Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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imperatives made the US Navy lead service in the Japanese war, to which the Army was obliged to defer. Soldiers could nowhere engage the Japanese without being transported to objectives in ships, and supported in action by fleets. MacArthur could bend strategy and sustain his own status as the most famous American participating in the struggle. But try as he might, he could not contrive absolute personal mastery.
This, then, was the background against which the supreme commander of SWPA arrived on Oahu, Hawaii, in July 1944, to meet Roosevelt and Nimitz. MacArthur’s tardy arrival reflected his distaste for the encounter. If he chafed at the need to parley by signal with the joint chiefs of staff in Washington, he found it intolerable to be obliged to fly several thousand miles to confer with a civilian politician, albeit the greatest in the land. MacArthur believed that Roosevelt had summoned the Hawaii meeting for political purposes, to further his re-election campaign by showcasing himself before the American people as their commander-in-chief. ‘The humiliation of forcing me to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a picture-taking junket!’ the general exclaimed furiously during the twenty-six-hour flight from Australia. For once, his paranoia was probably justified. His scepticism about the Hawaii meeting was shared by Admiral King. Roosevelt was always party to the big decisions, and on several important occasions—for instance, when he insisted upon the November 1942 North African landings despite the deep reluctance of his chiefs of staff—he dictated them. Nonetheless, US strategy in the Second World War was dominated by compromises between rival service chiefs. This explains the curled lips of King and MacArthur when, in July 1944, Roosevelt sought to be seen to play the part of supreme warlord as he offered himself to the American people for an unprecedented fourth term.
The struggle with Japan had moved many thousands of miles since the Hawaiian islands fell victim to the 7 December 1941 air assault, but they remained America’s principal rear base and staging area for the Pacific campaign. ‘Pearl was mostly brass and hookers,’ in the laconic words of cruiser bosun’s mate Eugene Hardy. Combat officers who visited the islands’ headquarters complexes were irked by the sybaritic comfort in which staffs did their business. Regular Saturday-night dances were held at Schofield Barracks. ‘There were dinner parties, beach parties and cocktail parties,’ wrote a Marine general, O.P. Smith. ‘At some of the parties the women guests wore evening gowns. You had the feeling that you were half in the war and half out of it.’ Personnel based on Hawaii shrugged that it would give no help to the men at the sharp end to impose a spurious austerity. After protests by visitors from the combat zone, however, officers’ clubs abandoned the practice of serving steak twice a day.
Roosevelt’s most important meetings on Hawaii took place at the Kalaukau Avenue mansion of a prominent Waikiki citizen, Chris Holmes. Naval aviators had been billeted there for some time, and for a week before the grandees’ arrival, working parties from the submarine base laboured overtime to repair the fliers’ depredations. The house then became the setting for performances by two remarkable thespians, the president and the general of the army, together with a supreme professional, the Pacific Fleet’s C-in-C. The only issue which interested MacArthur was resolution of the Pacific route by which the US should continue its advance upon Japan. Even as Roosevelt, Nimitz and MacArthur conferred, the US Navy and Marines were completing the capture of the Mariana island group. On 19 and 20 June 1944, in the ‘great Marianas Turkey Shoot’, carrier planes of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet had inflicted devastating defeat, indeed near annihilation, upon Japan’s naval air force. Around 475 enemy aircraft were destroyed, by comparison with the sixty Luftwaffe planes shot down by the RAF on 15 September 1940, biggest day of the Battle of Britain. The island chain, a mere 1,400 miles south-east of Japan, represented a vital link in the American advance. Its capture made possible the construction of air bases from which B-29 bombers could reach Tokyo. Its loss was by far the most important Japanese defeat of 1944, a decisive moment of the war.
Because no minutes were taken of Roosevelt’s meetings with his commanders, uncertainty has persisted about exactly what was said. The historical narrative relies on fragmentary and highly partial accounts by the participants. ‘Douglas, where do we go from here?’ Roosevelt asked. This form of address must have irked MacArthur, who signed even letters to his wife Jean with his surname. ‘Leyte, Mr President, and then Luzon!’ was the recorded response, naming two of the foremost Philippine islands. These exact words are implausible, for at that stage US plans called for an initial landing further south, on Mindanao. The thrust of MacArthur’s argument is not in doubt, however. He asserted, as he had done since 1942, that strategic wisdom and national honour alike demanded the liberation of the Filipino people, whose territory would then become the principal stepping stone for the invasion of Japan.
In October 1943, the joint chiefs had allocated the US Navy its own route across the central Pacific via the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana islands, assaulted principally by Marine divisions, while MacArthur’s soldiers advanced by way of the Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the hills and jungles of Papua-New Guinea. All these objectives were now achieved. The names of their torrid conquests had become written in blood into American history: Guadalcanal and Kwajalein, Tarawa, Saipan and Guam. Each had been the scene of a contest for a few square miles of rock or coral on which to create airstrips and anchorages to support the greatest fleets the world had ever seen. The Pacific war was fought almost entirely within gunshot of the sea. Amid the vast, empty expanses of the world’s largest ocean, men flung themselves upon outcrops of land, painted livid green by vegetation, with a passion mocked by their coarse beauty. In the first eighteen months of the conflict, though Japan’s supply lines were grossly over-extended, her armed forces engaged the Americans on not unequal terms. Until late 1943, for instance, the US Pacific Fleet never possessed more than four aircraft carriers. Thereafter, however, American strength soared, while that of Japan shrank.
A host of ships, planes, men and guns flooded west from the US to the battlefields. At peak production in March 1944, an aircraft rolled out of an American factory every 295 seconds. By the end of that year, almost one hundred US aircraft carriers were at sea. American planes and submarines were strangling Japanese supply routes. It had become unnecessary systematically to destroy Japan’s Pacific air bases, because the enemy possessed pitifully few planes to use them. Between 26 December 1943 and 24 October 1944, Japanese aircraft failed to sink a single significant American ship. Similarly, surviving Japanese army garrisons presented no threat, for Tokyo no longer had means to move or supply them. But even when the Japanese strategic predicament was hopeless, when resistance became—by Western lights—futile, their soldiers fought to the last. These desperate battles reflected, in some degree, the warrior ethic of bushido. Overlaid upon this, however, was a rational calculation by Tokyo. The superiority of American resources was manifest. If Japan pursued the war within the limits of conventional military behaviour, its defeat was inevitable. Its leaders’ chosen course was to impose such a ghastly blood price for each American gain that this ‘nation of storekeepers’ would find it preferable to negotiate, rather than accept the human cost of invading Japan’s main islands. If such a strategy was paper-thin, and woefully underestimated American resolution, it determined Japanese conduct by land, sea and air until August 1945.
‘No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud,’ wrote Gen. ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell. ‘It has to be slugged out—there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.’ There was, and remains, no doubt that this was true of the war against Germany. But did it also apply to the war against Japan? The enemy was an island nation. If the US Navy could secure sufficient Pacific footholds to provide air and naval basing facilities on the route to Japan, was it also necessary to fight a major ground campaign? It had been America’s historic intention to conduct any war with Japan at sea and in the air, rather than by land battle. Whatever the achievements of US ground forces since Pearl Harbor, the decisive victories had been secured by the navy—Midway and the progressive attrition of Japan’s air and naval forces. While American strategic planning assumed eventual amphibious landings in the Japanese home islands, it remained the fervent hope of most commanders that blockade and air bombardment would render these unnecessary.
There was only one messianic advocate of a major campaign to retake the Philippines: MacArthur. While others varied their opinions in the face of changing circumstances, the general never did. It is possible that beyond ego, a worm of guilt gnawed, about his