As late as 1943 the American Joint Chiefs of Staff had not adopted a clear strategy for winning the war in the Pacific. Early in the war they assumed that the burden of the land fighting against Japan would fall on Chinese forces. The bulk of Japan's army was deployed in China, and Chinese leaders had an immense manpower pool to draw on. But supplying and training the Chinese Army proved to be an impossible task. Moreover, fighting in China did not lead to any strategic objective.
Instead, the hard-won successes in the Solomons and Papua and the growing strength of MacArthur's and Nimitz's forces gave the Joint Chiefs the means to strike at the Japanese in the Pacific. They decided to launch two converging offensives toward the Japanese islands. Using Army ground forces, land-based air power, and a fleet of old battleships and cruisers, MacArthur would leapfrog across the northern coast of New Guinea toward the Philippines. Nimitz, using carrier-based planes and Marine and Army ground forces, would island-hop across the central Pacific. The strategy was frankly opportunistic, and it left unanswered the questions of priorities and final objectives.
At the heart of the strategy were the developing techniques of amphibious warfare and tactical air power. Putting troops ashore in the face of a determined enemy had always been one of war's most dangerous and complicated maneuvers. World War II proved that the assault force needed air and sea supremacy and overwhelming combat power to be successful. Even then, dug-in defenders could take a heavy toll of infantry coming over the beaches. Special landing craft had to be built to bring tanks and artillery ashore with the infantry, and both direct air support and effective naval gunfire were essential. MacArthur's leaps up the northern coast of New Guinea were measured precisely by the range of his fighter-bombers. The primary task of Nimitz's carriers was to support and defend the landing forces. As soon as possible after the landings, land-based planes were brought in to free the carriers for other operations.
The islands of the central Pacific had little resemblance to the fetid jungles of Guadalcanal and New Guinea. Atolls like Tarawa or Kwajalein were necklaces of hard coral surrounding lagoons of sheltered water. Where the coral rose above water, small narrow islands took form. These bits of sand furnished little room for maneuver and frequently had to be assaulted frontally. Larger islands like Guam and Saipan were volcanic in origin, with rocky ridges to aid the defense; the shrapnel effect of shell bursts was multiplied by bits of shattered rock.
In November 1943 Nimitz's island-hopping campaign began with his assaults on Betio in the Tarawa Atoll and at Makin a hundred miles north. It was a costly beginning. Elements of the Army's 27th Infantry Division secured Makin with relative ease, but at Betio the 2d Marine Division encountered stubborn and deadly resistance. Naval gunfire and air attacks had failed to eliminate the deeply dug-in defenders, and landing craft grounded on reefs offshore, where they were destroyed by Japanese artillery. As costly as it was, the lessons learned there proved useful in future amphibious operations. Like MacArthur, Nimitz determined to bypass strongly held islands and strike at the enemy's weak points.
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During January 1944 landings were made in the Marshalls at Kwajalein and Eniwetok followed by Guam and Saipan in the Marianas during June and July. Because the Marianas were only 1,500 miles from Tokyo, the remaining Japanese carriers came out to fight. The resulting Battle of the Philippine Sea was a disaster for the Japanese. In what U.S. Navy pilots called "the great Marianas turkey shoot," Japanese carrier power was effectively eliminated.
Almost as soon as the Marianas were cleared, the air forces began to prepare airfields to receive new heavy bombers, the B-29s. With a range exceeding 3,000 miles, B-29s could reach most Japanese cities, including Tokyo. In November 1944 the Twentieth Air Force began a strategic bombing campaign against Japan, which indirectly led to one of the bitterest island fights of the war. Tiny Iwo Jima, lying 750 miles southeast of Tokyo, was needed both as an auxiliary base for crippled B-29s returning from their bombing raids over Japan and as a base for long-range escort fighters. The fight for the five-mile-long island lasted five weeks, during February and March 1945, and cost more than 25,000 dead--almost 6,000 Americans of the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and 20,000 Japanese.
While Nimitz crossed the central Pacific, MacArthur pushed along the New Guinea coast, preparing for his return to the Philippines. Without carriers, his progress was slower but less costly than Nimitz's. After clearing the Buna area in January 1943, MacArthur spent the next year conquering northeastern New Guinea and the eight months that followed moving across the northern coast of Netherlands New Guinea to the island of Morotai. Because he had to cover his landings with land-based planes, he was limited to bounds of 200 miles or less on a line of advance almost 2,000 miles long. Furthermore, he had to build airfields as he went. By October 1944 MacArthur was ready for a leap to the Philippines, but this objective was beyond the range of his planes. Nimitz loaned him Admiral William F. Halsey's heavy carriers, and, on 20 October 1944, MacArthur's Sixth Army landed on Leyte Island in the central Philippines.
