All Hell Let Loose (92 page)

After almost three years of defeat in the east, the victors’ morale soared. Although a difficult campaign lay ahead in 1945, to reoccupy Burma at the end of a long, long supply line, Slim knew he had cracked the spine of the Japanese army in South-East Asia, staking his claim to be recognised as the ablest, as well as best-loved, British field commander of the war. As for the Japanese, Mutaguchi had never anticipated that he could conquer India, but cherished hopes that the spectacle of the ‘Indian National Army’ attacking the British might stimulate a general revolt against the Raj. Instead, the INA’s performance discredited it as a fighting force. Victory in Assam and Slim’s subsequent advance into Burma temporarily reasserted British authority in India. While Indian popular enthusiasm for independence remained undiminished, strikes and street violence receded.

The critical battles of 1944 took place much further east. That summer, a huge accession of resources to the Pacific theatre, notably warships and planes, enabled America to close the ring on Japan. While men continued to die and ships to sink, US dominance changed the character of the struggle. Petty Officer Roger Bond of the carrier
Saratoga
said, ‘If you went out to the Pacific after … January of 1944, you had a completely different experience and viewpoint than those before … I wasn’t part of the one where we truly were losing, getting chased out of the place.’ The Japanese were still fighting hard, but everywhere they were being forced back.

On Bougainville as on many other islands, Hirohito’s soldiers paid the price for staging foolish, futile infantry attacks against well-armed defenders. An American wrote in March 1944: ‘Enemy dead were strewn in piles of mutilated bodies, so badly dismembered in most cases that a physical count was impossible. Here and there was a leg or an arm or a blown-off hand … At one point, Japanese bodies formed a human stairway over the barbed wire. Five enemy dead were piled on top of the other, as each had successively approached the location to use a predecessor as a barricade and then fall on top of him as he in turn was killed. Farther out from the perimeter, where a little stream wound its way parallel to it, Japs killed by the concussion of thousands of mortar shells lay with their heads, ostrich-fashion, stuck under the least protection they could find.’

By 1944, the United States was producing so many ships and planes that it felt able to commit large forces to the Pacific. Fulfilment of the doctrine of ‘Germany First’ had always been compromised by the fact that American popular sentiment was much more strongly roused against the Japanese than against the Germans, and by the US Navy’s determination to be seen to win the war in the east. While Russia’s struggle still hung in the balance, this had been risky. But now it was plain that Stalin’s armies were triumphant, the Wehrmacht in eclipse. Eisenhower’s forces in Europe were relatively large, but nothing like as numerous as would have been necessary had they confronted Hitler’s legions alone. Although lavishly provided with tanks, guns, vehicles and aircraft, the Anglo-American armies were always short of infantry. Moreover, the Pacific campaigns imposed an enormous drain on Allied global shipping resources, out of all proportion to the relatively small combat forces deployed, because of the distances involved.

Service in the Pacific was an experience light years from that of Europe, first because of its geographical isolation. US Marine pilot Samuel Hynes wrote: ‘Out here the war life was all there was; no history was visible, no monuments of the past, no cities remembered from books. There was nothing here to remind a soldier of his other life; no towns, no bars, nowhere to go, nowhere even to desert to.’ Men obliged to exist for months under open skies in tropical conditions suffered relentlessly from disease and skin disorders, even before enemy action took a bloodier toll. Marine Frazer West described a characteristic problem on Bougainville: ‘It wasn’t dysentery … It was bad rain diarrhea – bad water … you can develop diarrhea real quick … Undoubtedly stress played a real part. We didn’t even know the meaning of the word stress then, but now we do.’

Amphibious operations became a Pacific routine, albeit a hazardous and challenging one. An American soldier wrote: ‘Even under the best conditions, the unloading phase of a landing operation is a hot, rugged chore. With a high surf pounding against a narrow strip of jungle undergrowth, with a set deadline of daylight hours, and under the scorching heat of a South Sea November sun, the job was an exhausting nightmare. Working parties were punching with every last ounce of blood to get ammunition, oil, supplies, vehicles, rations and water out of the boats and above the high-water line. Shore party commanders were frantically trying to find a few square feet of dump space and discovering nothing but swamp all along the beach. Seabees and engineers were racking their brains and bodies in a desperate effort to construct any kind of road to high ground where vehicles could be parked, oil stored and ammunition stacked. But there wasn’t any high ground for thousands of yards – only a few scattered small islands of semi-inundated land surrounded by a stinking, sticky mire. And hour after hour boats roared in to the beach jammed with supplies.’

The most important Pacific operation of 1944 was the seizure of the Marianas, key to the inner ring of Japan’s defences. When the US Marine Corps began its assaults on Saipan, Tinian and Guam, the Japanese Combined Fleet sailed to meet the invaders, precipitating the greatest carrier encounter of the war. ‘The fate of the Empire rests on this one battle,’ declared Admiral Soemu Toyoda on 13 June, as his ships, commanded by Admiral Jizaburo Ozawa, sailed against Spruance’s. But Ultra had once more revealed his plan to the Americans. The Japanese hoped to use submarines and land-based aircraft severely to weaken the Americans before the main engagement. Instead, seventeen of Toyoda’s twenty-five submarines were sunk, while his airfields on Guam and Tinian were devastated by US bombing.

Both sides deployed formidable forces, but the Americans outnumbered the Japanese by around two to one at sea and in the air, with 956 aircraft to 473, fifteen carriers to nine – four times US strength at Midway. Ozawa believed he had gained the advantage when he pinpointed Spruance’s ships, and was first to launch air strikes at 0830 on 19 June. But these were swiftly detected by American radar, and the report was flashed to Admiral Marc Mitscher: ‘Large bogeys bearing 265 degrees, 125 miles at 24,000.’ His chief of staff, Captain Arleigh Burke, said later, ‘Well that was just what we were waiting for, so we launched all our fighters, the whole blooming works.’

