D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  RABAUL

  While this campaign of fog and ice was being fought, General Douglas MacArthur was advancing across the long north coast of New Guinea, an island twice the size of France. At the same time, Bull Halsey’s South Pacific Fleet, with Marine and Army amphibious troops, was moving up the long ladder of the Solomons—through New Georgia, Rendova, Munda, and Vella Lavella—toward the northern-most island, Bougainville. The objective of this coordinated offensive, code-named Cartwheel, was the Japanese air and naval bastion at Rabaul, at the northeastern tip of New Britain, just northwest of Bougainville.

  In early March 1945, the Japanese had tried to stop MacArthur by landing 7,000 troops from Rabaul on New Guinea’s northeastern coast. Land-based American and Australian bombers from George Kenney’s Fifth Air Force swooped in at mast-high level, and in the three-day Battle of the Bismarck Sea sank four Japanese destroyers and all the transports. Three thousand troops drowned or were machine-gunned in the water by PT boats and fighter planes, a reprisal, the men said, for similar atrocities by the enemy. MacArthur would later call this the “decisive aerial engagement” in his theater of operations.3

  Even the air war was an escalating battle of attrition, one that Japan, with its smaller economy, could not possibly win. In the first twenty-one months of the war in the South Pacific, the Japanese navy lost 26,000 warplanes, almost a third of its total force, along with thousands of exquisitely trained pilots. American losses were also heavy, but the U.S. was replacing its fliers and planes at a far quicker rate, and doubling and tripling its forces in the region.4 With the Allies enjoying air superiority, Japanese hopes of holding Papua, the southeastern part of New Guinea, ended. The following month Admiral Yamamoto launched a last-ditch air attack on American shipping and air bases in the area, but his planes did little damage. In an effort to rally his pilots, the admiral flew to inspect air bases in the Solomons. The Americans broke the Japanese code, and under orders straight from Nimitz ambushed the plane from the sky, sending it spinning and burning into the jungle. Admiral Meneichi Koga—a vastly inferior military strategist—replaced Yamamoto as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet.

  JUNGLE WARFARE, SOUTHEAST ASIA (USMC).

  By mid-September, MacArthur’s troops had retaken the small ports of Lae and Salamaua, just north of Buna, battling boiling heat, jungle leeches, tropical ulcers, and starving and desperate enemy troops. MacArthur was now nearly halfway up the long northern coast of New Guinea, with the Philippines as his supreme objective. He then swung north and west, landing the 1st Marine Division, veterans of Guadalcanal, in the rain-soaked jungles of Cape Gloucester, at the western tip of New Britain, on the day after Christmas. One month later the Marines seized the airfield there. With that and Halsey’s establishment of airfields in the contested swamps of Bougainville the previous November, Rabaul was caught in the deadly American pincer. Bombers from Bougainville and Cape Gloucester pounded Rabaul relentlessly, destroying most of the planes the Japanese had sent to hold on to its South Pacific Gibraltar. With 100,000 of the Emperor’s infantrymen, Rabaul prepared for an invasion, the troops vowing to die in a final fight. They waited for the Americans, but the Americans never came and this proud and embittered Imperial Guard was forced to live out the entire war in humiliation on the bypassed island fortress.

  The American high command decided there was no need to try to take Rabaul in a costly offensive; it had been outflanked and neutralized. As Samuel Eliot Morison noted: “Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa would have faded to pale pink in comparison with the blood which would have flowed if the Allies had attempted an assault on Fortress Rabaul.”5

  At first, MacArthur angrily protested the decision to avoid Rabaul, but this tactic, first employed by Halsey in the Solomons, would become his signature strategy in the South Pacific, a strategy he later claimed to have invented. Instead of hitting Japanese strongholds, he flew over them, letting them “die on the vine,” saving lives and time. Beginning in the spring of 1944, his forces started that series of leaps along the New Guinea coast—Wewak, Hollandia, Biak—that eventually brought them within striking distance of the Philippines. This “leapfrogging” movement was one of the most brilliantly conceived offensives of the war, conducted without a major carrier force, with a small air arm, and only a minimal number of divisions. “If you force the Japs into a corner,” MacArthur explained his thinking to a reporter, “they’ll fight viciously to the death. They can live a long time on a little rice and few supplies. Flank them, give them a line of retreat even though it may lead nowhere and you have them.”6

  A NAVY CORPSMAN ADMINISTERS BLOOD PLASMA TO A BADLY INJURED MARINE ON CAPE GLOUCESTER, NEW BRITAIN (NA).

