But the Japanese Navy struck back. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a series of disjointed battles which resulted in the destruction of the Japanese Navy as a threat to future U.S. naval operations, the last hope of Japan to protect itself from an invasion of its home islands disappeared. Like the Germans in Ukraine, the Japanese had alienated the Filipinos to the extreme.
Perhaps no better indication of the follies of a modern occupying force applying draconian repression policies exists than the success story of Wendell W. Fertig in the Philippines. In 1941, Fertig, a middle-aged mining engineer who failed to graduate after five years at the Colorado School of Mines in the 1920s, had nonetheless become a mining engineer and consultant. But he had managed to complete the ROTC course while in college, becoming an officer in the Army Reserve, U.S. Corps of Engineers, and attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1941. Having lived in the Philippines since 1936, Fertig sent his wife and daughters back to the States when war broke out, whereupon he supervised construction projects on Luzon and Bataan. On his way to Mindanao, his Navy aircraft crashed during landing, cutting Fertig off from the main U.S. command when the Japanese forces slashed in behind him. When he heard the Americans had surrendered, Fertig refused to join the POWs and instead built the largest guerrilla organization ever commanded by an American, reaching over 35,000 men, Americans and Filipinos, tying down up to 60,000 Japanese until finally reinforced by MacArthur’s troops in March of 1945.
Respected and feared by the Japanese as “Chief in the Philippines,” Fertig was denigrated and dismissed as competition for the affections of Filipinos by General MacArthur. The tall, lanky, red-haired Fertig became widely loved and respected throughout Mindanao: he was considered a hero, and a Filipino. (When he returned to Mindanao in 1958, he was greeted by thousands of cheering Filipinos and a banner that read “WELCOME THE PATRIOT WHO LESSENED HUMAN SUFFERING ON MINDANAO.”)118
Yet in Europe and Asia the anticipation of a quick resolution in both theaters turned dark rapidly. Hitler, despite the astounding collapse on the Eastern Front, continued to obsess about America and the Western Front, hoarding his finest new tanks and moving fresh divisions into hidden reserve positions to launch a counteroffensive in December. With Allied aircraft denied the skies by poor weather and American lines in particular overstretched and thin, the Germans smashed through the American lines in the Ardennes and threatened to march to the coast. Eisenhower rushed the 101st Airborne to the defense of Bastogne, where it became encircled and a potential disaster loomed. As the northern American flank stiffened, Patton swiftly struck the southern in an awe-inspiring 90-degree turn, moving northward to attack with two full divisions on the third day after the German offensive began, and following with another division and a combat command a day later. While General Courtney Hodges and Patton did all the work, and Ike handled the planning, as usual Montgomery boasted to the press that his efforts had saved the day.
Then Monty went one step further: he sent Eisenhower what amounted to an ultimatum that “[o]ne commander must have powers to direct and control the operations! You cannot possibly do it yourself, and so you would have to nominate someone else.” Of course, the “someone else” was Monty.119 Eisenhower fumed. Either Montgomery or he would have to go. Ike drafted a message to be sent to the Combined Chiefs of Staff through General Marshall to choose between himself and Montgomery. Allied unity was threatened to the core by one egomaniacal individual, and Hitler’s ill-fated offensive on the battlefield came close to succeeding at the strategic level in breaking the Allies apart. Montgomery, alerted by his chief of staff that his job was in peril, quickly wrote a pacifying note to Eisenhower: “Whatever your decision may be you can rely on me one hundred per cent to make it work, and I know Brad [Omar Bradley] will do the same. Very distressed that my letter may have upset you.”120
Of course, Eisenhower got nearly as much static from his own subordinates, particularly Patton (whose performance, nevertheless, earned him the right to carp). Patton begged for more gas and supplies to launch a single-column advance into Germany, and especially (in his view) to beat the Russians to Berlin. Already sensing the postwar strategic implications, Patton hated Communists as much as he did Nazis, fearing Soviet control of much of Germany would prove a disaster—and he was right. Of course, Patton was spared Ike’s strategic alliance concerns, and the single-thrust approach was fraught with dangers of being cut off and surrounded, as exemplified by the Ardennes offensive. That failed to stop Patton’s incessant calls for more gas, or his unending complaining to his friend (and now superior) General Omar Bradley. Still, true to his word, Patton’s forces crossed the Rhine without stopping and he ceremoniously urinated in that symbolic river before heading toward Berlin.
