The Second World War (89 page)

On 15 December MacArthur’s vanguard landed on the southern coast of New Britain. Eleven days later, the 1st Marine Division, refreshed after its long break in Melbourne, landed on Cape Gloucester, the south-west tip of the island. For MacArthur, this part of the island was vital since it would secure the flank of his invasion route for the Philippines.

The marines landed on a beach of black volcanic sand the day after Christmas, having been told by their commander: ‘
Don’t squeeze that trigger
until you’ve got meat in your sights. And when you do–spill blood–spill yaller blood.’ It was the rainy season, with mud, perpetual damp, corruption, leeches, jungle rot, and patrols and skirmishes carried out in rain so dense that visibility was drastically reduced. Once the key feature of Hill 660 overlooking the airfield had been secured after heavy fighting, Cape Gloucester was under Allied control. Rabaul could now be bombed from several directions, although with the departure of the Japanese fleet it had lost its importance. But MacArthur’s forces still had to finish clearing the north coast of New Guinea.

While MacArthur came closer to realizing his dream of glory in the Philippines, Nimitz started to advance north on Japan, island by island across the central Pacific. Nimitz’s command included Vice Admiral Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, greatly strengthened with fast fleet carriers of the Essex class deploying a hundred aircraft apiece, as well as Independence class light carriers with fifty aircraft. The powerful carrier force meant that the invasion of the Gilbert Islands, the first chain to be assaulted, could take place without relying on ground-based air cover. These atolls, which were low-lying with little more than palm trees, seemed idyllic targets in comparison to the sweltering jungles, swamps and mountains of the large southern Pacific islands. But planners underestimated the problems presented by the coral reefs which surrounded them.

On 20 November, the 2nd Marine Division assaulted the Tarawa Atoll. Three battleships, four heavy cruisers and twenty destroyers bombarded the Japanese positions and landing strip. Heavy air strikes with Dauntless dive-bombers also went in, and the marines watching the explosions were greatly encouraged. It looked as if the whole island was being blown apart. But the low Japanese bunkers, built with concrete as well as palm trunks, proved far more resistant than the American commanders had expected.

The amtracs and landing craft took much longer to reach the shore than planned. The bombardment ended, and because of communications problems on the flagship USS
Maryland
a long pause followed which allowed the Japanese time to get over their shock and reinforce the threatened sector. But the greatest error was made by Admiral Turner, the obstinate task
force commander, who refused to listen to the warnings of a retired British officer who had recorded the island’s tides. Supported by the Marine commander, he had told Turner that at this time of year their landing craft would lack the necessary four feet clearance.

Amtracs carrying the first wave got over the reef, but then faced a terrible concentration of fire. Blocked by a low sea wall, they became targets for Japanese infantry throwing grenades. One baseball-playing marine managed to catch five grenades in a row and throw them back, but the sixth blew off his hand. The landing craft behind were then caught on the reef and became easy targets. A chaotic shuttle service began with the surviving amtracs between the beach and the reef. Even those marines who struggled to the beach were pinned down by the heavy fire. Radios soaked in seawater failed to work, so there was no communication between beach and the ships offshore.

By nightfall some 5,000 men were ashore, but at the horrific cost of 1,500 casualties, and burned-out amtracs. Corpses were littered all over the beach while many others rolled in the surf like flotsam. During the night Japanese infantrymen crept forward into some of the destroyed amtracs, and some swam to those in the bay, to turn them into firing positions behind the marines on the beach. Machine-gunners had even manned a bombed-out Japanese freighter and fought from there.

The pattern was more or less repeated at dawn next day, when reinforcements attempted to land. But, fortunately for the marines, another battalion which had cleared the north-west shore of the island was soon reinforced with tanks. The desperate fighting finally turned as marines began clearing bunker after bunker with a combination of explosive charges, gasoline and flamethrowers which reduced the defenders to little more than charred skeletons. Some were buried alive in their bunkers when an armoured bulldozer stopped up their firing slits with sand.

The battle finished at the end of the third day with a suicidal mass charge based on the
gyokusai
ideology
of ‘death before dishonour’ to avoid being taken prisoner. Marines cut down their attackers with savage glee.

