There is a tendency in the United States to reduce the Pacific and Asian theaters to Honolulu and Hiroshima and to concentrate instead on the war in France and Germany. But a eurocentric view greatly skews the big picture.
In spite of a “Germany First” strategy, the United States had already engaged in a score of naval engagements, conducted its first offensive, bombed Tokyo, and suffered ten thousand dead in the Pacific before ever launching its first land assault on Nazi-held territory (which in fact was into French Morocco and Algeria). For the rest of the world, the war in Asia and the Pacific involved twice the number of people, was almost three years longer in duration, and covered four times more of the surface of the planet than did the conflict in Europe and North Africa.
The region’s battles included the bloodiest in U.S. Navy history, the bloodiest in U.S. Marine history, the longest retreat in British military history, plus numerous incidents of Japanese forces experiencing casualties of 100 percent.
Within these milestones were many thousands of clashes, most lasting a few hours and others enveloping several months. Listed in chronological order are the ten most significant military clashes among them in terms of strategic, economic, and political consequences in the region.
1. SHANGHAI (AUGUST 13–NOVEMBER 9, 1937)
To the surprise of his country and the Japanese military, Nationalist leader CHIANG KAI-SHEK did not offer concessions to Japan after the CHINE INCIDENT along the Marco Polo Bridge. Normally he would back down after such military “disturbances” with Japan’s Manchurian Kwantung Army.
Instead, Chiang sent troops into the multinational city of Shanghai. The move was in clear violation of an agreement (one of many with Japan) to keep the area demilitarized. The unarmed city soon became host to 400,000 Nationalist Chinese and 200,000 Japanese troops, slamming away at each other with artillery, bombs, and small-arms’ fire. Unburied bodies filled the streets. Blocks burned to the ground. Fighting lasted for nearly three months.
A child wails amid the debris after the Japanese bombed Shanghai.
When the Japanese threatened to cut off his line of retreat, Chiang directed his men to remain in the city, dooming his best and most loyal troops. Only at the last moment did he order a withdrawal, which quickly turned into a terrorized rout westward to Nanking.
The Japanese lost some 70,000 men. Chiang lost at least 180,000. The number of civilians killed or maimed has never been accurately calculated. Chiang’s wish for international intervention went unfulfilled, and the war in Asia had officially begun.
At the start of the battle for Shanghai, the Nationalist Chinese air force tried to bomb Japanese ships moored in the city along the Yangtze River. The bombs overshot the targets and struck a busy shopping district, killing 728 civilians.92
2. PEARL HARBOR, OAHU (DECEMBER 7, 1941)
Strategically, Oahu loomed on the Japanese navy’s left flank. Imperial warships could not hope to move south against resource-rich countries until the military threat to the east was neutralized. From this logic, Japan’s naval high command began to view a preemptive strike against the American fleet at PEARL HARBOR as its best chance for success everywhere else.
Planned nearly a year ahead of time and set in motion while diplomatic exchanges continued between the two countries, the Japanese attack on U.S. naval and air installations in Hawaii went better than even the most optimistic had hoped. Shielded by a series of storms on its approach, a flotilla of eighty-eight warships sailed undetected on a five-thousand-mile voyage, launched some 350 planes, and retrieved all but 29 aircraft. In return, the attack crippled nearly every U.S. battleship in the Pacific, sank or damaged a number of other ships, and destroyed or damaged nearly three-quarters of all military aircraft on the island of Oahu. For the U.S. Navy, the first day of the war was the worst, with more than 2,100 dead.
The explosion of the forward magazines of the destroyer Shaw produced this dramatic image of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
For all their successes, the Japanese achieved only marginal gains. Their main targets—three U.S. aircraft carriers—were not at PEARL HARBOR. Of the seven battleships sunk or damaged, all but three were restored to full service. For the most part, docks, hangars, technicians, and engineers survived the raid, making for impressive repair times. Precious oil tanks were untouched. Above all, a previously isolationist American public abruptly became unified and belligerent, inspired all the more by a Japanese declaration of war that was delivered after the PEARL HARBOR attack commenced.93
So moved by the stunning success at Pearl Harbor, Japan honored the anniversary of the attack every month for the rest of the war.
