The plan was presented in Washington, D.C., at the Trident conference attended by Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs. It was revised in August 1943 at the Quadrant conference in Quebec, which decided that strongholds such as Rabaul would be “neutralized rather than captured.” A quiet port town in the Australian-mandated territory of New Britain, Rabaul had been seized by Japan in February 1942 and stood as its single most important air base in the Southwest Pacific. Thereafter Nimitz’s offensive would have precedence over MacArthur’s, with the aim of securing the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, Ponape and Truk in the Carolines, and possibly the Palaus as well as the Marianas by the end of 1944.
By late November 1943, at the Eureka conference in Teheran, the plan was revised yet again. Once Germany was defeated, Stalin pledged, the USSR would throw its weight behind the war against Japan, and “by our common front we shall win.” There was little reason for the United States to continue to support Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt decided, in spite of his promises to the generalissimo just days earlier at the Sextant conference in Cairo. Instead of depending on China for air strikes against Japan, the United States could establish bases on Guam, Tinian, and Saipan for the newly developed four-engine B-29 Superfort.
Meanwhile America had launched its Victory Program, the single largest armaments campaign in U.S. history. The objective was to achieve not superiority but supremacy “in any theater of the world war,” the president told Congress in January 1942. B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s would roll out of assembly plants. Factories turned out tanks, trucks, antiaircraft guns, rifles, and munitions. Naval and merchant vessels slid off of dry docks and into the sea. The numbers were impressive. For 1942-43 the goals were 185,000 aircraft, 120,000 tanks, 55,000 antiaircraft guns, and 16 million tons of merchant shipping. Wartime production as a percentage of the gross national product soared from 2 percent in 1939 to 40 percent in 1943. Military procurement surged from $3.6 billion in 1940 to $93.4 billion in 1944, when armaments production peaked. The 96,318 military and naval aircraft manufactured in the United States that year exceeded the combined total produced by Britain, Germany, and Japan.
In Japan, wartime spending surpassed even that of America as a percentage of the GNP by 1944, but Japanese productivity was outdistanced by that of the Americans. In the first sixteen months since Pearl Harbor, the GNP in Japan was nearly stagnant; output was increased through restrictions on consumer expenditures and nonwar investment. Japan’s imports of strategic materials—coal, iron, bauxite, steel, and raw rubber—began to plummet as her merchant shipping capacity was literally sunk. In 1937 Japan purchased 80 to 90 percent of her aviation fuel from the United States, but after 1939 the importation of high-octane gasoline was restricted.
The Axis powers were up against an industrial behemoth that was producing, by 1944, 40 percent of the world’s arms. The Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, had $1 billion earmarked for improvements in radar, sonar, the mass production of blood plasma, DDT, and penicillin and for funding the top-secret Manhattan Project. Nowhere would America’s technological and military might be more devastatingly deployed than in the Pacific.
Increasing U.S. productivity depended on raising revenues and conserving resources. Through eight loan drives, the War Finance Committees (“Enlist for Victory . . . Buy Victory Bonds”) sold an unprecedented $185.7 billion in securities to more than 85 million Americans. Housing for defense workers was subsidized, and food and gasoline were rationed. Women joined the ranks of factory workers, the Red Cross, and the uniformed services such as the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), WACs (Women’s Army Corps), or as Lucy Ferguson did, the USO (United Services Organization).
Millions of Americans volunteered for civilian defense activities, seeded Victory Gardens, collected tin cans, razor blades, and used clothing for salvage campaigns; they were even urged to “Save Waste Fats for Explosives!” Companies and corporations donated advertising space to shill for war bonds, while advertisers managed to tie in almost any product to the war effort with slogans that ranged from the expected to the ridiculous: Plymouth (“U.S.A.’s Strength Is Power to Produce”), Westinghouse (“To Provide for the Common Defense, to Promote the General Welfare”), B. F. Goodrich tires (“In War or Peace First in Rubber”), Parke, Davis (“The little black bag that will help win the war”), Bell System (“A United Nation”), Western Electric (“End of an Enemy”), Alligator raincoats (“Smart America Defends Itself Against Rain!”), G&W blended whiskey (“Symbols of Leadership”), Vaseline Hair Tonic (“Ever try to comb a sailor’s hair?”), Victory Free-Swing Suspenders by Paris (“No Metal Can Touch You”), and Dr. West’s Miracle-Tuft Toothbrush (“America has a job to do . . . keep fit!”).