Nearly 5,000 Japanese soldiers and Korean construction workers died over the three days. But the cost of taking a single tiny island–with more than a thousand dead and 2,000 wounded–shook American commanders and the public at home, appalled by the photographs of dead marines. Yet the losses prompted many improvements for future operations, with the introduction of underwater demolition teams, more heavily armoured amtracs and a complete reappraisal of communications and intelligence before any other landings went ahead. The limitations of bombing and naval artillery firing high-explosive shells were also re-examined. For bunkers like those on Tarawa, they needed armour-piercing ammunition.

In the spring of 1943, Roosevelt and Marshall had consolidated their strategy for China. Preferring an air offensive, they continued to reject Stilwell’s arguments that Allied land power should be developed in China to defeat the Japanese there. Their chief priority was to build up Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force on the Chinese mainland. It was to expand its role to attacks on Japanese shipping in the South China Sea, and raid Japanese supply bases to help the US Navy in the Pacific. But there was a flaw to their plan. Chennault’s successes were bound to provoke a Japanese reaction, and without sufficiently strong Chinese forces to defend his airfields the Fourteenth Air Force’s campaign would collapse. Chiang Kai-shek’s Yunnan armies were to be reinforced for this purpose, but they received little weaponry. The bulk of the first 4,700 tons of supplies was earmarked for Chennault, and Roosevelt’s promise that air transport flying over the Hump of the Himalayas would then deliver 10,000 tons a month was over-optimistic to say the least.

In May the Japanese launched their fourth offensive against Changsha in Hunan province, with an amphibious landing on the shore of Lake Tungting. Another attack from southern Hupeh suggested that this was an encirclement operation to seize an important rice growing area. B-24 Liberators from Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force raided Japanese supply bases and trains with reinforcements. The Liberators and their fighter escorts accounted for twenty Japanese aircraft, boosting the morale of the Nationalist troops on the ground.

Although Nationalist losses had been far greater than those of the Japanese, Chiang Kai-shek’s forces checked the attack from Hupeh and forced the Japanese back. In Shantung province, south of Peking, a Nationalist Chinese division far behind Japanese lines found itself being attacked both by the Japanese and by Chinese Communist formations.

The Nationalist government in Chungking had broken off relations with Vichy France, while the Wang Ching-wei puppet government declared war on the United States and Britain. The Vichy regime was also forced to concede France’s concessions in China to Wang Ching-wei. The large
White Russian community in Shanghai
, which had co-operated closely with the Japanese, had become increasingly depressed since the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. The hated regime in the Soviet Union looked stronger than ever, and the war both in the Pacific and on the eastern front was now going in a very different direction to the one they had envisaged. The idea of a Communist Shanghai was becoming a distinct possibility. The Japanese had left Mao Tse-tung’s forces to the north-east relatively undisturbed, and if the Red Army arrived after the defeat of Germany, then the Chinese Communists would take power.

The diplomatic shadow dance continued. Tokyo announced that Burma was to be given independence as a member of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Its puppet government accordingly declared war on Britain and the United States. And in a further attempt to bolster its claim of waging war on colonialism, the Japanese government set up an Indian National Army, led by Subhas Chandra Bose and manned by Indian prisoners of war recruited from Japanese camps.

Stilwell’s rows with Chennault had become even more acrimonious through that spring. Their quarrel had begun to hamper the war effort, to the dismay of Allied officers. Brooke described Stilwell as nothing more than ‘
a hopeless crank
with no vision’, and Chennault as ‘a very gallant airman with a limited brain’. Stilwell had also made an enemy of Chiang Kai-shek by wanting to send assistance to the Chinese Communists. Chiang was furious because Mao Tse-tung’s Communists refused to be part of the Nationalist order of battle. Stilwell claimed that they were fighting harder against the Japanese, which made Chiang even more angry. British intelligence, however, was certain that the Communists had made an unofficial deal with the Japanese, under which both sides restricted their operations against each other. Mao was husbanding his lightly armed forces ready for the civil war which was bound to follow the eventual defeat of the Japanese. And so, of course, was Chiang.