3. FALL OF SINGAPORE (FEBRUARY 15, 1942)
Winston Churchill called it the “worst disaster and largest capitulation of British history.” As far as disasters go, Britannia had suffered its share—the Norman Invasion, the Black Plague, and the battle of the Somme come to mind. But the PM was correct in the latter point. The eighty thousand Australian, Indian, Malay, and British troops captured at Singapore constituted the largest surrender in Royal military history.94
At the tip of the Malayan peninsula, the 240-square-mile island was the British Empire’s linchpin in South Asia. The citadel stood southeast of India, southwest of Hong Kong, and northwest of Australia. Assuming the naval base would be susceptible to attack from the sea, the British constructed massive defenses and batteries along the southern coast. The dense Malay jungle to the north was believed to be impenetrable.
An hour before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded “impenetrable” Malay. Battle-hardened from years of fighting in China, the Imperial Twenty-Fifth Army scored repeated routs over Commonwealth infantry, eventually forcing British commander Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival to call a retreat onto Singapore.
Though outnumbering the Japanese more than two to one, Percival did not have tanks or air support. His demoralized troops retreated farther and farther into the island, as did hundreds of thousands of refugees. Despite Churchill’s order to “fight to the end,” the defenders exhausted their supplies of food and water; yet unbeknownst to Percival, so had the Japanese. Unable to withstand a siege, Percival capitulated.
In Britain news of the surrender plunged the nation into mourning and unleashed a storm of conspiracy theories. A myth erupted that the massive coastal guns could not turn inland (they could, but their shells were only effective for piercing ship hulls). People blamed Parliament for not funding better defenses, though the government had spent many millions already. Percival was portrayed as a hero, a patsy, and an incompetent. In contrast, Japan exploded with pride. The once-mighty British Empire had been humiliated. More so than Pearl Harbor, Singapore appeared to assure ultimate victory. One newspaper headline declared: “General Situation of Pacific War Decided.”95
Strategically, the island proved to be marginal, as it was simply bypassed in the long, gradual Allied counterthrust a year later. But psychologically it was the high tide of the war for Japan and by many accounts the beginning of the end of British imperial power in South Asia.96
Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival lived through more than three years of imprisonment and was present at the formal Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay. Many of his fellow captives did not survive. As many as one hundred thousand refugees caught in Singapore eventually died in Japanese captivity.
4. MIDWAY (JUNE 3–6, 1942)
In the spring of 1942, while debating whether to invade Australia or push for India, Japan’s army and navy staff officers received a rude visit from sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers, compliments of Col. James Doolittle and the USS Hornet, coming in from the central Pacific.
Bomb damage was not extensive (fifty fatalities, one hundred homes destroyed), but the attack spawned a near-unanimous decision to seize the atoll of Midway, draw U.S. carriers to the island, and destroy the Americans in a battle for the heart of the Pacific Ocean.
While sending a diversionary fleet to bite the long Aleutian tail of Alaska, Adm. Yamamoto Isoroku ordered four separate strike forces toward Midway. Thanks to INTELLIGENCE intercepts, Adm. CHESTER NIMITIZ was aware of Yamamoto’s intentions and moved to stop him, albeit with a smaller force including the carriers Hornet, Enterprise, and the miraculously repaired Yorktown, which had nearly capsized at the battle of CORAL SEA. At first, everything went Yamamoto’s way.
Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Japan provoked the battle of Midway.
U.S. planes based on Midway (a miscellany of army, navy, and marine aircraft) flew to intercept the Japanese strike force. More than half the dive bombers and torpedo planes were shot down without scoring a single hit. Fifteen B-17s, soaring at twenty thousand feet, bombed the approaching flotilla but missed every ship. Meanwhile, Japanese aircraft strafed and bombed Midway’s defenses and airstrips at will, then returned to their flattops to load up for the killer blow.
Not until Nimitz’s carriers launched nearly everything they had, 151 aircraft in all, did the tide of battle turn. First to threaten the Japanese carriers were fifteen Douglas Devastator torpedo planes; slow and bulky, skimming the surface, ready to unload, when all fifteen were annihilated by zeros and antiaircraft fire. But their low-level flying pulled down Yamamoto’s fighter screen to sea level, allowing a handful of dive bombers to drop bomb after bomb on the Japanese decks. Within minutes, three Imperial carriers, carpeted with rearmed and refueled aircraft, burst into flames and foundered. The remaining Japanese carrier was mortally bombed soon after, at the price of the Yorktown, her belly cut open by two aircraft-launched torpedoes.