Before the fall of Berlin, Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, at Warm Springs, Georgia. His death momentarily convinced Hitler the Allies might fracture, but der Fuehrer’s fantasies disappeared as Harry Truman—a much less malleable and progressive leader than his predecessor—assumed the presidency. While Roosevelt was mourned, his death was not unexpected by those who knew him closely. He had been in poor health for some time. But it had little effect on the men at the front, especially as they stood on the threshold of victory in Europe.
By agreement, the Russians got to take Berlin, which fell on May 2. Hitler, who had been in his Berlin bunker since January 16, and nearly mad, had taken to moving phantom units around on maps and haranguing his remaining subordinates hourly. The failed July 1944 “Wolf’s Lair” assassination plot (“Valkyrie”), orchestrated by top Wehrmacht officers, including Generals Henning von Tresckow and Friedrich Olbricht, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, had left him more paranoid than ever. As the Soviets closed in, on April 29 he married Eva Braun, then after midnight, on April 30, gave her poison. He chomped down on poison while simultaneously shooting himself to ensure he did not fall into the hands of the Red Army. On May 8, General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the high command, offered the unconditional surrender of all German forces to the Allies.
Little was left of the once-dominant Nazi Germany that had devastated Europe. Out of 84 million ethnic Germans, 7 to 9 million were dead, 4 to 6 million were prisoners, and another 3 million would disappear in the convulsions still taking place as national boundaries were realigned. But other nations paid an even higher price, particularly the USSR, which lost nearly 27 million people; while another 3 to 4 million were in the gulag or would shortly disappear as Soviet prisoners. Other countries in Europe suffered greatly as well: Poland (5.7 million dead), Yugoslavia (1 million), the Baltic States (931,000), Romania (833,000), Greece (800,000), Hungary (580,000), France (568,000), Italy (457,000), Czechoslovakia (345,000), and Holland (301,000). Great Britain lost a comparatively low 451,000, while the United States, in both Europe and the Pacific, suffered 419,000 deaths. Vast numbers of young men had been drawn into wars—with much of the combat in Russia—that had no ideological meaning to them, no higher purpose. Hungarians, Romanians, and even Belgians froze to death or were gunned down in unnamed hamlets in the Soviet Union merely because their nations had fallen into Hitler’s grasp. When combined with the six million Jews and four million others that the Nazis deliberately exterminated, the horrific cost of appeasement from 1935 to 1939 stood out as starkly as a gravestone with the inscription “Do Not Repeat!”
Tragic as the physical loss was, the division of Europe, which came at the Yalta Conference in February of 1945 between FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, and cemented the principles discussed at Tehran, proved nearly as destructive to the human soul over the next forty years. As always, the Soviets would fail to meet their obligations under the agreement or keep their promises, especially free elections in Poland. This was true for both the public components and their private pledges, withheld from the British and American public until the 1950s for political reasons. Potentially the provisions of Yalta were worse than those of Versailles in that Europe was left in two armed camps, one of which, the Soviet
Union, had dedicated itself to the destruction of the other. Versailles, at least, left the European countries more or less disarmed with no dominant continental power.
