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By Root 1163 0

the Chinese. Once more, they died in their thousands and hundreds of thousands, as the warring armies swept over them. It is remarkable that Japan embarked on Ichigo at a moment in the war when such an ambitious operation had become strategically futile; its only significant achievement, beyond slaughter, was to disabuse Washington of its illusions about China. By 1945 the U.S. chiefs of staff had abandoned notions of seizing Taiwan and using it as a stepping-stone to create a perimeter on the mainland. They recognised that the country was incapable of participating effectively in the war. China was merely a great victim, second only to Russia in the scale of its sufferings and losses, and was denied the consolation of any redemptive military achievement.

2. Jungle Bashing and Island Hopping

AT THE JANUARY 1943 Casablanca summit conference, the Western Allied leadership reasserted the priority of defeating Germany, but agreed to devote sufficient resources to the war against Japan to maintain the initiative—the Americans committed themselves to a target figure of 30 percent of their war effort. This compromised the doctrine of Germany First more than the chiefs of staff cared to admit, but reflected the imperative created by American domestic opinion, so much more strongly committed to Japan’s defeat than to that of Germany. U.S. commanders thereafter decided that resource limitations ruled out an early assault on Rabaul. The USAAF was unwilling even to allocate long-range bombers to conduct a major air offensive against this, Japan’s key base in the southwest Pacific, before 1944. The chiefs of staff thus agreed that in 1943 Allied forces would pursue modest objectives: advancing up the Solomons to Bougainville, while MacArthur’s forces addressed the north coast of New Guinea. The latter was an exclusively U.S. Army and Australian operation, though dependent on naval support.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were unfailingly sceptical about southwest Pacific operations, which was directed towards ultimate recapture of the Philippines. They saw them as a sop to MacArthur’s ego rather than a path to victory. The admirals preferred instead to exploit naval and air power to thrust across the central Pacific through the Marshall, Caroline and Mariana Islands, the shortest route to Japan. It was a measure of the United States’ vast wealth that, instead of making a choice between these strategies, a decision was taken to undertake both simultaneously. Thereafter, Nimitz and MacArthur conducted parallel but separate and implicitly competitive campaigns.

The British, meanwhile, addressed themselves once more to Burma. Their retreat had ended in May 1942. In December that year, after the usual seasonal paralysis imposed by the monsoon, Wavell made a first tentative attempt to strike back, committing an Indian division against the port of Akyab, in the Arakan region of Burma facing the Bay of Bengal. Two attempted assaults failed, as did another thrust towards Donbaik in March 1943. The British field commander, Lt. Gen. Noel Irwin, held a reckless press conference at which he sought to explain Allied setbacks by asserting that “in Japan the infantryman is the corps d’élite,” while the British “put our worst men into the infantry.” It would take years, he said, to train Indian troops to the necessary standard to beat the Japanese. Allied censors smothered publication of his remarks, but they reflected the defeatism, incompetence and incoherence prevailing among British commanders in the East. Churchill minuted the chiefs of staff: “I am far from satisfied with the way the Indian campaign is being conducted. The fatal lassitude of the Orient steals over all these Commanders.”

Although 4 million Indian soldiers eventually bore arms for the Allies and substantial British resources were deployed in the subcontinent, the generals were slow to renew effective operations. Churchill fumed about the large forces deployed in northeast India, who were achieving wretchedly little; he once described the Indian Army as “a gigantic system