Kuzume had made the most murderous discovery of the island war. Tokyo might never had heard of it had Biak not lain directly in the path of MacArthur’s drive on the Philippines. Having mopped up the bird’s tail, the general was skipping up its back in the spring of 1944, using a new U.S. tactic, “leapfrogging.” Americans had stumbled upon this course while retaking Attu and Kiska, the Alaskan isles with which Yamamoto had tried to mislead Nimitz during the Battle of Midway. Lacking strength to attack both, operations officers bypassed Kiska—and discovered, after Attu had been retaken, that the Japanese had quietly evacuated it. MacArthur caught on. Late in April he leaped into Hollandia, and a month later the 41st Division hit Biak. Until now the cost of the offensive had been relatively light, but Kuzume’s cliff-and-cave defenders exacted a terrible toll; before the island was secured casualty lists were approaching Tarawa’s.
They might have been worse. The Japanese Navy, in hiding for a year, was preparing to emerge and reinforce the garrison. The ships were already at sea when, in mid-June, word reached Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa that Nimitz’s Central Pacific drive was about to pounce on the Marianas’ key islands—Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. This was the greater threat, and prows were turned that way. The resulting Battle of the Philippine Sea was another of those long-distance aircraft duels that disappointed old line-of-battle salts. It was, nonetheless, a stunning American victory. Hellcats knocked out the enemy’s land-based air power on Guam and, in eight hours of continuous fighting in the sky, beat off four massive attacks on the U.S. fleet. It was the most spectacular carrier battle of the war; by the end of the following day Ozawa’s air arm had been reduced from 430 operational warplanes to 35. After this Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, as Navy pilots called it, Ozawa withdrew—and Japanese soldiers on Saipan were cut off.
The Nips swore that they would make the Americans pay the highest possible price for Saipan. There were twice as many defenders as intelligence had predicted, and U.S. casualties dismayed Washington. After three thousand Japs had staged the war’s biggest banzai attack, driving GIs into the surf, surviving soldiers and marines wiped out the rest of the enemy or waited while the suicides saved them the trouble. Two weeks later other marines were fanning out across Guam’s reefs. Guam was only half as expensive as Saipan, partly because the banzai was less effective. U.S. casualties on Tinian, where the Japanese hadn’t thought a north shore landing possible, were even lighter. Even so, the Marianas Islands had cost twenty-five thousand Americans killed or wounded. Yet they were priceless. They gave the B-29s their first base within flying range of the Japanese home islands. Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, the commanding officer in the U.S. struggle for Saipan, called it the decisive battle of the Pacific war. Tokyo agreed; the German naval attaché there had reported to Berlin that the island was “understood to be a matter of life or death.” The Tojo cabinet fell, and for the first time Americans saw a way to victory in the Pacific, and were heartened.
***
At the outset MacArthur had opposed the marines’ invasion of Guadalcanal, and these thrusts in the Central Pacific so far from his own theater in the Southwest Pacific, suited him even less. “Island hopping,” as he now called it scornfully, seemed to him a waste of time—though it was indistinguishable from his own “leapfrogging.” By the summer of 1944 he was beside himself. Admiral King was suggesting that U.S. forces bypass the Philippines. America had to keep faith with the Filipinos, MacArthur insisted; it was a matter of honor. A matter of sentiment, King replied, and both appealed to Roosevelt.
The President, whose political advisers wanted him in Chicago at the Democratic national convention, went to Hawaii instead. He had to settle the military issue. On July 26, as the battle for Guam raged, the presidential aircraft touched down at Hickam Field. Nimitz and MacArthur, up from Australia, stated their cases. In a private session MacArthur actually threatened Roosevelt with political reprisals if his strategic plan was set aside; should the general’s promise to return to the Philippines be unredeemed, he said, “I dare say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall.” This was insolent and probably untrue, but FDR had seen it coming and had made his choice before leaving the White House. He answered, “We will not bypass the Philippines. Carry on your existing plans. And may God protect you.”
