by John Keegan
The Japanese landing troops found little difficulty in overcoming the Dutch local forces (which the population showed little inclination to support) wherever they were met. The Australians – whose will to fight was stiffened further by an air raid on Darwin, mounted from four of the carriers which had attacked Pearl Harbor, on 19 February – proved a tougher case. However, they were too few to check the trend of events. The only substantial counter in ABDA’s hands was its fleet, a formidable force as long as the Japanese did not employ airpower against it. It enjoyed some early successes. On 24 January American destroyers and a Dutch submarine sank transports off Borneo and on 19 February Dutch and American destroyers engaged others off Bali. Admiral Doorman’s test came on 27 February, when the ABDA command launched a Combined Striking Force against the Japanese invasion fleet approaching Java. Doorman’s ships included two heavy and three light cruisers and nine destroyers, drawn from the Dutch, British, Australian and American navies. Admiral Takeo Takagi, his Japanese opponent, commanded two heavy and two light cruisers and fourteen destroyers. Numerically the encounter looked an even match; and in resolution, as Doorman was to display, the Japanese had no edge at all. However, they possessed a superior item of equipment, their 24-inch ‘long-lance’ torpedo which was a far more advanced weapon than its Allied equivalents.
The Battle of the Java Sea opened late in the afternoon of 27 February, with little daylight left. The initial stage of the largest naval engagement since Jutland took the form of a gunnery duel at long range. When the Japanese closed to launch torpedoes, however, they quickly scored hits, and Doorman was forced to turn away to protect his casualties. As darkness fell he lost contact with the Japanese and shortly afterwards had to detach most of his destroyers to refuel. He nevertheless remained determined to prevent the Japanese fleet putting its troops ashore and so turned back in darkness to where he judged it to be. His force was now reduced to one heavy and three light cruisers and one destroyer, and the moon was bright. At 10.30 pm he found the Japanese again; more accurately, the Japanese found him. While he engaged one part of their fleet, another approached unseen and launched the deadly torpedoes. Both surviving Dutch cruisers went down almost at once, De Ruyter taking Doorman with her. The USS Houston and HMAS Perth escaped, only to be sunk the following night after a heroic fight; misaimed Japanese torpedoes sank four of the transports they had been trying to intercept. All the major units of the force on which ABDA ultimately counted to repel the Japanese from the southern Pacific and the approaches to Australia had ceased to exist.
Beaten at sea, the Dutch were also quickly forced to surrender on land. On 12 March a formal Allied capitulation was signed at Bandung, on Java; the Imperial Guards Division, which had taken Singapore, landed the same day in Sumatra, the last of the large Dutch islands remaining outside Japanese control. The Japanese were by no means unwelcome in the East Indies: the Dutch, unlike the French, had never found the knack of tempering colonial rule by offering cultural and intellectual equality to a subject people’s educated class. Educated young Indonesians – as they were shortly to call themselves – responded readily to the message that the Japanese brought ‘co-prosperity’, as they certainly brought liberation from Dutch subjection, and were to prove among the most enthusiastic of collaborators in Japan’s New Order.
Another people who had always resented colonial subjection were the Burmese, whose intractability was at odds with the much more complex mixture of love and hate their Indian neighbours felt for the British Empire. Britain had always had difficulty in ruling Burma, which they had finally conquered only in 1886 (the young Rudyard Kipling’s Tommies, drawn from life, had marched on the road to Mandalay). Few Burmese had ever accepted the outcome of the war and conquest and in early 1941 a group of young dissidents, later to become famous as ‘the Thirty’, had gone to Japan, under the leadership of Aung San, to be trained in fomenting resistance to British rule. Their opportunity was to come sooner than they had expected. During December the Japanese Fifteenth Army, which had entered Thailand at the beginning of the month, crossed the Burmese border to seize the airfields at Tenasserim. It was clear that a major offensive would follow shortly.
Burma was defended by a single locally enlisted division; part of the 17th Indian Division joined it in January. The only other Allied forces to hand were Chiang Kai-shek’s Sixty-Sixth Army, based on the Burma Road and (like most Chinese formations) of doubtful value, and two Chinese divisions commanded by the redoubtable American ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell on the Burma-China border. The commander of the Fifteenth Army, General Shojira Iida, had only two divisions, the 33rd and 55th, but they were well trained and supported by 300 aircraft; the British troops were not well trained and had almost no air support at all.
