The Eagle Against the Sun | The Second World War in the Pacific | Part 2
The Japanese Empire now stretched across almost six million square miles of the earth’s surface. Most of this was empty ocean, but it controlled more than ten thousand islands in the Pacific. The United States and its allies could not possibly conquer them all, so Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur developed a plan known as “island hopping.” American troops would seize only islands with large harbors or flat ground for airfields—the rest would be guarded by small US warships and their garrisons left to starve or surrender. The war’s two primary theaters, the Central Pacific and the Southwest Pacific, had different objectives that they would reach by island hopping. MacArthur’s command in Australia would recapture New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies and then advance on the Philippines. At the same time, Nimitz would seize any island large enough for bomber bases as he sailed toward the Northern Mariana Islands, a prewar Japanese colony. The American War and Navy departments had adopted a “Germany First” policy and were sending most of their resources to the European war, so it took time for the United States to build momentum on the other side of the world. In the six months after Midway, attention focused on MacArthur’s Guadalcanal Campaign, but as American factories and shipyards churned out enough war materiel for Nimitz’s seaborne advance, the US Navy became an unstoppable force that broke the might of the Japanese Empire.
“I Shall Return”
After the defeat at Midway, the Japanese secured more islands in the South Pacific and built fighter bases to defend them against the American onslaught. They seized Guadalcanal in the British Solomon Islands off the northeast coast of Australia in July 1942, where they built solid fortifications and an airfield. General MacArthur’s forces occupied neighboring islands and began to bombard Guadalcanal in preparation for an amphibious assault. The landings started on August 7th, and Marines captured the airbase thirteen days later. Enemy counterattacks failed to retake it over the next few weeks, and the two sides dug in for a long struggle. The Americans slowly gained ground day by day. Every night, they watched as warships on both sides blasted away at each other off the coast in what became known as “Iron Bottom Sound” for the number of ships sunk in the narrow channel between Guadalcanal and the American base on Florida Island. Admiral Halsey, who led the naval task force around the island, took incredible risks in hitting enemy warships during the fighting, and he became known as one of the best American naval commanders in history. The Battle of Guadalcanal took a heavy toll on both sides. Six thousand Americans died on the island, as well as more than thirty thousand Japanese, many in suicide charges aimed at the airfield. After a final naval battle against Halsey in September, Admiral Yamamoto ordered his ships to pull back and abandon the defenders on Guadalcanal. The fighting slowly came to an end, and the last units either surrendered or charged the Americans in late January 1943. This was America’s first victory on land over the Japanese, and the veterans of Guadalcanal remembered the carnage they had witnessed and steeled their hearts for the long campaign ahead.
The Pacific War saw minimal action during 1943 as events in Europe and North Africa drew most of the Allies’ resources to that theater. There was sporadic fighting in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea throughout the year as MacArthur’s men drove closer to the Philippines. In April, American codebreakers learned that Admiral Yamamoto was planning a tour of the combat areas in the South Pacific, and President Roosevelt ordered Admiral Nimitz to dispatch a squadron of fighters to intercept his plane. On April 18, 1943, Operation Vengeance took place over the island of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands, where American P-38 “Lightning” fighters shot down Admiral Yamamoto’s plane. He died of bullet wounds, and a Japanese search-and-rescue squad then found his body in the Bougainville jungle. Later that year, an American attack on the island of Tarawa in the central Pacific marked the opening of Nimitz’s move toward the Marianas. The entire garrison of four thousand Japanese soldiers perished, either in battle or by their own hands. Tarawa then became the first in a string of bomber bases that would take the war into the heart of the Japanese Empire.
With preparations for Operation Overlord now well underway in Europe by late 1943, the United States began to shift resources to the Pacific for the main drives toward the Philippines and the Mariana Islands. General MacArthur island-hopped his way across the Dutch East Indies and secured New Guinea by early March 1944. The first American troops landed on Mindanao, a small island in the Philippines, in mid-April. It would take quite some time for a major amphibious operation against Luzon, however, as the Japanese navy still maintained a large presence in the Philippine Sea. Meanwhile, Admiral Nimitz moved into the Marshall Islands early in the year and landed on Kwajalein Atoll, which was large enough to accommodate the new, large B-29 “Superfortress” bombers that could reach Japan’s Home Islands. Kwajalein fell in late January and then the neighboring island of Eniwetok a week later. Once the Americans had secured it and killed or captured its eleven thousand defenders, Eniwetok became the largest airbase in the Pacific theater.
