Wright Pacific Victory

Tarawa to Okinawa 1943-1945
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9540-8
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

The American 'island-hopping' campaign in the Pacific during the Second World War was a crucial factor in the eventual defeat of Japan in 1945. The assault and capture of these islands meant US bombers and their fighter escorts could now reach mainland Japan, disrupting and eventually crippling its war economy. The battles on Tarawa, the Marshall Islands, the Marianas group, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa were all characterised by savage fighting and heavy casulaties on both sides. Japanese garrisons often fought to the death and kamikaze air attacks posed a grave threat to the opposing US forces. Employing archive colour and black and white photographs, maps and first-hand accounts, the author relates these pivotal battles to the wider struggle against the Japanese in the Pacific.

DERRICK WRIGHT's interest in the Second World War was stimulated by the many Luftwaffe bombing raids on his native Teesside. He is the author of Tarawa: A Hell of a Way to Die, Pacific Victory and Peleliu: To the Far Side of Hell. Married with four daughters, he lives on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wright, Derrick

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

A New Sun Rising

Japan’s emergence as a major military and political power in the Pacific began in the middle of the nineteenth century, after hundreds of years of self-imposed feudalism. The arrival of Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ in Tokyo Bay in 1853, bringing offers of trade with the West, led to the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854 and the establishment of a US consulate in Tokyo. By 1858, most of Japan’s major ports were open to Western trade. With the deposition of the shoguns, the warlords who had virtually controlled the country for centuries, imperial power was restored under the Emperor Meiji. However, real control was maintained by a political and military clique interposed between the Emperor and the Diet, the Japanese parliament, a system that was to continue until the end of the war in 1945.

Japan rapidly adopted the industrial and military skills of the West, and, armed with a belief that they had a divine right to rule in eastern Asia, Japanese forces embarked upon a programme of expansion. Under the Emperor Taisho, a short, fierce war in 1895 against the Chinese gave them control of Korea, Formosa and the Liatung Peninsula on the Yellow Sea coast, and in 1904, forgoing a declaration of war, they attacked Russian shipping at Inchon and Port Arthur. In the ensuing Russo– Japanese War the Japanese were victorious on land in Korea and Manchuria; and, more significantly, at sea in the great naval Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, when most of the Russian Fleet was destroyed for negligible Japanese losses.

It was at this time that the USA began to emerge as a significant power in the Pacific; and the acquisition of the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Marianas, as part of the spoils of the Spanish–American War of 1898, sowed the seeds of distrust between the two powers. Japan’s alliance with the Western Powers in the First World War was rewarded at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles with the trusteeship of the former German possessions in the Marshall and Caroline Islands, and Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas, all of which were to become vital parts of Japan’s outer defence perimeter in 1941. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1921–2 attempted to control the size of US, British and Japanese Fleets in the Pacific, but the larger tonnage allowed to the USA and Britain because of their Atlantic commitments was seen as a humiliation, and Japan renounced the treaty in 1934. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression, which continued until the start of the Second World War, had a devastating effect on Japan, whose exploding population and lack of material resources forced her once more to look towards China. The blowing-up of a section of Japanese-owned railway in Manchuria in 1931 provided the flimsy excuse for war, leading to Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933 and to all-out war with China in 1937.

Viewing the situation with growing alarm, Britain and the USA conducted an escalating campaign of trade and diplomatic sanctions against Japan. The American ban on Japanese immigration in 1924 had already soured relations between the two countries. In June 1938 the USA placed restrictions on the export of goods that would be useful in war and froze Japanese assets in the USA and increased aid to Nationalist China’s Chiang Kai-shek. The Americans, British and Dutch imposed an embargo on strategic exports in the summer of 1941. Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in 1940, and the Russo-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941 with the Soviet Union ensured that her northern borders were safe, leaving her free to being what was to prove one of the most unequal wars in history.

‘Climb Mount Niitaka’

‘What did you think about Pearl Harbor? I never thought about anything except my duty and my work.’

(Capt Tadashi Kojo)

That the USA was surprised by the attack on Pearl Harbor is probably the most startling fact of the entire war. It was widely recognised by the US Government that the only country in the Pacific with the capability of attacking them, and the only one with any reason for doing so, was Japan; for decades the US Navy had carried out its Pacific exercises in accordance with ‘Plan Orange’, a thinly disguised code for war with Japan. Questions and conspiracy theories abound as to whether Roosevelt and Churchill knew in advance about the forthcoming attack and allowed it to happen to ensure the USA’s entry into the war; what cannot be questioned is that cryptanalysts from the USA, Britain and Australia had already broken parts of the Japanese diplomatic codes charting the rapid breakdown of relations between Japan and the US, and that the main Japanese naval cipher, JN25, had been compromised as early as 1932. Whatever the political ramifications, the fact remains that at 6 a.m. on 7 December 1941 a wave of 183 Japanese aircraft attacked the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor, and that an hour later a second wave of 170 aircraft arrived to complete the devastation.

