D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  Tenney picks up the story:

  WE CONTINUED MARCHING INTO THE CENTER of town, and when nighttime finally came we were herded into a large warehouse…. We were so tightly packed together that we sprawled on each other. When one of us had to urinate, he just did it in his pants, knowing that the following day the heat from the sun would dry them out. Those who had to defecate found their way back to one of the corners of the building and did it there. That night, the human waste covering the floor from those who had dysentery caused many others to contract this killing disease.

  The stench, the sounds of dying men, and the whines and groans of those too sick to move to the back of the building had become so unbearable that I put small pieces of cloth into my ears in a feeble attempt to drown out some of the noise. Nothing could be done about the smell…. The Japenese guards, also unable to bear the horrible smell, closed the doors to the warehouse, put a padlock on them, and kept watch from outside.

  About twenty-five men died in the warehouse that night. In the morning their bodies were tossed like garbage into a field behind the building.

  Tenney:

  ON THAT FIFTH DAY OF THE march, I witnessed one of the most sadistic and inhumane incidents on the entire march…. We had just stopped for a brief rest while waiting for another group to catch up with us. When the other group finally arrived, the guard ordered us to stand up and start walking. One of the men had a very bad case of malaria and had barely made it to the rest area. He was burning up with fever and severely disoriented. When ordered to stand up, he could not do it. Without a minute’s hesitation, the guard hit him over the head with the butt of his gun, knocked him down to the ground, and then called for two nearby prisoners to start digging a hole to bury the fallen prisoner. The two men started digging, and when the hole was about a foot deep, the guard ordered the two men to place the sick man in the hole and bury him alive. The two men shook their heads; they could not do that….

  Without warning … the guard shot the bigger of the two prisoners. He then pulled two more men from the line and ordered them to dig another hole to bury the murdered man. The Japanese guard got his point across. They dug the second hole, placed the two bodies in the holes, and threw dirt over them. The first man, still alive, started screaming as the dirt was thrown on him.

  As the men trudged on like zombies, twelve hours a day for several more days, they began to spot headless corpses in the roadside ditches. One American started counting heads. At twenty-seven, one head per mile, he stopped counting because what he was doing was making him crazy.

  Lester Tenney witnessed one of these beheadings:

  AT ONE POINT ON … THE MARCH, we saw an American soldier kneeling in front of a Japanese officer. The officer had his samurai sword out of the scabbard…. Up went the blade, then with a great artistry and a loud “Banzai,” the officer brought the blade down. We heard a dull thud, and the American was decapitated. The Japanese officer then kicked his body … over into the field, and all of the Japanese soldiers laughed and walked away. As I witnessed this tragedy and as the sword came down, my body twitched, and I clasped my hands in front of me, as if in prayer. I could hardly breathe.

  Later, Tenney said: “What made the beheading especially sickening was that the man’s body shook and twitched well after he was dead.”69

  Tenney and his fellow prisoners struggled on for several more days until, barely able to stand, they were ordered to make a double-time march to the little city of San Fernando. There they were crammed into small railway boxcars used for hauling animals and taken on a five-hour ride to Capas, near their final destination, the barbed wire compound of Camp O’Donnell. In the steaming boxcars, some men couldn’t breathe and died standing up. There was no room to fall down.

  The exact numbers are lost to history, but about 750 Americans and as many as 5,000 Filipinos died on the march. Those that made it, said an American doctor who survived, did it “on the marrow of their bones.”70

  “If I had to do it all over again, I would commit suicide,” said Kermit Lay, fifty years later.71

  The dying did not stop at Camp O’Donnell. Over 16,000 prisoners, 1,600 of them Americans, would die in this loathsome compound in the next two months. As Tenney relates:

  THE MEN WERE DYING AT A rate of 100 and 200 a day. Malaria was a big killer and dysentery was horrible. It was so bad that men would go to sleep next to a slit trench so that if they had to defecate they would just roll over.

