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

At 8:45 a.m. urgent appeals to Admiral Halsey had detached a force of five fast carriers with escort vessels to pursue Kurita. Two hours later, while still 335 miles away, these launched a series of air strikes, 147 planes in all, of which 14 were lost without significant damage to the Japanese. The following day strikes of 257 planes sank another of Kurita’s cruisers.

During this same eventful October 25th, Admiral Ozawa’s Northern Force, the “bait,” had been swallowed. In five air attacks, totaling 527 planes, Halsey’s carriers, commanded by Admiral Mitscher, sank four Japanese carriers and a destroyer. Among these was the last of the six carriers which had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The Battle of Leyte, strategically ill-advised from the Japanese point of view, ended its navy as a significant force in the Pacific. From that date, the American advance was held up chiefly by suicide tactics (the kamikaze attacks). Leyte is of great historical significance as the last naval battle in which battleships participated and played a role, admittedly minor. The Third Fleet’s Battle Line of six great ships did not even fire its heavy guns.

While General MacArthur and the army were clearing up the Philippines, capturing Manila after fierce house-to-house combat on March 14, 1945, the navy and air arms pressed on toward Japan. By October 1, 1944, two intermediate targets had been set: one was to capture Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands, about halfway from Saipan to Tokyo, to be used as an emergency landing area and fighter-plane base for the B-29’s attacking Tokyo from Saipan. The other was to capture Okinawa and other islands in the Ryukyus as bases for land forces to invade Japan itself.

Iwo Jima was invaded on February 19th and secured by March 26th. Bitter fighting which involved flushing Japanese, one by one, out of caves yielded 20,703 Japanese killed and only 216 prisoners by March 26th; 2,469 more (of which a third were killed) were disposed of in the next two months. The Americans lost about 5,000 killed, but three divisions suffered over two-thirds casualties in the struggle to capture this island of 4.5 by 2.5 miles. The dead on both sides thus amounted to 2,400 per square mile.

Iwo will always be remembered for the famous raising of the American flag on the top of 550-foot Mount Suribachi at the southern tip of the island on February 23rd, while fighting was still severe. On April 7th the value of the island was shown when, for the first time, B-29’s returning from Tokyo jolted down onto Iwo for relief; fifty-four landed that day. These big planes, flying the round trip from Saipan to Tokyo in about seven hours, were already engaged in the systematic destruction of all Japanese cities. The flimsy houses of these crowded urban areas made them very vulnerable to incendiary bombs, but the distance was so great that only moderate-sized bomb loads could be carried. On March 9, 1945, the Air Force tried a daring experiment. The defensive armament was removed from 279 B-29’s, releasing weight for additional incendiaries, and these planes, without guns but carrying 1,900 tons of fire bombs, were sent on a low-level attack on Tokyo. The result was the most devastating air attack in all history. With a loss of only 3 planes, 16 square miles of central Tokyo were burned out; 250,000 houses were destroyed, over a million persons were made homeless and 84,793 were killed. This was more destructive than the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima five months later.

The conquest of Okinawa was a much bigger task than Iwo Jima; 760 miles west of Iwo, it was only 360 miles from the Chinese mainland, and almost the same distance from both Formosa and Japan. It was 830 miles southwest of Tokyo Bay, a full 900 miles north of Leyte, and over 1,200 from the United States Navy’s refuge in Ulithi Atoll. The size of the island, almost 500 square miles, made it a possible staging area for an invasion of Japan.

The magnitude of the assault on heavily populated Okinawa is almost beyond behef. The fighting navy of no combat vessels with over 100 supply ships protected an amphibious attack of 1,213 vessels carrying 182,113 assault troops. The preliminary bombardment by naval guns fired 40,412 rounds in 16- to 5-inch calibers. The assault, on a perfect Easter morning, April 1, 1945, hit the coral reef, with four divisions on a front five miles wide. The size of the whole operation may be judged from the fact that the supply tankers in eight weeks (to May 27th) delivered 8% million barrels of fuel oil and 2i1/2 million gallons of aviation gasoline; in five of these weeks the same tankers delivered over 24 million letters to men engaged in the attack.

The Okinawa campaign was the most severe of the Pacific War. It required three months of intense combat to secure the island against the 77,000 Japanese defenders, most of whom had to be killed or committed suicide. The invasion force had 40,000 casualties, of which almost one-fifth were killed. The naval and air support suffered intensely from 1,900 kamikaze attacks which sank 30 and damaged 368 naval vessels, with the loss of 763 fleet aircraft, and with 10,000 naval casualties (of which half were killed).

The degree and kind of resistance from the Japanese at Okinawa raised grave questions regarding the final defeat of Japan. By May 1945, a major part of the Japanese population was completely disillusioned with the war and eager to find a way out of it. These sentiments were shared by most of the civilian leaders and by a good portion of the naval leaders. Some of the army, however, still believed that they could make the costs of an American invasion of Japan too high to be acceptable to American opinion. Somewhat similar ideas occurred to some of the American leaders. These Japanese fanatics believed that they could get a major part of Japan’s fighter-plane construction dispersed and placed underground by mid-September 1945. If these facilities were used to build cheap, uninstrumented kamikaze planes manned by untrained suicide volunteers (who were available in large numbers) and supplemented by human torpedoes, it might be possible to inflict unbearable losses on any American invasion of Japan itself.

As part of this project the Japanese had perfected a manned glider bomb, called Baka (foolish) by the Americans, which carried a man and 2,645 pounds of trinitroanisol in a 20-foot fuselage with 16.5-foot wing-span. Without any engine, but carrying three thrust rockets, this weapon was dropped from a conventional plane and came in on its target at over 600 miles per hour. Even with air cover and using proximity fuses, American ship defenses could be “saturated” and exhausted if enough of these came in over sufficiently extended periods. Several incidents in the Okinawa campaign raised fears of this nature. On April 16th the destroyer Laffey sustained 22 attacks in 80 minutes and destroyed all of them, but 6 kamikazes hit the ship, knocking it out. On May 11th, the picket ship Hadley was attacked by 10 planes simultaneously; all were destroyed but the vessel was hit by a Baka , a kamikaze, and a bomb, and was knocked out.

Neither of these ships was sunk, but casualties were so heavy that American leaders shuddered to think of the results if such attacks were hurled at troop transports coming in on amphibious attack. In June 1945, American estimates of their casualties in such an attack were over half a million. It is true that Japan could have offered such resistance, for at mid-August 1945, when 2,550 kamikaze planes had been expended, the Japanese still had 5,350 left, with adequate pilots ready, and had about 5,000 planes for orthodox bombing attacks, plus about 7,000 more in storage or under repair. These, with bombs and gasoline, were being saved for the American invasion. These considerations form the background to the Yalta and Potsdam conferences and the decision to use the atom bomb on Japan.