A World at Arms (163 page)

That campaign, it was decided, could begin even earlier than the December 20, 1944, date originally set for it. When a massive attack by American naval air on September 11 into the Philippines area destroyed large numbers of planes and ships, leaving little effective resistance at that moment, Admiral Halsey called on Nimitz to scrap the Palau Islands operation and strike for Leyte right away. Nimitz and his staff thought it too late to drop the Peleliu attack but agreed to an earlier drive for Leyte and offered the XXIV Corps, ready for another operation which would now be cancelled, to join MacArthur’s forces if he too were willing to move early. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Quebec for the Octagon Conference, asked for and received the concurrence of MacArthur,
^a
and moved up the date of the Leyte invasion to October 20. If the war against Japan could be speeded up, so much the better.

At Octagon, plans were also approved for a British fleet to participate
in the Pacific as the ships became available from Europe. King had his doubts, but the President ruled that the British would take part.
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The latter were also developing plans for their participation in the main attacks on Japan in other ways. A project for British very long range bombers, refueled en route to Japan from bases to be captured or built on Luzon and Okinawa, had originated in late 1943; it received the code–name “Tiger force” and the cooperation of General Arnold.
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Churchill originally did not want British troops serving under General MacArthur but instead preferred to concentrate on regaining the British possessions in Southeast Asia, especially Singapore.
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It was, however, intended that Commonwealth forces would be redeployed after victory in Europe, and the plans for the participation of British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and South African units in the final assault on Japan were developed in the summer and fall of 1944.
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There was certainly no inclination in London to stop short of the unconditional surrender of Japan.
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The Americans now went forward with the plans for a landing on Leyte. The 6th Army under General Walter Krueger, MacArthur’s main ground force, was to land on the island’s east coast, drive inland, and make possible the building of new and expansion of old airfields to provide land-based air support for the invasion of Luzon, now moved forward to December. This was to be the first time a whole American army with two corps would go into action in the Pacific at one time.
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The former responsibilities of 6th Army in New Guinea fell to the newly designated 8th Army under General Robert Eichelberger. Air support for the landing would be provided primarily by carrier based planes; both Admiral Kinkaid’s 7th Fleet, long attached to MacArthur’s command, and Admiral Halsey’s 3rd Fleet from Nimitz’s Central Pacific theater would support and shield the great invasion, in which eventually over a quarter of a million men were landed on the island.
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Thereafter an invasion of Luzon would be possible and from there, in turn, amphibious landings could be launched against the Bonin and Ryukyu Islands and then the home islands of Japan itself

The Japanese were certainly not about to let the Americans return to the Philippines without a major effort to throw them back into the sea. Just as the conquest of the islands had looked to Tokyo in 1940 and 1941 as an essential prerequisite for both the occupation of Southeast Asia and the effective control of that area afterwards, the whole structure
of communications between the Japanese home islands and the oil, tin, and rubber of the territories Japan conquered in the winter of 1941–42 depended on continued Japanese domination of the Philippines. Whatever the forms of sham independence Tokyo might temporarily allow collaborating elements in both areas, there was never any doubt that complete control of all military affairs and the major economic resources would be retained by Japan.

The Japanese army and navy leadership was for once in the war united on defensive planning. They were desperately trying to mobilize additional resources for war, in a manner not unlike the German exertions of the same year. The Japanese, in fact, hoped to draw on German technological advances for their own use, especially to exploit the German lead in design, testing, and production of jet fighters. Throughout 1944 and into 1945, they attempted to obtain the latest German advances. The slowness of the Germans in providing detailed information and the poor handling of what they did send negated all these efforts; the only real result was the unwitting one of providing the Allies with a great deal of intelligence on the progress of German and Japanese jet airplane development, because the reports on them were transmitted in code systems that the Americans were reading.
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Not only were the Japanese, to all intents and purposes, unable to profit from the latest weapons developments by Germany–exchanges of information about suicide airplanes hardly qualify–they had to anticipate in 1944 the real possibility that in the near future their German ally would follow Italy into defeat, with or without surrender. Japanese diplomats in Europe were cautioning the government in Tokyo not to count either on long continued German resistance or on a split in the Allied coalition.
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There might be minimal advantages for Japan from the Axis disasters in Europe: the withdrawal of Finland from the war could open a new route to Sweden across the U.S.S.R.,
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and the Mufti of Jerusalem, fresh from recruiting soldiers for the Germans from among the Muslims of Southeast Europe, now wanted to do the same favor for the Japanese in Southeast Asia and India
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-perhaps following Bose to East Asia before a German collapse–but all such trifles could not obscure the main danger.

