Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [132]
A nearly isolated China was something of a sideshow as far as the Americans were concerned. More crucial to them were the central and the southwest Pacific areas, where American troops were in contact with the enemy. Yet all the fronts—Aleutians, central, and Southwest Pacific, China, Burma—cried out for troops to fight and matériel to fight with, and decisions on priorities were not solely conditioned by geography or even by strategy, but by politics and interservice rivalries and by personal likes and dislikes. Burma remained a poor relation for the British, and in American planning, MacArthur and Nimitz waged a constant struggle for top billing and allocation of resources. As a soldier, MacArthur ended up with practically his own private navy to support his drive up past New Guinea and into the Philippines. Nimitz on the other hand ended up with his private army, the Marine Corps, as the navy worked its way west through the islands of the central Pacific. The converging strategy eventually proved to be sound, but it was achieved only after a great deal of argument. The Americans haggled among themselves in the Pacific theater almost as much as they did with the British in the European theater.
The one item on which everyone, British and American alike, could agree was the necessity of improving the shipping position. It was this problem that led the Allied leaders at Casablanca in January of 1943 to give priority to defeating the U-boats. This was carried even to the point of disrupting the strategic bombing schedule and diverting it to attacks on U-boat bases and yards, much to the dismay of the bombing planners. It also led to the agreement to invade the island of Sicily. Some things were already happening to improve the situation. The scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon removed a large potential threat, and the return of the remainder of it to the war on the Allied side provided a small boost. Later in 1943 the defection of the Italians from the Axis side had the result of subtracting an important amount of shipping from the enemy, and adding it to the Allied ranks. By then the U-boat menace was being contained, so the whole naval situation improved throughout the year.
Things that were achieved as by-products of other developments in Europe had to be won by battle in the Pacific. Through late 1942 and into 1943 the Americans and the Japanese hammered at each other. The anvil of their operations was an island in the Solomons called Guadalcanal.
In the late spring of 1942, as the Japanese extended eastward to New Guinea and past it to Rabaul, they decided that by ranging a bit farther southeast they could threaten the American supply route to Australia. As part of their Coral SeaPort Moresby venture they sent a small force down into the Solomons to set up a seaplane base at the little island of Tulagi. Across a twenty-mile-wide strait lay the much larger island of Guadalcanal, ninety miles long by nearly fifty wide, and here they began laboriously hacking an airfield out of the scrub and jungle.
After Midway the Americans enjoyed for the first time a marginal superiority over the Japanese. In spite of their official adherence to the Germany-first policy, they had shipped much larger numbers of troops to the Pacific than to Europe and had allocated the even greater proportion of shipping needed to sustain them over the longer Pacific distances. Most of this was the work of Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations, something of an Anglophobe, and an absolutely determined pusher of the U. S. Navy and its aims and ambitions. The American Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, once wrote that after a visit to the Navy Department he came away feeling that he had been in a place “where Neptune was God, Mahan was