PAGES 14-15: Island of Betio in Tarawa atoll, scene of the first amphibious Marine landing on an atoll in the Pacific war. The photo was taken in November, 1943, near the end of the 76-hour battle for this tiny island that took the lives of nearly 1,000 Marines and about 5,000 Japanese. The objective was the heavily defended coral airstrip built by the Japanese. Invasion beaches on the left side of the island were on either side of the long pier stretching out to the left in the shallow water over the reef. It was along this pier that Bob Sheeks and Vern Garrett landed on the first day of the battle. Green Beach, in the foreground, was where Bob Sheeks subsequently came ashore on the second day of the battle.
For America and her European allies, the Pacific war started on December 7, 1941, even though Japan had been fighting in the Pacific, on mainland China, since the 1930s. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that day was part of a much larger operation that spanned much of the Pacific, with raids on Wake, Midway, Guam, the Philippines, and other islands. These attacks were, in part, intended to neutralize the American military, giving the Japanese time to expand southward and to secure critical natural resources such as oil fields in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The Japanese had feared that the American Navy, if not severely damaged, would respond with force to their expansion into the South Pacific. But if the American military could be disabled for several months, the Japanese reasoned, they could secure new territory without fear of immediate reprisal. It seemed more likely that America would have to negotiate some kind of settlement, since it would take time to recover from the attacks of December 7 and to build back their military presence in the Pacific.
Although the United States had guessed Japan’s intentions to secure the natural resources of Southeast Asia for their Empire, the audacity of their attack on Pearl Harbor came as a real surprise. More than 2,000 Americans died on December 7, and numerous ships were sunk and damaged, with many more planes and facilities destroyed. But the two American aircraft carriers were not in Pearl Harbor that day and escaped damage. This proved to be a crucial element in the outcome of the Pacific war, since aircraft carriers would turn out to be the most important factor in the future success of the U.S. Navy.
At first the Japanese plan worked just as they had it figured. The attacks on December 7 across the Pacific did indeed neutralize the American military, and there was no early response to Japanese expansion southward into Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, British, Australian, New Zealand, and Dutch forces were overwhelmed by Japanese military superiority in Malaya (now Malaysia), the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and New Guinea (now West Papua and Papua New Guinea). And shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the American garrison on Guam was overrun. Wake Island fell on December 23, after the out-manned American defenders, fighting with no help from outside, incredibly repulsed the first attempted Japanese landing. The large American military presence in the Philippines was wiped out as well. Following a few victories over the Japanese in battles to defend the main island of Luzon, the American and Filipino forces were doomed without logistical and further military support. After bitter fighting while holding out on the Bataan Peninsula southwest of Manila, the American and Filipino forces had to surrender in April of 1942. To move the defeated forces to POW camps, the Japanese decided to march them rather than transport them, and the Bataan Death March became one of the most notorious atrocities of the Pacific war.
By then only the heavily fortified island of Corregidor, in the mouth of Manila Bay, remained for the Japanese to conquer. The siege of Corregidor, gallantly portrayed in the American media, was a truly heroic effort by the defenders, but they, too, were doomed to surrender to the Japanese after the island was invaded in May of 1942. The Americans and Filipinos who surrendered on Corregidor were spared another death march, and were, for the most part, transported to POW camps. But all who surrendered faced years under horrific conditions in Japanese POW camps or under hard labor in the Philippines and Japan, and many did not survive.
But as bad as things were in the spring of 1942, the American aircraft carriers had escaped December 7 unscathed, and they were still capable of projecting military force in the Pacific. The first indication of what the U.S. could do with their carriers came in April of 1942. The U.S. intended to send a strong message to Japan that even while the fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor was being rebuilt, there would be no respite for the Japanese. The plan was to actually bomb Japan, and from an aircraft carrier. However, getting small carrier planes close enough to bomb Japanese cities posed a great risk for the carriers. Surprisingly, someone had figured out that the B-25, a twin-engine Army Air Corps bomber, could take off from the deck of a carrier, and it had the range to allow the carrier to stay far enough away from Japan to avoid the Japanese Navy. However, the B-25 couldn’t land back on the carrier, so it was decided that the bombers, after completing their mission, would fly on to China and land there. At special airstrips built in remote areas of Japanese-occupied China, the planes would land, quickly refuel, and then be flown farther south to a part of China not under Japanese control, where they’d be turned over to the Nationalist Chinese to use against the Japanese.
