Good fortune brought a nucleus of gifted officers to Quantico during this period who were unafraid to brainstorm such vexing questions. These men reduced their analysis of Gallipoli into a positive breakout of six functional areas applicable to amphibious assault: command relations, naval gunfire support, air support, the ship-to-shore movement, “securing the beachhead,” and logistics. By 1934 the Quantico group had not only come to terms with the disasters of Gallipoli but also had defined a working doctrine for successful amphibious assault and published their findings as Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. Navy support came swiftly. Following three years of experimentation and refinement, the Chief of Naval Operations issued Fleet Training Publication 167 (FTP 167), Landing Operations Doctrine U.S. Navy, 1937. In 1941 the U.S. Army published its own version, albeit nearly a verbatim copy, as War Department Field Manual 31-5, Landing Operations on Hostile Shores.
Historians Jeter A. Isely and Philip A. Crowl of Princeton University described the initial Tentative Manual as “a remarkable document . . . pioneer work of the most daring and imaginative sort.” With it, the Marine Corps made one of its greatest contributions to the nation’s military capabilities.
Reading the original editions of the Tentative Manual and FTP 167 after six decades of practical application of amphibious warfare gives little sense of the groundbreaking nature of both documents. In certain points they seem almost quaint—describing the Marine landing force as light infantry supplemented with base defense artillery and aviation units, or urging troop commanders to execute the landing “with utmost speed and dash,” for example. But in tying together the previously disparate communities of naval gunfire, aviation, logistics, and assault tacticians, the early manuals provided invaluable service. So did insistence on “superiority of force at the point of attack” and “coordination by event not by time.” Kelly Turner’s attack aviators ignored the latter admonition prior to the assault waves reaching the beach at Tarawa, relying on their wrist-watches rather than gauging the extended distance the first waves still had to traverse to the beach. This lapse permitted Japanese gunners time to recover from the pounding and take deadly aim.
This initial concept of a doctrine for amphibious assault suffered from one principal shortcoming. None of the early editions of the doctrinal manuals sufficiently addressed command relations and unity of command. Ground officers generally accepted the fact that the naval “attack force commander” would execute the landing, but at which point, if any, would the troop commander assume full command ashore? And what about “conflict resolution” between the naval and troop commanders, the inevitable clash between strong-willed leaders with sharply different priorities? In the absence of such guidance, Kelly Turner at Guadalcanal acted as if he exercised full tactical command over all units afloat and ashore. Against General Vandegrift’s vocal objections, Turner retained control over elements of the 1st Marine Division as force reserves and tried to create new Raider units for separate missions far beyond the force beachheads on Guadalcanal or the Floridas. Fixing this void would take the active intervention of the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the Chief of Naval Operations.
America’s new amphibious doctrine had one redeeming grace. Throughout the prewar exercises and the war itself, senior commanders of all services remained amenable to whatever changes seemed necessary to resolve the problem. FTP 167 experienced three major changes between May 1941 and August 1943. Most of these reflected lessons learned in the ship-to-shore movement, naval gunfire support, and shore party operations. The issue of command relations received “off-line” modifications, especially in the Pacific after Guadalcanal, and just prior to Operation Galvanic in the Gilberts.
Other fortuitous developments in the Marine Corps and Navy in the 1930s paralleled and enhanced publication of Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. Under the enlightened leadership of Maj. Gen. Commandants Ben H. Fuller and John H. Russell Jr., the Corps finally ended its unbecoming post–World War I attraction to the U.S. Army and returned to its naval roots. Establishment of the Fleet Marine Force (FMF) as a type command of the fleet cemented this relationship. At the same time, the U.S. State Department terminated its long-standing commitment of Marine brigades to occupation duty in Nicaragua and Haiti, making available a substantial body of troops to man the new FMF. Third, the Navy and Marines (and on occasion the Army as well) resumed the annual series of fleet landing exercises that had languished since 1924. These exercises illuminated many of the problems and little of the promise of amphibious warfare, but each one led incrementally toward a better-equipped, somewhat better-trained landing force. Increasingly, the presence of Marine brigadier general Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith began to cast a long shadow at these annual training exercises. Smith became the indisputable apostle of amphibious assault, endearing himself to few senior officers of any service. But by his prickly insistence on amphibious preparedness and realistic training, he did as much as any other serving officer to help prepare the United States for certain key aspects of the forthcoming Pacific War.