The campaign went wrong for the British from the start. Required to defend a wide front with few troops, the 17th Indian Division soon lost its forward defensive line on the Salween river on 14 February, pulled back to the Sittang river, guarding the capital, Rangoon, held there briefly and then, through a misunderstanding, blew the only bridge across it while most of the fighting troops were on the wrong side.
Things quickly went from bad to worse. General Alexander, who had arrived from Britain to stop the rot on 5 March, decided that the remnants of ‘Burcorps’, as his force was called, would have to retreat to the Irrawaddy valley in the centre of the country if a stand were to be made. The Japanese Fifteenth Army, now reinforced by the 18th and 56th Divisions and 100 aircraft, followed on his heels. Alexander hoped to hold south of Mandalay, Burma’s second city, on a line between Prome and Toungoo, where a Chinese division had arrived; but he was pushed out of it on 21 March and forced into further retreat. His British and Indian troops were now short of supplies and exhausted, his Burmese troops had started to desert en masse. He was threatened with being outflanked both to the west and to the east, where the Japanese were driving the Chinese back towards the mountains of the China border. Faced with the dilemma of following the Chinese Sixty-Sixth Army (in reality about a division strong) along the Burma Road, which led from north-east Burma into China, where he had no assurance of supply, or of embarking on a trek across the roadless mountains of north-west Burma into India, he opted for the latter course. On 21 April he agreed with Chiang Kai-shek’s liaison officer in Burma that their two beaten armies should go their separate ways and set off to lead his troops, accompanied by thousands of civilian refugees, on ‘the longest retreat in British military history’. On 19 May, having traversed 600 miles of Burma in nine weeks, the survivors of ‘Burcorps’ crossed the Indian frontier at Tamu, in the Chin Hills, just as the arrival of the monsoon made further retreat impossible – but also, fortunately, denied the Japanese the possibility of pushing their pursuit into India itself.
About 4000 of the 30,000 British troops who had begun the campaign had perished; some 9000 were missing, most of them Burmese who had left the ranks. Only one Burmese battalion, largely recruited from one of the country’s ethnic minorities, arrived in India. Many of the fugitives accepted Aung San’s call to arms and joined his Burma National Army, which under Japanese colours briefly fought on Japan’s side in 1944 and after the war provided the nucleus of his successful independence movement. There were other survivors of the rout. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell trekked back into China, whence he sallied into Burma again in 1944. General Bill Slim, Alexander’s subordinate, reached India; he too returned to Burma in 1944, at the head of the victorious Fourteenth Army, which he rebuilt from the debris of the rout. Among its units were the 4th Burma Rifles, the sole surviving element of the original 1st Burma Division.
The victory in Burma almost completed the first stage of Japan’s offensive into the ‘Southern Area’. It had profited brilliantly from its occupation of a central strategic position – in Indo-China, Formosa, the Marianas, Marshalls and Carolines – to strike east, south and west against the scattered colonial possessions of its chosen enemies and their divided forces and to overwhelm them on
e by one. On 22 April, when Alexander accepted defeat and set out across the mountains into India, only one Allied stronghold still resisted the Japanese inside the ‘Southern Area’. It was the American foothold in the Philippines.
The fall of the Philippines
America’s presence in the Philippines, which were never an American colony and in 1941 not quite yet a sovereign state, had come about through victory over Spain in the war of 1898 (the Philippines had been Spanish since the sixteenth century). America had extended a protectorate over the islands, introduced a democratic form of government, raised a Filipino army – in 1941 commanded by the old Filipino hand, General Douglas MacArthur – and put the archipelago under the shelter of the Pacific Fleet. In December 1941 American forces in the island numbered 16,000 combat troops, but only two formed regiments, about 150 operational aircraft, sixteen surface ships and twenty-nine submarines. On 26 July 1941 the Filipino army had been taken into the service of the United States, under the terms of the 1934 Act of Congress granting provisional independence; but its ten embryo divisions were as yet unfit for operations. The only combat-ready Filipino force was the Philippine Scouts Division, American-trained but only 12,000 strong.
