World War 2 - the Pacific

Factual Questions
21

I doubt that’s true. Between December 7, 1941, and August 1945, the United States built over EIGHTY fleet and escort carriers. Losing some carriers at Pearl Harbor might have delayed victory, but would not have prevented it.

The Japanese decision to attack the United States is a classic historical example of Boiled Frog Syndrome, whereby a nation succeeds in getting itself into a horrible situation by stumbling from one short-term decision to the next without regard to the eventual result. The Japanese

  • Got into a nasty little war with Russia, so they needed military power and resources to fight Russia, which
  • Necessitated a level of imperial interference in local affairs, most notably Korea, which
  • Sparked conflict with China, which they solved by
  • Destablized and invading China, but which required a larger resource base, so they ended up
  • Getting into an unwinnable war with the Western Allies.

So in order to fight Russia, Japan took over Korea, thereby necessitating another war with China, thereby necessitating a war with the United States. Brilliant, huh?

The Japanese approach to fighting that war was the only realistic option, at least WRT fighting the Americans. If you’re an ordinary weakling shmoe going to fight Lennox Lewis, your best bet is to whomp him on the back of the head with a two-by-four and hope you hurt him badly enough so he doesn’t try to get up. If he does get up, your ass is grass. Sadly for Imperial Japan, the USA got up.

That distinction belongs to the Battle of the Coral Sea. Actually, if you discount a few screening submarines, it actually belongs to the Battle of Pearl Harbor itself.

Hey, Spoons:

I get the impression from the way this is written you think the British and the Commonwealth were fighting Japan before Pearl Harbor. They weren’t; Hong Kong, Singapore and all that came immediately AFTER Pearl, as part of the same general offensive. The other Allies were not at war with Japan prior to December 7, 1941.

22

Urk, thank you, Danimal and RickJay. Guess my memory isn’t quite as good as I thought it was, but this is what happens when one posts from work, I guess.

23

Gotta disagree with you on this one, RickJay. Had Japan succeeded in destroying American carriers at Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Ocean would have been completely wide open to them. Carriers were built because we still had a chance in the Pacific. The four carriers we had left after Pearl Harbor bought us time – time needed to begin production of other carriers.

Remember, the Pacific theatre was only getting about 30 percent of the war effort from the U.S.; Europe was the main focus. If Japan had been able to neutralize Pearl Harbor, they had control of the Pacific right up to the California coast. I don’t know where the various carriers were built during WWII, but I’d bet that more than a few were built in California shipyards. It would have been difficult to build those carriers with the Japanese navy shelling the shipyards. I’d also bet that carrier production started off slowly, and reached its climax in the last year to 18 months of the war. Just because we built 80 carriers in four years doesn’t mean we built 20 a year.

Even if carriers had been built and deployed, though, you’re faced with traversing thousands of miles of ocean, facing an enemy who controlled all the shipping lanes and who would have established land-based aircraft on every island big enough to house an airstrip. I just don’t see the U.S. overcoming that military and political hurdle, with the war going as it was in Europe. The U.S. would have sued for peace, in my opinion, and given over control of the Pacific to Japan.

24

Actually Japan had quite a respectable battleship fleet: Yamato, Musashi, Kirishima, Haruna, Kongo, Hiei, and Mutsu. There may be others that I’ve forgotten. Yamamoto’s plan for Midway was actually for his battleships to inflict the death blow, and Nagumo never reconciled himself to the idea that the day of the battlewagon was past.

IMHO, MacArthur’s entire management of the Philippine campaign was breathtakingly incompetent. In addition to getting his air force caught on the ground (arguably as much Brereton’s fault as MacArthur’s), he spread his forces paper-thin all over Luzon in the ridiculous belief that they could stop an invasion anywhere the Japanese chose to land. He was damn lucky that Homma didn’t cut him off from Bataan before he withdrew his forces there, and he lost many men and tons of supplies that should have been stockpiled on Bataan to begin with, according to the U.S. Army’s original plan of defense, WPO-3. He refused to confiscate desperately needed supplies from Japanese aliens living in the Philippines. When he left Corregidor, he appointed no new commander for USAFFE, in the apparent belief that he could run the battle from Australia, a decision remarkably similar to Hitler’s bumbling efforts to run the battle of Normandy from Rastenburg. Finally, he ordered the Bataan garrison to wait until all their food ran out, then attack through the Japanese lines and fight their way 60 miles through the jungle to Olongapo (his men by that point were so debilitated from malaria, months of half rations, and weeks of quarter rations that they would have been sore pressed to march to Olongapo unopposed, much less fight their way there in the face of a well-supplied Japanese enemy).