What followed became known as ‘the great Marianas turkey-shoot’: of Ozawa’s 373 planes dispatched, only 130 survived, having failed to inflict significant damage on the US fleet. A further fifty Japanese aircraft were shot down over Guam. ‘[The Japanese] were just devastated,’ said Burke. ‘You could tell that from the radio conversation.’ In the carrier operations room, eavesdroppers were monitoring enemy radio transmissions. When at last the disconsolate Japanese airborne controller asked his commander’s permission to return to the fleet, a listening American officer said, ‘Let’s shoot him down.’ Burke replied with pitying condescension, ‘No, you can’t shoot that man down. He’s done more good for the United States today than any of us. So let him go home.’ US submarines torpedoed Ozawa’s flagship, the new carrier
Taiho
, and the veteran
Shokaku
. These successes cost the Americans just twenty-nine planes; Toyoda’s surviving ships turned away.

Through the night, Mitscher’s Carrier Task Force 58 steamed hard in pursuit of the retreating Japanese, and the following afternoon US reconnaissance planes pinpointed Ozawa’s squadron. Mitscher took the daring gamble of launching strikes at extreme range, knowing that his 216 aircraft would have to be recovered in darkness. So great were American resources and so high the stakes that the carriers’ air component could be deemed expendable. Exultant pilots found the Japanese, among them dive-bomber-pilot Don Lewis.

This sortie sank another carrier,
Hiyu
, and damaged two others; the Japanese were left with thirty-five planes, having destroyed only twenty American aircraft. A further eighty of Mitscher’s force ditched from lack of fuel, or were lost attempting to land in darkness, but most of the crews were recovered. US factories could readily replace the lost aircraft, while those of Japan were quite unable to re-arm Ozawa. Spruance incurred criticism for breaking off the battle at this point, allegedly forfeiting a chance to complete the destruction of the fleeing Japanese. But he had inflicted a massive and irretrievable defeat on Toyoda’s fleet. He had no need to hazard his own ships, and perhaps the entire Marianas operation, in dangerous waters. Spruance in the Battle of the Philippine Sea displayed a wisdom and discretion that his counterpart and rival ‘Bull’ Halsey seldom matched. The action confirmed that American combat skills, as well as naval power, now wholly outclassed those of their enemies. For the rest of the war Japan’s pilots displayed diminishing proficiency, and sometimes even a want of courage. US carrier aircraft, notably the Hellcat fighter, dominated the sky, even when the Japanese deployed some new aircraft supposedly capable of matching them.

But victory at sea off the Marianas could not avert bloody fighting ashore. The Marines’ first objective was Saipan; its fourteen-mile length, and some high ground, enabled the Japanese to deploy 32,000 defenders in depth. When 77,000 US Marines waded ashore on 15 June, they met machine-gun and artillery fire which inflicted 4,000 casualties in the first forty-eight hours. The planners had anticipated a three-day battle, but the island’s capture took three weeks: the defenders had to be blasted from their bunkers yard by yard. An army division was committed in support of the Marines; after failing to take the densely forested position ruefully dubbed Purple Heart Ridge, its commander was sacked. But day by day, even while hundreds of thousands of their compatriots were fighting a similarly brutal battle in Normandy, the invaders slowly battered a path inland.

On the night of 6–7 July, 3,000 Japanese, sensing that the end was close, launched a futile, sacrificial
banzai
charge in which they were mown down by US firepower after desperate close-quarter fighting. ‘We had hardly any arms,’ said one of the few survivors, naval paymaster Noda Mitsuharu. ‘Some had only shovels, others had sticks.’ An American officer said: ‘It reminded me of one of those old cattle stampede scenes of the movies. The camera is in a hole in the ground and you see the herd coming and then they leap up and over you and are gone. Only the Japs kept coming and coming. I didn’t think they’d ever stop.’

Mitsuharu, lying in front of the American positions with two bullets in his stomach, saw a group of his comrades crawling towards him. One raised a grenade and said invitingly, ‘Hey, sailor there! Won’t you come with us?’ Then the wounded Japanese heard a voice cry, ‘Long Live the Emperor!’ and there was an explosion. ‘Several men were blown away, dismembered at once into bits of flesh … their heads were all cracked open and smoke was coming out.’ Mitsuharu himself lived to be taken prisoner. For weeks after organised resistance on the island ended on 9 July, small parties of survivors continued to attack Americans. Substantial numbers of soldiers and civilians, some of the latter under duress, killed themselves by leaping from the cliffs at Marpi Point.

On 21 July, Americans began landing on Guam, a larger island, thirty-four miles long, and a vital objective because it had the only good water supply in the Marianas chain, as well as the best harbour. The protracted resistance on Saipan had given the 19,000-strong Japanese garrison time to construct strong beach defences, but the Americans preceded the assault with one of the longest and most effective air and naval bombardments of the campaign. This wreaked havoc: organised resistance soon collapsed, though three weeks’ fighting was needed to suppress isolated strongpoints and secure the island for the Americans’ vast programme of airfield construction. Indeed, infantrymen were obliged to maintain patrols and to skirmish with small groups of Japanese on Guam until the end of the war.

The Marines attacked their third Marianas objective, the smaller island of Tinian, on 24 July. Lt. Gen. Holland Smith, commanding the assault, considered this the best-executed amphibious landing of the campaign. Organised opposition was eliminated in twelve days, though once again Japanese survivors refused to surrender. ‘Nowhere have I seen the nature of the Jap better illustrated than it was near the airstrip at dusk,’ wrote
Time
correspondent Robert Sherrod.