Against these troops, which MacArthur had concentrated near the capital, Manila, in the northern island of Luzon, the Japanese intended to deploy the Fourteenth Army from Formosa (Taiwan). It consisted of two very strong divisions, the 16th and 48th, which had fought in China, and was supported by the Third Fleet, which included five cruisers and fourteen destroyers, the Second Fleet of two battleships, three cruisers and four destroyers, and a force of two carriers, five cruisers and thirteen destroyers. The air groups of the carriers were to be supplemented by the land-based Eleventh Air Fleet and the 5th Air Division.
The first disaster suffered by the Americans came from the air. As at Hawaii, they were provided with radar but failed to act on the warning it gave; as at Hawaii, their aircraft were packed wing-to-wing as a protection against sabotage and were destroyed almost to the last machine in the first Japanese air strike, which fell at noon on 8 December. On 12 December Admiral Thomas Hart, commanding the Asiatic Fleet in Filipino waters, felt compelled by lack of air cover to dispatch his surface ships for safety to the Dutch East Indies, where, under ABDA’s command, they were to be destroyed in the Battle of the Java Sea.
By that date the Fourteenth Army’s landings had already begun. Scorning an indirect approach through any other of the 7000 Filipino islands, General Masaharu Homma put his troops ashore on Luzon on 10 December and began an advance directly on the capital. He had hoped, by landing at separate points, to draw MacArthur’s units away from Manila; when the defenders declined to respond, he put in another large-scale landing close to the capital on 22 December and forced MacArthur to fall back into a strong position on the Bataan peninsula covering Manila Bay and its offshore island of Corregidor.
Bataan, some thirty miles long and fifteen wide, is dominated by two high jungle-covered mountains. Properly defended, it should have resisted attack indefinitely, even though the garrison was short of supplies. In forming their line on the first mountain position, however, MacArthur’s troops made the same mistake as the British were simultaneously making in Malaya. They failed to extend their flanks into the jungle on the mountain’s slopes; in consequence their flanks were quickly turned by Japanese infiltrators. Retiring to the second mountain position, they avoided that error; but they had surrendered half their territory and were now crowded into an area ten miles square. In addition to the 83,000 soldiers within the lines, moreover, there were 26,000 civilian refugees, many of whom had fled from Manila, which the Japanese had heavily bombed, even though it had been declared an open city. All were placed on half-rations, but these rapidly dwindled, despite occasional blockade running by American submarines. By 12 March, when MacArthur left for Australia on Roosevelt’s orders (with the famous promise, ‘I shall return’), the garrison was on one-third rations. On 3 April, when Homma opened a final offensive, most of the Americans and Filipinos within the Bataan pocket were suffering from beriberi or other deficiency diseases and rations had been reduced to one-quarter. Five days later General Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur’s successor, offered his surrender. About 9300 Americans and 45,000 Filipinos arrived in prison camp after a notorious ‘death march’. Some 25,000 had died of wounds, disease or mistreatment. The last survivors of the Philippines garrison, who occupied the island of Corregidor, were shelled into surrender between 14 April and 6 May; on 4 May alone more than 16,000 Japanese shells fell on the tiny outpost, making further resistance impossible. With the island’s capitulation the whole of the Philippines fell into Japanese hands. The population, however, unlike those of the Dutch East Indies and Burma, were not disposed to regard the Japanese victory as cause for satisfaction. They had trusted, rightly, in America’s promise to bring them to full independence and rightly also feared that Japanese occupation presaged oppression and exploitation. The Philippines Commonwealth was to be the only component of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Japan would encounter popular resistance to its rule.
