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The American 'island-hopping' campaign in the Pacific during the Second World War was a crucial factor in the eventual defeat of Japan in 1945. The assault and capture of these islands meant US bombers and their fighter escorts could now reach mainland Japan, disrupting and eventually crippling its war economy. The battles on Tarawa, the Marshall Islands, the Marianas group, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were all characterised by savage fighting and heavy casulaties on both sides. Japanese garrisons often fought to the death and kamikaze air attacks posed a grave threat to the opposing US forces. Employing archive colour and black and white photographs, maps and first-hand accounts, the author relates these pivotal battles to the wider struggle against the Japanese in the Pacific.
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PACIFIC VICTORY
PACIFIC VICTORY
Tarawa to Okinawa 1943–1945
Foreword by Brig-Gen E.H. Simmons USMC (Ret)
Derrick Wright
Half-title verso: PFCs Harvey Tilley and Robert Dalton operate a radio on Guadalcanal, December 1943, while Cpl Ashton Howard stands guard. (National Archives)
First published in 2005 by
Sutton Publishing Limited
The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
© Derrick Wright, 2005, 2013
The right of Derrick Wright to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9540 8
Original typesetting by The History Press
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Chronology of the Pacific War
INTRODUCTION
1. TARAWA
2. THE MARSHALL ISLANDS
3. THE MARIANAS
4. PELELIU
5. IWO JIMA
6. OKINAWA
Select Bibliography
FOREWORD
In Pacific Victory Derrick Wright demonstrates once again his facility for compressing vast amounts of information into a short coherent narrative, in this case the Second World War as it was fought in the Pacific Ocean Area. As a centerline for this, Wright has chosen to follow the progress of Adm Chester Nimitz’s advance across the Central Pacific, a strategic counteroffensive that had been contemplated in contingency planning for the long-foreseen war with Japan and as set down in the not-so-secret US War Plan Orange.
It would be an essentially naval war with the Army and what was still at first the Army Air Corps playing supporting roles. A subset to this planning was the work of the US Marine Corps, which, with minuscule budgets, drew up paper solutions to the amphibious assault of fortified positions, based largely on lessons learned from the failure of the British at Gallipoli in 1915. All of this was war-gamed at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Complementary studies went on at Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia. A few Fleet exercises squeezed out of slender operating budgets gave a practical but limited testing of tentative doctrine.
The results, when war came, were remarkably prophetic. As a sop to the Army, Plan Orange promised a reinforcement of the Philippines, but the admirals in their heart-of-hearts doubted that the Japanese could be stopped short of Hawaii. It is said that the only unforeseen surprise was the emergence of the aircraft carrier as the dominant capital ship, supplanting the heavy gunned battleship.
As peg points along the line of advance, Wright has chosen the amphibious assaults of Tarawa, the Marshalls, the Marianas, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Wright’s writing is studded with statistics and tables, but he gets past these with illuminating anecdotal passages that bring the fighting down to the foxhole and gun-tub level. These human touches lubricate Wright’s fast-paced writing style. The surviving combatants who fought these battles are now very old men – the writer of these remarks is one of them – and they are dying off rapidly. Those who remain and their sons and grandsons will find their deeds, in a world that now seems lesser in valor, are still remembered in reminders such as Pacific Victory.
Edwin Howard Simmons
Brigadier General, US Marine Corps (Ret)
Director Emeritus, Marine Corps History
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As with my previous books on the war in the Pacific, I have received generous help from many veterans of the battles, and I would particularly like to express my gratitude to the following for valuable information and their generous cooperation, Peter Walker, John Lane, Bert Clayton, Oliver Sweetland, Charles Owen, Thomas Climie, Robert Riebe, Dale Worley, Gen Paul Tibbets, Robert Singer and Gen James R. Jones.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE PACIFIC WAR
INTRODUCTION
A New Sun Rising
Japan’s emergence as a major military and political power in the Pacific began in the middle of the nineteenth century, after hundreds of years of self-imposed feudalism. The arrival of Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ in Tokyo Bay in 1853, bringing offers of trade with the West, led to the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854 and the establishment of a US consulate in Tokyo. By 1858, most of Japan’s major ports were open to Western trade. With the deposition of the shoguns, the warlords who had virtually controlled the country for centuries, imperial power was restored under the Emperor Meiji. However, real control was maintained by a political and military clique interposed between the Emperor and the Diet, the Japanese parliament, a system that was to continue until the end of the war in 1945.
