All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [275]
Nothing could alter the campaign’s fundamentals: to defeat Japan, US forces must seize strongly defended Pacific air and naval bases. No application of superior technology and firepower could avert the need for American soldiers and Marines to expose their bodies to a skilful and stubborn foe. Even now that it was plain the Allies would win the war, Japan’s commitment remained unshaken. Japanese strategy, such as it was, required extraction of the highest possible blood-price from the Americans for every small gain, to erode their will and persuade them to negotiate. It is often claimed that Japan’s militarists alone insisted on continuing the war, but the generals enjoyed powerful support from conservative politicians, many fervent Japanese nationalists, and from the Emperor. In November 1943, at the first conference of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in Tokyo, Hirohito was warned that the Solomons were about to fall. His response was to goad his generals: ‘Isn’t there some place where we can strike the United States? When and where are you people ever going to put up a good fight? And when are you ever going to fight a decisive battle?’
Cultural revulsion underpinned the hatred which characterised Allied conduct of the Asian war. Japan’s savagery towards its prisoners and subjects was now well known, and often repaid in kind. Japanese willingness to fight to the death rather than surrender, even in tactically and indeed strategically hopeless circumstances, disgusted Allied troops. American and British soldiers were imbued with the European historical tradition, whereby the honourable and civilised response to impending defeat was to abandon the struggle, averting gratuitous bloodshed. Americans in the Pacific, like British soldiers in Burma, felt rage towards an enemy who rejected such civilised logic. The Japanese, who had been merciless in victory, now showed themselves determined to cull every possible human life from their inexorable descent towards defeat.
If the Allies had confronted their foe on a major landmass where there was scope for motorised manoeuvre, they would have achieved victory much more quickly: overwhelming US superiority in tanks, artillery and air power would have smashed the relatively primitive Japanese army, as did the Russians in Manchuria in August 1945. As it was, however, the long series of Pacific battles, miniature in scale by European standards, enabled the Japanese to exploit their defensive skills and sacrificial courage, without suffering much disadvantage from lack of artillery and air support. They excelled in camouflage and harassment – ‘jitter tactics’. Even in Japan’s years of defeat, its soldiers retained a remarkable psychological dominance of the battlefield. The US Marine Corps was probably America’s finest fighting ground force excepting the army’s airborne divisions, and achieved remarkable things in the Pacific, but Americans never matched the skills of their opponents, or indeed of the Russians, as night-fighters. The more urban and ‘civilised’ a society, the harder it is to train its soldiers to adapt to the lifestyle imposed by infantry fighting amid raw nature. The higher the input of technology to a branch of war, the more emphatic was American excellence: their carrier pilots, for instance, had no superiors. Peasants, however, often make the most stoical riflemen.
Once US planes could operate from Tarawa, they swiftly destroyed Japanese air capability throughout the Marshall Islands. In early February 1944, the Marines were pleasantly surprised by the ease with which they captured Majuro, Kwajalein and Roi-Namur atolls, a personal triumph for Nimitz, who overruled all his subordinates to insist upon attacking the central Marshalls, rather than the heavily defended easternmost islands. They then took Eniwetok, at the extreme north-western end of the Marshall chain, while