Season 15, Episode 19: The Pacific War, Part V: Hail Mary

The United States of America officially entered the second world war after the attack on Pearl Harbor and simultaneous attacks on other Pacific colonies in December of 1941 amid a groundswell of popular support. In addition to the recruitment, conscription, and training being undertaken to support this war effort, the US populace was also asked to make voluntary and sometimes not-so-voluntary sacrifices. On one side of this coin was the occasional request for people to donate their items which contained certain materials, especially rubber, metals, and even old rags. On the other side, however, was the introduction of rationing and price controls which were aimed at reducing conspicuous consumption so that there would be enough food to supply the troops at the front. In late 1943, after almost two years of being at war, there was a real danger that the US public would succumb to war fatigue.

US high command was aware that this could become a problem, and part of the reason for President Roosevelt’s insistence that the US should only enter the war if Japan directly attacked their territory was that he believed that the public would otherwise never support the kind of long war which would be necessary to defeat the Axis powers. It was partly out of fear that the public would turn against the war effort that the US high command devised a strategy for the Pacific War which they hoped would minimize casualties and bring the war to an end much sooner. This strategy is remembered, colloquially, as “Leapfrogging.”

Rather than conquer every Japanese-held island throughout the vast Pacific ocean, the Leapfrog strategy proposed capturing only those islands which hosted air strips or other tactical advantage and bypassing the islands which were heavily entrenched by determined Japanese defenders but did not possess any significant advantage. The principles of this strategy were sound enough: bypassing unnecessary islands would allow faster overall progress and the bypassed islands would eventually be cut off from supply, which would force their garrisons to surrender. However, the best-laid plans often have unintended consequences.

The Imperial Japanese Navy, in response to this strategy, began utilizing submarines as supply vessels, allowing them to sneak needed supplies to their stranded troops. Often included in these supplies were seeds and farming implements which the garrisons could use to gradually create their own semi-sustainable supply. Because they were busy soldiering, the task of growing sufficient food for these garrisons often fell to native peoples on these islands or imported Korean laborers, who were frequently subjected to abuse and often kept in a state of near-starvation. In a few instances, bypassed garrisons managed to travel to nearby islands which were under attack by Allied forces and provide much-needed reinforcements as well as, occasionally, launching counteroffensives which caused increased casualties among Allied troops.

In the autumn of 1943, the US launched a campaign targeting the central Pacific Marshall and Gilbert Archipelagos, which had both been heavily fortified with naval and air infrastructure. They were a major objective for the Allies in the Pacific, as the Japanese had built airstrips on many of these islands, thinking of them as “unsinkable aircraft carriers.” Taking the islands would reduce the air capacity of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which was still reeling from their defeats at Midway and the Allied successes in the south Pacific. The airstrips on these islands could also be utilized by Allied forces to provide air support for future incursions.

In late November, the US Pacific Fleet launched its initial attack against the Gilbert Islands, starting with a large atoll called “Tarawa,” home to a large airfield which the Allies needed to neutralize to make further central Pacific conquests less difficult. However, Tarawa had seen substantial improvements and increased fortification since the Gilbert Islands were subjected to an air raid in the late summer of 1942, more than a year earlier. Over a thousand Korean laborers had been imported to the island for the sake of improving its defenses.

In spite of heavy bombardment from the air and from naval artillery, Marines landing on the beach at Tarawa faced intense opposition from concrete pillboxes and snipers. Armored support units like tanks and personnel carriers frequently met with impassable obstructions and were occasionally destroyed by mines. The Japanese garrison fought seemingly without regard for their own life and limb, engaging in banzai charges and repeatedly refusing surrender even after their communication lines were destroyed by air strike. When the situation became hopeless for the defenders, many of their officers chose to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner. Casualties among the Japanese over the course of the battle were immense: of the over three and a half thousand Japanese troops in the garrison, only seventeen survived the battle, and of the over one thousand Korean laborers present when the battle began, less than one hundred thirty survived. However, the sufficiency of their defenses and their own determination had ensured that casualties among US troops was also quite startling: of the eighteen thousand US Marines who stormed the beaches of Tarawa, over a thousand were killed and over two thousand wounded.

The strategic consequences of the battle of Tarawa were not nearly as significant as its political consequences. The US public was shocked at the number of casualties sustained in the battle, which was heavily reported by nearly every major newspaper. More than a thousand were dead, twice that were wounded, and all for a little clump of sand in the central Pacific. Many of the families of those lost in the battle wrote angry letters to Admiral Chester Nimitz, who was the commander in chief for the US Pacific Fleet, and the public outcry was fed, in part, by comments from Marine Corps General Holland Smith, who in a moment of frustration while touring the Tarawa beach littered with American dead, criticized the losses as unnecessary. He continued criticizing the operation to seize Tarawa long after the war ended, claiming that the casualties were excessive and needless. Naval commanders like Chester Nimitz, however, defended the operation as both necessary and of critical strategic importance.