The Combined Chiefs of Staff weren’t satisfied. In Washington they argued for two months before agreeing that MacArthur should return to the Philippines. In the meantime Halsey had made a startling suggestion. The Philippine timetable called for early landings on Peleliu, Yap, and Mindanao. Air strikes convinced Halsey that the enemy’s air force was a broken lance. He proposed skipping the preliminaries and charging right into Leyte. His motion was carried, though the Peleliu operation, too far advanced to be canceled, went ahead as scheduled. The consequences were tragic. Biak had become a magic word in Tokyo. Kuzume’s lesson had been passed on to the commanding officer on Peleliu, who had made his men moles. Burrowed in natural limestone caves linked by underground tunnels and protected by layers of coral sand and concrete, they cut the 1st Marine Division to pieces, giving all American regiments a bitter taste of what was to come.
By the time the jagged ridges north of Peleliu airfield had been cleared, four American divisions were swarming over the beach at Leyte Gulf. Less than an hour after the main landings on October 20, 1944, the 382nd Infantry had the Stars and Stripes up; four days later General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army command post was ashore and Yamashita’s Thirty-fifth Japanese Army was marching against it. Krueger seemed stuck in the mud, and in Leyte Gulf the stage had been set for the greatest naval battle of all time.
Yamamoto was dead, but the Japanese Navy still cherished his dream of a decisive action at sea, preferably while U.S. ships were busy covering a landing. Now, if ever, was the time for it. Four separate Japanese task forces sailed against Halsey’s main fleet, which was protecting the Leyte operation, and Admiral Thomas Kinkaid’s weaker group of old battleships and small carriers. The enemy admirals knew they couldn’t match America’s new power—the U.S. had 218 warships, the Japanese had 64—so they hatched a brilliant plan. Leyte Gulf could be reached through two straits, San Bernardino to the north and Surigao to the south. Their center force, led by Admiral Takeo Kurita, was to head for San Bernardino while two southern forces entered Surigao. At the same time the fourth force, Ozawa’s, was to lure Halsey away to the north. Kinkaid would then be helpless. Banzai.
The southern prongs had no luck. Admiral Jesse Oldendorf had Surigao Strait corked. Torpedoes and gunfire exterminated the first Jap column; the second turned back after firing at radar pictures which later turned out to be islands. In the beginning Kurita’s luck seemed bad, too. On the way to San Bernardino, American submarines destroyed two of his heavy cruisers, and his largest battleship was sunk by U.S. aircraft. Actually these losses were a stroke of fortune for Kurita. Halsey, learning of them, thought him finished, and when Ozawa’s decoy was sighted Halsey took off after the bait—leaving San Bernardino Strait unguarded. In the darkness of October 24 Kurita slipped through. The following morning he sprang on Kinkaid’s exposed carriers in the first moments of daylight.
The carriers’ only protection was their screen—destroyers (DDs) and destroyer escorts (DEs), vulnerable vessels ordinarily used for antisubmarine work and manned mostly by married draftees. The destroyers counterattacked Kurita’s battleships, and then their gallant little escorts, who hadn’t even been taught to form a line of battle, steamed toward the huge Japanese guns. Kurita’s goliaths milled around in confusion as the DEs, some already sinking, made dense smoke. The U.S. carriers sent up everything that could fly, and Kurita, with the mightiest Japanese fleet since Midway, turned tail. The rout was complete, for Halsey was thorough in his error; he chewed up Ozawa’s bait, and in the final Leyte Gulf reckoning the enemy lost three battleships, four carriers, and twenty other warshi
ps. The emperor’s sea power was finished.
On Leyte the Sixth and Eighth Armies were now pulling a drawstring around the enemy bag. Yamashita, in Manila, privately wrote off the island at Christmas, though it wasn’t freed until the following St. Patrick’s Day. By then Yamashita could have done nothing about it anyway. GIs had hit the island of Mindoro on December 12; three weeks later four divisions made an almost unopposed landing at Luzon’s Lingayen Gulf. Bypassing the northern defenses of the Yamashita Line, they jumped Bataan, then Corregidor, and finally, in early March, Manila.
