The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

Trench warfare in the South Pacific

In most accounts of the Pacific War the Battle of Midway is considered the ‘turning point’. This is true only to a very limited extent. Had Yamamoto been successful in destroying the American fleet, Washington would have had trouble. However, the nature of naval battle in the Pacific had been badly obscured by Pearl Harbor and the destruction of Task Force Z off Singapore. The engagement in the Coral Sea proved a much more reliable indicator of results. If enough ships were at sea and enough aircraft in the air, both sides were going to suffer losses. Luck showed a tendency to even itself out. (The 4–1 carrier loss suffered by Japan at Midway was largely reversed a few months later when Japanese submarines sank one US fleet carrier, and damaged a second carrier and a precious fast battleship.) Taken together, the two carrier battles in the fall of 1942 (Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz) were a draw. Carriers played an important role in important moments during the early battles for the South Pacific, but in essence they had soon committed an unintentional suicide pact. Between October 1942 (the Battle of Santa Cruz) and June 1944 (the Battle of the Philippine Sea) there were no major carrier actions.

For well over a year the Pacific War revolved around land bases. Implicit in this geometry was an unprecedented number of engagements between surface ships. Somewhere between the firepower of warships and aircraft were thousands of infantry facing a fearsome enemy and an inhuman environment.

The South Pacific was the most unlikely battlefield of the Second World War. (I define the ‘South Pacific’ as did the natives: a vast area including New Guinea, the Bismarcks, the Solomons, and New Hebrides Islands.) There was nothing in the entire area, New Guinea included, that had intrinsic value except, of course, Australia. The issue was forced in the first months of the war, with Japan victorious everywhere, when Franklin Roosevelt decided to reinforce Australia, even at the expense of ‘Europe First’. Australia received precious US infantry, US air units and logistic support for an airbase network to support New Guinea. Roosevelt ordered General Douglas MacArthur to take command of forces in the theatre. On its part, Canberra withdrew home two veteran divisions from the Middle East immediately, and a third on the way. In addition, Australian territorial divisions began receiving very serious training. Canberra naturally concentrated its forces where Australians lived – the south-eastern quadrant of the country. In fact, the Australian Government had no idea what Japan might do. Neither had the Japanese.

MacArthur, given the precious toe-hold taken by the enemy at Port Moresby, was convinced that the war should be brought north. In this he was supported by the Australian Government. When the two precious veteran Australian divisions finished reforming in Queensland, both were sent to New Guinea to face Japan’s last ferocious assault. They were joined by an American division and a growing Allied air force. The United States and Australia had, in fact, reacted to the Japanese threat with startling speed and keen purpose. Japan’s military honeymoon proved very short.

By summer 1942 the Japanese Army, in contrast to its stance six months before, believed that New Guinea must be secured. In early summer an elite Japanese regiment, usually called South Seas Detachment, began an overland assault from Buna on the north coast of New Guinea toward Port Moresby on the south. Between the attackers and their target lay the Owen Stanley Mountains. After some bad moments the Australian defence stiffened. By September the Japanese force was facing malnutrition. A Japanese amphibious attack at nearby Milne Bay in late August failed badly and constituted Japan’s first major land defeat of the war. In September Tokyo decided that South Seas Detachment must retreat to the north coast. In hot pursuit, the Australians mauled the Japanese in November. The retreat, however, led the armies to one of the worst battlefields on earth at and near Buna.

Before South Seas Detachment headed over the Owen Stanley Mountains, the US Navy decided to take advantage of the Midway victory and ordered one of the most audacious and successful amphibious campaigns in history – the invasion of Guadalcanal. Prior to its launch, the Navy’s newly made construction branch, the ‘Seabees’, created vital bases in the New Hebrides Islands. Soon American intelligence learned that Japan was building an airfield on Guadalcanal and a frantic pace overtook preparations. On 7 August 1942 an Allied task force, including three aircraft carriers, escorted 12,000 men ashore on Guadalcanal and the small island of Tulagi. Marines pushed away some Japanese-led construction workers on Guadalcanal and occupied the nearly completed airfield. The small Japanese garrison at Tulagi, foreshadowing the extraordinary brutality that characterised the Pacific War, fought to the last man.