The prospect of Filipino resistance was, however, at best an irrelevance to the Japanese at the moment Corregidor fell on 6 May 1942. Their strategic horizon now ran around the whole western Pacific and deep into China and south-east Asia too. The historic European empires of the East – Burma, Malaya, the East Indies, the Philippines and effectively French Indo-China also – had been drawn into their sphere. To the Chinese dependencies in which they had established rights of occupation between 1895 and 1931 – Formosa, Korea and Manchuria – they had added since 1937 vast swathes of conquered land in China proper. All the oceanic archipelagos north of the equator were theirs, and they had made inroads into those to the south. Between the west coast of the United States and the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand lay largely empty ocean, dotted by a few islands too remote or too tiny to provide their enemies with bases for a strategic riposte. From the perimeter of the ‘Southern Area’ the Japanese fleet and naval air forces were poised to strike deep into the Indian Ocean, towards the British Andaman and Nicobar islands (captured in March 1942), towards Ceylon (raided in April, at the cost of a British aircraft carrier), perhaps even as far away as the coast of East Africa (the appearance of a Japanese submarine off Madagascar in May would, in fact, prompt the British to occupy the island later in the year). Above all, their great amphibious – better, triphibious – fleet remained intact. Not one of their eleven battleships, ten carriers or eighteen heavy and twenty light cruisers had been even seriously damaged in the war thus far; while the United States Pacific and Asiatic Fleets had lost – or lost the use of – all its battleships and large numbers of its cruisers and destroyers, the British and Dutch Far Eastern fleets had been destroyed and the Royal Australian Navy had been driven back to port.
All that remained to the Allies to set in the strategic balance against Japan’s astonishing triumph and overpowering strategic position was the surviving naval base of Hawaii, with its remote dependency of Midway Island, and the US Pacific Fleet’s handful of carriers, three, perhaps four at most. Little wonder that hubris gripped even such doubters as Yamamoto; at the beginning of May 1942, the consummation of victory, a prospect he had long warned hovered at the very margin of possibility, seemed to lie only one battle away.
FOURTEEN
Carrier Battle: Midway
In the context of the Pacific war in May 1942, one more battle meant a battle between aircraft carriers. There had never been such a battle before; but the Japanese navy’s victory at Pearl Harbor ensured that such a battle was inevitable, if the United States were not altogether to abdicate control of the Pacific to Japan. The destruction at Battleship Row had left the American Pacific Fleet with only its aircraft carriers among its capital ships afloat, and it must find a way of using those carriers to fight the might of eleven Japanese battleships, ten carriers and thirty-eight cruisers, wherever t
hey might next appear. Battleships, even in the numbers in which the Japanese deployed them, could not challenge a well-handled carrier force. ‘Command of the sea’, therefore, now rested on winning command of the air, as both navies had long recognised. Somewhere in the depths of the Pacific, the largest space on the surface of the globe, the Japanese and American carrier fleets must meet and battle it out for a decision. If the decision went in favour of the Japanese, as probabilities implied, their New Order in Asia would be safe for years to come.
The Japanese carrier fleet outnumbered the American by ten to three; if its light carriers were excluded, its navy still enjoyed a superiority of six to three. Moreover, the Japanese carriers and – even more important – their air groups were of the first quality. Before December 1941 the Americans had dismissed the Japanese carrier force as an inferior imitation of its own. Pearl Harbor had revealed that Japanese admirals handled their ships with superb competence and that Japanese naval pilots flew advanced aircraft, dropping lethal ordnance, with deadly skill. The Zero had established itself as the finest embarked fighter in any navy; the Kate and Val torpedo- and dive-bombers, though slower than their American counterparts, carried heavy loads over long ranges.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had not built and trained a carrier fleet as a second best to its battleship force. On the contrary, its carrier fleet was a national elite. For that the Americans – and the British – had only themselves to blame. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 they had forced the Japanese to accept a severe restriction on the number of capital ships they were allowed to possess. The ratio fixed was three Japanese ships to five British or American. The object was to limit the number of Imperial Japanese Navy battleships in the Pacific, which was a secondary theatre for the two Western navies, who at that time were locked in unspoken conflict over which was to enjoy primacy in the Atlantic. Aircraft carriers were subject to the restriction, but the purpose of including them was to guard against the danger that any power could launch ships in the guise of carriers which might subsequently be converted to battleships. Japan went the other way about. Already persuaded that the carrier was likely to be a dominant naval weapon of the future, it not only converted a number of battleships and battlecruisers into carriers, as it was allowed to do under the 1921 treaty (and Britain and America were doing likewise, to preserve seaworthy hulls they would otherwise have had to scrap). It also launched a number of seaplane carriers, a category the Washington Treaty did not recognise, with the object of converting them into aircraft carriers at a later date.
