The shortage of suitable landing craft limited the Marines’ scheme of maneuver for the Floridas. The Paramarines slated to assault Gavutu had to wait several hours until boats used for Tulagi and the neighboring landings could be retrieved and refueled. Nor could the landing force get very many of their organic major weapons ashore in the two-day fight for Gavutu-Tanambogo. The acute shortage of ramped lighters for Watchtower limited the Paramarines and their reinforcements from landing anything more than two light tanks and a battery of 75-mm pack howitzers.
American landing forces would require much greater firepower ashore in the coming assaults. Eventually, the Navy would have sufficient landing craft available to land medium tanks and 155-mm howitzers following the assault waves. In the first years of the war, however, Marine divisions mirrored the lift and assault capabilities of the makeshift amphibious fleet. As one historian commented, the restricted boom capacity of the early amphibious ships limited the choice of Marine tanks and artillery “to the Tinker Toy level.” These were the days of the Stuart M-3 light tanks (37-mm gun) and an artillery regiment comprised principally of the pack howitzers.*
Although American amphibious planners overlooked the available lessons of Gavutu-Tanambogo, they began to pay attention to subsequent landings in the Solomons and New Guinea. Two trends began to develop in the Pacific Theater, a greater appreciation for the role of logistics in amphibious operations and a general disenchantment with large-scale night landings.
The essence of amphibious logistics stems from combat loading, the embarkation of units, supplies, and equipment on assigned shipping to reflect the scheme of maneuver ashore. Combat loading gives little consideration to economic filling of cargo spaces and prime consideration to the principal of “first-needed, last-loaded.” The most combat-essential gear must be loaded at the very end and placed in the most accessible spot, such as a hatch square, or preloaded in its assigned boat on board the ship. Sounds simple, but in practice combat loading is one of the most frustrating experiences in military life. Doing the job right assumes several ideal conditions: that there is indeed an approved scheme of maneuver available, with its matching debarkation priority schedule; that sufficient shipping will be assigned to embark the troops, vehicles, and supplies needed to execute the assault; that the “ship’s loading characteristics pamphlet” accurately reflects the spaces available for combat cargo on each assigned vessel; and that there will be no last-minute changes. Most of these assumptions are as illusory today as they were in 1942.
A good transport quartermaster (TQM), typically a veteran warrant officer or senior staff NCO, was worth his weight in gold at the onset of each amphibious operation. The best of these not only knew their business but had a lively sense of improvisation. If lucky enough to be paired with an equally flexible ship’s first lieutenant or chief boatswains mate, the consummate TQM could somehow survive the vagaries imposed by higher commands. This was the exception. Embarkation of the amphibious ships for Operation Watchtower was a particularly wretched experience, due in part to the degree of urgency and compressed time schedule. The abbreviated offload at Guadalcanal reflected this poor start—too little essential, too much nonessential cargo delivered ashore before the Battle of Savo Island drove the amphibs away.
The impact of logistics on the vital element of acceleration, or momentum, in an opposed amphibious assault cannot be overstated. Assault troops have to dash ashore virtually naked, a storming party of riflemen and light machine gunners who cannot be slowed with logistical burdens. As developed in amphibious doctrine, tactical sustainability gets ashore by increments, first in follow-on scheduled waves, then in designated on-call waves, or “floating dumps,” finally by general unloading once the beachhead has been secured to enable unrestricted, administrative flow of boats in and out.
During World War II, there quickly developed an acrimonious difference of opinion between the Navy and the landing forces about the length of time this process should take. The Marines wanted selective unloading following the assault waves to remain the call of the tactical commander ashore—what he needed, when he needed it, delivered systematically to support the battle beyond the beachhead. But Navy commanders had great concerns about the security of the amphibious task force, that group of thin-skinned, lightly armed transports tethered to the beachhead and dangerously lacking the protective mobility available on the high seas. To hell, they said, with the niceties of an orderly offload at the call of the troop commander ashore. The urgent imperative to the Navy was the immediate general offload of all combat cargo in order to release the ships from their vulnerable anchorages.