Japan rapidly adopted the industrial and military skills of the West, and, armed with a belief that they had a divine right to rule in eastern Asia, Japanese forces embarked upon a programme of expansion. Under the Emperor Taisho, a short, fierce war in 1895 against the Chinese gave them control of Korea, Formosa and the Liatung Peninsula on the Yellow Sea coast, and in 1904, forgoing a declaration of war, they attacked Russian shipping at Inchon and Port Arthur. In the ensuing Russo– Japanese War the Japanese were victorious on land in Korea and Manchuria; and, more significantly, at sea in the great naval Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, when most of the Russian Fleet was destroyed for negligible Japanese losses.
It was at this time that the USA began to emerge as a significant power in the Pacific; and the acquisition of the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Marianas, as part of the spoils of the Spanish–American War of 1898, sowed the seeds of distrust between the two powers. Japan’s alliance with the Western Powers in the First World War was rewarded at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles with the trusteeship of the former German possessions in the Marshall and Caroline Islands, and Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas, all of which were to become vital parts of Japan’s outer defence perimeter in 1941. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1921–2 attempted to control the size of US, British and Japanese Fleets in the Pacific, but the larger tonnage allowed to the USA and Britain because of their Atlantic commitments was seen as a humiliation, and Japan renounced the treaty in 1934. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression, which continued until the start of the Second World War, had a devastating effect on Japan, whose exploding population and lack of material resources forced her once more to look towards China. The blowing-up of a section of Japanese-owned railway in Manchuria in 1931 provided the flimsy excuse for war, leading to Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 and to all-out war with China in 1937.
Viewing the situation with growing alarm, Britain and the USA conducted an escalating campaign of trade and diplomatic sanctions against Japan. The American ban on Japanese immigration in 1924 had already soured relations between the two countries. In June 1938 the USA placed restrictions on the export of goods that would be useful in war and froze Japanese assets in the USA and increased aid to Nationalist China’s Chiang Kai-shek. The Americans, British and Dutch imposed an embargo on strategic exports in the summer of 1941. Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in 1940, and the Russo-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941 with the Soviet Union ensured that her northern borders were safe, leaving her free to being what was to prove one of the most unequal wars in history.
‘Climb Mount Niitaka’
‘What did you think about Pearl Harbor? I never thought about anything except my duty and my work.’
(Capt Tadashi Kojo)
That the USA was surprised by the attack on Pearl Harbor is probably the most startling fact of the entire war. It was widely recognised by the US Government that the only country in the Pacific with the capability of attacking them, and the only one with any reason for doing so, was Japan; for decades the US Navy had carried out its Pacific exercises in accordance with ‘Plan Orange’, a thinly disguised code for war with Japan. Questions and conspiracy theories abound as to whether Roosevelt and Churchill knew in advance about the forthcoming attack and allowed it to happen to ensure the USA’s entry into the war; what cannot be questioned is that cryptanalysts from the USA, Britain and Australia had already broken parts of the Japanese diplomatic codes charting the rapid breakdown of relations between Japan and the US, and that the main Japanese naval cipher, JN25, had been compromised as early as 1932. Whatever the political ramifications, the fact remains that at 6 a.m. on 7 December 1941 a wave of 183 Japanese aircraft attacked the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, and that an hour later a second wave of 170 aircraft arrived to complete the devastation.
The Pearl Harbor attack was the brainchild of Fleet Adm Isoroku Yamamoto, who had been appointed Commander of the Combined Fleet in 1939. A veteran of the great naval Battle of Tsushima in 1905, he had spent a number of years in America in the 1920s and was an advocate of naval air power. Yamamoto had been influenced to some extent by the spectacular success of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm at Taranto in 1940, when a few obsolete biplane torpedo bombers had sunk or disabled a large proportion of the Italian Fleet, and he was convinced that carrier-launched attacks were destined to play a vital part in future operations. The 1st Air Fleet, composed of Japan’s 6 largest carriers and accompanied by 2 battle-cruisers, 9 destroyers, 3 submarines and a train of tankers and supply ships, had assembled in the anchorage of Etorofu in the Kurile Islands in northern Japan. Commanded by Vice-Adm Chuichi Nagumo, the fleet sailed to a point some 275 miles north of Oahu and awaited the coded message for the attack – ‘Climb Mount Niitaka’.
