The Conquering Tide (74 page)

The buildup of strength on the inner perimeter would take time—time to move troops from the mainland, to erect new shore fortifications, to build aircraft, and to train new air groups—so the policy designated “mid-1944” as “our approximate target for full readiness.”
³
But the new policy did not rule out an early confrontation with the American fleet, if opportunity offered: “Whenever the occasion presents, we shall capture and destroy the enemy's offensive forces.”
⁴

Koga was keen to fight his Tsushima sooner rather than later. Since May 1943, the commander in chief and his staff had been studying and revising plans for Operation Z, which envisioned a grand sortie of the Combined Fleet to confront the American fleet in the central Pacific, if possible while the enemy was pinned down in support of an amphibious invasion. Admiral Pownall's carrier raids of September and October 1943 had twice coaxed a powerful Japanese fleet out of Truk. Koga personally commanded the second of these sorties, and anchored his ships in Eniwetok Atoll for four days in October. In both instances it was soon understood that the American movements had been hit-and-run carrier raids rather than sustained operations, and the fleet returned to Truk.

Relentless shipping losses and the MacArthur-Halsey drive on Rabaul prompted successive revisions to Operation Z. In late October it was decided that the fleet would not come out to fight in Micronesia or in defense of the Bismarcks. The decisive confrontation would be postponed until the enemy attempted to pierce the inner perimeter. Koga would make his stand in the
Philippine Sea, in defense of either the Marianas or Palau, depending on the movements of the American fleet. Pursuant to those decisions, when the Fifth Fleet launched its offensive into the central Pacific, Japanese garrisons in the Gilberts and Marshalls received diffident air support and no naval support at all, except as provided by submarine patrols.

After suffering heavy air losses at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands (October 1942), the Japanese carrier task force had retired to the Inland Sea for repairs, for refitting, and for the rebuilding of its decimated air groups. Incumbent commander Chuichi Nagumo (who had led the carrier striking force in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway, and the carrier duels off Guadalcanal) was relieved and sent back to the homeland to command the Sasebo Naval District. His successor was Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, a tall, gruff, unsightly man nicknamed “the Gargoyle.”
^*
Ozawa took the fleet carrier
Zuikaku
as his flagship. The force was reorganized and designated the Third Fleet, consisting of three carrier divisions, two battleships, six cruisers, and more than a dozen destroyers. Most of the Third Fleet's air strength was concentrated in Carrier Division 1 (the veteran fleet carriers
Zuikaku
and
Shokaku
and the light carrier
Zuiho
) and Carrier Division 2 (the heavy sisters
Hiyo
and
Junyo
, both built on converted passenger-liner hulls and commissioned in mid-1942).

Throughout most of 1943, the Japanese carriers remained idle at Truk or in home waters. The same was not true of the air groups. Ozawa's carrier planes were repeatedly sent south to bolster the deteriorating fortunes of the land-based naval air forces at Rabaul and satellite airfields in the Solomons and New Guinea. In July 1943, most of Carrier Division 2's aircraft (about 150) flew into Rabaul to be integrated into the Twenty-Sixth Air Flotilla. The Zero pilots, trained at great expense to fly from aircraft carriers, suffered disastrous losses in pitched daily air battles against relentless waves of well-armed B-24s and B-25s.

In August and September, several Japanese fighter units were ordered to fly down to the primitive airstrip at Buin, on southern Bougainville, where conditions on the ground and in the air were even worse than at Rabaul. Halsey's heavily reinforced Guadalcanal-based air forces (AIRSOLS) battered
the hard-pressed dirt airstrip day by day, and many of the Japanese carrier pilots who survived longer than a week succumbed to exhaustion and disease. In October 1943, the flyable remnants of Japan's badly mauled air forces at Buin began pulling back to Rabaul.