That this plan, outrageous as it seemed, was given the go-ahead provides a good idea of just how desperate the U.S. was to strike back in response to Pearl Harbor. Jimmy Doolittle, famous air racer of the 1930s, was chosen to lead this operation and train the air crews. Ultimately, sixteen specially modified B-25s were loaded onto the carrier USS Hornet in California, and it headed west toward Japan.
On the morning of the day before the planes were scheduled to launch, the Hornet was spotted by a Japanese ship, and its position was radioed to Japan. But instead of aborting the mission, they decided to launch the B-25s from that more distant point and take their chances on reaching China after bombing Japan. All sixteen B-25s lifted off from the Hornet and bombed Japan, and almost all the B-25s reached China. Incredibly, sixty-two of the eighty Doolittle Raiders were safely smuggled across China and made it back to the U.S.
The impact of the Doolittle Raid on Japan was profound. Though little damage was done, the fact that American planes had actually flown right over Tokyo and released bombs on a country thought secure from attack had a real psychological effect on the Japanese people. It was also a spectacular morale booster back in the U.S.—really the first bit of good news to come out of the Pacific since December 7.
The Doolittle Raid made the Japanese realize that they needed to finish the job they started on December 7 and destroy the American carriers while the U.S. Navy was weakened. They devised a plan to lure the American Navy out to fight, and they decided to do it by invading Midway Island, only 1400 miles from Honolulu, in June of 1942. They figured that a landing on an island that close to Hawaii would have to elicit a response from the U.S. Navy, and they were right.
Midway was probably a good idea from the Japanese point of view, since Japan still had a considerable advantage in terms of aircraft carriers and aircraft. For the Midway operation, they sent the same six aircraft carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor, in addition to a vast armada of supporting cruisers, destroyers, and troop transports. Against them the Americans could only muster three carriers and a few other ships. On paper, the Japanese should have won an overwhelming victory. However, a key factor came into play that shifted the odds back to the Americans: the Japanese military code had been broken. Thus the Americans could foresee the movements of the Japanese fleet toward Midway. With this knowledge, the Americans were able to lie in wait and gain advantage from surprise. Still, the numbers were so lopsided that the Japanese should have won anyway. However, through a number of fortuitous actions the Americans ended up sinking four of the Japanese carriers, while losing only one of their own. Not only was the Japanese landing at Mid-way turned back, but Japan lost a majority of its capital ships, the carriers, as well as many experienced fighter pilots. Japan was on the defensive in the Pacific war from that point on.
But even with the stunning American victory at Midway, Japan was still in possession of many Pacific islands from which they had to be ejected. In early 1942 Japan had expanded not only southward into Southeast Asia, but eastward as well into the Solomon Islands in the western Pacific. This was viewed by America as a move to cut off communication with Australia and New Zealand, and thus make it even more difficult for the Allies to use those countries as staging areas for fighting the Japanese. The U.S. responded in two ways. First, a series of naval bases had to be constructed far enough south that ships could refuel and still make it to New Zealand and Australia. One of these bases was in French Polynesia, on the island of Bora Bora. Other bases were in Pago Pago, American Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides, and they were reinforced to keep the Australia/New Zealand lifeline open. The second step was to turn the Japanese back in the Solomons with military force. This would have to involve an island invasion, the first of WWII for the Marines.