The Pearl Harbor attack was the brainchild of Fleet Adm Isoroku Yamamoto, who had been appointed Commander of the Combined Fleet in 1939. A veteran of the great naval Battle of Tsushima in 1905, he had spent a number of years in America in the 1920s and was an advocate of naval air power. Yamamoto had been influenced to some extent by the spectacular success of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm at Taranto in 1940, when a few obsolete biplane torpedo bombers had sunk or disabled a large proportion of the Italian Fleet, and he was convinced that carrier-launched attacks were destined to play a vital part in future operations. The 1st Air Fleet, composed of Japan’s 6 largest carriers and accompanied by 2 battle-cruisers, 9 destroyers, 3 submarines and a train of tankers and supply ships, had assembled in the anchorage of Etorofu in the Kurile Islands in northern Japan. Commanded by Vice-Adm Chuichi Nagumo, the fleet sailed to a point some 275 miles north of Oahu and awaited the coded message for the attack – ‘Climb Mount Niitaka’.

Assembled around Ford Island in the centre of Pearl Harbor were 70 warships of the US Pacific Fleet: 8 battleships, 2 heavy cruisers, 6 light cruisers, 29 destroyers, 5 submarines and 24 auxiliaries; there were no torpedo nets, no barrage balloons, no facilities for smokescreens, and the bulk of the ammunition was locked away. Most of the officers and enlisted men were anticipating a quiet Sunday after the regular Saturday evening shore leave, but their hopes were soon shattered. Working to tactics that they had rehearsed for months, the torpedo and dive-bombers swooped on ‘Battleship Row’ and the barracks and airfields on Oahu, achieving total surprise.

The damage sustained by US forces was huge: 5 battleships and 3 destroyers sunk; 3 battleships and 2 cruisers badly damaged; 200 Army and Navy aircraft destroyed and 3,478 personnel killed or wounded. Yamamoto had hoped to wipe out most of the US Navy carrier force in the attack, but his intelligence was obviously at fault: the Yorktown was in the Atlantic, the Saratoga was undergoing repairs in San Diego, and the Enterprise and the Lexington were returning from Midway and Wake Island after delivering aircraft to Marine units. Lt-Cdr Mitsuo Fuchida, operational leader of the attack, urged Nagumo to send in a third wave of aircraft to destroy the tank farms and engineering shops which stood untouched, but the Admiral’s timidity prevailed and an opportunity to neutralise Pearl Harbor completely was lost. Had these facilities been destroyed, the remains of the Pacific Fleet would probably have had to retire to the US West Coast. Nevertheless, Yamamoto’s huge gamble had paid off and his faith in naval air power had been vindicated. The Japanese were amazed at the scale of their victory; the bulk of the US Pacific Fleet had been put out of action for the loss of twenty-nine Japanese aircraft and fifty-five aircrew.

The news of the attack was greeted with horror throughout the USA, and President Roosevelt’s speech marking the ‘date that will live in infamy’ was a prelude to the declaration of war against Japan on 8 December 1941. Germany’s and Italy’s declarations of war against America on the 11th marked the turning point of the global conflict. The USA’s isolationist stance was over; victory over the Axis, though the struggle would be long and costly, was guaranteed; and Adm Yamamoto’s prediction that ‘we have wakened a sleeping giant’ was to prove tragically prophetic.

The Japanese Octopus

Pearl Harbor marked the beginning of a series of disasters for the Allies that would continue until the end of 1943. Even as Nagumo’s carrier planes were returning from Oahu, troops of Lt-Gen Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 25th Army were being transported to Singora, Patani and Kota Bharu in northern Malaya; Japanese bombers were destroying the RAF’s few planes at Hong Kong and troops were crossing the colony’s borders; and Lt-Gen Masaharu Homma’s 14th Army was occupying the northern islands of the Philippines prior to an all-out invasion. Already, two of the edicts laid out in Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ were being fulfilled: the domination of the whole of the western Pacific and the expulsion of the Western imperialist powers. With the Imperial Japanese Navy now in control of most of the Pacific, there was little chance of intervention by the Allies; and, although the resources available to the Japanese for their attacks on Malaya, Burma and the Dutch East Indies were limited as the majority of Japan’s fifty-one infantry divisions were spread between China, Manchuria, Korea and the Russian...