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By Root 1312 0

the last few hundred yards to the shoreline with agonising sluggishness, under Japanese fire. A navy pilot gazing down on the scene said later: “The water never seemed clear of tiny men, their rifles over their heads, slowly wading beachwards. I wanted to cry.” Four days of fighting followed, among blasted palm trees and skilfully camouflaged defences. When the shooting stopped, the marines had suffered 3,407 casualties and almost all the 4,500 Japanese defenders were dead—just 17 prisoners were taken. Every participant in the battle was shocked by its intensity. It was a painful experience for the American people, as well as for the marines, to discover how hard they had to fight to overcome a sacrificial defence. National hubris, the doctrine of American exceptionalism, was affronted by the revelation that a primitive enemy could resist overwhelming firepower, that the path to victory made close-quarter combat and its sacrifices mandatory. Though significant tactical lessons were learned from Tarawa, the same infantry experience would be repeated in later island battles. From a global and especially Russian perspective, U.S. losses were small for important strategic gains, but they seemed very terrible when the prizes were mere atolls of coral and palm trees.

Nothing could alter the campaign’s fundamentals: to defeat Japan, U.S. 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 East 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Marine Corps was probably America