Holland Smith’s uncompromising efforts, coupled with the visionary productivity of the earlier pioneers at Quantico, gave the U.S. Navy a solid foundation of doctrine and training from which to build amphibious expertise on the eve of World War II. Two major deficiencies remained: the wherewithal (especially transports, landing craft, and tank lighters) to conduct large-scale amphibious assaults, and the necessary trial by fire to validate the new doctrine. These would come in the fullness of time. In the meantime, the initial amphibious advantage in the Pacific would lie with the Japanese.
Japan’s amphibious proficiency far exceeded that of the United States at the outbreak of World War II. Japanese strategic planners in the interwar years foresaw the need for seaborne assault landings against such American holdings as Luzon and Guam, as well as against those islands and coastlines in the South Pacific and along the littoral of South Asia currently held by China, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. The Japanese could draw on their recent successful amphibious operations in the Pacific against the Germans and Russians in World War I to refine doctrine and tactical concepts. They fielded steel, armored, self-propelled landing craft as early as the mid-1920s. By 1932 the Imperial Army and Navy had forged a rare agreement on a joint doctrine manual, Outline of Amphibious Operations. That same year, the Imperial Navy landed twelve thousand troops at Shanghai. It wasn’t a pretty operation, but it would take the United States another ten years before it could launch a similar-size landing. Before the 1930s ended, the Imperial Japanese Army had developed, tested, and fielded a family of ramped, shallow-draft, landing craft and several prototypes of multimission amphibious ships. Both programs matured years ahead of any similar efforts undertaken by the Western powers.
Yet interservice rivalry would hamstring the full development of Japanese military proficiency in the war to come, including the application of amphibious expertise. Japan in effect had two amphibious forces—the Army’s and the Navy’s. The Army had its own transports and landing craft, both operated by organic shipping engineer regiments. As World War II began, Army forces would execute the major landings on the Asian mainland and the larger island groups in the South Pacific. The Imperial Navy featured its own elite naval infantry regiments, the rikusentai, or special naval landing forces. At their height, the rikusentai numbered fifty thousand strong, fully an eighth of the Imperial Navy. Typically, they would land as light infantry units from destroyer transports. Their operations were generally smaller and their objectives more limited than the Army landings.
Notwithstanding this costly duplication of effort, the Japanese used their hydra-headed amphibious forces productively in the opening years of the Pacific War. They followed their invasion of Manchuria in 1937 with a double landing near Shanghai. By 1939 Japanese amphibious forces had seized Canton, Wenchow, Foochow, Amoy, Swatow, Pakhoi, Hainan Island, and the Spratly Islands. With forty thousand troops in Canton, the Japanese were ably
poised to go after Hong Kong should a general war erupt. Forcible possession of Hainan helped the Japanese isolate Hong Kong and threaten French Indochina. Seizure of Pakhoi put the vital Haiphong-Kunming railroad within range of Japanese attack aircraft. The stage was set.
The “glory days” for Japanese amphibious forces occurred immediately after Pearl Harbor when they were unleashed for conquest throughout the Pacific. Their successes are familiar: Guam, Hong Kong, the Gilberts, Thailand, Malaya, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, northern New Guinea, the Solomons. These amphibious landings followed a peculiar pattern worth noting. Despite their overwhelming air and sea superiority, the Japanese rarely resorted to storm landings of their own. Wherever possible, Japanese commanders preferred night landings by battalion-size units in column against undefended or lightly held stretches of coastline. These operations—tactically bold, strategically conservative—proved well-suited to the highly mobile but logistically stressed campaigns of conquest against a disorganized enemy. One of the Imperial Army’s finest moments came with division-level, shore-to-shore night landings across the Straits of Johore to seize the British fortress of Singapore. Accepting the reality that a frontal assault against Singapore from the sea would have proven unacceptably suicidal, Japanese commanders instead executed unopposed amphibious landings to the far north. The expeditionary forces then attacked through the Malayan jungle to seize the fortress from the north, its blind side.