  After the war, a high Japanese military official declared that Mac-Arthur’s island hopping “was the type of strategy we hated most.” MacArthur, he said, “with minimum losses, attacked and seized a relatively weak area, constructed airfields and then proceeded to cut the supply lines to [our] troops in that area…. Our strongholds were gradually starved out. The Japanese Army preferred direct [frontal] assault, after the German fashion, but the Americans flowed into our weaker points and submerged us, just as water seeks the weakest entry to sink a ship. We respected this type of strategy … because it gained the most while losing the least.”7 For every one of his men that was killed, MacArthur killed ten Japanese.

  TWO ROADS TO TOKYO

  New Guinea opened one road to Tokyo. Another was through the vast Central Pacific—the Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana islands. Clearing this tremendous bluewater highway would be the job of the United States Navy, with Marine and Army ground forces. MacArthur pleaded for supreme command of the Pacific theater and a single offensive, led by the Army, along the line he had been pursuing. But the Navy was unwilling to risk its big carriers in the treacherous shoals of New Guinea, where they would be exposed to land-based bombers; and Admirals King and Nimitz wanted the war in the Central Pacific to be an entirely Navy affair. Roosevelt, in consultation with his Joint Chiefs of Staff,* made the final decision: the offensive against Japan would be twin-pronged and simultaneous, with two separate commanders. MacArthur would continue his drive toward the Philippines while Nimitz cut across the Central Pacific, capturing strategically important islands all the way to the innermost reaches of the enemy’s defensive system. There, airstrips would be built to bomb Japan, and submarine bases would be carved out of coral to house the underwater fleets that would be sent out to decimate enemy shipping, with the aim of cutting off Japan from its resource-rich colonies in the South Pacific. It was a cumbersome command structure and strategy, a compromise between two insistent prima donnas—King and MacArthur—but it turned out to be surprisingly effective. It forced the overextended Japanese to repulse two concurrent, though independent, offensives, both of them pressed without cease by two of the most aggressive commanders of the war, MacArthur and Nimitz.

  The Japanese were rendered more vulnerable to this two-pronged strategy by the very scope and magnitude of their stunning opening offensive. In 1942, the empire’s defensive perimeter extended 14,200 miles, a distance equal to over one half the earth’s circumference. This made it virtually impossible for the fuel-starved Imperial Navy to sufficiently reinforce or supply the nation’s distant garrisons or prevent American submarines and planes from disrupting and eventually severing the empire’s far-flung supply lines, along with its economic lifeline to the oil, rubber, rice, and metals of the South Pacific.8

  Both offensives, each conducted in an area larger than the European and Mediterranean theaters combined, would employ amphibious warfare, but with a difference. Distances between neighboring islands were not nearly as great in the Southwest Pacific as they were in the Central Pacific. Employing excellent intelligence, MacArthur’s Seventh Amphibious Force, commanded by Rear Admiral Daniel “Uncle Dan” Barbey, the most accomplished amphibious naval commander of the war, preferred surprise landings, usually at night, using newly developed landing craft to fer
ry troops and heavy armor from shore to shore, with a small fleet of PT boats and destroyers covering the sea lanes and Kenney’s land-based planes providing air support. It was a march of the airfields. Once MacArthur and Halsey captured positions in the Solomons or New Guinea, their engineers would cut an airstrip out of tangled jungle and the troops would move under an umbrella of air cover to the next objective. This was triphibious warfare—ground, air, and sea—and it revolutionized the way wars were fought.