As it slowly became clear that the American force represented a major operation and not a raid, Yamamoto and others surveyed their situation with growing concern. The Australians and Americans were building up in New Guinea and northern Australia. With the Marines in the Solomon Islands, a two-pronged thrust was aimed at Rabaul. If the Allies could get by Rabaul, there was nothing to stop a thrust into the Indies. What appeared to outsiders as two separate campaigns – New Guinea and the Solomons – was seen as a single blow by Japan that threatened to unhinge its entire position. The threat was clear, but the response was slow and unco-ordinated.

The soldiers and airmen who entered the South Pacific encountered some of the world’s most malignant terrain. There were no roads, no real towns, no sanitary facilities, no electricity, no supply of fresh food and no European women. The indigenous population served both sides as porters, and some assisted the famous Australian coast watchers. For the most part, however, the civilians were bewildered onlookers to events they did not understand and in which they had no obvious stake.

What did exist was a miserably hot and humid climate that generated a medical nightmare for interlopers. Malaria was rampant and caused more casualties than battle. Tropical diseases of all types posed baffling problems. Dysentery was a constant danger because of poor sanitation. ‘Rot’, a tropical relative to the Great War’s ‘trench foot’, threatened to turn the smallest cut into a serious infection. Combat units did a good job maintaining morale under these daunting conditions, but stress was undeniable. (The rate of psychological breakdown among US forces was much worse in the South Pacific than any other theatre in the Second World War.)

Situated directly on the equator, the South Pacific was above all home of what an earlier generation called ‘the jungle’. American soldier Robert Kennington described it:

‘Jungle was really rough. We were hit by the heat, mosquitos, leeches and a little bit of everything else. Guadalcanal was about 96 miles long by 35 miles wide. Except along the beach and the top of the ridges there was nothing but jungle. The jungle had big trees that grew about 100 feet high. Vines grew out of them and dropped to the ground. Some vines grew as wide as your leg. We called them “Wait A Minute Vines”. They had big hooks on them like a rooster spur. When you tried to get through on patrol and ran into one of those vines you either stopped or you were cut up. When tangled you backed out. You learned not to try to bull through them because those hooks were like a razor. I still have scars from them. In the afternoon you’d really notice a kind of dead smell. Probably from all the decaying matter. Mosquitos were so thick you could wipe them off your arm in handfuls. You wade through the rivers and you’d come out with leeches you didn’t even know were there until you felt a sting. You’d look down and there was this creature on your leg full of blood.’

If anything, New Guinea was more daunting than the Solomons. The Australian and Japanese soldiers that crossed the Kokoda Trail traversed an area with trees so tall that the sky was dim at noon. On the coast, combat soldiers confronted the horrid New Guinea mangrove swamp. In 1942 an Australian coast watcher forwarded a description of where the Mambare River reaches the sea. This point was a few miles north of the miserable battlefield near the pitiful settlement of Buna:

‘The Mambare debouches into the sea between low, muddy banks along which nipa palms stand crowded knee-deep in the water. Behind the nipa palms, mangroves grow, their foliage a darker green dado above the nipa fronds. Here and there a creek mouth shows, the creek a tunnel in the mangroves with dark tree trunks for sides, supported on a maze of gnarled, twisted, obscene roots standing in the oozy mud. Branches and leaves are overhead, through which the sun never penetrates to the black water, the haunt of coldly evil crocodiles.’

Mobility through the jungle was severely limited. Most movement took place along paths made by native peoples or animals. As the Japanese found out to their grief, moving through the jungle itself made co-ordinated operations almost impossible and utterly exhausted troops prior to battle. Consequently, ‘control’ was a very abstract term in the South Pacific. One side or the other would seek to control strategic points – almost always airfields. The bulk of the terrain, however, was unoccupied. In this bleak environment, if an objective could be isolated through gaining air dominance and thus control of the sea lanes, it would be put under siege. If besieged, the defenders became immediately a wasting asset. If the attackers wanted the position occupied, starvation of the defending garrison soon became one of their most potent weapons. The Allies soon learned that it was better to bypass the defenders, rendering them irrelevant as military forces.

