CHAPTER 20
THE naval war between Japan and the United States was to be waged henceforward with the utmost ferocity in the crucial theatre of the South-West Pacific. Japan had not foreseen that its action there would become so critical for its fate: but it had lost the freedom of action at the Battle of Midway Island. The United States set itself to wrest the South-West Pacific from its hold, and Japan, which had committed itself heavily in the region, set itself doggedly to oppose it, first of all trying to enlarge its position, and later selling its territory inch by inch, and with such grimness that it hoped that the United States would become tired of the enterprise.
As the fighting grew in intensity, it gradually became plain that, in this Pacific theatre, the war against Japan could be won. The Pacific offered the path to Tokyo. Interest fell away from the other theatres and other activities, from India and from China, and was concentrated on two American commanders, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, who shared the direction of events in this region.
General MacArthur, in whom burned most clearly the determination to restore the United States’ position, and whose skill, confidence and military genius were thought to have made him the most effective commander for the purpose, had in March 1942 been ordered to withdraw from the fighting in the Philippines. He began his duel with Japan under something of a cloud. His withdrawal from the Philippines, though it had been ordered by Roosevelt, and though it was common sense, had, in the hectic atmosphere of the time, been criticized by the American Army, especially by the troops he had left behind. MacArthur was a general whose behaviour often flouted the conventions of the day. In the Philippines he had won disapproval by insisting that his wife and family should remain with him: he was able to do so because he had been under Filipino regulations and was free of American Army discipline: This singular man was to impose himself on the American and Australian Armies, who were almost fanatical in their dislike of privilege, and to make himself respected by virtue of his cult of personality if not superiority.
On his escape from Manila in a speedboat, he had had an adventurous voyage to the southern tip of the Philippines. When he got there, he found difficulty in going further. Rivalry between the American services made the American admiral in command in the region unwilling to spare any aircraft for his rescue. Application had to be made over his head through Washington to transport MacArthur to Australia.
It had been agreed between President Roosevelt and Churchill that operations in Australia should be under an American command, and to this post MacArthur was designated. The Australian forces, many of them battle-trained in the Middle East, passed under his control. On taking over, MacArthur found the Australians thinking in terms of defence. Their morale had been shattered by the events in Singapore, which they had been accustomed to thinking of as a guarantee of Australian security, and they did not quickly adapt themselves to its overthrow. Psychologically they were in the position of France after the loss of the Maginot Line. The Japanese appeared to be unstoppable, and were heading for Sydney and Melbourne; and the Australians looked round in despondency for a remedy. They aimed at holding the southern part of the continent on a line which passed through Brisbane. That portion to the north of this they had virtually reconciled themselves to losing when the Japanese invasion, which was expected in a matter of weeks, should begin.
MacArthur’s initial success was to change this attitude. He infused the Australians with confidence, and with the offensive spirit. His command was extremely short in manpower: it was poorly equipped, and its air power was deficient. But within three months the counter-offensive started.
The area which was the scene of the fighting was a chain of coral islands which lies to the north of Australia and curls around to the north-east. The pressure of the original Japanese offensive had nearly carried them to this region. But it had begun to flag before Japan had occupied the whole system. If Japan had overrun the islands, it would have been able to set up bases there from which it could have interrupted communications between Australian ports. The chain of islands was half-held by the Japanese, but their firm occupation came to an end in the Solomon Islands, and did not extend to the New Hebrides or New Caledonia. The objective of their next offensive, with a dangerously extended line of communication, was the Australian outpost of Port Moresby in the south of Papua, which was the Australian extension of New Guinea. This lay just to the south of the islands occupied by Japan and well within range of their new stronghold at Rabaul, a superb natural harbour in New Britain, easily captured from the Australians in January and then quickly transformed into an impressive fleet base surrounded by a cluster of airfields and military installations.
It was a matter of urgency to scatter the Japanese forces, which were preparing to take Port Moresby. The first engagement was the drawn naval battle between American and Japanese aircraft-carriers off the coast of Papua at the beginning of May 1942: the Battle of the Coral Sea. It was said to be drawn because losses on both sides had been roughly equal; but the Japanese had been convoying troops, which were intended for a coup de main against Port Moresby, and these were turned back and never came again. Thus the issue of the battle in truth favoured the Allies.