  MacArthur would make headlines in the American press by invidiously comparing the “island hopping” strategy of Navy and Marine commanders in the Central Pacific—the application of “direct frontal pressure, with the consequent heavy casualties”—with his own “hit ’em where they ain’t, let ’em die on the vine” strategy.9 But the geographic and strategic situation in the Central Pacific was vastly different than in MacArthur’s theater.

  Nimitz and the Marines were also committed to triphibious warfare but they would conduct it in their own way in the wide-open spaces of the Central Pacific, where distances between enemy strongholds were daunting. Great carrier fleets would make these giant leaps, landing troops at daybreak on D-Day, on small, hotly defended islands, where they expected to be met, head-on, at the water’s edge. These would be high-risk Storm Landings, usually by Marines, who would apply maximum killing power on a concentrated objective, getting in and out as fast as possible. There would be none of the deliberateness of MacArthur’s big-unit jungle campaigns, which were conducted either against large land areas with long coastlines, like New Guinea, and later, the Philippines, or closely grouped islands, like the Solomons, where there was room for surprise and tactical feints, opportunities to “hit ’em where they ain’t.” As a result, almost all of the Allied amphibious landings in the South Pacific were either unopposed or lightly contested; the big and unbelievably brutal battles occurred off the beaches, in the dense, miasmic jungles.10

  SOLDIERS OF THE ARMY’S 27TH INFANTRY DIVISION ATTACK A BEACH ON MAKIN ATOLL, GILBERT ISLANDS (NA).

  The geography of the Central Pacific made amphibious assault almost inevitable.11 Most of the islands the Americans attacked were too small and isolated for the invading forces to use deception or maneuver. And the assault armadas were so enormous and had to travel such great distances that it was relatively easy for the enemy to track them and read their intent. The only chance of prevailing was to go in straight ahead behind overwhelming naval and air firepower.

  The small size of these Central Pacific islands was actually a source of enemy strength. Iwo Jima, as Admiral Nimitz pointed out, “had no extensive coast line affording to the attackers a choice of numerous landing points, where the invading troops would meet little opposition.”12 In an attack against a large landmass, such as New Guinea or Normandy, the defender, not knowing where the landing force will strike, and not being strong enough to stoutly defend all likely landing beaches, has to leave the coast relatively lightly defended and concentrate most of his forces at a strategic location from which they can be moved against the invader, once the main landing place has been located. The attacker can choose the place where he wants to land and achieve tactical surprise, or hit the enemy in a spot where he is weakest.

  It was different with assaults on small, heavily defended islands, the most difficult of all amphibious operations. As Marine General Vandegrift explained to a United States senator who was concerned about the high casualties the Marines began to suffer in the Central Pacific in late 1943, “The defender can readily diagnose the point of attack, and due to the small distances involved, can … concentrate his forces against any landing attempt … [and] pour concentrated fire against the attacker at the moment when … comparatively helpless and exposed, the attacking troops are approaching the beach in small craft.”

  Small coral islands derived additional strength from their surrounding reefs. Until the Navy, in 1944, was able to develop amphibious tractors in sufficient numbers and with sufficient firepower to surmount these reefs without taking heavy losses, Marines were forced to disembark from landing craft a good distance offshore and wade in against lethal fire. Losses in such operations were always high, Vandegrift explained, because “there are no foxholes offshore.”13

  Many of these small, widely separated islands could not be avoided or “leapfrogged.” They had to be taken to provide air, naval, and supply bases to support the next island campaign, hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away. Even before the fighting ended, the Seabees, naval construction battalions, would begin building airfields, submarine pens, port facilities, roads, and hospitals—an entire island infrastructure garrisoned by support troops, including small numbers of African-American Marines. After rest and recuperation, the reassembled strike force would head out for the next Storm Landing.

  In the Central Pacific—a Navy-run war—speed was everything, every island assault bringing the Americans closer to Japanese cities to slaughter from the air and shipping lanes to strangle.