Hollywood went to war by cranking out movies about the Flying Tigers, Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Navy Seabees, and the Doolittle raid. In 1943 alone no fewer than three movies about Bataan were released—So Proudly We Hail! and Cry “Havoc” (both of which were about the army nurses), as well as Bataan.
“Why aren’t there any supplies?” asks one of the nurses in So Proudly We Hail! “I’ll tell you why. It’s our own fault. . . . Because we believed we were the world. That the United States of America was the whole world. Those outlandish places—Bataan, Corregidor, Mindanao—those aren’t American names. No—they’re just American graveyards.”
Some of the most distinguished films were the combat documentaries—Leland Hayward’s Marines on Tarawa, John Ford’s The Battle of Midway, John Huston’s Report from the Aleutians and San Pietro, William Wyler’s Memphis Belle, and Louis De Rochemont’s Fighting Lady. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall even enlisted Frank Capra to direct war orientation films for U.S. troops. Of the seven movies made under the collective title Why We Fight, only one of them, The Battle of China (1944), was about the war in Asia.
Families of Pacific POWs tried to keep abreast of the news by reading books, magazines, and newspaper articles. In 1942, Alfred A. Knopf published John Hersey’s first book, Men on Bataan, based on his dispatches to Time. In 1943 Viking brought out Clark Lee’s They Call It Pacific. Lucy Ferguson saved a copy of William L. White’s story in Collier’s magazine about John Bulkeley’s MTB Squadron 3 that was excerpted from his book They Were Expendable and made into a movie filmed in the Florida Everglades starring Robert Montgomery and John Wayne, playing characters based on John Bulkeley and Bob Kelly.
The accounts were often sensational, with headlines such as “DEATH WAS PART OF OUR LIFE,” inaccurate, and out of date. But it was hard to be critical of the information at hand when reliable information—about a son, lover, husband, brother—was so scarce. So if you feared the worst, you hoped for the best and read between the lines for consolation. You sought out news from any source, wrote to the parents of other POWs, wove a network of connections to catch a tip or two, and you prayed. Never regular worshipers before the war, the Bookmans began going to Temple Emmanu-El to pray for John’s safe return. They contacted Lewis and Sophie Glusman and visited the Russian-Jewish couple in their austere apartment on the Lower East Side. Worlds apart socially, they suddenly had much in common. They were not alone. Their sons were two of 126 Pacific POWs from New York state.
Sometimes you refused to believe what you heard. The Bookmans were friends of Frank Weil, a founding partner of the New York City law firm Weil, Gotshal. Weil told Samuel he had received a report of John’s death. Weil was president of the National Jewish Welfare Board, which had drawn up guidelines for the burial of Jewish sailors and soldiers in accordance with Jewish custom, and he maintained contact with the Chaplains Division. The Chaplains Division was on the distribution list of memoranda issued by the Bureau of Naval Personnel, but Samuel had received no corroborating information from it.
It was the news no parent could accept. How could he not have felt as if the very ground on which he stood were about to collapse beneath his feet? Samuel contacted the Navy Department immediately and Weil’s information pr
oved, blessedly, incorrect. John Bookman, previously reported missing in action as of May 6, 1942, was alive and a prisoner of war.
The Japanese were determined to slash Allied air and naval power by mounting sustained air attacks against the Solomons and New Guinea. Conceived by Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, Operation 1 was launched by the Japanese Navy Air Force on April 7, 1943, against American forces on Guadalcanal. Allied air defenses inflicted heavy losses, but Yamamoto, lured by exaggerated reports of the plan’s success, targeted Papuan bases next. On April 18 Yamamoto was on his way to southern Bougainville to congratulate his pilots for their bravery. But three days earlier U.S. Navy code-breakers had deciphered a message with his exact itinerary, which enabled American P-38s from Guadalcanal to intercept his plane, killing the architect of Pearl Harbor.
The Allied counteroffensive was accelerated in June 1943 as MacArthur and Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey’s forces moved against Japanese bases in the Solomons, attacking weakly defended islands and skipping more heavily armed garrisons. On November 23, the United States scored its first major victory in the central Pacific when the 2nd Marine Division, using newly introduced LVTs (landing vehicles, tracked), took the fortified island of Tarawa, one of the Gilbert Islands, after a vicious three-day fight at a cost of 1,009 American lives.