The Japanese were, however, favourably placed. From their bases they bombed Port Darwin, on the Australian coast, and severely damaged it. Having abandoned their hopes of taking Port Moresby by a frontal assault from the sea, the Japanese Army landed the first of 15,000 troops on the northern coast of Papua on 21 July 1942 with the intention of advancing overland across the Owen Stanley Range to take Port Moresby from the rear. MacArthur moved to counter the attack, inadequate though his force was. Three weeks after the Japanese landing, MacArthur sent reinforcements to New Guinea with orders to wrest Papua from the Japanese. At first the Japanese pushed the Australians southward until, suffering from severe malnutrition, dysentery and food poisoning – all of which affected both sides – the Japanese advance ground to a halt barely thirty miles from Port Moresby in mid-September. By that time MacArthur had assembled two Australian divisions (less one brigade) and leading elements of a United States Army division which was on its way. They could call on no effective naval support and their air support was supplied by a hodge-podge of aircraft of indeterminate vintage. On 23 September MacArthur handed over the counter-offensive to General Sir Thomas Blarney, the Australian Commander-in-Chief for Allied Land Forces in the South-West Pacific. In a painful struggle which took a further four months under appalling conditions, they prevailed. The struggle ended in January 1943 when the few surviving Japanese were no longer capable of organized resistance.
The backbone of the force was the Seventh Australian Division, veterans of the Middle East who had been among the Australian forces originally sent out as a rag-tag force, under-equipped and under-trained, to Palestine, then ordered to Greece, but diverted first to the Western Desert and back to Palestine whence it earned its spurs in a difficult but forgotten campaign in Lebanon and Syria against the Vichy French. With the collapse of British resistance in Malaya, the Seventh had been pulled out of the Middle East as part of the forces shifted to defend Australia. Wavell, with Churchill’s support, had wanted them in Burma and tried to hijack them when they reached Ceylon, but the Australian Prime Minister insisted they proceed to Java, which was how they came to be in Papua. Gripped by political and strategical forces beyond its ability to influence, the Division’s history of irritating administrative confusion and muddle was perhaps no more than characteristic of army life. The fighting in Papua well suited the individual qualities of the men of the Seventh.
It was largely a series of savage hand-to-hand conflicts, and there was less skill in manoeuvre than was to be usual in the campaigns designed by MacArthur. It was, however, notable for the skilful use of aircraft, themselves largely improvised for supplying troops (as in Burma later). It was also remarkable for the endurance of the troops, and for their overcoming mountainous jungles in conditions of equatorial heat, humidity and mud that make the area one of the most unhealthy and exhausting climates in the world.
It was a battle on a scale smaller than many, yet the maniacal tenacity of the Japanese which was to be a feature of the entire campaign is summed up in the final tally of human lives: of 13,000 Japanese losses in action in the final stage, only thirty-eight men were taken prisoner. The Australians lost 5,700 men, the Americans a further 2,800.
This operation in eastern New Guinea was quite a small one, and, with so much happening in the rest of the world, not very much noticed. But in the record of the whole war, it was significant. It marked the end of the Japanese offensive. It was the start of expeditions, desperately hard-fought but in the end universally successful, to force Japan back across the sea which it had sailed out to dominate so spectacularly. But MacArthur, surveying the tasks which still lay before him, was painfully aware of the difficulties which lay ahead.
He was fighting over a vast area, large parts of which were still unmapped. This was a handicap which has been little recognized, but was very grave indeed. For an American general to plan a troop landing in Europe with maps and charts showing the tidal movements was one thing: to plan the same operation for coral islands, where all that was available was native guess-work, was quite another. He was short of ships; he was given only medium-range bomber aircraft when he needed essentially long-range bombers; everywhere he went, airfields had to be constructed, often hacked out of the jungle by indigenous labour. For his supplies he had to compete with seven or eight rival theatres of war, and, as it seemed to him, invariably came out worst. Disease, especially malaria, was a still more deadly enemy than the Japanese, and the means of overcoming it could only be found by experimenting – and by exposing his armies at first to its ravages.
Nevertheless, from Port Moresby and the operations which he conducted for its relief in the encircling Owen Stanley Mountains, he was led on to the steps which, laborious operation after perilous initiative, in the end resulted in the reconquest of all New Guinea from the Japanese. From this position, he prepared to leap ahead, to wreak havoc among the forces guarding the Japanese Empire.