That danger was the redeployment of American and British forces from Europe to East Asia after the defeat of Germany, with the real possibility that the Soviet Union might join them in a concentric attack which, in its fundamentals, if not in its details, would be similar to the concentric assault on German-controlled Europe in the summer of 1944. The most important hope of Tokyo was that of keeping the Soviet Union neutral. Beginning in August 1944, the Japanese government
attempted diplomatic steps to encourage the Soviet Union to adhere to the 1941 Neutrality Pact. Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru appears to have thought of the possibility of some new Japanese-Soviet agreement which might lead to their jointly developing a program for a general settlement of the whole war, a project which assumed that the Moscow government was prepared to abandon its allies, relieve Germany of its Eastern Front, and thereby in effect force the Western Allies into making peace through a revived Tripartite Pact, with the Soviet Union taking the place of Italy.
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Once upon a time, in the winter of 1940–41, Stalin had been seriously interested in such an arrangement; but as the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Sato Naotake, repeatedly told his government, there was not the slightest chance of such a project now. Why should the Soviet Union leave a winning alliance for a losing one and give up the enormous advantages of victory for the minimal advantages Japan offered?
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Tokyo kept trying for months but simply could not get anywhere with its scheme. Whether or not massive Japanese concessions to the Soviet Union could at this time have turned things around remains an open question, but there was no inclination in Tokyo in
1944
to make the sorts of offers put forward in
1945
, when any interest Stalin might conceivably once have had was long gone.
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Even their military victory in China could not be turned to political advantage by the Japanese at this stage of the war. A wild scheme to make peace with Chiang on terms agreed by the Supreme War Council on September 5, 1944, hedging as usual on the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China, insisting on holding on to Manchuria, but promising to turn over Hong Kong and perhaps French Indo-China, never received a reply.
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As for the alternative, the puppet government of Wang Ching-wei, established under Japanese control in occupied China, that had already lost its real significance by this time. The death of Wang on November 10, 1944, after months in a Japanese hospital, put a formal end to what had always been a dubious project.
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As if all this were not enough, the Japanese again had to worry about a break with Portugal over the Japanese occupation of Portuguese Timor, a break which would have closed one of the few remaining Japanese windows on European developments. Minor concessions were made to Lisbon, but Japan made no concession on the critical issue: the evacuation of Japanese troops from the Portuguese portion of Timor. Tension continued.
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None of these problems affected basic Japanese strategy. The armed forces of the country were prepared to fight fiercely for every one of the islands and territories under Japanese control in the hope of so raising
their enemies’ cost in lives and treasure that at some point the latter would prefer a negotiated end to hostilities. If, in the process, major defeats could be inflicted on the Americans or the British–as the Japanese had hoped to do in 1944, first in the invasion of India and then in the “A-Go” operation against the Americans in the Marianas or New Guinea–that was, of course, all to the good. But no one in Tokyo expected that the Americans or the British could be discouraged from further operations by a single such event. It would be the cumulative effect of the fighting, win or lose, which was expected to wear them down. And the fighting would become more ghastly as the Allies came closer to the center of Japanese strength, the home islands. The fighting on Saipan and Biak and at Kohima had shown what the terrible battle for Peleliu confirmed: whatever the defects of Japanese naval and army leadership, whatever the superiority of the resources which the Allies could bring to bear, the soldiers and sailors of Japan would fight to the death in loyalty to the Emperor and in obedience to officers who died with them. And they would exact a fearful price.

In the summer of 1944, as a reaction to the defeats Japan had suffered, the Japanese leadership began the organization of suicide formations on a large scale.
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At a time when Japanese pilots received inadequate training and flew what had become inferior planes against better trained and more experienced American pilots in superior airplanes, and when the massing of anti-aircraft fire from large concentrations of Allied warships made possible the throwing up of a huge volume of fire, battle sorties by Japanese planes were ever more likely to end in their being shot down. Not only that, they were most likely to be shot down without having either brought down any American planes or damaged any Allied warships.

There are as yet no western language studies of Japanese army and naval aviation which plot construction, front-line strength and losses as comprehensively as Williamson Murray has prepared for the German air force, but the outlines are clear.
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The Japanese built 20,000 planes in 1943 and an additional 26,000 in 1944, but the losses in training, ferrying, accidents, and combat were so large that total front-line strength barely grew in numbers. From a force flown in 1941 by some of the world’s most skilled and experienced pilots, the Japanese army and navy air forces–always operating quite separately–had come to be by 1944 a force of dedicated men with little training or experience who in a high proportion of cases went down in their first combat.

It was in this context that it increasingly made more sense to many Japanese air force leaders to do with intent and to a useful purpose what
was already being done unintentionally and to little effect. Planes would be fueled for a one–way mission and aimed at Allied ships, the assumption being that the explosion would damage or sink the ship hit. There was no reason to believe that many more planes would be lost this way than any other, but it was assumed that in this fashion there would at least be something to show for the sacrifice. This tactic also had some other advantages: less modern planes could be used, the pilots did not need a great deal of training, and the morale of the Allied fleets hit by mass suicide attacks might well suffer. Named kamikaze, or divine wind, for the wind which had once dispersed an invading armada in the thirteenth century, this form of suicide attack was first put into action by the Japanese in the struggle for the Philippines in October, 1944, and on an increasing scale thereafter, with over 5000 held back to meet the invasion of the home islands.

By the end of the Okinawa campaign there had been 2,550 kamikaze missions of which 475 had secured hits or damaging near misses.
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Whatever one may think of the concept, it was under the circumstances certainly not an unreasonable or preposterous effort to match Japan’s resources to her goals. The one major miscalculation made by those who developed and oversaw what became a very large enterprise was that they appear never to have thought through the most obvious practical side of the project. Instead of carrying the largest possible explosive cargo–a 1000-pound bomb or more–the kamikaze planes were generally loaded with a 500-pound bomb, so that the ones which actually hit an American or British ship inflicted nothing like the damage which might have been wrought at no greater cost in Japanese pilots and planes.

As for the specific plans to defend the Philippines, which the Japanese correctly assumed would be invaded by American forces at some time in 1944 or 1945, there appears to have been a minor miscalculation on timing: the Japanese naval headquarters believed that no invasion would be attempted before the American Presidential election in November because of the repercussions of any reverse on Roosevelt’s chances for reelection.
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In reality, of course, the original post–election date was advanced to a pre-election date for reasons unrelated to partisan politics, an interesting reflection on continued Japanese misassessment of the American people.