Assembled around Ford Island in the centre of Pearl Harbor were 70 warships of the US Pacific Fleet: 8 battleships, 2 heavy cruisers, 6 light cruisers, 29 destroyers, 5 submarines and 24 auxiliaries; there were no torpedo nets, no barrage balloons, no facilities for smokescreens, and the bulk of the ammunition was locked away. Most of the officers and enlisted men were anticipating a quiet Sunday after the regular Saturday evening shore leave, but their hopes were soon shattered. Working to tactics that they had rehearsed for months, the torpedo and dive-bombers swooped on ‘Battleship Row’ and the barracks and airfields on Oahu, achieving total surprise.
The damage sustained by US forces was huge: 5 battleships and 3 destroyers sunk; 3 battleships and 2 cruisers badly damaged; 200 Army and Navy aircraft destroyed and 3,478 personnel killed or wounded. Yamamoto had hoped to wipe out most of the US Navy carrier force in the attack, but his intelligence was obviously at fault: the Yorktown was in the Atlantic, the Saratoga was undergoing repairs in San Diego, and the Enterprise and the Lexington were returning from Midway and Wake Island after delivering aircraft to Marine units. Lt-Cdr Mitsuo Fuchida, operational leader of the attack, urged Nagumo to send in a third wave of aircraft to destroy the tank farms and engineering shops which stood untouched, but the Admiral’s timidity prevailed and an opportunity to neutralise Pearl Harbor completely was lost. Had these facilities been destroyed, the remains of the Pacific Fleet would probably have had to retire to the US West Coast. Nevertheless, Yamamoto’s huge gamble had paid off and his faith in naval air power had been vindicated. The Japanese were amazed at the scale of their victory; the bulk of the US Pacific Fleet had been put out of action for the loss of twenty-nine Japanese aircraft and fifty-five aircrew.
The news of the attack was greeted with horror throughout the USA, and President Roosevelt’s speech marking the ‘date that will live in infamy’ was a prelude to the declaration of war against Japan on 8 December 1941. Germany’s and Italy’s declarations of war against America on the 11th marked the turning point of the global conflict. The USA’s isolationist stance was over; victory over the Axis, though the struggle would be long and costly, was guaranteed; and Adm Yamamoto’s prediction that ‘we have wakened a sleeping giant’ was to prove tragically prophetic.
The Japanese Octopus
Pearl Harbor marked the beginning of a series of disasters for the Allies that would continue until the end of 1943. Even as Nagumo’s carrier planes were returning from Oahu, troops of Lt-Gen Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 25th Army were being transported to Singora, Patani and Kota Bharu in northern Malaya; Japanese bombers were destroying the RAF’s few planes at Hong Kong and troops were crossing the colony’s borders; and Lt-Gen Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army was occupying the northern islands of the Philippines prior to an all-out invasion. Already, two of the edicts laid out in Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ were being fulfilled: the domination of the whole of the western Pacific and the expulsion of the Western imperialist powers. With the Imperial Japanese Navy now in control of most of the Pacific, there was little chance of intervention by the Allies; and, although the resources available to the Japanese for their attacks on Malaya, Burma and the Dutch East Indies were limited as the majority of Japan’s fifty-one infantry divisions were spread between China, Manchuria, Korea and the Russian border, speedy and fluent advances through jungle territories that complacent Allied generals had considered impassable allowed the Army to fulfil its timetable of 50 days for the capture of the Philippines, 100 days for Malaya and 150 days for the Dutch East Indies.
‘A Great Disaster for British Arms’
Japan’s attack on the Malayan Peninsula preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor by thirty minutes, with amphibious landings at Kota Bharu and on the north-east coast in the early hours of 8 December (7th, Pearl Harbor time), which were rapidly followed by landings at Patani, Singora and at Bangkok in Siam. These operations involved two armies: the 15th, who were to occupy Siam and advance into Burma to capture Rangoon, and the 25th, who would advance through the Malayan Peninsula to Singapore, the great British naval base. Before the war it had been planned for the RAF to have 22 squadrons with 336 aircraft situated throughout the Malayan Peninsula, which would be capable of destroying any invasion fleet and dominating the sky. In fact, by December 1941 they had in place only 13 squadrons with 158 aircraft, many of them obsolete, and the Japanese, with superior-quality aircraft flying from bases in Indo-China and Siam, were able to systematically destroy the British airfields and overwhelm the outdated aircraft. Despite valiant Allied attempts to secure a line across the peninsula, Lt-Gen Yamashita’s Army repeatedly forced the British and Commonwealth troops to retreat by landing behind their lines, and the campaign deteriorated into a hopeless rearguard action all the way to Singapore.
