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

‘The state of siege had settled down into a condition where bodies of civilians and Japanese were still strewn over the streets, in gutters, on lawns and in the middle of the pavement. Attempts to remove them were met with sniper fire, so instead of removal, when dusk came, the bodies were covered with quicklime to hasten their deterioration and to stifle the smell.’

Despite the insubordination of Japanese leaders defending Manila, a decision which may have cost 100,000 civilian lives lost, the Japanese were blown out of their positions by American tanks and artillery by early March 1945. Some 12,000 Japanese died in Manila and the remainder fled to the hills to face starvation. Isolated, the huge Japanese garrisons in the Philippines joined their neighbours in the theatre as useless military units. Indeed, the South Pacific and much of the Indies became, in effect, history’s biggest POW camp.

Unfortunately for the United States, the Central Pacific advance proved a far more bloody affair. The American nemesis, met before on a smaller scale at Buna and Guadalcanal, was the battle ethos of the Japanese infantry. The islands and atolls of the Central Pacific were small and the medium-sized garrisons found on them had enough time to build elaborate systems of caves, tunnels, beach obstacles and minefields. Most of these positions were difficult or impossible to spot from the air. Nor was it simple to bypass Japanese garrisons in the Central Pacific. The Americans believed that the road to Tokyo could only be travelled under the cover of land-based airpower. Unfortunately, the number of islands in the Central Pacific was much smaller than in South East Asia. If the Americans wished to employ land-based airpower there was often no alternative to direct assault on these Japanese positions. When Combined Fleet was crushed off Saipan, the Army realised that victory in a given battle was almost out of the question. With Combined Fleet almost helpless, all of these garrisons would be cut off hopelessly as soon as an American invasion fleet arrived. The strategic goal on the Pacific islands was no longer victory but simple attrition. Japanese generals told their soldiers to ‘withstand assault by a million men for a hundred years.’

Tokyo hoped that if the Japanese infantry could hold every position until the bitter end they might inflict enough casualties on the Americans to force Washington to accept a compromise peace. In fact, Tokyo badly underestimated American will. Yet what ensued was a bloody and brutal struggle that was interspersed by some of the largest-scale instances of politically inspired mass suicide in world history.

The fierce Central Pacific advance began in November 1943 when an American Marine Division invaded the atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. Badly outnumbered, the 5,000-man imperial garrison put up a furious resistance for 72 hours on its small rock. The Japanese commander cabled ‘May Japan last for 10,000 years!’ Altogether 17 wounded Japanese survived and were made prisoners. However, the Marines had lost nearly 1,000 men killed in three days – more than they had lost in battle during the entire Guadalcanal campaign.

Worse came on Saipan in June 1944. As noted previously, the Saipan invasion precipitated the crushing American naval victory during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Although isolated after the US Navy’s smashing victory, the Japanese garrison of 30,000 men fought with desperate tenacity. A night attack early in the battle very nearly broke the American line. Yet once on shore, the Marines and soldiers employed the techniques used to defeat the fanatic defenders on all of the Pacific isles.

American troops on Saipan, as on later islands, had the support of naval gunfire and aircraft throughout the campaign. Strike forces attacked beaches in armed amphibious assault craft. They also had large shallow-draft landing-craft that could deploy tanks as soon as a solid beachhead was secured. Once the tanks and land artillery were on shore, a type of military mathematical equation took over. If the Japanese were conservative (almost always bad news for American invaders) they would wait until US infantry closed and open fire with mortars and machine-guns from one of the hundreds of prepared positions. Inevitably Americans died, but the position was eventually seen and the advantage switched. American tanks proved a very difficult problem for the Japanese. Japan had only a handful of tanks deployed in the Pacific, and American armour found it simple to obliterate those found in the open. Japanese anti-tank guns were in short supply and too small in calibre. Thus, imperial infantry had to put down a withering small arms and mortar fire against an American tank-infantry team, hoping to drive off US troops and attack tanks with hand satchels of explosive. In the right circumstance, this technique led to the death of many American tanks and soldiers. It was, however, obviously a desperate tactic. Usually those with the satchel charges died under the American support fire.

Once identified, a Japanese strongpoint was dead. A machine-gun emplacement, if spotted by a tank, was usually destroyed by the tank at point-blank range, with the tank driving over the remnant to ensure destruction. If a strongpoint was more heavily held, tanks, machine-guns and artillery would keep up a covering fire while American soldiers climbed on top of the cave entrance, hurled grenades inside and prevented escape unless the cave had another opening. If possible, combat engineers got into place with their flame-throwers. If flame-throwers could operate, the defenders would either die immediately or retreat if possible. Americans were always on the look-out for a prepared cave that would have some kind of ventilation. Once found, US infantry employed incendiary devices of all kinds. If trapped, imperial soldiers either burned to death or were buried alive. (The Japanese called the American tactics of sealing and destroying caves ‘the horse-mounting technique’ and feared it greatly.) Japanese would retreat if necessary and if possible. However, ultimately the defenders ran out of space and supplies. The obvious solution in such circumstances was surrender. In practice, for Japanese forces, the response was suicide.

After two weeks of vicious fighting the Japanese position cracked on Saipan. The ‘end game’ disintegrated into barbarism remarkable even for the Pacific War. The Japanese commanders committed suicide. Previously they had ordered a pointless banzai assault against US infantry that cost the lives of 2,000 Japanese troops. After this grim prelude insanity gripped the island. Saipan had been Japanese territory since the First World War. Consequently it possessed a civilian population of approximately 25,000. Terrified by bogus propaganda that US forces would rape and murder them, thousands of women and children committed suicide, many within view of shocked American Marines. According to American testimony and interrogation of survivors, many civilians were forced to die by enraged and often drunken Japanese soldiers as an adjunct to their own suicide. Americans estimated that two-thirds of Saipan’s civilian population perished. Only a handful of prisoners came from the dead garrison. The Japanese inflicted 14,000 casualties on US forces, the worst so far of the Pacific War. It should be emphasised, however, that US losses were very slight during the blood-crazed last days. Saipan, and many battles that followed, duplicated on a large scale the pattern first seen at Buna: initial fierce Japanese resistance, slow American dominance due to superior firepower and Japanese isolation, and a final act of pointless Japanese suicidal violence.

Events followed this grisly pattern every step on the way to Tokyo. Marine Eugene Sledge, a veteran of the terrible struggles at Peleliu in 1944 and Okinawa in 1945, later tried to express the almost unimaginable stress put on the combat infantry:

‘The struggle for survival went on day after weary day, night after terrifying night. One remembers vividly the landings and the beachheads and the details of the first two or three days and nights of a campaign; after that, time lost all meaning. A lull of hours or days seemed but a fleeting instant of heaven-sent tranquillity. Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a nether world of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilisation and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines – service troops and civilians.’

All the small islands such as Biak, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Peleliu and Iwo Jima assaulted in the 18 months of war were ruthless ‘slugfests’ with relative violence controlled only by the size of the forces involved. It was both logical and fitting that Okinawa, the last battle of the Pacific War, was the most violent single encounter of the war and the one in which the Japanese leadership incorporated suicide most deeply into the essential fabric of imperial warmaking.

Because it was south of the home islands and relatively close, both sides knew that, if in American hands, Allied land-based aircraft of all types could wreak havoc across Japan and cover the already planned assault on Kyushu. After witnessing the enormous size of the American fleet that had assaulted the Philippines, Tokyo knew that when the Americans inevitably hit Okinawa, they would do so in great force. In a very real sense, Okinawa was a suicide mission in every respect. The Imperial Army hoped that a huge ‘butcher bill’ delivered to Washington might convince a hopefully war-weary America to consider the cost of attacking the Japanese homeland prohibitive and thus make the Americans willing to agree to some kind of compromise peace. No one in Tokyo expected the 100,000-man Japanese garrison on Okinawa to survive.

On 1 April 1945 the Allies (a large British task force participated in naval support) attacked Okinawa. Although initially unopposed, Marines and soldiers soon found themselves in an all too familiar fight against an entrenched and fanatical enemy. As before, the invaders had copious support from carrier-based aircraft and heavy naval gunfire. Convinced that their pilots no longer had the skill to contest Allied airmen, the Japanese sent some 2,400 kamikaze aircraft against Allied ships. Nearly 5,000 Allied sailors died in these attacks, a total slightly larger than the carnage in the Solomons 2½ years before. Allied sailors viewed their enemy with bewilderment, later expressing attitudes ranging from profound respect for Japanese courage to the view that they were fighting men who were pathologically insane. One witness, Vice Admiral C. R. Brown, later expressed the ethical confusion wrought by the kamikaze attacks:

‘Among us who were there, in the Philippines and at Okinawa, I doubt if there is anyone who can depict with complete clarity our mixed emotions as we watched a man about to die in order that he might destroy us in the process. There was a hypnotic fascination to a sight so alien to our Western philosophy.’

Against the advice of many combat officers, Tokyo decided to expend what remained of the Imperial Navy on a suicide mission. The Navy ordered a task force based on the super-heavy battleship Yamato and eight smaller warships to sortie to Okinawa. Shadowed from the outset, the small force received its first American air attack barely 100 miles south of Kyushu.

Ensign Mitsusu Yoshida’s battle station was to serve as liaison between the bridge of the Yamato and its air-search radar, giving him a unique vantage point for the tragedy to follow. Early in the battle an American bomb scored a direct hit on the heavily armoured radar room. Yoshida rushed to the scene where many close friends and comrades served. He described the psychological hammer-blow of war at its worst:

‘It is as if someone had taken an axe and split a bamboo tube. The bomb, a direct hit, must have sliced way in at an angle and then exploded.

Tuned and retuned in preparation for today’s decisive battle, the instruments have been scattered in all directions. I don’t recognise the debris. Not even any pieces left.

Just as I begin to think that everything must have been blown away, I notice a chunk of flesh smashed on to a panel of the broken bulkhead, a red barrel of flesh about as big around as two arms can reach. It must be a torso from which all extremities – arms, legs, head – have been ripped off.

Noticing four hunks scattered nearby, I pick them up and set them in front of me. To the charred flesh are stuck here and there pieces of khaki-coloured material, apparently scraps of military uniform. The smell of fat is heavy in the air. It goes without saying that I cannot tell where head and arms and legs might have been attached…

What emptiness! How did they die, those beings who only a moment ago were so real? I cannot stop doubting, stop marvelling.

It is not grief and resentment. It is not fear. It is total disbelief. As I touch these hunks of flesh, for a moment I am completely lost in thought.’

Three hours after the first bomb fell, five imperial ships, Yamato among them, were on the bottom, and four surviving destroyers were heading back to Japan as fast as possible. In one afternoon the Imperial Navy lost 3,500 men, almost as many sailors as the Allies lost to aerial kamikazes throughout the entire Okinawa campaign. In return, Japan gained nothing.

The garrison at Okinawa, because it was close to Japan, received an unusual number of artillery pieces of medium field level (105mm) and above. American infantry had a multitude of standard land artillery and was, despite kamikaze attack, continually supported by powerful naval gunfire. Artillery is the great killer of the modern battlefield. When added to the fierce effectiveness of machine-guns, grenades and rifles held by fanatical Japanese troops in hundreds of hidden strongpoints, Okinawa became a blood-soaked siege lasting ten weeks.

Marine Eugene Sledge had the unfortunate fate of going from the fierce battle at Peleliu to Okinawa. His unit entered the fray in early May just prior to an ill-advised Japanese counter-attack on entrenched American positions. The description of battle would have been familiar to someone at the Somme in 1916:

‘There was the brassy, metallic twang of the small 50mm knee mortar shells as little buffs of dirty smoke appeared thickly around us. The 81mm and 90mm mortar shells crashed and banged all along the ridge. The whizzbang of the high-velocity 47mm gun’s shells, which was on us with its explosion almost as soon as we heard it whizz into the area, gave me the feeling the Japanese were firing them at us like rifles. The slower screaming, whining sound of the 75mm artillery shells seemed the most abundant. Then there was the roar and rumble of the huge enemy 150mm howitzer shell, and the kaboom of its explosion. It was what the men called the big stuff. I didn’t recall having recognised any of it in my confusion and fear at Peleliu. The bursting radius of these big shells was of awesome proportions. Added to all of this noise was the swishing and fluttering overhead of our own supporting artillery fire. Our shells could be heard bursting out across the ridge over enemy positions. The noise of small-arms fire from both sides resulted in a chaotic bedlam of racket and confusion.’

Despite furious Japanese resistance, American numbers, firepower and skill left the issue in no doubt. By June the Japanese were driven to the southern portion of the island. In his memoir, Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, the highest-ranked Japanese survivor of Okinawa, gave a vivid description of the ruin of a once beautiful portion of Okinawa toward the end of the campaign:

‘Two weeks of battle changed the scenery completely. Hills were flattened and reshaped by tanks and bombardments. It was now a wasteland, the darkened terrain exposing a gateway to hell. Early one morning I left the cave and saw dark clouds rolling turbulently across the sky with gun smoke creeping across the land. For a moment the roar of the guns ceased. I was overwhelmed by the ghostly sight of the battlefield that had sucked the blood from thousands of soldiers. As a wise old man once said, “Even the demons of the world would mourn at this sight.” The hilltop was covered with corpses.’

With the outcome of battle decided, a final bloodbath ensued. Thousands of Okinawan civilians had been killed in military operations throughout the battle. As the end neared, hundreds more emulated the innocents on Saipan with useless suicide. Japanese soldiers had preceded them. As the Americans pushed back imperial forces, the Japanese faced the problem of evacuating the seriously wounded under relentless fire. In practice it was impossible and the result can be imagined. Colonel Yahara explained the situation:

‘The army should, of course, make every effort to carry the wounded to safe areas and prevent their capture by the enemy. The fact was, however, that we were unable to care for such large numbers. How to handle this situation?… The army directive on this matter stated: “In facing an emergency every Japanese soldier should act proudly.” In fact, many wounded soldiers shouted “Long live the Emperor!” as they took their lives with hand grenades, satchel charges or cyanide. In other cases, doctors injected patients with cyanide.’

As the end loomed, thousands of imperial soldiers joined their wounded comrades. Young intelligence officer Frank Gibney was led to the headquarters cave of the Japanese 24th Division and observed one of the largest of the ‘suicide caves’ on Okinawa. The dreadful event had taken place about a week before Gibney discovered the carnage:

‘With 7th Division intelligence officers, I went down to one of the cave entrances and crawled in. After a walk through a long tunnel we came on a huge underground cavern and one of the ghastliest sights I ever saw. Here lay General Amamiya [24th Division commander], surrounded by his staff and some two hundred officers and men. They had all killed themselves, most with grenades, although Amamiya had thoughtfully given himself a lethal injection to avoid the rigors of ritual suicide. The cave floor was literally carpeted with corpses.’

Resistance began to collapse on 20 June 1945. The last act was the ritual suicide of Okinawa’s commander, Lieutenant-General Mitsuru Ushijima, and his chief of staff, Major-General Isamu Cho, at dawn on 23 June. Although already ordered to make his way somehow to Tokyo and report on the battle, Yahara was drawn to witness the final scene:

‘General Ushijima quietly stood up. General Cho removed his field uniform and followed with Paymaster Sato. Led by candlelight the solemn procession headed for the exit, with heavy hearts and limbs.

When they approached the cave opening, the moon shone on the South Seas. Clouds moved swiftly. The skies were quiet. The morning mist crept slowly up the deep valley. It was as if everything on earth trembled, waiting with deep emotion.

General Ushijima sat silently in the death seat, ten paces from the cave exit, facing the sea wall. General Cho and Sato sat beside him. The hara-kiri assistant, Captain Sakaguchi, stood behind them. I was a few steps away. Soldiers stood at the exit, awaiting the moment.

On the back of General Cho’s white shirt, in immaculate brush strokes, was the poem:

With bravery I served my nation

With loyalty I dedicate my life.

The master swordsman, Sakaguchi, grasped his great sword with both hands, raised it high above the general’s head, then held back in his downward swing, and said, “It’s too dark to see your neck. Please wait a few moments.”

People were still nudging me toward the cave exit when a startling shot rang out. I thought for a moment it was the start of naval gun-firing, but instead it was Sato committing suicide outside the cave. When that excitement subsided, the generals were ready. Each in turn thrust a traditional hara-kiri dagger into his bared abdomen. As they did so, Sakaguchi skilfully and swiftly swung his razor-edged sword and beheaded them. Ushijima first, then Cho.’

In a narrow sense, the Japanese garrison on Okinawa had succeeded admirably. Although losing some 100,000 men to the inferno, they had inflicted the unprecedented total of 12,500 killed and 36,000 wounded on Allied forces of all types.

Such losses caused tremors in Washington but in no way halted the build-up for an invasion of Kyushu scheduled for 1 November 1945. Indeed, the tempo of the offensive increased. In July the Australians took the oilfields on Borneo. The British were planning an amphibious strike deep into South East Asia. The USSR, as Japanese intelligence knew well, was building up forces in Manchuria.

The powerful and growing ‘peace faction’ inside the Japanese Government realised that Okinawa was another great defeat. A large and well-entrenched Japanese garrison was crushed by an American army only half again larger than the defence force. Okinawa had cast great doubts on the Imperial Army’s claim that a ‘decisive battle’ on Kyushu could be anything else than a hopeless struggle leading to the destruction of much of the Japanese nation.

Undoubtedly some of the Japanese garrison were thinking along these lines also. In the weeks after the battle the Americans were astounded to find that nearly 7,000 Japanese soldiers crawled from unseen caves and surrendered, a total without precedent until that time. Japan was beginning to crack.

Japan itself possessed an undernourished population, its industry was crippled and its urban centres in ruins. The strategic bombing campaign directed against Japanese cities by American B-29s was savage but effective. Learning that Japanese industry, like that found in German cities, was not concentrated, the Americans abandoned their ‘pin-point bombing’ tactics employed in Germany in favour of area attacks against Japan’s densely populated urban areas. Knowing Japanese cities were made of wood and would burn furiously, the B-29s launched low-level night attacks, dropping thousands of small incendiary bombs. The result was a nightmare that overwhelmed Japanese attempts to protect its populace from immolation or asphyxiation in the inevitable firestorm. On 10 March 1945 journalist Masuo Kato witnessed one of the first and largest incendiary raids launched against Tokyo. On that occasion fortune conspired against the citizens of Tokyo as a fierce wind was blowing before the bombs dropped, which, as Kato recalled:

‘…whipped hundreds of small fires into great walls of flame, which began leaping streets, firebreaks and canals at dazzling speed. The flames roared on, gulping great drafts of oxygen, and thousands of human beings died in shelters, in the streets, in the canals and even in large open areas, like so many fish left gasping on the bottom of a lake that has been drained… On some broad streets, as far as one could see, there were rows of bodies where men, women and children had tried to escape the flames by lying down in the centre of the pavement. There were heaps of bodies in schoolyards, in parks, in vacant lots and huddled under railway viaducts.’

We shall never know if further violence was required to goad the Emperor into forcing his military to cease the conflict. In the event, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in early August provided a justification for capitulation, a justification used by Hirohito. Although the military chiefs pleaded for a last battle, even after the atomic bombs, the Emperor demanded an end to hostilities. After a brief flurry of diplomacy, Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945.