All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [354]
After almost three years of defeat in the east, the victors’ morale soared. Although a difficult campaign lay ahead in 1945, to reoccupy Burma at the end of a long, long supply line, Slim knew he had cracked the spine of the Japanese army in South-East Asia, staking his claim to be recognised as the ablest, as well as best-loved, British field commander of the war. As for the Japanese, Mutaguchi had never anticipated that he could conquer India, but cherished hopes that the spectacle of the ‘Indian National Army’ attacking the British might stimulate a general revolt against the Raj. Instead, the INA’s performance discredited it as a fighting force. Victory in Assam and Slim’s subsequent advance into Burma temporarily reasserted British authority in India. While Indian popular enthusiasm for independence remained undiminished, strikes and street violence receded.
The critical battles of 1944 took place much further east. That summer, a huge accession of resources to the Pacific theatre, notably warships and planes, enabled America to close the ring on Japan. While men continued to die and ships to sink, US dominance changed the character of the struggle. Petty Officer Roger Bond of the carrier Saratoga said, ‘If you went out to the Pacific after … January of 1944, you had a completely different experience and viewpoint than those before … I wasn’t part of the one where we truly were losing, getting chased out of the place.’ The Japanese were still fighting hard, but everywhere they were being forced back.
On Bougainville as on many other islands, Hirohito’s soldiers paid the price for staging foolish, futile infantry attacks against well-armed defenders. An American wrote in March 1944: ‘Enemy dead were strewn in piles of mutilated bodies, so badly dismembered in most cases that a physical count was impossible. Here and there was a leg or an arm or a blown-off hand … At one point, Japanese bodies formed a human stairway over the barbed wire. Five enemy dead were piled on top of the other, as each had successively approached the location to use a predecessor as a barricade and then fall on top of him as he in turn was killed. Farther out from the perimeter, where a little stream wound its way parallel to it, Japs killed by the concussion of thousands of mortar shells lay with their heads, ostrich-fashion, stuck under the least protection they could find.’
By 1944, the United States was producing so many ships and planes that it felt able to commit large forces to the Pacific. Fulfilment of the doctrine of ‘Germany First’ had always been compromised by the fact that American popular sentiment was much more strongly roused against the Japanese than against the Germans, and by the US Navy’s determination to be seen to win the war in the east. While Russia’s struggle still hung in the balance, this had been risky. But now it was plain that Stalin’s armies were triumphant, the Wehrmacht in eclipse. Eisenhower’s forces in Europe were relatively large, but nothing like as numerous as would have been necessary had they confronted Hitler’s legions alone. Although lavishly provided with tanks, guns, vehicles and aircraft, the Anglo-American armies were always short of infantry. Moreover, the Pacific campaigns imposed an enormous drain on Allied global shipping resources, out of all proportion to the relatively small combat forces deployed, because of the distances involved.
Service in the Pacific was an experience light years from that of Europe, first because of its geographical isolation. US Marine pilot Samuel Hynes wrote: ‘Out here the war life was all there was; no history was visible, no monuments of the past, no cities remembered from books. There was nothing here to remind a soldier of his other life;