Landings occurred in August of 1942 on the Japanese-held islands of Tulagi and Guadalcanal, across a body of water that came to be known as Iron Bottom Sound for all the ships that would be sunk there. Guadalcanal became the focus of the fighting since it was an island sufficiently large to support a number of airstrips. However, in 1942 the Japanese didn’t take the American threat very seriously and deployed troops piecemeal to retake Guadalcanal. Contrary to what the Japanese expected, the Marines they faced turned out to be fierce adversaries. Conditions on Guadalcanal were terrible for both sides, with malaria becoming a factor for the first but not the last time in the Pacific war. Americans learned a lot about Japanese military culture when they discovered that the Japanese were determined to fight to the death, even commit suicide to avoid capture. The first banzai attack of the Pacific war was experienced on Guadalcanal. After a tremendous struggle under horrible conditions, the Marines and then the U.S. Army defeated the Japanese. As at Midway, this was a severe blow to the Japanese, the first of a string of defeats for them in island invasions that stretched to the end of the war. However, this also signaled what Americans would have to face—a determined and skillful foe who would fight to the death rather than surrender.
After Guadalcanal a debate arose in the U.S. military, and it centered on two dominant personalities. One was General Douglas MacArthur. He had been in command of the American and Filipino forces in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded at the end of 1941, and he had been ordered to be evacuated from Corregidor just before the final surrender. He was determined to avenge this humiliation by retaking the Philippines, and argued that the best way to defeat Japan was through New Guinea, the Philippines, Formosa, and then Japan. In his view, being a general, this would be mostly an Army operation with the Navy and Marines in support. However, the other person who had something to say about this was Admiral Chester Nimitz. It was his view that a highly mobile Navy and Marine force could go more directly to Japan through the Marshalls, the Marianas, and Okinawa, skipping over entire Japanese-occupied islands and cutting them off from sustenance in the process. In his view this would be mostly a Navy and Marine operation, with the Army in support. Franklin Roosevelt faced a difficult situation, with these two strong egos not willing to give an inch in either direction. What was finally worked out was a compromise that, in effect, satisfied both of them. MacArthur was authorized to take the Army through New Guinea and the Philippines toward Japan, and Nimitz was told to take the Navy and Marines through the central Pacific toward Japan. In military terms, this was described as a giant pincer movement that would ultimately strangle Japan. More accurately it satisfied the demands of two men who represented the interests and aspirations of the major services in the U.S. military.
In the end the reasons for this decision faded from significance because the strategy worked. But it took three years, many amphibious landings on islands no one had ever heard of, and thousands of deaths and injuries on both sides. The Army under MacArthur hopped up the north coast of New Guinea, taking more lightly defended areas and isolating the larger concentrations of Japanese troops. American allies Australia and New Zealand played key roles in the fight for New Guinea, supplying troops, materiel, and staging areas in their home countries. By November 1, 1943, Marines made landings on Bougainville, and later on Cape Gloucester on New Britain, to secure the right flank for the Army operations on the main island of New Guinea.
Meanwhile, Nimitz’s first island invasion in the central Pacific was designed to be fairly simple. The Japanese had built an airstrip on a tiny islet that was part of Tarawa Atoll. The feeling was that after sufficiently intense air and naval bombardment, the Japanese defenders would be either dead or stunned by the shelling and the tiny island should be taken easily. However, there were two catches to this plan. First, the bombing and shelling of Tarawa didn’t turn out as planned. It started spectacularly. The pre-landing bombardment of Tarawa in November 1943 was an awesome sight to behold for the Marines on the landing ships. Most were convinced that no living thing could survive such explosive mayhem inflicted on such a tiny islet. What they couldn’t know, but would soon find out, was that the Japanese had ingeniously devised bunkers and shelters that protected most of their troops and guns from the bombardment. As a result, heavy fire surprised the landing waves as they went ashore on this supposedly devastated island.
The second catch involved the geography of the island itself. Tarawa was the first coral atoll the Marines had ever invaded. The fortified islet of Betio sat on a reef that extended several hundred yards out from the beach. The depth of the water over this reef varied from about a foot at low tide to over four feet or more at high tide. The Americans knew that the drop-front Higgins landing craft, designed for sloping sand beaches, were not really appropriate for coral atoll landings, and contracts had been let for a new generation of amphibious tracked vehicles, or amtracs. A number of these new amtracs were available for the Tarawa landing, but not enough to get all the invasion waves to the beaches. But it was thought that the depth of the water over the reef at high tide would be sufficient for the Higgins boats to reach the shore.