It was the first clear victory for the United States in the war. Along with losing four carriers, Japan also lost hundreds of irreplaceable pilots and never went on the offensive in the central Pacific again.
To cover up the tremendous defeat at Midway, Prime Minister Tojo Hideki hid the truth about the lost carriers from his emperor and the public, simply declaring the battle a great victory. Parades were held in Tokyo to celebrate.
5. GUADALCANAL (AUGUST 7, 1942–FEBRUARY 9, 1943)
As if slowly pushing a knife into an artery, Japanese forces advanced steadily along the Solomons, a chain of islands that cut across the sea lane between Australia and North America. On the easterly island of Guadalcanal, a few thousand Japanese engineers began building an airstrip, which they believed would make the knife’s edge razor-sharp.
In reality, Guadalcanal was not capable of being a major airbase. Though nearly a hundred miles long and thirty miles wide, it was a mountainous, jungle-carpeted, malarial, scorpion-infested steam bath without enough flat land to build a decent graveyard. Still, the local headhunters called it home.97
Adding to the misery of Guadalcanal, maps of the British-owned island were inaccurate, making navigation of jungle areas a waking nightmare.
Almost as an afterthought, some ten thousand U.S. personnel were sent to take over the airstrip. The invasion force initially met little opposition. Unwilling to hand over Japan’s southernmost possession, Adm. Yamamoto approved a naval counterattack, which abruptly sank four Allied cruisers in the area. The island quickly became a point of escalation.98
What began as two thousand Japanese on the island became nine thousand, then twenty thousand. Major naval engagements boiled in the surrounding waters, one of which lasted a mere thirty minutes but cost the Americans six warships. Air battles flared almost daily. Not until the United States amassed fifty thousand troops on the island did fortunes move to its side.
What was supposed to last a few days dragged on for six months. There were seven major naval fights, sinking more than forty major ships (most of them American). Hundreds of planes were lost. More than seven thousand U.S. sailors, marines, and soldiers perished along with thirty thousand Japanese. Guadalcanal was the first major offensive conducted by the United States in the war, and its conclusion signaled the turn of the Solomon knife westward.99
Four soldiers won the Medal of Honor on the beaches of Normandy. Nine marines won the Medal of Honor in the jungles of Guadalcanal.
6. ICHI-GO (APRIL 17–DECEMBER 11, 1944)
Tokyo’s intentions were ambitious, to say the least. Fifteen to thirty divisions would leave from strongpoints in east central China, head directly south for 1,000 miles, capture and destroy Chinese and American air bases along the way, and link up with Japanese forces in Indochina. The goal was to form a supply line stretching from Manchuria to Singapore. Fittingly, the name given to this bold project was Ichi-Go, “Operation One.”
The tactic was brute force—air support, artillery, and light tanks, backed by 140,000 ground troops and 70,000 horses on a front 150 miles wide. At first the offensive made considerable progress. Nationalist and regional Chinese armies often outnumbered the Japanese four to one. Yet poorly supplied and completely outgunned, the Chinese suffered casualties of twenty-to-one in several engagements. At one point, Japan pulled all available reserves from Manchuria and the mainland, creating a massive army of 360,000, its largest mobile force of the war.100
A Chinese Nationalist protects American P-40s still sporting the shark’s teeth of the Flying Tigers. Ichi-Go’s main objectives included the destruction of these air bases in southeast China.
Though a few Chinese regional armies fought with spectacular bravery, the Chinese Nationalist Army did not. Chiang’s troops simply melted away in the face of battle. Regional commanders begged the generalissimo and his Allied chief of staff, U.S. Gen. Joseph Stilwell, for weapons, supplies, and food. Both men repeatedly denied the requests; Chiang feared arming a potential rival, and Stilwell believed the Chinese were being driven back by cowardice. Ultimately, Washington lost all discernible confidence in Chiang.101
In the end the Japanese did achieve most of their objectives, linking with garrisons in Indochina on December 11, 1944, but a withered supply line halted any further progress, and U.S. victories in the Pacific made most of the gains irrelevant. Tokyo had spent itself in Asia, and Chiang’s Nationalists were routed, but another group benefited greatly from Ichi-Go. By watching the two main rivals fight to the death, Mao Zedong’s Communists suddenly became major contenders in the fight for China.
