Island Infernos: The US Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944

by John C. McManus

In an ironic travesty, the Sherrod story and the interservice tiff as a whole obscured the frontline reality that Marine and Army combat troops on Saipan had largely fought well together and had developed a deep mutual respect. “We have no fight with the United States Marines,” Captain Love wrote a couple of months after the battle. “They are Americans like ourselves and we admire and respect them as men.” The Marine Corps official historian later summarized, with sage insight, “Marines and soldiers fought a hard campaign side by side. On the battlefield itself, there was neither place nor time for interservice rivalry. The measure of value was how well each man stood his share of the common burden, not what his uniform color was when he stood clear of the mud and the dust. In truth, there could be no other answer to success in combat than interservice cooperation.” Indeed, this was so very true, for the two ground services were about to fight together on an additional array of traumatic battlefields.19

American riflemen quickly picked off three Japanese soldiers who were riding on the tank, but the vehicle kept on, heedless of bazooka and machine-gun fire. The lone-wolf tank overran a machine-gun crew, shot up cowering infantrymen in a ditch, and, in the course of its odyssey, swept a battalion aid station, a battalion command post, and the 307th regimental headquarters with cannon and machine-gun fire before a pair of American light tanks chased it away. In its wake, the enemy tank left two rifle companies in disarray. “The

were killed in action. By now, Obata had, at most, only about five thousand troops left, many of whom were in too poor physical condition to fight or had no modern weapons. The

The mobile campaign in Guam’s final days necessitated the continuous displacement and relocation of the division command post, a responsibility that devolved on the chief of staff.

point where he could hardly face the truth. For days he refused even to speak to anyone about Colonel McNair. “This is the first time, in my letter to you, that I have done so,” he wrote a week later to Clare,

Later, the general told Colonel Mace of McNair, “He was unusual in his lack of selfishness in order to promote the common good of the Division.

By mid-August, the Guam campaign petered out in the usual manner. Organized Japanese resistance largely ceased. The few surviving Japanese servicemen, most of whom refused to surrender, instead took to the hills and caves, where they starved, died of disease, or continued on in a hand-to-mouth existence, occasionally posing a threat to American bases or patrols. “The Japanese officer does not admit, even to himself, that his forces can be defeated,” one American officer claimed in a wartime analysis of the Japanese fighting soldier. “Surrender or retreat are beyond his comprehension.”

Soon thereafter, when the Americans overran his headquarters and killed all but three of his aides, he took out his service pistol and shot himself in the head rather than risk the humiliation and dishonor of captivity.

At Guam, the Americans had inflicted yet another monumental defeat upon the Japanese. In addition to the moral and humanitarian aspects of liberating the population, the Americans turned the island into a major naval and air base. By the fall of 1944, the island had become home to some 200,000 American military personnel whose very presence epitomized the growing momentum of the relentless Central Pacific advance to the Japanese home islands.

When Hirohito’s naval adviser heard the news of Guam’s fall, he glumly and correctly observed, “Hell is on us.”

General Douglas MacArthur had his own ideas about how best to deliver hell to Japan’s doorstep, and he feared, perhaps even loathed, all other visions, save his own, for a Japanese downfall. He believed, unshakably and irrevocably, that to defeat Japan the Americans must liberate the Philippines.

Beyond the endless military permutations of grand strategy, MacArthur’s yearning for the Philippines’ redemption amounted to something much more than a means of defeating Japan, perhaps something psychological stemming from his own cherished concepts of personal honor or maybe even, for such an egocentric personality, a powerful need to redeem his name and reputation in the eyes of the Filipino people, whom he loved in something of the same manner that a patriarch loves his descendants.

Lieutenant Colonel Roger Egeberg, his physician, once observed. It was as if, in MacArthur’s mind, an Allied final victory would mean little without the liberation of the archipelago. Anything else might be tantamount to accepting a forfeit rather than earning a true victory. Nor could he bear the thought of subjecting the Filipinos to Japanese depredations even a day longer than necessary.

New developments and competing ideas, especially from his nemesis par excellence Admiral Ernest King, who detested MacArthur and ardently opposed major operations in the Philippines in favor of invading Formosa and perhaps even directly the Japanese home islands, could easily evaporate past intentions. Moreover, MacArthur hankered to liberate the heart of the archipelago, and that really meant Luzon, the foremost island, where the capital, Manila, his onetime home, beckoned like a long-lost lover. In

is my opinion that purely military considerations demand the reoccupation of the Philippines in order to cut the enemy’s communications to the south and to secure a base for our further advance.” Control of the Philippines would sever the Japanese home islands from the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia), depriving the Japanese of conquered resources such as oil, tin, and rubber, all of which they badly needed to continue the war.

