All Hell Let Loose (40 page)

The condition of the besiegers was little better than that of the besieged: the Japanese, too, suffered heavy losses to malaria, beriberi and dysentery – more than 10,000 sick by February. Tokyo was increasingly exasperated by American defiance, and by the triumphalist propaganda which the saga of Bataan promoted in the United States. On 3 April, Homma’s reinforced army launched a major offensive preceded by a massive bombardment. Filipino units broke in panic before Japanese tanks; every movement by the defenders provoked strafing from the air; many men were so weakened by hunger that they could scarcely move from their foxholes. The Japanese pushed steadily forward, breaching successive American lines. On the evening of 8 April, Maj. Gen. Edward King on his own initiative decided he must surrender the peninsula, and sent forward an officer bearing a white flag to the Japanese lines. From jungle refuges all over Bataan, groups of defenders emerged, seeking paths towards Corregidor island, where Wainwright still held out.

On the morning of the 9th, King met Col. Motoo Nakayama, Homma’s operations officer, to sign a surrender. ‘Will our troops be well treated?’ King asked. The Japanese answered blandly, ‘We are not barbarians.’ Some 11,500 Americans and 64,000 Filipinos fell into enemy hands. The transfer of these debilitated men to cages became known to history as the Bataan Death March. Scores of Filipinos were casually killed, some used for bayonet practice. An American private soldier saw a weakened compatriot pushed under an advancing tank. Blair Robinett said: ‘Now we knew, if there had been any doubts before, we were in for a bad time.’ Sgt. Charles Cook described seeing captives bayoneted if they tried to get water. Staff-Sergeant Harold Feiner said: ‘If you fell, bingo, you were dead.’ More than three hundred Filipino prisoners were butchered in a ravine near the Pantingan river. Their killers explained that if the garrison had surrendered sooner they might have been treated mercifully, but as it was, ‘we suffered heavy casualties. So just pardon us.’ An estimated eleven hundred Americans and more than 5,000 Filipinos perished on the Death March.

The Japanese now concentrated artillery fire on Corregidor, little larger than New York’s Central Park; on 3 May Wainwright reported to MacArthur in Australia that every structure above ground had been levelled, the island denuded of vegetation. Conditions became unspeakable in the hot, stinking Malinta Tunnel, packed with fearful humanity. That night the submarine
Spearfish
evacuated the last party to escape safely to Australia, twenty-five strong, including thirteen women. A few hours later, the Japanese landed amphibious forces to storm Corregidor. At noon on 6 May, after two days of fighting, Wainwright surrendered all remaining US forces in the Philippines, first signalling to Washington: ‘With profound regret and with continued pride in my gallant troops I go to meet the Japanese commander … Goodbye, Mr President.’ An American navy doctor among the garrison, George Ferguson, sat down and wept, ‘just so disappointed in the good old U.S.A.’. Amid emotional and physical exhaustion, however, many men were simply glad the battle had ended. Only later did they discover that the ordeal had scarcely begun for 11,500 Americans who became prisoners of the Japanese.

The four-month defence of Bataan and Corregidor, which cost 2,000 American dead and 4,000 casualties among the invaders, was made possible in part by Japanese incompetence. The initial invasion force was weak, and composed of troops with nothing like the training and experience of Yamashita’s army in Malaya. If Homma and his officers had displayed more energy, the Philippines saga would have ended sooner, as Tokyo’s angry high command asserted. But nothing can detract from the gallantry of Wainwright, who did his duty more impressively than MacArthur, and of his garrison. They created a legend in which Americans could take pride – and of which Churchill was envious. To put the matter bluntly, US soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause.

Brigadier Dwight Eisenhower, who had served unhappily under MacArthur a few years earlier, wrote in his diary: ‘Poor Wainwright! He did the fighting … [MacArthur] got such glory as the public could find … MacArthur’s tirades, to which … I so often listened in Manila … would now sound as silly to the public as they then did to us. But he’s a hero! Yah.’ At home in the US, news commentators squeezed every ounce of glory from Bataan, from skirmishes at sea and manifestations of America’s embryo mobilisation. But in the Pacific, no one was fooled. Every Allied soldier, sailor and airman knew that the enemy was making the weather in every corner of the theatre. Lt. Robert Kelly of MTB Squadron 3, which evacuated MacArthur from Corregidor, said: ‘The news commentators had us all winning the war. It made us very sore. We were out here where we could see these victories. There were plenty of them. They were all Japanese. Yet if even at one point we are able to check an attack, the silly headlines chatter of a “victory”.’