The only positive things I can say about MacArthur are that he had great physical courage (his withdrawal from Corregidor was over his express objections, and he volunteered to lead the insane Olongapo attack himself), and he apparently was a tremendous motivator to his officers and men. But as an actual operational commander, he was cut from the same cloth as Douglas Haig.

25

I’m almost positive the Yamato was built near the end of the war, and wasn’t available at the beginning. I don’t know when the others you mention were built.

I agree completely that his handling of the Philippines defies description. But to summarily dismiss him as a commander based solely on that campaign (or lack thereof) is precipitous. He led a masterful campaign against the Japanese after the Philippines fell, gaining ground more quickly than was believed possible, and with far fewer losses of men than projected. Perhaps he was just better suited to an attack mode of warfare, rather than a defensive mode.

26

I don’t buy it, for three reasons:

  1. I just don’t see the U.S. giving up that easily. The situation after Pearl Harbor was really bad, and yet there was no hesitation to go full-bore after the Japanese. Why would there have been hesitation if it was a bit worse than really bad? I simply cannot envision the U.S. in 1941 just rolling over and saying “You win” as a result of anything short of Japanese troops walking up Pennsylvania Avenue.

  2. There weren’t four carriers at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941; there were three, and the USN had two others. IIRC, either Wasp or Hornet transferred from the Atlantic fleet (it was an insect, anyway) after Pearl, and Saratoga was somewhere else, too; throw in the escort carrier USS Long Island, and you still have some carrier forces available. Given the loss of USS Lexington in the Coral Sea, the difference between total disaster at Pearl and what actually happened is having either three carriers or one.

Midway can’t have happened without three USN carriers, but it’s quite probably Pearl Harbor itself would not have fallen.

  1. It simply is not true that Europe was the main focus of the American war effort, at least for the first 18-24 months after Pearl Harbor. At late as mid-1943, there were more Americans in the Pacific than there were in Europe and North Africa. (See John Keegan’s book for some nice breakdowns.) And had Pearl Harbor turned out differently it’s quite reasonable to believe the U.S. would have concentrated MORE on victory in the Pacific, not less.

  2. “Having control of the Pacific” does not by the wildest stretch of the imagination mean the U.S. coast was in danger. It’s one thing the threaten Midway; approaching the U.S. coast over thousands of miles of completely empty sea, facing a ground-based air force vastly larger than what the Japanese could have borne on their carriers, is something quite different. U.S. fleet construction would have continued more or less unabated.

  3. Enough carriers were built by the end of 1942 and in 1943 that I think it’s safe to say the U.S. could still have held its own until late '43 and then put on the final push. Bear in mind that by the end of 1942 most of the Navy’s fleet carriers were destroyed anyway. Lexington sank in May at Coral Sea, Yorktown was torpedoed at Midway, Wasp was topedoed at Guadalcanal, and Hornet was ambushed and destroyed at the Battle of Santa Cruz in October. For a month between the loss of Hornet and the arrival of Essex (CV-9) the U.S. Navy only had one fleet carrier (Enterprise) but they did have nine escort carriers. Granted, these losses came AFTER Midway, but I think the U.S. could have survived the loss of Midway.

I’m not discounting the huge impact of Midway and the unmitigated catastrophe it represents to the Japanese, but if Yamamoto had “run wild” for twelve months instead of ten, would it have mattered in the long run? The U.S. still gets the bomb in 1945.

27

Sauron said

It wasn’t the Yamato that you’re thinking of as it was present at Midway in the Main Body. The ship you’re thinking of is the Shinano which was sunk by the US submarine Archerfish on its maiden voyage out of Tokyo harbor late in the war (October 1944?). Actually there were a number of battleship encounters including one of the Guadalcanal battles IJN Kirishima and USS Washington(Savo Island?) and Leyte Gulf which was the last battleship v battleship encounter.

28

Good points, RickJay, but I’ll still debate ya. :slight_smile:

I don’t dispute your assertion that there were more Americans in the Pacific theatre than in the European. But you gotta remember, in the vast geographical majority of the Pacific war, we were the only ones around. Europe had a host of allies working together. In the Pacific, it was mainly the U.S. and the British. While the British played an important role, the brunt was borne by the U.S.

But in materiel, Europe got the lion’s share. I’ll try to dig up the references, but I would swear that no more than 35 percent of the munitions, industrial output, etc. of America went to the Pacific theatre until the war in Europe was over.

QUOTE: “approaching the U.S. coast over thousands of miles of completely empty sea, facing a ground-based air force vastly larger than what the Japanese could have borne on their carriers, is something quite different.”

You realize, of course, this is exactly what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor.

Even granting that the U.S. could have built aircraft carriers at the same rate, I’m not convinced that they would have been effective. If Midway doesn’t happen in June of 1942, Japan can station their carriers at the outer edge of their island chain and prevent any significant U.S. force from sortieing. Don’t forget, too, that Japan lost many of her best aviators at Midway, which affected the fighting ability of her carriers as the war went on.