On 8 December, Vice-Adm Sir Thomas Phillips, CIC British Far Eastern Fleet, was informed of Japanese landings in northern Malaya. Phillips assembled ‘Z Force’, including HMS Prince of Wales, a new 35,000-ton battleship, HMS Repulse, an older 32,000-ton battlecruiser, and four destroyers, and headed northward to intercept the Japanese transports in the Gulf of Siam. Phillips requested air reconnaissance for 9 December and fighter cover for the 10th, but what remained of the RAF was desperately trying to halt the multiple Japanese assaults; most of the airfields were under constant attack and the requests could not be guaranteed.
For twenty-four hours ‘Z Force’ was shielded by heavy cloud and rain, but on the 9th the weather cleared long enough for enemy reconnaissance planes to locate them, so Phillips turned about and headed back for Singapore. However, fresh reports were received indicating a landing at Kuantan and as this lay just a little off his return route he decided to investigate. The report proved to be false, but ‘Z Force’ had been spotted by a Japanese submarine and at 3.40 a.m. on 10 December aircraft of the 22nd Air Flotilla based in Indo-China were alerted. Shortly after 11.00 a.m. at approximately sixty miles east of Kuantan, eighty bombers and torpedo planes sighted ‘Z Force’ and the attack began. In a little over two hours both the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been sunk with the loss of nearly a thousand men, including Adm Phillips and Capt Tennant of the Repulse.
In the 1920s Brig-Gen ‘Billy’ Mitchell of the US Army had controversially presented the view that US Navy ships, particularly battleships, were highly vulnerable to attacks from the air – a view that he pressed so vigorously that he was court-martialled and suspended from the Army. His predictions were to be tragically realised at Pearl Harbor and in the Gulf of Siam. By 31 January, the Japanese had occupied the whole of the mainland, and the island of Singapore seemed frighteningly vulnerable. On the night of 8–9 February, elements of the 5th and 18th Divisions landed on the west coast and late on the 9th the Imperial Guards Division attacked near the Johore Bharu causeway. The collapse of British resistance in Singapore was now only a question of time, and on 15 February Lt-Gen Arthur Percival surrendered his command to Lt-Gen Yamashita.
In the greatest military defeat in the history of the British Army, 138,708 service personnel surrendered to a Japanese force half that size and would go on to endure nearly four years of brutal captivity from which one-third were never to return.
The whole campaign reflected the complacency and incompetence of those who had planned the defence of the Malayan Peninsula in general and the island of Singapore in particular. Responsibility lay not only with the hapless Percival, but with the British Government’s failure to provide modern aircraft and armour in sufficient quantities and in time, and above all in the arrogant and stupid underestimation of the Japanese. Gen Sir Henry Pownall, Gen Wavell’s Chief of Staff, summed up the situation well. ‘It is a great disaster for British arms, one of the worst in history. From the beginning to the end of this campaign we have been outmatched by better soldiers.’
‘I Shall Return’
‘Plan Orange’, America’s pre-war strategic plan for war with Japan, saw the Philippines as the most important outpost in the western Pacific. In the event of war, the garrison was expected to hold out until the arrival of the Pacific Fleet and reinforcements, but events at Pearl Harbor and Japan’s ability to land upwards of 100,000 troops from Formosa and the Palau Islands meant that the Philippines were doomed from the start. On 8 December, Gen Douglas MacArthur, who had been Military Adviser to the Philippines government since 1936, was recalled from retirement and given command of all forces on the islands, now designated US Army Force in the Far East (USAFFE). News of the attack on Pearl Harbor was received at 2.30 a.m. in Manila, the Philippines’ capital city, the delay being due to the five time zones and 5,000 miles separating the two locations, although it must be said that MacArthur did hear the news on the radio.