Divine Wind and Atomic Fury
Japan, though badly mauled and incapable of further offensive operations, nevertheless remained unbowed and unrepentant in the Pacific. On February 19, 1945, Marines assaulted Iwo Jima in what became the bloodiest engagement in Corps history. Dug-in Japanese pummeled Leathernecks on the beaches and shelled them from the 546-foot-tall Mount Suribachi, which seemed impervious to naval gunfire or bombing by air. Nearly every inch of the island had to be taken by hand-to-hand combat: flamethrowers and grenades were commonly used to eliminate Japanese pillboxes and tunnels, and the enemy refused to surrender. Out of the 20,000 Japanese troops who held Iwo Jima, scarcely 1,000 gave up. Perhaps the greatest image of victory in World War II came when Marines and a Navy corpsman raised Old Glory on top of Suribachi. The famous scene, of course, was the second such flag-raising: the first flag had been requested as a souvenir—a request that outraged the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, who said it belonged to the unit. Thereupon, Johnson ordered Lieutenant Ted Tuttle to find a replacement, shouting as Tuttle hustled off, “And make it a bigger one.”121 Tuttle returned with the flag from a tank landing ship and got it to the command post, where Johnson gave it to Rene Gagnon (one of the six men who raised the flag). Gagnon and forty other Marines headed back to the summit, where Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for the Associated Press, had replaced the man who photographed the first flag, Staff Sergeant Louis Lowery. Rosenthal, who put down his camera to help pile rocks, nearly missed the shot, but as the Marines lifted Old Glory, he snapped the photo. Three of the Marines were killed within days (Michael Strank, Franklin Sousley, and Harlon Block), and for years Block was misidentified as Sergeant Hank Hansen (who had raised the first flag). Gagnon and Ira Hayes drifted into alcoholism and “survivor’s guilt,” with Hayes—a Pima Indian—dying of alcohol poisoning in 1955. John Bradley, who died in 1994, never spoke of his experience, and it was only through the efforts of his son, James, that the details were uncovered and published as Flags of Our Fathers (2000). Rosenthal’s photo won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1954 Navy petty officer Felix de Weldon completed the sculpture of the event that stands as the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington Cemetery.
As the final step before assaulting the home islands, Okinawa was attacked in April. By then, the U.S. ground forces totaled 548,000 men, the largest amphibious operation carried out in the Pacific. Okinawa proved a tough nut to crack as the Japanese employed suicidal kamikaze attacks on American ships with the objective being to exchange a single Japanese pilot for 1,500 American sailors. As on Pelelieu and Iwo Jima, the Japanese forces made the Americans pay for every inch they gained in the hope of raising the U.S. casualty level to beyond what the American public would accept. As General Mitsuru Ushijima wrote to his troops, “One Plane for One Warship.”122 In fact, the suicide attacks convinced the Americans more than ever that they needed to employ firepower first and advance with human forces later. A member of the 1st Marine Division, E. B. Sledge, recalled, “The mud was knee-deep in some places…. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck…There wasn’t a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent.”123 Japanese generals committed suicide rather than suffer capture.
The Japanese suicide attacks sealed the fate of Japan itself by ensuring that if the opportunity arose, the United States would use any means other than human assault to take the home islands, including—once the new secret weapon became available—the atomic bomb.
Suicide tactics caused a great deal of concern to Army and Navy planners working on the invasion of Japan. After witnessing similar tactics at Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf, American officers anticipated extensive use of kamikazes and human bombs of all types when they invaded Kyushu and Honsu. In 1941, General Hideki Tojo had issued a military order—“Do not stay alive in dishonor”—instituting a principle similar to the one that would send generations of Islamic suicide bombers to their graves over ensuing decades. Against the United States in World War II, this dictum resulted in a mere 7 percent of all Japanese soldiers surrendering. (After Okinawa was “taken,” American teams spread out back over the previously “conquered” territory killing nearly 9,000 more snipers and holdouts!) Based entirely on what the Japanese saw as American weakness in its affinity for life, the Empire successfully struck at American morale on June 5, 1945, with large-scale attacks on the battleship Mississippi and the cruiser Louisville. Overall, the Okinawa kamikaze campaign sank twelve major ships and damaged four fleet carriers, three light carriers, ten battleships, five cruisers, and more than sixty destroyers, making it the most deadly campaign in the history of the U.S. Navy. Worse, the Japanese high command exaggerated the losses, reinforcing its view that the war could indeed turn on suicide bombing. To a large degree, the safety of the American naval presence in Japanese waters depended on neutralizing this tactic, and planners hoped that few aircraft remained in Japan’s arsenal for homeland defense. Indeed, as military historian Victor Davis Hanson has argued, the Okinawa invasion made the use of the atomic bombs all the more certain, as the United States would seek to avoid a repetition of Okinawa’s fanatical defense writ large all over the Japanese home islands. Kamikazes, paradoxically, provoked the loosening of America’s self-imposed restraint. In subsequent conflicts in the Middle East, jihadists would attempt (unsuccessfully) to use this very tactic to perpetuate a religious war between the West and all Muslims. Most, fortunately, would not buy into the propaganda as far as the Japanese had in 1945.
Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, seemed utterly determined to see the war through to unconditional surrender. Reports of the kamikaze attacks and the horrible toll of taking Okinawa that summer had convinced Truman that nothing less than victory over Japan was acceptable. He was prepared to order the full invasion of the Japanese home islands, even after numerous briefings indicating that the casualties would be high. Public pressure was already beginning to chafe at the terrible losses in the Pacific, and troops who had fought for three hard years in Europe balked at being sent to the Far East. If anything, American intelligence consistently underestimated the cost of taking the Japanese islands had an invasion been required. After the war it was found that Japan had mobilized more than 17 million men, women, and children to repel an invasion, and more than seven thousand planes had been held back for use against the invading fleet. Although the military had estimated upward of a million casualties, the actuality of Japanese preparations probably meant this estimate was low by as much as a factor of five. The so-called casualty myth would be raised by postwar leftist historians to claim that the atomic bombs were employed only to cow the Soviets through “atomic diplomacy.” But even Japanese historians, such as Sadao Asada, and American scholars, such as Richard Frank, have concluded that an invasion would have been horrifically bloody and that if anything, the Americans had seriously underestimated the costs—both to their own forces and to Japanese civilians.124
Three events, taken together, rendered all invasion planning unnecessary. First, the United States had developed the atomic bomb, tested it in July, and Truman gave approval for the Army Air Corps to drop the only two in existence on Japanese cities of strategic importance. On August 6, the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, flattening the city and causing 66,000 to 87,000 deaths. With the military in firm control of the Japanese government, the use of the bomb and the heavy casualties incurred did not seem to alter the government’s steadfast refusal to consider surrender. Indeed, the Japanese war leadership summoned its top nuclear scientist to determine if developing their own bomb was possible. At the same time, Japan protested the weapon (through the Swiss embassy) to the international community as a “disregard of international law by the American government,” and referred to the “new land
-mine used against Hiroshima.”125
Second, on August 8, the USSR declared war on Japan, and immediately broke through the Kwantung Army’s defenses. According to many recent revisionist historians, the Soviet declaration of war constituted a blow every bit as staggering as the first atomic bomb. Yet still Japan did not surrender.
Third, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9. In truth, the United States had a limited number of bombs—two more were scheduled to be dropped on August 13 and 16, and only two more would be ready by December, then there would be a long lull before any more radioactive material could be extracted. Aware of this, Truman sought to make it appear that the United States made the terrible new weapons as easily as it had turned out Liberty Ships or Sherman tanks, and he alluded to exterminating the Japanese people if surrender was not forthcoming. The conventional B-29 raids also continued, with Tokyo experiencing a full day’s worth of bombing on August 13.
Even after these three events, the following day the Japanese government announced it would only accept surrender terms with the understanding that they did not contain any demand that would lessen the prerogatives of the emperor. Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, then prime minister, had to plead with the emperor, contrary to tradition, to intervene directly, which he did (“I was given the opportunity to express my own free will for the first time without violating anyone else’s authority,” he recalled).126 A revolt broke out by diehards unwilling to admit defeat, but they failed to prevent the emperor’s speech on August 15 calling on the Japanese people to “endure the unendurable” being broadcast over the radio.127 After that speech reached the public, many of the military leadership committed suicide, including the war minister. Surviving Japanese officials flew to Manila on August 19 to meet with MacArthur to arrange details. American occupation forces began to land on August 28, and MacArthur arrived two days later. On September 2, at the formal surrender ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri, the Americans put every ship possible in view and flew seemingly endless flights of aircraft overhead. “We wanted them to know who won the war,” said one participant. MacArthur reinforced the point on September 27 when he met Emperor Hirohito—a man he wanted on his side—and yet wore only khakis instead of his ceremonial dress uniform.
A Patriot's History of the Modern World Page 55
