The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (109 page)

Moreover, U.S. submarines were conducting precisely the same campaign against Japanese commerce. Within hours of the attack on
Pearl Harbor, Chief of Naval Operations
Harold N. Stark had issued the order: “
Execute unrestricted air and submarine warfare against Japan.” This was an abrupt about-face. The United States was a signatory to the London Naval Treaty, which specified that “
a warship, whether surface vessel or submarine, may not sink or render incapable of navigation a merchant vessel without having first placed passengers, crew and ship’s papers in a place of safety,” and less than three months before, Roosevelt had described an attack by a German submarine on an American merchantman as “
violating long-established international law and violating every principle of humanity.” Although the United States began the war with more than a hundred submarines, twenty-nine of them in the Asiatic Fleet, prewar doctrine had called for them to be used primarily as forward scouts for the battle fleet, and to sink warships. In consequence, submarine commanders tended to be timid, and during the Japanese invasion of the
Philippines they sank only three Japanese transports. The reluctance to pursue aggressively enemy shipping was compounded by the
failure of American
torpedoes, which routinely ran too deep or failed to detonate, problems not solved until September 1943. The Americans also lacked a
commerce warfare doctrine and failed to adequately use aerial reconnaissance to direct submarine operations or to concentrate on oil
tankers, the Achilles’ heel of Japan’s overseas trade and the primary reason for its invasion of the Dutch
East Indies.

Japan depended vitally on merchant shipping for imports it could not produce at home—especially food and fuel—but it, too, was
slow to respond to the submarine threat by forming convoys and it continued to lavish resources on
aircraft carriers rather than destroyers and other escort vessels for antisubmarine and convoy work. The Japanese had an estimated six million tons of merchant shipping in 1941, and during the course of the war they built or otherwise acquired more than four million tons, but by August 1945, they had lost nearly nine million tons. Of the
thirteen hundred Japanese merchant ships lost or damaged beyond repair, about 55 percent were credited to submarines. Fifty-two of the 288 U.S. submarines that saw service during the war were lost, together with thirty-five hundred officers and crew.

According to a postwar study, American submarines had sunk so many Japanese merchant ships that the country would have been forced into submission for lack of fuel, war matériel, and food. Yet the Pacific campaign of the “Silent Service” is overlooked for several reasons. Instruments of stealth and deceit, submarines are viewed more comfortably from the perspective of the aggrieved victim than from that of the proud victor. For Americans, chalking up success in the Pacific to submariners risked legitimating the U-boat war in the Atlantic or otherwise drawing uncomfortable parallels between German and American strategy, an issue raised at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Admiral Dönitz.

In September 1942, the
U-156
had sunk a requisitioned British passenger ship carrying among other people 1,800 Italian prisoners of war. Although the Germans radioed their intention to escort the survivors’ lifeboats to safety and displayed Red Cross flags, an American plane attacked the flotilla, which by then included three other German and Italian submarines. To ensure that his
U-boats were never put needlessly at risk again, Dönitz issued the “
Laconia
order” stating that “
All attempts at rescuing members of ships that have sunk … are to cease.” In his defense, however, Dönitz secured an affidavit from Fleet Admiral
Chester W. Nimitz, who swore that “
On general principles, the U.S. submarines did not rescue enemy survivors if undue additional hazard to the submarine resulted or the submarine would thereby be prevented from accomplishing its further mission.” The submarine had once again proved as insidious as its critics always claimed.