  And when they died, we had to bury these men, which meant we had to go in a field and dig a hole in marshy soil. If you dug a hole too deep, water would come up and make the dead man float. So you had to take pieces of bamboo and hold the man down with them while you threw dirt on the body.

  Let me tell you this. When a man said there’s no use in going on any longer, he died. When he said there’s no sense in waiting because the Americans are not coming, he died. The men who had positive attitudes, the men who said, “I know I’m going home,” are the ones who came home.72

  After the war, Lester Tenney began to have nightmares that never went away. They occurred with acute intensity when, as a college professor, he started writing his memoirs. He had thought he had put it behind him, but his deep hatred of the Japanese returned. In time, however, he came to consider hating “as a sickness.” Today, he says he cannot blame an entire people for what happened to him during the war. The only hatred he still harbors “is for those who beat me.”73

  Kermit Lay felt differently. “I hate the Japanese. I won’t talk to them, and I won’t buy their products. It’s just the way it is.”74

  WAKE ISLAND

  Between Hawaii and the Philippines lay the three small but strategically important islands of Midway, Wake, and Guam. To control the Pacific west of Hawaii, Japan had to capture these outposts.

  At 8:45 A.M. on December 8 (the calendar is one day ahead west of the International Date Line), eighteen Japanese bombers smashed the military installations on Guam. The small garrison of Navy personnel and Marines had neither antiaircraft batteries nor coastal defense guns. Their few planes were quickly put out of action. The first landing came before dawn on the 10th, and within a few hours all resistance had been overcome.

  The defense of Wake is one of the heroic chapters of American history. A strategically important air base only 600 miles north of Japanese naval and air power in the Marshall Islands, Wake was lightly defended by a Marine fighter squadron equipped with a dozen new Grumman F4F Wildcats, and by a Marine Defense Battalion of about 450 men under Major James P. S. Devereux. But when the Japanese tried to land an “abominably commanded” invasion force on December 11, they were repulsed by devastating, close-range artillery fire and by the four Wildcat fighters that had not been knocked out of action in the initial bombing.75 Wake’s defenders sank or severely damaged six Japanese ships, causing the humiliated Japanese commander to call off the landing.

  Back in the United States, headlines blared MARINES HOLD WAKE, and the Washington Post compared the desperate defense of the island to the last stand at the Alamo.

  The Japanese returned on December 23, this time with six heavy cruisers and two carriers from Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor strike force. Carrier-based bombers knocked out the coastal gun emplacements that had chewed up the first invasion fleet, and land-based bombers from Kwajalein, in the Marshalls, pulverized the island. A naval relief force was assembled at Pearl Harbor and sent to sea, but it was recalled when word came in that the Japanese had already landed troops on Wake. One of the last radio messages from the island defenders was a grim piece of understatement: “Urgent! Enemy on island. The issue is in doubt.”

  Without Navy support and with only one functional searchlight, the outnumbered Marines were helpless to stop a landing force of over 1,000 Japanese, which came in under the cover of night. After holding on for thirty hours in furious fighting, the garrison surrendered to avoid a senseless slaughter. Major Devereux walked out to meet the enemy with a white flag tied to a
mop pole. Prisoners were taken to Shanghai. A hundred or so civilian construction workers were kept on Wake to rebuild it. All were later executed.

  Midway was also attacked the day Pearl Harbor was hit, but its shore installations were so effective that the small task force assigned to the job turned and ran. The big fight for Midway would occur later.

  SINGAPORE

  The attack on the American islands in the Pacific was part of a coordinated assault that targeted British and Dutch outposts in Southeast Asia.

  Hong Kong was the first to fall. This great naval base formed, with Singapore and Manila, a triangle of Anglo-American power in the Pacific. As early as 1940, however, Japanese occupation of nearby Canton had made it all but indefensible. The Japanese attacked on December 8, 1941, and for two weeks the fabled city was subjected to continuous bombardment from land and air. The British garrison might have stood up to this, but the Japanese cut off the water supply. Confronted with the responsibility for the suffering or death of thousands of civilian inhabitants, the British commander, Sir Mark Young, surrendered on Christmas Day.