Admiral Nimitz reached the Mariana Islands in June 1944 as American and British soldiers were fighting in the hedgerows of northern France. His ships fought a major battle in the Philippine Sea west of the Marianas, in which the Japanese fleet lost all but one of its remaining carriers and over four hundred aircraft. The landings on Saipan, the largest island in the chain, then began on June 15th. Saipan had been a Japanese possession since the First World War and was the first island attacked by the Americans with a large civilian population. It took nearly a month to secure Saipan. In the final days of the fighting, the Americans were horrified to watch more than thirty thousand Japanese civilians hurl themselves and their children from the cliffs at the island’s south end rather than surrender and live under enemy occupation. Japanese-speaking American soldiers begged parents to allow their sons and daughters to live, and the events on Saipan haunted everyone who witnessed them. American commanders who heard what had happened gained some valuable insight into their enemies. A willingness to die rather than surrender was not a trait of soldiers alone, and an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands might be impossible if the entire civilian population took up arms.
Now that Nimitz had reached his target, his fleet moved toward the Philippines to help MacArthur fulfill the promise he had made two years earlier. Japan massed its remaining naval strength in Leyte Gulf north of Mindanao, and Nimitz had to destroy it before troops could land on Luzon. In October 1944, the two fleets met for the last major naval battle of the war—and the largest in history. Japan’s last fleet carrier burned thanks to repeated air attacks from the Enterprise’s bombers, and warships of every sort went to the bottom as American fighters strafed them again and again. Japanese kamikaze planes flew into enemy warships in the chaos of battle, showing their “never surrender” spirit yet again in horrific fashion. After four days of fighting, the Battle of Leyte Gulf ended with over sixty Japanese ships sunk and five hundred planes destroyed. Among the American ships damaged was the Enterprise, which had taken several hits from kamikaze, and she was out of action for the rest of the war. The American journey from Pearl Harbor to Leyte Gulf had been long and hard-fought, and now it was over. For the rest of the war, the remaining ships of the once-mighty Japanese navy would operate in small groups or individually in increasingly futile attempts to slow the Americans’ advance.
With the Japanese fleet destroyed, General MacArthur now set about his final task: the liberation of the Philippines. American Marines landed on Luzon on January 9, 1945, and MacArthur led a second invasion force ashore later that month. His men entered Manila on February 3rd, and the battle for the Filipino capital was the most brutal of the Pacific War. The city was nearly destroyed in four weeks of fighting. As the Japanese became more desperate, they resorted to barbaric tactics like using civilians as human shields and butchering women and children publicly to terrify the Americans into retreat. Casualty figures soared past the quarter-million mark in the last days of fighting. The campaign continued until July, and on Independence Day 1945, MacArthur sent a message to President Harry Truman that he had liberated the Philippines.
Turning Toward Japan
Ever since the Doolittle Raid, planners in Washington hoped to organize a strategic bombing campaign against the Japanese similar to what was being done in Europe. The problem was distance—it was more than four thousand miles from Hawaii and three thousand from the Aleutians in Alaska to the Home Islands. Limited raids began from airfields in India and China using B-29 “Superfortresses” in late 1943, and engineers built new bomber bases on liberated islands like Eniwetok, Saipan, and Tinian as Admiral Nimitz advanced across the central Pacific. General Henry Arnold, chief of the Army Air Force, ordered strategic bombing to begin with a small raid on Tokyo in November 1944. Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft artillery inflicted heavy casualties because these early runs used precision tactics with low-flying bombers. Two months later, Arnold sent General Curtis LeMay, a veteran of the air campaign against Germany, to oversee the bombing of Japan. LeMay was eager to inflict as much damage on the Japanese as possible and repeatedly told his colleagues that he felt no guilt at destroying their cities and livelihoods.
High-altitude B-29 raids began in February 1945 and did tremendous damage to Japanese targets. A combination of firebombs and high explosive ordinance leveled most of Japan’s major cities in the war’s final months. LeMay ordered bombers to drop propaganda leaflets over targeted areas urging the population to overthrow the government in Tokyo, but the people ignored them and clung to hope of final victory. In March 1945, LeMay’s planes unleashed a firebomb attack on the enemy capital that set fire to fifteen square miles of the city and killed at least a hundred thousand people—the most devastating air attack of the war. Emperor Hirohito toured the ruins several days later and was horrified to see how his people were suffering. But he did not intervene to stop the fighting and allowed the generals who ruled in his name to carry on.