Japanese amphibious forces thus rolled through the self-styled Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but they were not altogether invincible. If we were to rate amphibious landings in the Pacific War on a scale of one to ten in terms of difficulty, with one representing an unopposed frolic and ten reflecting a storm landing against heavy opposition, the Japanese operations in 1941-42 would average about three. There’s nothing pejorative about such a rating. The amphibious forces generally succeeded, and they did so at admirably low cost. In relative terms, their missions were not that difficult. These landings rarely tested the mettle of Japanese amphibious assault capabilities. How these units performed against opposition is more revealing.
On four occasions, Japanese landing forces met spirited opposition and prevailed—against British forces at Kota Bharu, Malaya; against U.S. Army and Filipino forces at Baung and Mauban on opposite coasts of Luzon; and against British and Dutch forces defending Koepang, Timor, in February 1942. Koepang represented one of the few occasions when Imperial Army and Navy forces cooperated to execute an amphibious landing. The Navy rikusentai also employed their own parachute unit to complement their surface ship-to-shore assault. Each operation succeeded against determined resistance, although not truly against prepared fortifications.
In twentieth-century amphibious warfare, however, the trick is not so much getting ashore, but staying ashore. Generally, enough riflemen in the assault waves will survive the gauntlet of defensive fires to reach the beach and establish at least a toehold in the sand. This was the case at Tarawa, for example, where fifteen hundred U.S. Marines stormed ashore essentially intact in their tracked landing vehicles (LVTs), but then had to hang on for dear life for the next thirty hours because the tide and the reef and the Japanese gunners prevented the landing of most follow-on supporting arms and reinforcements. The loss of tactical momentum on such a prodigious scale nearly proved fatal to the 2d Marine Division.
These same circumstances developed during the so-called Battle of the Points in southern Luzon in January–February 1942. The Japanese launched four separate amphibious assaults against points along the western Bataan Peninsula. In each case, assault infantrymen fought their way ashore and secured a tenuous beachhead, but in no case could the Japanese land significant reinforcements, critical supplies, or heavy weapons. General MacArthur’s forces eventually threw the survivors back into the sea.
Three months later, a Japanese Army battalion executed a night landing on Corregidor Island, the final American stronghold. This was boldly done, the last straw—the garrison in fact surrendered the next day—but the difficulty must be discounted because of the exhausted state of the defenders.
The most embarrassing amphibious setback experienced by Japan occurred at Wake Island in December 1941 where a spirited little band of U.S. Marines and sailors inflicted heavy losses on the Imperial Navy landing forces, sank several ships, and quashed the entire expedition—for the moment. The isolated garrison could not last indefinitely. The second Japanese attempt, showing greater respect for the Marines’ 5-inch coast-defense guns, delivered a substantial landing force ashore at night and soon prevailed.
Both antagonists read the wrong lessons of the battle for Wake Island. The Japanese believed thereafter that coast-defense guns could punish an invasion fleet for a sufficient period of time to allow an effective air-sea-ground counterattack against a beleaguered island. Once they ceded the strategic offensive to the Allies in 1943, their fortification plans for island bastions in the Central Pacific invariably included the emplacement of big, turreted guns from Imperial Navy stocks. Similarly, certain U.S. Navy officers saw in Wake’s experience good reason for bombardment ships to lie well offshore, heeding British Adm. Horatio Nelson’s axiom “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort.” Subsequent U.S. successes against major-caliber Japanese coast-defense guns at Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima proved the fallacy of these arguments. In this case, however, Nelson’s ghost died about as hard as the old viscount himself at Trafalgar. Kelly Turner and Holland Smith, it seemed, had to educate every new gunfire support commander in the realities of island bombardment.