It turned out that the water covering the reef at high tide was not deep enough to allow the Higgins boats to get to the beach. So the first waves of Marines in the amtracs went right up to the beach and were immediately pinned down. But the Higgins boats of the later waves, bringing crucial reinforcements and supplies to the beach, hung up on the edge of the reef hundreds of yards out. All that could be done was to drop the ramps and dump the Marines into chest-deep water, with a three-hundred-yard wade in to the beach ahead of them, in the face of withering machine-gun fire. The carnage was unbelievable as the Marines were mowed down wading slowly across the reef. At one point, aborting the operation was considered, since so much was going wrong. But the Marines were tenacious and determined fighters. They hung on, slowly expanded the beachhead, and seventy-six hours later the battle for Tarawa was declared finished, with the deaths of the last of the roughly 5,000 Japanese defenders. Fewer than twenty Japanese were captured alive. The cost for the Americans was significant. In just over three days of fighting to take one tiny island, over 1,000 Marines lay dead, many washing ashore on the beach to provide graphic photographic evidence of the cost of taking the island. War correspondents who witnessed this carnage were shocked. They did the simple calculation of the number of islands multiplied by the number of Japanese defenders and the number of American dead required to take these islands, and there was an uproar from the American public. The term “Bloody Tarawa” appeared in the media, and the eventual cost of the Pacific war started to come into focus for the American public.
But the strategy for defeating the Japanese was to be relentless, and more islands were invaded. With many more amtracs available and improved tactics for neutralizing Japanese fortifications learned from studying those on Tarawa, the landings at Kwajalein Atoll in January 1944 went better. Majuro and several other atolls were taken, but then the Navy and Marines faced the much larger and more heavily fortified Japanese islands of the Marianas—Saipan, Guam, and Tinian. These islands were considered by the Japanese to be part of their inner defense ring, and they were determined to hold them at all costs.
Meanwhile, MacArthur had control of the northern coast of New Guinea, and was ready to return to liberate his beloved Philippines. He intended to do this by invading the southern Philippines and driving relentlessly to the north, to eventually retake Luzon and Manila. To secure his right flank, he asked Nimitz if he could invade and capture a Japanese airfield on the island of Peleliu in the southern Palau islands. This would be a bit of a detour for the Navy and Marines, but it would facilitate MacArthur’s return to the Philippines, and Nimitz agreed. Once again, it was thought that lessons learned from invasions of atolls in the central Pacific would stand the Marines in good stead in taking the relatively small, hilly island of Peleliu.
Then something happened that could have changed everything. Halsey’s carrier planes, in making bombing raids on the central Philippines, reported that Japanese military strength there appeared to be weak. Halsey suggested that MacArthur directly invade the central Philippines and save months and thousands of lives in his drive to recapture Luzon and Manila. MacArthur jumped at this opportunity and started planning an invasion of the central Philippines near Leyte. If he wasn’t going to invade the southern Philippines, the Peleliu invasion by the Marines became moot since the right flank argument was now irrelevant. But the invasion fleet had already sailed for Peleliu, and it would take immediate intervention by Admiral Nimitz himself to call it off. For reasons that only Nimitz knew, he decided to go ahead with the Peleliu invasion. It has been thought that he expected the battle to be fairly straightforward and didn’t warrant calling the whole thing off. What happened was exactly the opposite. The gentle, rolling, vegetation-covered hills of Peleliu seen in pre-invasion photographs—once stripped of vegetation by the pre-invasion bombardment—turned out to be limestone cliffs that were honeycombed with fortified caves. The battle for Peleliu turned into a nightmare that lasted two months at a cost of almost 9,000 Marine and Army wounded and dead, and roughly 10,000 Japanese dead. To this day, Peleliu veterans are bitter about the decision Nimitz made to continue with an invasion that had become unnecessary.
Meanwhile, MacArthur landed at Leyte and started the difficult slog through the labyrinth of Philippine islands, all Japanese-held, in his drive to Luzon and Manila. He eventually achieved his goal and declared the Philippine campaign ended in June 1945, but at tremendous cost. When Japan surrendered a couple of months later, American troops were still fighting in parts of the Philippines, and the Japanese there were never fully defeated.
