The Conquering Tide (78 page)

On March 11, the Joint Chiefs published a new schedule of operations against Japan. MacArthur's long jump to Hollandia, on the north central coast of New Guinea, would be completed on April 15. Truk would be kept under pressure by regular air raids and bypassed. The Marianas would be taken by June 15, Palau by September 15. The deadline for the invasion of
Mindanao was set for November 15, though that date was merely a placeholder. The return to the Philippines might become feasible earlier, depending on the course of events. That took care of the entire program against Japan for the calendar year 1944.

Nimitz and MacArthur had not yet met in a face-to-face command summit. The latter had routinely declined every invitation to travel outside his theater. The admiral, sensitive to protocols, could not invite himself to Australia. MacArthur was senior to him by a long stretch. (The general had received his first star when Nimitz was a commander.) When the CINCPAC asked for permission to tour naval commands in the Southwest Pacific area, the request was quickly granted, and Nimitz was invited to visit Brisbane. He arrived by seaplane on March 25 and found MacArthur and a retinue of staff officers waiting at the dock.

Nimitz and his flag lieutenant, Arthur Lamar, socialized pleasantly with the MacArthur family. They brought candy and orchids from Pearl Harbor and a silk outfit for the general's six-year-old son. Their meetings the next day, Admiral Kinkaid recalled, were stiffly formal but largely constructive. There was only one strained moment, when Nimitz called MacArthur's attention to a clause in the latest directive from the Joint Chiefs. The two theater commanders were to consider a contingency plan, to be activated in case Japanese resistance suddenly weakened, to move directly toward Formosa and the China coast. MacArthur, who never tolerated any talk of circumventing the Philippines, let loose a gale of indignant rhetoric. In a private report to King, Nimitz recapitulated the exchange that followed:

Then he blew up and made an oration of some length on the impossibility of bypassing the Philippines, his sacred obligations there—redemption of the 17 million people—blood on his soul—deserted by American people—etc. etc.—and then a criticism of “those gentlemen in Washington, who, far from the scene, and having never heard the whistle of pellets, etc., endeavor to set the strategy of the Pacific war”—etc. When I could break in I replied that, while I believed I understood his point of view, I could not go along with him, and then—believe it or not—I launched forth in a defense of “those gentlemen in Washington” and told him that the JCS were people like himself and myself, who, with more information, were trying to do their best for the country, and, to my mind, were succeeding admirably.
³⁵

M
ANY ORDINARY
J
APANESE BEGAN
to suspect that they had been misled, and that the tide of war had turned against their forces in the Pacific. The pattern of official news releases defied logic and common sense. Imperial announcements referred confusingly to glorious victories and strategic withdrawals. New “defense lines,” always closer to the homeland, must be held at all costs. Military experts, writing in the newspapers or speaking on the radio, soberly explained that Japan's grand strategy was to “draw the enemy in”—to allow him to come closer to the homeland, where at last he could be crushed with one blow. Courageous Japanese troops defended advanced positions to the last man, perishing all together like
gyokusai
—“smashed jewels.” Whenever a new position was captured by the enemy, it was confidently explained that defeat had been expected, and preparations had been laid in place for it. Official reporting about the war situation, wrote a Japanese American woman who spent the war years in Japan, “involved such obvious contradictions that even the more simple-minded listeners became doubtful.”

Everyone who could think at all realized that the country was in a more and more desperate state, its back to the wall. When it became impossible to hide the truth longer, the broadcasters would announce a battle or an island lost, and each time they did so the program was ended with music. It was always the same—the sad, sweet strains of
Umi Yukaba
, a well-loved old song. All over the nation people would bow their heads while someone quietly turned off the radio. The conviction of ultimate defeat had become widespread but everyone was careful not to speak his opinion; each carried on silently lest his doubts prevent another from doing his best.
³⁶

