Pacific campaign (1941-5). The roots of the Pacific conflict lay in the Japanese unwillingness to accept a status quo dictated by the USA and Britain. Following what most thought was a crushing victory in the Russo-Japanese war, Japan felt cheated by the ensuing peace brokered by Theodore Roosevelt. Nor was she happy at her share of the German Far Eastern possessions following WW I, when she was the least remembered of the Allies. The Washington Conference (1921-2) limitation on naval armaments, which purported to lock Japan into naval inferiority vis-à-vis the USA, was perceived as a further insult. The collapse of the world economy in 1929 played into the hands of extreme chauvinists, some civilian but primarily within the army, who were hostile to the West and anxious to build up an autarchic economic empire, and Japanese policy became overtly aggressive and expansionist. In time this led to an alliance with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy (the Axis), two other regimes dissatisfied with the ‘new world order’ following 1914-18 and determined to change it in their favour.
In 1931 the Japanese army in Manchuria seized the whole province. Border incidents with China were provoked until in 1937 full-scale war broke out, which led to the Japanese conquest of much of northern China by 1941. French defeat in Europe in 1940 permitted the Japanese to move into Indochina without firing a shot. Although she had a long-declared interest in China, a strangely proprietory attitude born of a century-old missionary commitment, the USA was slow to react to Japanese expansion, while the European colonial powers did almost nothing to obstruct it from fear of provoking a Pacific war they could not afford. But by 1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt felt strong enough to do more than merely provide economic and semi-official military aid to China, and began a more forceful economic campaign against Japan. In July oil and scrap-metal exports were restricted and, following Japan's occupation of Indochina, a tighter oil embargo was imposed.
The oil factor prompted Japanese military leaders to plan a ‘southward advance’ to seize the oil and other resources of the Dutch Indies and British Malaya. They believed that war with the USA was inevitable, but calculated that seizing oil supplies would allow the Japanese navy to hold a ‘southern perimeter’ in the Pacific around their new empire which Americans would lack the will or ability to penetrate. After the failure of diplomatic negotiations with the USA in the autumn of 1941, the emperor finally approved the plan to seize the southern area on 1 December 1941. Yamamoto, C-in-C of the Combined Fleet, knew the economic power of the USA and was not sanguine about the army-driven policy, but devised a plan whereby naval aircraft flown from a powerful group of aircraft carriers would neutralize the American Pacific Fleet while the southward advance was completed.
As Yamamoto had predicted, the Japanese ran wild for the first six months. Quite by chance, the US aircraft carriers did not share the fate of the battleships at Pearl Harbor, but the southward advance proved unstoppable against weak or poorly prepared defences. Hong Kong fell on 25 December and the conquest of Malaya was complete with the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942 (see Malaya and Singapore campaign). US forces in the Philippines were quickly cornered and finally surrendered on 6 May, while the Dutch East Indies, the Solomon Islands, and most of New Guinea were in Japanese hands by March. British, Dutch, and US naval and air forces in the theatre had been destroyed, but a US carrier force inflicted the first check on Japanese expansion at the battle of the Coral Sea (5-7 May 1942). After a raid on Tokyo by American carrier-launched medium bombers, Yamamoto was ordered to secure the ocean perimeter, an operation he combined with a plan to lure what was left of the American Pacific Fleet into a battle of annihilation.
The Pacific theatre became a chiefly American responsibility, as British Commonwealth forces struggled to contain Japanese pressure through Burma towards India. Though Roosevelt favoured priority for the European theatre following German declaration of war on 11 December 1941, the Anglophobe US navy chief Adm King (and much of American opinion) favoured emphasis on the Pacific. Forces were rushed to the southern Pacific to hold the remaining islands and to protect Australia, but the quantity of material and trained men available left a thin shield until American rearmament reached higher levels in 1943.
The turning point was the failure of the Japanese grand naval plan to achieve strategic dominance of the mid-Pacific at Midway between 4 and 6 June, where a US carrier force under Adm Spruance sank four Japanese carriers and destroyed the cream of Japan's naval aviators. Exhibiting none of the kamikaze spirit that was to characterize Japanese resistance later, when it made no difference to the final outcome, Yamamoto turned his huge battle fleet around and went home. Even given that his opponent Nimitz was intercepting his signals, something that was to lead to Yamamoto's aerial assassination a year later, his decision to withdraw was illogical. He knew that he was coming to the end of the window of opportunity before US industrial power inexorably began to crush Japan, yet he did not play his battleship trump card when it might still have been decisive.
While the USA devoted the bulk of its army to the war in Europe, the Pacific was by far the main theatre for the navy and US Marines, while MacArthur was successful in his public and private lobbying to ensure that the army also got enough resources to compete. The strategy was to assault (or bypass) key island strongholds while unrestricted submarine warfare gnawed away at Japanese trade and military supply lines. The Japanese were reduced to holding on to what had been seized and trying to conserve sufficient naval and air reserves to counter the American advance. The material contest was a very uneven one. In 1943-4 Japan launched 7 aircraft carriers, the USA 90. Japanese naval aircraft were soon technically inferior to their US counterparts, while by January 1944 they had only 4, 050 aircraft with which to oppose 11, 442. But even more significant was their loss of trained pilots, with 50 per cent of sorties not returning to base in 1944. Meanwhile US submarines reduced the Japanese merchant fleet from over 5 million tons in 1942 to a mere 670, 000 in 1945, and sank a warship tonnage of over 2 million.