As the campaign in Papua was coming to a close, in the first part of 1943 the Ninth Australian Division, which had displayed superb fighting qualities against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s forces at the Battle of Alamein, was returned to Australia for a much-needed period of recovery. After training in jungle warfare in Australia, the Ninth was dispatched to help four other Australian divisions and several American regiments to expel the Japanese from the Huon Peninsula, the area of the New Guinea mandate nearest to New Britain (and therefore Rabaul). The Japanese had taken control of the whole of the Peninsula and its southern approaches in March 1942 and had utilized their year of grace to construct airstrips and well-prepared fixed defences. The whole operation took a year to complete between early 1943 and the first few months of 1944. The vast difficulties of nature took its toll as it had elsewhere in New Guinea and the lesser islands nearby, where American forces were also overwhelming the Japanese defenders. Lieutenant-General R. L. Eichel-berger, Commander of the Thirty-second US Army Division in Papua, painted the scene:
It was about one part fighting to three parts sheer misery of physical environment. It was climbing up one hill and down another, and then, when breath was short, fording streams with weapons held aloft or wading through swamps. It was sweat and then chill; it was a weariness of body and spirit; and once again tropical illness was a greater foe than enemy bullets.∗
The eventual victory of the Allied forces, costly though it was, had never been in doubt. MacArthur was not a sporting man, and he used his superior numerical strength to advantage. The Huon Peninsula campaign, however, is interesting from another point of view as well: in the event, it was to be the last major campaign involving Australian Army forces in the Second World War.
In retrospect, it is plain that the Japanese, from the point of view of their long-term interests, would have done well to limit their offensive; to avoid overlong lines of communication; to have declined combat when this could be avoided; above all, not to have been lured into a contest for the possession of islands, which could only be of marginal use to them. This was the view of many of the Japanese generals, and if it had prevailed in shaping the strategy would have greatly increased the difficulty of the Americans in coming to grips with the Japanese Empire. But the Japanese Navy, still determined to conduct the Pacific War as a naval war, still over-confident in spite of the Battle of Midway, still with an abundance of battleships and cruisers which it could safely risk, overruled the Japanese Armies. Little by little the scope of the war enlarged, and eventually spread through all the intricate chain of coral islands in the Pacific. There was little rational planning behind the operations.
From the start the Americans had had a second headquarters command in the Pacific Ocean. In March 1942 the Pacific, by a decision of President Roosevelt, ratified perforce by the British, Australians and Dutch, was divided formally between General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz. MacArthur’s command included Australia, the Philippines, the Solomons, and most of the Dutch East Indies. The rest of the Pacific fell to Nimitz. But it was not a clear-cut geographical division of responsibility. Each of these officers was entrusted formally with the command of all armed forces in his area, whether on land, sea or in the air; but, by the instrument providing for the division between the commands, it was provided that Admiral Nimitz should have general control of all amphibious operations, whether these took place in his own zone or MacArthur’s.
This rather peculiar division caused trouble about the demarcation. It was against logic, and ran counter to the teaching of experience in other theatres of war. MacArthur wrote:
Of all the faulty decisions of the war, perhaps the most inexpressible one was the failure to unify the command in the Pacific… It resulted in divided effort, the waste of diffusion and duplication of force, and undue extension of war with added casualties and cost.∗
The division was difficult to maintain. For example, MacArthur’s operations in clearing the menacing Japanese from Port Moresby were on various occasions more amphibious than military, but he succeeded in keeping the campaign to himself. MacArthur wrote with a personal interest about the danger of divided aims. It galled him that it was freely suggested that he, though he was celebrated for his caution, could not be trusted with the safety of the Navy’s precious ships. A further limitation on him was that the charter setting up the respective commands laid down that Nimitz was from the start to be offensive in his operations; MacArthur, by contrast, was to fight defensively. This grudging attitude was to run, as a discordant thread, throughout the early years of the American counter-attack.
In this issue, MacArthur set himself, not for the only time in his career, to oppose the general political plan of Washington, on which the plan of campaign eventually depended. The Navy had for long looked forward to a war with Japan. War in the Pacific must essentially be a naval one; the principal interest with which it was fought must be the aircraft-carriers and battleships and the commander of these must be an admiral. The plans according to which it was fought had for two or three generations been the basic manuals for American naval training. This was the prevailing conception among the service chiefs in Washington. MacArthur was a general, and that was fatal to him. American naval officers form a curious, exclusive caste in American society; the war was an opportunity for this caste which it could not neglect. It is true that in the European War the Navy took second place; circumstances had taken charge and had directed a land strategy. It seemed only compensating justice that in the East Asian and Pacific Conflict, where geography restored primacy to the sea, the Navy and its traditional ancillary arm, the Marines, should be the main protagonists.