But they wondered, and worried. Aiko Takahashi, a young woman living in Tokyo, mused in her diary, “What exactly is happening? It's like picking colors in the dark, and for better or worse, there is no criticism of the government. It simply makes us uneasy.”
³⁷
The regime generally permitted accurate reporting of the progress of the war in Europe, and it was evident that Japan's Axis partners were not faring well against the Allies. The surrender of a quarter of a million German troops at Stalingrad was reported in Tokyo the same week that the Japanese people learned that their army
had abandoned Guadalcanal. The straightforward accounts from Europe were contrasted with the vague, shifting, and often contradictory narrative about the war in the Pacific. In September 1943 came news that the Italian government of General Pietro Badoglio had capitulated to the Allies. Since the previous July, when the dictator Benito Mussolini had been deposed and arrested, press reports had assured the Japanese people that the new government would carry on fighting for the Axis. Now Allied forces were pouring into southern Italy, and the German army was in retreat. At a newsstand in downtown Tokyo, observed the diarist Kiyoshi Kiyosawa, “people are standing in long, long lines, and they are eager to buy newspapers. It appears they received a considerable shock.”
³⁸
Japanese military authorities took to the airwaves and editorial pages and confidently asserted that the fall of Italy was a piece of good fortune, for the Third Reich had finally “thrown off the burden called Italy and an indestructible resistance would now be possible.”
³⁹
Kiyosawa lamented the stupidity and shortsightedness of official propaganda. The state-controlled news media was playing fast and loose with whatever remained of its authority and credibility. “It appears that the Japanese newspapers do not even have the common sense and logic of elementary school students.”
⁴⁰

Regime-sanctioned slogans and themes extolled the indomitable power of
Yamato Damashii
—the collective Japanese fighting spirit. Even if the enemy possessed material superiority—and in 1943, hints of America's enormous industrial output were seeping into news accounts—Japanese workers and warriors were capable of arousing themselves to new peaks of devotion and self-sacrifice. In the end, no matter what the cost, the transcendent spirit of the Japanese must prevail. When American forces stormed the Aleutian island of Attu in May 1943, a Japanese garrison of 2,650 soldiers fought a savage battle and died almost to the last man. Their cause had been hopeless—General John L. DeWitt's 7th Infantry Division assault troops had outnumbered the defenders by five to one—but they chose collective death over the ignominy of surrender. In Japan, the annihilation of the Attu garrison was inscribed as an important moral victory. It had proved that the Japanese warrior was willing to give everything for his country. The term
gyokusai
, first coined to describe the mass combat deaths and suicides at Attu, became increasingly familiar as one Japanese island garrison after another perished in similar fashion. Leading Japanese newspapers reported that “the heroic spirits of Attu” literally rose from the dead, took corporeal form, and renewed the fight against American forces
when they landed on Kiska island three months later. “Foreign reports reveal that the American forces fought intensely and bitterly against this army of spirits over a period of three weeks,” the
Japan Times and Advertiser
reported on August 24, 1943. “In the South Pacific sector, too, spirits of the Japanese troops have tangled with the enemy, causing many of them mental derangements and others to kill themselves as a result of nervous breakdown and morbid fear.”
⁴¹

By contrast, noted the Japanese commentators, the individualistic and luxury-loving Americans could never hope to emulate Japan's feverish devotion to victory in the Pacific. They wanted only to survive and go home alive. Long before they reached Japanese shores, the Americans would tire of the war and ask for terms of peace. So it was said. The chief of the Board of Information made the case at a speech in Yokohama in May 1943: “Soldiers are not tools but spirit! They are souls! American soldiers are crudely made and over-produced.”
⁴²
When General George S. Patton slapped an American soldier in Sicily in August 1943, the incident prompted excited commentary in the Japanese press. Here was incontrovertible proof that the enemy's fighting spirit was flagging! Since the United States was a democracy, its people would sooner or later bring pressure to bear on their leaders to seek a peaceful accommodation with Japan. Time was on Japan's side, because “conditions within America do not allow for a long drawn-out war.”
⁴³