The Navy’s point was valid. The predictable Japanese reaction to each new Allied landing throughout 1942-43 featured major air and surface counterattacks delivered in short order and with great vehemence. The longer the amphibs had to squat and offload supplies, the more critically vulnerable they would become. Kelly Turner’s amphibious task force at Guadalcanal had escaped annihilation after Savo Island only by an ill-considered flinch on the part of the victorious Japanese commander. There were other near misses. As a result, Turner and his captains sought to initiate general unloading as soon as the boats returned from landing the first wave. Their measure of effectiveness: how many hours of round-the-clock indiscriminate debarkation would it take before the ships could batten down their cargo hatches, retrieve their boats, and get to sea.
This procedure, fully understandable in the Solomons, became less so in the Gilberts. Hasty unloading of amphibious ships produced enormous problems for the landing force. No one knew which boats held what supplies; urgent requests for plasma, ammo, and water went unfilled; the Southern Attack Force soon ran out of boats—they were all loaded and circling in the lagoon. Some Marines compared the offload process to the Boston Tea Party. The line of departure became absolute chaos.
Chaos also seemed to attend Allied attempts at night landings in the Pacific. The two theaters of war held contrasting views on this subject. In the European Theater, amphibious planners heeded the words of Sir Roger Keyes about the Gallipoli fiasco, that it was “folly to storm a defended beach in daylight.” The Allies conducted successful night landings during the North African, Sicilian, and Italian campaigns.
The Russians had mixed results in night amphibious assaults. The Black Sea Fleet failed spectacularly to execute a night landing at Ozereyka Bay against German and Rumanian forces in February 1943. Yet a nearby diversionary landing by several hundred Soviet Naval Infantry troops that same night led to seizure of Novorossiysk and a seven-month foothold in that strategic sector.
The Pacific was a different story. The Marines, the principal landing force in the early years, recalled the admonitions against night landings of their prophet, Pete Ellis, plus their own adverse experiences in the Caribbean before the war. Captain Crane’s abortive night-landing attempt at Tanambogo also left a bad taste. Admiral Turner’s experiments with night landings in New Georgia with Army troops the following year left him equally disenchanted. Storm landings, it proved, would by nature require daylight. The final prep fires of ships and aircraft had to be as precise as possible in the morning, and the landing force needed enough residual hours of daylight to get sufficient combat power ashore before dark.
Building sufficient combat power to initiate storm landings would require plenty of specialized amphibious ships and landing craft. These were on the way, but top priority still belonged to the European Theater, which, until the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, still rated an 85 percent share of amphibious assets. The Pacific Theater’s share doubled after Casablanca and increased again later in the year with the Allied conclusion that a cross-channel assault into northern France was not possible in 1943. Slowly the trickle of amphibious ships and craft to the Pacific began to increase.
Troop transports were the most immediate need among the amphibious forces. The United States had paid the price for not starting earlier to provide such ships in the prewar years. Only wi
th the “Two-Ocean Navy Act” of 1940 did Congress provide funds for such unglamorous and undersponsored auxiliaries as troop transports. The first transports appeared almost overnight, reflecting the hasty conversion of a dozen passenger—cargo liners from commercial trade. (Captain Knowles’s transport Heywood was the twenty-year-old former SS City of Baltimore.) Most of these steamers were already long in the tooth. Their freshwater, ventilation, and sewer systems could not accommodate a thousand or more “passengers” on any sustained basis. The Navy Department thoughtfully renamed the conversions after legendary Marine Corps general officers—Doyen, Harris, Zeilin, Heywood, Biddle, Harry Lee—but the troops developed their own uncomplimentary nicknames, the least offensive of which was “the Listing Harry Lee.” Maligned and cussed, these old ships developed a can-do spirit and became valuable workhorses. In fact, much of the early practical body of knowledge of amphibious assaults came to reside in the crews of these journeymen transports simply because they were in demand all over the world. Several rotated between North Africa, the Aleutians, and the South Pacific during the bare-bones years of 1942-43, invaluable amphibious “stormy petrels.”
