But the Japanese hadn’t lost a war since 1598. The men in the badly wrapped brown uniforms were anything but inept in combat. As sharpshooters they were accurate up to a thousand yards. Each carried 400 rounds of ammunition (twice as many as an American infantryman) and five days’ rations of fish and rice. They were absolutely fearless; since childhood they had been taught that there could be no greater glory than dying for the emperor. Moreover, the hardware backing them up was awesome. At Pearl they had sunk America’s battlewagons, and presently Washington was learning that Nips’ ships were faster, their guns bigger, their torpedoes better, and their air power matchless in number and quality. Over Hawaii they had flown four warplanes, the Kawasaki, the Mitsubishi Zero, the Nakajima B5N1, and the Mitsubishi G4M1, each of them superior to anything comparable the United States could put in the sky then.
Secretary Stimson warned the country in the fourth week of the war: “We’ll defeat the Japanese in the end, but we shouldn’t look at the war with them through rose-colored glasses. There have been reports that the Japanese… are badly trained troops, ill equipped. The cold truth is that the Japanese are veterans and they are well equipped. The Japanese soldier is short, wiry and tough. He is well disciplined.” By then the fiction that any red-blooded American could lick ten Orientals had yielded, in Washington at least, to a shocked realization that the capital had entered its grimmest period since the Civil War. U.S. military intelligence—it was called intelligence—had ruled out an air strike at Pearl because, among other things, the enemy was known to be massing troops in Saigon, and everyone knew that Tojo couldn’t mount more than one offensive at once.
Everyone was wrong. By New Year’s Day the troops of Dai Nippon had not only thrust southward from Saigon; they had also made landings on Guam, Hong Kong, Borneo, Wake, and the Philippines. Tojo was out-blitzing Hitler. He was carving out an enormous salient—a tenth of the globe—into the direct route between the West Coast and Tokyo, and he was receiving invaluable assistance from Admiral Raeder’s unleashed U-boats. Shipping had been short from the outset. Raeder was determined to break the Anglo-American alliance, making the supply of overseas garrisons impossible by sinking every vessel flying the Stars and Stripes or Union Jack. In early 1942 it looked as though he would succeed. Merchantmen were being torpedoed almost nightly within view of Americans living on the East Coast. Within a few hours of each other that January, Nazi submarines dispatched the 6,768-ton British tanker Coimbra and the freighter Norness off Long Island and the U.S. merchantman Allan Jackson and tanker Malay off North Carolina. That year U-boats blew up 1,160 ships, better than three a day, including the destroyer Jacob Jones, which, when it went down off Cape May, New Jersey, became the first American warship to be torpedoed in her own coastal waters.
It was in these desperate months, with defeat following defeat, that the Axis powers seemed invincible. The Nazis were taking Stalingrad and reforming for their final leap on Moscow. Rommel was approaching Cairo—British diplomats there were burning their papers—and it seemed only a question of time before the Germans would be at the gates of India, where they would greet their Nipponese allies sweeping in from the east. Like Hitler, Tojo seemed unstoppable. General Joseph Stilwell limped out of Burma muttering, “We got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell.” In Washington there were strategists who thought it might take ten years to beat Japan. The two protective oceans appeared to have shrunk; not only were American seamen being killed within sight of the eastern seaboard, but the Pacific Coast heard gunfire, too. A Jap submarine shelled the Oregon coast at Fort Stevens. Militarily the attack was only of nuisance value but as a psychological thrust it was brilliant. The President decided to calm the nation. He scheduled a fireside chat and asked the newspapers to publish world maps so listeners could follow him. But the Japanese had access to American radio, and while Roosevelt was quietly assuring the public that there was no reason for defeatism, another Jap U-boat launched a small plane that dropped incendiary bombs on the southern Oregon coast.
***
Apart from Pearl, the first movement in the concert of offensives Tojo had prepared for December 7 was Malaya. A few foreign service officers in Washington, proud of their ability to read the Oriental mind, had hazarded a guess that the Japanese might trespass in Thailand. In a way they were right—as right, say, as forecasters who had predicted that New England might get a little rain that memorable September day three years earlier. Having taken advantage of Vichy weakness to convert Indochina into a staging area, General Tomoyuki Yamashita had entered into secret negotiations with the Thai government. As a consequence, the Thais surrendered to him after four hours of sham fighting on December 7. Now he was ready for his first big show: Malaya.
