A World at Arms (126 page)

The first of the Central Pacific operations ironically had been made even more difficult by an earlier raid on the Gilberts by Colonel Carlson’s raiders in August 1942, which had alerted the Japanese to their weakness there and caused them to reinforce the troops and defenses in the islands, and also by the American lack of recent and accurate navigation charts.
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The 2nd Marine Division, reconstituted after its ordeal on Guadalcanal, was to land on Tarawa while the 27th Infantry would seize Makin Island. A huge fleet of over 200 ships provided support; with the defeat of the German U-Boats in May 1943 and the completion of warships ordered in 1940 and 1941, it was now possible for the first time to have an adequately supplied large American fleet of carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers and other ships provide the basis for a massive amphibious assault hundreds of miles from the nearest base.
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Furthermore, this operation, code-named “Galvanic,” would see the first large-scale use of a new weapon, the “amphtrac,” a combined boat and tracked vehicle used as an armored infantry assault carrier that could float or run over ground and coral.
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In spite of a heavy bombardment, the Japanese on Tarawa fought effectively on the beaches and inland. In three days of some of the bloodiest fighting of the Pacific War, the marines had first to wade ashore in the face of enemy fire when the uncertain tides left their
landing ships stranded or crippled off shore, and then had to fight a deeply entrenched defending force without adequate artillery support, which could not be brought in right away for the same reason. By a combination of bravery and numbers and naval gunnery support, they overcame and destroyed a force of 4500 Japanese. Of the marines, 1300 were killed and over 2000 wounded.
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The initial attack on the Tarawa coral atoll had been on Betio, the main island of under 300 acres with the airport. The other islands in the atoll were taken quickly after Betio was secured, while the army division was able to seize lightly defended Makin. In that part of “Galvanic,” the major loss was the torpedoed escort carrier
Liscome Bay,
in which over 600 crew members lost their lives.

Although American commanders and the American public were shocked at the high percentage of casualties in the Tarawa assault, this was one battle about whose necessity there could be no argument.
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The Gilberts were needed for the subsequent attacks on the Marshall Islands, but much more important were the technical lessons about equipment, tactics, angle of naval fire, and the needed length and nature of bombardment learned in this first effort of a type that would have to be repeated many times. In a way the shock of losses proved salutary; the deficiencies uncovered really were remedied, and quickly at that. Nothing shows this more clearly than the next step in the Central Pacific thrust: the invasion of the Marshall Islands.

The American naval thrust across the Central Pacific had to include the Marshall Islands as the main intermediate objective on the way to the Marianas. From the latter, the Americans could strike at the Philippines, the Bonin and Ryukyu islands, or Formosa; but whatever they might decide once arrived in the Marianas, they could use these islands as bases for air raids on the Japanese home islands by the new very long range bombers, the B-295. Whether the Caroline Islands with their huge Japanese naval base at Truk could be by–passed or would have to be assaulted remained open, but there was no question that landings had to be made in the Marshalls. Nimitz decided in mid-December 1943 to by–pass the eastern Marshall Islands and, using carrier–air and land-based-air from Makin and Tarawa, attack and seize first Kwajalein, the world’s largest coral atoll in the center of the island chain-700 miles northwest of Makin–and subsequently Eniwetok at the northwestern end of the chain, another 300 miles closer to Tokyo. The lessons learned at Tarawa would be applied as a huge American fleet escorted two infantry and one marine division to islands in the Kwajalein atoll.

The Japanese had seized the Marshall Islands from the Germans in World War I and had been confirmed as mandate holders for the islands
in 1920. They had therefore had plenty of time to prepare and fortify positions, whatever their treaty commitments to the contrary. As the Americans were launching their attack, the Japanese themselves were planning a counter–attack with their navy, but this project was halted by the American thrust.
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That operation, code-named “Flintlock,” went forward smoothly. Air and naval bombardment helped the new 4th Marine Division to land on January 31, 1944, and crush the Japanese garrison on Roi and Namur at the northern end of the atoll, while the 7th Infantry found the islands of Kwajalein atoll far easier to take than Attu had been. Casualties were heavier for the Japanese and lighter for the Americans than at Tarawa; a great deal had been learned. This portion of the operation had gone so well so quickly that the force commander, Admiral Spruance, agreed to Nimitz’s proposal to move up the Eniwetok landing. In three days, portions of the 27th Infantry and a marine regiment took the main islands of Eniwetok atoll, thereby giving the Americans effective control of the whole island group.
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But this was not all. To protect the Marshalls operation, a major air assault by Admiral Mitscher’s task force was launched against the Japanese base of Truk on February 17. The Imperial navy, it turned out, had already abandoned Truk for the safer Palau islands, but the destruction of planes, ships and installation left a shambles of the “Gibraltar of the Pacific.” The combined effect of this successful attack and the seizure of the Marshalls made it possible to by–pass the Caroline Islands entirely; and the large Japanese garrison of Truk, like that of Rabaul, was left to contemplate its shrinking store of supplies.

