by John Keegan
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 t
he 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.
PART IV
THE WAR IN
THE WEST
1940-1945
SEVENTEEN
Churchill’s Strategic Dilemma
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.
Calculating the location and intensity of thrusts at the periphery of Hitler’s empire was to preoccupy Churchill during the next two years. He was already running one such campaign, in the Western Desert, had triumphed in another – the destruction of Mussolini’s empire in East Africa – and, though he had failed in a third, the intervention in Greece, he retained the power to strike again. Norway was a sector he kept constantly in mind; after America’s entry it could be only a matter of time before they did indeed jointly open a Second Front. Had Germany been America’s only enemy, there might have been less delay in opening a Second Front directly against the Atlantic Wall that Hitler was building on the north coast of France. However, for most Americans, Japan was the enemy which deserved the more rapid retribution. The United States Navy, which had been granted primacy of command in the conduct of the Pacific war, was deeply committed to making its main effort in those waters. In the Japanese navy, moreover, it recognised an opponent of equal calibre and thirsted for victory over it in a great fleet action; many American soldiers, including the celebrated MacArthur, shared the navy’s desire to settle with the Japanese, to take revenge for the defeats at Wake, Guam and in the Philippines, and to drive on Tokyo.
Throughout the first year of the Pacific war, therefore, Churchill found himself in an unfamiliar situation. Though no longer oppressed by the fear of defeat, he was equally no longer overlord of his country’s strategy. Because Britain could win only in concert with the United States, he had to bend his will to the wishes of strategy-makers in the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Roosevelt was still inclined to follow Churchill’s lead. General Marshall and Admiral King were not. King was interested in the Pacific to the exclusion of all other theatres. Marshall remained committed to Europe but believed the Second Front should be mounted on the shortest route into Germany and at the earliest possible date, and therefore was deeply suspicious of all attempts to postpone or divert effort away from this.
Churchill shrank from such a commitment. ‘Remember that on my breast there are the medals of the Dardanelles, Antwerp, Dakar and Greece,’ he exclaimed to Anthony Eden on 5 July 1941, in a reference to four disastrous amphibious operations of the First and Second World Wars which he had directed. It was all very well, as 1942 drew on, for the Americans to commit the Marine Corps and a handful of army divisions to island fighting in the Pacific and to contemplate wider amphibious leaps in 1943. Their campaign was fought against tiny garrisons separated by thousands of miles of ocean from their home base. A Second Front would commit the whole of the British and American expeditionary forces, not easily to be replaced if lost, to an assault on the fortified frontier of a continent within which stood an army of 300 divisions and a war-making machine without equivalent in the world. Throughout the course of 1942, therefore, Churchill found himself treading an increasingly narrow and slippery path. On the one hand, he dared not play down Britain’s commitment to the Second Front, lest the Americans conclude that their strength be better deployed in the Pacific (as were a majority of American troops sent overseas in 1942); on the other, he dared not play up Britain’s commitment, lest he found himself swept up in an American rush to invade the continent before the chance of success had ripened. He
had agreed with Roosevelt at their meeting in Placentia Bay, four months before Pearl Harbor, that if the United States entered the war the democracies’ joint strategy would be ‘Germany First’; in the eighteen months after Pearl Harbor he dedicated his efforts to persuading Roosevelt, but particularly Marshall and his fellow American generals, that Allied strategy should be ‘Germany First – but not quite yet.’
Temporising with military men was for Churchill a new experience. Thitherto he had dealt with generals and admirals – indeed with all in government – as an autocrat, sacking commanders with a readiness which even Hitler thought extreme and brought to the attention of his senior officers as an example of how much more reasonable he was as Führer than Churchill was as Prime Minister. ‘Between 1939 and 1943,’ the official historian of the Royal Navy observed, ‘there was not one admiral in an important sea command . . . whom Churchill . . . did not attempt to have relieved – and in several cases he succeeded.’ His dismissals of generals are notorious. In June 1941 he dismissed Wavell from command in the Middle East; fourteen months later he dismissed his replacement, Auchinleck, both in peremptory fashion; he also endorsed the dismissals of three commanders of the Eighth Army, Cunningham, Leese and Ritchie. He was difficult and demanding with those he left in office, particularly Alan Brooke, his chief of staff, with whom he was in daily contact throughout the war, but also with Montgomery, though rebuking that prima donna was to risk repayment in kind. Only General Sir Harold Alexander could do no wrong in his eyes: his famous courage and chivalrous manner excused him from reproach even for the dilatory conduct of the campaign in Italy in 1944, for which the blame attached to no one else.