In February 1943 the transports received a morale boost with their redesignation from APs to APAs—still naval auxiliaries, but now “attack transports”—accompanied by a retrofit program that installed multitiered Welin davits to accommodate a range of fifteen to thirty-three Higgins boats.* As 1943 wore on, new APAs joined the Pacific Fleet, built or modified as attack transports from the keel up, such as Ormsby and Sheridan. These new APAs were bigger, faster, more “spacious” in troop accommodations, and carried better armaments and armor.
Upgrading the transports did little to reduce their overall vulnerability to enemy action. Taking nothing away from their valorous crews, the ships were in no way men-of-war, but rather a fat prize sought by every armed predator on, over, or under the seas. The U.S. Navy lost ten transports (and an additional ten APDs, the smaller, high-speed transports built on modified destroyer hulls) to enemy fire in World War II. These losses included the large, radar-equipped transport McCawley, Kelly Turner’s flagship at Rendova; four other APAs torpedoed by German U-boats off Fedala, Morocco, following the Torch landings in November 1942; and the Susan B. Anthony, sunk by a German mine on D+1 at Normandy. Japanese torpedo bombers sank the APD McKean while en route to Bougainville with follow-on forces; 116 men went down. In the North Atlantic in early 1943, a German submarine sank the Allied transport Dorchester with the loss of 605 lives, including the inspirational “Four Chaplains.” Excepting the Anthony and Dorchester, our attack transport losses occurred after the main body of troops had already been debarked. Miraculously, in no case did we suffer the catastrophic loss of a fully loaded attack transport during any amphibious assault, a reflection of sheer luck and the Japanese Bushido mentality that invariably made them attack U.S. warships instead of the less prestigious auxiliaries.
By contrast, the Japanese lost 97 loaded transports, including 8 in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea in March 1943, in which 3,500 Imperial Army troops drowned.
In the cold-hearted calculus of war, an enemy transport crammed with combat troops on the high seas represents an ideal target. Better to kill these assault troops en masse before they execute a landing and have to be knocked off by twos and threes while swarming over one’s beach. The Japanese missed many opportunities to even the odds against the amphibious forces coming to assault their island fortresses. Even at Okinawa the kamikazes usually favored the gunships or carriers over the transports as their final targets. But we now know from declassified ULTRA intercepts that Imperial General Headquarters had finally come to appreciate the logic of preemptive strikes against Allied transports. Japanese plans for the defense of Kyūshū in 1945 featured a heavy concentration of kamikazes and suicide craft against the American transport anchorage at the onset.
What a perfect hell it would have been if one of our transports had been fatally stricken by enemy attack while still laden with embarked troops! In the first place, the transports were invariably overloaded for the assault landings, partly to accommodate unit integrity, partly because there were never enough ships to go around. Imagine fifteen hundred combat-equipped Marines or soldiers on a single transport, in addition to the three-hundred-man crew. Once embarked, the troops had only three places to go: the weather decks, the mess deck, and their “berthing compartments.” At General Quarters, all troops by necessity had to be confined to their berthing compartments, the equivalent of a cargo hold filled with floor-to-ceiling bunks, stacked twelve to fifteen high. With no open spaces in which to assemble, the troops had to retire to their bunks, each man further encumbered with rifle, helmet, and pack. These conditions were bleak enough—better than a slave ship, but much worse than the crudest steerage-class passage in turn-of-the-century tramp steamers. But imagine the chaos of a fatal torpedo or bomb strike, and the horror of trying to extricate even a handful of survivors from those jammed compartments to the weather deck in time. We lost hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen under nightmarish conditions in World War II. At least the storm landings were spared from what may have been the ultimate horror on the cruel sea.
Mary Craddock Hoffman
As 1943 matured, other new ships of particular value to amphibious assault began to appear in the Pacific Fleet. The first escort carriers, CVEs, participated in the seizure of Attu in the Aleutians in May. The following month Kelly Turner sailed for Operation Toenails, the seizure of New Georgia, with the first contingent of tank landing ships, LSTs.