Per usual, the Chinese did not have the weapons to stage effective resistance during Ichi-Go. One regiment fought using two rather vintage artillery pieces. The guns previously belonged to the French army and had been used in the First World War.
7. SAIPAN (JUNE 15–JULY 9, 1944)
Saipan was the home base of the Imperial Central Pacific Fleet and the headquarters of Vice Adm. Nagumo Chuichi, the man who directed the air assault on PEARL HARBOR. The island was also within heavy bomber range of Japan. In the summer of 1944 the United States was determined to take the island, and the Japanese were just as determined to hold it.
The attackers had advantages. Japanese air cover was almost nonexistent. U.S. submarines were sinking transport after transport of soldiers and supplies heading for the area. American marines and soldiers outnumbered the defenders almost three to one. The Japanese also had to protect more than thirty thousand civilians on the island. But Saipan—fourteen miles long and five miles wide—was littered with swamps, ravines, high peaks, and thickets of jungle, interspersed with caves ideal for defensive positions. Guarding their few beaches were reefs of jagged coral.
Though landing more than twenty thousand troops on the first day, the Americans were under almost constant fire. Units got lost. Fragile battle lines broke, reformed, and broke again. Torrid accusations of incompetence flew back and forth between marine and army commanders. As the battle entered its third week (it was supposed to last only three days), the Japanese launched the largest banzai charge of the war. More than three thousand men, some only armed with grenades, nearly liquidated two American battalions.
Trapped on the island, Nagumo committed suicide, as did several thousand of his men. Of the Japanese civilians, some twenty-two thousand jumped or were forced off the seaside cliffs on the west and north sides of the island. Others killed themselves with grenades or simply walked into the sea to drown. U.S. patrol boats struggled to move through the floating corpses.102
In the battle of Saipan, U.S. Marines suffered four thousand casualties in the first two days of fighting.
Back in Japan, the defeat meant the end of Prime Minister Tojo Hideki, who resigned along with his entire cabinet, as did the minister of the navy and the chief of navy general staff. In light of the impending attacks from B-29 bombers, Emperor Hirohito inquired if there was a way to quickly and favorably terminate the war.
Nearby Tinian and Guam islands were taken soon after Saipan fell. The three islands served as a hub for B-29 operations, and Tinian was the take-off point for both the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car on their atomic missions.
8. LEYTE GULF, THE PHILIPPINES (OCTOBER 23–26, 1944)
The largest naval engagement of the war began over a fight for land. In October 1944 Gen. Douglas MacArthur fulfilled his promise to return to the Philippines, invading the island of Leyte with 175,000 men under the protection of two U.S. fleets. In response, Adm. TOYODA SOEMU sent nearly every surface vessel left in the Imperial Navy, more than seventy warships, to crush MacArthur and the U.S. Sixth Army on the Leyte beachhead.
Though complicated, Toyoda’s plan almost worked, primarily because Allied INTELLIGENCE had not deciphered the code variation used to coordinate the attack. Using a diversionary force of four carriers, the Japanese lured the U.S. Third Fleet, assigned to protect the landings, northward and hundreds of miles away from Leyte. While the Third Fleet feasted on this sacrificial lamb, the bulk of the Imperial forces descended upon MacArthur and the remaining Seventh Fleet, curling around the island from the north and south.
The southern claw of the Japanese attack broke under the weight of a daring defense. The Seventh Fleet first stunned the attack with waves of PT boats, then stopped it cold with destroyers, and finally crushed it altogether using cruisers and battleships. The northern strike force sailed within range of the landing beaches, then withdrew under the false impression that both U.S. fleets were still in the area.
The landings at Leyte fulfilled Douglas MacArthur’s promise to the Philippine people. His “I have returned” address remains one of the most revered speeches in Filipino history.
Leyte Gulf was the implied end of Japanese rule on the expansive Philippines and the irrefutable end of the Japanese navy. It was also the last engagement between battleships ever and, in fact, the largest naval battle in world history. Oddly, it was also the first truly coordinated operation between the two senior officers in the Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. CHESTER NIMITIZ
In the battle of Leyte Gulf, the escort carrier USS St. Lô went down after being hit by a Japanese plane, making it the first of eighty-three Allied ships in the war to be sunk by kamikazes.