Few U.S. strategists caught the real lesson of Wake Island. The small battle provided a revealing preview of Japanese amphibious capabilities that even in December 1941, at the peak of its power, lacked the synergy—the punch—to execute a landing against well-armed opposition. This operational timidity seems uncharacteristic of the Japanese military’s well-documented affinity for close, offensive action, the spirit of the samurai. By contrast, even the U.S. Marines’ primitive Tentative Manual for Landing Operations of 1935 stressed utmost warrior qualities in the ship-to-shore assault: “Bayonets are fixed while well off the beach. . . . [The assault troops] charge the immediate beach offensives with the bayonet, and push the attack vigorously to the assigned objective.”
In some respects, the issue of Japan’s relatively toothless amphibious assault capabilities became academic following the defeats at Midway, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea. What further need would there be for their amphibious forces to fight their way ashore against opposition? In fact, this deficiency had serious implications for Japan’s efforts to forestall Allied offensive moves because they could never mount a truly effective counterattack against newly seized enemy beachheads. Japanese counterattacks were typically prompt and furious, consisting sequentially of air strikes, naval surface action, then a counterlanding to wrest the captured ground from the enemy. Japanese aerial counterstrikes remained effective throughout the war—consider the kamikazes at Okinawa in 1945. Japanese naval forces remained a threat, albeit a decreasing one after the Battle of Leyte Gulf. But their amphibious counterlanding operations failed across the board. Counterlandings at Guadalcanal occurred in piecemeal fashion and too far away from the objective, Henderson Field, to succeed. At Bougainville, the counterlanding force stormed ashore right where they would be most effective, directly within the Marines’ beachhead, but they lacked the staying power to be effective. And at Tarawa, the Ko Detachment never posed a threat—too small, too lightly armed, undertrained, never a factor.
The December 1941 invasion of Guam by Japanese amphibious forces as perceived by a Japanese artist. (U.S. Naval Institute)
On the other hand, Japanese amphibious forces demonstrated two remarkable proficiencies during 1941–43 that the Americans would have been well advised to replicate: the art of executing night landings and the art of extracting amphibious forces from a desperate situation. Regarding the former, the Japanese seizure of Guam on 10 December 1941 de
serves special mention. Put aside for the moment the fact that a tactical assault landing was probably unnecessary (155 U.S. Marines and a few hundred Guamanian Guardsmen defended the entire 228-square-mile island). The Japanese took no chances. They organized a joint landing force of rikusentai and an Army regiment, altogether about 6,000 men, timed their passage over or through the barrier coral reefs at high tide, and came ashore in total darkness at four landing points. For its size, this was one of the most masterfully planned and executed amphibious landings of the war (although whether it would have worked against even moderate opposition is arguable).
The Japanese employed their considerable nocturnal skills to conduct three prodigious missions of amphibious extraction during 1943. They evacuated the entire 5,000-man garrison from Kiska, rescued 9,400 from New Georgia, and pulled out 10,600 starving soldiers from Guadalcanal. While these operations are dwarfed by the Royal Navy’s classic evacuation under fire of 360,000 British troops from Dunkirk in 1940, the Japanese achievements reflect masterful planning and execution of one of the most difficult tasks in naval warfare. Of the Solomons extraction, Adm. Chester Nimitz candidly reported, “Only skill in keeping their plans disguised and bold celerity in carrying them out enabled the Japanese to withdraw the remnants of the Guadalcanal garrison. Not until all organized forces had been evacuated on 8 February did we realize the purpose of their air and sea dispositions.”
American amphibious developments during the first two years of the war in the Pacific remained hostage to the same limiting factors that existed at the eve of conflict, the lack of specialized wherewithal and a residual lack of confidence in the yet unproven doctrine of amphibious assault against hostile shores. Strategic factors also weighed heavily during these long months. Europe by deliberate choice still received the priority of effort and resources. The Imperial Japanese Navy still wielded sufficient power to threaten U.S. efforts to concentrate “superiority of force at the point of attack” needed to generate a true storm landing.
Storm Landings Page 3
