The Second World War (42 page)

The victory in Burma almost completed the first stage of Japan’s offensive into the ‘Southern Area’. It had profited brilliantly from its occupation of a central strategic position – in Indo-China, Formosa, the Marianas, Marshalls and Carolines – to strike east, south and west against the scattered colonial possessions of its chosen enemies and their divided forces and to overwhelm them one by one. On 22 April, when Alexander accepted defeat and set out across the mountains into India, only one Allied stronghold still resisted the Japanese inside the ‘Southern Area’. It was the American foothold in the Philippines.

America’s presence in the Philippines, which were never an American colony and in 1941 not quite yet a sovereign state, had come about through victory over Spain in the war of 1898 (the Philippines had been Spanish since the sixteenth century). America had extended a protectorate over the islands, introduced a democratic form of government, raised a Filipino army – in 1941 commanded by the old Filipino hand, General Douglas MacArthur – and put the archipelago under the shelter of the Pacific Fleet. In December 1941 American forces in the island numbered 16,000 combat troops, but only two formed regiments, about 150 operational aircraft, sixteen surface ships and twenty-nine submarines. On 26 July 1941 the Filipino army had been taken into the service of the United States, under the terms of the 1934 Act of Congress granting provisional independence; but its ten embryo divisions were as yet unfit for operations. The only combat-ready Filipino force was the Philippine Scouts Division, American-trained but only 12,000 strong.

Against these troops, which MacArthur had concentrated near the capital, Manila, in the northern island of Luzon, the Japanese intended to deploy the Fourteenth Army from Formosa (Taiwan). It consisted of two very strong divisions, the 16th and 48th, which had fought in China, and was supported by the Third Fleet, which included five cruisers and fourteen destroyers, the Second Fleet of two battleships, three cruisers and four destroyers, and a force of two carriers, five cruisers and thirteen destroyers. The air groups of the carriers were to be supplemented by the land-based Eleventh Air Fleet and the 5th Air Division.

The first disaster suffered by the Americans came from the air. As at Hawaii, they were provided with radar but failed to act on the warning it gave; as at Hawaii, their aircraft were packed wing-to-wing as a protection against sabotage and were destroyed almost to the last machine in the first Japanese air strike, which fell at noon on 8 December. On 12 December Admiral Thomas Hart, commanding the Asiatic Fleet in Filipino waters, felt compelled by lack of air cover to dispatch his surface ships for safety to the Dutch East Indies, where, under ABDA’s command, they were to be destroyed in the Battle of the Java Sea.

By that date the Fourteenth Army’s landings had already begun. Scorning an indirect approach through any other of the 7000 Filipino islands, General Masaharu Homma put his troops ashore on Luzon on 10 December and began an advance directly on the capital. He had hoped, by landing at separate points, to draw MacArthur’s units away from Manila; when the defenders declined to respond, he put in another large-scale landing close to the capital on 22 December and forced MacArthur to fall back into a strong position on the Bataan peninsula covering Manila Bay and its offshore island of Corregidor.

Bataan, some thirty miles long and fifteen wide, is dominated by two high jungle-covered mountains. Properly defended, it should have resisted attack indefinitely, even though the garrison was short of supplies. In forming their line on the first mountain position, however, MacArthur’s troops made the same mistake as the British were simultaneously making in Malaya. They failed to extend their flanks into the jungle on the mountain’s slopes; in consequence their flanks were quickly turned by Japanese infiltrators. Retiring to the second mountain position, they avoided that error; but they had surrendered half their territory and were now crowded into an area ten miles square. In addition to the 83,000 soldiers within the lines, moreover, there were 26,000 civilian refugees, many of whom had fled from Manila, which the Japanese had heavily bombed, even though it had been declared an open city. All were placed on half-rations, but these rapidly dwindled, despite occasional blockade running by American submarines. By 12 March, when MacArthur left for Australia on Roosevelt’s orders (with the famous promise, ‘I shall return’), the garrison was on one-third rations. On 3 April, when Homma opened a final offensive, most of the Americans and Filipinos within the Bataan pocket were suffering from beriberi or other deficiency diseases and rations had been reduced to one-quarter. Five days later General Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur’s successor, offered his surrender. About 9300 Americans and 45,000 Filipinos arrived in prison camp after a notorious ‘death march’. Some 25,000 had died of wounds, disease or mistreatment. The last survivors of the Philippines garrison, who occupied the island of Corregidor, were shelled into surrender between 14 April and 6 May; on 4 May alone more than 16,000 Japanese shells fell on the tiny outpost, making further resistance impossible. With the island’s capitulation the whole of the Philippines fell into Japanese hands. The population, however, unlike those of the Dutch East Indies and Burma, were not disposed to regard the Japanese victory as cause for satisfaction. They had trusted, rightly, in America’s promise to bring them to full independence and rightly also feared that Japanese occupation presaged oppression and exploitation. The Philippines Commonwealth was to be the only component of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Japan would encounter popular resistance to its rule.