Although the campaign lasted nearly two years, the Japanese lost the war in the South Pacific in the first six months. I have already noted the imperial retreat up the Kokoda Trail. This was followed by a miserable siege of some 8,000 Japanese soldiers, sailors and engineers near the village of Buna. An American division involved was effectively finished as a fighting force by January 1943 when the Japanese garrison finally perished. Even experienced Australian troops found the area a nightmare and suffered more casualties in that zone than anywhere else in the Pacific.

Guadalcanal was an equal disaster for Tokyo; there (and at Buna) the Japanese command structure showed serious defects. The US Navy had gained rough equality in terms of strength in carriers, but remained inferior in all other warship types. If they stretched their range, Zeros could escort bombers from Rabaul to Guadalcanal. Had Tokyo ordered Yamamoto to hit Guadalcanal with everything available, including major ground reinforcements, it is very possible that Japan could have isolated the Marine garrison and destroyed it. Such a move would have been risky with the American carriers still about, but an American defeat might well have caused Pentagon believers in ‘Europe First’ to shut down offensive operations in the Pacific for an extended period – exactly what Tokyo needed. Conversely, Japan could have accepted the loss of Guadalcanal and chosen a more favourable battlefield closer to Rabaul. In practice it fell between two stools. Japan was determined to recapture Guadalcanal, but tried to do it with minimum forces when an all-out effort was required.

Yamamoto ordered major naval reinforcements and slowly landed a sizeable force of infantry. However, the Americans, holding the only air base on Guadalcanal, could help to protect their own supply convoys and make extremely risky the embarkation of Japanese men and supplies from proper troop transports. Thus, although the Japanese landed a large number of men from small ships and barges, they were always desperately short of artillery, ammunition, medicine and food. Trying to compensate for superior US firepower with spirit and guile, the Japanese launched a number of night ground assaults on the Marine perimeter. All were crushed by American firepower and courage.

While the ground and air struggle at Guadalcanal was taking place, both sides established the pace of naval operations that existed with some variation throughout the Pacific War. The great fleet engagement that mesmerised a generation on both sides of the Pacific would not take place. Instead, aircraft proved mortal enemies to the most powerful warships during the day, making airbases the most important places in the Pacific. At night, if the fleets were close enough, warships could engage in violent and helter-skelter night surface actions.

Also, the many battles that took place, including all of the carrier engagements of the Pacific War, dealt with the attack or protection of an invasion fleet. This did not fit with pre-war doctrine, particularly in Japan. In ‘classic’ actions like Tsushima or Jutland, fleet fought fleet unencumbered with troop convoys. During the Pacific War there was not even a small Jutland. In each clash, one side was trying to bring in troop ships and the other side was trying to keep them out. Even Midway, despite Yamamoto’s intentions, fits this description.

The two carrier battles of the South Pacific and all of the night surface actions of 1942 were directly connected with troop reinforcement to Guadalcanal. These were deadly affairs. The US Navy lost nearly 5,000 men killed off Guadalcanal, several times the number of infantry deaths due to action. Japanese manpower and tonnage losses were worse. The major work off the well-named ‘Iron Bottom Sound’ off Guadalcanal, the graveyard for nearly 50 warships from both sides, was done by the cruisers and destroyers of the US and imperial fleets in night battles. The Japanese proved for a time to be better at night combat. Superior Japanese training proved more valuable than early American radar, and US destroyers, submarines and aircraft were crippled by miserable torpedoes until late 1943.