Surging through Thailand, three bristling columns invaded the peninsula under an umbrella of planes from Vietnam, driving the British back and back. The Japs didn’t really need so large a force, but they hoped to divert the RAF and lure the British Navy into a trap. It worked. Admiral Sir Tom Phillips went for the bait with the pride of H.M.’s Navy—the Prince of Wales, Britain’s finest battleship, and the heavy battle cruiser Repulse. His one carrier ran aground, depriving him of his eyes, and on the third day of the war Mitsubishi torpedo bombers sank the only two Allied capital ships then off Hawaii. Nothing could save Malaya now. The enemy advance accelerated—wild stories were circulated of Jap “monkey men” who swung from tree to tree, like Tarzan (in fact they were using bicycles), and Winston Churchill learned to his horror that the great guns of Singapore pointed only at sea and couldn’t be turned.
Those were Hirohito’s crack troops. While they had lunged southward, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma had been landing regular divisions on Luzon since December 10, the day Tom Phillips drowned and unfortified Guam fell into the Jap bag. In less than three weeks Homma was ashore at nine points. MacArthur declared Manila an open city (it was immediately bombed) and American soldiers and Filipino scouts were retreating into Bataan peninsula. Roosevelt wanted to save MacArthur. He knew how difficult the general could be, but respected his military judgment. He ordered him to Australia, and in the darkness of a February night MacArthur boarded a PT boat with his wife, his son, and the son’s governess. The men left behind sang bitterly:
We’re the battling bastards of Bataan:
No momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sam,
No aunts, no uncles, no nephews, no nieces
No rifles, no guns or artillery pieces
And nobody gives a damn.
Their complaint about the lack of weapons was painfully close to the truth. The defense was disintegrating; the only U.S. regiment on the peninsula, the 31st Infantry, was down to 636 men, so they withdrew into the tadpole-shaped island fortress of Corregidor, supported by ten obsolete planes and a few PT boats. The ranking naval officer, Admiral Tom Hart, had left the day after Christmas flying his four-star flag from the biggest warship he had, the submarine Shark. For a while the men in Corregidor’s underground chambers hung around the Signal Corps radio, but then they quit; the news broadcasts were too depressing. Hong Kong had fallen, its nurses raped in the streets by Jap soldiers. Wake was gone too, after a valiant two-week stand by five hundred marines under Major James Devereux, who beat off an attempted landing and then waited, in vain, for relief. By New Year’s Day, when Admiral Hart surfaced off Java and joined Field Marshal Wavell’s Allied command, Nips in defeated Singapore were taking dead aim on Java and Sumatra. Wavell studied his war map and flew off to India, leaving the Indies, as the angry Dutch said, to their fate.
It was a terrible fate. Led by a Dutch admiral whose orders had to be translated to Allied captains, seventeen Allied warships without air power sailed out to stop the invasion of Java. They were hopelessly outmatched. The largest among them were two cruisers, and looming over the horizon were the pagoda-like forecastles of seventy-four Jap ships, including four battlewagons and five carriers. In the seven-hour Battle of the Java Sea half th
e Dutchman’s ships went down with him; Jap planes proceeded to polish off most of the rest. The last two surviving vessels, the American Houston and the Australian Perth, tried to escape through Sunda Strait. The enemy had closed it, and in the night of March 1 they went down fighting, the Houston encircled by enemy steel, all her guns blazing defiantly and a bluejacket bugler standing on the sloping fantail sounding Abandon Ship.
***
It was difficult for people at home to understand what was happening in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor, like the Alamo and the Maine, is better remembered than the war that followed. One reason is that except for the West Coast, America was preoccupied with Hitler. Another is geography. Men on Iwo Jima got V-mail from relatives who thought they were still fighting in the “South Pacific.” Names from the European theater were a familiar echo from school days, but who had heard of Yap? Where was Ioribaiwa? And what was the difference between New Britain, New Caledonia, New Guinea, New Ireland, and the New Hebrides?