The Japanese reacted vigorously. For the first time in the war they employed Kamikaze attacks, suicide missions flown by young, half-trained pilots. And they used their last carriers as decoys to draw Halsey's carriers away from the beachheads. With Halsey out of the battle and the landing forces without air cover, the Japanese planned to use conventional warships to brush aside the remaining American warships and destroy the support vessels anchored off the beaches. They almost succeeded. In the naval Battle of Leyte Gulf, the big guns of the big ships, not carrier planes, decided the battle. The Japanese naval forces were decimated. Japan no longer had an effective navy.
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As violent as they were, most island fights involved small units and were mercifully short. However, the last two major campaigns of the Pacific war--Luzon and Okinawa--took on some of the character of the war in Europe. They were long fights on larger land masses, with entire armies in sustained combat over the course of several months. Japanese defenders on Luzon numbered 262,000 under Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, perhaps the best field commander in the Japanese Army. Yamashita refused an open battle, knowing that superior firepower and command of the air would favor the Americans. Instead, he prepared defensive positions where his forces could deny the Americans strategic points like roads and airfields. He wanted to force the Americans to attack Japanese positions in a new battle of attrition.
His plan worked. MacArthur's Sixth Army under Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger landed on Luzon on 9 January 1945 and began the Army's longest land campaign in the Pacific. MacArthur's forces fought for almost seven months and took nearly 40,000 casualties before finally subduing the Japanese.
The largest landings of Nimitz's central Pacific drive were carried out on Okinawa, only 300 miles from Japan, on 1 April 1945. Before the fight was over three months later, the entire Tenth Field Army-- four Army infantry divisions and two Marine divisions--had been deployed there. Like his counterpart on Luzon, the Japanese commander on Okinawa, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, refused to fight on the beaches and instead withdrew into the rocky hills to force a battle of attrition. Again the strategy worked. U.S. casualties were staggering, the largest of the Pacific war. Over 12,000 American soldiers, sailors, and marines died during the struggle. At Okinawa the Japanese launched the greatest Kamikaze raids of the war, and the results were frightening--26 ships sunk and 168 damaged. Almost 40 percent of the American dead were sailors lost to Kamikaze attacks.
When the Luzon and Okinawa battles ended in July, the invasion of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu had already been ordered by the Joint Chiefs. The date was set for 1 November 1945. Kyushu would furnish air and naval bases to intensify the air bombardment and strengthen the naval blockade around Honshu, the main island of Japan. A massive invasion in the Tokyo area was scheduled for 1 March 1946 if Japanese resistance continued. With the Okinawa experience fresh in their minds, many planners feared that the invasion of Japan would produce a bloodbath.
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In fact, Japan was already beaten. It was defenseless on the seas; its air force was gone; and its cities were being burned out by incendiary bombs. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August and the Soviet declaration of war on 8 August forced the leaders of Japan to recognize the inevitable. On 15 August 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender to the Japanese people and ordered Japanese forces to lay down their arms. Despite their earlier suicidal resistance, they immediately did so. With V-J Day--2 September 1945--the greatest war in human history came to an end.
Aftermath
The United States emerged from the war with global military commitments that included the occupation of Germany and Japan and the oversight of Allied interests in liberated areas. Almost 13 million Americans were in uniform at the end of the war; over 8 million of them were soldiers. But the impulse was strong to follow the patterns of the past and dismantle this force. Families pressed the government to "bring the boys home," and soldiers overseas demanded the acceleration of the separation process. American monopoly of the atomic bomb seemed to furnish all the power that American security interests needed. Some air power advocates even argued that the bomb made armies and navies obsolete.
President Roosevelt had died in April 1945, on the eve of victory. The new President, Harry S. Truman, and his advisers tried to resist the political pressures for hasty demobilization. Truman wanted to retain a postwar Army of 1.5 million, a Navy of 600,000, and an Air Force of 400,000. But neither Congress nor the American public was willing to sustain such a force. Within five months of V-J Day, 8.5 million servicemen and women had been mustered out, and in June of the following year only two full Army divisions were available for deployment in an emergency. By 1947 the Army numbered a mere 700,000--sixth in size among the armies of the world.