Homefront civilians were forever being exhorted to arouse themselves to greater efforts, to unite and summon their collective spiritual strength for an impending decisive confrontation with the enemy. “The present situation is truly grave,” the
Showa
emperor told them, in an Imperial Rescript opening a special session of the Diet on October 26, 1943. “The Japanese people must fully display their total strength and thereby destroy the evil ambition of the enemy nations.”
⁴⁴
The people replied with exceptional fervor. That fall, apparently without a word of complaint, the Japanese government abolished holidays and weekends. There would be no more days of rest; the people would “return their holidays to the emperor.”
⁴⁵
Labor drafts were steadily expanded into new categories. Unmarried women and university students were conscripted into civil defense work and war industries. Progressively younger children were drafted into the workforce: in September 1943, all girls over the age of fourteen; the following April, all children of both genders over the age of ten. Although the American air raids were still more than a year away, measures to evacuate children from the cities
were initiated in October 1943. Military conscription was expanded. In the fall of 1943, college students aged nineteen or older (except those majoring in science or engineering) were called to service. Middle-aged men as old as forty-five were inducted. The send-off ceremonies were every bit as elaborate and well attended as those of 1941, but the mood had turned perceptibly darker. People had seen too many wooden boxes wrapped in white cloth, containing the cremated remains of dead soldiers and sailors repatriated from the war zones. Aiko Takahashi, the young woman in Tokyo, told her diary that the send-off processions had become “rather pathetic affairs. . . . As I look at them, I have the wrenching thought that today once again, a funeral of living people is passing and youngsters with their sleeves rolled up are being sent off to die.”
⁴⁶

A
LMOST EXACTLY A YEAR
after Isoroku Yamamoto's aircraft was shot down over Bougainville, his successor as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet met a similar fate. Wary of Mitscher's rampaging carrier task force, Admiral Koga had made up his mind to transfer his headquarters ashore, from the battleship
Musashi
(then at Palau) to the town of Davao on Mindanao. On the night of March 31, Koga and most of his senior staff officers and cryptographers boarded three Kawanishi flying boats off Babelthuap and took off for the 650-mile flight. The big four-engine planes flew into a tropical witches' brew off Cebu, and two of the three went down. Koga's plane simply disappeared, and none of the aircrew or passengers was ever seen again. A plane carrying Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, Koga's chief of staff, ditched at sea about six miles off the coast. The vice admiral survived and managed to get ashore, where he was promptly taken prisoner by Filipino guerrillas. His captors found a cache of highly classified documents on his person. These included a signal book, an updated codebook, and a copy of “Plan Z,” the Combined Fleet's master operational plan for a fleet action in the western Pacific. Fukudome was returned unharmed to local Japanese army forces under circumstances that remain obscure, but the captured documents were handed over to the Americans. A submarine spirited the precious intelligence to MacArthur's general headquarters in Brisbane.

Realizing that the crown jewels had fallen into the enemy's hands, the Imperial Japanese Navy moved quickly to promulgate a new edition of the codebook and to write a new operational plan for the looming battle.
Koga's death was hushed up until May, when a new commander in chief was appointed. This was Admiral Soemu Toyoda, a torpedo specialist who had graduated from Etajima in 1905. Toyoda established his headquarters in an anchored flagship (the light cruiser
Oyodo
) in Tokyo Bay. A new plan of battle, designated “A-Go,” was prepared in Tokyo by the Navy General Staff and distributed the same week.

A month earlier, Tokyo had ordered another major fleet reorganization, the fourth since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The main striking force of the Japanese navy was redesignated the “First Mobile Fleet” (
Dai Ichi Kido-Kantai
). Its two principal elements were the Third Fleet, which included nine aircraft carriers arrayed in three task groups; and the Second Fleet, consisting of most of the navy's major surface warships, including the battleships and heavy cruisers. Vice Admiral Ozawa was “fleeted up” to command the entire force, while simultaneously retaining direct command of the Third Fleet, with
Taiho
as his flagship. The Second Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, was to function as a subordinate screening force, although Ozawa might send it to engage the enemy in a conventional naval gunnery battle if and when opportunity offered. The Combined Fleet had been reshuffled several times before, but the creation of the First Mobile Fleet took the unprecedented step of placing the carriers at the nucleus of the force, with the battleships relegated to a subsidiary role. For the first time in the history of the Imperial Navy, a carrier admiral would exercise tactical command over the battleships.