I don’t know about that; prior to the invasion of the Phillipines, MacArthur was in command of the Allied fighting in New Guinea aimed at eliminating Rabaul as the main naval base for the Japanese forces in the Pacific (outside of Japan). That was completed in early-mid 1944.
That’s pretty important, and the Navy definitely needed that.
No, actually Rabaul proved to be insignificant. The Navy by-passed Rabaul and let them starve because they were cutoff. And for practice the Navy would send their flat tops over to pound Rabaul for good measure. The bottom line is that it was the Navy who decided to by pass Rabaul because they had control of the sea and had pounded all their planes into the ground. McArthur was, well let us leave it hear…
Oops that should be here
What other areas of the Pacific or the ETO are up for discussion? It is enjoyable to read various opinions and discuss history.
A really good friend of my father’s in Fresno California was Army, and he went ashore as part of the advance team in Okinawa 24 hours before the invasion. His hair literally turned white overnight (think Leslie Nielson).
McArthur’s return to the Philippines is pretty widely acknowledged as a side show and not an essential part of defeating the Japanese.
Well, some military leaders actually did object to the idea.
Not everyone in the USA, or other Allied nations, was all “just kill 'em all.” There remained debate and argument over how far the Allies should go. Bombing of civilians remained a somewhat contentious issue throughout the war, for instance.
Well, yes i will concede that. But I wont concede that the Army did nothing in the Pacific.
Of course the two brass hats, one Army, on Navy advocated plans that waged was as they best understood it. This is only natural. Both truly believed their command held the key to victory.
The whole Pacific War was an elephant (the Japanese Army) versus a whale (the American Navy). The Japanese wanted a land fight and the Americans wanted a naval/aviation war. Like the preceding paragraph, both wanted to play their strongest cards.
There was no easy way out of this mess. The promises made by the technical warriors are chimeras. But naval blockade and air bombardment are cruel and blunt weapons. Further, even their best hopes of victory were years away.
(Do you think Churchill would have given up to strangulation by U-boats? It is foolish to think the Japanese were not made with the same toughness.)
The American people would not put up with another two or three years of starving the Japanese people. Further, such a plan meant that millions of Chinese, Koreans and other people would have been under Japan’s boot.
(If not for the Holocaust, Japanese atrocities in China would be the defining cruelty of the war.)
So a clean hands-off victory (as the Americans wanted) was years away at best. At some point the American Army would have to kill the Japanese Army. No way around it, it always comes to this.
No American victory in China, Taiwan, the Philippines, or Korea would defeat the Japanese. We had to kill them in Japan. An invasion was need to kill the Japanese Army. No way around it.
OK then, so we have to invade. It would be massively difficult to embark an invasion force in California and sail them to Honshu. We needed intermediate bases. Big ones. We needed places to base our planes, to overhaul our ships and to store mountains of stuff.
Despite McArthur’s plans to take Taiwan, the Philippines would serve as our nearest big base with a string of smaller ones suitable for airfields closer to the target.
MacArthur’s command may have taken Manila for the wrong reason, but it was valuable real estate.
OK, so now it is November 1945. The Olympic landings are fixin’ to happen. Some ships actually sailed from California months ago, some from Hawaii, many more from “nearby” bases. The Japanese now got what they wanted the whole time, the Americans at the limit of their naval power and about to face a huge land battle at the end of a long supply line.
And you know what? I bet the Japanese would have won at this point. It is commonly said this invasion would have been “Three Okinawas.” The difference would have been the Japanese air attack on the fleet would have been much more than at Okinawa. Basically, the Japanese invented the cruise missile and planned to launch swarms of them against the Americans.
It would have been a bloodbath at sea, followed by one on land. Even then, it is not clear that the Japanese would have surrendered. A second invasion, Coronet was planned for.
Nope. Nimitz’s well-thought-out scheme was an American pipedream. The Japanese would not have surrendered promptly under blockade and bombardment. To let them stave would have been to let the Chinese suffer even more. A delay would have let the Red Army march all over northeast Asia.
Honestly, when you look at it all and punch the numbers into your calculator, they way the war ended was a flipping miracle. That is a very hard conclusion to come to.
I feel MacArthur’s southern pacific campaign did serve a legitimate strategic purpose. Like the war in China it forced Japan to spread out its limited resources. Nimitz’s central pacific campaign may have been the primary campaign in the war against Japan but it would have faced much stiffer resistance if the other campaigns weren’t being fought.
Ultimately the Japanese would have lost. Ultimately. The possibility Operation Olympic would have been a horrifying bloodbath, however, was much likelier than not, in part because as we now know, the Japanese knew where it was going to happen. Geography dictated how an invasion had to be conducted and the Japanese knew south Kyushu was going to be the first target, so their plan was to resist that invasion with more or less everything they had on the assumption - probably a correct one - that immediate victory was their only hope of stopping the Allies.
I think the Allies would have punched through but it would have been indescribably awful.
In addition to all that, the Japanese over-estimated Allied strength. They were anticipating, and preparing, for up to 90 Allied divisions to land on Japan. The actual amount of planned Allied strength was way below that; hence an invasion would have been even harder to pull off than anticipated.
The idea of a 2 or 3 year longer war is misleading, personally I do not think that was likely at all.
You only have to look at what had taken place in Myanmar where the Japanese had already been routed and were in full retreat - couple of months would probably have seen them well on the way out of Thailand - the reason was mainly that they simply could not sustain their extended supply lines and that was largely due to the industrial damage and maritime damage in Japan itself, and by this time Japan had extremely severe fuel problems.