The public outcry in the United States over the supposedly heavy casualties suffered at Tarawa led Japanese Prime Minister Tojo Hideki to conclude that in spite of suffering a battlefield defeat, the Imperial Japanese military had actually earned a victory in this war. He believed, and in many ways needed to believe, that the US public was growing weary of the Pacific War and was not willing to see many more thousands of their countrymen die during its prosecution. He reassured the emperor that the US could be defeated, if not directly, then through the very democracy they claimed to champion. Even President Roosevelt, who had generally enjoyed unprecedented popularity in office, could not ignore the will of his people forever. Hoping that the US public’s reaction to the Battle of Tarawa was a harbinger of future antipathy toward their war effort, he believed Japan had an opportunity to isolate the US and successfully remove one of its main allies in east Asia: he proposed that the empire of Japan should make peace with China.

While the successful conclusion of the second Sino-Japanese War would almost certainly have made Japan’s military better able to conclude the war against the US on their own terms, the mission was doomed to failure from the start. Overtures from the Japanese government were met by the Chinese government with demands that Japan relinquish its occupied Chinese territory and likewise recant any future so-called “rights and interests” in the region. These demands were a hard line for the Japanese government, and the prime minister had no interest in acquiescing. Falling back on the old chestnut of pan-Asian idealism, in November of 1942 Tojo Hideki organized the “Greater East Asia Conference,” which hoped to unite the peoples of East Asia against the United States and Britain, characterizing the Pacific War as a race-based conflict in hopes of inspiring support for Japanese regional hegemony among the various peoples of East Asia. In terms of propaganda value, there is little evidence that this conference had any impact outside of Japan.

In early January of 1944, as the Gilbert and Marshall Campaigns continued apace, Japan ratified a treaty with their puppet government in Nanjing in hopes of swaying the Chinese populace. This treaty brought an end to Japanese extraterritorial rights in China, meaning Japanese residents of China would be subject to China’s laws. The government of Japan hoped that the Chinese would see this as a sign of future concessions and throw their support behind the regime of Wang Jingwei, but it appeared to do nothing to move the needle of public opinion. The empire of Japan was still seen as an unwelcome invader, regardless of any diplomatic generosity.

Throughout the early months of 1944, the Navy and Marines continued their assault against the targeted islands of the Gilbert and then Marshall Islands, finishing the campaign in February. Toward the end of that month, the prime minister appointed himself as the chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, effectively taking direct control of the army and its operations. The emperor continued to support prime minister Tojo for the moment, but if the grand strategy he was preparing did not result in an acceptable conclusion of the war, he would bear the consequences. As the Allies in the Pacific were recuperating from their ongoing island-hopping campaigns, the empire of Japan, now under the leadership of a combination prime minister-slash-chief of the army, was preparing to launch a new offensive against holdouts defending the Republic of China and against the British Empire’s footholds in Burma.

Preparations for the offensive against China began in early 1944, as Japan was in the midst of offering their diplomatic concessions to the Chinese. The Burma offensive was dubbed “U-go Sakusen,” meaning “Operation U,” and its preparation had begun in June of 1943, after a British offensive managed to restore supply lines to China by passing through an area which the local Japanese armies believed was impassible. Although the British had succeeded, this expedition witnessed huge casualties among the troops who completed it, most largely dying of exhaustion and succumbing to diseases like malaria.

Leading Operation U-go was Lieutenant General Mutaguchi Reyna, a man who had contributed to many preceding Japanese victories and was even involved in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident which launched the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. These victories had a profound effect on the man; he believed that he was destined to win a decisive battle which would lead the empire of Japan to ultimate victory.

During the early months of 1944, the Allies also prepared a new offensive and concentrated several large armies in the vicinity of Burma. Aware of this maneuver, Mutaguchi proposed utilizing a diversionary attack to draw some of that opposing strength toward Bengal and away from Manipur, the real target of this offensive. The plan relied on precise timing which assumed specific responses from their enemies. Coordinating the movements of the various moving parts of Operation U-go would be tricky and during some key points in the operation, these various army groups would not be able to communicate with one another.