Kelly, like Eisenhower, failed to grasp the importance of legends, indeed myths, to sustain the spirit of nations in adversity. American dismay in the face of those early defeats was assuaged by skilful propaganda. The United States had much less to lose in the east than did the British Empire. The epic of Bataan and MacArthur forged by Roosevelt and the US media was serviceable, even precious to the American people. The general was a vainglorious windbag rather than a notable commander, whose personality was repugnant. But his flight from Corregidor was no more discreditable than those of many wartime British commanders from stricken fields, including Wavell’s from Singapore. During the years that followed, MacArthur’s status as a figurehead for American endeavours in the southwest Pacific did much for morale at home, if less for the defeat of Japan. The 1942 Philippines campaign served no useful strategic purpose: the islands were indefensible by the small forces available, far from friendly bases. If the garrison had held out longer, domestic public opinion might have forced some doomed venture to relieve the siege of Bataan. The US Navy would have suffered a catastrophe, had it attempted to assist Wainwright in the face of overwhelming air and naval Japanese strength; Corregidor’s surrender relieved Washington of an embarrassment.

Thereafter in the Pacific, few ground actions came close to matching in scale those waged against Germany. The struggle engaged relatively few men, though it was conducted over vast distances and involved large naval commitments. Most of the Japanese army stayed in China. Tokyo’s Asian and Pacific conquests were achieved by small forces, dispersed across the hemisphere. The US, Australia and Britain, in their turn, contested mastery of islands and densely forested wildernesses with modest ground contingents of two or three divisions, while on Russian battlefields hundreds of formations clashed. The critical factors in each successive Pacific encounter were the supporting naval and air forces. Both sides’ soldiers and marines knew that their blood and sweat must go for nothing unless sea supply routes could be held open, dominance of the sky denied to the enemy. The United States Navy became the decisive force in the war against Japan.

2
THE CORAL SEA AND MIDWAY

In January 1942, the Japanese seized Rabaul, on New Britain, and transformed it into a major air and naval hub. In the full flight of euphoria following their triumphs – ‘victory disease’, as sceptics among Hirohito’s people came to call it – they determined to extend their South Pacific holdings to embrace Papua, the Solomons, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa. The navy persuaded the army to agree an advance to a new imperial outer perimeter with Midway atoll in the centre and the Aleutians in the north, which should be seized from the Americans. They would then have bases from which they could interdict supply routes to Australia, now the Allies’ main staging post for the Asian war.

Even before Corregidor fell, the Americans made a gesture which dismayed and provoked their enemies, because it provided an early hint of Japan’s vulnerability and lent urgency to their further endeavours. Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s 18 April air strike against Tokyo by sixteen B-25 bombers, launched from the carrier
Hornet
650 miles from Japan, was materially insignificant but morally important. Heartening the Allied peoples in a season of defeats, it was an imaginative act of military theatre, of the kind in which Churchill often indulged. It persuaded the Japanese that they must seize Midway, America’s westernmost Pacific foothold, held since 1867. Once Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had aircraft based on Midway, these could frustrate further Doolittle-style adventures.

Japan’s objectives would prove disastrously over-ambitious; but the alternative, from Tokyo’s perspective, was to concede to the Americans freedom to mass forces for a counterstroke. Yamamoto and his colleagues knew that, unless the US could be kept under relentless pressure, Japanese defeat was inevitable. Their only credible strategy, they believed, was to strike at the Allies again and again, until Washington bowed to the logic of Japanese dominance and negotiated a settlement. Above all, the Imperial Navy sought to engage and destroy US warships at sea.

Before addressing Midway, the Japanese moved against Papua and the Solomons. At the beginning of May 1942, three invasion convoys set sail for Port Moresby, protected by powerful strike and covering forces including three carriers. Vice-Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, directing operations, hoped that an American fleet would seek to intervene, for he expected to destroy it. The amphibious force destined for Tulagi island in the south Solomons, a few miles off Guadalcanal, landed unopposed on 3 May. Next day, aircraft from the carrier
Yorktown
struck Japanese ships offshore, sinking a destroyer and two smaller vessels, but the destruction was disappointing, when the attackers enjoyed almost ideal conditions.