Earlier in 1941, MacArthur had convinced Gen Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, that he could hold the Philippines if he had sufficient air power, as he did not expect any Japanese attack before 1942. As a result, more than a hundred fighters and thirty-five of the new B17 ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers were sent to the islands. In addition, the Asiatic Fleet under Adm Thomas Hart had been increased to 3 cruisers, 13 destroyers, 6 gunboats, 6 motor torpedo boats and 29 submarines; and MacArthur also had under his command a total of 31,000 troops, including Philippine Scouts (Filipino troops in the regular US Army).
The Japanese started their attack with raids on the airfields at Clark Field and Iba, and were amazed to find most of the Far Eastern Air Force on the ground. Chaos had reigned after the news of Pearl Harbor, and Gen Lewis Brereton, the Air Force Commander, had been unable to get MacArthur to make any firm decisions – at first he had ordered his B17s south to Del Monte on Mindanao, but the order was not carried out. Brereton had asked permission to send them out on a bombing raid to Formosa to attack the Japanese airfields, but this had been denied; instead they went out on patrol (without bombs). At 10.45 a.m., MacArthur finally gave permission for the bombing raid and the B17s returned to Clark Field to bomb-up and refuel, and it was at this time that the Japanese attack began. From the north, 108 bombers escorted by 84 fighters swooped in and wreaked havoc among the neatly lined-up rows of B17s and their fighter escorts. Clark Field was reduced to rubble and almost all of the aircraft were destroyed together with the adjoining hangars and barracks. A simultaneous attack at Iba Field to the west caught the P40 fighters of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron circling to land and short of fuel, and all but two of them were shot down. In two hours, the Japanese had destroyed 17 B17s, 56 P40s and 30 other aircraft, for the loss of 7 of their own planes. The Far East Air Force had ceased to exist and from then until the final capitulation at Corregidor the US forces were virtually devoid of air cover.
Sensing the desperate situation that was developing in the Philippines, the US Navy Department ordered Adm Hart to pull out his ships – he sent nine of his destroyers and one cruiser to Borneo and two cruisers to the southern Philippines. Following the occupation of a few northern islands and the landing of a detachment at Aparri on the northern coast of Luzon, Lt-Gen Homma’s 14th Army executed a classic pincer movement, landing the 48th Division at Lingayen Bay in the north-east on 22 December and the 16th Division at Lamon Bay in the south-west on the 24th. MacArthur requested reinforcements and more aircraft, but Washington had now accepted that the Philippines would have to be written off, and the General was on his own. MacArthur transferred his HQ to the tiny island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay as his troops, under Lt-Gen Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, fought a hopeless rearguard action down the Bataan Peninsula. With diminishing supplies of ammunition and food and the added burden of thousands of Filipino civilians to support, Wainwright bravely fought on. On 22 February, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines for Australia to assume command of the newly created South West Pacific Theatre, and on 11 March he left Corregidor by PT boat for Mindanao, from where he was flown to Australia.
On 9 April, all resistance on the Bataan Peninsula ceased and Wainwright transferred his HQ to Corregidor, where the garrison surrendered on 6 May. The US and Filipino prisoners from Bataan and Corregidor now endured a 65-mile march to Camp O’Donnell. In what became infamously known as the Bataan Death March, the already starving prisoners were given no food or water and anyone breaking ranks risked death. More than 5,000 were to die on the march and only 9,300 survived until the end of the war, among them Lt-Gen Wainwright, whose emaciated figure at the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri, along with his equally skeletal British counterpart Lt-Gen Percival, added a poignant presence.
MacArthur arrived in Australia vowing ‘I shall return’, and he redeemed his vow when his army retook the Philippines in 1945 after conducting a brilliant series of leaps across New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies. After the war, he was to oversee the rebuilding of Japan, and he later took charge of Allied forces during the Korean conflict, being eventually removed from command by President Harry Truman for refusing to obey orders. A vain, conceited and arrogant man, the title ‘American Caesar’ conferred on him by the author William Manchester was not inappropriate. However, his brilliant progress through New Guinea to Morotai, and his seemingly instinctive ability to strike the enemy where and when it would do most damage, places him alongside Adm Chester Nimitz as one of the great commanders of the Pacific War. Nevertheless, his defence of the Philippines was seriously flawed: by allowing his air force to be destroyed on the ground and by not withdrawing to the Bataan Peninsula sooner, he must bear much of the responsibility for the debacle.