The arrangement of the two commands had further consequences. It had been agreed between. Roosevelt and Churchill that the United States should have a large measure of independent initiative in the organization of military affairs in the Pacific. As Britain had the lion’s share of the initiative in the Middle East and in the Indian Ocean, so did the United States rule the Pacific War. This was in contrast to the convention operating in Europe and the Atlantic, where the planning was a matter of joint British and American responsibility; in the Pacific, any British initiative came to be headed off. By this process, the United States to some extent evaded the general directive, laid down very soon after Pearl Harbor, that the war in the Pacific was to take second place to the war in Europe. In 1942 the Americans systematically built up their war-making capacity in the Pacific through the sympathetic connivance of the Chiefs of Staff in Washington. MacArthur might groan that he still had ridiculously inadequate supplies, but they were very much larger than had been envisaged by the directive. Twice as many supplies were sent across the Pacific in the first six months of March 1942 as were sent to the European theatre of war. By the end of 1942, the United States had reinforced its stations in the Pacific by a total of 150,000 troops more than had been originally intended.
In August 1942 the Navy had its first chance to take charge of amphibious operations on a large scale. These were in Guadalcanal, a tiny island in the Solomons: it was in MacArthur’s command area, but the campaign there was directed by the Naval Chiefs of Staff and played little part in his biography. Once more, the area of combat was in the disputed coral islands which ringed Australia. Guadalcanal was very little known or explored; before its conquest by Japan, it had been a British colony; the local people were extremely primitive; a few traders were like characters from a novel by Joseph Conrad. The colony, which is only ninety miles long and twenty-five miles broad, is the epitome of a tropical island. Along its sandy beaches are coconut palms; abruptly behind them there rise jungly mountains and extinct volcanoes to a height of seven thousand feet. The flat ground is dark, steamy, rotting jungle, the perfect terrain for breeding the malaria mosquito.
The Japanese nearly beat the Americans to possession of it. They had occupied it with a skeleton force, and American air reconnaissance showed that they were building an airfield on it. They were interrupted by a counter-invasion: the Americans landed a force of 11,000 men. At first, both sides supposed that the fate of Guadalcanal would be settled within a week. Actually a savage and terrible struggle developed there which lasted until February 1943, when the Japanese decided to release their grip. The Americans had discovered what war in the Pacific amounted to, and had done so at horrendous cost. There had been no such gruelling campaigns before in the history of the war. The victory won by the Americans eliminated a threat to the Allied supply lines and provided the United States forces with a valuable forward airbase.
The battle cost the Americans six major naval engagements, and a heavy toll of shipping. Both sides lost an equal number of warships (twenty-four of all classes), though Japanese losses in supporting ships, such as transports, were much heavier. The Japanese dead among the ground troops numbered 24,000: American losses were lighter, but by a remarkable feint the Japanese managed to rescue 12,000 of their soldiers.
This savage battle marked out the pattern of operations which was to be repeated again and again in the Pacific during the next few years. Careful and skilful preparation by the American staff had been the main factor in the American victory; and so it was to be at Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, at Kwajalein and Eniwetok and Bougainville Island. The Navy concentrated upon the islands and pushed the Japanese relentlessly back. This strategy was a head-on assault. It was effective, and remorseless; but it was not very imaginative.
As the Nimitz campaign developed, General MacArthur was simultaneously attacking in his corner of the Pacific and the strategy of the two campaigns inevitably invited comparisons. Both showed undoubted successes. From September 1942 down to the middle of 1944, MacArthur was employed in re-occupying New Guinea. It was not the extent of the land occupied which was significant; MacArthur had overcome the arts of the Japanese in defensive warfare, in territory very favourable to them, and he had inflicted enormous losses of manpower on them.
