America at War: from Humiliation to Hegemony in the Pacific

AMERICA AT WAR: FROM HUMILIATION TO HEGEMONY IN THE PACIFIC

Setbacks in the Pacific

Three days after Pearl Harbor the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the American-controlled Philippines. Despite the war alert and the debacle at Hawaii, the entire American air fleet at Clark Field remained uncamouflaged and lined up on runways wingtip to wingtip. It was thus destroyed on the ground. Had it remained intact it might have thwarted, or delayed, the invasion. Meanwhile, the Japanese continued their drive into Thailand, Malaya, and Singapore. In quick order the American territories of Guam and Wake Island fell before Christmas, The new year witnessed Japan's takeover of the Dutch East Indies, and on 26-28 February a major defeat for Allied naval forces in the Battle of the Java Sea, where American forces were all but wiped out. By then the American garrison in the Philippines had withdrawn to the Bataan Peninsula, where it was overwhelmed and forced to surrender on 9 April. More than seventy-five thousand Americans and Filipinos would be forced on a "Death March" to Japanese prison camps. A majority of those taken prisoner died of maltreatment, hunger, and disease. All was not loss and defeat, however. In mid April Gen. James Doolittle led a force of bombers in the first American air raid on Tokyo, Most of the aircraft were either shot down or crash-landed in China for lack of fuel. The raids were not intended to have strategic impact but rather to boost the American public's morale.

Turning Point

Though the first six months of the Pacific War bore bitter tidings for Americans, in spring 1942 the fortunes of Japan began to change. The master plan drawn up by Adm. Yamamoto Isoruku—to inflict maximum damage on the American navy in order to buy precious time to negotiate—was thwarted by the unpredictable. On the morning of 7 December 1941 the aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor, the heart of the American fleet, were at sea. Their destruction had been the most important aspect of the Japanese war aims because without them American military operations in the Pacific would have no air support. With its carriers intact the United States could strike back much more quickly than Yamamoto desired. He had told his superiors that he could "run wild" for the first six months or year of war, but he had no confidence for the second and third years. In May 1942 his prediction began to prove true. When a Japanese carrier force threatened the Allied air base at Port Moresby, New Guinea, the Battle of the Coral Sea became the first naval engagement in history in which ships did not fire on each other. Rather, the entire battle took place between planes based on the carriers of each fleet. The result was a decisive U.S. victory, made possible by the presence of the American carriers not destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Though the U.S.S. Lexington was destroyed, it and the Yorktown put three Japanese carriers out of commission and prevented any further Japanese expansion southward to Australia. The following month, at the Battle of Midway, with Japan's capital carriers missing, the United States broke the entire Japanese naval initiative. From then on Tokyo would fight a completely defensive war.

Guadalcanal

Eight months to the day after Pearl Harbor the United States launched the amphibious operations that eventually would push Japanese forces all the way back to the home islands. At an inconspicuous dot in the Pacific, the 1st Marine Division waded ashore under withering fire to establish its beachhead. Guadalcanal, a small island in the Solomon archipelago, was the scene of fighting more savage and brutal than anything in the annals of American warfare. Marines had been warned that the Japanese took no prisoners, and propaganda photos of captured fliers being beheaded were circulated before the invasion. The initial landings brought heavy casualties to marines struggling off landing craft, stimulating rage among the assaulting troops. Americans used flame throwers for the first time, and Japanese attempting to surrender were incinerated instead. Marines decapitated their enemies, displaying their heads atop tanks as trophies, while in jungle outposts severed heads of Japanese were impaled on stakes around the perimeters of the camps as grisly warning to enemy infiltrators. So frightened were both sides in the ferocious fighting that each came to believe they were fighting beasts, not men. As a result, fears based upon presumed racial traits of the other side began to preoccupy soldiers of both nations. Propaganda on each side depicted the other as pitiless subhumans, and combat degenerated into a "war without mercy." Japanese soldiers were ordered not to surrender, and American marines were told to take no prisoners. Expecting no compassion, neither side gave any. Racial stereotypes would predominate for the duration of the war, making combat for each toehold of territory in the Pacific a nightmare. Each battle became more horrific and costly than the last, culminating in the appallingly savage spring 1945 battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where 130,000 Japanese and nearly 15,000 Americans lost their lives. At Okinawa 25,000 U.S. soldiers were evacuated after becoming psychologically disabled by combat fatigue, another measure of the ferocity of the fighting.

Winning the Pacific War

On 9 February 1943, six months after the American landings on Guadalcanal, the island was liberated from Japanese control. From then on American strategy involved an "island-hopping" campaign designed to defeat key Japanese forces and isolate others from resupply. Over the next few years small islands such as Bougainville, Tarawa, and Peleliu loomed large on the landscape of history as increasingly bloody battles were fought to wrest them from Japanese occupation. In April, in a symbolically important event, American fighter planes ambushed a plane carrying Admiral Yamamoto, shooting it down and killing him after a message decrypted by "Magic" had revealed Yamamoto's itinerary. In late 1943 U.S. forces moved from the Solomon Islands to the Gilberts. The new year witnessed a rapid movement through the Admiralty, Marshall, and Caroline chains, and then on to New Guinea. By mid July Saipan was captured, providing the United States with an air base from which to direct a long-range bombing campaign against Japan itself. On 10 August Guam was recaptured. In late October—a few days after American forces led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur returned to the Philippines—the U.S. Navy inflicted calamitous losses on the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. After this disaster Japanese military tactics became increasingly suicidal. The term kamikaze entered the American lexicon. Desperate to protect the home islands, the Japanese trained teenage boys to get aircraft airborne but not to land. They were expected to crash their planes into enemy ships, sacrificing their lives for the homeland. Though Americans saw the suicide runs as evidence of Japanese fanaticism, they were also proof of desperation.

Sources:

Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969);

Robert A. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);

Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969);

Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger (New York: Harper & Row, 1972);

C. L. Sulzberger, The American Heritage Picture History of World War II (New York: American Heritage Publishing House, 1966).