9. IWO JIMA (FEBRUARY 19–MARCH 26, 1945)
Called “Sulphur Island,” Iwo Jima was a pear-shaped volcanic creation five miles across and a vital airbase to the Japanese. With rancid water, putrid air, radiating heat, and minimal vegetation, it was a miserable assignment for its defenders and a deathtrap for anyone wishing to invade it.
But by the fall of 1944 the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff determined the island to be of absolute importance. Fuel and reliability problems were downing B-29s faster than the Japanese. The only viable landing site on the thousand-mile bombing run from the Marianas to Tokyo was Iwo Jima. Japan’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” had to be taken.
As the Fourth and Fifth U.S. Marine divisions quickly learned, as would the reserves to follow in their wake, days of naval shelling and months of bombing raids had done nothing to push the Japanese from hives of subterranean fortifications and caves. The Americans landed against minimal opposition, gaining several hundred yards and amassing thousands of men on the beachhead. Then the island defenders opened up with mortars, antitank guns, and machine guns. There was no cover; it was nearly impossible to dig foxholes in the soft volcanic ash. Assault vehicles became trapped in the formless soil.
Joe Rosenthal captured an immortal moment in this photo atop Mount Suribachi on day five of the battle, yet Iwo Jima would not be secured until day thirty-six.
By nightfall six hundred marines were dead, but the island had been cut in two. The following day, the Fifth Marines pushed south up Mount Suribachi, and the Fourth Marines fanned north to secure the airfields. Three days later, five marines and a navy medic planted a large American flag atop Suribachi, and photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the most famous image in American military history. In a grand sweep north, the Third Marine Division joined in the fray. Still, a month of brutal fighting lay ahead. Even as B-29s began making emergency landings after long bombing missions against Japan, ground troops were still mopping up heavy pockets of resistance. Not until the end of March was the island finally declared secured.
In killing nearly the entire Japanese force of 23,000, almost 7,000 Americans died. Yet by the end of the war, more than 2,200 B-29s made emergency landings on Iwo Jima, sparing 24,000 U.S. crewmen’s lives.103
In all, twenty-seven U.S. servicemen won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, twelve of them posthumously, a total more than any other battle in the Second World War.
10. OKINAWA (APRIL 1–JULY 2, 1945)
It was the last stop on the island-hopping campaign. Shaped like a serpent heading southwest, sixty-mile-long Okinawa held nearly eighty thousand Imperial soldiers, most of them positioned on high ridges across the serpent’s neck. On April 1, 1945, a half-million U.S. servicemen, plus an attack fleet from the British Royal Navy, essentially surrounded the reptile and thrust one hundred thousand men into its right side.104
Landings and advances north progressed well for the Americans. Troops reached the snake’s tail in two weeks. But the push south quickly turned bloody. Bombings and barrages failed to dislodge the Japanese from caves along the high ground. Mortars and artillery leveled the Americans from afar; grenades and machine guns slaughtered at close quarters. The long delays caused Allied naval support to remain in position, drawing hundreds of successive kamikaze attacks. On land the Japanese held out until an ill-advised banzai charge separated their lines, signaling the beginning of gradual disintegration. The following six weeks witnessed savage fighting in the skull of the snake—storms of artillery fire, roving packs of flamethrowers, and suicides. Discipline evaporated among the surviving Japanese, who began to turn on each other and against civilians. By late June most of the original garrison was dead.105
The battle of Okinawa killed or wounded 10,000 U.S. Navy personnel, mostly through kamikaze attacks. American marines and soldiers suffered 40,000 killed and wounded. All told, nine out of ten Japanese troops died. As many as 20,000 pro-Japanese native militia and 60,000 civilians perished.
The empire had lost the last remnants of its navy and most of its remaining aircraft, but that hardly insinuated an easy Allied victory in the impending invasion of Japan. Of the losses in the fight for Okinawa, 90 percent occurred on land.106
Along with the U.S. and Japanese banners, a Confederate flag flew over Okinawa. A U.S. marine lofted the Stars and Bars atop Shuri Castle after the stronghold fell to the Americans. Some claim the flag was in honor of the commanding officer, Gen. Simon B. Buckner Jr., whose father was a general in the Confederate army.