A Gallant Garrison
Two small but important islands were next on the Japanese list: Guam and Wake Island. Guam was a lost cause from the start. Flanked by the enemy-held islands of Saipan and Tinian, it was overwhelmed in two days; but there was to be a very different outcome to the invasion of Wake Island. Lying halfway between Guam and Pearl Harbor and some 600 miles north of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, Wake was actually an atoll of three islands around a lagoon, which had been designated for development as a submarine base and airstrip by the US Navy before the war. Defended by 13 officers and 365 Marines, the island also housed a considerable number of civilian workers engaged in preparing the defences. These defences consisted principally of six 5in naval guns in three batteries, three batteries of anti-aircraft guns and a number of obsolete ‘Wildcat’ fighters. Following three days of air raids from Kwajalein, the main invasion force arrived on 11 December, consisting of 3 light cruisers and 6 destroyers plus transports carrying 450 Special Naval Landing Force troops, all under the command of Vice-Adm Shigeyoshi Inoue.
As the Japanese ships came within range, the 5in guns opened up, damaging the light cruiser Yubari, sinking the destroyer Hayate, and damaging three other ships. Four of the US aircraft that had survived the earlier bombing raids now pursued the retreating ships, sinking the destroyer Kisaragi and damaging a light cruiser and two other vessels. In one short engagement the Japanese had lost over 400 sailors and airmen, an overwhelming but short-lived victory for the US forces.
As in the Philippines, confusion and indecision reigned. Adm Husband E. Kimmel, CIC of the Pacific Fleet, ordered Task Force 14 under Rear-Adm Jack Fletcher to Wake Island. But Kimmel was relieved shortly afterwards as a result of his performance at Pearl Harbor, and his temporary replacement, Vice-Adm William S. Pye, was reluctant to send a task force to Wake without direct orders from Washington; being more concerned with preserving what little remained of the Pacific Fleet, he ordered the return of Fletcher’s force.
It was now just a matter of time before Wake succumbed: air raids had continued incessantly since the first assault; the Marines had no aircraft left; and ammunition, food and morale were diminishing. On the 23rd, the Japanese began landing troops at various points on the island and the garrison bowed to the inevitable. In all, the Japanese had lost over 800 dead and 300 wounded for 120 American dead. Of the 1,146 civilian workers on Wake at the time of the invasion, 70 died and 12 were wounded. Apart from 100 civilians who stayed behind on Wake, the others and remaining Marines, sailors and soldiers spent the rest of the war in POW camps. As a result of US air raids on the island in October 1943, the Japanese commander, Rear-Adm Sakaibara, had the civilian contractors executed, fearing an imminent US invasion. He was later hanged as a war criminal. The defence of Wake Island, and the fighting spirit of its defenders, was the one bright spot in a scene of gloom for the Allies in the Pacific.
The Road to Mandalay
Having secured the northern end of the Malay Peninsula, the Japanese were free to attack Burma. The 15th Army under Lt-Gen Shojiro Iida had occupied Bangkok, the Siamese capital, on 8 December, and troops moving from the south took Victoria Point, Mergui and Tavoy in rapid succession, securing three important airfields en route. The main attack, which came from Raheng inside Siam, was directed at Moulmein; simultaneously, heavy air raids were mounted against Rangoon in which 3,000 civilians were killed. Though heavy losses inflicted on the Japanese Air Force by RAF fighters called a temporary halt to the raids, there was little overall opposition to the Japanese. The British CIC, Lt-Gen Hutton, had just taken up his post after years of deskbound appointments at home, and the only troops available were the 46th Brigade of the 17th Division, the 16th Indian Brigade and the 2nd Burma Brigade – few of these men were trained in jungle fighting and most of the best officers had been transferred to North Africa. By 26 January, Moulmein was under heavy attack and on the 31st it succumbed. Reinforcements were trickling into Rangoon, but it was becoming obvious that the city would have to be evacuated soon if there was not to be a repeat of the Singapore debacle. Gen Sir Harold Alexander, who had replaced Hutton on 5 March, ordered the evacuation on 7 March and the demolition of any equipment that could be useful to the Japanese. Successes elsewhere in South-East Asia allowed the Japanese to bolster their forces in Burma by 2 divisions, 2 tank regiments and over 200 aircraft, and as the British and Commonwealth armies moved into central Burma it was clear that the writing was on the wall. Emulating the campaign in Malaya in a series of retreats, hampered by the monsoon and appalling jungle conditions, the British retreated for 1,000 miles to the borders of India.
