The Second World War (48 page)

First of the atolls to be taken under attack were Makin and Tarawa in the Gilberts, British islands lying at the extreme edge of Japan’s defensive perimeter. Makin, lightly garrisoned by the Japanese, fell quickly when Admiral Charles Pownall’s Task Force 30 landed Marines and army units on 21 November 1943. Tarawa was a different matter. More heavily garrisoned (by 5000 Japanese), it was also surrounded by a high reef over which the new Marine amphibious armoured vehicles (amphtracs) passed easily but on which the landing craft in which most of the assault force were embarked stuck. The Marines suffered very heavy casualties getting ashore on 21 November and then found themselves pinned beneath beach obstacles which offered the only cover. Some 5000 men landed; by nightfall 500 were dead and 1000 wounded. Even direct hits from battleship guns failed to destroy the Japanese strongpoints, whose defenders ceased resistance only when killed. It was not until the following day, when a second force landed with tanks on an undefended beach and attacked from the rear, that headway was made – but in barbaric circumstances. Tarawa was the battle which taught the Marine Corps how ferocious the struggle even for the smallest Japanese-held island could be. Robert Sherrod, a war correspondent, recorded:

A Marine jumped over the seawall and began throwing blocks of TNT into a coconut-log pillbox. Two more Marines scaled the seawall [with a flamethrower]. As another charge of TNT boomed inside the pillbox, causing smoke and dust to billow out, a khaki-clad figure ran out from the side entrance. The flame thrower, waiting for him, caught him in its withering flame of intense fire. As soon as it touched him the Jap flared up like a piece of celluloid. He was dead instantly but the bullets in his cartridge belt exploded for a full sixty seconds after he had been charred almost to nothingness.

Despite such evidence of the Marines’ material superiority – or perhaps, in desperation, because of it – during the night the Japanese made a ‘death charge’, as they had done on the Aleutians, and ran on to the American guns; next morning the bodies of 325 were found in an area a few hundred yards square. At noon the battle was over: 1000 Marines were dead and 2000 wounded; almost all the Japanese had perished. To spare their men such horrors in the next fight, commanders initiated a crash building programme of amphtracs, earmarked naval vessels to act as specialised command ships to control air and sea bombardment and co-ordinate it with the landings, and had exact copies of the Tarawa defences built so that instructors could practise against them and train Marines in the best methods of overcoming them.

Tarawa had another immediate and positive effect on the development of the central Pacific campaign. Because the Japanese fleet had not intervened or even shown its face in the area, and because Japanese land-based aircraft from other islands had also not interfered, Nimitz concluded that it would be safe to leave the garrisons of the other Marshalls to ‘wither on the vine’ and press forward to the westernmost in the group, Kwajalein and Eniwetok. Kwajalein was so heavily pounded by ships and aircraft before the Marines landed on 1 February 1944 that they secured its northern islets in two days, and the army’s 7th Division took the southern atoll in four days, neither incurring heavy loss. As a preliminary to the invasion of Eniwetok and to complete the neutralisation of Japanese airpower in the region, Nimitz decided to launch Task Force 58 against the more remote atoll of Truk, a forward anchorage of the Japanese Combined Fleet, with room to accommodate up to 400 aircraft. Task Force 58 was really four separate task forces, each with three carriers which between them embarked 650 aircraft. In a high-speed assault on Truk on 17-18 February, its commander, Vice-Admiral Marc Mitscher, mounted thirty raids, each more powerful than either of the Japanese strikes on Pearl Harbor, destroyed 275 aircraft and left 39 merchantmen and warships sinking. The raid established Mitscher’s reputation as the master of fast carrier operations. It also ensured that Eniwetok fell by 21 February, though it took five days of fighting to overcome the suicidal Japanese defence.

The fall of the Marshalls opened the way to the Marianas, among which the large islands of Saipan and Guam were obvious landing places. Nimitz was in a hurry. Far to the south, in New Guinea, MacArthur was accelerating the pace of his advance. At the Anglo-American Quebec conference in August 1943 it was agreed that the projected pace of progress towards the Philippines was too slow, that Rabaul was not to be attacked but to be neutralised by air attack, and that MacArthur should advance along the northern coast of New Guinea by a series of amphibious hooks. The Cairo conference in November, which specifically approved Nimitz’s offensive into the Marshalls, appeared to MacArthur to downgrade his campaign. When his staff reported in February that they believed Rabaul could be left far to the rear by a descent north of New Guinea on the Admiralty Islands, which appeared largely undefended, he leapt at the chance. Between 29 February and 18 March 1944 the islands were secured and MacArthur at once decided to make his longest leap yet – 580 miles – to Hollandia, halfway along New Guinea’s north coast. There the Japanese, when surprised on 22 April, uncharacteristically fled in panic. Thence MacArthur drove forward throughout May, to Wakde and Biak off the north-west coast of New Guinea. The Japanese fought so hard for Biak that the battle was still in progress at the end of June and it was not until the following month that MacArthur could complete his strategic programme and, on 30 July, seize the Vogelkop peninsula, in the ‘head’ of the New Guinea ‘bird’, as a departure-point for his return to the Philippines.

The intensification of MacArthur’s offensive in the south had an unintended, indirect but crucial effect on the conduct of the central Pacific campaign. So alarmed were the Japanese by the landing at Biak that they determined to call a halt to it by concentrating the Combined Fleet in East Indies waters to recapture the island; at the end of May its ships, including the new giant battleships
Yamato
and
Musashi
, were already at sea. Then clear evidence that Nimitz was preparing to spring forward from the Marshalls to the Marianas and approach the Philippines obliged the Japanese to cancel the operation, and the Combined Fleet prepared to move to the central Pacific to fight a decisive battle in great waters.