On 5 May a US fleet with a small Australian contingent, led by Rear-Admiral Frank Fletcher and forewarned by Ultra intelligence of Japanese intentions, steamed to intercept Inoue’s main force. At dawn on 7 May in the Coral Sea, Fletcher dispatched his cruisers, led by British Rear-Admiral John Crace, to attack the enemy’s transports. Fletcher was misinformed about enemy locations. US air squadrons, instead of finding the Japanese carriers, chanced upon Inoue’s amphibious force. Its transports promptly turned away, to await the outcome of the fleet encounter. Crace withdrew, on learning that he was advancing into empty ocean. Planes from
Lexington
scored an early success, sinking the small carrier
Shoho
. Meanwhile Fletcher’s carrier group had an extraordinarily lucky escape. The Japanese fleet was 175 miles astern of him; his own planes were absent when enemy aircraft sank and destroyed an American tanker and escorting destroyer which were trailing his task groups. If Inoue’s bombers had flown further and found the US carriers, these would have been exposed to disaster. As it was, on that first day both rival admirals groped ineffectually.

Next morning, 8 May, as sunrise came at 0655, sailors in foetid confinement below took turns to snatch breaths of clean air from vents or scuttles, as waves of American and Japanese aircraft lifted off from their respective flight decks. Lt. Cmdr. Bob Dixon, who had led the previous day’s air attack on
Shoho
, again distinguished himself by locating the Japanese fleet. He lingered overhead to maintain surveillance, nursing his engine to save fuel – a constant preoccupation of naval fliers.

The first wave of US aircraft located and attacked the carrier
Shokaku
, inflicting significant but not fatal damage. Most of the torpedo-carriers and dive-bombers missed. The strikes were poorly coordinated. Dive-bomber crews suffered severe problems when their sighting telescopes and windshields misted up during the steep descent from ‘pushover’ at 17,000 feet to ‘pull-up’ at 1,500. Pilots fumed at their own lack of speed and defensive firepower against Japanese fighters. Commander Bill Ault got lost on his way home, a frequent and fatal error in that vast ocean. He sent a laconic farewell message before ditching and vanishing forever: ‘Okay, so long people. Remember we got a thousand-pound hit on the flat top.’ But
Shokaku
survived. Lt. Cmdr. Paul Stroop, a staff officer aboard
Lexington
, acknowledged ruefully, ‘We should have been more effective.’

And even as the Americans were diving on Inoue’s fleet, the Japanese struck Fletcher’s ships much harder. When radar reported enemy aircraft closing, the US carrier captains called for twenty-five-knot flank speed and began evasive action before meeting shoals of incoming torpedoes, a rain of bombs.
Yorktown
suffered a single hit which killed more than forty men, and a near-miss which momentarily blasted the ship’s racing screws clear of the water. Her captain asked the engine room if he should reduce speed, to receive the defiant answer: ‘Hell no, we’ll make it.’ But
Lexington
’s full helm turn as torpedoes approached failed to save her: the 40,000-ton carrier was struck with devastating effect. ‘It was pretty discouraging to see these Japanese launch their torpedoes then fly very close to the ship to get a look at us,’ said Paul Stroop. ‘They were curious and sort of thumbed their noses at us. We were shooting at them with our new 20mms and not hitting them at all.’ Blazes broke out which found plentiful tinder – inflammable bulkhead paint, wooden furniture such as no US warship would carry again. Half-naked sailors suffered terrible burns – ‘the skin was literally dripping from their bodies’. This was the last time American crews willingly exposed flesh in action. After just thirteen minutes the Japanese planes turned away, leaving a shambles which greeted Fletcher’s airmen returning from their own strike.

Heroic efforts were made to control
Lexington
’s fires: Lt. Milton Ricketts, sole survivor of a damage-control team wiped out by a bomb, was himself mortally wounded, but ran out a hose and began playing water on the flames before collapsing dead. Soon, however, in Stroop’s words ‘fires had gotten increasingly violent and we were beginning to get explosions … that sounded like a freight train rumbling up the hangar deck … A rushing wall of flame … would erupt around the perimeter of the elevator.’ Leaking gasoline fumes triggered a massive blast below decks: ammunition began to cook off; the decision was made to abandon the ship. Its senior officer, Admiral Fitch, walked calmly across the flight deck accompanied by a marine orderly clutching his jacket and dispatches, to be picked up by a destroyer’s boat below. Men in their hundreds began to leap into the water. The rescuers were so effective that only 216 of
Lexington
’s crew were lost out of 2,735, but a precious carrier was gone.
Yorktown
was severely damaged, though she was able to complete landing on planes two minutes after sunset. In the small hours of darkness, the dead were buried over the side, in expectation of renewed action next day.