Nimitz’s war machine had rolled over the Gilbert Islands and the Marshalls. Little by little the Japanese gave way at the edges of the vast Empire they had seized; but Nimitz gained his successes by weight of assault and as a result of the endurance of his troops. His casualties were usually considerable. The American troops who were flung into action were for the most part a civilian Army. Many of them had, however, been harshly prepared in the rather barbaric training grounds of the United States Marines in the Carolinas. Stories of these which seeped out during the war seem to have been well founded. Some troops had been less well prepared, and this accounted for some of the reverses which the Americans suffered in this campaign, which was the most sanguinary of any which were fought during the war. The American advance proceeded atoll by atoll. It was a war fought among tropical islands, with the same unreal beauty as a background, the same refusal to surrender among the Japanese, the same monotony of desperate attack and desperate defence. It became taken for granted that the Japanese did not surrender, but were killed. Often the sites which occasioned the worst slaughter were incredibly small. MacArthur, on the other hand, won his battles by sheer artistry. No other captain of the war based his strategy so consistently on principles. He commanded with style. He was conscious of history, and of the examples of other generals. The ghosts of all the battles of the world stalked the combats for which he was responsible. In the map rooms of his headquarters there was an atmosphere of erudition which was unfamiliar in the war. The bloody patterns of assault on these remote coral reefs were studiously compared with Napoleon’s famous victories, and even on one occasion with the victory of Hannibal at Cannae in 204 B.C. He also had a self-conscious, narcissistic regard for his own place among the pantheon of American military giants.
MacArthur despised brute strength. He sought, in a way which was rather like the principle on which the Japanese system of judo is based, to bring his force to bear on the enemy in places and at times that would find his opponent off balance. In this way he could hope to succeed with weaker strength, which was usually the position in which he found himself, and with minimum loss. In this island warfare he eschewed the practice of Admiral Nimitz of reducing the Japanese strong-points one by one. Nimitz modified these tactics as time went on, and employed a limited plan of bypassing small islands which would have made an inconvenient defence. MacArthur, on the other hand, practised a strategy of envelopment. He refused to assail the Japanese head-on in one of their prepared fortresses, and thought out ways of isolating it by operating upon its exposed line of communication. The by-passed stronghold proved in the end to be his victim, but it had been left to ‘die upon the vine’. General MacArthur then shifted his base forwards by some hundreds of miles, when the process was repeated with care never to expose his forces beyond the reach of protective air cover. He described as follows the system which he pursued:
The system is as old as war itself. It is merely a new name dictated by new conditions given to the ancient principle of envelopment. It was the first time that the area of combat embraced land and water in such relative proportions. Heretofore, either the one or the other was predominant in the campaign. But in this area the presence of transportation of ground troops by ships as well as land transport seemed to conceal the fact that the system was merely that of envelopment applied to a new type of battle area. It has always proved the ideal method for success by inferior in number but faster-moving forces. Immediately upon my arrival in Australia and learning the resources at my command, I determined that such a plan of action was the sole chance of fulfilling my mission.∗
The concept that success lay with a commander who best cooperated with nature was ever-present to him. One of his maxims was: ‘Nature is neutral in war, but if you beat it and the enemy does not, it becomes a powerful ally.’ A part of his success was due to the United States Army becoming more at home in the coral islands than the Japanese: which reversed the experience of the Japanese and of the British Army in the Malayan jungle at the start of the war.
In his campaigns, MacArthur relied to an exceptional extent on spying. He was fortunate enough to discover an Australian, Commander Long, with a great gift for attracting information and for sifting it. This was a new art in Australia, and Long organized a service which was free of the traits – the elaborate games and the affectation of policy making – which proved so constricting in other countries. The most valuable information was given by a force called the ‘coast watchers of the islands’. These were a fifth column which had been left behind in the islands when they were overrun by the Japanese. They consisted of British and Australian civil servants, anthropologists, telegraph operators, traders: and they were admirably served by bands of local natives. They were able to communicate by wireless with MacArthur’s headquarters. In war of unorthodox character, this kind information about Japanese strong-points and the distribution of Japanese manpower was often worth a whole division of troops. The exploits of these men are one of the most exciting chapters of war history; and it is very extraordinary that they have not become part of the folklore of the war.
To MacArthur’s military tasks were added the military and diplomatic ones of welding Australia and the United States in a close alliance. The Australians, in spite of their many positive qualities, were at this period notoriously hard to deal with: they were touchy, quick to take offence where none was intended, hypercritical as a kind of self-defence. In spite of a grotesque side to his character – which was self-assertive and boastful and which went with genuine confidence and did not mask self-distrust – MacArthur actually made himself liked, and won the confidence of Australia. He esteemed and got along well with Curtin, the Australian Prime Minister, and the two of them often collaborated in opposing Washington or London. He took an interest in preparing the reorganization of the Australian supplies so that by re-orienting Australian industry his armies actually received from Australia itself a much larger proportion of its needs than had been supposed possible.