Ted Blahnik was a crewman on the American cruiser Helena and participated in one of the largest naval battles off Guadalcanal in November 1942. A three-day affair, the Imperial Navy deployed a large force, including two battleships, intended to bombard into oblivion American air units at Guadalcanal. With their small window of superiority, Tokyo planned to land two more divisions with large troop transports and destroy the Marines. It was a plan by the Japanese that should have been tried two months earlier, but it resulted in a naval bloodbath, as recalled by Blahnik:

‘My battle station was on a 20mm anti-aircraft mount. Like most ships then, Helena had seen its share of air attacks. When planes struck, I cannot remember fear. Everyone was so busy there was hardly time to think, although you got a little shaky after the action was over. It was very different when Helena went in on the night of Friday the 13th, 1942. I was still at my 20mm, but we all knew that anti-aircraft weapons would play no part of the battle. Instead we were passive observers. Because we weren’t doing anything, all of us were scared as hell – inactivity does that. The battle was extraordinary. At night the main armaments firing like crazy and emitting huge sheets of flame from every gun. The noise was deafening. When a large shell leaves a gun at night, the heat of the barrel gives it a glow that you can see as it flies off. In the distance you could see other ships firing and searchlights scanning for the enemy. Everyone fired at everyone and we later found out that some of our ships had been firing at friendly vessels. Ships blew up or caught fire. All of this took place in a relatively short period of time and men who watched things but didn’t shoot were caught between a deep fear and tremendous awe. We lost two admirals and several ships. What was left of our task force headed for home in the early morning. We had, however, left one sinking Japanese battleship and other victims.’

Blahnik’s description was accurate. Two nights later the fleets came together again and the Japanese had the indignity of losing a second battleship. Imperial destroyers wrought terrible havoc, and not for the last time. Nevertheless, the Japanese troop convoy heading to Guadalcanal was obliterated by American airmen. Accepting the obvious, Japan ordered an evacuation of Guadalcanal in late January 1943 at the same time that Buna was in its death agony. (Ominously, so was the German force at Stalingrad.) East and West, the Empire had been defeated and would never again make another major offensive move.

By the time Guadalcanal and Buna were finally cleared, the terrible dynamic of ground combat in the Pacific War was all too obvious. Since the war, scholars have often attempted to ascribe the extraordinary ferocity of combat in the Pacific to racism on both sides. No doubt an abstract racism added fuel to the fire and contributed greatly to the American and Canadian Governments’ shameful decision forcibly to relocate citizens and residents of Japanese descent living on the West Coast to camps inland. However, at the point of fire, grim lessons learned on the battlefield, many sadly true, were far more important than pre-war racial antagonism in turning the conflict between the United States and Japan into something resembling a war of annihilation.

At the root of the terrible dynamic of savagery in the Pacific War was the unique and tragic military ethos propagated by the Japanese Government and military in the generations before Pearl Harbor. By 1941 Japan was the most intensely militarised nation in the world. Military service or training was a part of life from cradle to grave. The time spent in these programmes in any given year was often not great. Yet indoctrination and discipline were stressed, as were the twin notions of self-sacrifice for the nation and obedience to the Emperor.

In the famous Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors promulgated by the Emperor Meiji in 1882 (and carried by every Japanese fighting man in the Second World War) a set of virtues similar to the traditional samurai code of bushido was enumerated to serve as a guide for the Japanese soldier. The paramount duty was loyalty, even at the cost of one’s life: ‘Duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.’ In the same period the Emperor dedicated the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, a place where the Meiji and his successors came to pray for the spirits of those who died in the service of the Emperor. Thus, a connection was made between the military, the people and the Emperor. Over the years, this connection took on an increasingly mystical quality, initially generated by pride, eventually by desperation.

These conditions had important military ramifications. Many Japanese officers realised that their army could not hope to match the firepower of a Western army. The Japanese therefore were forced to make the best of a bad situation. They did so by trying to develop advanced infantry tactics, and by increasing indoctrination through personal example and spiritual training.