The following month, Koga ordered nearly 200 planes of Carrier Division 1 into Rabaul from Truk (Operation RO). Among them were many of the Third Fleet's most skilled and experienced airmen, including all of the squadron leaders. More than half of those planes were shot down within a week, and virtually none of the downed aviators were recovered. One of Admiral Ozawa's staff officers recalled the scene at the Spring Island airfield in Truk as the survivors arrived on November 13:

I was astonished by the small number of planes that had returned. There were hardly any fighters to be seen. But it was worse with torpedo planes and fighter bombers. None of them had come back. . . . On the field Ozawa was giving the commander's speech of instruction that customarily followed an operation. Afterward I heard from some fliers about the speech. Ozawa had climbed the platform to address them and, being overcome with dismay at how few of his men had survived, was unable to utter a word. He stood there on the platform in silence for a very long time, weeping bitterly.
⁵

On January 25, 1944, as the combined AIRSOLS and Fifth Air Force campaign against Rabaul reached its overpowering culmination, Koga fed another 150 planes from Carrier Division 2 into the meat grinder. Few of the Zero pilots had flown in combat prior to the deployment. They were instructed to avoid engaging the American bombers and fighters except when “battle circumstances appear particularly favorable to you.”
⁶
For the sake of morale more than anything else, Nakajima torpedo planes from Carrier Division 2 were dispatched on risky night missions against Halsey's ships off Bougainville and MacArthur's transports off New Guinea. Those flights scored no hits on American shipping, but dozens of the valuable bombers were lost to antiaircraft fire and operational accidents. Masatake Okumiya, an air staff officer, recalled the dreadful last days at Rabaul:

The days passed in a blur. Every day we sent the Zeros up on frantic interception flights. The young and inexperienced student pilots had
become battle-hardened veterans, their faces showing the sudden realization of death all about them. Not for a moment did the Americans ease their relentless pressure. Day and night the bombers came to pound Rabaul, to smash at the airfield and shipping in the harbor, while the fighters screamed low on daring strafing passes, shooting up anything they considered a worth-while target. So intense were the enemy attacks that we were unable to find time to attack their bases. Our losses mounted steadily, and the list of dead and missing pilots grew visibly.
⁷

The losses from Carrier Division 2 in this last operation at Rabaul amounted to about ninety planes. Among those few aviators who returned to Truk in late February, many had been laid low by malaria and other tropical diseases. They also brought with them the incubus of defeatism and despair, which inevitably spread through the remaining Third Fleet air groups.

I
N
J
APAN, NEWS OF THE
F
EBRUARY 1944
raid on Truk was reported with unusual candor. Some news reports falsely asserted that the Americans had attempted an amphibious landing and been repulsed, but on February 18 the Imperial General Headquarters released an accurate and unsparing account:

A powerful American task force suddenly advanced to our Caroline Islands Wednesday morning and repeatedly attacked our important strategic base, Truk, with a great number of ship-based planes. The enemy is constantly repeating powerfully persistent raids with several hundred fighters and bombers, attacking us intermittently. The war situation has increased with unprecedented seriousness—nay, furiousness. The tempo of enemy operations indicates that the attacking force is already pressing upon our mainland.
⁸

As always, the dire tone of this release was intended to arouse the Japanese people to greater efforts and sacrifices. But the regime could not countenance any admission that Japan might be in danger of losing the war. The editors of the widely circulated
Mainichi Shinbun
must have failed to appreciate
the subtle distinction. A front-page opinion piece, published on February 23, warned, “The decisive battles of offense and defense in the Pacific will not be carried out on the homeland shores of America and Japan. They will be fought out . . . on island bases several thousands of miles distant. If the point is reached when the enemy advances to the shores of our homeland, already there is nothing more that can be done.”
⁹

The article included some pointed criticism of the training of civilians to fight with bamboo spears, and added that the only real hope of repelling the American advance was to build more warplanes and aircraft carriers. When the newspaper landed on the desk of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, he blew his stack. Orders went out from the Information Board to suppress the article, but since more than 100,000 copies had already been distributed, the damage (such as it was) could not be undone. The Army Ministry issued a reprimand to the paper, forced the editor in chief to resign, and summoned other leading editors to be admonished against such commentary. The army drafted the journalist who had written the article, a common method of disciplining wayward writers.

Tojo was unpopular with the Japanese people and despised by most of the leading figures in the navy. He was pompous, shrill, and demonstrative, and tended to silence reasoned discussion with outlandish flights of rhetoric and sloganeering. He was always leaping to his feet, even in closed meetings of senior cabinet and military officers. In October 1943, when a minister referred to a disappointing harvest, Tojo stood and bellowed, “Even if we eat nothing, we members of the cabinet intend to give our lives for the nation!”
¹⁰
His antics sometimes seemed to ape those of Hitler and Mussolini, but Japanese culture was unsympathetic to the notion of concentrating power in the hands of one man. The emperor was the nation's singular figurehead, and his ministers were expected to govern with an attitude of humility and reticence.