On Bataan and Corregidor, as an Army officer wryly remarked at the time, the United States was “right back where we started.” B-29s had begun to scar the Japanese homeland, but it was still a remote fortress. Bringing it closer was the task of the other American pincer—the Central Pacific thrust that had driven from Tarawa through the Marshalls to Saipan. Its next target was the volcanic pile of Iwo Jima, “on the ladder of the Bonins,” as Admiral King put it. Saipan was within B-29 range of the Japanese capital, but only just. Superfort bomb loads were limited to two tons; those damaged in raids couldn’t get back. But if the Americans held Iwo, they would be 660 miles from Japan. The B-29s could carry seven tons of bombs and Tokyo would miss warnings of coming raids now radioed to the capital by Japs on Iwo.
The enemy thought a lot of Iwo’s eight square miles. The Navy’s seventy-four days of preinvasion bombardment scarcely jarred the defenders, because they had no barracks aboveground. Most of their caves were shielded by at least thirty-five feet of overhead cover. Nearly every Jap weapon could reach the beaches. The first two hours ashore were comparatively tranquil. Then the beachhead was blanketed with mortar fire. Despite this, Mount Suribachi and Motoyama Airfield No. 1 were taken in the early days of the battle, which, in the first year of the war, would have been it. Everyone waited for the Nips to form a banzai charge and come in to be slaughtered. They didn’t. Enemy soldiers had been thoroughly trained in Biak tactics. They stuck to their pillboxes and ravines, and when the end came in March the grim abacus showed 19,000 marine casualties.
The abacus was grimmer for the enemy. The Japanese equivalent of “It never rains but it pours” is “When crying, stung by bee in the face.” Stinging Superforts were swarming low over his homeland, beginning the methodical destruction of eighty Jap cities, killing one hundred thousand people in a single day in the great Tokyo raid of March 9, 1945. Halsey’s carriers had broken into the South China Sea, cutting the enemy’s oil and rice lines. Hirohito’s merchant navy was a skeleton; soon the American submarine score would be over a thousand ships. Shantytowns were rising in Yokohama and Osaka. Jap civilians were racked by tuberculosis and malaria. There was no food for their ration cards. Menacing reports from Japanese commanders in Manchuria reported that Russian troops were mobilizing on their frontier. When crying, stung by bee in the face.
Yet the Japanese morale showed no signs of cracking. Old men and women were being armed with bamboo spears. “Come and get us,” Tokyo Rose dared. To oblige, the Americans needed one more invasion base: Okinawa. General Mitsuri Ushijima, Okinawa’s commanding officer, had guessed in March that he would be receiving hostile visitors near Yontan Airfield on April 1. He was right. And he had a surprise for them. April 1 was Easter Sunday, but it still looked like April Fools’ Day to the GIs and marines wading ashore. There didn’t seem to be any enemy soldiers around. No one then guessed that it would take nearly three months to conquer the island, or that Okinawa would be the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war. Actually Ushijima had a hundred thousand soldiers concentrated in the southern third of the island. By April 12 it was clear that this would be another Iwo. Okinawa’s burial vaults had been converted to pillboxes; caves masked heavy artillery that could be rolled in and out on railroad tracks. Ushijima expected to win, too. The Japanese strategy was to wait until all American troops were ashore, knock out the U.S. fleet with suicidal kamikaze bombers, and slaughter marines and GIs at leisure.
In Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Roosevelt had dressed and settled in his leather armchair, the global situation was more promising. Chatting with Lucy Rutherfurd and two visiting cousins, Miss Margaret Suckley and Miss Laura Delano, the President was all smiles and optimism. Strategically, American arms were victorious on all fronts. Germany had been cut in half. Apart from a few obstinate pockets the Wehrmacht was disintegrating, surrendering by the tens of thousands. Japan would be more difficult, of course. Iwo Jima had fallen, in time Okinawa would, too; there could be no doubt about the eventual outcome. Yet as of this April 12, the war against the Axis had cost the lives of 196,669 Americans; total U.S. casualties were 899,669 Americans—6,481 of them in the past week. There could be no glossing that over. After so great a sacrifice, he had told those around him, world peace would be absolutely secure.