The prospect of Filipino resistance was, however, at best an irrelevance to the Japanese at the moment Corregidor fell on 6 May 1942. Their strategic horizon now ran around the whole western Pacific and deep into China and south-east Asia too. The historic European empires of the East – Burma, Malaya, the East Indies, the Philippines and effectively French Indo-China also – had been drawn into their sphere. To the Chinese dependencies in which they had established rights of occupation between 1895 and 1931 – Formosa, Korea and Manchuria – they had added since 1937 vast swathes of conquered land in China proper. All the oceanic archipelagos north of the equator were theirs, and they had made inroads into those to the south. Between the west coast of the United States and the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand lay largely empty ocean, dotted by a few islands too remote or too tiny to provide their enemies with bases for a strategic riposte. From the perimeter of the ‘Southern Area’ the Japanese fleet and naval air forces were poised to strike deep into the Indian Ocean, towards the British Andaman and Nicobar islands (captured in March 1942), towards Ceylon (raided in April, at the cost of a British aircraft carrier), perhaps even as far away as the coast of East Africa (the appearance of a Japanese submarine off Madagascar in May would, in fact, prompt the British to occupy the island later in the year). Above all, their great amphibious – better, triphibious – fleet remained intact. Not one of their eleven battleships, ten carriers or eighteen heavy and twenty light cruisers had been even seriously damaged in the war thus far; while the United States Pacific and Asiatic Fleets had lost – or lost the use of – all its battleships and large numbers of its cruisers and destroyers, the British and Dutch Far Eastern fleets had been destroyed and the Royal Australian Navy had been driven back to port.

All that remained to the Allies to set in the strategic balance against Japan’s astonishing triumph and overpowering strategic position was the surviving naval base of Hawaii, with its remote dependency of Midway Island, and the US Pacific Fleet’s handful of carriers, three, perhaps four at most. Little wonder that hubris gripped even such doubters as Yamamoto; at the beginning of May 1942, the consummation of victory, a prospect he had long warned hovered at the very margin of possibility, seemed to lie only one battle away.

In the context of the Pacific war in May 1942, one more battle meant a battle between aircraft carriers. There had never been such a battle before; but the Japanese navy’s victory at Pearl Harbor ensured that such a battle was inevitable, if the United States were not altogether to abdicate control of the Pacific to Japan. The destruction at Battleship Row had left the American Pacific Fleet with only its aircraft carriers among its capital ships afloat, and it must find a way of using those carriers to fight the might of eleven Japanese battleships, ten carriers and thirty-eight cruisers, wherever they might next appear. Battleships, even in the numbers in which the Japanese deployed them, could not challenge a well-handled carrier force. ‘Command of the sea’, therefore, now rested on winning command of the air, as both navies had long recognised. Somewhere in the depths of the Pacific, the largest space on the surface of the globe, the Japanese and American carrier fleets must meet and battle it out for a decision. If the decision went in favour of the Japanese, as probabilities implied, their New Order in Asia would be safe for years to come.

The Japanese carrier fleet outnumbered the American by ten to three; if its light carriers were excluded, its navy still enjoyed a superiority of six to three. Moreover, the Japanese carriers and – even more important – their air groups were of the first quality. Before December 1941 the Americans had dismissed the Japanese carrier force as an inferior imitation of its own. Pearl Harbor had revealed that Japanese admirals handled their ships with superb competence and that Japanese naval pilots flew advanced aircraft, dropping lethal ordnance, with deadly skill. The Zero had established itself as the finest embarked fighter in any navy; the Kate and Val torpedo- and dive-bombers, though slower than their American counterparts, carried heavy loads over long ranges.

