Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [86]
3. The war in the Pacific
So would go the war with Japan. With the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, the Japanese embarked on a military campaign designed to conquer East Asia and consolidate their new empire, called the Greater East Asian CoProsperity Sphere, before the Americans could recover from the blow and while the Soviet Union was under siege by the Germans. (The Japanese military command was at least publicly contemptuous of the American will to fight in the wake of a serious setback.) The Japanese followed Pearl Harbor with coordinated assaults on Guam and Wake Island, attacks in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines, and continued aggression against China. Better planning and technological superiority on the sea and in the air contributed to Japan’s early victories. Having underestimated the Japanese even more completely than the Japanese had underestimated them, the Americans were shocked to discover that they were outgunned. ‘It was a terrific blow to us, all our pilots particularly, to find that the Japanese Zero was a better airplane than anything we had,’ said a rueful US Admiral Arleigh Burke. By spring 1942 the Japanese held virtually all Southeast Asia, had taken the American surrender of the Philippines, were ensconced in South Pacific island redoubts including the Solomons, Guam, and Wake Island, and seemed to threaten British Ceylon and India, New Guinea, and even Australia and New Zealand.13
By mid-year, however, fortunes started to turn. American naval units managed a stalemate with the Japanese in the Coral Sea in May. The following month, the Americans defeated the Japanese fleet attempting to capture Midway Island, dispatching four Japanese aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser and killing scores of Japan’s best pilots. While not fully recognized at the time, Midway proved the turning point in the war. Thereafter the Japanese largely assumed a defensive posture, hoping to wear down the Americans in a war of attrition in the Pacific. But, as American war production increased manyfold and Soviet success at Stalingrad set the Germans on their heels, a war of attrition did not favor the Japanese. The US Army General Douglas MacArthur, despite having been forced out of the Philippines, took charge of the Southwest Pacific theater and engaged the Japanese in New Guinea. Navy Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded US forces elsewhere in the Pacific, opened a campaign that summer to liberate Pacific islands with an attack on Guadalcanal in the Solomon chain. The Americans seized an airfield there, survived a devastating attack on their ships in nearby Savo Bay (four sunk, three damaged), and undertook a bloody ground campaign against Japanese troops whose ranks were intermittently reinforced. The Americans and Japanese fought each other on Guadalcanal through the summer and fall, past Christmas and into the new year. ‘It is almost beyond belief that we are still here, still alive, still waiting and still ready,’ wrote an American correspondent. ‘The worst experience I’ve ever been through in my life.’ A Japanese NCO named Kashichi Yoshida jotted a poem of despair:
Covered with mud from our falls
Blood oozes from our wounds
No cloth to bind our cuts
Flies swarm to the scabs
No strength to brush them away
Fall down and cannot move
How many times I’ve thought of suicide.
It ended in early February when the remaining Japanese withdrew. Thousands had died on both sides.14
Like their German allies, the Japanese fought on, with growing desperation as the circle closed around their home islands. In January, as the
Japanese gave up the struggle for Guadalcanal, Roosevelt at Casablanca announced Allied resolve to win ‘unconditional surrender’ from the Axis