American teachers, unfortunately, hadn’t gone into that. They couldn’t be blamed. Until the air age, islands like Wake, Midway, and Iwo had been almost worthless, and as late as 1941 entire archipelagoes were of interest only to Standard Oil or Lever Brothers. The U.S. Navy started the war with obsolete eighteenth-century charts; sea battles were actually broken off because no one knew where the bottom was. The Marine Corps had to survey King Solomon’s Isles as they went along. Their first engagement there was fought on the wrong river—they thought it was the Tenaru, and discovered afterward it was the Ilu.
Most of what the public did know about the Pacific had been invented by B movie scriptwriters. The South Seas were pictured as exotic isles where lazy winds whispered in palm fronds, and Sadie Thompson diddled with missionaries, and native girls dove for pearls in fitted sarongs, like Dorothy Lamour. It was an appealing myth, and there was a flicker of truth in it. The girls looked more like Lister bags than Lamour, but most veterans of the Greater East Asia War, as the enemy called it, can recollect scenes of great natural beauty—the white orchids and screaming cockatoos in Guadalcanal’s dense rain forests, for example, or the smoking volcano in Bougainville’s Empress Augusta Bay, or Saipan’s lovely flame trees.
But American men hadn’t come as tourists. They were fighting a savage war, and the more breathtaking the jungle looked, the more ferocious the combat turned out to be. Some islands were literally uninhabitable—Army engineers sent to survey the Santa Cruz group for airstrips were wiped out by cerebral malaria—and the battles were fought under fantastic conditions. Guadalcanal was rocked by an earthquake. Volcanic steam hissed through the rocks of Iwo. On Bougainville, bulldozers vanished in the spongy, bottomless swamps, and at the height of the fighting on Peleliu the temperature was 115 degrees in the shade. Sometimes the weather was worse than the enemy. At Cape Gloucester sixteen inches of rain fell in one day. The great sea battle of Leyte Gulf was halted by a double monsoon, and a month later a typhoon sank three American destroyers.
Like any war, this one had its special sights and sounds, to be remembered in later years as a kind of blurred kaleidoscope or a random selection of old film clips, enough to jog quiescent memories later, and sometimes even to stir the dark recesses of the mind where the terror of those days still lurked. There were the Quonseted troops on sandy outposts ringed by the brasslike sea—castaways on cartoon islands, vindicating Justice Holmes’s definition of war as an “organized bore.” There was scratchy monotony on the ship PA systems, the smell of sweat, the sickening heft of an empty canteen. Temporary airstrips were paved with slabs of perforated metal like pieces from a gigantic Erector set. There were the blossoms of artillery crumps in the banyan jungles, the meatballs on Zero wings flashing under the equatorial sun, the way phosphorescent organisms in the water would light up when a zigzagging prow taking evasive action creamed through them, and the image of carrier pilots scrambling across a flattop deck, helmets flapping and chart boards clutched under their arms.
To former marines and GIs, however, the most poignant memory is likely to be of that almost unbearable tension in the small hours of Z-day or A-day or L-day of a new operation, when they stumbled down from their hard transport bunks, toyed with a 3 A.M. breakfast, watched the warships sock the shore with their fourteen-inch salvos and then crawled down in the swinging cargo nets to rocking Higgins boats, those unbelievably small landing craft, with their packs tugging hard on their already aching backs. Peering nervously toward the purply land mass ahead, they would highball in toward Red Beach One, say, or Green Beach Two, hoping there would be no reefs this time to hold them in Jap machine gunners’ sights, wondering what the terrain would be like, and knowing it would be another miserable blast furnace—torture for the foot soldier, yet touched, as all the islands were, with a wild, unearthly splendor.