It is essential to understand the Japanese concept of ‘spirit’; it did much to shape the nature of battle in the Pacific. Educators, following government guidance, taught Japanese youth that they belonged to a special race that was culturally and morally superior to the decadent and materialistic West. Officers and nationalist educators passed on to recruits their contempt for American and European soldiers. (The Japanese defeats suffered in 1939 against the Red Army were a closely kept secret.) The spectacular victories at the start of the war seemed to confirm the lessons learned in school and training camp.

But the notion of ‘spirit’ had a deeper connotation. It included the belief that the human will could surmount physical circumstance. Japanese officers taught their men, and most themselves believed, that they could do things no other army could simply because Japanese troops would not be denied. All Japanese recruits knew of great acts of heroism in both the distant and recent past of Japanese history. Most icons had one thing in common: they and their followers died in battle. Death in battle was portrayed as an honour to the family and a transcendental act on the part of the individual. Surrender was a disgrace to the soldier, and a disgrace to the family. No doubt some soldiers believed government propaganda that the enemy would butcher them if they were captured. However, for the most part, there can be no doubt that the astounding physical courage shown by Japanese soldiers came from spiritual indoctrination.

The most remarkable behaviour shown by Japanese soldiers was their willingness to accept orders that meant certain death and their refusal to surrender. The death of the young is one face of war. All societies know this. Unfortunately for all concerned, the Japanese extreme veneration of death was unique and came dangerously close to becoming a cult of oblivion.

Japanese views also struck at the very nature of the warrior code as understood in the West. In the West, death in war had value only if it had purpose. Soldiers were asked to risk their lives in battle, not commit suicide. An officer intentionally putting his men in a position where they had no reasonable chance of survival would in all likelihood not be obeyed in a Western army. (Every Western army had its equivalent of the Alamo, but these were very much the exception.) If conditions showed that further resistance was futile, surrender was honourable. The Japanese took this attitude as a sign of weakness. Although the Japanese did not understand it, surrender in a Western army was viewed very differently. Honourable surrender in the Western tradition prevented the needless squandering of one’s own men. It also prevented the needless squandering of the enemy’s life. It was a mutual agreement, manifested over centuries of history, that served as a brake on the worst excesses of war in Europe and in many other parts of the world. If Japanese officers did not hallow the lives of their own soldiers, they were likewise showing a contempt for the lives of the foe.

The cult of death, which ultimately became the heart of Japan’s combat ethos and shaped the battlefield tactics employed, was obvious very early in the war. The early American soldiers going to New Guinea and Guadalcanal were miserably trained in military basics and there was no time for organised political indoctrination. (Pearl Harbor, naturally, was the ultimate proof that the Japanese were warlike, cruel and, most importantly, devious.) However, in all the South Pacific battles, examples abounded of the refusal of Japanese troops to surrender, regardless of circumstance. Stories multiplied on Guadalcanal and New Guinea of Japanese soldiers pretending to surrender only to fire upon their potential captors at the last moment. Soon most Allied infantry believed it was dangerous to try to take prisoners. Naturally the ‘rumour mill’ inherent in war made the perception even more vivid. Yet the image was valid enough.

Stanley Larsen, at the start of an extremely distinguished military career, was a young US Army battalion commander attacking one of the last Japanese strongpoints on the almost impenetrable jungle ridges on Guadalcanal in January 1943. Japanese resistance was hopeless and the garrison of about 200 near starvation. Larsen got a tank up the ridge in the morning and crushed what was left of the Japanese line. At a time when there was no hope, what was left of the Japanese garrison attacked at night. It was a good example of the famous ‘banzai charge’. Larsen described what took place:

‘We gave them a chance to surrender but they wouldn’t. That night after the tank attack, the enemy made a banzai attack against a company which was overlooking their water hole. It was a steep slope. I’ve only been in two banzai charges, and they are terrifying. In this one 85 Japanese were killed. Twenty-one were officers and the rest enlisted. F company did not lose a single man. We had a bulldozer up there and we bulldozed a mass grave and all were buried there. That was the end of the Japanese strongpoint.’