Major objectives of the Navy and Marine drive to Japan were the Mariana islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. With those islands in U.S. hands, airfields could be built for the new B-29 Superfortress bombers, which could bomb Japan directly. However, the Japanese considered the Marianas part of their inner defense ring, and would fight to the death to keep those islands out of American hands. Marines landed on Saipan in June of 1944 and faced a fanatical and determined foe. Saipan was declared secure in July of 1944, but isolated resistance continued to the end of the war. Thousands of Japanese and Chamorro civilians had fled into the mountains when the Americans landed, and efforts to get them to surrender by American military forces and interpreters continued to the end of the war as well. Near by Tinian was also invaded and secured, and there was an epic struggle to recapture the former American territory of Guam that went from July to August, 1944. Marine casualties soared, and thousands of Japanese died, but the occupation of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam signaled to the Japanese that the end was truly near as B-29s started bombing operations over the Home Islands in late 1944.
The B-29 bombing raids over Japan were arduous twelve-to-four-teen-hour round trips made even more dangerous by the fact that there was no emergency landing strip between the Marianas and Japan. If a B-29 was damaged or ran low on gas, the only alternative was to ditch in the ocean. In addition, an island halfway to Japan had Japanese airstrips and fighters based there that could intercept the B-29s on their way to and from Japan. This island’s name was Iwo Jima, and it became clear that it was necessary to take Iwo. It, too, was a relatively small island, and with all the experience gained in other Pacific island landings the Marines were confident they could secure the island in a fairly predictable way. But once again things didn’t go quite as planned. The Japanese had had time to construct the most elaborate and complicated network of caves and tunnels of any of their Pacific island possessions. With this tunnel network, they could house virtually their entire defensive force of 20,000 men and their weapons deep underground, immune to the American bombing and shelling. This set the stage for one of the most gruesome island battles of the Pacific war.
The Marines landed on Iwo Jima in February of 1945, and it became clear from the outset that the Japanese defenses had escaped the pre-invasion bombardment virtually intact. Marine casualties were high, but there was no alternative to proceeding with a series of frontal assaults against heavily fortified Japanese positions. The most famous photo of the Pacific war was taken by Joe Rosenthal when an American flag was raised on the summit of Mount Suribachi. This happened five days into the battle, but by no means did it mark the end of the fighting. The flag-raising only signified that the Americans had secured the very southern end of the island. The entire northern end still had to be taken, and it wasn’t until late March that Iwo Jima was finally declared secure, at the cost of nearly 6,000 Marine dead and over 17,000 wounded. More than 20,000 Japanese died on Iwo. However, the taking of Iwo Jima served its purpose—the use of emergency landing strips there saved the lives of an estimated 20,000 airmen, and Iwo Jima-based Japanese fighters could no longer shoot down B-29s on their missions to Japan.
On September 2, 1945, General MacArthur (at microphone) conducts the surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay as high-ranking Allied officers look on. The first to sign the surrender document is Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu. Behind him stands General Yoshijiro Umezu, the Japanese Army chief of staff, and other members of the Japanese delegation.
The final land battle of the Pacific war was for the island of Okinawa. This was considered to be the final steppingstone to the invasion of Japan itself. The Japanese realized this and, starting with the American invasion on April 1, 1945, put up a terrific resistance to the Marines and Army troops sent ashore to secure the island. What resulted was a horrific eighty-two-day battle with nearly 7,400 American dead, more than 30,000 wounded. The civilian toll on Okinawa by far exceeded any other island battle in the Pacific, with a conservative estimate of 150,000 Okinawans killed. The Japanese dead totaled about 108,000. But now the stage was set for the final invasion of Japan, an event that was feared by every American serviceman in the Pacific.
Then something happened that none of those American servicemen expected. Two of a new type of explosive, something called an “atomic bomb,” were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945. The B-29s that dropped the atomic bombs flew from their bases on Tinian in the Marianas. Suddenly the Japanese surrendered, unable and unwilling to resist in the face of such terrifying new weapons. The American fleet sailed into Tokyo Bay, and on September 2, 1945, the Japanese signed the surrender documents on the deck of the Navy battleship USS Missouri. The Pacific war was over.