The emperor was the ultimate underwriter of Tojo's long ascendancy in the ruling circle. For nearly three years Hirohito trusted and listened to Tojo, and even after the war the emperor defended the general's conduct and leadership. Immediately after the Truk raid, Tojo moved to consolidate his grip on the military planning and command functions of both the army and the navy. Since the Meiji era, authority in each service had been divided between a ministry and a general staff. But now, with the emperor's support, Tojo forced the resignation of General Sugiyama, the army chief of
staff, and named himself to that post while retaining his positions as army minister and prime minister. Navy chief of staff Admiral Nagano resigned and was replaced by the navy minister, Admiral Shigetaro Shimada, who also kept his existing job. The shake-up brought the planning staffs of both services under the control of the ministries. Because Tojo had always found Shimada a pliable colleague, it also brought the entire regime more firmly under the control of Tojo. Opposition within the general staffs melted away when the emperor let it be known that he had backed the plan.

B
ETWEEN
N
OVEMBER AND
F
EBRUARY
, most of the aircraft carriers were again pulled back to Japan for repairs and to take on replacement airplanes and aircrews. The
Zuikaku
went into dry dock at Kure; the
Shokaku
, at Yokosuka in Tokyo Bay. The carriers were fitted with new radar systems and antiaircraft weaponry. New aircraft were embarked from Iwakuni Naval Air Station in Hiroshima Bay. Because the newly trained aircrews had not yet been cleared for carrier landings, it was decided to lift the planes aboard by crane rather than fly them aboard after the fleet had put to sea.

Six months was needed to train the new air groups. But the Americans could not be expected to oblige that timetable, so all understood that the Third Fleet might be thrust into battle before it was ready. Ozawa's air staff fixed an optimistic deadline of April 1 to have the new carrier air force fully trained, equipped, and ready to confront the enemy. The Third Fleet was to have 500 aircraft on nine carriers (five heavy, four light). Another 400 to 500 land-based fighters and bombers would be positioned on island airfields within easy range of the Marianas and Palau.

Japanese war planners had hoped to produce 40,000 new military aircraft in 1944, but the production rate was barely half that level in the fall of 1943. Aviation plants were straining under the pressure of material shortages, maladroit logistics, and a paucity of trained machinists and engineers. Shipping losses bit deeply into deliveries of Malaysian and Jakartan bauxite, the industry's chief source of aluminum alloys. The Mitsubishi complex in Nagoya had expanded steadily, employing 43,000 workers by the end of 1943, but it had turned out only 1,029 new Zeros in 1943, fewer than half the number demanded by the military services. The Japanese aircraft industry had relied to a disproportionate extent on a small, overworked coterie of talented craftsmen and technicians, and was
never optimized for mass production. Belated efforts to introduce standard production-line techniques brought some improvement, but neither Mitsubishi nor the other major aircraft suppliers (Nakajima, Aichi, Kawasaki, Tachikawa, Yokosuka) managed to ramp up output fast enough to fill the military's ballooning wartime orders.

When a government inspector passed through the Nagoya works in late 1943, he was surprised to learn that newly manufactured Zeros were still being hauled away from the plant by teams of oxen. There was no airfield adjoining the Mitsubishi plant. The new units had to be transported overland to Kagamigahara, twenty-four miles away, where the navy would accept delivery. The aircraft were too delicate to transport on trucks, and the railheads were not convenient. Twenty oxen had died, and the remaining thirty were verging on complete exhaustion. Feed had been obtained on the black market, but the supply was not reliable. Essential wartime deliveries of replacement aircraft thus hung on the fate of a diminishing herd of underfed beasts. Mitsubishi engineers at length discovered that Percheron horses could haul the aircraft to Kagamigahara faster and required less to eat. These ludicrous exertions, when compared at a glance to the arrangements at Boeing, Douglas, or Grumman, tell most of the story of Japan's defeat.