Vast amounts of equipment had been destroyed and 13,000 men had been lost, most of them as prisoners. The Burma Road from Lashio into China, the last land route by which Britain and the USA could send supplies to Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Army was lost. Christmas 1941 was not a time for celebration: Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day and the Japanese had effectively taken control of Malaya, the Philippines and Burma. The way was now clear for the occupation of the Dutch East Indies and its huge oilfields.
The East Indies Fall
The Japanese planned a three-pronged attack on the Dutch East Indies: the western force, sailing from French Indo-China, was to head for Sumatra to capture Palembang and then move into Java; the central force, coming from the Palau Islands, would take the oilfields of Borneo and move south to join up with the western force; and the eastern force, also from the Palaus, would take the Celebes, Ambon and Timor. In overall command was Lt-Gen Imamura of the 16th Army, which was supported by units of the Special Naval Landing Force, around 450 aircraft and a naval force of 2 battleships and numerous smaller vessels under Vice-Adm Nobutake Kondo. The campaign went with astonishing ease; Sumatra suffered heavy air raids from Malaya and, although Allied air forces were able to cause some damage to the western-force troop convoys, the Japanese were able to land 3,000 troops on the Sumatra coast while paratroopers seized the main airfield and oil installations. The central force rapidly occupied Tarakan, Balikpapan and Bandjarmasin in Borneo, and by 10 February the whole island was in Japanese hands; on the same day, ground troops and paratroopers captured Menado in the Celebes and within three days they had occupied the whole island.
Japanese domination in the air had prevented Allied naval forces from playing any significant part in the defence of the East Indies, but a ‘Combined Striking Force’ of Dutch, British and American vessels had been assembled under Dutch Rear-Adm Karel Doorman, and on 19 February it clashed with a Japanese force in the Lombok Straits off eastern Bali. Two enemy destroyers and a transport were damaged for the loss of one Dutch destroyer, but the invasion of Bali was in no way interrupted. Another battle followed on 26 February, when Doorman’s ships sailed out of Surabaya on the north Java coast to intercept the invaders. The ensuing action in the Java Sea was a total disaster for the Allies, with the loss of two Dutch cruisers and two destroyers, heavy damage to the British cruiser HMS Exeter and the death of Rear-Adm Doorman. The Japanese had expected to occupy the Dutch East Indies in about six months – it took them only three, and the coveted oil resources were secure.
Clearing the Indian Ocean
With the occupation of Burma now a certainty, Britain realised that there was a significant threat to the island of Ceylon, a vital link in the defence of India and an importance source of rubber following the fall of Malaya. A Japanese occupation of the island was unthinkable; it would alter the whole balance of power in the Middle and Near East. Six brigades of troops, desperately needed elsewhere, were rushed to the island and an Eastern Fleet of 5 battleships, 3 aircraft carriers, 7 cruisers and 14 destroyers, all under Adm Sir James Somerville, was assembled. The fleet looked impressive on paper, but there were serious deficiencies: four of the battleships were old, of First World War vintage, and therefore vulnerable to air attack; and one of the carriers, HMSHermes, was small and carried only a few obsolete aircraft.
In fact, the Japanese had no intention of attacking Ceylon, but they saw the Eastern Fleet as a threat to their troop convoys, which were using Rangoon as their principal port of entry into Burma to supply the 15th Army. As a result Vice-Adm Nagumo’s 1st Air Fleet, under the control of Vice-Adm Kondo, sailed to the Indian Ocean to intercept Somerville, and simultaneously Vice-Adm Jisaburo Ozawa led a force of 1 light carrier, 7 cruisers and 11 destroyers into the Bay of Bengal to attack merchant shipping.
Somerville split his force into two groups – the fast (the battleship HMS Warspite and the carriers HMS Indomitable and HMS Formidable) and the slow (four old battleships and the Hermes) – and patrolled south of Ceylon. But after two days there was no sign of the enemy so he detached Hermes to Trincomalee and two cruisers, HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire, to Columbo, and the rest of the fleet retired to a base in the Maldives. On 5 April, the Japanese fleet was spotted by reconnaissance aircraft, and Somerville immediately left the Maldives hoping to engage them; but he was over 600 miles to the west, and Japanese carrier planes caught the Cornwall and Dorsetshire and sunk both of them within twenty minutes. Somerville was now warily keeping to the south-east of Ceylon and did not make contact with Nagumo’s ships, which had turned their attention to Trincomalee. They bombed the port and sank HMS Hermes and a destroyer before joining up with Ozawa’s roving force, which had sunk 23 merchant ships totalling 112,000 tons.