Across the sea, in the United States and Canada, a secret project was underway to develop a weapon even more terrible than the firebombs. A group of scientists who had fled Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had written a letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939. They warned him that Hitler might be working on a bomb that used a process called “nuclear fission” to split uranium atoms and unleash enough energy to destroy an entire city. The president gathered these men, including the German Albert Einstein, the Italian Enrico Fermi, and the American J. Robert Oppenheimer, and gave them the funds to develop an atomic bomb. The “Manhattan Project” worked in secret for four years at sites across North America to create these weapons. The first breakthrough came in December 1942 when Fermi’s team started a self-sustaining nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago, and work continued as the war built toward its climax in the Pacific.
The American offensive against Japan continued after the liberation of the Philippines. Supplies to the Chinese increased despite problems with the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek (who at times seemed more interested in personal luxury than directing the war against the Japanese). Some American generals wanted to land troops in occupied French Indochina, but the prospect of a lengthy ground war on the Asian mainland concerned many in the War Department. Instead, General LeMay stepped up his strategic bombing of Japanese cities while Nimitz moved northeast from the Philippines and the Marianas toward the Ogasawara Islands. The largest of these, Iwo Jima, had enough space to build an airbase and was close enough to Japan for P-51 “Mustang” fighters to escort LeMay’s bombers and cut losses from Japanese anti-air artillery. The landings began in February 1945, and only four days into the fighting, American troops raised a flag atop Mount Suribachi, the highest point on Iwo Jima. Later that day, a photographer captured a reenactment of the scene on film, which became the most famous image of the Second World War. However, the picture of victory on Iwo Jima was premature. The Japanese defenders retreated into a complex of tunnels, which the Americans had to clear with grenades and flamethrowers. Casualties mounted over the next five weeks, and twenty thousand Japanese soldiers fell by the end of the battle (while just over two hundred were captured and not a man had surrendered). The Battle of Iwo Jima was the only engagement in the Pacific War in which American losses exceeded Japan’s.
What became the final battle in the Pacific was meant to be the first step toward the invasion of Japan. The island of Okinawa in the Ryukyu chain contained an airbase that would be the jumping-off point for the attack on the Home Islands. The amphibious landing on April 1, 1945, was the largest in history and came to be known as the “typhoon of steel” in both English and Japanese. Over two hundred warships blasted away at the Japanese defenses while more than three thousand planes bombarded every square inch of Okinawa. Then, two hundred thousand soldiers and Marines went ashore and began to drive the Japanese back. The seventy thousand defenders had no chance of winning, but they fought desperately and even resorted to mobilizing boys as young as nine to serve in the line. The civilians on Okinawa also took up arms against the American invaders, a foretaste of what awaited on the Home Islands. The casualties in the Battle of Okinawa were truly staggering. One hundred thousand Japanese soldiers and conscripts died, and at least as many civilians took their own lives, while more than twenty thousand Americans perished. At sea, kamikaze planes wrought havoc on Nimitz’s ships, sinking or damaging more than four hundred in all. Okinawa was far and away the largest battle of the war in the Pacific, and it showed yet again what would happen if the United States invaded Japan itself.
Victory
By the summer of 1945, Hitler’s Germany lay in ashes, and only Japan stood between the Allies and world peace. In July, President Harry Truman met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in the ruined German city of Potsdam outside Berlin. Truman had been in office for only three months and was still getting up to speed on wartime affairs. He sought advice from the veteran Churchill (at least until word reached Potsdam that the prime minister had lost the postwar election and was replaced by his political opponent). The Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration on July 26th. This document set out the conditions for Japan’s surrender: the removal of the militarists in Tokyo who had started the war, the occupation of all Japanese territory by the Allies, the return of captured lands to their rightful owners, the disarmament of the Japanese military, and the handing over of all war criminals for trial and punishment by the Allies. It then promised Japan’s “prompt and utter destruction” if the emperor’s Cabinet refused to surrender. Most historians interpreted this clause as a reference to the atomic bomb, which was tested successfully in Los Alamos, NM, only twelve days earlier. Truman had not known of the Manhattan Project until a few weeks earlier (though Stalin was aware of its existence thanks to his many spies in the United States and the United Kingdom). After a heated debate in Tokyo, the imperial government rejected the Potsdam Declaration and vowed to fight on.