Yes, most of the Pacific Fleet’s carriers were destroyed by the end of 1942, but that was six months later than most of Japan’s carriers went down. That six months made a huge difference, in my opinion. Again, the carriers bought the U.S. time it didn’t have initially.

The Manhattan Project was begun as a race against the Germans, and the possibilities of the A-bomb’s use as a means to end the war with Japan weren’t seriously considered until the potential casualty lists regarding the invasion of the Japanese home islands were being generated.

Besides, I have a signed memo from Roosevelt that says the U.S. would surrender to the Japanese if all our carriers were destroyed. So there.

29

BTW
The Shinano was a carrier built on a Yamato class battleship hull, and the Yamato was sunk on a suicide mission to disrupt the landings at Okinawa.

30

Well, I’ve gone and pulled my Jane’s Fighting Ships of World War II. It has Yamato being launched August 8, 1940. She’s listed as being sunk by U.S. navy aircraft on April 7, 1945. I don’t think she had actually ever seen combat before then.

I see I’ve forgotten several Japanese battleships. The full fleet was twelve battleships: Yamato, Musashi, Nagato, Mutsu, Ise, Hyuga, Fuso, Yamashiro, Kongo, Haruna, Hiei and Kirishima. Except for the first two, all these battlewagons were World War I vintage.

I fail to see much brilliance in MacArthur’s conduct of the war after the Philippines. The island-hopping strategy he is credited with so often actually originated with Halsey’s staff. I suppose a general deserves some credit for recognizing a brilliant idea when it’s dropped into his lap, but I’m not ready to call him brilliant on that account. Before that he was smashing his forces to pieces against every Japanese strongpoint on the way to Buna and blaming his subordinates for everything that went wrong.

I’ll grant that the Inchon landing in Korea was bold and imaginative.

That is certainly news to me. And very strange, considering how much MacArthur groused about his theater being relegated to second priority. I’ll have to take a look at that Keegan book.

31

I thought there was a “Free Europe First” policy?

32

I must admit a grudging respect for Japan in WW2. Japan was totally cut off from the modern world until 1854, locked in an almost medieval feudal society. In less than 90 years they advanced to a point where they challenged the major powers and caused havoc over half of Asia. Japan was the only Axis power to attack American soil. Japanese submarines did shell the West coast and deploy small aircraft that did attack targets on land. Balloon bombs did cause forest fires and were responsible for the only U.S. deaths on American soil during WW2.

33

At the time of WW2 they were also argueably the most racist and xenophobic nation on earth. See “The rape of Nanking” above.

34

Re. the Philippines, it is useful to note that it was not just “a base” as suggested several times above, but a complete US colony beginning the process of disengagement, with major natural resources and excellent strategic location - in addition to things like the harbors…

An excellent book on the subject is Brian McAllister Linn’s Guardians of Empire: The US Army and the Pacific, 1902 to 1940(Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997), whence I will bowdlerize a couple thoughts here.

The US had prepared for a Japanese invasion since 1920 or so, acc. to DOD records that Linn researched. The problem was how to financially support the various options sought out, and to move them past both the US colonial, US mainland and Philippine national political obstacles. Unfortunately, 1920 also brought the 1920 Defense Act which slashed US military funding there and Hawaii big time, ~45%. And it got worse with time.

US foreign funding would drop with the Depression. Also, for example, US Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934 ordering Philippine independence in 1946, and setting up an interim “commonwealth” government, basically cutting off funding for anything that Phil-based commanders like MacArthur sought to initiate. The Philippine government, in turn, was itself was not too keen on providing the manpower to the colonial in which they had little if any managerial participation [compare to modern day Republicans complaining about American troops in United Nations forces).

So arguably MacArthur was not quite at fault: given no resources, he was expected to set up a complicated defense strategy that used few US monies, and mostly indigenous soldiers, at a time when US didn’t want to relinquish authority to the “natives” because the Army’s function was as much anti-insurrection as it was anti-invasion.

When Corregidor fell, there was nowhere else to stage from in the Philippines, BTW, and he did leave at about the last minute. And what would have been done with the folks in Bataan ? Read the War Journal of Major Damon Gause", Hyperion Press 1999 for the account of an officer who was there, and eventually escaped to Australia.

MacArthur did get undue credit for island-hopping, though.

35

The battleship Yamashiro met its end in a hail of 14- and 16- inch shells from the original Pacific battle line, including the California and the West Virginia, both scarred veterans of Pearl Harbor. The Fuso was steaming to the same fate, in the Surigao Straight in 1944, but an American destroyer torpedo spread broke it in half before it could meet the ultimate revenge.