In May 1943, in an attempt to resolve the dispute between Stilwell and Chennault, both men were summoned to see Roosevelt just before the Trident conference in Washington. Roosevelt confirmed the priority of Chennault’s air offensive from China, but also allowed Stilwell to continue with his campaign to retake northern Burma. The President had a tendency to avoid disputes between commanders by allowing both options to be pursued at the same time, as was the case with MacArthur and the US Navy following the Twin Axis strategy in the Pacific.

In July Operation Buccaneer, a major landing on the Burmese coast, was proposed to clear the Japanese from the Bay of Bengal. Chiang Kaishek supported the plan, but remained rightly suspicious that the Allies were not prepared to commit major ground forces on the south-east Asian mainland. Not surprisingly he resented the idea that he would provide troops to win back Burma, while the Americans and British accorded his forces in China such low importance. In any case, the shortage of shipping eventually put paid to Buccaneer.

Relations with Chiang Kai-shek were not helped when in mid-August the Quadrant conference in Quebec agreed to set up South-East Asia Command, or SEAC, with Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten as supreme Allied commander. Brooke, who had a low opinion of Mountbatten’s
competence, observed that he would need a very clever chief of staff to carry him through. This he received in the form of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall. But Mountbatten would also have as his deputy ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who loathed him. Mountbatten, who was glamorous and charming and made good use of his royal connections, possessed a great talent for public relations, but he remained a vertiginously over-promoted destroyer captain.

Chiang Kai-shek was horrified to learn that his troops were thus to serve in Burma under British command. He wanted to ask for the recall of the increasingly fractious Stilwell, but then changed his mind in October on recognizing that without him he might not have any American commitment to support his forces in China. Ironically, this about-turn was supported by Mountbatten, who feared that Stilwell’s recall would increase the suspicions of the American press that the British were taking over in south-east Asia. American officers were already joking that SEAC stood for ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. Stalin would have laughed if he had known the full details of the rivalries and personal antipathies which bedevilled Allied strategy.

Brooke had been even more horrified before the Quadrant conference by Churchill’s suggestion that Orde Wingate, recently promoted to brigadier, should be made army commander. Back in April, Churchill had not liked the British plans for Burma, saying: ‘
You might as well eat
a porcupine one quill at a time.’ And yet typically he had now become entranced by the idea of irregular operations behind Japanese lines.

Wingate, a fundamentalist Christian and ascetic visionary whom General Slim compared to Peter the Hermit, was no charlatan. He was almost certainly a manic depressive, and had tried to commit suicide by cutting his own throat. He was not easy to deal with. He drove his men hard; in fact he was pitiless even towards the wounded, but he was just as hard on himself. Bearded and scruffy, wearing an old-fashioned sola topi that looked too big for him, he did not conform to the image of a senior officer of the Royal Artillery. He wandered around naked, chewed raw onions, strained his tea through his socks, and sometimes wore an alarm clock on a string round his neck. He had earned his reputation as a master of irregular warfare after organizing Jewish ‘special night squads’ in Palestine to counter Arab attacks, and by his leadership of Gideon Force in Ethiopia. Churchill had always welcomed unconventional ideas and it seemed that Wingate would provide a solution to the stalemate in north Burma.

In India in 1942, Wingate had suggested to Wavell that columns supported by airdrops, roaming in the Japanese rear, would be very useful for attacking enemy supply lines and communications. In February 1943, he was given his first chance to prove his theories. With the 77th Brigade split
into two groups, which were sub-divided into columns, Wingate’s forces crossed the River Chindwin. Each detachment had a reconnaissance group from the Burma Rifles, and carried rations, ammunition, machine guns and mortars on pack mules. [See map of Burma, p. 554.]

By the third week in March, most of Wingate’s Chindit columns were across the Irrawaddy, but radio contact was increasingly difficult and supply drops became hard to organize as two pursuing Japanese divisions forced them to keep moving. Short of food, they began to slaughter and eat the mules, which meant that most of their heavy equipment had to be abandoned. Wingate’s columns were soon in retreat, having failed to cut the Mandalay–Lashio road and losing in the process nearly a third of the 3,000 men who had started out. Discipline was exerted ruthlessly, with several floggings and even some executions. A large number of wounded and sick were left behind. Of those who returned, exhausted, fever ridden and half starved, 600 were unfit for further duties for many months.