Meantime the Russians overran Manchuria in absolutely spectacular fashion obliterating over 780 thousand Japanese personnel - 4 whole armies. It is highly likely that this was the defeat that was the main factor in prompting the Japanese surrender, rather than the atomic weapons dropped by the US.
In that case the Japanese surrender would likely have taken place even if US had landed.
Nope. The nukes led directly to Hirohito forcing the surrender through sheer force of will and personality, and he was very nearly assassinated for his trouble. The Army wanted to fight to the last man.
True, but I don’t think that the main objection to an extended blockade was possible famine in Japan. From everything I’ve read, there was a lot of war weariness and extreme reluctance to incur the degree of casualties involved in invading mainland Japan, which is why nuclear weapons were used- they promised the fastest resolution to the war, and with the least US casualties.
Now as to why they wanted to invade vs. just let the naval blockade take full effect, I’m not sure. I think there was a certain recognition that a blockade would be very long and wouldn’t really result in the sort of unconditional surrender and dominance over Japan that the Allies desired.
Bombing of civilian targets was always a fairly contentious issue among US commanders, even in 1942 when the 8th AF first started operations out of England. In Europe at least, there was always lip service paid to the idea that they were bombing specific war-related targets, although in practice they did stuff like having the entire group drop simultaneously when the lead bombardier dropped, which was much more of an area bombardment scheme than they’d used earlier in the war.
The war vs. Japan was more vitriolic all around, partially because the Japanese had attacked us without warning, and partially out of a large degree of racial animosity that the war vs. the Germans didn’t have. The way the bombing campaigns were carried out was in large part an extension of that vitriolic intensity. Curtis LeMay was a large part of the issue in both theaters; he was notoriously hard-nosed about defeating the enemy, and introduced a lot of the more civilian-unfriendly, but more effective bombing techniques in both theaters.
I don’t think anyone’s really saying that. IMO the proper description is that the Army played more of a supporting/secondary role vs. the Navy and USMC in the Pacific. However, that’s not to say they played a small or unimportant role by any means. This is not much different than saying that the Navy played a similar role in the European theater by squashing the U-Boat threat in conjunction with the Royal Navy.
No, but his government would have voted in a new PM, likely Halifax. Halifax wanted a brokered peace with Germany, and apparently Hitler was going to offer generous terms. Not even a surrender.
Churchill was very much afraid the U boat war was going to force the island to surrender.
However, the Japanese has no rela peace party, and yes, starving them out wouldn’t have worked.
No, we had invented ways to stop the kamikaze. We would have won, it would have been costly.
And you know what- the Bomb could well have been delayed by months or even a year, and if som, Macs plans would have been the right ones. Nimitz plans only worked because we developed the Bomb, something neither he nor Mac had any concept of.
This is the Propaganda the USSR has pushed, but no. The Bomb allowed the Emperor to save face, and bypass the War hawks without being assassinated on the spot. They werent losing to more foes, they were losing to a terrible technological breakthrough.
The US Army played a MUCH bigger role than the Marines did. Far, far more troops deployed in the Pacific War were Army than Marines. I’m not sure if you meant there to lump the Navy and Marines together, but when it came to fighting on the ground, it was largely an Army operation by a wide margin.
As to which between the Army and Navy played a greater role, I don’t know how one answers that question. War is a combined arms affair. This isn’t analogous to a single battle, like observing that the Battle of Britain was won by the Royal Air Force.
I think it was more of a psychological breakthrough than a technological one. The fission bombs of 1945 were certainly devastating - but in practical terms, Japan was already being devastated by other means such as conventional bombing.
But by 1945, it was clear to everyone in Japan that the course of the war was not going in Japan’s favor. They were losing territory, the enemy was getting closer, they were running low on men and supplies. Anyone looking at it objectively would see that Japan was on a path to inevitable defeat.
So how do you get people to keep fighting a war which they are losing? You give them the narrative that things are going to change. Tell everyone that Japan had never lost a war; fate had clearly chosen Japan to be victorious. So things might look bad now but as long as people didn’t despair and give up, destiny would protect Japan. Something big would happen that would change the course of the war and put Japan back on top.
This is why the atom bomb had such a major effect on Japanese morale. It was exactly the kind of war changing event that the Japanese people had been waiting for. But it was the Americans not the Japanese who had it. So according to the story that the Japanese had been telling themselves this was a sign that fate favored America over Japan. The atom bomb shattered the Japanese belief that they had a destiny. And without that belief, they were able to look around and see how bad their objective reality was.
Did most people in Japan know what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It’s not THAT small a country, media was controlled, and by all accounts most people were stunned when the Emperor gave his speech (and sort of confused, as his court Japanese was hard to understand.)
Civilian morale had been crumbling for some time. Cities had already been almost wholly evaculated of children; absenteeism in workplaces was epidemic; millions were homeless. Japan had already been secretly working with the Soviets to try to end the war; the Soviet declaration of war absolutely did help push them to surrender because that cut off the very avenue of peace they’d been counting on.
Certainly from the perspective of Hirohito and various other senior Japanese leaders, the events of August 6-9 were genuinely terrifying. It was not so much one event as the sudden wave of them; they went from “we are losing and need to find a way out of this, maybe the USSR will help negotiate a peace” to “holy shit. holy shit” in a span of 72 hours
I was lumping them together, in the sense that it was fundamentally a naval war, decided by naval concerns and strategy, and not really centered around taking/holding land. The USMC played into that very well in that they’re naval infantry and geared for amphibious landings.
The Army did have the bulk of the troops, but they were not calling the shots, and Army considerations weren’t what was driving the war. That’s why I’m saying they played a supporting role.