What should be noted in Larsen’s narrative is the high number of officers and the lack of American casualties. The attack described was a method of suicide. Larsen’s story is only one of many from Guadalcanal and gives credibility to the even more miserable accounts of the end at Buna.

In the last days of the Buna campaign, the newly arrived US 41st Division helped liquidate the Japanese garrison in January 1943. Sergeant Joe Murphy later recounted to the 41st Division’s historian a horrible battle at a Japanese field hospital:

‘Company G opened up on the shacks with all possible firepower. A hut collapsed under a stream of bullets. We flanked the shacks and picked off riflemen. From the nearby cemetery the Japanese light mortar fired only three or four times before we killed it. Meanwhile, grenades began exploding among the huts as able-bodied defenders and hospital invalids blew themselves up – or tried to blow up G Company. Some Japs fought in the open, some fought from foxholes and trunks of large trees. Others ran and were cut down. And in the huts our tense riflemen found live Japs under blankets and dead Japs under blankets. And G Company had no chance to check each corpse with a stethoscope – not when a pale hand might reach out to blast a grenade in your face. So G fired first and pulled blankets off corpses later. Some Nips were dead or dying of wounds, malaria, dysentery and blackwater fever. Some patients held live grenades under blankets and tried to blast us or blow themselves up. I saw one Nip rifleman with an amputated leg – prone and firing from the floor of a hut. We found newly dead grenadiers hiding under blankets beside skeletons.’

The murderous result of this dynamic can easily be imagined. Allied soldiers did take prisoners throughout the war when conditions were right. (In action, a high percentage of prisoners early in the war was of imperial soldiers found unconscious.) However, Allied soldiers believed that an apparent surrender might be a trick. They also believed, with reason, that the Japanese took no prisoners on an active battlefield. The obvious effect was that Allied soldiers became less likely to attempt to take prisoners. Sadly, until the end, the Japanese ethos rejected surrender. It is also undoubtedly true that, as the war progressed and the Allies engaged more common Japanese infantry units, Japanese troops attempting surrender were shot out of hand. This in turn reinforced Japanese propaganda that the Allies would murder any Japanese in their clutches (including civilians). The Second World War’s most tragic self-fulfilling prophecy was well in action early in the Pacific War.

The tide began to turn at Buna and Guadalcanal, but the South Pacific remained a fierce struggle throughout 1943. A slow advance up the Solomons and the coast of New Guinea finally allowed the Allies to bypass Rabaul in early 1944. They were, however, still far from Japan. Many American soldiers sardonically quipped ‘Golden Gate in 48’ or ‘Join Mac and never come back’. In reality the long fight in the jungle proved well worth the cost.

Drive to Tokyo

Although not obvious in early 1944 Japan had suffered its Stalingrad in the South Pacific. Losses in aircraft, pilots, warships and seamen had been crippling and put serious strain on Japan’s limited production capability to replace these losses. The qualitative edge in both air and sea operations had shifted to the United States. Although large numbers of Japanese aircraft rose to contest the skies in 1944–45, Japan’s best pilots had perished in the South Pacific and the Allies were now beginning to pile up a colossal ‘kill ratio’ in their favour. Obviously, better US planes and pilots were also accompanied by a quantitative edge growing rapidly after mid-1943.

The change in tempo of operations after Allied victory in the South Pacific was striking. Early in the war imperial forces had the edge. The long struggle in New Guinea and the Solomons was hard fought. However, once Rabaul was bypassed and the Allies moved into the open waters of the Pacific, every major engagement between fleets and air units was a crushing and decisive US victory. In June 1944, when the Americans attacked the Marianas Islands, knowing the island of Saipan was within range of Japan for the secret B-29 ‘Super-fortress’ bomber, the Imperial Navy sortied the core of the fleet in search of the ‘decisive battle’. Despite decent odds for Japan on paper, American fliers and submarine crewmen humiliated the once proud Imperial Combined Fleet.