The disaster of Truk was the last straw for General Tojo; he had the navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Nagumo, sacked and replaced by Navy Minister Shimada while Tojo himself took over as Chief of Staff of the Japanese army.
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It was apparently Tojo’s hope that a greater and more direct personal role in command of operations in the Pacific would enable him to coordinate the army and navy more effectively in resisting the American advance. The effect of his action, however, was negligible in the military sense but made his own position far more vulnerable: the next big Japanese defeat was to cost him all his accumulated jobs.
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The broad outlines of American strategy in the Pacific had been agreed upon at the Quadrant Conference at Quebec in August 1943. There it had been formally decided that the Central Pacific thrust would head for the Marianas and that in the Southwest Pacific for the Vogelkop peninsula, the northwest corner of New Guinea. From these positions, an invasion of the Philippines as well as other alternatives would be open.
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The decision of the second conference in Cairo, to drop “Buccaneer” in favor of a reinforced “Anvil,” the invasion of southern
France, had meant down–grading the whole China theater. This appeared feasible in December 1943 because in the interim Chinese military effort had been negligible, the Western Allies had received assurances of Soviet support in the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany, and because of the recent advances in the Pacific theater, in particular the successes in the central and northern Solomons and in New Guinea. It now seemed plausible to look toward the possibility of a victorious end to the war in the Pacific three years hence, that is, in the fall of 1946.
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Preliminary details were agreed upon in early December by planners of the Combined (U.S.-British) Staffs for operations in 1944 and thereafter.
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The original plans for a major air offensive against Japan from bases in China increasingly faded from view with first the logistical problems on the supply route from Burma and then the collapse of Chinese resistance in 1944; the fact that the Marianas were within the 1500 mile range from the Japanese home islands of the new B-29S made the seizure of these islands, therefore, all the more important. Their capture had long loomed as the central feature of a thrust across the Pacific-they were the key island group on the way–but the shift of emphasis from the Asian mainland to the Pacific side of Japan and the availability of a weapon which could reach Japan itself directly from the islands now made them an all the more significant target in the view of the Americans.
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From the Japanese perspective, the centrality of the Marianas was equally obvious. Although not well informed about the B-29, the Japanese could see how important the islands were to the control of their routes to Southeast Asia, their hold on the Philippines, and the defense of the home islands themselves. They accordingly built up their garrisons on the islands, of which all but Guam had been in their possession since they had seized them from the Germans in World War I. Even as the authorities in Tokyo prepared to hold on to the Marianas by a combination of new strategies with the fight-to-the-death tactics of earlier engagements, they also inaugurated one more offensive procedure.

Since the fall of 1942, there had been planning for a project to set the forests of the American and Canadian West on fire by balloons carrying incendiary materials and blown across the Pacific by the prevailing winds, especially the jet stream. They would come down in the Western Hemisphere, where they were expected to start more fires than the Americans and Canadians could put out. Here would be a Japanese created set of fire-storms to devastate the heavily forested western states and provinces of the United States and Canada. In March of 1944 a
conference was held to work out the details and production schedules, the whole project being delayed by other demands on the Japanese war economy. From November 7,1944, to March 1945, some nine thousand balloons were released, of which well over a thousand landed on or exploded over the United States and Canada.
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They did little damage and caused only a few casualties, in this way no more effective than the earlier occasional shelling of the coast by Japanese submarines; but they do show that the strategy of making the war as costly as possible for Japan’s enemies had an offensive as well as a defensive component until the end.

The American double thrust in the Central and Southwest Pacific areas was, however, not likely to be halted by the launching of balloons. The concentration of all Japanese military might would be needed, and Tojo’s increased power might have made such concentration possible had he–or anyone else in Tokyo-ever had the needed strategic vision. But it was precisely at the time that the American double thrust moved forward in the spring and summer of 1944 that the Japanese launched their great land offensives in China and into India from Burma, whose course has already been described. Of these operations, that in China succeeded while that into India failed, but both drew resources which were not available to meet the Americans in the Pacific; and in this sense the Americans benefited substantially from the diversion of Japanese resources which was imposed by Japan’s view of priorities in the war.

The expectation of the Japanese army and navy was that the Allies would continue their campaign in New Guinea while the American navy would head next from the Marshall Islands into the Palaus. Not only was this latter assumption incorrect and diverted reinforcements from the threatened Marianas to the islands further south, but the basic Japanese naval defense plan proved faulty. The “A-Go” plan as it was called consisted of two main elements. A consolidated fleet of carriers, battleships and smaller warships would hit the Americans from a base between the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, a location chosen because it made possible direct fueling with oil from Borneo which did not have to be refined before being used (though with bad effects on the engines). The carriers would depend on the greater range of their planes, extended even further by the possibility of landing and refueling on airports in the Marianas or Palaus before returning to the carriers.
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The second element was a massive allocation of about five hundred land based planes which would harass and weaken the American fleet in concert with the carrier planes. Originally the plan for the destruction of the next major American offensive was aimed at the naval support of MacArthur’s forces struggling on Biak, an operation reviewed later in
this chapter. But just as the “A-Go” operation was to be mounted against MacArthur under the code–word “Kon,” the Japanese learned that the Americans were landing on Saipan in the Marianas. All attention was now focused on that island and the Philippine Sea to the west of it.

On June 15, 1944, two marine divisions landed on Saipan with an army division held in reserve to land there if needed, or to begin the process of taking Tinian and Guam if not. It would be needed. The massive pre-invasion bombardment had damaged the defenses,
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and air attacks on air bases in the area had almost eliminated air support for the defenders; but the assaulting marines were slowed by an energetic and effective defense by the 30,000 man garrison. Here was an island of some size with mountains and dense jungle, not a small coral atoll, and the marines had to fight their way across it. The 27th Infantry division was sent in to assist them. The Marine Corps commander of the land operation, General Holland M. Smith, fired the 27th Division commander, General Ralph S. Smith, when that division did not perform the way he imagined it should; the best study of the “Smith-Smith” controversy suggests that “Howlin’ Mad” Smith was the wrong man to put in charge of what was indeed a most difficult operation.
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In three weeks of bloody fighting, the Japanese were driven back; after a final and colossal suicide charge in which several thousand of them died, the remaining soldiers and hundreds of civilians who had lived and worked on the island jumped off a cliff to their deaths.