Yet too much had changed for the Army to return to its small and insular prewar status. Millions of veterans now remembered their service with pride. The beginning of the Cold War, especially the Berlin blockade of 1948, dramatically emphasized the need to remain strong. The Army had become too deeply intertwined with American life and security to be reduced again to a constabulary force. Moreover, the time was not far off when new conflicts would demonstrate the limits of atomic power and prove that ground forces were as necessary as they had been in the past.
Further Readings
Despite its age, Charles B. MacDonald's The Mighty Endeavor: American Armed Forces in the European Theater in World War 11 (1969) remains a sound, informative, and highly readable survey of the American role in the war in Europe. For the interwar Army, I. B. Holley, jr.'s General John M. Palmer, Citizen Soldiers and the Army of a Democracy (1982) is good for the early years. Palmer was the architect of the National Defense Act of 1920. D. Clayton James' The Years of MacArthur: Volume 1, 1880-1941 (1970), looks at the interwar Army in terms of the man who dominated it in the 1930s, while Forrest Pogue's George C. Marshall, Volume 1: Education of a General, 1880-1939 (1963), focuses on the man who oversaw its transformation into a powerful, modern mass army. Volume 2: Ordeal and Hope, 1939-1945 (1986), and Volume 3: Organizer of Victory, 1943-1945 (1973), are the best sources on the War Department and the General Staff and cover an enormous range of topics from strategy and logistics to personalities.
Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk (1980) is a popular, semijournalistic account that places German tactical and operational innovations in the context of interwar German Army politics and the Nazi rise to power and also discusses the relationship between tactics, equipment, and organization in a nontechnical way. Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-1945 (1982), by Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, is a seminal and important book, tracing changes in military doctrine from the perspective of the artillery arm from World War I through World War II. Bidwell and Graham analyze the origins of Blitzkrieg tactics and panzer organizations and the evolution of indirect artillery fire and their impact on war.
W. G. F. Jackson's Battle for North Africa, 1940-1943 (1975), is reliable, and Martin Blumenson's Kasserine Pass (1967) can be supplemented by Ralph Ingersoll's The Battle Is the Pay-off (1943). Written in the immediate aftermath of the Kasserine Pass debacle by a journalist-captain who accompanied the Rangers on their raid against the Italian-held pass at El Guettar, it has the gritty immediacy of a contemporary first-person account and ends with an impassioned plea for tougher physical conditioning and more realistic training.
A useful antidote to grand theoretical speculations about the nature of war is John Ellis' The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (1980). Using a vast array of first-person accounts, Ellis focuses on the experience of frontline combat in both theaters. Ellis has also written Cassino: Hollow Victory (1984), a gripping and critical account of Allied attempts to break through the mountains of central Italy, an effort which, the author believes, was crippled by a self-serving and inept Allied high command. Useful companions are Wyford Vaughan-Thomas' Anzio (1961) and Martin Blumenson's Anzio: The Gamble That Failed (1963).
Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (1984) is among the best of the new books on the invasion. A careful and skilled journalist, Hastings asks why it took so long for the Allies to break out of the beachhead. He finds the flawed performance of the citizen armies of Britain and the United States at fault, when compared to the skill and proficiency of the Germans. Russell F. Weigley, in Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945 (1986), asks similar questions about American combat performance and advances a provocative thesis, suggesting that the U.S. Army never reconciled its two conflicting heritages--that of the frontier constabulary, with its emphasis on mobility, and that of U. S. Grant's direct power drive in the Civil War. Thus, U.S. combat formations in World War II were structured for mobility, while American strategy and operations called for head-on confrontations with the center of enemy strength.
Ralph F. Bennett's ULTRA in the West: The Normandy Campaign, 1944-1945 (1980), heavily based on the original, declassified decrypts, is sound on ULTRA'S impact on the land campaign. Charles B. MacDonald's A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge (1985) updates earlier accounts of the German Ardennes offensive with the latest available information about the Allied intelligence failure, while his Company Commander (1978) is still one of the most moving and honest first-person accounts of small-unit command responsibility available. (MacDonald was one of the youngest captains in the Army in 1944 when his company was hit and overrun in the first hours of the German offensive.)