Shortly before noon Bill Hassett appeared, dragging a leather pouch from Washington. The mail had arrived. Hassett suggested that the President postpone his paper work until after lunch, but FDR said he would do it right now. Hassett put before him a State Department paper requiring his approval. Roosevelt brightened. “A typical State Department letter,” he cheerily told the ladies. “It says nothing at all.” He worked through the rest of the papers, affixing his weakened signature to a batch of postmaster appointments, routine correspondence, and Legion of Merit awards to eminent Allied statesmen. The White House still regarded ballpoint pens as a passing fad. Fountain pen ink could easily be smeared, blemishing a document, so as the President worked, Hassett laid out the signed papers on a divan, empty chairs, and the rug. When he came to Senate Bill 298, extending the Commodity Credit Corporation, he winked at Lucy Rutherfurd and said, “Here’s where I made a law.” Just then there was a sound in the outer hall. Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff, the portrait painter, had arrived. She glanced in, puzzled by the sheets of paper everywhere. “Oh, come right ahead,” Roosevelt called. “Bill is waiting for his laundry to dry.”
Hassett went about it quickly, and with averted eyes. He did not approve of Madame Shoumatoff. She distracted the President too much, he thought, with her measurements of his nose and requests to turn this way or that, and she even dictated his apparel; this morning, for example, he was wearing a Harvard tie and a vest, neither of which he liked. To Hassett all this was “unnecessary hounding of a sick man.” He didn’t even think she was much of an artist, but Lucy liked her, and so did FDR. As Hassett left, handing Roosevelt a batch of State Department reports, Madame erected her easel and slipped his boat cloak over his shoulders. Instantly he became engrossed in the state documents.
***
Because the papers were diplomatic, and because FDR had been troubled all week by Russian duplicity (less than two hours ago he had Cabled Churchill, “We must be firm”), it is not too fanciful to suggest that in the last moments of his life the President may have been reflecting upon the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, two months earlier. He had gone there because his military advisers had told him that it was necessary. General MacArthur, General Albert Wedemeyer, and the Joint Chiefs had spoken with one voice: they wanted the Soviet Union to declare war on Japan, and they believed it worth almost any price. At that time—six months before atomic weapons were to alter permanently the nature of war and geopolitics—none of those who knew of the Manhattan Project thought it worth mentioning. “The bomb will never go off,” wrote Admiral Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, “and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill got more from Stalin than they had expected. In the past they had found the Soviet dictator a hard bargainer. He liked to sit impassively behind the impenetrable screen of the Slavic language—his stock of English phrases was confined to “So what?” “You said it,” “The toilet is over there!” and “What the hell goes on here?”—and in his present position he could afford to gloat. For nearly three years he had been the weakest of the three, begging the Anglo-Americans to open a second front in Europe and unable to of
fer them anything in exchange. Now they had to come to him. Nevertheless he was mellow. He secretly agreed to enter the anti-Japanese coalition. In return the Soviet Union would be given certain privileges in Manchuria (notably a half-interest in the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railway), the Kurile Islands, half of Sakhalin (another island north of Japan), an occupation zone in Korea, a U.N. veto for major powers, and, in another secret agreement which would later cause domestic difficulties in the United States, U.N. seats for the Ukraine and Belorussia. The Anglo-Americans further agreed to recognize the autonomy of Outer Mongolia.
Poland’s borders were to be redrawn, adding lands that had been German. Stalin solemnly joined his allies in guaranteeing all eastern European countries, including Poland, the right to choose their leaders and governments in free elections. Long afterward the American President and the British prime minister were assailed as naive; how, it was asked, could they have trusted pledges from so implacable an enemy of democracy? The fact is that they had very little choice. They were at war with Japan; Russia wasn’t; the Red Army could do as it pleased, promises or no promises. At the time it appeared the Russian dictator, flushed from the European victory, was in a generous mood. The greatest beneficiary of the conference seemed to be Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin signed a treaty with Chiang recognizing him as the ruler of all China and promising to persuade Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese to cooperate with him.
Pat Hurley and Henry Luce praised the Yalta agreements; so did the American and British press. Averell Harriman and George Kennan, both veteran Kremlinologists, were skeptical. But that was not a popular view in early 1945. Winston Churchill had urged Eisenhower to “shake hands with the Russians as far east of the Elbe as possible.” Ike disagreed. He countermanded an order which would have sent Patton into Prague and withdrew his GIs west of the Elbe, permitting the Russians to free Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany, and Berlin. After visiting Moscow Eisenhower declared: “Nothing guides Russian policy so much as desire for friendship with the United States.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 52