  Next came Penang in Malaya, then Singapore. Wearing sneakers and moving by foot and bicycle, with small bags of rice wrapped around their necks, 70,000 Japanese troops under General Tomoyuki Yamashita, one of the great commanders of the war, swept through 580 miles of rice fields, swamps, and rubber forests, crossed the Straits of Johore, and laid siege to the island city, which was packed with fleeing refugees. Running dangerously low on supplies and water, and with panic spreading through the city, British commander Sir Arthur Percival surrendered over 130,000 soldiers and internees to an army about half the size of his force.

  Legend has it that Singapore’s defenses “faced the wrong way,” toward the sea. But that is not true. The guns faced the mainland, but were armed with the wrong ammunition, shells unsuited for battle against ground troops.

  The capture of Singapore opened the way to the Dutch East Indies and was as important a victory for the Japanese army as Pearl Harbor was for the Imperial Navy.

  THE DUTCH EAST INDIES

  The Dutch East Indies was a vast archipelago that stretched over 3,000 miles from Malaya to the Solomons and included Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Celebes, New Guinea, New Britain, and thousands of smaller islands. Here was the storehouse of oil, rubber, timber, rice, and metal production that had driven Japan towards war; and from here it could threaten Australia, only 300 miles to the south.

  From bases in Indochina, the Japanese swept down into the East Indies in December 1941. The outgunned Allies could put up almost no resistance to this inexorable land and sea blitz, speedier and on a scale vaster than anything Hitler had imagined. Two awesome Japanese attack forces “slithered into the Netherlands East Indies like the arms of two giant octopi,” writes Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, who served on eleven different ships during the war and wrote a fifteen-volume history of American naval operators in World War II. “The Western octopus worked down the South China Sea to North Borneo and Sumatra; the Eastern to East Borneo, the Celebes, Ambon, Timor and Bali. Aircraft would pound down a beachhead, amphibious forces would then move in and activate another airfield and soften up the next objective for invasion.”76

  Here off the coast of Borneo, the U.S. Navy fought its first surface engagement of the Pacific war, a battle for control of that island’s tremendous petroleum wells and refineries. It took place on the night of January 23-24, 1942, in magnificent Balikpapan Bay, one of the busiest oil ports of Asia. The Americans drew first blood. When the Japanese landed an amphibious force on the south side of the bay, four blacked-out World War I destroyers, known as “cans” to their crews, slipped through the darkness and surprised a dozen enemy troop transports that were in the midst of unloading, sinking four of them, along with a patrol craft. Had they not had defective torpedoes, they would have sunk more. Shaking off their losses, the Japanese landed marines and took the island, chasing into the jungle the workers of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group who had remained behind to set fire to the wells. Of the seventy-five workers, only thirty-five survived the malarial jungle, Japanese firing squads, and prison camps.77

  The Battle of the Java Sea was the last desperate effort to save the sprawling archipelago. Admiral K. W. F. Doorman of the Dutch navy was in command of an Allied force of five cruisers and about a dozen destroyers when, on February 27, it ran into two enemy flotillas, far superior both in numbers and firepower to his fleet. In this, the biggest surface naval battle since the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the Japanese annihilated their opponent and established their supremacy in the South Pacific.

  Now there was nothing to stop the Japanese conquest of Java. From Sumatra and Borneo, 100,000 troops invaded the all but defenseless island. On March 9, the Dutch East Indies surrendered. A day earlier, the Japanese had landed troops on the north and east coast of New Guinea, at the desolate but strategically valuable jungle outposts of Lae and Salamaua.

  Moving southward from bases in the Mariana and Caroline islands, Imperial forces occupied the Admiralty Islands, the Northern Solomons, and the Bismarck Archipelago, where they smashed a small but fiercely courageous Australian garrison and built their most formidable military base in the South Pacific at Rabaul, at the northern end of the island of New Britain. Blessed with a magnificent natural harbor, Rabaul is within easy reach by sea or air of New Guinea and the entire Solomon chain, stretching southward to a godforsaken disease pit called Guadalcanal. From fortress Rabaul, all major Japanese operations in the area would be launched and supported.

