1945, the Allies destroyed 103 Japanese tankers. In 1942, 40 percent of East Indies crude oil production safely reached Japan. In 1943, that proportion declined to 15 percent; in 1944, it fell to 5 percent; and after March 1945, not a single drop arrived on Japanese shores.
From a 1943 peak of 7.8 million tons, ingot steel production plummeted to a per-annum production rate of about 1.5 million tons in 1945, or about 15 percent of the industry’s production capacity.
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.
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 winches began taking up strain on the cables on the morning of March 8, 1943. The Oklahoma groaned, creaked, and gradually began to turn. The winches pulled her over at the rate of 3 feet per hour. They pulled for more than two months, until June 16, 1943, when she was upright with a 3-degree list.
The extraordinary heroism in Italy of the all-nisei (second-generation Japanese American) 442nd Regimental Combat Team was publicized and celebrated in the Hawaiian press.
A supreme logistics effort was required to push such a fleet across the Pacific. A supply train of auxiliaries (including fifteen fleet oilers) would provide underway refueling and replenishment from bases at Funafuti, Espiritu Santo, the Fijis, and Pearl Harbor. Looking beyond the Gilberts, into the Marshalls and Marianas, the service and supply forces would be obliged to move quickly into newly conquered territories and convert them into advanced rear bases to support the next westward leap. Timing must be meticulous and exact. Admiral Spruance, when interviewed by historians after the war,
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The hard-run bulldozers were called into service to finish the job. They approached with blades raised as armor against fire, and shoved a small mountain of sand and coral up to cover the entrance and firing slots. A few marines climbed to the top of the structure and poured gasoline down the air vents. A single hand grenade was enough to convert the blockhouse into a kiln. The remains of 300 Japanese were later excavated from the interior.
Nimitz also heard directly from parents and wives of some of the slain marines. “You killed my son on Tarawa,” a mother wrote from Arkansas. The CINCPAC insisted on reading and answering all such letters. He told Lamar, “This is one of the responsibilities of command. You have to send some people to their deaths.”
O’Hare’s loss was headline news in the United States. He was one of the most famous flyers in the American armed forces, a singular hero to Irish Americans, and one of the most respected and best-liked men in the carrier navy. A Solemn Pontifical Mass of Requiem was held at the Basilica of Saint Louis in Missouri. O’Hare received a posthumous Navy Cross and gave his name to the busiest commercial airport in the world.
Positions on that inner perimeter would be heavily reinforced with land-based air units and army troops to be transferred from Manchuria. Garrisons outside the perimeter, including those in the Gilbert and Marshall island groups, would receive no further reinforcement. If attacked, they must exact a bloody toll on the enemy before perishing in combat to the last man.
When the newspaper landed on the desk of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, he blew his stack. Orders went out from the Information Board to suppress the article, but since more than 100,000 copies had already been distributed, the damage (such as it was) could not be undone. The Army Ministry issued a reprimand to the paper, forced the editor in chief to resign, and summoned other leading editors to be admonished against such commentary. The army drafted the journalist who had written the article, a common method of disciplining wayward writers.
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.
Leading Japanese newspapers reported that “the heroic spirits of Attu” literally rose from the dead, took corporeal form, and renewed the fight against American forces when they landed on Kiska island three months later. “Foreign reports reveal that the American forces fought intensely and bitterly against this army of spirits over a period of three weeks,” the Japan Times and Advertiser reported on August 24, 1943. “In the South Pacific sector, too, spirits of the Japanese troops have tangled with the enemy, causing many of them mental derangements and others to kill themselves as a result of
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The immediate fueling situation could be alleviated by allowing the ships to take on unrefined Borneo petroleum, which was pure enough to drive the engines, but volatile and dirty. Ship’s engineers detested the stuff because it left layers of filthy sediment in the boilers, and it greatly increased the risk of explosions and fires.
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.
Alfred Thayer Mahan had lectured that a naval commander with a clear advantage must pursue, attack, and destroy the enemy, and “nothing can excuse his losing a point which by exertion he might have scored.”33 To a colleague who remarked that the British had done “well enough” in a recent battle, Horatio Nelson had famously replied, “If ten ships out of eleven were taken, I would never call it well enough, if we were able to get at the eleventh.”
According to Ensign Don Lewis of VB-10, stretching an aircraft’s fuel reserve was as much art as science. It was a matter of flying “gently,” of climbing little by little to altitude, of keeping the aircraft balanced by switching between auxiliary fuel tanks.62
The time to consider the risk in turning on the lights for a night recovery is before launching the attack. If the planes are to be launched so late in the day that a night recovery is probable, and if the tactical situation is such that you are not willing to do what is required to get the planes back safely, then you have no business launching the attack in the first place.68
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.
But Operation “Shoestring,” as WATCHTOWER was ruefully nicknamed by the men who carried it out, vindicated King’s philosophy of the early counterattack. In subsequent operations of 1942 and 1943, north and south of the equator, planners had been forced to work against oppressive deadlines and commanders had been forced to rely on deficient or awkward logistics. But the Americans had always appeared before they were anticipated, and the Japanese had been obliged to fight earlier than they would have liked. “Everywhere, I think, you attacked before the defense was ready,” Admiral Kichisaburo
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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.
In March 1943, when all Japanese magazines were ordered to print the slogan “We’ll never cease fire till our enemies cease to be,” Chuo Koran printed it inside the magazine, following the editorial, rather than on the cover as specified. This small act of defiance sealed its fate. A shutdown order followed within days. Hatanaka was branded a communist and hauled off to prison, where he was beaten and tortured almost daily for nine months.