American submarines had surrounded the Japanese Home Islands and sank every cargo ship bound for its ports. The people faced starvation, but faith in the emperor kept them fighting as their cities burned and their children scrounged for food in the rubble. Planners in Washington began to work on Operation Downfall, timed for November 1945, and estimated that the invasion of Japan would cost more than a million American men killed and wounded. The Japanese had at least three million soldiers under arms at home and a civilian militia of almost thirty million. If the entire population took up arms, as was likely, the United States would face an enemy force of nearly sixty million men, women, and children. There was little doubt that the Allies would prevail, especially since the Soviet Union was now planning to abrogate its treaty with Japan and enter the Pacific War, but the cost would be the near-extinction of the Japanese race.
Harry Truman faced perhaps the most difficult decision ever to befall an American president. On the one hand, he had officers like Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay pushing for the invasion; on the other, he had the atomic bombs that might be enough to force Japan to give up. He gave the order for the Army to select targets for the two bombs while at Potsdam and then awaited the results. A Japanese submarine nearly derailed the attacks by sinking the American cruiser USS Indianapolis, which carried the nuclear triggers, near Tinian. Another ship brought replacements to the island, and the plan moved forward.
On August 6, 1945, Colonel Paul Tibbets took off in the B-29 “Superfortress” Enola Gay (named for his mother) with a single bomb in its cargo hold. His target was the city of Hiroshima on the island of Honshu, whose population received a warning late the previous night that an attack was coming. Tibbets’ crew released the bomb, called “Little Boy,” at 8:15 am local time, and it exploded about two thousand feet above the city. “Little Boy” destroyed the center of Hiroshima in an atomic fireball unlike anything ever seen in human history. The blast incinerated over fifty thousand people, and the resulting fire and nuclear fallout killed at least as many more over the next few months. News reached Tokyo within hours of Hiroshima’s destruction. When the Cabinet met, the civilian leaders insisted that the government surrender, but the generals refused, and Emperor Hirohito remained silent. Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and immediately overran Manchuria in northern China and pushed into the Korean Peninsula. Again, the government in Tokyo would not give up. On August 9th, the B-29 Bockscar destroyed the city of Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu with a second atomic bomb, called “Fat Man.” Local geography limited the destruction to about half of what had occurred in Hiroshima three days earlier, but at least forty thousand people lost their lives.
Once again, the imperial Cabinet met in Tokyo but could not agree on surrender. Then, in a stunning moment, the emperor gave his opinion to the ministers for the first time in the country’s history. He stated that he could no longer bear the suffering of his people and ordered the government to accept the surrender terms as stated in the Potsdam Declaration. Members of the imperial family insisted that Hirohito remain on the throne, and the Allies agreed to this change to their terms. After a brief attempt to overthrow the emperor and continue the war by hardline generals, the world heard the news on August 14, 1945, that Japan had surrendered on “Victory in Japan Day.” Soldiers still fighting in China or stranded on long-overlooked Pacific islands laid down their weapons on hearing Hirohito’s broadcast to the Japanese people the following day—the first time anyone had listened to the voice of their divine leader on the radio. As had happened on May 8th, celebrations worldwide erupted at the news that the war was over.
General MacArthur arrived in Tokyo on August 30th to take up his new post as military governor of Japan. Three days later, aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Japanese government signed the surrender documents. Officials from the Allied Powers then affixed their signatures to the paper, with General Jonathan Wainwright, once a prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines and now a free man, signing for the United States. A flight of American and British warplanes zoomed over the warships in the harbor in a final display of Allied victory, and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. Humanity’s most devastating war was finally at an end.
Good Idea, Bad Idea
Could you, dear audience, have given the order that President Truman did to drop atomic bombs on an enemy country? That really is the core of this episode, and it’s another question I ask my students. Did America have another option? Could we have brought Japan to its knees without annihilating two cities and incinerating over a hundred thousand people? Time does not permit a detailed discussion here, but I hope you will ponder this question and perhaps be grateful you have not been placed in that position. Joe and I will talk through our own thoughts on this and many other matters in our discussion next week.