The Imperial Japanese Navy had not built and trained a carrier fleet as a second best to its battleship force. On the contrary, its carrier fleet was a national elite. For that the Americans – and the British – had only themselves to blame. At the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 they had forced the Japanese to accept a severe restriction on the number of capital ships they were allowed to possess. The ratio fixed was three Japanese ships to five British or American. The object was to limit the number of Imperial Japanese Navy battleships in the Pacific, which was a secondary theatre for the two Western navies, who at that time were locked in unspoken conflict over which was to enjoy primacy in the Atlantic. Aircraft carriers were subject to the restriction, but the purpose of including them was to guard against the danger that any power could launch ships in the guise of carriers which might subsequently be converted to battleships. Japan went the other way about. Already persuaded that the carrier was likely to be a dominant naval weapon of the future, it not only converted a number of battleships and battlecruisers into carriers, as it was allowed to do under the 1921 treaty (and Britain and America were doing likewise, to preserve seaworthy hulls they would otherwise have had to scrap). It also launched a number of seaplane carriers, a category the Washington Treaty did not recognise, with the object of converting them into aircraft carriers at a later date.

By conversion and new building they had succeeded by 1941 in creating the largest carrier fleet in the world, which not only embarked the largest naval air force, of 500 aircraft, but was also grouped – the analogy might be with the German Panzer divisions – in a single striking force, the First Air Fleet. The four light carriers could be detached for peripheral operations. The six large carriers –
Akagi
(Red Castle),
Kaga
(Increased Joy),
Hiryu
(Flying Dragon),
Soryu
(Green Dragon),
Shokaku
(Soaring Crane) and
Zuikaku
(Happy Crane) – were kept together for strategic offensives. They formed the group which had devastated Pearl Harbor. In May 1942 they stood ready to engage the American carrier group in battle and consummate Japan’s victory in the Pacific.

The American carriers, though few in number, equally did not represent their navy’s second best.
Lexington
and
Saratoga
, completed on battlecruiser hulls in 1927, were in their time the largest warships in the world and were still formidable ships in 1942;
Enterprise
was a later but purpose-built carrier;
Yorktown
and
Hornet
, which were to join her in the Pacific from the Atlantic Fleet, were sister ships. The aircraft they embarked were not the equal of the Japanese. In particular, in 1942 the Americans lacked a good shipborne fighter. But their aircrew, even by comparison with the First Air Fleet’s elite, were outstanding. America, after all, was the birthplace of the aeroplane, her youth had conceived a passion for flying from the start, and the US Navy’s carrier pilots were leaders of the breed.

Carrier flying excluded all but the best. The technique of launching and ‘landing on’ was extremely rigorous: at take-off, without catapult, aircraft dipped beneath the bows of the ship and frequently crashed into the sea; at landing pilots were obliged to drive at full power into the arrester wires lest the hook missed contact and they were forced into involuntary take-off, the alternatives being a crash on the flight deck or a probably fatal ditching. Flight away from the ship was quite as perilous as launching and landing. In 1942 there was no airborne radar. The gunner of a ‘multi-seat’ torpedo- or dive-bomber could keep a rough check of bearings headed and distance flown, and so guide his pilot back to the sea area in which they might hope to find the mother ship by eyesight – from high altitude in clear weather. A fighter pilot alone in his aircraft, once out of sight of the mother ship, was lost in infinity and found his way home by guess or good luck. Extreme visual range in the Pacific, from 10,000 feet on a cloudless day, was a hundred miles; but strike missions might carry aircraft 200 miles from the carrier, to the limit of their endurance – and perhaps beyond. If the carrier reversed course, or a pilot was tempted by a target to press on beyond his point of no return, a homing aircraft could exhaust its fuel on the homeward leg and have to ditch into the sea, where its crew in their dinghy would become a dot in an ocean 25 million miles square. Only the bravest were embarked on carriers as aircrew.