Lurid settings produced bizarre casualties. Twenty-five marines were killed during the Battle of Cape Gloucester by huge falling trees. Shipwrecked sailors were eaten by sharks. Japanese swimming ashore after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea were carved up by New Guinea headhunters, and others, on Guadalcanal, were eaten by their own comrades. The jungle was cruel to defeated soldiers, who, as America’s growing sea power cut off lines of escape, were usually Nips. If they were surrounded, only cannibalism and ferns were left to them, and they had to share the bush with snakes and crocodiles. Even when they had an escape route the odds were against survival. Just one man in five was able to bear arms after Admiral Mori’s retreat across New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula, and during General Horii’s disastrous flight across the Owen Stanley Mountains, the general actually drowned.
Japanese surrenders were proscribed until the Son of Heaven ordered it, and even after Hirohito had done so, diehards sulked in caves until well into the 1950s and even afterward. Japs considered it disgraceful to be taken alive. Some carried suicide pistols with a single bullet in the magazine. When defeat loomed in the middle years of the war, officers would round everybody up for a traditional banzai (hurrah) suicide charge. Men without rifles were issued clubs, men unable to walk were given hand grenades or land mines and told to blow themselves up. No one was exempt. The Saipan commander was too senile to kill himself, so an aide shot him, and it was on Saipan that five-year-old Japanese children formed circles and tossed grenades back and forth until they exploded.
Hara-kiri had always been highly regarded in Japan, but to the samurai warlords last-ditch resistance also made military sense. Having captured more of Oceania than they needed in half the time they had allowed, they were maneuvering for a negotiated peace. “We are prepared to lose ten million men in our war with America,” General Homma had warned in 1939. “We will build a barricade across the Pacific with our bodies,” said a crudely lettered sign over the Jap dead on Peleliu. Their propaganda never mentioned anything except total victory over the Yankees, though in their inner councils they were more realistic. If the U.S. regained the initiative, the admirals and generals planned a war of attrition. The closer Americans came to their homeland, the more determined the Japanese would become. Tokyo would mobilize suicide boats, human torpedoes, and great clouds of kamikaze planes. Faced with landings on Japan itself, the national slogan would be: “One hundred million people die proudly!” They knew MacArthur expected fifty thousand U.S. casualties the first day of an invasion of Japan, followed by a campaign which might last years. The American people, they reasoned, would not pay such a sacrifice for unconditional surrender. Therefore they prepared posters to be put up in Tokyo toward the end: “The sooner they [the Americans] come, the better.”
What made Pacific combat so ferocious, and turned it into a conflict in which few prisoners were taken, was that Japs thought it shameful for their enemies to surrender, too. Their captives were not treated gently. Corregidor’s survivors were led on a “death march” after their capitulation—that is, the weak and the wounded were literally marched to death. Nips beheaded marine raiders captured on Makin Island, and at Milne Bay they left beh
ind bayoneted Australian prisoners whose penises had been lopped off and the foreskins sewn to their lips. Above hung a taunting sign: “It took them a long time to die.”
Such behavior brought swift retaliation; not since the French and Indian War had American troops been so brutal. Women and children were excluded; there were none of the atrocities against civilians which were to stain the Army’s honor a quarter-century later in Vietnam. But in combat there were no truces, no chivalric gestures. The U.S. Navy waged unrestricted submarine warfare. Nips in the Admiralty Islands who preferred starvation to surrender were left in the bush and used for target practice. It was a hard war. Generals and flag officers could be as bloodthirsty as riflemen. Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair told his troops, “We must hate with every fiber of our being. We must lust for battle; our object in life must be to kill.” Admiral William F. Halsey ordered the erection of a huge billboard on a Tulagi hillside, visible to passing ships:
KILL JAPS. KILL JAPS.
KILL MORE JAPS.
You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well.
In the same mood, MacArthur told General Robert L. Eichelberger that if he didn’t take Buna he needn’t come back alive, and in 1943, when spies reported where Japan’s great Admiral Yamamoto was, American commanders deliberately sought him out with P-38 fighter planes and killed him.
Yamamoto was a genius, an Oriental Nelson. He had masterminded the multipronged naval offensive which had seized 300,000 square miles of Oceania in six months. Had he known that the U.S. Signal Corps had broken his Purple Code, the war would have taken a very different turn. As it was, he came so close to annihilating American power that he became a perennial Pentagon argument for staggering defense budgets long after he was dead.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 40