In January 1944 Rabaul was neutralized, and then in February Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58 overwhelmed Truk, the Imperial Navy’s own “Gibraltar of the Pacific.” Later that month Admiral Nimitz ordered carrier-based airplanes to launch strikes against the Marianas, 1,000 miles away. Tōjō was right when he warned the Diet in December 1943 that “the real war is just beginning.”
On February 26, 1944, the 200 POWs from Cabanatuan boarded a wood-burning train in Cabanatuan City and shuffled sixty miles down to Manila. After two years of Japanese occupation, the “Pearl of the Orient” looked like a piece of discarded costume jewelry. Storefronts were boarded up. Businesses were closed. Pedicycles and calesa carts took the place of cars and trucks. Except for an occasional Japanese Army vehicle flying the flag of the Rising Sun, dusty Azcarraga Street was bereft of motorized traffic.
They thought they had said goodbye to Bilibid forever, only to find themselves confined for two weeks in the Old Back Building. Nearby were hundreds of POW graves. The new Japanese commanding officer had cut rations by a third. Fifty percent of Bilibid’s patients were now suffering from food-deficiency diseases. Al Smith and Ted Williams were almost completely blind. The Japanese issued “winter clothing” to the POWs from Cabanatuan culled from the old U.S. Navy uniforms stored in Cañacao. Fred was handed Captain Davis’s jacket and overcoat. They then let the men purchase as much food as they could afford from the poorly stocked commissary.
The Manila Tribune was smuggled into Bilibid daily, and POWs on work details at the Pandacan oil refinery had access to a shortwave radio set. On February 21, 1944, the Philippines declared a national emergency. Guerrilla activity was widespread in the provinces, banditry was common, and civil unrest was exacerbated by severe shortages of food and clothing. The Japanese had implemented air raid drills, and foxholes were being dug around the capital. “Can ‘Yanks and tanks’ be far behind?” Hayes wondered.
The news was encouraging to the POWs except for one story: an unmarked Japanese merchant ship carrying Allied prisoners had been torpedoed and sunk west of Corregidor.
Before America entered the war, the International Committee of the Red Cross had appealed to the Allied and Axis powers to ensure the safety of prisoner-of-war transport ships. In February 1942, when significant numbers of Allied and Axis prisoners were in transit in the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters and casualties began to mount, the ICRC renewed its plea. In July 1940 a German U-boat had attacked the Arandora Star as it was on its way from Britain to Canada carrying 712 Italian internees and 478 German internees. More than 600 lives were lost. On August 8, 1942, an Italian vessel, Nino Bixio, was sunk by an Allied submarine while sailing from Benghazi to Italy. Thirty-seven of the 201 Australian POWs on board perished. One month later the British passenger ship Laconia was transporting 800 Italian POWs when it was torpedoed in the South Atlantic by a German U-boat.
The ICRC proposed that such ships be marked for immediate identification, that they have adequate lifesaving equipment on board, and that their cargo be restricted to prisoners of war only, not to soldiers or arms. Transport by sea, the agency recommended, was a last resort to be undertaken only if no other option was available. Britain balked; the vessels would become easy targets. Germany countered that hospital ships, protected under international law, could be used in their place. The Allies suspected they would serve, instead, as a cover for troops and matériel. The Italians shared the Allies’ suspicions. The Japanese maintained a position of stony silence.
In November 1942 the Combined Chiefs of Staff issued a directive pertaining to operations in the Mediterranean: “In view of the extreme importance of attacking enemy shipping and of the relatively small number of casualties to prisoners of war so caused, no prohibition should be placed at present” that would preclude attacking enemy ships. Seven weeks earlier more than 842 Allied POWs had been lost in the East China Sea when the USS Grouper torpedoed the Lisbon Maru while it was on its way from Hong Kong to Shanghai. As far as the Combined Chiefs were concerned, the plight of POWs in the Pacific wasn’t even a consideration. Submarine warfare would continue as it had since Pearl Harbor, when Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, issued the order: “Execute Unrestricted Air and Submarine Warfare against Japan.” The objective was twofold: to destroy the Imperial Japanese Navy and to liquidate the merchant fleet in order to sever Japan’s lifelines for raw materials. The strategic advantage was deemed more important than the prospect of Allied POW deaths. With no sea lanes to protect them from becoming targets of the U.S. Navy’s air force, fleet submarines cruising at a depth of 125 feet or less were themselves at risk, even though they were armed with a radar set—the SJ—designed specifically to detect aircraft.