Stephen Ambrose's Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1970) is a judicious and balanced assessment of Eisenhower from his arrival in Washington in December 1941 through the German surrender in May 1945. Omar N. Bradley's and Clay Blair's A General's Life (1983) is a far more partisan biography of the so-called G.I. General, which provides a sometimes disconcerting glimpse of the internal tensions and disagreements within the Allied high command in Europe. It should be balanced with Nigel Hamilton's exhaustive, but also pugnaciously partisan three-volume biography, Monty: The Making of a General, 1887-1942 (1981), Monty: Master of the Battlefield, 1942-1944 (1983), and Monty: Final Years of the Field-Marshal, 1944-1976 (1987), and all can be supplemented by the fairly reliable official histories produced by the American and British military services in the postwar period.
Two general histories provide excellent surveys of the Pacific war, from the causes to the conclusion. John Toland's The Rising Sun, 1936-1945 (1971), views the war from the Japanese perspective and focuses on the war's causes, Japanese war plans, and the early victorious campaigns from the vantage point of Japan's military leadership. A counterpart volume is Eagle Against the Sun (1985) by Ronald H. Spector. Like Toland, Spector covers the entire conflict but views the war from the American perspective. Eagle Against the Sun may be the best single-volume survey of the Pacific war yet written.
The historical literature on Pearl Harbor and the first six months of the war in the Pacific is voluminous--so vast that readers must be especially careful in their selections. Perhaps the best picture of life in the prewar army is found in James Jones' fictional From Here to Eternity (1985). The subject of Pearl Harbor has produced countless pages of description and analysis, but much is of interest only to professional historians and specialists in the subject. Two books of special value to the general reader are Walter Lord's Day of Infamy (1957) and Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept (1982). Day of Infamy begins in the predawn hours and details the fascinating, dramatic events of the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The book is short, and Lord writes in a clear, journalistic style. At Dawn We Slept is a more complete and exhaustive book on the attack, the events leading to it, and the surrounding controversies. Although the book is over 700 pages long, the style is readable, the story interesting, and the treatment complete. If a student can read only one book on Pearl Harbor, Prange's work is the logical choice.
The best single-volume survey of the first six months in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor is John Toland's But Not in Shame (1961), which relates the story of defeat in the Pacific with a true sense of heroism and tragedy. Included are the American defeats at Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Corregidor, and Wake Island, and the Allied failures in the Dutch East Indies and Singapore. Stanley Falk's Bataan: March of Death (1984) is a moving and unbiased account of one of the most emotional subjects in American military history.
The battles for Guadalcanal and for Buna went on simultaneously, but Guadalcanal received far more attention from the American press at the time and from historians since that date. However, the quality of the works on Guadalcanal varies greatly. An older but reliable account is The Battle for Guadalcanal (1979) by Samuel B. Griffith II, which can be supplemented by Richard Tregaskis' Guadalcanal Diary (1984), a classic in war reporting that came out of the fighting on Guadalcanal. For the Papua Campaign, Lida Mayo's Bloody Buna (1979) not only chronicles the battles but also effectively conveys the nightmarish qualities of fighting in New Guinea--the constant rain, the disease, the lack of proper food and equipment, and the constant threat of death from the Japanese or from the jungle.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written on the campaigns that produced victory over Japan in the Pacific war. They range from very detailed volumes in the official histories of the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps to highly romanticized books on specific actions, people, weapons, and so forth. The following three books are accurate, balanced, and interesting accounts of the subject. Two sound works covering the offensive period are D. Clayton James' The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945 (1975), for the offensives in the Southwest Pacific and the Philippines, and James and William Belote's Titans of the Seas (1974), an account of the carrier battles in the Pacific. But no work better describes combat in the Pacific war at the squad and platoon level than Island Victory (1983) by S. L. A. Marshall. During World War II as a combat historian he gathered material for Island Victory by interviewing infantrymen of the 7th Infantry Division who had just cleared two small islands in the Kwajalein Atoll. The book tells the stories of squad and platoon fights with holed-up Japanese on islands no more than 250 yards wide. There are no generals or colonels here, no high-level planning or strategy. This is the story of ground combat from the vantage point of the individual infantryman, and, like MacDonald's Company Commander, the work is a testimony to the determination and heroism of the individual GI.
Note: The publication dates are shown for the most recent editions listed in Books in Print. Many of these books were originally published years earlier.
Список литературы
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