During 1944 the US advance northwards from New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and westwards across the Pacific from the Marshall and Gilbert and Ellice Islands was speeded up in order to secure bases from which American long-range bombers, and in particular the new B-29 ‘Superfortress’, could attack the Japanese home islands. In June 1944 the US navy was in a position to attack and seize the Mariana Islands, including Saipan, from which sustained air attack could be conducted. Japanese leaders were determined to hold on to what they saw as the critical area of the Pacific theatre. Adm Ozawa gathered a force of 9 aircraft carriers and 450 aircraft, but was greatly outnumbered by the 15 carriers and 902 aircraft available to the US task force. In what became known as the ‘Great Marianas Turkey Shoot’ US aircraft destroyed the Japanese carrier force and all but 35 Japanese aircraft. The battle of the Philippines Sea was an overwhelming US victory and paved the way for the successful occupation of Saipan by 10 July and Guam by 8 August. On every island Japanese soldiers refused to surrender, which made conquest a longer and more costly process than the balance of material forces suggested. In savage fighting almost all the 27, 000 Japanese troops on Saipan were killed.
Not to be outdone, MacArthur was making a virtue of necessity by ‘island-hopping’ around areas of Japanese strength, and used political and sentimental arguments to insist on the strategically irrelevant invasion of the Philippines. In October the largest task force of the Pacific war sailed for the island of Leyte to begin the reconquest of the archipelago. The Japanese navy calculated that a triple-pronged counter-attack making use of the channels between the islands and the remains of their land-based air power might offer a last chance of success, but they simply lacked the strength to make their brilliant conception work. The battle of Leyte Gulf was the largest naval engagement in history and despite luring away Adm Halsey's main battle fleet, there were enough ships left to withstand the Japanese attack and US submarine and air dominance was decisive. The Japanese lost 28 warships to 6 and were finished.
Conquest of the Mariana Islands allowed US bombers to be deployed for a concerted attack on the Japanese war economy. The Twenty-First Bomber Group, which had been prepared for operations from mainland China, was transferred to Saipan from where operations were launched from November 1944. The Japanese war economy was already crippled by lack of raw materials because of the submarine campaign, but the American Joint Chiefs ordered the air force to attack Japanese aircraft and shipping industries, and to undertake urban area bombing as in Europe. From March 1945 Gen Le May undertook the firebombing of vulnerable Japanese cities as gloatingly predicted by Mitchell, and between May and August a schedule of 58 cities was drawn up for destruction from the air. As has since become their habit, American air leaders argued that bombing alone would decide the issue, blithely ignoring the fact that without the US navy they would not even have got within range.
The Pacific campaign, 1941-5.
(Click to enlarge)
Nonetheless preparations began for a massive amphibious assault on Japan, code-named OLYMPIC, for which the US navy allocated 90 aircraft carriers and 14, 000 combat aircraft, larger than the force deployed for the Normandy campaign. The Japanese military prepared for a last-ditch defence of the motherland, building thousands of primitive miniature submarines for suicide missions, and converting their remaining aircraft into one-way flying bombs for kamikaze attacks. It was the fear of massive casualties from the conquest of the home islands that encouraged the American government to launch attacks with two atomic bombs developed by the summer of 1945. Horrific though they were, the casualties inflicted by the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no greater than those killed by Le May's firestorms. Japan might have capitulated earlier, but US insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged the war.
By August 1945 Japan was in ruins, and the political conflict between hard-line militarists and civilian capitulationists was resolved by the emperor, who made his first-ever broadcast to his people on 15 August, announcing in one of history's greater understatements that the war had ‘not necessarily developed in a manner favourable to Japan’. By this time the last major Japanese armies had been effectively destroyed in the Burma campaign and by the Soviet-Mongolian Manchurian campaign. Even before this, the Japanese would probably have capitulated if they had been assured that they could keep their emperor, which in the end they did.
The Pacific war was fought with a ferocity and barbarism matched only on the eastern front. It was a clash of cultures alien to one another in which profligate displays of extraordinary courage were commonplace on both sides. The single most disturbing thing for the Allies was that the Japanese code forbade surrender, meaning that even hopelessly surrounded and outnumbered garrisons fought to the death, and that Allied POWs were barbarously treated. Even after the end of the war, Allied aircraft had to drop leaflets on the remaining pockets of resistance scattered throughout Japan's short-lived island empire, explaining what surrender meant in the western context. Unconvinced, the last Japanese soldier did not give himself up for a further quarter-century.
Although the outcome was US Pacific hegemony, the war also destroyed the moral underpinnings of European empires in the region, from which Holland, France, and Britain extricated themselves with varying degrees of skill. This ranged from the outright disastrous French attempt to reverse the tide in Indochina, to the more measured departure of the British having defeated insurgency in the Malayan and Indonesian campaigns. Perhaps more significantly, the Russians were now a major presence in the Far East after a 40-year hiatus, and the Japanese had so weakened the Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek that Mao Tse-tung and the communists were able to take over a third of the world's population in 1949. These changes led to the Korean war, and ultimately the Vietnam war, of which it might be said that it, too, did not necessarily develop in a manner favourable to the main apparent victor in the Pacific campaign.
Bibliography
- Dower, J., War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986).
- Iriye, A., The Origins of the Second World War in the Pacific (London, 1987).
- Rhodes, R., The Making of the Atomic Bomb (London, 1986).
- Thorne, C., The Far Eastern War: States and Societies, 1941-1945 (London, 1986).
- Vat, D. van der, The Pacific Campaign: The US-Japanese Naval War, 1941-1945 (London, 1992).
- Werrell, K. E., Blankets of Fire: US Bombers over Japan during WW II (Washington, 1996)
— Richard Overy/Hugh Bicheno