36

I don’t buy it. True, MacArthur’s resources were extremely limited. But he was not “expected to set up a complicated defense strategy.” He inherited a perfectly workable defense strategy, War Plan Orange 3 (WPO-3), which was designed with a realistic appreciation of USAFFE’s weakness. The plan was to cede the Luzon plain, which obviously could not be held, to the invader and fight the entire campaign on Bataan and Corregidor.

MacArthur proceeded to junk that strategy and spread his meager resources all over Luzon, in violation of Frederick’s famous maxim that you cannot be strong everywhere, in the belief that with a company or two of half-trained, under-equipped soldiers per mile of shore line he could stop the invasion on the beaches.

Even after his air force was destroyed on the ground, meaning the Japanese landing would inevitably have unhindered air support, he left his men spread out on the beaches. There was still time for him to concentrate his forces on Bataan, but he left them dispersed for two weeks, until the Japanese finally landed at Lingayen Gulf, made mincemeat of his forces. Only then did MacArthur finally reconcile himself to reality and give the order, “WPO-3 is in effect.” In other words, go back to the plan we had before I screwed everything up. So the USAFFE soldiers had to conduct a bloody fighting retreat across the Luzon plain, in the face of total enemy air superiority, destroying irreplaceable supplies to keep them out of Japanese hands, just to get to where they should have been to begin with: Bataan.

MacArthur was lucky that Homma drove directly on Manila instead of cutting him off from Bataan. Had Homma possessed an inkling of imagination, he could have trapped Luzon Force between 48th Division and 16th Division, and the entire Luzon campaign would have been over by February.

It was not MacArthur’s fault that his resources were insufficient to fight the type of campaign he would have liked. It most definitely is his fault that he developed a battle plan that, given his lack of resources, had no realistic chance of success, especially when a superior and more realistic plan was already available.

I must confess I don’t catch your meaning here. I was criticizing MacArthur for his conduct before Corregidor fell, not afterward. Even back then, it was U.S. Army policy to let the man on the spot make the decisions. MacArthur refused to give Wainwright that freedom of action, instead he planned to run the rest of the battle from Australia. MacArthur left Corregidor for Australia on March 12, 1942; King surrendered the Bataan forces on April 9, while Corregidor held out until May 6. Thus for eight weeks MacArthur proposed to manage the battle by remote control. By pretty universal consensus, that is bad generalship.

37

Also, I’d like to recommend Ronald Spector’s excellent Eagle Against the Sun as a fine one-volume overview of the Pacific war. Spector convincingly explains that while the United States paid lip service to the “Europe First” strategy, the reality of strategic allocations was split roughly equally between the two theaters, with the butt-end going to CBI.

In particular, Admiral King was adamant about having an equal if not greater share of landing craft go to the Pacific. There is good reasoning behind the idea, but Spector and others hint that the Americans hid behind the shortage of landing craft in the West (as well as the bureaucratic vacuum of the Med, which somehow never managed to return the resources they were allocated) to delay the European landings until mid-1944.

Hey, it worked. Trained (but mostly not blooded) troops hit the beaches at Normandy, and considering the difficulties the Americans had, it was probably a pretty good idea.

38

I think Germany had Japan beaten in that department. The Rape of Nanjing was horrible, but not fundamentally different from the fate of Warsaw in 1944. And it was not the Japanese who set up extermination camps to systematically eradicate “inferior” races. Racist and xenophobic they were, but they were not the champions.

39

.

Acc. to Linn’s research, WPO-3 was precisely not accounting for USAFFE weaknesses in the Philippines or Hawaii, and itself had evolved [WPO #1 through x] into one of those creatures designed by committee. It certainly couldn’t account for the political realities in getting Philippine troops on the ground, the US mixed-mission, or lack of materiel. (Linn also discusses records showing types and conditions of materiel, particularly aircraft…).

MacArthur was certainly having a hard time managing the two missions [the whole concept of abandoning Region 3 led later to the Huk rebellion… comparable to arming and training then abandoning mujaheddin and later getting the Taliban and Bin-Laden] so the alternative view was the Gen. sought to protect the country [typical grand but valiant scheme] and at the end, with no backup, gave up and fell on “save the capital and environs”. He had tried to set up the indigenous forces, but was frustrated by funds and the US Governor. Had that effort not been stymied, there would not have been spread-out troops but good coverage by US & native forces. And the lack of leadership in April, well, that was recognition that they’s lost, and has less to do with MacA than with the valiant US & Philippine troops who took almost two months longer to surrender than expected.

Agree to disagree, and 'nuff said (and leaving it to the texts) lest this get yanked to GD.

40

True, but the Japanese did have a facility where they performed “medical experiments” on the Chinese.