Japanese juggernaut
In the short term Tokyo experienced victory beyond expectation. Japan’s strike against Pearl Harbor was a spectacular success in the tactical realm. By May 1942 imperial forces had seized American bases on their perimeter, crushed the British in Malaya, moved into Burma, pushed into the South Pacific and finally captured the Philippines. Most importantly, the resource-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies were in Japan’s hands. Looking at the map, it had conducted a spectacularly successful military campaign. This cavalcade of victories came quickly and intoxicated Japan. If these gains could be maintained through an eventual peace agreement, a Japanese empire would have come into existence via the semi-divine imperial sword.
Assessing these early Japanese victories is important in judging Japan’s overall war effort. Closely defined, the Japanese armed forces displayed every major military virtue in the grim craft of war. Like Hitler in Europe, the Japanese could not have picked a better time to begin their war. The hard-pressed British were crippled by strategic muddle over the defence of Singapore. Similar muddle existed in Washington concerning the Philippines. With the Pacific Fleet and Britain’s naval task force destroyed in the first days of war, Allied naval forces were pitifully small when compared to their Japanese opponents and were easily overwhelmed. On land the bulk of Allied forces consisted of ill-trained colonial levies. With a few notable exceptions these units were unable to face the Japanese in serious combat. The Japanese Army’s major opposition came from a very small number of Regular Allied ground units. British and Australian units in Malaya were incompetently deployed, vulnerable to infiltration and were seriously deficient in air power.
Although obscured by the euphoria of victory, Japanese commanders might have looked at land operations against the Americans with concern. American ground forces on the Philippines conducted a skilled retreat to the Bataan Peninsula. Supported by artillery and a few tanks, these forces mauled the first force of Japanese invaders. Although Japanese victory was inevitable, it took heavy reinforcements to accomplish it. American capitulation in May was due more to a collapse in logistics than military defeat.
Some sober Japanese officers like Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Chief of the Imperial Combined Fleet (the Navy’s core of operational warships), realised that the Japanese victory was far from complete and that Tokyo’s easy victories were not likely to be repeated. Disappointingly, neither Washington nor London showed any signs whatsoever of defeatism. What Tokyo’s pessimists partially sensed was that local Allied weaknesses had allowed a string of Japanese victories that were so easy that they masked serious deficiencies in all of the Japanese armed forces. Within a year, all of these weaknesses would be evident to both sides.
Nevertheless, their lightning victories gave the Japanese an aura of invincibility for a brief moment. At the front, Allied morale was shaken. Indeed, it is difficult to overrate the shock effect when explaining early Japanese victories. Jim Morehead, soon one of the first American fighter ‘aces’, was one of a small number of American fighter pilots sent to aid the Dutch against the Japanese onslaught upon Java. Later Morehead described the odd chemistry at work in a unit that concludes it is beaten:
‘Whereas youth is normally optimistic about fate, forever feeling that if bad things happen, they will never happen to me, now there was a reversal. Unlike any combat circumstance I was ever exposed to, it switched. The attitude changed to, “I am a goner, the next one lost will be me, I know it will be me.” How many times I heard, “We’re just flying tow targets. We are all on suicide missions!” Such conclusions were only logical. Anyone’s arithmetic can figure out how many missions you are likely to last if ten go out and only five come back. While an alert shack is normally boisterous with laughter and wisecracks, silent anxiety was the mood in those days.’1
In the rush of events the Japanese made a tremendous blunder. Tokyo could never decide how to deal with Australia. However, the splendid harbour at Rabaul in the Bismarcks was an obvious target and was seized, along with some nearby points in New Guinea in January 1942. However, the Imperial Army’s parsimony with ground troops came into play. In January the remaining Australian bases on New Guinea were almost undefended and could have been seized with a few imperial battalions. Had Tokyo done this all of New Guinea would have been in Japanese hands. It is very doubtful that, given their limited naval resources, the Allies would have attempted an amphibious attack from northern Australia against southern New Guinea. With foresight, Tokyo could have shut down the New Guinea front before it started. As it happened, the Australians reinforced Port Moresby in south-eastern New Guinea and the Americans launched a carrier raid in the area.
This potential weakness was very important. Japan had made brilliant plans on starting the war but had no clear road toward ending it. As an attack against the United States mainland was out of the question, Tokyo planned to establish a maritime perimeter of air bases, which, supported by Combined Fleet, the fighting core of the Japanese Navy, could guard their new empire. Any major break in this chain, however, left vulnerable either the oil and minerals required for industry or the Japanese home islands themselves.
Finally realising the potential danger from Moresby, the Imperial Navy formed a powerful force to attack these targets. By this time the United States was firmly committed to defending Australia. In May 1942 the Japanese carriers protecting the invasion fleet met their American counterparts in the Coral Sea. Tactical laurels went to Japan, but imperial forces suffered serious losses and the all-important invasion of Moresby was postponed. In the meantime two crack Japanese fleet carriers were out of action for Yamamoto’s grand plan for the Central Pacific, which began three weeks later.
In keeping with the central tenet of Japanese fleet operations, Yamamoto was eager to entice the remainder of the American Pacific Fleet, particularly its aircraft carriers, into a battle of annihilation. In late May, Combined Fleet threw everything it had into a complex and powerful drive toward the north-central Pacific designed to force a battle. In early June, Combined Fleet’s carrier force was mauled at Midway.
Trench warfare in the South Pacific
In most accounts of the Pacific War the Battle of Midway is considered the ‘turning point’. This is true only to a very limited extent. Had Yamamoto been successful in destroying the American fleet, Washington would have had trouble. However, the nature of naval battle in the Pacific had been badly obscured by Pearl Harbor and the destruction of Task Force Z off Singapore. The engagement in the Coral Sea proved a much more reliable indicator of results. If enough ships were at sea and enough aircraft in the air, both sides were going to suffer losses. Luck showed a tendency to even itself out. (The 4–1 carrier loss suffered by Japan at Midway was largely reversed a few months later when Japanese submarines sank one US fleet carrier, and damaged a second carrier and a precious fast battleship.) Taken together, the two carrier battles in the fall of 1942 (Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz) were a draw. Carriers played an important role in important moments during the early battles for the South Pacific, but in essence they had soon committed an unintentional suicide pact. Between October 1942 (the Battle of Santa Cruz) and June 1944 (the Battle of the Philippine Sea) there were no major carrier actions.
For well over a year the Pacific War revolved around land bases. Implicit in this geometry was an unprecedented number of engagements between surface ships. Somewhere between the firepower of warships and aircraft were thousands of infantry facing a fearsome enemy and an inhuman environment.
The South Pacific was the most unlikely battlefield of the Second World War. (I define the ‘South Pacific’ as did the natives: a vast area including New Guinea, the Bismarcks, the Solomons, and New Hebrides Islands.) There was nothing in the entire area, New Guinea included, that had intrinsic value except, of course, Australia. The issue was forced in the first months of the war, with Japan victorious everywhere, when Franklin Roosevelt decided to reinforce Australia, even at the expense of ‘Europe First’. Australia received precious US infantry, US air units and logistic