Many members of Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi’s command staff disliked this plan, arguing that it was too risky and that widely separating the offensive groups made them vulnerable to enemy envelopment. Mutaguchi arranged for these officers to be transferred before the operation got underway.

Operation U-go began in early February 1944 with a diversionary attack by the 55th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, who assaulted positions held by a unit of Indian troops fighting under the British flag at Arakan. While initial efforts successfully pushed the Indian division back, they retreated to a defensive position called the “Admin Box,” which was quickly fortified against further incursion. Japanese troops expected their siege of the Admin Box to succeed but were soon disappointed when Allied planes made regular supply drops while imperial supplies dried up and their own air corps was unable to resupply them, being tied up with other engagements in the Pacific. The Japanese troops were forced to withdraw after two and a half weeks, starving and exhausted.

The diversionary attack had failed to convince the Allies that the Japanese were targeting Bengal, but orders to redeploy relevant troops came too late from British commanders and in early March an Indian Division was cut off and nearly enveloped. However, now that it became clear that their target was Manipur, the Allies were able to transport troops from Arakan to the targeted city of Imphal, rescuing the beleaguered Indian troops and defending against the attack to the north of Imphal.

Other prongs of this offensive launched in April, and continued through June, with Japanese forces once more being forced eventually to withdraw due to severe supply shortage. Before Operation U-go officially ended in failure, however, the planned mass offensive in China began.

Ichi-go Sakusen, meaning “Operation Number One,” began in April and was originally part of a contingency plan conceived a few years before. Meant to be set in motion in the event that Japan lost control of Southeast Asia, the plan was to secure the central rail corridor in China and raid the area for raw materials which Japanese high command intended for a renewed offensive in 1946. Unlike the already-endangered Operation U-go in Burma, Operation Ichi-go enjoyed a few pre-existing advantages which would prove critical.

The “Europe First” policy which had been agreed upon when the US joined the Second World War was reinforced at the Tehran Conference in late 1943, with president Roosevelt personally guaranteeing the United States’ commitment to prioritize defeating the Nazis in Europe to leaders of both the UK and USSR. As Operation U-go raged on in Burma, the Allies did not believe that the Imperial Japanese Army would stage a concurrent large-scale offensive, especially considering the losses they had sustained in the Pacific. To assist the defense of Manipur, British commanders had demanded the redeployment of Y Force, an American trained and American-equipped division of China’s National Revolutionary Army. Chinese intelligence warned of an impending offensive in northern China and resisted the redeployment of Y Force, who were among their best soldiers, but US leaders threatened to cease payments to China through the Lend-Lease Act unless they sent Y Force to Burma. China complied in May, after Operation Ichi-go had launched but before anyone realized just how serious it was.

The nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek believed that a renewed Japanese offensive would begin in the south, rather than the north. The north was still reeling from the damage wrought by the intentional flooding of the Yellow River by KMT troops retreating from Xuzhou in 1938, so the nationalists expected a southern offensive and largely disregarded reports about Imperial Japanese troops amassing in the north. Even when Japanese armies began penetrating the border of KMT-controlled areas in the north, this was seen by Chinese leadership as a mere feint, likely meant as a diversion to support the ongoing Burma offensive.

As Operation Ichi-go began in late April, defenders in the province of Henan were quickly overrun and the Beijing-Hankou railway seized. By mid-May, it was apparent to Chinese leadership that this attack in the north was no mere feint, but a concentrated offensive. The city of Luoyang, a former capital of ancient China, was taken in spite of being well-provisioned and possessing a considerable garrison of defenders. While the damage to China’s infrastructure had slowed Japanese progress, it also hindered communication between nationalist-led military groups. The General in Luoyang claimed that he requested permission to counterattack the Japanese incursion during its early phases but that he did not receive a reply for a week, by which time the Imperial Japanese Armies in the vicinity had fortified their positions and were unassailable. Luoyang was encircled by May 14 and was captured eleven days later.

There was another factor at play in the collapse of nationalist forces in the face of reinvigorated Japanese aggression: corruption. To the surprise of almost no one who had been observing China’s situation for any period during the preceding century, its government was experiencing a shortage of funds. The Lend-Lease Act of the Roosevelt administration had helped them meet some of their short-term needs but corruption within the officer corps was a continuing problem and in some cases their troops were not being paid on time. This lowered morale and led, in some cases, to mass desertion as men sought gainful means of survival. There were, of course, some soldiers who had joined the struggle out of an abundance of patriotism and were willing to undergo collective hardship for the sake of national liberation, however long in coming. That left a third group of soldiers within the nationalist ranks who remained at their posts but decided to make up for their income shortfalls through creative means like extorting peasants, selling stolen goods on the black market, and other such illicit activities. The nationalist forces within the military also frequently press-ganged civilians into doing hard labor to support the war effort, all of which served to make the nationalists extremely unpopular in some quarters of the nation.