In addition to aircraft carriers and submarines, and the various vessels designed to protect or hunt them, World War II saw the development of a third class of vessels barely imagined before the war:
landing craft for amphibious operations. Boarding ramps and gangways have long been used for discharging troops, horses, and equipment, but through the 1930s amphibious landings tended to be cumbersome affairs in which soldiers clambered over the side of the hulls of small craft to wade ashore, and ramps had to be fitted to the top of the bulwarks to land motorized transports. In the 1930s, the Japanese developed a landing craft with an integral bow ramp for personnel and light vehicles, and
New Orleans boatbuilder
Andrew Higgins adapted this to a boat designed for work in the
Louisiana bayous. Formally known as a “landing craft, vehicle, personnel” (LCVP), the eleven-meter-long
Higgins boat could carry a platoon of thirty-six soldiers, or a dozen troops and a jeep, and had a draft of only three feet aft and two feet forward. The propeller was protected so that it could easily back off the beach, and it was designed to turn around without broaching in the surf. More than twenty-three thousand were built and they were widely viewed as integral to the Allied success. Marine general
Holland M. Smith, who commanded amphibious operations in the Pacific, wrote that the Higgins boat “
did more to win the war in the Pacific than any other single piece of equipment,” and General
Dwight Eisenhower, who oversaw Allied landings in
North Africa,
Sicily, and Normandy, described Higgins as “
the man who won the war for us. If Higgins had not designed and built those
LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.”

The Higgins boat was one of
more than thirty types of American and British landing and amphibious craft, from amphibious jeeps to 117-meter-long
LSTs (landing ship, tank). With massive double doors in the bow, an LST could carry three smaller
LCTs (landing craft, tank), each with five medium tanks or 330 infantry and their equipment. Landings on hostile shores were executed with a choreographic precision. Troop transports halted several miles off the coast and the smaller landing craft were lowered and circled near the transport before the troops boarded them via rope net ladders or vehicles were lowered into them by crane. Waves of landing craft would then approach the beach, disgorge their troops, and return to the transports for more men. Once the beachhead was secured, the landing craft were loaded with supplies. Mechanized vehicles drove onto the beach under their own power, while palletized goods were dragged onto the beach by tractors or other vehicles and nonpalletized goods were passed hand-to-hand by gangs of soldiers and sailors. Landing craft also carried the wounded back to transports or hospital ships.

Two Coast Guard–manned Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) with their bow doors open to the beach on Leyte Island, the Philippines, in 1944. Sailors are laying down a sandbag causeway from the LSTs to the beach to speed up the off-loading operations. Well suited though they were to carrying huge quantities of cargo, their unwieldy form explains why LST was popularly said to stand for “large, slow target.” Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

As the prodigious output of the Higgins yards suggests, the difference between victory and defeat depended on which side could produce more ships and matériel and get armies and their supplies where they needed to go. Meditating on the
battle of the Atlantic, Churchill wrote,

In this numbers game, the industrial capacity of the United States gave the Allies an insuperable advantage. Well into the 1930s, the combination of the
Great Depression, isolationism, and pacifism had militated against building a fleet up to the limits allowed by the naval treaties. Roosevelt took the first steps toward naval rearmament by directing funds appropriated for the
National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 to build 2
aircraft carriers, 4
cruisers, 20 destroyers, and other ships. The following year Representative
Carl Vinson secured passage of the
first of four acts to increase the size of the navy. Japan’s repudiation of the London Treaty and invasion of China and
Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany facilitated further increases, culminating in the Two-Ocean Navy (or Vinson-Walsh) Act of July 1940, which called for 13 battleships, 6 aircraft carriers, 32 cruisers, 101 destroyers, and 39
submarines.

With its own shipyards taxed by the need to build and repair warships, and under regular threat from German bombers during the
battle of Britain, the British ordered 60 Ocean-class freighters from the United States under the Lend-Lease program. When Britain placed its order, Roosevelt called for more than 300 additional
tankers and dry-cargo
Liberty ships, a modification of the Ocean class. As of 1941, the
U.S. Maritime Commission was on track to build five million deadweight tons of shipping in 1942, and seven million in 1943.
^a
In January 1942, these
figures were increased to eight million and ten million tons, respectively. When it was pointed out that this rate would not produce enough ships to transport and provision the soldiers destined for service overseas—1.8 million in 1942 and 3.5 million in 1943—the targets were increased to twenty-four million tons for 1942–43. In the end, American shipyards turned out twenty-seven million tons of shipping over the two years, 125 percent of the original goal. (Munitions manufacturing and war construction attained only 60 percent of their goals.) This output was achieved thanks to unprecedented levels of prefabrication and subassembly, and the introduction of new methods and people—including women and minorities—into the shipbuilding trades. All told more than fifty-five hundred merchant and naval vessels were constructed under Maritime Commission contracts during World War II, including 2,710 Liberty ships and nearly five hundred Victory ships, which were roughly the same size as Libertys but more than a third again as fast.