  These easy conquests confirmed Japan’s view of the capitalist West as decadent and hopelessly weakened by materialism, and spawned a dangerous spirit of overconfidence. For a time, it looked like Australia would be the next target, and it was vulnerable, for some its best combat forces were fighting with the British in North Africa. Unknown to the Allies, however, the Japanese had no intention of invading Australia. Their aim was to establish bases off Australia’s northern coast in order to cut the American supply line to the island continent. The Japanese correctly saw Australia for what it became, a Pacific England, the staging area and initiating point for an immense Allied counteroffensive. Accordingly, aside from bombing the northern port of Darwin, their major military effort against the island continent was to build air bases in the South Pacific to sever its supply lines to Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.

  Allied leaders feared that the victory-drunk Japanese would drive westward into the Indian Ocean, conquer India at a time when anti-colonial sentiment there was running high, and link up with Axis forces fighting in the Mideast and the Mediterranean. But Hitler and Mussolini thought they could handle the British in that theater without Japanese help, and the Japanese army wanted to keep the burden of its forces in China and Manchuria to subdue the Chinese and prepare for a possible war with Russia. This would be a fight to take new territory and consolidate old land grabs on Russia’s mineral-rich northeastern border. The Japanese were counting on the Germans to crush Soviet resistance in their great summer offensive of 1942, opening up Russia for an invasion from the east. But the Red Army held fast, and the Chinese proved impossible to subdue, so a great part of the Japanese army remained in China for the duration of the war. This made the retaking of the Pacific, horrible though it was, a less bloody affair than it might have been. If Japan and Germany had cooperated as closely as the United States and Britain, the war would have been indefinitely prolonged. But the two Axis allies fervently mistrusted each other and failed to launch a single joint offensive.78

  THE DOOLITTLE RAID

  At this low point in the war, with Allied forces in the Pacific either defeated or on the defensive everywhere, American naval and air power delivered several critical counterpunches.

  In January 1942, Vice Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, one of the first American heroes of the war, had sent his carriers against Japanese positions in the Marshall Islands, sinking seventeen ships and destroying forty or fif
ty planes. Three weeks later the carrier Enterprise led a force that bombarded Wake Island, and Halsey’s carrier planes hit enemy bases on the north coast of New Guinea. Then, on April 18, 1942, Halsey’s task force of Enterprise and Hornet stunned the Japanese by launching a bombing strike on Tokyo.

  The attack had been planned by President Roosevelt and his top naval advisors and was intended to revive sinking home front morale. It was one of the great gambles of the war.

  Since American aircraft carriers were unable to get close enough to Japan to send out their short-range bombers, Navy planners decided to load the deck of a carrier with mid-range Army bombers, even though planes this large had never flown from a carrier in warfare. In complete secrecy, volunteer pilots were trained at a Florida base to take off at precariously short distances. The flight decks of carriers were too short for retrieval; the bombers would have to fly 1,100 additional miles beyond Japan, to friendly bases in China. Command of the mission was given to Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, “King of the Sky,” a racing pilot known for his daredevil aerial stunts, but also for his deep knowledge of aviation (he held a doctorate from MIT in aeronautical engineering).

  In April, the carrier Hornet steamed toward Japan with sixteen twin-engine B-25s on its deck, each carrying three 500-pound bombs and one incendiary bomb. None of the pilots had ever taken off from the deck of a carrier, and the men did not learn their target was Tokyo until they were far out to sea. When it was announced over the ship’s bullhorn—“Now hear this. Now hear this. This force is bound for Tokyo”—the sailors and airmen cheered wildly. This would be payback for Pearl Harbor.

  TOKYO BOUND. A B-25 CLIMBING OFF THE DECK OF THE USS HORNET, APRIL 18, 1942, AS PART OF THE DOOLITTLE MISSION TO BOMB TOKYO (NA).