1941–1942, the Japanese had invaded the Philippines, not out of any particular desire for them, but because they could not tolerate an American-controlled enclave in the belly of their burgeoning empire.

Control of Luzon might also provide the Americans with a useful base to sustain northerly advances to Formosa, Okinawa, and the home islands. So there were solid strategical reasons for returning to the archipelago.

“The Philippines is American territory where our unsupported forces were destroyed by the enemy. Practically all of the seventeen million Filipinos remain loyal to the United States and are undergoing the greatest privation and suffering because we have not been able to support or succor them.

we would probably suffer such loss of prestige among all the peoples of the Far East that it would adversely affect the United States for many years.”

“In my view, ‘by-passing’ is in no way synonymous with ‘abandonment.’ On the contrary, by the defeat of Japan at the earliest practicable moment the liberation of the Philippines will be effected in the most expeditious and complete manner possible.”

MacArthur had harbored a career-long distrust and dislike of Marshall, whom he continually suspected, with no grounding in reality, of sabotaging him in Washington. “His hatred for General Marshall never changed,” Lieutenant General Eichelberger once claimed, on the basis of many conversations about this with MacArthur.

would take twenty-six hours, with a pair of refueling stops in New Caledonia and Canton Island, to travel from Brisbane to Honolulu.

The Americans finally snuffed out the last Japanese resistance on November 27. Over a five-week period during this final phase of near-pointless fighting, Mueller’s division lost 110 men killed and 717 wounded. Before committing ritual suicide, Nakagawa burned the colors of his 2nd Infantry Regiment and sent a farewell message to Inoue’s headquarters at Koror, “Sakura, sakura.”

At Peleliu the 1st Marine Division suffered 6,526 battle casualties and the 81st Division another 3,275, totaling between them 1,792 fatalities. The Wildcats also lost 2,500 men, at least temporarily, to sickness, nonbattle injuries, and combat fatigue. Almost 15 percent of the Americans who participated became casualties. Infantrymen accounted for 79 percent of the killed, wounded, or missing. The Japanese lost about 11,000 soldiers killed, plus a handful taken prisoner. They succeeded in inflicting a one-to-one casualty ratio on the Americans, a disquieting harbinger for future battles.

Just as Admiral Halsey had anticipated, the Palau operations, and Peleliu in particular, accrued no strategic advantages for the Americans. Operation Stalemate proved to be the very embodiment of a Pyrrhic victory, and a sour example of the wrong way to fight this war. American victories in the Marianas, combined with the decision to bypass Mindanao, and the preeminence of Allied air- and sea power, had already isolated every Japanese serviceman in the Palaus.

The airfield on Peleliu played only a tangential role in the war, as a backwater base. As a silver lining, one might argue that the only value of the air base came about the next summer when a Peleliu-based search plane located some stricken survivors of the USS Indianapolis. Otherwise, the Peleliu airfield played no meaningful role in the war (and Angaur field proved almost equally ancillary). “The expedition was unnecessary,” Colonel Venable bluntly wrote to a historian after the war.

In the battles for both Peleliu and Angaur, American senior leaders at the division level demonstrated little strategic or, for that matter, tactical vision. Both battles demonstrated the unsettling truth that remarkable American gallantry at the tactical level, and the capture of ground, did not automatically lead to strategic advantages—an object lesson that subsequent generations of American commanders might well have taken more to heart.

Peleliu served as a cautionary tale for the wrong way to fight the war, a dreary monument to poor strategic decision-making, faulty intelligence, self-defeating, almost childish interservice rivalry, and lack of flexible response against a thinking and determined enemy, one who had finally embraced a strategic outlook appropriate to the circumstances.21

If Eisenhower saw the Normandy invasion and the campaign in Europe as a modern crusade against tyranny, MacArthur viewed the Allied return to the Philippines as something even more hallowed, something akin to the rescue of a beloved family member, an almost mystical moment of redemption and fellowship. Seldom in American military history has a general felt such a messianic sense of mission and so tight a bond with those whom he sought to liberate.

