Inferno - Max Hastings [360]
A thousand such incidents make it easy to understand why U.S. Marines and soldiers fighting in the Pacific treated their enemies as mortally dangerous wild beasts.
Informed Japanese knew that their home islands, on which millions of houses were constructed of wood and paper, now faced an ordeal by air bombardment; the Marianas airfields brought Japan’s cities within range of U.S. bombers. The shore battles showed that Japanese soldiers’ willingness for sacrifice could extract a high price for each American victory, but the invaders’ firepower was irresistible. Nimitz’s submarines were inflicting a scale of attrition on Japan’s merchant fleet unsustainable by a nation dependent on imports. The combination of naval blockade and air bombardment ensured Japan’s defeat, even if U.S. ground forces advanced no farther. But the Japanese government remained committed to fight on: the supremely stubborn military men who dominated Tokyo’s polity believed they could still achieve a negotiated settlement, preserving at least their holdings in China, by convincing the Americans that the cost of assaulting the Japanese homeland would be unacceptably high.
Even as the marines were fighting for the Marianas, in the Southwest Pacific the United States was conducting a much more controversial campaign. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the regional supreme commander, was bent upon personally achieving the liberation of the 17 million people of the Philippines, where he had spent much of his service life. A former chief of staff of the army with powerful right-wing friends at home, in 1944 MacArthur flirted with a presidential election run against Roosevelt, abandoning this notion only when it became plain that he could not secure the Republican nomination, far less beat the White House incumbent. He remained an immensely formidable figure, hard for the chiefs of staff to resist, his prestige raised so high by domestic propaganda that he was effectively unsackable.
Navy planners argued that, with the Marianas air bases in U.S. hands, the large Japanese army in the Philippines could be left to contemplate its own impotence while American forces addressed Iwo Jima, Okinawa and thereafter the Japanese home islands. There was a case for the United States to undertake limited operations to secure some Philippines airfields and harbours, but none for what actually followed. MacArthur was bent upon fighting his way through the entire archipelago, and so he did. Although he never gained the formal endorsement of the chiefs of staff for his purposes, no one in Washington was powerful or clear-sighted enough to stop him. Marshall once wrote memorably to MacArthur, “Remember, the Navy is on our side”; the Southwest Pacific supremo never acknowledged this.
In September 1944, carriers of Halsey’s Third Fleet off the southern Philippines inflicted punitive losses on Japan’s surviving air capability. On the twelfth alone, 2,400 American sorties destroyed 200 enemy planes in the sky and on the ground. Nimitz and MacArthur agreed that the island base of Peleliu should be seized before the army addressed the Philippines. On 15 September, men of the 1st Marine Division made an assault landing with massive air and naval support: 10,000 Japanese defenders, supported by deeply emplaced artillery, resisted fiercely. The ensuing campaign, which also engaged a U.S. Army division, proved a nightmare. Vast quantities of ammunition and effort had to be expended to overcome the enemy’s positions bunker by bunker. It was later calculated that 1,500 artillery rounds