Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The American counterattack to this Japanese southward push took the form of two parallel thrusts northward, passing to the east and west of Rabaul and Truk. The western thrust, under General MacArthur, aimed to reconquer New Guinea and move northward through the Admiralty Islands and the Philippines to the China Sea. The eastern American thrust, under naval control, sought to go northward through the Solomon Islands, then bypass Rabaul and Truk far to the east through the Marshall Islands, returning to the Tokyo road by attacking the Marianas from the Marshall Islands (700 miles east of Truk). This double movement is usually referred to as a “ladder” in which alternative advances on either side by the Americans led to Japanese counterattacks from Rabaul and Truk between the two legs.

At first much of the fighting was piecemeal, with inadequate supplies for both sides, but American supplies continued to come, while Japanese support was much more intermittent. This eventually became the story of the Pacific war, as American supplies, delivered from 6,000 or more miles away, buried the Japanese beneath water and earth. This struggle northward from Australia and New Zealand was to have been accompanied by a third thrust, under General Joseph W. Stilwell and Lord Louis Mountbatten from India, across Burma, to reestablish connections with southwestern China. For some time it was expected that MacArthur and Stilwell, converging on China from the Philippines and Burma, would establish a mainland base from which the final assault on Japan could be made. The Burma Campaign, held up by the difficulties of the terrain and constant diversion of men and supplies to other theaters, did not reach China, over the hand-built Burma Road, until February 1945. MacArthur was held up for two years (1942-1944) in the New Guinea area. Thus we must focus our attention on the eastern drive from New Zealand northward through the Solomons.

This eastern drive began on August 7, 1942, when Guadalcanal was invaded by naval and marine forces from Wellington, New Zealand, 2,375 miles farther south. By February 8, 1943, after six months of horrible jungle combat, often without either air or sea support, the Solomons were conquered. Six drawn naval battles during the struggle greatly weakened the enemy surface forces, while his air forces were crippled. In the same period, Japanese advance bases were expelled from the Aleutian Islands, and at least 135,000 enemy ground forces were left isolated in New Guinea and Rabaul.

By the autumn of 1943, the Allied forces had reached the great barrier of the Japanese Mandated Islands in the central Pacific. These were passed in a series of amphibious operations called “island hopping.” The first of these, Tarawa, in the Gilbert archipelago, was a small operation in comparison with subsequent “landings,” but its name still brings horror to those who remember it. In four days 3,100 marines were torn to pieces (a third fatally) to capture a small coral island defended by 2,700 Japanese with 2,000 civilian laborers. The fanaticism of the Japanese was a revelation, and may be measured by the fact that 4,500 were killed. We learned a great deal about amphibious warfare at Tarawa, especially the need for thorough preliminary naval bombardment and for detailed knowledge and planning in regard to tides, winds, reefs, and local fire support.

In February 1943, this experience was applied at Kwajalein, the world’s largest atoll, 560 miles north of Tarawa, and at Eniwetok, 340 miles west of Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands. In these landings Americans had their first large-scale experience of the irrationalities of fighting Japanese. Officers of the Mikado attacked tanks with ornamental swords, while privates sometimes killed themselves when they had Americans at their mercy. But usually they fought skillfully and tenaciously until the outcome was hopeless, when they made suicidal “Banzai!” charges. These two landings cost 695 American dead to kill 11,556 Japanese. During these operations Admiral Raymond Spruance led a carrier task force in a strike on Truk which destroyed over 200 Japanese planes and a dozen naval vessels at a cost of 17 American aircraft.

In the course of 1943 the American advance up the right leg of the Pacific “ladder” to Tokyo got so far ahead of schedule that several projected landings were eliminated, all future landings were advanced in date by a couple of months, and the whole weight of the advance was shifted from its original project of a final assault on Japan from Formosa or the Asiatic mainland to an undated and unspecified amphibious attack from Pacific bases. This left three major problems: (1) the need for an island close enough to Japan for preliminary bombardment by land-based planes; (2) the possibility of very large American casualties when the Japanese invasion came off (possibly in 1946); and (3) what could be done about the millions of Japanese ground forces in northern China and in Manchuria. The last two of these problems led to efforts to obtain Soviet intervention in the war against Japan; they meant, almost certainly, that considerable concessions must be made to the Russians in the Far East and that the final assault on Japan must be left until several months after the final defeat of Germany, to allow Soviet forces to be shifted from Europe to the Far East. In the meantime, the need for an air base for land-based bombers within range of Japan resulted in the conquest of the Marianas Islands.

The Marianas were 700 miles north of Truk, over 1,000 miles northwest of Eniwetok, and almost 1,600 miles from Tokyo. The conquest of Saipan in the middle of this archipelago in June and July 1944 was the second great amphibious landing that summer, two marine divisions, under Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith, hitting the beach at Saipan on June 15th, only nine days after D-Day in Normandy. The Japanese had 29,000 men on Saipan, 7,000 on Tinian, and 18,000 on Guam. All three were eliminated by the end of July. Japanese resistance was so intense on Saipan that an American Army division, held in reserve at sea for the other islands, had to be thrown ashore at Saipan on the second day. That island was conquered by July 9th, with 27,000 of the Japanese garrison of 32,000 killed to 3,400 Americans dead and 13,000 wounded. Over 24,000 Japanese and 2,214 Americans were killed on the other two islands.

Efforts by the Japanese fleet to disrupt the Marianas attack led to the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19-20, 1944). This was another “naval” battle in which no surface vessels fired upon, or even saw, each other, since it was fought entirely in the air and under the surface. On the opening day the Japanese lost 402 planes, while destroying 26 American planes, and two of their carriers were sunk by American submarines. As the Japanese fleet, denuded of air protection, fled westward, Spruance’s planes pursued and sank a carrier and several lesser vessels at a cost of 20 planes. This engagement shattered the Japanese naval air support and left the Philippines open to American assault.

In September 1944, another amphibious attack landed in the Palau group of the western Caroline Islands, 1,175 miles directly west of Truk and only 610 miles directly east of Mindanao, the large southern island of the Philippines. Feverish haste was made to conquer this group and to prepare Ulithi Atoll, the best harbor in the area, as a base for American surface vessels, since ‘the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines had been moved up from December 20th to October 20th, only four weeks after the occupation of Ulithi on September 23rd. The invasion forces of two divisions had left Hawaii on September 15th with their original destination at Yap, just south of Ulithi, but were diverted to rendezvous with two divisions from MacArthur at sea, 450 miles east of Leyte. In the meantime, in the first half of 1944, the Japanese fleet shifted from the Inland Sea of Japan to Lingga Roads, off Singapore, in order to be closer to a supply of fuel oil; and the Japanese Army on the mainland of China drove southward from Hankow to Hanoi (Indochina), cutting Chiang Kai-shek off from all eastern China and overrunning the American strategic bombing bases in the area.