But the massive growth of American power, along with the steady northern advances far away from the island continent, had begun to marginalize Australia’s role. Increasingly her troops were consigned to babysitting bypassed Japanese garrisons in the South Pacific. MacArthur envisioned no substantial role in the coming Philippine campaign for Australian military forces. MacArthur—and by proxy the United States—no longer needed Australia as badly as before. Like a bicycle cast aside for an automobile, MacArthur intended to make little more use of his Australian allies beyond the incorporation of a few ships into his fleet, now that he had access to the prodigious largesse of his own nation. For Australia, this change from full partner to backbencher whiffed of bittersweetness. No Western Allied country had mobilized its population so completely for war, and contributed so much per capita, whether in blood or treasure. And yet the relief from paying such a heavy price must have been profound, even though it came at the price of less influence and importance as the war neared an end.

this sense, the moment that MacArthur climbed back aboard the Bataan, his personal B-17, it encapsulated a new, climactic phase of the Pacific War, one that had been building for much of 1944, an entirely American-dominated war raging far beyond the South Pacific, focusing now on the imminent destruction of Japan itself, albeit through operations in the Philippines and other archipelagos located within close proximity to the home islands.1

On October 16, with the Curtin meeting very much in MacArthur’s rearview mirror, he boarded the USS Nashville to embark upon the invasion of Leyte, known to his staff as Operation King II, the greatest amphibious operation heretofore attempted in the Pacific War. With

Known as the Central Philippines Strike Force and composed primarily of Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet, the armada hailed almost entirely from the two great SWPA bases of Hollandia and Manus. Minesweepers

Over hundreds of miles of blue ocean, Kinkaid’s convoys circled and rendezvoused, assembled into formations, and sailed ever northward, a mighty host of 738 warships, their varying shapes and sizes so diverse as to present nearly a complete picture of mid-twentieth-century naval hardware. There were six battleships, five heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, including Nashville, eighteen escort carriers, eighty-six destroyers, and twenty-five destroyer escorts, all protecting a staggering assemblage of some 420 ships needed to carry four reinforced infantry divisions, plus supporting troops, to Leyte.

The Seventh Fleet formed nothing less than a moving American city. Kinkaid’s 738 ships were crewed by some 50,000 sailors and carried about 150,000 troops of Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s powerful Sixth Army.

Like an advance cavalry strike force of yesteryear, Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet continued slashing at Japanese bases from the Philippines to Formosa, Okinawa, and their environs, a mission that perfectly suited the aggressive old sea dog and his equally bellicose partner Vice Admiral Mitscher.

“Our fighters were nothing but so many eggs thrown at the stone wall of the indomitable enemy formation,” a Japanese admiral admitted ruefully of a raid against one Formosan airfield. The Japanese inflicted damage, though. They shot down seventy-six of Mitscher’s planes, costing the lives of sixty-four crewmen, and they badly damaged two cruisers that escaped only as a result of an elaborate salvaging and towing effort.

Owing to distorted, wildly optimistic damage reports by inexperienced rookie pilots, as well as a cultural tendency toward authoritarian gullibility, the Japanese convinced themselves that they had scored a major turning-point victory. The naval section of Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo issued an October 16 communiqué that claimed massive American losses of eleven carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one destroyer, with eight more carriers and other surface ships badly damaged. Proving that one person’s retreat is another’s redeployment, the Japanese claimed that Halsey had fled in disarray, when in truth he had simply retired to begin covering the imminent Leyte landings.

Emperor Hirohito issued a triumphant rescript to mark the supposed victory, prompting spontaneous waves of joyous festivities all over Japan from a worried population that had begun to sense the shadow of the American wolf approaching their door. “We celebrated the ‘Glorious Victory of Taiwan,’ ” one Japanese general recalled with chagrin after the war. Countering this narcotic-like self-delusion, Admiral Halsey, in tandem with Nimitz’s headquarters, released on October 17 a chortling statement: “Admiral Nimitz has received from Admiral Halsey the comforting assurance that he is now retiring toward the enemy following the salvage of all the Third Fleet ships recently reported sunk by Radio Tokyo.” Beyond the derisive humor, the statement made it clear that the Japanese had sunk none of Halsey’s ships, a true buzzkill for any Japanese observant enough to digest the message.2 The truth of the Japanese situation was, of course, considerably more unsettling than portrayed by Tokyo, though by no means hopeless. For the first two years of the war, the Philippines had served as little more than a backwater staging base, and a restive one due to growing guerrilla acti...