After the fall of Luoyang to Japanese troops in late May, the Imperial Japanese Army continued its mass offensive against its next target: Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. There had been two previous attempts to seize Changsha, which we discussed in episode 11, so finally conquering this city held tremendous propaganda potential for the Imperial Japanese military. It was also the junction of two rail lines, which were the primary targets of this incursion. Some of the local rail lines led straight to several air bases at which US pilots were stationed with their craft. Taking those bases would cripple air support for local Chinese troops and ease future incursions.

Several Imperial Army groups in the southern region near Hunan lent support for this endeavor. This time, Changsha would not be spared from the horrors of invasion and occupation. All things considered, Operation Ichi-go was extremely successful and the empire of Japan gained control of the railways throughout eastern China and the surrounding territory. However, while this victory was still being achieved, concurrent events were transpiring in the Pacific which would considerably blunt this triumphant moment.

As the Japanese mass offensive against China was underway in June of 1944, the US Navy was preparing to deliver a crushing blow against the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific. By 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy was in fairly bad shape. In April of 1943, just after the US finalized their capture of the eastern Solomon Islands including Guadalcanal, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku decided to boost morale by taking a tour of Japanese forces stationed throughout the South Pacific. You may recall that Admiral Yamamoto had planned both the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway. US intelligence intercepted communications from Japanese radio operators detailing the admiral’s plans and, on the orders of Admiral Chester Nimitz, the commander-in-chief of the US Pacific fleet, launched a secret mission to kill him, dubbed “Operation Vengeance.”

On April 18, 1943, a Mitsubishi G4M bomber which Admiral Yamamoto was using as his primary means of transport was intercepted along with its fighter escorts by a convoy of sixteen US fighters - specifically P-38 Lightnings. The P-38s engaged in dogfights with the zeroes escorting the admiral and one of the US pilots strafed the admiral’s transport with 50-caliber machine-gun fire until it began to spew smoke from its engines. The admiral’s transport crashed into the jungle on the island of Bougainville, where it was later discovered by a Japanese rescue team, who concluded that all aboard had perished. The admiral was cremated and his remains were given a state funeral back in Japan, along with the usual bevy of posthumous medals and honors.

The loss of Admiral Yamamoto was a severe blow to the already-demoralized Japanese forces in the Pacific, who then suffered through the ensuing allied campaigns which drove them out of the Dutch East Indies. Though much of the action had taken place in the south Pacific, the US Navy had begun to focus on the central Pacific as their next target, beginning at Tarawa and the other islands in the Gilbert and Marshall Archipelagos. After completing the seizure of those island chains, the US Pacific Fleet turned its eyes on the Mariana Islands, which includes Guam, which had been a US possession which the Japanese had seized near the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Near Guam was Saipan, a former Spanish and then German possession which the Japanese had seized near the beginning of the first world war.

Japanese Naval Command knew that Guam and Saipan, along with the other Mariana Islands, were prize targets for the US Navy, as those islands and their air strips could be used to support bombing raids against the Japanese home islands themselves. They developed a contingency plan in the case of an amphibious US attack against those islands, hoping once more to take advantage of their enemy’s initiative and draw the US Pacific Fleet into a decisive battle which would turn the tide in this war.

Unfortunately for the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Pacific Fleet not only knew about the Japanese fleet’s contingency plan, but had managed to intercept valuable intelligence detailing precisely what the Japanese response would be to an amphibious invasion of Guam and Saipan. That being said, even without this foreknowledge it is unlikely that the Japanese would have triumphed in the battle that was to come; the victories which they managed to score against Allied naval forces had sapped them of most of their veteran pilots. Combined with the advantages enjoyed by US pilots, who were now equipped with valuable intelligence regarding how to easily win dogfights against Japanese fighter planes, the odds were already stacked against the Imperial Japanese Navy before the decisive battle which they hoped to win.

