All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [276]
A powerful competitive element entered US conduct of the struggle. MacArthur became fearful that the New Guinea campaign would become a backwater, and accelerated his own operations. His troops seized the Admiralty Islands three months ahead of schedule, thus encircling Rabaul and forcing the Japanese to withdraw up the north coast of New Guinea. In April 1944, he staged his most daring and dramatic coup of the war, capturing Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea, bypassing 40,000 Japanese troops, and in June repulsing a strong Japanese counter-attack along the Driniumor river. His forces also captured the Vogelkop peninsula at the western end of New Guinea, together with the nearby island of Biak, which became an important air base.
There is a persuasive argument, advanced by the US Navy at the time and by many historians since, that MacArthur’s campaign became redundant at the end of 1943; that the only purpose of his subsequent bitter and bloody campaign in the Philippines was to fulfil the personal ambitions of its commander, at the expense of many Filipino lives, along with those of several thousand Americans. US dominance of air and sea had become so great that Japanese forces in the south-west Pacific were incapable of transporting troops to threaten Allied strategic purposes. In late 1943 US submarines, decisive contributors to victory, began to wreak havoc upon Japan’s supply links to its over-extended empire. Many Japanese island garrisons were starved of weapons and ammunition as well as food.
Yet it is characteristic of all wars, and especially of the greatest in human history, that events and personalities acquire a momentum of their own. MacArthur existed. He held a grand title, and had been exalted by propaganda into the most famous of American warlords. His public-relations machine was the most effective branch of his headquarters. Though Roosevelt and his associates, together with most of the nation’s military leaders, thought him a charlatan, when a 1945 poll asked Americans whom they considered their greatest general, 43 per cent replied MacArthur against 31 per cent for Eisenhower, 17 per cent for Patton and 1 per cent for Marshall. SWAPO’s Supreme Commander had a physical presence, strength of will and personal authority greater than those of the US chiefs of staff. Although MacArthur was never given the massive resources he demanded, he exercised a political and moral influence which sufficed to sustain his campaign and enable him to pursue his chosen personal objectives. Rationally, the United States might have halted its ground operations against Japan in 1944, once the Marianas had been secured. From its air bases, the USAAF’s Superfortress bombers could reduce the enemy’s homeland to ashes. Together with naval blockade, which crippled Japanese industry and above all oil supplies, irresistible air bombardment made eventual Japanese capitulation inevitable. America’s last bloody island campaigns of 1944–45, like the belated British advance into Burma, did little to advance the outcome of the war.
But this is a perspective accessible only to posterity. At the time, it would have seemed unthinkable – save to the airmen fiercely ambitious to show that they could defeat Japan on their own – to halt ground operations. The US Marine Corps and army divisions deployed in the Pacific expected to keep fighting, and so did their commanders and the nation at home. Once great peoples are committed to the business of killing, there is a bleak inevitability about the manner in which they continue to do so until their enemies are prostrate. In the spring of 1944, the Japanese were still far from acknowledging defeat.
Italy: High Hopes, Sour Fruits
1 SICILY
In September 1939, wiseacres in Britain said, ‘The generals learned their lesson in the