The Indian Ocean episode only proved that the Royal Navy’s old and semi-obsolete ships were no match for the fast Japanese carriers with their modern aircraft and experienced pilots. The Eastern Fleet was soon disbanded, leaving the Imperial Navy virtually masters of the sea.
The Doolittle Raid
President Roosevelt was very concerned about the effect on the American public of the seemingly endless string of disasters in the Pacific, and demanded some kind of morale-booster – the result was a bold and imaginative raid on the Japanese capital, Tokyo. The idea originated with Capt Francis Low, a member of Adm Ernest Joseph King’s staff, who suggested that twin-engined bombers might be able to take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The idea was developed by Capt Donald Duncan, King’s air-operations officer, and tests were carried out off the coast of Virginia with B25 ‘Mitchell’ bombers taking off from the new carrier USS Hornet. Once it was established that the B25s could clear the deck (with room to spare), plans for the raid got under way in earnest.
The raid would have to be a joint Navy–Army affair. A specially created task force of two carriers with cruiser escort would get the Army flyers to within 500 miles of the Japanese coast; and after the raid the B25s would fly on to China and land at airfields under the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Forces. The whole operation was risky and would depend on skill and outstanding leadership.
The ideal leader was already available. Lt-Col James Doolittle had an outstanding record, the holder of dozens of aviation trophies and records, the first man to fly an ‘outside’ loop, and the first pilot to take off, fly a course and land without seeing the ground. He was full of enthusiasm and within a month had organised and trained the crews of the sixteen B25s required for the raid.
The new task force (TF16), under Adm William Frederick Jr (‘Bull’) Halsey, left San Francisco on 2 April 1942. On the 18th, by which time they were within 700 miles of Japan, they were located by two enemy ships and the element of surprise was lost. The bombers were immediately dispatched, but the premature departure meant that they would have an extra 200 miles to add to their overall trip. Flying at low level, the bombers attacked targets in Tokyo, Kobe and Nagoya and then flew on to China. Many ran out of fuel and, due to incompetence and misunderstandings on the part of the Chinese, the airfield at Chuchow was in total darkness. Despite many crash landings and diversions (one crew ended up in Vladivostok in Russia!), seventy-one of the eighty crew members survived.
The damage caused by the raid was negligible, but the effect on US morale was huge and the Japanese, fearing further attacks, moved four fighter groups back to the homeland. The Chinese were to pay a fearful price for the raid when the Japanese killed over 250,000 people in reprisal, one of the worst atrocities of the war.
Stalemate in the Coral Sea
Having secured the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese now turned their attention to the east and to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, vital to the Allies for the security of Australia. US cryptanalysts had intercepted some of the Japanese naval code JN25 and were aware of the threat to Port Moresby; the Navy had therefore assembled a task force based on the carriers Yorktown and Lexington, with an additional Australian cruiser squadron, all under the command of Rear-Adm Frank Jack Fletcher. Hearing of a landing at Tulagi north of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, Fletcher headed north to intercept it, but found that the covering naval force had already left. He then sailed to the eastern tip of New Guinea, hoping to catch the invasion convoy heading for Port Moresby, while his aircraft searched the Coral Sea for enemy carriers.
Unknown to Fletcher, a separate enemy task force under Vice-Adm Takeo Takagi had entered the Coral Sea on 5 May and was only 70 miles to his north-east. On the morning of 7 May, reconnaissance planes from both task forces reported seeing fleet carriers; both were wrong. Fletcher’s planes had sighted the light carrier Shoho, part of the retiring escort from the Tulagi force; and Takagi’s planes had sighted a destroyer and a tanker which Fletcher had detached from his main force. Carrier planes were immediately dispatched by both sides, and the Shoho, the destroyer (USS Sims) and the tanker (Neosho) were all sunk.
Both task forces were now aware of each other and on 8 May began mounting air strikes. The Japanese carrier Shokaku