Before it could arrive, Nimitz’s Marines and the army’s 27th Division had debarked at Saipan in the Marianas. Saipan was a large island with a garrison of 32,000 men; the American operation against it was proportionately large also. Seven battleships fired 2400 16-inch shells into the landing zone before the troops touched down on 15 June, and eight older battleships kept up the bombardment during the landing, strongly supported by aircraft. Over 20,000 American troops were put ashore on the first day, by far the largest force yet delivered in a Pacific amphibious operation, and equivalent in size to those debarked in 1943 in the Mediterranean. However, the Japanese defenders resisted fiercely and meanwhile the First Mobile Fleet – the carrier element of the Combined Fleet – was approaching to deliver its strike against Task Force 58. Fortunately the American submarine
Flying Fish
, on patrol off the Philippines, saw it clearing the San Bernardino strait and gave Mitscher warning. He at once turned to the attack, with fifteen carriers against nine, and prepared to mount an aerial offensive. In the event the Japanese established Mitscher’s position before he did theirs; but because of the superiority of his radar, fighter control and now aircraft – the new Hellcat was faster and better armed than the Zero – all four of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s attacks failed, either in dogfighting above the carriers or against the guns of the ships. When this ‘Great Marianas Turkey Shoot’ was over on the evening of 19 June, 243 out of 373 Japanese aircraft had been shot down, for the loss of 29 American; and in the course of the action American submarines torpedoed and sank the veteran
Shokaku
and the new
Taiho
, Ozawa’s flagship and the largest carrier in the Japanese navy.

This was not the end of the affair. Next day Task Force 58 found the First Mobile Fleet refuelling, sank the carrier
Hiyo
with bombs and damaged two others and two heavy cruisers. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, as the two days of action were called by the Americans (the Japanese named it the ‘A-Go’ offensive), therefore halved the operational strength of the Japanese carrier force, reduced its aircraft strength by two-thirds – perhaps an even more damaging blow, since pilots emerged very slowly from the Japanese training system – and left Task Force 58 almost intact.

Disaster at sea for the Japanese was followed by disaster on land. After a bitter fight on Saipan, the defenders began to run out of ammunition and chose suicide rather than surrender; among the Japanese on the island were 22,000 civilians, of whom a large number are alleged to have joined the survivors of the 30,000 combatants in killing themselves rather than capitulate. Saipan was declared secured on 9 July. The neighbouring island of Tinian, where resistance was much lighter, fell on 1 August and Guam, whose garrison was battered into defeat despite its desperate resistance by an overwhelming American bombardment, on 11 August. All the territory that the Americans then coveted in the Marianas was theirs. From it their new bomber, the B-29 Superfortress, would be able to reach out to attack the home islands directly. Even more important, from the Marianas the Pacific Fleet could begin preparing the assault on the northern islands of the Philippines, whose southern islands were also threatened by MacArthur’s advance on the East Indies.

The coming of the Pacific war had changed the dimensions of Winston Churchill’s strategy. Intimations of defeat had been replaced by the certainty of victory. ‘So we had won after all!’ he recalled reflecting at the news of Pearl Harbor. ‘Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war – the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress. We had won the war.’

The news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, like that of the victory of Alamein, the withdrawal of Dönitz’s U-boats from the Atlantic in May 1943 and the safe landing of the liberation armies on D-Day, was one of the high points of Churchill’s war. Many low points awaited, including the loss of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
off the coast of Malaya – ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock’ – the surrender of Singapore and the fall of Tobruk. After Pearl Harbor, however, Churchill never doubted that the Western Alliance would defeat Hitler and subsequently Japan. Perhaps the sentences of his magnificent victory broadcast of 8 May 1945 were already framing themselves on the evening of 7 December 1941.

The conduct of no war is ever simple, however, and the conduct of any coalition war is always unusually difficult. The anti-Axis coalition of the Second World War, as Hitler constantly consoled himself and his entourage by emphasising, was almost unmanageably disparate. Two capitalist democracies, united by language but divided by profoundly different philosophies of international relations, had been driven by the force of events into an unexpected and unsought co-belligerency with a Marxist state which not only preached the inevitable, necessary and desirable downfall of the capitalist system but until June 1941 had been freely bound by a pact of non-aggression and economic co-operation to the common enemy. The co-ordination of a common strategy involving not merely the means but also the aims of making war was therefore destined to be difficult. How difficult, in December 1941, Winston Churchill could not foresee.

At the outset the gravity of the crisis which gripped the Soviet Union itself simplified Anglo-American strategic choice. With the German army at the gates of Moscow, there was no direct military help that either of the Western powers could lend to Russia. Britain was still scarcely armed; the United States had only just begun to emerge from two decades of disarmament. At the instant of the German attack in June 1941, acting on the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, Churchill assured Stalin that every weapon and item of essential equipment that Britain could spare would be sent to Russia, and the north Russian convoys began at once. During the meeting in August at Placentia Bay, New-foundland, which produced the Atlantic Charter on democratic freedoms, Churchill and Roosevelt reinforced the offer, and as a result United States Lend-Lease was extended to Russia on generous terms in September. Stalin, however, wanted nothing less than the opening of a Second Front, a demand first made to Churchill on 19 July, and he was to repeat and heighten that demand throughout the next three years. In 1941 there was no chance of a Second Front. Britain and the United States could only hope for Russia’s survival while they calculated how best they could together distract Hitler from his campaign of conquest in the east and weaken the Wehrmacht at the periphery of the German empire.