Japanese ship movements, both merchant and navy, were followed by the Fleet Radio Unit, Pacific, in Pearl Harbor (FRUPAC) and in Melbourne, Australia (FRUMEL). FRUMEL comprised the old CAST codebreaking unit from Corregidor. As the U.S. Navy’s cryptological units, they intercepted, decrypted, and processed coded radio messages from the Japanese Navy. The top-secret intelligence they gathered was known as ULTRA, which referred also to enciphered Axis army communications that had been broken into by cryptanalysts. ULTRA was instrumental in revealing Admiral Yamamoto’s objectives at Midway in June 1942, and it had enabled South Pacific cryptanalysts to decipher the admiral’s ill-fated flight plan to southern Bougainville on April 18, 1943.
U.S. Navy cryptanalysts had penetrated the main Japanese naval operational code, JN-25, more than a year before Pearl Harbor. The Ship Movement Code (SM) was a primary source of information on ship loadings, army units by name, designation, the order of battle, and the number of troops at a given moment. The merchant or “maru” code was “a lower level code” and easier to break and read than JN-25. Frequently, messages were intercepted from a Japanese “port director” who would route a ship or convoy and advise the port of arrival.
“The Japanese were meticulous about giving noontime positions of merchant ships,” said Donald Showers, who was deputy chief of the estimate section of FRUPAC in 1944. “You could plot that and figure out exactly where a ship was going to be every twenty-four hours. They were good navigators, and this was very reliable information for submarines. If we knew submarines were operating in assigned patrol areas, we’d convey latitude and longitude so they could intercept the ship or convoy.”
Admiral Nimitz’s headquarters in Pearl Harbor received the information on a regular basis. The operations officer for Rear Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Jr., commander of the Submarines Pacific Fleet (ComSubPac) visited FRUPAC’s offices daily to sift through their reports. Time-sensitive material could be con
veyed to fleets at sea in an hour or less, if the ship had a cryptological system that could intercept and decipher FRUPAC’s messages.
To prevent ULTRA data from being intercepted by friendly surface vessels, naval cryptographers devised a special code that only submariners could “copy” and that only the submarine communications officer could decode. Only the captain, executive officer, and those with high-security clearance were allowed to read such messages, which were then burned. Not even submarine skippers knew the real source of ULTRA intelligence.
The Australia-based submarines in Perth (ComSubSoWestPac), and later Brisbane, answered not to Nimitz, but ultimately to MacArthur. And if MacArthur disagreed with a piece of intelligence, noted Showers, “he chose to ignore it.” In spite of the divided command structure, “ULTRA tip-off messages,” according to William Tuohy, “led to almost half the sinkings of Japanese ships claimed by submarines.”
The Japan-Truk shipping lanes and the narrow Luzon Strait, where Japanese convoy routes converged, became favorite targets of American submariners. Inspired by the success of German U-boats who attacked Atlantic convoys with concentrated force, ComSubPac began to experiment with three-boat “wolf packs” in September 1943, as opposed to the “lone wolf” patrols that were conducted in the Central Pacific in the previous twelve months. The results were impressive. In February 1944 American submarines attacked fifty-four Japanese merchant vessels exceeding 500 tons apiece, sending 256,797 tons of shipping to the bottom of the sea.
On February 25, the day before the medical contingent departed Cabanatuan for Manila, a Japanese convoy was targeted by two U.S. submarines, the USS Raton and the USS Rasher. The ships were on their way from Java to Ambon. On intelligence from ULTRA, Lieutenant Commander Willard R. Laughon of the Rasher opened fire on the 6,500-ton Tango Maru with four torpedoes, three of which exploded on impact. Then she prowled an hour and a half before ambushing the Rysei Maru. It was a spectacular kill; the vessel sank in just six minutes. Laughon radioed Lieutenant Commander James W. Davis of the Raton to apologize for “hogging the show.” The Rysei Maru was carrying 4,998 Japanese soldiers. What Laughon didn’t realize was that the Tango Maru had 3,500 POWs on board, 3,000 of whom died.
Conduct Under Fire Page 39