“Had the plan succeeded, the effect on the Allied troops on Leyte in all likelihood would have been calamitous, for these troops would have been isolated and their situation would have been precarious indeed,” stated Krueger’s Sixth Army post-battle report, succinctly summarizing the ground soldier’s perspective on the affair. Alas, the notion fortunately remains forever moot.

As it was, the Battle of Leyte Gulf inflicted irreplaceable losses on the Imperial Navy and ceded control of Philippine waters to the Americans. The battle eliminated any chance that Japan’s navy could positively influence the Leyte campaign, or any subsequent battles in the Philippines. Though victorious, the Americans were fortunate to dodge the consequences of a loosely dysfunctional command arrangement as well as risky operational decisions on Halsey’s part and perhaps Kinkaid’s,

MacArthur fixed the blame on the divided command that had led Halsey and him to work at such cross-purposes. “Of all the faulty decisions of the war perhaps the most unexplainable was the failure to unify the command in the Pacific,” he later assessed.

Sho amounted to more than just an operational plan for strategic victory. It also alluded to a prevailing command-culture expectation for commanders to employ aggressive measures against the Americans, regardless of the prospects for ultimate success. General Yamashita came to the Philippines fully expecting to fight the decisive battle on Luzon, the only part of the archipelago he saw as strategically worthwhile. By contrast, Field Marshal Terauchi and his staff wanted to fight with all possible strength wherever the Americans landed, for fear of allowing them to solidify air and naval bases that might make Luzon untenable.

The argument about preventing a fatal American buildup did have some validity, though neither the field marshal nor his staff seemed to take into account Leyte’s many inadequacies as a major base (the same largely held true for MacArthur and most of SWPA headquarters).

By the time the Americans landed on A-Day, Tokyo had decided to embrace a showdown battle on Leyte.

The levelheaded Yamashita did not buy the Formosa victory fantasies. He pointed to recent evidence of major air strikes from Halsey’s carriers to make the argument that the job of shipping reinforcements securely to Leyte would be problematic. Even with safe passage, Yamashita doubted the troops could get to the island in time to destroy the Sixth Army. The massive reinforcement of Leyte promised to make Luzon less defensible and Fourteenth Area Army more vulnerable to follow-up American invasions elsewhere in the Philippines.

“We had hopeful discussions of entering Tacloban by the 16th of November,” Major General Tomochika, the chief of staff, later wrote with chagrin. “We were determined to take offensive after offensive and clean up landed American forces on Leyte island. We seriously discussed demanding the surrender of the entire American Army after seizing General MacArthur.” An exuberant Suzuki told his chief of staff that he would insist upon “the capitulation of MacArthur’s entire forces, those in New Guinea and other places as well as troops on Leyte.” Clearly caught up in a moment of ecstatic self-deception, he added, “We don’t even need all the reinforcements they are sending us.” In a postwar letter to a Japanese journalist, a chastened Tomochika insightfully added, “The Japanese people were led to believe that strength through ‘Yamato Damashi’ (Yamato Spirit) was legendary. Our educational system was not founded on a scientific basis but was entirely based on this false concept.” Too late, Tomochika grasped that the Japanese were far too prone to dismiss or disregard hard facts in favor of an almost spiritual mysticism. Many

Any attacking force that failed to seal off the battlefield risked being worn down and defeated by attrition as the defenders reinforced themselves. This had almost happened two years earlier at Guadalcanal; the Japanese now attempted to make it a reality on Leyte. Between October 23 and December 11, Fourteenth Area Army sent nine separate convoys to Leyte, originating mainly from Luzon and Cebu, and managed, in spite of intensive American air attacks, to land forty-five thousand troops and ten thousand tons of matériel. The Americans sank an incredible 80 percent of the transport ships, yet almost all of them went down close enough to the coast for large numbers of troops to stagger or swim ashore, often minus weapons or equipment.

On A-Day the Japanese on Leyte had been heavily outnumbered, doomed to eventual annihilation when the Americans snuffed out Makino’s 16th Division. The reinforcements changed that demoralizing dynamic.

The heavens are arched with streaks of fire as the tracers from the Navy ships meet those from the guns ashore. Brilliant lights from flares, blinding flashes of light from exploding bombs, and yellow domes of fire formed by burning particles of phosphorous bombs light up the sky. Balls of flame streak through the sky from time to time, as enemy planes gradually lose elevation until they finally crash into the sea in a great mass of flame.”