  These were more than amphibious invasions. They were amphibious assaults, operations in which the invasion was an assault from start to finish.14 And the Marine Corps was superbly qualified to carry them out. Beginning in the years immediately after World War I, Marine Corps planners had begun searching for a unique mission for the Corps to guarantee its continued existence at a time when Army commanders were claiming that their own troops could easily take over the redundant responsibilities of the Marines. This provoked the Marines, led by Major General Holland “Howlin Mad” Smith, a former Alabama attorney and a combat veteran of World War I, to fashion a new doctrine of warfare: ship-to-shore assaults against heavily defended enemy islands.

  As early as the 1920s, the United States Navy had expected to fight the next war in the Central Pacific, following a surprise Japanese attack on one of America’s island outposts, most likely the Philippines. The Navy’s War Plan Orange envisioned the American fleet steaming across the Central Pacific toward the Japanese home islands and bringing on a decisive battle with the Imperial Navy. In this, the Marines saw an opportunity. To navigate the extreme distances of the Central Pacific, the Navy would need island bases currently held by the Japanese. The Marine Corps proposed to invade and secure these farflung garrisons, using new amphibious tactics it had begun to develop in the 1930s.

  “To the minds of many interwar military leaders, the marines might as well have proposed to land on the moon,” writes historian Ronald H. Spector.15 While daylight assaults from the sea against fortified beaches were as old as organized warfare, critics argued that modern land-based and air weapons made them unfeasible—almost suicidal. British and French forces had attempted such a landing in 1915 at Gallipoli, in the Dardanelles, to force Turkey out of the war. But the miserably trained, poorly led troops—most of them Australians—were defeated on the beach-head, a military fiasco that almost ended the career of the invasion’s architect. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.

  But Marine Corps visonaries, beginning with Major Earl H. “Pete” Ellis, one of the first to study the operational necessities of a war against Japan, were confident that seaborne assaults against heavily defended beachheads were possible with careful logistical planning, aircraft and submarine reconnaissance, massive air and naval bombardment, close and continuous air support, and new landing craft to put men and arms on the beaches suddenly and in overmastering force. The Marines made pioneering contributions to the technology as well as the theory of amphibious warfare, encouraging the development and mass production of shallow draft Higgins boats (LCVPs, Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel) as well as amphibian tractors (LVTs, Landing Vehicle, Tracked) capable of carrying assault troops over the treacherous coral reefs that rimmed the atolls of the Central Pacific.* The Army introduced its own amphibian truck, the DUKW, nicknamed “Duck.” These ungainly-looking six wheeled workhorses carried supplies, artillery, and ammunition from ship to shore, to both Marines and Army infantry, beginning with the invasion of Kwajalein
in early 1944. In most Central Pacific operations, amphibian tractors and DUKWs were carried to their launching sites in the bellies of huge, shallow draft Landing Ship Tanks (LSTs), where they entered the water through clamlike bow doors. Although the Japanese began the war far ahead of the Americans in landing craft design, these and at least a dozen other assault vehicles helped make the U.S. Marine Corps, by 1944, the world’s most feared amphibian warriors. By then they were what Pete Ellis, writing in 1921, had hoped they would become—not just “skilled infantry men and jungle men” but “skilled water men” as well.16

  MARINE RAIDERS GATHER IN FRONT OF A JAPANESE DUGOUT ON BOUGAINVILLE, SOLOMON ISLANDS (NA).

  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States Marine Corps, hamstrung by budgetary restrictions, lacked both the manpower and the landing craft to conduct ambitious amphibious operations. Guadalcanal had been aptly named Operation Shoestring. By late 1943, however, with as many American fighting men—Army, Navy, and Marines—deployed against Japan as against Germany, the Marine Corps had the men, equipment, and experience to begin an epic island offensive against history’s greatest oceanic empire. And thanks to prescient, planners at its Quantico, Virginia, training and strategic planning facility, it knew how to do the job. After the war, General Alexander Vandegrift, then the Marine Corps Commandant, claimed that the Marine Corps’ greatest contribution to victory was “doctrinal … The basic amphibious doctrines which carried Allied troops over every beach head of World War II had been,” he said, “largely shaped—often in the face of uninterested or doubting military orthodoxy—by U.S. Marines.”17