In addition to the forewarning intelligence, which was obtained courtesy of the Filipino anti-Japanese resistance, the US Navy enjoyed a considerable technological advantage in the form of a new kind of anti-aircraft ordnance. There was a practical reason why the airplane was, thus far, considered one of the most important weapons platforms in the second world war: they are extremely destructive and relatively difficult to hit. Estimates indicate that even experienced pilots were expending thousands of rounds of ammunition for every plane they managed to shoot down in a dogfight. The ordnance used by anti-aircraft guns was usually rigged to explode at a certain altitude, by direct impact, or using a timing mechanism, none of which were terribly reliable in the midst of a bombing raid. The new type of ordnance being produced for US anti-aircraft gunners utilized a cutting edge proximity fuze, which as its name suggests was capable of detonating when it came within a certain distance of its intended target. This made anti-aircraft fire much deadlier than it had been in previous engagements, since a direct hit was no longer required to inflict damage upon one’s target.

Japanese high command expected that the US Pacific Fleet would continue their successes in the south Pacific by continuing south and believed that they had until at least November to fortify their holdings in the central Pacific, especially Mariana Islands like Saipan and Guam. When US forces instead began attacking Saipan in force in mid-June, the commanders of the Imperial Japanese Navy were flummoxed. Feeling compelled to respond, both because of the danger to their home islands and because they still hoped to force the US Navy into a decisive battle which the Japanese would win, the response of the Imperial Japanese Navy was an all-out attack with nearly every carrier, battleship, and submarine they could field.

The ensuing Battle of the Philippine Sea was certainly a decisive battle, but not in the way that Imperial leadership hoped it would be. Hoping to gain an early advantage by striking first with a massive air attack, their planes were largely defeated thanks to superior training of US forces and the new proximity fuses which their anti-aircraft gunners deployed with truly devastating effectiveness. One US pilot later compared the battle to (quote) “an old time turkey shoot!” (end quote)

The Battle of the Philippine Sea was a devastating defeat for the Imperial Japanese Navy, who lost nine aircraft carriers in the course of the skirmish, as well as many support craft and hundreds of pilots who could not easily be replaced. The casualties for the Japanese were nearly three thousand personnel killed. On the US side, only one battleship had been damaged and casualties were a little over a hundred. However, while US Naval power enjoyed superior advantages when engaging their Japanese counterparts, armed forces on the ground were not so fortunate. The Battle of Saipan raged for nearly a month, cost the lives of over three thousand US soldiers, wounded thirteen thousand more, and also caused the deaths of between eight and ten thousand civilian residents of the island, a significant number of whom committed suicide out of fear borne from Japanese propaganda that US service members would subject them to torture if they allowed themselves to be captured. The imperial troops on the island fared far worse, losing over twenty-five thousand in the ensuing fighting along with five thousand suicides of their own, with the final week of fighting featuring numerous hopeless banzai charges by desperate, starving Japanese troops. Its casualty count was worse than the battle of Tarawa.

The early summer of 1944 also bore witness to another large amphibious landing on the other side of the globe. On June 6, Allied troops made a large-scale incursion onto the beaches of Normandy in northern France, surprising defenders and seizing a large beachhead which would be used to stage further offensives into Nazi-occupied territory. The decision to open a second front in northern France was resisted initially by Winston Churchill, who preferred to target the Balkan states east of Italy instead. He was more or less outvoted by President Roosevelt and Secretary Stalin, who pressed for a target closer to England which would require greater effort by Nazi high command to defend while they still had large numbers committed to their eastern front with Russia. The three did agree, however, to arm Yugoslav partisans in the Balkans and coordinate guerrilla strikes there as a kind of consolation for Churchill.

The Normandy invasion was largely successful, in spite of the errors made the night before regarding the proper deployment of the airborne infantry, some of whom landed many miles from their intended target areas. Many of the fortifications defending the beach in northern France were manned by conscripts rather than hardcore partisan Nazi troops, and many of said conscripts were actually from Denmark, Norway, France, or other occupied territory and they frequently surrendered without putting up much resistance. This is not to say that the Normandy landings were an easy affair, just that some unexpected advantages prevented the collapse of the entire operation, whose success was far from certain during the planning stages.

Germany had lost control of Normandy, and the Imperial Japanese Navy had suffered one of their most devastating defeats in the war by the summer of 1944. The second world war was still far from concluding, but all signs indicated that the Axis powers were losing ground while the Allies made serious strategic gains. Although the Imperial Japanese Army had met with great success during Operation Ichi-go and the major railways throughout eastern China were now under their control, the KMT and the Communists of the United Front were still refusing to surrender. Japanese high command hoped that they could force a capitulation, which would allow them to redeploy two million infantry from the Chinese mainland to other areas of the empire which were now under threat by Allied incursion. For the foreseeable future, those soldiers would be tied up on the mainland.

Next time, we’ll discuss the final year of the second world war, and all that led to the decision by imperial leadership to give up the dream of a pan-Asian empire led by Japan.