The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

neutralisation of Rabaul. The front in the South Pacific moved relatively little in nearly two years. Within a year of victory in the South Pacific, an American invasion fleet, in early April 1945, was heading for Okinawa on the doorstep of the Japanese home islands. By the time the fleet set sail, American submarine blockade and intensive air attack on cities had brought Japanese industry to a state of near paralysis.

      Another major reason for the impressive quickening of operations lay in the South Pacific debacle. The Japanese Army was shaken by the prospect that the Allies would crack the Rabaul position and move into South East Asia and recapture Japan’s irreplaceable sources of raw materials. Consequently, generals stripped the army’s reserves from Japan itself and Manchuria and moved them into the South Pacific or Indies. By late 1943 there were 40,000 troops on Bougainville, 100,000 on Rabaul, 250,000 on New Guinea, 125,000 on the Malay Barrier. The garrison in the Philippines was also increased, ultimately reaching 450,000 men.

      This was a miserable distribution of manpower. As Rabaul was coming under pressure, the United States was making ready an additional advance into the Central Pacific. Saipan was one of its first targets. MacArthur’s advance did indeed threaten South East Asia, but the US Navy’s drive through the centre was aimed at Japan itself. Nevertheless, because so many men were allocated to defend South East Asia, there were few remaining to ward off a blow in the centre. To give an idea of the depth of the calamity, there were more Japanese infantry defending Bougainville than on Saipan or Iwo Jima. There were more imperial troops on Rabaul than on Okinawa.

      Once the Americans bypassed Rabaul there was nothing to prevent them from crushing by siege the huge Japanese garrisons sent south. Indeed, the bulk of the Imperial Army sent to the South Pacific and South East Asia was simply bypassed with very little loss to Allied forces. Japanese troops on New Guinea, so desperately needed elsewhere, sat on the coast of the primitive island, serving no military purpose and trying to ward off starvation. When the American Army deployed its vastly superior firepower and mobility on the relatively open spaces of the major Philippine Islands they crushed the Japanese opposition and forced them to retreat into the Philippine hills and mountains where they also became not a foe but an annoyance.

      The Philippine campaign did include one of the most violent and senseless engagements of the Pacific War. When MacArthur’s troops invaded the main Philippine island of Luzon in January 1945, his Japanese counterpart, General Tomouyki Yamashita, believed that the city of Manila was of no strategic worth and ordered it abandoned. (Ironically, MacArthur himself had declared Manila an ‘open city’ in 1941, also realising that it was impossible and pointless to defend.) Incredibly, the imperial naval and army troops defending Manila refused to obey their commander and deployed in long-prepared defences inside and outside the city. The murderous chemistry inside Manila was as bad as that of Saipan or Okinawa, but very different. The Filipino people had been the most difficult for the Empire to subdue. Guerrilla warfare had begun in 1942 and only increased in intensity.

      The 15,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors ordered to defend Manila were hated by the population and the emotion was returned in full measure. When the siege of Manila began (most of the fighting was in the southern part of the city) the city’s population, expecting rapid American victory, was in place and the Japanese garrison in a state of suicidal fury. The result was that the long-suffering civilians of the Philippines were caught in nightmare pincers. Japanese troops, often within eyesight of American artillery observers, raped and murdered thousands of civilians. Artillery, mortar and small arms crossfire coming from both sides probably killed more. American tanker Tom Howard was in the middle of the siege for the southern portion of Manila:

      ‘The state of siege had settled down into a condition where bodies of civilians and Japanese were still strewn over the streets, in gutters, on lawns and in the middle of the pavement. Attempts to remove them were met with sniper fire, so instead of removal, when dusk came, the bodies were covered with quicklime to hasten their deterioration and to stifle the smell.’⁷

      Despite the insubordination of Japanese leaders defending Manila, a decision which may have cost 100,000 civilian lives lost, the Japanese were blown out of their positions by American tanks and artillery by early March 1945. Some 12,000 Japanese died in Manila and the remainder fled to the hills to face starvation. Isolated, the huge Japanese garrisons in the Philippines joined their neighbours in the theatre as useless military units. Indeed, the South Pacific and much of the Indies became, in effect, history’s biggest POW camp.

      Unfortunately for the United States, the Central Pacific advance proved a far more bloody affair. The American nemesis, met before on a smaller scale at Buna and Guadalcanal, was the battle ethos of the Japanese infantry. The islands and atolls of the Central Pacific were small and the medium-sized garrisons found on them had enough time to build elaborate systems of caves, tunnels, beach obstacles and minefields. Most of these positions were difficult or impossible to spot from the air. Nor was it simple to bypass Japanese garrisons in the Central Pacific. The Americans believed that the road to Tokyo could only be travelled under the cover of land-based airpower. Unfortunately, the number of islands in the Central Pacific was much smaller than in South East Asia. If the Americans wished to employ land-based airpower there was often no alternative to direct assault on these Japanese positions. When Combined Fleet was crushed off Saipan, the Army realised that victory in a given battle was almost out of the question. With Combined Fleet almost helpless, all of these garrisons would be cut off hopelessly as soon as an American invasion fleet arrived. The strategic goal on the Pacific islands was no longer victory but simple attrition. Japanese generals told their soldiers to ‘withstand assault by a million men for a hundred years.’⁸ Tokyo hoped that if the Japanese infantry could hold every position until the bitter end they might inflict enough casualties on the Americans to force Washington to accept a compromise peace. In fact, Tokyo badly underestimated American will. Yet what ensued was a bloody and brutal struggle that was interspersed by some of the largest-scale instances of politically inspired mass suicide in world history.

      The fierce Central Pacific advance began in November 1943 when an American Marine Division invaded the atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. Badly outnumbered, the 5,000-man imperial garrison put up a furious resistance for 72 hours on its small rock. The Japanese commander cabled ‘May Japan last for 10,000 years!’ Altogether 17 wounded Japanese survived and were made prisoners. However, the Marines had lost nearly 1,000 men killed in three days – more than they had lost in battle during the entire Guadalcanal campaign.

      Worse came on Saipan in June 1944. As noted previously, the Saipan invasion precipitated the crushing American naval victory during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Although isolated after the US Navy’s smashing victory, the Japanese garrison of 30,000 men fought with desperate tenacity. A night attack early in the battle very nearly broke the American line. Yet once on shore, the Marines and soldiers employed the techniques used to defeat the fanatic defenders on all of the Pacific isles.

      American troops on Saipan, as on later islands, had the support of naval gunfire and aircraft throughout the campaign. Strike forces attacked beaches in armed amphibious assault craft. They also had large shallow-draft landing-craft that could deploy tanks as soon as a solid beachhead was secured. Once the tanks and land artillery were on shore, a type of military mathematical equation took over. If the Japanese were conservative (almost always bad news for American invaders) they would wait until US infantry closed and open fire with mortars and machine-guns from one of the hundreds of prepared positions. Inevitably Americans died, but the position was eventually seen and the advantage switched. American tanks proved a very difficult problem for the Japanese. Japan had only a handful of tanks deployed in the Pacific, and American armour found it simple to obliterate those found in the open. Japanese anti-tank guns were in short supply and too small in calibre. Thus, imperial infantry had to put down a withering small arms and mortar fire against an American tank-infantry team, hoping to drive off US troops and attack tanks with hand satchels of explosive. In the right circumstance, this technique led to the death of many American tanks and soldiers. It was, however, obviously a desperate tactic. Usually those with the satchel charges died under the American support fire.

      Once identified, a Japanese strongpoint was dead. A machine-gun emplacement, if spotted by a tank, was usually destroyed by the tank at point-blank range,