The ungainly, shallow-draft, flat-bottomed LSTs may have had British origins, but in their down-home utility and versatility these ships had Made in America stamped all over them. They rode rougher than a cob, but they could beach themselves, open bow doors, lower a ramp, and discharge wheeled or tracked vehicles in shallow water or onto a causeway, conveniently carried on each side. If nothing else, the LST’s shallow draft (3′1″ forward, 9′6″ aft in landing configuration) permitted a much closer approach to any beach, thereby greatly reducing the turnaround time for boats extracting casualties from the fight and receiving more combat cargo to return ashore. LSTs thus made ideal seaborne medical clearing stations, or mother ships for small craft, or relay ships to deliver cargo from the bigger APAs or AKAs much further at sea. Some LSTs, equipped with the experimental “Brodie slingshot,” could even launch the Marines’ spotter aircraft—or at least succeed in doing so two out of three tries. (Well, most of the time.)
More specialized landing craft appeared, including the LCI (dubbed “Elsie Eye” by lovesick amphibians), which proved marginal in its designed role as an infantry craft in the Pacific but excelled once modified to fire rockets or heavy mortars as a close-in fire support boat during the ship-to-shore assault.
Things were looking up for the threadbare amphibious forces, but the flow of these new ships and craft remained thin for a good half of 1943. Even then, the Pacific Fleet retained the lion’s share of these new assets, leaving Rear Adm. Daniel E. Barbey, commanding “MacArthur’s Amphibious Navy” in the Southwest Pacific Area with the scrapings from the barrel bottom. Under pressure Kelly Turner grudgingly sent one APA south to Barbey, but the ship had a chronic oil leak, a fatal tattletale for marauding Japanese submarines, and Barbey had to rely on a hodgepodge of other castoffs and derelicts to commence his celebrated drive up the New Guinea coast.
Kelly Turner invaded Rendova in New Georgia with the 43d Infantry Division and the 9th Marine Defense Battalion in late June. In addition to losing his flagship (first to Japanese torpedo bombers, then—a final indignity—to an American PT boat skipper with an itchy trigger finger), Turner experienced several other anxious moments. The Army had trained several companies of elite commandos, Barracudas, who would comprise the assault waves, clear the target beaches, and guide the follow-on waves ashore. Darkness, inexperience, and general “friction” resulted in a late launch of the Barracudas and their landing on the wrong beach. The
main body, ignorant of this, sailed shoreward anticipating a covered landing. Turner had to galvanize them with this urgent message: “You are the first to land! You are the first to land! Expect opposition!” All hands experienced anxious moments until the newly designated assault force overcame the few Japanese defending the beach.
The initial landing at Rendova thereby succeeded, but the buildup of combat power ashore suffered from heavy rain, deep mud, and more inexperience. By D+2 supplies and equipment of every description clogged the exposed beach. At that point the joint air defense system failed badly. A flight of Imperial Navy bombers from Rabaul surprised the landing force and devastated the beach with impunity. Among the many casualties was the senior observer from the 2d Marine Division detailed to Rendova to learn firsthand about amphibious landings. Lt. Col. David M. Shoup barely escaped with his life. Shoup’s amphibious odyssey still had a few more twists and turns to follow until his memorable performance as the chief architect and executioner at Betio, but his traumatic experience at Rendova had provided searing lessons. These would prove beneficial at the onset of the great Central Pacific campaign, whose forces were already starting to coil for the first strike.
* The inability of the LCVP (and the larger LCM-3) to negotiate coral reefs takes little away from the fact that these landing craft truly revolutionized amphibious warfare. As designed by Andrew Jackson Higgins, both boats provided the landing force for the first time with reliable, wide-ramped, shallow-draft, high-powered craft with exceptional sea-keeping and surfing capabilities. The advent of the Higgins boats of both configurations quadrupled the landing options available to naval forces. No longer would they be restricted to seizing developed ports for amphibious power projections; any undeveloped beach became a prime access point. Coral reefs, however, remained a vexing obstacle in the Pacific.
Storm Landings Page 5