In playing this role, MacArthur was much helped by accidents in his previous career which had detached him from the ordinary life of an American soldier. In his service as military adviser to the Philippine Government, he had come to conduct himself with an unusual detachment from the American military machine. This, combined with a natural tendency to a certain Caesarism in politics, had brought it about that in his Pacific command he was often handled by the American Government as if he were an independent political power and not a subordinate officer. His relation to the American authorities was like that of a much-prized condottiere to an Italian city state. The legend of MacArthur as the great American pro-consul was enhanced by the fact that when the war began he had not been back in America for years, nor was he to return until 1951. Though MacArthur undoubtedly gained from this position, he had as a rule to forgo the ability to influence the military planners by personal knowledge of the officers concerned. A remoteness from understanding American politics complicated his career. Piercing political insight into fundamentals was combined with a pathetic political incompetence in day-to-day matters.
Throughout this fatal combat in which Americans were locked with Japanese in a contest from which neither side could free itself, one single fact stood out. The war was waged with the utmost ferocity, but often under the eyes of relatively idle armies who were obliged to remain spectators of what was going on. Of the vast number of men mobilized for the war, the greater part were destined never to come into combat. Japan had an Army of fifty-one divisions: until the very end of the war, forty of these divisions were either occupied in China, which for most of this period had a totally inactive front, or were employed in guarding the frontier with Russia. And on the American side the number of troops employed in the actual offensive by MacArthur, and later in the reduction of the Pacific islands, was very small indeed in comparison with the vast army which the United States had concentrated for war in the Far East. (Similarly in this Far Eastern War the British troops who had actual combat experience were limited to the four or five divisions in Burma.) The Western Allies could not make use of a larger force. They had chosen to fight the Japanese on narrow fronts – in New Guinea and in the Pacific islands – and the circumstances of the war were such that there was no room for a great concourse of troops. Thus the war came to resemble the war at Troy. The serried ranks stood and watched the combat fought between the heroes. Their fate was decided in battles in which they had no part.
In this desperate fighting in the Pacific, Admiral Yamamoto, still the central figure and imaginative genius at war whom the Japanese, with their great military gifts, had contributed to that conflict, was taken out of the picture. His death was plotted in Washington. It was brought about by arranging an ambush by American fighter aircraft which fell on him in great strength as he was flying on a tour of inspection to one of the Pacific bases held by Japan. This was in April 1943, soon after the Japanese withdrawal from Guadalcanal. The details of his flight, the precise time of arrival, were all obtained by intercepting cipher messages which could be read. Yamamoto was always punctual to the moment: the surprise depended on the ambushing aircraft being able to count to the minute upon his presence at the destined place of encounter. Yamamoto went to his death with a punctuality that was a rare virtue among orientals, even among commanding officers. His end was like the death of Hector who was similarly taken at a disadvantage by a force of Achilles’ myrmidons:
Look Hector how the sun begins to set
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels
Even with the veil and darkling of the sun
To close the day up. Hector’s life is done.
The American Admiral, having plotted his overthrow, could find no more fitting words to announce it than the following telegram to the exterminators: ‘Congratulations Major Mitchell and his hunters; sounds as though one of the ducks in their bag was a peacock.’ Democracies have curious lapses of taste when they go to war. At the press conference to celebrate the success of the plan, the same Admiral observed: ‘I had hoped to lead that scoundrel up Pennsylvania Avenue in chains with the rest of you kicking him where it would do the most good.’ It is said that the audience whooped and applauded.
By July 1943 the American planners were already satisfied that they had chosen the right road. They lifted their sights, and began to consider what they should do when they drew near to Japan. Could intense air bombardment, from Chinese airfields and from their great aircraftcarriers, and unremitting submarine warfare, really reduce this proud people, or would the unemployed army of over a million be ready to dispute their way? Would an invasion be necessary; and, if so, would the history of the fanatical defence of small atolls be lived through once again, this time in the island centre of the terrible and warlike race?
MacArthur and Nimitz were the two American personalities who dominated the Pacific. They had taken up the initiative when it had been dashed from the Japanese by the Battle of Midway Island. They had begun to attack, and had succeeded in their campaigns ever since. To halt them began to appear as being beyond Japan’s capacity: the only doubt was how long they would take to cross the Pacific, and to make war on Japan at its gateway.