In October 1944 the Imperial Navy threw the dice for the last time. Attacking a massive American armada invading the island of Leyte in the Philippines, Combined Fleet made another futile attempt to defeat a major American invasion and thus gain some kind of leverage for an optimistically anticipated compromise peace. Despite some American errors, the resulting Battle of Leyte Gulf was an air and sea calamity for Japan. In the ensuing battle for the Philippines the Japanese Army Air Force was also shot to ribbons. Japan’s plight became so desperate that, for the first time in modern history, suicide became an integral part of a nation’s military apparatus when kamikaze air attacks were first employed over the Philippines.

Also the line moved much more quickly after the Allied neutralisation of Rabaul. The front in the South Pacific moved relatively little in nearly two years. Within a year of victory in the South Pacific, an American invasion fleet, in early April 1945, was heading for Okinawa on the doorstep of the Japanese home islands. By the time the fleet set sail, American submarine blockade and intensive air attack on cities had brought Japanese industry to a state of near paralysis.

Another major reason for the impressive quickening of operations lay in the South Pacific debacle. The Japanese Army was shaken by the prospect that the Allies would crack the Rabaul position and move into South East Asia and recapture Japan’s irreplaceable sources of raw materials. Consequently, generals stripped the army’s reserves from Japan itself and Manchuria and moved them into the South Pacific or Indies. By late 1943 there were 40,000 troops on Bougainville, 100,000 on Rabaul, 250,000 on New Guinea, 125,000 on the Malay Barrier. The garrison in the Philippines was also increased, ultimately reaching 450,000 men.

This was a miserable distribution of manpower. As Rabaul was coming under pressure, the United States was making ready an additional advance into the Central Pacific. Saipan was one of its first targets. MacArthur’s advance did indeed threaten South East Asia, but the US Navy’s drive through the centre was aimed at Japan itself. Nevertheless, because so many men were allocated to defend South East Asia, there were few remaining to ward off a blow in the centre. To give an idea of the depth of the calamity, there were more Japanese infantry defending Bougainville than on Saipan or Iwo Jima. There were more imperial troops on Rabaul than on Okinawa.

Once the Americans bypassed Rabaul there was nothing to prevent them from crushing by siege the huge Japanese garrisons sent south. Indeed, the bulk of the Imperial Army sent to the South Pacific and South East Asia was simply bypassed with very little loss to Allied forces. Japanese troops on New Guinea, so desperately needed elsewhere, sat on the coast of the primitive island, serving no military purpose and trying to ward off starvation. When the American Army deployed its vastly superior firepower and mobility on the relatively open spaces of the major Philippine Islands they crushed the Japanese opposition and forced them to retreat into the Philippine hills and mountains where they also became not a foe but an annoyance.

The Philippine campaign did include one of the most violent and senseless engagements of the Pacific War. When MacArthur’s troops invaded the main Philippine island of Luzon in January 1945, his Japanese counterpart, General Tomouyki Yamashita, believed that the city of Manila was of no strategic worth and ordered it abandoned. (Ironically, MacArthur himself had declared Manila an ‘open city’ in 1941, also realising that it was impossible and pointless to defend.) Incredibly, the imperial naval and army troops defending Manila refused to obey their commander and deployed in long-prepared defences inside and outside the city. The murderous chemistry inside Manila was as bad as that of Saipan or Okinawa, but very different. The Filipino people had been the most difficult for the Empire to subdue. Guerrilla warfare had begun in 1942 and only increased in intensity.

The 15,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors ordered to defend Manila were hated by the population and the emotion was returned in full measure. When the siege of Manila began (most of the fighting was in the southern part of the city) the city’s population, expecting rapid American victory, was in place and the Japanese garrison in a state of suicidal fury. The result was that the long-suffering civilians of the Philippines were caught in nightmare pincers. Japanese troops, often within eyesight of American artillery observers, raped and murdered thousands of civilians. Artillery, mortar and small arms crossfire coming from both sides probably killed more. American tanker Tom Howard was in the middle of the siege for the southern portion of Manila: