A World at Arms (123 page)

As for the Soviet interest in acquiring the northern portion of East Prussia with the port city of Konigsberg (with the southern part going to Poland), this was agreeable to the British and Americans, who had been convinced by the incessant German propaganda of the interwar years that Germans could not live on both sides of Poles and who were therefore certain that East Prussia should never be returned to Germany. The rest of Germany after these amputations in favor of Poland and the Soviet Union would probably be dismembered into several states, but this issue was not resolved. Like so many other matters, this one had to be put off because of lack of both time at the meeting and careful preparations on the question beforehand.
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When the British and American leaders met again in Cairo afterwards, the detailed implementation of the Teheran decisions was worked out.
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It was at this time that the new command arrangements were finalized. Eisenhower was appointed for Overlord,
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British General (later Field Marshal) Sir Henry Maitland Wilson was put in charge of a consolidated Mediterranean theater, and a new command system for the American component of the strategic bombing offensive combining the long-range bombers in England and the Mediterranean was established. At the insistence of the British and with the reluctant acquiescence of his Chiefs-of-Staff, Roosevelt eventually reversed his promise of “Buccaneer” to Chiang to make possible an enlarged assault lift for Overlord and “Anvil” (the landing in southern France) with a resulting delay in operations in north Burma, a downgrading of the China-Burma-India theater, and greater emphasis on the Pacific approach to attack Japan. The route to the hoped for victory over Germany had been laid out, that for victory over Japan had not yet been finally defined, but both the British and the Soviet Union were expected to join in that campaign.
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EAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC, 1943

The Pacific War had reached a stage in early 1943 where new choices certainly had to be made. The campaigns in Papua and on Guadalcanal were now essentially complete, while the stalemate in China continued and the Japanese remained in control of most of Burma. The question was what to do next. For the Japanese, the critical point was to hold what remained of their earlier conquests; and although an outside observer could see that the tide had turned decisively against them in the second half of 1942, this was not fully recognized in Tokyo. There the main concern was to fight hard on the periphery while staving off any entry of the Soviet Union into the circle of Japan’s enemies. For most of 1943, that meant a bloody holding operation against her United States and British enemies and an effort at reinsurance with the Soviet Union.

In the South Pacific, the Japanese would try hard to rebuild the strength of their forces on New Guinea, depleted by the Australian-U.S. victory in Papua, in the hope of holding on to the northern portion of the great island, thereby protecting the approaches to their major base at Rabaul.
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These efforts were thwarted by quick Allied moves, greatly aided by an airlift arranged by Kenney’s 5th Air Force, and by a crushing defeat inflicted by the same air force on a major Japanese reinforcement effort in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea at the beginning of February 1943.
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Recognizing that there was now no hope of major offensive operations by their European allies, the Japanese saw their only hope in efforts to forestall American, Australian and British advances.
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It was the erroneous belief that such a defensive victory had been attained which led Admiral Yamamoto to head south to congratulate his winning pilots, only to be intercepted and killed by American air force planes alerted through breaks into the Japanese code.
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The loss to the Japanese was in some ways more symbolic than substantive; Yamamoto’s successor, Admiral Koga Mineichi, followed essentially the same defensive strategy, and he as well as his successors would preside over naval battles in which the navy pursued overly complicated plans that in their own way resembled nothing as much as Yamamoto’s divided approach at Midway.

The Japanese not only hoped–and failed–to hold their perimeter in the south; they had decided to hold in the north as well. An effort to reinforce the garrison in the Aleutians failed, and the landing forces
there faced as best they could an American determination to retake the islands. It could be argued that the United States insistence on retaking Kiska and Attu was almost as unwise as the Japanese insistence on trying to hold on to these indefensible outposts which led nowhere for either side. The Americans had finally ended the interminable squabbles between the army and navy commanders in the theater by the relief of the naval commander. On May 11, 1943, American troops landed on Attu, by–passing and thus effectively isolating Kiska. The supporting fleet included two battleships that Yamamoto imagined he had sunk at Pearl Harbor; his death the preceding month saved him embarrassing questions. In bitter fighting which lasted until May 30, the Japanese force on Attu of about 2500 was destroyed at a cost of over one thousand American lives. The Japanese thereupon decided to evacuate their 5000-man garrison from Kiska, a project they successfully pulled off on July 28 without the knowledge of the Americans, whose big landing force the following month was as astonished as it was relieved to find the Japanese gone.

Only in Burma did the Japanese succeed in holding their own. Incompetent British leadership brought on a new defeat as an attempt was made to drive along the coastal plain to Akyab. Without reinforcements from elsewhere, the Japanese army in Burma drove back the British-Indian 14th Army with heavy losses in men, materiel and morale. This disaster confirmed the belief of British headquarters in Delhi as well as London that Burmese jungles were appropriate only for Japanese to fight in; a curious reversal of the earlier easy assumptions of Japanese inferiority, especially at a time when Australian (as well as American) soldiers were demonstrating the nonsensical nature of such pronouncements in the jungles of New Guinea. The Japanese were equally successful in containing the efforts of the so-called Chindits, a special force organized by Orde Wingate to disrupt Japanese communications in the interior of Burma by the employment of columns of specially trained soldiers supplied by air. The remnants of Wingate’s force were chased out, but at least he had shown that, contrary to the belief of many, British and Indian soldiers were not afflicted with some special hereditary incapacity for fighting effectively in Burma. In the meantime, and before this lesson was fully learned, the Japanese drove forward the construction of the railway connecting Thailand and Burma, bringing fame to its “Bridge on the River Kwai” but death to tens of thousands of local people and prisoners of war forced by Japanese guards to labor on it under the most horrendous conditions.
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Japanese hopes of successfully defending the perimeter of their empire
were heavily dependent on the maintenance of peace with the Soviet Union, and concern over the possibility that the latter might allow American use of air bases in the Soviet Far East was especially high during the fighting in the Aleutians in May of 1943. As the battle for Attu was raging, Tokyo asked for and received renewed assurances from Moscow that the neutrality treaty of 1941 still held and that the Soviet Union would not allow American planes to utilize Soviet bases. While the Americans struggled to get Lend-Lease planes to Alaska for Russian pilots to fly to the Soviet Union, their leaders could read in the intercepted Japanese telegrams the exchange of assurances between Moscow and Tokyo.
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The Soviet promise of May 21,1943, to adhere to the Neutrality Pact did not entirely reassure Tokyo. Though satisfied that American planes could not use Soviet bases, the Japanese government was greatly alarmed by the turn of the European war against Germany and Italy as the collapse in Tunisia and the fall of Mussolini threw the weakness of Japan’s European allies into bold relief.
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A major effort was begun to improve relations with the Soviet Union in which, without informing its allies beforehand, Japan was willing to make substantial concessions in regard to its rights in north Sakhalin and on other issues in current Japanese-Soviet relations in the hope of obtaining a new series of agreements with Moscow.
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These negotiations dragged on for months inconclusively with the Soviet government steadily but very carefully pushing for practical concessions without committing itself to any new formal agreement on the major political issues.
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Even Japanese congratulations on the Red Army’s recapture of Kharkov from their German ally hardly budged the Soviet Union.
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The latter could remain confident that the danger of any Japanese interference with the steadily growing stream of American aid across the Pacific-to say nothing of a Japanese invasion of its Far East provinces–was out of the question.

Since the Japanese did not plan to attack the Soviet Union at this time, and the Soviet Union, as their leader told the United States and Britain at the Moscow Conference in October and at Teheran in November, intended to go to war with Japan only
after
the end of the war in Europe, negotiations could proceed.
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The position of the Russians was steadily improving; that of the Japanese was steadily weakening. As the talks proceeded, the Soviet government secured the termination of the Japanese oil and coal concessions on Sakhalin-originally scheduled for 1970 -by a protocol signed on March 30, 1944.
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In this agreement, as in the new fisheries agreement signed at the same time,
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the Japanese made extensive concessions to retain Soviet good-will. If their German
ally objected, that was too bad. Having repeatedly but unsuccessfully urged the Germans to make peace with the Soviet Union, the Japanese attempted to maintain peaceful relations with their Soviet neighbor regardless of Berlin’s complaints about Soviet troop transfers to the European theater from the Far East and American aid deliveries through East Asian waters.
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From the perspective of Tokyo, concentration on the fighting with the United States, Great Britain and China was quite enough. During 1944 the Japanese moved twelve infantry divisions from Manchuria to the fronts on which they were fighting in the south.
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These transfers eventually made it easier for the Red Army to crush the remaining Japanese units; but in the critical situation facing Tokyo, combat in the south had to be nourished even if this meant concessions to Moscow.

While the Japanese hoped to hold on to their earlier conquests, concentrating on a firm perimeter and able so to concentrate because of continued peace with their Soviet neighbor, the British, as has already been hinted, hoped to hold on to their Indian empire but without any major effort to recapture its Burmese portion.
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From time to time the British staffs in London had to engage Churchill’s proclivity for impossible schemes, in this case primarily his repeated urging of a landing on Sumatra (operation “Culverin”), but in general the strategy of London remained defensive. There were several reasons for this preference. The available resources, they believed, should be concentrated on Germany first, and any offensive operations which detracted from that priority would only prolong the war. Once Germany had been defeated, there would be plenty of force available for offensives against Japan, and the British were quite determined to play their part and contribute their share in this endeavor; but the Pacific theater would have to wait.

Furthermore, the British never shared the American belief in the future role of China as a great power, distrusted Chiang with his loudly expressed sympathy for Indian nationalists, and greatly doubted that there was any point to the American concept of opening a land route to China across north Burma. The terrible state of the railway in the Indian province of Assam which supplied both the Allied forces in north Burma and the air bases for the air supply route into China reflected not only the torpor of local British administrators and commanders but also the unwillingness of the leadership in London to put some drive into the situation. One has only to contrast Churchill’s constant bullying of subordinates for progress on projects in which he was interested with his passivity in the face of the perpetual troubles of the Assam railway if one is looking for an accurate assessment of London’s view of the whole
theater.
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In view of this attitude, the British let the Americans build up the air supply route to China as much as they wanted to and themselves did as little in the theater as they possibly could. As will become apparent, under the prodding of the Americans, the blows of the Japanese, and the new leadership team, Lord Louis Mountbatten as South East Asia commander and the very able General William Slim as 14th Army commander, that turned out to be far more than they had anticipated.

The Americans in looking toward 1943 in the Pacific concentrated on projects to improve their position for action in subsequent years when more force would be available.
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As much Japanese shipping as possible was to be sunk by Allied submarines and planes, and steps would be taken to seize bases closer to Japan from which that country itself as well as its shipping routes could be bombed. The issue of a landing assault on the Japanese home islands was at this time left open, but the same operations which brought them within land-based airplane range would in any case be needed for such an assault. At Roosevelt’s insistence and with the full and enthusiastic support of Admiral King as well as General Marshall, the United States was building the warships and especially the aircraft carriers for mastery in the Pacific.
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In September 1942 the first flight tests of the B-29 took place. Planned since 1939, this very long-range bomber started coming off the production lines in July 1943 for deployment against Japan, first from China and then from the Marianas. As a new weapon in warfare, with a 1500–mile range that was about double that of the standard long-range bombers of the time, its availability came to play a major role in determining strategy in the Pacific War.
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