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By Root 1725 0

143,668 men doing battle with sixty-four Japanese vessels totalling 42,800 sailors and airmen. It was the last action fought between battleships, and was decisively won by the Americans, who by the end of the four separate engagements over three days had established unquestioned dominance over the Pacific Ocean for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Four Japanese aircraft carriers, three battleships, six heavy and four light cruisers and a submarine were sunk and scarcely another ship in their Navy emerged unscathed; more than 10,500 sailors and airmen and 500 planes had been lost. By contrast, Admiral William Halsey had lost one light carrier, two destroyers, 200 aircraft and about 2,800 killed and 1,000 wounded.2 Then on 5 November Vice-Admiral John McCain, who commanded the carrier Task Force 38 of the Third Fleet, attacked Luzon, with the result that the Japanese lost a further 400 aircraft and a carrier for the loss of twenty-five American aircraft and the damaging of the carrier USS Lexington by kamikaze suicide-bombers. The kamikaze were a sign of Japanese fanaticism by that stage of the war, but also of their desperation. (They also deployed Kaiten manned torpedoes later that month.) John McCain was a supremely successful air commander whose pilots once sank forty-nine Japanese ships in a single day and who were to destroy no fewer than 3,000 grounded Japanese planes in the last five weeks of war after 10 July 1945.3

The punishment that the Imperial Navy took in mid-November 1944 was devastating – four destroyers, a minesweeper and four transports carrying 10,000 troops were sunk on 11 November, a cruiser and four destroyers on the 13th, the aircraft carrier Junyo on the 17th, still more vessels on the 19th – yet still it fought on. Nor were there any signs that the Philippines could be recaptured without a long and debilitating land battle. Japanese stoicism in the face of half the world might have been strategically crazy but must inspire admiration. By the end of November, thirty-five B-29 bombers had raided Tokyo by night, the start of a destruction of the cities of the Japanese mainland that was to mirror that of Japan’s naval, military and air forces. (In mid-February 1945 aircraft from Task Force 38 would conduct 2,700 sorties against Tokyo and Yokohama, for the loss of only eighty-eight aircraft, or 3 per cent.) Yet with no allies left, and ultimate defeat certain, still the Japanese fought on with seemingly undiminished ardour, genuine obedience to the perceived wishes of the Emperor playing an important part. Whatever the reason, it led directly to the deaths of over 1.5 million Japanese servicemen and 300,000 civilians during the Second World War.4

Although the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not among them, some war crimes were committed by the Allies on the Japanese. George MacDonald Fraser, who fought in the 17th (Black Cat) Indian Division at the siege of Meiktila and the battle of Pyawbwe in Burma, described in his autobiography Quartered Safe Out Here how between twenty and fifty wounded Japanese soldiers had had rocks dropped on them in cold blood by an Indian unit, and explained his own feeling that ‘the notion of crying for redress against the perpetrators (my own comrades-in-arms, Indian soldiers who had gone the mile for us, and we for them), on behalf of a pack of Japs, would have been obnoxious, dishonourable even.’5 American Marines had to face the sight of their dead comrades’ penises having been cut off by the Japanese and stuffed into the corpses’ mouths. This kind of atrocity invited occasional barbaric reprisals, for even those fighting in a good cause can be brutalized by war, but in the view of the military historian Victor Davis Hanson there was ‘a certain American exceptionalism that such barbarism should and usually was to be condemned as deviance rather than accepted as the norm – quite different from the Japanese’.6

On 13 December 1944, the heavy cruiser USS Nashville, on her way to the amphibious assault on Mindanao in the Philippines, was badly damaged by Japanese