As the Allies and Axis powers battled each other around the world, Soviet-
Japanese relations were eerily calm. In 1938, Japan and the
Soviet Union had clashed over the border between the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria) and the Soviet Union. The
Russian victory at the battle of Khalkhin Gol (or Nomonhan) forced the Japanese to set their sights on Southeast Asia; but the mutual need for a stable border in Northeast Asia led to the Japanese-Soviet
Neutrality Pact of 1941. Under Lend-Lease agreements negotiated after the German invasion of the Soviet Union that June, the United States committed to supply the Soviets via the Arctic, the shortest but most dangerous route; the Persian Gulf, the longest run; and across the Pacific from the United States to
Vladivostok. Because of the neutrality pact, the Japanese allowed ships
sailing under the Soviet flag safe passage. Technically only goods with civilian applications could be sent via Vladivostok, but these included dual-use cargoes like food, fuel, trucks, locomotives, and engineering equipment. Thus while the Arctic convoys are the best known, more Allied ships sailed to Vladivostok than to all other Soviet and Persian Gulf ports combined, and in far greater security.

Two days after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Its armies proceeded to occupy the
Liaodong Peninsula where, as Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin had agreed at the
Yalta Conference, “
The former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904 shall be restored, viz.… The commercial port of Dairen [Dalian] shall be internationalized, the pre-eminent interests of the Soviet Union in this port being safeguarded, and the lease of Port Arthur as a naval base of the U.S.S.R. restored.” Chinese communists welcomed the Soviets’ presence at Port Arthur as a deterrent to American intervention, and they remained until 1955.

After declaring war on Japan, the
Russians moved into Korea and on August 10 the United States proposed to
divide the peninsula along the 38th parallel, a plan to which the Soviets agreed. The Russians backed the totalitarian communist rule of
Kim Il Sung, while the Americans supported the authoritarian right-wing government of
Sygnman Rhee. Both the Soviets and the United States withdrew their forces in 1948, but whereas the Russians had left their protégé with planes, tanks, and a cohesive army, the Americans withheld arming Sygnman Rhee’s regime. In the summer of 1950, the armies of Kim Il Sung crossed the 38th parallel, and quickly reduced the territory under South Korean control to an area around the port of
Busan. The
United Nations
condemned the invasion and, led by the United States, landed troops at Busan. General
Douglas MacArthur, supreme allied commander in Japan, proposed an amphibious landing at
Incheon, about twenty-five kilometers from
Seoul. With a tidal range of ten meters, treacherous currents, and a granite wall rather than a beach to seaward, this was a risky move. Compounding these problems were a schedule shorter than that for any comparable operation in the Pacific War and the fact that the American forces who would lead the operation were out of training. Nonetheless, on September 15 a flotilla of 260 ships, including old
LSTs commandeered from the Japanese fishing fleet,
landed thirteen thousand troops at Incheon, followed the next month by landings on the east coast. In the aftermath of the massive Chinese counterattack at the Chosin Reservoir, in December the navy evacuated more than 100,000 troops, 17,500 vehicles, and 350,000 tons of cargo from Hungnam in “
an amphibious invasion in reverse” that lasted two weeks. Apart from these operations and providing carrier-based air support for ground troops, naval operations in the Korean War were otherwise limited.